Today we’re diving deep into the powerful journey of Dana S. Diaz, a true warrior and author whose latest book, *Choking on the Scapegoat, Child in a Narcissistic Family*, lays bare her experiences with narcissistic abuse. Dana’s story is one of resilience; she opens up about her tumultuous childhood and the haunting question survivors often grapple with—“Why did you stay?” Through her candid reflections, we’ll explore the long-lasting effects of transgenerational trauma and the steps she took to reclaim her voice and identity. Dana’s insights are not just stories, they’re a lifeline for anyone who has ever felt unseen or unheard. So grab your favorite snack, settle in, and get ready to be inspired by her journey from pain to empowerment!

What a powerful conversation we had today with Dana S. Diaz, a true warrior in the fight against narcissistic abuse! Dana is not just an author; she’s a beacon of hope for many who have felt the oppressive weight of emotional trauma. Her latest book, 'Choking on the Scapegoat,' dives deep into her formative years spent in a narcissistic family, revealing the painful yet transformative path she traveled. Dana's story is one that many can relate to, as she tackles the haunting question of why survivors often stay in abusive situations. Her candid reflections on her childhood experiences of neglect and emotional abuse set the stage for a broader discussion on the nature of love and self-worth.

During our chat, Dana opened up about her upbringing and how it shaped her beliefs about love, making her vulnerable to further abuse in her adult life. She illustrates how emotional scars often go unnoticed, emphasizing that abuse extends beyond physical violence. We also engage in a critical conversation about societal perceptions of abuse, where many fail to recognize the subtleties of emotional manipulation. Dana's insights are not just personal stories; they’re a rallying cry for change, encouraging listeners to acknowledge their worth and seek healing. Her journey from victimhood to empowerment is a testament to the strength we all have within us to rise above our circumstances.

As we conclude, Dana shares valuable advice for those trapped in abusive environments, highlighting practical steps they can take to plan their escape and reclaim their lives. She inspires us to take action and prioritize our well-being over toxic relationships. This episode is not just about overcoming adversity; it’s about embracing our true selves and finding the courage to break free. So, whether you’re on your healing journey or simply want to learn more about the effects of narcissistic abuse, Dana’s words will resonate with you long after the episode ends. Tune in, get inspired, and remember: healing is possible!

Takeaways:

• In today's episode, we dive deep into Dana S. Diaz's journey as a survivor of narcissistic abuse, shedding light on the importance of finding your voice and reclaiming your identity.
• Dana's memoir, 'Choking on the Scapegoat,' reveals the devastating effects of childhood trauma and how it shapes our understanding of love and self-worth.
• We discuss the concept of a scapegoat child in narcissistic families, illustrating how these roles impact mental health and long-term relationships.
• Dana shares the crucial advice of asking yourself what you truly want in life, emphasizing that understanding your desires is key to breaking free from toxic relationships.
• The conversation highlights the insidious nature of emotional abuse, often starting with subtle insults that escalate over time, making it hard to recognize until it's too late.
• Dana's journey of healing underscores the power of storytelling and writing as a means to process trauma and foster resilience, encouraging others to share their truths.

Links referenced in this episode:

• danasdiaz.com

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome to Becoming Bridge Builders, where we explore stories of resilience, healing, and transformation.

Today's guest is someone who encourages whose courage and vulnerability are helping thousands find their voice.

Dana S. Diaz is a survivor, author, speaker, and advocate for victims of narcissistic abuse.

Her latest book, Choking on the Scapegoat, Child in a Narcissistic Family, is a raw and riveting memoir that chronicles the first two decades of her life marked by instability, neglect, and emotional trauma.

In this follow up to her debut memoir, Gasping for Air, Dana answers a haunting question so many survivors face.

Why did you stay?

Through her story, she sheds light on the devastating effects of transgenerational abuse and the long journey toward healing.

Dana, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for allowing me back on.

I'm very happy to be back.

Well, it's good to have you back on again.

You must have been a good guest.

The first time I invited you, so I hope so.

