Christine Dillard: Surviving Coercive Control, Gaslighting & Emotional Abuse

You can be the person who commands the boardroom and still feel like you are disappearing at home.

In this powerful episode of Women Like Me Stories & Business, Julie Fairhurst sits down with Christine Dillard, author of The Truth She Showed Me, for an honest conversation about surviving coercive control, gaslighting, emotional abuse, and the long journey back to yourself after a 17-year marriage that slowly stripped away her confidence, peace, and sense of reality.

Christine shares what nonphysical abuse can look like behind closed doors: the angry outbursts that train you to overcompensate, the sudden “crises” that happen when you try to leave the house, the loss of alone time, and the quiet isolation that can leave a woman exhausted, confused, and questioning herself.

We talk about the moment Christine realized what she was living through was not normal, and why leaving an abusive relationship is rarely as simple as walking away. Children, finances, health insurance, custody fears, housing, and safety can all make leaving a careful, complicated process. Christine also speaks to the shame many high-performing women carry in silence — looking strong, capable, and successful in public while privately falling apart.

This conversation also explores the way the body often tells the truth before the mind is ready to say it out loud. Insomnia, tight shoulders, racing heart, high blood pressure, chronic stress, and emotional exhaustion can all become signals that something is deeply wrong.

Christine offers compassion for women who are still asking, “Is it really that bad?” Her answer is steady and clear: if you are asking the question, there is a reason.

This episode is for the woman who looks fine on the outside but knows something inside her is begging to be heard. It is also for the friend, sister, daughter, coworker, or loved one who may need help recognizing the signs.

If this conversation brings someone to mind, please share it with them. And if it speaks to you, subscribe, leave a review, and pass Christine’s book along to the person who needs the words.

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If this conversation stirred something in you… good. That’s where change begins.

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I’m Julie Fairhurst, and this is where stories turn into power.

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Transcript

Welcome And Christine’s Story

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Women Like Me Stories in Business. I'm your host, Julie Fairhurst, and today I'm joined by Christine Dillard. She is the author of The Truth She Showed Me. It's a memoir about surviving coercive control, gaslighting, abuse inside a 17-year marriage, and what it really takes to come back to yourself on the other side. Christine is also a director at a Fortune 500 company, a single mom of two, and a woman who has done the deep inner work required to rebuild her life from the inside out. This is going to be a powerful conversation. It's going to be about truth, survival, courage, and the moment when a woman stops performing okay and starts finding herself again. So, Christine, thank you so much for being willing to be on the podcast with me.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Thank you, Julie. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Christine, let's let me ask you a little bit about what led you to write the truth she showed me.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

You know, as I was leaving my marriage, one of the things that I found myself doing on a regular basis was questioning my own reality and kind of working through the emotions of, you know, was it really that bad? You know, was it were there good moments? Were there, you know, I was just working through a lot of that. Just was it that bad? And I realized that as I was working through that, that if I was going through that, at some point my children were probably gonna go through that. And what I wanted was an opportunity to really kind of journal and just start documenting the things and the experiences that I had in the marriage. And it didn't start as a book, it started as a little bit of a journal and and then kind of morphed into a book over time.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

I love that you that you journaled it and then you put it into the book. So what made you put it into the book?

SPEAKER_00 2:00

You know, after I started, so up to the point where I was, you know, a few months out of the marriage, I really hadn't talked to anybody about the things that had happened yet. At that point, people knew, like those closest to me, kind of knew that there were some things that maybe were off, but I hadn't really shared any details. And the more I wrote, the easier it became to talk about it because I had kind of been worked through the emotions of living through it again and kind of validating the experience that I had. And then as I talked about it more, I started finding in all of these other women and all of these other men, everybody has a story, and everyone carried the same shame, the shame, the same emotions, just the same like I feel alone, lack of validation. Everybody everybody I talked to had those same feelings and emotions. And it started kind of this fire, I guess, in me to share my story so that other people could feel validated through that. And that's kind of how it started to turn into a book.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

I love that. You know, it's it's um if you can't write it for yourself, write it for the one who needs to read it. Yes. Yeah, because he or she is out there for sure. Absolutely. So, for someone listening who may not fully understand the term, what does coercive control actually look like in real life?

