Survivor. Therapist. Truth-Teller. Meet Marcia Williams

In this very first episode of The Healing Lounge, host Marcia Williams opens up about her journey — from surviving a 30-year marriage to a narcissist to becoming a licensed therapist dedicated to helping others heal.

Marcia shares her personal story of pain, awakening, and resilience, and why she created The Healing Lounge as a safe space for survivors to finally exhale. You’ll hear what to expect from this season, from taboo conversations about abuse to practical tools for healing, and why your story matters too.

Reflection Question: What’s one part of your story you’ve never told out loud, but know it’s time to honor?

If this episode speaks to you, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with someone who needs encouragement on their healing journey.

Takeaways

Marcia is a licensed therapist and a survivor of narcissistic abuse.
The podcast aims to share experiences of pain and healing.
Childhood trauma can impact adult relationships.
Recognizing red flags in relationships is crucial.
Compartmentalization can be a coping mechanism in abusive relationships.
Healing is a non-linear process that requires support.
Community and validation are essential in the healing journey.
Marcia's story serves as a beacon of hope for others.
Healing can begin even before leaving an abusive relationship.
The podcast will cover taboo topics related to narcissistic abuse.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to The Healing Lounge Podcast
01:59 Marcia's Journey: Before the Storm
06:36 Inside the Storm: The Relationship Begins
12:48 The Aftermath: Awakening and Realization
17:02 The Healing Journey: Finding Strength and Support
19:50 What to Expect in The Healing Lounge

Transcript

Hello!  I am so excited to bring to you the very first episode of the very first season of The Healing Lounge Podcast With me your host Marcia Williams. I am a licensed therapist I am an author and I am a narcissistic abuse recovery coach.

Most importantly, I am a survivor just like you. I am so excited and happy and blessed to have a platform to share with you my experience of pain, but what led me to my peace. And so that's what this podcast is about. And I'm so happy to share all of my experiences with you as a survivor of a 30 year marriage to a narcissist and as a licensed therapist and narcissistic abuse recovery coach. Along the way, I'm going to share with you stories of of celebration, stories of healing, stories of my struggles because I've been through it all. I truly honestly can say I have experienced it all and I am thankful to be here to share it with you with my only prayer being that my experiences lead you. want to be a beacon of hope for you to know that if I can be married to a narcissist for 30 years and now five years divorce tell you I am living my very best life, I want you to know you can do it too. 

So welcome to the very first podcast of the Healing Lounge. I want to start by sharing my story with you. It's a long story and I promise I will only share with you the things that matter. married to a narcissist before the storm, inside the storm and the aftermath and awakening. And that's what leads me to you today. 

Before the storm.
 
It's hard to remember, honestly. I am 55 years old today. I met my narcissist when I was 17 years old. My birthday is late. So by the time I graduated high school and went into my first fall semester of college, I was still 17. So as you can imagine, leaving home at 17, I left behind one sister and three brothers, my youngest brother being one year old. Yes, my mother, bless her heart, started over again. And that's when I said, ‚Åì that's my cue. I'm out of here. So I arrive on campus just young, ambitious, just excited about the next stage of my life. 
 
Before I got to college, I was already really active with friends, with boyfriends. I was already working. I was active in high school as a cheerleader. So I would say I had a pretty well-rounded life. And I was just expecting more of that when I got to college. Now, don't get me wrong. I wasn't this, you know, pretty perfect little girl, just bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready to experience the best that college had to offer. Well, I was ready to experience the best that college had to offer, but as I always share with my clients, I came with my own baggage. So after my own therapy, I came to understand I was a people pleaser, and I did search for external validation. 

So that's what I brought along with me to college, but nonetheless, It was truly before I got to high school that I experienced trauma in my life. And so I can honestly say that that childhood trauma is what carried me through relationships in not the healthiest ways.  So there is that. And I openly share that with you listeners and viewers because it's likely that most of us, and I was gonna say all of us, but I'll stick with most of us, because not everybody can say they've had trauma.
 
My childhood trauma involved being molested by a family member. Let me say extended family member. So, you know, as I grew up, I learned to have a basically leave the past in the past mentality. I just wanted to keep moving forward with my young brain, like I knew what I was doing. This is the mature me speaking for her. So I bring that into the conversation to say that absolutely it had an impact on the romantic relationships in my young age that I participated in. So let's bring that into my ambitious, excited 17-year-old self, anxious to find happiness and love and a career from this college experience that I was bound for.
 
