Have you ever left a relationship more confused about yourself than about the person you were with?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of emotional abuse, coercive control, gaslighting and intimate partner violence. Listener discretion is advised.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy open Season 9 with the question everyone asks and almost nobody asks clinically: what does it actually mean to call someone a psychopath, and what does it feel like to be in a relationship with one?

This is not a diagnostic checklist for your partner. It is a map of a pattern, from the inside.

IN THIS EPISODE:

- Why psychopathy is not a DSM diagnosis, and what antisocial personality disorder actually covers

- Robert Hare and the PCL-R, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised

- Factor 1, the interpersonal and affective traits: glibness, charm, grandiosity, shallow affect, no remorse

- Factor 2, the antisocial lifestyle traits: need for stimulation, impulsivity, irresponsibility, early behavioral patterns

- Prevalence: under 1% of the general population, roughly 25% of incarcerated populations

- Subclinical or "successful" psychopathy, and Snakes in Suits by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare

- Why corporate, legal, political and even mental health environments show elevated rates

- The honeymoon phase: love bombing, mirroring and future faking

- Why mirroring works, and why it is a performance rather than recognition

- The shift: devaluation, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting and isolation

- The slot machine effect, and why unpredictable reward builds anxious attachment

- What gaslighting actually is, and how "you should get some therapy" gets weaponized

- Why an outsider can see it and the person inside cannot

- Trauma bonding as a neurobiological response, not a weakness

- Why couples therapy is contraindicated, and what to ask a couple's therapist before you start

- Safety planning, and why leaving is the most dangerous period even without physical violence

- Trauma informed care, somatic approaches, trauma focused CBT and EMDR

- Karin Huffer's work on Legal Abuse Syndrome, and litigation as a tool of control

- The closing thought: the grief is real, even though the relationship wasn't

CLINICAL TERMS: psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, PCL-R, Hare Psychopathy Checklist, narcissism, sociopathy, coercive control, love bombing, mirroring, future faking, devaluation, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting, isolation, triangulation, trauma bonding, anxious attachment, betrayal trauma, plausible deniability, safety planning, EMDR

RELATED EPISODES: Stalking, Surveillance and Coercive Control Parts 1 and 2 · How to Identify a Narcissist · Spiritual Narcissism: Twin Flames on Fire · CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians and Jonestown

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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Six documentaries, two therapists, and one question running under all of them: what does the camera do to a case? Shannon takes Betrayal: Dirty Secrets, EDP445: The Sick Mind, and Joe Berlinger's Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes. Cathy takes The Hillside Strangler, Maternal Instinct, and The Crash.

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of child predation, violence against a pregnant woman, sexual assault and murder. Listener discretion is advised.

SHANNON'S THREE

Betrayal: Dirty Secrets (Hulu). Colorado Springs police officer Joel Kern held a decorated career and a family man image while running a secret sexual double life with roughly fifty people, using his badge and his schedule as cover. His wife Karoline found out while their daughter was hospitalized. He retired before he could be fired, kept his pension, and was never charged.

EDP445: The Sick Mind. Bryant Moreland, a YouTube sports commentator with millions of subscribers, caught in a sting run by the vigilante group Predator Poachers. The clinical ground here is parasocial attachment, predatory persona construction, and the uncomfortable question of what vigilante predator catching actually accomplishes.

Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes (Netflix). Berlinger's fifth and final entry, built from 137 previously unheard prison phone calls Manson made to a retired detective across the last nine years of his life. Survivors are centered: Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, Stephanie Schram. One detail stays with you. Manson learned his mind control technique from Dale Carnegie.

CATHY'S THREE

The Hillside Strangler (MGM+). Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono killed ten women and girls across Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978. The first on camera interview with Bianchi, and the first-time lead detective Frank Salerno has spoken publicly in over forty years. Bianchi claimed amnesia, submitted to hypnosis, argued his confessions were fabricated, then turned on Buono. Watch how a man relates to his own story across four decades.

Maternal Instinct (Netflix). Taylor Parker faked a pregnancy for months, with a silicone belly, false ultrasounds and a gender reveal party, then murdered Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was thirty-five weeks pregnant. She is the youngest woman on Texas death row. This one is genuinely difficult.

The Crash (Netflix). Seventeen-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove into a brick building at over a hundred miles an hour, killing her boyfriend and his friend. No skid marks, no braking. Convicted of murder as an adult.

All six are streaming now, and the discussion is better if you have already formed an opinion.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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What does horror actually do to the person watching it and do this season's releases earn the reaction they're going for?

