Healing From Emotional Abuse

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Overcoming Childhood Abuse: With Kendra

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Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Healing From Emotional Abuse. I just wanted to remind everyone that April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and to be aware of what's happening in your community. Your local rape crisis center should be holding several events, including a Denim Day and a Walk A Mile In Her Shoes and various other really fun events. Even local colleges will have some. Look into them. They're a lot of fun to partake. There's just a ton of fun activities and events to do around town to support your community and support your local survivors and be involved. As you know, for Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I'm doing live interviews with survivors every week. Today we have my amazing friend Kendra, she is a phenomenal champion. She is so strong and she's overcome some really horrific events in her life. And I'm so honored to have her on here. So welcome Kendra.
 
Kendra: I was I think 11 years old. So, I was in the fifth grade. And I had met a friend she was new to our school new to my class, and we got along really well. And we would walk home from school every day together. And that quickly turned into she would come to my house after school; I would go to her house after school. And we spent pretty much all of our time together when we weren't in school, or doing other like family related things. And we kind of had been building up building up building up. And finally, we decided like, oh, let's have a sleepover. So of course, like her parents cleared it. My mom cleared it and it was like the one friend who parents my mom had never met before. So, she was a little bit hesitant, but it was literally a block over from the house. She'd met the girl, she felt very comfortable. She knew that if anything happened, it was within walking distance at home, maybe two to three minutes. So, she okayed it and we had just like a normal night. What girls do. We ate Top Ramen, we watched Halloween. And we went to bed and we were sleeping.
 
And I woke up I have no idea what time it was. I woke up because I kept feeling something tickling my leg. That made me very uncomfortable and I kept thinking there was like a bug on me or something. And I kept kind of just brushing my leg and swatting it away. And I also noticed it was really, really cold. And I had my back turned, I guess towards like the outside of the bed. And I woke up and opened my eyes, I could see the window was open and I could see that the TV was on, which wasn't abnormal to me. We'd fallen asleep watching movies, the window being open was a little bit weird. And I remember thinking that. I rolled over and there was nobody there. So again, I thought, okay, I don't know what's going on. I just kept brushing my leg And I fell back asleep. And I don't know how much time had passed But I woke up again. Because from the waist down, I didn't have clothes on any more. My shorts and my underwear had been pulled completely down And I kind of sat there, my eyes barely open. And I just remember, I don't know what was being played on TV. But I remember the background being really blue in the whole room was illuminated in blue. I opened my eyes and there was a man sitting on the edge of the bed. And he was just running his hands up and down my legs. He had lifted my shirt up. And immediately I remember thinking, I'm in trouble. Okay, I can't do anything. I was so terrified in that moment to confront this man. I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what was going on. And so, I tried to play it off. As best as I could as an 11-year-old girl, of like rubbing my face like I was kind of waking up and like, pull my shirt down and try to pull the covers up. And also try to scoot a little bit further into the bed and close to my friend. And I was successful in doing so. I kind of got away from this man and he got up and he left the room. I can only presume to go to the bathroom. And I pulled up my shorts quickly and I shook my friend and I just was trying so hard to wake her up.  I kept saying,  “There's somebody in your room, there's somebody in your room, there's a man in house, I don't know what to do.”
And she was out cold she did not wake up. And I could hear him coming back in and so I just wrapped myself up in the covers and pushed myself as close to her as possible and he continued to sit on the edge of the bed and try to touch me through the covers. But I just kind of kept tossing and turning. Didn't go back to sleep for the rest of that night. No idea what this man looked like. I've no idea who he was. The next morning I mentioned to my friend when she woke up, I said, “Hey, there was somebody in your room last night, you know anything?” She said, no. I woke up a few times there was nobody in here. “Like no, there was, you know, watching something on TV.” And I remember being really uncomfortable and just packing my little bag as quick as I could and getting out. And I got home and went to an event just like a family event. And I told my cousin. I remember just feeling really gross and dirty and scared. And I just told her, I said, I don't know what happened like he took my clothes off. I don't, I don't know. And she kept telling me, Kendra, you have to tell somebody. I was like, I can't help but I'll be in trouble. You know, like, I was wearing shorts. And I'm blaming myself at 11 years old for wearing pajama shorts to bed. And I, you know, immediately thought to myself, if I had worn pants, or if I've had socks on with this wouldn't have happened. I don't know why my brain was wired that way at such a young age. But it was. And the entire day I kept telling my cousin No, it's okay. It's okay. And then my cousin said no chance. I said, No, I made it up. I made it up. Nothing happened, nothing happened. Because I was afraid, I thought I would be the one in trouble. Like, I was the one who chose asleep over. I was the one who also let it happen. I didn't confront him. And so, in my mind, I thought, I'm going to be looked at like you let it happen, like this is your fault. So, several hours of convincing went by, and my cousin finally said, if you don't tell your mom, I will. I said, Okay, so she walked upstairs with me. I told my mom. And from there, it's kind of a blur. I don't really remember all the details. I remember the cops being called, I had to disclose everything that happened. I remember riding in the back of the police car to show them the house because I didn't know her address. And I don't know what happened if they ever found out who it was. I do remember my mom mentioning a few months later that, you know, she had stayed in contact with the officer that we reported it with, just kind of follow up. And they had mentioned they have a suspicion about who it was, like some family member in the house. But nothing was confirmed and then nobody in the family had come forward. They all said that, that member of the family was not living there. They hadn't seen him in a while and I think the worst part for me was I went back to school that Monday, and she knew what happened and she didn't look at me. She wouldn't talk to me. Her birthday party was a few weeks later, and of course, I wasn't allowed to go. She kind of made it known to like all of you girls in our class, like, Oh, yeah, she made up some rumor about my family. And it wasn't until the week after her birthday party. And I just remember my little heart broke for her. I was walking home from school and she ran up behind me and she got my attention and she was crying. She said I'm so sorry, I didn't believe you.
 
So, it happened to me that night at my party. And I just remember, like, I have chills now. Like recounting that. Several years later, I think I was in junior high. She actually attended my junior high and we were in a class together. And of course, I approached her like, Hey, you know, do you remember me? And she's like, No, I don't remember you. And she denied ever knowing me. She denied ever being friends with me. And I was kind of like, that was kind of it for me. It's like, okay, either, you've gone through something far more traumatic, and you’ve really blocked it all out and you truly don't remember, or you're embarrassed or something else has happened and you don't want to associate with me and that's fine. So, here's where we just kind of cut all ties and never saw her again.
 
Marissa: I'm so sorry. That happened to you. Oh my God, that's such a painful story. I hate it. I'm not going to lie.
 
Kendra: It couldn't. And I always think to right, it could be worse, it could be worse. And I'm grateful it didn't go further. And I'm grateful that whatever he had planned if he had anything else planned, he stopped. But yeah, it's like I wouldn't wish that on anybody in any situation,
 
Marissa: Right? That's so scary. You're in a place you don't know. It's a human being you don't know and have never seen and nobody believes you. And everyone's trying to convince you that your will not your family. But can you know, your friend is trying to convince you it wasn't true and their family was protecting, that's horrible. And for an 11-year-old to already be pretty much conditioned to believe that it's their fault, no matter what it speaks so, so loud about our society and how we conditioned people. Thank you so much for sharing that.
 
Kendra: I think what's crazy to me too, is it didn't come up until several years later in therapy for something completely unrelated. You know, talking about past trauma and things like that. I was asked to tell my story. And halfway through my story I said, and it's not like the pajama shorts were short, like, like they were long. And you know, my therapist said no, don’t. Like don't make that excuse. It doesn't matter what you were wearing. And I think that's like I don't know; maybe other people feel this way maybe they don't. But I think that's the thing that's so tricky about trauma is no matter how much healing you do and what processing you go through, there's always kind of those little things that just slip out of if I had done this or that that underlying tone of guilt and shame that just come along with it.
 
Marissa: I think you're totally right. They don't go away. It's never really addressed. You know, we say, oh, it wasn't your fault, doesn't matter what you were wearing. But there's no healing with that, you know, I can think of 1000 reasons why my assault would have been my fault. But not really, because I had no control over the situation. Like you did. And I think that a lot of people agree with us that it's, all about how we condition it. And we ignore the little things when we're trying to heal the big picture, those little things are still seeds that are still planted, right? What did you do? Because you are you seem at least very well adjusted and stable. You know, I don't know what happens in your head. But, you know, what did you do to heal from it? Like, was there anything that you tried that worked really well, for you?
 
Kendra: I think what was hard is, at 11 years old, I didn't understand the impact that it had on my day-to-day life, or what it was going to do down the line for me. I was very fortunate in the sense that I had a supportive family who, you know, immediately addressed the situation. My mom offered therapy or different outlets like that, because she knew that she couldn't be the one to do all my healing. And my little 11-year-old mind, I was like, No, I don't, need that I think I'm fine. You know, I want to get back to my normal life. I wanted to be able to sleep overs again. I think that, the trauma aside, my social life and my social class at a really critical point in my life (I was getting ready to be out of elementary school and get into junior high with a new friend group), that was being disrupted in a very bold way. And so, I didn't do anything for several years. And it really wasn't until seven or eight years later, when I started to address, “Oh, I'm uncomfortable around them. So uncomfortable.” Or if somebody brushes my thigh, like, I'm triggered, and I just coil up. And I never associated the two together, I just thought, Oh, I'm just shy. And I'm introverted. And I just rather not confront people. And so that's kind of when I was, I was open about it. And I found some other people who had gone through something similar. And I then went to therapy for, like I said, different trauma and a lot of things started to come up. Like, I'm afraid of men, I feel like I have no power like that stuff started to come up. And just figuring out different avenues, things like writing, and we did a lot of you know, kind of sort of like telling a different story to myself using objects and getting, you know, an unbiased third party's view on that to kind of help really frame everything differently for me. And then it also came up I think I allowed not necessarily abuse but a lot, a lot of really inappropriate behavior in my teenage years that I thought, Oh, I had a friend that kept asking, “Just lift your shirt up just flashed me.” And I was really uncomfortable and really triggered by that and I didn't know why I couldn't explain it and so, I did it. And as I was doing it, I was crying. He's like, what's wrong? What's wrong, I was like, I don't know, like, I'm uncomfortable, I'm really uncomfortable. So, I think I didn't have the wherewithal to stop a lot of that In my teenage years. I think therapy was a big outlet, I would say when I was 17-18. And over the last few years, just kind of going back through that and talking through trust issues and trauma and why I view things the way that I view them. And then also never putting myself in a position where I feel like I could be compromised. If I'm ever in a position I'm uncomfortable around somebody I make sure somebody else knows. And I get out of there as quickly as possible. And I don't stand for anybody treating me a certain way or telling you to do something or asking me to do something where I'm uncomfortable. I kind of identify those triggers when they bubble up and I just I get out of a situation as quickly as possible.
 
Marissa: That's awesome. And that's really smart. Being situationally aware is very underrated. It's never ever, ever the survivor's fault in any situation ever. But there are very good ways to get yourself out of compromising situations just by being situationally aware. And I love that you always let somebody know when you're uncomfortable and get out as soon as possible. A lot of people, at least from what I've learned will just stay silent because they don't want to make anyone else feel uncomfortable, or burden anyone and they don't want to be known as like “that guy.” So, it's so much better that you have a like a routine and like a system and you know, your worth and you know where you stand and you get yourself out of it to keep yourself safe. That's amazing. I want to go back to that object thing you were talking about was I've never heard of that. And I'm so curious. What is it?
 
Kendra: So, we it was like just a really big sandbox. And she basically sat me down and I had objects at my disposal and they were small things like little figurines, houses, shapes that I could use. I just had the sand and I was able to play with the sand, she said just had to get it to where you want it to start. Whether it's bumpy, you want to spell something in it, you want to completely flat? However you feel good with the sand. Then think through a situation in your life, or think through and in this situation, part of it was because I was suffering trauma at being from being robbed at gunpoint by a male. And so that's for me was like a really prevalent thing, right? Like, I'm very uncomfortable around males. And I feel like, like, I don't have power in a lot of those situations. So that's kind of what we were playing out. So, she wanted me to get figurines and kind of highlight, okay, so like, in any situation where you're uncomfortable, what is the male use an object to describe the male use an object to describe you. And it became very apparent, because I think it was like a big GI Joe style figurine that I put in the sandbox for a male. And I picked the smallest, most fragile, infant looking figurine for me. And I positioned us very closely. And of course, I'm doing a lot of that subconsciously. I've got a safety net, you know, maybe a few inches away from me, but I'm closer to this male that has all of the power. And just a lot of dark shapes and a lot of dark fingers behind him. Just kind of talking about being fearful and of course, as I'm doing this, I'm just thinking, right, this is how I feel in these situations. And she was able to really help me break it down and think through. Okay, so if you're in a situation you feel this way, what do you have in your back pocket? What tools can you pull, and if you're looking at these figurines, what could be helpful for you. And that's where some of the things like telling somebody, I'm uncomfortable, finding your voice, like not being afraid. And now, it's always better to be safe than sorry. And if you're in a situation where you're uncomfortable, nobody's going to care about you, but you So stand up scream, make as much noise as possible and at the end of the day, you probably won't regret it. And so that's where I learned a lot of those things is okay, you know, like, it's not just me, if I'm in these situations, I'm not by myself, I'm not weak, and quiet. I can, stand up and I can move and I can make noise, I can get other people involved, and I can pull myself back into my safety bubble at any point. And that was extremely, extremely enlightening for me.
 
Marissa: That's amazing. I love that that you said nobody else is going to protect you. But you are nobody else is going to care. But you. So, you do you need to be your biggest advocate and your biggest ally. And who cares if you scream and piss people off and you know, look silly for a second. You're keeping yourself safe. And that's the most important thing. Awesome, thank you so much. What advice would you have? Or would you give to little girls that might be in that situation that you were in?
 
Kendra: One, always be the person that that you need to be your own advocate. And I know that that's hard when you're young, but also find a trusted source and tell a trusted source. And I think it's so much easier hindsight is 20-20. I remember like sitting on my bedroom floor and playing a game with my cousin and her like basically threatening me, right? Like, you don't tell somebody I will and thank God I had her in my life. Because if I didn't, I don't know that I would have come forward ever. And this has been, you know, nearly 20 years. So, find somebody, especially if you're young, if it's an adult, great. But if it's not like somebody who's going to help fight for you, and don't be afraid of coming forward. And I know that that's hard. And I know, I think now it doesn't matter, you know, I'm 30, I still sometimes feel that same way. Like, oh, I don't want to come forward because it's embarrassing, or nothing's going to come of it and in my situation, nothing did come out I couldn't find anybody. I don't know what happened to my abuser. But I know that my voice may have at some point stopped it from happening to somebody else. And so, remember that, you know, if you're in a situation, you're fighting for yourself, you're also fighting for everybody else that’s going through it. And we're a lot louder as a crowd than we are as a single individual. So, don't be afraid to step up and know that there is a community out there that does support you. And you won't face that judgment and that shame and that guilt. You can shut that whenever you're ready to let go of it.
 
Marissa: Thank you so much. That's all so helpful. Thank you so much for sharing your story and for being here and advocating for survivors everywhere. You're phenomenal.
 
Kendra: Thank you.
 
Marissa: And I'm so honored that you’re my friend. Kendra, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your story with us. You have such an amazing outlook and such phenomenal, helpful advice. I can't thank you enough for being here. Just a reminder to everybody listening to get involved in your community for Sexual Assault Awareness Month and to support survivors. We want everybody to live a brave, full and peaceful life. Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you next week.
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching.  Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!
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Healing From Emotional Abuse: Abusive Relationships In High School: With Liz

Get Your FREE COPY of  my book, 3 Signs of A Toxic Relationship, Now...
Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa: Welcome back to Healing From Emotional Abuse. In honor of Sexual Assault Awareness Month for April. Like I said, last week, we are going to be doing interviews with real survivors talking about their stories and how they healed every Wednesday this month. Today we have with us my amazing friend, Liz. It is so awesome to be able to see you and talk to you in our messy buns and sweaters because we are self-quarantined for Coronavirus.
 
Liz: Hey!
 
Marissa: I haven’t brushed my hair in two days. Liz was born and raised in Long Branch New Jersey. She graduated with a BA in communications. She says she's very anxious about sharing her story for the first time. But after years of dedication to her healing and recovering. She wants to share her story as a way of promoting survivors to speak up about their abuse. She has a boyfriend and he has been a huge supporter of her and everything that she has been through and everything she's doing. So I want to welcome you to breaking through our silence. How are you today?
 
Liz: Thank you so much. I'm well, you know, like you said quarantined right now telecommuting for work. So, um, it's definitely interesting, but I'm good. Thank you.
 
Marissa: All right, awesome. So let's just get into it, if you don't mind sharing with us your story and a little bit about what you went through?
 
Liz: Yeah. So um, it's kind of a weird story. Still, to this day, still doesn't make a lot of sense. Actually, I owe a lot of things to you and your books in your podcast has really been helpful on the way you analyze things and explain things in the way sometimes people react or do things. It's helped make a lot of sense of some of the things I went through. And it's helped me be able to sit down and really find the right words and actually be able to form a timeline because the mess I went through with this weird friend group I was involved with just didn't make any sense for so long. And I've finally now has sat down and made a timeline where I can say, Okay, this is when this happened. And then this is when everything really did start going downhill.
 
Marissa: So tell us a little bit about it.
 
Liz: So um, we're all like high school friends. It's just so weird. Like, I can't even imagine this is something I went through. Like, this isn't anything I would even be able to like, you know, I just can't believe it's still to this day. But anyway, so what happened was, we were the four of us were all friends. And, you know, high school drama of who's taking who to prom and everything. And there was me, Jeff, Zack, and Dan, and really simple friend group. There was like a few other people that were like, in and around the friend group. But there was like the four of us that were mainly involved in the situation. So actually, and it's really funny, because the first I always had this crush on Dan. Like, basically from the time he and I became friends. And for years after that, like I just always had a crush on him and junior year because we met in freshman year. So junior year, is our first prom. And Zack had actually asked me to it but I wanted to go with Dan so I told him I messaged him, he Facebook messaged me to ask me to prom. And I Facebook messaged him back saying, you know, I'm really sorry, but I've actually been waiting for Dan to ask me and I guess they must have talked. Dan told me that they and said that he wanted to go to prom with me. And I was of course just as any other girl would be like, over the moon happy. The boy that I want to go to prom with asked me to go this is amazing. It was it was just great. We went to prom together we started dating. I don't even remember how we dated, I just remember hanging out a lot. Watching him play sports or just hanging out with him at his house or driving around because he had a car a little bit before me, it was just like those really sweet, cute little like, fun thing. There wasn't any pressure to it. It was just something we were kind of doing like we were boyfriend girlfriend just having fun. Really light and carefree. Just really simple. The mess started to occur the summer going into senior year when them and a few other people kind of involved in our friend group went on this trip, and I didn't go on the trip because of finances. You know, my family doesn't have as much money as many other families in those towns surrounding Long Branch. So I didn't go I was like the only person in the whole friend group who didn't go. When they got back. Things were really weird. Like I said, before they left Dan and I were over the moon, super cool, happy, having a good time, whatever. And when they got back, I didn't hear from him at all. Like, he just wasn't texting me back or calling me at all. And I was so confused and Zach didn't seem to know what was going on. But Jeff seemed to have magically all these answers. He said, “Oh, while we while we were on the trip, Dan was hanging out with this other girl and really falling for this other girl and he doesn't want to, see you anymore or talk to you anymore. He just wants you to stop contacting him.” And because he’s my friend. I trusted him. So I was like, yeah, cool. Okay, I mean, not cool. But, you know, I'll stop contacting him. Little did I know? And I didn't find this out until a year later, he was doing the same thing to Dan. He was telling him that I didn't want to talk to him, even though I don't know where the miscommunication was, because I was the one texting and calling. That's the background information. Going into senior year was like a real mess. Actually, that was also when I had met my current boyfriend that I'm with now who I love tremendously and we have such a wonderful life now. But at the time, my friend Jeff like was just so like, involved in my life, because he was such a close friend. He was so involved in my life. I just trusted him so innately. Whenever he told me like not to talk to someone or not to do something, or vice versa, I would just do it because I trusted him. So he even convinced me to stop talking to my boyfriend that I'm with now. And it's so weird to think back on the horrible things he said to me and think how like, I just trusted it. He was like, you know, I don't really think this guy is a good guy. He doesn't sound like he really wants you for the right weight reasons. You probably wouldn't want to keep talking with him. It was just one of the things where I was just like, Okay, I guess it makes sense. It was long distance. I guess it makes sense. So I stopped talking to him to which really upset me because I didn't know how to stop talking to him. I didn't know how to tell this person that I really didn't know for that long that I didn't think he was really into me. So, I just kind of ghosted him. And it definitely hurt me as much as it hurt him because even all these years later, or even after him and I got back together, it's something that still haunts me. And something he and I still talk about every now and then because, you know, I just love him so much. He's definitely someone who I think I'm going to be spending the rest of my life with. And to know that I did that to this man that I love so much because of this guy that just had so much control over me. I was just so naive, I can't even believe that I allowed that to happen. I allowed him to control so much of my life, even the people I spoke with and dated.
 
