EP 22 Beliefs that Stay After the Abuse Ends

In this episode, we’re talking about the beliefs that stay long after emotional and psychological abuse ends. The ones that make you question yourself, doubt your worth, and feel like you’re still the problem… even when you’re finally free.

You’re not broken. You were conditioned.

This is a conversation about unlearning the identity you were given, understanding why healing takes time, and gently beginning to separate who you are from what you were taught to believe.

TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE AND TRAUMA

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Transcript

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Welcome to Wildly Heard, a podcast about rising from psychological and emotional abuse and stepping into purpose, authenticity, and true identity. Each episode unpacks the journey of healing, from learning to recognize the scars of abuse to reclaiming your voice and embracing the truth of your identity. We'll explore what it means to walk free from fear and self-doubt and how to rebuild a life that is rooted in confidence, joy, and wholehearted living. This is what it means to be Wildly Her. Welcome to Wildly Her. I am your host, Pamela Moore. And before we get into anything today, I want you to just pause and take a breath. Because the conversation today may feel a little bit heavy for some of us. So I just want you to take that minute, take a deep breath, and then let's get into it. Because what I want to talk about today is when we walk away from relationships where there's psychological or emotional abuse, and we start to realize that we are still feeling a lot of the same things that we felt in that abuse. It's when we walk away and we still feel like there's a struggle, and we start to doubt ourselves and we start questioning why am I still struggling? Why can I not get over this? Why am I not getting better? Why does this still affect me? Here's what I want us to talk about today. And I want you to hear me when I say this. You are not broken. You are shaped by something that maybe isn't fully untangled yet. Because one of the hardest parts of healing from the psychological and the emotional abuse is the damage that doesn't end just because the relationship ends. That's what people don't prepare us for. They they we just don't know what that's gonna look like. And so when we get on the outset of it and we start to feel like, oh, I've gained some freedom, there's a little bit of like a catching your breath and thinking it's gonna get a little bit better, it's gonna start to feel better, and then it doesn't, and we just don't know. So we start to notice that we're still anxious or still overthinking, still doubting ourselves, still questioning so much of our worth. And then somewhere we start to feel like maybe I was the problem all along. Maybe I was the toxic one. Maybe I'm the crazy one. And I think, honestly, this may be more true if our abuser was someone in our lives when we were children. Because if you grew up with a parent or a guardian who was emotionally distant, highly critical, unpredictable or disconnected in some way, it's in those formative years, we don't have the capacity to understand, hey, this isn't healthy for me. And somewhere we had to just make sense of it. And that's where it can get complicated in healing because we never just leave the environment and and all of the beliefs that come with that too. All of that comes with us, these beliefs that we hold on to. And they're quiet and they're subtle and they show up in ways where we second guess ourselves. We we need this constant reassurance. It's this feeling of being too much and not enough all at the same time. And even in that discomfort when things are calm, because we don't know what to do with that. So we're always waiting for something to go wrong. And then we start judging ourselves. Here's what I want to stress to you healing from psychological and emotional abuse takes a very long time. And the reason for that is because what was harmed was not just your feelings. It is emotional abuse and it is psychological, so it affects our thoughts and our emotions, but it's so much deeper than that because it really gets into our sense of reality, our sense of identity, and our sense of safety. Abuse is never surface level damage, it is absolutely an attack that is a foundational one. Abuse gets into our identity. So our minds start forming these beliefs that we hold on to about ourselves based on how we're treated and what we have to do to survive. You absolutely cannot rush this type of healing because it will require time and some work to untangle all the things that we learn to survive. When we're in emotional and psychological abuse, the way that your brain adapts is it's this conditioning. So we're conditioned to doubt our own perception, our own realities. And we're trained in a way that we learn to prioritize someone else's emotions over even our own safety. We learn that being good and quiet and small is how we create stability for ourselves in some