Nobody Taught Us What a Healthy Relationship Looks Like — Here's the Cost

Nobody taught us what a healthy relationship should feel like. Not in school. Not in graduate training. Not in the culture we grew up in.  

And that missing lesson? It's costing survivors years of confusion, repeat heartbreak, and an obsession with understanding the very people who harmed them. 

This week marks a major shift for Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse. After a year of flying solo, Dr. Kerry welcomes Lynn Strathdee as her new co-host — a UK-based psychodynamic psychotherapist, echoism specialist, and survivor whose path to this work mirrors so many of yours. 

Inside this episode:

• How Kerry and Lynn met through echoism — and why their shared focus on the survivor's inner world changes everything  
• How free, violent porn rewired intimacy into rage  
• The Predator's Playbook: cobras, pit bulls, and the deliberate targeting of survivors  (Get your copy of the Predator's A-Z Playbook here!)
• Why you can't stop talking about the abuser 

🔹 PODCAST EXTRA — MEMBERS-ONLY BONUS SEGMENT 

Why does studying the abuser feel productive but actually keep you stuck? 

In this exclusive bonus, Lynn and Dr. Kerry break down the difference between understanding your abuser and healing from them — and the one shift that moves you from analysis to recovery. 

Find the exclusive second segment and weekly newsletter here: https://substack.com/@breakingfreenarcabuse  

LYNN STRATHDEE is a UK-based psychodynamic psychotherapist specializing in echoism, narcissistic abuse recovery, and the unconscious patterns that keep survivors stuck in repeating relationship cycles. A former educator turned therapist, Lynn brings both clinical training and lived experience to her private practice, where she works with clients online and in person. Her approach goes beyond surface-level psychoeducation to the deeper identity work that creates lasting change. 

Lynn’s Website

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!

• Youtube
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Facebook

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

Nobody Taught Us What a Healthy Relationship Looks Like — Here's the Cost

Lynn Strathdee: [00:00:00] have a need to be seen. But the need to be seen, when that goes unmet for a very long time, makes you so vulnerable to an abusive relationship. And it goes so beyond that, doesn't it? Because a regular habit, especially when it's free and it's so hyper-stimulating- Yeah ... it re- it very easily goes into addiction.

And then you're in a whole 'nother hellscape, and I don't think that is overdramatizing. I think, you know, there's... it's really bad

Dr. Kerry: So today we're making a big shift with Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse as we go into our next season, and that is I'm being joined by a co-host. And I'm super excited about this because I have been doing this show alone for a year now, and I've decided that I've really missed the aspect of having a co-host.

Lynn, I'm excited that you're here, Lynn Strathdee, and I've been trying to remember how you and I met. 

Lynn Strathdee: I remember. Well, I used to follow you- Mm ... um, years ago. You were just an expert on the internet, on TikTok specifically, [00:01:00] and I used to watch all your reels. I mean, I kinda needed them at the time because I was going through some stuff.

And then I started making my own content, and you very kindly reached out to me and said something supportive. "I'd love to chat to you sometime about the stuff that you're talking about, and maybe you could come on..." And you sent me lots and lots of messages, and we just started this kind of conversation, and then I came onto your as an interviewee- Mm

talking about echoism, 'cause I was really focusing back then on pretty much exclusively on echoism. That's 

Dr. Kerry: right. 

Lynn Strathdee: I can't remember where I was. I was in France at the time, yeah. 

Dr. Kerry: Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah, I do remember the first one, and I, I was so excited because I hadn't heard of echoism until I was writing, and I had just gotten back out of a retreat and found myself really struggling to engage with the women there.

I felt so nervous and uncomfortable and not in my own skin. And my, the coach at the time said, "Have you ever heard of this word echoism? You should look into it." Mm-hmm. And then I sort of stumbled into some of the same arenas that you had as you unpacked it, and I thought, " Somebody else is following the [00:02:00] same journey and having some of the same insights," and I really appreciated that content.

