Escaping Narcissistic Abuse: Tiffiny Newton on Trauma Bonding, Gaslighting & Reclaiming Power

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Bent Not Broken. Heartbreak and trauma may feel like the end of your story, but here it's the beginning of a bold new chapter. I'm your host, Coach Deborah Griffiths, and this is the space where women rise, rebuild, and rediscover their purpose. Remember this truth. You are bent, not broken. Six years after leaving an abusive relationship, Tiffany Newton turned her pain into purpose. As the founder of New Tide Consulting LLC and co-founder of Ignite Her, Inc., she empowers women to rebuild their lives with confidence and independence. Through self-defense training and domestic violence advocacy, Tiffany helps women recognize the signs of abuse, create safe exit strategies, and reclaim their strength, proving resilience can lead to freedom. Welcome, Tiffany. Thank you so much for having me here. What were the first red flags you didn't recognize at the time?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Looking back with help of a therapist, rewinding to when I first met him and all the things of the love bombing and the future faking and all of those things, the gaslighting. The first things that I recognized is the slight, ever so slight guilt. So I we hit it off right away. We met each other at the dog park. We started hanging out. We had a lot in common, going to the gym, eating healthy, doing all these things, having our dogs. But if I needed to do something on my own, he would be like, oh, well, that's not as important as us, and kind of dismissing things of mine, my autonomy. So I would spend more time with him so he could get his hooks in. And then when I would spend a night apart from him, he never let me live that down. Well, I don't know what you were really doing. You say that you were getting stuff together for your accountant, but I don't know what you were really doing. How long were you in this relationship?

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Just under two years. Okay. And tell us a little bit about it. Like you just started how it started off, but when did you start figuring out there's something wrong with this picture? And what did you do to leave?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

So I was in denial for a long time. Four months into our relationship, someone mentioned, I think you're in an abusive situation. You should probably look at getting out. And I was like, no, I'm not. Look, he's telling me I'm in an abusive relationship. Because he was so good at crafting the time frame, right? Abusers only really have to be nice to you one day a week or less, one hour a week, right? You're hoping and waiting to get back to that person that you initially met. So you're just waiting and waiting, waiting for them to be that person again. Oh, they're just having a bad day. You excuse it away. It progressively got worse. You know, no one starts in an abusive situation by getting punched in the face, right? Or else you wouldn't stay. It's very slow and manipulative and you know, a way to suck you in. So starting the way I did, the little tiny, you know, is that more important than us? You know, help if I want your help in redesigning or decorating this condo, renovating this condo because you'll be spending a lot of time there, you know, really trying to future fake me into what our future could be together. And again, he just mirrored me so well that he knew what he was doing. I mean, there's no way I'm the first person he did this to. And on and on, we trips together. If I was smiling, he would say, Are you not happy to be here with me? Kind of making me rewire. Like, what is my face saying that I don't know what my face is saying in that instance? Into a flat out just lying to me. He signed up for Ashley Madison on my birthday, which is a cheating site for married people. He lied about that. And I believed him because that's what he manipulated me to do, gaslit me to do. As things progress, I noticed I'm like, why is he always on a good night? Why am I always in tears? Why am I always like on my birthday? Why am I the one crying by the end of the night? It started off so nice. Why am I crying at the end of the night? On our one-year anniversary, he sent me to the spa for the day. He was out in Utah at work. I was at the spa, and I overly exaggerated. Thank you so much. This was so amazing, all of these things. And he was livid because I was only texting him the thank you. I wasn't posting it all over social media on how amazing he is and how grateful I am to have him in my life and what he did for me that day on our anniversary when he was out of town. And then things just started like the Ashley Madison thing made me question. Like it was, I kind of compartmentalized it. So it was back there. It just wasn't forefront to make me connect all the dots. And little by little, we went to North Carolina for him to get dental work. And he's in under anesthesia getting dental work done. And I have his phone as a hotspot. And I search his email because that he had to have all my passwords. He had to have everything almost from the very beginning. He didn't trust me online because of the algorithms of the way Facebook and Instagram work, but he didn't trust me. So he kept pushing that he didn't trust me. So I'm like, well, he doesn't trust me for some reason. So I'm gonna do a quick search. So I just typed up F-U-C-K and S E X into his email and uppopulated a proposition. He had hired a male escort to come have sex with him in a Utah hotel. And this was on her one-year anniversary. While he is making me cry because I didn't post about him enough on social media, he's having sex with a male prostitute. Unreal. And he denied it. That wasn't me. Flat out denied it. I had screenshots, I had everything. That was not me.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

So tell us the story of when you left. What made you decide to finally leave, and how did you do it?

