Struggling with Post-Separation Abuse? Get Real Help from a Surprising Direction

Are you struggling with  post-separation abuse and drowning in documentation? 

This week, Anne Wintemute introduces AimeeSays—an AI tool that helps abuse survivors make sense of chaos, document their experience, and present their story in a way family court will actually hear. 

PODCAST EXTRA EXCLUSIVE SEGMENT 

Find the exclusive second segment and weekly newsletter here. 

MORE ABOUT THE PODCAST EXTRA INTERVIEW 

🔹 Anne reveals how to use AI to document abuse to overcome the victim-blaming that happens when overly emotional in court. 

👉 Get immediate access to this extended interview

THE TOOL 

• AimeeSays (A-I-M-E-E Says) - Start free chat or subscribe 

MORE ABOUT ANNE WINTEMUTE 

Anne K Wintemute built AimeeSays after years of witnessing post-separation abuse survivors carry impossible burdens—forced to understand their trauma AND convince others of it. Her AI tool helps survivors document abuse, extract key events automatically, and transform emotional chaos into fact-based reports that courts can't dismiss.

• Social: Find AimeeSays on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn

Resources

• ReclaimYou: Dr. Kerry's AI-powered coaching app
• The Complete Recovery Collection: Narcissistic abuse resources
• First Steps to Leaving: Online self-paced digital course
• Toxic-Free Relationship Club: Live coaching & community support

Follow Dr. Kerry!

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D, a retired psychologist & author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism. 

As an Amazon affiliate, commission is earned from qualifying purchases.

This podcast/video is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, counseling, or professional mental health advice. If you are in crisis, please call 911 or your local emergency number.

Transcript

Your New Secret Weapon AimeeSays 2026-02-23 Spotify Video

Anne Wintemute: [00:00:00] One person is driving the disequilibrium. They're having two different conversations. One is attempting to communicate in the form that we're all taught. It's an exchange in honesty, and the other one is using communication to maintain, create, and then maintain disequilibrium because it is in that disequilibrium that they feel the power.

Dr. Kerry: The perpetrator does not want conflict resolution. They're not wanting equity. They're not not planning to just, you're not looking for the properties to be distributed accurately or for you to have a shared custody. They want your upsetness. How does Amy says help. 

Anne Wintemute: I just was so fed up with how inhumane it was.

To expect people who had survived traumas to also be the people in charge of their own recovery. And we built an AI to kind of bridge that gap and support, help people understand their story and tell their story because that was hugely predictive in their outcomes.[00:01:00] 

Dr. Kerry: Most survivors walk into the courtroom or any post-separation abusive situation, feeling outmanned and outgunned. But what if you could have a secret weapon in your pocket today and when to mute, joins me to talk about Amy says, which is an AI powered coach specifically for abuse and helping you win your situation around the documentation 

Anne Wintemute: of abuse.

Dr. Kerry: So I'm very excited to have Anne went to mute with me today because you found me on LinkedIn and you reached out when, I don't know if you knew that I was working on a narcissistic abuse AI coach app at the time or not, but it was sort of providential 'cause it was right while I was working on that.

And you introduced yourself and talked to me and I'd never heard of Amy says, so why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what Amy says is. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes, absolutely. Uh, my name is Anne Ute. Um, my background is working with people experiencing post-separation abuse, [00:02:00] and, uh, about two and a half years ago, I just was so fed up with how inhumane it was to expect people who had survived traumas to also be the people in charge of their own recovery.

They had to mm-hmm. You know, understand what happened to them and then convince other people of what happened to them. Such an emotional burden on, on the victim, on top of the victimization. Yeah. Uh, so I set to work with my co-founder, Steven, and we built an AI to try to kind of bridge that gap and support, um, help people understand their story and tell their story.

Because what I was seeing in my work was that that was hugely predictive in their outcomes 

Dr. Kerry: because AI was already. In the world. How did you know that, that that wasn't doing a good enough job? 

Anne Wintemute: Well, when we first kind of put a beta out there to see, is this something that could help people chat? GPT was something some people were still struggling to pronounce.

