Ep.1: Rebuilding Your Life and Reconnecting with your Children: Amanda's story

Amanda Nguyen shares her story, from full time stay at home mom, who after 20 plus years, found herself in a custody battle with her abuser- a tug of war between her and her abuser, where the children were the rope. She chose to lay down the rope, with the hope and intention of being able to reconnect with her children.

Through this, she did hit rock bottom, she was suicidal, but, has built back her life all the while, learning how to stay in contact with her 3 boys who live fulltime with their dad. While still living with the pain of not being able to parent as she once was able to, she's learned to parent from afar and managed to build a life she loves, despite her pain. 

If you have experienced the intentional fracturing of your child's bond with you, the weaponization of your children, and feel helpless and hopeless, this is the conversation for you. 

You can follow Amanda and her story as it unfolds on IG @thebakealong. 

Visit: https://chantalcontorinescoaching.com to learn how to work with me.

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This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice.

Transcript

0:02

Hello everybody. Welcome to my very first episode of The Survivor's Playbook. I am Chantal Contorines, and this is the podcast for every survivor of abuse, be they parent, child, or parent who's being forced to co-parent with their abuser. And this is with a twist, if abusers can have a playbook that they play by, why can't survivors have a playbook? And this podcast is stories of hope from both experts as well as survivors, and sometimes the powerful combination of expert survivors. On that note, our very first guest is one of my favorite humans in this space. I have, collaborated with her extensively in the past. Her name is Amanda Nguyen, and she's both a survivor as well as an expert advocate. On that note, thank you so much, Amanda, for being here for my very first episode. I'm beyond excited and also a little bit nervous'cause I've never done this before. So thank you so much. So let's dive into you a little bit, as much as you feel comfortable talking about your situation and how you climbed yourself out of the bottom. Whew. Okay. Let's not get too much in the weeds. Yeah. Because these are stories of hope. Yeah. But a little context for my background is I was married to my ex-husband at the age of 21. Met him when I was 15. We were together for 30 years, and it took me that long to find my way out of the abusive relationship. I didn't quite have a grasp on the depths of the abuse. But after I left, it became very clear that I had been in an extremely abusive relationship. And that's very common, right? So many people assume that they know when they're in the relationship, but abuse is so insidious that you don't actually understand you, it's not good, you don't feel happy, but it often takes time. That's called the delayed realization, right? And that's very common. Especially psychological abuse. Yeah. If others can't understand it, even the person in it can't understand it. It's very nuanced and it happens over a long period of time, and so you don't recognize it easily. I naively thought that I could just leave and parent, co-parent with my ex-husband and I was mistaken. Yep yep. As soon as he understood that I was really leaving he be started to behave differently. And so I had to really think on the fly and become strategic about how I would protect myself and my children after. Let's see. Three to four, three years of prolonged litigation in the family court. I decided to do what I call dropping the rope and the tug of war that you can't win. I quickly realized that the courts were no match for the manipulation and skills and tactics that my abuser possessed, that he would actually weaponize the courts as a way to further disconnect me from my children. And so I took, again, I went against my attorney's recommendations and against a lot of people's recommendations, and I left the courts. I surrendered custody of my three boys. They were ages nine nine. 15 and 17 at the time. I think, I can't remember exactly, but there's been lot that's been going on since then. Yeah. A lot's been going on. So I negotiated outside of the courts with my attorney's help to surrender custody because I felt that would be the best way to in some ways it's an odd strategy. Because you're actually giving the abuser exactly what he wanted, control over the children, but you're also not engaging in the battle that he desperately wants. And I think it's so important, that piece right there. So you went against the recommendations'cause we've talked before Experts, your legal team. So what you actually did is something that a lot of survivors have a hard time doing is trusting their instincts, right? When you've been partnered with this type of person, when you've been in a relationship being a parent or a partner, they gaslight you so frequently that you actually stop being able to trust your intuition because everything is off within your system. And I think that's really powerful because you literally took a giant leap of faith in yourself Knowing that you actually knew your abuser better than anybody else, better than any expert any legal team. And, this was the only way for you and your children to possibly survive this And so that's incredible. Honestly, that's actually gives me goosebumps because you, you did what so many people are scared to do is to trust themselves despite that's a lot of pressure. To be under, to have people telling you, don't do this. You should do this. And you're like, no, I have to lay down the rope. The shame that you carry. Yeah. The shame that you carry from relinquishing custody. I was a stay-at-home mother to my three boys. That was the only life I knew. And I had to grapple with the idea that would society shame me? But I have to, every day that I talk to someone and they ask the question, do you have children? What would my answer be? And could I deal with, I don't know. Judgment, criticism, judgment, shame, especially as a mom, right? Especially when that has been your entire world. Your identity was so entwined with your three boys? That was who you were, a parent first and foremost. The role loss, that was a role loss. That was so much of who I was, a mother, a stayat home mother full-time, knew nothing else other than that. And how sad is it that part of your decision making was how you were going to be viewed by others? It shouldn't have even been that. It's what should be in my best interest and my children's best interest, not what other people think of me, because nobody understands this. Nobody does. If, and unless you've experienced this, you simply don't understand what survivors and victims have to endure. And what that looks like and the toll it takes on your mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health. Both adults and children alike. But yeah, no, no one. No one could give me the answers. I had to find them within myself. And after 30 years of my own intuition just being destroyed, I had to find that, I had to realize that I was the best expert in my case as everyone is their own best expert in their case. And that is actually what we learn in school, is I'm a graduate student earning my degree in counseling psychology. So let's just stop and recognize that you went from this to where you are right now, which is empowering and educating yourself, and then helping others do so as well. Honestly, every time I talk to you, I just love you a little bit more. We can talk more about my studies. Yeah. But they've been really helpful personally and my work with reconnecting with my three boys. But the, I had to say, this is what I know is true. And I took a really bold move. And I remember that day because the person I had to convince most was my attorney, who is a dear friend and I love her and she's amazing, and she was by my side the entire time. But she's an attorney and so she has a set of tools. And those tools are the courts justice, the law. But those are not tools that could be used in my case because they were ineffective. They, the courts do not have the capacity to deal with the psychological issues that were involved in my case. I'm not saying it's not for everyone, but for mine, it was not going to work. And so I called her one day and I still had, visitation with my youngest son who was nine at the time. And I said, I am not showing up to pick my son up this weekend. I'm not doing it. And that and how did that feel for you? It was sickening. It was sickening because in that moment I was, in some ways in a lot of ways I was abandoning my son and it's what you felt that you were doing. You weren't actually, you were doing this because you knew that he was going to traumatize your children further. This is the thing is that certain abusers, not every abuser is as is exactly the same, but yours was very, and is very adept at manipulating people psychologically and mentally and emotionally. And you knew that if you continued, he was just gonna keep putting more pressure on your children. More pressure on my children and on myself. And it became very clear that I had to find a way to get out, and that was drawing a line in the sand and saying, I will not pick up my son. I will not allow my ex-husband to engage us all in this battle to further separate us and abuse us. And that was when my attorney knew, okay, we need to find another solution. And she started working on finding a solution. It was a very creative solution. And, she's a masterful negotiator, and, but you had a good advocate in your corner, right? So even though she didn't necessarily agree with your approach, because that was outside of her scope, right? She respected you and your choice and your intuition enough to say, okay, now we're gonna pivot. Yep. I'm gonna be the best advocate for you. And most people don't have that. Yes. And so I was really fortunate to have her, and I relied on her. For her expertise in negotiation, not necessarily in family court law. Yeah. Although she was an expert, but she was an expert negotiator. And so that's really was a pivotal moment when she drafted the document that released all of us from the abuse in the family courts because you like literally took away the only thing that tethered you to him, that he could actually continue to further abuse you and your children with which you just as you said, and I love this description, you were in a tug of war and your children were the rope and you chose to lay down the rope. And cut off his supply. But that didn't, but that did not mean that I was giving up hope on reconnecting with my kids. I also realized that I needed to heal because once I understood that I was a victim of domestic abuse, extreme course of control, I knew that there was a lot that I had to unpack and there was no way I could heal with my children if I wasn't starting the process of healing myself. And so I reached out to, first of all, I started writing. That's really the first thing I did, and that's how I stumbled upon you was you wrote this beautiful nine piece essay. And I was like, wow, okay. She's a person who understands this. Yeah. So I thought it was very cathartic to share my experience, and I did it selfishly because I wanted to write these essays and I placed them on Instagram. That was my placeholder, where my story could be shared in case my boys ever found it, in case they went searching for what's the truth? Where's mom's side of this story? And so I put it there not realizing that it would resonate with others, and that people would reach out to me and say that this is happening to me. Maybe this is what I need to do. Help me figure out. And so these series of essays called How to Separate a Mother and Child, just really went through the, the strategy that abusers use to separate you. And I also talked about. The ways in which I did not show up as a great parent where I fell for the traps that my abuser laid, and I actually made it worse for my kids. And this is the thing that so many protective parents grapple with is when you are partnered with an abuser and you share children together, it's impossible to show up as the kind of parent you would if you didn't have the overarching overwhelming stress from the abuse. We are triggered, we are in survival mode. We're in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Oftentimes, our children do not get the best version of us Not because we don't love our children unconditionally, wholeheartedly, but because we ourselves are victims of abuse and we are barely surviving. We are treading water and oftentimes going under. And so this is really important for so many people to understand you have to give yourself grace and space, you did the best that you could with the support, knowledge and tools that you had at the time. Because I know a, like a lot of my clients, they, feel tremendous shame and guilt for not showing up the way that they could have had they had the right support and the right nurturing environment for themselves to be the best parent they possibly could be, right? And I had to reflect on the ways that I didn't show up and I. Not wallow in it and linger there, but just logically think, okay, this is how I showed up, but I need to show up differently for my kids if I really wanna help them. And that's when I started educating myself on the psychology of what happens in these abusive dynamics and how our abusers seek to create chaos. And we, of course we fall for it. Because we become reactive as a way to survive. Our behaviors make a lot of sense when you look at them through the perspective of the abusive dynamic. They, everything makes sense about how we behave, why we don't leave our abuser, why we parent in certain ways. And I, when I left that abusive dynamic, when I surrendered