Extreme Post-Separation Abuse with Jo Fonda

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seventeen days before the tragedy of September eleven, two thousand

(00:04):
and one, a chilling event unfolded in a tiny New
Hampshire town. A pilot weaponized an airplane, intentionally crashing it
into his own home. The attack made national news. Who
was this pilot? Why would he do such a thing?
Now the pilot's wife is speaking out. Joe Fonda, who

(00:30):
was married to him for twenty years, says their relationship
was characterized by emotional and financial abuse, infidelity, and instability
from the very beginning. Less than forty eight hours before
the plane crash, Joe obtained a restraining order against him
and fled with their eight year old daughter. Joe's terrifying

(00:54):
story is a powerful reminder of what lurks when toxic
relationships end. In fact, ninety percent of survivors experience post
separation abuse, which can escalate quickly and violently, even if
the perpetrator has never been violent before. Ending a relationship

(01:15):
doesn't end the danger. From Red Table Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia,
I'm Doctor Rominy and this is Navigating Narcissism. This podcast
should not be used as a substitute for medical or
mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling,

(01:36):
and or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to
any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including
matters discussed on this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which
may be triggering to some people. The views and opinions
expressed are solely those of the podcast author or individual

(02:00):
participating in the podcast, and do not represent the opinions
of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia, or their employees. Joe,
it is such a pleasure to have you hear. Your
story is actually one of the most profound and extreme
examples of post separation abuse I've heard. Let's talk about

(02:21):
the man you ended up marrying. So how old were
you when you met?

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Sixteen?

Speaker 1 (02:26):
How did the two of you meet.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
I was out for a walk with a girlfriend of
mine and we were going by Union College, which is
close to my home, and we were just like, I've
never been in a fraternity house. Have you ever been
in a fraternity house? Like, let's go check it out.
We just wandered in, thinking it was like going into
a Starbucks or something. I don't know what we were thinking,

(02:48):
but we started going up the stairs and just maybe
a few steps up. This guy stops us and says, hey,
excuse me, ladies, can I help you? And he was
smiling and was like we were just looking around and
he's like all right, and he let us go, and
then when we came back down the stairs, he introduced
himself and it was my husband to be Lou. We

(03:11):
stayed for dinner and we chatted and called my house
the next day and asked me out on a date. Okay,
so we went out to dinner. I made it very
clear before when we were even talking that I had
a boyfriend, Gino, and I wasn't looking to date anyone.
He said, I have a girlfriend too. I'm like, okay,

(03:31):
you know this is this is fine. We can be friends.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Okay, So how did how did the relationship unfold from
that point going forward?

Speaker 2 (03:41):
So it kind of went off the rails pretty quickly, actually,
even just as friends. So he had wanted me to
go to a fraternity picnic maybe a couple weeks later.
So at the time, Gino was still my boyfriend, although
it was a long distance relationship, and I said, oh no,
Gino's coming to visit so I and he was clearly

(04:02):
not happy about it. Though. Gino came with a friend
and my friend and I went to meet with them
and they had to go home for something. I came
back where we were supposed to meet and he was gone,
and there were no cell phones back then. There was
absolutely no way to get in touch with someone back

(04:24):
then who you didn't know where they were. And I
was distraught. I was totally abandoned by Gino. I was
irrationally looking all over town on foot with my friend
and the only person I knew with the car was.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Lou Okay, and lou Is the guy from the fraternity house.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, gave me a ride home. But then the next
day he called. He wanted to talk about what had happened.
And from my perspective, I had just called a friend
for a ride. From his perspective, this woman that he
was dating had blown him off on a date, gone
on a date with someone else, and then called looking

(05:05):
for free transportation, and instead of it being a conversation,
he was driving fast and erradically, and like at first
I was apologizing for what I did because I saw
it when he said, all right, you did this thing
to me, and I saw it, and I'm like, okay,
I'm sorry, You're right, that was kind of a crappy
thing for me to do.

Speaker 1 (05:24):
So the crappy thing you did was called him for
a ride because you had been abandoned by Gino, right?
Was that why he was driving fast? Did that seem
like a reaction to that? Because he was so old?

Speaker 2 (05:34):
He was mad about how I treated him, So he
was embarrassed that I didn't go on this picnic with
his friends. I was scared to death. He wouldn't let
me out of the car. He did take me home,
but I shut the door and like, have a nice life.
I thought I was never going to see him again.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Okay, and you're sixteen, you're young. How old was Lou
at this time?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
He's five years older than me, So.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Twenty one, sixteen to twenty one big developmentally, it's big
in every which way. You were still a kid in
many ways. He was coming into adulthood. So you have
a lot going on. You've been abandoned by one guy
who was having a tantrum, and then and honestly, this
other guy was having a tantrum.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Good point.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
I got to say this, though, Joe, that fast driving thing,
that's actually a red flag. Everyone can pay attention to
There's actually some interesting research on this that these kinds
of antagonistic narcissistic personality styles are associated with dangerous driving,
and that can show up early in a relationship because
somebody's mad, or even if they're showing off or they

(06:38):
get mad about another driver. And I'll tell people, if
you see someone driving real angry early in a relationship,
when it's easy to get out, get out because this
is a marker for a bunch of other stuff. So
you slam the door, get out of the car with Lou.
You think you're never going to see him again. So
then what happens.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Then little time goes by, I get a call he
needed to come back to Schenectady because things weren't going
well with his parents and they were kicking him out
and he needed a place to live, and did I
know a place that he could live? So I went
and looked for him, you know, and then tried to
get back in touch, saying how I found this place,
that place. I called the house a few times, left

(07:17):
messages with his family, didn't hear anything back, and I
was like, hey, whatever, and then went about my way.
By that time, I had broken up with Gino.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Interesting though to me, throw the tantrum, drive the car that.
But then he doesn't think anything much of calling you up,
because I think that's actually a big ask of someone
didn't find a house, especially a sixteen seventeen year old
right to say, hey, help me find a place to live.
It's a big it's a big thing to ask. And

(07:48):
so you do, and he comes back in September. You've
broken up with Gino. So what happens now?