Mm-hmm. Most people had never used it. We were really at the very kind of first cresting [00:03:00] wave of implementation. Um, so we've kind of tested the. Theory we, we built this really simple flask application where someone could cut, paste a message that they'd received from their ex in, and it would produce a report for, here are the present forms of abuse in this communication.

Or Here's the gaslighting, here's the blame shifting, here's the dvo. And within just a couple of months, about 30,000 messages had been submitted into this ai, and we got tremendous feedback that this was something people were struggling with alone that was really disruptive to their lives. So we kind of took it as a mandate to see what could AI do that would feel like people had human one-to-one companionship and support, because we knew that wasn't possible in the current kind of ecosystem of resources for people who have been through this kind of interpersonal violence.

Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it, it's interesting because I've found that I, I was telling people early on, just feed. Messages through to see what would happen, but it was kind of hit [00:04:00] and miss, and it didn't always pick up the critical pieces that I think was really essential. And on top of it, early AI was like, there's a lot of nuances to mm-hmm.

Narcissistic abuse. I think that gets really missed and we don't understand a whole lot. And I think we're still developing a language for it, in fact. Absolutely. There's pieces of, like, for example, one of them that. AI and I created together with semantic abuse. Mm-hmm. I don't know if you realize that, that I was, it was my conversations with around a very difficult relationship that it said, oh, this is semantic abuse.

And I said, is there such a thing I've never heard? Like, Nope. You and I are talking about it right now, like, oh, oh geez. But there's a whole pieces of this that we don't understand. So how did you get interested in narcissistic abuse at all? I mean, why? 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah, you know, my background is in really interrogating systems that fail women and children specifically.

So, you know, one career ago, but three genres ago that wasn't advocating for evidence-based maternity care, if we know what produces positive outcomes [00:05:00] for, you know, childbearing people and their children. But that's not really what we see in our, our maternity care system. And then it was an education. We know what elementary.

Aged children need to thrive. But our school systems didn't look like that. So I built a school, I, and then I, you know, I was seeing what was happening in the family court system for people who were finally brave enough to say, I need help. I can't solve this problem on my own. I need you. And to realize that the system was really not prepared to, uh, address those needs.

And sometimes, often, I. Produced Greater Harm in Retraumatization. So that's where I've been digging in for the last handful of years and, and where I, I plan to live out the remainder of my career. 

Dr. Kerry: Mm. So given an, a typical scenario that Amy says faces on a given day. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah, so we say, you know, Amy is from Red Flag to rock bottom.

So we've got folks talking to Amy after a weird Tinder date and folks who have lost custody of their children, um, after, um, trying to get the courts to [00:06:00] intervene and provide safety for those children. Um, but I would say that the majority of our subscribers, 'cause we have a free product, most people use the free product, but the majority of the people who subscribe are in.

Some phase of, of re relitigation. Um, so they, they didn't realize how bad the system was until they had a really rough go around the first time in family court, and they're now trying to do everything that they can to, um, either regain access to their children, um, or, or keep the safety that they have from the, from the abusive party.

Um, I would say that is, uh, kind of a typical place to come in. And their needs are, are heavily emotional and cognitive. Um, they're in kind a constant state of, um, hyper vigilance and retraumatization and, um, you know, triggers of their PTSD and the expectation and burden of documentation is in place, you know, placed solely on their shoulders.

So our um. Kind of common profile, I suppose, uh, if you will, is someone who is like, oh my gosh, okay, so [00:07:00] this thing just happened. Crazy pants. I need to get back to work. I feel my heart rate increasing. Amy, jot this down, put it on the timeline. Um, and then have the ability to walk away and get back to their lives.

And Amy can hold onto that information, um, you know, collate it, tag it, categorize it, put it on the timeline, put it in a bubble chart, and, and let the person who really needs to get back to their lives kind of. Wipe their hands of, of, um, that upsetting thing that just happened. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, I'm thinking there's a lot of like basic things that we're hopping over as if everybody knows.

So I'm gonna go back and sort of unpack at the start. 

Anne Wintemute: Let's do it. 

Dr. Kerry: I know that there are people who've never talked to AI at all, and they think that there's some kind of like magic. Back in the grad school days when I would wanna do a search. If there was a way for me to do a, a search in abstracts, now people maybe not even know what I'm talking about there.

