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. Does The Online Emotional Abuse Support Group Have Other Resources? The best emotional abuse support groups online have educational resources like a podcast, workshops, or even quizes 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. DoEs The Online Emotional Abuse Support Group Cover All Types of Emotional Abuse? If the support group doesn’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. Does the Support Group 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. Does The Emotional Abuse Support Group 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. Transcript: Here’s What Makes The Best Emotional Abuse Support Groups Online I have Elizabeth Estabrooks, MSW on today’s episode. She’s a writer, speaker, author with subject matter expertise on survivors of [00:03:00] 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 was appointed to 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. 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. [00:04:00] Women have been serving since the American Revolution. But a lot of 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. 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 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, they were sent 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. They weren’t considered real military members. That was the status of women. So in 1948, Truman signed the Women Armed [00:05:00] 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 women were informally called WAVES. They had separate training. Their training included things like how to wear makeup. Then they disbanded in 1977 and Jimmy Carter being a feminist, said, “We have to do better.” They began sending 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: Can I tell you how honored I am to be talking to you right now. Like this is a huge deal and I am so proud of you. Elizabeth: Thank you. So, I talk about this in my book, we’re all a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds. You start out at the welcome center and then you get on the bus and they [00:06:00] take you to the company where you’ll do your basic training. There’s camaraderie, we’re all joking and laughing and being a bunch of teenage boys and girls. And we get off the bus and we hustle into a formation, which was ragged as hell. ‘ Cause we didn’t really 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. 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 we could hear mumbles of, ” Yeah, You don’t belong here and we don’t have to be [00:07:00] nice to you. The drill sergeants just gave us permission.” When I was writing the book, it occurred to me that what they were doing was setting 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.” Throughout basic training, there was a lot of real sexualized, sexist, 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 of the obscene sounds and gestures that you can imagine. 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 that you finished. So I finished it six weeks cause I was like, I gotta get the hell outta here. Anne: Yeah. Elizabeth: Then I was stationed in [00:08:00] 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 being grabbed, assaulted in various ways. I consider myself lucky that I was one of the few women who was never raped during her military service. This was ongoing. It was every single minute of every single day that I was in uniform on base. Anne: I am so sorry from that, the overall feeling would have to be my government doesn’t care about me as much as it cares about men. That’s the vibe. Elizabeth: Yeah, we’re 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 women who were pregnant to remain in the military. Up until that time, if you got pregnant while you were in the military, legally they could throw you out. Even though you could have a baby while you were in the military, you couldn’t [00:09:00] join the military if you had babies unless you gave up custody. Anne: Wow, so no man has to give up custody to join the military, but women do. Elizabeth: That’s exactly what I said to the recruiter. And he said, “Oh, they’ve got wives and mothers. We don’t have to worry about them with their children.” Anne: That’s crazy. Elizabeth: That’s what he said 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 just never gonna happen.” We were gonna join on the buddy system and so I went ahead and 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 of that because I was a young feminist. I understood discrimination and pay gap and all of that stuff, even at that age. So I was shocked when I began understanding. Anne: Institutional mysogyny. Elizabeth: That’s exactly exactly right. I stayed in, they tried to push me out, but I [00:10:00] 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. They had told me when I joined, okay, you’re gonna be active duty for three years and then you have to join the reserves. Stay at the reserves for three years when you get out. When I left, they told me, “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 whole lot going on around that. OJ Simpson had killed, Denise Brown and Ron Goldman. When something national like that happens, instills fear in every survivor and victim across the country. No matter how long they’ve been separated from their abusive partner and we were dealing with that. I [00:11:00] got a shelter funded and eventually I got my bachelor’s degree in gender studies and political science, so I expanded my vision and my work. So I was doing community safety. I was doing, gender specific services and I did that for most of the rest of my career. The government was having a huge budgetary crisis. All of my contracts were with government agencies, so they all got canceled ’cause, they were all about domestic violence and sexual assault and gender specific sources, that was deemed unimportant and that’s when I shifted my focus to women veterans. So all the time before that, I had focused on communities, civilian women. Although looking back, I know that there were probably some women veterans that 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 a lot of ’em 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 causes trauma. They call it military sexual trauma. And I didn’t learn [00:12:00] 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 of 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. Elizabeth: That is so true, the difference is that when women are assaulted by their partner or sexually assaulted by someone in the military. They also then face, an extreme amount of institutional betrayal. We know that women are sexually harassed in their were places and Anita Hill brought that to light and 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. Even though I complained about it multiple times when I was [00:13:00] in the military, I was forced to remain there to work to deal with this on my own because 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. Even in today’s military, women face that and men are sexually too. But as you and I know, we are not going to stop sexual assault against men until we do something about the misogynistic culture that drives and promote sexual assault and harassment against women. We know women are raped or sexually assaulted, they’re called feminine pejoratives. Bitch pussy, slut, these are the terms that are 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. [00:14:00] They lessen that because they’re also then called gay or homosexual is used 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 they were from the military dishonorably. And that only ended a few ago. Anne: Yeah, I can imagine the difference in your story had you shown 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’ve made from the top. Everyone in our military is a human being who deserves respect, and everyone in our country is a human being and we are tasked with the safety of our country, which includes all of the 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 [00:15:00] in and I take the elevator up to the third floor. And the door opened. I look out and there’s mops and brooms and buffers. It’s janitorial accoutrement. And 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. And 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.” 