Rosanne Moore, my Voice of Influence colleague, is back on this episode to offer guidance on how you can be of help if you suspect that someone in your life is in an abusive relationship.

In this episode, Rosanne shares why the place to begin is with yourself, how to create a safe space for the person you want to help to open up, what you need to keep in mind to empower a woman in this situation, how to support victims of abuse at different stages in their journey, and more.

Mentioned in this episode

• Voice of Influence | Episode 146: Finding Her True Voice After Domestic Violence with Naghmeh Panahi

 

Find our Lifeline resources and information about the course here.

 

Transcript

Hey, there!  So, this is Andrea Wenburg with the Voice of Influence podcast, The Voice of Influence show on YouTube, and I’ve got with me Rosanne Moore.  We have been exploring on the Voice of Influence podcast.  We’ve been exploring, in particular, the difference between healthy and unhealthy influence.  It’s very important to us, and I think it’s highly relevant and important for us to cover.  And so, over the last few weeks and through the summer of 2020, we have been interviewing people for that on our podcast.  So, if you haven’t checked that out, we encourage you to go to voiceofinfluence.net and find our podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

There are a couple of episodes that Rosanne and I did previously that have to do with myths around abuse and coercive control.  We highly recommend that you see those videos.  And then this particular episode is going to be about helping others who are in a situation like this, in particular, where… you know, finding meaningful ways to help somebody who is actually in an abusive relationship and helping them out actually without hurting and making it worse.

Andrea:  Rosanne, let’s tell them a little bit about what we’ve just created, you’ve created with Lifeline.  Lifeline is a resource to help, in particular, women who are in an abusive relationship or coercive control and how to get out.  Rosanne, would you please give us a little description of Lifeline?

Rosanne Moore:  So, when I was going through my own process of getting out of an abusive marriage, there were a lot of resources that would deal with the psychological impact of an abusive relationship and unraveling that.  I had a pretty easy time finding things that would help me with that.  What I did not find, very readily, was something that would be a practical guide for the daily decisions, the legal process…  Something that would help me understand what to expect in the court system, how to navigate the court system, how to rebuild my life and my home for my children, safety for my children – coming out of a situation like that.

So, I was being asked… and anybody in this situation is being asked to make decisions that will affect long-term living at the same time that they’re trying to unravel major trauma that they’ve been through.  So, I wanted to provide a practical step-by-step guide that would help women tailor decision-making to their specific situation.  Something that would help them think through and not just have this overwhelming situation that they felt like they’d been dropped in, immersed, and were drowning in, at the same time that, emotionally, everything feels up for grabs.  So that’s how Lifeline was born.   It’s a practical guide for navigating coming out of coercive control, navigating the family court system, including divorce, for those who may be experiencing that.

Andrea:  All right.  So, Lifeline is a very robust resource.  And you can text VOILIFELINE to 44222 to get actually the first module for free that has to do with establishing safety and preparing yourself for the process.  You can also find it at voiceofinfluencence.net/lifeline.  So, right now we’re going to talk, specifically, to people who are in a situation where they see others who need help, somebody else.

So, Rosanne, let’s say I just learned that someone in my life is in an abusive relationship or I suspect it even, and I want to help.  I really do, but I’m not exactly sure where to start.  Where do you recommend that we start?

Rosanne Moore:  Okay, this is going to sound a little counterintuitive, but the place to begin is with yourself, doing kind of an evaluation with yourself.  You want to make sure you’ve got yourself out of the way first so that you can see the situation clearly and respond in a way that you’re not projecting your needs or your fears or anything else into what’s going on.  So, you want to do a little bit of self-evaluation.  You want to recognize, “What are the limits of my experience and knowledge?”  It’s okay to have limits.  Everybody, to some degree, has limits.  I’ve been through this myself.  I have walked through the situation with other women as an advocate, but I’m not a professional counselor and I’m not an attorney.

