Nearly died's personal story
I was in a controlling relationship with my partner. She is a lovely sweet girl but unfortunately has some mental health issues which caused her to invent lies about me, accusing me of a lot of untrue things, control me, manipulate me, scratch, punch, hit me and blame me for all of it. She even had me believing I was the abuser. I was in a male violence group thinking it was all my fault. What hope did I have of seeing the truth when even the domestic violence handouts are gender biased saying “he controls her”.
It wasn't until I spent sometime seeing another counsellor (3rd counsellor) that she picked up on some of the things I was saying that were going on in our relationship that she asked to meet her. Eventually I encouraged my partner to come in and see my counsellor. When she came in all she was interested in doing was playing the victim, saying things she knew would hurt me and shaming me. The counsellor later pointed out that she believed that she has paranoia (I later found out the she may suffer from bipolar also).
I tried to bring this to her attention hoping that she might get help and we may be able to save our relationship. This only angered her more so for the next couple of months our problems got worse. One time she came home drunk accusing me of cheating on her. She then hit me and was threatening to smash a heavy weight over me. I refuse to fight so I got into a room and locked myself in to stay away from her. She then rang the police on my phone, said she killed someone then hung up. Straight after that she was going to cut herself. I came out of the room to prevent her from self harming and 000 called back. I told them what had happened. I stayed on the phone while she pretended that I was hurting her. The police arrived and she had superficial cuts to her wrists so they took her to hospital.
A week later she was in a bad mood and doing everything she could to draw me into an argument. After hours of her efforts she threw a bottle at me that broke so I pointed out to her how she was behaving. It instantly made her furious. She started trying to cut herself with the glass bottle so I took it off her. What followed was her running around the house try to grab things to cut herself with and me following her taking them off her. I ended up outside near the back door when she threatened to lock me outside saying “hahaha you think there aren't plenty of things inside that I can cut myself with” and she slammed the door shut. Me fearing that she may hurt herself stepped straight towards the slamming door put my hand up to stop it. In that instant I realised my arm had gone through the glass in the door. I had severely been cut right up my arm.
I have lost use of my hand, 1mm deeper and I would have lost my arm and if it had bled for 5 minutes more I would have died. While I was in emergency she called the police and told them I punched the door and was attacking her. Despite the junior officer remembering the incident the week earlier at the house the senior officer decided to give me an AVO without even speaking to me and asking my side of the story. The police are allowed to issue AVOs without talking to both parties if they deem there to be a threat. But I was no threat - I was in hospital for the next week waiting for my 3rd operation. If they had bothered to talk to me I could have told them the truth and they could have seen the evidence like the fresh scratches on her wrist from the broken bottle and where I put the bottle. They could have seen my injuries were on the palm of my hand going down my arm which would suggest I put my hand up to stop the door as opposed to the statement which said I punched the door. Anyway I was left with the option to spend large sums of money in court to clear my name or just accept an AVO that I didn't deserve.