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29 | Why Healing After Abuse Takes Longer Than You Think · The Messy Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Messy Middle, the podcast for women navigating the raw, confusing, lonely aftermath of narcissistic abuse and emotional control.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Erica Leon, trauma-informed abuse recovery coach, mom of five, and creator of the six keys to unfuckwithable.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you're picking up the pieces, questioning everything, and trying to remember who the fuck you were before you were so carefully erased, you're in the right place.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back to the messy middle.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into this episode.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: This might be a long one because I have a lot to say about this topic.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: It is I should be over this.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: The I should be over this by now trap, which is really what it is.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: So this is something I hear all the time as I go through my hundreds of hours with clients every month, and it's not just from women who left six months ago.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just from people who left a year ago.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's people who've left five years ago, it could even be more.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: They've rebuilt their lives, they often have new relationships.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's women like you who've moved house, changed careers, raised children, built businesses, done all those things they were quote unquote supposed to do.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And yet somehow this thought still sneaks in.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: The I should be over this by now.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: It usually arrives with a sigh of frustration or embarrassment, or people don't tend to say it out loud to be honest.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe to their closest, closest friends, they might let a little bit of the paper knife out here and there.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't really sound or feel angry, it just sounds and feels exhausted.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: For fuck's sake, why am I still thinking about this?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why does it still affect me?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I even still talking about it?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why can't I just move on?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think there's shame attached to why can't I just move on?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because it makes it seem like you're stuck on the person, and that's not it at all.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna go through these how I see them happen again and again and again so often that the pattern recognition, that's my thing.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the most painful traps I think survivors fall into because it sounds so reasonable.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: On the surface, it sounds logical, sounds healthy even.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Of course you want to move forward, and that's what everyone's telling you to do, and of course you don't want to stay stuck, who does?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And of course you don't want your entire life to revolve around what happened to you.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: But here's something I noticed.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's women saying this that are usually not stuck, they're usually exhausted.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: They are exhausted from carrying not only what happened, but the pressure to stop being affected by what happened.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's so weird when you're in an abusive relationship and you try and share it with the outside world.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Often there is a shrinking away of people, a minimizing of your experience, as I've talked about here many times, this rush to stop you saying the things that are painful, to be able to sit with your pain, the uncomfortable truth they have to sit with that the person is actually a fucking douchebag who you jointly know, and they have no intention of cutting them off, standing up for you or anything else.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And Switzerland just doesn't work in these situations to be a safe person for a survivor.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can't be cavorting with the abuser, you just can't.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, I don't care what your stance is on this.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ask any survivor.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is not the way, and it's also to do with recovering conveniently for people.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is a huge pressure, and it really pisses me off.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It gets under my skin.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's much more than that, because there seems to be some kind of unspoken expectation that healing should happen on a schedule.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really an official schedule, nobody really writes it down or hands you a pamphlet, but you can feel it.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a kind of pressure.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: At first, everybody asks how you are.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: They might even have boring ass lives and they want to know all about your quote-unquote drama, which is your pain, by the way, ill.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they check in, they understand everyone's concerned, and then a few months pass, maybe a year, maybe longer.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And after that time, the expiration date, as it were, the energy starts to shift.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: People stop asking.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I totally get this, by the way.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: It is not fun to be in the group where everyone's as they were, except one person who was in an abusive relationship, is now divorcing and it consumes them.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: I've been that guy, and I must have been intolerable.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if anyone is listening to this, other than my mum and my dog, then I apologize to you wholeheartedly.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: But from this perspective, as the person going through it, it is also awe-consuming and extremely painful.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when they stop asking, it feels just like your world is crumbling because you were leaning on it, depending on it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And even if they do ask, you could almost feel them hoping for a particular answer, a reassuring answer, a neat answer, an answer that lets everybody relax.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: If they want really to hear you saying, Oh, I'm doing great, I'm totally over it, I'm moving on.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're still struggling or processing, or if you're still fucking furious, if you're still trying to understand what happened, you can start feeling like you are somehow failing at recovery, like you've missed this deadline that nobody told you about.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like there was a point where you were supposed to stop talking about it.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, a point where you were supposed to stop feeling it, stop being affected by it, stop letting it rule your life.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I think a lot of women end up turning their pain inward because of this.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not because they're healed, it's just because they don't want to be that woman who's still talking about it.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this fucked-up view in society of this hysterical woman, this scorned woman when she gets betrayed.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're not really talking about the douchebags that go and cheat on their wives after they've had a bunch of kids or cheat on them in any capacity.