Tanya-Mari Dube (show host, motivational speaker, published author, and online educator), joins Jeanne today to talk about the challenges of being raised by a narcissistic mother. She details her experiences in the foster care system, how the narcissistic abuse shaped her romantic relationships and the healing programme she offers to others like her. An episode not to miss!
[DISCLAIMER: This episode may contain some triggers for certain listeners. Please reach out for help if needed. Follow the guidelines in the episode or reach out to your local help centres.]
Tanya-Mari Dube (show host, motivational speaker, published author, and online educator), joins Jeanne today to talk about the challenges of being raised by a narcissistic mother. She details her experiences in the foster care system, how the narcissistic abuse shaped her romantic relationships and the healing programme she offers to others like her. An episode not to miss!
Episode Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
03:30 Background to Tanya-Marie's early childhood and journey in the Foster care system.
06:42 How did Tanya-Marie realize that she had been raised by a narcissistic mother and had suffered narcissistic abuse?
10:22 Gaslighting, rewriting history and harsh criticisms from the narcissistic abuser.
13:00 Where did the anger go once Tanya-Marie's mother passed away?
17:26 How did her experiences with a narcissistic mother impact Tanya-Marie's parenting?
20:18 Controlling your anger issues as a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
23:30 The fear of having kids and not being able to be a good mother.
28:04 What is RISE and how does it help survivors of narcissistic abuse?
35:00 How to know if you are dealing with a narcissist or narcissistic abuse?
40:00 Where to find Tanya-Marie.
41:00 Conclusion
Episode Links
Jeanne Retief: Blog | Podcast | Instagram | FIGGI Beauty Shop
Tanya-Marie Dube: Linktree | Facebook | Instagram
[00:00:00.000] - Jeanne
Good morning, FIGGI goddess, and welcome to another episode of the My FIGGI Life podcast. I'm so excited to talk to Tanya Marie-Dubé today. She helps women thrive in business and life after narcissistic abuse. If you are unsure about all the technical, medical explanations and definitions of narcissistic abuse, and gaslighting, be sure to go back to our episodes with Dr. Chelsie Brooke Cole and Dr. Amelia Kelley. In case you find yourself not quite understanding maybe everything that we are talking about, if you want to know more about those technicalities and the different types and the definitions, then those are the episodes for you before you listen to this one. But I can't wait to introduce our guests, so stay tuned.
[00:00:48.520] - Intro
Welcome, goddess, to your sacred space. This is My FIGGI Life podcast, where we openly discuss life's wins and losses on our journeys to self-discovery. This is your best life. This is your FIGGI life. And now here is your host, Jeanne.
[00:01:07.040] - Jeanne
Welcome back, goddess. I want to introduce our guest to you today, Tanya Marie Dube. She was born into the foster care system, living in eight homes by the age of two, and living as a homeless street kid on and off for six years from 12 to 18. Tanya Marie-Dubé is a show host, a motivational speaker, published author, and an online educator. In 12 weeks, she helped women who have been struggling with narcissistic abuse shift their paradigms so they can raise their vibration, heal their past, get on track, and create a massive impact. She teaches women like herself to understand and overcome narcissistic personality disorder abuse and use this knowledge as fuel using a unique blend of Western psychology, Eastern philosophy, and mindset and spiritual development strategies. They have fundamental tools to create a great life and business for themselves and transform the lives of others after abuse. She's trained as a results coach with Tony Robbins and is certified as an advanced belief clearing practitioner. She has been coaching for 30 years with an extensive educational background in psychology and completing her MA in metaphysical sciences. I'm so happy to have you on the podcast today. Welcome.
[00:02:26.600] - Tanya-Marie
I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much. This is going to be really fun.
[00:02:29.400] - Jeanne
Yeah, I have so many questions for you. I always think, and I think we were just talking about that before we started recording, is how many of us, unfortunately, have these stories, but we don't always have the support system that we need to get through it or to get to the other side. I'm a firm believer that I will always be part of the recovery and the healing process, but there definitely is these different phases that you find yourself in where you're still struggling to make sense of it all, where you are and what's up from down. We're going to talk a little bit about your story, and I also want to talk about RISE. But before we get there, I'd love for you to share with us your, I guess, foundations of narcissists and narcissistic abuse. I think the starting point would probably be your mother. To realize that as a child is really complicated and difficult. I, for myself, know I've known about the word narcissism for a long time, but what narcissistic abuse is, it only really became clear to me recently. How did you realize that that was what had happened with your relationship with your mother?
[00:03:42.240] - Jeanne
What trigger points were there for you to understand that, Oh, well, I think this is my story.
