Unveiling Shadows Podcast Meet Dr. Lisa Turner I EP 96 - Revolutionizing Trauma Detection with AI

Hosted by Kimberly Mosby, author of “Unveiling Shadows,” in this podcast , Dr. Lisa Turner shares her groundbreaking work on using AI to detect coercive control and trauma in relationships. She discusses her innovative app Validate, which analyzes communication patterns to identify emotional manipulation and abuse, empowering victims and professionals alike.

Key  Topics

AI's role in understanding trauma and coercive control

Development and function of the Validate app

The four stages of grooming and manipulation

How AI can assist legal and therapeutic processes

The importance of objective data in abuse cases

Community and workplace applications of AI tools

The psychological impact of coercive control

Misconceptions about abusive relationships

Empowering victims through technology

Future directions in AI for trauma recovery

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Lisa Turner

02:02 Dr. Lisa Turner's Journey and Background

05:05 The Development of AI Tools for Trauma

10:29 Understanding Grooming and Coercive Control

14:57 The Validate App: Analyzing Relationships

20:12 The Importance of Objective Data in Relationships

22:14 Navigating Toxic Relationships

24:10 Introducing the Validate App

25:54 Training Coaches for Coercive Control

29:06 Understanding Linguistics in Coercive Control

36:58 Women Supporting Women in Tech

 Resources

CET Freedom - https://cetfreedom.com

Validate App (Waitlist) - https://cetfreedom.com/validate

Dr. Lisa Turner - LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/lisaturner

 Guest links

LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/lisaturner

Website - https://cetfreedom.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Unveiling Shadows Podcast. I'm your host, Kimberly Mosby. Join me as I dive into powerful stories of resilience and strength. In each episode, I sit down with guests who have faced similar journeys of course of control, financial manipulation, and personal invasion. Together, we uncover the shadows, share our experiences, and inspire others to reclaim their lives. Tune in, listen, and be a part of the community that stands tall against the forces that seek to control us.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Unveiling Shadows Podcast. I'm your host, Kimberly Mosby, and today's guest is Dr. Lisa Turner. She's an award-winning coach, forensic AI pioneer, and founder of CET Freedom. As a teenager, Lisa was groomed in traffic, spending five years as a virtual house prisoner under coercive control. Her lived experience now underpins her work in trauma, behavior, and recovery. Following her keynote speech on TEDx, Lisa can share insights on how AI can be used to better understand trauma and uncover the often invisible patterns of coercive control within relationships. She explores how these patterns can be made visible and therefore actionable using AI tools designed to detect subtle behavior dynamics, like her forensic validate AI tool that analyzes the patterns inside someone's relationship conversations and shows them objectively and with evidence whether manipulation or course of control is present often before they can name it themselves.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

