Here’s What Makes The Best Emotional Abuse Support Groups Online

Are you looking for the best emotional abuse support groups online? Here’s what you need to know.

1. DO THE EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE HAVE OTHER RESOURCES?

The best emotional abuse support groups online have educational resources like a podcast, workshops, or even quizzes to help you understand exactly what’s happening to you.

For example, did you know there are over 19 different types of emotional abuse? Take our free emotional abuse test to see if you’re experiencing any of the 19 types.

2. DO THE EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE COVER ALL TYPES OF EMOTIONAL ABUSE?

If the emotional abuse support groups online don’t understand betrayal trauma, which is trauma resulting from emotional abuse caused by infidelity and deceit, then the group may not meet your needs.

3. DO THE EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE MEET MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY IN ALL TIME ZONES?

There’s no telling when your husband will be emotionally abusive. When something happens and you need support right away, consider attending a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session for emotional abuse. Check out the Group Session schedule.

4. DO THE EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE ACTUALLY HELP YOU GET TO EMOTIONAL SAFETY?

A lot of support groups blame you for what’s going on. At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we never victim blame. Instead, we help victims figure out exactly what’s going on and what to do next through our Living Free Workshop.

Key takeaways from this interview:

• The Long History of Women Being Left Without Support
• How a Culture of Misogyny Undermines Legal Support for Women
• How Institutional Betrayal Creates More Trauma
• When Leaders Fail to Enact Policies that Support Women
• Why So Many Women Don’t Know What to Search For

TRANSCRIPT: HERE’S WHAT MAKES THE BEST EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE

Anne: I have Elizabeth Estabrooks, MSW on today’s episode. She’s a writer, speaker, author with subject matter expertise on survivors of personal violence gained during her nearly 30 year career. She holds a bachelor’s degree in gender studies and political science from Eastern Oregon University and a Master of Science and Social Work from Columbia University. From 2021 to 2022, she served on the VA National Domestic Violence Task Force.

The secretary’s task force on inclusion, diversity, equity and access. The VA Sexual Assault Prevention Committee and the National Gender Policy Council Work Group. Her book, Broken in the Stronger Places: From Resilience to Resourcefulness is a memoir that spends her life from joining the military through her exit from the VA and the one year solo healing road trip that followed. We are talking about the lack of emotional abuse support groups online or support in general.

Welcome, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me here, Anne.

Anne: Were you in the military before you became a domestic violence expert?

Elizabeth: Yes, I was in the military. It was post Vietnam. They had done away with the draft. And there had been a lot of changes. Women have served since the American Revolution. But many people are unaware, for a long time only 2% of the military could be women, and they couldn’t be officers. There was a lot they couldn’t do. For black women, it was even worse. WASPs were the Women’s Air Service Pilots.

SERVICE WOMEN’S FIGHT FOR SUPPORT FROM THE MILITARY

Anne: They are so inspiring, by the way. I encourage everyone to look them up.

Elizabeth: Oh, it was amazing. Mostly white, but there were some Japanese women and there was one, indigenous woman. I don’t think black women were allowed. Because there was so much discrimination.

Anne: Mm hmm, There were no emotional abuse support groups online.

Elizabeth: So these women entered and they received special training so it was a big deal. The WASPs, flew 60 million miles. They flew into danger, all that stuff. When the war ended, the military sent women home without so much as a benefit or anything. There were a number of women who died in service and their family members were responsible for paying the money to send them home from England or wherever they were.

The military considered women not real military members. That was the status of women. So in 1948, Truman signed the Women Armed Forces Integration Act, post World War II. It gave women full-time permanent status in the military.

The exception prior to that act was that a certain number of nurses could remain ’cause they needed medical. And so as time went on, it began increasing.

After the draft ended, volunteerism among men decreased, and they were having trouble staffing up the military. There were the WACs, Women’s Army Corps. The Navy informally called women WAVES. They had separate training. Their training included things like how to wear makeup.

WE HAVE TO DO BETTER FOR WOMEN

Elizabeth: Then they disbanded in 1977. Jimmy Carter, being a feminist, said, “We have to do better.” The military started to send women to co-ed basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I was in the second wave of women to go through co-ed.

Anne: I feel honored to talk to you right now. This is a huge deal, and I am so proud of you. Helping women who had no emotional abuse support groups online or any other support.

Elizabeth: Thank you. So, I talk about this in my book. We’re all a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds. You start at the welcome center, and then you get on the bus, and they take you to the company where you do your basic training. There’s camaraderie, we’re all joking and laughing, and being a bunch of teenage boys and girls. And we got off the bus and hustled into a formation, which was ragged as hell. ‘Cause we didn’t know what it was.

