Episode 19: The Role of Forensic Psychologists in Family Court with Dr. Catherine BarrettThe Role of Forensic Psychologists in Family Court with Dr. Catherine Barrett

Dr. Catherine Barrett Riverside

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Dr. Barrett specializes in addiction recovery, domestic and intimate partner violence, chronic mental illness, and narcissistic abuse, A topic that I know all too well. Hi Catherine. Thank you so much for chatting with us today. Thank you for having me. I would love to hear a little bit about your background.

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And so I basically took. Both of those degrees and married them with a dual focus in clinical and forensic work. A lot of my background and my doctoral work was actually working with the perpetrators, doing risk assessments and assessing what their level, if at all, should be in reintegrating back into the community.

These are folks who committed pretty heinous offenses. Some of them were due to. Mental illness, but others were due to antisocial personality disorder, otherwise known sometimes as psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorders, sex offenders, sexually violent predators. After I finished all of that work, I went back to a clinical practice for a while and I needed a little bit of a break from that, as you can imagine.

And through the course of that, I ended up starting to, first of all, I went through my own experience of being in a narcissistically abusive relationship, which was the first time. I had to recognize that this exists, right? A lot of us don't even understand this until we're in it, which a lot of my clients will say how could you not know if you were assessing psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists?

Because I share this only because many folks feel. A lot of guilt and shame and if someone like myself with all the knowledge and academia and all of that could be baited into it, anybody can. And so from there I started to see a lot of clients who were experiencing this. And then I was linked to colleagues in the field through some of the presentations and things that I was doing who said, Hey, we really need you in family court.

And so I started to work alongside some folks that brought me into that. And then eventually it was just this merger of personal, professional, clinical and forensic. Expertise that now here I am really not by accident because I'm, glad I've been able to offer as much as I can. But it really was a happy accident in how I got here.

Can

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[00:02:51] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Forensic psychologist is essentially someone who is trained in the psycho legal framework. And what I mean by that is it's. It's the use of psychology within the legal system. So what differentiates clinical from forensic psychology is like a subdivision of clinical psychology with an emphasis in being trained to assist the courts and helping them understand maybe levels of risk, helping them understand somebody's propensity for a certain behavior.

It focuses much more on what we know right now versus the potential, right? So when we think of clinical psychology. We think of individuals who are focused more on treatment treatment recommendations, mental health diagnoses. There are aspects of that in forensic psychology, but really our role is to assist the trier effect, assist the court in understanding this is who is in front of us.

This is what. Is going on, and this is what this could mean from either levels of protective factors or risk factors. That's like the oversimplified way of explaining that.

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[00:03:57] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Most of the training in forensic psychology is from understanding risk through learning different ways of assessing, learning, very strategic ways of interviewing somebody. Understanding that just by talking to someone, that our guess is in our clinical perception or assessment is really only good as a flip of a coin, which means if you are interviewing somebody, you have about.

A 50% chance of accurately assessing them unless you are using other forms of information, psychological tools. This is where I oftentimes get into debates with the court about who they might choose to hire, because if you don't have a training in forensics, then there's this lack of knowledge or competency in the importance of knowing how to assess as accurately as possible.

And I also think that also includes having a lot of training and background in risk assessment such as domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and how domestic violence no longer looks just like a caveman with a club. That we've really come a long way in understanding emotional violence and the sophistication of offenders in their presentation when we're interviewing them to just go based on what they're saying or go based on listening to a therapist who may not have the training to fully understand the pathology. This is where a lot of these folks slip through the cracks, right?

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How important is getting a risk assessment and a psych eval for court cases?

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And a lot of my conversation was around these incestuous sort of circles of professionals that they tend to use over and over in their jurisdictions, because I get it, they know them, they're familiar with them. Maybe the evaluator's been working for 35, 40 years doing these. But what I find when I end up doing product reviews on these evaluations are these are individuals with no training.

t continuing education was in: 1980

These classes are mostly around reporting laws and mandated reporting, but it very rarely gets into personality disorders and coercive control. So the court, I think, makes assumptions that if you are a psychologist. Then you must be an expert in domestic violence and that could not be further from the truth, right?

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[00:07:17] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Very much

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[00:07:34] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah, they don't consider it a priority because I think they oversimplify domestic violence, and I think that unfortunately, what I tend to see sometimes is this, these layers of pseudo justice. It takes a lot of courage for someone to step up and say, I've been abused, or my child's being abused or there's a fear that they might be being abused because we know historically victims are not believed, Right.

