How to Tell Emotional Abuse vs Normal Conflict – Natalie’s Story
Description
What’s the difference between emotional abuse and normal conflict? I’ll dive into that below. When we’re figuring out the difference between emotional abuse vs normal conflict, it’s important to focus on emotional safety either way.
Step one would be to take an emotional abuse quiz to see if what you’re experiencing is emotional abuse.
Understanding Emotional Abuse vs Normal Conflict
Emotional Abuse: Emotional abuse is manipulating someone’s emotions to exploit them. Because it’s aim is exploitation, it causes significant damage to the victim’s sense of self.
Normal Conflict: Normal conflicts are an inevitable part of any relationship. These types of benign conflicts are caused by differences in opinions, values, or expectations, but there’s no exploitation involved. Normal conflicts happen with two healthy people who care about each other and want the best for each other.
When a husband uses online explicit material or cheats on his wife, it’s a form of emotional abuse that deeply affects her. Normal conflicts don’t cause infidelty, it’s emotional abuse.
What Is Emotional Safety
Many women in the Betrayal Trauma Recovery Community share stories of feeling alone—when friends dismiss their accounts of emotional abuse. Sometimes clergy or therapists discount emotional abuse victims, especially when their emotionally abusive husband lies to the clergy or therapist about what’s going on.
In many religious communities, marriage is more important than a person’s feelings or emotional safety. Which doesn’t make sense, since the point of marriage is emotional safety. This type of abuse violates the essence of marriage. Choosing safety doesn’t mean ending your marriage. Your husband’s decision to be emotionally abusive has already broken that trust.
At Betrayal Trauma Recovery, we emphasize that safety encompasses several aspects of life:
- Physical Safety: Make sure you meet basic needs like shelter, food, and clothing. Removing yourself from immediate emotional threats.
- Emotional and Psychological Safety: Finding an environment where you can express yourself without fear of judgment or retaliation.
- Spiritual Safety: Your beliefs are respected and not used against you.
- Financial Safety: Gaining control over your financial resources and decisions.
- Sexual Safety: Having autonomy over your own body and choices.
Steps To Begin Your Journey:
- Separate Yourself from Harm:
- Enroll in The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Workshop to learn what type of abuse you’re dealing with (or even if he’s actually abusive), and then what strategies to use to keep yourself emotionally safe.
- Surround Yourself with Support:
- Practice Self-Care:
- Focus on basic needs like nutrition, hydration, and sleep to maintain your physical health.
- Educate Yourself About Abuse:
Transcript: How to Tell Emotional Abuse vs Normal Conflict
Anne: Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery. This is Anne. I’m so excited to have Natalie on today’s episode. She’s the author of All the Scary Little Gods, and I’m so excited to have her on today. Welcome, Natalie.
<figure class="wp-block-image aligncenter size-full">
</figure>Natalie: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.
Anne: You’re amazing. I’ve always appreciated your work. Especially all the interesting and fascinating deconstruction that you do with spiritual abuse. I love it. You’re so smart. And it’s just, it’s fun to have you here.
Let’s start by talking about your new book, All the Scary Little Gods.
Natalie: I wanted to tell my story. Because I wanted to help women stuck in fundamentalist programming. Who maybe weren’t able to read. Or had the capacity and interest in reading a scholarly type or non-fiction book about deprogramming. In fact, that might even scare them off a little bit. But they might want to read a story about it.
So, instead of telling people how to walk this journey, you know, do step one, two, and three. I wanted to show them what a potential journey of deprogramming and deconstructing might look like. Especially for women who weren’t ready to give up their faith. But wanted to figure out how their faith aligned with goodness and love and their core values. I think it was like the English teacher in me saying, show, don’t tell.
Anne: I loved that it felt so honest, you are expressing that inner dialogue. Helping women know you’re not crazy. Everybody thinks these things.
Discussing All Types of Emotional Abuse
Natalie: Yes, exactly. The first part I wrote from my younger self. So you kind of hear about my childhood from that perspective. And it can be kind of humorous, because as adults read it, we can see what’s going on, but the child is clueless.
And then there’s a lot of arguing and disagreement inside of me throughout part two. As to what is the best course of action in any given situation. I was in a very religious environment that was oppressive. But I had bought into it hook, line and sinker because I grew up in an environment like that.
Fortunately, I kept journals. And when I read through them, I heard the arguments inside of me. Part of me would argue in my journal and think one way, and then another part of me would think a different way. And so I just started listening to those parts of me and figuring out, like, what were their concerns?
I had many different kinds of concerns that were almost contradictory in many ways. I think a lot of us do. Many of us have conflicting thoughts inside of us. And then we think, am I schizophrenic? Am I crazy? What is my problem? Why do I know one thing with my head? But then on the other hand, I keep making these other decisions over here, and I can’t seem to get any traction in my life.
Anne: Can you talk about those concepts of deprogramming? The effects of spiritual abuse are so damaging how did you figure out for yourself if faith is right for you?
Deprogramming & Deconstructing Faith
Natalie: I feel like it’s a very individual process. If I said, Oh, well, my path led me down this road, and I kept my Christian faith. And so therefore, that’s the right way. Then all I’m doing is repeating what I grew up with. So I think giving yourself freedom to sift through the beliefs you maybe have. And decide which ones have served you in your life and have served the people around you.
And actually align with what you choose to believe about a creator God. Or however you want to describe that God and which ones don’t. Because for me, I kind of boiled it down to love. And when I looked at the life of Jesus Christ and what he represented, I decided he represented love and was a deconstructionist.
So when we deconstruct, I feel like we’re walking in the footsteps of Jesus, whether we align ourselves with him or not. That’s what we’re doing. I decided that love was the bottom line for me. What about my faith was actually expansive or expanding love in my own life for myself first. Then for my family, and then for those around me into the world, and what things were actually fostering more oppression, more abuse, more control and power over systems.
I realized that much of what I believed actually contradicted love. So I removed things from my life and focused on emotional abuse vs normal conflict. I also opened myself up to my children choosing their own paths, with some deciding to completely walk away from their faith.
The Concept Of Love In Faith
Natalie: I don’t have any fear about that anymore, like I used to. But again, it’s because of what I now believe about God. I was scared of God before. Because the God I worshiped was very little and scary. I bowed down, worshiped, placated and catered to many other little scary gods in my life. That sort of represented that scary God. I needed to get rid of that kind of thinking to truly love myself and other people.
And honestly, in order to really love God. I don’t think that when we’re afraid of something, we can enter intimacy and love for that other person.
Anne:<
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