You Were Never Meant to Be Controllable | Podcast

If you’re living in fear of the other person… it isn’t healthy love.

Love doesn’t control.
Love doesn’t silence.
Love doesn’t demand fear — it casts it out.

Listen to the podcast here:

You were never meant to live small, afraid, or manipulated.
You were created to live fearless, free, and uncontrollable — not in rebellion, but in redemptive alignment with who you were designed to be.

Freedom doesn’t come from controlling everyone else (or from complying with control, either).
It comes from being grounded in truth and rooted in love.

When you live in truth and love, you can’t be bought, and you can’t be manipulated.

This also means that while you're becoming more and more impervious to being controlled, you're also releasing your hold on the compulsion to try and manage the outcomes around you. In this process, you'll find yourself gradually recognizing that:

...you can’t control your ex.
...you can’t control the world around your children.

The only thing you can control is who you are becoming — the ways you model integrity, calm, and courage.

Freedom from fear doesn't have to feel like an impossible dream.
It’s a direction, a path forward...
And you don’t have to walk it alone.

💬 Favorite Moments from the Episode:

“If you’re living scared of the other person, it isn’t love.” — Sarah

“Freedom comes from being grounded and rooted in what you know to be true.” — Sarah

“Uncontrollable doesn’t mean rebellious. It just means you can’t be bought.” — Sarah

Catch this episode on YouTube:

Meet your hosts: 

Sarah McDugal – high-conflict communication strategist guiding protective parents through family court chaos with integrity, clarity, and calm under pressure (no tiptoeing, no legalese, no playing nice with coercive control)

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If this message stirred something in you, take your next step toward clarity and courage:

🧭 Freedom Navigator BASECAMP – join the coaching community for protective parents walking through post-separation abuse and family court chaos.

THINGS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

"Exposing the PLAYBOOK: the 3-Step Blueprint to Anticipate Your Abuser's Next Move in Family Court"

The $7 Investment That Could Save You Thousands

• What’s Inside:

  ✅ The three biggest myths that can sabotage your case before it even starts.

  ✅ The 3-step strategy to anticipate their next move before they even make it.

  ✅ The exact tactics abusers use to manipulate the system—and how to fight back.

  ✅ Insider tips to protect your sanity and self-care while navigating family court.

• Get it here.

SUPPORT WILD:

• Join the SCOOP for $17/mo (it’s like our Patreon, but with mega-perks!)

• And check out our workshops for quick, bite-size steps to clarity.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Hey there, you are listening to This WILD Journey podcast where we do our best to speak fierce truth, but also offer tender hope. And all the way through, build the mindset shifts that you need in order to live in freedom.

Freedom that comes with truth, freedom that comes with integrity, freedom that comes with wholeness and healing.

I'm your host today, Sarah McDugal, and today it's just me. Uh, I'm filling in for Coach Bren as well.

And today's episode is not just a talk. I'm actually going to share a message that was originally something I shared live with a group of my inner circle coaching clients in FREEDOM Navigator's BASECAMP strategy support for protective parents.

But it was too powerful not to also bring here to the podcast. It is more than just, uh, uh, just a conversation. It's, it's a call to shake loose the chains of fear, the things that hold you captive, the things that are keeping you squelched and silenced. It's a call to reclaim your identity and walk in the unshakeable truth of who you were created to be fearless, free, and uncontrollable.

Now, if that sounds a little bit unnerving, especially the "uncontrollable" part, I'm going to explain it very clearly in the bit that you're gonna hear in just a minute. So don't panic. Don't freak out on me.

But instead, I want you to, to kind of pull back and think about it big picture. Because the truth is that love and fear were not made to coexist.

Now in today's world there are times when we feel afraid based on other experiences that we've had, even when we are surrounded by love, but love should not be causing fear because love is the antidote to fear. So if you've been trained or conditioned to believe that control equals love or that subjugation equals love, or that some other kind of minimizing who you are equals protection that is supposed to be coming out of love... then friends, it might be a time for a detox.

Let's dive in to this segment of what I was sharing with my FREEDOM Navigator | BASECAMP clients. And then when this is done, stick around.

Stay with me for just a couple closing thoughts. Here's fearless, free, and uncontrollable.

The goal is to live a fearless, free and uncontrollable life.

Now, for those who are familiar with a faith-based perspective, it is highly compatible with a faith-based perspective. Let me explain that for you.

If you are fearless, what is the opposite of fear?

Love? Yes. And in the Bible it says that there is no fear in love. Perfect love erases fear, casts out fear. Because fear brings torment.

And we've all lived in torment. We've all lived in fear at times. But when we are fearless it means we are living in love.

If we are living afraid... it is not love. And that is something I wish every teenager and every child could have drilled in from infancy.

If you're living scared of the other person, it isn't love.

