Latest / #Divorce: Support before, during and after with Sarah-Jane / Season 4 Episode 3# Empowerment Through Innovation: Supporting Survivors of Domestic Abuse with Amanda Haigh"

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Season 4 Episode 3# Empowerment Through Innovation: Supporting Survivors of Domestic Abuse with Amanda Haigh" · #Divorce: Support before, during and after with Sarah-Jane

• 0:07
  Hello and welcome to our podcast hashtag divorce support people
• 0:11
  during an art. I am Sarah Jane Tester,
• 0:15
  international family mediator and French family lawyer based
• 0:19
  in Leeds and I'm joined as always by my Co host or the
• 0:23
  residual Life and Divorce coach based in London.
• 0:27
  In each episode we dive into real conversation about love,
• 0:32
  breakups, Co parenting and starting over.
• 0:36
  Whether you are thinking about separating, going through a
• 0:39
  divorce or finding your feet again, we are here to guide you
• 0:45
  with empathy, honesty and a good dose of experience.
• 0:50
  And we don't do it alone. We invite amazing guests,
• 0:54
  experts we trust and work with to share insights on everything
• 0:58
  from emotional well-being and parenting to legal and financial
• 1:03
  questions. Because getting the right
• 1:06
  support makes all the difference.
• 1:13
  Today we're diving into the world of domestic abuse.
• 1:16
  Not just the reality of what survivors experience, but also
• 1:20
  how new survivor LED approaches are creating hope, support and
• 1:25
  practical solutions. Our guest is Amanda Hay, a
• 1:29
  social entrepreneur, author of Fix Your Future, Live Your Best
• 1:34
  Life, the host of the podcast Heal with the Real, where you
• 1:39
  can find tips, strategies, and tools to live your best life
• 1:43
  after trauma, with a particular focus on domestic and
• 1:46
  narcissistic abuse, and the founder of Fix Your Future Ltd
• 1:52
  and You Kind Therapy. With more than a decade of
• 1:56
  experience in advocacy and project leadership, Amanda is
• 2:00
  building tools in communities that empower survivors,
• 2:04
  including a pioneering VR solution designed by survivors
• 2:08
  for survivors. Amanda.
• 2:13
  Thank you for being here today with us, and we're looking
• 2:16
  forward to exploring your journey and your vision and the
• 2:20
  technology you're using to help survivors not just survive, but.
• 2:24
  Thrive, thank you. What a lovely welcome and intro
• 2:30
  for for me. I really appreciate that.
• 2:32
  Thank you. It's lovely to have you.
• 2:35
  I'm curious actually to understand what got you there.
• 2:39
  Can you tell me about your journey?
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  What led you to found and fix your future and therapy?
• 2:45
  Yeah, lift experience, I was going to say unfortunately, but
• 2:50
  actually it's more fortunate I think because I now look back
• 2:55
  and I'm grateful because without those it's weird to say that,
• 3:00
  but it without those experiences, I wouldn't be
• 3:03
  developing what I am today. I found myself in lockdown in a
• 3:07
  narcissistic relationship years prior to that where I'd been in
• 3:12
  a really abusive, domestic abusive relationship.
• 3:16
  It brought all those emotions and now there were very two
• 3:19
  different unhealthy relationships, but they 1 was
• 3:24
  really abusive and you can clearly tell the signs that it
• 3:27
  was abusive because there was lots of stalking, breaking in
• 3:32
  car tyres slash, things like that.
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  And then the narcissistic one was very covert, so it was hard
• 3:41
  to know. And there was lots of love
• 3:43
  bombing in the beginning and I just thought this man was my
• 3:46
  world and my dreams. Unfortunately, it was another
• 3:50
  unhealthy relationship that I'd got myself into.
• 3:53
  And it brought up for me all that those years of trauma that
• 3:58
  I'd just put on a mask and got on with life.
• 4:01
  You like you do you just win those.
• 4:03
  Back in those days, it was very much just put on a mask and get
• 4:07
  on with it, or we were told to just get on with things.
• 4:10
  And actually that just came flooding all back.
• 4:13
  I'd had all this trauma that I'd just kind of pushed down.
• 4:17
  When I found myself in this narcissistic relationship in
• 4:20
  lockdown, it just all came flooding back and I began my
• 4:24
  healing. That's kind of my beginning of
• 4:27
  the journey of right, OK, let's make a change for more survivors
• 4:31
  to recognise unhealthy relationships.