Speaker 2 (07:55):
So what happens now is I can't explain why I
thought it would be a good idea to go visit
at the fraternity house was totally emotionally a wreck, and
I wasn't looking to have a new boyfriend, at least

(08:15):
not consciously, and for whatever reason, thought that Lou and
I could be friends.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
Okay, Okay, So I want to frame that a little. Okay,
because you were sixteen years.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
Old this time. I had turned seventeen, just turned a
whopping seventeen.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Not thirty. You're sixteen, you're seventeen. There's a guy who's
older than you. You had a nice encounter. He clearly
throws tantrums when he doesn't get his way. You saw
that drives erratically asks for a favor. You do it
at sixteen? He doesn't communicate Joe. The vast majority of

(08:53):
adults wouldn't pick up those red flags. Okay, so you're
getting into.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
It with him.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
This still doesn't sound like a relationship to me.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
No. It was after a few weeks of him being
back at college and he knew I wasn't seeing Geno anymore.
He started to press for like, well, so why aren't
we going out? Now you're not seeing him anymore? Okay,
this is I didn't have a good reason, and so

(09:21):
it kissed for this first time okay, and started acting
more like boyfriend girlfriend.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Okay, let's fast forward a little bit. You do get
engaged to this person? How did that happen?

Speaker 2 (09:31):
Following year, a girlfriend of mine wanted to go on
a cruise and that would be fun. Agreed to go
with her, and obviously Lou was not. Now it's obvious
that he would not be happy with me doing such
a thing, right, He pitched quite a few fits about
me going on this trip, but I didn't care about

(09:55):
his complaints. I was going. This was something I wanted
to do. I had known tension of being long term
in our relationship. So I went on the cruise and
while I was on the cruise, I got paged getting
paged on it.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
The overhead overhead Joe, please come and there's a phone
call for you. Yeah, okay, yep.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
When I got the call through, it was and it's weird.
It sounds like a sonic thing. I've never even heard
it on a on a movie kind of what it
sounds like. But it was like, will marry me. It's
like a really bizarre sound on ship to short calls
back then, I was like that was like but like

(10:42):
he was barely speaking to me when I left. He
was so mad because you were going on because I
was going on the on the cruise, and so my
reaction was like, you know, this was it was dread
But what came out of my mouth was yes.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
When you think back to that, Joe, are you able
to connect back into yourself in a way emotionally to
think about where that yes came from?

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Even for that amount of time, I had the sense
that he was dependent on me.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
Ah, okay, okay, he.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Was dependent on me for his well being, so whether
it was talking him down from being upset about something,
so he was always upset about something with somebody. A
People do what they do, and he would react very
strongly to whatever people would do, And so there were

(11:35):
all kinds of offenses that I would run interference to
keep things from bothering him. In the first place, I
helped him with school work. He wasn't doing well in school.
I would if he was reading a book for a paper,
I read the same book. I took a lot of
the same classes. Basically, even though I was going to school, also,

(11:56):
I was helping him along. He was estranged from his family.
He was all on his own. His dad had stopped
supporting his school financially when he hurt his knee, and
he had a stop playing football, so financially I was
also supporting. So I was working full time and going

(12:16):
to school full time. I felt very needed. And it's
not like in a good way, Like it's not like,
oh he needs me.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
No, no. I understand the trauma bond can often begin
through the belief that we need to help someone. For
somebody as young as Joe, who subsequently did feel needed
with time, she then felt responsible for him, which would
keep her stuck. She had a role and function in

(12:44):
this relationship, and this sense of responsibility is often what
underlies people getting stuck in unhealthy relationships, and so since
he needed you, it seems like that was a big
driver in you saying yes. I guess the corollary that
would be, what did you think might have happened if
you said no?

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Just like saying I'm going to go on this one
week cruise was a big deal, right, And there's so
much anger. Yeah, so many fights, like he would get
physical and he wasn't physical with me. He was physical
with stuff, you know, rip stuff, bang on stuff. Yeah,
you know, just visceral feeling from these these fights. I

(13:26):
knew that if I said no to getting married, it
wasn't going to be okay, have a nice life. I
knew all hell would write loose.

Speaker 1 (13:37):
Okay, So you're you're seventeen, Okay, he just turned eighteen eighteen,
she that makes him twenty three. You're kind of taking
full responsibility for another adult who sounds like a petulant,
tantruming child, who is reacting strongly, who is always angry
about things, who's huffing and puffing, who is financially reliant

(13:59):
on you. I'm gonna say it again, an eighteen year
old girl and I guess my question then, is there
was some fear. Were you afraid?

Speaker 2 (14:11):
Well, I had seen what happened when he doesn't get
in his way, and it's not pretty. Anytime he was
mad at somebody, he wasn't shy about showing his disappointment
and his anger and replacing blame. And if he would
have just said, you know, I'm just going to leave
you behind, I would have been I would have been
okay with that. I wasn't afraid of him leaving me ever, right, right,

(14:35):
I was never afraid of him leaving me.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
You were afraid of his reactions.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
I was afraid of his anger.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
It's interesting early in the game, you already saw what
that post separation abuse was going to look like. If
this guy doesn't get his way, the consequences are so
dire that it's easier to appease him. And that's where
I call sort of tantrums as manipulation. One of the
things in it I take fault with the field of
even health of well, a person has a choice when

(15:02):
someone's having a tantrum, they can step away. But it's
not that simple, right, There's all the psychological dynamics in
us of we like to feel needed. We want to
feel helpful. We might feel obligated if you're on family roles,
gender roles, whatever. And having these tantrums became a form
of manipulation because over time you would live in your

(15:24):
life to keep the tantrums at.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Bay, especially the ones that seemed to be my fault.

Speaker 1 (15:28):
Correct which over time I'm sure everything became your fault.
Oh yeah, okay, so you get married. Once you got married,
what was your relationship like?

Speaker 2 (15:37):
So he got accepted to Duke University to their MBA program.

Speaker 1 (15:41):
That's a big deal.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Helped him write his application.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
So you got accepted to Duke University for their NBA program.
Is what happened? You own that?

