Anyway, I’m going to do it again. B.F. is doing quite a bit better. It’s looking like she will probably not have to have any surgical procedure or suturing, and she’s actually been pretty easy-going when Kore and I wrangle her into the bath tub to wash her wound with beta-dine and then apply the antibiotic cream. She’s still a bit off-balance, but overall she’s doing very, very well. We’re very pleased and thank everyone who has sent love, prayers, reiki and donations, to help Kore offset the vet bill.

It is sometimes possible to predict the likelihood of the person you are currently or are about to become involved with being abusive. Below are a list of behaviors and traits which are common in abusive personalities.

These are commonly known as Warning Signs

While not all abusive people show the same signs, or display the tendencies to the same extent, if several behavioral traits are present, there is a strong tendency toward abusiveness. Generally, the more signs are present, the greater the likelihood of violence. In some cases, an abuser may have only a couple of behavioral traits that can be recognized, but they are very exaggerated (e.g. extreme jealousy over ridiculous things)

Often the abuser will initially try to explain his/her behavior as signs of his/her love and concern, and the victim may be flattered at first; as time goes on, the behaviors become more severe and serve to dominate, control and manipulate the victim.

Jealousy
At the beginning of a relationship, an abuser will always say the jealousy is a sign of love. He/she may question you about whom you have spoken to or seen during the day, may accuse you of flirting, or be jealous of time you spend with family, friends, children or hobbies which do not include him/her.
As the jealousy progresses, he/she may call you frequently during the day or drop by unexpectedly. He may be unhappy about or refuse to let you work for fear you’ll meet someone else, check the car mileage or ask friends to keep an eye on you.

Jealousy is not proof of love, it is a sign of insecurity and possessiveness.

Controlling Behavior

Controlling behavior is often disguised or excused as concern. Concern for your safety, your emotional or mental health, the need to use your time well, or to make sensible decisions. Your abuser may be angry or upset if you are ‘late’ coming back from work, shopping, visiting friends, etc., even if you
told him/her you would be later back than usual. Your abuser may question you closely about where you were, whom you spoke to, the content of every conversation you held, or why you did something he/she was not involved in. As this behavior gets worse, you may not be allowed to make personal decisions about the house, clothing, going to church or how you spend your time or money or even make you ask for permission to leave the house or room. Alternately, he/she may theoretically allow you your own decisions, but penalize you for making the wrong ones.
Concern for our loved ones to a certain extent is normal – trying to control their every move is not.

Quick Involvement
Many victims of abuse dated or knew their abuser for less than six months before they were engaged or living together. The abuser will often claim ‘love at first sight’, that you are ‘made for each other’, or that you are the only person whom he could ever talk to so openly, feel so at home with, could
understand him so well. He/she may tell you that they have never loved anyone so much or felt so loved by anyone so much before, when you have really only known each other for a short amount of time. He/she needs someone desperately, and will pressure you to commit to him/her or make love before you feel the relationship has reached ‘that stage’.
He/she may also make you feel guilty for not committing yourself to him/her.

Unrealistic Expectations
The abuser may expects you to be the perfect husband, wife, mother, father, lover, and friend. He/she is very dependent on you for all his/her needs, and may tell you he/she can fulfill all your needs as lover, friend, and companion. Statements such as: ‘lf you love me, I’m all you need.’, ‘You are all I need.’ are common.
Your abuser may expect you to provide everything for him/her emotionally, practically, financially or spiritually, and then blame you for not being perfect or living up to expectation.

Isolation
The abuser may try to curtail your social interaction. He/she may prevent you from spending time with your friends or family and demand that you only go places ‘together’. He/she may accuse you of being ‘tied to your mother’s apron strings’, not be committed to the relationship, or view people who are your
personal friends as ‘causing trouble’ or ‘trying to put a wedge’ between you.
He/she may want to live in the country without a phone, not let you use the car, stop you from working or gaining further education or qualifications.

