Perhaps most important is this: Lindsay Clancy was seriously mentally ill for months before the tragedy, and despite repeatedly asking for help, her mental health needs were not sufficiently met.

I have watched the trial footage and taken careful notes on the testimony. The experience has been both sobering and thought-provoking. There are many lessons to be learned.

Lindsay has admitted guilt. She killed her children. But the central question for the jury is whether she was criminally responsible given her mental state. Their decision will determine whether she is sent to prison or to a secure forensic mental health facility.

This was not a trial in which the defense said Lindsay was mentally ill and the prosecution said she was perfectly healthy. All agreed she was seriously mentally ill. All agreed that she made a very serious suicide attempt. All but one agreed that she suffers from bipolar disorder (the exception, Avram Mack, testifying for the prosecution, diagnosed severe major depressive disorder).

Lindsay has spent the past 3.5 years in Tewksbury psychiatric hospital, where she has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and is on a medication regimen for that.

This distinction is important.

What is bipolar disorder? A brief overview

In the simplest terms, bipolar disorder is an illness in which the brain’s regulation of mood becomes unstable. A person experiences episodes of depression along with alternating periods of abnormally elevated or activated mood called mania or hypomania. This can look like excessive energy, severe insomnia, grandiosity, rapid speech, rapid weight loss, impulsive behavior, irritability, confusion, racing thoughts, and agitation. Psychotic symptoms, including delusions and auditory hallucinations, are common during episodes of mania. These symptoms wax and wane in a cyclical pattern. People with bipolar disorder can have long periods of time when they function normally.

Bipolar disorder is segmented into two types: bipolar type I and bipolar type II. Bipolar I includes episodic symptoms of psychosis during mania, along with alternating episodes of depression. Bipolar II disorder involves major depressive episodes and hypomania—a less extreme form of mania.

This brings us to another important lesson from this case.

People with bipolar disorder often spend years seeking treatment before receiving an accurate diagnosis. Research has shown that delays of five to ten years are common, and sometimes even longer. One key reason is that individuals usually seek help when they are feeling depressed. It is much less common for someone to seek help because they have recently experienced unusually high energy, little need for sleep, increased productivity, or racing thoughts.

Clinicians often see patients during a snapshot in time when depression is most apparent, which can make it easy to miss the underlying bipolar disorder.

We’ve heard the term “postpartum psychosis” applied to this case. Postpartum psychosis is often closely intertwined with bipolar disorder. Childbirth can trigger a severe mood episode with psychosis, and the majority of women who develop postpartum psychosis either already have bipolar disorder or are later found to have it.

Why an accurate diagnosis matters

Safe and effective mental health treatment depends on an accurate diagnosis. Certain medications, such as SSRIs, can actually worsen bipolar disorder. This seems to have been the case for Lindsay Clancy.

The process of diagnosis can be challenging. Symptoms like depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, extreme mood changes, and psychosis often overlap in complex ways, and they can be part of numerous distinct conditions. A treatment that is helpful for one may be ineffective or even destabilizing for another.

This is where Lindsay’s history is especially concerning. She did not refuse treatment; in fact, she sought help repeatedly.

She saw multiple professionals. She reported worsening anxiety, insomnia, “horrible intrusive thoughts,” disabling depression and eventually suicidality and fears she might harm her children. Her family described a dramatic deterioration from the woman they had always known. She sobbed and rocked for hours, was afraid to sleep alone, went days without sleep, and thought others could read her thoughts.

Yet none of the multiple clinicians treating her before January 24, 2023, when the children were killed, recognized bipolar disorder. None saw the indications of psychosis. Only one suggested bipolar disorder could be a possibility.

Although I am sure her clinicians had good intentions, they did not look deeply enough. They did not hold collaborative sessions with her family to understand what was happening at home. Records were woefully inadequate. Safety plans were not developed. The clinicians did not communicate with each other. As a result, Lindsay was prescribed medication that ultimately made her condition worse.

More than three and a half years later, Lindsay remains hospitalized at Tewksbury State Hospital. Bipolar disorder is now her diagnosis of record there. Multiple defense experts agreed, as did all but one prosecution witness.

This is a crucial part of Lindsay’s story.

What about psychosis?

Psychosis means that a person’s ability to accurately perceive reality has become seriously impaired. It can include hallucinations, such as hearing or seeing things that are not there, or delusions, which are fixed false beliefs that feel completely real to the person experiencing them.

Psychosis is a symptom of brain illness, not a personality type. It is entirely different from being a ‘psychopath,’ which refers to someone who lacks empathy and remorse.

The central psychiatric dispute at this trial was whether Lindsay became psychotic at the time of the killings. Multiple defense experts concluded that she was and that she experienced a command auditory hallucination.

The three prosecution experts (none of whom had any history of evaluating postpartum psychosis) questioned whether her report of the voice was consistent with psychosis and concluded that she retained the ability to understand what she was doing.

These disagreements shouldn’t overshadow the areas where there was agreement.

Both sides agreed she was not exaggerating or faking symptoms of mental illness.

Another important fact has received remarkably little attention. Psychological testing comprised measures designed to detect exaggeration, fabrication, and malingering. The testing showed that Lindsay was not inventing psychiatric symptoms. In fact, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction.

Defense psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick testified that the testing showed a tendency to minimize rather than exaggerate symptoms. Prosecution psychiatrist Dr. Avram Mack acknowledged that the psychological testing was valid and did not indicate that she was lying or malingering.

This is important to consider when evaluating claims that Lindsay invented psychiatric symptoms to avoid responsibility.

The objective testing says no. All the experts agreed with this.

There was also significant agreement about the kind of mother Lindsay had been.

Witness after witness from both sides of this case described Lindsay as a loving, attentive and devoted mother.

Her children’s pediatrician, teachers, nanny, friends, coworkers, and family members described children who were well cared for and a mother who was deeply involved in their lives. The family’s nanny testified that she had never been concerned about Lindsay’s treatment of the children.

There was no history of child abuse. No history of violence. No pattern of cruelty toward these children that culminated in murder.

Something significant changed.

The argument in this trial is over what that change meant, not whether Lindsay Clancy had consistently been a secretly sadistic mother waiting for an opportunity to kill her children.

We do not need to create a villain

Some of the most troubling aspects of this case have unfolded outside the courtroom.

On one side of social media, Lindsay must be transformed into a cold-blooded, manipulative baby killer who fabricated mental illness after painstakingly planning the murders.

On the other side, Patrick Clancy must become the villain: an abusive or unfaithful husband, a malignant narcissist, or—in the most extreme conspiracy theories—the person who actually killed his children and somehow framed Lindsay.

Neither of these versions is accurate or helpful.

As human beings, we often seek simple explanations for tragic events. When something unbearable happens, we look for someone to blame, because it can make the world feel more predictable.

However, severe mental illness is complex, and so is this case.

Patrick Clancy does not have to be a monster for Lindsay Clancy to have become severely ill.

Lindsay does not have to be a monster for three beloved children to have died by her hands.

And acknowledging Lindsay’s psychiatric illness does not minimize the horror of what happened to Cora, Dawson and Callan. Understanding an act is not the same thing as excusing it.

The jury has a much narrower and more difficult task: determining whether Lindsay Clancy was legally criminally responsible for what she did on January 24, 2023.

The rest of us can ask another question:

How did a woman who was repeatedly asking for help, seeing mental-health professionals and deteriorating in front of the people around her reach this point without anyone correctly identifying what was happening?

This may ultimately be the most important question this tragic case leaves us with. What can we learn by thoroughly considering the facts?

In my view, the only way justice can truly be served is for all of us to deepen our comprehension of mental illness and to listen carefully and respond compassionately when women call out for help.

I saw the blurry sepia photo for the first time on my computer monitor in a Facebook family genealogy group in 2017. The picture had been taken over 75 years earlier, but I recognized her immediately. It was a kick in the gut. My diminutive mother stared back at the camera, looking cornered. She stood in a rural Kansas wheat field squinting into the sun with her first-born, a 1-year-old, alongside the balding farmer in bib overalls who’d raped her. She was 14 years old; her husband, two decades older. He was the man she’d been forced to marry because she was pregnant. I’d never seen a photo of him, but I knew my mother’s face the moment I saw it.

The room spun. I couldn’t catch my breath and had to sit down. “She looks like a child” I said aloud, confirming it to myself. The photograph appeared to capture a middle-aged farmer with his two children, a girl and a baby – not a husband and wife with their infant. This wasn’t normal. In that moment my view of my family morphed into something I didn’t recognize.

I’d never seen any photos of this period in my mother’s life. She wouldn’t have allowed them in our home—because she was ashamed of her past. The few photos I have of her started at age 23, when she’d met and married my father—when she’d looked grownup and sophisticated. She’d tried to erase the past before then, even though the past included bearing a total of three children with the farmer who’d raped her in 8^th grade. This old photo would have been forbidden by her; it carried power because it was part of the secret. A secret that now confronted me and shifted my reality. The story I’d heard years ago was true. This was proof.

As children, we intentionally play with reality. Amorphous clouds take shape as misty silver horses. Faces appear in woodgrain doors. Constellations in the night sky become warriors. Yet we believe our parents and grandparents are steadfast characters in our personal mythologies, based on our limited knowledge of them. But there’s always more to the story than what we know, and if we knew it all, we’d realize that in some way everyone is pretending to be someone else.

My family had never made sense to me, but I was raised on partial stories and half-truths. There was an elaborate tapestry of secrets woven throughout my family's history. Rape, secret marriages, and lost children were some of the hidden threads. I had three older half-siblings who were adults when I was born, but no one ever spoke of their father or the circumstances of their origin. And that was the tip of the iceberg.

There was much intentional forgetting in my family, and I’ve had to play detective to connect the dots and patch together the true narrative. Memories were edited to create a more pleasing picture. The list of “things we don’t discuss” was so lengthy that voices eventually grew silent, and as people died, stories were lost forever. My mother Delpha, her mother Mary, and her five siblings are all long dead – and they were the secret-bearers.

Some of the dots have been connected through online DNA testing services and ancestry databases. The internet has helped connect long-lost cousins and other family members. Different people knew different segments of the narrative. Even with the detective work, there will always be certain mysteries. I only knew that things in my family never added up.

There was no denying the pain revealed in that photo of my mother with her first baby and the rapist she was forced to marry. Facing it rocked my world and shook my identity. And if I’m going to talk about it, I’ve had to face my own part in the transgenerational teen pregnancy legacy of my family.

I come from the lineage of the rural poor of the southern United States. My parents escaped the tenant farms of their youth and made it as far as California in the late 1950s, where I was born and raised. They wanted a better life for themselves and my mother’s three kids; little did they realize that we unwittingly carried the emotional baggage of past generations in our DNA. Under-educated and cut from the cultural cloth of Calvinism and misogyny, I followed in the footsteps of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmothers and became a teenage bride at 16, marrying a much older man in a small church wedding. I didn’t know it, but I was four weeks pregnant at the time.

Unlike my mother and grandmother, I was not forced to marry. I was searching for a bond and a template for my life, and he was an older man, traditional in many ways and eager to provide a structured home. He also taught me how to write a check and helped me with my algebra homework.