Speaker 2 (15:50):
So? Yeah, helped. I worked and he was going into
school like I used to just I would wake up
in the morning and just have this help me, Like
like my first thought in the morning was like a
silent scream of help me.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
You waited a while to have children. You didn't have
a child until twelve years into the marriage. You get pregnant,
And can you tell me about the day that you
found out you got pregnant.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah, so we had been we had been trying for
a few months and then I did pee on the
stick and it was positive, and I was like so excited.
And Lou was getting ready to go on a trip.
He was a consultant at that point, and so he
was traveling a lot, and by this point I knew
he was cheating a lot. He came in the bedroom

(16:41):
and I came out with the thing and I said look,
and he's like, oh, okay, oh yeah, just oh.

Speaker 1 (16:49):
And I said, oh, you showed him a positive pregnancy
test after you'd been trying for months. And his reaction was.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Oh oh, And I said oh. And he goes, all right, well,
I don't know what you congratulations? What do you expect
me to say? And then he gave me a little
peck and said I gotta go, and he went on
his trip. I think the part I haven't really explained
is he was also very charming. Okay, so I haven't

(17:19):
really explained the forward facing persona. When anybody would meet
him on a professional basis, he's the big smile, glad hand.
He was an expert in his field, so to speak,
normal people when they would meet. He was laughing and
joking around about things. So he wasn't just this grumpy

(17:40):
jerk until somebody irritated him.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Okay, so he would be charming and charismatic. People were
drawn to him. I maybe did that play a role
in him back when he was at Union and he
was a student.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
He had it back then. So when he met my parents,
they were impressed.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
Okay, all right. So he had this charming charisma and
only when he would be frustrated or disappointed would this
kind of crack show up, and then he would be
quick to react.

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, so you know, doctor Jackyll, mister Hyde, Mister Hyde
would come out when SOMETHINGE didn't go away.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Did other people see that?

Speaker 2 (18:16):
People saw one or the other for the most part,
So there are plenty of people who never saw that
side of Lou that was angry. Like a lot of
times he would bring it home and then other times
he would flip out in a store.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Okay, okay, all right.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
So he would occasionally flip out a in a public
setting and I would be like, you know, dial it back,
you know, okay, we still need to get our food here.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
Kind of thing, do you feel like? Mostly he brought
it home.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Mostly he brought it home, or he was covert about
how he would get his revenge on someone.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
In these twelve years. What I'm hearing is there wor
some good times Mister charm would show up and you
would have fun. Was every morning waking up with dread
for twelve years before you found out you were pregnant?

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Oh gosh, no? No, okay, now did We did lots
of things. We would go hiking. Okay, within a certain week.
There would be good in a bad time.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
But so there were good times. There were also these tantrums.
You get this lukewarm reaction from him, and you're pregnant.
Now tell me about the day then your daughter was
actually born.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
He was miserable throughout my pregnancy. He projected a horrible
life to follow. I was gonna get fat. Oh, I
was gonna get ugly. We were gonna have He called
it a life of crumminess ahead Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:47):
Was he not in on the wanting to get pregnant
in the first place? Or was that just was that
something you wanted and he agreed to. Was he ever
enthusiastic about there? I'm a little bit confused because it
seemed like he was into it.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
He wasn't to it before we actually got pregnant. Okay,
even during the process of getting pregnant. He was one
hundred percent into it, were right, But that was a
light switch moment when I showed him the stick and interesting,
and then after that he just got increasingly down about
the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
So it was more of that withdrawal again. I mean,
it almost feels like that that pattern got reproduced again
there as well.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
I was sure he was going to leave me.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
We will be right back with this conversation. Oh okay,
all right, I was okay with and you're okay with that.
Despite we had fun hiking and there was this charming
guy by and large the dread woman from the early
years of the marriage that never left. So the entire marriage,

(20:47):
it was sort of I kind of wish this guy
would just go away, but I'm not going to end it. Yeah, okay,
so you have a baby. Did you stay in the
same house that you were in or did you ever
have to do anything like that like look for a
house together.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
So that whole process was a complete disaster. Every house
that we looked at was unacceptable, and from silly little
things like, oh, that has a dead tree in front.
If they would leave a dead tree in front, what
kind of things are they hiding inside? The house. You
couldn't have neighbors being too close to you. You couldn't

(21:21):
have it can be the best house in the neighborhood, couldn't
be the worst house in the neighborhood. You can't have
neighbors too closed. And I picked a spot in the
middle of an eleven acre lot, and that's where we
determined that we could build. So we were living in
temporary like a condo.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
And how did all of that go awful?

Speaker 2 (21:42):
The builder at one point sent it an email saying
that he was no longer willing to talk to Lou,
or communicate with Lou, or see Lou. He was micromanaging
everything on the property, and then he would blow up,
explode to the point where at one point he damaged

(22:02):
his vocals courts by yelling so much and thought he
broke bones in his in his hand from like pounding
his fist while he was yelling at the guy.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Okay, so you're back to traditional reactive tantruming, Lou, how
are you feeling emotionally?

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I was furious with you, angry. I was angry. I
knew he was cheating in all kinds of every every
port in the storm he was he had something going
on wherever he was going.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
So he was still traveling for work, and so he.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Was constantly on the hunt for people locally and people
like if he had a client out in Pennsylvania, he'd
be hunting there. If he had a client and he
had one in Oregon, he had one in California, he
was hunting all the time. And you know, so even
though he was telling me, you know, no, I'm not

(23:01):
doing anything, but if you keep pestering me and nagging
me about this, it will happen. You're gonna make this
a self filling prophecy. So yeah, at this point, he
had taken up bodybuilding as a as a hobby and
he found a new girlfriend. Okay, but he wasn't hiding
it from me anymore.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
So it went from undercover relationships that I knew about
but for whatever reason you probably know, I don't but
didn't call him out on him, to in my face relationship.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
What does it mean? In your face?

