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We worry about what pornography teaches boys to expect from women. Why aren’t we asking the same questions about the explicit fiction being promoted to girls?

It’s not just pushed to teens by the industry, but defended and celebrated! Nothing can be wrong with female sexuality. But what is it changing in women?

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Dark romance books such as Haunting Adeline have found huge audiences through BookTok. Stories built around obsession, coercion and sexual violence are celebrated as female empowerment and concerns…

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Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of deliberately deceiving investors. Why is the conversation now about feeling sorry for her?

Her new documentary, You Can See Everything, presents a softer image: a mother facing separation from her children. In this episode of Psychobabble, I examine that sympathetic portrait alongside her conduct, her deposition footage, and the evidence of deliberate fraud.

Using the triarchic model of psychopathy—boldness, meanness, and disinhibition—I explore the personality traits behind deception, exploitation, intimidation, and calculated image management.

Did Holmes believe her own claims? What does her response to scrutiny reveal about accountability? And why do motherhood and allegations of abuse change how people interpret her actions?

A closer look at Elizabeth Holmes, female psychopathic traits, and the behavior that sympathy can lead people to overlook.

Subscribe to Psychobabble with Spier for more psychological case analysis and honest discussion of female psychology.

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Her new documentary, You Can See Everything, presents a softer image: a mother facing separation from her children. In this episode of Psychobabble, I examine that sympathetic portrait alongside her conduct, her deposition footage,…

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Are women’s political choices driven by too much empathy—or by the pressure to agree with the group? If empathy explains their politics, why can it disappear when the victim challenges the cause?

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Even Republican women blame men for the challenges women face. Tom Golden presents survey data suggesting that this attitude reaches across political parties and age groups and we discuss what happens when blaming men replaces examining your own choices.

I’m joined by and for a conversation about feminism, female accountability and false accusations. Starting with the public reaction to the Cornell 7 case, we examine how accusations against individual men become sweeping judgments about men generally, and how claims of victimhood can shield women from scrutiny.

We also discuss blame and resentment in relationships, regret and reputation, what false-allegation statistics actually measure, university investigations, and the use of trauma explanations to dismiss contradictory evidence.

Please like and subscribe, and support Janice, Tom and Jim’s writing on Substack.

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I’m joined by Dr Fiona Girkin, a researcher specialising in female psychopathy and dark personality traits, whose doctoral research examined workplace bullying in the community services sector. We discuss relational aggression, weaponised victimhood, revenge, parental alienation and the difference between everyday selfishness and calculated abuse. We also explore whether feminism, social media and a lack of accountability are rewarding destructive behaviour and how to recognise warning signs in workplaces, friendships and romantic relationships.

Find Dr Fiona Girkin:
Website: https://www.drfionagirkin.com

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Therapy won’t save your marriage. Not because therapists explicitly tell women to divorce. Most therapists would bristle at the suggestion that they push patients toward leaving. They don’t give advice, they would say; they help the patient understand herself well enough to reach her own conclusions.

This sounds benign. But it already hints at the problem: whose interests are being treated?

The reason I focus on women is simple: women initiate around 70% of divorces. Men are overrepresented in several psychiatric categories that account for substantial treatment, including substance-use disorders and schizophrenia, but women make up roughly two-thirds of the U.S. psychotherapy population receiving the kind of individual treatment in which marital dissatisfaction is likely to become part of the clinical work.

The Individual Is the Patient

For women who take marital dissatisfaction into individual therapy, the therapist’s assumptions can shape what happens next. We focus on therapy as a method while turning a blind eye to how therapists think.

In the first session, you establish the treatment goal: less anxiety, more energy, more motivation to get out of bed, feeling happier and more content with life. Once the goal is established, you start identifying what is standing in the way of it. If the patient is burnt out because of work, the job becomes part of the obstacle standing in the way of the goal state of mind. You might prescribe sick leave or start looking for another job. There is nothing controversial about this. Something in the patient’s environment is making her unwell, so you change it.

Why should marriage be treated differently? Marriage has no special status inside the therapeutic model. Psychiatry was built as medicine, and psychotherapy around treatment of the individual psyche. Her anxiety, mood, functioning and sense of self are what the clinician is trying to improve. The marriage or the family is not the target organ. If the marriage is making her anxious or unhappy, then it’s viewed as the obstacle in much the same way as the job was in the patient with a burn out.

