Ongoing contact

Where shared children oblige an ongoing connection, the abuse can continue for years. It can be terrifying to have to face an abuser at regular handovers, to receive covertly abusive text messages, and to endure ongoing financial control via everything from losing children’s clothes to refusal to pay realistic child support. The future can seem like an unbearable and overwhelming prospect.

Emotional abusers want their victims to despair.

Facing ongoing post-separation abuse as a deeply traumatised person, perhaps as someone with PTSD or C-PTSD, is very different from facing it as someone who has received EMDR, psychotherapy and effective coaching.

As part of the recovery journey it is empowering to understand the underlying mechanism of ongoing covert abuse. Together we can come to recognise and witness it objectively. Its occurrences and the forms it takes may well come to be predictable. This will greatly diminish its power.

Where children are involved, perpetrators will often refuse to work or find ways to conceal earnings in order to withhold adequate child support. In this way they can impose financial control long after the end of the relationship.

Despite common misconceptions, family law and the Child Maintenance Service are no match for this conduct. Seeing the fallibility of these services and of family law itself can be terribly disillusioning.