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I want to read you something. I received a message recently from a woman who had just ended a 20-year marriage. She had been a stay-at-home mom for most of that time. Two kids, a whole life built around someone else. She had finally recognized what she had been living inside emotional abuse, financial control, sexual coercion. And she finally left. But here's what she sent me that stopped me. She said, He changed. About three years ago, he stopped the sexual pressure. He put me on his bank account. He apologized for some of the ways he treated me. And now I don't know how to feel about any of it. Because if he could change, was it really abuse? And if it was, why do I still feel so confused? Why do I still feel like I'm the one who's falling apart? And then she said one more thing. I don't even know how to know what I want anymore. And I have read that message many times because it's not just her story. I hear versions of it constantly from women at different stages in different circumstances, carrying the same impossible tangle of questions. Was it really abuse if he got better? Was it my fault it took so long? Why do I miss someone who hurt me? Why can't I just feel relieved? Who am I now? What do I even want? Today's episode is my answer to all of those questions. And it's for every woman who has ever stood in that confusing in-between space, feeling like she should have the answers by now and wondering why she doesn't. You are not lost, you are not broken, and you are absolutely not alone. Let's talk about it. Hi, I'm Lisa, and this is the Pattern Breakers Collective, where we dig into the patterns that shaped us, the ones we survived, and the long, unglamorous, absolutely worth it work of breaking free. Before we get into this, the usual note, when I talk about harmful dynamics, I'll use he for the person causing harm. That reflects my own experience and the patterns I've worked in professionally. But I recognize that these dynamics exist across all genders and all types of relationships. If your story looks different from the truth that I'm describing, it still applies to you. Now, I want to be upfront about something today. This episode was written in response to a real message from a real woman. I'm not going to share her personal details. She knows who she is, but more importantly, her questions are not unique to her. I chose to address them publicly because I hear them so often from so many different women that I believe that there's an entire community of you sitting with the same confusion that she described. And I think that you deserve to hear it addressed out loud, not in platitudes, not in internet sound bites, in the real, complicated, human way that these experiences actually unfold. We're gonna cover a lot of ground today. What it actually means when someone changes after years of harm, the grief nobody warns about when you leave, what sexual coercion inside long-term relationships actually looks like, and why women minimize it, the identity collapse that follows years of survival, and what it actually looks like to start coming back to yourself slowly and perfectly and on your own terms. Stay with me. This one matters. Let's start here because I think this is where most women get stuck first. Yeah, maybe he did change. At some point, maybe when you emotionally disconnected, maybe when you threatened to leave, maybe when you actually left, things shifted. The behavior that had been a problem for years suddenly wasn't a problem anymore. He became softer, more present, apologetic. He did things that you had been asking for for years. And that creates a very particular kind of confusion that I don't think gets enough attention. Because on one hand, you feel this complicated relief. Finally, finally he's doing it. Finally, he's capable of this. And on the other hand, something in you is asking a much harder question. Well, if he was capable of doing this all along, why did it take losing you? I want to sit with that question for a second because I think it's the one that carries the most pain and the most confusion about whether what you lived through was real. The short answer, and the one I want you to hold on to, is this the change does not rewrite the history. And the fact that change was possible does not mean that the harm wasn't real. Here's why. Real, sustained change in someone who has caused harm, real accountability, not just behavior modification, is rare. And the reason it's rare is that it requires a very specific kind of self-awareness that most people who operate from control, entitlement, or coercion have spent years actively avoiding. Because genuine accountability sounds like I understand the specific harm I caused. I'm not going to minimize it or explain it away or make this about my good intentions or center how hard this has been for me. That is different from I changed because I didn't want to lose you. One of those is insight, the other is consequence management. And what I see most often, not always, but most often, is that the change that happens when a relationship is threatened is consequence management. It's not that the person suddenly understood the harm, it's that they suddenly understood what the harm was going to cost them. And I want to say something about that as directly as I can. The fact that someone was always capable of treating you well and chose not to until their access, comfort, reputation, or control was threatened is not proof that the relationship was fine. It is actually evidence of how the harm operated. It was a choice made repeatedly, over years, with full awareness that a different choice existed. He didn't become capable of respect when he changed. He was always capable. He