SPEAKER_00 3:19

So, coercive control at the highest level is the experience that we have of abuse

Coercive Control In Real Life

SPEAKER_00 3:26

that is not physical. It's often something that goes unseen for a long period of time. It comes in the form of the way people talk to us, otherwise spouses talk to us, the way that they control finances, the way that they control our behavior through their behavior. So, in my situation, a lot of times there were very angry outbursts because things didn't go perfectly or because you know that the kids were acting out tonight, or they were tired and there was a tantrum, there would be an adult outburst as well. And for me, that started to train me to make sure that I had the kids in order and I had everything mitigated before he got home so that we didn't have to deal with that once he got home. So I tried to constantly stay in front of those things. It's ruined holidays. You know, a lot of times there's patterns with coercive control. It's a lot of times not a it's not like one big thing. It's a lot of small things that happen over and over and over and over again. And that's why it's so easy to dismiss and not not necessarily justify, but also like it's we don't we don't justify it, we we dismiss it and we focus on I think the the positive things that are that are in our lives and we I don't I don't even know how to explain it really. Like we you you work through that experience and you're like, okay, well, today was a good day. Yeah, yesterday was a bad day, and he got angry and I had to deal with that. But now that today's a good day, I don't necessarily want to create a bad day by dealing with and talking about yesterday. So you get into this habit of constantly either overcompensating or telling a different story to yourself about what's really going on. It sounds listening to you explain it, it sounds exhausting. Oh, it is, it is so exhausting. You're always on and you're always trying to proactively prevent problems. Some that never show up because you prevented them, other ones that show up 10 times because you tried to prevent one. It is, it's just you're always on. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

So gaslighting, it can be so subtle at first. What did you when did you begin to realize that your reality was being questioned or twisted?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

There were instances very early in our

Gaslighting And Losing Your Freedom

SPEAKER_00 5:48

relationship that I noticed it, but we were new, and like nobody goes into a relationship hoping it ends, and then you don't get into a marriage hoping you fail at that or that it fails. And so you I told myself anyway, I I gaslit myself. I told myself it wasn't that bad. I told myself that every marriage had problems. I told myself that everybody had a temper of some sort, right? Like there's there are things that I told myself and lied to myself about. And you get to this point very early on in my marriage where like he didn't have to gaslight me anymore. The most common instances of it were when I tried to do something without him. Whether it was a grocery store run or it was maybe a girl's night or things like that. Early in our marriage, I would try to do those things alone to get time alone. And there would be a crisis at home the minute I left. There would be 20 text messages, there would be phone calls, and not for anything major. Nobody was hurt, nobody was like really needing me in those moments, but it was an interruption to the peace that I was trying to get by spending a few minutes away. And then I got to a point where I just I didn't do things alone anymore. I went to a girl's night happy hour, he came with. I went to the grocery store, he came with. I brought the kids with, like we all went. And so now all of those little things where you might have had a moment to recover, recharge, they're gone.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah. When was there a moment when something inside of you said, this isn't normal and I need to start paying attention?

SPEAKER_00 7:26

Sadly, it took a really long time. It was 13, 14 years in. And it came down to a scenario actually right here in this office where he had come home from work, yet again, in this just

