Many women are grieving two things at once right now, a relationship that didn’t protect them and a country that won’t either. 

There is a lot happening in the world right now, and none of it is abstract. Not for women. Not for our marriages, our divorces, our bodies, our safety, or our credibility. What we are witnessing is the lived, relational impact of rising authoritarianism.

In this solo episode, I wanted to take a moment to slow this conversation down and connect the dots between what women experience privately and what is unfolding publicly. 

This is not about ideology or opinion.
It is about power. It is about who is believed, who is doubted, and who is controlled.
And it is about why so many women are feeling alarmed, not because they are confused, but because they recognize the familiar dynamics of control. They recognize the patterns.

For a long time, we were taught that politics lived “out there” in elections, legislation, and institutions we were never meant to shape, while relationships were framed as personal, private choices. That separation was not accidental. It was strategic. 

Authoritarian systems depend on that divide, because when women’s lives are framed as personal, our suffering can be dismissed as individual failure and our silence mistaken for consent.

This episode is a call to stay awake without collapsing, to stay aligned with what you already know, and to remember that awareness does not require constant activation. We do this together. We tap out and tap in for one another. The personal has always been the political. 

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• Why separating “the personal” from “the political” was an intentional strategy designed to keep women’s suffering isolated and depoliticized
• How women’s exhaustion, self doubt, and depletion inside marriage are not personal failures, but political conditions
• Why you cannot meditate, communicate, or self optimize your way out of systems built on unequal power
• How naming harm becomes threatening to systems that rely on fragmentation and silence
• How authoritarianism mirrors abusive relationship dynamics through control, denial, punishment, and gaslighting
• Why women, especially Black women, recognize creeping control early and sound alarms before institutions do
• Why backlash against women’s clarity is evidence of lost control, not women being wrong
• Why rest, regulation, and nervous system care are essential parts of resistance, not distractions from it

✨ If you’d like to watch the video version of this episode, you can find it here.

Resources & Links:

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The Divorce Survival Guide Resource Bundle
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Kate’s Substack Newsletter: Divorce Coaching Dispatch
The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast Episodes are also available YouTube!
Seven Step Mindset Reset for Divorce 

Episode 95: Toxic Abuser-in-Chief: What Politics Has to Do With Your Marriage

Show Transcript:

Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. So there’s a lot going on in the world today and I wanna spend a little bit of time today trying to process coalesce, put some pieces together, connect some dots, however you wanna put it. What we are all living through right now as women getting divorced. As women living in the US, Canada, around the world. Obviously it’s very political

It is not abstractly, not theoretically, but in the most intimate ways possible. It’s political in our marriages, in our divorces, in our bodies, in our safety, in who is believed in, who is doubted. For a long [00:01:00] time, women were taught that politics lived out there in elections, in legislation, in institutions that we were not ever meant to shape.

And we were taught that relationships were personal, private, individual choices. That separation between the political out there and in here. That separation was intentional. It was strategic because when women’s lives are framed as personal, our suffering can be dismissed as individual failure, and our endurance can be praised as virtue, and our silence can be mistaken for consent.

So if you’ve been feeling that. Maybe something happening in your own life, like your marriage, your [00:02:00] divorce, your sense of safety or autonomy feels inseparable from what’s happening in this country. You’re not conflating things, you are connecting them, and connection is dangerous to systems that rely on fragmentation.

So there’s a phrase. Many of us encountered many years ago in a classroom in our women’s studies class and a book, whatever Gloria Steinem said, and she made this most famous, the personal is political. Sidebar, my fiance, Ethan said this to me on our first date in casual conversation. He was like yeah, the personal is political and I.

If that wasn’t my first green flag anyway, so this idea, right? It’s a feminist idea, again, most [00:03:00] closely associated with Gloria Steinem and second wave feminism. And it’s often repeated now so casually that it’s, I feel like it’s radical, meaning gets a little flattened. So I wanna slow it down and break it down because it was never really meant to be poetic, right?

It was meant to be diagnostic. It was a refusal to let women’s suffering be dismissed as private failure. So what Steinem and other feminists were naming was that women’s everyday experiences, childcare falling disproportionately on our shoulders, emotional labor being invisible and expected financial dependence, framed as quote, security domestic inequality treated as personal choice.

