Self Care After Emotional Abuse: Here’s How To Heal

Are you struggling with self care after emotional abuse? Here are 6 ways to help yourself heal.

Did you know there are 19 types of emotional abuse? To start your healing journey, first take this free emotional abuse quiz to determine exactly what type of emotional abuse you experienced.

When They Call You Crazy: Self-Care Tip

Tragically, their abusive partner, their families, friends, and others call many victims of betrayal, and relational abuse implicitly or outright “crazy.”

The implications of being labeled crazy, codependent, and overly sensitive are intensely damaging to already-fragile victims. Others condition victims of relational abuse and betrayal to believe what others tell them, especially negative things about themselves (the victims).

If you have been told that you are crazy, or any other distressing label, know that you are not crazy and you are not alone.

One helpful self care after emotional abuse tip for women who have been treated so insidiously by others, is to find a safe person, or safe community, to validate you, support you, and answer your questions.

When Everything Feels Confusing: Self-Care Tip

Anne compares living in an abusive relationship to ending up stranded in the mountainous wilderness. You’ve survived, but you have no idea where you are, or how you will return to civilization alive.

As victims try to understand what is happening to them, they may feel overwhelmed, depressed, and even terrified. Most women do not consider themselves victims of abuse until they have learned about abuse and trauma. Covert abuse is notoriously difficult to detect, and when victims spend their time trying to appease their abusive and unfaithful partner, they simply don’t have the time or energy to discern the abuse.

If you are confused, lonely, and afraid to make decisions, a self-care after emotional abuse action that you might take is setting safety boundaries. Simply deciding what makes you feel safe emotionally, physically, and spiritually – versus what makes you feel unsafe. Jotting these points in a journal or on your computer may help you better understand your current safety level and what decisions you can make to increase your safety.

When Life Is Falling Apart: Self-Care Tip

Most victims of betrayal and abuse eventually reach a place where life feels completely unraveled.

If you’re having trouble with the day-to-day tasks, or if the grief seems overwhelming to you, or if your husband’s “addiction” and all his recovery efforts have completely swallowed your self-care or identity, I invite you to take a step back, detach a little bit, and think, ‘What do I need to take care of myself? What habits do I need?

Anne Blythe, founder of Betrayal Trauma Recovery

The chaos that abusive men create in relationships, families, and communities is so immense and overpowering that victims may feel that getting out of bed each day is an enormous feat, only possible with incredible grit and willpower.

If you are feeling this level of trauma and exhaustion, consider your health with these questions:

• Did I eat enough today?
• Am I hydrated?
• If I’m not sleeping well at night, can I take a nap today?

When women experience betrayal trauma, their bodies react by shutting down or going into hyper-drive. As victims decide to protect and nourish their own bodies through nutrition, hydration, and rest. They are better equipped to continue their journey to healing. I created the Meditations in The Living Free Workshop to help women immediately get relief from some of this trauma.

Betrayal Trauma Recovery Supports Victims of Betrayal and Abuse

At BTR, we understand betrayal trauma in marriage and the paralyzing devastation of abuse. Every single woman who has gone through this debilitating trauma deserves a safe place to process reality, ask important questions, express difficult feelings, and make connections with other victims.

The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group meets daily in every time zone and offers women a community of validation, support, and compassion. Join today and begin practicing the self care that will help you find true safety.

Transcript: Self Care After Emotional Abuse

Anne: Before I get to today’s topic, which is from a Wall Street Journal article entitled Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazies. And also give you a self care update about where I am in my self care situation. I want to talk about Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group. It is our daily support group. And we have 26 sessions per week in a four week month. That’s 104 sessions per month, which equals 156 live hours with a professional coach.

That is the least expensive professional live support in the world. That comes down to 80 cents per hour. And we built it that way on purpose. Why did we do it like that? Because we’ve been through it. When I went through it, I didn’t know how to pay the bills. I literally didn’t know how to buy groceries, because my ex cut off my bank account and didn’t give me money for groceries.

So I know that money is on your mind. And we wanted to ensure that you can get high quality support for very low cost. And we have professional individual sessions. Whatever works for you, works for us.

I also want to talk about why Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group is completely online. It is because I was a bit agoraphobic when the trauma first hit. I didn’t want to go anywhere, put my bra on, or get out of bed. I mean, I was having a hard time. So we wanted to remove all barriers to getting help and self care after emotional abuse.

Self care after emotional abuse: Forming Real Connections Online

Anne: Some days have five sessions a day. You never have to get childcare, put your bra or makeup on. You don’t have to pay for gas, or need a car and can come online and talk to real people.

And even though it’s online, you can form amazing close relationships. So many other services out there, you’re texting a faceless coach, and they might not get back to you right away. You might be just watching modules or videos, but you’re not actually able to share your story and feel the love coming back to you.