Hopefully I can duplicate that or do better.

That's good.

So I'm going to ask you my favorite question.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Ooh, the best piece of advice I've ever received.

You know, I don't even know like that anybody ever actually said it, but I've seen it so much and it's so simple.

But just be yourself.

I mean, I just think that's the key to life and a big aspect of that.

And I think it actually leads very well into my childhood, which opposed that belief.

But I think when you're yourself, it's so much easier to go through life because you don't chase the approval, you don't chase other people's acceptance of you.

You don't have to belong and do all these things that we do, the people pleasing, all those types of tendencies that seem to make us suffer inside.

You know, it's just, it's okay to be different.

It's okay to be yourself.

So just be yourself.

I love that.

And it's, someone once said you can only be yourself, right?

Well, but look at how many people, you know, are not themselves, that they subdue themselves or they try to be something different so that somebody will approve of them.

And, and you know, that's kind of how some of us were raised, that it's not okay to be who you really are.

You have to be someone else for us to love you.

And it's so hard.

It's so hard to do that because you really don't know who that person you lose yourself in that Mask of all the different people and personalities.

So your new book, Choking on Shame is deeply personal.

What inspired you to write this prequel, a pre sequel to your prequel, I guess, is what it said to Gasping for Air.

Well, after gasping for air, which was about my first marriage, 25 year relationship to an abusive narcissist, a lot of people, the next question, the obvious question was, well, how did you end up in that situation?

And if it was that bad, why did you stay for 25 years?

And for me, the answer was very simple.

It was so obvious even when I was in it.

And it was my childhood, no doubt.

You know, the long and short of it was I was born to an unwed teenage mother who didn't want me, nor any children, I believe, because she had her tubes tied immediately after I was born and she married an abusive narcissist who wanted me even less.

So I was verbally abused, physically abused, neglected emotionally and in many other ways.

And, and it, it did not lead me to, to any sense of esteem or self worth or a feeling that I deserved better than what I was given, which wasn't much.

So of course I was a perfect target for somebody who wanted servitude in a partner or wife.

And that's what happened, unfortunately.

So growing up in that environment, how did that shape and define your understanding of things like love, identity, even survival?

Well, it absolutely shaped my ideas, but in a very skewed perspective.

I could give so many examples of ways my mother verbally and non verbally impressed upon me that mistreatment equaled love.

But what made me sad was the times that she did actually say it.

But every time I was being physically abused by her husband and literally crying for her to help me, and she's just a few feet away, but she would turn and wash the dishes or do whatever and pretend that it wasn't happening, she was telling me that it was okay for this to be happening.

And then you follow that with this man and my mother telling me they loved me, even though that didn't feel like what love is supposed to be, it was impressing in my heart that this is what happens in a loving relationship.

But in fact, as I was getting older, preteen teenage years, my mother, when I would complain to her about, you know, my feelings about the physical abuse, the verbal abuse, and even her, you know, denial and neglect of it all, she would always say, well, he wouldn't treat you so badly if he didn't care about you so much.

And those words still ring in, in my brain and in my heart, and I find that that is part of a very large part of why I stayed in my first marriage.

Because I didn't even like my first husband the first time I met him.

But I thought, oh, well, I better latch on, because nobody else is going to want me.

You know, I was told that, too, that nobody would ever love me, nobody ever wanted me.

So it's these beliefs that just rang through, you know, my mind that led me into these situations, that I better just attach myself to whoever would tolerate me, you know, and.

And for whatever amount of time, because that's all I deserved.

Because, in fact, I was even told many times growing up that I shouldn't even exist.

I shouldn't have even been born.

And so, again, just going back to those feelings of worthlessness, I thought, well, if this is what life gave me, I'm not even supposed to be here, so I should just be glad that somebody is, you know, suffering my existence.

So in order for you to get to that place or your mom to get to that place, she had to have something in her past that brought her there.

So what led to her accepting this is what love is and it's okay for my child also to have love like this?

Yeah.