These were not isolated problems. They were evidence. Evidence of how [00:04:00] power is organized when a woman feels depleted in her marriage, when she doubts her worth, when she feels responsible for holding everything together while being told that she’s too much or hysterical when she can’t hold it all together, right?

That is not a personality flaw. It’s a political condition. Second wave feminists understood something that is still threatening today, that you cannot fix systemic inequality with individual coping strategies. You can’t meditate your way out of structural subjugation. You cannot communicate better.

Inside a system designed to privilege one voice over [00:05:00] another, and you can’t choose better when the choices themselves are constrained by power. Calling women’s experiences personal was a way to keep them apolitical. Calling them political was a way to make them collective. And that is exactly what we are watching happen again right now.

So here is where this stops being theoretical. What we’re witnessing today is not a disagreement about values or ideology. It’s a struggle over who gets to define reality when women say, my marriage wasn’t safe. My divorce was punitive. My body was legislated without my consent. I watched institutions protect men instead of women.

We’re not offering opinions. [00:06:00] We are reporting our lived experience, and the response is chillingly consistent. That’s not what happened. You’re misunderstanding you’re exaggerating, you’re making this political, but naming harm has always been political because harm does not exist in a vacuum.

Millions of women are independently reaching the same conclusions right now. That what we were told was private failure is actually structural design. What we were told was endurance. Actually extraction that what we were told was protection was always conditional, and once that recognition sets in, it doesn’t stay neatly contained.

Women don’t suddenly become [00:07:00] angry. They become unwilling. We become unwilling to accept marriages that require. Self erasure. We become unwilling to accept laws that treat our bodies as public property. We become unwilling to accept institutions that demand silence in exchange for belonging. And that refusal is what’s being labeled radical.

Not because it’s extreme, but because it breaks the spell. You can see how quickly women are punished for noncompliance now, how fast the language turns contemptuous, how quickly clarity is framed as hysteria, how often accountability is treated as an attack. This is not new behavior. It’s escalated behavior because [00:08:00] systems built on unequal power don’t soften.

When challenged, they harden. They narrow who is credible. They reassert hierarchy. They lean on nostalgia, morality, and fear. And many women already understand this instinctively, this moment feels familiar. It feels like the moment in a relationship when you finally say, I’m done explaining myself, not because.

You’ve given up because you’ve seen enough.

So to talk honestly and straightforwardly about this moment, we have to name what’s happening in the United States without euphemism. We are [00:09:00] experiencing and have been for a long ass time, a rise in authoritarianism, not all at once, right? Incrementally. Since 2016 when I did a podcast episode entitled Toxic Abuser in Chief, it has been rising incrementally relationally.

Authoritarianism doesn’t announce itself as tyranny, it arrives as order. As common sense as protecting tradition, restoring stability, sound familiar? And it always begins with the same question. Who should be trusted and who should be controlled? Women. Feel this shift early. We’ve been the ones who have been sounding the alarms.

Black women in particular have been sounding the alarms early because control over us [00:10:00] in particular, again, black women is never a side effect. Of authoritarianism. It is a central strategy. That’s why the earliest signals appear in reproductive restriction, marriage law, custody decisions. The treatment of survivors whose pain is taken seriously or testimony is doubted.

It shows up early in race relations. How we’re treated the most marginalized among us. This is not theoretical for women or, and especially again, women of color. Our lived experiences are acting as early warning systems. When you’ve lived in a marriage where rules quietly tightened, where your credibility eroded, where autonomy was framed as [00:11:00] selfishness, where resistance was met with punishment, you don’t need a political science degree to recognize the pattern.

You know what creeping control feels like. So when women. Say they feel alarmed right now. That alarm is not ideological. It’s experiential. We’re watching the same dynamics. We’ve survived privately being scaled up publicly. Narrowing who gets protection, reframing harm as misunderstanding, portraying dissent as threat, demanding obedience in exchange for safety.

Women are not becoming politically informed in spite of their personal experiences. They are becoming politically informed because of them. Every marriage that requires silence. Every doctor who dismissed pain, every court that prioritized control over safety, every institution [00:12:00] that asked women to endure quietly for the greater good that has been our education.

Authoritarianism depends on people treating private suffering as isolated, but once women stop doing that, once they integrate. Their experiences into larger understandings of power, authoritarianism loses one of its strongest shields because women no longer need to be persuaded. They already know what control looks like.

