People put up with abusive relationships for years, sometimes not seeing them as such despite the red flags. Today’s guest is Kelly Thomas and she joins us to help us learn more about how to spot the signs that a relationship is becoming destructive. Kelly is a survivor and the Founder and CEO of Girls Like You, a nonprofit that helps coach young kids who are in trouble and focuses on building self-confidence. We hear about how Kelly got started doing the work she does and why she believes that having self-love is foundational to building healthy relationships as well as escaping abusive ones. From there, we get into the many different types of red flags and warning signs that a relationship is unhealthy. For many of the young people Kelly works with, the very things that are abusive about their partners are often read by them as signs of love. A partner that calls obsessively and tries to control your movement is not being loving! Some of the other red flags Kelly talks about are things like verbal abuse, and partners who themselves grew up in abusive situations and won't seek help. We talk about some of the reasons why a partner might become abusive, and how relationships often start with the abusive partner pretending not to be. For an enlightening discussion that can help you get more educated on the difference between healthy and destructive relationships, tune in.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Harambe Phone Number — 609-225-6936
Kelly Thomas
Girls Like You
Juvenile Conference Committees
Suicide Prevention Hotline — 1-800-273-TALK
Domestic Violence Hotline— 1-800-799-7233
People put up with abusive relationships for years, sometimes not seeing them as such despite the red flags. Today’s guest is Kelly Thomas and she joins us to help us learn more about how to spot the signs that a relationship is becoming destructive. Kelly is a survivor and the Founder and CEO of Girls Like You, a nonprofit that helps coach young kids who are in trouble and focuses on building self-confidence. We hear about how Kelly got started doing the work she does and why she believes that having self-love is foundational to building healthy relationships as well as escaping abusive ones. From there, we get into the many different types of red flags and warning signs that a relationship is unhealthy. For many of the young people Kelly works with, the very things that are abusive about their partners are often read by them as signs of love. A partner that calls obsessively and tries to control your movement is not being loving! Some of the other red flags Kelly talks about are things like verbal abuse, and partners who themselves grew up in abusive situations and won't seek help. We talk about some of the reasons why a partner might become abusive, and how relationships often start with the abusive partner pretending not to be. For an enlightening discussion that can help you get more educated on the difference between healthy and destructive relationships, tune in.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Harambe Phone Number — 609-225-6936
Kelly Thomas
Girls Like You
Juvenile Conference Committees
Suicide Prevention Hotline — 1-800-273-TALK
Domestic Violence Hotline— 1-800-799-7233
EPISODE 06
[INTRO]
[00:00:05] RW: Welcome to this episode of We Hear You from Harambe Social Services in South Jersey. We Hear You is designed to give a voice to victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. This forum is for survivors and their allies to discuss issues that impact them and their families, as well to educate communities. In the coming segment, we will hear from survivors. They will tell us their stories and what they would like for us to know. As allies, we want to hear how we can support them.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:46] RW: Welcome to We Hear You, our new podcast from Harambe Social Services designed to give a voice to victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Tonight’s special guest is Kelly Thomas. She is the Founder and CEO of Girls Like You, which is a phenomenal program which she's going to tell us more about. But she is also a survivor, and we are so happy to have you with us tonight.
Kelly, welcome.
[00:01:21] KT: Thank you so much. I'm excited. This is such a wonderful – I was so excited to know that you're doing this. I think this is very necessary, so thank you for inviting me.
[00:01:32] RW: We know that our listeners are going to be very much enlightened. But, Kelly, that was a very short and sweet introduction, but we’d like you to tell us some more about what you're doing at Girls Like You.
[00:01:46] KT: Yes. Girls Like You I actually started about seven or eight years ago, and it was one of those things where my kids’ friends were coming over, and I was talking to them individually and in groups. I just decided let's make this a business, a nonprofit. I’ve been doing it for a while. I started out, like I said, doing mainly group – just talking to girls about self-esteem and confidence, relationships. Of course, teenage girls have a lot to say about a lot of things. They taught me a lot.
I just recently became a 501(c)(3) organization and I’m working directly with the Juvenile Conference Committee in Winslow. The high school has a – It’s called a SOR program, so they have a referral service through them. I'm working a lot with juveniles in detention and some that are at risk. I’m actually working with boys also. It's more of a coaching young people that are in trouble and coaching young people that are in detention and transitioning out. That’s not the only group that I’m working with but that’s my main group right now.
