Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back. Before we get into today’s episode, there are two things that I want to bring to your attention. The first is, of course, the Unbreakable Retreat, which is happening in Sedona, Arizona from September 10th through 13th. It’s an incredible experience. I will talk more about that actually in today’s episode.

And I am running an Independence Day sale right now off of focused strategy sessions. Focused strategy sessions are three sessions that you can use, over the course of weeks or months if you need to, and they really are honestly one of the more impactful ways that you can work with me, and I am running in honor of America’s 250th anniversary of independence, in honor, in particular, our fight for independence as women in this country, in your lives.

I [00:01:00] am running a special of $250 off. So that’s probably one of the biggest sales I’ve ever run. But it seemed good timing, and a good use of the celebration of the 250th anniversary birthday of our independence, because Lord knows we could use a little bit more of that independence right about now, nationally and personally.

So you can find all of that information in your email. I’ll put a link for the focused strategy session Independence Day sale in these show notes and for the Unbreakable Retreat.And now let’s get into today’s episode. I’ve told you guys this before, but we’re gonna break it down a little bit deeper.

When I got out of my marriage, I had no idea who I was. I mean that very literally. I had zero sense of self, capital S self. I didn’t know what I liked, what I wanted, what my [00:02:00] values were, right? I just– I was so disconnected. I didn’t know what my favorite color was. I didn’t know what I wanted to eat on a given day.

If I didn’t have plans with my friends, I would sit there feeling numb and completely rudderless. I had all this time that technically belonged to me, and I had no idea how to inhabit it. Not just spend it, but inhabit it. I had spent so many years living in reaction to someone else that when the relationship was over, the absence of that constant reaction felt like a void.

Except I didn’t know that. I didn’t understand that was what was happening. But I do think that a lot of women experience this after divorce, and so I kinda wanted to name it, right? You work so hard to get your life back. You imagine that once you’re out [00:03:00] of the marriage, you’ll naturally return to yourself, and then you leave, and you realize you’re no longer entirely sure who that self is.

Now, you’re not the same person that you were before, right? You might have kids now. That completely alters who you are. But also what you’ve been through has completely altered who you are. So today I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about what happens when you have spent years orienting your life around another person and suddenly have to learn how to live from the inside again.

Hopefully, when we’re done here I want you to understand why freedom can feel so disorienting, why you might be struggling to know what you want, and how you can begin rebuilding a relationship with yourself after years of living in response to someone else Because losing yourself inside a marriage rarely happens all at once, [00:04:00] right?

It happens really gradually. You start making small adjustments, right? You learn to not bring up certain topics because they always turn into a fight. You learn which version of the truth he can tolerate. You pay attention to his mood before deciding what kind of evening everyone’s gonna have. You change how you speak.

That’s a big one for me. Inside my marriage, I had to alter… My husband somehow hated the sound of my voice, which I love because so many of you seem to like the sound of my voice. But when we were married, it has nothing to do with the sound of my voice, by the way. Whatever it was that was triggering my ex-husband about me had nothing to do with the sound of my voice, but he would tell me it was the sound of my voice.

And as such, before we were married once, he told me he [00:05:00] hated the sound of my voice. He asked me if I was… I think I’ve told you this before. It’s insane. He asked me if I was turning into a man. Why? I don’t know. And told me that he couldn’t stand the sound of my voice, and I promptly lost my voice for five days.

Literally, no sound came out of my… I was not sick. I was not sick. I literally lost my voice. So talk about losing who you are. Good God. These are the ways that we quote, accommodate the narrowing box that we are allowed to exist in when we live with emotional abuse, right? We change how we speak, what we ask for, how much space we take up.

We keep everything running. We manage the schedules and the kids and the household, the emotional temperature. We manage the consequences of his behavior, his rage. We’re constantly trying to understand him better. Why is [00:07:00] he angry? What’s his trauma? What can I do differently to make him feel better so that he’s not angry?

How can I explain this away, in a way… How can I understand, like, how can I explain my feelings to him in a way that he’ll finally understand so he’ll stop being so angry, right? Your attention keeps moving outward over and over and over and over again until over time You become so intimately familiar with him and increasingly unfamiliar with yourself.

You know exactly what will irritate him. You know what he wants for dinner. You know how much time he needs before or after work or whatever before he can have a conversation. You know what he’s gonna say when you bring anything up, money, intimacy, parenting, the future. Meanwhile, your needs, your [00:08:00] preferences begin to disappear.