 So to describe me before the storm, and I'm actually gonna say, as my friends would describe me before the storm, I was ambitious, I was socially active, I was opinionated, I did have a sense of confidence, I was a cheerleader. So I was outgoing, and I was independent.  I was quite independent. I had my own car before I got to college and a job. So there were things about me that were evident to my friends that defined me as someone who knew what they wanted in life and was a go-getter.
 
 Now I bring you Inside the Storm.
 
I met my then boyfriend at 17 years old, just fresh onto the college campus. And I had just broken up with my high school boyfriend because I was ready for a fresh, clean start. But of course there was some grieving. I was homesick. I'm young. And here comes who I used to call, my knight in shining armor. Tall, dark, and handsome, active in sports, well-known on campus, and a personality and charm that could not be overlooked. I fell head over heels pretty quickly. And he didn't waste much time grooming me, hence the name of my book, "GROOMED".
 
Throughout our college experience together, we dated in the strangest ways, I think. And the reason why I say strange is because this is where the red flags presented themselves and I ignored them. So strange ways meaning he had certain expectations that I assumed were normal. and don't forget the baggage I'm bringing with me is a people pleaser and external validation. So because he had already hooked me with his charm now it's my turn, my turn to show him that I am the one for him because I had decided he was the one for me.
 
And so it became a game of cat and mouse. And he was the cat and I was the mouse.  I was determined to show him who I was and what kind of girlfriend and how special I could be for him and with him. Now, what was in it for me? His confidence was just huge. I now know he is an overt narcissist and so he was confidently arrogant, confidently braggadocious. He thought so highly of himself and I was much more meek than that. I had a sense of confidence, yes, but I was much more soft spoken. Let's just say that. But his confidence is partly what attracted me to him.
 
And so over time, over these four years of dating, I didn't realize that I was shrinking. I didn't realize that I was being gaslit. I didn't know that this was the silent treatment when he threatened to break up with me because he accused me of talking to another guy on campus, which I hadn't done, and would just cut me off, ignore me when we were on campus, not return my phone calls and things of that nature. I didn't know what to call these patterns of behavior. But now I know I was inside the storm.
 
Of course, more often than not, I assumed it was me. More often than not, thought, maybe I was talking to a guy in a way that looked suspicious to him. I'm going to be careful of how I talk to guys on campus. Maybe I was acting in a way that was embarrassing to him. I don't want to embarrass him.  I want to be a compliment to him.
 

So this went on throughout college. By the end of college, we had moved in together and started talking about marriage. By this time, all the red flags had come and gone. I take that back, had come and stayed, but they became normal. You all probably have heard the story of the frog in the water.  And as the water gets warmer and warmer and warmer, the frog continues to adjust to the temperature. And by the time the temperature was piping hot, I had adjusted before we even got married.
 
 So as you can imagine, my married life to a narcissist was the exact replica of our dating years, tenfold. Everything had escalated. All of the manipulation, all of the devaluing, all of the discarding, it just continued and formed...
 
 A trauma bond.
 
I was stuck. I was in denial. And I was determined to fix it.
 
By now, I had gotten my master's degree and I became a licensed therapist. Now remember, the water is piping hot, but I can't tell. It feels just fine to me. Comfy cozy.  And so my career as a therapist in no way, shape or form, did it collide with my marriage to a narcissist. I was the queen of compartmentalization. I was able to completely compartmentalize what was happening at home and walk out of the house as a therapist and a career woman in corporate America not ever once putting two and two together. 

Until....
 
The aftermath and the awakening. 

The turning point was not for 29 more years. That's how resilient I was. That's how confident I was. And that's how much denial I was in. I was so comfortable in my denial.  So much so that I convinced myself, I gaslit myself, I told myself this must just be what marriages go through. Now also we've got to keep in mind the secrets. So many secrets because so many things that were going on filled me with shame and guilt.
 
 And for that reason, and I believe any listener who is a survivor will agree with me. We keep these things to ourselves. Number one, because we're conditioned to not air our dirty laundry, but number two, because of our own shame and guilt. I mean, if we talk about it, we have to say why we did it, why we allowed it, why we stayed.
 
 Why we accepted this behavior.  And those were questions that I had no answers to. So what did I do? Compartmentalize. I had a garage full of compartments filled with different sides of me that I had to become in order to survive my marriage. I literally learned how to lie to myself.  Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. This is where reactive abuse comes in. With reactive abuse, I would let my anger and frustration out on him to the highest level. Lucky for him, he's very tall, very big, and very strong. And nothing I did to him could hurt him.  And he never hurt me back, physically. Physically. He didn't have to. He had control in every other way possible.
 
