Nina: 0:06

Welcome to another episode of Dear Nina Conversations about Friendship. Today we’re discussing a harder topic than usual what to do when your friend is in a toxic or abusive relationship. It can be very hard as a friend as opposed to a family member to know where the boundary is and when and if you can step into help or how you can help. As you know, I am not a therapist. I say that all the time just to be clear, and I’m not going to claim to have the answer for every situation. But I can share, dear Nina listeners, stories with you and we can learn from people’s experiences.

Nina: 0:42

Today we have Rachel Katz, who is a nutritional scientist, yoga teacher and wellness embodiment coach and the host of the full life podcast. She has over 45,000 Instagram followers on her account. Rachel underscore, katz underscore which I honestly cannot even imagine managing, and I feel like I’m really involved in my Instagram even with my little following. So that is not at all the topic we’re talking about, although when Rachel reached out to me, it really made me feel with it, because she’s young and cool and very fabulous. You will see on her Instagram. So thank you, rachel, for coming and for being willing to share your story with us. Welcome.

Rachel: 1:20

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here and I love that intro. Thank you.

Nina: 1:25

Why don’t you start at the beginning of what you feel comfortable with? I do have listeners that have asked about this topic. I really didn’t have my own expertise to share, so I’ve sort of left it. And then when you and I started talking, I was like this is really an opportunity to address an important topic.

Rachel: 1:43

Yeah. So maybe I can go ahead and just share a little bit about my experience being in a toxic relationship, and because everything I’m going to share is from my own experience and also from just my experience watching other friends go through the same thing. Unfortunately, I know a lot of other people who have also gone through really toxic relationships. So just from my experience, my friends’ personal experiences, I’ve learned a lot, so I can just start there and share a little bit about what that was like.

Nina: 2:13

That would be great. And how old are you for reference?

Rachel: 2:16

I’m 28.

Nina: 2:17

Okay, I just think that’s helpful because I’m 46. We’re the different generations and I think people speak so much more openly now, which is great. Women really advocate for themselves a lot more than maybe they did, so you bring a lot of hope to listeners, I think.

Rachel: 2:34

Thank you, and I really do think a lot of that has to do with social media, because, even from my perspective so I entered this relationship back in 2013. And I feel like even back then nobody was really talking as openly about this stuff.

Rachel: 2:51

I’ve only seen people talk more about it openly within the past, maybe four years, and I feel like if I didn’t have access to that information, I honestly wouldn’t even know that I was in an abusive relationship or how toxic it actually was. So I think there are a lot of downsides to social media, for sure, but I think it’s really cool that there’s so many people talking about it openly and it’s so easily accessible to people, because I think before that people just didn’t have access to that information so they honestly didn’t even know.

Nina: 3:26

That’s a good point. Okay, back to your story.

Rachel: 3:29

I entered a relationship with my ex in 2013. I was 18 at the time, so I had never been in a serious relationship before this, and my whole life I wouldn’t say my whole life, but for a long time before this I desperately wanted to be in a relationship that was like the center of my world. I was like I need to have a boyfriend or my life is going to be over really soon, and at that point in my life I didn’t have a lot of love for myself. I wasn’t confident in who I was. I was really, really struggling just internally with my own self-love and self-confidence. And that was the time that I entered this relationship and at first, this person made me feel like I was the most amazing person in the world, crazed me, loved, bombed me, made me finally feel like I was seen and I was loved and I was worthy. I would say the first six months were like perfect. We never fought, nothing bad ever happened, and I was in it.

Rachel: 4:32

At this point, he became my best friend, my everything really, really quickly, and then it slowly started to become really toxic. There were a lot of ups and downs, a lot of him saying, okay, we’re breaking up, and then we would get back together the next day A lot of verbal, emotional, sometimes even physical abuse. It started happening like, really subtly, and then just slowly got worse. I at the time, to be honest, like I said, I didn’t even know that I was in an abusive relationship. Maybe I subconsciously knew, but I was trying to protect myself, so I didn’t want to face what was actually going on. But around 2018, so we were already together almost five years we broke up again, but at this time, something within me felt different and I was like I’m done, something has to change.

Rachel: 5:25

And even though we broke up, it took me a year to actually like fully break free from this person and cut off contact and just not even have him in my life as a friend or in any capacity.

