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Jul 10
  • Written By Scott Drochelman

    • #192 – Dr. Heidi Brocke

    #192 - Dr. Heidi Brocke

    Surviving A Toxic Marriage and Helping Others Escape

    Dr. Heidi Brocke spent 14 years in an extremely emotionally and narcissistically abusive relationship. Her ex-husband had his fingers in so many aspects of her life. They owned a chiropractic center together. They owned a ranch. They had two children together. All things he used to torment and control.

    The home was filled with fits of anger, extreme punishments and constant fear for her and her two daughters. And somehow even after trying to leave 6 times, he always found a new pressure point to bring them all back to him. There was no help coming from the courts, law enforcement or anyone else.

    Heidi eventually escaped but was forced to leave her teenage daughters behind and he kept them from her for 5 years. Every night she feared for their safety. And somehow, miraculously, they all came out the other side, but not without a significant amount of work.

    Today, she’s used what she’s learned to help hundreds rid and heal their toxic relationships and hosts the podcast “It’s not Normal, It’s Toxic”. She’s also an international keynote speaker, recipient of the Empowering Women in Business of The Year award by Inspiring Lives Magazine, and has been featured in both Forbes and Time Magazine for the dedication given to her clients and her work with toxic relationships.

    Episode Resources

    Connect with Heidi

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    Lionrock Resources

    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change, sponsored by lionrock.life.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    When I got to my house, I walk in, it is completely destroyed. Every single thing in my house was completely destroyed. There was not a dish in the cupboard, there was nothing on the walls. All the furniture was upside down. My clothes were in the yard. Literally everything was completely destroyed. So I called the sheriff. The sheriff came out to my house to write a report, and my former walks in the front door with the sheriff in the house, and the sheriff asks him to leave and he says, “No, this is my house. My name’s still on it. I don’t have to leave”, and the sheriff says, “Yes, you do. You have to leave.” Well, sheriff gets a drug call. Everybody wants to be on the drug bust, right? They don’t want to be out here in the middle of the country writing up some domestic spat thing.

    So he gets over the speaker that there’s a drug bust, and he goes, “I got to go. I got to go.” Well, I was not going to stay there by myself. I was fearful enough for my life at this point that I was not going to stay there by myself. So I follow him out of the house. I go to get in my car. My former had taken my purse and my car keys out of my car, so I couldn’t leave. So I chased the sheriff’s deputy down the road and I said, “You’re going to have to take me with you” and he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not allowed to transport a civilian in my squad car.” I remember distinctly saying, “If you don’t take me out of here, you’ll be back here in the morning for a homicide.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to the Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. Today I am here with Dr. Heidi Brocke. Dr. Brocke spent 14 years in an extremely emotionally and narcissistically abusive relationship. Her ex-husband had his fingers in so many aspects of her life. They owned a chiropractic center together. They owned a ranch. They had two children together, all things he used to torment and control her. The home was filled with fits of anger, extreme punishments, and constant fear for her and her two daughters, and somehow, even after trying to leave six times, he always found a new pressure point to bring them all back to him. There was no help coming from the courts, law enforcement or anyone else. Heidi eventually escaped but was forced to leave her teenage daughters behind, and he kept them from her for five years.

    Today, she’s used what she’s learned to help hundreds rid and heal their toxic relationships and host the podcast It’s Not Normal, It’s Toxic. She’s also an international keynote speaker, recipient of the Empowering Women in Business of the Year award by Inspiring Lives Magazine, and has been featured in both Forbes and Time Magazine for the dedication given to her clients and her work with toxic relationships. This story is wild, friends. Heidi has been through a whole lot and this story is a perfect example of how things aren’t always what they seem. Please enjoy Dr. Heidi Brocke. Let’s do this.

    You are listening to the Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.

    Thank you so much for being here, and I’d love to hear about how you grew up and what your childhood was like, because it was very … what’s the word?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Isolating.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, it was very homogenous. That was the word.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    I would’ve never known that because obviously growing up, that’s all I knew. But I grew up on a little dairy farm out kind of close to Bozeman, Montana, which Bozeman, Montana has become very famous with the Yellowstone series, and I grew up in a little Christian community. It was Christian reform. We went to the same church. We all went to the same school. I saw the same people for the first 18 years of my life really. I am the middle of three sisters, which already makes me the problem child, right? Some of the stuff that I’m talking about now with you asking me about my upbringing, I have just had some revelation in some of this. My mother is very introverted, very, and both my sisters are very much like her. My dad was worked all the time, but I definitely have his personality, but I didn’t really see him that much.

    I mean, I’d ride on the tractor and stuff, but I am the only extrovert in the family. When I say extrovert, I’m like all the way extroverted. I was always a hundred miles an hour and I said if I had a dollar for every time someone said, “Heidi, be quiet, Heidi, just calm down, Heidi, go sit down. Heidi, what are we going to do with all your energy?”, I was just that person. But we had to drive 160 miles to go school shopping. My closest neighbor was three miles … well, probably a mile. It was my grandma. The next neighbor was my uncle and aunt. The next neighbor was my cousins. Our lives are either on the sledding hill with our cousins or on the bikes with our cousins or hiking around. Other than that, it was school and church.

    I’m the only one that left. I’m the only one that moved out of the state of Montana. They’re all still right there. My sister and my niece teach at the same school. They still go to the same church. I had gone to a private college for two years at extremely ridiculous tuition, but that was the college my mom went to, and that was the college my sister went to and after two years, I was like, “I don’t even know what I want to study.” So I moved back to Montana and I went to Montana State for a year and in that time I was working for a chiropractor, and I absolutely just soaked up A and P, anatomy and physiology, and I loved working on the cadavers, and I was nuts about that. After a couple … well, it was probably two semesters, my mom finally said, “Okay, you’ve been in college for three years. What are you doing?”

    I thought, “Well, I don’t have any other answers, so I’ll just apply for chiropractic school and if I get in, I’ll go.” I applied in July and I was moved to Davenport, Iowa by the Quad Cities by October. That is literally how much thought went into my healthcare career. When I went there, I had my own apartment for the first time, and of course, nobody told me anything about financial aid by the way. My mom just said, “Here’s the money for college. Sign right here.” I didn’t know I was taken out a loan or whatever. In that particular college, we do 33 credits a trimester, so you have 99 credits a year. You’re in class from 7:30 in the morning till almost 5:00, and then you’ve got homework for each one. Well, I was in my own apartment and I just ate it up. I don’t think I missed a test question in the entire first year of my grad school. The only reason I’m saying that is it’s now playing into the person that I am trying to figure out.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What does that tell you about the person that you were?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Well, back to my upbringing a little bit. I just pulled this crap off maybe a month and a half ago. I think when I went into grad school, I really thought everybody was like the people that were in the community that I grew up in. I mean, why would there be anybody that didn’t want your best interest in mind? But the thing I think made me pour into the study so much is, again, I just looked back on this, I was always being compared to my siblings or to other people. It’s not anything that anybody was doing maliciously, but it was … My older sister, her name’s Jill, and she is the cross country state champion, and she has a 14-inch waist and she gets $5 for every A on her report card, and she’s valedictorian and she likes the good boys, and she works in this high school office on her lunch hour as assistant admin. Meanwhile, I’m stealing footballs from boys on the playground.

