Restoring Resilience with Chelsey Brooke Cole

Narcissistic abuse can leave you feeling invisible in your own home, disconnected from who you are, and unable to explain what you're living through, even to the people closest to you. In this episode of Restoring Resilience, Chelsey Brooke Cole explores the three layers of loneliness in narcissistic relationships: Isolation from yourself. Through cycles of punishment and reinforcement, narcissist...

Why does leaving a narcissist feel like withdrawal? Dark triad researcher Dr. Daniel Jones explains his "social cocaine" theory: how a narcissist's artificial charm and grandiosity create a rush that can leave you craving the highs, even after the abuse begins. It's a drug you never consented to, and it can happen to anyone. In this episode of the Restoring Resilience Podcast, Chelsey and Dr. Jone...

Why do so many survivors know something is wrong and still abandon their own needs, intuition, and boundaries? Jessica Anne Pressler is a therapist, a hospice social worker, and the creator of the Traitor Within Framework. She calls that part of you "the traitor within." It's the part that learned in childhood that keeping the peace, avoiding rejection, and earning love was the safest way to live....

People in abusive relationships rarely say, "I'm being abused." They say it's a rough patch, a hard season, or a compatibility problem, and that language can keep them stuck for years. Domestic violence advocate, coach, and Why She Stayed podcast host Grace Stuart joins Chelsey to share how it took years to recognize her own relationship as abuse. Grace explains why whoever controls the language c...

Narcissistic abuse is an invisible war. You're hypervigilant, exhausted, and constantly bracing for the next blow, but nobody around you can see the battlefield. So how do you walk off a war you can't even see? Chelsey is joined by Anne Jolles, author, TEDx speaker, and founder of Grace Trail. When her son was deployed to Afghanistan, Anne turned to walking in nature to cope, and out of that came...

If you've been told that forgiving a narcissist means letting them back in, dropping your anger, or acting like what they did wasn't that bad — that isn't forgiveness, and believing it is what keeps most survivors stuck. In part two of this series on forgiveness and narcissistic abuse, Chelsey answers the question underneath all of it: what does forgiveness actually mean, and is it even necessary...

"You need to forgive me. I said I was sorry. What more do you want?" If you've heard some version of that — from a narcissist, a family member, or someone who has no idea what you actually lived through — this episode is for you. In part one of a two-part series, Chelsey Brooke Cole unpacks what's really happening when a narcissist demands your forgiveness. Spoiler: they aren't asking for forgiven...

Covert narcissists don't announce themselves. They're pleasant, humble, sometimes the wounded one in the room — and that's exactly why you don't see the abuse coming. Dr. Les Carter — psychotherapist, bestselling author, and creator of the Surviving Narcissism YouTube channel — joins me to break down the covert presentation of narcissism and the mind games that come with it. They cover why covert...

Do narcissists know what they're doing? Are they born that way — and if so, can we still hold them accountable? Dr. Peter Salerno, licensed psychotherapist and expert in personality disorders and pathological relationship dynamics, joins the show to explain what the research actually says. Heritability estimates for narcissistic traits now range from 40% to over 70%, drawn from fifty years of twin...

Most narcissistic abuse content assumes the victim is a woman. Jared Mello's isn't — he survived a covert female narcissist, and he now coaches men and women who are living it. He's blunt about the parts that go unspoken. That a man disclosing abuse by a woman has to think carefully about where he says it, because plenty of rooms will tell him to shut up. That the damage is often emasculation — be...

She spent 27 years married to a man who was quietly turning her own children against her — and she's one of the world's leading experts on coercive control. Dr. Christine Cocchiola (TEDx speaker with 1.5M+ views, trained under Dr. Evan Stark) joins me to expose what's really happening when your child comes home from your ex's house saying words that cut the deepest. Coercive control isn't "hidden...

Your body is exhausted. Your nervous system is on high alert. And no matter what you try, something still feels off. The gut problems, the anxiety, the brain fog, the walls you can't seem to lower… survivors are often told it's stress, or aging, or that they should be "over it by now." Betrayal trauma expert Dr. Debi Silber is here to tell you it's none of those things — it's Post Betrayal Syndrom...

