Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery. This is Anne. I have Jen on today's episode.

She's going to be sharing her personal story and she has a very interesting twist at the end.

I'm just going to dive right into this. Welcome, Jen. Thank you.

Let's start with your personal story. When you were dating way, way back long ago, can you

talk about the grooming process that he used? I think it was a pretty

typical grooming process. He was just really kind. He was very, very attentive. He was in contact almost like hourly. He was constantly in

contact with me. I was always getting text messages and he was always

complimentary and kind.

Kind of swept me off my feet a little bit.

We were friends at first and he was a little bit that way

even as we were friends and then it progressed into more and it became even more that way.

So when did you start noticing the abusive behaviors?

I didn't recognize them as abuse at first. It took me about two years after we separated and the divorce was a year later that I really

started to recognize that there was abuse that had gone on other than pornography use.

How did you learn about that? Is it just being educated about it?

What helped you realize that was abusive?

I was reading actually one of the articles that you had put out there and it was talking about ways that you could recognize someone that was working recovery and ways to make restitution.

As I was going through, I started recognizing just a whole bunch of different things that had gone on and that were still kind of going on

even in my interactions with him after the divorce.

So that's when I really recognized.

Before that, I had had therapists advise me to read a book and I read the book and it was just after we had separated.

It was two to three months after.

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