[00:03:07] RW: Wow! That is so exciting because hearing your work and knowing that you started with your own children and then kind of have an offshoot from that is really just so relevant, because we are very often with our children. Especially the young people, they are coming up on things that when we were around it – Well, not me because I’m a dinosaur. But young people are very much more advanced around so many topics than we are, but yet they are still children. I’m excited to hear that you’re working with both the young ladies and the young men because they both really need to have that special attention around how they're struggling with certain things, having that positive influence to guide them, so so important.
[00:04:13] KT: Yes, definitely. They – I try my best to learn the things. Like you said, they’re exposed to different things. They have different trends and different ideas about life, so I do a lot of research on what the kids are doing. I can't say that I like everything, like the music. Very hard for me but I have to be able to relate to them on some type of level to get them to open up. I mean, it works wonders. But again, I'm finding out what they're exposed to and what their ideas are of the world and of themselves. It’s very sad, but they do come out of their shell and they are open to new ideas also. They’re open to that guidance, so it’s very rewarding.
[00:05:04] RW: Then you mentioned that you’re doing this work with the juvenile justice system. These are children who are in residence with the justice system.
[00:05:17] KT: Well, some may be. Most of the kids that I’m working with have been referred, whether through an arrest or through a resource officer at their school. Some, for an example, there was a young man that I was working with recently, and he was arrested at school. It’s funny because I met him and his mother. I met his mother and him through an organization that I’m involved with in Winslow. It wasn’t about mentoring at all but I could see that his mom was kind of struggling with the fact that he got arrested. I was trying to give her more information, so she could advocate for him. Then it turned into getting him paired up with a mentor in the area, a male mentor.
It’s kind of like I get referrals through a lot of different places. A lot of them have been exposed to domestic violence, sexual assault. Hopefully, you and I could – I like to refer to experts in certain areas that I’m not necessarily expert. For an example, I would love to send young people to you, so they can get a better understanding of healthy relationships. I don't do so much of the domestic violence section anymore because, like I told you, my kids are – I have two college students right now and a elementary school student. They’re pretty aware of what I do, so I try not to talk about my personal experience for fear that they’ll have any kind of judgment or any kind of relationship issues with their father. I like to refer the young people to places where they’re going to get the most help if it’s not with me.
I focus on confidence building and I feel like that’s the foundation of what we need to talk about when we’re talking about any of these issues; domestic violence, sexual assault. I mean, we either don’t have the confidence when we get into situations or we lose confidence because we got into those situations. That’s where I kind of build from. Building confidence with the young people and even with their parents, it all falls in line with putting them with the right people.
[00:07:34] RW: Well, that is so important. I’m glad that you mentioned that, the whole issue around sometimes it's a matter of not so much that people do not have confidence going into the unhealthy relationships. They sometimes lose the confidence. Many, many people believe that folks are in unhealthy relationships that turned violent at times because they have poor self-esteem. You and I know that is not the case. Very often it’s a matter of someone who had lots of confidence, and they were loving their self, and they were loving life and all kinds of good stuff. However, when they got with a particular partner who was intimidated or what all of their issues were, they [inaudible 00:08:29] to tear away at that.
I know that we want to keep this more generalized and that's totally okay with me, but can you talk a bit about some of the types of things that may happen in relationships where people are maybe coming into a relationship and then they may begin to see there are some red flags that they most likely don’t see initially. But can you talk some about red flags that may be present that would indicate an unhealthy relationship?
[00:09:10] KT: Yes. I mean, there are so many. There are so many. Like I said, talking with young ladies especially, you hear a lot. This is one thing that is a huge factor with young ladies in relationships, and that is the amount of attention that their partner is showing them. Sometimes, they mistake that for, “Oh, he loves me. He cares about me.” But they don't take it as obsessive behavior, which is sometimes what it is. That’s definitely a red flag when you're getting 15, 20 phone calls. Someone is asking you where you are every time you go somewhere. Those types of things that might make someone not as wise. Like you said, it may not have anything to do with confidence but just experience might make them feel like, “Hey, he really cares because he wants know where I am. He wants to be with me everywhere I go. He wants me to himself, not with my family, not with my friends.”