In high school in 1976, I listened to a youthful Elton John on the radio, earned straight As, and carried a small bouquet of daisies at my wedding. I wore an ankle-length off-white wedding dress with a Victorian collar and long sleeves. I’d spent my free time in church, and in my mother’s mind that was supposed to have protected me from premarital pregnancy. In truth, church was where I’d met him. My older husband.

I’d graduated high school a semester early with extra credit and skipped prom and grad night festivities at Disneyland. We moved into an old wooden house next to the train tracks. I had a collie dog, a vegetable garden, and a used crib I’d purchased at a garage sale. He sold his Harley-Davidson for a $5,000 down payment to buy the house. We spent Sundays in an evangelical church and Wednesday nights in Bible study. I had a template for my life, which was comforting to me at the time. Some part of me was trying to create the nurturing home with a stay-at-home mom I’d always wanted as a child.

My mother stopped by to visit in the evenings on her way home from work, since my husband worked the evening shift at the steel mill. I spent my days fervently studying Lamaze books, confident that with the force of my will I’d master the method of childbirth without pain. I’d amassed a library of volumes on natural birth, breastfeeding, and child rearing, and as is my way, prematurely fancied myself an expert on these things. At 16, pregnancy and parenting were all I talked about. I’d taken a path entirely apart from my peers, and for the first time since puberty seemed to be getting closer to my mother. Thus, my pregnancy opened the dusty cellar door of memory for my mother’s strange confession.

“I know something about abortion,” she started hesitantly one evening when we were alone and sipping iced tea in my living room.

Conversations about personal matters were far outside her comfort zone, and I felt my stomach tighten as she veered into this strange territory. It was a moment of peculiar intimacy; there was a crack in her armor I could hear in her voice. It set me on edge.

She was 50 at the time and had no idea that a malignant tumor had taken root deep in her brain. There would have been some urgency in the conversation if I’d known we had only weeks left to get to know one another as women. I wish now I’d asked questions, but I had no practice at this. Instead I sat frozen.

I knew that my mother and her four siblings had been born and raised on a small farm in rural Kansas. The house was built of rocks and had no indoor plumbing; in winter, heat came from a wood stove. They used a toilet out back in an old wooden outhouse and pumped water from a well. They made all their own clothing, and the girls used the floral fabric from flour sacks to sew dresses, saving up many sacks to make one dress.

I’d heard many stories about the hardships of farm life during the Great Depression, but she never shared personal details about relationships or human emotions.

That evening my mother spoke softly, in a stranger’s voice. She seemed to drift into a trance and looked away while she spoke, staring out my living room window at a streetlight that had just come on as the sun set.

“Your Grandma Mary was married as a young girl in Oklahoma, before she married my father, Tom,” she said. “She got pregnant and had to get married when she was 14. The baby girl was named Helen. “She took a shaky breath. “He was a bad man, and she left him after two years because he beat her.”

“I didn’t know Grandma was married before,” I said, shocked and unsure how to respond. “Helen, I’ve never heard of her.”

“We didn’t know who Helen was at first,” my mother said. “She was my oldest sister, but it took a while to figure that out. I was 11 when she showed up at the farm. She was 18 but had been raised in Oklahoma by her father. Grandma had tried to take her when she left, but he was violent and wouldn’t let her take little Helen when she tried to leave. There was no one to help her, and Grandma was forced to leave the baby with him. Grandma sent her letters over the years but didn’t see her again until she showed up at the farm years later. Helen ran away from her father and came to Grandma because she was unmarried and in advanced pregnancy—close to full-term.”

“It didn’t go well between Grandma and Helen. The girl wasn’t right in the head. She’d lie in bed all day and wouldn’t help with the chores. She was lazy and talked to herself. Grandma tried to talk sense into her, but she’d argue. Grandma told her a single girl couldn’t just stay unmarried and keep a baby in those days. She’d have to give it up for adoption. That’s just the way it was. Grandma wasn’t mad about the pregnancy—those things happened. But the adoption of the baby was not up for negotiation. If you didn’t get married, you had to adopt the baby out. There were always married couples who couldn’t have their own and would be happy to take it. It was done all the time. Grandma and Helen had a ruckus about it. Helen was upset and stormed out.”

My mother paused before continuing, her gaze fixed at the streetlight through the window. The house was growing dim as twilight deepened. I sat still, barely breathing.

“Helen found a horse doctor out in the country to help her induce an abortion. She came back to the farm having contractions and spent most of the night laboring in the outhouse out back. She stayed quiet. The next morning there was a trail of blood from the outhouse to the back door, and Grandma could see what she’d done because she was no longer pregnant. Grandma exploded. We’d never seen her so upset.”

My Grandfather Tom had left at dawn to work in neighboring fields. He had no idea of the chaotic upheaval that took place at home when Mary realized that Helen had aborted, alone and in the dark, in the outhouse in the wee hours of the morning. No one knew if the baby had been born dead or alive. Either was possible, and Helen didn’t seem to know, or refused to respond. Mary was in an uproar, told Helen to pack her things and leave, and that she never wanted to see her again. Helen packed a canvas bag and set off on foot. She never saw her mother or any of her sisters again.

My grandmother was bereft, shrieking and panicked at the possibility that there could be a premature baby in the sewage pit beneath the outhouse. And if the infant was dead, it was untenable to her that it be left in the excrement in the pit toilet. Though she was only 4’11,” she was a farm wife with a family of five children, and she ran a tight ship. Mary went into action and mobilized her other children (Ann 16, Doris 14, my mother Delpha 11, Ida 10, and Ross 9) to move the wooden outbuilding off the pit and then dig through the excrement beneath to recover the body of Helen’s baby. This was no easy task, as the outhouse weighed over 300 lbs. It took all of them, struggling in unison throughout the morning, to get it completely off the pit.

It was a sticky summer day, and they labored under the white-hot sun through air thick with confusion, trepidation, and shame. With garden tools, rakes and shovels, they dug through the fly-covered stinking muck for hours in search of Helen’s baby. My grandmother alternated between wailing and ranting at “that fool girl” she’d sent away. Flies swarmed, and they all retched as they covered their lower faces with kerchiefs and put mentholated ointment in their nostrils.

“It took hours, and Mother was so upset. The older girls, Ann and Doris, were crying and complaining, but Ida and little Ross were trying to help. Mother wouldn’t let us stop. It took most of the day, but we finally found the baby’s body.

“We cleaned and washed her in the basin in the kitchen—it was a perfect tiny girl—and we dressed her in Ida’s doll clothes. Mother had Ross and me bury her in a shoebox under the yellow rose bush in the garden. We said a prayer for her, and Ida cried all evening.”

At the end of that unforgettable day, my grandmother declared that Helen and the day’s events were never to be spoken of again—and for the most part they were not. Members of the family who were not present on that Kansas farm never knew that Mary had given birth to a girl named Helen in Oklahoma as a teenager and left her there with her abusive first husband.

Helen went on to live a nomadic lifestyle for many years, moving from state to state and giving birth to multiple children, most put up for adoption. She never married. She did raise at least one of the children —a cousin I have met online who now lives in California—named Mary, after my grandmother, who banished her. Though she didn’t confide much of her own history to me, just two years after Helen’s banishment my mother was raped while walking past a neighboring farm to her job at a slaughterhouse, and before she could graduate 8^th grade she was pregnant and married to the balding farmer in bib overalls. She was a 14-year-old with a year-old baby in that sepia photograph I found online. She was an 18-year-old farm wife with 3 children and no future, married to a man who beat her when she made her escape. I heard bits and pieces of my mother’s story from other relatives, long after her death in 1977. I found the photo that made this all real to me on Facebook in 2017.

It’s difficult for people younger than forty to have a sense for what life was like before birth control was readily available, and before abortion was legal.

Sex was dangerous. Life-threatening dangerous. Consequences for having sex could change everything.

I have a sophisticated friend and neighbor named Carol who is 89, about the age my mother would be if she were still alive. She wears her brunette hair in a shoulder-length bob and loves to discuss current events. Carol came from a respectable upper-class urban East Coast family and speaks of what it was like being a young woman when she was growing up in the days before birth control and legal abortion. “Our mothers would prefer that we died rather than get pregnant before we were married – I’m serious. Your mother would rather you be dead. I knew girls that killed themselves.”

Carol’s voice crackles with a passion that spikes my heart rate. It’s an uncomfortable rush of adrenaline caused by anxiety.

I felt that same anxiety from my mother when I was twelve, and she cornered me in the laundry room one Saturday morning for her version of the talk. It was a furious, whispered, 90-second sermon about never letting boys touch me lest I lose my virginity, become pregnant, and be ruined for life. She terrified me. I see now she was terrified for me.

I thought she was hyperbolic then, but I get it now. I understand her fear. Sex was dangerous. Men were not to be trusted. One pregnancy could change everything. Consequences were often catastrophic.

The amount of pain visited upon the women in my family and carried through the generations is immeasurable, and we are just one family. Just one.

I wish I could have heard my mother’s full confession during her lifetime. I wish she had not been crippled by shame for events over which she had no control. I am grateful for her attempts to protect me, however misguided they were at the time. I’m also grateful for the therapist I found when I was in my mid-twenties who helped me see the full range of life choices available to me which allowed me to ultimately take a very different path and toss away that tired old family template. I got a divorce, went to college, and became self-supporting. My offspring from my teenage marriage are all in their 40s now – and none of them have chosen to procreate.

Pattern broken.

I would have told her there was no reason for her to bear the burden of shame about anything that happened. I wish my Aunt Helen had not been banished by her own family and forced to depend upon strangers in a society that offered no support to women with mental illness. I wish someone had offered my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt compassion, respect, and help instead of abuse and shame. I don’t want their stories to be erased; their experiences have much to teach us.

It’s a slow walk to healing, but it begins by speaking the truth.

The answer can be summed up in one word: prevention. We cannot stop a problem we don’t understand. That, and mass killings literally make me sick. I cry every time one happens, and yes, they are often preventable. I want to do my part. The book was one single thing.

In my 30-plus-year career as a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with nearly every type of person in private practice, substance abuse treatment programs, forensics, and mobile crisis. I’ve seen children as young as two and seniors in their 80s. War veterans. Addicts. The anxious, the depressed, and those tormented by OCD. Couples who don’t know how to get along. People who adore their children as well as people who abuse them. People who are simply interested in personal growth and living their best lives.

And interspersed with all of the above, both victims of violence and perpetrators of it.

After writing that book, I began to receive frequent requests to give commentary in the media on issues related to violent crime. True crime has become a very popular genre in the culture, and people sometimes ask me why I’m so interested in it.

In truth, I’m not in the way many people imagine.

I don’t like violence. It’s not entertaining to me. I’m not fascinated by blood, and I avoid gory movies. I don’t enjoy graphic crime scene photographs. I don’t read autopsy reports. If my work focused on those things, I wouldn’t do it.

What has fascinated me for most of my life is human behavior, and how we can prevent people from hurting each other.

Why does one person endure childhood trauma yet become a compassionate, thoughtful adult while another develops into someone capable of terrible violence? Why does one relationship become a source of joy while another becomes abusive? How do so many people overlook glaring warning signs of danger?

And perhaps most importantly, how do people rebuild their lives after the worst thing imaginable happens to them?

