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Hi Warriors, Welcome to One in Three.
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I'm your host, Ingrid.
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I'm honored to introduce today's guest, Julie Barth.
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Julie is here to share her powerful story, one marked by loss, abuse and the kind of resilience that only presents itself when it becomes your only option.
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Through her healing journey, Julie discovered a deeper purpose to help those who are walking a similar path.
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So, instead of me telling you everything, I'm going to let Julie speak for herself.
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Here she is.
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Hi, Julie.
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Thank you so much for joining me today.
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Hey Ingrid, it's nice to be here.
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Thank you for having me.
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I'm very appreciative of your time and your topic.
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So, before we jump into all that, do you mind just giving a brief background, or maybe not so brief?
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You have quite a bit to talk about of.
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You know what brought you here.
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Sure.
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So I am the mother of six and I opened up a charity a couple of years ago to help women in crisis.
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I have had a pretty long history as far as my adult life has pretty much been full of caregiving and I have a special needs daughter.
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I lost my first husband, who was like my best friend growing up, to pancreatic cancer when we had four very small children.
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So I know all the complexities of caregiving while also trying to be a parent and then, after I got past that, he passed.
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He actually ended up living 16 months, which was a blessing in some ways.
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They told him he would have two weeks to live, so yeah, so we were able to get him for a lot longer than that, but I think anyone who's a caregiver knows that you hate even saying that some of it was a curse, but there were some hard fought months at the end there.
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So after getting out of that, after he passed, I kind of just wanted to put it behind me.
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I had a special needs daughter that I fought for four years just trying to get her.
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You know to be at a point where we knew she was going to make it, and all of you know the surgeries that came with that and finding out about her genetics, and so it was really just a decade of, you know, fire drills and bouncing from one thing to the next and I kind of, when he passed away, I just wanted to like move, be gone, you know, not think about it, and while everyone else is just starting to grieve, you know, I think I was like I, you know, every day was a grief, you know griefing process of losing him just a little bit more.
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So, you know, I think that I kind of just picked up and I left my family behind and I met somebody who I married and that was, I think, really just a reaction to trying to not acknowledge the first situation in Duckett.
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I just wanted to run away from it, but I quickly found out that you, you know, people say like you can't run from your problems and it sounds very cliche but it's true.
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So yeah, that's kind of just a little synopsis.
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There's a lot of ups and downs in the first 10 years and following that, which is my second book is focused on, is I was in an extremely emotionally abusive relationship and I never would have thought that I would have been where I'm at.
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You know, I fought to get my first husband to, you know, to help him be here.
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And my special needs daughter, you know, I was always in the, in the, in the brain, trying to make her better and fighting and just being so involved.
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And then I went from that straight to this person that I didn't even recognize.
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So it was like Julie had left the building.
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I found myself doing really stupid, silly things, crying and just things that were very uncharacteristic of myself.
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So I think that's why my life and my goals now are committed to helping women in different financial situations, different emotional states, different fire drills that they find themselves in life.
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Whether it's being the mom to a special needs daughter who couldn't get vaccines because we couldn't afford them, or, you know, caring for a loved one when you have four other kids.
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Our charity is based on trying to get women to a position where they don't have to lose everything.
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The way it's structured now, you have to like be so, you know, and it's kind of sad because you're like, oh, I'm in poverty, that's amazing.
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And you're like, wait a second, I'm in poverty.
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So, yeah, we're trying to catch them before they get to that point, because you shouldn't have to give everything away before someone's like oh, now you have nothing will help.
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We just don't think that's a fruitful way to go about charities and really boost people when they need to most.
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I think that when you help people when they've hit bottom, it becomes more of a almost like they're dependent.
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Now They've lost their independence and it's harder to then create a life beyond that.
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Pancreatic cancer is terrible and I'm very sorry that you went through that.
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I'm a medical provider so I know that it's very difficult for caregivers and you're appreciative of that time.
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But then that time also kind of draws out the pain that you see your loved one go through and I know that's a difficult process.
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It leaves you almost in a state of vulnerability and more, I guess, exposed to somebody that can take advantage of somebody in that kind of a situation, and it happens quite a bit that people then end up in relationships with an individual who ends up being abusive.
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How long were you guys married?
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It was a long decade, I can honestly say.
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You know.
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We lived together for about six years until you know it was like unbearable and he started traveling for work.
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So I was blessed in the fact that he wasn't around.
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I had two small children with him and then I had four from my first marriage.
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Everyone always says, why did you stay so long?