I point people to Anne Burgess's work all the time, and if people don't know who she is, she was a psychiatric nurse back in the seventies that is actually responsible for the FBI, having an empirical way to psychologically profile offenders. And she did this through listening to victims of sexual violence and she said, we can learn a lot about our perpetrators.

By believing and listening to our victims, but that all erased when we brought people like Richard Gardner into family court.

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[00:09:06] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Oh my gosh. I think that's so well stated. And there's a couple of things I'll add on to that, which is one Gavin de Becker has a wonderful book called The Gift of Fear, and Gavin de Becker is the lead threat assessment person in the world, and he almost witnessed his mother dying through domestic violence when he was a child and ended up becoming an accessory for the FBI as a child and helping them understand how something like this happened. Then he developed, then he grew into this work, and the gift of fear addresses just that nobody snaps overnight.

The problem is, everything you just said is there's one, a diffusion of responsibility, which is I don't wanna be the person who's going to call out a parent or assume that a parent is violent or that anybody's violent, a child, a neighbor a student, right? So when you think about threat assessment, what we know, when we look back at folks who have taken a gun to a university, or in your case, unfortunately, the death of a child, these are things that, if you do what's called a psychological autopsy, we can look back and go, there is so much evidence leading to the fact that we had enough to at least pull this person aside and contain them, whether that was because they were a psychopath or they were incredibly mentally ill. Things don't happen on a, just people don't snap like that.

In addition to that, because there's this. Diffusion of responsibility and this sort of air to, I don't wanna accuse this person, and I don't wanna overuse the word I'm about to use, but it can create a form of gaslighting in the victim or the target who's in the relationship, because no one's talking about the fact that this person could be dangerous.

And so it's a perfect storm for. Allowing this individual to get more and more pathological while the target or the victim is carrying the moral responsibility of, how do I fix this? Am I making it up in my mind? And then the next thing you know, there's this tragedy that happens, but in hindsight, we all can look back and go, we saw it coming.

And this is where the courts fail us, right?

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[00:11:14] Dr. Catherine Barrett: signs. Yeah. There

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[00:11:22] Dr. Catherine Barrett: That's just it. Is this disbelief that somebody, yes, and I think that there's this overcorrection, like we don't have to over pathologize every parent that walks into family court, but I do think that we have to be aware that.

That people can be unwell, right? And people can also be psychopathological, right? They both can be true. People don't always kill because they're psychopaths people. And I'm not justifying anybody's actions if they kill and they aren't psychopaths. What I'm suggesting is it happens more than we think.

Absolutely. It's happened in my own practice to my associate, had a client whose daughter died horrifically after we tried warning the evaluators that she shouldn't have unsupervised visits and how many more. And I said to these judges in July, I said, how many more children have to die?

Oh, I know. For you guys to like maybe err to the side of caution the other way.

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[00:12:22] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah, that's right.

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And it happens and it's happening everywhere. And it's happening at an alarming rate. Yes, it is. So it's, yeah. Do you work with one month's Battle and Tina Swithin?

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And, learning her story. Yeah, just remarkable human for everything that she's done and what she continues to do. This is hard work. We're in a constant uphill battle, as we are the minority we are the hysterical, pathologized histrionic people that are, trying to stop justice in a lot of people's minds.

This is the fight, unfortunately.

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[00:13:30] Dr. Catherine Barrett: astounds me the amount of mostly women, some men who have gone through this, and the more that I've been doing this work, and I've even had some people in my personal life say, Catherine, I've heard you talk about this, but now it's happening to this is everywhere.

And I'm like, it is unfortunately. But you don't get it until you're going through it or you are somehow affiliated with it. You just don't believe it's a thing.

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He did it just to hurt me. Yes, because he knew it was the only thing that would actually hurt me and upset me and ruined my life because yes, everything else he threw at me. I just let it roll off my shoulder. I went on, I was trying to have a very happy life, and he actually loved Greyson. They had a good relationship and he solely did this just to hurt me.

Yeah, he loved himself more. He loved hating me more than he loved his child. Yeah, which he ended his life as well. He could have just done that if moving away wasn't his solution. But this is the solution that he chose to end two lives and mine virtually. Yeah, even though I'm still here, but that's the route that he took.