Blame-shifting for Problems
Very rarely will an abusive personality accept responsibility for any negative situation or problem. If they are unemployed, can’t hold down a job, were thrown out of college or University or fall out with their family, it is always someone else’s fault, be it the boss, the government, or their mother.
They may feel that someone is always doing them wrong, or out to get him.
He/she may make a mistakes and then blame you for upsetting him/her or preventing him/her from doing as they wished to.

Blame-shifting for Feelings
The abuser will deny feelings stem from within him/her but see them as reactions to your behavior or attitude toward him/her. He/she may tell you that ‘you make me mad’, ‘you’re hurting me by not doing what I ask’, or that he/she cannot help feeling mad, upset, etc. Feelings may be used to manipulate
you, i.e. ‘I would not be angry if you didn’t …’ Positive emotions will often also be seen as originating outside the abuser, but are more difficult to detect. Statements such as ‘You make me happy’ or ‘You make me feel good about myself’ are also signs that the abuser feels you are responsible for his sense of well-being. Either way, you become in his/her mind the cause of good and bad feelings and are therefore responsible for his/her emotional well-being and happiness.
Consequently, you are also to blame for any negative feelings such as anger, upset or depression.

Hypersensitivity
Most abusers have very low self-esteem and are therefore easily insulted or upset. They may claim their feelings are ‘hurt’ when they are really angry, or take unrelated comments as personal attacks. They may perceive normal set-backs (having to work additional hours, being asked to help out, receiving a parking fine, etc.) as grave personal injustices. They may view your preference for something which differs from their own as a criticism of their taste and therefore themselves (e.g. blue wallpaper rather than pink, etc.)

Cruelty to Animals
The abuser may punishes animals brutally, be insensitive to their pain or suffering, or neglect to care for the animals to the point of cruelty, e.g. not feeding them all day, leaving them in areas he/she knows will cause them suffering or distress. There is a strong correlation between cruelty to animals
and domestic violence which is still being researched.

Cruelty to Children
The abusers unrealistic expectations of their partner are often mirrored in their attitude toward children. He/she will think of children as ‘small adults’ and blame the children for not being responsible, having common sense or understanding. He/she may expect children to be capable far beyond their ability (e.g. is angry with a two-year old for wetting their pants or being sick on the carpet, waking at night or being upset by nightmares) and will often meet out punishments for ‘naughtiness’ the child could not be aware of. Abusers may tease children until they cry, or punish children way beyond what could be deemed appropriate. He/she may not want children to eat at the table, expect them to stay quiet, or keep to their room all evening while he/she is at home. Since abusers want all your attention themselves, they resent your spending time with the children or any normal demands and needs the children may have.

As above (cruelty to animals), there is a very strong link between Domestic Violence and Child Abuse.

‘Playful’ use of Force in Sex
He/she may pressurize you to agree to forceful or violent acts during sex, or want to act out fantasies where you are helpless. A male abuser may let you know that the idea of “rape” excites him. He/she may show little concern about whether you want to have intercourse and uses sulking or anger to manipulate you into compliance.
Starting sex while you are sleeping, demanding sex when you are ill or tired, or refusing any form of intimacy unless you are willing to go ‘all the way’ can all be signs that he/she could be sexually abusive or sexually violent.

Rigid Gender Roles
Abusers usually believe in stereotypical gender roles. A man may expect a woman to serve him; stay at home, obey him in all things – even things that are criminal in nature. A male abuser will often see women as inferior to men, more stupid, unable to be a whole person without a relationship.
Female abusers may expect the man to provide for them entirely, shift the responsibility for her well-being onto him or heckle him as being ‘not a real man’ if he shows any weakness or emotion.

Verbal Abuse
In addition to saying things that are meant to be cruel and hurtful, either in public or in private, this can include degrading remarks or running down any accomplishments. Often the abuser will tell you that you are ‘stupid’, could not manage without him/her. He/she may keep you up all night to ‘sort
this out once and for all’ or even wake you at night to continue to verbally abuse you.
The abuser may even say kindly things to your face, but speak badly about you to friends and family.