just wasn't motivated until there were consequences, and that is an enormously painful thing to fully absorb. I have sat with this in my own life. The specific grief of realizing that the person who'd hurt me was not someone who couldn't help it, but someone who hadn't prioritized not doing it. That distinction shifted something fundamental in how I understood what I had been through. And here's the other piece of this I really want you to hear. Even if the change is real, even if it's genuine, sustained, and deeply meant, your nervous system doesn't get a receipt that says case close, harm processed. Your body lived through years of fear, hypervigilance, confusion, coercion, and instability. That doesn't dissolve because the environment has shifted. The healing still has to happen. And the healing is yours to do, regardless of what he does or doesn't do now. So yes, he may have changed and it was still abuse. Both of those things are true at the same time. You're allowed to hold on to both. Now I want to spend some time on sexual coercion specifically, because the woman whose message inspired this episode mentioned it. And because I think it's one of the most minimized forms of harm inside long-term marriages, and the minimization gets worse the longer the relationship goes on. Because here's what happens over 20 plus years. In the early years, something happens that doesn't quite feel right. Maybe you went along with something you didn't want. Maybe you said no in some indirect way, and it was either ignored or the fallout from saying no was bad enough that you learn pretty quickly that saying no wasn't safe. So you start to adapt, you start to anticipate, you start to manage, to head things off, to go along before being asked, to make yourself available, not from desire, but from fear of what happens if you don't. And over time, that adaptation becomes so automatic that you barely even notice it anymore. And it just becomes how things are. It becomes part of the routine of marriage. And because it's gradual, and because it doesn't look like the dramatic assault scenario that people think of when they hear the word coercion, women talk themselves out of naming it. They tell themselves, this is just marriage. They tell themselves, maybe I'm being dramatic. They tell themselves, well, it's not like he forced me. And meanwhile, their body has been keeping score the entire time. I've talked about consent on this show before, but I want to say something specific about it in the context of a long relationship because I think this is where women get the most confused. Consent inside of a marriage is not a one-time thing. It is not something that was established at the beginning and never needs to be checked again. It is not a default state that he gets to assume. And going along with something because the alternative, the silence, the anger, the guilt trip, the cold shoulder, the days of tension is worse than just doing it. That is not consent. That is pressure operating on a long enough timeline that it starts to feel like choice. There is a particular emotional experience that I want to name. The split of technically agreeing while internally feeling disconnected, resentful, violated, or completely alone. Women describe this constantly, but then they minimize it because there wasn't a dramatic scene. But your body knew it has always known. And what I find significant about this particular woman's message that inspired this episode is that he stopped the sexual pressure a few years ago, after she had tried to end the relationship. And this brings us back to what we talked about in the last section because that's where timing matters. The pressure didn't stop because he finally understood that it was wrong. It stopped when the leaving became real. It stopped when there were consequences. And I want women to hear this clearly. The fact that it stopped does not mean it didn't happen. The fact that it can stop when someone chooses to stop it, it means it could have stopped at any point. That's not really comfort. That's the truth about how coercion works. You are allowed to name that even now, even if it stopped, even if it was a long time ago, even if it was gradual, even if no one else could see it. You are allowed to call it what it was. Maybe a relief, maybe even a victory. Yay, she finally left. But for the woman who left, it doesn't feel like a victory. It feels like the ground disappeared. Because here's what she was doing for years, whether she realized it or not, she was in a constant state of emotional labor, monitoring the temperature of the household, anticipating reactions, preventing conflict, managing his moods so that life could keep running, explaining herself, adjusting, shrinking, trying to keep the peace while also holding everything else together. That is a full-time job, a relentless, thankless, invisible full-time job. And it consumes so much mental and emotional space that it becomes the structure of all of your days. And then it's gone. And that void, that sudden silence where the constant low hum of survival used to be, it doesn't feel like peace right away. It feels like disorientation, like something is wrong. Like you should be doing something, but you don't really know what. Not always, not every moment, but sometimes, sometimes in the middle of the ordinary quiet of a new life, something surfaces. Of course, there's going to be memories of good moments, a feeling of loss that doesn't match the story that they've been telling themselves about why they left, a grief that doesn't make sense on paper. And women shame themselves for this constantly. They think, well, if I miss him, does that mean that I'm wrong about what happened? Does that mean that I should go back? Does that mean that I never really loved him or I loved him too much? Does it mean that something is wrong with me? No. It means that you're human. You don't get to choose when attachment ends. Attachment is not a rational system. You can know with complete clarity that something was harmful and still feel the pull of what it was at its best or what you had hoped it would become. You can grieve someone who hurt you. You can miss a version of a relationship that was never fully real. That is not contradiction, that is a grief. And grief is not linear and it does not ask for your permission. You are allowed to feel relieved and devastated in the same week. You are allowed to know that you made the right choice and still cry over it. Leaving was right, and it was also a loss. Both of those things are very real. What I want to say to the women in that in-between space right now, the ones who have physically left but emotionally still feel tangled is this that confusion is not a sign that you made the wrong decision. That confusion is what happens when a nervous system that has been in survival mode for years tries to figure out what peace is supposed to feel like. Give it time. Give yourself time. The ground will come back beneath you. So let's talk a bit about that grief, the specific grief about leaving a long relationship. Because I think women are given a completely inadequate vocabulary for what they're actually feeling. The narrative out there is usually one of two things. Either you should be relieved because you got out, or you're grieving a relationship that you should have left sooner, which implies that you should feel a little guilty about the grief on top of everything else. Neither one of those is helpful. And neither one of those captures what's actually happening. Because when you leave a 20-plus-year relationship, maybe not even that long, but regardless, you're not grieving one thing. You're grieving many things at once. And most of them have nothing to do with whether the relationship was healthy. You're grieving the time, you're grieving the years, not just the bad ones, all of them. Two decades possibly of your life, of who you were during those years, of the things that you gave, and the things that you gave up, and the things that you believed were possible that turned out not to be. You're grieving the future that you imagined when it started, the version of this that you thought that you were building, the marriage that you thought that you were gonna have, the person that you thought that he was going to be, and the person that you thought that you were going to be inside of that life. You're grieving the version of yourself who kept hoping. She tried so hard. She believed so fiercely, she stayed so much longer than was good for her because she kept believing that if she just tried harder, loved better, communicated more clearly, stayed calmer, needed less, eventually things would change. That woman deserves to be grieved, not blamed, not lectured, grieved. You're also grieving the stability. Even if that stability was a performance, even if it was held together by survival rather than real peace, there was a structure, there was a known world, and even a painful known world can feel safer than an unknown one. And for the women who were stay-at-home mothers, which is so many of the women I hear from, there is an additional grief that is financial, practical, and identity related all at once. The loss of a role that was, for all its difficulty, a form of purpose. The terror of financial uncertainty after years of depending on someone else, the question of who you are when that thing that defined your days is suddenly reorganized by separation, that is a lot of loss. And it all lands at the same time. And on top of all of it, a lot of women are also managing kids, logistics, legal processes, financial fear, and the social fallout of a life changed publicly while still trying to process something that would take anyone's breath away. Grieving something harmful does not mean that you want it back. It means you are human and you lost something real, even if what you lost was partly illusion, even if what you lost was the hope more than the reality. Grief doesn't require perfection from the thing being mourned. So if you are in that grief right now, please stop asking yourself why you're not over it yet. Please stop measuring your healing against some imaginary timeline. Please stop treating your sadness as evidence that you are wrong to leave. You are not too slow, you are just in it. And being in it is exactly where you're supposed to be right now. Okay, I want to come back to the line. I don't even know what I want anymore, because I think it's the one that most women don't say out loud because they're afraid of what it means. That sentence carries so much. And I want to say first before anything else, that is one of the most honest and courageous things a woman can admit after leaving a long relationship because most people will not let themselves acknowledge how lost they feel. They'll perform strength, they'll be fine, they'll move forward without ever sitting with the fact that they genuinely don't know who they are on the other side of this. So if you said it, or if you're saying it to yourself right now, I want you to know that I hear it. And it doesn't mean that you are broken, it means that you've been surviving. Here's what I want to explain about how this happens. When you spend years, and in many cases decades, organizing your inner world around someone else, your own preferences, desires, opinions, and instincts become secondary. Probably not all at once, probably gradually, you stop consulting yourself because consulting yourself kept leading to conflict, disappointment, correction, or silence. So eventually you stop. And the self-consultation muscle atrophies, like any muscle that goes unused. So now, in the quiet on the other side of the relationship, you reach for what you want and you find not a lot, or a blur, or contradictory things that you can't make sense of, or possibly nothing at all. And that is disorienting in a way that is very hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived it. Because it's not depression exactly, and it's not confusion exactly. It's more like a kind of blankness where your own preferences and instincts used to be. So, how do you begin? How do you start to find yourself again after 15, 17, or 20 years of disappearing inside someone else's life? Here's what I actually know to be true about this process. You don't find yourself all at once because you didn't lose yourself all at once. You don't wake up one morning with full access to your desires and preferences and a clear vision of who you are. It doesn't work like that. You rebuild it in tiny moments and small private questions that you ask yourself and actually wait to hear the answers to. What do I actually want for dinner tonight? Not what's easiest, not what avoids conflict. What do I actually want? Do I want company right now, or do I want to be alone? What does my body want? What feels right? These questions sound almost embarrassingly small, but they are practice because after years of deferring, every single moment of genuine self-consultation is a thread that you're pulling back toward yourself. Let yourself be a beginner. A lot of women expect themselves to emerge from these relationships already knowing who they are, as if the healing should have happened in the middle of surviving. But that's not how it works. You couldn't know who you were becoming while you were inside of it. You were too busy adapting. So now you get to be a beginner again. You get to try things and like or not like them. You get to have preferences that you didn't know you had. You get to discover things about yourself that surprise you. That's not failure, that's reclamation. You get to practice tolerating your own feelings. One of the things that gets trained out of women. In these types of dynamics is the ability to just feel something and let it be. Because feeling things used to lead somewhere dangerous: a reaction, a dismissal, a punishment. So women learn to flatten their emotional experience, to not feel too much, to keep it manageable. Rebuilding yourself means letting feelings come back. And some of them are going to be uncomfortable. Some of them will be confusing. Some of them will feel way too big. That's okay. You're just learning to be with yourself again. And you get to stop waiting for certainty before you start. This one is important because a lot of women in this space tell me they don't want to start building anything new until they know exactly who they are and what they want. And I understand that impulse, but certainty doesn't come before you start. It comes through the starting. You don't find yourself by waiting until you can see yourself clearly. You find yourself by making small choices and noticing what they feel like. You don't have to know who you are in order to start moving toward her. You just have to be willing to pay attention to what feels true and act on that one small moment at a time. Now I want to say something that might be uncomfortable, but I think it's one of the most important things in this episode. A lot of women who leave relationships where harm occurred spend significant emotional energy monitoring whether the change is real, watching to see if it sticks, looking for signs of genuine transformation, waiting to understand him before they can understand what happened. And I get it. I genuinely understand why. Because if the change is real, that affects how you make sense of everything. It affects whether the years of trying meant something. It affects whether you might be making a mistake by leaving permanently. It affects whether there's a version of this where it all works out. But here's what I want to gently offer. As long as your healing is organized around whether or not he finally changes, your life is still emotionally orbiting him. You are still waiting, still watching, still making him the center of the story about your future. And your future doesn't have to be about him at all. The question that actually moves you forward is not, will he be different? It's who do I want to be? It's what does my life look like when it's built around what I need rather than what I'm surviving? That shift from what is he doing to what do I need is one of the most significant turning points in healing. And it's not a one-time moment. It's something you choose again and again every time the old gravitational pull shows up and tries to make his growth the measure of your freedom. Your freedom is not contingent on his insight. Your healing is not dependent on his accountability. Your life does not wait for his evolution. It begins when you decide that it does. Okay, I want to close with something actually useful because I am aware that we've covered some heavy ground today and I don't want to leave you there. I'm not gonna give you a 10-step healing plan, I don't believe in those. I'm gonna tell you the things I've seen genuinely help, not just survive, but actually begin to rebuild. First up, get a therapist who understands this specifically, not just any therapist, someone who understands trauma, coercive control, and the specific psychological aftermath of long-term emotional abuse. This matters because well-meaning therapists who don't understand these dynamics can inadvertently send you back into the cycle, suggesting communication