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And I think that anybody going through it knows you're staying for a reason, but you're not quite sure what that reason is.
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You know, unfortunately, the only way to survive these relationships is to get out of them.
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But from the outside, where it looks so clear like you should leave, you're in danger Internally.
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When you're a caregiver and a mom and you have all these issues from whatever baggage you've been through it's usually attachment disorders, people like emotionally abusive people.
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They can pick out that person that is, you know, bleeding, who is just wants everyone to be happy to please, or they're very good at finding the pleaser.
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They're very good at finding someone who you know is broken in some ways and just needs wants somebody there to support them and unfortunately you end up losing everything you have in these relationships and you can't see it.
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So it's so clear on the outside, you know, you know it, but making taking that step just seems like you're going to, you know, lose everything, and so you stay stuck in it.
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Yeah, and I think it's especially more difficult when you have children involved, especially if that individual is their father and he was for two of them, and it's an insidious kind of thing that happens.
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It's not like he just comes in with abuse, right yeah.
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I can honestly say there was something about him, because everyone is always asking me what are red flags.
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But I think what I've come to learn most about, the best advice that I can honestly say there was something about him, because everyone is always asking me you know what are red flags?
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That I think what I've come to learn most about the best advice that I can give to people is I don't need to tell them these red flags Like you know them.
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If you're Googling it, if you're searching, if you're like you know, all the time on computer trying to figure out what's going on in my relationship, what's wrong, your brain is saying there's something not right about this relationship or you wouldn't be looking.
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I think you know taking that one step of getting out of it.
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You know there's that's the complexity in it, because if you do that you feel like you're going to lose everything.
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You know you're probably tied to them financially, you're tied to them economically and you've done some pretty stupid stuff.
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You know they get you to react so that you do really stupid, crazy things and then they're like see, you're crazy and you can't.
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You know you can't disagree with them because the things that I was doing, like chasing and crying and telling him to get out and begging him to come back.
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Those were all very crazy things, you know, whatever crazy looks like, but again you know there's no, they keep telling you you're the problem.
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You are doing things that make yourself the problem.
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So if you expose somebody and say I want to get out of this, you also have to kind of take that veil off of yourself and admit all the things you've done.
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And that's a hard pill to swallow too.
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It's a reactive abuse, Like what they do is they poke at you until you have this explosive moment and it's oh, I hate it.
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I know that my abuser would do that and would just sit back with a smirk on his face and say, look at you, Wow, Wow, Look at that reaction, You're crazy.
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And then I would believe it.
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I would sit there and think, oh my God, I can't believe.
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I just screamed like that or you know whatever.
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And I actually probably am crazy and I think you know you kind of are.
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You've lost the semblance of who you are at that point.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And you will do anything to stop feeling the way that you're feeling, whether that is you're afraid of them leaving, whether that means like I just don't want to have to deal with the enormity of finding a job and moving out.
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And you know they, they purposely set you up and they get you so in, in in a grain, in something that, although it looks so easy for other people on the outside like just leave, you know, on the inside you, just when I ended up getting divorced, I found several chairs that were stationed all around my house and I would go outside on the front porch when I would get very upset because I didn't want the kids to see me cry, and I would just fall apart on the front porch, you know, texting and crying and begging.
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And it wasn't until after he left that I noticed that he, like skillfully placed chairs behind trees and behind the gate so that he could see me while I was falling apart because he gained so much pleasure from watching me.
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So just bottomed out, distressed.
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And then it got to the point where he was taping me, he was videotaping me, he was taking the text messages that I was sending him and he was sending them out to his friends.
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So he was making this case that she's crazy.
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And I played right into it because from the outside I look crazy.
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When I read through some of the texts that he was giving to the court I was like what was I thinking?
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But in the moment it literally feels like you're going to die if you do not make this work and you do everything to stick with it.
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So, yeah, I mean it's a very terrible dynamic to be in and again, I think these people are very masterful and they know what will just like make you do whatever they want.
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And again, you know they don't come in saying I'm going to hate your kids.
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I'm going to treat them, you know.
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But you do know something's up, because these people do not operate like everyone else.
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You know, I think mine was that he never wanted to hear me talk about my first husband.
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When everyone else was trying to get me to slow down, to grieve, to talk through it, I was like nope, nope, nope and I thought that him not wanting to hear about it was that, oh, like he's just trying to give me space and it took me probably two years to recognize he really just didn't care.
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He didn't want to hear me, he didn't want my problems, he didn't want to shoulder any burdens.
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He literally was like just don't talk.