Dr.Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Very rarely do abusers conform to the stereotypical image of a constantly harsh, nasty or violent person, either in public or in private. More frequently the abuser portrays a perfectly normal and pleasant picture to the outside world (often they have responsible jobs or are respected and important members of the local community or Church) and reserves the abuse for you in the privacy of your own home. Nor are abusers always overtly abusive or cruel, but can display apparent kindness and consideration. This Jekyll and Hyde tendency of the abuser serves to further confuse the victim, while protecting themselves from any form of suspicion from outsiders. Many victims describe “sudden” changes in mood – one minute nice and the next explosive or hysterical, or one minute happy and the next minute sad.

Drink or Substance Abuse
While neither drinking or the use of drugs are signs of an abusive personality, heavy drinking or drug abuse (NOT including smoking marijuana) may be a warning sign and do increase the risks of abuse, especially violence, taking place. Often an abusive person will blame the drink for his/her abuse. However, a person who, knowing there is a risk he/she could be violent when drinking or on drugs, chooses to get drunk or high, is in effect choosing to abuse.

History of Battering or Sexual Violence
Very rarely is abuse or violence a one-off event: a batterer will beat any woman he is with; a sexually abusive person will be abusive toward all his intimate partners. Situational circumstances do not make a person an abusive personality. Sometimes friends or family may try to warn you about the abuser. Sometimes the abuser may tell you himself/herself that he/she has hit or sexually assaulted someone in the past. However, they may further go on to explain that “she made me do it by …” or in some other way not take responsibility and shift the blame on to the victim. They may tell you that it won’t happen with you because “you love them enough to prevent it” or “you won’t be stupid enough to wind me up that much”. Once again, this is denying their own responsibility for the abuse, and shifting the responsibility for the relationship to remain abuse-free on to you. Past violence is one of the strongest pointers that abuse will occur.
If at all possible, try to speak to their previous girlfriends.

Negative Attitude toward Women
Some men may tell you that you are different to all the women they have known before, who display a lack of respect of women generally or who talk negatively and disrespectfully of their previous wives or girlfriends. They may tell you that you are special, not like the others and that they consider themselves to be the luckiest man alive to have found the last decent woman.
It is not likely to be long before they remember that you are a woman and don’t deserve their respect.

Threatening Violence
This would obviously include any threat of physical force such as “If you speak to him/her again, I’ll kill you”, or “If any wife of mine acted like John’s did, I’d give her a right seeing to”. Threats are designed to manipulate and control you, to keep you in your place and prevent you making your own decisions.
Most people do not threaten their mates, but an abuser will excuse this behavior by saying “everybody talks like that.”, maintaining he/she is only saying this because the relationship or you are so important to him/her, tell you you’re “over-sensitive” for being upset by such threats, or obviously want to hurt him/her.
Threats can also be less overt, such as “If you leave me, I will kill myself”, or “You are so wonderful, I will never let you go/couldn’t live without you”

Breaking or Striking Objects
The abusive person may break your treasured object, beat his/her fists on the table or chair or throw something at or past you. Breaking your things is often used as a punishment for some imagined misdeed on your part. Sometimes it will be justified by saying that now that you are with him/her, you don’t need these items any more. Breaking your possessions also has the effect of de-personalizing you, denying you your individuality or literally trying to break links to your past. Beating items of furniture or throwing objects will often be justified by saying you wound him/her up so much they lost control, once again shifting the blame for this behavior on to you, but is actually used to terrorize you into submission.
Only very immature or abusive people beat on objects in the presence of other people in order to threaten or intimidate them.

Any Force during an Argument
An abuser may physically restrain you from leaving the room, lash out at you with his/her hand or another object, pin you against a wall or shout ‘right in your face’.
Basically any form of force used during an argument can be a sign that actual violence is a strong possibility.

