Why do people stay in abusive relationships?It’s one of the most common questions people ask after stories of trauma, coercion and abuse. But it’s often the wrong one.

In this episode of Psychology, Actually, I explore the psychology behind the question “Why didn’t she leave?” through the lens of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl https://amzn.to/4tAA93f - unpacking trauma, grooming, coercive control, attachment, dissociation, threat, and why survival can look deeply misunderstood from the outside.

We explore what keeps people in harmful situations, why trauma reshapes choice, and how compassion helps us ask better questions.If you work in mental health, support survivors, or want to understand trauma more deeply, this is an important conversation.

• Read Nobody's Girl, by Virginia Roberts Giuffre here: https://amzn.to/4tAA93f
• Read Dave Pelzer Books: https://amzn.to/49bM5jE

⏱️ Timestamps

• 00:00 Why “Why didn’t she leave?” is the wrong question
• 01:58 The trauma, grooming and abuse at the centre of the story
• 03:09 Why we’re drawn to stories like this
• 05:19 Trauma and the need to make meaning
• 06:29 What stories like this teach us about prevention
• 07:54 Compassionate curiosity in mental health work
• 08:57 Trauma, parenting and keeping children safe
• 10:04 Why survivors may reconnect with harmful people
• 11:04 Attachment, longing and early wounds
• 12:16 Why she stayed – trauma, coercion and threat
• 13:38 Grooming, dissociation and distorted self-worth
• 14:41 Why fear and loyalty can override escape
• 15:40 Why this story still matters

If you find this video helpful you might also like my other videos in the psychology behind the story. There's Lily Allen, Sir Bradley Wiggins, Johanes Radebe & Kieron Dyer. You can find the playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLatjYNXFAzGc_x3sPfAKBsUIhIoi8Ycrj

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Since I finished reading Nobody's Child by Virginia Giuffre, I've been sitting with something I can't quite shake. Whilst I expected the book to stay with me because of what happened in it, that's not actually what's been on my mind. Instead, I've been noticing what I was drawn to and what I wasn't. And if I'm honest, that doesn't always sit entirely comfortably because it's made me question what we're actually trying to understand when we hear stories like this and how easily we can end up asking questions like, "Well, why did she stay? Why didn't she leave?" So I thought as a clinical psychologist, we could take a look at some of this together.

Hi, welcome along to Psychology Actually. I'm Dr. Marianne Trent, a qualified clinical psychologist. Now, I can't be alone that I enjoy reading books that are relevant to kind of psychology, mental health, trauma, and wellness. Growing up, I'm fairly sure in my late teens, early 20s it was. I was reading books by Dave Peltzer like a child called It, that kind of vibe. So I was intrigued when posthumously Virginia to phrase a book, Nobody's Girl was published. In case you don't know her name or the name of the book, let me give you a little bit of information. I'm going to be talking about things as facts because there've been legal processes that took place that determined that was the case. So Virginia Roberts Giuffre might well ring a bell for you if you think about Andrew Mantbatten Windsor, who was previously Prince Andrew. And it was Virginia or Jenna, as she called herself and is called in the book, who had been trafficked to Prince Andrew at the time.

And I'm sure that now the name rings a bell if it didn't already. So Virginia or Jenna had ended up crossing paths with Ghislaine Maxwell and with her partner at the time, Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the book is about trauma. It is about grooming. It is about sometimes the worst in humanity where people start to not treat each other as if they're humans, as if they have value for anything other than what they want them for. And that can be challenging, that can be triggering. I think the first thing to say is that it is a book of two halves. So the first half is about her upbringing and essentially what unfolded, what happened to her. And the second half is about justice and getting everything to lay a little bit flatter and ultimately holding people accountable. And I would like to level with you. As a human and as a psychologist, both parts of me found the first half much more interesting.

It's this human desire to learn and to find out information and to kind of ... I like reading magazines like That's Life Magazine. I don't know if you guys ever read any real life stories, but I like knowing about people's experiences and how they felt at particular times and what mechanisms they might have drawn upon to help them to survive tricky things. I personally was less invested in the justice and also I think less invested in her family that she went on to have afterwards. And that doesn't always sit that easy because you think you want to be this kind of balanced clinician that's being a justice warrior, but I am also human. So I would love your thoughts if you've read the book. What did you think about the two halves? How did they stack up for you? So I think some of the psychological mechanisms going on here is that humans are drawn to intrigue and kind of curiosity and maybe sometimes always drawn to a shock factor.

So I'm always thinking about kind of compassion focused theory and the way that our brains are wired and put together. And if you find that angle interesting, please do check out the episodes that I did with Professor Paul Gilbert where we go into compassion focused therapy in more detail. And I think when we recognise that we've got that more of an interest, our attention is held more by that. We shouldn't shame ourselves for it. We shouldn't judge ourselves for it. We as a species are kind of a survival first species that we need to be paying attention to things that might pose us risk or someone else as well. So it is just the way that our brains are wired up. I think one of the other things that struck me was how the experience of trauma can kind of force us to reprioritize things that we might not have done had we not experienced them.

So what I'm meaning here is that a lot of the time Virginia or Jenna was away from her family as she was trying to sort all these legal processes. She was often in different parts of the country from them. And that priority, being able to choose that over being with her family in a more present day-to-day capacity, can't have been easy for her family either, but it did feel like the trauma had forced her to reprioritize the justice over the importance of spending that time with her family. And I think maybe that's the desire to kind of do some meaning making in our experiences. When something awful has happened to us, there can be that sense of something needs to count. This needs to have happened for a reason. There needs to be more emphasis on this, more highlight on this so that this didn't just happen to me in vain so that other people can take note and so that important conversations and thoughts happen to make it less likely that this will happen to someone in future.

