May 21, 2021 • 16 mins
No one should stay in a marriage or relationship that is physically or emotionally hurtful. Dr. Saltz tells how to recognize the hallmarks of a bad situation, how to get out and get safe, and how to avoid repeating harmful patterns.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before today's episode, I just wanted to warn you all
that we will be covering sexual assault and abuse. If
this is going to be triggering for you, consider not
listening to this episode. Bees are challenging times, but you
don't have to navigate them alone. Welcome to How Can
(00:22):
I Help? I'm Dr Gayl Saltz. I'm a clinical Associate
Professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, a psychoanalyst,
and best selling author, and I'm here every week to
answer your most pressing questions, hopefully with understanding, insight and advice.
(00:44):
Today's question seems to be about when it's okay to
move on to a new relationship after a marriage has ended,
but actually it's about domestic abuse and its profound effect
on the victim. One in four women and one in
ten experience intimate partner violence, and violence can take various forms.
(01:06):
It can be psychological, physical, emotional, or sexual. People of
all races, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes, and religions
experience intimate partner violence. However, this violence has a disproportionate
effect on communities of color and other marginalized groups, economic instability,
(01:30):
on safe housing, neighborhood violence and lack of safe and
stable child care and social support can worsen an already
tenuous situation. Intimate partner violence as a public health issue
cannot be addressed without also addressing social factors, especially in
the context of a pandemic that has caused so much
(01:53):
social isolation. During this year, due to the pandemic, domestic
violence has risen in and reporting the violence for help
with intervention has gone down. The rise is due to
more economic strain, forced increased stress due to having children
home from school requiring care while parents juggle how to work,
(02:17):
more job loss, less access to safe spaces like shelters,
which close down in the pandemic, isolation of all family
members due to social distancing. The decrease of reporting is
due to many shelters and centers that help with domestic
violence victims support. Closing down and also being at home
(02:40):
all day with the partner means that there's no safe
way to speak to someone about what is going on
and how to help. Many victims are afraid to report.
They feel trapped because they don't have enough money or
they don't have a place to go. They've been threatened
about leaving maybe they fear for the well being of
(03:01):
their children and are overwhelmed about how they and their
children can be safe. If they do report, they need
support and a viable plan from community supports or a
family member or a friend, and they need a way
to have law enforcements support their safety once a plan
is established. Let's get to the question for to day.
(03:27):
Dear doctor Saltz. One year ago, just as the global
pandemic began to sweep our nation, I left an abusive
relationship of twenty three years. I had emotionally checked out
of this relationship about a decade prior to the pandemic.
I had worked for my spouse on his dairy farm
for the duration of the relationship. The cause of emotionally
(03:50):
checking out was when my spouse came home from two
weeks away. The entire time he was gone, I was
getting up at four in the morning and staying up
until eleven at night because I was holding down the fort,
so to speak, taking care of the farm as well
as our children. The day he was scheduled to return,
(04:14):
I showered and fell into bed, exhausted, knowing he would
be back to check on certain things about the farm.
He must have tried to awaken me, but I was
in a deep sleep when he sexually assaulted me. But
I had grown so accustomed to pandering to his every
whim I just prayed he would be done soon. I
(04:34):
didn't say anything. I felt like it was my fault
for going to sleep without wearing any underwear, like I
should have known he would need sex after being apart
two weeks. The next morning, I looked at myself in
the mirror and thought, one on Earth am I still
here for I began making plans to leave, but then
(04:56):
I heard on the news that a person in another
their place had stabbed his children to death to get
back at his ex wife. I could see my spouse
as capable of that, so I stayed. Long story short,
my children are bigger and stronger than he is, so
(05:16):
they're no longer in any physical danger when they're with him.
One is away at school and hasn't spoken to their
father in years. I felt a blissful sense of freedom
when I left him a year ago, But now I'm
beginning to long for companionship with someone new. How long
(05:37):
do I need to wait before beginning a new intimate relationship.
I heard a psychologist on another podcast saying we should
wait at least a decade before dating if we were
married for over twenty years. I'm in my fifties. I
feel like that's an excessive amount of time. I would
love to hear your opinion. This question is really tragic
(05:59):
for several reason. You have been living with a man
because you have been too afraid of what terrible, violent
thing he might do to your children were you to leave.
