You Are Not Crazy

Afleveringen

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  The Angry Daughter 05.08.2026 15min

  In this episode, I reflect on what it actually means to be the angry daughter — the scapegoat, the truth-teller, the one who names what others refuse to see. Drawing from my own childhood and my experience as a mother, I trace the way systems assign their tension to one person, teach her not to trust herself, and then use her exhaustion against her. This episode is for anyone who has ever been told that their reaction was the problem, that their clarity was the threat, or that their limits we...
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  Why You Keep Saying Sorry (Even When You Did Nothing Wrong) 29.07.2026 13min

  In this episode, I'm talking about why self-blame becomes almost automatic when you've been in an emotionally abusive or coercively controlling relationship, and why it feels like relief even when it's actually costing you. I get into the nervous system science behind it, specifically how fawning works, how your brain gets wired to connect calm with compliance, and why that wiring doesn't just disappear when the relationship ends. If you have ever cried the whole drive home because you ...
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  You Were Never the Problem with Najwa Zebian 22.07.2026 1u

  If you have ever walked away from a relationship, or a parent, or a childhood, and still found yourself waiting for the person who hurt you to finally acknowledge what they did, this episode is going to reach something in you. Najwa Zebian is a writer, speaker, and the host of the podcast Beyond Words. Her work has reached millions of people around the world, and her new book is called The One Who Broke You Can't Heal You. I have been following her for years. A client sent me one of her...
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  How Coercive Controllers Use Timing to Keep You in Their Orbit 15.07.2026 24min

  In this episode, I'm talking about something I call the Saturday text. It's never Tuesday at 10 AM when your coffee is warm and you're mentally ready. It's always when you've finally exhaled, and I want to explain why that timing is never an accident. I go deep into the way dysregulation gets used as a delivery mechanism of coercive control, including what the person sending the text is actually getting out of it, which is not just pressure relief but confirmation that they still have access ...
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  What Coercive Control Does to Your Time 08.07.2026 18min

  There is a particular kind of loss that doesn't get talked about enough when you leave a coercive relationship, and it isn't the loss of the person. On some level, that was survival. The loss I am talking about is quieter and stranger than that. It's the loss of your own mind, entire summers, thousands of small moments that were technically yours but that you never actually lived. In this episode, I talk about what it looks like when coercive control colonizes your nervous system so completel...
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  I Didn't Know I Was Still Holding My Breath 01.07.2026 27min

  Some healing doesn't come from therapy or from doing the work in the way you expect it to. Sometimes it comes from watching your team win the NBA finals. In this episode, I'm sharing something personalL what the Knicks winning the 2026 championship actually did to me, and why I wasn't prepared for it. This win cracked something open that I didn't know was still there, and I've been sitting with it ever since. This is a detour from my usual content, and it also isn't, because healing has never...
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  It Shouldn't Feel This Confusing: Naming the Cycle of Abuse 24.06.2026 16min

  You know something is wrong, you just cannot name it yet. In this episode, I walk through the cycle of abuse — tension building, explosion, reconciliation, and the illusion of calm — and explain why that cycle is exactly what keeps you hooked. I break down what a trauma bond is, how intermittent reinforcement conditions your nervous system to crave the person who is hurting you, and why your confusion, your self-blame, and your inability to just leave are not weaknesses. They are ...
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  When Love Feels Like a Hostage Situation 17.06.2026 33min

  If you have ever felt like you were walking on eggshells, apologizing for things that made no sense, or grieving a version of someone who seemed to disappear, this episode is for you. I am revisiting one of the most listened-to episodes BPD in romantic relationships with two more years of client work, research, and personal processing behind me. I break down what borderline personality disorder actually is, how it differs from Narcissism even when the lived experience feels nearly identical, ...
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  How Manipulators Use Words to Maintain Control 10.06.2026 13min

  I break down some of the most insidious and subtle ways abusers use language to dominate the narrative and erode your sense of reality. I walk you through five distinct patterns of weaponized communication: emotional manipulation disguised as vulnerability, defensiveness used as a silencing tool, blame-shifting hidden behind false equivalence, coercion dressed up as ultimatums, and silence deployed as punishment. Each example reveals the same underlying strategy — redirecting accountability, ...
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  The Underpinning of All Abuse: Coercive Control with Dr. Christine Cocchiola 03.06.2026 56min

  Dr. Christine Cocchiola is back, and this conversation goes deep. Dr. Christine is a coercive control specialist, therapist, TEDx speaker, and author who trained under the godfather of coercive control, Dr. Evan Stark. In this episode, we get into what coercive control actually is: not a form of abuse, but the underpinning of all abuse. That distinction matters more than most people realize, especially inside a family court system that still does not know what to do with it. We talk about the...
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  When Co-Parenting Becomes Coercive Control 27.05.2026 24min

