EP 24 The Truth About Leaving a Narcissist

TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE AND TRAUMA

In this episode, I’m opening the door to my own story. I’m sharing the reality of what it took to walk away… the violence, the heartbreak, the unraveling of everything I once called my life. Because no one really talks about this part.

Leaving doesn’t feel empowering at first. It feels like grief swallowing you whole. Because leaving wasn’t just a goodbye, it was a collapse. It’s not just the relationship you lose. It’s the people, the family, the familiarity, the system you knew, the identity you built to survive it.

I’m also breaking down the stages many narcissists move through when you leave. I'm talking about the patterns, the reactions, the attempts to pull you back into what you fought so hard to escape. I don't want to incite fear, but to prepare you. To help you see clearly when the chaos tries to rewrite your reality.

This episode is for the woman standing at the edge. The one who knows she needs to leave, or already has, and is wondering why it hurts this much.

You’re not weak for grieving. You’re not wrong for choosing yourself. Sometimes the bravest thing you will ever do is walk away and keep walking.

We'd love your feedback. Your voice matters here. Feel free to email us at WildlyHerPodcast@gmail.com. 

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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'm your host, Pamela Moore. And today I want to shift gears a little bit and I want to talk about what it looks like when we are leaving the relationship with a narcissist. And this is one of those where we I really want to dive in and talk about the hard truths. And it's the it's the part of the hard truth that we have to face and what that looks like. Because leaving is not easy. And it's certainly not, you know, some people can say, oh, I know it's hard, but the the level of difficulty and the things that we go through from the outside looking in is it's something that's most people cannot even begin to fathom. And so for those of us who have lived in it, especially when it's been something that we've grown up with as a child, or we've been in these long-term relationships. Like I've known women who have been in marriages for 20, 30, 40 years and just feel hopeless in it. When we do walk away, we never just walk away from that abuser. It's not just about that relationship. And sometimes the thought of walking away makes this fear alarm sound off so loud inside of our brains that it's loud enough to just drown out the idea of leaving. Because sometimes it's just easier to stay. And we feel like it's just easier to survive. It's kind of like trading off the evil I do know for the evil that I don't know. And we tell ourselves then that it's not that bad because there are good days. And so we feel like we can survive and just push through the bad ones. Leaving, we understand, means being alone. It's the heartbreak. It will absolutely require starting over because it can dismantle our entire world. And so many of us, we understand that, and it it paralyzes us with that fear. And there is nothing that anyone can do to absolutely prepare us for it. And no one really prepares us for this part of the leaving because we have people in our lives who love us, who tell us to leave, who tell us that we deserve better, who tell us to choose ourselves. And all of that is absolutely right and true. No one is deceiving you or misleading you in any way by saying those things. But here's what we're not prepared for, and what most people don't really realize that the choosing yourself might cost you everything that you built your life around. The people, your routines, the places that once felt like home, and sometimes even the versions of you that had to survive in all of this. And when this is all we've ever known, or it's the thing that we've known for so much of our lives that we've forgotten who we were before, it's absolutely terrifying because we don't know what's on the other side, and we don't know who we are without this in our lives, without without who we are in survival. We don't know what that is. And so today I want to share with you some of what happened when I left. I want to give you a little bit of insight, and I am not in any way trying to incite fear or in any way discourage you from taking those steps to leave, if that's what's in your heart to do. But what I want to do is I want to be real. I want to share some hard truths. And let me also stress that if it feels like it's too much, just stop and don't listen anymore. And if this feels like it may be a little too heavy for you, then don't listen alone. Maybe just listen when you're ready or when you have someone who can listen with you. And for those who are on the outside and survived the leaving, I hope that you find some encouragement that you did the right thing. Because I know how it feels that it doesn't always feel like we did the right thing. We can struggle to settle into the peace because it's tangled in so much loss and so much deep, deep grief. And because sometimes it takes a while for our nervous system to feel safe without the chaos. What I share today is not the ugliest part of my story, but some of it is some really ugly parts. This is not a list of things to do to prepare for you to leave. I can address all of that later. What I want today, what I feel like I need to explain, is if we're going to heal, then honesty has to be at the top of the list. So