Now, how does one know that they need a forensic psychologist or I probably could have benefited by having one.

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What this is and that you trust their credentials. When we are dealing with, and we're dealing with evaluations and we're dealing with expert testimony and we're dealing with someone who understands the psycho legal framework, I think it's important to have someone to. Not and here's another thing too as an aside, not someone who calls themself a forensic psychologist because they've worked in the court system.

What does their degree say? Because if you're clinically trained, and this is not, I don't want to make this about ranking because clinical psychologists are excellent as clinical psychologists. But it's in our academia. Like I took classes just on expert testimony. I took classes just on risk assessment.

I took classes on court documentation on how to assist the trier effect. This is not taught in clinical work. So clinical work is taught from the framework of everyone can get better through therapy mostly. Okay. To be honest with you, that's not entirely incorrect, but the focus is on treatment goals, recommendations.

The problem with that mindset is we also have to recommend, we also have to recognize sometimes that isn't the case, that we have folks who are not in the capacity of self-reflection, remorse, empathy. Introspection, whatever it might be, needed to either be a healthy parent or partner or co-parent or have any sort of amenability to treatment.

And the only way that we can accurately assess that is if we have profound knowledge and risk assessment, personality disorders, domestic violence and how to address a court that way. And I think that is a very particular type of training. Now, that doesn't mean that all forensic psychologists do family court either, you have to make sure that, there's forensic psychologists that work on workers' comp for neurological damage because someone fell off a ladder at work. So you still have to be looking for someone who has an expertise in trauma-informed care and intimate partner violence.

So this is where it can get very overwhelming for people when they're doing the search. And I was actually on the phone with a guardian ad litem yesterday, who was doing a consultation with me because she's no one has ever broken this down this way, and we keep hiring all these people.

I said, yeah, that's why these cases last 7, 8, 9 years, because then they realize the evaluation's wrong. It no longer matters. Now we have to go back to the drawing board and that just puts the victims, whether that be the healthy parent or preferred parent and the children just under so much more stress and trauma that my job is to help educate people on let's get it right from the beginning.

And my job as an educator is to put clinicians out in the field as psychotherapists who understand this and see this and can help their clients really find the right people to build these teams. Because more often than not, it's chosen by the judge who has no idea how to vet these folks that they use.

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[00:18:20] Dr. Catherine Barrett: I personally used to do the evals and now most of the time I'm hired in to do product reviews on the evaluations to make sure that they're unbiased, to make sure that the structure and the function and the language.

A lot of times I'll be hired to look for holes. 'cause a lot of times they're really poorly done and they demonstrate a lot of biases. But yes, there are forensic psychologists out there that do these types of evaluations. Where I find they're to be the most corruption and difficulty are custodial evaluations.

These are mostly done by developmental psychologists or clinical psychologists who have never worked with perpetrators, and they, it astounds me. How many of them say they've worked with victims, yet they tend to revictimize the victims through these custodial evaluations, and they tend to lean towards 50 50 no matter what, because custodial evaluators are damned if they do, they're damned if they don't. They're the highest to be sued because one side always wins. The court likes these cases. Are they paid by someone in particular, like one side? Depends on the case. Okay. Sometimes they're appointed by the judge. Sometimes there's a, one party will say, here's three.

The other side picks one. Sometimes they shares the fees, sometimes they don't. That's really important to think about who's paying for it, and what does their narrative say when it comes back? But I think that the difficulty is the family court system has set it up in such a way that there's such an abundance of these cases that the custodial value evaluators are so pressured into, I'm just gonna say 50 50 no matter what the rest of the, this I've read some evaluations.

I'm like, how could you possibly conclude 50 50 after reading this? But this is what happens. The judge and the attorneys and everybody else who's making judgment just goes to the conclusion. And they don't see, and that's why I'm brought in is to really wreck their world by going, okay, put the conclusion over here.

Did you look at page one through 20? How did this person get 50 50? So it's, and how do you do that?

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[00:20:20] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah. In this case the mother was of course the one that was being pathologized, and she was, they were trying to say that she wasn't listening to what CPS had already said.

