The Messy Middle Podcast

If the idea of dating again still makes you feel physically ill, this episode is not for you yet, and that is completely okay. But if you have got to the point where you are dipping a toe back in, or even just thinking about it, this one is for you.

Because something strange happens when you start dating after narcissistic abuse or a high control relationship. You expect to be better at spotting the warning signs. And in some ways, you are. But there is another layer that nobody really prepares you for.

Your body is still wired to respond to what it got used to.

That intense, fast-moving, all-consuming feeling you might get with someone new? A lot of the time that is not chemistry.

That is your nervous system recognising a familiar pattern. And the person who is steady, consistent, and actually shows up? They can feel flat. Boring, even. And that is exactly where things get confusing.

In this episode I get into:

• Why your nervous system can make red flags feel like chemistry and safety feel like a disappointment
• The difference between activation and actual connection, and why it matters so much at this stage
• Why words like "boring" and "something's missing" might actually be really good signs
• How the old conditioning comes back online when something feels slightly off and you start negotiating with yourself instead of trusting your gut
• Why dating after abuse is less about spotting red flags faster and more about slowing everything down
• The specific things worth paying attention to that go way beyond what someone says
• Why you are allowed to take your time, change your mind, and not get it perfect

You do not have to go into this with perfect discernment. You are allowed to learn as you go. And if dating feels confusing right now, that does not mean you have gone backwards. It means your system is recalibrating.

And instead of asking yourself why you are not feeling it, try asking this instead: what is this reminding me of?

That question will tell you everything.

📩 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.

Financial Fear After Narcissistic Abuse: What Nobody Talks About

There is a moment that hits almost every woman after she leaves. Sometimes it is not right away. Sometimes it is weeks later, late at night, looking at her phone or her bank account, and it lands like a quiet, heavy dread.

I am on my own. And I am going to have to fight for everything.

This week I am talking about financial fear after narcissistic abuse, and I want to be honest about how much bigger this is than most people give it credit for. I have lived it. I see it every single week with the women I work with. And I think it is one of the most isolating parts of leaving, partly because so many women feel embarrassed to say it out loud.

In this episode I get into:

• How financial control creeps in slowly and why it is so easy to miss while you are in it
• Why the aftermath is not just emotional, it is practical, and often deliberately designed to keep you in survival mode
• The two ways most women respond to financial fear after leaving, and why both make complete sense
• Why money after abuse is really about safety, self-trust, and whether you believe you can take care of yourself
• Why so many women come out the other side with a clearer, more conscious relationship with money than they ever had before

This is not about being good with money. It is about not being in the dark anymore. Because being in the dark is where your power got taken in the first place.

If money feels heavy or looming right now, you are not behind. You are not incapable. You are in the middle of learning something you were probably never properly taught. And you will absolutely smash it.

I promise.

📩 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.

In this episode, I’m talking about something that almost every woman I’ve ever worked with eventually hits: the quiet grief of “wasted years.”

It’s that heavy moment of looking back at a relationship and thinking, I lost myself in that. Sometimes it’s years, sometimes decades. And it often comes with shame, confusion, and a harsh inner narrative that says you should have known better.

But what if that whole story is built on hindsight that your past self simply didn’t have access to yet?

Let’s get into it.

In this episode, I cover:

•  The quiet, often unspoken grief that shows up after narcissistic abuse and emotional control 
• Why “I should have left sooner” is usually hindsight talking, not truth 
•  How abuse dynamics, coercive control, and gaslighting distort your perception while you’re inside them Why your brain rewrites the past once you finally learn the language for what happened 
• How survival, timing, and nervous system capacity all shape when you were able to see and act 
•  Why those “wasted years” are often years of adaptation, not failure 
• The shift that happens when grief turns into clarity, discernment, and self-trust 
•  How survivors often emerge from this stage with a strong refusal to lose themselves again 

This episode is not about reframing pain into positivity or skipping over grief. It’s about giving it space, naming it properly, and removing the self-blame that so often gets attached to it.

Because once you understand what you were actually navigating, the question stops being “Why did I stay?” and starts becoming “How did I survive that?”

And that shift changes everything about how you move forward.

📩 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.

If you've ever walked away from a controlling or abusive relationship and found yourself completely frozen over the smallest decisions — what to wear, whether to text someone back, what to order for lunch — this episode is for you.

It's not just that you stop trusting them after manipulation, control, or abuse. You stop trusting yourself.