So about a couple months after that, maybe not even that long, it might have been like a month and a half or so he made a move on me. He was like asking to hang out with me all the time, which I did. Because you know, I was just like, whatever, like, we'll hang out. I really just didn't think anything of it. And then before I knew it, he had kissed me. And we had like, started dating and everyone at school knew about it. Like we were just all of a sudden boyfriend-girlfriend, and it happens so fast. I was like, Okay, I guess this is happening. And I just so passively allowed these things to happen. I allowed him to talk me out of talking to people allowed him to talk me out of hanging out with people. And it just really quickly kept declining from there. I lost friends because as our relationship progressed, he would tell me I couldn't do this, or I couldn't do that meaning like, he wanted me to come straight to his house every single day after school. So as soon as school let out, I was to go right to his house, and I was to stay there for dinner. I had dinner with him and his family every single night for like, almost the entire senior year of high school. Because that's how long this relationship ended up going on for. He would even like tell me like, you know, if it was time for me to go home, like if my dad was texting me like, you know, it's time to come home, he would give me such a hard time and it was causing problems with me and my family, obviously, as well. It caused me to have this big fight with my mom and it kind of caused me to have this big fight with my dad and my step mom. And it was just this big, like, snowball going down this hill that was just growing and growing. And I didn't know how to stop it. It was just messing in every aspect of my life. But yeah, so that's like the meatiest part of the story is like all the things he ended up doing. It even got to a point where he had like spies. There was this one kid that lived next door to a friend of mine and I just went over to hang out with this friend of mine. This kid that lived next door to him that knew I was dating, Jeff, would go back to him and tell him if he saw me there because it got to a point where I wanted to see my friends, but like I couldn't, because he would tell me, No, you have to be here with me. You have to come right to my house and be here with me. And if I lied to him, like I said, like, oh, I have to go talk to my mom or I have to go to this appointment a couple times, I lied to him like something like that, so that I could go hang out with some friends so that I could get some space. And the kid that was like, basically spying on me would go back to Jeff and say, like, Oh, she's over here or she's there. And it was so weird and crazy. It made me feel so vulnerable. I was like, Oh, my God, he's got like, spies everywhere. He knows exactly where I'm going. He knows when I lie to him, because somehow he's got these people like spying on me. I'm like, I don't even know where to go now return. So literally got to the point where I had no friends left. All I had was him. And I just became so dependent on him. Whatever he said, we were going to do was what we were going to do, and I didn't have a choice in the matter.
 
Marissa: So he tried to well actively isolate you from all of your friends and family so that he can have full control over you. That's awful.
 
Liz: Yeah, and it worked. It worked because I don't have the most Kodak picture-perfect family. So I have my own issues there about family. So it was easy to get me away from family it was I don't have the best relationship with some people in my family. So that was easy. The hard part was distancing me from my friends, because I always did have such good connections with my friends, at least the friends I had at the time. I still have a couple friends from that group. It's just, I just don't have anyone else. I literally only have one or two friends left from that group. It's weird how much it all ended up affecting me It ended up I literally like lifelong friends I had through high school and like school and whatever, like I don't have any more and it's really weird to think about how like all this unraveled and touched so much of my life.
 
Marissa: How do you think that this abuse is still affected you?
 
Liz: It still affected me because it makes me so hard to trust people now I don't know what kind of ulterior motives are lying behind what someone wants from me. Like, it makes me always second guess, well, why does this person want to be friends with me? Like, what are they going to get out of this friendship and it makes it so hard and like kind of makes me feel a little lonely. Because like I said, like, so many people ended up getting involved in this situation, and not all of them know the truth. So that's hard to like, a lot of rumors ended up going around a lot of false information that made me look bad, not even him. So at the end of the day, like he's the one that caused all this, you know, mess. And then I'm the one who gets the short end of the stick nobody involved in the situation wants to hang out with me or be my friend anymore, because they hear these lies and like the untrue part of the story. And it's like, you know, now all these years later, it makes me feel so lonely in betrayed.
 
Marissa: How did you get out of it? How did you leave? What was the last straw? And what did you do?
 
Liz: It was right around May. He and I got into a few altercations. In the March-April timeframe, which I still don't know how to, like get the words out of my mouth about. But it did result in him putting his hands on me in a way that he should not have. And so that was the final straw that was like, I did this weird dip with my, emotions. I really hit rock bottom where I was like, that's it. I'm just always going to be treated like this for the rest of my life. And then I did this weird rebound, right in the beginning of May, where I was like, You know what, no, I'm not gonna be treated like this, I am going to find a way out because High School is almost over. And there's a way to get out of this. There's other people in the world that do care about me. And it was right around the time that my mom and I were actually patching things up. So I went to her house for Mother's Day and met her new boyfriend who was now my stepdad. We were talking and hanging out and it was just a really good time. And I ended up confiding in her some things, you know, saying how unhappy I was and how he's just ruining everything about me. He was ruining me as a person. He was making me an unreliable person. He was making me lie. And I just, I'm so sick to my stomach with this relationship I need to get out. And actually it involves me moving back in with her. During the course of this relationship, He had convinced me to get into a fight with my mom and move out of her house and with my dad and then was causing fights between me my dad, so I moved back in with my mom because we were fixing things and I had confided that with her. Unfortunately, it still took a couple more months. So unfortunately, like I still went to senior prom with him. I didn't have a choice in that I had to go to senior prom with him. There was no way I was getting out of that. So I did that and it was just the worst night of my life ever. People ridiculed me all through post prom. It was just horrible the public humiliation I went through with him. And then the last straw was he invited himself on this family trip we were all taking. And I told my mom, I said, I can't, he cannot come with us. He needs to realize this relationship is ending and it's over. And he just needs to stop. He needs to stop contacting me. He needs to stop being around me. He definitely cannot come on this trip. And she said, you need to call him and tell him that. So I called him and I had him on speaker and I actually was literally I was sitting on the floor. My mom was sitting on the stairs and I called him and put him on speaker. And I did say I said you know, things with us are over. Please do not come on the trip. Please do not show up tomorrow morning. Please do not come. And I was very nice. Just very civil like that. And he was just so insistent. He said, No, I will be there and coming on the trip. We're going to fix things he just had it so intent in his heart. He was going to fix everything. And I just said to him, I said over and over again. I can't even like remember how long the phone call lasted but it felt like forever. Just be begging him. Please, please do not come. And I got to the point where I even though like maybe if I tried to use like a scary voice like I don't know, I just thought like if I put on like big girl pants and like this did girl voice like maybe he would get the memo. And I did say at one point I said I swear to God, if you come on this trip, this is not going to be a good thing. And like I tried to be as demanding as possible. But it just wasn't It wasn't happening. He showed up and came on the trip anyway. And throughout the whole trip, we fought. I was sick the whole time, violently sick the whole time. Like my family was so confused by what was going on. Like kind of bragged on me about it too. Like, why is she always in the bathroom? Like why won't she come out of her room? Why won't she come out and enjoy family time? And it was because he was there? And no, no one was really backing me up and saying you know what, you shouldn't be here, you shouldn't be coming on this trip, and you should go home. So, that was the final straw and we did finally, by the end of that trip, we had finally officially broken up.
 
Marissa: Okay, good. Well, I'm glad that you got out of it. I'm sorry that, you know, he came on the trip and ruined that trip for you and all the things that came with it, I want to go back real quick and just comment on being on the floor. I also like being on the floor. And I think it like grounds us, you know, we can be so comfortable. And I don't know the kind of physical abuse or anything that you've endured. But for me, I was pushed off a lot of chairs, and my chairs were flipped and things were you know, so like I was always falling and hitting my head or hitting my back or hitting my shoulders. And so for me sitting on the floor is like a very comfortable thing. Because like I can't fall, you know. And it's been 10 years since my abuse and I’m still always worried about falling. Thank you so much for sharing your story And I'm sorry that you went through everything you went through. I know that you said earlier that my books and everything have helped you. And that makes me feel really good. So thank you for saying that. What have you done thus far to help you heal from it? Because obviously, you're in a great relationship now.
 
Liz: Yeah, so many things. Another thing that kind of got me in the situation I was back then was low self-esteem. I was bullied all throughout middle school and a good portion of high school. And another thing I've just been coming out and talking about recently is an eating disorder. I actually was anorexic on and off. And of course, like that was never a good thing. I had severe anxiety and I just had such like low self-esteem. So I believe that, that was the core problem. So that is the first thing I addressed when trying to rebuild and heal and recover. So I got into healthy eating and yoga and working out lots of meditation and just focusing on the things that I love about myself and not the things that I hate and just building myself up instead of tearing myself down. So when I look in the mirror, I don't say like, oh, your skin looks bad and you're fat. I say like, dang, you thick and you beautiful and have awesome hair. And it's like, okay, I can live with that. Like you had mentioned my boyfriend. I mean, he had the best reaction out of anyone I've ever told. So I told him when he and I originally got back together. I waited about I guess it was about a month to tell him the gory details. He had the best reaction. I mean, nobody else reacted the way he did. He just put his arms around me No one has ever hugged me when I told them they were just skeptical and wanted to know more and he didn't care. He didn't care about the details. It took me so much by surprise that I didn't know to hug him back. He literally like just he grabbed my arm to like stop me from talking just pulled me in into this like the most comforting hug I've ever had. I almost like I was just so frozen. I didn't hug them back. It took me like a few minutes of him hugging me to be like, Okay, this is the part that I actually hug back and reciprocate that feeling. So yeah, he's just been amazing. And he's never pushed for me to tell him any more than what I have. I mean, he's always been open for me. He's always said, you know, whatever you want to tell me I'm here for. He's like, but I'm not going to ask. And I'm not going to push. That has been the main thing that has supported me because people that have found out have really pushed me to give more detail like, well, what was the part that really was the bad part? What was the worst part? And there are so many rumors. There's rumors of more like violence, like, there wasn't this violence of like him punching me constantly. He kind of did this thing where like, he would like, wave his arms really close to me or wave his hands like in front of my face, or by me and like, when he was angry, he was yelling at me like, as intimidation. But I could never actually say that he hit me. He had never hit me. He just made me feel like he was about to all the time. And that was one thing. Another rumor that went around was that he choked me out. He didn't choke me out. He just scared me. And that's what people like, people that started finding out more things that happened. More people started misconstruing them and like lying, like, Oh, I heard she got choked out. And I heard like, he punched her. Like, it's not what happened. It wasn't abusively violent like that. It was just him manipulating me to give him anything he wanted. And that does include us having sex on that was the first time I had sex. And it was the whole thing was manipulation from beginning to end of like, we're just going to do this or we're just going to do that we're not going to you know. Don't worry. Like, you know, you love me. So because you love me, you're going to do it anyway. And like, just this weird mix of like, comforting me with comforting words. Like don’t worry, its okay. And then this weird, like aggressive part where it's like, well, you love me. So you're going to do this. It was just all manipulation, I don't have any other word for it than that. And it just, yeah So when I started to try to tell people how like, it was just, it was just this mess of things of all these things I didn't want to do, including having sex I did not want to do that did not want to have sex with him. But because it was what he wanted. And because he used his the words the way he did to benefit himself. He got what he wanted.
 
Marissa: So no matter if he hit you or not, it's abuse. And I personally think that emotional and verbal abuse are more lasting, because the words really stick with you and they haunt you for years. I mean, like I said before, I'm 10 years out, and sometimes I still wake up and I'm like, wow, I'm a real big piece of human garbage. And I'm like, No, I'm not I am worthy. I have to get, you know my ex's voice out of my head. And another thing is those situations where you're being manipulated or coerced into sex is still sexual assault. Any unwarranted unwanted or unwelcome sexual advance. It could be them saying something inappropriate to you or manipulating you into having sex and that is still sexual assault. It leaves an imprint on you negatively, like I know for me, after I was assaulted by my boyfriend, sex didn't feel good for years. I couldn't figure out if it was me. Or if it was, I didn't know. But I just had such a horrible traumatic experience that I couldn't understand why people love sex so much. Did you have something like that?
 
Liz: Actually, exactly that. And in one of, I believe your stories in Breaking Through the Silence: The Journey to Surviving Sexual Assault, at one point you it said like even when it was happening to like when you know you don't want it but like you can't control it, you just feel numb. Like when it was happening. I don't even remember what it felt like. So like my first time ever having sex. I don't even remember what it felt like because I just remember feeling numb and scared and afraid and not knowing what to do. I was just there. I was just existing in that moment. And I don't know anything else. So when this was all said and done when truth started coming out, and he actually did admit to what he was doing at the end. So at the end, there was this weird meeting between me, Jeff, Dan, and this other kid that was kind of involved in the situation. And he did admit to the four of us and in that circle that night was like, yeah, no, I lied. I lied to her and I lied to him to break them up. And this is what I did. And like he admitted it, he had totally admitted it and was not denying anything. So, once things started progressing like that, and dust started settling Dan and I actually did get back together. We dated on and off the first year and a half into college. And I have to say, he was such a tremendous support. During all those times whether we were on or off. He never pushed me and it definitely was tough being sexually active with him because I didn't know what I was doing. I was still scarred and afraid of the things that had happened. I didn't know what to do next, I didn't know how to be with a guy, and my first time was just ruined. And now this new time that I this new chance I have, I still don't really know what I'm doing. So it definitely took a while for me to come around. But I have to say I could not have asked for a better boyfriend at the time than Dan. He was super, super supportive. Whatever I said I needed he did or he got for me. And it was just great. And to this day, we're still really good friends, I still hold him as like a really good friend to me. And my boyfriend completely knows all of this, like when we are getting back together. And I was divulging all this stuff you know, I told him all of that I was like, Listen, like, Dan and I were still friends because he him and I had just been through all of this mess together. And we're just we just still even years after we've broken up, still support each other no matter what we're doing career wise. And he's got a girlfriend who is wonderful. I think she's a nicest person in the world. Like, couldn't ask for a better person for him to be with either. That's really the light out of everything that had happened is my friendship with him. And I'm still really good friends with Zack too. He is a really cool friend of mine. We're always joking around. And we call each other every now and then because we've all moved away. No, none of us live there anymore.
 
Marissa: So what advice would you give to other survivors who have gone through or are going through something similar?
 
Liz: The advice I would give, is to talk despite whatever voice that is in your head, or weird feelings you have about it, talk. I went years without talking and even after so like I would have these weird like occasional explosions, like at one point, I had not talked about it for like a year. And then I had an explosion about it with my mom and my stepdad. And I had another explosion about it a significant period of time, like six months or something like that with some other like another group of friends that I had made, like these weird explosions. And it came to a point where I was like, maybe I wouldn't explode if I talked about it in a healthy environment and got it out of my system. So that's what I started doing. One of my best friends now that I made in high school, she is also really super supportive of all this. And she has been the main person that I've gone to like when I feel it bubbling up again. And I feel like something's come up where I need to, like express this or express that she has been awesome, where I've been able to, like call her or like go over her house and be like, Listen, I need to talk about this. And you don't have to say anything back because, you know, sometimes there's nothing to say back. But I just need to like say this out in the open in the air so that it's not inside me. I've actually still haven't really formally seeing a therapist. It's a daily debate for me. I, to this day, a million years later, I still wake up every day and at least once a day think about like finding a therapist to talk to. But I have this weird pride about it, and I would say to survivors to not have that weird, stupid pride. Because I have this weird battle inside me about therapists where like, I know, I should go to one and I should really keep working on the progress I've made. But I have this other side of me that's super proud of the progress I've made. And all this time being alone without a therapist and just being like, you know what, I don't need a therapist, because I already did the significant amount of work that needs to be done when you're healing. But I would say don't do that, because it's not healthy what took me probably 10 times longer than it should have to heal. So I would say talk and talk to someone professional.
 
Marissa: Yeah, that's a good idea. Professional help can be very, very good, for some people, it doesn't work for everyone. So I always tell people don't rely on a therapist, you have to do a lot of work yourself as you've learned Liz. But having an ear like a listening ear with somebody professional can be very, very helpful. Also know that it's not like a one stop shop. Not every therapist is a perfect match for you. So if the first one doesn't work, keep therapists shopping, because you'll find somebody that fits you perfectly and understands you. It's not like they're all trained exactly the same. Well, it's really good that you have such a support network, though, I'm really happy that you have friends to turn to and have a better relationship with your family that you feel comfortable talking to them. And that you found somebody that rewired you back to a good sense of self and of what you should expect from a relationship. That's really important. I'm so proud of you.
 
Liz: Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, and that's the main reason why all these years later, I'm finally ready to like talk about it because I do finally have the support network that I should have had in the beginning. And like I said from the beginning like your organization, your podcasts your books, have helped me tremendously like reading all the stories and hearing everyone else's stories and being like you know what, there are other people in the world that makes their stories publicly known. And I can do that I can speak up. So yeah, thank you. Thank you.
 
Marissa: Thank you. I hope and I'm also really glad that you felt confident enough and empowered enough to speak up and want to help other people do the same. I think that's really admirable. And I love you. Oh, is there anything that you want to share any projects or anything?
 
Liz: Actually, um, I have started a book about my life. So it does go from like, my childhood about middle school-esk time to current day. I don't know if it's something I'll ever publish, but it's something I'm doing as part of my healing to like, put everything down like in a book and be able to like, look back at it and read on it and just be like, you know, what, I've been through the wringer. I've been through a lot of things in my somewhat short life. I mean, I'm only like, 26. So I just been through, I just can't even believe all the things I've been through. So yeah, I am writing a book. Whether I ever publish it or not, is another story. But yeah.
 
Marissa: Well, if you ever decide to publish it, let me know I can help you.
 
Liz: Cool, sounds good.
 
Marissa: Thank you again, so much for being here, Liz. I really appreciate you speaking out and empowering the survivor community to speak up and become the champion of their voice like you have, and I am just so grateful. Thank you very much.
 
Liz: Oh, of course. Thank you so much for having me. This was so wonderful.
 
Marissa: Oh, good. Okay, well, I'll have you on again soon. We'll do a month check back or something on your book and on your therapy.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching.  Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!
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Healing From Emotional Abuse: How To Heal: With Nana Ponceleon

Get Your FREE COPY of  my book, 3 Signs of A Toxic Relationship, Now...
Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
 
 
Marissa: Hey guys, welcome back to Healing From Emotional Abuse. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And for the month I wanted to speak with champions, people who have overcome their abuse and are now working to change the world for survivors to help them become the champions of their stories. I want to celebrate taking our lives back and hopefully encourage others to do the same. With us today is my dear friend, Nana Ponceleon. She was born in Venezuela and before she had the courage to do what she really wanted. She got a bachelor's degree in business administration with a minor in computer science from Pace University in New York. She worked in sales and marketing in several companies, including Microsoft for over 11 years. Today, she's a full time actress in New York. She's worked in over 27 films, short films, features and TV shows, and many commercials and plays since graduating from Stella Adler. She is passionate about the human spirit has created a project which the vision is to create a world where women and men collaborate, cooperate and co-create their shared world together called Act Feminine. Act Feminine today is more focused on helping women but it will evolve in the future to be all inclusive. Thank you so much for being here. Nana, I'm so excited to talk to you.
 
Nana: Oh, not as much as me. Thank you for inviting me and thinking of me!
 
Marissa: Anytime. So Nana, and I met at a Tony Robbins retreat. And we instantly clicked and fell in love and I adore her. I watch her Act Feminine videos on YouTube. All the time. Every time they're on every time she puts out a new one. I'm probably like the fifth person to watch it.
 
Nana: You're so sweet. Thank you,
 
Marissa: Of course. And thank you for being here today and sharing your story. You were telling me before we started recording that this is the first time that you're publicly sharing your story, right?
 
Nana: This is absolutely correct. It's like coming out of the closet for me.
 
Marissa: How do you feel right now?
 
Nana: Nervous. Excited, but nervous,
 
Marissa: Understandable, just know that you are sharing with a supportive community. And we're here to empower you. And I'm really, really honored that you chose me and Healing From Emotional Abuse to be you’re coming out party.
 
Nana: Well, I guess the title is perfect for me today.
 
Marissa: Well, I'm glad you're here. So let's get started. Would you mind telling us a little bit about your story, or as much of your story as you're comfortable sharing?
 
Nana: Okay, so I, as you said, I'm from Venezuela, but I moved to Baton Rouge because that's where my dad went to school at LSU. And I have deer. And you know, my mom's family there who moved when I was very little, and I decided to go to LSU as well. I met this man, we got married at 19 years old. I was a baby, and he's from Venezuela, too. So I moved to New Orleans because my boyfriend, your husband at the time was working there. And four months into the marriage, we got married December. And in April, I walked into my apartment coming back from school and this man was inside the apartment. Initially, he said that, you know, where the money is, it looked like a robbery. But eventually, you know, it turned into a rape. And my life just got… I don't even know what the word is. But I guess transformed, changed in an instant. It became a before and after. And I'm not married to my husband at the time anymore. Which to me it's sort of understandable because, you know, four months into a marriage, you get raped inside your house. It just my whole life became a full big mess. I didn't tell anybody at the time. I didn't tell my mom. My father was the only one who found out actually because, strangely enough, which might not be strange for those people who believe in this things. But he called when the police were at my apartment and it was just total chaos in the apartment. They were taking prints and you know, the police flooded the place afterwards to investigate and he called right at that moment. So it was inevitable for him to find out but I didn't share it with anybody. And I can't tell you that I was ashamed. I think I was numb more than anything, and probably that's what made me not want to share it. Because I literally didn't know what was going on. It was like this weird feeling of being here but not being here. I don't know. I don't know if I'm making sense.
 
Marissa: Oh, that makes total sense. It's like it's, um, dissociation.
 
Nana: Yes that I think that's the perfect word. Yes, you're totally correct. Which I can do very well, you know, and I think that was my survival mechanism.
 
Marissa: That makes sense. And it's super common. A lot of people dissociate especially during intimate moments, or moments of chaos and confusion. They just like leave their body.
 