  If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right — showing up, advocating, holding it together — and still somehow ending up as the problem, this episode is for you. Int his episode, I get honest about what it actually feels like to be in the cycle: the exhaustion of defending yourself against false narratives, the way every act of good parenting gets twisted into evidence against you, and the invisible toll of a system that wasn't designed to recognize coercive control. So many p...
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  I'm Not Fucked Up, I'm Detoxing 20.05.2026 16min

  If you've ever thought "what is wrong with me?" after leaving a toxic relationship — this episode is for you. I break down why the anxiety, hypervigilance, and panic that show up after you leave aren't signs that you're damaged. They're signs that your nervous system did exactly what it was trained to do. I walk you through the difference between anxious attachment and trauma-conditioned hypervigilance, why healing feels worse before it feels better, and what it actually looks lik...
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  Walking on Razor Blades: Life with Someone with BPD Description 13.05.2026 20min

  BPD is often misunderstood, reduced to stereotypes of moodiness or drama — but if you've loved someone with unmanaged borderline personality disorder, you know it feels nothing like that. In this episode, I break down what it actually looks like to be in a relationship with someone who splits, who swings from adoring you to discarding you in an instant, and how you slowly begin to disappear in the process. This isn't about demonizing people with BPD. It's about naming the impact o...
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  How I Actually Healed (And Why It Didn't Look the Way I Expected) 06.05.2026 14min

  People ask me how I healed all the time, and the honest answer is that there is no clean framework I can hand you. In this episode, I share the specific practices that actually made a difference for me — and they are not always the ones you would expect. I talk about why I stopped healing on everyone else's timeline, how I gave myself permission to grieve on a schedule as a single parent, and the journaling practice that helped me separate what was real from what had been distorted.&nbs...
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  What I Did When I Couldn't Trust My Own Mind 29.04.2026 11min

  Before I knew what a trauma bond was, I was hiding my phone under my mattress. I deleted his number, wrote it on a piece of paper, folded it into a journal, and made myself work to find it. At the time I thought I was being ridiculous. Looking back, I was surviving. In this episode, I talk about what it actually looks like to break a trauma bond when you can't go cold turkey — the messy, imperfect, sometimes embarrassing strategies that create just enough friction between the craving an...
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  BPD Splitting in Relationships: What It Feels Like and How to Heal 22.04.2026 23min

  If you've ever felt adored one moment and suddenly on the wrong side of a wall you didn't see coming, this episode is for you. I open with my own experience of being in a relationship where warmth could vanish in an instant — where I replayed conversations trying to find the moment I slipped, and where I slowly became someone whose entire focus was managing another person's emotional state. In this episode, I break down splitting — what it is clinically, what it feels like to be on the receiv...
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  Why They Never See It: The Psychology Behind Why Personality-Disordered People Don't Know They're the Problem 15.04.2026 15min

  If you've ever wondered why the person who hurt you seems completely unbothered — even convinced they did nothing wrong — this episode is for you. I break down why people with personality disorders genuinely don't experience themselves as disordered, how shame avoidance rewrites their reality, and why no amount of explaining, evidence, or emotional appeals will get them to "see it." Understanding this isn't about giving up — it's about stopping the cycle of trying to reach someone who doesn't...
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  Pattern Recognition vs. The Blame Game 08.04.2026 7min

  There's a difference between someone naming a pattern to seek resolution and someone digging up the past to dodge accountability. If you've ever tried to address what's not working in your relationship and ended up defending yourself instead, this episode is for you. We talk about what healthy accountability actually looks like — and how to recognize when someone is rewriting history to keep you stuck. Support the show *Please Note: there is a long intro that explains my services. If you do n...
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  When Mental Illness Becomes an Excuse for Abuse 01.04.2026 27min

  This month’s Patreon episode dives into a theme that kept surfacing in your questions: When does mental illness explain behavior… and when does it become an excuse? Before answering your submissions, I break down what we actually mean when we talk about pathological abuse — repeated patterns rooted in personality structure, not just “a bad fight” or poor communication. We explore coercive control, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, blame shifting, and the power imbalance that defines th...
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  How I Help Clients Untangle High-Conflict Divorce 25.03.2026 14min

  In this episode, I share what it’s really like to support clients through the chaos of high-conflict divorce — when legal processes, endless emails, and contradictory communication make it nearly impossible to think clearly. I talk about how I help clients slow things down, organize what’s actually happening, and find stability in the middle of emotional and legal overwhelm. I also share how confusion becomes one of the main weapons of post-separation abuse, and what I do to help survivors re...