And so, even in Lifeline, the counsel that we give is how to choose those professionals.  It’s not to take the place of these professionals.  So, know the limits of your experience and your knowledge and don’t pretend to be what you’re not.  If you want to be a supportive friend, there are ways to do that very meaningfully, and it matters, and that’s a crucial role.  But you don’t want to pretend you’re law enforcement.  You don’t want to pretend that you are a counselor with years of experience in domestic violence if this is your first gig.  You don’t want to do that.  

So, recognize your own limits first.  Recognize that this situation is not about you.  You’re not the hero.  You don’t need to come in and save the day.  You’re not the judge, who if this person tells you something you need to determine whether or not it’s really accurate, whether what she’s saying is true or not.  You’re not her judge.

Andrea:  Oh, okay.  Hold on just a second.  I think that that might be one of the things that causes people probably to hesitate on helping somebody else because they’re not sure if they should believe or not.  So, can you expand on that a little bit?  Like, why shouldn’t I be the judge?  Shouldn’t I know or shouldn’t I try to figure that out before I help?

Rosanne Moore:   So, the first thing to realize… and we’re going to have a resource list that’s specific to helpers.  We’ve got a resource list for a woman in the situation – and a helper would benefit from the things on that list as well – but we’re going to have a resource list specific to helpers as well.  One of the things you need to know about abuse is the vast majority of the time – like 98% of the time – the person is telling the truth, and they’re not exaggerating.  They’re actually minimizing.  So, the little piece that they’re telling you or the thing that they’re searching for words to tell you – which is even more common – the situation is probably far worse.

And so, if you shut them down by responding, like, with investigative questions, that is not helpful.  They’re already struggling.  They’re living with somebody in a coercive control situation.  You’re living with somebody who’s constantly trying to reshape reality to gain control over you.  They’re constantly, basically, lying to you about your perception of what is real.  And so, if you have an outsider who’s like, “Well, are you really telling the truth?” the person just shuts down.  Like, they’re already overwhelmed.  They’re already traumatized.  So, you need to go into with the assumption, “This person is asking for help.  They are distressed.  I’m going to assume that they are telling the truth.”

Part of the reason you can assume to do this is… because people automatically go, “Oh, no, you’re supposed to presume innocence until proven guilty.”  All right, you’re not a court of law.  Nobody’s going to jail because of what you do, okay?  So, that’s not your role here.  Again, this is back to knowing your limits of what your role is.  You’re not the jury.  This is not a court of law.  You don’t have to presume that she’s lying.  You need to give her the presumption of innocence, that she’s telling the truth.  You need to begin there because if she is lying, that’s going to come out over time.  And the fallout from that is, at worst, you can go back and you can apologize to the person.  It’s not going to be a big cleanup because everything is against a victim of abuse coming forward.  Everything is in place to protect against false accusation, okay?

I know that’s an unpopular idea.  On the rare occasion somebody gets falsely accused, is that a horrific thing?  Yes, it is.  But there are ways to clean that up.  You get it wrong – you assume she’s lying – and you handle this badly, you could get somebody killed.  I mean, it’s that serious.  So you need to go into this, and you don’t rush into this.  And again, this is about knowing your role.  You don’t have to be the judge.  You listen, and you look for ways to support.  You don’t have to be the arbiter of what is true.  You start with, “How can I listen and be supportive?”  You don’t have to be the great savior and rescuer.  That’s not your role.

Again, what a woman in this situation needs is not somebody else to come in and take over, even with good intentions of rescuing.  What she needs is to have someone who helps her gain clarity so that she can use her own agency to make decisions.  That’s another reason why you don’t need to be the judge.  She needs to be able to have her own agency.  And if you come in and you tell her what you think is real and what[‘s] not, that’s pretty arrogant for one thing.  You don’t know what happened behind closed doors, you know.  You don’t need to be the expert for her.