That pretty much tells me everything I need to know
about the quality of this relationship. This horreendous, abusive sex
act that was a turning point for you sounds like
(06:20):
it was predicated on a prior relationship that had built
into it. He can do what he wants to you,
and it's your fault. This is the hallmark of an
abusive relationship, and one it likely has not been safe
for you to stay in for the past decade, but
that you had managed by capitulating silently and carefully to
(06:43):
his demands. You say you worked for him on his farm,
not you worked with him and your farm. You felt
like the employee, the subservient servant, rather than a partner.
You clearly trapped and unable to leave due to your
fears about your children. Yet I hope other listeners will
(07:07):
hear that there are methods of leaving an abusive relationship
that utilizing the support of for example, the National Domestic
Violence Hotline eight hundred seven nine nine Safe or eight
hundred seven to three three to plan, how to devise
a place to go, to get financial support to leave,
(07:31):
how to organize to get police and legal protection for
yourself and your children. It's available and safer than staying.
How can I help with Dr Gayl Salts will be
back after this short break. That being said, men, any
(08:00):
abused women live in terror and stay terrified that their
abuser will harm them or harm their children in retaliation
for leaving, especially if their partner has threatened this, and
over time the partner has subsumed control, eroding the self
esteem of their victim until they have no will, completely helpless,
(08:25):
even feeling undeserving of anything, and too terrorized to move.
This is the psychological abuse piece that is integral to
intimate partner abuse. That you believed his sexual abuse was
your fault is indicative of this type of thinking and
(08:46):
your question do I need to wait some long period
of time before I'm allowed to find myself. Some modicum
of companionship and love also bespeaks the belief that you
are undeserving or can't have anything good for yourself. I
don't know any mental health professional that would say you
(09:08):
must wait a decade to search for a new partner,
no matter how long you've been married. The only advice
I would have about searching for a companionship, which you
should most definitely do and now if you'd like to,
is that you think about what psychological elements drew you
(09:28):
in the first place to an abusive man. This is
hugely important because without understanding your own attraction, the compulsion
to repeat can be strong, and many people re enter
another abusive relationship it feels familiar and becomes what they
(09:49):
see as love. Many people who end up in abusive
relationships have either witnessed abuse in their growing up, often
in their parents, or were subject to abuse as a child,
or were in an abusive relationship in their teens. You
may be able to unearth the origins of this pattern
(10:11):
on your own, or you may find you really need
to see a therapist for an objective trained outsider who
can help you to on earth and understand what drew
you to your first mate in the first place, what
happened in the relationship and in your mind, which is
often unconscious, that allows you to stay in this dynamic
(10:34):
all those years, and what the abuse did to your
sense of self worth, your self respect, belief that you
are deserving, and the ability to hold these things more
dear to yourself than any partner. This is crucial to
understand about yourself before you choose another permanent partner with
(10:56):
whom to have a healthy relationship. These personal insights have
no timeline. I urge you to start the thought process now.
I urge you to look for any signs of a
potentially abusive partner. A wish to separate you from friends
or other family members, to isolate you, to have control
(11:20):
over what you do or where or who you're with.
A need to keep tabs on where you are or
who you communicate with. Someone who either ignores your wishes, opinions,
and needs, or who outright tells you they don't matter,
are not as important or valuable as his. Someone who
(11:43):
goes back and forth between professing love and full of compliments,
an angry outbursts with negative judgments of your opinions, your appearance,
your choices, actions, and the other people in your life.
These are all signs of a potentially abusive relationship and partner.
(12:07):
You also mention that you've been checked out emotionally of
this relationship for ten years. This is another reason I
would not put a timeline on how soon to start
dating after the end of a marriage. It really depends
somewhat on when this relationship emotionally ended, as opposed to
when it legally ended. Many people stay in emotionally dead
(12:32):
marriages for all kinds of reasons, financial the children, health insurance,
one partner seriously ill or too mentally compromised to engage
inertia and abuse. The legal ending is often arbitrary, and
the emotional end, as in I have stopped emotionally engaging
(12:57):
with my partner in any way and I just exist
with you like roommates, is often the actual end of
the marriage, particularly if there is no attempt to repair
it along the way. Often enough, I see a person
who is not only emotionally checked out, but in addition
has mourned the loss of the relationship, and by the
(13:20):
time the legal divorce happens, they are truly ready to
date and find someone new. What is most important is
that each individual take the time to analyze what went
wrong in the relationship and why, and most importantly, what
in their personal psychology they brought to this choice of partner.