Those are the questions that make me curious. The complexity of the human mind fascinates me. How can we make the world a safer place?

The Psychology Is the Story

When a headline announces another horrific crime, the facts themselves usually aren’t that complicated. Someone was killed. Someone was arrested. A trial will follow.

Those facts tell us almost nothing. The real story lies underneath. What beliefs was the offender living by? What emotional needs were driving them? What personality traits were present long before the crime?

Were there moments where intervention might have changed the outcome? Could anyone realistically have predicted this? Those are psychological questions, and they’re infinitely more useful to me.

Why Is True Crime So Popular?

True crime has exploded over the past decade. Podcasts, documentaries, books, streaming series—it sometimes feels as though every platform has another murder story waiting.

People often assume this reflects something morbid about us. While that may sometimes be true, I’m not convinced it’s true for all of us.

I think many people watch true crime for the same reason our ancestors sat around campfires telling stories about witches and werewolves: stories teach us how to survive in a world that feels unpredictable.

Our brains evolved to pay attention to danger. We remember threats far better than pleasant afternoons because, from an evolutionary perspective, survival depended on it.

When people watch a documentary about coercive control, stalking, or manipulation, they’re often unconsciously asking: “Would I have noticed?” “Could this happen to me?” “How do I recognize someone like this before it’s too late?”

In other words, they’re gathering information. It’s an attempt, often unconscious, to reduce uncertainty. We have a desire to understand, because understanding helps us feel safer.

Of course, there are limits. Watching hundreds of hours of true crime won’t make us perfectly safe. In fact, for some people, constant exposure to frightening stories can increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Like most things in psychology, dosage matters.

We Also Like Being Scared

There’s another piece of the puzzle. Humans have always enjoyed controlled fear.

Ghost stories. Roller coasters. Haunted houses. Horror novels. Scary movies. These experiences allow us to flirt with danger while knowing we’re actually safe. Behavioral scientists call this “recreational fear.”

Our bodies experience many of the same physiological reactions—an increased heart rate, heightened attention, adrenaline—but within a protected environment. Afterward, there’s often a sense of relief, excitement, or even accomplishment.

True crime can function similarly. We step briefly into humanity’s bleakest corners...and then close the book, turn off the television, or finish the podcast before returning to our own living rooms. It’s a safe encounter with unsafe ideas.

But There Is a Difference.

There is an important distinction between consuming violence and trying to understand it.

One asks, “What happened?” The other asks, “Why did it happen?” That second question is where psychology lives.

If we can understand the pathways that lead to violence, we become better at recognizing risk, protecting vulnerable people, improving treatment, and perhaps preventing some tragedies altogether.

Likewise, if we understand how survivors heal, we learn something equally valuable: human beings are remarkably resilient.

I’ve watched people recover from experiences that at first seemed unsurvivable. Not quickly and easily, not perfectly, but in a way that still makes life worth living. I can add myself to that list.

These stories deserve as much attention as the crimes themselves, and these are my favorite stories to share.

So no, I’m not fascinated by murder. I’m fascinated by people. The child who grows into a healthy adult despite enormous adversity. The victim who somehow discovers joy again. The offender whose life reveals warning signs we might someday recognize in someone else.

Psychology asks us to look beneath behavior. For me, that’s where the real story has always been. Since understanding people, all kinds of people, is one of the best tools we have for making the world a safer, wiser, and kinder place.

At this point, healing has become one of those words that gets used so often it starts to lose all meaning. Ask ten people what healing actually looks like, and you’ll probably get ten different answers.

Some seem to think healing means never feeling anxious again. Others imagine it means becoming endlessly calm, enlightened, and unbothered by anything life throws at them. Some see it as an absence of emotional pain. I see it somewhat differently.

Maybe “Healed” Is the Wrong Word

Part of the confusion may come from the word itself.

When we talk about being healed, it sounds as though there is a finish line somewhere. A magical point where all the old wounds are resolved, all the unhealthy patterns have disappeared, and we finally arrive as fully evolved human beings.

I’ve never met that person.

Not in my personal life. Not in more than three decades as a psychotherapist. The reality is that psychological growth doesn’t work that way.

There is no clear line separating the “healed” people from the “unhealed” people. There is no graduation ceremony where someone hands you a certificate declaring that you’ve officially completed your emotional development.

Life keeps happening. People we love get sick. Relationships end. We make mistakes. We discover new blind spots. Old insecurities occasionally reappear when we’re stressed, grieving, exhausted, or overwhelmed.

The healthiest people I know aren’t people who have transcended all of this. They’re people who recognize what’s happening more quickly, recover more effectively, and respond with greater wisdom than they once did.

Perhaps a better way to think about healing is as an ongoing process of becoming our best self. We’re all works in progress. The question isn’t whether you’ve arrived. The question is whether you’re moving in a healthier direction than you were a year ago.

The problem isn’t that people want to heal. The problem is that the word has become so vague that many people don’t know what they’re actually working toward.

If healing is real, how would you know if it’s happening?

Healing Is Not the Absence of Pain

One of the biggest misconceptions about healing is that it means getting rid of uncomfortable emotions.

It doesn’t.

Healthy people still experience grief, anxiety, anger, disappointment, loneliness, jealousy, fear, and heartbreak. In fact, being unable to experience those emotions would be a problem in itself.

Healing is not about becoming numb to pain. It is about developing the ability to experience pain without being controlled by it.

The question is not whether difficult feelings arise. The question is what happens next.

Do you spiral for three weeks after receiving criticism?

Do you shut down emotionally every time someone disappoints you?

Do you cope by drinking, overspending, overeating, lashing out, withdrawing, or convincing yourself you’re a terrible person?

Or can you recognize what you’re feeling, tolerate the discomfort, and respond intentionally?

That’s healing.

Healing Begins With Awareness

Most of us spend years running on autopilot. We react without understanding why.

We find ourselves in the same arguments, the same relationship patterns, the same self-defeating habits, and wonder why life keeps replaying the same frustrating episode.

Healing begins when we become curious.

Instead of asking:

“What’s wrong with me?”

We begin asking:

“Why do I respond this way?”

“What am I protecting myself from?”

“Where did I learn this?”

Many of the behaviors that create problems in adulthood originally developed for good reasons.

The child who learned to stay quiet may have grown up in a home where speaking up was dangerous.

The perfectionist may have learned that achievement was the only reliable path to approval.

The people-pleaser may have discovered early that keeping others happy felt safer than risking rejection.

Understanding these patterns doesn’t excuse harmful behavior, but it does help explain it.

And understanding creates choices.

Healing Means Changing Patterns

Insight alone is wonderful. Insight alone is also wildly overrated.

Many people can explain every detail of why they behave the way they do and still keep doing exactly the same thing.

Real healing requires behavior change.

You know you’re healing when you begin making different choices. You speak up when you would normally stay silent. You set limits where you once tolerated mistreatment. You apologize when you’ve made a mistake instead of becoming defensive.

You stop chasing people who repeatedly show you they are unavailable. You learn to tolerate the discomfort of disappointing others.

None of these changes feel good at first. In fact, many feel terrible.

Growth often feels less like floating toward enlightenment and more like repeatedly choosing the healthier option while your nervous system complains loudly about it.

Healing Is Better Emotional Regulation

One of the most measurable signs of healing is emotional regulation. This doesn’t mean suppressing feelings. It means having a wider window of tolerance. You recover faster after setbacks. You become less reactive. You can experience strong emotions without immediately acting on them.

The situation that once ruined your entire week now disrupts your afternoon. The comment that once sent you into a shame spiral now makes you uncomfortable, but you recover. The conflict that once triggered panic now becomes a difficult conversation.

That’s progress. Not perfection.

Healing Changes Relationships

One of the clearest places to see healing is in our relationships.

As people heal, they often become better at recognizing healthy and unhealthy dynamics. They become less attracted to chaos. Less willing to tolerate manipulation. Less likely to confuse intensity with intimacy.

They learn that boundaries are not punishments. They’re simply guidelines that protect emotional well-being.

Healing often means becoming more selective about who gets access to your time, energy, and trust.

This may disappoint some people. That’s okay.

Healing Creates Agency

Perhaps the most important aspect of healing is developing a sense of agency. Agency is the belief that your choices matter. It is the understanding that while you may not control everything that happens to you, you do have influence over how you respond.

People who feel powerless often remain stuck in cycles of blame, resentment, helplessness, or hopelessness.

People who develop agency begin asking different questions.

Not: “Why does this always happen to me?” But: “What can I do next?”

Not: “Who is going to rescue me?” But: “What resources do I have available?”

Agency doesn’t mean denying hardship. It means recognizing your capacity to influence your own life.

So How Do You Know If You’re Healing?

Here are a few measurable signs:

• You understand your emotional triggers better than you used to.

• You recover from setbacks more quickly.

• You set healthier boundaries.

• You make decisions that align with your values.

• You tolerate discomfort without immediately escaping it.

• You take greater responsibility for your choices.

• Your relationships become healthier and more reciprocal.

• You spend less time fighting reality and more time responding to it effectively.

None of these changes happen overnight. Most occur so gradually that we barely notice them.

Healing Is Not Linear

Another misconception is that healing should look like a steady upward climb.

It doesn’t.

Most people imagine growth as a straight line. You learn a lesson, develop a skill, and never struggle with that issue again.

Unfortunately, the human brain doesn’t work that way.

You may spend years developing healthier boundaries and then suddenly find yourself saying “yes” to something you should have declined.

You may learn excellent coping skills and still have a week where anxiety gets the better of you.

You may think you’ve completely worked through an old wound only to discover that a new situation has touched a part of it you hadn’t encountered before.

This doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It doesn’t mean you’ve gone backward. It means you’re human.

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One of the best indicators of growth is not the absence of setbacks. It’s how quickly you recognize them and course-correct.

Years ago, a painful event might have knocked you off balance for months. Today, perhaps it’s a few days.

Years ago, you might have stayed in an unhealthy relationship for years. Today, you recognize the warning signs within weeks.

Years ago, you may have blamed yourself for every disappointment. Today, you can evaluate what happened with greater perspective and self-compassion.

That’s what progress looks like.

Not perfection. Not immunity from struggle.

Just a growing ability to navigate life’s inevitable challenges with more awareness and skill than before.

Healing is rarely dramatic.

It doesn’t usually arrive with a flash of insight, a perfect meditation practice, or a social media-worthy breakthrough.

More often, healing looks like quietly making better decisions over and over again. It’s choosing the difficult conversation. Taking responsibility. Learning new skills. Being kinder to yourself. Showing up differently than you did before.

In other words, healing isn’t a destination. It’s the ongoing process of becoming a person who can navigate life with greater awareness, flexibility, resilience, and self-respect.

Not perfect. Just a little healthier than yesterday.

And honestly, that’s enough.

CBT. DBT. ACT. EMDR. IFS. ERP. CPT. and that’s just the beginning.

To therapists, these letters represent years of study and specialized approaches to helping people overcome anxiety, depression, trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a host of other emotional struggles.

To everyone else, it can feel like trying to decipher a secret code.

Many people begin their search for therapy believing the most important question is: Which approach works best?

Should I find someone who does EMDR?

Is CBT better than ACT?

Do I need IFS?

Will DBT help with emotional regulation?