Abstracts is just a fancy way of saying, of all the literature out there ever in psychology, how do I find the ones that specifically have to do with gaslighting, for example? And there would be a way that you [00:08:00] would query and then it would bring up the articles that are probably appropriate based upon the year that they were published.

It was work, it was learning to search for information was a lot of hard work. So I have a feeling that people think just like going into the library and trying to find a book that it's kind of. It's difficult, but tell me about how AI actually works and how do you query it? 

Anne Wintemute: I think the explanation that you just gave is, is, um, the best that I've heard in terms of like, what did we automate with generative ai, right?

AI that comes back and produces something for you. We automated that process that you were talking about. Yeah. We've made it possible for anyone, anywhere. To go and say, Hey, I need X, Y, Z, and for that retrieval process to happen in seconds across huge bodies of data 

Dr. Kerry: and not to have specific, critical, the right, you don't need the right words either.

Mm-hmm. You could even spell it wrong. I think that people like, well, I, I, we like, we have to, we have to ask in a Right. There's all these like, you, like you're [00:09:00] gonna, there's a right way of prompting. No, actually it's very. Very, it's very basic. It doesn't care how you prompt, right as I'm, am I saying that correctly?

Anne Wintemute: Yes. The, the value in the prompt is the context that you provide, not how academic it is. The structure of it, because it's kind of searching from a constellation, if you will. Like all of the AI information, what it can read has been vectorized into the sky. Billions of stars. Mm-hmm. And when you say shoe, the AI you're talking to is says that relates to, to sock, to boot, um, you know, to lay.

Alright. So I, I could build from the context of shoe and now I have an idea of what I'm looking for. Yeah. Versus a traditional search query where if you spell it wrong, it's not gonna return you any results because Right. It's a literal, you know, literal letter for letter. Uh, so the prompting absolutely matters, but it matters in different ways than we, I think, are traditionally taught in how we ask questions.

As long as you produce enough context what I'm searching for, what I need, what I want, how I'm feeling, the language [00:10:00] models can put that together and return a response that is incredibly accurate. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 'cause I often will go in to say something like this, this just happened and I think this was what happened, but I'm not for sure.

What do you think happened? And then I'll give it context. 

Anne Wintemute: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Kerry: But I tell, I'm telling it where I'm at and what I wanna know, and then I tell it what happened. It's amazing, then it's able to then give me a result that it will basically analyze it from another perspective. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes, yes. And then you can interrogate that answer.

Well, show me a different perspective. Exactly. Um, exactly. Well, what is actually, this thing is true. Um, and, and really kind of tease out. It's very conversational. Um, you know, I like. AI for people who may have struggled with boundaries because those boundaries were, you know, uh, perpetually violated by people within their closest circle.

Um, it, practicing boundaries with AI is fun. Um, and even one of those is, that's not the answer I was looking for. I need you to give me something more like X, Y, Z, or, the question I asked was this, can you please focus on that? It's an incredible [00:11:00] opportunity to, to redirect and flex those muscles of, Nope, not like that, like this.

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, you're right. I'll even, I'll even say you're wrong or you missed this critical detail. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. 

Dr. Kerry: And it'll say, oh yeah, you're right. I did miss that. And Yes. You know, and then it will go, come back with another perspective. 

Anne Wintemute: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Kerry: So, okay, so that's how to talk to it, is you just talk to it and you push back on it and you, you, you think with it.

It thinks and you're thinking with it. So then let's talk about more specifically when it comes to narcissistic abuse, because like you said, one of the, you said early on when we walk into these, like post-separation or post legal abusive situations, we're often on the, we're very much on the defense usually.

Anne Wintemute: Oh. 

Dr. Kerry: And, and we're scattered, scared, we're feeling attacked. And uh, it's very, and it feels ex, it's extremely personal. Yes. I know that attorneys are able to sort of separate themselves from the personal and say, no, this is a fight and this is the job of the, is to go in and fight somebody. But when you're the person that's [00:12:00] being maligned, it does not, it does not feel like you are, you're in a.

