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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.
You Are Not Crazy
When Co-Parenting Becomes Coercive Control
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right — showing up, advocating, holding it together — and still somehow ending up as the problem, this episode is for you.
Int his episode, I get honest about what it actually feels like to be in the cycle: the exhaustion of defending yourself against false narratives, the way every act of good parenting gets twisted into evidence against you, and the invisible toll of a system that wasn't designed to recognize coercive control.
So many protective parents are living through isn't just "a difficult co-parent." It's post-separation abuse — and it has a name.
I break down how coercive control shows up after separation: the counter-parenting, the gotcha moments, the forced engagement loops, the way silence doesn't end the cycle — it just changes the channel.
I also talk candidly about my own experience navigating this, what keeping myself regulated actually looks like, and why being the safe parent is one of the heaviest gifts you can carry.
*Please Note: there is a long intro that explains my services. If you do not want to listen, just fast-forward 5 mins past. This intro will be changed in future recordings to be shorter. I am not paid to record this podcast and it is a free offering. Offering my work is the only way I can sustain the podcast*
Join the Patreon: https://patreon.com/Youarenotcrazy
*New Course*: Unhooked: Map the Cycle of Abuse in your Relationship
Website: Emotional Abuse Coach and high-conflictdivorcecoaching.com
Instagram: @emotionalabusecoach
Email: jessica@jessicaknightcoaching.com
{Substack} Blog About Recovering from Abuse
{E-Book} How to Break Up with a Narcissist
{Course} Identify Signs of Abuse and Begin to Heal
{Free Resource} Canned Responses for Engaging with an Abusive Partner
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