The word ‘toxic’ is used a lot in current zeitgeist, but what does it really mean? And what are the greater implications it can have on your relationships, and your sense of self? In today’s episode I discuss all of that with Dr. Heidi Brocke, a Toxic Relationship Awareness & Healing Specialist. After spending 14 years in an extremely emotionally and narcissistically abusive relationship she was able to leave, and turned her past into her passion; she left her 24 year career in healthcare to use her life experience and education to be the person she needed when she herself was trapped in the darkness of an unhealthy relationship.
This topic may be something you personally need, or could shed some light on someone you know. The goal of Dr. Brocke’s message is to provide hope, healing, and freedom to those whose lives have been affected by toxic relationships, emotional abuse, and narcissistic behaviors. She shares her real experience, tips that work, and doable exercises for rebuilding your sense of self after a toxic relationship.
About a few other things…
Do you struggle to create habits that stick? It’s not your fault. The truth is simple: you’ve been trying to form habits using methods designed for perfect robots–not real women living real lives. It’s time to change that. If I could help you gain confidence in creating habits AND guide you to uncover the ONE supportive habit to deeply care for yourself, could you commit 21 days to learning this method? The Sticky Habit Method is a 21-day course that revolutionizes the habit-formation process. It’s real habits for real women.
Sign up for the Go Getter Newsletter to get Progress Pointers in your inbox every Tuesday.
This episode is brought to you in partnership with Redd Remedies. Use code PROGRESS for 20% off Peaceful Mama & Rhythm & Flo, as well as the rest of Redd Remedies products on their website.
You can listen the episode below, or on Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, Youtube, Overcast, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, or search for “About Progress” wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show please share it, subscribe, and leave a review!!
SHOW NOTE
Heidi’s Website, Podcast
Habit Type Quiz
Values Exercise
Finding Me Academy
DSL Guide
Try me FREE Class and check out my NEW Habit Course
Leave a rating and review for the podcast!
Lend your voice and experience + be featured on the show HERE
Join Monica on Facebook and Instagram
Songs Credit: Pleasant Pictures Music Club
TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Dr. Heidi Brocke, welcome to About Progress.
Heidi: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Just trying to get everything set up was kind of about progress.
Monica: You are in the right place for sure. Listen, we have been talking off, off the air about this word toxic. It’s such a phrase that people use a lot, and I think for good reason, we’re getting more educated about what kind of boundaries we need within normal, healthy relationships and what it looks like when those boundaries are crossed and perpetually and chronically.
And there’s almost this feeling in the this zeitgeist that people are beginning to realize, oh, I’m in a toxic relationship, and we’re gonna talk about what that looks like for starters, for women who are curious about that. But, The majority of our discussion today is going to be about what you do after you’ve stepped away from that relationship or it’s been resolved in some way, or the boundaries are in place when you are left with that emptiness of yourself being not there anymore, at least in in the ways that was before that relationship started.
So let’s begin with your definition of toxic. I think it’s really important to start there.
Heidi: Okay. The first thing I wanna make sure that the listeners know, and some people have probably heard me. I, I am not a mental health professional. I always make sure that people know that I’m a chiropractor, acupuncturist by trade, and I had 15 years training on the toxic relationship by living it.
And I did 25 years in healthcare, and now this is actually what I do full-time. And I started at seven years ago. I chose the word toxic because toxic is not a diagnosis. Toxic is a blanket phrase. It is an adjective. It’s, it’s an adjective that’s used to describe any relationship in the status that it’s in, that is unhealthy for you mentally, physically, or emotionally.
And that can be an intimate relationship or a partner. That can be family situations, that can be friendships, that can be coworker situations, it can be social circles, it can be your parents, it can be your kids, it can be your siblings. It’s any type of relationship. What I like to make very clear about toxic is it is not a diagnosis, but the way it’s showing up on social media now. People assume it’s some time of diagnosis that has a, a checklist. And what, what toxic is, is toxic is a relationship that’s unhealthy for you. And the only person that gets to decide if a relationship is healthy for you or not is you.
And so what, what I do, because I’m not a mental health professional, I don’t diagnose, I don’t treat, I do a ton of education on the toxic personality and how the toxic personality’s behavior affects you.