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah. Yeah, it's a really helpful concept for people- Mm-hmm ... particularly women, I have to say But not necessarily women who are repeatedly in or find themselves repeatedly in abusive relationships. And I came across the term echoism because I was just finishing up my degree in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

We'd sort of been looking at narcissism and narcissistic personality as part of our training, and my relationship history had me really wondering how on earth I kept finding myself in these with very similar types of men, and discovered a book by a woman called Donna Christina Savory, who's a kind of psychoanalyst and existential psychotherapist.

And she provided this whole kind of framework of the personality type of someone who's actually gonna be probably pretty attracted to narcissistic characters and what that was all about. And we had to do a presentation for the degree, and I was like, "Right, that's what I'm gonna read up on this topic 'cause I feel like it applies to me."

But it's actually turned out to be a really helpful concept for lots of people. Yeah. [00:03:00] You know, it does res- it does resonate. 

Dr. Kerry: It does. It does. It's sort of the emptying of oneself. So I would love, though, for you to tell us a little bit about who you are, 'cause people know, know who I am, but if they have not caught our two interviews, they would not know really much about you at all.

So who are you, what are you doing, and how did you get into this sort of frame of working with abuse victims? 

Lynn Strathdee: I'm in the UK, based over in the UK, and I'm a divorcee in my early 50s. I'm a mum and a grandma. I was a teacher. Was in secondary education. Languages was always my, like, my training and my specialism, French specifically.

Became a kind of special needs and then on to school leadership. I also had been in long-term substance abuse recovery. So I got into recovery from alcohol as a very young woman and stayed sober for a long time, but then got, had a relapse, and the relapse really was a pivotal point. My marriage ended. I then started my psychotherapy training because to be honest, I'd always wanted to be a therapist.

I mean, teaching wasn't, I should never really have been. It just wasn't my- Mm-hmm ... it was never a [00:04:00] comfortable domain. I loved being with the children, but like many of us, relatively late, uh, diagnosed ADHD person, secondary education and all that goes with it. So anyway, I kinda went across to psychotherapy.

But all the while underneath of that, after the ending of my marriage, it was just really painful relationships, but actually coming, coming into abusive as opposed to just painful. But at the time I didn't really, didn't really understand that, and it was only after things got pretty difficult in terms of, you know, stalking and so on that I really thought there's something pretty serious going on here, and I kind of started to learn about abuse.

I mean, 10 years ago, there wasn't really a-- the terminology wasn't out the way it is now. No. I get that it's kind of in many cases overused, but when back then I just didn't know anything about it. I didn't understand any of this stuff. So like many people, it was like a personal mission, and then once I'd kinda learned about it and trained, I thought, "Well, I wanna work with people who've been dealing with what I've been dealing with.

You know, I wanna do that." So. 

Dr. Kerry: I'm shocked, and I've been thinking about my graduate training. I was talking to AI last [00:05:00] night about those that I got to be exposed to. I was in a very unique location in a very unique period of time when I was in graduate school, and I was exposed to some of the biggest thinkers at that time because of where I was at in school, and I didn't even realize it.

I met Pete Walker, for example. I got to hear him speak. He came to the graduate school- He wrote the C-PTSD. Yeah, complex PTSD. And then also Dr. Margaret Singer, who was instrumental in identifying that Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, was not a dissociative disorder. He claimed he had a multiple.

She disproved it with the Rorschach. I got to hear her actually discuss how she disproved it, and she came and lectured. And then Ileana Gill was involved with the Chihuahua, I don't know if I'm saying that right. It was a big, huge catastrophe in California in which a busload of children were kidnapped and held for a period of time, and she was instrumental in treating their trauma, and she also then came and did some training with my group as well.

Lynn Strathdee: Wow. What, they came to your college course? Yeah. Your degree course? 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, exactly. They were all [00:06:00] specialists brought in to train us. And then I also sat with Nathan Adler and Dr. Paul Warner and some of the big research thinkers at the time, and I had no idea that, that I was being exposed to these types of, you know, pivotal, transformational psychological perspectives, which has kinda helped shape me to where I'm at today, and I don't know how I was gonna connect that back to us, but- 

Lynn Strathdee: Well, I was talking about how Uh, ultimately back when I- Oh

first was experiencing it, there wasn't a lot of language. Yes. And then there came this flood of language- 

Dr. Kerry: Yes ... 