I'm just going to call it what it is. There are a lot of resources that you'll find that'll teach you how to take all the steps necessary to set up your finances or how to start therapy or find a support group, all of the things that we need to help us prepare for that leaving. But what I want to talk to you about today is what happened when I left. I want to be honest about what all we're leaving behind. I want to talk about the stages that the narcissist will go through when you leave. I didn't believe it when I heard how things would play out, but I got to tell you, it was pretty freaking accurate. My situation was a marriage of nearly 25 years. I had known my ex-husband since I was 14. And so I thought I knew him pretty well. I thought I had seen everything because I knew who he was in public, and I absolutely could tell you who he was behind closed doors. I thought I knew the patterns well. But I realized that there were things I wasn't admitting to myself about how he truly was. My survival was dependent upon my silence and my tolerance. And so when that ended, the things escalated, but it was things that were always right underneath the surface. I just refused to admit that they were there to that degree because I had pacified for years to keep it all from exploding. So a couple of things I want to touch on today. The first thing that I want to tell you is that you're not just leaving a person. You will absolutely be leaving an entire system. We never just walk away from one relationship. We walk away from an entire ecosystem that was built around that dynamic. You'll find this true no matter how you're related to your abuser, if it's a parent or a spouse or whatever, or a sibling, however that connection is, you will find that there is an entire ecosystem that revolves around the dynamic of that abuse. And when you stop the silence, you're gonna find that there were people who benefited from your silence, people who were way more comfortable with the version of you that stayed small and hidden, people who don't want the truth because the truth disrupts everything and it incites fear in them. So when you leave, the hard truth is you're not just disrupting your own life, you will disrupt many lives. And so it creates this ripple effect. There will be people who, and they're not meaning it in any way to harm you. It's in their own pain and in their own denials. They will minimize what you went through. They'll probably defend the person that hurt you, and they absolutely will encourage you to just keep the peace. And there will be people who may even just quietly distance themselves from you because the truth causes them too much pain and they can't face it. And so they just can't face you. The hard part in that is to not take it personal. Because it feels very personal, because it feels very much like the attack is against you for speaking truth, for stopping the silence. And what you'll find is a tremendous amount of grief in that because you're not just losing the relationship with the abuser, you now are losing an entire network sometimes. There's a lot of grief to unpack there. And I I can give you a prime example here. I have a very sweet sister-in-law. It was my ex-husband's sister. And not long before I actually walked out, when I was in the preparations of leaving, because I prepared for years before I was able to finally walk away. And right before, it was in that same few months before I walked away, she had a situation in her family on her husband's side, where they had a family member related to her husband that had walked away from an abusive situation. And she had been outside of that situation for a couple of years or so, and had settled into a home and was moving on with her life. And then out of nowhere, her ex showed up at her front door and shot her in her front yard. And it devastated the entire family. And I remember her talking about that and how how hard it was, and how nobody, nobody thought that would ever happen, and how nobody thought he would ever do anything like that. And the whole time inside of my body, I'm trembling and thinking, okay, so she can see that sometimes you don't see the truth of the other person that's really there. And so when it came time for me to leave, I confided in her that things were not what I had made them out to be, that things were different, that there was violence behind closed doors inside of our home. And I was terrified. And it shook her. And even in the midst of facing that with another family member, she couldn't face it about her own brother. And at first I was so angry. And it it was that very sister, and I believe it's because she probably went to him and told him exactly what I had confided in her about how he really was. And so the day that I was going back to our home to try to pack up my life from 30 years with this man, he had called on her and requested that she be the one in the house with me while I packed up our family and tried to decide who gets what and what what pictures to take and what to leave behind because I had nowhere to go and so I knew I couldn't take much. And when we were sitting in the home together and I'm packing boxes, she is on the phone with him repeatedly, telling me when I would pick things up around the house, that he was calling her and telling her I wasn't allowed to take that. And I learned that he was in our front yard covered with a ghillie suit, one of those military suits for camouflage, and he had an AR propped up on a tripod and was watching