Life Uncut - So I dated a Sociopath

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Grab your oxygen tanks people because we are about to get deep. We chat about the new bachelor contestants before we dive right in to a more serious topic, dating a sociopath. Britt opens up and shares the experience that completely changed her life. We also introduce a new segment, “Ask Uncut” where we answer your questions. Please hit subscribe, if you like us hit 5 stars and leave a review to help us grow. Because, well, we love love. xSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura and I'm Brittany and today we have a real doozy of an episode for you. I think it's fair to say that most people have experienced some sort of toxic relationship in their life, whether it be with a family member, with a co-worker or in their own personal relationships. Today, someone very close to me is going to be sharing their experience with the toxic relationship and that person is so close to me. She is close enough that I can smell her. Please don't. Do you want me to? We're pretty early in the morning. Have you showered yet? I actually haven't, no. Have you? No, it's okay. It's 5.30 in the morning right now and this is the only time we had to get this podcast done.

So we were on a hustle, guys. Britt is going to be sharing with us a pretty huge dating story and how she's dealt with this toxic relationship in her life and how it's shaped her. And I'm really, really proud of her for sharing this and I'm actually really excited for her to share this with all of you. Not because it is an exciting story. It is actually really quite a traumatic story.

But I think that there are a lot of points from this that are going to relate to a lot of people who may find themselves in similar situations or find themselves in other toxic relationships. But before we get into the thick of it, Britt, I know you watched The Bachelor. Of course, I am only human. Give me your lowdown. What do you reckon? Right, well, we did speak about it last week that I openly love Matt. You love him? Yeah, I think Matt Agnew, just so you know, if you didn't pick anyone, Britney loves you. The end.

I thought you were clarifying. I'm going to send him a text. I'm going to slide into his DMs and let him know. I have a sneaky suspicion the man is very in love, which I'm stoked for because that's what the show is about. Don't say you're stoked. It's a lie. She's actually heartbroken.

But you know what? We're still pretty excited about the show itself. So, yeah, I did watch it. Did you watch it? Yes. Okay, so we were away for the week and I made my sister book an airbnb that had tv free to air i was there we couldn't go out for dinner because i was watching the bachelor it's a dedication isn't it very much though so what did you think of the first lot of

girls because obviously it was they came in two lots over two nights what was your initial just go your initial overthought i love them i love them all no i think that it's been cast so well we said this in the last episode but this season seems to really have characters and i like that I like that there is the villain, but she kind of came in as the crazy bride. Rachel. Rachel, the crazy bride. Yeah, I get a real Kira vibe from her. Do you know what I love?

I love that she brought her best friend in as the bridesmaid, but I'm pretty sure Matt got confused and thought it was a contestant. Did anyone else hear her call her friend a bitch face, though? Did you see that? Best friend goals. I was like, whoa, that is – I don't know how you're going to feel being the best friend watching that back. Speaking of toxic relationships, don't let your friend call you a bitch face.

That's not nice. yeah remove yourself from that immediately so okay if you had to pick your top girls who are they oh off the bat okay so i think elena so she was the girl from mauritius she's mauritius yeah she's french yeah she looks beautiful she seems normal oh you mean cream that one i like her oh cream no i liked her she seemed super normal she was beautiful i think ellie she won me over with the marshmallow campfire ellie won everyone over she's the dream she was just so sweet i think we'll see her in the end i'm i'm worried that i'm gonna get nikki gogan she's amazing she'll be potentially yeah oh we have to prepare our hearts for that or maybe she's the girl maybe she is

she might be you know who i love i love the girl from rio i just think her narrating of this season so far with the curly hair I want to be best friends with her and I want her to narrate my life so funny yeah she's she's a cutie she's got really glowy skin yeah now Britt's creeping on her as well do you know what else I like about this season I like that they've brought in the intruders and they've brought them in at the very beginning because normally there's this sense that an intruder can't win the show because the intruders haven't had enough time with the bachelor yeah I mean I do think it's been from one of the few of the girls dropped their comments and just how we know filming is i think it's been about a week it was only night two but i reckon

the girls had about a week in there before the intruders came in but that's nothing oh no in a week only one person's probably had a single date so far so most people are pretty much on an even playing field yeah i really like that instead of bringing the intruders in three quarters of way through which they normally do just to try and spice things up for the viewer there's no way that an intruder is going to win if they've only got two weeks to spend with the guy of course yeah so bringing them in at the beginning it means that we still have that injection of new girls do you know what i think is funny though but one of them could win yeah and i love how it's old girls versus new girls and i love how the old girls are like we're the old girls you can't come

in here and i was like babes it's been one episode you're not old it's been one but you know what they've been in there for a week so they already start to feel like they've got their click and they've got their groove of what's happening in the house so i can kind of understand that we never had intruders on our season at all no not none i don't know why i don't know whether it was a call from production or whether matt had said that he didn't want intruders but we never ever had any sometimes i feel like they get halfway and they're like oh we need to spice this up what did you think of the date with sagand the first single date yeah to be honest i was a bit on the fence about it because i thought it was super over the top

okay as in like what they were doing was over the top well i don't know i just i just didn't feel like i saw enough of them actually talking oh my god thank you so i actually made thank you i made a comment on instagram i was sort of doing some instagram stories mainly of me eating looking distressed i said did i just blink and miss the whole chat because i didn't see anything so i was actually looking at the social media pages for the date from the bachelor's instagram and everyone was saying this is the most romantic date i've ever seen they're perfect together i honestly don't think I heard them say one sentence other than other than the one bit where Sagan said this is so beautiful I'm speechless and I was like girl you've been speechless this whole day

