Welcome to the You're Not Crazy podcast, hosted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes in healing from narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself and others, and heal the relationship with yourself so you can learn to love in a healthy way. You can connect with Jessica and find additional resources, content, and coaching at emotionalabusecoach.com. Before we begin, I just wanna make a quick note. At the end of this episode, I spend the last four minutes walking through the way people work with me and where to find resources, my links, and my courses. If you are a returning listener or are already a client, you can absolutely skip that part. If you're new or trying to figure out what kind of support you need, it's there for you. It's the last four minutes. Thank you so much for being here When I was drafting out notes for this, I kept thinking, like, that I wanna title it The Text That Came on a Saturday, and you'll see why. This is a topic that covers both post-separation abuse, co-parenting, as well as separating from an abuser or trying to separate from an abuser, and how they offload their emotions to control us. But when I was saying that I wanted to title this The Text Came on a Saturday, it's because it's never Tuesday at 10:00 AM. It's never when you're already sitting at your desk and your coffee is actually warm, and you're mentally prepared for some things to come through. Similarly, when we're at work and we're, like, ready for whatever comes in to come in, it's a Saturday and you're at a kid's birthday party, or you're finally at the farmer's market, or you're just sitting on the couch, or you're so tired that you actually let yourself stay in bed and your brain actually hasn't turned on And then your phone lights up. And the text is never an emergency. It's not a logistical necessity. It's usually a loaded message that requires some sort of response and implies that you owe one, and is framed just ambiguously enough that ignoring it feels like a choice that you might pay for later. And a lot of times they know you read it. And so your Saturday is now gone, not because you responded and not because you didn't, but because the test- the text exist, like it exists in the first place, or the email, or the phone call, or the missed call. And now you have to decide what to do with it and what that decision is now living in your body, or how it's living in your body for the rest of the day. That's not an accident. And something that doesn't get clearly named enough in conversations about coercive control is the way in which dysregulation gets used as a delivery mechanism of the control. It's one of the things that makes it so hard to name and so hard to explain to a friend, a judge, a mediator, or your therapist, someone who has not lived inside of these dynamics. Because the person doing it is not always calculating. Sometimes they're genuinely flooded, genuinely overwhelmed, unable to hold what they're feeling inside their own body for just one more second, so they find a way to send it to you, to offload it, to know that now they are on your mind. And what happens on their end once they send it is actually pretty telling because they feel better. The thing that was building inside of them has now been discharged. It's almost like it's handed off to somebody else, now they're lighter. They might even text you something like cheerful or be like, "Oh, why are you... Like I... Oh, this was just a logistical question. Oh, I just emailed you about Thanksgiving, e- e- even though it's May, and like what the plans are and trying to figure out travel, but I, I don't, I, I don't get why that was, that was wrong. I'm just trying to plan ahead." And they'll act like nothing happened while you're sitting there destroyed, thinking about how every single freaking year Thanksgiving is a fight, and you're still holding on to that message, deciding what to do with it, managing that internal cortisol spike and the racing thoughts and rehearsal of every possible response and every feeling, and they got it out, but for you this process has just started And I've worked with clients who describe this pattern so consistently that it stops surprising me, though it never stops being infuriating on their behalf. This one client I have, um, that's navigating a high-conflict co-parenting situation with someone who had spent years using communication as a form of control told me she almost could predict the timing of when it would come in. And it's not the content, because the content changed constantly, but the timing. Weekend afternoons, Sunday nights, holidays, the day before a holiday, moments when she finally was trying to exhale. And she said, "He knows when I'm okay, and he does it, and that's exactly when he does it And here's the thing about coercive control that people who have only read about it in books sometimes miss is that intent is not the whole story. Impact is part of the story. And if you've been here and if you've listened to me before, you've definitely heard my rant about intent and impact. And if you haven't heard the rant, I promise you I will likely go on the rant again in a short time because I could do that every single freaking day. Intent is not the whole story. Impact is part of the story, and pattern is also part of the story. Because when somebody consistently, reliably, across many months and years, sends the loaded text on a Saturday, the pattern itself becomes the mechanism whether or not they know they're doing it. But trust me, they know. That being said, I wanna talk about the, quote, not on purpose, end quote, piece for a moment because I think we extend that benefit of the doubt too