If you want to grow, learn about relationships, and put valuable lessons into practice in your own life… you’re in the right place. 💌In The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Jungian analyst James Hollis explains that people use romantic relationships to seek a “magical other” who will fix their inner emptiness. Instead of a how-to fix a partner guide, the book is a call to stop using love as a rescue mission and to grow up yourself.Core Ideas

* The Lost Garden: Humans feel a deep wound from birth and early life. We long to go back to a safe, whole place—our personal “Eden”.

* The Magical Other: We look for a soulmate to heal this old pain. We hope the right partner will make us feel complete and save us from our past.

* The Trap of Projection: We do not see our partner clearly. We glue our own hidden hopes and inner images onto them. When they fail to act like our dream image, we feel angry and let down.

* Personal Responsibility: A real relationship only starts when you stop expecting your partner to be your saviour. You must own your own life, pain, and growth.

Love smarter ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Join VLVT — relationship skills training, powered by AI & psychological research.

Join CoupleChat — AI couples coaching for the two of you. 🛋️

Lindsay Clancy is on trial for the deaths of her three children — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — and the jury isn’t just being asked to look at the facts. They’re being asked to decide something much narrower: was she conscious enough, in that moment, to know what she was doing was criminal? That’s what a trial is built to determine. Psychology asks a different question — and today we’re looking at both.

I go through what the psychiatrists and psychologists have actually testified to, the dueling diagnoses at the center of this case, and what postpartum depression and bipolar disorder actually look like from the inside, using the DSM-5 and the research behind it. I also get into the danger of mismanaged psychiatric medication, the risk-assessment failures I think this case exposes, and the timeline showing just how many times Lindsay Clancy tried to get help before this happened.

This is about understanding what psychology actually sees when it looks at a case like this with real thoroughness — and perhaps why so many people are afraid to ask for help in the first place.

Trial status is current as of recording — this case is moving fast, so some details may have changed by the time you’re listening.

If anything in this episode hits close to home: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988), National Maternal Mental Health Hotline (call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA).

In this episode, we discuss:

* What’s known about the case, the charges, and where the trial currently stands

* The legal question at the center of the trial vs. how psychology approaches the same facts

* What the psychiatrists and psychologists have testified to, and where the experts disagree

* Postpartum depression: DSM-5 criteria and what it actually feels like

* Bipolar disorder, misdiagnosis, and why mixing the two matters so much clinically

* Hallucinations vs. delusions, and the command hallucination she’s described

* Why mismanaging psychiatric medication is so dangerous — and what responsible care should look like

* The risk-assessment failures this case exposes

* The timeline of every time she sought help, and how the system kept failing her.

Welcome to the Connie Perl Psychology Book Club. We’ll meet right here on Monday evenings to discuss compelling ideas about psychology, love & relationships — written by great writers, analysts, & researchers. If you want to grow, learn about relationships, and put valuable lessons into practice in your own life… you’re in the right place. 💌In The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Jungian analyst James Hollis explains that people use romantic relationships to seek a “magical other” who will fix their inner emptiness. Instead of a how-to fix a partner guide, the book is a call to stop using love as a rescue mission and to grow up yourself.

Core Ideas

* The Lost Garden: Humans feel a deep wound from birth and early life. We long to go back to a safe, whole place—our personal “Eden”.

* The Magical Other: We look for a soulmate to heal this old pain. We hope the right partner will make us feel complete and save us from our past.

* The Trap of Projection: We do not see our partner clearly. We glue our own hidden hopes and inner images onto them. When they fail to act like our dream image, we feel angry and let down.

* Personal Responsibility: A real relationship only starts when you stop expecting your partner to be your saviour. You must own your own life, pain, and growth.

Love smarter. ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Join VLVT — relationship skills training, powered by AI & psychological research — and learn the relationship science you need to optimize your love life.

Welcome to the Connie Perl Psychology Book Club. We’ll meet right here on Monday evenings to discuss compelling ideas about psychology, love & relationships — written by great writers, analysts, & researchers. If you want to grow, learn about relationships, and put valuable lessons into practice in your own life… you’re in the right place. 💌In The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Jungian analyst James Hollis explains that people use romantic relationships to seek a “magical other” who will fix their inner emptiness. Instead of a how-to fix a partner guide, the book is a call to stop using love as a rescue mission and to grow up yourself.Core Ideas

* The Lost Garden: Humans feel a deep wound from birth and early life. We long to go back to a safe, whole place—our personal “Eden”.

* The Magical Other: We look for a soulmate to heal this old pain. We hope the right partner will make us feel complete and save us from our past.

* The Trap of Projection: We do not see our partner clearly. We glue our own hidden hopes and inner images onto them. When they fail to act like our dream image, we feel angry and let down.

