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. They're signs that your nervous system did exactly what it was trained to do. 

I walk you through the difference between anxious attachment and trauma-conditioned hypervigilance, why healing feels worse before it feels better, and what it actually looks like to slowly teach your nervous system that the threat is over.

Transcript

Welcome to the You Are Not Crazy Podcast hosted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes. And healing from narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself and others, and heal the relationship with yourself so you can learn to love in a healthy way.

You can connect with Jessica and find additional resources, content, and coaching@emotionalabusecoach.com.

Before we begin. I just wanna make a quick note at the end of this episode. I spend the last four minutes walking through the way people work with me and where to find resources, my links and my courses. If you are a returning listener or are already a client, you can absolutely skip that part. If you're new or trying to figure out what kind of support you need, it's there for you.

It's the last four minutes. Thank you so much for being here. People will say that they feel like they are, well lack of a better word, totally fucked up after getting outta relationship. And the reframe I wanna offer you is that you're not fucked up, that you're actually detoxing. And I think I've seen this with a lot of clients, but I've also seen this within myself, that we feel like we have like gained anxious attachment or we feel like we've always been attached.

And anxious attachment, which I will explain is not actually what's going on. It could be a part of us could be there, but there also could be the element of that you're leaving a very toxic situation. And there's a story that a lot of us tell ourselves when we start dating again after an abusive relationship.

And it sounds like I'm a mess. I'm too much, I'm broken. Something's wrong with me. We cry over a text that didn't come. We check our phone 17 times. We feel a wave of panic when somebody says they'll be available and then they're not. And because we can see ourselves doing these things and feeling this way, and we're aware how looks and aware about feels, we decide or conclude that we must be the problem.

And that all the time in the relationship that we were in, the trauma bonded one, that it broke us. Either we were broken in it or broken now, or both. And I wanna offer you a different reframe because I think it's helpful. And like I said, both things could be true. You could have came out of the relationship feeling all the things that you're feeling, and your nervous system was also doing what it was trained to do.

So when you were in that relationship, you were the one. Who was dealing with shifts that would change without warning, you never really knew what version of them you were gonna get. Your body had to adapt all the time you were hypervigilant, and that's a survival response. Your nervous system became a way to read the room, to look for cues, and to stay a step ahead of the next blowup.

It's live in the cycle of abuse. When you learn to track the micro expressions, the microaggression, the tone of voice, how long before they responded, what they meant, when they said, fine, you weren't being paranoid, you were being adaptive in this situation, and for a long time, maybe years, that's what kept you safe.

The problem is that when the relationship ends, body doesn't get the memo. Your nervous system doesn't know what, that the threat is over keeps doing what it was trained to do, which is watching, scanning, bracing. So when a new person doesn't text back or says they'll let you know when, and then they don't follow up with you, or if they give you like a vague non-answer, when you ask a question, your system just fires up.

Not because you're broken, but because you're still doing the job. It learns to do. The real work isn't to shame the alarm system. It's to gently, slowly teach it that things are different now and we misname. And so many survivors, of course, of controlling relationships that come to me are convinced that they have anxious attachment.

And sometimes that's part of it. Sometimes anxious attachment patterns predate the relationship. Sometimes the relationship created them. Sometimes it's both. But I wanna be careful here because I think. We sometimes mislabel something important because there's a difference between anxious attachment, which is a relational pattern rooted in early experiences of inconsistency, unavailability, hypervigilance that's been trained into you by the abuser.

This is about a wound from long ago react. Reactivating to the present. The second is a direct response to the sustained psychological conditioning. They can look identical from the outside. They can even feel identical from the inside, but they have different roots and they need different responses.

When you were in it, when you weren't imagining things, the shoe really did drop. The rug really was pulled out from underneath you. They really did say they'd be available and then disappeared. Did make you feel insecure for needing a simple confirmation? I remember my, one of the first times I was dating after my marriage, um, I had to get a babysitter and I was like asking the guy to confirm this was like not even the first date, this was the third date.

