The Hole in Your Soul Forced Your Choices

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If you keep ending up in narcissistic abuse, trauma bonds, toxic relationships, or dating patterns that keep reopening the same wound, this episode is where I call the whole thing what it is.

The Hole in Your Soul Forced Your Choice gets into trauma inheritance, attachment wounds, abuse recovery, dating after abuse, and the deeper reason you stay, go back, pick the same kind of person, and keep calling the ache chemistry when it is really old pain doing the choosing.

I am not here to help you make the pattern prettier. I help you tell the truth about it, break it at the root, and stop handing your life over to the same wound in a different body.

If abuse still has its hands on your body, your choices, and your self-trust, get inside RRR Membership, for women trying to leave, have left or are just out of the abusive relationship.  

If that healing is already landing and you are ready to date after abuse with  stronger standards, self-safety and security, guarded empathy, and sharper discernment, step into The Black Cat Academy.

Transcript

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So I want to tell the origin story of the hole in your soul before we get into today's episode. This is going to be incredibly poignant for you, whether you are trying to leave abuse, you have just left, or you were dating after. So the hole in your soul is something that I learned about when I was trying to get and stay sober. I was a human being who just could not function without running through all of my emotions full out. If I was angry, I drank. If I was sad, I drank. If someone pissed me off, I drank. It did not matter, and I kept coping with my life that way. It was either alcohol or an eating disorder, and it had stopped working for me. And I told this story before, but I ended up suicidal early January 2020, and the hole in the soul understanding came shortly after that. So your life up until this point has been influenced by people, places, and things, and this is a very organic human experience. However, people that have experienced trauma and abuse or toxicity or difficulty have something that I have now called the hole in your soul. And I want you to think about a wound. If you fell down and you scraped your knee, there's an open wound. And if you do not clean it, bandage it, it can get things inside it, it can get infected, and it would take a lot longer to heal. So then you would have to clean up the wound, air dry it, bandage it. Maybe the scar is deeper or the healing time is longer, right? So this episode essentially speaks to that. The hole in my soul stemmed from my trauma inheritance from my parents. My mom was someone that really struggled with mental health, and my dad was someone that struggled with alcoholism and anger issues. And growing up in an environment like that, I was left chasing love and trying to prove myself or disappear. And even when I left home, that trauma inheritance followed me into every single relationship that I had ever been a part of, which is why I chose emotionally unavailable, avoidant, or narcissistic men, and why I kept company with other friends that had severe mental health issues, addiction-related problems, and issues within their relationships that mirrored mine because you are the company that you keep. And it does have to do with how you feel about yourself. It's your worthiness, your self-trust, your self-concept, and the level of self-respect that you carry. And guys, it took me over five years to fully come into this understanding. Yesterday I had a private coaching call with a woman who found me through this podcast, The Narcissus Worst Nightmare. And just like her or any of my other clients, when we have that first initial conversation, they usually talk about the relationship that's in front of them or what just ended. But it's never just that. Because if you go back to the hole in the soul theory that I just shared with you, your trauma inheritance creates a wound. And if the wound is not addressed, it becomes a part of your nervous system wiring, which creates a pattern. And your body, the hole in the soul that you have, tries to change the ending of the initial wound that hurt you. So I'll go back to my own example chasing emotionally unavailable, avoidant, narcissistic men. That was because I was trying to change the narrative of what happened with my dad, which is not possible unless I address what happened with my dad, right? Well, yesterday on this call, this woman was so brave and she shared so honestly, and it reminded me of the hole in the soul. And I honestly like there's so many things for my sobriety and my mental health recovery that I've still not shared here yet that truly changed my perspective on relationships, on life, on living differently, on being a free woman that is free from abuse, free from addiction, free from mental health. And the only way that the hole in the soul ever gets resolved. And we're going to get into this in the podcast episode today, but from my own personal experience, it's becoming unshakable within who you are in your own identity that's totally separate to anything else. If you're a mom, it's separate to that. If you've been abused, it's separate to that. If you are married, if you have a career, if you have a job even that just takes a lot from you, it's separate to that. So able to give yourself every single thing that you have probably looked outside of yourself your entire life, looked for this in other people, things like love, respect, validation, safety, understanding, compassion, right? So you are able to give yourself everything that you need right now. And when you can really fully own that and repair your relationship with yourself, nothing