What your RED result actually means

Red means the moments this assessment asked you about: the silent treatments, the apologies you didn't owe, the nights you couldn't sleep while they could, the version of you that quietly went missing somewhere along the way, were not personality differences, or "communication issues." And they were also not the result of you being too sensitive, too anxious, or too much.

They were tactics. Documented ones with predictable patterns and an entire body of research behind them that nobody handed you, because the people doing the research weren't looking for women in their own kitchens at 2am.

The reason you couldn't see this clearly while you were inside it is the same reason a fish can't describe water: when something is everywhere, it stops looking like anything at all.

And, please hear this slowly, Red doesn't mean you are broken. It means something specific happened to you. There is an entire universe of difference between being damaged and having been damaged. The whole point of recovery is the distance between those two sentences, and you are allowed to take the first step across it without yet knowing what's on the other side.

If you're feeling two things at once, that's your nervous system doing its job.

Part of you is exhaling. Finally, the thing has a name, a category in a real clinical world. You aren't unhinged or "too much." The vague, half-finished version you've been trying to describe to your sister, your therapist, your best friend,  the version that always made you sound a little dramatic, or paranoid, or like you should have just left already, that version is real. It is documented and has a clinical pattern. This can be quite something to take in, so let your shoulders drop one inch lower than they were five minutes ago. Deep breaths as you keep reading.

Part of you wants to argue with the screen. "But they weren't like that all the time. The good days were really good. I'm not the kind of woman this happens to. I provoked some of it. What about the parts that really were my fault." That voice is also allowed. It isn't denial, but rather loyalty to them, to who you used to be, to the story you've been telling yourself in order to keep functioning inside a life that required functioning. Both reactions are happening in the same body, in the same room, in the same minute. And that is ok, both can be present and true. Neither one is the final answer. The final answer takes a few more weeks, a few more conversations, and a real recovery process. It is way too important and bigger than a result page.

Here is the hardest thing nobody told me, that I am telling you now:

This kind of damage does not undo itself just because the relationship ends. It also doesn't undo itself just because the relationship stays and gets better for three weeks. Your nervous system, your self-trust, your sense of what is real, these aren't on a calendar. They are all part of an intentional process.

Willpower alone won't get you there. Neither will time Time on its own. And reading another book about narcissism won't get you there, either. (I know. I read so many of them.) And going back will not get you there, no matter how convincingly they hand you the version of them you fell in love with on the way back in.

What will get you there is three things, in order. 1) Naming what actually happened, with language specific enough that you stop softening and excusing it. 2) Understanding what it did to your body and your brain, because you cannot repair what you cannot see. 3) Rebuilding the woman you were before this, alongside the woman you are becoming next. (They are not the same woman. Both of them deserve to meet each other.)

That is what I teach. That is what the next sixty minutes on this page exist for.