These are reasonable questions. Different approaches can be useful for different problems. Therapists spend years learning them.

But after more than three decades as a therapist, and after sitting on both sides of the therapy room as both clinician and client, I’ve come to believe that most people are asking the wrong question.

The better question is this:

Can I build a meaningful, trusting relationship with this person?

Because decades of psychotherapy research have repeatedly found that one factor predicts success more consistently than any particular technique:

The quality of the therapeutic relationship.

Psychotherapists and researchers call this the therapeutic alliance.

Clients call it something much simpler.

“I feel understood.”

“I feel safe here.”

“This person gets me.”

The Therapeutic Alliance

Study after study has found that successful therapy depends less on the specific model being used and more on whether the client feels understood, respected, emotionally safe, and genuinely connected to the therapist.

Techniques matter. But techniques do not operate in a vacuum.

The most sophisticated intervention in the world is unlikely to help if it comes from someone who feels dismissive, arrogant, distracted, rigid, or emotionally unavailable.

Conversely, many people make remarkable progress with therapists who use a blend of approaches but are consistently thoughtful, attentive, flexible, and deeply engaged.

A therapist can be highly trained and still miss the person sitting in front of them.

Credentials are important. Competence is important.

But neither guarantees connection.

What Actually Makes a Good Therapist?

In my experience, the qualities that matter most aren’t easily measured.

A good therapist brings compassion without becoming sentimental. They bring wisdom without becoming preachy. They bring insight without reducing people to diagnoses.

They are emotionally intelligent enough to know when to listen, when to challenge, when to educate, and when to simply sit with someone’s pain.

Most importantly, they are flexible.

Human beings are complicated. No single model explains all of human behavior. Good therapists adapt their approach to fit the client rather than trying to force the client into a predetermined framework.

The best therapists I know use many tools. But they never mistake the tool for the work itself.

The work is the relationship.

An Uncomfortable Truth

Not every therapist is especially talented. And even excellent therapists are not the right fit for everyone. This isn’t criticism. It’s reality.

Therapy is intensely personal. Personality, communication style, values, life experience, emotional presence, and even a therapist’s sense of humor can influence whether the relationship feels productive.

If you consistently leave sessions feeling unseen, misunderstood, judged, confused, or emotionally disconnected, don’t ignore that information.

Your reactions matter.

The relationship matters.

You Are Allowed to Interview a Therapist

One of the most underutilized tools in finding a therapist is a brief consultation call.

You do not need to tell your entire life story. A simple overview is enough.

“I’m struggling with anxiety.”

“I’ve experienced trauma.”

“My marriage is falling apart.”

“I feel stuck.”

Then ask a question that tells you far more than any website biography ever will:

“What would you do if you were working with someone like me?”

Listen carefully. Do they sound thoughtful? Do they sound curious? Do they ask questions?

Can they explain things in plain language? Do they seem genuinely interested in understanding you?

Pay attention not only to what they say, but how you feel while they’re saying it.

Our nervous systems are remarkably good judges of emotional safety.

Therapy Is Not the Only Place Healing Happens

As much as I value psychotherapy, I think our culture sometimes overestimates what happens inside a therapist’s office and underestimates what happens outside of it.

Some of the healthiest people I know have never spent a day in therapy.

They found healing through meaningful friendships.

Through spiritual communities.

Through volunteer work.

Through raising children.

Through caring for animals.

Through art, music, writing, gardening, hiking, dancing, teaching, mentoring, and service to others.

They found purpose. They found belonging. They found ways to contribute to something larger than themselves.

Those experiences matter a great deal.

Human beings need more than symptom reduction. We need meaning. We need connection. We need opportunities to grow, create, learn, and participate in life.

Therapy can help us get there. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary.

But therapy itself is not the destination. The destination is a fuller life.

The Bottom Line

Finding a good therapist isn’t primarily about finding the right acronym.

It’s about finding a human being who can meet you with intelligence, compassion, honesty, and skill.

Someone who can help you understand yourself more clearly.

Someone who can challenge you when needed and support you when life becomes overwhelming.

Someone with whom growth feels possible.

And if you’re fortunate enough to find that relationship, therapy can be transformative.

But don’t forget that healing also happens in friendships, families, communities, creative pursuits, acts of service, and meaningful work.

The goal is not simply to spend time talking about life.

The goal is to build a life worth living.

This was unusual enough to get my attention. He first taught me to play about 20 years ago when I was trying to wrap my head around the problem of game addiction. We had some fun, and I learned a lot, but I never saw any real depth in the stories I found in the virtual worlds of the time.

I’ll admit it: if someone had told me a few months ago that a video game would leave me reflecting on grief, family, and healing, I would have been skeptical.

I tended to think of video games primarily as entertainment—an escape, a pastime, something far removed from the emotional depth of a good novel or film.

But that assumption is outdated. I learned this by playing Expedition 33, an independently produced game that’s won many awards. This game shares a story with depth.

Storytelling has evolved in virtual worlds. Some contemporary video games explore the same themes that have occupied writers, filmmakers, poets, and psychologists for generations: love, mortality, identity, trauma, loss, and the search for meaning. The medium may be different, but the emotional territory is familiar.

As we worked our way through the story together, I began to suspect that the game wasn’t really the point.

Something else was happening.

By the time we finished, it struck me that grief was the central theme of the entire experience.

Beneath the fantasy setting and adventure lies a story about loss, mortality, memory, and the impossible wish to undo what has already happened. The characters are not simply fighting an external enemy; they are wrestling with the same questions that eventually confront all of us.

How do we keep living when someone we love is gone?

How much of our identity becomes organized around grief?

When does remembering become a way of honoring the dead, and when does it become a way of refusing to rejoin life?

What moved me most was that the story does not treat grief as a problem to solve.

There is no magical cure. No final victory over loss.

Instead, grief is portrayed as something that must be carried, integrated, and transformed. The characters move through denial, anger, longing, bargaining, and acceptance—not in a neat sequence, but in the messy, circular way real grief unfolds.

The story suggests that healing does not come from erasing pain. It comes from learning to live alongside it.

As a therapist, I often talk about the ways human beings process difficult emotions indirectly. Sometimes it is easier to discuss a novel than a childhood trauma. Easier to analyze a movie than to describe our own heartbreak.

Stories create what therapists sometimes call a “safe third space.”

Rather than talking directly about our losses, we talk about the characters’ losses.

Rather than exposing our deepest feelings, we discuss what moved us in the story.

Yet beneath the surface, our own experiences are being activated and processed.

This can be especially important in families.

My family has experienced more than its share of loss. Death, illness, trauma, and grief have shaped us in ways both visible and invisible. Like many families, we do not always talk openly about these experiences. Sometimes the losses are simply too large, too painful, or too woven into the fabric of our lives.

What occurred to me afterward was that perhaps my son wasn’t just inviting me to play a game.

Perhaps he was inviting me into an emotional experience.

The fact that he was dedicated to sharing it with me suggests he recognized something in the story that resonated with our families’ lives. Maybe he wanted someone else to witness it. Maybe he wanted me to witness it.

By experiencing the story together, we occupied the same emotional landscape for a while. We reacted to the same moments. Reflected on the same themes. Sat with the same questions.

No formal conversation was required.

No emotional excavation.

No one had to say, “This reminds me of our family.”

Yet somehow, we both knew.

What touched me most was realizing that healing does not always arrive in the forms we expect.

We often imagine that healing comes through dramatic conversations where everyone finally says what has gone unsaid. Sometimes it does.

But often healing is quieter than that.

It happens through accumulated moments of connection.

A shared walk.

A remembered story.

A song.

A film.

A book.

Or, apparently, a video game.

Those moments create something grief often takes away: the feeling that we are not alone with our experience.

The older I get, the more I think grief is not only about losing people. It is also about finding ways to remain connected—to those we have lost, to the parts of ourselves shaped by those losses, and to the people who survived them alongside us.

Sometimes the most meaningful grief conversations don’t happen as conversations at all.

Sometimes they happen while sitting beside someone you love, journeying through a story together.

For my son and me, Expedition 33 became one of those stories.

Not because it solved anything.

Not because it explained grief.

But because, for a few hours, it allowed us to sit together in its presence without being overwhelmed by it.

We simply witnessed it together.

And sometimes that is enough.

Sometimes that is exactly what healing looks like

While the homicide rate in the US is overall falling, domestic killings are going up.

Whenever these tragedies occur, we search for explanations. Was it mental illness? Financial stress? Divorce? Social isolation? Easy access to firearms?

The answer is usually some combination of factors. Human behavior is rarely explained by a single cause.

But there is another influence worth examining: the rise of online grievance communities often referred to as the manosphere, red-pill culture, or men’s rights extremism.

To be clear, most men who consume this content will never commit violence. Many are lonely, depressed, searching for answers, or trying to make sense of rapid social change. They are angry and unhappy people, but they are not violent.

Still, some of the messages circulating within these communities overlap in striking ways with attitudes psychologists have observed in abusive relationships for decades.

The themes are familiar:

• Women are responsible for men’s happiness, status, and emotional well-being.

• Men are entitled to control their partners.

• Divorce is an unjust theft perpetrated against men.

• Women who leave are disloyal, manipulative, or deserving of punishment.

• A man’s worth is tied to dominance, status, and control.

• Vulnerability is weakness.

Most people who encounter these ideas will never become violent. But for individuals already struggling with entitlement, possessiveness, narcissism, or an inability to tolerate rejection, such messages can provide something dangerous: a framework that transforms personal pain into moral justification.

Instead of experiencing a breakup as heartbreak, it becomes betrayal.

Instead of seeing divorce as loss, it becomes theft.

Instead of accepting a partner’s autonomy, it becomes evidence of disloyalty.

And once someone begins viewing themselves as the victim of a profound injustice, revenge can start to feel righteous.

Throughout my career as a psychotherapist, I have worked with people experiencing overwhelming grief, humiliation, abandonment, and loss. Most eventually grieve, adapt, and move forward.

A small number do something different.

They become consumed by grievance.

Their suffering hardens into resentment.

Their resentment becomes entitlement.

And entitlement becomes the belief that someone else should pay for their pain.

This is where the psychology of domestic homicide, familicide, and revenge suicide often begins.

Contrary to popular belief, domestic violence is rarely about anger alone. At its core, it is usually about coercive control. The abuser experiences a partner’s independence, resistance, or departure not merely as a loss, but as a threat to identity and power.

The most dangerous time in an abusive relationship is often when a partner tries to leave. Fifty percent of women murdered are killed by current or former intimate partners. Most of those murders happen when they are trying to leave the relationship.

For some individuals, separation is experienced not as heartbreak but as annihilation.

The thought process becomes:

If I can’t have you, nobody can.

If you are going to destroy my life, I will destroy yours.

If my world is ending, everyone else’s will end too.

Family annihilators frequently leave behind explanations that sound remarkably similar to modern grievance narratives. They speak of humiliation, betrayal, unfairness, and victimization. They describe themselves not as perpetrators, but as the injured party.

The specific language may differ, but the psychology is strikingly familiar. As I discussed in my book The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence, this kind of grievance thinking is also behind most mass shootings.

