When Dr. Brenda Wade first met Wendy Ida a year ago, nothing short of an "intensive intervention" could save her from the trauma she'd endured at the hands of an abusive husband.
"We have a little girl, growing up in the projects in New Jersey and being traumatized and feeling unsafe everyday of her life," Wade explained to The Huffington Post. "For [Wendy], the terrible trauma she went through as a child, repeated in her marriage ... The nervous system tends to go into a state of red alert, and [it] can never calm down because it’s saying, 'Any minute, someone is coming after you. You have to run.'”
But when we first met Wendy Ida last week, her life of trial had clearly taken a different turn.
The first step: fleeing the abusive situation she found herself in, according to Wade. "In Wendy’s case, it wouldn’t have mattered who she talked to, if she exercised or anything if she was still in that situation," she says. After that, Wendy would have to come to terms with what she'd been through, the beginning of a process Wade refers to as "Insight, Skill, Action."
Watch as Wendy describes how she did it in the video above and scroll through the slideshow below for the three principles Wade says lie at the core of Wendy's success.