Welcome to the show, Doc. Thank you. It's so good to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Yes. So uh where I'm interested in this AI tool for identifying coercive control because I did my TEDx speech on coercive control.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Yeah. I wish I'd known that I would have watched it. Identify I I actually call it making the invisible visible because it's it's actually beyond just coercive control. That's one component of it. So I kind of I don't know if I should say trigger alert or whatever, trigger warning, but so I was well, you already said I was groomed and trafficked as a child by my music teacher, brought from the Australia, brought from Australia to the UK, which is why I've got a little bit of a twang in my accent. I sometimes sound a little bit Australian. And I was uh I mean I often say, you know, like at the time, I just thought it was a relationship, and then I thought it was a bad relationship, and then I thought I got out of a bad relationship. It wasn't until ye decades later, wasn't until years later I realized I'd been, you know, in an ab an actual abusive relationship. And then it was years, decades later, that I it turned out it was part of a much bigger grooming gang and the head of the school. I believe he is in prison now. I know it last time I and I I don't really keep up on him. But anyway, he was arrested and charged and and went to trial. I don't, I didn't pay attention to the outcome. Okay. And so when I got out, I was studying to be an engineer, because that was all about things and and metal and no emotions, because that was all I could cope with at the time. Yeah. I had no clue that I was even traumatized. Then I kind of had this realization oh, not everybody wakes up kind of just wanting to go back to bed and stay asleep for the rest of their life. Yeah. Oh, not everyone's this miserable. Wow, that's weird. Wow, what about subulance? I started going to therapy and I tried all different kinds of therapy from the you know, uh evidence, you know, hard evidence, psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry, and then went into the more woo-woo, esoteric, tried them all. And one of the things that I did was I viewed it all through my engineering lens. So my engineering degree is actually in production and systems entry. So what we do is we look for a process. Okay, so we're gonna do this, this, this, and this, and we'll get this product. So it's all about the steps. And what I did was I noticed that some therapies worked, some didn't. And so I started to systematize what were the things that actually worked and what were the things that didn't. And I came up with a whole bunch of frameworks, and I even developed an entire new modality that seems to do really well and it holds up against like pretty strong research to completely clear trauma and painful emotions from the past. And that's called CET, which it stands for that CET stands for conscious emotional transformation. Okay. I was, and then I I'd left engineering by now. I mean, I'd got my PhD and which is in mathematical modeling and aeroacoustics. Then I was training other people in variety of modalities, you know, some in other, you know, from other schools and also um my own methodology. Then AI came along and I started to take my frameworks and get and train AI on them. Now then something weird happened when like just before the pandemic, I started to notice, like I was quite into a lot of spiritual circles. And this is how it actually all began. Okay. I was I started to so I started to talk to some of my colleagues and friends in spiritual communities, and they started to say things like how their teacher had become really strange, and it seemed to be like they didn't feel comfortable with things, and just a lot of like what you might call conspiracy, you know, like conspiracy theories, but worse, and really like high control tactics. Now, having been in a coercive controlling relationship, I thought this smells just like it. This is not just a coach being authoritarian and and you know, like being accountability. This is well, this is victim blaming. Oh, this is Darvo. This, you know, uh deflect and reverse victim uh victim offender. This is all, and I started to spot the frameworks and the actual, you know, all of the things and all of the like all of the different tools that somebody who is a in a position of power might use in somebody in a you know in a not in a position of power would use to abuse them. And so what became my kind of catchphrase was I built an app. And the very first app I built was actually called Sanctuary Scan, and it was designed for spiritual schools. So it looks at things like bite model and like all of the things in like it's basically spots cults. It's like it, you know, it's you know, it should be am Iinacult. And I don't know if that's an AI, that's uh that's a domain, it's not my domain. Yeah, but maybe I should get it. But it's so it's like this, and the thing is, it worked. And I was like, I wow, we can do this. And then somebody else said, Can you do it for relationships? And it's like, yeah, the frameworks don't need to be different. Let's do it for relationships. And someone else said, Could you do it for the workplace? And so now we have one for the workplace called Culture Scan, which looks at all of the, you know, anyone who's in a marginalized or you know, in a basically in a position of lower power has a frequently experiences, so uh, you know, bias, uh, microaggressions, all of those things, the tool can spot it. And one of the things that it does is, and then another one just for coaches, looks at like how much, how in integrity is your coach. And one of the places that started was when um my uh I was actually on a podcast and I was talking about my past to somebody highly, highly spiritual, and and she did kind of manifesting and she was into that. And I won't name who they were, but I had this really interesting experience. And she started to ask me about you know my past and being groomed. And then she said this, she asked this question, she