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Like like I knew and we talked and he knew
I knew, and he actually would make me clear out
from our poundhouse sometimes for she had an open relationship
with her husband, so it was kind of sanctioned on
her side at first, but then when they got to chummy,
then her husband was calling it out.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Okay, So I need to understand this. You're renting a townhouse,
you're building a house, you have a daughter, you're married.
You didn't call him out on past infidelity, so there's
no conversation there. There was never like an explosive I
know you're cheating. Nothing. He would cheat, You knew it,
and you look the other way.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
For the most part. Yeah, I would call out the
hunting behavior and he would deny the hunting for somebody okay,
and then say, if I kept it up, I was
going to cause the relationship. Okay, God be my fault.

Speaker 1 (24:25):
I understand that.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
But no, I didn't even bother saying okay.

Speaker 1 (24:29):
So now he's got this new one. You're all living
in a townhouse. He's asking you to leave the townhouse
so he can have his girlfriend over to have sex.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
With her because she made him happy, because.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
She made him happy, Okay, so now there's no not
seeing it like here I am. This is to me,
the read I would have on this as anyone listening
to this is he is trying to make you leave
the marriage.

Speaker 2 (24:55):
Yeah, and it gets worse.

Speaker 1 (24:57):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
He was like, oh, you know her husband is a
bad guy, because you know he said. No, She's like,
this is abusive. She should actually move in with us,
and we should you know, pay for her to go
to college.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Okay, Holy sister wives, Like, what is happening? So he
is saying, I need to take this in. Okay, I
need to up till now I gotta say. I'm like, okay,
this just sounds like an unhappy relationship until let's run
the girlfriend mentorship program in our house and move this

(25:33):
woman in pay her tuition. You're not in an open relationship.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
No, how are you not voluntarily?

Speaker 1 (25:42):
How are you responding to this?

Speaker 2 (25:45):
I'm pushing back, saying no, we can't be doing this,
and then he would get mad and he would blow up,
and then I would get beat down verbally, emotionally. You
know about how horrible his life is and this is
the only thing that makes him happy. And you know,
because we're living in a townhouse, how horrible.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
I almost feel like a student in question. Okay. In
any story like this, okay, a person who is so
enamored of their side person would move out. They'd say
I've met someone I love them or I fall in
love or whatever, and I'm going to go rent my

(26:24):
own place by.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Will.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
My lawyer will be in touch with you about the details.
I've heard that story before, and it's a devastating, heartbreaking story.
The idea that someone's leaving you for someone else is
the ultimate in abandonment. I understand that story.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
He's asking you to adjust to this correct And he
didn't want to leave, and I don't think she wanted him.
I think she could see what an unpleasant person he
could be, so she was getting all the good stuff.
But I think she could also see how he was
acting towards me. So it's not like she was wanting
to leave her husband. Lou asked her to leave.

Speaker 1 (27:03):
Her husband to move full time into your townhouse with
you and your daughter, a new house.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Because a house. Yeah, And then he asked me to
talk to her and encourage her to do so.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
I just, okay. So here's the thing.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
You can't pick it up.

Speaker 1 (27:23):
You can't make it. I mean, my head is spinning
with the utter lack of empathy. You know. I've heard
variance on this, the father having an inappropriate relationship with
like a living nanny or an au pair, right, But
this is a person he gets into a relationship with.
But it seems like there's almost zero self awareness that
this is a completely inappropriate thing to ask for that.

(27:48):
Did you understand what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Like, Oh, he thought he was better than most husbands
that go out drinking and go to bars and hang
out with their friends and go place, you know, go
to sports games. He thinks.

Speaker 1 (27:58):
This is so having a girlfriend that you move into
the house is on the same level as having a
beer with somebody and watching a Patriots game. Better than Yeah,
it's not planet Earth, at least not the United States
planet Earth.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
And if I cared about him, I would want him
to be happy.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Okay, so this is manipulation on such a high level.
I've got to tell you you might have broken a
new sort of world speed record on navigating narcissism. And
that takes some doing because we've heard stuff here. But
the idea that you are in a presumptively monogamous marriage
with someone who was asking you to do this, how
were you feeling at this point?

Speaker 2 (28:35):
So this is when I started having spells of lightheadedness
and my heart was racing, and I would feel dizzy
and I would have to like suddenly sit down. I
thought I was having a heart attack. A few times
I went to the doctor thinking, all right, there's something

(28:55):
wrong with my heart, and lou knew that I was
having these physical reactions. The physical tests came back negative
for any issues. Then they asked her, well, what's going
on in your private life? And I talked about the
stress of moving, trying to find a house and move
and build a house, and that we've been fighting because

(29:16):
of the stress of the move. And then they said,
you have anxiety induced depression.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
It sounds like you're having panic attacks. I mean those lightheaded,
dizzy and heart attack moments were panic.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Attacks, and that those episodes were panic attacks. So they
basically said, do you have depression, anxiety and you're experiencing
panic attacks? And then they started medication.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Did you mention to the medical team you're working with
And by the way, my husband is having an affair
and wants to move his affair partner into the house
while we remain married. Did you share that tidbit with them?

Speaker 2 (29:56):
No?

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Okay, because that's a big one, right, and it's interesting
you didn't it really really is, What do you think
drove that decision to not share that piece of it.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
It's embarrassing even to talk about now, because I objectively
I would say that anybody would just say screw this
and leave.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
See. I want to put your feet to the fire
on that, Joe, because this isn't about you. This is
about that somebody thought this was okay to do this
to you. You're absolutely right. A lot of people would say,
come on, now, get up, find your you know, get
out of there. What's wrong with you? You know? Absolutely not.
I think I am having this shocked reaction because what

(30:37):
this person did was shocking and remorseless and unempathic. And
when we are in the wake of that kind of behavior,
we have panic attacks. It's almost as though a short
circuiting in the system starts to take place. We're experiencing
this cataclysmic fear, but we can't give word to it.
And so I fully, fully empathize with the sense of

(30:59):
embarrassing that one would feel about sharing this. But I
really want to put a fine point on this. You
weren't doing anything. You were living a life, and there's
nothing foolish about what you did. You had a family,
you had a child, and we had a guest On
this podcast named Doctor Jennifer Fried talks about betrayal blindness,

(31:19):
that when we are betrayed, there is a not seeing
it that can happen and not acknowledging it, and she
even uses this interesting term of it woshes away. Just
you see this guy. There's no not seeing this he is,
I'm going to move this person in. And while there
was certainly this moment of in the doctor's office not
wanting to share with them the wholeness of what was happening,

(31:41):
there was a placing it aside. So how did you
talk about this in your marriage?