form. It may be a fake piece or temporary, but it's something that we can hold on to. We're striving for that. Over time, your nervous system wires itself in a way that is constantly anticipating harm. We learn how to adapt by ignoring our body, our emotions, and our needs. And so learning then how to recognize those things and being safe to do it takes some untangling and some time. So healing is not about moving on. It's about learning how to trust your own thoughts and know what's yours and then what's not. It's about building this sense of self, but we're having to do it sometimes from the ground up. We have no foundation to go back to. We are learning how to hold our body in a way that we're no longer in danger. And that's a foreign concept for some of us. So it's not a mindset shift. This is about a full system recalibration. We're talking mind, body, and identity. So your system cannot rush this process because our system has been trying for years to do what it is so beautifully created to do, and that is to protect us. So don't hate yourself for where you're at or how long it's taking, or something you feel like, I'm still struggling with this. Why? What you need now is some safety to untangle lies. And what healing is, is this shifting into becoming you without the shame and the fear. So today I want to dive a little bit into this. I want to talk about two specific things that I think are somewhere in the top of the things that feel the most difficult to shake from ourselves. There's so much more for us to untangle, but I think these are two really big ones. So I want to just start with this. First is this belief I am the problem. Oh, this one. This one runs so deep. When I tell you I did not know how to shake this for so long, this one was so hard for me. It lasted for years because this belief didn't come from nowhere. Like it didn't just show up. This is something that was installed in us, but it comes in so subtly. It comes in through blame, emotional withdrawal, this constantly being misunderstood or being dismissed, and through the punishments that we get, the silence, the tension, the rejection when we show up as ourselves or when we try to be ourselves. All of that communicates to our system that we are the problem. So your brain starts to pick up this belief. And here's what we do in that. We start to believe if I'm the problem, okay, I can fix that. And if I can fix that, then I can stay safe. But here's where that belief falls apart. Because in that survival logic, the problem is that in this type of abuse, what makes us the problem for our abuser shifts from day to day. So it's a puzzle that has no solution, and it leaves us feeling overwhelmed, damaged, insecure, and hopeless. It starts to develop the deepening of this belief that I am the problem and there is no solution to that. So we succumb to the belief that we are unfixable. But I want you to know that there is hope. There is a way to untangle this. So here's how we do it. You can't rip it out. We want to. We want to so bad. But you can't. You have to gently and slowly outgrow this one. And it is going to be a slow shift, but I promise you, once the momentum starts, you will feel dramatically different. And it will feel like you're moving super slow at first, and then all of a sudden there's a sprint that happens. So slowly, what you're going to start to do is separate what's yours from what was placed on you. And this is that when things come up, we start to pause, and that pause is so important. So we pause and we start to ask ourselves, is this actually true about me? Or is this something that I was taught to believe about me? I'm not saying that you have an answer to that, and I'm not saying find the answer. What I'm saying is when we pause and we ask that question, we actually open up and create space in ourselves that we can spread a little bit of doubt into that being true about us. And we get the space to investigate and find out. And then from that space, we can start to look for patterns. And I'm not talking about isolated moments. We all have moments when we just screw it all up. And there are times in my life when I was the problem. And that's okay. But that is not a truth that holds firmly about me as a whole. So I'm not talking about isolated moments. I'm saying looking for evidence of patterns. So the abuse convinces us that it's just you. Here's where I'm saying we can break that because healing will start to reveal to us that the pattern existed regardless of what I did. So then it wasn't about me. Here's the realization that I want you to find. It goes from I am the problem into I was in a system where I was treated like I was the problem. When we can make that separation, when we can finally start to see and hold that realization, now, now things start to open up. It will be a slow shift to notice that. But the moment that we start taking that first pause and asking ourselves, is this true of me or is this something that I was taught? And we start to give space for that realization to come in, then I can start seeing those things. And