Anna Kendrick: The Real Beauty Of Art Therapy In Healing Your Trauma – And How It Can Lead You To Finally Being Recognized For Your Real Talent After Years Of Work In Your Industry

Back in October, Anna Kendrick appeared on the ‘Call Her Daddy’ podcast, where she spoke with Alex Cooper of her abusive 7 year relationship with an unnamed ex. She said, ‘I was, like, reading all the articles and going, ‘This doesn’t look… like, some of it looks like how they’re describing it, but not completely,” she recalled, confirming that “the relationship was seven years. It was like an overnight switch… that went on for about a year. So it didn’t follow that more traditional, like, it’s like a frog in boiling water thing where it started slow. It came out of absolutely nowhere, but was built on this foundation of I had so much love and trust for that person, so I thought it had to be me. Like, if one of us is crazy, it must be me. So it was very, very difficult to actually go, ‘No, I think this is him. I think this is his stuff.’ I turned my life completely upside down trying to fix whatever was wrong with me. I’ve had several sessions with him in the last several years where he’s apologized to me because I think he realized what was going on, like, right toward the end. He told me one day I was terrorizing him because I was just crying because I couldn’t pretend that things were fine anymore, and I just started crying. And he screamed in my face, ‘You’re terrorizing me.’ But it was truly from the place of a person who believed that they were being terrorized.’

Kendrick also opened up to Cooper of her time in therapy. After she yelled in one of her sessions, she emailed her therapist to apologize, but instead, he called her to tell her he was proud of her for opening up and speaking out. And even though I don’t even know her personally, and she’ll probably think I’m a creep for even saying this even she ever reads this, I’m proud of her too. I’m not only saying this as a fan of her work, but as a fellow abuse survivor as well. The actress also previously opened up about how she created embryos with a longterm ex, presumably the same ex, before they broke up. She told Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on their ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast, ‘I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband. We had embryos together, this was my person. And then about six years in, about somewhere around there, I remember telling my brother, when things had first kind of gone down, ‘I’m living with a stranger. Like, I don’t know what’s happening.’ It wasn’t just the, ‘Oh, I’m losing a relationship.’ It was that I believed that if we broke up or, you know, if he left basically, it was a confirmation that it’s because I’m impossible, I’m lucky that he’s even tolerating my b—–t. There was an inherent thing of me being so rejectable that this person who loved me very deeply for six years, it suddenly occurred to him, how awful I was or something. The shame, that lingers much longer.’

There was obviously a lot of trauma that Kendrick had to endure during her abusive relationship, as well as after. Emotional abuse is hard to define and even understand that you’re in it because the hints are always so subtle. If you’re someone that had endured emotional abuse of any capacity, you will likely experience both short-term and long-term effects. You’ll experience them even you’re not actually aware of the emotional abuse that you’d been experiencing at the end hands of a romantic partner.

Short-term effects:

isolation and loneliness
self-doubt
shame
confusion
low self-esteem
fear when interacting with others
avoidance of activities related to the incident
feelings of powerlessness

Long-term effects:

mental health conditions
neuroticism, or the tendency toward low mood and negative emotions like anger
chronic stress
physical health challenges like body aches and heart palpitations
attachment challenges
emotional disconnect or apathy

It’s important to note that many people who endure emotional abuse at the hands of their romantic partners had also endured emotional abuse throughout their childhood. Victims of emotional abuse become attracted to this vicious cycle because that’s just what they know, if not all they know about how to be treated by people closest to them. We previously discussed Kristin Cavallari and her experience with narcissistic abuse at the hands of her father and, presumingly, her ex-husband, Jay Cutler. She’s been very open about her past experience of narcissistic abuse at the hands of a romantic partner on her podcast, ‘Let’s Be Honest.’ She never named that romantic partner by name, but it’s fairly obvious by context that she was talking about Cutler, and I tell you all about it in my previous blog entry with Cavallari as the subject matter where I provide 13 signs of narcissistic abuse one can endure at the hands of a parents, a romantic partner, and even a friend.

With that being said, for the sake of this particular blog entry, we’ll be discussing emotional abuse endured at the hands of a romantic partner and the effect it has on adults. According to research, long-term emotional abuse even impacts how the brain works in ways that include:

Emotional understanding and empathy – experiencing emotional abuse can bring changes to the hippocampus that make it harder to empathize with the emotions of others.
Self-awareness – emotional abuse is linked to thinning of certain areas of the brain that help the victim manage emotions and be self-aware — especially the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe.
Epigenetic changes and depression – according to research done in 2018, there’s a connection between childhood abuse to brain changes that may cause depression. Epigenetic refers to how your environment and behaviors affect your genes. In particular, the study found changes to certain genes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is an area of the brain that’s involved in the stress response.

And you might inadvertently think these behaviors are to be expected from partners, family, or friends.Emotional abuse, more particularly, chronic emotional abuse affects how you see yourself in your abusive relationship. Your romantic partner WANTS you to feel and experience the following:

Codependency – long-term emotional abuse can make you feel as if your needs aren’t valued and don’t matter as much as everyone else’s. This can lead to codependent behaviors, as well as ignoring your own needs and boundaries. You might also engage in people-pleasing behaviors or tend to establish relationships with abusive partners.
Fear of abandonment – you will experience manipulation tactic, which will then lead to you might feel high levels of stress or abandonment anxiety in your relationship. This could manifest as a behavior sometimes labeled “clinginess” that’s often rooted in a deep fear of losing your support system.
Trust challenges. – if you got out of an emotionally abusive relationship, you might see yourself having harder time trusting even a supportive, compassionate partner. When you’ve been let down in the past, it can take courage and vulnerability to trust that another person won’t hurt you again on purpose.
Difficulty being authentic – the emotional abuse you experienced often takes the form of criticism or picking you apart, you might’ve internalized some of these comments leading you to feel shame. As a result, it could seem difficult and scary to open up to a new partner, leading to emotional distance in the new relationship.