Nana: Yes, that oh my god. It's so funny that you say, well, not funny. Amazing that you say that? Because after the rape, he was still in the apartment. And well, I was totally, you know, I was tied up and he knew what he was doing. And I remember thinking in an instant, that with the most peaceful feeling, which was the weirdest thing. I remember saying to God, God…. you can take me now. But it was so peaceful though my reset, it was so strange, because it really was, like, I was feeling an out of body experience. Like, literally went into this place of total peace, which is so weird. And it wasn't a white tunnel. It wasn't that kind of thing. You know, no white tunnel or anything. It actually it was very black, to, you know, everything I saw, or I felt what was in my mind and someone who I love dearly, Also from the Tony Robbins community, She's an amazing, amazing woman, Jessie Child, she said to me that is exactly what you're describing, that you felt is exactly what we strive for, through meditation. And through, wanting to go into this oneness sensation, because I literally felt like my body was not there. And I was in this black space, or everything was like, suspended, and I felt nothing. But the nothing wasn't like, it was peace. And, and that's why I kept saying, God, you know, you can take me now you can take now. But you know, it's, okay. It's done.
 
Marissa: That's so scary. You know, so you were totally at peace with that.
 
Nana: But with leaving. With going. With dying
 
Marissa: Yeah. And I'm sure that's a relatable feeling for a lot of people, especially in something that's as intense or violent.
 
Nana: Yes. And, and I think also, because also, I didn't know what was going to happen, because he was still in the room. And I didn't know if he would kill me if he would rape me again, if I had no idea because I couldn't see. So it was this feeling of I don't want to go through this again. I'd rather die.
 
Marissa: Thank you so much for sharing that. It's such a tender, sensitive moment, and thank you for being so vulnerable with us. I just think it's so important that people know, that after such a traumatic situation, that there's a myriad of ways people feel it's not like everyone immediately goes to telling people or anger. You're human, you know, so everything you experience is so personal. And thank you for being so candid with us. That's, you know, really, really helpful.
 
Nana: Well, no, no, my pleasure, you know. If, if I'm going to come out, I'm going to come out.. And, to me, now that you say anger, you know, that anger has been an emotion, not readily available to me through this process. It came and went. And that is very strange, because when I used to think of rape, I would think, okay, the emotion is anger, you know, the natural one, and that the one that you would live in all at all times. And it wasn't for me, but I think it was my ability to dissociate. I was very good at that ever since I was a girl actually, and this has nothing to do with the rape. Whenever something emotional and stressful came into my life. I was able to sort of detach and literally go into this place of feeling nothing. And I think it came handy in this situation, you know? I talked to an expert from Columbia University here because I worked in a project, I was blessed to work on a project on grief therapy, though it's not for rape victims is for parents who have lost children. I asked her and I said, listen, there are parts and there are things I don't remember and I literally don't remember. Like, no matter how I try, I don't remember. And she uses in grief therapy, taking the parents through the whole process of remembering every single detail. And I said, Okay, so maybe I'm not gonna totally heal, if I don't go through that process. And she said, and I'm sharing this because this might help some people, you know, I don't know. She said, No, because it's different. A parent loves their children, they adore them. And when they lose the children and forget parts of what happened and the life, they feel twice as guilty, because they feel like they're betraying their children by not remembering. So the remembering process is a healing process.
In your case, you really don't want to do the work of remembering. And if you truly don't remember, and you're okay with it, and it doesn't bother you, then let it be. That to me was like, Oh, what a relief.
 
Marissa: Thank you so much for saying that. That's so important. A lot of people I've found doubt themselves and doubt that it really happened and question whether or not there, you know, they're really a victim because they don't remember some or any of what happened to them. But it's a trauma response, fight, flight freeze, and then tonic immobility, some people freeze, and then they freeze it out, and they dissociate, and some people will fight back. But not a lot of people will fight back, you know, and that's not, that doesn't mean that you're not a victim. It doesn't mean that it didn't happen, it just means that your brain is protecting you by shielding out those memories.
 
Nana: Totally, totally. And that's exactly what happened to me. And when I talked to Katherine, she said, perfectly normal. And you shouldn't make an effort to try to remember, you know, I was taking to hypnosis session or a couple, trying to because I saw him very briefly, I walked into the room, he had closed the shades, the room was dark, and he just jumped on me. So I saw him actually just the second and we had dark Rayban glasses covering his eyes, which is very smart, because eyes are very distinct. And they took me to hypnosis sessions to try to remember and sort of freeze his image. So I could do the portrait again, that they could draw the portrait again, based on what I was seeing during hypnosis. There was no way they could take me past the door. Even under hypnosis, every time they would bring me in the room. I said, you know, I'm walking down my hallway and I get to the door of my room, and there I stopped and they go like, Okay, so what else? What's next? I just, I never was able to make that next step, and walk into a room. So it was impossible. We couldn't do it. Not even under hypnosis. So that's how much you shield yourself.
 
Marissa: Yeah, your brain knows what's best for you. And if it doesn't want you to remember if it blocked it out, you know, maybe there's a reason for it.
 
Nana: Yeah, absolutely, though, and this is something I'm going to share. And I'm going to jump to the movie that we've talked about. Because I decided for those who are listening to this and don't know, obviously, I decided to make a movie, after many, many years. And the reason I made I decided to make the movie and this is also first, I was on a set of a show called the Perfect Murder. And I'm in the scene and I am the killer. So these two cops are supposed to arrest me.  And you know, we're on one of the breaks. And we're talking and they say that they were real NYPD detectives, and I'm like, Oh my God, you know, you're acting, and you're doing this. And you know, they say yes, because sometimes they use this also as advisors, because these are recreations of true stories. So they need, you know, the police to verify that what they're showing is the way things are done. So we started talking about police and all of a sudden, we talk about police corruption. Low and behold, the police that investigated my case came as one of the most corrupt in the country. And all of a sudden I went like, Oh my God, because and I'm not going to share the whole details. But weeks after the rape, I'm driving to school and I see him without, like I said giving too much details. The police told me that it couldn't have been him. He wasn't there at that time. Because then I'm like, Okay, why? How do you know? Well, he's an undercover cop. So it couldn't have been.
 
I am 100% sure that it was him. Same hair, same Rayban sunglasses. You're around my neighborhood. And when these guys are telling me this, I went like, Oh my god, this is what happened. And at the time, I had no representation. It was just my husband and meet two young people who were from Venezuela. And why would we doubt what the police are telling me. And I just let it be and moved to New York to live a better life because I literally couldn't live there. It was, too tough and for me, different than sometimes for other people, of course, you know, I just couldn't walk into my apartment, the fear was being inside the house instead of outside of the streets. That is not a good feeling.
 
Marissa: No, I can't even imagine it's supposed to be your safe haven. And it's where you're feeling the most vulnerable.
 
Nana: Oh, it was terrible. I had to buy an emotional support dog. I bought a German Shepherd at the time. And until like, yeah, until I heard Max barking, I wouldn't go in. I had to check everything in the apartment under the bed and the closets. And before I could sort of relax
 
Marissa: In such a system, you know, that, that? It's so uncomfortable and feeling that fear in your home? I couldn't imagine.
 
Nana: Yeah, it was that's why you know, it's like your life just goes inside out in an instant. It's like, relationships, change. Your relationship with the environment changes, everything.
 
Marissa: So let's talk a little bit about the movie you're putting out, you're putting out a short film, you wrote it, you're acting and you're co-producing it. And it's about your story.
 
Nana: Right? So this short film is just going to be I'm calling it, you know, people call it a teaser. Because the movie that I want to make is the long, the feature film. This one is just to start creating awareness on this. And what happens to a person when they become obsessed is, and it's a little bit about justice, but it's also about healing. It's about her obsession of reopening the case, that drives her a bit crazier, and how that doesn't necessarily heal you. Though, of course, justice is justice. And it has to happen. It's not the healing, what I found is that it's not what heals you, you know, I can put him in prison and still suffer every day. So it for me, it was like a reveal. So this short film is more focused on that, because I initially got very upset and very angry. And I wanted to reopen the case. And I'm not going to explain all the details of what that entitles. And whether I'm doing it or not, because it's very easy today, they have my DNA. And I have a suspect identified. So it would be it's very, very easy. You know, you do a test period, then. So anyway, I got very angry and then it just dawned on me that whether he's in jail or not, my process is my process. And the healing comes from another place, from within.
 
Marissa: 100%.  People who have not gone through this will often say, well, you know, if you put them in jail, or if you make a report, it'll make you feel better, because you'll know they're behind bars and they can't hurt other people. And while that's 100% true, it’s not going to heal anyone, because we the crime scene is our bodies. You know, it's not like an end. For you it was in your house. So not only are you living in a skin body that makes you feel uneasy and uncomfortable and vulnerable, but you're taking that body and putting it in a home that also makes you feel uneasy, uncomfortable and vulnerable. So wherever this person resides, whether it be jail, six feet under or next door, you will have the same problem and the same process to heal because that person did what they did. And it is still affecting you day to day.
 
Nana: Correct! Absolutely correct. Because even if he would have gone to prison the next day, I would have had to go through the same process of healing. And that is so important for I think for victims of any crime actually, that healing is from within. If we focus too much on the outside, searching for the healing outside by putting them in jail by revenge by hate by all of that it only makes it worse.
 
Marissa: Absolutely. That anger just fuels. It fuels the negativity and it's toxic.
 
Nana: Yes. And like you say, of course they deserve justice. Of course they do they deserve to be behind bars. Yes. I mean, no question about it. But don't put your expectations that once that happens, you're healed. That's the only thing.
 
Marissa: So what did you do to help you heal? You got an emotional support animal, you moved. But was there anything else that you did?
 
Nana: Oh, I have done throughout the years, many things. I initially went to a rape crisis group, which helped a little bit. And eventually I said, you know, I can't do this anymore. To me, it was too much. I sort of felt that I was visiting that every day, and it to me it didn't work as well. I mean, there were ladies there who had been going for quite a while. It did help a lot. And this I have to say in Releasing the initial release of just explaining, saying, sharing with other women that were supportive that that helped a lot. However, it got to a point where, okay, I Released it. I've said it a million times, I've described what I remember, but it was hurting me too much. So I stopped then after a couple of years, well, after I graduated Actually, I moved from there to New York, like I said, to start a new life. I graduate into graduating here in New York, and I went back home. After graduation, I started therapy there, my mom had gone to therapy for her divorce, thank god bless her. And I started with that therapist, it took me six months before I started talking about it in therapy. It was group therapy. First time I ever heard of something like that. Powerful, powerful kind of therapy. And six months in he says okay, Nana so when are we going to talk about this? I'm like, “Yeah, well, maybe next session, but this problem with my mom, and my soon to be ex-husband, blah, blah, blah.” And he just took a sweater out of his neck that he always had started to wrap it around, and just jumped on me. And he created a like, he opened, he connected me with the moment. He just jumped on me as if it was attacking me. And I just couldn't breathe. It was horrible, but it was the only way to get me started on talking about it.
 
So I started working on it there, I ended up getting a divorce. Because like I said, you know, it was a marriage just couldn't survive that it was too much. So I got a divorce and then but I got better throughout through my therapy. And then over the years, it's been just healing in the sense of first being very clear that it wasn't my fault. Because I went over this a million times that I leave the door open, because I went into the apartment, went back outside to look for my mail and then came back in. And I blamed myself for leaving the door open for years. And  the NYPD detective (someone else not the ones on the set) told me he had been watching you for a while this is not this was not a robbery who turned into a rape. And that scared the hell out of me thinking that this person had been watching me and then one day decided to do it. It's a very scary thing. So that, you know, I had to deal with that. So I didn't feel paranoid that everybody was watching me all the time. But it's been a process. You know, it's been between therapy and just awareness. The Act Feminine project has helped a lot, also.
 
Marissa: Tell me about that project.
 
Nana: Okay, so the project is about connecting women with their femininity. And of course, after hearing the story about the break, you can imagine why I was probably disconnected with my feminine. But the truth is, I wasn't because of just because of the rape. I realized that I had been disconnected from my feminine side. Basically all my life. I've been very masculine energy oriented all my life. My dad was my hero, I wanted to be with him all the time. We you know, there was no brothers in the family. And my dad was always fixing cars and doing things, and for me to be with him in that I had sort of to become his boy. So I did that, oh, my life. And my mom wasn't the best role model for her for feminine side. And I want to clarify this. This is not about nail polish or heels. It is about the energies that we all humans have the masculine and the feminine, or the Ying and the Yang. And people call it whatever name you want. But it's just these two polarities that we all have inside, you know about this, because we do it at Tony's events and talk about that. Actually, at a Tony event was when all of this dawned on me, because I got married, again, I'm divorcing my second husband, after 25 years And this has a lot to do with it. I was mostly in my masculine, which meant, our roles were reversed. And I wasn't fulfilled as a woman.
So I decided to create the Act Feminine because I see so many women out there, and they don't have to be abused, to be in this feminism and extreme feminism, with social environment with the economy, that it's fully operating on masculine energy, makes us women just become fighters and hunters all the time and little time for the feminine, which is what heals us. Which is what takes stress out. And this is not said by me, then you know, many experts are talking about this, when we don't go to our feminine side, as much, or at least half and half, we get sick, we get stressed beyond what is normal stress and stress that you can handle, we get sick, more women are dying from cancer than ever before. Heart disease is the number one cause of death, 2/3 of people with mental illness, Alzheimer's, dementia are women. So there are a lot of and I'm not saying that only this is the cause. But definitely, if we don't go to our feminine side, we don't relax. Our cortisol levels don't go down. We need oxytocin for that to happen. The only way to generate oxytocin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin is when we go to our feminine. Masculine energy generating testosterone in my body, all the time with cortisol becomes the time bomb. So that's why I started the project and obviously, being raped was like the last straw for me.
 
Marissa: The pinnacle of all of it.
 
Nana: Right? I was in my masculine energy a lot. And then the rape comes right when I'm starting a new life when I'm starting a new marriage. Oh, that was that was it for my femininity. It was like, Okay, so the energy that I feel comfortable in safe, with my masculine, which I still do, and I love.
 
Marissa: I'm the same way
 
Nana: I adore my masculine energy. And when I talk to women that are very extreme feminists, I say, you know, it's not about giving up. Because it really isn't, it's not about giving up rights. It's not about giving up your masculine, it’s just about learning how to use another side of you.
 
Marissa: It's balancing yourself, it's knowing that you don't have to fit into a stereotype. You know, you don't have to paint your nails every day and do your hair and makeup every day in order to be and feel like a woman.
 
Nana: Correct. And that is so important because people think of femininity, or the feminine energy as that. And that's why one of my mantras is “Femininity is not something you wear, it's something you feel.”
 
Marissa: Exactly. If I don't feel like brushing my hair, I don't.
 
Nana: And that's fine. You know that that's fine. That doesn't mean that you're not going to be connecting with people that you're not going to be creating. It has nothing to do with the outside.
 
Marissa: 100% thank you for sharing that. I think that's really an important thing for everyone. But I think especially for survivors and champions, I feel like the world paints such a vivid picture of what a victim should look like. And most of the time that's not accurate. So, I think at least, we get really confused and feel like we're not we're not victims or we don't deserve, you know, happiness or we don't deserve to feel better, because while it wasn't that bad, but it is that bad. It's always that bad. It doesn't matter what the situation was. And being able to engage both sides of your energy, I think allows us to be more forgiving of ourselves and more tolerant of our own processes.
 
Nana: Absolutely, absolutely. You just said something that made me made me think even further of this. Feminine-masculine energy for victims specifically, because when you were describing that I felt this little, my heart jumped a little bit and I said, Okay, I know why this just happened two seconds ago. And it happened because, in a way, what you're saying is so absolutely spot on. If you're a victim, in your mind, at least I felt that way. I can't be happy. I can't enjoy. I can't flow. Because then what kind of a victim am I? Nobody's gonna feel sorry for me. They're not gonna love me. They're not gonna, they're gonna say, Oh, really? You were abused? You don't look like it?
 
Marissa: Right? Oh, if you are a real victim, you'd be crying. You wouldn't talk about it? Well, no, I mean, that's not true. You smile. You're not a victim. If you were really raped or abused, you wouldn't be smiling or laughing. You know, and that's not that's not fair to survivors. It's not fair to paint that picture on them. Because it deters people from speaking up. And encourages low self esteem and self doubt.
 
Nana: Correct. Now, I'm going to tell it to every victim out there. The power from within of being happy and feeling joy and pleasure, though. I was victimized. That is the true power. That is the true revenge. If you want any kind of revenge. My revenge is I am the woman I am today because of what happened. And I have no doubt about that Marissa. No doubt. Zero. 
 
Marissa: Yes, yes. I say the same thing. You know, I'm not happy about what happened to me. It's not like I celebrate it. But I celebrate the person I became because of it. Yes. Thank you, Nana. Yes.
 
Nana: Totally. And I say it over and over, like, not everybody. Well, I don't I very few people know about this, actually, compared to the people I know. And some people are going to be very surprised. But I always say that I used to say the therapy right, the therapy that I did at that time, made me into the person that I am today. Of course, they didn't know that I went there because of the rape. But it is I mean, I am this woman that I am today, sharing this being able to teach this being able to help other women because of what happened. And like you say Happy? Of course not. I mean, it was years of hell, months of hell of crying, and you know, I cried enough already. It was Hell. But this Heaven that I'm living in and striving for every day, came out of that. And I am grateful and blessed.
 
Marissa: Thank you so much for being here. And thank you so much. For all the beautiful advice and words of wisdom and strength that you embody and gave to us and all the survivors and champions out there. I am so honored to be your friend and if you need an extra or something in your movie, hit me up.
 
Nana: Oh, listen for the feature. We'll need a lot of people and help.
 
Marissa: Yes, perfect. I'm in sign me up.
 
Nana: I'll take your word. I'm gonna put that on the paper.
 
Marissa: Perfect. Thank you for listening and supporting survivors and champions all over the world. When we can encourage survivors to speak out about their abuse, we are slowly but surely changing the world for survivors and champions everywhere. If you're interested in supporting Nana's cause you'll find a link below to the Kickstarter for her movie. Thank you again so much for supporting me for supporting Nana and for supporting survivors everywhere. Talk to you next week.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching.  Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!
 
police officer assault. stalked by police officer. assault police. assault by police officer. life transformation. life transformation after abuse. life transformations. relationship advice. sexual assault. 

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Tips To Save Money: With Rob Wrubel

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Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa: Welcome back to Healing From Emotional Abuse. Today we're joined with my friend and colleague, Rob Wruble. I met him at a retreat in California, and he is awesome. I'm so happy to have him here today. Rob is the award winning and bestselling author of Financial Freedom for Special Needs Families. He speaks regularly to family organizations, serving people with developmental disabilities, as well as two groups of professionals serving adults with developmental disabilities and their families. Hi, Rob. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to talk to you.
 
Rob: Marissa, I am too. When we first discussed this, maybe a month ago or so three weeks, I can't remember. I've been looking forward to it pretty much every day. So, I'm glad to be on and thanks for all the work that you do.
 
Marissa: Oh, my gosh, thank you for everything that you do. And that's really nice to hear. So, thank you, I was really excited as well. I've been talking about this a lot. I don't know if you know too much about financial abuse, and I know I've mentioned it in an earlier podcast episode. But a big reason why people survivors do not leave domestic violence situations is because of fear of finances. And a lot of them have endured financial abuse, which can range from either being told they're not allowed to have a job by their narcissist or being forced to work but not having any access to their household money. And that presents a huge problem for people to leave, because it requires a lot of money to leave to be able to get an apartment, especially if you have children. And to be able to feed yourself and your children. So, have you dealt with or worked with people who have had any sort of situation like this or any fear regarding having enough money to survive?
 
Rob: I have it's come up in so many different ways. And certainly, money is for so many people, a meaningful and stressful area of their lives. And I've definitely come across people who really don't have any access to money in the relationship at all. I haven't met that many and I don't have a specific way that said, Gee, I've got no access, I don't have any money. But I've definitely run across people who are who have hinted at that that all of their paycheck goes to their partner or spouse or whomever it is that they're currently living or afraid with. And I've met lots and lots of other people who just feel like they haven't ever been able to put two pennies together, let alone to have a few $100 or a few $1,000 to establish themselves and life. So, it's a huge issue, frankly, for a lot of different people. And the more I've thought about our upcoming talk and talk to some other experts in the field, realize what an issue it is for somebody who feels a little bit hopeless and doesn't necessarily know where their way out is. And so, I look forward to talking to maybe some strategies that can help people out a little bit.
 
Marissa: Awesome. What advice, have you given the people that you've worked with already? Who have dealt with similar situations? Is there anything that you can that you just off hand advice that you give them?
 