said, Well, what were the red flags? And I was like, Well, I was 12. I don't know if I would have spotted them. And I'm looking at your face and you're like going, what? And and and then she said, Well, there must have been some red flags, it must have been some I, you know, some hints that he was gonna be abusive. And I and I was like, Well, there really wasn't. And I I have this framework, uh, which I call lean, L-E-A-E. And I'd walk her through what I call the four stages of grooming. So the first stage is luring, they just cast the net, they just look out at like who's gonna bite. It's not particularly targeted, they're not after you specifically necessarily. I know that does happen in some cases, but the like in a in a lot of cases, they just cast the net and see who bites. Okay. So that's the luring, and they just see who nipples. The next one is enchantment, the E of enchantment. And this is the love bombing and the showering you with gifts and praise, and there's no one like you. Oh, you're so special, you're so magical. And then you become completely, so you know it's the love bombing phase in in a lot of high control groups. And and uh and then the next the next thing that happens is because they've showered you with gifts, they then start the manipulation. It's like, oh, I did all those things for you, I gave you all that. You can do this one thing for me, and this is the which is manipulation. And so they and then what happens is they what they often do is they start to manipulate you to violate your own values. It's and sometimes they do it to actually get you to break the law. And because the thing is, if they know that you've done something illegal, then that's a massive hook. That's like a leverage point. Or it's like, well, you better do even more of the things I tell you to do because otherwise I will go to the authorities and tell them about this terrible thing you did. But even if it's not illegal, if it's just like against your own values, there's what this does is this kind of it causes the individual to almost start to gaslight themselves. They start to justify, oh, I had to do it because, and all it's you know, I was wrong and they were right. So it starts to this is one of the really insidious ways that this manipulation takes place. Then so then you're in full-on manipulation. Now, then once you're in there, like the final phase is the final E, which is full-on extortion, basically. You are now under their control. There's it's really difficult to get out, even if you want to. So I'm on this podcast, I'd walked her through these four stages, start saying, Well, back in the first L, what were the red flags? And I'm like, Well, it doesn't really work like that. You know, it's like there just aren't any because they seem so normal. It's like they just cast the net and see who bites. And she kept asking this question, and then she said, she started telling this story about, well, she knew somebody was much older than her, and he started to say all these things, and she noticed and didn't go there. And why didn't I notice? And I was like, Well, maybe I was just stupid, but but and it's I was kind of like in this how am I not explaining this properly? Like, what is this person not getting? And then she says, Well, where does personal responsibility come in? Where does the idea that we create our own universe come in? I'm like, wow, this is victim blaming. And that was one of the reasons why I am so passionate. Like that experience, that experience, I am guessing that many, many people listening to this who have been in a coercive controlling relationship will have heard something, now maybe not as as extreme at that as that, but it'll be something along these lines. So I was interviewed by the BBC about after I wrote my first book, which was called I Love to Pedophile. And they in the interview, they just said, they said, why didn't you just leave? You weren't locked in. There was no, there was nothing stopping you. Why didn't you just leave? And now my guess is, you know, like everyone who's been in a coercive controlling relationship knows it's not that simple. Right. Because by the time you're right in the extortion, which is like the full enslavement, ensnarment, like which is the other, you know, it could be any of those E's, like you are fully, you know, engulfed in this psychologically, emotionally, mentally, energetically. You have no money, no resources, no friends, no, no support network. This is all you know, and there is no, there's no just in the why don't you just leave? There is no just by the time. And there's no justice. So this is one of the reasons I do what I do because one of the things that the the tools that I've made, so if we look at, and we could talk about any one of them, but look at validate, because it's um the one that many people know about individual like coercive controlling personal relationships. But the same process happens. So one of the things that there's a big misconception, so several misconceptions. So the first one is abusive relationships involve physical violence. They often don't, because they don't bloody need to. Right. They got you controlled with everything else. They might threaten, but actually the threat is nearly always emotional, way before it's physical. So that's the first big myth. The other common myth is that that you must be really dumb to have got yourself into that. Like you, it's like stupid people get into these, you know, stupid people join cults, stupid people don't leave. And it's actually the opposite because this is gonna start is gonna so somebody who, and I won't say a stupid person, but we'll say someone who just kind of like, they're just more self- they're more accepting of the world as it is, and they don't like maybe do any deep thinking. People call them not the deep thinkers. And they might, they go, they're in a situation and they go, I don't like this, and they'll just out of there. They don't analyze it, they don't go try and reason it through, they'll just go, I don't like this, and they'll just leave. It is that simple. And that's