Settle Your Body And Arrive

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Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to invite you to take a moment. To breathe in slowly. And back out again. To lift your shoulders up to your ears. To hold them there for a moment. And then to release them. To let them drop. Unclench your jaw. Open your hands. If safe to do so. Feel your body soften just a little. Whatever is happening in your life right now, this is your time just for you. Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host for today's episode, Danielle Black. In the previous episode, you met my husband Drew. If you haven't listened to that one yet, number 97, I'd encourage you to take some time to listen. However, today's episode can stand on its own, even if you haven't heard number 97. Today I want to talk about something that came up in the response to that episode, and honestly something that comes up a lot in my work. The idea of dating after experiencing abuse and not in a catchy, glossy, here are five tips kind of way. Rather, I want to talk about what it actually looks like from the inside. When I put out that anniversary episode, I got messages from women who were somewhere between inspired and utterly terrified. And what I heard underneath many of those messages was the same thing. That sounds beautiful, but I could never do that. I don't trust myself. What if I pick wrong again? And I want to talk about that, not to dismiss it. That fear is completely real and valid and it makes perfect sense. But rather to be honest about the fact that I had all of those fears as well. I didn't venture out into the dating world without fear. I was afraid. I was genuinely afraid that I would encounter more of the same. I was afraid that my picker was broken the lens through which I was choosing potential partners that whatever in me had chosen badly before would choose badly again. I was afraid that I would meet arseholes and I was afraid that I wouldn't recognise them until it was too late. And it's important that I address that because I think there's a version of my story that could be minimized to she healed, she got clear, she met the right person, happily ever after. And while that might seem to be partly accurate, it glosses over something that I think is really important, and that is that I did all of that still feeling afraid. I did it with the fear still there. And I think that distinction really matters. But what I want you to consider holding is that alongside the fear, I also believed strongly that my person was out there. Now I couldn't prove it, I had no evidence for it. Up until that point there was plenty of evidence against it, but I held that belief anyway. Not necessarily as a certainty, but as a possibility that I just refused to let go of. And alongside that belief was that I believed that my person was out there looking for me. Now I know that that might sound a little woo-woo, um, particularly from me because I'm very evidence-based in my work. But I've thought a lot about this over the years, and what I believe now is that that particular belief, the belief that my person was out there and that my person was also looking for me, it did something important. It positioned me from passive to active, from waiting to be found to actually moving towards something. I wasn't sitting on the couch hoping that the universe would deliver someone decent to my door. I was taking action, I was making myself available to be found, and that meant that I needed to do it even when I was feeling a bit afraid. I had doubts about my judgment in relationships. Significant doubts. After what I'd been through, that I think makes complete sense, the fact that I doubted myself. But I chose to move forward anyway, not because the doubts weren't real, but because I decided that they just didn't disqualify me from moving forward. Something also that I did during that time was that I got very clear on what I wanted in a partner. But that's not actually where I started. I started with thinking about what I didn't want. At the time that felt infinitely easier. Oftentimes the don't wants are clearer. And for me, they were written in my lived experience. I didn't want someone who was controlling. I didn't want someone who disrespected me or my son. I didn't want someone who swore at me or put me down. I didn't want someone who ever made me feel small or stupid, or like I needed to manage his moods to keep the peace. I didn't want someone who kept score. I didn't want someone who punished with silence. The list goes on. And then slowly I turned it around. I started to articulate and get clear on what I actually did want. I wanted someone who would adore me and my son Ash. Not someone who would tolerate us, someone who adored us. I wanted someone who would work with me as a genuine equal partner, not in theory, but actually in practice. In the daily lived experience of the relationship. I wanted someone who was willing to have mature conversations about emotions, who didn't shut down or escalate when things were hard. I wanted someone who was reliable, who was steady. Now here's the part that I had not decided whether or not I was going to tell you. But I'm going to tell you anyway, because I think it matters, and it's just you and I here, right? You won't tell anyone. My list also included physical characteristics. Things