It’s clear through words and works of art that the emotional abuse Kendrick had endured brought a twist to her life completely. Even the work she’d done since her abusive relationship changed drastically. She went from starring in movies such as ‘Pitch Perfect’, Mr. Right’, and ‘Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates’ to starring in ‘Alice, Darling’, ‘A Simple Favour’, and most recently, ‘Woman Of The Hour’, which also marked her directorial debut. And this was a decision that Kendrick made for herself. Following her getting out of the abusive relationship, she told her agents that she didn’t want to do comedy movies anymore. She wanted to go beyond being known as a natural comedian by her fans. In an interview with The Independent, she shared, ‘I think I’d hit a point of critical mass, where it felt like… Oh boy, here we go… I think what was happening at that time was I was being forced into a place of performance and dishonesty in my private life. I just couldn’t spend another second breathing dishonest air. It’s a literal true story that, in the aftermath of this really traumatic relationship, my plumber came over and asked how I’d been, and I just told him everything. I physically couldn’t continue performing. In the parlance of the internet, I think I was known as sort of quirky and relatable. But in that, there’s not a lot of room for sadness and fear.’

The plot line for ‘Alice, Darling’ mirrored the one of Anna Kendrick’s real-life events of being in a years-long emotionally abusive relationship. She actually signed up to star in the movie before the relationship ended. The relationship shifted when her ex fell in love with another woman, and she, in turn, attempted to work through their issues with understanding and love, and as mentioned before, couples therapy. She told Dax Shepard and Monica Padman of working on the film while still having her ex in her life, ‘He came to visit me on a set and he was acting very strange and distant — I was very confused. After over a week I finally asked him ‘are you OK, is there anything I need to be worried about, are we good?’ And the worst possible thing — he started talking about this girl. The next year of my life became, ‘it was nothing — I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. It became increasingly hostile each time I tried to talk about it until it was, I’m curled in a ball, you’re screaming at me, I don’t know how we got here. It was so alarming. And it was so much easier for me to assume that I was crazy or doing something wrong. Because he behaved so badly — I was sort of living with I don’t know how to be around you and I know that I can’t bring up that I’m now scared of you. It’s taken me two years to kind of get to a place of knowing what was happening inside of him when I would bring up anything other than ‘You are the love of my life and you walk on water’ … I was burning him alive — I think that’s why it was so effective on me as a gaslighting tool — [he thought] I was doing something terrible to him — and yes that pain is based on a distortion that has nothing to do with me.’

Shepard then offered to give his own theory on Kendrick’s ex’s tactics and mindset. He said, ‘You went the other way which he was totally unprepared for — her kindness is really demonstrating how bad of a mistake it was. Had you yelled at him, I bet he was prepared for that, but you being loving and understanding he almost caught on fire with shame at that point. When he was developing this relationship on the side he came up with a narrative about you that justified it — and then you’re none of the things he’s been telling himself.’ Shepard has been with fellow actress, Kirsten Bell, since 2007. They have two children together and are frequent collaborators. There were never any signs of abuse between the two, publicly at least, so it’s safe to say that he was giving his own perspective to Kendrick’s abusive relationship from a man’s perspective.

‘Alice, Darling’ is a 2022 dramatic thriller which follows Alice, played by Kendrick. Alice takes goes on a weekend getaway with her two best friends, Sophie and Tess. Alice lies to her boyfriend about her whereabouts, and therefore, is uneasy and tense throughout the trip. As Sophie and Tess see right through Alice, they help her recognize the abusive nature of her relationship. Early versions of the script included Alice having bruises on her body, but Kendrick, as an executive producer of the movie, decided against that. She said in an interview, ‘really didn’t want to make a film that I would have gone, ‘Oh, well it’s not as bad as this movie. Maybe I’m just dealing with normal, healthy conflict. It’s a bold thing to just stay with the main character’s experience, rather than spoon-feeding an audience, ‘Here’s the abuse you can point to.’ To just look at the (psychological) effect that it’s having on a person and trust that it’s abusive. Those daily things add so many layers to the more obvious moments of abusive behavior. When someone is angry or violent, “sometimes it’s easier to go, ‘OK, this has crossed a line and this isn’t about me. This is about you.’ And with those smaller moments that are so insidious, I feel like, ‘There’s a judgment and a superiority here. But if I call it out, I’m going to get told that I’m imagining it.’ kind of sprinkled all the gory details into conversations with different friends. Because I knew that if I told the whole thing to one person, that person would be like, ‘Dude, run.’ I had every benefit in starting my recovery and it’s still so hard. I really don’t know how people do it, just having to go, ‘Well, I don’t have any evidence but I have to trust myself.’ It makes me want to cry.’

Kendrick’s certainly put all her heart and soul into making ‘Alice, Darling’ and bring it to life for the world to see. The same could be said of her making ‘Woman Of The Hour’, her Netflix hit released in 2023, which marked her directorial debut. The movie is based on the true story of serial killer, Rodney Alcala. It tells a fictional story of his appearance on ‘ The Dating Game’ in the 1970’s, where he was looking for his next victim. Kendrick plays Sheryl Bradshaw, a character that was based on the real-life Cheryl Bradshaw, a contestant on The Dating Game’ in 1978. Here are the major differences between Cheryl and Sheryl: