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In a Relationship with a Narcissist? Here's What You Need to Know!
In this episode, we dive into the complex world of narcissistic relationships with therapist and trauma expert Sonnet Damon. We'll explore the subtle signs of narcissistic abuse, why it's so easy to get caught up in these toxic dynamics, and—most importantly—how to break free and rebuild. Sonnet shares practical tips for healing, from reparenting exercises to setting boundaries and finding your way back to healthy, fulfilling connections. Whether you're questioning your own relationship or supporting someone else, this conversation is a must-listen for reclaiming your power and moving forward.
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Do the sex Think fun, honest and feminist as fuck, and always with the goal of fighting the patriarchy. One female orgasm at a time. Welcome to the locker room. Today's topic think you loved a narcissist? Here's how to break free and recover for good. Look, I've been there, stuck in a relationship that made me question everything, including myself. One minute they made me feel special, and the next I was walking on eggshells wondering what I did wrong. Sound familiar. If you've ever found yourself wondering was I with a narcissist or worse, was it my fault? This episode is for you.
Speaker 1:I'm sitting down with therapist Sonnet Daymont to break down the real signs of narcissistic relationships, why we get pulled into them and, most importantly, how to heal, rebuild and never go back. Sonnet is a highly accomplished therapist specializing in trauma, anxiety and resilience. She's considered an expert in trauma and is currently working on a book about overcoming trauma and relationships with people diagnosed with dark triad personality disorders, called when Dangerous Feels Like Home. That title resonates for some disturbing reason. Sonnet, I would love it if you would just take a moment to tell my listeners a little bit more about you.
Speaker 2:Sure, like you said, my name is Sonnet Damon. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist based in the Los Angeles area. Primarily, I see people who are overcoming different forms of trauma or processing anxiety, and I'm excited to be here and talk to you about the way I do therapy for assessing and then overcoming narcissistic abuse.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 1:So, listeners, I think this is going to be an episode that's going to be very useful and resonate with, unfortunately, a lot of people, and I really want you to listen and stay through to the end, because it's going to help you understand better what kind of relationships you've been in, you are in, or that you don't want to go back to how to identify them and then how to not only get out of them and recover, but to get to a place where you're not just leaving one toxic or narcissistic relationship to enter yet another.
Speaker 1:One of the things I've been talking to a lot of people about lately is there came a point in my life where I had to say, yes, I've had a lot of unsuccessful, bad or toxic relationships, but there's one common denominator, and that's me right. I'm in control of this to some extent, and the same is for you. So you have the opportunity right now to talk to an expert, or listen to an expert on narcissistic relationships and get some real guidance and takeaways within an hour that can help you transform how you engage in relationships, and we will, of course, be giving you takeaways at the end to get you started on a journey back to having healthy relationships.
Speaker 2:So are you ready?
Speaker 1:Ready to dive in Sana, because I think I am. I hope I am All right. Cheers, let's talk about having healthy relationships in the future. Cheers, all right. I want to start with an obvious question. In your practice, how do you define narcissistic personality disorder, or how do you identify when someone has truly been in relationship with a narcissist?
Speaker 2:And so when a new client comes in to see me and they're coming in to grieve or to get over a breakup, whether or not they identify it as a narcissistic relationship across the board, most therapists will sort of assess and scan to see if there were incidents of abuse. We're trained to do that. So we'll listen for qualifiers of emotional abuse and there's multiple assessments. You can look up. The Gottmans have assessments on emotional abuse and I'll listen to the experiences they've had and see if any of those sound abusive. And then I'll screen for prenatal abuse. I'll ask about sexual abuse and physical abuse to see what they went through and if any of those more toxic or abusive interactions, matched with the qualifiers of narcissistic abuse.
Speaker 2:And narcissism as a dark triad, tends to result in a lack of empathy or a real challenge at experiencing empathy. And so with that comes behaviors and interactions where it's clear over time to the person who's in relation with them that there really isn't a sense of consistent or maybe any empathy. So that is a nice screener there, seeing if empathy is involved. Manipulation is a big characteristic of those with narcissism and then of course, like attention seeking and a drive for attention. A lot of times in narcissistic relationships you'll hear about things like jealousy induction, where the partner tries to make the other person jealous by doing comparisons or checking out other people or openly flirting or bringing in reasons to make the person feel insecure as a form of manipulation. Additionally, when someone's main drive is external validation and attention, you'll see that play out when the couple socializes.
Speaker 1:I hear a lot of people, when they come out of relationships that were clearly toxic on some level, saying I think I was. I think that my ex was a narcissist. I think that I was in a narcissistic relationship. What are some clear indicators maybe for a person who's struggling to at least figure it out right? What are some things that you would say? If you've seen X, y and Z, this is a pretty good indicator that the relationship was leaning towards being with a narcissist.
Speaker 2:I tend to go off those basics lack of empathy, manipulation, and the real source of feeling powerful and having a sense of self-esteem in the world comes from attention, external validation from other people. When you're in a relationship with someone who's got those three things going on, it feels very different than when you're in a relationship with someone who doesn't. There's manipulation and gaslighting and emotional abuse. Examples aren't happening in relationships with people who don't have narcissism. In the same way, Now you could have somebody who maybe is incredibly immature or has dissociative identity disorder or some other disorder going on, or has dissociative identity disorder or some other disorder going on and they'll still experience infancy, going back to signs of abuse.
Speaker 1:What are some subtle signs of narcissistic abuse within a relationship that individuals often overlook or explain away so that they can stay in the relationship or justify it to themselves?
Speaker 2:Great question, right? The question of what are the subtle signs that you see when you're in a relationship with a narcissist that you might not notice early on or you might excuse or explain a way, will vary from person to person, but there are some that are pretty common. For starters, gaslighting is really common, where you're told one thing and then it changes the next time you talk. Or sort of Jekyll and Hyde, hot and cold behavior. One day you're the best cook ever, the next day you can't be trusted with a knife, you're a really bad cook. Sort of shaking the self-esteem a little bit Oftentimes when people come in to therapy with me and I'm kind of assessing oh, was this narcissism or was it just toxic and immature?