when you're in the E to E, the enchantment to manipulation. They'll go, Oh, there's something not right here. I'm off. But a smart person, a really intelligent person, and a really, and this is a really key point, a really empathetic person. They will feel the emotions of their abuser. They will feel their emotions, they will f and they will care about them. And because that person is loving, kind, empathetic, and intelligent, what they'll do is they'll overthink it to the extent where they actually start gaslighting themselves and they'll start to, you know, say things to themselves like, it was because he was feeling this or they were feeling that, and oh, maybe I did, you know, maybe I was a bit snap snappy with that, you know, in that conversation. Oh, you know, and they'll start to justify it to themselves. And so and by the time they're doing that, I I often say this, it's like when people are held and trapped in coercive control, it doesn't work by making by locking the door. It works by making you believe you want to stay. So you actually believe you want to stay. Now, one of the really powerful things the way this app works is so what you do is you you either just describe the scenario, but it works way better if you do this. You drop in text messages, transcripts, conversations, emails, DMs. And what it does is it analyzes and it analyzes both parties. Because most people think that abuse just comes from the abuser. But what happens is that one of the biggest markers of an being in an abusive relationship is how does the abused communicate back? So, so the the tool, and I'll I'll come back to that. Remind me if I go off topic, which I probably will, ADHD brain. So what uh what uh so the way the tool works is it looks for all of these linguistic markers from peer-reviewed frameworks of power dynamics, manipulation, emotional manipulation, uh, coercive control, Java, you know, uh has all of these different frameworks. And what it does is it looks for how the the interaction and it gives you uh it gives you four things, four things in the output. The first thing it gives you, it just describes the behavior. And it takes it from this gut feeling of something isn't right to this is emotional manipulation, this is financial abuse, this is so it gives it a label. Now, j when I've you know done this in my beach tests with people, with they're like, oh my god, it's got a name. Like that's what people say, I didn't even know it had a name. So the first thing it does is it gives you a label for the behavior. The second thing it does is it flags sometimes you we could call it the severity level or the risk level. And that's like, how intense is it? How how bad is the behavior? And you know, it can do that either, you know, uh zero to five, and zero being we see no markers of this behavior, and five being this is pretty extreme. But you could also do it as a percentage, and you know, you can set it how you like it. The next thing it gives you is a confidence score. Now, this actually comes out of cybersecurity. So no, no, you can take the engineer, the girl out of engineering, you can't take the engineer out of the girl. Sorry, not sorry. And so what it does is the app itself will say, okay, it might say, behavior is this really severe, but I'm actually not that confident because we've only got one text exchange. So it might say, I'm 30% confident in this, or I'm 10% confident, or I'm 90% confident based on it's both quantitative and qualitative the data. So it gives you, and then the final thing it does is it actually cites the exact phrases where that behavior is labeled. And this is where it comes in really useful. We're doing a bolt-on, like an optional extra module for the legal community to use. Because one of the things lawyers struggle with, there's a really interesting statistic here in the uh in the UK, which is only one in every 58 cases, coercive control is actually illegal in the UK, prosecutable by law under the Serious Criminal Offenses Act of 2012. I think if I've remembered that right. If I'm sorry if I'm a I'm not a lawyer, if I've got that wrong, I apologize. But really hard to get evidence, especially as the woman or the victim will often downplay all of their experience because they're gaslighting themselves. And so what the act will do is it will give all of this data and it will cite the exact linguistic markers. So it can then turn that into a witness statement. So the lawyer, and obviously the lawyer still has to check it because AI does, you know, we do our best to get rid of, you know, all of the hallu it actually doesn't really hallucinate because of the way we've we've benched, like we've benchmarked it and the exemplars and things like that. But we just know AI does. I say sometimes working with AI, it's like it's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. The smile of somebody who's tried to get sense out of AI, and it's like, why did you do that? So now the app is pretty good. Um, we have another really powerful piece in the app. Just stop me if I'm getting too techie at any point. But so we have uh we anonymize it before we analyze it. So the analyzing agent, as we call it, doesn't actually know whose side it's supposed to be on. So what this does is it eliminates any bias. Okay. So so what it does is it will just say speaker A, speaker B. And then the and the so the analyzing agent just analyzes it, speaker A, speaker B, and it doesn't know who's inputting the data. And then when you come on the output, it'll go, okay, speaker A was exhibiting this, these behaviors. And I'll even might say, like, the the victim is sometimes doing stuff as well. You know, it'll say speaker B also did this, this, and this. I actually had a case where somebody was trying to demonstrate, they were trying to use my app in the beta test to to demonstrate that they were being abused and uh in a in court, and it actually the app it was like, oh, this is Java. Speaker A is doing Javo and they were speaker A. And it was like, oh, I don't know if you want to use this data. Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

