Breaking Free: Healing Narcissistic Wounds and Rebuilding Self-Trust

🎙️ Beyond Mommy Dearest

Episode One: Breaking Free: Healing Narcissistic Wounds and Rebuilding Self-Trust

In the first episode of Beyond Mommy Dearest, host Noelani Pearl Hernandez, trauma-informed coach, mother, and wife, explores the lasting impact of narcissistic, emotionally immature, and abusive mother-child relationships and  Kimberly Weeks, Trauma recovery coach and Founder of Global Trauma Institute discuss their Jounery to Healing.

This conversation is for adult daughters who grew up in families that looked functional but felt unsafe, confusing, or emotionally heavy. Those praised for being strong or mature, yet never emotionally protected or believed.

Joined by guest Kimberly, a survivor of generational trauma, the episode examines how early survival patterns follow us into adulthood, shaping relationships, self-worth, and the nervous system.

Noelani challenges the “just grow up” narrative often used to shame survivors who create distance or boundaries, reframing those choices as conscious, adult, and often necessary for healing and generational change.

This podcast is not about blame or revenge. It’s about understanding impact, trusting yourself, and choosing clarity without shame.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Welcome to the Mommy Dares Podcast. This is a podcast for people who grew up in families that looked functional on the outside, but felt confusing, heavy, or unsafe on the inside. For people who were praised for being strong, mature, responsible, or resilient, but were never actually protected, emotionally held, or believed. I want to ground this in who I am because context matters. I am Nelani Pearl Hernandez. I am a wife, I'm a mother, I'm a trauma-informed coach, and I'm an organizational psychology effective consultant and executive coach. We help the helpers. As someone who understands narcissistic abuse and abusive mothers, I know they don't magically disappear when you grow up, get married, or have children of your own. For many of us, that's actually when it gets louder. This podcast exists if you grew up with a narcissistic, emotionally immature, or abusive mother. You were likely trained early to doubt yourself, to minimize your feelings, to anticipate everyone else's needs, and to carry responsibility that was never age appropriate, and to feel guilt for wanting space, autonomy, or peace. And then adulthood happened. You built a life, you fall in love, you become a partner, and you became a parent. And suddenly the question isn't just what happened to me. It becomes how does this stop with me? That is what beyond Mommy Dearest is about. It's not about revenge or villainizing parents or internet therapy slogans. This is about understanding the impact of trauma, how it lives in your nervous system, how it shapes your relationships, and how to make conscious choices instead of reactive ones. That's why I'm so excited that Kimberly Weeks is here with me today. Kimberly was born into generational trauma. Her life started and was shaped with abuse, instability, and a lack of safety that forced her into survival mode for so long, long before she had words to understand what was happening. And like many survivors of narcissists and maternal abuse, that impact followed her into her adulthood. Unstable relationships, repeating patterns, and self-sabotage that makes sense only when it's viewed through the lens of trauma. A constant feeling of needing to earn love and belonging. What's powerful about Kimberly's story isn't that she followed the script, it is that she reached a reckoning. A moment where surviving wasn't enough anymore, when continuing the same way meant losing herself, where choosing herself became necessary and not selfish. So today I am very honored to have Kimberly here to chat about the work that she does with survivors as someone who understands what it means to be unseen and unheard and not believed, and especially by a parent. So, Kimberly, first, thank you for being here. I greatly appreciate it. And I really want to start with the lived experience before we get to the labels and all the language. Right. So, what does it actually feel like, if you can remember or tap into it, to grow up as a child from as a child of a narcissistic parent before you ever knew what narcissism was?

SPEAKER_01 4:33

That's a really strong question, and it's an important one. Um for me, I I'm a twin. I have a twin brother. So um it was my brother and I in in the house growing up. And all I can remember, and I talked about this yesterday with somebody, all I can remember is I never knew what was going to happen. There was no like home to come to that was stable. I didn't have like predictability as to what I did have as predictability was unpredictability. I just knew that there was going to be something that took place at some point that was going to, you know, it would be my um father abusing my mother. And all I remember is watching that and being very confused between the person that the person was outside the house and the person that the person was inside the house. It created for my mother a constant state of hypervigilance, which again, when you're a parent and I'm a mother of four children, and I have raised children and had a narcissistic partner, that person's nervous system is constantly on alert and constantly in chaos. So the person, to the best of their ability, my mother was doing the best that she could to parent us, but she did it with a nervous system that was on high alert all the time and was activated. I mean, activated about anything and everything. And so when you're parenting kids, you pass that pattern down to them of being in survival mode and being on alert and being um, you know, the part of your brain that develops for survival gets a lot of work, but the part of your brain that does that needs to develop childhood development for creativity and imagination and goal setting, it doesn't do the same kind of work. So my nervous system actually got framed. I mean, it's the word marinated in figuring out how to negotiate life based on survival, not based on self-actualization, discovery, and you know, being, you know, my best self. I've learned how to navigate the world, and most children in these environments do, based on how do I survive the situation, and that becomes the framework with which you make decisions every day. Everything's about survival. And so that's what I remember growing up. I remember not knowing what was going to happen. I remember having lots of lows of depression because of what was happening and what I was seeing. I remember not understanding and feeling because the my my father would basically teach us to disrespect my mom. So I had this like disrespect in my system towards I looked down on her. I looked, you know, I believed what I was hearing. Right. Um, and that caused me to, you know, basically rebel against the person in the situation that was the safest person, which caused some confusion as a child, also, because you're like, um, this person I know loves me, cares about me. They're not doing violence to this other person, right? Like I have these feelings about them, and I don't really know why. And I didn't know until I was in my 30s why I had that animosity in my nervous system towards my mom.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