Fear is not love. So fearlessness is living rooted in love. That is the first thing. So when we are living fearless, free and uncontrollable, the baseline is love.

Next is free. Living in freedom does not mean that everyone else around you has now suddenly become a great person. Living in freedom means that we are standing firmly on what we know to be true.

And I'm not just talking about theological doctrine.

I'm talking about be as simple as not being gaslit. I know what is true. I trust my senses. I am aware of the reality of what is true around me.

Let's go back to that faith-based perspective. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Freedom comes from being grounded and rooted in what you know to be true.

And I just wanna throw out there, for those of us who have come from very high control religion backgrounds, that being aware of what is true is quite generally an ever recalibrating process. I know for me, things that I believed to be true 20 years ago, some of those things I now know are still true... and other things I now know were simply taught to me as truth.

And I have more information now, so I know better, I can do better. And I have recalibrated constantly back to that true north, right? To know what is true.

So when we get more information, we recalibrate, we adjust, and that is healthy and good. So: fearless, free, and uncontrollable.

Fearlessness is rooted in love.

Free is grounded in truth.

And uncontrollable... again, this is not a girl's gone wild. I am out of control. Nobody can control me. Ain't nobody gonna tell me what to do. It means that you don't have a price.

Uncontrollable means that you cannot be manipulated. Why? Because you are rooted in love and grounded in truth.

So when you are fearless and free. Other people coming in and saying, you know what, if you don't do what I say, I'm gonna tell everybody, dah, dah, dah, dah. You're like, go for it. Okay. I know the truth.

I'm unflappable because I know where my love comes from. I know what is true. I know what is true about what I have said and done. I know what is true about things that have happened around me, and I don't have a price I cannot be bought.

My integrity is not for sale to be manipulated because I cannot be controlled.

Fearless, free and uncontrollable.

As protective parents, when we are seeking to

A: protect our kids, and

B: give our kids the tools to live well despite whatever they have been through, first we start with ourselves fearless, free, and uncontrollable.

Being grounded, being established in what we know to be true. And that is the baseline that allows us to not be so quickly and easily dysregulated when someone throws a bunch of arguments at us that we know are false, because we are grounded in what is true.

The more that we are exercising this worldview for ourselves, the more we are able to model it for our children 'cause our children feed very closely off of our emotional regulation, dysregulation, our calm or our tension and fear.

This doesn't mean that you are instantly able to keep them safe from everything around them... because you can't.

You can't control the world and the environment around them.

You can't control their other parent.

You can only control you and model this.

So instead of trying to control your kids to do what you know to be right, focus on living this out to them... where they are seeing it for themselves in your life... where you are modeling it.

That is your first step, is to address this for yourself as your own personal baseline because you cannot expect your kids to be able to live with a level of regulation that you aren't even achieving yourself.

Does that make sense?

Okay, so if something inside you stirred during this message, and if you felt that ache of truth in your gut, the pull toward clarity, that desire to live more courageously, but also maybe even some confusion about how to get there... you're not alone!

I remember feeling that way. I remember thinking that, this can't be it. I can't be just living this chaos indefinitely. I have to find a way to thrive and not live in fear without just waiting until everything is done.

And as a protective parent, if that's where you are too, don't let it pass. It isn't just about getting inspired for a moment.

It's about going ahead and moving forward into transformation. I genuinely believe you were created to live fearless, free and uncontrollable! Not in rebellion, more like in a redemptive alignment with your original design.

And if you're ready to take that healing deeper, if you need... maybe, maybe you've got therapy covered, but you really need practical tools for navigating a high stakes, high conflict custody battle, or communicating with a manipulative and toxic ex, or rebuilding your ability to parent after trauma and betrayal and trying to figure it all out from the ground up it.

If that's where you are, I want you to jump over to www.myfreedomnavigator.com and click on TOOLS at the top.

This is where you're going to find quick eBooks, coaching, clarity strategy tools built specifically for protective parents like you, for survivors of post-separation abuse and intimate partner violence and trauma. Especially those who are walking through the fire of family court chaos and that deep, fatigued emotional exhaustion.

Start with Exposing the PLAYBOOK and then grab the High-Conflict Communication Wizard to help you organize your messages and your paper trail or book a strategy coaching session to help you regain your footing and untangle reality and get your voice back.

'Cause here's the thing. Freedom is not just a dream, it's, it's not just a hope... this abstract thing that is nebulous and unreachable.

Freedom is actually a direction. It is a course of action, and you don't have to navigate it by yourself.

So let's stay connected.

Shoot me a message on the chat bubble at www.myfreedomnavigator.com.

Send this to a friend who is deeply needing to know that they too can live fearlessly, freely and uncontrollable. And always remember... until next time, you don't have to walk This WILD Journey all alone.