custody, that didn't mean I was surrendering the idea of being a parent. It. Meant that I didn't, I wasn't physically with my kids. Yes. And the case with my older boys, it also meant I was not talking with them not one word from them. So I had to figure out how do you parent from afar? How do you parent from the sidelines? And the first step was healing myself. And I'm not gonna say that I am healed. It is will be a life long journey for me. Yeah. It's not a destination, it's a journey. And you take two steps forward and half a step back. And there are some days where you grieve and you cocoon and you're a blubbering mess. And other days where you feel, okay I've made the right decisions for my, for myself and for my children. And so for you, you must have hit rock bottom. Yep. I will say that I was suicidal. And that is a terrible place to be for any person, but let alone a protective parent. Because, and there's so much going on behind that. So how did you, as a protective parent who's had to let go of the rope in order to heal and then reconnect with your children, right? Because you knew that was the best strategy for you and your children. You were trusting your instincts against everybody else, telling you completely differently. How did you climb back from that lowest of lows? So first was sharing my story, putting it on paper, writing it, so it's there for me to just review because sometimes I forget how bad it was. I know that sounds strange, but No, but it's not because. Like we minimize to be able to survive this. When you're in the relationship, you have to minimize what you're experiencing? You justify it. There's always an excuse or they just had a stressful day. Or if I just did this a little bit differently, if I was more nurturing. If I was more accommodating? So everything, and when you're in it, you can't see the forest for the trees and gaslighting is so effective? So we actually start to question ourselves and they also love to project, so they, you are the problem for so many of the issues that you experience and which is why writing things down is so important? Even if it, you've never broadcast it to the world. Even if you don't publish this stuff, even just for you in your own private time to say, actually I'm not crazy. I actually really experienced abuse and it was actually worse that I'm painting it to be, because we still oftentimes minimize it, even if we do understand, we say it wasn't that bad. And sharing my stories opened me up to a support network that I didn't realize was out there. And so it connected me with other parents in the same situation. It also let the people around me know exactly what was going on in my life without you having to, every time you encountered them, give them like, the Cole's Notes version of, they could just read this on their own time and understand where you're coming from, but also, you just talked about something that's so important. Abuse is so isolating, abusers isolate their victims, be they children or adults? So part of healing is actually reconnecting with people who understand without you having to explain, write down your essay. People just Hey, totally get what you experienced, Amanda. And you don't have to justify your behavior. You don't have to justify this, like the choices that you made, which, when you are partnered with an abuser, they take away all your optimal choices. And so you're left having to choose from less than optimal choices. So no matter what you do, it's not gonna be the best decision because they've taken those all away. It's going to be the best choices you have given the circumstances. Correct. So writing the next step was education. I had to learn as much about the psychology of this, and I stumbled upon a doctor's lesson, the class about protective parenting. How best to reconnect with your kid. And it's not a straightforward path, it takes a lot of turns, but the first is recognizing your own traumas and starting to heal them. And for everyone that is different. And it's a combination of things and you just have to keep at it. Every morning you get up and you keep at it. And for me it was a combination of educating myself, seeking support from my friends and my family. The solidarity of the community that was experiencing the same thing as I was and yoga. Yep. Yep. Therapy. And it's really just a, it's a mix of things, right? And you just see, you see what works in helping you deal with your traumas. I never stopped communicating with my kids. I continuously sent texts whether they were reading'em or not. And then I did what I knew how to do best, which was bake. And so I would send care packages to their house and I didn't know if they got'em or not, but I sent, there was no expectation of acknowledgement. It was high love, low pressure. Yeah. They didn't have to, they did not have to respond. And this is a really big thing because so many parents, protective parents especially, become very upset when they don't get responses. But you have to understand your child is doing the best they can to survive in an inhospitable like environment. And sometimes a response is simply too much. Like they are not safe to respond. But it doesn't mean that you don't stop, right? And your text should not be, I really miss you and I can't believe, this should be, I love you. I thought of you. I saw this thing and it made me think of you, this comic strip. I thought that you would enjoy this. I saw this book. Maybe you could read the book. In fact, I can email you the book or mail you the book? So low pressure, there was no expectation of a response. And don't take it personally? Your child is also a victim of abuse. That's the reality. Correct. So I did a lot of research initially on how to communicate with my kid in a one way fashion. And everything that you said is exactly what I did. No need for a response and just send love. Just tell them, oh, today I thought of you because it was Easter and I remembered last Easter we did this. Wasn't that fun? Send pictures. Hey, this picture popped up in my photo album today, and I just thought of you. That's all you do. You don't say, why are you not talking to me? Where are you? Are you safe? I miss you so much. Tell your father that this is not right. This is, yeah. There's no shaming or guilting or obligation. They already get so much of that from the other parent. They get so much pressure, and I call it high pressure, low love. The text that I sent to my middle son that sparked our reconnection was a text where I apologized, and I, he had given me this necklace and he was quite young when he had given it to me when we were in the divorce process and I was nasty and I said, how did you even pay for this necklace? Did you get the money from your father? Horrible. Oh my God. That was horrible. But I said it, right? Yeah. So this is the thing though is we are human and we're humans who are under tremendous pressure? We're in a pressure cooker. So