Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse
Confused by your relationship? Do you catch yourself second-guessing, walking on eggshells, or feeling emotionally drained? Whether you’re still in the chaos or trying to rebuild after leaving, this podcast is your lifeline.
Join retired psychologist Dr. Kerry McAvoy as she exposes the hidden dynamics of toxic relationships. You’ll learn how destructive personalities operate, the manipulative tactics they use, and the stages of abuse—plus the practical steps to heal and reclaim your life.
If you’re ready to break free, rebuild your self-worth, and find lasting emotional freedom, hit play and start your recovery journey today.
Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse
Why You Didn't See It Coming: How Male Predators Can Dupe Anybody
Ever wonder why you didn't see it coming?
This week, Don Hennessy joins Dr. Kerry to expose the hidden playbook male predators use to infiltrate your mind—without you knowing it happened. We unpack the shocking truth about what predators are actually really after
PODCAST EXTRA EXCLUSIVE SEGMENT
Find the exclusive second segment and weekly newsletter here.
MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST EXTRA INTERVIEW
🔹 Hennessy breaks down the grooming steps you never saw coming.
Don reveal why 75% of people think "it couldn't happen to me.”
👉 Get immediate access to this extended interview
HENNESSY’S BOOKS
- How He Gets Into Her Head
- Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control
- How He Wins: Abusive Intimate Partners Going Free
MORE ABOUT DON HENNESSY
Don Hennessy is an Irish psychotherapist and author who spent decades working directly with abusive men and their partners. He’s at work writing his fourth book.
Submit your question to be answered on air here!
Dr Kerry’s Resources
- ReclaimYou: AI-powered coaching app built on Dr. Kerry’s experience.
- The Complete Recovery Collection: Educational resources for narcissistic abuse healing
- First Steps to Leaving: Online self-paced digital course
- The Toxic-Free Relationship Club: coaching & community support
Follow Dr. Kerry!
Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D, a retired psychologist & author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism.
Disclaimer: This podcast/video is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, counseli...
How Smart Women Get Duped, Featuring Don Hennessy
Don Hennessy: [00:00:00] The older I get, the more I realize that all the other behaviors, all the things that are written, all that stuff is just. A spoke screen. What they're really about is sexual dominance in the relationship. All their other behaviors is just to lead Jewish way or to get women to think differently. Within a half hour of meeting somebody, they will assess whether they were kind or not.
So if you were a bitch, which is what we call them here, ladies who only thought about themselves or who were high maintenance, they would touch you. So you had to be kind. And the second most important thing is you had to be truthful. Their approach was like treating a cancer. So if you had a stomach cancer, you'd have pain and you'd have bleeding and you'd have all sorts of digestive systems.
And what they were doing was actually. Treating the impacts and the effects. So they were covering up the blood and reducing the pain and all of that, but nobody was examining the tumor. In Ireland, [00:01:00] there were about 25% of relationships are abusive, could be even higher, but there are definitely 25% and it has nothing to do with the women.
Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm.
Don Hennessy: But that's how clever men are. That's how devious these guys are. They put all the responsibility back on.
Dr. Kerry: What motivates abusive men to be exploitative? To answer that question, Don Hennessy, the author of How He Gets Into Her Head, joins me today, talk about the inside of a manipulative or exploitative relationship. So Don Hennessy, it has been a really privilege to be here with you today. I have very much looked forward to this interview 'cause I've been a long time fan of yours.
So why don't you tell those who are not familiar with yourself, who you are and how you got interested in the realm of domestic abuse?
Don Hennessy: Well, actually, uh, for about the first 20 years of my career, I didn't do anything about abuse. I actually worked in a different profession altogether, and [00:02:00] when I was in my mid forties.