else matters. I have a client right now who six months ago, she was a woman who was in a very rough place trying to figure out whether she could leave the narcissist that's in her life. I've actually done a whole podcast episode on this. She was the woman that I said, if you need to go back to this relationship to try and figure out more information, more data, and more evidence to understand yourself, I said, Yeah, let's do it. Yesterday she sent me the most beautiful message saying, I don't even think about him. So if this at home for you and you believe that you have a hole in your soul and you're like, yeah, Meg, I want to figure this out, we are going to address that today. And I'm going to help you walk through what needs to change in your life in order for the hole in your soul to be repaired within yourself, separate to anyone else. So let's get into it. You keep calling it a choice because that hurts less than admitting how much of your life has been driven by what is still bleeding in you. It is easier to call yourself stupid than to face how hungry you were. Easier to say you picked wrong than to admit something and you was still starving hard enough to mistake familiarity for safety. So you look back at the person, the staying, the going back, the same ending, wearing a different face, and you shame yourself for not being smarter. Meanwhile, the real story is sitting right there. You are not reaching from peace, you're reaching from the hole. Your phone lights up and your body reacts before your brain gets a vo. You already knew who they were. You already know what happens if you let them back in. The history is sitting right there, but maybe this time it means something. Maybe their voice will be softer because the person is different, or maybe this is the part where all the pain finally crashes out into true love. You were not standing free in that moment, you were standing there empty, and emptiness will sell you peace for one hit of hope. By the time you see yourself clearly again, you're in the car replaying the conversation or in the kitchen trying to act normal while you feel sick to your stomach, or in bed next to someone who says they love you, but your body is still waiting for impact. It's the part people on the outside never understand. We want to talk about things like standards and red flags and self-respect and better choices, like your body was not involved. Your nervous system told your body there's an ache, there's a rhythm, there's a pull. And then later, when the whole thing starts rotting all over again in your hands, you call it another bad choice. I'm Megan Webster, I'm an abuse recovery coach, a trauma-informed strategist in the woman, a narcissist hopes to never meet twice. This is the narcissist worst nightmare podcast where survival ends, shadow becomes power, and you rise into the person impossible to manipulate, magnetize, or replace. Today we were talking about the hole in your soul that forced your choices. So you did not stay in what was hurting you, crawl back to what broke you, or keep picking the same kind of person because some part of you deep down with a clear mind decided that pain sounded really appealing. What happens is a lot meaner than that. The wound gets there first. It gets there before your logic, your self-respect, before the promises you made to yourself in the aftermath of last time. It sees something familiar, it feels that nervous system charge, it smells the hope, and then it starts reaching. Then your mind shows up late and gets handed the job of explaining a choice that your body already had started making. This is where so much shame comes from. You look at yourself afterwards and think, how the hell did I do that again? You start acting like this is your character when this is really a hunger issue. Somewhere inside of you was still trying to be chosen, to be kept, trying to change the ending that should have happened years ago, still trying to pull love out of the same kind of hand that only knows how to hurt you. When that part gets lit up, it does not care about your long-term peace. It cares about relief right now. It cares about the ache shutting up for a minute. It cares for that hit of maybe. And that is how narcissistic relationships can feel very electric in the beginning. Your body does not hear danger first. It hears intensity, importance. And that makes old wounds sit up straight and call the whole thing fate. Then once you're attached, the softer version of them keeps you there because the wound keeps trying to turn that brief opening into proof. Proof that pain meant something, that the waiting is about to pay off, that if you hang on for one more week, one more month, one more apology, one more conversation, you finally get what you were starving for all the way along. You are not chasing a person at that point. Your nervous system is chasing relief. This same mechanism shows up after abuse as well. A new person will walk in and your body does not ask whether they are good for you. It asks whether they feel known. A text will hit and your chest moves before your mind can sort out whether anything actually happened. Someone steady gets close and part of you starts backing away because there's nothing to chase, nothing to decode, nothing to survive. And survival has been your version of intimacy for far too long. Then you sit there upset with yourself and your own behavior because the person in front of you might not be doing anything wrong at all. The wound is still looking for the old story. And if it cannot find it, sometimes it starts to recreate it. This is a piece I need you to stop lying to yourself about. You are not always choosing the person. A lot of the time you are choosing the feeling that came from them, the obsession, the false hope, the crack of attention