That’s one of the big things that it's very hard to untangle for a young – To explain to a young person. Not even a young lady. A young person is that that behavior is not healthy. Everybody, whether you’re in a relationship or not, you shouldn’t have to not do the things that you normally would do because you're in a relationship with someone. That’s the big one.
[00:10:38] RW: That initial grooming, that isolation becomes that master weapon. But it’s so camouflaged. They just – That it looks like romance to them.
[00:10:53] KT: Yes, definitely.
[00:10:54] RW: Again, to anybody but younger people may have a more difficult time discerning that this isn’t romance. This is possessiveness of the human obsessing. With somebody who’s texting you 30 times within an hour and then constantly wanting you to check in, either that they’re –The texting is probably the major one.
[00:11:27] KT: Definitely, yes. There’s a young lady that I’m working with right now. I tell you, just with the training that I’ve had and what we know about dealing with people who are going through this, we can’t tell them what to do. It’s just kind of like it’s rough because I see this young person, and she doesn’t see that she is in an abusive relationship. She doesn't want to consider herself that person like, “How could that – That’s not me. I wouldn’t let anybody do it.” But it is that exact behavior that we we’re talking about. That obsessiveness. She’s described getting spit in her face from this young man, things that she doesn’t consider abusive. He didn’t punch me. He didn’t push me. He didn’t put his hands on me. He spit in my face or he’s following me around or he’s calling a million times. Instead of looking at that like, “Okay, I have to begin to think about my safety,” it’s more of, “Wow, he really cares because he’s spit in my face and now he’s calling me 50 times.” It’s not registering to her, and I can’t say you need to leave him. I know the language I have to use and it’s hard sometimes.
I will say this about my own experience. I didn't know that my own experience with domestic violence and even witnessing domestic violence in my family from multiple women. Once I got away from that situation in my own life, I didn’t know that that trauma was still there. One of the reasons why I don't deal with that solely anymore is because I had a neighbor who was going through it and I think that trauma resurfaced. I like to be able to send young ladies to people that can help them better than me because instinctively I want to go pick them up and get them out of there.
I have a safety kit in my car for anybody who may need it. I’m thinking about that but I’m also thinking about what information do they need in order to know and not necessarily to leave because that’s not always the safest thing to do but just to know that this is what happening to them and to see it for that, instead of seeing it for what they want to fantasize basically about. You want the fantasy that he's calling me 30 times because I’m that special for him. He got so angry with me because he’s so passionate about me. Those ideas is kind of hard to turn.
[00:14:04] RW: Now, you mentioned that as a major one for young people. Also, just in terms of language that is not domestic violence or intimate partner violence or anything that’s as technical as that is not language that most young people and many of us that are older will attribute to themselves. They will say, “Oh, no. That’s not me. Oh, no. I don’t know. I won’t tolerate that.” I think that when you were talking about working with young people particularly, how would you say, what would be important about that in terms of trying to guide young people when you’re trying to coach them about what’s healthy and what’s unhealthy in terms of language?
[00:15:03] KT: Well, the – What I try to do because I'm also a behavioral therapist, so that’s what I do for my day job. I work with children with challenging behavior, children that are on all types of spectrum. I mean, it might just sound very elementary but my language is just words that are going to uplift, even if it’s, again, not really focusing on domestic violence or sexual assault or criminal charges. Not really focusing on those things but more so of how they feel about themselves, how they view themselves and not so much of what's going on the outside world.
I feel like that’s the most important thing to do is just get any person that you’re coaching to look within themselves, see the beauty in themselves, see the potential in themselves. Then once they get that clear vision, other things they won’t tolerate like we’re saying. We’re saying we don’t tolerate certain things, and I definitely was that woman who never would've thought I would be in a situation that I was in with mainly obsessive behavior. That’s mainly what I was dealing with.
Other things happened too because it always turns into something else. I mean, if one thing doesn't work, somebody’s going to go through the next thing to try to control you. But knowing yourself, if you don't really know yourself, you’re going to believe that, “Hey, I’ll never experience something like that. That’s never going to happen to me.” But when you truly know yourself, you know that anything can happen. How am I going to handle it? How am I going to treat myself? How am I going to acknowledge it, be honest, truthful? When I’m talking to young people, it’s always about self. I always turn it back to them, so they could have gotten trouble for anything, and I’ll say, “Okay, you know you got in trouble. You know you got arrested. I’m sure you dealt with that with your parents, so let's talk about you.” That’s kind of my angle and my process when mentoring young people.
