Hi, welcome to Res Ipsa. I'm Melissa J. Hogan, and we are examining the intersection of the law, faith, and abuse. This is the first episode of Res Ipsa Nota, which is "the thing itself is known," where I'm going to talk more about the specifics of abuse in action and how that plays out in personal scenarios that I have lived, examples in the news, cases that I have worked on, clients I've represented, obviously with names and circumstances changed or amalgamated in order to protect people's identities.
Today, we're going to talk about how can people not see that they are in an abusive situation.
Maybe you're here because you have been there and you feel the confusion and the guilt after waking up and realizing, "Oh my gosh, I did not see what I was in. How did I not see it?" Or maybe you're here because you love someone that has been in a situation like that and you struggle to understand how they didn't see or you just really want to understand better, learn, or maybe, like many of us, you want to arm yourself so that next time, you hopefully will see better.
There's a self protective aspect when you come out of an abusive situation, that we think we can learn everything and get our radar up so that we will not fall prey to it again. We learn and we study. Obviously a lot of that is really good.
There are a lot of things to be learned in order to spot red flags, to not stay longer once we see behaviors that are like that and not to fall prey to some of that manipulation. But the reality is we are going to encounter unhealthy people. We are going to encounter more abusive people in the world and the best we can do is learn and use wisdom and discernment and good boundaries and give ourselves grace the next time that happens.
So how does someone not see that they are in an abusive situation? I'll start with a little bit of my story.
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