Why Most People, Including the Victim, Fail to Recognize Narcissistic Abuse

Are you being abused and don’t know it? Not only is society blind to narcissistic abuse, but so are most victims.

In this episode, Lisa Sonni joins me to talk about why narcissistic abuse is so difficult to spot, even to the victims, and the role this plays in the difficulty of getting help.

To learn how to break your silence and society’s denial in this week’s podcast extra interview with Lisa. You get access to this resource along with twenty other amazing interviews with experts like Dr. Les Carter and Bill Eddy. Get that help today: substack.com/@breakingfreenarcabuse

Resources Mentioned:
More on Hannah Neeleman & the Ballerina Farms controversy: https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-sunday-times-magazine/article/meet-the-queen-of-the-trad-wives-and-her-eight-children-plfr50cgk

How He Gets Into Her Head by Don Hennessey: https://amzn.to/3WICNET

How I Met, Married, and Got Scammed by a Gold Digger TikTok series: https://www.tiktok.com/@kerrymcavoyphd/playlist/Gold%20Digger%20Series-7391205894526176031?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

New Powerful You Group Coaching: https://kerrymcavoyphd.com/new-powerful-you/

Follow Dr. McAvoy!

• YouTube: @kerrymcavoyphd
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• Facebook: @kerrymcavoyphd
• E-mail: hello@kerrymcavoyphd.com
• Newsletter: https://breakingfreenarcabuse.substack.com/ 
• Website: https://www.breakingfreenarcissisticabuse.com/

Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D., a mental health specialist and author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships, deconstructing narcissism, and understanding various other mental health-related issues. Her memoir, Love You More: The Harrowing Tale of Lies, Sex Addiction, & Double Cross, gives an uncensored glimpse into the dynamics of narcissistic abuse.

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Transcript

EP 78 Why Most People, Including the Victim, Fail to Recognize Narcissistic Abuse

Kerry: Abuse isn’t that easy to recognize, even when you’re in it, but certainly not from the outside. Today, Lisa Sonni joins me to talk about what to do if you discover that you’re in a toxic situation and you don’t have community support.

Not everyone recognizes abuse when they see it, and often, we don’t even know that we’re being abused when in the midst of it. And there’s been a recent controversy that you may have been paying attention to, about Hannah Nieland or something like that, but it’s Ballerina Farms. We tend to call her the woman from Ballerina Farms.

What captivated me about her story was how much I could relate to what she was going through, even remembering what that felt like to be in the midst of something. I knew it wasn’t perfect; I knew maybe the relationship was hard, but I certainly wouldn’t have considered it abuse. In fact, there was a moment near the end of our relationships— and I’m talking after I already knew that my ex was trying to get as much money from me as he could. He had been cheating a lot, aware of how promiscuous he was being, and how disinterested he was being around me or with me. But we happened to be at one of our properties, enjoying the pool, and near the end of that, we encountered some vacationers. And we’re chatting them up, and I was watching my ex talking to this vacationer, and the vacationer stopped both of us and said, “Look at the way she looks at you. If only a woman would look at me the way she looks at you and loves you.” And I knew that this person who was watching us had no idea what it was like to live on the inside of this relationship. To the world, I looked beautiful. People thought I had a fairytale relationship, like I had found the new love of my life. They had no idea the nightmare that I was surviving. Absolutely true, I think we all...

Lisa: ...in the relationship, there’s a point where you don’t know that you’re being abused. And I know when I look back, I would have said that I was happy. We were also seen as a power couple. We worked in the same industry, both in senior executive roles. I would have said that I was happy. If you had looked at my Instagram, you would see smiling pictures, and everybody said, “You’re so lucky. You’re so lucky.” And I think there were aspects where I thought, yeah, I am lucky, except for the whole abuse thing. Except I didn’t call it abuse. That actually didn’t really happen until I was already out of the relationship.

I can see how many people are in the relationship, don’t know that it’s abuse. If other people do question, like, “Are you sure that’s okay, the way that they treat you?” You will defend that person. And sometimes you don’t have people in your life that think it, or if you bring your relationship problems to friends or family, you might be gaslit, “Are you sure you’re not making too much of it?” Or, “I don’t know him like that, so are you sure you’re not overreacting? He’s not that bad, get over it,” or, “Marriage is about compromise,” or whatever people say that convinces you that it’s not abuse.

Kerry: What was the general feel of your world about your relationship? Do you have a sense of whether or not they liked him or didn’t like him?

Lisa: So I knew that none of my friends liked him. I knew that they tolerated it and accepted him. That said, we worked opposite schedules, so he wasn’t around very often, but they knew him. And in fact, my best friend’s husband used to be his friend, and he would say they grew apart. What made them grow apart was that they grew up, and my friend’s husband no longer participated in the party boy lifestyle. He just was like, “I have nothing in common with this person anymore.” But my friends didn’t like him; they didn’t think that he was necessarily the best fit for me.

My family was much more quiet about it, which I respect in some ways, in that if they had told me how they really felt at the time, I would have been upset and would have withdrawn. They didn’t know that it was abuse because I lied about what was really going on, but they didn’t like the way he treated me. And there were a lot of things that happened that both of my parents now are like, “Yeah, that,” and “I remember that.” And “I remember watching and I hadn’t thought,” and I felt now in hindsight, I’m being told by everyone, “We never thought that person was the right person for you.” No one told me. And again, I get it. I wouldn’t have listened. I know that about myself. I don’t say I wish they had told me.

Kerry: Yeah, that’s one thing people often say is, how supportive is your environment? You should use them as information, but we can’t always use that information. I know that I deliberately withheld information, that I curated what I shared so that what you saw was what I wanted you to see. I wasn’t letting you see the rest of it because it put me in a terrible position of, “What do I do if you disagree with me and I’m not ready to follow through on your advice? I’m going to then lose your support if I don’t do what you think.” I think that’s one of the tragedies that happen around abuse victims is that we unknowingly put them in a greater bind, in more pressure, even though we actually technically care and love about them or we’re trying to help them. We make things worse. Like here’s...

Lisa: ...what you should do, right? You should leave, and I can help you, and why are you with someone like this? And then you stay, and then you start feeding into that, like, maybe she likes it, maybe it’s not that bad, maybe they just had an argument, and it gets downplayed.

I remember this was such a significant moment, it was 2021 or 2022, I forget, I had dinner with two friends that I used to work with, back when I was in my situation, and I told them for the first time the story of the assault, the big main assault that happened for me, and how I went to work the next day. And at that point, I worked with one of them in my office, she reported to me. And when we got to work in the morning, we just, you know, “Morning, blah blah,” and we did a little bit of work, went for coffee, came back. And when I’m telling her the story, the night before I was assaulted. And the next day I just went to work and got my coffee and had a good time. Normal day. And she was like, “I can’t...” but she cried. We... she cried at the dinner table. She couldn’t believe that I felt so alone that I couldn’t share that. Not that we were even... she was also my employee, I realized, but we were friends. I couldn’t share it. The only people that knew what had happened to me were my two best friends. Not my sister, my mother, nobody. I lied to everybody. And even my friends never called it abuse. We understood it was an assault, but I was like, “No, no, he’s going to apologize.” I was still defending him right after he nearly cost me my life. I was defending him. I understand how it all plays out, but I know why we feel that way right in your face, and you don’t see it.

Kerry: No, no, you don’t. I didn’t see it either. And here I’d even had graduate school training, it’s not intensively focused on domestic violence. It just is not. It’s too much about psychology that you have to know that you can’t make room for that. You’re just trying to master the techniques of therapy. But I did take an extra class specifically on it to learn more about it. But here’s the thing. We didn’t cover emotional abuse. We primarily focused on physical abuse and then the dynamic of the mental health of the abuse cycle. We didn’t know the definition of gaslighting until recently. I had never heard of DARVO; now, maybe that is covered these days because it might be a psychological technique that’s been integrated into the work, but there are a lot of things that I had no concept of. So here I’m in this emotionally abusive relationship, and definitely, we didn’t talk about coercive control. I hope that has massively changed.

I just thought that this was what relationships were like, and I had had a history of seeing not really healthy relationships. I think that’s the other thing that’s really hard, and maybe that’s even what’s tying in with the Ballerina Farm situation, is that whether she’s abused or not abused, we don’t know. But regardless of that, we live in a society where there’s one class of people who have more power than the second class, and that is men have more power than women do. And I’m not saying all abuse victims are women, by far. I know many, many, many men who also get abused. But yes, primarily, women are more vulnerable in these situations because of this inequity in the culture.

So in my world, the world I grew up in, women were expected to put up with moody, temperamental, difficult men. And so when I was experiencing that in my relationship, I just thought, “Oh, well, this is what everybody goes through.” I didn’t realize that there could be anything different. I think what’s so interesting about that, and I know it’s...

Lisa: ...like a huge topic, but the idea that I grew up so different than you, right? Different generation, different family. I grew up in the suburbs, you grew up on a farm. So different. And we grew up to be different things. But what we both grew up with was this idea of men. And what’s interesting to me is, where did I learn about men? Obviously through my own interactions with them, but my father, my brother, boyfriends over time, it was like, this is how men are, this is how men are, this is what men are like. And so it became, well, men yell, and men are highly emotional, and men have no control, and men are filled with rage, and men are going to grab you. It’s just what men do. And it’s so interesting here we are in 2024, and people don’t say that about men.

Men have said that to me my whole life. That’s all I’ve ever heard about men. So it normalized it. I’m not here to bash men. It’s what became normal. So why didn’t we know it was abuse? Because all men are like this, which is not true, but that’s what they’re told by the very men that are in some ways doing it.

But I didn’t have a stream of abusive relationships, just this big one. Before that, they weren’t abusive.

Kerry: Right? In fact, I would say most of my adulthood, really living with Brad and being in the community they was in, I saw a lot of women coming into power, men respecting women, and I just thought, “Oh, well, okay, that was sort of my childhood experience. Yeah, okay, maybe women can’t have positions of leadership at church. Maybe we’re not allowed to really teach men at church, but that’s sort of a spiritual thing, not really a community thing.” Yet I would have to say I still was in a way—I don’t know if I’ve ever said this to you before—I kind of lived a trad wife life.

I made my own bread, I learned how to spin yarn, I was making quilts, I was doing—now, I also was working two days a week, but if I could have, I wouldn’t have been working at all. I would have wanted to be home and running the house and doing all these really incredible projects. I canned, by the way. I did my own wallpapering. I loved doing all of that and really enjoyed it. And I would have liked to have made it more of a focus of my life. But what I didn’t appreciate, and it made me super vulnerable in the second relationship when I didn’t have a good man that I was in a relationship with, is that you start to take that, and it can go too far, and it also can create a sense of isolation because it makes it really difficult when you put that in the backdrop of, “This is what gender roles look like, whether it should be or shouldn’t be.” Then when does it become abuse? That becomes hard, and to even the point when I had a bad moment, and I called home to say, “I think we might be getting a divorce,” and then I later, a few weeks later, called and said, “I think we might be working it out because I’m having this idea that, hey, I have more to lose if I leave this relationship than if I stayed.” I think that’s what people don’t appreciate, is when I started to separate, I realized he meant that there’s going to be mass destruction. We’re going to all massively lose here. I’m going to walk out really damaged by separating. So when I went back, my thought was maybe not only could we recover the relationship, but maybe I could recover my financial integrity in this relationship.

And I’ll never forget, I called home, and the comment I got was, “Oh, you’re not going to be one of those women, are you?” Oh my God. So I know. So here I am. No. So what do you do with that? You end up feeling like I’m on my own. No one gets this. They don’t really appreciate what I’m going through, and I’m certainly not getting helpful advice. There are several junctures in that relationship where I actively reached out for help and didn’t get help. And I was either pushed off or brushed off or ignored. And I keep thinking, what would have happened if somebody had done something different, had said something to me? Like even in your story, what would have happened if your family said, “Lisa, we just don’t think this is a good match. Regardless of the abuse piece, we just don’t see this with you.” I know you said you couldn’t have heard it, but would it have helped? Would it have...

Lisa: ...helped? I mean, I can only speculate, and I feel strongly that, for me, it wouldn’t have, and I don’t want to speak for others. I think that maybe others it would have helped. No, at the time, I’d never been more convinced of anything—that he was the one. He was my everything. I would have done anything. I did do anything for him. Absolutely anything that he asked me to do. I blindly signed things regarding a business venture that he wanted, that I was just like, “I have faith in you.” I didn’t feel coerced. Having said that, I did know at the time that if I said no, that he would hammer me until I said yes. So it was easier to just not ask a lot of questions. In hindsight, I should have asked a lot more questions, but I still would have done it. I would have. My parents could have told me they didn’t like him, and all that would have made me do was feel uncomfortable when we were all together at family things, but I knew, you know, like my sister, they would be the most clear person in my life that was definitely like, “I don’t think he’s for you, but if you’re happy, I’ll never bring it up again.” And I knew that that feeling stayed, and that she never brought it up again, but I knew that it didn’t change. And then when I was out, it became like I was watching that situation, and I was thinking this in the moment. Sometimes I do wish that the specifics that they were talking about, the examples they would have brought to me, but I know me, I would have then brought those issues to him, maybe even saying, “So and so family member said this,” which is not a good thing. It would have gotten me into more arguments with him and made him rationalize more behavior. So, I mean, it wouldn’t have helped me leave. I think really what would have helped me is awareness of abuse in general prior to even being of age to be in relationships, honestly, or at least being a teenager, knowing what to look for. That’s why I think the education at any age—learning about what abuse actually is, learning how to trust your instincts and know the feelings in your body and boundaries just generally—so that when you find yourself in a bad situation, you recognize it. Like this idea of submission into a relationship, like in a trad wife sort of style. I think that’s a breeding ground for abuse because you’re signing up for a power imbalance.

There’s another trad wife. Couldn’t tell you her name. She made a video, and I commented on it because I really appreciated one specific thing she said. She was talking about five things you need to know if you’re going to be a trad wife. And one of the things was that you need to marry a genuinely loving and generous man because that’s, in her view, of course, that’s the real leader. If you’re going to let a man lead you, he needs to be truly kind and loving. Because she herself recognizes that this format of a relationship can be abusive. So to be careful, because a lot of the men that seek a trad wife seek it for power. She was quite clearly saying that in her relationship there’s balance in that she trusts him and so on. But all I heard was, yeah, be careful. I could name 10 off the top of my head that are publicly talking about being an ex-trad wife and how they realized at one point that it was abuse.

Kerry: Somebody sent me an article. And for those who are unsure what we’re talking about, trad wife stands for traditional wife. Sort of the image I have when I think of that word is the 1950s homemaker. Sort of the Leave It to Beaver mother is what she was. I would say she was a trad wife, the traditional wife.

Lisa: But also, just as an aside, not to be confused with a stay-at-home mom. That’s not the same thing, right? It’s not a partnership, a traditional wife with traditional gender roles. Husband earns the money, makes the decisions. You do all the domestic, you do everything, and you...

Kerry: ...serve him. That’s what it is. Right. There’s a powerful scene. I’ve been watching a new series on Apple called Lady of the Lake. It’s set in, I think, the 1950s. It features the main character, Natalie Portman, and there’s a scene where Natalie is trying to sell her car, just trying to sell her car, and no one will allow her to sell her car because she needs her husband’s signature. And she realizes that if she wants to get away from him, she needs cash to be able to have rent, and she can’t even sell her car without his permission. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about that kind of level of loss of control. It’s interesting hearing you talk about that nobody could have broken through your sense of reality, and on top of it, to the degree that you were so faithful to him, to even that you are being taken into directions that ultimately would cost you something. Maybe you didn’t realize at the time, maybe he promised that it wouldn’t happen that way, but it did essentially happen. And you said you thought that education would have helped, maybe made you more aware, maybe even made you be increased alarm, so when you got into that relationship, you would have been cognizant of it. Do you think there’s anything else that would have helped? I often think about that, like, what would have made a difference in my life?

Lisa: I think education for sure, but I think self-worth, boundaries, but these are all relational things that I wish that we all learned. They don’t teach it in school, so you’re left to the devices of if your parents know and what is modeled to you. I was born in the 80s, that wasn’t a thing that anybody was talking about—teach your children consent and boundaries and self-worth. And for everything I love about my parents, I grew up with my mother probably leaned more towards the gentle parenting, respectful parenting; my father was definitely an authoritarian. But I grew up with, what I learned about myself was that I needed to change who I was a bit to make other people happy, and kind of people please and fawn. And that just carried me through.

I wish I had learned something else, right? I wish that I had had a secure, healthy attachment. But who was talking about attachment theory? I mean, I don’t even know when attachment theory actually came to be, but it’s much more popularized now, but I would say that a lot of people still haven’t heard of it.

Kerry: It was showing up in the 70s, I think, 70s and 80s, but yeah, it’s become trendy lately. Well, you’re making an interesting point, and that is, you’ve been talking about the qualities of yourself. I’ve been back immersed in Don Hennessy’s book, How He Gets Into Her Head, which by the way, if anybody has not looked at this, I highly, highly recommend it. It’s such a good book. He’s an Irish law enforcement officer who spent the majority of his life part of a task force working with domestic violence cases. The book is—he makes a case about trying to find the variables or the qualities that make people vulnerable in abusive situations as if they could prevent it. If you could say, Lisa, if we understood these types of variables about you, we could then jump in and protect you from it so that you don’t end up in that situation. He keeps emphasizing over and over, they couldn’t find any. There was no consistent variable across all the victims.

I mean, I agree with that. When you think about it statistically, imagine you have this large group of people and you’re looking for a variable that consistently shows up with a certain percentage so that it’s valid. That’s what you’re looking for, a test of validity. And there was no variable that they could find that had any test of validity to it. He keeps saying that it wasn’t until they began to look at the perpetrator’s characteristics and style of interactions with the victims that suddenly then everything—the pattern—emerged. That it wasn’t in the victim. It’s not the victim’s boundaries. It’s not the victim’s personality. It’s not the victim fawns too much. It’s not the victim is codependent or a people pleaser. It is that there are predatory people who have learned how to psychologically manipulate the minds of others in order to convince them to do the things that they want. And I think that’s where we often get wrong, is that we—even just recently, for those who may have followed me on TikTok, know that I posted a 29-part series called How I Met, Married, and Got Scammed by a Gold Digger. The amount of vitriol I have experienced. The amount of personal blaming that somehow that there’s something inherently wrong with me, that I should have known better, or I can’t be that good of a clinician, or how just outright stupid I must have been to be in this relationship. We as a culture have the perspective, whether we know it or not, that everybody should be so informed and should see this.

And the problem is, it’s not that easy to spot. It’s not that easy to recognize when you’re in, and it’s certainly not easy to get out once you’re in it. And the problem has been—and this is the part we don’t like—we live in a world that has monsters in it, and we pretend that we don’t, right? We don’t like that reality. We find that a frightening reality, that there are people who can get into your head. That’s why he named it the way he named it. They get into your head, and they convince you and change you. And here’s one of the ways that he talks about that is eerie and bothers me because it happened. He talks about how predatory people have a language, the way in which they view the world, talk about it, and construct it. And they pay attention to whether or not their victim starts to use that same language and see things from that perspective. And when that woman or man does, then the person knows that they’ve successfully targeted and groomed that person. But here’s the problem. He then makes the statement that says the rest of us have also been groomed. The whole culture has been groomed because we use that language too. Because if you’re a predator, what do you want? You want to avoid detection, and you want to avoid prosecution. You don’t want any responsibility or accountability. So when we focus on victims, we basically are colluding with the mind of the predators. “I didn’t hurt this person. It wasn’t me. If they had just had better boundaries, then this would have never happened. I just happened to, like, take advantage of their naivete or their vulnerability.” No, no, this was a setup from the get-go.

Lisa: Yeah, they act like it just... the reason that it happened is because of the victim, which does assign blame on that.

I try, you know, after years of therapy and being out of my own abusive relationship, to not focus on him but to focus on how I can do better moving forward. But the truth is, when you look back into—and this is why I’m saying no matter how many people had said it to me, told me, taught me, I’m telling you I would have made probably zero different decisions or very few different decisions, because I think more than anything, what I find so ironic almost about the people that are like, “Could never be me,” is that that is what will make it be you. That, frankly, cockiness or, like, superiority that comes from these victim shamers that are like, “I guess you were just stupid, Kerry. You need to think that we were stupid and that you’re smarter than us so that you feel safe that it would never happen to you.” But that’s the literal thing that will make it happen to you. That feeling that intelligence is what’s going to help you. So even when I talk about education, I don’t just mean like, “What is abuse?” You just read a description, but to, like, know and feel what it feels like, which maybe it’s impossible. Maybe you can’t really know until you’ve been through it. And I know there are some things we can do to protect ourselves, but we have to look at the reality that is it can happen to anyone, and the more people think it could never happen to them, the more vulnerable they are.

I make so much content around just leave and the sort of sarcastic videos that I’ve made about how hard it is to leave and all the reasons that we stay. Even in that, we don’t think that it’s abuse. And that, to me, that’s the biggest thing, is that if you have people telling you, like, “You should just leave,” you’re like, “But it’s not abuse.” People don’t factor in your entire life experience and your worldview and all of the things, instead of saying—and I saw this on Instagram, I forget who posted it, but I loved it—“I see how hard that you were trying to be loved,” instead of like, “Why did you stay?” We all want love. How nice that you tried so hard to make something work, that you valued your marriage, and you valued your vows so much that you were offering someone forgiveness and kindness.

And it’s wild to me that some people are like, “Well, I guess you’re stupid.”

Kerry: What? Yeah. Have you ever run into somebody who had that position and then got abused and spoken to them about that shock—shocking twist of world perspective?

Lisa: I haven’t had any length conversations, but I can tell you that whenever I make those videos, there are multiple people in the comment sections in detail. In fact, not just even one comment, but multiple comment threads, talking about how they really felt like it would never happen to them. “And I had a friend, I had a sister who went through it, and I could not understand it until I went through it on my own.” So I haven’t had any in-depth conversations, but you do, even in the comments, see that shift of, “I thought I was invincible. I thought this could never happen to me.” It reminds me of kids doing crazy dangerous things just thinking they’ll never fall off the slide. And they do because you just think you're above it. I don't know. You just think that it's not going to be you. You're more informed.

Kerry: But you're not. When I was counseling, and I would see people come into my office—and usually, they were women in domestic violence situations—I thought, "This is not going to happen to me. I don't know why they're staying." I did have the arrogance, thinking as a psychologist, somehow that made me impervious to this, but I think people think that...

Lisa: ...about...

Kerry: ...I have.

Lisa: I mean, I'm a coach. I have so many clients that are psychologists and therapists and social workers that come to me not seeking traditional therapy because they themselves acknowledge that they are a therapist. They didn’t see it, that their colleagues don’t understand it. And they come and seek a coach to talk about it in a specialized capacity because they’re realizing they thought that it would never be them. And they feel embarrassed. And to be honest, I tell them all about your book. I tell them all, "You’ve got to read Love You More because I want you to see you’re not alone in being a victim, but you’re also not alone in being a clinician or a therapist who has experienced this too." Because people think that you should know, like, "I get that I didn’t know, but you should know." But, you know, go through the program yourself and tell me what you learn. Tell me if you figure out that you’re going to be in an abusive relationship or how to stay out of an abusive relationship. They’re not teaching it. I know.

Kerry: Yeah. No, people somehow think that therapists are superhuman. We should just have this extra sense and just know predatory behavior. Yeah. No, it doesn’t quite... you’re the most blind when it comes... yeah, the most blind when it comes to yourself, which reminds me...

So, we’re going to jump over to the podcast extra, and we’ll talk about what we’re going to talk about there. But, you and I are having a group coaching program that’s starting up in September and October that is directly related to this. We didn’t do this on purpose, but it’s hitting me as I’m talking to you. We should talk about that. We’re launching New Powerful You in mid-September and early October. So, two different groups—it’s 10 weeks of classes, which I honestly love everything that you and I do together, but I have an affinity for this one because it’s exactly about this. It’s learning how to get better at spotting predatory behavior. And not only that—because, yeah, that’s great to know—but how to deal with it when you’re still battling all this aftermath. Like, you get out of these relationships, and you think, "Okay, just go no contact." That’s what we say. Just go no contact, and this is going to get better and simple. But it doesn’t. You and I both right now could start listing story after story about how this person continues to make their life miserable despite no contact. They’re going no contact, but they find ways to really mess with them. So, I would love to have people join us. It’s a 10-week group coaching. There’s more information on the website about it.

Yeah. What are you most excited about in this class?

Lisa: I think knowing—I mean, I love helping people through this because, for me, it’s like, I didn’t feel like the resources really existed or I didn’t know about them, so I’m all about telling people about it and helping people, but keeping you from doing it again, keeping you feeling like you have that sense of personal power. You can spot the behaviors, but like you said, I think that the fact that we really focus on, "Okay, and what do you do about that? When you see the boundary violations, now what?" Because it’s easy to say, "Break up with them." But is that an option? And how do you deal with it? I think that because we’re really focused on that practical application, that it’s going to be great for people who are co-parenting with these narcissistic abusers or, if you would never have to speak to them again, phenomenal, but sometimes they’re in our family—you never know. So, to really make sure that you’re not going to get manipulated back in—I mean, some people are even like divorcing and figuring out house stuff or custody of a dog.

Kerry: You know, and how do you not get sucked back in?

Lisa: Oh, I know. Or even when one of your children gets married, and then your ex-partner wants to host it at their house. That’s one of the situations I’m being made aware of right now that’s happening. I have a client going through that. I know. It’s just always like they find a way to insinuate themselves and make life really hard. Or they’re the ones hosting the baby shower for your first grandchild or some horrible thing. If you’re struggling with that kind of, like, "How do I really protect myself better? How do I spot this? What do I do so that I don’t always end up looking like the bad person?" I really hope that you guys would consider becoming a part of it. It’s a small group setting. We’re having limited space. So, I hope you’d become part of the New Powerful You. It’s going to be in September and October. More information is on the website at kerrymcavoyphd.com. I know you’re going to also have it housed on your website as well.

Lisa: Yes. Yes. So that you can find out information there too.

Kerry: All right. So, on the podcast extra, let’s jump over and talk about how do you get better support when you’re in the middle of it, and you know that it’s polarizing. What you’re going through is very polarizing, and people are going to come down strongly one way or the other because I know we both face that. So, we’re going to hop over and do that, but thank you so much for this fantastic discussion.

Well, that’s a wrap for this week’s episode. Are you following me on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? Find me at Kerry McAvoy PhD. And whether you’re in or out, considering leaving, or have left a narcissistic relationship, find community support at my Toxic Free Relationship Club. You can learn about this resource as well as others at kerrymcavoyphd.com. And I’ll see you back here next week.

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Find community support at my Toxic Free Relationship Club. You can learn about this resource as well as others at kerrymcavoyphd. com. And I'll see [00:29:00] you back here next week.