Our guest, Leslie Morgan Steiner,a Harvard educated and powerful business women, spent four years married to another Ivy League hot shot from Wall Street. Sounds sort of perfect, right? Unfortunately, there were no Disney moments here. Instead Leslie was in an abusive relationship where her husband poured coffee grounds on her head, pushed her down a set of stairs, and it wasn’t until she was almost brutally beaten to death that she decided it was time to end the relationship. Join us on May 15 as we discuss “why victims stay? “, Leslie’s incredible story of recovery, and offer advice to victims trying to start over and heal from abusive relationships with others. If you can’t make the live date, make sure to subscribe to get the recording when it comes out. Our friend us on Facebook.

Show Summary

Link to Segment 1: Changing Our Perceptions – Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of NY Times best seller, Crazy Love, will shift your thoughts about domestic violence victims. She’ll offer an intimate look at who gets abused and why victims often don’t act. Anyone can be a victim of this kind of violence and abuse, hear what made her (Harvard educated business women from an affluent loving family) susceptible to her husband’s psychological trap.
Link to Segment 2: Advice for Surviving and Thriving – Leslie offers 3 pieces of advice and hope for abuse victims who want to get out of their relationships and restart their lives. Leslie offers how she successfully got out of her 4 year marriage and is now happily remarried. Get a better understanding of why it’s so hard for victims to leave. Hear the major life lesson Leslie learned after her experience.

Post from our Guest

crazy love

If you and I met at one of our children’s birthday parties, in the hallway at work, or at a neighbor’s barbecue, you’d never guess my secret: that as a young woman I fell in love with and married a man who beat me regularly and nearly killed me.

I don’t look the part. I have an MBA and an undergraduate degree from Ivy League schools. I live in a red brick house on a tree-lined street in one of the prettiest neighborhoods in Washington, DC. I’ve got 15 years of marketing experience at Fortune 500 companies and a best-selling book about motherhood to my name. A smart, loyal husband with a sexy gap in his front teeth, a softie who puts out food for the stray kittens in our alley. Three rambunctious, well-loved children. A dog and three cats of our own. Everyone in my family is blonde (the people, at least).

Ah, if only being well-educated and blonde and coming from a good family were enough to defang all life’s demons.

If I were brave enough the first time I met you, I’d try to share what torture it is to fall in love with a good man who cannot leave a violent past behind. I’d tell you why I stayed for years, and how I finally confronted someone whose love I valued almost more than my own life. Then maybe the next time you came across a woman in an abusive relationship, instead of asking why anyone stays with a man who beats her, you’d have the empathy and courage to help her on her way.

We all have secrets we don’t reveal the first time we cross paths with others. This is mine.

About our Guest

Leslie Morgan Steiner lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three young children. She recently completed her third nonfiction book, which explores the ways advances in fertility treatments are changing the face of the American family and expanding what it means to be a mother today.

Her 2009 memoir about surviving domestic violence, Crazy Love, was a New York Times bestseller, People Pick, Book of the Week for The Week magazine, and subject of the first TED Talk by a domestic violence survivor.

She is the editor of the critically-acclaimed anthology Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (Random House 2006) a frank, surprising, and refreshing look at American motherhood from 26 different perspectives.

From 2006-2008 she wrote over 500 columns for the Washington Post’s popular daily on-line work/family column, “On Balance.”

She currently writes the weekly column, “Two Cents on Modern Motherhood,” for Modern Mom and Mommy Track’d: Managing the Chaos of Modern Motherhood.

Steiner has been a guest on the Today Show, National Public Radio, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and has been profiled by Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Elle, Parenting, Parents, Self, Glamour, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Steiner holds a BA in English from Harvard College.

Her writing was first published in Seventeen Magazine when she was 21. As a writer and editor at Seventeen, she explored subjects ranging from eating disorders to teen runaways to family relationships. She went on to contribute to Mademoiselle, Money Magazine, and other magazines, and to work as a restaurant critic and feature writer for New England Monthly. Her essay “Starving for Perfection” appeared in the anthology The College Reader (Harper Collins).

In addition to years as a nonfiction magazine writer and editor, Steiner has an MBA degree in marketing from the Wharton School of Business.After graduating from Wharton in 1992 with an MBA in Marketing, she launched Splenda Brand Sweetener throughout Australia, the Mid-East and Latin America for Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest consumer healthcare company.

She returned to her hometown of Washington, DC in 2001 to become General Manager of the 1.1 million circulation Washington Post Magazine, a position she held for five years.

Over the years, she has turned her professional experience into advocacy for abused women as a spokeswoman at The Harriet Tubman Center in Minneapolis.