He Blamed ME For The Emotional Abuse – June’s Story

It’s common for victims of emotional abuse to say, “He blamed me for the emotional abuse.” If this has happened to you, here’s what you need to know.

To see if you’re experiencing any one of the 19 types of emotional abuse, take our free emotional abuse quiz.

If you need help, the safety strategies in The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Living Free Workshop can help you protect yourself from emotional abuse.

This episode follows Junes’s Story:
Part 1: He Blamed Me for the Emotional Abuse – June’s Story (THIS EPISODE)
Part 2: Divorcing A Narcissist – June Checks In One Year Later

Transcript:He Blamed ME For The Emotional Abuse

Anne: June and I did this interview years ago. At this time, my ex was abusing me and my kids on almost a daily basis under the guise of co-parenting messages that were emotionally and psychologically abusive. He was undermining my children’s medical care, their extracurricular activities, and their school work. I constantly had a pit in my stomach.

Although I was actively trying to figure out how to deliver myself and my children from the abuse, the answers hadn’t come yet. When I listened to this episode again, I could hear the anger and frustration in my voice. I was doing everything right, at least everything I’d learned up until that point. I did everything the typical therapist and clergy told me to do.

Everyone told me that I should get over it and move on. They couldn’t wrap their head around the fact that I was still being emotionally and psychologically abused and my children were being undermined. Yet I was being blamed by the court and guardian ad litem.

Thankfully after years of study and prayer, I discovered emotional safety strategies that in stages delivered us from the abuse when I implemented them. I didn’t even have to go to court.

My children and I no longer have to deal with my emotionally abusive ex, and I still use these strategies. I wanted to make sure that my experience wasn’t a fluke and that these strategies weren’t just specifically for me. I tested the strategies for years with other sheroes who confirmed that they worked for them too.

Being Blamed For The Emotional Abuse

Once we knew they would work for any woman in any situation, I created the Living Free Workshop. In our BTR Group Sessions, women ask questions about how to implement these strategies and find support there.

Make sure you check out the Group Session schedule. I’m still angry that women trying to get to emotional and psychological safety are thwarted and blamed at every turn. I think we should all be angry about that. In this interview, a member of the BTR Community, June shared her story.

June found out that her husband used pornography and had affairs with multiple partners. He continued to do it after they were separated and going through the divorce process. At the time, June’s four children were very young and all of them have special needs to varying degrees.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ehlocZ9sLag

We’re going to start by talking about the challenge of having special needs children when your husband is emotionally and psychologically abusive. Then she shared her story of how she met her husband and how she discovered the truth. You guys are going to be really curious about June’s story. June, let’s start with you talking about your children.

The Challenges Of Parenting Special Needs Children When You’re Being Blamed For His Emotional Abuse

June: I have four children. They range from age nine to three, two boys and two girls, and they each have some level of special needs. My 9-year-old has autism spectrum disorder, sensory processing disorder, auditory processing disorder and also ADHD.

He’s probably been most impacted as far as special needs go and on the disability range. My other children have speech and language issues, and all of my children have been affected by trauma. Which is really important to note because the treatment for trauma impacted children as well as special needs children can overlap sometimes.

In my own home and in my own parenting, I do a lot of things to address that; things to help them feel safe, things to help them process that trauma and process those emotions. It really is no different, many times the work I do with my profoundly impacted child as opposed to the rest of my children that have suffered the trauma is the same.

Anne: Let’s talk about your nine-year-old son who is on the spectrum for a moment. Would you say that some of his behaviors have escalated due to the trauma in the home? Do you see that? They’re a little bit correlated.

Impact Of Emotional Abuse On Children”s Behavior

June: I see that my son who has autism can have a very hard time processing those things. He can have a more difficult time than the other kids processing the actual separation and divorce. He can tend to perseverate on that and ask why. Any answer that I give him won’t necessarily satisfy him.

Kids on the spectrum and kids with special needs in general, can all have sleep issues and insomnia and anxiety. I definitely have seen that increase in my son. Yes, to answer your question, some of the behaviors have escalated.

Anne: You’d mentioned sleep, when your son or all of your children are having sleep difficulties due to the trauma? How do you practice self-care in a situation that is extremely stressful and difficult?

June: I feel like it’s very important to teach my kids what emotions look like and how we process emotions. I would say, if I’m angry about something or if the kids are angry about something.

The Strategies I Used When He Blamed Me For Emotional Abuse

We will go outside and we will say, I’m angry and that is okay. Giving them those ways to process and handle those emotions is very healthy. It is very healthy for me to have that self-care time and that alone time should I need it. I do find ways and carve out little moments during my day that I can do that.

Self care is so important not only for anyone who’s going through a divorce due to abuse or separation or difficult time.It’s also just for a parent in general of a special needs child because oftentimes you never get a break.

It is important to take that upon yourself to learn how to get yourself some relief when you need it and be able to implement that in your daily routine. The things I do, I mean of course I love bubble baths, but when I’m out and about and dealing with a crisis situation with one of my kids, I can’t really go home and take a bubble bath and just stop everything.

I will practice mindfulness driving in the car like pulling over for five minutes to do some deep breathing.

I will do some grounding exercises and the most important thing is that I’ve taught my children how to do these things too.

They know little exercises there’s one that’s called Take Five where we go through the five senses, we pick out five things that we see. We pick out four things that we hear, three things that we touch, two things that we smell, one thing that we taste, and there’s definitely a neuroscience behind it.

The Legal Challenges Of Being Blamed

It switches your brain into getting out of the fight or flight symptoms and into a more grounded state. If any of my children are experiencing anxiety, we’ll do these simple exercises. We’ll do teddy bear breathing and all of these little cute names that we have for the things that we may do to help.

Anne: For women who are separated and or divorced, like June and I, do get a quote, “break” every other weekend when my kids go with my ex. June is in that same situation right now where her children go with her soon to be ex every other weekend. A lot of people think that divorce solves the problem. It does not. The abuse continues.

We still have to learn how to deal with it. In my case, the abuse is that he’s still lying about what happened. He’s still manipulating people. Also, there’s some physical things that are happening with my kids when they come home and they’ve felt physically unsafe with him. June is in that same situation.

There’s this dichotomy of really enjoying the break and having that be a time of self-care, but also really worrying about our children. When my children (who are neurotypical) come home their behaviors have escalated. It takes a while to get back to normal. They have trouble sleeping or they have trouble with school or trouble with getting up in the morning. It throws their whole schedule off.

There’s this dichotomy between I like the break but I want to protect my kids and it’s really hard. What to do with your emotions when the children are with an abusive dad?