(13:45):
What did they bring to their way of handling what
went on in the relationship, what they brought to patterns
of dysfunction in communication, in relating in sects. What's important
is to own their peace their part so that they
can make a better and healthier choice of partner and
(14:06):
a way of behaving and communicating in future relationships. So,
in a nutshell, I advise you to not wait to
start yourself analysis and start looking for some happiness and
companionship in your current life. I hope that was helpful.
(14:28):
This past year of lockdowns and tremendous uncertainty has caused
many women to become lockdown with abusive partners. Partners who,
in feeling they have lost control in many areas of
their life, become more abusive as a means of gaining
more control and unfortunately over their victim partner. Numbers from
(14:54):
the initial lockdown showed domestic violence to have risen eight
point one percent the previous year, with women particularly having
been affected, and this number is likely to be a
low number compared to the actual numbers, as domestic violence
is classically underreported, which brings me to my concluding thought.
(15:19):
It often takes someone in the abused person's life to
notice and help them. If you see someone you care
about increasingly withdrawn, anxious, defeated, any signs of bruising or
other injury explained away as accidents, or wearing long sleeves
(15:41):
and warm weather sunglasses, and other means of hiding signs
of injury. If they suddenly and repeatedly can't meet, can't talk,
ask them about abuse in a safe way for them,
which means in person and in private. Don't ask them
(16:03):
via text, which are likely to be monitored by a
violent partner. Then give them resources to get help, make
calls for them which they might not be able to
do without privacy. Help them find a safe place to
go and have some resources to go with you and
(16:26):
be saving their life. Do you have a problem I
can help with? If so, email me at how can
I help? At Seneca women dot com. All senders remain
anonymous and listen every Friday too. How can I help
with me? Dr Gale Salts
Before today's episode, I just wanted to warn you all
that we will be covering sexual assault and abuse. If
this is going to be triggering for you, consider not
listening to this episode. Bees are challenging times, but you
don't have to navigate them alone. Welcome to How Can
(00:22):
I Help? I'm Dr Gayl Saltz. I'm a clinical Associate
Professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, a psychoanalyst,
and best selling author, and I'm here every week to
answer your most pressing questions, hopefully with understanding, insight and advice.
(00:44):
Today's question seems to be about when it's okay to
move on to a new relationship after a marriage has ended,
but actually it's about domestic abuse and its profound effect
on the victim. One in four women and one in
ten experience intimate partner violence, and violence can take various forms.
(01:06):
It can be psychological, physical, emotional, or sexual. People of
all races, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes, and religions
experience intimate partner violence. However, this violence has a disproportionate
effect on communities of color and other marginalized groups, economic instability,
(01:30):
on safe housing, neighborhood violence and lack of safe and
stable child care and social support can worsen an already
tenuous situation. Intimate partner violence as a public health issue
cannot be addressed without also addressing social factors, especially in
the context of a pandemic that has caused so much
(01:53):
social isolation. During this year, due to the pandemic, domestic
violence has risen in and reporting the violence for help
with intervention has gone down. The rise is due to
more economic strain, forced increased stress due to having children
home from school requiring care while parents juggle how to work,
(02:17):
more job loss, less access to safe spaces like shelters,
which close down in the pandemic, isolation of all family
members due to social distancing. The decrease of reporting is
due to many shelters and centers that help with domestic
violence victims support. Closing down and also being at home
(02:40):
all day with the partner means that there's no safe
way to speak to someone about what is going on
and how to help. Many victims are afraid to report.
They feel trapped because they don't have enough money or
they don't have a place to go. They've been threatened
about leaving maybe they fear for the well being of
(03:01):
their children and are overwhelmed about how they and their
children can be safe. If they do report, they need
support and a viable plan from community supports or a
family member or a friend, and they need a way
to have law enforcements support their safety once a plan
is established. Let's get to the question for to day.
