Welcome to the You're Not Crazy podcast, hosted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes in healing from narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself and others, and heal the relationship with yourself so you can learn to love in a healthy way. You can connect with Jessica and find additional resources, content, and coaching at emotionalabusecoach.com. Before we begin, I just wanna make a quick note. At the end of this episode, I spend the last four minutes walking through the way people work with me and where to find resources, my links, and my courses. If you are a returning listener or are already a client, you can absolutely skip that part. If you're new or trying to figure out what kind of support you need, it's there for you. It's the last four minutes. Thank you so much for being here When you're inside an emotionally abusive or narcissistic or coercive controlling relationship, one of the most disorienting things is not knowing why any of it is happening, and you spend an enormous amount of time trying to decode that behavior. You replay their words because they're easier to hold onto than the actions. And when you factor in what we're told that society says a relationship is supposed to look like, it's really hard to reconcile what's actually going on. Because when there's intermittent reinforcement and they're not always that bad, and there's a good afternoon or a moment when they're the person you thought you married or you thought you were dating, it pulls you back in with hope, and it can make you feel like you're losing your mind, but you are not. The through line throughout all of this is power and control. It's not love, it's not confusion, it's not that they're stressed at work. It's not that they had a bad day or a bad month or a bad year or a bad 12 years. It's power and control, and they maintain it at your expense. And it's the expense of your kids too if you share them with this person. And it happens to far more people than we think. A lot of people in the outside world might notice you're distressed, or sometimes they might notice you're left to manage everything. But if this was a movie, you know, they're watching... The outside world's, like, watching this movie where the plot keeps shifting and the resolution never comes, and they just remain confused about what's going on. And so when you try and talk about it, it can feel confusing for you too. And what makes this particular brand of behavior so difficult to name is because it might not be fully deliberate. They might not know, the abuser may not know that they are deciding to create all this chaos. It doesn't excuse them from it, but they are so consumed often by their own need for internal validation, and that need functions like a well that can never be filled. And they can't register the impact that it has on anybody else because all they care about is this internal accounting. They're never doing anything wrong. Their needs are simply the ones that aren't met that-- and they're the ones that matter, and they're right, and everyone else is an afterthought, if they even register that at all. And it produces like a script with two actors almost. It's like one version of this person is present and reasonable and warm. They have the good afternoon. The other version appears without warning but is somebody else entirely, and it feels like whiplash. It's deeply dysregulating, and that dysregulation keeps you focused on them and focused on figuring it out because you're trying to predict what version will show up And you work to manage the environment so you can avoid triggering the difficult person that's coming out. That's not a relationship, that's literally coercive control. If you are managing yourself so much because you can't manage the person that you're with or, like, the relationship is so unpredictable that you need to be in that space, it's, it's no longer functioning. And so this script tends to flip in a lot of different ways. But usually when you need them to show up for you, when you have invest energy and time in something, whether it's personal, whether it's together, whether it's a vacation, whether it's performance, whether it's a presentation, whether it's a work trip, they create conflict. If you have kids, they create conflict in front of the kids, and then somehow the conflict becomes your fault for not managing it better. The chaos is consistent even when the surface presentation of this starts to vary. And so what do you do? Because there's only so much that you can read on the internet before you start to feel crazy and that you're getting a PhD in emotional abuse. One of the thing you can start doing is by accepting that you cannot decode them into cooperating. So the analysis, the conversation, the attempts to make him understand the impact, the overexplaining, they're not going to end up producing a different person because he's not confused about how to behave. He's behaving exactly as someone who behaves when the primary concern is maintaining control. And from there, the work actually gets a little bit more logistical and practical. And trust me, I understand even as I'm listening to myself say this, that I'm dumbing some of these things down so much and I'm making it sound simple, and I completely know it's not simple. And if you are-- this is the first time you're ever listening to me, I apologize, and I think you should listen to some of my other episodes where I do talk about how freaking difficult I know this is. But I'm dumbing it down because sometimes just hearing it, like, in this way can be helpful. It can be helpful to hear you start by accepting, but then it gets very logistical, logical, practical. You start limiting your interactions to what is necessary and structured. What does that do? It begins to create space for you. You find communication channels that he actually responds to, you know, and whether it could be email or texting or something else, and you move the relationship there as much as possible. I had a client once that told me that almost every... Actually, I've heard, heard this a couple times. Every meaningful conversation was happening in text messages because that's the only place that any communication could happen. And a lot of times it would still break down, but then at least my client was able to go back and look at the communication and say, "Okay, this is what happened. Like, I tried so hard