After moving cross-country for his promotion — leaving my beloved career behind — fibromyalgia hit with pain so severe I could barely sit upright. I thought my body was broken, but it was expressing suppressed anger the only way it could.

How did I go from successful corporate professional to financially dependent housewife? When fibromyalgia made it impossible to work, he criticized me for not being like "other women” who would “kill" to be taken care of.

I twisted myself into his preferred role to keep the peace, until I was thoroughly convinced he knew what was best for me.

The surrender happened slowly

…like a leaky faucet that floods the foundation until there's nowhere left to stand.
I was convinced that even if we divorced, I'd still have to orbit his life. My forever fate.

But even then, I tried to make it work five more years.

The last straw happened one day when the words, "I can't do this anymore," came tumbling out of my mouth, without thinking.

He replied, "You don't want to even try?"

What about the five years I'd already tried?

That's when I realized he had never tried at all.

The grief wasn't just about losing the man I loved. I grieved the career I'd walked away from, the life I'd never gotten to choose — all because I'd made his dreams more important than my own.

The net result? Rebuilding my life and career from the ground up.

In the first six years, I moved ten times, was kicked out of two siblings' homes, worked odd jobs while desperately trying to restart the corporate track.

For years, I'd jolt awake at 2 a.m. imagining all the moments I could have stopped this madness from the beginning.

Eventually, I got tired — tired of renegotiating the past, of never feeling enough, of watching my life spiral without meaning.

I wanted the years ahead to count

To do work that mattered. To have a voice that felt solid. Have relationships that felt mutual.

So I dove into understanding what had really happened — with him, and with the family patterns that made his behavior feel familiar.

Then one night, watching a video about covert narcissism, a light went off. I saw it clearly: I'd been manipulated from the beginning. My marriage hadn't just failed — it had been a lie all along.

Once I came across the term covert narcissism, everything clicked.

I filled my bookshelves, journaled over a thousand pages, analyzed every angle. The man I thought I knew was a person I didn't even recognize.

The hardest part wasn't just seeing him clearly — it was seeing my lifelong relationship patterns.

I'd been disappearing in plain sight — bending to keep the peace, mistaking compliance for love, and confusing self-sacrifice with connection.

I discovered a therapeutic approach that reached the root of emotional patterns in less time than traditional talk therapy.

Immediately, I wanted to try it.

After my first Rapid Transformational Therapy® session, something began to shift — and over the next few, unmistakable changes unfolded. The night terrors stopped. A calm settled in my body.

I started to recognize myself again — the real me — and I liked her.