Challenges Of Co-Parenting With An Emotionally Abusive Ex-Husband

June: Yes, and I do want to say that any child that is going through the divorce of their parents experiences trauma even in the best of circumstances. That is traumatic for a child and the impact of trauma, regardless of what it is, even if it’s a minor trauma, major trauma, it really depends on how the child perceives it and the impact is really the same.

Even though your children might be neurotypical, you can still do things to address the trauma that they may be facing, even if it is, like I said, in the best of circumstances. I really identify with what you’re saying. It’s so important to take that break when your children leave so that you can catch up on things that you need to do.

Cleaning for me is like self-care because so often I’m running day to day with the kids and we’re going to appointments and therapies and school and all sorts of things, and sometimes I don’t get a chance to clean something the way that I would need to.

I’ll do that on my weekends and I also take that time to be very reflective and to plan my week because I know I have a big week coming up. On my weekends, I will often look for chances to increase my own learning when it comes to my children with special needs. No one can be blamed if you just need to rest.

Continued Emotional Abuse Post-Divorce

I go to advocacy seminars, disability symposiums, trainings, and parenting classes. Many times in your own community, these things are completely free. You just have to know where to look.

Get involved in your community services board if your community has one, which most communities do. There are lots of organizations, nonprofit organizations in general that will offer these sort of things: National Alliance of Mental Illness and mental health organizations.

There are a lot of places that will give you free training for children who have special needs or just general children who have trauma or parenting neurotypical children with no trauma.

It breaks my heart to know that my children might be feeling unsafe. We have been in that situation before and if they have disclosed that they have felt unsafe or they’ve been uncomfortable with something when they’re not with me. I have really struggled on how to handle that, some things I will bring up to him and say, Hey, the kids have mentioned this. It very easily gets manipulated.

The next time that he sees them he will say, I never said that and you shouldn’t tell mom that, or something like that. In those situations, I’ve really just started to teach my kids what my husband’s gaslighting was without badmouthing him at all. That way I can’t be blamed for it.

I just let them know if someone tries to convince you that something didn’t happen that really did happen or that they didn’t say something that they really did and you know that to be real. That’s gaslighting and they appreciate learning that terminology.

Addressing Children’s Special Needs When Being Blamed For Emotional Abuse

They come to me and say, this person was gaslighting me today. I also try to give them and teach them the tools that they need to handle any situation that they might feel unsafe in.

If they are made to watch a movie that is inappropriate or scary, we will role play and I’ll say, what can you do in this situation? The answers that they come up with are great. They say, I can leave the room. I can say, I don’t want to watch this, I tell them I can be blamed for it not being allowed. You can go in your room and play Legos, or close your eyes and think happy thoughts.

Giving them the tools for handling those difficult situations that I have no control over is so important. I do the same thing for my autistic child that I do for the rest of my children, they can all use those tools and effectively implement them in the situations that they’re in.

Anne: Yeah,I have found that has really helped too. Teaching them about gaslighting, they come home and tell me there was a gaslighting situation or this is what happened, and it was really weird, Mom. We felt really uncomfortable. I am so grateful that they’re starting to see that and that they can tell me how they feel about it.

They have words now to describe what is happening to them. By the way, a lot of people ask when I tell them the situation, they’re like, what? He still can take the kids every other weekend even though he’s done this, this and you had a protective order and he was arrested?

When Legal Proceedings Blame The Victim

A lot of people don’t understand that in many ways the law protects abusers and it’s super traumatic when you start going through the divorce process thinking, oh, we’ll finally feel peace. You start realizing that maybe your attorney or the judge or other people don’t understand abuse. What they’re deciding is actually keeping your kids in a harmful situation.

A lot of people don’t realize that. Then there’s also the abuser’s family who is supportive of him and thinks he’s great. My ex hit my son in the face while playing a video game. My ex’s mother, he lives with his parents, used it as an opportunity to tell my ex (My son overheard.) that my son should be blamed because he must be an addict, which hurt him so much.

He said, I feel so unsafe around grandma. She doesn’t understand the situation. She didn’t even hear the whole truth of it, but immediately she threw me under the bus and supported her abusive son. He came home and told me that. In your case, it even came down to clergy and your faith community.

I just want to put out there that a child with autism or I have another friend who has a daughter who has Down syndrome, can have a Mom who is going through this with her abusive spouse. Many other women that I know have a disabled child while an abusive husband in the home is currently lying and manipulating. He’s currently angry.

What It Feels Like To Parent With An Emotional Abuser

He’s currently looking at online content and a lot of people see the disability and women feel free to talk about the disability, but they don’t want to talk about what’s happening with their spouse. Can you talk about in the past when you didn’t understand you were being abused and the situation in the context of having a child with special needs?

June: There was definitely this intersection where I was handling the situation with my children that have special needs and really trying to learn what I could and advocate for them in the school system and educationally. Also, I was very wrapped up in my marriage failing and why my husband was doing these things and what I could do to help that situation.

We went to marriage counseling and I went to counseling on my own. I learned all I could about problematic behaviors, affairs. I really delved into it all and took it upon myself to try to understand how I could possibly save our marriage and our family and help him.

The Impact of Emotional Abuse

I very much wanted him to succeed and to be a healthy person because I believe that abusive people can change and I believe that people can make mistakes and right those wrongs. I began to learn about abuse.

It was very clear that this situation I was in was taking away from my ability to be the best parent I could be for my own children.

I spent so much time in trauma over and over and over again, Trauma from daily verbal abuse and from emotional manipulation, coercion, spiritual abuse to awful degrees. It impacted my ability to advocate and look into the issues that were going on with my own children and to really be present for that.

Once I realized that was the case saw that this intersection was happening, it was a collision, I couldn’t do both. My son didn’t talk until he was about five years old. He used sign language up until that point. When he did start talking, he jumped right into speaking full sentences and parroting people and echoing what other people were saying.

My son heard the names my husband called me. When I realized that my son would repeat that very soon because he was talking. They were subjected to hearing it, was the point for me that this is not getting any better. In fact, it’s getting worse and this is normalized for my children. I would not be blamed for continuing to expose him to that.

Learning From A Childrens Therapist

How it was impacting my ability to also parent my children in a healthy way was the basis for preparing myself that I might have to be a single mom one day.

Anne: Have you seen your children’s behaviors improve since you started setting a boundary around your husband’s abusive behaviors?

June: Yes, I love talking about this because it is truly amazing when you receive the help that you need and you receive the care and the love and that you feel like you belong somewhere and you feel like people understand you. When I left my marriage, my children and I had all received services at a center for abused women and their children.

Part of this was I would go to a support group and the kids would go to children’s support group. It was led by child therapists and social workers, and I took advantage of their amazing training. I would meet with the child therapists alone on a different day to ask them, how can I help my children going through this very, very difficult and traumatic situation?

