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I want to tell you something that I don't really talk about publicly. A couple weeks ago, I left something that I loved. Not a romantic relationship, not a job, not a city. I left a paddling community. Something that I had built part of my identity around. People I had shown up for, trained alongside, genuinely cared about. And the moment I left, the moment I stopped showing up and stopped explaining myself and stopped trying to earn something that was never going to be freely given, the story about me changed. Suddenly, I was difficult. Suddenly, I was dramatic. Suddenly, I was one who couldn't take a joke, who walked away instead of working it out, who had changed. And here's what I want to tell you about that. For the first time in my life, I was completely okay with it. Not because I'd stopped caring what people thought. I'm human. Of course I cared. But because I had finally learned something it took me far too long to accept. Sometimes, being the villain in someone else's story is the only way to become the hero in your own. And today, that's what we're talking about. Welcome back to Pattern Breakers Collective. I'm Lisa. Before we jump in, the usual note. Throughout this episode, I'll mostly use he when talking about unhealthy or abusive dynamics. That reflects both my professional experience and my own lived experience. But I recognize that abuse is not limited to one gender or one type of relationship. It shows up in families, workplaces, friendships, communities, churches, anywhere unhealthy power dynamics exist. If your story looks different, the principles I'm describing still apply to you. Now, I need to say something upfront about today's episode because it's a little different. This one is personal, more personal than most. I spend a lot of time on this show talking about patterns women live inside, the emotional dynamics, the psychology, the slow erosion of self. And I believe deeply in that work. But I also think the most powerful thing I can do sometimes is sit down and tell you, I live this too. Recently, not in the past. Not in a story from 10 years ago, in the last year. Because one of the most humbling realizations I've had is this. Understanding these patterns doesn't make you immune to them. You can study manipulation for years. You can sit with hundreds of survivors. You can teach this material to rooms full of women. And you can still find yourself inside an unhealthy dynamic without fully seeing it. Not because you're not smart enough, because the pattern is familiar. And familiar things don't always announce themselves. So today, I'm gonna take you through what happened to me, what I missed, what I finally saw, what I did about it, and what the fallout looks like. And along the way, I want to show you why the lessons that came out of a canoe club on the island of Hawaii apply to every room in your life. Let's go. Because I think what happened to me makes the most sense if you understand the specific conditioning that made it possible. I think one of the most dangerous things little girls are taught, quietly, consistency, from the time that they were very small is that being good means being easy, easy to get along with, easy to forgive, easy to inconvenience, easy to overlook, easy to require very little from. We are praised for being flexible, for being understanding, for keeping the peace, for not making a scene, for taking the high road, even when the high road costs us something real. And somewhere along the way, a lot of us stopped asking the question that might have changed everything. At what cost? Because there is a difference between kindness and self-abandonment. And the line between them is not always obvious while you're living on the wrong side of it. Kindness says, I care about your feelings. Self-abandonment says, your feelings matter more than mine. Kindness says, I'm willing to compromise. Self-abandonment says, I'll be the only one who compromises. Kindness creates healthy relationships. Self-abandonment creates resentment. And resentment that builds in silence is one of the most corrosive forces that I know of. And here's the thing about self-abandonment. It rarely feels like a choice in the moment. It feels like survival. It feels like wisdom. It feels like not making things worse. You laugh at the joke that hurt you because the alternative seems more costly. You say yes when you want to say no because the conflict that would follow seems harder than the resentment that follows saying yes. You stay quiet when something happens because you don't want to be the difficult one. A hundred tiny moments, none of them individually catastrophic, all of them adding up. Until one day you realize you've become genuinely skilled at one thing: protecting everyone else's comfort while abandoning your own. This doesn't just happen inside of abusive marriages. It happens in friendships, at work, inside family, in churches, on sports teams, anywhere there is an unspoken rule that says, if you want to belong here, don't make anyone uncomfortable. Unhealthy systems reward compliance, not authenticity. Now I want to name something specific about what happens when you finally break that pattern. When you finally stop overexplaining, stop people pleasing, finally say no or that wasn't okay. Something fascinating and predictable occurs. The conversation stops being about what happened and starts being about you. Suddenly, you're too sensitive, too emotional, too much, too difficult. And that's when so many women back down, not