Where There’s Smoke Series: Covert Abuse
Covert abuse is the usury and manipulation that arises from a profound sense of entitlement. It gaslights its targets and redefines reality. I’m a survivor of incest, but I can say covert abuse inflicted the most harm by cutting my ability to discern off at the knees.
Covert abuse may leave no bruises on your skin or broken bones, but it assaults your spirit and bruises your loving and caring. It whittles down your self-confidence and fills you with self-doubt.
Where There’s Smoke Series
Where There’s Smoke Series on Covert Abuse, including the prequel, Eyes Wide Open: Navigating the Healing Journey, is my response to the usury and manipulation that arises from covert abuse and its profound entitlement.
Eyes Wide Open: Navigating the Healing Journey
The prequel to the Where There’s Smoke Series, Eyes Wide Open: Navigating the Healing Journey is a not-so-little manual of self-defense to assist you on your path of healing. It focuses specifically on the healing path itself, because the healing journey should be about healing old wounds, not accruing new ones.
This book empowers you to recognize red flags to questionable practitioners and false claims of expertise. You’ll learn how to assess the health of support groups and explore the metrics of growth to help you determine your progress and efficacy of any healing relationship you engage in on your journey.
Books in the Where There’s Smoke Series
Where There’s Smoke Series on Covert Abuse is a 3-part series that exposes covert abuse, giving you practical suggestions on how to address, respond to and heal from it.
The series opens with laying a foundation for our study, then moves to focusing on its impact on you, and finishes by delineating the specific tactics covert abuse uses to manipulate, use and attack.
1) Where There’s Smoke: The Healing Journey is the foundational book in the series. I share my experiences with covert abuse, and the incest that it helped justify and sustain, and the catalyst that set me on my healing journey over 30 years ago.
The Healing Journey draws a wider picture of covert abuse, before narrowing in on the details of covert abuse from different angles in the following two books in the series. Together, we’ll explore the templates or patterns of behavior that covert abuse creates in childhood, using my background as reference, and highlight the dynamics of covert abuse that initiate and sustain other forms of abuse.
We’ll look at the violence of covert abuse, potential and actualized, and the stages it goes through in relationships. What does it means to draw the line, and why is it so important to know where yours lie?
How do we handle the emotions that arise as we realize the cost of covert abuse in terms of estranged relationships, damaged reputation and lost opportunities?
We’ll answer these questions and others in this book.
2) Where There’s Smoke: Smoke Alarms.
As tempting as it is to look outside of ourselves for evidence of covert abuse, the straightest way to find evidence for its presence is to look for its impact on you. Working backwards from the effect, you can follow it to its cause. We’ll identify the different ways covert abuse can impact you, emotionally, mentally and physically, as well as your creativeness and sexual energy.
3) Where There’s Smoke: The Fire.
Here we focus on the specific tactics of covert abuse.
Passive Covert Abuse is manipulating concepts or ideas such as the idea of loyalty or forgiveness or friendship, and manipulating the emotions or feelings associated with them.
Active Covert Abuse is actions such as projecting, gaslighting, deflecting, verbal insults, gossip or slander, and the like.
We also look at Collaborators, because they are the dry winds that turn a local fire into a wildfire. With collaborators, the covert abuser can inflict much greater harm than they could by themselves. We’ll look at what covert abuse appeals to in its collaborators and how to protect yourself from being used in this way.
When Will the Books Be Available?
Eyes Wide Open: Navigating the Healing Journey, is in its final editing stage, so should be soon. All three books in the Where There’s Smoke Series are in first and second drafts. There’s no expected publishing date as of yet.
I plan on having a sign-up for updates and monthly correspondence from me to you, more in the line of letters rather than newsletter. Or you can subscribe to this blog and keep in touch that way.
Until then, stay true to your journey, to the light in your heart, to who you are and who you are becoming, always.
Demian Yumei,
~ Keeping the Dream
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