Gaslighting, Trauma & Healing After Divorce with Kristen Crabtree

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Bent Not Broken. Heartbreak and trauma may feel like the end of your story, but here it's the beginning of a bold new chapter. I'm your host, Coach Deborah Griffiths, and this is the space where women rise, rebuild, and rediscover their purpose. Remember this truth. You are bet, not broken. Today's guest is Kristen Crabtree, a woman whose work helps people rediscover the parts of themselves they spent years silencing. Kristen is the author of Be the You That's More You Than You've Ever Been, and the creator of Paramar Paradox, a self-recovery ecosystem born from her own lived experience, including 22 years in a psychologically abusive marriage. After 52 years of forgetting who she was, she rebuilt her life layer by layer, and now she helps others do the same. She's not a therapist or an academic, but she's a certified divorce coach and a lifelong seeker whose honesty and insight help audiences feel seen, understood, and awakened to who they truly are. So get ready for a conversation that's raw, real, and deeply empowering. Welcome, Kristen.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Thank you, Deborah. I'm so glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

I'm glad you are here as well. So let's get going. Tell us a little bit about your 22-year same-sex marriage that involves psychological abuse.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Well, I think the most interesting thing about it, and probably the thing that might wake someone up, is I thought we had a fantastic marriage because we never fought. But I realized we never fought because I had learned to never disagree. And I had gotten to a point where I couldn't even hear my own voice enough to disagree. It wasn't until I did trauma therapy from childhood abuse that, and that was when I was 53, so three years ago, four years ago. So it wasn't until I did that that I started to realize I had opinions and I had a voice, and it felt wrong to be told what to do, and that I was not as smart. I have a master's degree, but everything that I did was wrong, and I needed to be lectured and told how to do things right. I just acquiesced to that. I went along with it. The realization I had just a couple weeks ago is that she used my past trauma as a way to control me. So she was actually a police officer when I met her, and she had also been a chiropractor. She had those kinds of experiences behind her. Because I had been sexually abused, sexually assaulted, and raped when I was younger, I had a lot of fears. She took advantage of that as a way to impart control because I wasn't safe unless I was with her. It was never about building my sense of internal safety for myself. It was about I wouldn't be safe unless she was protecting me. And that kept me captured, our marriage, you know.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

So it kept you shut down. If you felt like you couldn't even disagree or express an opinion, she shut you down.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Yeah, and the funny thing about psychological abuse, and I don't think anybody can get this unless they're in it. But it's so different from physical abuse, and I am definitely not lessening how horrible physical abuse is. Right. There's some kind of physical identifier of it. And it's often a big thing, you know, it's not like somebody going bam. With psychological abuse, it's very rarely a bam. It's a chip, chip, chip, oh, darn day. And you don't even notice the chipping, right? But it's everything you do is wrong. Everything. How you make the cup of coffee, whether you bring the cup of coffee upstairs at the right time, whether you schedule the walk with your friend at the right time, how you clean the cutting board, how you choose an avocado, how you open the avocado, how you cut the avocado, how you scoop the avocado out, how you wash your dog's butt when she's had diarrhea, how you vacuum, how you do the laundry, how you talk, whether you make the right eye contact, shut up enough so that they can speak. You know, I mean it's just constant. And so when I tell my story of abuse to people who've never witnessed that, if they only hear a couple pieces, I know they think, what a baby. I mean, come on. So she told you how to clean a cutting board. What's the big deal? And it's not any one little thing, it's just this constant for 22 years, you know, chip, chip, chip, until there's nothing left of me. I feel the visual I have of me leaving the marriage was crawling out on my hands and knees and clawing my way into my car. That's not what happened. That's what felt like happened.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Right. And I know from my experience, these things don't happen overnight. It's years. You could have days when everything is fine, and then all of a sudden, you didn't make the coffee right. And and maybe you didn't do anything differently, but to them, they'll say you didn't make the coffee right, and we'll overreact. In my case, I saw a lot of overreaction to something trivial, but that gets you on the feeling like you're constantly walking on eggshells.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

So it's intense, it's very intense.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

From that process, I am so fortunate to have an amazing support system that has actually gotten bigger ever since I got out of my marriage. That being said, people who wanted to support me but didn't understand psychological abuse sometimes said the wrong thing without meaning to. You know, they were trying to say things that was supportive, but because of the nuances of psychological abuse, sometimes it would actually hit the wrong way. It's hard because you love your loved ones and you appreciate their help, but sometimes you want to say, you know what, that's not helping. Just, you know.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

What was it that actually woke you up to the fact that you were in this relationship and you needed to leave? Was there an incident that was the straw that broke the camel's back? Sort of.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

I mean, really, it was so there there's two answers to that question. Okay. There was a moment in my therapist's office. I went to therapy. When I left his office at the end of it, he said, over the next two years, things will change for you because you've set down that load you've been carrying. And that actually petrified me. I didn't want things to change, right? You know, we don't like change. Right. That scared me. And I didn't know yet that I was in a bad marriage. And so the idea of change was really frightening. Two years later, almost to the day, I was calling him and saying, you know what, my marriage is a wreck, and I really need to figure out how to fix it. She won't go to therapy with me. She did try later. She won't go to therapy with me. So I need to start therapy to figure out what I can do to fix it. So that was how I went. About a month and a half later, he asked me a question. It was basically, what more do you need to do to fix her and fix your marriage? And I was like, What more can I do? And he looked at me and he's like, No amount of therapy that you can do is going to change her or change the relationship without her involvement. And I thought, wow, he's right. The other way to answer that though, is, and actually, my book sort of gets into this, not directly, but indirectly, is very rarely are big moments the result of one big thing. It's usually an accumulation of little details that happen over time. For example, two years before I left my wife, I was having a panic attack, and a friend of mine said, Maybe you should try EMDR, which is a therapy. I actually wound up doing something called progressive counting, but it was by somebody who does EMDR. So she planted that seed, and also that same person was into listening to Audible. I used to listen to Audible, but my wife would always talk bad about this friend who actually was her baby's mama. My ex never read a book or listened to a book. So I always felt shame, like, oh, I can't do that because if I'm not reading a book, I'm not good, right? So, anyways, that friend was always listening to things, and finally I decided a year and a half after my trauma therapy, I thought, you know, I'm gonna start listening to Audible. And I was at my hairstylist, and this does actually answer your question, it's just a roundabout way of answering it. I was at my hairstylist about six months before I left my marriage. I was talking to her about the challenges I was having with my wife, and she'd been hearing about it over the couple of years, and actually backing up. So, and the reason I'm backing up to these small details is my book has chapters called The Web. The web is little stories that show how just tiny little changes and what you do ripples out into your life, but also into the world. Before this hair appointment, somebody had recommended a book to my hairdresser. My hairdresser loved the book, and when she was hearing my woes, she said, Oh, you really should listen to this book. I said, I actually now have audible, so I'll listen on my way home. Well, the very first, the prologue to this book, it's it's called Untamed. Excellent book. Glendon Doyle is the author. The prologue to this book is a story about a cheetah, which oddly enough is what I now have text. On your arm, yes. Yes, thank you, Glendon Doyle. When I heard the prologue, it just kind of cracked me open. I was like, wow, I can really relate to this. And it has nothing to do with marriage, relationship, humans. It all has to do with this cheetah. So to answer your question, what cracked it open? You know, a friend of my hairdresser's, my ex's baby's mama, the person who posted a message on a community board about a good hairstylist to go to. All these little things coming together into this package of eventual transformation. They all contributed to that waking up, waking up, the me going, oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Interesting, because it's not always just one thing, it could be the onset of things all coming together at once.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

The other funny thing that was sort of a one moment. So my therapist asking that question was a bit of a wake up. And then about a month after that, question from my therapist, I asked for the divorce and she wouldn't let me leave. She used financial control to prevent me from leaving. So I found a very cheap, awful, but very cheap furnished rental that would allow the pets to be there. And I told her I had found a place that we could afford. She said, Oh no, we can't even afford that. So I was shut down. Another week goes by, and I find another place that's even a little cheaper and even a little worse. I present that and she says, No, you can't do that either. We can't afford that. By the way, we could afford it. About a week later, I'm singing my woes to a friend of mine, and she says, Why don't you just move out? Why don't you just leave? And I said, Well, I can't. She said, What do you mean you can't? You don't need her permission. And I went, Oh my god. That's right. It had never occurred to me that I actually had the ability. She wasn't beating me into submission. It just never occurred to me that I actually was allowed to do that.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

It didn't occur to you to even allow yourself to have those entertain those thoughts and entertain plans of creating a life for you. Interesting. Divorce often triggers an identity crisis. And in your book, you mentioned the four bodies: mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. How does this help clients reconnect with themselves during the divorce process?

SPEAKER_00 14:44

Yeah, so usually leading up to the divorce, there's some fraying or breaking of the edges of those bodies. And certainly during the divorce, that gets intensified. And it looks differently depending on whether you were blindsided and the other person left or whether you were the one that left. All of that can look different, but it's still traumatic. There is some part of you that has been nullified or made invisible during the process. So you probably wouldn't be in the midst of a divorce. There are exceptions, you know, amicable divorces, but for the most part, that's true. So the reason that I break it down into four bodies, there's several reasons why that's a useful way of looking at things. One is we kind of are four bodies. Hopefully they're all merged together. Working with each one individually allows you to strip away the other pieces so that you can really zero in on your thoughts, zero in on your feelings, zero in on your physicality, and then your energetic presence. The other reason it's helpful to look at it as several components is the loop that happens. So our thoughts cause our emotions, which cause our behavior, which cause our experiences, which cause our thoughts, which cause our emotions. When you look at the bodies as separate identities, you can identify what stage of loop you are in, and you can break it there. So you can break it at any of the stages. It doesn't have to start at thought. I am such a failure. I've just never done anything right. That's the thought. That's the feeling. I don't want to go out with my friends tonight, even though they invited me. That's the behavior. The experience is you stay home and you're lonely and alone. The thought from that is I'm worthless, nobody likes me, I'm all by myself. But that loop can be broken at the thought, if you become aware, or the feeling, if you become aware, or the experience, the physical part, if you become aware, depending on where your awareness clicks in, determines how you create that shift, how you create that break. But I think that looking at the four bodies, breaking them down and healing them each individually is helpful.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

How do you create that awareness?

SPEAKER_00 17:43

There's the challenge, right? Because we've got monkey brain going on, chattering the brain, chatter from outside. You could get away a little bit from the chatter outside, up in your bedroom by yourself, but the chatter in here is the really hard part. So it's quieting the mind, and that is the hardest and easiest thing to do. Meditation is really the solution. The challenge with that is helping people realize that meditation doesn't have to look like sitting in a posture and going, hmm. For a lot of us, that is really hard to do. And so we wind up feeling like failures, and so we don't do it. But meditation can be as simple as mindfully eating. You prepare your food mindfully, and then when you take your bite, instead of looking at your computer or your phone or reading the magazine or watching TV, you take a spoonful of your oatmeal and your fruit and your nuts, and you close your eyes and you focus on the texture and the flavors. That is meditation, right? You're quieting things down enough to be aware. In this case, it's being aware of the food that's in your mouth. But it can also be a walk through nature. And it can be sitting cross-legged and saying a chant. I mean, it can take all those forms. But I think a lot of people get intimidated about the idea of meditation and feel like failures when they try it, so they give up. So finding the one that works for you is the magic. I had such monkey brain going on. I had a lot of trouble with the kinds of meditation where you're supposed to just focus on one thought or clear your brain. Those kinds just weren't working for me because I was so entrenched in monkey brain. I stumbled upon Dr. Joe Dispens's book, Becoming Supernatural. I didn't know who he was, didn't know anything about it. I needed something on Audible. So I selected his book and he uses a very different kind of meditation. It's very loud. It's music, big reverberation of his voice. It's very expansive. It can be very time-consuming. Some of his meditations are hours and hours long, but once you get eased into it, those are glorious. They were my favorite times of my day. We're sitting for two hours in a chair by myself, blindfolded with the headphones on, listening to this incredible experience. I don't do that now, not because it's not valuable, but just because it worked for me then doesn't mean it's what I want right now. And that goes back to there's so many different kinds of meditation.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

I was gonna ask you, can something like taking two minutes for deep breathing, you know, just be cognizant of your breath and just slow everything down and relax your body?

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah, there's so many breathing techniques. Now, that being said, usually when we're in need of a breathing technique, even if we know to do a breathing technique, we don't want to do, or we don't think about it, or we're so caught up in monkey brain that we can't do the breathing technique unless a friend of ours who we're on the phone with says breathe, and then you're like, okay, I'll breathe. Even like just two seconds of saying, Okay, this can be different. As simple as that, you know. I can change this.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Yeah, absolutely. So you've also created the paramour paradox that came from your lived experience rather than from Siri. What was the first layer of yourself you uncovered in your own excavation that I like to write?

SPEAKER_00 21:38

So that book was actually written in 1999. Now I've greatly modified it, but it was also based on the four bodies. It also included the web stories. I wrote it when I was 31. My life experience wasn't enough, and so the book was filled with the Footnotes. And this is back in the days of literary agents and publishers. I had a literary agent read it and said, This is awesome as a dissertation. Right? You haven't, not enough of you is in this book. Fast forward to a little more than a year ago, I had been to Dr. Joe's retreat and come home sitting on the sofa talking to my true self. I had started to communicate with my true self and said, What am I supposed to do now? True self said, go find your book from 1999. And that was so out of left field. But I did, because I'm a digital hoarder, so I was able to dig it out of my deep dark archives. I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it. True self wasn't kind enough to tell me that. So I just opened it up and the first chapter was eight exercises. The first one being Way Am I, which is now my introduction exercise to my work. I'm not claiming it's unique. I was 30, right? So it probably came from somewhere else. I don't know where that is, but it's an excellent, very simple, straightforward exercise. I did it this year plus ago and started to realize all the layers that were piled on top of me. And then that exercise was followed up by another one. So I went through the first eight exercises in the book, and I remember thinking, God, who wrote these? I mean, they're awesome, they're brilliant. And so I decided I was supposed to keep going through the book myself as the reader, not as the author. And there were such great shifts in me that that experience of going through my own exercises and questions combined with the exploration I was doing, resulting from meditation and journaling, allowed the rest of the Paramour Paradox ecosystem to unfold. And to some people, this will sound woo-woo, but it literally was given to me by true self. Every single piece of it, none of it came from logic, none of it came from me thinking, oh, what's a good business? It was just, you know, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to do next.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

So when you say true, true self, are you talking about like a higher power, or is that what you call a higher power, or is it through your meditation you were feeling voices, sensing things, and came to be?

SPEAKER_00 24:31

So I hesitate to answer that in too much depth because I never believe in imposing my own thoughts or philosophies. Philosophies, that's the word I was looking for. And you know, uh God is amazing, God is not what I call that entity. To me, true self comes from source and it's part of source. Each of us have an element of source that source wants us to do in this world. That is what I call true self. It's that part that is of source that is here to do some sort of brilliance, some sort of magic. And we all have brilliance. I'm not claiming to be more brilliant than you. You are just as brilliant as anybody. We are all brilliant, and we are all here to provide some gift to the world, and that's what I call true source.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

I know many people blame themselves after leaving toxic relationships. How does the excavation process help clients separate their true identity from their survival strategies they had to adopt in their marriage?

SPEAKER_00 25:48

That survival strategy phrase is key because without psychological abuse, we have survival strategies to enable us to function in the world. With psychological abuse, it just gets more intense, more layers, more mud on top. And I said mud without even realizing that my whole book is about being an archaeologist and doing a dig and to get up your artifacts. So, yes, mud. You said something about how you get separated from true identity. We get so immersed in wearing the masks that have allowed us to survive that we don't, one, even realize that they're masks, and two, once we do realize that that's not really who we are, a lot of times we have shame for wearing it. And it's not shameful. You called it a survival strategy, and that's exactly what it is. It's fantastic that you are able to have survival strategies. If not, you wouldn't be here anymore, right? So all of us have adaptations that we've done because of circumstances that can be as little as I grew up in a great family, but they didn't want me to do art, even though that was my passion because it wasn't a good profession, so I did business. Is that a trauma? No. But did you have to create a survival strategy that separated you from who you are? 100%. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

You describe how small aligned shifts can create major life changes. Can you share how this concept helps clients in divorce recognize the power they still have, even when everything feels out of control?

SPEAKER_00 27:36

So often when we are overwhelmed, the process of being, the immersion in that overwhelm makes us think that we are stuck. Becoming aware of that overwhelm can allow you to find one little change to make. And then that one little change takes hold, you feel it, you're like, ooh, I did that. That can lead to another little change. So the little changes can be as simple as going to bed at a different time. So you've been in the habit of going to bed at 11:30, you get your kids to bed by eight, and then you watch TV, and then you go up to your room and read a chapter of a book, and then you fall asleep, and it's 11:30, right? So then you get up the next morning and you're wiped out, and so you're a little bit testy with your kids and your spouse if you have a spouse. So instead of doing that, you watch an hour less of TV and uh either read a different book or don't read and actually go to sleep, and you wake up feeling more refreshed. That's one little change that you're in control of, and that can ripple and allow you to have success and build on that.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

You're creating momentum.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

I'm wondering, going back to my previous question, we were talking about survival strategies, is our ability to focus a part of our survival strategy because we really can't take in more than so much.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, my ex told me to go see a neurologist because I couldn't remember anything, and that's actually what part of psychological abuse is. If you go to support groups, that's a common thread. Oh, they told me I can't remember anything. So I went to this doctor that I've been going to to get a referral to a neurologist. The doctor listened to everything, and she had been listening to stories of mine over the years. She said, No, I'm not going to give you that referral. You do not have something wrong with your nervous system, your neurology, your brain. You're being chased by a bear. You can't take in anything else because you're so busy focusing on the bear.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Goes back to that fight or flight mechanism. And when we're in that mode for too long, it can produce losing memory, can produce becoming depressed, it can it can cause all kinds of physical ailments as well.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

And here's something to parlay off of that, that loop, the thought, emotion, um, behavior, experience loop, we actually become addicted to those chemicals. Yes. When we're in trauma, stress, anger, we're releasing cortisol and adrenaline into our system, which does all kinds of different things to us. We get out of the stressful situation and we start to break free of that, and we keep either ruminating on the past or being catastrophic about the future, or getting into other really crappy relationships, or just beating ourselves up all day long. And it's because we're addicted. We need that chemical, we need that cortisol and adrenaline. It's the sobriety that is so hard once you get free. I gave up drinking when I asked for a divorce because we used to drink a lot and I wanted to keep sane. I told myself I'd start drinking when I got the divorce, but I didn't because I didn't need it. It was easy for me to be sober off the alcohol. Not so easy to be sober off the chemicals. So I would look at myself in the bathroom mirror and say, you know, got rid of alcohol, quit being a junkie to cortisol, just stop. You know? And I would be like, be sober, be sober. You don't need that cortisol. And it's just, yeah, it's amazing what our bodies, you know, what they do, how they adapt.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Right. When I was going through my divorce, this was in the mid-1990s, so they didn't really know as much then as they do now. When I wrote my book, I started hearing about the addiction to the fight or flight chemicals. And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm not an addict. I've never taken drugs. I don't admit. And it was amazing to realize that, which becomes even more important for women and even men coming out of a divorce to take time to heal before you jump back into the fire because you need to, you need to heal. You need to give yourself permission to heal. You need that time. So for someone listening today who feels invisible in their marriage, identity, or daily life, what is the very first step they can take to begin remembering who they are?

SPEAKER_00 33:10

And you know, that sounds hard, and it is initially. And you, Deborah, came up with the best example. It doesn't have to be a two-hour Dr. Joe meditation with your blindfolded headset on. It can be a moment, a breath, just pausing for a second. That can be enough to start to quiet the brain. And that's the very first step. Once you get the quietness, then you get the awareness. The awareness is the that loop, the dynamics of others and how they're playing a role, life in the world. Then eventually you get the awareness of the awareness. You start to be aware that you're aware. And that's I think where you start to experience source or God or whatever you want to call it.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

It's very liberating to become aware. Yes. Kristen, where can people purchase your book or learn more about you? Do you have a website? I'll put it all in the show notes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

I do. It's available on Amazon, but my website, ParamoreParadox.com, has a link to the Amazon page as well, but I will definitely give you that link.

SPEAKER_01 34:24

All right, perfect. Thank you, Kristen, so much. This has been a very interesting discussion today. I wish you all the best and good luck with all of your endeavors.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

Thank you, Deborah. And thanks for tolerating some of my more esoteric thoughts. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 34:42

Thank you for listening to today's episode of Bent Not Broken. I hope that this episode reminded you that even through life's toughest moments, you are bent, not broken. If this message inspired you, please share, rate, review, and subscribe, as it helps us reach more women who are ready to rise and rebuild. And until next time, keep living bold and walking in your purpose.