strategies that only work with people who are operating in good faith or framing everything as both sides when the power dynamic was fundamentally unequal. A trauma-informed therapist who gets it will help you understand your own nervous system. They will help you rebuild self-trust, and they will help you locate yourself in a way that doesn't depend on someone else's narrative. If you don't have access to therapy right now, I know it's not always accessible to everyone. There are support groups for domestic violence and emotional abuse. Survivors can genuinely be healing. There is something specific about being in a room, even a virtual one, with women who understand your experience without you having to explain it from the beginning. Second, stop demanding that you be healed already. If you are two and a half months out, that is nothing. That is the beginning. I say that not to discourage you, but to give you permission to still be in the thick of it because you are. And expecting yourself to have emerged with clarity and direction at two months post-divorce from a 20-year marriage is like expecting to run a marathon two weeks after a major surgery. You are healing from something serious. Give it the time that it requires. And when people, including yourself, tell you that you should be further along by now, I want you to hear my voice saying, no, you are right on time for where you are. Number three, do small things that are just for you. Not productive things, not things that benefit the household or the kids or your healing journey in some measurable way. Just things that feel good, that feel like you, even if you don't know what those are yet. Start experimenting. Try things. Notice what makes you exhale. Notice what feels like relief rather than performance. Those small signals are your instincts waking back up. Pay attention to them. Number four, let people help you. This one is hard for women who have spent years being self-sufficient out of necessity, who learned that needing things was dangerous or led to being used or created obligation. But connection is part of how we heal. Letting someone bring you dinner or just sit with you or let you talk without offering advice, that is not weakness. That is being human. And it also quietly is a way of rebuilding trust and relationships and other people and in yourself. Number five, trust the first thing you knew. This one builds on something we've talked about in recent episodes. When you feel confusion starting to spiral, when you start asking yourself whether it was really that bad, whether you made the right choice, whether you're being fair, come back to the first thing you knew before anyone else's narrative, before the analysis, before the second guessing. Your body knew it was not safe. Your nervous system knew. The version of you who finally tried to leave knew. Come back to her. She has not been wrong about this. And now I want to come back to where we started. To the woman who spent 20 years building a life around someone else, who finally named what she had been living inside, who is now standing on the other side of it, confused and grieving and wondering who she is. And I want to say directly to her and to every woman listening who recognizes herself in her story a few things. The confusion you feel does not mean the relationship was healthy. The grief does not mean leaving was wrong. The fact that he changed does not erase what it took him to get there. Or what your body paid for the years before he got there. Missing him does not mean you should go back. Not knowing who you are right now does not mean that you are lost forever. You are two months out from 20 years. You are allowed to still be in the middle of it. And that question you asked, I don't even know how to know what I want anymore. I want to tell you what I think it means. I think it means that you are ready. Not ready to have all the answers, ready to start asking. And that is the beginning. That is the whole thing, actually, the willingness to ask yourself real questions and wait with patience and compassion for yourself to hear the answers come back. I promise you, they will come back slowly, and small moments and preferences and instincts and desires that surprise you in the quiet of a life that is finally genuinely all yours. Keep going. There are women sitting alone right now, maybe just a few months out of something long and heavy, who need to hear that their confusion makes sense, their grief is real, and they are not alone in it. You might be the person who gets this episode to them. Please do that. And if you haven't yet, leaving a review wherever you listen genuinely helps more women find this space. It costs you 60 seconds and it helps me reach someone who needs it. And third, if today's episode hits somewhere deep, if you're sitting with the recognition that understanding this isn't enough, that you want to do this work with real structure and real support, I want to tell you about my 12-week program, Breaking the Cycle and Healing from Toxic Love. It was built specifically for women who are ready to break this pattern at the root, not just learn about it, actually move through it. We go deep on everything we touched on today and a whole lot more in a structure container with actual support. It is truly transformative work. I have watched women come in carrying years of shame and walk out understanding themselves in a completely different way. If that sounds like where you are, head to my socials or patternbreakerscollective.com. All of the information is there. Reach out, ask questions. There is no pressure, just an open door. Okay, that's it from me today. Until next time, keep breaking every pattern that taught you to put yourself last year.