Lady News - Power & Control
Lady News is a feminist podcast centring lived experience, investigative storytelling, and the voices mainstream media overlooks.
Lady News - Power & Control
Emotional Abuse, Made Visible
A charming start can hide a calculated pattern. We open our first Lady News episode by naming the tactics that make emotional abuse so hard to see love bombing, DARVO, fast intimacy and we ground them in a brave, lived-experience story from Leesa Scanlan. Her account traces the slow shift from fairy tale to fear, how late-night conflicts and word salad undermine confidence, and why outside voices can be the mirror you need when self-doubt takes over.
We walk through the power and control wheel to show how small moments add up to a system designed to chip away at autonomy. Then we get practical. You’ll hear how documenting timelines and screenshots supports clarity, how paid family and domestic violence leave can create space to plan, and what it looks like to file a police report even when no crime is charged. For South Australian listeners, we break down the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme , SA's version of Clare’s Law, what information may be shared, the role of the caseworker, and how your own report can be considered in future checks.
Finally, we talk about healing, trauma bonds, and re-entering dating with new eyes. We separate false green flags of excessive praise, constant availability, rapid future plans from the real ones: boundaries honoured, steady behavior, genuine accountability. If your gut says something is off, that’s data worth trusting. For links to resources, support services, and more on the power and control wheel, head to ladynews.com.au. If this conversation helped, please follow, share with a friend who might need it, and leave a review to help others find these tools and stories. Your voice can help someone else feel less alone.
You can find out more about the Duluth Model and the POWER & CONTROL Wheel here .
A great TV series to watch which we found to be relevant to this topic is FAKE. .
Support Services
If this episode raises difficult feelings or brings up personal experiences, support is available. Help is free, confidential, and available nationwide:
1800RESPECT
📞 1800 737 732
🌐 www.1800respect.org.au
24/7 counselling and support for people impacted by family, domestic and sexual violence.
Lifeline
📞 13 11 14
🌐 www.lifeline.org.au
24/7 crisis support for anyone feeling overwhelmed or unsafe.
Beyond Blue
📞 1300 22 4636
🌐 www.beyondblue.org.au
Mental health support, including anxiety, depression and trauma.
Mensline Australia
📞 1300 78 99 78
🌐 www.mensline.org.au
Support for men experiencing or using violence, or struggling with relationships.
Kids Helpline
📞 1800 55 1800
Before we begin, we want to acknowledge that this podcast discusses domestic and family violence. Please take care while listening, and if you need support, resources are available in the show notes or on our website at ladyns.com.au. Lady News with Elise and Penny. Welcome to Lady News. This is our first episode, which is pretty big, and I'll be honest, I'm a little bit nervous.
SPEAKER_02:I'm your host, Elise. And I'm Penny. Lady News exists because family and domestic violence doesn't always look the way people expect it to.
SPEAKER_00:It isn't always physical or obvious. And often, by the time you realize something isn't right, you're already deep in it.
SPEAKER_02:This podcast is about education, awareness, and connection. So women don't feel alone, confused, or ashamed for missing the signs.
SPEAKER_00:Each episode of Lady News focuses on the power and control wheel created by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota. It's a tool used across the world to understand how to identify abuse in relationships. So instead of asking, was it bad enough? The wheel helps ask, Was power taken away?
SPEAKER_02:For some women, this handy little resource is the first time the abuse that they've been subjected to finally makes sense. The patterns of behavior you might be or have experienced could be emotional abuse, economic abuse, using children, coercion and threats, intimidation, isolation, minimizing, denying and blaming, and using male privilege, all of which are driven by one central aim: power and control.
SPEAKER_00:In this first episode, we're focusing on emotional abuse, which is one of the hardest forms of abuse to name, because it often hides in everyday interactions.
SPEAKER_02:It can look like constantly being second-guessed, feeling like you're always the problem, or slowly losing confidence in your own judgment.
SPEAKER_00:It's when disagreement turns into self-doubt, when love feels conditional, and when your emotional safety depends on keeping the peace.
