Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Hello, hello. Um, y'all, I am sitting in my office getting ready to record this episode. I've just written out my outline for it. I mean, this episode is, whoo. I thought last week's, you know, I was like buckle up for last week's, but this week, same. I keep trying to have these like light episodes with y'all, and what's coming through my body most of the time is just intense, deep topics. And the ironic piece of that is today in the Dallas area. We are currently under a tornado warning um till about six o'clock tonight. And so I have this incredible view of all of these dark, stormy clouds and um just just stormy vibes today, which is gonna fit beautifully in the topic that showed up today, wanting to be shared, which is how you can know the difference between true love and love that is just a mask for control and manipulation. I'm so deeply excited to share the thoughts I have on this with you guys. I'm gonna be sharing a lot of examples from things I've been noticing in my clients right now to a very personal experience I had this last weekend that is teaching me deeply about what love is and what it isn't for me. And I definitely want to start by caveating it with that for me piece because love is just a word, it is just a placeholder that we get to really put whatever concept we want into. And as I'm gonna talk about in the episode, it can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. And you and your partner may not actually have the same definition of love, and that could surprise you. Like you could have been married for a really long time and just not even know that your partner's idea of love is actually really different from yours. So I wanna, before I dive into that piece, I just want to say, like, foundationally, I am learning, and what I've come to really believe deeply is that true love does not need to manipulate you to get what it wants. So I'm just gonna place that here at the beginning of the episode to be you know kind of floating around, sinking in in your brain, and I'll come back to it at the end. Okay, so love is just a word, it is different depending on each person you talk to. So I really want you to take a second and just pause and think for yourself. What does the word love actually mean to me? What do I think it looks like when someone loves me? What you know, what should it look like? What should it look like when I love someone else? When you're in love with someone, what do you do and what do you not do? So maybe pause the podcast, stop for a second, you'll get a lot more out of it if you take this second to breathe in deep, see what you think love is, and maybe even as you're having those ideas come up, notice in your body which of those thoughts about love actually feel good and which might kind of have some stickiness around them, or feel a little bit like, oh, I mean, it sounds right, but it doesn't necessarily feel right in my body. So take a second to do that. Okay. So once you have these ideas in your head, I want you to have that definition as we're going through this and kind of be checking in as I'm giving you examples for what you might believe. And I would offer, if you want to take it even a step further, maybe writing those things down in a note in your phone and later on asking your partner, hey, you know, what does love mean to you? What does it look like? What does it involve? How do you know someone loves you or not? So I remember having this conversation towards the end of my journey with my now ex-husband when we were married. I remember having a moment with him where I was asking him, What does love mean to you? And he said, Well, love is when you're willing to do things you don't want to do because you care about someone else. And I can still feel it in my body. In that moment when he said it, everything inside me, it was like a wild animal screamed out, like, like, no, no, that is no, no, no, that is not what love is for me. Oh my God. And I'm gonna, I'm like, I'm gonna get emotional. This episode has so much emotion in it right now for me. But it's like a visceral reaction in my body of like, no, that is not what love is for me. It is not abandoning myself and doing things I don't want to do because I care about someone else. And why that was so impactful at the moment is because that was the definition I had grown up with. That was what I had done for the goodness, 29 years of my life up until that point. I had deeply believed that love meant giving people what they wanted, even if it meant hurting myself. It meant not having my own dreams and my own passions, and instead letting others really tell me what they needed and fulfilling that for them. So, some other ideas that as I was thinking about of like, okay, what might you run into ideas of love that would fit kind of with this version of love that I think is encapsulated in this whole, it's when you do something you don't want to do because you care about someone else. Um, some of the other ideas were like, love is when you stay, even when you want to go. Or love is when you sacrifice what you want for others. Love is when you play by the rules and you don't rock the boat. Love is about not asking questions and being satisfied with what is. Love is being grateful for what you have instead of being selfish or ungrateful, wanting more than what you have. Love is when you accept someone exactly as they are, even if they're not growing or changing, and you stay with them regardless because you made a promise and you made um a vow. So notice, as I said, each of these kind of what's coming up for you in these definitions of love. Um, maybe these are things that you've heard, maybe these are things you believe currently right now. Ultimately, you get to define love for