Lynn Strathdee: and knowledge and 

Dr. Kerry: technology. That's what I was gonna, is-- So despite all of that, that's why I wanted to give you that framework. Despite all of the specialty, unique experiences, I didn't know what a healthy relationship was.

Nobody in graduate school actually said, "This is what you should feel like in a relationship. This is what a relationship shouldn't feel like. These are the things you should put up with. These are the things that you shouldn't put up with." And did you feel the same kind of, like, mystification about all of that like I did?

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah, I did feel that. But I think what has muddied the waters for me, and still does to an extent, is the way that culture [00:07:00] plays actually quite a big part in what's acceptable- Mm ... in terms of behavior. Like, we can't separate that out And because of our generation, you know, we're women in midlife, the men that we would've been dealing with would have a very, let's say, old school idea about- 

Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm

Lynn Strathdee: you know, the way that women should be treated, and arguably that's still going on in c- in, you know, in some areas. But the point is, it was hard. You would never have called some of that abuse. 

Dr. Kerry: No. No, 

Lynn Strathdee: we wouldn't. Because, because culturally it was just like, well, yeah, you know, that's just what- That's what a relationship

this is what it is. Yeah. So there was that as well that made it more difficult, I think. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 'Cause I'm at the end of, I don't know if UK views generations the same way the United States does, but I would've been at the very end of the boomers. Very, very end. The part that I don't really even feel like I connect with them, but I'm not al- also Gen X.

You would've been solidly sitting in Gen X. 

Lynn Strathdee: Solid Gen X. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. I- in my opinion, the Gen X is the generation that had it the roughest in the sense [00:08:00] that you guys were the latchkey kids. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah.

Dr. Kerry: Your parents worked and you came, at least in the United States, and came home and you sat home alone in an empty house watching, you know, getting your snack after school.

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah. And a lot of our parents were very, uh, kinda laissez-faire because- Mm ... they were kind of coming out of, I mean, not everybody had the kind of, uh, the crazy '60s. A lot of families in the '60s- Yeah ... certainly in the UK, were not living this kinda wild flower power life. It was pretty, pretty restrained. And so when we were growing up, a lot of our parents just let us do whatever.

You were just kinda left to get on with it. But of course, we're the kind of sandwich generation because obviously the younger people now have a very different idea, understandably, of- 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah ... 

Lynn Strathdee: of w- how life is and what, what relationships are. But I do think that Gen X is the, is the kind of sandwich in the middle of the boomers and the millennials and, and on, and on, and on.

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 'Cause the other thing that I'm thinking, and I don't know how this ties in or not, but UK's experience of the World War II was radically different than the United States. [00:09:00] I mean, yes, we were engaged, but we didn't have our country bombed to hell the way that you guys did. And the, the separation that children were experiencing, I don't know how widespread that was, but there were families that were actually being separated for safety- Absolutely

in that period of time. So that would be the generation your parents grew up in the middle of that. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah. Extreme poverty and, you know, rationing, all that stuff. Yeah. 

Dr. Kerry: When you're in the middle of that, you don't ask yourself, "Is this a good relationship?" When you're thinking basically, "Am I gonna have shelter?"

Lynn Strathdee: Mm-hmm Yeah. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 

Lynn Strathdee: Ex- exactly. 

Dr. Kerry: So it's-- because I know, here's the thing that I raised my kids in, and that is they front and center. It very much is how happy are they? Whereas when you were growing up, the question is, do you know where your kids are? Mm-hmm. That was sort of like, we actually had PDAs on the television.