[00:15:03] RW: That is wonderful and it’s so important because it sounds similar to some of the work that I do. When I go to the young people, it’s a very different conversation than when I talk to the adults. I just focus it on healthy relationships and I let them know, because sometimes I’m with young people as young as 12 and 13, so I – This actually is about being in a relationship with anyone. You need to learn to have healthy relationships with everyone that you meet, whether they’re romantic or not. Let them know that these are skills you can learn and carry and those things that you said about it’s all about valuing yourself. That is key because one of the things we talk about is what do you want. We can get so caught up in having a relationship, having a partner. We get so caught up with that, especially as young people that we lose sight of what do we want as an individual.
[00:18:23] KT: Yes, definitely.
[00:18:24] RW: Being able to cultivate that. What you are saying here really does seem to focus on that aspect of building that foundation for just loving yourself.
[00:18:39] KT: Yes. No matter how old we get, we can always go back to that foundation and say, “Okay, I'm six-feet tall but it’s a mess. This is six-feet tall of a mess.” We can go back to ground zero and start over when it comes to building the love for ourselves a lot of times. I think this is just teenage stuff but it’s like, “Oh, I hate my hair,” or, “My skin is awful. I wish I was thinner,” or whatever the issue is. That’s where I kind of go into the healthy relationship. Okay, you don't have a healthy relationship with yourself. That’s – People are going to pick up on it. Unfortunately, narcissistic people pick up on that. Manipulative people pick up on the way that you feel about yourself.
Again, that's probably something. I’m sure that’s what happened to me, just not looking at myself as the grand woman that I am. I didn't see myself that way. No, I didn’t look at my calendar and say, “Hey, I want to get punched in the head today.” I didn’t look at the calendar and say, “Hey, I want to be followed around all over town.” But I didn’t look in the mirror and say, “Okay, you're beautiful and you deserve the best.” I wasn’t doing that. As much as we’re probably bombarded with self-love quotes on social media, and everything, we really have to practice it. That might mean getting down and dirty. Like I said, going down to ground zero and saying, “You know what? I could do better at certain things.” That’s also loving where you acknowledge that, “Okay, there are some things I need to work on. I’m not the worst person ever because I’m 250 pounds but, okay, I can work on that. I can work on exercising or eating better.” That’s still loving yourself.
But when you just don’t love what you see in the mirror every day and you don't love how you feel about yourself and then you don’t do anything about it, people can pick that up and then they want to keep you there because they know that, “Hey, I can get away with this. She doesn’t even care about herself, so she’s not going to stop me from doing what I want to her.” Or him because it’s not just those.
[00:21:00] RW: Yeah. It’s so important that I’m glad you say – Also mentioned that it's young men and young women or it’s boys because anybody can be in a manipulative relationship. We know that we’re talking about young women who can be extremely abusive, even physically. They can abuse in ways that are different than young men do and also the violence they inflict may not be as severe, in some cases just the body weight and all of that. But then, again, there are men who have been fatally wounded and killed. That happens to men as well as young women, so it's important that as we’re having these conversations that we do let folks that are listening understand that this can happen to a young man or a young woman. There is no disgrace for any victim who are being victimized because you are doing the best that you can in the circumstances.
But as you’re pointing out that very often, if you are looking for something in someone, looking to someone to give you something that you haven't really accomplished for yourself, then it can kind of end up with you shortchanging yourself.
[00:22:44] KT: Yes, definitely. It’s so worth it to be alone and work on yourself and then emerge so that you can get that equal person, that equal relationship of love, someone who loves themselves and they will love you as much as you love yourself. I mean, whether it’s in a healthy relationship or unhealthy, I think people can only love you as much as you love yourself. Again, we said in the beginning. Sometimes, it’s the lack of confidence that gets you in situations or those situations can break your confidence.
