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You Are Not Crazy

Author: Jessica Knight

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You know something is wrong. You just can’t always explain what it is.

Why do you keep apologizing when you didn’t do anything wrong? Why can one nice interaction make you question months of mistreatment? Why do you rehearse conversations before you have them? Why are you still trying to make someone understand you when explaining yourself has never worked? Why does every individual incident sound small when the pattern has changed your entire life?


You Are Not Crazy is a podcast about making sense of the relationship experiences that don’t make sense.


I’m Jessica Knight, an emotional abuse coach and survivor. I take the confusing, contradictory, often ordinary-looking moments inside emotional abuse, coercive control, trauma bonds, narcissistic relationships, and high-conflict separation and slow them down so we can understand what is actually happening.


We look beyond labels and individual incidents to the patterns underneath them: what a behavior does, what it gets you to do in response, what happens when you resist it, and what you eventually learn to believe about yourself.

Because emotional abuse doesn’t only hurt. It can change the way you communicate, make decisions, respond to conflict, interpret other people’s behavior, and trust your own perception.


Here, we talk about gaslighting, manipulation, trauma bonding, intermittent reinforcement, coercive control, high-conflict divorce, post-separation abuse, difficult co-parenting dynamics, and the process of rebuilding self-trust after a relationship that taught you to doubt yourself.


But this isn’t a podcast about diagnosing every difficult person or telling you that every conflict is abuse. It’s about understanding the pattern.


What happened? What did it make you do? Why did your response make sense at the time? And what changes once you can finally see the mechanism underneath it?


You are not crazy. There is an explanation.

Let’s find it.


Learn more about Jessica’s work and resources at emotionalabusecoach.com.

279 Episodes
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In this episode I'm resharing my 2022 conversation with Tina Swithin, founder of One Mom's Battle and co-founder of Family Court Awareness Month, because so much of what she said still holds up. Before the interview, I walk through what has changed in custody law since we recorded. Kayden's Law had just passed Congress when Tina and I spoke, and each state has had to write its own version, so progress has been uneven. I cover California's Piqui's Law, reforms in Maryland, Utah and Pennsylvani...
Every October during Domestic Violence Awareness Month I come back to Maid, and in this episode I look closely at Sean and why he is one of the most accurate portraits of coercive control I have seen on screen. Almost nothing he does would hold up as evidence on its own, so I talk about how control builds in the space between what happens and what anyone else can prove. I also get into why his remorse after Alex leaves feels so real to her. Near the end, I share the one place I think th...
In this episode, I talk about why leaving a relationship built on coercive control almost never happens the way people expect it to, in one clean break that sticks the first time. I get into the departures nobody counts: the afternoons spent sitting in a parked car working up the nerve to call a lawyer or a coach, the conversations that started with "I can't do this anymore" and somehow ended with me apologizing while he sat there in tears. I share my own experience with a partner who c...
In this episode, I break down something that confuses almost everyone who has loved a person with personality pathology. We assume that if someone caused real harm, some part of them would know it. I explain why that assumption is usually wrong, and what impaired self-awareness actually looks like from the inside of a disordered mind. I walk through the defense mechanisms that protect a person from ever feeling the shame that would normally lead to change, including denial, minimization, and ...
I'm sharing a pattern from my own past relationship with a partner who had borderline traits, the slow erosion of any separate identity, where a walk to pick up my daughter became a negotiation and a boundary became proof I didn't love him. I break down why explaining yourself never works in this dynamic, what I call the "fake repair" cycle, and why mapping the pattern on paper changed everything for me. I also talk about why healing sometimes means accepting you'll be the villain in someone ...
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