Right. And you know, it's really interesting because for me, my mom was the one who caused the abuse, and that animosity, that frustration is something that I feel as soon as the phone rings for my dad. Yeah, because I have a special ring. And my dad also was a victim in this, just like your your mom had the abuse that went on. And I know there's so many children that are going through this with parents who are going through divorce or various things where there is that animosity, and they don't know why they have the animosity. Right. But it just is an automatic we talk about it getting activated instead of triggered. It activates this cycle that then you go through. And for narcissistic survivors, it's like a constant cycle of survival mode, and you might start to settle down, and your abuser um sees that you settle down and they'll just activate it again. So you go through the whole cycle again.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

Yes, and it's in your body, and I used to think it was enough to have this kind of cognitive awareness and understanding to be like, okay, well, I I I intellectually, and I think as a child too, I intellectually understood what I was seeing. I knew it wasn't good, but I also didn't see anything else, so I didn't know how to relate any other way, right? So, you know, early on in my 20s, I yelled a lot, I was very angry as a parent because I was a young parent, and um I didn't know that there were people that sat down and had conversations about things that they were differing on, and it was calm and people could listen and people could validate. I had no framework for that whatsoever. So I just went around yelling at people every time I I laugh.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

I laugh not because of judgment, I laugh because I I hear a lot of what you know, I was a young parent too, and my what my daughter often says, because I also am a mother of four. I have my daughter and then my three bonus kids. What my daughter often says about the calmness that I have with the other kids is where was she when I was growing up? Like you're so you have the chill now, is what she says.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Yes, and I will say too, there is that that wiring is there. Yes. So even when you are calm energetically, you can cut people.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Oh yeah, yeah, it's the I wish she would. Like that's always right there in the back of my head. I I wish she would. I wish I please, please do it. And and for me, what I when I realized wholeheartedly that my mom was narcissistic was when my daughter and I sat down and I apologized because for me it was a uh like I thought, okay, I know this is the right thing to do as a human being. And then I thought to myself, this is something my mother would never do. And and then it triggered, you know, an activation. And and I didn't um I don't I very rarely talk to my daughter or my kids about my mother. We've been no contact for quite some time. But it it was a very like cleansing experience for me to know that we could get to the other side of this, and it doesn't have to be generational. And you know, three, four, five generations down, you know, my great-great-grandchildren, hopefully their nervous systems will be more stable, that they will know that they were loved. And it was because of the moments that we have now, yeah, that we're talking about this. And I and I know that oftentimes um parental abuse, especially narcissistic abuse, is kind of hidden, it's really quiet. And so people around you don't know those things. And oftentimes, because they're narcissists, if a mandatory reporter might be called in because of things that are going on, that person then can kind of you know dust over the whole situation. Yeah, so what messages did you internalize about your needs or your emotions or your right to take up space during this time?

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Um I felt as an elementary kid, as a high school kid, that I needed to have a ticket out of the house. I internalized that family was not safe. So I was the kid that signed up for everything. I was captain of the cheerleading, I was the senior class president, I was the homecoming queen. I was I was constantly trying to find some kind of safety, community, and belonging in performing. You know, one of the person I have an incredible therapist, his name is Dr. Gene Schrader, and he says to me that there isn't a world equation that we all operate on, and that equation is appearance plus performance equals acceptance. And I was working that equation like it was nobody's business. I signed up for everything, I was in a hundred clubs, I was trying to lead everywhere I went, I left my brother. I decided to go, and we talk about it in nervous system regulation. I had more of a sympathetic response where I was in fight or flight all the time. So I was moving, moving, moving, doing, doing, doing.