And the first like 50 pages of the report was dad's narrative. And the next 10 pages were moms. And I made a pretty bold statement to the court when I was rebutting this through my review and then I also said, the evaluator says that she has all this experience in DV, yet she's criticizing the mother for not believing the CPS report and the fact that law enforcement and CPS have looked at this three times and basically equating unfounded with false, and that's not true. Unfounded just means it hasn't met the statute of legal evidence. That doesn't mean that these children weren't abused, it just means it didn't meet the legal statute. And oftentimes it doesn't. There is no physical evidence. So the attorney actually crossed me and said Dr. Barrett, don't you think after three CPS, people looking at this and three law enforcement agencies, officers looking at this, that mom's just choosing not to believe it.

And I said why don't you go ask the family of Gabriel Fernandez what they think about that? Because how many CPS people pushed his case down the line, how many law enforcement agents diffused their responsibility? And this child was being locked in a cabinet and forced to eat cat food and ended up being killed by his mother?

No, I don't why would I trust that? I know nothing about those investigations. So even the questions that I get during testimony, and I said to this attorney, I said, not only is that ignorant, it's offensive. To think that we can just blindly believe a system because they've, I don't know, supposedly done their due diligence.

And if there's no evidence, of course they're gonna mark it as unfounded. That just doesn't mean false. So these are some of the things that I'll look for in these evaluations to show the court justice has not been served.

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[00:22:15] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Oh my gosh. Yeah. And sometimes I have, I have some great attorneys that I've worked with who are all about building a team, but I will say to some folks who are looking for attorneys . So just be mindful of attorneys that are unwilling to work with a team that are unwilling to be educated. That my job is not to come in and tell you how to run the rule of law, that's your lane. My job is to help you apply psychology to the law. And that's not what they've been trained to do.

So if the attorneys are open to that and many of them are sure we end up building a great, I don't testify as much anymore, but what I do is a lot of. Private consultations and I help the attorneys strategize their cases, help them reword deposition questions, just to catch these people on the stand in lies.

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[00:23:17] Dr. Catherine Barrett: I think it's because they have to admit they don't know everything. That's true, right? But don't come into my possibly. Of course not. Of course not you and I know that. But there are some egos that get in the way, and not just with attorneys, with psychologists.

We have to admit when we're outside of our area of competency I've had to turn down cases before that. For example, if they involve autism neurodivergence, that's my specialty and sometimes that's very relevant in these cases. Like I said, I can speak to this, but I can't speak to that. That's not my concentration. We have to be open , we cannot be experts in everything. We can't. Sure.

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[00:23:58] Dr. Catherine Barrett: yeah. So we first, we always wanna look at history. History is the number one predictor of future behavior if there hasn't been any sort of meaningful intervention. So what I mean by that is, are there people who can make progress in therapy if they have the capacity for reflection, the ego strength to tolerate the difficulty of getting through and staying amenable to treatment?

Sure. There, there are, I'm still a psychotherapist. I still believe that therapy can be really effective. I just think we also when we're doing risk assessment, we have to look at what are the risk factors that get in the way of this person profiting from experience. And what I mean by that is did they learn from what they did?

Is there remorse there? What risk factors are still present in this person's life that may increase their propensity for violence? What sort of dynamics do they have with the people in their life, with their work relationships, with their consistency? One of the areas that gets tricky.

And another thing that I brought up to these judges in July was, the court has something called stare decisis, which essentially means that once something has been presented and the judge has ruled that we're not talking about the abuse anymore. We've already been over this. We're not bringing it in.

Again, I said that's really a failure because this is ever evolving and if the children are still seeing the allegedly abusive parent and now we're no longer able to bring in new evidence, I know a lot of judges that will shut down evidentiary hearings when there's new evidence on a topic that they've already decided no longer, and never existed.

So I think that we also have to remember that there's an importance of looking at history. These are not incidents in isolation, right? So we need to open up our mind and go, Hey, if there's nothing to hide, let's talk about this full history of this person's relationship and interpersonal dynamics. I look at the, one of the number one things I look at is flexibility versus rigidity.

Okay? Somebody's interpersonal style is maladaptive if there is zero room for flexibility in their thinking, right? Can they be cooperative? Can they, and I don't mean that boundaries. I'm not talking about boundaries. Someone can say no. Because something is unhealthy. I'm talking more about can someone look inward and say, I'm not perfect.

There's room for me to grow here. Maybe I was wrong there. I'm looking for a capacity for somebody to be flexible, to be able to tolerate the word no. To tolerate the well narcissist won't. Exactly. Exactly. So what we're doing is without even having the diagnosis, we're looking for arrogant and antagonistic interpersonal styles.

