This post was sponsored by The Allstate Foundation as part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own.
With age comes experience and while there is so much to be excited about in life, unfortunately there are some experiences I wish I were still naive to. I’ve see friends grow and succeed in life, fulfilling their dreams. I’ve also seen friends fall into pitfalls throughout life. Sometimes they can pull themselves out of it and come out wiser on the other end, but in one specific case, she couldn’t.
More specifically, my friend left her well-paying job to be a stay at home mom. Shortly after her daughter was born her relationship took a nasty turn, but it didn’t end there. She became pregnant again and was hopeful her relationship would improve, until her husband became verbally abusive. In the meantime she started planning to separate from him but realized with his control of the finances and bills, there was nothing left for her. Unless he was aware of it, she had no access to cash on her own.
At this point she’s pregnant, has a toddler at home, and feels secluded from her friends and family. People around her started noticing the changes in her relationship and her own behavior, and started to ask questions. The more she was questioned, the more she pulled away, until she was an island of a person with two kids under 2 and a husband who took full advantage of her feelings of defeat.
In my experience, you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. In the same token, I know that knowledge is power and if someone in the same situation knew they had options or a way out, they would feel more confident taking their lives back into their own hands.
Did you know that financial abuse happens in 99% of domestic abuse cases? Those numbers are astounding, but not really surprising. An abuser will take all the power they can get, and giving up financial power would mean they would lose some control at some point.
Hopefully someone who reads this post will find strength and the ability to regain control of their lives. The Allstate Foundation is an organization working to help end domestic violence and financial abuse by empowering women financially. To support this initiative, Allstate Foundation Purple Purse fundraises locally and nationally to provide financial empowerment tools and resources for financial abuse survivors.
You can find out more about PurplePurse.com by visiting them on the web. If you know someone who can benefit from this information, please pass it along.
I’m sorry to hear that your friend when through this. Unfortunately, this is similar to what I went through growing up. I made sure that my husband is very different from my father.