SPEAKER_02 14:14

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. That's what I did.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Organizing, organizing. And I did that to overcome what was happening at home because when I came home, I didn't know what was gonna happen. Right. So I did as much outside the home as I possibly could to overcome that feeling of unpredictability. I really did internalize that in the in the in the family dynamic, I was not going to be responded to.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

And what I found is I carried that into my parenting with my daughter, um, with my oldest daughter. I found I carried that into any situation where I felt that I was being wrong. There was a hypervigilance where I was like, nope, you did that wrong. And then it was the, you know, all of the things that as I look back on my life now, I think, oh gosh, how could someone do that? But there's that constant scanning um of always feeling like you're bracing for something. How did you kind of get through that part of it to what I find now is being intentional about relaxing, being intentional about that rest. And it kind of takes me a moment. I might need to clean the kitchen first, and then I can be intentional about rest.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Well, I'll say two things. The first thing is my body had to collapse. I went through um developing an autoimmune disease and I was married, and I was married to a narcissistic abuser, and my body, I was constantly trying to, you know, take care of everything so everybody would be okay. And um, my body could not handle it anymore. And so eventually it gave out. And I went into all of the for those people who've experienced autoimmune responses, the inflammation in your body is so intense that it causes your body to start to break down, and um I would not be able to get out of bed, I would not be able to function, I would not be able to remember things and recall things because there were lesions in my brain that were keeping me from remembering things. So my body had to stop me. And from that, it taught me coming out of the hospital, having to learn to re-walk, having to learn to recommunicate, because when people would talk to me, I couldn't understand what they were saying. Like my I couldn't confuse in my brain. Um so I had to learn to slow down the pace of my life and completely change how I live, my entire lifestyle, how I work, like all of those different things. And that process helped me not have flare-ups. So then it became okay, I have to watch how I'm reacting or responding to situations, I have to watch my activation, I have to watch who has access to me, I have to watch what kind of conversations I get into, I have to watch who I'm gonna have an argument with because that could lead me to the hospital. Right, right. So I literally had to start negotiating based life based on how do I maintain a nervous system that allows me to function every day. There is a theory called spoon theory, it's for people with chronic illnesses. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but spoon theory basically says when a person has some kind of chronic illness, they have fewer uh amounts of energy than the regular average person, and they measure that amount of energy based on spoons. So let's say the average person has 25 spoons of energy per day. Right, right. For a person with chronic illness, they might have 15 or 10, right, or 20. So you have to choose where your spoons of energy go. And so I would literally where I would pop off at somebody, or I would be like, oh, I gotta go fix this problem. I literally started having to sit literally figure figuratively and literally sit back and say, I don't, I don't have but like maybe five more spoons for the rest of the night. And it's like one o'clock in the afternoon. So I don't think I'm gonna respond to that text message.

SPEAKER_02 18:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

I don't think I'm going to engage in that conversation on social media about politics. Right. I don't think I'm gonna, I don't think I'm gonna run to the store because I lost, you know, forgot this one item. I think I'm just gonna figure out how to make it work with what's in the house. I started having to determine how it's literally a framework of determining where you spend your amount of energy and what you give your time and attention to. I say often the best things that have happened to me have been the things that have woken me up, and my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis woke me up to the reality of how my nervous system was dominating my flesh pattern of reaction and hypervigilance was dominating me, and I was experiencing a slow walk into collapse. There's a lot of women that can can can that can you know reconcile with that.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Well, and I really like the spoon theory, and we'll make sure in the the um show notes that we put this in. I think that if we go back and we look and say, okay, it starts with trauma, the trauma rewires that nerve nervous system, and that long-term emotional trauma, whether it's uh especially when it comes to childhood, which we both had, uh relational by bear uh marrying it or being with a narcissist, and then that ongoing abuse, it keeps your body in that fight, flight, freezer, fawn system. And your body never gets that all clear.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

Right. So for those of you who are listening, what this could mean is that constant cortisol, that constant stress and adrenaline, which is not good for your system. Poor sleep and recovery, meaning, have you ever gone to sleep and not feel like you've rested? Um, and that heightened pain sensitivity, um, which then can change into this autoimmune disease because it's constant, constant, constant, whether it's MS or lupus or any of those things. Right. Because your stress system talks directly to your immune system. So oftentimes I'll I find myself telling my daughter, don't stress yourself out, you're gonna get a cold. Because that brain and that nervous system and hormones and the immune system are in constant conversation. Your body is an amazing thing. And so you have all these things that are going. And then what that chronic stress leads to, whether it's a job, it's your mom, it's a partner, it's you're worried about your kids, any of those things is inflammation says stays switched on. You're confusing your immune system. So it can't tell the difference between a friend or foe, so it's just gonna fight everyone. Just like a, you know, a human being. And it increases that autoimmune flurrups. So the boundaries that you're talking about, this spoons theory, is how you can work through it. And oftentimes, as a narcissistic abuse survivor, you have people pleasing that's in there. And that those things do not go together.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