you haven't said one word and also the orchestra I didn't even hear them play but they looked great in the background I just didn't see them have any actual chemistry yeah in the in the helicopter they didn't actually have any conversation at all they were just enjoying the view and I think she did open up a little bit towards the end about how she'd been single first seven years which is how we ended up getting into our conversation for today but that was the only thing that was the only thing and I don't know if that was enough to walk to be able to say that they had this real chemistry I'm glad you said that because I thought I must have just had a micro sleep and missed the whole thing but no not just me didn't have a micro sleep I honestly I wasn't sold on that first

single date to be honest nor was i also where did they get changed in the bush that's my point behind the front and where did the where did the dress come from matt i'm sorry when they say matt set that up you did not put that dress in oh come on we all don't don't ruin the smoke and mirrors okay no he probably the bachelor organizes all the dates actually do you know what i can say this and attest to this the bachelor has a very very big say on every single day i know that there's this like rumor out there that all the dates are done by production the bachelor actually gets to dictate very much the the plan of the date yes i'm just um i'm just taking the piece she's hateful because she thinks matt's in love and it's not with brit i can give you that spoiler matt and

brit do not end up together spoiler so okay so we got talking after the bachelor and if you've listened to our first episode you would know that brit touched on the fact that she has been single for seven years which for some people might sound crazy because Britt you have everything going for you why are you single and I know that that's really an offensive thing to be asked no it's I it's not offensive it's just that it wears you down sometimes when a lot of people ask you over and over over again for seven years but often there's a reason maybe you've chosen that maybe you haven't met the right guy yet but you have quite a good reason up until this point as to why you carved out some time for yourself. Correct, Laura. Thanks for asking. I am asking. And I

really, I mean, I've really want to approach this sensitively for you. So I really kind of want to give you the microphone a little bit and lead into this conversation. However, you feel most comfortable as well. I am, to be honest, I'm pretty open and comfortable talking about this now, but I never have really voiced it on a national platform before. I got to the point where I started to talk a lot about it with my friends and I did mention it to Nick on The Bachelor but we didn't go quite into depth because I had said I just wanted to skim the surface with it and I didn't want to be airing my dirty laundry on national television. Did you take a little while to sort of process the fact that your whole life was going to be in the public? I 100% did

okay yeah and I definitely was not going on there for a woe is me and this is my story otherwise I would have told it yeah so I do have an interesting story and I want to help people that might be in this situation because I do think it's going to be a lot more common and essentially that is well to put it simply I dated a sociopath yeah so there it is that is the end thank you for listening to our podcast and look I don't think that it's fair to throw around the term sociopath willy-nilly because we don't have any sort of uh degrees we don't have qualifications in this but i think once you listen to this story that brit is going to share it's pretty hard to say that this person or individual who made these decisions doesn't display sociopathic tendencies

yeah and clinically i know that this person is now i mean people use sociopath and psychopath path interchangeably but they are different also there's this big common misconception that both are these violent horrible murderers that we see on tv thanks to people like shows like criminal minds of course but i think that there are a lot of people who are very high functioning and who have amazing jobs and they can maintain some solid relationships but they dip into being very narcissistic or they display those tendencies without necessarily having to be full-blown yeah so there's a narcissistic personality disorder that sort of goes hand in hand with a sociopath yes usually they share very similar characteristics character traits

and i think let's we're going to call him luke okay his name was not luke i and and this whole episode is not about trying to trying to make a victim out of a certain person so you want to keep him anonymous oh 100 this isn't about calling somebody out yeah about awareness it's not a it's not a revenge podcast by any means definitely not so let's start the story this is the reason i've been single basically for seven years i met luke at work and luke is he was the most beautiful charismatic um he could sell water to fish the guy could he could do anything he wanted he could convince you of anything and you would he had this air of confidence where he would walk down the corridor and whether you were attracted to him or not you looked at him do you know those people

yes just in a real energy just the way they carry themselves and a little bit egotistical that came out later but so sometimes that's attractive in someone as well you know having like a little bit of arrogance especially if they're in a powerful job that can be really attractive i know i have sort of been drawn towards that in a person before yeah it's just that maybe if they sit at about 70 to 80 percent of arrogance yeah not about 157 which is what Luke was sitting at anyway so this is quite a long story so I'm just going to try and give you the main points he approached me and basically told me I was beautiful told me everything I wanted to hear we started dating immediately and within about three and a half four weeks he was telling me he loved me which

is very fast in hindsight but of course I was just smitten so I said I loved him back and it was intense it was the most intense relationship I cannot even describe it there were probably 70 to 80 messages a day usually from him I would respond obviously but and they were via so many different medias, phones, emails. He'd be popping in to see me at work. And when you're in this new love and this new infatuation, you just think this is the best thing since sliced bread. Someone cares about me that much. Someone's so interested in me. And we delved into the most intense relationship ever. Let's just say hindsight's a beautiful thing. So we're going to fast forward a few years and then we'll come back i found out he had a double life so after

two years uh we were getting married he'd taken me to tiffany's um he'd convinced me to get this rhodesian ridgeback dog we were buying this house in melbourne you really had set up a life for each other we had set up our life we had uh chosen our kids names it was really intense it also sounds like the beginning of your relationship he just completely love bombed you which is what you said in episode one yeah which is like a real way of just making someone feel completely adored and that level of adoration is is addictive yeah i did i felt like the most amazing person in the world like he would not look at another person and all of this i would like to say was coming from him all these plans were his so he always made these huge romantic gestures as well but