The Moment It Finally Clicked

SPEAKER_00 7:41

chaotic state of I'm gonna quit or I'm on the edge of getting fired because things were going poorly at work, and there was all this financial stress and just the emotional stress of me trying to figure all the things out and make sure the bills were paid and make sure that the kids had health insurance and that the mortgage was paid, you know, all of these different things. And I I kind of lost it that day. Like I hadn't cried in years, and I cried that afternoon. I was just had a meltdown because the stress was overwhelming. And he said to me, he said that he had no idea I was under that amount of stress. And I kind of looked at him and I was like, How? How do you not know? Like, we live here together, we all know what the bills are. Like, we can't survive with only one of our incomes. And he had told me that that night or that afternoon that he would he would do better, he wouldn't, he would, he would stick with the job, he would try to take some of that stress off of me. And I remember looking at him and knowing that in that moment there was no there was no way that was gonna happen. Like it might happen temporarily, but it was gonna fall back to me in the end anyway. And at that point, it was just one of those moments where I was like, you know, half the income is easier to do it myself. And I wasn't committed to that because I wanted to keep my kids in their school district. I wanted to maintain their life and keep it as stable as possible. So from that 13, 14 year mark forward, what I did was I started planning. And when he left my office that day, I figured out what I needed to offset his income. And I doubled that work for for nearly three years to replace his income, to make sure I could carry the health insurance and put all these steps in motion so that when we did get to the point where I'm filed for divorce, then that I knew that there was that kind of for me personally, there was that security in leaving.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I went through a divorce years and years ago, and it was the same kind of thing. Like it clicks in your head and you go, okay, so how? When? What am I gonna do? And and you start planning it. Yes. And yeah, yeah, it's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Well, if you underestimate the plan sometimes, right? Like it's not as simple as just saying, Oh, I'm done, I'm leaving.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

No, no, well, it well, I mean, no, because you're tied, you've got financial obligations together, you've got children together, you've got mortgages, you've got friends, you've got families. It's it's I know there's people that do do that, but I mean, for me, I couldn't have done it.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Yeah, yeah, if you can great, right? Like everybody's journey is different, but yes, for me, it wasn't that wasn't an option.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

No, no. What do you wish more people understood about why leaving an abusive and controlling relationship is not simple, other than what we just said.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

You know, the biggest thing is I think, you know, when there's, and this is not a pro to physical abuse by any means, but when there is physical abuse and there is a documented like jury of that physical abuse, right, it is a slightly easier story to tell in the court system and to for the court system to acknowledge than when it comes to custody and things like that. And when we're talking coercive control and when there aren't bruises, and when you when you question whether or not you can actually report it and whether or not something can be done about it, uh because frankly, our our legislation is a little behind on this, when you question those things, like you, there's risk, right? Like if I would have left it that that's 13, 14 year mark when I had decided it was time, my daughter was not old enough at that point to be recognized in the court system as having her own opinion on where she lived. And that was one of the primary drivers beyond like keeping their life stable. I needed to wait until she was of a certain age to be able to move safely if it ever came to that. You know, we got to a point where the the way it worked out was the kids would live with me and I wouldn't interfere with custody or with his time with them if he petitioned for that. And it it didn't come to a situation where we had to go to court, but I didn't want to take that risk because the risk was 50-50. And it when it was 50-50, I couldn't be there. Yeah, yes, yeah, and so I think that's that's something that's really that's something that I would love for people to understand is it's just not that simple. It's not as simple as just walking away.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

No, it's no, no, no, and especially with children. Yes, yes, yeah. You just don't, yeah, you're right. You can't risk certain things happening. Yes, yeah, absolutely. What about shame? Did you did shame play a role in your journey?

SPEAKER_00 12:34

It did, it played a huge part in my journey for a long time, for almost the entire time, frankly. I mean, there's a reason I didn't talk about it, right? One, I