SPEAKER_02:We also want to talk openly about red flags and green flags, especially in dating.
SPEAKER_00:Because being older, wiser, and experienced doesn't make you immune. It just means the signs are often more subtle.
SPEAKER_02:We are giving women language, clarity, and confidence. So you can trust yourselves earlier. We invited people with lived experience of emotional abuse to speak out and share their stories.
SPEAKER_00:Lisa Scanlon bravely answered the call, and this is her story.
SPEAKER_02:Lisa, you experienced emotional abuse in a past relationship, and I'm pretty sure that this guy seemed like the man of your dreams in the beginning. Can you tell us what happened?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and and what you just said is is very true. Um when I met this person, um, we met by chance at the gym. Um I actually approached him, and he it I felt like for the first time in a really long time, I had met somebody that just got me. And I felt like I had met, yeah, like you said, the man of my dreams. Um, it moved very quickly at the start. Um, he was very, very conversational. Um, we had exchanged numbers, so there was a lot of backwards and forwards conversation happening very quickly, and he, you know, planned the first day and all of those types of things. And like it really did feel just like really wonderful, like to feel that sort of love. And yeah, it just it just moved very quickly um in those early days. I guess in hindsight, what I was experiencing at that point was a lot of like love bombing.
SPEAKER_02:Had you heard of that term before this, or did you think it wasn't love bombing at the time?
SPEAKER_04:I didn't believe that it was love bombing at the time, definitely not. Like a lot of the things that I can sit and talk about in regards to relationship now are all with hindsight. Um, when I was in it, it didn't really feel that way. And I don't even know if I had really heard the term love bombing very much, um, or if I had, it was all very like peripheral. I'd never experienced it like that. And you know, it was a lot of things, you know, that we're all waiting our whole lives to hear somebody say. It's you know, I've never met anybody like you. I've never, you know, I can't believe that you like me, um, like I'm pinching myself, all those kind of things makes me sick to think about now. But like it was the things that like I'd waited for someone to say to me, and so it felt like that fairy tale. And that's the thing with perpetrators as well, they don't walk into your life presenting themselves as the monster that they are, they walk into your life presenting themselves as the man of your dreams, which is exactly what happened here. And you know, we were together for six months, it wasn't a very long relationship, and the things that started to happen, it was all very subtle. Um, so it all just happened like bit by bit over time, and it wasn't until the very end that I even considered the fact that it it was abuse.
SPEAKER_00:Was it anyone in your circle who started questioning things that you were retelling to them about the relationship or about this person?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, that was um a a big help in my situation because it it was difficult because I had started to keep a lot of things to myself. So at the very start, there was a couple of you know fights that we'd had um where I told one or two people and then we got back together, you know, and we talk about the cycle of abuse. That's what I was caught in. So it was like, you know, everything's really wonderful and everything's going great, and then there's like a change, and it's hard to even explain it. Um, but you start walking on eggshells, and you are just aware that at any moment something's gonna happen, the fight, the escalation would happen, I'd be discarded, he'd give me the silent treatment, disappear, and then he would come back and be like, I I don't want to lose you, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. So I was experiencing that repetitively, and I stopped sharing that with the people that were closest to me because for several reasons, partly because I was trying to protect him, because still at this point I thought I was gonna marry this person or you know, that this was going somewhere. So there was that protective part over him, but also because I think I was um embarrassed and you know, I felt shame around, probably because there was an unconscious part of my brain that was like, get out, like you should you shouldn't be putting up with this behaviour. So I felt ashamed to actually tell people. But as it got worse and as it went on, the select people that kind of did know what was happening. I had one or two of them make comment. And hearing somebody external to yourself say that sounds like abuse, or what you're experiencing, have you noticed like that this happened last month? Or you know, having someone else put their lens on it was a really great way for me to be able to zoom back out because, as well, throughout the relationship, anytime there was a problem, he would flip it using Darvo and and word salad and all the things that these people do, and it would be my fault. So I'm going through this relationship thinking that every fight was my fault. So to have someone else bring their lens in and say, actually, what he's doing, he's projecting, or he's doing this, or having someone do that was so helpful because I couldn't see it myself.