Have you ever been mid-sentence and completely lost your words? In this episode, author Ellen Tift — creator of the There's a Word for That book series — explains the science behind why your body responds the way it does to narcissistic abuse and complex trauma, and why "just calm down" is never the answer. In this episode: The garden metaphor for the traumatized body: why the roots of who you are...

You were kind, agreeable, willing to compromise — and somewhere along the way, you stopped recognizing yourself. If you've left a narcissistic relationship unsure what you like, what you want, or whether you can trust your own memory, this episode gives you the language for why. Chelsey talks with Bill Eddy — attorney, therapist, mediator, and author of 20+ books including Splitting — about how na...

Have you ever looked back and thought, "He saw exactly what I needed... and used it against me"? That gut feeling isn't paranoia — it's accurate. In this episode, psychotherapist Chelsey Brooke Cole breaks down the dark psychology behind how narcissists and predators actually choose their targets, and the answer might surprise you: predators don't go after the weak, they go after the warm. Chelsey...

You can't catch a covert abuser with a checklist. They don't follow a script — they follow you. Divorce coach Kate Anthony spent years deciding the definition of emotional abuse didn't fit her marriage — because her ex was never overt. The harm was quieter: a slow, tailored erosion of her sense of self that no bullet list could capture. In this conversation, Kate explains why the checklist keeps s...

"He never lost his temper. He chose it." Don Hennessy spent more than three decades sitting across from male intimate abusers — and what they taught him upends nearly everything we assume about how abuse works. In this episode, Don Hennessy — former Clinical Director of Ireland's National Domestic Violence Intervention Project and author of Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control — explains th...

Can a psychologist fall victim to a narcissist? Dr. Kerry McAvoy says yes — and she lived it. In this powerful episode, Kerry shares her personal journey of narcissistic abuse recovery after losing her husband to cancer and being targeted by a predatory partner who used coercive control to trap her. If you've ever doubted yourself in a toxic relationship or wondered how to spot a narcissist before...

Have you ever felt so beaten down that you stopped trying to change things — stopped fighting for your boundaries, stopped taking care of yourself — because it felt like nothing you did actually mattered? That's not a character flaw. That's what narcissistic abuse does. And in this episode, I'm talking about the one psychological concept that has to be rebuilt before anything else in your healing...

Do you second-guess yourself constantly — wondering if what happened to you even "counts" as abuse? In this episode, I'm sharing five statements I hear from survivors over and over again — phrases that immediately tell me someone has experienced relational trauma, even when they've never labeled it that way. These feel like random doubts, but they're not. They're patterns. And once you can see the...

If you've ever escaped a narcissistic relationship only to find yourself in another one, this episode is for you. Not the "here are the red flags to watch for" version you've heard before — the real conversation. The one that goes all the way back to the emotional needs that didn't get met when you were young, and explains how those needs have been quietly choosing your partners ever since. I'm jo...

After narcissistic abuse, most of us are so focused on what we don't want that we never learned what a healthy relationship actually looks like. In this episode — Part 2 of my series on creating healthy relationships after narcissistic abuse — I'm giving you the practical roadmap. I'm walking you through 4 green flags that will tell you more about a person's character than any red flag checklist e...

After surviving narcissistic abuse, most of us do one of two things: obsess over red flags — or give up on love entirely. In this episode, I'm breaking down why  neither  of those approaches will lead you to a healthy relationship, and what you actually need to do instead. If you've survived narcissistic abuse, betrayal trauma, or gaslighting and you're wondering whether you can ever trust yoursel...

In this powerful episode, Chelsey sits down with renowned psychotherapist and bestselling author Ross Rosenberg to completely reframe what we think we know about codependency — and why the label itself may be doing more harm than good for narcissistic abuse survivors. Ross introduces his groundbreaking concept of Self Love Deficit Disorder (SLDD) — the deeper truth beneath codependency — and expla...

In this episode of the Restoring Resilience Podcast, I sit down with Anne Wintemute, the co-founder and CEO of AimeeSays, to discuss a groundbreaking tool designed specifically for survivors of domestic and narcissistic abuse. Unlike standard AI models, AimeeSays is a trauma-informed system that understands the complexities of coercive control, gaslighting, and the systemic hurdles survivors face....