Bonus Episode with Dr Ramani
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I'm Barbara Schroeder. And for this bonus episode, we're in conversation with Dr. Ramani Dervasula. She's been our guide through all six main episodes of Bad, Bad Thing. And Dr. Ramani is a clinical psychologist and author. One of her popular books is Should I Stay or Should I Go? Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist. Dr. Ramani is going to help us respond to comments and criticisms and questions that we've been getting and seeing online.

from everybody who's been listening. And Dr. Romney, I don't think I've ever told you this, but I wanted to tell you that before I contacted you, I had interviewed other therapists for this podcast and all of them were qualified, absolutely great. But when I gave you some of the materials and I listened to what you were saying, your incisiveness and your wisdom, you're the absolute right fit for this. And I've been to a lot of therapists. I've interviewed a lot of therapists. So thank you for bringing your expertise and your

You have a great way of communicating in regular language to people, and it's incisive, and we appreciate that. Well, I appreciate you, Barbara. Thank you for saying that. I think it was 22 years of teaching undergraduates. You better put things in simple language or they're going to fall asleep. I still think they fell asleep.

But I had to learn. That was a strange skill for me to have to develop over such a long time. Let me ask you, have you been getting any reaction from the podcast? You know, what's so interesting in a case like this, yeah, definitely. And some of it is really around...

sympathy for someone who killed someone else, you know? And, and so it really speaks to how a case like this can bring up some in, in listeners or people who have heard about the story, it can really bring up their unresolved conflicts and fears in a way that they ally with somebody. If I said to someone, would you ever ally with a murderer in a story? They'd be like,

no. And then they hear this story and they're like, oh, and so it's that. And I will say, you know, sometimes it's, it's criticism of, you know, um, you know, you shouldn't be offering impressions on someone you've never met. And that, I mean, I get, I get that on the daily from everybody. So there is that. And I get that. And I, and I get that. However, there it's, it's such a catch 22, Barbara, right? So if somebody is ever my client, I would never by law ever,

From the day I'm alive to the day they're dead, I'm dead, everyone's dead. I could never comment on them, right? So the idea that the only person who could comment on someone is someone who's seen them clinically is actually a sheer impossibility. And when I think about how we train therapists...

I spent all those years of graduate school having case after case after case after case put in front of me and being asked to offer an analysis, a diagnostic formulation. So it's this, I don't know whether that anger of how dare you weigh in on someone you've never met comes from almost a fear in people in general of, I don't want you to...

I don't want you dissecting me. And I tell people that would be a busman's holiday. Like I am not going to analyze you, but I do. It's interesting. It's emotion. What I, what the feedback is emotion. Right. And that's, in this case, people react very strongly to very emotionally. If you've ever been cheated on, if you felt desire, you respond to this story. And, and there is a lot of, I mean, in this era that we live in, there's a lot of quick judgment, a lot of strong and harsh judgment, but,

And that's what this story elicits in a lot of people. And what we tried to do is go to deep dive past that surface. He's horrible. She's horrible. Who's the monster? And I think people have been responding to that. We've gotten some good feedback to that. But what is it that you would call

caution people when they hear about the story and they do have that instant reaction like, oh, she's horrible. What is it you would caution people about? Listen, in every story, I think this story more than many others tells us, even when you know the details of the story, it's just not sit in, maybe it's to not sit in judgment. And I think when we hear stories, we try to lift them into our own lives. Like, what did I learn from this that would guide me in my own life?

And I always tell people, because you know, Barbara, my work is speaking about personality styles like narcissism that actually do a fair amount of harm to the people on the receiving side of them. I say, you know what? You don't need to judge someone who's narcissistic. You need to learn how to set boundaries and

how to protect yourself, learn how to understand, have realistic expectations of this. So to me, it's almost like you hear a story like this. We want to judge. We want a simple, almost like a biblical interpretation. And what I really tell people, like everything's more complicated than you think.

And instead of getting so lost in the why someone does something or wanting to write them off as evil, think about yourself and what you learned about this in terms of how you interact with people who make you uncomfortable. Well, it has that great line that you said in episode one. Whenever you look at a story of evil, you're seeing the tip of the iceberg. Mm-hmm.

To go below, that's where the real story is. So I have just a couple of questions for you and then I'll launch into what some listeners have asked about some conversations that we'll have. But as far as all the cases you've ever handled, how unusual is this one?

You're going to be surprised when I say this. Not as unusual as you would think. The difference is what it culminated into. Mercifully, the most will not culminate into a place of a murder-suicide. However, Barbara, more often than not, I will tell people this is in the list of possibilities here. So you are going to have to prepare yourself. Alarms and this and everything. It's really a...

