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Some school counselors are using code to let their LGBTQ students know they're safe.

William isn't allowed to tell his LGBTQ students he's on their side, so he has to do it in code. When he overhears them chatting with friends, he strains to absorb the language they use with one another and repeat it one-on-one. In counseling sessions, he refers to the significant others of students and school staff as their "partners" instead of "boyfriends" or "girlfriends."

He had second thoughts about hanging a sign in his office that reads: "Your identity is not an issue."


"I actually checked with my bosses ahead of time," he says. "They were like, 'Nope, you’re good!'"

As a middle-school psychologist in Virginia, William (who requested his real name not be used, for fear of retaliation) has always had to skirt around school board rules restricting his ability to address the fears and challenges of his lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer students out loud. But things have changed.

Before January, William says he would hear a homophobic or transphobic slur from a colleague (not all bullies are students, it turns out) maybe once a month. Now, he says, those voices have gotten much louder — and more persistent.

"The sad part is I can't be as loud as they can be without getting in trouble," he says.

For many school psychologists, sticking up for their LGBTQ students in the Trump era feels a lot like paddling over a cultural tidal wave.

Their efforts are frequently complicated by having to navigate a patchwork of guidelines and legislation governing what they can and can't say, and what they must reveal to parents if asked. Eight states restrict how teachers discuss some LGBTQ topics in schools.

That leaves some educators worried they're not doing enough.

"I’m seeing school counselors who were maybe feeling like they were sitting pretty with their programs and what they had been offering their LGBTQ youth at their sites now ramping it up," says Catherine Griffith, assistant professor of student development at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst School of Education. That means asking for more trainings and workshops, particularly on how to talk about trans-specific issues, like pronoun usage and bathroom conflicts.

A student in Massachusetts works on homework. Photo by Jewel Samad/Getty Images.

Griffith recommends approaching conversations with struggling students by listening first and recognizing their expertise on their own lives. She also endorses approaches like William's, in which counselors use visual cues (like a sign hanging in an office) and specific language to signal support. Her research into interventions for LGBTQ youth led to the development of a curriculum — which she distributes free to educators — that emphasizes the helpfulness of organized groups to combat social isolation.

For students, Griffith explains, the ability to organize helps them learn from peers, develop a sense of altruism, and bear witness to others' challenges, especially when it feels like voices in positions of authority are aligned against them.

While William struggles to sneak a kind word to a struggling eighth-grader, 3,000 miles away, the kids in Cynthia Olaya's Campus Pride Club are lighting bonfires on the beach.

A 14-year veteran psychologist from Long Beach, California, Olaya looks younger than her 40 years, a stroke of genetic good fortune that she believes makes it easier for students to open up to her.

"I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to use that," she jokes.

Here in Fountain Valley, where she helps oversee the two-decade-old group, the Trump administration feels far away — literally and figuratively. Earlier this year, when rumors began swirling that the president was prepared to sign an executive order allowing business owners who cite religious convictions to discriminate against LGBTQ customers, her principal addressed the controversy, bluntly, over the school loudspeaker.

"He said, 'Don’t worry students. We’ve still got your back,'" Olaya recalls.

The club, formerly a Gay-Straight Alliance, recently rebranded to be "more trans-inclusive." Her LGBTQ students benefit, she explains, not only from the group, but from robust institutional support and, perhaps most critically, support from their elected representatives. Last year, the state board of education approved a measure requiring that schools add the contributions of LGBTQ Americans to history lessons as early as second grade. A 2017 law bans state-funded travel to states that have anti-LGBTQ laws on the books. In California, there are no rules preventing her from freely discussing her students' gender and sexual orientation.

Her students are worried about what the Trump administration might do to rollback their rights, but most are not panicking — yet.

"I think they feel like, 'We’re safe here,'" she says.

The Trump administration has alternated between playing coy with LGBTQ rights and launching an all-out assault on the policies of the Obama administration.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

At times, both approaches appear to be on the table simultaneously. The draconian religious freedom order Olaya's students feared in February turned out to be little more than a symbolic statement when it was signed in May. The president announced a similarly harsh measure to ban transgender Americans from serving in the military — but has yet to take steps to implement it. The military, it appears, is ignoring it for the time being.

How LGBTQ kids fare in this whipsaw environment can have less to do with how much their counselors want to help and more with the institutional and legal frameworks that govern how much they can help.

