Shownotes
In this episode of Soul Sparks, hosted by Saima, Kristen Crabtree shares her deeply personal journey from emotional conditioning to self-truth.
This conversation is for anyone feeling stuck, confused, or quietly unsettled in their life. Kristen unpacks how awareness—not strength—is the real beginning of change, and how small moments of self-trust can guide you back to clarity, authenticity, and inner alignment.
About the Guest:
Kristen Crabtree is an author and self-revelation guide.
After leaving a psychologically controlling 22-year marriage, she now helps others reconnect with their inner truth and rebuild self-trust.
Episode Chapter:
00:00 – Opening: What if your life isn’t truly yours?
02:15 – The first quiet shift toward truth
06:40 – When your body speaks before your mind
11:20 – Learning to trust inner signals
16:05 – Why strength isn’t where change begins
20:30 – Small moments that build self-awareness
25:10 – The tipping point: when staying becomes unbearable
Key Takeaways:
- Awareness often begins as subtle discomfort, not clarity
- Your body communicates truth before your mind understands
- Ignoring inner signals makes them louder over time
- Small intentional actions build self-trust gradually
- You don’t need strength to begin—just honesty and awareness
How to Connect With the Guest:
- Website: https://www.paramourparadox.com/
- Book: Be The You, That’s More You Than You Have Ever Been (available via major online retailers, including Amazon)
- Contact: Guest email is listed at the bottom of paramourparadox.com
- Facebook: facebook.com/paramourparadox, facebook.com/destinationtrueyou2.0
- Instagram: @paramourparadox, @destinationtrueyou
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Transcripts
00:00:08 Saima: Today's conversation is about what happens when you take that lens off, and what becomes possible when you finally see yourself clearly. Welcome to Soul Sparks the show with short Conversations open long doors. I'm Simon, and today I'm joined by someone whose life and work carry a quiet but profound courage. Kirsten Crabtree is an author and self revelation guide who helps people move from a life ship by conditioning to one rooted in their own truth. After leaving a twenty two year psychologically controlling marriage, Kristen now guides others through the inner work of awareness, emotional patterns, and learning to trust themselves again. So this is going to be a meaningful conversation. Stay close. Kristen, welcome to the show.
00:01:00 Kristen Crabtree: Hi, how are you?
00:01:03 Saima: I'm fantastic. Kristen, I'm glad that you were able to join today.
00:01:07 Kristen Crabtree: Me too. It's great to be here.
00:01:12 Saima: Mhm. So, Kristen, you know, before we get into the heart of it. I'd like to start here. When you look back now, what was the very first moment you felt something shift. Not the dramatic turning point, but the quiet one. The first crack of light.
00:01:31 Kristen Crabtree: So, you know, the the interesting thing about that question is that it's not usually, I think, you know, for myself or for people I work with something that you can trace back to one specific moment. I can tell you that I left my marriage in a place of confusion and fog, not clarity. So there was a moment before I left where I realized things were terribly wrong, but I didn't know what that meant. So you could, in a way say that that was a moment of clarity. Um, but it looked like a moment of a horrible anxiety attack, basically. Um, but that moment, that shift, I was on a bathroom floor having an anxiety attack, but my fear shifted from I, I can't, um, leave. I was too fearful to leave to I can't stay. The teeter totter tipped and again, I, I can't say that there was clarity or spark, but it was the moment where the bear that had been chasing me was finally scarier than the abyss in front of me.
00:03:04 Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.
00:03:06 Saima: That's incredibly honest Christian, and we describe that moment. It doesn't sound dramatic from the outside, but internally it feels like everything is unraveling at once. And that mix of, uh, like I said, loving a marriage and still feeling that confusion and fog that such a difficult place to be because it's not clear cut. It's not obvious, obvious. And that makes it even harder to trust what you're feeling. And I feel that moment, like you said, um, on the bathroom floor, it feels like one of those, uh, breaking points where the body is almost speaking, where the mind hasn't fully processed yet. And what really stands out is that you knew something was wrong even without having the language for it. That kind of inner knowing is really powerful, even when it's scary.