[00:03:50.270] - Tanya-Marie
I was born right into the foster care system. She already couldn't take care of me. But I mean, that was something different in my mind my whole life. She was just not capable. By the time I got into the eighth foster home when I was two years old, I spent a lot of time with this family. They fought to keep me. We went to court every single year, so I could stay in that house, not be moved around. I was very, very lucky. The foster father there and the foster mother became like my parents. But the foster father became like my father. We were so very close. He used to sit me down all the time, and he would say, It's not her fault. She's struggling with addiction, alcohol addiction, drug addiction. She's very young when she had you. She'd already put another child out for adoption before me. There was a lot there for her to unpack. I think because she grew up in foster care as well, and she did grow up in 18 different homes, and it was really difficult for her. I always thought of her like that. Then, of course, I was very academic, and everyone thought I was going to be a lawyer when I was older because I loved reading and I'm a good debater and all of that stuff.
[00:04:51.100] - Tanya-Marie
But he used to sit me down and he would just say, You need to look at this realistically. This is all that she could give you. I went through my life believing that. When I turned 10 years old, she got married to this man who ended up being a pedophile, and he was physically and emotionally abusive, psychologically abusive. I only lived there for two years before the two of them had beat me up bad enough that I ended up leaving when I was 12. I ran away with $18 in my pocket, and I started to live on and off the street from 12 to 18 years old, just trying to finish school. I was a straight-A student, and my education meant the world to me. I didn't fully understand her psychosis. I knew she had mental health issues as well, and I would expect that from the life that she had. I would expect that she had a hard time dealing with all the emotional stuff, especially she was born in 1953. It's not like there was a ton of help psychologically, and most people were still of the mindset that if you have a therapist, there's something very wrong with you.
[00:05:44.720] - Tanya-Marie
So people avoided therapy, traditional therapy. I just expected, I don't know, I just took it for what it was. Then I started learning about narcissism because I had been in relationships, intimate relationships with people who fit this bill. I was in university and I got onto the section of personality disorders. It's very vague until you specialize, right? So personality disorders, and there was a small little paragraph on it. I associated that with my intimate exes. But it wasn't until I started doing these kinds of... I run that interview series, Unbreakable Women. In that interview series, I have people coming from all over the world. Now I've interviewed over 300 people, and many of them had narcissistic mothers. I was like, Oh, okay, a narcissistic mom. I just never even thought about it like that. Then people started to give me their definition of what they experienced, their definition of what a narcissistic mother was.
[00:06:44.630] - Jeanne
What would they tell you? What is their definition of that?
[00:06:47.560] - Tanya-Marie
It was like the constant competition, constant competition. This was my mom. I remember one time when I was 11, she had said, I was never allowed to have people over. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere to anyone's house. I was like, It was really weird. I just thought that was my mother. But she one time allowed me to have a whole bunch of my friends over. Here we are, I invite all my friends over. I'm super excited to have my friends over. I live in a very scary house, but I've got my friends. They come over and my mom puts me to work cleaning the house while they're there, and she dresses in my clothes, and now she's hanging out with my friends at the kitchen table talking about my life with them. It was just so weird. I remember it's always stood out to me as but I never thought that... I know narcissistic partners are very competitive, but they pick you for different reasons your parent has you, so it's different. I never associated the two. The competition was awful. She was constantly competing with me, tearing me down, making me feel like I was never good enough for anything, that I could never do anything right.
[00:07:49.980] - Tanya-Marie
But remember that I only spent a very small period of time with her. I was comparing her with my foster mother a lot. I thought, This something's not right. I used to say it all the time, This doesn't feel right. Something's off. This isn't like nanny and Papa's house. That used to make her nuts. It was setting me up to fail all the time. It didn't matter what it is that I was doing, but she was just setting me up to fail. Say, she put my lunch in my bag and I'd go to school and I'd not have anything to eat all day because she didn't do it. She would take me to school and then fight with me in the hallway, and then I was late for my class and then I would get in trouble for it. She would call me a liar. She would do these horrible things to me and then tell our entire family, her side of the family, that I was this horrible kid who did all these things to her. There was one time when I think I was 15 years old, she had put me in this weird group home, really weird group home with all these kids that were like really bad mental health issues, like all kinds of crazy stuff.
[00:08:47.040] - Tanya-Marie
She puts me in there. She has me almost arrested and thrown into this place. I was 15 years old, around 15, 16 years old. Anyway, I ended up running away from this place. I got out of there. I had to break into her house to get my belongings because she wouldn't give them to me. So all I did was… This is so bad. I ended up taking a window off, climbing in through the back window, taking things that belong to me, putting the window back perfectly and leaving. That's it. She told everybody that I stole all these things from her. It was just so much, but I always just attributed it to my mother having mental health issues. I never, ever knew. If you go back to my interviews, even two years ago, you would never hear me say my mother was a narcissist. This is new information for me, relatively.
