378: What Do You Say to a Teen Who Won't Listen to Warnings?

Cecilia Gonzalez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to talk about the ten years she spent in an abusive relationship that started at fourteen, and how she now teaches teens to catch the first yellow flag before it happens to them.

Chapters

(00:00) - Introduction

(03:20) - Why Love Has to Start at Home

(07:15) - Control That Looked Like Protection

(10:42) - Jealousy, La Tóxica, and the Stages of Love

(14:29) - The Wrong Bus: Love Bombing and the Phone Cycle

(17:56) - Blame, Eggshells, and "I Can Fix It"

(24:01) - The Music Video That Made Her Leave

(27:51) - Three Skills: Communication, Equality, Rights

About Cecilia Gonzalez

Cecilia Gonzalez is the Human Trafficking Prevention Coordinator at Higher Ground Youth and Family Services in Orange County. Her students know her as Ceci. She is part of a team that delivers near peer prevention in local middle and high schools, teaching from lived experience rather than from a textbook, and she builds her presentations around quotes and stories that teens recognize from their own lives. She entered an abusive relationship at fourteen with an older partner and stayed in it for ten years, a decade she now uses to show students how control can arrive disguised as protection. She left at twenty-four, when her oldest daughter was two months old. Today she is raising three daughters, and she talks with students about la tóxica, love bombing, the silent treatment, and the rights every young person has: to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.