I hesitate to view the manosphere as the primary cause of these crimes. Family annihilators existed long before podcasts, YouTube channels, Reddit forums, and social media influencers. Men killed their wives and children decades before anyone coined the term “red pill.”

The underlying vulnerabilities are old.

Possessiveness.

Entitlement.

Fragile identity.

An inability to tolerate rejection.

A belief that loved ones are extensions of oneself rather than autonomous human beings.

What may be new is the ease with which vulnerable individuals can find communities that validate and reinforce these beliefs.

The internet did not create grievance.

But it can magnify it.

It can transform private disappointment into a shared identity.

It can convert personal suffering into a narrative of persecution.

And for a small number of psychologically vulnerable individuals, it can make revenge feel justified.

The same psychological mechanism appears across many forms of extremism. Whether the ideology is political, religious, racial, or gender-based, the process is remarkably similar. Personal pain becomes a story of victimization. Victimization becomes grievance. Grievance seeks someone to blame.

Most people stop there.

A dangerous few do not.

The tragedy is that grievance feels empowering while quietly making people more helpless. It directs attention toward what others have done rather than what we can do. It encourages blame rather than adaptation.

And adaptation is how human beings survive loss.

Pain is unavoidable. Heartbreak is unavoidable. Rejection is unavoidable.

The belief that someone must suffer because we are suffering is where danger begins.

Some stories help us heal.

Others teach us to hate.

The stories are horrifying, and I won’t share details here. But I get it. I’ve heard such stories for decades now. Not all suicides are the same. Some are acts of malevolence. And that’s hard for people to understand who haven’t lived through it.

Yesterday, another:

“I just wanted you to understand how much relief I got from reading your book and naming what happened. I read all the other books on suicide and no one ever named it.”

I’ve marked off some pages for myself. As reminders.

I did a search for therapists who specialize in suicide survivors. Each time there are more, which is great. But it almost feels like I’m not that either. This is in a different category, and it doesn’t feel like they get it.

“I’m not healed. Like you said - never free of grief. A shard of sorrow in my heart, but I have grown around it. That was a lovely way to put it. I always thought of myself as Kintsugi or just reminded myself of the wise words of Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

A friend asked me recently if I’m uncomfortable since the book came out, exposing so much of my history and my private pain. I replied that no, the story needed to be told because there are so many people who need to know they aren’t alone. And there is nothing to be ashamed of. We all need to tell the truth. We find strength from each other.

There’s a meme that floats around social media that I often share: “My brokenness is a better bridge for other people than my pretend wholeness ever was.” I truly believe this.

I pray that those who need the book can find it.

Another just came in as I write this post:

I just finished your Nightbird book this morning and love your heart for people, the honesty you bring, and vulnerability so much. Thank you for writing and sharing your story. I am a therapist too and work with veterans, your work is so valuable.

I seldom cry, but these messages do it for me.

Now, many children are spending large portions of their psychological development inside algorithmically engineered environments like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

And I don’t think we fully understand what this is doing to them.

As a psychotherapist, I’ve become increasingly concerned about what happens when developing brains are exposed to endless streams of stimulation, social comparison, outrage, sexuality, consumerism, fear, and emotional manipulation before they have the maturity to process any of it.

Children and adolescents are not simply “small adults.” Their brains are still under construction. The emotional and reward systems develop earlier than the parts of the brain responsible for judgment, impulse control, emotional regulation, and long-term thinking. In other words, young people are neurologically wired to seek novelty, excitement, approval, and belonging long before they have the ability to consistently manage those drives wisely.

That vulnerability matters in digital environments designed to exploit attention.

These platforms are not neutral. Their business model depends on keeping people engaged for as long as possible. The algorithms learn what triggers emotion and then deliver more of it. Shock. Envy. Rage. Fear. Sexuality. Validation. Humiliation. Conflict. The more emotionally activated a person becomes, the longer they stay online.

Adults struggle with this. Children have even less defense against it.

One of the biggest developmental concerns I see is the replacement of inward identity formation with outward performance. Adolescence is supposed to be a time of gradually discovering who you are through relationships, experimentation, creativity, work, mistakes, and real-world experiences. But social media shifts the focus outward. Many young people begin constructing identities around likes, followers, appearance, virality, or group approval.

Instead of asking:
Who am I?

the question quietly becomes:
How am I being perceived?

That is not a small psychological shift.

Another concern is attentional fragmentation. Platforms built around rapid-fire short videos train the brain to expect constant novelty and stimulation. Over time, ordinary life can begin to feel unbearably slow. Reading a book, sitting in class, tolerating boredom, engaging in deep thought, or sustaining focus becomes more difficult.

Boredom, by the way, is not the enemy of development. Boredom is often where imagination, self-reflection, frustration tolerance, and creativity begin.

Children also now encounter ideas and imagery that previous generations would never have been exposed to so young. Violent content. Pornography. Eating disorder communities. Extremist ideology. Misogyny. Self-harm culture. Conspiracy thinking. Cruelty disguised as humor. Social humiliation as entertainment.

And the algorithms don’t merely expose vulnerable kids to these things once. They often escalate the content. A child watches one emotionally charged video and is quickly led to more extreme versions because emotionally intense material keeps attention locked in.

This is one reason online spaces can become developmental echo chambers. Instead of broadening perspective, they can reinforce black-and-white thinking, grievance, identity confusion, fear, cynicism, or emotional instability.

Then there’s the simple issue of emotional overload.

Human nervous systems were not designed to absorb a nonstop stream of global catastrophe, peer comparison, outrage, advertising, and social judgment every waking hour. Many young people never fully disengage long enough for their minds to settle. Sleep suffers. Anxiety rises. Mood regulation weakens. Real-world relationships can become thinner and less rewarding compared to the constant stimulation of online life.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that technology itself is bad. These platforms can educate, connect, inspire creativity, and provide community — especially for isolated young people.

The problem is not occasional or thoughtful use.

The problem is unfettered immersion during critical developmental years without boundaries, guidance, mentoring, or protection.

We would never allow corporations to freely shape children’s nutrition, education, sexuality, emotional development, and worldview without oversight in every other domain of life. Yet we have largely allowed tech companies optimized for engagement and profit to become some of the most powerful psychological influences in modern childhood.

I suspect future generations will look back at this era with genuine astonishment.

Not because children had access to technology.

But because we handed developing minds over to algorithms and assumed there would be no cost.

These are not isolated details. They are clues to a disturbing cultural shift.

Mass killings no longer emerge solely from private rage or individual psychopathology. Increasingly, they arise from digital ecosystems that reward grievance, glorify notoriety, and psychologically condition vulnerable people toward violence. The internet did not create narcissism, alienation, hatred, or violent fantasy. But it has industrialized and amplified them in ways humanity has never before experienced.

For decades, deeply alienated young men often remained socially isolated. Today, extremist online communities connect them instantly with others who reinforce their anger, validate distorted thinking, and offer belonging through shared resentment. What once remained hidden in the minds of angry and grievance-focused individuals can now evolve inside self-reinforcing online subcultures that function almost like extremist fandoms.

And in some corners of the internet, mass murder itself has become gamified.

Most do not come from abusive homes. Many have been well-parented, but somewhere, things went off track. While a small percentage have a developing significant mental illness, many do not. Young men who feel invisible, powerless, or socially rejected may stumble into online communities organized around grievance, misogyny, racial hatred, nihilism, or violent conspiracy theories. They are searching for identity and meaning.

The online world offers all of that immediately.

It offers community.
It offers explanation.
It offers enemies to blame.
It offers status.
Most dangerously, it offers an audience.

This is part of what makes modern online radicalization psychologically powerful. Human beings are social creatures. We absorb values, norms, and identities from the groups around us. In earlier eras, geographic limitations constrained who influenced us. Now a teenager sitting alone in his bedroom can spend ten hours immersed in forums filled with people validating rage, celebrating cruelty, and framing violence as heroic.

These digital communities often evolve into echo chambers where empathy erodes and extremism intensifies. The more provocative the content, the more engagement it receives. Rage and humiliation become social currency. Hatred becomes identity.

Eventually, violence itself becomes performance.

In some extremist forums, users openly discuss previous mass killings the way sports fans discuss legendary games. Perpetrators are ranked by “kill scores.” Tactical details are analyzed. Manifestos are archived and admired. Some users fantasize about surpassing previous body counts or achieving greater notoriety than earlier attackers.

This “scoreboard effect” fundamentally changes the psychology of mass violence. Murder is no longer simply an act of destruction. It becomes competitive theater.

The killer is no longer merely trying to harm people. He is trying to force the world to witness him.

Many perpetrators are acutely aware of the media environment they inhabit. They understand that images spread instantly. They know news outlets will analyze their motives, replay their photographs, publish their writings, and dissect their lives for weeks. Some intentionally stage attacks for maximum visual impact. Others livestream their violence in an attempt to transform murder into spectacle.

Their manifestos function as press kits.

This is one reason the Columbine massacre became such a cultural turning point. Beyond the horror itself, Columbine created a template — a script for how modern mass killers could achieve infamy. The perpetrators carefully documented themselves on video, fantasized about fame, and imagined Hollywood films being made about their lives. After the massacre, their faces and names saturated television screens around the world for months.

And some vulnerable young people were watching not with horror alone, but with fascination and identification.

The “Columbine effect” became real. Online communities formed around obsessive admiration for the killers. Many participants were adolescents born after the massacre itself, yet they immersed themselves in videos, writings, photographs, and mythology surrounding the perpetrators. Some romanticized them. Others viewed them as symbolic avengers against humiliation and social rejection.

Mass murder had become culturally transmissible.

Research on social contagion has long shown that publicized behavior can spread through imitation, particularly among vulnerable adolescents. We see this with suicide contagion. We now see it with mass killings as well. After highly publicized attacks, additional attacks frequently cluster in the following days and weeks.

This does not mean media coverage causes violence by itself. Most socially isolated young men do not become killers, neither do most people exposed to extremist content.

But psychologically vulnerable individuals are not affected by media in the same way others are.

Some individuals become consumed by grievance. Some fixate obsessively on violent fantasies. Some experience profound narcissism and begin seeking a path toward significance, domination, or revenge. Online extremist ecosystems can then function as accelerants, steadily escalating rage while simultaneously normalizing violent solutions.

The internet has also altered the structure of identity itself. Young people increasingly learn who they are through digital performance. Attention, followers, outrage, and visibility become markers of social worth. In this environment, notoriety can feel indistinguishable from significance.

If someone cannot become admired, he may decide to become feared.

This is especially dangerous in online communities where violence is framed as strength, masculinity, or transcendence. Certain extremist spaces promote fantasies of omnipotence through destruction. Killing becomes psychologically fused with empowerment. The perpetrator imagines transforming himself from a humiliated outsider into a figure who commands worldwide attention.

Better to become an infamous antihero than remain invisible.

Technology has evolved faster than our psychological ability to manage it. Over time, vulnerable individuals may become trapped inside distorted digital realities where violent thinking feels increasingly rational, justified, or even inevitable.

And unlike previous generations, they no longer radicalize alone, yet their parents generally have no idea.

What concerns me most as a psychotherapist is not merely the hatred itself, but the emotional vacuum these communities fill. Beneath much extremist violence lies profound emotional disconnection, identity fragmentation, shame, and loneliness. Online hate communities often provide the first sense of belonging some vulnerable individuals have ever experienced.