[00:09:29.790] - Jeanne
It's scary, though, because I think two things have happened in society. Unfortunately, we have this thing called social media, and we have this thing called Dr. Google. Dr. Google. There have been, I feel personally, a lot of instances where things like the word narcissists, like gaslighting, have become almost conversational. If you don't like somebody or you're having a thought, Oh, he's a narcissist, or she's a narcissist, or they're gaslighting you. It almost takes away from what the victim has suffered because it's really such an incredibly emotionally and mentally, psychologically debilitating thing to go through. I don't know about you, but I still have triggers, and I think I will always have some form of PTSD about it. You were talking about the criticism, the things that she would tell you, You're a liar, you're this happened, almost like they're picking.
[00:10:31.100] - Tanya-Marie
Things- Completely rewriting history. Completely rewriting history.
[00:10:35.210] - Jeanne
It's almost like they are in the meanest, most verbally abusive way possible, accusing you of the things that they are doing. That you have seen them done that you experience them doing, but they do it so well that you end up believing you are the person that cannot handle criticism. You're overly sensitive. There's something wrong with you. Did you have this experience too?
[00:11:01.310] - Tanya-Marie
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. This is a woman who looked me right in my face and told me that she should have had an abortion with me. Then when I brought it up years later, it's funny because when you don't know you're in a narcissistic relationship, you're looking at them like you're trying to use logic and reasoning trying to get through to them. But learned nurses don't have logic and reasoning. Literally seven year old children who have the psychological capacity of a seven year old child. So it's constantly revenge. They got to get you back. Get you back. So, yeah, my whole entire life was her saying things to me that were horrible, and I wouldn't repeat them because I didn't want people to think my mother was like this. It was embarrassing. But yeah, the rewriting of history was outstanding, even as she was dying. Right before she found out that she had breast cancer, she was 47. She had called me up. I think I was 25 or 27 years old when she called me, and we had been estranged for a really long time. She started to talk to me about her breast cancer and the journey that she had just embarked on.
[00:11:56.240] - Tanya-Marie
I decided just to squash everything and just be there for her. There. At some point in her two-year journey from diagnosis to death, she brought up stuff in her past. As I saw her decline, for me, it was just like I wasn't even going to go there because I just didn't know if she was going to live. It just wasn't important enough to me to ever bring up in that situation. But she brought it up and we got into a conversation about it. I didn't have very much emotional control at the time. She could get me pretty angry pretty fast. She actually said that none of those things had happened. She said that she would never never apologize to me. She said those words, You will never get an apology out of me. I thought, Wow! What I took that to mean was that I am not good enough for this woman to give me an apology. I took that in and it sat with me and it sat on me. My entire self-worth was wrapped up in whether or not my mother wanted me. My entire self-worth was wrapped up in how I could get straight A's all the time because that at least made her pay attention to me.
[00:12:57.200] - Tanya-Marie
My self-worth was just in the wrong places. So when she said this to me, it was like someone took a knife to my heart and just twisted it. I was devastated. I thought she's going to die without ever saying sorry for any of the things she did. She practically handed me over on a silver platter to her pedophile husband. This woman was saying she would never apologize to me, and I thought, Wow. Then she was on her deathbed. I got a phone call from her, and she had said that my mother had apologized on her death bed and wanted her to tell me that. Now, whether it's true or not, I'm going to say it's true because my aunt wasn't involved in all of the stuff like that. It was interesting. Once my mother passed away, there was nobody left to be accountable for all the stuff that she had done to me, so I had to just bury it with her. All these years later, hearing women talking about it. There was one woman that I found online who is just all she does is talk about parents abusing children when they're narcissists. And so I happened to pick up, it came across my feed on Instagram.
[00:13:55.800] - Tanya-Marie
I can't remember her name, but holy moly, everything she was talking about. I was like, Oh, that's my mother. That's my mother, and that's my mother, and that's my mother. It was crazy. As I started to decide for myself, spiritual development has been relatively new in my life. I started a spiritual practice seven years ago. Now I teach these spiritual principles in my work. But before that, it was 30 years of teaching mindset and personal development. Or at the time, it was like 26 years of me teaching just that long. I'm huge on going in deeper, as deep as I can to know who I am and what it is I want has been the clearest path to inner peace and happiness for me. I just decided that if it doesn't align my thinking or my language is not aligning with what I say that I want, then I have to figure out why. This was no different with my mother. With my mother passing away and all these residual feelings, you want to know when they came back up? Years later, when I had my first child and I was holding my baby up and I thought, Oh, my gosh, I was this little.