Some communities have followed the president's lead in loosening, or refusing to enforce, current protections. Others are resisting the charge.

In some places — the jury is still out.

Holiday, Florida, is an area in constant transition. In the middle school where psychologist Jacalyn Kay Jackson works, immigrants and students of color mix with white students from "more conservative" families. Many arrive in the district for a year or two before moving on. 80% are on reduced or free lunch. Many are LGBTQ.

Since the inauguration, Jackson says her students have been showing "more anxiety" than usual. While Muslim and immigrant students have received the bulk of harassment from their right-wing peers, the backlash has been stinging her LGBTQ kids as well.

"We did have some transgender students and gender-nonconforming students who were worried that some of the rights that they felt that they had fought hard for were being taken away," she says.

Jackson has held the role of LGBTQ liaison for her district since last school year — and she's thrilled about it. She spends half a day a week teaching other educators in the district how to best support gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and trans youth, how to navigate locker and restroom issues, and how to create safe spaces for discussion and recovery from trauma. She's working on a 60-page best practices guide, which she plans to distribute to teachers in her district this coming school year. Despite the occasional complaint, her district is fully behind her work — which gives her much-needed cover.

In her area of Florida, the 2016 shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub opened a lot of eyes to the dangers LGBTQ youth face. She hesitates to call it a "silver lining," but that's the phrase that comes to mind. More parents have been going to Pride parades. Many who were formally opposed to, or equivocating on, expanding LGBTQ rights in the district have come around a bit.

"Not that they’re actively supportive, but maybe they’re more possibly supportive, perhaps because it hit closer to home than it ever has been," Jackson says.

A person builds a balloon rainbow near the site of the Pulse shooting in Orlando. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

It's not a cakewalk. Some students in Jackson's school still face rejection from their families. As the Trump administration attempts to dismantle Title IX guidelines and rollback trans-inclusive policies in the military, LGBTQ kids, she explains, need a "buffer to what [they're] hearing on the news," which for many, isn't at home.

Still, with support strong and growing, at school, that "buffer" appears to be holding — for now.

The only reason her work is possible in this social and political climate, she explains, is the last five years of rapid-fire progress toward LGBTQ inclusion and equality.

"Kids really heard a message when marriage equality came through, and prior to that as some of the individual states started recognizing marriage equality," she says. Meanwhile, parents and colleagues who were previously supportive are looking for ways to be more supportive — particularly of trans students.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

"A lot of them were wondering, 'What pronoun do I use?' and 'How do I support them?' and 'How do I have this conversation?'" Olaya says.

Even in areas where it's hard to keep the door open, there are signs that a metaphorical lock has been smashed off. William recalls counseling one student whose relatives were debating sending her cousin to a conversion therapy camp, and she was worried she would be next. Students, especially younger ones, who reveal too much about their sexuality to teachers often run the risk of being outed to their parents, even if the crisis originates at home. This student, like many others, knew she could come to William for help and that he would keep her confidence.

"The kids know how to ask the right kinds of questions," he says.

Increasingly, their school psychologists are trying to find the space to send the right message back.

"The message is: We’re listening, we’re here for you."

A cassette tape from the '80s.

Generation X occupies an interesting time in history, for those who care to recognize that they actually exist. They were born between 1965 and 1980 and came into this world at an interesting inflection point: women were becoming a larger part of the workplace and divorce was at the highest point in history. This left Gen X to be the least parented generation in recent history.

Gen X was overlooked in their domestic lives and culturally were overshadowed by Baby Boomers with their overpowering nostalgia for Woodstock, The Beatles, and every cultural moment celebrated in Forest Gump. Once Boomer navel-gazing nostalgia began to wane, a much larger and over-parented generation, the Millennials, came on the scene.

“Whereas Boomers were the ‘me generation’ and millennials were the ‘me me me generation,’ Gen X has become the ‘meh’ generation,” Emily Stewart writes at Business Insider. But even if Gen X is a little aloof, that doesn’t mean they aren’t totally rad, awesome, trippindicular, and that it’d be bogus to define them any other way. To explain the unique history of Gen X and why they’re often overlooked, history teacher Lauren Cella created a timeline on TikTok to explain them to her Gen Z students..