And he kept giving me these vague answers and I said, look, I don't mean to be annoying, but. This is what I can do. And he said if I didn't cancel, then we're still on and then proceeded to cancel because I asked the question as if like my need for clarity and planning was the problem. And of course I felt ridiculous for even asking.

And so you are not. A psycho. You were in a relationship that required you to be a detective just to be stable, and now you're learning what it means to exist. In the absence of that instability, a lot of times our body doesn't get caught up yet, but we're also probably dealing with irrational behavior while it's happening.

And nobody tells you about the period after you leave because it usually feels worse before it feels better. Not because you made the wrong choice, not because you're not healing, but because your system is finally getting to process what it couldn't afford to process when you were still in survival mode.

And you can think about it like. Physical detox when somebody stops drinking or stops using, the body has to work through what was in the system. It's not comfortable. It's not linear, and there are nights that are brutal, but that discomfort doesn't mean that there's evidence that things are getting worse.

It's actually evidence that it's getting better. And when I went through my trauma bond, I got physically sick. And I remember telling this to my coach at the time, like I am just like. It is summertime and I'm so sick and it's like not getting better, and she was like, this is what this feels like. This is the trauma bond breaking.

This happens a lot. And I honestly had no idea. The grief that you feel at these times, even if the relationship was one that had to end, is for the relationship for the years, for the version of yourself who tolerated what you tolerated. The grief needs somewhere to go and your body likely has been holding it.

And so when a new person doesn't text back cancels last minute, or gives you something that feels even slightly inconsistent, your nervous system uses that moment as like a portal. All of the old pain floods in not just because of this person, because the portal opened. It's not a sign you're too damaged to date.

That's a sign. The grief is moving and you need to let it move. I, and what you might wanna try, when I was in the thick of it, checking Instagram story views, spiraling over unanswered messages, or deeply ashamed of how much space this person was taking up from my brain started journaling. Not the polished journaling, raw journaling, the kind where you write, I hate him.

Why am I like this? And I literally just talked his profile and I'm in my mid thirties. You let it out. But then you don't apologize for what you're saying. And then, and this is the part that I think really mattered, it was that I would step away. I would go get a cup of tea, go for a walk, my daughter wasn't home.

I'd give myself breaks from that spiral and then I would go back to the page and try and write for my stronger self. Not that everything is fine self, not the self that pretends that it wasn't hard, but the self that could say, yeah, I'm crying over a text and this is hard. And I'm learning how to be in a relationship again after something that was crazy toxic.

That salt could write back to the panicking part of me with something like, it's okay to be scared. You've been through something real. What that practice did slowly was start to create a different pathway for my brain. If the only voice I was hearing was fear, meaning like if fear was the only input, my nervous system had no reason to settle down, but if I could all spread something else, even something small, it started to learn that there was another option.

Not that there was no fear, but alongside something steadier, and I still cried over the text. I won't pretend that the practice made it stop, but it helped me reframe those thoughts and it helped me get through those nights that were really hard because it turned into evidence that I was grieving, not that I was broken, and it helped me get to the next day, and sometimes that was just what I needed.

One. The things that comes up a lot in this phase that I see with clients is the memory of the pull. That, that, that obsessive consuming can't think about anything else feeling. And often there's some ambivalence about it because as awful as it was, it felt like something, felt like intensity. Sometimes healthy, available, consistent feels like nothing.

It feel boring. I remember not wanting that anymore. I remember specifically not wanting the feeling of canceling my own plans to chase somebody else's availability. I wanted to be able to wait. I wanted to trust that I would be okay to wait. I wanted to build something where I wasn't constantly bracing for that rug to be pulled out from underneath me.

But I also had to be honest with myself and my nervous system had been trained to equate that kind of chaos with love or affection. So the calm didn't just feel different. It was actually feeling like it was very suspicious. That's the part of the detox too, learning to tolerate and eventually to prefer a relationship that doesn't require you to abandon yourself, to stay in it.