It doesn't feel like you've walked into a battlefield. It feels like you're being destroyed. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. Oh my gosh, yes. I love that. I mean, people in these situations are animated from a place of fear, of self preservation, of defense, and of course they are because who they are as a person, their lived experience, the safety of their children are all under fire.

And I cannot think of a scenario where people would be more likely to feel terrified, defensive, powerless, um, and really struggle from the the cognitive. Load, uh, that people in that situation have at the time when they have to be most on their A game, they have to be most articulate, right? They have to be most able to kind of set aside the fact from the emotions.

It's, it's really can be a no win situation. Um, and again, all of us burden, this is primarily put on the protective party. Um, and we just think that that's inhumane. 

Dr. Kerry: And you also need to know what the objective of the court [00:13:00] system is, which is not the objective of your partner and not often your objective either.

And that makes, I think another piece that's extremely confusing is there's about division of assets or can these two people work together to raise these kids? I mean, those are tend to be the two big questions that are being asked. So you go in and you have an abusive partner who's then saying, no, you're the abusive one, and the kids are better off with them or that no, they don't, you know, usually some big thing that, that's wrong or feels ner at a kind of, at a story level wrong.

So how does Amy says help with that situation? 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. So at its most basic level, as I said earlier, Amy is here to help you understand your story and help you tell your story. Mm. And what that looks like is really kind of clearing up the chaos abusers, narratives live in chaos. It lives in in goalposts, moving.

It lives in shifting. You know, who's the perpetrator, who's the victim? Who needs to show accountability for this? What actually happened? Who is [00:14:00] unwell in this situation? Yeah. And that. Chaos is what keeps protective people, victims targeted people on their heels because you're constantly trying to deal with this ever shifting kind of tumultuous narrative about you within the context of course, of, you know, self-preservation and you're being, you know, intentionally misunderstood, which is really deeply unsettling.

So, you know, Amy's primary purpose is to help calm that, help that make sense, help understand what happened to you, help understand that story. Then while you're having those conversations with her and she's responding and it feels really, um, cathartic and you know deeply understood, you feel deeply understood, she is doing what is kind of our secret sauce, um, which is a huge difference.

For example, from chat. GPT is she is trained to extract the key information, data, event types, tactics of abuse, how those things apply to the, you know, your state statute, what's relevant, not relevant. [00:15:00] She's doing all of that automated in the background as you have those conversations. So you click out of a conversation into an events tab and go, oh my gosh, that conversation, I just have produced 11 things that are now on my timeline.

Um, that was endangerment, um, that was gaslighting. This was blame shifting. Um, and you see, and I used the word constellation before, but you kind of see the constellation of your lived experience emerge into. Single page that you can look at and that clarity, even if you never have any legal issues, you never gonna have to go in front of a judge or convince someone else what happened to you so that they'll take whatever, you know, authoritative action they, they have to take, even if you never need that.

Just being able to see. On a single page, that's what happened. That makes sense. Mm-hmm. That helps every, you know, health or, or mental health or employment issue or, or fog or, you know, autoimmune disease that I developed down the line makes that make more sense. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 

Anne Wintemute: And that sense [00:16:00] making is an incredible power of ai.

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, because the thing that I often see is people walk into these, these, uh. Legal situations with reams and reams of paper, you know? 'cause one of the things that I urge, and I think I'm, I'm a, I'm one of many people who do this, is that to create sort of a legal document of date, time, and event witnesses, you know, all of the details he said, she said this is exactly what happened.

But then you have to distill that into something that's usable. 'cause courts don't want, they're not gonna go through 40, 50 pages of something. Mm-hmm. And, and in fact, if you go in with 40 to 50 pages, think about how you look. You look like you're a vindictive person who has an ax to grind and they're psychologically they're going to see you in, in, in my opinion, um, jaded eyes.

They're gonna see you as sort of cynically as the one who has the issue. 

Anne Wintemute: And I, I'd like to take this moment here to talk about. Why victim blaming? 'cause what you're talking about there is if I come in with all of my story Yeah. They're gonna see [00:17:00] you through these jaded eyes. Why that victim blaming is so, um, problematic.

I think that, you know, for people to whom this has never have happened, they presume it could not happen to them and that it doesn't happen to them because of some actions that they take. There's something special about them and the way they would handle a situation that it couldn't happen to them.

