What's up ladies, welcome to a special episode of Women of Impat exclusively for my podcast community. Today's episode is going to be raw, it's going to be honest and hopefully so deeply healing for anyone who's ever found themselves trapped in one of those nefarious toxic dynamics with someone in their lives. Now we're getting into the emotional manipulation, the confusion, the self-doubt and the aftermath of loving someone who slowly made you feel like you were losing yourself. Just like I'm losing my voice. Now over the years, I've had the utter privilege of interviewing some of the world's leading experts on narcissism, relationships, trauma, psychology, communication and human behavior. And after hearing from so many of you in the comments and the DMs, it's so shocking to hear and see how many of us are still silently struggling from these experiences right now. So today's episode is dedicated to all of you experiencing that pain, the healing, the fear, and I'm going to be answering the questions that a lot of you just too afraid to ask out loud. So buckle up because we're going to go deep today and we're starting with this question. After years with a narcissist consistently questioning my feelings and reality, I don't trust my own instincts anymore. How do you rebuild trust after emotional manipulation? All right, so how do you build self trust so that you can continue in a life that you really want to thrive? And I'm going to start first of all talking about gut instincts because gut instinct guys is not in my opinion. It's not like you just born with it and you got it. I think it absolutely needs to be trained and cultivated to make sure it's reading the signals for what they really are and giving you signs and intuitive

communication to know when something is potentially dangerous. Now, that's why many of us haven't necessarily done the work to build that instinct to be so accurate. So I love this idea and the reason why I love it is you can get it good at anything if you put time, effort and energy and you really want to get to that So that's's why that's the best news because with your gut intuition, yes, you may be let's even say you're not even starting from zero. Let's say this person in your life was so bad and toxic to you that now not only is your gut instinct at zero, it's actually a let's say minus 10 you are the opposite of just being able to trust and you know lean into it. Excuse me. Oh, let's say you're at minus 10. You are the opposite of just being able to trust and lean into it. So, let's say you're at minus 10. What are the things you need to do in order to get it to a plus 10? It's not going to happen overnight. And again, that's a great news because we don't just expect that we should be amazing at it tomorrow. If we see another woman in our lives, it's really good at trusting her gut instinct. Don't be yourself up. Give yourself the grace to know that you're going to do the work to get good at trusting your gut instinct. Now, I know this sounds crazy, guys, but I actually did it like I was building a business and it worked like a charm. So I found myself trusting somebody who ended up using me and I thought, really, Lisa, How can you at this point in your career, your self-esteem, your intern work, all of the things?

How can you still fool point in your career, your self-esteem,

your your internal work, all of the things? How can you still fool for these types of nervous behavior when you've done all the research? And the thing was is that I just didn't give myself the grace to fool make a mistake and get back up. So I said okay, next time somebody shows me a potential sign that my gut instinct is trying to tell me, cream at me, wave a flag whatever, I'm not going to act on it but I'm not going to ignore it.

I'm going to write it down and I'm going to put exactly what sign gut instinct feeling I got over this thing. And over time, I'm going to start training myself. So this is exactly what happened. Someone did something in my life, a female friend. And I wrote down, like I said, this is more of a

female friendship, but it absolutely applies to a male partner. This woman said something to me, and I was like, that feels very of her personality that I thought of her as. And it was just very small. It was a tiny little common. And I was like, before I ignore it, I brush it aside, or before I make a big deal out of it, I'm just going to jot it down. And so I just wrote it down.

A couple of weeks later, they did something else that would seemed off against the character

that I'd... a brush aside or before I make a big deal out of it, I'm just going to jot it down. And so I just wrote it down. About a couple of weeks later, they did something else that would

seem off against the character that I'd painted them to be. And so I wrote that down and I was like, it just seemed a bit odd that they did this when I think of them like this. Over time, I think it took maybe three to six months, potentially. I actually don't know exactly. I started to realise a pattern that every few weeks they would do something that actually

just showed a tiny little glimpse that maybe I had imagined who they really were. And then guys, it all came out. The whole thing unraveled. A bunch of our skills got together and we started talking about heartbreak and stuff and then we realised we were all having the same experience but no one wanted to A talk badly, no one wanted to assume, make assumption, and no one wanted to really feel like they were gossiping. And so, in that, I realized I was training my guy to start to spot signs, to pay attention to those signs, and to not ignore them. Over time, I started to realize I really was on point with a couple of the things that I saw. That gave me confirmation that I need to keep doing the work, I need to work on, I need to work off, I need to practice my gut instinct and intuition to get to the point where I can get really, really good at it. And I'm still on that journey. So it's not going to be an overnight thing, but you absolutely can train yourself. Now the second part of it of your question, so the first part was how do you train your gut instinct so that you can You can trust it and then how do you build your self-trust after emotional manipulation? Okay, so we went over the gut intuition and now we're going to go into how do you trust yourself? So I just recently interviewed Dr. Peter Salerno. Now this guy is so good, he's a psychologist and he talks about narcissism, toxic relationships specifically, we spoke about female friendships.

But the one thing that we did talk about at the end of that interview, you've got to go back and watch it guys, it's so good. But we spoke about how to rebuild your reality confidence. And he actually came up with that word, that is not me. And basically what that means is, you have been so mind twisted, I was going to say something a little rude, but I'm trying to under watch my language. You don't know which way is up, you don't know which way is down,

you have no idea because they've manipulated your reality so much, you have no idea what reality actually looks like. Just going to take a sip of water. Like I said, this is very raw guy, so you can hear all the stumbles in the water drinking. But, okay, so the reality confidence talks about reality confidence and, um, I pulled it up because I think it's really freaking useful for you guys to stop practicing this if you want to start building trusting yourself after emotional manipulation. So number one is you need to name what happened. You actually need to give language to the behavior. And I think a lot of us are too afraid, embarrassed, I understand, and

I get it, and I empathise. But we don't want to think of ourselves as a victim. We don't

want to think of ourselves as having been abused. Put all these labels and names, and you start to maybe feel differently about yourself. So we try to ignore that maybe we have been abused. And we don't want to put a label on it because we feel it means something about us, but you cannot heal until you actually give language to what happened. And this is

something that I know is going to take time. It's not going to be easy, but it will be the first step in being able to heal from what actually happened to you. Okay, number two, in building your reality confidence is you've got to see with the pattern for what it is. It wasn't random. It wasn't accidental. They probably did absolutely target you because you're the type of person that is going to forgive them, not put up boundaries, all of those sorts of things. So you have to actually see the pattern for what it was and not ignore that that was a part of why potentially they chose you. Now again, this isn't a victim blame at all. This is for you to be able to empower yourself to grow, to learn, to see what happened and then come back from it and build your reality confidence back. You can't do that until you realise it wasn't accidental and it wasn't random. And the next one is accept, it wasn't intentional. So they deliberately went after you, they deliberately wanted to hurt you and they deliberately knew it was going to cause you pain. I think a lot of us women tried to be like, maybe they didn't mean it. Thinking kindly of of someone is such a beautiful place to come from, right? Like it's such a beautiful trait of yours to look at somebody and try and give them the benefit of the doubt. I think that that can be beautiful from a purity standpoint. The problem is it doesn't serve you. It doesn't serve your relationship. It doesn't serve your life. And so knowing that this wasn't intentional, that this This person did want to to hurt you, is something that I think can actually free you from the blinders that we sometimes wear, that we try to pretend that someone actually didn't mean to. It makes you feel better, I get it, but it doesn't allow you to heal. So in all just a bit of your reality, your reality, confidence, that you must accept that it was intentional and not accidental.

Alright, so now moving on to the next one is you need to validate your perception

that you're not imagining it. He wasn't asshole. He did do all those nefarious things.

You have to actually make sure that you validate what happened. You don't want to start now

gaslighting your freaking self. And I get it, we all do it as a protective mechanism,

but it doesn't help, serve you, it doesn't help you build your confidence back and it won't help you heal. So you have to make sure that you just validate exactly what happened and your perception of what happened and not tell yourself that you imagined it. All right, so now moving on to the next one, which is actually the final one, which is rebuild self trust through clarity. So now at this point, you need to be able to test and try out, you've got instinct, right? So that's going to now reverting back to the first point that I actually made about your gut instinct. You need to rebuild it through trust. It's not going to happen overnight. So you have to take inventory of things that happen around you. You need to go back need to re-work or re-read your work so that you can start to get absolute clarity on how you're feeling now if you can trust yourself to make those decisions. If you start to find in your inventory collection that you're wrong a lot, right now you just know great. That's an indication, it's a data point for you to know that you're not ready to be able to trust your instincts And that's beautiful instead of going in thinking you got it and then making the same mistake All right now moving on to the next question Even though I know my ex was toxic a part of me still misses them and craves that validation Why is it so hard to emotionally detach from a narcissist? All right, so this is where I'm going to be loving, but honest, because the whole point of why you listen to this podcast and me and my guess is because you actually want to make a change. This isn't always kumbaya to make you feel good about yourself. It actually is to make a change and grow and get better in life so that you can have a thriving relationship. So the thing right here right now is you got to admit that you did get something out of that relationship. Right, you even said, even though I know he was toxic, part of me still misses them and craves their validation. That actually is a great confession and enlightening on the fact that you do realize that they were there and you got something out of the validation. Now I wanted to go a little deeper and go what exactly was it that they were validating that you don't get from yourself. Because you did get something out of it, right? You somewhat, maybe not consciously, but weighed the pros and cons on, I don't feel good about myself, but oh my god, he makes me feel good in this area. And so that's why you stayed. I didn't find why you stayed. I didn't find what that validation

was. So could it be that you never felt good enough to take a chance and for some reason they always believed that you had the right to go out and try something. And so you didn't have the courage to go and do it, but they were able to validate that you were good enough to give it a shot. Okay, that's one bit. They validated that you were beautiful and you grew up,

your entire life feeling like the ugly duckling and finally somebody actually sees you. That was definitely my core wound. And so you're getting validation from someone finally making you feel beautiful because you never felt beautiful. That's very possible. Intelligence, maybe you had told your whole life

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