Speaker 2:What I tend to see is the people with more like abusive narcissistic partners will be blaming themselves more, like they really bought into the manipulation and the gaslighting, to the point where they're not blaming the partner for everything and they're not being able to see like, well, the partner did this and then I did that and now I got to solve this mystery. It's way over here where like, oh, I am terrible, I did all these horrible things. He was right because I gained weight, he had to cheat on me or whatever sort of twisted, gaslighting thinking was thrown out there by the abusive person. They have believed it, which is also how we end up staying too long. A lot of times. People will see behavior like that and they'll leave Not everybody. And what is that difference? That difference? Right, there is something that is a combination of sure, maybe your narcissist was especially cunning and manipulative, but also like how did you have someone call you a name and not say I don't let you call me names?
Speaker 1:I think that that is, you know, something that I've grappled with, as I've done my own healing process, and one of the things that I think is hardest to heal from when you've gotten out of a relationship that wasn't healthy is like how did I let somebody do that to me? You know, because if one of my good friends said to me, hey, my ex did X, y and Z to me, or my ex said this or did this to me, I would be like why the fuck are you with them? Like that's so horrific. But as someone who's in that kind of relationship, it's just it's so easy to make excuses, right. So, or, you know, it has felt easy for me Like I can see how I've excused over my lifetime in different relationships things away. So I guess that brings me to do narcissists, look for certain types of people to try to get into a relationship with. Or are there certain types of people who are prone to falling prey to narcissists and entering relationships with them?
Speaker 2:I think there's probably a little bit of a combination right.
Speaker 2:Like even within narcissism, there's a spectrum of some narcissists tend to be more like the victim narcissist, some tend to be more the grandiose narcissist, and we all tend to know about that spectrum of behavior where the victim wants the attention of being harmed and wants to manipulate people by being rescued, and so that external validation comes from that role of victimhood.
Speaker 2:Validation comes from that role of victimhood, whereas the grandiose wants the external validation for being the best, for being seen as attractive or smart or whatever it is, and so there's those two sort of directions that the narcissism tends to veer. And even within that there's a factor of what we call like Machiavellianism or like a more of a streak of meanness or predatory behavior. Some narcissists are a little more attention seeking, but it's all about the attention. They're not necessarily like strategic enough to figure out the long game of hooking you in and being Machiavellian and manipulative to a degree that is like predatory and harms other people. It's more straight out about the attention. So that really varies. So if you say, do narcissists consciously seek out their supply, probably depends on the narcissist and where they sit on those different spectrums of types.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and do you think that there are certain types of people who are more prone to, certain types of people who are more prone to get into relationships with narcissists, or who are more vulnerable to narcissists.
Speaker 2:I think that's also a good question because, similarly, like we all have this sort of constellation of being. You picture the spectrum that I just laid out of, like those quadrants of types of narcissism, where we have all sorts of quadrants of types of things within us that we put up with, don't put up with, they're interested in, not interested in for various degrees. So it really would depend on the individual person. Therapy with a professional after an experience like that is important because you can really lean into who you are and get to know yourself and figure out how to do your internal healing. If you're finding yourself in that same pattern over and over again, it's not victim shaming or anything to look at yourself and say, hey, wait a minute, what's going on. My friend over here hasn't had four of these guys.
Speaker 1:That's a hard. It's a hard, that's a hard conversation to have with yourself. I think for me it has been a hard road to look at myself and say over the course of my life and like not all of my relationships have been toxic or bad, but there's enough of them, right, that I'm like where really extreme things have happened, that I had to have that conversation. And I like that you bring up this as a victim blaming, because ultimately I felt like in the long road, looking at myself and saying again I'm the common denominator. It gave me some power. I didn't feel like I was just going to continue to move through the world in a way in which I might fall into yet another trap and another trap until the day I died. Right, it gave me hope. It was like oh, I can do this work here and then be in healthy relationships.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's absolutely true. I mean, there's endless supply of interventions and types of therapy and exercises that you can go out there to do to get relief and learn skills and learn about boundaries and even just learn how to read people Within narcissism. You know, you asked me like is there like always a prey drive? I'm in a college like a dog, but is there always like a thing they're scanning for that makes people more susceptible? And that, I think, varies individually on the narcissism, as does most things Like, we're all individuals, but certain behaviors like love bombing people talk about that all the time. It's nice that this like trend of people wondering if their partners are narcissists after they have a shitty breakup is out there, because now people are talking about love bombing and looking at it and it is often a red flag that something is going on that might not be safe in the long term.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about love bombing? Is it a sort of key signifier of being engaged in something with a narcissism, and in what ways do narcissists use love bombing?
Speaker 2:So my experience working with different clients and then just knowing different people that are on the spectrum of dark triads personally and professionally yeah, that does tend to show up, whether someone has narcissism, sociopathy or a psychopath or these are more trendy terms than what you see in the DSM. But antisocial personality disorder or borderline personality disorder with more malignant traits, those sorts of things, those personalities do tend more often than not to engage in a really fast come on in the relationship Love bombing, like all of a sudden we're going on trips. You're the best partner I've ever had. Let me tell you how much. The other ones were not so great. Let's go to dinner every night. Can I text you the entire day with explicit texts so that you're just so into me you can't think about anything else.
Speaker 2:Like that type of bomb, love bombing, where they just come in so strong, does align with people that end up not being very healthy. And are they all narcissists? No, are some of them possibly worse in terms of danger and discomfort of dating them? Possibly Are some of them not as bad, possibly it's just a whole spectrum. But when you're getting in a relationship really fast like that, why aren't you reflecting on how you feel about the person. Feel about the person listening to what they tell you about themselves and checking in between seeing how it feels to spend a day or two apart, like why so?
Speaker 1:fast, yeah, and it's interesting because I think, talking to my girlfriends, we all love like instant chemistry, hot and heavy, and I think what I have learned is that you can have instant chemistry and hot and heavy, but it's a conversation that you can have with someone and you can both like in a healthy connection. If you are able to identify wow, this feels intense, let's take our time, let's get to know each other, whereas when I have been in unhealthy relationships, there's been the grandiose statements, actions, and then if I said, okay, let's like slow down, or I pulled back a bit, the reaction to that would be super negative or there would be a nasty kind of reaction to it. Because I think for women and like I don't know, I'm not a man, so I'm not going to speak for men, but I do think women love like an incredible romance that takes off fast, right, but it obviously can put us in a position of being prey to someone who is narcissistic and is there for their own reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it does make you vulnerable to that right Because you don't have time to think and reflect in between. And then, at the same time, there's this added piece of like why don't I just sit with myself and think and reflect in between Right and what does this person?
