From Emotional Crutch to Consequences: Six Years with Fragile Men –PART 2

If you are ready to burn the “good girl” and “cool girl” roles to the ground, this episode will meet you there. If you are not ready, but your body leans in anyway, you are still welcome here. You get to listen at your own pace, pause when your nervous system says stop, and come back when you are ready.

I am not here to fix you, diagnose you, or tell you what you should do with your relationship. I am here to say out loud what many of us were trained to swallow. I am here to talk about consequences, self-protection, grief, and the exact moment you stop existing as an emotional crutch and start existing as a whole person again.

If you are still in it, on the fence, or already out, trying to make sense of the rubble, you belong in this conversation. You don't need to be ready to leave to deserve clarity. You do not have to be “healed” to deserve safety. You only have to be willing to hear the truth of your own experience and let that truth matter.

****Listen to episode 2 to get the full arc here, but you definitely do not have to. Thank you for listening, sharing, and advocating for our cause. <3****

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

I spent years shedding the good girl, cool girl brainwashing. Imagine a woman high in empathy and agreeableness with complex trauma and no boundaries as the good girl cool girl. Yeah, that was me, ladies and gentlemen. I used to think that consequences were cruel. I thought withholding access to my body, my time or my emotional labor made me cold or unloving. That belief kept me trapped. Every time I eased up on a boundary to keep the peace, I abandoned myself a little more. Every time I swallowed my voice to avoid conflict, I taught him and many others that my pain was negotiable. Consequences are not revenge. Consequences are information. When I stopped over explaining and started responding with action, the dynamic changed. I removed access instead of begging for respect. I stopped debating my reality. I let my no be the end of a sentence. Even if my voice shook, and even if my nervous system screamed at me to fawn. No one taught me that protecting myself would feel this lonely at first. You lose people when you stop being endlessly accommodating. You lose the version of yourself that survived by being agreeable. You lose the fantasy that love will be enough to change someone who benefits from your lack of boundaries. That grief is real and it sits next to a quieter truth. The people who stay when you are fully boundaried are the only ones who were ever safe enough to have you. My relationship with my ex-husband radicalized me. Through psychological warfare, coercive control, and insidious physical and sexual abuse, I realized what I craved, deserved, and what I needed to do. My relationship with my ex-husband radicalized me, yes. But it also exposed the training I received long before him. The training to downplay my pain, to rationalize red flags, to see my own needs as negotiable, to take pride and endurance instead of safety. The culture calls it being a ride or die. I call it self-abandonment wrapped in romance language. I do not want to be a ride or die. I want to be a woman who rides for herself, who refuses to die in someone else's chaos. I want to be chosen, not needed. I no longer want to be infrastructure for a man who refuses to build himself. I no longer want to be the emotional support system, the therapist, the mom, the rehab, the job coach, and the spiritual guide, all in one body that he does not even respect. Need without responsibility is dependence. Being needed in that way kept me exhausted and resentful, but I called it love. To fully soften into my feminine, I had to stop collapsing into learned helplessness and start practicing active self-protection. Softness is not the absence of strength. Softness is what becomes possible when strength is established. When I know I will choose myself, I feel safer relaxing around others. When I know I will leave at the first sign of coercion, I feel safer opening my heart. To be held without fixing, I had to stop treating other people like projects. I used to be addicted to potential, not who he was in front of me right now. Every red flag became a challenge, every injury became a chance to prove how forgiving and resilient I was. Now I do not want to be impressed by how much pain I can tolerate. I want to be impressed by how quickly I walk away at the first violation of my values. To stop proving my worth, I had to accept something uncomfortable. The people who cannot see my worth will not see it no matter how much I perform. No amount of cooking, sex, financial help, emotional labor, or spiritual support makes a person value what they are committed to devaluing. Overgiving did not make me more loved. It made me more useful to the person exploiting me. My radicalization taught me that narcissistic individuals target your empathy, not your weakness. They study your history, your insecurities, your dreams, and then reflect them back to you. At first it feels like the safest connection you have ever known. You feel seen in a way you have been starving for your whole life. But that reflection is borrowed light. When you pull away, they dim because there was nothing there to begin with. The soulmate was your own soul projected onto an empty container. So now when someone praises my empathy, I pay attention to how they treat my limits. Compliments mean nothing if they collapse the moment I set a boundary. Mirroring means nothing if they only reflect what benefits them. A partner who truly loves me will not fear my no. They will respect it as proof that I am self aware and self protective, not as a threat to their control. I used to think healing meant I would never attract unhealthy people again. What I know now is very different. Unhealthy people will still find you. The difference is how long they stay. The difference is how early you leave. The difference is how you talk to yourself after you see the truth. Do you shame yourself for missing the signs or do you thank yourself for leaving faster than you have ever done before? I'm not trying to be the good girl or the cool girl anymore. I am not interested in being the most understanding woman in the room. I want to be the safest woman in my own life. That means some people will call me difficult, cold, selfish, dramatic or too much. They are allowed to be wrong about me. Their misunderstanding is no longer my emergency. If you see yourself in my story, this part is for you. You are not broken for wanting to be chosen. You are not weak for how long you stay. You were trained to abandon yourself to maintain connection. You survived with the tools you had. Now you get to choose new tools. You get to choose consequences, you get to choose distance, you get to choose yourself. Even if your voice shakes and your hands tremble as you walk away. That is what my six years with fragile men taught me. My softness was never the problem. My lack of protection was. Now my softness and my protection live together in the same body. And this time, access to that body, that heart, that mind, that spirit is earned, not taken, not assumed, earned. I am grateful for the painful relationships in my life because they show me boundaries and pulled me out of people pleasing. I am not romanticizing what hurt me. No one should suffer like I did, especially to learn a lesson. I am not romanticizing this hurt, but I am refusing to waste it. I turn raw experience into sharp self-knowledge, trusting data, intuition, and hard won boundaries. I honor rest, create fiercely, love precisely, and refuse to abandon myself for anyone's comfort again. You are listening to this for a reason. You have been invited to your awakening. Open your eyes, gaze into the abyss and face your shadow. Embrace every emotion, every feeling, every memory. At the end of it all, you will be left with the shame and the anger. Use it. Use your anger to squash shame and awaken to your power. The belief in a just world leads people to blame victims. Assuming people get what they deserve helps maintain the illusion of control and security, and people mainly perceive what they expect to perceive. Our minds actively construct reality by filtering incoming information through existing knowledge and biases. Dismantle the system and the programming through education, self-compassion, and alchemy. Be ruthless. Once you begin this journey, you will start to see, hear, and experience things differently. This is the way. This is the way for anyone who has experienced or is currently going through abuse. Alright, that's it for now, my 515 crew. I'll meet you all soon on the next episode. Stay tuned and stay safe.