If you have years and years of experience in working with domestic violence, you’re an expert and experts know not to try to take over.  They listen well.  They handle that well, okay?  But don’t come in as if you’re the expert.  And don’t come in – for those who are spiritual – don’t come in as the voice of God.  I’ve seen that happen a lot in religious circles.

Andrea:  Right, sure.

Rosanne Moore:  I want to give a quick example of a situation that I saw where this was handled very, very badly.  And it was not from wrong intentions.  The intention was to help.  The intention was good.  I knew the person who did this.  Their stated intention was to help with justice and protect the oppressed, but they didn’t know enough.  And so they went in and they had a need to be the hero.  They had a need to save the marriage for the sake of the church. 

Andrea:  Like a personal need, like a desire to be the hero.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, right.  And it wasn’t something they recognized in themselves, but everything they said and did revealed that that was the driving force in what was going on because they weren’t listening well.  They made assumptions when the abused woman tried to disclose what was going on, and there was evidence that what she was saying was true.  The response was, “I know that that’s your opinion that he’s abusive, but I don’t believe that’s real.”

Andrea:  Whoa!

Rosanne Moore:  How arrogant is that?  They hadn’t been there for the things that she had been there for, you know.  How arrogant to tell her that the situation she was in – that they were not present for – was just a figment of her imagination when there was a lot of corroborating evidence that what she was seeing was real and true.  But they didn’t ask good questions.  They needed the marriage to be fixed because they needed to feel like they were the ones who had saved the marriage.

Andrea:  Why does somebody feel like they need to be the one to save it?  What’s behind that?  I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot more than just a little bit, but can you just give us a snippet?

Rosanne Moore:  All right, so if it’s a family member, family members don’t want the disruption for the children or for the family.  They don’t want the embarrassment.  You know, there are a lot of reasons why a family member doesn’t want that kind of disruption in the family relationships.  It’s messy.  Same thing can happen with close friendships.  They don’t want to take sides.  It’s messy.  It’s disruptive.

In this case, it was religious leaders, and so as religious leaders, their focus was on, “Well, God has ordained marriage, and they made vows before God, and God hates divorce.”  And they had all of these things in their head so that they weren’t recognizing safety for the victim is the primary goal, not saving the marriage.  If it turns out that the marriage can be saved and it will happen only if the abuser deals with his stuff… which is not something you can control and is not something that necessarily is going to happen simply because he says he wants it to happen because he can say right words; actions have to be there.  But you can’t control that and so that cannot be your goal.  What you can make as a goal is doing everything possible to help the victim be safe.

And along with that, her safety and well-being is the point, not your comfort level.  That’s the other factor.  It feels messy, you know.  People are afraid of being wrong.  Well, what happens if you’re wrong?  You can always go back, and you can say, “Hey, I totally blew it and I’m sorry.”  And you know, is it disruptive?  Is it hard to recognize that you’ve made a mistake and come back and take ownership?  Well, guess what?  That’s maturity.  Sorry, you know.  None of us get it right all the time about everything.  But if you’re looking at percentages, you’re going to be far more likely to be wrong if you don’t listen to her than you are if you do.

So, if you just from sheer percentages standpoint, it makes sense that you assume she is telling you the truth and you support her accordingly.  And that doesn’t mean over time as things unfold if there’s evidence that she’s lying…  And evidence is not the same as things look disruptive because if she’s traumatized, it’s going to be messy.  Her timeline is not always going to be right.  She’s going to say contradictory statements.  She’s going to seem confused.  All the things that people look at and say, “Oh, well, she’s changing her story.  She must be lying.”  That’s actually an indication that she’s traumatized, and she is telling the truth.

