Collateral Lives

How Abuse Radiates Through a Household

Content Note
This essay contains descriptions of domestic violence, threats of harm to animals, illness, and death of family pets. It documents the ripple effects of abuse within a household. Reader discretion advised.

Introduction

This piece is part of an ongoing body of work examining coercive control and domestic violence as systemic harm - how it affects not only adult survivors and children, but how it radiates outward through every living system within an abusive home.

The losses described here are not isolated tragedies or metaphor. They occurred within a sustained environment of fear, instability, and threat. Animals cannot testify, but they absorb prolonged stress, deprivation, and violence in ways that often manifest physically. Their suffering is frequently invisible, dismissed as coincidence or misfortune, when it is anything but.

I am sharing this account partially as an exercise in grief, but more importantly, as documentation. Domestic violence does not end with the primary victim. It reaches children. It reaches animals. It reshapes homes into ecosystems where harm compounds quietly over time, often long before others can recognize or intervene.

While other essays I’ve written focus on adult and child survivors, and on how control is enforced through fear, isolation, and sometimes technology; this piece documents an often-overlooked dimension: how abuse affects the animals living inside those same environments.

This essay is meant to be read as evidence of pattern. It shows how violence radiates outward, how control reshapes an entire household ecosystem, and how harm accumulates - especially when the conditions that cause it are normalized, denied, or ignored.

Readers do not need prior context to understand this piece. But for those continuing through my writings, it offers a critical lens: abuse does not stop with its intended target. It reaches everyone who depends on the target for their own safety.

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The Story

One of my sugar gliders passed away on January 3, 2026, around 3:30am. Her name is Butters. She is the daughter of Cookie and Ashton, sister to Peanut and Chip, niece to Honey and Sugar.

Butters was born in the spring of 2023, as was Limey, whose parents are Coco and Marshal.

In May 2025, all of the gliders were held at my in-laws’ home for approximately 45 days while my son and I were court mandated to stay at a domestic violence shelter along with our dog and cat. The shelter could not accommodate the gliders, understandably so.

When I got them all back in mid-June 2025, various afflictions were present.

Honey had a small hole in the side of his neck, deep enough that I could see the muscle move. Honey and Cookie’s other brother, Sugar, passed away in late August 2025 - from what, I do not know, as he did not have any symptoms or irregular behavior. Butters had a bowel blockage that the vet didn’t have a whole lot of options other than diet changes for resolving.

Peanut was returned with the onset of hind leg paralysis, which has reversed only slightly and remains under close observation. He is the same tiny size as Butters, and they were always together. I am sad that he has lost her too. They looked out for each other, fending off greedy uncles who liked to snatch their food.

So I changed up their diet and monitored Honey back to a healthy state. He now has a small scar where the hole was. Butters started putting weight back on and became more active, though she still struggled with bowel movements. Peanut moves much slower than the others, but seems to have adapted to his challenge.

Around midnight on January 3rd, I noticed Butters was awake and just sitting quietly. Sugar gliders are nocturnal, so this caught my attention. I took her out of the cage and she snuggled into my neck as usual. But she felt a little cold, which felt wrong, and I watched her closely to see if she was just slow to wake up.

We snuggled for a bit. When I shifted to a new seat, she seemed alert.

Then she went still for a few minutes.

Then she had several small seizures.

I called multiple emergency vets, but none of them had staff who could see sugar gliders.

My son and I could tell we didn’t even have time to take her anywhere. We hugged. And somewhere in that moment, she passed - her little body curled around my hand. I could feel that her breathing had stopped, and when I peered into her eyes, I had to say goodbye.

This is just one story of many I could tell about the side effects domestic violence has had on all of my animals.

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The Background

When we moved into my current home in September 2020, it followed my family’s initial incident entering the legal system earlier that year. But I was committed to making things work better than ever before.

Instead, things continued to get harder.

He wanted another exotic pet. We already had two Bengal cats (I would have been fine to adopt as I always had before.) We researched monkeys, foxes, kinkajous, savanna cats, and others.

I’ve realized now more than ever that he sought material items, animals, and people for all the same reasons: something to show off, to flaunt, so that others would “respect” him. I know it sounds silly when I write it this way, but it feels like an accurate representation based on my lived experience.

Anyway, we settled on sugar gliders.

We bought two in August 2021. A few weeks later, the store had three more, and they were incredibly cute. The following year, there was one alone at the store for far too long, and I convinced them to sell him to me. I knew we would have difficulty introducing him to the existing colony, and that resulted in having two cages with the two separate colonies I have now.

Over time, my ex lost interest in the gliders. They have very specific dietary and bonding needs, and all of that responsibility fell to me fairly quickly - which I didn’t mind because I not only love animals, but I love learning about them. I had already begun pouring myself into researching how to properly care for these tiny exotics.

In January 2023, my cat Goldie passed from small lymphoma cancer. In November 2023, my dog Oscar was diagnosed as terminally ill, with tumors throughout his liver and spleen. He stayed with us through all the incidents with my abusive husband and even suffered a severe leg injury at the start of 2025. Oscar passed away during the second week my son and I - along with Oscar and our other cat, Sultan - were in the shelter.

I know in my heart that he waited to go until he knew my son and I were safe.

He was my protector. Not in a way that could physically fend off my husband, but he was of great comfort to me and registered as my “emotional support animal” (a title he more than lived up to.) And when he was in the car while my husband was angry, the abuse toward me was less intense.

Although children are often the bystander casualties of an abusive adult relationship, the animals living in that environment are also in the line of fire.

As my son and I buried Butters and I looked at the memorial painted rocks marking each grave, it struck me how many I’ve lost over the past few years. It is the kind of undeniable, in-your-face proof of the ripple effects of domestic violence because the waves hit not only children, but family pets.

In addition to the gliders I’ve named above, we also lost Peaches and Flour at six to eight months old, babies of Butters; as well as Mojo and Mocha, babies of Coco. Neither Mojo nor Mocha made it to opening their eyes before Coco ate them, which is a natural response when a baby is born with defects or when the environment is highly stressed.

In 2023, he became increasingly irritated by anything that took me away from being available to him. He discouraged me from taking the gliders out of their cages. He then decided our thirteen-year-old son should be responsible for feeding all of them and did not allow me to supervise.

At the same time, my son was experiencing significant verbal and emotional abuse and was functioning in his life at bare-minimum capacity.

Several times, my ex would threaten to harm the gliders by “stomping” on them. Just writing that makes me nauseated.

So when my ex would scream at me that it was all my fault - the deaths, and anything else that did not go his way - it felt real. It felt deserved. Because underneath all my fear, I believed that if I had just stood up to him and gotten away, safely and permanently, this could have been prevented.

And now that I have done that, I am still dealing with the aftermath - the uprooting of his ideas, his words, his fears. Unearthing and unfolding them, laying all of this out transparently in the hope that my words become a warning sign, a red flag in the patterns of coercive control and abuse.

I have cried with a friend who lovingly reminded me that this is not all my fault. That I did not willingly neglect my animals. That I was right to believe it was safer for them to remain in their cages at times, so they could avoid injury when he would physically attack me and/or demand sex.

But none of that changes my sadness for losing Butters, or any of the others.

They absorbed the painful energy in my home for years, to the point that it manifested physically.

I pray that Butters is the last one. In the biblical spirit of Job, I attest to the strength of my faith that God may answer my prayers - to end this suffering, to stop the pattern of death that has swept through my home for so many years.

I pray for Oscar, my sweet pup, my confidant, my walking partner…. He was the kind of dog anyone would ever want: smart, loyal, strong, faithful, fun, obedient.

All the things God asks us to be, actually.