Tami Kiekhaefer: Learning to Trust Yourself Again

Six months out of the relationship and you still miss the person who harmed you. Eight years out and you still brace when the phone lights up. What is actually happening there, and is any of it a sign that something is wrong with you?

Tami Kiekhaefer is a licensed clinical social worker in the Denver area who has been in private practice since 2002, working with anxiety, depression, trauma, couples, and domestic violence. She describes her approach as meeting people where they are instead of handing them a plan they are not ready for. She has written two books, Preparing for the Jungle: Avoiding Snakes and Pitfalls on the Path to Healthy Love, and From Chaos to Calm: A Six-Step Strategy to Break Through Anxiety. She says she lived both of them before she wrote either.

In this episode she and Lisa start with the shoulds, the running commentary that says you ought to be over this by now, and why that commentary makes it harder to think clearly. Tami explains why a relationship you knew was unhealthy can still leave something to grieve, and why six months is a short window for the kind of trauma this audience is carrying. They talk about impulse and the pause that interrupts it, about attachment and where the capacity to trust gets built, and about the difference between listening to your intuition and rationalizing past it.

Tami also describes cutting off the attention an abusive ex is feeding on, and is direct about the safety planning that has to accompany it, because people escalate when the supply runs out. Lisa adds the piece specific to family court: you cannot simply go silent on someone you share children with, so the communication has to get strategic instead. She walks through the sequence her Strategic Communication work teaches, pause, analyze, then strategize, including the decision about whether a message needs a reply at all. The conversation closes with what both of them found on the other side.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why the trust that needs rebuilding is trust in yourself, not only in other people
• The dance that feels comfortable because it is familiar, and how to change the music
• What to do with a hostile text instead of answering it, and the question to ask first
• Why low confidence and high anxiety make you reactive, and what to rebuild first
• Cutting off the attention an ex is feeding on, and the safety planning that goes with it
• Why going silent is not an option when you are co-parenting, and what to do instead
• What fear underneath a partner's behavior explains, and why that makes it less personal
• Non-negotiables and red flags, and what changes once you have done the work

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Never trusting anyone again, and why that is so common
3:00 No shoulds: room to not be okay yet
5:00 Why you can still miss someone who harmed you
7:00 The dance that feels comfortable and leaves you bruised
9:00 The hostile text, the pause, and the question to ask first
11:00 Attachment, intuition, and where trust gets built
14:00 Cutting off the attention an abusive ex feeds on
17:00 Escalation, scarcity, and why safety planning comes first
19:00 Co-parenting when going silent is not an option
20:00 Her two books, the fear under the behavior, and non-negotiables
27:00 Ten years on the other side

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
🔗 Tami Kiekhaefer at Healthy Healing: https://healthyhealing.net/

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.