And that's the part nobody really talks about. Your internal compass gets scrambled. Not because you're broken, but because you were trained to override it. Over time, the loudest voice in your head stops being yours. It becomes theirs. And once you understand that, everything starts to make a little more sense.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why making even basic decisions can feel debilitating after leaving a controlling relationship
• How self-trust gets eroded slowly and quietly, not all at once
• Why that harsh inner critic voice is often not yours, and whose it actually is
• Why big, dramatic reinventions won't rebuild self-trust, and what actually will
• How to use micro-decisions as daily medicine for your nervous system
• What the freeze response really looks like, and how to gently bring choice back online
• The guilt wave that shows up when you start putting yourself first 
• A simple end-of-day journaling practice to start reconnecting with your own signals

You don't rebuild self-trust with grand gestures or sweeping life overhauls.

You rebuild it by choosing your lunch for the right reasons, leaving when you said you would, or following a tiny impulse and noticing how your body responds.

It's unsexy. It's repetitive. And it is some of the most radical work you will ever do.

You didn't lose your intuition. It just hasn't been listened to in a very long time. Let's change that.

📩 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.

No one prepares you for this part. You think leaving the relationship will be the hardest thing… until your world starts getting smaller in ways you didn’t expect.

In this raw and honest episode, I dive into the social fallout that often follows leaving a narcissistic or high-control relationship. 

The friendships that fade. The family members who stay neutral. The quiet distance. The subtle disbelief. The gut-punch comments like “it takes two.”

And the part that hurts the most? Wondering if it’s somehow your fault.

I break down why this happens, not to scare you, but to free you from the shame spiral that so many women fall into when their support system shifts or disappears.

Inside this episode, wcovers:

• Why you may lose up to 80% of your social circle after leaving
• How “neutrality” often protects the person who caused harm
• The role of bystander inaction and why people don’t step up
• Secondary isolation and why leaving can feel just as lonely as staying
• The subtle ways people question your reality and how that impacts your healing
• Why some friendships were built on proximity, not depth
• The unexpected clarity and empowerment that can come from this loss

This isn’t just about grief. It’s about rebuilding.

Because while this phase can feel deeply lonely, it’s also where you start choosing differently. Where you stop performing, stop appeasing, and start aligning with what actually feels safe, real, and true.

If your world got smaller after you left, this episode will help you understand why… and remind you that you didn’t make the wrong choice.

You didn’t lose everything.

You’re making space for something better.

📩 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’ll never need anyone again.” If you’ve said this (out loud or quietly to yourself) after coercive control, betrayal, divorce, or going no contact… this episode is for you.

In this conversation, I’m unpacking the very real phase so many women enter after high-control or narcissistic relationships: the swing from “I can’t survive without them” to “I will never depend on anyone ever again.”

And I want to normalize this immediately: That response makes sense.

If trusting someone meant humiliation…
If vulnerability meant punishment…
If needing support gave someone leverage over you…

Of course your nervous system would decide: I’ll handle everything myself.

But there’s nuance here.

In this episode, I break down:

• The difference between hyper-independence and the sacred cocoon phase
• Why becoming “the strong one” can turn into an identity (and quiet isolation)
• How armor protects you… and how it can also exhaust you
• The hidden cost of always being capable
• The difference between fear-based independence and healthy autonomy
• Why “I don’t need you” and “I don’t trust you won’t hurt me” are not the same sentence

But there is a difference between healing solitude and fear-based exile - and learning to feel that distinction in your body is part of the work.

This episode is not about rushing back into relationships. It’s not about convincing you to “open your heart” before you’re ready.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming dependent again.

It means expanding your capacity - inch by inch - so that connection no longer equals control, and support no longer equals weakness.

You don’t need to be rescued. And you don’t need to be hardened forever either.

You get to be sovereign.

📩 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.

You finally got out. The chaos has stopped. So why does peace feel flat? Restless? Almost… boring?

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I’m talking about something that so many women experience after leaving a narcissistic or high-control relationship but rarely admit out loud:

Calm can feel uncomfortable.

Instead of relief, you might feel numb. Irritated. Agitated. Like something is missing. You might even catch yourself missing parts of the relationship and immediately spiral into, “What is wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with you.

If you lived in volatility for years, your nervous system calibrated to volatility. The adrenaline spikes, the emotional highs and lows, the intermittent reinforcement, the push-pull dynamic, that chaos had a rhythm. And your body learned how to survive inside that rhythm.

When it disappears, your system doesn’t instantly relax. It scans. It waits. It braces.

