Financial Abuse And Absolute Power

It all adds up

Four hundred bucks. That’s it. That’s what I had to my name after I decided to leave my abusive marriage.

My ex, despite not working at the time or for months prior to our separation, had cleared out “his half” of our accounts without warning — the day before our son’s birthday, for which I was planning a little party for him and his friends.

Four hundred bucks.

It’s not much. Especially considering the fee to file for divorce, without the help of an attorney, costs about that in my state. Just the filing fee. It’s one of the reasons I started a nonprofit to help abuse survivors pay filing fees, so they won’t get held up when they need to begin the divorce process or protect their kids through legal custodial intervention.

As the founder of that nonprofit, I now realize that I left with quite a bit of money. Some people leave or need to leave with far less, if any. I’ve talked to women who have secretly saved, bit by bit in small increments, over the course of several years, waiting for their opportunity to leave.

For others, the extreme temperature of a moment makes the decision for them. They didn’t have a choice. Saving over time wasn’t an option.

That “400 bucks” is a bit of trivia that I find most profound when I’m talking with survivors, writing stories that share the nuance of domestic abuse, illustrate how far I’ve been able to come on my own since leaving that relationship, or — like now — when I continue to demonstrate how closely aligned the activities of the current presidential administration are with the tactics of an abusive spouse.

I mean they’re in lockstep.

We’ve now entered the financial abuse conversation. We could call it an era, but I would argue we entered it on inauguration day, when he signed a stack of executive orders that had been prepared by others to implement the very real and often scoffed at Project 2025.

Financial abuse is present in almost every abusive relationship. By almost, I mean statistically speaking 99%. It is one of the pillars of abuse, joined by other tactics that include:

• Coercion and threats

• Intimidation

• Emotional abuse

• Isolation

• Minimizing, denying and blaming

• Using children

• Using male privilege

Those in the domestic abuse ecosystem are all-to-familiar with the wheel of power and control, a pie chart that offers one equal-sized slice to each of these tactics. It is that wheel, and the check marks I could assign to nearly every tactic, that finally woke me up to what I was navigating and had been navigating for years.

And now America is firmly in its grasp. As a whole.

I had previously described MAGA supporters as individuals who were entrenched in an abusive relationship, and that description is still valid. Some people categorize it as a cult, and that isn’t wrong either, since abusive relationships are a cult of one.

But now, with the unfurling of widely panned economic sanctions on Americans in the form of exorbitant tariffs on our trading partners, we’re all in the quicksand. Even the ones who don’t ascribe to the lunacy of the MAGA machine.

The stock market has tumbled, experiencing losses it hasn’t seen since the COVID-19 pandemic. Jobs are being lost across a variety of sectors, including the automotive industry (which the administration says it’s trying to protect). The value of the dollar is going down. Economists are being vocal about their concerns that the administration has used “dumb” math that will rock global economic stability. And business leaders are battening down the hatches for a recession, just months after the previous administration left office with an economy that was the “envy” of the world.

Meanwhile, on main street, we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop — ie. for prices to go up even further and inflation to increase even more than it already has, as are the very predictable outcomes of this type of economic policy.

This might be the quantifiable harm I wrote about previously, comparing the moment when survivors of abuse reach their breaking point to when MAGA supporters may begin to see the actual light and GTFO. Because, it’s clear that violating constitutional rights and norms don’t quite tip their allegiance.

All of this is to say that this type of financial abuse is predictable for someone who has survived an abusive relationship. Why?

Because financial abuse, the kind employed by abusers, keeps the balance of power in their favor. It keeps anyone under their control right where they are. And it limits the options that are available to anyone trying to break free.

It’s why I started the type of nonprofit that I did. Because you will tolerate a lot if you’re financially under someone’s thumb.

For an abuser, that’s the whole idea.