I was not to be blamed. The things that I learned from that and the things that my children learned just from going to a support group like that with other children who were experiencing similar things were amazing.

Encouragement For Women In Similar Emotionally Abusive Situations

One of the things we did was to implement a safe space in our home. We set up a little tent in the corner of one of our rooms. It has pillows and it has all sorts of sensory things, bean bags and smelly candles and Play-Doh. It’s like a designated space for working through those things that they feel.

We also use time-ins instead of time-outs, if one of my children is having some difficult behaviors or being very irritable or not getting along with the other children. Instead of putting them in timeout, their behavior is a call for help and their behavior is communication. The first thing about trauma-informed care is that all behavior is communication.

What my child is communicating with me at that time when they are acting out is that they need help processing what they’re feeling. Instead of being blamed they are being helped.

I take them aside and we do an emotional check-in or we’ll play a short game about what they felt that day. Tell me a time that you felt brave, or lonely, or happy today. Those times we do that and set aside for even just a five minute conversation, can help push the reset button on their behavior.

It really gets them back on track where they need to be. That is a coping mechanism that is teaching them emotional intelligence and how to process those feelings.

Anne: For other women who have a child with special needs, who find themselves in an abusive situation. They start realizing that these fights that they’re getting into with their spouse are actually verbal abuse. Their husband is lying or using without their knowledge. What advice would you give them?

Challenges In Being Blamed: Leaving An Emotionally Abusive Husband

June: I would definitely say to inform yourself and to educate yourself. The more empowered that you can be in your situation to identify what is going on, the better off you will be in handling whatever happens and whatever you decide and whatever comes your way. I also feel like it is essential to stress that I am a much better parent being out of that situation.

I can now focus on my children. It’s like this whole new world has opened up to me about kiddos that deal with trauma and special needs and how to best mentor them and help them through these things and advocate for them.

It takes advocacy on every level in the community, in schools, even in churches. You really have to educate other people and you as the parent are the expert on your child and being in an abusive relationship can hinder that. It can take away some of the ability that you have to really focus on the children that need it.

I cannot stress enough how much my parenting has changed. How much my life has really opened up. My eyes have opened up to a whole new world helping children with special needs or children with trauma or any child in the best and healthiest way.

Anne: As she shares her story, take deep breaths and remember that she is on her way to safety and will get there eventually, getting to safety is a journey. Also, before we start, I want to talk about how women start this journey. They don’t think their husbands are abusive. Being blamed is so painful. They think, okay, we’ve got this problem, he’s got an anger problem or he has an addiction problem, the trauma symptoms aren’t as bad.

Finding Harmful Content On Her Husband’s Computer

Trauma symptoms are lower because a woman thinks that the situation is manageable or that things can get better. Then as she learns more and realizes that it’s abuse and starts to try to confront the abuser and the abuse gets worse, then the trauma gets worse. When you set a boundary around the abuse and it doesn’t stop, but it escalates, then the trauma becomes even worse.

For listeners, I don’t want anyone to think, oh, things are getting worse. This is really bad, and so it’s the wrong thing to do. It’s the right thing to do and it’s the only way out. June, let’s talk about how you met your husband and when you first suspected that he was using exploitative content.

June: I met my husband when I was in college and everything seemed great. He was the man of my dreams. I was young, in my early twenties, when he came along.

I didn’t have too much of a problem with it because he came across so well, my family liked him. He checked all the boxes that I was raised to believe meant he was a safe and worthy person. We ended up getting married, and I remember I was sitting on the bed in our first year of marriage using his computer for something, and I happened to look in one of the files and I saw a bunch of photos from a topless beach.

Recognizing When He Blames YOU For The Emotional Abuse

I was shocked. It was very clear that these were homemade photos. It wasn’t like he downloaded these, this was like homemade photos taken of women on this topless beach. I had known that he had spent some time in a place that had a topless beach. He was in some of the pictures with a friend of his, so I confronted him about it and he gaslit that away and manipulated it and said, oh, he blamed his friend.

He just never deleted them from the device. Looking back, that was my first real D-Day. That was such a little thing compared to everything that has happened since, but that was definitely a huge red flag. If I could go back and speak to the former June in that time, I would teach her that that was a huge red flag and to pay a lot closer attention than she did.

Anne: Why do you think women in this situation dismiss those little experiences? They’re really big experiences, but why do we say they’re little? Not that they should be blamed.

June: I think that we want to believe in the good of people and someone doing something like that, that’s voyeuristic. I would say it’s also stalking, but it goes beyond that. We don’t want to believe that anyone is capable of that and that’s foreign. It’s foreign to me because I have no propensity to really do that, and so we want to believe the best in people.

The Extent Of Being Blamed For Emotional Abuse

These are men that we love. We want to save our families. We want everyone to be healthy and happy. It’s not hard for someone to come in and say, Hey, these weren’t my pictures. Here’s what happened, and give us an explanation. For us to just take them at their word and believe it. Definitely throughout our dating and throughout our marriage, there was abuse all along.

I had reached out to people. I’d reached out to my parents, to friends and other family members. I told them what was going on.

He called very, very horrific names. I remember one time even when we were dating. We had been in a fight about something and I went into the bathroom, shut the door and was sitting down on the floor with the lights off. He came in there and was just yelling over me, the B word over and over and over again. I was huddled in this corner, oh my gosh, what is he doing?

We had probably only been dating a few months by the time that situation had happened, and still he had said he was sorry afterwards. There was a point when he came into my apartment and decorated my whole room with rose petals. I look back, this is a textbook abusive cycle, the love bombing, the apologies.

Then the explosion and the honeymoon phase and then building up the tension and the explosion and the love bombing. It was just very much like that, but every time he would apologize. He just blamed something else for his behavior.

Being Stuck In The Abuse Cycle With Your Husband

I would stay because he’d said he would get better and then it would happen again. Then he would apologize and I would stay and every time that he apologized, things did get better until the next time..

You become invested in how the relationship is. In the first year of marriage, it was a lot of verbal abuse. I would tell people, and nobody else really picked up on it. They were like, marriage is hard.

Anne: He must be stressed.

June: And all this while, I found out later, he was calling friends and family members and gaining rapport with them. Saying that he’s concerned about June because she seems like she’s depressed and really gaslighting me to my family, really for the next 12 years he blamed me. He had done this as the abuse was on and off just like an abusive cycle would be.

All the while he was gaining this trust of my family and of my friends when things escalated to the point that I had to leave. That made it extremely difficult for me because I did not trust some of my family at that point.

Anne: Talk about when you actually started realizing that the behaviors that you were seeing were abusive as opposed to just thinking that he had an anger problem or that he was a addict. Talk about how you made that shift to realizing that these things were abusive.

