From Survival to Sovereignty | Part III

If you’ve made it this far in this 3-part series, I’m grateful that you’re still here.

I had to take some time with this one:

1. Because I’m a mama first and my babies needed me, and

2. Because I had to consider the direction I wanted this to go—ensuring that you don’t walk away thinking I’m centralizing my relationships with men and their role in my life. Rather, that you see the beauty in what transpires when a woman makes the often difficult choice to not only recognize when an attachment is no longer healthy and when toxic behaviors evolve into repeated patterns but that she can still break cycles and transform her life even if she doesn't know what that looks like or what’s on the other side.

Shall we get back into it?

Here we go…

Though it’s been a few weeks since this trend first hit social media, I’m still in deep reflection about what January ’16 looked like versus now and all of the magical but often grueling transformations that have unfolded since leaving what was, by far, the hardest relationship of my life. For just a moment, I'd like to revisit why it was “the hardest,” because on the surface, it would be easy to say it was because I was cheated on, emotionally abused, consistently disrespected, at the mercy of a man’s refusal to lead, refusal to offer safety when I needed it most, and his utter disregard for my feelings...

But the truth?

It was the hardest because it was the first time in my life where I had completely lost myself. Not just in the relationship, but in connection who I was as a woman.

I would look in the mirror and not recognize the woman staring back at me. I’d gained so much weight (which was particularly uncomfortable as someone who’d been a high-level athlete) that I spiraled deeper into toxicity and toxic lifestyle practices. My relationships—ironically, with the few people who truly saw me—took a toll because I was humiliated by the life I was living and the woman I’d allowed myself to become. For all intents and purposes, I was below rock bottom.

But the beauty of being that low is… there’s nowhere to go but up.

In Part II, I discussed how I'd eventually gained the courage to leave, take accountability for the role I played in the allowance and continuance of his neglect, I discuss how I learned to forgive myself and how alone in deep solitude, I rediscovered who I was. Things were moving in an energy of alignment, unknowingly preparing me to meet my husband, but the most important part of this season was this...

The real work didn’t begin until I met CB.

After everything I’d just survived, I had to learn not only to trust his intentions, but to trust myself inside an experience I’d never had before — a healthy, uncomplicated relationship — and not sabotage it.

What I’ve learned over the years is that choosing sovereignty after decades of survival conditioning requires believing that once you cross that threshold into safety, security, and sovereignty… you’re actually safe — a feeling many of us have never truly experienced. Because of that, it can feel naïve or even irresponsible to believe you’ve stepped into a new timeline after spending years in sufferance. How are you supposed to let your guard down in a space that’s suddenly meant to be safe, especially when you’ve only ever known chaos, turmoil, disrespect, neglect, and abuse?

My journey has taught me that healing your way out of survival and into sovereignty — as terrifying as it often feels — demands understanding that the identity you built in your most tumultuous seasons, along with the behaviors that kept you alive, must be healed and released to make space for the traits required to embody your divine feminine.

And that, my loves, admittedly is hard. Because to choose this new timeline — for me, the era of becoming Bree — you also have to rebuild your self-trust and though people talk a lot about losing self-worth in toxic relationships, people rarely talk about a woman losing trust in herself, her decisions, her boundaries, and her tolerance of abuse when she's been conditioned to accept the bare minimum.

So as I navigated those first few months with CB — which honestly felt like a fairytale — I found myself (in private, not with him) thinking,

“Did you really manifest this?

You??

The girl who let xxx play her like a fiddle for three years?

Girl, bye!”

Self-sabotage used to swirl around me like a storm. I questioned whether I even had what it took to “keep” a man like him. Eventually, I had to tell myself — literally out loud in my apartment — to shut the fuck up. Because those thoughts were real, yes. Those doubts were valid, yes. But they belonged to an identity that needed to die so Bree could fully live.

Those thoughts weren’t contributive to the relationship I was building with a man divinely intended for me nor were they contributive to the relationship I was rebuilding with myself… with my softness… my worth… my self-trust… and my divine feminine.