me through the windows of our home through the scope of his gun. And she knew this. She knew that he was watching me through the scope of his gun. So when I told her about the violence and the threats inside of our home, when I told her about him and the weapons that he had and the times that I was terrified that he would shoot me, she sat in our home as a witness to him having his gun pointed at me at that very moment. And even in that, there was something inside of her that could not face this truth about her own brother. And somewhere in her own pain and in her own deflections and in her own denial, the same denial that I had lived in for 30 years. And I couldn't, I was angry at her for holding on to this denial when it's the same thing that I did to survive in it for so long. But somewhere when I was willing to admit it, I wanted everybody else to admit it too. And in her own denial, she had convinced herself that he would never actually do anything to me. I was so angry. I was so angry with her. And I wanted to scream, and I felt like shouting, and and I remember being so mad at her and saying, Why can't you see this? And I was just screaming and and I probably to her looked like the crazy one. I probably to her looked like the toxic one. I probably to her looked like the violent one because I was the only one shouting at the time. And I remember shaking because I truly thought in that moment he would shoot me in our home, and his sister would help him cover it up. It was that hard. I had a gun pointed at me more times than I care to admit. And in that moment, I really felt like I needed somebody to validate my fear. And the truth is, even in the midst of that, they cannot. I remember her telling me when we were sitting there, she was sitting at our kitchen table while I'm going through the house and trying to pack my life and feeling crazy and terrified. The level of terror in my body in that moment was astronomical. And I remember her saying, I don't want to know. Stop telling me. Those were her words. And it shook me to my core because I didn't understand. I didn't understand it. In that moment, I couldn't understand. When I finally walked away, I didn't I didn't just leave his family and him. I left an entire network that was willing to protect him at all odds. The family that I had known since I was 14 years old suddenly abandoned me. And and the hard truth is, for so many of us in this type of abuse, sometimes that's the only family we have left because we've abandoned so much of our past, so much of our own family, so much of our friends that were not connected to our abuser in somehow, in some way. And so it feels like we are absolutely losing our entire family. And the grief runs so deep. The second thing that I want to talk about today is that not only will you have people who are in their own denial, but your abuser will use an increased amount of flying monkeys. And this part I need you to hear. Because as much as we've had it in the past, the escalation of this is intense. Because there will be people who will not just be protectors of your abuser, but absolute messengers and enablers of the person that you are leaving behind, of the system that you were leaving behind, of the abuse that you are leaving behind. And the hard thing is, just like with me and my sister-in-law, I couldn't see it at the time, but I want to warn you that they're not bad people. It's just easier to stay aligned with what's familiar than to face what's true. The hard part is that, and this one's gonna sting. Not everyone is coming with you. But please know that doesn't mean that you made the wrong decision. My ex-husband called everyone that I had ever known in my life, people that I had not talked to in years, all trying to guilt me in disdain. And whether they do it subtly or loudly sometimes, it puts people in the position to take sides. And sometimes you have to sever those relationships for your own safety. And it doesn't mean that those people are bad people. It means you have to do what's safe for you. And there is another level of grief in that. Because sometimes our friends and and and other people, maybe not even friends, just acquaintances, they get caught in the middle of the trauma. And they get caught in the middle of the nagging from the abuser. And sometimes the best thing you can do for them is just disconnect completely to release them from being in the middle of the drama. One of the people that I lost is the relationship that I had with my ex-husband's daughter. She was not my flesh and blood, she's not my daughter. It was my stepdaughter. And I wanted to be honest with her, and I did to the best of my abilities, but I understood that I was talking about her dad. And so it was very hard. And I realized that putting her in the position to maintain relationship with me, she was very much caught in the middle. And to maintain relationship with me would be accepting some of the truth of why I left, or even accepting the fact that I left. And that I think put her in a position to say that maybe her dad was a bad person. And I know that he was bombarding her. And so there was a time when she pulled away from me and it hurt. It hurt so bad. And I didn't know what to do with that. And so I had to come to the place that I released her. As hard as it was, and I I may have made the wrong decision, but when she pulled away and she needed space, I gave it to her without words. I just, I just let her go. And I felt like I was doing the best thing for her