 So I get home and he's not there, but his laptop is. It's kind of like left out. But I think to myself, I'm not gonna check it. I'm not gonna do that. So I go into the kitchen, I start washing dishes, cleaning up, and then I'm like, I'm definitely gonna go on the laptop. I'm just like, let's just keep it 100. And like some divine intervention, I just guess the password in like two tries. The computer lights up and you know how with Max, your text messages sync to your computer? His message chat was like already up and I'm watching this guy live sexed with another woman. So I decide to join the conversation. So I type, hey, this is Shan. He is staying at my place right now. I'm just curious what the nature of your relationship, although it seems pretty clear here, and send. And then I just watch chat bubble disappear. Chat bubble disappear. Then I hear footsteps in the hallway. I live in an apartment at the time. My door bursts open. He's drenched in sweat. And he was like, we've got to talk. And I was like, oh no, we didn't. I am talking. And I've said what I had to say. And all that's left to say at this point is like, get the out. And it's very, there's a very distinct difference between when you know something is over. Like when every time that you break up with a toxic person or you break up a toxic relationship, you believe in your heart, yes, this is the last time. But there was something distinctly different about this time. I just 100% knew this could never happen again. And I was right. And I've never seen him since. Hello there, lovers and friends. Today's video has a very special guest. And when I say very special, I mean muy especial. Which of course means the exact same thing. Nonetheless, I am joined today by Shan Boudram, who actually is Shan Brady. What's up? Hello there, lovers and friends. Oh no, you don't, you don't get to do the hello there, lovers and friends. Rude. Anyways, this video is a really special one. It's about how to get over a toxic relationship. It might be a heavy one, possibly a triggering one for some people, but I hopefully believe a really important one. And you're about to bury your whole soul to us. So let's get it popping by asking the first question. How did it all begin? This relationship began like many relationships do with several false starts. And then 2012 happened, which was just a really awful year for me. I lost my best friend that year. I was really lost in my career. I was living in a salon basements spare bedroom. And there was a person who I had idealized romantically that rejected me. And so I just felt like I had nothing. And all of a sudden, my now ex started popping up, started hanging out with me, started asking me to go on bike rides, things that I really enjoyed, started like taking an interest in helping me to advance my career, which was really staying at the time. So he asked me out, like officially like high school things, like let's make this official and like actually date. And I remember my literal thought when he asked me was, okay, this guy has been on and off important in my life for so long. He should at least be an ex. And that's, I knew that, but yet somehow along process of dating, I forgot that. And I transitioned from looking at this guy, like for who he was and saw him for who he could be to me. And I elevated him to husband level, to potential life partner level. And that was the most dangerous thing I've probably ever done my whole life. In your perspective, obviously, cause you're the only person in the relationship who's currently here, what made this relationship toxic? What made this relationship toxic to me was the emotional warfare that went along with it. Yes, there was the verbal insults. Yes, there was moments of the physical, of the being spat on and the being shoved. Yes, there was the cheating and tons of it. I, as I've said many times before, got chlamydia in this relationship because of his indiscretions and, but more than any of those things, the worst part to me were the mean, matter-of-fact statements that he used to make about me. I'm a quitter. I am not good at relationships. I don't understand men. He had a daughter. I was a terrible stepmom. So just those blanket, flat, like bombs that he used to drop pretty frequently that really just wore, not just on how I felt in the relationship, how I felt about myself as a person. But in hindsight, as long as I didn't think I was good enough, I wouldn't realize that ultimately I was too good for him in the relationship that we had. There is no amount of information or expertise that any one individual can have that's going to overcompensate for someone else's lack of character, lack of discipline and overall toxic behaviors. Do you think that there were warning signs that it was gonna be this kind of relationship before you agreed to get involved with him? Not just yes, but hell fucking yes. Hell yes, there was warning signs. There was all kinds of warning signs. Oftentimes when I hear it's actually watching the R. Kelly special the other day and it was so fascinating to watch each person try to justify why they began the relationship by saying he was so sweet in the beginning. He was so nice and he suddenly changed. And yet this man has had 25 years of history of being a shitbag. And my ex is the same thing. He had a long history of people he had screwed over. I was warned so many times by so many different people. I saw things with my own eyes multiple times and yet still I thought I could be different. And yet still, and that's a part of victim shaming in many ways, right? Like we attribute it to the other people brought that out of him. And it's funny because in the end with that girl who I joined in on the messaging with she never like, she never reached out to me afterwards. And she continued a relationship with him, right? She, after I moved, was out of the picture. I removed myself. She was like, great. Now it's just me and him what I've always dreamed of. And she dove right into this like full relationship with him. And I kept thinking to myself, oh you think it's me? Like you really have told yourself that I was a problem. You've allowed him to tell you that I was the problem. That I was crazy or psycho or negligent or selfish or whatever adjectives he chose to use to describe what we shared. She believed that. She thought that she was special and she was different. And I thought that I was special and that I was different. So yeah, there was tons of warning signs. What would you say was the lowest point in the relationship? We decided to move in together every step of the way I got warning signs. When we started looking, I found something out about him and I called it off. And then for some reason we decided to get back together and keep looking. Because we all know that if a relationship is a disaster when you're apart, surely when