    So going into grad school, I think because I liked it so much and I wanted to fit in and I wanted to prove myself, and I didn’t want to be second string and I didn’t want to be mediocre, I was the only one that left Montana, I’m the only one that’s going to have a doctorate, and I think that type of personality that’s been told that, we turn into perfectionists, we turn into the overachievers, the always chasing the success thing, whatever that is, I will never forget the first day I got one wrong. I thought my world was ending. It was just something inside of me that made me feel finally good about myself. That perfectionism scenario thing has carried on for a really long time. It hasn’t been up until maybe the last five years that I’ve been okay with leaving dirty dishes on the counter till morning and not having to have everything perfect.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What a relief to have found a little bit of space to not have to be perfect. You met your husband in grad school and to the point of I thought everyone was like the people in my town, everyone had your best interest at heart, interestingly, as a result of growing up in a place like that, maybe there was not a lot of training around listening to gut feelings. Because when I hear your story, I hear a lot of intuitively knowing.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    That’s me looking backwards, though.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But the intuition was there at the time, it’s just you weren’t taught how to listen to it or what to think of it, or you were taught that you were wrong.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Well, in that community, everybody had to fit in. So interesting. I had no intention of dating. I was going there. I was going to get my doctorate. I was going back to Montana, and I didn’t think I wanted to get married. I didn’t think I wanted kids. This was my life plan. Clearly, it worked out just perfectly.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Doesn’t it always?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    It was funny because I was the only female on the college campus at that time that wore cowboy boots. I didn’t wear them every day, but I wore them quite a bit and I wore my wranglers to class, and there was two guys on the campus, not in my class, but on the campus that had wranglers on. I don’t think I would’ve ever spoke to him if we wouldn’t have both had our wranglers and boots on on the same day. It was actually … I moved in ’93. I had only been there for two months when he introduced himself to me in the mail room. To me, he was a good-looking cowboy. You don’t see good-looking cowboys in the middle of Iowa when you come from Montana. But anyway, he had asked for my number, and then I flew home for Christmas and he had asked me out and I knew I didn’t want to date and so I had turned him down.

    Then when I got back, he asked me out again and I said no and he teased me and asked me out again. That’s where my problem personality started coming in, because I started feeling like I was being mean or like I was being the bad person. Even then, these are red flags that right over my head, but “Okay, well if you don’t want to go out with me, then I’ve got somebody else that does”, that little trick. So I did go out on a first date with him. This was funny also. He showed up in an old truck and asked if we could take my car. But again, me, what’s the big deal? That’s probably not that big a deal. But looking back, I’m like, “Well, duh.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Was he a student with you?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes, but he was two years ahead of me. So the first date, fine, it just started getting where, okay, then he wanted to go out again, and I really didn’t want to go out again. A lot of it was I was dedicated to my work or that’s the excuse I was using. Looking back, I didn’t feel that super comfortable around him and so I would tell him no. Well, he’d show up at my door or he’d call me or he’d show up at my locker and it just seemed to be everywhere all the time. So, of course, I went on a second date with him, and that first year was on and off. He really wanted to date me. It was almost over the top. “I can’t believe I’ve dated so many people and I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. You’re my soulmate. Where have you been?” That whole thing.

    Well, to me, some people really fall for that. I, in my head, did not fall for that. I kept thinking, “This doesn’t feel right.” But the manipulations with him started very early, and then he would disappear for two or three weeks and then he’d show back up like, “Oh, aren’t you glad out I’m back?” Just all that playing back and forth. That year was a lot of breakups, get back together, breakups, get back together, breakups, get back together. The get back togethers was … I somehow always felt guilty because I knew that this wasn’t the person. There was different stories through that first year that didn’t add up. He could have a convincing story no matter what, so then I’m a benefit …. I should have a shirt that says I’m a benefit of the doubter. Because as soon as they have a story that makes sense, you start questioning your own story, you start feeling like you overreacted, like you overthought, like, “Oh yeah, you’re probably right.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I want to point out that something I’m hearing you say, which is that the assumption that you had was that you were wrong, that you were always wrong. I think that’s interesting, given what you said about you’re too much, you’re this. The assumption was this feeling is not … it’s not real, it doesn’t mean anything, I’m wrong, me not wanting to be around him, that’s wrong. The benefit of the doubt, whatever doubt I have, it’s wrong. Whatever the messages were, how they translated into this relationship were “I’m just wrong, so I’m going to go with your story.”

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Or I would shove it [inaudible 00:12:39] “Well, I’ve never been in a situation like this. I’m supposed to be an adult now. I’m at grad school”, but mentally I didn’t feel like it. In my community, nobody talks about problems either. I mean, I went to undergrad not knowing a single thing about sex because we just don’t talk about anything.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you say not knowing a single thing, what do you mean?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    I think I got a book that said here’s how babies are made.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So when you got to college, you had never had sex?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Not til undergrad, no. By the time I got to grad school, I had, because had had a boyfriend earlier. But that being said, that was very on and off and it was very up and down. To your point, he would make me feel rejected on purpose, so I would hang on tighter. That brings me back to the things I’ve uncovered. I was always changing myself so I would fit better into the certain groups in school. I was changing myself so I would fit better into my family so I wasn’t the loud one and I wasn’t bothering everybody and the whole Heidi go outside thing. I learned early on how to just stuff the real me down and adapt so that I was accepted or that I was good enough.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Tell me about getting pregnant or finding out you’re pregnant. How long into that was-

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    So I was going to say that first year was on again off again, again off again. Let’s see, I think he was supposed to graduate that following February, and we had kind of started going out and he convinced me to give up my apartment and move in with him. Everything in my being said, “Don’t do this”, but he was very convincing and “It’s going to be great, and I have the horses out there” and I would’ve never recognized it as fear until now looking back on it. It wasn’t fear of my physical safety at that point. It was fear of making him mad or fear of disappointing him or fear of having to have a fight or fear of not being good enough and if I don’t do what he wants, then he’s going to disappear again. It was all of that. I’ll never forget pretending I still had my apartment living with him, so my parents wouldn’t know.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, okay.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    I moved out there in the fall, and the whole time I was out there, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is not right.” Now, I think when I chalked it up to I’m very scheduled person. I like my schedule, I like to be on my schedule, I like the same thing, and I chalked it up to me feeling uncomfortable because I wasn’t on my schedule. Now, I was driving a half hour in, and I didn’t have my desk and I didn’t have my … but there was something that happened there. He got angry about something and he threw a coffee cup against the wall and broke it. I remember thinking, “Huh.” I don’t remember what it was. It wasn’t anything big. Maybe I tried to break up with him again. That could have been a possibility, and immediately that scared me. I’d never seen anything like that. But he just basically said, “Well, I’m sorry I got mad and broke the coffee cup, but if you wouldn’t have …” It’s basically, “I’m sorry, I got mad, but you pushed my buttons” type of thing.

