Codependency Taught You to Center Men

Pre-order Decentering Men: The Definitive Guide to Choosing Yourself by Sherese Charlie Taylor, out March 16, 2027 from Abrams Press: https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/decentering-men_9781419792786/ If you learned early that love means being useful, this episode is for you. Charlie traces how codependency starts at home, why it follows women into their relationships with men, and why healing one makes healing the other easier. She also explains why the people who benefit from your labor push back when you take it back, and how to stop waiting for someone else to make you feel good about yourself. CHAPTERS 0:00 Codependency and men are social lies 0:32 Decentering Men, now available for pre-order 1:26 Who this episode is for 1:44 Where codependency starts 3:01 My own codependency 3:43 Why healing one helps heal the other 4:14 Expect the backlash 5:09 Replace your center 5:58 Accept yourself 7:16 Treat yourself with kindness TOOLS FROM THIS EPISODE Start Knowing Yourself Again is for the woman who has spent years making decisions around what someone else wants and is ready to find out what she wants. https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Charlie’s Toolbox is the institution for women choosing themselves. The Firsthand Newsletter: https://charliestoolbox.kit.com/00fbe52663 Substack: https://substack.com/@charliestoolbox The Shop: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Website: https://www.charliestoolbox.com Podcast: https://charliestoolbox.podbean.com Follow for daily inspiration: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@charliestoolbox Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charliestoolbox LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/charliestoolbox New episodes drop every Tuesday, so subscribe and you’ll never miss one.

Pre-order Decentering Men: The Definitive Guide to Choosing Yourself by Sherese Charlie Taylor, out March 16, 2027 from Abrams Press: https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/decentering-men_9781419792786/ If you started decentering men because someone promised you a better man on the other side, this episode asks you to take an honest look at that motivation. Charlie explains why decentering men in hopes of attracting a better partner still keeps him at the center, and what it takes to own your thoughts, your dreams, and your decisions instead. Then, in Charlie’s Advice, a 20-year-old listener asks how to build confidence when everything about her future feels uncertain, and Charlie answers with steps she can start using right away. TOOLS FROM THIS EPISODE Start Knowing Yourself Again is for the woman who has spent years making decisions around what someone else would think and is ready to find out what she actually wants. https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Submit your question for Charlie’s Advice: [email protected] Charlie’s Toolbox is the institution for women choosing themselves. The Firsthand Newsletter: https://charliestoolbox.kit.com/00fbe52663 Substack: https://substack.com/@charliestoolbox The Shop: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Website: https://www.charliestoolbox.com Podcast: https://charliestoolbox.podbean.com Follow for daily inspiration: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@charliestoolbox Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charliestoolbox LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/charliestoolbox New episodes drop every Tuesday, so subscribe and you’ll never miss one.

*You Will Be Alone If You Don't Understand the Gray Area* If you sort people into good or bad the moment they disappoint you, the people around you have already noticed, and they have quietly started bringing you less of their real selves because they can never predict when one mistake will get them removed from your life completely.   In this episode of Charlie's Toolbox, I explain why the inability to sit in the gray area makes you hard to be around, beginning with a story about harm from a mother and the developmental reasons this capacity should have been practiced long before adulthood asked us to use it. For women who are decentering men and choosing themselves, I break down how fear can disguise itself as self-respect, and how cutting people off can feel like a boundary when it is really a way of avoiding complexity. We close with five practices, ordered from the easiest to the most demanding, that start with delaying judgment and end with returning to fiction on purpose, so you can build the muscle for holding complexity in low-stakes moments before you need it in the high-stakes ones. None of this asks you to tolerate harm or stay silent about what hurts you, because the goal is to extend to yourself and the people you love the same complexity you already accept in every character you have ever loved on a page. The written companion to this episode is on Substack, where free subscribers get the full essay every Monday and paid subscribers get the deeper frameworks and community every Thursday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tools and stories to help you choose yourself in a world that socializes you not to. The Firsthand Newsletter: https://charliestoolbox.kit.com/00fbe... Substack: https://charliestoolbox.substack.com The Shop: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Website: https://www.charliestoolbox.com Podcast: https://charliestoolbox.podbean.com Follow for daily inspiration: TikTok:   / charliestoolbox   Instagram:   / charliestoolbox   LinkedIn:   / charliestoolbox     New episodes drop weekly, so subscribe and you will never miss one. 

