Soon after I left my ex, he told my kids that my friends were the toxic sisterhood. They weren’t to have anything to do with them.

When I found out, I told one of those friends. We laughed so hard. In fact, we half-seriously considered getting t-shirts with “Toxic Sisterhood” emblazoned on them.

The label didn’t sting at all, not even one teeny little bit. I didn’t feel the need to defend myself and my friends against it. We just laughed, because we both knew something he didn't: he was right. Yes, my friends were toxic — to his brand of abuse. They saw through it. They named it. They held me steady when he was doing everything he could to make me doubt myself. Of course he wanted them gone. They were dismantling everything he’d spent years building.

He meant it as a weapon. It landed as a compliment.

There’s also another pattern worth naming here. Coercive controllers are masters of projection. The things they accuse you of are frequently the things that best describe them. My friends weren’t the toxic ones in that dynamic. He was. By calling them the toxic sisterhood, he was projecting his own label on them.

This matters because once you see it, you start to notice it everywhere. The abuser who accuses you of alienating the kids is usually the one doing the alienating. The one who calls you unstable is frequently the source of the instability. The one who says you’re controlling is the one who spent years controlling everything.

So when your ex attacks, it's worth asking two questions, not one. The first is the one we’ll come back to: is there something true here I can own? The second is: what does this tell me about this person?

That same judo move, of turning an insult into a power play, showed up recently in politics.

Earlier this year, Bobby Pulido, a popular Tejano musician running for Congress in Texas, found himself on the receiving end of a dig from his opponent. She released a video implying he wasn’t a serious candidate. This was the line that got everyone’s attention: “This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera, but who you trust with your family’s future."

She meant it to make him look small, unserious, and absolutely out of his depth.

Pulido didn’t get defensive and try to dispute it. He didn’t release a counter-video listing his qualifications. He leaned into the label, saying “A quinceañera isn’t just a pachanga, it’s a rite of passage that brings family and neighbors together, and honestly, that’s exactly what this campaign is about. We want to bring people together, not tear them apart.”

Then, his campaign launched an online form for quinceañera invitations. By the next morning, they’d received over 900 requests from across the district. Last count: over 2,000.

There’s something that De La Cruz didn’t get: quinceañeras aren’t frivolous. They’re a serious rite of passage in the Latin community. They’re all about family. They’re tradition. They’re community. By mocking them, and trying to diminish Pulido, she did the exact opposite. She also exposed her own disconnect from the people she was supposed to represent. And he let her do it, just by owning what she’d thrown at him.

What Pulido did, and what I did without even realizing it, breaks down into three moves.

Claim the label. Don’t dispute it. Don’t explain why it's wrong. Take it and stand in it.

Reframe what it means. Look at what the label actually describes and ask: is there something true here that I'm genuinely proud of? If yes, that’s your ground. My friends were toxic—to abuse. Pulido was a quinceañera performer—someone embedded in the heart of his community.

Let the abuser pay for it. When you stop defending and start owning, the attack loses its power. Worse for them, it often reveals something about them—their values, their priorities, what they’re actually threatened by.

You have to know which attacks are ownable

This doesn't work for every accusation, and it’s important to be honest about that. Forcing a reframe on something that isn't true will feel hollow to you, to the judge, and to everyone watching.

So before you try this, ask yourself one question: is there something true in this attack that I’m actually proud of?

If your ex calls you “too attached to your kids”. Is that true? Are you the one at every school pickup, every appointment, every bedtime? Then yes, that’s ownable. What your ex is calling an attack is actually your parenting record.

If your ex says you’re “too emotional”. Are you someone who feels things deeply and fights hard for your children? Then own it. Document the consistency underneath the feeling. Let your ex keep calling it instability while the record shows something else entirely, including their own instability.

Maybe your ex called you a gold digger. One mom I know, whose ex accused her of this in a court filing, did the math. She’d spent nearly 20 years homeschooling four kids, driving her ex to and from work most weekdays because he wouldn’t let her have a second car, and running the entire household. The number she came up with was over $320,000 a year in unpaid labor. He extracted years of her free labor for his own personal gain, and called her the gold digger. She said:

But if an accusation doesn’t have a true core you can stand in, don’t try to spin it. Log it, hand it to your lawyer, and move on. Not everything your ex throws at you deserves a response, strategic or otherwise.

But tactics are just the surface layer. The tactical piece is important, but it’s not really the point. What really matters is who you are when your ex takes a swing at you.

A coercive controller counts on your defensiveness. They’ve spent years learning exactly which accusations make you scramble to explain yourself, which labels send you into a spiral, which attacks make you forget what you know to be true about yourself. When you defend yourself, it gives them more fuel.

When you stop defending, not because you're ignoring them, but because you know who you are, something shifts. You’re not playing on their terms any more. They’ve thrown a pile of steaming mud at you and you’ve looked at it, taken what was useful, and left the rest.

What you’re doing is leaning into the attack with 100% authenticity. It’s a posture you adopt, standing strong in your truth. And it’s one you can practice, because the next attack is coming. When it does, before you reach for a rebuttal, ask yourself: what’s true in this that I can own?

Sometimes the answer will be nothing, and you'll know to leave it alone or just look for the projection in it. But sometimes, and more often than you think, you'll find something in there worth claiming. Something your ex meant to diminish you with that turns out to be exactly who you are, and something to be truly proud of.

The toxic sisterhood is still going strong, by the way. We never did get those t-shirts made. Maybe we should.

If your ex’s accusations have a habit of worming their way into your head and undermining your confidence, a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, is a great way to unpack it, expose it for what it is, and stand proudly in your own truth. So click that button down there, and book a call with me, even if you just want someone to rant to. Yes, I’m a coach but I don’t push coaching on someone who isn’t ready for it or can’t afford it. And I’ll send you a bunch of free, helpful resources to get you started.

Want to know more about what I do?

While I was typing this newsletter, this little notification popped up for me. I get these a lot and I always ignore them because I don’t want this newsletter to be clogged up with advertisements. It’s not my aim to monetize it.

But, there is one thing I’m putting here as an advert, and it’s a link to my own book. This is the official launch week, so I’ve reduced the price to $0.99 on Kindle. BTW, you can’t buy Kindle books on your phone app, so the Kindle version won’t show up there.

Even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can download the Kindle app on your phone and read it there. That’s how I do it. If you do read my book, I’d appreciate it too if you review it as well. Those reviews will help the book be seen on Amazon by others who need it.

This next resource is just up my street, not because I’m into dating but because it uses the same critical discourse analysis framework I draw on in my own work.

A lot of my readers are already members of Jenny Young’s Burned Haystack Dating Method®Facebook group and you’re probably aware that her book (yay, no more having to sift through gazillions of Instagram videos to find all her rhetorical patterns) is coming out in a couple of weeks.

Jenny sat down for this podcast interview to talk about how she developed this method using her academic background in critical discourse analysis, which is way more interesting than it sounds. She also discusses some of the patterns that should earn men an instant block when you see them come up in their dating profiles.

Recognizing manipulation patterns in a dating profile is the same skill you’re building every time you look at one of your ex’s attacks and ask: what is this actually telling me?