Innocent Victims of Abuse

According to statistics, a battered woman will return to her abuser an average of seven times. But Susan's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show might have prevented a woman named Heather from making that mistake. Heather wrote a letter to Oprah saying, "I had already made my safe exit, but I was still trapped inside of it, wanting to jump right back in and fix it. This woman has opened my eyes to what I could not see before."

Heather says she wanted to thank Susan in person for helping her. "Nobody in my family has ever experienced domestic abuse. They were all extremely helpful in talking to me, but nobody could relate to what I was feeling, and they couldn't understand why I wanted to fix it," Heather says. "Hearing Susan talk and saying and feeling the same exact things that I felt, it felt like it was okay to leave. It was okay to walk out."

Like many women, Heather says she wanted to return to her husband because she thought she could fix her marital problems. "I've only been married not even two years, so I kept saying to myself, 'Maybe this is the normal marriage things?'" she says. "But then when it progressed from verbal to physical, you start really questioning, 'This isn't an early marriage crisis that you need to fix. These are real problems.'"