because I don't want her to have to choose or make decisions about her dad based on anything from me. I had known that precious girl since she was born. I was there the day she was born at the hospital. I went. I was there for her entire life. And it hurt so bad to lose her. But I knew that that was part of unfortunately the damage that happens in these relationships. And for a long time I took it personal that maybe I did something wrong, that maybe if I could have just stayed, maybe if things had just worked out, maybe if I could have just stayed silent, maybe if I could have just sucked it up a little bit longer. But the truth is, I didn't create that. And neither did you. The relationships that you lose, many times, it's hard to admit that even if you have a hand in walking away from other people, it's not because you created the mess. So many times in this type of abuse, we feel like we're the problem. And absolutely, this can make us feel like we are the problem. But the truth is you're not. Sometimes standing up and speaking the truth makes you very much on the outside. But you are on the outside of a system that is supporting that abuse, that functions around that abuse. It doesn't make you the bad guy. It makes you honest. The other thing that I want to talk about is when leaving, it absolutely means you could be leaving everything you know about life up to that point. So sometimes leaving means you may have to not only lose friends. And walk away from family and be excluded from every family get-together or family chats or things that you were involved in, but it can absolutely mean changing where you live. You may be starting over financially. And so many times, especially if this is where you have been for a number of years or through your childhood, it can mean rebuilding your identity from the ground up. So it's not, again, it's not just leaving a relationship. You're not just walking out and severing one relationship. It can mean leaving your entire life. And the grief in that needs to be honored. You can't rush that. You can't minimize it. You can't just do this positive thinking your way through it. That stuff doesn't work. What you need to know is it's going to be a contradiction. Because there's a part of you that can feel free and grateful for the freedom, and there's a part of you that will be grieving and hurting because you've lost everything. And two things can be true at the same time. You can be happy for something and sad for it in the same moment. The paradox is there and it's real. And you're going to have to honor that grief because it's part of the healing. What I want to touch on right now is the stages of what the narcissist goes through when you walk away and when they are losing control. Because there are stages that they will go through. And this is what I was talking about in the beginning. That when I was when I was first walking away, very early on, I came across this information. And if I if I could remember where I where I'd heard this, I would absolutely give full credit. I just don't remember. It's been too long. But I can tell you that this stuck with me because when I first heard it, I kind of blew it off and thought, hmm, I thought I knew him so well. And some of that won't apply to me, you know, when I'm listening to what people are saying about this, when I learned these stages. But I gotta tell you, it lined up. It was so accurate, it was scary. It was absolutely scary. So the first thing that they're gonna go through, the first thing that they will employ is what's called hoovering. And this is when they use um either victimization or the flying monkeys, or they'll make all these promises for getting help and and uh trying to do better or being better themselves, and how they've come to this realization that and now things are gonna turn around and don't walk away yet. We're right on the precipice of the greatness of what we are together. It's all of those things that suck you right back in because they they go right back into that mirroring and giving you the things that you've been longing to hear for so long. Or there's this victimization about how they're devastated or they're they're going through some type of crisis and they they they play on your good nature of not wanting to hurt them or destroy them. And and so if if leaving right now means destroying them, you you put it off and you stay. Anything to suck you back in. So many times when we start to walk out, this first stage is where we turn around and go right back in. I did that. I I I left countless times over the years, and every single time this sucked me right back in. That's why it's called hoovering, because that's exactly what it does. When hoovering doesn't work, then it turns to anger. And this is the first part of the violence. And depending on the type of narcissist that you're dealing with, and if if you want to dig into the types, there's a whole episode on that, or there's lots of research online you can look into, but there are varying types and degrees of narcissists. But this absolutely things will turn to anger. And this is that first part of violence. And depending on the degree or the type of narcissist that you're dealing with, it will look a little bit different. But somewhere in here, it'll look, it'll look like them making threats. This is them screaming. This is them telling you how worthless you are, how you'll never make it without them. They will belittle you and try to convince you of how weak you are, how you can't