"Do you know it's 10 o'clock at night? Do you know where your kids are?" Oh, yeah. Actually, they played that at, on the television here. I've 

Lynn Strathdee: heard about, 

Dr. Kerry: yeah. And, and then but for my generation, it was, are you keeping your child happy? Mm-hmm. Are they feeling secure? Are you keeping them... Almost the idea that if you kept them attached to you, you could kind of perfectly raise this kid, which is [00:10:00] wh- what a shift that is from do you know where your kids are to- Mm

are you perfectly meeting their needs? So I think there's been this big difference of what we expect in relationships because we've changed our expectations. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah, and emotional literacy is a absolutely intrinsic part of life now. Whereas when- Mm-hmm ... you know, when we were children, and I know there's a s- there's a bit of a gap between you and me, not a massive one, that wasn't a thing.

So in relationships, the idea of the stuff that we regularly think about now in terms of what constitutes healthy, unhealthy, abusive boundaries, rights and responsibilities, and all of that stuff is so d- it's just so, so different to how it was back then. And I don't think you can take culture out. I just don't think you can.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we talk enough about culture, actually. I, 

Dr. Kerry: I agree. Do you think it's bad, though? Do you think the shift is good or bad? Or may- that's making it arbitrarily black and white, but let's for a moment do that. Do you think this, our increased awareness, is this helpful? 

Lynn Strathdee: I think we're at risk of going too far.

I [00:11:00] think it's-- I mean, I think you'd probably agree, there's, there can be a real pathologization of human error, you know, bad decisions, immaturity, all of that stuff. I think there's a, a rush to labeling. I don't, I don't think that's in debate. But as usual, I th- we overcorrect when there's not been something, and I think we've probably overcorrected, and I think we'll probably come back to something like the middle.

But we're not there yet. I think we've probably gone a bit too far in the other direction. Do, do you know what I mean by that? 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, I do, because here's the other caveat I think that's, we're, uh, in, in a massive shift around as well, and that is our perspective of patriarchy. 

Lynn Strathdee: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Kerry: That we, we're questioning and pushing back against that in the ways that I don't think we have in any generation before.

Mm-hmm. Saying that maybe that's also not inherently very, it, that actually is inherently oppressive- Mm-hmm ... and problematic, and that's also creating some of the toxicity that's occurring in our dynamics. And you and I talked about this. I don't know if you had a chance. Did you watch the show Inside the Man-o-sphere?

Lynn Strathdee: I, I haven't. I haven't 

Dr. Kerry: watched [00:12:00] it, no. Okay. I, I did. It, it, it goes fast. Be curious to see what your reaction is. Mine was that to me, I know it was an effort to be an expose of the thinkers of people at the top, like an Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines, that, that group of people. Some of them I didn't know who they were, although they definitely sound very, very frightening people.

But I, I was shook by how much they felt like shaky, insecure men. Like, almost like prop stand-up men- Mm-hmm ... who are attempting to say, act like they're Tarzan, when to me, the y- first wind that comes along that's stressful, they blow away. Mm-hmm. In fact, even the interview process was shaking them apart.

Mm-hmm. And I thought, see, that to me is a incredible insecurity. If this was really a... Let's just, for example, use Tarzan, the alpha male that doesn't really exist, I think, in reality. He wouldn't have been intimidated by that experience, and these men could hardly withstand the pressure. 

Lynn Strathdee: Mm, because essentially, it's kinda hiding behind somebody else's kind of avatar 

Dr. Kerry: image.

Or, or hiding behind, a lot of it was their sexuality. Mm-hmm. Hiding behind their rage and [00:13:00]anger and use of women as sexual objects. 

Lynn Strathdee: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, which is not a new thing. But I think the fact that we're, we're talking about all of this is great and necessary, but I do think we're in a bit of a pickle at the moment in terms of men- Mm.

Say more. What do you mean? Men, women, relationships. I do think sometimes that men are kind of demonized and laughed at in ways that we wouldn't tolerate if it was about women. Again, I just think it's overcorrection. I think that's what happened. I don't wanna understate the problem. There is definitely a massive problem.

I think the porn industry is a lot to do with it. 