I hate to put people on edge, but I said, I don't want to be writing an epilogue to a tragedy here. I really, really don't. And so I do tell, this isn't a lot of the emotional stuff we saw. The betrayal and the intense emotional fallout from the abandonment, the back and forth dance of do we stay, do we not?

the obsessive focus on keeping the relationship together, the deceit around the infidelity, the reaching out to the employer to destroy the lover's employment.

All of this, believe it or not, when you're dealing with these kinds of personality styles is not unusual. So I think that that's where, well, like I said, I've never seen a story just like this one unfold clinically, but you better believe I have seen every single element of it.

of what we saw in this story unfold in one way or another in practice. And the fact that we had access to those recordings, to the selfie videos, I mean, this is stuff that I've never seen in my decades-long career as a journalist. How unusual was that and how helpful was that for you to analyze the story and people's motivations and feelings? So having those recordings, you know, to really...

It's one thing to read something. Like if we'd even read a transcript of those recordings, it had a very different impact. Like, you know, it's been some time since I'd even seen the original recordings and obviously not heard what we've heard, you know, on the podcast and everything.

The childlike, immature, terrified quality of the person in them. You saw this like, is this an adult woman or is this a child in an adult woman? Like it spoke to this complexity and sort of the psychological unbraiding of this person in the face of this abandonment trauma.

So that's what we got to see. But I've got to be honest with you, Barbara, as people's reliance on technology goes up, up, and up, we are going to see more and more cases where there is this library of self-made videos and self-made recordings. I think we've entered a new era of that, especially when people are so – and this was a case where we saw obsession is the word that keeps coming up over and over again. This obsessiveness can lead to this almost a person –

talking to themselves in a phone is so that's like a different version of them that it creates like the version that's being recorded is different than the person having the experience like it's a very complex experience of identity and everything. So that was unusual for its time because it's an older case.

I think we're going to start seeing that more and more. Well, I think you're right. One of my children let me know, and they're young adults, actually. I can't call them children anymore. But they let me know that there is a trend on TikTok right now where people are filming themselves crying. And that strong emotion gets people's attention. Yes. Which brings me to one of the first comments from, this came from the Apple Podcast Review. Someone, kookaburra1701, she said, Mark seemed to have a childlike view of conflict, with conflict always being bad. Yes.

Hence, in one of the interviews, he tries to paint himself as the good guy by saying he avoided conflict whenever possible. So that played a role in this, how people deal with conflict? Very few people are good at conflict. And what we have is like, think of conflict as a continuum.

A lot of people are at the low end of that continuum. They can't tolerate conflict. They will do anything. They will lie. They will deny. They will appease. They will do anything to avoid conflict. At the high end of that continuum are the people who are always gunning for a fight. What we all want to do is be in that mid-level.

And do we need to learn how to be in that mid-level? Yes, we do. Do our parents or whoever's raising us need to mirror that? We don't. Think of the modal case, the child who might have grown up watching parents argue. Watching parents argue is actually really terrifying for a lot of children because most adults don't do it well, right? Now, people who might have grown up with healthy conflict, they might have watched two parents have a disagreement.

but then talk it through and then take ownership and then come back together. Bless them. They're probably those rare mid-level conflict people. So it's okay to do that, to have conflict in front of your child. But I would say it can't involve yelling. It can't involve name calling. It certainly can't involve violence, but it can be the sort of thing of, hey, wait a minute. You said you were going to empty the dishwasher while I went. And then the person said, I didn't hear it that way. And say, let's

slow down because we did agree to this and now this is throwing off the whole evening. The child may watch this wide-eyed and then, I hate to say it, the majority of couples might escalate that, especially if they're tired or they're stressed. And so what happens is people associate conflict with

They associate conflict with abandonment. They associate conflict with, as you, as this person, as Kukabera pointed out in the comment, is we associate conflict with not being the good person. So this idea, though, that conflict can simply mean I don't agree with you and we need to come to an agreement and it's uncomfortable. So few people have been raised like

with the idea that it's safe to have conflict. And people who do have sort of immature personalities always need to be liked.