This can happen in obviously abusive relationships. It can also happen in marriages where a woman has spent years over-functioning and caretaking and accommodating or carrying the emotional weight for two people. When you are the over-functioner and they are the under-functioner, that may not look like overt abuse, but the relationship itself becomes the organizing force in your life.

All of your choices get shaped by what will keep things moving, steady, organized. Your energy goes towards managing what might happen next. And even your pleasure, right? You start enjoying things because the family enjoys it. “Oh, w- the family loves that restaurant. I like it ’cause everyone else likes it.”

And then you stop asking yourself, “What would I choose?” Because [00:09:00] your preferences seem less important than keeping the machinery and the whole family and everybody else happy. And then the marriage ends because you’ve had enough of all of that right? Or whatever other reasons that is present in addition to all of that.

And at first, there’s there’s plenty to keep your attention going outside of yourself. You’ve got attorneys, financial documents, parenting plans, housing decisions. Are you moving? Is he moving? All of the hard conversations, right? The divorce actually gave you a job, and if you already had a job, it was another job.

It was already another job if your job was in the home as well, because that’s 24/7. But you had a job. You’re building an exit. You’re creating stability. You are protecting your children. You are trying to make strategic decisions while your life is changing all around you. And all of that keeps you moving and also keeps your focus occupied, again, [00:10:00] outside of yourself.

But then the pace starts to shift. It starts to slow down. And maybe the divorce is final or the immediate crisis has passed. You’ve established enough of a routine that your days are no longer consumed by legal decisions, and financial decisions, and kids, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And then there you are, and you have all the freedom that you fought for, and you have no fucking idea what to do with it.

You have an internal emptiness that you did not expect. That was completely my experience. When I left my marriage, I did not know how to live a life that was not organized around someone else, reacting to someone else. I had wanted freedom so badly, and once I had it, oh my God, I was so excited. I was ready to go all, whoa.

The first reaction was like, [00:11:00] “Woo-hoo!” And then slowly I realized I did not know what to do with myself. If I had plans, I was fine. Plans gave the day shape. It gave me somewhere to go and someone to be with. I could step into some version of myself that existed around other people, and again, that was external.

But when I was alone, everything went quiet and I was numb. I had no strong sense of what I liked, what I wanted, what would make me feel good. I remember deciding “Okay, I need a hobby. I need a hobby.” So I went and I walked around Michael’s looking for a ho- literally shopping for a hobby, up and down the aisles.

And I went home completely empty-handed. I didn’t even know who was choosing, so how could I choose? So one of the only things that I knew how to do was go [00:13:00] shopping. I would go shopping because it gave me an activity. It created movement, like I’d get out of my house. I could look at things, try them on, all of the…

Whatever. Whatever. It was shopping. It was– It got old really fast. It didn’t do anything. It didn’t give me anything except for some, momentary dopamine hit of “Oh, I look cute,” or “Oh, this dress, this is gonna solve all of my problems,” right? “This trip to the container store is gonna get me so organized that then I will feel better about my life.”

And of course it got old, and very expensive. What I know now, obviously, is that I was trying to fill a void. I was trying to create an external version of myself with new clothes, new home, new organization, blah blah blah, ’cause I didn’t have access yet to anything inside me. And then as more of the feelings from the marriage, as the trauma started [00:14:00] pushing its way to the surface, I turned to alcohol.

And alcohol helped me numb what I didn’t understand. It gave me relief from the restlessness and the emptiness. It softened the feelings that I could not name. So at the time, I did not have language for what I had experienced. This is 2010, ’12, ’13. We were not talking about emotional abuse, coercive control, gaslighting, trauma, post-separation recovery, any of it, in the way that we do now.

No one was talking about this. We didn’t have podcasts. We didn’t have Instagram really, right? These conversations existed pro- yes, of course, somewhere, but they were certainly not accessible to me. I did not have a framework for understanding why I felt so disoriented. I didn’t know that years of living around another person’s behavior could leave me so disconnected [00:15:00] from my own inner life.

I didn’t know why the feelings were getting louder once the marriage was over. I didn’t understand that the shopping and the drinking and the partying and all of that, and the, all the dating, same thing, were coping mechanisms. They were distractions. I knew I was miserable. I just didn’t know why. And that lack of language really fucking matters.

When you can’t name an experience, it is so much harder to make sense of yourself inside of it. You feel the impact, but you can’t locate the cause. You don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s like there’s a sniper, but you can’t– You don’t know which roof it’s coming from or r- if it’s a sniper at all You wonder why you’re so lost when you’re the one who wanted to leave.