I had a sort of a, I suppose I had a sort of recognition that maybe I could use my life to do something better than what I was doing. So I got started the relationship counseling and I got myself a job with a, a center and I, it was in Cork and uh, I worked as a relationship counselor. Within a week of joining the, the team in there, I was invited by my director who was a clinical psychologist who had trained in, in Chicago, but he said, we seem to be getting a lot of abusive men and couples who have difficulties with domestic violence in the center.
So we decided, uh, that we would study the issue and for about two years without engaging with anybody in, in the field. We studied it for our own sakes, and also to decide [00:03:00] whether as a center, it was appropriate for us to get involved. Even so, having made the decision that we would. Uh, set up a project. We developed a, what was known as the Cork Marriage Counseling Domestic Violence Projects, a long title.
And, uh, we began to work in the area and a team of five of us, six of us. Originally, there was three men and three women. We decided to run a group for men and a group for their partners independently. What we discovered initially was we were the only people in the world doing this. Most of the other groups were working either with the men or with the women were working separately, and in some agencies they had an overarching director or something, but the team weren't engaging on both sides of the issue.
So [00:04:00] that's what we did. We worked for about five or six years in. Believing that we as very clever Irish men could persuade other Irish men to behave properly and teach them things they didn't know about how to behave properly. Then for about three years, having listened to their partners over those five or six years and realizing that what we were doing was quite dangerous, we decided on a slightly different tactic in that we would bring them in to the groups.
But rather than we tried to educate them, we invited them to educate us. We didn't tell them that's what they were doing. We still told them they were getting treatment and getting all sorts of guidance and all of that. But we actually listened to them and we documented all their sessions. We recorded everything and we analyzed it subsequently, and it was because both myself and one of my [00:05:00] directors had been working also with what we call pedophiles.
We were a church-based organization here in Ireland, and there, there were a huge amount of pedophilia going on in the church, and it began to become exposed. And so we had plenty of, uh, clients in that area. So we went through a conference in Birmingham in the UK where they ran a, a treatment center for p pedophile men.
It was in that conference where we got the language to describe the pattern of how these pedophiles operated. And when we came back to Ireland, we began to realize that the guys we were working with were following the same pattern, and we began to explore that and confirm it. So it came from. Probably an unusual source in that we knew it about other men, but we didn't have any idea how [00:06:00] these men operated until, until we began to analyze them.
And as we analyzed them, we realized that behaving in exactly the same way. We also went to the women who were attending our groups at the time and we ran questionnaires passed them and we asked them to. Try and see how they would describe what actually happened to them. And what was really scary at the time was none of the ladies actually knew what had happened to them.
They had no idea how they ended up in an abusive relationship. They kept on saying, I must be very stupid. I must be very naive if it had happened more than once to them. It must be written all over my face, that I'm a, a sucker for these kind of men or whatever. So they kept on internalizing the responsibility and when we began to look at that, we said, no, that's not, that's not what's happening.
We suddenly began to realize [00:07:00] that the men were doing something which we couldn't quite define. So we spent about three years exploring what the men were doing and trying to have a language to describe it and realizing that their operation was very covert, and the women who were the target of that operation were not able to define it or describe it.
Dr. Kerry: Mm.
Don Hennessy: So that's. Where we got our ideas from. That's why we began to think, oh, hold on a second. There's something we don't know or something we're not able to see. And as we revealed that, we found the pattern, we found how they were operating. And uh, I have to admit that when I started finding this, I said, oh my God, I'm going to get five or six or seven books out of this now it'll be great for my career and all of that.
And then we began to realize all the guys do exactly the same thing. There was only one book in them really. [00:08:00] So we began to define it and eventually. Five years later, I wrote the book, but we had spent a number of years touring Ireland, going around to various centers and expressing our opinions. What was really fascinating was that on platforms, the people who attacked me most were women.
They said, why the hell are you telling us what we know already? We know what's going on. We know how women are suffering. We know what, what they're putting up with, and we don't need men to tell us, uh, why they're suffering or what's going on for them, or we don't certainly want to waste time thinking about the men.