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And then by the time I was ready to talk it was pretty much known don't you're stop being.
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He used to say you can't control your emotions.
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You can't control your emotions.
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And you know, I was like I didn't realize that emotions were to be controlled and I kind of do.
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I was like if you knew what I'd like to be doing right now.
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I'm controlling them pretty well.
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They have no idea the amount of control that we have.
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Yes, I would agree with you there.
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Only, during certain parts, you know and I think that that's a cycle of these things is that you feel so helpless and you're bottomed out and you're like, oh my gosh, I just can't do another moment, and right when you're about to leave, you know he would come back and he'd say stuff like, well, fine, if you really want this to, if you really want to make it work, if you're, if you want, you know, if, if you're going to keep begging me even when I wasn't, he just knew that he was gotten to that point where I was going to walk, and then he would just flip it around and you know, it was like I always say, it was like someone was choking me out, and just as I was about to take my last breath, he would like let go, and it almost felt like he was the one saving me, which, you know, the person that's literally trying to kill me turns himself into the savior, like within an hour of, you know, this entire blow up fight.
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I'm thinking I made this all up in my head.
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So, yeah, I mean it's.
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It's crazy literally to be in that and not be able to see it.
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Yes, and I had a guest on and I'm not going to make an assumption of narcissism going on, but you know, because it is definitely an overused topic but it sounds pretty darn close.
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But she came on to talk about narcissistic personality disorder and she said that it gets to a point where you know they do the breakdown, build you back up, breakdown, build you back up, but then the cycle gets.
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You're so into the cycle where you're on the floor and they've broken you down and then just the fact that they're not unleashing abuse actually seems like a gift.
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At that point it's not even apologies anymore or anything like that, it's just the fact that you get to breathe for a second and you're like, oh he's a good guy because he's letting me breathe and I can do this.
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Yeah, See, I knew that I was looking at it wrong, but now that I see it can be fixed, I'm going to go right back into trying to fix it even more.
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Yeah, and that's the thing is like it becomes.
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It becomes less and less about what's going on and more about the rapidity of the cycle.
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You know where it was, this drawn out cycle.
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You know it would be like two weeks of him not talking to me, and then he would kind of be nice to me and I was like, oh, and then he would be nice to you for like a week and then he would start all over again.
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Yeah, and it just becomes exhausting and you don't even see it.
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You just kind of are in the motion of waiting for the uptick so that you can breathe again.
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Absolutely, oh.
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And then you see how kind they are to everyone else and how you know even giving are helpful, and then you think it really actually must be me if he can act like that with everyone else, and it's just me.
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Yep, my car broke down and I had my mother, who's in her eighties, I had my daughter, who was, you know, before 10 years old, and my son and we were in second Atlanta and I was driving his truck and it broke down and he wouldn't come get us, like he would just.
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He was like just wait for it.
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It took us like seven hours and we were in a horrible part of town and he would not come get us.
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But the very next day his parents' car breaks down, like 45 minutes from our house, and he's like out the door going to pick them up.
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And I'm thinking, you know.
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And then he would say to me well, if you didn't let the gas run down, that's you.
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Why am I going to clean up after your stupidity?
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You know, and run down, that's you.
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Why am I going to clean up after your stupidity?
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And it was one of those like but you're so willing to step in for everybody else, but when it comes to me, you're being ridiculous.
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Calm down, you're being way too emotional If you weren't so stupid you wouldn't put yourself in this position.
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This is your fault and you begin to believe it.
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You mentioned also some a financial component, and financial abuse is definitely a thing.
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I'm sure pretty much everybody can figure out what that means.
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But do you mind just sort of going into a little bit more detail what that looks like?
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Yeah, I think a lot of people think about like, yeah, sure, the house.
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You know a lot of people share a house and if you're a stay-at-home mom, you know I wasn't technically, I worked still but you know, when you're sharing stuff with somebody you don't even know how much they're taking care of until they start, you know, taking back those things or not caring for them.
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So you know, we first moved here all of a sudden I was responsible for everything, and then the yard work because he didn't want to do that, and then this, and then that, and so I started seeing that I was so stuck in my house I couldn't sell it because he was supposed to refinish it but he didn't want to.
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He gave up, he wasn't contributing any money.
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So I can't sell my house because it's in ill repair, but I can't repair it because I don't have any money.
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And then we were on the kids, were on state aid because we had six kids and there's no.
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I mean that would be like $1,500, if not more, a month.
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So the kids are on Medicaid.
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Well, he refused to hand in any of his IRS forms every year.