I hear this all the time from women. “I wanted this. Why do I feel so bad?” And my response to that is always, “Because nobody ever wants this.” What you wanted was [00:16:00] happily ever after. What you wanted was a happy marriage. You were forced into making a decision that you never wanted to have to make. But you’re still you’re still left in this confusion because maybe you don’t have n- you’re learning the words for it.

That void before the marriage ended and maybe during it, like at least you had something to respond to, right? You were busy. You were distracted from yourself. You co- you had things to do and someone to react to. And then the void after the marriage ends, it can make unhealthy familiarity feel comforting.

It’s almost that negative intimacy. It’s we know how to do this toxic dance, and it keeps us, keeps me feeling connected to them, or it keeps me busy and distracted from myself, right? And that feels comforting. And then also you know that’s not healthy. When I was [00:17:00] going through this I had divorced friends too, and they cared about me, they understood the grief of a marriage ending, all of those things.

But their experiences were different from mine. They were not in abusive marriages, and I didn’t yet know how to explain what had happened inside my marriage because, again, I didn’t have the language for it. I had no language that allowed me to say, “I have spent years organizing my entire internal world around another person who was systematically hurting me, criticizing everything I did, making me feel worthless, and now I cannot find myself.”

There was no community around that part of my experience. There was companionship, there was support, there was friendship, there were hikes and shopping and dinners and drinks and whatever, but there was not the feeling of being truly, deeply understood, and I think that distinction is so important. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel profoundly [00:19:00] alone in what you have lived through

People may understand divorce without understanding coercive control. They may understand heartbreak without understanding what chronic emotional manipulation does to your self-trust. They may understand that you left an unhappy marriage without understanding how thoroughly you had learned to disappear inside of it.

And when no one around you has language for it, you may continue assuming that you’re the problem. That’s what I did. I was like it- nobody else is talking about this. Nobody understands it. No one…” We go through the world, we learn about ourselves and our experiences through hearing other people speak about their own experiences with something similar.

I often talk about going to my very first Al-Anon meeting and hearing people speaking the words and feelings that I had not yet been [00:22:00] able to identify within myself, but as soon as I heard other people say it, I was like, “Yes, that. It’s that. It’s that. Whatever that is, it’s that.” This is part of why it w- it is so important for me to do this podcast, to name these experiences, because language helps you locate yourself.

When you hear someone talking about coercive control, you suddenly go, “Fuck, that’s the thing. That’s it. That’s why I was constantly scanning. That’s why I have been constantly questioning my own perceptions,” right? It’s gaslighting. Gaslighting, that’s the word for it. When you learn about emotional abuse, especially covert emotional abuse, you can finally see why you became so careful, so accommodating, so disconnected from your needs, right?

The language [00:23:00] doesn’t erase what happened to you, of course not, but it gives you a map. It gives you a roadmap. It tells you that there’s a reason that you feel untethered. It helps you understand that finding yourself again will require more than changing your relationship status. You have to rebuild the relationship that you have with your own inner experience, and that can begin in some really ordinary places, right?

Okay what do I want for dinner? What food makes me feel good? What colors make me feel happy? If I were to redo my whole bedroom, right? This is a great opportunity, right? When we get divorced, and you’re starting out all on your own, and it’s… when I got divorced, I made my bedroom so girly.

It was, like, all shabby chic. It was white frills. It was just cute. I made it as cute as I could because I [00:24:00] hadn’t been allowed that in my marriage. These are the baby steps. How do you wanna decorate your house? How do you wanna spend a Saturday when no one else gets a vote, when you don’t have the kids?

What music do you wanna play in your house? I was never allowed to play music in my house. My God my ex-husband is a total audiophile, so the music that I liked was beneath him and not really acceptable. What do you enjoy when enjoyment doesn’t necessarily have to serve a purpose, like pleasing somebody else?

I know a lot of these questions can feel really difficult, like really confusing and huh? So if you’re listening to me say, ask these questions and you’re feeling the void kind of like staring back at you, like I get it. I get it. It’s baby steps. We can be s- really fucking capable of negotiating a complicated settlement and [00:25:00] completely unable to choose a restaurant.

Those two things can coexist, or maybe not even like negotiating a settlement, but like your job. You’re really fucking good at whatever job you’re, you have, whether that’s as a corporate attorney, or a marketing executive, or a stay-at-home mom. You’re really fucking good at your job and you can make decisions and you know what to do and you know how to parent, but you don’t know your favorite color.

