JANILEE: Welcome, friends. You found Janilee and Larissa at the corner of “I'm Living my Life” and “Someone Else isn't happy about it.” This is VILIFIED.

LARISSA: Welcome, everybody!

JANILEE: Each week we talk about life and healing. Using a question as a starting point. This week, Larissa, do you want to know what question we're going to start with?

LARISSA: If I remember correctly, it's “How do I take the first step?”

JANILEE: Boom. A+ on the pop quiz.

LARISSA: Yes, I understood the assignment. Yay!

JANILEE: You did such a good job. I'm so proud of you. So how do you take the first step?

LARISSA: Well, when I realized that was the topic, I thought about that and I was like, “Well, how did I take the first step?” And I haven't got a clue. Either the first step was taken for me or I was told I had to or I just put one foot in front of the other.  

JANILEE: Here's the thing, and I find it interesting you said that maybe sometimes the step is taken for you. I feel like there's a lot of social services that come to mind as far as CPS or DCFS or these child protective agencies. And sometimes when an external force gets involved, it can sometimes force that. So even if it's not like a parent-child relationship, even if it's, say, a romantic relationship, you can have people who are so concerned for your safety that they'll call in an anonymous tip, right?. So sometimes the wheel does get moved by other people. That's not you.

LARISSA: Yeah. So, one example I was told by a police officer at one point, “We can't do anything more for you until you get a restraining order.” And I went, “I didn't even realize that I could do that.”  And then that started that process because that was the third or fourth call in a month and they were getting sick and tired of coming out. And I don't blame them, right?  Or it was a provider like a psychologist saying “Things are going to get better for you when you leave. It's going to be okay. You're going to realize life does doesn't have to be this hard,” and the light bulb clicking. Or it was me looking at the situation going, “Wait a minute, this is completely toxic.  I deserve to feel worthy in a relationship. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to not be screamed at. I deserve to not watch my partner drink seven beers and then scream at me for a while.” I mean, none of those things are okay.

JANILEE: We're not striving for perfection, though. What we're striving for is freedom to make our own mistakes. We're striving for a safe environment in which to screw up. The only people who ever make us believe or think or tell us that we have to be perfect are the abusers.

LARISSA: That's such a good thing to think about!

JANILEE: Because if you think about anyone who's ever not abused you, they don't say, “Yeah, Larissa, we can't be friends anymore unless you're perfect.” Yeah. I honestly say the opposite thing to my friends whenever they apologize for not being perfect or I'm talking on the phone to them and their child interrupts, or they didn't pick up the phone when I called, or maybe I might have done this morning and not gotten on at the scheduled time to record the podcast. But whenever those things happen, when life gets in the way and anyone that I know apologizes to me for being imperfect, I always say, “I'm really grateful that you're not perfect, because I don't want perfect friends. That's just too much pressure. I can't take it.”

LARISSA: Right? And it's a really good thing to remember is that! The people that love you the most are not going to expect perfection. They're going to want to see you grow and do better and have a better day every day. But they're going to appreciate you for who you are in the moment that you're in. And that's something, Janilee, that I didn't even realize was an issue in my life until you said, “You mean you're being a good mom? You mean you're not letting me interrupt you with your kid? How dare you?” And you were just joking. And I'm sitting there laughing and going, “Oh, yeah! Okay. It's okay. That my kid's interrupting.”

JANILEE: Yeah, you can't be 200% all the time. You can't be 100% Larissa the mother and 100% Larissa the friend. And I do this to quite a few of my friends. I actually accidentally did it to my boss at work once.  He messaged me and said, “I need to push back our one on one meeting for, like, five to ten minutes because I need to pick up my daughter from school. And he said, I hope you're okay with that.” And I was sarcastic, and this is again through chat, so you can't read tone, but I said: “No! I'm not okay with it. How dare you go pick up your daughter!” And then I was like, like: “Oh, wait a second. I said that sarcastically. I do this with all of my friends. So we're vibing good?” And he totally took it in stride and was fine with it. But it's such a part of what I do.

I even do it with my piano students, right? When they're learning a new song, they've never seen the song before. They play the song and they make a mistake and they get really embarrassed. And so I'll say to them, “You know what? I'm really glad you didn't play that song perfectly.” And they'll look at me like, “Do you know how to be a teacher?!” And I'll be like, “Well, because here's the thing. If you played this song perfectly your first time ever playing it, you wouldn't need me as a teacher, right? There's no reason for me to be in this equation because you have everything figured out.”

And I think that when we look at it from a broad perspective, right, everything in life, whether with your boss at work or with your friends or with any students that you teach, you don't need to expect perfection to love and care about people and want to see them grow, right? And so after the first episode, Larissa, I'm not sure if you know this, but we actually said, “Oh, we'll talk about taking the first step next week and talk about taking the first step next week.” And we probably said it like six or seven times, and here we are on episode 5, finally getting around to talking about taking the first step. But the reason I'm okay with that is because you actually mentioned this at the end of I can't remember, I've been editing so many episodes. But at the end of one of the episodes, you said that “Growth is important and understanding is vital to being able to have confidence in the decision that you're making.”

LARISSA: I said that? Wow, I'm smart.

JANILEE: I think that all the time {while} I'm going through these I have to write out the transcripts for these episodes. And half the time I'm thinking, “Wow, we're goofs!” And half the time I'm like, “We said what?! Dang! We're smart!”

LARISSA: Yeah, I'm sitting here going “I said something that wise? Wow! Yay me!”  

JANILEE: It's crazy, but yes, you did. And so I think it's important that we've had these conversations first about making sure that we know that we're not the problem, right? We're not the narcissist. And then also if we leave, we're not the problem because the problem is the Narcissist not being able to control you, which is not a problem. And then after that we talked about like, well, hang on, how did we even can get here? There's a lot of things to consider that go into how we got here and cycles of abuse. Which we're going to get into detail later this episode and all of this trauma and everything generational trauma. And then last week we talked about labels and how all of the stuff we've been through and all of the actions that we take can be these labels that we put on ourselves that are also manipulated by our abusers and people trying to keep us in place, right? All of that is so much information to take in. But it's helpful to have that confidence in taking the first step because you've been able to consider so many different things and you're able to recognize patterns. And this is something like we've talked about behaviors in a very black and white kind of way, but we always put the disclaimer on it. This is for patterns of behavior. This is not for a one off situation. This is for when your entire relationship is defined by this pattern of behavior.

So I wanted to start with this wonderful thing called the cycle of abuse. It's not a good thing to be abused, but I like this cycle of abuse because it gives us this insight into how into why things happen over and over and over again. And we seem to be just living that never ending Groundhog Day.

LARISSA: Well, and I think it's important to recognize also you can have your heart say “He's going to get better. What if, what if, what if?”  But or she or it or whoever the person might be. But it's important to know that if this is a cycle, if this is a pattern, and a pattern is two times or more to me,  then it's not going to get better. They're not going to change. And if they do, five years from now, great, but it's not going to change without an external force. It's not going to get better. And just because it looks like it does, when you do walk, it's not it's an act.  

JANILEE: Yeah. You mentioned in a past episode as well, you're going to have to listen to these episodes. Man, you're really wise. You mentioned that when you're dealing with a narcissist, that you need to understand that the niceness is the mask and the anger is not the mask. And so I think that's a really good image to kind of keep in mind as we talk about the cycle of abuse. I am not going to note this in the show notes just because it is everywhere and I don't remember where I heard it. And it's very common. Literally, if you just search on the interwebs “Cycle of Abuse,” you'll get all the images and all of this other stuff that you can look into.

But for now, I just want to read there's four steps and I just want to read them. Are you ready? Are you ready for that?

LARISSA: Just moving my hand.

JANILEE: {Jokingly} How dare you? How dare you move your hand when it was cramping from holding the microphone? You interrupted my flow, and I just can't handle dealing with you and you're interrupting right now.

LARISSA: Right?! It was actually my hand wasn't cramping, it was going numb. I don't know what's going on with me lately.

JANILEE: {Jokingly} That doesn't change it. It's still not acceptable.

LARISSA: Oh, okay, sorry. Okay.  

JANILEE: See how your response is laughing, though? It's because you know that I am so not serious.

LARISSA: Right? Exactly.

JANILEE: But if I was your abuser and I said the same thing, how would you have reacted?

LARISSA: I would have fawned. I know I'm a fawner. I'm a person who friends and fawns, which means that I immediately go into “I'm so sorry. Do whatever I'm supposed to do and be that perfect person, distract and make the whole situation better.”

JANILEE: Yeah. And a reasonable person wouldn't you wouldn't go into a situation with a reasonable person thinking, “I can't let my hand go numb because then I'll move it and it will disrupt the flow that this other person has.” You only think those sort of things when you're going into situations where you're not allowed to just be. And I've seen some posts, I love how much social media can connect us if used. Right. So I've seen some posts that's like, “You don't really understand how much you can be abused until the thought of someone angrily folding their socks at you makes you shudder.”

LARISSA: Yes. Or you don't realize that you're in an abusive situation until you're on the other side. And it's like, how does it go? Something along the lines of, “You don't realize you're standing in a garbage pile until you're out of the garbage pile.” You don't realize that you have poo on your shoe until you're walking, until you've cleaned your shoe, because you're just in this horrible situation and that's all you know. You don't know any different.  

JANILEE: Do you want to know what blows my mind, though? There are people who don't know what it means to have a pair of socks folded angrily at you. There are people who hear that phrase, and they go, what are you talking about?

LARISSA: That's crazy. Really? Because there are people like that.

JANILEE: Yeah, because they've never had someone angrily fold a pair of socks at them.

LARISSA: Man, I would love to be one of those people.

JANILEE: Sometimes that is what blows my mind, because it's just we've existed in the garbage piles. We've existed with the poo on our shoes. There's no other world. And then we realize there's some people who are all, “Right, you live a very different life than I do.”

LARISSA: It's kind of like the people who had actual car tissues, tissues in the car that were not from the leftover, napkins from going to drive through places, and they were actual tissues that you saved at the car. That's a whole different world than I lived in.

JANILEE: That's a fancy ass world. Okay?  

LARISSA: I agree. It's kind of like my kiddo thinking that food only is delivered at our door. That's a whole different world than I grew up in.

JANILEE: Yeah. Okay, so cycle of abuse, number one.

Step 1: tensions build, right? They increase. There's less communication. The victim becomes, like, fearful, and they have to placate. They have to do that fawning that you talked about, like, fawn over the abuser and everything.

And then after this, {step 2} there's an incident, right? And incidents can be big. They can be small, but it involves verbal, emotional, and or physical abuse. Right? This is where anger comes out. Blaming happens. Threats and intimidation an abuser puts the victim back in their place.

And then step 3: reconciliation. The abuser realizes that if okay, this is another thing. Consciously or unconsciously, the abuser realizes, “Oh, I can't be mean 24/7, because if I am, then this person has greater reason to leave.” So they apologize, like we talked about previously, their narcissistic way of apologizing. They give excuses. They'll blame the victim. Like, “I only exploded because you did this thing, right?” And then they'll just be like, “You know what? We're just going to move on past it.”

And then there's step 4, which is calm, right? The incident is forgotten. There's no abuse happening. We're in that honeymoon phase. And if any of these phrases are sounding familiar, it's because Larissa and I have talked about them a lot in the past couple of episodes, especially with that whole cycle thing.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: They come up over and over and over again.

LARISSA: Yeah. For an example, I had a relationship where somebody would threaten to leave. And the first time it happened, the person packed their bag and I was like, “Okay, go ahead and go. I'm not going to stop you. If you don't want to be here, I'm not going to keep you here, because that would be selfish of me.” And the person just stood there and stared at me and I was like, “But we can't have a relationship where you're threatening to leave all the time because that's not healthy.” The next time it was {that} the person had done something really awful (in my opinion) and blown up way past where they needed to. And I had left with my kiddo and I was hanging out for 3 hours and this person was sitting outside waiting to pack up their stuff to leave again because they had threatened to leave again.  3 hours later I come home because I'm not going to end what I'm doing. And I'm like, look, “This cannot happen again.” And then two weeks later, the same thing, “I'm leaving. That's it. I'm over this.” {So my response was to say} “Okay, go ahead and go.” And that's when it's a pattern. That's that third time or that second time where you've said, this is not healthy. This is not okay. This is my boundary. Threatening to abandon me or leave me when you know that that something big to me isn't okay.

JANILEE: Well, and knowing that it's a big thing to you is the reason they use it. Because if you didn't care about it as the victim, there's no power in it. There's no reason for them to use it.

LARISSA: Right? Exactly.

JANILEE: Okay. Bouncing around a little bit, but you mentioned boundaries. {Larissa begins to start apologizing on camera.} No, don't apologize. We're just bouncing around because that's kind of what this episode is. We're taking everything that we've talked about, and we're kind of bringing it all together into this taking the first step moment. Okay. So what we have with boundaries and we've talked about this as well in the first episode, I believe if you've listened to all of them, you know what I'm talking about. But there is leaving in stages. There's leaving in stages way to go about this. And more often than not, it comes with setting a boundary. Okay? So, 

LARISSA: {Sarcastically} Boundaries are fun.

JANILEE: Boundaries are tough, especially for somebody who's gone through trauma.

LARISSA: For someone who has been pushed past their boundaries a lot of times or who didn't have boundaries modeled for them growing up, or who had messed up boundaries; poo covered glasses boundaries modeled for them.  It is so difficult to learn to set a boundary and then to learn how to apply that boundary. And so when you start setting them, you feel like you're screwing up and you're not. It's just so foreign to you. And I remember that feeling the first time I ever set a boundary with someone and being like, “Oh, my gosh, I've messed this whole thing up and I'm just such a mess. And I came across so aggressive, and I wasn't trying to even be aggressive.” And that's that Itty Bitty Shitty Committee in your head.  It's going to feel weird at first, and that is completely acceptable. You have permission to feel off while setting your first and second and third and fourth and fifth boundaries. And more than having permission, you are going to feel off, period.

JANILEE: Yeah. Okay. So there is someone on Instagram, and we'll have to check and see other platforms that this person might be on who goes by Haley Page McGee. And she has a video that I came across this week that I really liked, and it talks about the difference between a request and a boundary.  And I will share it in the stories this week. I'm going to share one thing from different Internet creators in the Instagram stories this week, so you'll be able to find this specific video I'm talking about. But in this she talks about, there's like 4 things that constitute a boundary and 3 things that constitute a request. And essentially, when I was listening to it, one: it's such a good video, so definitely check her out. She's cool. But second is it comes down to what makes a boundary successful is our willingness to follow through on it.  

LARISSA: That's so true. Sorry. No. Just like light bulb moment. A boundary is something where you follow through. A request is something where you don't. Like when I'd be threatened with a year's worth of groundings and three days later, my mom or dad would be so annoyed with me, they'd unground me.

JANILEE: Yeah, well, and another thing that I realized is you don't need your abuser's permission to set a boundary. You might feel like you do. But, no. You probably will {feel that way}.

LARISSA: Yeah, just my thought too. No, I felt like I always needed permission to set these boundaries or somebody's permission. It didn't necessarily need to be {the abuser, so} whether it was the court or my therapist or the police officer or a friend.  

JANILEE: And in the past, Larissa and I have given you listeners, permission. You have permission to set a boundary and to do things for yourself. We will remind you as often as you need reminding. And like I mentioned in a previous episode, I had to ask for permission to be mad at my mom for permission to feel a feeling. And that is a lot harder, {it} is a lot easier to do than it is to set a boundary. Feeling a feeling easier than setting a boundary, because setting a boundary, all of a sudden, there's a second person involved and a second emotion involved. Okay? So another way to think about it is.  Let's say that you have a house and a yard and it's yours. You have all of the rights to it. It is completely and totally yours. If someone is encroaching on your property,  you can move that property in this makeup world, right? You can just uproot and go somewhere else where they can't get at you. And if they come to you, then you use court and you use police. And Larissa is very knowledgeable in these aspects.

LARISSA: Sadly, that's an education in and of itself.

JANILEE: Yeah, there are things you can do for yourself as well. For me, when I took that last step of after I'd gone through all of the stages, I took that first step out on my own. The last of the stages, that moment that we're talking about today, in that moment, I  had researched beforehand how to block numbers for my type of phone and how to make sure that this and this person couldn't contact me. I completely and totally got off of Facebook because it was the only social media I had used. And I to this day, still don't use Facebook because that is not where I'm going to be. Right? And I got very protective of myself in electronic ways. And then I also physically moved myself to a new location.

LARISSA: I did something sorry, go ahead.

JANILEE: Just finishing up what I was saying. None of that involved an actual court and none of that actually involved any sort of police officers because my mom gave up easier and I was a legal adult and she had no actual authority over me. But it's different when there's legal ties that bind you to your abuser. You're going to need different aspects. You're going to need legal help to get out of that.

LARISSA: And see, even with the court's involvement, even with legal protections, there have been situations where the restraining order got violated. So I went out, bought a new phone, got a new carrier, got a new Apple ID, and got a new phone number. I was like, let's just nip this whole thing in the butt. And there's nothing wrong with doing that.

JANILEE: Then you also get to decide who and what you're putting there and you get to  completely, almost start over.

LARISSA: I mean, I didn't because I had people that I had to keep in contact with and so they had to have that number providers, the exchange location for my kiddo, stuff like that. But. You know, it is okay when you are ready to set that boundary. And the way I look at boundaries is if they're like a fence on that property that you have,  you can put up that fence and you can move that fence in my imaginary boundary world. And that fence can go higher if it needs to, and it can go lower, and I can lower it, see how it goes, and then put it back up. And that is okay to do.  It's your house. It's your property.

JANILEE: It's your life. It's my rose bushes, is the way I look at it. Yeah. And you are the only person who has complete and total autonomous authority over your own life. You might have a million people trying to assert their authority onto you, but they don't actually have authority. Take them to emotional court, put up that wall as high as the sky, and they don't have any claim.  So one thing that I felt we should talk about today as well is the difference between emotionally immature and narcissistic people. We've talked about both in the past, and we've talked about the differences, but there's just three things that I really want to just make sure are crystal clear for anyone that may need that reminder, because even still, I remind myself of these things. Right? And the first one, it's really sad. Well, actually, I'm going to reorder these.

LARISSA: Okay?

JANILEE: So the first one is that the narcissist will do these things unconsciously or consciously, but most of the time it'll be unconsciously because, remember, if they had that ability to okay, they have the ability if they chose to use the ability to think things through consciously, they would self reflect and they would be different, and there would be that emotional immaturity.

LARISSA: Right?

JANILEE: So people who are emotionally immature and aren't being narcissistic, they're aware of it, and they're able to see that they're growing, no matter how incremental and tiny and the smallest little baby steps you've ever seen, even if you're just like being army crawling across the ground, you're still making progress. And you can see that.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Whereas narcissists, they do these things to protect their internal world and to protect their reality from shattering, but they don't really understand. You ask them why they do something and their response is going to be it's not going to make sense.

LARISSA: Give you a word salad.

JANILEE: Yes, word salad. Because there's no logical reason for it. But unconsciously, they are doing it because they are scared and they are worried about their life and their reality.

LARISSA: Right. Yeah.

JANILEE: Anything you want to add to that point?

LARISSA: I think it's important to recognize they do have control over this behavior, because they don't show it in every situation. So they know the behavior is bad, but they can't help themselves. And whether that's an unconscious or a conscious thought, it is. No matter what, they cannot grow, and they cannot even take one step forward, two steps back, and it's tough to determine. I mean, I know that I suffer from a lot of emotional immaturity because of what I've been through in my life, but I'm struggling, and I'm working through it, and I'm growing, and I'm taking the steps. I'm seeking out growth, whereas other people are going, “I'm not the problem.”

JANILEE: The thought of growth makes Narcissists uncomfortable.  

LARISSA: That makes so much more sense because it's a lot of work.  That's why my Three Narcateers are not growing at all, okay {that makes sense}.

JANILEE: I was talking to a friend last night about something different, but this friend was dealing with a narcissist. And I was able to point out to this friend that for narcissists, oftentimes their realities and their personal melodies are cookie cutter, right? It's something that was created by a lifestyle, by a family heritage, by a religion, by anything, and it's just cookie cutter. And it was made and it was given to them. And they don't have to put work into it. They don't have to build a reality. They don't have to build a personality. They just use the one that was given to them already completed.

But for people who, people like us, who want to build our own reality, who want to live in the real world, who want to grow and expand and create our own personality from scratch, it's so much more work and it hurts and it's hard. And oftentimes narcissists will point that out and say, Are you sure? Because you're in a lot of pain trying to build a personality. You're in a lot of pain trying to get out of this reality. So getting out of this reality is wrong and growth is bad because it's hard. It's. But that's not the case. Growth is not hard because it's bad. It's hard because it's hard and it's life. It's just life.

LARISSA: Yeah, like an example would be being told, “Oh, you're just wanting a pity party.” When no, I'm trying to get out of this situation, and I'm trying to grow from it and I'm trying to not repeat this.

JANILEE: But their behaviors in that situation would have been to get a pity party because they wouldn't be trying to grow. They'd be trying to get things to stop shifting. They try and get things to stop moving and stop growing, and that's just not the way of the world.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: Second point on the list: They will reframe their reality with or without you. Their reality is going to make it through whatever choice you choose to make. And if you are choosing to not be in their reality, they will reframe their reality without you. I used to have a different role in my mom's reality, and now the role I have is villain.  Because I left. Because I changed. Because I grew I'm still a part of that reality in as much as I'm the villain of that reality, but I no longer am living in that reality because the reality is more important than the people. It's more important than you.  I have so many examples. Yeah,  crazy, because these are things that one thing that I love. I'm a nerd. I like to research things. But one thing I love in every aspect of everything I'm ever interested in is finding commonality. Finding common ground, finding four or five different cultures of people who lived in different areas of the world who had no way of knowing that they existed. And they all had these common beliefs and these common understandings and the goodness of humanity and those types of things.

LARISSA: Right. I loved cultural anthropology, too.

JANILEE: Yeah, way to put a label on it. See, labels can be useful. Boom. Full circle moment. I'm signing off.  Okay, so finding these similarities is helpful, but I never expected to find them in what I was doing as far as healing myself, but they are there, and now that I've seen them for what they are, and there's patterns, and it's almost like a template that most abusers and narcissists use.  You can predict it happening. You can see something and say, this is going to happen. They're going to have a hissy fit. This bad thing is going to come of it, and everyone's going to be like, wow, you're crazy. And I'm like, okay, yeah, call me in five months. Boom. I was right. It's not hard to see once you can view the pattern. So, Larissa, you saying I have so many examples. “Well, yeah. No, duh.”

LARISSA: No, I was talking to my therapist this morning, and I was saying, unfortunately, this is the path we are on. I know where this path goes. I would love for the path to take a different route. I would love for there to be a bend in the road, but right now there isn't. And until something changes, until somebody out there makes something change, this is the path, and this is where we're going. And this is what the end result is going to be. And I don't want that result. And I can't change this path because it's not mine.  

JANILEE: There you go. Okay, I was going to ask, was this in regards to some sort of legal something that you're it wasn't legal?

LARISSA: No. It's more just looking at where things are going to end up.  

JANILEE: Seeing when it comes to  if we're looking at other people's lives, right, we can see where it's going, and if they don't change something, they're going to crash. But if it anything that is our life, if we're on the path at all in any way, we have the power to change it totally, 100%.

LARISSA: Yeah. Well, I mean, unfortunately, people make the choices they make, and those consequences from those choices are their own. They know what those consequences could be. You explain those consequences, that's that boundary where you say, I'm putting this in place, this is what the consequence is, please respect this. And when they don't,  they can create the “I Hate Larissa support group.” There probably already is one.  

JANILEE: Or the I hate Rachel Green club.

LARISSA: There you go.

JANILEE: And you're in good company. You're just being vilified. Oh, my goodness.  I think I just figured out where the name, where the podcast comes exactly.

LARISSA: It's getting to the point where I have been able to say, “Go ahead and create this support group. I don't care.”  It took so many years. So many years and so much work. But it's worth it. It's worth it to have that freedom and to know that it's okay for me to not be perfect in everyone's eyes and that I'm not everyone's cup of tea.  And even if it's not an abuser or narcissist, you're not everyone's cup of tea.

JANILEE: Yeah. Just life. But you are welcome here, and we embrace you with open arms. Come be vilified with us. We're going to create a  vilified support group.

LARISSA: Yeah!

JANILEE: Okay. The last point on this list is people are pawns.

LARISSA: Yeah.

JANILEE: This was so hard, and I still get emotional thinking about it. But  when I made my exiting thing right, I put up a very firm boundary, and I said, Mom, I'm not talking to.  Ever again. And she  would text me from different numbers from, like, my dad's phone, or she'd email the relatives that she knew were still in contact with me. And all of a sudden, these cousins that I'd never spoken to personally one-on-one in my life, were coming out of the woodwork wanting to have lunch with me because people are pawns.

LARISSA: They're the flying monkeys for this person. Yeah.

JANILEE: And when none of that worked, I had a previously set up appointment to take my younger sibling out to lunch. And I show up and I say, “I'm outside of the house. I'm waiting”, and get a text from my dad's phone that says, “If you don't come in and talk to your sister's mother, you don't get to take her out. Because we don't like our children going out with people that we don't know.”  

LARISSA: Wow. Holy. Yeah.

JANILEE: People are pawns. And it was the hardest thing in the world for me to exit that chess game. And as we've mentioned before, it has effects. I spiraled, but I was able to gain my ground at the bottom.

LARISSA: Right.

JANILEE: But even something such as hanging out with people who are still in that reality, that's a pawn. And the narcissist and the abuser is going to use every possible pawn that they have. And everyone in that reality is going to believe that you are bat shit crazy.

LARISSA: Yeah. And they're going to believe that you are the villain because they live in that reality. And in that reality, you are the villain. That reality just isn't real life. Yeah. It's just the shit colored glasses or covered glasses.

JANILEE: It's that yeah.

LARISSA: There's so many different times where somebody's been used. Like, there was a letter written about me and sent to so many family members.

JANILEE: Hey, I read that letter!

LARISSA: Yeah, it was the first time I was ever introduced to you. And you were all, “This is a narcissistic pattern.” And I'm all “Really?! Oh, I'm so glad that it's not just me who thinks this.”

JANILEE: Yeah, Larissa and I have a mutual friend, and that's how we met. And this mutual friend was so upset on the behalf of Larissa and not as experienced dealing with narcissists as I am.

LARISSA: Or me.

JANILEE: That's really such a weird badge of honor to wear. I try and put it to work. Hence the podcast, right? I've dealt with narcissists. I can deal with them. And so this friend asked, our mutual friend, asked me to read this letter. And I read it, and I was like, “Yes. There we go.” And it wasn't just, this is textbook narcissist. I was able to predict by the time that I was done with the letter, I said, “Okay, so this narcissist just said that this one thing about Larissa, she's going to first of all, {she} is going to say that someone outside of herself believes so, so that it's not just the narcissist. And then after that, she's going to back it up with some kind of action that everyone else is supposed to take. And then she's going to morally justify it.”

LARISSA: Literally {this is what happened}. Think of, like, a 5 paragraph essay outline.

JANILEE: It was a narcissist letter

LARISSA:  And it was, “Larissa has been diagnosed with these psychiatric conditions” that this person's not qualified to diagnose me with. “And she's doing these things, and she doesn't realize that she's causing the problems she's causing, so don't help her. Abandon her and her kid.”

JANILEE: And the last step is, “What's the moral justification for it? To protect the family?  To protect other person else from you.  To protect everyone from me and help me.”

LARISSA: It wasn't even just that. It was “To help me realize what I'm doing wrong.”  

JANILEE: Yeah, “Let's let's all come together collectively and convince this victim that they are dumb and that they are crazy and that their reality is not reality.” Well, let's look at it from our perspective without the crap colored glasses on. It isn't because we're not wearing the crap colored glasses. And we look at all these people who are trying to convince us. And their faces, oh, look, there's a new person crap colored glasses. A new person crap colored glasses. They're all wearing the same glasses. So of course we're seeing things differently.

LARISSA: {Laughing} It's that scene in The Incredibles 2, where they're all wearing those messed up goggles.  And they're all being hypnotized and controlled. And the only people who are not wearing the glasses are the only ones that understand  what's actually happening.

JANILEE: But that doesn't change how emphatic and how convincing the people wearing the glasses can be.

LARISSA: Oh, yeah. I mean, what's really sad is I hadn't tried to sway any of them. These people that this letter went to and this letter went to probably 200 people, maybe more.  I still, to this day, four years later, have not tried to do that. Because I don't have to justify and I'm going to let actions speak for themselves. I'm going to let the situation speak for itself. I'm going to let the people make their own choices about this person, because I don't need to control other people and I don't need to control their opinions.  

JANILEE: It well and all of this, there's a common root in everything that we've said. If you are in that place where you're taking that step, you have to trust your own senses over anyone else's.

LARISSA: And more often than not, that is never done.  

JANILEE: It's usually called gaslighting in the psychological community, but the idea is you get a person so convinced that they cannot trust their own senses, and the only way they can accurately perceive anything around them is by trusting what you tell them. That's gaslighting.  There's a lot of people use it in a lot of fancy ways, but at the core, that's what it is. And so when you are  trying to take this step, you have to trust your senses. And they will be questioned multiple times by so many people, by everyone in that reality. “Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? I don't know. Man have you checked the sky lately? It's looking kind of green.” It's going to be tested, and you have to be able to say, “I know what I'm experiencing. You don't.”  

LARISSA: Yeah. And it is so difficult to do. I struggled so much with that, and it wasn't until a psychological evaluation came out saying “She can't even trust her own reality because it's been that damaged and it's been broken that badly” that was actually written almost word for word, basically, into this document, and it was cited. And I read this and went, “Oh, my gosh.  What I was told where I was forced to lie about certain things and believe that as truth, where I was doing this, where I was doing that, all of these things.”  

JANILEE: Boom.

LARISSA: And its, it is so freeing to start believing yourself and to start believing when you look at the sky and it looks blue or I mean, I've heard when there's a tornado coming, it does look green. So if you look up at the sky and you see it's green, believe it that it's green.

JANILEE: But. 

LARISSA: But also it's okay to turn to a trusted, wise friend, somebody who is that trusted, safe person who isn't going to gaslight you, who isn't going to play these games and say, this is how I see this. Is this right?  And it took so long of me having to do that to say, I'm seeing it this way. Am I seeing the world correctly to learn, “Okay. Yes. This is the correct way of viewing this. Yes. This is actually accurate. Yes. This is actually what you went through. Yes. This is not okay.” To start believing yourself. And the more you do it, the more you will.  

JANILEE: Okay. You are just psychic, I swear. Because the last thing on my list is ask for the help you need. We've talked in a past episode about how hard that can be and how if you're lucky, you have one, two people that are on your side when you're leaving,

LARISSA: And sometimes you don't have any

JANILEE: And sometimes you need to go find someone. Right?  And look, this whole episode, it's not like Larissa and I are saying, “Okay, step one, do this. Step two, do this.” Because everybody's different. There's no way to literally put a bullet point list. Like, you cannot do that with this. Everyone is so different. And the only things that we can say is trust yourself. First of all, all this information we've thrown at you, you know what to expect. So trust your instincts, understand what you're seeing, ask for help, and know it's going to be the hardest thing you've ever had to do. That's really all that we can list out for you.

LARISSA: I remember standing there repetitively saying to myself, “I can do difficult things. I can do difficult things.”  And I literally just said that for, like, an hour to myself as this poor domestic violence advocate looked at me, probably thinking I was nuts or horribly injured. I don't know what she was thinking.  And she finally looked over at me and she's like, “Yeah, you can. And you just did.”  So even if you don't have a person, there are numbers you can call. There are resources that you can ask for for help.

JANILEE: Be safe with doing it. If you need to borrow another person's phone, if you need to get a burner phone to do so, if you need to go to a neighbor's house to call for help.  Go to whatever library and use their computers.

LARISSA: Exactly. It is okay to reach out to those organizations and say, “I am struggling with this. I need help.”

JANILEE: When it comes to therapists, specifically something that I have found that helps is search out a trauma informed therapist. Most often they'll have that like on their bio or something.

LARISSA: You can also call and ask, are you trauma informed?

JANILEE: Right? Because they're going to be the ones that understand what's happening and understand your situation better. I remember my therapist, I was scared because I was worried that I was going to go in and the therapist was going to confirm everything that I'd ever been told by everyone else.

LARISSA: But the opposite happened, right?

JANILEE: I go in and my therapist is like, you are the psychologicalized child. I can't remember the phrase. I'll look it up and put it in the show notes. But you are basically, I remember “You are the identified patient because in your system, you are the one person that's not letting it work.” So even if your parents are like forcing you to go to therapy because they want you to change, your therapists aren't dumb. They're going to be able to see it. And so find a trauma informed therapist that you feel comfortable with. If you don't feel comfortable with a therapist change, find a new one.

LARISSA: It's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean that you're a horrible person for leaving.

JANILEE: It means you two didn't vibe. And you need to have someone that you can trust on this journey with you to make it through. I also had a friend who asked me if I would kind of be their therapist just to help them through certain situation because they were scared to get a therapist. And as long as you ask a friend first and then they say that they're okay with it, then know that you can rely on that friend. But it's not the. Having a friend as a psychologist is definitely not a long term solution. But if it helps you in the moment, it helps you in the moment.

LARISSA: And remember that every day is a new day to take just one more little step, right?

JANILEE: Like when I did this final kind of Iron Curtain going down thing, it wasn't as if I all of a sudden had to scramble. I kind of prepared beforehand, just intuitively. And remember, we're learning to trust our own instincts, trust our own views of reality. You're going to instinctively kind of prepare yourself for these things.

LARISSA: And I mean, I remember sitting in the shelter and I had not planned to leave yet. I had planned to make my move  very organized and very neat and very financially planned out. And none of that happened. And situations are what they are. I had to do what I had to do. But I remember sitting in the shelter and one day somebody had written a quote up on this bulletin board and it said something along the lines of “It's, okay, if you didn't take that step today because you have been so exhausted from living in survival mode,” that “Just surviving is enough.” And so if you have started to take this first step, if you are sitting in a shelter, if you have reached out to a trusted friend, if you are starting to question whether or not you  need to leave, it is okay, wherever you are in that moment, to take that moment. Take the time that you can safely. I mean, if it's a matter of, “Okay, if I stick around, I might not be alive tomorrow,” or “The police have told me I need to get a restraining order,” {you would be} better to go do that. And “Now it's not safe to be at home,” or there are certain situations where moves have to happen, or child welfare saying, “I'm going to take your children from you and put them in the system if you don't leave.” In those situations, do whatever you have to do in that moment. But it is okay to give yourself that grace, to say, “I did everything I could today by just eating, peeing, pooping, maybe taking a shower and putting on clothing.”

JANILEE: “I stayed alive today, and it's okay that I stayed alive today and tomorrow. I can take this on when I have more energy.”

LARISSA: There are days where you have to give yourself that grace, and you have to give yourself that permission to take a moment to take that nap when your body's so exhausted.  It is okay to do that and  give yourself that compassion that your abuser is not giving you.  

JANILEE: Yeah. And here's {where it can be} so hard, though, right, to give yourself that grace. And so whenever I see something that's like I saw one yesterday and shared it on my Instagram story, where it was the picture of a little duck in front of a camera and someone had captioned it, and I was like, “Did you take care of yourself today? Did you feed yourself?” And this is the voice I imagined it in my head. It was like, “Did you feel the feelings? Did you allow yourself to feel all the feelings that you're feeling? I'm proud of you.”

LARISSA: Exactly. And just allowing yourself that safe space is huge. Because without that safe space, even for you, the likelihood of going back is high. And if you do go back, it's okay too. The average person  returns to an abusive situation seven times minimum.  

JANILEE: And it's like Larissa said in a previous episode, actually, is if you go back, you're most likely going to leave sooner because your tolerance for their bullshit is less that's okay.

LARISSA: Yes, your tolerance for what you're going through will decrease the further you are from the situation and you can heal.  I know how reactive it can feel to be back in that situation and then get out of it again and go, “Oh, wait, yeah, I don't want that again.”

JANILEE: I was just going to say we both just kind of shrugged at each other because  we're out of words, because there's so many things that people will throw at you with so many different reasons, but the one thing that matters is you and you and you.

LARISSA: Yeah, you matter. And taking that first step, whether you're being forced to take it by an external force or you're forced to take it because somebody is threatening your safety, or you're taking it through carefully calculated moves or the moment came for you to leave and you took it. You saw an opportunity, you saw an out and you grabbed a hold of it and you didn't let go. Wherever you are taking your first step, it is okay. You have permission to take that first step and you are doing the best thing for you.

JANILEE: It is scary. I remember how scared I was.

LARISSA: I remember sitting, there going, “What else can these people take from me? What else can go wrong?  What else do I have?”  And being so afraid  and I've come through and I now can go, “You know what? I've gone through a whole heck of a lot worse with a lot less. And look at what I can do now.” I didn't believe in myself. I didn't believe that I could do it. I remember telling myself and friends and the Lord, “I can't take anything more. Do not give me anything else. I am at my max” and I don't even know how I got through it all. The grace of God, my friends, my loved ones, my true troop. And I've built that community for myself, and I would not trade it for the world anymore. And you deserve it. It does not matter what this person is saying to you. You are worthy of safety and love and happiness  and peace.  Yeah,  I don't know what else to say either. Sorry.  

JANILEE: No, I'm just sitting here, and it's just true. And I don't know if you need to pause for a second and just let yourself feel it. You heard Larissa got a little choked up, like, these emotions come up, and that's okay. Pause the podcast. Take all the time you need to feel it. And just remember that you're feeling these emotions because you're being yourself for the first time. And it's scary.

LARISSA: It's really scary. It is so scary. And, I mean, I spent so long figuring out myself just because of that. It's, and I was terrified that I was going to be something screwed up. But you're not. You have the power. You will love you eventually.  The first set of feelings that I felt, I was like, “Oh, heck no. What am I supposed to do here? Help. Why?”

JANILEE: Well, and we'll get into that later. I want to say next week because it makes logical sense, but I do not know what the name is. We'll find the question for it. But essentially, you've left, right? And that feeling when you first leave, when you first drop the Iron Curtain, and when you're finally able to take a breath, that's scary. And Larissa and I have always tried to be real with you, right? Like, here's how it's going to happen. It's not going to be easy.  It's not going to be easy. Yes, I said that two times. Because it's very important to understand the enormity of what you're taking on. We've talked about how emotionally immature people are, like children, emotionally, in a weird way, you taking the step is kind of like you're being born.  Your true self is getting a chance to exist unperturbed for the first time.

LARISSA: You're finally able to spread those wings and be the beautiful person that you were meant to be. I remember even having an advocate say “It's okay to ask for stuff.” And me sitting there going, oh, “You mean this Christmas list. I can actually ask for something for me, not just for so and so,” or, “You mean it's okay,” and feeling selfish to even ask for myself or even to ask, “Am I screwed up here? Is my thinking all messed up? Or is this accurate here?” It's not selfish to seek out that help.

JANILEE: All right, I just want to end this episode really quick with a story. So after I had made my grand exit, I came down with an illness, a physical illness, and I was bedridden, and the person I was staying with was like, “Oh, man, I'm sorry that you're sick. If you want, there's some drink for you, like some electrolyte drink in the basement.” And I was like, “thank you for letting me know.” Right? And then I just stayed in bed because I wasn't feeling well. And then, I don't know, like half an hour later, this person comes back into my room with two different flavored drinks and just puts them on my nightstand and was like, “I just want to leave these here for you in case you want them. So they're nearby and then left, right?” My first feeling was guilt {thinking} “How could I have missed the fact that I was supposed to go and actually get the Gatorade? How did I miss the fact that I was supposed to go and get the drink right then when they said it and I didn't, and so they had to bring it up to me?” But what actually was happening was someone was caring enough about me to say, “Hey, I noticed that it might have been hard for you. Let me help.” So asking for help, yeah, it's super, super hard. But more often than not, the right kinds of people, they're going to be happy to help no matter what.