Speaker 2 (31:48):
So we would go through these cycles where I would say,
all right, you can't keep doing this. This has to stop.
I need to have some self respect and you need
to show me respect. I understand this is what makes
you happy, but it's not fair to me. Imagine being me.
And then he would just blow up and beat me

(32:10):
down and then claim that I had set him up
for this, that somehow I was responsible for him being
in this position of having this relationship that he now
cannot live without. And then he would claim that I
had said everything was okay and that I was fine
with it, and I was like I never. I never gaslighting,

(32:31):
never ever, never ever did I ever? So yes, I
had a couple of times I went along with it
because you beat me down.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
And what did going along with it look like?

Speaker 2 (32:42):
Like me leave in the apartment?

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Oh, I see, And so somebody's gaslighting you. Someone's manipulating
a eure upside down, so you'll sometimes almost seem like
it's agreement right, like you're you're in it. That's actually
that's the end. That's the end of the gas lighting cycle.
Very few people get all the way down into the
sort of the bottom floor of the whole gas lighting process.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
I remember just like literally being on the floor during
these arguments and him, you know, beating on a chair,
you know, and insisting that this was my fault and
that my emotional problem goes way back and it has
nothing to do with him or her, and that it's
you know, this is all about like when I got pregnant,

(33:24):
that you know, my issues date way back then and
it's got nothing to do with now. And like, yeah, right,
I agree that I've had emotional issues for a long time,
but this has taken it to a whole new level.

Speaker 1 (33:37):
He's making it about your emotional issues at this point,
your emotional issues, emotional issues, tracking them back to the pregnancy.
You're even sitting here saying I acknowledge I have emotional issues.
You do realize that the vast majority of these emotional
issues sound like they were caused by being married to
a man like this. Oh okay, so I'm not you
know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
I didn't.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
Now you weren't present with the history of anxiety and
depression by your reports even growing up. He's telling you
you're the one with the problem. So where do you
go with that?

Speaker 2 (34:07):
So I wrote a long letter because like whatever I say,
he said it, I didn't say it. So if I
send an email, then I'll have it in writing and
I could like pull out my documentation and prove no,
this is what I said. See it says it right here.
So I wrote this really long letter saying you know
exactly how I felt about everything. I acknowledged you know

(34:29):
my part, to the extent that I have a part,
but I let it happen. I acknowledged my part and
said this isn't healthy for me. It's not good for me.
I can't do this. If you want to pursue this,
I will be a good co parent. Basically with you,
I wish you all the best. I want you to
be happy. I want me to be happy too, though,

(34:52):
so I cannot live this way, okay, And so don't
be thinking that I approve in any sense. I never have.
You know, there are times when I said do what
you want, but I didn't say I'm okay with it.
It was a very loving letter.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Writing long letters in order to feel heard is a
telltale sign you're being gaslighted and maybe dealing with a narcissist. Remember,
narcissists are all about power, control and domination. Arguing just
to get your point across can be destabilizing and unsettling,

(35:29):
as they use tactics like gaslighting and fast paced, pressured
speech to overwhelm and dominate the conversation. They always try
to win the argument. If you find yourself writing long
letters or text messages to explain yourself, it may be
a sign that you are in a toxic relationship.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
His response was, first of you didn't even acknowledge that
he got it, And then he said, oh, yeah, yeah,
I got that. We decided that there's too much pressure
on us, so we're not going to see each other anymore.
Like this means you're going to go underground basically.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
So he's going to go seek out new supply. I mean,
because that's what these other women are. They're sources of
narcissistic supply or you know that. That's really what it
sounds like. So this is the too much pressure is
basically your letter saying if you want to pursue this,
pursue this, but I'm out, and him saying then, well,

(36:30):
that's too much pressure. In essence, he can't have both things.
He can't just basically openly have this relationship in this
townhouse in your presence. Meant that he actually had to
make a choice. So he said, Okay, I'm going to
end that relationship with her. How did that feel?

Speaker 2 (36:52):
I was so proud of my letter and I I
really thought, okay, this is he's going to like have
his aha, you know, like I guess it now, I
see what I yeah, No, it was it was I
was like, now what you know?

Speaker 1 (37:08):
So now what?

Speaker 2 (37:09):
Now what? And so now he pretended that they weren't
seeing each other anymore, but they were, but they were.
At one point he gave her an ultimatum basically because
he wasn't happy with sharing her anymore with her husband.
So he gave her an ultimatum, and she's like, yeah,
I'm just going to focus on my marriage now, and

(37:30):
she ended it with him.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Okay, so she ended it. When we're talking about mechanics,
we're talking about, you know, the absurdity of it all.
Were you hurt?

Speaker 2 (37:37):
I was hoping that they would decide to be together.
I was thinking this was my potential out.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
So you really were looking for the out. But it
seemed that him ending that relationship meant you didn't have
your out. Correct, even though you always had your out,
I didn't see any you didn't see now because you
were afraid of what.

Speaker 2 (37:58):
That's the same reason I said yeah to getting married
in the first place, the vague I'm gonna deal with your.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
Wrath, okay, So you're still afraid of his wrath. You're
afraid of his anger. And so if he was with
the new gal and theory, well, he's got a safe
place to land, he's got his person, he's all sorted.
So then you could get up and leave and it
would be less of a there'd be less of this reaction.
This house ever get built.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Yeah, so the house got built. She stopped seeing him,
but he went right back to hunting, sure for relationships,
and I saw that and I'm like, all right, I
don't I didn't even unpack my stuff. So we moved
into the house and I unpacked just about everything, but
my stuff was still in boxes. I started to talk
to people more. So I talked to one of my sisters.