possibly survive without them. They will scream and demand that you recognize all the things that they've done for you or the things that they've tolerated from you, what a horrible person you are, and how they've just been tolerating you for so long and how no one else will ever want anything to do with you. They will make the threats to absolutely destroy your life for walking away. And it gets scary because you can see the violence in them, because you can see the hatred in their eyes, because you can hear it in their voice of how serious they are. If hoovering doesn't suck us back in, many times this stage will because we don't want to see how far they will take these threats. When I got to this part, it was very much a reflection of the worst days inside of that marriage being on repeat, because this was not the first time I had seen that anger. I could see this anger on a lot of occasions, on things that he would be angry about, and I would take the brunt of it, and it would be like this. There were times that he would push me, slam me into the ground, slam me into the wall. There were a lot of times he threw things at me across the room. And so I knew this was part of what I was so much in denial. Even in the midst of that, inside of my marriage, when it turned to this anger, it incited so much fear in me because I had had a taste of this level of violence before. And I had never taken it far enough to see how far he would go on those threats. But I absolutely had seen it escalate to this point many times inside of our marriage. What happened inside of our home, so many people do not know. I would pick up the pieces and deny and pretend like it never happened. Just pacify until the anger passed. And so I understand when we get to this point when we are trying to leave that we stop and turn around and go back. Because there is a terror and a torment that comes with this. And we do absolutely feel like we are too weak to survive. But I need you to know your feelings are not facts. And I need you to know they didn't pray on you because of your weakness, quite the opposite. They prayed on you because of how strong you are, and they sucked the absolute life out of you. That's why you feel weak. But that's not who you are. If you still don't give in after this level, the next stage that they go to is the smear campaign. And this is when they reach out to everyone you have ever known in your life and tell the most hideous stories about you. Anything that they know to be true about you will be exaggerated and they can build an entire narrative around it to convince people that you are the problem and they are the victim. And this is where people may reach out and try to convince you to go back or to get help or do both. That's where I was. I had people reaching out to me trying to put me into AA programs. If I went out to dinner somewhere and had a drink with dinner, he absolutely made sure someone was there to take pictures and then he blasted those pictures out everywhere and talked about what an alcoholic I was. And there was his proof, right? Because I had a drink with dinner. And he created this entire narrative that he had been living secretly with me and my alcoholism for years and never said anything. But now, you know, that I was going through this midlife crisis and destroying the entire family. And then people bought into it. He told people that I had been molested as a child and that I was suffering all this trauma and I was acting out and losing my ever-loving mind because of it, and built an entire narrative around that and told stories to people. And people were scared of me because they thought that I was being violent because of this trauma that I had apparently had that was never true. But how do I say it wasn't true? How do I prove that? Sometimes people are willing to believe the first story they heard, not the truth that comes later. And that's another reason why sometimes we just have to let people be where they're gonna be and grieve the loss of that relationship, too. I had people trying to convince me that I needed hormone therapy because he built this narrative around me going through menopause and being depleted and hormonally outraged. And so I was a completely different person. I was a completely different person. That part was true. Because I finally spoke truth and stopped pretending that my life was okay and that I was happy. And he used that and exaggerated it to mean something completely different. The smear campaign is a ploy to get people to isolate and pull away from you and to support them as the victim. Because if they have all of the support and you are left alone and they can convince you that you are too weak to make it without them, it just builds that narrative in your head that you'll never survive without them. And nobody believes you. I want you to know that it doesn't matter what anybody else says, you own your truth. And it is hard. It is hard. I I went through this, and the more that I heard the stories and the more that people would come to me and try to convince me, the more I had to just stop trying to defend myself because people honestly didn't want to hear the truth. I let people go so that they weren't caught in this drama of being constantly nagged by my ex-husband about the problems that he created, this narrative of things that were going on that were so outlandish. I just let people go. And I let people believe whatever they wanted to believe. If you want to believe that story, that's fine. And