because they suddenly believe that they were wrong, but because they've spent a lifetime believing that making someone else uncomfortable is one of the worst things that they could possibly do. So I want to say something that took me a very long time to actually believe. Someone else's discomfort with your boundary does not automatically mean that your boundary is wrong. Say it again with me if you need to. Someone else's discomfort with your boundary does not automatically mean that your boundary is wrong. Sometimes it simply means they're no longer getting the version of you that benefited them. And that's exactly where my story begins. So let me tell you about the canoe club. If you've been following me for a while, you know I live on Hawaii Island. My husband and I moved here about five years ago. And one of the things that this island gave me, one of the things that I genuinely didn't expect, was outrigger canoe paddling. I fell in love with it completely. Not just the sport, though I love that part of it, the discipline of it, the competition, the way it demands something real from your body. But the history behind it, the connection to Hawaiian culture, the deep respect for the ocean that is embedded in every stroke. I love all of it. It became part of how I understood my new life here, part of my identity in this place. A couple of years ago, because of my age division, I was integrated into a certain women's crew. And I remember exactly how I felt when it happened. Excited. These were women that I admired, a little more experienced, more established in the community of the club, women I thought, genuinely thought maybe these are people that I would build real friendships with. Maybe I'll finally feel like I belong here. And isn't that where so many dynamics begin? Not with fear, with hope. At first, it was small things. Comments that didn't quite sit right, a joke that landed with a little too much edge, remarks about me being from the mainlands, said with a tone that made being from somewhere else feel like something I should apologize for, and a few comments that looking back now with clear eyes were outright full of hate rhetoric. I knew it. Even then, in the moment, something in me registered it. And I did what so many women do. I became a defense attorney for the people who were hurting me. Well, maybe she didn't mean it like that. Or maybe that's just her personality, or maybe I'm being too sensitive, or don't make this into a thing. Have you ever noticed how quickly we start building a defense case for the prosecution? How fast we take the side of the person who hurt us against ourselves? I didn't want to make waves. I didn't want to be that person. I didn't want to be dramatic. And if I'm being completely honest with myself, I wanted to prove myself. I thought if I worked hard enough, paddled well enough, showed up consistently enough, was kind and generous and good enough, eventually I would earn the respect I kept trying to find. But that's the thing about unhealthy systems. You cannot earn from someone what they have no intention of giving. And because I kept saying nothing, because my silence communicated that this was acceptable, the behavior got bolder. And not just toward me, toward other people too. I started watching these women belittle others, make fun of people after they walked away, roll their eyes at a younger paddler's question, mock someone's technique after they worked up the courage to try something difficult, sometimes over the smallest things, sometimes just it seemed to feel the power of it. And every time it happened, I felt the discomfort rise in my chest. And then I told myself, stay out of it. It's not your business. Just paddle. Don't create more problems for yourself. Because anytime I would say something, that's what would happen. It would become more for me to deal with. I became good at surviving something I should have never been trying to survive. And here's what hit me the hardest when I finally sat with all of it. I help women recognize these dynamics for a living. I've studied manipulation and coercive control for years. I've sat with hundreds of survivors and helped them see exactly what was happening in their own lives. And there I was, making excuses, minimizing my own discomfort, trying to earn kindness, trying to prove my worth, telling myself that if I just kept showing up, things would eventually get better. The people were different, the setting was completely different, the stakes were different, but the voice inside my head, that voice was identical. Don't say anything. Don't make this bigger than it is. Just keep the peace. That's when I finally understood something that I should have known already. The pattern wasn't following me because I attract difficult people. The pattern was following me because I was still responding the same way. And pattern breakers, that is a genuinely uncomfortable realization. Because if we're always waiting for different people, we never become different ourselves. Then something happened that I couldn't explain away. A couple weeks ago, I watched one of the women in her 50s, mind you, get inches away from a much younger paddler's face and start yelling at her, not correcting her, not coaching her, yelling at her, trying to use sheer force to make her feel small and comply with what she wanted. And I stood there thinking, I cannot do this anymore. Not because it was the first thing I'd seen, because it was the moment that I finally, clearly, without any softening, saw what this was and saw what it had been all