Nicole Christie | Reclaiming Myself: Releasing What Was and Reaching for What Will Be
In this powerfully candid and gripping episode, Nicole shares—for the first time—painful details of abuse she experienced in her marriage. She walks us through scenes and memories, illustrating how it chipped away at her sense of self, and how a traumatic, yet transformative Reiki experience released her ex-husband’s grip on her. Travel with Nicole as she embarks on a post-divorce journey to Maui, a place laden with memories from her marriage and of her ex-husband, where she works with a Reiki master whose guidance aids the deep healing that set her free, and led her to reclaim herself, her voice, and her life.
Show Notes:
Connect with Nicole on Instagram
Learn more about Keawakapu Beach
Find your sun and moon sign with this free birth chart calculator
Wendy Areus at Grace Healing Maui
More about Isak Dinesen (the quote Nicole shares is: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”)
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[00:00:00] This episode of Here For Me contains descriptions of intimate partner abuse and disturbing images. Please use discretion when listening.
Welcome to Here For Me, a podcast about the power of choosing yourself. I'm Nicole Christie, and I'm honored you're joining me for stories and conversations about life's disruptions, derailments, and transitions.
On this podcast, we talk about navigating challenges, walking through fire and along the way learning to show up for ourselves. Because, just as we say “I'm here for you” to show we care for someone, saying “I'm here for me” to ourselves is the best form of self-care.
We're airing this episode on Valentine's Day 2024. It's a day that evokes mixed emotions and reactions. A day filled with romantic pressure and expectations. A day many single people despise because we live in a culture that suggests we should feel less than if we're not partnered.
I've spent roughly half the Valentine's Days of my adult life in a relationship, and the other half on my own. And I have to say, there's something special about being single on this day. In many ways, it's the ultimate Here For Me moment. A day to celebrate the power of choosing yourself, to reclaim yourself. To recognize that while we may be able to go further together, there are some things we can only do on our own.
Last year, on my first solo Valentine's Day in 11 years, I was ironically hit with violent food poisoning at 12:05 a.m., literally five minutes into the holiday.
[00:01:49] It wasn't remotely the celebration of choosing myself I'd anticipated, yet it felt like the last phase of a necessary purging. The month prior, COVID had purged my respiratory system, and three months prior, I'd purged my home after the end of my marriage—donating, recycling, cleaning, saging.
The end of purging was the beginning of what I call The Great Reclaim. First I took back my house, then my body, then my heart, then my soul. Part of The Great Reclaim involved taking back places that were rich with memories of the life I'd let go of: San Diego's iconic Hotel del Coronado and its beach I frequent multiple times a week, and the stunning mid-century Palm Springs hotel, Holiday House.
But the most significant reclaiming was the island of Maui. It was an icon of the decade spent with my ex-husband. A place we visited for a month every summer, staying nearly rent-free in a vacation condo generously provided to us by two of my dearest friends. It's where we were married in 2015 on Keawakapu Beach on Maui's south side.
The state of California declared me officially, legally single on October 15th, 2023, a full 13 months after our separation, thanks to the daunting task of filing divorce papers and the state's mandatory six-month waiting period once you do so.
[00:03:27] Being someone who needs to mark the ending of chapters and the dawn of new ones, on October 16th, I left on a week-long solo trip to Maui, my first visit in seven years. I wanted to reclaim the island I love so I could return for years to come, with a clear head and a full heart. So I could freely make new memories—first with myself, someday with another. I knew it would be an emotional trip, and I relished the opportunity to feel and process it alone.
When friends lovingly probed into my plans for the trip and my desired mental state, I told them I was going to marinate in whatever came up: grief, elation, relief, hope. Perhaps it won't surprise you that I felt all of that, sometimes within a span of minutes, as I revisited and reclaimed favorite places: beaches, restaurants, bakeries, the winery perched alongside the idyllic Kula Highway, which overlooks the memory-laden south side of the island.
