Surviving Kidnapping and Escaping the Clutches of a Narcissistic Sociopath, Part 2 with Kristi Christensen

What if you could transform your deepest traumas into your greatest strengths? What if the darkest moments in your life could be the catalyst to profound healing and empowerment? This episode is a beacon of hope for anyone who has ever experienced abuse or trauma. We sit down with the courageous Kristi Christensen, who shares her inspiring journey of escaping an abusive relationship and healing from complex PTSD. Her powerful story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, revealing the potential within each of us to overcome our most challenging experiences and build a life of sovereignty and independence.

Kristi's life is not just about surviving, but thriving and inspiring change. Her experiences with a corrupt legal system, the struggle to distance herself from a narcissistic sociopath, and her endeavor to instill in her children the importance of personal sovereignty, paint a vivid picture of her strength and determination. Kristi also opens up about her journey towards healing, discussing the profound impact of groundbreaking treatments like ketamine therapy. This episode is a raw, enlightening look into the world of a survivor, offering valuable insights on how to navigate trauma and reclaim control over one's life. Join us for this extraordinary narrative that will touch your heart and remind you of the power of resilience.

Kristi and I would love to hear your thoughts!  If you'd like to support the podcast, please follow/subscribe to be alerted to upcoming episodes and also, leave a review.

Wishing you lots of love on your own hero’s journey,
xoxo, Karen

Thanks so much for listening!  Please share this episode with your loved ones and spread the love to bless others!
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Connect with Karen Hall

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Podcast: The Hero Within Podcast

Connect with Kristi Christensen

Kristi states, "I was born to an empath and a narcissist/sociopath, and my mother tried to kill my dad and he had my mom committed.  They both lost custody and I lived in a foster home for a year.  Then my mother won custody and was going to move to Japan so my dad kidnapped me and my brother for 6 years.  The FBI found us in the Ozarks in 1995 in a survivalist situation and returned us to our mother.  Eight years later, the cops removed me from the home when my mom attacked me viciously and I was homeless for a year.  I married and divorced 4 times from age 18-24 and the last marriage was super abusive.  He is a super rich rancher in a small town in Utah."  She  divorced and is in the middle of legal battles for custody of her 2 children.

Books Kristi discusses in the podcast:
 
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker
Attached by Amir Levine
Scream-Free Parenting by Hal Runkel
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Instagram: @fairybrowmother

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey there, welcome back. I'm Karen Hall, your host of the Hero Within podcast. I'm passionate about sharing inspiring true stories of unsung heroes who've overcome some of life's most challenging adversities. Come along with me and learn how you too can find hope and healing to return to love. My friend Christy Christensen suffered repeated trauma growing up, causing complex PTSD, and if you haven't heard part one, you'll want to tune in and listen to her story of being kidnapped and what happened to her afterward. Today, in part two, we learn about Christy's resilience after being abused by a narcissistic sociopath and how her abuse impacted her belief system and her life. Even in the midst of her pain, she shares her moment of awakening and how this moment changed her entire life.

Speaker 2: 1:03

Having children's most amazing thing in the world. I love them more than anything. I didn't even know what love was. I literally had no idea what love was. It's the most amazing responsibility being a parent. I take it very seriously. I never thought I'd have kids because I was so afraid, because childhood wasn't fun for me. I didn't have one, right, I had to get that to another human and so the pregnancy wasn't planned. So the moment I found out I was pregnant, I read all these parenting books just to try to make sure that this child would have a really nice childhood.

Speaker 1: 1:36

I think you've probably learned some really great tools for parents that are dealing with some of this past trauma in their own life. Can you give us some more suggestions of things that have worked for you when you have felt triggered as a parent?

Speaker 2: 1:50

Yeah, I would say people that are struggling with this. The main impulse you struggle with is that you weren't treated as a sovereign being as a child. You were treated as a commodity. You were a product that needed to work right all the time and not make the parent uncomfortable. And so I like screen-free parenting because it teaches you the number one lesson that I want to tell people struggling with this your children are not your property. They're sovereign beings and you're forming an adult and you have to remember that, and you can't squash their spirits when they assert their independence. You want a child that can go out there. I was just taught to please and be polite, be pretty and give people hugs and to never put people out and to be this little doll that my parents showed off. And what happened was you get into high school and you basically have men take advantage of you. You have the freaking grit to say no, or the fortitude or the sense of self. You have no sense of self. You literally just exist to please other people.

Speaker 1: 2:52

You weren't allowed to say no.