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So I would be on the phone like fighting with people saying like I cannot, because my special needs daughter was one of those people and I was like I cannot let this lapse and I would just cry.
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And they were like he has to get his stuff in.
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Well, of course he didn't want to turn his stuff in, because then I would know how much he was making.
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So you know, not only it was all of these things like if you don't want to contribute, it's not okay, but I can, I can do with that but not only was he not contributing, he was actually messing things up on purpose.
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And then when I would call and I would cry and I would tell these people like I can't lose my medical and he would hear me yelling at people He'd be like God, see how mean you are to people, like you think you own everyone, you think that you're so entitled and I'm sitting there thinking I'm just trying to save my kid's medical insurance, or I'm just trying to save my kid's medical insurance, or I'm just trying to save my daughter's disability, but he would throw.
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He just had this way of throwing things in my path so that I would trip up, no matter what that was.
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It took me years.
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I went through probably like seven lawnmowers in my backyard and I finally recognized that it was because he was taking breaths and he was throwing them down in different places so that when I cut the lawn I would go over them and it would break the.
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I mean, that is the level of depravity that this man was capable of.
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That I refuse to see.
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You know, I would make excuses for it.
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I would probably do that because one of the dogs was, you know, digging or.
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I just refuse to see how truly, and you know, and to your talk of narcissism, I get very upset with my girls and boys.
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They're on social media and they're like you're gaslighting me and I'm like girls you don't even know what gaslighting is.
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Yeah, I'm like you are diluting how seriously dangerous these individuals are.
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When you lump people and say like, when you use it as such, like a term, it loses its true toxicity.
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Like it is a dangerous, dangerous term relationship to get into somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder.
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And it's not just a matter of somebody's trying to pull one over on you.
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That and that's what gaslighting is.
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It's the manipulation and the complete.
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I mean you just you have no idea what your reality is anymore and you're so confused and you're so lost.
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It's dismissing.
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You know, overreacting I had that all the time You're overreacting, You're so emotional, you need to pull yourself together, kind of thing.
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Or you know, I was just kidding.
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I didn't really mean that.
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I don't know why.
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I was just kidding.
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Why are you so sensitive?
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You're so sensitive?
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Take a joke, can't you?
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You know nobody else would have been so sensitive, or just even denying things like that happened.
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I would never say that.
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Why would you think I would say something like that?
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Yeah, I know, yeah, it's a horrible thing or making up stuff you said, and I'm like I never said that, yeah, you did no, really, and it doesn't even sound like something.
00:20:18.840 --> 00:20:19.262
I would say.
00:20:19.262 --> 00:20:43.641
No-transcript for them to do that.
00:20:43.641 --> 00:20:52.320
I think a lot of people are just so quick to say there's something wrong with them if they react that way, and not that we all should get a pass when we behave badly.
00:20:52.320 --> 00:20:55.934
You know that's a completely different subject.
00:20:55.934 --> 00:21:09.167
But narcissists definitely have a way of I mean they're they're very, very good at painting you to be something and then pushing your buttons to make sure that you show every aspect of what they're claiming you do.
00:21:09.167 --> 00:21:15.727
And they're also very good at um accusing you of doing the very things they're doing, which confuses the heck out of me.
00:21:15.727 --> 00:21:20.747
You know like, yeah, everything that he claimed when he came after me during the divorce.
00:21:20.747 --> 00:21:22.618
You know everything that he was claiming.
00:21:22.618 --> 00:21:24.483
I was like that's you.
00:21:24.483 --> 00:21:26.498
You know he was saying that I was abusing dogs.
00:21:26.498 --> 00:21:28.603
I'm like I would never abuse a dog.
00:21:28.603 --> 00:21:36.627
I mean, that's where I draw it line, like I would never abuse a dog Like he gives me a lot of stuff, but I would never abuse a dog.
00:21:36.647 --> 00:21:50.046
Right, yeah, so yeah, and it is the thing that they know will also make you fall into line, because they know you want people to see you as a good person and they know that you care what people think and that's what they use against you.
00:21:50.994 --> 00:21:53.019
Well, how did you get out actually?
00:21:54.103 --> 00:21:57.612
So, as I said, I had four from the first marriage.
00:21:57.612 --> 00:22:04.962
He actually left one time and he went to the lawyer and he must've found out that he wasn't going to get anything.
00:22:04.962 --> 00:22:08.681
So after about six months came back, said oh, I really want this to work.
00:22:08.681 --> 00:22:20.205
And from that point on he started videotaping me and, like I said, sending my texts out and messages out, set me up for stuff you know, said like I need you to go see the psychologist because you're crazy.
