The Messy Middle Podcast

“Be the bigger person.”

“Take the high road.”

“Don’t be bitter.”

“Think of the children.”

Sometimes these phrases are genuinely useful. Sometimes they’re another way of telling the person who was harmed to absorb more of someone else’s behavior without becoming inconvenient.

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I’m unpacking the hidden cost of always being told to take the high road, especially when you’re recovering from abuse, navigating post-separation abuse, or trying to rebuild your sense of agency after years of having your reactions monitored and controlled.

I’m talking about:

• Why we can become more focused on how the person who was harmed is responding than on the behavior that caused the harm
• The “Hydra” of messages that can all lead back to the same idea: contain yourself, don’t make waves, and don’t make other people uncomfortable
• The difference between self-command and imposed restraint
• Why anger isn't automatically a sign that you're bitter, unhealed, or becoming like the person who hurt you
• How women can end up trying to “win the breakup” morally by proving how calm, reasonable, and emotionally regulated they are
• The difference between feeling something and acting on it
• Why strategic restraint can be incredibly powerful when you’re dealing with courts, custody, lawyers, or someone who is actively trying to provoke you
• How to create a private channel where your feelings get to be completely honest and a public channel where you choose your actions strategically
• How to tell the difference between a restraint that is protecting you now and an old rule you’re still obeying because resistance used to feel dangerous
• And why I don't actually want you to be the bigger person. I want you to be your own person.

Because sometimes silence is power.

Sometimes silence is fear.

Sometimes walking away is freedom.

And sometimes you're simply choosing not to give someone access to your nervous system.

The important question isn't whether your response looks mature enough from the outside. It's whether you chose it.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Sometimes the people who help us through our hardest seasons become incredibly important to us. They show up when we're falling apart, listen to the same story for the hundredth time, help us make decisions, and remind us that we're not crazy.

But what happens when we start getting better?

In this episode, I’m talking about the invisible contracts that can form in relationships during a crisis. Nobody consciously creates them, but sometimes a relationship becomes organized around one person needing help and the other person being the helper. And when that dynamic starts to change, things can feel surprisingly complicated.

I’m exploring:

• What happens when someone who supported you through your worst period struggles with the stronger, more independent version of you
• Why being needed can become part of someone’s identity, purpose, or sense of connection
• How another person’s crisis can sometimes give us distraction, emotional intensity, or a place to direct energy we aren't using elsewhere
• Why this doesn't automatically mean the person was secretly hoping you would stay broken
• How you can start noticing when you're performing “need” to recreate an old sense of closeness
• Why some of the hardest boundaries are with people we genuinely love and feel grateful toward
• The difference between gratitude and feeling like you owe someone permanent access to your life
• What it means to let someone have feelings about the person you're becoming without shrinking yourself to make them more comfortable
• And why good help should ultimately be able to tolerate becoming less necessary

Most importantly, I’m turning the question back toward you. Rather than trying to diagnose what might be happening inside someone else, I want you to notice who you become around them when you sense they're uncomfortable with the newer version of you.

Because someone can have been incredibly important to your survival and still struggle with your freedom. Both things can be true.

You can remember who carried you. You can be grateful. And you can still fucking fly.

If this episode brings up something you recognize in one of your relationships, I hope you'll listen with curiosity rather than judgment. Sometimes the first step isn't confronting anyone or deciding what the relationship means. It's simply noticing that you're no longer willing to keep signing the old contract.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Have you ever finally gotten some peace and somehow felt... weird about it?

After living through criticism, control, emotional volatility, or constantly having to monitor someone else's mood, the absence of all that chaos can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. You might expect to feel instantly relieved, but instead you find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering what you've forgotten, or even unconsciously looking for the next problem to solve.

In this episode, I'm talking about something I think we don't spend nearly enough time noticing: the things that are no longer happening.

Because when you've spent years learning to recognize danger, you also need to learn how to recognize its absence.

In this episode, I explore:

• Why peace can initially feel uncomfortable after chaos and emotional control
• Why the absence of something unhealthy doesn't always immediately feel like the presence of something healthy
• How your nervous system learns to expect criticism, monitoring, conflict, and emotional punishment
• Why we tend to notice moments of activation but overlook the moments when the knot never arrives
• What I mean by "recoding the absence" and how you can start doing it in everyday life
• How to notice what you actually gain when criticism, monitoring, or emotional punishment is no longer there
• Why safety isn't just about avoiding danger, but also about experiencing pleasure, ease, autonomy, and choice
• Why you don't need to immediately fill your newfound space with another project, relationship, routine, or thing to fix
• How urgency can become a substitute for purpose, and what happens when you begin letting desire pull you instead
• How to start recognizing the quiet, ordinary moments of freedom that your nervous system may not yet know how to appreciate

And there's a little practice for you at the end, because I don't want this to be another episode where you understand something intellectually and then carry on with your day without actually experiencing it.

If you've spent a long time surviving someone else's reactions, I want you to start noticing what happens when those reactions simply... don't happen.

And maybe, before you immediately ask yourself, "What's next?", you can just have the space for a while.

You can find all the details and resources I mentioned in the show notes. And as always, if there's something you'd like me to answer in a future episode, send it my way.

I'm so glad you're here. Take care of yourselves, and I'll see you next time.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

There’s a stage of recovery I don’t think we talk about enough.

It’s not the leaving. It’s not the boundaries. It’s not understanding what happened or learning to trust yourself again.

It’s the moment when you suddenly realize you’re not waiting anymore.

You’re not waiting for him to understand what he did. You’re not waiting for his family to finally see it. You’re not waiting for your children to understand. You’re not waiting for an apology, for karma, or for some future moment when everyone finally agrees that you were telling the truth.

You’re just living your life.

And sometimes you don’t even notice it happening.

In this episode, I explore:

• Why you can be completely finished with someone and still find yourself waiting for their acknowledgement
• The deep need to have your reality validated after years of gaslighting, blame-shifting and having your experience rewritten
• Why closure can’t depend on another person finally admitting what they did
• How freedom gradually shifts from being defined by what you escaped to simply becoming your ordinary life
• What happens when your attention finally starts coming back to your own work, children, friendships, interests, plans and future
• How the work changes when you move from surviving to creating
• Why you don’t have to be completely “healed” before you start participating in your own life
• And what it can look like when the life you thought was waiting for you on the other side of all this turns out to be the life you’re already standing in

I think one of the biggest signs that you’re getting your life back is that eventually it stops feeling like a life you got back.

It just feels like yours.

You may never get the apology.

They may never understand.

His family may never see what you saw. Your children may take years to understand their own experiences. And yes, sometimes injustice is simply fucking unfair.

But at some point, their understanding can become less interesting than what you’re doing next.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

It’s something I hear from women all the time after leaving a relationship - especially after years of narcissistic abuse, emotional control, or simply living in a relationship where they became very good at adapting themselves around someone else.

And while I understand why we want to say, “You’ll find yourself again,” I’m not actually sure the goal is to get the old you back.

Because which version of you are we talking about?

The woman you were before him? Before marriage? Before children? Before everything you’ve lived through?

Maybe you’re not supposed to go backwards.

Maybe you’re meeting a woman you’ve never had the opportunity to become before.

In this episode, I explore:

• Why the end of the immediate crisis can sometimes leave you feeling more lost, exhausted and flat rather than wonderfully free
• What happens when your nervous system has spent years monitoring someone else’s moods, needs and reactions - and suddenly there’s nobody to monitor
• The temptation to fill that space quickly through dating, reinvention, work or becoming a completely “new” woman
• Why grieving the family, marriage or future you wanted does not mean you want your ex back
• The particular identity shifts that can happen for women who have spent years as wives, mothers or full-time caregivers
• The difference between discovering who you really are and trying to reconstruct some supposedly “authentic” version of your old self
• Why “you’ve changed” isn't automatically an accusation or evidence that something has gone wrong
• How identity is discovered through experience, not just through sitting at home thinking about yourself
• Why “I don’t know” can actually be a really important stage of rebuilding your life
• And how to start collecting new data about yourself without turning the whole process into another fucking self-improvement project

So if you’re sitting there thinking, “Who the fuck am I now?”, I don't want you to automatically interpret that as something being wrong.

