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. I wanna offer a reframe around trauma bonding for today, and I'm not gonna get into what a trauma bond is. I, in like the detail that I have in other episodes, what I wanna talk more about is the feelings because when you're going through this, you probably have heard it 3,000 times what a trauma bond is, what it looks like, how you get it, all of that. I wanna talk a little bit more about the feelings and if you need some more introductory info, I'll put a few podcasts in the show notes so you can find them. But for today, I wanna talk a little bit about the pain that you feel when you're healing from a trauma bond, because that pain is withdrawal. And it is also grief, but it's not grief in the way that we grieve somebody leaving our lives or someone that's healthy. Your nervous system is craving this pain. Grief is the pain of losing something that was real and good and healthy, but craving is the pain that your brain is almost demanding this chemical response. It has become conditioned to need it. And so it feels identical in your body. Grief and pain feel the same, but they're not the same. And they don't necessarily call for the same kind of response. And so when you feel grief, you usually honor it or you sit with it or you let it move through you. You might even have to schedule time for grief to allow yourself time to process. But when you are feeling craving, you almost need to ride it out and not act on it. A lot of times I tell people to remind themselves that they are withdrawing from something, not the person, but from the cycle itself that you were in, you're withdrawing from the intermittent reinforcement that comes from a trauma bond. And so this reframe does not necessarily help you make the framing stop, but it creates a little tiny space between that feeling and the actions that come, because the actions usually are related to trying to numb the pain. But over time, with more of those spaces, the space gets wider and that's what healing really looks like. It's not the absence of that craving, but the growing distance between the craving and what you do with it. And so I wanna walk you through how a trauma bond actually forms because understanding what that looks like is one of the most helpful tools in the toolbox. So if craving and grief feel identical but are not the same, the next question is why your nervous system learned to crave this in the first place, which never happens by accident and happens in stages. And I wanna walk you through them because once you see how it was formed, I think that the craving might feel less like a character flaw or something wrong with you and more like a conditioned response to something that was done to you. And there are seven stages that I typically talk about when I'm talking about it in this way. When I'm talking about it with a client, I certainly don't go through seven stages because they all feel like they're happening all at once. One of the stages is love bombing. And so the relationship typically begins with this overwhelming intensity, this attention, affection, declarations of connection, often really fast and you feel seen in a way that you never have before. And what you don't know yet is that this person has assessed you and they seem to have identified what you need and that they've given it to you in this dose. But this can also be looked at a time of being targeted. The second stage is trust and dependency because the love bombing felt so real that you began to trust this person deeply or reorganize your life around them. And you share your vulnerabilities, your wounds, your history, and all that information will later be used against you. But this stage feels like intimacy, but it's actually a power transfer because I'm sure if you look back, you realize maybe I started to depend on things I never actually needed to depend on somebody for. The next stage is usually when criticism begins, and it's often so subtle at first that people dismiss it. And a comment about how you handled something or a tone shift or a moment where you felt like you did something wrong, but you're still not sure what can all be part of that criticism and the abuser begins to chip away at your self-concept. And so you start to question your own perceptions. The fourth is gaslighting and manipulation and by this time, reality is actively distorted. You're being told what you experienced didn't happen, that you're too sensitive, that your memory is wrong and that you're the problem. And the goal is to sever your connection with your own inner knowing so that you become so dependent on them to define reality. Because when you can't trust your own relationship, you likely are looking at the other person and the other person is telling you something that feels real. The fifth one is resignation and submission. And this is when we find ourselves spawning, which is a trauma response and where you stop fighting, start pushing back and start trying to manage the relationship by becoming whoever they need you to be. Your identity starts to dissolve and you look for approval in them and you start to question what you think and what you want and maybe you even forget it. The sixth step is loss of self and you no longer recognize yourself and the person that you were before the relationship, it feels like a stranger. And I don't think that this stage gets talked about enough, but there's a lot of grief here that's unlike any other because it's almost like a grief for realizing how far you drifted from yourself and being able to feel that but then take an action towards choosing that again, it's really psychologically heavy. You might look back at who you were, what you cared about, how you moved through the world and what you believed in yourself. And it's one of the most clarifying places that you can land because it means that some part of you still remembers who you actually were and you can see both sides. You can see both parts of it. And that version of you was not destroyed, it was just buried. And the last stage is addiction to the cycle. And by that stage, usually the intermittent reinforcement has done its work and you're not staying because you're, don't have another choice, you're staying because your nervous system has been conditioned to, but you're also having all these other feelings and all these other recognitions at the same time. The highs and lows have been now calibrated to keep you hooked and leaving feels like dying or my reference of chopping off my arm with a butter knife. And most people come to me usually around this time or stage six and say, "I know this is wrong. I need to leave, but I cannot move." 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 a 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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