generously and too automatically, and there is no logistical reason to bring up Thanksgiving on a Saturday afternoon in May. Thanksgiving's not happening for months. There's no form to file or flight to book yet or decision that cannot wait until Monday when you're both in a more functional head space. That topic was chosen because it's a known trigger, and it's a known trigger that's ar- s- specifically around splitting time because in this one specific case, they're not fully divorced, so it's actually It's-- Well, it's contentious because they are not actually divorced, and they will have to figure that out, and last year was a shit show. The topic was chosen because of that, and the day was chosen because it's when her guard was down. And at some level, conscious or not, again, they know what they're doing, and they know it's gonna land like a grenade, and you'll spend the rest of the afternoon writing responses in your head or actually trying to draft them, and that's coercive control. It's just another way, another mechanism of it. And I wanna be specific about what they're actually getting out of it because I think that's the part that gets skipped over, and it's the part that explains it. They're not just reliving their own pressure. Pressure relief is a side effect. Like, they're not just trying to relieve that. What they're doing is confirming that you're still in their orbit. Your response is the thing they were after. It's not necessarily a particular response, not an agreement, not compliance, just a response, a read receipt, a visible disruption to your afternoon. Any signal that the line between you is still live and that you're still reachable And that they still have access to your nervous system. That confirmation is the payoff for them, and the dysregulation is the way that they get there. And that's why the Saturday text does not stop when the relationship ends. And I think a lot of people believe that coercive control requires an active relationship or a shared space and ongoing contact, but it absolutely does not, and it continues over and over and over again post-separation, especially if you share kids or you're going through a divorce. Because the Saturday text is how coercive control operates across no contact attempts, across months of silence, across years. Every time you respond, even briefly, even calmly, even with a single word, you're confirming that that lease in your head is still active, and you're telling them without meaning to that they can still reach you. And for someone whose entire psychological architecture is built around maintaining control over you, that confirmation is actually enough. They get what they're needed-- what they needed, and they-- that's why they sent it. And when they send it, what goes on for them is not actually that they're thinking about this in a meaningful way a lot of the time. What they're doing is trying to offload their internal dysregulation. They need to inter-- externalize that somewhere, and you're the place they have trained themselves to put it. You're familiar, you're responsive, you are reliably affected, and you are the container they built for exactly this purpose over the course of the relationship. And the text is them reaching for that container out of habit or compulsion or need, the same way someone reaches for a drink. It is not about you, and it's-- it, it is about what you do to them, which is make them feel less alone in whatever way they may be sitting with that. Maybe it makes them feel like they still matter or that they still have a place to put the thing that they can't hold, which is themselves. And the moment you respond, they have all of that. Their Saturday gets better, and yours gets worse. And the asymmetry there is so consistent and so complete that it has a name, and that is coercive control And in trauma-informed work, there's this concept called co-regulation. It's this idea that our nervous systems are not fully self-contained, that we can regulate in relationship with other people, particularly people who we are attached to or have history with, and that a calm presence can genuinely help a dysregulated person settle. Well, if you think about a parent with a child, dysregulated child, that makes a lot of sense. I think I spend the majority of my week when my daughter's not in school doing just that, and it's also one of the most commonly weaponized dynamics in a coercively controlling relationship. And what gets described to me over and over is that the partner or ex-partner becomes so dysregulated that the only thing that helps them is you, your presence, your reassurance. That's why they want so badly for you to respond exactly how they want you to respond. And when you can't do that, when you're too depleted or hurt or simply too human to perform that function on demand, they tend to re- escalate. They send another text, they call, they make the situation worse until you respond that the way that you need, which is usually at that point that you're so done and so not yourself. Usually, they end up causing a fight, but then they calm down, and they wanna move on and have dinner. And it can play out over years and where you become so conditioned to absorbing their emotional discharge that you stop noticing that it's happening. You just know that you're always tired, and you never can explain why. And that's not co-regulation. It is coercion. Co-regulation is mutual, and it's all thirds. When I am doing it with my daughter, I might not even always be in the place to do it, but I have this, "I have to tap into it. I have to be able to." In this context, your emotional labor is taken without consent at a cost to your nervous system, and