Check out the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session schedule, click on this link. We built this with you in mind, for you, to meet your specific needs for self care after emotional abuse based on what we went through and based on what our needs were. We don’t want any other woman in the world to suffer in isolation or to try and get help and get the wrong kind of help, okay.

Okay, on to today’s topic. So my amazing mother, who’s been on the podcast before, who you have heard, she is a reader. One of the things she reads is the Wall Street Journal and in an interview with Paul McHugh by Abigail Shrier, I hope I’m pronouncing their names accurately. It is entitled Standing Against Psychiatry’s Crazies.

Paul McHugh’s Perspective

Anne: In a nutshell, what this article says is that sometimes the psychiatric or therapeutic community doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And I’m thinking about betrayal trauma. Sometimes when others give women this awful diagnosis, this is an example of armchair psychology. Or they diagnose them as codependent. Or they tell them, you’ve got all these problems that you need to resolve.

When victims of abuse should be told, this is an abuse situation. This is going to be painful, but you will get better. Like, what you are going through is completely normal, and how you’re feeling is completely normal, and you are completely normal. As you work toward healing, you’re going to be fine. It’s hard to feel that when we’re going through it, but that’s the truth. Especially if we walk toward healing and self care after this kind of abuse. And this is what it says.

His contrarian roots run deep. He was a diminutive boy in the 1940s. When psychoanalysts had popularized the notion that physical deficiencies, including short stature, produced inferiority complexes. Especially in boys and men, he became a prime candidate for the experimental growth hormone therapies. But Paul’s father, a school teacher, decided against the treatments recommended for his son.

Shortness wouldn’t be the worst problem he’d have to face, the Elder McHugh reasoned. As it turned out, the animal derived pituitary treatments were ineffective. The human derived form sometimes carries infectious agents that cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Again, I don’t know if I correctly pronounced that, an incurable degenerative brain disorder.

Critique of DSM Checklist Psychiatry

Anne: He says, “I know my life would have been easier if I had four or five more inches,” says McHugh. Who now stands five foot six, but his childhood experience taught him a lesson that helped him become a giant in this field. Sometimes psychiatry’s cure is far worse than the disease.

McHugh believes that psychiatrists first order of business should determine whether a mental disorder is determined by something the patient has. A disease of the brain or something the patient is or something a patient is doing. Behavior such as self-starvation or something the patient has encountered a traumatic or otherwise disorienting experience.

Practitioners too often practice what he calls DSM checklist psychiatry. “Matching up symptoms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with the goal of achieving diagnosis. Rather than inquiring deeply into the sources and nature of an affliction. I came into psychiatry with the perception that it had not matured as a clinical science in which rational practices are directed by information on the causes and mechanisms of the disorders,” Dr. McHugh says.

Every other medical discipline has that. He still regards psychiatry is in need of organizing principles. “That’s putting it mildly,” says the author of the article, Abigail Schreier.

Self care after emotional abuse from Sex Addiction

Anne: So let’s talk about this concept in the context of addiction. What we see right now is a slew of words. Addiction, pornography addiction, intimacy disorder, intimacy anorexia, compulsive disorder. People are trying to figure out what to label these behaviors. At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we’ve made it really simple. It’s called abuse. All these behaviors can be under the umbrella of abuse.

And these behaviors need to stop. The victim of these behaviors needs to learn a new skill, which is setting boundaries. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with her. She’s not codependent or crazy. She not in this situation because she had a messed up childhood, she’s just fine. And she will grieve, because she’s a victim of abuse, obviously. She needs to learn a new set of skills and self care that she hadn’t learned before because of emotional abuse.

It’s like if you were in a plane crash in the middle of the mountains, and you survived. But you didn’t know where you were, and you had to learn new skills in that moment. You might have to learn how to hike if you’ve never hiked before. You might have to learn how to. start a fire. And you might have to learn a bunch of different things. We’ve all seen survival movies. The most famous might be Cast Away, where when he lands on the island, he doesn’t know how to spear a fish.

He doesn’t know how to open a coconut. He doesn’t know how to make rope. And in the five years he spends on that island, he learns a ton of amazing survival skills.

Personal Self Care Journey

Anne: That’s how it is to be in an abusive relationship. There’s nothing wrong with you. Your husband victimized you, and now you need to learn new skills. And the skills that you’ll learn from this experience will benefit you the rest of your life. Just like the skills someone learned in a survival scenario would benefit them the rest of their lives.

One of the skills I’m learning I did well when I was single before I got married. So I got married when I was 30, and I had my oldest son 10 months later or-ish. I’m so bad with time. I was married in August and had my son in July, so I don’t know how many months that is. Immediately when I married, my self care sort of fell apart. Before, when I was single, I could work out every day. I ate well, I made sure that if I had an injury, I got into the doctor.