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[00:26:28] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah. So there's that. And then, I also know that he was involved with a cult. And so we also have to look at, what is this person's narrative?

What are their potential delusions, cognitive distortions, things that are getting in the way of him, being in touch with reality. And we know that, there's really good clinicians out there that work with folks that have been in cults for some time, and the level of deprogramming that has to happen when they come out of cults.

So if someone's still in that, again, without pathologizing him, I. We can say to the court, there's a deep concern that there, there's a something very dogmatic that's happening that could get in the way of him effectively parenting or using judgment for impairment and insight, impairment in judgment.

Impairment in flexibility. I'm not looking for someone to say I haven't had any problems till her. Okay. That's a telltale sign. Calling their ex borderline. That's the big one too, right? Yep. Trying to flip the script and getting the victim on the defense to is the biggest sleigh of hand.

If you ever have an attorney that is only going in there and trying to defend you, you're gonna lose your case because they want you on the defense. It takes all the emphasis off of highlighting what they've been doing, so we have to flip that script.

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We didn't have that history. And he doesn't have a history of obviously killing people. So what are they to look at and everything that you just said. The narcissistic remarks. The, the cult factors, the fact that he literally said he had post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illnesses.

These are all things that a forensic psychologist or maybe just a logical person would assess that, maybe we should look further into these things. Because I was just, it was just brushed off. The judge literally said in our first hearing that was years ago. The cult situation, God, because he, it was right out of college.

He was like 20, and that's what he said. Like 20 years have gone by, so he must be reformed.

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What do we know about his way of thinking? How do we not know that over this time he still hasn't, internalized the philosophies of this cult, even if he's not actively in it. There's a reason why people have to go to therapy sometimes for years after they come out of a cult, right? Because you are traumatically bonded to someone who has completely worn you out, worn you down, and worn you out, you have no sense of self anymore, okay? What you were told was once safe and rational and logical and empathic. You are now told all of what you learned early on in life is wrong. Someone doesn't just come out of that framework because they've stepped outside of the room of that church.

And for a judge to make that kind of call with no mental health training, with no risk ASCE assessment training, with little to no DV training, this is the danger of the court system. And I know I've had many of conversations about is it better to move to, a jury system versus one judge?

And that comes with its own issues, but it scares me that this. Such a rush to judgment and that this person could not recognize, Hey, let's bring in some experts. Let's see maybe where this guy is now, and not for any reason then to protect your son, but they're so afraid to offend the parent, right?

And it's all about making this fair for the parent who's, the abuse is alleged upon, right? That we forget that the child is at the center of this, right? What would've been so bad about going, Hey, we're gonna pause here for a minute. We're gonna assess some things and the worst thing that comes out of it is that we've had to put you through some tests and everything's fine.

But they wanna rush to,

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[00:30:41] Dr. Catherine Barrett: because you are the ridiculous one. You are the hysterical one. How could he possibly be a father and such a good dad if he was this crazy or cultish? And listen, both can be true. You can have someone who's appears to be a good enough father without knowing behind closed doors where his mind is and how it could take one trigger for him to do something.

And unfortunately. You are the cautionary tale. That's why I do this podcast. And that should never have happened.

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[00:31:09] Dr. Catherine Barrett: absolutely. That should never have happened. Yeah. He should

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Yeah. He wasn't on the birth certificate. He didn't wanna be here for the birth and he didn't sue for paternity until Greyson was six months old. Six months. And then I had to just hand my baby that to a stranger. Yeah. They don't even question that. Like, why now? Did he wanna show up? He said because he's entitled to.

Yeah. Yeah. That he had DNA. The DNA makes everything perfect and it's 50 50. Meanwhile, where was he the first six months of Greyson's life.

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The mother and again, we're still, as much as we don't talk about it and we pretend we're no longer there, when I say we, not necessarily us on this side of the lane of the aisle, but that Richard Gardner's philosophies around, 90 some percent of mother's lie is still embedded in these judges' heads, although we have debunked that.

And it's closer to 1.3%.

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Yeah, back then. And they just completely got rid of that.

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They don't have the male privilege in society. They aren't believed as much. So are there fathers who are victims to this? Absolutely. Sure. And I've worked with some great dads, but I think that the majority of what we see is due to social construction and Right. And historically disbelieving women who allege this, and a lot of this rhetoric started, with Gardner's Garbage.