But I began to say that their approach was like treating a cancer. So if you had a stomach cancer, you'd have pain and you'd have bleeding and you'd have all sorts of digestive systems. And what they were [00:09:00] doing was actually treating the impacts and the effects. So they were covering up the blood and reducing the pain and all of that, but nobody was examining the tumor.
Yeah. So that's what we were doing. That's what the books are about, taking out the tumor and dissecting it.
Dr. Kerry: You made so many fascinating comments. I wanna circle back to the beginning. It's you, something you said. You said you started trying to treat the men before you started listening to them, and you said it just made things worse.
What happened when you started with that first approach?
Don Hennessy: What we discovered was that the men were learning from each other. So if they were physically violent to their partners, they could. Transfer that to a mental control, and they would be equally in control, but they wouldn't be physically violent anymore.
And so in this country, they weren't making or breaking any crimes. Causing any criminal convictions. [00:10:00] So the women actually didn't know how to handle these new guys, the men who were actually physically violent. It was still obvious.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: But most of them actually learned a new way of controlling their partner.
Dr. Kerry: So yeah. Let's unpack what you discovered because you said there's, it's like there's one playbook they're using. So what happens in the grooming of a person?
Don Hennessy: The initial thing is that you and I, I don't know Kerry, if you have a family or anything, but if, if you are raring kids, we all groom people.
Dr. Kerry: Mm.
Don Hennessy: Right. Uh, we find out which one is going to be empty, the dishwasher, and we don't ask the other one to do it. We just keep playing up on the one child. If we go into a new office to work. We, within an hour, we will know the person to help us with the photocopying machine or tell us where the coffee cups are and we'll ignore somebody else.
Dr. Kerry: You're right, we do, we, we type people, don't we?
Don Hennessy: Absolutely. We're all [00:11:00] quite skilled at finding people who will cooperate with us, make our lives a little bit easier. So grooming is a, a natural thing. What's difficult to accept with men? In this situation when it's an adult groom me another person, is that the intention is devious.
That they're not just out to make everybody a little bit life easier. They're out to actually take advantage of the partner. And that's the piece of it that was somewhat hidden from us, and also something that was very difficult to accept. Because most of the men we met were very pleasant individuals.
Mm-hmm. And they could talk really possibly, uh, better than some of us. Some of them were very successful in their own businesses and in their own careers. They were professional then, and we felt a bit daunted by them in a [00:12:00] way. It was quite hard for us to keep focusing on the idea that all these guys are very, very cynical and very malevolent in what they're doing at home.
Dr. Kerry: Hmm. So could you distill down to what their ultimate goal was?
Don Hennessy: It became very clear. As a matter of fact, I was only asked about this yesterday by somebody from the States. Um, I was asked. What did I think of the, I dunno if you're familiar with the wheel that Duluth people, Ellen Pence, she produced it, it back in the nineties, I think, or late eighties, and I said, yeah, the, the only thing that's missing in that wheel I said is the, the steel rim that should contain it.
I said, because that's sexual abuse.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. You're thinking of the po, the wheel power and control wheel. Is that what you're thinking of? Yeah,
Don Hennessy: yeah, yeah, yeah,
Dr. Kerry: yeah. Because you make a statement I thought was like. It just, it rocked me. But when you, when I read it in the book. Which I love this book, but [00:13:00] when I read it in the book, it suddenly was like, to me, a puzzle piece slipping into place.
And you talk about near the middle and the backend about they're looking for sexual entitlement, the privilege access, sexual access to somebody or to women in general. But I thought, oh geez, that was, you're right. That's what all of this is about. Is that
Don Hennessy: all, all of this all, all, and the older I get now, I'm nearly 80.
Uh, but the older I get, the more I realize that all the other behaviors, all the things that are written about and castigated and condemned in other people's books, all that stuff is just a smoke screen. What they're really about is sexual dominance in the relationship. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Kerry: And
Don Hennessy: all their other behaviors is just to lead you astray or to get women to think differently.