Andrea:  Right.  And if she’s turning into drugs and alcohol or some other behavior that you would normally look down on…  Maybe you need to look at that, maybe I need to, we need to look at that as evidence of her need for help.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  I mean, if you think about the fact that a coercive control relationship is basically a hostage situation…  It’s a socially and legally mandated hostage situation where the person that you had entrusted your life to turns out to be your greatest danger.  That’s pretty freaky, you know, for anybody.  That’s the stuff of horror movies, quite frankly.  If you think about it, horror movies are usually based on finding out that the person you trusted is actually the one trying to kill you, right?  And so, for her to be in that situation, of course she’s going to be looking for ways to numb the pain or to numb the fear.  Not everybody turns to drugs or alcohol or whatever.  But if she does, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s the problem and she’s lying.  That may be a secondary issue that’s come because of what she’s been through.

Andrea:  Right.   Okay, obviously, safety then is a huge piece of what I should be worried about or should be concerned about when I want to help somebody.  One of the things that I think I and many others who want to be supportive might struggle with is how do we do that without actually making things worse?

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  So, begin by listening, okay?  If you’re suspecting that somebody is in a high control relationship, you’re getting a sense that something’s not right.  She’s being very isolated.  He may seem very charming and very nice, but she looks shut down.  The smile is always pasted on, but there’s something in her eyes that you see that is dying, okay?  Those are all indicators something’s not right.  You don’t want to automatically assume, “Oh, okay, she’s an abused wife.”  You want to do what you would do in any situation where you see somebody suffering.  You see indication that somebody is suffering.  You want to ask how they’re doing.  You want to ask good questions that show that you are concerned and you are available, and you don’t want to assume that you have information or understanding that you don’t have, okay?

So, when she gives you a little piece of information, you don’t want to automatically assume you know what that means.  You want to probe further.  “How did that make you feel?”  “Then what happened next?”  “Does that happen often?”  “What kind of thing makes that happen?”  I had a situation with a friend that I had not seen in several years, and I crossed paths with her in a public place.  And I was just chatting, asking how the family was, but I could see in her face that something was not right.  She had been a very vibrant person before.  She was very subdued, very shut down.  I didn’t know if she was just tired or whether something was going on.

And so, as I asked, you know, about her kids, how she was doing what was happening, the things she started sharing indicated, “Okay, things are not going well at home.”  And so, I began asking just gentle questions about, “How long has it been like that?”  “What kind of help have you been able to get so that you’re not alone in this?”  And the more she talked, the more I thought, “Oh, this sounds like an abuse situation.”  Now if I had said, “Are you being abused?” that would have freaked her out.  First of all, we’re in a public place.  It would have scared her.  If she hasn’t come to terms with that and she can’t put words to that yet, that would have been like, “Whoa, what are you talking about?”

And so, my question to her was just a gentle, quiet, “Are you safe at home?”  And her eyes filled with tears when I asked that, and that was the point when she opened up and she shared more.  That question, “Are you safe?” that’s not like a tool that you want to just automatically pull out of your belt and use for everything.  But know that that’s an underlying thing you want to find out.  If you’re concerned about somebody’s well-being, in some way you want to indicate a concern, “Do you feel safe at home?”  And that might not be just physical safety.  That might be emotional safety because in a lot of situations, there’s no physical violence, but there could be sexual violence – but they don’t think of it as that.  There can be financial control.  There can be soul violence, like the person is being attacked at an emotional and psychological level all the time.  And so, it’s like their spirit is being annihilated by the other person.

So, you want to ask that question about safety.  And that gives an opportunity for them to share in a gentle way what’s going on.  If they haven’t come to terms with the word abuse yet, if you ask about safety, it may help them connect emotionally with what they’re actually dealing with at home.  And if they have come to terms with, “All right, there is abuse, but I’m afraid.  I can’t talk about this freely.  I don’t know who understands, who’s gonna believe me.”  I mean, like, “Who’s gonna believe me?”  If you ask that question about safety, then that’s an indicator to them, “This is the person I can talk to about this.  They’ll get it.  They will get it if I talk to them about this.”