    Then again, I internally reflect and go, “Oh yeah, he has provided me a nice place to live and maybe I’m not giving this enough chance,” and when anybody from the outside would go, “He threw a coffee cup at you and smashed it up against the wall”, but I just again took it upon myself. The next Christmas came, so this was a whole year of on again, off again, and I was going to fly home because I wanted to break up with him. So I was going to fly home to Montana by myself, and he said, “Well, if you really loved me, you wouldn’t go see your family for Christmas.” Again, I thought, “Oh, well, we have been getting along okay”, so he bought a ticket to come with me. We were then going to borrow my sister and her husband’s truck to go to Idaho where his family was, so we could meet both families. When we got to-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Sounds like your breakup plan was going really well.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yeah, the next six of them went that well too.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The breakup plan started with going to meet the families.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes, yes. Isn’t that hysterical?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I love it.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    I do have to tell you, I know the toxic personalities well, because what I teach now, I teach how they think. If the listeners hear me say something that is absolutely not funny and I’m laughing, it’s only because it’s just like that. It’s like, “How the heck did I miss that?” The stuff that happened in my former marriage was completely ludicrous. But anyway, when we got to Montana, I knew he had a ring, and I told my dad, “He’s got a ring in his pocket. When he asks you, will you please say no? I do not want to marry him, and we have to figure out when we get back to Iowa, I need to get my stuff out of there. I need to get back into an apartment.”

    So he asks my dad if he can marry me, my dad says no, and I just told him I was going to stay in Montana. He could still take the truck and go to Idaho and see his family. Then that night, I realized I was two weeks late, so I took a pregnancy test and yes, tada. So after telling my parents I didn’t want to be with him, I got up and left with him the next morning because he basically said, “Well, if this is mine, we need to make a home for it.” Well, of course. I’m 22 years old at the time, of course, that’s what I’m thinking. There were off and on times through that pregnancy that if I would try to break up, he would throw out the, “Well, are you sure it’s even mine? Maybe that’s why you want to want to break up.”

    But anyway, so I got up and left. He gave me the engagement ring in Idaho. Huge marquee, it had to be flashy for everybody. We drove back to Bozeman because where we got on the plane. I had to tell my mom that we got engaged. I had to tell my mom I was pregnant. I had to tell my mom we were back together and I got on the plane and I left. My mom planned the whole wedding. She sent out all the invitations. We were going to fly back in February and get married, and about the end of January, I just called her and I said, “No, I cannot marry him.” So my poor mother sent all cancellations out. I did have some friends help me move out, and I spent the entire pregnancy in my own apartment.

    But it was very stressful because the same thing, he would show up, he would call, he was continually, “We got to get back together. We got to get back together. We got to get back together. We’re got to get back together.” But it was kind of this off and on thing. Meanwhile, I am the size of a house trying to do 33 credits a trimester, and it was ridiculous. But anyway, I had her on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks late, and my mom had come for the delivery. Well, my mom had planned on coming when she was two weeks old, but my mom’s plane landed when I was in the delivery room and I had her, and of course that part was fine, but two weeks afterwards, after my mom left, he started it on the getting married again, and I kept telling him, “No, I think we should just keep it the way it is. Let’s just keep it the way it is.”

    Then he basically said, I’m not quoting these words, I just remember him saying, “Well, then I’ll take Mesa and you’ll never see her again.” So I married him the next day. Looking back, that would’ve never happened, but I was 23. I was scared to death. I felt like my family was mad at me. I didn’t know anybody. I was living by myself. I had a brand new baby, and I have somebody saying he’s going to take her and I’ll never see her again. So I married him the next day. That wedding night I spent in a hotel room and he spent in the lobby studying for some test with some female, and I had a crying baby in the lobby. But anyway, fast-forward through that, I graduated. We bought a place there because he got a teaching job at the college to wait for me to graduate.

    We got a place there. He was still teaching. I bought a practice there. We had another baby. So I had my own practice and I loved it, and I was doing okay because during the day I could be away. Until he decided to quit teaching and come into practice with me. That was the day I thought I was going to die. We had a very, very successful chiropractic sports injury clinic for a long time, but it was just almost like, okay, I don’t want to go on a first date with him, and then once I agreed, it just was this huge pile up of and then all of a sudden we had a business and we had two daughters, and we had land and we had a ranch and all of our finances were together, and it was just all of a sudden blah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What was so bad about being with him? I mean, you’ve certainly given lots of incidents and things, but on a day-to-day basis there was this yuck factor.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes. That’s basically what I teach now. I am a very emotionally driven person. I would’ve never gone into healthcare if I didn’t get fulfillment out of supporting and fixing and helping and caring for, and I’m the peacekeeper, I’m the conflict of avoider. So I only see the world through my emotionally wired eyes. I’m the first one to give up something so somebody else can have it. I’m the first one to cancel my … I make sure everybody in my world is okay today. That’s how the emotional wired person operates. Through those years, I ended up basically giving up everything. The girls and I would’ve never known it was as extreme as it was because we lived it every day. His temper was zero to a hundred. We never knew from one second to the next if he was going to be mad or if he was going to be in a good mood.

    I only had time to pay attention to what he was doing and what he was saying, because now I have two girls and I have to know how to react because I am the supporter, the fixer, the conflict avoider and the peacekeeper. So, “Okay, if he’s in a good mood, we’re going to do this. If he’s not in a good mood, we’ll do this. If he slams the door, I want you girls to go to your room. If he doesn’t slam the door, [inaudible 00:20:56],” like that. I was constantly paying attention to what he was saying and doing so I could stay one step ahead of him. The inconsistency and the unpredictability keeps our attention on them. I would call him before I left from work, and he would be in a great mood, and I had a 13-minute drive home and he would be completely opposite.

    But the control ended up being ridiculous. The isolation, he didn’t want me to be with my friends, he didn’t want me to be with my family. Any hobbies that I had that I enjoyed, he basically made me quit. So my attention was on him 100% of the time.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Was he punishing as well?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Very. Punishment, possession, having to ask permission. If I would’ve said, “How come I always have to ask permission for everything?” He would’ve said, “You don’t have to ask permission for anything. You can do whatever you want.” But I learned through repetition and reprimand that if I didn’t get permission, there was going to be conflict. So I was continually, “Well, can I go out with Shauna for margaritas?” and hope he would approve. I’m freaking 34, right? But I’m hoping he would approve, and sometimes he would say no, which gave him power and control, and sometimes he would say yes, but the minute he said yes, I would know more sit in the booth and my phone would start blowing up because when I’m out with my friends, my attention’s not on him. He would say, “The cows are out” and I had to leave right now. Or he would need something. “Well, where’s the can opener?” My phone would blow up the entire time, so I wasn’t allowed to have time with my friends.