So yeah, so I felt like you got a question. You were gonna I I think this sounds amazing. So what is the app called again? It's called Validate. Validate. That's a good name for it. I like it.

SPEAKER_02 19:41

Yeah, the intention is that it gives objective, it gives objective output, you know, that it like it tells you this is what's happening, this is what we can see. And if it can't see anything, it will let you know. And if it sees some things but it's not confident, it will let you know. So so yeah, so as I said, you know, one in 58 cases only ever actually get prosecuted for coercive control due to lack of evidence. So so that's that's basically my app, or one of that's that's one of them.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Yeah, I like that one. I think any single woman should probably have that app, especially if they're dating someone and uh, you know, not quite sure. I mean, obviously you wouldn't tell them you're using the app, but it would be, you know, whether or not you're going to waste your time with this person or not, and whether or not you can trust them.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Yeah. And the thing is, dating is normally the first E, the enchantment. Yeah. And and what so here's one of the interesting things. So actually two interesting things. So the first is there's this golden window between within which somebody is in a coercive controlling relationship where they and I call it being foglit. So because like gaslit, it gaslight, I mean it does, my app does measure gaslighting, but gaslighting is only one of the markers. So I call it foglit because this woman, and it is mostly women, but not always. But we'll call them the the the recipient, if you like. The receiver is in this fog, and they've actually lost trust of their own gut instinct. You know, one of the, you know, one of the things, you know, people say, oh, just trust your gut. That is offline. That is, you know, like you know, it's like if there's no internet connection, it's you know, it's worse than that. It's like it has left the building. And and even worse than that, your intuition will tell you one thing one minute, another thing the next minute, because it's been so distorted by the fog. So, but there's this golden window where they're they know they're in the fog, they know something's up, but they are not yet fully enslaved, ensnared, trapped, and trapped. So they haven't got to that final E. And that's the golden window where if they're presented with objective data and they cite it and and um you know that. The app cites it, they can really start to monitor themselves and their own responses and their partner. And I know you said any single woman. Honestly, I think anyone who talks to people. Yeah, probably. So anyone in any kind of relationship, it we know that there are abusive friendship relationships.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

It doesn't need to be a romantic relationship. We know that, you know, you can be in a peer, like in a peer group, the whole group can be kind of cult-like. We know, you know, it's like if you've ever been in um, you know, CrossFit, by the way, I love CrossFit, but it is officially almost a cult. So so is it, but kind of a good one. Don't want to say, and cult, I love CrossFit. It's not a bad cult. But but you know, so we know that, you know, so like anyone who's in any kind of group or interaction, it can get messy. And, you know, so the spiritual community went really toxic and became really culty, and lots and lots of people who, you know, back in the early noughties, there was this beautiful spiritual community. It was like anything goes, and we're all about love and acceptance. And then it was like, well, how did you create that? You know, being abused, you know, how did that six-month-old baby create getting cancer or being abused? And it's like, I'm pretty sure they didn't. Yeah. You know, that that's like Darvo, but on the victim. So so I was also gonna say there. So um, yeah, so I think I think I think it's got so many different uses because it just it gives you that compass in the fog. Yeah. So you're, you know, and that's why I you know I call it fog lit, we're all fog bound. And I there's you know, these di various levels. And what we want to do is we want to get people to recognize it before they get fully, fully ensnared.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yes, I agree. And I agree about the friendship relationships too, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, spiritual communities and even coaches, you know. I had I've had some like there's a fine line between, you know, tough love accountability and downright bullying and abuse. You know, it's like like and that line, the uh it's a terrible name, it's a really boring name. Coach integrity scan can actually pinpoint that line. It's like, oh, I think they're crossing it.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Yeah. Yeah. This sounds amazing. So where can people find your app?

