Welcome home. I'm Dr. Tamer, a minister, licensed psychologist, and sacred artist. And this

is Homecoming, a podcast to facilitate your journey home to yourself. While I will provide

weekly inspiration and mental health tips, this podcast is not the same as personalized therapy.

I'm so excited you're on the journey. If you want to request specific topics or to submit a

poem for me to read on the podcast, email me at homecomingpodcast at gmail.com. Also to build our

community, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. Let's begin. Welcome home co-journers.

I'm so glad that you are with me for another episode. And I am so excited that at this ending of

October, which in the United States is intimate partner violence awareness month, I'm excited to

be able to be joined by a special guest, healer, psychologist, minister, sister, friend,

author, Dr. Vanessa R. Abanathi, who is a clinical psychologist, mindset consultant,

and liberation theologian, whose aim is to transform systems that oppress people such that

people might rise from surviving to thriving. She provides psychotherapy services to individuals,

couples, and families in her California and North Carolina practices. Welcome Dr. Vanessa.

Thank you for having me, Dr. Tama. Oh, absolutely. I love the work that you do and the ways in which

you share not only in person, but in social media. And a big part of the work that you have done

is on recognizing the signs of abusive relationships and healing in the aftermath of abusive

relationships. And so I know people are usually more familiar when they think of domestic violence,

they think of the physical aspect, but can you talk some about emotional abuse in relationships?

Yes, emotional abuse is really the one that becomes more insidious and it's often a precursor to

what often escalates, which can't escalate into physical, and it leaves what we call invisible scars.

So it's being diminished, it's being devalued, discarded at times, sometimes trying to lean in

somebody else, making someone else seem like they're better than you so that they may even groom

...