Healing from your husband’s hidden abuse is possible. Anne Blythe, M.Ed. host of The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Podcast shares the 6 stages of healing from hidden abuse.

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What Is Hidden Abuse?

Hidden abuse is invisible. It includes financial, emotional, psychological, sexual, and spiritual abuse.

Will I Ever Heal From Hidden Abuse?

The short answer is, yes.

You can and will heal from hidden abuse. As women resist hidden abuse, they usually go through six stages on their journey:

1. Confusion


2. Going For Help (Over and Over)


3. The Wrong “Diagnosis” (Several Times)


4. Despair


5. Abuse Education


6. Making Their Way To Emotional Safety

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Transcript: The 6 Stages Of Healing From Hidden Abuse

Anne: Today I’m going to talk about hidden abuse. Hidden abuse is any abuse that you can’t see. All the abuse I talk about Betrayal Trauma Recovery is hidden.

That includes emotional and psychological abuse and sexual coercion. Hidden abuse doesn’t leave bruises or physical injuries. There’s no way to “prove” it with pictures, but it does leave emotional and psychological injuries.

Cultural Perception of Hidden Abuse

In our culture, hidden abuse doesn’t really count.

You can sue someone in civil court for fraud. But fraud does not come into account. With civil divorce cases, because people don’t classify hidden abuse as domestic violence.

For some reason, if a husband defrauds his wife, that’s not really fraud. He’s not a great guy, but he still shouldn’t have any consequences in divorce, cases apparently. But hidden abuse is 100% domestic abuse.

Invisible abuse includes financial, emotional, psychological, sexual, as well as spiritual abuse.

I mentioned sexual coercion. Sexual coercion in marriage is invisible. It can happen in various ways. What I talk about on this podcast often is when a man uses pornography or has an affair. Or has a secret sexual life. He obstructs his wife from having the knowledge she needs to have a mutual relationship. So he uses psychological abuse, emotional abuse, gas-lighting, lying deceit to purposefully obstruct his wife from finding out who he really is.

This is sexual coercion, because if she knew who he was, the likelihood of her consenting to sex is extremely low, and he knows that he’s well aware. So he obstructs her from gaining that knowledge, so she will continue to either have sex with him or continue to be in a relationship with him.

Here’s an example of abuse that the public wouldn’t necessarily recognize as the abuse. But once you’re educated about it, you can clearly see it’s abusive.

Financial Abuse Example: Rose and Tom

This one is under the category of financial abuse. Let’s say there’s a woman named Rose. She’s lived a seemingly ordinary suburban life. She’s married to Tom, a well-respected local entrepreneur. To the outside world. They’re the picture of success, nice cars, a beautiful home, frequent vacations.

To their family and friends, Tom meticulously crafted a narrative that paints Rose as financially irresponsible. Insisting that he needs to take full control of their finances to protect her from her own poor spending habits. This seems reasonable to Rose at first.

She’s thinking, “Since I don’t know a lot about our finances, maybe I’m spending too much, so yeah. Help me rein it in.” As the months turned into years, decisions about money evolved into a series of overpowering restrictions that Tom imposes on Rose. Because she’s “irresponsible”.”

The Abuser’s Real Goal Is Control

The thing is she’s not, and she never has been. They had a ton of money, so she could have gone out to lunch with her friends. She could buy clothes online. It wasn’t the lack of money that was the problem. The problem for Tom was that he found Rose’s independence and happiness, and all her friends, to be very threatening. He wants to control her.

If he controlled her finances, he could start shutting things down. So as Rose’s access to money became limited, and discussions about budgeting were often framed as her “lack of understanding of their financial goals.” Which he never laid out for her, because he didn’t give her all the financial information.

When he did say we have this much money, it was a lie. He was lying to her. So whenever she would question the restrictions, he would gently remind her of all the times she’s failed to manage the money wisely. Which by the way, she wasn’t allowed to manage. Highlighting her mistakes, which weren’t actually mistakes.

In Rose’s case, it begins to take a toll. She starts to think she’s stupid, and finds herself increasingly isolated and unable to make financial decisions. This is just a downward spiral for Rose.

Here’s another example.

Financial Abuse Example: Eliza and the Engineer

Eliza is a successful attorney. Who’s targeted by a financial abuser for her money. He lies to her about being a successful engineer. He’s like, Hey. I’m super successful, too. Awesome. We’d make a good pair. He covers up the fact that he had a low wage job with mountains of credit debt.

So she doesn’t know this. Then once they get married, he tells her that he lost his job because of cuts. She doesn’t know that this job never existed. Then he begins opening up new joint credit cards without her knowledge, and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that Eliza is on the hook for.

No one else finds out that he lied about being a successful engineer. No one would approach this as financial abuse or fraud, since they’re married.

Psychological Abuse and Gaslighting

When it comes to psychological abuse, gaslighting and other tactics intended to alter a victim’s reality.

Psychological abusers are willing to lie and also deny truth to your face to purposely deceive you. They want to live that double life, and their willingness to deconstruct their victim’s identity through lying and gaslighting is shocking. Psychological abusers get a kick out of the harm and chaos they cause.

They’re happy they got away with it. There’s never a time when they feel bad they’re hurting you. In fact, they like it.

If you watch for it, you can see the smirk on their face, and you can see that they’re gaining some energy from the dysfunction.

Emotional abuse is intended to exploit and manipulate a victim’s emotions for gain. Trying to make someone depressed, sad, feel bad about themselves undermines their self-confidence.

All forms of abuse, stem from an inability to have empathy for other people. Abusers have a core belief that other people were created for them to exploit.

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Community of Betrayal Trauma Recovery

The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Community is a community of wives and ex-wives of porn users, psychological abusers, emotional abusers who went down the porn addiction route usually, or who did couple therapy. These women sought help, and no one helped them identify that they were abuse victims and their husband was abusive.

All listeners to this podcast suffered hidden emotional, psychological, and even sexual abuse in the form of sexual coercion. Healing from hidden abuse is a process. During all six stages, victims actively resist abuse and try to figure out what’s going on.

There’s never a time when a victim of hidden abuse isn’t actively resisting the abuse and trying to get to safety.

Here Are The Six Stages To Heal From Hidden Abuse:

Healing From Hidden Abuse: Stage 1 – Confusion

All victims who are abused by this invisible type of abuse are confused. That confusion signals they’re resisting the abuse. They know something is wrong. They just don’t know what it is. They’re resisting abuse by trying to figure out what’s going on. Most victims blame themselves during this stage.

They try to improve their safety, thinking that the cause has something to do with them, especially because th