And what I find anyway is it's so difficult to get women to open up about what goes on in the bedroom.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: They don't [00:14:00] want to talk about it because they're ashamed or they're uncertain that it might be all their own fault or whatever other reason. So these guys, they hide behind all the other activities, the physical violence, which I'm now beginning to think.
Is directly in proportion to the amount of resistance that they meet. So if a, if a woman is compliant, there's no physical res resistance. There's no physical violence. But if she's not compliant, if she's saying, I'm not doing that anymore, then physical violence will reemerge. And the other parts of that is that.
When women are trying to explain why they're so upset or why they're so heartbroken, or why they're so unsure of who they are themselves, they never mention their sexual experiences. They all talk about the other things, the fear and the lack of money or [00:15:00] the tension in the house or anything else but. To get them to talk about what goes on in the bedroom is impossible almost.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. And you, but you talk about why and it you're, and you're right. You, you nailed it. I mean, I'm a woman. I've been living this life. Um, and, and that is because from the moment we are almost like we're born, our sexuality interpreted everything that happens around us, everything that's, um, occurs to us is.
Then turned in as an interpretation about us.
Don Hennessy: That's right.
Dr. Kerry: So as a result, if I'm not interested in intimacy, then somehow I'm frigid or I'm, there's, I, I'm, I'm a tease. You, you know, it's always flipped. So there, it's a reflection of my failure instead of seen as a dynamic happening between me and the other person.
Don Hennessy: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's, it's all, all the responsibility comes back onto the woman if the relationship is unsuccessful [00:16:00] in any way. I say right at the beginning of that book, uh, that she gets full responsibility for the emotional temperature of the relationship.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: It's all her fault, whether it's working or not.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here, so what you're essentially saying, let me back up and say it again because I think this is so powerful. It's not that the guy is ashamed. It's not that the guy is insecure. It's not that he just loves to have power. It's about he's trying to protect his sexual dominance. That's what you think is going on in these abusive relationships.
Don Hennessy: That's, that's all that's happening. Mm-hmm. And what really makes my hair fall out? And you can see a lot of it's after falling out already, is to find, most of the literature today are discussing why men are narcissists.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: And it, it's the buzzword. And actually a narcissist is quite a harmless individual.
He just loves himself, which these men do as well. But that's another smokescreen. [00:17:00] They're not really thinking about themselves except where it comes to sexual gratification and they want to guarantee themselves that their partner will be available when and if they need to have sexual gratification, that's all they're interested in.
Wow.
Dr. Kerry: How did that affect you when you realized that, I mean, especially as a man, what, what was, I would love to know what your reaction was.
Don Hennessy: My reaction was relief because as a young man, I was studying to be a priest in the Catholic church and I was severely abused on a number of occasions by other men, and that left me.
Kind of puzzled about what, what a man was or what a man should be. And it took me quite some time to realize that these guys were all the same. They were all operating from the same principle, which is their gratification was what they were [00:18:00] entitled to. And it didn't matter how hard or how damaged the person, the target, what person would be, they just saw it as their right.
To have their own sex needs gratified.
Dr. Kerry: So then they make another big, huge conclusion in the book, and that is we're looking in the wrong direction when we talk about victim and victimology, that we really should be talking about male entitlement.
Don Hennessy: I, I'm just looking at you now, Kerry, and I'm saying to myself, first of all, there's something Irish about you, well, partly because of your name, but to think that every woman who's being abused in this world today and in Ireland, there were about 25% of relationships are abusive.
Uh, could be even higher, but there are definitely 25%, and it has nothing to do with the women.
Dr. Kerry: Mm. I want you to wish you could scream that seriously.
Don Hennessy: Oh no. It, it, it has nothing to do with them.
Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm.