(38:46):
I shared with hers, you know, some of the relationship
issues with him, and how he was behaving with the
house hunting and the build and the other women, and
she was supportive, and it was like amazing to me
after all these years of not talking to anybody, that

(39:06):
there was support. Right, So now suddenly people are starting
to give me advice, but also saying, well, that's not cool.
The way he treats me is not okay, it's not normal.
People don't do that, and it's bizarre that you need
somebody to tell you it's not your fault. And you

(39:26):
know they're not acting that way because of what you did.
They're acting that way because of who they are.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
So now you've got support, you're talking to people, but
you're still living in the same house as this guy. Okay,
your stuff isn't fully unpacked. There's a part of you
that seems psychologically resistant. At this point, the wheels are
off right. Your husband is basically having a series of
multiple relationships with other people. Another piece of this story
is also that Lou was a private pilot.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
We owned up private airplane.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
So I know that there was a part of your
story that I'd like to have you share is that
you and your daughter and he were on an airplane
and something became very clear to you at that point.
Could you share some of that?

Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yeah, So I said, all right, I want a divorce.
We are going to divorce, and he wasn't having it.
He admitted to a sexual addiction and he would only
go to counseling of any sort if I agreed to
stay together. But the counseling he wanted to sign up
for was sexual addiction counseling.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Just as an aside. Sex addiction is it's there's a
phenomenology there. There's no two ways about it. Okay, it is.
We see it come out in multiple different ways. Pornography
hiring people to have sex with somebody going on like nowadays,
is a million different ways you could find a person
to have, you know, sex anywhere with you. It's disregulated.

(40:55):
The addiction term is meant that the person feels that
they almost can't control the earth. While there is some
talk of love addiction, it really is sex addiction. Is
it's not relational, right. It is about sex, masturbation, pornography,
short term sexual hits, whatever. It's not about somebody showing

(41:18):
up and saying I want to move my girlfriend into
our home. That's not sex addiction. And I think that
the commandeering of the sex addiction defense people who study it,
they'll see that there's a whole picture there. There's often
a lot of remorse, there's often a lot of shame,
and in therapy there's often a lot of work on

(41:40):
trauma and all. It's just very complicated, right.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
And so at that point I had moved out of
our bedroom and he was just getting increasingly weird and
weirder and weirder and weirder. And then he had made
appointments for dental work for all three of us back
in Delaware. Haul ourselves back to Delaware, and while we
were on the plane, I'm in the in the co

(42:05):
pilot's seat and Angelica's in the back and he's flying.
All of a sudden, I had an overwhelming clarity that
he intended to crash the plane with all three of
us in it on purpose. And so I'm just sitting
there and I'm like, because you know, he had been

(42:28):
getting weirder and weirder the more it became clear I
was determined to leave and had made threats vague, that's
but nothing, nothing specific. And I was like, oh my god,
he's going to kill all of us. And I sat
there and I'm like, if he's gonna put the plane

(42:49):
in a dive, all right, all right, there's a knife here.
I'm going to grab this knife here. I'm gonna I'm
gonna blind him, and then I can once he's blinded,
I I could kill him because I can't fight back
from that. And I know how to operate the plane myself.
I'm not a pilot, but I can do it, and
I can dial for help and dial in for help.
And figured all that out, and none of that happened, clearly,

(43:11):
none of it happened, okay, But when we got back
that night safely, I was determined that there was serious,
serious danger.

Speaker 1 (43:23):
My conversation will continue after this break.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Got sense that it's not safe. It's not okay to leave.
It's not safe. To leave. So we got back home.
I finally got my stuff together to decide to leave
and came up with a plan. I called my sister
had given me the phone number for the domestic violence
support and called it and explained not everything clearly, but

(43:53):
enough and got the feedback that you're not crazy and
if you don't feel safe, you're probably not. You should
leave with a safety plan. Yeah, So I decided that
I was gonna pack up a few things in the
back of the car and go see a lawyer, which
I was forbidden from doing, but I did it anyway.

(44:15):
But in that one day, I found a lawyer to
see me agree to help me. I gave him a
retainer and my intention was to go pick up Angelica
from camp and then just take off with her before
he even got home. Okay, but I don't know if
he had a sense that something was unusual, and for

(44:36):
the first time ever, he went and picked her up
from camp. So I got to I gotta figure something else.
And then we needed to take a car to service,
and so Lou and I met up. I got Angelica
in the back seat with me my car, which was

(44:56):
a bit of a trick because Lou's like he wants
to drive that car, and I was like, oh, I
felt like an actress. I'm like, oh, you drive it
on the way back. You know, I'll follow you over there.
You drive, we'll drop the car off and then I'll
follow you back. And then when we were getting off
an exit to where the car dealership was, I slowed
down and then I kind of darted back down and

(45:20):
on the highway and just gunned it. And then he
noticed I wasn't behind him after he made the turn,
and then he called me on the cell phone and like, oh,
you missed the turn or you know. I'm like, yeah,
I need a break. This has just been too much
and I'm gonna I saw a lawyer filing for divorce.
I suggest you go see a lawyer too. I let

(45:41):
him talk to Angelica. I explained to Angelican the drive
before I took off what was going to happen, and
just said, you know, clearly we've been fighting. He called.
I just kept saying I just need peace, please, I
just need peace. And went to one hotel.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
So now you and Angelic are staying.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
And we stayed at a hotel that night one night
then and then the next day went to the back
to the lawyer's office as planned. The attorney said, this
is clearly emotional abuse for him, domestic abuse. So he yeah,
he was someone who had been trained. So then I
go to the courthouse. Right, we had written up in

(46:21):
affidavit and I wrote up a petition for a restraining order.
I didn't want to get a restraining order. The attorney
is the one who told me you really need it
because this is the only thing that you can use
to stop him from constantly calling you and harassing you.
And this is how you can have temporary custody of
your daughter.

Speaker 1 (46:41):
So you take the paperwork for the temporary restraining order
to the courthouse and.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
Meeting with the judge. He hears it all and he said,
I'll grant this. This is a one month temporary restraining order.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
And so you got it. So now how did that work?
That they were they would still serve him to let
him know that it's in.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Yeah, So around ten thirty at night, I got a
call from the police saying they were getting ready to serve,
to serve okay, and they wanted to know details about
the house and guns and stuff, and I explained all
that and he's not somebody that you want to disregard.
If he takes like a you're not going to take
me out of here stance, he means it okay, you know,

(47:26):
and they're like, oh, you know, we deal with this
stuff all the time.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Does that go off without incident?