Seeking Social Support During Divorce From An Emotionally Abusive Man

June: There were things all along the way that I look back on, these were all red flags and I missed them. He would chat online inappropriately with women and he would tell me about it. I don’t know why I didn’t have the capacity to understand what was going on, like I said, he would always apologize and I would always stay.

It was not until I had a friend that reached out to me and confided in me about her situation with her husband who has some very, very problematic behaviors, use and infidelity and things like that, voyeurism. She said, I just have a feeling that I need to be there for you and ask you if you’ve ever thought that your husband is like that. I don’t know what she picked up from my husband.

She didn’t really know him very well, and maybe it was things that she picked up on in me. There was definitely a change when I was going through some things privately that maybe she could pick up on. She just shared her story and that night I came home and I just asked my husband, is this an issue for you?

I started tying some of those situations together. There was a time that he had come home and I was 37 weeks pregnant. He said, this woman attacked me in my office, and I was like, oh my gosh, this sounds so dangerous. She was trying to come on to him he blamed her. Well, in reality, I found out that they had been conducting an affair on the hospital’s messaging system.

When You’re Blamed For Your Own Emotional Abuse

He had gone to her office, shut the door and locked it, and there was some kind of encounter, and I was 37 weeks pregnant. When I found that out, he shrugged it off. He had no idea what was going on, and he just blamed her. We are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We went to our ecclesiastical leader who is called the bishop in our church.

He has really no training to be able to identify abuse or handle infidelity or marital problems.

He is a volunteer. We are going to him, and now I look back and I’m thinking, this situation is just so prime for mishandling. Here we are, we’re talking to someone about this huge situation, and yet nobody really picked up on the gravity of it. We went to our bishop and learned some more things about the situation that I felt like I needed to know.

I think my bishop was kind of in shock. He didn’t really know what to say. My husband talked his way out of it. I was 37 weeks pregnant. This was my fourth child. I had three other children under the age of five at the time, one of whom had profound special needs.

Finding BTR.ORG & Feeling Relief From The Blame

There’s no way I believed him when he said it was not his fault. We had our baby and things kind of went back to normal and normal for us. Which was a lot of abuse. I just remember a few months after my baby was born, it was the summer and I had taken all of my kids to go see a movie in the park and to play.

My husband was at work and he had just been nasty to me and hanging up on me all day. I’m just thinking, what did I do? What is going on with him and how do I deal with this situation? The confusion was extremely difficult. After that, I started learning more about addiction, behaviors, use.

I found BTR, which was a beacon of light to me in this situation. I listened to all of the podcasts every single week, I would just wait for the next one to come out. For the first time I had a label of what I was feeling. I didn’t know what this was. When I learned about betrayal trauma, I could understand these symptoms.

This is trauma that happens to someone when they are in the situation of being betrayed by someone that they trust implicitly. When I would listen to the BTR episodes, I remember listening to your story and how horrific it was, but also at the same time, I didn’t place myself in that category. I still didn’t, but the more that I listened and the more that you would talk about covert abuse, the more that connected with me up to that point.

I Was Being Blamed: Escalation of Abuse

There was no outright physical abuse yet. The covert abuse that you would describe was very, very much the same of what I was experiencing. The manipulation and the lying and the psychological harm, even the spiritual abuse. That is one thing that I started connecting with and learning about, and that opened my eyes to seeing and really identifying that I was in a very bad abusive relationship.

Anne: You’re listening to me. I’m sharing my story. You’re thinking, whoa, I’m really relating to this. When did his behaviors escalate to actual physical violence?

June: His behaviors started escalating when I started finding out more and more about some of the extreme problems that he was having. I found out about several inappropriate relationships that he had had with people at his work. He was in a very powerful position. These were people who were under him, so it was an abuse of power. He always blamed the women.

He’s actually licensed also by the state. I knew that could be a very bad situation for him as far as that goes. When I started finding out about this, he would come to tell me and confess these things. It was almost as a way of him gaining my trust.

Anne: My ex did the same thing. He would tell me part of it. The way he would say it was manipulating it so I would view it in a certain way to help him rather than me. I realized later that this was dangerous. What was happening probably should have been reported to the police.

Realities Of Divorcing An Emotional Abuser

Anne: My ex did the same thing. He would tell me part of it. He would say it was manipulating it so I would view it in a certain way to help him rather than me. I realized later that this was dangerous. What was happening probably should have been reported to the police.

June: Exactly. So he would come and tell me these things and say, “ There’s an inappropriate encounter with someone at his work.”, or “This woman sent me these unsolicited pictures of her in a compromising position” or “wearing nothing”. He always blamed the women.These things all accumulated. My husband ended up moving out for two months or so.

He was in therapy with a therapist who claimed to treat addiction and problematic behaviors and everything. I had started therapy on my own and we had gone to therapy together with each of our therapists. They were at the same facility. We had met with them maybe once or twice. My therapist easily identified that I was in an abusive situation. His therapist did not.

Anne: Yeah, we’ve noticed that so much with so-called Addiction Experts. They do not identify the abuse and they’re not helping keep the wives of addicts safe at all. It’s really actually pretty scary and dangerous

June: We were really trying to work things out. He was going to SA meetings and he had shown a lot of humility and improvement. I remember thinking, if this is the man that could be with me all the time, that is who I want. He did move back in and we had a pretty good, I’d say six to eight months of progress.

Establishing Safety During Abuse & Blame

Then things started to slip again, and it was more verbal abuse that started creeping in. It was more psychological abuse. It was these things that would start to come back in and I would ask him, is anything going on with people at work? These abusive behaviors are a really, really big red flag for me.

I had tied it altogether at that point, I had tied the verbal abuse to the other problematic behaviors, and he just insisted, no, no, it wasn’t.

He just came to me one day out of the blue and said, I have actually been lying to you and there’s three women who I’ve had inappropriate relationships with off and on. I am using again, and it was like a D-Day all over again. I’ve given him my trust in thinking he’s a safe person. I’ve let him move back in.

I have overcome part of that betrayal trauma to be able to be intimate with him again and to be able to really want to work on our marriage.

When I found that out, it was a huge D date. You have been lying to me this whole time and you are not a safe person, and at that time, I asked him to move out again. He wouldn’t. He became very mean, very irate, very scary. I received a message from somebody anonymously about his reputation at his workplace and that he made people feel uncomfortable.

There was even one that described a certain situation where he assaulted a female in this closet at work. Once again he blamed her. He was sleeping downstairs, and I went downstairs and I asked him about this and he demanded to see my phone.

June Discovers Even More Abuse & Her Husband Blamed Her

I said, no, you can’t see my phone, and I went upstairs and he was running after me. At that point, I was very, very scared. I had just found out that this person was very unsafe.

