Dismissed True Stories
Dismissed True Stories is a survivor-led podcast that dares to break the silence around domestic violence, emotional abuse, and toxic relationships. Each episode shares the raw, unfiltered realities of what abuse really looks like. From overlooked red flags to moments of escape, and everything in between.
Created by a survivor-turned-advocate with a broadcasting background, DTS is where stories once silenced are now spoken. Loudly, honestly, and without apology. We’re not here to sensationalize abuse; we’re here to humanize survivors.
You’ll hear from survivors finding their voices, families forever changed by loss, and organizations working to support healing and recovery. Sometimes, it’s one survivor passing the mic to another with a piece of advice that could change or.. save a life.
But DTS isn’t just about telling stories of survival. Each episode's commentary helps you decode your own story, make sense of your experiences, and see the patterns you might have missed while in survival mode.
The tone? Like talking with a trusted friend. No fluff. Just truth.
Whether you're navigating narcissistic abuse, gaslighting, or coercive control or you're in the process of rebuilding your self-worth and healing your trauma this space is for you.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is finally tell your own story.
Survivor-led. Heart-led. Truth-led.
#DismissedTrueStories | A podcast for survivors and victims, by survivors.
Dismissed True Stories
We’re All The Same: Survival Similarities
We dissect the initial warning signs and the devastating impacts of emotional manipulation and physical violence, including gaslighting and isolation tactics. The courage it takes to break free from such toxic relationships is nothing short of heroic. As we prepare for our summer hiatus in "Season Two Preparation and Thank You," I reflect on the transformative connections formed through this podcast and the deep gratitude I feel for our listeners. Stay connected via social media for updates, and remember, your value in this world is immeasurable.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 800-799-7233 OR text begin to 88788
Join the Sisterhood! The Survivor Sisterhood
Come join our community of survivors who are looking to meet someone just like you! See the behind the scenes work that goes into the sisterhood non-profit business, discuss DTS episodes, and of course find your survivor sister.
🔗 Follow Along:
Ready to share your story? Send me an email with the main talking points of your experience and I'll reach out to book an interview.
dismissedtruestories@thesurvivorsisterhood.com
Give DTS a 5 star rating! It helps this podcast reach other victims and survivors who NEED these stories! Help us find each other, help us heal, and help us find safety. Love you, mean it.
This episode of Dismissed True Stories is brought to you by Persephoneai. Persephoneai is an innovative and disruptive discreet app where you can more securely stash your evidence of abuse, make static notes, upload attachments, import audio-video files and even request transcription and language translation. Transcription and language translation. Then export your full evidence, report on your timeline, sos the police or even use it in court after your safe exit. You are not alone, and Persephone is here when you don't know who to tell. Find Persephoneai on Google Play or the App Store. In this episode, we will be hearing directly from a survivor as they recount their personal journey. Dismissed True Stories recognizes that discussion of abuse and trauma can evoke strong emotional responses and it may be triggering for some listeners. Listener, discretion is advised. Hey, I'm Elissa and this is Dismiss True Stories the podcast.
Speaker 1:This podcast was born from the idea that when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a war reporter in the sense that I just really wanted to talk about the things that matter in the world. And when I ended up walking away from my professional broadcasting career and into an abusive relationship, I realized that victims and survivors really do fight their own wars at home. I volunteer with a local domestic violence shelter in my city and as I was putting on a vigil for the lives lost to domestic violence last year, I stumbled upon a story that will forever stick with me. I did the research to find this victim's family, since she is no longer with us, and one sentence kept rattling around in my brain Let them tell their story. And while I haven't worked up the confidence to get in touch with her family just yet, I want this podcast to not only be about the survivors who lived and escaped, but the stories from the family members of victims who, unfortunately, are no longer with us. I sat on this idea for almost a year before I decided to randomly make a TikTok video asking for survivors to come forward and share their stories of survivorship, and what happened next was completely and totally unexpected. Women came forward sending me their stories of survival, telling me that they were so sick and tired of being quiet, because what happens so often is that survivors are silenced, people aren't ready or equipped to handle their truth or sometimes simply they just don't want to make the time. But now, on Dismissed True Stories, we're making the time. I can't believe we're here already the season finale of season one. That is absolutely insane to me.
Speaker 1:So the reason why I started this podcast was because I wanted survivors to understand that they're not alone. Healing happens in community. You already know that. That is like role number one for me in survivorship and I was hoping that this podcast would help survivors understand that they're not alone.