that hit your wound in the exact place it was already open. Until you get honest about that, you can keep blaming yourself in stupid ways and miss the actual problem. Your real problem is not that you never learn the lesson. The problem is that your wound is still hungry and hungry parts of you still keep reaching for what matches them until you decide the ache does not get to run your life anymore. I talked a little bit about my own experience with trauma inheritance, but this is going to be a little bit more informational, a little bit of a deeper dive. Nobody starts their trauma inheritance from zero. You came into life already standing inside of something. Your childhood home had a feeling to it. Love had a feeling to it. Being wanted had a feeling to it. Maybe home felt tense or uncertain. Like you were trying to read a room, trying to stay small, earning softness or love, waiting for the switch, trying to keep the peace, trying to become easy enough to love. Whatever your narrative is, your body learned it before you had actual language for it. In relationship, years later, you call it things like loyalty, compassion, hope, empathy, chemistry, being the one who sees the good in people. Underneath all of that, your body is often just recognizing an old road. So you can be an adult, you can be smart and self-aware and still feel yourself changed the second somebody gives off a familiar signal. Your chest tightens, your voice shifts, your hope wakes up way too fast, your standards start negotiating with your emptiness. That is not because you're broken or blind. Your body has history. It learned what home feels like. And later on, it can keep calling that feeling home, even when home is a place that taught you to disappear. This is what trauma inheritance really is. It's not just pain, it's what gets normalized, what closeness feels like when it's mixed with tension, what being chosen costs you, what kind of treatment your body learns to tolerate before it even questions it. So when you grow up and you're attracted to a certain type of person, but half the time your body is just moving towards what it already knows how to read. Known wins a lot when peace feels foreign. And known can feel powerful as hell. It can feel magnetic and exciting and like there's something important or deeper there or something that's worth fighting. Meanwhile, all that's really happening is your body recognizing a road that it survived before and it moves towards it because it's familiar and it's proof. And this is where a lot of people would get trapped. They try to make meaning out of what is actually conditioning. They keep trying to romanticize what their body already knows how to suffer through. A huge piece of this is the story loop. So it's not just trauma inheritance. You're not just drawn to what hurt you because it's familiar. You're drawn to it because a part of you is still trying to fix it. So it keeps reaching for the same kind of person, the same kind of ache, the same kind of almost love because it still believes a different ending is possible for you if you can just get this one right. Maybe this time you picked. Maybe this time you get kept. Maybe this time you are enough. Maybe this time you leave first. And maybe this time the wound finally gets what it's been begging for since the first time that it opened. This is the part that takes a lot of people out. You're not only attached to who they are, you're attached to what they represent. You're attached to the fantasy that this person will finally hand over what every other version of the wound withheld. It's the possibility that all the waiting and the self-abandonment and the shrinking and the confusion and the hope and all the nights that you stayed up trying to make sense of everybody else's damage might finally amount to something for you. This feels brutal for a lot of my clients when we first discussed this because it can keep a person very loyal to their own pain for a long time, even after they've seen facts. The loop can feel very vicious. It's not only pain repeating itself, it's also hope dragging pain back in through the front door and calling it unfinished business. You were not just attached to a person, you were attached to the possibility that this person will finally close the story that every other one left ripping through you. Then when they don't, when it ends the same way or close enough to it, the wound gets louder because now it has fresh proof that the thing it has been starving for is still out there somewhere. So it reaches again because the loop is alive. And when that loop is alive, you can waste years thinking you are searching for love and what you're searching for is resolution. You can call it chemistry or devotion, you can call it seeing the good in people when your body is really just trying to force a different ending out of the same storyline. This is why you will keep choosing the same type of person. The face changes, the name changes, the wound does not. People will say things to themselves like they're too forgiving or too emotional or too intense. But what's really happening is that the old story keeps just getting new people. Your body is just recognizing old pain. It's trying to outsmart it, beat it, or force it to end differently. So you do not have to carry the original wound anymore. But it also leaves you feeling very split in two different worlds. A part of you does see the facts, the other part of you keeps arguing for one more chance. One part knows what this is doing to your peace, the other is still kneeling in front of the possibility that maybe this person might be the exception. Living like that will make you feel fucking insane. And it's not insanity, it is your body, your nervous system, and your wiring trapped between the truth and an old