Speaker 2 (47:31):
So they call me back and say, you know, he
put up a resistance at first, but he gave in,
went in and got his computer and some stuff and
said he was going to go to a hotel.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Okay, so he's gone to his own hotel. He just
still doesn't know where you are, right, Okay. Now it's
the next day. Now what happens.

Speaker 2 (47:48):
Seven twenty in the morning, I get a phone call
on my cell phone and I see it's low Okay, Yeah,
it didn't surprise me because I really didn't expect him
to abide by the order. I don't want him to
get into trouble. And I also don't want them to
have it opportunity to leave me a nasty voicemail because
he had been leaving me like really nasty stuff.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
Okay, so you seven twenty in the morning, he violates
the order, he calls you, You don't report it to
the police.

Speaker 2 (48:13):
Then what happens about maybe a half hour later, I
get a call about our alarm system and they said,
the panic alarm in your master bedroom has gone off.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
You're getting a phone call about them. The security from
the security company got it, and.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
I'm like, oh, I said, nobody should be there. Please
notify the police. Nobody should be there, and if that's happening,
then there's there's a real problem. So so then I'm
pacing around and then call the police and I said,
you know, I've been waiting for a call back. And
they're like, oh my god, thank you for calling. An
airplane crashed into your house and it's it's fully engulfed

(48:50):
in flames and we need you to go to the
property now to help the responders. I got there and
the entire development was just all emergency vehicles, police s, ambulance,
fire trucks. By multiple times in the media, was already.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
There because a plane crashed into a house. Like that's
a plane.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
The neighbors called it in.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Right, and that's what made the panic alarm go off.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
The plane crash, made.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
The plane crash, made it go off. Okay, so you
get to your house, there is a plane crashed into
your house.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Obviously the police had the records of me going to
the police department them serving the the restraining order, so
they knew that that was an incident house. So their
biggest concern was that we were in the house more
than anything else. So for them it was kind of like,

(49:46):
all right, this is not as bad as it could
have been because you and yourcau because we were not
in the house.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
Okay, So what went through your head when you got
to the house.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
I was scared that he somehow had managed to do
this and make it look like maybe he was dead too,
but that he wasn't.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
Oh, so you suspected it was him. As soon as
you heard a plane crash in the house, you suspected
it was him, Okay, because which would be recentble because
planes don't crash in the house.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Yeah. I wasn't thinking it was a coincidence.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
No, no, no, no, no no. I mean a plane could
crash and land in a street, or in a neighborhood
or in a yard and arm ahouse. But this went
right into the house.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Yeah, And this was in the middle of it was
a clearing oh yeah, yeah, out of an eleven acre.
It was a very precise, precision attack.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
So it isn't. But that jumps out of me that
what went through your head was that I know it's him,
and my concern is that he is still alive.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Somehow I had to lay out the schematics of the
house so to speak for them, and then explained about
Low's stature and you know, identifying features and so that
when they did get to the plane, because they hadn't
gotten to the plane itself yet, it was all based
on the neighbors saying what they saw with the airplane
circling before the crocket. So when they said, yeah, we

(51:07):
did find a body and it matches your description or
the remains match your description, because clearly there was a fire.
The house was just a skeleton.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
So now you know he's dead, there's a body, there's remains,
you can't you know, I mean, and it was clearly him. Okay,
it had to have been extraordinarily difficult time. You've lost
your home, You've gone through the terror of leaving this relationship.
You knew it was going to be bad. It certainly
doesn't sound like you ever thought it was going to
be this.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
And the hardest part was telling Angelica what had happened.
So that was horrible. And then later that night having
to call his mother and his sister and you know,
call my family, you know, but calling his mother was
really tough. But then after that it was really media.

(51:58):
Media was relentless, was very interesting to the world. That
was August twenty fifth, thousand one one. And then in
the morning of September eleventh, two thousand and one, my friend,
one of the ones who had been a real support
person and my closest friend, he called. He said, are
you watching TV? So which no channel? I wasn't, he

(52:20):
goes any and I turned on the TV and you know,
the images that were going so now I had, oh
my god, like, is this this my fault? Because it
had been national not just national news, it was international news.
It was everywhere you know about what he had done.
Kamikaze pilot and burns down his hats and crashes into

(52:43):
the house. And I felt responsible And even though I
know it's not like I go there like, okay, they
were probably just going to hijack those planes, you know,
like but they got this idea from lou to like
do this instead with crashing buildings, and like, oh my god,
this is all my fault. Everyone's going to know it

(53:05):
is my fault. So so yeah, little PTSD from that.

Speaker 1 (53:11):
Alone, yea, I think, yeah, probably other things or years.
It's it is it did trauma survivors blame themselves for
things that have nothing to do with them. It's part
of the architecture of trauma, a throwback to trying to
attempt to make some sense of control over something that

(53:34):
was happening, and the proximity of somethings that was such
a catastrophic event in your life against an image that
was so similar two weeks later. Is I mean, you
were in the throes of acute trauma at that point
when nine to eleven happened. It was it was what
it was like seventeen days, you know, So that's we

(53:58):
consider that acute traumatic stress. Most people will continue to
have trauma responses within that thirty day period. Most people
will then, you know, sort of it will there will
be a tailing off, and it'll leave a toll, but
may not cause impairment in their life. But that connection
of those two events took what was already your daughter's grief.
It was her father, and this is not the end

(54:19):
you wanted. You wanted the two of you to be
able to go off into your own separate lives. This
is not what you would hope for. And then you
also still lived in fear right until the very last
moment that he was still alive and could harm you.
This was a person who felt dangerous to you. But
I wanted now focus in years later because your daughter,
Angelica is now an adult, right, she's grown up and

(54:44):
she will go into relationships. Now, what did you talk
to her about and when she started dating?

