42. Part 3 - Post-Separation Abuse Unpacked: Minimising, denying and blaming the protective parent.

Hi, thanks for joining me on another episode of the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host, danielle Black. Hey, I'm Danielle Black and I'm the coach you need if you're dealing with post-separation abuse. I help you make sense of ongoing abusive behavior after separation and help you take back your power and control. Let's go. This episode is part three of our post-separation abuse series, unpacking some of the ways in which controlling people, abusive people will continue to abuse you post-separation. Today we're going to be talking about the way in which perpetrators of family violence and post-separation abuse continue to minimize their behavior, deny their abusive behavior and blame you or literally anyone else for their behavior choices. This can manifest as the abusive person denying the reality of the abuse in all of its forms. If you haven't listened to the episode on gaslighting and the episode on DARVO that is, deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, you might find those episodes interesting and informative. So episode number six is Unmasking DARVO Understanding how Abusers Distort Reality, understanding how abuses distort reality. And episode number seven is Gaslighting Unveiled.

Abusers will commonly deny the reality of the abuse. They'll deny your experience and the experience of your children and will accuse you of either lying or exaggerating. They won't take your concerns seriously or your children's concerns. They'll accuse you and or the kids of causing the abuse, of causing their behaviour. They may falsely accuse you of abuse or violence or continue with low level, subtle forms of manipulation, gaslighting, coercive control, to agitate you to a point where you're pushed over the edge in terms of what you can handle, so that you lash out. They might make light of the abuse or normalize the abuse in some way, shape or form. They might blame their choice to use violence and abuse on anger problems, on the fact that they work so hard, they're so stressed, they're the only ones doing xyz. Fill in the blank. There will be a reason for their use of violence or the reason that they behave the way that they do. But underneath all of that, what you will notice, or what you may notice when you reflect on this from the past, and also what you might be experiencing now in the present, is that there's an underpinning of entitlement. They justify their use of control and abuse because they actually feel entitled to behave that way. They believe that they genuinely have a right to behave that way.

It's also important to keep in mind that their behavior is not an anger problem and to expand on that a little bit further. You might like to listen to episode number three, or re-listen to episode number three, titled it's Not an Anger Problem, to expand on that aspect a little bit more. They might also recruit other people to support their false narrative. This can include friends and family members, but it can also include their lawyer. It can also include telling authorities and the court that they themselves are the good parent and that you are actually the problem. It's common for them to go after the mental health of a protective parent, and that's something that I covered in a fairly recent episode, episode number 35, which is titled when your Mental Health Is Attacked, and that also features a bit of a rant from me about equal shared parenting time. That's an issue that I have some very passionate views about, as I'm sure most of you have probably worked out.

This episode's fairly short and sweet, talking about the way in which controlling people, abusive people, will minimize their behavior, deny their behavior. They'll minimize the harm that it causes, or deny that it has caused harm. They'll accuse you of exaggerating. They'll blame you for why they've supposedly had to behave the way that they have. They'll potentially make out that it's because of anger. They want you to believe that they can't control what it is that they're doing, which oftentimes is a total lie. Really, what's going on is that they feel very entitled to behave the way that they do and if you're wanting to delve a little bit deeper into this, so the minimizing, distorting reality, denying and then flipping the narrative, claiming that you're the offender and they're the victim, as I mentioned, you may like to have a listen for the first time, or re-listen, to episodes number six, number seven and also episode number 35 regarding when your mental health is attacked. Thank you so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.