[00:14:55.750] - Tanya-Marie
She put me in foster care. I was this small. I couldn't even believe it. So all these feelings came back up. And that's what happens when you don't deal with trauma from narcissistic abuse, or you don't have a way to look at it that empowers you and liberates you.
[00:15:12.440] - Tanya-Marie
After she had passed away, how did you deal with all of these unresolved emotions? Because now you don't have anybody to be angry at anymore, and you don't have anybody to question or even to talk about to your psychiatrist or psychologist or spiritual mentor saying, I don't understand. I don't understand why they did this. I think death is such a finality and those almost secrets and the why's are buried with them. How did you move through that and how did you work.
[00:15:50.060] - Tanya-Marie
Through that? All I was dealing with when she died, like it's nothing, but all I was dealing with was the physical abuse, the emotional abuse, the sexual abuse. Like, that was enough.
[00:16:01.470] - Jeanne
You didn't have the capacity for anything more in any way.
[00:16:05.450] - Tanya-Marie
I hadn't learned about, I think I was 36 when I learned about narcissistic personality disorder. I'm 48 now. It was relatively new. So when she passed away, I didn't deal with it. I buried it down. The year that my mother died is also the year I had my very first miscarriage. It was also the year that I got married. It was the best year I ever had at school because I used to bury everything down and throw it all into my work. I did not deal with it at all. If you're a high performer like I am, which I imagine you are as well with your business and everything you've been through and your past credentials, what you're doing before you have this business, when you're a high performing woman, you learn and you're a fast processor, you learn to just shove it down and move on because it's what's worked for you. That's what you think. You think it's worked for you. Then all of a sudden, something happens in your life and everything comes bubbling back up to the surface.
[00:16:56.630] - Jeanne
Now- It's like a tornado. It's like an absolute tornado here in.
[00:17:00.870] - Tanya-Marie
Now not only do you have to deal with the thing that just happened, but now you've got all of this other stuff coming up from your entire life. It almost knocked me right off my feet. That's when I had my daughter, and I realized that's the age I was when she put me in foster care, and then I realized I had to deal with it, and I went through postpartum depression. It was like a whole bunch of things.
[00:17:26.660] - Jeanne
You also find when you had kids, the same happened to me. A lot of more intense things came up from me when my daughter was born. One of the big reasons for that was, I think, of the many, one of the big challenges I had was I could never understand why my abuser wasn't taken away, why we still continue to live with him. You don't ask a narcissist questions because you are always wrong, and they always suffered for you and struggled for you. One of the things I was told was, when you have kids, you will understand. I think as toxic and as weird and as unsensical as that is, somewhere in my subconscious, I thought, Okay, it's going to be okay. One day, this is going to make sense to me. There's going to be this aha moment, and I'm going to understand why I wasn't better protected. Then my daughter was born, and I've had this immense sense of rage because I just felt like now I understand even less why I would have stayed in that situation.
[00:18:32.370] - Tanya-Marie
Yeah. Well, my stepfather, I ended up writing my mother a 10-page letter when I was 17 years old, begging her to please leave him and to leave my stepfather. We take my sister, I'm 17 years old. I've got all the energy in the world. I'll get three jobs to take care of us, but these are all the things he's done to me. I came forward to her with what he had done to me. I detailed what I was going to do. I was going to sue him. I was going to take everything he had. I was going to liquidate all his assets. Someone gave me that phrase. I was going to like, This is what I said in this letter, but you want to know what they did? They ended up packing up their entire house and moving away from Alberta to Arizona without telling me. Here I was knocking on the door and the next door neighbor came out and she said, What are you doing here? I told her and she said, Well, no, they moved. It was like, How much more can these people do to me? I know it was crazy.
[00:19:25.180] - Tanya-Marie
She decided to stay with him. I was like, You? I was wondering. How Like, what universe do I live in where she's still married to him after what he's done? It was insane. Then I felt compelled to keep a relationship going with him and her a little bit, but him too, because I had my sister and my only way to have a relationship with my sister was to go through these people. It was crazy. When my daughter was born, I was so mad. I was so angry. Throughout my life, I have found myself in these narcissistic, intimate relationships, and my anger was coming out there.
[00:20:01.660] - Jeanne
I had the same thing. I couldn't control my anger. There are so many times that I am so severely disappointed and ashamed of myself. But I was going into... I was choosing the wrong relationships for the wrong reasons. I was always repeating the types of relationships and examples that I saw.