Rob: Yeah, there's probably three or four really different areas to think about. And there, they're obviously related, but they're very different. One is, and maybe we can come back to it is how do you have conversations with the person that you live with that you want more access to information about or control over the financial piece, but that's probably the very end because that's probably the biggest, hardest piece to get over. And obviously, for people in abusive relationships, when that may never, that conversation may never happen. There's a bunch of other things that people can do first, what I see a lot is that people just don't think that they can ever even have any money. And it doesn't necessarily come from the relationship partner, it may come from, how they were raised, or how they've always handled money in the past. And so, one way to think about is how are people successful with saving some money versus people that haven't had a chance to do it. And a lot of it when I when I meet and talk to people has to do with the messaging they got when they were younger. Some people were encouraged to you know, take their pennies and put them in a little piggy bank on their desk as a symbol of, hey, you've got some extra put it away. Other people grew up in situations where there just wasn't any extra money to go around. And so, they never got that piece. And so, a lot of times they have to think about what is it that you can do on personal behavior, to find ways to save money. And if you're in a relationship or you don't have a partner you can trust it's a little bit harder. But if you have access to any actual cash, and very often the easiest way to save the first little bit of money for people, and especially for people that are being watched, is to just have some cash available. And so, if you're the person that may be buying groceries and have some money and hopefully, you're not turning in the receipt, you know, is there an extra $5, $10, or $20 a week or a month that you can take and put into pocket. And so, there's a way sometimes just with the change that you get from, from your cup of coffee or a sandwich or something where you can start to accumulate, again, a few dollars is not going to be a lot. But really, I guess one of things that I see is for people who have never been able to put any money aside for anything, it's changing that behavior pattern. And so even if it looks like it's only 50 cents here, and $1 there and $5 there, watching that money add up in a safe and secure place, it might be in the glove compartment of a car, it might be at the bottom of a sock drawer, which is kind of an obvious place, so maybe not the best place. But it's changing that behavior pattern of saying, Okay, I'm the kind of person today that can actually take a little bit of the money that I have access to, and put it in a place where I can keep it, get it when I need to, and see that it's growing on a weekly, daily or monthly basis. And we see that, for people that might even be say saving into a retirement plan at work for the first time, that first paycheck, the second, third and fourth paychecks or money has come out a lot of times, it's the first time anybody's ever saved any money. And after a couple of months, there's a confidence level to the fact that they could put it to the side, that's so important for somebody to save for long term. And I think in the group of people that you talk to and work with, it’s so important to gain some confidence and control by taking very, very small steps. But taking those steps,
 
Marissa: I love the idea of taking little bits of money at a time and hiding it in a place where the narcissist won't find it a lot of the time in these abusive relationships, the abuser will have full access of the money, so won't really have the survivor won't really have cash on them, and if they do, it's very little. And if they do ever have access to any of the money, it's usually very highly secured or monitored by the abuser. So, I love the idea of little by little, even if it's just 50 cents, hiding it somewhere like in a shoe you don't wear is something that's pretty popular. Something that I've been doing, And I know that not a lot of survivors have this ability, because a lot of them don't have access to their money. But I've been bartending for 13 years and every $5 bill I get I put in a drawer. And so, at the end of the year, I have a ton of money saved up that I forgot about or didn't touch, and it ends up paying for a vacation.
 
Rob: No, I love that idea. And it's somehow creating some mental accounting for the thing, like you said, this $5 bill, they're going in the drawer, my daughter used to love Hamilton or still does love Hamilton. And for the first time she ever had a $10 bill on her hand, she's like, I am never spending that. And so, on some level, that's a different one, when people have access to the money is finding some tricks to say that money, I'm not going to touch that money, I'm not going to touch and then it's there. And so that's a different situation for you, or in that case for my daughter. And for somebody who really doesn't have any access at all. But it is finding those little ways, and what we see so often is that it's the really small changes at the beginning, can have really big impacts. And that impact may not be for a month or two or in some cases a year or two.
 
But it's the person that we become by making those small changes. And so, for the group that we're talking to today, I would imagine that so much of it is gaining a little bit of confidence that slowly, again, I don't know all the dynamic particularly well. But that feeling that I, “Hey, I can't hold down a job and should be allowed to do that I can have my own money. And there's nobody that can take that away from me. I can maintain family relationships, and social relationships," that have all been whittled down from what I understand so often and in abusive relationships, the freedom really starts with having that seed of independence. And that comes from having something in somewhere where people can be confident. And one of the great things about money as much as it can be a pain in the neck all the time. And there's never enough of it. And some people seem to have lots and lots and lots of it and don't good, do good things with it. But one of the things about money is it's very tangible and very countable. And so, while we might want to become a better person in some way, or might want to exhibit time, and independence and freedom in some way, that's a little bit harder to measure. Even there, you can come up with metrics but money like if it's 50 cents here, $3 there and $8 there, we can go and count it and we can even say this, it was on this many days, I was able to put the money away. And it lets us as people start to feel like we're making some progress in a very tangible and very measurable way.
 
Marissa: I love that I think you're totally right on being able to be financially independent, even in a very small way, saving little by little but knowing that it's growing, it really does build confidence. That's a really good point. The cost to leave an abuser, let’s just say you're starting from nothing. And you might not know the answer to this question, but what would you think would be a good goal for them as a financial planner to be able to effectively leave?
 
Rob: No, and so often we look at what is that goal, what's it going to take in every city is going to be different. I'm in Colorado, where an apartment probably for two, or three or four people is going to be, gee keeps going up, it's going to be $1,000 a month to $1,800 a month. Whereas 10 or 15 years ago, you could probably move to someplace for $600 a month, it just gets a little bit harder to do that. So, as you know, a lot of apartment places you need to have first month and last month rent, that's probably not the right way to think about it, because there's also a lot of other places that are out there that tend to be on by individuals that tend to be smaller apartment buildings, one or two-family type houses that have been divided up into a couple of different apartments. And you're just looking for something to get by for the first period of time. And so really, I'd want somebody to have one, two, probably three months of rent, there's some other strategies, and we're going to get to about that. But that's probably, you know, in an ideal world, somebody could have two or three months of rent ready to go, and then enough money to put food on the table for the family. And then enough money for utilities, we're just trying to build a life quickly, and get out quickly and find a place to go. So, you're looking at few $1,000 probably get somebody out in almost city in almost any city in the country. But there's a lot of other strategies people can put in place that don't require as much money. And these are, again, confidence building exercises that somebody could start with, that aren't specifically financial in, in Colorado Springs where I live. And I know pretty much in every community of a decent size around the country. There are lots of nonprofits that serve people who have abusive relationships. There are lots of organizations that serve people that are homeless. And I would say for the most part that a single parent who is homeless with children can probably find an organization that's going to get them housing and even pay for that housing, often for 90 days into one of the other things that somebody could do, if they have any access to the internet, obviously, you're going to want to hide browser histories from somebody, but in your community, take a look go to the homeless organizations online. Very often they are having a specific program for families who are on the streets, or who might be on the streets, and they can use them. Every community has a women's not even just women only but an organization that serves people who are abused. And I know again, there, it's very hard for people to make that first call and get there. But these organizations are so good about coaching people on how to be more confident, what steps to take how to get out of a place. And they often have housing for a period of time as well. So those aren't long term solutions, but it's making that initial contact with the outside world can be so fruitful and can reduce the amount of money that somebody actually needs.
 
Marissa: You mentioned that you learned a couple strategies. Would you mind sharing?
 
Rob: Yeah, so one of them was, you know, just starting to save a little bit of money at a time. So, some of these strategies really are about the people we become as we start to change and look for something else. So how do you reduce your financial need to get in touch with nonprofits, there are usually friends or family that people have lost contact with through abusive relationships that I know of personally, that happens. And it's very hard for people to pick up the phone and make that call to somebody to say, “Hey, I'm in trouble, or I need help,” or, “here's what I need,” and it may be that they don't have anybody, most people have somebody they can go to. And there again, somebody may have an extra room in their house for a couple of weeks or a month, where somebody can get out pretty quickly and reduce the financial need that’s going to get them there. You mentioned very early that people are often controlled to where they aren't even allowed to work. And so, one of the other bright spots in our world today is that there's a very, very low unemployment rate. And so, there's a lot of people who think they can't get a job, that they don't have any skills, they haven't worked for six months, a year, two years. But the reality is when I walk around, there are for hire signs just about everywhere. And it may not be the ideal job, but it's usually enough for somebody to get moving and get started. So, a lot of the strategies are less about specific financial side, we'll come back to the financial a little bit and more on what opportunities are there. And can somebody start to feel a bit confident about what they're going to do. There's another strategy on the financial side that I do want to talk about. And this is for people that would be working, if they're working in a place where there's a retirement account, and they can put money into that retirement account that starts to money that is outside the control of anybody else. Now if they're in abusive relationship and somebody is monitoring every transaction in every paycheck that's going to be found pretty quickly. A lot of companies match these days. Somebody could be saving into a retirement account and depending on whether they're going to change jobs or not, if they leave that company, they may have access to money into we've worked with people who were just out of one of the companies that work with had a lot of people were actually just out of jail. And none of those people had ever saved any money before. In some of those people, after they'd worked in that company for years, started putting money in. And several of them made the comment, this was the first time I've ever had money in my life. They didn't have a lot of money but it was the first time they had money on the sidelines that they couldn't touch while they were working there. And some of them had moved on to another job, but or we're going to lose their apartment, and needed access to the $500 or $1,000 that they had saved, to be able to live until they were able to use a retirement account as a way to escape whatever else has happened for them. It's not the world's best strategy. But again, it's another place of just trying to find out, where is it that I can put some money together. And so sometimes you can use a 401k at work. And there may even be a match maybe free money from the employer on that, to start to stash some money away, that might be able to use be used in the right circumstances to buy a period of time of freedom.
 
Marissa: Do you know of any accounts outside of 401k’s that are like that. So high interest, like I know money market accounts sometimes have higher interest and banks like Capital One 360 and Ally Bank that don't actually have any brick or mortar banks have higher interest rates. But do you know of any accounts or anything like that any banks that would be good to use to stash money away little by little with higher interest rates?
 
Rob: Yeah, you know, when somebody is just getting started, or just trying to put some funds together. For the first few months of living, or even the first year of living, in the basics of financial planning, we like to have people have what are called emergency funds. So, if something wrong happens, there's money there. For somebody in the situation, who's just trying to get out and establish themselves with whatever kind of living situation, put food on the table and pay their basic utilities and gas bills, interest rate doesn't matter at all. So, it's nice to get a little bit of interest and if you put money into a bank, and you put it into a checking account, usually those checking accounts don't pay you any interest. But if you put it into a savings account, or like you said, if you can find a high yield savings account, whatever money you having in that account might earn half a percent or 1%. And so, your money just sitting there is earning a little bit of extra money for you. And it's a great thing to have. Don't ever discount that interest being paid is just extra money for you down the road. But it's really secondary, the purpose of having those emergency funds in place at all. The purpose, there is easy access to money. And whether it's paying you a quarter of a percent, half a percent or 1%, the bigger piece of it is, can I access it today when I need it. And so sometimes when you get into higher interest accounts, they may have a little bit of restrictions on it. But even if they don't, it's not so important whether you earn a little bit more a little bit less on your emergency funds. The most important thing is I can go to the ATM or to the bank or write a check and that money is there immediately. And so, while it's good to get those, it's not something I get too caught up in because again, I just want instant access when I need it. And that's you know, getting into the situation of financial abuse is one of the nice things today is somebody can go online, they can open up an account online, they can, if they can figure out how to get money there, which is sometimes the problem would be online systems and things, they can get all their statements delivered electronically. Or they can often in some cases, even turn them off, or set up a phantom email address to get it. So, there are ways to not have quite the same degree of paper trail that are out there, and so that's not a bad way to go for somebody who's just building these up and needs to keep a degree of secrecy around it. Obviously, in a better relationship, everybody knows where you know, who's got what and how it's all working. But because of the ability to do everything online today, it's not a bad way to go and even there's some app-based accounts now that, again, depending on the situation, some of them I believe, round up. So, if you're paying with a debit or credit card, and you pay $3.95 or something for five cents can go into a savings account. And if you pay $2.10, the 90 cents would go into a savings account. And I know somebody who is using one of those services, who ended up saving far more than she expected. Not enough to, you know, take a trip anywhere or anything big like that. But she was surprised at how quickly just rounding up actually added up for her. And that's how she built a little bit more actually than her emergency fund.
 
Marissa: That's a really good idea too, because then it's not like you said there's no paper trail, and it's automatic. So, it's not like you have to hide the change. It's off a debit card.
 
Rob: And it may I don't know how it would show up on the debit card statement, if somebody is really looking at it, you know that, hey, 45 cents once to XYZ app company, but somebody could explore that a little bit more and let you in, let me know, I'd be interested to hear. Yeah. So where can you squirrel away money. And cash is still the best way to do that. getting access to, like I said, trying to find other ways to save money, whether like an online bank account, one of these apps, money into a retirement account at work. Those are kind of three different ways I think that people might be able to think about, how do I start to put some money aside that I can just get to when I need it, for one case, can't always get to when you need, it's not the best strategy, but it can work in certain circumstances.
 
Marissa: But 401K's are great if the person is working or able to hold a job, as per their narcissist, like you said, because you're surviving without that money anyways, it's like it doesn't exist. And then one day, you get a letter in the mail saying that you have X amount of money saved up that you can move to an IRA or something if you needed to.
 
Rob: If you leave the employer, you can actually access into that, again, looking at a strategy, how do you get out? How do you build up a nest egg that if you need a couple of months of living expenses, you might be able to access it, the 401k could do that for certain people? And so that's an option. It's much better as a long-term strategy. But I'm just looking at ways ahead of you get money side-cared outside of the household where the abuser lives that maybe they don't even know about. And so that's one, I'm banks, or bricks and mortar banks, again, because you can actually walk in and make deposits. And even now you can turn off all the statements, and they can all be delivered electronically, I think from probably every bank, I think actually could prefer it. So those are just a couple of different ways where you could put money. The other piece competes have financial conversations with somebody who's trying to control you.
 
Unfortunately, there's probably no way to have that as a Healthy Working conversation. But if somebody has not yet been had all of their power, and all of their access, and all of their ability to have a say, taken away, and somebody starts to see that happening, a real clear way to find out whether this is healthy or not is to start to say, “Hey, we need to have a regular meeting about money.” And so, for somebody who's kind of going in that direction, where things aren't working, and start to say to their partner, let's have more clear-cut goals and conversations around money. And if that answer is, “No, I do all of this and you can't do it, you shouldn't do it, you're not capable of doing it.” It's just such a huge red flag in any relationship, that something isn't right. And so hopefully, if people use that, on the earlier side, they may recognize, oh, I've got to take some different steps here, I'd be there got to continue to advocate for that. I've got to get into a therapeutic relationship for me, and maybe this relationship as a whole or maybe, hey, this is just not going to work And I'm lucky I found out. Now, before this case got worse over time. And again, a lot of relationships don't do a good job of talking about money. But if you're in one, and you're not sure if it's in his relationship or not and you start to say let's talk about money, and I want to be involved in it. And you get shut down really, really quickly, and then also denigrated along the way, that's just such a clear sign and take it as a clear sign that something is not right. And you don't have to put up with it.
 
Marissa: That's awesome advice. And very true. There is a whole cycle of abuse, and I'm sure you're aware of but it starts off in the honeymoon phase and then travels to the tension building phase where you're walking on eggshells, and the survivor doesn't know what they can or can't say to piss off the narcissist and then an explosion happens. And once the explosion happens, that's when the cycle restarts and it keeps restarting. And I know I have a whole other podcast episode about the cycle of abuse and all that it entails. But once you start to see red flags, I think this goes back to confidence, like you were saying as well as you have to trust your instincts, you know, look for the yellow flags and the red flags and trust them. And if it doesn't feel right, then leave. If it doesn't feel right, then then take that as a clear sign.
 
Rob: Yeah, and if you don't have access to money to live your life, to me, that's a huge clear sign as well. It's just it's a fundamental way of how we all work in society that people can if they can afford it, want to go buy a cup of coffee, whether it's at the local deli or you know a $5 Frappuccino someplace depending on what they can afford, and they're taken to task for it and brought down in the in a not a positive way. And the conversation isn't, “Hey, we're trying to budget and that was outside of our budget. What can we do to fix this?” and it's all negative, negative, negative? Yeah, it's a huge issue in any relationship, and one that bears having significant conversations about whether it's really yourself or finding a therapist or a family member and saying how am I going to get this to change and if it doesn't change, probably not a relationship that’s ever going to work.  And again, little bits of confidence, putting a little bit of money away, frankly, having the confidence and I know, it's very difficult to say, I'd like to be involved in the conversation, because you're going to find out with that simple question, whether you're going to get a positive response, you're going to get that fair to middling responses could be a person that doesn't matter, you're going to get a really negative response. And so, the conversation around money, that behavior around money is very, very telling. And whether or not a relationship has a chance to really go anywhere or not. Now it can be fixed in a healthy relationship, and it just can't be in a toxic relationship. Again, one of the things about money is it's very tangible. It's very obvious what's happening with it, and so it can be used as a benchmark for the bigger relationship that might not be functioning well, like you talked about in the cycle before to the honeymoon phase, you're going to find out pretty quickly in the with the money part are you in the honeymoon phase is it all being taken away. And as opposed to, hey, let's go out to dinner, you know, and other things that might be more fulfilling and satisfying emotionally. Again, the money's a little bit of a dry part. But it's a huge area that you can gauge what's happening.
 
Marissa: You mentioned at the beginning, and so I don't want to get off of people who are still in abusive relationships and move to people who have left and find that they're struggling a little bit. A lot of the tips and tricks that you mentioned before where you know, the roundups in your bank account and saving the extra change in like a piggy bank or something and just watching that money grow and grow and grow, that would be really effective for people who have already left as a means of saving money. Because chances are, if you left an abusive relationship, where there was a lot of financial abuse, you're starting from ground zero, do you have any other ideas for people like that in those situations that can help them outside of the ones that we've mentioned already?
 
Rob: One of the things when people are just starting out, and for somebody who's gotten out of the relationship, they're now standing up on their own. Hopefully, they're talking to everybody to know what resources are available, whether that's section eight housing, or food stamps, or whatever it's called in your community just to cut the expense side of it a little bit. And then like I said, it's in today's environment, it's not always easy to find work that can support a full household, but it's usually fairly simple to find some work. And then so one of the things people have to do is, again, change that mindset to say, “How am I going to start to put little bits away?” and it's that round up. When my kids were younger, we had a big jug. And anytime we had some extra change, it all went in there and went into a place where we could see it, because it was that same piece of how do we make money tangible? And how do we know we're putting some away. So, whether you do it that way, a little bit into a bank account, probably one of these apps is even better than a bank account, because banks tend to charge a decent amount to people who don't have enough to keep in there right away. So those really don't change, it just becomes even more important than somebody that on their own, to build emergency funds. So that if a job is lost, or there's a health issue that comes up, there's some money there and credit cards aren't being used, and debt isn't there, and they don't have to go back to somebody else and ask for money. And so, money again becomes a symbol of when I start to have it in the bank, I'm starting to gain some independence. What we see also, and not everybody budgets, because budgeting is just people don't ever seem to like it, is every time you get paid, taking a little bit of it, and putting it someplace is a huge piece. So not just rounding up from change and not just throwing pennies into a big jug. Thinking out of every paycheck I get, I'm going to put 1% or 5% or $25 or $50 into the bank at the beginning and then into long term savings afterwards, is how people start to be able to step up a little bit.
 
We also see that people are carrying lots of debt, until I would I've come to understand sometimes an abusive relationship to that the debt is all carried by the person who's being abused. And so, they're even if they do move out, they may have car payments that are on cars they don't even actually own or don't have access to. And so somewhere along the way, and this is not a first couple of months issue, but it's a first year or two issue is just listing out everybody and every organization that you owe money to and how much it is every month and starting to focus on what's most important or not. And in some cases, it makes sense to not pay debt, and pay utility bills and housing bills and food first. So, sometimes we see people that are really struggling with debt, and they're just never going to make it and they're going to have to lose that car or if they own a condo or a house, they're going to have to lose that condo or house because they won't be able to feed their family otherwise. And we see a lot of times with debt collectors, or I've heard many, many times they're very vocal on the phone. And I've even talked to people that said I'm paying my car payment of $400 a month that I can't really afford. And I'm not, you know, I'm not turning the lights on in my house except for at night for an hour or something, because I can't pay my utility bill either, once. So, in that, in those cases, sometimes people have to really look at what are their fundamental core expenses to live as independently as possible, may not be a great style of living. That is what has to be paid first, food, utilities and place to live, and probably health insurance. The lender on your car probably doesn't need to be paid before you go to the grocery store. And so, people sometimes have to shift their priorities, because they're, they're responding to a loud person on the phone is saying they have to make a $250 payment. Instead of realizing no, they actually need  $150 of that to feed their kids. And so again, a lot of is just a mindset mind set shift that people have a hard time making, and understandably so. So, when they realize take care of food, utilities, and house first, put a little bit of money on the side. Next, all that other stuff is noise, and it's going to work itself out one way or the other.
 
Marissa: That's so true. And I just have two pieces that I want to snowball off of what you just said, because I think that what you just said is super important. First and foremost, when you said that you can take a percentage or a financial number, and kind of skim it off of the top of your weekly or bi-weekly or daily paycheck, you can actually set up bank accounts that will auto do that, like it'll auto deposit $25 of your deposit into a separate account. So, I do that actually, all the time, where x amount, or I did when I had my full-time job at the army, I think I did 10% or 15% of every paycheck would go into a bank account and Ally Bank that I just kind of forgot about and I didn't have to think about it. So, when I'd look at my bank statement, that money was already gone And I forgot about it. And it didn't exist in my budget. So that money was just being saved. And I'd have to budget around that money not being there.
 
Rob: Yeah, that a lot of people call that pay yourself first, take some money, like said right off the top that goes somewhere else, you can't touch it. And then you don't plan on it every month for your spending, and you've just saved some money, it's great way to go and if you can automate it even better.
 
Marissa: I know a lot of banks do. I don't know about every bank or anything. But that was a good point. So, thank you for bringing that up. And the second thing was, I love that you said the loud people on the phone, because I hate when they call because they are, they're loud, and they yell at you and they make you feel bad. A lot of the time, you can tell them, “Listen, I've had a change of finances, and I can't afford this payment, is there any way we can reduce the payment or is there any way that you can give me like a 60 day on hold or something, hold for 60 days or something,” and they'll call you back in 60 days, and then you can start paying again. But it gives you an opportunity to gather money, it gives you an opportunity to, like you said before prioritize, and it gives people an opportunity to not have to stress about so many things at once. Because I mean, you're totally right. A lot of the time the debt does follow the survivor because it's a mechanism of control from the abuser.
 