In this episode, I break down:

• Why your nervous system confuses familiarity with safety
• The “intensity illusion” and how intermittent reinforcement wires your brain
• Why steady can feel suspicious after fireworks
• The urge to self-sabotage, text them, pick a fight, or create drama
• Why calm can feel like emptiness instead of freedom
• The difference between feeling unsafe and feeling unfamiliar

I also share a simple micro-practice to help you gently expand your capacity for peace without overwhelming your system.

There is a gap between chaos and comfort. That gap is the messy middle.

And if peace feels weird right now, that doesn’t mean you made a mistake. It means your nervous system is recalibrating.

Eventually, calm stops feeling boring. It starts feeling safe. Then powerful. Then luxurious.

And one day you will realize the fireworks were not chemistry. They were conditioning.

If your peace feels strange right now, you are not broken. You are learning a new rhythm.

And that rhythm? It’s called freedom.

📩 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.

Who am I when I’m not managing someone else’s moods?

Who am I when I’m not bracing for the explosion, calculating the cost of my resistance, or shrinking myself to keep the peace?

In this raw and deeply honest episode of The Messy Middle, I’m diving into one of the most disorienting questions we face after narcissistic abuse and coercive control:

Who am I without him?

This isn’t just about being single. It’s about identity loss after emotional abuse. It’s about what happens to your nervous system when you’ve spent years adapting to volatility, managing someone else’s emotional temperature, and surviving through hypervigilance.

In this episode, I talk about:

• How coercive control slowly rewires my nervous system
• Why I felt lost, untethered, and confused after leaving
• The grief no one warned me about: mourning the version of me who survived
• Why “missing him” was often my body missing predictability, not the abuse
• How his voice tried to live on inside my inner critic
• The subtle, powerful steps I took to rebuild my identity safely

If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “I don’t even know what I like anymore,” I’ve been there too.

What I’ve learned is this: that identity fracture isn’t weakness. It’s conditioning. And rebuilding doesn’t happen through pressure or performance. It happens through small, nervous-system-safe choices that help me trust myself again.

I also share a simple, practical exercise I use to reconnect with my body’s preferences and rebuild self-trust, one tiny decision at a time.

If you feel like you’re between versions of yourself, not who you were but not yet who you’re becoming, you’re not broken.

You’re in the messy middle.

And that space? It’s where autonomy, selfhood, and real freedom begin.

📩 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 happens when you’ve been gaslit in your relationship… and then gaslit again by the medical system?

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I respond to a listener question that so many women quietly carry:

What do you do when you’ve been dismissed, minimized, and made to doubt yourself - not just by a partner, but by doctors?

This isn’t about “bad bedside manner.” This is about institutional gaslighting. And for survivors of emotional abuse, it can feel like retraumatization all over again.

In this episode, we unpack:

• Why the modern medical system was never designed around women’s bodies
• How trauma shows up as chronic illness, autoimmune issues, hormonal chaos, and nervous system dysregulation
• Why “everything looks normal” can be a form of erasure
• How medical dismissal mirrors coercive control dynamics
• The link between long-term emotional abuse and physical symptoms
• Reclaiming yourself as your own authority

This episode is both validating and activating. It’s about understanding that your body is not betraying you - it’s communicating. And you are allowed to believe it.

You are allowed to:

• Fire doctors who dismiss you
• Walk out of unsafe appointments
• Stop over-explaining yourself
• Trust your lived experience over someone else’s credentials

Becoming unfuckwithable sometimes starts with one quiet, radical decision:

I believe myself. Even when the system doesn’t.

If you’ve ever left an appointment feeling small, foggy, shaky, or wondering if you imagined your own symptoms - this episode is for 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 happens when your body knows the truth before your mind is ready to admit it? 

In this deeply personal episode of The Messy Middle, I reflect on a powerful message from a listener who paused the podcast to do inner child work in real time: hugging a childhood toy, asking what she needed to hear, and speaking words of truth her body had been waiting for. 

That moment wasn’t random. It wasn’t “woo.” It was healing. 

This episode is about learning to trust the moments your body speaks before your brain catches up - especially after narcissistic or emotional abuse, where self-trust has been systematically dismantled. 

In this episode, we unpack: 

• Why intuition gets overridden in abusive dynamics
• How gaslighting trains you to doubt your own knowing
• What somatic healing actually looks like in real life
• Why you don’t need full memories or flashbacks to heal
• How to gently rebuild trust with your intuition without forcing it

Through lived experience, client stories, and practical examples, this episode reminds you of something essential:

You are not broken. You are remembering.
 
If you’ve ever had a gut feeling you ignored, whispered truth to a younger version of yourself, or felt something shift in your body before you could explain it - this episode is for 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.