yourself. Okay. It is just a word that ultimately gets to be whatever you want to make it. In this episode, though, I want to share some things that I want you to be very aware of when you are defining what love is for you. So I'm gonna start off this exploration of love by diving into what I see most regularly in my clients in their marriages, which is narcissistic codependent love. And narcissistic codependent love is built on lots of enmeshment. Okay, enmeshment is where my emotional happiness depends on you, and vice versa. So there's a lot of loss of individuality, loss of personal responsibility for our own happiness, lots of needing others to be certain ways so that we can feel good. Now, growing up as a child in a family with a narcissistic mother, this was the game. Like, I you had to play by the rules of enmeshment, which were always thinking about how is what I'm choosing gonna affect other people. I can think back, I rarely made any decisions without always first considering like, what is my mom gonna think? How is she gonna react to this? So notice that may be the case in your marriage, rarely making any decisions from a true like, this is what I want. And it's not that you don't communicate what you want. I'm not saying you just go off and do things without telling your partner, but a lot of you don't even communicate what you want because you've already anticipated your partner isn't gonna like it or it's gonna make them upset, and so you just repress it. So enmeshment is a cornerstone of the narcissistic codependent love. Another key piece of this love is control. When you are enmeshed with someone and your happiness depends on them, they are and I want you to think of this. What I see the dynamic the most often is a lot of like a husband who has more of a narcissistic personality. So in being enmeshed with you, he feels like you need to make certain choices to make me feel good. You making choices I don't like hurts me. And so, ergo, you shouldn't do those things that hurt me. And there becomes a lot of need for control because if you're the one that holds my happiness, then I have got to get you to do the things that I need you to do for me to be happy. And for most of you, that's gonna show up when you're considering divorce, and I need you to stay married to me so that I can be happy. So that was, you know, this one of the second pieces. A third piece is because they need to control you, they will use a lot of defining, a technique of defining you to really ultimately manipulate, and that's just a technique of needing that control to get you to do what they want. So the defining comes about in like them having lots of stories about who you are and defining you through their lens. An example just popped into my mind. I remember one of my sisters dating a guy in high school that my mom was set on her dating. And they came to a point in their relationship where my sister was kind of over it, like, did not want to date him anymore, was ready to break up. And my mom had this story about how he was the best thing she was ever gonna have in her life, and she didn't know what she really wanted, and she was being impulsive and she needed to think through this more clearly, and she was gonna regret this. And if she broke up with him, she was always gonna look back and be sad. Perfect example of like my mom had this idea and thought she knew my sister better than my sister knew herself, and so much so, you know, believing that she knew my sister's true motives and what she really wanted, so much so that she used this fourth key piece of this type of love, which is using authority, using this authoritative kind of stance of I have a better insight into what's really happening and who you really are and what you really want. So you really shouldn't trust yourself because I know best. This is happening in a lot of your marriages. I am watching it in multiple of my clients right now with husbands who especially, and you know, quick side note, if you've had an affair, this can be ratcheted up substantially because they use the affair to kind of shield themselves. Like it's a weird little mental twist that they're doing where they think because you had an affair, they now have a right because you did, and I'm gonna put this in air quotes, something bad. You guys know how I feel about this, but because you did something bad, they now have the right to parent you, to treat you like a child, to tell you that you don't know what you want. I mean, the whole gamut, right? They'll go so far as being like, you're delusional, you think the grass is greener, you're gonna regret this, you're never gonna be happy, you're gonna leave and be sad the rest of your life. Massive, massive amounts of defining you, telling you who you are that they know best. And what's so sneaky about this is if you really step back, and of course, I get to do this as a coach because I'm not in the middle, I'm watching it from the outside. I just have to laugh because I'm like, lo and behold, what he's saying is best for you just happens to be what's really best for him and serves his motives the most. Although they would never say that, right? And honestly, so much of this, I like to give people the benefit of a doubt that a lot of it is just subconscious. Um, I really felt that with my ex-husband. A lot of the manipulation and the control that he did when he was trying to prevent me from leaving the marriage, I think came from deep desperation, a lot of fear. And when people are afraid, they do things that they wouldn't do, probably in a more calm, centered, grounded state. You can kind of see the worst sides of people come out when they're afraid of losing something that at that moment in this codependent narcissistic relationship, they are using that relationship with