Don Hennessy: Uh, but that's how clever [00:19:00] men are. That's how devious these guys are. They put all the responsibility back on the woman.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. In fact, there was a research study that came out of France and I don't know what year, but it's recent. It's pretty new, and it was looking at autistic women, autistic girls and women, and they found that nine out of 10 autistic women were sexually assaulted before the age of 18, nine out 10.
Don Hennessy: I
Dr. Kerry: was just, I, I cried.
I cried.
Don Hennessy: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Kerry: Because we're talking that's nearly universal. When there's a, a more vulnerable population, it's nearly universal. There're being a, and the majority of these women were under 15.
Don Hennessy: Yeah. That's, that's the kind of world we're living in, unfortunately.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: It's probably been this way for the last 10,000 years.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: Women are always as seen as less than. Women are always seen as being subservient to a man. Certainly [00:20:00] the church that I used to belong to was very much in favor of men's rights, conjugate rights. My mother died in 1998 and she believed that it was the duty of any wife to be. Available to their husbands whenever, uh, he requested it.
Uh, which meant that, uh, just after the war in Ireland when we were very, all very poor. My mother had five children within three years. Hmm. She twos, the other thing is my sister is a twin, and I realized on reflection at how the world treated her so differently than I got treated. So it's been going on a long time.
Women are second class and there is a book, I won't think of the name of the altar now quite recently, but she talks about empathy. Mm, HIM, empathy. And she says that's what's a rife in the world today. There's some [00:21:00] difficulty in a relationship, and our immediate position is to be groomed by the man into feeling sorry for him, irrespective of what he's doing to his partner.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. So talk about how. It happens culturally and and what you think we need to do to shift that to, to put the focus back on where, because you, you spent on most of the back half of this book of how he gets into her head trying to identify how we can change. And it isn't just simply to stop the abuse.
We need to a cultural change.
Don Hennessy: We need a cultural change, which, and I regret have to say this, but I think the only people who will create that change are men. Yeah, I
Dr. Kerry: do too.
Don Hennessy: And men are shirking the job, they won't do it. Uh, they're quite happy if their own particular circumstances are going okay. They don't want to engage with anybody else.
They don't want to challenge other men [00:22:00] who are abusive. And the only other way to change that is to change it in the law. Where that, uh, we have a new law in Ireland. We're not sure how to use it yet, but it's called coercive control. And that has been criminalized, it's been taken out of family law and it's been put into the criminal courts, and some men have been prosecuted on their coercive control.
The difficulty at the moment is that, um. It still re, the whole process relies on the target woman to produce the evidence, and women aren't skilled at doing that yet. But maybe with some effort, the women will begin to collate the evidence and produce the evidence, and then the sanctions will be appropriate.
But the biggest problem, I think we fear. From what I can see now, and I'm not very familiar with Facebook or any of these things. I don't, I'm not on them, but I'm sure they're there. [00:23:00] Is that the new generation of men growing up? Being almost encouraged to be misogynistic and to look for their own rights, and that women are there to be used.
And there are several very prominent people in, certainly in this part of the world who actually say those things quite clearly and openly on social media. That's the big danger. Now, these boys are growing up in families where their father mis mistreats their mother and they will think that's the right thing to do.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah, and you can see it here too. It's, it's, it's prevalent. The idea of that, I mean the, the push to release Jeff Epstein's files and the resistance to that. Why? Yeah, because it will reveal powerful men who've been involved, and they don't want, they don't want that revelation, so it's. Yeah. Or even the p Diddy trial, you know how he basically walked away with not hardly any of the [00:24:00] charges and why?
Because, because Cassie looked like she loved him, which, well, she was scared of him, and she probably did love him, and, but somehow that mi, you know, changed the perspective and made it look like it wasn't as bad as it really was. Yeah, we, we just, I, you know, I, I, I see a lot of victims walk into court and they're already behind the eight ball.
As a woman, when you walk into court and you say, he abused me, that there's the assumption, and this, I love to talk about this, this, there's an assumption of full autonomy and full agency, like, like both partners have full control over themselves and their choices, but that's not actually what happens in these relationships.