So, you know, think of it from that point of view when you think about the word toxic.
Monica: I’m glad you’re starting there because I think I, I know what you’re getting at, that, that checklist can get in the way of us owning that, oh, I am in one and I don’t want. To be in this relationship anymore. And really it’s a rebuilding of self-trust again, of, of being able to acknowledge, I don’t need a, a giant checklist to tell me that this relationship is not healthy for me.
I’m living it.
Heidi: Yeah. And I think the problem with the checklist is there’s 50 things on the checklist and they, they check 48 and then we go, oh, well they didn’t check the other two boxes. So it’s not that, you know? And validation is good. Definitely Google, but just know that, that you get, you get to decide what’s good for you or not? Now, being in it for a long time, our, our perception of what’s good and what’s not gets worked. You know, being in a toxic relationship or a place that’s not healthy for you is like walking into a room that stinks. If you stay in the room, the smell goes away, okay? It doesn’t mean the room doesn’t stink, it just means your body desensitizes you to that smell so you don’t have to continue to smell it.
And when you’re in a toxic relationship, the toxic behaviors and the hurt feelings and the emotional pain you get used to it. So you don’t, you don’t realize it. And so sometimes you have to come back to you know, well, what is it that I want in my life and what did I expect out of the relationship?
And where do I wanna go from here? And what parts of me are no longer with me because of this relationship? Those are the questions that are gonna help, you know, you decide to get out. Now, once you decide to get out, This was my, this was my perception and I’m open to any questions that, that you have about my past relationship.
But I literally thought, okay, great. I’m out. And that is the only person on the planet that is like this. So who I’m, I’m good. Right? And, and Logic would say that, you know, I thought my upbringing was normal and I was a happy kid, and I was outgoing and extroverted. And then, oh, I got into this relationship and my world turned upside down. So logic would say that, get out of the relationship and your world’s gonna turn right back, right side up. And, and I have spent 15 years discovering that’s, that’s not necessarily how it works. And so I’ve dedicated my life to the people who need to rediscover themselves because when we leave, we don’t even realize how much of ourselves we compromised and how much of ourselves, you know, we lost.
And so it’s, it is really pushing you to see that you’ve, you’ve over the years or your time in this relationship, You’ve learned to put yourself last. And so really what we’ve done is we’ve trained people what we’ll accept, and then when we try to put ourselves first one, we don’t even know how to do it because our attention has not been on us.
And two, we’ve been made to feel selfish if we put energy into ourself. And even though the rediscovery process for me afterwards was fun. It was also, and to this day, is the hardest and, and it is frustrating some days because, you know, depending on the severity of a toxic relationship or the amount of trauma you’re thinking, patterns change.
You see the world differently when you come out of relationships, whether you want to or not. And, and so you dig into this, you know, the whole divorce coach. Okay, what have I always wanted to do? Okay, I wanna hike. And then you hike and then you’re like, ah, I don’t really like that. Now what do I do? And you really are kind of floundering out there in, you know, what you wanna do.
Nobody’s asked you for 10 years what you wanna do. Nobody’s asked you for 10 years. What makes you happy? I had a 53 year old lady when I asked her what, what was her favorite color? She had no idea.
Monica: Hmm.
Heidi: It, it was, I don’t know, you always wanted me to wear red.
Monica: Got
Heidi: So it’s, it’s being, allowing yourself to make those decisions.
But we also have so much self-doubt that we tend to have learned not to make decisions because we feel like if we make the wrong decision, a firing squad is gonna show up. You know, I really like to go hiking, but what if I don’t like it? And you have to, you have to be able to push yourself. Well, yeah, what if you don’t like it?
You don’t go again. But we’d rather just not go in the first place in case we don’t like it. Cuz then what’s gonna happen? And we really believe that the whole, the whole world’s gonna crash down because we have to make the right decision or else,
Monica: Yeah, you’ve been living in that kind of environment for so long. It’s, it’s, it feels like life and death decisions, these, these disc rediscovery decisions. As you’ve been speaking, I’ve been able to kind of identify some things that they can look for when they’re thinking about themselves within the relationship.
So while the Googling the checklist can be helpful with validating to look for signs in the other person, since we’re talking about themselves, what on their side can they look for if they want to be able to pinpoint this as an unhealthy relationship for
Heidi: I spent 15 years in a relationship that I knew I did not wanna go on the first date. There was something that made me feel uncomfortable, but then I’m the emotionally type. Why your personality? I’m the caring, the kind, the supportive.
I don’t want conflict. I want, you know, people to like me. That’s, I wouldn’t have gone into healthcare if that wasn’t me. So after him asking me three or four times, I started feeling guilty and I started feeling like I was a bad person. And you know, 15 years later, a business, two kids and me running away was the result of me saying, yeah, I’ll go on the first date.
So for 15 years I fought with the question, should I stay or should I go? So, And if you have listeners right now that are in a relationship trying to validate the question they’re trying to answer is, should I stay or should I go? Okay. Now the confusing thing about these relationships is they’re not bad 100% of the time, right?
On Tuesday things seem good. On Wednesday they’re horrible. So on Tuesday you’re fine in the relationship. On Wednesday you wanna leave, and Thursday it’s not so bad. So we hang on to the days that aren’t so bad, even though they’re probably not really that good, they’re just that much better than the bad days.
Monica: Mm-hmm.
Heidi: And so when, when we talk about should I stay or should I go, you can’t answer that unless you have all the facts. If, if somebody came to you and said, you have a job promotion and your new office is on the corner and you have to wear blue and your lunch hours at two o’clock, let me know in the morning if you want the promotion.
There’s no, there’s no way you can make the decision on that because you don’t, you don’t have enough information. So if you’re one of the people that is sitting there going, should I stay or should I go and feeling that emotional rollercoaster from Tuesday to Wednesday to Thursday? Put the, should I stay or should I go question in a box and put it on the shelf?
Because the only reason you can’t answer it is you don’t have all the facts. And instead, start asking yourself questions. Like, when I look at this relationship logically, meaning take all the emotion out. Take the fact that you have kids out. Take the fact that there’s been time invested. Take the fact that you have marriage vows.
Take the fact that you know everything is all intertwined. Pretend you’re looking at one of your friend’s relationships. If you look at it logically, is this relationship healthy for you or not? And answer yes or no, you know? Then also look at it and look at what did I used to look like if there was a time in my life that I felt like, oh, my life is going the direction I want it to go.
What did it look like? Your career was just starting. You had a great group of friends. You were going to the gym, you had hobbies of your own. If you had that time in your life. Look at it now, have you given up all those things to accommodate to this relationship? Yes or no? And, and the, my number one thing is we can’t control other people, but for some reason we get in these relationships where the goals of the two parties are different.
And people like me think, well, if I just talk to them and if I just tell them and if I, if I just use the right tone of voice and put the right color shirt on and pick the right time of day. For the 97th time, if I just let them know how they hurt me, that tomorrow morning they’re gonna wake up and they’re gonna act like me and everything’s gonna be fine. And, and in reality, they’re wired completely different than us. So, so when I work with somebody, I teach you how to see the world through their eyes, because you only know how to see it through the emotionally wired eyes, right? So, so ask yourself this, knowing that you can’t control what they say or do.
You can’t control their reactions. You can’t make them do anything. If nothing in the relationship changes, if everything that is happening and the status that it is today stays that way, is this the relationship you wanna be in for the rest of your life? Start asking yourself questions like that rather than the, should I stay or should I go?
Because the toxic relationship is usually got emotional abuse involved. And when, when you look at it with emotion, you can justify why it’s easier for you to stay. Than to go. And it’s always easier to stay in what’s familiar than to step into something you don’t know. So should I stay or should I go? If you can start answering these questions every morning, by the end of the month, it’s gonna make the answer to the other question a lot clearer.
Monica: Especially if you are also shining a light on What about me has been lost in this process? You talked about being in a, in a position of constant accommodation of the other person, losing a sense of your own preferences, your own likes, your own dis dislikes, your own hobbies, your own passions, your own voice.
What else are, what can they look for there? And, and, and maybe you can even share with your own experience what that looked like as well.
Heidi: Well for those who have seen me or can see me on this, I have almost black hair. I am as extroverted as they come. I’m the first one singing on the bar. By the time I left my former relationship, I had blonde hair because three weeks after he married me, he was really disappointed in himself cuz he was always gonna marry a blonde.
I,
Monica: Oh
Heidi: so for 13 years it was highlight, highlight, highlight. I didn’t hardly talk. I was a very good chiropractor. I could, I could function very well because I was confident in that arena, but everywhere else, the minute I stepped outta my office, my confidence went out the window. I didn’t have an opinion.
I took the path of least resistance to avoid conflict, and I never smiled. I never laughed. In fact, by the time I left, I walked with my face down all the time. Now I didn’t realize it at the time. My relationship was, was very, very, extremely emotionally abusive. But my girls and I didn’t know it because we lived in it every day.
Now looking back, I’m, I’m able to see that and I ended up running away and leaving everything and leaving my kids which he kept for five years from me. So, so when I’m talking about going through the recovery, I was a doctor with no patients. I had no money. I was a mom with no kids. I was in a new place with no friends.
So if I can do it,
Monica: Yeah.
Heidi: You can do it. And I have a couple exercises where you can start, because if the people that are listening to this that are really going, oh my gosh, I need, I need to latch onto this. You’re just like me when somebody says, oh, just take better care of yourself. There’s, there’s, there’s nothing that you know of of where you’re supposed to start with that.
Monica: That self was gone, right? Like
Heidi: your yourself is gone. You know, what makes you happy? I don’t know. What, if you had a day off, what would you do? You know what I did? I cleaned my house because it was safe to clean my house. We, we always attract to what’s safe and what’s gonna keep us outta trouble and, and get the conflict down.
So, so in the recovery and the people that are still in it can do this exercise to kind of validate and help answer the question of should I stay or should I go take two pieces of paper and write the alphabet on each piece of paper. And on one piece of paper, write something you want more of in your life that starts with each letter.
And on the other piece of paper, write something that you want less of in your life that starts with each letter. Now, the less of list is gonna be ugly. It’s gonna have stuff like criticism and belittling and fighting on it. So the list of what you want more of in your life is gonna be harder to fill out because your focus hasn’t been there. And then I always tell people, take the list of what you don’t want in your life.
If you’re trying to validate something or you’re trying to answer the, should I stay or should I go question behind each one of the things on the list of what you want less of. Write down the number one thing that’s bringing it into your life. It’s, it’s just like if you walk in the kitchen and the kitchen stinks, what’s the first thing we do?
We smell the garbage can, or we smell the drain, or we smell the refrigerator. Maybe last week’s broccoli in the refrigerator. Right? And then we realize there’s a rotten potato in the bag of potatoes. I mean, have you ever smelled a rotten potato? Okay. We don’t go. We don’t go, oh, it’s a rotten potato. We’ll leave it in our kitchen.
Right. We don’t even dig it outta the bag. We don’t want the good potatoes that have been fraternizing with the rotten potato. We just like, The whole bag out because it’s bringing something into our kitchen that we don’t want. So this, this, these lists really help you validate. One, you probably haven’t been paying attention to yourself because that list is gonna be harder.
Two, you’ve been focusing on all the stuff you don’t want, which is bringing more of the stuff you don’t want. And as soon as you can identify what the number one thing is, that’s bringing it in, then you can start thinking about the steps to lessen or remove it from your life. Because, because all you’ve been doing is thinking, oh, well, I, I overreacted.
I should have kept my mouth shut. Oh, I pushed his buttons. I, you make excuses for the way the relationship is because of how you are or what you did, because that is how they have trained you.
Monica: And that’s where it’s super complicated
Heidi: Very,
Monica: and gonna, it be different and to different degrees. Like you said, yours admittedly was a super, really, super harsh degree of what a toxic relationship looks like.
Heidi: If you would’ve said that to me right after I got out.
Monica: You still wouldn’t have totally
Heidi: I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have, you know, when I finally decided to do this, I had to look back and dig all that crap out from underneath the rug. And I’ve been doing this for seven years and I have one or two people that I worked with that was more extreme, but, but I always make a joke.
The Lord was like, okay, Heidi, you’re gonna be a chiropractor for 25 years. Well, I train you for your real job. You know, and, and so I always just embrace the fact that mine had to be that bad in order for me to, you know, to be able to do what I’m doing. Because my, my biggest struggle in trying to recover and trying to rebuild myself was finding.
People that understood emotional abuse and toxic relationships. So my mission is to be the person I needed when I was going through it because there’s, if, if someone has not been through an emotionally abusive relationship, you can talk, you can explain, you can justify, and they look at you like, oh, why don’t you leave?
And I remember thinking, yes, that is a great idea. I’m glad you brought that up. I haven’t thought about that every day for 15 years.
Monica: Yeah.
Heidi: You know, and so, so being able to relate back and, and you know, when you say what is the first step in rediscovering yourself, I literally take myself back and go, okay, when I was here, what did I feel?
What was I scared of? What was I doing? And I would’ve struggled with the list of what I wanted more of in my life,
Monica: Yeah. I, and I, I see this in, in women in different ways. I, I don’t deal with, typically with women who have had the extent of like toxic relationships or emotional abuse, but the loss of self is really relevant to all those in my community.
Heidi: being able to reclaim yourself is huge. However, I will tell you, it’s, it’s not, it’s not a journey that has a destination. And I had this, I was just telling You this before we got, before we started recording that I kept thinking, oh my gosh, okay, I got out of it.
I can fix this. I spent 15 years thinking, okay, you can fix this, you can fix this. And I fixed a lot. I have overcome a lot of stuff. But I get, I get hung up once in a while and I end up with triggers and it sends me completely down a black hole. And I have had to accept the fact that that relationship changed me and it was a relief.
It was a relief for me to realize you can, you can quit trying to fix it. Just come up with strategies so when it happens, you can deal with it. I gave up my entire life to accommodate someone else.
And I had to learn to make decisions that were best for me. I always made decisions based on what other people would think, how it was gonna affect somebody else. And even if I knew it wasn’t the best decision for me, I’d make it anyway because it caused less conflict. And so I have, I have exercises in place that keep me on track for Heidi, living for Heidi, and making sure that I have a value system that’s distributed.
Monica: Mm-hmm.
Heidi: You know but the A to Z list is an, is an excellent place to start in self-discovery because then after you identify what is bringing into your life, you don’t want, you can scoot over to the what I want more in my life and write down one thing you can start today that’s going to incorporate each one of those.
And all of a sudden you’re gonna start getting excited and you’re gonna start noticing this stuff is gonna show up in your life because your attention is now going into you, you know, the other thing. I go through waves of this too, and I’m just gonna say it’s, it’s because of my past. If you think of a time in your life when you felt really secure, like, oh my gosh, my life is going the direction it I want it to go. When you start feeling insecure, look at what you’ve quit. I quit working out. I quit going out with my friends. I quit eating. Well, I, you know, It’s the things we put into our own life that make us feel secure in ourselves. So if you quit doing that, of course you’re gonna feel insecure.
And then we start looking to other people to make us feel secure. You have to continually invest in your own life for you to feel secure and safe in your own life. And, and I, I have an exercise that I do once a quarter and I evaluate the different areas of my life.
So I make sure that the investment in Heidi that has to go in is going in because it’s very easy to get distracted and fall off. And then pretty soon I’m making decisions based on what’s best for other people and I’m feeling insecure. And then when my husband comes home from work because he had a bad day at work, I’m going, what did I.
Monica: You go back to the, the learned response and behavior and the loss of self too, and blaming of self weirdly, which is all untangled. So, you know, I feel like. Women who are listening are gonna be like, I wanna know so much more about just toxic relationships in general. This is where I’ll refer you to Dr.
Heidi’s podcast. It’s not normal, it’s toxic. There’s so much more there. But as, as we said at the beginning, this is more about what about that loss of self and how do we rebuild it? You’ve given us some great ways to start there with that a, b, c exercise as well as the, what did I quit exercise, which is super valuable.
I, I have two big kind of questions for you. The first is, What else? Like for that woman who is feeling that complete loss of I, of, of self, anything, any other pointers you can give to her about how she can rebuild that sense of self and recover?
Heidi: Yes, ask yourself what your values are. And then now this is kinda like, love yourself. You go, well, what are your values? And people go, I don’t know what that means. And so your value system, every, every individual has a standard by which they live. It’s our morals, it’s our ethical, it’s our compass. Okay?
When you’re in relationships, like my, I changed my values so I would fit better, you know, and, and so when I came outta that, I didn’t have a value system. So think about this. What? What is it that you want your kids to see when they look at you? What? What are the things and the attributes and the character traits that you want your friends to go, oh my gosh, she’s the most honest person.
Monica: Mm-hmm.
Heidi: what do you wanna put out there? What do you want people to say at your funeral? And then you, you list your top five. And if you’re a mom, you can’t put family on your top five because nobody has to remind you that your family is valuable. So you have to think of another one. Okay. And, and then you take those, those five things and look at the different areas of your life and make sure that if this is the person I wanna reflect, each area of my life is projecting those, because it’s really all about getting back to who you are.
And one of the hardest things for me was I was always very concerned, well, what if people don’t like me? What if I’m not good enough? What if, you know that kind of thing. And, and when you, when you. Get to a place where you know what your values are and you’re representing your identity. You know what you want, you know what things you don’t want in your life, then, then you can look at the people around and go, you know what, if you don’t like me?
So what?
Monica: Mm-hmm.
Heidi: And and tho that’s one of the huge things that I’ve overcome. If you don’t like me, I don’t care. Especially when I started this, even my family question, what you’re gonna go on, on, on, like the radio and tell people about this? You know, we don’t talk about things, we don’t talk about abuse, we don’t talk about, and, and I literally, if you don’t like me, so what if you don’t agree with me?
So what, and that was a, that was a lot of reassuring myself. But if you can, if you can get to know who you are in every category, questions like that aren’t gonna be hard to answer.
Monica: And it’s a good way to practice that, that inner like acknowledgement, like, this is what I want and this, and also the, the action that follows that up, that I’m going to live out what I want and that’s okay.
Heidi: And, and you know, when I moved I had to decide what I was doing for money and there was a lot of decisions that had to be made. And I was one that learned, don’t make a decision cuz it’ll be the wrong one. Just wait. And the decision will make itself.
Monica: Yeah.
Heidi: And I couldn’t make big decisions. I couldn’t order off of a menu.
When I left my former, it wasn’t because he was telling me what to order, it was because he would say something like, how come you’re having chicken? Or Don’t you think that’s too expensive? So at 35 years old, I’m waiting to see what he orders, waiting to see the price point, and then I order something I don’t even want.
Hoping it’s gonna be okay with him. So if you’re one that has noticed through relationships or, you know, sometimes parents are like this, parents like to make the decisions for their kids and then make the kids feel like they’re making the wrong one. So if you’re feeling that as an adult, the next time you go to the grocery store, take your list, but by a different brand of every single thing on your list than you normally do because you normally buy gif because who doesn’t buy gif Peanut butter, right?
Make yourself buy Peter Pan and you get it home and it sucks. Okay. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You pitch it in the garbage and you go back to the store and you buy another one. It’s not, you’ll realize that, that the decisions that you think are life or death, you just make another one.
You just change directions. Who cares? I’ve never seen a firing squad show up and I made some bad decisions. You know, so if you’re, if you’re stuck on little decisions, do do stuff like that.
Monica: Yeah. And that experimenting is a great way to earn back that confidence. Also, a great way for you to acknowledge your values, like we discussed, as well as your wants. These are great. It’s starting places for them. And I still feel like we’ve just hit the tip of the iceberg here. There’s so much there.
I wanna direct them again to your podcast. It’s not normal, it’s toxic. I do want to end though, with hearing more about like, where are you now? So, so like, if, if, if we could talk about the sense of self primarily for you and, and anything else you want to add to that. Like what’s different now in your
Heidi: Okay. So I, I have been with the man that I’m married to now for 15 years. We’ve been married for 11 years in September, and I did a lot of the self-discovery in the five years that I didn’t have my kids. I didn’t think that they, I would ever have relationships with them. I left them when they were 11 and 13, so, They came back, they ran away from him also when they were 17 and 19.
They’re 25 and 27 now. And I have a great relationship with both of them. And, and I was feeling really good. They came back. My life seemed to kind of go together. Well, then I, I turned it to mom again.
Because they had just gotten out of it. So I had to really guide them through the beginnings of self-discovery. And I actually had been doing great My hus- I would marry the man that I married to every day of my life. In fact, I’m releasing a four-part series. He finally agreed to be on my podcast. It’s getting released next week on the struggles that he had in being in a relationship with somebody who, you know, has been out.
And so I had a lot of really good years. And I was just telling you before, the last year has been the worst one since I have gotten out. I kind of let some of the things go that I know I needed to do to stay secure in myself. One of the things that devastates me is I had, I had eight or nine really good years and now all of a sudden, 15 years out and I’m fighting episodes where I have to pull off the road and sit for an hour to calm myself down.
And this was where the realization came in that I’m gonna have to accept the fact that some of this isn’t gonna fix. But when I can’t fix it, then I beat myself up and I’m still a failure and nobody understands. So I feel broken. And I, I spiral right back into that old thinking pattern because abusive relationships change the way you see everything. And, and I really thought I was done and, and I really wanted to, to be the, the one that could say, oh, I’m totally over it. And, and I have had to accept in the last six months. This is not something I totally get over. This is now something that I put plans into place. So when it happens I deal with it, but I also always know that as, as bad as I hate what I’m going through now when I have to peel off at another layer, it’s because there’s a client coming in about a year and a half that is gonna need, have needed me to go through this.
I always come out on the other side of one of these challenges. So yes. I would love to be like, yay, I’m done.
And, and I’m, I’m not. But I think it’s also kind of encouraging because I don’t wanna lead other people to believe that there’s a destination in some of this. You’re gonna have good days and you’re gonna have days you wanna crawl under a rock, and that’s okay. Figure out a plan when you’re under the rock and your best while you’re under there.
Monica: Yeah, I, again, I so appreciate the honesty. I’m sorry it’s been so difficult. I know that that coach or that client rather, I know that client is around the corner, who, who needs what you’re going through now? And I have felt that way in recovery from eating disorders and other things too is sometimes it is a spiral.
It’s not just a spiral down, it’s also a spiral up and, and sometimes you have to go back down to go back up. And
Heidi: And the spiral up is good, and then the spiral down. Even though we know on the spiral down, we’re not back to square one, but you can’t tell us during that spiral that we’re not back
Monica: can feel like it. Yeah, but you’re right. It’s having that objective knowledge, like I’m not, I’m never gonna go back to the, the lowest square one and I know how to get back up, man. It stinks where I am right now. And, and that’s just how it is. So Dr. Heidi, this has been so amazing. Thank you for your knowledge and your experience.
Can you share where people should go if they want to, to find more?
Heidi: Yes. if you go to my website, it’s coaching with Dr. Heidi is my website. You can find all, I have a community, I do private coaching, all of that type of stuff is there, but there’s something on the website called the toxicity profile Analysis. And it’s long.
It’s 106 questions and I use it because I get results that help me. If somebody books a consultation with me, I can see a little bit more into the relationship, but you can go on and take that and just sometimes reading and answering the questions will validate that some of the behavior you’re experience experiencing, you’ve now accepted as normal.
So it might, it might give you a little Overview on, oh my gosh. They call me names every day. And in the beginning I was super upset. They were calling me names and now it doesn’t even phase me, which means you have normalized to their behavior, which is gonna make the name calling not seem unhealthy.
So, so the toxicity profile analysis, a lot of times you don’t ever have to book with me, but sometimes it, it just starts you thinking about the things you’ve changed and things you’ve given up. And it helps a lot of people just to have to answer the questions.
Monica: Okay, great. We’ll direct them there as well as to your podcast. Again, it’s not normal, it’s toxic. Thank you very much for your time
Heidi: Yes, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