that was not your optimal, finest parenting? You're not gonna be, broadcasting that far and wide, although we just did on the podcast. But this is also to validate everybody We've all done this. Even parents who have the most supportive partner or co-parent and have no financial obligations that that they can't meet. We all make mistakes we all say things in the heat of the moment due to stress, whatever that stress might be. And so what do we do? We repair. Yeah. And so I needed to repair that and I sent a text and I said, Hey, that was horrible. What I said to you. I'm thinking that you must have felt really bad because I diminished the gift that you gave me that was so touching. And so I'm just sorry for that. And that was it. End of the story, couple days later, boom. A reply and it was, mom, I can't forgive you for a lot of the things that you've done to us, but I'm willing to talk with you if you do one thing for me. My response was, understood. What can I do for you? That was it. But what a simple gift you gave your boy. Of just hearing what he was saying. Validating his feelings and his emotions without any kind of pressure. Just what can I do? And so this is been a lot of my work is realizing that there are several narratives. Each person holds their own narrative of the events that happened. It's like history, right? It's our history, it's our own personal history, and it's biased. It's our perspective on the world. And we look at that through our trauma lens, through all the lenses that have created us to this point. And so we each have our own narrative, our own history. So I had to understand that he has his narrative, right? I don't, I have not lived his life. I was not a 13-year-old boy. He had a different relationship with his father than I had in, in several ways. So he viewed him differently and didn't fully grasp what the abuse was and what was happening. And so I had to understand that we had two versions of a story and neither were right nor wrong, and I had to respect his version, and I had to hold back on telling my version if I wanted to reconnect with him. And so his request, I could simply meet it because I let go of my narrative, my version of reality, and I just accepted his. And that opened the door to us reconnecting. So now we were communicating on text, and I was keeping it very light and fun and really asking him, how are you? What do you need? What's going on in your life? How can I support you? And I really became his therapist. And I think this is the key to reconnecting with your kids, is you do not parent the way that you thought you should parent, you become a therapist for your child. And when I reconnected with him, I was just starting graduate school working on my master's in counseling psychology. And what I didn't realize is that all the skills they were teaching us about how to be a really good therapist were also the same for like how to be a really good parent that is attuned to their child and can validate and repair any ruptures in the relationship as they happen. That's a really hard skill when you're a parent because you have to let go of the parent so much, right? Of so much. Like you have to relinquish control as a parent and parent from a different perspective. Graduate school has solidified it, and now I parent like a therapist. And those skills have been really helpful in helping me reconnect with my son and stay connected with my younger son as well. So you've been through it all and we've heard your personal perspective, right? Like your own story of abuse, how you went through the system, how you walked out of the system, because you knew that the system was not going be supporting you and your family the way that it needed to, and for you to actually live. You were going to continue to be abused. The system was gonna be weaponized against you and your boys. Now can we talk a little bit about this wonderful document that you sent to me and that I'm still reading. Because I think this is also really helpful for protective parents and I don't know what you plan on doing with this if you're gonna publish it, if it's gonna be expanded. But I think these are also really important tools that pair beautifully with what you've just spoken about. With how you actually parent your boys. Even though you don't have the physical proximity, you're still parenting in a different way. And I think that's for every protective parent. I always tell my clients, we're not parenting the way normal parents parent. We have a different set of rules of engagement. Why? Because there's coercive control. And so we don't approach our children the way an average parent would, approach their children when there's issues when they act out. Because we're not simply dealing with children's emotions and their lack of, maturity and hormones as they, work through teenage years. We're dealing with so much more complex. So do you wanna talk a little bit about this document that you have? Yeah, so I started writing this document on how to reconnect with your children. And going step by step. It was based off a lot of my self study around estrangement. And estrangement is defined as separation from a family member, a loved one when you're an adult, so it's not when you're a child. But there's a lot of lessons around estrangement and how to reconnect. And so I took those lessons. And so I took the lessons on estrangement and how families reconnected to build the foundation of this document. I also took a lot about attachment theory. And how our kids are attached to us and how they're compromised. A lot of it had to deal with informed care around trauma survivors and how we approach trauma survivors'cause a lot of us are dealing with complex trauma and it's actually still occurring. So the idea of PTSD where it's post-traumatic doesn't really work for us because we're all still living. Yeah. Like we're living in the trauma. When you are tethered to your abuser with children, you're still living the trauma. The trauma doesn't go away. You're still being forced into a trauma situation by this person. What I really like about this I think people are better able to understand it from this viewpoint, which is more of a macro. Which is the cult. When you have a cult it's all about brainwashing and in like indoctrination and isolation and manipulation and control about outside sources. It's us versus them. And if you view an abusive relationship in the same, be it partner or parent, in the same lens, when you have a person who's so indoctrinated and is enmeshed with the cult leader and the cult itself trying to force them out with logic doesn't work, they become so much more defensive and they're more likely to withdraw from you. Even though it makes sense to you from the outside looking into them, they've had their, like their minds have been worked on, they've been manipulated. It's active brainwashing and that's what happens with adults and children who are, in