Rachel: 5:39

So, even though we broke up, it took me a long time to just detach myself from this person. It took me being away from this person and spending more time with myself to actually realize like wow, that relationship was not just toxic, it was pretty abusive. What happens which is what I’ve learned on my journey is when you go through something traumatic, sometimes it takes stepping away from the situation to actually begin to process what actually happened to you and realize like, wow, actually this happened and that happened and that was very abusive and very unhealthy. So that was my experience with being in a really abusive relationship. Also, about a year after I stopped talking to this specific person, he showed up at my house and just spilled all of this information that I didn’t know beforehand, that he was cheating on me. He just kind of confirmed things that I already knew he was cheating on me, our whole relationship, and he was also using drugs throughout our whole relationship which I was completely oblivious to.

Rachel: 6:48

So that kind of threw me on another loop of going through a healing journey, even though I thought I healed, this just added another layer to it where I was like wow, I really was being lied to and I really just didn’t know so many things that were happening. So there definitely was a lot of layers to the whole experience, but I learned how to treat other people who are in a toxic relationship, and it taught me a lot about how to deal with friends who are in that situation.

Rachel: 7:19

I feel like sometimes it’s so hard to understand until you go through it yourself, and then you’re able to live from that perspective and be like wow, okay, this is actually the kind of support that a friend needs during this time.

Nina: 7:32

Before we get to that, because that is definitely what I want to talk about. First of all, I’m sorry you went through that. It sounds like you came out of it a lot stronger, but you still had to suffer a lot while you were experiencing it. So thank you for being honest about what you went through and sharing it with us. We get hardened to stories of people suffering and I just think it’s important to take a moment to just say that’s terrible, that that happened to you.

Nina: 7:56

Also, as a mother of teenagers as I am and I have listeners of all ages for sure what I love about doing a podcast about friendship is friendship is like an ageless topic. I hear from people teenagers all the way through 80s, but as someone around my age with teenage children before we get to the friend part I’m curious if there’s anything your parents could have done and I’m not saying they did anything wrong. I’m thinking of myself as a mother. What would I do in that situation if I noticed my daughter was like breaking up and getting back together with the same person over and over and over again, even just that piece, even if I didn’t know anything else, but I saw that. What could a parent have done?

Rachel: 8:32

Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think the hard part about being in an abusive relationship, especially with someone who’s a narcissist, is they’re really good at isolating you from your friends and your family and that causes you to be even more dependent on them for that emotional support which makes it harder to break away. Because a lot of times when we would break up, I would just drive to his house, I would do anything I could to fix the situation because my nervous system couldn’t handle it and I needed that relief of we need to figure this out and get back together. So my mom would watch that and she would tell me, like you better not go over there, you better not leave this house, stuff like that. Or when I would tell her certain situation, she would start to view him in a negative light and I think that actually made me not want to share anything with her anymore, because I feared that, because I knew, oh, if I share this or if I tell her I’m going to his house, or if I tell her that I’m hanging out with him, she’s going to tell me that I shouldn’t or judge me.

Rachel: 9:38

And I think what people in that situation really need is just support and judgment, free support, because, at the end of the day, that person who is in that abusive relationship is going to be in it, whether you tell them that they shouldn’t or whether you support them. Unfortunately, it’s their journey to go through and the only time they’re going to leave is when they decide that they’re ready to leave. It doesn’t help to tell somebody you shouldn’t be in this situation. It’s really toxic. Or even, like my mom would do, would try to threaten me to not go over there and see him.

Nina: 10:13

I can’t even blame her. I feel like I would do the same thing.

Rachel: 10:16

I’m glad we have this conversation.

Nina: 10:18

It’s hard. It’s so hard to watch your kid do even less harmful things than that, let alone something you know is destructive in their life, even like spending money or something I’ll be like don’t buy that you know you’re going to regret it. It’s like hard not to tell them what to do. And then if I knew that they were really struggling and I’m curious what friends did or what we didn’t really get to, how you got yourself out of it exactly. You said it took really separating for a whole year. Did you block him on all social media? I assume you would have to.

