Moving Out In 48hrs

My experiences (and advice for) exiting an abusive household.

This is as good as it gets, if you can: act shockingly quickly. I asked for the house to myself for a weekend, because it's not reasonable for someone to make big moves in that timeframe. In this type of situation, you have to do things which are not reasonable.

I scattered my material possessions to three friends' garages and the essentials to my sharehouse room.

This was fresh off the back of three and a half weeks homeless.

It was actually less than 48 hours, but I wasn't sitting there with a stopwatch. I arrived late on the Friday and was gone by sunset on Sunday.

When a survivor's residence is the site of their abuse, it can be very easy to convince them to settle back into the "safe" status quo. The person exiting the situation should not be alone at any point in this proces; the abuser (or an enabler) will very probably turn up and sweet talk them into staying. The central objective of moving fast is to minimise opportunities for this to happen.

Years later, while working to help others through this, here is what GPT made of me afterwards.

If you're getting out in a hurry, remember privacy first: disable any cameras and the WiFi so any stray gadgets have nowhere to phone home to. The camera system I'd built was specifically designed to respect privacy, and there was a central point from which the entire thing could be instantly shut down.

DoorDash sometimes has places like The Reject Shop who will deliver plastic boxes of varying quality to your door on-demand. Lifesaver.

You know how I have profound anxiety? That's usually a disability, but when there's actual life-or-death danger, it becomes a superpower. When most people would be running around like headless chickens, my CNS was finally acting on the crisis it had spent years preparing for. People kept telling me to stop, relax, slow down, calm down. I kept having to tell them that I fucking need this, that the anxiety was the fuel driving what I was doing. My baseline curse had turned into situational competence.

Within a rounding error, I took everything that was mine and left everything that wasn't. The anxiety flashbulb memories were extremely effective.

Take photos as you go.

Be extremely careful who you trust. If you create a group chat, it should contain only the people who are actively engaged in helping this second, not everyone who says yes. Pare ruthlessly.

Expect triangulation to be leveraged even on the people who help you through the crisis. They're your friends now, but this is one of the critical hinge points where you might later suddenly find they aren't anymore. Nobody is immune.

Catalogue everything you move. It will save you a lot of grief when family law proceedings start. If you want to keep something, you should take it with you; the court barely has time to split a house, let alone sentimental items. You only get to decide once.

My friends kept trying to cut corners and just shove everything into a big box. Sorting things would actually have been much quicker then than after a disruptive change, so I wish I'd been much firmer on that one.

"Wow, this is going so well! Everything is already packed!"

........fuck.

This was not my first rodeo with DV, and realising that I had been subconsciously preparing to leave at a moment's notice for many years was pretty rough.

I miss the pets, but leaving them behind was the right call. Got a solid cuddle in on the last night. They knew something was wrong. My ex later had a go at me for "abandoning" them, in apparent denial of the fact that she had just forced me into unstable housing.

My first partner after my ex made an advance before I finished moving out. Miss Land Speed Record said "I will always be attracted to someone competent in crisis mode, because it implies that when something goes wrong there'll be backup." She told me to do walkthroughs of the house on video, then record me locking myself out, so that nobody could trash it later and claim it was my fault. One of my friends brought a backpacker along (???) and I had trouble shutting them up for this. Amazing.

I moved all the way across town because it was all I could get in a hurry.

My ex exploded at me over text, demanding to know why I didn't just move the essentials out and leave the bulk of my stuff for her to hold hostage. She didn’t say "hold hostage". She didn’t have to: I still can’t see what other function that arrangement would have served.

This will be much safer and smoother if you do it once in one move. Eliminate any source of leverage you can. Leaving a second time is an order of magnitude more difficult.

Checkin

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Cognitive capacity: improving - estimate 20% brain

If you're going through something similar, check The Coercion Handbook.