SHADE - Winnipeg

Happy Valentine’s Day from us at SHADE!
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Podcast 8: Understanding the healing journey
This final episode in Season One of When Love Hurts podcast series is about healing in the context of abuse. The authors help us to imagine moving through a figure 8, where the lower loop represents grieving and the upper loop represents rebuilding. Women need time as there are so many losses to grieve in this context. Using an excellent metaphor of a boat and a dock, the long emotional process is described that immensely helps to normalize this lengthy emotional process so that women who have been abused see themselves as amazing and resilient. A look at how society disenfranchises this kind of grief by not really giving women victim-survivors of violence permission to grieve the way they need to grieve is reframed by noting it is important to remember that women don’t want the relationship to end; they simply want the abuse to end, thus frontline workers need to support women in this in-between place. It takes way more than weeks or months – it may take years to even start working on her grief. Anger is also looked at as anger manifests itself differently in the two parts of grieving and rebuilding. https://www.whenlovehurts.ca/2026/01/8-understanding-the-healing-journey/

Podcast 7: Mothering, post-separation abuse, and the legal system -
Women’s experiences post-separation and of the legal system. Exploring the deeply ingrained belief that a man can be abusive to a woman and still be a “good father.” The difference between “repair parenting” and ‘counter-parenting.” Parental Alienation (PA) has been disavowed by the World Health Organization [WHO] as a valid diagnosis. PA operates as a powerful distraction tactic that discredits women’s abuse claims while positioning abusive men as victims. Men are seen as having rights to their children yet have no requirements to be safe, active, and connected fathers. Often, the legal system removes the right of women to protect their own child(ren). Children are safer and more supported when mothers are safer and more supported. Good co-parenting should look like collaboration, respectful communication, joint decision-making, goals that provide consistency for children, mutual respect – this is impossible when the man who is abusive believes he is central, superior, and deserving (Podcast 5). https://www.whenlovehurts.ca/2025/12/7-mothering-post-separation-abuse-legal-system/

Podcast 3: Understanding the Power and Control Wheel. Abuse is about intention, impact, and a clear pattern, one rooted in power and control. This power and control wheel looks as not only physical abuse. Verbal, financial, social, spiritual, sexual, cultural, using the children are each forms of abuse. Post-separation abuse can also include litigation and social media abuse. What is important when assessing someone’s behaviour is to ask, ‘What is the intention behind it?’ and ‘What is the impact of it?’ https://www.whenlovehurts.ca/2025/12/3-understanding-power-control-wheel/