Rob: Yeah, and you're stuck with it. And those people are just going to have to wait, you know, and that goes back to that confidence, little pieces at a time competence just doesn't come overnight. But one of the things people can remember is, if you can't pay something, you can just tell them you can't pay it, and that you don't intend to pay it as well. And by the way, you don't want to be harassed over the phone. And so, it's just another way where we get to exhibit some self-determination and control, we may have to pay that debt at some point. And we may actually have voted. And so, I'm not saying if you can pay it just turn away from it. But it's this sort of looking for strategies and then also telling people who are not being kind to, you know, take a walk is always feels good to me. So, again, nothing financial about that one. But it is another financial strategy where it's Take care of yourself and the most important parts of yourself first. And then you can start to work on those things that are really around the edges from a survival point of view.
 
Marissa: That's a good way to build your confidence tell the telemarketers and the people that are that are hounding you for money to piss off.
 
Rob: You don't know them. I mean, they may be very nice people but you don't know they don't know you they're making judgments about you, you can make a couple of judgments back so.
 
Marissa: It’s a good plan. I think next time I get a phone call like that I'm just going to take a long walk off a short pier.
 
Rob: And I always try to be kind too, but sometimes you get people that you know, they're just never going to be nice and it might be the same person and sometimes you you've got to bring up your attitude level to match theirs unfortunately, but…
 
Marissa: Standing up for yourself is a big leap forward in healing from emotional abuse.
 
Rob: So, you know, I just don't think there's any when I think about it, like how you get started on savings and building some Financial Peace there's no like super-secret way of doing it. That's complicated that the regular people don't know about that's not it all comes down to very, very simple to talk about sometimes hard to do behaviors. And it is that little bit at a time, build the confidence. And then it just starts to bloom over time. And so, you know, as you're thinking about it, and people listening or thinking about it, you don't have to make it any more complicated than taking $25 out of every paycheck, or 5% out of every paycheck, or all of your change shows, or three, just simple to think about ways to do it. And you'll see it happening as you do it. And it's just exciting to watch when it happens.
 
Marissa: There are times where I forget that I automatically put money in an account. And I'll open that app and be like, Oh, my God, I have $500. Where did that come from? And it's in the grand scheme of life, It's not that much, but it's like a happy surprise for me.
 
Rob: Yeah. And then as you get further along, that either those will grow, or you'll say, Oh, I can use that $500 now to do something that I want to do, and not have to have, you know, don't have enough emergency funds in other places. And so, yeah, just it really ends up being a great thing, if you can just do a little bit at a time.
 
Marissa: The last thing I want to get back to in the very beginning, you said, a lot of people don't believe that they will have or deserve to have money. What do you tell those people when they say that?
 
Rob: Yeah, and it's interesting, because I don't always know where it's coming from, when that comment gets made. I think there's, again, a couple of things people can do about it.
 
One is, look around the people who you hang out with. And very often the conversation among those people is, I don't have anything, I'm never going to have anything. You know, the little guy can't get ahead in today's world. And people tend to hang out with people that have that same conversation who don't ever get anywhere, And because it's a self-fulfilling piece. So, part of it is where's all that messaging coming from? Is it coming from family, when you grew up? Is it coming from the people that you hang out with? Those are the two biggies. And if you can just recognize that those messages are coming from everybody around me, and I don't have to put up with it anymore. Again, we're talking mind shift here, or attitude shift to saying, I'm not going to do that. I want to live a better life than that. And I'm going to make some changes starting this week, this month, and next month to get there. That is always the starting point for how people go from that never have any money to I'm building money, reserves, wealth, retirement, whatever they want to call it. And so, the messages that are around you every day, that's a big piece of it. The other piece of it is we live in a world where we are messaged all the time on ways to spend our money. And so, like I always want the new phone or I want the new plan or the new shoes or I want to eat it Applebee's instead of eating at home. And so, people make lots and lots of decisions that they don't really think too much about, because they've been pulled in some direction or other. Jia has to have this to be happy, or I don't want to do this. So, I'm going to just spend money to make it happen. And I see that I can eat at home, I can eat healthier at home, and far less money than by eating out. And so again, depending where somebody is and their process of putting some money together, there are many ways that we spend money that we really don't have to. And so, we're again, for somebody starting out who's not got enough necessarily to do a lot of extra, that's a little bit harder to do. But as it starts to be a little bit more, what people tend to do is they make more, they spend more, and they're still in that exact same spot, no emergency funds, no money going into retirement account. So, for somebody who's getting out of an abusive relationship and may have gotten into their first job, and maybe now has like, you know, just enough to make things happen. It's bare bones and whatever you have to do, you have to but then six months from now a year from now you get a raise, or you move to a different place, and you get a little bit more money. When most of the time happens, people just spend that money. And what they don't say is I can spend a little bit of that money but more of that needs to go to savings more that needs to go to pay off debt, or some of that needs to go to retirement accounts. And so, it's those critical decisions, and people are just starting to move from that bare bones to that next level that really will make the difference over the next 5-10 -20 years.
 
Marissa: That's awesome. Thank you so much for all that. Is there anything else you want to talk about any programs or anything that you're working on that you want to shout out?
 
Rob: So, I'm a you know, a financial planner, and part of my specialty is families who've got a member with down syndrome or autism or some kind of intellectual developmental disabilities, although really, I work with all kinds of people around the country. And if people want to find out more about me, they can go to RobWrubel.com, and just kind of see what we're about, if it's a good fit. Like I said, I'm so excited that you decided to have me on and had lots of conversations and thinking through, see when somebody is really just getting started and how do they get out of the relationship and have a get some control and power back. I just realize it's such an important topic, not just for people who are in abusive relationships, but really for just about everybody. Because those very, very basic behaviors don't change. Now, somebody's ability to own it and feel good about it, are obviously different. And, and so I just really want to say thank you for the work that you're doing, and encouraging people to get out there and have happy and more positive on the financial side lives and just, you know, blossom as people. It's unfortunate that so many people have the need, but it's exciting that you're out there helping them.
 
Marissa: I really appreciate that. Thank you. And if we collectively help one person get out and not go back, I think the percentage right now is 80% of people that leave abusive relationships go back, and a large percentage of that is financially based, then I think that we've succeeded, you know, and thank you for everything that you've shared. You've given a lot of awesome tips to save money, you’re just such a good person and I encourage anyone who's interested in financial planning or finding out more information to reach out to rob. He is friendly and fun and he's a wealth of knowledge. You can find his book Financial Freedom for Special Needs Families is available on Amazon, as well as his website, www.RobWrubel.com and feel free to reach out to him with any financial based questions. I'm sure he'd be happy to work with you and answer them for you.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching.  Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Abuse and Narcissism During Covid

Get Your FREE COPY of  my book, 3 Signs of A Toxic Relationship, Now...
Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Welcome to a special episode of Healing From Emotional Abuse.  I know that we’ve all received email blasts about Covid-19 from every mailing list we’ve ever signed up for, at least I did, about what every company is doing to take precautions.  That’s great.  I’m joining those people, but more as a PSA. 
 
In the midst of this craziness with Corona-pocalypse, I want to spread a Kindness PSA.  Abusers and Narcissists are most likely working from home now, as most people, at least in various states are confined to their homes.  And even if they're not, the world is in a chaotic state.  That became really apparent when people started fighting in supermarket aisles over toilet paper, and I almost got run over in Walmart by another shopper to get to the gatorade first.
 
The heightened stress will typically increase abusive explosions and survivors don’t have anywhere to go. Everyone is quarantined, self-quarantined, or just encouraged to stay in their homes.  Leaving is hard when the world is not in financial ruin and slowly crumbling to the ground around us.  However, now, when everyone is afraid of Covid / Coronavirus and trying to manage and reduce the spreading of it, it will be more difficult for survivors to leave their abusers.  For a few reasons.
 
Shelters might be stricter on taking in new people for fear of infecting the safe house and other survivors living there.
 
There will be less of a chance or opportunity for them to flee safely, because the abuser will always be home. They will be monitored.
 
Gathering and securing any money to leave will be more difficult, because there are limited resources for securing  income.
 
The chance for fatalities becomes heightened from both Mob Mentality, and from Abusive Explosions.
 
The healthcare and hospitals that survivors would go to after an incident will most likely be full, or limited in the medical care that they can provide.
 
 
 
For all of these reasons, I wanted to try and do my part in spreading kindness and empathy towards each other.  We are living through a scary time.  If not for us personally, then for friends and family members who will be more aggressively affected by this covid virus.   
 
People become selfish, and aggressive, with an “every man for themselves” mentality.  THAT is the most dangerous part.  The fact that there are videos of people fighting over a roll of toilet paper makes me sad.  This  is the most opportune time to deny psychologists the explanation that stressful situations tear communities apart, and instead come together and help support each other.  We are more likely to survive and thrive in times of stress and hardship when every man is for everyone - sharing resources, and support.  Those of us that have outside the home battles in addition to the inside the home battles, like abuse, need empathy and comfort more than ever.  And I hope that this strong and beautiful community can come together and give them that.
 
But, that does not mean to put your family at risk.  Some things you can do for survivors at this time, that won’t put you or your family in jeopardy are:
 
Give the survivors in your life love and support to know that they aren’t alone, and have a place to run or people that will empower them when they are ready and able to leave.
 
Safety Planning Guide
 
Help them research shelters and nonprofits that are available when the time is right.
 
Safety Planning Guide
 
Help them find places to secure money, maybe into a separate bank account where their abuser cannot access it or see it.
 
That doesn’t mean to give them money, but helping them keep their money safe. A lot of times people will hide change or hide money throughout their house, and that might pose a problem when the abuser is always home.  Financial abuse.
 
Safety Planning Guide
 
Help to create a safety plan with them of where and how they can get out and go when the quarantines are over, and they have a safe opportunity to leave.
 
The reason I do not recommend invite survivors into your house in times like this is, the abuser will have plenty of time to search for them, and that could put you and your family in danger.  You do not want the abuser to come break down your door and hurt you or your family.  To be proactive in keeping everybody safe, I would follow these four guidelines in helping, so that when quarantines are over and when people can leave their houses again, they’re very prepared.
 
Safety Planning Guide
 
I also think it’s important to mention that in crisis situations and natural disasters, the rate of emotional abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, rape and sexual assault also increase.  That could be being displaced, in a shelter, staying in an unfamiliar place, or even in your home.  But people are losing control of their reality.  Everything in the routine is different - so people lose their minds and, abusers grab for control where they can.  I am by NO MEANS justifying any sort of violent act — not rape or sexual assault, emotional abuse, physical abuse, financial abuse, or any sort of abuse.  I just wanted to help bring situational awareness. 
 
Be aware of your surroundings.  If you’re in a shelter or know someone in a shelter, be cautious and aware or encourage them to do so.  If you’re staying with someone, anyone, a stranger, a friend of a friend, a friend of yours, a family member, or anyone outside of your normal housing situation, you can be at an increased risk of emotional abuse, sexual assault, physical abuse.  Take precautions to keep yourself safe. 
 
I can’t stress enough the importance of evading the mob mentality.  In crisis situations, there are more fatalities from looting, riots and chaos, than there are from the actual virus. If everyone could reach out to someone they know that might need a little bit of comfort, that could make the world a better place, and make this scary situation a little easier to handle. Reach out to the elderly people in your family and in your neighborhood.  See if there is anything you can do to help them, or make this easier.  A lot of elderly people are walking around supermarkets just trying to get the bare minimum, and there’s nothing left for them.  Do you party, do what you can, do what you can to make this easier for the people who are at a heightened risk.  And if that means giving up one roll of toilet paper, do it.
Keep yourself, your family, and your community safe.  Wash your hands with soap, not just sanitizer.  And drink a lot of water.
 
Talk to you soon!  Send loving energy out there!  That way, we can all get through this together.
 
Safety Planning Guide
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Signs of A Toxic Relationship

Get Your FREE COPY of  my book, 3 Signs of A Toxic Relationship, Now...
Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Today, I wanted to read a couple of the stories from my books: Breaking Through the Silence, the Journey to Surviving Sexual Assault and Breaking Through the Silence: #Me(n)Too. Both of these books are compilations of survivor stories, told from their voices, in their words, including my own.  To help all survivors become champions and take their lives back, feel empowered and feel relatable to other survivors.  I want every survivor to know that they are not alone, and what happened to them was not their fault.
These are real stories from real people that have endured and overcome their abuse and assaults. These stories are in the words of the champions, so there may be some inappropriate language or triggering content. Be mindful while to listening to keep yourself safe.  Thank you so much for listening and supporting champions of abuse.
 
All the stories being told today can be found in my books, Breaking Through the Silence, the Journey to Surviving Sexual Assault and Breaking Through the Silence: #Me(n)Too, available on my website at www.marissafayecohen.com/the-books or on Amazon.  Like I mentioned before, these are all from the voices of the survivors.  They had complete control over their stories. Every champion that signed on to help me with the Breaking Through the Silence series, voiced their intention to use their stories to help other survivors feel empowered by knowing that you are not alone.
 
The first story I’m going to read is from Breaking Through the Silence, the Journey to Surviving Sexual Assault. It’s called, Will You Become One of My Friday Night Regulars, on page 62.
 
Will You Become One of My Friday Night Regulars?
I’ve talked about my abuse with my daughters, but not with my son or husband. I’ve never told him, because I felt it would be so hurtful for him to know. I told my daughters that this is uncomfortable, but I wanted them to know what happened to me to make sure they knew how to take care of themselves. Yes, you should be able to do what you want and be safe, but in this world, you just never know who’s a predator.
I was a freshman in college, and it was my first time away from home. I was naive; I was not a virgin, but I was very naive about how things worked in the world. I was much more trusting than I became in the end. I went to a party with a male friend of mine, hosted by his friend who was on the soccer team. I had too much to drink, as often happens in school your freshman year, and apparently, I passed out. My friend was hanging around the party waiting for me to be awake enough for him to try and get me home. The host of the party (my friend’s friend) said, “Don’t worry, just leave her here. I’ll take care of her when she comes to.” Of course, my friend thought nothing of it. After all, he was an athlete, a buddy, and a good boy from a good school.
I came to, completely out of it, and knowing that something was going on. This guy was on top of me. I was so confused because I was drunk, and I wasn’t sure about what was happening. Then I felt extreme pain, and boy, that sobered me up. He was about 6’6 or 6’7. I was not aroused in the slightest. He ulcerated my vulva. I yelled for him to stop, but he continued to do it anyway. Afterward, I was still drunk, but also in shock. There was blood on the sheets. He said, “I didn’t know you were a virgin.” I said, “I wasn’t,” to which he responded, “I better take you home.” 
When I came in, my roommate was still up. She looked at me and said, “You’re bleeding.” There was blood on my legs, between my thighs. She thought I had my period and was trying to warn me, but I just started freaking out, wailing, and crying. She couldn’t get out of me what was happening, so she called my friend that I went to the party with. He came over and managed to calm me down, and get out of me what happened. When they realized what had happened, we didn’t even know what to do. Who knew? There was no guidance; there was nothing -- this was the 1970’s. He took me to the Health Services building, and the doctor asked me if I wanted to call the police. At this time, self-preservation had kicked in, and I said no. I just wanted to make it all stop somehow. The doctor said, “I will say this was obviously not consensual. This was not willing, you don’t have tears in your vulva from nothing.” I just said, “No, no, I want to go home. I just want to go home. I just want to go home.”
Then, the harassment started. The whole thing couldn’t have taken two weeks, maybe more. Everyone had whiteboards on their doors, and the next day when I came back from class, somebody had written that I was a slut on my door. Then notes started being pushed under my door. Notes that called me a dirty whore, and if I say anything they will tell everyone that I’m a dirty slut. I had no idea what to do. There was a knock on my door one time, and when I opened the door, there was my attacker. He wanted to know if we could go out and talk. I told him, “No. I never wanted to see your face again.”
He was just standing there looking ashamed and uncomfortable, and then he said, “So, my coach says that he knows that you had another boyfriend and that your old boyfriend (who was also a soccer player), is willing to testify that you’re a slut and you would sleep with anybody.” I just looked at him and told him, “You just get out of my face. Just get the fuck away from me and stay the fuck away from me.”
He tried to see me one more time after that. He called me and said that he had to talk to me. I called up two male friends of mine who were on the track team, big guys, in an absolute panic. Why didn’t I call the police, campus security, call my dorm, I don’t know. The guy showed up, and my two very large friends were just sitting there. They stood up and said, “If you didn’t understand her, she said she never wants you to contact her again.” I never heard from the guy ever again. Thankfully I got past that, and I was lucky enough to have no sexual problems as a result. I’m thankful to have had support, not just from women, but also from male friends.
When I was 23 or 24, I had a boyfriend who was violent toward me. He was quiet and seemed unassuming. He had a lot of interesting stories from being a roadie with my favorite rock band. Things seemed fine at first, and then he started having what began as little hissy fits.
For example, once we were going to a concert and when we got to our seats, he didn’t like the view from the seats. I remember saying, “Well, it doesn’t matter. These seats are fine. We can see fine.” All of a sudden he got up and stormed off. Now, had I been a different woman, I would have thought, “what the fuck, asshole?” stayed, watched the concert, got a cab home, and never saw him again. Because I am how I am, I asked, “What, what’s happening?” I started grabbing my coat, followed him and kept asking what happened and what was wrong. Of course, I was thinking, “What did I do?” because he made it seem like my fault.
From there, it progressed. He would be overwhelmingly lovey-dovey and romantic one moment, and then would be the smack-down. It was a lot of emotional abuse. One moment he would say, “I love you, I love you,” and then “I don’t want you to do that, and you’re going to do it anyway, and I’m not going to speak to you.” For example, one night, my friend asked me to be his date to a wedding. My boyfriend didn’t want me to go, but I told him, “Look, he has been one of my best friends since high school. I’m not going to tell him no. He’s my friend, you know he’s my friend.” He still didn’t want me to go to the wedding, but I assured him I would come home immediately after. We weren’t living together, but I spent much time at his place.
On the night of the wedding, I was wearing a short dress and sandals (keep in mind that this is in December, but it was a cute, appropriate outfit for an indoor wedding). When my friend dropped me off and I walked up to my apartment. I had this really wonky lock, and usually you could pull it, and jiggle it to open it up. This time, however, it didn’t open, and there I was in my short dress with my bare legs and sandals, unable to get into my apartment. It wasn’t that late, maybe midnight. My boyfriend lived blocks away — within walking distance. I walked all the way to his apartment, and I rang the doorbell, and I said, “It’s me. My lock won’t open again. The damn thing won’t open!” He said, “Too bad.” I rang again and said, “I’m in a dress, in sandals, and it’s snowing out. Let me in!” but, he wouldn’t let me in. I was starting to panic, and I had to beg to be let in. The next morning, it was like nothing had happened. I asked him why he wouldn’t let me in, and he said he was tired.
He only hit me twice during our relationship. I know, the word “only” is not great because it shouldn’t even happen once. The first time was after we had broken up. I went out with someone else, and he called me when I got home. I could tell he was very upset. He begged to speak with me and came over. He started asking questions about whether the guy had kissed me during our date, and was digging for information. In my mind, it wasn’t any of his business -- he broke up with me, and I can kiss whoever I want. Then he slapped me. I looked at him and told him, “Get the fuck out, and I never want to see you again.” He called, and called, and cried, and called, and begged, and cried and showed up with roses. He said, “What was I thinking?” and, “If you take me back, I’ll make it up to you!” Why did I take him back? The guy who I was out with that night called me, and I told him I had gotten back together with my boyfriend.
He was a nice guy, and I didn’t tell him what had happened, but he said, “You know, you’re a nice girl. But I gotta tell you; you’re being really stupid. And it’s not because you’re not going to date me. It’s because you’re putting up with this and you don’t have to.” I made excuses for him. I don’t seem like that kind of person now, but being with someone like that chips away at your self-esteem. And yet, I was with him for another year. The first six months because I wanted to be, and the second 6 months because I was afraid of him. He started complaining about me spending time with my male friends, but then it became my female friends too, and then my family. He didn’t want me to spend time with my parents. “Why do you have to spend so much time with your family? Why do you have to spend so much time with your parents? Aren’t you a grown-up?” Of course, I would keep doing it, because I was not going to step away from my friends and family. That would lead to these punishing hissy fits. I was unhappy. I was not myself, and people saw it.
There was one wonderful woman at work, this wonderful, old, grandma- like lady with white hair who was always sweet to me, who said, “Something’s not right. You’re always so cheerful and happy. What’s wrong?” I told her everything. I told her what was going on, not realizing how bad it was. She was not sweet this time. She looked at me very sternly, and she said, “You need to stop. You need to stop this right now. You need to stop this.” I believe she even used the word abusive.
Oddly enough, the thing that finally made up my mind was when I got my first cat. I didn’t want to be at my boyfriend’s anymore; I wanted to be at home with my kitty cat. And I began to realize if I want to be with the animal more than I wanted to be with the man, that was saying something. He didn’t want to sleep at my apartment because of the cat. When he came over to my place, and we were starting to get intimate, my kitty jumped up on the bed because he was used to sleeping in bed with me. Without even stopping, my boyfriend scooped him up and tossed him off the bed. And for the first time, I kicked him, and pushed him off the bed, and said, “Get Out! Get out! Get the fuck out!” I was screaming, “Don’t you ever touch my cat! Don’t you ever touch him! Get! The Fuck! Out!” And he did. And I thought, “If he could abuse me, but he mustn’t touch my cat, what does that say about me?”
I thought this was it, and I was done. I should have let it be over, but the next day, I told him I needed to talk to him. So, the next day I went over to his place to end it. As soon as I spoke the words, “This is over, I’m done!” he started walking towards me...and I knew. I just knew. I ran for the door to try and get it open, but he got me at the door. He hit me so hard that he knocked me out. It sounded like a “thunk,” almost like the sound that you make when you hit a watermelon. The next thing I knew, my shirt was torn, I was bleeding, and I wasn’t by the door anymore - I don’t know how I got to where I was. I started screaming and screaming and screaming at the top of my lungs, “Help, help, someone call the police, help!” By this time, my boyfriend had gotten himself together, because he saw that I was hurt and bleeding and hysterical, and he was trying to calm me down. He asked to let him take me to the hospital, and I let him drive me to the E.R. I just wanted everything to stop, for it to be over.
When we got there, the nurses did an intake report to see what happened. I told them I fell and hit my head. So, after I was stitched, the doctor asked me what happened because it said that I tripped and fell. The doctor said they had to give me some stitches, and they needed to stabilize my jaw because it was unhinged. I had three stitches on the side of my head. “Who hit you?” the doctor asked. I didn’t say anything. He said, “This is not a falling accident. This is an impact accident. This is what you get when someone hits you. Was it your husband, your boyfriend, your father? Who is it?” I still didn’t say anything. He said, “Do you know how I know this? I know this because every Friday night, they come in here, these beaten women. It’s the same ones over and over again. And each time, it’s a little worse. It’s a black eye. Then it’s a black eye and a broken nose. A broken cheek. Stitches in the head, it’s a concussion, and some of them eventually die. They have police out in the waiting room. I’ll have them come in, I’ll file a report, you’ll file a report, and they’ll arrest him. So, are you going to become one of my Friday night regulars?”
With that, I was able to meet his eyes, and I said, “NO! Never again”.
I left the hospital and went home, where my boyfriend was standing, crying and apologizing. I told him that he was not staying, and he was not coming in, he was leaving. At this point, I was so calm; I was just trying to keep control. I went into my apartment, shut it and locked it. I went into my room, and thought, “I’m safe now.” I felt overwhelming relief because I was never going to see him again, ever...or so I thought. He called and called, trying to apologize. He would go through phases. He would call begging and pleading. He would call in the middle of the night screaming and cursing at me. One night, he was down in the courtyard of my apartment complex, banging on the door and screaming, and the girl upstairs called the police on him. He sent roses to my office one time. I looked at the card, went into the lunchroom, threw the roses in the garbage, and went back to my desk. Two years later, I was in a new relationship with my now-husband. I told my husband about the phone calls, and how I would just hang up. One day the phone rang, and my husband decided to pick it up. He said, “Yep, hello? Nope. Nope. She doesn’t want to talk to you. Go right ahead. It’s a whole lot harder to beat up another man than it is to beat up a woman. Come right on.” and he hung up. I hyperventilated and thought I was going to hear my doorbell ring, and he would be tracking me. But thankfully, I never heard from him again.
What helped me at first, were my friends. Women didn’t talk about assault, or domestic violence very much, but if you did share, somebody would share back if they’d experienced it. It was really helpful to hear another woman say, “Don’t you put up with that shit.” Especially older women. I got a fair bit of counseling, which also really helped. I never spoke to my parents about the rape, and I don’t know if I told them about the abuse. I mean, obviously they saw it. They aren’t stupid, and they probably knew something was going on, and you could see that I had been beaten up. I think that the hardest part was looking back and thinking, “Good Lord, what was I missing in me, that I would take that?” It isn’t my fault. I know it isn’t my fault.
You can’t let it define you; what you did, what you didn’t do, how you fought or didn’t fight, is not who you are. Someone else did you wrong. How it felt, what you did at the moment, and how it felt in the moment is all so confusing for a decent person who doesn’t want to hurt anyone else. It’s really hard to comprehend. Someone else fucked up, and you got the sharp end of it, but it’s still your body and still your life. It’s still your sexuality. It doesn’t belong to them. I don’t know how we make it stop. I don’t think we can make it all stop. Women can’t do this on our own, because women want to be loved and desired and wanted. In addition to wanting to be respected, they want to be desired. That’s why women with brains and guts and education and ambition will go somewhere and have their pubic hairs ripped out by their roots with a bikini wax. Why? Because somebody told women, it makes them sexier. You have to have men join you as part of the effort to stop abuse. All it takes is for good people to do something.
 
