Welcome to the narcissistic trauma recovery podcast. I'm Caroline Strawson and I'll be sharing with you

awareness, understanding and education about the devastating effects of narcissistic abuse to help you thrive.

I want you to know that I've been exactly where you are and I believe you.

And this show is all about taking you from trauma to transformation.

So one of the hardest things that Al you found when I was in my relationship with my ex-husband,

who was a covert narcissist, was that I put on weight.

And I used to look in the mirror, feeling full of shame, full of hatred for myself.

And in this episode, I want to talk to you about my emotional eating protector part that would come up.

That actually, I really hated myself

for that part and for being so overweight. But this episode, I really want you to look at that.

Maybe you have an emotional eating part as well when we talk about narcissistic abuse and trauma

that maybe you are hating on as well. And that energy of hatred, I want to see if we can

maybe shift that in this episode so that you can maybe see things through a slightly different lens.

So when I was in my relationship with my ex-husband and when I fell pregnant with my son,

which is in 2003, so a long time ago now, I actually put on four stone. Now, I'm a tall woman. I'm

5'11. So I suppose in some respects, luckily for me, I didn't look massive. However, I remember

saying to my mum and my husband, every time we went to sort of any postnatal meetings,

that I would say, do I look that big?

My husband and my mum would be like, yeah, you look bigger.

And I just had absolutely no idea actually about how big I was.

I don't actually got something called polyhydramine, so I had a huge amount of water retention. So I was massive. Bear of mind, I'm 5'11 and my ex-husband was 6'3, so we were

going to have a big baby anyway. And literally the measurements on my tummy when they measure that

...