Don Hennessy: No, you're right. Uh, the belief is that it takes two to tango, so everybody's equally responsible, but nobody has actually brought the, the legal system to learn. Nobody's tried to teach them. I try to teach them here and they wouldn't even allow me back into the colleges. Mm-hmm. [00:25:00] Because nobody knows, or nobody's prepared to accept that what men do at the beginning completely, uh, unbalances the whole process.
Yeah. And without appearing to do anything in the first year or two of the relationship, they can control a woman's mind. Without actually ever being physically abusive or without actually while appearing to love her almost, and while charming her and, but they've already gained access to her thinking and they use that then against her subsequently.
And she finds that difficult to explain because she didn't know it happened in the first place.
Dr. Kerry: Exactly.
Don Hennessy: Exactly. If she goes to call, she can't explain it.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. I took your brainwashing scale at the back of that second relationship that I was in, and he, just to give you perspective, never physically touched me, never called me a bad name, didn't even scream at me, but I, I rated a mind control with terror.
That's, I was [00:26:00] terrified of him. Terrified of him. And what he did was he used very subtle withdrawals. He would emotionally disappear on me and punish me if I didn't comply exactly the way he wanted. He let me know right at the beginning, it was his way only, and that I would lose the relationship if I didn't go along.
Don Hennessy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And, and that would be your loss, I mean, to say
Dr. Kerry: Yes. Yes.
Don Hennessy: That, that, that you would suffer the consequences than that. Like, so you were being stupid if you didn't go along.
Dr. Kerry: He'd even let me know that he would say things like, you're making such a big deal that you're, he, he had a phrase he'd say, why do you have to turn everything into a storm and a teacup?
He'd love to say that, A storm and a teacup. I'm like, no, it's my feelings. Or it's what's happening between us. Are you gonna let it ruin the day? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I do wanna. You know, it was, he was, but he was very good. He established it right off. I mean, immediately he, right, like by the second date, he was already implementing things, strategies in there to let me [00:27:00] here.
Well, at first we have to set it up, like why would I care? Well, he presented as the perfect person. I'd never met anybody that I felt so matched with, so I was really invested.
Don Hennessy: He had to present himself as the perfect person because only then would you open up to him. Only then would you re reveal who you really were, how your inner world worked, and that's the information he needed.
Yeah, so one of the things that it would be very clear at the beginning of any relationship, these men told us that, that they would, first of all. Within a half hour of meeting somebody, they would access whether they were kind or not. Mm. So if you had a, if you were a bitch, which is what we call them here, ladies who only thought about themselves or who were high maintenance, they would touch you.
So you had to be kind. And the second most important thing is you had to be truthful. So you didn't dress up your own life. You told them what was happening [00:28:00] for you, the your dreams and your anxieties and your previous experiences and all of that. Bit by bit. You didn't have to tell 'em all in one day, but you began to speak like that about yourself.
That's what fed his information. That's what. Gave control over your mind.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. I concluded at the end when I stood back and looked at the whole thing from a psychological perspective, I realized I never knew him. I have no idea who he is, and I was in a relationship and married to him for two years. I knew him for three.
I never knew him.
Don Hennessy: Right, right. Yeah. That's the, that's the really sad thing because. I'm not sure how far psychology has gone, but when I looked up psychology 20 years ago and gave up on it, uh, I re I realized that there was very few discussions about evil people.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah.
Don Hennessy: But it, it, that's what, that's what they are.
These guys are evil. They spend, I remember Scott Peck, [00:29:00] he's probably before your time.
Dr. Kerry: No, I read his book.
Don Hennessy: Right. He, he read the People of the Lie.
Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm. Excellent
Don Hennessy: book. In that book, he said that he wasn't sure about evil people. He said one thing he realized was that he worked in the prisons in the East Coast and he said that the evil people are not in the prisons.