you're together 24 seven, it will get much better. I just wanna pop in for a quick little second. I hope you guys are enjoying this video to tell you about a private podcast that I'm doing that is all about what's happening in this video. Mind manipulation within relationships. In this podcast, I break down the dark psychological games that can be played and I give you the recipe for gaslighting, love flooding, dentistry, emotional entrapment, reductions. And the purpose of telling you this is that you can steer clear of them. That you can hopefully see your own negative relationships reflected in them and know that there is a way out. And you've gotta find that out ASAP. Preferably long before you move in with the person as, you know, I apparently did. So the catch with this podcast though is that you had to have pre-ordered my book, The Game of Desire. And once you do that, you get emailed a password. So when you go to thegameofdesire.com slash blog, you just type that in and then you can listen away. At the very end of this video, I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek of what that podcast entails. Okay, back to the video. So I moved in with them and it was the worst, worst four months of my life. I'm actually really proud to even say that number because we had a one year lease and I'm really proud that I got the fuck out of there. But in that time, I had cried so much that there probably wasn't a square inch of that apartment that I hadn't been on my knees on. My lowest of low points probably is I was going, my mom was coming to stay with me for the weekend because he was going out of town. My mom was gonna come and stay. And he picked a fight with me as my mom got to the train station. So I wanted to go pick her up, but he picked a fight with me. And like my mom was here, I have to go get my mom. And he was just arguing, arguing on my mom was here, I have to get my mom. And so eventually the argument got so bad that I had to just run. I literally grabbed the keys and I ran away from him to get to the elevator. He chased me down, ripped those keys out of my hand and smashed them. It was a car lock key, right? So it was electronic. He smashed the keys on the ground so I couldn't go pick up my mother. I would like to say that the next day I left him, but I didn't. That was probably a low point. Out of curiosity, how many times did you try to leave the relationship before you actually made your clean break? I tried to leave countless times. I was dating my ex. It was my longest adult relationship. So I'm gonna say maybe somewhere between three and a half to four years, maybe 4.25 years. It kind of gets foggy in my brain as time goes on and as the positivity of my new relationship washes those memories away. But I left. I tried to leave probably once every three months, minimum. And the first time that I wanted to break up with him was probably two months after we started dating. And it wasn't because anything bad had happened. I wasn't cheated on. There wasn't any like massive blow-ups or terrible arguments or embarrassing me in front of my family, calling me names in front of my mom. None of those things had happened yet. But it was just that I was like, bro, it's not supposed to be this hard. Like I literally said to him, like we're just not compatible. Like it really isn't this difficult to get along with someone. And I don't have these problems anywhere else. So something has to be amiss here. And then he started with his usual, which became like his mantra of I'm a quitter. That I don't understand relationships. That I don't understand people. And what was amazing about the timing that he came into my life is that because I didn't have much and I had lost a lot recently, he always pointed back to those. He always said to me, this is why your best friend left you. This is why you couldn't keep the man. This is why your career is failing. This character flaw that's making you quit on our relationship is the reason why you are who you are or the lack of who you want to be today. And I believed him. One of the most dangerous quotes I have ever been told before is relationships take hard work. That is the victim's anthem, right? When you're going through an abusive cycle with somebody or a negative toxic relationship, that is what you tell yourself to get through it, that this is how it's supposed to be. And that if you want something good, you have to go through the bad in the process. And I'm just like, fuck no, no. If you are struggling, backbreaking, heartbreaking, soul crushing, struggling to make something work, it's not supposed to work. There might be a little bit of friction. You might have to do one or two extra things to make something truly click into place. But if you find yourself sweating and crying and indistinguishably sweating and crying, you're not in the right place. You're not in the right place. Where do you think that you were to blame in this relationship? Like where would you take some of the onus for the way that it all went down? Yeah, that's a great question. And some of that's always in the back of my mind as I tell any story. I'm a reactive person and so I can't be with a reactive personality. I don't have a temper, but I don't have a filter. He doesn't have a filter and he has a temper. That combination was awful, right? Because we would be getting to a place and the emotions would be heightening. And then I would say something that probably shouldn't have been said. And then next thing you know, it's completely overblown. So compatibility wise, I was at fault because my weaknesses were amplified within the relationship. I know where I'm not an awesome person and like to be honest with you, I'm still working on my sharp tongue. I refer to Jared a lot of the times as white snow. And so if I call Jared a name out of anger or I say something mean, he just kind of just like looks at me and then I'm like faced with what I've done. I'm faced with the mistake that I've made. And being that kind of personality has allowed me to get better at that and to stop that behavior. I think I've gotten a lot better since we've gotten together. That was the first mistake I made. As the relationship went on, the biggest fault I would say, obviously going through his phone, like all that searching, MacGyvering, Detectiving, all that real housewife shit, so tacky. I was embarrassed to be that person. I'm embarrassed to tell those stories about myself. It's not right, it's not ethical. It's just gross. I wouldn't want to be with someone like that, but it was my only form of self-protection. I couldn't rely on him for the truth, but ultimately it didn't, if I found it once and I had to keep looking, I didn't have to stay and I chose to stay. Another massive fault, character flaw of mine. Like I was needy in that relationship and that just kept something going