a relationship with a coercive controller. It's the same sort of premise. We just have the micro level that's more of the macro level. So that was my second area of study. Cults. Yeah. And deprogramming. And the strategies that they used that families had used to pull their children out of the cult, their adult children, typically out of a cult and back to them. And in the idea of working with families that are suffering through estrangement as well as cults, the idea is not to use force. Force has been used on survivors and our children from day one. That's how the coercive controller operates. They use force coercion. And so it means that whatever tactics we use, whatever tools we use, you can never use force. And that goes back to the therapeutic skills that I'm learning. There never. Never can it, it's never effective if you've used force to make it happen. Kids, people have to come willingly to therapy. So this was my next idea, that reunification therapy, it falls flat on the very premise because reunification therapy uses force. It uses a court order by a judge that says to a kid, you are complied. You are you must comply, and you are compelled to come to this therapy session and sit with a parent that you don't wanna be with. It doesn't it? It never works. No, because again, you are then it's. Even though the intention is totally different, it's the same premise. Your child is being coerced, they're being forced to do something against their will. Even if their will is built on a foundation of lies and a narrative that is false, it's what your children are currently experiencing. It's how they feel right now. Doesn't matter why they feel that way, it's how they feel. And that's part of the validation and the respecting of their feelings and their emotions, even though you know why they have those feelings and emotions and it's not truly how they really feel. If you were to, pair back and go all the way down to the basics, that's how your child feels right now. Correct? Correct. So I took a playbook from deprogramming in a way. And estrangement stories from families that were estranged. And it's hard because I understand that parents. Think they have very few options and that even if they're using the courts to get a child to comply with the orders and sit in an office with them, it just, it's never gonna work. It just doesn't. But I also, in this document outline strategies for what to do if your kid is sitting across from you in reunification therapy, and a lot of it comes from giving your child the say and the control and the power. They haven't ever had that. They're very beautiful. That is critical, right? Just like us, just as the adult who was abused, our children have never had the power to advocate for themselves. To express themselves without fear of criticism or shame or mockery or judgment or, wrath. And so that's a huge, and it's counterintuitive and it's really hard for a lot of protective parents who are desperate. If your child's attachment and the relationship with you has been severed or is being fractured, you're desperate to cling on, you're desperate to grab onto your child because it's, you are so upset by this all and understandably. This is exactly why abusers do this. Correct, correct. Because it's the ultimate pain point for any parent. You're grieving a child who's still alive. We grasp at desperate measures, hoping to find the results we want. And there's a lot of injustice behind what we experience, and so we have to let go of that, right? It's fair, we clinging to that injustice, right? This is not right, this is not fair and correct. It is not right. It is not fair. But if we hope to find justice through using force or even the courts, it's the wrong place to look for justice really. So that's like the first premise, giving your kids some control and some say more than you would in a normal parenting situation. That's the hard part. So we're definitely parenting differently and this is really important because a lot of my clients and even just a lot of my followers get really up and arm. No, I parent the way that I parent. I'm like, and I totally understand where you're coming from. However, you can't parent the way an average parent parents. All those books that we have read on parenting really don't apply when you have coerce some coercive control in the mix. It just, you have to, all that goes off to the wayside and you're parenting from a very different place. This document that I created. It was created for my attorney because she had said, because of her, because of the issue she had to deal with, in my case, she became aware that the family courts were no place to take these custody battles, justice. There's not gonna be any justice found there very rarely. So she decided that she would no longer engage in custody disputes for her clients. She would keep the divorces that she was handling to just the finances. But at the same time, she also felt really bad because she didn't have a solution for these parents. Because when you're divorcing, it's not just about the finances, it's a lot about the custody. And so she asked me if I could. Help with the clients she had and help them find another way that didn't use the courts, and this document was created from that. And so I'm still working on it to fine tune it, but it's very much a work in progress and I hope to use it to help her clients. But beyond that, it made me think that, look, I wrote a series of essays a few years ago on how to separate a mother and child. Now would maybe be a good time to write a series of essays on how to reconnect a mother and child. And I use mother because I'm a mother.'cause you are a mother and that's your own personal perspective. You're not saying this is very key because there's a lot of people come out of the woodwork and they get defensive. She's not saying that men don't get abused, but this is her own personal perspective. She is a woman, she's a mom. So that's where this is from. But you can easily say, how a parent can reconnect with their child. Yep. Can change the pronoun to suit your own specific it's interchangeable. Yeah. But I feel like I need to bring it from my perspective, but that's genuine and authentic. It's your perspective. So maybe a series of essays needs to be written on how to reconnect a mother and child a parent and child. And so I'm working on those that could be put out on Instagram, because I think it would just bring back the idea that there's hope and reconnection and also a real time diary on how I'm reconnecting. So that people could see that it's not linear. That if you do make contact with your kid, it's likely to have highs and lows. You're likely to experience times when there's no connection and they've just gone silent. You feel like all is lost. Then there's moments where there's lots of connection and you might feel a little overwhelmed by that amount of connection as well. And so it will maybe offer a