Rachel: 10:49

I did eventually. I actually was already dating my now boyfriend and I was in a healthy relationship. There was a moment where, I think, I didn’t hear from him for like six months or something and then he reached out to me again and at that point I had healed so much and I was able to look at what he was telling me from such a different perspective and I was just like I don’t want any part in that. I don’t need this in my life. This is not healthy, and I finally blocked him from everything. It took time because there’s so many layers. It was like, okay, now I’m not going to see you, but I’m still not going to block you. Now I’m not going to contact you, but if you want to contact me, I’m still curious to see what you’re going to say. You know, so it takes time.

Nina: 11:33

And I guess what I mean when I say what made you finally end it because I know we talked about it a bit is was there a certain person, was there something that pushed you Finally over the edge?

Rachel: 11:44

Well, this is why I started my whole business to help people heal their relationship with themselves, because I truly think that the more you love yourself that’s really what it is the more you love yourself and have a good relationship with yourself and value yourself, the more you’re able to see things from that perspective and discern better who it is that you would want in your life and who has no place in your life.

Rachel: 12:10

When you’re coming from a place of I don’t fully value and love myself, it’s harder to set those boundaries or block those people or even know what it is that you want in relationships. I went through this deep healing journey of healing my relationship with myself and loving myself that eventually I just was able to see things from a different perspective. But again, it took time for me to even realize the extent of everything that I had gone through, and it was a process. At first I started to notice from not having contact with this person and all of these memories popping up that were blocked because of my trauma, I started to notice this person is really unhealthy. This person was probably cheating on me, just starting to put all the pieces together, but I still didn’t realize it was abusive until I completely was removed from the situation and was able to heal my relationship with myself and also meet someone else who showed me what a healthy relationship actually was. And then I was like, oh, okay.

Nina: 13:17

So let’s bring this back to friendship. What was going on with your friends during that time?

Rachel: 13:21

It was hard because there were a lot of friends around me who judged me, definitely when I started sharing information with them and the result of that was I just didn’t share things with them anymore. I didn’t want them to know. I felt so much shame anytime that I would choose to reconnect with my ex or hang out with my ex, because after we broke up, like I said, it took a whole year for me to finally break free and during that time he would randomly call me and I would jump to go hang out with him and I just started lying, or I just not even lying, but I just wouldn’t tell people where I was or that I was hanging out with him because I felt so much shame and I was so embarrassed. And on the other side of things, my ex would also with these certain friends. He would tell me like, oh, what did you tell your friends about me? Because I can tell that they don’t like me, you shouldn’t hang out with them. And he would start planning all these ideas in my head of those friends are not my true friends and they’re not good people because they didn’t like him.

Rachel: 14:26

And that was further, further pushing me into him and farther away from my friends. It’s really hard because I understand from the other point of view. I’ve also come out of that and seeing my other friends go through things like that and it’s so hard. You just want to like scream at them and be like why don’t you see this? You deserve so much better. This is so unhealthy. What somebody in that situation really needs is just support.

Nina: 14:55

What might that look like, now that you’ve had friends in that role, where you are tempted to tell them like don’t, don’t do it. What has worked?

Rachel: 15:03

That’s a really good question.

Rachel: 15:04

I think just listening, just listening to what it is that they’re going through and being a safe space for them to share, that experience feels so isolating, so so isolating, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to break free from those relationships because at the end of the day, you feel like that person, even though they’re abusing you, they are the only person you can go to for support. So I think just being a safe space for your friend to share and just listening, without any judgment and without giving advice or without you know there’s a lot of ways even if you don’t judge someone with your words, you’re judging them in the way that you look at them or view them, or maybe they don’t want to hang out with you as much so they start distancing themselves from you. But I think, truly as hard as it is practicing non-judgment and just being there for your friend and knowing eventually they’re going to figure it out and trust that they will and still be there for them and be a safe space for them to share.

Nina: 16:07

That’s really good advice for dealing with friends in all kinds of situations. A friend could sometimes really just want to be heard and accepted. It doesn’t have to be something as extreme as a dangerous relationship, and I’m going to really take that to heart. I think that will help listeners and parents, because I kind of like we talked about before, from the parent point of view. It’s really the same issue to know you want your kid and your friend to feel that they can come to you and that you’ll be like a soft place to land or you’re going to be heard, you’re not going to roll your eyes, you’re not going to sigh, like what you’re saying, like it’s not always words.