While my ex didn’t have all of these traits, she had a good many of them, and I see a lot of them in my ex-step-father as well. Such fun. But hey, they’re exes for a reason.
If you’re saying to yourself right now, wow, this could be a page out of my life…you should pack up and get out of Dodge as quickly as you possibly can. Googling is really helpful in locating shelters in your area, and shelters are really, really great about helping you get back on your feet, providing you with tons of resources, including child care. You’ll be purchasing Wilmington NC real estate in no time (unless that’s where your ex is).

Read this and make a copy for your files in case you need to refer to it someday. Maybe we should all take some of his advice! A corporate attorney sent the following out to the employees in his company.

1. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put ‘PHOTO ID REQUIRED.’

2. When you are writing checks to pay on your credit card accounts, DO NOT put the complete account number on the ‘For’ line. Instead, just put the last four numbers. The credit card company knows the rest of the number, and anyone who might be handling your check as it passes through all the check processing channels won’t have access to it.

3. Put your work phone # on your checks instead of your home phone. If you have a PO Box use that instead of your home address. If you do not have a PO Box, use your work address. Never have your SSN# printed on your checks. (DUH!) You can add it if it is necessary. But if you have it printed, anyone can get it.

4. Place the contents of your wallet on a photocopy machine. Do both sides of each license, credit card, etc. You will know what you had in your wallet and all of the account numbers and phone numbers to call and cancel.
Keep the photocopy in a safe place.

I also carry a photocopy of my passport when I travel either here or abroad.
We’ve all heard horror stories about fraud that’s committed on us in stealing a Name, address, Social Security number, credit cards.

Unfortunately, I, an attorney, have first hand knowledge because my wallet was stolen last month. Within a week, the thieve(S) ordered an expensive monthly cell phone package, applied for a VISA credit card, had a credit line approved to buy a Gateway computer, received a PIN number from DMV to change my driving record information online, and more.

But here’s some critical information to limit the damage in case this happens to you or someone you know:

5. We have been told we should cancel our credit cards immediately. But the key is having the toll free numbers and your card numbers handy so you know whom to call. Keep those where you can find them.

6. File a police report immediately in the jurisdiction where your credit cards, etc ., were stolen. This proves to credit providers you were diligent, and this is a first step toward an investigation (if there ever is one).

But here’s what is perhaps most important of all: (I never even thought to do this.)

7. Call the 3 national credit reporting organizations immediately to place a fraud alert on your name and also call the Social Security fraud line number. I had never heard of doing that until advised by a bank that called to tell me an application for credit was made over t he Internet in my name.

The alert means any company that checks your credit knows your information was stolen, and they have to contact you by phone to authorize new credit.

By the time I was advised to do this, almost two weeks after the theft, all the damage had been done. There are records of all the credit checks initiated by the thieves’ purchases, none of which I knew about before placing the alert. Since then, no additional damage has been done, and the thieves threw my wallet away this weekend (someone turned it in). It seems
to have stopped them dead in their tracks.

Now, here are the numbers you always need to contact about your wallet, if it has been stolen:

1.) Equifax: 1-800-525-6285
2.) Experian (formerly TRW): 1-888-397-3742
3.) Trans Union : 1-800-680 7289
4.) Social Security Administration (fraud line): 1-800-269-0271

We pass along jokes on the Internet; we pass along just about everything.

If you are willing to pass this information along, it could really help someone that you care about.

Some of the things in that I knew about, but others I hadn’t heard of or thought of. It’s common sense to me not to put my social security number on anything, but I hadn’t even thought about the credit card numbers on checks or things like that. We’ve been lucky to not have had any problems with our credit, but it’s only a matter of time. I’d be sending that attorney a gift basket if I knew who he was. Your credit is so unbelievably important in this day and age, because it affects so many things. If we’d had an issue we wouldn’t have a house right now.