you to feel some kind of sense of safety or certainty in themselves. So you leaving isn't just you leaving, it's a huge piece of what they use to feel safe in their life leaving. So they're gonna fight for that. And they're gonna pull out their subconscious, is gonna pull out dirty techniques like control and manipulation and using authority and making you responsible for their feelings to do that. So, with those kind of four things that I talked about, right? The first one was the enmeshment, then using control, using a lot of defining of you, and then becoming like an authority figure in your life, treating you like a child. They have more insight into you than you do into yourself. I want to state very clearly this is not love. Love is not manipulation. Um, if I had to say what I think this is most, this is this is the machinations of childhood trauma in adult relationships. This is, I never got enough love in my childhood to feel truly safe in myself. And now I can't, the the thought of being without you is too terrifying to let you go. Not because I really genuinely love you, not because I genuinely see you and understand you and love who you are as a person, but because I'm terrified of trying to figure out my identity and who I am without this piece of you in my life. Yeah, as I'm saying these words, I'm like, oof, I can almost like collectively feel a lot of you, like, oh shit. Like let this sink in. This love is not what we really what I think we think of as like what what I'm using in this episode is calling true love, right? The love that is like, I see you, I know you, I see your heart and your passions, and I love who you are as a person, and I want you to be happy, and I want me to be happy, right? That is like true love. I get you, I see you, I respect you. What I just defined is not love. It's not true love. This is love that is that is the word love being used to hide fear, manipulation, and control. And it can get so tricky when you are in the middle of it, y'all. So I, as I was writing this episode, I was like, oh my God, I totally like I have been in the middle of this. I mean, I was definitely in the middle of this when I was in my marriage. But even since then, and I think it's helpful for you all to know that, you know, you guys just see me through the podcast. And so at times it can feel like I have all the answers and my life is great. But like, y'all, just like I said last week, it is messy up in here. I am healing and learning how to love all sorts of aspects of myself. So one of the things I wanted to share is that I definitely found myself actually in a relationship that, as I've had hindsight and time away from it, looking back on it, in a lot of ways was more abusive than my marriage in just different ways. And I was trying to, with this episode, think back on it and think like, what was it that kept me? And how did I not see what was going on in that relationship? And I realized I think it really came out of when we first met each other, we fell in love like really fast and hard. And that is that incredible feeling of like, oh my God, I have this hole inside of me, you have this hole inside of you, and together we feel complete. And really looking back, this was a partner who really needed me for his identity. Like where he was at in his life, having me in his life allowed him to think much better thoughts about himself. That is a pretty dangerous place to be in, because then me leaving in some ways means I'm taking his identity with him, this identity that he really likes now. So as things started to get rocky in the relationship, you know, when we we'd started this off this premise of like, oh my God, you are so amazing, so filling, so awesome for me. Then when I started to realize, uh, maybe this isn't what I want, he would use those techniques of guilting and shaming me into staying. And a lot, you know, I'm not even going down into like the deeper technical aspects of what it looks like when a narcissist is manipulating you. Um, I hope to do that in the future on a it's gonna be a long episode though, and I didn't, I'm like, I gotta gear up for that one. But using techniques, like one of them would be like the whiplash of one second he's saying to me, like, I love you, you're my everything. And the next minute he's, you know, verbally attacking me. One minute he's playing the victim and saying I'm this terrible person and I'm going to hurt him so much. And the next he's like, fine, leave. What that does to your brain, it it's like it is a lot. Like whiplash is the best word. It is just like, whoo. Like you can't keep track of what is going on because there is so much up-down all around. In fact, one of my partners talked about it this week where she was having this conversation with her husband. He's talking about one topic, she like kind of pins him on it, and all of a sudden he is like off on a totally different topic, like bringing up something about their children and how she'll be a bad mother. And I was like, that is textbook. Do you see what he did there? As soon as you kind of like get something established, they will just change direction entirely. And that change creates this like emotional jolt in you that then disorients you. So this is not like I want you all to know if you're in the middle of this, have so much compassion for yourself because it is very difficult to see through it. And that's why, with a lot of my clients, one of the first things I recommend to them is the book The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists. Because if you don't understand what's happening, if you don't have words to pin it down, to be like, Oh, that's gaslighting. He's pretending like what happened didn't happen. I mean, some of my clients have partners who will literally, you know, they'll