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Cheating, in my opinion, should be illegal.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll talk about that in another podcast episode.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: But there is this idea of look, he's moved on.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's got his family, girlfriend, whatever, and he looks normal and she's still unhinged looking and haunted.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's really messed up because when you've been on the receiving end of that, you know that you could never move on at that point that they are moving on, because it would just be like discounting everything you've been through.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They are not replaceable to you like you are to them.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to talk about that as another subject here in this podcast towards the end.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: But a woman who's still upset or who's still trying to make sense of something that happened years ago is viewed in a very poor light.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that really has made a lot of us just keep it in.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I hear people apologizing all the time.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: I know I should be over this.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've talked about this before.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's been years.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: How often have you heard that?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a really close friend with someone who's gone through this, you maybe have heard that, and you've probably heard it a lot in your head.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: But people wanting you to recover conveniently is a huge pressure, whether we know it or not.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: They want you to recover in a way that makes everyone else comfortable, in a time frame that stops people feeling awkward, stops people having to quote unquote choose sides, recover in a way that doesn't require anyone else to sit with your pain and allows the world to move on.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And let's be honest, nobody really says take all the time you need, and actually means three years from now, I'll still be here listening.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Come and talk.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: What they mean usually is take the time that you need, but there are terms and conditions.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: You have to read the small print.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And survivors feel that.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: They feel the shift, they feel it.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody is supportive in that first part.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, you can feel people wanting a different version of you after a certain amount of time, a less sad version, a less angry version, a less inconvenient version.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: That version that says, Don't worry, I'm fine now.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you're still probably trying to make sense of what happened because it wasn't just a breakup.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I think a lot of people just have normalized things like betrayal and emotional abuse to the point where it's just thought of as a normal thing.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody steals your car, you know what happened, you know who did it, you know why you're pissed, and you know what reality is.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: But when somebody betrays you, manipulates you, gaslights you, lives a double life, has an affair, uses you, lies to you for years, pretends to be someone they weren't, you aren't just grieving the event.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: You're grieving reality.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is the thing.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Reality itself takes a hit.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because you because now you're asking questions like if that wasn't real, what was?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: If the marriage wasn't what I thought, and the person wasn't what I thought, what else am I wrong about?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: If that person who I thought was my best friend who had my back, who wanted what we built together, and would do anything to protect it, and my kids, if that person wasn't who I believed they were, can I trust my judgment?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: If I miss that, what the fuck else am I missing?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so much heartbreak the way people tend to minimize it.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fucking existential crisis, and people act like that's just a regular breakup.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just the relationship that broke.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Trust broke, identity broke, future plans broke, safety broke, reality broke.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your understanding of yourself broke, your understanding of your person broke, and sometimes your understanding of how the world works broke.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then fucking society and bless them, they mean well, they turn around and say, Have you tried dating again?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, I can feel myself getting ranty here because this happens all the time.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: The burden is constantly put on the survivor.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Heal, recover, move on, forgive, date again, trust again, be positive, don't let it define you.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Learn the lesson, rise above it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, your fucking ex is on hinge with your kids in his profile photo.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: It really drives me nuts, right?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna breathe.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Gonna try and calm myself down.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And let's move on to another reason why this is such a big topic.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: There is another thing.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yet another thing is when people get tired of hearing about it.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the loneliest parts of this recovery is realizing that other people often move on before you do.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not because they're bad people, it's they might be, who knows?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: But it's because they didn't really live it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: They witnessed it, but you survived it.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the same thing.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Your friend saw the divorce, you lived the marriage.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Your friend heard about the betrayal, but you experienced the betrayal abuse.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And your friend might know there was an affair, but you built a life with the person who had the affair.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: These are not remotely comparable experiences.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And yet over time, there can be this subtle pressure to just stop bringing it up, stop revisiting it, stop trying to understand it.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said earlier, women often internalize that pressure.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They start censoring themselves, they stop saying things out loud.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're finished processing at all, because they just don't want to bore people anymore.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to seem bitter, they don't want to seem stuck.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that is heartbreaking to me.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes the very thing that helps people heal is being allowed to tell the truth about what happened.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not forever, not every day, but for as long as it genuinely needs space.