[00:20:19.210] - Tanya-Marie
This is what a lot of abuse victims go through, is this immense guilt and shame for reacting the way that we react in those relationships. I just want to say that, yes, you're going to want to put yourself through that, but don't. We live in this really weird society. I'm an actor. I grew up as an actor. I've been an actor since I was four years old in a school play. I did theater most of my adulthood or my childhood years up until my early 20s. Then in my 20s, I did film, and I did five films. What they teach you in the acting world is very different from what is acceptable as a woman in the world that we live in now. It is okay to have a real human, emotional reaction to something that's happening to you. In the acting world, we were taught, don't you dare hold back on that emotion. Don't you dare hold back on showing all of the drama, because in everything you're ever going to watch an actor be in, it's going to be some crazy moment in their life, and they got to fight their way through it.
[00:21:17.360] - Tanya-Marie
You got to see something real. It's how we relate. It's because it's how we feel. But the society that we live in says, as a woman, don't you dare get angry. You're labeled a really angry person then, and you can't be trusted. As a woman, you're taught you got to keep yourself small. You're there to be subservient to society. How dare you be all the things and nothing at all or be nothing at all. You got to fight for more. It's constant, and we can't seem to win with that. When it comes to abuse, if you railed out, hit back, screamed back, said things to defend yourself, called them out on their bullshit, whatever it is, you pat yourself on the back for standing up for yourself. Because I'm going to tell you something, narcissists in relationships with us, with women like us, they take every single thing that is pure and good about us, and they flip it on its head like it's something horrible. Then they make us feel bad for being compassionate. They make us feel bad for being empathetic or to have empathic moments in our lives where we just deeply, deeply feel the emotions of other people.
[00:22:16.920] - Tanya-Marie
They prey on everything that is good about you, and it's why most women will turn around and say, That's it. I'm never going to get into another relationship alone. I feel the most safe when I'm isolated. It is the brainwashing that is taken over them, and this is the stuff that I help women work through. I don't ever want to see a woman being held down after a narcissistic relationship because it is all just brainwashing. If we can get through that part, then we can start to rebuild our lives.
[00:22:49.180] - Jeanne
But I wanted to ask you one more thing about having kids, especially after dealing with narcissistic parents. Do you feel sometimes that you're so completely focused on not doing that and not having that happen with your child that you almost overcorrect sometimes and you have to catch yourself?
[00:23:07.970] - Tanya-Marie
When I became a mom, I had lost two babies. I'd had two miscarriages. I was in a terrible marriage. I know it was awful. The second one really did me. For sure, both of them were traumatic, but the second one was really painful. Anyhow, so I decided I really want this baby now. I'd always thought I didn't want to have children, and it was because of my narcissistic mother. I didn't think I'd be a good mom. I didn't think like Is thought I was going to ruin people. I was just like, I don't know how to do this.
[00:23:33.480] - Jeanne
It's exactly the same. Exactly. I was married to my husband for eight years before we even started talking.
[00:23:41.970] - Tanya-Marie
I had decided that because of my upbringing and the way things were my understanding of psychology and human behavior that I was taking on the role of a teacher now. I always tell my children, if it wasn't for you guys, I don't even know what would have become of me because having children for me personally slowed me down, made me really look at my actions and my thinking and my behavior. It made me find the love. It made me come from a place of love and trying to be the best example that I could be. During my divorce, that was a pretty crazy relationship. And so when I left, it's everything to me in the world to make sure that my children are raised with knowing what healthy boundaries are. I didn't have those. To know how to stand up for themselves unapologetically, with kindness and not feel guilty about it. That's huge. That's massive to be able to just say no without feeling guilty or shame around, just saying no if it doesn't work for them. I've spent my whole life with them. My oldest is now almost 18. Just making sure that I do this check-in with them every month.
[00:24:45.440] - Tanya-Marie
Well, not so much now that they're older, but when they were little up until they were both respectively around 10 years old. But I'd sit down with them every month and say, Let's do a check-in. How am I doing as a mom? What can be better? What do you need more of with me? They would say to me, like you flew off the handle about the thing the other day. I'd say, you know what? I'm so sorry about that. I would explain and we would talk about it and work through healthy emotions. I don't know. I just wanted to raise them differently. Nobody in my childhood hugged me and kissed me and said, You're beautiful or You're so smart or I love you. I just didn't have that. It was my foster father only who was like that. I wanted to raise them holding their hand all the time, touching their faces, giving them kisses, asking them where they're at in their mind, and then spending time learning about their development at their age before they had a chance to tell me what they were going through. That way I would meet them at the impasse and could prepare them for what's coming.
[00:25:42.130] - Tanya-Marie
Do I do that? Sometimes I think I do a little bit, because I guess what I'm trying to always balance out for myself internally is how much my whole life I thought there was something so very bad with me, like so wrong with me, so awful about me. I just decided for other people whether or not they were going to like me. I just had such a poor self-image that that's what I find myself doing mostly with my children is I'll say and do something, and then I've got to go back and see if I'm being crazy. Because that's what we were taught as children, is that we're nuts. I'm crazy. I'm nuts. I don't deserve anything. I'm not worth it. How dare I repeat something? That didn't even happen like that anyway.
