Red Flags & Real Love

Virginia McConnell

Break the Patterns is a weekly podcast about relationship patterns, narcissistic abuse recovery, and what healthy love actually looks like. Hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery, and former private investigator — this show brings honest, practical conversations for anyone ready to stop repeating the same relationship and finally choose differently.

  1. 4d ago

    Jane Doe #3 — "Broken Parts of People Break People More"

    Send us Fan Mail Content note: this episode includes descriptions of abuse, addiction, and violence. Support is available — the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Take breaks. Come back when you want to. Most guests describe one relationship. Today's guest describes three, each of them close to a decade long — and says the red flags were never hidden in any of them. They were visible from the first week. She saw them, picked them up, and carried them anyway. In this episode: One week of love bombing at the start of each relationship — and years spent trying to get back to itGaslighting so complete that he once opened a door and pretended not to know her, while she stood there holding their babyWhat happens when the people around you start deciding the common denominator must be youWhy she chose partners she thought she could fix, and what that said about what she believed she deservedHow addiction arrived — first as mockery for not drinking, then as seven years of her lifeThe moment her daughter was born and she realised the cycle was about to have a second generationBoundaries — the one thing she'd go back and tell herself, and why it matters most for neurodivergent people who were raised believing something was wrong with themWhat ten years single, twelve years sober, and a business built from nothing actually looks likeShe says the guilt is the only lasting damage — not the broken nose, not the years. The guilt about what her children saw. If you're hearing your own life in this, that's not proof anything is wrong with you. Ready to go deeper? More of Virginia's story at http://breakthepatterns.netBook a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatternsFollow along on Instagram and Facebook @officialvirginiamcconnellSupport the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  2. 6d ago

    Real Talk with Mia Hanks — 29 Years, Two Memoirs, and the Long Road to Naming It

    Send us Fan Mail Some patterns don't announce themselves. They arrive quietly, build slowly, and by the time you have language for what's happening, years have gone by. My guest today is Mia Hanks, an author and survivor who spent 29 years inside a marriage marked by covert narcissistic abuse — the kind that leaves no marks anyone else can see. She's written two memoirs about that experience, and in this conversation she shares what those years actually looked like from the inside. If you've ever wondered why it took you so long to see it, Mia's story is a reminder that the answer is usually built into how these patterns work — not into anything wrong with you. Find Mia: Books and more of her story: https://miajhanks.com Narcissism in Marriage: Understanding the Cycle of AbuseReady to go deeper? More of Virginia's story at http://breakthepatterns.net Book a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatternsSupport the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  3. 6d ago

    Real Talk with Dr. Eric Williams — The Three Questions Only You Can Answer

    Send us Fan Mail Everyone around you can see it. Your sister sees it, your best friend sees it. And none of it moves you an inch. Dr. Eric Williams explains why — and it's not stubbornness. My guest is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 20+ years of experience, an Army veteran, and creator of the Shared Language Framework, built for couples in their first five years before resentment sets in. He's worked with over 500 couples worldwide. In this episode: Why two people can both be trying and still fail — "clean," "help," and "love" don't mean the same thing to both of themThe six reasons couples end up in his officeWhy "you've changed" is his biggest pet peeve — and why both of you should haveTrading right versus wrong for what's working versus what's notCan't versus won't — why "you knew how I was when you met me" is a forecast, not a defenseTaking accountability without taking the blameThe three questions: Is this relationship meeting your expectations? How long can I do this? What am I willing to do about it?Nobody can answer those three for you. Nothing moves until you do. It took me a year to answer mine. Find Dr. Eric Williams: Free communication quiz: whywefight.coastalfamilymedia.com/quizCommunity: skool.com/the-origin-code-projectReady to go deeper? More of Virginia's story at http://breakthepatterns.netBook a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatternsFollow along on Instagram and Facebook @officialvirginiamcconnellSupport the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  4. Sep 3