be like, Hey, I'm feeling this. And they're like, No, you're not, or that didn't happen. Or um, you're just overreacting, right? It feels so high and low, like one minute telling you how much they love you, and next that you're gonna be an idiot for leaving them. So ultimately, what got me out of that relationship, what saved my bacon, because I was in and out. I like broke up and got back together in that relationship like three times, y'all. That was how much I was like really emotionally tied to this person. It was my deep trust in myself. And ultimately, as much as this person wanted to define me, I had done enough work to really fucking trust myself that no matter how much he was feeding me the thoughts to redefine me in the way he wanted and the story he wanted, I could go enough off of my body to know what was true or what wasn't for me. So I also in sharing that example, I also had some client examples that I wanted to use just to give you guys scenarios that will illustrate this love that I'm talking about. This love that is not true love. Okay. It is love that is a mask for control. So I've had a client who husband at the time, I would say like half the time is love bombing her, which is where, like all of a sudden, where previously in the marriage he was incredibly neglectful and not, you know, no matter how much she asked him to do stuff or told him what she needed, he just would ignore and keep doing what he was doing. Now he is doing all the things. He's buying all the things, he's saying all the things, he's touching all the things. And half the time he is also doing what he did previously, which is defining and manipulating, shaming and judging her. But because he is now, and I'm putting the snare quotes, giving her what she said she wanted, her brain gets really confused, thinking that this is love. And he's doing a great job of convincing her because he's all on board with telling her it is love. Look, I'm giving you what you wanted. We are healing it, we are fixing it. Here's what I want to say true love is not giving you what you said you wanted now that you're about to leave. Oof, and my teeth are like gritting as I say it because it is such bullshit to watch these men all of a sudden when the risk is, oh shit, I'm gonna lose you. Now they're willing to do all the things and and manipulate you by saying, Why do you want to leave still? I'm doing all the things now, with total disregard for all of the years that led up to this point, right? So it is not giving you what you want now that you said you're going to leave. Okay? True love is respecting and trusting you enough to believe you when you say you know what you want, and it's not this. And what I mean by that is when you're saying to him, Look, I just don't think I'm happy still, even though you're giving me all these things, I'm still not feeling it. I still think I want to go. Can he stop and even give you the space to like, okay, you get to believe and want that? Or does he just immediately rush into convincing you that you do? No, no, trust me, you do. You're getting the things you want. Notice that if he cannot hold space and just like, okay, yeah, you're right. Even with me giving all the stuff you said you wanted, it still might not be enough for you. And that's okay. If he can't do that, it's not real love. Okay, client number two. In this scenario, this is a client who has a husband who, you know, his approach instead of like doing all the things is to come down really hard with like massive shame and guilt. So very much words like, you're destroying our family. Um, she she's had an affair. So like you should have, you shouldn't have had an affair, you should have told me how unhappy you were sooner. Um, you should have communicated with me, things would have been different, which once again, I just want to say, like, bullshit, because in a lot of these instances, you have been communicating. In fact, I'm gonna have to ask one of my clients. She told me yesterday there's like a Taylor Swift song that basically talks about this exact thing of like, I was telling you all along, you just didn't want to hear it. And that is the truth. Like, I know in my own marriage, I was making pleas for intimacy. I was asking for the things I needed, and he didn't want to hear it or couldn't hear it, right? And with that happening over enough time, I just eventually built up walls that by the time we reached the point of divorce, I was too tired to take down. I know I could have. I I knew when I got divorced, I could have stayed with this person and like found a way through it. But I also knew in my gut I didn't want to. I wanted something else. And I finally respected myself enough to do that, to not just say, oh, well, because I'm married, I should stay and work this out and take down all these walls. Instead, it was like, no, this is my life. I get to spend my energy how I want. And based off of all the pieces, right? A big piece of that was I was 19 when I married my ex-husband, hardly knew myself. I knew I'd been raised by a narcissistic mother by that point, you know, when I was making this decision. And it was like, no, I want a life where I get to figure all that out outside of a marriage. And I have the right to choose that. So coming back to this client, she has this husband, he's just putting it all back on her. Like shame and guilt overload. And I see this a lot where husbands who were very emotionally neglectful in the marriage, just because you had an affair, all of a sudden, all responsibility for their part in actually showing up as an emotional partner in the marriage, in the, you know, 15 plus years of marriage you had together, is like wiped out. Like, nope, none of that counts. You cheated, and so that is the only thing that matters. Y'all. Love is