(03:27):
Dear doctor Saltz. One year ago, just as the global
pandemic began to sweep our nation, I left an abusive
relationship of twenty three years. I had emotionally checked out
of this relationship about a decade prior to the pandemic.
I had worked for my spouse on his dairy farm
for the duration of the relationship. The cause of emotionally
(03:50):
checking out was when my spouse came home from two
weeks away. The entire time he was gone, I was
getting up at four in the morning and staying up
until eleven at night because I was holding down the fort,
so to speak, taking care of the farm as well
as our children. The day he was scheduled to return,
(04:14):
I showered and fell into bed, exhausted, knowing he would
be back to check on certain things about the farm.
He must have tried to awaken me, but I was
in a deep sleep when he sexually assaulted me. But
I had grown so accustomed to pandering to his every
whim I just prayed he would be done soon. I
(04:34):
didn't say anything. I felt like it was my fault
for going to sleep without wearing any underwear, like I
should have known he would need sex after being apart
two weeks. The next morning, I looked at myself in
the mirror and thought, one on Earth am I still
here for I began making plans to leave, but then
(04:56):
I heard on the news that a person in another
their place had stabbed his children to death to get
back at his ex wife. I could see my spouse
as capable of that, so I stayed. Long story short,
my children are bigger and stronger than he is, so
(05:16):
they're no longer in any physical danger when they're with him.
One is away at school and hasn't spoken to their
father in years. I felt a blissful sense of freedom
when I left him a year ago, But now I'm
beginning to long for companionship with someone new. How long
(05:37):
do I need to wait before beginning a new intimate relationship.
I heard a psychologist on another podcast saying we should
wait at least a decade before dating if we were
married for over twenty years. I'm in my fifties. I
feel like that's an excessive amount of time. I would
love to hear your opinion. This question is really tragic
(05:59):
for several reason. You have been living with a man
because you have been too afraid of what terrible, violent
thing he might do to your children were you to leave.
That pretty much tells me everything I need to know
about the quality of this relationship. This horreendous, abusive sex
act that was a turning point for you sounds like
(06:20):
it was predicated on a prior relationship that had built
into it. He can do what he wants to you,
and it's your fault. This is the hallmark of an
abusive relationship, and one it likely has not been safe
for you to stay in for the past decade, but
that you had managed by capitulating silently and carefully to
(06:43):
his demands. You say you worked for him on his farm,
not you worked with him and your farm. You felt
like the employee, the subservient servant, rather than a partner.
You clearly trapped and unable to leave due to your
fears about your children. Yet I hope other listeners will
(07:07):
hear that there are methods of leaving an abusive relationship
that utilizing the support of for example, the National Domestic
Violence Hotline eight hundred seven nine nine Safe or eight
hundred seven to three three to plan, how to devise
a place to go, to get financial support to leave,
(07:31):
how to organize to get police and legal protection for
yourself and your children. It's available and safer than staying.
How can I help with Dr Gayl Salts will be
back after this short break. That being said, men, any
(08:00):
abused women live in terror and stay terrified that their
abuser will harm them or harm their children in retaliation
for leaving, especially if their partner has threatened this, and
over time the partner has subsumed control, eroding the self
esteem of their victim until they have no will, completely helpless,
(08:25):
even feeling undeserving of anything, and too terrorized to move.