Dr. Kerry: I think- Why are we not talking more about that? I don't know. Why is that, like, like we've normalized as if-- 'Cause I grew up in a world in which the way you got porn is you had to order it online, or you went to the store or a special store. It was even packaged secretively, so the front page was hidden, and you had to walk out with it or have it appear in this brown paper sack.

Mm-hmm. Now it's streamed in where, for free- Mm ... where anybody and everybody can consume it. The [00:14:00] content's changed. I mean, the content back in then was still pictures that were brushed and glossed and looked really beautiful, and now it's become violent- Mm-hmm ... and it's sort of this merging of rage with intimacy as if that somehow is intimacy when it's not anything about it at all.

It's really actually, to me, feels like just anger worked out sexually. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah. It, there's quite an aggressive, demeaning... I mean, it was always objectifying- Yes ... wasn't it, by definition? Yes. But there does seem to be a demeaning element to it now. I really do feel for young, young women. Obviously, this may apply to young, you know, bi or, or gay men as well.

I do worry about what it must be like to try and have an intimate sexual relationship as a young woman with a young man who's grown up in this culture because- Thankfully, that's not something that, you know, a woman in her 50s-- this wasn't, this just wasn't how it was. 

Dr. Kerry: Mm. Yeah. In fact, my husband, late husband, grew up in an environment which it was readily available as a magazine in his [00:15:00] house.

It was in the bathroom, he said, uh, because it was a, you know, all boys bathroom upstairs. He said it was something he deliberately chose to not engage in and moved away from 'cause he didn't like it. That wasn't-- it was never a feature of our relationship. There was nothing on his photos that I had to worry about.

There was no browser history that, that we-- I would've stumbled in. I-- really there wasn't. It was just was not a part of my life. But I now know that I don't think you can hardly meet a man that that's not part of their regular habit today. 

Lynn Strathdee: Mm. And it goes so beyond that, doesn't it? Because regular habit, especially when it's free and it's so hyper-stimulating- Yeah

it re- it very easily goes into addiction, and then you're in a whole 'nother hellscape. And I don't think that is over-dramatizing. I think, you know, there's-- it's really bad. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. Well, in fact, I-- this was wild. I had a conversation again with AI about the rates of ED. I asked, "What was it 40 years ago?" And it went out and pulled government statistics.

Mm-hmm. And then I said, "What are the rates of it today?" And it says, "It hasn't changed." And it pulled the government statistics, and it was three times, three to four times worse. And I said, "Wait a [00:16:00] minute. Why did you just tell me it hasn't changed?" Mm-hmm. "Look at the numbers and tell me why you just said it hasn't changed."

And it said, "Oh, you're right. I'm wrong. It has changed significantly." I said, "So why did you tell me that? What was the reasons?" And of course, it's struggling. This is what I think. Now, I'd love-- maybe I'm being a little bit of a conspiracy theory. I think we don't wanna see that it's changed. I think there's a natural bias that it was reflecting culturally is that we wanna, like, pretend that's not happening, that's not happening, even though people are getting sicker because of the proliferation of this material.

Lynn Strathdee: No, absolutely. I mean, I don't know what it's like to be a man, obviously. I think there's a identity crisis. Mm. I think there's a role crisis, and again, so much of this is, you know, bound up with culture, with meaning- Yeah ... where people are in the world, AI, technology, phones, all of these things that are so massively impacting every single area of our life, you know?

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, and it c- to circle back to abuse, because the core question to abuse is to me, and I'd love to hear what you think the core question is to you, is how do I [00:17:00] maintain my sense of stability and connection with myself and value in the world if I'm not for sure how to regulate how I feel about myself in this moment?

And what people often then then tend to do is I do it by managing my environment. I don't do it at all. I do what I feel when I feel it, or it's other people's fault that I feel this, and that therefore they deserve what they get. But we do weird things because we don't know how to regulate ourselves in that moment when we don't feel good about who we are and how we're showing up.

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah, but there's also, I think social media makes this worse, the idea that we're supposed to feel good all the time. 