[00:26:26.980] - Jeanne
It becomes a problem sometimes with discipline because kids do need discipline and safety. But I find myself often going back and going, Oh, maybe I misread the situation. Maybe this wasn't as bad as it really... Maybe I was too harsh. Maybe I shouldn't have said... It's this constant struggle. It always feels to me like you're on a tightrope.
[00:26:50.580] - Tanya-Marie
You're.
[00:26:51.520] - Jeanne
Balancing and then you're leaning more towards the left and more towards the right and you're just trying to hang on.
[00:26:58.350] - Tanya-Marie
I try in a lot of situations to just hear the problem and then walk away. If I'm the one who's mad about something, I just need to go collect my thoughts. I've learned this about myself. In order to be more of a responder and not a reactor, I have to be able to assess the situation. Maybe it is because I had a narcissistic mother. You tell me if you're like this, if it serves you just to stop and just reflect first. That's what I do first. But I've always taught them too, that if you're going to do something and you know that it's not okay to do it, or you know that it's by definition of our family rules, you've done something outside of that that's going to get you in trouble, then you better own it, or else why are you doing it? Own it and let's talk about it. Don't be afraid of getting in trouble. We go through a lot of that stuff too. There's a lot of talking and there's a lot of just working out what's okay? It's okay to make a mistake. It's okay to not have it 100% all the time.
[00:27:54.150] - Tanya-Marie
It's okay to not know what you're doing. It's okay to say you don't know, but whatever it is that you did, you got to own it and you got to show up to the table being okay with that.
[00:28:02.680] - Jeanne
Tell us a little bit more about Rise.
[00:28:09.960] - Tanya-Marie
Rise is my 12-week program. It's my signature program that I walk women through. The very beginning stages of going through narcissism, we tend to internalize everything the way that we were just talking about even having a narcissistic parent. But when you're going through a narcissistic breakup too, you internalize everything and you're in that narcissistic fog and you don't know how to get out of it, and you feel like that's it for you. You're done. You're constantly caught up with whatever the narcissist is going to do next. You're still racing around the same way you did inside of the relationship. They're still getting to you. Now they're doing even worse things because now you're separated. They have the children alone. Most narcissists, when they have their children by themselves, are not treating those children properly at all. It usually goes against everything that the mother is trying to do, so it causes a ton of conflict. I feel like narcissists, real narcissists with their children will hurt their children in order to get to the mom because all about the mom. It's all about the relationship and destroying that relationship. When you go through Rise, which is all about reinventing yourself, impacting others, making a strong personal connection, and then embodying the lesson, that's what Rise stands for.
[00:29:15.300] - Tanya-Marie
I personally believe that getting through narcissistic abuse recovery does not have to take a long time if you start to understand why you have this lesson and what the purpose of it was for your future. If you're a spiritual person like I am, then I have to look at all of my life lessons. We haven't even touched on most of the stuff that's happened to me in my life. I have to look at all of those lessons and think, Why did all of this stuff happen to me? It's not my fault that it happened to me. I didn't ask for these things to happen to me, but they did happen. What do I do now? What do I do with all of this information? Because the alternative, if I don't do that, is that I make it feel as though I wasn't worthy of love, of proper care, but I wasn't worthy of real relationships that actually went somewhere in life that meant something meaningful. I was looking at everyone else thinking, Why do they get all of that? And I don't. What's wrong with me? That's the alternative to not walking down a path of trying to understand the lesson, knowing why you went through it and how you can use it for your life.
[00:30:16.510] - Tanya-Marie
It's funny. When the children were younger and they were trying to walk their path through this and understand what was happening, my daughter said something along the lines of, This feels like a video game. Every level is going to give me a new tool, and then that tool goes in my tool belt, and then I'm running and running and running, and then the next thing happens, and then I get that tool and put it in my tool belt. I was like, Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. When we can understand why these things are happening, it's almost like we can look at ourselves from a bird's eye view and see ourselves down there as something separate from the human experience, if you will. If you are spiritual, you believe things like you've chosen your parents and you chose your path. Now, the obstacles that happen on that path are still just obstacles. However, they're put in place at very specific times in your life, which is why you have to trust the timing of your life. But they're put there at very specific times in your life to give you tools for the next thing that's coming.