like approximate height, eye colour, and yes, even tattoos. Now I know some of you might be listening to this and having a bit of a laugh, or even rolling your eyes, and I want to be clear that I'm not here to tell you that this is the only right way to do it, or that you need to have a list with specific eye colours on it. I'm just telling you what was true for me. I wanted a partner with blue eyes. Now I should say I have hazel eyes, my son Ash has blue eyes, and I've always loved his blue eyes. I'm not even really sure why I put blue eyes on the list, to be honest, but I think part of it was because Ash has them. And I've always just found something deeply familiar and comforting in his blue eyes. And part of it, you know, and again, I'm just here being completely honest, my ex husband does not have blue eyes. So make of that what you will. And the tattoos, some context around that. My ex was white collar, wearing a suit to work every day, very polished, very respectable looking on the outside. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that that hasn't had a lasting effect on me because it has. Men in suits can still give me pause. Not all of them. My husband Drew looks wonderful in a suit on the rare occasion that he needs to wear one. But that particular presentation, that particular uniform of respectability for me, that carries associations for me. What I was drawn to in the idea of a tradey with tattoos was something that felt less masked, I suppose. I wanted someone whose exterior felt a bit more aligned with the interior. That was my logic at the time anyway, if it can be cold logic. And here's the sort of crazy woo woo thing. Drew ticks all of the boxes on my list, including the blue eyes, including the tattoos. All four of my children have blue eyes, which means that I carry the gene somewhere in me. But something about that detail, the blue eyes, makes me smile every time I think about it. I don't think the specifics of my list are the point. The point was the practice of getting clear, of taking seriously the question what do I actually want? As well as thinking about what I didn't want. Not what am I prepared to settle for? Not what do I think I deserve given what I've been through, but rather what do I actually want? That question, when it's asked seriously and answered honestly, can be very powerful. It can shift your entire orientation. You can stop scanning for threat, which your nervous system is probably already too good at, and instead you start scanning for fit. Does this person fit me? Something that often comes up in conversations about dating after experiencing abuse is trust. Specifically, how do you learn to trust again? And I want to offer a reframe on that because I think that very question itself might be part of the problem. When I started dating again, I was not fully trusting of other people. I want to be honest about that. My nervous system had learned through very good reason to stay vigilant, to read the room, to look for the early signs of something that felt familiar in the wrong way. I was not starting from a place of open, uncomplicated trust, and honestly, I don't think it would have been appropriate for me to. What I mean by that is that when I was dating, I trusted myself to end a relationship. That was the promise that I made to myself. Not that I would get things perfectly right, not that I'd never be hurt again, not that I'd never come across any assholes, but that if my instincts were fired, if my body told me something was wrong, I would listen and I would act. A put down framed as a joke? Done. I would have ended it. Jealousy about the time that I dedicated to Ash or about needing to maintain communication with my ex, I would have ended it. Swearing at me, making disagreements personal rather than staying focused on the actual issue, done, ended it. I trusted myself to call out patterns when I saw them, even if it was painful, even if I had feelings for the person, even if I'd already invested in the relationship. That trust in my own capacity to act in my own best interests and in the best interest of my son is what made it safer for me to open up at all. Because I wasn't betting everything on the other person being who I hoped they were. I was betting on myself, on my ability to course correct if I needed to. And I do want to say here something that might sound a little bit harsh and unsentimental for an episode that, you know, I was hoping would be primarily about love and hope. But, you know, I'm nothing if not direct. After 13 years of marriage to Drew, I'm still not living in fantasy land. I am a mature woman. I know that forever is not guaranteed for me and Drew. I know that relationships end, that people change, that life is unpredictable in ways that we cannot anticipate or prevent. And I trust myself to be ultimately okay no matter what. I trust myself to have my own back. I trust myself to grieve if I ever need to grieve. I trust myself to rebuild if I ever need to rebuild. That trust is what makes it safe for me to love fully, to experience the joy without holding part of myself back as some kind of insurance. That trust in myself is what lets me allow myself to need my husband, to want my husband, to love my husband, to let myself be adored by him for the past fifteen plus years. It's safe for me to do all of those things, not because I don't think anything bad