SPEAKER_00:And what did he do when you started calling that out? Because obviously you had these people kind of labeling what you were experiencing, but then when you're in the conflict with that person, you don't always have the labels. It's not until you start labeling it that it can um inflame the conflict.
SPEAKER_04:So I'm trying to think if I actually called him out at all. I think like because when we were in conflict, my natural response is to like retreat um and mend. Like I would want to fix it. So even if maybe I was trying to have a constructive conversation about something that had upset me, that would get flipped into how horrible of a person I was, and that actually now we're fighting about something that I had apparently done, and so I would end up apologizing because he would go round and round in circles and confuse me. He would keep me in conflict for hours, often at night, which is a common tactic because you become very tired and exhausted, and so yeah, I would end up apologizing, and then I would just because of the trauma bond as well, I would just want to fix things, and so I would just let something go, or I would just apologize so that we could move on, and so there wasn't any calling out um of the behaviour at that point, and then I think when the time came and I knew that it was time for this to end and I was going to leave. I had gone backwards and forwards multiple times in my head about that as well. I kind of quietly exited to some degree, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because you're very smart because then you're no longer feeding it.
SPEAKER_04:Correct, yeah. And you know, a lot of the stuff I've read since then is like the best way to deal with people. Um, and a lot of what I've read has been in relation to what is being called like narcissistic abuse, which is what I believe I experienced um undiagnosed.
SPEAKER_02:A lot of what's well, yeah, they're not gonna go get help. Yeah, they're not gonna ask for a test themselves. No.
SPEAKER_00:I think I might be a narcissist.
SPEAKER_03:How can we I started questioning myself during it as well, thinking I was a narcissist. But yes, that's a very good point.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, um, that if you're a narcissist, you don't usually question if you're a narcissist. So if you are questioning, you're probably not.
SPEAKER_03:Good. That was very validating when I read that as well.
SPEAKER_04:Um, but one of the things that they say is like the best thing you can do is grey rock, which is just not give anything back if the perpetrator's coming at you with those like questions and like won't let up, the best thing you can do is give them something that they can't come back at, and to kind of exit the conversation. So I kind of used that strategy to some degree when trying to just exit the relationship.
SPEAKER_00:How did it affect your work?
SPEAKER_04:I had a lot of flexibility in my day. I was a sales rep. So I was going from customer to customer, visiting them, and so there was a lot of space within my day, and that's where it started to play into me. And my anxiety got very high. Um, it affected my um appetite as well. So I was not eating as much as I should have been eating, and just really I was nowhere near as engaged at work as I should have been during that time. Um, I guess when it comes down to it, something had to give. And unfortunately for work, that was the place where that came in. And when things had gotten to its worst, I had decided I needed to speak to um a lovely lady who works in HR at the company I used to work for. And I was relaying to her um what was happening, and she was actually a really great support in that time. And as a, you know, a person who was not part of my circle, she just listened to what I had to say, and she was also very blunt. She was like, You need to get out of this, you don't deserve it. Like what you're experiencing is abuse, it's time to go. And I think I'd never had anyone be so matter-of-fact with me about it as well, and I think I kind of needed that firm, loving hand of hers to sort of help me. And she was the one who um actually let me know that I could use domestic violence leave to have some time off while I tried to get my headspace a little bit better, um, and also to have time to do certain things I needed to do, like um go to the police. Making a police statement doesn't take five minutes, so being in the right headspace to do that.
SPEAKER_02:Can you tell everyone about that and what the process involves?