I would never presume to know what people are thinking, but certainly my mother did come from an abusive household.

Talk about a narcissistic and abusive father.

Her father also was an alcoholic who had done things.

And forgive me, anyone who's listening, I freely speak my truth.

So I don't mean to trigger anybody, but he went so far as to putting my mother and her brothers in a tub when they were little and putting a gun to their head and playing Russian roulette, things like that.

So, you know, he would bring women home and be intimate with them.

With my grandmother sleeping in the next room.

It just.

I can't even imagine the horrific home that that must have been to grow up in.

And then, you know, my mother being only 16 when she got pregnant with me, she.

She.

I don't think she.

Well, I. I can't imagine that she would have had any chance of healing from that or even knowing what to do with her own trauma, never mind raising a baby without passing that trauma on to me.

And that's exactly what happened.

When I look in retrospect, I see that all that shame, all that neglect, all that stuff that she.

She basically burdened me with was just the stuff.

Stuff she wasn't willing to take accountability of for herself.

And.

And even before that, I've.

I'VE spoken even recently with my grandma, who, God love her, she's 84, but, you know, she's at that point where she's talking more openly about her life and her childhood and.

And it's actually very sad, but she had very similar experiences as I did with her stepfather.

So I see that this is just a generational pattern that I have apparently been the chosen one who has been assigned to break it all.

So we will see, because I'm the one who decided to break it.

But I also have a child who grew up in.

In a home with an abusive narcissist.

So, you know, I always joke with him.

He's 22.

And I'm like, no pressure, but, you know, it's on you to break the chain, dude.

So tell us a little bit about how you broke that chain.

Cause it had to be very difficult to get out of that cycle if it's been three or four generations.

What.

How did you break that cycle?

Well, you know, I came to the point where I had to decide if this is what I really wanted and what it was.

You know, the short version of it is towards about the 24th year, 23rd, 24th year of my 25 years with my ex husband, I became very, very physically ill with all kinds of symptoms.

I mean, a few dozen symptoms that didn't make any sense and did not even seem related.

Mayo Clinic ended up realizing that I had so much cortisol, that stress hormone, running through my body at such extraordinarily high rates that my body had.

Basically, my white blood cells had attacked themselves, thinking they were attacking the threat.

But I became autoimmune.

I developed a rare lung syndrome.

That's the scratchiness you hear in my voice.

It's likened to having COPD and fibromyalgia all at once.

But more of my symptoms go towards fibromyalgia.

But it was at that point that I.

The doctor sat me down and he said, I can't give you a pill.

I can't give you a surgery.

There is something in your life causing you all this stress.

Whatever it is, if you don't get rid of it or resolve it in some way, he said, your body is shutting down.

I mean, at that point, I was down to 93 scale skeletal pounds.

I was so weak, I could barely tear toilet paper off the roll.

In the mornings, I had a breathing machine, an oxygen machine, and a backpack that I had to wear a mask on, you know, just to get through the day.

And that didn't make sense for somebody that previous to that was very healthy.

I ran five miles a day, coached the cross country team.

I ate apples and hard boiled eggs for lunch, like this should not be happening to me.

And it was at that point that I realized that was my deal breaker.

That was the moment that I had to choose whether I was going to sacrifice myself for my then husband and for, I guess also for my mother and stepfather and anyone else that had ever asked me to sacrifice myself in deference to them and my servitude to them, or do I choose me.

And the irony of that for me is that my deal breaker should have been something very different.

I mean, most people would say, especially in a marriage, oh, if they cheat on me, I'm out of here.

You know, you hear that all the time.

Well, let me tell you, it's not always the case.

Most often it is not.

You have time invested with this person, you're interacting and intermingled with their family.

You have children, you have a mortgage, you have the dog, you have whatever.

You know, it's not easy to just say to hell with all of that, we're just going to move on and do our own thing.

So I stayed for many things and many reasons.

And certainly I had many reasons to leave.

Not just infidelity, but there was physical threat to my life, in fact multiple times.