One of the things that’s really common with people who are abused is they’ll talk about the difficulty in their marriage.  They usually don’t want a divorce.  I mean, that comes much later.  But if they’re in the early stages of processing, they will bring it up as a marriage issue that they’re trying to figure out what they need to do differently.  And as you ask questions and as you listen, what a lot of people make mistake of doing is they give marriage advice before they’ve asked questions to find out, “Is this actually a marriage issue?”  If this is an abuse issue, it is not a marriage issue.

Andrea:  Right, right.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, and so you want to actually find out what is going on.  Chris Moles, he works a lot in domestic violence circles, and he works with abusers as well as with victims of abuse.  And the analogy he gave is, “If you don’t accurately assess what’s happening in the relationship, it’s like hearing the sound of clopping hooves on the road and assuming that a horse is coming towards you when you actually have a zebra.”  And so, what happens a lot of times is people… they project their own relationships into something that somebody says about the marriage, and they try to give marriage advice…

Andrea:  Or their experience with somebody else.

Rosanne Moore:  Exactly.

Andrea:  It’s all about their own experiences, though.

Rosanne Moore:  Exactly, which is why getting yourself out of the way first and asking good questions is going to be primary to being a good helper.

Another thing you want to do is often… because if she hasn’t figured it out yet, she’s going to be blaming herself a lot.  She’s going to be talking about the situation and looking for a resolution. And she’s going to be very focused on what she can do differently because she’s always trying to figure out what she did to make him so angry, why the relationship is not working.  He’s constantly telling her it’s her fault.

And so, telling her it’s not her fault directly is not going to be effective.  She’ll just tell you more reasons why she should have been able to make him happy somehow.  And she hasn’t figured out why yet, but somehow it’s supposed to be her job and make it okay.  So, what works far better is if you listen to that and you ask about how she felt in the situation.  And then you give her an analogy like, you know, “If your sister were in a situation where this kind of behavior was happening to her, how would you respond?  If your child came to you with this kind of a situation, how would you respond?”  And usually she’s very clear about, you know, she would be loving and supportive.

So, then the question is, “Okay, so if you weren’t treated that way, that’s not something you did wrong.  You deserve to be treated with love, just like you would treat your child or your sister or that other person you care about.  You treat them with love.  You treat your husband with love, so why would you not also be worthy of that?”  And that frees her to begin thinking differently so that she’s not blaming herself.  It also kind of gives her some language to be able to describe situations so that she’s not just carrying all of that load and doesn’t have any words.  That’s a big part of abuse.  You live with this constant sense of something’s not right, but you don’t really have words for why it’s not right.

Naghmeh [Panahi], when we had her on just a few weeks ago, that was something she talked about in her relationship.  It was like cancer; you know something’s bad that’s going on, but you don’t know what it is.  And that’s very common in abusive relationships.

Another thing you want to do in terms of listening well and in maintaining confidentiality, make sure you don’t take anything she says back to the abuser.  You do not want to do that because she will pay for it later.  He will come back, and he will punish her later.  And she will not be able to tell you anything in the future.

Andrea:  So, don’t try to fight for her.  Don’t try to confront him or anything like that.

Rosanne Moore:  Or even go “get his side of the story.”

Andrea:  Oh, wow, yeah.

Rosanne Moore:  That’s not your job.

Andrea:  Right.

Rosanne Moore:  Because you got to understand abusive people don’t say, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been abusing her.  Like, I feel really bad about that.”  They don’t do that.  They give you a very plausible-sounding story, and they’re very good at taking a lie and wrapping it in a veneer of truth that sounds plausible enough that you then want to level the playing field and you want to assume that, “Well, it was probably just a misunderstanding,” something like that.

Andrea:  Right.

Rosanne Moore:  If a person is afraid all the time in their own home, you do not have a level playing field.  It’s not just a marriage issue.  That is not what’s going on.  So that’s why asking questions, finding out, gauging what her level of fear is, and even if she’s not able to give you specific examples… because trauma does that.  Trauma makes it very difficult to communicate and to analyze situations like that.  And so you don’t want to breach her confidentiality with the abuser, in particular.  You want to help her make decisions.  “What do you need?”  “Okay, so you’re saying this is going on and you’re not feeling safe; what do you need?”  “Would it help to talk to somebody at a domestic violence hotline?”  “Have you thought about getting counseling by yourself?”  Don’t recommend marriage counseling.  Don’t do that.