Speaker 2:do what's going on here. Are we not satisfied enough in our own selves, or is this just so powerful and good and why not temper it and slow it down? There's a great book that I refer people to towards the end of therapy sometimes at the beginning, when we're dealing with relationships like this called how to Not Die Alone, by Logan Urie, and she's fun. She was a psychologist that worked with Google doing IUX and trying to figure out how to make things more addictive and engaging, and then she moved over to dating apps after that, and so this book is about more or less how dating apps are engaging and addictive. And as you read this book, she talks a lot about research out there on healthy relationships and research out there on dating slow and all this different research that's utilized in the creation of these apps to make them more engaging. And in this book she obviously has a side business where she's trying to sell being a dating coach or an expert in her own rank. She brings in that research to try to educate people on what does current research I think this one was published in 23, say on dating what's most effective, and in there there was one reference that I recall about people who choose to wait two months to have sex.
Speaker 2:It's a really long time if someone is texting you all day trying to take you on trips, trying to take you out to dinner every night or every couple nights.
Speaker 2:So if you space the dates out, you get a little bit more time to experience whatever this mystery is that happens if you wait two months.
Speaker 2:And what they say happens in this research that she references is that the sort of chemistry that you experience in early dating will last longer if you are slower to start. The intimacy in general which is kind of fascinating because you think I'm sure you've been in long-term relationships too it changes. In fact she talks a little bit about the neuroscience of love, like that first early chemistry is really intense and then it slowly becomes like a different type of fun, interesting chemistry. But a lot of people, especially people that are more on that impulsive, narcissistic spectrum, they want to go back to that early hot sex over and over again and the reality is is you want it to progress and feel different. So more parts of your brain and attachment, and I think that's a great read If any of your readers are in that stage where they're like okay, I've done this work. I see that I got in this hard relationship. Now how do I start figuring out how to get into healthier?
Speaker 1:ones Right. So a good question is what's the arc for? Not the narcissist, but a person who's suddenly going? I think I might be in not only a toxic relationship but a relationship with a narcissist. We all have that moment where we're like this really is not feeling right. Can we talk a little bit about the arc from the beginning, what it looks like at the beginning, to that point where we start, the turning starts to happen and then the thoughts start happening where it's like this doesn't. Something doesn't feel right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it's such a painful process if you've been through it or supported a friend or anyone through it, right, and often what happens is people come in and they're doing the questioning. We're arguing a lot. Is it me? Are sexes as great? Is it me? This is happening? That is happening. Is it me as opposed to the more neutral? I know I did this, they do this. This is where we're at. How do we navigate it as a team or what am I missing here? It's more of a self-blame.
Speaker 2:And what I tend to watch for and the way I tend to conceptualize those early stages of waking up to it and what I will will flat out say a lot of times, is if your partner is really really nice sometimes and then really really unkind sometimes and you're just going back and forth, back and forth, how would you not be puppy trained to behave a certain way so that they're nice all the time, like it would just be exhausting after a while you would just give up and start doing their preferences, so that you're over here, right, and look at that consciously and start figuring out if maybe a little bit of that is happening, like are you going back and forth? And then, in general, if you had like a coworker or a girlfriend that was in your friendship group, if she was super, super nice, your best friend one day, and then like a total negative person and using the information she got when she was nice to like talk bad about you or be manipulative, you probably wouldn't give her all that nice information when she's nice, right, if she's hot and cold, hot. So why are you doing that with your partner, like what's happening here, and so just having like that sort of open dialogue about that? Now, that situation where someone's hot, cold, hot cold is very different in narcissism than when somebody is just kind of immature. When someone's immature and they're growing as a person, they're going to feel empathy. They're going to be sad. You're upset. They're going to be in the middle too.
Speaker 2:What did I do wrong? How do I take accountability? How do I change? You'll have some hard things happen, but you'll see some change in behavior over time.
Speaker 1:It sounds like one of the key things to look for in a partner to know that you're in connection with a healthy person is empathy from them when things get hard or difficulties arise. So I know this may sound like a silly question what? But? But I'm going to argue that people who are repeatedly getting pulled into toxic relationships with narcissists or other people with those kind of disorders might not know what empathy looks like from a partner, especially if you grew up with you know parents who weren't particularly empathetic, or siblings. What does empathy look like when you are in a relationship with a healthy person and things get hard and you have problems, as opposed to what it looks like when you're with a narcissist who doesn't have empathy for you or the situation?
Speaker 2:When I start off with you, with people and looking at that connection between childhood experiences, or how did you miss this right? Or what is empathy? What does empathy feel like when it's consistent, someone's consistently? What I sort of do is have people do like an inventory and collect data of the experiences they've had. And there's this great book called Getting Past your Breakup by Susan Elliott where in chapter six she presents this inventory where people write out the experiences they've had with their partner. When people come into session, I have them write out two or three partners. We'll just do lines on the page and they'll answer 13 questions on the last three partners and then we've got sort of some data points.
Speaker 2:When people have empathy, do they do these things? We can talk about it right. And then we go into a second section of that inventory where they do the exact same rollout on the people who were around them when they grew up. If they were raised in a boarding school environment with a nanny, if they were raised with two parents or a grandma, whoever raised them. Same similar questions, and then we can see how the behaviors line up and that gives us a really good opportunity to talk about like what healthy empathy looks like.
Speaker 2:Usually there's at least one caregiver in there who had displays of healthy empathy, so we can talk about what that looks like, what that feels like. We can talk about our own relationship. Are you trusting me as a therapist? Do you think that I'm experiencing a genuine curiosity? And when you say that and I scrunch my face and touch my heart a little bit, do you think it's performative or do you think I'm actually feeling it? And what does it feel like to have someone care enough to react when you tell them something hard? How is that? And so you've got these two different ways in which you can approach, like looking at, talking about and feeling into what empathy is like. But you can also go the other route of you know how you experience empathy when you care for other people.
Speaker 1:What does it feel like when you have it Right, and so what does empathy in a healthy relationship look like? What is it when you're with a partner and things get hard? What should people be looking for to know that you've got a partner capable of empathy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean absolutely. In early relationships there's going to be conflict and challenges like that. You want that so you can see how the two of you work through it. When those situations come up, a person who has empathy will be curious about what you're experiencing in the midst of the conflict. It's not about a competition of who won. It's they're able to keep their emotional regulation and their curiosity and their engagement with you open enough to where they're able to hear that I have random conflict.