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Honestly, she's been married now for oh seven years. Who
she's married to her first and only boyfriend? Wow? Okay,
she started dating in high school. But before she dated him,
you know, I did talk to her and one of
her girlfriends, and her girlfriend was maybe a little more

(55:11):
interested in boys than Angelica was at the time, and
I talked to them about my experience and good good,
you know, And I talked about the earlier times with
even before Lou you know, and mistakes I made and
not things are dangerous. It's more about the self respect

(55:34):
and you know, don't settle for things that aren't right.
If something doesn't feel right, it's not right. Yeah, just basically,
if you don't feel good, if in a relationship, it's
probably not good for you.

Speaker 1 (55:50):
Yeah, I mean it's it's tough. That's tough advice for
young people to listen to. So how have you been healing?
What's your healing process been?

Speaker 2 (55:57):
Like, I'm married to a good guy.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Good now, gratulation.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
He's a good guy and he's been through his share
of bad experiences himself, so in general we're really good
to each other.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Good. But you trusted love enough to get married again,
which is amazing.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
I never thought I would. I keep a very tight circle,
so I feel really vulnerable outside of the circle, but
I'm great with my circle.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Yeah, that's great. Actually, I think the small circle idea
is actually very much the landscape of survivorship. I always
say your relationship with trust is going to change. Right now.
I want to ask you one last question, which is
if you could talk to your sixteen year old self
who had just met Lou in the stairwell of a

(56:46):
frat house, what would you tell her.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Well, I'm going to preface this by you know, I'm like,
to change anything is to change everything, and then I
don't have Angelica.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
That's good. I'm glad, so I would.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
I wouldn't change thing that resulted in not having her
in my life. But my instincts were right when I
got out of the car after the speeding, so everything
was fine up till then. You know, there's you know,
even though there was a couple of awkward things, you know,

(57:21):
with the early dates, but are not dating, whatever those were,
But my instinct when I got out of that car
and slammed it and said that's it, we're right. There
was no reason to go back and test the waters.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Yeah, yeah, yes, and yet most people do. But I
really want to come back to what you said. To
change anything would be to change everything. It was such
a I've never heard anyone quite say it that way, Joe,
And I'm really glad we're sort of ending in that
place because many survivors will spend years ruminating if I'd

(57:55):
done this, if I had done this, if I had
done this, I'd had done this, And the of your
focus on Angelica, This is the daughter I wanted, This
is the human being I wanted in the world, and
a whole series of events had to happen and that
put Angelica in the world. And that framing of the

(58:15):
suffering as something larger is that whatever universal calculus is
being done, that that moment happened, and no, I didn't
get out of the car, and by not getting out
of the car, this happened. This human being came into
my life. It's a hard way sometimes to view it
because so much suffering happened, but it can sometimes be
the way to view it that allows us to find

(58:40):
the psychological strength, the soul strength to keep fighting another day.
So I have to say that perspective taking is quite
remarkable given what you had went through. So thank you
so much for sharing your story.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
Thank you, thank you for your work.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Joe. Let's
start with one of the last things Joe said. Joe
ended her story with a profound quote that I do
hope at some point in their healing that survivors are
able to feel. She said, to change anything is to

(59:16):
change everything. I thought that was a beautiful framing. Now,
I have no doubt that some survivors may not resonate
with that, but for many of you, there was something
that grew out of these toxic relationships, beloved children, some
good family relationships, self awareness, and even experiences. I view

(59:38):
it as those flowers that sometimes grow out of the
sidewalk cracks. From the harshest of places, beautiful things can grow.
We don't get do overs, and all we can do
is take a moment and recognize that there may be
some things in our life that came from this struggle.
Framing these experiences in a meaning oriented way doesn't take

(01:00:00):
away the pain, but it may foster your healing in
our next takeaway, When I hear a story like Joe's,
I wish there was a high school class on warning
signs and dangerous patterns in new relationships. The reactive sensitivity,
fast driving, jealousy. These often are signs that show up

(01:00:20):
early and are always a sign of problems to come.
Charm and charisma can make it hard to spy these patterns.
In Joe's relationship, she said, she quickly slid into a
pattern of rescuing with Joe looking for places for him
to live, and this rescuing can often happen if someone
believes that this may soothe the narcissistic person. These patterns

(01:00:45):
can start getting set early in narcissistic relationships, and somehow
we have to find a way to shine a light
on these patterns so there is less risk of young
people making excuses for pentially abusive partners. For this next takeaway,
this story teaches us how narcissistic tantrums and the drive

(01:01:09):
to make them stop by appeasing the narcissistic person means
that almost everything that happens in a relationship like this
is coercive. Being paged multiple times on a cruise ship
and then having to say yes to a marriage proposal
so she could make his harassment stop is not consent,

(01:01:29):
but yet, over and over in these relationships, people relent
to all kinds of things to make the abusive harassing
behavior stop for a moment. Then, when that gets coupled
with a sense of guilt or pity for the narcissistic person,
a person, especially a young person, can get corralled into

(01:01:49):
a situation that is very difficult to safely climb out of.
In our next takeaway, there's entitlement, and then there's entitlement.
Her husband's request that she allow his girlfriend to move
into their home together simply because she made him happy.

(01:02:11):
That's a whole other level of entitlement. We always think
we have gotten into the far boundary of entitlement, but
then we hear something like this, It's easy to take
a hard line stance and believe we would never put
up with something like this. However, after years of enduring
emotional abuse in the relationship, a person in a relationship

(01:02:34):
like this may not fully register it. However, Joe's body
did register it, and the cardiac symptoms she was having
turned out to be panic attacks, which are not unusual
in people experiencing this toxic and abusive a relationship. In
our last takeaway, Joe's pattern of self blame after the

(01:02:56):
plane crash went so deep that she blamed her elf
for the nine to eleven attacks, which occurred just seventeen
days later. She was still in the throes of an
acute stress crisis, and trauma survivors often do blame themselves
for events that are clearly unrelated to them, but the
similarity of the events, her accumulated history of trauma within

(01:03:18):
the relationship, and the recent trauma of experiencing a similar
event connects all of this. While most stories of post
separation abuse do not have such extreme outcomes, it is
not unusual for survivors of these kinds of abusive relationships
and post separation abuse to blame themselves for a variety

(01:03:40):
of incidents that happen in their lives for years to come.

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