A very good day

After persevering through many years of marriage with a man who I thought was just a really difficult person, I had reached a stage where I no longer tried to rescue him each time he screwed up. I stood back and allowed him to deal with his own problems – and it was working well.

Even though I was still nursing the effects of a serious back injury which limited the hours I could work and types of jobs I could do, I took my two girls and left, not knowing how I would manage. It wasn’t easy at first. As impossible as it seemed, I was better off financially than I had been in my marriage with two wages and I was much happier because I had regained control over my life and my choices, plus my two teenage girls were doing better academically and emotionally.

I invested in my education and personal development – everything I did was aimed at understanding why people do what they do, so I could understand what happened to me and why, and to make sure it never happened again.

I started supporting other survivors of family violence and discovered that the strategies I had used in my own recovery process seemed to work equally well for other women when they implemented them.

I found that once women are able to recognise the strategies used by their abusers, they have the tools needed to eliminate all of the hooks that were once used as a means of control over them. Once that’s done, the result is unhindered freedom and they become a wonderful role model for their children to follow.

Family Violence Mindset Solutions is about “Unlocking the why behind family violence and creating effective strategies for change.”

One day, there was yet another incident that followed his same pattern, (a pattern I recognised so very well) and finally he said: “I can’t fool you anymore, can I?”  It was at that point that I realised he had just admitted he had been intentionally “fooling” me for years and I had somehow broken through the mind game. 

I had survived years of his verbal, emotional, psychological, financial and sexual abuse – I was a survivor of family violence.

On that day things changed for the better and after that, I had many more good days. I didn’t know that over the years I had quietly developed a number of strategies that were effective in coping with his abuse. When I began working with other survivors of family violence, I naturally shared my strategies with them and was surprised to find that they worked equally well for them too. That is when I started to create training modules specific to the needs of the women, as they recovered from the traumatic effects of family violence.

It’s exciting to see that more than 450 women have now been able to understand: 

• why their partner did what he did and 
• why they reacted as they did in response to his abuse. 

By exposing and explaining the mindset behind family violence and resolving the thinking that has caused the problematic behavioural choices, the goal is to:

1. Alter the strategic interventions used with survivors of family violence, so that the women and children do not have to return to an environment of abuse.
2. Expose the perceived benefits of violent behaviour for perpetrators and offer constructive and sustainable alternative behavioural choices.

“Dianne has a wealth of experience and knowledge of working in many different sectors and is a very skilled speaker and presenter who have the skill to present the subject with stories relating to her own life experience and women’s stories, together with visual drawings to enhance the point of learning. Dianne’s understanding of FV, empathy and humour based analogies draws the women into participating and interacting with Dianne well.”

“Dianne’s sessions have been well planned and well presented. The feedback from the women has always been very positive. On the topic of Facing the Fear:

• “I never knew that he was scared of me and that was the reason he was not letting me speak out – as the truth will come out’.
• “It was awesome – everything just fell into place for me’.
• ‘I now go out into my community and interact with them – before I thought it was my shame now I know its not’.
• Sunshine FV Registrar said “Dianne’s presentation was excellent and she is so cool about this stuff she really states it the way it is and women just get it’.
• “The story and drawing was great – it really made sense to me’.
• Geraldine Ellawala, Lead Worker Women’s Program, Djerriwarrh Health Services