SPEAKER_02 24:10

Yeah, so if you go to cetfreedom.com, there's you can yeah, there's a wait list at the moment. It's been in beta testing for us. If you join the wait list for validate, it's uh it's right there on the homepage. You can click on there, join the wait list. You can actually join the wait list for any of the apps that are being fully launched with a beautiful front-end user interface. We've been in beta testing, and we have a very select group who are using it inside our community, inside of very it's it's a really ugly user interface at the moment, and it's quite because well, I'm very transparent. I was like, I'll if something's rubbish, I'll tell you it's rubbish. It's a rubbish user interface. I was focused because I'm an engineer, I was focused on getting the tool to work. So um, so I'm I'm gonna I've got a development team making it really user-friendly. The validate will be available. We are anticipating, but somewhere around end of August, mid-September, it should be launched. So so so yeah, so go to cetfreedom.com. Okay. And you can join the wait list and I will, and you'll you'll get lots of uh well not lots, but you'll get some lovely emails from me explaining more about it, and uh we're building a community there. Because one of the one of the things that really helps is having a community. Yes. The other thing that we're doing alongside of it, because every single person who uses validate, they come to me and they go, Can you coach me? I think I need relationship coaching, I think I need coaching to get how to get out of this, I think I need coaching on how to, you know, or therapy to recover from this. And I am beyond capacity, like beyond it. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're building, I'm training coaches because to into to interpret the data and also because there's a very like, whereas most coaching and therapy, it's very different when you've been in a coercive controlling relationship. Regular coaching and therapy is often not appropriate because regular coaching and therapy looks at, well, let's look inside you to see like what had you make these decisions and what had you, you know, ask for this? What had you, you know, like what was it? This kind of, you know, it's like the let's look at your weaknesses and your strengths. And it's like, actually, anyone, anyone in the world is is susceptible to being to being becoming involved in a coercive controlling relationship. Anyone. So looking at what did the person do wrong, what's wrong with the person, is not the right place to go. And it actually ends up with then the burden of I don't really think it was me, gets put onto the client. So what I'm doing is I'm training coaches in that very specific approach to assisting people to get out, assisting their, you know, client clients in understanding what this means. And one of the things coaches come to me and they say, How is it that we have like, you know, why does my client loop? I keep explaining it to her and she, I think she's gonna get out, and then she goes right back, or I think he's gonna change, and then they loop back, and it's like, okay, that's probably because they're fog bound. And what you need is a tool like validate to show them the way out of the fog. It's like you can see it, but they can't. And so what the tool with a well-trained coach can do or therapist can do is it can help the victim. And I hate that word victim. I have yet to find, I don't even like the word survivor. I've yet to find the right word. I use the word target, it's like like we're spies. It's because it's more fun. Yeah, not that it's fun being in a coercive controlling relationship, but we'll try to make anything other than that fun. Find the fun where we can. But it's like so, so it's like the the you know, it helps the target to see their way out, gives them that that compass out. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Target is a great word because a lot of people are targeted in more ways than one.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I was I've been using this word, and I'm like, is it the right word? But it kind of feels the right, right to me. Because even if they're not like sometimes people are targeted even before they're in the relationship.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

And sometimes, you know, and then sometimes they're at the luring stage and they become the target. So and I was thinking that's way better than victim. And they're not yet at survivor because they're not even surviving yet.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Right, correct. Yeah. I like that word. Yeah. I am so excited. I'm going to join the wait list. Please do. For your app. This is gonna be amazing. It's going to help a lot of people. I think uh, yeah, you should be really proud of yourself for building this and you know, helping people I identify to get out of the fog list.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I was like trying to say, well, what is the app like? And I said, It's like a fog light that helps, but it doesn't just help you see through the fog. It actually helps clear the fog. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

I love it. I love it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

One of the one of the things that that is one of the ways the app works is it doesn't just look at the language of the abuser. It looks at the language of the target. And I'll give you an example.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:19