to go with that there were a lot of downsides but i always let them slide so there was a lot of really last minute canceling weekends away because we live separately and he did have a very high powered high pressured position and it was very easy for him to say within 10 minutes I can't make it I'm at work I've I've been called I have to go and you sort of sit back and think oh okay well you know he's out there doing this amazing thing so we'll we'll let that go but I had this constant, like disappointment. I was always, every week there was something, but I loved him so much I made an excuse. The job is how he got away with it for so long. He also, he didn't have social media, which wasn't the end of the world because this was quite a while ago. It was quite new to

everybody, but he somehow always knew what I was doing and where I was and what I'd done the day before if I hadn't even told him yet so do you think maybe he did have social media and he just had a different profile or something or had a way of keeping tabs on you yes he did um turns out he had been for want of a better word almost stalking me I guess um from day one he to the point that he would even make up fake emails fake email accounts to email me to test me if I would maybe go on a date with him not knowing who he was wow so one day i put a picture up of me in swimwear with a bunch of my friends at the beach we'd been surfing and i he's not on social media almost within half an hour i got a message from him saying have you been putting bikini photos

up britney and i said excuse me like what are you talking about like low-key controlling you should be able to put whatever yeah whatever you want up of yourself on your social media page without having to think how that's going to be yeah and I said I'm sorry how do you even know that I said yeah I put a photo up at the beach and he had he told me and he showed me the email he forwarded it to me an email that he got from someone anonymous saying the most horrible things what they wanted to do to me from seeing this photo so I yeah so I was disgusted because I had seen this email that someone had written him and he said how do you think this makes me feel Brit like knowing people are out there seeing this photo and they want to do these things to you

so he made me delete my social media because of that because he made me feel like there was these really disgusting men and it turns out he just had these fake accounts and he used to he used to just make people up write emails to himself so he could forward them to me to control me it got to that point yeah wow fast forwarding two years and it comes out coincidentally that through this mutual friend that didn't know both of us existed it came out that luke was marrying someone else at the same time so he was literally living a double life he was literally living a double life and how was he doing this so you were based in melbourne no i was in port macquarie okay he was in newcastle and his other partner was in melbourne

so she had quite a high profile job too and that's the only reason he could really pull it off so the tyranny of distance made it easier for him to be able to sort of have a life set up in port macquarie and have a secondary life set up and he just kind of could float between the two of them because of his occupation. So every second weekend, we would go to his place, this beautiful house on the beach, and he would change the whole house, pack it up, change it so it was suitable for me, my photos, my clothes, my cosmetics, everything I left.

And then I would leave and turns out he'd have to pack the whole house up and hide it and reset the house for how his other partner had it. And he did this every weekend for two years. but this is insane this is actually an insane story yeah and the fact that you are such an intelligent woman to think that you had the wool pulled over your eyes really makes me think if this could happen to anyone this isn't something that's isolated to you definitely if somebody wants to purposely deceive you and if somebody wants to lie then I think this can honestly happen to anyone well it turns out the way the way to successfully lie apparently is to

try to keep as close to the truth as possible yeah but he was setting up lives to the point of we had a rhodesian ridge back and he and her had a rhodesian ridge back and we were buying the same house and they were buying the same house we were we both wore the same perfumes he made us he bought us all the same presents he wrote us christmas cards and letters that were word for word identical i know this because i became friends with this woman but they were to the point of let's call her emma there were point she was um of a sort of asian descent and i'm obviously blue-eyed caucasian he would say dear britney i can't wait to have children i hope they have your eyes but then her letter would be like dear emma i can't wait to have children with you i hope

they have your eyes we've got different eyes i mean completely but the same same sentiment so wait hold up and rewind when you said you became friends with her yeah you can't just say that and throw that into the conversation because if this is me she would be 10 foot underground which i know it's not her fault how did you become friends with her okay so um he had told me he had this ex girlfriend yeah he said he'd been with her for a long time they broke up then he met me and i was the love of his life it came out at dinner with this mutual friend that emma was very much still around so how did you know this mutual friend and did they not know okay yeah they were new to work and they had worked with luke previously but we they were so new that i hadn't got to the point

of saying hey so this is my life i'm dating luke so we just didn't even know each other existed yeah like we didn't know and he accidentally just dropped it here to another friend he said hey have you been to luke's when he's mrs cook's she's so good and i knew that that was my luke and i thought hang on I've never met you and I've never cooked for you so I just played dumb for a second it took me two seconds my heart dropped and two years flashed before my eyes everything was adding up like it was just like it clicked over everything made sense for two years I thought oh my god and so when you were sitting there at this dinner did you say anything to the people that were there yeah so um I probably looked a bit psycho for a second I played it cool and I thought I'm just

gonna you could not even compare to how psycho i would have looked um so i just played a cool for a second because i knew as soon as i told them they were not going to give me any more information so i said oh luke you know that works at xx and he was like yeah i thought i thought he was single and he said oh no no he's been with this mrs emma for like six years they're getting married oh did you just hear that then that was my heart breaking i'm not sure if you heard it that was mine i actually can't even imagine yeah so there was this table of people sitting there and i just i ended up losing it i got i was like so erratic i stood up and i had my phone and i was like i'm marrying luke i've been with luke for two years like who the hell is this girl and i

