The Mend Project’s blog offers articles, personal stories, and more to help victims and responders of narcissism and emotional abuse.
Use the search box below to search our articles, or scroll down to view them as a list.
Additionally, you can click here for free downloadable resources.
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…
The thing with covert emotional abuse is that the tactics used by the one causing harm are tactics we see in many of our relationships, even those that are not abusive. And so it can be very confusing to those within the abusive relationship as well as those hearing about it from the outside. Minimization,…
Did you know that abuse does not discriminate? It can happen to anyone. Children, teens, adults and the elderly all can be victims of abuse. Violence happens in intimate partnerships, parent-child relationships, within the workplace, at church or school, and among teens who date. There is no minimum age requirement for abusive relationships, and the…
In 2020, Jessica Simpson released her memoir “Open Book”. In her life account, she divulges her struggles throughout her past. She speaks openly about her battle against drugs and alcohol addiction fueled by the unaddressed sexual abuse she experienced as a little girl. There are multiple inspiring elements of Simpson’s story. However, one aspect that…
When someone you love is in an abusive relationship, the impact of that relationship affects everyone in their circle, including you. You may not see the abuse or even realize that what you do see is abuse so much as you feel that something is “off.” It is particularly difficult to spot an abusive relationship…
Abuse in relationships does not always look like hitting or name-calling. Frequently, abuse is much more subtle than that, and can slowly wedge a divide between couples, digging deeper into the victim day by day. This is what is called “Covert Emotional Abuse (CEA)” and “Dismissing” is one of the tactics covert abusers use to…