So interestingly, even this morning as I was on social media, I saw that the local police force to me had been doing some what they called stings on hotels and taking young people into hotels with alcohol. So the older person was carrying alcohol and the older person would say to the younger person, "Turn your phone off." And then they were trying to pay in cash and they were trying to book hotel rooms. And this is supposed to set alarm bells ringing for the sign of trafficking or grooming. And actually three, I think, of the five people called the police immediately. And obviously it was the police doing the sting anyway, so I'm hoping that was revealed. But there were, I think, two people who did allow this hotel room to be booked. And I think it is the learning from stories like this, from cases that then are hopefully trickling into our own narratives, the narratives of crime prevention agencies and kind of social services that are really getting us to think about really being more conscious and intentional and that we can be empowered to ask questions.

I think as we're working in mental health settings as well, it really can be we need to give ourselves permission to ask questions, to not assume that people in front of us are always going to tell the truth and to be compassionately curious and respectful. And this crops up in physical health settings as well, that we need to be trying to make sure that the clients in front of us are not at risk, but aware that they might not be telling us all of the information because of fear from someone that might hurt them or because they are conflicted or groomed or feel like it's not safe for them to do that. So yeah, that idea of compassionate curiosity and learning from the stories of others, I think for me feels really powerful. And as a mother, I found it really tricky. When during the second half of the book, she describes losing her youngest child, her daughter for a bit when they were at a wildlife park because she'd just taken her eye off her and she'd wandered off.

And then I think she eventually found her playing with wallabies or something. And it really made me think about the evidence that suggests when someone has been abused, they are less likely to be able to keep their own children safe because they might not follow some of the safety precautions that people who have not been abused would've done. And I think that's a really powerful idea as well. So not to shame or blame people, but just to be aware of those mechanisms. And when we're working with people who have been abused, it's actually really important that we support them to make optimum decisions that keep themselves and their family safe in future. One of the trickiest aspects is the level of abuse that she experienced from her father and from one of the neighbours growing up when she was a child. And then actually in her adult life, she reconnected with her father and ultimately with her mom too, and really wanted to have her father know her children and be in her life.

And that is a hard one to understand. And I suspect some of the mechanisms that kept her in the grooming situation with Maxwell and Epstein are around here as well. And we're talking about attachment, wanting to be part of something, wanting to have someone know us and see us and be able to share information about our heritage. And we see this time and time again with people who've had really difficult upbringings. Sometimes that desire to be part of something really drives the bus and is favoritized and prioritised over being part of nothing and being part of maybe just your own family or making you feel vulnerable, unloved, uncared for, which are obviously some of the deeper early wounds that have been set in motion. And there is the reparenting that often happens when people have experienced abuse, that they want their own children to have a different experience.

And so maybe she wanted her children to have a different experience of her dad and of her mom, but also it's that longing and hoping for a different outcome that describes being very watchful and really wanting to make sure that they weren't alone together. And that level of threat and distress that must have been going on at that time, to then have all of that still outweigh the desire to emancipate, to say, "Actually, I'm not having you in my life. We're not doing this and it's not okay what happened." But I think those desire, the desire to repair and reconnect and ultimately to be loved, that can be so very powerful. And I think the overarching question that people have about the situation is, well, why did she stay? She wasn't handcuffed. She wasn't restrained. She was free to come and go, to go from where she was living and then to come back when she was called.

And I think this is where the nuance really is kind of apparent and it's incredibly complex, isn't it? And people absolutely begin to think that that's their worth, but also when people are being paid for something, then that becomes a job, doesn't it? And when you've got a job, you can kind of have that sunk cost fallacy. Well, at least I've got a job and I'm being paid and if I've been doing it for this long, it will be hard to get a job and people will notice the gaps on my CV and they'll wonder where I've been and what I've been doing. We can almost invalidate ourselves really by staying in situations that might feel damaging. And I think there's also complex mechanisms at play here with possible dissociation. So in order to do things that your mind doesn't want you to do, but you're being asked to do by someone with your body, then sometimes we'll dissociate from that, especially if you are being fed and clothed and looked after and paid reasonably well and kept in good standards, kind of luxury standards, living a luxury life, going to desert islands and kind of meeting hugely influential people, that lifestyle can be hard to quit.

And it does muddy the water, doesn't it? Especially if someone's been abused when they were younger, then we're not comparing someone that's had a very stable, solid existence of being loved and adored and being able to talk about things are challenging and having that be responded to. That was not her experience as a child or as an adolescent. And when you've been raised in an abusive situation, then your own unique sense of worth and value can be affected. So when someone is looking upon you favourably, telling you that you're a good girl, that you're beautiful, that you're doing things really well, that also can be really, really tricky to start saying no to. And of course, the very important point here is that her younger brother, whom she adored had been threatened. So if she was going to tell anybody about what happened to her or what was happening to her, then bad things would happen.

And when you do have someone that adores you in your family, then of course that leverage over you is going to hold really a great deal of weight indeed. I would love your thoughts on this. What have you thought to this episode? What's it evoked for you? Have you read Nobody's Girl? Are you intrigued to read it in future? I would love to know what you think of it. If you like this style of diving into books that are kind of psychologically relevant, then please do take a moment to go over to YouTube if you're not already watching on YouTube and check out my Psychology Behind the Story series. This is my first solo podcast episode for quite some time. So it's really nice to connect with you in this way. If you enjoy hearing me talk about complex human emotions and processes, I think you might also really like my exclusive members only content podcast, which is called Inner Work.

And you can dive into that as a free three-day trial on Apple. You can join directly from Captivate and you can join on YouTube too. There's details in the show notes, and please let me know if you've got any questions, if you've got any ideas for future topics for the podcast, I would love to receive them too.