So a target, if they're in a coercive controlling relationship, they will often communicate in a very different way that isn't immediately obvious. So let's say a normal person has been to the shop, been to the store, they bought some groceries, they're on the way home, and they'll send a text to their partner to say, on the way home, there's a bit of a traffic jam. Or just say, I'm away, running late, nothing more. Somebody who is the target will say, I'm on my way home. This happened. I've got the receipt with the timestamp. There was a traffic jam, and they'll send photos of the traffic jam. They'll show like photos of the Apple, you know, the maps with the line, you know, the road being read. They will massively over-explain before it's even happened. Like before, like even before they're preempting that their partner is going to be angry, that they were, you know, instead of it being 15 minutes at the store, it was 22 minutes. And they'll, you know, absolutely, you know, they know, oh my God, I'm seven minutes late. I'm I'm gonna be in trouble. I better send them all this information. And the app will look at that. The other thing it looks at is what I call the delta, so which is like how it changes over time. So you can be in a relationship and it's nice, you know, lovely to begin with. And then over time, it's like instead of going across this trajectory of being nice or you know, or this trajectory of being lovely, it'll start to go, or it's starting to get really, really, you know, going downhill, getting really, really, you know, you're losing your power. So, because it monitors it over time and it stores it in longitudinal memory. Very boring techie speak, but it's just like how we remember things across time. And it's like, I remember this happened last Tuesday, but better than how we remember it because it actually stores what actually happened rather than how we distort our own memory. Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

And it's a great tool for accountability, for self-accountability, you know, to find out whether or not you're the b abuser.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Yeah, and and the way we've designed it. So it so uh a really good scenario to explain this one is is with the tool uh culture scan, which actually looks at work toxic workplace dynamics. That one has uh, I think it has actually 22 frameworks. It's a lot more complex. And what it does is it actually has three uses. So the first use is just for the person who feels targeted. It's like there was something funky about that conversation, I'm not sure what it was. And you can run the transcript, run the DMs, the Slack messages, the emails through, and I'll go, yeah, this is the behavior, this is the severity, this is my confidence, here's the citations. Exactly. It works in exactly the same way as validate, but just different frameworks.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

And then you can go, okay, I got evidence now, I can now start to track this. Yeah, it's it's getting worse. Yeah, that was just a blip. And it's like one of the things I think we need to be really careful about with any of these things is humans are messy. We are like humans, human. And in any human interaction, we'll have a bad day, we'll snap, you know, like there is no such thing as 100% perfect communication every single moment of the time. It's like it doesn't happen and let's not expect it. Let's not be reasonable. It's but it's like so that's why tracking it over time. So, so the three use cases are first of all, the the person who feels targeted. They can monitor it, track it, and go, oh yeah, there is, there's a pattern here. The second is for somebody who uh so either HR or the it's often the manager, but or you know, or the the abuser or the you know the the the bully actually gets more like they can run their own communication through. So HR can run it through and go, do you know what? I, you know, you're you know, there's some there's some markers here. Let's talk about how we can communicate differently. The other thing it can do is if, and this is one of the things that's really interesting, because we're now so much more aware of how people you know, of this, you know, I would I was a woman in engineering in the 90s. Like the sexism you would not believe, and it was just standard, and like there was no HR to take that. Like HR would have gone, well, what did you expect being an engineer? You know, it's like, but now we don't, you know, now we understand it, we don't expect it. So here's the other thing. So people, a lot of leaders have actually become nervous of saying something, giving feedback to a subordinate that the subordinate needs to hear to improve their work. The business needs that person to get that feedback. And there's this, oh, I don't want them to think I'm being a bully. So here's what you do: you run it through culture scan and you'll say, This is the situation, this is the feedback, and it will clean it up for you. Or it'll tell you, no, that's fine, you can send it like it is, or it'll say, Okay, that's gonna come across, that reads as a microaggression. You can't question where they went, where they did their degree, or you know, where they went to university, or like you can't, you know, that that's gonna read as a micro invalidation or whatever. So, so so you can actually use it to prevent it, which is a kind of second or third use case. I've lost count now. But the so you can use it if you feel targeted, if you've been accused. So let's say someone accuses you of bullying in the workplace or being an abusive partner. You can run your own communication through and it will go, actually, you know what? I'm not. Now that's really powerful in a personal relationship because it will it will spot Darvo. So because often, you know, what an abuser will do is say, it's not me, it's you, you're the abuser. Yeah. You can then run it through and go, Well, am I the abuser? Run it through and it will tell you who is the abuser. And if you're in the workplace and you've been accused of that, you can run it through and actually go, look, there are a few dodgy moments, but nothing like what we're what we're being accused of here. So so the three use cases are for the target, for the uh accused, if they've been potentially falsely accused, it can vindicate them. And also to prevent so that we can just have cleaner language. One of the one of the ways that one of my users actually was using it was she's autistic. And so autistic, I personally I love autistic people because they say what they bluffy mean. Like, okay, what are you actually trying to say? Oh, okay, yeah, I can handle that. And so what she does is she runs it through culture scan and then she gets culture scan to say, okay, this is the information I want to convey, but without hurting their feelings, or let's, you know, can you soften it for me? And so it will do that. The other thing it does is people who are kind of, you know, more likely to be on the people-pleasing spectrum. It can they'll run it through culture scan and they'll say, This is what I'm trying to say, but I want to be more boundaried about it. And culture scan will actually say, okay, here's how you can set really clear boundaries without being offensive, without being bullying or anything like that. It's just, there's the information. I need the quarter two results. Okay, here's the quarter two data. So yeah. So so those are the those are the the kind of the use cases for for for cult for all of the apps, really.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Yeah, culture scan. I like that because there are workplace bullies, you know. I've experienced that in my lifetime and sometimes, you know, others, like a group of people, you know, bullying one individual. So I think that app is amazing as well. And they and people can get it in the same place, the C Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Again, there's a wait list. You can if you there is a way if you want to join the uh I need to train people on how to use it or with the crappy user user interface. Okay. There is a way to get access to that if you're really desperate for it and you really need it now, but you'll need to join the training to get access to that. So we're building don't worry, we're building user interfaces. We're on it.