Shame And The Double Life

SPEAKER_00 12:43

had shame, like that I'd internalized for myself of like, how did I get here? How did I let this happen? And you know, when you work through the healing process, you realize you're not in control of other people's behavior. But that doesn't make it easier, right? Like, because I still, I mean, 17 years is a long time. And not only did I put myself through that, but I put my children through that. And so you carry that shame, you carry that regret and that guilt. Then you worry about silly things like what the neighbors think could tell you. Yeah, the neighbors don't give shit. Um, they they did not care, did not fit them at all, as it turns out. So, you know, getting to the point where you know, I could let that go. Because up to this point, up to the point, actually, of when I released the book, I was truly living a double life. I was this woman in my professional life that seemed to have it together, like had command of the boardroom of you know, executive meetings and things like that, her business. And then outside of the business hours, here I am, this other woman who can't even defend herself, like and wasn't standing up for herself or her children. And there's a there's a ton of shame that comes with that. But releasing the book publicly was the chance I got to kind of bring both those women together and be that one woman, which was super freeing.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Yeah. And when you publish your story, the shame goes away. It does. Yes, it does. Yes, and sometimes people are very because that's what I do is I help women with their stories. And a lot of times that's one of their biggest fears is oh, what is everybody gonna think? And the shame that they feel. But once it's out there, they realize that the shame is really in it's an internal thing.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

There's yeah, yeah. Isn't it mind blowing? Like once you once you start talking about your story, like how validated you feel by the community that's out there, like it's such a supportive survivor community that it's it's a little mind-blowing because you live so long thinking you're the only one and you're alone in all of it. And it's so not true.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

No, no, but we don't, but we don't know that when we're when we're in it. You get blinded, and you're blinded by guilt and shame and the isolation and trying isolation and trying to keep the peace and and and it's so case chaotic, there's no time to think. Yes, clearly. Yeah, wow. So you said that the body knows things the mind can take years to catch up to. How did your body speak to you during the time that you were going through all this?

SPEAKER_00 15:23

You know, when I started the book, and you can kind of see in the title,

When Your Body Starts Screaming

SPEAKER_00 15:26

I I called it the lies she told me because I was mad. I was mad at myself because I let myself get here because I didn't acknowledge it for what it was. And as I kind of worked through my journey, I realized that well sh my body, she had been telling me all along, and I didn't know the signs in the early stages. I didn't, I didn't recognize them for what they were raised. Like I, you know, I I woke up every day with a sore neck and sore shoulders and my back hurt because I didn't sleep well. I didn't sleep at all because I tossed intern all night trying to make sure that like the kids didn't make a peep. And if they did, I got there first so that I didn't it didn't disturb him. It was in the heart racing when he raised his voice, myself or the kids or a stranger, the road rage. It was it should have been just the sweaty palms, like just in a number of different ways. And what I realized in this process is, you know, when I didn't listen, she got louder. So those were all fairly benign symptoms. And then I got to a point where I had high blood pressure and high cortisol and insomnia, and all of these things started to compound and become a lot louder. And they were all a result of the high stress and the high anxiety of that time period, and it showed up in so many different ways that I just didn't recognize for what it was at the time.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

It's so interesting hearing you say that because I I believe that you know you can only stuff so much down and eventually it's gonna come out somewhere, and and an illness and and that type of thing. And and I I yeah, I used to have I only have one kidney, which I've been fine, but I but in my 20s and 30s, I had so many kidney infections that would land me in the hospital for a whole week. And finally, I just started to see the correlation as what was happening in my life. And and every time I had that kidney infection, I got to check out. I checked right, I was in that hospital.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Your body giving you a little bit of a somebody else takes care.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Yeah, it was just yeah, yeah. And and and then I haven't had a kidney infection in 20 years. Isn't that insane?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

I mean, it's not how our body can protect us, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Yeah, yeah. It just, I know, and and but when I was in it though, I'm like, and I, you know, and then they send you off for all these tests or do, but nobody bothers to say what's going on in your life.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yes, that, that right there, yes. If we like when we go into the doctor and they say, and I know we're doing the best we can right now, but we can do better. When they say, Are you being abused at home? Are you scared to be at home? Whatever the question is, right? No, nobody's answering that honestly, because that person's probably sitting in the hallway where I have to go home to them, one of the two. It's not safe. Yeah. And yeah, like if we started looking at how the body and the mind talk instead of just treating a symptom, I think we'd be we'd uncover a lot more, a lot faster. Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