The drill sergeants say to us, “This is your family now.” There were five male drill sergeants. “We help each other out.” They said, “Look to your front, look to your back, look to your left, look to your right. These are your brothers and sisters. They will always be there for you. They will always have your back.”

And in the next breath, literally they said, “And for you females out there understand that we think there is no place in this man’s army for girls. And we’re gonna spend the next eight weeks showing you just how much we mean that. If we have anything to do with it, not one of y’all will make it through.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE: ADDRESSING MISOGYNISTIC CULTURE

Elizabeth: Being in the field you’re in, you understand how that sets a culture. It set the tone to the men that had just been our buddies.

Suddenly, we were othered and heard mumbles of, “Yeah, you don’t belong here, and we don’t have to be nice to you.” The drill sergeants just gave permission.” When I wrote the book, it occurred to me that what they did was set the direction of our future. Sexual harassment, you’re going to experience it and we don’t give a damn. So just deal with it. We’re gonna encourage it so that you’ll leave. There were no resources, no emotional abuse support groups online.

Throughout basic training, there was a lot of real sexualized, misogynistic stuff that happened. From there, I went on to my training. I was in supply at Fort Lee, Virginia.

That was only moderately better. We had more freedom, so we weren’t just confined to being in formation all the time and being with our drill sergeants. We would be walking by, say, a billet full of men. And they would literally hang out the windows and yell obscenities at us.

If they were standing on the streets, they would grab their crotches, they would make all the obscene sounds and gestures that you can imagine.

THE LAW ALLOWED WOMEN TO SERVE, THE CULTURE TRIED TO PUSH THEM OUT

Elizabeth: That program at the time was a go at your own pace thing. It was a 12 week program, but you could get out anytime you finished. So I finished it six weeks, because I was like, I gotta get the hell outta here.

Anne: Yeah.

Elizabeth: Then I was stationed in Kissingen, Germany at Harvey Barracks. I was the first woman in my company, and one of only, maybe not even a hundred on the whole base. It was brutal. It was constant harassment, constantly grabbed, assaulted in various ways. I consider myself lucky. I was one of the few women never raped during her military service. This was ongoing. Every minute of every day I was in uniform on base.

Anne: I am so sorry. The overall feeling would have to be that my government doesn’t care about me as much as men.

Elizabeth: That’s the vibe. Yeah, we were only there because the law forced them to have us there.

Anne: That is so sad. It’s also so awful that the culture would permit people to treat other citizens like that, people who have signed up for service.

Elizabeth: At that time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made it possible for pregnant women to remain in the military. Up until that time, if you got pregnant while in the military, legally they could throw you out. Even though you could have a baby while in the military, you couldn’t join the military if you had babies unless you gave up custody.

THE DOUBLE STANDARDS OF MILITARY POLICY

Anne: Wow, so no man has to give up custody to join the military, but women do.

Elizabeth: I said that exactly to the recruiter. And he said, “Oh, they’ve got wives and mothers. We don’t need to worry about them with their children.”

Anne: That’s crazy.

Elizabeth: He said that to me. He was such an asshole. So my friend couldn’t join, because she was like, “I’m not giving up my children to join the military. That’s never gonna happen.” We were gonna join the buddy system, so I signed my name on the dotted line. I had no idea, I was 18 years old.

Anne: I wanna just point out to you that you did the same thing that every other 18-year-old man would do. You’re not any different than any other person who’s joined the military.

Elizabeth: Thank you. That was my entrance into the military. I didn’t know they could discriminate. I didn’t know all that because I was a young feminist. So I understood discrimination, pay gap, and all of that stuff, even at that age. So I was shocked when I began understanding.

Anne: Institutional mIsogyny, with no emotional abuse support groups online.

Elizabeth: That’s exactly right. I stayed in, they tried to push me out, but I said, “No, I know my rights. I get to stay in the military as a pregnant and or single mother.” When you joined, and I think it’s the same way today, it was a six year enlistment. So it could be any combination of six. It could be a full six years active duty, it could be three years active, three years inactive, two years, whatever that combination was.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE: I GOT A SHELTER FUNDED

Elizabeth: They had told me when I joined, okay, you’re active duty for three years, and then you have to join the reserves. Stay at the reserves for three years when you get out. They told me when I left, “You’re a hundred percent done. We don’t want you, you can’t ever rejoin.”