Upon landing in Maui, I headed straight to Paia Fish Market, a favorite place for mahi mahi tacos and lilikoi margaritas. I had a bit of time before check-in at my Airbnb, a modern, light-filled condo in Wailea where I'd never stayed as my friends sold their vacation condo and my heart told me reclaiming that complex by staying in another unit wasn't the right thing. So after lunch, I decided to bite the bullet and visit Keawakapu Beach, the site of our wedding eight years prior.
[00:05:02] It's located in front of a restaurant where the wedding dinner had been held, and which closed during the pandemic. I'd heard another restaurant was going to open there, but the site remains empty—oddly dark and haunting for a blue-skied, sun-drenched location.
On my way to the beach, I walked the perimeter of the restaurant and stopped at the window that was at our backs during the dinner. It was boarded up. In a beachfront restaurant lined with windows, it was the only one that had been destroyed, patched up, and shut down. I stood in front of it and let tears silently flow.
Then I walked up the path that had served as the aisle, just as I'd walked down it eight years earlier into a future I never envisioned would unfold as it did. It felt like a reversal of fortune, and I welcomed it with a heart that already felt lighter.
I returned to the beach several times over the course of my stay, including on my birthday, which I celebrated with my feet in the sand and Maui Pie Company chicken pot pie in my lap. Each time I returned, I allowed myself to feel whatever came up. Each time, there were fewer memories that washed over me as they receded to a special corner of my heart—the one where those sort of memories go, much like an heirloom jewelry box on a high shelf in a closet, never forgotten but freeing space for the new.
[00:06:35] While on Maui, one thing I wanted to do was buy myself a piece of jewelry to celebrate this new chapter. Something I could look at and remember how far I'd come and how much I'd grown. I wanted to purchase a piece I could easily see—a ring, a bracelet.
About halfway through my trip, I found what I was looking for, a cuff from a local designer's collection called Mermaid Scales. It looks exactly like that, almost honeycomb like in its appearance—bold but light, gentle and strong.
As I left the shop, I kept thinking the collection name felt meaningful in some way. And then it dawned on me. In astrology, I'm a Libra sun and a Pisces moon. The symbol of Libra is the scales and the fish—in this case, a mermaid—is the symbol for Pisces. It felt like a reclaiming of myself, the person I was born to be, and the future I was walking into, both as they've always been written in the stars.
Another gift I wanted to give myself on Maui was some sort of self-care ritual, a spa day or energy work. On my first morning, as I sipped coffee from the spacious, sunlit condo balcony, I searched online for someone who could provide both and found a woman named Wendy in Haiku, which, if you're familiar with Maui, you know, is an especially spiritual place on the island.
[00:08:14] Wendy is an intuitive healer, Reiki master, and massage therapist specializing in trauma recovery. I reached out to her for an appointment and her only availability that week was on my birthday. I told her it felt like just the rebirth I needed.
I arrived at Wendy's home, a warm, light-filled space on a large swath of open land. When she welcomed me at the door, I was immediately taken by her gentle, calming presence. Once settled into her treatment room, she shared what she was picking up on: that I'd left a toxic relationship, that I was healing deep trauma, that I was shedding karma from multiple lifetimes.
“You've done a lot of work on yourself in the last few years,” she said.
I nodded and felt my eyes fill with tears.
“But there's something you're still carrying from him,” she mused.
I let the tears fall and the sobs escape as I choked out, “His voice. He is now my inner critic.”
I told her how I heard him whenever I made a mistake, fell short of my own expectations, or felt I'd let someone down. That any time I was running late, I heard him say, “What the fuck is wrong with you, Nicole? Do you not know how to tell time? What are you in fucking kindergarten?”
Wendy said we would release that voice. She reminded me I wouldn't be fully healed that day.
[00:09:49] There was still more to do on my own, in other ways, with time. But given the healing I'd already done, we'd make great progress if I gave myself fully to the energy work. I mentioned I was looking forward to a relaxing massage as well, and she told me she'd incorporate that, but felt the bulk of the session needed to focus on Reiki, something I hadn't yet experienced.
“The trauma you're still holding is stuck in your body, in your energy,” she explained. “That's why talk therapy only goes so far. Because trauma is also trapped in places your voice can't reach.”