SPEAKER_00 7:26

So it took me five times to finally leave. It started the very first time I left was the beginning of May 2018. And then my final time of leaving was October 31st, 2018. Halloween. Okay. Halloween. So from the first time I left, we had a huge fight. I won't go into all those details, but I came back the next day, and then we had another fight. Again, the whole back and forth, right? And the whole time I'm thinking I'm overreacting. That's why I came back.

unknown 8:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

So I questioned my intuition. I questioned my responses to things. Should never question that. Like you are not overreacting. So on the fourth time, I literally was losing my mind. My, like I was like, something is wrong. Like, I feel like I'm going crazy. This is happening, but you're saying it's not. Like he was rewriting reality, right? A very narcissistic trait, the gaslighting, all of that stuff. So I went online to betterhelp.com, which is a mental health therapy organization, and I found someone that I could do online therapy with. So I could type stuff into a chat, copy and paste his text messages, copy and paste his emails, get their opinion to make sure I wasn't going crazy because I thought I was. And she absolutely set me straight. And that was at the fourth time I left. The fourth time I left was in the middle of a hurricane here in Florida. And if that doesn't tell you how desperate I was to get out, I don't know what it is. But I came back. And the final, so between the fourth time and the fifth time, I started having a strategy. So I wanted to get my stuff out of there without having him recognize it because he had put security cameras everywhere. So when he was out of town, he was watching me 24-7. Oh my. Okay. So if the cameras went down, I would get a phone call cussing me out, saying if the cameras aren't fixed, I'm calling the cops and getting you thrown out. Thinking I was messing around with someone else while I was there and he wasn't. Anyway, paranoia. And I just started like grabbing clothes out of the closet, putting them in suitcases, and just telling him I'm donating this to Goodwill. But I was dropping it off at my storage unit, which he knew about. He knew that I had the storage unit because he had some stuff there, his mom had some stuff there. But I used it as like my to-go place, right? So I started like stashing stuff there. He thought I was giving it away. And then I would order necessities from Amazon. And Amazon has those lovely little boxes that are all over town at gas stations and like Home Depot or Lowe's, and they have funny names. And you punch a code and it pops open the door and you grab your box. So rather than having boxes arrive to the house, I was having boxes shipped to that box. And on the way to work, I passed one. So I'd grab the box. And on the way home, I would throw the box in the storage unit because he timed me to and from work. So if there were five minutes that I wasn't home, I was cheating on him. Or I was sleeping with someone at the office, or there were a bunch of extra things that he would just make up. So that is how I planned that nothing really was missing from the condo. Most of my clothes that I wore on a regular basis were in suitcases in the storage unit and like the stuff for my dog, so medications, and because I wasn't on any rural medications at that time, just like vitamins and supplements and stuff. So the dog medications, the dog food, like I got all of that already prepped and sent over to the storage unit. And then the final day, he came in and I was working. It was a Saturday. I had like one hour left of work. And he came in and he dropped his drawers and stuck his family jewels in my face and demanded a blowjob. Oh my. And I was on the phone with a client. I'm like, I'm working. He's like, then I'm gonna find someone to give me the sex I deserve. So I said, Yeah, you are. Call so and so. And I shut my computer and I started packing up my stuff. Like the stuff that was left that I knew I was gonna take because I had kind of already separated things out. And he got very physical, like grabbed my dog, spit him my face, punched my chest, backed me into the closet in the corner. Like he was 6'2, 250. I'm 5'4, 125 pounds. Like he's double my weight and almost a foot taller than me. So very bullying, very aggressive, screaming in my face, yanking my dog around. And of course, I stick up for my dog. I mean, she's 13 years old, and I'd had her since she was a puppy. And I'm like, put my dog down. He's like, see, if you were as good to me as you are to this dog, you would, we would be fine. So just went off the handles. So I leave, I get a hotel near my job in Tampa, and he gives me a call and he says, My mom has had a heat stroke out on the balcony. I found her passed out. I need your help. Well, I switch into like caregiver mode, right? Because his mom was always nice to me and I wanted to help her. You know, little did I know I should have just told him to buzz off. And I get to his house to help him with his mom. She's not there. He's cooking dinner, he's preparing dinner, lit candles, and trying to like, you know, have a discussion. Like, how was your day? I miss you. Those kind of things. And I'm like, I can't where's your mom? Like, this is ridiculous. And so I go to leave, and he's screaming, and he's like, You should be on your knees begging for me to take you back. I mean, we went on trips together, and this is interesting. So he has to go to Italy for this one client, and we get me a ticket to go along with him. So we turn it into like a trip. So we go to Italy and then we go to France and then we fly home. He's closing on a condo, so he's like, hey, I need your help. I need to pay off this credit card before the closing of the house. The exact amount was the amount of my stuff for the trip to Europe. But he bragged and pushed on me that he paid for my trip to Europe. No, honey, I paid for my trip to Europe. If you asked for that back, I paid for my own trip. And he still owes me $40,000 to this day.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