SPEAKER_01 36:52

Yeah, I can't wait until your apps come out. This is gonna be amazing for people.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

And I'm at and I've been uh nominated for like several awards, and I'm up I'm going up to London big because I live right out in the country. Big London town on Thursday night for an award, and I'm actually in uh my category, I'm up against somebody I don't think I'll win it, but there's somebody from Microsoft there, somebody from Google there, who's you know, who's also up for it. It's like even to be nominated and be and to get to the final. Yeah, I it's like one of my other apps, like I pray. Thank you. Well, I'd love to win it, but do you know what? I was like, may the best woman win. Because it's it's a woman in tech award. And it's like, may the best woman win. And I am rooting for like women in tech, I am rooting for you. One of the things I I love about like women in tech is like we will so willingly often just like help each other out. It's funny because I'm speaking at a conference, I was gonna give a freebie giveaway, which is my it's one that measures mental load that women carry. And then I noticed that one of the other speakers is speaking about mental loads. So I just messaged her. I said, I was gonna give this as a freebie, and I really don't want to steal your sunder and you know, like tread on your toes. Like, if you let me know if you're not okay with that, I'll find another freebie to give away so we don't, you know. And she's like, Oh no, that's fine. That's fine. No, I'm really glad about it. I'll mention it in my talk. So it's like women supporting women.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

I love that. And as we should, right? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 38:25

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yeah. I agree. Well, good luck on Thursday night. I'm really excited, and I'm thank you for coming on the show and sharing what you have, your gift for people.

SPEAKER_02 38:37

Thank you. Call it that. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, there's been a lot of late nights coding. I know when I I go to my message therapist and she's like, How have you been? I said, I've been coding. I'm a shrimp. You've got lots in your shoulders. What have you been doing? I've been coding. Just into the night.

SPEAKER_01 38:56

The your massage is warranted then, once a week for sure. Thank you. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

All right, stand the app. Thank you for listening to the Unveiling Shadows podcast. I hope today's episode has shed light on the experiences that too often remain hidden. If you or someone you know has a story to share, please reach out to me. Remember, you're not alone and your voice matters. Follow me on social media and subscribe to the podcast for more inspiring stories. Until next time, stay strong and keep unknowing the shadows.