The older language of duty and obligation has no clinical significance inside the therapy room. For that, you’re in the wrong church. A therapist places the self at the centre, and everything around it is judged according to what it is doing to that self.

Philip Rieff described the mid-twentieth century as a turning point in which older sources of authority weakened while psychoanalysis and the therapeutic worldview expanded. The moral question of whether a person was faithful to his obligations was increasingly replaced by a psychological question: is this good for me? Self-reflection and psychological wellbeing took the place previously occupied by duty and commitment.

By the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Bellah and his colleagues described this as expressive individualism. In Habits of the Heart, after hundreds of interviews with middle-class Americans, they found people struggling even to explain commitment in a language that didn’t revolve around the self. Why stay in a marriage? Again and again, the available answer was some version of personal choice, personal growth or personal fulfilment.

Eva Illouz traced the same change through self-help books, advice columns, workplace psychology and therapeutic practice. As psychology moved further into ordinary life, relationships increasingly came to be evaluated according to what they delivered emotionally. Is this relationship helping me grow? Am I getting a return on my investment? Illouz called this emotional capitalism: the language of markets applied to intimacy. People had started describing relationships in a language that sounded like financial banking.

This cultural shift permeated the psychological field of study and its clinicians. So, when marriage enters the therapy, it has to justify itself by what it does for the self.

The problem is not that psychotherapy fails to produce change; the methods themselves are often sound. The problem is the direction of change. Research has found that patients begin adopting more of their therapist’s belief system during treatment: their values shift in the therapist’s direction.

When Dissatisfaction Becomes a Diagnosis

Here is an example of why this matters. Take one of the most common complaints women bring into therapy: the “mental load.” When the wife says the division of labour is unfair, the therapeutic task immediately becomes communicating the grievance, setting boundaries and negotiating a different arrangement. The method works perfectly well. What determines the direction is the therapist’s assumptions about what needs changing.

What is much less likely to be examined is whether her perception of unfairness has also been shaped by her existing dissatisfaction. The same diagnostic bias appears when she says she is unhappy: therapy immediately excavates for the reasons why. Yet perceived unfairness is strongly tied to marital dissatisfaction, and longitudinal research shows that the relationship runs both ways. Wives who were already dissatisfied later became more likely to judge the division of housework as unfair; that perception of unfairness then predicted more conflict and still greater dissatisfaction.

Furthermore, which therapist in their right mind would risk disrupting the holy therapeutic alliance, the strongest predictor of whether therapy will work, by asking: Should you be this unhappy?

Therefore, it’s no wonder qualitative findings show that women in individual therapy often come to question whether they should sacrifice for their marriage at all. Logically, when personal fulfilment is what you need to improve your mental health, staying in an unsatisfying marriage can come to look like self-abandonment and emotional suppression. And so, therapy can easily give rise to the conclusion that the marriage no longer fits the woman’s new self-concept.

Another example of where we see the ideological bias that permeates the mental-health complex is in the way therapists talk about children and divorce. Put your hand up if you have ever heard the hypocritical and asinine line, usually delivered in the aggressive kindergarten-teacher voice: “Sometimes divorce is the best thing for the children.” Often used to reduce guilt about ending a marriage.

But notice how suddenly, effort on behalf of the parents can be demanded: Don’t bad-mouth the other parent. Keep routines stable. Live close enough for custody to work. Attend the same school events. Insisting that the parents now make the divorce as painless as possible for the children. They couldn’t exert the same level of effort to fix the marriage? The secular therapeutic world has no problem imposing obligations on parents when it comes to co-parenting. It just struggles to impose obligations on them as husbands and wives.

Religious people still have a language for marital duties and claims. The secular world (in which the therapy methods evolved, and the majority of therapists grew up) lost that language at the same time as therapy became its church and clinicians its clergy. Within that worldview, marriage is not sacred enough to demand sacrifice. It has to justify itself by what it does for the individuals inside it.