emotional debt. It still thinks can be paid if it stays long enough. So until you see the loop, you keep mistaking repetition for destiny. You keep thinking that a pattern means this is your type, your fate, your cross to carry, your weird attraction, or your unlucky in love. It is not random. It is not something that's magic. Something old is still looking for closure in places that it only knows how to reopen it. Once you see it, the whole story starts changing. Now you're not only asking why do you keep choosing this, you're asking why does old painting still believe it gets to win here? And that question is where your power starts coming back. When you stop calling this loop some kind of relationship, when you stop giving repetition some kind of meaning, it stops coming back when you admit that your body has been circling an old wound, not because the wound is sacred, but because it's still unfinished for you. I've had this conversation a lot on TikTok, the just leave conversation or just staying. And people love to talk about staying like it's a singular moment. It's actually a hundred tiny betrayals spread out over time until they just become normal for you. You stay when you shrink the thing that hurt you because facing the whole thing at once would absolutely break. You stay, you stay when one better day erases 10 bad ones in your body just long enough to keep you emotionally trapped. You stay when there's one minor, softer version of them that hits the starving place in you and makes you feel like leaving now would throw everything away in one moment. By the time you understand what's happening, your body has made choices in small pieces over time. And those small pieces are what made it so easy to lie to yourself. You're not waking up each morning saying, I would love to abandon myself again today. You do it in the small things, explaining, reframing, bargaining, minimizing, delaying, telling yourself maybe you're tired, maybe you're stressed, maybe the week was weird, or maybe they didn't mean that. And that is how your body keeps all of this alive. It does not ask you to swallow the whole lie at once. It asks you to have it in manageable bites. Going back to abuse or toxicity has its own cruelty. You know the history, the damage, what it cost you last time, but your body still lights up when the opening comes because the opening does not register as danger at first. It's relief, it's a trap. You're not always going to go back to the person. You are going to go back to break the pain. You're going back to that one message, that one flash of the version of them that you wanted, the one moment that lets the wound believe that not all of it was for nothing. Then later, when the cycle closes around your throat again, the shame steps in and talks to you like you're a fucking idiot. Shame never tells you the whole story. The full story is that your body grabbed for relief, and the relief was attached to the very thing that kept destroying you. That is what people who have never lived it do not understand. Dating the same pain again can look better on the outside and still be the same loop. Different face, different job, different style, different name, same feeling in your chest. The intensity, the uncertainty, the almostness inside of you. The person gives you just enough to keep the old hunger alive and now your body is back in a familiar territory calling it chemistry. And steady people can feel really flat and boring because they do not hit that wound in the same place. Predictable people will also feel underwhelming because there's no chase for you. And then you convince yourself that you were just not feeling it when what was really happening is that peace was not loud enough for a body that still trusts ache more than ease. It's why dating after abuse feels complicated. The person who might actually be good for you will be harder to feel, while the person who is emotionally expensive lands in your chest, not because they're deeper or more meant for you. Your body already knows what to do with uncertainty, what to do with the ache. It knows how to confuse activation with importance. So later on, when it blows up in your face again, you call it another bad pick instead of admitting that your wound is still active. A lot of this has to do with how normal this can start feeling. You stop calling it pain and you just start calling it a pattern. You don't call it self-abandonment, you say you have blind spots. Instead of calling it a loop, you say, I have bad luck. Meanwhile, your life keeps getting narrower, your trust gets thinner, your standards are almost walls now, your body is tired, your mind stays crowded, and love turns something you keep surviving instead of something you get to live inside. This is not about romance. It's how it affects your sleep, your parenting, your work, the way you see yourself. It reaches into how fast you can relax, how much joy you can hold, how much softness your body lets in before it starts looking for the cost. That is how a pattern becomes your life. Not because it is your identity, but because the fallout keeps taking up so much room that you forgot who you were when you weren't managing it. So when I say things to you like the hole in your soul forced your choice, I'm not saying you had no agency. What I am saying is that got hijacked by something that was starving, that the ache was louder than your wisdom in those moments, that your familiar pain can feel safer than unfamiliar peace when the whole body is being trained inside the first one. If you do not get honest about that, you will keep blaming yourself for outcomes while staying very loyal to the engine that created them. And the hole in your soul does not stay in just behavior for very long. It does not just sit there influencing a few bad