Tanya Marie Dubé: The 3-Column Chart That Stops the Reaction

There is a reason your ex seems to read your mind. Tanya Marie Dubé's explanation is that they spent the relationship training you to be predictable, and that the same thing felt like uncanny closeness in the early stage, when it looked like being understood.

Tanya Marie Dubé is a narcissistic abuse recovery mentor, speaker, author, and host of the Unbreakable Women interview series, which she runs quarterly and through which she has interviewed hundreds of experts. She is Canadian, she came out of the foster care system, and she has spoken publicly about a childhood and then an eighteen-year relationship that gave her a long personal history with this. Her earliest work was walking people through divorce; her practice now starts after the recognition, at the question of what you actually do next.

In this episode, Tanya explains why people struggle to find help at all, which is that you need the vocabulary before you can search for anything. She found hers in a textbook paragraph. She and Lisa talk about the loop people get stuck in, where attention keeps returning to what went wrong and keeps finding evidence for it, and why she points clients toward where they are going instead. Lisa raises a pattern BTGO sees constantly in family court: someone who spent years having their authority taken hands it immediately to an attorney and expects to be saved, which is the same arrangement in a new coat.

Then the practical core. Tanya's three-column exercise: your triggers, your usual reaction, and the response you have decided on in advance, with ten seconds of pause between the trigger and anything you do. Copies on the phone, the laptop, the bathroom mirror. Lisa connects it to writing by hand, to keeping a promise to yourself, and to the strategic communication work BTGO does with clients, because the abuse comes through the communication and that is where you answer it. Tanya finishes on the message designed to get a rise out of you, what is usually going on when it arrives, and why emotional stability is the actual defense rather than the better argument.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why you can't find help until you have the vocabulary for what happened
• How the loop keeps finding evidence for what you already believe about yourself
• Why handing your authority to your attorney repeats the pattern you just left
• The three-column chart: trigger, usual reaction, decided response
• Why ten seconds of pause changes the outcome, and why handwriting it helps
• How doing the exercise rebuilds self-trust, not just self-control
• What's usually happening on the other end when a provoking text arrives
• Why emotional stability defends you better than the better argument does

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meet Tanya Marie Dubé, and why this information is hard to find
7:00 Finding the word in a textbook paragraph
10:00 Getting out of the loop, and where you point your attention
13:00 Giving away your authority, and doing it again with your lawyer
15:00 The courtroom moment, and what her lawyer told her afterward
17:00 The three-column chart
18:00 Why writing it by hand matters, and rebuilding self-trust
20:00 Emotional stability as the actual defense
21:00 Strategic communication, and starving the reaction
22:00 The text designed to get a rise, and gray rocking it

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Tanya Marie Dubé: https://www.tanyadube.com/
🔗 Tanya Marie Dubé on Instagram (@tanyamariedube): https://www.instagram.com/tanyamariedube/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.