Speaker 2: 2:53

No.

Speaker 1: 2:54

You had never even developed that skill to assert yourself, to be able to say no.

Speaker 2: 2:59

Yeah, and so many of us parents like that, like you, will do what I say and think what I tell you to think and act the way I tell you to act, instead of standing back and gently guiding your child and just realizing you're a steward there, their own person in your steward. And your job is not to go melt them down and pour them into a mold, is to gently and lovingly help them form their adult self and not internalize that when they assert themselves has nothing to do with you. Like understanding that psychology, that book screen, free parenting. It actually transcends the parental child bond. It helps you with every relationship in your life. So it's really good you can grow up with any kind of trauma.

Speaker 2: 3:38

But the other books that I read that helped me. I remember the four agreements was the first book that, like released me from the prison of my mind right. Realizing that your thoughts are not who you are teaches you to observe your thoughts but not get lost in them. And it teaches you that this world is a construct. It's like the collective dream of the average person, like everything you see can be changed. So it basically taught me you can change.

Speaker 2: 4:06

And I just felt very firmly messed up. I felt so broken. I always said I was like junker car that was held together by tape. And so I help a lot of women in particularly violent situations get out of these situations and the first book I have them read is the Four Agreements, because it's the first book to really understand that you are the master of your reality and that you can mold your reality. It's hard to believe that you can when you're so steeped in pain and sadness. I said that's a really good one. And for anybody who grew up in a caustic familial system that led them to have CPTSD, there's this book called Complex PTSD from Surviving to Thriving. It's in complete layman's terms. It helps you understand every one of your triggers, why you are the way you are, why you bond. If you repetitively bond people poorly or just bad people, this will help you understand that. That's amazing. Attached is this book that talks about John Bulby's attachment theory on the different attachment styles. That helped me greatly understand why I was bonding to narcissistic, abusive people.

Speaker 1: 5:18

Do you think your mom, in addition to being a sociopath, do you think that she was also a narcissist?

Speaker 2: 5:23

Oh yeah, and interestingly enough, I don't really know what my dad is. I don't have a relationship with either of them, but I feel like some people are literally born a sociopath or a genetic sociopath, and some people are abused into it. I feel bad for my mom. She's from England. Her mom abandoned her when she was six months old in her apartment with her twin because she had an affair with their dad and it was a lot of inherited trauma. But she was just born that way Little to no empathy, doing anything she needs to do to get what she wants. But was she born that way or was she abused into that? She had a horrible childhood.

Speaker 1: 5:59

That makes sense. Why, when you said that you bonded in your relationships with men, that it was often a narcissist that you were bonding with because that was so familiar for you for so many years.

Speaker 2: 6:12

Yeah, that trauma bonding thing is no joke. So people need to go Google trauma bonding if they are. Repetitively bonding to looks like people that is a real thing, Traumatizes you and you bond to them because that's what your parent did. They criticized you, made you feel little and then you were hyper vigilant in getting their affection to try to be worthy of something. They let you know you're not worthy and you're like if I can just prove to them I'm worthy, so let me just do all this service and all this kindness and earn love. And then you think as an adult that the model for love is not unconditional. You believe you have to earn love. Love is conditional. So when you get into relationships with people that make you earn love, it feels familiar like this is what love is? Your parents, they model and teach you what love is. And narcissistic parents teach you that love is earned, which is very precarious, alleged to sit on romantic relationships. And then people do that to their kids. They just regurgitate this when they have kids and it's very unbaw.

Speaker 1: 7:10

And then a person would seem, I would imagine, in most of these situations, to never measure up, because none of us are perfect, and so the narcissist would get mad at something at some point, and probably frequently, and so it would probably reinforce this feeling that I'm never good enough.

Speaker 2: 7:28

They do that. They cripple your self-esteem and they're very tactical about it and they make sure that you do not have enough self-esteem to leave them right. And so I'm sure you know narcissists. They engage in these cycles of abuse and love bombing. They just let you have it, they just abuse you, abuse you, abuse you until you cannot take it anymore and you start to pull away. And the moment you start to pull away, oh, all of a sudden, this nice person comes in.

Speaker 2: 7:54

I think the biggest lesson I learned that I would advise people when dating. I figured out dating sound with the most amazing, loving, wonderful human being, and I always joke that he treats me like an endangered species. I'm like a panda and he is my handler. I love it.