 And so for that reason, I was stuck. I was absolutely positively stuck. I was stuck in my mind. I was stuck in my heart and I was stuck in my marriage.
 
 The awakening 29 years later during what I call my fake wedding anniversary.

I learned that he had been having an affair with a mutual friend, whom made sure to not refer to me as a mutual friend. Even though I had been to her house for parties with my husband at the time, she had been to my house for parties. And all along, the two of them were having an affair.  Now, this was not his first affair, I later learned. And I'm going to be completely honest, I had an affair five years into our marriage as a part of what I will call reactive abuse, not an excuse.

And so this time, 29 years later, sealed the fate of our marriage because I had to ask myself.  "Can I live like this for another 30 years?" I've made it this far, part of me says. What's another 30 years? I know what to expect. I now know he is never gonna change. He even liked to remind me of that. He would say, I am who I am. I've always been this way. Don't expect me to change. Well, I accepted that for as long as I could until I couldn't.

And I decided it's my turn. I decided I'm not okay. I decided I can't live like this anymore.  That began my healing journey. And my healing journey included therapy. It included support from friends and family who stuck it out with me for 30 years.
 
And I'm so grateful for them because Lord knows they knew there was nothing they could say to me that would change my mind from marrying who I thought and truly believed was the love of my life.  So they sat back and went along on the ride with me. And I'm thankful. I'm thankful for them today. Still my friends today. Been through thick and thin. I literally abandoned them and finally reclaimed my support after I left the narcissist. 

Healing is not linear, but it is worth it. And I am here to tell you and share more stories in more depth, getting raw, getting really real. I'm putting it all out there. I'm putting it all out there because I know that my experience is going to be your beacon of hope.
 
 Today, I am a survivor, first, a therapist, an author, a speaker.

And anything else that God gives me the strength and the courage to do because I now know why my prayers weren't answered during the marriage. And today I don't regret one moment. My three boys who are grown, understand today what they didn't understand their entire childhood. And they literally say to me today, why didn't you leave sooner?  Good question.

Healing can feel lonely, and it was for me. I hadn't yet found my voice. I hadn't yet found the courage to speak up. I could barely find the courage to speak the truth in therapy. Because when you say it out loud, you've got to face it. And you've got to accept the part of you, the 50 % that was you. It takes two to be in a dysfunctional relationship. And I was as dysfunctional as my narcissistic ex-husband.

But I promise you are not alone anymore. Please do not ever think you have to go through your healing journey alone. And guess what? Healing starts before you leave the relationship. So don't think that you can't follow me until you've left the relationship. Absolutely not. Follow me now. Follow me today. I promise you.

This lounge is where community and validation live. We will touch on taboo topics because my ex-narcissist was also a sex addict.

It's one of the reasons that I'm looking forward to this journey on this podcast series with you. It's because I finally found the safest space possible, and that's my own podcast, to talk about sexual abuse in narcissistic relationships. So that's just one of the taboo topics. But I promise you, amongst all of the topics that we will talk about, there will be laughter, there will be tears, there will be truth, and there will be strategies to help you heal.

So what you can expect in the Healing Lounge are not just solo episodes with me, but also guest interviews from survivors, therapists, and experts who will share their knowledge, their understanding, and their support.  There will be storytelling, not just mine, but from other listeners.  But all in all, every episode will have a nugget of healing that you can add to your toolbox.

I am an author. My book is called "GROOMED: Life Married to a Narcissist and How I Overcame Narcissistic Abuse". I have programs, coaching groups, one-on-one support, and I'm a licensed therapist. Listen, this is not a commercial. You will always leave The Healing Lounge, fed.  

I want you to reflect.  Between now and the next episode, what's one part of your story you've never spoken out loud, but need to honor?
 
 I am looking forward to sharing with you in the next episode, Why leaving a narcissist feels impossible. So I invite you to subscribe, review, share, and join me in the next episode and every episode of every season to come in The Healing Lounge. And don't forget to go to my website, thepassagetopeace.com. I have a community waiting for you.
 
A community of women who are still married and yet still learning how to find and protect their peace. I have a private Facebook group, private coaching groups, so many healing tools that I want to share with you and I look forward to sharing with you.
 
I cannot wait for this journey. I'm so glad you're here and I can't wait to see you in the next episode of the Healing Lounge.
 
I'm your host Marcia Williams, survivor first, therapist and narcissistic abuse recovery coach second. I'm here for you.