No, they don't. And so you begin to ask yourself the question: how do I make sure that I'm taking care of myself as a priority first? And that is a huge shift for a child. Yes. Now an adult who has learned to, how do I make sure that my other my parent is okay? Because they're in this relationship dynamic. And you feel responsible, you have a parentified burden, like life. It's no longer about how do I take care of me? It's how do I take care of everyone in the house so that I can have some calm and safety here. Right. So I had to shift completely out of that people pleasing. And now when I say completely, of course, I still have the tendency. Right. They're still, you know, yeah, they don't dominate me anymore. But I had to, I had to start asking myself the question first: how do I take care of myself in this system, me, or this situation, so that I'm not sacrificing my body, my needs, my desires to please another person. It had to be flipped. Right. I had to become the first person I'd say, what do I need? What do I want in this situation? And the moments where my my inclination to go prioritize someone else first, I pull in and remember, wait a minute. If I do that, then I'm gonna put my body every time I violate this, where I prior to prioritize one another person ahead of my own needs, I pay for it.

SPEAKER_02 24:06

Right. And I think one of the things too is I want to tease this out a little bit because it's not the selfishness that we see in a narcissist. This is literally a life or death situation. And as adults, we have responsibilities. And when you grow up having to suppress that anger or know the difference really quickly between anger and needs, or staying hyper-vigilant, or earning safety through compliance, yes, or absorbing that emotional chaos, you become that parent a lot quicker. How do you see those early dynamics in what we just talked about? How did they show up in your life, in your relationships, or maybe in work, or the way you talked to yourself?

SPEAKER_01 25:01

So I lockstepped from my childhood into my marriage. I literally prioritized and I really you use the word earning. I really thought that I could earn love from my spouse by performing and appearing according to what his desires were. And I put all of my eggs in the basket of studying and learning what his needs were and his desires were, and I did everything I could possibly do. If he wanted more kids, we had more kids. If he wanted me to get a job that I made more money, I got a job that made more wanted me to look a certain way. I tried the best to look a certain way. If you want me to wear certain things, I would wear those things. I really, I really again I'm not a I'm not an authentic person in this. I'm literally putting on the narcissist has you do what they do. And what a narcissist does is they have a mask and a performance, a personality they put on for people. And so they adopt, they get you to adopt that same process by putting on what they want you to do and losing your own identity and sense of self. And so through that process, my whole direction was about what do I do again in the name of trying to be safe in this family dynamic? What do I need to do for this person so that I can be safe and have my needs met and have a family and have belonging? I literally transferred what I learned in my childhood into my marriage, and I couldn't see it because I was trying to do it differently. You're you're trying to have connection, you're trying to have conversation, you're trying to have the kids do things together and do the little fake pictures and all the things you didn't need to do. You're you're you're you're attempting to do something different, but you're actually duplicating what you came out of because you haven't taken the time, and I didn't take the time to do my own work apart from a relationship to heal the wounds within myself.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

You know, that I I believe is um a really important part of being able to go into a healthy relationship. You know, I I always say, by the grace of God, I ran into my husband the one the day that I did, um, after I had been not with a partner for quite some time, and I was able to recognize the kindness not as a mask for something else, but for the kindness it was. And that I think is a real specific point for a lot of people who have been in that narcissistic abuse where they hear, I think in my experience, they would hear a compliment. And because the narcissistic parent maybe didn't give them as much, they go to that person. But that first person ends up to be a narcissist, so then you don't trust yourself. And as you're going and working through who you are, you realize that there are really good people out there. There are, they're good people, and um the moment that you realize that, that the narcissistic relationship you were in with your mother or your father or your your ex-husband isn't just difficult family dynamics, it is abuse, right? That is uh an eye-opener. And it sounds like for you, that really happened when you had your MS flare up, when you you found that out.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