And today women can rejoin. Then a friend asked me to join the board of the local Domestic Violence Crisis Intervention Center. And that started my career in the field of domestic violence and sexual assaults. I eventually became the director, and there was a lot going on around that.

OJ Simpson had killed Denise Brown and Ron Goldman. When something national like that happens, it instills fear in every survivor and victim across the country. There are now emotional abuse support groups online at BTR.

No matter how long they’ve been separated from their abusive partner, we were dealing with that. I got a shelter funded, and eventually I got my bachelor’s degree in gender studies and political science. I expanded my vision and my work.

So I did community safety. I did gender specific services, for most of my career. The government had a huge budgetary crisis. All my contracts were with government agencies. They all got canceled ’cause they were all about domestic violence, sexual assault, and gender specific sources. That was deemed unimportant, and that’s when I focused on women veterans.

So all the time before that, I had focused on communities, civilian women.

THE SECONDARY TRAUMA OF INSTITUTIONAL BETRAYAL

Elizabeth: Although looking back, I know that there were probably some women veterans I was helping, and I just didn’t realize, ’cause I didn’t talk about being a veteran. Women then didn’t talk about being a veteran, and many still don’t today.

Everything I did was on women veterans and sexual assault in the military. So when you’ve had experiences of harassment, assault, and or rape in the military that cause trauma. They call it military sexual trauma. And I didn’t learn until years later that I had that.

Anne: I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through. And also so proud of you that you kept putting one foot in front of the other, you kept providing for yourself and your family. Um, with all your experience, can you talk about just some overall themes that you see in relation to domestic violence in general, perhaps specifically in the military, but perhaps more like culturally?

Because I think the military has its own culture, obviously, but it’s also sort of indicative of the overall culture. So maybe you could talk about how those all intersect. And how emotional abuse support groups online could help.

Elizabeth: That is so true, the difference is that when their partner assaults them, or someone in the military assaults them. They also face extreme institutional betrayal. We know that women are sexually harassed in their work places, and Anita Hill brought that to light. They don’t talk about it because of so much fear. Women in the military, even if they talk about it, it’s like tough We have to stay.

THE MINDSET OF A MISOGYNISTIC CULTURE

Elizabeth: I complained about it multiple times. They forced me to remain there to work and deal with this on my own. Nobody at my company cared except for my platoon sergeant, but he was never around. The leaders in my workspace didn’t care. They would laugh it off.

So there was no one, no one who cared. Women face that even in today’s military. And men are also sexually assaulted. But as you and I know, we will not stop assault against men until we do something about the misogynistic culture that drives and promotes sexual assault and harassment against women.

We know that when women are raped or sexually assaulted they’re called feminine pejoratives, bitch, pussy, slut. These are the terms used against men, because they don’t meet that toxic male culture standard.

Anne: It’s not their fault. In the minds of the abusers, if these men weren’t feminine, then they wouldn’t have been assaulted. Because that doesn’t happen to real men.

Elizabeth: That’s exactly right. When men in the military talk about being sexually assaulted, they refer to it as hazing. They lessen that, because they’re also called gay or homosexual as an insult. There’s a lot of fear for men.

Around that fear for women is that for years, women who were sexually assaulted received dishonorable discharges. They were charged with adultery. And that only ended a few years ago.

THEY GET A WHOLE HOSPITAL AND I GET A JANITOR’S CLOSET

Anne: Yeah, I can imagine the difference in your story if you showed up at basic training and they said, look to your right, look to your left. You’re all in the same family. We treat everyone with respect, end of story. What a difference that would make from the top. Everyone in our military is a human being who deserves respect. Everyone in our country is a human being. We are tasked with the safety of our country, which includes all citizens.

Elizabeth: Yes, we were less likely to get benefits to have our claims approved. The first time I was at the Boise VA, which is one of the best in the nation, it was all very male.

They said to me, “Come in for your first appointment, so we can get a baseline, third floor.” And I said, okay. So I go in and take the elevator up to the third floor. And the door opened. I look out and there’s mops, brooms, and buffers. It’s janitorial accoutrement. I was standing there holding the door open. I could see a woman down the hall at a desk. And by this time it’s making this obnoxious elevator, binging sound. She said, “Miss, can I help you?”

And I said, “Yeah, I think I have the wrong third floor.”

She said, “What are you looking for?”

And I said, “I’m looking for women’s help. They said, it’s on the third floor.”

And she said, “Yes, ma’am, that’s us.”