 
Thank you for listening today. I hope you enjoyed the story.  I know they’re a little dark, and they’re hard to hear, but it’s really important that more people speak out about their abuse and what they’ve experienced in order to help other people feel comfortable doing the same thing.  The whole purpose is to empower other survivors.  We want a world where nobody feels isolated and stuck because of a situation they are or were in.  I want everybody to have the comfort and support of a community that empowers and loves and validates them. And I think that by writing these books and sharing these stories, is a really important and effective way to let people break through their silence, and heal from their emotional abuse.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Narcissistic Abuse Cycle

Get Your FREE COPY of  my book, 3 Signs of A Toxic Relationship, Now...
Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Welcome back toHealing From Emotional Abuse.  Today, I want to address the Cycle of Abuse, and the 6 types of abuse that are most prevalent.
 
There are three parts to the cycle of abuse.  There is the Honeymoon Phase, the Tension Building Phase, and the Explosion Phase.  This is often referred to as the power and control wheel.
 
Abusive Relationships, like every relationship, start off with the calm honeymoon phase.  The abuser is charming, and kind.  Makes you feel comfortable and loved. Mine would bring snacks to my desk at school and we would watch Glee, because he knew I love that show.  And he would send me cute messages and tell me how beautiful, smart and witty I was. 
 
Once he had me smitten, he began to make occasional, seemingly out of character remarks to me.  He started to push my boundaries with verbal abuse.  Telling me that things I was saying were stupid, or that I was stupid.  My opinions were invalid.  Or that the major I declared in college was dumb.  You name it, he said it.  It made me feel really insecure.  I began carefully selecting things to tell him.  Things that wouldn’t make me look stupid to him.  Things that would avoid any conflict. I felt like I was walking on eggshells, and anything I said to him could be used against me, or used to make me feel bad.
 
Have you ever experienced a friend, partner or colleague that treated you like this?  It might have confused you, because once you were once so close, or they were so nice.  And all of a sudden, it started to creep in that they became a little hurtful. And then, very hurtful.  They would make little jabs that threw you off or confused you. And then you felt insecure or uneasy sharing things with them?    This is the tension building phase of abuse.
 
Finally, the last phase of the cycle is the Explosion phase.  The explosion phase is when the big blowout happens.  When the abuser snaps and creates a big act of control.  It could be causing a scene, or yelling.  It could be a blowout of verbal or emotional abuse.  It could be physical or sexual abuse.  The recent trend we’ve been seeing is strangulation, over the last couple of years.  The explosion phase is usually when friends or family will be called or asked for help, or when the police will be called.  Or when the survivor tries to leave.
 
The problem is, that brings us back to the beginning of the cycle.  The honeymoon/reconciliation phase. This is when the abuser comes back and apologizes.  Makes promises that they’re not going to keep. Like that they’re never going to hurt them again.  Or makes a million excuses for their behavior.  “Oh, but honey, I was just drunk, and I was angry.” Or, “I have so much stress at work, and there’s something going on with me.” And sometimes, they’ll bring gifts and chocolate, and are extra affectionate and attentive. 
 
And the cycle continues.  Everything is great for a short period of time, and then tension builds again until we hit another explosion.  And things don’t get better.  They will always continue to get worse and worse, because throughout the tension and explosion phase, the abuser is pushing boundaries.   Seeing how far they can push their control over the survivor. 
 
There are 6 major types of abuse.
Emotional abuse / Psychological abuse
Verbal abuse
Financial abuse
Spiritual abuse
Sexual abuse
Physical abuse
 
Verbal abuse is when someone says mean things to you in order to belittle you and make you feel insecure.  It’s a way to break your confidence down, so you’ll submit to what they say about you.  It can be cursing, yelling, calling mean or derogatory names.  Anything that is said with the intention to hurt someone else.
 
Emotional abuse and Psychological Abuse is used to break down your self-worth, and push boundaries.  For example, the emotional abuse that my abuser said to me was that I was lucky to have him because nobody else could ever love the damaged person that I am.  That I had no value and no worth, and I would never aspire to be anything.  I would always depend on him to take care of me.  He knew that was my biggest fear, because I grew up so independent, and being taught how I need to be an independent person and take care of myself. And he exploited that by trying to make me feel like I would never achieve that.
 
Financial Abuse is very common, but not often talked about.  There are a few scenarios that depict financial abuse.  Either the abuser does not allow the survivor to work, so they won’t have any access to money, and won’t have work experience, which impacts someone’s ability to leave their abuser.  And the other type is forcing the survivor to work, in order to sustain the household, while the abuser has full control over the finances, and often times stays at home.  They usually monitor the bank accounts to make sure that the survivor isn’t spending any money, or lying about where they are.  And also, not allowing the survivor any access to the money they’re bringing in, so they cannot leave. 
 
Spiritual abuse, also not commonly talked about, is refusing the survivor the right to their beliefs.  It can be the abuser forcing the survivor to believe in the abusers religion of choice, or just not allowing the survivor to practice the faith or religion that they want.  It cuts survivors off from their communities, and is also a method of control. 
 
Physical abuse is the most commonly talked about.  It’s actually what people usually envision when talking about domestic violence.  It’s the pictures of people with black eyes, making the excuse that they’ve walked into a doorknob, or tripped and fell down the stairs.  It’s any physical contact that is meant to hurt someone, or control someone, or have them submit to the abuser.  Like I mentioned before, choking and strangulation have been very common in the last few years.  I personally think it’s because cutting off someones air supply is horrendous, but it’s also complete control over their life.  And fingerprints are easier to hide behind hair.  Pushing people down stairs, biting, scratching, hitting are all different examples of physical abuse.
 
And sexual abuse.  This can range of making an off-putting sexual comment, or behavior - like touching someones leg, or butt or any part of their body that makes them uncomfortable, to full on rape and sexual assault.  Harvey Weinstein was just convicted on this. Two people came forward and said that he had forced himself on them, and that’s sexual abuse. It is any unwanted or unprompted sexual advance where no consent is given. 
 
Abuse doesn’t typically start out physical.  If you meet someone, you start to like them, and then they punch you in the head, chances are you’re going to leave, right?  What they’ll do is build trust and affection and love.  And in the midst of your relationship building, they’ll insert small jabs and boundary pushes to see what they can and can’t get away with. And like climbing a staircase, they’ll start with verbal or psychological abuse.  Push boundaries and see how much they can get away with. Then, they will move up to the next step.  They may touch on financial or spiritual abuse, and sometimes both. Then, when they have that full mind control over you, they’ll move up to the next step and may push to become physically and sexually abusive.    Not every abuser follows the exact same pattern, and not every relationship becomes physically abusive.  But it’s not as simple as, they punched me in the face, so I’ll leave. It’s little-by-little steps, building up the abuse as they go, after the survivor is already smitten.  Or after the survivor already feels trapped.  People would not stay in abusive relationships if there wasn’t some semblance of love.  If they didn’t see good in the abuser. Or if there weren’t times of beauty and kindness and love.  They wouldn’t stay. 
 
I mean, would you? If you were with somebody that you truly loved, and they started acting really bad towards you, you would wish for the good times back. That doesn’t mean you enjoy the abuse.  It just means that you know that they can be better, because they have been.  So survivors will hold out for that to come back.  Maybe they’ll justify it by saying their narcissist is just stressed at work or this is a phase. Or they’re going through a lot.  But at the end of the day, the bad habits and the bad traits and the bad actions don’t go away.  The bad behavior is what stays.  And it’s the good times that become fewer and farther between.
 
Have you ever heard the song Love the Way You Lie, by Eminem and Rhianna?  I really appreciate that song for how lyrically gifted Eminem is.  That song does a phenomenal job of depicting the cycle of abuse.  He highlights a few different types of abuse, and the lyrics are cyclical.  They take you on a journey around the cycle of abuse a few times. Rhianna depicts a survivor, who is conflicted because she loves her partner so much but doesn’t like the abuse, and Eminem depicts the abuser, and the cycle.
 
I’ve picked out a few excerpts from the song to break down, but I urge you to listen to the whole song and try and find the different parts of the cycle.  I’m not even going to try to rap, I’m just going to read the lyrics.  That is so not my forte.
 
This is the explosion.
 
Where you going, I'm leaving you
No you ain't, come back
We're running right back, here we go again
 
Honeymoon / Reconciliation
 
It's so insane 'cause when it's going good, it's going great
I'm Superman, with the wind at his back, she's Lois Lane
Tension:
But when it's bad, it's awful
I feel so ashamed,
Explosion:
I snapped, who's that dude
I don't even know his name, I laid hands on her
Honeymoon:
I'll never stoop so low again, I guess I don't know my own strength
....
You ever love somebody so much
You can barely breathe, when you're with them, you meet
And neither one of you, even know what hit 'em,
Got that warm fuzzy feeling, yeah them chills, used to get ‘em
 
Tension Building
 
Now you're getting fucking sick, of looking at ‘em
You swore you've never hit 'em, never do nothing to hurt 'em,
Now you're in each others face,
Spewing venom, and these words, when you spit ‘em
 
Explosion
 
You push, pull each other's hair, scratch, claw, bit 'em,
Throw 'em down, pin 'em, so lost in the moments, when you're in 'em
It's the rage that's the culprit, it controls you both
 
 
If you listen to the whole song, it rounds the cycle a few times, like I said.  And there are a ton of other songs that reference abuse or the cycle of abuse. Wasted and Blown Away by Carrie Underwood, My Immortal by Evanessence, Better Man by Little Big Town (that’s a really good one) — because it references that want to go back from the survivors perspective, but having to fight yourself to recognize that going back is a mistake.  I could do an entire podcast episode on just music about abuse and sexual assault.  If that is something you would want to hear, leave me a comment and I’ll absolutely do that!In the meantime, I hope this helped you understand more about the cycle of abuse, and the types of abuse that are out there.  It’s way more than just hitting someone.  Abuse destroys you psychologically and emotionally until you feel completely trapped and isolated.  It’s a horrible place to be.  But we’ve built a community here that is in place to help support and empower survivors to leave, and feel confident growing into their strongest selves.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Movies About Narcissism : With Mike Sellari (Part 2)

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Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa:
Hey everyone!  Welcome back to Healing From Emotional Abuse. This is part 2 of my conversation with Mike Sellari.  Writer, director, producer and movie expert. With Mike’s insight, we were able to pick apart a bunch of movies with depicted sexual assault and discuss the necessity of those scenes, in relation to the themes of the films.  If you haven’t heard part 1 yet, go check it out on Youtube, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Podbean, Stiticher, iTunes, basically any platform that hosts podcasts.  In this episode of Healing Through Emotional Abuse, we dive a little deeper into the world of cinema.  And just a heads up, some of these depictions of sexual assault may be graphic and potentially triggering.  And there will definitely be movie spoilers.
 
Marissa:
I think that rape and sexual assault and domestic violence have been used as slapstick comedy for a really long time because it was not something that was really questioned.  Every time somebody came forward about domestic violence through the late 90s, the police would show up, they would tell the narcissist or abuse to take a walk around the block, and they’d question the victim about what they did to piss off the abuser.  That’s how it was handled.  It wasn’t handled. That’s the problem.
 
Mike:
Yeah, and you see that.  You see that in the first season of Veronica Mars, and it kind of carries on into the second season of Veronica Mars. It is about a rape, and she goes to the police to report it, and his response is, “You know, I think you should go see the Wizard, and ask him for some guts.” Or something like that.  I don’t remember exactly what he tells her to ask for. 
 
Marissa:Because that still happens today, in real life.  But also, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Netflix show, Unbelievable. 
Mike:Yeah, I love it.
 
Marissa:
Okay, Awesome!  So, Unbelievable is based on true stories.  It’s about several people who have been sexually assaulted or raped in various places around the country.  And with the first case specifically, she goes to the police right away, she makes her report.  They ask her the same question 55 times. And then they find one small detail that she mixed up, because it’s really easy for us to forget the exact order of things - who she called first was the thing she mixed up- and then they get her on that, convince her what happened didn’t happen, made her believe that the police were never going to help her.  So she just admits defeat, says it was a lie, even though it wasn’t.  And then she get ostracized for it.
 
That’s the kind of stuff I’m hoping becomes more common in film and tv - just like you were saying before.  We have to see the uncomfortable stuff to really feel it and understand it, and take the severity of it to heart.  If we don’t see it, if they were doing it off screen, or they do just soundbytes or it’s just a black screen or whatever, it takes the power and the discomfort away from us.  And it makes it easy to excuse.
 
So even in the show 13 Reasons Why, which I know you’ve seen. When that show was released, the National Suicide Hotline said that their phone calls blew up 40x.  So, 40x the normal number of calls were made to the hotline.  Which is a phenomenal, but also awful, because you don’t know if those same people were already suicidal or if it was something they felt glorified suicide.  The statistics were never conclusive.  One thing I did really appreciate - I watched a little bit of the second season and it really felt like it was trying to bank too much on the #MeToo Movement, which pissed me off a lot - but I really appreciated the cinematography of the rape scene because it’s so, you just, it just.  Oh god. The closeup of her face, and you just see her.. the life leave her eyes. 
 
Mike:
Yeah
 
Marissa:
The humanity just falls out of her.  And it lingers like 10 seconds too long.  And they did that on purpose so that you could truly see the dehumanization of a person when they’re being raped.
 
Mike:
I’m going to move away from movies for just a second to mention a book that I just recently finished and I recommend to you and your listeners.  It’s covering a lot of topics here. And what it’s called is Talking To Strangers. It’s a Malcom Gladwell book.  The thesis of the book is that we as a society do not know how to talk to strangers.  We do something called “defaulting to truth,” meaning that as soon as somebody says something to us, even if we haven’t met them before, our inclination is to believe that person.  And the reason we do that is because if we don’t, society can’t function.  That’s how society functions is because of default to truth.  If everybody is super suspicious of every single person, we can’t trust anybody, society can’t function.  The whole premise of the book is, we don’t know how to talk to each other.  We don’t know how to make decisions regarding each other.  We really don’t know how to read people.  And because of that, problems arise. You can’t tell comfortability, or if you are, you’re not sure about it.
 
You look at people who have made these apologies and stuff like that in real life.  And you can find the difference between the people we like and the people we don’t like.  Dan Harmon comes to mind, where Megan Ganz accused him of sexual harassment.  It’s what I mentioned before. He was always asking her out.  He was her boss, she was afraid to do certain things.  There was this sexual harassment thing, and she called him out on it and it became a whole situation.  I highly recommend everyone to listen to his apology.  It’s a masterclass of apologizing, how he did it on his podcast, talking about the situation.  That’s why he’s still doing Rick and Morty and still able to do stuff.  He has his show Harmontown.
 
Alright, we’re talking about abuse and all that stuff, we have to hit the main ones.  There are two movies that we haven’t talked about that we’ve gotta talk about.  First is, The Last Tango in Paris.  Marlon Brando, there’s that infamous scene where he rapes her with butter. She talks about how that has affected her as a person and as an actress.  Last Tango in Paris was a move, though, that was highly revered. People still talk about how much that movie has influenced them. Now, this girl was traumatized by this.  She was 19 years old, they didn’t have it in the script.  She showed up on the day, and they said, in this scene, he’s going to rape you and use butter as lubricant. It’s obviously not really happening but she was crying.  The tears you see in the movie are her real tears.  And Bertolucci and Brando defended themselves throughout the years, and it became contentious.  I think that’s why the Last Tango in Paris doesn’t come up in the conversation of great cinema anymore, which is fine.  There are movies that we revere at a time and then we can say, “We’re done with that.” And we can move on. 
 
It can still exist and we can watch it for  posterity.  But we don’t always have to revere something because it was revered in the past. And I think we’re learning that more and more.  And I think that’s something that, it took a while for people to treat women the right way, or at least closer to the right way.  Movies we have to talk about.  Last Tango in Paris, it’s a brutal thing, and we didn’t see it as brutal in the time.
 
On the flip side, there’s a movie that we do see as brutal and it was seen as brutal at the time.  And that’s The Last House On The Left, and that’s Wes Craven’s first movie.  I just watched it for the first time a couple months ago.  I’d been putting it off for a while.  I knew what it was about. They remade it recently, not as aggressive. And I mean, it’s a staple in horror cinema.  When you watch it, you can see the moments of Wes Craven’s talent.  I mean, you can see his talent in there.
 
The premise of the movie is, these two girls are going to a concert in the city.  They meet this guy, he is like, “Hey, come hang out.” and stuff like that.  Him and his family are actually escaped convicts.  And they torture them, they keep them hostage.  They rape one of the girls.  It’s very brutal.  And this one girl dies just walking into water, just defeated.  It feels very much like an Ophelia moment, and she’s dead.  And it’s just brutal watching it.  And to a point, you can say it’s gratuitous. And early Wes Craven movies did that. And there are movies that put rape in their movies that I don’t think they need to.  Recent one that comes to mind is Don’t Breathe.  But Last House On The Left I think needs it in there, because it goes back to that brutality thing.  It shows that these are the most debased people ever. 
 
And theres a reason people watch that.  There’s a reason wired in us that is kind of okay with violence.  And maybe that’s because society told us it’s okay with violence.  PG-13 movies with blood are okay, but not a little sex. 
 
There’s a great movie documentary called This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which is about the MPAA,  the Motion Picture Association of America.  The people who rate movies.  And they talk about, if there are two similar things in two different movies, one gets rated PG-13, one gets R.  And a lot of times it has to do with sexual orientation.  Gay stuff ends up being R, Hetero stuff ends up being PG-13. Again, a lot of this changes.   There is violence to a certain extent.
 