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’s women health clinics in all the VAs. It’s so much better. What I always say to women veterans is just try it. If I had walked away from the VA that day, I would’ve missed out on some very good care. They passed this [00:16:00] public law that mandated the Center for Women Veterans be opened. And that they focus on policy and care just for women. And there’re 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 that I had been doing. So I moved to DC I joined the VA and everything was going great. I had a wonderful director. We were getting 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 we were doing a lot of 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 was the one who handled them. And then, things changed. People that were hired had no knowledge of the VA, of government, of budgeting, of any of that stuff. It started becoming clear to me that my new director was uninterested in following the mandates and directives set [00:17:00] under the public law that stood up the Center for Women Veterans. A woman had been sexually assaulted at a VA by her doctor and all she wanted was for the VA to stop him from working there. At the time my director, said that it is VA policy to maintain the employment of medical providers who have been accused of sexual assault as long as they still hold a medical license in that state. I lost my mind and I said to my director, ” This policy must be disbanded.” And she said, ” There’s nothing I can do about it.” I said, “It’s literally your job to do something about this. The public law demands that 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 that I’ve heard, Anne, hers was the worst. It was more brutal than my mind could even comprehend. And I had spent decades being able to speak to women and be empathetic and I crumbled when it was done. Then she was betrayed and [00:18:00] abused by the VA and the next day. I was getting ready for work and I was sitting on my bed and crying and 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 you spent 30 years in this field is nothing short of phenomenal. That you continue to do this work in spite of your own trauma and you can never again hear another story. You’re done. You’re a hundred percent done with this field. It’s to your own mental health detriment if you continue.” 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. ‘Cause what they say with kintsugi is that it is stronger in its broken places because of the lacquer and the gold powder that’s 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 came to understand the falsity of that metaphor and why it doesn’t work. Because [00:19:00] they don’t acknowledge retraumatization. A lot of women who’ve read my book have said, both veteran and non-veteran, it’s like you told my story. I feel so connected. One of the very first women said, ” I have 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. So the next time say, “Why did he do that? Why was he allowed to get away with that?” Because for decades we haven’t gotten any better in that field. We keep putting it on the women to escape, to change to dah, dah, dah, dah. We need to be putting it on the people who are doing the deed. Healing is not an event, it’s a process. And trauma gets inside of you and you [00:20:00] 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 in mass numbers re-traumatized. 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, 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, to gain our strength if we have emotional safety in our own immediate vicinity with the people that we’re surrounded with, that care about us. I’m so lucky with my children, I said to my son, it was this morning, I said, ” 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 [00:21:00] feel so good. Not everybody has that, so I wanna acknowledge that. Getting to emotional safety is what our Group Sessions are about. So that you can start building that, as you’ve come out of the experiences that you’ve been through. I am guessing that you’ve made some close friends who have been through similar things. That 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 who are experiencing trauma really need. They just really need that safe space to process what’s happening. Elizabeth: Yeah, and having that shared experience, having a group or a person that you have that shared experience with 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, [00:22:00] oh, 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. I met my next guest, Lacey at a conference. She told me how difficult it was to find support before she found Betrayal Trauma Recovery. She didn’t even know the term betrayal trauma at first, so she didn’t know what to search for. And that matters because when women don’t have the right words, they can’t get the right help. Welcome Lacey. Lacey: Hello Anne, thanks for having me. 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 those are the words I needed to search for. I just started stumbling across things, so 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 to. What you were saying was resonating with me. So I took your advice. It was good for me when I found BTR because 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 were just talking about the conference. I wouldn’t have known anything about that if it hadn’t been for the Betrayal Trauma Recovery podcast because there are not a lot of 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. And 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. And you were talking 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. Because 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. 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. 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 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. https://youtube.com/shorts/QgWLaB34xIE 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. Lacey: In my town, I hadn’t found any groups that I felt comfortable going to just because they didn’t focus on my specific need. And then having such a hard time finding a counselor. I felt like they were listening, but maybe didn’t get it. And 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. Emotional Abuse Support Groups Online: Gratitude and Community Support 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: Betrayal trauma recovery was built by all of us. 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 support groups are full of amazing women. 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 a part of, proud of, and grateful for.