Welcome to Narcissist Apocalypse, everyone.

I am Brandon Chadwick and today we will be doing an educational follow-up to Clara's story.

And Clara's story is an interesting story because even though you see how angry her partner is all the time, the abuser,

Clara also sees how this person grew up. She was able to

experience this person's family. And it can be very easy to keep telling yourself that what you're

dealing with, it could be emotional immaturity, it could be that they're damaged, that maybe,

you know, they're coming from this difficult family.

Maybe they just don't know how to communicate.

That is something that Clara said during our episode.

And maybe finally they will get the help that they need and things will get better.

And that's part of what makes this kind of abuse in this story really hard to see clearly.

And sometimes the full picture doesn't show up at the beginning. Sometimes you see pieces.

There's friction that could be going on. You see some of the effects, but you really don't fully

understand this person until you stop cooperating with the system that is protecting them.

And that is a huge part of Clara's story. So today I want to talk about the core themes in

Clara's story, the fear, obligation and guilt and shame that kept everything in place for so long.

But before we get to that, if you want to be a guest on our Survivor Story episodes,

like Clara was this week, go to our website at Narcissistapocalypse.com, click on the guest

form button at the top of the page.

There you fill out our guest form and press the submit button.

We also have a newsletter at our website, a new newsletter.

And with our newsletter, you get reflections of what happened in Clara's episode, reflections on your life, plus you get a free

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