@laurencella92

A love letter to Gen X from your millennial cousin🫶 Gen X didn’t start the fire, so after this I will just leave them alone because they do not care 🤣 But seriously for a generation that sometimes gets “forgotten” and stuck between the larger boomer or millennial cohorts, the genres they created paved the way for pop culture as we know it. I’m still not sure who let kids watch “The Day After” on TV or play on those hot metal playgrounds, but Gen X survived to tell the tale. Today, the so called “latchkey” kids, born 1965-1980 are actually super involved as parents, aunts, uncles, teachers (or maybe even grandparents)😉. Kids today want to say they are “built different” but I think Gen X is the one holding down that title because they grew up tough, they saw too much, they made it out, and they know exactly who they are and wouldn’t have it any other way.✌️ #g#genx

In Cella’s video, she divides Gen X into three distinct phases.

Phase 1: 1970s stagflation and changing families

“Gas shortages meant stagflation. So parents either both had to work or maybe they were divorced. So that meant microwave TV dinners and kids that sort of raised themselves,” Cella explains. “There was no parenting blogs, there was no after-school travel sports, emailing. Like, none of that existed. Bored? Go outside."


Phase 2: The neon ‘80s

“But then came the 1980s, where everything was big and loud. The hair, the bangs, the Reaganomics, mass consumerism (because now we can trade with China). The whole media just exploded,” Cella says. “But now we have TV, we have movies, we have TV, movies, home movies, TV movies, favorite TV movies, music, music, Videos, music, video, television. All these different genres and all these different cliques and all these different ways that you can express yourself.”


Phase 3: 1990s post-Cold War Skepticism

“Gen X sort of comes into the 1990s more sarcastic and skeptical,” Cella continues. “The Cold War ending meant that they rejected the excess of the eighties. And there's the shift. Grunge, indie, alternative, flannels, Docs [Doc Martins]. At this point, the technology is also exploding, but not like fun home media, but like corporate media. So there's this resistance to sell-out culture.”


Cella has a theory on why Gen X seems forgotten, and it’s not just because CBS News famously denied its existence. She believes that it comes down to Gen X’s inability to call attention to itself. “So Gen X is a bridge between these two larger, more storied generations. So it's not necessarily that they get forgotten. They don't really want the attention. They're kind of fine to just like, fly under the radar like they always have, because honestly, it's whatever.”

Image via Canva/Kampus Production

Gen X parents discuss biggest parenting difference between them and Millennials.

Parenting styles are always changing from generation to generation. And Gen Xers are taking note about how vastly different their parents' (from the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers) style of parenting differs from Millennials.

One Gen Xer shared, "Something I’ve noticed the last 10 years or so is how much parents are constantly 'doing' something with their kids all summer. I have a few friends that are much younger and have children of all ages. It seems like everyday they are going to the zoo, going to the park, going to a museum, waterpark, taking them horseback riding etc. It never stops."

After explaining the observation, they continued, "I just remember being a kid and playing outside all summer and maybe doing 1-2 things all summer. Do kids really need this much constant stimulation? Please correct me if I’m wrong. It just seems like A LOT."

@nostalgicjunkies1

80s parents gave us freedom. We played till sunset, rode bikes, and explored the world without a care. They trusted us, letting us grow with our own experiences. 🕶️💖 #80sNostalgia #Freedom #Parenting #ChildhoodMemories #90sKids #80sParents #Nostalgia #ParentingWin ! #nostalgia #childhood #80sparents #millenial #childhoodmemories #80sbaby #teenager #throwback #millennialsoftiktok #80snostalgia #nostalgiacore #usa #fyp #foryoupage #trending

Many Gen Xers agreed, and explained the value in giving their kids space growing up. "My kids are older now, but when they were young, I tried to do a combo of unstructured time and fun activities in the summers. We'd have a few days of unstructured time in a row, then hit a museum or water park or something to break it up. I think they both have value," one wrote.

And another Gen Xer added, "It’s not an all or nothing thing. Being around your kids 24/7 so they get smothered and never learn to make their own decisions is bad but our parents basically ignoring us all the time was just as bad. There’s a pretty large happy medium where you hang out with your kids sometimes while in other times you leave them to their own devices."

The post garnered further reaction, and healthy debate. Other Gen Xers disagreed, noting their parents could have been more involved with them growing up.