It doesn't happen immediately, ever. It happens in pieces. It happens over awkward dates and uncomfortable moments and nights when you're not sure if you're reading a situation clearly. Through the lens of everything you've been through. It happens when you catch yourself mid panic and think, wait, this person hasn't actually done anything wrong.

That thought or that distinction is beginning of something at beginning of your brain starting to equate another kind of relationship as safe. And if you feel like you need to rush the healing, you don't, the fact that you're still carrying the weight of what you survived is not a character flaw. It's not evidence that you're damaged.

Will never be loved or can't be loved. It's actually proof that you have been healing and it's not proof that you should have healed faster or moved on sooner. It's evidence that what you went through is real and it was hard into your body doing this low, painful, necessary work on unwinding something that was built over time.

I often think about it like this and says, what I thought about it when I was in it is like if your arm was broken, you wouldn't jam it back into the socket and expect it just to work. You'd find a way to help it heal. Perfectly slowly, one painful degree of movement at a time. And that is honestly what's true here.

And so if you feel like you are really fucked up, you're not fucked up, you're in the detox, and the detox is working. I really hope that this was helpful. If this resonated with you, you might want to look at my work at emotional abuse coach com, including my course, specifically unhooked, which is designed specifically for people navigating.

Aftermath of these relationships, and as always, all of my resources will be shared in my outro, but you always can reach out to me if this episode resonated and you're realizing that what you're dealing with isn't just stress or miscommunication, there are ways to get support that don't minimize what you're experiencing.

I'm gonna spend the next couple of minutes telling you about my offerings. Because at the core of my business is one-on-one coaching. The podcast is something that I do because I do like being able to help a broader audience, but the truth is that the core of my work is really coaching and providing other offerings so that people can begin to heal.

At the center of everything I do is one-on-one coaching. That's where I slow things down, listen closely, and help you make sense of what's happening in your specific situation. It's not a template. It's not just based on theories, but it's really focused on your real life. Some people start with a one-time validation call That is a single focus session where we look at one specific situation or pattern.

You're struggl and the goal isn't to fix your life or push you into decisions. It's to help you name what's happening, put it into context of reality, help you notice where you are in it, and offer some feedback and tools to how to navigate it. I also offer an intro call. The intro call used to be called the Clarity Call, and it's a short call where you can share what's going on for you.

And I can explain how I work and whether I'm the right fit for your situation. There's no obligation to continue after that. It's simply a way for us to get on the same page for moving forward. For people who need ongoing support, I offer weekly or biweekly coaching. This is especially helpful if you're navigating emotional abuse, trauma bond, high conflict divorce, or custody and co-parenting with a difficult or controlling person.

Ongoing work allows us to track patterns over time, stay anchored when things escalate, and make decisions in a way that protects your nervous system and your long-term stability. All of my coaching options can be found on my websites, emotional abuse coach.com and high conflict divorce coaching do com.

Both links are available in the show notes of this episode. In addition to one-on-one coaching, I offer several self-paced courses and programs. They're called Divorcing A Narcissist one-on-One, how to Document for Family Court, the Emotional Abuse Breakthrough Course Setting Boundaries With a Narcissist and Unhooked, which is my program and private podcast that walks you through the full cycle of abuse, helps you map it out in your relationship, and shows you how to begin to break free from the trauma bond.

I also write on Substack. I explore topics like trauma bonding, emotional abuse, course of control, high conflict divorce, and the cluster B dynamics. There's a free option and a paid membership that offers deeper dives, q and As and additional resources. Everything that I do and everything that I build is around one core truth and message that you're not crazy, you shouldn't feel crazy, and that even though I can see patterns in what they're experiencing, it doesn't mean that it's normal.

It's not healthy. My work is really about helping you understand what's happening and begin to trust yourself again. All of the links that I shared are in my show notes, and I really appreciate you being here.