along. It was the moment that I stopped building the defense case. So I left. Not just the crew, the entire club. I had to leave a place that I genuinely loved. I had to leave other people who had done absolutely nothing wrong, people who were just paddling and minding their own lives because I couldn't stay in an environment that required me to disappear in order to belong to it. My husband and I don't get to paddle together anymore because we now belong to different clubs. I uprooted something real in my own life. Not because I had done something wrong, but because I finally refused to keep doing something that I knew was wrong to myself. So I want to spend a minute on something that I don't think gets talked about enough in conversations about boundary setting and leaving unhealthy dynamics, the grief. Because the narrative around leaving something toxic is often framed as liberation. And it can be, but it is almost never only that. When I left the canoe club, it didn't feel victorious at all. It felt sad. I felt like I had lost something that genuinely mattered to me, a community that I hoped would become home, like a version of my life here on this island that I had to give up. And I think women are often caught off guard by the grief that follows leaving because they expected to feel better. They expected relief to be the primary emotion. And when sadness shows up alongside the relief, or when they find themselves missing something that was also hurting them, they interpret that as a sign that they made the wrong choice. They didn't. You can grieve something that was bad for you. You can miss a community that was toxic. You can mourn the version of a relationship that you hoped it would become, even while knowing clearly that it was never that thing. Grief doesn't require the lost thing to have been good. It requires the lost thing to have mattered. And that club mattered to me. The hope of belonging mattered. The specific identity I had built around that community mattered. Losing those things was real. I don't want to rush past that part or wrap it up in triumph. It didn't feel like in the moment. What I want to offer instead is this the grief and the rightness of that decision can coexist. They lived in me at the same time, often on the same afternoon. I could feel clearly that I made the right choice and still feel the weight of what it cost me. Both things were true. They didn't cancel each other out. That's what I want women to understand about the moments when they finally stopped tolerating something at the expense of themselves. Leaving is not always a relief. Sometimes it's a relief and a loss at the same time, and you were allowed to mourn what you had to give up, even when giving it up was exactly the right thing to do. After I left, the story about me changed almost immediately. Suddenly, I was the problem, the one who had acted a certain way, the one who was standing off to the side, the one who had changed, the difficult one, the villain. And I've been thinking a lot about why that happens. Because it's not random and it's not unique to my situation. It's a pattern I see constantly in the women that I work with across wildly different circumstances and environments. The moment someone stops participating in an unhealthy system, that system almost immediately starts generating an explanation for why they're the problem. And the explanation almost never sounds like, well, she finally started respecting herself. It sounds like she changed. A woman leaves an emotionally abusive marriage and suddenly she's breaking up the family. Someone leaves a toxic workplace and suddenly they're not a team player. A daughter starts setting limits with her parents and suddenly she's ungrateful. A friend finally says that wasn't okay, and suddenly she's too sensitive. The facts don't change. The only thing that changed is that someone stopped performing the role everyone had become comfortable with. Here's why that happens. Healthy people don't need a villain. Think about the people in your life who genuinely love you, who are emotionally mature, who have done their own work. When you tell them that they've hurt your feelings, they may not respond perfectly, none of us always do, but they get curious, they ask questions, they try to understand. They don't immediately start building a case against your character, because emotionally healthy people don't need someone else to be wrong in order to feel okay about themselves. Unhealthy people often do, because if you're not the problem, they might have to look at themselves. And that is genuinely threatening to someone who has built their sense of self around never being wrong. So instead, they rewrite the story. She's changed instead of, well, she's finally respecting herself. She's difficult instead of, whoa, she's finally stopped tolerating what wasn't okay. Well, she's selfish instead of, whoa, she's finally set a limit. The behavior is exactly the same. Only the interpretation changes. And if we're not careful, if we haven't built enough internal stability to hold our own version of reality, we start to believe their version. I've had women sit across from me and say quietly like they're confessing something, maybe I am selfish, maybe I am asking for too much, maybe I really am difficult. And one of my favorite questions to ask them, compared to what? Compared to silently accepting things that hurt you, compared to never disagreeing, compared to making yourself emotionally smaller so that everyone else can stay comfortable? Because if that's the comparison, then yes, you have changed. And I genuinely hope that you keep changing. I hope that you are becoming harder to manipulate, harder to guilt, harder to intimidate. I hope that you are actively becoming the kind of woman who no longer mistakes keeping the peace for keeping herself safe. Because those two things are not the same. And confusing them has caused a lot of women a lot of years. Here's something else worth understanding. When you set a limit and someone reacts badly, there's a temptation to interpret that bad reaction as proof that your limit was wrong. But I want to offer you a different frame. Sometimes a limit doesn't push people away, it reveals them. It shows you what the relationship was actually made of, whether it can hold two full people or whether it only worked when one of them was willing to be smaller. I've seen women cry in my office after setting a single limit. Not because the limit was wrong, but because the response to it told them everything that they've been afraid to know about the relationship that they were in. The limit didn't create a problem. The limit exposed one that had been there all along. It isn't. Healthy relationships have conflict. Healthy marriages have arguments. Healthy friendships sometimes hurt each other's feelings. Healthy coworkers misunderstand each other, healthy families disappoint each other. That is part of being human, not a sign that something is wrong. The difference isn't whether conflict exists. The difference is what happens after. Can the other person hear your perspective even if they don't completely agree with it? Can they get curious instead of defensive? Can they say, I didn't realize that I hurt you? Or help me understand rather than here's why you're wrong to feel that way? Can they apologize? Can they actually repair? Because healthy people are willing to repair. They care more about the relationship than about being right. They don't need to win, and they don't need to make you the villain in order to feel okay about themselves. Unhealthy systems operate very differently. In an unhealthy system, your discomfort becomes the problem. Your limit Becomes the offense. Your honesty gets called disrespect. Your withdrawal gets called betrayal. Your growth gets treated as a threat. And the system's response to your attempt to change things is almost always the same. How do we get her back to the role she was performing before? The accommodating one, the quiet one, the one who keeps everyone comfortable by absorbing the tension herself. Now I also want to say something specifically about abusive relationships because that is the core of the work I do. I get asked regularly, should we try couples counseling? And my answer depends entirely on what kind of a relationship that we're actually talking about. If two people genuinely love each other but have poor communication tools, avoidant patterns, or unresolved personal histories, counseling can genuinely help. Communication is a skill. Emotional regulation is a skill. Repair is a skill. Most of us were not taught any of these things growing up, and they can be learned. But if there is coercive control, emotional abuse, manipulation, fear, or a significant power imbalance, traditional couple counseling can actually make things more dangerous, not less, because an abusive person can weaponize the therapy process. They can use your disclosures against you later. They can perform insight in the therapist's office while behaving completely differently at home. They can become more skilled at the manipulation through access to therapeutic language. So understanding what kind of relationship you're actually in, not what you hope it is, not what it looks like from the outside, but what it actually is, matters enormously. It changes what kind of support is safe for you. So let's make this real because awareness without action keeps us exactly where we are, and I don't want to leave you with insight that doesn't translate into your actual life. One of the biggest misconceptions about pattern breaking is that people think it starts with the huge decision: leaving, divorcing, quitting, walking out. Sometimes it does, but most of the time, pattern breaking starts in moments so small that nobody else even notices. It starts the next time someone makes a joke at your expense. Old pattern, laugh along, tell yourself it's not a big deal, spend the drive home replaying it and wondering why it landed so hard. Pattern breaking? Pause. Notice the feeling. Instead of immediately asking, Am I overreacting? Ask instead, why did I feel the need to laugh at something that actually hurt me? Maybe you don't say anything that day, but you notice, and noticing is where everything begins. Or maybe it's at work. Your boss asked you for the fourth time this month to stay late because you're always so dependable. You can hear in that sentence what's actually being said. I know you won't say no. Old pattern, say yes, cancel your own plans, go home resentful, tell yourself it's fine. Pattern breaking. I can't tonight. No long explanation, no 10-minute apology, no I wish I could, but just I can't tonight. And then letting the silence exist without rushing to fill it. Maybe it's your family. Someone makes a passive-aggressive comment at dinner, the kind that lands with perfect precision on the exact thing that you're most insecure about, said with a smile so that you can't call it out without looking like the dramatic one. Old pattern. Smile, pretend you didn't hear it, replay it in your head for three days. Pattern breaking. I'm not