I want to tell you a really quick story. So one night I'm lying in bed with my Kindle reading, and I'm starting to fall asleep, and all of a sudden, whack, it dropped out of my hand because I started to fall asleep, and it got me right here. And I knew I'd thought, oh, that's not gonna be good, right? So you go to sleep. I wake up in the morning and I've got quite the shiner, which develops into like a really black eye. And like I'm going looking for like, can I get makeup for it? And you know, because it was just like, yeah, it was bad. Anyway, I'm telling you this story because I had to go see my doctor. And my doctor was away, so I saw a different doctor that was in, and I don't even remember what I was going for. It had nothing to do with the black eye, but I sat in front of her for at least 15 minutes and she never once said, How did you get the black eye? Oh my gosh. I'll never forget that. Now I wasn't abused, a Kindle. I told my She doesn't know that. No, she doesn't know that. No, I was shocked that and I kept it waiting, you know, and luckily I I wasn't an abused woman. I just dropped my Kindle on my eye, falling asleep. But but but I was just, and it really woke me up because I thought, what if I was really an abused woman? Yes. What if I needed help? Yes, that's your opportunity, doctor, to say, hey, that's quite the shiner. Like, what if not a word, not a peep. But anyway, wow. I know. So sometimes we think, you know, well, I didn't go there for help for that, but uh, but I sat there totally expecting. I had a waitress who looked at me and then looked at my husband, and she said to him, Did you do that? Way to go.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

The waitress cares more.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

The waitress cared more than the doctor. Anyway, that's my little story. Uh yeah, but yeah, it we need to, but we need to, we as as a as a collective women, we need to say, Hey, are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help? Do you want to

Signs To Notice In A Friend

SPEAKER_01 20:47

just chat?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Something. Yes. I always get the like, how do you know? Um, and one of the telltales, and I didn't recognize this back then, but I can see it real quick now. If she is, if she, if your best friend, your sister, your mom is with you all the time and her phone never leaves her hand, there's a reason for that. It's because she's gonna miss the call or she's gonna miss the text and she's gonna pay for it later. And it is a, it is, it's a habit. It's not, it's not the thing where I set it down and I pick it up in every half an hour and look at it. It is she is looking at it constantly and she is always multitasking because she's always trained to stay on top of whatever might go wrong outside of this conversation. And man, when you start to look for things like that, you start to see things real quick. Though the abrupt departure, if you're at dinner, you're at happy hour with your girlfriend and everything's going great, you guys are having a great time, all of a sudden she abruptly leaves and she makes up an excuse, right? Kids got sick, whatever. There will always be an excuse, but it was quick. If that happens more than once, that might be a flag. It might be worth having the conversation.

unknown 21:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

I will I don't know about you, but like I wasn't ready to, if somebody would have said, Said, this is what's happening to you, I wouldn't have listened. And I probably would have actually said, I'm I'm not gonna talk to you anymore. Because I wasn't ready. But I also think the thing that helped me get ready was hearing other people's stories. Yes. Even if I couldn't call it mine yet. Yeah. The reality is, I think the more we talk about it as a society, the more we talk about the signs and the symptoms, the more educated we all are on, oh, it is that bad. Like if you're asking yourself that, yeah, it absolutely is. Or you wouldn't be asking.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yeah. How did you deal with it at work? So, how did you keep going while carrying so much privately?

SPEAKER_00 22:39

That was the one place I felt like I was successful. I felt to some degree like I was failing as a mother for not being able to protect my kids better. I was failing at my marriage because I couldn't keep that together. I couldn't keep him happy. So work was the one place where I had that feeling of like I was in control. And that made going to work easy. It made being a good performer really easy because it was like, okay, that's the one place where I got that validation I needed. And luckily, because I we came into our relationship with both of us kind of having 50-50 for like household income. Luckily, there was never a time where it was like he owned all the finances. Because that would have been a very different story. And it is for a lot of people. But because we started down that path initially, like we couldn't sacrifice my career for just his income. We couldn't live like that, at least not in maintain. So that worked to my advantage because I got to keep that sanctuary, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

So why do you think you ended up there?