Marissa:
A lot of the things you say are based on perspective.  But also, based from your experience.  And that’s totally okay.  I actually just want to shift gears just a tad, and go to pedophilia.  For some reason, while you were talking, what popped into my head was American Beauty.  And I’m not a Kevin Spacey fan anymore.  I’m actually quite devastated at the destruction he caused, because I was a big Kevin Spacey fan, and then found out he’s a pedophile in real life.  And Anthony Rapp is one of my favorite Broadway actors. So, I have a real issue.
 
Mike:
You are the big Broadway girl.
 
Marissa:
BIG Broadway girl.  So, for him to have hurt somebody who I have never met, and have so much love for… and hurt anyone in general. To rape somebody and assault somebody in general…
 
Mike:But specifically Anthony Rapp
 
Marissa:
Specifically Anthony Rapp. it makes him such a horrible human being.  But American Beauty, growing up was one of my favorite movies.  I just thought it was so creative. And looking back I’m like, No no, this is an adult male, 40-something or 50-something, having an over sexualized infatuation with a 15 year old.  Now, in some states, like Mississippi, that’s actually okay, because the age of consent is 14.  But in most states, I think pretty much every state but Mississippi, that’s SO not okay. And that is SO wrong.  So I just want to focus on that for a minute, and see if you can think of any other movies or examples of movies that have that kind of theme, and okay and almost glorify pedophilia. 
 
Mike:Well, I will in a sense, I mean, I’ll get you there in a second. I don’t know if there’s a lot of stuff that glorifies it. But, we looked at things in different ways.  First off, you’ve gotta remember where we come from.  We were okay with Elvis Presley marrying, how old was she? Like 13 or 14 years old?  And I mean, you see it for forever.
 
Look at The Professional. Natalie Portman and John Reno are fantastic in it.  And it’s about the relationship between a grown man and a young girl. Now, he sees it more as a Father-Daughter relationship, and she obviously tries to flip it around.  And you can kind of look at that relationship and think, how is that not related to Besson’s own relationship with Maïwenn Besco? She was this french model, but she was really young when she was dating Luc Besson.  And I know people have had conversations about why Drake is friends with Millie Bobby Brown. That seems weird just because they’re both actors or famous or something. 
 
And we again, default to truth, and want to hope that people are the best that they are, and we’re all just trying to pick each other up, and meet cool people.  And I mean, look, I work in the entertainment industry.  I’m a talent manager.  I have clients and I’ve worked with clients who are kids; I’ve worked with clients who are older. And I would call some of them friends.  Is it weird that I have an 18 year old friend? It’s someone I work with.  So, it becomes complicated in this kind of industry because I work with them, but at the same time, they are kids.  And then it’s like, what are we saying “work” is? And it becomes complicated.  I think it’s just ultimately looking at it at a case-by-case basis.  If you want to look at movies, Manhattan was always one that always put me a little off.  The premise of the movie is Woody Allen is dating this really young girl.
 
Marissa:
Wasn’t Woody Allen sleeping with his step daughter? Not his step daughter, his adopted daughter, or his foster daughter?  No, his adopted daughter.
 
Mike:
Yes.  And it’s also not glorified.  It’s not meant to be a good thing. People call him out on it.  But it seems like a funny movie. People praise this movie, and stuff like that. The movie charms us.  In the world of the movie, we’re there.  And I haven’t seen Manhattan in a very long time. I believe it’s not used… they don’t say this is a good thing, I think people really do call him out on it.  I’m trying to think of other movies.  There’s definitely tons of movies where young girls have been sexualized. 
 
But you’re talking about pedophilia.  I mean, movies that really do explore it in interesting ways.  I mean there’s Little Children, which is a fantastic movie.  There’s Mysterious Skin, which is about how two people have coped with being sexually abused as children by their baseball coach.  There’s also Mystic River, plays on dealing with a pedophile, and how does it affect you.  Here’s the thing, a lot of the examples I’m coming up with don’t say this is a good thing. And to an extent, American Beauty doesn’t say it’s a good thing.
 
Marissa:
I just think they do a really beautiful job of creating a positive character arch for Kevin Spacey’s character. He goes from being this miserable, horrible dad, totally removed, piece of crap human being, to  then he just sees this girl in a skimpy outfit as a cheerleader, at 15 or 16 years old, and his whole world changes.  He starts being happier, and sticking up for himself.  He quits his job and starts working out.
 
Mike:Well, okay. So this is something about American Beauty, which again, I think further along will change.  I mean, 90s and you probably remember this, were such a different time with everything.  And so good. And also, it’s a pre-9/11 movie.  And it’s weird when you see pre-9/11 movies and you see peoples problems.  It’s like, our problem was, we were too bored with our lives.  Look at Fight Club.  Look at American Beauty. I mean, Revolutionary Road, which was kind of a sequel to American Beauty in a spiritual way in my mind, because they were both directed by Sam Mendez and they both are explaining the boringness of suburbia and how it kills us.  Little Children does the same thing.  And I don’t think that they’re saying that he’s… I don’t even think they’re saying in American Beauty that Lester Burnum was a bad dad.  He is a person that is now bored with his station in life. He’s in the suburbs, he did everything he was supposed to. And then, yes, he gets an injection of, “Maybe I need to start living my life.”  And has this mid-life crisis thing, where he starts smoking weed, and working out, and doing all this stuff.  And working at Burger King, and stuff like that.  And he knows his wife is having an affair.  And that’s part of the thing that pushes him.   And what’s one of the most mid-life crises things, you date a younger woman. 
 
And I know… Marissa just made the biggest grimace face… Everyone, just so you know.  But that was something seen as stereotypical.  Stereotypical thing in the 90s, when some guy would go through a mid-life crisis, they would buy a motorcycle or a hot-rod or corvette.  They would go on some vacation.  They would maybe have an affair with a younger woman.  It’s seen in so many movies.  It’s really cliche, and that’s what American Beauty kind of plays on.  And then what is to make that even worse? And that’s where he stops.
 
When he has that moment to have sex, and then right before he dies, he has that content moment where he’s looking at that photo of his family, and he realizes, “You know, I had it all along.” Again, I haven’t seen it in a while.
 
And this is where you and me differ.  I can separate art from the person. It’s difficult sometimes because you say, well this came from this persons mind. Yet, this mind is also that.  And what I’ve noticed from people is, people are complicated. And people have different layers to themselves. It’s an onion, it really isn’t just one thing.  Kevin Spacey can be a good actor and can also be the biggest piece of shit ever.  And I can still say he’s a good actor.  Woody Allen has written some of the best screenplays of all time.  And has been a shitty person.  Louis C.K. is gross.  But, Hilarious is a great comedy special.
 
Marissa:
I’m going to definitely comment on the Louis C.K. thing. Because I went and saw him at Madison Square Garden before the accusations came out, and I remember him making a joke about masturbating in front of his assistants or employees.  And it was so gross that it was funny because of the way he said it, and the way he worded it.
 
Mike:
Exactly.  It’s meant as a matter of fact thing to play on our ideas of society, and hold a mirror to it in a weird way.  Obviously, he was commenting on real things, but when you’re not looking at it in a context, it plays differently.
 
Marissa:
But that to me rang differently because he knew he was doing something wrong, and disgusting, and made a big joke about it. So not only was he doing the bad thing, but then he was mortifying the people he was actually doing bad things to, knowing they couldn’t hurt him. I would say he, I remember he waited a year after the accusation came out to come out and start doing comedy again, and apologize.  I’m still kind of conflicted about it. I do think that his comedy is good, but like you said, I just have a difficult time differentiating the art from the person.
 
Mike:I know.  And there are some episodes of Louis that are just out of this world fantastic.
 
Marissa:
Thank you so much for doing this with me Mike.  Oh my gosh, I’m happy we got to have this chat and you are so knowledgeable and awesome to talk to. And you’re very funny.  I really hope we get to do this again soon. I love the idea of us watching a movie and then discussing it. I definitely have al list now of movies I have to watch.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!
 
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Healing From Emotional Abuse: Movies About Narcissism : With Mike Sellari (Part 1)

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Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entire lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa: Hey Everyone! Thank you so much for joining us this week on Healing From Emotional Abuse. Today I’m so grateful and excited to introduce my friend Mike Sellari to talk about sexual assault and domestic violence and how it’s portrayed in movies and tv. Mike has an amazing background with film. Right now, he lives in LA as a talent agent, but I do have to say that back in 2006, I starred in his first student film that he wrote, produced and directed, called Man Seeking Woman.  So we go back a long. time. He’s an awesome person with a great personality and I’m so excited to have him here.  So, let’s get started.
 
So, lets’s talk about some movies. You’re a huge movie buff, you love talking about movies and I love looking at your posts on Facebook.  Every single time you watch a movie, you kind of critique it and every season, I love looking at your lists of best movies of the year. So, I’d love your perspective on movies with domestic violence and sexual assault themes, and what you think about them.
Mike:
Okay, I mean, right at the top, I feel like I’m already going to be treading into dangerous waters with whatever I talk about. Mainly because it’s a complicated issue.  There’s a lot of different ways we can discuss this.  There’s a lot of different points of view, and I think everyone thinks different.  So, I guess it’s hard to talk about, because you’re saying domestic violence, abuse and stuff like that.  And a lot of that also goes back into misogyny and a lot of that goes back into the distribution of power between men and women.  Especially from pre-60s, because there was that whole “housewife” ideal of the 50s and stuff.  And you can see that with older movies with women, “Being in their place.” And men as the aggressor.  Even in the 30s there were still powerful women.  You look at stuff like the Philadelphia Story or His Girl Friday, or Lady Eve.  You’ll see strong women characters besting the man. But you also see people looking at women in a way that was more, “Of the time.” And I guess right at the top, we really can’t look at things from the past with 2020 eyes. We’re going to look back at a lot of stuff, because probably every single one of these movies has happened in the past.  And some just come from different generations. And I’m going to talk about movies that I also love, and will watch still.  It’s kind of like you have to just be able to say, look, that was a different time.  50 years down the road, we’re going to look at the stuff we’re doing on a normal basis and our kids are going to be like, “What? What are you doing? How could you just let that happen?” And we’re going to say it was just a different time, and they’re going to tell us that’s a bullshit answer. And we’re going to say, look, I know, we just didn’t realize it. 
 
I mean, if you look 5 years ago, the stuff that we were laughing at in comedies that now we’re looking at and we’re pulling on our collars and going yikes because it’s hard to watch.
 
Marissa:
Superbad is a great example of that, actually.
 
Mike:
And honestly, a fantastic movie.  And something that we’re going to get into is the idea of what is art, and how far can we push our art? And what’s subversive vs. expletive vs. gratuitous. And then, also, if we’re going to show reality, shouldn’t we have to show the dark sides of reality? Because if we hide it, then what are we saying about our history, and stuff like that?  For instance, talking about the civil war and the stuff that did or didn’t happen.  Talking about our history and movies about slavery.  Haven’t we said all we’ve needed to say, or are we hiding stuff from our past that we don’t want to talk about? But we’ve got to keep it.
 
Something to just start off the top, and this is definitely an abusive thing.  Let’s talk about Michael Jackson for a second.  Obviously, we’ve known about his quirks and his weird things, and I truly believe he had a mental illness - and I believe a lot of this stems from mental illness.  There’s a whole thing we can talk about with Michael Jackson and his family. And also just what were people doing in just letting their kids be around him? And also stuff we just decided to turn a blind eye to because of certain things. And it keeps going, then Leaving Neverland comes out and that was an intense documentary.  And after that came out, James L. Brooks announced that they were puling an episode from the Simpsons from all internet, rerun, syndication, and now it’s on Disney+ but that episode is not on Disney+.  And it’s not even that Michael is in it.  You’re not seeing his imagery.  It has nothing to do with off-color thing.  The premise of the episode is Homer goes to a mental institution and meets an inpatient who calls himself Michael Jackson.  He’s clearly not Michael Jackson, but he’s voiced by Michael Jackson.  It’s weird that we pull that form our history, because we have to look back and see that we see that.  However, James L. Brooks says, “This is my stuff. I get to make the decision over what I want out there. And I don’t want it to seem like Michael Jackson is getting more residuals, or his estate getting money from this.” So, when we start taking things out of our history and out of our films,  I worry that we have the ability to repeat ourselves in dangerous ways.  It’s important to see that stuff. It’s important to acknowledge that we were off base and learned from it.  We can watch those movies in a different way.  We can see that they were made in those times.
 
For instance, let’s go into now talking about this. There was a time when rape was a joke.  It was kind of funny.  It was played off as not a big deal.  It was played off in comedies in particular as something that could just happen. Let’s talk about specifics here.  There’s a movie if you think back into the early 2000s, there’s a movie I really like that a lot of people don’t called 40 Days and 40 Nights. It starts Josh Hartnett and Shannyn Sossamon, who I just love. And the premise of the movie is, this guy is experiencing a breakup.  He’s experiencing this obsession with sex and stuff.  So he decides to not masturbate or have sex or do anything sexual for Lent. For 40 Days and 40 Nights. And everyone says he can’t do it. It’s impossible.  And he starts losing his mind… it’s a comedy. Meanwhile, his friends are all betting on the day that he’s going to “bust”.  And people try to take advantage of that.  At the end of the movie, his ex girlfriend bets a lot of money on the final day, and then rapes him while he’s asleep.  It’s seen as just a plot point.  And then the other girl, the girl who likes him, is like, “I can’t believe you had sex with her.” It’s not, she did it against his will. He was pinned down. He didn’t want it. But that doesn’t matter in the context of that story.  But if we look at it there, it’s really weird that she just rapes him and we’re not going to talk about that? And the same thing happens in Get Him to the Greek. Jonah Hill is raped by Carla Gallo.  You mentioned Superbad, with the period blood girl. That’s like the reversal of that scene in a way.  So there’s this playfulness. There’s this moment in Revenge of the Nerds where Louis puts on this Darth Vader costume that the jock was wearing.  And the hot girl, thinking it’s the jock has sex with him. And he pulls off the mask and she’s like, “You’re that nerd!” But she’s like, that was wonderful. And she forgets it.  Like he’s “sexed her” into it’s okay.
 
If we at that and we look back into the 80s the 70s, moments in the 60s, and even in the 90s and 2000s, and late 2010s. We see these moments.  It was before being really aware of what we were doing. 
 
There’s a philosophy I have and that’s: What we put on TV really feeds into society.  And then society feeds it back. It’s a cycle.  You see movies and I can’t think of any specifics, but the guy pursues the girl.  She says no.  And the idea is, it’s romantic to keep going and push, push, push.  Keep doing that. You see it in tons of high school movies.  You see it in movies like American Pie.  You see it in to an extent, When Harry Met Sally. That teaches us at a young age that “A No just means you have to keep going, and push past the no. And one day, she’ll give you a shot.”  And so that feeds back into it.  And that becomes problematic. 
 
However, we’ve also romanticized a certain thing. There’s a term from How I Met Your Mother which I love and use in my own daily life.  It’s called Dobbler-Dahmer effect. It means an act could be construed as romantic or psychotic based on how the person feels about the other person.  It’s not an easy explainable situation that we’re talking about here.  And because of that, we get these movies that show us grey areas.  I mean, 16 Candles, there’s definitely that weird moment where the guy is like, “Here, just have my girlfriend.” That’s another thing of older movies, is women being treated as objects.  And stuff like that.
 
Obviously, throughout all the history of cinema, and television, we’ve seen people who combat that.  We’ve seen Lucille Ball fight back, and Mary Tyler Moore be these stronger women on TV.  You see and take over what we have.  But you also see the Honeymooners where Ralph is always threatening to beat his wife. “One of these days, Alice. One of these days.”  And even though she’s the power-play in that relationship, there’s still that. I mean, people grew up with that.  But at the same time, comedy is what we’re doing to comment on society in a way.  And like it or not, the bad parts are in society.
 
Let’s talk about stuff kids watch.  Animal House, a movie that I love.  My dad showed that to me.  I love Animal House. And there’s that scene where John Belushi is on the ladder looking at the sorority girls. And they’re just all taking off their tops and having a pillow fight.  Everyone remembers that scene.  And there’s the moment that, that girl walks into a different room, and he hops with the ladder.  Okay, it’s hysterical because it’s Belushi hopping on a ladder to see what this girl is doing.  Let alone that he’s peeping on her.  Even the idea of a Peeping Tom was charming in a way, in these older days. 
 
In Back To The Future, I mean, they call him a perv, but George McFly is spying on his soon-to-be future wife getting changed with binoculars from a tree.  And he falls from the tree and that’s how he supposedly meets his wife.
 
We see certain things as, “Oh, that rascal,” sort of thing. And Belushi is the most rascally of rascals.  We see him do the eyebrow thing. We see his face. He’s got this baby face. We’re inclined to laugh.  At the end Animal House, there’s that moment where the girls clothes get ripped off by happenstance, and the chaos of the whole thing, and John Belushi, dressed as a pirate, swings down and picks her up and puts her in a car.  And she’s screaming and her legs are kicking, and then the last moment we see, he drives off with her.  Then later, it cuts and he has her arm around her.  She’s sitting in the car, she’s happy, and later, you realize she becomes Senator and Mrs. Bluto Blutarsky. He stole her and she became his wife and everything worked out. 
 
And we know that’s not real life. That’s not how life works. And we know to an extent that Animal House isn’t real life.  We know that Revenge of the Nerds isn’t really how college goes.  We look at Porky’s and we say that’s not how real life is.  I mean, Porky’s, is a really great example. That’s a movie that’s played for laughs all the way through. Weird.  And also, talking about going back to a different time. Here’s the Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus for Porky’s:
 
“Gleeful in its misogyny and celebratory of bad behavior, Porky's is an intermittently funny farce that will leave audiences feeling in need of a shower.”
 
And that’s weird.  That’s just weird. And I mean, the most famous scene of Porky’s is the shower scene.  It’s the scene where a group of girls, completely naked, and to that extent, we look back in the past, it seems very gratuitous and those TNA movies were just meant as softcore porn to show kids.  It’s why Porky’s isn’t meant to be taken seriously.  Although, it’s problematic.  There’re these guys and they’re peeping on girls. What does that teach other guys?
 
There’s a hole in the shower and they’re looking. The girl gets in the way and they yell to move.  And the girls laugh.   Like it’s charming that these guys are spying on us. We laugh at that.  There’s also in Scary Movie, people were just beating up women and it’s played for laughs.  It’s kind of like when you see a Naked Gun movie and Leslie Neilson punches an old woman or something.  Or even in an Austin Powers movie, where he’s very hyper-world sexual. We laugh. is it funny to punch an old woman? You think about it, and it’s weird but the answer is.. in the right context.  He knocks the girl to the ground and jumps like a wrestler on his elbow off-screen and you hear a noise.  It’s these things that are played for funny.  And it actually wouldn’t be funny if it was a guy.  The reason it’s funny is because it’s taken to such an extreme. It’s not even that, that’s a plot point of the movie.  It’s meant as almost slapstick comedy.  It’s mean as a hyper-realized version of Marx Brothers.  Or Stooges or something like that.
 
If you want to move away from the playfulness and talk about it as as serious subject, we can do that. Rape and abuse is used as a weapon. Let’s talk about the ones that use it better. The ones that use it traumatically.
 
There’s things that are also books that became movies.  Let’s talk about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  The whole premise of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, or I guess I shouldn’t say premise, I should say themes, is about the violation of women and the violence against women.  You have this guy investigating this family and the death of this girl, and who killed this person.  At the same time, he’s teamed up with this woman whose life has been shaped by abuse. She is a lesbian. She’s being raped by her parole officer who she is forced to give blowjobs to in order to not land in prison, because he controls her and it’s this power dynamic.  You watch these scenes and they’re visceral.  There’s a scene in his office and you see his hand just around her head.  You’re not seeing anything really, it’s very close up, but it’s hard to watch.  And you say to yourself, do we need to see that? Can it be implied? And the problem with implying it is, this is what happened in the older movies.  You’d see stuff happen off screen. You would hear people say things.  And it becomes not that bad if we’re just saying words.  When we start seeing stuff, it then become more visceral.  And something about a movie, there’s something about art even.  It’s supposed to invoke a feeling.  And there’s a reason why we still talk about these movies today.  It’s not because we think, “Awe, can you believe they did that?” No.  There’s something artistic here.  There’s something that’s trying to be said.
 
Also, rape is used to show savagery.  There’s that mentality that we put that on the savagery.  One of the most universal movies that people have seen that showcased rape in a savage way was Deliverance. Do you know Deliverance?
Marissa:
Again, I know of it, but I haven’t watched it.  I’m not as cultured as you are.
 
Mike:I wouldn’t call myself cultured. I just call myself someone who watches a lot of movies.  Deliverance is a John Boorman movie that is honestly, it’s good.  This is an Oscar-caliber movie. The movie has Ned Beatty, of the Beatty’s, Sean Connery, John Voight.  It’s basically these four friends that decide they’re going to go down a river canoeing.  They’re going to live in the wilderness, and Sean Connery is this really man’s-man who knows the wilderness.  One of the guys is more of a white-collar guy.  And there’s these locals that are played up as these rednecks, and they are of their own area.  Almost like their own law and stuff.   They’re in two different canoes,  and they get separated. And one of the canoes crashes and the two guys happen upon these two rednecks who basically beat them, tie them to a tree, force one of the guys to strip naked, squeal like a pig, and then they rape him.  They kill these locals and now all the other locals are after them.  And it becomes this fight for survival.  By the end of the movie, you see what happens, and you’re like, this is this ordeal these people have gone through. And it is an ordeal.  It’s crazy.  How almost primal it becomes.  And I think that’s part of what Deliverance becomes.  It’s showing that primal-ness.  Some people say, did we need to have that rape scene there?  Couldn’t it just be violent? And I don’t know the answer to that honestly.
Marissa:
Thank you so much Mike, I always love talking to you about this stuff because you’re so insightful and so well versed in the world of movies and cinema and all that.  So, I just wanted to thank you for being here and talking with us.  And we will talk again next week about more of the history of how sexual assault has impacted cinema and movies.  And truthfully our culture.  I look forward to talking to you again next week, Mike.  We’ll see you soon!
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!

