When you think about Domestic Violence, the first thing that comes to mind is a weak victim. Christa White is the proof that at least sometimes, that is not the case.

Around two years ago, Christa found herself pregnant and living with a man that she trusted and thought that she knew.

“I was on birth control at the time, which had somehow gone missing,” said Christa on how she had gotten pregnant. “I thought he had a condom on, he had taken it off about halfway through, so I really do believe that it as a plan to keep me.”

A short time after Christa had become pregnant, she and her boyfriend, Carl, went to the courthouse to sign a marriage license.

Carl had lied to Christa saying that he had signed up for the Navy after Christa had gotten pregnant. He told her that he wanted to be a better man for her and Adriana. After he had told her this, White ran into the recruiting officer that had filed Carl’s paperwork and told her “it’s too bad about his record.” Christa had no knowledge of Carl’s police record before this, but by that time, Christa had already been married.

The signs were small at first. Carl would get angry that Christa would hang out with her friends, many of which were men. He would yell and punch holes in the walls out of anger. Christa tried to make sense of this telling herself that she would be upset too if Carl hung out with a bunch of women.

“I slowly started dwindling down my friends."

Cutting off all of her connections to the outside world was only the beginning of the abuse that Christa went through. After Carl had isolated her, the verbal abuse started. “He would yell at me and ask me, why are you wearing eyeliner? Eyeliner makes you look like a whore.” After dealing with this for so long, Christa said that she became his “doormat”.

The physical abuse started small, with a grab of the arm here, and a threat of a punch there. But on her first Mother’s Day, the relationship took a turn for the worse when she finally put her foot down and got herself and her infant daughter out of a terrible situation.

After Carl was arrested, there was a “no contact” order placed on Carl, but in March 2013, he had pushed to get that lifted on the grounds that he is Christa’s daughter’s father and he couldn’t see her so he wasn’t going to pay child support. But even though he filed for this he never tried to contact Christa to see her daughter. Since then, Christa has filed a restraining order against Carl.

Now Christa is the mother of beautiful, 19 month-old Adriana White and is in the best place in her life that she could ever hope for. She has the best support system that she could ever ask for, including her best friends and roommates, Jill Black and Bryan Reasner, and her first boyfriend since her divorce, Matt Hill.