The Importance of Respect in Abusive Relationships

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I think one of the things with these abusive relationships is the thing that we consider love is so far removed from what actually healthy, normal, positive love is. If you've been in that toxic situation, you really have to go through a process of detoxing and learning that actually this is what I want. And I was lucky because I had seen that in my own lifetime with my own parents that I knew, okay, that'swhat I want. But I think if I hadn't, and if I'd seen my parents had been in a similar relationship, I would have just stayed because that would be marriage to me.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

'I am my childhood’s wildest dream,’ says Saima Mir. This episode is about the process of getting there, not just the determination and hard work, but also the intangibles: the beliefs, ambitions and understandings that you don’t even know how to articulate, but which hold you up on a decades-long journey to becoming.

In this conversation, the journalist and bestselling novelist talks about shame, failure, the experience of being gossiped about - but also the inner strength and family support that allowed her to reinvent herself after leaving her first two husbands. Saima came late to journalism, but forged a successful career on TV and in print before writing her genre-changing (or will it be genre-defining?) novel, The Khan. Here, she surveys that pathway to this place, and how it built her iconic character, Jia Khan.

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