Healing From Emotional Abuse: Reclaim Your Life : with Dr. Leonie H. Mattison

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Can you heal from abuse?  What do I do after leaving my narcissist? What does a healthy relationship look like? These concerns cross the minds of over 20 people every minute; over 28,800 people every day.  And the sad fact is, we still don’t talk about it enough.  Healing from Emotional Abuse isn’t a bandaid situation.  But it doesn’t have to be a five year process either. Millions of other survivors around the worlds entires lives have been impacted by their narcissist.  Yours doesn’t have to.  To show you how to live a free, confident and peaceful life, your host and Founder of the Healing From Emotional Abuse Philosophy, Marissa F. Cohen.
 
Marissa:
Today we’re joined with Dr. Leonie Madison. She’s an organizational and talent development practitioner, Author of the books The Thread: The perfect Steps for a God Ordained Purpose, and Beside Still Waters: 21 Days to Developmental, as well as the creator of Threads: 6-Step System to Help Survivors Free Themselves from Past Trauma and Live An Abundant Life.  She earned a doctorate in organizational leaders from Argosy University, A Masters in Business Administration from Georgian Court University, and A Christian Life Coach Certificate from Light University.  She’s a recipient of 2018 8th Annual Pacific Coast Business Times 40 Under 40 Award - Recognizing the 40 best and brightest transformational leaders on the central coast under the age of 40.  Thank you so much for joining us today.  I’m so excited to chat with you.
 
Dr. Leonie Mattison:
I am so excited about our conversation today as well.  Thanks for having me.
 
Marissa:
Of course! So lets get started.  Would you mind telling me a little about your story and what brought you to where you are today?
 
Dr. Mattison:
Sure! Thank you for asking! So, My name is Dr Leonie H. Madison.  I like to consider myself an impact storyteller.  I’m a trauma survivor, and I was chosen to be able to do this work of pioneering what we’re calling The Thread.  It’s a project, it’s a book, it’s a devotional, it’s a 6-step system; all in the spirit of helping survivors to achieve intentional transformation.  Helping survivors to rise from the trauma that they’ve experienced and to do some work.  Take the steps forward to really force your life forward. 
 
I am a single mom.  I have three beautiful daughters and a dog.  And they are all the highlights of my life, and I love them dearly.  I love my job.  It’s part of my calling;  I am an organizational and development practitioner, where I get to really help organizations to shift strategy, improve performance and grow revenue.  I always say that’s how I use my superpower in the marketplace.
 
And beyond all of those things, I am just one grateful girl speaking to another survivor, saying, “Hey, I survived.”  Also speaking to your listeners saying, “I survived.  And after survival, I had to do some work to survive.  To thrive beyond the trauma.”  So that’s a little bit about who I am and why I got here. 
 
I have a background about my experience being a victim of abuse.  I’m not sure if you hear my accent, but I was born on the beautiful island of Jamaica.  The west indies.  I suffered quite a number of years of abuse as a child.  Sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse.  I immigrated to the US when I was about 15 years old.  I am also the product of parents who, my father abandoned us.  My mom had to leave the island to get work and so we grew up being bounced around from one city to the next in Jamaica.  And that’s where a lot of the abuse started.  And then when I came to the US, it didn’t stop.  I thought it would, but it didn’t.  I unfortunately suffered abuse in the faith-based community.  I was abuse by a priest minister, sexually and spiritually.  And so I have that traumatic background, and I didn’t allow the background to keep my back on the ground.  I listened to quite a number of your podcasts and it was really using the power of my voice and my words to elevate myself from out of those situations.   It’s one thing to get up, but it’s another to create a new mindset and to adapt new behaviors to truly live this abundant life that we were created to live.  So, that’s in a nutshell who you’re speaking with today.
 
Marissa:
You gave a lot of really good information, so thank you for sharing. So, your book is called Thread: A 6-step System to Help Survivors Free Themselves From Their Past Trauma.  If you wouldn’t mind maybe giving us a little taste of the six steps, or what you learned while writing the book.
 
Dr. Leonie:
I love that question.  So, the 6-step system was developed as a result of my experience while I was on my healing journey.  And I remember particularly, in addition to the abuses that I’ve gone through, endured, suffered, whatever word you want to use there, I am also a survivor of Delspalsy and a stroke.  I had finally made the decision, it was almost like my awakening journey, I finally made the decision after hitting rock bottom that I was ready for change. 
 
There was a dissonance between the girl I was living or the woman I was living, versus the woman that I deeply down in my soul thought I should become.  And so I started questioning a lot of theories, philosophies, and just life on a whole.  And my big question was to God.  I wanted to know why I had gone through what I was going through (Why am I going through what I’m going through). I wanted to know why he abandoned me.  I wanted to know why God chose this path for me. I had a lot of questions and I just felt like, books were great, and I would read and gain new knowledge, but I felt like I wanted to challenge God to give me the answers to the questions I was asking. 
 
And so, I’m on this journey, and I felt so many times while I was on this journey, there were times where my back was literally on the ground.  And somebody had to come pull me up, because I just couldn’t get up on my own. While on this journey I was bitter.  I was angry.  I was lost.  I had no courage or energy to live at one point.  And I remember distinctly.  I was on, what I call, one of my excursions.  And I remember I was sad, and I was crying.  The sun was hot.  And I had a radio, and I turned the radio on. When I turned the radio on, there was a minister on there, and I distinctly remember him talking and he said, “The prodigal son come home.”  And I turned it off because I didn’t want to hear anything religious.
 
Then I went inside the living room and I remember turning the television on.  And on came this woman.  Her name is Juanita Bynum.  She’s a female minister.  And she started the whole, “Prodigal son come home.” again, thing.  And i knew exactly the story in the bible.  And at that point she got my attention.  And I listened.  And at the time, you have to understand, I had just gone through a physical abuse by a partner with someone I was dating.  They had abused me physically, kicked me, I fell on the ground, knocked my head.  There was an iron and the ground, and I burned a part of my leg.  So, I was in a very bad situation, and I was self-blaming as well.  So when she said that, I knew I needed help, but I didn’t trust anyone around me to help me.  And I definitely didn’t trust God because I was blaming him.  And so when she started speaking and she said, “There’s a woman watching and the Lord said to tell you, if you turn to Him, He will turn your life around.”  And I turned the television off and said, “I don’t believe that.”  I just don’t believe it.  And I remember I just started crying and screaming and I got to the point where my mind felt sick and tormented.  I took all of this glassware and I just smashed the house.  I couldn’t hit him because he wasn’t there.  And I took the television off of the wall and I smashed it.  I was just so angry, I felt so alone.  I screamed.  I cried to the point that my neighbors called the cops because they thought something was wrong. Like I was being abuse.  And when they came, they couldn’t believe how I had trashed the home.
And it was at that point I realized that I really needed help.  And it was at that point that I started sharing my story.  I actually got up and went and got help from a therapist.  And I started sharing my story.  I didn’t know, I had forgotten some of what I had been through.  At this time, I was in my 20s, and I had forgotten some of what I’d been through, but she was asking the right questions, that triggered the memory.  And i started connecting the dots of what happened to me in my past as a little girl, and being molested.  From being inappropriately touched.  From being raped when I was sick in bed. I started connecting the dots and I realized that these were patterns in my life. These were things that were happening to me every 5-10 years.  I would go through a huge traumatic injury.  And so i started documenting everything that I could remember. And the first thing I remember doing was, when the therapist asked me what is it that I want.  “What do you want your life to look like?”  I didn’t know what I wanted, because I was never given that option before.  But I remember I went home and started thinking and dreaming of the best life ever.
So part of my system, the first step is to Think of the outcome you want.  Think of that outcome.  That’s the T.  And the H is to Harvest the lessons you’ve learned and heal your heart.  And what I know for me, the lessons that I’ve learned on my journey, one of the biggest ones was I was a big people -pleaser.  In  my book I refer to myself as, I was a “giving harlot.”  I would give, give, give because that’s what I thought God wanted me to do. I give up myself, I’d give up my time, I’d give up my resources.  I would give without being conscious of what I was doing.  And I was doing that because I wanted, I needed, I so needed for love.  I was so needy for affirmation and acceptance.  Step 3, R for release.  Release fear and break the painful pattern.  And there are questions that are associated with each of these steps.  And step 4 is Enlist. Enlist allies to become the person you lost inside.  And what I love about E step.  This is where I do what you’re doing.  I empower women to speak up.  To share your story.  To release and get it out.  Talk about what you’ve been through without changing or blaming.  Share your story.  Release it from out of you.   So that’s the E.  So, step 5 is A for Adopt.  Adopt new mindsets and create new healthy patterns.
 
I see help as an equivalent to medicine. So if you’re taking medicine, you have to allow it to work. You have to give it time to take effect.  And while it’s working, something is breaking apart or falling apart, and it’s okay.  And this one of the most difficult steps because it forces us to step away from those behaviors. Or to step away from the things that we’ve been told.  I remember listening to your podcast and you were talking about how victims are often times blamed. They blame us while saying you were wearing.  Or it’s something you were doing.  Maybe you said something to trigger a reaction from the person. So this is the step where we’re saying, you’re gonna demolish those accusations.  You’re going to let go off of them because they’re untrue, and they do not power the better and most highest version of who you’re created to be.    And the last step, step 6, the D. That is Design your joyful life. And it’s almost like I’m saying to women Dream Again.  You get to dream of a new you, and design your joyful life with intention.  Design that life that you really want.  Design the life that will allow you to fulfill your mission and take the step.  Take action.  Be bold enough so say, I deserve to free myself of trauma.  Those memories.  Design that life that says, I will rise and go for the win, and be okay with that without feeling guilty.  Without having to justify anything to anyone.  To taking charge, taking your power back, and to really feel passionately about women taking your power back out of the hands of trauma.  Reclaim your life and live it. And living with intention.
 
Marissa:
You are so inspirational, and you can just hear the passion in your voice. I loved listening to you, I didn’t want you to stop talking. 
Dr. Mattison:
Thank you.
 
Marissa:
Thank you for doing the amazing work you’re doing. I think THREAD, those 6-steps are perfect.  It’s like rewriting your story.  It’s speaking it.  It’s what I say.  You have to Break Your Silence.  You have to speak your truth.  Because if you stay silent and don’t speak your truth, you can’t heal.  You’re still not accepting it.  And you’re still letting it weigh you down.  And i think it’s so important that survivors always speak about it and break their silence because that’s the only true way to heal. 
 
Dr. Mattison:
Absolutely. I  couldn’t agree with you more. Well said.  I have found healing writing a book.  I have found healing just talking to you and sharing my story. The emotions I feel is one of joy and liberation.  And that’s why I wrote the book. I wrote the book to create an avenue for women just like, just like you. Designed by abuse, and are desperately wanting to work through the past, so they can live the life that God envisioned.
 
This book is really a reminder to survivors that you’re not alone. You’re not alone on your healing journey. And I want them to know that God can heal them, to control their stories. To take control of your story. To rewrite it and to rewrite it with their own voice.  To rewrite it out of gratitude because they survived. We’re survivors. 
 
I was listening to one of your podcasts where you were talking about, again, the whole victim shame thing.  I was angry.  I listened to it and I wasn’t angry at you, but I was just so angry knowing that so many women never share their story.  And either they’re living as victims in the space and the world of guilt and shame, or some of them have passed on never feeling that freedom that you and I feel today.  And I want to help millions of women, even if it’s just through writing and sharing your story with me.  Or we jump on my podcast and share it as a revamp in my podcast.  And if even just one chapter of that story, I want you to share it.  Share it without retribution. Share it without the guilt and the shame. Share it out of your spirit of survivorship. Out of that gratitude-ness.  Out of that liberation.  Knowing that you’re no longer a victim.  You survived the hell that life put you through. Girl, rise! Rise. Share your story so we can help others to do the same.
 
Marissa:
I am so in agreement with you. Everything you just said. There are so many of us.  One of these campaigns that I started a couple of years ago with a friend was called I’m a Statistic because the connotation of being a part of a statistic is so negative.  You’re just a number.  But if you think about it in terms of survivors, you’re a statistic, you’re one of a million, or one of one hundred million.  Of this huge number of people that can all relate to you and empower each other to speak our truth.  To let that weight get lifted off our shoulders and help us heal.  So, I love that. I love everything you’re saying. When you started seeing your therapist, and I also saw that you used a healing coach, what techniques or tools did they teach that you helped you with your anger, and your bitterness, and also with your healing.
 
Dr. Mattison:
Number 1, breakthrough for me happened when I was taught to speak to the little girl when she shows up.  That little girl was always ignored.  She was always told to shut up.  She was abandoned. She never felt like she mattered.  So when that little girl shows up now, I don’t ignore her.  When she wants to be acknowledged for how she’s feeling, I stop and I pay attention.  So that was a breakthrough for me was to recognize acknowledge and pay attention to the little girl, Little Leonie when she shows up.  And what that looked like for me while i was on my healing journey, an example is, I was diagnosed with breast lumps, and I remember I was angry.  And I wondered why this happened to me.  So when I went into the surgery, it left a lot of marks. The wounds and the things to deal with.  And I wouldn’t touch my breasts. I felt shame, I wouldn’t touch it.  And I remember the second tool that I learned was to do mirror work.  And I remember, I’m in front of my mirror, and I didn’t want to look at myself.  I was looking away.  And finally, I said, I’m going to face her. I’m going to face me.  And I looked in the mirror at myself, and I looked at myself and I said, “I’m not going to ignore you. It’s not fair.  You gave my children, you breastfed my children, and now that you’re not well, I’m going to ignore you? No!” And I just started putting lotion all over my body.  And I started lotioning myself and just thanking my breasts for what it has done and how far it has come with me.
And I lotioned my body and thanking my body, and thanking my organs and my hands and my feet. I just started being grateful.  And then I said I love myself.  I remember I looked at myself in the eyes and I say this to women, “Leonie, I love you.  I love you.  I’m not going to abuse you.” Because that’s what a lot of us as survivors do, and we don’t know we’re doing it.  We end up abusing ourselves.  We end up ignoring ourselves.  We end up being so negative. And in the book, there’s a chapter in the book where I actually went through a whole exercise for what I learned.  It's around page 181.  I remember listening to Lisa Nichols, she’s also a motivational speaker, and while I was attending on of her conferences, I learned this.  About speaking forgiveness over yourself.  And I wrote in my book, after hearing Lisa Nichols speak during one of her seminars, I started speaking words of forgiveness to myself in the mirror.  Every day for 21 days I would look myself in the eyes, place my hands over my heart, and with no self judgement, would learn to speak forgiveness over myself.  And affirm the value of my God-ordained existence.
 
Now here’s what I wrote, and replace your name with mine. 
 
[Leonie] I forgive you for forgetting who God says you are, and for not accepting yourself completely.  [Leonie] I forgive you for allowing others to corrupt your mind into thinking you weren’t good enough.  [Leonie] I forgive you for lowering your standards and seeking love and acceptance in all the wrong places.  [Leonie] I forgive you for letting people take advantage of you, and letting bitterness cause you to miss mistake lust, lies and loneliness for love.  [Leonie] I forgive you for ignoring the warning signs.  For not trusting your discernment. 
 
I also honored my commitment to the woman I’m becoming through positive self-talk.  So that’s another tool I learned and I wrote. 
 
[Leonie] I commit to valuing myself and that my Yes will be a true YES.  And my No will be a firm NO.  [Leonie] I commit to pressing stop completely on the negative self talk. [Leonie] I commit to letting go of living in torment from living in past failed relationships. [Leonie] I commit to loving you always and will be okay with you when you’re crying, and when you feel sad.  [Leonie] I commit to lightening up and not coming down so hard on you.
 
The next part, I wrote:
I celebrated with Love, the woman who is taking steps to write a better next chapter in her life.
[Leonie] I celebrate you for getting out of bed this morning.  [Leonie] I celebrate you for showing up and operating with excellence at work. [Leonie] I celebrate for seeking help to heal, and I celebrate you for writing and sharing your story with the world. [Leonie] I celebrate your model in self-care, self love and healthy boundaries.  [Leonie] I celebrate you for  knowing, believing and appreciating the fact that your very existence is enough.  You can rise above your limitations ands self defeating thoughts. To stand in the space of possibilities.  In that space there’s plenty of room for pioneers of the possible.  History makers.  Navigators of the unknown; Change agents, and trail blazers. 
 
God remains the same.  He is the creator of life, the author of purpose, and the remodeler of old into new. 
 
Marissa:
I love that.  I think mirror work is so strong and so underrated.  And your affirmations are phenomenally written.  They are so powerful.  You are such a powerful speaker and I really do enjoy listening to you.  I think you should make your book an audio book so I can listen to it. Your voice just adds something to it.  Your passion and your true love towards helping survivors and through telling your story is really infectious, and I just catch myself drifting off listening to you.  Envisioning what you’re saying.  I love it.  So, thank you very much for sharing all of that.
And going back to mirror work.  Mirror work is so important.  It’s all about telling yourself how much you love yourself, and forgiving yourself and looking at the parts of your body and the things that happened to you, that hurt you.  And learning to truly embrace them, because it’s all just a part of you and it’s a part of your story.  I love it.
 
Dr. Mattison:
Thank you. Thank you very much.
 
Marissa:
What advice would you give to survivors that are still either on their healing journey or not yet on their healing journey.
 
Dr. Mattison:
Mmm. That’s a great question.  So, if you’re a survivor of trauma, and you're desperately seeking help and thinking about fulfillment in your life, and let me say there are a lot of people out there who aren’t, I think the best thing the woman or men who love us who are listening today can do, is to listen to your soul. It has a voice.  I mean, really stop and listen to the wisdom of your soul that’s crying out for healing.  That was what caught my attention.
 
You’ve got to make the decision to reclaim your life. You just have to.  And take the determined steps to make sure that you do.  That’s where I remember I got stuck.  I spent my childhood pretending to be someone else, while I was hiding behind the pain of my past.  Much of my adult life, I was hiding behind the childhood pain, while I was retreating back into darkness.  And i remember I thought I was living up to what society expected of me, and I wanted to be something other than who I really deeply felt in my soul I was created to be. I made my soul sick.  And when the soul is sick, it’ll vomit all over you.  When the soul is sick, it shuts down.  When the soul is sick,  you’re confused about your purpose.  When the soul is sick, then the body eventually manifests itself off the sickness.  The mind manifests itself on that souls sickness.  And so, I remember having to just pause, because I was realizing these symptoms, you know the bitterness, the anger, the sicknesses that I was experiencing, were all symptoms of a soul that was sick.
 
And so that would be my number one advice to victims and survivors. Listen to your soul. Listen to it. And because it’s during those moments that your soul will actually help you to see what you’re wanting and needing to help it to get better. It is during those moments that we will see that, “you know what, I need to listen and I also need to take steps to becoming better.”  So embrace the wisdom of your soul, and turn off the noise of everything else that is unnecessary. 
 
Marissa:
That’s great advice.  One of the chapters in my second book, Breaking Through the Silence: #Me(n)Too, was “You’re Only As Sick As Your Secrets.” And I love that.  You really are.  You’re only as sick as your secrets.  If you hold on to your abuse, and you don’t let it out, and you don’t heal, you’re truly killing yourself from the inside out.  Is there anything else you’d like to share?
 
Dr. Mattison:
My book is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, almost everywhere books are sold.  And in March, actually, I’ll be preventing at the Best You conference in Los Angeles and I’m inviting folks if you’re in the LA region to come on out and hear more about my book.  The topic of the talk is Rise From Trauma and Reclaim Your Life.  So, I’m really inviting as many women as possible to come out to March 20th at 5pm to attend to really important intentional conversation that I’ll be having with women.  And my website is being revamped.  My podcast will be ready around the April timeframe, and so I’m also welcoming guests who want to share their story of trauma and how they’ve achieved intentional transformation. And also, together we can learn so we can help more women to rise to become the women that they were created to be.  So, you know, that will be my last little tidbit for our listeners.
You can follow me on Instagram: Leonie H Mattison
I’m on facebook: Leonie H. Mattison,
 Twitter @LeonieMattison.
 
I really look forward to engaging with as many women as I can this year because I am on a mission to impact millions.  And one of the last things I’ll share with you about how my book took another turn, too, I’m actually doing some work in the local county jail here in Santa Barbara. So the book is actually in the jail here, and the women are reading the book and they have tons of questions. So i’ll be starting a 12-week program online and also on-site to really be looking at how to achieve intentional transformation.  SO people can check out my website, I’ll have more information in the coming days on how I’m really on this mission to reach a million women with a message of intentional transformation.
 
Marissa:
Great goals and thank you so much for sharing your story, and your work with us.  You’re such an inspirational person and I’m so happy that I got to talk to you today.  Thank you very much for being here today.
 
Hey! If you enjoyed this podcast, you have to check out www.MarissaFayeCohen.com/Private-Coaching. Marissa would love to develop a made-for-you healing plan to heal from emotional abuse. She does all the work, and you just show up. Stop feeling stuck, alone, and hurt, and live a free, confident, and peaceful life.  Don’t forget to subscribe to the Healing From Emotional Abuse podcast, and follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marissafcohen, and instagram @Marissa.Faye.Cohen. We’d love to see you there!