Speaker 2: 8:12

There's like this neurological phenomenon that makes mammals breed with each other, and that is like when you first meet somebody, you dump out a ton of serotonin and dopamine, and this excess level of serotonin and dopamine can last up to two years after you've met the person. It's one of the ways mammals bond, and so how many times have you heard somebody say they stay in these toxic relationships because they're just trying to get back to how good it was in the beginning, yes, all the time. Well, that person didn't exist. That person had excess chemicals, they were chemically high, basically right. What that means is they're on their best behavior. You're on your best behavior and they don't exhibit red flags. And even if they did, you're so chemically high you can't see them.

Speaker 2: 9:00

So I finally learned I don't get attached to people before the two year mark because you don't know people. And so I always tell people you don't actually get to start knowing who that person is or who you are with that person until those chemicals drop off. So two years, don't get attached too much. Before two years, do your best, have fun, be wonderful, but don't tell yourself stories about who this person is because you don't know yet. So the two year mark start to discover who they are and then start making permanent stories in your head about who this person is. Because when you make those stories in the first year, you can't mentally separate it, because you decided to write the story, the narrative of who they were, in that first year. So 10 years into it you're being super abused. You can't mentally separate it. Go, that's a good tool.

Speaker 1: 9:45

Yeah, and that's interesting too, because any person should take time to get to know someone else, especially in a romantic, long-term situation with someone. But when you've gone through trauma, it's especially important not only to do the work on yourself but to give yourself time within that relationship, because it can be deceptive, especially in the beginning. On both sides you can misinterpret things that they're doing and they can be deceiving in the things that they're doing, and so I think that is very wise advice to take your time and to really get to know someone Okay one more.

Speaker 2: 10:17

I have to tell you one more that I figured out for anybody who's trying to date. I figured out to ask them about their last three relationships. And if when I asked them about their last three relationships, it sounded like she was crazy, she was evil, she was crazy, run. There's no other thing to do, just run, because one of two things is happening they're a narcissist and they're not culpable for their behavior. Because a healthy person will not call other people crazy. A healthy, empathic person naturally will look for their fault and even if the other person was crazy, they will point out things that they were culpable for in the relationship, right? So a healthy person will be like we grew apart, she kinda got mean, but like I probably didn't help. So run, because it's usually a sign of a narcissist. And if they're not a narcissist, it's a sign that they are so mentally unhealthy that they are bonding to crazy people over and over.

Speaker 2: 11:08

And they're just not there yet we're not a throwaway person. They just need to do some work.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Right, and what's interesting too is that, like you said, even if the other person does have mental health issues, recognize the way they talk about the situation, the angle from which they describe that.

Speaker 2: 11:25

Yes, it's very telling.

Speaker 1: 11:28

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:29

The father of my kids, super abusive and very wealthy. He's a millionaire, like in central Utah. He's a cattle rancher and I'd call the police and they would never help me because he like owned them. And so I hit a camera and got out of there like that. But that was the last one I ever bonded to, the last one that broke me so hard. You can only take so much before you have to look at yourself and realize that you are the common denominator, so something is wrong here. Like you're bonding to these people, you have to be culpable. Always tell people If you got yourself into the situation, you can get yourself out, and you have a responsibility to get yourself out, because the victim mindset is just going to make you take drugs or drink a lot. So, no matter how bad it is, I always tell the women that I work with who are getting out of these situations it's bad and you didn't deserve it, but you did put yourself there. You can get yourself out.

Speaker 1: 12:24

Right, and you can look for resources and ways you have to do this, especially when you have kids.

Speaker 2: 12:30

You just don't get to disappear into sadness or victim. You need to rectify the situation and you can. We all have that personal power. If I'm still alive, flip. Anybody can do anything.

Speaker 1: 12:41

That is awesome, because most of us do not go through what you went through. Your story is very unique, and to have the resilience, first of all, to say no to your mother the first time when you were 16. Really, it took incredible courage. And then, as you were going through and recognizing, you made changes in yourself. And so tell us about the father of your children, tell us about what that relationship was like, how it came to be, and then how you were able to recognize and make changes and get out. Like you're saying to these women, you have a responsibility here.

Speaker 2: 13:13

So I had my son and realized how bad it was. He would drink a lot and he would criticize me all the time. This narcissist, just eat away at your self-esteem. You cannot have self-esteem. They'll help you a little bit when they beat you down. So far you can't function. They'll build you up a little, but they can't let you get above this line of self-confidence.

