Why Am I Even Here? What Leaders Don’t See

A Personal Essay from MSI’s Founder

How abuse, past or present, shapes a woman’s productivity and success, and why it is even harder for women who run their own businesses.

I drove 19 hours one way to Colorado for my daughter’s wedding. I was present in Colorado during the two weeks leading up to the wedding because being there for my daughter mattered to me.

At the nearly the end of the wedding reception, my former mother-in-law said, “Why am I even here?”

Those words have been living in my head rent free ever since. They have also become the title of the book I am writing. When I tell others, they say it’s the most stupidest question ever.

In light of the distance I had traveled and the time and effort I had committed to being present, those words were especially painful. They also brought me back to a larger question I had been forced to confront throughout my marriage:

Why am I here?

Why continue building a business after years of being told I was a loser? Why continue working after being told the business was worthless? Why continue trying to create something meaningful when instability was repeatedly introduced at the moments when I most needed concentration, confidence, and professional discipline?

Finally in last night’s harassing text message (over a month later) After the wedding, I told my former husband what his mother had said. He responded that she had never forgiven me for telling him to move out on December 31, 2011, at 11 a.m. I made that decision after he had stayed overnight at a friend’s apartment for the second weekend in a row. Gave him 2 weeks to decide what he wanted. He tells me in a text message the night before a certification audit he wanted to divorce. Because he was working out of the house, I was convinced by our counselor to let him back in. The worst decision ever. The mental abuse just escalated. I finally got him out by showing I had legal rights and protections to kick him out again. Those facts tend to be forgotten by his family.

I include that history not to turn my daughter’s wedding into a forum for longstanding family conflict. My daughter should not be required to carry the adults’ conduct or choose between competing accounts. I include it because a decision I made in 2011 was still being invoked years later as a reason for resentment toward me.

The answer to the larger question—why am I here?—is not that suffering gave me purpose. Abuse should never be romanticized as the source of someone’s strength.

The abuse obstructed my purpose. It did not create it.

My purpose came from continuing to recognize that my work had value, even when the person closest to me repeatedly said it did not.

Abuse Is Not Always Visible

I lived for years with psychological abuse.

The abuse I experienced did not always present itself as a single dramatic event that others could easily recognize. Much of it took the form of psychological aggression, degradation, destabilization, and attacks on my professional identity.

For years, my former husband called me a “loser” and told me my business was worthless. He threatened divorce before a certification audit and at other times, beginning when our daughter was eight years old. Those threats introduced marital crisis and uncertainty when I needed to prepare, lead, make decisions, and remain professionally focused.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes intimate partner violence as including physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, and psychological aggression by an intimate partner. Psychological aggression is not a lesser category. It is part of the definition.

The CDC’s newest National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey data brief, published in February 2026, is based on responses from 15,609 U.S. adults collected from September 2023 through September 2024. It treats coercive control as a form of psychological aggression: behaviors intended to monitor, control, or threaten an intimate partner. Its examples include keeping a partner from having their own money, tracking their whereabouts, and destroying something important to them.

That framework matters because abuse is often misunderstood when there is no single visible injury. Repeatedly telling a woman she is a failure can affect how confidently she makes decisions. Creating conflict before an important professional event can redirect the attention she needs for her work. Hostile communications can consume hours that should have been spent serving clients, producing work, or generating revenue.

When Psychological Abuse Defines the Workday

Most of the harassing words I experienced came first thing in the morning.

The timing mattered. Instead of beginning the day by planning my work, preparing for clients, or concentrating on business priorities, I first had to absorb degrading or confrontational comments and then try to recover sufficiently to function.

This included harassment about my decision to attend Mass every morning. Attending Mass was one way I grounded myself and prepared for the day. Instead of being respected as a personal spiritual practice, it became another subject of conflict.

After these morning encounters, I had to shake off what had been said and go to an office where I paid rent because I could not work effectively in the environment at home.

Leaving the house did not erase what had happened. I still arrived at the office carrying the effects of the morning’s confrontation. Before beginning productive work, I had to regain focus, restore my confidence, and redirect my attention from the personal attack to the needs of the business.

There were many days when I simply had to put my boots on and get to work, no matter what. Once I was safely inside the office, I would do yoga poses to calm my body and help my nervous system shift into its parasympathetic, rest-and-recover state. Only then could I begin the work clients were counting on.