if you don't, don't. But I stopped defending myself. Because defending myself just put people in the middle. And I stopped giving in to the drama. I s I just stopped. Because the more I tried to defend myself, the more I felt like I was just caught up in the drama and I was exhausted from it. So I let the smear campaign happen and I let people go. If you wanted to judge me, judge me. If you wanted to hate me, hate me. But I was at absolutely at a place that I could not, could not live in that anymore. And so I just let it go. And if you're still moving forward beyond the smear campaign, if that doesn't work to draw you back in, this is when that anger escalates to violence. This is when if you are dealing with a malignant narcissist, things can get extremely violent. My ex-husband was a covert malignant narcissist. And things did get extremely violent at this point. This is when they may stalk you, they uh increase the threats against you, they will corner you, it can turn physical, and depending on the type that you're dealing with, it the the physical harm can be pushing, smacking, um, maybe even locking you in, using weapons to increase the level of their threats. And all of this is while they're still spinning their spear their smear campaign to keep other people away from you. When it got to this point, Mike's husband stalked me constantly, and he had employed other people to participate in the stalking as well. I don't know how, and I don't know how people thought that that was okay, but they did it. When he stalked me, he absolutely followed me around and he used other people's vehicles so that I wouldn't know it was him. He would drive around to wherever I was. He parked in parking lots and watched me through the windows of different businesses. He sat outside of my mother's home and watched my bedroom window at night. And I know that because he texted me that and told me that. And everywhere he went, he carried an exuberant amount of cash and a gun everywhere he went when he was following me. I don't know in those days how many times he actually pointed that gun at me. I honestly don't know. He may have, he may not have. If I had to guess, he probably did. There was one instance when I it was after I had moved out, and he had called me back and said that I could come pick up a few more of my things at the house. And so I went after work, and that was the last time I was in that house. I went to the house, it was him by himself there, and I went to gather a few of my things, and I had the box in the dining room by the back door, getting ready to leave. And he said he needed to talk to me just for a moment, just give him a moment to talk to me. And I sat down. He seemed extremely calm, and so I didn't feel the threat in the moment. And again, I had lived with him for so long. I thought I knew. And he handed me this check. Remember, I said that some of us will be struggling financially? I absolutely was. I walked away with nothing, I was leaving everything behind. I took half of the debt, and I was I was working a job that paid me shit. I didn't make anything, I was barely getting by. And he knew that. And so he wrote me a check and he offered me$12,000 that he said I could just have to do with whatever I wanted. That was never the case when I was in the marriage. I could never do that. But but on this day, he offered me a check for$12,000 and he said I could have it if I stayed in the house for 30 days with him. Just give him 30 days. And he he swore up and down that if I gave him 30 days, he could show me how different things were and and that everything would be good and I could trust him again, and it would, it would, it would all be wonderful if I would just do, then I could have the$12,000. And when I told him no, and I would, I was leaving, I got up and I picked up my box, and he ran to the door ahead of me and he blocked it and locked it. And I begged him to let me out and he told me no. And then I ran to the front door and I saw him running. He was coming up behind me and he was passing me up, and so I threw the box into the living room and I sprinted to try to get to the door before him, and he got there before me and he blocked it and he locked it. And he said, Please don't leave. These were the only two doors outside of our home. And I ran back and forth as fast as I could, trying to get to the door before him, and he kept getting there first. And I could feel this fear in me, and I could feel the ringing in my ears, and I thought, I'm gonna die right here tonight. He's not gonna let me leave. I'm gonna be trapped right here. He could, he could hide me, he could kill me, and nobody would ever know. He would just say that I disappeared and nobody would believe me because nobody's believing anything I say anyway. And all of these things are running through my head, and we're running back and forth between the doors, and I'm screaming at him to please let me go. And he's grabbing my arm and he's throwing me back, and he's he's telling me I can't leave. And I'm terrified because I know he'd been stalking me, and I know the weapons that he has in this home, and I know what he's capable of, and I know the threats that he has made, and everything is running through my head, and my eyes are starting to widen, and I have this tunnel vision, and I can't, I have no peripheral vision whatsoever anymore. And the ringing in my ears is loud, and I'm shouting, and I, and I'm I'm I can't hardly breathe. And my legs feel like they have bricks on them, and