the other person doesn't have to account for it because they've already moved on. I lived this in the relationship I was in, had a very specific rhythm that I didn't understand exactly while I was in it towards the last couple of months. But his need to control me or to discharge was probably when I was the most pulled back from him. It was always when I was very occupied or very depleted. It was never, ever when I was rested and present and had capacity. It was when I was in the middle of something with my daughter, or I had just gotten through a rough week and finally had a quiet evening, and I just wanted to go to bed at seven PM, or when I was traveling and alre- already quite disoriented. The message would come in, and suddenly the quiet evening that I thought I was gonna have was gone. I was back in the cycle managing his feelings while mine were set untouched And the specific example I come back to a lot is the fact that he broke up with me when I was in another country by text with an ultimatum. It wasn't a phone call, it wasn't a conversation, it was a text that came in the morning when I was thousands of miles away with nowhere to put it, no way to process it in any normal context and completely alone And he just basically gave me this ultimatum of, this is probably a direct quote, but it's not 'cause I don't have it in front of me, but it's- I've read it enough. "Either you accept my version of love and show up for me as that version, which is this, this, this, this, and this. Basically abandon all parts of yourself, show up for me, or the relationship is over." And I responded with something like, "Where's the neutrality in this? Like, I'm not going to do that. You know I'm not gonna do that." And he said, "Then you just gave me your answer and you, you don't want the relationship." And I was like, "This is psychotic." And that night, like the night that came after that, he blocked me. And I feel like one of the last things I said to him when I was still in a relationship with him, earlier that day, for example, was that I didn't feel all that safe in the place I was. I ended up being fine as time went on, but it was like a day I didn't feel that safe. So he did it when I was, like, purposely focused on me. That's the thing I want you to understand about the timing of things. It's not random. When someone sends a loaded text when you're at a birthday party with your kids or you just sat down for the first time in a week, it's not just bad timing. They're sending it when you're least equipped to hold it, which is when you're most likely to respond in a way that gives them what they need just to make it stop. And I spent a long time trying to be fair about whether he knew what he was doing or not. I do not spend much time on that question anymore because I know the answer. In the context, of course, of control, it doesn't change what happened. His feelings did not stay in his body, ever. They came to live in mine. And whenever he sent them, or whenever he had these outbursts too, it was always intentionally when I was focused on something else, and then I had to absorb it and he walked away lighter. And if you're living in this right now, then you can think about it this way, is like people who are operating in good faith, even difficult people, even people who are struggling, do not consistently time the hardest communications for moments when you are most off guard. That is what struggling looks like. Struggling looks like messiness and imperfect timing and genuine repair attempts. And what I'm describing here looks like a pattern. Patterns and coercive control are the point. You are not imagining the timing or pa- being paranoid or hypervigilant. You're actually pointing out what's actually happening. And if you doubt it, it's actually a symptom of exactly what this relationship or kind of relationship does to a person. You're trained to doubt yourself and trained... And that training didn't happen by accident And if you are in a co-parenting relationship and that text arrives wrapped in something logical about a school schedule or something like that, or a pickup, right? These... That's technically what the content says, but we all know it contains something else and something sharp. And the second you read it, even if you can't explain to somebody why, just trust that feeling, 'cause your nervous system has been reading this person for many years and it knows. And the goal, practically speaking, is to create as much distance as possible between the arrival of the text and your response, not because you're playing a game, but because your need to get out of that threat response before you actually make a decision or reply. Like, it's so much stronger to wait and reply on Monday, despite if you get 13 follow-up texts. Because a reply written from inside that cortisol spike is rarely the reply you want on a record, and in high-conflict co-parenting situations, everything is on the record. But just like we talk about the patterns of abuse, cycle of abuse, this all falls in that same roadmap, and you're not required to be available for someone else's emotional discharge whenever they decide So the fact that they need something from you doesn't mean you owe it to them. It's a boundary that co- coercive relationships spend years trying to erase, and it's, it is really one worth fighting to get back. And the, the thing that you can do is really look at the pattern and trust your gut and begin to make notes about when it's happening so then you can begin to make notes on how you wanna handle it differently. I think it goes without saying right now that, um, actually, I don't know that everybody follows me on Instagram, so if you