to have this conversation, and this is where it went." And, like, when you separate yourself from it, you start to see how crazy it can be at times In a way, you start waiting for their participation because waiting for them to be in a good mood is itself a form of control that they have over you. I know this from experience, and a lot of times I had to reach a point where I had to act without them. Like, I remember I would just go and cancel the flight if I was like, "You know what? There is no good time to bring up not being able to go on this trip with this person. Like, and this is going so bad, I can't imagine going." I'd cancel it and tell him about it later. Or I would go and I would, like, sign myself, you know, if I wanted to do something and I was like, "Oh, I wonder if I should ask, like, what's going on that day," I would just go and sign up anyway. I didn't wanna wait until he was in a good mood. Waiting for someone to engage in a good space is not neutral, and it costs us stability. Sometimes if I wanted to, like... If I didn't wanna do something or if I knew my answer was gonna be no, I would just, like, take it out of my calendar. I would just do these small things to then get myself to the place where I was just not being stuck in that old movie anymore. Because a lot of times we end up with so many open threads and unresolved decisions and constant loose ends that, that are created that aren't accidents, and they're not oversights, but it's part of the mechanism of control. As long as things are unresolved, you have to keep interacting with them, and they need the threads to stay open, so you do your best to close them, not because they agree or cooperate or finally understand, but because you can and because you need to. And that's where a lot of your power actually lives. It's not from getting through to them, but it's in refusing to wait for permission to move forward with your own life. And one thing I say all the time is that if you feel so stuck in the same movie and the same cycle is you have to start creating these little pieces of space for yourself. Nobody really understands how much mental space opens up when you actually leave because when you're in it, you will never imagine that it would. All you see is the pain. But the amount of brain space and being able to think your own thoughts, it's incredibly different. And I think it's really hard in a relationship to not have any space for your own thoughts, especially when you're within their chaos, and you have to start to try and create these little moments, even if it's five minutes where you're sitting in your car and you're thinking just for yourself. And I'm sure many of you have sat in your car longer, took an extra long path on the way home just to have that moment of clarity for yourself. And so if you are navigating this, if you're trying to stop figuring this out, if you're trying to figure out what comes next, I do this work all the time, and you can learn more about what I do and what that looks like at emotionalabusecoach.com. But I really do hope that this was helpful If this episode resonated and you're realizing that what you're dealing with isn't just stress or miscommunication, there are ways to get support that don't minimize what you're experiencing. I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes telling you about my offerings, because at the core of my business is one-on-one coaching. The podcast is something that I do because I do like being able to help a broader audience, but the truth is that the core of my work is really coaching and providing other offerings so that people can begin to heal. At the center of everything I do is one-on-one coaching. That's where I slow things down, listen closely, and help you make sense of what's happening in your specific situation. It's not a template. It's not just based on theories, but it's really focused on your real life. Some people start with a one-time validation call. That is a single focus session where we look at one specific situation or pattern that you're struggling with, and the goal isn't to fix your life or push you into decisions. It's to help you name what's happening, put it into context of reality, help you notice where you are in it, and offer some feedback and tools to how to navigate it I also offer an intro call. The intro call used to be called the clarity call, and it's a short call where you can share what's going on for you, and I can explain how I work and whether I'm the right fit for your situation. There's no obligation to continue after that. It's simply a way for us to get on the same page before moving forward. For people who need ongoing support, I offer weekly or biweekly coaching. This is especially helpful if you're navigating emotional abuse, trauma bond, high-conflict divorce, or custody and co-parenting with a difficult or controlling person. Ongoing work allows us to track patterns over time, stay anchored when things escalate, and make decisions in a way that protects your nervous system and your long-term stability. All of my coaching options can be found on my websites, emotionalabusecoach.com and highconflictdivorcecoaching.com. Both links are available in the show notes of this episode. In addition to one-on-one coaching, I offer several self-paced courses and programs. They're called Divorcing a Narcissist 101, How to Document for Family Court, The Emotional Abuse Breakthrough Course, Setting Boundaries With a Narcissist, and Unhooked, which is my program and private podcast that walks you through the full cycle of abuse, helps you map it out in your relationship, and shows you how to begin to break free from the trauma bond. I also write on Substack, where I explore topics like trauma bonding, emotional abuse, coercive control, high-conflict divorce, and the Cluster B dynamics. There's a free option and a paid membership that offers deeper dives, Q&As, and additional resources. Everything that I do and everything that I build is around one core truth and message that you're not crazy, you shouldn't feel crazy, and that even though I can see patterns in what you're experiencing, it doesn't mean that it's normal. It's not healthy. My work is really about helping you understand what's happening and begin to trust yourself again. All of the links that I shared are in my show notes, and I really appreciate you being here
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