Well, I mean, that was that it at the time I didn't know it was an MS flare. I thought I was losing my mind. I just really and to a degree I was losing my mind. You were, yeah, yeah. Um, but I think that what what what the moment for me was was with all of the and what a narcissistic relationship, the person consistently moves the goalpost of what pleased them, and I was doing all that movement, trying my best, all that movement, my body's breaking down, I'm in the hospital, constantly my system is is just white, and it didn't matter what I did. I could not please this person, and even when I did the movement from okay, they said they wanted this, okay, now they want this, so let me move over here. Even when I did that, it was still either not good enough or it wasn't what it was wrong, it wasn't what right? Yeah, the term is called a double bind. The double bind is when they present you with options and choices, no matter what you choose, it's not gonna satisfy them. And so it's a set up for you to fail so that they can ridicule and devalue and discard you. And I remember coming to grips with the reality that no matter what I did for this person and how I bent and contorted myself, and devalued my own needs and desires and tried my best to meet theirs, there was nothing I was going to be able to do to satisfy them because the truth is a narcissistic personality is not able to be satisfied, it's not satiate, you can't satiate it, it's like pouring money into a really bad investment that just keeps sucking dry. Right. That was my experience, and and it I I had compassion on my ex-husband because that wasn't just what he was projecting to me, it was actually what was also happening in himself, right? It didn't matter what he did. He could buy new cars, he could get a new house, he could get doesn't help clothes, they could get a new business, he could start a new venture. It didn't matter, he wasn't going to be happy. No, and and I was just living inside of that world of I can't be happy, and nothing anybody does can make me happy. And so for me, that was the moment, the moment where I realized this is not like it's like you're in uh a false world. This is a real none of this is real, this is a fantasy illusion. This person is have me on a hamster wheel chasing, and I'll never reach it, and I'm and my body is breaking under the weight of trying to appease this person, and it woke me up.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Yeah, I mean, and you know the double bind in like layman's terms is you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. That's right, and I think that is the most insane phrase I've ever heard. Yes, that's not the way life works. There it there is not any situation that is this or that. It could be this, and it might not exactly be what you want it to be, and you might feel a little guilt, hopefully no shame, but it might be shame instead of guilt. Right. Um, and ultimately, when you come back around, when you re-examine those things later, it ultimately was the best decision for you.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

And I'm internally grateful that you chose yourself at that moment because you have been doing amazing work, um, not only for yourself and your kids, um, but also for other people. And we're gonna talk about that too. Um, what I want to do is I want to zoom for out for a moment and really think of um where many survivors have felt invalidated and we're just coming off the holidays. Right. So holidays are a hard, hard sell for a lot of people who have narcissistic family members, parents in their um atmosphere. And I was appalled, I'll say nicely, in the mainstream self-help culture when um Miss Oprah Winfrey and Mel Robin started to talk to adult children about the reasons why they went no contact with their parents. And I I really was bothered by the narrative that was created or the framing that they created where it was, well, if you cut off your parents, you're just being childish, or at some point you need to just forget about all that stuff and grow up, or you only get one mother. And then the worst, and I I don't believe that Oprah R Mel Robbins did this, they bring it back to the Bible and they say there's you know, all of these quotes about honoring the parents. Correct. Yeah. And for people who didn't grow up in narcissistic or abuse with narcissistic or abusive parents, that can sound like accountability or empowerment. And for trauma survivors, this really lands differently. So I got really angry when I saw it and I said, okay, is this something I want to take up? And then I thought to myself, this is this could land very similar with other narcissistic abuse survivors, where it sounds dismissive or there's shame in no contact, or your pain makes others feel uncomfortable. So you figure out and you manage it really quietly. And what the framing misses is that most survivors don't arrive at these boundaries or this distance impulsively. And they didn't, I didn't wake up one day and say, I'm just gonna do this. And I didn't cut off the people because I couldn't, I can't handle my mom in that conflict. But for me, after years of trying to explain or forgive or communicate better or change or do all the things, um, it just didn't work. And it became a very similar to what you said, a life or death situation for me. And it's not just growing up. In fact, for many of the survivors, it we grew up way too early. We were we were pre-rentified, we had to emotionally regulate those adults, and we had to learn how to manage their feelings over ours. So growing up isn't that guidance, it's kind of that erasure. So when you hear no contact framed as being childish or immature, what do you think is fundamentally misunderstood about narcissism, narcissistic abuse as a child and receiving that for someone to say that?

SPEAKER_01 36:29

Um, how dangerous it is, how dangerous narcissistic abuse is is a fundamental lack of understanding of the the damage to a person's physical body, because I really don't believe what manifested in my my marriage was just what happened in the marriage. I can remember instances of certain physical things happening in my teenage years that were that were a kind as symptoms of that kind of like something was going on in my brain and my nerves, right? So it just reached its fulfillment in my marriage, but I can remember being 16, 17, 18, and having certain things happen that there was something happening in my immune system, and there was something happening in my nervous system, right? So I think there's a disconnect two in two ways. A with how dangerous it is physically to a person's life and capacity to function and take care of themselves, and then spiritually there is a disconnect because people that have narcissistic personality disorder, people who have high traits of being able to um get pleasure from seeing people be harmed, which is called sadism. Um and sadism has a sexual component to it, but you know, there's a part of like getting charged up and getting off to seeing someone powerless, helpless, and be dominated and controlled. There's a part of that that that's in narcissistic abuse, yes spiritually is also people having access to your life, where there is a component of darkness and demonic activity. And I'm just gonna say it straight. Yeah, I agree. When there is, and so you know, the Bible says that the the Satan has come to steal, kill, and destroy. And so, as an adult, if you have gotten away from a family system and minimized your contact with the parent, but that parent is still coming after you to dominate and control you, what's really coming after you is that spiritual influence and spirits that are coming to cause destruction in your life. So when you go no, when when a person makes the decision to go no contact, A, they've had to come to grips with the reality that the parent that they have longed for, performed for, and tried their best to overcome that abusive relationship by dynamic by jumping through all the hoops and meeting all the goalposts. They have had to come to the the place of accepting they will never have a genuine loving relationship with that parent.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