willing to joke about that. Said calmly, not angry, not dramatic. And then letting what follows follow. Or maybe it's in your marriage. Your partner interrupts you every time you speak. Not once. Every time. Like your words are placeholders until he's ready to say something again. Old pattern, stop talking, tell yourself it's not worth the argument, carry the resentment. Pattern breaking. I'd like to finish what I was saying. Clear, calm, and meaning it. Or maybe it's a friendship. You realize that you're the only one reaching out every time, planning everything, initiating every check-in, carrying the entire emotional weight of the relationship. And you've been telling yourself that that's just how you are. You're the one who shows up for people. Pattern breaking might simply be doing nothing, waiting, seeing whether the relationship has two people in it or just one. That one is quiet and it is devastating and it tells you everything. Pattern breaking is not one giant act of courage. It is hundreds of tiny decisions that slowly teach your nervous system my needs matter too. And eventually, those tiny decisions don't just change your behavior, they change who you are. You stop asking, how do I make everyone happy? And you start asking, what kind of woman do I want to become? And that shift from managing other people to becoming yourself is the real work. Not leaving one unhealthy relationship, becoming someone who no longer abandons herself inside any of them. The ones other people tell about us. Because every one of us exists in two different narratives. There's the story you're living, and there's the story someone else tells about you. Sometimes they're the same. Often, especially in moments of change and growth and finally choosing yourself, they're not. Somewhere, right now, there is probably a version of me being discussed. Maybe I'm difficult. Maybe I'm the one who couldn't take a joke. Maybe I'm the one who walked away instead of working it out. Maybe I'm dramatic. Maybe I changed in ways people didn't like. They're allowed to tell that story. It's theirs. But I don't have to live inside it. In my story, I'm the woman who finally stopped trying to earn kindness from people who enjoyed withholding it, who finally stopped confusing belonging with self-betrayal, who chose peace over proximity and meant it, even when it was hard. Was it painful? Yes. I lost a community I loved. I lost a version of my life here that I had to build with genuine care. I have to start completely over in a sport that had become part of who I am. Some of the people I left behind had done nothing wrong. They were caught in the middle of something that they didn't ask to be in. And I'm probably gonna mourn that for a while. But here's what I carry forward that I didn't carry before. I respect myself more today than I did before I left. Not because I won anything or proved something, because I finally showed myself that when the moment came, I was willing to choose myself. And I didn't know with certainty that I'd do that until I actually did it. Every major decision that I've ever made has disappointed someone. Moving to Hawaii disappointed someone. Changing careers, disappointed someone, leaving unhealthy relationships, disappointed people. Speaking publicly about abuse disappoints people every single day. Asking the things I ask disappoints people regularly. And I've realized something that I hope you hear very clearly today. If I build my life around never disappointing anyone, I will spend every remaining year of my life disappointing myself. I refuse to do that anymore. I would rather disappoint you than abandon myself one more time. I hope someday, if you're not there yet, you feel the exact same way. If this episode hit something real for you, whether it was a canoe story or the pattern you recognize in yourself or the specific version of the villain role that you've been handed inside of your own life, I want to leave you with this. You are not required to stay inside stories people wrote for you. You are not required to keep performing roles that cost you yourself. You are not required to wait for someone else's permission to stop shrinking. The story they tell about you when you finally start choosing yourself, let them tell it. You don't have to live inside it. You get to live inside of yours. If today's conversation made something shift, I'd love to help you take that further. My 12-week Pattern Breakers Collective program is where we do this work in depth. Not just understanding the patterns intellectually, actually changing them at the level of daily behavior, at the level of your nervous system, at the level of how you show up inside every relationship you have. If that's where you are, all of the information is available on my socials or at patternbreakerscollective.com. Just reach out. And I have two small asks. First, send this episode to one woman who needs it. Not someone already in this community, someone still in the middle of something who doesn't have words for it yet. Maybe the friend who always seems to be the one who gives more than she receives. Maybe the woman who laughs at things that clearly aren't funny to her. You know who she is. She needs this. And second, if you haven't left a review yet wherever you listen, please do that. 60 seconds. It helps other women find this space when they're searching for something that they can't quite name yet. Until next time, don't be afraid to become the villain in someone else's story if it means that you finally get to become the woman that you can respect.