Speaker 2:If, when, when you leave your pens all over my desk, my ADHD gets super triggered and I can't focus at work. And can you please just put your pens in the pen cup, right, and then the person who's leaving the pens everywhere isn't like you're controlling. They're able to say, oh, I hear that you can't focus when my pens are everywhere. Okay, I'm going to work really hard to gather these pens and I might mess up a couple of times, but I don't want you to be in pain and I'm sorry. In fact, I'm going to put three pen cups over there so that I've got some kind of strategy so we can get this right.
Speaker 1:So they care about, like, what it is that's creating conflict within you and they're willing to problem solve that with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. They're hearing your experience, they're curious about your experience, they're imagining what it's like for you to have that experience and they don't want you to suffer.
Speaker 1:They don't want you to suffer, right? I want to share sort of a personal. I was actually talking to someone about this this morning because they were asking me as this year I finally opened up to like I've opened up to being open to meeting people. I'm not like aggressively trying to find anyone. I'm not out there searching for my next love, but I'm like if I meet someone, I'm going to allow myself to like explore that. And so this person was asking me what are your hard no's that you've learned from your past relationships? And I was trying to.
Speaker 1:I wasn't very good at putting this into a little soundbite for them, but what you just told me resonates. So, for instance, one thing I am an anxious person. I tend towards being anxiously attached, right. So if someone pulls away from me, I'm going to pull towards them a little bit more, and this has been across my life. And one of the things I do unconsciously with the people I love if I think for something, for some reason, they might be upset with me or I'm feeling anxious about our connection is I'll say I love you and I'll say it a lot Meaning within an hour.
Speaker 1:if they're sitting there with me, I won't even recognize I'm doing it, but I'll say it frequently where it fits right. And with an ex, he pointed it out and it in a way that was like so do I have to say this back to you every time you say it. And I became very self-consciously aware of it and I didn't have the resources to say, oh, I say that when I'm feeling anxious, like this might be an indicator that I'm anxious about something that's going on with us. And when I finally had the resources because then what he would do is withhold saying it back to me. And it was very clear and embarrassing because then I was like, oh, I've just said I love you and you're being silent or looking like nonchalantly the other way it was very clear when I finally had the resources to say it's because I'm feeling anxious, like maybe we could figure out, like what I really wanted in return was for him to say hey, I noticed that you have been saying this a lot over the last hour.
Speaker 1:Right, like something is clearly going on. What's going on? Like you're clearly anxious. What can I do to help you? Or what can we do to figure out what's uncomfortable here. I feel like that's an empathetic reaction. So, as opposed to withholding and not saying it back and making it very clear that I'm doing this annoying thing, so I feel like is that a good example of what you're talking about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, and not an uncommon example. I've heard that exact thing with the. I love you and seeking reassurance that you're loved when you feel sort of moved away from and I think you're right. Wouldn't it be beautiful if you picked a partner who was consistently kind and, when you found yourself doing that, said hey, I'm curious, I noticed you said I love you more today than normal, why not?
Speaker 1:That's empathetic. So I wanted to share that example with listeners because I think, like there is a good example where, instead of me thinking wow, that's not an empathetic way to react to my anxiousness, I thought, oh, something's wrong with me because I'm anxious. How embarrassing. Something's wrong with me, you know, I'm just too nervous, I'm too insecure. Wrong with me, you know, I'm just too nervous, I'm too insecure. And I think that that's a good example of something to look for in a relationship with someone who's not healthy for you, at the very least, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think that that's a beautiful example. That's really clear. I think that will help a lot of people, because I hear that often. That exact example and what I think is so beautiful about that is it's also like shining light on this idea of like kindness, like is kindness, consistent.
Speaker 1:Some people can consistently be kind, choose one of those you keep saying consistent and, and so I want to shine a light on that, because what people will also say is but he did this, this wonderful thing for me. He went and got me all these flowers, or I was feeling down and he wrote me a card. He sent me a card, but then the next day he's's like whatever. It is like ignoring your I love you's, or in a bad mood and cold, and everything you say to him is like you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:It's not kind. So it sounds to me like another marker here is inconsistency, if kindness is there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that Jekyll and Hyde, hot and cold, right? Most people don't tolerate the hot and cold in their friendships or with business partners. How safe would that be if your business partner was hot and cold? But in a romantic relationship it can be. It seems to me like a little easier to say like oh, what if it's me? And going back and forth. And so when I brought up that intervention I use with the Susan Elliott book, where we do the inventories and data point collecting on like the last few relationships and then also on the childhood relationships, like you really see, like what are those unmet needs and then how do I give them to myself? Right, I love that.
Speaker 1:That's so that's part of your healing process is giving consistent kindness to yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if the unmet need that, you see, let's say you've got a hot and cold mom, or hot and cold mom and hot and cold dad, and so it's going back and forth, back and forth, and then all these partners have this hot and cold behavior and you sort of see it on paper. Then you know like, hey, I got enough of these. If I stay in relation with my parents, do I really want a partner that's hot and cold? Maybe when I go out and I date, a value that I look for is consistent kindness, like when they're upset or dysregulated. Can they remain curious and empathetic while we navigate conflicts? If they've had a hard day at work or something happens that's stressful to them, do they take that out on me? Or are they able to say I need a break, I'm going to go exercise, go for a walk and be home when I feel good, and I'll ask for your support then, right?
Speaker 1:All right, that's wow, that's an eye-opener. There, folks, I just feel like my whole Dang. I hadn't even stopped to think about hot and cold throughout my life. I've definitely experienced a lot of it in relationships, but I hadn't thought about the origin of that so much. Right, because it is. If you have experienced that growing up and then you're going to seek that in partners, thinking that's the way relationships are right.
Speaker 2:Seek it or just not notice, like if a young woman has like your average. Well, we all like to fantasize average upper middle class background with like two loving parents and like great jobs and mentors and tutors and like the whole cheerleading squad and the whole thing that American young women think they should have access to. Or at least that's sort of what the view was when I was growing up. That's what I thought when I watched TV and saw people having those lifestyles. When someone has that sort of like general, like happy-go-lucky, easy-peasy childhood and they go on a date with somebody and that somebody says what's your favorite hobby? And they say it's, you know, cheerleading, and then the person they're dating says, well, that's dumb, or are you like a preppy snob? They would say, wait what? I don't? Let people talk to me like this. This does not feel good in my body, you're not kind. They would notice.
