6.13 | The Signs of Hidden Financial Abuse

And what is showing up for me is not the overt signs, although there's plenty of those.

It's more the subtle signs of financial abuse, which is partly my story.

Um, and I didn't know I was in a financially abusive relationship until after I got out, after I ended my marriage.

What I did know was that I didn't feel safe sharing money with him anymore in those last four years particularly because there were-- there was an incongruence or a mismatch between how knowledgeable he sounded when he talked about money and his actual money behavior, which was paying the bills late even though there was money to, to...

in my account to pay them, um, being in debt, watching us go through boom and bust cycles, and there were lots of other, um, experiences or incongruences that showed up.

And, um, yeah.

So I'm gonna share that story, and this is the second time that I'm recording this because the first time I was, I was struggling with the words.

It felt v- vulnerable and exposing, and yeah.

I didn't feel quite grounded, and I wanted to be more grounded when I, when I recorded this.

But before we get into the story, I want to share some statistics and kind of get a little bit deeper about why, why I'm sharing this now.

And the first thing I want to say is that financial abuse isn't rare, and the kind that gets recognized, the overt kind, is really only part of the story.

In the United States, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, in...

Financial abuse is present in 98% of intimate partner violence cases, right? So if you're being emotionally and physically abused, [chuckles] you can bet your ass that you are being financially abused as well.

In the UK, one in six women has experienced financial abuse in a current or former relationship, and separately, one in five women in the UK have experienced the broader category of economic abuse.

In New Zealand, it's 15%, and in India, check this out, coercive control shows up in nearly half of marriages, almost double the rate of physical and emotional abuse alone.

So high, high prevalence.

And then, like, this financial abuse, right? After you escape it, there are devastating consequences.

Some of them are survivors facing a two time risk of poverty, like twice the risk of poverty as the average, than the average.

The homelessness risk jumps four times.

70% of women report severe mental health decline.

That was the case for me, and I'll share some of that later.

And the hidden fallout is the long-lasting credit damage and losses averaging 33,000 USD.

But the statistic that matters to me the most today, and, and I hope that matters to you, is the... out of the women who experience financial abuse, only two in five recognize that it's happening.

And the pattern is built to be unrecognizable while you're in it.

It's k- it's covert, right? And researchers call this an unrecognizable or unrecognized form of abuse, and for me, it looked like years of confusion, feeling like I was the problem when [chuckles] it was never mine to solve even though I had a part in it.