"Was it really that bad?"

In this episode of The Messy Middle, Erica dives into the painful spiral so many survivors experience after leaving an abusive relationship. The memories start to soften. The good moments rise to the surface. The loneliness feels louder than the harm. And before you know it, you're questioning your own reality all over again.

If you've ever found yourself missing someone who hurt you, replaying the good times, or wondering whether you exaggerated what happened, this episode is for you.

Erica explores why this happens, how gaslighting continues long after the relationship ends, and why your brain naturally tries to edit painful memories to reduce discomfort. She also explains why so many survivors question themselves, return to unhealthy relationships, or worry that they're somehow the problem.

Inside this episode, you'll learn:

• Why your brain tends to remember the good moments first
• How loneliness can distort your perception of the past
• The lasting impact of gaslighting and self-doubt
• Why questioning yourself doesn't mean you're wrong
• How to stay anchored in reality without re-traumatizing yourself
• The difference between remembering isolated moments and looking at the overall pattern
• Why it's possible for good memories and harmful dynamics to exist at the same time

This is a compassionate conversation about self-trust, healing, and staying connected to the truth of your experience when your mind starts rewriting the story.

If you're caught in the "maybe it wasn't that bad" spiral, take a breath and press play. You are not alone, and there are very real reasons this happens.

As always, send in your questions and Erica may answer them in a future episode.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this episode, I’m talking about why dating after abuse often becomes loaded with pressure, hypervigilance, self-criticism, and endless overthinking.

The “Am I gonna miss the red flags again?” spiral. The scanning. The second-guessing. The feeling that every interaction somehow determines whether you’ll end up hurt all over again.

But what if dating wasn’t actually about finding “the one” right now?

What if it became a practice ground for rebuilding self-trust instead?

We dive into:

• Why dating apps and modern dating can feel so dysregulating after emotional abuse
• Using dating as a social experiment instead of a high-stakes performance
• How to stay connected to yourself while interacting with other people
• The small moments where self-trust is either built or abandoned
• The importance of noticing how your body feels after a date, not just during it
• Red flags to pay attention to, especially around misogyny, accountability, empathy, and control
• Why discernment is more important than perfection

This episode is not about becoming cynical, guarded, or terrified of relationships. It’s about learning how to stop disappearing inside them.

Because the goal isn’t to become perfect at spotting every bad person instantly. The goal is learning how to stay connected to yourself while gathering information, observing behavior, and trusting your own nervous system again.

Dating becomes very different when the focus shifts from:
“Do they like me?”
to:
“Do I actually like how I feel around them?”

This is an episode about self-trust, nervous systems, boundaries, intuition, discernment, people-pleasing, healing after narcissistic abuse, and learning how to stop betraying yourself in tiny ways just to keep someone else comfortable.

And somewhere in the middle of all that… you might actually start having fun again too.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this episode, I’m talking about the hypervigilance that kicks in after emotional abuse recovery.

That feeling where every comment, every inconsistency, every weird vibe suddenly feels loaded. Your nervous system is scanning constantly. Your body reacts before your brain can even catch up. You start wondering: Am I finally seeing clearly… or am I becoming too guarded?

We dive into the overcorrection phase that so many survivors experience after leaving abusive relationships. The swing from over-explaining harmful behavior and giving endless benefit of the doubt… to wanting to run at the very first sign something feels “off.”

I talk about:

• Why your nervous system starts flagging danger everywhere after coercive control 
• The difference between discernment and hypervigilance 
• How trauma can blur the line between noticing something and actually being unsafe 
• Why not every uncomfortable moment is automatically a toxic pattern 
• Learning to trust yourself again without shutting the whole world out 
• The importance of observing behavior over time instead of rushing to conclusions 
• Why your body reacts so strongly to familiarity after emotional abuse 
• How self-trust and discernment are rebuilt slowly, through practice and awareness 

This episode is for the women who feel exhausted from constantly scanning, second-guessing, and trying to “get it right” early so they never end up trapped in abuse again.

You are not broken for noticing more now. You are awake. Your awareness has expanded. And now comes the next part of healing: learning how to work with that awareness in a way that protects you without imprisoning you.

As always, we’re talking nervous systems, somatics, self-trust, trauma responses, emotional safety, and the messy middle of healing after narcissistic abuse.

And yes, I’ll still be reminding you to put your feet on the floor, breathe, and trust your damn self. 💛

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Because something strange happens when you start dating after narcissistic abuse or a high control relationship. You expect to be better at spotting the warning signs. And in some ways, you are. But there is another layer that nobody really prepares you for.

Your body is still wired to respond to what it got used to.

That intense, fast-moving, all-consuming feeling you might get with someone new? A lot of the time that is not chemistry.

That is your nervous system recognising a familiar pattern. And the person who is steady, consistent, and actually shows up? They can feel flat. Boring, even. And that is exactly where things get confusing.

In this episode I get into:

• Why your nervous system can make red flags feel like chemistry and safety feel like a disappointment
• The difference between activation and actual connection, and why it matters so much at this stage
• Why words like "boring" and "something's missing" might actually be really good signs
• How the old conditioning comes back online when something feels slightly off and you start negotiating with yourself instead of trusting your gut
• Why dating after abuse is less about spotting red flags faster and more about slowing everything down
• The specific things worth paying attention to that go way beyond what someone says
• Why you are allowed to take your time, change your mind, and not get it perfect

You do not have to go into this with perfect discernment. You are allowed to learn as you go. And if dating feels confusing right now, that does not mean you have gone backwards. It means your system is recalibrating.

And instead of asking yourself why you are not feeling it, try asking this instead: what is this reminding me of?

That question will tell you everything.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

There is a moment that hits almost every woman after she leaves. Sometimes it is not right away. Sometimes it is weeks later, late at night, looking at her phone or her bank account, and it lands like a quiet, heavy dread.

I am on my own. And I am going to have to fight for everything.

This week I am talking about financial fear after narcissistic abuse, and I want to be honest about how much bigger this is than most people give it credit for. I have lived it. I see it every single week with the women I work with. And I think it is one of the most isolating parts of leaving, partly because so many women feel embarrassed to say it out loud.

In this episode I get into:

• How financial control creeps in slowly and why it is so easy to miss while you are in it
• Why the aftermath is not just emotional, it is practical, and often deliberately designed to keep you in survival mode
• The two ways most women respond to financial fear after leaving, and why both make complete sense
• Why money after abuse is really about safety, self-trust, and whether you believe you can take care of yourself
• Why so many women come out the other side with a clearer, more conscious relationship with money than they ever had before

This is not about being good with money. It is about not being in the dark anymore. Because being in the dark is where your power got taken in the first place.

If money feels heavy or looming right now, you are not behind. You are not incapable. You are in the middle of learning something you were probably never properly taught. And you will absolutely smash it.

I promise.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

It’s that heavy moment of looking back at a relationship and thinking, I lost myself in that. Sometimes it’s years, sometimes decades. And it often comes with shame, confusion, and a harsh inner narrative that says you should have known better.

But what if that whole story is built on hindsight that your past self simply didn’t have access to yet?

Let’s get into it.

In this episode, I cover:

•  The quiet, often unspoken grief that shows up after narcissistic abuse and emotional control 
• Why “I should have left sooner” is usually hindsight talking, not truth 
•  How abuse dynamics, coercive control, and gaslighting distort your perception while you’re inside them Why your brain rewrites the past once you finally learn the language for what happened 
• How survival, timing, and nervous system capacity all shape when you were able to see and act 
•  Why those “wasted years” are often years of adaptation, not failure 
• The shift that happens when grief turns into clarity, discernment, and self-trust 
•  How survivors often emerge from this stage with a strong refusal to lose themselves again 

This episode is not about reframing pain into positivity or skipping over grief. It’s about giving it space, naming it properly, and removing the self-blame that so often gets attached to it.

Because once you understand what you were actually navigating, the question stops being “Why did I stay?” and starts becoming “How did I survive that?”

And that shift changes everything about how you move forward.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

It's not just that you stop trusting them after manipulation, control, or abuse. You stop trusting yourself.

And that's the part nobody really talks about. Your internal compass gets scrambled. Not because you're broken, but because you were trained to override it. Over time, the loudest voice in your head stops being yours. It becomes theirs. And once you understand that, everything starts to make a little more sense.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why making even basic decisions can feel debilitating after leaving a controlling relationship
• How self-trust gets eroded slowly and quietly, not all at once
• Why that harsh inner critic voice is often not yours, and whose it actually is
• Why big, dramatic reinventions won't rebuild self-trust, and what actually will
• How to use micro-decisions as daily medicine for your nervous system
• What the freeze response really looks like, and how to gently bring choice back online
• The guilt wave that shows up when you start putting yourself first 
• A simple end-of-day journaling practice to start reconnecting with your own signals

You don't rebuild self-trust with grand gestures or sweeping life overhauls.

You rebuild it by choosing your lunch for the right reasons, leaving when you said you would, or following a tiny impulse and noticing how your body responds.

It's unsexy. It's repetitive. And it is some of the most radical work you will ever do.

You didn't lose your intuition. It just hasn't been listened to in a very long time. Let's change that.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this raw and honest episode, I dive into the social fallout that often follows leaving a narcissistic or high-control relationship. 

The friendships that fade. The family members who stay neutral. The quiet distance. The subtle disbelief. The gut-punch comments like “it takes two.”

And the part that hurts the most? Wondering if it’s somehow your fault.

I break down why this happens, not to scare you, but to free you from the shame spiral that so many women fall into when their support system shifts or disappears.

Inside this episode, wcovers:

• Why you may lose up to 80% of your social circle after leaving
• How “neutrality” often protects the person who caused harm
• The role of bystander inaction and why people don’t step up
• Secondary isolation and why leaving can feel just as lonely as staying
• The subtle ways people question your reality and how that impacts your healing
• Why some friendships were built on proximity, not depth
• The unexpected clarity and empowerment that can come from this loss

This isn’t just about grief. It’s about rebuilding.

Because while this phase can feel deeply lonely, it’s also where you start choosing differently. Where you stop performing, stop appeasing, and start aligning with what actually feels safe, real, and true.

If your world got smaller after you left, this episode will help you understand why… and remind you that you didn’t make the wrong choice.

You didn’t lose everything.

You’re making space for something better.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this conversation, I’m unpacking the very real phase so many women enter after high-control or narcissistic relationships: the swing from “I can’t survive without them” to “I will never depend on anyone ever again.”

And I want to normalize this immediately: That response makes sense.

If trusting someone meant humiliation…
If vulnerability meant punishment…
If needing support gave someone leverage over you…

Of course your nervous system would decide: I’ll handle everything myself.

But there’s nuance here.

In this episode, I break down:

• The difference between hyper-independence and the sacred cocoon phase
• Why becoming “the strong one” can turn into an identity (and quiet isolation)
• How armor protects you… and how it can also exhaust you
• The hidden cost of always being capable
• The difference between fear-based independence and healthy autonomy
• Why “I don’t need you” and “I don’t trust you won’t hurt me” are not the same sentence

But there is a difference between healing solitude and fear-based exile - and learning to feel that distinction in your body is part of the work.

This episode is not about rushing back into relationships. It’s not about convincing you to “open your heart” before you’re ready.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming dependent again.

It means expanding your capacity - inch by inch - so that connection no longer equals control, and support no longer equals weakness.

You don’t need to be rescued. And you don’t need to be hardened forever either.

You get to be sovereign.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I’m talking about something that so many women experience after leaving a narcissistic or high-control relationship but rarely admit out loud:

Calm can feel uncomfortable.

Instead of relief, you might feel numb. Irritated. Agitated. Like something is missing. You might even catch yourself missing parts of the relationship and immediately spiral into, “What is wrong with me?”

Nothing is wrong with you.

If you lived in volatility for years, your nervous system calibrated to volatility. The adrenaline spikes, the emotional highs and lows, the intermittent reinforcement, the push-pull dynamic, that chaos had a rhythm. And your body learned how to survive inside that rhythm.

When it disappears, your system doesn’t instantly relax. It scans. It waits. It braces.

In this episode, I break down:

• Why your nervous system confuses familiarity with safety
• The “intensity illusion” and how intermittent reinforcement wires your brain
• Why steady can feel suspicious after fireworks
• The urge to self-sabotage, text them, pick a fight, or create drama
• Why calm can feel like emptiness instead of freedom
• The difference between feeling unsafe and feeling unfamiliar

I also share a simple micro-practice to help you gently expand your capacity for peace without overwhelming your system.

There is a gap between chaos and comfort. That gap is the messy middle.

And if peace feels weird right now, that doesn’t mean you made a mistake. It means your nervous system is recalibrating.

Eventually, calm stops feeling boring. It starts feeling safe. Then powerful. Then luxurious.

And one day you will realize the fireworks were not chemistry. They were conditioning.

If your peace feels strange right now, you are not broken. You are learning a new rhythm.

And that rhythm? It’s called freedom.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Who am I when I’m not bracing for the explosion, calculating the cost of my resistance, or shrinking myself to keep the peace?

In this raw and deeply honest episode of The Messy Middle, I’m diving into one of the most disorienting questions we face after narcissistic abuse and coercive control:

Who am I without him?

This isn’t just about being single. It’s about identity loss after emotional abuse. It’s about what happens to your nervous system when you’ve spent years adapting to volatility, managing someone else’s emotional temperature, and surviving through hypervigilance.

In this episode, I talk about:

• How coercive control slowly rewires my nervous system
• Why I felt lost, untethered, and confused after leaving
• The grief no one warned me about: mourning the version of me who survived
• Why “missing him” was often my body missing predictability, not the abuse
• How his voice tried to live on inside my inner critic
• The subtle, powerful steps I took to rebuild my identity safely

If you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “I don’t even know what I like anymore,” I’ve been there too.

What I’ve learned is this: that identity fracture isn’t weakness. It’s conditioning. And rebuilding doesn’t happen through pressure or performance. It happens through small, nervous-system-safe choices that help me trust myself again.

I also share a simple, practical exercise I use to reconnect with my body’s preferences and rebuild self-trust, one tiny decision at a time.

If you feel like you’re between versions of yourself, not who you were but not yet who you’re becoming, you’re not broken.

You’re in the messy middle.

And that space? It’s where autonomy, selfhood, and real freedom begin.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this episode of The Messy Middle, I respond to a listener question that so many women quietly carry:

What do you do when you’ve been dismissed, minimized, and made to doubt yourself - not just by a partner, but by doctors?

This isn’t about “bad bedside manner.” This is about institutional gaslighting. And for survivors of emotional abuse, it can feel like retraumatization all over again.

In this episode, we unpack:

• Why the modern medical system was never designed around women’s bodies
• How trauma shows up as chronic illness, autoimmune issues, hormonal chaos, and nervous system dysregulation
• Why “everything looks normal” can be a form of erasure
• How medical dismissal mirrors coercive control dynamics
• The link between long-term emotional abuse and physical symptoms
• Reclaiming yourself as your own authority

This episode is both validating and activating. It’s about understanding that your body is not betraying you - it’s communicating. And you are allowed to believe it.

You are allowed to:

• Fire doctors who dismiss you
• Walk out of unsafe appointments
• Stop over-explaining yourself
• Trust your lived experience over someone else’s credentials

Becoming unfuckwithable sometimes starts with one quiet, radical decision:

I believe myself. Even when the system doesn’t.

If you’ve ever left an appointment feeling small, foggy, shaky, or wondering if you imagined your own symptoms - this episode is for you.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this deeply personal episode of The Messy Middle, I reflect on a powerful message from a listener who paused the podcast to do inner child work in real time: hugging a childhood toy, asking what she needed to hear, and speaking words of truth her body had been waiting for. 

That moment wasn’t random. It wasn’t “woo.” It was healing. 

This episode is about learning to trust the moments your body speaks before your brain catches up - especially after narcissistic or emotional abuse, where self-trust has been systematically dismantled. 

In this episode, we unpack: 

• Why intuition gets overridden in abusive dynamics
• How gaslighting trains you to doubt your own knowing
• What somatic healing actually looks like in real life
• Why you don’t need full memories or flashbacks to heal
• How to gently rebuild trust with your intuition without forcing it

Through lived experience, client stories, and practical examples, this episode reminds you of something essential:

You are not broken. You are remembering.
 
If you’ve ever had a gut feeling you ignored, whispered truth to a younger version of yourself, or felt something shift in your body before you could explain it - this episode is for you.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

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

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

In this episode, we talk about:

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

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

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

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

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

This episode is for you.

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

You’ll learn:

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

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

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

Sometimes healing is about realizing:

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

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

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

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

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

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

In this episode: 

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

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

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

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

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

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

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

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

We talk about:

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

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

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

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

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

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

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

I talk about how...

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

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

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

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

TRIGGER WARNING - In this episode, I talk about domestic violence, abuse, trauma, and the ripple effects of generational harm. If you need to skip this one to protect your nervous system, I fully support that.

Thirty years ago, my dad died. Not the stepdad who raised me for most of my life, but my biological father, whose story is woven with violence, patriarchy, poverty, and survival. In this episode, I peel back the layers on a generational cycle that shaped him, shaped me, and shaped the work I do today.

I talk about the brutal upbringing he endured, the harm he caused, the day I stood between him and my mom when I was just a kid, and how that moment became the spark that shaped everything I now teach about boundaries, self-worth, and cycle breaking.

This is an unfiltered look at patriarchy as the water we’re all swimming in, how boys lose their humanity inside it, and how we reclaim ours in spite of it. It’s also about compassion without excuses, accountability without denial, and the complicated truth that you can love someone and still name the ways they failed you.

Most of all, it’s about what becomes possible when we choose to stop repeating what hurt us.

If you’re navigating your own messy middle, I hope my story helps you feel seen, less alone, and more certain that you are allowed to break every cycle that broke you.

Tune in. This one matters.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this raw, intimate episode of The Messy Middle, I’m taking you back to the moment I finally realized my inner critic wasn’t my voice at all. It was training. Conditioning. A survival strategy installed by people who once held power over me.

And it all came crashing down in the most bizarre, perfectly timed encounter inside an Office Depot...

I’ll walk you through the full story, the panic spiral leading up to my very first support group, and the exact moment the universe slapped my inner critic across the face and reminded me who the hell I really was.

We’re diving deep into:

• Why your inner critic often sounds like your earliest abuser, not you
• How your nervous system uses self criticism as a safety plan
• The hidden thoughts that run on autopilot and tank your self worth before you even notice
• The moment everything shifted for me and why it changed the entire trajectory of my work
• A powerful somatic exercise that will change how you relate to your inner critic forever

This episode is not about “being kinder to yourself.” It’s about exposing the lie, reclaiming your internal space, and realizing you were never the problem.

Get comfy, grab a notebook, and be ready for an exercise that may hit you right in the chest, in exactly the way it needs to.

Your inner critic has been running the show long enough. It’s time to meet the real you underneath all that noise.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

 I’m talking about the truth-telling, throat-tightening, survival-trained younger me. The part of me who learned early to shrink, perform, stay quiet, and swallow every truth just to stay safe.

I share the deeply personal story of sitting in couples therapy with someone who was actively cheating on me, the gaslighting that nearly broke me, and the one painful moment that ended up becoming my turning point. What was meant to shame me became the spark that led to my biggest breakthrough, my life’s work, and the thousands of women I support today.

Inside this episode I walk you through:

• What the inner child actually is and why she drives so much of your relationship patterns
• Why betrayal hurts long before you have proof
• How emotionally neglectful childhoods shape the partners we choose
• The way abusive or emotionally immature people weaponize vulnerability
• The real reason you felt like a child in your adult relationship
• How your younger self has been warning you all along

And at the end, I guide you through a grounding somatic practice that helps you meet your own inner child the way I wish someone had met mine: gently, honestly, and without trying to fix her or dismiss what she needed.

If you’ve ever felt like a shell of yourself, wondered why you tolerated so much, or questioned whether you’re “just too much,” this episode is going to hit you right in the chest in the best possible way.

You’re not broken. You’re rebuilding. One felt truth at a time. Take a breath, tune in, and come meet the part of you that’s been fighting for you all along.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

If you’ve ever whispered that to yourself after surviving narcissistic or high-control dynamics, you’re not alone. And no, you’re not cursed, broken, or doomed to attract the same person in a different body for the rest of your life. What you are is a human being who learned survival in a world that normalizes manipulation, misogyny, and emotional labor piled onto your shoulders.

In this episode, I break down what’s really happening underneath that fear.

I talk about how manipulative people actually operate, the early “tests” they run to see how much they can get away with, and how your body can confuse familiarity with safety. I unpack why chemistry isn’t destiny, why repetition isn’t sabotage, and how your nervous system is simply trying to finish an unfinished story.

We get into everything from:

• Why you’re not a narcissist magnet
• How conditioning sets you up to tolerate too muc
• The modern rebrand of misogyny and why it matters
• Why early red flags feel comforting if chaos was once your normal
• How healing shifts your entire signal
• Dating as a social experiment

Most importantly, I walk you through how to rebuild self-trust so deeply that coercive people can’t hook into you anymore.

When your safety lives inside you, you get to choose differently, walk away sooner, and stand steadier in your feet than you ever have before.

This isn’t about avoiding life. It’s about building a life your nervous system can actually thrive in. A life that feels like coming home to yourself.

And no… this won’t always happen to you.

Let’s talk about why.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

In this raw, unfiltered episode, we break down the real reasons survivors stay — and spoiler alert: it’s not because you’re weak, naïve, or broken. It’s because your nervous system, your hope, your history, and a masterclass in manipulation were all working against you.

We unpack the shame hidden in that question, the biochemical addiction of intermittent affection, and how childhood wounds, conditioning, and culture keep so many women loyal to chaos disguised as love. She dives into how “reactive abuse” isn’t abuse at all — it’s your body trying to save you — and why your staying was actually your system fighting for safety in the only way it knew how.

This episode is both a gut punch and a hug. You’ll walk away understanding that you didn’t “waste years.” You were gathering data. You loved deeply. You hoped fiercely. And now, you see.

💔 Trigger warning: This episode discusses emotional and psychological abuse, trauma responses, and recovery.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

Spoiler alert: it’s not because you’re naive, dumb, gullible, or any of the garbage your inner critic might fling at you. 

I break down exactly why intelligent, empathetic, emotionally aware women end up in these relationships, why the early love bombing feels intoxicating instead of suspicious, and how your nervous system, childhood conditioning, and craving for genuine connection all play a role in overriding those early intuitive nudges.

You’ll hear:

• Why charm is not a personality trait but a manipulation tactic
• How narcissistic partners gather “intel” early on and weaponize it later
• Why your nervous system will often choose the familiar over the healthy
• The real reason you cling to denial longer than you think
• How grief shows up when the truth finally lands
• Why “safe” partners can feel boring or wrong 
• How to start rebuilding trust in your intuition without fear

If you’ve ever tortured yourself with “I should have known better,” this episode will feel like a deep exhale. You’ll understand the psychology, the biology, the conditioning and the truth behind why you didn’t see it… and why none of it was your fault.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

After almost a decade and a half in practice and well over 10,000 hours with clients, these questions come up again and again in different forms. And if you’re at the beginning of this healing journey, or even a little further along but still wrestling with these thoughts, I think you’ll find a lot of clarity here.

Q1: How did I not see this sooner? I’m breaking down what narcissistic abuse actually feels like from the inside. How it messes with your memory, perception, and self-trust. The gaslighting, the manipulation, the subtle erosion of your reality, the way these people choose you, and even what’s happening in your brain throughout all of it.

Q2: Why did it take me so long to leave? Spoiler: it has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with internalized programming, trauma responses, and relational conditioning that started long before the relationship itself. I’ll unpack the myth and the total garbage behind “Why don’t you just leave?” and explore the cycles, systems, and childhood dynamics that make this pattern so hard to recognize when you’re in it.

Q3: Will this always happen to me? We’ll talk about rebuilding self-trust, interrupting the shame loop, and why it feels like you keep attracting the same person with a different face. I’ll walk you through how to retrain your nervous system, what real safety actually feels like, and why healthy dynamics can feel weird or even boring at first.

This three-episode intro is designed to give you grounding, clarity, and a sense of direction as you move forward. Stick with me. We’re going much deeper from here, but I wanted to start with the questions I know so many of you are carrying. If you need these answers, these episodes are for you.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.

I’m Erika Leon, Trauma-Informed Abuse Recovery Coach, mom of five, and creator of The 6 Keys to Unfu*kwithable.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re piecing yourself back together, questioning everything, and trying to remember who the f*ck you were before someone tried to erase you - you’re in the right place.

In this first episode, I share a crumb of my own story: the devastating double betrayal that blew up my life and ultimately became the start of my freedom. 

From discovering my ex-husband’s affair with my 'best friend', to navigating the nightmare of family courts, systemic abuse, and total life collapse... it’s been one hell of a ride.

But it’s also what led me to my mission today: helping people reclaim their voices, rebuild their confidence, and rise the f*ck up after abuse.

Through unfiltered conversations, listener questions, client stories, and a healthy dose of righteous rage, we’ll explore the deeper conditioning that keeps women stuck — and how to dismantle it piece by piece. Expect truth bombs, laughter, healing, feminism, and the occasional f-bomb (because let’s be real).

Whether you’re still in survival mode or ready to feel bold and unfu*kwithable again, this is your space to learn, laugh, cry, and rise.

📩 Send in YOUR questions and get them answered on the podcast!

📢 Get a Laster Coaching call for only $150. A 45-minute session to get to know me, experience my approach, and receive a personalized plan to kickstart your healing journey. Perfect for testing the waters before diving deeper.

🎬 Watch Unfu*kwithable Boundaries Masterclass for FREE. Learn how setting clear boundaries can change your life for good and where to start! 

📝 Get the Somatic Keys Course. Learn how to recognize your signals, regulate your responses, and reclaim your nervous system as a place of truth.