And even people coming forward saying that he was planning, you know, my demise.

And yet I stayed.

And so the irony is, is that it took my own body turning on me for me to wake up and have enough self respect to say, okay, I'm, it's time to say no, it's time to say this isn't okay, and time to say yes to myself that I get to live and I get to live on my terms.

And part of that is not being married to you, sir.

And, and part of that is also, you know, not having a relationship anymore with my mother and stepfather.

So out of that experience, you've become a voice for victims of narcissistic abuse.

What do you wish more people knew about the long term impacts of the trauma you just described?

I think the most important thing to think about is you know that I think typically in society you don't consider abuse or domestic violence beyond what you see meaning, forgive the flippant verbiage, but you know, unless you're shot or shanked like, or have a black eye, nobody believes you.

And the thing is, is that abuse and domestic violence, more often than not, do not start with, you know, I married Chucky and he's Running around with a butcher knife.

Usually it's the beginnings, I think, start in the language when this person is insulting you, when there's vulgar language and references to you, that's just disrespectful.

And somebody who loves you, even somebody who cares about you or likes you a little bit, does not talk to you that way.

And I feel like it's kind of like if you think of a little kid, when our children are growing up, they get to that nice age, what, five, six years old, where they start testing things.

They start, you know, maybe they say the word crap instead of some, you know, an S word or an F word, like they're testing you out.

Maybe they're a little older than that now that I'm thinking about it.

But you know what I'm talking about.

And it's kind of like that testing ground.

They're using the language, they're disrespecting you, humiliating you, embarrassing you, diminishing you, demeaning you to see if you're going to stick around.

And then if you do, you, you know, as they're stripping away your sense of, of self worth and self esteem, then they start doing, you know, then things start flying around the room and they're punching holes in walls and slamming doors.

It escalates.

And that's the insidiousness of abuse and domestic violence.

Because certainly when I got with my ex husband, yeah, the language was there and he was slamming doors and, and things were being punched and what have you.

I never in my wildest dreams would have ever expected that 25 years later, this man was actually making attempts on my life to where I would have to call the authorities crying because I honestly thought he was going to succeed.

I would have never guessed that.

Nobody thinks that's going to happen to them, and nobody thinks it's going to happen to somebody they know.

But let's be real.

One in three women globally are in an abusive relationship with a current or a former intimate partner, and one in four men, I mean, that's a lot.

That's 25 to 33% of all people are being abused in some way by a partner.

But our criminal justice system does not recognize it until you actually suffer some physical, you know, consequences of it.

So it's really upsetting to me that people then don't understand what abuse and domestic violence really is until they see somebody physically affected by it.

When there's so many other things, there's so many other ways somebody could suffer tremendous lifelong mental impacts even without the physical Violence as an aspect of that.

If I remember, before you left, you had a plan and you had brought people in on your plan.

Kind of tell us a little bit about what you think people should do who are caught in abusive situations, who are trying to figure out how to leave.

What are some things they need to do to prepare themselves to leave.

Absolutely.

You know, it's funny because I will share that plan, but now that I'm thinking about it, even in my childhood, because I thought, well, when I was a kid, I didn't really have a choice.

Even child services bought mom and stepdad's act of, oh, you know, we have this difficult daughter we don't know what to do with.

You know, even though I had handprints around my neck and such.

But I, even at 12 years old, was stashing my babysitting money every five or ten dollars.

And every $20 grandma sent for my birthday, I was stashing it.

I was getting ready so that when I was 18 and could leave.

And lo and behold, I found myself doing the same thing in my first marriage.

Every little, you know, if I got a little bonus at work, if, if somebody gave me, you know, again, grandma sending the, the hundred dollars for my birthday, because you get more as you get older, but, you know, getting the money for, in the envelopes for birthday or Christmas or whatever, I stashed it away.

So what I did was I went and God love Walmart, you can get for $50, a fireproof, waterproof safe that has a little handle.

It's about the size of a nice, you know, large purse.

But I put, I stashed away money in there.