    Eventually it’s easier for me to just not have friends and not try and talk to my family or go see my family than to fight with him every day about it. I just started cutting myself off. Then I started some hobbies. I started a candle company. All the money our office was filtered through the same thing, so I didn’t have access to my own money. I don’t want anybody to think I didn’t have access to money. I worked very hard. I saw a lot of patients, but I didn’t have access to anything that he couldn’t see. I had to use a credit card for everything. So he would question things, he would go through the receipts and whatever, and that wasn’t necessarily that bad, but I would’ve never gone on a shopping spree ever. I would’ve snuck a new bra in under the Walmart receipt.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What about your daughters? Was he punishing to your daughters?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yeah, and anybody in his life are placed there for their self security. If I would have been adamant on saying no at the beginning, he would’ve realized he couldn’t have got what he wanted from me and the relationship would’ve never developed. But during the love bombing phase when he loved everything about me and he accepted everything and I was his soulmate and he was buying me stuff, what he was doing during that phase was seeing if I was the personality that would adapt into the person that he wanted to basically serve him the things that made him feel secure. During the love bombing phase, he is also getting me to invest into the relationship because when an emotionally wired person invests or make promises or gives their word, it’s harder for them to back out. I remember distinctly him asking me to tell him secrets that nobody else knows.

    I remember there was a short time in my high school career that I had had trouble with bulimia for years. In a fight, he would throw that in my face, that I was the one with an eating disorder. But in the beginning, he really made it sound like all my secrets were safe with him, and what he’s doing is he’s gathering information. So once he gets me in a spot where I’m stuck, he uses all that information plus all the power plus the punishments, plus the fear plus all of that to keep me as a person that’s in his life to supply him with those things.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That dynamic changes as a parent, because if they go after your kids, you want to put yourself in between them and try to protect your kids, of course, in those relationships. Can you paint a picture for me of what that would look like?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    He didn’t really look at the kids until they were walking. He was completely distant in the delivery room. He never got up at night, never one time, never helped me with anything because anything I would need that would give me attention, and he would get more attention from me from not doing stuff because I would get angry. They don’t care if it’s positive or negative attention. Well, as the girls started getting older, his punishments to me were harsh, but I only remember getting spanked one time in my life. But he would make promises-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    By your husband?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    No, no. By my dad.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay, sorry.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    That’s what I mean. I didn’t know how other people disciplined their kids and the thing that was crazy is I loved these two so much. You don’t know until you’re a mom that you can love something so much and it would break my heart because he had them working when they were little tiny. Basically what he did is he occupied all our time and all of our schedules, so we didn’t have time to do anything else. That way, he was getting done what he needed done. He could be the boss. He had power, he had control over our schedules. As the girls grew, it got worse and the punishments were stand in the corner for two hours. Two hours. It was very heartbreaking to me because the only thing I knew to do was to stay there and try to protect them.

    Now, like I said, I left that relationship six times. I did not successfully get out of that relationship till the seventh time. One of the times my oldest was 15 months old and I was pregnant with my second. My mom had come out, we had just moved and she had come out to help paint the kitchen, I think, and it was Father’s Day, and he was so mad that we were painting the kitchen on Father’s Day and not acknowledging Father’s Day, even though he made me work through the Mother’s Day that he left for a rodeo or something and my mom packed me and pregnant with Shiloh and Mesa in the car, and we drove home to Montana without telling him. I was so scared. I was so-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Because your mom was like, “This is not okay.”

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes, she was like, “This is it. We’re going.” We get there and, of course, he calls and mom answers and he talks to me, and all he had to say was, “I can’t believe you’re breaking up our family.” I went, “Oh my gosh.” I felt so guilty. I felt so guilty for breaking … I didn’t want my kids to be from a broken home, blah, and this co-parenting, this back and forth thing, and I went back. He got me on that twice, or he’d threatened to go get another girlfriend or he’d start threatening me. Or one of the times I remember I held my ground, held my ground, held my ground until I was so exhausted. I was so exhausted from him begging me to come back. I finally just was like, “Okay, fine. It’s going to be easier than trying to keep you away from me forever.”

    But as the girls got older, they got very involved in rodeo. My oldest, Mesa, she started running pro rodeo when she was nine, and she was a little prodigy. She was winning everything. She still holds several records. Shiloh also ran. It was fun. We started out with youth and it was all fun and they were good. He was a very good doctor, he was very good at his job, and he was very good at keeping the horses sound and doing that. They were doing the youth things. They were winning. It was a family thing that we were doing. We took them to a clinic in Texas, and it’s a very well renowned barrel racer and she said, “That horse isn’t enough for Mesa. Mesa’s twice the rider of the horse she’s on.” Well, immediately he started seeing fame and fortune and we started buying up very, very expensive barrel horses, and Mesa did great.

    So our life turned into working at the office, seeing patients and all the money going into the truck and the trailer and the horses and the meds and all of that, entry fees. It got him a lot of attention, it got him a lot of girlfriends, it got him a lot of interviews. He had girlfriends the whole time, the entire time. But as soon as I would call him out on it, they would go away and he would never admit to any of them. Now I know I was the one that he was getting most of his power and control over, me and the girls, and so he would seek attention and admiration elsewhere. As soon as I would call him out on it, he would come back and be the good guy for a little bit and within a couple months he’d be back out.

    I used to be devastated. “Oh, what does she have that I don’t have? She must be blonde and she must be skinny and she must have more money and she must be able to ride a horse” and blah, blah, blah, and it just devastated me. Now looking back, it was an attention thing, but what happened in this scenario, because we were talking about the kids, is Mesa was doing so well that it ended up turning into something that was not fun. It ended up turning into if she didn’t win first at everything, she was grounded to the trailer and she didn’t get to eat.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    She didn’t get to eat?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yeah, he wouldn’t get her anything to eat.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you say grounded to the trailer, what does that mean?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Make her go back to the horse trailer. She couldn’t hang out with her friends after the barrel race. I don’t know if you know that much about roadies, but you take your horse and your truck and your trailer and you go. But at this time, since she was running so much, I would stay at the office, he would leave for a week with her the next week he would come back, I would go for a few days, he would stay at the office. That was kind of a relief, but it started to get such high pressure on Mesa, and that’s where girlfriend number 15 came in. I started standing up for myself. I think I had several people telling me that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, but I think I thought it was verbal. Yeah, he yells and screams and calls us names all the time, but he does that every day. Being in a toxic relationship is walking into a room that stinks. If you stay in the room, the smell goes away. It doesn’t mean the room doesn’t stink, it just means you’ve desensitized to it.

    Me and the girls were so desensitized to name-calling and yelling and arguing and him throwing things, it literally was just our life. It was just him. We would’ve never thought abuse. We would’ve never thought domestic violence. We would’ve never thought that because we were so used to it, it was normal. I think this is how I justified that this relationship could be normal if I would just learn how to be a better wife, because he wasn’t hitting me every day. Now, it did escalate to that type of thing towards the end, but he wasn’t hitting me every day so it’s not abuse. Right? With the barrel racing thing, I knew that they were leaving and he had a barrel trainer, a tall blonde barrel trainer riding with him, and she was going to take Mesa to Canada for a barrel race, and it was our 11th wedding anniversary.

