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…
As I write this, I’m mid-air flying to London for an emergency trip back to the UK. ✈️ Cam was there with me when I got some concerning news and he was so amazing, nothing but supportive. 🥰 It wasn’t even a thought that I had to ask for “permission” to book a flight home even though it means all our Christmas plans go out the window. I had a moment where I thought what this would have been…
“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…
“Relationships take work.” Well yep, that’s true, but there IS a difference between two people working on a healthy relationship and people disguising emotional damage as effort. The latter leads to slowly becoming a shell of yourself. 🐚 All relationships have challenges. Hard conversations, disagreements and growing pains are normal. But if you constantly feel anxious, confused, or like you’re the only one trying to fix things, that’s not “just a rough patch.” That’s a red flag. 🚩 …
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…
Some of us even earned the full loyalty card. 🙋♀️ You know the one… the relationship that looks cute on Instagram but feels like slow emotional death in real life. The one where you convince yourself “he’s just misunderstood,” while your gut’s in the corner quietly sobbing into a bottle of wine. 🍷 If you’ve ever wondered how to build your own red flag starter pack, here’s the foolproof 5-step formula I perfected back in my toxic relationship era.…