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: If it's taking up space for you, it's really nice to be able to get rid of it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about something else which is a hard truth.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I sound mean when I say it in my support groups, but I really do think it's helpful information.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I had fully embodied this truth earlier in my process all those years ago.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most confusing parts of recovery is watching someone move on as though none of it mattered.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: You are completely devastated, trying to make sense of years of your life, trying to put the pieces together, and meanwhile, they're dating, posting pictures, tagging people in their social media, where your kids can see probably, acting fine, living life, and it honestly can make you question your own experience.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because surely if it mattered, they would be hurting too, right?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: But empathy assumes reciprocity.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: We assume if this mattered to me, it mattered to them.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: If I loved them, they loved me this much.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm grieving, they'll be grieving.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that just isn't true.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Often.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Most often it isn't true.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you were attached and they were just entitled.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you were invested, but they were just benefiting.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, most of the people that I work with were convenient.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional labour, physical labour, childcare labor, romantic labour, sexual labor, household labor.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the person didn't want to get rid of them.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted their cake and eat it too.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't think you were important enough to be honest with.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: They thought they deserved someone hotter, maybe when you had a baby, and they thought they could go and do that.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't want to get rid of you.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted all the benefits that you bring.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that is despicable.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you are just a functional thing to them.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when that function stopped serving them and they couldn't hide anymore what they were doing, they just move on.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's like replacing an appliance.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: You are a toaster.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's horrible to say and it's brutal to accept, but it's often closer to reality than the story survivors tell themselves.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like, oh, they couldn't handle you, you're amazing.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst that's true, that's not really how they feel about it.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: People who are narcissistic or emotionally immature or emotionally manipulative, entitled just don't care.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: They use you for what they've always used you for, and they don't care what else they do to get their needs met.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: You're like a toaster or an oven or a vacuum cleaner.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: When you don't work the way they want you to anymore, or you're answering back, or you see them too clearly, and you're not an adoring mirror from anymore, and you call them out, they'll just replace you.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: You'll just put another toaster in there and they'll throw you in the big garbage can.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry, this sounds awful, but it is the truth.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing I hear a lot and I have fully experienced is why did they look fine and you don't?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Another trap this is, another rabbit hole that all my clients, bar none, have gone down and taken a good while down there.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: They look at how quickly they appear to recover and looking at how quickly they date, move on, replace, how they're smiling in these pictures, and they assume that means you're the broken one.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But you aren't seeing recovery.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: What if you're just seeing avoidance?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: What if you're seeing entitlement?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: What if you're seeing someone who doesn't simply attach to people in the same way you do?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Those are real different things.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Fast doesn't automatically mean healthy at all.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And slow does not automatically mean broken.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Healing is not a performance.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, I think many women stop asking, when will I be over this?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to start asking a better question.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: What am I actually trying to get over?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because the answer perhaps isn't the relationship.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the betrayal, the loss of trust, the loss of certainty, the collapse of your future, the collapse of your identity, your collapse of the worldview, like we talked about.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a lot.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: When you see it clearly, it becomes much harder to shame yourself for not being quote unquote finished.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been carrying around that thought, I should be over this by now, I want you to just consider something.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you are measuring yourself against a timeline that was never realistic in the first place.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And a bunch of people, there's so many yapping voices when you go through something like this.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's online, with your friend group, from family, all mostly bullshit advice.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: So many voices.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: You might be comparing your recovery to people who didn't experience what you experienced.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're all so different.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you're judging yourself for still being affected by something that genuinely changed the way you see yourself and other people in the world.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, doesn't really sound like failure to me.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds like someone trying to make sense of something really hard that mattered.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Someone trying to rebuild trust to rebuild their reality, someone trying to rebuild themselves.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that just takes longer than you like.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: All the people that want you to be back to normal would like.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: But that does not mean you're doing it wrong.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: It might just mean you're dealing with something much bigger than everybody has realized and understands.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm sending you a whole bunch of hugs and love.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I promise you you will be victorious.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of love.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you next time.