Like we were saying about it could be a young lady or a young man. It could be I'm in my 40s. It could be me. I know a family member who – she was in her 60s and because she was alone for so long, not necessarily working on her confidence and working on her love for herself. She was just alone. She took really good care of herself but she met someone. She was ready for a relationship, and he was very abusive. Even as an older person, you can experience it. It really has no limits. It's all about how you are accepting love from yourself and then you just radiate that into the world.
[00:24:12] RW: You really are touching on something now because elderly people – Certainly, there are people who have been in a long-term abusive relationship, and they have grown old with someone who has abused them for 20, 30 years. Those exist. Now, they’re elderlies still in an abusive relationship. Okay. But you’re right. There’s that other side of the person who just wants a companion, and they strike up with someone who is prince charming in the beginning. I mean, initially, and I'm going – I’m saying prince but they are princess. Princess are lovely if it’s a woman. But they wonderful in beginning. They find out what it is you like, so they like what you like. Whatever you like, they like. Wherever you want to go, that’s where they want to take you.
Then as you are comfortable, then they move in a little more and starting not too fresh overnight. The next thing you know, you have people who are even remarried these individuals and then they’re finding, “Well, where’s all my freedom? Why am I not making my own decisions on my own. Well, I was making decisions before.” Now, suddenly someone is taking that right from you and having this level of control over your life that you hadn’t dealt with before. Now, you’re older.
[00:25:58] KT: Yes. Sometimes, it could be any age but I would assume that being an older woman like this woman was very close to my heart but she – I’m sure what it had been because she has passed away and it has something to do with the domestic violence that she experienced. It kind of was like a trickle down effect. She was too embarrassed to say, “I made the wrong choice,” and that's another reason I think that people stay in relationships because they are too ashamed to say, “Hey, this is what’s happening to me.” Or people are going to expect me to not have been in a relationship like this. They know I wouldn’t have done it. So many different examples.
Another young lady I know, she is my age and she met, like you said, prince charming, very verbally abusive. To me, that was another red flag. When someone is cussing at you, calling you names, and then they’re sorry the next day, I mean, that I call is a hamster wheel. That’s just the beginning of what – You can't predict what’s going to come next because then when they're tired of cussing you out, calling names, and it escalates to something else because you are sticking around for it. There’s no blame there at all because everybody wants love. Everybody wants love.
When you think you found it, you’re going to try and you’re going to try and work that out. You’re going to try to work through the arguments. But I know this young lady particularly who was getting verbally abused, she did not want to tell her family that she was breaking up with this man because of what her family thought him. They thought he was prince charming who came to sweep her off her feet. Again, I don’t encourage people to leave situations like that because I know it could be dangerous and I know I could be the enemy because once the honeymoon period starts again, then it’s like, “Okay, you told me to leave.” I don't say those words but I always bring it back to self like, “Do you want to live like this? Do you want to look forward to this next Monday? It’s Monday. You've been through all kinds of hell today,” if I’m allowed to say that. Do you want to look forward to that next Monday? That’s self-reflection right there. Do you want that?
Another point that you made and as far as red flags, I was dating a man. Very short period of time, probably a week or two, we went on a couple dates. When I – One thing I did not do on my previous marriage was ask a lot of questions. I think that most people don't because they think that it’s not necessary. I’ll find out when it’s time. But there are things that you need to know when you're going into a relationship, and that is that person’s upbringing and their parents. Not to judge anyone or anything like that but to just know.
[00:29:06] RW: Well background.
[00:29:08] KT: Yes. This man told me that his parents had been married for, what, 30 years and they were in an abusive relationship. The mother was being physically abused. I asked him if he was going to a therapist. He said no. To me, that was something I need to get out of. It’s only because I know and I’ve been around women like you have taught me so much. I knew to get out of that situation quickly. Some women might feel the need or men might feel the need to comfort that person whose parents have been in an abusive relationship for 30 years.
[00:29:49] RW: Don’t you know? Don’t you know.
[00:29:52] KT: Yes. I don't feel the need to do that. I think people need to go to therapy and stop playing around because you can’t grow up in a situation like that and think that you, “Okay, I can handle it. I’m not going to repeat that.” You most definitely will repeat that. Not –
[00:30:08] RW: In some way. In some way going, it’s going to come out.
[00:30:10] KT: Yes, in some way. Yes.
[00:30:12] RW: It’s going to come out. It maybe not be that you are abusive but you may have some other confidence issues and all kinds of just poor conception of what a relationship should be.
