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.

In this episode, I’m responding to listener messages that came in after the Inner Child ep, including one powerful moment that stopped me in my tracks.

A listener shared how she paused the podcast, climbed into bed with her childhood stuffed zebra, and spoke truth to the younger version of herself. What she described is exactly what real healing looks like - not performative, not perfect, but embodied, intuitive, and honest.

From there, we move into some big, thorny questions I get asked all the time:
Do we have to forgive our parents?
Do we have to forgive narcissistic abusers?
Is forgiveness actually necessary for healing, or has it been weaponized against us?

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why forgiveness is not a prerequisite for healing
• How women are conditioned to use forgiveness to stay small, quiet, and palatable
• The difference between forgiveness, freedom, integration, and indifference
• Why rage, grief, and truth-telling are often essential parts of recovery
• How to redefine forgiveness on your terms, or reject it altogether
• A body-based reflection to help you feel what forgiveness actually means to you

This is not a “just let it go” conversation. It’s a reclaim-your-power conversation.

If you’ve ever felt pressured to forgive before you were ready, or told that healing requires you to absolve the people who harmed you - 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.

In this final episode of The Messy Middle Six Keys series, we’re closing with the key that changes everything: Abuse Dynamics Education.

If you’ve ever wondered why you still doubt yourself… Why therapy, books, or “doing the work” hasn’t fully set you free… Or why a part of you still feels hooked to someone who treated you like shit…

This episode is for you.

We’re talking about the hidden mechanics of emotional and narcissistic abuse. Not surface-level red flags, but the real operating system behind manipulation, gaslighting, coercive control, and psychological warfare.

You’ll learn:

• Why abuse is not about anger or miscommunication, but power and control
• How coercive control works so quietly you often don’t see it until years later
• The most common abuse tactics and how they show up in real life
• Why you didn’t see it sooner and why that does not make you weak, naïve, or stupid
• How manipulation turns into your inner voice and how to start separating what’s yours from what was injected into you

This episode also includes a grounding, body-based validation exercise to help you stop gaslighting yourself and reconnect with what your nervous system has always known.

Because healing isn’t just about becoming more regulated, more forgiving, or more understanding.

Sometimes healing is about realizing:

This wasn’t yours to fix.
This was done to you.
And once you can name the game, you stop playing it.

If you’re ready to reclaim your power, rebuild self-trust, and finally answer the question “Is this always going to happen to me?” with a solid no, this episode will land.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And that’s where real freedom begins.

📩 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 wondered why boundaries feel impossible, why you keep going back, or why your body reacts before your mind can catch up, I made this episode for you.

If you’ve done the therapy, read the books, understand the patterns of abuse, manipulation, or people pleasing, and yet your body still freezes, fawns, shuts down, or betrays you at the exact moment you need it most, this episode is for you.

This is a deep dive into somatics and energetics, and why trauma doesn’t live in your thoughts. It lives in your body, your breath, your nervous system, and your energetic field.

In this episode:

• I talk about why you can’t logic your way out of trauma, why insight alone isn’t enough, and why your body is not broken or failing you.
• I share personal stories from my own journey, including the moments when my body knew the truth long before my mind could cope with it.
• We explore why freeze, collapse, people pleasing, and panic are not character flaws, but intelligent survival responses, and how changing the questions you ask yourself can shift everything.

I also guide you through gentle, practical somatic and energetic exercises you can do with me, including:

• Taking your nervous system and energetic pulse
• Learning to listen to sensation instead of overriding it
• Feeling and strengthening your energetic boundaries
• Releasing emotional and energetic residue you’ve been carrying that isn’t yours

This is not about forcing yourself to be more confident, more assertive, or more healed. You cannot bully your nervous system into safety. Healing happens when you meet your body with curiosity, respect, and compassion.

Your body is not the problem. It’s the portal.

📩 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.

Let’s talk about boundaries. The real kind. Not the affirmations you repeat in the mirror and then immediately override when someone pushes. I mean lived boundaries. The ones you feel in your body before they ever become words.

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I’m unpacking why boundaries feel so uncomfortable, scary, and even dangerous for so many of us, especially if you grew up without them, were punished for having them, or survived narcissistic abuse, coercive control, high-conflict relationships, or lifelong people-pleasing.

I share why boundaries aren’t a communication problem, they’re a survival strategy. Why your chest tightens, your hands go cold, or your voice disappears when you try to speak up. And why that doesn’t mean you’re bad at boundaries. It means your nervous system learned how to keep you safe in environments where saying no came with consequences.

We talk about:

• Why setting boundaries often costs you relationships and why I wish someone had warned me
• How abuse, emotional neglect, and patriarchal conditioning train your body to fear saying no
• Why “off-the-shelf” boundary advice doesn’t work for trauma-trained systems
• How your nervous system and neuroception drive boundary responses
• Why boundaries start in the body, not the mouth
• The difference between external boundaries and the powerful boundaries you set with yourself

I also guide you through simple somatic practices you can use right now, including a body-based boundary exercise and the yes/no compass to help you reconnect with your inner truth and learn what your body’s yes and no actually feel like.

You didn’t fail at boundaries. You learned to survive without them. And now, we get to gently teach your system something new.

Start small. Start where your body feels safest. And let this be the beginning of coming home to yourself.

Sending you lots of love. Tune in, and I’ll meet you there.

📩 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 of The Messy Middle, I’m diving into intuition and why so many of us learned not to trust it, fear it, or shut it down completely.

If you’ve experienced emotional abuse, gaslighting, narcissistic relationships, chronic people-pleasing, or high-control dynamics, there’s a good chance your intuition wasn’t just ignored, it was actively dismissed, minimized, or punished. Over time, that teaches you to second-guess your own knowing and disconnect from your body altogether.

I talk about how...

• How intuition is not woo-woo or mystical. It’s biological. It lives in your nervous system, in your body, in that quiet, steady knowing that doesn’t shout but also doesn’t go away'
• Trauma can blur the line between intuition and hypervigilance, making it hard to tell the difference between fear and truth;
• I also share my own experiences, including how intuition showed up for me around betrayal and cheating long before I had proof, and what it felt like in my body when I ignored it versus when I finally listened.
• We explore what intuition actually feels like, how it differs from anxiety, why society teaches women to demand evidence for their inner knowing, and how to gently rebuild trust with yourself after years of self-gaslighting.
• There’s also a guided somatic exercise in this episode to help you reconnect with your body’s yes and no, so you can start recognizing intuition again in a way that feels safe, grounded, and accessible.

Your intuition isn’t broken. Neither are you. It’s been there the whole time, waiting to be invited back into the conversation.

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your knowing and start trusting yourself again, 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.