for a long time and probably enabled a lot of behaviors of his that needed to be changed. The last thing I will say that I really hated about myself in that relationship, I hated him as a person. I wasn't happy for him. I didn't want good things to happen for him, but I was addicted to him and in some ways in love with him as a form of this addiction. So I stayed with somebody that I didn't want the best for. When he would tell me positive news, I didn't feel happy or positive for him. When he was in a good mood, I was kind of angered by that because I didn't like him so much and I felt so much resentment towards him. So his happiness made me feel mad. So yeah, that was probably a big mistake I made. Staying with someone I didn't like and as a result, never being able to truly love them. There's a lesson in every lived experience. So with that being said, do you ultimately regret this relationship or are you grateful for it? Hell yes, I regret the relationship. Whenever I hear people say stuff like I don't regret anything, I'm like great for you. There are two kinds of lessons in life. Things that you have to learn through experience and things that you can read about. This is definitely something I could have read about. I didn't have to experience someone spitting on me to realize I don't want that for myself. I didn't have to experience having my body and my health at risk to realize like that's probably not the place for me. There was just like the amount of like actual lessons that were valuable and applicable to the quality of life that I now have that I got from this relationship. I could probably count on one hand and that's how many years I was involved. I was involved with this a double time if you add up the whole thing together. So no, this was not a relationship that I'm like, I'm glad I went through that. The only bright spot to going through this relationship is that I have so much more understanding and connection with people who have been through something similar. Anybody who's been through a toxic relationship where there really is nothing in it for them other than pride and a desperate need to fill a void that that person can never fill, I understand and connect with those people but also think I could have gained that just from reading a lot. So yeah, when I hear people who have been in relationships that were like the right person but the wrong timing, maybe the wrong circumstances or the wrong long-term goals, those are the ones that you don't regret because you found yourself and you learned about yourself in the process. In this relationship, I lost demolish, peed on, stamped on who I was and had to claw my way back out, which took some time and I want that time back. And the question that you knew we were gonna have to end things off on if there's anyone who is watching this video right now who is currently going through a toxic relationship, what advice would you give to them? My advice to anyone who feels like this relationship sounds very similar to what they're currently going through would be to intellectualize your current experience. When you're looking at things through a microscope, it feels like a one-off, it feels like you're on your own private island alone going through this and no one else will understand but once you start to read and understand that this is a pattern of behavior, this is a chain reaction of events and that this behavior would have happened with or without you, that's when you could start to break yourself free out of it. The reason why I stayed in that relationship for so long is because I felt it was me, right? I recognize that even if I left this situation that was toxic and harmful and hurtful because I believe what he said about me, that I'm not a good woman, that I don't know about relationships, that I don't understand men, that I am a bad step mom, because I believe those things, I recognize that if I didn't deal with my problems here, they would come up elsewhere because I was the problem, right? And to want to take the blame on for yourself because you love that deeply, that you wanna do anything you can, even if that means risking your own self-esteem. And in September, a major thing happened where I looked this guy in the face and I said, it is not my fault you're fucked up. The most powerful thing I could have done, it is not my fault that you are fucked up. There is nothing that I could do, there is no more that I could love, there is nothing that I could have said to make you a good person. And you have to go on that journey for yourself and that journey to... That's when I was able to set myself free. And I only got to that place by listening to other people's stories, by reading books about, it's called an ardent rake, look up ardent rake from the art of seduction. When I literally read about that passage, I was screaming in my car from feeling like I found the potion. I found the recipe list for how to emotionally manipulate someone the way that I had been. This feels like a great place for me to step back in here and talk about the private podcast. I actually read the passage from the art of seduction that gave me that screaming in my car aha moment. And I hope by listening to this podcast, you might get that exact same experience yourself. And maybe you can help yourself or someone you love get out of something before it is too late. Okay, so without further ado, here's a little preview. So love's letting goes exactly like this. Someone meets you and they have an ridiculous amount, again, like the rake of affection for you. They hardly even know you and yet they are willing to do and say anything to be around you. They are so just up in arms with you and you get all this positive affirmation, all this positive attention. But if you really slow down to think about it, you haven't earned it, right? Like they don't really know you. You don't really shared much with that person and so all of this attention is almost like a kid who gets a new toy. Like for example, if you give a kid a new toy that you spent a hundred bucks on, they didn't really care about it. They're gonna play with it for two, three hours, right? If you give a kid a happy meal toy that costs you 50 cents, they're gonna play with that toy for two or three hours. It's not the toy that they are enamored with. It's the fact that it's something new. And that's a lot of times what happens in love flooding. It's like you get all of this focused attention and love and inspiration and it just feels like, wow, I'm special, but truly you're just new and that's what they're reacting to. So after you get all this love, attention, affection and it feels really, really good for you, they'll start to scale back a bit, but they'll be strategic with this. I hear love in you Like oh, ah, where you learn that? Oh, ah, how you hear that? Oh, ah, where you learn that?