not pinning the entire burden of a broken marriage on one person's actions of having an affair to get emotional connection and thereby ridding yourself of any responsibility in the matter. That is bullshit. Can you see it? Do you see it so clearly? That is not love. True love is owning your part like an adult and being honest about your shortcomings. Yeah, I fucked up for you know 15 plus years when you were asking for more intimacy or we were growing apart, I didn't show up and I didn't go get, I didn't go reach out to a therapist. I didn't start reading books, I didn't start coming to you and checking in with you. True love is realizing that sometimes the reality is maybe you're just not the best fit for someone else and what they want most. And the move is not to shame them back into staying with you and loving you, but letting them find what they want most. Oof, right? I mean, this is a level of love. Like, when I say true love, I mean it, y'all. This is a love that is makes me think of that quote where they're like, you know, love is unselfish and love is kind, and this is that kind of love. Okay, client number three. And this is the final example I'm gonna give from different clients that I've had. So in this one, this was a client whose husband, you know, doing all the things, like for so many years, had been so neglectful in the in the marriage, completely wrapped up in his work, and in her having an affair and moving in forward with a divorce, has like done a 180 and is like, okay, I will change everything that I am just to stay with you. Like, tell me what you want, I will be okay with it. In fact, to the point of like, I have no wants or needs beyond making you happy, which sounds really seductive, doesn't it? Like, that's gotta be love. Like, love has got to be someone telling you, I will do whatever it takes to be with you. I will abandon everything I want, who I am. You know, you want me to quit my job, I'll quit my job. You want me to be okay with you going out every weekend, I'll be okay with that. Whatever it is, just like stay married to me. And yet, he's doing all of this without ever really acknowledging the reality that's in that she keeps trying to get him to admit, which is like she doesn't want to stay. Okay, like he really just is not hearing her. And and when she says, I think I just don't want to be married, actually sitting with that and saying, Okay, if you don't want to stay, then you can go. Someone listening to you say what you want and trying to convince you that they can give that to you when what you're saying is I don't want to be with you, and they're like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Trust me, trust me, you do want to be with me. And no matter how many times you keep coming back and being like, hey, it's not really a fit, like, I don't really feel it with you, they're like, no, no, no, no, trust me. That is not love. That is not someone who genuinely cares about understanding you and seeing you as much as someone who is desperately afraid of losing what you represent in their life and is so desperate and ungrounded in themselves that they will do whatever they think it's gonna take to keep you. True love is not being willing to change everything you are just to make someone stay with you. True love is having enough respect for yourself to say and to sit in the discomfort of, okay, maybe I am not the best fit for you. And maybe people change over time, and maybe what you wanted when you married me isn't what you want now, and maybe what you really want now isn't who I am, and that's okay. Instead of desperately doing everything you can to keep the marriage and convince your partner to stay at all costs, it's actually hearing and listening to what is needed and being honest when you can't provide that. Which the reality in this marriage is what she's wanting, he can't provide that. It's very clear. In this instance, she wants deep emotional honesty and vulnerability and authenticity. And where he's at in his growth, he can't provide that. Nor is he willing to do the work to do that. Like to do that, he would need to be like, I have, I'm fucked up. I have issues, I need to go work with a therapist, I need to fully see and own and know myself. Most of y'all's husbands aren't doing that. Instead, they're just throwing a bunch of stuff at you that they think you want without really doing the internal work to be the man you want. And they don't realize just doing all the things without being that person isn't going to really fix it. So, in all of these examples I gave you, none of those marriages and none of the things that those husbands are doing that they would label as love are true love in the way that I choose to define it. And in most of them, I believe they are examples of really emotional childhood in these men. And what I mean by that is they are acting like emotional children by tantruming and lashing out and um freaking out and just running around trying to do a bunch of stuff without taking any real responsibility for how they've shown up in the past and even for how they're showing up now. Like they are expecting to be able to shame and guilt you all the time and still call that love. That you, them telling you you're a horrible person for having an affair, you're a horrible person for leaving this marriage, that somehow that should mean you should feel safe and want to stay married to them now. Do you see the crazy mindfuckery of it? Oh my god. Okay, so I want you to take all of this episode with I want to caveat it by saying, y'all, I do not have vast experience with true love. Okay. The love that I have experienced as I as I looked back over love in my life during this episode, I was like, oh my god, the love that I have experienced for, I would say, like pretty much