00:03:55 Kristen Crabtree: Absolutely. You summarized that beautifully. And and that is that is the moment as it appeared to me. And, and, you know, as a similar story could be told by so many people who have stepped out of the existence that wasn't right. Um, you know, and sometimes the existence not being right is very subtle and sometimes it's very dramatic. You know, whether you're talking about abuse or just not aligned. Um, you know, there's different different extremes, different experiences, but I think, um, the takeaways that you just provided are, are dead on.
00:04:41 Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.
00:04:43 Saima: That makes sense. And that's really striking, Christian, the way, you know, like you said, it's not a, it's not a personal moment. It's almost something universal. Like so many people have that quiet realization where something doesn't feel right, even if they can't explain it. And, you know, that sense of knowing without clarity, that feeling that something is off, even when everything on the surface might look fine, That can be such a disorienting place to be. It also makes those moments feel less isolating, like there's a shared human experience in that kind of awakening. So for someone who finds themselves in that same space where something doesn't feel right, but, you know, they can fully name it yet, what would you say is the first step toward understanding what that feeling is trying to tell them?
00:05:33 Kristen Crabtree: Yeah, it's a very powerful question. It really boils down to, um, trust. And there's a lot of different angles that it can be answered by. One of the things that I teach people is that, um, our true self, whatever you want to call it, that, that part of us, that is the real us, it can't text us, unfortunately. Right? So the only way it really has to communicate with us, or one of the main ways that it has to communicate with us is through emotions, through feelings. And you can see that, you know, when you reflect on, um, times in your life when you've been hit over the head with a two by four, so to speak. You know, you've been knocked down due to, um, you know, a disease or a spouse leaving you or, um, you know, something really traumatic. Um, if you trace back a little ways, you start to see a pattern of communication that you ignored. So it usually looks something like this. I'm going to paint a story of, um, you're looking for a job, you're, you're doing job interviews and you go to this job interview and there's just something off about the environment or the boss and you leave there going, oh my God, there's no way I can work there. But they offer you the job and you drag your feet and time clicks away and nobody else offers a job. So you take it and you go to the job. And, you know, within the first couple of weeks, you're just feeling awful. Like you get sort of sick to your stomach as you're driving to work. Or maybe you can't sleep at night, or you wake up with headaches or have migraines and, um, you just keep working through it. And then every time your boss walks by, your muscles tense, then, you know, a week or two later you start vomiting before you go to work because you're just so stressed out and you ignore that. And then, you know, I don't know, maybe a month later you wind up in the hospital thinking you're having a heart attack, you know, and the message continues. And what's happening there is you're your true self, your truth, your inner voice, your higher self, whatever you want to call it is trying to, to communicate with you. It's trying to tell you, don't do this, you know, don't go this way. This is the bad direction. And the longer you ignore it and the more you ignore it, the louder it has to be to get your attention. And so it goes from that little gurgle in your stomach to knocking you on your butt. And that's, that's when you know, okay, something needs to change. So if you're able to identify that before you get to the two by four, you can start to make little changes. And that will help your true self, your truth, know that you're listening. So if you're getting the message and you get it soon enough before you know, again, it wipes you out. If you can start to just look at little teeny changes that you can make in your life that might, um, uh, assuage, um, the situation. So, you know, perhaps it's, you need to start setting boundaries, um, or, uh, request a different desk in the office to, you know, not be near the toxic coworker or whatever, you know, those little things will at least create some self trust, even if they're not the big solution. They will create enough self trust that the voice will start to get louder in a good way, not louder. Like I need to hit you over the head, but louder. Like you can actually hear it better.
00:09:33 Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.