    I knew he had this girlfriend, which he denied because she was the barrel trainer, and I had to drop him off at the airport because he was flying. He handed me a note when he got out of the plane and I thought, “Oh my gosh. He remembered it was our anniversary” and the note actually asked for a separation. He did not remember it was our anniversary. I drove straight from the airport that day to the attorney’s office, and I filed for divorce, and I drove straight to the hairdressers and I had my hair dyed back to its original color. When I knew that they were on their way back, I called them and on speaker told him that I had filed for divorce and I knew that she was in the truck. Little beknownst to her, she thought we were already divorced because he had already lied to her.

    From that day on, everything went absolutely 100% Jerry Springer, just insanely ridiculous. I was so excited that I filed thinking that he was going to sign. Well, if I filed and expected him to sign, that would give me power. Right? Okay, that’s not how it works in this relationship. I don’t get to decide that, so he refused to sign. Well, he also refused to get rid of his girlfriend, but he also refused to let me go. For six or seven months, it was this, “Okay, well, if you don’t want to get back together, then I’m going to go be with her.” Then when they would get … “Well, fine, then I’ll just go back” and it was this back and forth ridiculous thing and I had to work with him every single day in the office. Finally, she broke up with him and headed somewhere. She finally had had enough.

    I basically just kind of conned him into signing the divorce papers saying that will give us a new start, knowing I don’t want to be here, but I cannot figure out how to get away from him. By this time, I mean I’d been with him for 12 years, his temper scared me and I didn’t want the girls to have to go through it. I knew that if something happened to me, the girls would have nobody. So after she left, I basically decided “This’ll be my life until the girls are 18, I am just going to put my head down and I’m just going to do this.” He did sign the paperwork. He only agreed to sign the papers if I didn’t use an attorney, which now every single one of my clients, that’s the first thing I say.

    They’re going to say, “Let’s not use an attorney”, and the only reason that is he knows he can convince you of stuff. You already know. You spent 12 years not being able to stand up for yourself. Your attorney’s your team, your divorce coach is your team, your financial advisor is your team. But we’re always thinking, “Well, that good person from the beginning’s coming back.” So he drew up the divorce papers, put every loophole he could in it, I was so desperate to just have those divorce papers signed because for some reason I thought it was going to make a difference. They were signed and nothing changed for an entire year. All the money stayed together, all the properties stayed together. He agreed to 50/50 but refused to sign a parenting plan so there was nothing saying when the girls were with me, when the girls were with him.

    Through that year, I told him I wanted to buy a house so we were going to have to figure out how to get funds to buy a house. Well, the only way I was allowed to have my own house was if it was on the same property. Now, it worked well. There was a hill, we had 160 acres. We couldn’t see the houses. It actually worked good because the kids’ horse pastures were between, and they had four wheelers and they had horses, and so they’d just fly between the two. But now looking back, that was so he could keep track of my schedule. He knew when I was home. He knew when I wasn’t home. He knew if I had company over. He still knew all of that and I’m standing there with divorce papers thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I’m free.” There was nothing that changed except now he was legal to have girlfriends.

    So I did a year, a year like that and really just decided, “I’ll just stay here. I’ll just do this. I don’t care. I don’t need anything. I’m very low maintenance person. I’ll just grit my teeth and when the kids are 18 and we’ll figure it out.” Well, there was one night I was headed to a rodeo and he said, “I have spies out. I want to make sure you know that. So if I catch you talking to anybody, there’s going to be health pay.” He would time when I got there and he would time on my way home and I had to work with him every day. I’m not going to rock the boat because there was times he’d have me locked in an office fighting when we had patients waiting in the waiting room. I don’t know how many times I used the excuse that I had allergies because I had been in my office bawling my eyes out because of something.

    But anyway, in my head, I’m going, “The last thing I want is another man”, and I had already dedicated to just doing this. Well, that night, the man that I’m married to now actually saw me. So I actually had some conversation with him, but then never thought anything about it and a couple days later, I had a friend call and say, “There is a rough stock rider out here that wanted to know if he could have your number,” and I was like, “Fuck my life. No way. No.” I mean, I still have to go to work. I am just trying to be here for my kids. I said, “No, he could not have my number.” Well, as rodeo works, you call into rodeos three or four weeks in advance. So he guessed where I was going to be next and two weeks later, the man that I married to now introduced himself to me.

    I was still very on guard because people will tell my former, there’s people all over that we know, so I was very on guard and I talked to him for about a week on the phone. I got the guts to tell him I met someone, and he was in Oklahoma with Mesa at that time, and he wanted to know why I didn’t answer the phone the night before and I said, “Well, I met somebody” and he was coming back from Oklahoma to kill me. One of the scariest days of my life because I just met this man a week ago. I have no idea about him except that he’s calm. From here till it actually ended is so dramatic and confusing, it’s ridiculous. Basically, I told him that. Now here I am. Now what am I going to do?

    So I called him and he said, “Well, you have two options. You can either stay there and keep doing the same thing you’ve done for 14 years, or you can drive to St. Louis and we’ll figure it out.” I looked at Shiloh because I had her and I go, “Do you want to go on an adventure? And she goes, “Yeah.” I drove to his house and I’d only seen him once and talked to him on the phone for a week. I had to shut my cell phone off that day. It rang over 200 times. I had to close the office because he started calling the office phone. That was what allowed me to drive to St. Louis. I was so scared driving. It didn’t even occur to me till a few months afterwards. I was headed down 55 towards St. Louis, my former would’ve been coming up 35, but for some reason I had it in my head we were on the same interstate, and I was so scared that he was going to see me driving.

    I mean, I shook the whole way. It’s a four-hour trip, and I shook the whole way and I’m trying to make Shiloh think we’re on an adventure, right? Well, I get down here and I see this guy for the second time. Still again, I know nothing about this guy other than we talked on the phone a little bit. In that we had to talk on other people’s cell phones because mine would go through the cell phone bill. I mean, my stomach is in knots. My stomach was always in knots. In fact, I lived with a knot in my stomach. Well, I stayed down there for three or four days. Jeremy is the name of the man that I’m married to now. He got me a separate phone so that I could talk to him not on the other one.

    Well, I had patients waiting, so I had to go back up there. So I timed it, I left really early so I could not stop at the house and just go straight to the office when I went back. Of course, he was there and it was interrogation, interrogation, interrogation. He locked me in my office. He found that phone. He broke it. I had a friend that worked at a tanning salon next door, so I wrote her a note and brought it over to her to call Jeremy and let him know he broke the phone. Jeremy then in turn called the police and sent them to our office. My former stood behind the door and made me lie to the police officer that everything was fine. Everything was fine. They didn’t know who called. Well, the police officer knew enough about him that he said, “I’ll just be across the street.”

    Well, we deflamed that. Two weeks after that, Mesa was supposed to run a rodeo and Jeremy just happened to be in the same one and my former tried to tell Jeremy he couldn’t enter the rodeo. Jeremy’s been rodeoing for 20 years. How come all of a sudden this barrel racer’s dad’s going to think he can tell him he can’t come? That’s how authoritative he thinks he is. He can just speak and everybody’s supposed to cower. So I left early, which made him really mad. As soon as I met Jeremy, he called the girl that I divorced him over back and somehow convinced her to come back up there because he didn’t want to be by himself. So I left early for the rodeo, made him mad. He wouldn’t let me talk to Mesa at Pet Rodeo. Jeremy won the bucking horse riding. Mesa won the barrel horse. They were pulling out with the truck and the huge trailer and the barrel horse in it, and the girlfriend and Mesa, and he saw Jeremy standing by a car, and he jumped out of the moving truck and got into a fist fight with him.