SPEAKER_04:I think a lot of people don't make police reports because they don't think that they can. It's one of the reasons. I think safety is obviously another really big one. People fear for their safety in making the report, or maybe there's children involved. Many reasons, but you can actually go into a police station and request to make a police report. I believe they refer to it as a street check or a report of information. And so you can go in and just say, look, I've experienced this pattern of behaviour from this person, and I would just like to have it put on file. I would suggest if anyone does consider doing that, to have your ducks in a row beforehand. So have a bit of a timeline of you know, when you met, when certain events happened, um, and some evidence if you can. Often victim survivors will have a file on their phone already, or like a, you know, in your camera, an album of screenshots and evidence already. So you might have some of that, and just go in and like I can remember saying, like, I know that there's been no crime committed, but I want this and it's my right to come in and do this to report it. I want it put on file. Not only because if something happens to me, then it's there and you know who to go to, but also for anyone in the future that it has been recorded that this person has behaved in such a manner. So, yeah, that's something else I've tried to to talk about a little bit more because I want people to feel empowered in saying that, also potentially to be prepared that when you're going to the police station, you don't get to choose who you uh speak to necessarily, and that not everybody is going to potentially have the same uh level of sensitivity or maybe the same level of training that others may have. So um, you know, I've heard good stories and and less great stories about people doing this, so I just think it's really important to keep in the back of your mind that the reason why you're going in and that it's your right to do so.
SPEAKER_00:How was your experience with the police?
SPEAKER_04:Mine was really good, I have to say. So I do feel grateful for that, but the process in itself took probably 90 minutes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So that's why I say as well, like it doesn't take five minutes when you go in there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a job itself, isn't it? Reporting, and you have to have support and be really prepared for that. Yeah. Did you feel safe?
SPEAKER_04:I did, and I was reassured that like um when you make this report, like that person isn't told, for example. Because I think that's another fear that people have. So, in relation to making the report, yes, I did feel safe.
SPEAKER_00:Is there a register in South Australia?
SPEAKER_04:This is the other thing that I try to talk about as much as I can with people because so many people don't know that it exists. And I, being in South Australia, am extremely lucky that I have access to it. So the domestic violence disclosure scheme, um, what it is, is it is South Australia's version of Claire's Law. And Claire's Law is a UK police policy. You can request information about a current or previous partner of any, you know, domestic violence or AVOs or anything that could be worrying in a domestic family violence type scenario. Um it's absolutely incredible. Again, I didn't know that it existed until I needed it. And the fact that it's not nationwide is heartbreaking. I do know that there is a petition being reviewed at the moment um to try and bring that in um nationally.
SPEAKER_02:The police report that you filed, uh, do you think that would be on the register, or would it only be things that people have been convicted of? Or what about ongoing investigations? Would they come up on that type of report? Do you think?
SPEAKER_04:So in South Australia, how it works is you file your request for the report, then you are matched up with a caseworker, like a women's services caseworker, and they call you first and ensure that you're safe and give you tips and tricks and all the rest of it. And then maybe a few weeks after that, you have your meeting with SAPOL and so the South Australian police and this case worker, and they deliver to you what is or is not on there. I think that the two of them, I don't know if it's just the police officer or the two of them together, review what is on the file and then decide whether it's relevant or not. I requested that my police report be included in any future domestic violence disclosure scheme applications. So you can also do that if you make a police report. So if it's relevant to why somebody is asking about if they like, you know, if there's a history of domestic violence, then there's no reason why it shouldn't be included.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And how are you going now in relationships? Like, did you find it hard to start dating again? Especially because it sounded so lovely at the start. Yeah. They would have all looked like green flags.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So how do you know when the green flags are the red flags?
SPEAKER_03:Great question.
SPEAKER_04:Um, I think that there's multi-parts to that answer. Um, I feel like I've probably only just recently started to feel like I'm ready to enter the dating scene again. Um, I knew I needed to take some time um to heal and to work on some internal things myself. But I think what will help me is that I've been able to sort of look back on that relationship and things that at the time I thought were green flags, I think weren't really, if I'm being honest. So, you know, the the relationship being moved very quickly at the time. I'm like, oh, he wants to spend time with me, he's always available, this is great. Actually, what he's doing is fast tracking everything. So he's rapport, like he's making the rapport building phase of a relationship very, very fast, which isn't great. Right.