don't, I am a Knicks fan, and we just won. I say we as if I'm on the team. And Jalen Brunson said in an interview, which it does directly relate to this, "You're allowed to think about the worst scenario, but then you have to go out and do something about it." And that's what I think about this. When you write down those patterns, that's what you're doing. You're thinking about them. You're noticing. You're logging. It's giving at least yourself some place to go with this, right? But then you can think about what you can do about it. Like, oh, after the OFW call comes in at 8:30 in the morning, I'm gonna take OFW completely off my phone till tomorrow morning. I will give myself a half an hour to see if there are messages. I don't have to read them, but then I can, you know, I'll do the same thing. And is it annoying to delete OFW and re-enter it every single day? Yes. Can you absolutely do it? Also yes. And then if this is not a co-parenting relationship, if this is something between, you know, in a relationship, you start saying no, and you stop the apology game. With that person I described, like, I really think he did the breakup just to see if I would just, like, completely fawn and go back to it, but I actually had been setting boundaries so much that I didn't. It doesn't mean it didn't hurt. I've talked about it on this podcast. It hurt like hell, but I could not do it anymore, and I knew that. And I had been setting boundaries of not caretaking, not saying sorry, not taking the both ways. I literally got to a point where I started to pretend that I didn't see his messages, and asking me to come over when he knows I have five, literally five minutes before I have to go get my daughter, and nothing with him was five minutes. I started to really think about, like, he knows exactly what he's doing. He couldn't get in touch with me all day 'cause I had back-to-back clients, and now the five minutes I have before I go and pick up my daughter, who's likely gonna be very dysregulated, is not the time that I can give to him. Because the 15 times I did, I knew what happened. And so I started to let him get mad at me Because your nervous system belongs to you, and so does your Saturday and all of the other moments that you want. And so as always, I really hope that this was helpful. And if you need support, if you want support, you can always reach out to me at emotionalabusecoach.com. If this episode resonated and you're realizing that what you're dealing with isn't just stress or miscommunication, there are ways to get support that don't minimize what you're experiencing. I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes telling you about my offerings, because at the core of my business is one-on-one coaching. The podcast is something that I do because I do like being able to help a broader audience, but the truth is that the core of my work is really coaching and providing other offerings so that people can begin to heal. At the center of everything I do is one-on-one coaching. That's where I slow things down, listen closely, and help you make sense of what's happening in your specific situation. It's not a template. It's not just based on theories, but it's really focused on your real life. Some people start with a one-time validation call. That is a single focus session where we look at one specific situation or pattern that you're struggling with, and the goal isn't to fix your life or push you into decisions. It's to help you name what's happening, put it into context of reality, help you notice where you are in it, and offer some feedback and tools to how to navigate it I also offer an intro call. The intro call used to be called the clarity call, and it's a short call where you can share what's going on for you, and I can explain how I work and whether I'm the right fit for your situation. There's no obligation to continue after that. It's simply a way for us to get on the same page before moving forward. For people who need ongoing support, I offer weekly or biweekly coaching. This is especially helpful if you're navigating emotional abuse, trauma bond, high-conflict divorce, or custody and co-parenting with a difficult or controlling person. Ongoing work allows us to track patterns over time, stay anchored when things escalate, and make decisions in a way that protects your nervous system and your long-term stability. All of my coaching options can be found on my websites, emotionalabusecoach.com and highconflictdivorcecoaching.com. Both links are available in the show notes of this episode. In addition to one-on-one coaching, I offer several self-paced courses and programs. They're called Divorcing a Narcissist 101, How to Document for Family Court, The Emotional Abuse Breakthrough Course, Setting Boundaries with a Narcissist, and Unhooked, which is my program and private podcast that walks you through the full cycle of abuse, helps you map it out in your relationship, and shows you how to begin to break free from the trauma bond. I also write on Substack, where I explore topics like trauma bonding, emotional abuse, coercive control, high-conflict divorce, and the Cluster B dynamics. There's a free option and a paid membership that offers deeper dives, Q&As, and additional resources. Everything that I do and everything that I build is around one core truth and message that you're not crazy, you shouldn't feel crazy, and that even though I can see patterns in what you're experiencing, it doesn't mean that it's normal. It's not healthy. My work is really about helping you understand what's happening and begin to trust yourself again. All of the links that I shared are in my show notes, and I really appreciate you being here