Speaker 2: 13:35

So I had my son and I had no way to make money. I'm in the middle of nowhere and he controlled me with money. I wasn't allowed on his bank account and men do that so often. So many of my clients talk about it all the time. They're men. The most abusive ones control them with money and so they can't get away or they feel they can't. There's always a way. So I did not know anything about bath bombs or sugar scrubs, but I started making them and I just dyed them neon colors and it sold and I just sold it and sold it and sold it and then eventually had enough money to take training for the eyebrows that I do and I just hunkered in on that and then I just saved for four years Because I knew that if I left it would be in the middle of the night or something horrible, like you couldn't just walk away or peacefully tell that person that you wanted to divorce.

Speaker 2: 14:25

It was not good the day the police came. It's so bad. I have the video. He's screaming, he's drunk. I have the baby in my arm. He's breaking stuff and cursing and we had been separated for six months.

Speaker 2: 14:41

We lived in the same house but he was downstairs and I was upstairs. I gave him the divorce papers. He kept saying he signed, I wouldn't sign Anyways. So I told him I was going to have him served and he just lost his mind. And in the video he's breaking stuff. I'm trying to pour the alcohol out. His dad comes in halfway through, takes the baby from me. I try to get the baby. His dad shoves me on a video and then I try to get my phone to call the police and his dad takes the phone from me, which is illegal. But nothing happened to either of them. Nothing happened, nothing. They're untouchable. Oh my gosh. Yeah, nothing made sense to my lawyers. We'd keep going and we had evidence and then he still got like 50-50 custody and then we'd go again. I recently got evidence that he's leaving them home alone. They're seven and four. The judge threw out my case and then ordered me to pay his legal fees.

Speaker 1: 15:35

This is unbelievable. It's insult upon injury. It's bad enough that it's happening. Now you have evidence and you're being invalidated yet again, and then to make you pay for the legal bills.

Speaker 2: 15:47

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:48

Absolutely, and furiating, I know, and you probably feel an element of helplessness because this is the judicial system, and where do you go for remedy?

Speaker 2: 15:58

Yeah, you don't. My lawyer said that our only legal recourse is to leak the story to KSL and I was like this cannot be real and it really blew my mind. But yeah, I feel pretty helpless. I left four years ago. It's been a horrible four years.

Speaker 1: 16:14

And to have your children taken away like that, where the thing that motivated you to make these changes and you probably live for your children oh yeah, you have them taken away from you, the first being that you felt that true love for oh my gosh.

Speaker 2: 16:31

Yeah, no, it's been really horrible A divorce to him for a year and a half and I went to custody evaluation. I thought I was finally over the year and a half mark and then Judge was going to support his appeal to order a new one and the custody evaluation had taken a year. And I was so glad it was over because my five-year-old had ground his teeth down to nubs you could see the inside like the pulp of his teeth because he was so stressed. I thought I was finally over. Yeah, and he just goes to appeal it and order a new one. And I was like, what are you doing? Like what are you doing? And he let me know in no uncertain terms that I was no different than one of his breeder cows and I was brought there to give them airs and I could stay and raise them. But if I didn't want to stay and raise them I could basically eff off and die in a ditch. And then he let me know that him and his dad picked me off this dating website because they knew I didn't have any family or money or any way to fight back. Oh my gosh. And then I said you know, like if you love Waylon, my son and you'll stop. And he was like you know what? You're right, if you love him, you'll stop.

Speaker 2: 17:33

So I stopped, you know, and that was four years ago. And so I see him three weekends a month. It's unlivable and the judicial system is corrupt and this judge is corrupt and I don't know what to do. And I just don't know what to do. And last year got really bad. So just to tell people out there, I was so much better after I left and then I got very hard with the custody stuff and all the past history that I have makes it hard.

Speaker 2: 17:58

I just got to a point where I couldn't go on anymore. I stayed because my boys and I never want to do anything, but I just didn't want to live anymore. I think breathing was hard. I didn't even call child services because everybody down there sprayed of them or works for him gets horrible. And so I went to the temporary custody hearing and he had brought over 30 family members to a temporary custody hearing and it was kind of a weird Freudian slip because the judge said do you think you can intimidate me, mr Christensen? And I remember thinking that was a very familiar thing to say to someone that you supposedly don't know? Why would you think that was the case? Why wouldn't you think somebody just wanted the support of their family? They knew who this was and he knows that he's intimidating. They own people in that town. I mean, that's a tiny town. There's like 350 people in that town.

Speaker 1: 18:50

The Good Old Boy Network is very real.