Right. That's crazy to me. Like being a mother, you and I, both mothers, I can't imagine ever not loving my kids. Yes, I can't imagine that. Even my my three bonus kids, I cannot imagine not loving them or not feeling if they are hurt, or if I've even done something like, I feel bad when I have to be like, no, you can't do that. And I like, oh, I really want them to. Right. To me, that is absurd.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Yeah. And so for the child, the child is having the adult child is having to say, I'm never going to have a loving mother. I'm never gonna have a protective loving father. By the time they go, no contact, they've had to go through a kind of funeral. They've had to recognize that that hope that they had for reconciliation and health with that parent is dead. So the no contact is just an ex is is like the execution of what's already been happening. And it takes a great deal of strength, of courage, of um prioritizing and esteeming yourself to say, I know that's my parent, but I'm not going to allow that. I'm an adult now, and I'm not going to allow that parent to continue to terrorize me for the rest of my life. I'm not going to make it so that that parent has access then to my own children to continue that same pattern with them. And so I'm going to make the decision to take the L and cut the line between me and my kids with this person so that they can no longer continue this pattern. And I don't continue having the atmosphere spiritually of having that person influence me with my children either. It is a huge decision. It is not what anyone makes lightly. And so when people who are, you know, famous or have lost influence talk about going no contact from parents or anyone in your family system. It could be siblings. I've I've coached people who've had to go no contact with their siblings, their twin, with I mean, like all of those things. They do have, they have no, I'm gonna use the word sacredness, they have no honor for the the the place of damage that a person has to get to to make that choice, and also the the the a willingness to let go of their whole family system in many situations, right? To respect themselves and protect their own children.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

Well, and um Elizabeth Kubler Ross talks about grief, and that's something that for many of these survivors there is the assumption that this distance comes from anger, but for many survivors, that deep mourning that they are leaving their parents that they never had, or their their family, like you said, an entire family system is hard. And and that grief isn't a linear thing, you know. There's a denial, like, did this really happen to me? Oh my gosh, I can't believe this. And then you get raw angry. Yes. And then there's bargaining. I wonder if I could see her, you know, for 15 minutes and I'll bring my kids with me so that they could do a quick little thing. And then there's depression, and then there's acceptance. What people don't tell you about this, especially when it goes, you go through this as a result of trauma, is you don't move through these stages like one after the other. It's a loop, and you might revisit it, you might get a phone call, it might be, you know, the ringtone of your mom or a song that you hear in the car, and you spiral back, and that's normal. Yes. And it's a decision you make every Every time you decide that you're not going to pick up the phone was something, you know, I found me thinking about my mom at two times more recently. Number one, going through perimenopause, because she would know we share DNA that I could say, hey, what happened with you? And that caused me to go through a whole series of griefs along with going through perimenopause. So it was all combined together. And then recently, when I don't have makeup on, I look a lot like my mom. And I think I don't know if a lot of survivors have that thought that when they look in the mirror, they say, Oh, that's the person that I do not like. And what I've just what I've really gone through is that the stages of grief to figure out how can I get through this and be okay with the decisions I've made. And and like you said, it's not it's not a lightweight decision. No, it's incredibly painful. It's incredible. Right. It's continually painful. And you know, I don't know if you experience this too, is when I listen or like when I look at my husband's family, because they are amazing. Like his family is they're just great. What would you say to someone who might be listening to this, who's married, who's raising kids, who's holding a job, and they so feel judged for managing their relationship with their mother this way.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

I would say that um they should give themselves a lot of compassion and grace because um to make that decision, they're you know, now that their mothers to make that decision, they have a relationship with their own children. Hopefully, they've done some of their own personal work so that they can stop certain patterns and not repeat them with their own children. I have had to do that. I have had to do my own personal work because of the way that the patterns I grew up with were showing up with my, especially my oldest child. Um and you know, so so first of all, that you know, give yourself compassion that you're trying to disrupt that pattern. And a part of disrupting that pattern is when you're a child, you cannot make certain decisions because you're a parent, you're you're being parented by that person and you are subject to their you know rules and household dynamics because you're the child in the situation. But a part of changing that pattern is seeing yourself individuating and seeing yourself as your own individual person with agency and free will, and feeling a lot of support, and I will just speak that to those who are watching this: a lot of support to individuate that way and decide I don't want this pattern in my life to continue. I couldn't do anything about it as a child, but I can do something about it as an adult and feel the support. I mean, some people said permission, but sit feel the support to be able to make that choice. That's actually breaking the pattern. That's actually health. Because, you know, for many of us, this has been generations of behavior patterns that have normalized and have been said, you know, just that's just the way it is, and people just accept it and people just look the other way. I mean, we're talking deep things, molestation, verbal, physical abuse, all kinds of things. I mean, parental, you know, looking the other way while other family members do harm to kids, and they just kind of well, that's just your uncle, or that's just your right.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

That's just where they are.