Also had confirmation of this from someone who worked with him, and here he was running after me trying to get my phone. I ran upstairs, he pushed me into a wall. He tackled me. He got my phone. I scratched him. I’m five five and I weigh 140 pounds. He’s six six and he weighs 220, so I did whatever I could. I was very, very scared for my life because I had no phone.

I ran outside to a neighbor’s house and called the police. When the police came, they looked at him and they looked at me and he had a scratch mark. It was a male police officer and I was incoherent. I was in trauma, I couldn’t really describe anything of what had happened, I was just trying to process it myself. I had no visible bruising yet, or marks or anything that was bleeding. That did show up a few days later.

He went inside and my husband was just bawling and he blamed me for the whole thing. The police officer said, well, I have to take you away because he has these visible injuries, and so I was taken away that night. I was arrested and sat in the holding area for just a few hours and then they let me go back home. I didn’t have anyone that I could call to pick me up.

Support To Face Blame During Divorce

I have no family around. Nobody really knew what was going on in my situation in my marriage. I felt very much a sense of shame and I couldn’t call anyone and say, I’ve been arrested. Come and pick me up. There was just nobody that would understand that. My husband did call one of his friends who was actually from our church. Looking back, I see that he had set this up.

The more empowered I would become, he would say the more crazy I would get to this friend, and so I think he could see that I was becoming empowered and stronger and being able to identify abuse. At the same time, he was telling people that I was becoming more depressed or more and more angry.

I retained a lawyer and I had injuries of my own, which I had someone take pictures of, and that case was dismissed, but I knew I was in a very unsafe situation. At the library I did research on domestic violence and abuse. I learned that 40% of women who are in abusive relationships, had their partner blamed them and have them arrested for abuse for fighting back.

Suddenly in the shame of that situation, I was able to understand that this was no fault of my own. I also felt more empowered and safer to reach out to people and say, look, my husband did this to me and he had me arrested. He accused me of abuse, and I slowly started gaining support of a few people just in a very close knit circle that I could trust and could see what was going on.

I Was Blamed By My Clergy For His Abuse

It was just a few months after that things really started escalating. My husband started using my arrest as leverage. He said that if I ever left, he would get custody of our children have this history. He blamed me for the whole situation, he said I would be out on the street. I wouldn’t have anywhere to live. It was very much held over me. The abuse just escalated from that point. He got a free pass.

I did reach out to the bishop when I found out about more incidents and many other indiscretions, and my husband and I went to meet with the bishop at that point. After my arrest and after he had confessed a bunch of things to me. The bishop was meeting with my husband privately. They met for probably about 45 minutes before the door finally opened.

I went in and I said, I am really at my wit’s end. I’m thinking that this is not a safe situation and I need support. The bishop looked at me and he said, you need to be a better wife and mom and your husband has told me everything that has happened. You are angry. He called me a feminist.

Anne: Which is not a bad word, by the way. Great word. Thank you for the compliment, sir.

When Your Church Community Won’t Protect You From Abuse

June: It became clear that my husband had gone in there and just said all of these things. June wants to go back to school and I don’t feel like she needs to do that. The bishop said, you don’t need to go back and get your master’s degree. What are you even thinking? You need to just be a better wife and mom and your husband is dissatisfied, he blamed me for my husbands actions. You need to give him more.

Basically, I very clearly saw what was happening. I started just speaking my mind and I said, this is not okay. You cannot be saying this. This is not okay. My bishop started to ask me details of things that I had done when I was a teenager. He said, your husband said that you were not faithful. I said things I did as a teenager have no bearing on any of this.

First of all, I’m a married mother of four and I’m 34 years old. You do not need to be asking me these questions. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to understand what he was doing. I look back now and I see that shamed me for something that I had done a long time ago.

He was trying to shame me into stopping the complaints or pointing the finger about how abusive my husband was.

When The Blame Doesn’t Stop

Anne: He was trying to silence you, right, and say, look, you are the one that’s the problem. Stop causing all this hullabaloo and take your place as a wife and mother. He blamed you for the abuse.

June: The questioning continued. My bishop said that if I submitted myself to him that he could fix me and that he has a very special way with women. That he has insight into women and that he has a unique ability to fix them and fix their problems and help them. It was so far out that I could identify it as inappropriate.

I went there thinking that I would feel safe and protected and loved, and I knew that something was going terribly, terribly wrong. I didn’t have the language to say, this is harassment. It’s inappropriate questioning. It is verbal abuse. It is blaming, it’s rationalizing, it’s deflecting. It’s projecting. I can name exactly what was happening, but at that time I didn’t.

It was so confusing to me why he was asking me these things and why he was taking the position that he did.

I eventually tried to teach him a little bit about trauma, use, infidelity, and abuse and how it all ties in together. He stood up, his face got very red, he yelled at me.

Secondary Emotional Abuse, Being Blamed By Clergy

He said, I’m exhausted and I don’t know what else you want from me. I’m trying to take care of all of these people and you’re making my job difficult and you need to listen to me.

It was very scary, I came to him disclosing that I had experienced verbal abuse. That was very triggering for me. It was very, very traumatizing. I got up out of his office and I actually ran out of the church. It was probably 11 o’clock at night at that point. Nobody else was there.

I had immediately called a friend and I called my mom and explained what happened. From that point on, I had tried to take it up to the person above him. Which is the stake president, like a hierarchy, and explain what happened. This bishop’s behavior, and his questioning was inappropriate. Things are happening in my home that are terribly wrong and I need some help.

The stake president said, I don’t believe the bishop did that. I tried. I tried to report to whoever I could report it to, but there’s really nothing else I could do.

Anne: This story is getting really intense, I’m just going to recap really quickly. She starts recognizing that her husband is abusive. Goes in to see if she can get some help from her clergy, and ends up being emotionally abused by her clergy as well. At this point, June, you’re realizing that you can’t get help from clergy and you need to turn somewhere else. What do you do next?

Moving Forward, Despite Emotional Abuse With Divorce Proceedings

June: I start educating myself. I listened to BTR, I found a lot of comfort and guidance in really identifying the behaviors that I was seeing in my own home from my husband as abusive behaviors. I became empowered enough and informed enough and I did initiate separation. His behavior escalated phenomenally during that time. The name calling was getting much worse.

I had no lawyer. We had no legal separation. I had consulted a couple of lawyers, trying to figure out what the situation would be like. I do suggest that informing yourself is paramount, it’s key. When we would exchange the children, he would come into my home and yell and throw things around.

He berated me for the children’s clothing. When he moved out, he packed up all of his guns and laid them in the hallway.

The kids and I were in the house and it was very obvious that he was doing that as physical intimidation. One day he picked up the kids. He called me horrific names. My children were there. He came inside my house. He wanted to pack up some of their clothes because he said I didn’t do it right.