Speaker 2:Now, if the same situation happens with somebody else, maybe the parents were inconsistently kind hot, cold, hot and cold and their date says you know what are your hobbies? And they say, oh, I don't know, I don't have that many. I like to read, I guess. And they say, oh, so you're a nerd and that young woman's like father's called her a nerd or mother's told her to stop reading all the time, or something similar to what this man just said's not necessarily she's seeking it out, it's just like she doesn't notice right like you're not notice, right, and so those sorts of like nagging, unkind, negative behaviors that like sneak their way in, aren't necessarily sought out as much as just you don't notice that someone's not being super loving to you.
Speaker 2:Now, when we're adults, I like to think that, as an adult, if I do this inventory and I write down what did these past relationships have in common? What did childhood have in common? Well, I'm circling some negatives here. Well, now I'm an adult, I can figure out how to learn these behaviors, give these things to myself and reparent myself, and I don't have to like I get to decide how I want to navigate dynamics with parents if they're still behaving that way. But I can absolutely learn about boundaries and cut off behavior. So I'm not navigating that consistently right. And and I can also figure out how to, how to go out and seek people who don't behave that way and feel into what that feels like. Yeah, learn some of those lessons.
Speaker 2:I think if there's a real lack of assertiveness for one reason or another. There's a bunch of books on assertiveness.
Speaker 1:So, before we get into the steps to healing which I think you're already giving us some right, like this whole parenting yourself, or giving the things to yourself that you're realizing you haven't had and you need, and what are typically the things that bring someone to a breaking point when they're in a relationship with a narcissist- so this is the part of healing that I think is like is is kind of fascinating and like just full self-disclosure, wise, like no one's interested in doing this kind of work unless they've had similar experiences.
Speaker 2:I can speak the language and it's interesting to me because of that. So I absolutely have like empathy for people navigating this and like a real curiosity and interest and passion navigating it. And and at the same time I see there's like this interesting paradox where it's like if you wake up to these dynamics as an adult, if we get into a situation where we really kind of bottom out with the behaviors of other people, we we wake up with an adult vocabulary and an adult ability to go through and learn Okay, what did I miss? How do I reparent it? We can do it really fast, really loving and really thoroughly right. And with that comes leadership skills, because you're able to describe, catch and see exactly what those pathways are. So if another friend comes to you or you have a niece or a young woman and they're engaging in some of that behavior, you know what questions to ask or how to sort of see things unfold in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. So there's something really beautiful about that piece and in that there's a lot of research on when something hard happens to us. If we help other people that have similar things happen, it's very healing. So as much as like getting to that point where, hey, this is really awful, and bottomed out is painful, there's like a light at the end of the tunnel or like a rainbow or whatever you want to call it, especially if you consider going out there and courteously coming up with an action plan to have a really satisfying next year. And so I think your original question that I sort of prefaced with all that, was how do you know when it's really really bad, like what does it look like at the end?
Speaker 2:And usually I mean I hate to say it, but my experience with people that are truly dating dark triads narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, people that are way off on that end of the spectrum is that your health starts breaking down. Your physical body can't keep up with chronic stress and you're very much questioning yourself, not trusting yourself, trusting your own judgment. You're unable to tolerate just like sitting alone. It doesn't feel good anymore. There's certain things that I see over and over again. Everybody does it a little different, but pretty consistently there's actual physical health consequences to being in a relationship with someone who is hot and cold and inconsistently kind or manipulative, or all these types of behaviors that come out when you have someone really really close to you that doesn't have empathy, like you can't hold that much stress for a period of time. You're not supposed to your body's rejecting it, right, and so that's usually when someone reaches out for help, either because physically they're getting ill, taking a toll on your body, or maybe your work, I don't know. You know some women are more work driven, but absolutely it's going to affect your body too. That is an indicator that you need to start paying attention and like whether or not a woman leaves at that point, or a man, because women can be abusive, and all these different types of dark chides. In fact, the book I'm working on right now is about women who have those characteristics.
Speaker 2:But when you're in a relationship and that's happening the person sometimes is the one to leave you because there's these little cycles of love-bobbying engaging. Then they devalue you more or less oftentimes, and then they get to this discard phase and then they're searching out a new prey, a new source of external validation, and then, if they leave first, then you're dealing with a, a new prey, a new source of external validation. And then, if they leave first, then you're dealing with a person who's got health consequences, feels rejected, is trying to make sense of all this gaslighting how much of it was my fault, how much of it was theirs. And nonetheless, they can use all of that information to look at the reality of what they've experienced in the past, organize it, figure out what they want in the future, figure out how to give themselves what they're missing so they can go after what they want in the future and then bring in healthy people.
Speaker 2:And I don't know if I've done a good job expressing this one or not, but it's absolutely something that I do in therapy and when I am in conversation with people about this topic. It's talking about like, reading the like, reading this, the cues that a person could potentially be this way, like what. What are the indicators? And sure, they're a little different for everyone, but but getting really good at being able to tell when a person doesn't have empathy consistently or kindness consistently, is really important. You don't want to start a business with someone like you, don't want to marry someone like that. That is a business. You're mixing your future. You're supposed to be supporting and rallying and helping each other, right, you don't? It doesn't sound like a fun person to have lunch with, nope.
Speaker 1:To have anything with, like the hot, cold, the push-pull, the. I mean it's an exhausting thing to experience and I want to say this I think this is also why women who get out of relationships with narcissistic individuals have a massive glow up after. I mean, your body is going to start healing the minute it gets to rest and relax from constant, never-ending stress and anxiety. You can't help like, but you know, start to heal. If you've lost hair from it, your hair will start to grow back. If you've gained weight from your, you know cortisol levels being out of control, you're going to start to like see some of that dissipate, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you do so.
Speaker 1:here are the perks people. Yeah, yeah, you do so here are the perks people?
Speaker 2:yeah, those are awesome perks, but even even just being able to like sit with the self and figure out, like, what are my dreams and goals and what do I want next and how do I find supportive people can I ask you this and then we'll get into then?
Speaker 1:I want to start giving a package of like steps towards healing things people can do your approach to that, Because I feel like this is sort of an epiphany I've had over the last stretch of time. I think for me, like I recognize that I have a pattern of getting into deep relationships where I'm just crazy about really unhealthy people and part of the thing that I had to come to terms with was that I wasn't just doing that in my romantic relationships. I could also then look at my friendships, my deep friendships, and see where I was inviting some of that behavior in, or people with those behaviors into my friendship circle, into connection, and I was experiencing some of the same discomfort and anxiety in those friendships. Is that something that people can look for who are like oh, I'm not only in, you know, a relationship with someone romantically this way, but this is also perhaps in other areas of my life.