[00:30:31] KT: Yes. Witnessing something healthy is so important. Sometimes, we don’t always have – Of course, we can’t say, “Hey, give me the best parents ever,” and they’re going to – That’s not always the case. I can’t concern myself with someone who witnessed unhealthy relationship, so I had to go to therapy and I had to do research on it. Sometimes, that’s how you’ll learn. Not necessarily because of what you’ve seen. But this person that I’m speaking of, I can’t say for sure. I only knew him about two weeks. Can you say for sure that he would’ve been physically abusive? But he definitely required a lot of attention and he wanted a lot of my attention. Those two together, him not going to therapy and him requiring so much attention made me say, “Let me close the door.”
[00:31:25] RW: That’s sound like a red flag because people who just tend to be overly needy and that feeling of you're getting the feeling for them that you must save them. You must [inaudible 00:31:39] them. That is not your responsibility but too many of us fall in that trap. That is like a big rabbit hole. You know that you are halfway down and can’t get back up.
[00:31:56] KT: Absolutely, yes.
[00:31:58] RW: [inaudible 00:31:58]. They’re such a good guy. They’re so sweet. They’re so – They are.
[00:32:05] KT: They are, absolutely. That also is not enough. It’s not enough for a successful relationship. It’s not. I mean, you can't just be a good person. I mean, this definitely goes both ways, more so than a lot of the other red flags. I mean, definitely obsessive behavior goes both ways too. But that need that people have to save someone, I’ve seen a lot of men do that also. They want to swoop a woman up and they want to be her prince charming and they are good people, and that woman is just like cussing them out, putting them out, whatever, doing whatever. But he’s staying in there because he just wants to show her.
Like you said, it’s not our responsibility to make someone else happy. We can't do it. It’s impossible to do. We could bring people joy but we can't make them happy. That's one thing that I also try to convey to young people is that you want to be happy already with yourself by yourself. I used to tell my daughter. My daughter is 22 now, and one thing that she wanted, needed so badly was friends, friends, friends, friends. I used to tell her, the day that you can sit in a room for 24 hours , and I’m talking to a teenager, 24 hours by yourself, no phone, no validation from anyone else , no compliments from no one else, no anything from anyone else, that’s when you will start to say, “Okay, let me deal with myself.” I mean, 24 hours is not a long time. But for a teenager, it’s eternity.
But when you can be alone and be happy with that, like I’m happy alone with my terrycloth robe and my little dog and talking to my kids and listen to my iTunes, I’m very happy by myself. I would love to meet someone who is happy by himself too. Then we could just being each other joy.
[00:34:14] RW: Just helping people understand that concept of being alone is not lonely.
[00:34:19] KT: Yes, definitely.
[00:34:20] RW: It’s not a negative thing to not be surrounded by people all the time.
[00:34:26] KT: Yes. That is so important.
[00:34:28] RW: When you don’t know that, then you kind of settle for these folks that are all broken up or inside, and they need to either break you up so that they can feel more whole or constantly just they need something. You can never fulfill that need, too broken.
[00:34:53] KT: Never. That’s very important. Yes, you can only get what they have. You can only get what a person has. If misery is what they have, that’s what you’re going to get. I think that that's something, especially for women like myself who I have older kids. I got married very early. I was 21. My mom would love to see me married right now, and I’m like, “Mom, I just enjoy myself. I enjoy that I'm doing things that I really want to do. I’m setting goals and I’m meeting them. I have no interception.” I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being in a relationship. I know that one day I will but I spent 22 years as a mother and part of that as a wife and not in a healthy situation.
It’s good to just get down. Like I said, get down to the bottom of it. Build yourself up again but do it in a healthy way like healing as a wound in the proper way, properly so it can – It won't resurface but sometimes we got to take that time for ourselves, so it won’t resurface.
[00:36:11] RW: This is so, so important because I think not only have you given us some tips about what to look for in terms of red flags, and those red flags don't always look red, that they’re kind of looking pretty like flowers.
[00:36:31] KT: Yes, red roses maybe sometimes.