Speaker 1:But the other thing that I really wanted to come out of this was to help people who have either experienced abuse and never really called it what it was, or for the victims who are still in abusive relationships or marriages to be able to identify that that's what is happening to them.
Speaker 1:Because a lot of the times if you're listening to this and you're a survivor, then you know it just doesn't quite click sometimes because you could be in denial or you could be gaslit, groomed, manipulated, and that is exactly what has happened. I have had numerous people reach out to me and say I understand now that my relationship is unhealthy and I am going to take the steps to recover and to escape. I never expected for some of those people to be extremely close to me and for me to not even know it. It's insane. So in editing these stories this season, I have come across many similarities and so I thought for the season finale I would put them all together in one episode. Identify their abuse. Just by listening to this episode and listening to the similarities, helping them understand that abuse is many times textbook and you're not alone, so let's get into it.
Speaker 2:So it's been a long, long time since I left, but it still affects me a lot. I just started going to therapy in like August, to deal with it. I've been in a lot of therapy, a whole lot of therapy.
Speaker 3:I've worked through some of it.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, right now I've been seeing the same therapist for a little over a year now, and it's been the most consistent therapy I've ever had, and so I'm in a really good space in regards to all of that.
Speaker 1:I've seen a lot of survivors share their stories in which there was a significant age gap between them and their abuser. A lot of the times it's because being younger you're easier to manipulate.
Speaker 3:Originally we met online on a dating website and at that time I was 18, young dumb, and he was 29.
Speaker 5:And I was like so I guess you have been my first red flag right there he is in his 40s and he is into you and I'm like okay, young, me young, 21 year old. He was like, okay, never been with a guy that old. But I'll see where it goes, I'm not against anything. And of course there's love bombing.
Speaker 1:the whole point of it is to gain control over another person and increase your dependence on the abuser Showering you with love, selling you a fairy tale, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:He was definitely saying all the right things. Everything I wanted to hear of that. Oh, you know what? No matter what, I'll be there, whether we're just friends or we're just in a relationship, but I'll be by your side. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to go through this alone.
Speaker 4:Fell in love so quickly and that was just the love bombing and the. He had to be with me all the time and I just thought that was so romantic because nobody's wanted to spend that much time with me.
Speaker 5:Em asked me. I'll just use Em for him. Em asked me if I needed to come over to cry, have a shoulder to cry on, talk things out, and I was so grateful for that. So like, yes, I can really use that.
Speaker 6:I started dating somebody and there was love bombing. In the beginning, as a teenager, I was completely perfect, fairy tale, all of that fun stuff.
Speaker 1:And then, once you've committed to a relationship, because you've been love bombed and sold a fairy tale, they're going to move into that next step, which is isolation.
Speaker 2:I had just felt so isolated from all of my family and friends back home, from everything I knew, and I felt like there was no way out because he had told me for so long they don't love you, they don't care about you, that I believed him, and so I was like this is this, is it? Like this is how it ends for me. So it was just him and I. I was like this is it, this is how it ends for me.
Speaker 5:So it was just him and I. I was completely isolated. I had no friends.
Speaker 6:Isolation, all of it. It's not anything that you're supposed to recognize. You're not supposed to see it because you're not supposed to have to be around it. You're not supposed to be witnessing it. It's not normal around it.
Speaker 1:You're not supposed to be witnessing it, it's not normal, and one of the ways they can keep you isolated is leaving you to take care of all of the responsibilities of life, like deciding to not work and leave you to pay all of the bills.
Speaker 2:I was like there's no way he's going to stay jobless, Like he'll get another job. There were tons of jobs where we were living and so I was like it'll be easy, no problem, Never even tried.
Speaker 3:I was like you know what? You don't help me, you don't do nothing, I pay all the bills too, and I'm going to school, and I was over it. I was like you know what.
Speaker 1:At this point, I'm done. I don't want to be in a relationship with you.
Speaker 3:We're married, but I'm a single mother.
Speaker 4:Every single story that I shared this season, the survivor had mentioned power and control, especially him being very controlling of what I can and can't do, so one of his tools to control the family was to tell us that we were crazy and put us in therapy.
Speaker 5:Looking back now, that was a total control move on his part.
Speaker 6:And so I was like I am just taking control from one person and giving it to another person is what it felt like.
Speaker 1:I just can envision the control as he puts it on and feels empowered every day, Just some weird type of draw, and one thing that we can tend to do as survivors and victims who are in abuse is try to rationalize why things are the way that they are, by telling ourselves that other people could have it worse, or telling yourself that it's really not that bad, so you don't have to make the hard decision to walk away.
