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You Are Not Crazy
You know something is wrong. You just can’t always explain what it is.
Why do you keep apologizing when you didn’t do anything wrong? Why can one nice interaction make you question months of mistreatment? Why do you rehearse conversations before you have them? Why are you still trying to make someone understand you when explaining yourself has never worked? Why does every individual incident sound small when the pattern has changed your entire life?
You Are Not Crazy is a podcast about making sense of the relationship experiences that don’t make sense.
I’m Jessica Knight, an emotional abuse coach and survivor. I take the confusing, contradictory, often ordinary-looking moments inside emotional abuse, coercive control, trauma bonds, narcissistic relationships, and high-conflict separation and slow them down so we can understand what is actually happening.
We look beyond labels and individual incidents to the patterns underneath them: what a behavior does, what it gets you to do in response, what happens when you resist it, and what you eventually learn to believe about yourself.
Because emotional abuse doesn’t only hurt. It can change the way you communicate, make decisions, respond to conflict, interpret other people’s behavior, and trust your own perception.
Here, we talk about gaslighting, manipulation, trauma bonding, intermittent reinforcement, coercive control, high-conflict divorce, post-separation abuse, difficult co-parenting dynamics, and the process of rebuilding self-trust after a relationship that taught you to doubt yourself.
But this isn’t a podcast about diagnosing every difficult person or telling you that every conflict is abuse. It’s about understanding the pattern.
What happened? What did it make you do? Why did your response make sense at the time? And what changes once you can finally see the mechanism underneath it?
You are not crazy. There is an explanation.
Let’s find it.
Learn more about Jessica’s work and resources at emotionalabusecoach.com.
Episodes
273 episodes
Why Confusion Is the Real Damage in Coercive Control
In this episode I look at why confusion, not fear, is often the clearest sign that a relationship is built on coercive control. I walk through four patterns that show up again and again: the gap between how someone behaves in private versus in ...
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Are They Trauma Bonded to You Too?
Sponsored recommendation:Listen to the Mind Your Midlife podcast In this episode, I'm answering a question I get asked constantly: ar...
The Lying Isn't an Accident: A Conversation with Anne Blythe from BTR.org
Sponsored recommendation:Listen to the Mind Your Midlife podcast This week I'm joined by Anne Blythe, founder of BTR.org (Betrayal Tr...
Why I Stopped Trying to Decode Them
Sponsored recommendation:Listen to the Mind Your Midlife podcast In this episode I talk about why emotionally abusive and coercive co...
Withdrawal, Not Grief: Understanding the Trauma Bond
Sponsored recommendation:Listen to the Mind Your Midlife podcast This episode is a reframe. If you have already learned what a trauma...
Dating After Abuse: Why My Answer Is "Traumatized"
Sponsored recommendation:Listen to the Mind Your Midlife podcast Someone recently asked if I'm dating, and my honest answer was "trau...
When Co-Parenting Isn't Safe: The Case for Parallel Parenting
I break down why parallel parenting is a communication strategy built specifically for high-conflict dynamics, not a failure of one. I talk about what it actually looks like in practice: handling your own parenting time independently, limiting ...
Why Closure Is a Myth with Najwa Zebian
Najwa Zebian returns for a second conversation, and this one picks up exactly where the first left off.Her new book, The One Who Broke You Can't Heal You, comes out August 25th, and we talk through w...
Pattern Blindness: Why No One Believes You Until It's Too Late
In this episode I break down pattern blindness, one of the least talked about reasons survivors stay stuck in self-doubt. I explain why family court and even well-meaning friends tend to evaluate coercive control one incident at a time rather t...
The Angry Daughter in Love
In this episode, I return to the angry daughter — but this time, I look at what happens when she tries to love someone. The survival skills that kept her intact in her family of origin are the same ones that quietly work against her in relation...
The Angry Daughter
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 a...
Why You Keep Saying Sorry (Even When You Did Nothing Wrong)
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...
You Were Never the Problem with Najwa Zebian
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 Zebia...
How Coercive Controllers Use Timing to Keep You in Their Orbit
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 ac...
What Coercive Control Does to Your Time
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...
I Didn't Know I Was Still Holding My Breath
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 ch...
It Shouldn't Feel This Confusing: Naming the Cycle of Abuse
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 ...
When Love Feels Like a Hostage Situation
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 ...
How Manipulators Use Words to Maintain Control
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 disguise...
The Underpinning of All Abuse: Coercive Control with Dr. Christine Cocchiola
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...
When Co-Parenting Becomes Coercive Control
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...
I'm Not Fucked Up, I'm Detoxing
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. The...
Walking on Razor Blades: Having a Partner with Unmanaged BPD
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 actual...
How I Actually Healed (And Why It Didn't Look the Way I Expected)
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 ...
What I Did When I Couldn't Trust My Own Mind
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 ridiculo...