#ScarsOfSurvival: Author Sathya Callender-Wilson Speaks On DV

October was not just the month of spooky costumes and fall frolicking, it also marked National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month.

The numbers are staggering. The White House reports that in America, tens of millions of people have experienced intimate partner violence and four in 10 American women and nearly 3 in 10 American men are still impacted by sexual abuse, physical violence, or stalking at some point in their lifetimes.

Source: John Kevin / Getty

With that in mind, Sathya Callender-Wilson has made it her life’s work to share her story and those of people who’ve overcome their trauma despite physical and emotional scars.

Below the nine-year domestic violence survivor and editor of Scars of Survival magazine tells BOSSIP about how witnessing, experiencing and surviving abuse fuels her passion for spreading hope through her nonprofit and her publication.

“I said, ‘God, what is it that you want me to do? What is my purpose?’ And that’s when he showed me, that ‘You were able to survive, heal, and overcome, and now you need to help others do the same.'” 

Source: Scars of Survival / SSM

BOSSIP: Tell us about your background, and how that led you to start Scars Of Survival.

My name is Mrs. Wilson. I just got married on January 12, so I’m still a newlywed. I’m originally from Brooklyn, New York, but I stay in Georgia and I’m a mother of five and I have five grandchildren. I’m an overcomer of a nine-year domestic violence relationship that nearly took my life. It was my youngest son’s dad that took me through that whole ordeal.

Growing up as a child, I spent my earlier years with my maternal and paternal grandparents. I was able to go to private school and I was very spoiled. I was the only grandchild on both sides and the only great-niece, so there was a lot of attention was on me. My mother was working and living her life because she was young. She had me at 21, so I didn’t remember her being around a lot when I was that young. When I turned eight years old, she married my sister’s dad who was in the Navy and we relocated to Orlando, Florida and so we lived on the military base. I was the only child, so I had a childhood. I was able to go skating and ride bikes and do all that stuff.

My mother became my at-home mom and an at-home wife so I started experiencing having my mother. She was there all the time, but she was abused. [My sister’s dad] was very abusive. There were times that I would try to fight him off my mother. It was bad, I would hear my mother screaming. So that went on from eight years old until about the age of 12 because I had my oldest son at 14, so I was a teen mom.

So the last experience with him was when my mother moved. We got an apartment and he found out where we were and was saying he was going to kill her. Before he could get to her, I pushed him down the flight of steps and the cops came and arrested him. That was the last time that we witnessed my mother go through that.

After bouncing around from shelters and witnessing traumatic situations like drug use and prostitution, Callender-Wilson says she too experienced abuse like her mom. 

The same guy that I ended up allowing back into my life, he abused me. He was on drugs. He was incarcerated when I met him through his cousin because she and I were best friends and that’s how I met him. This guy was 12 years older than me, so I kind of looked at him like a father figure, although he was supposed to have been a boyfriend. But I ended up getting pregnant with my daughter and I was in the shelter the whole time. He ended up getting locked up again. So I dealt with that whole thing for the entire year. When I got my first apartment, I had to pay bills. I was on welfare and had no idea how I would pay my electricity bill. I was just totally lost.

Source: Scars of Survival / SSM

At the age of 18, I didn’t know anything about working and it was just trying but my grandparents did the best they could to help me, I stayed there for a year and after that, my paternal grandmother convinced me to move to North Carolina. I moved to Fayetteville and I thought my mother was going to help me, but she had gotten married again and he wasn’t very supportive of her being supportive of me. So here I am in a nice house. I have my Section Eight still, no car, trying to get to work. By this time I had  three children and I’m struggling to to get to work. It was a struggle for me. It was really, really, really, really hard. I was depending on the taxi cab and they would come late. I ended up losing one of my jobs because I was always late waiting for taxis.

I had a social worker, her name was Ms. Rodriguez. I’ll never forget her. When I was on public assistance, she called me into the office one day and she said, “We want you to get your driver’s license.” And I said, “Well, I don’t have a car.” And she said, “Don’t worry about it, get your driver’s license.” And so I said, “Okay.”

Callender-Wilson was gifted a car via Operation Blessings and landed a job and that’s when things started to change; that is until her ex came back into her life under the guise of “being a new man.”

  After enduring abuse including physical, sexual, and financial, the publisher remembers a moment when things came to a head and she knew she had to get out. 

What was your breaking point? 

The day he almost took my life. He was strangling me, and I actually felt myself going. I could see fire in his eyes and it was like the devil was coming. My children were upstairs, I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t even scream. And I know, it had to be God that kept me because if it wasn’t for God, I wouldn’t even be here today. It had to be nobody but God that caused him to release his hands from my throat because I couldn’t even scream for my children. [Eventually] itwas my children who got me to my breaking point after I learned that they started sleeping with knives underneath their pillows, and were planning on doing something to him [in retaliation for me]. I  knew I didn’t want my children to experience getting in trouble over my decisions.

The New York native eventually moved to Georgia and married a friend who helped her get out of her abusive relationship. After that marriage unfortunately ended, Callender-Wilson went on a healing journey that led her to start delving into entrepreneurship. 

During that healing process, I had a vision to start a show so I reached out to a young lady and she connected me with a publicist. And the first thing the publicist said to me was, “Before I take you on as a client, I really need you to submit yourself to God and ask God, what is it that he wants you to do. What is your purpose?” I didn’t know but I literally dropped down on my knees that night and the tears were rolling. And I said, ‘God, what is it that you want me to do? What is my purpose?’ And that’s when he showed me that ‘You were able to survive, heal, and overcome, and now you need to help others do the same.’

And so I ended up calling him back the next day, and I said, “I did what you suggested for me to do, and this is what was shown to me.” And he said, “That’s all I wanted you to do.” And so he connected me with someone to help me get my logo done.

Her nonprofit and eventual magazine, Scars of Survival, was birthed and named after a scar she has on her finger from previous abuse. 

I looked at my finger because I still have that scar from when I had surgery after he broke it and I said, ‘That’s a scar. And that scar shows I survived.’ My finger works. I’m healed. It’s functioning. I can still use my hands and that led me to Scars of Survival’s name and logo.

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