I just kept standing there and I said, “So just let me make sure I get this right. I served in the same military as the men and they get an entire freaking hospital and I get the janitor’s closet?”

She said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m very sorry.”

EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE: CREATING POLICIES TO SUPPORT WOMEN

Elizabeth: We’re laying on a table with our legs in the stirrups. With nothing but a curtain separating us from the janitorial stuff going on in the hallway. And, now there are women’s health clinics in all VAs. It’s so much better. What I always say to women veterans is try it. If I had walked away from the VA that day, I would’ve missed some good care.

They passed this public law, which mandated the Center for Women Veterans be opened. And that they focus on policy and care just for women. There are 10 directives and two mandates in that law. And that’s what they’re supposed to follow, hard stop. I was recruited to join the Center for Women Veterans because of the work I had done.

So I moved to DC, joined the VA, and everything was going great. I had a wonderful director. We got things done. She had served under four presidents, and she was a phenomenal director and cared deeply about women veterans. And making sure that we were doing the right thing and doing many initiatives. It was fabulous.

We worked with all women veterans, not just women who were survivors and victims, right. But those cases generally came to my desk. When women complained or contacted VA, I handled them.

And then, things changed. People hired had no knowledge of the VA, of government, of budgeting, of any of that stuff. It became clear to me that my new director was uninterested in following the mandates and directives set under the public law that stood up the Center for Women Veterans.

WHEN LEADERS REFUSE TO ENFORCE LAWS THAT SUPPORT WOMEN

Elizabeth: A woman was sexually assaulted at a VA by her doctor, and all she wanted was the VA to stop him from working there.

At the time, my director said it is VA policy to maintain the employment of medical providers accused of sexual assault, as long as they still hold a medical license in that state. I lost my mind and said to my director, “This policy must be disbanded.”

And she said, “There’s nothing I can do about it.” This woman had no emotional abuse support groups online to access.

I said, “It’s literally your job to do something about this. The public law demands you do something about this. It’s your mandate.” And she refused.

Then there was a woman who, her story of all the thousands of stories I’ve heard, Anne, hers was the worst. It was more brutal than my mind could even comprehend. And I spent decades speaking to women and being empathetic, and I crumbled when it was done.

The VA then betrayed and abused her. The next day. I was getting ready for work and sitting on my bed and crying. I texted my boss and said, “I’m not working today.”

She said, “Are you okay?”

I said, “No, and I will never be okay again.”

My psychologist said, “The fact that you got your own sexual trauma and spent 30 years in this field is nothing short of phenomenal that you continue to do this work despite your own trauma. You can never again hear another story. You’re a hundred percent done with this field. It’s to your own mental health detriment if you continue.”

ACKNOWLEDGING RETRAUMATIZATION

Anne: Wow, that’s intense.

Elizabeth: Kintsugi, the art, where they repair fine porcelain with gold. In the early nineties, the field of mental health developed a theory around that.

What they say with Kintsugi is that it is stronger in its broken places because of the lacquer and the gold powder added. And so the field of mental health took that up and said, you too can be stronger in your broken places if you go through the CBT and the therapy and the da da da da da.

And during my work, I understood the falsity of that metaphor and why it doesn’t work. Because they don’t acknowledge retraumatization.

A lot of women who’ve read my book say, both veteran and non-veteran, it’s like you told my story. I feel so connected. One of the first women said, ” I had been in therapy, and something happened recently, and I came absolutely undone.”

We women blame ourselves for everything. I’m a loser. I can’t even do therapy right. I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad this, I suck at that. So we’re always happy to take that blame on ’cause that’s what the culture does for us. It’s on the woman. It’s always on the woman.

For the general population, understand that our words matter, that headlines matter. That when we say things like, “Why didn’t she just leave? Why did she stay?” We’re putting the onus on her. What we need to do is shift that, turn that around.

changing the way we talk about emotional abuse

Elizabeth: So the next time, say, “Why did he do that? Why was he allowed to get away with that?”

Because for decades, we aren’t any better in that field. We keep putting it on the women to escape, to change to dah, dah, dah, dah. We need to put it on the people doing the deed.

Healing is not an event, it’s a process. And trauma gets inside you and you can heal. You can do better, but be aware of something that most psychologists or therapists never talk about, and that is re-traumatization.

Something can happen. We saw that during the OJ Simpson trial. Women across the country were re-traumatized in mass numbers. You’re so confused when that happens, ’cause you’re thinking, I thought I was all better. Don’t beat yourself up, find some help, a group, emotional abuse support groups online. You deserve to be healed and happy.

