i am Ekho Podcast: 006
The Complexity of Forgiveness with Ada Lloyd
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Transcript:
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If you hadn't done this, I wouldn't have had to do that. You were never, ever, ever responsible for somebody else's choices. As much as I do have empathy, that's not a pass for your bad behavior, and it certainly doesn't give other people the right to revictimize me and harm me.
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When I was growing up, I was being sexually abused by my father. It was long before it was on the public radar. And so when a child is experiencing something they don't know that anybody else is experiencing, the natural reaction is to feel that there's something wrong with you. And that creates a whole lot of struggles in childhood. At one point I finally got
up the courage to tell my mother what was going on. And I wanted her to put her arms around me and tell me she was sorry and that she was going to kick him out. And instead what I heard was, your father didn't really do anything. He just wanted to be close to you. Now, that was the day that I emotionally buried my mother. I had already emotionally buried my father.
That was also when I started figuring out, okay, I need to find a way to get out of here. So I found a socially acceptable way to run away. And that was, I got myself on a college campus, 2,500 miles from home, one month after my 16th birthday. And so that gave me a sense of physical safety, but I took all the emotional crap with me.
And fast forward over the years, there's still no programs, nothing going on out there to address these issues. And I was really fortunate in that along the way I received a life altering epiphany. You are not responsible for your father's choices, but you are responsible for how you allow them to impact your life. And so that got me going on a journey of self discovery.
And the only thing out there at that point was the self-help personal development industry that was already alive and well. So I jumped into that and I would find a principal and say, this might work, let me try it. And if it helped, I'd put it in my basket and keep it. And if it didn't, I'd toss it and I would look for another principal. Over time, I had a basket full of principals that weren't connected.
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And about this time, and I'm thinking, you you need to figure out how these go together and what works. I got a phone call on a Monday night from the leader of my local church congregation. And Frank said, will you speak in church on Sunday? And I said, sure. I'm thinking faith, hope, charity, no big deal. And I'm divorced with three kids at the time. And my oldest one was making really stupid life choices. And he said,
You have more stress in your life than most people do, and you seem to deal with it better than most people do. I want you to speak about how you deal with stress from a gospel perspective. At that point, my heart went, because I knew what I was going to need to say. Now, remember, it's still not on the public radar. Yes. And so at that point, I went and found my two younger daughters who were still at home.
And I said, Frank just called and asked me to speak in church on Sunday. And as teenagers do, they rolled their eyes at me and said, so what else is new? And I said, I feel like I'm going to need to make a reference to the abuse I experienced growing up. And they were aware of it, no details, obviously, but they knew about it. And so I'm going to announce something that nobody talks about in front of 200 people they've known their entire lives in a church setting.
And to their credit, they said, we're good with that, mom. my goodness. And so on Sunday, I started by saying, you know, we all experience normal everyday stress. The guy that flips us off on the freeway, the boss that's nagging us about who knows what, the teenager that rolls her eyes at us. But we all have uncommon stresses. Things like divorce, delinquent kids.
having been sexually abused as a child, financial issues, health issues. I named a half a dozen. That was my only reference to the abuse. And then I went on to say, these are the strategies I've used to deal with those things. Afterwards, I had three women come up to me and two of them independently laid their head on my shoulder and whispered amidst their tears, I thought I was the only one.
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The third one laid her head on my shoulders and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. She couldn't say anything, but I knew and she knew that I knew. And that was the day I understood that even though my healing was not yet complete, I had an obligation to light a path forward for those who did not yet know it was possible. And so over the next several years, as I ran my business and raised my kids and lived life and
I would do what I could to help people as I encountered them along the way or as somebody else referred them to me or whatever. And in 2009, it was time for me to shut down my business and to do what I'd always wanted to do, which was work with people and help them find ways to make life better for themselves and for their kids. But before I could do that,
I knew that I had to finish doing some work on me. And that's when I created the seven pillars of a happy and successful life. And those are personal, which is your relationship with yourself, physical, everything about your health, your body, your appearance, whatever your priorities in those areas are, emotional, which is largely about resiliency, spiritual, however you define spiritual,
professional, whatever brings money into the household. Financial is largely about stability and long-term plans and all of that. And then relationships of all kinds. And once you know what success looks like to you in each of those areas, not society, not mom and dad, but to you, you can then create your unique definition of success.
And you can use that as a mindful filter to know when to say yes and when to say no. Because most of us say yes when we know we should have said no. And we wind up keeping our commitments to others, but not to ourselves. Very true. Yes. You know, and then to create a roadmap. And so I was working with these principles and having a lot of success and a lot of good things happening in people's lives. But inevitably it seems like
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we would get to a point where they were stuck. And what was working was no longer giving them, you know, it's like going from a freeway speed down to a speed where there's a stop sign on every corner. It was working. They were heading along, but then that was sort of like slowing down. get it. And so the more we would delve into that, it
seemed like inevitably it went back to something that happened in their childhood. It might have been something really big, or it might have been something that would seem to be insignificant. And as I saw that happening, I began to infuse more of my experience, what I had learned in working, you know, with people. I also did more research about, you know, the long-term
effects of child abuse and all of that. Then in 2022, I did something really stupid. I was using a cane at that time and in the middle of the night I went out into the living room without my cane and I tripped over my own two feet and I wound up in the hospital. Now the good news is I didn't break anything. When I came home a few days later, spirituality is really important to me.
And I had a very clear spiritual prompting that I needed to tear apart everything that I had done and take parts of it, add other things to it, and rebuild something new. And I very clearly felt God's hand in the process of doing that. And what I created was achieving emotional freedom now. Now, the first person who went through this had been
physically, sexually, emotionally, mentally, and financially abused growing up. Her parents even took her babysitting money. When she finally left home, she got herself into another abusive relationship, which is very normal, very, very common. She finally extricated herself from that relationship, got herself into therapy. She had married a good guy at this point.
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and had been in therapy for five years when a mutual friend connected us. And she wasn't really sure she wanted to try something else, because five years of therapy hadn't worked. Her husband was even more reluctant because he didn't want to see her disappointed again. And he didn't want to spend more money on something else that wasn't going to work. She ultimately decided she wanted to give it a try. And it's a 12 week program.
In week six, when she came onto the Zoom call, she had tears running down her face. And she said, you know, I was in therapy for five years and nothing changed. In six weeks, you have changed my life. At that point, I had tears running down my face. And I knew that there was more power in this program than I had even realized. And I continued to see that
that happen. Now here's something that I think is significant for your listeners as we talk about narcissism is the most common line in abuse, whether it is verbal or nonverbal, and it is most commonly verbalized in cases of domestic violence. If you had done this, I wouldn't have had to do that.
abusers and enablers will look to make their victim responsible for their choices. You are never, ever, ever responsible for somebody else's choices. And it's classic narcissism. It's all about me. And that is what the abusers, the enablers, and the bullies are doing with that attitude of
You know, let me blame you. And so what we do is we separate out stories. Your story is what you experienced, how you felt about it then, how you feel about it now, and how you feel about what was said to you. Not what was said to you because that was a lie. Yes. But how you feel about it.
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His conventional therapy tends to have you talking around and around and around in circles about what happened, but not about how you feel about what happened. That is true. Yes. And so part of the stories is identifying your abuser story and your enabler stories. And I use the analogy of a puzzle. If you're putting together a puzzle and you're missing a few pieces, you still have a pretty good sense of what that puzzle looks like.
They have a lot of pieces about what was going on in their abusers and enablers lives at the time or their bullies lives at the time that they were being abused. So we're going to take those puzzle pieces and create a puzzle that's your abuser and one that's your enabler. And these are things that are going to make sense to you. So your brain is going to accept them as truth.
which allows you to separate your story from their stories, then toss their stories in the dumpster. And then there's still the legacy of the voices. So we then go through a process of quieting the voices so they no longer have impact. And then we transition going into from breaking, those are all about breaking the chains.
I'm the emotional chain breaker for that reason, you know, to creating, using the seven pillars and all of that to create the life that they want. And there are so many people that even today with all of the publicity that's out there about child abuse, about narcissism, about all of this destructive stuff that goes on in society.
Too many people feel like, well that might work for everybody else, but it's not going to work for me. If I could give people one message, it's...
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You're wrong. You're allowing yourself to allow them to continue to abuse you by holding on to the fact that it's not going to work for you.
And it just breaks my heart for anyone to be living in pain when I know there's an option. So the option that you're suggesting is this, um, the seven pillars option. Yes. So the idea is that we're going to take somebody from pain to joy. The it's a 12 week program. The first seven weeks are all about healing. The last five weeks are saying, okay,
You've broken the chains. Now let's create the life you want. I like that. And here's the thing. Is all of us have experienced something that might be relatively innocuous, but somehow it got stuck in our psyche and it impacts us. Is past, present or future, we are all going to experience those kinds of things. Yes.
So my attitude is when we start this program, let's look for the 800 pound elephant. And the 800 pound elephant is whatever it is that is still impacting your life today. Is a lot of this subconscious, like how do you determine what is still impacting your life the most today from your childhood experiences? Like is there a process to go through? It really is. It's a pretty easy process for people to identify because
The first lesson that they have, you know, when we talk about abuse, people tend to think physical and sexual. Yeah. And then they kind of stop the list there. But the list that they get is about 20 items long, which tends to trigger lots of other things. And one of the ones that has been coming up a lot more recently, recently coming up a lot is emotional abandonment. Okay. Yes. When they go down this list,
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And I tell them, said, you know, anything that you have experienced, is for, okay. Anything they write is strictly for them. If they want to share it with me, that's cool. But they never have to show it to another living soul. What they have to do is be honest with themselves. That's hard sometimes. Anything that you have experienced, identify who it was and what they did. Two, three words. No, no big deal.
And then when you're done, it's going to be pretty obvious to you what the 800 pound elephant is. Yeah, it's the one that sort of jumped off the page and smacked you in the face. When you talk about emotional abandonment, you said that you referred to that in reference to your mom and your dad. Uh-huh. Or a term similar. And now you're talking about it again. Could you describe that in a little bit more detail? Well, I'm going to give you two or three examples.
So with my mom and my dad, it was a matter of me emotionally burying them. And so it was like, I can't trust them. I will give lip service to them, but I'm never going to trust them with anything that's important to me. It's going to be a very superficial, casual relationship. And then I was married for 20 years before we were divorced. And I have defined described that
is an emotional desert. Because in a marriage, you expect to be connected. You expect to have communication. You expect to have support. And when that's not there, it's a pretty lonely place. But you can't sort of tell the world, hey, I need friends. need all of this.
because it's like you're throwing your spouse under the bus and that doesn't look good for you as well as for them. So you don't do it. You so you live on autopilot. An autopilot has us disconnected from our emotions. And that's how the majority of the population lives the majority of the time. And then emotional abandonment is more like
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The parent is there, but they're not there emotionally. It might be because they're so busy working that they just don't have the bandwidth and the energy to be there. It might be that they're an alcoholic and they're checked out because of an addiction. We know that abuse is generational. So if they grew up in an atmosphere
where they didn't feel any love or any support or any encouragement or any nurturing, to them that's normal. It is, yes. And we tend to live our normal because we think it's normal even though it's not. And it's certainly not healthy. Yeah. it's the emotional abandonment is physically present, but emotionally gone.
physically there but checked out from forming that emotional connection and bond to the children or whomever their partner, whoever. know, yeah, that sense that a child has of safety, of being loved, of mattering, of being protected. You know, those things are all missing when there's emotional abandonment. Do you feel that your father or your mother were narcissistic? I have no doubt that they were both covert narcissists. A classic narcissist
It's just a little more out there. More grandiose, yeah. You know, that you can see that it's all about them. The me is bigger than anybody else or anything else in the room. So a covert narcissist fits in more socially, but they are more adept at hiding those narcissistic tendencies.
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So you may not necessarily see them in the workplace. They're more behind the doors in the home. And that is what I lived with and dealt with where out in public, he was able to put on a very good show. And he wasn't a super braggart, although it did kind of come out. You know, he always had a story about some great thing he did buried in there.
But behind closed doors, that mask slipped and in front of me and in front of people in the immediate family, they saw the narcissism. And even sometimes it would slip out in public and people would catch a glimpse, especially if he didn't deem that person important. So if he didn't think that they were, you know, prestigious enough or smart enough or, or, in a powerful enough position, he would sometimes let it slip. But.
I'm, you know, that's exactly what a covert narcissist is. So would you mind describing a little bit about why you're convinced that your parents fell into that category? You know, I think that
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One of the things that I mentioned earlier about how you're never responsible for somebody else's choices. Narcissists are absolute masters, whether it's full blown out there or the covert variety. They're absolute masters at diminishing you. Yes.
to make them feel more powerful.
because really abuse and narcissism is all about power. Okay. So it's making them more powerful and it's making you responsible for being inept in one way or another so that they're having to do this. It's not that they're choosing to do this.
It's your fault that they're doing this. But when they put you down for doing it, then they feel more powerful. I see. And it feeds their narcissism. Does that make sense? It does. And whatever you said, nothing is ever their fault. It's your fault. This might be the most clear example I can give you from my relationship, but
When my narcissist was arrested for the second time for domestic violence, I got a concussion and a broken collarbone. And how that happened is he shoved my head into a wall and I kind of put my arm out like this to brace myself. And he told me afterwards that I broke my own collarbone because I put my arm out to brace myself. So it was my fault. Yeah, the collarbone got broken. Absolutely classic.
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If he will make it your fault, then he's the good guy. He's vindicated. He has no responsibility for what happened to you. It's, it's, it's totally your fault. And the enablers, which you talked about, which kind of in the narcissist jargon, we call those flying monkeys. I have heard them try to defend him and say, no, they were nowhere in my relationship.
And I personally didn't really talk about my relationship. Now he was one quick to talk about our relationship, but you know, as a decent spouse, I felt like, you know, our marital problems I wasn't going to share even after we separated and divorced. It still didn't feel like it was everybody's business to know all our marital problems, but
the number of them that defended him with things like, well, you know, every story has two sides to it, or, you know, there's more to that relationship than you know, as if to defend his behaviors by pretending like they knew what was going on in my relationship without ever asking me or me ever sharing anything about it, just as a means of sort of defending him and trying to push the blame on me.
So two things that come out in your story there. One is very often somebody who is in a domestic violence situation or an abused situation of a child or whatever will try to reach out to a family member for support. And they will be told things like, quit being a drama queen. It's not that big of a deal. Get over it.
Yes. Even 20 years later, you may hear those same things from people who are supposed to be your family, your support, the people that care about you. 100%. And the other thing is that when you're talking about people like, you know, there's two sides to every story and all of this. I think a lot of times people
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will defend the abuser or the narcissist because it's hitting too close to home. You are 100 % there because his greatest flying monkey, and I'm not exactly sure which side you mean of this, but I'll just tell you, one of his, the people that have hurt me the most was a victim of domestic abuse herself. And she literally said to me,
I never got justice and you shouldn't want it either. And she told that to other members of our church and community. And I wonder if me speaking out about it, I was quiet at first. I was for over a year. I was very quiet, but I just heard it just, they wouldn't stop harming me. The enablers in him that I finally spoke out about it in my blog. But I do wonder,
Why would someone who is a victim themselves of domestic violence say these things to me? And I wonder if that does hit too close to home. So here's the thing to be aware of. The vast majority of victims and perpetrators of domestic violence were abused as children or saw violence when they were growing up. So consequently, it is their normal.
Remember the gal that I told you about who had had all kinds of abuse and then she wound up in an abusive domestic violence relationship because we're drawn to what feels normal to us. You've heard the expression about people marrying their ex-spouses. Yes. And it's a different person, but it's the same.
persona if you will. Yes. Yeah. And it's the same thing in this situation because when we grow up in a dysfunctional situation we don't have the clarity of mental and emotional eyesight to see red flags that maybe somebody else would see. After
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Max and I were divorced. I had somebody that had known both of us for a couple of years through church. Didn't know us really well, you know, or anything. They to me, you're blossoming. I can't understand what you ever saw in him to begin with. And my reaction was, no, I'm not blossoming. I becoming me again, because I had made so many compromises to try to make the marriage work.
But it really kind of twisted a bit of a knife when she said, you know, I could never see what you saw in him. Because it was like, is my judgment really that crappy that other people can see these things that I couldn't see? And I just think that we come from a place that doesn't put us in the best position.
to make good choices about partners and spouses. And consequently, a lot of times it's kids that then pay the price for the poor choices that we make. And we know that abuse is generational. And so my thing is I will do everything I can to stop it, to heal those who have suffered from it.
or those who have perpetrated it to save another generation. So they don't grow up with the same pain as their parents. And I think you touched on a good point. As hard as it can be, I mean, it's very hard whenever you're the victim. But there is something to be said about the abuser and their past and their trauma and
You know, I agree we're responsible for our response and I'm not saying I'm at all in any way responsible for what he did or his parents or his upbringing, but that upbringing does often play a part in how people react and respond to things. And one of the things that, you know, I will say about my father is I don't know what he experienced growing up.
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that led him to make the choices that he made. But as an adult, he had the freedom to choose to make those choices or to make different choices. We are not responsible for what we experience as children. It leaves a mark, it leaves a legacy. But I'll go back to that epiphany that I told you earlier, where it was
You are not responsible for your father's choices, but you are responsible for how you allow them to impact your life. One of the things that frustrates me in society is we've come to this point of celebrating victimization. We're all victims of one thing or another, those circumstances that were never on our bucket list, but we have the freedom to choose our attitude and our actions.
You're right. And we definitely have the responsibility not to allow that to change us to a point where we're perpetrating the abuse on the next generation or even the same generation on others. Right. We have to, we are responsible for our response, our reaction and how we treat others. As much as I do have empathy for various people in my life that have harmed me to include my ex.
That's not a pass for your bad behavior. And it certainly doesn't give other people the right to re-victimize me and harm me in an attempt to defend him. You know, one of the things that I will talk about is forgiveness. And society has this attitude all too often in my estimation that says, okay, no harm, no foul. Let's just, you know, move on and it's all good. Yes. And I don't believe that.
Now, you know, there's small things where that may be appropriate, but I'm talking about things that significantly impact somebody's life. And I believe that forgiveness is for me. yeah, definitely. If you have harmed me, I don't need to tell you I forgive you because that in a way is condoning your choice. if I forgive you for me,
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What I'm doing is I'm lifting the burden of anger and hurt off of my shoulders and I'm not perpetuating self abuse by holding on to what you did to me and continuing to abuse myself with it. I mean, that's absolutely crazy. That is 100 % correct. Forgiveness is always for me, in my opinion, if I forgive someone, it's for me because I don't want to carry that on my shoulders.
I don't want to continue to think and dwell and fret about that. I want to move on. want to heal. you know, if I, if, if that is something I need to forgive somebody for that, I will, but it's not for them. And I probably won't. You're right. Unless it's a small thing or, know, I'll tell someone, of course I forgive you. You know, it wasn't an unintentional or whatever. Yeah, not a big deal. But if it's a major conscious decision to harm me repeatedly, yeah.
I totally agree. You know, one of the most destructive legacies from dealing with narcissists or abusive situations is how it affects our ability to trust. And part of this is trusting others. And I'm always shocked when I explain this to people and it's never occurred to them is that, you know, fine.
You meet somebody new, trust them on a very superficial level. When you see that trust honored, you you can trust them a little bit more. When you see that honored, you can trust them a little bit more. But so often I find people want to go from here to here. And then it blows up on them and they're, you know, upset and unhappy and everything else. But it's not only trusting other people, it's trusting yourself.
and trusting yourself to know who and when and where to trust. And that is, think, one of the hardest things to help somebody heal from. I wrote a blog on this, actually, on the of what he took from me, what the harm caused more than anything was my ability to trust others and myself, my own judgment, my own understanding of humans, because
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with narcissists, as you well know, a lot of it is built on deceit, if not all of it is built on deceit. So it's all, there's a secret life going on, there's deceit, deceit, deceit. And that really impacts the victim because you start to wonder like what was real, what wasn't real, was anything real? How long did I live in a total lie? And that ability to trust others, but more importantly to trust myself,
The greatest harm, the physical abuse was not the greatest harm he did to me. Greatest abuse to me was my ability of taking from me my ability to trust. And now I'm on a process to take that back. Good for you. Not allowing him to do that to me. Healing and learning that, you know, I was the victim of a very manipulative and devious person.
And that's not a reflection on me. That's a reflection on him. He wanted to make it all about you. But in reality, it was all about him. Exactly. Exactly. And, know, it just played out so many times to such a strong level for like, after he was arrested the second time for domestic violence, and I knew the relationship couldn't be repaired.
I went at the advice of my lawyer and I got a temporary PFA. And whenever we went for the permanent PFA, he is a professor and part of his research and funding is on, believe it or not, studying domestic violence and PFAs. And his lawyer requested that I get a civil no contact instead of the PFA so he wouldn't lose his funding and likely his job. And I agreed to that for several reasons.
most of which he had two kids that were not my kids, they were my stepkids at the time, that were dependent on his income. And he used that goodwill gesture to tell everybody Echo couldn't get a PFA because she made it up. And then whenever we came time for the actual trial for the abuse, there was a civil, like a domestic violence assault first time abuser, even though this wasn't his first time program.
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that I agreed to let him go through. And if he completed this program, the charges would go away, his record would be expunged. And I agreed to let him go through this program so that maybe he could be rehabilitated, maybe he wouldn't face jail time, and also to keep it not as public on us and our family. And he turned that around to say the charges were dropped because Echo made him up. And so,
every goodwill gesture I afforded him, he manipulated and turned that to make it look like I made up the abuse and the charges were dropped. I couldn't get a PFA because it never happened. And that level of deceit, whenever you're trying your hardest to get your family through this and you're trying to get them through this and you're trying, you know it's going to end the relationship, but you least want to have, them have as good of a start in their new life as possible.
And they just manipulate that and within your church community, within your greater community, your friend groups, twist that. That is deceit and betrayal. And it makes you really trust mistrust yourself. I think one of the sad things in society, and maybe we're gradually coming around to understanding it better with, with gaslighting, hitting the public arena more, but
It's that.
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Perception is framed in ways that have nothing to do with reality. Correct. And the reality was you had a concussion, you you had a broken collarbone. That wasn't perception. That was reality. And yet he was able to use your goodwill.
to frame everything so that the perception was that you were the bad guy and he was the good guy. And I don't think a normal person would do that. You wouldn't be able to say, this person has helped me out so much. I have my job. I'm not in jail. I'm going to just be quiet if nothing else. What a normal person that doesn't have this narcissistic tendencies manipulate it like that?
But see, the thing is that this normal person that wasn't a narcissist wouldn't have been in that position to begin with. That is 100 % true. You're right. Hopefully when he finally went to jail, there was a bit of a wake up call that, Oh, maybe Echo was right and things weren't quite what we believed they were. Well, he never actually, he spent.
a night in jail when he was arrested, but then he got out on bail and we never went to trial because we did the violence diversion program option instead. And so he was able to use this to manipulate the story. And people that I've talked to directly tend to understand. And I mean, I have medical records, I have the police report, have, I have pictures of me, I have all of that. And I've shown that not publicly, but I have shown it to people that have come to me.
But the people that never bothered to come to me and instead listen to gossip from his enablers or flying monkeys and him, tend to believe the story that I made it up. Another story that is circulating is that to make him look bad, I threw myself into a wall and broke my own collarbone and gave myself a concussion. And people believe this. That is what shocks me.
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is that people believe this. You know, I've, I've got a friend that was married to a classic narcissist and, because of the number he did on her kid, their kids about creating a perception that was very untrue and unreal about things that they experienced. In a lot of ways, she's still estranged from her kids today because they don't see that so much of what was not good was
What their father?
fed into them year after year after year after year after year. And that in our church group, there were only three of us that started out being, if you will, on Team Lisa because he had spent years laying the groundwork for how awful she was.
That's exactly what happened to us. And it was within our church community where it primarily took place. And he was the former president of the church. So he was a big name in the church. Yeah. Similar thing here. Because years behind my back, like I said, everything is, you know, fake and false. He was laying the groundwork for it so that
whenever the time came that I ever left him, he could go in and say, see, she's crazy. What's interesting is over the next maybe three years, gradually more and more people came over to her side because
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things came out that Todd's true spots as both of us are wearing spots. Unplanned, unplanned. I know, I got the memo. What can I tell you? Wow, but interesting that over time they began to see the truth. But the biggest catalyst in this was his brother went online and got
proof of some of the things he was doing and gave it to her. That was sort of like the beginning of the shifting. And some of the other powers that saw it and realized that their judgment had been 180 degrees off. And I think that that also speaks, as you said, it was similar in her case to the power dynamics where if
the abuser is a president or a minister or something like that within a church setting specifically I'm talking about. Not only will they side with them, but they will attack and harm the victim for speaking out against it. It's interesting how often somebody who is being abused as a child, their father is very prominent, very social, very financially.
very much a presence that is looked up to and admired. Yes. You know, even revered in the business community socially. You know, they're the the movers and the shakers. And what everybody sees is this public persona of goodness and power and generosity. Yes, yes, yes. And what's going on behind that facade?
is a totally different. It's totally different. You know, and so again, classic narcissism. You know, they're out there looking like, you know, the greatest things in sliced bread. In the case of mine, he's a professor. He has many publications. president of the church, you know, looks great, but behind closed doors, totally different story.
i am Ekho Podcast Studio (47:28.895)
Well, and this is one of the things where the trust comes into play. Because when you're dating somebody like that, yes, you see the professor, you see the publications, you see the respect of their peers, you see all of the things that are telling you this is a good person. Exactly. You're not seeing.
What's hidden?
And what's interesting is how often when a woman marries a narcissist.
It's like with the wedding a flip gets switched. And up until the wedding, she has seen this public persona of this amazing, wonderful person. And suddenly, know, well, she can't have contact with her friends. She can't do this. He has to know where she's at. You know, all of these control mechanisms.
that come into play. That's so reminiscent of my story because we dated for about four years before we moved in together and there was never any violence. There was deception. There was other issues, but there was no violence. Within a month of us moving in together, maybe two months, he was arrested the first time for domestic assault and harassment, which the harassment was.
i am Ekho Podcast Studio (49:08.661)
like good for you for filing the police report so we got arrested. That was, I did not see that side until we moved in blended our families. And then at that point I'm like, I have two kids, he has two kids. We're in one house. We sold our houses. What do I do here? You know, so I tried to cover for him. I didn't press charges that time. The first time I, I helped him make a cover story because it was in the newspaper.
We said that he was on prednisone with a steroid and it made them all wonky and that was what happened. you know, and it, you know, I was in a situation where I didn't see a good way out of it at the time. And then the second one almost a year later was so bad. He, he, he did do some physical violence against me in the meantime, but the, the next major one was about a year later. And I knew after that one,
there's no repairing this relationship. There's nothing we can do here. And during that one year interim period, was, he did admit that he had alcohol, that he was an alcoholic, whether he was or not, I don't know, but that's what he admitted. And we treated it as if that was the case. And so he would try to stop drinking. He would, and he'd go to Alcoholics Anonymous. We were in couples counseling for this sort of behavior, but it never got better.
He continued to lie and so much deceit. He continued to keep drinking. He never did stop. He would drink, he would lie and drink behind my back and all kinds of awful stuff. But that part of him never showed until we moved in together. you're right, like when you get married or when maybe when you move in together, something changes, that's when the mask kind of falls and you get to see the real version of them.
You know, one of the things that has some relevance here, but I think is good for us to think about for a minute. When you come from a place of being abused as a child, or when you're living with domestic violence, there is a strong probability that you will create a facade that says, I'm competent, I'm capable, it's all good.
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But back here, everything is shattered into pieces. Yes. And you know, you're crying. And you can't risk dropping the facade because if you do and people see this, you know, you're going to be judged and you're going to be dealing with all of the rest of this stuff that you don't want to deal with.
And I live in a small town, so it's particularly awful. It's awful anywhere, but in a small town, it's really hard. And you're right. You have to, you put up that facade because I don't want people to see all this and there's shame and there's, you know, guilt. And so like, if you brought children into this relationship, you're feeling guilty about that. And so when we have this facade, it protects the narcissist.
It does. It protects the narcissist. We think that we're protecting ourselves and we are, but we're also protecting them. You're 100 % correct with that. That is exactly what we are doing. And I remember at one point he even told me, if you tell people, they're not going to believe you. And he was right. Largely. He was right.
Because at times I had, I would say to him, if you don't quit drinking and you know, he would sometimes have his kids with him and be out drinking and I'd have to go find them. You know, it was horrible. you know, I was afraid he was it because he was drinking and driving with his kids, not mine, but with his, you know, I would say to him, I am going to tell the kids mom that you are doing this. And he said, if you do, she won't believe you. And whenever I did tell her finally what was going on,
She didn't believe me. He was absolutely right.
i am Ekho Podcast Studio (53:24.206)
So to be fair, I don't know that she didn't believe me, but she didn't, she at least told people she didn't believe me and she worked with him to further harm me. Well, in her own way, she was probably still protecting him. And the kids, yes, 100%, 100 % that's what was going on. I have no doubt about that, that that was what was going on. We live in a small town.
There's a whole bunch of dynamics there. She left him for the previous minister's daughter, who then she broke up with the daughter and got with a trans man. And we live in a very small community. So, you know, she was dealing already with the pressures of being in a queer trans relationship in a small town. And then to have that her kid's father is an abusive.
alcoholic, you know, would have just been too much and too hard on the kids and too hard on the whole system. And so she chose to protect him. another layer that would have sent the whole thing into the stratosphere. Absolutely correct. And she was also dependent on him largely financially, not that necessarily he was giving her money, but he was paying for nearly everything for the kids.
And so, you know, protecting that job, which was a concern of mine too, for him to protect that job. Not for me personally, but for him and the children that I greatly cared about and love. But these are the layers of what women of, or victims, I should just say victims. Dominantly women, but sometimes men. Victims face and why we put up these facades that you're right, they protect the narcissist. That's what they're doing. She's protecting him. I was protecting him.
We protect him because we don't want people to see what's back here. It's embarrassing. I just think it's important that we talk about these things. As hard as they are, yes. Because there are people who are suffering, feeling like they're the only one or there's no path forward or whatever. And what you are doing, what I try to do,
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is simply give people hope that there is an option out there and they can heal and they can have a great life without
it being collared by everything that has happened in their past. Well, Ada, I am so thankful for you. I am thankful for what you do. I am thankful for your 12 week healing program. We are definitely going to put the link here for that program and also a link to your healing guide. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was last minute. I greatly appreciate you and I hope that we can talk again soon and maybe we can do a follow up podcast.
I would love that. It has been an absolute delight. I am thrilled that you are doing what you are doing. Thank you. Because narcissists are all around us and too often they're celebrated and the damage that they do either is unseen or it's swept under the rug. It is. You're right.
You're right. And especially like a small town, you know, that makes it really hard. Do you still live in that small town? I do. I still live in that small town. Kudos to you for having the courage to do that. I will say I was kind of being more private about it, but certain things came to light, like it being published in the newspaper and him insisting on this like smear campaign that they made it so public that I thought.
There's no sense in me being quiet anymore. You know, I might as well say what I have to say because everybody knows when they know a false story. So I'm going to tell the truth and I'm going to give people the language to understand maybe what they're going through. Yes. And a story that, Hey, this is my story. I know it's not your story, but maybe you can relate to it because it was hearing other victims of narcissistic abuse, their stories and listening to people like Dr. Romani.
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for whoever else is out there talking about this, that I was able to name what was going on in my life, have a framework for understanding it, and most importantly, realize I'm not alone. I'm not going through this alone. And that is so empowering. And that is a huge part of my healing is to know I'm not alone and to know that we're building this community. You're building it, I'm building it, we're all building it, we're talking about this and we're saying, you know, this is enough.
We're not going to be quiet. We're not going to be silent. We're going to talk about our experiences. You know, I look at what we do as throwing pebbles into the lake and the ripples go forth with the people that we impact with what we do. And it allows them to impact other people. And my attitude is I just want to throw as many pebbles in as many lakes as I can.
I agree with that. The last person I interviewed talked about the butterfly effect. We're making a little nipple, but it causes a hurricane way far away. And that's what we're doing. We're throwing the petals in. You're right. I love it. It has been such a delight to spend this time with you. I feel the same way. And thank you so much. I look forward to our next discussion. So do I. Take care. Take care, Echo.
