WE Survive Abuse/Tonya GJ Prince

Some seasons are rougher than others.

Many Survivors learn the invaluable skill of not letting outside reactions decide what your experience with harm means. People may minimize, dispute, reframe, or overanalyze what you went through. It's easy to do that from the cheap seats.  
But survivorship requires a private anchor: what I lived is real even when it is not understood or believed.

In this short episode Tonya GJ Prince speaks directly to Survivors with validating affirmations.

What does it really mean to protect women? And who gets to decide when a woman's safety concerns are "serious enough" to matter?

In this episode, Tonya GJ Prince reflects on her experience as a court advocate, where she witnessed women being denied protective orders because they were perceived as "strong." The lesson was unmistakable: many women are expected to endure risk until they can prove they are in immediate danger.

Tonya challenges a culture that praises itself for inclusion while teaching men that they are entitled to be wherever women are—even when women express a need for boundaries, privacy, or safety. She argues that encouraging male entitlement to women's spaces is not an act of protection, no matter how noble it is portrayed.

This conversation explores female vulnerability, the reality of male violence, and why women should not have to justify their need for safety before they are taken seriously. If a woman must first prove danger to you before you will respect her boundaries, you are not acting as her protector—you are asking her to bear the burden of risk.

This episode is a call to rethink what protection actually requires: listening to women, respecting their boundaries, and recognizing that prevention begins long before harm occurs.

What Women Are Still Waiting to Hear

Why won't they say our names?

In an era when nearly every issue has a spokesperson, why do so many women and girls feel unheard when it comes to their safety, dignity, health, privacy, opportunities, and rights?

What are the simple truths that many women have been waiting for political leaders to say out loud?
Why do some issues affecting women seem to disappear into abstract language while the lived experiences of women and girls remain in the background?

And what does that silence communicate?

In this episode, we ask the questions that many women have been carrying for years. We explore the words that have gone unsaid, the acknowledgments that never came, and the leadership many women are still hoping to hear. This isn't just about political parties. 


It's about whether women and girls are named, seen, and recognized as human beings whose safety, dignity, and lives deserve clear and consistent leadership. Join me as we explore 26 things many women are still waiting to hear from those who seek to lead them. You may not agree with every question. But if you've ever wondered why so many women feel that something important is missing from our public conversations, this episode is for you.

Freedom has always had an important relationship with truth.

On Juneteenth, we remember a painful reality. Freedom had already been declared, yet many Black families remained in chains because the truth was delayed, withheld, and kept from them. The distance between freedom spoken and freedom lived carried consequences that echoed through generations.

Juneteenth teaches us something enduring. Truth may be delayed, buried, denied, or feared, yet it still carries power when it arrives. Healing begins when people dare to face what is real. Safety grows where honesty is practiced. Freedom deepens when truth finally has room to breathe.

This episode is a gentle invitation to move toward truth with courage, wisdom, and compassion for ourselves and one another.

Because sometimes the longest journey is the distance between what we sensed… and what we finally allow ourselves to name.

Some people do not grow, evolve, and change. They rebrand. In this episode of the We Survive Abuse Podcast, Tonya GJ Prince explores a familiar pattern in abuse, sexism, and misogyny: the person who reinvents themselves just enough to escape responsibility while still participating in the same culture of silencing violence and abuse against women and girls.

Through the short fable The Man Who Changed His Coat, this episode examines how harmful people often trade in old language for softer words, new identities, cleaner images, spiritual vocabulary, public innocence, or claims of growth without doing the hard work of repair. Because a new coat is not the same as a changed heart.

This conversation is for survivors, advocates, truth-tellers, and anyone who has watched someone cause violence and abuse, rename themselves, refuse accountability, and then accuse women of being divisive for remembering the stones. We are talking about self-exemption, silence, reinvention, bystanderism, and the dangerous lie that “I am not that man anymore” should end the conversation. At We Survive Abuse, we do not confuse image repair with transformation. 

For most people, true transformation is indeed possible, but we listen for the truth beneath the costume.

Some songs are bigger than their chart position.

In this episode Tonya GJ Prince gets personal with a look at Billy Joel’s “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and the little-known purpose behind the song: a message of hope for young people facing shame, despair, and thoughts of self-harm.