This is the psychological abuse piece that is integral to
intimate partner abuse. That you believed his sexual abuse was
your fault is indicative of this type of thinking and
(08:46):
your question do I need to wait some long period
of time before I'm allowed to find myself. Some modicum
of companionship and love also bespeaks the belief that you
are undeserving or can't have anything good for yourself. I
don't know any mental health professional that would say you
(09:08):
must wait a decade to search for a new partner,
no matter how long you've been married. The only advice
I would have about searching for a companionship, which you
should most definitely do and now if you'd like to,
is that you think about what psychological elements drew you
(09:28):
in the first place to an abusive man. This is
hugely important because without understanding your own attraction, the compulsion
to repeat can be strong, and many people re enter
another abusive relationship it feels familiar and becomes what they
(09:49):
see as love. Many people who end up in abusive
relationships have either witnessed abuse in their growing up, often
in their parents, or were subject to abuse as a child,
or were in an abusive relationship in their teens. You
may be able to unearth the origins of this pattern
(10:11):
on your own, or you may find you really need
to see a therapist for an objective trained outsider who
can help you to on earth and understand what drew
you to your first mate in the first place, what
happened in the relationship and in your mind, which is
often unconscious, that allows you to stay in this dynamic
(10:34):
all those years, and what the abuse did to your
sense of self worth, your self respect, belief that you
are deserving, and the ability to hold these things more
dear to yourself than any partner. This is crucial to
understand about yourself before you choose another permanent partner with
(10:56):
whom to have a healthy relationship. These personal insights have
no timeline. I urge you to start the thought process now.
I urge you to look for any signs of a
potentially abusive partner. A wish to separate you from friends
or other family members, to isolate you, to have control
(11:20):
over what you do or where or who you're with.
A need to keep tabs on where you are or
who you communicate with. Someone who either ignores your wishes, opinions,
and needs, or who outright tells you they don't matter,
are not as important or valuable as his. Someone who
(11:43):
goes back and forth between professing love and full of compliments,
an angry outbursts with negative judgments of your opinions, your appearance,
your choices, actions, and the other people in your life.
These are all signs of a potentially abusive relationship and partner.
(12:07):
You also mention that you've been checked out emotionally of
this relationship for ten years. This is another reason I
would not put a timeline on how soon to start
dating after the end of a marriage. It really depends
somewhat on when this relationship emotionally ended, as opposed to
when it legally ended. Many people stay in emotionally dead
(12:32):
marriages for all kinds of reasons, financial the children, health insurance,
one partner seriously ill or too mentally compromised to engage
inertia and abuse. The legal ending is often arbitrary, and
the emotional end, as in I have stopped emotionally engaging
(12:57):
with my partner in any way and I just exist
with you like roommates, is often the actual end of
the marriage, particularly if there is no attempt to repair
it along the way. Often enough, I see a person
who is not only emotionally checked out, but in addition
has mourned the loss of the relationship, and by the
(13:20):
time the legal divorce happens, they are truly ready to
date and find someone new. What is most important is
that each individual take the time to analyze what went
wrong in the relationship and why, and most importantly, what
in their personal psychology they brought to this choice of partner.
(13:45):
What did they bring to their way of handling what
went on in the relationship, what they brought to patterns
of dysfunction in communication, in relating in sects. What's important
is to own their peace their part so that they
can make a better and healthier choice of partner and
(14:06):
a way of behaving and communicating in future relationships. So,
in a nutshell, I advise you to not wait to
start yourself analysis and start looking for some happiness and
companionship in your current life. I hope that was helpful.
(14:28):
This past year of lockdowns and tremendous uncertainty has caused
many women to become lockdown with abusive partners. Partners who,
in feeling they have lost control in many areas of
their life, become more abusive as a means of gaining
more control and unfortunately over their victim partner. Numbers from
(14:54):
the initial lockdown showed domestic violence to have risen eight
point one percent the previous year, with women particularly having
been affected, and this number is likely to be a
low number compared to the actual numbers, as domestic violence
is classically underreported, which brings me to my concluding thought.
(15:19):
It often takes someone in the abused person's life to
notice and help them. If you see someone you care
about increasingly withdrawn, anxious, defeated, any signs of bruising or
other injury explained away as accidents, or wearing long sleeves
(15:41):
and warm weather sunglasses, and other means of hiding signs
of injury. If they suddenly and repeatedly can't meet, can't talk,
ask them about abuse in a safe way for them,
which means in person and in private. Don't ask them
(16:03):
via text, which are likely to be monitored by a
violent partner. Then give them resources to get help, make
calls for them which they might not be able to
do without privacy. Help them find a safe place to
go and have some resources to go with you and
(16:26):
be saving their life. Do you have a problem I
can help with? If so, email me at how can
I help? At Seneca women dot com. All senders remain
anonymous and listen every Friday too. How can I help
with me? Dr Gale Salts
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