then here's what I want you to do with that. Because what our minds need is evidence. Affirmations are great, but affirmations without evidence will never hold true in our in our subconscious. They just won't. You have to have the affirmation, but you also have to have evidence. So I want you to start with building the evidence first. We're gonna work in the reverse. Because your system will not trust your words. And that's okay. That's perfectly okay. So instead of trying to just feed this affirmation, I am worthy, let's try looking for experiences that your brain can actually anchor to. So start instead of thinking ahead, let's start looking back. Maybe over the day, maybe over the week, whatever that is for you. But somewhere start to notice where you set a boundary, and even if it was hard, you survived doing it. Start noticing when you acknowledged your feelings instead of dismissing them. Look for those moments when you didn't over-explain yourself. Look for those moments when you felt a little bit uncomfortable, but you didn't abandon abandon yourself and you didn't try to fix it. You just sat with it. Look for moments when you chose rest without feeling the need to earn it. That's a big one. Look for moments when you actually didn't apologize for something that wasn't for you to apologize for. Look for times when you can give yourself compassion instead of criticism, and it may be in a very small moment of your day. But that one moment is so powerful. Give it to yourself. Look for times when you stayed instead of running when you wanted to. That's a big one. Because our identity will shift through evidence and consistency. So here's what I want you to do. When you see that evidence, when you look back and you find it, start writing it down. You may even, you may even start your own little like separate journal that's like an evidence journal. And you can have fun with it. Set it up in like detective mode and have fun decorating it. Do it in a way that makes it yours, but make some type of a place for you, a space that you can hold this running list. Take those opportunities and turning and turn it into this habit of looking, you know, and it may be once a week that you sit down and do this. Don't put any pressure on yourself to make it a strict schedule. But every once in a while, sit down and look at how you showed up for yourself and write those things down. Because you are looking for the evidence that you are not the problem. You are looking for evidence when you can show up as yourself and the world kept turning and nothing fell apart because of it. And you survived. You survived. Even if somebody else gets upset because of something that you didn't do for them and you held your boundary, but it didn't cost you, that's okay. Give yourself the evidence of that. Over time, it starts to shift our belief, and we start to recognize where I was taught that I was the problem in a system and not because I really am. Give yourself that gift. The second thing that I want to talk about that's so hard for us in this shift and in this healing, and this is a big one, is fear and how fear stays in our body. And I think I think we really underestimate how fear holds on. Because mentally, like in my conscious mind, I can have a very real conscious thought that I know that I'm safe, but my body will not agree with me. Because this is what happens in this type of abuse, our nervous system learns that safety can disappear. It feels temporary. So even when I can rationally think I am safe right now, there's something in my body that tells me, but it's temporal and it will fade. Because peace was usually followed by some type of a punishment, and most often it came without warning. And so even though I braced myself for it, I never knew exactly when it was coming. And there's something in that that was a shock to my system, and so I didn't trust the safe moments. So now my body stays on guard. Fear looks like overthinking. Fear is bracing myself, intensing, waiting for something to go wrong, expecting things to fall apart, expecting that it's not going to work out. It's that uneasy. It's when I get anxious because things are calm and I don't know what to do with that. That's not you being broken. Please hear me on this. You are not broken. That is your body being loyal to what it learned to help you survive. But here's the hope I want to bring because we can begin to soften that fear. And again, healing is not about forcing it or ripping it out. We don't do that. That is way more traumatic or just as traumatic as where we've been. We don't do that to ourselves. But gently, we're going to teach our bodies something new. And again, we're looking for evidence. So when we start to feel this fear grow, the most beautiful thing that we can do is pause and take a deep breath. Because it's not about getting rid of fear. Fear never goes away. Fear is real. And there are moments in life we we should be afraid. We need fear. But it's learning and expanding our capacity to hold fear and to still feel safe alongside of it. So we're not eliminating