It rarely starts with a big moment. 🤷🏼♀️ No dramatic fight. No obvious dealbreaker. No clear reason you can point to and say, “This is wrong.” 🤔 As a relationship coach and trauma-informed practitioner who has spent over 20 years working with women in unhealthy dynamics and perpetrators of family violence as a Parole Officer (and having lived it myself in many past relationships) I see this quiet questioning stage all the time. This means awareness is starting to…
“Have you ever considered bankruptcy?” 🧐 My stomach dropped when she suggested that to me. I was having a chat with My Budget, exploring options to get me out of the hole I’d gotten myself into. 🕳️ I was sitting in my newly built house, not being able to afford toilet roll. No landscaping, no blinds, and concrete floors after living there for three years. How did I let this happen? 🥺 I’d spent almost 8 years at…
I recently posted this reel on my Coach Carly page and Sue commented “more about the fawning experiences please, so here we go! In the past, when people used to talk about living in survival mode, they would refer to “fight, flight and freeze” modes. Fight, flight and freeze refers to well-known stress responses that occur when the body senses it’s in danger, prompting a release of hormones to either help you fight or run away to essentially save your…
I don’t watch MAFS generally but one of my friends was very insistent this week that I watch what’s unfolding with dickhead (whoops, I mean Adrian) and Awhina, so I set myself up a 9 now account and got stuck into some clips. 🤔 My friend started out as a client quite a while ago now and back then knew nothing about coercive control and domestic abuse. After quite a few sessions together, I’m proud to say she’s regularly…
Most of us in life experience at least one relationship that becomes unhealthy for us. I’ve had my share of long term relationships that were abusive and codependent where I ended up as a shell of who I was. 😶🌫️ Leaving is hard because you’ve lost all confidence in who you are as a person. Abusive people show traits of narcissism and usually have attachment issues from childhood which tend to create a toxic playground and codependency/trauma bonding in…
I was listening to a podcast about domestic abuse yesterday. The woman being interviewed works in the field with survivors + training professionals. She was sharing her experience of her own abusive relationship + the shame she felt being in one while also working in the field, as well as how it changed her work. It brought up so many parallels for me that I wanted to share. I never share this stuff from…