all of my previous romantic relationships in my family dynamic with any romantic partners, it has it has been narcissistic, codependent, enmeshed love. Which makes, you know, it makes so much sense, right? If that's what I experienced in my family, that's what I'm going to typically repeat in my partnerships as an adult. But with that said, and this is why love's been on my mind so much this week, I had an experience this last week that really showed me otherwise. And I want to share it with y'all. So, as you all know, the partner that I'm dating, it's been very, very different for me. My friend Quinn and I were talking a week ago, and she was like, Britta, where previously, when you've dated people, I've seen you get kind of more unbalanced, less grounded. Typically, it tends to take over your whole life. Other parts in your life tend to suffer because you kind of lose your ability to not be consumed by them. It's been the opposite. She's like, you actually have more to give in being with him. You actually are still, you know, showing up in your business, showing up with your clients, actually having showing up more with your children. And we were just talking about what a good sign that is. But this last week, and you guys probably caught a little like wink at it in the last episode where I talked at the end of the messiness of right now feeling like, ooh, I feel so safe in this relationship, and I kind of want to be free to do whatever I want and to like have new experiences with new people. And I said in that episode, I told you guys I was going to talk with him, or you know, that we had talked and we had shared. Um actually, when I'd recorded that episode, we hadn't talked yet, but I knew I was going to. So I shared it from that framework. And I did, which was good. I think I was meant to share it in that episode because it helped me have the like fortitude to do it, because being seen in your messiness can feel very risky. And thankfully, with him, I'd kind of been hiding these feelings because I didn't want to hurt him. Right. There's that people-pleasing, codependent, right? Enmeshment. What I want to do is probably gonna hurt you, so I'm not gonna tell you. But I finally just I could feel that hiding from him and not being honest about it was compressing and constricting my ability to really feel and enjoy the love that I was experiencing with him. So I dove into the messiness. I ended up having a conversation with him, uh, where I told him, um, you know, there's a part of me, I'm considering going to the burn this year, and there's a part of me that wants to go to the burn and be able to have a burn like what I did last year, where I was single and I could just kind of flit wherever I wanted. I felt no restraint around what I could or couldn't do with anybody, and I could just kind of follow my flow. And this really, I think this feeling comes out of a belief I've had about myself that has really served me in the past like four and a half years from um since my divorce, around freedom is me being able to do what I want, when I want, with who I want, without restriction. And freedom is me being able to, you know, have people come and go and be okay with it, which has served me a lot. I will just say, like a side note, I have realized I think a lot of that is um somewhat of a trauma response, to be honest. I've lost a lot of people that I've loved over the last four years. And because of that, I needed to adapt this idea of myself that was like, that's okay, you know, there's always someone better. There's always someone better. You guys may have heard me say that previously. So that was kind of the framework. One part of me was in this framework, and then another part of me was in this like, damn, I really feel so loved and seen and safe and held in this container with this partner. I don't want to fuck that up. I don't want to lose that. How do I reconcile the two? And so I just dove into the messiness of telling him, this is what's coming up for me. I haven't made a decision. I don't really know what I actually want, but I needed you to know where I'm at. And y'all, oh my God. I got to see even more deeply who my partner really is. Because in that moment of confusion and vulnerability, right? I am super vulnerable in this moment. I'm admitting I don't really know what I want. I've got a lot of things going on right now. He did not pounce and try to define and convince me. He did not take advantage of being able to at all like, like threaten me, you know, say, okay, well, if that's what you want, then I'm out, or any of the other, you know, manipulations. Well, that really hurts me. How could you do that? None of that. Okay. And this is not like this is a man who deeply loves me and wants me in his life. And even that, even his deep desire would not push him to destroy my self-trust so that he could have what he wants. In that moment, he in and it was, it wasn't just that moment. It was over like a period, you know, that evening as we talked, that whole evening, and even into the next morning before he left. Not once did he manipulate me. Not once did he shame me. Not once did he guilt me. And yet he also held to his own boundaries, which was the simpleness of saying, yes, like I see where you're at. And if that's what you want to explore, I understand that's what you need to do. I'm also not going to invest as heavily in this. And that's, I knew that, y'all. We had defined in the relationship early on that this was going to be monogamous, that we were going to be committed to each other. I mean, I was the one that established that, that wanted that. And um, that's what we'd been building this relationship off of. So, you know, me changing directions, and it's so beautiful, isn't it? That like, this is what I mean by I don't want