could ever happen, but because I trust that I will be okay if it does. Self-trust is key, and this is not some kind of motivational platitude. It's the actual practical mechanism. When you trust yourself to act in your own interests, you free yourself to be so much more present in a relationship because you're not white knuckling it. I want to close this episode with something that I think is one of the most important reframes available to women in this space, and that is that it is a mistake to think that safety is the absence of threat. It's not. Safety is the presence of safe connection. That's a different thing entirely. And I think this distinction has enormous practical implications for how we approach recovery, relationships, and our own nervous systems. Because when we define safety as the absence of threat, we set ourselves an impossible goal. The world is always going to contain potential threats. Other people are always going to have the capacity to hurt us. And a nervous system trained in a high threat environment will find those threats even when they're not there. They'll generate them from ambiguous data, they'll interpret neutral behavior as hostile, we'll brace for an impact that's just not coming. If safety means the absence of all of that, then honestly, safety will never be available to us. We'll stay on the couch, not interacting, not risking anything, not putting anything on the line, not creating anything, not growing. But if safety means the presence of safe connection, which I believe it does, then not only is it available, it's something that we can actively build, we can seek it out, we can cultivate it, we can grow our capacity for it over time. And this is the part that I want to sit with for a moment before we wrap up. Because it's the piece that often gets missed. Nervous system capacity, the ability to tolerate intimacy, vulnerability, connection, and the inherent uncertainty that can come with caring deeply about another person, it's not built through avoidance. It's built through exposure, carefully and thoughtfully on our own terms, but through exposure, through contact nonetheless. You build that metaphorical muscle by working it, not by protecting it indefinitely. And that doesn't mean throwing yourself onto Tinder and hoping for the best. I don't recommend that, by the way. It means making deliberate boundaried contact. It means choosing safe connections, not just romantic ones, but also friendships, communities, spaces where you can experience what it feels like to be seen and not exploited. And then gradually on your own timeline, letting that capacity expand. And just a note on dating apps when I was saying, you know, don't be diving straight into Tinder. I do want to say here that Drew and I did actually meet on a dating app. I can't even remember the name of it now, actually I don't think it still exists. But it is possible to find love with the technology. I think there's lots of spaces out there, well meaning ones, that inadvertently encourage women to stay small, to stay protected, to keep the walls up because those walls have once upon a time kept them safe, and that anything's better than going back to what was. I understand that. At one point in time I felt that. But walls don't distinguish between the people who hurt you and the people who won't. They keep everyone out equally. And so if your goal is to live a life that is full, not just safe from the worst, but genuinely full, then at some point the walls have to become something a bit more like a gate. Something that you can control, something that you can open when you choose to. And self-trust is what gives you that. If you're in the middle of something hard right now, court proceedings, another kind of co-parenting conflict, the long aftermath of the relationship that cost you more than what it gave you. I'm not saying that you should be out there dating. I'm not saying that this should be the next item on your to-do list. I'm not saying anything about your personal timeline. Rather, what I'm saying is please don't decide from inside your hardest chapter that the hard chapter is the whole story for you. And you know, I've had my own hardest chapter. I know what it looks like from there, I know how permanent it feels, I know how easy it is to conclude that trust is no longer available to you. I know what it's like to feel that maybe you're just too damaged, that the version of you who hopes for something good is just too naive. But she isn't. She's the part of you that survived, and she deserves to be listened to. The fear and the hope can coexist. The doubt and the movement forward can coexist. You don't have to wait until you feel fully ready because ready is a feeling that rarely arrives on its own. Rather, you move towards it. You do it still feeling a bit afraid. You trust yourself to course correct if you need to, and you stay open to the possibility that your person is out there and that they're looking for you too. I did it still feeling afraid, and it led me to thirteen years. Years of marriage that have proven to me that a healthy relationship was possible, that something different than what I had experienced before was possible. Thank you so much for being here with me for this episode. If this resonated with you, please consider sharing it with someone who needs it. I look forward to connecting with you next time.