Dr. Kerry: Mm. And 

Lynn Strathdee: that that's, you know, if you're not feeling good, then you should be doing something about it, or there's something you need to change, or when in fact that's something we wouldn't have seen, you know, years ago either if you were down, if you were unhappy.

But there's a different kind of culture now that is constantly coming at you about if something doesn't feel comfortable, then you need to act. You need to [00:18:00] change that by doing X, Y, Z, when in fact it's part of being human. But the internet and social media don't... That doesn't, you know, that way of thinking- 

Dr. Kerry: Mm-hmm

Lynn Strathdee: isn't profitable. 

Dr. Kerry: No, no, you're right. It's not profitable. Yeah, and there's also that our meaning is derived by the number of views, likes, and interactions we get, engagement with- Mm ... social engagement. Mm. If there's no engagement, it's almost like we've turned that adage that I always grew up with, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Mm-hmm. And the answer is, we should know, is yes, it did. You don't need to hear, have someone hear it for it to be legitimately there. But we've taken that and said, "If I show up in the world and no one gauges, do I exist?" 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah, exactly. 

Dr. Kerry: And a lot of us feel like, no, we don't. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah. If no one's looking Am I really there?

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. 

Lynn Strathdee: Am I real? 

Dr. Kerry: Exactly. 

Lynn Strathdee: Which I think is part of that manosphere- I do, I do too ... thing with being s- being seen. And let's face it, the need to be seen, we all have a need to be seen, but the need to be [00:19:00]seen when that goes unmet for a very long time makes you so vulnerable to an abusive relationship. Yeah.

Because of course, abuse is abuse, and that's why people are abused. I'm not blaming the victims, but what I mean is it just makes you ripe- Yeah ... for abuse when you feel invisible and you're desperate for someone to notice you, to remark about the small parts of you, the, you know, your looks or your life, your character, those things.

Makes you so vulnerable. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. Somebody wrote in a comment to one of my videos, 'cause I've been talking more about dark psychology lately, kind of moving- Mm ... more deliberately in that direction, and she merged two studies together. They worked together, that's why she thought of them together. The first was with John Gottman and it was somebody else.

Don't remember the other person's name, and they were looking at two types of abusers, Type A and Type B. Mm-hmm. The cobra versus the pit bull, and the cobra is a person who it's more deliberate, intentional, and they get calm when they're abusing. It regulates them or pleasures them, whereas the pit bull is reacting.

They're [00:20:00] dysregulated version of the abuse. There's somebody I think leaped off that research, and it was, her name is Dina McMillan. She d- found that regardless of age, ethnicity, all sorts of different kind of comparison, like different metrics, the, the playbook remained the same- Mm-hmm ... for the cobra type.

Mm-hmm. And she devised what she called the A to Z playlist of an abusive man, of the Type A abusive man. What struck me by what you just said was the first part of it is first thing you do is you target. You look for vulnerability. And I think that that's why we focus on victims so hard, is that we're trying to reduce people's vulnerabilities without realizing that we're also inadvertently abusing them by doing that, by saying- Mm-hmm ...,"Stop being a victim."

What she did, and what I love so much, is they looked at the predatory pattern, that there's targeting, deliberate targeting that's occurring in the beginning. Yeah. Because the fact of the matter is, Lynn, we all get vulnerable from time to time. Mm-hmm. You and I are not gonna avoid stages of life in which we're lonely, we're in transition or- Mm-hmm

life has gotten hard for us. 

Lynn Strathdee: Uh, things happen. There's a grief, you [00:21:00] know- Yep ... there's some sort of crisis. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Absolutely. Exactly. I would love to hear, 'cause I know you and I could keep talking about this, and I'm looking at how, what the time is. What do you hope will happen in our conversations?

Do you kinda have a wish list that you have for us, like what you'd like to see that... Because here's mine. Mine is that you and I have a friendship. We didn't say this part. We've actually met in real life. 

Lynn Strathdee: We have. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, yeah. We've done a vacation 

Lynn Strathdee: together. 