real time diary on. I love that. Connect honestly, like your first essay, which is what I think somebody posted it in, like their stories and I started and it was like a rabbit hole. I went down and the way you write, you are an exceptional, I'm an English psychology major, so English is I love good writing and you are an exceptional writer and the way you word it is so authentic and genuine, and it's so relatable. And so even if you don't understand, like even if you've never experienced abuse, I think it, it really helps people from the outside go, oh, this is how this happened. This is why he or she stayed and they didn't leave. This is why it looks this way. This is why there's reactive, emotional messages and, breakdowns. This is how this happens. So I think you're not only helping survivors who are living it and experiencing it or have, escaped and have moved on, but also for society at large to say, okay. And I think the more we have these types of real life experiences that are brought to the forefront, the better off everybody is, because knowledge truly is power not only for survivors, but also to get the supportive community. Because if you haven't experienced this, it's really hard to understand. The nuanced complexities of abuse and how seemingly smart people, fall for this. But you have to remember, abusers are expert con people. They've spent their entire lives learning how to con people. And abusers aren't always horrible. If they were horrible all the time, we would be more than likely to leave. But they give you just enough good stuff that you feel hopeful and you feel like you have to try harder. And it's also important for us to realize what we experienced is also what our children are experiencing. It's very similar. There's differences, but how we were confused and we were adults who understood that abuse actually happens they're just children and it's their parent. Correct. I spent a lot of time explaining my abuse to people who were not familiar with this style of abuse. And that helped me get really clear on, on what I had experienced. And so every time I told my story, I felt it was a, an attempt to get people outside of this world to understand and if they could just come away with a little bit of understanding, I had succeeded. And so it helps you get really clear with your story, but you mentioned something about your children are in the same situation and I think we forget about that because, in abuse, the focus is so much on what happened to us. And we have to understand that the same thing that happened to us is happening to our children. And so that's why we're the best experts because abusers typically tend to abuse and the same manner and fashion across the board with anyone they come in contact with. They have their own playbook. And tried and tested techniques. They like literally have been doing this for a long time and they've come up with their best techniques. That, that actually have been proven to work. It's fascinating because when I help other parents, the, one of the first things I do is I ask to read their text messages or their email correspondence with their ex. And the thing, I just see a pattern that becomes very clear in the way that abusers communicate it is mind-boggling because it really feels like they all read the same document on, it's like they all went to the same school, right? Like, how, and that's what's truly fascinating from like a psychological perspective, is how do people from different cultures, religions, backgrounds, genders, how do they adapt in this way, in this maladaptive way, and how do they learn the same techniques? That is what's truly so fascinating from a purely, educational perspective. Unfortunately this fascination also comes with a lot of devastation.'Cause they just cause so much devastation for anybody that they come in contact with that they have a prolonged relationship with. And I can say from my schooling speaking with professors what, how can you help abusers see what they're doing? And most of the time their answer is, we can't. It's really in these situations, it is a little humorous because the way you treat it is you treat everyone that had to deal with it. You help them heal and recover from the abuse It's very rare that you can treat the abuser. And that's also how you find, it's all the people who are in therapy, are, there's always a common denominator, and it's the person in the middle, and everybody around is doing all the work to heal themselves. And this person who's like the catalyst for all this introspection and deep dives and, undoing like all the things that have happened they're incapable of the introspection needed and the vulnerability, because this is hard work, which is why so many people, like in families that are dysfunctional, continue, the same dysfunction that they grew up in is because it's hard to undo, it's hard to be vulnerable, it's hard to do the work. So our kids, we will see, we'll watch them, and a lot of the things that they do will feel very familiar to how the abuser acts. And I've had a lot of parents say to me, oh my goodness, my kid is just like the abuser. They have all the same traits. And I'm like, yeah, but no. They're not the story has not been written for them yet. Yeah. They aren't an abuser. But they are being weaponized. They are being trained. They are being, and you're being abused by proxy. So where your ex let off your child now comes back to you and they're mimicking the intonations, the same wording, the verbiage, the body posture like rolls of the eyes. And it's so triggering for so many people, because it's the person, it's the people that you love the most, more than anybody else in the world. And they're treating you the way that your ex treated you. So that has to be the shift in your thinking. You can't start saying, my kids like the abuser. No, they're not. They have behaviors that are similar to the abuser because they've had to, they've had to in order to survive those, they're adapting hope, right? Yep. And so we have an opportunity as the parents, if we have done our own work and we've started healing, we have an opportunity to heal with our children. And so a lot of the study I've done is on co-regulation and how we can build capacity in our children by healing alongside with them. Children need our nervous system. They borrow it from us. And this can be up to the ages of, I don't even know, let's just say into early adulthood. Because a lot of these kids have a diminished capacity. So much of their development has been stalled because of the abuse. And so we have to remember that the kid we see in front of us at age let's say 15, should not be compared to another 15-year-old. So don't compare your children. That 15-year-old that you have before you has developed in a completely different way. And so you need to really be able to hold space for who they are at that moment and parent them in a way that maybe feels a