I put all of my legal documents in there, like my Social Security card, passport, copies of my driver's license, anything, you know, really important.

I also bought a jump drive, a large storage drive where I uploaded all of my tax documents, bank documents, bank statements and such, as well as any pictures I had.

You know, because now we are in this digital era where, so that way I had all of this in the safe.

I called it a grab and go.

Because that way, if I had the opportunity and I knew I could get out of there safely with my son, with the animals, that I didn't have to go back.

Because people say, you know, I want to have my, my clothes and my furniture.

Screw that, that can all be replaced and you can make more money, but you need to have something to sustain you, whether it's even just enough money to stay at the Red Roof Inn for one night or a few nights until you get settled somewhere else to make sure you can eat, make sure your children can eat, but just have something, anything ready to go so that you don't have to go back.

Good, good information.

In your book, you talk about the concept of a scapegoat child.

Can you explain what that means and how it manifests itself in the narcissic family dynamics?

Absolutely.

I mean, the way it manifests is that it's decided.

It's kind of.

I don't know if they, like, had a little huddle and decided it was me or if it was just this unspoken agreement, but I was, at least for my mother, even before my stepfather came along.

Again, the fact that she was an unwed teenager who did not want children, that is an important fact.

Here I am.

And in fact, I don't think she was planning on taking me home from the hospital because it was my grandma and great grandma that showed up at the hospital to see their firstborn grand and great grandchild.

And they weren't going to leave there without me.

Grandma paid the bill, and it was actually great grandma who took me home, not my mother.

So I think that my mother having been sort of forced into the role that she never wanted in the first place, set the stage for her to be able to blame me for all that was wrong in her life.

And that's essentially what a scapegoat is.

The scapegoat is the person in the family who is blamed, even if they had no part in it, didn't even have to be there.

I mean, it's not like I was present at my conception.

But, you know, it was my fault that I was born and.

And it went into so many things.

It's the little.

It was the little comments.

I remember multiple times when I was little how she would call me a mistake or refer to me as an accident.

She would say that she always wanted a boy and not a girl, so I was the wrong gender.

She had wanted to name me Daniel, but since I didn't come out a boy, that was my fault too.

Apparently.

She had to name me Dana because she wanted to name me Danielle, but I'd be too dumb.

She said to me, spell that.

So she had to shorten it to Dana.

And it's just all these little things.

But what people don't realize about even just taking bullying and verbal abuse as it is, even one insult from anybody can actually last in your brain for an average of 20 years.

Average.

So imagine being told multiple times a day all these terrible things about your over the span of the first 18 years of your life.

And.

And then beyond that, how that makes you feel as a human being.

I mean, versus a compliment.

You know, when you.

When somebody compliments you, it's forgotten.

In an average of 30 days, it's gone.

But that one little insult stays for an average of 20 years.

And.

And what happens in our brains.

I love neuroscience.

Forgive me for this little tangent, but this is what I need people to understand.

It's not like I just could decide that I didn't want to believe those things.

Your brain actually looks for evidence in the world every single day of the things that you're told of, the things you repeatedly hear about yourself, about other people, about politics, religion, everything.

And when you're repeatedly exposed to those beliefs, your brain begins to accept.

Accept them as beliefs.

In fact, they say it only takes hearing something two to seven times, that's it, for your brain to actually accept it as a truth, regardless of the validity of it.

So it's.

It's very sad to me that we are so careless with how we treat each other and so careless with the words we speak, particularly to the people that we love.

Wow, that's.

I didn't know that.

That's very interesting.

Your healing process had to be a very long and difficult one, and you said that writing kind of helped with that process.

But how is it writing something so emotional, so personal, was it hard to relive and bring up those emotions, to put it down on paper?

Writing choking on shame was probably one of the most horrible and traumatic things I ever had to go through.

More so than living those first 18 years of my life.

Honestly, I really don't like when people call themselves broken, but I found myself many times during the writing of that book saying that this book was just breaking me all over again.