Yeah. So when people are faced with kind of the emotionality of a victimized person. Their response. Unfortunately is to blame the victim because they themselves need to believe it couldn't happen to them. There's something fundamentally different about their view or what they would do in that situation that it couldn't happen to them.

Exactly. But what triggers that is that emotionality. So we have, like I said, you know, it's kind of auto extraction, so I'm having a chat. I can tell Amy, oh my gosh, I flipped my lid. I cried for hours. This is crazy. I could use a bunch of profanity and the event. That Amy would distill from. It might be three sentences long, no emotion, very fact-based.

And I remember when we first introduced this, people would come [00:18:00] out, come and say, you know, but she didn't get any of the emotion. 

Dr. Kerry: You're right. 

Anne Wintemute: Don't worry that still lives in that conversation, but we are trying to help people's stories be heard by reducing those, um, kind of friction points of the listener.

And one of those things is, and I hate it, it's a messed up system. I wish we had more empathic people in power, but they see that emotionality and think I would be, I would fear different in this situation because I would do X, Y, Z. And it puts them in a position to blame the victim. So we stripped that out in that event database.

Dr. Kerry: I love that. Yeah. We do live in a world that that's really. Believes in justice. This is a just world system. And therefore, if, if it's not being just to you, then you must be somehow activating it in some way because we, we kind of have this arrogance thinking it would never be me. Yes. I wouldn't handle it like this.

Uh, I, I can work everything out. And we also don't realize this, this is another, something just recently that in fact it was AI who told me this and I thought, you're exactly [00:19:00] right. And now that I can, and now that I see it, I can't unsee it. There are people who get regulated by other people's. Emotional dysregulation.

Anne Wintemute: Hmm. Tell me more about this. Tell me how this 

Dr. Kerry: shows up. Okay. Yeah. So what that means is, for example, sometimes we inter even healthy per people do it in, so say you have a super bad day and you come home and your partner doesn't quite get how bad of the day was, and they, they're not being empathic with you around that.

So then you start to get more up. I'm using a healthy version of it. You start to get more upset and you start to, like, you do things around the house in a way that then they start to feel distressed and like, now you get it. That's what my day's been like. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. 

Dr. Kerry: Okay. And you feel better because now they're feeling the pain of what you're feeling.

Right. Okay. But there are people who then feed off that. That is the point. The point is not resolution. Think back now to the two people involved in this narcissistically abusive relationship, the perpetrator and the victim or the survivor. The perpetrator does not want conflict [00:20:00] resolution. Mm-hmm.

They're not wanting equity. They're not not planning to just, they're not looking for the properties to be distributed accurately or for you to have cus shared custody. They want your upsetness. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. 

Dr. Kerry: And when you're upset, then they feel better. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. If it feel, so that's, that's the other piece of this is that mm-hmm.

You're fighting people who are not fighting fair or even fighting for the same reasons. If what you think is the point or the, uh, the sort of the objective is not their objective. Yes. And so as a result, you're not even heading towards the same goal. 

Anne Wintemute: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Kerry: What's nice about Amy says, Amy can distill that down and observe that, and then have the language to help you then put it into words that will make it make more sense to an external source who doesn't understand that this person isn't looking for resolution.

Anne Wintemute: No, and I, I wrote a piece on this that, that. Courts evaluators would disregard people's communication records, right? Between the, the targeting and targeted person and like, oh, it's a, it's a goldmine. [00:21:00] Everything you need to know is present in those communications because we label these relationships high conflict, and I say, Royal, we there.

I don't wanna include myself. If you look at it, one person is driving the disequilibrium, right? One person is driving it. They're having two different conversations. One is attempting to communicate in the form that we're all taught. It's an exchange in honesty, right? Mm-hmm. And the other one is using communication to maintain, create, and then maintain disequilibrium because it is in that disequilibrium that they feel the power.

Right? Mm. If we have equilibrium, if we are in agreement, if there is consensus, there isn't a power dynamic and these relationships are are problematic because one of the people is only at rest when they feel that they're exerting that power. And that's why you find yourself fighting over the most ridiculous things, like whether or not the sky is blue and you're like, how can you even take that [00:22:00] position?

