The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episode 20: Uncovering Emotional Abuse with Rhian Lockard
On the show today, I am thrilled to be joined by my great friend and colleague, Rhian Lockard. Rhian Lockard is a multi-certified life coach, an empath, an ordained interfaith minister, a certified life coach, and an expert on emotional abuse. She currently runs a program called Divine Communication, in which I am enrolled, and it helps you connect with your spirit guide, your intuition, and so much more. Rhian seeks to support people in courageously cultivating their best lives with gentleness, guidance, and love, and feels a calling to her work.
Show highlights:
- Rhian discusses how you can recognize if you’re enduring emotional abuse including having a sense of never feeling like things are ok in your relationship.
- Rhian says one way to judge whether or not a relationship is abusive is to ask yourself if it feels safe to bring up problems you see in the relationship and to be aware that an abuser will seldom admit any fault or will not follow through on working on solutions.
- Emotional abusers will use your vulnerability against you and will shame you for the ways in which you’re asking them to uplift you.
- Rhian says an abuser wants something different from a romantic relationship than the victim does. An average person wants true connection, true intimacy, and love. Abusers seek someone to be subservient.
- Emotional abusers may make you feel like you can’t spend time with family and friends you love.They want to isolate you from voices of reason.
- Rhian says that often times, your abuser will strip away your own sense of belief in yourself and make you not trust your own reality.
- Kate shares that it can be incredibly difficult to leave an abusive relationship and that it often takes someone 8 tries to leave.
- Kate and Rhian discuss the Kavanaugh hearings and show the dynamics of emotional abuse during them.
- Rhian suggests to break away incrementally because it may just be too much for you to handle all at once.
- Tell yourself that you’re being emotionally abused, sit with it a while, and tell yourself it is not ok.
- Rhian says there is no playbook for how you handle this, it’s just about what works for you.
- Kate shares that the very last thing you should do is to go to your abuser and tell him/her that you’ve figured out they’re an abuser.
- Rhian tells us that your abuser wants all of what you have to give and they do not want you to give it to anyone else.
- Rhian suggests that if you’re serious about getting help, then get help. Don’t tell your abuser you’re getting help or he/she will dismantle it.
- Remember...it’s not your fault that you’re in an abusive situation, but it is your responsibility to save yourself. Seek assistance.
Connect with Rhian Lockard:
Rhian on YouTube
Am I the Abuser? A video in which Rhian tackles the idea that people have made mistakes in their relationships and therefore feel like they deserve abuse — or worse, might be abusers themselves.
Connect with Divorce Survival Guide
To find out more about how I work with clients, click here. To take the two-minute Should I Stay or Should I Go quiz, click here.