• 4:35
  You've been so brave. Thank you.
• 4:37
  Well, you describe your work as survival LED, but in practice,
• 4:41
  what does that mean? Why is it so important to you?
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  It's really important that we're developing something with lived
• 4:48
  experience, and although my lived experience can contribute
• 4:54
  to this, other people's lived experience could be completely
• 4:58
  different to mine. So it's just important to hear
• 5:01
  the stories of numerous survivors so that we can develop
• 5:07
  something that's going to be purposeful and mission LED.
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  And right from the beginning, that was my thought process.
• 5:16
  It had to be survival LED that when.
• 5:21
  Someone is emerging from a coercive or abusive
• 5:25
  relationship. What are some of the biggest
• 5:29
  psychological or practical barriers they say?
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  Fear, shame. And people quite often will say
• 5:42
  why didn't they leave sooner? But there's so many barriers,
• 5:46
  economic barriers, money. They may be isolated from family
• 5:51
  and friends and they may not have any money or their
• 5:55
  perpetrators took control of the purse strings, the bank account,
• 5:59
  everything, so they've got no money to leave.
• 6:03
  It could be that they both share parental responsibilities and
• 6:08
  therefore that's always a tie. There's numerous reasons and
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  like I said earlier, we're told to just get on with it.
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  And it was very much seen as a behind closed doors private
• 6:23
  matter, whereas I think the landscape is changing slightly
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  so that people are coming forward more and more.
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  But there's still a huge shame, huge, huge shame about what's
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  gone on. It can happen to everybody,
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  anybody. There's a perceived thing that
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  it happens to people who have less money, who are uneducated,
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  all those things. But actually it can happen to
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  anybody. I think it's a much of self
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  esteem as well, your childhood when you come back to yourself
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  and then you let someone else take control because you think
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  you don't know. It can not always, but most of
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  it can stem from childhood experiences.
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  You know, for me, I had a wonderful childhood.
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  And so there was a few things that I'm sure you know along my
• 7:24
  way because what I did when I started healing through the
• 7:28
  abusive situation, I wrote and published my own book.
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  And within there were a lot of the self help tools that I use.
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  And I do look back on my childhood as I do remember one
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  of the things which I wrote about in my book was my dad
• 7:49
  calling me Minnie Alma. Now my mum's name is Alma and
• 7:54
  she was a really big lady and a lot of his work friends, he
• 8:03
  called me Minnie Alma. And I used to hate that because
• 8:09
  that meant that I was also this big person.
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  And this was a shameful thing for me.
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  I remember walking behind my mum because all the kids used to
• 8:17
  take Mickey and things like that.
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  So there are little things that I pick up on.
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  And I did write about in my book that I guess does contribute
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  bullying at school and things like that.
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  That just those little traumas that you gather along the way
• 8:33
  through life's lived experiences, which actually then
• 8:38
  end up being probably a bigger trauma.
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  But yeah, there's all these little, little tiny traumas that
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  kind of add up to this bigger thing, bigger picture.
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  I agree. Sometimes it can be childhood
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  traumas, not always. But I think with domestic abuse,
• 8:57
  that in itself is a huge trauma that you're with for the rest of
• 9:02
  your life. So it's just having that tool
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  belt of things that you can be armed with to support you when
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  you're feeling triggered or you're feeling low one
• 9:12
  particular day because it never goes away.
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  How can technology help in any way?
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  Well, for me, when I set off on the journey of developing what
• 9:27
  I'm developing, I found that there was up to two year wait
• 9:30
  list for mental health support for survivors.
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  One of the refugees that I'd gone in to do phase one research
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  told me that it was a 5 month wait list to get onto a wait
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  list. So that was before she even made
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  the wait list. It blew my mind.
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  So I think having this software that can be an interim before
• 9:57
  professional therapy is a lifeline for so many.
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  We also found that because regular therapy can often only
• 10:07
  be 8 to 10 weeks of very short lived, whereas survivors
• 10:12
  suffering with PTSD need long term support.
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  So the software picks up again after the 8 weeks of real
• 10:20
  therapy. So it's just a continuum of
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  support for survivors and I think it's going to be a game
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  changer for many, many people that are just desperate,
• 10:33
  desperate for urgent mental health support.
• 10:40
  That's fantastic. Then technology can be used and
• 10:43
  and actually you were developing VR solutions as well designed
• 10:47
  for survivors that you quite carefully.