Because obviously the sky is blue. Well, they must have run out of other things to create this equilibrium about. Exactly. Exactly. Um, so they're, they're focusing on that weird thing that you just can't come to an agreement about so they can maintain that power. 

Dr. Kerry: Now there are people out there and there's more information that's coming out about this as well, is that AI then is over validating and as, as a result can, we can develop an emotional attachment to it even.

So let's talk about sort of the downside of it and how, what your thoughts are on that because I'm super curious 'cause I'm, as I said, you know, I have a app that's coming out too. Mm-hmm. So I'm entering into this realm and there's a part of me, it's like, well people could get attached to that too. And that's kind of scary to think about that.

So let's. Yeah. How do you, how do you see, is that a real risk that you see? How do you manage that? Maybe what does the user need to know about that? 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. Um, a whole other podcast could be done on this, so let's graze it. We're gonna graze this pasture a little bit. Um, so, so the question is, is it dangerous to put a sycophant in everyone's pocket such that [00:23:00] their ideas as deranged as they could possibly be, um, are validated?

Um, and they have kind of a source of energy to continue to, to cling to their set of beliefs? Um, I think that. That there are people who will be prone to that regardless of their environment or the book that they read or the conversation that they, that they have with friends. I don't think this is something that AI invented, but certainly made more accessible to people, um, who might be prone to that.

Now as we live at the frontier, Amy says, our company lives at the frontier of technology. We are so far advanced from, from most of the people in the sector in terms of the application of ai. And that means that we kind of incorporate as. Certain degree of risk tolerance and presumption of responsibility by our users.

So you ask, you know, what do, what do you tell people? Um, well, one, our model is toned down from the SCO event that you're gonna see in chat GPT because she's a different algorithm in the background. Right. She's, she's evaluating for very [00:24:00] specific things versus saying, Hey, I'm here. What do you need? I'll give you whatever you want today.

So it's already slightly different. Yeah. But we advocate, you know, just like. I could drive a car at 16 years old. There is a presumption of responsibility that comes with having access and deriving utility from something that is as powerful and potentially dangerous, and I don't just mean in our context, but AI is being used in all sorts of dangerous ways.

We imbue a certain amount of responsibility to those users, which means like anyone listening, if you find yourself thinking, I need to leave this party because, or, I'm gonna go home early from this because I need to talk to, to my ai. If you find yourself not doing or engaging in the world in ways that you should, because you have maybe developed a reliance on, on your relationship with ai, please.

Take a look at that, and you could probably even have a conversation with that AI about setting some boundaries around that. Um, but we're building for, you know, the 98% of people who have no one [00:25:00] else that can validate that experience, don't feel understood in their spaces, have been profoundly isolated.

Um, we're building for them. And, you know, you're, you're not wrong that there are people like with any technology or substance or anything else can be prone to overuse. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. I found that chat, GBT four versus five was a very, it was a big shift. Four was extremely psychologically validating to the point that it felt, it felt quite emotional at times.

And whereas five, it's sort of been weeded out. And it's interesting because. It did feel like a relationship to me. Mm-hmm. Even though I knew there was a part of me that knew there wasn't a relationship, but I think that's something we need to be aware of. You're right. It's the user's responsibility to be aware of is that as much as these things are validating, and I agree, Amy, Amy's goal is different than chat GT's, goal chat, GPT, if you really, I mean, let's be honest, you strip it down, they want users.

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. Right. Which makes it makes sense And, and I, we will use video games as another analogy like Call [00:26:00] of Duty wants users 

Dr. Kerry: and it want time and game. It's not just users. They want time and game. Yes. Chat. BT also wants time on app. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. And we, it. Uh, fundamentally we want Amy to give people their time and mental health and money back.

Yeah. By offloading so much of that cognitive and emotional burden. I mean, ha we, we wanna talk about the emotional labor of, uh, of women and we have many male users, so it's not, it's not, um, you know, solely experienced by them. For sure. Yeah. But there is a legacy of building labor off of kind of invisible strife, uh, and um, uh, kind of loss of life of women.