I’ve always loved extreme sports, well individual sports might be the better word, like skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, rowing, those types of sports. And so I’d had several neck injuries from all my adventures and I had had a few neck surgeries. And so going to the chiropractor was important. When I did yoga every day back then, I was good at that.

But after getting married, it was like my whole world got off kilter. I gave up my entire life for him. So I left my job that I loved. I worked at the same school for six years and loved my friends there. I developed my own program, and my job was exactly what I wanted as a school teacher.

self care after emotional abuse: Husband’s arrest Pulled me out of a terrible situation

Anne: And I chose to leave all that and go on an adventure for my husband. So everything kind of got thrown off and I just basically gave up everything to be a couple or to be with him and to make our life together. And then everything centered around him and his moods and what I could do for him and, you know, all this stuff.

When he got arrested because of an abuse incident, he was suddenly gone. I needed to focus on myself, which I should have done before. I should have had that skill. But I was just in this vortex of abuse, and I was so confused and couldn’t figure out how to get out. One of the things that has struck me lately is that God literally like pulled me out of a terrible situation. I had been praying, I had been wondering what to do, and then my ex got arrested and I got the protective order, which I had never even considered.

And so then I held it, but I didn’t know how to do any of those things before that happened to me. So I’m not this amazing, like wise person who quickly got myself out of an abusive situation. Well, no, it was a disaster and a complete mess. And the only reason why I ended up out of it and seeing it for what it was, was because of that arrest.

And I am so grateful. It happened suddenly and it was super traumatic, but it was the right thing. Let’s talk about self care after emotional abuse. This has been hard for me for the past 10 years of my life.

Self care after emotional abuse: Atomic Habits and Daily Routines

Anne: So I recently read a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I would highly recommend to everyone. It was an eye opener for me about how to structure daily habits in a way that works for me. In reading that book, I realized that part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for me to do daily self care is because I had to think about every little thing because I didn’t have any established habits.

So, making the bed was super difficult. Like, if I got it done, it was a miracle. Putting eyedrops in was a miracle. My eyes are problematic in many ways. And one of them is that I’m an impartial blinker, and there’s nothing you can do to control it. It’s involuntary. When the doctor told me I was like, Oh, that’s a good to know.

At least some part of me is impartial to something, because I have an opinion about everything. When I found that out, I knew I needed to do eyedrops every day, but doing that was difficult. Just basically getting anything done was hard. I could only do one thing a day. And I remember talking to my sister, she said, okay, what are the things you need to do?

And I was like, I want to read my scriptures every day. I want to pray every day. I’m pretty good at that. I usually get that done, but it’s not like always at the same time. I want to exercise, and eat right. Also I want to spend more time with my kids. I want to make my bed or, you know, whatever. And, we’d make these goals, and it seemed so overwhelming to add self care after this kind of abuse.

Structuring Habits For Self Care

Anne: I couldn’t do all the things. I could only do one thing. At the beginning of the self care process, I would be like, I made my bed today, and then everything else would fall apart. Or, I put eye drops in, and then everything else would fall apart. This book has helped me structure my habits so that I don’t have to think about self care.

Now I have turned the corner. I make my bed every day without much thought, which is awesome. I put eyedrops in. And I am exercising every day. Now I’m going to yoga. The dishes get done in a more easy fashion. So if you’re having trouble with the day-to-day tasks, or if the grief seems overwhelming to you. Or if your husband’s “addiction,” and all his recovery efforts, have completely swallowed your self care or identity. The whole goal here is to start taking care of yourself. That’s the goal here.

And if he chooses to stop being abusive, great. And if he doesn’t, either way, you are on the path to a happy and peaceful life. One of the things I decided to do is what I call a weekly self care power hour. And I’m going to cycle through six things every six weeks. And one of them will be a meditation from the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Workshop. That’s going to be a little different than my daily self care. I don’t know what self care will look like for you.

It might look like making your bed every day, it might look like meditating every day, it might look like praying and reading your scriptures every day. Those are all the things I do in my self care.

Skills For the rest of your life

Anne: Part of your self care might be attending a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group session for your self care power hour. It might be an individual session with one of our coaches.

The theme of today’s episode is you’re not crazy. You are not sick. Your husband or ex lies about what happened in order to discredit you.There is nothing wrong with you. You are just in a survival situation, and the exciting thing is that the skills you learn right now will benefit you the rest of your life.

If I were you, and I’m listening, and it was me back four years ago. I would have wanted to say, this lady, I don’t like her. She doesn’t get it. She doesn’t understand how painful it is. That’s what I would have said four years ago. So if you’re saying that right now, it’s okay. I have been there, but I’m also feeling so good. Because I’ve come out the other side. And what helped me do that was an amazing network of women who understood. The education that came to me due to studying abuse led me to where I am now, and I’m so grateful.