That does not excuse violence. But if we fail to understand the emotional and psychological mechanisms involved, we will continue responding too late.

We also need to rethink the way we collectively respond to mass killings. Every time news outlets endlessly replay manifestos, images, tactical details, and body counts, they risk unintentionally feeding the contagion effect. The FBI’s “Don’t Name Them” campaign emerged precisely because researchers recognized that extensive publicity can contribute to imitation behavior among fame-seeking perpetrators.

The most dangerous aspect of modern extremist ecosystems is not simply that they spread hatred. It’s that they offer psychologically vulnerable individuals identity, purpose, belonging, and imagined significance through violence.

Mass killers understand the viral nature of modern media. They understand spectacle. They understand branding. They understand that in a culture obsessed with attention, infamy can feel like a twisted form of immortality.

The internet did not invent grievance, narcissism, or violence. But it built an unprecedented machine for amplifying all three at once.

(This topic is covered extensively in my book The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence)

There is a painful reality that many families of those with severe mental illness discover: insight is not guaranteed. A person can be intelligent, articulate, even seemingly rational in moments — and still lack the neurological ability to recognize that they are seriously ill.

This phenomenon is called anosognosia, and it may be one of the least understood and most devastating aspects of severe mental illness.

Anosognosia is not denial in the ordinary sense. It is not stubbornness, rebellion, laziness, or a refusal to “take responsibility.” It is a neurological impairment affecting self-awareness, commonly seen in schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder with psychosis, and some other brain disorders. Researchers estimate that roughly half of individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders have significant anosognosia. Their brains literally cannot accurately perceive the illness itself.

To families, this often looks baffling and heartbreaking. A loved one may be hallucinating, delusional, paranoid, or spiraling into chaos while insisting with complete certainty: “I’m not sick. You are.”

And because they do not believe they are ill, many refuse medication, therapy, hospitalization, or follow-up care.

This is where Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) enters the conversation.

What Is Assisted Outpatient Treatment?

Assisted Outpatient Treatment is a civil court process designed for a very specific population: individuals with severe mental illness who repeatedly deteriorate because they lack insight into their condition and therefore do not voluntarily remain in treatment.

AOT is not incarceration. It is not punishment. It is not indefinite forced hospitalization.

Instead, it is a structured legal mechanism that allows a court to require treatment compliance while the individual continues living in the community.

Typically, AOT involves mandated participation in treatment services such as:

• psychiatric care

• medication management

• therapy

• case management

• substance abuse treatment (when relevant)

• supportive housing services

The goal is not control for its own sake. The goal is stabilization before catastrophe occurs.

Most AOT laws were created after repeated tragedies in which severely ill individuals cycled endlessly through psychiatric hospitals, jails, homelessness, psychotic deterioration, victimization, violence, or suicide — all while technically retaining the legal “right” to refuse treatment.

In practice, many families discover that the current system often waits until someone becomes actively dangerous, commits a crime, becomes medically compromised, or completely collapses before intervention is allowed.

By then, enormous damage may already have occurred.

The Myth That People Must Be “Dangerous Enough”

One of the greatest misconceptions in public discussions about involuntary treatment is the belief that people are casually or easily committed against their will.

In reality, the legal threshold for involuntary psychiatric intervention in the United States is extraordinarily high.

Generally speaking, a person must be shown to be:

• an imminent danger to self,

• an imminent danger to others,

• or “gravely disabled” to the point of being unable to care for basic survival needs.

Families often watch loved ones descend into psychosis for months or years while being told, over and over:

“There’s nothing we can do unless they specifically threaten someone.”

This creates a cruel paradox. We often wait for the brain disease itself to destroy insight, relationships, housing, employment, education, physical health, and safety before acting.

The system tends to prioritize civil liberties in theory while ignoring the reality that severe psychosis itself can profoundly impair autonomy and decision-making.

A person experiencing paranoid delusions, command hallucinations, or severe mania may no longer have intact judgment about treatment decisions — just as a person with advanced dementia may lack capacity in other areas.

Yet our cultural conversation about psychiatric intervention often becomes oversimplified and polarized:
either “leave people alone” or “lock them up.”

AOT attempts to occupy a middle ground.

What the Research Shows

While AOT remains controversial in some circles, research from multiple states suggests it can significantly reduce:

• psychiatric hospitalization

• homelessness

• incarceration

• emergency room utilization

• victimization

• arrests and violent behavior in high-risk populations

One of the best-known programs is “Kendra’s Law” in New York, enacted after a young woman named Kendra Webdale was killed by a man with untreated schizophrenia who had repeatedly cycled through failed systems of care.

Studies of Kendra’s Law found substantial reductions in hospitalization, homelessness, and arrests among participants. Critics sometimes frame AOT as coercive, but many families and clinicians view it as a humane alternative to repeated psychiatric collapse, incarceration, or death.

Importantly, AOT tends to work best when paired with robust community resources:
good psychiatric care, housing support, accessible medication management, crisis services, and continuity of care.

A court order alone is not enough. The system must actually provide treatment.

Why This Conversation Matters

Many clinicians, family members, and advocates believe our current standards are too reactive rather than preventative.

We intervene after the psychotic break.
After the suicide attempt.
After the assault.
After the eviction.
After the overdose.
After the family is shattered.

Then we call it compassion.

But allowing a severely psychotic person to deteriorate while insisting they are exercising “freedom” is not always compassionate. Sometimes it is abandonment disguised as civil liberty.

This is especially true when anosognosia is involved.

We readily accept involuntary intervention in many other areas of medicine. If someone is unconscious after a traumatic injury, we do not refuse treatment because they cannot consent. If a person with advanced dementia wanders into traffic confused and disoriented, we intervene.

Yet severe psychosis is often treated differently — despite the fact that the illness itself may destroy the person’s ability to understand reality.

None of this means civil liberties should disappear. Psychiatric systems have absolutely made grave mistakes historically, and safeguards matter deeply.

But we also need the courage to acknowledge another truth:

Untreated psychosis can be profoundly neurotoxic, terrifying, and life-destroying.

And families should not have to wait for bloodshed, incarceration, or irreversible devastation before help becomes legally possible.

The challenge is not choosing between compassion and liberty.

The challenge is learning how to protect both.

Anyone with a public platform eventually encounters them. I get my share.

Not thoughtful critics. Not people engaging in good-faith disagreement. I’m talking about the people who appear almost parasitic in their interactions: venomous, irrational, oddly personal, and often completely disconnected from the actual content of a post. They don’t argue ideas so much as attempt to contaminate the emotional atmosphere around them.

I think it’s important to distinguish between disagreement and trolling. Healthy disagreement is part of intellectual life. Intelligent people can see the same issue differently. They can debate, challenge, and question while still remaining grounded in reality and relevance.

Trolling is something else entirely.

Research on online behavior has repeatedly found correlations between chronic trolling behavior and traits associated with the “Dark Tetrad”: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Not every rude commenter is psychologically disordered, of course. But habitual trolls often display recognizable patterns: lack of empathy, impulsive aggression, manipulativeness, emotional shallowness, and apparent enjoyment of causing distress.

Some seem intoxicated by the feeling of power they get from provoking others. Others appear driven by grievance and resentment. Many hide behind anonymity because anonymity removes the normal social consequences that keep most people’s behavior within civilized bounds.

The internet can become a laboratory for disinhibition.

People say things online they would never say face-to-face. Some become increasingly extreme because outrage and cruelty are rewarded with attention. Algorithms themselves often amplify emotional intensity. Rage spreads faster than nuance.

And importantly, trolls are often illogical because logic is not actually the point.

Many aren’t trying to communicate coherent ideas. They are attempting to provoke an emotional reaction: shame, fear, self-doubt, anger, confusion. This is why engaging with them so often feels bizarre and circular. You think you are entering a discussion, but the other person is often engaged in a dominance ritual or emotional extraction exercise.

Trying to reason with someone whose primary motivation is emotional provocation rarely works.

This is why blocking people is not weakness. It is psychological boundary-setting.

Many thoughtful people struggle with this. They feel obligated to respond to every accusation or distortion. But mentally healthy people generally assume that if someone is upset, there must be something to repair, explain, or clarify. Trolls exploit this instinct.

You do not owe unlimited access to your nervous system.

Blocking, muting, refusing engagement, and declining to “take the bait” are often the healthiest responses available. In clinical language, we might call this stimulus control and boundary maintenance. In ordinary language, it means refusing to let strangers drag you into emotional quicksand.

Public visibility requires psychological boundaries.

The unfortunate reality is that some people experience genuine pleasure in hostility. Others are chronically dysregulated and looking for somewhere to discharge their rage. Still others feel powerless in their real lives and seek moments of artificial superiority online.

None of this means criticism should be ignored. Thoughtful critique can be useful and even transformative. But discernment matters.

A person thoughtfully engaging your ideas is very different from someone trying to injure your peace of mind.

One is conversation.

The other is predation.

Recently, I came across an argument from an influencer I have respected that stopped me cold.

The claim was that misogyny is rooted in childhood trauma and that if we could just get these men into therapy, we could fix the problem.

The logic is simple: men who hate women must have been hurt by women, especially their mothers, early in life. Heal the wound, and the hatred dissolves.

It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also increasingly circulating alongside manosphere content, often as a kind of corrective to it.

As a psychotherapist with more than 30 years of clinical experience, I had two immediate reactions: I understood the appeal. And I knew it wasn’t true.

Not long ago, I sat across from a couple who had been referred after a series of explosive conflicts in their relationship. The female partner described him as controlling, demeaning, and at times frightening. That played out in my office.

He didn’t see it that way.

“What you have to understand,” he told me calmly, “is that women say they want respect. But they don’t. They want a man to take charge, and that’s what I do.”

He wasn’t agitated. He wasn’t overwhelmed. He wasn’t describing pain. He was explaining a worldview.

And increasingly, those worldviews are shaped in online ecosystems where similar beliefs are repeated, validated, and amplified.

If therapy were a reliable cure for entitlement or lack of empathy, I would have seen it by now.

Therapy can help people change. But it is not a magic wand. And misogyny is not a mental health disorder.

There’s something deeply comforting about the idea that misogyny is a wound.

If hatred of women comes from unresolved pain—an absent mother, a humiliating rejection, early neglect—then the solution feels clear. It sounds compassionate.

But misogyny is not, at its core, a trauma response.

It’s a belief system.

And belief systems are shaped by culture. Today, they are also shaped by algorithm-driven content, viral clips, and influencers who package resentment as insight.

Recent surveys point to a widening ideological gap among young adults, with some data suggesting young men are more likely than their female peers to endorse traditional gender roles—a shift researchers are examining in the context of online influence (see Pew Research Center’s reporting on gender gaps among young adults).

Researchers studying online radicalization have long noted how repeated exposure to reinforcing content can normalize extreme views, particularly for younger users still forming their identities.

We live in a world that has long centered male power and normalized female subordination.

Most boys learn early what it means to be male. They absorb cues about dominance, entitlement, and emotional expression. They see whose voices matter, whose boundaries are respected, and whose are not.

You don’t need trauma to internalize those lessons. You just need to grow up paying attention.