SPEAKER_01 47:59

You're disrupting that pattern of acting like what's happening isn't happening, and you're calling it out, you're telling the truth, and you as an adult who is separate human being from your family system, making the decision that this is what I want for my life moving forward, and here's how I'm gonna protect myself, my spouse, and my children, and that is a huge accomplishment, huge, huge.

SPEAKER_02 48:31

I mean, and that you know what I like the word disruptor because often disruptors we've seen in history, you know, get a lot of grief. And it's not a question of whether or not you can tolerate it, because I'll say this right now for everyone who's listening. You can tolerate it, you've come this far. Yeah, it really becomes the question of do I want my kids to learn what this is what love looks like? Yes. Do I want my daughters and my son to know that this is what love looks like from a parent to a child or with partners?

SPEAKER_01 49:07

And that's not a childish thing, yeah, that's a conscious thing, that's an adult thing, yes, is generational healing, yes, and the other part of it is no one took care of me as a child in this way, and I'm going to, as an adult, take care of my inner child, the part of me that remembers all of these things happening, the part of me that grieves in the middle of the night, the part of me that looks at other families, like you said, with your husband's family, and wishes I had that, and reconcile that I won't have that with that parent at any point, but I can give it to myself now as an and so it's a big part of like how do I show up for me now, right? Right in ways I couldn't do as a child.

SPEAKER_02 50:04

You know, I love uh you have a post where you're hugging your inner child, and I haven't quite done that yet for myself, meaning I haven't done a picture of that because I think for me that moment becomes really real where the real question to myself isn't why can't you just get over this? Because it's that's not the real question. It for me is um, why was I not believed? And how can I believe you believe now? And I think a lot of survivors are expected to absorb the harm in the name of maturity while the accountability is optional for that other person. Yeah, yeah. And that's the part that often gets skipped. If someone is in that space of their healing where they're saying, Well, why isn't that person being held accountable? What would your advice to them be to kind of move forward or move from that space so you're not always in that loop of asking that question?

SPEAKER_01 51:04

Yeah, yeah. There's two things I'll say. First of all, your no is accountability. Your no contact is accountability, your boundaries around your own heart are your are are the accountability. Some people want the accountability from the rest of the family system. They want perhaps at times, depending on what took place, law enforcement to hold that person. Um, those types of things. And the reality is if the person can no longer harm you today or your family that you've created and your children, then that's all the accountability that's necessary for you to move forward. There are times when a person does need to, because there's still other people in the family system that are vulnerable, they need to pull other people in to have kind of a reckoning, uh, so that other young children or other young people do not fall prey to that same kind of abuse. Right. But for the most part, most people are outside of the statute, quote unquote, of limitations. And so what's necessary for moving forward as an adult is for you to enact your own accountability plan. And part of that is saying, this is what I'm going to, how I'm going to engage my parent, or it, this I will not be engaging that parent any longer. And that's me holding them accountable for the way that they treat me, not just as a child, but today.

SPEAKER_02 52:38

You know, you talk about these parts. I would love for you to talk about the work that you're doing to help others who are experienced this, because what I've discovered with by going through my own training to help others is there's a lot of people who have experienced this. And so there's plenty of people to go out there and heal um in regards to this. So I would love for you to talk about that. And I think you have a class that's coming up, if I remember correctly.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