@b.u.p.c

Replying to @duanemclendon still raising kids at my age. #genx

One Gen Xer explained how their parents' hands-off style influenced theirs to be completely different. "We were also just kinda generally neglected. Like, I was in Little League in the summer, but I had to ride my BMX bike like 45 minutes to get to practice, and I for sure had to make lunch for myself before I left home. I suspect that part of what’s going on now is a reaction to that," they wrote.

Some Millennials also shared that they intentionally don't overstimulate their kids. "This has not at all been my parenting style. To take it even further, I feel doing so is ultimately a disservice to the kids, no matter how well intended. Too many children have become dependent on constant outside stimulation," one wrote. "Too many kids are too damn busy. Learning to amuse yourself is a life skill, and parents ought to be encouraging it. Let them just be once in awhile, especially on their Summer break."

@mrjackskipper

Am I right? #relatable #parenting #90s

However, other Millennials defended their more 'involved' parenting style proudly. "I read that on average working mothers today spend more direct time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s. That was pretty telling to me. ETA: My point being that parents in our generation in general probably spend more time with children," one shared. And another added, "My father once bragged to me he had never changed a diaper. It was not the flex he thought it was."

One Millennial parent summarized their parenting style succinctly: "I think it's because Millennial parents see their kids as human beings and not just something they had to make and raise cause society told them to."

via JustusMoms29/TikTok (used with permission)

Justus Stroup is starting to realize her baby's name isn't that common.

One of the many surprises that come with parenthood is how the world reacts to your child’s name. It’s less of a surprise if your child has a common name like John, Mohammed, or Lisa. But if you give your child a non-traditional name that’s gender-neutral, you’re going to throw a lot of folks off-guard and mispronunciations are going to be an issue.

This exact situation happened with TikTok user Justus Stroup, who recently had her second child, but there’s a twist: she isn’t quite sure how to pronounce her child’s name either. "I may have named my daughter a name I can't even pronounce," Stroup opens the video. "Now, I think I can pronounce it, but I've told a couple of people her name and there are two people who thought I said the same exact thing. So, I don't know that I know how to [pronounce] her name correctly."


@justusmoms29

Just when you think you name your child something normal! #2under2mom #postpartum #newborn #momsoftiktok #uniquenames #babyname #babygirl #sahm #momhumor

Stroup’s daughter is named Sutton and the big problem is how people around her pronounce the Ts. Stroup tends to gloss over the Ts, so it sounds like Suh-en. However, some people go hard on the Ts and call her “Sut-ton.”

"I'm not gonna enunciate the 'Ts' like that. It drives me absolutely nuts," she noted in her TikTok video. "I told a friend her name one time, and she goes, 'Oh, that's cute.' And then she repeated the name back to me and I was like, 'No, that is not what I said.'"

Stroup also had a problem with her 2-year-old son’s speech therapist, who thought the baby’s name was Sun and that there weren’t any Ts in the name at all. "My speech therapist, when I corrected her and spelled it out, she goes, 'You know, living out in California, I have friends who named their kids River and Ocean, so I didn't think it was that far off.'"

Stroup told People that she got the name from a TV show called “The Lying Game,” which she used to watch in high school. "Truthfully, this was never a name on my list before finding out I was pregnant with a girl, but after finding out the gender, it was a name I mentioned and my husband fell in love with," says Stroup. "I still love the name. I honestly thought I was picking a strong yet still unique name. I still find it to be a pretty name, and I love that it is gender neutral as those are the type of names I love for girls."

The mother could choose the name because her husband named their son Greyson.



The commenters thought Stroup should tell people it’s Sutton, pronounced like a button. “I hear it correctly! Sutton like Button. I would pronounce it like you, too!” Amanda wrote.

“My daughter’s name is Sutton. I say it the same way as you. When people struggle with her name, I say it’s Button but with a S. That normally immediately gets them to pronounce it correctly,” Megan added.

After the video went viral, Stroup heard from people named Hunter and Peyton, who are dealing with a similar situation. “I've also noticed the two most common names who run into the same issue are Hunter (people pronouncing it as Hunner or HUNT-ER) and Payton (pronounced Pey-Ton or Pey-tin, most prefer it as Pey-tin),” she told Upworthy.