Andrea:  It’s not a marriage issue.

Rosanne Moore:  It is not a marriage issue, and it will set her up to be punished in private at home and shut down and isolate her.  So, find out what she needs and you can start that process with her.  As she begins to come to terms with what’s going on, she’s going to feel grief and she’s going to feel anger and it’s going to feel messy.  And keep listening.  Don’t try to tamp that down for her.  That is a necessary part of her regaining her agency and her autonomy.

Andrea:  Be that safe space for her to explore that, probably, or express it.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  So, if you want to be a good helper, you need to be a good listener while she’s processing.  A big part of healing is having a safe space with somebody who’s a caring listener, who will let you voice the ugliness and the anger.  And she has reason to be angry.  And she’s had to keep all of that inside and all of that tamped down.  Does that mean she needs to be angry forever?  No, but if she can’t bring it out and process it, it’s going to make her sick physically.  It’s not going to go away.  She’s got to be able to process it safely.  And you want to process your own emotions elsewhere.

When friends start hearing that someone that they love… or a family member that they love is being treated horribly, they’re in a lot of horror, and it brings up a lot of emotion for them.  They’re angry.  They’re horrified.  They feel guilty that they didn’t recognize it sooner.  They feel, like, just off-balance, like, “How could I not have seen this sooner?  How did I get deceived in this?”  So, you want to continue getting yourself out of the way by processing your own stuff, but you want to do that separately from your friend or family member.  You don’t want to ask them to help you process it.  They have enough on their plate already.  Process your own emotions elsewhere, get help with that.  And you don’t want to try to jump in, take over and say, “Well, I’m going to tell him like it is!”  You will escalate things further, and you could create a potentially extremely dangerous situation.

When you’re dealing with a high-control person, it’s like a tug of war thing.  They’re always looking for a battleground, always looking for a game of tug of war.  They don’t have to win.  All they need is somebody to pick up the rope.  So, if she’s trying to de-escalate the situation and you go over and you try to pick up the rope on her behalf, he’s won and she’s going to pay for it.  She is going to pay for it.  You have just empowered him.

Andrea:  Can you say that again? 

Rosanne Moore:  So, your idea of confrontation and of saying what is true and bringing him to account, all of that kind of stuff rises up.  It’s understandable.  You want justice, right?  You want justice for the person that you love.  But all of that stuff in you that rises up and wants to come in, make sure truth happens and he has to face what he’s done, it’s going to come back and punish her.  It’s wrong to do that.  You don’t want to do that.  That puts her in a more dangerous situation.  And quite frankly, it’s not your place.  If the time for confrontation needs to happen, that’s for her to do.  It’s not for you to do.  She’s lived with the situation a lot longer than you have, and if there comes a time for her to do that, she’ll know when she can do it safely.  But you don’t know enough about this.  You don’t know enough about the dynamics, and you could create a much more dangerous situation for her out of your need to vent.  So that’s not helpful.  It’s very dangerous, actually.

Andrea:  Okay, all right.  So, what is the process of really helping somebody get out of this situation when it feels really dramatic?  It feels like, “Oh my gosh, this is such a big deal.”

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  So, if you watch it on TV, right, it’s always the drama.  In TV or movie or whatever domestic violence stuff, they always make that conflict really high and make it really dramatic, and big rescue, and all these big emotions.  The reality is the best way to help is to restore her agency.  It’s very practical.  Everyday things of taking her from a place of having no agency to her having restored agency.  Not you going in and rescuing, but her being able to pick up her agency to have a voice again.