was frantically like swiping photos in front of their face showing them all like just all photos of us on holiday to try and prove like not even to try and prove it to show them how well just justify the day I wasn't a psycho but of course I had a yeah that I had a life with this person and their face this guy's face I'll never forget it he just looked at me with so much sympathy Britt I'm so sorry I promise you I did not know I don't really know what to say to you and I just said you're gonna have to excuse me threw my cutlery down stormed out of this restaurant and so when you found out and you said that everything flashed before your eyes did you sort of have this hindsight that things weren't right and things didn't add up oh definitely

i felt so ridiculous and so angry at myself because there were so many signs and my sister sherry with who were so close she would never straight out say i hate this person don't date them but she was constantly saying bro this doesn't sound right why is he why is he canceling last minute or why did he have a piece of her clothing still because that would happen i found something and I you know I would quiz him and I would leave that conversation apologizing to him that's how good he was whenever I approached him about anything I would end up apologizing and begging and crying saying I'm so sorry because he would he's so manipulative he would be able to flip it around and make it make it your problem like gaslight you too you felt like oh I can't

ask these questions all right and he had an answer to everything like um he had this huge house oh she must have left it here a year ago when we broke up or always something or I thought it was yours and so i didn't throw it away always he was so secretive of his phone that's another thing like would not let anyone look at his phone the manipulation in this relationship was next level and it was on so many levels um the abuse was on so many levels but i remember seeing one day he was showing me a photo of his work and as he was swiping i saw a video of me and i had never seen it before and i could see that i was nude and um i said hang on what was that i was like oh nothing nothing nothing swiped by and i said no that was i know that was me and he had filmed us sleeping

together without your consent i had no idea wow and i was like i don't know this is not cool i don't know about angry i was just really taken aback and i said i didn't know when was this and he said, babe, I'm like, babe, you know that, you know, you'd had a few drinks, we'd spoken about it. And he ended up convincing me at the end that I had somehow agreed to that. And I guess the thing is, is when you love someone and they're lying to you, you want to believe them because it's not in our innate nature to, to think that someone's lying, especially if you're not a liar yourself, then, you know, you take what's said to you for face value. And yes, there may be this underlying niggling uh like insecurity or something that doesn't quite add up

but if that person is manipulative enough they can make you feel like you're the one who's being crazy and you're the one who's sabotaging your relationship and you're the one who's making issues out of nothing but the reality is when it's a good relationship and there isn't any lying going on you don't feel crazy you just don't because there's a calmness to the relationship whereas I feel like listening to what is going on in your life with this relationship it sounds really frantic it was there was no calmness ever and high energy all the time yeah I just was constantly in the wrong and constantly apologizing so there were a few things like that that happened but so we fast forward I've just found out and I had remembered him telling me because he because

this friend had said they'd been together six years this other couple I'd remembered him telling me about his ex-girlfriend so it was she was so easy to track down so i just i first of all i called him he didn't answer he's never not answered me in his life because he was borderline obsessed with me and i just knew that the other guy had like gone mate giving you a heads up brit knows yeah i um but he was in trouble so i called him holy yeah wow of course he didn't have to answer his phone and he didn't answer and so i messaged him and said call me immediately or i'm going to tell find this other woman and tell her and he called me back straight away and then as the phone was ringing and I was looking at it I thought you know what stuff you why am I even giving you that

option I'm just gonna tell her anyway and so I didn't pick up for him do you think you you thought that initially because you still love him you know you love doesn't just stop immediately and even through betrayal usually the first reaction we have is anger but that is that anger doesn't necessarily mean that you have just wiped the love slate clean like you still feel love i it was the most stupid woman but i loved him so much even when i had heard that you're not i was still making excuses in my head as i was walking down the street trying to find these girls details i was still making excuses that this has to be wrong of course you're not stupid your whole identity from two years has just been taken away from you that's it's you

cannot expect yourself to understand or to process that in a matter of seconds that takes months if not years to heal from I think that to be able to heal from that if you ever could heal from that because the level of dishonesty runs so deep how do you trust someone again it did form a lot of trust issues for a long while it turned out that so I called her and we spoke for seven hours and she was amazing she was incredible she said as soon as I told her as well the last two years of things fell into place for her as we're on the phone to each other we're sending each other emails about proof she's like i believe you brit but can you just forward me this just so i can throw it in his face i was sending her emails i was like okay this is the house we're

buying he just emailed it to me she wouldn't get it she'd email me i wouldn't get it and then in front of our eyes all our emails being deleted so he he was on he already had just worked it out was trying to save his butt he was at his house he was in your email about email so i didn't even know he knew my password this is how he had been following me and monitoring me for so many years he knew my passwords he was doing it to her too so we were like oh my gosh quickly log out read our password we went back in and turns out we were in each other's blocked senders so i didn't know who she was but in my email emma was blocked and britney was blocked in hers in case he had just thought of everything in case we had ever stumbled across each other and thought to try and contact

each other and never would have made it the level of deceit just runs so deeply with this yeah he had covered himself on all levels i think that's probably a testament to how intelligent he he was i mean you can use your powers for good or for evil can't you and this guy really used his powers for evil it's just so selfish we'd be on a holiday we'll be overseas and he would force me to leave one day he said you have to go home I've got so much work to do you have to go tomorrow it has to be he wouldn't let me stay and it turns out because she would be flying in within an hour of me leaving she would go and they would they would do their thing and I felt really horrible for her because she had been with him for six years but she was amazing to me I was we had this amazing

friendship but um I I ended up having I changed my password over the next six months quite a lot and he was constantly I had this I had something on my computer that told me where someone was logging in and he was constantly finding my password again and I didn't understand it I ended up having to get somebody that was in military security to look on my computer and everything that I typed I don't know what the technical term is but like a key logger yeah it would go to him so it didn't matter how many times I changed the password so this is actually a thing you can install it's like a spyware and it key logs all your passwords which I mean your computer does that anyway. But if somebody is looking at your computer externally, they can get your

passwords to your banking or your email or to any of your private data. It's absolutely not. I felt so violated. And to think that he had to go to that level prior to the fact that you knew. So you didn't know. For so long, you thought that this was a normal relationship. And yet he had already done all these different things to try and control you from the very get-go yeah i i had no chance from day one no you were hooked you were just hooked yeah and i think that that's also a testament to being in a relationship with someone who is narcissistic or who has psychopathic tendencies it is so incredibly hard to leave because they make it incredibly hard to leave Well, so one of the main characteristics of someone, of a sociopath, is their lack of empathy.