You’ve lived. You’ve changed. You’ve survived things you once thought might destroy you.

And now you get to find out who you are when survival isn't writing your entire job description.

And honestly?

I think she's going to surprise the fuck out of you.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

What if your self-improvement journey has quietly become another way of telling yourself you’re not enough?

I’ve noticed how easy it is to turn healing and personal growth into another fucking project. I’ll date when I’m more confident. I’ll apply for the job when I’ve dealt with my imposter syndrome. I’ll set the boundary when I’m more healed. I’ll wear the bikini when I finally make peace with my body.

There’s always another version of me waiting in the future - the one who is supposedly more regulated, more confident, more healed, more worthy of finally getting to live.

In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between growing because I’m curious about myself and growing because I believe I need to fix myself.

In this episode, I explore:

• How self-improvement can become another way of measuring whether I’m “doing healing right”
• The difference between genuine self-awareness and constantly monitoring myself for what needs fixing
• How learning about trauma, attachment, boundaries and nervous system regulation can sometimes become another fucking report card
• Why being “healed” doesn’t mean I’ll never get triggered, people-please, make mistakes or have a really shit day
• How the constant search for the next thing to work on can keep me believing there’s something fundamentally wrong with me
• Why understanding my patterns doesn’t mean I’ll never repeat them
• The difference between asking “What do I need to fix next?” and “What am I curious about now?”
• Why I can know I’m enough and still want to grow, change and learn
• What it looks like to approach personal growth from fascination rather than self-rejection

And this is the bit I really want you to take away from this episode.

You don’t need to stop learning. You don’t need to stop changing. You don’t need to declare yourself officially healed and never have another messy fucking Tuesday.

I just want us to stop treating our growth as the admission fee to our own lives.

Because maybe you’re not a problem to solve.

Maybe you’re a woman who is allowed to be curious about herself simply because she’s alive.

You can know you’re enough and still be unfinished.

You can be proud of who you are and still become someone new.

And you don’t have to reject yourself in order to change.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

What if you've spent years trying to become the version of yourself you think is easiest to love?

I think a lot of women would say they don't believe love has to be earned.

But then we look at what it actually looks like in their relationships, and sometimes there's a very different story underneath.

In this episode, I’m digging into what happens when you stop auditioning for love and start asking a much more interesting question: What am I choosing?

We talk about:

• How “earning love” can hide inside being endlessly helpful, understanding, loyal and forgiving
• Why understanding someone's trauma doesn't mean you have to tolerate their behavior
• The difference between unconditional love and relationships that absolutely need conditions
• Why you don't have to stop loving someone before deciding they're unsafe or no longer right for you
• How women can end up with a dangerously low bar for what they're entitled to expect from a partner
• Why potential is not evidence of who someone actually is
• What changes when being single becomes a genuinely acceptable outcome rather than something you need to escape
• How building a life you love changes the way you evaluate romantic relationships
• Why partnership should add to your life, not require the erosion of you
• The shift from asking “How do I become someone worth choosing?” to “What am I choosing?”

You don't have to prove how deeply you love somebody by demonstrating how much you're willing to tolerate.

And you absolutely don't need a romantic partner to validate the life you've built.

Love can be wonderful. Partnership can be wonderful.

But neither should require your disappearance.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Have you ever finally sat down… only to get back up again 30 seconds later? Why does rest feel wrong when you're completely fucking exhausted?

And even when you do sit down, your body might be on the sofa while your nervous system is still clocked in.

I see this all the time with the women I work with - and I've experienced it myself.

We often think we're bad at resting. That we need to learn better self-care. That we just need to manage our time better or become better at switching off.