a partner who just fucking lets go of all he is and what he wants just to be with me. If in that moment he'd been like, okay, yeah, sure, you can go hook up with other people and like I'll definitely be here waiting for you. A deep part of me would have been like, mmm, as it was, he just stayed grounded in himself with the realness of, and I didn't need him to explain that much because I knew I knew what he wants. He is someone who has had lots of opportunities to have lots of relationships over the last six months and has not specifically because he knows deeply what he wants and what he's looking for. It was an incredible opportunity to see him even more deeply and to realize that he would rather let me go than manipulate me. And y'all, he absolutely could have. He could have. I looking back, I Was I'm little like wow, I I was so vulnerable in that moment. If he had told me, um, if he had at all applied like pressure, pushing my buttons of shame and guilt, he probably could have easily made me say, I want to stay in the relationship with you from that space, right? But because he didn't, because he was really like, Yeah, I understand. And you have to follow your path and do what you gotta do. And this is my path, and this is what I'm gonna do. It gave me the space. He preserved the most important thing in me, which is my self-trust in myself. And that next day, after he had left, I had time to go talk with Quinn. She's my coach, best friend, and coach, and in that container, really get to put everything out on the table, right? And talk through all of it. And funny enough, after seeing how my partner had responded, I was like, oh my fuck, this is what I want. I wanna, I wanna commit to this. And I was able to see more clearly how the things I thought I wanted, like I said earlier, were probably coming from more of this trauma response belief I'd developed that commitment equals loss of freedom. And when Quinn and I really dove in and examined, like, wait a second, are you actually losing freedom in your relationship with this partner? What she helped me see was it was the opposite. Like, actually, the more safe I've felt with him, the more free I've become. A lot of the things I thought I wanted that sound kind of like fun and wild when I've actually gone and done them, or they actually can be really stressful, which is another aspect of just living and accepting that I have CPTSD. Instead of just like, let's go do all the crazy things, realizing, wait a second, actually, I like to do crazy things, but they're actually more enjoyable when I can do them in a connected, loving space with a partner. So I can still have that variety and that newness and that play in my life while doing it with him. And where we ultimately landed, and I'm so excited, is the potential of us both going together to the burn this year. Which, you know, we don't have tickets, we don't have a camp yet. So there's a lot of moving pieces there. But if that actually happens, it will be an incredible, like just an incredible experience. Because I, in leaning in and deciding I want to be with him, that was a huge step for me in my growth. And a healing of a deep wound I've had around not being able to trust that I'm safe in relationships and not being able to trust that that person's gonna stay. So uh with that side, I wanna just kind of wrap this whole episode by saying that to be honest, guys, like I'm just I'm tired. I'm tired of the word love being bastardized as a cover-up for what really is just narcissistic manipulation. And now that I'm experiencing true love, I feel that even more potently. Like, oh my fuck, this is what true love is. Let's stop calling what really is narcissistic manipulation love. I believe true love is built on the foundational principle that I trust you, like when that your partner, you know, when they're saying I love you, it's like I trust you that you know what's best for you, and I respect you to do what's right for you, even if it means I lose you. Because ultimately I want what is best for you, and I am grounded enough in myself to do what's best for me as well. And I will say that doesn't mean that you're not sad when someone leaves, right? When we get divorced or when a breakup happens, but you ultimately respect the other person's journey enough that you do not manipulate, control, define, do all those things to try and get them to stay at the expense of their self-trust. All right, y'all. My good. This was such a good episode. I loved doing this one with y'all. Um, I keep forgetting to remind you, so I'm going to at the end of this episode just say, please go like and subscribe to the podcast. It helps tremendously with my ratings on iTunes and it makes a difference every time you do when you go rate it or you go subscribe. It allows it to be sent out to more women. When they search it, it's gonna come up more regularly. And I love that. It feels like you getting to participate in sharing this with the world. It's you know, a little small, tangible thing that you can do to help others find these words, which if you're listening, I'm guessing you feel inspired and impassioned by them too. And I want more women to hear them. So that is something I am asking for you to go do. Um, and you know, the great thing about subscribing is then every time a new episode comes out, it'll it'll notify you so you don't have to worry because you know, sometimes I post on Tuesdays, sometimes I don't always get a new episode out every week, but that way you'll never miss one. So know that I love you all. I loved going on this journey with you. I hope that this deeper in you know, this deeper take and exploration into what love really is helps you think about it differently for yourself and ultimately decide what you want it to be. Till next time,