And I think this is really important for people to know. If they feel like somebody just doesn't have any emotion, any connection to reality, it's a sign. So I knew that something was big, like hugely wrong when I finally spoke to him for the first time. The first thing he said to me, I picked up the phone and he said, I hope you're happy, Brit. And I was so taken aback. I said, sorry, you hope I'm happy? Like, no, I'm devastated. my entire life has just fallen apart well he's taken everything from me that i loved he said

well you could have just kept this to yourself you didn't have to tell her so that now i don't have either of you that was his i just was so gobsmacked it's it almost sounds ridiculous repeating it like but this is the level of selfishness that this person had to display he said you obviously set out to ruin my life and you've done that so congratulations to make you feel so do you know that in itself was one last dig at making you feel bad and like you're the reason why this ended like this was your fault it was unbelievable and taking absolutely no responsibility for the way he acted and behaved throughout this whole relationship and from this I developed insomnia and anxiety because he was so mad and there had been like

violent outbursts in the relationship too he knew I lived and worked and he he honestly from the depth of his heart thought he believes that i ruined his life so i started not sleeping because i thought what if this person comes what if he really really wants revenge because he thinks i've ruined his life i didn't tell my family straight away for probably a few weeks why was that well i was so embarrassed and i know that sounds like a strange comment or a strange emotion to have but i felt like what a loser what an idiot how could you have dated somebody like this how could you ever going to marry someone like this like how could they have pulled the wool over your eyes for so long I thought and I was just for some reason I just felt like it was all my fault and my

problem and it's because he had trained me for years to feel like that I finally had to tell my parents and once I started and my sister once I started telling them it all just fell out and I they made me realize that this has nothing to do with me this other person has come in with real intentions to control your behavior and your behavior was controlled and the way that you the things that you did in your relationship were the outcome of what somebody else wanted the manipulation that somebody else wanted out of you that could happen to anyone yeah even the things i would wear he used to manipulate that but in a way that's not like you're not wearing that it was just in a way that made me feel insecure about what i had on and i'd end up putting on

what he wanted just to like jump back to what you were saying just before and not in any way to compare your relationships to relationships that I've been through but in my experience I know that when I have had to lie to my family and friends or like I've had to change the story a little bit to make my ex-boyfriend seem like not such an arsehole that's when I knew that that this was really profoundly wrong like something was really really a problem if I was having to constantly try and make excuses for their bad behavior did you find that you were at a time making these excuses as to why he was behaving a certain way and or keeping it from your close friends and your family because you didn't want them to judge him was that something that you found that you

were doing 100 there would be weekends that he would that i would plan and he would cancel last minute and it turns out it was for reasons like emma his other partner had flown in to surprise him so he would have to cancel at a minute's notice and then I was so embarrassed by that that I would tell my friends I had to cancel it because I got called into work and I couldn't I just couldn't get there and really you just didn't because it was me constantly being knocked back knocked down trodden on walked over and it's a it's a funny point that you just said about when you feel like you start to make excuses because you don't want people to know how horrible they are my best friend said the same thing the other day when I was talking to her about this she said

my boyfriend was such a drop kick but she she would make excuses for him and lie to people about him about how great he was or how he got a promotion or whatever to make him sound better because she said i was just embarrassed that he was a drop kick but i didn't ever want to end it and she loved him and she loved him yeah and she loved him but there are there are some loves that it's it's an addiction it's it's not necessarily being in love with the person but it's being in love with the feeling of being in love and that in itself can be incredibly addictive. And I know from my past experience with dating someone who I definitely, I mean, like I said earlier, I'm not a counselor, I'm not a psychiatrist, but he displayed a lot of characteristics that would

put him in the narcissistic category. I wanted to be with him so much because I loved being in love with him and the relationship we had was so intense and so heightened that I was addicted to it. But now that I'm in a healthy relationship, it's made me realize that healthy relationships don't have those huge peaks and those huge lows. They run at a more constant, they're calmer and you don't wake up every day thinking, is today going to be a good day or is today going to be a bad day. You just know that every day is going to be good because there is that constant reliability to it. Well, that's a good point because I was constantly walking on eggshells. Yeah. It's funny you say that every day I was like, what's he going to be like today?

