Episode 42: Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Surviving Childhood Trauma, Escaping Narcissistic Abuse and Recovering Faith with Kerie Hamilton

⚠️ Disclaimer

This episode discusses domestic violence, trauma, and suicidal ideation. Please listen with care and use discretion. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.

Take action today: Donate to Safe Harbor of Eastern Kentucky 

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This episode is one of the most powerful, raw, and redemptive stories we’ve ever shared on Girls Who Recover. My guest, Keri Hamilton, is a certified life coach specializing in PTSD, trauma, and narcissistic abuse — and the author of Sorry Satan, This Soul Is for the Savior. Her story is a living testament to faith, resilience, and recovery after domestic violence.

In this conversation, Keri opens up about:

• Surviving years of childhood abuse and the unhealed trauma that shaped her adult relationships.
• Falling into the hands of a narcissistic abuser and the devastating cycle of love-bombing, control, and trauma bonding.
• The terrifying moment she almost ended her life — and the divine light that intervened.
• How she found faith, spiritual awakening, and self-love on her path to freedom.
• Why healing is both a spiritual and neurological process, requiring deep work on the nervous system, mind, and heart.
• What real love is (and isn’t), and how to recognize manipulation disguised as affection.
• How women can reclaim their power, rebuild their foundation on God and self-trust, and create lives they truly love.

This episode was recorded for Domestic Violence Awareness Month and we’re sharing stories and experiences of brave women who have faced and overcome domestic abuse.

Keri’s story reminds us that healing begins when we choose ourselves and that even in the darkest moments, the light can still find us.

If you or someone you love is experiencing domestic violence, please reach out for help.

• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or thehotline.org

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Love Kerie as much as I do? Find her here:

Kerie’s Instagram

Podcast: Bottom’s Up

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Hey gorgeous.

I love you.

I'm so proud of you.

And I believe in your ability to create a life you absolutely love.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Girls Who Recover podcast with Dana Hunter Fradella, where incredible women just like you, go to transform life's biggest setbacks into your most powerful comebacks so that you can live a life you. Love. I'm your host, Dana Hunter Fradella, transformational coach and founder of Girls Who Recover, and my mission is to pull back the curtain on our mistakes, failures, shame and personal disasters, and light the way for how to use those to create your biggest and most gorgeous comebacks. Follow the show now. Grab your iced coffee and turn up the volume for girls who recover. Let's light it up. Oh, hey, gorgeous. Welcome back to this incredible episode of The Girls Who Recover Podcast. I am stoked to introduce you to our gorgeous and very powerful guest today, Carrie Hamilton. Carrie is a certified life coach specializing in PTSD, trauma and narcissism. Author of, sorry, Satan. This Soul is for the Savior. Love that, and podcast host of Bottoms Up. Check out her podcast. So good. Carrie stands fiercely for faith transformation and inner strength and healing. her story is one of resilience, walking through the darkness of abuse and trauma, but continuing to be the light God placed within her. through her writing and podcasting, Carrie gives voice to pain, strength to survival, and hope to healing. I hear a book title there and Carrie believes her trauma was a gift as it allowed the destruction to make. Discovery. She refused to become the monster. She fought and assures that the love of God remained the foundation that broke every chain. Ladies and ladies, can I please get a warm welcome for Ms. Carrie Hamilton? I hear you clapping. Hello, Carrie. I love you already. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for joining us. So our warmup question today is, what is the last thing that made you laugh out loud, like genuinely full body belly about the pee in your pants? Laugh out loud. I would have to say my children. The things that some of these children say and do these days, I'm like. I was not that child. I don't think I was that child. And the things that my children do and say, they make my world go round. So they just, they hear things on the internet and there's just so much stuff that they do. Fuels my soul. So it's hilarious. And that's funny too'cause I was like, what would my be my answer to the question be? And it was my, it's my kids because they have the wildest imagination and then they say the most hilarious things. Yeah. And I thought who gave you that witch? Definitely wasn't me. And I was like, okay, maybe it was me. I love it so much. And I also love to laugh. I feel like it's distinct evidence that we're alive, that we're surviving, that we're even thriving. So Carrie, you're here to tell your story. You will have a few minutes to tell us what it was like, what happened, what it's like now, and then I will ask you some questions about what I hear along the way. So I'm gonna pass the mic over to you. Please tell us all about you. Sounds good. I was raised here in Chicago, Illinois, and I still reside here. my parents married very young, so my father actually before I was born, my father and my mother had decided to divorce. they were basically divorced before I was here, which led to abandonment issues, with myself and my sister. I feel that my mother had then married, very fast because clearly she had codependency issues and she longed for that marriage that she had committed to and was not, my dad was unfaithful to her and it wasn't a decision of her own. Another marriage. unfortunately the knight in shining armor that she thought she had married was actually anything but he was, very abusive, an alcoholic, had mental disorders that were undiagnosed and untreated at the time, which caused a very chaotic, sad and crazy childhood. it was, there was an incident that basically occurred, that had legal then involved in which my sister and I were removed from the home. you can remove people from trauma, but if people don't do the therapy and the work to heal, the trauma doesn't remove from them. And so that is basically what happened. We had a few things of counseling so that the legal system can basically take us away, but that was it. It was basically then we were taken outta the situation. And since it wasn't there anymore, it was like stuffed under a rug and we just moved on with life. Of course it came with me because I never took the trauma outta myself, which then resulted in many horrible relationships growing up and not knowing my worth and value. knowing love only as a sacrifice, because that is what I did, is I had sacrificed my life to survive from an abuser. you feel that's all you deserve because that's all you know. You know what love is not, and now what love is. eventually I had, gotten married and my ex-husband was actually an amazing husband. However, since I never healed from my trauma, it was a boring marriage to me because when you are in abuse and in abusive, relationships and or childhood, you become addicted to the chemical imbalance of the highs and the lows from the abuse and then the calmness. So because I just had the calmness, I was missing that other additive of the chemistry part that was releasing from my brain. So throughout my marriage I would buy purses and clothes and a house, and I then I wanted a bigger house, and then I wanted a summer house. And I was just constantly getting, looking for that dopamine rush of what I would've had from, or I'm sorry, dopamine rush. The adrenaline rush would've what I would've had in the abuse because all I had was the dopamine rush of love. And I didn't know what love was because I knew what love was not. And since I didn't have a sacrifice in my marriage, and my marriage was actually healthy, I ended up divorcing my husband because I felt bored. I didn't feel loved because I only knew love as toxicity, not as calmness. So I stayed single for a couple years, and then when I got back into the dating world. All this online dating stuff came about, and I was all new to all of that because of course I had been married for over a decade, so I was never on online dating, and it happened to come out when I was in my marriage. and so that's what I did. I online dated and I thought it was like the cat's ass because I'm like, heck yeah, you could just see who the nasty people are and I'm not wasting my time. I unfortunately, then fell victim into the hands of a narcissist, and I had never known, I've always heard the word narcissist, and honestly, it, I cringe when people say that word because there's so much uneducated people, they wanna say that. Oh, I was cheated on. So that person's a narcissist. No, that doesn't mean that just because they have a characteristic of a narcissist that's who they are. Of course, like I said, I've always heard the word I never had ever in my life, even though I had some catastrophic and horrible relationships, even in the dating realm of life. I never actually, luckily was in the hands of a narcissist until now. And the whole reason that I felt totally right in the rabbit hole of the narcissist is because what did I crave in my marriage that I had a wonderful marriage, but what did I crave? I craved love. I craved that feeling of love. So here comes toxicity and the craziness of what I'm interpreting love to be. And so I fell right in the rabbit hole of that love bombing because I thought, heck, this is what I've been looking for my whole entire, Unfortunately, he also was abusive. I had him arrested twice for domestic battery. he ended up even putting trackers on my vehicle and tracked me for eight months. I literally was running from the devil. this guy literally almost killed me. The trauma bond is the same addiction as what I had as a child. I was addicted to the abuse as a child, and now I'm addicted to the abuse of my adult abuser. and this is why I went into the life coaching and specializing narcissism and stuff, is because I was so intrigued my whole entire family lives in different states, so I didn't really have a big support system. So I had to really rely on education and surrounding myself in a community that I could understand the true definition and what narcissism entailed. Not just, oh, this guy's a cheater, so he's a narcissist, Going through that education, that's where I became a life coach. And there was two things majorly that stuck out to me. Number one is the addiction. you become addicted to the narcissist because they put you on such a high and such a low. It is literally the same addiction as a heroin addict because heroin, this is why individuals who do heroin, they get hooked within the first or second time that they do it because the high is so incredibly high and you don't worry or know or face any life. Situations and you feel just so dang wonderful. So you crave that drug again. And then obviously when you come off the drug and you're in reality, that's your low. So that's the same thing with a narcissist when they're love bombing you and making you feel that you found your magic night and armor. then when they abuse you, you're at the low. So doing that causes a chemical imbalance, which is then what's called the trauma bond. And you are literally bonded to the trauma that they give. So you have to break yourself from that addiction. And just like one who is addicted to anything, alcohol, drugs, you name it, you go through a sickness, you become ill, you are what they call dope sick or whatever, words you wanna use toxic. Exactly. Chemical detoxing for sure. And so that's where I almost then really truly died. I couldn't eat. at the same time with a narcissist, you're not allowed to be the one that leaves, they have to be the one that is, getting rid of you, because it's all about control and it's on their time so if you're the one running away, that's not allowed. So as I'm trying to get away and I'm putting, restraining orders on him, he was showing up at my church. and he was, antagonizing me, calling me caller ID black like 70 times a day. extreme. And then they know, they're such professionals at what they do. They know just how to get under the law, for instance, he wouldn't show up to me filing for a restraining order. I went Dana six times. And finally at the sixth time, I said I was crying to the judge and I said, listen, this man's going to kill me. I've already, it got to the point, this is how bad it was. I signed my beneficiary assets to my ex-husband to make sure, because I know my ex-husband is a great father to my children, and he would never take my money and run or something. He would make sure it got to my children. But that right there, what does that tell you? Someone that's gonna turn their assets, order their ups. Ex-husband. You don't hear about that often. But I said that to the judge. I said, listen, this man's gonna kill me. I've already given my assets basically over to my ex-husband. Could you please put this restraining order in for my children, for the sake of my children at least can they possibly be saved when this man finally does his last straw? In the state of Illinois, since he wasn't there to state his side, the judge honored me the restraining order that day, but he didn't put it as a no contact. He just put it as a hundred foot restraining order. So of course when it got to the devil, let's just call the abuser, the devil. he wants to retaliate because of course I can't have control. He has to have control. it has to be his story and his line, I'm the bad person or whatever. So that's where he showed up at my, it was on a Thursday that I got the restraining order. And on Sunday he showed up to my church. he's never stepped foot in the church that I go to and have been at for years. Even my ex-husband was going to the same church. so that tells you how long it's been a part of my life. here he shows up there and so I call the police'cause I'm thinking great, I have this restraining order right. The police come, they're like, oh, I'm sorry. He's within a hundred feet. There's nothing we can do. You can go to a different church or you could go to a different mass time. I was like, this is insane. I was literally running from the devil. So that's where now I, I was living to survive and I wasn't living to live. And this is where I know, and I can relate to people that are suicidal. I used to have a mindset where I would be like, let's say Robin Williams for instance, God, he's a millionaire. He was so funny and just like full of life when you would listen to videos and movies and whatever with Robin Williams and that's what people see. They see the outside, the materialistic of it. But you never know what someone is fighting behind closed doors. And when I think about suicide, people would say God, Carrie, you have three beautiful kids. You have a business. You've got a beautiful home. And it's yeah, those are actually what kept me living still is my children. And that was the reason that I still fought, is because I needed to take care of my beautiful home that you say and, be grateful. But then it gets to a point where you are in such misery because you're literally running from the devil and at the same time, you're breaking an addiction to this person that you know is horrible for you. And so you're going through, the breaking of an addiction. And so your whole chemical imbalance is now even more out of whack. And it gets to the point where you're so miserable. I remember it breaks my heart I'm gonna try holding back tears. But I remember my daughter coming in and she had painted a picture and she said, mommy, look, I did this picture. It's so cute. And I, this was my reaction to her. I looked and I said, what do you want? And that was what hit me. I said, oh my God. I didn't even know who that was. Like it was almost like an out-of-body experience. And I thought, I'm sick. This is not, I would never talk to my children like that. I allow my children to death. And so right there I was like, oh my God, I need help. I really need help. And, so as I was, trying to fight all of that's where then suicide became more and more of a thought for me every single day because here I am, like I said, fighting to survive and not fighting to live. And now how can I let my kids endure this psychotic how I treated my daughter with painting that picture? I craved peace so much. That death sounded so peaceful. And so I went in my basement and I hung an extension cord around the rafters of my basement. And I stepped on a five gallon bucket that they used to paint the ceilings of my house. And I put it around my neck and I went to go jump off the bucket and Dana God's reel because at the time that I was gonna step off, the light popped in my basement and I was like, oh my God. So I took the extension cord off. And It's still hanging like in my rafters, but I'm like, ah, I can't touch it yet. But anyway, where I'm getting at is that I know that there's more for me in life, and So that day I left, I went to the grocery store and I had said, I said, God, if that was you, like, show me a sign. I need to know that I need to keep fighting. I went to the grocery store and I knew I needed bread for my kids, to make lunches for the next day. And I was in the line to check out and I kept, there was a woman behind me, I would say she was in her sixties or seventies if I had to put like an age. And I kept turning to take my groceries out of my cart and putting'em on the conveyor belt. And twice we made eye contact and she kinda smiled, at me and I smiled back, and so here I'm at the cashier now, and she tells me my total. I go to hand her my debit card. And as she's handing me my card back, after she rings me up, I felt a hand on my shoulder. And I was like, thinking who knows me or who's here, And I turn and I look and it's the lady that was behind me as I was putting my groceries on the cart. And she said to me, honey, you're gonna be all right. You're one of the good ones. And I was like I looked like a deer in headlights. I was like, thank you. Like I, I don't even know if I said thank you. I don't even know what words came out because I was just like, oh my God. I just had asked to, for that to happen, for me to see a sign. And so I ran to my car. I threw my groceries in there. I don't even know if they, they were all over the place. I just threw'em in there and I sobbed like I, I was, I couldn't even breathe. And I called my sister. I have one sister that lives, in Indiana, like the closest state to me, and. I was like, I was hyperventilating and trying to get it out to tell her. And we laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn't funny, but my sister was like, oh my God, I don't have your location. Does he have you? She was thinking when I called and I was hyperventilating that the abuser had gotten me. And so she's I don't see the location. I could hear her on the other line and I'm like trying to catch my breath to tell her what happened? And she's I don't see the location. Where are you? Where you, he has you, doesn't he? He has you. Oh my God. Oh my God. Like I can hear her frantic and finally I could catch my breath. And I was like no, Juan. I'm like, and then I tell her and she's oh my God. I told her, everything that had just happened and she was like, then we're both sitting here like uncontrollably crying. But that was the justification that I needed. And I still, to this day, I took a picture of myself as I was in my car with tears and all, and I was. That gave me the resilience. And I said to myself, listen here, bitch, if you doubt your fucking self or your self worth ever again, you look at this damn picture and you don't ever let that man, get the best of you ever again. And it was honestly from that point on that I was like every mental thing that he had done, every, we had court, that was another thing too. Here I left the abuser and time had gone on and it's always, him doing things that, calling me 47 times. But again, no caller id. So of course, every time that I'm calling the police to my house and have to document it, but there's no proof that we could say it's him'cause it's no caller id. but yes, so I had to go through 19 months of court to keep seeing this devil. And it was like, here, you're out of the situation. you're trying to move on. And it was like I was still in that high and that low because even though I was in a normal life and trying to heal myself every month I had to go to court and there's the devil again. And that's when I knew that I had to be the voice and I had to do what I do, which is the podcast. And that's where Bottoms Up comes from, is because we have to go to the bottom. We have to hit that rock bottom. and that's where we start. Because here's the truth. We're all building empires on rocky foundations of our past. If we're not healing things and or let's just say quicksand, we're building our empires on quicksand and eventually it's gonna sink If you don't heal yourself and become the best you. And that foundation begins with God, universe, source, whomever your person is that whatever religion or faith that you're in. but if you don't build yourself on that solid foundation, you can't get to that empire. and that's what I try and tell individuals within the coaching. a lot of times you'll see individuals, they'll be in a broken marriage and then they'll find some woman that. Fills their desires, and then they go to that person and it's now your house isn't destructive yet. You didn't, demolish it yet to start that foundation on something solid and build something. You're just putting basically a, an empire on a one story house. You can't do that, but it isn't until you heal your inner wounds and your inner child that you can be, that solid foundation and that solid empire that you want to build. if God gave me a choice right now and said, do you want this high left to everything, or do you want this life that you just lived? I would pick my life all over again because I needed that. I needed the destruction. To be my discovery, and now I am a whole different person. I was using materialistic things and seeing desires as love, and it's not, the love comes from you from within and it begins with you. it isn't Outside of you. Our desires, your true love is internal and I needed to know who I was. And like I said, my whole life, I've found love as a sacrifice. And love is not a sacrifice. It's unconditional. and I needed to love myself because if I didn't love myself, I'm just allowing that to be a justification for the inability for others to love me. It has to start with you, things that I needed to learn and know, and I would've never been able to if I wasn't with that narcissistic individual. And a true narcissist when. I was shocked to know that in these groups that I was in, people were like, oh my God, did you, like they really are the devil. Their eyes turned black. And I would see that when he would be in his enraged things, his eyes would turn black. And I was like, oh my God. when I saw that other people that had acknowledged that happened to them, I was like, oh my God, that's crazy. Back in the day, the old me, let's just say, I would feel bad to tell people, if you were upset, if you and I were to go to the movies and I wanted to go to the park and I saw that you were getting upset'cause we weren't going to the movies, we were going to the park instead, then I would be like, all right, you know what Dana, we'll just go, we'll go to the movies. It's okay. Like I would always just mend my, ways and bend myself and take the hit of whatever. Because I just wanted everyone to be happy. Because when I was abused as a child, the one thing I would do over and over again is I would take my hands and I would go and put them in my knees and I would go back and forth and I'd say, God, just please let me love, don't let me be this monster. I don't wanna be the monster that I'm fighting. I want to be a lover. And so I would always be someone to make everybody else happy and everyone else lovable. even if it caused me misery and I had to realize that there's nothing wrong with asking to be treated right. That's what you're supposed to do. I would've never discovered that if I didn't go through the trauma that I had gone through. it is crazy how life brings you down roads and, helps you discover who you really are and the empowerment. you can't be in the darkness that takes over you. You have to be the light. And you think that things are happening to you to destroy you or that you think that it's all negative, that your life just stinks. no, God's rejection is your protection and you have to realize that if you're forcing it, it's not for you, so yes, Carrie, that is such an incredibly powerful story and I just wanna extend to you so much love and my heart just feels so much sorrow for the little care who wasn't taken care of. I wish that I could say the story is very different from the others, but story after story of girls who recover tends to start with, sometime in our littlest versions we weren't well cared for. And we as humans do replicate the way that we're raised. And that just like to normalize that, but also that doesn't take away the pain and the destruction and the violence and the sadness. And I affirm for you a couple of things. One is the terrorism that you walked through, some of which was self-created through no fault of your own. No fault of our own, when we're really just repeating the addiction that we were raised with. And then also, so just wanna honor that. Because I think, and you mentioned this too, in order for us to really appreciate the light, we have to know the darkness. And so I imagine you get most of your, most of the affirmation of, you're so resilient and you're so strong and you did you walk, fought and you walk through. And so if you're open to it, I'm gonna ask you just a few questions that came up for me as I was listening. You did such a beautiful job, identifying and defining the word trauma bond, and I'm hearing the connection that you're making between the violence, the abandonment, the development of a self when you were a little Carrie by, the violent relationship that your mom was in. So in our first eight years is when we develop who we believe we are, identity. And then I hear you being so awake to this journey through your marriage where everything on the outside seemed. Wonderful to the, an onlooker might say, Carrie, and it sounds like they did. Why would you leave? you highlighted something so powerful is that there is an addiction to the cycle of violence and so just like there is an addiction, you use heroin, we can use any heroin's the fastest if we can agree on that. But other things too that are more subtle, like shopping or alcohol or whatever, that will still ultimately progress to, you have to have that thing or you are not Okay. the cycles are so up and so down. You used heroin as an example, so high. And then when you're not, it's not that you're back to reality, it's your whole chemical system has been depleted. So it's the lowest of lows. and although I don't have experience with this, it sounds like a very similar chemical reaction. So the biology of the brain, coupled with the hurt of the heart and the understanding of what's real from the subconscious, we emulate that. Yes. And so if you would be open to it, can you just define a couple things for us? Can you say what narciss, what do you mean by narcissist? Because there is a clear definition this fits, this doesn't fit. So in the simplest way, how does somebody know that they're dealing with a narcissist? So there's quite a few. Obviously if they are diagnosed, that would be the most common. People are, how I explain it to my clients are, they are literally, everyone has seen the show Hoarders, right? It's such a common show that has been around. So when you talk about hoarders, people are like, oh, I know what that is. From seeing the show. And what it is those individuals go through a trauma too, at a young age. Whether it's a death or same as me, maybe they experience abuse or sexual abuse, anything in those natures. And you either become, when you're in that trauma, you either become an empath and you are like myself, where I. Overly loved because I didn't get that love. So I wanna make sure I pour that out to everybody because I never wanna be that monster that I faced. And then you have the narcissistic side of it where they don't have empathy because they've turned that emotion. They've never had that. They don't know what love is. They've turned that emotion off to them completely because they've never felt it and they don't want to feel it. And they've actually now resorted in anger and madness. And so they're just mad at the world and everything around it. And anything that triggers that trauma that they had encountered, that en heightens whatever situation that they were in. So like hearing about hoarders. If you go in a hoarder's house and you pick up, let's say for instance this, you would look at this and say, this is a nasty Kleenex. Throw it out. That's gross. And to them, they have an emotional attachment to that because there was something that had happened in their life and they were like, no, it's grandpa's. The narcissism, dis the Narcissism personality disorder is exactly like a hoarding disorder, where basically they have emotional attachments to people, to individuals. So they don't know how to love, they don't love themselves, they don't love anyone. You are actually an entity to them. So it's whatever supply that you are supplying them, that is the value that they see you at. So if you are, giving them a place to live and giving them sexual, whatever, that's what they value you at. You are a sexual piece to them. You are an entity of money to them. You are an entity of a house to them. Whatever your supply is what they attach you to. So that's why they don't also like to discard you unless they have another source to replace you. And that's where then they're like hoarders. Hoard things and narcissist people, hoard people. So it's like walking picture yourself, walking in a room and there's a bunch of people sitting on shelves. That would be basically like the mind of a narcissist. There's always, there's, they always have some sort of source and they always have a backup source. And that's why most of'em are cheaters and liars and so forth, because they have to keep a on running source. Because God forbid, and especially the older we get, the more we're becoming experienced in the dating world and marriage world of life and even just people in general. So the older we get, the odds of us sticking around is even slimmer because we're like, wait, we've seen that before. Wait that's a red flag. So they really need a good amount of supply to replenish should you say, Hey, I'm not dealing with this, it is empaths that they crave because I am going, oh my God, I wanna love love. And I always call it the Beauty and the Beast analogy. I always say we are the beauties that are like, tame the beast. So give me love. You've ever seen Disney, the, beauty's always wanting to just calm the beast down and they're just, get outta here. nothing is ever good enough. And so the empath keeps going back and they get addicted to wanting to. Especially say myself as a naive child in facing childhood abuse, I didn't have the advocacy, I didn't have the muscles, I didn't have the mindset, I didn't have any of that to fight my abuser as an adult, or I'm sorry, as an child. So that made me even more addictive to the narcissist because now I am an adult and I have the advocates and I have the strength and whatever you wanna say to heal this monster and to save this monster. But the truth is, it's a personality disorder. so many people wanna save them and help them and cure them. It's not curable, it's who they are. just like how I equivalate to, for a logical mindset is. People that have Down syndrome, that is a genetic disorder. So you can never, no matter how much medication they take or how much therapy they undergo, you will never be able to make them not have Down Syndrome. And just you would never look at a Down syndrome per person and be like, why are you acting like that? What's going on here? You wouldn't say that to someone.'cause you know that they have Down Syndrome. And that's the same thing with a narcissist. You can't, you're in an ongoing cycle of wanting to save and help and you're sitting here being an empath looking in and narcissists don't know how to look in. And that's why they can't heal is because in order to heal, you have to feel, and they don't know how to feel. You have to feel in order to heal. You mentioned healing in a few different ways. One of the very first things you said was, healing is required and you can't, if there's experience, if you've experienced trauma as a kid, you can't get, and you said, I never took the trauma out of myself, which is interesting'cause it implies that as. It is our responsibility to heal. I'll say that for sure. Especially as adult women. Hell yes. Let's like, let's be in the driver's seat of our own healing. Yes. And also this honoring of Hey, this shit happened, this like really fucked up shit happened and healing is required. And I work with a lot of women who were like, it's my fault. I'm like, oh no, it's not your fault and we're gonna be done with that. Like you can set aside that we must, if we're gonna step into what is actually required, which is feeling the feeling so that you can get to the healing. And I think all of us at some level do. And so I also heard. And I think about healing, this is your question, but I just wanna sort of riff on this for a second. Because there's so many levels of healing, and so there's nervous system healing, there's brain chemistry healing, there's somatic in your body healing, there's heart coherence, healing where you feel safe in your own body with other humans, by yourself, with your kids. And the reaction that I heard you say when your sweet kiddo came in and said the painting, and then you had a big overreaction, that tells me there is totalness just, nervous system dysregulation Coupled with deep trauma, shame, guilt, remorse, all the things. And so what would you say has been most potent on your healing journey? And what does that look like for you? Just as humans, we are all creatures of habit. This is why we go back to the things that we do, because that makes us feel safe.'cause that is habitual to us. it's our safe space that we think is our safe space. Even if it's not, even if it's toxic, it's a safe space.'cause that's all we know. And so I will never forget when I first went to a therapist with this, I walked in the door saying to myself, someone has to help save me from there's gotta be some sort of help out there. So in the first four sessions, she would keep asking me about my childhood. And finally at the four session, I looked at the lady and I said I'm not like, I know you're doing your job, but I'm here for. Someone that's been abusing me late like literally like I'm in, I'm trying to escape from this person. and she looked at me and I go, and you keep asking me about my childhood. And she looked at me dead in the eyes and it was like, almost like I felt her eyes in my soul. And she was like, honey, that is exactly why you keep entertaining that, people like that. And I was like, wait, what? It dawned on me and I was like, wait, hold on. what do you mean? And she was like, you were raised to know what love is not and not what love is. So here you're craving something that you've never had. That's like putting a blind person in a room and saying, pick out the color red. They're blind. You know what the color red is, so you don't, if you don't know it. Same with if I were to say, Dana, give me$90 million right now, you would be like, I don't have$90 million and I know what$90 million looks like. So how can you give something or even entertain something if you don't even know what it is or you've ever seen it or experienced it or whatever. And that goes back to exactly what you had just said a few minutes ago with, you need to go through darkness to know what the light is. And that was just like my marriage. I had a healthy marriage and a great marriage, and I didn't even know what that was. It came into my life and it exited the same way because I didn't know what healthy love is. I knew what toxic love was and I knew what trauma was, and I knew what sacrifice was and I could sit here and tell you. Loyalty is my biggest attribute because that was one thing I knew. I knew I had to keep my loyalty and I had to keep my truth and I had to keep my, my stance and my, independence. I like. Those are all strong. I'm a very strong independent woman because that's who saved me, from the trauma and that it was myself and and just going through those things. I had to mentally prepare myself when I, when my childhood abuser would come in and abuse and, it was a lot of mental things I had to prepare myself from and know. So that gave my loyalty because I had to. I had to be loyal to the people that I knew that were loyal to me to save me. You know what I'm saying? Can I ask you also, and if this is too much, just pass, no. I hear the word abuse a lot and I'm curious, like for the listener who's asking the question, is this me? Can you say a little bit more specifically about what that abuse looked like? Either as a kid or Maybe as an adult? What did that mean? Abusers, they start out. Abusing your mental state. So clearly no one goes and they just punch you in the face and you're like, Hey, let's go to dinner. You know what I mean? That doesn't, it doesn't happen that way. What they do is they break you down mentally first. They learn everything about you, what your, what your fears are, what you know, what you've been through in life. as I shared with my ex abuser, how I had the abandonment stuff from my father, and, they start to get to learn your family and things like that. And so they use those things as control for ways to manipulate you. he would always put in my face, you have daddy issues. So if I wasn't doing something That he wanted me to do it was because I have daddy issues and I wouldn't allow him to do it because of what my dad did to me in my past. So they would turn it to manipulate it. Then in your mind you're like, wait, I don't, okay, yeah. Maybe I shouldn't do that because my dad did that. Okay, I'll do this then. So instead of standing to my boundaries and my worth and my value, I would. Bend my ways for it, because I don't wanna have daddy issues from what my dad did to me. No way. I wanna love and care and I wanna be opposite of that. So they manipulate you in that type of mindset. and so it begins usually with mental abuse because that is mental abuse when you work. Yeah. That's ga that, that qualifies as gaslighting, right? Oh, this is an issue that I see that you have, that like to weaponize it against you. Yes. To make you question am I even saying, is that right? Okay, great, then I'll just adjust. Yes. And so then they'll even take the gaslighting and they'll put it into stonewalling, which is where they go silent on you. And it's like they use that silence as a weapon to. manipulate you too, Let's talk about this. Let's talk about our issues, right? Of course now if they're stonewalling you and they're, using silence as a weapon, like now you wanna push even more and be like, come on, Dana talk to me. What? Now it's like you're pushing even more to be in their life and do things. So then in order to get them to talk to you and not use silence as a tool to abuse you, okay, fine. Let's do X, Y, and Z, whatever it was that that they want you to do. They totally play mental games is really what it is. They play mental games with you and so that you open up and you give well. Then once it gets to the point where they know they have you mind manipulated, that's where then it turns into the abuse. Because now if they've covered all their stuff and they know you always give in, now I need to take it a step further. And as they say, takers will always take, and they don't know their limits. So in order to keep you even more bonded, they then go to the physical abuse, they then go to the, some sexual abuse. I think, it just, it's an ongoing thing because the more, I always call them sticky products. So I was an assistant vice president for Chase Bank for 13 years and we would always do sticky products, which means when we would open a checking account, we wanted to make sure we did their direct deposit, their online bill pay, all of those things because those were sticky products to make sure that client doesn't really ever wanna leave because then they gotta change their payroll and then they gotta change, whatever. So that was the sticky products. That's the same thing as a narcissist. They do sticky products, but their sticky products are. They wanna, they move super fast because like I said, they're con artists. So like when you have someone that quick changes, they wanna hurry up and wait, gimme tens and fives and this, and they're quick change artists, and they wanna hurry up and manipulate you and get extra money from you. That's like how narcissists are. They wanna move real fast oh my, I wanna come, let's move together. Let's, so that in your mind, you're thinking it's wonderful because you're on cloud nine and you think they're the soulmate, so they wanna hurry up and move in, and then they wanna hurry up and have kids with you right away. And then they wanna combine assets of financial stuff. And because those are all sticky products, because you can't just up and leave your house. you have to sell your house. It's a process. You can't just up and leave your kids. you have your kids for your life. So all of these are sticky products in a sticky way for these abusers to always have a ledge and something on you. And they'll use, they don't love themselves, so they don't love the kids. So I always see too, a lot of individuals are like. He doesn't even love these kids. Like he, he's in and out of these kids' life all the time. the only time that he acts like a Disney dad is when he's trying to manipulate someone else and show that he's this wonderful father. And, so then that new person is gonna be like, oh, he's a great dad. I've seen him being a great father. This is great. And especially at our age, most of us have children, so we wanna find someone that is a father figure for our children too. So they'll use those kids as a tool. And when someone's not, when they're doing, they reeled in their new victim, then it's like the kids are obsolete again because those kids are only an entity and a source and a sticky product to manipulate. Tell me a little bit. I just wanna can we just agree how fucked up this is? okay, so a couple just like really quick definitions. What do you mean when you say love bomb? Like they're love bombing you. What does that mean? What was your, gimme an example from your experience. So love bombing is they actually say, I love you right away. And love is something that is felt, that is emotional, that becomes an attachment. You can't me meeting you today, Dana. I can't say I love you Dana. Sure you could say in a friendly way. With an emotional attachment. I don't emotionally attach love you. You know what I'm saying? Because I don't know you like that. Yeah. And but they do, they use, they, they literally use the word love and they say and because you're on that cloud nine, you think of it as, they even use words like soulmate. They make it like,'cause that's what, especially us women at our ages, I'm 42 I wanna find my soulmate. I don't wanna be in the dating world anymore. You wanna find someone that's forever, like the dating world's exhausting. And so they'll use words like that to pull you in along with they will treat you like. The dream that you've always wanted in your life. some of'em will use money as a way if they know that you're financially hurting or that you're, experiencing something, because you're a single mom and maybe you have financial setbacks or whatever, they'll use even funds that they, oh, guess what? Then I'm gonna help pay your mortgage this month. And they'll do things that you're like, wow, like this. They're showing you that undivided, unconditional, crazy love. But really it's their way of reeling you in. And that's why I brought up the online, dating. It is like the hoarding ground for narcissists because what is everyone on there doing? They're looking for love. Narcissists are in there like a fish literally reeling you in, fishing you in, because they know everyone's on there looking for love. So that love bombing is like right away. For, anyone to fall right in that rabbit hole just like I did. So the cycle of abuse that starts in childhood, you said something I just wanna point out. Sure. You said your mom was hoping for the night and shining armor, but turns out it was just a different variation of this, of the devil. And then this sounds like narcissists are trying to show up as knights or knight test says, or whatever, in shining armor. But beneath that armor is likely some trauma of their own, some lack of connection to actual love. So with our sweet women who were like, but. But if more therapy or like more this or more that, then no, it's not. It's like somebody who, you, there isn't even a co a comparable example in addiction because I truly believe and have concrete evidence to support than any addict from any substance can recover. But in this case, this is not like that. It's different in that no, actually you need to get the fuck out. Yes. You're literally, they are the devil. Dana. my abuser would get so enraged, he would even say I see red. And I didn't know until I went through all of my therapy, all of the therapy, and then became a life coach myself. Actually, ones that say they see red and ones that are so likely to choke you, like mine actually choked me. And that was one of the domestic violence, the very first one, the domestic battery that he was arrested for. They are 70% more likely to kill you in a homicide. And so since your, this episode is gonna be featured for October, which is domestic violence month, I can't like, I don't wanna just skip over this fact that you realize, and it sounds like, so did your sister and so did the people who loved you, that you're, this guy was on, on a mission to kill you. Oh, absolutely. And so your breakthrough was very spiritual, and your sister was like, oh my God, are you dead? In some ways we really need two episodes for this. But in some ways he almost did. So you're up on this bucket. You've got the electrical cord on your neck, and then let's close at least this first conversation with this, right? Although it wasn't at his own hands, he was almost successful with the mission of taking you out. it doesn't seem like an accident that the light exploded in the middle of this and in the darkness you had what sounds like a divine download of oh no, I'm not going out in the dark like this. This is, and then I heard you say something so powerful. as we move on to okay, listen, you clearly are on her healing journey with this. It has to do with you accessing the light. You've mentioned God a bunch of times, you've said there is no healing without a foundation from the spirit. The spirit doesn't care whether you get it in church or out in your backyard in meditation. She doesn't care what you call it. It does not have a name. Hashem is a name I was reading earlier, which is the place for all things. Yes. And so I'm wondering about. I'm wondering about the healing journey. I heard you say therapy. I also heard you say you're talking to yourself in a way that's very differently. Who else are we talking to most of the day? To ourselves. So it sounds like you had a breakthrough in the way that you're talking to yourself. I love that you called yourself a bitch.'cause I love that word. Hey bitch, we're not going out like this. We're gonna get it together. We're gonna go get the help that we need. And it was, it didn't sound like when you were saying that you were weaponizing your shame against yourself. You're like, Hey sis, wake up. Let's go. We have more to live. We have more to give. We have more. And so you've spent what sounds like the last couple of years using this new connection to the light, right? Not an accident. The light exploding. Not an accident. The woman behind you being the voice of God Hey, you're gonna be okay. You're on the team, you're on the right team. You're one of the good ones. You're facing the darkness with your own light. It's so explosive that bulbs can't even handle the voltage. So can you speak. about the breakthrough, the spirituality and how that has led you into, you look like a goddess of light, oh, like I feel like my superpower is I can spot whether you're plugged into stores or not from across the room. We glow when we are. Yeah. And so can you bring all of that together? How do healing and spirituality and you talking to yourself and you now using the destruction as your own discovery, not just for you, but for your clients and the world and our audience, how does that fit together and how does that fit together for you now? As a child and growing up from destruction and so forth. I have always been one of church. However, I was actually baptized Presbyterian, I, converted to Catholic for, to marry my ex-husband'cause he's a huge into Catholic and his parents and stuff too. And then as I got divorced, I started going to a Christian Church. Then as I went through the trauma and as you said with the light bulb and that I am not even actually religious, which is probably why I never connected to a physical religion and was bouncing around. I am now on a spiritual side. I have Christ consciousness. I don't live in my subconscious mind anymore. I live in my conscious mind. Yes, I realized that my thoughts actually create my reality. it's within me. the love I needed to find was actually inside of me. I know that if I were to say anything, the richest part of me is my heart, is my love. I have it so much overbearing. I'm like, I just wanna give it to everybody. I just have so much of it, it's almost like I feel like I'm walking around with a chest of love I just feel so much, and as you said, you really. You veer towards those people because now you know who like God's people are. And I just say God, because that's like what I was raised of calling them God. So whether you call them God, it's just people who remembered who they are and what we're here for. And you used the word love and that's just a synonym for God. That's it. Yes. Yes. So tell us a little bit about the work that you do in the world. I have so many more questions. we're gonna have to come back for another episode. But tell us about, no, I wanna hover here just for a second.'cause I think they're connected. You're work in the world. You said you're clear on what love isn't. And now you're so in overflow with what love is. Can you tell our gorgeous listener what is love? How are you experiencing it now? And how can the listener plug in so that she can also heal, so that she can experience that kind of overflow love? Absolutely. You first and foremost, you need to find a lot of what we fall into is the comfort zone, and we also fall into codependency, which is basically we are seeking outside and being dependent on other things or people to fulfill the love inside of us. And a lot of times what happens is that, you fall into the darkness and you think that it's something that's destructing you and you're in this misery, and that's where you're supposed to stay because that's now your comfort zone. But really, it's basically think of it as God pushing you out and is stay out, get out. I haven't even mentioned this part yet, but here I had him in jail for domestic battery, but Dana, this man is abusing me and so forth. I still kept going back because of the trauma bond. So here I'm, and which is very normal. This whole time that I had him in jail, my mind was saying I need to get him in jail. Because once he's in front of the judge will make him go to therapy. And the judge,'cause he wouldn't do it with me, just saying it. So the whole time I'm not doing it for him to bear the consequences of what he did to me. I'm doing it because I loved him so much and I wanted him to get help, but he would never just walk into a therapist's office and say, Hey, I need help. So that was my mindset of it. So that's why I still kept going back to him. I still kept going to bed with him while I'm literally in court with this man. And it got to the point where then what they do is what's called reactive abuse. He picked me up, he threw me on the cement ground, and then he like staged it to where he went to his neighbor's house and was gonna ring the doorbell. And I was like, I literally brushed him like, I was like no, come on, talk to me. And so I brushed the side of his shoulder and he ended up having the cops come and he had me arrested for domestic battery. he did it purposely where on holidays, judges can't see you until Tuesday. So they transferred me to the county jail, which is with rapists and murderers and all that. normally those type of incidents, you're out, the same day. I've never even been in jail till that time. My ex-husband of 10 years is a police officer. So clearly I don't have records of having any type of whatever perception. I'm like, Carrie, I don't know how this sounds, but you don't belong in jail, my friend. No. And that was the scariest part of it. So now I'm sitting in jail To rape and abuse and so forth.'cause these individuals are from brokenness and that, and now I look like I'm, not of that nature. And so of course I'm like not, I look like a naive piece of meat to them, and it was definitely a scary situation, but where I'm going with this is that I needed to go to jail and have that happen because that was what stripped the snake's head off. And that was my final straw that I was like, I can't do this anymore. I have tried doing everything to help this man. And it was like, and that's actually in my book, it says, our savior sent me to prison. And I remember, they give you one piece of bologna and one piece of bread. And I remember the bologna was like the color of chocolate. So there was no way I was about to eat that. And so I'm sitting here and I'm ripping the bread apart and I literally in my head was like, give us this day, our daily bread. It was like, came in my head and I was like, this is, I just knew, I knew that was my, that was God saying, listen, this man has hit you so many times. you keep getting away, but then you keep going back, That was him giving me my spanking. You know what I mean? That was the guy. Can I challenge that a little bit? Sure. Because the question was, tell us how you were experiencing love. And yes, it sounds like actually that bread was evidence of God's love for you. Yes. Maybe in a spanking spankings are hot sometimes, I don't know. Carrie, if you could. with the last couple of minutes that we have Speak into what does love mean to you right now, and how do you help your, what does it look like to work with you? Tell us about your work in the world. Yes. Okay. So love is, again, I was raised knowing what love is not. And what I mean by that is I always knew it as a sacrifice. You had to give in order to get, and you had to, it was based on conditions. I, if I gave you more money or I gave you more time, or I gave you your way, you would love me more. It's unconditional. It's this person will love you whether it's a bad day, a good day, and they will preserve the bad days to make sure that they're better on the good days. And it's, you don't have to do anything, but be you and be in your authentic self and. No one will want the true people that truly love you. They wouldn't wanna change you at all because they love all of your imperfections perfectly. And we are all perfect individuals. We just have to see that we're in the wrong place with the wrong individuals. And it's, this is how we are growing is we're, it's like being a tree in just a little small pot the tree's not gonna become this huge, massive tree. If it's only in an environment this big, it's only gonna grow as far as it could go. So if you want to have this abundant life and you wanna have all this beauty you have to get out of that environment because you need to grow. And so you need to go into soil that is large enough to make you grow into this abundant tree. Otherwise, sitting in this little pot. This is as far as you can go, and then you're sitting here and I hear that as an act of self-love is leaving as an act of self-love. And so I wanna normalize this and I wanna also bring in something that I heard you say before we close out. thank you so much. One is. It is so normal in situations of abuse, just like it is an addiction to go back and go back and go back. And I'm, I have some time set aside for research this afternoon because I'm interviewing an executive director of, a place in northeastern Kentucky called Safe Harbor. But I don't know how many times is typical and either we leave or we die. So just like normalizing that those are the two paths. And also it is so hard to leave and it has nothing to do with your moral character or how much God loves you or how much you love yourself. It literally comes down to the results of abuse and the results of addiction to the chemicals that we talked about. And so I just wanna normalize that when you've got a friend or you are the friend who you know, in recovery, we say keep coming back. That does not apply there. And also, if it happens, our job is to love and support that person until they can link, have the spiritual experience that it sounds is needed. And also, the second thing I wanna say is link up with a supportive community, which it sounds like you did to learn about the vocabulary, to learn about other people's stories. And just by you listening to podcasts like this, and please go listen to Carrie's podcast. You are helping set yourself and other people free. And you're also understanding and normalizing. Why can't they just leave? Stop fucking asking that now. And now you can show up and be supportive. Okay. So thank you so much. This is part one. We're definitely gonna bring you back for a part two because I just feel there's so much here, there's so much underneath this. And in the meantime is if you had one piece of, one piece of, I don't even love the word advice, but one last sentence to say to the woman who is either in that situation or the woman who loves that woman who's in that situation, what would you say? I would say that. I know that you love them. I know you wanna change them. I know you wanna help them because that's just it. You are amazing and you are a wonderful soul, and that's what God put in you is so much love and unconditional love. And that was also one thing too, is I knew it got to a point where I knew that he was sick, he was mentally ill. And so then because of my unconditional love, people always ask the question that you just said, why don't you leave? I always flip the shoe on the other foot and I say picture this. If this was your child and your child went next door and beat up the neighbor, you would say, God, my son has something wrong. Like he, what happened? He must have anger issues or something like that. Now, how do you abandon your child when they need you most? So that's why you go back to the abuser because you know that you love them so much and you know that what they're doing is wrong and you wanna help them and save them and cure them, Ideally, you get to the point where you have to love yourself more and that's just it. You can't, if you are losing yourself to be someone that you're not, to have love for another, that's not love. Yeah. you have to love yourself more. Yes. we're gonna let that be it for today. You have to love yourself more. There's a big question of like, how do we do that? And so stay tuned. We're gonna come back and have that conversation. So Carrie, in the meantime, please open your heart, hear this from mine. I freaking love you so much. I do myself. I'm Marty obsessed. I'm so grateful for you and your co courage. Thank you. And to tell the specifics of your story and then to help us know that there is a way out. Yes. And then it starts with the woman in the mirror and the spirit that beats her heart. Yeah. And I believe in your ability to continue to heal, to continue to create light for other people on your path, and to create a life that you absolutely love. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. If you've built a strong recovery foundation and you're feeling ready to break through life's glass ceilings, let's make it happen together. In the show notes, you'll find a link to book a free one-on-one conversation with me We'll get clear on what next level success looks like for your life. We'll create some powerfully aligned goals and a plan. We're gonna talk about the big thing holding you back, and you will walk away with a roadmap for how to create a life you are obsessed with. Because hear this from me, my friend. You deserve. Success and freedom and the full identity of a woman who knows what she's capable of and who she is. And I wanna help you get there. So book your free call in the notes. And if you love this episode, follow us five stars, write a review, share it with your best friend, share it with your mom. And in case you haven't heard it today, I love you. I'm so proud of you, and I believe in your ability to create a gorgeous life. You are madly in love with starting. Right now and I'll see you in the next episode,