Speaker 2:There's absolutely cases for that. I'm thinking about this other book that I really enjoyed, but unfortunately the author passed away not too long ago. He wrote two books. One was called Psychopath Free and the other was called Whole Again, and his name is jackson mckenzie. They're great little books and he based them on a bunch of interviews. He was a coach rather than a therapist and in those books he talks about how, at the end of narcissistic relationships or relationships with people that are dark trans, there tends to be like friends that come around that are like curious about the drama, and it happened enough times in these interviews that they were able to like write about the commonalities, like, oh, who were the friends that like just came at you real fast and they were like your bff in the midst of healing from a toxic relationship or relationship with a narcissist, and then how did you navigate your way out of those dynamics and figure out how to find more supportive ones? That's a great little set of books to read.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's an interesting phenomena. So let's talk about it this way Either you have been discarded or you gained the courage to be like I need you to leave my life now, like I know that this isn't healthy. I have to get out of it. What? How do we begin to move forward with healing? Because I would imagine, and you can confirm or deny that most people, when they come out of long-term I would say when I say long-term, a year or more, longer relationships with narcissists, they're not in great condition physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, holistically. So what does that look like? Starting to move forward and heal and in a way that will keep you from going back into another narcissistic relationship?
Speaker 2:I could speak to the way I do it with my clients and what I've seen in books and different strategies other therapists use. Everybody's experience can be a little different. It's not like there's a set ladder of rules or steps you have to take in order to get to the end. It can happen in a different order and in a different way for everyone. But I'll sort of talk you through what I do with folks. I will start off by doing that getting past your breakup inventory and we'll put all those things on paper so we can kind of look at the data points and then we talk about okay, where are the reparenting pieces and how do you give that to yourself and tolerate that right? And then we do some mindfulness exercises, some basic CBT.
Speaker 2:Cognitive behavior therapy is like dog training. It's one of the easiest therapies and it's just so beautiful and effective. Research over and over again on CBT it's helpful. That includes mindfulness, thought restructuring and extinguishing through exposures. So going out there and experiencing things that trigger the memories for life. And in that process we figure out how to mindfully catch when our moods and feelings are dysregulated, how to catch the way we have fear-based thoughts and how to navigate them and fact check them with reality. And in that place of working on thought restructuring they call it I tend to go into the schemas more, depending on where the person is.
Speaker 2:An adult woman is a lot different than like an 18-year-old woman. There's an older woman that's different than 18-year-old. So maturity, all sorts of things, but we evaluate together. Do you want to do schema work? And schema work is how does what you think about get influenced by what you grew up being around as a kid? So then we get a little more into that experience with the sorry. So then we get more into the experience of navigating, like the parent relationships, and is there any actual trauma there that you're afraid to look at and you're not able to look at in order to see that, hey, I'm putting up with stuff I shouldn't, because I don't even want to look at the fact that I'm up with it.
Speaker 2:And at that point I'll often do something called EMDR with women or men men come in for this too and withDR we look at the exposures and the extinguishing, the way going into the memories feels, and then we can pull out the lessons learned and bring down the reactivity to the memories or the triggers of the memory so you can tolerate pulling your wisdom out. And then, once you're in a place where you more or less, and then once you're in a place where you more or less know what you were doing, why you were doing it, we start figuring out how do you care for yourself, right? How do you start giving those things to yourself? And along the way, I weave that in through mindfulness, but getting to the point where you can notice that you're having a hard emotion and trust that you can feel it all the way through. You could put your hand on your chest when you're feeling lonely or when you're feeling hurt, that you remember someone doing something and you can sit on your couch or your bed and just notice what it feels like in your body when you feel that way and let yourself feel it all the way through till it leaves you and then so yourself feel energized again and then go out there and like function well and being able to process feelings in real time, as opposed to not being able to tolerate the feeling or look at the bad experience. That is a big piece of what I call like reparenting right and and like showing up for the self.
Speaker 2:Sometimes people have like really superficial things, like if you were married to someone and you missed out on your education because maybe they had narcissism and you just put all your energy into building up their career instead of your own, then maybe something that's really important in terms of your reparenting is to figure out, like what are my dreams and goals, what do I want to do, and then what is my action step to start finding people who've done that, so I can feel supported while I go. Do it. Finding healthy people.
Speaker 2:I tend to do a lot of work around boundaries. How do we know if someone qualifies to be our acquaintance? What's the behavior of an acquaintance? What's the behavior of a friend that we share with a friend that we don't share with an acquaintance? What are the qualifiers to be close-knit, even closer than a friend to get lunch with here and there? What do we share with those people that we don't share with the other people? Now, when we bring a romantic partner in, do they need to meet all those qualifiers so that I know that they're safe before I open up my whole, my body, my finances, everything to them? Or do they just need to be hot and we'll see what happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and yeah, I hate to say it but, like oftentimes when we're young or we're just so engulfed into the chemistry of the relationship, or let's say, we just fill out a bio on a dating app and someone shows up and they say you know what I'm? All those things you say you want, and you're like, oh cool, Then we can. Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Let's get married. Yeah, no, right.
Speaker 2:I think they're predatory and they're on the dating apps and they're like oh cool, I just have to pretend to be this.
Speaker 1:Nice, I can do that for six months. I'm telling you six months. They can't do it any longer than six months. It's a six-month mark. Everything goes south you get it.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you, I feel like three to six months, that's about as long as they can be the perfect picture, but even in that time frame, you'll see little things. I love all of those pieces that you mentioned because I feel like a lot of them resonate with things that I myself have been doing. I'm like, okay, I've been on the right track right Over the last year and a half, and I love that. You talk about learning how to sit with the feelings, the awful feelings that come afterwards and tell you and soothe yourself and talk to yourself and say afterwards and tell you and soothe yourself and talk to yourself and say, yeah, you're feeling really sad right now, because of course, you are. That was a really painful thing that happened. You know, like and it's okay to be feeling this way and say all of the loving things to yourself, like you would somebody else, right? And the cool thing is is then you realize you're always going to be there for yourself, right? You're always a resource for yourself. You know, coming out, everything's raw, everything feels like it's falling apart, and this is a way you can start to put the pieces back together, back together. So I'm curious now about where I'm at which is so you've gone and you've talked to therapy. You've done some CBD cognitive behavioral therapy which I think you're right is one of the gold star approaches to healing and there's so many techniques within it that I love that this reparenting exercise and concept you bring in, and then the EMDR I've also experienced that and there are a lot of pieces and, of course, getting guidance from someone who knows how to tie it all together for you. It's important to get help right, but eventually you're going to get to a point, hopefully, where you're like okay, maybe now I'm open to being open to meeting people.