I'm starting to shake. I'm just trembling all over, and I can't, I can't seem to get to the door fast enough. Finally, I was able to fight him off of the door and push him away. And I I got the door unlocked and I opened it and he slammed it shut. And I was, I twisted the knob enough, and I kept pulling and kept pulling and kept pulling, and I pushed him away one more time and got it open, and I ran out and I got to my car as fast as I could. And when I had the door open, he got out and he stood between my door and the car so that I couldn't close the door. And he's begging me not to leave. And the only way that I can get out is to back up. But backing up meant knocking him down because he's blocking my door where I can't close it. And and I thought, am I gonna have to hurt him? Am I gonna have to run him over just to get out of here? Like I and I can't think straight and I can't hear, and I I can't hardly turn the key, and I can't hardly get the car to do anything. I my legs, I can't push the brake. I just can't, I can't, I couldn't seem to get my body to operate. I finally got the car in reverse and I started backing up, and he's walking with the car as I'm backing it up so that I still can't close my door. And I and I I finally turned just enough where I could push him out of the way. I slammed the door shut. And and I just gassed it. And I thought if I run him over, I just run him over. I don't I and I didn't look back. I just drove off. And the stalking continued after that. He put a tracking device on my car. He even went so far as to cut the fuel line on my car one night when I was parked at a restaurant. And when it broke down, I took it to the shop. And the mechanic, when I went back the next day, he called me and he said, Can you please come in? I need to talk to you. And I went in and I'm thinking, okay, well, what's wrong with my car? And that's when he tells me that my ex-husband had gone up to the shop repeatedly and begged the guy, saying, I think it's, I think there may be something wrong with the fuel line. You know, that's my wife, and and she's been having problems with that. And I, and I'm pretty sure I looked at it before, and I think it's something with the fuel line. And he kept, and the guy kept saying, There's no reason for me to look at the fuel line from what she's describing. And he said he finally looked at it and he found the cut. And he asked me, this total stranger asked me if I felt safe with this man and that if I was still living at home, that I needed to find a way to leave. And I remember telling this mechanic, please don't talk to him anymore about my car. That is my ex-husband. We are no longer married. And yes, I left because of the violence. It was hard that it was a total stranger that saw it, and so many people around me that didn't, that knew me. But that is how far the violence will go. And it may go even farther for others. I'm so sorry to say that. So you do whatever you have to do to keep yourself safe. This is why so many people leave. We not only leave the relationship, we sometimes we leave the entire state. I left. I left, I had to just move away. I couldn't stay. And I've talked to so many others who did the same thing. The smear campaign can ruin your job. The people have lost jobs over that. It can ruin your whole livelihood. It absolutely can destroy you, and the violence can be so bad that for your own safety, leave. Because here's the part that I want to get you to. If all of that is happening and you still continue to walk away and you do not give in, if that does not work, they will eventually write you off and act like you never existed. In some cases, they Block you and they isolate you from family and friends all in an effort to cut you off completely. This is why so many survivors have to leave their lives behind and start over. We just start over. And we know that even if they block us and cut us off, they're never really gone completely. They do continue to monitor us, they do continue to follow us and gain information. They never really let go. Because what they're looking for is your demise as a price for leaving their control. So here is the hope I want to give you because there is hope in this, as ugly as it is, and it is so, so ugly. Here is the hope in that. Because I went through it. I did it. I did do it, and I survived it, and it was not in vain. And I have to tell you, if I had the choice to do it all again, I would do it a hundred times over. Absolutely do it a hundred times over for the life that I have today. You're not making the wrong choice to choose yourself over the abuse. You're not. The pain is so very real, but it is not the proof that you should have stayed. Oh, let me say that again. The pain is so very real, but it is not the proof that you should have stayed. Yes, you will be lonely, but that doesn't mean it's better to stay and abandon yourself. And you know, if we're being really honest, we were isolated and lonely and terrified long before we walked out. That escalation of violence is the thing that we probably saw inside of our own marriage. We just learned how to deny it. So you're not really, you're you're not really inciting anything that you haven't seen before. And missing the people in your life doesn't mean that they were safe people for you. It means you're human. It means that our our nervous systems are wired for connection, and even unhealthy connection feels good in the moment. And so when we step outside of that, we start to go through things that