And so if you can let go, like, listen, I'm not always going to be liked. I don't want to be hated, but there's times that I may have to take an unpopular opinion. Think of a parent who's like, you're going to bed. I hate you, mom. You're going to bed, you know? And so we learn that in many roles, but the aversion to conflict is such a, it is such a dangerous spot in relationships. And I agree with this person that a mature adult, right?

learns to have healthy conflict, doesn't panic in the face of conflict, doesn't associate conflict automatically with abandonment or with the idea that they're the bad person. And in the case of this person astutely points this out about Mark, the need to be the good guy, that sort of being the personal brand is an issue. When we look back at this case, and who knows if at some very nascent level, this is something Mark was going through. I'm not convinced that if

Speaking out and making a decision earlier

would have resulted in a different outcome. It is quite conceivable, regardless of when it happened, Jenner would have had an incredibly strong and potentially aggressive and violent reaction to it. We don't know because at the end of it, it was still an abandonment. It was still a betrayal. It was still seemingly one of Jenner's greatest fears. We don't know because what complicated it is, by the time the homicide and the suicide took place,

It was so mixed up with confusion and betrayal. But again, there is always that question of no matter when it came up, was this potentially going to be the outcome? Jelena S. writes, Mark is a cowardly loser, in my opinion, and quite possibly a narcissist. He seems bizarrely obsessed about being caught between two women while showing no maturity or real empathy toward either. I believe if Mark would have learned to make a decision, stick to it,

All involved would not have been in the situation. Secrets are sick, especially when you keep them from yourself. What secrets was Mark keeping from himself? I think that he was keeping secrets from himself, like how he really felt about the marriage. That, you know, it seemed... Listen...

There's a lot of theories out there about infidelity. There really are because, again, my focus is on narcissism. I see a very specific brand of cheater. You look at other people's work that they'll have different theories on infidelity. But ultimately, something ain't working quite right. I mean, it's really, really not. And whether it reflects an issue in the personality of the cheater, the communication in the relationship, whatever.

Whatever it is, something's not going right. So I think that Mark was not able to do the work of the ambivalence around the relationship with Jenny. It's awful. It's awful to be in a marriage and feel ambivalent about it. And it is, you know, and I think a lot of people justify it in a million ways. Marriages are hard.

I can't expect this to always be this or that. And in some ways, affairs and extramarital relationships become a distraction. So you don't need to deal with the brewing problem in your marriage. But ambivalence is a really lazy way to go. And then using these kinds of workarounds and getting needs met in other places, it reflects an impulsivity, a certain lack of

discipline, an entitlement, a lack of empathy to do that, to say, oh, I've met someone at work and they're younger and they're my boss and I'm going to have an affair with them and why not? That's a lot of

gates that were walked through without thinking about, you know what I'm saying? Like every time you walk through one of those gates, it was a choice. Yeah. Well, so the secret he kept from himself was what should he have been saying in his mind at that moment? I have fallen for someone else. I need to examine my marriage. The secret would have been

Do I even want to be in my marriage? I'm completely interested in this other person. What is that telling me about my marriage? Who am I? Who am I and what am I about? What are my values that I want to, you know, that I'm considering going here? What are the ramifications of this going to be? You know, if I do this, those kinds of decisions, but basically it's the most simple decision of all,

Is this marriage working and do I still want to be in it? It's a yes or no. That's a great question. We'll take a short break here. And when we get back, Dr. Romney will tell us why she believes neither Mark nor Janair could just simply leave their relationship. That's right after this. The problem was, this is something that struck me about their relationship. And it's an issue that comes up in so many relationships.

Somebody is waiting for the other one to be the executioner. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. Nobody wants to be the one who goes on record and says, he left, she left, she left.

She walked out. She blew up the marriage, right? It's easier to have somebody else do that work. It's easy to say. I do not know what it is about our culture of marriage that somehow you're more heroic if you're on the more victimized side of it. That we look down on the person who says, this marriage is not working. I'm going to go. That person's the bad guy. I mean, Mark's interpretation of that wasn't incorrect, right?

But then the issue becomes that is a – I don't – again, I do know where that kind of ideology comes from. It's unhealthy and he fell into it. He wanted to be the good guy. So again, they kept each – the other kept waiting for the other to be the executioner.

He was honestly, in some ways, the way he was playing cat and mouse with her, I sometimes wonder if he really was waiting for that moment for Jenner to say, you know what, if this is how you feel and this is what you did, I'm out. And then Mark could go around town and say, Jenner left me. Interesting. It's a better story. Yeah. Yeah.

Kalei spray one. Mark sounds like a shitty husband, but I don't find him to be a shitty person. I truly did empathize with the husband by episode three, which I was surprised about. And that is something we've heard several times where people, you go into this thinking, oh, Janair is so hurt. She's the victim. Mark is the bad guy. Meredith is the other woman. But then you, people do have these feelings about what's, what's happened. What's the dynamic there?

