Who Am I Now? — Identity, Healing, and What Monique Tepe Built After McKee

You get out. The divorce is final. You're physically safe. And then one morning you're standing in your kitchen and a thought hits you that you weren't expecting: Who am I?

Not "what do I do now." This is deeper. What do I actually like? What do I actually think? What do I actually want — not what keeps the peace, not what avoids punishment — what do I want? For someone coming out of coercive control, those questions can feel impossible. Because the person who entered that relationship has been systematically disassembled.

True crime coverage talks about the abuse. The escape. The arrest. It almost never talks about what comes after — the healing, the identity work, the daily act of becoming yourself again after someone spent years trying to erase you.

This episode honors what Monique Tepe built after her marriage to Michael McKee. She chose Spencer. She chose parenthood. She chose joy while carrying fear. And she did it knowing — according to family — that the threat had never fully gone away.

We cover what recovery actually looks like: the identity excavation, the role of therapy and its accessibility barriers, the shame that doesn't belong to survivors, and the community of people carrying the same silence. This episode speaks directly to anyone still rebuilding after what happened to them.

You are not what happened to you. You are what you build after.

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

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