I have an addendum though from someone who works at a credit card company, that number 2 is not actually good to follow any more because it may result in your check not being processed properly. The checks are now processed by computer, and the computers need all of the numbers so that your payment is not processed to someone else’s account because the last four numbers are the same as yours. There’s little chance of a person at the credit card company seeing your numbers from the check, and if they were that unscrupulous they would probably have some other way of looking it up anyway.

We have our own personal good news this week. We adopted a kitty from the Humane Society. Her name is Nimue Caledonia. Nimue for the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian legends and Caledonia for the ancient Roman name for the Scottish areas that my family hails from.

As you can imagine I’m very VERY happy to have this new addition to our family. My husband surprised himself and me being also happy about the cat. He has allergies to cats and couldn’t be around my old cat Ani for very long at all, but given we have the filter and the allergen reducer on the A/C unit and tile floor and I found a light haired cat who wanted to come home with us we thought it might be okay and so far he hasn’t had any allergy attacks despite the fact that she’s a very lovey-dovey kitty and likes to climb up on everyone and lick and nuzzle with them.

Nimue had a little bit of a sad story before coming to us. She wasn’t abused by any means but she was born at the shelter and had been taken home by another lady and then brought back. The lady had been calling the shelter and her vets office every day complaining that the cat was too noisy and was keeping her up and couldn’t they do something about the fact that she meowed too much. The workers at the shelter told her that perhaps it was best if she just brought the cat back to them and they would hopefully find someone else to take her. The munchkin and I came in two days later and she came up to the bars and stretched out trying to touch me. The workers had been telling me about another cat called Tigger who we had met on the previous Friday while visiting but he had longer fur and I felt that we were meant to have a female cat.

When “Angelina” as they were calling her came up to the bars and I found out her name I had a feeling she might just be our cat, and then when I heard what had happened and saw how lovey and gentle she was that was it. She came home with us.

I’m always amazed at how much good work the humane society does. Leesburg Humane Society is a no-kill shelter, which means if an animal doesn’t get adopted they’re at the shelter until they die of ill health or natural causes. The shelter is often over crowded because of this as most people want to adopt puppies and kittens or will go to a shelter which does kill the animals because they’re saving them.

I also know from working there that they take a huge loss on every pet they adopt because they charge only $50 for dog adoption and $40 for cat adoptions no matter what age the animal is. They have either already spayed and neutered the animal or will give you a certificate to get that done for free from your local vet, and cover all the animal’s shots for the first year, which means on each animal they adopt they lose at least $150 dollars. Add to that the fact that the shelter operates entirely on donations and it’s really hard for them to keep up.

They do have a thrift store in town which sells clothes and other items (like a Goodwill does) to help with their financial upkeep but that’s all they have other than people’s generous donations. They would have closed down a few years ago were it not for a very kind man giving them a stipend out of his will.

They have a large area of land and as well as rescuing cats and dogs of all shapes and sizes also rescue larger animals and farm animals. When I worked there they had a huge boar, two shetland ponies, several goats and a horse, right now they have two horses, rabbits, birds, cats and dogs. Many of these animals will never be adopted but remain at the society where they’re loved and cared for until the natural end of their days.

They were talking about a school in our area and showcasing all the good things that that they’re doing for their students. Apparently this is a weekly feature that the news broadcast does as part of their morning line up, and I thought that it was such a great idea, too often the news bits that I catch are really downers, students going on rampages, schools losing money, parents going on strike and CPS being called on them, but this is a wonderful feature and I was happy to see them complimenting both the students of the school for their attitude and intelligence but also the teachers for the important work they do for the community.

Teachers are so often in thankless jobs. I have several friends who work in teaching and they tend to get a lot more abuse from both students and parents than they do compliments, which is a shame, and here the news broadcast is making sure to boost everyone’s attitude about both learning and teaching. I thought that was wonderful. Fox 35 Cool School of the Week program features Lyman High School in Orlando this week, and has voting up for next week’s cool school.

I thought as the broadcast came to an end how this was also in line for the program that my friend Skeet does weekly, her “Share Some Good Stuff” meme.