Speaker 2: 18:52

Oh yeah, and the worst part of it is I walk into this courthouse and all these people who were my family just a day before were there to intimidate me and that broke my heart, and my mother was there.

Speaker 1: 19:07

Your mother.

Speaker 2: 19:09

My mother was there. She had only been around my son twice. She just didn't care. I finally asked her figure out if you want to be near him or stay away from him. But just like, figure a lane, Like. I will not have you bonding him and then him getting attached and then you abandoning him. So she just stayed away. She never came around. She was there to testify with bells on that. I was mentally ill and a bad mother. She never seemed to be a mother. If you reject a narcissist, they will spend the rest of their life trying to prove to everyone that you're bad. They will just spend the rest of their life trying to destroy you.

Speaker 1: 19:44

It blew my mind. That is the perfect description and that's why you had to leave the way you did with your husband, because it isn't safe to leave.

Speaker 2: 19:53

You can't leave a narcissist nicely. So people who think you're going to leave a narcissist nicely or have a logical conversation, get rid of that notion. They don't do logic, they do self-interest and if what you're saying does not align with what is best for them, you're going to get destroyed and railroaded and abused and gaslit. So if you aren't trying to leave a narcissist, we'll leave in the middle of the night when they're gone.

Speaker 1: 20:17

Right. And then that's your mother is in the courtroom getting this attention on her again with your ex-husband against you. It's just the pain of the abandonment again in the courtroom.

Speaker 2: 20:29

Oh yeah, they put me on the stand and they introduced the video. If a normal person gets afraid, they get a trigger to their amygdala that says bite this or flight this and immediately get a secondary recurrent to their prefrontal cortex. This part of your brain houses logic and reason and it says, first of all, calm down. Second of all, let's think of the repercussions of fight, reprecussions of flight, and if there is an option C that doesn't destroy your life. Conversely, somebody with PTSD, when they get frightened, they get a trigger to their amygdala, immediately lose all connectivity to their prefrontal cortex and then the secondary trigger that's supposed to go through prefrontal cortex hits that amygdala like a MAC truck and basically kicks them into what is known as their limbic system, the reptilian brain. At that point, depending on how bad your trauma is, it determines how bad your PTSD is. So at that point, when you get hit with the second one, if you're like me and you have really bad PTSD, you don't really have prefrontal cortex. People in that animal state don't do calm or logic or reason. They're going to do anything to just survive the situation. Yeah, fight is very obvious. That's like attacking somebody or whatever. Most people don't realize. Flight looks like a lot of online shopping Eat a bunch, drink a bunch of alcohol, watch Netflix. These are forms of flight. So people engage in these behaviors just trying to like cope.

Speaker 2: 21:51

But when I was sitting on the stand, I hear the audio of the video. I hadn't heard it in about a month. And I look out and all these people who were my family are just staring at me. They don't believe that he's been doing this. Actually, some of them did. Some of them reached out to me after and said that they had no choice but to be there. Basically, and I see my mother and that's the last thing I remember it just triggered and then you just dissociate. I had my girlfriend there and she said I just started crying and rocking back and forth and I had water in my hand and I dropped it and I just like lost it, oh my gosh. And the crappy thing is is people don't understand PTSD right and they treat it like a mental illness. And it's not a mental illness. You have a neurological disorder, your brain is misfiring, you're not crazy. So if you have PTSD, you're not crazy, your brain is misfiring.

Speaker 1: 22:41

Takeaways from part two Christy's whole life. She heard how she wasn't lovable and she didn't feel loved. She was told it was her fault. She wasn't loved and she believed all these repeated messages. She decided she didn't want to have a child because her childhood was so painful and she didn't want to do that to another human. But after she found out she was pregnant, she was determined to read everything she could to help her child have a really nice childhood. Christy recommended some of her favorite books and how they helped her to uncover her limiting beliefs and change her false narrative and then mold a new reality for herself. While learning healthy parenting tools. She realized she was in an abusive marriage and she gained the courage to leave the father of her children, and Christy talks about the traumatic legal battle that has followed. Christy also shared how she helps other women in abusive situations and tools that she recommends for them.

Speaker 1: 23:42

Have you heard about ketamine? Be sure to listen to part three, in which Christy talks about what happens to our brain with complex PTSD and the amazing breakthroughs she has made in her healing through ketamine treatments. Thanks for listening. I know you're busy. Did you know that you help spread the love by leaving your review and following. This helps increase our visibility so people can find us online. I really appreciate your help. I'm wishing you lots of love in your own hero's journey.