Hello beautiful soul
One of the main vision statements for my company is this: that women are safe, serene, sacred, sublime and therefore surrendered.
Surrendered — not to another person. Not to a system. Not to a story someone else wrote about who you are supposed to be. Surrendered to yourself. To something greater. To the version of you that was there before the world got its hands on you.
That has been one of the greatest quests of my own lived experience. And today I want to tell you about a part of that quest I do not talk about lightly.
I need to give you a trigger warning my darling, because today I am talking about abuse, domestic and in the workplace.
Abusive dynamics don't always arrive with big flag so you know to avoid them.
(I say don't always, as if you've been subject to abuse in your life, you'll know that sometimes we have straight up ignored the flag. Yikes. And me too.)
Abuse often arrives suuuuuuper quietly. You actually really connect with that person on many levels. You start out full of hope, but gradually an invisible cage forms around you, and in that relationship before you even realise you are inside it.
I don't say that because I want to frighten you or to be dramatic. But because I think the real conversation — the one that actually helps — is not the one we usually have.
Here is what the usual conversation sounds like:
There is a baddie. There is a goodie. One person does the harm. One person receives it. The story is clean and binary and it lets everyone know where to stand.
Here is what I know to be true from my own life.
It is almost never that simple.
At the peak of being in a relationship that was harming me I did not love myself at all. Not even a little. Hatred was closer to the truth. And underneath all of the lies I was telling myself — about him, about us, about what was possible — a part of me wanted to self destruct. I didn't feel like that conciously, but it looking back it was true.
But I wasn't "brave" enough to do that to that for myself, so I outsourced it. And I stayed for many reasons, but one of them was, because I believed (wrongly) that he was right. I was not worthy of love.
He did not destroy me. But the credit for that belongs to me, not to him.
I want to pause there for a moment because I know how hard it is to receive. I have said it out loud recently to people and watched the discomfort move across their faces. Because we want the story to be clean. We want the wronged party to be wholly innocent. And the love and protectiveness behind that impulse is real and I understand it.
But here is what I also know.
When you do not love yourself — when you are running so far from your own pain that you cannot even feel it properly — you will find situations that match that frequency. Not because you deserve harm. Not because you asked for it. But because the body finds what it knows. The nervous system recreates what it recognises. And if what it recognises is that you are not quite worth protecting — it will keep finding evidence for that until something shifts.
The shift does not come from changing them.
It comes from changing you.
I know this because that is exactly what happened, twice. The first time I was so messed up, and now looking back I see that my leaving that dynamic in nothing short of a miracle.
The second time, I did not leave my marriage by making him tell the truth. I left by becoming a woman he could no longer lie to. By straightening my spine — slowly, imperfectly, one microscopic moment of sovereignty at a time — until the version of me standing in front of him was someone who could no longer pretend not to see what was there.
But here's the really interesting part. I am SO grateful for that second marrigae. I got a very painful do-over. Because that woman? The one who was born through that experience?
I would not trade her for anything.
I entered that marriage absolutely and madly in love and desperate to make it work. It took me two years to understand that the reason I could not make it work had very little to do with what he was doing and everything to do with what I was not yet willing to see. About him. About myself. About what I had been tolerating quietly because tolerating quietly was what I had learned to do. AGAIN.
The invisible cage does not announce itself. It is built slowly. From tiny moments of contraction. From the times you did not say the thing. From the times you made yourself smaller so the room would not shift. From the times you told yourself it was not that bad, you were being too sensitive, you just needed to try harder.
My friend Grace said something to me recently in a conversation I will not forget.
"I believed his lies because I wanted to."
I have not been able to unhear it since. You want to save your family. You want the marriage to survive. You want to be successful at the job. You want to be the story where everything works out in the end. And so you take any grain of hope he offers and you build a whole world on top of it and you call it trust.
This happens at home. And it happens at work. The same dynamics. The same slow erosion. The same invisible cage. The same woman who does not recognise herself until she looks up one day and cannot remember the last time she said what she actually thought.
The microscopic moments of sovereignty are the way out.
Not a grand gesture. Not a dramatic exit. Just — one moment of saying the true thing. One moment of feeling your feet on the floor. One moment of a straight spine. One moment of choosing yourself so quietly that nobody else even notices but your nervous system does and files it away as evidence that you are worth protecting.
Those moments compound.
And one day you look up and you are someone else. Someone who was always in there but had learned to wait. Someone who cannot be abused in the same way anymore. Someone who is dangerous — not because she seeks revenge but because she finally, fully knows her own worth.
Here's what I think, women are not merely wounded by our hardest moments like these. We are revealed by it. Pain does not always break a woman. Sometimes it exposes the sacred architecture of her soul.
I would not change what I went through. Not because it was not painful — it was the most painful thing I have experienced. But because of who I get to be because of it. Because of the quality of presence I can now bring into a room with another woman who is still inside her own invisible cage and cannot quite see the walls yet. Because of what it taught me about the body, about the nervous system, about the slow and patient work of coming back to yourself.
That is what we do inside Women Who Lead.
Not just leadership strategy. The deeper work. The work of tracing the cage back to its origins. Of understanding why you contracted in the first place. Of building the kind of embodied sovereignty that does not depend on anyone else choosing you — because you have already chosen yourself.
If something in this landed for you — if you read these words and felt something move that you have not been able to name — hit reply and let's talk. Let's figure out what your next chapter looks like and what the woman on the other side of this looks like for you.
She is already in there.
She is just waiting for you to straighten your spine.
Rooting for you always
Ruth x
Ps. If anything in this newsletter resonated in a way that felt close to home, please know you do not have to navigate it alone ❤️
UK: National Domestic Abuse Helpline — 0808 2000 247 — free, confidential, 24 hours a day. refuge.org.uk
US: National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 — free, confidential, 24 hours a day. thehotline.org
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