Speaker 1:I think one of the biggest things that comes up for me and so whenever it's something that comes up for me I have to imagine this is common for everybody else is like how do I trust myself? You know like, how do I trust myself? And I know when I started to have feelings for someone for the first time, there was so much fear. It was like, oh, this feeling last time led to a lot of pain and pain that I have no fucking interest in ever returning to, and that was kind of through my healing process. I kept promising myself I'm like we don't ever have to go through this again.
Speaker 1:Here's the beautiful thing. It was kind of the same. When I was giving natural birth to my son, my mantra was I never have to do this again, I never have to do that. And that got me through giving birth right, and it was kind of the same thing coming out of a really painful relationship. So when I started having those little tingles I was like, oh, this feeling is connected to fear and oh, this feeling could lead to pain. Right, give me what, doc. Tell me what. What do you do with that doc?
Speaker 2:so what I'm hearing you say is that you feel ready to date again. You've done a lot of this work and now it's going to be a matter of like if I go out there and I test the waters, it's it's gonna feel scary and it's going to hurt a little bit.
Speaker 1:And I think, specifically like I've had a lot of people ask me out, I've gone out on dates and I've met people, but as of recently, I've had some experiences where I was like oh, kind of like I like this person, you know. I mean where the feelings were elevated on my side which I didn't expect. Honestly, I was kind of like I think maybe I'm past that kind of feeling for someone else and I'll just have sort of this like lovely, you're okay, I'm okay, let's date feeling. But I started to get like the sparkly feelings you know what I mean Like the oh, maybe I Early dating brain chemistry, right.
Speaker 2:So how do you feel like safe, experiencing that early dating brain chemistry which is really electric and engaging, even my my thought would be learning about early dating and what happens when we're falling in love, like how, how does that happen in the mind? If you you've got that lobe and yuri book, that'd be a great starting point and just kind of watching this out, right, like here I am, I'm dating, thinking about him more often than not, I'm having fantasies, I'm excited and this is what happened last time and it didn't work out. Well, what if I lose control and I miss some red flags, right? And so my thought would be committing to check in with yourself that Logan Urie book on page 169, she has these like eight questions that you ask yourself in between each date and they're questions like how did you feel around the person?
Speaker 2:What did your body feel like? How do you? There's a bunch of there's. I think it's like eight of them. Actually. This is top eight questions. Anyway, checking in continually for a little while, right, see, decide consciously. Do I want to have sex with this person early on and have the charge of the fun chemistry?
Speaker 1:I mean that, that that ship has sailed.
Speaker 2:Okay, sorry, that ship has sailed I mean, I have a feeling you're pretty knowledgeable about sex or bringing it in in different ways, but the reality is is like attraction does change and it has to be something that you want and you think is beautiful and you're looking forward to as a if you want the relationship to last right, if you're constantly trying to chase that early attraction. It's important to know about the brain chemistry of attraction and love, I guess is what.
Speaker 2:I'm saying Slowing down and just paying attention to yourself, trusting that if a conflict happens you're going to be gauging like. Is this person consistently kind? How did he react when I told him X, y, z that put us sort of at opposing needs at the same time? Was he curious? Was he kind? Was he making efforts to make sure I felt connected too and my needs were met? Was I able to listen to him? Was I able to stay calm and curious? Did I make any efforts to make sure his needs were met?
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's just really kind of like a slow process. Can you consciously talk about it? One of the cool things about being single in our 40s and 50s and 60s and upwards is that we can just talk about this stuff with our partners and if they don't like it most men if you're heterosexual and dating men are going to be like, hey, I'm more excited about talking about this in my 40s and 50s and 60s than I was in my 20s Like they've learned those skills too. And not to say that all of the men that are available to date are there, but there are enough of them to where it's real easy to tell if the person can show up and have that conversation.
Speaker 2:And if they can't something you want, which hopefully it is to be treated with kindness consistently. There's others, and it's nice to be by yourself too. There's lots of fun to be had.
Speaker 1:I think that that was something I have found. What I love about where I'm at now and what I think is important for people to know if they're coming out of being in an unhealthy look, I'm saying unhealthy relationship maybe narcissistic, but where the dynamic was unhealthy or you were treated in a way that was unkind, consistently or inconsistently is that rebuilding myself? After my last relationship and having so much time alone, I learned what it felt like to be at peace and I learned how to really enjoy that and how to really enjoy my life on my own terms by myself. Right, and that piece being traded off for a relationship.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't want to say traded off, but what I want to say is like that piece is really valuable to me. It's very valuable as a single person, and so I think that, unlike maybe before in my life where I hadn't experienced that, so it wasn't like oh, I'm going to get in a relationship and that means that this kind of single piece isn't necessarily going to be the same. Like now, I'm like hmm, whatever I'm changing, if I'm changing my status as single to partnered, it's going to have to be for something that kind of like equals. This piece I have on my own right. That's kind of what the competition is. The competition is it's got to be greater than what I've got, and what I have right now is pretty fucking great.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's one way to look at it. It sounds like what you're saying is there's this real consciousness around how good it feels to be loving, and on my own this feels good in a way it didn't before and I courteously don't want to trade it in for a different experience. Is there a way to sort of embody both? How do I embody both?
Speaker 1:Can I Wait? Can I embody?
Speaker 2:both. How would you embody both?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't have those skills. Look, I'm not going to. I know what I know and I know what I don't know.
Speaker 2:You took that Logan Urie book and you read it right and you got to that chapter that talks about like the eight questions's say. You decide I love this guy. It's so fun to like get together and be intimate and go on adventures, but I also really like reading and maybe on wednesdays I'm just gonna read and if he wants to come over you can read in the other room or he can go hang out with his friends or whatever, but I'm still going to make that time to have for myself right, but it's not all relationship or all along right, but instead like how do I bring the two together?