it. We're teaching our body that fear and safety can exist at the same time. So instead of fighting the fear, we're going to acknowledge it. So taking that deep breath, pause, and then giving myself just the space. I can I feel scared right now, and that's okay. Maybe even recognizing this feels familiar. And so my fear is starting to grip me. But that doesn't mean that it's happening all over again. Maybe I just need to remind myself of that. It doesn't mean my body's gonna immediately relax, but I'm opening the capacity for my mind to see beyond what it was looking at before. I'm just trying to open up a little bit inside my mind. Maybe it's recognizing the fear, pause and take a breath, and then reminding ourselves to come back to the present moment. So maybe telling myself, my body is remembering something and I'm feeling this fear, but I'm not there where that fear started. I'm right here. When we start to orientate to the present moment, we teach the body that we're safe, even while we're holding the fear. So fear lives in past or future, safety lives in the present. So we can remind ourselves, I am in a different place. Maybe I maybe it's that I'm in my own home and I'm safe right now. Maybe it's reminding myself I'm feeling this fear and I'm expecting to be punished, but no one is punishing me right now. Maybe I can look around and see that nothing is wrong in the present moment. I'm afraid of what's to come, but I'm safe right now. This is teaching our nervous system again, very slowly, to pause and come present instead of the immediate brace and holding on to that brace. So your body learned to tighten and prepare and anticipate. And what we're trying to do is soften that just a little bit. So maybe we can tell ourselves it's okay to relax. Maybe we just need to take deep breaths and remind ourselves I am safe. I am safe. A big one, and this one was hard for me because in my trauma, my trauma response went freeze. Fawn and flight. That was my pattern. I would brace, I would start fawning and people pleasing and trying to fix whatever it is to ease the tension and make it go away if I could. And if I couldn't, I wanted to shrink, hide, and run. Whatever I could do to get away. I needed to, I needed to escape. If escape is yours, and we're trying to escape the discomfort, a big part of sitting with that fear is I can stay with myself in this moment. And we don't abandon ourselves in our fear. Deep breath, I can stay with myself. Deep breath, I'm uncomfortable right now, but I'm not gonna abandon myself. Deep breath, I have survived this feeling before. And I will do it again. The other thing that we can do is replace urgency with some type of a calm. Because fear wants us to do something, fix it, and run, right? Mine was fawning and running. So safety says I can slow down and take my time. Maybe I do need to leave, but I'm gonna do it slowly. So deep breath, I can respond and not react. Deep breath, I don't need to figure everything out right now. Let me pause and think for a moment. Deep breath, I'm gonna move slowly. And I slow down. What we're doing is building trust with ourselves. This is where the identity starts to shift out of fear and into safety. Because one of the most important reframes of all mentally for us is that fear can be there, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm in danger at this moment. Sometimes the fear is that your body hasn't caught up to your freedom just yet. And that's okay. Again, it's slow. We are not gonna rip the fear out. Fear for me was one of the hardest things to embrace without spiraling, to be able to hold fear and safety in the same moment. Because in this type of abuse, fear was used against us in the most powerful ways. Our systems were taught how to brace for an attack that may or may not come. So we just never knew. So for this one, I urge you to be kind to yourself. I gotta tell you, this one has taken its toll on me. It's the one thing that is so hard to embrace and one of the hardest to understand. It has taken me years in healing work to be comfortable with letting people down and not holding on to even a this heightened fear of my ex to find me and the consequences of that. When I tell you that that fear is huge, it's huge. The fear that I held for my life that escalated towards the end of our relationship was so intense that it has taken me years to untangle so much of that. Fear is very real. And I do not want to discount your fears. I want you to know I completely understand the depth of this one, and I understand the depth of it in our bodies, in our entire being. I know what it's like to brace ourselves and to hide because I did it. And I did it long after the relationship ended. When I tell you that this one was so much a part of my life, I I had, and this may sound silly to some people, but this is the level that I want you to understand that I know how deep this one goes. It was so much a part of my life that I had a full-on panic attack trying to buy toilet paper one time. Because after I got remarried, my new husband was so he's so loving and