It was demeaning, demanding, very scary behavior. After seeing this behavior, I did not feel safe sending my kids with him. They were all in the car and I went and I got in the car with them and he grabbed me from the car and threw me on the driveway in front of my children. Then he drove away with my kids in the car. He left me lying on the driveway. I was hysterical, traumatized.

When Law Enforcement Blames The Victim

He injured me. I had an abrasion on my elbow. He tore my clothes in several places. I had bruising on my hip. I called the police. The police came. It was so scary because of what had happened last time when I called the police. My injuries were visible at this point. He still had the children.

The police officer came. He assessed the situation. He talked to my husband who has a prominent position in our community, and he introduced himself with his title, which is impressive to people. I remained calm and I told the police officer what happened. I showed him my injuries and the police officer said that he could leave. The children ended up staying with me, which I was grateful for.

I still to this day have no idea how he didn’t get arrested given the injuries.

Anne: Manipulated the law enforcement.

June: That weekend he called me several times. The next day he came to my house, tried to get in the door, knocking on the door, calling friends and family of mine. He called a bunch of our friends and told them that I was crazy. Meanwhile, I am just trying to figure out how I’m going to survive this situation with an obviously dangerous and abusive person.

I had no time to call anybody to make them see my side of it. That was just not in my capacity. I had this injury, trying to figure out what in the world I needed to do to keep myself and my family safe. I was able to get a restraining order.

The Consequences Of Emotional Abuse

Anne: How did you feel when you went to file the protective order? Did you feel like, what am I doing? How is this happening?

June: Yeah. I was very scared that I wouldn’t be believed first of all because that is what was happening all around me. I was being blamed as the instigator, the angry and scorned woman. Of course I had felt angry. My anger was not driving any of this. My need for safety was.

Anne: By the way, this story. I know it’s horrific and difficult for our listeners to hear this. This is really typical for abuse victims. This period of confusion and what is happening, and he’s blamed you and nobody can understand this is exactly what happened. It happened to me too, but this type of manipulation and coercion with people around is exactly what we start to see. Women can feel like they’re going crazy.

June: Yes, he left me on the side of the road several times when he got angry at me in the car. He would just pull over and kick me out of the car and I would be left there for hours, in different places in front of my children. He withdrew money from our bank account, so I couldn’t buy groceries at this point. I couldn’t buy a birthday cake for my child who had a birthday that day.

He was of course very verbally abusive, but mentally and psychologically and socially aggressive to me and in ways that I couldn’t even recognize because I didn’t know it was going on.

Emotional Abuse & Blame Began When She First Got Married

I didn’t know that he was calling our mutual friends without me present and telling them these stories and painting me as this person who had all of these mental issues.

He would also very frequently embarrass me in public situations that we were together, and make jokes at my expense. He would demean me and be very coercive, trying to get me to do things that I wasn’t comfortable with.

Anne: When you started recognizing the behaviors, did you recognize that he was this way all along, but you just hadn’t seen it?

June: Yes. The trauma became so much greater when I started realizing that I his abuse started from the beginning. On our honeymoon to a foreign country he told me he wanted a divorce. What was he even talking about?

He wanted to leave me in the jungle, alone, in this foreign country. I had no idea how to speak their language or anything. It was very scary. Things like that were happening, but then I would also be so grateful when he would make it right and when he wouldn’t behave in those ways.

It was like this huge relief, it’s almost like he became accustomed to the love bombing and the apology and the honeymoon period that happens.

Getting A Restraining Order But Still He Blamed Me For The Emotional Abuse

The restraining order was for myself and my children. For three days I knew that we were to be safe and secure and left alone. I was unsure if he would even abide by the restraining order. Then, I did make the decision to file for divorce at that point. I went to my parent’s house with my children.

My parents live in a different part of the country, but legally I knew that I needed that protection. I needed to go ahead and file for the divorce and be away from the situation. My children and I left in the middle of the night. We had nothing really packed. We drove for a few days and lived with my parents for about four months. While I filed the paperwork for the actual divorce.

It was over the summer. The kids were in summer camps and in all sorts of activities. I received great services from a women’s center. My children received great services at the same place, and it was very much a time of healing and a time of safety and security. Now, it’s not to say that he didn’t abuse that situation.

He would call every day and demanded that it would be on video, which I did facilitate because I was trying to remain reasonable. He would call at all hours of the day, even into the night. Once I couldn’t answer my phone and he called the police to do a well child check in the middle of the night, which was very scary to my children and to me.

My Emotionally Abusive Husband Cut Of Access To Money

I had asked him also for money to buy diapers for my children, pay for medication and pay for food. I had very little money with me, but I had no means of paying for those things. Before I left in fact, he had taken all of the money that we had, cut me off and transferred it to an account that I did not have access to.

June: I was living on credit cards,

Anne: Took all the money away so you can’t even buy groceries, right? Yeah, that happened to me.

June: I had started on food stamps when I went to this different state. It was purely by knowing that he would not make this right. By getting the restraining order and setting boundaries, his behavior escalated. That was really an answer to me that I did the right thing, because he wasn’t supporting his children. I donated plasma to get some money. We were living with my parents. They supported me and my four children.

At that point, I really liked where we were living. We were around family. His family had also lived nearby. We had seen his family when we were out there. The kids saw their cousins and they were excited about that. I am in a state that very much expects parents to co-parent and to work with each other. It was clear that we would not be able to agree or decide on something that was reasonable together.

Being Blamed By The Court System

We went to court. Unfortunately, there is not a way that the law identifies covert abuse or emotional abuse.

Anne: We see that over and over again where the law does not protect victims of emotional abuse from perpetrators. If there’s no physical evidence and he’s lying and manipulating, there’s no protection for victims. That leaves all of the burden of protecting yourself on the victims themselves.

June: The courts like to give people a chance

Anne: That’s never helpful. If the court held them accountable, it would be more helpful to get the perpetrator to actually make changes and for the victim to be safe.

I think there’s a serious problem in our country right now protecting abusers and it’s scary for the victims.

June: When I walked into the courthouse for our hearing, I didn’t know how it was going to go, and I immediately saw a friend of mine. We had gone to church together and we had done a few other things. She was in a similar situation. She had divorced an abusive person who had an affair. I saw her at the courthouse and she wouldn’t look at me.

My first initial thought was like, oh my goodness, what is she doing here? Maybe she’s here to say hi to me or to support me. She was there with my husband and she was a witness.

Blamed Even By Friend’s

She testified that I planned to kidnap my kids.