So, transformation is actually going to look very practical.  She’s going to need housing.  She’s going to need food to eat to keep up her physical strength.  And in a high drama, high emotional situations, sometimes she might forget to eat.  She might need to be reminded of that.  She might need you to bring a meal so that when she’s working on paperwork for court, she doesn’t have to think about supper for her kids.  That’s covered, you know.  She’s going to need rest.

When you live with somebody who is not safe, you don’t sleep well.  You’re always on high alert.  You’re dealing with PTSD issues.  So, when you get out of that, your body is depleted.  You need physical rest.  You’re exhausted.  Plus, there’s all these emotions that you’re processing, and so that’s draining physically as well, so you need physical rest.  She’s going to need transportation.  I mean, does she have transportation?  If she doesn’t, she might need that.  That might be something she’ll need help with.

She’s going to need legal protection.  She may need childcare.  She would benefit from counseling.  If that’s something she wants to pursue… don’t push it.  When she’s ready for it, it can be offered as a safe place for her to unpack this, rather than “Oh my gosh, you are so messed up.  You need counseling.”  Instead, it’s, “You’ve been through a very traumatic event.  I think you needed a safe place to be able to talk through this with somebody who’s gonna care and be able to be there for you and understands what you’ve been through.”  If it can be presented like that.

I sometimes talk to people who’ve been through stuff and counseling has been pushed at them as if, “You’re broken and you need to go get fixed.”  And yeah, yucky, you know.  Nobody wants to feel like they’re the broken, messed up person that everybody looks at and thinks less of.  And I know with my own kids… my daughter at one point said she was sitting in the counselor’s office waiting to meet with her counselor and she said a man in his forties came into the waiting room while she was waiting for her turn.  And he was obviously very anxious about being there in the waiting room.  And he was chatty, and he finally said to her, “So, does this feel weird to you that you’re at a counselor’s office?”  And she said, “No, my mom says it’s kind of like going to the doctor for your primary care visit.  You know, your well-child checks and stuff like that.  It’s just you need to take care of your heart and your mind as well as your body.”  And she said he got this look on his face like that was a completely new thought.

Andrea:  That’s great.

Rosanne Moore:   But really, that’s how you want to present counseling.  Like, “You’ve been through a very traumatic event.  You are a strong person who has survived this, but I think it would be really valuable for you to have a safe place where somebody else could take care of you, rather than you having to always hold it together.”  And then giving her permission for self-care, because she’s been in a relationship where all resources have been poured into keeping him calm, like trying to keep him from blowing up or keep him from punishing her in some way.  It may not always be explosive anger.  It may be covert manipulation.  But all of her resources have been basically focused on trying to keep him from acting out.

And so, giving her space… like, she needs self-care.  She needs a chance to recover taking care of herself.  I know when I was at the point where I was filing for separation, my youngest son was three years old, and one of the self-care things that I did before I filed… because assets were going to be divided, you know, based on that.  And all of those years, I was still wearing maternity clothes.  He was three years old, and I was still wearing maternity clothes because we weren’t going to spend money on me having clothes.  It didn’t matter that they didn’t fit.  You know, it was just we weren’t going to spend money on me.  They weren’t worn out so I should just keep wearing them, right?  So, self-care for me was buying clothes that actually fit, that were non-maternity clothes, so things like that.

And then work – she’s going to need work at some point.  But that may need to come incrementally.  She’s been through a really traumatic thing.  And so having to take on, if she hasn’t been in a full-time job, to have to suddenly take all of that on at the same time she’s got all of this upheaval [going] on…  You know, sometimes people have unrealistic expectations of somebody who’s been highly traumatized and they expect them to just, you know, be responsible and all of that.

Well, you wouldn’t expect somebody who had been in a car wreck and needed months of rehab for a physical injury from a car wreck to just be able to walk into a new job and start something new and take care of themselves.  You would recognize that they needed help getting to that point of independence.  It’s the same thing here.  She’s going to need help getting to financial independence, and she needs permission to do that rather than pressure.

