Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery. This is Anne. I have Allison Peterson on the podcast today.

She's an avid advocate for women and a staunch believer in self-defense.

She helps women find their voices to speak out against abuse. She has a

black belt in traditional Taekwondo and teaches adult classes at Johns World

Martial Arts in North Salt Lake Utah.

She helps teach the women's self-defense classes.

As a much smaller woman in stature only,

she understands the struggle of personal space

and the need for all women's voices to be heard and respected.

Welcome, Allison.

Oh, thank you.

It's good to be here.

So Allison, how did you gain the courage to find your voice and be heard?

It was definitely a long time coming.

To start martial arts was kind of, you know, people are going to be a little funny.

You know, they're like,

is that a kind of a younger person's sport?

I came from a home of abuse.

Some of the adventures that I've had out on the road and growing up

and also, like at the grocery store even. I've had experiences

of men following me, pestering me, I'm short and tiny and an easy target. It really was just no more. I do not want to be a target anymore.

I decided to attend classes at Jones World Martial Arts mainly because they do a wide range of martial arts. I wanted to learn a lot of self-defense. I wanted to learn technique because when a guy is six foot plus, he's got a lot of mass behind him. technique if you know what you're doing wins you can get out you can escape you can defend yourself even with the enormous size difference it was was very, very important to me.

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