A Taboo Talk with Michelle Spexarth - Financial Abuse, the Cage You Cannot See
Financial abuse usually doesn't look like what we picture.
There isn't always a villain or a screaming match.
Sometimes it looks like being fully dependent on someone else, with no income of your own and no backup if it all falls apart. It looks like doing the math over and over and landing on the same answer: if I leave, the bills stop, and I have no way to catch my kids when they fall. So you stay, for the kids... knowing that's the safest option you have in that moment.
That is not weakness and it is not a cliché.
For so many women, especially moms, it is simply the truth.
Being financially dependent is its own kind of cage, and it keeps women in situations they would walk away from in a heartbeat if the money were not a leash.
I am not talking about this from the outside. I have lived it. And now we're talking about it.
In this episode I sit down with Michelle Spexarth to name it plainly: the quiet forms of financial control most people never call abuse, what it actually takes to start rebuilding when you have no income and no support system, and why financial freedom is the thing that finally makes leaving possible.
No woman should ever have to stay because she can't afford to go.