kind and precious to me. But even in that, I went to the grocery store one time to buy some things that we needed, and toilet paper was on the list, and I did not know what kind of toilet paper he was used to using. And I went into a full-on spiral at the grocery store trying to find the exact toilet paper because I had studied the toilet paper in his bathroom, trying to get the pattern of the quilting and the thickness just right. And I was afraid of the consequences of bringing home the wrong toilet paper. That is how deep that fear can run. When I tell you I know this one, I know this one intimately. But I also know that it is possible to feel safe again. Your mind needs evidence, not just affirmations. So this one is another good practice with your evidence journal. Have a reference that you can turn to as a reminder of how you showed up and you were safe in spite of the fear that came. Show yourself how you came through safely on the other side of that fear. Look for those moments when you walked away slowly. Look for those moments when you paused and took a deep breath. When you noticed how you were feeling and you were able to sit with that discomfort. Look for those moments when you showed up on the other side. Look for those moments when you responded instead of reacting. Write down the evidence of that. Give your brain evidence. Because with evidence, you can start to shift the identity, you can start to shift the subconscious beliefs, but you gotta have evidence. Here's what I want you to see about your shift in identity. Here is how healing moves slowly, quietly, and oh so powerfully. When healing first starts, when we start to open up some things, we hold on to this belief that I am the problem, I am broken. When that shift starts to happen is when we open up our minds to the capacity and the space to say, maybe I didn't deserve what happened. And then eventually we start moving into, I really didn't deserve that. Then we start to shift into I can trust myself because we have hard evidence to back it up. And then without even forcing it to happen, we start really discovering who we are because now we're untangling the lies from the truth of who we are. Now we start to become more comfortable with being ourselves and being safe in that. That's why I think it's most important to talk about the two hard beliefs, and that is the one that I am the problem and I'm broken, and the fear that we have to hold on to. I want to leave you with one grounded truth. You were trained to believe something about yourself in an environment where you were not safe to be fully you. Let me say that one more time. And if you're in a place you can write it down, write it down. Because I need you to know you were trained to believe something about yourself in an environment where you were not safe to be fully you. So of course it's going to take time to unlearn that. And you are worthy of the patience and the grace for yourself. And if you're asking yourself, why am I still struggling? the fact that you're even asking these questions is evidence that there's already a part of you that knows that the beliefs that you're holding on to are not the full truth. Healing is not a destination. It's not about arriving at this moment when all is well in the world and I don't suffer anymore. Healing is this process of letting that part of you become louder than everything else that you were taught. Healing is a journey of discovering you and loving you in the ways that you should have been loved all along, and giving yourself the safety that you should have had all along. Here is my desire for you. I want your voice to be heard. I want you to be seen. I want you to feel safe. I want you to know. Know it in your identity, in your very being. I want you to know that you are loved and cherished. Most of all, I want you to know that you are not the problem. And you are safe to be you. That's what I want for you. If any of the things that I have shared with you today resonate with you, I hope it makes a difference for you. And if there's anything that you don't agree with, wholeheartedly I say to you, throw it out. I am never suggesting that I hold all the answers. I don't. I know that I don't. There is so much more. Take what I've shared today, do your own investigation, learn more. Learn more about yourself. As always, I am here for you. Always, always. And I will always end with this. Because I mean it from the the depths of my soul. If you have ever been where I have been, or if you are there now, if you if you know the darkness that I have known, I need you to know that I see you and I believe you. Thank you so much for listening today. And I hope that you felt the love and the encouragement that's being sent to you. Feel free to share this podcast and follow us so that you'll get notifications when we release new episodes. And until we meet again, dear friend, be kind, be courageous and truth. Love yourself as deeply as you would a close friend. And keep leaning in to the joy and the beauty of discovering what it means to be authentic, whole, and wildly.