Caroline Strawson is a multi- award winning EMDR & Rapid Transformational Therapist specializing in self-healing the trauma after narcissistic abuse. She is the author of the best-selling book Divorce Became My Superpower, and she is a leading international authority and expert in narcissistic abuse and trauma. After going through her own devastating divorce from a narcissist where she had over £70,000 of debt ($85,000) and her family home repossessed, she was diagnosed with C-PTSD and suffered with depression, anxiety and self-harm. Her personal journey to not just bounce back but bounce forward quickly turned into a personal mission to want to help others through the trauma of narcissistic abuse. Caroline is passionate about raising awareness about psychological abuse, and is helping thousands of people thrive after abuse. She holds individual therapy sessions with clients all over the world with her unique methods to rapidly heal others after narcissistic abuse healing the inner wounds associated with narcissistic abuse and trauma.
Caroline Strawson is a multi- award winning EMDR & Rapid Transformational Therapist specializing in self-healing the trauma after narcissistic abuse. She is the author of the best-selling book Divorce Became My Superpower, and she is a leading international authority and expert in narcissistic abuse and trauma.
After going through her own devastating divorce from a narcissist where she had over £70,000 of debt ($85,000) and her family home repossessed, she was diagnosed with C-PTSD and suffered with depression, anxiety and self-harm. Her personal journey to not just bounce back but bounce forward quickly turned into a personal mission to want to help others through the trauma of narcissistic abuse.
Caroline is passionate about raising awareness about psychological abuse, and is helping thousands of people thrive after abuse. She holds individual therapy sessions with clients all over the world with her unique methods to rapidly heal others after narcissistic abuse healing the inner wounds associated with narcissistic abuse and trauma.
Subscribe to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast
Apple Podcasts | Google Play | Google Podcasts | Spotify
Stitcher | iHeart | TuneIn | Overcast | SoundCloud
Resources Mentioned:
Our Sponsor:
Connect with Us:
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame and I am your host. Today, we have Caroline Strawson. Caroline Strawson is a multi-award winning EMDR and Rapid Transformational Therapist specializing in self-healing the trauma after narcissistic abuse. She is the author of best-selling book, Divorce Became my Superpower and she is a leading international authority and expert in narcissistic abuse and trauma. After going through her own devastating divorce from a narcissist where she had over $85,000 in debt and her family home repossessed, she was diagnosed C-PTSD and suffered with depression, anxiety and self-harm. Her personal journey to not just bounce back to bounce forward quickly turned into a personal mission to want to help others through the trauma of narcissistic abuse.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Caroline is passionate about raising awareness about psychological abuse and is helping thousands of people thrive after abuse. She holds individual therapy sessions with clients all over the world with her unique methods to rapidly heal others after narcissistic abuse, healing the other wounds associated with this abuse and trauma. This is an amazing, amazing story and just an amazing lovely woman. If you get nothing else out of it, her accent is beautiful but I just loved doing this interview so hold on to your seats. Episode 54, let's do this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Caroline, thank you so much for being here.
Caroline Strawson:
Aw, you're welcome. Thank you so much for asking me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I just wanted to spend an hour listening to your voice, your accent. It's so beautiful.
Caroline Strawson:
It's really interesting because my sister lives in Arizona. She lives in Phoenix, and she's got still the British accent but every now and again, it comes out this American twang as well and then my nephew, of course, he's totally American and he's like, "Hey, Aunty Caroline." And, it's like my sister is so British still.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, it's coming down the generations. It's so funny. I always joke if you're British, there's certain accents where you can say anything and it sounds sophisticated and then there's other accents, which will remain nameless, where you can say anything and it sounds not sophisticated.
Caroline Strawson:
Correct.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I love it.
Caroline Strawson:
[crosstalk 00:02:49] hard.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, thank you so much for being here. You wrote a book called Divorce is my Superpower and I think that's amazing. Also, I've been saying that as a result of COVID that the best employment, the most steady employment is going to be the divorce attorneys right now because everybody's locked in the house with their spouse.
Caroline Strawson:
Absolutely. Yeah, it's a really tough time for a lot of people. I deal a lot with abusive relationships, hence my book. I've got a lot of people in my group on Facebook who are actually in lockdown with their partner still. They aren't actually even divorced yet.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They're planning on divorcing and they're locked ... Oh, no.
Caroline Strawson:
We're doing some exit strategies as we speak.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, no. Oh my gosh. There's so many scenarios where it's horrifying. So, tell me a little bit about what your background ... Where did you grow up? What was your family like?
Caroline Strawson:
Okay, so I'm originally from a place called Manchester here in the UK. That's where I was born. We traveled around a lot actually as a family growing up. We actually lived in a place called Papua New Guinea for two years when I was younger. We toured all along the east coast of Australia. We loved traveling and my dad worked for a big chemical company so we moved around. I went to lots and lots of different schools actually growing up, which was great because it allowed me to be good at speaking to people but of course, when you get lots of friends and then you have to move, you don't particularly want to move.
Caroline Strawson:
I always had an interest in the medical sector. Fascinated with programs on TV, loved watching all of that, and I remember in my teens when I was deciding what I was going to do at university, I actually would have liked to be a doctor when I look back but my mom was very good, she said, "Yes, but a doctor, if you have children and then you go back into it, it's going to be hard." So, I ended up actually becoming a podiatrist. That's what I became. That was originally my background as a podiatrist and up until really when my marriage ended 11 years ago, I did podiatry on the side but I also worked for an airline as well.
Caroline Strawson:
I loved traveling, so being a podiatrist I was able to still have my own business, being a podiatrist because I was just in private practice. I ran my own clinic, but also then I was able to travel the world for free. So, it was the best of both worlds. I worked in the health service here in the UK for a while and then worked for British Airways and for Virgin actually.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, awesome.
Caroline Strawson:
Yeah, which was great fun but again, passion has always been the human body, the brain, all of that. Then, I got married. I met my husband when I was flying for British Airways and we got married, and I suppose that archetypal marriage at the start. We got a house and then we had our son, and then really for me things started going downhill ... pinpointing for myself when we were thinking about having our second child. I ended up having four consecutive miscarriages at that particular time, so it was a really tough time. A lot of my friends were having their second child and there was a few red flags that were starting to come to the fore, but pushing them to the back of my mind because I thought, "No, we're going to have a sibling for my son."
Caroline Strawson:
And, I fell pregnant for the fifth time and I went on to have my daughter, Maddy, but six months into my pregnancy with my daughter, I found out my husband was having an affair. So, you can imagine at that time it was like, "What do I do? I can't even go and get drunk because I'm pregnant. I can't even do that."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my gosh, I never even thought of that.
Caroline Strawson:
Exactly. No, I couldn't even do anything. And again, I'd always been the type of person actually that had said, "If anyone ever cheated on me, that would be it. They would be gone. That was it." But actually when you're pregnant, you have a home together, you have a life together, what do you do? So of course, he was very upset and crying and everything, so we decided to give it a go, but really for that point onwards, I think something probably died inside of me and I also started to become aware that there were little subtle things that were happening and I was really losing myself, who I was.
Caroline Strawson:
I threw myself into being a mom. That was always my priority, and a year after I had my daughter, my mom passed away very, very suddenly. So I'd had a bit of trauma. I had my miscarriages and then obviously the affair and then my mom passed away really suddenly, and then a year after that, my husband walked out on me and my two children as well. So in a space really of about two years, there was a lot of trauma. A lot of trauma. Then, found out we were in over 70,000 pounds worth of debt which is over $100,000 worth of debt, and obviously about a third of that was in my sole name so you can imagine I was a single mother with two children totally reliant on me because we'd move hours away, and I was just working part-time as a podiatrist at the time.t
Caroline Strawson:
That culminated about a year after that, I actually had my family home repossessed as well, so I'd literally lost everything. Literally, I was at rock bottom. I'd been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which probably is complex PTSD because it was a number of events as well. I had depression, anxiety, self-harm. I used to literally start my mornings on the bathroom floor having a panic attack, or stopping myself having one. I'd get my toothpaste, because I used to bite my nails ... I used to get the toothpaste and literally on the top of my thighs, I would be gouging out the top of my thighs. I almost wish I had a volume button on my head that I could turn everything going down.
Caroline Strawson:
It was really only my two children and genuinely, if I didn't have my two children, I wouldn't be sat here right now. I was at a really, really low place. It was only then that I thought I've got to stay. Yeah, it was a really, really low point in my life. I'd lost my mom who was my rock, best friend, and then my husband had walked out. But I'd realized when I was going through therapy afterwards what type of relationship I'd had. I'd always been a confident, ambitious woman and I was a shell of who I was. I was literally a shell of who I was. I didn't realize ... I didn't even realize, Ashley, as an intelligent woman that I'd been in a psychologically narcissistically abusive relationship. I just didn't know.
Caroline Strawson:
It was very subtle. The gaslighting, everything that had happened in the relationship, I just didn't realize. So, it was this realization then of, "Wow." And I even remember my therapist saying this to me, and I was like, "No, no, no. He just cheated." But all the things I started to say about our relationship and what he used to say to me and everything else, it was just an eye-opener. I remember she said to me, "Go and Google narcissist." I went and Googled it and I was like, "Oh my goodness. This is him. This is him." It really scared me in a way because I was reading, "Get away from them, get away from them," and then at the bottom of this article I read it said, "But, it's really hard if you have children with them." And I was thinking, "Oh my goodness. What next?"
Caroline Strawson:
Yeah, it was a really, really low point in my life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh my gosh. There's so much to unpack here. Okay, so what did your husband do for a living?
Caroline Strawson:
He was cabin crew for British Airways. When I was cabin crew, we met and everything else. Even now when I look back, there were red flags. I just didn't see them. I didn't see them because he was saying all the right things to me that because of my own deep wounds myself, it was like, "Oh, amazing." He got a tattoo with my name on it a month after we met. Now to me at the time, of course, I was like, "Wow, he must really like me. That's amazing." Obviously where I am now, it's like, "Whoa, a month? Wow, that's a huge red flag." But at the time, because I've got deep inner wounds of not feeling worthy myself, having somebody say all the things that I really wanted someone to say to me, it was just like I was a magnet to someone like that. I was a real co-dependent seeking external approval, external love and of course, he ticked all of the boxes. I was like a magnet to him.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So, when you were moving around as a child a lot, you loved to travel but also that creates difficulty with attachments because in the back of your mind, you know that you're going to another place. You know that these friends, no matter how close you get to them, truly there's going to be a day where you're not going to be there anymore. How did that play into ... You talked about your deep wounds of codependency. What was the dynamic that you grew up with that created deep wounds that caused you to feel like this was everything you needed?
Caroline Strawson:
Primarily my father. As much as I love my dad, my dad had a very cold upbringing. As much as I love him, he's here today, I adore him but his parental capabilities weren't one of showing me love or praise so I grew up never hearing, "I love you" from my dad or, "I'm proud of you." I never got that, and even when I was doing all my own deep healing, I was very sporty and very academic. I was a real high achiever because of course I was seeking approval and wanting my dad to say, "Hey, Caroline. I'm really proud of you there." And even when I go back to when I was seven, eight years old, I'd do little gymnastic routines in the lounge and my dad would be the judge and he'd sit on the sofa and he'd look at me go, "Hm, 9.99 recurring."
Caroline Strawson:
And, I'd be like, "Again." I'd do it again. Now of course as an adult, I can look back and think my dad was just being silly and just trying to make a joke of it, but for that child, that seven, eight year old who thought she did it perfectly, who thought she'd done really well, the meaning I attached to that was my dad is not giving me a 10 because I'm not good enough and that's then what gets wired in as the belief, so I'd bring home reports where it was straight A's and he'd glance at them and say, "Well done," but there was no real praise. There was not what I wanted, so of course that was getting wired in all of the time. So, I'd try even harder to see if I could get that praise as well and it just never came. Even to this day, my dad has never said, "I'm proud of you." And, I've achieved a lot but he still has never said that to me.
Caroline Strawson:
But, I'm okay with that now. I wasn't back then. It was really a driving force for me. A lot of the things that I did, I always would then phone home and tell my mom and my dad to really get my dad's approval. My dad was very much quite a cold person, only again to his capability. My mom, on the other hand, was a real codependent empath. So from her upbringing, my grandfather ... I never met him, but my mom's father used to beat up my grandmother. He left my mom and her sister and my Gran when she was 14. So again, that dynamic then, my mom was very much not feeling good enough so her sense of worth came from being an amazing mom, which was great for me because I look back with great memories of my mom but there was a real codependency there as well.
Caroline Strawson:
My mom was seeking her worth for being the great mom and I was seeking my worth from my mom then, as well, because my dad wasn't doing that. So there was again the dynamics of all of that, which of course led me to grow up to be a codependent seeking worth from others in relationships and friendships but it made me a magnet to toxic friendships, to toxic relationships as well because I was seeking that attachment with somebody that I didn't have from my father.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. It's really interesting. I related a lot. I have the achiever gene. My dad actually is a really warm person who would tell me that he was proud of me, but I do remember I would get straight A's, I would bring that home and he would say, "Of course you got straight A's." I had set that expectation and in his mind, that's a compliment but as a kid, it felt like, "Oh, it's not remarkable."
Caroline Strawson:
Not enough.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's not enough.
Caroline Strawson:
And it's conditional, "I will say this if it's this." It becomes conditional.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
And, so what I hear and what I love to talk about because of the importance is intergenerational trauma, and maybe trauma is the wrong word in some cases, but really we're talking about how when you don't do your own healing, you pass whatever it is on. I think we all are going to do our own healing and probably still pass whatever it is on to some extent, but the ability to stop and face those things about ourselves is so important when you bring kids into the picture because as you know, they pick up on that. You picked up on that and then our children pick up on that. You have children, so you know what this feels like where you know that your dad in those scenarios with his 9.99, you know what he meant because you get it from the adult perspective, he's being funny. He's being dry sense of humor funny.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
But you also know from the experience the tremendous lifelong memory as a child what that does, so sometimes, in my experience, when I do my own work it can be almost paralyzing sometimes as a parent because I have little kids and I think to myself, "I'm going to make a joke" or "I'm teasing" and I'm always wondering ... I have twin boys and they're very different and I'm always thinking I know some of this will be lost in translation and I don't know what it is. When you have that knowledge as a parent, you're like, "Okay, I'm trying to get the right message across," and we know how vital that is.
Caroline Strawson:
It is, and I think that comes with awareness. I'll hold my hands up. When I split up initially with my ex-husband, the way I was parenting was very much cyclical of how my mother was parenting. I was getting my worth from my children, so I was almost ... And, we call it bulldozing parenting. They couldn't feel pain, they couldn't feel anything because if they cried, that meant I was a bad mother. We can't have that. So, I was this overly protective mother because then if they were smiley and happy all of the time then that must mean that I'm a good mom. I had to really dig deep and actually think, "Well no, actually my children need to feel pain. They need to feel hurt and angry, and I need to be by their side allowing them to feel that so they know it's safe to feel like that and learn how to process all of that, too."
Caroline Strawson:
I grew up with fairytales, happily ever afters all the time, so for me, I don't think I realized my parents were actually real human beings until I was about 23 because I thought they were these perfected people and not flawed human beings, which of course we all are. We all have our flaws. I think when you mentioned about intergenerational trauma, it is trauma. Trauma is just overwhelm to our system, and that can be different for everybody based on our own past experiences as well. I think you're right. And one of the things I'm really passionate about in my business is breaking that cycle. I look at my two children now to actually how it was when we split up, 10, 11 years ago and they are both so independent now and they get it that however people behave is just a projection onto them and not a reflection.
Caroline Strawson:
And had I not done that deep work and had that awareness of that, we'd have had another cycle of this.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's so important. I think one of the things that people misunderstand sometimes is the idea of self-esteem. I just want to touch on this. When I started to do work on myself, which I was going to die or do this work so I did the work, I though that self-esteem was your accomplishments or what made you valuable to other people. I did not understand how that worked, and I also thought I had self-esteem if I could compliment myself, so I could say, "Oh, I'm funny. I'm decently good looking. I'm smart. I know I'm smart." So, I thought that was self-esteem and what I learned was self-esteem is your deep inner feeling of worth on the planet, why you believe that you deserve to live.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What I also learned from dating a narcissist and having that experience was when I put ... And frankly, with drugs, whatever it is ... when I put myself self-worth, my reason for being on the planet in the hands of something or someone else that that person, or thing, but that person now has complete control over me because if they do not approve or love me, I no longer have a reason to live, worth on the planet, and that's a terrifying thing and something that I did not understand why I felt like I couldn't breathe when they weren't around or when they left, or when they were gaslighting me and I was like, "I know I'm crazy but I know I'm not that crazy."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That is that feeling of I can't breathe because you have put yourself self-worth, your reason for being alive and on the planet in this person's hands so it's no longer in your control.
Caroline Strawson:
You're right, and I think that boils down to as well expectation. I talk a lot with my clients about expectation that you think, "Well, if I behave like this, then surely that must mean they will recognize that and say this or do that." And then when they don't do that, we live a life of disappointment. We don't sometimes recognize that they're not showing you that because they're not capable of that. We assume because of past experiences and meaning we've attached to that, that they're behaving like that because we're not worthy, we're not good enough. And just as you're saying, we then need to seek that somewhere else, which then can become addictions, emotional eating. We can become addicted to shopping, porn, gambling, food. We need to fill that ... I call it a hole in your soul. We need to fill that hole in your soul by something because if we don't do that, then-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
There's no reason to live.
Caroline Strawson:
... why are we here?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, why are we here. If you don't have self-esteem, then the things that are truly annoying about living, the stuff we have to do, those things become unbearable, and that's really where you get to those rock bottoms where you basically are just taking down to the studs and you get to make a decision about what you're going to do differently. And, it's very, very painful. In the program, in 12-Step, we say that expectations are future resentments, and they are. They are future ... When we expect, and I do a lot of work around this, too, and I often do a mini-inventory of myself. I got to tell you, a lot of the time, I don't even realize I have expectations. That's what boggles my mind is that-
Caroline Strawson:
When you feel it in your body when someone doesn't behave how you think they should behave, because, "I'm being good. I'm doing this. Why aren't you behaving like that?"
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Well, and it's the stuff that it's like no way that one wouldn't behave this way. That's the stuff, right? Because, there's expectations. It's Valentine's Day. Of course you would get me something, a card. There's that expectation. And then there's the expectation of, "I expect, because we're friends, that you won't steal from me. I expect that you would treat me the way I would treat you or that you would have basic common human decency." And to me, I could not make sense of that and I think that's probably ... And, I want to get into this relationship ... probably what happens with the narcissist. In my experience is you literally can not compute. It just doesn't compute. There has to be a mistake.
Caroline Strawson:
Correct, and this is when we have in narcissistic abuse something called cognitive dissonance. We need to find a reason for something, so we have them behaving this way and we're thinking, "Hey, they should be behaving like this." So we have these two conflicting with the same thing, and our brain needs to find a reason, so for me it would be, "Well, maybe he's tired. Maybe he's this. Maybe he's that." I would want to find a reason to stay in the relationship, to carry on, just to stay safe and that was my version of staying safe of finding the reason just to stay where I was because that, for me, was safe because I didn't die yesterday so that must be okay being like this.
Caroline Strawson:
But we need to find a reason for it, but just as you say, you can't comprehend that, "Surely if I'm being this nice and I'm doing all of this, then he should behave like this and he's behaving like this. But then, what could be the reason for that?" So, it's two conflicting opinions and again, when I look back, my gut was telling me this all of the time. I just didn't listen. I just didn't listen.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What were some of the red flags leading up to getting married? The tattoo was one of them.
Caroline Strawson:
So, he'd been married before as well, and it ended very suddenly. He cheated in that marriage, as well, but again the cognitive dissonance. The reason why was he was young. He was a young man in his early 20s when he got married, and of course, rationally I could understand that. He was too young, didn't want to settle down. But that still, at the back of my mind, I thought, "Oh, okay. He still cheated though." So, there were little things like this. Lack of emotion with certain things were red flags to me. Sometimes he was overly affectionate and then other times with things, I'd think, "Oh, okay. That didn't seem any empathy," which of course I know for a narcissist now is one of the biggest red flags of zero empathy.
Caroline Strawson:
So there was subtle things that when I look back, moving very quickly, "I've never felt like this before. You're amazing." Just really showering me, really with all the things I wanted to hear in some respects. And of course, I can look back now and think that they're red flags, but at the time, some of the things were little warning signs. I remember even on my wedding day actually thinking, "Is this the right thing to do?" Because we'd had problems a couple of years before, and then a year before, so it hadn't been plain sailing at all but it was still, "Maybe it'll work. I'm sure it will. I'll do my best. I'll make it work. I'll make it all all right. I'll show that I'm good enough," so to speak.
Caroline Strawson:
It was very much when I look back some of these subtle differences and then during the marriage, I look back at some of his behaviors, extreme behaviors on things, and again, in my book, Divorce Became my Superpower, there's one time when he came back from work and he told me he'd kill somebody. I know.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What?
Caroline Strawson:
I know. He'd been on a flight. He was eight hours late coming home from a flight, and I'd call British Airways and they told me, "No, the flight had landed. There were no emergencies." And bear in mind, I used to work for them myself. I also got a medical background, so I was getting really worried because I kept trying to call his mobile. No answer. I actually called the local police. They took his registration of his car to see if there had been any accidents on his journey home because they would take the number plates. No, that was fine. And eventually he answered his phone and he just said, "I think I killed somebody." I was like, "What? What do you mean you killed somebody?" He said there was a lady who came off the airplane. She'd fallen, hit her head. He had to perform CPR on her.
Caroline Strawson:
As he was telling me all of these things, and of course having a medical background, I was saying, "Well, where were the paramedics at this time?" Asking what I know, "Where were the rest of the crew?" Because, he was saying he was all on his own, and that isn't what happens. And then in the end, he was like, "So, stop talking to me. I'm in shock. I'm in shock." Brushing it, so my gut was saying, "That doesn't sound right, but my husband is lying and saying he's killed someone? Who does that? Who does that?" I remember when he eventually came home, he literally took his shirt off and he said, "Oh, it's got blood on it," and put it in the bin. He wouldn't talk about it.
Caroline Strawson:
So, as much as I was trying to talk about it, he was dismissive of me, "I'm so in shock. I can't talk about this." I said, "Well, should you go back to work because you're in shock?" Again, I knew the British Airways procedures, they were very good actually at supporting their staff if they'd been through any events on the airplane. We heard nothing from them over the next few days, and I remember saying when he eventually went back to work ... because again, I kept thinking, "This can't be true because it doesn't make sense," but he was looking me in the eye and telling me this, so what do I do? Keep saying, "You're a liar"?
Caroline Strawson:
I remember when he went back to work, I said, "You must tell your line manager that they didn't contact you for this," and I remember calling him and saying, "Have you spoken to your line manager?" He said, "Yes, and guess what? She survived and she thinks I'm this hero for saving her life." Again, I was thinking, "This isn't true, but is it true? But, it can't be true, but is it true?" Because he's my husband, why would my husband like to me and say he's killed somebody. Bear in mind, I'm an intelligent woman, but I was left questioning things. Is it real? Isn't it real? And I just literally lost myself. I was purely focusing in the end on being a mom because I didn't know what was real and what wasn't real because he would tell me these things, and there's lots of other snippets in my books about other things that he did as well that again left me wondering what was real. What was real and what wasn't?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
When you look back, and let's just take that one for a second, what would have been the other response?
Caroline Strawson:
I think the other response was to listen to my gut with all of that. So when say I was asking those questions, I knew it wasn't true. I knew it wasn't true, but again, knowing how the brain works about trying to keep me safe and not taking things in maybe that I didn't want to hear or feel because we had a home together, we've got children together. So when I look back, I wasn't in the space to do anything other than what I did because of the abuse, but when I look back and I think it wasn't really what I should have done in that moment, it's how I should have been going into that relationship. Had I gone into that relationship knowing my worth, I probably wouldn't have gotten married to him anyway, but even if something like that would have happened in the marriage, my reaction would have been very, very different because my starting point would've been different.
Caroline Strawson:
I would have been coming from a place of self-worth, self-esteem, not a place of lack. Not a place of not feeling worthy, not good enough in that, and again, the trauma of psychological abuse, I'd already got physiological brain changes happening in my hippocampus. My hypothalamus. I was addicted to being in that relationship. Every cell of my body started to get used to feeling on edge. And, I talk a lot about this with my clients about the addiction to a narcissist, and research has shown that it's 20 times harder to break an addiction to a narcissist than heroin because we're so entwined with them and that's why no contact is so difficult with a narcissist. It is so, so hard.
Caroline Strawson:
It was all of the cells of my body like an addiction, I needed the struggle. And what you might think, and people might think, "That sounds crazy. Surely you don't want to feel like that," but that was my version of normal. That was my version of safe. That was what I knew and of course, it became a habit to me to feel like that and then the moment if I started to move away from that, that felt scary to me. That felt dangerous to me. This was what I knew.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Let's say you had a client who called you and the client called you and told you this story. They're married, they have two children. They have friends at school. They have the whole setup. They own the home and the husband called your client, said this story and they say, "Caroline, I know he's lying and what should I do right now?" What would you do?
Caroline Strawson:
So the first thing I would make sure is that they were safe. I volunteer at my local domestic abuse charity and one of the big things that we talk about is safety. We've got to make sure that they're safe because if they're going to have a conversation potentially with their husband when they come home, or their wife because obviously it's non-gender specific here, they need to make sure that they are going to be safe. The conversation would really be led by them. What do you think you want to do now? Because at the end of the day, it's not my place to tell someone just to leave a relationship. They have to be ready to do that, and it's not just I would love to say to lots of people, "You need to leave and get out." I can't do that. They have to be ready.
Caroline Strawson:
Just like if someone would have said that to me, I wouldn't have believed them and I wouldn't have done that. We're all on our own pathway and we're all on our own journey. But what I would say is if you feel like this, then maybe it's time to think about an exit strategy at some stage and I would go through a lot of things that they could do without their partner knowing. Getting photocopies of everything, for instance. Bank accounts, passports. Knowing where all of these things are so that when they are ready, and that's the key here, when they are ready ... because certainly here in the UK, the stats are it takes seven times before somebody actually leaves a domestically abusive relationship. So that will seven times they report it, not forgetting all the other times that it's happened behind the scenes anyway.
Caroline Strawson:
That person has to be ready, so if someone contacted me in that moment and said, "I think he's lying," it's really listening to them in that moment and helping them with what they feel in that moment to get them back online into the front part of their brain so that they can make some calm and rational decisions as to what they feel is the best thing for them to do. Like now for instance with COVID-19 and a lot of people being in lockdown, and they are in abusive relationships. I'm not going to say to them, "You need to leave," because it's not necessarily the time. What we need to look at is safety is paramount but we can still create an exit strategy for when you are ready.
Caroline Strawson:
I will often get friends message me that, "My friend is in an abusive relationship. What can I do?" I say, "Just be there. Just be there for when they are ready to go that they know you are there." The isolation sometimes ... certainly for me, I became quite isolate in my marriage, as well, but it's really important in that moment really just to be heard and validated. That if someone contacted me and said that, just to listen to them, just this to validate their feelings, just to help them regulate themselves again for them to make the decisions. I can't make them for them. They have to be empowered enough to be able to do that, but they need to be able to do that safely and securely.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, that's great advice. I was thinking back the relationship I was in. The stakes were not as high as having children and home-ownership and all that, but I was very isolated. I was young and a teenager, and he was in his late 20s, so he had access to my parents and whether or not I was going to get sent away and all these different things. I remember one day he said that he was going to the grocery store and he didn't come back for two days. He told me he had been gone for four hours. We're using drugs, so there's also that but the convincing, "No, you have lost your mind, Ashley. I was only gone for four hours." I was like, "No, I was looking for you. I didn't know where you were."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That repeated, "You're losing your mind," and that moment where you know that it's not true, you know that that's not true. That can't be true, but also there's two things going on. Number one, you're not so certain of yourself. You know it's not true but you're also like, "Am I ..." There's a little voice that's questioning. Then, you can't prove it so you're like, "I can't prove that ... He says it." His arguments that degrade you make some sense to you. And the other thing is, and this was the biggest thing, if it's true, then what? What am I going to do? Okay, so I prove it. I'm not going to leave. I'm not ready to leave and that was the big thing. I knew I wasn't going to leave or ready to leave, so at a certain point you just move on because yeah, you know it's not true and he knows it's not true, but you can't prove it, and even if you could, then what are you going to do?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You're still there and it's easier to just gloss over it than it is-
Caroline Strawson:
This is when we have the physiological changes that start to happen in the brain. The hippocampus shrinks with the trauma of abuse and the amygdala, the fear center of our brain, becomes bigger. So when our hippocampus shrinks, this is why so many people start to get brain fog. They start to have that lack of focus because that memory center is shrinking and all of these things are happening to protect you because our brain's number one job is to protect us, to keep us safe, to keep us away from the biggest perceived pain. So, it shrinks in the size. The amygdala increases in size, which then means we become a lot more alert. We're a lot more living in our trauma responses and actually, a lot of people talk about three trauma responses, fight, flight and freeze. I'm sure your listeners will know that.
Caroline Strawson:
But there's actually a fourth trauma response within narcissistic abuse, with psychological abuse and abusive relationships, and that's actually the fawn trauma response. The fawn trauma response is just as we were saying there. It's almost like we become almost submissive in some respects. Or, we try and make it right because that's our version of trying to stay safe in a relationship. We'll be really, really nice then or we'll just ignore that then and we'll try and gloss over it and make it all okay because it's our brain thinking, "What do you need to do right now to stay safe? What is going to be the least pain for you right now? And, that's how we're going to act."
Caroline Strawson:
Very often, a majority of my client, they live in functional freeze really and they were in fawn when they were in the relationship and freeze, and then once they're out of that, as they move through, they can move back into sympathetic and fight or flight, but a lot of the time they're very much in that dorsal vagal aspect of the trauma response of freeze. Because that's literally them just getting through each second of every day. It's not them being weak. It's just their brain saying, "This is how you need to do just to get through your relationship. Just get through right now. Maybe it'll change but right now to help you survive, we're just going to go into shutdown."
Caroline Strawson:
And, that's why a lot of people don't see anyone, speak to anybody because literally their brain is just focusing on the major organs to survive, to stay safe because of the physiological changes that have happened.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Like you said, I'm a smart person. I would never have pictured myself being capable of where I ... You could much more easily see myself abusing drugs or alcohol than I could have the person I turned into simply as a result of the relationship. You definitely outline that correctly which is that basically you're waiting for the next thing. You also don't know because nothing makes sense, you don't know what's your fault and what isn't. You don't know what's real and what isn't. I remember we used to go to these festivals, and again I was on the lam from my family so I couldn't really call my parents. That would end up in a whole other thing, so he would leave me places to see what I would do and then come back six hours later in parking lot somewhere, somewhere I didn't know where we were, and create dependence.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
For us, it was drugs and different things, create dependence and all these things. If you ask anybody who knows me today, they would say, "There's no way she would let that happen." But when you need that esteem, that self-esteem, when there's some sort of pull ... For me, it was intertwined with drugs and alcohol which certainly complicates things but it could be intertwined with, "Okay, this is the next stage of life. I need to have children." Whatever that thing is, and you really do find yourself in this place where it's all well and good that you know the "truth", "This person is full of shit and I know it," but again, if your life is so intertwined, you have the choice to just somehow go on your gut, right? And blow the whole thing apart or just keep your mouth shut and keep going and hope that it doesn't happen again.
Caroline Strawson:
Correct, and again, with a lot my clients, I will really help them understand the trauma responses. Every single client I have who has been, like I said, in a toxic relationship or a narcissistic relationship have all the signs and symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. They're in that stage. They spend the majority of the time in sympathetic or that ventral vagal, the bottom of that emotional ladder in fight, flight or freeze. And it's really interesting talking to them, getting them to recognize because a lot of them ... And, I went through this as well. Just as you were saying, people look at me now and think, "God, I can't imagine you being in a relationship like that." I always wish I had a camera to show some of my clients and to show what I was like because this was not me then. It really, really wasn't.
Caroline Strawson:
I was like this different person, but what I understand now from all my training and everything is the brain's number one job is to keep us safe so how we react in these moments, it's not us being weak. It's our brain perception of perceived threat and danger of an abusive relationship. I know when I was having say my panic attacks once I was out of my marriage, that was me being in this sympathetic, the fight or flight. My body was mobilized ready. I was ready to react. And, I talk a lot with my clients about, "Is there a lion about to eat you?" A lot of them are, "No, there isn't now." But, you're still feeling as if you're in the trauma of that relationship.
Caroline Strawson:
So, it's really interesting really getting people to understand that awareness of where they are now in the present because they're still feeling all of those things, the traumas, somatic memory in their body from those past events that haven't finished processing and that's why many people still years and years later, they haven't truly healed say from narcissistic abuse because they haven't timestamped that memory in the hippocampus into the past. It's like it's still happening right now for them. They still have all of those somatic sensations and that's not a pleasant place for people to live their life. This is where we start to get stress-related illnesses.
Caroline Strawson:
I did a poll in my free group on Facebook the other day asking about what stress-related illnesses do you all have, and it was astounding. The number ... Fibromyalgia, migraines, IBS, thyroid issues, liver issues, adrenal fatigue literally, and as I started to talk to them about maybe why they had these, pretty much they thought it was just from being in the relationship but they didn't get the cortisol and the effect that trauma has on the body. And you will know this from talking intergenerational traumas, there's such now a lot of research now even about childhood trauma, the propensity for disease and illness later on. It doesn't mean you will because we can change the environment and everything, but if you don't do that and you're still holding that stored trauma, there is a higher likelihood that you are going to suffer with stress-related illnesses later on in life.
Caroline Strawson:
I absolutely know. I was talking to my cousin about this today as well actually. My mom suffered with rheumatoid arthritis from a very early age, about 32, and I am absolutely convinced that due to her childhood trauma with her father and the dynamics of her mom and dad and the domestic abuse, that that stored trauma had something to do with her getting rheumatoid arthritis at 32 years all. It was all stuck in her body and needed to come out somewhere, her immune system as well.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It's interesting when we talk about the trauma and all the stuff. We really talk about it in sobriety from the perspective of feelings and situations. We talk about it like you're driving a station wagon, and you're driving and just every time gnarly comes up, you throw that behind you, you throw that behind you. Right? Because you have to, because you got to keep driving. You just keep throwing it behind you and getting help, getting well, whatever form that looks like is like slamming on the brakes and all of that baggage coming, slapping you in the back of the head, going onto the dashboard and covering your vision. And because it's compounded because you haven't dealt with it, it's coming back all at once, the feelings are so intense even though those things happened in the past.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Because again, it's not timestamped because you didn't timestamp it. You threw it back there and here it comes. That's why we avoid it, and that is why I always say to people, "You can avoid it, but eventually there's no room so it's coming back. You can either have a smaller load come back ..." It's like my email inbox. I can ignore it until it's 15,000 emails or you can create new habits and changes and willingness to feel these things and remember that no matter how terrible you feel, it's not permanent.
Caroline Strawson:
I heard a great analogy of this awhile ago, actually, around some trauma training that I was having, and she was liking it to a swimming pool. We imagine our brain and our body, we're like a swimming pool. We have a certain capacity of that swimming pool, and through our life as things are happening, trauma, events, beach balls are coming into that swimming pool. They're all going into that swimming pool, and at some stage, that swimming pool is going to be full and it's going to start to overflow. It's going to start to be overwhelmed. So, it's thinking about the starting point for healing is we want to increase the capacity of that swimming pool, so even the beach balls that are already in there, then even if they're still there, we can still be a regulation level and cope with the beach balls that are still in there, and then process them one by one to try and obviously move our way through that.
Caroline Strawson:
Then also, any new beach balls that are starting to come in as we're moving forward, we learn to process and deal with them as we go along. This was something, again, from going through all of that trauma, just as you were saying, I shoved it to the back of my head. I can't deal with that now. Even when my mom died, it was almost like I didn't grieve for that for a long time. I didn't dare go there. I didn't want to open that up. Yeah, I was too busy trying to survive and earn money for my children. I can't go there. I'm not going there. It didn't mean it wasn't there. It didn't mean that in certain events in the present moments for me, I didn't react and have these physical somatic reactions to all of this, but it's really about increasing your capacity.
Caroline Strawson:
Because stuff is going to happen in our life, but if we don't increase that capacity then we're always going to be in that stressful state, and then as new things come, we want to be able to deal with them as we go along as well, because I know certainly for me, it was any new thing that came in, it was almost like, "Ugh, another thing. Goodness me, something else." It was like the end of the world because of course, my brain had been set by that stage with all this physiological changes that because my amygdala then had increased in size, even dropping the car keys for me was a major event and it was sending me into a trauma response of fight, flight or freeze. I was on this hyper-alert all of the time, or I was in hypo-arousal as well, just in shut down and not wanting to move or see anybody.
Caroline Strawson:
I always remember thinking that I would have quite happily become and agoraphobic during that time had I not got my children, because I had to take them to school because nobody else was going to do that. But if I didn't have children, I didn't want to see anyone or speak to anybody. But that was because my brain was saying, "Caroline, you need to go into shut down." And again, it wasn't me being weak. It was going into shut down for when I felt safer to start moving up and mobilizing again.
Caroline Strawson:
Again, we talk a lot about with people who have been in abusive relationships, addictions and they have a lot of shame and guilt around all of that because of their reactions to things, and I'm such a believer that when we educate people about their own body and why we react the way we that do, then we can have a bit of compassion and kindness to ourself and understanding, but then we've got to take responsibility and have intention of how we are going to move forward, however slow that is. It is about gently moving forward, processing any past traumas, stamping them into the past so we can think of them ... Because a thought is just a thought, but the words and pictures we say to ourself elicit our emotional responses in our body. That's what causes the problem for us, it's our emotional responses. It's what we're telling ourself all of the time that makes us the way.
Caroline Strawson:
It's not events that make us feel a certain way. It's the meaning we attach to those events and what we're telling ourselves. Normally a negative belief, "I am helpless. I am worthless. I am powerless. I am not enough." That's what causes us to have the somatic responses in our body as well. It's just really helping people slowly to recognize all of this, too. I didn't know when I came out of all of this, I was at a space of, "How am I going to heal from this? Is this is for the rest of my life now? Is this it?" I remember I was at a crossroads one day and I remember it was when I hit 40, and I remember thinking, "I've got two roads here. One, I can just stay how I am for the rest of my life and feeling sorry for myself and being angry at everybody, and that could be my life, waiting for a knight in shining armor to come and rescue me," because I grew up with Cinderella stories, happy ever afters.
Caroline Strawson:
"Or, I could rescue myself." The biggest gift I could give myself was to rescue myself, to heal my own deep inner wounds, and now we have a phenomemon in positive psychology called post-traumatic growth, which I have had following on from the complex PTSD, and I now realize that the growth I've had in my life and where I am now, I would never have had that had I not gone through those traumatic experiences. So of course I wish my mom was still here, of course, but being in that narcissistic relationship, I actually have incredible gratitude actually because he just shone a spotlight on the inner wounds that were already there. He was just really good at shining a light on those for me to recognize, for me to heal to live the rest of my life feeling more joy and connection whereas had I stayed in that marriage, had I just flitted between relationships even, I would never have healed those deep inner wounds of lack of self-worth, not feeling good enough, lack of self-esteem.
Caroline Strawson:
So actually I feel incredible gratitude for that, but again, it took a lot of deep inner work to get to that stage.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Absolutely, absolutely. Stay tuned to hear more in just a moment.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Hi, it's Ashley, your beloved host. When I'm not hosting The Courage To Change: A Recovery Podcast, I'm running the recruiting department at Lion Rock Recovery. We are always looking for amazing licensed mental health counselors, along with various other sales and operations positions that pop up from time to time. The Lion Rock culture is one of collaboration, support and flexibility. Our employees work from home offices all over the country, utilizing technology to connect to one another. We are always hiring. So, if you want to have the best job ever, check out our open positions and apply at www.LionRockRecovery.com/about/careers.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Tell me about parenting the children of the narcissist who you're healing from, who leaves you ... How did that go? What is that like?
Caroline Strawson:
It was a challenge because a lot of people think, "Well, you're out of the marriage now. Surely it should get better."
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
They don't have kids.
Caroline Strawson:
Yeah, well if you have kids, it actually gets worse because of course if you're coming from that place still of not feeling good enough, they know what your Achilles Heel is and that's being a great mom, so they're going to say all of those things to make you not feel a great mom, which is going to elicit all of these emotional responses in your body. Again, it was a challenge and it took a lot of intention and daily practice of sitting in feeling the way I did, understanding I'm feeling like this right now. Why am I feeling like? What am I telling myself right now as to why I am feeling like this? When I started to peel back that onion, it was I feel like I'm not a good mother, and I had to challenge that and get curious about that that actually I am, I'm a great mom.
Caroline Strawson:
But I was at the start a very codependent mom, so I had to heal my inner wounds to then break that cycle for my children. I never badmouthed my ex in front of my children. I did not want to do that at all. I wanted them to make their own decisions. They were very young to start off with, and then as they have got older and I see this a lot with my clients, they get so worried that their children are going to be psychologically abused by their ex-partner. Yes, that can potentially happen but if you can empower your children to have a healthy sense of self so that they recognize other people's behavior is never a reflection of them. It is merely a projection onto them from their own past experiences.
Caroline Strawson:
I was religious in teaching my children this so that they recognized that. They don't see their dad that much. They hardly see him at all. They have a nice relationship with him that works for all of them, but my children absolutely know ... He's got another family now as well ... absolutely know that their dad not seeing them is absolutely no reflection of their worth because they know how worthy they are. They understand their dad loves them to his capacity and that their dad is just projecting onto them. It is no reflection of them, and for me that is the biggest gift. The reason why I know that is my daughter had an incident at school about six months ago and someone was being quite mean to her at school and she came out and she was really upset and I said to her, "What do you want to do about that?"
Caroline Strawson:
She said, "I'm really upset, Mom, but I know that she has stuff going on at home so I know her behaving like that isn't about me. She's just taking frustrations out on me that she has going on at home." She was 11 years old when she told me that and I was like, "Aw, I was in my late 30s before I knew that." I just thought, "Wow, you know what ..." And again, I felt gratitude for what I'd been through because had I not been through that, I'd of probably still been parenting my children, "No, you can't feel like that. I'm going into the school. I'm going to say something." Or say, "You need to say something back." But, I didn't.
Caroline Strawson:
She knew it was not about her, and that's why both of them ... I have a son and a daughter ... I know ... Touch wood ... neither of them will end up in toxic relationships because they know their sense of worth. They know just as you were saying, they know their place on this planet. They know simply for breathing, for being who they are, they are good enough. They're amazing for who they are. Not because of grades. Not because of how they look or anything else, just for being themselves. And I'll often say things to my son and my daughter, but my son normally answers back more. I'll say, "I'm so proud of you." And he'll always go, "Why? I haven't done anything." I said, "Just for being you. Just for being you. You're amazing and I love you."
Caroline Strawson:
That, for me, is the gift I can give them from the stuff I have gone through, that you can break that cycle. And it is, it's been a challenge. For me, when I'm with my clients, it's we don't focus on the narcissist. We don't focus on what they may say or do or act. What we focus on is what can you do? How can you empower yourself and in turn, break a cycle and empower your children so they can still have maybe a relationship with their mother or their father as a narcissist, but they recognize that their behavior is no reflecting of them? Absolutely not. That they are amazing for who they are and this is just their projection to their capability of parenting the child.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You've made this career, this comeback of healing and written this book about divorce being your superpower. They obviously were around when your home was repossessed. When we look at not speaking negatively about our partners, and I think people even in relationships where their ex is not a narcissist, but in this case, how do you or did you think about talking about what was happening with saying divorce is my superpower like, "Oh, you divorced my dad ..." I mean, they know about that, and then this label, "Oh, Dad's a ..." So, in someways that label is negative. How do you answer the question?
Caroline Strawson:
It's a really great question because I think even if you spoke to my children about their dad being a narcissist, they don't see it in a negative way as such. Because it just doesn't affect them. They don't feel, because I'm very calm and regulated. I have an amazing relationship with them. They see what their dad is like with messages to them and they saw what their dad was like when we were ... Particularly my son because he was older, but they see how him and his new wife and family are towards me. I don't need to say anything. They see it anyway. But what I want to teach them really is that we have choice in our reactions. We get to choose how we react to that, so if I hear anything, I could react and say, "Ugh" and call him or message him or anything else like that.
Caroline Strawson:
But I choose not to because I know there's no point to do that anyway because he is who he is. For instance, when we had the house repossessed and we had to move house, again, I explained that mommy can't afford to stay here anymore. I didn't then need to say, "Because daddy isn't doing anything." I just focused on what me, what I know. I said, "Mommy can't afford it. It's just my wage. I can't afford to stay here." I remember the day that it got repossessed, I'd got a rental property not far from where we currently lived so they didn't have to move schools or anything, and I remember they went to school in the morning and I had got two friends who helped me move. Literally we moved in that day, and when I picked them up from school, both of their bedrooms were organized and the lounge was organized. It was really important for me that the spaces that they came into felt homely.
Caroline Strawson:
Literally, it wasn't a traumatic experience. Of course for me, I felt really ashamed that I had my home repossessed and everything else, but I focused on I needed to create a home environment. And again, what I teach my children with that is, "You know what? It doesn't matter that we moved from a four-bed detached house to a three-bed semi-detached house because actually it's the people inside that make it a home. It's not about the bricks and mortar. It's about the love and the people inside." Actually, we're in a different house now because I've remarried now, but we have really happy memories of that house because it was the three of us.
Caroline Strawson:
I remember I bought a kitchen table and I put it together myself. So they could see mom being independent, building and doing and creating. They've seen me go on. They both go to private school now, which I pay for ... Solely pay for ... so they've seen what hard work can do. Without me, I don't need to say anything about him. I just focus on me and my relationship with my children.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Have you had any response from him about the book?
Caroline Strawson:
Yes. So of course, when it came out, I've changed all the names in there. And I think I called him James in there, I think it was. He didn't say anything for about a month. There was nothing, and then my son came back and said, "Oh, Dad called me Harry today." I was like, "Okay, then." But, they didn't say anything else. There was nothing else said. That was it, and then I had an email where he signed off James.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, man.
Caroline Strawson:
The thing is I know what my ex is like. He won't take me to court, and I put a lot of disclaimers in there, and actually all the stuff I did put in about him, I have proof for and some of it was already in the public domain anyways so there isn't really anything he could do. And actually, the book wasn't about slating him necessarily anyway. It was really about my feelings around being in a relationship like that, and again, it was a lot of other stuff about my mom and surviving on my own and my own journey through healing as well. Even now, 11 years later, I was telling my cousin this today, I had an email from him ... He's blocked on everything. Even now, he's blocked on everything but I even had an email because I put something online the other day about his tattoo.
Caroline Strawson:
Basically, I was talking about love bombing and just giving an example because I always think if people know that I've been through that, I'm one of you, I've been there, I know what it's like and I think people can relate to that more as well, just like yourself. I put about him getting a tattoo and just saying, "For me, I was like wow, he's got a tattoo. He must really like me," but obviously this is a red flag and it's real love bombing. And I had an email from him about two weeks ago saying, "Stop lying about me on social media. I got a tattoo a year after we met and it was because you need reassurance. That's why I got it."
Caroline Strawson:
I haven't replied to it because there's no need to because I know why he has to say that. He has to say that because his new wife will be there thinking, "What? You got a tattoo only a month? Well, what about me?" So, he has to say something to appease his new wife, and actually his first wife, I'm actually really good friends with now. We're great friends on Facebook and she's lovely. Really nice. She's one of my biggest cheerleaders in what I do, and actually probably she probably took longer to get over him and they didn't have children, then I did as well. Even 11 years on, they still don't change. There's no research out there whatsoever that a narcissist can recover. There isn't any research. There's none. None at all.
Caroline Strawson:
So, there isn't any medical research to say that or not because the issue with a narcissist or narcissistic personality disorder is they have to recognize that there is an issue to even go and get a diagnosis. Of course, no narcissist will say, "Hey, I wonder if I'm a narcissist. I'm going to go and see someone to get a diagnosis." They don't do that. There are some people out there, there's some people on Instagram that are self-professed narcissists and it's actually quite interesting reading some of their posts and everything, but from a healing perspective, again, they have real deep inner wounds. They're not born a narcissist. This comes, again, from childhood. It can be the golden child or a complete lack of love, which is what my ex-husband's was. Then, they are created like all of this.
Caroline Strawson:
But again, I feel incredible sadness really for my ex-husband because he's never really going to know what true love because there's not that depth there because he's still seeking. A codependent and a narcissist actually come from the same place, that hole in the soul, not feeling good enough, but a narcissist will expect someone else to try and make them feel like that whereas a codependent will think, "Oh, I must be like that to show I am good enough." So again, coming from two different perspectives but actually from a similar starting point.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What do you think about people who have narcissistic traits?
Caroline Strawson:
Again, to be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, there are nine traits listed to diagnosis someone with NPD and you have to have six or more. Somebody could be six, somebody could be nine. Not everybody has narcissistic traits. We all have some kind of narcissistic traits in us but just because someone takes, say, a lot of selfies, that doesn't make them a narcissist. I think in our society today, the word narcissist is so over-used. Everybody's ex is a narcissist if it ends badly and it absolutely isn't the case, and actually it negates away from people who have been true victims of narcissistic abuse because it makes them feel like they can't say anything because people will just think, "Well, just get over it. You're out of it now so it's absolutely fine."
Caroline Strawson:
It can happen with a narcissistic parent, work colleagues. I just had a client who had a narcissistic business partner, so we had to do a lot of working through that. How do we manage that when we're coming away from all of that. They can come at you from any direction, but we all have narcissistic traits and I think it's recognizing ... Again, we give too much emphasis to other people. When somebody comes and messages me, for instance, and says, "Is my partner a narcissist," and they'll give me this breakdown of a couple of behaviors, and in isolation it's really difficult to say. I can't message back and go, "Yes, they're a narcissist." What I do say is, and I normally send them a video I've got on YouTube actually called Have I got Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome? I will send them that because it's about them and its' about what do you feel in that relationship?
Caroline Strawson:
Do you feel like your gut is saying, "Hm, that's not right?" Do you feel like you're losing yourself? Do you feel like you're questioning yourself? Are you becoming a shadow of yourself? Lots of these things because we know that for fact. I had a client the other week who came to see me and she'd got about four sides of A4 paper written with sentences that he had said to her. Now in isolation, you could make excuses for all of them. He was tired. He'd been at work. Put together, we start to paint a picture of somebody, but if you start to say to somebody, "Oh, I think my husband or my wife is a narcissist. They said this to me," and someone might go, "Well, maybe they're tired." Then you start questioning yourself so you don't bother saying anything to anybody else then.
Caroline Strawson:
So, for me a lot of this is about education. It starts with you. How do you feel in that relationship? Do you feel you're in a healthy relationship? But a lot of people don't know what a healthy relationship is because our healthy relationships are modeled from when we were a child, and if our parents ... Again, on average, they're all doing the best that they can, but if that isn't a healthy relationship and then we have our beliefs formed in childhood that become the blueprint of who we are, then we may not be in a healthy relationship then ourselves. So just as you were saying, it's breaking that cycle but it comes with awareness.
Caroline Strawson:
The biggest thing I talk to people about is having that awareness and that starting point of where you are and the intention that you want to heal, and one of the biggest things is that you are deserving because so many people think they're not deserving to heal. Of course, you are. Everybody deserves to live a life filled with joy and love and connection. But we have to work at that, because our brain's number one job is just to keep us safe so we've got to be intentional about everything else. And that can sometimes bring us a lot of pain and discomfort because we're processing past traumas.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Can you tell the audience a little bit about narcissists for people who aren't familiar with the DSM like we are? Can you talk a little bit about what the traits are, what the tipping points are?
Caroline Strawson:
So, there's nine different traits. They're things like there can be a sense of grandiosity. There's a whole host. The one thing I always say to people, though, for me above anything else ... because we can make it more complicated as such ... it's empathy. Does your partner have empathy? The example I use is if you were sat on the floor and you told your partner that you were really ill, how would they react to you? And then how would they react to you if they had an audience of your family or their family there? Is there a difference, and people will know this if they have been in a narcissistic relationship ... I know my ex-husband was very different around other people. I remember sometimes having my friends around and he'd suddenly start hoovering, so they'd all be going, "Aw, he's such a good husband. He's so nice."
Caroline Strawson:
Yeah, when they were gone, that was it. For me, empathy. We can go through all the different traits in the DSM, but for me even the DSM with that, there's different types of narcissists. I tend to talk a lot about the overt narcissist. That's the traditional one we would probably think of. That person who walks into the room and demands attention, that they are like, "Look at me. I deserve to be here." These delusions of grandiosity. The most dangerous type of narcissist is the covert narcissist because they will act like a victim. Poor me. Feel sorry for me, and they will say all of these things, "Oh, poor me. I'm the victim in all of this," and that can make it very challenging then if you are the partner or ex-partner of one of those. My ex-husband is a covert narcissist. If you met him, you'd think, "What a charming man. He's so nice. He's lovely."
Caroline Strawson:
And that makes it even more frustrating obviously because if you're then saying, "Well no, he's like this and he's like this," and people will think, "Well, hold on. He seems really, really nice." Because of course, that's the demeanor that they have as well. So really, it's looking from the perspective of how do you feel being in that relationship? Are you questioning yourself all of the time? Are you going crazy? Are you losing yourself? Do you feel like you are being isolated? Have you got control over the money? Empathy is the key for a narcissist. They have zero, zero empathy. They can fake it to start with, to get their own narcissistic supply, but the big thing is that lack of empathy. They don't have any empathy. It's all about getting that supply.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
How does that differ from sociopath if they don't have empathy?
Caroline Strawson:
A sociopath won't necessarily have any feelings around all of that, whereas the narcissist will still very much be able to cry and show emotion and look like they are showing emotion and they are aware of all of that as well.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Got it, okay. Yeah, it's an incredible story. Just when you were talking about the sitting on the floor, I was thinking of your miscarriages and what that must have been like.
Caroline Strawson:
It was. I remember telling him, I remember on a couple of them, almost crying for the loss of my baby but the loss of where's the reaction? Where's the empathy there? Even on one of my miscarriages, I had to go and have a D&C and my mom came with me. Not my husband. My mom came with me. It was never discussed. It was just like another event in the day. "Oh, you're back home now." Almost like I could have been shopping or something. There's that deep, again, "Is it me? Have I done something wrong? Am I not good enough? Is he being like this because of me?" So I had to really, again with the healing, really recognize that it wasn't because of me. He was being that to me.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right.
Caroline Strawson:
Very, very different.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing now in your Rapid Transformational work?
Caroline Strawson:
Yeah, so again, that's been a journey. I became an accredited divorce and breakup coach. To be honest, I was really shying away from trauma, narcissistic abuse because again, it's overused word and I thought, "Gosh, do I really want to go down that route?" But the universe was telling me something and I obviously went down that route. Again, through my own training and academia, I'm in the final part of a masters in positive psychology and coaching psychology, so a lot of my work is using positive psychology interventions, as well, which is the study of what makes people happy, and the post-traumatic growth aspect of healing from trauma. And then, I use EMDR which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which has been incredibly powerful for my clients with helping with that stored trauma.
Caroline Strawson:
Because again, they don't end up where they are for no reason. There are lots of reasons for that, so EMDR has been great and I do it all online, as well. I have a great tool that I use. I use cross-tapping as well, so really helping process any stuck trauma that people have. And then, Rapid Transformational Therapy is a combination of hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, CBT and NLP and that actually gets to the root cause. So this is all about your subconscious beliefs there. If you have a subconscious belief of "I am not worthy", where's that come from? In an RTT session, which is about two and a half hours long, we go right to the root cause of all of that. We do some inner child healing, some re-parenting. We go on this journey, and then you get your own transformational recording. It's about 15-20 minutes to listen to every single day, because the brain works on repetition.
Caroline Strawson:
So 60% of the success of RTT is the session itself about what comes up and how we gravitate all around all of these scenes that come up, and then 40% of the success is listening to it every single day then as well so that you find yourself where you would normally react one way, because you've been listening to the recording, you start to react the other. Really what I want to do I reset people's starting points, so we're getting rid of any trauma that has been stored from any past experiences. And again, I've worked with people where there's been child abuse, rape, kidnap, addictions, all kinds of things in the past, so we're really working on clearing that and then we want to upgrade that subconscious belief.
Caroline Strawson:
Because if we don't work on both, what I found was if I was working just on a subconscious belief, great, they feel worthy but if they've still got that stored trauma and they have a trigger, they're still going to feel like it. And then, if we didn't work on clearing the trauma ... Sorry, if we then didn't work on the belief and the clearing of the trauma, then we can clear the trauma but if they still got a belief of "I am not worthy", they're still going to stop themselves doing stuff. They're going to procrastinate. They're not going to get to the next level in their life or their business or their job and anything like that. So for me, combining them both together along with positive psychology and education ... So, I teach my clients the Polyvagal theory which is all about our vagus nerve. When they understand all of this, I'm such a believer that the starting point, they get why their body has behaved the way it has for all of these years, why they ended up in that relationship, why there were addicted to this, why they eat so much.
Caroline Strawson:
All of these different things coming together, they have an understanding that actually it's only their brain and their body trying to protect them, but it's coming from a place of the protection based on past experiences. All the files that are there, that's why we need to react like that but it's getting curious and questioning all of that and thinking, "Well okay, I get why you reacted like that but do you need to react like that now? Do you need to react getting angry now or running away or going into freeze? Do you need to react or are you safe now?" We're increasing the capacity so they can cope better and then teaching them ... Everybody that finishes working with me, they got a toolkit really for the restaurant of their life so that as the beach balls still start to come in, they can process them as they go along as well.
Caroline Strawson:
But along with, particularly because I work with a lot of trauma, but those then with narcissistic abuse practically of how to go no contact, how to parallel parent because you can't co-parent with a narcissist. How do you parallel parent? So practical things then as well about how do you manage a narcissist in your life and stay sane.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. You are absolutely a delight and amazing. Where can people go to find more information, read your book? Where do they find you?
Caroline Strawson:
So, my book is on Amazon, Divorce Became my Superpower. You can get that on Amazon. Facebook is always a good place to catch me. I've got my business page, Caroline Strawson. I have a free group on Facebook, Divorce and Breakup Support After Narcissistic Abuse. I have a membership called The Self-Healer's Circle where I do lessons and lives and teachings and meditations in that group. I've got my YouTube channel where they can go and watch lots of things just to, again, dip their toe in, maybe "Have I been in a narcissistic relationship?" And then, Instagram. And then my website, which is CarolineStrawson.com. Lots of places that people can find me, drop me a message and again, I always try and help anybody that's messages me. I get people might not be able to work one-to-one with me, but I've tried to, again, even structure my business that I have free stuff. I have minimal payment stuff. I have one-to-one work because for me it's really important. I've been there.
Caroline Strawson:
I know what it's like to have complex PTSD, be at rock bottom, so even if I can do a tiny little thing for somebody and it helps someone on their journey, then for me it's worth it.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
That's wonderful. That's wonderful, and it's just a delight. You're a wealth of knowledge and I love how much you've put into your healing. It's just a beautiful thing when people take the situation they find themselves in, and I know what that feels like to say, "Okay, I can either die here. This is it. Or, I can make a different decision." Making that different decision is the scariest thing ... Dying, that's the known, right? It's the other thing that's terrifying and you made that decision. Amazing. Amazing. Truly amazing, Carolina. Thank you so much and we'll put all the information in our show notes and can't wait to see all the amazing things that you continue to do for people.
Caroline Strawson:
Thank you. Really appreciate it. It's been lovely. Lovely to meet you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You as well. Thank you.
Caroline Strawson:
Thank you.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
This podcast is sponsored by Lion Rock Recovery. Lion Rock provides online substance abuse counseling where clients can get help from the privacy of their own home. They're accredited by the Joint Commission and sessions are private, affordable and user-friendly. Call their free helpline at 800-258-6550 or visit www.LionRockRecovery.com for more information.