little odd. You might have to treat them like a toddler. Extreme patience. But at the same time, giving them a lot of control and say. And that's very scary. That's a weird world to be in. So many people are like, but I'm gonna create a narcissist. I'm gonna create an abuser if I don't have rigid boundaries and there aren't consequences to behavior. And I get a lot of backlash online with this, a lot of people are like, no, you're absolutely wrong. And it's not my job to try to persuade you to do it. This is the work that I do with my clients. But it's, and it's counterintuitive, which it is. Why we've talked about you are not going to be parenting the way the average parent parents. You're just not. Those same tools are not going to work with your child who's an active victim of abuse. So let's say your kid is yelling at you and they're angry, or they decide to give you the silent treatment, and these are behaviors that your abuser used. The difference is that your kid is using'em to survive in an impossible situation. And so what you have to do is look beneath that behavior and try to meet their primary needs. Which for all of us, it's the same. It really is. It's safety and being allowed to be vulnerable with someone that's what our children need. They need to know that no matter what they say to us, they're gonna be safe and we're not gonna use it against them. That's the definition of unconditional love. Exactly right. No matter, and I've told my children and it's a harsh way to look at it, but this is what I mean when I tell you that I love you unconditionally, it doesn't mean that I always, like your behavior. Your behavior is not who you are. You are different from your behavior. Your behavior comes from a, trauma. What you've experienced in the day. I always love you. I don't always like your behavior so much so that if you were to kill a person, I would still love you. I wouldn't like your behavior, but I would still love you. My love is not conditional. It's not based on what you do or what you don't do or how you show up in the world. It's based.'cause I actually love you unconditionally no matter what. You'd obviously have to face your consequences to your actions, but I would be there to support you. You wouldn't get like a free card. I wouldn't try to cover it up, but I would be there to support you as your mom Correct. Yeah. That's exactly what we need to do. We need to give them the unconditional love that they're not getting, much of the love they get from their other parent is conditional. Yeah. And we don't even, it's not even love. Like honestly. Yeah. If you define love, what they're experiencing isn't love. And that's why I always use brackets, right? Quotes, like we can call it love, but that's not really what we show. What we model is what real love looks like, what genuine love looks like. And it's not conditional, it's not transactional. It's not based on, if you do this for me that I'm gonna give you some affection and some attention today. It's all the time, it's all encompassing. It doesn't mean that we're perfect parents, that we show up perfectly for our children. We make mistakes, but then we apologize and we repair. Which is also something they'll never get with their abuser. Correct. There's very little chance for repair. Yeah. It always does come with a condition, but once you realize that your child is not an abuser, you separate them from their other parent, you can start to look at their behaviors with a different perspective and make sense of them. And this is when, this is what they call like attunement, right? When you are actually in attunement with your child, you can look from their perspective and see the world through their eyes for a moment and really feel what they're feeling apart from your experiences. And kids feel that. If you've ever had therapy, you'll know that feeling when a therapist is really connected with you in a way that shows you, they understand, they authentically understand. That's attunement, that's what we want with our children. We want that attunement. And so that's a big part of connecting with your kids, but you have to release this idea that they're just like their abuser. Yeah. And divest yourself from that belief or that fear. That's a, so many protective parents have two fears, I think, that their children are gonna become just like their abuser or that they're gonna partner with an abuser.'Cause it's what they know. And we can't live in fear. It doesn't mean that you don't educate yourself. It doesn't mean that we're not real. Like when I coach I am frank. But you live with. Knowledge. Real knowledge. And that's continuous. You're continuously educating yourself. It's not unlike a one-stop shop where you just take one course, it's constantly reading and investigating and doing deep dives. So you educate yourself because knowledge is always power and empowering. And then you take action and you take action and you also couple that with hope. And I think when you have those three things those three elements, and also support, be it expert support, community support, or preferably both, right? You're more likely to be able to navigate this with more clarity and more confidence and less chaos. They love to create chaos. They love to create exhaustion on every level. Because then you're far easier to manipulate person who's exhausted mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, is more likely to be like a key candidate. To be manipulated and to be controlled. Yeah, exactly. And that's your kid, right? And that was you at that time. And that's what co-regulation is when I talk about like they borrow your nervous system. Yeah. These kids borrow your nervous system,'cause theirs is not fully developed yet to be able to handle the emotions that come with being a victim. Really. Yep. And sustaining this abuse.'Cause the system couldn't protect'em from it. So they borrow your nervous system. You don't want your kids borrowing a traumatized nervous system. So you have to, you're still parenting when you are healing yourself. That's the best gift you can give your kid is a parent that is in the process of healing. On some journey. Yeah. Towards, some sort of healing journey, right? It's like you are a work in progress, right? So it doesn't mean that we expect perfection because what you're actually doing as a protective parent who is still being abused, it doesn't matter if you've laid down the road, there's still abuse in the system, right? There's still abuse happening, there's still trauma and there's still all this sort of stuff. But you do the best that you can and you move forward, right? You embark on a journey that you make for yourself and also for your children, right? Again, you cannot, just like when you're in an airplane, they always say, put it on your own oxygen mask first before you put it on your children. That feels selfish, but it's not. If you put it on your children first, you might