Dr. Kerry: So we've gotten to... We, yeah. We had a v- And I hope that's one of many more.

So we've gotten to meet each other and be around each other, so we have this real relationship that's came off of a parasocial relationship that's become real. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah.

Dr. Kerry: And what I really love about you and, and clicked with you is that you think about things in a careful way that, like I do. Mm-hmm. And I would love to have people be able to get on the inside of how we've pondered our own journey, but also the journey of other people, 'cause we both work with people, as we kind of ponder this journey of healing together and making things that don't make sense make more sense, or at least how we make sense of it.

Mm-hmm. That's what I hope that we can kinda share with the- Mm-hmm ... with those who are listening. What do... You have some thoughts about that? 

Lynn Strathdee: Yeah, I do. I [00:22:00] think if I had like a wish where we could go, how we could maybe be helpful, it would be, and I know this has been done, but I don't think it's ever overdone, and even then I don't think it can be done to really convey the extent of it, which is that in this stuff, when it comes to abusive relationships, the trope of, "Well, you've gotta love yourself.

You've gotta love yourself. Forget about the abuser. It's all about you," that is so true, but when you're coming out of one of these, the only thing you really wanna do, speak for myself, is talk about the abuser. Mm. Because they have such a grip, and it's an addiction. Again, I'm speaking for myself. It takes over the mind to such an extent that it's really easy to stay stuck on what is going on with them, and yes, that is helpful, but I don't think we could overstate the fact that- In reality, it is all an inside job, and if you do that work, you literally become, I don't wanna say unfuckable with, because we're all...

Who, what kind [00:23:00] of naive person would say, "I'm untouchable"? But you become very, very different, completely different person when it comes to... Um, my personality hasn't changed, and people who I know who've really recovered, their basic personalities haven't changed, but all of those gaps in themselves have been filled.

So when that abuser comes and tries to fill one of them, stick their finger into that gaping space, well, there is no gaping space, so they get nowhere. And I think that's something I would really love to really kind of get into more. Do you know what I mean? 

Dr. Kerry: I, I, yeah, I do. It's interesting 'cause I'm, I'm listening to Pete Walker's book, Complex PTSD, right now, and he talks about the development of self-compassion, and that the- that's one of the holdouts when we've survived a traumatizing environment.

Either we've never developed it or we've lost it, and that becomes an incredibly, a source of vulnerability. Mm. And you can hear it in the degree that we become our own worst critic often after these relationships. Mm, yeah. With all the rumination loops and the, the why questions and the, you know, feeling shame spirals that we have.

There's a lot [00:24:00] of hap- Yeah, I agree. Mm. I would love to see that, too. So with that in mind, I know we won't do this every episode. Just because you're a reminder, you're not new, but you're new to this, why don't you tell people how they can find you, and then let's jump over to the podcast extra and talk about why focusing on the abuser and trying to understand them usually doesn't do what we hope it will do.

Mm. We can talk specifically about that. But how can people find out more about you if they wanna visit your website? 

Lynn Strathdee: Sure. I have a website. It's www.echoismrecovery.com, and you can reach out that way, and I'm usually pretty good at coming back to people. Yeah. I have a private practice, and I see people online and in person all the time, so 

Dr. Kerry: yeah.

Yeah, that's great, 'cause people ask me all the time, "Do you take one-on-ones?" No, I don't, but Lynn does. Yeah. So I'm thrilled that you're, you're doing that. I'm so grateful to That's fantastic. 

Lynn Strathdee: Yes. It's good. 

Dr. Kerry: So I look forward to this really fantastic next phase, the start of the new season with Lynn as my co-host, and it...

We'll be meeting together every other week and talking about the things that right are where you're living. Mm. In common day experiences that you have when you're living with somebody who's emotionally immature. So I'm [00:25:00] really excited for us to embark on this adventure together. 

Lynn Strathdee: Thanks, Kerry. Thanks for having me.

It's good to see you. 

Dr. Kerry: Yeah, you too.