So not only did you have emotional abuse, you had physical abuse and financial abuse.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Sexual assault, coercive control. I mean, I've got a story for all the different types of abuse from him. Did you ever call the authorities on any of these?

SPEAKER_01 15:26

I did not. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Because I didn't know. You don't know what you don't know, right? Right. I didn't realize that it was battery and assault when he threw me on the floor and bent my phone in half. I didn't know that him deciding he was gonna do whatever was rape because I was in a relationship with him. The things that I know now, it brings up night terrors, which is why I wrote the book, which is why I started a nonprofit, which is why I'm getting certified to teach self-defense in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, because I will never be in that situation again.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

I understand. How would you explain trauma bonding bonding in a way that people would understand? Addiction.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

That need that you have for your first cup of coffee in the morning, that need for a 2 or 3 p.m. sugary snack, that need to go shopping when you feel down or depressed. It's the exact same feeling. You are holding on to hope by a string, hoping that they will treat you like they did in the beginning. And that is never going to happen. You're right.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

So talk to us a little bit about that fifth and final time. And you mentioned that he kind of brought you back for his mom, who supposedly had a heat stroke. After that, you left. Then what happened?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

On the way out, I noticed that things in the condo were slightly moved around a little bit, which was strange because he was kind of like everything kind of had its place. It's like the movie Sleeping with the Enemy, you know, everything kind of had its little place. The towel on the rack, yes. And all the labels facing out and like all of the things, right? So I go into the condo and I just notice, I'm like, things are different. Not that he's like, it wasn't from just him being there. I just sensed something different. And so the condo building that he lives in is a three-tower condo, and you have to pull in and be on an approved list to get in. So you have to call down to the guard gate, give your name. It has to be pre-approved unless you're meeting at the front office for like a realtor showing or whatever. So on my way out that night, I pull over to the guard gate and I said, Hey, we had some people over for dinner last week, and someone left a very expensive handbag. I don't know how they didn't leave with the handbag, but I want to make sure it gets to the right person because the wallet wasn't in there. There was no identification. I don't know who it belongs to. Can you tell me who was here? There was one lady's name. And follow me here. He had gone into my Facebook account as me, found this lady, and blocked her. So if I went to go search her name, she would never show up because she was in my blocked list. Oh my. Okay. He did that with another girl who he did have sex with while we were on our first when he kicked me out when I left him the first time. He kicked me out and took my key and then called her over. So he went into my Facebook and blocked both of those girls and sent nasty messages calling people pieces of shit. I mean, literally, like verbally degrading people as me to these people. I'm assuming you changed all your passwords now. Oh, yes. I mean, he went in and changed my Instagram name from I had an Instagram name because I was in bodybuilding for a couple of years. So I had like ancillary people who knew I had met a ton of people, and he had a huge problem with that because the people you may know would show up on Facebook and they would be guys posing, girls posing. It was like equal number of guys and girls in like bathing suits posing, bodybuilding poses. And he accused me of being friends with them because it showed up in people you may know. So anyway, that's a whole other thing. But he would go through and delete. There's probably two or three thousand people he deleted out of my Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Well, that was his attempt to control you and isolate you.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Oh, yeah. One of my best friends, she was the very first person he isolated. Anyone that I had gone anywhere with or had a picture with online that we had a good time, he made sure to cut them off.

SPEAKER_01 20:43

That's all a pattern of a narcissist, yeah. It's one of the things they do. Isolate. Yep. Well, how did you begin letting go of the guilt and the self-blame?