There was no place for them to take up space in the future I was creating and I knew they had to stay in the past I'd just left.

Being with CB has been an enlightening journey. Yes, our love is sometimes consuming — we are genuinely, deeply in love — but in the moments when one of us fucks up, I’ve had to learn to separate the trigger from the truth. I’ve had to allow my husband to be human, not a projection of my old patterns of choosing “bad men,” and I’ve had to stop demanding that he heal wounds he never caused.

That was a game-changer because it put me at the helm of my own healing, it created space for me to lean into discernment rather than drama and it set the tone for healthy, intentional communication even in chaotic moments. Nothing I'd previously been familiar with but everything I knew I wanted to embody in this new experience.

Another thing I’m proud of is this: because I know I’ve had patterns of unhealthy attachment, I've consciously created space for my husband to go do the things that bring him peace as I do the same for myself. For someone who grew up deeply entangled with a controlling, emotionally manipulative mother that was further perpetuated in my relationship with my ex(es), space used to feel threatening. Now, however, it feels sacred and intentional because falling in love with solitude in the months after leaving my ex prepared me to revel in my own independence while in partnership with my husband.

And I'll say this looking back at the intentional decisions I've made for myself and for my role in our marriage...

Recognizing your own patterns — especially the unhealthy ones — tracing them back to their origin, showing yourself grace, and then choosing a higher frequency… that’s some of the most powerful work a woman can do.

The transformation doesn’t begin with choosing better; it begins with seeing your patterns clearly and understanding that while they are yours, you never should have had to adopt them in the first place. So put them down and leave them where they are.

And instead of letting bitterness calcify inside you, instead of shutting yourself off from real connection to avoid future harm, you must make the conscious decision to transform and transcend all that was done to you that you didn't deserve. That is the inner working of true divine femininity and the sooner you recognize it, the easier it becomes to take accountability for the patterns and behaviors you currently embody as a means for past survival that cannot follow you into your season of future sovereignty.

Your survival - though it may have spanned a longer timeframe than you would have liked...was nothing more than a season. And guess what? Seasons never last forever.

You can’t bring snow into spring. It'll kill the flowers.

You can’t bring spring flowers into the summer heat. They'll wilt.

You can’t bring sand into the cooler autumn days. It's pointless.

And you cannot bring the identity you'd built to survive into the era where you’re meant to thrive.

In the 10 years I’ve been in this new timeline, I’ve not only been in the longest, healthiest relationship of my life (together for 10, married for 7), but I also entered motherhood nearly six years ago — which shook me in a similar way as meeting CB did. With deep mother wounds, raising children has been both beautiful and challenging. Nurturing them in ways I never saw, felt or experienced sometimes reminds me of what I didn’t have and the ways in which my mother couldn't show up for me. But when those triggers begin to rise, as they will for you in their own unique ways, we have two choices: allow them to disrupt our cultivated peace, wreaking havoc on a nervous system that craves stability or transform them into something triumphant. 

Even when it’s hard, I always choose the latter because that’s just what you have to do after years, decades, hell even generations of survival. When you once never had a choice, when you had to opt for silence in order to keep everyone else’s peace but your own, when merely breathing in some cases was an act of radical defiance, the concept of sovereignty seemed impossible.

But here’s the real truth about survival that is still true in sovereignty.

Breathing is an act of radical defiance and as long as you are breathing, you’re still alive.

And as long as you’re alive - and this is the part where things shift - now, unlike ever before...YOU DO HAVE A CHOICE.

So when healing happens, lean into it.

When timelines shift, trust them.

When identities shed, embody knew ones.

The triggers rise, transform them.

And when the energy of sovereignty arrives at your doorstep, surrender to it.

Because you deserve to see what it feels like to lay your weapons down and discover who the warrior is who no longer has to fight.

If any part of this series resonated with you, please be sure to leave a comment or any feedback. I deeply appreciate you taking the time out to read this series, to immerse yourself in my journey and I pray that you feel seen, held, nurtured and reminded that though the journey may be challenging...you are never, ever alone.