Once the marriage fails the test of individual wellbeing, therapy supplies the language to explain why. Emotional unavailability. Attachment incompatibility. Boundary violations. Gaslighting. Narcissism. Husbands report long-standing quirks and ordinary arguments being retroactively recast in this language. A clinical framework doesn’t just provide a place to “vent” and organize your thoughts in a neutral environment. It legitimises the dissatisfaction, lowers guilt and makes leaving easier to justify.

Husbands report wives returning from therapy with sudden ultimatums: separate bedrooms, financial separation, withdrawal from domestic or social obligations, all under the language of “protecting my peace” or “preventing burnout.” They also report being cut out of the process by which the marriage is being judged. Instead of bringing grievances to the husband, the wife processes them with the therapist and presents him with the finished verdict spoken in someone else’s voice.

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By that point he is arguing not only with his wife, but with an unseen authority. Husbands describe “My therapist said” changing the status of the disagreement. Frustratingly, his account is no longer just another viewpoint, it’s treated as resistance to a psychological interpretation already validated elsewhere and labelled with a term he has never heard. “That’s your attachment style talking,” he might hear.

Then it can build the confidence to act. But that confidence is tentative. Think of a personal trainer holding your feet while you do sit-ups: you perform better while the trainer is shouting numbers at your face. Therapeutic validation can work the same way. The patient leaves feeling assertive and brave, and when the effect inevitably fades, she goes back for another dose.

Then, and often before any legal filings, therapy provides a structured environment where the mother can plan how to break the news to children, minimize developmental trauma, and establish clear boundaries for post-divorce co-parenting before filing legal papers.

Can Couples Therapy Save the Marriage?

Imagine you have ADHD. When looking for treatment, would you trust a psychologist who doesn’t believe ADHD is a disorder to treat it? It’s the same thing. Why trust your marriage to a mental-health establishment that no longer believes in marriage as an institution?

Longitudinal tracking found that up to 40% of couples who attend marriage counselling divorce within four years. In roughly 30–50% of couples seeking therapy, one spouse is “leaning in” toward repair while the other is “leaning out” toward exit. The leaning-out spouse is more often the woman.

The leaning-in/leaning-out split creates a few problems. One has to do with the therapeutic alliance. One partner arrives ready to talk, reflect and “do the work.” The other is defensive or openly sceptical. When the cooperative spouse looks committed and psychologically minded; the resistant spouse looks like the reason nothing changes. Therapists are human and want to feel like their job is important and that they’re doing the job well. Which spouse is likely to be the recipient of the therapeutic alliance?

The second problem is that his refusal to engage can then become the final piece of evidence that the marriage can’t be saved. For a woman who has already emotionally left, marriage counselling becomes the final checkbox before divorce. “See, I have tried everything!” That changes what the room is for. One spouse may think they are there to save the marriage while the other is using therapy to decide how to leave. Marriage counselling doesn’t always treat preservation of the marriage as the goal. Often the stated goal is clarity.

By that stage, it might be hypocritical to call it marriage counselling, as it’s unclear if anyone in the room is trying to save the marriage.

So, when presented with the demand that counselling is the next step, don’t seek out the institution that is pro-individual and anti-marriage. Go to the institution that believes in marriage and will treat the marriage itself as the patient. Psychology starts from the idea that a person should be complete as an individual. Countless psychology magazines will tell you, “If you’re not happy alone, you’re not ready for a relationship.” Religion starts somewhere else. “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). The individual is not complete until he is bound into obligations larger than himself: marriage, children, family.

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The Cornell 7 case has become about much more than what happened that night.

Jane Doe’s lawyer says her behavior afterward — including initially describing the encounter as consensual — is a “textbook” trauma response. Across social media, people are making the same argument: contradictory behavior after an alleged assault doesn’t undermine the trauma narrative; it may actually confirm it.

But is that what the research shows?

In this episode, I look at how the definition of trauma has expanded, what PTSD was originally designed to describe, what studies of forcible rape survivors actually find, and what happens when a psychiatric explanation becomes so flexible that almost no evidence can count against it.

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Catch up on Monday’s Live Stream with Christine Grace Smith on men walking away from dating:

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In this episode, I look at why grievance-based feminism is psychologically attractive, why facts alone rarely change minds, and what can actually replace it. From mate choice and accountability to marriage, interdependence, motherhood and cultural incentives, this is a practical look at how women can move f…

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Special thanks to for uncovering the kind of material …

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