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Realizing that nothing I could have done would have changed the outcome at all, other than leave sooner, right? I could have been the best girlfriend in the world, but that goalpost was always moving. If I met exactly what he told me, no, that's not what I said. I told you to do this. So nothing I could have ever done would have changed the outcome of how he was treating me, how he felt. I mean, looking back, he hated me. He hated what I stood for, he hated the smile on my face, and he literally hated me to treat me like that. You don't spit in someone's face if you like them or love them. You do that with hatred. Your eyes change black because you hate someone. Like I stared a monster in the face for You're lucky to be here. I'm glad that I was out before COVID hit because I probably would not be around. That's a good point. At least I could get to work. Have that travel time away and have some of the day away. If we were stuck in the same place, that it would have been really bad. I mean, it was it would have been worse. Yeah, it would have been much, much worse.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Much, much worse. Yeah. What was the hardest about rebuilding your confidence after leaving?

SPEAKER_00 22:46

The second guessing. Thinking, you know, why should I trust myself? Because I picked him. I picked someone that would treat me so terribly. Like, I how can I trust myself again?

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Did you have any trouble making any kind of decisions as well? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Oh, yeah. I mean, trauma brain is a real thing. It's like pregnancy brain. Like, you can't tell a story in like a normal chronological way. I had to sit down with a calendar. I'm like, I'm gonna document some of this before I lose my mind. And so I sat down with a calendar. I'm like, we went to a trip here, and then we did this here, and it was like bouncing all over the place, like true trauma brain. Like you don't have a timeline, you just know things that happened. And so trying to line those up with a calendar and then filling in some of the details, you just you don't realize how much you do compartmentalize, and that's training, right? They're training you to get past it. Just look forward. That was in the past. We're past that. Why do you keep bringing up the past? You feel like an idiot if you continue to bring it up. It's because your body's telling you to bring it up because their pattern hasn't changed. But we don't listen to that always. No, we don't.

SPEAKER_01 24:17

And that's part of our problem. We don't listen to our bodies and our intuition because they're the ones that might we get our mind in it and tell change the narrative.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Yeah. Well, and you know, I was married before. I was just married from 2008 to 2010, and he used that against me. You know, this is why your marriage failed. This is why he left you, this is why you're worthless, this is why no one wants to be in a relationship with you. Like all of these things, he was using everything against me. And of course, I was sharing things out of us having an intimate conversation, not realizing that that was going to be his ammunition. You never want your innermost vulnerabilities, failed marriage, failed relationships, feeling these ways. Like you don't ever want those to be used as ammunition. And he was very skilled at it.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Well, they're good at that. They want to get to know you so well, and to try, you know, they want you to trust them. And so you open up and you tell them, you know, your secrets, your vulnerable points. Yeah. And then it ends up becoming a weapon. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. How has self-defense training supported your healing and empowerment?

SPEAKER_00 25:48

With some of the physical aspects of my relationship and sexual assault and ways that he cornered and intimidated me, I now am empowered to get out of those positions with leverage and technique. So learning that you don't have to be stuck against a wall, against a bed, against a car, in a sexual assault position. Like you have the ability to get out, even if the person is bigger than you. The guy who brought Brazilian jujitsu here was a little man. He was 140 pounds, and he was going up against much larger men, and it was all leverage and technique. So it's very empowering to flip someone over. It's very empowering to get out of a strangulation move. It's very empowering if there's a sexual assault position and you can kick someone in the face and you learn how to angle your body to get out of that. Sounds good.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

What sign should someone trust if they're questioning their relationship?