[00:36:32] RW: Sometimes, red roses. But they’re really danger flags. You gave us some good pointers about that narcissistic type personalty that’s totally obsessive and wants to just be with you all the time or have all of your attention all the time. You talked about this excessive calling or texting, just want to know your every move. Then there was the verbal abuse which is very often [inaudible 00:37:15] because not that it isn’t horrible but because people that me didn’t hit me.
[00:37:21] KT: Right, exactly.
[00:37:21] RW: He didn’t hit me. As long as I didn’t get the black eye and the busted lip, then that’s not abuse and that’s so not true. Then just that having the discernment to ask more questions about people's background and when they are from situations where they haven’t had those healthy role models that digging into whether or not that's something that they want to process as an adult and try to get healthier, not saying that because they had the background that you don’t want to be with them, but just saying, are they planning to process that. Are they trying to get some help around getting healthier, would make a decision around whether or not that’s a person you want to spend more time with.
The constant, the rescuer, they are always looking for the damsel in distress. The women are look – Always wanting to be just Sigmund Freud and putting them on the couch and they are going to analyze everything and fix it. They’re their psychologist, their counselor. They want to help them. They can help them because they’re just so nice but they have all these problems. Any of those are totally really red flags and things that folks on whether they are male or female should be looking out for.
Then you pointed out too that it can happen to anybody at any age, whether it's the young people or whether it’s older adults. They get into relationships later. They’re abusive young women or men that may come along. That older men are certainly susceptible to younger women who come along, and they see them as a extra paycheck. They get swooped up and caught up in situations where maybe they even have a child with this person. Then it’s just dreadful. They’re really just caught up and they want really in their older life is to have some peace but they’re kind of caught up. Well, it’s just so much.
Kelly, you are definitely going to need to come back and to talk again. There’s just so much. Well, I could just go another hour with you. But there is so much that you did share with us for this hour. As we start to wind down, is there anything else you want to add that we didn’t touch on tonight?
[00:40:09] KT: I just want to say thank you again for not just inviting me but just doing this period because I know you probably experienced it too. Sometimes, you need some grounding when you work with people and to be able to share stories and kind of get it off your chest. I think a lot of people can get – I think coaches can get a lot from this podcast, as well as survivors. There’s a lot of people that need to be educated in domestic violence and sexual assault awareness because a lot of people are going through those things or they had witnessed it like we talked about as young people and haven’t processed it. They think that, “Oh, that happened to me,” or “I watched that 20 years ago.” It’s not a part of my life but it is. It’s not something you could just shake off, so this is such a necessary platform. I just want to say thank you and I would love to come back and talk some more and learn some more.
[00:41:09] RW: Well, you are certainly so welcome, and we feel as though you blessed us and we’re so grateful that you were able to come on tonight. We just wanted to say for those of you who may be listening tonight, you may be somebody that might be going through some of the things that Kelly mentioned and we talked about tonight. We want you to know that Harambe Social Services does provide services for folks who want to come in and talk to somebody. You can do that with us for free. There are no charges involved in the services that we provide. Just give us a call, 609-225-6936. Someone is there. We are happy to talk. Please don't hesitate.
Again, yes, we do talk to teens. We talk to older people. We do talk to men, so you can give us a call about any of those things. Then also, if you would let people know that you heard this podcast and you would just tell them about it and invite them to join us the next time so that we can get the word around that We Hear You is all about you and we want to share our information. We all need to learn, we’re all growing, and we need you to help us to participate.
Again, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us tonight. We look forward to talking to you again and working with you in the future.
[00:42:54] KT: Yes, definitely. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to see you again in person.
[00:42:59] RW: All right. Thanks so much. Good night.
[00:43:02] KT: Have a good night.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:43:04] RW: Thanks for joining We Hear You podcast with our host, Rose Williams, from Harambe Social Services, a grassroots organization in South Jersey. Harambe is Swahili for pulling together in unity. We use the principles of the Nguzo Saba in all of our services to educate communities about domestic violence and sexual assault. Our primary focus is to provide counseling services to victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. If you or someone you know needs to talk to us, please call 609-225-6936. Again, that number is 609-225-6936. Our counseling services are free of charge.
Be sure to follow Harambe Social Services on Instagram and Facebook. We would love to hear your feedback about tonight's focus. Tell a family member and a friend about the show. You can help us get the word out. Go to buzzsprout.com to make a review. Thank you. Be safe. Be well.
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