Believe Women: Why Don't We? - true love scam recovery

Believe women.
How is disbelief of women
still a thing in the 21st century?
Why aren’t women talking about abuse believed?

Believe women. How is it this needs to be said? What is going on that in the 21st century women are still disbelieved when we speak out about a fake-lationship under narcissistic abuse and coercive control…?

Why are women disbelieved when we talk about narcissistic abuse, marital rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence? And what is the cost of this disbelief?

When we’re not believed at a crucial moment we realize we matter little. It’s shocking. Being disbelieved sets us up for further abuse, loss, betrayal, grief, and anger that runs deep.

We can start from right there, wherever we are, and use our feelings and circumstances as a springboard and a function to make change rather than in pain.

Believe Women: Why Don’t They?

women breaking free of the chains of inequality

Let’s take a look at the roots of this disbelief. There’s a saying, about not knowing where you are now without knowing “where you came from”.

Have you taken a road down memory lane into the history of women? I was just promoted to recently and here’s what I found:

Women Were Personal Property

Did you know women were considered personal property and referred to as chattel as were enslaved humans, cows, horses, plows, shovels, and kitchenware…?

Personal property is an actual legal term. There are laws around it concerning its protection, who it belongs to, and what can be done with it. So, what is “personal property”?

Here’s a definition I discovered: personal property is everything other than real property [real estate and land] and is often referred to as movable property, personalty, or chattel. [California Civil Code §663] Personal property can be transferred or sold using a bill of sale and may be pledged as security for a loan.

Essentially, in the USA and throughout the world, women were owned first by their fathers and then by their husbands.

Narcissistic Abuse unwound

Set the Women Free

Coverture was still in effect in 1862. Married women lost civil rights of any societal significance when they married under coverture. Women were not allowed to own anything.

Even in the 1990s groundbreaking episodic HBO show, Sex in the City there’s a scene where Miranda is given the 3rd degree about her ability to purchase a condo in NYC. Miranda is portrayed by actress, Cynthia Nixon who today speaks about the realities of being female. All was not accomplished when we won the vote or went through women’s lib.

You Can Have Sex in the City But You Can’t Get a Bank Loan

The scene depicts the status of women at that actual time in the 1990s when Miranda, a high-level, the hard-working attorney attempts to get a bank loan to purchase a condo. She’s questioned with incredulous disbelief about her ability to pay for real property (real estate) on her own.

She’s asked about her marital status and when it’s discovered she’s single, she’s asked if her father or brother is taking out the loan along with her. Meaning there’s disbelief that the money isn’t a man’s, that a man approves and that she’s a safe debt risk as a woman. The thing is these massively accepted beliefs engrained in a society weaken us at our knees.

Things Women Can’t Do: Beliefs That Diminish Women

Here are things women could not and/or cannot do around the globe even as late as now:

Own property or buy a house
Be employed or own a business
Vote
Drive a car or have a driver’s license
Refuse sexual advances of their spouse
Learn to read
Walk freely outside on their own
Dance in public
Study or read scripture or religious doctrine
Preach or teach scripture or religious doctrine
Get a primary school education
Attain advanced degrees
Go to college
Speak publically
Hold political office
Show their face, hair, collarbone, wrists, arms, ankles, or legs in public
Be out at night in safety
Go to a bar
Go to a restaurant
Wear a standard bathing suit
Contradict their husband
Hold hands with a romantic partner
Walk with a romantic partner
Eat with men
Eat before the men
Travel without a man
Initiate a divorce
Retain custody of their own children in divorce
Be lesbian or bisexual, transgender or non-binary
Make life decisions
Have a bank account
Apply for a bank loan without the joint signature of a husband, father, or brother
Decide who they will marry
Decide when they will marry
Refuse female circumcision, ie: genital mutilation
Live independently as an unmarried woman without shame, stigma, or harassment
In several countries both men and women believe that without being covered head to toe in black, men would potentially sexually attack any woman, at any time, on sight because the men would not be able to hold back and the presence of a woman incites this

Women Are Not Constitutionally Equal to Men

Even now, in 2023 women are not written into the US Constitution as equal members with equal rights within the USA.

Without realizing it we absorb these unquestioned and sustained cultural mores and ways. This is where so many of our customs and opinions and thoughts and emotions about women come from.

This becomes especially dangerous when these subconscious ideas are tapped by the element of coercive control. These thoughts related to subservience or service to men feed into a sociopath’s or narcissist’s wishes.

So why did – and do – people believe women are mere property, underserving of civil rights and fundamentally unequal; why do some see women as inherently “bad”?

The subjugation of Women as Rooted in Religious Beliefs

These notions of women as less than are rooted in ideas spread and promoted within religious philosophy and doctrine. Religion, religious teachings or dogma is frequently where people’s ideas and ways of living come from since the time religion existed. The ideas of the church or similar ruled the day.