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  Can you tell us more about what it looks like and what it is
• 10:52
  about? Sure.
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  So I've used it. I've already used virtual
• 10:56
  reality. My background was I was a
• 10:58
  business developer for 15 years now and I'd always run third
• 11:04
  sector organisations, so CICS and predominantly worked with
• 11:09
  the learning disabled demographic.
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  It set me on a trajectory of writing grants and setting
• 11:16
  different things up for them. I started working with VR and
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  people with learning disabilities and going into care
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  homes or places that they went through the day, day services
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  and they were getting to use the virtual reality.
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  They were going on roller coasters for the first time.
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  They were swimming with dolphins, and they were doing
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  just all this beautiful things. I was like, how can we use this
• 11:43
  technology for good for survivors of domestic abuse?
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  So the virtual reality therapy is actually an AI therapist.
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  So when you enter into the immersion, you're entered into a
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  really beautifully. It's literally over a lake and
• 12:03
  it's just serene. You can open the windows and
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  listen to birdsong. You can have a choice of the
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  therapist that you want to choose.
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  It's just a really beautiful space that you're fully immersed
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  in that feels so realistic, and then there's meditations and
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  breath work and different areas of the VR that you can go in
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  afterwards for real grounding techniques.
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  That's where we're at at the moment with the development, but
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  we've been successful just recently with our next lot of
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  funding, which will help us to embed it into two frontline
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  services and do the clinical research, look at reduction in
• 12:48
  PTSD symptoms, look at reduction in return to the crisis service,
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  look at cost savings for the frontline services.
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  Because women who are all survivors, should I say, because
• 13:03
  it's men too, can go back to their partners anything up to
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  seven times. So if we can cut that return
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  rate in half, we'll be saving frontline services huge amount
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  of money. You said you've tested the
• 13:18
  project, but is it the true mind form principles out there
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  already into the VR technology? How does it work?
• 13:26
  Yes. So it's all in the you put your
• 13:28
  headset on and it's all in the virtual reality therapy when you
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  use the headset. Wow.
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  Yeah, I was impressed by it because I'm not very good with
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  VR. And immediately the way you
• 13:43
  described it, it's so calm and you just put this thing on your
• 13:47
  head and you're transported. We were in a very noisy room and
• 13:52
  I tried it and I couldn't hear anything.
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  And I was focused on choosing my therapist and it was really,
• 14:00
  really good. I think it's a really good tool.
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  Sometimes you almost forget it's not real.
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  You're right and it can be. You know, we've just done a huge
• 14:10
  exhibition at the Climb Festival which is a 2 day festival for
• 14:15
  entrepreneurs and investors. We were in the West Yorkshire
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  Combined Authority stand and it was so busy in there and
• 14:24
  literally you just put the headset on and people completely
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  transported straight away to this space.
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  Like you say, you can be in the busiest of spaces but still feel
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  and taken away to this serene place.
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  I've tried VR before and I have to say it's it's absolutely
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  amazing. I was like blown away but but I
• 14:44
  could see I would have never imagined you could use it for
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  domestic abuse survival. It's just a prototype, but has
• 14:51
  it been used by domestic abuse survivors and if so, do you have
• 14:57
  any feedbacks from them? It has.
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  We worked with four frontline services and our phase one
• 15:03
  research. So we worked in refugees, we
• 15:06
  worked in domestic abuse services that are after crisis.
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  So there was a peer-to-peer support group so that they could
• 15:17
  support each other for after the abuse because just leaving is
• 15:22
  the very first part. But actually you've got a whole
• 15:26
  length, a timeline in front of you where you're coping with
• 15:30
  those PTSD symptoms. This was a peer-to-peer group
• 15:33
  that supports that demographic. And then we worked in a men's
• 15:38
  service with X addicts and so completely different
• 15:43
  demographic. But actually it was really
• 15:47
  interesting to get the viewpoints of male perspectives.
• 15:51
  Some of the feedback was the men were saying that they could open
• 15:55
  up to this therapy, that they could say things that they
• 15:59
  couldn't say to real therapists because there was still that
• 16:04
  barrier even with real therapists, that they were
• 16:09
  afraid to fully open up. Whereas with this they could
• 16:13
  just say what they wanted. People were saying that they
• 16:17
  found it very lifelike. We got some really great
• 16:22
  feedback and research from that phase one, and what we did was
• 16:26
  then iterated the software with all that feedback.