And I think this is an area where that's especially true when we talk about interpersonal violence and victimization. Um, so yeah, we're, we're trying to help them. Take that thing that could derail them for three days and make it 13 minutes. Yeah. And get them out there and back to their lives. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah.

Because if you think about it, and this, I don't, I don't think people have ever thought about this either. So what is, if you think, walk into a therapist [00:27:00] office, what is the objective of a therapist? If you actually have multiple objective? One is obviously your health and that you're satisfied with the experience that you have.

But another one is that we also want clients, so we get paid. And one of the things they talk about, at least in my grad school, they talked about is your job is to. Put yourself out of a job. And you have to trust the fact that, that there's enough people who need this type of help, that you're not actually putting yourself out a job to get somebody well, right.

I don't think all things are created in that kind of light, but I do think that, I know for me, that was when I put, when I put together reclaim you, I, I was conscious of that. My job is for you not to need the app. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. 

Dr. Kerry: Just like your job is to help give clarity to somebody who's outgunned in a legal situation or a separation situation.

Isn't necessarily time and app, but it's is to make them feel like they're seceding. Yeah. And just the fact that we are aware of that helps minimize, at least decrease, in my opinion, the risk of it. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. Yeah. I love that. Um. We, when, when folks cancel, they get a, a [00:28:00] notification. Um, because we, if someone's canceling because we haven't met their needs, we wanna build to that space.

Sure. Um, you know, we are in a space and uniquely positioned to really address victim needs because our funding is not coming from another source. Right. We don't have to. Hold onto key metrics for our grant funder who, who is looking at very specific things we can really build for those users. So if somebody cancels, we, you know, hope that they will share why.

And one of the options that we have is, you know, my situation has resolved and I no longer need Amy. Which is, you know, like you're saying, you know, work yourself out of a job. I mean, we literally cheer like, yay, we got another one of like situational resolution because that is what we want. We wanna shorten the amount of time between.

You know, the harm occurring and the resolution of that harm or, or the need for, you know, kind of documentation or that consistent support and emotional validation. We wanna make that as short as possible. That is our success story, and we love when someone says like, oh, my situation resolved. I no longer need this, this support resource.[00:29:00] 

Dr. Kerry: That's awesome. And then the second issue that, in fact I just heard of it today, AI was asked, how often does it hallucinate? I had love to have you talk about what is AI hallucinations, but it, it guessed that roughly 20 to 30% of the time it's hallucinating. I thought, geez, that's, that's an unacceptable figure.

I don't, so what did, what do you think of that? And first of all, define what hallucination is an AI hallucination is. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. So hallucination or, or confabulation is when the AI returns, um, an inaccuracy and. Presumably in the study done were, you know, it's the, the 20%, which is, that does sound really, really high to me.

Um, it's inaccuracies in both material, like really important inaccuracies and non-material, um, inaccuracies. 

Dr. Kerry: Like the one I saw was, was with strawberry, have it count the number of RS and strawberry and it couldn't do it. 

Anne Wintemute: Oh. So, okay. So that's great. So, um. The systems that AI uses to retrieve information have [00:30:00] limits that make it very difficult for you to ask quantifying questions.

So questions around how many times. For example, so if I upload. Um, a bank statement, uh, or three months of bank statements and say, um, how many times, uh, did this person who has this card go to a liquor store? Uh, the number is likely to be wrong, and that is due to constraints in those systems. Um, if you say, did this person visit.

Uh, a, um, a liquor store. Are there, um, you know, and tell me some things that you see about the pattern of, of visiting liquor stores, for example, and then let's talk about how this might have an impact on this person's parenting capacity. Or is this evidence of the substance like that that is something that AI is, is designed to do well, or that it's current design does well.

So, you know, we re we see this as a limitation in our own. System. Someone uploads an an Excel file with three years of, um, the documentation that they did prior to them [00:31:00] using Amy to document and they say, you know, how many times did X happen? And the result is not satisfying. It's not, it can't be complete because of how the systems work.

And that is, that is an example. Now, ideally the model would come back and say, um, Hey, that's actually hard for me to do. Mm. Unfortunately, sometimes the model comes back and says 11 as though it is like a definitive answer. 11 is the answer to your question, or 42. What is that book about The, uh, yeah, the answer to the 

Dr. Kerry: universe.