expire before you're able to actually help your children. So you have to invest back into yourself. And I think this is also something that so many people who have, experienced abuse have a hard time with, is putting themselves first. It feels selfish, it feels uncomfortable. You've been conditioned to not put yourself first. But if you don't take care of yourself, then you certainly can't show up as the parent that your children actually need and deserve. Correct. Yep. And that's, putting yourself first is gonna be different for Yep. For everybody. Everyone's journey is going to be different. We are giving you like an overview. It doesn't mean you have to follow exactly in this, these footsteps, and do exactly what Amanda did or what I'm talking about. But it's, you adapt, we're giving you a playbook and you use what works for you and put down what doesn't work for you. I learned early on that one of the best ways to help someone leave a cult is to show them a cult member that left and survived and thrived. And so I was like, oh, that's me. I'm the first member to leave our little family cult. Yeah. And I knew that if I wanted my boys to leave, I'd have to show them how to leave. Yeah. And how to leave in a way that they could not only survive, but thrive. And so a part of that was going to school and I made it very public. Yeah. That's why I posted everything on Instagram. Literally laying the foundation for the steps for them to leave. Yeah. And I've talked about that. But you are literally your child's model for how to escape. And if escaping comes at too high of a cost, if you're broken, if you are, in this and you're stuck in this, place where you, there's no forward movement, you're not healing, you're not growing, you're not living, your child is gonna be like, why the heck would I leave? It's just, it's safer to stay with the abuse that I know than venture out on the outside. You would literally, and this is not to place more shame and guilt and pressure on protective parents, but you also have to understand that how you're living your life post escaping is also what your children are looking for and towards. And if you are thriving, it's giving them like a modicum of hope. Hey, there's life on the other side. Yes, this is gonna be hard, but I can actually still live a great life on the other side and my mom or my dad is showing me how to do that. Exactly. Kids are smart. They're gonna choose the person that they think will help them survive. And unfortunately, because abusers diminish their spouses in such a way, kids don't see their other parent as someone that can protect them. And this is again, nothing to do with how wonderful and powerful and capable you are as a survivor, but when children, it's survival. Who is going to be the best leader? We are our children's leaders. We have to be confident, we have to be, capable. We don't want leaders of our countries, of our organizations who are lacking confidence, who are feeling hopeless, helpless, and powerless. That is not attractive. We don't gravitate towards them. No. You like, you gravitate towards people who are confident that they can, help you. That they are going to be, and our children are the same. They're looking to you going, is this person gonna be able to keep me safe? Correct. Which is why the system fails us too.'Cause the system, keeps enabling abusers. Yeah. And they don't understand how survivors present. It's they're like, yeah that's a whole nother rabbit hole. Yeah. And we, yeah. I am just so thankful that you were able to take the time to come on and be my first guest on my first episode of my podcast. I wanna have you on more'cause I feel like we could talk for hours and hours. So much of what you do is not only remarkable, but it's also exactly the kind of playbook that people, survivors should be looking at. Again, not exactly what you're doing, but taking parts, the key parts. How to get up from down, like you are at the bottom. And you're living a great life. It doesn't mean that you still don't have grief, doesn't mean that you still don't have sadness. It doesn't mean that you still don't have trauma that you're working through, but it means that you've been able to live a life that you actually love and you've done a lot of great things despite the great pain that you've had to experience as well. And those two things can live side by side. You can have pain and you can also have pleasure. Exactly. You have to give yourself permission to enjoy life because that is really what empowers you. When your kids see you living that life they're not jealous, they're looking at you and saying, I want that. Maybe this is a parent that I can come to for help. Yeah. If I do decide to leave, maybe I'm going to be safe. You show them that safe way out. And you only do that by modeling it. Of course. And so while it feels selfish, it's really not. But it's the first, it's like one of the first steps you have to take is helping yourself. Yes. And that's a playbook out of like cult survivors. That's cult psychology 1 0 1 right there. Yep. Exactly. So thank you so much for being on. I wanna have you on again and again, and probably again, because I feel like this is, we've just scratched the surface. There's so much more that we could talk about. And next time I talk to you, you're probably gonna have more, updates and more, intel for people to be able to read through and listen to. And thank you. You're amazing. As I always tell you, and every time I meet you, I love you just a little bit more. Thank you. I love being your first, and I think you were also the first person in my membership too. You're the first expert guest speaker was inside of The Collective. Yeah. You were. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And I think also my first live, is that possible? I think that's possible. Yeah. Yeah. How? But that's how much you resonate with people though, right? Because you're authentic and you're genuine, and you don't pretend to be perfect and you don't pretend to have all the answers. You are still learning, you're still a work in progress. And so learning means that you're not perfect all the time. This is really important to understand this, right? You're gonna make mistakes, but that's how you learn. Yep. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you so much for having me. I really thank you so much. Thank you for listening to The Survivor's Playbook. If today's episode help you feel less alone, more clear, more confident, more educated and empowered, share it with somebody else who you think might also need to feel more empowered and educated. And if you're ready for deeper support, you can join my monthly membership or grab free tools at chantalcontorinescoaching.com, the link is in my show notes. Remember, your clarity is your power. Your calm is your resistance. You are not crazy. You are not alone, and you are not powerless. Until next time, keep going. I see you.