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[00:33:32] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah. I mean he's the one that essentially, discussed parental alienation syndrome. His mother's being hysterical and Right. And having sadomasochistic rape fantasy, the guy was off his rocker. And Family court is the only court system that still allows this terminology. Criminal court. Civil court. They don't allow it.

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Yeah, that's right.

So that's, I think people also forgot that, like, why would I alienate the person if he wasn't even involved in our lives? I brought him in because I thought I was doing the right thing. And honestly, that is one of my biggest regrets because he didn't even have to know. And I would have my beautiful baby boy here today.

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It's true as much as you've probably heard it, and it maybe it sounds performative at this point, but the truth is no parent should ever have to lose a child that way. But more importantly, the judicial system that was supposed to protect you so profoundly failed and fails over and over again.

And I don't know what it's going to take if they're so cautious about protecting these like. Abusive people, right? They're so scared to offend, right? These people at the cost of these child's lives, right at the cost of these mothers sanity and ability to thrive. And, you know better than I, but it's I don't even think frustrating is a strong enough word. It's so damaging. No, they parent

parental rights are, is trumping the, the actual situation. That's right.

Entitlement, right? Like the child is a property status of some kind versus their own individual being, and I think it's just going to take platforms like this and documentaries and exposure. I think people, more people outside of those who are involved or who have personally experienced need to understand that this is a thing. I just think that we have to continue to push and it's hard, right? There's days that we don't wanna fight. I can only imagine that there's days that you absolutely don't wanna fight because that's, there are many, so much of your last four years is fighting.

And that can also be really exhausting. But I just think we don't have a choice, right?

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And to get the people involved in my case and like them that the tools they need to become a better lawyer, judge, decision maker, because clearly they're all at fault.

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Then I did another one remotely for judges in New York and Connecticut. I said, can we just learn to take a pause? Do we have to just assume that the mother's lying from the get go until we have evidence. I'm like, what is the harm? And just going, Hey, let's put the kid first. Let's put the child first.

Let's just air, may, maybe mom is making this up, even if that's what goes through your head, which it shouldn't be, but let's just say it is. What is the harm? If this case is gonna take eight years because of his flipping antagonism, anyway, let's use that pause productively and investigate this, like honestly, investigate.

And because most divorces, most custody battles that are between what I would actually consider high conflict, and when I say high conflict, I mean there aren't too, there isn't like a personality disorder in the couple. It just means they can't stand each other, they want out. Those actually resolve fairly quickly when cases have gone on this long.

It's because you're dealing with someone who is maladaptive personality disorder, psychopathic, sociopathic, whatever you wanna name it. This isn't normal,

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[00:37:51] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Not to weaponize the court so much that, I have had clients who have to go back to their home countries and leave their children here because.

The father has wiped them out of all financial resources on purpose and pathology. Yeah. The list goes on and on, but it, I don't know at what point and how loud we have to scream for these judges to, and then where's the consequence? They just get to go home to their families after they make these rulings.

Absolutely. There's absolutely no consequences. They have immunity and what's done is done. Sorry, is what I get. Sorry. Yeah,

I agree with you. Yeah.

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[00:38:34] Dr. Catherine Barrett: So it's easy for me to say this because, people will say, trust your gut at the beginning, which can be really hard to do. 'cause some people go into these relationships without having a gut because maybe they've had a history of other relationships, dynamics, maybe with a parent or another partner, but what I would advise folks to do is the earlier on that you feel your boundaries aren't being respected. And I'm gonna, there's gonna be an aside to this is to leave. Don't allow yourself to go any further. And what I mean by that is if we have to know what our boundaries are. Our boundaries are what give us a sense of self that there are deal breakers. And if we go into relationships with the boundaries are actually not for the other person, they don't listen to 'em. They violate 'em. That's why restraining orders don't work. The boundaries are for us, it's for us to understand. If someone pushes beyond something that we, in our gut is feeling like, this doesn't feel right to me, this is not what I stand for, and they persist.

Persistence is not flattery. Persistence is abuse. So if you're feeling that. Pause because the sooner you can get out, you lessen the chance of that trauma bond, the lessen the chance of trauma bond forming. It's really all about primary prevention, right? Women are made to apologize, ask for permission, and acquiesce to flattery and persistence.

