Being prepared is the key to your safety — I grew up in Arizona, with my early childhood spent in the desert (fun fact: Arizona isn’t just cacti and tumbleweeds; we have a diverse climate that includes mountains and snow and freezing temps, oh my!) From early on, I learned how to keep myself safe whenever spending time outdoors…

Perverts = Periods? — Did you hear about the married woman and mother in her mid-forties who cheated on her husband and groomed a teenage boy who was the age of her son? …

Holding onto illusions will never set you free — When you’re in a relationship with a narcissist or trying to recover after one, heartbreak comes in bulk. Everything hurts. It’s because of the way a narcissist breaks your heart. Like tricking you into sharing your deepest, darkest secrets, and the most vulnerable parts about yourself. Then having that information…

Lessons I not only learned but survived — I have never heard my father apologize. For anything. To anyone. Why would he? He was never to blame, at least that’s how he saw it. Everyone else was the problem. And by everyone, I mean me. From a young age, I tried fitting into the expectations my father designed…

Don’t let a diagnosis distract you from seeing what you need to see — “Your husband is a narcissist,” the psychologist who we had come to for marital counseling told me. A what? At the time, I didn’t know what a narcissist was. Back then, no one was writing much about narcissism yet. Narcissistic abuse wasn’t even a thing on anyone’s radar. …

And bubble baths have nothing to do with it — Hey, I’m not knocking what a deep soak in a hot tub can do both for your body and your spirit. But when this hits the top of the self-care chart over and over again (along with massages, as if everyone can afford those), it becomes dangerously close to gaslighting…

Though they’ll never tell — The single biggest mistake we make with narcissists happens at the very beginning of a relationship with them. That very first moment when we assume we’re meeting someone on a level playing field. With no game plan. Like two souls who were wandering around aimlessly and suddenly bumped into one…

Everything — He kept a machete underneath the mattress upon which we slept. Just in case, he said. Every night, I imagined the horror of what “in case” might mean. Even though we lived in a small town where people left their doors and cars unlocked (obviously we didn’t because of “in…

Your well-being depends on knowing the difference — “I never saw a single sign,” said no one who has ever been in an abusive relationship. Instead, we who have had our heart broken by an abuser have boatloads of red flags we can look back on, which is quite the ass-kicking to our self-esteem when we realize what…