The manosphere didn’t invent misogyny—it amplified it. It built an ecosystem where resentment is validated, entitlement is reframed as injustice, and anger toward women is encouraged.

Its most visible figures have amassed massive followings, especially among young men, with content designed for rapid sharing—short clips, bold claims, high emotional payoff.

That’s not untreated trauma, that’s cultural reinforcement.

The idea that we can “send men to therapy” to fix this misunderstands how therapy works.

Therapy requires willingness. It requires the capacity to question your own assumptions and tolerate discomfort.

Many people can do that. Many cannot.

Over the years, I’ve worked with individuals who caused significant harm and felt little remorse—not because they were secretly wounded children, but because they believed they were justified.

They didn’t ask, What’s wrong with me?
They asked, Why is everyone else overreacting?

That’s not a clinical issue. That’s a values system.

There’s also a persistent myth that all perpetrators were once victims.

Sometimes that’s true. But not always.

Some people harm others because they are reenacting trauma. Others do it because it works—because it brings power, control, or status, often without consequence.

When we reduce all harmful behavior to trauma, we blur that distinction. We minimize agency. We turn ideology into pathology.

And we misunderstand what we’re dealing with.

None of this is to say therapy doesn’t matter. It does.

I’ve seen people build insight and empathy. But change is slow, effortful, and requires genuine motivation.

There is no intervention that erases entitlement overnight. No technique that dissolves narcissism on contact.

If there were, every therapist would be using it.

The belief that therapy can solve misogyny is appealing because it keeps the problem contained. Fix the individual, and the system fixes itself.

But misogyny isn’t an individual malfunction.

It’s part of a broader cultural system—one now reinforced through digital communities and constant online feedback loops.

Therapists work one person at a time. We don’t control algorithms. We don’t rewrite cultural narratives. We don’t dismantle systems of power.

Real change happens through shifts in norms, accountability, and what we collectively tolerate.

I wish the solution were as simple as sending people to therapy.

I wish empathy could be reliably taught, entitlement gently dismantled, harmful beliefs dissolved. But that’s not how change works.

What we’re dealing with isn’t a population of wounded men waiting to be healed.

It’s a culture—now supercharged by technology—that continues to teach men they are entitled to women.

And until we address that, we will keep offering solutions that sound compassionate, but were never designed to solve the problem in the first place.

I had no idea how this book would be received. I was concerned that it would be too dark for some, even though the thread running through my story is optimistic. Though our histories shape us, they don’t have to be our destiny. There is always reason to hold hope. With the right kind of support, we can survive the hardest things.

This is my core message. And one that seems to be resonating for so many people.

It was my honor last night to attend the PenCraft awards ceremony in Las Vegas, where Nightbird received the best of summer and fall of 2025 in the memoir category.

Though I don’t travel much, I figured I’d regret not going. I don’t enjoy Las Vegas—in fact, I go out of my way to avoid it. But I’m not used to winning awards. It may be the only one I ever get ;-) What the hell. So I hopped on a plane to Vegas. I even put on a dress.

I was deeply touched by all the feedback I got, as well as all the gracious reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Best of all, I’ve gotten dozens of emails this year. People have shared stories similar to mine, things they’ve never talked about due to the shame and stigma they’ve carried. I said in the beginning that if my story could help even one person, it’s worth putting it out in the world.

One recent email in particular really hit me. It was from a man who said:

“My addiction really did mess up my brain, and suicide often seemed the reasonable choice. I clearly recall the evil logic of just a few months ago that was so prevalent—if my wife leaves me, I’d kill myself, and my suicide would be a fitting punishment for perceived wrongs.

Thankfully, professional therapy, a supportive network of family members and friends, my patient wife, and the program have all helped me realize a better and more hopeful future. And reading your story made me swallow hard, feeling shame for those thoughts that consumed me, while also feeling a tinge of pride in how far I've managed to come.

And so, thank you.”

It took bravery to write that. So much credit to him.

It’s been a very vulnerable process and taken a lot out of me energetically. So, to all of you who’ve read it, thank you for making space.

May we all have grace upon ourselves. Hold hope. Be well.

On sale now on Amazon

“Why didn’t they just leave?”

The question often carries an unspoken assumption: that staying must reflect weakness, dependency, or lack of intelligence.

But after more than thirty years as a psychotherapist working with survivors of abuse, I can say this with certainty:

Many of the people trapped in abusive relationships are exceptionally intelligent, capable, and strong.

In fact, the very traits that make someone thoughtful, loyal, and psychologically sophisticated can sometimes make them more vulnerable to becoming trapped in a destructive dynamic.

Abusive relationships rarely begin with cruelty.
They begin with connection, intensity, and hope.

Understanding the psychology behind these relationships requires looking at three powerful forces: trauma bonding, intermittent reward, and the gradual erosion of personal agency.

The Trap of Trauma Bonding

The term trauma bond describes a powerful emotional attachment that develops between a victim and someone who intermittently harms them.

These bonds are not a sign of weakness. They are the predictable result of how the human nervous system responds to alternating cycles of threat and relief.

When someone we love hurts us and then later comforts us, the brain can become deeply confused. The same person becomes both the source of danger and the source of safety.

Over time, the nervous system begins to cling to the moments of repair.

When the abusive partner apologizes, cries, promises to change, or suddenly becomes loving again, it creates a powerful sense of relief.

The brain learns:

The pain may stop if I just hold on a little longer.

This cycle of rupture and reconciliation creates a bond that can feel nearly impossible to break—even for people who clearly understand what is happening.

The Power of Intermittent Reward

One of the most powerful behavioral conditioning systems ever discovered is intermittent reinforcement.

In psychology experiments, animals press a lever far more persistently when rewards are unpredictable than when they are guaranteed.

The same principle appears in abusive relationships.

If a partner were cruel all the time, most people would leave fairly quickly. But abusive partners are rarely cruel all the time.

Instead, they often alternate between:

• intense affection

• normal periods of calm

• and episodes of cruelty or control

The loving phases can feel incredibly real and meaningful. The person who insults or intimidates you on Tuesday may be the same person bringing flowers on Friday.

For many victims, the question becomes:

Which version of this person is the “real” one?

Hope attaches to the kind version.

Victims often begin to believe that if they can just fix the stress, avoid triggering conflict, or love the person enough, the good version will finally stay.

But the unpredictable return of kindness only deepens the attachment.

The Confusion of “Two Different People”

Many survivors describe their partner as though they were two entirely different people.

There is the loving, charming, attentive version—the person they fell in love with.

And then there is the cruel, explosive, dismissive, or manipulative version.

This creates enormous cognitive dissonance.

Intelligent people often try to solve the contradiction.

They search for explanations:

• Maybe it’s stress.

• Maybe it’s alcohol.

• Maybe it’s childhood trauma.

• Maybe therapy will help.

• Maybe if I communicate better.

The relationship begins to feel like a problem to solve rather than a situation to escape.

And for thoughtful, empathetic people, the impulse to understand can keep them stuck far longer than outsiders expect.

The Slow Erosion of Agency

Abusive relationships rarely destroy a person’s confidence overnight.

Instead, power erodes gradually and subtly.

It may begin with criticism.

A partner questions your memory, your tone, your choices, your friendships. Over time, self-doubt grows.

Then come small accommodations:

• avoiding topics that trigger arguments

• spending less time with friends

• apologizing to keep the peace

• walking on eggshells

Each step seems minor in isolation.

But slowly, the person who once felt confident and autonomous begins to feel smaller, less certain, and more dependent.

By the time the abuse becomes unmistakable, many victims feel emotionally exhausted and psychologically disoriented.

Leaving can feel overwhelming.

A Story I Often Think About

I’ll call this former client Elena. I’ve been involved in more similar situations than I can count.

She was a successful professional—bright, articulate, and deeply thoughtful. The kind of person who could analyze complex situations with clarity and insight.

Yet when she talked about her partner, her certainty evaporated.

“He’s not always like that,” she would say after describing an explosive argument in which he had screamed at her for hours.

Then she would describe the next day, when he arrived with coffee and breakfast, apologizing and telling her she was the most important person in his life.

“He can be so loving,” she said. “I know the good version of him is real.”

Over time, Elena had slowly rearranged her life around managing his moods. She avoided certain topics, distanced herself from friends who questioned the relationship, and spent enormous emotional energy trying to keep the peace.

From the outside, the solution seemed obvious.

Inside the relationship, however, she was caught in a powerful cycle of hope, fear, love, and confusion.

When she finally left, she told me something that has stayed with me ever since: “I didn’t realize how much of myself I had lost until I was gone.”

Why Leaving Can Be the Most Dangerous Moment

Another reality that is often misunderstood is that leaving an abusive relationship can be the most dangerous time of all.

When someone who has relied on control begins to sense that control slipping away, the situation can escalate rapidly.

For abusive partners, separation can trigger a profound threat to their identity, power, and entitlement. The response is sometimes an attempt to regain control by any means necessary.

Research consistently shows that the danger can spike during separation. One widely cited study of domestic homicide found that a woman is about five times more likely to be killed by an abusive partner when she attempts to leave the relationship.

The loss of control can provoke desperation, rage, and a determination to reassert dominance at any cost.

Survivors often face a surge of intimidation or manipulation when they try to leave, including:

• threats of violence

• threats of suicide

• stalking or harassment

• financial retaliation

• attempts to gain custody of children as a way to maintain control

In some of the most extreme cases, separation can provoke catastrophic violence, including homicide or familicide. Many of the domestic violence tragedies that appear in the news—the cases that leave entire communities asking “How could this happen?”—occur during or shortly after a partner attempts to leave.

This is why domestic violence advocates emphasize safety planning rather than simply telling someone to leave immediately.

Survivors often work quietly with advocates, attorneys, or trusted friends to create exit strategies—securing finances, documents, housing, and protection orders before making the final break.

From the outside, the question may sound simple: Why didn’t they just walk away?

But for many victims, the calculation is far more complex.

Reclaiming Power

The most important shift for many survivors happens when they stop asking:

“Why did I stay?”

and begin asking instead:

“How did this happen to me?”

That shift moves the focus away from shame and toward understanding.

Abuse thrives in secrecy and confusion.

But when people learn about trauma bonding, psychological manipulation, and the slow erosion of agency, something powerful happens:

The fog begins to lift.

Understanding the psychology does not erase the pain of these relationships.

But it restores something abuse works very hard to take away:

clarity—and with it, the possibility of reclaiming one’s power.

A Reflection

If you have ever found yourself wondering how intelligent, capable people can become trapped in abusive relationships, it may be helpful to remember this:

These dynamics are not about intelligence.
They are about human attachment, hope, and the powerful conditioning of the nervous system.

And if any part of this dynamic feels familiar in your own life, you might ask yourself: Where in my relationships do I feel most like myself — and where do I feel like I’m slowly disappearing?

That question alone can sometimes be the first step toward reclaiming your power.

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

It sounds simple. Logical. Even obvious from the outside.

But from the inside, leaving a long-term relationship can feel like tearing apart your own identity, rewiring your nervous system, and stepping into free fall—all at once.

Let’s talk about why.

1. When “We” Becomes Who You Are (Identity Fusion)

Over time, relationships stop being something we have and start becoming something we are.