So you have been single now for seven years and a big part of that was the healing process after dating someone who was so manipulative. How do you think that that has changed your, your want to get into new relationship or the way that you date now or your perception of of men in general okay so that's a good question um I think my my look at dating has completely changed so I'm not single now seven years later because of that that's I don't want people to think that I really recovered well from that bought a one-way ticket to Brazil and I was gone for three years so it was a pretty good healing process and I think that you're a testament to just how well someone can get over a traumatic relationship because you are so fiercely independent you're such a strong woman

you have done so many amazing things in your own personal life you've traveled by yourself you've bought your you've bought your own property like you have done things in your life that you've achieved it on your own yeah and you haven't waited for someone to come around and and said okay i'm gonna do that alongside you you're like no i want to do this i'm gonna do this shit on my own i don't need no man damn straight no it's so true i think everything happens for a reason i always say that but this horrific situation really shaped me and it sounds so cliche a bad situation goes overseas to find herself um comes back a new person to a point. It's not cliche. There's a reason why people do it. People go overseas because

they want to escape their identity that they have here. They, you know, I think there's an amazing part of traveling after something that's been traumatic because it means that there's no hangups. Nobody has a preconceived perception as to who you are. You get to go away. I'm sure maybe some people might call it running away, but you get to go away and you get to be a new version of yourself in a fresh environment and give yourself some space to grow and and heal yeah so well a pivotal moment for me was um i was walking down the street one day and i looked in a window i was walking a route overseas that i had never walked i looked in a window and i saw this monk this his coat i was like what's that okay i looked in and he looked

at me and we waved at each other and that was the start of a month that he and i spent together with a monk yeah with a monk where were you i believe it or not london you spent a month with a monk in London. Not what you think, right? Not to bet. It wasn't like in the Amazon jungle. It was just. There's monks in the Amazon jungle? Well, you know. There might be. I spent a month with him, not a month full time, just like every day I would see him. Yeah. And the main thing that I took away from him, and this is how I approach life, and this is how I would love everybody to approach life, is that your whole life depends on your reaction to any given situation. So something bad is going to happen to every single one of us in our life, a death, a traumatic breakup,

whatever it is and things that are completely out of our control out of your control so the situation's going to happen you can either go to your room and be depressed and anxious for the next six weeks or you can still deal with it and mourn but you can get on with your life and take something positive from it either way the situation happened and that's not going to change all that's changed is how you're dealing with it and i do think as well that you can exacerbate your own hurt by trying to control somebody else's reaction to a situation in the end to answer your question i was single just because i knew i didn't want to waste any more time all of a sudden i knew who i was and i knew what i wanted i knew my expectations and i knew what i deserved and i

just didn't want to waste my time again with someone that didn't fit that criteria and i know that it kind of sounds bad to have a criteria in dating but you kind of do need that you do i i'm actually an advocate for having some sort of checklist and it's not about the way the person looks and it's not the way what the person earns or the job they have or any of that stuff it's about the the type of person that they are and what they want for their goals in the future so that you know from day dot that your relationship marries up and that you're heading in the same direction a lot of people don't want to ask those questions because they don't want to know they don't want to be let down at the beginning if it's not what yeah what their goals are because

if someone says actually do you know what I don't want these things that are on your checklist well then what are you going to do are you going to walk away from that person and say and say okay unfortunately I really like them but you know what they're not on the same trajectory as me or are you going to waste three years and try and change that person to be on the same trajectory as you well yeah exactly and then you've wasted three years of your time yeah and so I really I I mean, I'm, I believe in checklists and relationships and people might disagree with me and that's fine, but I do think it's important to sit down and write down what you want and what you've learned from your past relationships in order to make better decisions in your

next relationship. Yeah. I mean, I don't write a checklist as such, but I don't even write a grocery list. I have a general list in my head of like, you know, but I'm pretty open to meeting loads of people now, like all different walks of life. Totally. And look, I'm not saying this because I think that there needs to be the same, that it's just one type of person.

I think that it could be many different types of people, but they have similar characteristics. So that way you're heading in the same direction. Do you know what else is really crazy? Tell me. I just realized, I just remembered now, he took us both to the same Tiffany's. As in you and the other woman, you both went to the same. Not even just Tiffany's in general, the same one. what if he got the same sales rep i don't know and do you think he liked flirting with the danger

of it a little bit do you think that there was a maybe he got off yeah on this idea that that close it was yeah like he he was like a chess player in this whole game yeah and um i eventually it turns out he was with 13 other women as well in that time what but you know he's just blown my mind no but he said to me oh my god he said the one time i said you know what just be honest i'm never gonna speak to you again just tell me and he said okay there were 13 other women but you were the only other like girlfriend you're the one i love as if that made me feel better he said he but you know what maybe he said that as well and look it may it may be the truth but maybe he said that as a way of just hurting you more he told me and i believed it he he had a tear in his eye

because this is the one time i ever spoke to him and saw him and only because i ran into him on the street one day he had a tear in his eye and he said believe it or not i did love you and i know everyone in australia is gonna hate me right now i believe that because i believe in this super messed up sociopathic way that's love to them because he i know he cared about me he wouldn't have dated me for two years i'm not saying it's normal i'm just saying in his messed up world there was his version of some sort of love yeah i think that that's important to say that i i think what you and i think love is someone who can do that to you doesn't have the capacity to love yeah in the way that we love statistics say that we all you everyone now has met a sociopath in

their life they just don't know it they're just normal normal people on the street that you run into every day and sometimes sometimes they're the most charismatic amazing always are enchanting people and then it's only the people who are very very close to them that can see that there's a layer or a facade there that that doesn't quite fit look i'm sure this is going to hit home to a lot of people to an extent cheating the double life the lying i just want people to know that the embarrassment you feel because i know there'll be women out there listening saying that's me i feel that it's got nothing to do with you i don't want anybody to feel that embarrassment or feel like they are the victim because you're not and you can take this into