All of the old Hollywood films were, Pepe La pew and all this. Throwing themselves at the woman. They're and we should be flattered and all this, and we're supposed to be coy and shut. No. And one thing I will recommend to anybody out there who's listening to this is read Gavin de Becker's, the Gift of Fear, and I'll leave you with this.

He says in the book, okay if a man is respectful. And again I'm talking about this from a very hetero model. I also understand that this can happen in queer relationships. My relationship was with a woman. But in society, if we're looking at a man who is respectful, if a woman says no or no thank you, a man who's healthy will go, I respect that, I completely understand it. And he gives an example of a woman walking to her car and a man coming up to her in the parking lot says, Hey, let me help you with your groceries. Like coming off, very charming, very nice, very non-threatening. And she says, no thank you. I have this. And he says something like, bitch Gavin Becker says, be a bitch. Be the biggest bitch you can possibly be. Stop acquiescing apologizing because anybody who is healthy, man or woman, or any gender in between, if you say no and someone cannot tolerate that is your biggest warning sign right there, right?

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[00:41:28] Dr. Catherine Barrett: It's really difficult. And I think the more we talk about this and the more people are aware of what that early love bombing or focused attention might look like, we're all allowed to be excited at the beginning of a relationship.

Sure. But where the biggest warning signs are is when that person will say something like, I'm gonna marry you, and they've known you for two weeks. Or I'm gonna, they're already making these decisions. They're not asking, they're telling you, and they're getting very jealous very early on if you spend your time elsewhere.

Those are, that's not, excitement. That's again, persistence, that's bullying, that's guilt. That's not healthy.

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you're a great mom. Let's get married and bring and move to Hawaii. Literally in the same sentence.

Yeah.

That's when you know something ain't right.

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[00:42:25] Ali Kessler: wasn't enough.

[: 00:42:27

That anybody can, anyone can be baited into these relationships because these people are so good at making excuses for themselves. And if you are a healthy person and you've experienced healthy relationships, then our first sort of go-to is to give someone the benefit of the doubt, because we can't imagine that someone would be that way.

Sure. So a lot of the healing with clients that I work with at the beginning is just understand what's happened to you and understand that you didn't do anything to cause this and that's oftentimes one of the biggest hurdles.

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Inner, I have a lot of guilt myself, and I think about all the things I could have should have done.

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[00:43:14] Ali Kessler: in reality was that it was outta my hands.

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[00:43:17] Ali Kessler: I relied on people that could have made a difference that didn't.

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All you knew how to do, right? Like we can always reflect back and we can use that for future relationships, right? But to go back and try to relive the trauma and have all of that guilt is a normal part of the beginning of the work. But my hope for my clients is we get past that stuckness at some point because that can become somebody's mental and emotional prison for the rest of their lives if they can't get out of that.

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[00:43:51] Dr. Catherine Barrett: 1000%. And it's hard. It's now

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[00:43:56] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Oh, so I have a very unrelated yet related podcast. Okay. So I have a podcast called Terror Talk podcast. Okay. And my colleague and very good friend Shannon Calder and I, were both psychologists and we both understand narcissistic personality disorder very well.

We also happen to be a very big fan of. Horror films. Okay. And so the podcast is much more pleasure, but we also talk a lot about mental health topics, but it's basically psychology and it's horror and true crime from a psychological perspective. And so that sounds, sometimes it's just fun around horror.

But oftentimes we'll take very recent true crime cases, right? We dissected the episode adolescence, so some of it's very topical to what we're also seeing in the world of. NPD and how that, and what people can do.

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[00:44:41] Dr. Catherine Barrett: Yeah. The Menendez. The Petito. All of those are, especially as a forensic psychologist, and I know people who worked on those cases. It's man. I cannot believe just how, and I know it seems like more now because there are documentaries every second, but it just seems like there's more and more each year.

There are. There are. There definitely

[: 00:44:59

And you have no idea. No idea. Alright. I totally appreciate you coming on and sharing all your wisdom with us. And I find this fascinating and I could probably talk for hours, so maybe we'll have you back on, but I appreciate it. Yeah,

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I think it, it's just so great that you're just, I. Giving people an opportunity to talk more about this. So thank you for having me.

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So it's awesome. Nice to have a community.

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[00:45:55] Ali Kessler: Okay. Bye.