Why do Black women still pause before showing their truest selves, even in friendships that have lasted a decade? Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar and the new novel Friends and Family, joins Charlie to talk about walking away from a life that was chosen for her, the night a neighbor called the police on her daughter's friends and five squad cars arrived with guns drawn for the only other Black teenager in the house, and how that night became a novel about two women whose twelve-year friendship can't survive what they each refuse to see. Friends and Family is available October 6, 2026. Get your copy here: Friends and Family: A Novel: Baszile, Natalie: 9780593492161: Amazon.com: Books   TOOLS FROM THIS EPISODE The Chosen Circle: A Guide to Building the Network That Holds You Up walks you through the five types of friends every self-authored woman needs, with steps to find and keep each one, so you know exactly who you can call first the way Babs calls Mecca and Logan. $37, and free for members of our private community. https://stan.store/charliestoolbox   Start Knowing Yourself Again is for the woman who, like Natalie in her family's business, has been living the life that was expected of her and is ready to figure out what she actually wants. https://stan.store/charliestoolbox   The Single Woman Safeguard helps you build the friendship, community, and family infrastructure that holds you up when a relationship you counted on can't. https://stan.store/charliestoolbox   Pre-order Decentering Men: The Definitive Guide to Choosing Yourself (Abrams Press, March 16, 2027). https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/d...   CHAPTERS 0:00 Welcome Natalie Baszile 0:24 What choosing yourself means to Natalie 3:09 The real police call that inspired Friends and Family 6:36 Why the Bay Area was the right setting 8:25 Writing through George Floyd, empathy fatigue, and backlash 11:56 Collapsing the timeline into a pressure cooker 13:54 Babs, Nora, and the longing to be unburdened by race 17:14 Testing a twelve-year friendship 18:52 Why Babs goes to her sister and best friend first 19:33 Queen Sugar and what she asked Oprah and Ava to protect 21:06 The conversations Black women have with themselves 23:00 Novels, documentaries, and nonfiction, including HARVEST 26:25 Balancing three projects at once 28:15 What Natalie hopes readers carry from the book 32:19 Where to get Friends and Family Charlie's Toolbox is the institution for women choosing themselves. Website: https://charliestoolbox.com Substack: https://substack.com/@charliestoolbox Shop the Toolbox: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox Instagram and TikTok: @charliestoolbox

Believing in yourself is not the same as having a plan, and this episode of Charlie's Toolbox is about the distance between the two. Magical thinking is what happens when we expect conviction alone to change our reality while the real mechanics of change, which are strategy, testing, adjustment, and follow-through, never get built. It looks like quitting a stable job for an idea no one has tested, giving it three months of total dedication, and answering the backlash with "I just believed in myself" after the savings run out. In this conversation, we trace the two places magical thinking most often starts, which are spiritual belief standing in for strategy and planning from where you wish you were instead of where you actually are. We also separate calculated risk from uncalculated risk, and grounded self-belief from borrowed self-belief, so you can tell whether what you are holding is a plan or a feeling before it costs you anything you cannot get back.   This episode pairs with my Substack essay, [Magical Thinking Is Ruining Your Plans](https://charliestoolbox.substack.com/p/magical-thinking-is-ruining-your), where I go deeper on each pattern with examples. Paid subscribers can also work through the companion worksheet, if you join our private community, [https://charliestoolbox.substack.com/p/from-belief-to-blueprint-the-magical ] which walks you through your own reality check step by step so you can see exactly where belief has been standing in for a plan.

Women are told to lean in, hustle harder, and be the girlboss, and then penalized for doing exactly that, which is the contradiction Stefanie O'Connell takes apart in her book The Ambition Penalty. In this episode of Charlie's Toolbox, Stefanie talks about what she personally wanted from girlboss feminism, the moment the spell broke for her, and why the word "ambitious" so often lands as a critique when it is applied to a woman. The conversation moves through the research on how institutions rather than women's behavior create the penalty, what it takes to name that out loud without apologizing for it, and what choosing yourself looks like inside a system that charges you for it. Stefanie also shares what writing the book cost her and what it gave back to her. If you have ever been told you were too driven, too much, or too ambitious by the same rooms that asked you to perform ambition, this conversation gives you the language for it. *Connect with Stefanie* Website: [Stefanie O'Connell – Too Ambitious](https://tooambitious.com/) Book: [The Ambition Penalty on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Ambition-Penal...) Instagram: [@stefanieoconnell](  / stefanieoconnell  )   Want more from us, join our Substack Follow our Instagram 