• 16:30
  We did have a clinical room, quite a clinical space when we
• 16:34
  first did the testing and then we changed it to the serene
• 16:38
  space that you saw Sarah Jane. All the feedback's just gone
• 16:44
  into changing what it now looks like.
• 16:47
  I heard that you're doing empowerment to entrepreneurship.
• 16:52
  Programme. How does it help building a
• 16:54
  business with the survivors? This I've got to tell you this
• 16:59
  story because it's just a beautiful story.
• 17:02
  For me, it was the cherry on the cake of why I'm doing this.
• 17:06
  So we went into a refuge on our phase one research and one of
• 17:12
  the young ladies or survivors that tested our software, we
• 17:18
  found out she was a software developer and she got in touch
• 17:23
  with theirs a few weeks later after we did the research and
• 17:27
  said that she would love to be part of the team.
• 17:30
  Few weeks later, she's now part of the team.
• 17:34
  She's just an incredible human being.
• 17:43
  She was brought over through an arranged marriage and held as in
• 17:50
  modern slavery, and it was a very, very sad story.
• 17:54
  She tells a story and there wasn't a dry eye in the room
• 17:58
  when she stood up and spoke about her story.
• 18:00
  It was a stand up for people that wanted to gain confidence
• 18:05
  through speaking. I said this is going to be an
• 18:07
  amazing event, do you want to do it?
• 18:08
  I wasn't sure whether she'd say yes or not, but yet she said
• 18:12
  yes. We went along and honestly there
• 18:14
  was not a dry eye and I was just so proud of her.
• 18:18
  It just fills my heart with joy to just witness this beautiful
• 18:24
  woman whose petals, like describe it as her petals are
• 18:28
  slowly opening and she's just becoming this flower.
• 18:32
  So stories like that, This is why I do it.
• 18:37
  She worked across a lot of sectors as well, advocacy, tech,
• 18:41
  social enterprise. What could be the best
• 18:43
  potential, the most potential for collaboration to support
• 18:47
  survivors in a new way? The most helpful for me is
• 18:51
  frontline crisis services that are on their knees and that
• 18:54
  they're that breaking point. If we can stop, there's a 32%
• 18:59
  return rate back into service. If we can have that for the
• 19:02
  frontline services, we can be saving them money.
• 19:05
  So we're looking to collaborate with more frontline services.
• 19:10
  We're looking to enter the NHSI know this is a really difficult
• 19:14
  place to get into, but we are regulating the software through
• 19:22
  an organization called Digisafe. So they're helping us to get
• 19:25
  regulatory requirements for DTAC, which means we can then
• 19:30
  commercialize into the NHS. We're looking to collaborate
• 19:34
  with places like Bupa, private healthcare services.
• 19:40
  We're looking to collaborate with more violence reduction
• 19:43
  partnerships because I was part of the Community Leaders West
• 19:48
  Yorkshire and that is funded by the Violence Reduction
• 19:53
  Partnership and it's a group of organisations that are all
• 19:57
  working together to keep West Yorkshire a safer place to live
• 20:02
  through that network. We would love to work with more
• 20:06
  violence reduction partnerships across the country.
• 20:10
  There are just a few that I'm looking to collaborate with the
• 20:13
  future therapists as well and looking because what we found
• 20:18
  was therapy was £77250 per hour. Survivors, especially the ones
• 20:25
  that are suffering economic abuse, can't afford to get that
• 20:29
  therapy. So therapists are turning away
• 20:35
  survivors that are approaching them.
• 20:37
  One of the therapists that I know, she charges £150 an hour
• 20:42
  and she's having to turn people away and that breaks my heart.
• 20:46
  So having maybe an option for therapists, for real therapists
• 20:51
  to have an option that they can have that package as well so
• 20:56
  that they're they aren't turning people away.
• 21:00
  This can be used to reduce waiting lists, but also to
• 21:03
  reduce workload for therapists who don't have the time to see
• 21:08
  everybody they can offload. They have a dashboard as well,
• 21:12
  so all the frontline services have a safeguarding dashboard
• 21:16
  that they can monitor themselves.
• 21:18
  The real therapists can monitor that safeguarding dashboard to
• 21:22
  make sure that they're delivering it in a safe and
• 21:25
  regulatory way, or ethical way, should I say.
• 21:29
  If it flashes up, they can immediately see that that person
• 21:34
  may need that immediate support. So that nobody falls.