    Now, mind you, I have to remind you, we’ve been divorced for over a year now. So they ended up getting into fist fight. My former got arrested, and I left the next morning with Jer just to get out of there for a minute. I got a restraining order against him, a temporary one, and just got out of there. I had Shiloh with me again that time. While I was down there for the two weeks, I was just getting ready to go back and I did not want to go back, but I had to. I had Shiloh and I had clients and I ran down to Jeremy’s horse barn to help him feed horses and one of his horses kicked me in the thigh. So he had to call then my former from the hospital and let him know what happened and Shiloh was supposed to start school the next day. Jeremy then had to take Shiloh to meet him right after this fist fight thing.

    Then I went back because I had to figure out how I was going to get out of this because this was a relationship that we weren’t stopping. He knew my story. He knew what was going on. He helped me escape. I don’t know how the man made it. But I went back up there and for a year I tried to buy his half of the practice out. I tried to sell him my half of the practice. I tried to divide stuff. He wouldn’t agree. He wouldn’t agree to anything. So for a year, Jeremy and I did long distance and through the entire year, my former kept trying to break us up. He never wanted me to stay at my own house. He would threaten me if I stayed at my own house.

    One of the times I came down, this was probably the weekend after the rodeo. I came down, spent a couple days here, went back and he said, “Hey, the girls …” He can be as mean as a shark when I leave and then when I’m coming back into town, I call the girls and he says, “Tell your mom to come up here for supper because you guys haven’t seen her.” I said, “No, I’m not going up there for supper” because it’s just confusing to the kids. I mean, I didn’t say that. I wanted to go to my house. When I got to my house, I walk in, it is completely destroyed. Every single thing in my house was completely destroyed. There was not a dish in the cupboard, there was nothing on the walls. All the furniture was upside down. My clothes were in the yard. Literally everything was completely destroyed.

    So I called the sheriff. The sheriff came out to my house to write a report, and my former walks in the front door with the sheriff in the house, and the sheriff asks him to leave and he says, “No, this is my house. My name’s still on it. I don’t have to leave,” and the sheriff says, “Yes, you do. You have to leave.” Well, sheriff gets a drug call. Everybody wants to be on the drug bust, right? They don’t want to be out here in the middle of the country writing up some domestic spat thing. So he gets over the speaker that there’s a drug bust and he goes, “I got to go. I got to go.”

    Well, I was not going to stay there by myself. I was fearful enough for my life at this point that I was not going to stay there by myself. So I follow him out of the house, I go to get in my car. My former had taken my purse and my car keys out of my car, so I couldn’t leave. So I chased the sheriff’s deputy down the road and I said, “You’re going to have to take me with you” and he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m not allowed to transport a civilian in my squad car.” I remember distinctly saying, “If you don’t take me out of here, you’ll be back here in the morning for a homicide.” I said, “He will come and kill me,” and I 100% believe that. So I get in the backseat of the squad car. All I had was my cell phone.

    He drives me two miles down a gravel road in the dark and kicks me out in a graveyard with nothing but my phone and leaves me there so he can go on this drug run. Luckily there was a full moon because I had light, but I’m standing in a graveyard in the middle of nowhere, and I’m just bawling my eyes out because everything had been taken from me. He made me get rid of my family and my friends. So I got really attached to decorating my house and some of my collections and stuff like that, and it was all gone. He destroyed it all. So, of course, I called Jeremy. Well, in the meantime, he sneaks back and puts my wallet and my keys back in my thing, and that was absolutely one of the most frightening nights of my life, and then I ended standing in a graveyard.

    Then a few weeks later, I really started standing up for myself during this time and that’s when things really started escalating. Because they want an emotional reaction, if you don’t give it to them, they’ll yell louder. If they yell louder and you don’t give a reaction, they’ll punch something. If you don’t react, they’ll throw something. If you don’t react, then the pushing and shoving starts, or they start blocking doorways. So breaking things or punching walls is the step before domestic violence. What they’re looking for, though, is they are looking for a reaction out of you. What I had learned to do is not give a reaction. He could yell, I didn’t care what he called me, I didn’t care how loud he yelled, I would just stand there. That’s not what he wanted. He wanted a reaction. So pushing and shoving started. One night, he threw a hunting knife at me, went right past, stuck in the door behind me.

    So I had to balance this do I stand up for myself or do I keep the peace because my girls are here? Now, it was very evident to me that if I left, he didn’t treat my girls like his kids, he would move them directly into the spot that I just left, and I knew that. So there was four or five months of me sitting in my house with my lights off, hoping he would think I wasn’t home because I was scared to death that he was going to show up. I didn’t really ask to see the kids that much. If they wanted to come through the pasture, they could. About four months later, Mesa was set to run a barrel race in Texas where she was looking to set a record. Someone had won it four times and she was fixing to tie it.

    So he went down with the girls, and I came down later. It was Mother’s Day, the day she won. She did win. She won the record. She had a horse trailer, so I had to pull the horse trailer home. My mom and dad had flown down from Montana to watch him run. Mother’s Day was Sunday, and the agreement was that they could ride back from Texas to Iowa with me. But of course he had me scheduled with patients at 8:30 the next morning, which meant I had to drive all the way through the night and go straight to work. That’s the kind of stuff he would do, just push me till I couldn’t go anymore. I had patients scheduled at 8:30, which meant I would’ve had to do a 13-hour drive, and he decided he wasn’t going to let me have the girls on Mother’s Day because him not letting me have the girls got the attention off the mother and got it on him.

    So my mom just said, we got to get on our plane, because we got to go. You just get in the truck and you just start driving. Don’t worry about the girls, just leave them here. You don’t want to fight about it.” So I left them with him and they could ride home with him and I got to St. Louis because I had been long distance with Jeremy for almost a year, and I was going to stop and see him for a couple hours before I went on home. My mom called him and told him to take my keys when I got there and she basically said, “she doesn’t have the power to do it herself, she’s so scared of him, so when she gets to your house, can you just take her keys and just don’t let her go back to Iowa?”

    So when I got there, I didn’t know this, and he took my keys and he said, “Your mom and I decided you’re not going back.” Of course, everything in me as a healthcare practitioner, “Yes, but I have patients on the schedule and I’m abandoning my patients.” But I didn’t. I stayed for two weeks and I didn’t have a plan. He, of course, was through the roof. I would leave my phone in the other room because it would just blow up, and it was just awful, awful, awful texting. I waited two weeks and I called my accountant and I drove up there and I had my accountant meet me and I signed my half of the practice over and I signed my patients over and I signed my accounts receivable over and I gave him everything but one piece of property so I could have something to sell.