I suffered so many migraines and stomach issues and days of depression that I would spend in bed.

But the beautiful part of that is that my intellectual mind reminded me that, you know, when, you know, I hate to call it a failure, but when we find ourselves down and out, that's an opportunity to reflect on what it is that's bringing us down what it is, you know, even if it's, let's say, a failure, that's a, you know, that setback, as they say, is setting you up.

It's an opportunity to, you know, for feedback for yourself.

It's an opportunity to reflect on that.

And.

And what is it about this that I need to explore so that I can be better next time, so that I can cope with this better so that I can accept this truth or whatever it is.

But yes, writing for me is very healing because we know our.

We know our history, we know our memories, but they're just swirling around there.

I mean, if my brain was like me, a type, a Capricorn, it would have file cabinet and it would have proper files with the memory stored, you know, and there's certain categories, but that's not how our brains work.

They're just, you know, I always think of like Linus in the Peanuts comic strips where we.

He just had that messy scribble above his head, you know, that's kind of how our brains work.

And so when you're writing down these memories and really diving into the details, it's outside of you.

So when you're rereading it, you can see patterns.

You can recognize those details that about yourself and other people that maybe you didn't recognize when you were in that experience or even thinking about it.

So it really just gives you a different perspective.

It's never going to be objective, but it's much more objective than curing it in our brains and in our hearts.

So having lived through this, what advice do you have for somebody who may be recognizing that they've been affected by a narcissistic abuser?

I think my best advice is just to really ask yourself what you want.

Because that was the turning point for me when I finally asked myself, what do I want?

Because nobody had ever asked me that.

It didn't serve their interests for me to want anything, in fact, so it was never something that came up.

But when I asked myself what I wanted, I mean, I knew right away.

And I think that if you ask anyone that, you know, whether it's a short term or a long term desire or goal, everybody knows in their heart of hearts what they want, you know, And I wanted to be married to somebody that liked me, at least, if not loved me and respected me.

And I wanted to travel and I wanted to actually pursue a degree in journalism, not work as a housekeeper like my ex husband had me.

You know, I wanted to be loved and appreciated.

I don't think that was much to ask.

And so then my next question was, can I have that in the circumstances that I'm in?

And well, I think we could all agree that was not going to happen.

Sadly, I'm not promoting divorce, but it was necessary for me to separate, you know, and move on from that marriage, as it was also very necessary for me to remove myself from the toxicity that my mother and stepfather, even as an adult, even into my 40s.

And, you know, we're bringing into my life, it was not healthy for me, and I could not heal until I was removed from it.

So it's just about, what do I want?

And can I.

Can I have that?

Is it possible for me to have that here?

And if it's not, then you have to kind of see, you know, what that means for you.

What does that mean?

Are there people?

Is it your circumstances?

Is it your location?

Is there something you can do to get yourself to that place where you want to be?

We talk about your healing.

What role?

Because this is important to me as a pastor.

What role does faith play in your healing process?

Well, it was a tremendous part of it.

You know, I was born and raised Catholic.

But regardless, you know, for all of us who know and love God, you know, one of the most impressionable statements that anybody ever made to me was actually from an African missionary priest that I befriended.

And he saw how distraught I was over my situation, especially when, you know, my mother and I parted ways, because that's a terrible thing, to not have your mother in your life.

And he said, but you're a child of God.

You're not your mother's child.

You are a child of God.

And he said, yes, your mother called you a mistake, but you are no mistake.

God does not make mistakes.

God meant for you to be here.

And just hearing him say that and then repeating that in my mind, because I believe that I just had never seen that because I was so focused on all of these people in my circumstances that were telling me I wasn't supposed to be and that I shouldn't be.

But when I realized that's right, God doesn't make mistakes.

And he made me exactly who I am and what I am and put me in exactly the situations that I needed to be in in order for me to be who I am now kind of all came full circle.

But had I not gone through all those things, how could I truly relate and verbalize for those who are still victims of circumstances like that to be able to connect with them and help them get to a better place?