Season 9 of Shrink Chat opens with Evil Dead Burn, the series Silo and The Shards, and a run through the rest of what's landed lately: Disclosure, Obsession, They Will Kill You and Passenger.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy review them the way nobody else does, not on scares per minute, but on whether the psychology holds up: what the films get right about fear, grief, control and the way people actually behave under threat, and where they reach for a cheap shortcut instead.

Reviewed in this episode:

• Evil Dead Burn
• Silo (series)
• The Shards (series)
• They Will Kill You
• Disclosure
• Obsession
• Passenger
• Forbidden Fruit
• Whistle
• Plus, horror trivia and games with Cathy

More from Season 9:

• S9E1 CULTS Part 1: how a group turns ordinary people into killers

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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How does a nurse, a teacher, a software engineer end up participating in mass death? Shannon walks Cathy through the clinical pathway that turns ordinary people into killers using Heaven's Gate, the Zizians, and Jonestown to prove the same mechanism runs every single time.

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of mass suicide, murder, death by poisoning including the deaths of children, cult coercion and coercive control. Listener discretion is advised.

Season 9 opens with the question that sits underneath every cult story ever told: how does a group turn ordinary people into killers?

Not people who were always dangerous. A nurse. A teacher. A college student. A software engineer. Someone whose neighbors would describe them as quiet and kind.

Shannon takes the lead on this one, and the argument is deliberately uncomfortable; the pathway from ordinary person to cult member to participant in mass death is not about weakness, mental illness, or stupidity. It's about psychology. And it runs the same way every single time, whether you're looking at a California mansion in 1997, a Silicon Valley rationalist community in 2025, or a settlement in the Guyanese jungle in 1978.

Same process. Different costume.

Three cases, deliberately chosen because they have nothing in common but the mechanism. Heaven's Gate believed human bodies were containers for extraterrestrial souls. The Zizians organized around AI existential risk and analytic philosophy. Peoples Temple organized around socialism and racial justice. Cosmic, rationalist, political; three completely incompatible belief systems, one identical psychological structure underneath.

That structure is what Shannon and Cathy spend the episode taking apart. Robert Jay Lifton's eight criteria of thought reform. Margaret Singer's self-dissolution process. Erich Fromm on why freedom is psychologically expensive enough that people will trade it away. Jung's Mana Personality, which explains why a leader's word can override what you can see with your own eyes. And running through all of it, Albert Bandura's moral disengagement — the four specific mechanisms by which a person with an intact conscience does something monstrous and does not experience themselves as monstrous while doing it.

The core argument, and where the episode lands:

The most dangerous thing about a cult isn't the leader. It's the moment when the group becomes more real to you than your own perception. That isn't weakness. That's how human psychology works. And knowing that is the only protection.

Heaven's Gate · Marshall Applewhite · Bonnie Nettles · Rancho Santa Fe, California · March 26, 1997 · 39 dead · the Next Level · "the Demonstration"

The Zizians · Ziz LaSota · rationalist and effective altruism communities · AI existential risk · "undead" and "p-zombie" ideology · six deaths, 2025–2026

Peoples Temple · Jim Jones · Jonestown, Guyana · November 18, 1978 · 918 dead, 304 of them children · White Night rehearsals · the largest mass death of American civilians before 9/11

Clinical terms: thought reform · coercive control · moral disengagement · self-dissolution · cognitive dissonance · milieu control · dehumanization · DDD syndrome · the Mana Personality · the ShadowThis is Part 1 of a three-part Cults series. Part 2 goes into ritual violence. Part 3 goes deeper into contemporary cases

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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What does it mean to be scared in 2026?

Horror Facts with Cath is back — and so is the watch list that somehow kept growing. This month Shannon and Cathy work through thirteen titles across film and series, from a claustrophobic submarine nightmare and a wedding week that was never going to end well, to a spider in a 1930s trench coat and a medical examiner who doesn't know when to quit.

This episode covers:

Film:

• Iron Lung — claustrophobic, gorgeous, more blood than any horror film in history
• The Backrooms — A24's liminal space debut from the youngest director to ever hit number one at the box office
• Hokum — Damian McCarthy's follow-up to Oddity, atmospheric Irish horror
• Lee Cronin's The Mummy — demon possession, practical gore, and a Blumhouse/Atomic Monster collaboration
• Whistle — teen slasher meets cursed artifact meets Final Destination logic
• Thrash — hurricane sharks, Netflix, Tommy Wirkola, exactly what it sounds like
• Undertone — audio-driven A24 horror built almost entirely on sound design
• Return to Silent Hill — the third attempt to adapt the greatest horror game ever made
• Send Help — 2026's genre wildcard
• Scream 7 — Sidney Prescott returns. Ghostface returns. Shannon and Cathy have thoughts.