In the ’40s one or two religions that came into widespread membership and practice preach dogma (dogma means: something a particular group sees to be true), based in a religious founder’s original teachings, that see women as equal; equal to any other human, and all humans equal one to the other, in value.

Religious Philosophies Across the Globe Denigrate Women

In religions such as Christianity of all genres, Catholicism, Islam (both original and Black Muslims), Mormonism in all its incarnations and sects, Mennonites, the Amish, and Jeudisim and more, are philosophies and directions for living daily life in which women were and are made secondary and subservient to men. Women were and are portrayed as inherently evil or polluted in a way men are not among other beliefs which deny the inherent dignity of women. – These are false beliefs, yet hold sway in legal and all cultural matters in which they are upheld.

Social and Religious Beliefs Give Pathological Users Advantage

Because the world is set up to believe women are less valuable, not as important, not as capable and not equal to men, predators have a built-in doorway into making use of women and getting away with it. – Isn’t it time we put an end to this?

Yes. And next: how? The first place to look is in our own surroundings and all at the same time we can unearth inequity, and beliefs that motivate actions that support this inequity everywhere.

For recovery far beyond anything you can read in an article

Ask Questions and Answers Give Fuel to Rise Up

It’s a very amazing little thing about the human brain: when we ask it (ourselves) a question, the answer shows up. The answers come up from all around us. They were sitting there all along. I love it when answers pop like hot corn in a frying pan or microwaveable bag.

The human body, brain, chemistry, physiology is such that when we ask something, we get an answer: so let’s start asking. What do we think about ourselves as women? Do we believe we’re good enough? Is it true, for example, that we’re whores and sluts if we sleep with a certain number of men or have sex at a certain time, such as before marriage?

Examine our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious alike. Start with questions. How do we really feel about our position and purpose in a family? As single women how many of us feel shame somewhere inside ourselves about some aspect of being female? Don’t we see it everywhere that being alone isn’t as good as being married..? – And doesn’t “married” usually mean married to men?

If We Believe it, Someone Else Does Too

These are the kinds of beliefs that lead to judgment about ourselves as well as feed into how others in positions of authority and making proclamations that affect our lives, such as that judge in the courtroom, might see us.

Law is devised and voted in as law based on people’s beliefs; law changes based on people’s beliefs. – And take this in: courtroom decisions are not made based on law; they’re made based on the Judge’s personal beliefs coupled with the limits of legal proceedings – and all too often those beliefs the Judge holds and the decisions they make leave us feeling betrayed.

Our Beliefs Are the Foundation of Our Pain and Our Healing

What we believe feeds into and creates things. Thigns that support our recovery and things that do not. Such as the misconception that “the other woman” under hte spell fo the same socioapth we escaped is less than us or is a “slut”, or deserves what the pathological user, sociopath, predator, or “narcissist” does to her. – Bullocks. The other prey are fundamentally just like us: Humans who thought they’d found love.

Granted, sometimes some of the other prey – people who believe themselves to be the wives, girlfriends, fiances of the sociopath we broke away from or are tisll “with” – are sociopaths too. Otherwise: they’re just like us. Even someone dysfunctional with their own personal self-focused glitches.They’re in it just as we are or were. Ensnared, deceived, used, and wrung out in confusion and trauma.

Chose Beliefs Deliberately and Boldly

Before we believe something let’s ask what it means. Where does the belief come from?What about is makes this believable. Is it something “everyone else” believes, so we do too? Has the belief been passed down as “right”, so we don’t question it? Does believing it allow us a place in a group of people we feel we need ot be part of, so we go with it?

Understanding Our Value is Protection from Harm

I am the first and the last and the loudest to say: anyone can be ensnared by a pathological predator. All it takes is not knowing they exist and understanding what that means along with the right timing for them and the wrong timing for us.

That said, I do believe that the more we understand who we are, the more clear and conscious our own needs and beliefs are to us, then the better chance we stand of not being ensnared by a predator or swayed by those who do judge us.

Talk and Talk More

To get to the basis of anything, a dialogue is needed and dialogue is when all involved come away with something new and feel an expansion of their lives. Dialogue creates empathy, understanding, and a bond and reflects and demonstrates our interconnectedness as fellow humans… Start with dialogue within ourselves.

Chose your beliefs. Know your mind. Make sure of consistency from beliefs, to thoughts and emotions to actions. Stand straight. Speak out. Say what needs to be said. Be bold. Vote your voice; if you’re female or a person “of color”, people died so that you could do that. Say “no” when that’s how you feel. Say “yes” to things that matter. Support one another. Believe each other.

Human rights start with recognizing the importance of every individual. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

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As a certified coach, upholding industry standards I strive to inform, educate, invite thought and dialogue, to co-plan, co-strategize, advise, consult, refer, recommend, train, teach, guide and coach people in guided recovery and discovery specific to these crimes, and from hell and broken in the aftermath to whole again, and more. You decide what winning is.