But I think there's something much deeper going on.

What if you were never actually taught that rest was something you were allowed to have?

What if you learned that you had to earn it?

And when your worth has become tangled up with being useful, responsible, available, needed or endlessly capable, stopping can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why so many women feel guilty when they sit down
• The difference between being physically still and actually being at rest
• How invisible labour and cognitive load keep your nervous system permanently “on”
• Why “just practice better self-care” completely misses the bigger picture
• How women are taught to earn their worth through usefulness, performance and caretaking
• Why stopping can feel unsafe when your nervous system has learned that usefulness keeps you safe
• Why you don't need to become more productive, disciplined or efficient
• How learning to rest can actually be an act of self-trust
• A simple 10-minute experiment to notice what your mind says the moment you stop

Because I don't think the goal is to become a woman who never does anything for anyone else.

I think it's being able to love deeply without disappearing. To give generously without becoming completely empty.

And to rest without putting yourself on trial.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Why do you replay conversations in your head long after they’re over?

You know the drill.

Three days later, you’re in the shower, driving, folding laundry or making dinner - and suddenly you’re replaying that conversation again.

What they said.
What you said.
What you should have said.
What you’ll say if it ever happens again.

And somehow, your brain has turned one awkward conversation into a full Netflix series.

But what if this isn’t simply “overthinking”?

In this episode of The Messy Middle, we explore the fascinating connection between replaying conversations, self-policing, emotional abuse and the inner critic that can quietly take over your life.

Because after years of criticism, shame, emotional unpredictability or abuse, you may have learned to criticize yourself before someone else can. Your nervous system may have decided that if you can catch your mistakes first, anticipate every possible reaction and constantly monitor yourself, you’ll stay safe.

The problem?

Eventually, you may stop realizing that the voice doing all that criticizing isn't actually you.

We talk about:

• Why your brain may be replaying the feeling of a conversation rather than the conversation itself
• How emotional abuse can leave you policing yourself long after the abuser is gone
• Why the inner critic may be made up of voices you've collected throughout your life
• How perfectionism can turn every interaction into an internal performance review
• The connection between your inner dialogue, your nervous system and your physical state
• Why you don't need to argue with your inner critic - you just need to stop giving it voting rights
• And the simple exercise Erica uses to help women identify whose voice they're actually hearing

You'll also get a practical exercise to try the next time you catch yourself replaying a conversation:

Don't try to stop the thought. Catch it. Write down the first sentence exactly as it appears - and ask yourself: “Who does that sound like?”

Because awareness is where the shift begins.

You are not crazy. You are not broken. And that relentless voice in your head may not be your wisdom at all.

It might just be an old survival strategy that forgot to retire.

The question isn't always “Is this thought true?”

Sometimes, the better question is:

“Is this thought useful?”

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Have you ever spent more time choosing a coffee, a shampoo, or a paint color than you did making one of the biggest decisions of your life?

If you've left a controlling, manipulative, or narcissistic relationship, you're not imagining it. Those tiny everyday decisions can feel surprisingly overwhelming - and it isn't because you're bad at making choices.

In this episode, we explore why survivors often lose trust in their own judgment, how years of criticism and gaslighting condition your nervous system to see even small decisions as dangerous, and why the hardest part of recovery isn't always leaving - it's learning to choose for yourself again.

You'll discover why self-trust isn't about always making the "right" decision. It's about believing you'll be okay, even if you don't.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why everyday decisions can feel harder than life-changing ones.
• How narcissistic abuse disconnects you from your own preferences and intuition.
• The difference between surviving and truly choosing.
• Why gathering more information rarely creates more confidence.
• A simple exercise to begin rebuilding self-trust one small decision at a time.

If you've ever caught yourself asking, "Can I run something by you?" or "What would you do?" before making even the smallest choice, this conversation will help you understand why - and show you the first steps toward trusting yourself again.

Because healing isn't about becoming someone who never gets it wrong.

It's about becoming someone who knows she'll never abandon herself again.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.