Nina: 16:42

Sometimes it’s other things we do to show our disdain or something for a decision someone’s making is not always in words at all. It’s very challenging. I’m so glad we’re doing this topic. Is there anything else that you wish a friend had done then? I don’t mean your particular friends like they were probably doing the best they could and they’ve probably learned. You guys were young, but in hindsight, is there anything a friend could have done differently other than just really listen? Is there really anything a person can do to get someone to change?

Rachel: 17:11

I can talk about a friend that did really help me during that time and she’s still one of my best friends. This friend, she’s a therapist, so that’s probably why she knew what to do in those moments. She really just listened to me during that time when I would vent and wouldn’t really give me advice unless I asked for it. But when I did go to her for advice she would try to help me and instead of being like this is what you should do or shaming me for going back, she always was open to hearing what it is that I had to say. And not only that, but I remember she gave me this book because she was. She just gave me an example of another friend that she knew in the past.

Rachel: 17:54

She was also in an abusive situation. I think one day she just dropped off a book at my house that talked about being in an abusive relationship and how to break free from that. It was in such a non-judgmental way. It was just like here I’m just going to place this little piece of advice and you can take it, you can leave it, but would just plant little seeds again, without judgment or telling me what to do, and she was just always there to listen. So I think, at the end of the day, that’s really all that you can do, even though it’s really hard and it’s so frustrating. There’s really nothing you can do in those situations because at the end of the day, I heard all of the things, I knew deep down what I was supposed to do, I got all of the advice but at the end of the day, until I was ready to make that decision, nothing was going to change.

Rachel: 18:45

The only other thing that I would add is there is a time to, of course, be there for your friends, but if at any point they’re projecting, whatever it is that they’re going through onto you, I think at that point it is helpful to set boundaries.

Rachel: 19:01

I will say when I was going through this time, even though I was in a really hard place, I don’t think I was like mean to my friends or possessive of any of my friends or projected onto them because I was unhappy that they were in a relationship and I wasn’t and I was going through this hard time. From the other side of things, I have also been that friend that has watched one of her close friends be in a really toxic relationship, but at the same time she was also projecting that onto me and not being nice towards me because of it and not being nice towards my now boyfriend who’s great because she was jealous and just upset about her own situation. In that case, I did have to set boundaries for myself and be like, okay, I can’t really be around this person because at this point it’s hurting me. Did you tell her?

Nina: 19:52

I did yeah.

Rachel: 19:54

Unfortunately she wasn’t really able to see that and it kind of got to a point where unfortunately we’re not friends anymore and now she is in a much better relationship and I love that she is. So I think just trusting that your friend will figure it out is all that you can do. If need be, set those boundaries for yourself if it’s affecting you at that point.

Nina: 20:18

Yeah, that’s fair, because we can’t fix everything for everybody. And, yeah, if it spills over onto you and you know, you can’t really help. I mean, I think it is very fair to set a boundary and not allow yourself to be mistreated because someone’s unhappy. It’s basically what you did. Yeah, all right, rachel, can you tell everybody where to find you? And I said it before, but the underscores can be confusing. So you say it again and tell us about your website and just end us on that note.

Rachel: 20:44

Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram at rachel underscore katesy underscore. My website is thefulllifebyrachelcom. My podcast is the Full Life by Rachel podcast. That’s pretty much all the places where you could find me.

Nina: 21:02

Wonderful, and I’ll have that all in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming and talking to us and sharing everything, and we’ll see you back on Instagram in the meantime.

Rachel: 21:12

Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Nina: 21:14

Everybody come back. When our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. It is just true. You know how, when you listen to a podcast, the host always asks you to rate it. On Apple podcasts, spotify or ever you listen, apple seems to matter the most. I guess it makes a difference when someone goes to the search bar if they put in friendship, if a podcast has a lot of reviews and stars, then that is what gets shown. I am on my way with some great ratings and reviews, but of course I could always use more.

Nina: 21:45

One other really helpful thing, if you like the show, is to just share it with a friend. Send them a text, send them an email, say I’m enjoying this podcast about friendship.

Nina: 21:53

I think you would too. It makes a huge difference. The third thing I’d say is share it on social media, because that helps me reach people I would never reach on my own. Okay, actually, there is a fourth thing. I am on Substack at Deer Nina Conversations About Friendship, where I have a free newsletter and once a month I have a paid version, which is where I take the anonymous questions I receive and give my full thought out answer. Thank you for considering all of that. I appreciate your time and I hope I’ll see you again next week. Bye.