A very good day

After persevering through many years of marriage with a man who I thought was just a really difficult person, I had reached a stage where I no longer tried to rescue him each time he screwed up. I had stood back and allowed him to deal with his own problems – and it was working well.

I was no longer the Florence Nightingale coming to mend and heal the wounds.

One day, there was yet another incident that followed his same pattern, (a pattern I recognised so very well) and finally he said: “I can’t fool you anymore, can I?” It was at that point that I realised he had just admitted he had been intentionally “fooling” me for years and I had somehow broken through the mind game.

I had survived years of his verbal, emotional, psychological, financial and sexual abuse – I was a survivor of family violence.

On that day things changed for the better and after that, I had many more good days. I didn’t know that over the years I had quietly developed a number of strategies that were effective in coping with his abuse. When I began working with other survivors of family violence, I naturally shared my strategies with them and was surprised to find that they worked equally well for them too. That is when I started to create training specific to the needs of the women, as they recovered from the traumatic effects of family violence.

It’s exciting to see that more than 450 women have now been able to understand:

• why their partner did what he did and
• why they reacted as they did in response to his abuse.

A perpetrator’s greatest fear is being found out and losing control.

Family Violence Mindset Solutions is about exposing the why and empowering the women and children to create a new “normal” that is vastly different to what they have had in the past.