We also revisit the spirit of Casey Kasem’s radio era, when countdowns were not only about numbers, but about listener stories, dedications, memory, and the human lives attached to music. This is part music history, part cultural reflection, and part love letter to young people who are growing up in a world that measures almost everything by numbers: followers, streams, likes, rankings, relevance, and reach.

But like human beings, music was never meant to be only a scoreboard. Music is an art form that can become the voice in the night. It can say what hurting people may not yet know how to say out loud: “I hear you. I see you. There is a way through.”

This episode invites listeners to remember the soul of music, the power of songs that help people hold on, and the truth that a life does not have to be popular to be precious.

Some people call it “nuance.”
Some call it “hearing all sides.”
Some call it “not rushing to judgment.”

But when endless debate leaves women and girls exposed, it is not wisdom. It is delay.

In this episode, we talk about the people and institutions that spend too much time camping in the grey area while women are told to doubt their feelings, soften their boundaries, question their instincts, and wait for protection that never comes.

Drawing from the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 21 about the two sons, we look at the difference between saying the right thing and doing the actual work. The son who sounded obedient did not go into the vineyard. The son who went did the will. That lesson still speaks.

A society does not get credit for saying it cares about women and girls while refusing to build guardrails. A community does not get credit for saying it believes Survivors while debating them out of their own warning signs. 

A church, school, family, movement, or institution does not get credit for “dialogue” when no safety plan follows. This teaching is for the women who have been told they were “overreacting.”

For the girls whose discomfort was explained away.
For the Survivors who were asked to keep talking while danger kept walking free.
For the safe adults who are done confusing endless discussion with protection.

Grey areas require lanterns to see clearly.
Grey areas require guardrails to protect women and girls.
Grey areas require action.

Bring a plan.
Bring protection.
Bring the work.

But do not bring another debate and call it safety.

In this episode of We Survive Abuse, we step into a modern fable about a simple bench, a tired woman, and a town that does not realize it is watching control happen in plain sight.

Too often, people believe unfairness and inequality towards women only counts when it is dressed in religious language, old traditions, or formal authority. But sometimes control wears modern clothes. It shows up in friend groups, workplaces, community spaces, activist circles, family systems, dating conversations, and public debates where women are told they may have boundaries only if men find those boundaries acceptable.

Through the story of Lena, Miss Geraldine, and the bench at Maple & Ninth, this episode asks a necessary question: What happens when a woman’s “no” becomes a group discussion, but a man’s discomfort becomes policy?

 This is a short, soulful teaching episode about boundaries, permission, social control, and the quiet ways women are trained to stand while others debate whether they are allowed to sit.

For Survivors, advocates, women, and anyone learning to recognize control before it puts on a sacred name.

Elizabeth Packard was not simply a “wronged wife.”

She was a mother. A thinker. A religious dissenter. A wife under the rule of a husband who believed disagreement was disobedience. She was a woman living under laws that treated a married woman’s mind as something her husband could explain better than she could. And when they tried to make her disappear, she did something dangerous. She remembered herself.

She was a woman who survived legal kidnapping, religious punishment, psychiatric labeling, institutional confinement, and the public burden of being called insane by men who wanted obedience mistaken for health. After three years in the Illinois Hospital for the Insane, she was released with a label meant to bury her: “incurably insane.” 

But Elizabeth Packard did not disappear under that word. She studied the system that swallowed her. She documented what she saw. She fought for married women, people confined in institutions, and anyone whose liberty could be taken because power found them inconvenient. 

This episode honors the woman who turned pain into reform, stigma into strategy, and personal suffering into public law.

Generally speaking, women have never lacked love. We have carried kindness and compassion through kitchens, churches, courtrooms, sickrooms, families, and places where no one even stopped to ask who was carrying us.

But there is a difference between love and management.

In this powerful audio reflection, Tonya GJ Prince explores how women are often expected to become service workers for someone else's comfort while swallowing their own discomfort in silence. Through the biblical story of Mary and Martha, this recording asks a necessary question: What happens when a woman chooses herself and refuses to be sent back into a role that keeps her only useful, but unfed, unconsidered, and unprotected?