She told me the session might feel like an anxiety attack or drowning, but to give myself to it. She said doing so would feel like the lucid state between being awake and asleep. She encouraged me to lock into it and let it take me, reminding me she'd be right there, holding space and moving the energy out and through.
Before we got started, she gave me an image to hold in my mind: that of a car accident, where my ex-husband and I were stuck in the car. She told me all I had to do was get out of the car. It seemed simple, but I knew it was likely anything but. I laid face down on the massage table, my heart pounding, and felt Wendy's hand on my back.
“Remember,” she said, “just get out of the car.”
[00:11:31] For the first few minutes, my heart continued to pound and I couldn't get out of my head. I focused on my breathing and eventually I felt the lucid state settle in, along with an intense pressure in my ears as if they were going to explode.
I saw my ex-husband and me in a car on Maui's Highway 311, where we'd driven together many times. Except this time I was in the driver's seat. We were stopped in the middle of the road and the car was on fire. My ex-husband was yelling, as he often did, and I was tongue tied and panic-stricken, as I often was. I willed myself to get out of the car and watched as I finally opened the door and stepped out.
I was immediately pulled upward into a calm, quiet, white space. It seemed like maybe where we go when we die, but I knew I wasn't dead. I peered over the edge of the space and could see the car engulfed in flames, my ex-husband trapped in it. I winced and looked away.
“You have to watch him,” an unidentifiable figure said.
“I don't want to,” I protested as tears streamed down my cheeks and I sobbed fully, freely, loudly into the massage table’s face cradle.
“You have to,” the figure said again. “It's the only way to set yourself free.”
So I watched. I watched my ex-husband burning, screaming, dying.
[00:13:07] It was a vulnerability I'd never seen in him. And all I could do was watch. Much like I felt he did during my most vulnerable moments when a freak virus took my skin and toenails, as ocular cancer ravaged my eye, my tear duct, and threatened to move deep into my skull.
But help arrived for him, as it did for me. I watched as people pulled him from the flames and tended to him. I watched as he healed and a gray figure—presumably his next partner, his person—approached him and they walked out of my sight together.
My sobs into the face cradle lessened along with the pressure in my ears, and I looked up at the unidentifiable figure.
“Is he OK now?” I asked.
“Yes,” the figure assured me, holding out a hand. “It's time for your next chapter. Are you ready?”
I nodded, took the hand, offered to me, and was led onto a platform surrounded by clouds. As I looked out, I saw my ex-husband turn and hold up a hand, bidding me farewell. I returned the gesture and stepped fully onto the platform and into alignment with what has always been calling me.
I felt Wendy's hand on my back telling me the first half was over and I could sit up. I wiped my eyes, sniffling and still choking out occasional sobs. Wendy brought me a glass of water and tissue and said she'd leave me to process what I'd experienced.
[00:14:54] When she returned, she acknowledged me for doing the work and said the second half was usually easier. Then she regarded me cautiously.
“You know you're highly intuitive, yes?” she asked.
I sniffed and nodded.
“You have the ability to see into future timelines. If you like, feel free to set that intention before we start the second half of your session.”
As a child, I wanted nothing more than to see into the future, to be able to predict bad things before they happened, so I could be prepared. Some say that's the result of childhood trauma, being raised in an environment where one walks on eggshells and becomes hypervigilant as a result. I learned to acquire knowledge as power; if I knew about someone or something before I entered a relationship or situation, I felt I had the upper hand. Of course, that's an illusion. And after what I've endured during my lifetime, and particularly the last five years, I rarely have the desire to know what's coming my way.
But two years ago, I sensed this ability setting in, and I've learned to trust it and surrender to it. So that day in Wendy's gentle care, I asked to peep into a future available to me—knowing nothing is guaranteed, that we're always the conscious creators of our lives, no matter what opportunities come our way. I slipped back into the lucid state and scenes flashed through my head,
[00:16:24] the way I imagine it happens during a near-death experience, when your life flashes before your eyes. Except this was my future. A house with a beach view—white, modern, minimalist—and a handsome yet unidentifiable man asking if I minded him leaving a pile of belongings in the entry.
