4. GRIP (Silent Wives) – Lyrics
Power & Control · Religious Abuse · Marital Violence · Inherited Silence
(Scroll down for lyrics)
I was working alongside another woman, and slowly—carefully—we started to tell each other the truth. Not the whole truth all at once. Just enough to test the air. We were both in abusive relationships. Different details, different houses, but the same physics: fear, confusion, self-editing, the constant calculation of what might make things worse.
We shared a break room. We shared jokes. We shared the kind of laughter that keeps the peace.
And underneath it, we shared bruises—some visible, some not.
There’s a line in this song where I say, “I thought she ghosted me.”
For a long time, I really believed that.
She stopped answering. The calls went dead. The connection vanished without explanation. I told myself all the things people tell themselves when someone disappears: maybe she moved on, maybe it got awkward, maybe I imagined the closeness.
What I didn’t know—what I couldn’t know at the time—was that her silence was an act of protection.
He had threatened to kill me if she spoke to me again.
She didn’t ghost me.
She was keeping me alive.
That’s what I mean when I say, “That’s how deep the grip goes.”
Silent wives don’t start silent
They are trained there.
This song isn’t loud because the reality it comes from wasn’t loud. It was quiet in a way that felt organized. Domestic. Normal from the outside. The kind of quiet that happens when women learn, early and often, that escalation is dangerous and compliance buys time.
“The tighter I clench, the better his grip.”
That line isn’t metaphorical to me. It’s muscular. It’s how my body learned to behave—brace, manage, anticipate, shrink. I learned how to read micro-shifts in tone. I learned when to joke. I learned when to freeze. I learned when silence was safer than honesty.
And I wasn’t alone in that.
“Our mothers blinked through the slam and the prayer, called it faith just to not disappear.”
That line holds generations.
I watched women before me survive by swallowing sound. By turning pain into politeness. By calling endurance love, obedience devotion, and fear marriage. Many of them were religious. Many of them weren’t. The theology didn’t matter as much as the lesson: stay quiet, stay alive.
Silent wives aren’t weak.
They are strategic.
Abuse doesn’t always announce itself
Sometimes it wears a wedding ring.
Sometimes it prays.
Sometimes it jokes in public and tightens rules in private.
“He changes the rules mid-sentence. I flinch, then edit my presence.”
In abusive dynamics, the rules are never stable. What was safe yesterday becomes punishable today. What was praised becomes mocked. You learn to contort quickly. You learn to take responsibility for moods that aren’t yours. You learn to call it love because no one ever gave you a better word.
This song isn’t about one night.
It’s about a posture.
Silence as protection
One of the hardest things for people to understand—especially people who have never lived inside this kind of danger—is that silence is often an act of care.
My friend went silent to protect me.
I stayed silent to protect myself.
Many women stay silent to protect their children, their jobs, their lives.
Silence doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
It means everything is.
That’s why this song holds restraint instead of release. It’s the sound of women holding on.
Things I learned while writing this song
I didn’t sit down to write GRIP with conclusions in mind. I wrote it from the body outward. But in the process, some truths became impossible to ignore:
Long-term abuse often relies on unpredictability, not constant violence
Threats don’t have to be carried out to be effective
Silence is frequently a survival response, not agreement
Many women disappear socially to protect others from retaliation
Religious language is often used to justify control and endurance
Freezing, pleasing, joking, and minimizing are learned intelligence—not flaws
Learning this didn’t make me feel powerful.
It made me feel grief for how much adaptation it took just to stay alive.
A book that helped me understand the pattern
There’s a book called Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft that helped me put language to what I had lived through. The author spent years working directly with abusive men, studying their belief systems, tactics, and patterns of control.
The book dismantles the myth that abuse is caused by anger, stress, or misunderstanding. It shows how intentional, patterned, and strategic it often is.
There’s a free PDF available online, which I’ll link here for anyone who wants to read it gently, in their own time. This isn’t advice. I know leaving can be dangerous. Sometimes fatal. This book didn’t tell me what to do—it helped me stop blaming myself for what I couldn’t stop at the time.
Why I’m breaking my silence now
I’m not writing this because I think talking fixes everything.
I’m writing because silence almost killed me.
I became chronically ill. Chronically depressed. I didn’t want to live for most of my life. My body carried what my mouth couldn’t say.
These songs are me breaking that pattern—not loudly, not dramatically, but honestly.
I’m not offering solutions.
I’m sending out quiet flares.
If you recognize yourself here—whether as the woman who stayed, the woman who disappeared, the woman who joked through pain, or the woman who is still holding her breath—I want you to know this:
Your silence made sense.
Your survival wasn’t a failure.
You are not late.
Crow blessing
May the grip loosen without punishment.
May what you held to survive stop being mistaken for devotion.
May the quiet scream beneath your teeth finally exhale.
A black wing rests on the wire—watching, remembering.
LYRICS
[Verse 1]
We share a break room—jokes on loop,
while pain’s in bloom, and bruises fade too soon.
I say, “He cried after hurting me. I took the blame.”
She says, “I pretend I’m in someone else’s bed—
so I don’t wake up screaming at what he said.”
He changes the rules mid-sentence.
I flinch, then edit my presence.
The tighter I clench, the better his grip.
I learned to freeze, to please, to twist when it burned,
called it love ‘cause no one ever gave me the word.
He knotted the vow like a marital noose.
No one ever told me it was all abuse.
I joke through pain like it’s polite.
I’m one of the many who freeze each night.
Our mothers blinked through the slam and the prayer,
called it faith just to not disappear.
[Hook]
They say “wife.” I live beneath.
Wear the ring. Swallow the grief.
God is the gag. We call it alive.
Silent wives. Grip to survive.
[soft, spoken like a prayer]
Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked—
but those were the hands that held me.
He prayed with his fists, then sealed it with a kiss.
I flinched and obeyed—still ended like this.
[Verse 2]
I spot the lie in the turtleneck—
mid-spring, no breeze. No cold to check.
The bruises hide in that black fabric.
She bends, she folds—she’s acrobatic.
He erupts on her, full volcanic.
We both wore bruises like wedding rings.
I called to check—her grip on the phone said everything.
She whispers, “He’ll hear this call.”
He mutters. She gasps. Then the line clicks.
I don’t know what happened to my friend.
He said he’d slit her throat in her sleep—
said I was next if she dared to speak.
I thought she ghosted me.
But she was protecting me.
Silence was the price of my pulse.
That’s how deep the GRIP goes.
[Bridge]
If God is grip, then I am God.
If He watches, I’m the fraud unflawed.
He watches? Then watch this.
I’m the bruise clenching into a fist.
You say: “You’re just like her.”
I say: “That’s not a curse.”
Our mother’s quiet scream
still lives beneath our teeth.
[Hook]
They say “wife.” I live beneath.
Wear the ring. Swallow the grief.
God is the gag. We call it alive.
Silent wives. Grip to survive.
[Outro]
If He’s the script, then I’m the pen.
If He watches it all, I write the end.
Now look.
The grip is gone.
The mirror spoke.
And I’m still strong.
The grip is gone
