One of the first things my ex did when things were going downhill was to take my laptop and sell my DSLR camera.
I just thought it was a strange thing to do at the time. He said he took my laptop as punishment for being bad and bluffed something about needing the money for the camera, and seeing as we were always in crippling debt despite his extraordinarily high earning capacity, I took his word for it.
It was only months later when he'd gone and I was suddenly in charge of providing for two adolescent children that I realized he had been very specific about taking my two tools of trade from me. As a trained journalist and photographer, these were the things I needed to make money. He also made a big deal of letting the family Adobe subscription lapse, meaning I could no longer take in graphic design work as I'd done in the past.
When I mentioned it offhand to my counsellor friend, she told me that it was just a part of his financial abuse. Keeping women in financial turmoil and creating reliance on the man was a very common abuse tactic, she said. Taking away any ability she had to create her own living was essential to keeping the door of the cage locked.
Financial abuse. I didn't even know it was a thing, let alone been perpetrated on me. Suddenly, images of me scaling garden walls to steal vegetables to feed my children flooded in, crying because he'd thrown away hundreds of thousands of dollars on a vanity business rather than keep our house and feed our kids, paralysed in frustration when he'd erratically stop working but also knowing that if I reacted, he'd do it for longer in order to teach me a spiritual lesson about "attachment to money." It was deeply physically painful and psychologically damaging to be so worried about eviction and providing for my children all the time, and in my case, I wasn't even allowed to flinch.
Turns out, this silent tormentor of women is very common. Financial abuse underpins almost all cases of regular abuse — 98 percent in fact. Financial abuse is how he keeps you crawling back to him. And if you can't leave, then he can pretty much do what he likes to you.
Which leads me to suspect that the actual incidence of financial abuse might be much higher in otherwise normal relationships, as it is only being reported after the abuse has accelerated to the more blatant forms of abuse.
What is financial abuse and how does it affect me?
Abuse is the use of a power discrepancy to hurt you, and in our society, money is power.
In short, financial abuse is when your abuser uses money to manipulate and torment you. If you are in a constant state of anxiety about where your basic needs are coming from and you are beholden to your partner's financial whims, you are probably being financially abused. If you don't have control of your resources, or any ability to fix a bad situation through your own efforts, but your partner does, that's a red flag that you're being abused.
How can I recognize if I'm being financially abused?
There are many ways someone can manipulate your financial situation to your constant disadvantage.
It's not romantic, but if several of these things are happening you are almost certainly being financially abused:
