The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women is a safe space for trauma survivors and neurodivergent women ready to claim their voice, soften into their truth and feel at home with themselves.
I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), certified Life Coach, and 500-hour trained yoga instructor who understands this journey intimately as a neurodivergent woman, trauma survivor and as a therapist and life coach.
Each week, I offer soulful episodes where I intertwine my lived experiences with insights from my therapy practice all with the goal to help women unmask and find peace in their lives by healing trauma and learning how to accommodate their neurodivergence.
Through real talk, mindfulness practices, and gentle healing approaches rooted in trauma-informed wisdom and nervous system care, you’ll find practical tools to help you feel safe in your body, seen in your story and supported in your journey.
This is your sanctuary to soften, heal, and remember that you were and are never too much.
Work with me: Click the link to schedule a free 15 minute consultation.
The Awakened Heart: A Podcast for Healing Women
BONUS EPI: Walking on Eggshells in Relationships: A Guide to Healing
This episode unpacks why walking on eggshells is a trauma response, not a relationship skill gap, and how fawn shows up in adult intimacy. I share somatic tools, red flags, options when your partner won’t change, and how to choose yourself with clarity and care.
• naming fawn and people pleasing as survival
• how childhood unpredictability shapes adult attachment
• neurodivergence, masking, and rejection sensitive dysphoria
• trauma reenactment, intermittent reinforcement, trauma bonding
• somatic work to expand the window of tolerance
• differentiation and small acts of authenticity
• accountability for the partner creating eggshells
• red flags for abuse and gaslighting
• three paths: accept, survive with boundaries, or leave
• grief, reparenting, and building a secure base within
• what healthy conflict looks like and what children learn
Here is the link to a previous episode I mention in today’s podcast, titled: What if Being the Common Denominator isn’t a Bad Thing. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/17305987-bonus-epi-what-if-being-the-common-denominator-isn-t-a-bad-thing
If you're wondering whether what you're experiencing is abuse, reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233. Another resource: 741-741, the mental health texting hotline.
Want to help more women hear this episode and support me by helping my podcast grow? Please share this. Please comment, leave a review.
About Me:
I’m Autumn Moran, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas specializing in trauma-informed care for neurodivergent women and trauma survivors.
Therapy (Texas residents only):
I provide individual therapy in my private practice for women working through trauma, late diagnosis processing, relationship challenges, and healing from narcissistic abuse or toxic family systems. My approach is neurodivergent-affirming and focuses on helping you understand your patterns while building practical tools for nervous system regulation and authentic living.
Life Coaching (available anywhere):
For women outside Texas or those wanting support alongside therapy, I offer:
•Somatic Healing Coaching: Bridges the gap between cognitive understanding and embodied healing through nervous system work, movement practices, and practical integration tools. Perfect as a complement to talk therapy or for those ready to work directly with their body’s wisdom.
•Unmasking Journey Coaching: Specialized support for late-diagnosed neurodivergent women learning to reconnect with their authentic selves after decades of masking. We work on identifying your real needs, rebuilding your sense of self, and creating a life that fits who you actually are.
Whether you’re healing trauma, discovering yourself after late diagnosis, or both, my goal is to help you not just understand your story, but feel genuinely safe and at home in your own body.
Subscribe & Share:
New episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday. If today’s episode resonated, please share it with someone who needs to hear it or leave a comment—it helps other women find this space and know they’re not alone. Check me out on Apple Podcasts and many other platforms.
Work With Me:
Ready to start your healing journey?
Book a free 15-minute consultation: (http://linktr.ee/EmpoweringWellnessHub)
Listen to my DIVINE WOMAN Playlist (Apple & Spotify): Empowering songs for women healing through
Welcome to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women, a place where your voice matters, your body is sacred, and your journey home to yourself is honored no matter how winding the road. I'm Ana Moran, licensed professional counselor, life coach, yoga instructor, and ultimately your companion on this sacred path we call healing. I offer therapy for clients in Texas and life coaching for neurodivergent women everywhere, especially late diagnosed women ready to unmask, claim their authenticity, and finally live the life that's been calling to them, to you. Today we're here, we're talking, we're going to talk about something that lives deep in our bodies, something that might feel so familiar you don't even recognize it as a problem anymore. Because you just can't, because your nervous system has learned a long time ago that survival depends on reading the room, managing all the moods, and keeping all the peace for everyone. If you're walking on eggshells in your adult relationship, this probably isn't the first time. For most of us listening, trauma experienced, neurodivergent, this is a pattern that started in childhood. This is a trauma response. Excuse me. This is your fawn response showing up in intimate relationships because it's the survival strategy that kept you safe when you were small and had no other options. Maybe you're already hypersensitive to emotional atmospheres. Maybe you've spent your whole life masking, which is just another form of walking on eggshells, monitoring how you come across. Adjusting yourself constantly to be acceptable. Maybe rejection sensitive dysphoria makes any hint of disapproval feel like alienation. Maybe you've been told your whole life that you're too much, too sensitive, too dramatic. So you learn to make yourself smaller, quieter, more manageable. I'm clearing my throat for the last time. Sorry. And now you're here in an adult relationship doing the same song and dance, except now you're exhausted. Now you're losing yourself. Now you want solid ground, right? You're tired of this dance. But what can be really hard in this dynamic is what do you do when the only one willing to change is you? What are your actual options when your partner or the person you're in a relationship with isn't a willing party in transformation? How do you heal from this pattern when it's wired into your nervous system from childhood? I mean, this is kind of the reality for a lot of people. You're not alone here if this resonates. I see this often. I was motivated by this episode's topic from the past couple of weeks of just working with clients. When you're not in a relationship where you both are ready to do the trauma work. So buckle up, buttercup, take a nice deep inhale, get comfy if you need to get a drink, if you need to get a notepad, if you need to get some tissue, my dears, get what you need to get. Hey, and if you're doing something while you're listening to this, if anything gets heavy, just take a beat, take a breath, say something kind to yourself. So walking on eggshells is a part of a relationship dynamic. And what often I don't feel is acknowledged is that it's not a relationship problem. It is, in fact, a trauma response. Because if you grew up walking on eggshells, and most of us did, your nervous system learned that hypervigilance keeps you safe, that monitoring the emotional temperature of the room is how you survive. That being small, manageable, and ever so fucking accommodating is how you avoid danger, right, my ladies? Been here, done this, feel this, right? Maybe it was an explosive parent. Maybe you had a parent who withdrew love when you displeased them or slighted them in some way based on what they perceived. Maybe you had a parent whose mood determined whether you got fed, you got help, you got held, or you got screamed at. And maybe they were just completely unpredictable, warm, cruel, you never knew. So what happened? You learn to read microexpressions, you learn to sense shifts in energy before they became obvious, and you learn to adjust constantly. You learn that your feelings were secondary to keeping them regulated, and you learn that authenticity was fucking dangerous. That's not accommodating, that's not being considerate, that is survival. That's what children do when they have no other option. And your nervous system coded as it is, or coded it as, sorry, this is how you stay safe. You must perform, you must mask, you must be what other people want you to be in order to stay safe, and now you're in an adult relationship, and the same system is activated, except now it doesn't feel like a choice, it feels like who you are. I'm just a people pleaser, I know, I know, but I'm just a people pleaser. Where do we get that? Why is that a badge of honor or something to be saying, like, oh, it's okay, girl. I'm just people pleasing. Can we stop right there and acknowledge, ma'am, miss ma'am, that you're saying that you're actively having a trauma response all day, every day. And we're gonna dig into that. That means a dysregulated nervous system. That means a heart that's never resting, organs that are never resting, a brain that is always scanning the fuck. That is not something to be proud of. That is not something to hold on to or identify as. That is something to say, wait, what the fuck? Let me stop this shit and heal myself. I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing this because I'm thinking if I don't, I will die. Okay, sorry, I got intense. So let's let's I think I just went over it. I got ahead of myself, but thinking about what happens in your body day to day. You walk in the door, and before you even consciously register it, you've scanned your partner's face, their body language, the tone of their greeting. Your nervous system is already calculating safe or not safe. Good mood or bad mood. Can I relax or do I need to be on guard? You rehearse conversations in your head, playing out every possible response, trying to find the exact right words that won't trigger a reaction. This is not thoughtfulness. This is hyper-vigilance. You self-censor constantly, you have thoughts, feelings, needs, but sharing them feels unsafe, feels dangerous, feels like it's going to start some shit. So you edit yourself in real time, offering only the version you think is safe. Or you say nothing at all, and the real you just stays hidden. You feel responsible for their emotional regulation. When they're upset, your nervous system interprets it as a threat to your safety. Their discomfort becomes your emergency, and you jump in to fix it. Not because you're naturally helpful, but because your body is trying to eliminate the freaking threat. Maybe you get that sinking feeling in your stomach when you sense their mood shifting. That is not anxiety. That's your body recognizing a familiar danger pattern. That here we go again. That feeling, that's your nervous system saying, I know this situation. This is the situation where bad things happen. You can't fully relax in your home even on good days, because there's this underlying vigilance. You're always a little bit on guard. And if you're neurodivergent, this pattern often has additional layers that make it even more entrenched. As if, right? It can get harder. Because you might already be hypersensitive to emotional atmospheres, right? Like I said earlier, you feel other people's feelings intensely, sometimes before they even express them. And this makes you incredibly in tune to your partner's emotional state, which feeds right into eggshell walking. If you've been masking your whole life, hiding your neurodivergent traits to appear normal, you're already practiced at walking on eggshells. Masking is constantly monitoring how you come across and adjusting yourself to be acceptable. So when you enter a relationship with someone who requires careful management, you slip right into patterns you already know, what you've already been trained to do. Rejection sensitive dysphoria can make this exponentially worse. Any hint of disapproval, any sign that your partner is upset, any criticism, even mild and constructive, can feel like complete rejection. So what happens? You work incredibly hard to prevent any scenario where you might be criticized or rejected. Which happens, which means what happens? Walking on smaller and smaller and smaller eggshells. Executive functioning challenges can make it harder to plan an exit, to organize your life separately from this person, or follow through on boundaries you set. So when you so even when you know you need to leave or change things, the practical execution feels overwhelming, which then keeps you stuck. And I'm I I feel like I say this a lot, but I I think it's so fucking important. I don't think it's said enough. And I think we as neurodivergent as trauma experience and just as women need to hear this. Many of us have been told our whole lives that we are too much, too sensitive, too intense, too emotional, too demanding. I mean, we could go on and on how women are minimized for being such wonderful creatures. So when you enter a relationship with someone who reinforces that message, guess what? It feels true. It feels like the problem is you, not the dynamic. And you keep trying to be smaller, less quieter, more manageable. But why? You're the common denominator, so of course you're the problem. I have an episode about this. I don't know what number it is, I don't know when the published date is, but the title says something about common denominator. And if I can remember that when I'm doing the show notes, I'll link to it because I think it's a powerful message as well to hear that yes, you're the common denominator, dear, and I acknowledge that, but that doesn't correlate to you being the problem. Off track again. Off track. Here we go. Getting back, getting back. I want uh I know that understanding that this is a trauma response, not a relationship skill deficit, it changes everything. It means you can't think your way out of this. You can't just communicate better or be more assertive. Your nervous system has coded this pattern as survival, and intellectual understanding doesn't override that. It means the solution isn't just couples therapy or relationship books. The solution is trauma healing, nervous system regulation, somatic work that helps your body learn a new definition of safety. It means you're not weak or codependent or broken. You're responding exactly how a traumatized nervous system responds when it can encounters familiar danger. And it means that if your partner isn't willing to do their own trauma work, isn't willing to understand how they're activating your system, isn't willing to create actual safety, you're not in a relationship problem that can be solved with better communication. You are in a trauma reenactment, and you might need to make a different choice to heal. I want to sidestep here and I want to acknowledge this just in case, right? Both sides of the story. I want to speak to the people, to the women, possibly, to whoever's listening. If you have been told by your partner that they walk on eggshells around you, that they feel nervous around you, that they never know what to say, or they feel like everything they say is wrong, or they can never do anything right. And maybe that's confusing or painful because you didn't ask for that, and you don't want them to be afraid of you. Here's what I need you to consider. If your partner is walking on eggshells, it's because they don't feel emotionally safe with you, and that might be because of their trauma, absolutely, but it might also be because of your dysregulation. If you get angry quickly, if you shut down when they bring up concerns, maybe you get defensive and turn things around or need to question every detail or need to know proof about every single thing, or them to replay it for you. If you withdraw love or affection when you're upset, if you make them responsible for your emotional state, like look what you did, I'm mad because of this. Even if you don't mean to, even if you're also responding from trauma, you're creating an environment where there can't be, where your partner can't be honest. Your trauma doesn't excuse the impact of your behavior. Both things can be true. You're hurt and struggling, and your partner doesn't feel safe. If this is you, I'm going to talk more about what your work looks like a little later. But please stay with me because understanding the trauma underneath this pattern for both of you is essential. All right, so let's do, let's go a little deeper, right? Let's let's talk about patterns that get wired into your nervous system because understanding the roots helps you understand why it's so hard to change. This doesn't start in your adult relationship. This started when you were a child with a developing nervous system trying to survive in an environment that felt unpredictable or unsafe. Maybe this was explosive parent. You knew you never knew what would set them off. You learn to be hyper-vigilant. You watch for warning signs, tiptoe through your own home. Your nervous system learned loud emotions equal danger, and my job is to prevent them. Maybe you had a parent who was emotionally volatile, sometimes warm and loving, sometimes cold and rejected, rejecting. You couldn't predict which parent you'd get on any given day. So you learned to scan constantly to adjust yourself based on their mood, to work hard to keep them in the good mood because the alternative was terrifying. Your attachment system got wired for anxious hypervigilance. Maybe you had a parent who withdrew love when you displeased them, the silent treatment, the cold shoulder, emotional abandonment as punishment. So you learned that your worth was conditional, that love had to be earned by being good enough, easy enough, pleasing enough. Your nervous system learned my feelings threaten my connection to my caregiver, so I need to hide them. Maybe you had a parent with mental illness or addiction who needs always came first. You became parentified. And you can also be parentified without mental illness or addiction. You learn to regulate them instead of them regulating you. You learn that your job was to manage their emotional state, to be the stable one, to sacrifice your needs for theirs. Your nervous system learned I'm responsible for other people's feelings and my needs don't matter. Maybe you had a parent who was critical and perfectionistic. Nothing you did was good enough. You learned to constantly monitor how you were being perceived, to adjust and perform and perfect, always trying to earn approval that never quite came. So what did your learned nervous system learn? I am fundamentally unacceptable as I am, and I need to work hard to be tolerable. And maybe you experienced overt abuse, physical, sexual, emotional. You learned that adults were dangerous and fucking unpredictable. You learned that your safety, depending on being invisible, compliant, whatever kept you safe in the moment. Your nervous system learned hypervigilance is survival. And maybe your home looked fine from the outside. There was no obvious abuse, but there was emotional neglect, emotional unavailability, subtle invalidation, your feelings were dismissed, your needs were inconvenient, you were told you were too sensitive, too dramatic, too much. So you learned to make yourself smaller, need less, and to ultimately be easier. So what did your nervous system learn? My authentic self is too much, and I need to manage myself to be acceptable. When this happens in childhood during critical developmental windows, it doesn't just create behaviors, it shapes how your nervous system works. It shapes your neurobiology. Your brain's threat detection system becomes hyperactive. You see danger where others see normal conflicts. Your amygdala learn to fire at the slightest sign of emotional intensity. Your window of tolerance becomes so narrow. You can't handle as much emotional activation before you flip into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And for most of us walking on eggshells, you live in fawn, appeasing, accommodating, managing others to stay safe. Your attachment system gets organized around anxiety and insecurity. You don't have a secure base. You don't trust that love is stable or that connection is safe. So what happens? You work constantly to maintain connection by ultimately abandoning you, yourself. Your sense of self becomes organized around other people's reactions to you. You don't have a strong internal sense of who you are, separate from how others respond to you. So in relationships, you become whoever you think you need to be. And this is complex trauma. This is developmental trauma. And it doesn't just impact your relationships, it impacts everything. But we're focusing on relationships today because that's where it shows up most painfully, right? And in neurodivergence growing up in this kind of environment, you often got hit twice. First, you already had nervous system differences that made you more sensitive to emotional stimuli, more prone to overwhelm, more likely to notice sub subtleties others missed. So you picked up on your parents' dysregulation even more intensely than a neurotypical child might. Second, you were likely already getting the message that you were too much in some way. So you were already learning to mask, learning to monitor how you came across, learning to make yourself acceptable. And that created a perfect setup for becoming the expert eggshell walker. And many of you were also punished more harshly for your neurodivergent traits. Your emotional intensity was met with anger or deception. Your need for routine and predictability was dismissed as being difficult. Your sensory needs were ignored. Your different way of processing was treated as defiance. So not only did you learn to walk on eggshells, you learned that your authentic neurodivergent self was fundamentally ugly, unacceptable. And that makes it even harder to show up authentically in adult relationships. Yeah? I mean, fuck you. So moving on. Heavy shit. Let me show it, slow it down. So what about the person whose reactivity creates the eggshells? Because they also usually have childhood trauma and it's just manifesting differently. Maybe they were in a home where emotions were explosive, where intensity was the only way to be heard. So they learn that if they don't react big, they don't matter. Their nervous system learned emotional intensity is how I get my needs met. Maybe they grew up with caregivers who are emotionally unavailable or dismissive. So now when their partner has needs or feelings that differ from theirs, it triggers old abandonment wounds. Their nervous system interprets any conflict as rejection, so they defend against it with anger or withdrawal. Maybe they experienced abuse or neglect and never learned emotional regulation because no one modeled it for them. They genuinely don't have the skills to sit with uncomfortable feelings without discharging them onto someone else. Maybe they've always been told they were the problem, that their feelings were too much, that they needed to be quieter or smaller. So now they swing in the other direction. They refuse to be silenced. They haven't learned the difference between being authentic and being dysregulated. Maybe they're also neurodivergent, and their emotional intensity is part of their neurology. They feel things bigger and react faster, and they never learned how to regulate their emotions in ways that don't impact others. I'm not excusing the behavior. I'm sharing this so you can maybe understand. This is often trauma-meeting trauma. Two wounded nervous systems in a relationship, each triggering the other's deepest wounds. But, and this is very fucking important, understanding where someone's behaviors come from doesn't mean you have to tolerate it. Your partner's trauma is not your responsibility to fix, and it doesn't justify making you feel unsafe in any way. You carry these patterns into adult relationships because your nervous system is still operating on childhood programming. When you meet someone whose emotional intensity matches your parents, your nervous system recognizes it. And it activates all those old survival strategies. So it's like this saying your nervous system will choose familiar chaos over unfamiliar comfort. So this is why logically you can know that you deserve better, that this isn't healthy, that you should leave or change things, and you still feel frozen. It's not weakness, it's your nervous system trained doing what it was trained to do. This is trauma reenactment. You're unconsciously drawn to familiar dynamics because familiarity feels like truth to your nervous system, even when familiar means pain. And the little really fucking insidious part is when you're in a relationship that mirrors your mirrors your childhood dynamics, part of you thinks, if I can just get this person to love me, accept me, stay regulated around me, then I'll finally prove I'm worth it. I'll heal that original wound. But you can't heal childhood wounds through adult relationships. You can only reenact them until you do the actual trauma work to rewire your nervous system. When your partner's dysregulation triggers you, your body goes into fawn responses. You appease, you accommodate, you manage. This temporarily reduces the threat. They calm down, the conflict ends, which reinforces to your nervous system see, this works. This keeps You're safe. Keep doing this. But it doesn't actually create safety, it creates the illusion of safety by preventing conflict in the moment. And over time, you're teaching both your nervous system and your partner that managing your behavior is how peace happens rather than addressing the actual problem. This is operant conditioning at the nervous system level. Every time you walk on eggshells and successfully avoid the reaction, your brain says, this is the right strategy, and the pattern gets more deeply ingrained. If there's unpredictability in your relationship, sometimes they're loving and wonderful, sometimes they're angry and critical, your nervous system gets caught in an intermittent reinforcement pattern. This is one of the most powerful forms of conditioning that exist. The good moments feel so good, especially in contrast to the bad ones. Or they're so good that you're able to minimize the excruciatingly bad ones. So you keep trying to get back to those good moments. You keep thinking, if I can just figure out the right way to be, we'll have more good days than bad. If I can just get, if I can just, if I just this is trauma bonding. The intensity of the lows makes the highs feel more meaningful, and your nervous system gets addicted to that cycle, even though it's destroying you. And there are beliefs, core beliefs, that got wired in your childhood that continue this pattern. If I just do it right, they'll be okay. This is the belief that you have control over someone else's emotional state. It makes sense when you're a child trying to survive. I get it, but it's not true. You cannot regulate another adult. I know where they're coming from. This likely came from being parentified or from having a caregiver who made you responsible for their emotional states. But your partner's feelings are theirs to manage, not yours. Your partner's feelings are their responsibilities to maintain and regulate. But I just can't handle the reaction. I can't handle the. I can't, I don't want, I'm a I'm a essentially you're avoidant of their behavior in some way. And this is often true from a nervous system perspective. Your system goes into overwhelm when you're dysregulated. But the solution isn't to prevent their reactions by managing yourself. The solution is to build your own capacity to stay regulated when they are not. Girl, this is love. It's hard. This is what love looks like. It's ups and downs. You've got to stay strong. You gotta push through. Not everything's rainbows and sunshines. If your model for love was conditional, unpredictable, a required self-abandonment, then this relationship feels familiar. It feels like love because it matches your template. But it is not, it is a trauma reenactment. It's reenactment. I'm too sensitive too much. I'm the problem. I just need to calm down. I need to get off his ass. I need to stop nagging him. Like I just, I need to, I need to be better. I'm just gonna work on myself. I'm I'm he's he's wonderful. I love he's such a he does you he put gas in my car the other day, girl. He's he's amazing. He even put his dish in the sink without me asking. If you were told this as a child and your partner reinforces it now, it feels true. But your sensitivity is not the problem. Your needs are not the problem. The dynamic in this relationship is the problem. Your nervous system knows the dance. As painful as it is, like I said earlier, it's familiar. The unknown is so scary to a traumatized nervous system that the known that they that it chooses the known terrible. Leaving means uncertainty. Being authentic means risking rejection, setting boundaries means conflict or being abandoned. And all of those trigger your threat detection system because they're unknown variables. So you stay in painful familiar because at least you know how to navigate it. At least you have strategies that work, even if they're killing you. And one thing I see constantly with childhood trauma trauma survivors is you minimize what you're experiencing because it doesn't match your definition of bad enough. It's not that bad. They don't hit me. Other people have it worse. I'm probably overreacting. They had a hard day, they didn't mean it. I mean, look what all we have. We have a good life. Look at all the money I have. Look at this life. Look at my car. This minimization comes from childhood. When you had to normalize abuse or neglect to survive, when you had to make excuses for your parents' behavior, because the alternative of accepting that your caregivers were harmful was too threatening to your survival, you learn to minimize harm. And you bring that into adult relationships. You tell yourself it's not that bad, even when you're walking on eggshells on the daily, even when you can't relax in your own home, even when you're losing yourself. Like, think about that. Can you relax? Can you lay on the couch and watch TV all day and not do the dishes, not put away laundry, not go grocery shopping, but essentially watch the game all day. Without worrying about what your partner will say, without worrying about what their mood or reaction will be when they come home, without worrying about what expectations they have on you or how you need to perform so that they can be happy. If you're walking on X shelves, it is that bad. You don't need to wait until it gets worse to acknowledge that this is harming you. And if you're neurodivergent, there are additional factors keeping you stuck. Executive functioning challenges make it hard to plan an exit. Our major life changes feel overwhelming. Steps involve in leaving, finding housing, separating finances, organizing logistics, being safe, can feel impossible when you already struggle with executive functioning. Your history of being told you're the problem makes it easy to believe that this dynamic is your fault, that if you could just manage your neurodivergent traits better, the relationship would work. RSD makes the thought of your partner's reaction to boundaries and leaving feel unbearable. The anticipation of their anger, disappointment, or rejection can be so overwhelming that you avoid it at all costs. Let's talk about the scenario where both people recognize this as a trauma pattern and are willing to do the work. This is possible, but it requires both people to commit to their own trauma healing, not just working on the relationship. If you're the person walking on eggshells, your work is about reclaiming yourself and rewiring your nervous system, not about getting better at managing your partner or relationship improvement. You need trauma therapy, not couples therapy first. Individual trauma work, whether that's EMDR, somatic experiencing, cognitive processing therapy, internal family systems. There's so many outlets, so many ways. What I recommend you to do in get your favorite drink, get a gummy, whatever it is you do to relax and unwind, get in a fun space, open up your search engine of choice and type in complex trauma therapist in your state. And then scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll past all the sponsors. All the sponsors. Really look. Don't hit anything that's sponsors, don't hit anything that's a major corporation, but find people that are individual therapists owning, you'll just have to find those websites. Get you about two or three, set up some consultations, have some questions, and meet with a therapist. Because you need modalities that work with your nervous system, not just your thoughts. You need to build your window of tolerance. You need to be able to practice regulating your own nervous system so that your partner's dysregulation doesn't automatically hijack yours. This is somatic work, breath work, grounding techniques, vagal toning, bilateral stimulation. You need to practice differentiation. Learn where you end and they begin. Their feelings are not your responsibility. Their reactions are not proof that you did something wrong. You can care about them and still have boundaries. You can love them and still say no. You can say no and still be lovable. Maybe start practicing small acts of authenticity in low-stakes situations. Don't lead with the scariest thing. Practice expressing a preference about dinner. Practice disagreeing about something minor. Build evidence for your nervous system that honesty doesn't always lead to disaster. And try to work on identifying your fond response in real time. Notice when your people pleasing, overexplaining, or preemptively apologizing. Just asking you to notice it, not judge it, not change it, not fix it, not do anything with it. Just notice it because when you notice, it is a powerful shift. Because later you can work on interrupting it, but awareness is the thing that needs to come first. And when I say trauma work, process your childhood trauma. The reason this pattern feels so intense isn't just about your current relationship, it's about the original wound. You need to grieve what you didn't get as a child. You need to have compassion for the child you were who had to learn these survival strategies. And if you're the partner who's been creating the eggshells, your work is about taking radical ownership and developing the capacity to regulate yourself without using your partner as your emotional dumping ground. You need your own trauma therapy. Your reactivity is coming from somewhere and it needs to be understood and healed. Your partner cannot do this work for you. Your partner cannot teach you what they're learning and their therapy to help you do yours. You have to do this for yourself. Not because you love your partner, but because you love yourself. Learn your escalation patterns. What happens in your body before you explode, before you shut down? Do you feel heat, tension in your chest, a racing heart? Learn your early warning signs so you could interrupt the pattern before you're fully activated. When you notice these patterns, walk away, learn to self-soothe. If you don't know what that means, go to a therapist, join a support group, use Google or AI. But do not use AI as your sole therapist. Go to a trauma trained therapist. Sorry, I got a little heavy there. Develop distress tolerance skills. This is dialectical behavior therapy 101. DBT distress tolerance skills. When your partner says something that bothers you, that discomfort is yours to sit with. Practice the pause, practice feeling uncomfortable without immediately discharging it onto them. And this might mean literally leaving the room to regulate yourself before responding. You're not leaving to room to build your argument. You're leaving to room to leaving the room to calm yourself down so that you can come back and have a healthy conversation. And I want you to own the impact of your behavior without being defensive. That's not who I want to be. I'm working on it. Not, I'm sorry, but not, I wouldn't react that way if you didn't. Full stop. Take freaking ownership. And when you have a rupture, practice repair consistently. You will mess up. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is coming back after ruptures. I was dysregulated earlier and that wasn't okay. I'm sorry. What do you need from me now? How can we heal now? Are you ready to talk now? What action step can we do? What solution can we have? How can we avoid this happening in the future? Actively invite honesty and then prove it's safe through your actions. I know I've reacted defensively before, but I really want to hear what you're feeling. Even if it's hard for me, I want to know. And then when you tell and when they tell you something hard, you have to practice staying regulated over and over until they believe it's safe. Get support for your own regulation, whether that's therapy, medication, support groups. You need help building these skills because if you could have done it alone, you would have already done it, my dear, and we wouldn't be here. So stop acting like you don't have any growth to grow.
SPEAKER_01:Be fucking for real.
SPEAKER_00:Like really all that is, when I hear those responses, I see an avoidant human who doesn't want to deal with their own problems, who doesn't want to heal, who would rather stay in this current discomfort than go through something hard and feel better. I am sassy today. My bad. And for both people, if you're both committed to change, you need to understand that this is trauma work, not relationship work. You're both healing old wounds that are getting activated in this relationship. Slow down all difficult conversations. Conversations. When things start escalating, pause. Have a code word. I love to say pineapples, right? That was my first code word when I started working with clients. It's like if somebody is dysregulated, if you start feeling the warning signs, if it gets too heated, if you feel unsafe, pineapples. And when we one of us says pineapples, we have an agreement that we will shut down what we're doing. We will walk away from each other for 15, 20 minutes, and then we will come back after we self-soothe and after we've come back with a solution.
SPEAKER_01:So when things start escalating, you pause, not to avoid, but to regulate.
SPEAKER_00:If you don't want a code word, you can simply say, I can feel us both getting activated. Let's take 20 minutes to regulate and come back to this. Learn about each other's trauma responses. If you understand that their defensiveness is an old wound getting triggered, it doesn't excuse the behavior, but it helps you not take it personally. If they understand that your fawning is a survival strategy, they can help create more safety. Create explicit safety agreements. When I need to tell you something hard, can we set aside time when we're both regulated? Can you commit to not raising your voice even when you're upset? Can I commit to not shutting down if you express anger? Simple, not easy, because triggered, right? And practice co-regulation. Learn what helps each other come back to the center. Maybe it's taking a walk together. Maybe it's holding hands while you breathe. Maybe it's sitting in silence. Find what both works for you. And please celebrate small wins. Notice when you navigate conflict differently, even slightly. We just disagreed and neither of shut neither of us shut down. That's progress. Or the code word. We used the code word and no one ignored it or got mad. We did our thing. This work is hard and slow. You're rewiring nervous systems that have been operating this way for decades. Be patient with yourselves and each other. So what do you do when your partner isn't willing to do their trauma work? When they won't acknowledge that their behavior is a problem. When you're doing all the healing and they're still activated and reactive and making you feel unsafe. This is where we need to be really honest. And it's going. It might be hard to hear. So, like, if your partner consistently creates an environment where you can't be honest, blames you for their emotional reactions, minimizes or denies your experience. That's not how I said it. That's not what I did. Tell me what I said. You're too sensitive, you're being too much, punishes you for speaking up through anger, withdrawal, silent treatment, or some other consequences. You know how they treat you when you when you try to advocate for you. Who refuses to take accountability or do their own work, or who makes temporary changes only when you threaten to leave and then they revert back. This might be emotional abuse, and I don't use this term lightly. Abuse is about power and control. It's about one person creating a dynamic where the other person can't be their authentic self, can't have needs, can't disagree without consequences. And here's what's crucial to understand about trauma and abuse. You cannot heal from childhood trauma while actively experiencing abuse in your adult relationship. The abuse reactivates your trauma constantly. You're trying to heal a wound while someone keeps reopening it. You cannot fix an abusive dynamic by managing your behavior better. The problem isn't your communication skills. The problem isn't your trauma responses. The problem is that your partner is creating an unsafe environment, whether consciously or unconsciously. And no amount of your therapy, your self-work, your trauma healing will change that because they're not willing to look at themselves. When you're alone in this work, you have three options, and none of them are easy. All of them require a lot of fucking courage. But I want to be honest, right? Because pretending you don't have choices keeps you stuck. So option one, stay and accept it. This means truly accepting that this is who they are and this is what this relationship is. Not hoping they'll change, not waiting for them to wake up, not believing that if you heal enough, they'll suddenly see the light. True acceptance means this is what it is, they are not going to change, and I'm choosing to stay anyway. Most people who think they're accepting are actually just resigning themselves while a piece of them dies slowly, and resentment and hatred and negativity are always there. If you choose this option, you need to be brutally honest. Can I accept this without resentment? Without losing more of myself, without damage to my mental or physical health. And can I truly make peace with this being my life? And for most people, the answer is absolutely fucking not. And that's not failure, that is clarity. Option two stay and change yourself. This means building internal resources and boundaries while remaining in the relationship. This is not about fixing the relationship. This is about survival and self-preservation. Build your own regulation capacity. Work on regulating your nervous system so their dysregulation doesn't automatically hijack yours. This doesn't fix the problem, but it helps you survive it with less damage. Set boundaries even when they're not respected. I'm not available for conversations when you're yelling, I'm going to step away. They might escalate. They might punish you. But the boundary essentially protects your nervous system. Reclaim pieces of yourself outside of the relationship. Can you be authentic with friends? Can you journal your real feelings? Can you maintain connection to who you are even if you can't show that in your relationship? Build external support. You cannot do this alone. Get a therapist who understands trauma and relational dynamics. Find friends who clearly and don't who see you clearly and don't gaslight you. And you can create emotional distance while remaining physically present. This is sometimes necessary for survival. You're in the relationship, but not fully invested because you're protecting your core self. This is like the art of detachment when you're in like a relationship with a substance user. But I need to be clear: this is a survival strategy, not a solution. This is what you do while you build capacity to make different choices or while you navigate practical barriers that make leaving complicated right now. This is not sustainable long term. Staying in a relationship where you can't be authentic, where you're constantly regulating around someone else's dysregulation, where you have to protect yourself from your partner, this has cost, real cost to your nervous system, your mental health, your physical health, your sense of self. And option three, get the fuck out of there. Leave. And sometimes leaving is the only way to stop the trauma reenactment and actually heal. And I know, I know this feels impossible. I know there are real fucking barriers, especially in the environment of our country, of our economic system right now. Financial dependence, children, fear of the reaction, hope that they'll change, cultural and/or religious expectations, isolation, trauma bonding that makes leaving feel so unbearable, unbearable, even when safety is destroying you, or even when say I'm sorry, I am I'm heated. I'm ex I I get so mad. I get so mad at the world because it's like I want women to be able to be independent and free on their own if that's what they choose to, especially if the people around them are not safe. But we live in a world where women have lesser opportunity, lesser resources. Half the time we're not even believed when we disclose the abil the abuse, the abuse. We're dismissed, we're picked over. And then we have the children. And if our partner has more of the finances, they may take our children away. And then they're gonna abuse our children.
SPEAKER_01:There's no good way out of this. All of this is real.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not minimizing this. And I'm putting this out in the world now. So if there is someone that knows how to write grants, if there's someone who wants to get in business and wants to create a nonprofit for women who seek independence and safety with themselves, their children or their pets, not a domestic violence shelter. I'm talking about a nonprofit that helps women get housing, get jobs, get therapy. I mean, it's a domestic violence shelter without the domestic violence shelter. So, like, I just I want to be able to give people the ability to be independent, to not rely on someone that's harming them. But also, hard doesn't mean impossible.
SPEAKER_01:Complicated doesn't mean you don't have options. Use your resources to help come up with a game plan.
SPEAKER_00:Because staying in a relationship that requires you to abandon In yourself has high cost. These costs accumulate. These costs happen to your nervous system that stay constantly activated. This has a cost to your sense of self, to your physical health. Chronic stress literally impacts your body, impacts your brain, impacts your capacity to feel joy and presence. And leaving doesn't have to happen all at once. Sometimes it starts with internal separation, getting clear that this isn't okay, stopping the internal argument about whether you're overreacting, and building certainty that you deserve better because sis, you do. Sometimes it's practical preparation, quietly building financial resources if you can, reconnecting with support systems, gathering documents, consulting with professionals about your opinions. I had, I knew someone at one point in my life who was financially dependent on their partner. And whenever they went grocery shopping or whenever they went anywhere that gave you a keypad to get cash back, they would get cash back and squirrel that away.$10,$20 a year. Sometimes it's building capacity, working with a trauma therapist to build regulation skills so you can tolerate the discomfort of transition, processing the childhood wounds that make leaving feel impossible. There's a difference between leaving from a place of reactive anger versus leaving from a place of clarity. Both are valid, but the second is usually more sustainable because you've released the fantasy that they'll change and you've made peace with what it is. So whether you're working on this with a willing partner or navigating it alone, healing from eggshell patterns requires specific things that go beyond insight and good intentions. And that is trauma-informed therapy. You need a therapist who understands complex trauma and who can work with your nervous system, not just your thoughts. Because trauma doesn't live in your frontal lobe, it lives in your body, in your nervous system, in its implicit memories. There has to be a daily practice of nervous system work. It's not something you do once a week in therapy. Learn to identify your nervous system states. Fight or flight, freeze or shutdown, fawn. Are you safe? You can ground through your senses, name things you see, touch, taste, hear, smell, bilateral stimulation. Butterfly taps. You can Google that. Breath work. Movement, shanking, dancing, wiggling. The goal is building your capacity to stay regulated or return to regulation quickly when you get activated. And you have grief work to do. You have to grieve. This is a non-negotiable. Grieving the childhood you didn't get, the parent who couldn't provide safety, the child version of you who had to develop these strategies. Grief for the younger version of you who chose this or who walked into this, who thought they were doing their best, who made choices, who you now look back and say, who the fuck was that? Grieve the relationship you wanted, the partner you hoped they'd become, the version of yourself who could show up without fear. Grieve the fantasy of what could have been if they were willing to grow with you. And grief isn't linear, it's messy, it comes in waves. Let it move through you. And you need to build a secure relationship with yourself. You need to become the secure base that you didn't have as a child. Learn to resource yourself, learn to validate your own experiences, and learn to trust your own knowing. Practice reparenting your younger parts. When that child part gets activated and scared, can adult you offer reassurance? Can you be the safe parent to yourself that you needed? This isn't about positive affirmations. This is about actually showing up for yourself in ways no one else ever did. And it's what you've always needed. And you need community and connection. You cannot heal in isolation. I am here for you. Support groups are here for you. Find healthy relationships. You might have to start from zero. And healing takes time. Healing trauma, rewiring your nervous system, and the responses that have been grooved into you for decades. So be patient. Progress, grieving, none of that's linear. You'll have good days and hard days, days where you feel strong, and days where you slip back into old patterns. All that's normal. The direction matters more than the pace. As long as you're moving toward healing, toward being authentic and safety and being safe, you're doing it right. And how do you know when someone is going to change? How do you stop holding on to hope that's delaying your healing? I want to talk about red flags that someone won't do the work. Maybe they blame you for their reactions consistently. You made me so angry. If you hadn't said that, I wouldn't have gotten upset. Those, there's no ownership. They gaslight you. That didn't happen. You're remembering it wrong. You're too sensitive. That's not what I said. Because they make you doubt your experience. They refuse accountability. When you name the impact of their behavior, they deflect, they defend, they turn it around, they need details, they need to show you to reenact it to show all the proof. Or they bring up your past mistakes. There's never genuine, I hurt you and I'm sorry. They make temporary changes only when you threaten. Then once they feel secure that you're over it, they revert back to who they are. And this cycle can repeat for years. I said it before, and I'm going to say it again. One major red flag is they won't go to therapy, they won't read books, they won't do anything differently. They won't even acknowledge there's a fucking problem that requires their participation in solving.
SPEAKER_01:I am angry about it. Be better.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe they punish you for speaking up. The quant consequences may be subtle. They may withdraw, they may be cold, the silent treatment, or it might be overt, yelling, breaking things, threatening to leave. But the message is clear. Your honesty has consequences. And how many times is enough? There's no magic number. But if you've clearly named the problem, explain the impact, ask for change, offer to go to therapy together, and nothing has shifted in months or years, this is your answer. Because Maya Angelo said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. I am not three strikes, you're out. I am not even two strikes, you're out. You show me who you are one time, and that's all the information I need to know.
SPEAKER_01:You don't need to show me twice.
SPEAKER_00:At some point, continuing to hope for change is participating in your own harm. It's a trauma response. The hope that if you just find the right words, the right approach, the right way to be, they'll finally see you in change. But you've been trying and it hasn't worked. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because they're not a willing participant. For many of you who have been walking on eggshells, you might not know what healthy conflict and healthy connection actually look like. So, healthy conflict. In a secure relationship, conflicts exist. It's not the presence of conflict that's the problem, it's how you navigate it. Both people can express feelings without fear of punishment or abandonment. You can say I'm hurt without worrying about an explosion or the silent treatment or being invalidated. Both people take ownership of their part without keeping score. This is what I'm struggling with. This is where I made a mistake, not, but you did this worst thing three weeks ago. There's genuine curiosity about understanding each other. Help me understand how you see this. Not as a manipulation tactic, but as a real interest in your perspective. When things escalate, both people can pause, regulate, and come back to the conversation. Their capacity, there's capacity to repair after rupture. The goal is connection and understanding, not winning or being right. You can disagree and still feel fundamentally safe with each other. And if you have children and you're walking on eggshells in your relationship, I need to talk about what they're learning. Children are incredibly attuned to emotional dynamics. Even if you're trying to hide it, they feel the tension. They notice that you're different when your partner is around. They're watching how conflict gets handled, how emotions get expressed, and how boundaries work. When they watch you walk on eggshells, they learn their authentic feelings and needs should be suppressed to keep the peace. Your child learns that other people's emotions are more important than their own. Your child learns that love looks like self-abandonment and hypervigilance. They learn that they should monitor other people's moods and adjust themselves accordingly. They learn that speaking up has consequences. They also learn from watching the reactive partner that emotional intensity is how you get your needs met. It's okay to make others responsible for your feelings and that you don't need to regulate yourself if others will do it for you. So you're teaching your children to repeat this cycle, to mistreat their partners, and to not learn what love really is. And these lessons get wired into their developing nervous system. I don't care how many times you tell them the right way, they're going to do what you do. That old saying, do as I say, not as I do, that is so shitty, makes me so angry, and it's so disgusting. What a cop out for parenting. Do better in your actions, not your words, because your actions are who you are. Your words are who you want to be. You're not just modeling a relationship, you're teaching them how to be in a relationship, what to expect and what to tolerate. And I know some of you are staying for the kids. You're trying to protect them from the disruption of separation or divorce. But consider what you're protecting them from versus what you're exposing them to. Divorce is hard for kids, absolakin' Lutley. But so is growing up in a home where one parent is walking on eggshells, where conflicts never get resolved, just avoided, where emotional intensity is how problems get handled. They learn that this is what relationships look like. Sometimes staying and modeling eggshell walking is more damaging than leaving and modeling self-respect, boundaries, and healing. I'm not saying leave immediately. I'm saying that staying isn't neutral. It has a cost. If you're listening to this and you recognize yourself as the person who creates the eggshells, thank you for staying. That this is taking courage. You might feel defensive, ashamed, angry. All that's okay. They all make sense. Your emotional reactivity, whether it's explosive, anger, cold withdrawal, defensiveness, or making them responsible for your feelings, is creating an environment where they can't be honest. That doesn't make you a bad person, but it does mean you have work to do. Your intensity likely comes from your own trauma. Maybe you've never learned to regulate yourself. Maybe you have childhood wounds. Understanding where it comes from is important, but it doesn't excuse the impact. So you've got work to do. You've got trauma work to do. You need to speak with a therapist. Practice repair consistently. Actively invite honesty and regulate your emotions. Learn how to self-soothe. Talk about your childhood. If you're walking on eggshells on your relationship, I want you to know this is not normal. This is not what healthy relationships feel like. And this is not your fault. You are not too sensitive. You are not overreacting. You are not asking for too much. The bare minimum of a healthy relationship is feeling emotionally safe to be yourself. This pattern comes from trauma. It lives in your nervous system, and healing is required more than trying harder in your relationship. This requires trauma work. If your partner is willing to do their own work, transformation is possible. It's hard, but it is definitely doable. If they're not willing, you have to make different choices because you cannot heal from childhood trauma while actively experiencing emotional unsafety in your adult relationship. Because this pattern just keeps getting reinforced. Your options might all feel terrible, but staying in a relationship that requires you to abandon yourself isn't neutral. It has real costs to you, your nervous system, your mental health, your physical health, your sense of self. And solid ground doesn't always mean a transformed relationship. Sometimes it means finding your own footing regardless of whether your partner changes. And sometimes it means walking away from the eggshells entirely, even when that feels impossible. You get to choose. Even if no one modeled that for you, you get to choose you. Even if it feels selfish, even if it's messy and hard and scary, you get to choose yourself. Because choosing yourself might mean staying and building boundaries. It might mean leaving. It might mean getting support to figure out what you need. But it stops with stop it starts with stopping the internal argument about whether your experience is valid. Because it is. You deserve better and you are capable of making different choices, even when those choices feel impossible right now. Both of you deserve relationships where authenticity is possible, where conflict doesn't equal danger, where two imperfect people can be honest with each other and work through hard things together. That's the relationship worth building. And if you can't build it together, you can at least commit to building that capacity within yourself. I know this was heavy and probably brought up a lot. So if you're feeling activated, please reach out for support. Talk to a trauma-informed therapist, call a trusted friend. If you're wondering whether what you're experiencing is abuse, reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233. 1-800-799-7233. You don't have to figure this out all today, but you do get to start asking different questions. I'm rooting for you, my dear. I see you, and I believe you deserve relationships built on solid ground, not eggshells. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I know this was heavy. Again, if you're feeling activated or overwhelmed, another resource I'd like to offer is 741-741. It's a texting hotline, mental health texting hotline, and they will help you gather some coping skills while they're on the line with you. Talk to a therapist, talk to a trusted friend. I'd love to hear from you. Got a question? Message me. Want to help more women hear this episode and support me by helping my podcast grow? Please share this. Please comment, leave a review. This helps me show up in searches so that more women can heal. I just want to help everyone heal. Want to work with me? I offer virtual therapy for women in Texas who are navigating trauma, neurodivergence, and life transitions. If what I share on this podcast resonates with you and you're looking for personalized support, I'd love to work with you. Book a 15-minute consultation form via the link tree. Until next time, my dears, I want you to know that you are never too much, never too late, and you don't have to figure out all alone because I'm right here every Wednesday and Friday. May you be happy and free. May mine and your healing ripple outwards to bless the world with happiness and freedom. Take care of you, and I'll see you soon.