00:09:35 Saima: I, I would say that's a really grounded way of explaining it. Christian. Like the previous answer, which is that how trust isn't something that suddenly appears. It's built through those small moments and small actions. That's really a remarkable point. And what you're pointing to, those everyday signals we tend to brush past that's so real. Like the body reacting, the stress before something even happens. That feeling of resistance, we notice it, but we often override it. And what you're saying is almost like a learning a language we have been ignoring. And once we start paying attention, patterns begin to show up very clearly. And I really like how you bring it back to small practical tips like setting boundaries, changing environments. It makes it feel doable, not overwhelming, I would say. Now there's a word people often use when they, you know, talk about breaking free from toxic environments or controlling environments. And that word is strength. But I wonder if that framing, you know, sometimes misses something. So what do you think people get wrong about what it actually takes to begin seeing ourselves differently?
00:10:48 Kristen Crabtree: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I was not strong when I made my biggest changes at all, you know, um, so strength is, you know, that's kind of something that you start to feel after you make the shift. So. I think what is really. Key to, um, making change is awareness. And even if awareness isn't clear. The moments that you get, um, you know, even if they're brief, brief one, two second moments of clarity, that is what starts to create the space for change regardless of whether you feel strong. So there are a lot of ways to get awareness to get those moments of space. The word that scares people, that is, you know, really the, the strongest solution is meditation. But when you're in a place of chaos and trauma, or even just daily, um, busyness, the idea of meditation or even the practical experience of it, it feels very impossible and winds up making most people feel like failures. So I like to break that down in a, in a easier, more bite size, um, portion that then enables you to have those spaces so that you can start to discern alignment and authenticity from adaptation. And there, there are more tools of what people would call mindfulness, but I think people also have a misunderstanding of what mindfulness can look like. So one of the things that I suggest people do when they're just starting to try to find a way to create those moments of space, is to do something very simple with great intention. So it can be chewing your first two bites of food or even your first bite of food. Even if it's a McDonald's hamburger. Like it doesn't matter. Um, let's take the not most healthy meal, a McDonald's hamburger, sorry, McDonald's. And we'll, um, unwrap it with great care. We will look at the bun and the meat and the cheese. We will smell it as it comes to our nose. We will smell the grease and love it. We will take a bite of it. We will taste the the different flavors, the salt, the grease, the meat, the cheese. The sort of sweetness of the ketchup will experience all the different textures in our mouth. So that is mindfulness and mindfulness done in teeny tiny little moments like that is what then creates enough space. It's quieting of the monkey mind and the monkey mind is that internal chatter that explodes in our heads all day long. And if we can't break through that, then there's no way for peace. There's no way for clarity. There's no way for strength. None of that can happen. Um, so even just chewing one bite of food with intention will start to create a habit and a calmness in those little moments of awareness, bite, intention, whatever you want to call it, that you can then tap into to start to develop the self-trust. Um, the strength, the clarity and all those things that will help move you into a richer experience of life.
00:14:59 Speaker 4: Mhm.
00:15:00 Saima: That's a really powerful reframe, Christian, because I think so many people are waiting, you know, to feel strong before they make a move. And what you're saying is it doesn't actually work that way. It's almost the opposite. That change begins in a place that can feel uncertain, even fragile. Not full clarity, you know, not not that level of confidence, just this awareness that something isn't right. And that part you mentioned about awareness, even when it's not fully clear, that really stands out to me because most of us dismiss those early signals. If they don't come with certainty, we think, maybe I'm overthinking, or maybe it's not that bad. But those small moments of noticing they are actually the beginning of seeing things as they are. And it also feels like awareness is what slowly loosens that grip, even before any big decision is made. Just being able to see something differently starts to change, you know, our relationship with it. And there's something very honest in what you said, like you weren't strong in that moment. It wasn't strength driving the change. It was awareness and that makes it a lot more human and honestly a more accessible, you know, for someone listening who doesn't feel strong right now.