That just means that one skill has more practice than the other. You have… You are more practiced at your job than you are about asking yourself what it is that you like. You have practiced anticipating, managing, accommodating, responding. You have not practiced asking yourself what you want. You may not have practiced desire or just sitting quietly long enough to notice what is happening [00:27:00] inside of you, and when you begin to try, you might feel nothing, and that can be really frightening.

You ask yourself what you want, and the answer doesn’t come. You take a day for yourself, and you’re bored. Oh my God, the number of times that I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna go to the spa for the day,” like the Korean spa, or “I’m gonna go take myself to a hotel at the beach overnight.” I became bored and antsy and desperate and felt like I didn’t belong, like I, I shouldn’t be there, like it was all a fucking ginormous waste of time and money.

I finally would get a l- time alone, and then I’d be like reaching for my phone, right? Or another cocktail or some other, like whatever, or nothing because it didn’t fill that void. Sometimes being in that void [00:28:00] is a sign of how disconnected you’ve become from self because your wants have been ignored or criticized or made inconvenient for so long that you just stopped consulting them.

And they just need time to come back. They need a sense of safety that like when every desire that you had used to create conflict, why would you continue to desire anything? Wanting became dangerous. When asking for something led to anger or withdrawal or ridicule or punishment okay, I don’t have needs.

So the work of finding yourself again often begins very quietly, noticing the smallest response. Ooh, I like this. I do not want that. Maybe it’s just things on your plate. What are you eating first? What are you avoiding? Maybe you don’t like it, and that’s okay. Or, “I feel… You know what? When I spend time with this person, I feel really good.

[00:29:00] Every time I talk to this person, I feel totally depleted. This room feels really peaceful. This room feels really chaotic, and every time I walk in here, I wanna run out.” So you’re starting to gather evidence about yourself. You pay attention to what brings you closer to your own life, and then you begin making choices from that information.

And sure, it sounds simple, right? But for someone who has spent years abandoning themselves to preserve a relationship, it is radical. You’re gonna feel guilt. You might second-guess yourself. You might have to worry that having stronger preferences will make you difficult, will make you displeasing to someone else, to your next partner, to the person you started dating.

You may have people in your life who were really fucking comfortable with the version of yourself who was always very accommodating to everybody else and their needs. And as you become more present inside [00:30:00] yourself and more expressive of your preferences and desires, some relationships might shift. And that’s okay.

It’s more than okay. That is part of this process. Finding yourself after divorce is not about, locating this fully formed human who was, like, just waiting to be discovered. You’ve changed, and you’ve lived through things, and you have learned, and you are someone new now. You’re going to begin to build this new human.

There might be parts of your old self that you wanna reclaim. Maybe there was some hobby that you did before that you stopped doing. You may wanna try it out again. It might no longer fit, but it might. There might be parts of you that you thought you would carry through that no longer fit, and you wanna release them.

You get to discover all of these things over time, and discovery requires space. This is one of the reasons our regular lives can make the process so [00:31:00] difficult. We’re still parenting, we’re still working, we’re still managing money and schedules and the house and the dog and the laundry, and communication with your ex, who is still triggering you to no end You might have a few quiet hours and then like you’ve gotta go grocery shopping, and you’ve gotta go to the, Amazon returns and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

And the habits that kept you moving during the marriage and the divorce are continuing because life happens. Things get done. Other people are taken care of. What I don’t want is then for like years to pass, because you can build a completely new life and still be absent from it. You can create a peaceful home and never sit still long enough to feel the peace.

You can have freedom and continue living as though someone else’s needs are more urgent than your own. And at some point, you need experiences that interrupt that pattern. You need time when your attention is allowed and [00:33:00] needed to return to yourself. You might need space where no one is asking you to manage the fucking room.

You need to be around people who understand what it’s like to lose contact with yourself inside of a relationship. You need moments of pleasure, of beauty, movement, rest, conversation, and quiet That have no bigger job to do other than just being. This is why I created the Unbreakable Retreat. When I think about what I needed during those years after my marriage ended, I needed language.

I needed community. I needed people who could help me understand that the emptiness I felt inside had a history. And I needed space to explore who I was without immediately reaching for something to fill the void. And so Unbreakable [00:34:00] is designed to offer that kind of space. This is why women have said that this retreat is life-changing.