• 21:40
  Down the cracks. Yeah, exactly.
• 21:43
  But that's that's what happens sometimes and it can have stare
• 21:47
  consequences if those people don't get the support they need.
• 21:52
  Audrey, do you have one last question?
• 21:54
  We always ask a more practical question of all anyone once we
• 21:59
  build their life after domestic abuse.
• 22:01
  What tool would you recommend? When I wrote my book in the back
• 22:05
  of there, I purposely wrote all the the tools that really helped
• 22:10
  me move forward. So journaling was my #1 go to.
• 22:15
  That's how it all started for me.
• 22:17
  Journaling and self love meditations because I didn't
• 22:21
  love myself and that was the reason why I was picking these
• 22:26
  unhealthy relationships because I didn't have any boundaries and
• 22:30
  I didn't know what boundaries were.
• 22:32
  I didn't know what red flags were.
• 22:33
  I would say learning, first of all, go and learn about what are
• 22:38
  the red flags in relationships. Journal, If you're feeling any
• 22:44
  stress or anything coming up for you or triggering you in that
• 22:49
  moment, journal, write down those thoughts.
• 22:53
  The journaling ended up becoming my book and that it just poured
• 22:57
  out for me. Positive affirmations as well.
• 23:00
  I started doing them in the mirror.
• 23:03
  Doesn't work for everybody, I must say, but for me it really
• 23:07
  worked because I hated looking at myself in the mirror.
• 23:11
  Especially things like I've had three caesareans, that slight
• 23:17
  overhang, what you get with caesareans, things like that.
• 23:21
  I just used to hate it. Now I cherish it because that's
• 23:24
  where my children came from. So just looking at yourself,
• 23:28
  smiling at yourself each day, giving yourself a high 5,
• 23:31
  looking yourself in the eyes and saying actually, I do love you.
• 23:36
  Things like that really worked for me.
• 23:38
  And meditations quieting my mind because 80% of the time we're in
• 23:44
  our own heads. The whirling about the past,
• 23:48
  whirling about the future, worrying and just getting that
• 23:53
  voice to quieten. Sometimes we need that.
• 23:57
  So meditation is morning and evening for me and working out.
• 24:02
  I just singing to Sarah Jane before we did this podcast.
• 24:07
  I said, OK, I'm all hot and flustered, but I'd just been
• 24:09
  doing my workout and I get my favorite music on and it just
• 24:14
  makes me happy and joyful to work out to my favorite music
• 24:19
  and just do half an hour. Because I know that even though
• 24:22
  it's hard sometimes and you don't want to get up and do
• 24:26
  that, I know that it's doing me good.
• 24:29
  So yeah, I've got a few things in my tool belt that I use on a
• 24:33
  regular and it just keeps me motivated, keeps me resilient.
• 24:39
  That's fantastic. And I think it's the
• 24:40
  consistency, isn't it as well that works?
• 24:44
  And the more consistent you are, the more momentum you get.
• 24:48
  It takes 30 days to install daily habits into your life
• 24:55
  until you just automatically do it.
• 24:58
  It's true. And so I just did it for 30
• 25:02
  days, kept doing it, kept pushing myself.
• 25:05
  And then, yeah, we just automatically do it then.
• 25:08
  So yeah, whatever you pick is the regularity.
• 25:11
  Thank you, Amanda for sharing your insights and your
• 25:14
  vulnerability and your incredible forward thinking with
• 25:19
  us. It's really a pleasure to have
• 25:21
  you on our episode today. And what comes true so clearly
• 25:25
  is that survivor empowerment is not only about safety, it's also
• 25:31
  about creativity and future building.
• 25:35
  That's what we I take out of what you said today and through
• 25:39
  your projects, you're helping make that future possible for
• 25:42
  people. If you want to know more.
• 25:45
  About. What Amanda does about her book.
• 25:48
  We'll put everything in the show notes.
• 25:51
  If this episode resonates with you or with someone you know,
• 25:55
  please do share the episode because the more people hear
• 25:59
  about what Amanda does, the better.
• 26:03
  Thank you so much, Amanda, for being with us today and thank
• 26:07
  you for listening. Thank you so much for the
• 26:10
  opportunity. I really appreciate it.
• 26:13
  I hope that if any of the listeners are able to take
• 26:18
  something away from today, that's my hope.
• 26:21
  Thank you so much. Thank you, Amanda.
• 26:24
  Bye now.