00:16:19 Kristen Crabtree: Yeah, I remember actually at one point, um, my, I called my, my father, um, and was, you know, crying to him about how I was, you know, miserable, didn't know why and wanted to leave, but couldn't leave. And he said something to me about you're so strong, you can do it. And I was like, I am so tired of people telling me to be strong. I'm not strong, you know? And that's the place that, um, I start working with people when they're in that space when they're so, um, lost and clouded and just feeling, you know, like curling up into a fetal position. Um, and that is that's where the work begins. It's, you know, often when you are right there that the change is around the corner, but but you have to find the path to it.
00:17:19 Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.
00:17:21 Saima: That makes sense. And, uh, that's a really raw moment, Kristen. The honesty in that, you know, being on the phone saying I'm miserable. There's something very real about that kind of breaking point and what you said about people calling you strong, but, you know, like you were, you weren't feeling that inside. That really stands out. Sometimes those levels don't match what someone is actually experiencing, and it can almost make it harder to admit what's really going on. It feels.
00:17:48 Speaker 1: Like.
00:17:49 Saima: That moment wasn't about strength at all. It was about truth. You know, just being able to say, this is where I am without trying to hold it together. And maybe that's where things actually begin. Like I said, you know, not in being strong, but in being honest enough to let someone see what's really happening. So when you look back at that moment now, what do you think shifted internally after you allowed yourself to stay out that loud?
00:18:24 Kristen Crabtree: Oh, um, you know, really it was for me what allowed me to take the step. Um, is that tipping point that went from the fear being, um, about leaving, you know, I, I can't leave, I'm not strong enough to leave. I'm afraid of what would happen if I leave. Will I be able to, you know, provide for myself. Will I be safe? Will I be able to afford, you know, being on my own? That fear was what was dominant for so long. And then there came that moment on the bathroom floor where the fear became, oh my God, if I stay, I'm going to die, is what it felt like. Now, would I have really, I don't know, you know, maybe I attempted suicide when I was thirteen, so maybe, um, but it felt that way. And so the, the fear, as I put it, that the bear chasing me, um, became, um, so much scarier than the unknown abyss that I was standing in front of. Um and I, you know, I do think that sometimes it's, it's that tipping point, um, that we have to hit before we can actually take the step that will bring us to clarity.
00:19:57 Speaker 4: Mhm. Mhm.
00:19:59 Saima: That's really remarkable, the way you, uh, I would say the way you phrased that, like that's a really heavy place to be. And the way you describe that, um, tipping point, it's not just discomfort anymore. It's realizing that you can't leave, you know, keep leaving the same way that kind of awareness, uh, can be frightening, but it's also incredibly clarifying. And sharing something like that takes a lot of honesty. It gives people listening permission to acknowledge how serious things can feel without, you know, minimizing it or pushing it aside. It sounds like that moment, as difficult as it was, became a line. You, you know, you couldn't cross back over with something and you knew things, you know, things had to change. So, uh, Christian, for people who felt something in this conversation and want to find you, go deeper with your work or learn more. Where can they reach you and what's the best place to start?
00:20:57 Kristen Crabtree: Mhm. Thank you. So there's, um, really two directions you can take if you are ready to chat. Um, I do have a place you can go to have a free conversation with me. And this really is my passion work. It's what my truth wants me to do. So there's not going to be some big sales pitch. It's um, you two point zero dot com y o u the number two, the word point, the number zero dot com. Alternatively, if that feels like a big jump for you. Um, I do have a book called Be the You that's more you than You've Ever been and a bunch of other supporting things like a journal and a course and so forth, which can be found at paramour paradox dot com. And I'm sure that you'll be putting, um, that website in, in the, um, links for people.
00:21:49 Speaker 4: Mhm, mhm.
00:21:50 Saima: That's surely going to be beneficial for all our listeners out there. Kristen. Thank you so much. This was exactly what Soul Sparks is for the kind of conversation that starts something in the person listening, even when they can't quite name it yet. And to everyone who joined us today, you don't have to have it all figured out. Just stay curious about yourself. That curiosity is the beginning. This has been soul sparks and we'll see you in the next one.