    I had a U-Haul come and I packed everything that was left up and I moved to St. Louis and I left everything and had to leave my kids. My kids were 13 and 11 at the time, and they had bit it as long as I had. I remember looking at myself and going, “You are not the mom they need you.” I could not protect them even if I was there, which is what I had been trying to do. There was no protecting them. It was just the three of us in this same awful place and none of us could protect each other at all. I had always covered up for his behavior. “Well, your dad’s just having a bad day. Oh, well maybe you shouldn’t have said that. Maybe that was …” I had always made excuses because what you do, you hide things from your kids.

    They knew him just like I knew him. They had learned to adapt. They had learned to get along, they had learned when they keep their mouth shut, they had learned whatever. I thought, “You know what, if I keep covering up for him, they’re going to be 40 years old and he’s still going to be controlling them.” So what the hardest decision of my entire life was I have to become the mom they need. They have no idea what a normal relationship looks like. They need to see his true colors because when they’re 18, I want them to be able to choose the relationship that they have with him and it not be off of mom talking bad about dad. Of course, the barrel racing, I couldn’t afford to take them and their horses anyway.

    So I packed the U-Haul and I moved four hours south with nothing. I didn’t talk about that former relationship when I was in it because nobody understands emotional abuse. You get things like, “Oh, well, if it’s that bad, why don’t you leave?” Yeah, that’s a great idea. I haven’t thought about that every day for 15 years. Every day was this constant anxiety up to here.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What did your relationship with the girls look like after you left?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    When I left, I was under the assumption that, okay, well, our divorce decrease is 50/50, and so surely he’s going to let me have the girls. He kept my girls for five years from me. I had very, very little contact with them. I didn’t talk about it when I moved because I’m trying to build a new practice and how do you explain that you’re a mom that left two teenage girls in an abusive place in Iowa? So I never talked about it. After about four and a half years, now I did learn that no news was good news. My girls were tough. They had spare keys to the cars hidden outside. Now, they’re 13 and 11, and these girls would drive a car if they had to escape. No news was good news. If I did not hear from the girls, they were doing just fine.

    But when it got bad, they would find a way to get ahold of me. So the only calls I ever got from them were catastrophic and then I’d have to go up there and they’d say they want to live with me so I’d go get them and they’d be at my house for a month. Not even a month, two weeks, and he would call and say he was going to kill their barrel horses or that he was going to sell them, or “I’ll buy you a new truck” or whatever and they would literally run back away from my house up there. He told the girls that I called him and I didn’t love them anymore and that I never wanted to see them again and then he blocked me from their phones. I don’t 100% think the girls actually believed that, but he blocked me from their phones so I was unable to call their phones.

    The only time I would hear from them was when it was an emergency. I got a call one night, I didn’t know there was anything going on. My oldest daughter had called from somebody else’s phone just to ask me something and then she said, “Oh wait, I’m pulling up to the house, something’s wrong.” Well, then I didn’t hear anything and there was always something wrong so it didn’t really have me too worried about it. About four hours later, I got a call from one of my daughters and what had happened is he was trying to get a horse to do something and Shiloh wasn’t making the cows work right and he hit her with the cattle prod. I know him well enough that he probably did hit her with the cattle prod, but of course it was Shiloh’s fault because she bumped into it and he didn’t hit … it was that kind of thing.

    It spurred a great big, huge fight, which then he told them to leave, but he wouldn’t let them have their keys. They’re 17 and 19 at this point. Wouldn’t let them have their keys, wouldn’t let them have their purse, and so they started walking down the gravel road. Mesa called the cops and she could hear him coming behind them. She could hear him running. He knocked the phone out of her hand and pushed her down, and he grabbed Shiloh and was dragging Shiloh back to the house and she was screaming, and Mesa saw a car coming down gravel. They’re out in the middle of the country kind of by my graveyard and she ran towards it, and it was an off-duty police officer and they called in the basic SWAT team.

    They don’t go up to my former husband’s house without SWAT gear. That was when my girls came back. The state actually pressed charges against him because anybody else who would press charges, he would threaten them until we dropped them. So the state pressed charges for my girls and they came to live with me after I left them at 11 and 13 and they came back at 17 and 19. Jeremy was a great support. I don’t know how he did it. I mean, him watching me, what I went through with me not having the girls and him having to keep his mouth shut and not just go take care of my former, I don’t know how he did it. He thought he knew what he was getting into, but he definitely didn’t. There was about a year and a half in and he said, “I think maybe you should go talk to a counselor.”

    For the first three visits, I just basically started telling her about my story. Of course, I was bawling. It’s the first time I’ve ever told it and I was super upset and my blood pressure was high. Then I think my former realized I had a saddle he wanted because he let Mesa come down for a weekend. Because he wouldn’t let her come down just to visit, it would’ve had to been for something. She called me and she said, “Do you think I can go talk to that counselor?” I said, “Yeah”, and I got her an appointment and she went in and talked to her and then the next time I went in, she said, “I have to apologize to you because I didn’t believe a word you said in those first three sessions.” She said, “The stuff that you described that you and your girls have been through, there’s no way you could be functioning as a healthcare provider, starting a new business, taking care of people,” and then she said she was going to diagnose me with something that was basically I was making stuff up to get attention.

    She said, “I have to tell you, the stories you told me were so over the top, I didn’t believe anything until Mesa came in and told me the same thing.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How did you repair the relationship with the girls? Did they have resentments about your decisions?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Well, I always bought them birthday gifts. The first few birthdays I sent them, he never gave them to them so I just started getting them and keeping them. I would get their cards and stuff and I would just keep them here. But anytime I got to talk to them or be in communication, I always made sure that I was here no matter what. “I am always here no matter what and I will never stop loving you no matter what happens. I’m never going to stop loving you.” So they knew at that point that they could call me. Now, they had called me at times before and gone back, but this goes to everybody in my life told me to leave too. Nobody’s leaving a situation like this until they’re ready. My mom told me, my friends told me. I had to be ready myself and the girls had to be ready themselves.

    But about three years ago, I booked an Airbnb and I took Mesa and Shiloh, the first trip we’ve ever done to Branson. We just booked a Airbnb in Branson, Missouri, and it had a fireplace and they wanted to go through their pictures. I hadn’t been able to look at pictures because they trigger me. I don’t remember my kids from the time they were three till we started taking rodeo pictures. There is no memory of the cute things they did. There’s no memory of the things that they said, because my job was to freaking keep them alive. So when I would look at these pictures of them when they were little, it would trigger me so bad I refused to look at them. But they’re like, “Mom, we’ll all be together. Let’s look at them.”