When that happened, I put it together that they were in a relationship, they were having an affair. I had some other information from a few other people, other evidences of that. I realized what was happening. He manipulated her and blamed me. She did not know the reality of the situation, she knew about the abuse. She knew about the verbal abuse.

I confided in her my fear and I said, I need to have a plan in place, and so that was the extent of the conversation. She had come to court and said that I had planned to kidnap my kids and make up the assault. My husband manipulated her and blamed me.

The damage she caused to me and my children was irreparable. That was a very traumatic moment. It was horrific to realize that while I was in this really dire situation, living with my parents, with my four kids, that he was here having an affair with her and choosing not to support his kids and actively working to discredit me with an employee of the city.

Divorce Proceedings With Husband Still Perpetrating Emotional Abuse

Anne: Can you talk about the divorce proceedings and how fighting a narcissist for custody has played out? t

June: Yes, so I came back here and trying to co-parent. My children had experienced trauma, they had anxiety. They were unsure of what kind of situation we were coming back to. I wanted to make that as smooth as I could for them. When I did get back here, I came to the home that I would be living in. It was unkempt.

He took anything he wanted, furniture, valuables. Also, he had left a piece of chewed gum as a message to me. He always said divorced women were like chewed gum. He had disassembled locks and doorknobs from the house.

There were feminine products that were clogging the plumbing of the house.

He had taken the liberty of having people in the church move my personal belongings, my intimate clothing and my children’s clothing. We had no discussion about it. That kind of set the stage for how the period of time since I’ve been back has gone.

Emotional Abuse, Blame From Clergy

He does these things blatantly and there really is no recourse. I’ve asked him for some of my belongings and some of the things that he took without permission. I didn’t get any of that back. That’s been a hard thing. When I did return, I went to church. I made the effort to co-parent and keep my kids as stable as possible.

When I went back to see this bishop. I was actually with my father and he went in with me. I felt safer because my dad was there with me.

Anne: For those of you not familiar with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Instead of choosing the congregation that you go to. You find out where your congregation boundaries are and you go there.

That’s why June didn’t just go to a different church because her boundaries were those particular boundaries and that’s what everyone does within the church. I wanted to give you some background on that as to why she didn’t think, oh, I’ll just go somewhere else.

June: Yes, exactly. I went to my bishop with my father. I said, I don’t know if you know about the situation, but I’m happy to share with you the things that have happened and what my children and I have been through. We’re going to be coming to church here. He stopped me and said, I know that you kidnapped your kids.

Clergy & Church Community Did Not Help, Instead Blamed Me For The Emotional Abuse

Everyone says that you kidnapped your kids and you have got a serious issue. It was so uncomfortable. I said to him, I didn’t kidnap my own children. First of all, I had a restraining order. Would you like to see it? And I said, my husband is not paying support. He hasn’t been supporting us. I don’t think he should have a calling.

The bishop said, I don’t care about any of that. That stuff does not matter. He didn’t want to see any of the documentation I had. I mentioned to him that my husband was having an affair with another single woman in the ward, and he had no intention of discussing any of that. It was so uncomfortable. By that time I had really learned how to set boundaries and I saw that this was not a good situation.

I just stopped the entire discussion and left. The bishop didn’t hear my side of the story or look at any of the evidence that I had. He had made his mind up. There were a couple of other things that had happened from that point on in our church.

The women have an organization called Relief Society, it is for providing support for the women in the church and those who are in need and ministering to women.

When Church Blamed Me & Refused To Help

I had called the president of the Relief Society and reached out to her about my situation. My husband was still not paying support. We were going to have to garnishee his wages. That could take a period of time to set up.

I was very much in need at that point, I exhausted all of my credit cards, all of my resources that I had. I was in need of food for my children and had nothing to pay for any other bills. If I can get some food for my children for the next few weeks, that is one weight that I don’t have to worry about, at least for right now.

Anne: The church has a bishop’s storehouse where members of the church who are in need can get food, and that’s what she’s talking about.

June: The Relief Society met with me. We had a discussion. I described what was going on, I did not say that my husband was abusive. I didn’t berate or demean the bishop in any way, I just explained to her my need and she called me up a few days later.

She said she had spoken with the bishop and she didn’t believe that my husband could afford to pay the support that the court ordered. The bishop was also saying this. I told her I actually have no money. It was clear that the bishop had that information from my husband. Clearly my husband said he couldn’t afford to pay for it.

Husband’s Emotional Abuse Expands To Clergy

He declined to help me and my children with food. They said, I need my children to have some food. That’s it. He said, you’re not being truthful with me. You’re not being honest. Your husband said that he would never leave you or the children in this situation.

He was just believing my husband. I said, he hasn’t given me anything. I have not received anything. He took a lot of the food that was in this house. I have texts and emails of many of these interactions. The bishop came to me a few days later and wanted me to meet with one of his counselors who is actually a lawyer. I had reached out to my own lawyer at that point.

She said, that is grounds for filing a complaint against that lawyer.

That’s grounds for disbarment. You cannot do that. We have an open custody case and divorce proceedings and no one should be asking you to meet with someone else who is a lawyer. I declined to do that. The bishop said that he wanted to go over my finances and that the lawyer, his counselor would be there to help.

I showed the bishop screenshots of my bank account and the bills that that I had no way to pay. He said, you can have some food. I think I had two orders, and then I went to place an order with the Relief Society president. At 10 o’clock at night, and the bishop actually texted me back and said, there will be no more food. If you need food, you need to come in and meet with me and the state president.

Emotional Abuse When The Chuch Blames Me

These were the same leaders. One of them had abused me and the other had enabled that abuse, and so I was not going to meet with them under any circumstances alone or with someone. That was not a situation I was going to put myself in. He cut off the food and my children and I didn’t receive any more assistance in that manner from my church. I’ll tell you, that was a very, very dark time.

That was very, very difficult. The year before that we paid 10% of our income to the church in voluntary donations for tithes. Here I was now in this situation having no income for myself. My husband wasn’t paying the support and I needed basic things for my children.

I became a bad person for even asking for that and labeled a liar. I look back now and it is a miracle that I even survived that time. The darkness that I felt from betrayal in so many ways, on so many levels and by so many people was so great. I did set the boundary that I would not attend that congregation anymore.

I knew that was no longer going to be a safe place for me or my children when they were in my care. That was a tough decision. I did know that my safety was first. My children’s safety was first and my family’s safety was first.

Being Far Away From Family When He Blamed You For Emotional Abuse

Anne: . You’re still in divorce proceedings. How have the divorce proceedings gone?

June: We have been in and out of court for almost two years now. When you’re going through divorce in the courts, you have to deal with things like custody and support and visitation, and you have to decide all of these things. If you cannot decide it together, then you go to court. He has violated the order several times in small ways, small ways that I really have no way to address.