Speaker 3:And then every time he would get upset with me, he would raise his fist, but he would never hit me. So it's every somewhere fast. That was shown throughout. But you know, I just was like oh, you know, he never did put his hands on me. It's okay, you know he gets mad, he might raise his fist, but he never hit me yet.
Speaker 4:My line was if they put their hands on me, that's when it's wrong. Nothing else is wrong. It's when they put their hands on me in a violent way, and I think that that's also important.
Speaker 1:A very manipulative way to regain power and control and this can also be seen as narcissistic hoovering would be to threaten you when you do try to walk away with things like they're going to hurt themselves or they're going to unalive themselves.
Speaker 5:I'm done. I'm going to go drinking and jump off a bridge. I'm going to go do this. I'm going to do very dangerous things. At first it was just texting. No pictures were sent. His favorite was to.
Speaker 6:If I left.
Speaker 1:He was going to kill himself in front of the kids, in front of whoever however, I wish I could tell you what this was and why abusers choose to strangle their victims over hitting them, but one of the misconceptions is that they choked you, and I am very persistent on reminding a survivor that they did not choke you.
Speaker 5:They strangled you, and that is actually an attempt at unaliving somebody, and so, instead of hitting, me, he decided to choke me up, and that was the first time that he actually choked me, and he choked me until I passed out and he like kind of threw me up against the wall by my throat and trying to choke me out, and so I started just clawing at him, slapping him, just trying to get him off of me, and when he finally does, I slink down to, like, the floorboard and I'm rocking myself and just like freaking out, in which his response was get up, get get up now, cause I was trying to scream when he had his hand on my throat originally, like I, he was like why are you freaking out so much? I was like you just choked me out. He's like no, I didn't Like, you're not, that's not what happened. Like, and I was like then what happened?
Speaker 6:So much gaslighting all the time that I don't think I even really had a perception of reality.
Speaker 5:He, even after the incident, tried to gaslight me into thinking it was my fault and that it didn't actually happen. So I gaslighting myself of, just like it's not that bad, like a lot of women have it worse than me, and it's kind of like I drove myself to stay because of that. I was like, well, it could be a lot worse.
Speaker 1:Are we even surprised that another common theme is cheating?
Speaker 2:And he had been talking to so many women and had been getting photos of them and like sending them so many inappropriate things, I was just like I was floored.
Speaker 4:I mean, it was probably 10 or 15 different girls throughout our relationship, it somehow came out that he cheated on me with his ex-girlfriend and she was pregnant.
Speaker 5:What I didn't know at the time was that he had made a fake profile on Facebook to pose, as his friend Turns out, who he was dating at the same time with me.
Speaker 1:I call this next part the love compass.
Speaker 4:And so I think it's important again being raised in narcissism. I obviously didn't have a good compass of what love is.
Speaker 6:I wasn't able to have healthy relationships modeled to me. I wasn't, honestly, not necessarily super sure of the wrong kind of relationships at that point, but I wasn't sure what the right one looked like. I wasn't sure or taught how to love yourself first, or how to have grace with yourself, or how to not let people treat you poorly.
Speaker 1:Sometimes our abuser will be honest with us about their struggles and tell us that they've changed, even though they know that that's a lie and in our gut or our intuition can tell us that that may not be true. We will ignore that because we want to see only the best in them and we want to believe that they can change.
Speaker 4:But he told me he changed and I believed him because he seemed to have his anger under control, because he never got physically intimidating.
Speaker 5:He told me he changed and I wanted to believe him this next part just really fucking sucks.
Speaker 3:He hit me in the head. He was behind me. I was facing the sink and he was behind me. He hit me in the head like punched me in the head.
Speaker 4:And he just unleashed on me. He started punching me, kicking me um like grabbing me by, like my shoulders and like just banging my head against the floor repeatedly and hitting me so hard in the head that he was getting up and making sure I was breathing.
Speaker 3:When I went to sleep, so he's always playing it on me being woken up by being used as a punching bag.
Speaker 1:I think most have a drug of choice, but alcohol was a very common theme this season Blackout rage.
Speaker 2:Yes, it would be like blackout rage, yeah. So he, when he drinks hard alcohol, he and he thinks it's hilarious he gets an alter ego, he says where he's very mean and vindictive and yells a lot, says horrible things.