your hands and you can control your outcome it's just hard to walk away sometimes but very hard to walk away my advice too is if you've got a really close friends or family that are telling you things that you disagree with and like about your partner maybe just try and open up and listen to them for a little bit because it's coming from somewhere well it's coming from people who love you it's coming from people who genuinely have no ulterior motive other than they want the best for you. So if your friends are telling you that the guy you're dating is a dick, the guy you're dating could be a dick. It's true though. Spoiler. He's a dick. He could be. Yeah. And love is blind. That statement is so true. I also think it's important to touch on the fact that

when you've been cheated on or when you've been lied to, or you've been manipulated in a relationship, it's very easy to start to get into the mentality of what can I do to make myself better so that this person won't cheat on me again, or they won't leave me. Because I know that in my past relationship where I was cheated on, my first reaction wasn't to think this was their fault. This is entirely their issue. And I didn't do this to the relationship. My first reaction was and I'm actually almost embarrassed to say this now was I'm not skinny enough I'm not pretty enough I'm not intelligent or interesting enough I'm not funny enough and I wanted to change myself to make myself better for them where now I look back on that and I just wish I could talk to

that broken girl and say holy shit get rid of that person who makes you feel so insignificant and so unworthy of being loved in the way that you deserve to be loved because it was years of life where I made excuses for someone who made me unhappy and that's half the battle with everybody I don't think there are many women out there that could put their hand up and say 110 percent I am happy with how I am and I think that I hope that there's more women than that I really do too and I think we're moving in that direction but I think with so much outside pressure from social media from men that are just saying, oh, well, you could lose a few kilos. Or I read something the other day about a girl saying her boyfriend bought her a gym membership and just left it on

the kitchen table for her. Didn't say anything. Like the most passive aggressive. That is so unsubtle. Oh, it's not cool. Look, maybe let's play the devil's advocate here. Maybe the gym is important to him for his mental health. And that is, he was like, you know what? You'll feel happy, go to the gym. I would probably kill Matt if he tried to subtly and not so subtly tell me that I needed to go to the gym because he wasn't as attracted to me. Well, I think that, I think the point of it was this guy. Oh my God, that kills me. Britt, I'm so grateful that you shared this story because I know that this is not something that you have spoken about publicly. It is a huge and life-defining story. And I do think that there are people who will listen to aspects of this

and say, you know, I've experienced that or I know what it's like to be controlled or manipulated in a relationship. And like I've already said, the fact that this happened to you and someone who I think is so independent, it genuinely blows my mind because it truly can happen to anyone.

If you have that feeling that just something isn't right, it probably isn't. Your gut instinct in every situation in life really needs to be trusted and listened to. so we did have a section that we wanted to start including in this podcast because we have been receiving so many messages and questions and i love that this has become really interactive but we are introducing a section called ask uncut that was not rehearsed

we didn't even plan that but we nailed it so ask uncut so you guys please like message us on our instagram which is at life uncut podcast you can ask us your questions and we will pick one out each week to be able to answer it for you and give you our unqualified spin on what we think of that question very unqualified can we make a note yes please so the because of the the conversation we've just had and how we've ended that conversation the question that we were asked today was my partner cheated on me now i don't trust him do you forgive and how do you move past that britney what do you think of this this is a tough one do you think it's possible to move on from a situation where someone has cheated yes to be honest i do i think it's very dependent

on the situation but if they've come forward and they're really honest and it was an honest i can't say honest mistake but i definitely think there are times that you can speak as a couple and i have read studies from psychologists that say couples that there has been infidelity have actually come out stronger because they've gone and worked through it they've worked out why it happened and they've been better than ever i think if you can move on happily and accept it that's Great. But if you have said you've accepted it, but then you're going home and saying, I don't trust him. How do I, how do I internally move on? Then you're not going to, if you can't trust his everything. I do agree. I think that yes, it is possible to move on from cheating in

a relationship. However, I think that it fundamentally changes the relationship and it takes a long time to heal from that. And so I think that both parties need to be realistic that it might take a year or two years to really heal from some sort of infidelity and it does depend on what sort of infidelity that was like we don't live in a vacuum there's no yes and no answer to these questions but i think that as we uh move more into a society where there's diminishing stigma around couples counseling there there is more conversation around acceptance and putting out on the table what you need in a relationship and what you want and maybe getting to the root cause of why why did this person cheat in the first place was it an absolute moment of

just stupid there was too many drinks a stupid decision was it something more systematic and endemic in the relationship so I think it really does come down to the cause and why was it an actual affair which in which case there's so many more layers of lying yeah how long and also are there dependables do you have children are you married do you own a house together I think that when you start bringing in more of the bigger life commitments then there's more reasons for people to work it out but if you've been with your boyfriend for six months and he's done this it makes it so much more difficult to try and work through that because honestly who can who can deal with the drama I think for me the underlying thing here is

the trust part where she says I just don't trust him she wants to stay with him but she doesn't trust him well the betrayal is the most damaging part of that yeah if you can't trust them and you're going to be wondering where they are every night you need to leave just call it what do you think of the idea if somebody has cheated in a relationship then their phone and their email and everything else needs to be an open book as in like kind of like random drug testing so you if you have yeah but i think of it like that it's like a random drug test like you've cheated on me I've forgiven you but right now I feel insecure so give me your goddamn phone because I want to check what the fuck you were just doing again two sides to it I think that a relationship

should be open enough anyway that if you're like babe I'm just going to jump on and check that email I think you should have access to each other but I think if you're at the point where you feel like they go out of the room and you need to trawl through their stuff it's not right you're not sitting in a comfortable trustworthy relationship but I do think that if you've made the decision to move forward from cheating then there is give and take because I don't think that the crime of wanting to look at someone's phone because they've betrayed you matches the crime of cheating no I think you should have access yeah so if that person has asked for your forgiveness then they need to understand that they well I think this this might not be true but I think that