So it's kind of a.

It's it.

To me, just knowing that is healing, knowing that God had his protective hand over me, his child.

I'm getting chills now.

All of those years growing up and in that abusive marriage, he always knew that I would be okay.

He meant for me to endure that, but he was always, always protecting me through that to make sure I made it to the other side so that I could be here exactly in this moment doing what I am doing.

Wow, what a powerful testimony.

So I hear there's a.

There's a trilogy you're working on.

Tell us more about what can readers expect in the next phase of Dana's life?

Oh, yeah.

Well, the third book in the trilogy is out.

It is called Rising from the Ashes.

Breaking the Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse.

Honestly, it is probably the.

The lightest, safest book for anybody to read in this trilogy.

The first and second one are very raw.

And honestly, the second one that we were just talking about, about my childhood, it has not done well numbers wise, because so many.

I mean, pretty much everybody that picks it up, they get to about the third chapter in and they.

They just can't do it and they say, sorry, I just.

It reminds me of a child called it that book from the 90s.

That, that's.

That's a real tough read.

It's hard to.

To face that kind of reality.

But Rising from the Ashes is just kind of giving everybody the end of the story.

I don't know that it's actually over, but it kind of brings everything to a closure.

So because we have a reappearance, you know, kind of tying up the loose ends with my ex and, you know, it's about the healing and it's about, you know, how I even.

There's reappearances of my mother and stepfather and some of my adult interactions with them and our final interactions as the cases.

But how I came to terms with all of that and how my perspectives changed.

So it's definitely a lighter read.

There's nothing, you know, really that anybody would have to worry about as far as like the.

The actual abuse taking place.

Cause the abuse is done by book three.

It's more the overcoming and the coming to terms.

That's great.

So I love to ask my guests this question, you know, this is probably coming.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I always say love.

And it's funny because I was obsessed with hearts.

I mean, as early as I can remember as a little girl, 3, 4 years old, I remember my grandma giving me these little red garnet earrings.

And I've always been obsessed with hearts.

And so I think it's ironic that what was the one thing I was always chasing in life was love, right?

But I came to find out in.

In my ripe age here of 49, about to turn 50, that I'm the love.

My love for myself is in me.

My love that I can give other people that's in me.

I God is love.

I am love because I am a part of him.

And so it's always going to be love.

Love is always the answer.

Great.

So in something new for the podcast is you got to pick your surprise question number between 1 and 5 for your surprise question.

Okay, I'll go in the middle with number three.

What's something that you've never been able to do well?

Okay.

I've never been able to sing well and it's the one thing I always wanted to do.

I was that little girl with like, you know, the hairbrush microphone in front of the mirror trying to sing like Madonna and you know all that.

Yeah.

It just never.

I do, though.

I love me some Taylor Swift.

And let me tell you, I belted out in the car like nobody's business.

And I don't care, but nobody needs to hear me.

That's too funny.

So working leaders find you, Dana, and about what you're working on and also get your books.

Yes, absolutely.

I would just say go to my website, Danasdiaz.com you will find the memoir trilogy there.

And incidentally, it's in print, ebook and audiobook, all three formats, all three books.

I also have all the links to my socials on the website.

I put out a weekly blog.

There are more things coming that I'm going to keep to myself, but there are more things coming.

But if anybody incidentally does want to read the first two chapters of my first book, Gasping for Air, you can go to my website.

Put your email in there and you will be emailed the first two chapters for free so you can try it out before you buy it.

Well, Dana, thank you so much for your bravery, your honesty, your commitment to helping others find their way out of the darkness.

Choking on shame is more than a memoir.

It's a lifetime for anyone who's ever felt unseen, unheard, or unloved.

For our listeners, we'll include this link to Dana's website, her books and resources for survivors in her show notes.

If you or someone you know is struggling with the effects of narcissistic abuse, know that healing is possible and you are not alone.

This is Reverend Dr. Keith Hayne.

You've been listening to Becoming bridge wielders.

Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep choosing hope.