Anne: Yes, those layers of trauma, not that the trauma isn’t compounding, but it’s easier for us to rebound, gain strength, if we have emotional safety in our own immediate vicinity with the people that care about us. Some have had intimate images shared without consent.

I’m so lucky with my children. I said to my son this morning, “I’m just so angry and I’m sorry if I’ve been very, short lately.”

And he said, “Oh Mom, you’re amazing. You have such good intentions. We love you. We understand why you would be upset, and it makes sense that you would be. You’re safe with us Mom.” And it just made me feel so good. Not everybody has that, so I wanna acknowledge that. Getting to emotional safety is what our Group Sessions are about.

WOMEN DESERVE THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Anne: You can start building that as you come out of the experiences you’ve had. I guess you’ve made some close friends who have been through similar things you can relate with that. You can call and be like, can you believe what happened? And you can process it together, and at least you have an immediate safe space. So that’s what women experiencing trauma need. They just need that safe space to process what’s happening with emotional abuse support groups online.

Elizabeth: Yeah, and having that shared experience, having a group or person with which you have that shared experience really is a positive in your life. Pursue that, because if you’re in a home where you’re not safe, where you don’t feel safe, where you’re afraid to say your words. I know how hard it is. If you’re not safe, you deserve to be and find that safety where you can.

Anne: Yeah, women deserve the pursuit of happiness just like anyone else.

Elizabeth: That’s right, perfect.

Anne: Yep, well thank you so much, Elizabeth, for sharing your story. Thank you for spending time with me today.

Elizabeth: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation, Anne, and I appreciate all the work you’re doing. Thank you for giving survivors a space.

Anne: Thank you.

finding help before you know what you need

Anne: I met my next guest, Lacey, at a conference. She told me how difficult it was to find emotional abuse support groups online and support before she found Betrayal Trauma Recovery. She didn’t know the term betrayal trauma at first. So she didn’t know what to search for, and that matters. When women don’t have the right words, they can’t get the right help. Welcome Lacey.

Lacey: Hello Anne, thanks for having me.

Anne: Can you start with how it felt to be searching for help when you didn’t know what you were looking for? All you knew was that your marriage was really confusing.

Lacey: Initially just friends and maybe counselors and books, I would read them and listen to it, and it didn’t resonate with me. So as I dug further, I started learning words like betrayal trauma. You know, I didn’t even know that’s what I had. So I didn’t know the words I needed to search for. I just started stumbling across things. I had to weed through a lot of things that were not helpful before I could get to the things that were.

Even with books they suggested, sometimes you’re just not in a place where you can sit down and read and comprehend a book. Betrayal Trauma Recovery for me was just something consistent, weekly that I could turn on and listen. What you said resonated with me. So I took your advice. It was good for me when I found BTR. It’s a consistent voice of reason that I could turn to. Listening doesn’t take nearly as much brain power as sitting down and studying or something like that.

PROMOTING BETRAYAL TRAUMA RECOVERY & HELPING OTHERS

Lacey: You talked about the conference. I wouldn’t have known anything about that if it hadn’t been for the Betrayal Trauma Recovery podcast There are not many resources in my area. Even the counselor I’m seeing isn’t trained in this area. She doesn’t know about resources like books and things that you suggest on BTR. I just want to do my best to help other ladies find it quickly, more quickly than I did.

It’s great with the podcast, I can go back and re-listen. Before I got on with you, I was listening to a few things. You know, I probably will not have my own podcast or website or anything like that. It’s difficult for me to talk about these things with people in person. I want to do my best to promote you in the best way possible to help other people.

Anne: I’m grateful for your support. You’ve listened to the podcast since the beginning, and one of the things you mentioned is that you wanted other women to know about Betrayal Trauma Recovery. It covers things emotional abuse victims need to know. You talked about how easy it is to help women find us. Just follow the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts by actually clicking the follow button. The more subscribers or followers the podcast has, the more the algorithm shows this podcast to women when they’re searching for help.

Like you said, you were searching for things, but you didn’t know to type in betrayal trauma in to Google because you didn’t know what you were searching for, exactly.

Lacey: Right.

Anne: Then finally, when you found the word betrayal trauma, you found us, you found Betrayal Trauma Recovery, and our emotional support groups online.

IMPROVING ONLINE VISIBILITY

Anne: So as women search around, they search for words like infidelity, cheating, or addiction. Lots of women are searching for narcissism stuff, like covert narcissist traits, lying, “How do I help my marriage?” Or betrayal trauma in relationships.