And it’s not life-changing in the, in those ways of like you go away for a w- a three-day workshop and you feel like your life has changed, and then, two months later you realize that nothing’s really w- nothing’s lasted. This retreat literally changes lives long-term. I hear from women years later that the friendships, the community, the experiences, the work that we did has lasted as life-changing.

And part of it is, we’ve got three full immersion days just outside of Sedona in this unbelievably healing place. If you don’t know the magic of Sedona, it has these energy vort- vortices that are places in Sedona where [00:35:00] literally you walk and the air temperature changes. You can feel a shift.

You can feel the kind of buzzing. It’s very mystical, magical. And this is … We’re not doing the retreat in one of these vortices. They’re like public areas. But we will visit one or two. But we are in a private retreat setting in the surrounding area. You get to step away from all the daily roles that keep you in constant response mode.

You’re not responsible for any of the food that you eat. It is lovingly and meticulously and magically prepared by our chefs, Shal and Roxy, who accommodate every single dietary restriction you can possibly imagine, all locally sourced, farm-raised everything. You’re not organizing the schedule.

I’ve got that. You’re not explaining your experience to people who need to be convinced that [00:36:00] it was hard. You are with women who understand that divorce is about far more than the end of this legal bind. We talk honestly, we rest, we move, we eat beautiful food, we laugh. We allow room for whatever has been difficult to heal beneath the noise of everyday life.

This retreat is not about spending three days analyzing your ex. You have already spent enough of your life organized around that motherfucker. This is time for you to become more present inside your own life. Maybe you’ll remember something you used to love. You’ll discover something new. You’ll realize how tired you are.

You will make lifelong friends. For real. Sure, three days in, in the desert cannot answer every question about who you are now, but it can give you the questions, and it can give the questions [00:37:00] that you have and that we put to you room to breathe. So whether you come to Unbreakable or create that kind of space somewhere else, I want you to stop assuming that you should already know who you are.

You have spent years learning how to survive inside of a relationship, and it makes sense that learning how to live as yourself will take time So just begin to pay attention. Pay attention to where you feel more expansive and where you begin to shrink. Notice the people who make it easier to hear yourself.

Pay attention to the choices that feel like yours. You are building intentionally, one brick at a time, a new relationship with yourself. This is the thing that I didn’t understand when I first left my marriage. I thought freedom would tell me who I was, but freedom actually gave me the space to begin finding out.

And at first, I [00:39:00] filled that space with all sorts of other things, shopping, alcohol. I’m not blaming myself, right? Those choices w- were what I had available in the context of what I’d lived through and what I didn’t yet understand, what I didn’t have language for. But they also delayed the deeper work.

And eventually, when I stopped numbing and I became curious about the emptiness and the void, I was able to build a really strong relationship with myself, one that is so rooted in who I am that I was actually able to meet somebody that I fell in love with and I married. And I have started a new hobby.

This is really big for me, really big. It was like one of the last sort of frontiers for me, is I just… That hobby thing, that scroll, strolling the aisles of Michaels being like, what is all this shit?” I started taking a sewing class, and I have become [00:40:00] completely obsessed with sewing.

I’m still very new, but I have so far made a placemat, and I have made a tote bag and a bucket hat. This week, I will be making a zippered makeup bag, pencil case kinda thing, and then I’m gonna move on. And I don’t know what I’m gonna make, but I am obsessed, and I spent yesterday at Michaels getting exactly what I wanted and knowing exactly what I wanted, and spending time in one aisle or two aisles, and looking through fabrics and looking through supplies, and organizing my s- my sewing space.

It was a very different experience of going to Michaels with passion instead of the void. So again, all I want you to know is that you do not have to figure any of this out alone. You don’t have to keep distracting yourself from the void. The emptiness is just a space that hasn’t been claimed yet. It might be the part of [00:41:00] your life that is finally waiting for you to arrive. So while you may have gotten your life back, now it’s time for you to learn how to live in it.

And if you wanna join us on the Unbreakable Retreat, sometimes I feel like sales emails or a sales page for a retreat don’t really express enough. What did it… Like, why are we doing this? And honestly, this is really why we’re doing it. I’m doing it so that you can learn how to live in this new life that you have created for yourself.

If this piques your curiosity, head on over to kateanthony.com/unbreakable and you can sign up there. We have payment plans, and I think the early bird, we have another week and a half, maybe two weeks of the early bird where you get $500 off. Again, payment plans are available, full payment, whatever you need.

And if you have any questions, let [00:42:00] us know. We are more than happy to answer them. All right. I love you, and I love who you’re becoming, and I cannot wait to meet her. Bye.