Therapists refer to this as identity fusion—a deep blending of self and other. Your routines, your memories, your future plans, even your sense of meaning, become intertwined with another person.

You’re no longer just you.
You are you-in-this-relationship.

So leaving isn’t just about losing a partner.

It’s about losing:

• The shared story of your life

• The version of yourself that exists inside that story

• The imagined future you’ve built together

This is why people often say, “I don’t even know who I am without them.”

They’re not being dramatic.
They’re describing a real psychological disorientation.

2. The Investment Trap (Sunk Cost Fallacy)

Humans are wired to avoid loss.

The sunk cost fallacy is our tendency to continue investing in something simply because we’ve already put so much into it—time, energy, love, years of our lives.

You might hear it in thoughts like:

• “I’ve already spent 10 years on this.”

• “I don’t want all of that to be for nothing.”

• “Maybe if I just try harder…”

But here’s the painful truth: Staying doesn’t recover what’s been lost. It only adds more to the cost.

And yet… walking away can feel like admitting failure, like erasing a chapter that mattered deeply.

So people stay, not because it’s good, but because leaving feels like proof of wasted time.

3. The Hook of Uncertainty (Intermittent Reinforcement)

Not all relationships are consistently bad.

In fact, the ones that are hardest to leave usually include moments of warmth, connection, and tenderness.

This creates what’s known as intermittent reinforcement—a powerful psychological pattern where rewards are unpredictable.

It’s the same mechanism that keeps people pulling slot machines.

• One good day after ten bad ones

• A moment of affection after emotional cruelty

• A promise that things will change

These moments don’t just feel good—they feel hopeful.

And hope is sticky. It keeps people emotionally invested, waiting for the next “good moment,” believing that if it happened once, it can happen again.

4. Love Is Also Chemistry (Oxytocin & Endogenous Opioids)

We often talk about love as an emotion or a choice, but it’s also a biological process.

Long-term attachment involves neurochemicals like:

• Oxytocin – associated with bonding, trust, and attachment

• Endogenous opioids – the body’s natural pain-relief and pleasure system

These chemicals reinforce connection and soothe distress—especially after conflict or separation.

This is why:

• You can feel physically calmer when you reconnect with a partner

• Separation can feel like withdrawal

• You may know something isn’t right, but still feel pulled back

In very real ways, attachment can function like an addiction.

Not because the relationship is “toxic” in a simplistic sense—but because your nervous system has learned: This person is where relief lives.

5. The Nervous System Doesn’t Love Change

Even corrosive relationships can feel familiar. And the nervous system often prefers familiar pain over unfamiliar uncertainty.

Leaving means:

• Disrupting routines

• Facing loneliness

• Managing fear about the future

• Letting go of certainty—even if that certainty hurts

So people stay not because they don’t see the problems…

…but because their entire system is organized around not losing what feels known.

A More Compassionate Question

Instead of asking,
“Why didn’t you leave?”

A better question might be:

“What made it so hard to leave?”

Because when we understand the forces at play—psychological, emotional, and biological—we move out of judgment and into compassion, and compassion is where healing and growth occur.

And an additional layer to all of the above is that many financial assets are blended and cannot be easily divided. If there are shared children, the difficulty is magnified tenfold.

If You’re in This Place

If you’re struggling to leave—or wondering why you can’t—it doesn’t mean you’re weak.

It means:

• You formed a deep attachment

• You invested meaningfully

• Your brain and body adapted to connection

And unwinding all of that takes time.

It’s a long-term process

Leaving a long-term relationship isn’t just a decision.

It’s a process of:

• Reclaiming identity

• Rewiring attachment

• Letting go of the life you thought you would have as you develop an entirely new plan and direction

And that deserves far more respect and compassion than most people realize.

We’re taught to calm it down, push it away, rise above it. To be the reasonable one. The easy one. The one who doesn’t make waves.

But anger isn’t the problem.

Anger is a natural human response. It shows up when a boundary has been crossed, when something feels unjust, when someone—maybe you—is being hurt.

It’s your internal alarm system saying: this is not okay.

And importantly, anger is energizing. It activates the body, sharpens focus, and pushes us toward action—toward protection, toward change.

Without anger, we would tolerate things we shouldn’t tolerate. We would stay silent when something inside us knows we shouldn’t.

What Anger Is Meant to Do

4

At its best, anger is protective.

It helps us say:

• “That’s not okay.”

• “You can’t treat me that way.”

• “Something needs to change.”

It gives us the energy to act—on our own behalf, or on behalf of someone else who is being harmed.

In that sense, anger isn’t the opposite of care. It’s often rooted in it.

When Anger Turns Harmful

Anger only becomes a problem when it gets distorted.

It can be misdirected—taken out on the wrong person because it feels safer than addressing the real source.

It can be fueled by misperceptions—assumptions, mind-reading, or old narratives that don’t match the present moment.

Or it can be repressed—pushed down until it shows up as depression, anxiety, physical tension, or emotional numbness.

The issue isn’t that we feel anger.

It’s when we lose our relationship to it.

Anger vs. Aggression

Anger and aggression are not the same thing.

Anger is an emotion.
It’s internal. It carries information. It tells you something matters.

Aggression is a behavior.
It’s how anger gets expressed—and sometimes, misexpressed.

You can feel intense anger and respond without aggression.

Aggression shows up as:

• yelling, insulting, or threatening

• intimidation or control

• physical or verbal harm

Healthy anger, by contrast, is assertive, not aggressive. It communicates clearly without violating someone else’s boundaries in return.

The goal is not to eliminate anger. It’s to express it cleanly.

A Simple 3-Step Tool for Healthy Anger

When you feel anger rising, try this:

1. Pause and regulate
Before reacting, slow your body down. Take a breath. Unclench your jaw. Let the initial surge pass just enough so you can think.

2. Reality-check the story
Ask yourself: What am I assuming? What do I actually know?
This helps prevent distorted thinking from hijacking the moment.

3. Express the boundary clearly
Say what needs to be said—directly and respectfully:

• “I’m not okay with that.”

• “Please don’t speak to me that way.”

• “I need this to be different going forward.”

No attack. No over-explaining. Just clarity.

A Better Question

Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this?”
Try asking:

“What is my anger pointing to?”

Is there a boundary that needs to be set?
A truth that needs to be spoken?
A situation that needs to change?

Anger is a signal.

It doesn’t have to become a weapon.

Final Thought

The absence of anger isn’t always peace.

Sometimes it’s fear.
Sometimes it’s accommodation.
Sometimes it’s the slow erosion of the self.

Healthy anger is different.

It’s clear.
It’s grounded.
It’s purposeful.

It says:
This matters.
I matter.
And something needs to change.

Imagine your nervous system as a glass of water.

If you’re alive, there is water in the glass. Always. Your body is never at zero—your brain, your heart, your hormones are constantly working in the background to keep you going.

Now imagine that every stressor in your life is like dropping an Alka-Seltzer tablet into that glass.

It hits the water and immediately begins to fizz.

A single tablet? Not a big deal. A little activation. Your system handles it.

But life doesn’t hand us one tablet at a time.

It’s:

• A difficult conversation

• A looming deadline

• A sick child

• Financial pressure

• Bad sleep

• Political stress

• Old trauma getting stirred up

Each one drops into the glass.

And each one fizzes.

The Moment It Overflows

4

At a certain point, the glass doesn’t just fizz—it overflows.

That overflow is what we call nervous system dysregulation.

It’s not abstract. It’s physiological.

Your body floods with stress chemicals. Your system shifts into survival mode:

• Fight (irritability, anger, reactivity)

• Flight (anxiety, urgency, restlessness)

• Freeze (shutdown, numbness, depression)

• Fawn (people-pleasing, loss of boundaries)

From the outside, it can look like someone is “overreacting.”

From the inside, it feels like you are barely holding it together.

SIGNS YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM IS AT CAPACITY

Sometimes the overflow doesn’t look dramatic, it just feels off.

Watch for:
• You’re more irritable than usual (small things feel big)
• You feel wired and tired at the same time
• You can’t focus, or your mind is racing
• You feel emotionally flooded, or oddly numb
• You’re withdrawing, avoiding, or shutting down

The key insight:
Nothing is “wrong” with you.

Your glass is just full.

Why Some People Overflow Faster Than Others

Not everyone has the same size glass.

Some people are walking around with a shot glass.
Others have something closer to a Big Gulp.

That difference isn’t about strength or character. It’s shaped by:

• Genetics

• Early attachment experiences

• Trauma history

• Chronic stress exposure

• Nervous system sensitivity

If you grew up in unpredictability or fear, your system may be wired to react quickly.

Your glass is smaller because it had to be.

That’s adaptation, not failure.

Two Ways to Restore Regulation

When the glass is overflowing, there are only two real options:

1. Take Some Tablets Out (Reduce the Load)

We often try to push through stress, but your nervous system keeps score.

This might look like:

• Saying no

• Reducing commitments

• Getting better sleep

• Limiting distressing media

• Creating more predictable routines

This isn’t avoidance.

It’s load management.

2. Make the Glass Bigger (Increase Capacity)

This is the deeper work.

Capacity-building doesn’t remove stress but it changes how much you can hold.

This includes:

• Therapy (especially trauma-informed work)

• Breath and body regulation

• Movement and discharge

• Safe, connected relationships

• Practicing emotional tolerance

Over time, the same number of tablets creates less overflow.

Not because life got easier but because you got more resourced.

What’s Happening in Your Body (And Why It Feels So Intense)

Before we move on, it’s worth pausing for a moment because this “glass” metaphor isn’t just conceptual. It maps directly onto real biological systems.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN YOUR BODY

When your “glass” is full, this isn’t just emotional, it’s biological.

→ Your alarm system turns on (Sympathetic Nervous System)
Your brain detects threat (real or perceived) and hits the gas pedal:
• Adrenaline rises
• Heart rate increases
• Breathing speeds up
• Muscles tense

This is fight or flight.

→ Your stress hormones kick in (HPA Axis)
Your body releases cortisol to keep you alert and ready.
Helpful in the short term—but when stress stacks up, cortisol stays elevated.

Over time, this can look like:
• Anxiety and irritability
• Poor sleep
• Brain fog
• Emotional exhaustion or depression

→ When it’s too much: shutdown (Freeze response)
If the system is overwhelmed, the body may shift into conservation mode:
• Numbness
• Disconnection
• Low energy
• Feeling “flat” or unable to act

This is not laziness. It’s protection.

→ Regulation = flexibility
A healthy nervous system isn’t calm all the time.
It’s able to activate, and then settle.

That’s the goal:
Not eliminating stress…
But increasing your ability to move through it without overflowing.

The Missing Piece: Awareness

Most people don’t realize how many tablets are already in their glass.

They just know they’re snapping at people, crying in the car, or unable to get off the couch.

But nothing is sudden.

The glass has been filling for a while.

Awareness is the pivot point:

• “Oh. My glass is full.”

• “No wonder I feel this way.”

• “What needs to come out right now?”

That moment is where regulation begins.

Remember

You are not “too sensitive.”
You are not “bad at coping.”

You are a human nervous system responding exactly as it was designed to respond—given the load it’s carrying and the size of the glass it has.

The work isn’t to shame the overflow.

The work is to understand it, and then, gently, begin to change the conditions that created it.