[00:31:11.290] - Tanya-Marie
If you remember back when I said leaving high school, my guidance counselor gave me that university-level, entry-level textbook, asked me to read it. I resisted. I resisted. I resisted. I took it with me. Finally, a year later, I started to read it. Then I would be at the bus stop and there would be a woman going through something and I just read the psychology of it and I could teach it to her. I would end up staying on a bus for six stops past my stop because I was engaged in these conversations that were so fantastic. But that's what I really do believe, through a lifetime of serious abuse, a lifetime of tons of adversity, that if I can now look at it like I've been given a master's degree or a PhD in adversity, that's why I went through it. I went through it so that I can have this life helping other women go through it so that they can also see that these are tools in their life that are meant to use for something else. We don't have to get caught up in the human experience of, I'm not good enough.
[00:32:04.530] - Tanya-Marie
These low vibration thoughts of, I'm not worthy, or, No one loves me, or, I'm not lovable, or, I should be isolated. I should be out of society. These are very low vibration, dark energy thinking, and they're not yours. This stuff was put on you by your narcissists because that's how they feel about themselves. Once you understand that it's not yours, it's been put on you, you were taught to feel this way. But if you think about it, how long a narcissist actually spends working on you, picking you apart, systematically dismantling you, it has become a career effort for these people to mess with your head like that. If you can understand that that this is not yours, you were just in the brainwashing fog of it all, you got to be able to give it back and now start focusing on why you got the lesson and what you're going to do with it. Once you do that and you get yourself busy in the reclaiming of your life, taking back control, pursuing the goals that you were too scared of pursuing before the narcissists came into your life, all of the things that picked you apart and made you feel like you were not good enough, if you can get into the action of that, you do not have the time for a pity party.
[00:33:09.740] - Tanya-Marie
You start to understand the whole purpose of everything that you've gone through. This is what Rise does. From beginning to end, a 12-week program, I also offer, because it's a three-month program, I offer nine months of additional support after that. You're not left by yourself wondering what you're supposed to do with all of this stuff. It becomes a group thing that I do every single month after that. But the first 12 weeks is an intensive program. It is designed to get you out of the brainwashing fog to wake up and to start focus on the other stuff.
[00:33:37.480] - Jeanne
What does that look like, the 12-week program? Is it a session per week online? Or is there exercises that you have to go through and some work that you have to do that you guide them through?
[00:33:47.970] - Tanya-Marie
Sure. Every single week, I drop a video training, and then that same week, we have a live discussion about it. It's like a group chat. We can all get together. That runs itself like that for 12 weeks. You have me in your ear two times a week, really getting clear on these fundamentals, the grounding of what it is that you're building off of so that you don't fall back into old patterns of behavior, so that you don't fall back into old ways of thinking. Because I do believe that what you think is going to determine how you feel, and how you feel is going to determine what action that you take. If this is all true, if we can just make that true, then that means that we really have to be in the energy of healing, the energy of moving forward. I think honestly, community is the best place for that because so many women that I have met in my six years of having an online business about narcissistic abuse recovery, so many women, it's shocking to me how I'll get on the phone with somebody and they'll cry because they feel finally heard and seen, and they really do believe they're going through this alone.
[00:34:48.240] - Tanya-Marie
There's no one in the world going through it like they're going through it. Narcissists are so textbook, they're like, all the same. It blows my mind. Of course, it's like, I don't know, this has been like such a lesson for me too, having gone through so much of this. We're talking with women and thinking, okay, there was a time when I thought I was alone too, but he understood what I was saying about this.
[00:35:14.930] - Jeanne
What if somebody is not sure that they have been subjected to narcissistic abuse or that they are living with or are part of a relationship with a narcissist? Can they still come to your program and will there be clarity for them in that?
[00:35:29.700] - Tanya-Marie
The love bomb you first. The love bombing is crazy and it feeds the lack of self-worth. The need for acceptance and validation is there for us as the victims of narcissistic abuse. We want someone to love us and to cherish us this way, partly because we believe all the societal conditioning about relationships and not being whole by yourself, partly because no one's ever taught us to become empowered women, to stand on your own two feet intentionally fulfilling your own dreams and goals. Then partly because most people who go through narcissistic abuse grew up with something crazy in their lives that they had to learn serious survival skills with. We still carry this thread of wanting to be accepted and validated. The love bombing starts, that's absolutely crazy. It's like a whirlwind and it's like a whirlwind, and it's beautiful, and you feel like you met your soulmate. They do that a lot. We're soulmates. We've lived lifetimes together. It's all very emotional and dramatic. There's that. There are very clear markers about and whether or not you're with one. One is lack of empathy. Watch a really sad movie or a true crime show or movie with them and watch their reaction when people are getting hurt.