Amy DuBois Barnett made history as the first Black woman to lead a mainstream American magazine, with editor-in-chief roles at Ebony, Teen People, and Honey.  Her debut novel If I Ruled the World follows Nikki Rose, the only Black editor on staff at a major fashion magazine in 1999, who walks away from a boss who tells her Black girls don't sell magazines and takes over a struggling hip-hop magazine instead, with six months to save it and prove what she's capable of. Amy joins the podcast to talk about writing a character who came from her own history, the industry politics that shaped both the book and her real career, and what it took to finally put this story on the page. Learn more about Amy: https://amyduboisbarnett.com/ Get her book: https://www.amazon.com/If-I-Ruled-World-Novel/dp/1250378141 Follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amyduboisbarnett/ Follow her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amyduboisbarnett/  

Charlie's Toolbox is an institution for women choosing themselves, and this episode is proof of what that choice can actually build.   This episode sits down with Les Alfred, host of She's So Lucky and former host of Balanced Black Girl, who spent eleven years building a career in wellness before turning that experience into a media company built entirely on her own definitions of success. She walks through the real bar she set for herself before she let herself quit a job, the first dollar her show ever made and where it came from, and the decision to retire a brand that was already winning because it had stopped being true to what she wanted. She also breaks down what actually pays in this business versus what people assume pays, and what it really means to create your own luck rather than wait for it.   This conversation is proof that the life on the other side of choosing yourself has actual numbers attached to it, and Les hands over the ones that mattered most to her.   Follow along with Les and She's So Lucky here: https://www.shessoluckypodcast.com/   If this conversation moves something in you, that is exactly what Charlie's Toolbox exists for. Join the community https://linktr.ee/charliestoolbox of over 100,000 women choosing themselves at charliestoolbox.com subscribe to the Substack for the frameworks behind every episode and follow along on Instagram and TikTok for the conversations that continue long after this one ends.  

You know that lightness certain women carry, the kind that lets them keep moving without a fall ever threatening who they are, and the theory behind it starts with one refusal: the refusal to believe the bottom is a place you live. This episode gets into what separates a woman whose identity survives a public failure from one who doesn't, using Madonna and Eartha Kitt as the throughline for the three things that make a fall survivable instead of permanent, and why the lowest point in your story might be the exact material the next version of you gets built from. Find the full show notes, essays, and community at https://charliestoolbox.kit.com/b393ccc7f6 Subscribe to Charlie's Toolbox on Substack for the written companion to this episode, the full practice layer, and the deeper frameworks: https://charliestoolbox.substack.com Join The Firsthand, the free weekly newsletter, every Thursday: https://charliestoolbox.kit.com/00fbe52663 If you're in the middle of your own reinvention and need the framework for it, Start Knowing Yourself Again is where you start: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox/p/the-firsthand-self-starter-kit- And if the fall you're rebuilding from had a man at the center of it, Decenter Men gives you the tools to make sure it doesn't again: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox New essays drop every Monday on Substack, free for all subscribers. Paid members get the full toolkit, extended frameworks, and community.

What does it look like to choose being liked over being right, and what does that choice actually cost you? This episode pulls apart a truth most people never get to examine on purpose: the difference between the kind of right that gets you fired and the kind of right that gets you into a fight nobody needed to have. Using real examples that are playing out in culture right now, this conversation unpacks why competence alone was never going to be enough, why some people accept the alienation as the price of staying correct, and why the road that looks easier is actually a set of learnable behaviors rather than a personality trait you either have or don't. If you've ever walked away from a room confused about how you ended up the villain when you were technically right, this one is for you. New episodes drop every week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get in touch with yourself through our products at Charlie's Toolbox (@charliestoolbox) on Stan, linked here: https://stan.store/charliestoolbox, Or become a paid member of our community on Substack at https://substack.com/@charliestoolbox for the extended breakdown and further reading.