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About Rachel
I am 58 years old. I live ten minutes from the beach on the south coast of England with my husband — the most wonderful man — who I married in 2022.
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I have three adult sons and two grandchildren who are, without question, the best thing in my world.
My life now includes long walks on the beach, a garden I love, weekends with my grandchildren, and regular trips to Italy — where my husband and I plan to retire one day, somewhere near a good pizzeria and an even better wine bar.
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I no longer work 60 to 80 hour weeks as the only breadwinner. I no longer carry the weight of everything — the finances, the decisions, the future — entirely alone. My husband and I are a team in the truest sense of the word. Every plan we make, every decision we take, every part of the life we are building — we do it together.
There is no coercion in my life. No guilt tripping. No gaslighting. No walking on eggshells. No version of myself carefully managed to avoid someone else's reaction.
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Just peace. Real, ordinary, deeply felt peace.
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I am telling you this not to boast — but because when I was in the middle of what I survived I could not imagine this life existed. I could not picture what the other side looked like. I felt trapped
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You don't have to be
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It is nearly ten years since I filed for divorce. A decade that has taken me from the worst chapter of my life to the best one, with eight of those years researching and recovering because there were no tools to help me.
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So peace, recovery and happiness are all possible.
My Story
I spent 25 years in a narcissistic marriage.
However, it wasn't until I was mid divorce I was made aware my ex husband was a Narcissist. I didn't know that's what it was. I just knew something was profoundly wrong — and that somehow, despite everything I gave, everything I carried, everything I tried, the problem was always me.
When it finally ended I was not prepared for what came next.
Most people assume that leaving is the hard part. It isn't. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, separation is frequently where the abuse escalates — it just changes form. What I experienced had a name I didn't know yet.
Post-separation abuse.
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What nobody tells you about leaving
The legal process took two years and cost me over £35,000 in solicitor's fees.
Not because it was complicated. Because it was deliberately prolonged. Communications unanswered. Forms not returned. Incorrect and untrue statements. Allegations designed not to succeed but to delay, to destabilise, and to drain — financially and emotionally.
Every tactic that had worked inside the marriage was now being deployed through solicitors. The arena had changed. The abuse had not.
And like so many survivors of domestic abuse I made a decision I would not make today.
I settled for 35% of everything I had built and paid for. Our home. Our business. Everything I had put into a life that was supposed to be shared. Not because it was fair — it was not even close to fair — but because I had been worn down to the point where ending it felt more important than fighting for what was mine. Because the children had been through enough. Because I just needed it to stop.
If I had known then what I know now — what is inside the divorce and co-parenting resources in this platform — that would not have happened.
That is not self-pity. That is the reason this platform exists.
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What I lost and what I built
The person I had spent 25 years trying to protect my children from turned his attention to dismantling my relationship with them once the marriage ended.
I lost the relationship with one of my sons, he spent his life seeking constant validation from his father, and of course taking 'his side' was an obvious and immediate way of getting that validation met. This is obvious to me now, and this is why I wrote 'What Children Carry', which is a framework explaining how and why children are impacted by Narcissistic parents and how in separation this then shows up in behaviour and actions, the 'safe parent' struggles to comprehend.
In the silence that followed I did what survivors do. I researched obsessively. I tried to understand not just what had happened to me but what had happened to my children — how coercive control doesn't end when you leave, how it redirects, how children become the channel through which the abuse continues long after the relationship is over.
I couldn't find a single resource that explained all of it clearly enough to have made a difference when it mattered.
So I built one.
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What I know
I am not a therapist. I don't have letters after my name.
What I have is 25 years of lived experience, years of obsessive research, and the particular clarity that comes from having been completely lost — and finding your way back.
I recovered. Fully. And everything I learned on that journey is inside this platform.
The Unbroken Hub exists because the resource I needed didn't. Not something that just validated the pain. Something that took you all the way through — from the first moment of recognition to the other side of the hardest parts. Written by someone who had actually been there. Who understood not just the psychology but the lived reality of what it costs.
Every resource inside The Unbroken Hub was built by a survivor for survivors.
This is what I needed. It is what I built for you.