SPEAKER_00 27:08

If something feels off, it probably is. And I'm not saying to go around and blame the other person, but if something feels off, start patterns. Patterns don't lie. Words do, patterns don't lie. So start documenting that, and that should be your proof, not finding proof that they're cheating or they're doing X, Y, and Z. That's like the ancillary stuff. The proof is in the pattern. So start documenting. I said this, he said this back, but that wasn't reality. How did I feel? I felt uneasy. I felt queasy. I felt like your body's talking to you. Right. Your body is telling you something is wrong and can escalate sickness. Like trauma can escalate into physical illness, physical disabilities, even. Like people have gone numb in their feet, in their hands. I actually lost complete, I was completely numb with my pointer finger and my thumb. I was like, don't worry about it. You're fine. Whatever. I haven't been able to feel these two fingers for decades. And I'm like, no, no, no. This was like overnight. And he kept dismissing and dismissing and dismissing. Well, it was a part of my neck that was severely, I had a disc that had a little thing on it. And going through a chiropractor and doing some physical therapy, it got better. But one of the things is we would walk the beach and my head would be down. And having head down for prolonged periods when you have a neck problem during that, he exacerbated it because when my neck was hurt, he still expected blowjobs. And if I didn't give them, I had hell to pay. So listening to your body, taking notes of the patterns that your body is trying to tell you. And get out as soon as you can. I mean, it's hard to say because someone could have told me you need to get out. I wouldn't have listened. Most people don't listen until the line in the sand is crossed. Each person, when I talk to people about safety planning, you have to decide what is the one thing that that person's gonna do that will have you go, no more, I'm out. What is it? And define it. And when you hit that, you are out. Like your brain is like, I am done, but you have to define it. If you don't, you'll stay in the cycle. Right. So tell us about this book that you've written. So the goal with this book is there are so many people that have loved ones in some type of domestic situation, whether it is financial, physical, emotional, coercive control, religious abuse, whatever part of the abusive cycle or situation that they're in, and they don't understand what's going on. My sister, my cousin, my coworker, my best friend is in this situation, and I don't understand why she can't leave, why she won't leave. So that's kind of the lens I wrote this through. And it's a guidebook, how to approach them, the language to use, how people can miss the signs, what are the signs? And then when it calls, I use my own story as the example. So there's a real life example in there. And as you get to the back of the book, there is a more of a novel. It's one, it's a small chapter because this book wasn't about me, right? It's for other people to understand, but there is a small part of here that is my story and the list of 41 rules he had for me to follow, and the aftermath, and all of the the cycle of abuse and the resources that are available. So it's I think a very useful situation, especially there's a checklist. And I because I didn't realize I was in an abusive situation until I mean, even when I left, because he wasn't always physical. Like, remember, I was denial of the sexual assault. I was in denial of the assault and battery, I was in denial of so many things. And then I read the the circle, the power and control wheel. And I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Going around the whole thing. And I had a story for each of them, except for the children. But then he utilized my dog.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

So going through that, I'm like, oh my God. And I sat in that and cried for a long time, just about that. And then there are so many checklists out there. There's a book called Dangerous Personalities. It is written by an FBI agent. And I started going through there, and I was like, oh my God, this is super duper scary because he exhibits all of these. Like I was highlighting more than was blank going through those. Interesting. What's your book called and where can the listeners get it? It's called Behind the Smile, The Unseen Signs of Emotional Abuse. It's available on Amazon. You'll probably have to type behind the smile in my name, Tiffany Newton. Or you can go to my website, which is TiffanyNewton.com, and you can go to Amazon. It's at Barnes Noble at Walmart Books a Million. So you can go just click on wherever you buy books, and the link will take you there.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Perfect. I'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Sounds like a very interesting book. Thank you. Last question. What's the first step toward empowerment you'd encourage for women today?

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Make and hold promises to yourself. We are not last in the lineup of people in our life. We should be first. And I saw a cute quote: if you're a dog lover, you'll absolutely understand this, but talk to yourself like you would talk to a dog in front of you. Oh my goodness, you're such a good girl. I love you so much. You're so pretty. Like, give yourself we're too hard on ourselves. We live in a world where there is so much pressure of relationships and looking this certain way and doing these certain things. Back it up. Like bring yourself joy. Go on a joy journey. Find something. Make a promise to do X number of steps to do that. You don't have to do the whole thing at the same time, but take the first step, check that first step off the list, do the next step. And as you hold promises to yourself by completing those items in that task to get to where you need to go, you're building your confidence. Because each time you hold a promise to yourself, you're learning to trust yourself again. And that's probably one of the biggest problems I had is learning to trust myself again.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Kisney, thank you so much for sharing your story. It's an incredible story. And kudos to you for taking that pain and finding purpose with writing your book, co-founding Ignite Her and finding New Type Consulting. Good for you. Really appreciate the conversation. Yes, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Bent Not Broken. I hope that this episode reminded you that even through life's toughest moments, you are bent, not broken. If this message inspired you, please share, rate, review, and subscribe, as it helps us reach more women who are ready to rise and rebuild. And until next time, keep living bold and walking in your purpose.