The interference was not limited to the beginning of the day.

There were also incidents when I was trying to recover after work and prepare myself for the next day. I remember having just gotten into the jacuzzi in an effort to decompress when I was confronted with comments asking when the company was going to make any money.

In the context of years of being called a loser and being told my business was worthless, I did not experience that as a constructive discussion about business planning. I experienced it as a continuation of the message that my work had no value and that my efforts represented failure.

That timing mattered too.

The ability to decompress after work is connected to the ability to return to work the next morning. When conflict intrudes on both the beginning and the end of the day, there is little protected time in which to recover.

The cycle became:

1. Begin the morning with harassment or criticism.
2. Try to regain composure and leave for an office I maintained because I could not work effectively at home.
3. Complete professional responsibilities while carrying the effects of the morning.
4. Return home and attempt to decompress.
5. Be confronted again about whether the company would ever make money.
6. Try to recover sufficiently to begin the process again the next day.

These were not merely unpleasant conversations adjacent to my work. They affected the conditions under which the work had to be performed.

When Abuse Enters the Workplace

Domestic abuse does not remain neatly inside the home.

Workplaces Respond to Domestic and Sexual Violence, a national resource center funded by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, compiles research showing how abuse follows people to work. In one state study it cites, 87% of employed survivors received harassing phone calls at work and 96% said the abuse affected their ability to do their jobs. In a national survey, 83% said an abusive partner disrupted their ability to work. Missed workdays, lateness, and lost jobs appear again and again in the research.

These consequences are especially significant for a business owner. There may be no supervisor to redistribute the workload, no paid leave, and no separate organization to absorb the disruption. When the owner cannot work effectively, the business itself loses productive capacity.

The loss is not limited to the duration of a confrontation. It can include:

• Time spent processing what was said.
• Going to counselor appointments to make sense of it all because most of the time he made sure I caused the issues
• The effort required to regain concentration.
• Reduced confidence while making decisions.
• Difficulty moving immediately into complex or client-facing work.
• The cost and effort of maintaining a separate working environment.
• Lost recovery time at the end of the day.
• The cumulative effect of repeated anticipation of another confrontation.

Research supports the conclusion that these effects have substantial economic consequences. A CDC-published study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated the lifetime U.S. economic burden of intimate-partner violence at nearly $3.6 trillion in 2014 dollars, based on approximately 43 million adults with a history of victimization. That included $1.3 trillion—37% of the total—in lost productivity among victims and perpetrators. The estimated lifetime cost was $103,767 per female victim.

Another CDC-supported study specifically examined short-term lost productivity. Victims of intimate-partner violence, sexual violence, or stalking reported nearly 741 million lost productive work and school days over their lifetimes. The regression-adjusted average was 4.9 lost days per victim (95% confidence interval: 3.9 to 5.9 days). The researchers valued that short-term loss at $730 per victim and $110 billion across victims’ lifetimes, in 2016 dollars. The authors described that amount as a minimum economic valuation of the immediate effects, rather than a complete calculation of every long-term consequence or missed opportunity.

The research establishes something important: reduced productivity and economic loss are recognized consequences of intimate-partner violence.

Why It Is Harder for Women Who Own Businesses

Women own about 14.5 million businesses in the United States, or 39.2% of all firms, according to the Wells Fargo 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report. Many of us started those businesses for the same reason I started MSI: to be present for our children while still earning a living.

Most of what has been built to help survivors at work assumes the survivor is an employee. Workplace policies, leave, human resources, and employee assistance programs all depend on an employer standing behind the person. A woman who owns her business usually has none of that. She is the employer, the human resources department, and the person who has to keep the revenue coming in, all at once.

That creates pressures employees do not face in the same way:

• The business itself becomes a target. When the business is hers, attacking it is a way of attacking her. “Your business is worthless” is not a comment about a job she could leave. It is a comment about something she built.
• Business and household finances are tangled together. The National Network to End Domestic Violence reports that financial abuse occurs in 99% of domestic violence cases. When the household and the business share money, risk, and decisions, the business becomes part of that picture.
• Timing can be used against her. An employee’s audit or big presentation is her employer’s event. A business owner’s audit, proposal, or client deadline is the business. Conflict introduced right before those moments falls directly on the company’s results.
• Nobody covers for her. An employee who has a terrible morning may have coworkers who absorb some of the load. When an owner cannot make the sales calls or send the invoices, they simply do not happen.
• Her results get judged without the context. In a divorce, a loan application, or a family conversation, the business’s profitability is treated as a measure of her competence, with no accounting for the conditions she was working under.
• The research undercounts her. Much of the workplace data counts missed workdays and lost jobs. An owner rarely misses a “workday” on paper. She shows up, does the work she can still manage, and the cost appears later as calls not made, invoices not sent, and growth that did not happen.