“I know you hate that, babe. I promise I'll move it tonight.”
And me being okay with it because I trusted him.
A scene in black and white, me walking through New York City. Black jeans, black jacket, black boots. Why am I here again, the great metropolis where I lived in my thirties? Do I live here? Whose hand am I holding? Where are we going?
The images started flipping more quickly, like fast forwarding through a movie at ten times the speed. I could no longer discern most of them, but it was okay. What mattered was how I felt: optimistic, hopeful, and at peace.
The last thing I saw was me on Keawakapu Beach, my hands raised to the sky as someone, perhaps the unidentifiable figure who pulled me from the burning car, dumped buckets of warm saltwater on me from above. I saw my body split in half from head to toe, the saltwater cleansing me from the inside out.
When Wendy touched my arm to let me know the session was over, I felt calm and content, like I was warmly lit from within. Wendy asked if I would be open to sharing what I saw during the session.
[00:18:00] I told her everything I'd seen and felt during this transformative experience. When I finished, she asked if she could tell me what she saw and I welcomed it.
“I've never seen this in 20 years of practicing Reiki,” she said quietly, a slight catch in her voice. “I saw your inner child and your higher self integrate and ascend to the divine. You are free.”
On the drive back, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. It was a person I hadn't seen reflected back at me for at least ten years. Bright eyes, glowing skin. As I wound my way through Maui's upcountry, the song “You and Me” by the duo of the same name popped up on shuffle. I've always interpreted the song as one about soulmates, about twin flames, if you're familiar with that concept (no, not the cult from the Netflix documentary).
But that day in Maui, it was about my higher self and my inner child. Together at last. Together forever. And as the lyrics say, “There for me when I fall apart, guiding my direction when I'm riding through the dark.”
Before I left Maui, I paid a final visit to Keawakapu Beach. It dawned on me that I hadn't gone into the ocean the entire week, so I spent my last morning bobbing in the surf. I swam out to a point where I could clearly see the site of the wedding, the restaurant, the boarded-up window.
[00:19:42] I let the tears flow hard and freely. Remembering what Isak Dinesen said, “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” I was experiencing all of that at once. And as the waves calmed and the tears slowed, as the sun dipped behind the clouds and raindrops began to fall, beachgoers scattered and I released my grip on what was so I could reclaim what was mine and reach for what will be, whispering over and over:
“I set you free. I set myself free.”
About a month after I returned home from Maui, I noticed I could no longer remember what my ex-husband looked like. I could no longer recall the sound, the cadence, the tone of his voice. Certainly if I saw or heard him, I would recognize him. But it was as if the burning car had extinguished any visual memory of him, and the intense pressure in my ears during the Reiki session was the power of his voice leaving my body.
One day I caught myself in a moment of self-talk—it was my own voice and it was gentle. I was chiding myself for something and called myself “kiddo.” A few days later, I said something out loud to myself in the car and called myself “babe.” Not long after that, I playfully muttered something to myself under my breath, followed by “Right, sis?”
I was talking to myself as a parent. As a partner. As a sibling. As a friend.
[00:21:28] Perhaps this is what Wendy witnessed: all parts of me, present and integrated into my own being. Perhaps this is what it means to reclaim something, a place, a thing, oneself. It's not so much taking it back as releasing the parts of it that no longer serve you, and weaving the rest through the tapestry of your soul. Perhaps this is what it means to be whole: the ability to be everything to yourself, not to the exclusion of others in your life, but to be your own anchor, your own beacon, guiding your direction when you're riding through the dark—into the light, into a life that is yours for the claiming.
Here For Me is produced by Lens Group Media in association with Tulla Productions. As is often said, it takes a village to make this podcast, and my deepest gratitude goes out to every person in that village: our producers Dave Nelson and Stacy Harris, our audio editor, JD Delgado, designer and illustrator Amy Senftleben, and our production assistant, Sarah Carefoot. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you'd follow the show, rate, review, and share it with people you love. You can also follow me on Instagram at nicolejchristie. Until next time, thank you so much for listening—here's to you being here for you and to the power of choosing yourself.