SPEAKER_00 23:44

Oh goodness. There was definitely I think my perception of love was very different. I'm not even sure I could tell you that I knew what it was back then when I started down my relationship with Path with him. I didn't love myself. That's clear. I don't know that I even got to the point where I did love myself until the last couple of years as I got on the other side of this. As we get older, we just we learn a little more about like where love starts and that we can be whole without another person. Like it's great if we can compliment each other and that works, but that we don't rely on that and you know, we get brought up, or we didn't. There wasn't there's a gener a long generation or a long set of generations of us that were brought up with this two-parent household, two kids, white pick offense, you know, all the things. And like we were all striving for that, and nobody got divorced. You know, I was I grew up in the 80s and 90s. People didn't get divorced, people worked through it or ignored it, you know, depending on the family. But you see a lot of those women getting divorced now. There's there's just the there's a whole movement, it feels like, where women are feeling more empowered to make changes that are better for themselves. And it's it's inspiring to watch.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Absolutely. I think that we're that we're definitely more empowering for ourselves and for others. I feel like we're I feel like we've become a tribe of back to our femininity, but you supporting one another. Because I think you're right. I think for years that, and maybe our parents, our grandparents didn't have that opportunity. Right. Because everything was so, you know, you have six kids, seven kids, you're living in a three-bedroom house, one bathroom, everybody's working the farm.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

There's no time for yeah, and they didn't have access to the resources, right? Like they didn't have TikTok and Instagram where you could learn about these types of abuse and what's right and what's not, what's normal and what's not. You know, there's just there's so much more access to information.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

No, you're so right. And and and even now, if if someone's in a situation but they're living in it in silence, you're right. They can go to the internet, they can go to YouTube, they can go to TikTok, they can find resources and and books and and videos that they can hopefully watch to help them get a little bit of more courage to to help themselves, where years ago, yeah, that wasn't an anonymous friendship, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Like we don't have to wait till after nine o'clock to call the one person whose phone number we have. We we can actually have anonymous friendships online where we have similar stories and we can live on each other. It's it's cool.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

It is, it is, yeah. So writing a memoir about something this personal, it really takes enormous courage. So, what was the hardest part for you to put your truth on paper?

SPEAKER_00 26:49

It's a very honest story. There,

Writing The Memoir Without Polishing

SPEAKER_00 26:52

there is no level of perfection on either side. And I think the hardest part in working through all of it was acknowledging like my part in not just like enabling the behavior that was happening in my home. Because again, we learn to accommodate, we're trained to accommodate through this form of abuse the behavior. And so, in a sense, we're enabling it. I have some responsibility in this. I can't control his behavior, but I can control mine. And that was tough. The other piece was the acknowledgement of the things that I thought I protected my kids from that I didn't. Because as I, you know, as you work through something like this, you start to in the same way that your body protects you, your mind protects you as well. And you bury a lot of things. And when you start working through the healing process, you work through trauma coaching and all the things, you start to uncover a lot of things that you ignored and you put away and you didn't even know existed for a while. And those pieces start to fall back together, and you realize it's it was a lot bigger and worse than you thought.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's all you can do when you're in that situation. It is, it is because it's survival. That's right. You're not gonna, you're just gonna go crazy if you don't, or something's gonna happen to you. Yeah. Yes. So for someone listening who's questioning their own reality right now, what would you want them to know?

SPEAKER_00 28:26

I want them to know that if they're questioning it, that that we believe you, and that it is that bad. Again, if you're asking yourself that question, I say this a lot, you're asking yourself that question, there's a reason. Your mind is caught up and it is that bad. And it gets really, really easy to hear people's stories and start to compare. And all of these different kinds of abuse, physical or otherwise, are super sophisticated and they get more sophisticated by the day. You can't compare stories. No, you can't. Abuse is abuse. And if you're asking yourself, is it that bad? the answer is yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

So, what kind of response have you gotten from your book?