It’s rare that a woman with marriage troubles goes immediately to Google and types in betrayal trauma and finds emotional abuse support groups online.. My goal is to help women get this information as soon as possible. Making sure they can find us online is important.

The first thing I ask people to do is actually click the follow button, and then to help even more rate the podcast on their podcasting service, or iTunes or Spotify. And that five stars means Google or iTunes starts paying attention to it. So podcasts with a lot of ratings get more visibility. And that’s what we need. There are examples of misogyny and how to figure out what is happening.

If someone types in infidelity, for example, it’s so much better to find Betrayal Trauma Recovery if you’re searching infidelity. Than finding that a wife causes infidelity, not meeting her husband’s needs. Or a wife not being safe enough for her husband, or something like that.

You’ll see things evolving over time with BTR as I learn better ways to describe things. As all of us know, it’s an ever evolving process to describe what we’re feeling and what is happening to us. And so I try to update the website over time and all the materials over time when I have a better way to describe something.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE: ENGAGING WITH BETRAYAL TRAUMA RECOVERY ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Anne: Another way to help other women know about this amazing community is to comment on the btr.org website. Because the way search engines work, the more interaction a website gets, the higher ranks on a search engine. Same thing with Instagram and Facebook, the more comments on each post, the more interaction, the more people see it. That algorithm is like, Hey, this is interesting. And they show it to more people.

So if you’ve been grateful for this podcast and want to help get the word out. Going to our YouTube channel and commenting on all of our videos, commenting on our posts. We’re on Instagram at. At btr.org_. And on Facebook, commenting on our posts.

We have some wonderful supportive women who are part of the emotional abuse support groups online, take five minutes a day while waiting for carpool. And they go through all of our posts on our social media platforms on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And in the comments, they just do an emoji, like a handclap or a 100. Or the celebration emoji. It can just be an emoji. You don’t even have to say anything. That helps the algorithm so much. So if you’ve been putting emojis on our social media posts or writing short comments on our website, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. .

That’s the cool part about this podcast. It’s by trauma survivors for trauma survivors. So we can make it whatever we want.

EXPERIENCING SUPPORT IN PERSON

Anne: So tell me about your experience being around so many women, like having come from an isolated state of not talking to anyone you felt understood by the emotional abuse support groups online by BTR.

Lacey: In my town, I didn’t find any groups that I felt comfortable going to. They didn’t focus on my specific need. I had such a hard time finding a counselor. And I felt like they listened, but maybe didn’t get it. I have friends and family that know that I’m separated. And they know that I’m hurting, but still, again, they don’t know the details or maybe how to listen with understanding.

Being around all these women, even if their situations weren’t the same, or if they hadn’t experienced the same thing, it just felt like they knew how to react appropriately and the right things to say. It felt so good to talk and not worry about filtering what I was saying or trying to remember what I had already told them, or is this person safe or not?

Or when am I going to run into them at the grocery store? You know, or do they know my husband? All these things that are constantly going through your mind when you’re at home and trying to know how to talk to people. None of that was there. And I was able to just talk and share my story, and not feel judged. Sometimes you just want to talk and have somebody listen, and it was a great experience.

Anne: Yes, it has always been my goal to create the best emotional abuse support group online. I have a podcast, a workshop or even quizzes to help you understand exactly what is happening to you.

EMOTIONAL ABUSE SUPPORT GROUPS ONLINE: GRATITUDE AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT

Anne: We do have a free emotional abuse quiz. To get that abuse quiz, click on the link. There are 19 different types of emotional abuse. I’ll talk about that in another episode. But you can also see what those are and take that quiz.

It’s really important to me to have a group at least once a day and multiple times a day. So that you can get support right away that actually helps you get to emotional safety. So many people don’t know what to tell you to do.

Lacey: I just want to throw out there that I’m sure donating helps continue how y’all are already working on spreading the word. I don’t know, I just want to throw that out there. Because I think everybody should donate, and uh, I want to help you any way I can.

Anne: We all built Betrayal Trauma Recovery. There’s no way I could have started it without the emotional or financial support of all the women listening, small and large. Betrayal Trauma Recovery support groups are full of amazing women. They are the best emotional abuse support groups online. And knowing that there was someone on the other side of the microphone listening to me, because when I would feel so dark and sad and just be speaking into a microphone in my basement.

And there’s no way I could have done it without you and without the coaches. So I’m very, very grateful that this is an organization by trauma survivors of trauma survivors. It’s a community that I’m part of, proud of, and grateful for.