He has sworn at me during exchanges and does things to try and elicit a reaction or a response. I never respond, I never react. I have learned to know what I can control and what I cannot control and let the rest go. Going in and out of court has obviously been very expensive. It’s been very time consuming.

Anne: I want to stress that you are in a part of the country that is completely, totally far away from your family and support system.

June: Not only do I not have family here, but because I stepped away from the church and because I have the experiences with my bishop and my state president that I have had. The congregation alienated and ostracized me. They enabled the wrongs committed right in front of them.

Soldiering On Despite Continuation of Emotional Abuse

Many people knew that my husband was having this affair, and yet everyone chose to ostracize me. I’m not considered a person who has a testimony anymore because if I had a testimony, why wouldn’t I be coming to church and I’m painted as this feminist who has gone crazy.

I have also received some very, very troubling evidence that the bishop is defaming me in the community and that members, individual church members are doing the same thing.

They use the same language, they use the same words, they use the same phrases to describe me. They talk about my divorce and they talk about the state of my mental health, and it’s very damaging. It’s troubling, and there’s no way again that I can really address it.

Yes, I’m going back and forth to court doing the best I can for my children, trying to advocate for my children. All have special needs in some way or another, and trying to co-parent with a person who will not co-parent in return. He will use every situation to abuse or manipulate in some way.

When I Discovered He Blamed Me For The Emotional Abuse

All the while just feeling very alone in what I’m going through.

Anne: Yeah, it stinks. It’s really bad. I was thinking of different things we could put on Facebook and one of ’em was it’s really, really bad. We get it because during this situation, so many people try to tell me or you or other victims, it’ll be okay. It’s not as bad as you think it is. It’s really, really, really bad. You are in a super bad situation.

What helps give you peace when you’re having a really difficult time?

June: It’s interesting. I have cultivated an authenticity in myself that brings me a lot of peace and the relationships that I have now. Although they may be few, they’re meaningful to me because there are people that I do feel very safe with. There are people that have seen the other side of life and how awful and ugly it can be. They still love me and we understand each other.

There’s a sense of empathy that comes with going through trials like this that many people, I think never really get the chance to cultivate within themselves. Standing in my truth and knowing that I have survived. I have survived some of the worst situations that I had ever imagined I’d ever be in.

I will continue to survive, I’ll continue to build resilience and I’ll continue to reach out to others. To gain community and connection with those who have also survived horrific, horrible and unbelievable trials in their lives. That gives me a lot of peace, that sense of community with others who know.

Advice For Other Women Experiencing Emotional Abuse

Anne: Yeah, because you’re still in the thick of things with nothing being final. He’s still doing all these things that are just not right. I hope that you do have a little glimmer of hope that things will get better eventually.

What advice would you have for other women who are in a situation that is really difficult like yours?

June: Learning about boundaries is crucial. You have got to learn about boundaries and how to set them appropriately. If someone is saying inappropriate things to you. Or if someone is not offering you wise or sound or righteous counsel. You need to be able to recognize that and empower yourself to leave that situation immediately.

You don’t even have to explain. Cultivating your own worth within yourself. Knowing that you are a worthwhile and wonderful and lovable and amazing person as you are. In these situations, our worth seems to suffer. How we feel about ourselves seems to really plummet.

It’s important to be able to hold on to the knowledge and the core belief that you are worth it. That you do not deserve to be abused, lied to, manipulated and cheated on or blamed. That you deserve safety and happiness and security and peace. You deserve peace in your life.

Anne: Yeah. When you started recognizing, okay, I need to start setting boundaries, did you imagine that it would get this bad?

When The Emotional Abuse Escalates

A lot of women don’t realize, okay, I’m making my way to safety. This is cool, but they don’t realize it’s going to get a lot worse. Can you talk about that?

June (01:16:39): It definitely can escalate with an unhealthy person. Boundaries will make them escalate, and they will make them more abusive and behave in more unhealthy ways. With a healthy person, I believe boundaries can be great. They will respond in a healthy and respectful way. That was not the case in my situation. When I set the boundary, it escalated things astronomically.

I could have been more prepared, although I knew that the most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she decides to separate. It’s dangerous when she initiates separation or when she decides to leave that relationship. Really, when a woman would set those boundaries.

Anne: Yeah. I think a lot of women hear about boundaries, and for some women, their spouse is like, oh, this is a boundary, and they realize that they need to change and they change. It’s a miracle and it’s amazing, but a lot of women don’t talk about when you set that boundary, things escalate and that is terrifying to think about.

Women are more prepared for the escalation of the abuse as they start to make their way towards safety and knowing that doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong thing. You’re going to be blamed and accused of abuse. It is part of the process of getting to safety. I think it would maybe help women be a little bit more prepared for what’s going to happen.

Difficulties Trying To Protect Yourself From His Emotional Abuse

June: Yes. I really wish that local women’s shelters and local resources and organizations that address domestic violence and domestic abuse would be more acknowledging of that fact. I called and said, I was experiencing abuse, I don’t know what to do.

If you need to leave very quickly, have the children’s medication and their birth certificates and important papers, you need to get a little bit of money and have those things ready. Well, that’s not a hard thing to do.

Anne: I was going to say, that’s the easy part.

June: Right? That is very basic. Okay. What they don’t tell you is that if your spouse or your significant other who is abusive, reacts in an unhealthy way to these boundaries. Years of legal abuse, years of being blamed and years of financial abuse. I mean, I can’t even begin to describe how this abuse has affected my credit.

We share loans together that he just won’t pay.Those are things that I wish that I would have known. I am fully aware that they want to get women to safety. What is hard is I don’t find a lot of resources that address the long-term subjection to abuse.

Lots of these women do end up suffering when they set the boundary to leave.

Hoping For Safety from Emotional Abuse

Anne: And the abuse doesn’t end. The person continues to lie. They continue to manipulate, if you have children with that person, then it really doesn’t end. We have to learn how to figure out how to be peaceful. How can I find strength through this long-term trial? Because it is a very, very difficult situation for a very long time,

June: And so many states expect you to co-parent, and so you need to know those options legally. You have got to consult an attorney, know the law in your state. Obviously, the best thing for my children is that they have two healthy and stable parents. I would love for that to be the case.

He uses things against me in court, something that I’ll tell him. He’ll bring up and twist it against me. Any way I can be blamed. Learn so you can prepare.

Anne: Which is really, really scary. Oh man, this situation feels impossible. There are options for women. I turn to prayer and pondering to determine the best actions I can take. The answers will come to us, and it might take time and it might take effort, but we will find a way to create safety for us and our children.

June: Exactly. I fully agree. There’s always a solution. I look at things that way sometimes through this journey.

Anne: Thank you so much for sharing your story.

June: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.