    So we lit a fire and we started going through these pictures and we were able to laugh. But you look at this, “Mom, look there’s the Christmas tree with my horse ornament on it.” “Yeah, well that was five minutes before he tipped the tree over and smashed every ornament in the room.” So we were able to go through all the pictures and talk about that together, and we did. We laughed and laughed and laughed and they told me … Of course, I apologized to them for leaving and they said, “Mom, you can’t feel guilty about that.” They said, “You’re not allowed to feel guilty one more day. We knew exactly why you were leaving. Did we want you to leave? No, because then it was us.” But they said, “If you wouldn’t have left, one of us would be dead by now because his temper was getting worse and worse and worse.” So they said, “This is the last day you get to feel guilty about leaving us. You leaving us actually saved our lives.” My girls are doing very well other than the residual stuff.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What I love about it is your ability to own it and to … I think as a mother myself, I definitely was like, “Okay, how do you leave your kids? You just stay until everybody can get out.” When you explain why that wasn’t going to work and what they knew and how to repair and how you still were there for them, life is messy and complicated and I think one of the overarching messages for me is be careful who you have kids with. I think people think, “Well, if it doesn’t work, I’ll just get divorced.” That’s something I’ve heard people say. Or “I want a baby now and if the marriage doesn’t work, whatever.” Who you choose to have children with is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make because you are tied to them for life.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes. I always say … Now, I haven’t spoken to mine for over 12 years. I did see him in Oklahoma a couple weeks ago because Mesa made a finals and I knew he’d be fine. I’m not scared of him at all. I know exactly how he’s going to act. I told Mesa, “He’s going to act like this. Everything’s going to be fine.” He followed it to a complete T. But that was a huge win for me because I checked my blood pressure, I checked my breathing the whole time, nothing. That man has zero control over me. When I started this work, he heard the podcast and he was going to turn me in for slander and all this crap. Right now I’m like, “Yeah, bring it on. I think that would be a good idea to blow my career onto water probably.”

    But I think that the hardest thing was the identity. When you get in those and you give so much up of yourself, when your husband’s around, you’re a wife and when your kids are around, you’re a mom and when you’re at work, you’re a doctor or you’re an employee or you’re a friend and you get dumped in a room by yourself and nobody’s telling you who you’re supposed to be right now or how you’re supposed to feel, that I think was my biggest struggle through those five years. I didn’t have my kids. I was a doctor with no patients. I had completely walked out. I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing.”

    For me to get the fun-loving, independent, crazy Heidi, he does not like me to give him credit, but my husband now is the one that has pushed me to my independence. A healthy relationship is two independent people that work well together. It’s not one dependent on the other. So pushed me for friends, pushed me to have hobbies, and I always think, “Oh yes, I’m fixed. I got it. I got it all fixed”, and about that time I get hit by a freight train. I think the revelation for me this last year when I was talking about peeling off another layer, now that I’ve kind of backtracked a little further, I’m okay with it not being fixed. I think I realized this isn’t going to be fixed. I don’t have to promise to anybody that I’m not going to have a meltdown because this isn’t something that’s wrong with me. This is something that happened to me and I’ve been fixing and adapting and changing myself just to be good enough and to be perfect. This last year just made me go, “Oh, well, if you can’t deal with it-“

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That is the lesson, is we’ve never done this part of life. Even if you’ve done work on certain things, if your life changes dramatically and you become a different person as a result, you may see that experience in a whole new way. Well, to that end, you do coaching with people now around relationships. If people want to find you, where can they go to talk to you more about what you do?

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Well, I have a podcast, which it’s funny, it’s called It’s Not Normal, It’s Toxic and I started that podcast in 2018 to start talking about my story. I had never told it, and I thought that way I don’t know the audience. We’re growing like crazy. I didn’t mean that to happen, but It’s Not Normal, It’s Toxic is an easy way to find me. Coaching with Dr. Heidi is my website. The toxicity profile analysis that I was talking about, you don’t have to set up an appointment with me to take that. You can just take it because even reading the questions may make you go, “Oh yeah, I’ve gotten kind of used to that.” Then I just launched a community as well. My private is full and my mission is to help as many people as I can. I just launched a community and all that information is on the website. I’m on Instagram, most everything is under Coaching with Dr. Heidi. The support group is called Strength Within, and that’s on Facebook. That’s a private group.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. That was incredible and I’m sure it’s really hard to talk about some of that stuff and you did an incredible job, so thank you.

    Dr. Heidi Brocke:

    Yes, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Wow, what a story.

    Scott Drochelman:

    What a story. You really gave me a lot to work with there.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I just threw you the ball there and said, “Run with it, bitch.”

    Scott Drochelman:

    In this ping pong that we do back and forth, that was the equivalent of you just hitting it out of the room and being like, “Go get it. Go get it”.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Go get it.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Fine, I’ll go get it because I still want to play ping pong. All right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yep. That was what I was banking on. I was banking on your desire to pong ping.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Pong ping. This conversation with Heidi, I think it’s just a good reminder that this can happen to all kinds of people because it’s very clear, she’s a sort of a no nonsense person. She’s very strong, she’s a self-made person. She’s done all these great things with her career and with her education. I think it’s always helpful for people’s perception to be like, “This is a situation that anybody can find themselves in”, and that even somebody who you feel like has resource and things like that, there’s not an easy way out of this situation when the partner is the level that her partner was.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    What I heard when I was listening were a lot of red flags painted green, starting with her not wanting to date him, and just some of the living together stuff and the resistance she had to the relationship, kind of all the whole way up until even getting engaged. There was so much resistance. I felt like her cells and biology knew that this was a bad idea, but her training, whatever that looked like, her life experiences did not give context to this novel scenario she was encountering, and so she continued to go with it. I also think that it’s a common trait that we see many women have that says, “No, you’re just crazy. Just ignore whatever. This is you being dramatic”, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So many times we get into situations, I know I have, with people or just situations in general where we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re imagining things or we’re just being difficult or we’re just being crazy the whole time.

    Then when it gets really, really bad, now we’re able to say, “Oh my God, it’s really, really bad. Oh no.” Then that’s when we would say, but we’re so far down the rabbit hole at that point because every red flag has been painted green. I just have a lot of compassion for that situation. That’s really painful. She grew up so almost like idyllically that when this guy … I mean, he just knew. The other piece is these people who are of this persuasion, of this personality, of this sickness, whatever, however you want to refer to them, they know that you aren’t capable of withstanding their persistence and so they choose you. They’re not going to go after someone who’s going to call them on their shit.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I feel like there was so much maneuvering to just get himself kind of in the door and then once he’s there, just the number of pressure points that he was able to exploit.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh my God.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I mean, it was insane. It’s like leaving no way out. It’s controlling the money and the business and then using children and using their horses and using … it was every pressure point imaginable to have to try to leave six times.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    And then loses everything that she’s worked for, all the money. It’s really tough. It’s also a really good story and reminder about listening to your intuition. The situation doesn’t need to be the worst it’s going to be for you to decide this isn’t going to work for you and a reminder that things can always be worse, they can always get worse, and that there is hope even when you don’t see any way out of a situation. I think the transformation from being someone who is chosen by this person because he had an idea that she would respond the way she responded to a person who no longer puts up with toxic behavior is an important lesson on something that we all can practice doing before we get into relationships with people, whether romantic or otherwise.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Well, if you find that maybe something in this is familiar to you or maybe too similar to your situation, we do really encourage you to try to seek some help. It is worth it, and there are places to go. There are things that can be done. Reach out to us. We can try to point you in the direction of some resources that might be helpful for you. Ashley, anything that you want to leave the people with this week?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    If you heard this and related to what Heidi was going through, I just want to send out a big hug and let you know that there are other paths. As Scott said, please reach out to us if we can be helpful. All right guys, we’ll see you next time.

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    Scott Drochelman

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