Speaker 6:And he ended up drinking excessively, smashing every crystal cup in my house. Tried to drive drunk, tried to make a scene.
Speaker 4:I did not know was in recovery or was supposed to be in recovery and was drinking again.
Speaker 1:One thing from my own personal experience I did not realize was abuse was when you are trapped or confined to a certain area and your abuser won't let you leave.
Speaker 6:Did you ever get trapped in like cars? Did he trap you in like closed spaces to fight before you either went somewhere or left somewhere?
Speaker 4:Um, like he would scream at me for six, seven, eight hours straight, no break. Um, just demeaning, um and kind of like trapping me. Um, in, like the basement to keep me there so he could just keep going in. Like the basement to keep me there, so he could just keep going, and we have a moment where we realize that we're just done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know how it is. It's the. He loves me. He's a really nice guy, I promise.
Speaker 3:Yep, the protection of his reputation. I was like, no more, I'm not going to do that for you. That is the moment that I woke me up and realized, like if this week continues down the street, I may not make it to see another day. Like I won't get to see my kids be married, I won't get to see my first days of school, I won't get to see them go to prom, I won't get to see them grow up. And that's what I was thinking the whole entire time, that what I was. I was thinking that the whole entire time. Like I was, just like you know, how can I get out of this? How can I get out of here? How can I live for just right now?
Speaker 5:and then she said he did that to me too, though, so you're not alone. And when she said that like you're not alone, I just broke down completely like I was. That was the first time I was like maybe I'm actually not alone, maybe I'm not crazy. I got his abuse the worst. I got all the negative, the abuse. It's the bouts of abuse that were horrific. Like this is not okay, this is not normal.
Speaker 6:It's like not okay and it's not okay. It's not okay that I thought it was okay.
Speaker 1:I want to leave you with the advice of these incredible survivors.
Speaker 2:Make a plan and execute it and don't turn back because it's so much brighter on the other side. It's amazing. You just have to make the plan and execute it. Even if it's amazing, you just have to make the plan and execute it. Even if it's just going to someone and saying you know it could be someone you don't know very well it could be a co-worker like me and just saying this is happening to me and I need help. Can you help me? And you would be surprised at the number of people who are willing to help I mean, don't get me wrong couples argue like they should never grow physical.
Speaker 3:You should never be calling one another out or each other's name. Stuff shouldn't be thrown. You shouldn't fear for your life. So the slightest sign of that, run, and don't be upset about running. There is going to be somebody out there who loves you and that's not going to make you fear for your life.
Speaker 5:You're not crazy, no matter how they make you think, and the moments where you feel the most like you, when you're alone, if you get the chance to be alone, or don't try to think that it's nothing, because it is something, no matter what it is, even if it's just an unkind word, while that may not be a punch to the face, it's still a punch to your mental health, which is a punch nonetheless, and so don't let yourself think that it's too little or insignificant. Nothing's too little or insignificant. I kind of referenced this earlier insignificant.
Speaker 4:I kind of referenced this earlier the people, the person that you're afraid to leave, that version of the person that you're afraid to leave, that you don't want to lose, is not the person you're leaving. You're leaving, you want to leave that person, the person you're hanging on for is just their mask. You're not crazy?
Speaker 6:You're not crazy, You're not weak, You're not less than Most of the time. They sought you out and they picked you because you were that good of a person. It wasn't your fault and you're worth fighting for. Other piece of advice I have is if anybody is ever in a situation where someone's disclosing domestic violence to you, I have not came across one situation where it has not been a case of if they're telling you something, multiply it by a thousand. If they're not telling you the full story, it was worse. And if they're speaking up, they have something to say.
Speaker 1:I can't believe. That's it the end of season one of Dismissed True Stories. Like I really never even pictured being here at the end of a season. I have learned so much. I have grown in my healing journey as an interviewer, as a journalist, as a podcaster, as a sister, a survivor sister Like just thank you so much for being here. I just can't find the words to say Like I'm stuttering. The feeling is incredible. I love every single connection that I've made. This podcast has truly changed my life. It has helped me connect with so many on such a deeper level, which is something that I crave. It's beautiful, it's incredible.
Speaker 1:Wow, I promise I'm only going to be gone for the summer. I'm going to take a month or two off and really focus on season two and getting ahead of the curve just a little bit. I will be back in the fall, so give me a follow on my social media. I've included my handles in the footer of this episode so you know when I am launching season two. Oh my, I can't believe I'm even saying crazy. And remember the world is truly a better place because you are in it. See you in season two, Thank you.