“Another person commented saying her name is Susan and people always think it is Season or Steven,” Stroup told Upworthy. After having her second child, she learned that people mix up even the simplest names. “No name is safe at this point,” she joked.

The whole situation has Stroup rethinking how she pronounces her daughter’s name. Hopefully, she got some advance on how to tell people how to pronounce it, or else she’ll have years of correcting people in front of her. "Good lord, I did not think this was going to be my issue with this name," she said.

This article originally appeared last year.

Education

Carl Sagan's 1988 astronomy course had nothing to do with stars. The final exam is still relevant.

"He knew critical thinking was a skill needed to tackle the world's problems."

Public Domain/Library of Congress

Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 class had little to do with astronomy, at least on the surface.

If you signed up for a college class called Astronomy 490, you'd likely expect it to be a high level study of the cosmos. It would focus on stars, planets, galaxies, black holes, perhaps delving deeper into theories of the world's greatest astrophysicists and cosmologists. Something having to actually do with the night sky at least, right?

Famed astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan offered Astronomy 490 at Cornell University as a senior seminar course in the 1980s, but it was nothing like what one might expect. The focus of the course wasn't stars, but "critical thinking in scientific and non-scientific contexts." The course used examples from Astronomy and other fields and case studies from the history of science as well as "borderline science and medicine, religion and politics." The idea was to help students across all fields of study to become better thinkers through logic and rhetoric and the scientific method.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Students had to be approved by Sagan in order to take the class, and they had to be "well-qualified" and prepared to "assimilate an extensive reading list" as well as participate in class discussions. The book list included textbooks on logic, reasoning, cooperation, and free thought, and class discussion topics ranged from world hunger to Affirmative Action to the Palestinian state.

The Library of Congress houses Sagan's handwritten course notes, which special curator and digital archivist Trevor Owens wrote, "include mention of the important balance between openness to new ideas and skeptical engagement with those ideas in science" and show how "he wanted to use student’s every day experience with things like television to prompt them to think more skeptically about how claims are made and warranted in everyday life."

TV, television, carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking Critical thinking became even more important in the age of television. Giphy

But what was perhaps most interesting about the course is its final exam. Or rather, exams. The Library of Congress has course exams from 1986 and 1988, and they differ in what Sagan asked students to do. However, the purpose was the same: To prompt students to put to use all the critical thinking skills they had gained in the class.

In his 1986 final exam, Sagan asked students to do two thought exercises and write papers about them. The first was to comment on the pros and cons of this quote from George Bernard Shaw, written around 1921:

"Our credulity, though enormous, is not boundless; and our stock of it is quite used up by our mediums, clairvoyants, hand readers, slate writers, Christian Scientists, psycho-analysts, electronic vibration diviners, therapeutists of all schools registered and unregistered, astrologers, astronomers who tell us that the sun is nearly a hundred million miles away and that Betelgeuse is ten times as big as the whole universe, physicists who balance Betelgeuse by describing the incredible smallness of the atom, and a host of other marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment. In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific."


carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course First page of Carl Sagan's Astronomy 490 final exam in 1988.Library of Congress

The second part of the exam was to design and execute an experimental test of sun sign astrology (such as the daily horoscopes in the newspapers of the time). If that experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was poor, students were to explain its popularity. If the experiment found that evidence for sun sign astrology was fair, good, or excellent, students were to explain the scholarly disdain for it. In other words, they had to make the argument against whatever their experiment results were.

In the 1988 exam, students were asked to read "When Prophecy Fails," a short book about a UFO cult known as Clarionites (also Seekers) in the 1950s that had predicted that the end of the world would happen on December 21, 1954. Researchers followed the group to see what would happen when their predicted apocalypse didn't happen.

Sagan asked students to imagine they were part of that research team, but altered the scenario in two ways—adding a new charismatic leader rising up among the Clarionites and some natural disasters occurring on December 21, 1954.

UFO, cult, clarionites, when prophecy fails, end of the world sci-fi ufo GIF Giphy

Then he asked the students to do the following:

- Describe your best estimate of what might have happened as a result of these altered events over the next few years, informed by our readings and class discussions, including the Milgram experiments. [The Milgram experiments tested people's willingness or unwillingness to follow authority when it meant harming other people.]

- Compose a dialogue, taking place 34 years later (i.e.,now) between a believer in Clarionite intervention and a skeptic, making the best case possible for both points of view.