There are some people who've done very evil things, but they're not evil people. He said the evil people are out wearing the best of suits and the best of shoes and braiding themselves around. And how he would describe evil is somebody who gets out of bed every morning with the intention of undermining another human being.
Dr. Kerry: Yes, yes.
Don Hennessy: That's what's going on. That's how they think they, it comes kind of easy to them, but that's what they spend their whole day doing. You become their project. And they want to make sure that they are infiltrating your thoughts and [00:30:00] manipulating how you react.
Dr. Kerry: Yes. I, I watched him groom, uh, a young nurse who was taking care of his mother, who happened to be living with us because of needing surgeries.
Pretty significant surgery. So we were in another country and we had a young nurse come in to do the care for her, and I watched him start to slowly. Work on her to get her to trust him, to tell him things to confi, to, he would rescue her in the rain and go pick her up so she didn't have to take the taxi.
These little subtle moves. And then when things broke apart and we weren't in the area, and he moved away, she texted him, I caught, I caught the text, and she said, what happened? Why are you not talking to me? Why are you not? I mean, I, I was thankful for her 'cause I know it saved her, but mm-hmm. But I could see the emotional connection he had built with her that she was grieving the, the loss of the connection.
Don Hennessy: Yeah.
Dr. Kerry: He's, he, he called it hunting. He was hunting.
Don Hennessy: That's what they are. They're predators. Yeah. But as most [00:31:00] predators, you need to be very subtle. You can't just run up and jump on somebody. You have to just make sure that they don't run away. You have to make sure that when you're being abusive, that they blame themselves for it.
Yeah.
Dr. Kerry: And you
Don Hennessy: can increase abuse bit by bit then until such time as you gain complete dominance and the person that you're targeting has no idea how it happened or what happened. Even. But they certainly feel it.
Dr. Kerry: Yeah. So we're gonna wrap up this interview and jump over to the podcast Extra, which is where I wanna talk about the steps to grooming.
So actually, let's break it down and talk about how someone gets into another person's head. But if somebody wants to learn more about your work, where can they go to to find out about you or your work?
Don Hennessy: Well, I, I'm not sure anymore because my, I published the first book, and I think it's still available in, uh.
Probably in, certainly in Amazon bookshops and stuff. Um, but the, the, the other two books, um, my publisher went [00:32:00] broke, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of those copies left anymore. But if anybody's interested, I'm writing another book called We Need to Talk About Him, and it's written about him rather than about her or us.
And I hope that'll be published sometime in the future.
I
Don Hennessy: don't have a,
Dr. Kerry: oh, I'm thrilled.
Don Hennessy: I don't have a publisher yet, but maybe before I die, I mean, my kids keep telling me I'm 80. I should be reading the paper and watching horse racing or something. I, I need to get this out of my chess process.
Dr. Kerry: No, I'm thrilled.
I know, I know. How he gets into her head is on Amazon. I know that. And I will make sure that I put, I think I even got a fam a, a library copy. 'cause at the top it's, it's in, it's in this casing and it says family at the top. So I think this is a resell from a library. But anyway, it is available on Amazon.
I'll make sure to put the link. I also make sure to include your other books. I don't know, I have not [00:33:00] tried to purchase them, but I know you have three books actually. Right. Three books and you're, oh, I'm thrilled to hear you're working on a fourth. I'm just, yeah. Yay. That's, that's good news. Very, very good news.
Don Hennessy: That's, that's the first bit of encouragement I've gotten though, so thank you for that, Kerry.
Dr. Kerry: So we we're gonna hop over to the podcast extra and talk about how grooming happens. So thank you so much for joining me today.
Don Hennessy: Welcome, Carrie.
Dr. Kerry: Well, that's a wrap for this week's episode. Are you following me on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube?
You can find me at Carrie McAvoy PhD or you can learn more about me and my resources such as the Toxic Free Relationship club@carriemcavoyphd.com, and I'll see you back here next week.