The, the, the, yeah. The galaxies guide to the, yeah. Yes. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. Uh, and, and then another, um. An area where AI in general is prone to returning a, a result that, um, you really don't wanna fact check is if you're asking it about things that doesn't actually have information about. Um, so if I'm a user of Amy, and Amy has no information about, um, you know, the number of times my ex had our children, you know, five and [00:32:00] 8-year-old children watching, rated our movies, and then I say, Hey Amy, how many times has, um.

You know, has my ex had our children watch rated our movies, you've created this like weird bubble where the AI is attempting to find the right types of information that you need and that information doesn't exist. That creates an opportunity for hallucination. Mm-hmm. Um, so, you know, within our own, um, kind of scenarios in our particular use case, hallucination risks are lower because people know their stories so well.

They're not talking about something they don't know anything about. They're talking about their own personal experience. So we have somewhat reduced risk of hallucination. The others, as we know, is, is, um, making specific citations of open source information like, um. You know, what's the law for X, Y, Z?

What's the case study for X, Y, Z? Um, show me five studies about, you know, A, B, C. Those kinds of things tend to retrieve higher level of [00:33:00] inaccurate results, and we've seen those in the media. Um, so certainly double check the things that, um, you don't know personally. Uh, when you're using an ai, 

Dr. Kerry: I make it, give me the source.

Yeah. I make it to give me the source and then make sure those sources are alive. They're real. 

Anne Wintemute: Yes. And go read the source because it might have picked out of paragraph five something that it, it chunked into meaning for you. Yeah. Um, when actually maybe the study says the opposite of what you want us to ship.

Yeah. 

Dr. Kerry: Exactly, exactly. This has really been wonderful. I, I would love to jump over to the podcast extra and talk about how does people just get started? Like how do they know this is the right fit for them? Because there's some may think, oh, this is too good, be true, or maybe this, my situation's not the right situation.

So let's really kinda help the people know who this is for, and it maybe this really for them. But how can people learn more about, Amy says, as well as learn more about you and what you're doing. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah, so Amy says.com. Amy is spelled A-I-M-E-E says.com. [00:34:00] Any of the support or contact buttons lead to me, I can be found on LinkedIn or on Facebook and Instagram.

I and, uh, all of the other ones, um, I'm, uh, uh, 42 years old almost. So I'm not particularly good at listing them all out in rapid order. Um, but you can find us as, uh, Amy says in those locations. 

Dr. Kerry: I appreciate that. Thank you so much, Anne, for being on today and sharing this wonderful, incredible, timely resource.

I really deeply appreciate learning more about it. 

Anne Wintemute: Thank you so much, Carrie. 

Dr. Kerry: It's 2:00 AM again, and you're replaying that whole conversation over and you're wondering yourself, was it really that bad? Or maybe I'm just being dramatic. So you start to draft that, I'm sorry, text again, because the guilt that you're feeling or the confusion you're experiencing is just unbearable.

And you know this loop because you've been there before. But I want you to know that you're not alone. I'm Dr. Kerry McAvoy. I'm a retired psychologist and for 25 years I've been helping people untangle exactly what toxic relationships do to your mind, how they create the [00:35:00] confusion, the self-doubt, and that trauma bond that keeps pulling you back in.

Here's the truth. Recovery isn't about getting more information. It's about having the right support in the exact moment you need it. That's why I've created Reclaim You. It's a private, always available coaching app built from my work and my content organized into an extensive library that you can actually use when you're triggered inside it.

You'll get five minute lessons when your brain can't handle a deep dive. Check-ins that meet you exactly where you are. Whether you're feeling strong, shattered or numb boundary scripts that help you say no without overexplaining grounding tools that work fast when you're activated and progress tracking so you can see proof you're healing even on days when it feels like you're not.

There's no appointments, no waiting, no judgment, just practical support right when you need it, reclaim you. Real hope in real time. Right in your pocket and it's a coaching support, not therapy or emergency [00:36:00] care. Learn more@studio.com slash Dr. Kerry. So start your healing today and reclaim you.