feel like withdrawal. Because our nervous system is is longing for that chaos again. There's a part of us that it feels disorienting, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. Because we're not just breaking the bond of this one relationship, we're destroying an entire pattern and system of abuse that you were in. You will need to find some type of shelter and safety for yourself when you leave. And I got to tell you, you're not gonna take everyone from your old life with you. But if you can find two or three solid, safe relationships, and it may just be the therapist that you talk to, and that's okay. You cling to that and you do what you need to do to be safe until the storm passes, because I promise you that it will. Maybe you move away. I did. I know countless others who have done that. It's hard. I know it's hard. I wish that I could say that when we finally get the courage, we feel like we're doing the right thing, and we walk out of this abuse and we stand up for ourselves. I wish I could say that we just ride off into the sunset and it's just bliss. But that doesn't happen right away. You will have to fight for you. You will have to fight for you, but you are absolutely worth it. I don't care what your abuser has lied to you about, and it is a lie, that's not who you are. Staying in these relationships costs us so much more than the leaving ever will. Losing yourself is a very high price to pay. Leaving will take away some of the comfort that we became accustomed to. Not because it was comfortable, not because it was safe, but because there's something comforting in the familiar. And we're breaking those patterns. And our nervous system will absolutely feel that discomfort. But we are stripping away the lies and making space for what's real. When we walk away, there will be that time when you have to heal from those things, but then we start to begin to rebuild. And in that rebuilding, this is when you're riding off into the sunset. This is you finding relationships where you don't have to shrink. This is you building that life finally when you don't have to perform or hide anymore. This is when you discover the version of you that doesn't have to abandon yourself or fight so hard for acceptance. This is when you start to come into that place when the torment begins to end, when you're not fearing the next day, when you can't feel settled in the peace. This is when you walk out of survival. And you leave behind that version of you that had to twist and become something smaller in an effort just to be chosen. And the hard truth is, they never really chose you. They chose who you were becoming so they could control you. And I know that it feels like everything is falling apart. But I gotta tell you, that falling apart is not the end of your life. That's when for the first time it's actually yours. You're not being controlled anymore. You're not being dictated on how you need to show up or who you need to be. For the first time, you can create space in this rebuilding to be safe. To be you. I highly, highly encourage you if you are thinking about leaving at all and you are still in the midst of it, please, please seek out help. You do not have to do it alone. There there is help available. There absolutely is. I want to encourage you that if you have walked out and you're you're feeling that withdrawal and you're feeling lonely and you're you're feeling that grief, honor your pain. Let yourself grieve. Give yourself that time to heal. It will take time. It just does. But if there's one thing that I've learned in the life that I have built on the outside of all of that, it's beautiful. It's so beautiful over here. It's so good. I stopped faking the peace because I know what it is to have it for real. I stopped pretending that everything is okay because I know that it is now. I don't have to pretend. I don't have to hide anything from anybody. I don't have to do that anymore. I don't have times when I shrink and I pull away because I just can't survive today. I don't do that anymore. I get to live. I get to live. It's so beautiful over here. There is hope. There is something on the other side. It's hard, it's hard as hell. It absolutely is. But I gotta tell you, I'd do it again. I would absolutely do it again. To be without that torment, I cannot even begin to describe how amazing it is. As always, always I am here for you. I am sharing my truth because I want to be honest. No one was honest with me. People just didn't know. Hell, I didn't know. I didn't know what to expect. I thought I did, but I didn't. I really thought that I did, but I just didn't. I also want you to know that no matter how dark it gets, I promise you you're not the only one. And if I can communicate anything to you that you are not alone, I know how far that goes for so many of us. Just to know that we are not alone. So please let me shout that from the mountaintops to you. You absolutely are not alone in this. And as I've said with everything else, I am not the expert. I I have just lived it, and I have done a ton of research and work over the years, and I'm just sharing my heart and my truth with you. But if there's anything that doesn't resonate, you just toss it aside. That's okay. And I will always, always, always end with this. Because if you have seen this darkness, if you know this level of torment, please know that no matter what anybody else says, 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 in 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 her.