I would love to hear about it. I do. I so I uh helped co-found an institute called the Global Trauma Institute, and it is a learning platform and training ground to help people who want to support other people who walk through um any kind of trauma. We have an initial course, we have an advanced course, and we also have courses that are specialty courses. I teach a course called, or I'm about to launch a course called the Narcissistic Abuse Practitioner Course. If you want to be a person who specializes in supporting and walking people through abuse relationships with a narcissist, whether in their childhood, whether in their family system, whether in an intimate partner relationship, um, we go through a 17-week training to help equip and train and practice coaching and get feedback and all of those things for folks who are like, you know, I want to not have what has happened to me like end with me. I want to multiply what I've learned to do and the healing that I've been doing and help support other survivors. So that's the first thing that's through Global Trauma Institute. Um, and you can find information on uh globaltraumainstitute.com to sign up for that course. It starts on the 12th of February, so I'm super excited about that. Um but also one of the things that our our our tagline for the institute is that we are an organization by trauma survivors for trauma survivors. And the root of that is anyone that is a practitioner with us has to commit to continuing to do their own personal work because if you're not doing your own personal work and you don't have your own uh uh support systems to be able to continue healing yourself, you can't be the best practitioner to anyone else. 100%. I have a um a community for women called Stand Firm. It is based on the Bible verse, Galatians 5, 1, and and that verse says this, and it really sums up a lot of what I we've been talking about today. The Bible says, Jesus said, I set you free to live a free life. Now stand firm, therefore, and do not allow yourself to be entangled in a yoke of bondage again. The reason why you go no contact is to come out of bondage from your family. The reason why you put boundaries in place with a former spouse or partner, even if you co-parent with them, is so that you come out of bondage to that relationship dynamic. One of the things that most of us know is it takes seven to eight times for a person to leave an domestic violence situation and stake on. And that's because they keep getting pulled back in to that bondage over and over again in the hopes that that person will change. And God has given us in the Bible direction I set you free so that you could actually live free. But you're the one that has to stand firm, set your boundaries, take care of your nervous system, establish your, you know, how you're going to interact in relationships. You're the one that has to do that so that you don't get pulled back into that same pattern with someone else. And so that's the name of the community, is called Stand Firm. And I walk with women for an entire year so that they not only have coaching and support, but they have community and co-regulation to be able to hold themselves accountable, but also be supported as they're going through that grief cycle and that healing process.

SPEAKER_02 57:09

You know, this is all I think very amazing. And I know that the work that we do, so we do organizational psychology with nonprofit organizations. And one of the things that came out of that is we do a lot of trauma-informed work with them. And I said, Oh, well, I'll, you know, I have a narcissistic mom. I'll go ahead and do the narcissistic uh recovery um relationship coaching. And one of the things that I find really true is I found this quote and it says, the healer suffers first and then they return with the medicine. Because we're really changing that generational thought process, right? Yes. And so whether you decide that you want to do the work that you are doing, meaning go through this training, which I think is phenomenal, because not only did it create Kimberly, who's in a fun a phenomenal person, but it's created, you know, hundreds of others. If it's the stand firm community, if it's working with Kimberly or myself individually, doing the group work that we do, there is a space for you that you can come to where you don't have to explain it. You don't have to explain why you should have left sooner or try to explain any of that work. Because what I want you to hear is that you didn't fail it out of family, you responded to the reality that was in front of you. And if you are deciding no contact, that distance doesn't mean rejection. It sometimes means that regulation and that self-respect. And it means that sometimes pausing that healing or pausing that harm is going to be really what takes you to the next step. So my hope is that in the work that we do together, and this won't be the last time we have Kimberly on, because um, Kimberly and I, I think, are bound by our stories that are incredibly similar and incredibly different, and bound by this healing. And what I want to do with this podcast is really be here to tell you that you have choices that you can make. And it's here to help you trust yourself enough to make the choice without that shame or that guilt. And I'm not here um so that you feel like you're doing something wrong. It's so that you can gain some clarity. And if after this conversation you you spent, oh my gosh, Kimberly's, I felt like that. She's totally right. Or, oh my goodness, Nelani, I totally felt that. And you feel seen and grounded and less alone, then we're doing exactly what we need to.

SPEAKER_03 59:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:55

So we're gonna keep talking. We'll be back in a couple weeks with another episode. Kimberly, thank you for being my first guest. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:05

And I can't wait to continue healing with you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you so much. I am honored to be able to share this space and to lock arms with you in this work.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:14

Thank you. Healing from a narcissistic mother doesn't happen in isolation or on a timeline. Some weeks you feel steady, and other weeks a small crack can feel like everything opened. That's why we offer monthly support and small trauma-informed support groups for adult daughters of narcissistic mothers. Monthly support looks like ongoing individual support for when real life happens. It includes trauma-informed coaching, ongoing message support, and a private monthly check-in to help you stay grounded, regulated, and supported between moments of contact, conflict, and self-doubt. This support is steady and not overwhelming. There's no pressure to fix anything, just consistent support so you are not carrying this alone. Also, do small support groups. Our groups are intentionally small, confidential, and trauma-informed. They're designed for women who want a community without the chaos, validation without comparison, and structure without judgment. We focus on a shared understanding, nervous system regulation, boundaries, and self- and reclaiming self-trust. It's real-world trauma-informed support for daughters who grew up managing someone else's emotions and now are learning to protect themselves. You are not behind, you're not too sensitive, you're responding to what you live through. Our first support group starts this Wednesday, January 27th, and the theme is coming home to yourself. Learn more by visiting BeyondMommyDaris.com.