SPEAKER_00:What would you say to anyone listening who is in that phase of a relations a relationship where you are feeling like all the conflict is your fault but you don't know how to get out.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think and a lot of people will find themselves in that sort of position. And that answer can be so varied because, you know, for myself, there was no shared finances, no shared housing, and no shared children. So to exit was actually fairly easy in comparison. But I think that, you know, to anyone, I would say if you're you've got that feeling inside, that's your intuition. Um, and I think that was something that I ignored and swished down a lot throughout that relationship. Um, so to honour that you feel that way and that you know deep down that you deserve better than the treatment that you're currently getting. And then to just remember to show yourself kindness and compassion. I remember that when I was making that decision that I wanted to end the relationship, somebody said to me that on average it takes a woman seven times, seven attempts to actually leave. And she said that to me and she said, So give yourself grace, you know, you are actually bonded, trauma bonded to this person. And when I left, I felt like an addict, and that's something that victim survivors talk about as well. Um, and I had to like say out loud to myself, sometimes, like, you're this is the withdrawal part, like you need to like just get through this part, and each day is gonna be a little bit easier. Um, you know, and for people who do have um more complicated situations, um seek help in places that you can, whether it's trusted family or friends, or using things like um the domestic violence disclosure scheme, like we talked about, using your domestic violence leave, which is 10 days additional to your sick leave. There's other things that are available like the leaving violence payment. Um, I don't know if this is nationwide. Um, I do know if it is, yeah. So you can gain access to um$5,000, I believe it is, um, to help yourself get to a safer place. Whether it's you know, it might be that you need some money to change locks or replace screen doors or move into a new place or buy some furniture or something. There are some extra support services that are there that people don't know about. So I just think, yeah, it can feel obviously extremely daunting, but just to know that you don't have to live like this, like you can with time, like you can get to a place where you can feel free and safe, and you don't have to walk on eggshells anymore, and that there are so many people that love you and will support you through that.
SPEAKER_00:That's such amazing advice. And I've just had so many goosebump moments today with you, Lisa. Thank you so much for being here on the Lady News podcast, and you just come across as such a beautiful person with a caring heart. So thank you for being here with us.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much, Mr. More Goosebumps. Oh my gosh. I think there were so many relatable moments as well, and I think you really are helping a lot of people.
SPEAKER_04:Thank you so much, and like I said, like if this resonates with one person, then like all of this is worth it because I just can't stay quiet while this is going on, and so many wonderful women and men, but we know statistically there is a lot more women that are in this situation, and I just want to pass on the things I found out in my experience and the ways that they can get help.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that was so powerful, and way too many points that Lisa made resonated.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, sharing a story like that does take strength and vulnerability.
SPEAKER_00:What stood out to me, Penny, was how clearly emotional abuse can sit inside everyday dating experiences.
SPEAKER_02:And how long it can take to recognize what's happening to you when you can't see any bruises, but your confidence is slowly fading away.
SPEAKER_00:Lisa also highlighted really important practical realities, including police reporting and the empowerment that can come from documenting evidence.
SPEAKER_02:And the fact that paid family and domestic violence leave exists, something that some women still don't even know about.
SPEAKER_00:For South Australian listeners, there is also a police disclosure option available if you have concerns about someone you're currently dating.
SPEAKER_02:We'll link more information in the show notes and at ladynews.com.au.
SPEAKER_00:Everything we heard today sits firmly within the emotional abuse segment of the power and control wheel.
SPEAKER_02:And in future episodes, we'll continue working through this wheel one piece at a time.
SPEAKER_00:If this episode resonated with you, visit ladynnews.com.au for free articles, resources, and ways to contact Penny and I.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for listening to Lady News. Take care, and we'll talk to you next time.
SPEAKER_01:You've been listening to Lady News with Elise and Penny. Join us on Instagram or at ladynews.com.au