    Rebuilding Self-Trust After Trauma with Jessy Pearson Cheney

    Send us Fan Mail What happens when you leave an unhealthy or abusive relationship, but your body still feels like you're in danger? In this powerful conversation, Virginia McConnell sits down with Jessy Pearson Cheney, an Emotion Code practitioner who helps women rebuild trust in their bodies after relationships that taught them to ignore their own intuition. Jessy shares her personal journey through trauma and domestic violence, and explains why healing isn't always about understanding everything intellectually. Sometimes, the body needs to be part of the healing process too. Together, Virginia and Jessy explore how trauma can affect the nervous system, disconnect us from our intuition, and keep us repeating relationship patterns—even when our minds know better. They discuss self-trust, fight-or-flight responses, emotional patterns, movement, and practical ways to reconnect with your body and begin feeling safe again. In this episode, you'll learn: Why leaving an unhealthy relationship doesn't automatically erase the patterns it created How trauma can disconnect you from your body and intuition Why you may know someone isn't safe logically but still feel drawn to them emotionally How rebuilding a relationship with your body can help restore self-trust The role of movement in releasing stress and pent-up emotions How body-based approaches can complement therapy and other forms of healing Simple ways to begin listening to what your body is telling you If you've ever questioned your intuition, struggled to trust yourself after a difficult relationship, or wondered why your body still reacts even when you're finally safe, this conversation is for you. Listen in and discover what it can look like to stop overriding yourself—and start trusting yourself again. About Jessy Pearson-Cheney Emotion Code Practitioner Jessy works with women rebuilding trust in their own body after a relationship that taught them not to. Having experienced domestic violence herself, she brings more than theory to this work; she’s walked through it and found her way out. What she sees, again and again, is that leaving the relationship isn’t where the pattern ends. The body often keeps replaying old wiring long after the danger is gone, staying too long, missing red flags, feeling drawn to familiar dynamics that don’t actually feel safe, even when the mind knows better. Jessy gets to the root of where that wiring started and helps clear it directly, so safety isn’t just something a woman knows intellectually, it’s something her body finally believes. Women who work with her leave feeling safer in their own skin, more able to trust their own read on people and situations, and less pulled back toward the same pattern again. Ways to contact;  Jessy@jessypearson.com  All socials: @jessypearsoncheney Text: 765-436-0985 Support the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  5. Sep 1

    Always Be Collecting Data with Anil Gupta

    Send us Fan Mail Most people go into relationships with hope and a good feeling. Anil Gupta goes in with a system — and he's blunt about why: roughly nine out of ten relationships fail, and most people are on their fifth, sixth, or seventh before they marry, still guessing. My guest today has spoken in 18 countries, shared stages with Richard Branson, Les Brown, and Daymond John, spoken at Harvard, TEDx, and on Fox News, and met the Dalai Lama. He's a five-time international bestselling author. He also built all of it out of the hardest moment of his life, in 2008. What he brought to this conversation wasn't inspiration. It was homework. In this episode: The happiness formula: giving × gratitude × growth, scored out of ten — and the pickleball fall that took him from 729 to 1 in half an hour, and how he climbed back before the day was outThe hundred-dollar-note exercise: why your worth doesn't move no matter what's been said about you or done to youThe moment he stopped me mid-sentence to correct how I described my own past — and what saying "I had none" does to the brain that "I had less" doesn'tAwareness → clarity → focus → action → results → momentum, and the small daily practice that starts itWhy "speak less, listen more" is a relationship skill, not a manners ruleThe three-way test every partner has to pass: integrity, being loving to everyone not just you, and being healthy — emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, and financiallyA-B-C-D-E-F-G: Always Be Collecting Data, then Evaluate, Finalize, and Go. Looking for alignment: the dog question, and how a two-minute exchange tells you whether someone is telling you the truthWhy he'd tell you not to date at all yet — and why coffee at an awkward hour reveals more than dinner ever willThe question to ask about their last relationship, and what complaining versus complimenting predicts about how they'll talk about youIf you've ever wondered why the same thing keeps happening, this episode hands you a method instead of a feeling. Find Anil: http://meetanil.comReady to go deeper? More of Virginia's story at http://breakthepatterns.netBook a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatternsSupport the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  6. Aug 26

    Real Talk with NK Navarro — "My Picker Is Broken"