- What lessons, if any, can we draw?

Sagan clarified that there was no correct answer to either of the exam assignments. He simply wanted to see the students' critical thinking in action and for them to show what they'd learned with "coherency and cogency of argument."

carl sagan, astronomy 490, critical thinking, final exam, college course Second page of Astronomy 490 final exam from 1988.Library of Congress

What stands out about these exams is that they ask the students to make arguments on both sides of a controversial topic. After all, critical thinking isn't just about being skeptical or rejecting ideas in the name of science; it's also about being able to understand and construct the arguments someone would make on any side of an issue. If you understand someone's arguments well enough to create them yourself, they become much easier to deconstruct and point out the elements that don't makes sense.

In a time when people have a hard time agreeing on basic facts, conspiracy theories abound, expertise is under attack, and prejudices of all kinds easily cloud people's judgment, perhaps we can take Sagan's final Astronomy 490 goals to heart and work on sharpening our critical thinking skills.

A very angry woman.

A husband filed for divorce from his wife and burned bridges in the process by making incredibly disrespectful remarks to her. This came 10 months after she had their second child (the couple has six, in total). After losing his high-paying job, he turned course and asked her to take him back again. Should she take him back, given his lot in life, or hold firm and say good riddance to bad rubbish?

The situation came to a head when the husband demanded that his wife, who had a 10-month-old baby, stay in the house, instead of taking her child to a dentist appointment. She went anyway, and then the man slept in his game room for two months. He told everyone that he was divorcing his wife and went so far as to contact an attorney.

“He told me I was not the prize. I'm almost 40 and have four kids, three of whom are minors. He said he's the prize, he's in his prime, and makes good money, and any woman would love to be in my shoes and take care of his kids. He even went as far as inviting his baby mother into the house to visit while I was out,” the woman wrote on Reddit.

sad woman, upset woman, woman looking at phone, shocked woman, mad woman A sad woman looking at her phone.via Canva/Photos

Once the man had made his intentions clear, things changed quickly

“Fast forward, he loses his job and telling me to wait to move. He then starts talking nicer to me and acting differently than before,” she wrote. So what was the wife to do, take back the man who said that she was “not the prize” and that he was desirable because he had a high-paying job? Nope. She stood her ground and said he needed to leave. “I told him I was still moving out and going forward with separating because his actions did not align with someone who wanted to be with me,” she wrote.

The woman then asked the commenters if she was right to follow through with what her husband started. The commenters were overwhelmingly on her side. “He said he was done, so let's be done, even if now it's an inconvenience for him,” one of the top commenters wrote. “Sounds like YOU are the prize after all, because he's an unemployed AH who's soon to be unable to rent an apartment because he doesn't have a job. Hope his parents live close by and can take him in.”

confused man, upset man, divorced man, man wearing brown, man with questions, A dejected man.via Canva/Photos


The therapists weigh in

Upworthy spoke with Paige Harley, MA, a conflict expert with over 30 years of experience helping couples and families walk through breakups and divorce. She says the woman shouldn’t feel any guilt for her actions. “Absolutely never a reason to feel guilty about setting boundaries. However, make sure you are clear about what a boundary is and specifically what yours are,” Harley told Upworthy. “It’s hard and you will need to be the ‘bigger person’ but your future self will thank you—as you are setting the tone for what comes next.”

Dr. Najari Jeter, a licensed marriage and family therapist, relationship expert, and host of The Coupled Podcast, says there’s nothing wrong with separating, but that’s just the first step. "I would say that this woman is not in the wrong for sticking to the boundary of separation. It clearly reinforces to him that he cannot threaten the safety and stability of the relationship without a consequence,” Dr. Jeter told Upworthy. “The deeper issue is, can she separate herself from his view of reality and their marriage? Just because he says these things to her, it doesn't make them true. She may need to accept that he says these things to himself and others about her, but they aren't true--and that defending herself to him will likely get her nowhere.”

Unfortunately, the woman had to deal with a verbally abusive man who isn’t supportive of her or their combined six children. But what’s great to see is that after her husband tried to knock her down a peg and then leave her, she stood her ground and would not take him back. There’s no doubt that she also felt great support from the 1,300 people who commented on the page, with nearly all of them supporting her decision.