00:22:20.205 --> 00:22:28.957
And if you do that, so by the time you know, finally, I think I kicked him out three or four times, but I kept letting him come back in.
00:22:29.037 --> 00:22:38.319
And at the very last time my son, who is the third youngest, he said to me mom, I don't understand why you keep letting him come back.
00:22:38.319 --> 00:22:41.003
He said he's threatened to kill you, he's threatened to kill me.
00:22:41.003 --> 00:22:43.347
I've lost my childhood over this.
00:22:43.347 --> 00:22:45.556
I don't leave my room, I'm afraid of him.
00:22:45.556 --> 00:22:53.577
And, you know, in that very moment I realized that if I couldn't get out of it for myself, I at least had to get out of it for my kids.
00:22:53.577 --> 00:22:54.699
And that was the end of it.
00:22:54.699 --> 00:22:55.941
That was the beginning of the end.
00:22:55.941 --> 00:23:05.435
But he came after me and said I was a drug addict, an alcoholic, that I was bipolar personality.
00:23:05.435 --> 00:23:11.548
Whatever it was, I was crazy, crazy, crazy and luckily it was a battle.
00:23:11.548 --> 00:23:14.460
But the truth always does come out.
00:23:14.460 --> 00:23:20.523
But unfortunately it takes you thousands of dollars, your reputation and a whole lot of years off your life to get it.
00:23:21.154 --> 00:23:25.931
Yeah, and I know some people who have had to move just because that.
00:23:25.931 --> 00:23:43.029
But yeah, the smear campaign because it got so bad that they couldn't stay in the same town they were living in because everybody's looking at her like she's the bad guy and you know, difficulty doing anything there.
00:23:43.029 --> 00:23:47.415
I mean, some people have a hard time finding a job because they believe all these lies that are told.
00:23:47.415 --> 00:23:55.309
And it's again when you know all these social media individuals are overusing the terms.
00:23:55.375 --> 00:24:11.878
it really minimizes the effect that it takes on people and it destroys literally destroys lives and yeah there came a point where you know and that's one of when people ask me for, like, what's my biggest advice?
00:24:11.878 --> 00:24:18.558
I did, I lost everything, you know, and I hung on as long as I did because I was so afraid of what people are going to know.
00:24:18.558 --> 00:24:27.982
People would know what went on in my house, that people are going to see that crazy text messages or that you know, somehow I was going to be at fault and you know.
00:24:27.982 --> 00:24:40.944
I think that the only way to get out of these relationships is for one to accept that, yes, you might lose everything, but I think that everything that I lost I either didn't have to begin with or it was the very thing keeping me stuck.
00:24:40.944 --> 00:24:44.731
When you talk about losing, you know people in your community.
00:24:44.731 --> 00:24:47.056
I lost all my childhood friends.
00:24:47.056 --> 00:25:01.038
I did move away from my home and he was going back there and talk about a smear campaign, telling everyone I was crazy, sending my text messages, telling everyone I wouldn't let him see his kids and the people that I grew up with that I had known my whole life.
00:25:01.038 --> 00:25:09.086
I can't say that they ever said anything to my face, but it was very quiet behind the scenes and I didn't really even try and reach out.
00:25:09.165 --> 00:25:11.768
When I left, I just that was it.
00:25:11.768 --> 00:25:27.432
I had to be okay with losing what I lost and what I found out was that on the other side of it I'm so sorry that it took me so long to do it A and B there's nothing you can do to change what's happened.
00:25:27.432 --> 00:25:29.436
Whatever's happened has happened.
00:25:29.436 --> 00:25:35.941
You just need to move forward, because you can't fix it, you can't change it, and the more you try, I always say it's like a sweater.
00:25:35.941 --> 00:25:39.798
You pull on that string and all of a sudden there's no sweater left.
00:25:39.798 --> 00:25:46.480
You just keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and that's the way these relationships cannot, in any way, shape or form, be healthy.
00:25:46.642 --> 00:25:50.415
I have, you know, read, you know there's that back and forth that.
00:25:50.415 --> 00:25:51.618
Can you be with an narcissist?
00:25:51.618 --> 00:25:51.939
Can you?
00:25:51.939 --> 00:26:06.356
In my own head, if you have to ask that question, that is someone that is not healthy for you, because you shouldn't ever ask can I be in a relationship with somebody that inherently says you're going to need to put out more than you should?
00:26:06.356 --> 00:26:09.002
I mean, why would you want to, can you?