Many women don’t need language like DARVO explained to them. They’ve lived it. They know what it feels like to name harm and be told that didn’t happen. You misunderstood. You’re overreacting, and then suddenly you are. The problem for speaking, this isn’t just a personal abuse tactic, it is political strategy.

When institutions respond to violence or injustice by saying, [00:14:00] you didn’t see what you just saw, this is you’re being politi. This is like whole thing is being politicized. They’re not neutral. They’re destabilizing trust in perception itself. When you watch a video of a woman being murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, and the political response is.

That’s not what happened. She was the aggressor. We recognize that as DARVO, deny attack, reverse victim and offender, they’re attempting to destabilize trust in perception, which is gaslighting. Women who have survived this privately are among the hardest people to manipulate publicly. That’s why clarity is being pathologized.

Why women who speak plainly are called hysterical, divisive, bitter, or a fucking bitch and shot in the face. That word is not accidental [00:15:00] Contempt. Is how dominance tries to reassert itself when obedience fails. Backlash is not evidence. Women are wrong. It’s evidence that something is losing control. Many women are grieving two things at once, a marriage that didn’t protect them, and a country that won’t either.

That grief is not naive. It is the mourning of an illusion that if you follow the rules. You’d be safe. That’s what they’re telling us. Renee Goode should have just followed the rules, done what the ice agent told her to do, and then she wouldn’t have been shot in the face. She was following the rules. She literally was turning to leave.

So this idea, this illusion that if you follow the rules, you’ll be safe. It’s bullshit. Authoritarian systems offer conditional protection. Good women, quiet women, obedient women. Until they don’t. Because once you see that, once you truly see it, [00:16:00] you can’t unsee it. They’ll only protect us if we’re quiet and obedient.

And even then probably not so much. And that grief that we’re all contending with right now is often the emotional cost of clarity. So I just wanna say, this is not a call to panic, although, we should be sounding a lot of alarms right now. It’s a call to stay awake without collapsing. You don’t need to scream, you don’t need to convince anyone, as trying to convince an abuser that what they’re doing is abuse doesn’t work.

You just need to stay aligned with what you already know. I always say, you don’t need to convince him. You need to understand this for yourself, so you need to stay aligned with what you already know because authoritarian systems do not fall when they’re opposed loudly. They fall when people quietly withdraw.

Belief, obedience and [00:18:00] consent. They have fallen when opposed loudly, revolutionarily. But right now the, I think the more powerful aspect is the withdrawal of belief. Withdrawal of obedience. Withdrawal of consent. And women, you women who have already left marriages, abusers, we already know how to do that.

The personal has always been political and the fact that so many women are recognizing this at once is feminist consciousness reemerging under pressure. Which is exactly what history tells us happens when control tightens, and it’s also what history tells us effects change. So before we end today, I just wanna take a moment if you’re a little riled up.

You might be a little trigger triggered, might have some grief coming up, some rage coming up. So let’s just resettle [00:19:00] your nervous system a little bit. So if you can let your shoulders drop, unclench your jaw, take one slow breath in through your nose, and a longer breath out through your mouth.

Nothing needs to be decided right now. Nothing needs to be fixed today. Clarity doesn’t require urgency, but if this conversation brought up grief, anger, or recognition, yeah. Good. Those are signs that something is starting to integrate in you or it has been all along. You’re not alone in what you’re noticing, what you’re feeling, and you’re not required to carry it alone and all of it all at once.

So let your body remember this. You are safe in this moment. You [00:20:00] are allowed to rest. You are allowed to pause. Awareness doesn’t mean constant activation. In fact, it can’t. It also includes knowing when to soften, when to breathe, when to come back into yourself. So for the rest of today, choose one small thing that brings you back into your body.

A walk, a warm drink, a shower, quiet music. Stepping outside in nature. No analysis, no action plan, just a little steadiness. And we will keep having these conversations together from a place of clarity, not overwhelm, because when we do this together, I can tap out while you keep going. You can tap out while I keep going.

It is a collective experience rising up against authoritarianism politically and  personally is a collective process. [00:21:00] It’s a collective endeavor. So that’s all I have to say about that for today, you wonderful week, and I will see you again next week. Bye.

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DISCLAIMER:  THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL ADVICE.  YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY, COACH, OR THERAPIST IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN ADVICE WITH RESPECT TO ANY PARTICULAR ISSUE OR PROBLEM.

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