decisions and then leave the rest of your identity untouched through enough repetition. It starts teaching who you think you are. And that can get really expensive because you're not just dealing with pain. You are building self-concept around what pain trained you to do. You start calling yourself the person who stays too long, just trusts around people, ruins good things, falls too hard, picks chaos, gets bored when things are healthy, and keeps ending up in the same kind of relationship or cannot seem to stop wanting what hurts. So that's when your pattern stops feeling like something you learned and starts feeling like something you are. If you think this is just your type, your history, your thing, your nature, your curse, or whatever words you want to use, you stop pushing back on it with the kind of force that can actually change your life. Now every repetition and every experience becomes proof that your identity is real. You stay too long again and you tell yourself, this is just what I do. You overgive again and you tell yourself this is just who you are. You get hooked by someone that's abusive or toxic, and now you have more evidence that you are the kind of person who always ends up in these kinds of relationships. The truth about the hole in your soul is that your wound can grow roots. It stops being your voice for a moment and it starts taking over your life. It can also shape how you see your own value too. If you spent too long trying to get love from people who make you work for it, some part of you will start believing love is only real when it costs you. Love looks now being wanted looks like performing, proving, fixing, waiting, or bleeding. And that can almost feel fake because your body is being trained to read struggle as something important. And then your identity shell hardens more. You become the person who is always almost chosen, the one who gets close but never gets held, the one who is heard but never understood. And you the one who gives up everything and still ends up empty, the one who can survive but cannot seem to receive. That identity is not truth. That is your wound. And once the wound gets into identity, it starts deciding what you are allowed to want. You lower the bar because the older part of you still believes asking for more is useless. Or maybe you raise the wall so high that nobody human can get inside it because it's safer to be unreachable than disappointed again. You tell yourself that you're protecting yourself, and maybe sometimes you are, but a lot of the time you're just obeying an old injury that already decided what is and what is not available to you. That is what makes this so important. If the hole in your soul only shaped your choices, that would already be painful enough, right? It's shaped the version of you that walks into every next choice, and that is why the pain can keep showing up until it looks like identity instead of an actual injury. It feels true because you can line up story after story, experience after experience, and say, see, this is who I am. You're not lying that the pattern exists. You're lying when you let the pattern become who you are. This is when the trap will close. Once you start introducing yourself through the wound, the wound gets to keep where you are. It starts to shape what you expect, what you allow, what you settle for, and what you think is realistic for your life. This is how somebody will end up with standards that look strong in the outside and still being set by pain underneath. It's not just about repeating a relationship pattern. You're trying to reclaim a false identity that's built from pain. This is why this work is so much deeper than make better choices or just leave. Better choices do not come from self-hatred and surface awareness. They come from you stopping treating wounds like a core self and start seeing it for what it is. This is survival. It's coping. It's not your soul, it's not your heart, it's not your truth. And your real standards, once you break away from that, are available to you. Your desire is available to you. Your real ability to choose and receive and walk away and hold your. Is underneath all of that too. The work is not becoming somebody else. The work that you need to do is getting the wound out of the driver's seat long enough that the real you has a chance to sit down and unpack the pain that has been there all along. Repair starts when you stop treating the ache like it has authority over you or your life. Up until that moment, a lot of your life and your relationships are built around whatever gives your nervous system or your wound a hit of something. You call it love and chemistry and compassion and loyalty and just needing more time. But underneath, you're still letting your hunger decide what feels important. Repair begins the minute that you stop confusing that hunger with your truth. The pull can still be there, the want can still be there, the grieving can still be there, but the body can still lean towards what has heard it before. The shift is that you stop acting like the pull deserves obedience because it showed up. And this is the part that people don't really want to hear from me. They want a better choice to feel better. They want the nervous system to just calm down, the cravings to die, the fantasy to fall apart on its own, and then to step into a better, healthier life. Most of the time, it does not happen in that order. I get really annoyed with social media and the healing world and how they express what could happen. Most of the time, the old wound is still loud when you make a new move. You do not feel better at first. You do not get freed by waiting for the ache to shut up. You start feeling free when that ache is still speaking to you and it does not dictate your next decision. Repair can feel