* Personal Responsibility: A real relationship only starts when you stop expecting your partner to be your saviour. You must own your own life, pain, and growth.

Love smarter. ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Join VLVT — relationship skills training, powered by AI & psychological research — and learn the relationship science you need to optimize your love life.

You already know the story.

A name you didn’t recognize. Six months of DMs. A Signal app with no messages in it. A phone turned face-down one too many times.

Micro-cheating is one of the most talked-about — and least understood — relationship phenomena of our time. And in this episode, I’m going all the way in: what it actually is, why we do it, whether technology created it or just made it easier, and what it says about us as a species that we have always, in every era, been capable of maintaining a hidden inner life inside a committed relationship.

Our technology changed, but have our drives and desires?

After Betrayal Guide 🛋️

If you’re navigating betrayal, cheating, infidelity, or secrecy, I’ve created a guide filled with suggestions, exercises & actionable advice backed by psychological research. Click through to discover how you can take your power back right now.

In this episode, I cover:

* What micro-cheating actually is — and why the line is never about the act, always about the concealment

* The one question that cuts through all the ambiguity and tells you immediately whether something crosses a line

* Signal, Telegram, disappearing messages, and the industrialization of relational secrecy — what these tools actually make possible, and what that costs

* The OnlyFans question: when does paid digital interaction become a breach of trust, and what does the research actually say?

* The neuroscience of why hidden things feel so compelling — what dopamine, wanting, and the forbidden have to do with each other

* The Kinsey data from the 1950s that reframes everything: was secrecy really worse before smartphones, or have we always been this way?

* What sociological research on people who maintained parallel lives for decades tells us about compartmentalization and the “authentic self”

* Michael Slepian’s Columbia University research on the psychology of secret-keeping — and why the person hiding something pays a price the research makes very clear

* Whether we are always going to descend into secrecy as a species — and what it actually takes to rise above it

* Three clinically grounded things you can do: whether you’re the one hiding something, the one who found something, or the one trying to make sure neither ever happens

Referenced in this episode:

* Schilling, M. Definition of micro-cheating and its popularization in clinical and media contexts

* McDaniel, B.T., Drouin, M., & Cravens, J.D. (2017). Social Media Infidelity-Related Behaviors (SMIRB) Measure. Computers in Human Behavior.

* Kinsey Institute Research (2025) on perceptions of digital behaviors and infidelity

* Slepian, M.L., Chun, S., & Mason, M.F. (2017). The Experience of Secrecy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

* Slepian, M.L. (2024). The New Psychology of Secrecy. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

* Berridge, K.C. & Robinson, T.E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews.

* Norbury, A. et al. (2015). Dopamine Regulates Approach-Avoidance in Human Sensation-Seeking. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology.

* Garcia, M.C. (2018). L’infidélité conjugale: individualisation de la vie privée et genre. Enfances, Familles, Générations.

* The Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) on extramarital sex across American marriages

* Signal app: end-to-end encryption, disappearing messages, and their use in relationship concealment

Love smarter. ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Ready to go deeper? Join VLVT — the world’s first relationship skills training platform. Optimize your relationships, understand yourself on a deeper level, and change your life for the better. Loving smarter has never been so easy.

Welcome to the Connie Perl Psychology Book Club. We’ll meet right here on Monday evenings to discuss compelling ideas about psychology, love & relationships — written by great writers, analysts, & researchers. If you want to grow, learn about relationships, and put valuable lessons into practice in your own life… you’re in the right place. 💌I’m so excited to introduce you to the first chapter of our very first book. In The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, Jungian analyst James Hollis explains that people use romantic relationships to seek a “magical other” who will fix their inner emptiness. Instead of a how-to fix a partner guide, the book is a call to stop using love as a rescue mission and to grow up yourself.Core Ideas

* The Lost Garden: Humans feel a deep wound from birth and early life. We long to go back to a safe, whole place—our personal “Eden”.

* The Magical Other: We look for a soulmate to heal this old pain. We hope the right partner will make us feel complete and save us from our past.

* The Trap of Projection: We do not see our partner clearly. We glue our own hidden hopes and inner images onto them. When they fail to act like our dream image, we feel angry and let down.

* Personal Responsibility: A real relationship only starts when you stop expecting your partner to be your saviour. You must own your own life, pain, and growth.

Love smarter. ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Ready to go deeper? Join VLVT — the world’s first relationship skills training platform. Optimize your relationships, understand yourself on a deeper level, and change your life for the better. Loving smarter has never been so easy.

In this episode, I take on one of the most loaded questions in relationship psychology: what chronic infidelity actually tells us about a person. Not morally. Psychologically.