I had a friend… she was a mother of seven, she had five children still at home when she found out he was a serial adulterer.  And there were drugs and other issues involved.  

But she got pressure from other people because they knew she was under financial pressure.  He wasn’t paying child support and alimony the way it was supposed to.  And they said, “Well, you just need to go get a job at the grocery store.”  And she’s like, “For $8 an hour, so I’m not gonna make very much, and I homeschool my children.”  And she had children with some learning needs that homeschooling was the way that she needed to go with those, and they were all traumatized by what they had been through.

So, the expectation was for her to go get a low-income job to supplement this.  That was a church group that the person was in that said this to her.  A better response would have been for that church group to say, “Hey, how can we, for the next six months, help you get on your feet?  You know, give you some space to heal, and maybe give you some budgeting advice?”  “Maybe help you sit down and figure out what kind of work could you do that would actually meet your financial needs, so you’re not doing a minimum wage job and wearing yourself out with long hours of work, but still not having enough to really provide for your family’s needs.”

So, those are some very practical things.  And then of course, Lifeline – this brings us back to Lifeline.

Andrea:  Sure, yeah.

Rosanne Moore:  If you want to help, realize that Lifeline is going to have a lot of things that will help you understand better how to help her.  That resource list, having a basic understanding of how abuse works, what it does to its victims, how abusers manipulate; those things are going to be really important if you want to be an effective helper, and there are resources for that on the helpers list.  And then Lifeline itself… if she’s in a place where she’s wanting to get out, she may not have the $25.  We’ve tried to keep the program really inexpensive to make it affordable.  We’re talking twenty videos and worksheets that are essentially a workbook that will give her very practical help.  You could help cover that cost of that for her.  So that would be another really practical thing that could be very transformational.

Andrea:  Thank you, Rosanne.  I’ve got one more question for you.  And this might be repetitive in some ways, or you might decide that your answer is something you’ve already said or it might be something a little different.  But when somebody wants to be a “Voice of Influence” in the case of supporting somebody who is in a controlling relationship, what summary advice do you have for them?

Rosanne Moore:  Two things.  One is learn as much as you can.  So, listen well, like I said.  We talked about this already.  Not just listen to her, but also try to look at that resource list.  And it’s kind of like the race thing, right?  I know our family is looking at the ways that we can be more sensitive to those who are minorities and who experience life differently than our family does because we’re white.  And so, listening to them rather than telling them what we think is a really important part of that.  So, I would say listen well and try to learn, go to that resource list.

The other thing that you can do is understand that she has constantly, in her head, a litany of accusation that he has poured out on her for all this time.  He has undermined her perception of reality.  And so, you don’t want to come in and try to be the voice of reality to her.  But when she says things that you realize are from his influence – like, that he is giving her a negative view of herself – you can challenge those gently.  Not directly, but by asking questions.  “Why do you think that about yourself?  Do you want to know what I think, what I see in you?”  You want to reaffirm the good things that you see about her.  Your best way of being a “Voice of Influence” on her behalf is to help her find her voice again.  See in her what she can’t see in herself right now.  And so, you don’t want to come in and be a voice for her as much as you want to call out of her the voice that has gotten lost in all of the other noise.

Andrea:  Mhmm, absolutely.  Thank you so much, Rosanne.  That gets to the heart of what we do at Voice of Influence is helping other people.  When you want to be a “Voice of Influence”, the thing that you do is you help others express their voice and do it in a respectful way and all that. Anyway, I really appreciate you and your “Voice of Influence” on behalf of those whose voices have been oppressed, those who are struggling to figure out what to do next.  Thank you, Rosanne, and thank you for helping us to know better how we can help without hurting and have that meaningful impact in that way.

Rosanne Moore:  Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this again.

Andrea:  Of course.  Again, you can find the resources that Rosanne talked about and get access to Module 1 of our course Lifeline by texting VOILIFELINE – all one word – to the number 44222 or go to voiceofinfluence.net/lifeline.  All right, we’ll see you soon.