Series:

• Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen — Netflix, Duffer Brothers produced, wedding horror, 8 episodes of dread
• Scarpetta — Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta, Prime Video, forensic thriller
• Spider-Noir — Nicolas Cage as a 1930s New York superhero-turned-private investigator, Prime Video

Two licensed therapists — one forensic psychologist, one clinical marriage and family therapist — reviewing horror so you know what's worth your time and what's worth avoiding entirely.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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Why are audiences so fascinated by female psychopaths? In the 2010s the most talked about stories in true crime, film and television kept landing on the same unsettling idea: that psychopathy does not always look violent or chaotic. Sometimes it looks calm, strategic and socially invisible.

This episode continues our Female Psychopaths by the Decade series with the 2010s, the decade that changed how audiences talked about it.

THE REAL CASES

Jodi Arias, and what forensic psychologists mean by emotional congruence

Joanna Dennehy, the Peterborough ditch murders, and the difference between psychopathy and sadism

Miranda Barbour, the Craigslist killing of Troy LaFerrara, and self mythologizing

Katherine Knight, and why her case came roaring back in the 2010s

Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Dee Dee Blanchard, and the collision of victim and perpetrator

THE FICTIONAL ONES

Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, and why the one star reviews say more than the five star ones

Villanelle in Killing Eve, and why Cathy could not finish the show

Rose Armitage in Get Out

Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones

Azula

Plus the clinical groundwork: cognitive versus emotional empathy, primary versus secondary psychopathy, and why early psychopathy research built its rubric on male prison populations and then failed to recognise women who did not match it.

We are discussing psychopathic traits and behaviors. We are not diagnosing anyone.

Which female psychopath from the 2010s disturbed you the most, and why?

CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS

Game of Thrones premiered in April 2011, which puts it squarely inside the decade. Shannon says on air that it started before the 2010s.

Katherine Knight: Cathy hedges on who the remains were served to, and the record is clearer than the hedge. Knight murdered her partner John Price at Aberdeen, New South Wales, in February 2000. She skinned him, cooked portions of his body, and set the table with place settings and notes for his three children. They never arrived and never ate.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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In Part 1 we followed the investigation. Now Shannon and Cathy go somewhere far more unsettling, inside Gary Ridgway's head. What does it actually take to live a double life for nearly two decades? To hold down a job, get married, attend church, and kill without remorse? In Part 2, our two therapists unpack the psychological machinery behind one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.

Ridgway's profile wasn't that of a thrill-seeking sadist, it was something arguably more chilling: a methodical, compulsive need to kill driven by psychopathy and paraphilic disorders. Shannon and Cathy dig into the cognitive dissonance that allowed him to rationalize his crimes, the narcissism that ultimately helped investigators break him, and what his case reveals about the darkest intersections of psychology and violence.

If Part 1 asked how he wasn't caught sooner. Part 2 asks who he really was. Buckle up.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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How does a predator this prolific go undetected for so long?

He held the same job for 30 years, married three times, and attended church on Sundays. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, was hiding in plain sight for nearly two decades while methodically strangling scores of women across King County, Washington. In Part 1 of this two-part true crime deep dive, therapists Shannon and Cathy apply their criminal psychology expertise to one of the most baffling serial killer investigations in American history.

From the bodies first discovered along the Green River in 1982 to the failed polygraph that pushed Ridgway down the suspect list for years, this episode traces the jaw-dropping failures and near-misses of one of the longest unsolved serial killer cases in American history, and what they reveal about the limits of criminal profiling and forensic investigation.

Shannon and Cathy bring their clinical lens to what made Ridgway so psychologically elusive, so dangerous, and so disturbingly easy to overlook. If you think you know this case, think again.

Part 2 drops next and it goes somewhere darker.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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Why are people so spectacularly bad at being people?

Shannon and Cathy take a break from profiling serial killers to profile something arguably more baffling — the sheer, staggering stupidity of ordinary human behavior. From dumb criminals to absurd laws still on the books, this episode is pure chaos with a psychological twist.

Because even ridiculous behavior tells you something about the human mind. And some of it is genuinely unhinged.

Until then... Sleep safe. 😴

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What do a centuries-old vampire, a polio-era nightmare and a monster's bride have in common? Shannon and Cathy have opinions.

Shrink Chat is where two psychologists get gloriously off-script. This episode Shannon and Cathy dig into their latest horror movie, series and book reviews, including Dracula, Iron Lung and The Bride, plus trivia, highlight games and the general jackassery you come here for.

No serial killers this week. Just horror, laughs and two PhDs with too many feelings about monsters.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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