SPEAKER_00 29:09

Heartbreaking, it's it's been heartbreaking. It's been it's it's done what I wanted it to do. Like I said out and said, I just I want if one woman reads this and thinks, oh my gosh, I have words for the things that I went through. I've had several people reach out over the last couple of months and say, you know, for 30 years I lived in this situation and here I am reading this book, you know, and now I'm out and I'm reading this book, and it's like you're you're writing my life. How did you know? And those are, like I said, heartbreaking because there's a lot of them. But the ones that really get me are the ones where someone says, I read the book, but I just gave it to my friend because she needs it too. And that's that's how I hoped this book would work. Like I hoped that it would be something that someone would read and be like, I know someone who needs to read this and pass it along.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Yeah. That's that, yeah, that's that's all we can hope. Yeah. Yeah. Is that once we share it, that it's it's um it's a light for somebody else for sure. Well, what would you say to a woman who looks strong on the outside but is quietly breaking on the inside? And I guess that was you.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

That was me. That was me. I would I would tell her she's not alone. And I would tell her there is absolutely no shame in exiting that journey. And then if you choose to sharing your story, there's absolutely no shame in that. The outpouring of love from people is a little mind-blowing, but also it kind of does that whole restores your faith and humanity thing. It's it's a beautiful community out there. So if you're you've got it all together, but you're breaking inside, just know you're not alone.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Yeah, absolutely. Your story carries pain, but it also carries a lot of power. So, what does freedom now mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 31:06

Oh, freedom for me today is the ability to be one woman and not two, to find peace in just a sunrise, in laying in bed for 10 extra minutes, because that was something I never got to enjoy before. I was always moving and thinking and going. And, you know, the quiet Sundays with the kids, the couch ratting, watching TV with them. They're just the peace that comes with all of that. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Well, I would like everyone to know that we are gonna have in the show notes, we are gonna have ways that you can reach out to Christine and that you can purchase her book. So we'll have a link in there for you so that it makes it nice and easy for you. It sounds like a fabulous book. And and if it's not necessarily

Freedom Now And How To Help

SPEAKER_01 31:53

for you, just like Christine just said, you probably have a friend who might need to read it or a or a spouse, not a spouse, I'm sorry, uh a parent, a child, who knows? There's a lot of people out there that that get themselves in situations and and and need to have some light so that they can see their way out for sure. Well, what do you hope, what do you hope readers take away from the truth she showed me?

SPEAKER_00 32:24

I take like I'm hoping that they for those that are living in, I'm hoping that they take away the fact that they're not alone and they feel some form of validation in the process. And for those that are supporting people who might be going through it or who have gone through it and you're maybe on the other side, you know, I'm hoping you find maybe peace in knowing that we're trying to drive change. Like that's that's the bigger mission here. Like knowledge is great, but at the end of the day, there's some change that needs to take place. We talked about legislation a little bit. We talked about, you know, the doctor's visits and things like that, recognizing it. So I'm hoping that they take away enough knowledge to be able to help have those conversations too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

Wow. It's um just so needed because of the isolation, you know, and and and especially I find these days that we do spend more time isolated because everything is not everything, but so much of what we do now is is on the computer. Many of us work from home. And uh, so we're not getting some of us are not getting out the way we used to. So networking groups, whatever, whatever you need, those girls' nights out, those are can do uh, they're so needed. We just need our our female energies around us for sure to help. So yeah. Well, Christine, thank you so much for bringing all your truth and your book and all the wisdom that you've been willing to share from from what you went through. And and I know that there's people that are gonna be listening to this that are gonna find they're gonna see a little bit of light. And hopefully that's enough to get them to start going towards it. And definitely buy her book if you, if you are, you know, if you're going through anything like this and struggling, get her book. It's gonna help you, it's gonna give you some guidelines, it's gonna, it's gonna let you know you're not alone and that you too can can have a better life. Yeah. Thank you so much, Julie. You're welcome. Thank you so much. Okay, everybody, as much as we could carry on, we can't. So thank you so much for being here for this episode of Women Like Me, Stories and Business. And we will see you all again next time. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.