[00:36:42.070] - Tanya-Marie
That was pretty eye opening to me. It was a lot of laughing and inappropriate moments. It was weird. Also, watch how they puff themselves up to be something that they're not when they're around other people. Watch how much kinder they are to strangers than they are to you. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to when you say that you want to hang out with a family member, you want to spend time with people who mean something to you, watch how weird they get around that because it becomes a threat to them that you don't need them. Now you need other people too. It's stuff like that. They want to control all the money. They want to know where you are at all times. They really try to isolate you from family and friends by making it difficult. Every time you want to do something, they give you such a hard time that you stop asking. The same thing with asking them to do things. They don't like to do things. They want zero responsibility. They want to be able to do whatever the hell they want. The minute that you start asking them, you get a fight, so you learn to stop asking.
[00:37:37.350] - Tanya-Marie
Then the last thing that I'll point out is, it's not the last thing, but it's the last thing I'll talk about, is the gas lighting. As soon as you come to them and you say, I don't like that comment that you made about my face or my weight, or I don't like the thing that you said about me. You just downgraded every skill I ever had. It's absolutely nothing. It just made me feel bad or made me feel weird. Can we talk about it? That is the minute that they will start circling around you, making you feel like you're crazy or too sensitive, that you need to get yourself in check. If you find a woman texting them on their phone, how could you be looking at their phone like that? How could you second-guess their reasons for talking to another woman? You're crazy. It's absolutely bonkers. They turn it around on you. If you're wondering if you're with a narcissist, if any of those things, if you can identify with any of these things, you should be leaving.
[00:38:29.170] - Jeanne
You're not trying to pass all of these things in your 12-week program. There are tools and guidelines for doing this or helping them.
[00:38:36.150] - Tanya-Marie
Through this? This is the part that I don't teach. I mean, I can. This is the stuff that we can do in one-on-one conversations. If you're at that point where you're still trying to get out, I know all about that, and I know how to do it, and I know how to do it carefully, so absolutely ask me about that, because there's no reason that I can't do one on one, stuff like that on the side. The program itself gets you from the point where you're starting to really understand you've left, now you understand that this is like.
[00:39:05.000] - Jeanne
Maybe- You're rebuilding.
[00:39:06.070] - Tanya-Marie
Your life. Yeah. Maybe it's the third time you had to leave like me. Maybe it's the seventh time. They say it takes seven times fully to leave a narcissist. If you can do it in one shot, good for you. You learned the lesson. But some of us, we still second-guessed ourselves and they threw us back in, or for some women, finances got them to go back, or there was a pet that was left behind and they're threatening to kill it or hurt it somehow. There's all these things that narcissists will do that make a woman feel bad and want to go back. If you're in a scary situation, then what you do is you're going to have to find some way to make money on the side, and then you've got to bank that money secretly. You got to... It's going to be a lot of stuff to get yourself out of that relationship if it's scary. Also, if your narcissist finds out when you're leaving, make sure you leave a few days before that. At the point where you're like, That's it. I need to take control over my life. This is crazy. How did this happen?
[00:39:58.110] - Tanya-Marie
Why is this happening? That's where you find me. Then I take it from there and then off you go.
[00:40:02.480] - Jeanne
Where can our audience find you?
[00:40:04.140] - Tanya-Marie
First, you can look at my linktree, linktr.ee/tanyamariedube but you can also reach out to me at info@tanyaDube.Com. That's my email. Let me know what you're going through, and then we can get on a call and figure out what direction you need to go in. Because I've interviewed so many people in this area, so many healers and teachers. If it's not me, I can refer you to someone. I think a referral is much better than just trying to find someone random on the internet. The other thing that you can do is you can download my freebie. You can get it at tanyaDube. Com. It's called Five Key Steps to Reclaim Your Life After Narcissistic Abuse. It's the first five steps that you would take before you and I would work together.
[00:40:42.610] - Jeanne
If you didn't get that, don't worry, all the links will be in the episode notes for you, so you can easily link to Tanya Marie. Thank you so much for sharing all of this wisdom with us today. We're so, so grateful for your time.
[00:40:56.540] - Tanya-Marie
Thank you so much for having me. It flew by, didn't it? Wow. This was so much fun with you. I love seeing you. I love talking to you.
[00:41:03.340] - Jeanne
Thank you so much. Remember, goddess, as always, everybody deserves to celebrate the goddess within. Until next time, I will see you soon on the My FIGGI Life podcast. The My FIGGI Life podcast is free to all of our listeners. It's not sponsored, and I would like to try to keep advertorials out of our episodes. It helps me so much when you support this podcast by sharing it with a friend who may need to hear some of these episodes or who may benefit from it. But mostly, it helps us so much if you rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts or other platforms. Thank you so much for your support, FIGGI Goddess.