In this week’s blog, we share a story submitted on our website by “Valerie” (not her real name). Valerie’s journey through the family court system might sound extreme to some of you, but it’s not. We at The M3ND Project hear so many stories of adult victims of abuse who lose custody of their children…
When you are feeling fatigued, anxious, stressed, depressed, fearful or other symptoms of trauma distress, it’s important to take time to get grounded and return your mind and body to the present moment! Grounding techniques help protect against symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety disorders, and the effects of Trauma or Vicarious Trauma. Let’s…
In the last two posts of our blog, we addressed what it is like to be an adult child of a narcissistic parent. Most recently, we shared Stuart’s story. He is a survivor of narcissistic abuse by his mother. Through his story, we showed what it was like growing up with a narcissistic mom, how…
In last week’s blog, we shared what it is like to grow up with a parent who is a narcissistic abuser. We shared the struggles victims have in understanding the abuse they endured and in finding healthy relationships as adults and how they instead commonly find themselves repeating the abuse cycle within their relationships. Often,…
It wasn’t until I was in my third serious and very unhealthy relationship that I began to dig deeper into why I kept picking men who treated me so horribly. It seemed that with every relationship, I was seeking validation of my self-worth but all I was getting was a constant demand to ensure and…
This week’s blog is a little different for us, but we are too excited to wait. We wanted to take this time to share our latest podcast interview. If you have been following The M3ND Project, you may remember that the organization was birthed out of our founder’s, Annette Oltmans, personal struggle with covert emotional…
There are many images that come to mind when we think of child abuse. Some may imagine the child in foster care who was abused by their biological or adoptive parents and pulled from the home because the home was no longer deemed safe enough for the child to remain. Some of us assume physical…
Why is validation so important to an abuse victim’s healing process? To answer this question, it’s important to understand more about what a victim experiences internally in response to the covert abuse. Within the abusive relationship, a victim’s emotions have been regularly dismissed, denigrated and invalidated by their abuser. Through frequent, systematic use of various…
Today, we are sharing a story from a brave woman, named Crystal (a pseudonym to protect her privacy). In abuse cases, victims often say that the covert emotional abuse was much worse than any other form of violence that occurred. It is common that the honeymoon phase Crystal experienced in the beginning happens before the…
If only I knew what I was going to hear before the phone rang and I decided to pick it up. I wonder if I would have answered; if only I had known. Within minutes, I realized that this was a conversation I did not want to have; in fact, I was not at all…