uglier before it gets better because it forces you to bury the fantasy for real. You are not only grieving the person, you are grieving the version of the story where all of your waiting finally meant something. The part of you that kept believing one more chance would turn the whole thing around. Or the hope that kept you in the room after the peace had already left. As long as that fantasy stays alive, the loop stays right alive with it. The body can't reach for what it is still secretly believing is going to save it. For a while, repair can feel very boring to the injured part of you because peace does not hit the same way that chaos does. Confusion will flood your system, uncertainty creates charge. Longing can make your whole inner world feel like busy and alive and full. Steadiness does not do that. It feels very underwhelming. Your body is lived on adrenaline and ache and pain, and it can make peace look like something is missing, even when the only thing is missing is the old injury of the wound. Sitting still long enough to learn a new emotion is part of repair. When you stop chasing the flood of emotions and start building a life that your body does not have to survive, that's when real change happens. In the middle of all of this, the identity starts cracking too. You stop introducing yourself through the wound. You stop talking like you were the one that stays too long, chooses wrong, confuses pain for love, loses yourself or always gets hooked. You stop turning repetition into personality and you just start getting honest. The real you is usually being buried under a survival structure for so long that getting yourself back can feel less like self-improvement and more like another layer of pain. Pain has been stifling your voice, your standards, your choices, your desire, and repair is when you finally get to tell it to get the fuck out. What changes then is not only behavior. The whole field of your life begins to shift. You stop giving meaning to what drains you. You stop acting like intensity proves depth. You stop kneeling in front of people who can only ever give you almost. Your nose get firmer because it no longer is negotiating your starvation. Your yes gets slower because it's no longer chasing relief. What once looked magnetic starts looking expensive. What once looked boring starts feeling safe. This is not a downgrade. It is your body learning how to understand what hurts. So where you are right now is not neutral space. You know this is costing you. Every time the same ache talks you into one more chance, one more conversation, one more reopening, one more person who hits the same wound in a different way, your life gets smaller, your peace gets thinner, and your standards start negotiating with your brain. You already know what this feels like in real time. You tell yourself things like you're being open and compassionate and hopeful and understanding. And what is really happening is you are reopening the old wound again, and it's still getting access to your future. That is the gap. On one side, this version of you is still letting emptiness choose. That version keeps circling the same pain, calling it love, trying to make a home out of what is starving you while you are paying for it with your body, your time, your mind, and your life. On the other side of the version of you who stops handing sacred meaning to the thing that still cuts you open, that version is not less loving. It is just less available for self-abandonment. It does not need another decade of wreckage to prove the lesson. The version finally gets honest about what it has cost you and decides the pattern is not going to get another season of access. You do not need more awareness. You do not need more understanding. You need interruption. You do not need one more beautiful explanation of why the same thing keeps happening. You need a place where the root gets dealt with for real, where your nervous system stops treating pain like home, where your self-trust comes back online, where the wound stops doing half of the choosing for you in your life. This is where I come in. I help you break it. I help you stop calling that ache chemistry, stop calling self-abandonment love, and I help you tell the truth fast enough that your life stops getting handed over to what keeps hurting you. If this episode is exposing how much abuse shaped your choices, how much old pain still owns your body, and how much of your life has been built around survival instead of peace, the RRR membership is for you. This is where I help you rebuild your life after abuse from the root. If the root work is already landing for you and you already have that healing to show up and you are ready for that healing to show up in a way that you date, choose, trust, receive, and hold your standards after abuse. The Black Cat Academy is where I help you become the version of you for that in real life. So the decision is not whether the episode landed. The decision is whether you are finished letting the wound choose for you. And if you are, stop romanticizing the middle and stop acting like more time inside the pattern is going to help you. Choose the space that matches where you are and let this be the place where your life stops belonging to the ache. If this episode cracks something open and you get that means you are waking up, please share this with another person that needs it. Send me a DM on Instagram to tell me what landed the hardest for you. You did not just choose wrong. The pattern made sense. It does not mean it gets another decade of your life. Understanding is not where this ends. Ending its access is where it begins. This is the narcissist worst nightmare podcast. The hole in your soul kept choosing what matched it until you decided the wound does not get to choose your life anymore.