Welcome to Narcissist Apocalypse, everyone.

I am Brandon Chadwick, and today we'll be debriefing Charlie's story.

And this one is going to look a little bit different from our usual format.

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

Survivor's Story episodes like Charlie was this past week, go to our website at Narcissistapocalypse.com, click on the guest form button, fill out the form, and press the submit button. Also at our website, we have a support group. So if you need support, join our support group. We have Zoom meetings every Wednesday night, Thursday afternoons, and Saturday nights.

And we have foreign boards for you to support, join our support group. We have Zoom meetings every Wednesday night,

Thursday afternoons, and Saturday nights. And we have foreign boards to you to post on to get the validation that you need from survivors just like you. And we also have a newsletter on our website

that gets a free workbook for every new survivor story. So sign up for that today at

Narcissistapocalypse.com. And today we'll be going into Charlie's story.

And most of the time when we do these follow-ups,

we're really tracing a very familiar arc.

We always do the fear, obligation, guilt, and shame,

and the way someone ends up trapped inside an abusive relationship.

But Charlie's story has a little bit of these things, but it doesn't always fully apply to her story.

So this wasn't this 20-year marriage where control was, you know, maybe silent for a little bit and then started escalating. It wasn't a relationship

where there was survival mode going on from day one. This wasn't like that. And what this

story was really about is what can happen when a survivor goes looking for help after abuse

and the person offering that help becomes unsafe too.

And Charlie had already been through relationships where she tried to love someone into becoming better.

She'd carried this religious training that told her love was supposed to be long suffering.

She'd been taught at a deep level that leaving was something

to feel guilty about. And then after another painful relationship ended, she went looking for

...