if they've betrayed your trust and they've asked for forgiveness then they need to come to the table a little bit with being open and also allowing you to act a little bit freaking crazy at times whilst you're healing. Well, it's bound to happen, isn't it? Absolutely. Okay. We're all good now. It's so unfair for them to say, you forgave me. You said you weren't going to bring this up. You can't go through my phone. There has to be some give and take. And I'm not saying that it gives you the liberty to do it for forever. But I think whilst you're getting over that initial trust hump there needs to be some give and take in that okay Brittany I feel like we've covered some pretty heavy topics today thanks for bearing with us guys but we we really needed to get that

out into the atmosphere oh yeah and I also think that you know like love can be amazing and love can be really shitty and so it's okay to talk about the things that are really difficult so if you're in the midst of a shitty shitty relationship or you're trying to find your way out of something that's quite toxic I hope that there's been little parts of this today that you've been able to take away and go yeah I've got this yeah as long as one person takes something from this and learn something we're happy Brit baby give me your suck and your sweet suck and sweet so suck first suck is probably the fact that I got home to bed at about 1am and it's 5am and we got up to record this podcast oh my god so I am so sorry so we were supposed to

record this podcast at like a normal reasonable hour of the day but because we're both ridiculous humans oh we just there's so much going on in life and i have a baby and so i had to be here when matt wasn't working so we had to get this recorded and finished before 8 a.m she's like babe how's 5 30 and i'm like mate great let's do it look it in so so brit's suck is me basically is what she's saying yeah my suck inadvertently is laura is it but let's end on a sweet and i hope that that's also me my sweet is uh obviously you every day getting the croissant and coffee with you is this girlfriend uh no the sweets probably i did my talk with beautiful minds for mental health for the teenagers i flew down to melbourne i saw that on your instagram that's babe that's

so wonderful explain a little bit about what that is we just went down uh uh me and a guy called andrew who is amazing he speaks to the boys teenage boys and we just speak to them about about being a really strong woman, independent, how to deal with online bullying, how to be a good person, mental health issues, everything in the mental health realm. And they were 14 year olds that I spoke to, about 60 of them. And it was so great. They all messaged me and said that they really took something away from that. And thank you so much for coming. And I just felt like finally I was giving something back. And you go in and speak to them in schools. We go to their schools anywhere in Australia. Any school in Australia can call and organize

it with beautiful minds so it's government funded it's a school curriculum and uh it's a really really amazing thing they're doing i love that you're doing this i mean you know you have a you have an influential following and to be able to go in and speak to young children and be like yeah you know sure i work in this influencer world but god it's all made up and it's all shit and smoke and mirrors this is me this is what i look like you know i have great days i have shitty days I think that it's so important for young people to actually see what an influencer in I'm doing inverted commas looks like in the real oh yeah we've got a camera set up here what an influencer looks like in real life so yeah I think that that's really beautiful that you're

doing that and I love that that's your suck and your sweet and what's yours my suck and my sweet uh my suck my suck was probably also getting up at 5 30 to do this podcast after I just got up at 4 30 to breastfeed Marley and also Marley peed and pooed all over herself during her sleep last night so that was really interesting to deal with yeah you guys are so welcome for these details I told you that every week my suck and my sweet was going to be something baby related I have an inkling maybe your sweet might not be baby related well yes my sweet is actually pretty great so this week I don't know if anyone was following my Instagram but this week Matt and I we took our first trip to Melbourne. So we flew on a plane with Marley. It was a success. She slept and we

did a trade show called Life in Style. And Life in Style is a great big wholesale trade show, which is a way of getting your brand out there. And I don't know if you guys know, but I have my own jewelry business. And so for me, it was a really amazing opportunity to one, feel like an adult again and talk to other adults and be working. Without something attached to your breasts. yeah I was just really amazing Matt Matt came down he stayed with me for the full five days he stayed at the Airbnb and took care of Marley and just just did everything that he needed to do he did was full-on dad mode and I loved it I saw a lot of selfies and he was stoked like matching

beanies he was loving dad life it was so good because in the past six weeks he hasn't had a lot of time on his own with Marley without me being a bit of a helicopter so it gave him the autonomy to just be a dad without me telling him what to do. And it also gave me the freedom to be a business owner again and to work for Tony May and to work for myself. And I just felt so invigorated. I mean, I'm tired, but I'm so invigorated from a week of doing that. And I really feel like it's possible to be a new mom and to have the business and to have the relationship and to have all these different facets of life and juggle it.

Yeah, I take my hat off to you because you were doing, I'm proud of you. Thank you. I think I messaged you and said that cast, you've got a thousand things on your mind, but you still nailed it and very successfully.

Thanks, babe. I'm really lucky. I have an amazing support network and I think that that is so crucial when you're a new mom. 100%. Yeah. Well, thanks for listening, guys.

Guys, thank you for listening. I am, I'm honestly, Britt thank you for sharing yeah sorry that was a bit heavy today no never apologize that was why we got into this I'm so grateful for you sharing your story and I'm sure that people who are listening and who have gotten this far are very grateful for it as well and I know that it's a big deal for you yeah to put this out there I'm glad it's finally out there I hope someone's life has been changed slightly but guys feel free to write in to us any questions or advice you need don't forget to subscribe and come back next week yes so if you would like to follow us on social

media as i said it's at life on podcast feel free to slide into our dms there as well guys yeah it's always exciting and we will have another episode for you next wednesday ciao We'll be right back.