None of this means women who own businesses are less capable. It means that when a woman who runs a business is also living with abuse, the usual measures of success can hide what she is carrying. The business may look like it is underperforming when, in fact, she is holding it together under conditions most people never see.

What Leaders May Not See

Leaders generally evaluate performance through visible outcomes: attendance, responsiveness, productivity, revenue, deadlines, and consistency. What they may not see are the private conditions under which those outcomes are being produced.

They may see someone arrive at the office without seeing the harassment that occurred first thing that morning.

They may see someone working from a separate office without knowing that her home environment did not allow her to work effectively.

They may see reduced concentration without seeing how much effort it took to shake off degrading comments before the workday could begin.

They may see an employee’s religious practice as separate from work without knowing that the employee is being harassed at home for attending Mass or pursuing another source of stability.

They may see a missed deadline without seeing the conflict created immediately before an important audit, meeting, presentation, or client obligation.

They may see completed written work and conclude that the person is functioning normally. What they may not see is that writing may be the only form of work she can manage at that moment. She may still be unable to make a sales call, contact a potential customer, issue an invoice, participate effectively in a meeting, or complete necessary physical tasks.

They may see a company that is not reaching its financial potential without considering that its owner has operated under sustained psychological pressure while being told that she and her work have no value.

The CDC’s 2023/2024 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey data brief reports that 34% of American women—nearly 43.5 million—have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetimes. Nearly 30% experienced at least one related impact, which may include fear, post-traumatic-stress symptoms, concern for safety, missing work or school, or the need for legal services. Separately, 30.2% of women reported psychological aggression by an intimate partner, while 27.2% reported at least one form of coercive control or entrapment.

These statistics do not mean leaders should diagnose abuse based on an employee’s performance or make assumptions about someone’s private life. They mean leaders should understand that performance can be affected by circumstances that are serious, recurring, and largely invisible.

The cost does not stay with the person experiencing it. The researchers behind the CDC lost-productivity study concluded that victims’ lost productivity affects family members, colleagues, and employers. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Workplace Violence Program notes that domestic violence spills over into the workplace, and it lists the organizational effects: productivity impediments, psychological damage, diversion of management resources, increased personnel and security costs, and the temporary or permanent absence of skilled employees.

The appropriate leadership question is not simply:

“Did the person produce anything today?”

It is:

“Which essential functions could the person perform, which could she not perform, and what were the resulting operational and economic consequences?”

An evidence-oriented leadership response is neither pity nor permanently lowered expectations. It is the creation of conditions in which a person can preserve safety, maintain economic independence, and continue producing valuable work.

That can include:

• Maintaining confidentiality and treating disclosures seriously.
• Providing reasonable flexibility for legal, medical, safety, or family needs.
• Preventing an abusive person from using workplace systems or contact information to continue harassment.
• Training managers to respond without blame, interrogation, or amateur diagnosis.
• Evaluating performance with appropriate context while maintaining clear expectations.
• Connecting employees to qualified legal, medical, safety, or advocacy resources.
• Recognizing that economic independence may be essential to a person’s ability to leave or remain separated from an abuser.

Leaders are not expected to become investigators, counselors, or judges. They are responsible for ensuring that workplace practices do not deepen the harm or unintentionally assist someone who is attempting to interfere with another person’s employment. Employers looking for a starting point can find free policy guidance and training through Workplaces Respond.

Why MSI Matters to Me

My business has never been only about revenue.

I started MSI when my daughter was four years old so I could be more present in her life and make sure she had proper care. Being her mother came first. MSI was built around that.

Its purpose is to help people and organizations replace confusion with clarity, inconsistency with reliable systems, and unsupported claims with evidence. For 28 years I have taught organizations about accountability, leadership, ethics, audits, and continual improvement, most recently through MSI’s leadership, ethics, and internal auditing courses.