    Send us Fan Mail There's a moment in dating when the story stops being about them and starts being about you. NK Navarro found hers in a coffee shop, in tears, at 40. My guest today is NK Navarro, author of When the Bar Is in Hell: Dating at 40. She's an entrepreneur, educator, and single mom with two master's degrees who relocated to get specialized care for her youngest son — and who then spent five years discovering that experience doesn't make dating any less complicated. Her book started as journal entries she'd read aloud to friends, who kept telling her the stories were too good not to publish. She's not wrong. Wait until you hear about the minivan. In this conversation: The coffee date that unraveled in real time — the makeup on his shirt, the device on his dashboard, and the phone call that explained everythingWhy she kept swiping right on the same kind of man, and what it took to admit the pattern was hers"Fire" — the one who didn't fit her checklist, had his life together, and told her the truth she wasn't ready forThe sentence in the middle of her tears that changed everything: you are single because of youWhy she didn't chase him back, and what respecting someone's no taught her about respecting her ownBeing a lifelong fixer, and learning that the word no ends with a periodThe three practices that actually hold her together: gym time with no screens, a midday walk with the dog, and a journaling rule her mom taught her — every entry has to end on something good, however smallThis one is funny. Genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. It's also one of the most honest accounts of self-accountability we've had on the show — because the hardest pattern to spot is the one you're choosing. Find NK: Website: nknavarro.comTikTok: @authornknavarroFacebook: Author NKWhen the Bar Is in Hell: Dating at 40 — available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Books-A-Million, Indigo (Canada), and independent bookstoresReady to go deeper? More of Virginia's story at http://breakthepatterns.netBook a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatternsFollow along on Instagram and Facebook @officialvirginiamcconnellSupport the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  7. Aug 19

    Jane Doe #2 — "I Would Choose My Mother Over You"

    Send us Fan Mail Content note: this episode includes pregnancy and infant loss, infidelity, and sustained emotional and verbal abuse. Take care of yourself as you listen — pause when you need to. The Jane Doe series is where anonymous guests share what they actually lived through. No names, no places, no identifying details — that's what makes this kind of honesty possible. Today's guest spent twelve years with someone they met on a dating app. The beginning was attentive, flattering, and fast — a whirlwind they'd only later recognize as love bombing. The early signs were small enough to explain away: impatience, a temper that flared easily, unkind words about other people. Then, with the wedding months away, the sudden announcement that children were a non-negotiable no. What followed was years of a pattern tightening: a mother-in-law who openly criticized their age, race, culture, and appearance. The loss of a daughter partway through a pregnancy, grieved almost entirely alone. A gut feeling that something was wrong that took two separate discoveries to finally name. And a partner who, in the end, said out loud whose side he was on. In this conversation: How a fast, flattering start can hide a pattern that only makes sense looking backThe message spotted while sitting in a church in Mexico — and the explanation that didn't hold upFinding proof of a years-long affair at two in the morning, and why the pandemic made leaving feel impossibleWhat it does to a marriage when a partner's family becomes the thing you're up againstThe love bombing that arrives after someone gets caught: the flowers, the cards, the therapy, the counseling that ended the moment it got uncomfortableThe single sentence in a counselor's office that made everything clearWhy "I just need to be a better wife" is so often the wrong questionWhat choosing yourself actually looks like in practice — the quiet planning, the separate finances, the plan you hope you won't needLife on the other side: their own home, low contact, and a sense of self rebuilt from the ground upThen the six questions asked of every guest in this series — including the one that lands hardest: what would you want someone still in it to know is possible? Support the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

  8. Jul 29

    Keeping the Hope and Not the Fantasy with Violet Lange

    Send us Fan Mail Violet Lange is a dating, relationship, and intimacy coach who helps smart, spiritual women attract healthy, lasting love. In this episode, she shares her latest dating after toxic and narcissistic abuse relationships. We also get into: How do you know when you're actually ready to date again versus just wanting to not be alone?What's the hardest part about dating after this kind of experience — what catches people off guard?What does a healthy early relationship actually feel like when you're used to chaos? How do you keep yourself from reading "calm" as "boring"?What are the first things to look for — and look out for — when you start dating again?You can check out more about Violet Lange at violetlange.com/loveharmonics/ Love Harmonics: 6 weeks for $69 to change your love life at https://violetlange.com/loveharmonics/ doors open August 17th and it starts Sept 10th on IG as @violetlovelange on FB as https://www.facebook.com/violetlange1 Ready to go deeper? Free workshop August 3rd — 7:30pm ET, register at Upcoming Events More of my story at Break the Patterns  Book a complimentary consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns  Follow along on Instagram and Facebook @officialvirginiamcconnell Support the show Red Flags & Real Love is a Break the Patterns podcast, hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery. 🔗 Free quiz: breakthepatterns.netlify.app  🔗 Website: breakthepatterns.net  📅 Book a free coaching consultation: calendly.com/breakthepatterns Connect with Virginia:  📸 Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell  👥 Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell New episodes every week.

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Break the Patterns is a weekly podcast about relationship patterns, narcissistic abuse recovery, and what healthy love actually looks like. Hosted by Virginia McConnell — Dating and Relationship Pattern Coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery, and former private investigator — this show brings honest, practical conversations for anyone ready to stop repeating the same relationship and finally choose differently.