Warning Signs of Emotional Abuse
Relational violence red flags to help determine whether you are experiencing psychological maltreatment
Name calling or demeaning you.
Intimidating you with threatening looks, actions, or gestures.
Destroying your belongings or your home.
Trying to control you, your time, and your actions.
Shifting blame back to you in order to avoid responsibility, or questions your reality. This is called gaslighting.
Criticizing your appearance.
Being jealous of time spent with your friends or family.
Making threats to hurt you, themselves, or others to get what they want.
Humiliating or embarrassing you in public.
Inappropriately infantile behavior.
Acting possessive and not trusting you.
Threatening breaking up, abandonment, or divorce to manipulate an argument.
Threatening suicide during arguments.
Blaming you for their unhealthy/abusive behaviors.
Having outbursts, becoming passive, or being overly demanding.
Shaming/Guilting
Dismissing your thoughts, values, opinions, or emotions.
Accusing
Monitoring
Verbally berating
These behaviors are red flags! Do not justify them, dismiss them, or engage with them.
Set boundaries. Your wellbeing is a non-negotiable. You deserve safety and care.
Their emotional wellbeing is not your responsibility.
You deserve to be peaceful and safe. Your feelings are real.
You are enough.
Harassment and Threats are Violence
If he never hit me, did it still count as abuse? I remember wondering this one afternoon, just hours after he picked up our daughter. The text messages kept coming—accusations, threats, guilt trips. He said his life was worthless. That it was all my fault.
I felt a wave of panic: Was she safe? Should I call someone? Should I be documenting everything in case I needed it for court? The fear lodged deep in my chest. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep. His messages weren’t just upsetting—they were a constant invasion of my right to peace.
Turning Poison into Medicine: My Journey through Relational Violence
There was a time when I felt like a volcano ready to erupt every day. After my divorce, I faced panic attacks, overwhelming chronic pain, and a simmering rage that threatened to consume me. The constant triggers, the toxicity around me, and the chaos of breaking free from narcissistic abuse left me emotionally drained and utterly exhausted.
Eventually, I hit a deep low—a dark night of the soul where I came face to face with my shadows, the tremors of ancestral rage, and the grief of a planet in crisis. Post-traumatic growth is real, and the darkest hour heralds the dawn.
From the muck blossoms the lotus. Training in mindfulness and somatic psychotherapy helped me learn and apply practical skills for setting effective boundaries around my mental real estate, reclaiming my time, tending to my heart, and nurturing my creative spirit.
Through it all, I’ve meditated… Every… Single… Morning… as a non-negotiable and radical act of self care. I do this as an investment in my future self and in my entire family and community system. I sit so that I can be steady and grounded enough to be responsive and available when I am called to service. I spend time actively tending to my heart, so that I can connect deeply with my daughter and be the mother to her that (as an adoptee), I did not get to have. Along the way I gained a toolkit of skills that I have been fortunate to share with hundreds of educators, students, school leaders, and helping professionals and I have seen the ripple impact spread far and wide.
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Whether you're recovering from burnout, breaking free from toxic dynamics, or simply ready to make more space for yourself— Fierce Boundaries offers a pathway to reclaim your life and restore your heart.
Art as Resistance. The Practice of Reclaiming Myself with Painter’s Tape
From the Prologue of Fierce Boundaries:
“At home, later that afternoon, the printed stack of “evidence” yelled at me from the pile on my desk. So, I whimsically threw the papers into a metal bucket and lit it on fire. I took it outside and placed it in the yard where the smoke billowed around the house, symbolically cleansing us all from the memory of this toxicity. I got out a giant canvas and a lot of paint and I sliced the surface in half with painter’s tape, and I let myself have my feelings all over the damn place. The top part of the canvas was where I let my light shine, painting my brilliance with handprints and iridescent, glowing colors. On the bottom of the canvas, I splashed and splattered hues of darkness and fire and smeared them around angrily with a gigantic brush and dramatic, pounding strokes.
Once the pages in the bucket outside burned down to dust, I mixed the ashes with acrylic gesso so that they turned goopy and gray, and added them to the painting, right along the “boundary” between the two sides. Then I pulled up the tape, and laid the canvas down on its back, and ran drippy blood red along the seam between the two very different parts. Then I tipped the painting back up and let the blood run down into the murky, ugly, bottom half, away from the flower garden of my soul and the bright explosion of color that represented my heart.
That night, I blocked his number for good and shot him one last email… (get the book to keep reading).
The original “Resolution” painting that became the cover of Fierce Boundaries