In 2009, when I told my former husband I was going to create online courses, his only response was criticism. Today MSI offers 29 of them.

There is a painful contradiction in teaching those principles professionally while having lived in a personal environment where my work was demeaned and my judgment was attacked.

But there is also clarity in that contradiction.

I know what it costs when people avoid accountability. I know what happens when harmful patterns are treated as isolated incidents. I know the damage caused when appearances are given more importance than evidence. And I understand why no system can improve until the truth about its performance is acknowledged.

That understanding strengthened—but did not create—my purpose.

Attending Mass in the morning was one way I tried to reconnect with that purpose before beginning the workday. Maintaining a separate office was one way I protected the space necessary to act on it. Continuing to serve clients and develop the business was not proof that the abuse had no effect. It was evidence that I continued working despite its effect.

During some of the worst of those years, I led NSA through the development of 11 management systems and 6 certifications over a six-year period, followed by four more years of support.

My purpose is not to prove to my former husband that I am not a loser. If proving him wrong became my purpose, he would still be setting the direction of my life.

My purpose is to build work that is useful, ethical, and capable of helping other people succeed. It is to apply what I have learned about leadership and accountability without allowing his assessment of me to become my assessment of myself.

Protecting My Daughter Without Remaining Silent

My daughter should not be required to carry the weight of the adults’ conduct.

My former husband has had conversations with her that, as I understand them, imply that I am a loser or unsuccessful. I am deliberately not quoting her, asking her to validate my account, or placing her in the position of choosing between her parents.

I include this only because repeating a degrading narrative through a child can extend that narrative beyond the marriage. But I will not make my daughter responsible for proving what happened to me.

Protecting her does not require me to deny my experience. It requires me to speak carefully, distinguish what I personally experienced from what others may have witnessed, and keep responsibility where it belongs—with the adults. I’m finally getting this off my chest here because if I posted on other social media platforms she would see and more than likely cause her to be angry.

Why I Am Here

I attempted to present the abuse during my divorce proceedings because it was relevant to my ability to work, build a profitable business, and maintain professional and economic independence.

I continue to document it because the behavior and its consequences did not simply disappear when the marriage ended. More than a decade after our divorce, he still sends messages I experience as harassment. Last night was one more. This morning, I blocked him.

But documentation is not the entirety of my purpose.

I am here to tell the truth without turning my life into a request for sympathy.

I am here to help leaders understand what they may not see when they evaluate a woman’s performance without knowing the conditions under which she is working.

I am here so that other women who run businesses under these conditions know they are not alone, and that a hard year for their company is not a verdict on their worth.

I am here, first, because I am a mother. Everything else I have built, including MSI, came after that and alongside it.

I am here to protect my daughter without accepting silence as the price of protecting her.

I am here to keep MSI operating and to build a business grounded in integrity, accountability, and meaningful work.

I am here because the value of my work was never determined by the person who called it worthless.

Living with psychological abuse explains some of the conditions under which I was trying to succeed. It does not define the limits of what I can still accomplish.

So when I return to the question—”Why am I even here?”—my answer is clear:

I am here because my work has purpose. I am here because my voice has value. And I am here because the person who tried to diminish both does not get to write the conclusion of my life.

With love to my daughter.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief. February 2026.
• Peterson C, Kearns MC, McIntosh WL, et al. Lifetime Economic Burden of Intimate Partner Violence Among U.S. Adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 55(4), 433–444, 2018.
• Peterson C, Liu Y, Kresnow M, et al. Short-term Lost Productivity per Victim: Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Violence, or Stalking. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 55(1), 106–110, 2018.
• National Network to End Domestic Violence. Domestic Violence & Economic Justice.
• U.S. Department of Labor. Workplace Violence Program.
• Wells Fargo. 2025 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses. January 2025.
• Workplaces Respond to Domestic and Sexual Violence. The Impact of Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault, Stalking and Sexual Harassment in the World of Work.

Diana Lynn is the founder and president of Management Systems International (MSI), a veteran-owned, female-owned ISO consulting and training firm based in Carlsbad, California. She is writing her upcoming book, Why Am I Even Here? This essay reflects her personal experience and is not legal, medical, or psychological advice.