Emotional abuse makes you poor.  That is a simple fact of life. Any woman who has ever been in an emotionally abusive relationship knows to her cost that the relationship makes you way poorer than you ever deserved to be.  In every conceivable way.

Yet most women struggle to understand why this was bound to happen, or even the most important ways in which emotional abuse makes you poor.  In this article we’ll be looking at the 3 key ways – yes, it does boil down to 3 key ways  –  in which emotional abuse is guaranteed to impoverish you.

#1 Way Emotional Abuse Makes You Poor

You’ve probably already worked out for yourself that an emotional abuser is NOT great when it comes to sharing.  He’s really NOT good when it comes to sharing good feelings, good fortune, or funds with you.   Mr Nasty is a man who, as often as not, won’t even share a smile with you. He’s a “Me! Me! ME!” sort of guy.  (Actually, a “Me! Me! ME!” sort of toddler who wants all the goodies he can grab, all for himself.)

When you finally walk away, it comes as a rude shock that he wants to leave you with nothing, financially.  But that is the nature of the Beast.  ‘Decent’ and ‘reasonable’ are just two of the words that don’t feature in his vocabulary.  He lives in a world of lack  –  even if his income is stratospheric.  The only way he experiences that lack less acutely is by depriving you.

#2 Way Emotional Abuse Emotional Abuse Makes You Poor.   

Emotional abusers may start out by offering you the moon and stars – although not all of them do.  Whatever the offer they make you, it is NOT unconditional.  It’s the (s)prat to catch a mackerel  scenario.  If, by some miracle, you could make his life perfect in every way, then… Theoretically, he’d be delighted, and change instantly into Prince Charming.  In reality, he’d be much more likely to go into melt-down – because he wouldn’t know who the hell he was if he wasn’t on a permanent fault-finding mission.

Finding fault with you feeds an emotional abuser.  He undermines your sense of self-worth, consciously and consistently, because he imagines that he comes out better from the comparison with you.

What his fault –finding means for you is that:

• You stop believing in yourself
• You stop trusting yourself
• You are repeatedly traumatized and re-traumatized
• You become emotionally paralyzed
• You end up despising yourself as much as he despises you – mostly for the same ‘reasons’.

An emotional abuser robs you of your sense of self, leaving an empty space where you should be – or, at least, that is how it feels to you. 

It’s incredibly hard to motivate yourself to do anything when you feel like an empty husk.  I’m guessing that if a stray dog, or cat, turned up on your doorstep in a sorry state, you’d feel obliged to do something to help that creature.

An emotional abuser turns you into an emotional stray.

What do you do to help yourself?

More often than not, little or nothing.  Because you don’t believe you’re worth it.

Instead, you go into Empty Husk mode*.  As one wonderful client put it recently;

“When I started working with you, I thought I’d be doing well if I didn’t feel suicidal most of the time.”

Little did she know!

Now, she says:

“I’m too busy laughing at the absurdity of it all to feel bad about what happened.”

She’s laughing, she’s living, and she’s discovering that she is a rich, beautiful person, who can have a rich, beautiful life.  Despite all the awful things she’s been through.

#3 Way Emotional Abuse Emotional Abuse Makes You Poor

Never underestimate the cunning of an emotional abuser.  Mr Nasty really is a cunning son of a gun.  So cunning that he gets you to buy into robbing yourself of the present and the future that you can have.

This week I‘ve been speaking with a very talented musician.  She’s an amazing lady.  Most people are SERIOUSLY impressed by her.  Unfortunately, she’s had an emotional abuser in her life.  Guess how he’s left her feeling?

He’s left her with a bad case of Empty Husk syndrome.  Emotionally and financially at rock bottom – despite being bright, wise, and pretty self-aware.  Much as she wanted to work with me, she didn’t see how she could – because she was both broke, and broken.

What future did she see for herself?

The Empty Husk future.  The barely-getting-by, Life’s-hardly-woirth-living, same-old-same-old future. With or without her emotional abuser.  Still living with the same emotional abuse whether or not he was around to deliver it in person.

And then she got it.

She said:

“I have no financial worth because I have no self-worth. You can’t have money, until you believe you’re worth it. It all starts with self-worth.”

We talked about simple ways to kick-start her financial abundance that she had never even considered.

She’s decided to step out of her lifelong ‘comfort zone’ of worthlessness  and work with me.  We’ll be laser-focused on creating her the self-worth that builds financial worth.

Will she turn her life around? Absolutely.

Did she believe she could before our conversation? She didn’t have the belief that anything could ever change for her.

That’s how emotional abuse makes you poor.  If that’s not the present and the future you want for yourself, and you would be happy to walk away from that mind-set, get in touch. But don’t leave it – and yourself – on the back burner.  My time is limited.  If you are one of the first 5, I’ll be happy to speak with you about how you can overcome the emotional abuse that’s  making you poor.  Don’t  you miss this boat.

 

* Empty  Husk mode.  This is when there is nothing left for you, and your thoughts frequently turn to just giving up.