Rather than framing cheating as simply right or wrong, I zoom out — drawing on evolutionary psychology, Freudian theory, and developmental research — to ask what repeated betrayal reveals about a person’s capacity for self-regulation. Because desire, I’d argue, is not the interesting part. Everyone feels desire. What matters is what someone does with it.

I explore why the ability to tolerate an impulse without acting on it is not weakness, but one of the most sophisticated psychological skills a human being can develop — and what it means when that skill is chronically absent. I also look at the cultural tension we’re living in right now: a world that simultaneously celebrates self-mastery and romanticizes impulsivity, and the damage that contradiction does to our relationships.

Whether you’ve been cheated on, are trying to understand a pattern in yourself, or are simply curious about the psychology underneath one of the most common relationship ruptures there is — this episode will change the way you think about infidelity.

In this episode, I cover:

* Why civilization itself is built on the demand for self-regulation — and what that has to do with cheating

* The Freudian negotiation between instinct and restraint, and what it means to be psychologically developed

* Why the Coolidge effect doesn’t justify chronic infidelity — and where that logic breaks down

* The developmental lens: what chronic betrayal actually looks like through the framework of emotional maturity

* Dysregulation as the true driver of repeated infidelity — and why desire alone is never the real answer

* What CBT, Emotion-Focused Therapy, and psychodynamic psychology each reveal about how to interrupt the pattern

* What those who have been betrayed need to hear — and the one clarifying question that cuts through everything

Referenced in this episode:

* Sigmund Freud on the negotiation between instinct and social constraint

* Darwinian evolutionary psychology and the social costs of unchecked impulsivity

* The Coolidge effect and its psychological limits

* Research on frustration tolerance, delayed gratification, and self-regulation development

* CBT cognitive distortions common in chronic infidelity

* Emotion-Focused Therapy and the emotional states underneath affairs

* Psychodynamic frameworks on repetition and relational pattern

After Betrayal Guide 🛋️

If you’re navigating betrayal, cheating, infidelity, or secrecy, I’ve created a guide filled with suggestions, exercises & actionable advice backed by psychological research. Click through to discover how you can take your power back right now.

Love smarter. ❤️‍🔥🧠📱

Join VLVT — relationship skills training, powered by AI & psychological research — and learn how to turn your toxic relationships into healthy ones.

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy are often remembered as one of the most iconic couples in modern history — but what was actually happening beneath the surface of their relationship?

In this episode, I take a clinical psychology lens to their story, analyzing their dynamic through attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), psychodynamic theory, and systems psychology. We explore how identity, public pressure, emotional regulation, and relational patterns may have shaped their connection — and where desire and long-term compatibility diverged.

This episode breaks down:

The pursuer–distancer dynamic in relationships

How attachment styles influence conflict and intimacy

The psychological impact of fame, identity, and public scrutiny

ADHD, emotional regulation, and relational functioning

The difference between chemistry and sustainable love

If you’ve ever been in a relationship that looked perfect on the outside but felt misaligned on the inside — this episode will help you understand why.

This is not just a story about them.

It’s a framework for understanding your own patterns in love.

References

Barkley, R. A. (2015). Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: A handbook for diagnosis and treatment (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Gustavson, D. E., et al. (2022). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and chronic pain: A review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 9547351.

Johnson, S. M. (2004). The practice of emotionally focused couple therapy: Creating connection. Brunner-Routledge.

Klein, E. (2003). The Kennedy curse. St. Martin’s Press.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood. Guilford Press.

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity. Harper.

Disclaimer: Podcast episodes are educational and are not a replacement for therapy.

In this episode of Connie Perl Psychology, we take a deep psychological dive into Clavicular—the viral TikTok looksmaxxer—and unpack what his content reveals about modern masculinity, attraction, and the evolving meaning of love in the digital age. Through the lenses of attachment theory, CBT, psychodynamic theory, EFT, and narrative psychology, this episode explores looksmaxxing culture, emotional detachment, performance-based identity, and the growing tendency to treat relationships as transactions driven by status, visibility, and ROI. Is looksmaxxing actually a search for love—or a defense against it? And what does this mean for Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and the future of intimacy?

Disclaimer: Podcast episodes are educational and are not a replacement for therapy.

What happens when someone falls in love with an AI? In this episode, we explore the psychological, neurological, and relational implications of AI companionship through the lens of a real case from Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin?. This isn’t just a conversation about technology — it’s a deeper inquiry into what makes love real, how attachment forms, and what happens when connection becomes frictionless, perfectly responsive, and disembodied. Drawing from clinical psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience, we unpack the difference between feeling loved and being in a mutual, embodied relationship — and what this shift could mean for our capacity to love another human being over time.

Disclaimer: Podcast episodes are educational and are not a replacement for therapy.