Removing the Fog of Toxic Relationships (ABSTRACT)

Shannon Petrovich is a therapist, author, and YouTube creator who specializes in helping people deal with and heal from narcissistic, abusive, and other toxic relationships. Her new book, Out of the Fog and into the Clear: Journaling to Help You Heal from Toxic Relationships has earned a number one Amazon best seller status in Codependency self Help from Abuse and Personal Transformation. She has a YouTube channel called Therapist Talks that has over 23,000 subscribers and 1.5 million views.

In this conversation, Petrovich discusses what a toxic relationship is and how to know if you're in one. She also offers advice on how to deal with being in a toxic relationship, both in terms of interacting with the other person and in terms of how you handle things yourself.

Shannon also talks about her journey to becoming a therapist and her inspiration for starting a YouTube channel focused on narcissistic relationships. She discusses how she feels that helping people one hour, one time, a week is not adequate and that she needed to share more on a wider scale. She talks about how she developed her channel and how it has led to her writing a book about the topic.

Shannon discusses her approach to helping clients overcome negative self talk. She uses a trauma-informed care approach and emphasizes the importance of recognizing how we talk to ourselves inside our own heads. She also notes that if we are toxic towards ourselves, we are more likely to be defensive towards people who talk to us in a similar way.

The conversation discusses the idea that some of the negative self-talk and behaviors that people exhibit could be a result of being on the receiving end of a narcissistic or toxic relationship. It is explained that sometimes these behaviors stem from stories that people tell themselves about their childhood experiences. It is important to recognize these false narratives in order to break the cycle of toxic behavior.

 

HIGHLIGHTS 

So we have to learn that self compassion, I have to treat myself the way I would treat a friend. I have to be encouraging when I'm down. I have to help myself and not beat myself up.

And I believe you mentioned this self compassion is a crucial part of your recovery. Since you take yourself with you wherever you go. Can you please, kind of, for the listeners, elaborate on what that means for us?.

And a complete lack of empathy. And when you see somebody doing that, you have to take a giant step back and make sure that you don't get attached to that person on any level.

I tell you, that's a good place to be for someone who is working with this within themselves to take that step back and watch that circus go by. And it sounds like one who may be narcissistic or narcissist, they also get puffed up, like the hot air balloon you mentioned.

So when we talked about the character qualities and the values, a person who has a personality disorder of any sort has an empty sense of self and it's all dependent on getting puffed up from other people.