Speaker 2:so my pendulum's more balanced and that's just like yep yeah, you can.
Speaker 1:I guess you could have both if you have someone that honors that and values that too, where you don't have to feel fear when you're not together. Right, yeah, too much silence in between or time off in between. There's that fear of what am I going to come back to? Or if I come back to see them after some time apart, are they going to be cold? Are they gonna? You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's it's hard to feel at peace when you're alone or if you're dealing with someone who engages in jealousy induction and tries to make you feel insecure, like oh, they could fall in love if I'm not keeping their extension because external validation is so important in there right, and so, being with someone who's not like that, you're going to feel that like trust and calmness, hopefully in peace, so that you can have your time alone very good, yeah, ideally you say to the person like I'm feeling, like I need some alone time, I would love to just play video games all night or go read or go do something with my girlfriends, and and then they're curious and they're kind and they say oh, I didn't realize you were missing out on some of those things.
Speaker 2:Which would you want to do that every Friday? Do you miss your book club? Yeah, okay. Club, yeah, okay. Here we solved a problem with curiosity and kindness and empathy that's a fantastic example.
Speaker 1:How simple was that? I love it. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 2:I think it sounds like a lot of relearning, and healing when you get out of these relationships is learning what, what is possible, right and what it looks like, because some of us don't even know what it looks like because we haven't had it you know no difference between, like trying to learn it for the first time and then relearn it, right, but that's okay, because then, when you're, when you're learning these things for the first time, you cultivate these skills to articulate them from an adult voice, and that's okay, because then, when you're, when you're learning these things for the first time, you cultivate these skills to articulate them from an adult voice, and that's leadership, right. You get to help other people and and you get to be really awake and present for an experience some people might have gone through osmosis and never not really get as a human right, right. I mean when yeah, I'm thinking about another book that I think would be good for readers to know about if they really are interested in this subject and there's a researcher out of Austin, texas, named Kristen Ness and she wrote a book called Self-Compassion and when we get to the stage that you're describing, where we're learning these new skills and it's like tiring sometimes, right, like you do kind of need to rest and there's going to be moments of like man, this isn't fair or this is exhausting, or whatever it is how do we be consistently kind to ourselves and just accept that, like this is. This is part of what I'm navigating. Parts of it are really good and fun and leadership skills and you know all sorts of nice energy and opportunity is going to come to me as a result. But then parts of it are tiring.
Speaker 2:And when that comes, how do I just let myself rest and how do I let myself recharge? And I didn't talk about this before, but when I do therapy with people, a big thing that we work on is like routine physical exercise making sure you sleep, are you eating healthy? How does everything fit together? Are you having authentic relationships with yourself, with other people? That's part of self-compassion too Just showing up and making sure you have a really nice routine.
Speaker 1:Really taking care of yourself, giving yourself all of those things you need. I think sometimes it's surprising, if you take stock of your life and realize all the things you need, that you're not providing for yourself right, and giving that to yourself. I call it dating myself myself. I thought about, like all the things I get into, like when I'm in love with someone, like I'm all in and I'll like help them with their skin routine, I'll like do all if they need something. You know I want to nurture them and give them the things they need.
Speaker 1:But then I look at myself and I'm like, oh, you know, I haven't bathed in this many days, or I need this vitamin or this thing and or to get my hair done, but I haven't done it because I'm busy taking care of someone else, and so spending a year and a half like giving myself all of it, I'm like, oh, I need that, I'm just going to get for myself and that just give it to myself, right. And it's pretty amazing. I got a lot of things because I wasn't giving it to someone else. You know, I was like dang, I've upgraded this and that, you know, and it feels really amazing.
Speaker 2:Good, and then hopefully, as you're navigating dating, you know you're able to find partners that can already do that for themselves. Yes, and that'd be nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then it's just enjoyable when you do it for one another. I love that. So, look, guys, this has given you, like, a lot of information. You know what to look for in your relationships to identify if perhaps you're in a narcissistic relationship or just a relationship with someone who's just not healthy for you for whatever reason at this time, but some really good identifiers the sign that you know you got to get out. We've given you that Some great jumping off points for embarking on your healing journey, and some books as well. If you could, as we close this out, would you give my listeners three things if they have listened to this and they're like, yeah, I need to get out or I'm healing from this three things they could start doing tonight to start really moving in the direction of healing. And then information on where they can find you, all the places and get in touch with you if they want to work with you directly or learn more about you.
Speaker 2:So if you wanted to reach out to me personally, you're welcome to go to my website. It's sonnetdaymontcom. It's just my first and last name, which should be listed anywhere that you're getting access to this podcast. And then, if you wanted three things that you could just start doing right now, I would recommend starting off by maybe ordering a book or two. I would order that Getting Past your Breakup book by Susan Elliott so that you can, if you're not ready to dive into that inventory, just sort of read a little bit about it. And I would recommend going to the doctor and checking on your physical health, getting blood work, making an appointment and figuring out what you're going to do to start caring for your body, because long term stress like that is really hard. And finally, you know you're welcome to go to my website. I'll give you a recommendation if I'm not able to see you in my practice. Or you could go on Psychology Today and just start looking for therapists that can work with you.
Speaker 2:I, as a therapist, love doing in-person therapy. If you can find someone in person, if there's ever a time in your life to like invest in that, this would be it. And you know, just be really kind to yourself.
Speaker 1:Consistently.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I love that. I love that the idea of being consistently kind to yourself and loving yourself in that way, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. In early days it's hard. You, you get it going and you get better and better at it as time goes, and then just finding people that have been through it and are healthy thank you so much.
Speaker 1:This has been a really wonderful conversation. I feel like I've myself gotten some great takeaways that will be useful on my own journey and dating in the future or just being in connection with people in the future, and I think there are just so many people out there who are going to listen to this and feel less alone and feel a little bit more confident in wherever they are on that path and whether they're in relationship or exiting and trying to heal. So check her website out, listeners, and if you have questions or comments, you know what to do. If you're on YouTube, scroll down. You can leave a question or comment in the comment section below this video. Of course, if you are a listener, you are welcome to email me at Annette at TalkSexWithAnnettecom, and I will get the question to the person it needs to go to or I'll try to get an answer for you. You can also scroll down and click on my speak pipe and leave me a voicemail. So until next time, listeners, I will see you in the locker room. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Do the sex? Do the sex?
Speaker 1:Ring loop.