Or he's engendering empathy. Part of what we saw in the podcast, part of what I experienced even as I read all the information was this was a man who felt like he was between a rock and a hard place, recognized Janair's fragility, knew she was going to be hurt if he left, didn't fully want to hurt her, and then she started getting more obsessive.

you know, that her behavior started becoming more and more problematic. And so now they felt like, I think some people viewed him as sort of imprisoned in this situation with this really, really difficult person. And anyone who listened to that podcast, who's had any kind of a human relationship, maybe not even a marriage, but a friendship,

or family relationship, anything, with a person who was getting obsessive and manipulative in the way it was happening in that story has some empathy for that. You know, they're saying like, okay, this guy was trying to do something impossible. And by the time you're getting into episode three, episode four, it was very clear that, and again, I really believe this, that a choice, any choice he made at that point was already heading towards potentially disastrous consequences. Yeah.

You know, you could see the shift in her mental state. And it was starting to feel more and more unstable. And I think he thought he could manage it. It's so interesting. There is a point, like in a script, it would be the dark night of the soul is what they call it. But there was a point where Janair, who had been speaking to people online, who had been speaking to anybody who would listen, to friends, old friends who would call up,

She told them so much. She had a divorce coach. She had a therapist. She would say, Mark's a bad guy. I feel awful. She told a friend, I feel like killing myself. She sent a friend a photo of her being on top of the building, ready to jump off. But yet she never talked to people about it.

Yeah.

I hate to use the word evil, right? To me, that's not precise enough. I think it speaks to, though, that the act of killing Meredith wasn't an impulsive crazed act. It wasn't that by any stretch.

That ability to do two things at the same time, like you described, to portray oneself as a victim, as a person wronged, as a wonderful person who's putting up with this horrible man, right? The story sells, right? You talk about someone cheating, you become the hero, like, oh my gosh, you poor thing.

Then having these sorts of murderous thoughts and knowing not to share those, but knowing to share the others. It's too intentional. It's too calculating. Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for, calculating. And so that then speaks to a – like –

You know, it's funny. You're using the word narcissism, right? When we talk about narcissistic defenses, all right, when we talk about narcissistic defenses, one thing that's very notorious about that pattern is the ability to know what to say and what not to say. So your public image looks just right. A person who was fully dysregulated, fully chaotic would be saying, I've been wronged and he cheated on me.

Like all of that would be coming out in the same torrent. That ability to control it here, but put out a certain brand, you know, those are, that's a great example of a narcissistic defense. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, yeah. Somebody at Carly asked the fibroids that she had in the surgery, the low level pain, is that a contributing factor to someone's mental decline?

You know, again, when we look at mental decline, we're definitely looking at something that is such a multi-determined picture, right? When we look at any mental health issue known to, with the exception maybe of something like schizophrenia and even there, it's very nuanced, is that the number of things

that contribute to a person having any form of psychiatric or mental health decline. It's part of a hypothesis, yes. And I think it's even more subtle than that. It's not just the low-grade pain that accompany the fibroids. One could even argue that fibroids are a gynecologic complication. It impacts a sense of womanhood. It impacts hormones. So there's a biological element to it. So there's

perceptual pieces to it. It's where it is in the body. It is a, and it's the pain. When I would say that it would really depend on how severe a person's pain is. We definitely, chronic pain is associated with a greater likelihood of, for example, of depression and anxiety. We know that. That's been established. Yeah.

In and of itself, because her being sad or anxious was only a small sliver of the dysregulated picture that resulted in the videos and the audios and the smear campaign and all the things she was doing.

I think that that mental decline might have been more in the sense of despair by that, but the fibroids and the pain, not so sure that the continued dysregulation was actually, you know, was related. All of it's related, and that's the problem. You have a thousand pathways leading to one destination. The real difficult part is which of those pathways are stronger than the others.

This is from an anonymous comment. How redeemable is Mark Gerardo? Will he ever get past this? Is it possible that when he says his only motive in telling this story and writing a book is to help others? So,

Listen, none of us can fully get into Mark's mind, right? When we talk about redemption, everybody wants the redemption story. And the question is, what does redemption really mean in this? What does it mean? Does it mean he never does this to anyone again? Does it mean that his level of empathy has gone up? Does it mean that his ability to be transparent in human relationships has increased? No.

That, to me, would be in the direction of a form of redemption. The profits he's making are going to help people. That's a redemption. So I think that...

When we think about redemption, there's an overt redemption and there's an internal redemption. The overt redemption is what the person does in the real world. Are you changing your behavior? Are you a nicer person? Are you more charitable? Are you conducting your life in a way that people can observe that you're a transparent, empathic person of integrity? Overt.

the internal, if you even want to call it the covert elements of redemption are, are those processes changing inside? You know, is there that sense of, I don't, I don't care if I'm the good person, a good guy anymore. I don't have to be that person anymore. I'm just going to go through the world. Honestly, you know, has that process changed inside? The only person who can answer that fully is Mark. And even for all of us, it really depends on how good our self reflective capacity is, is to say, yeah, I know what motivates me, or I see that this has changed.

He's the only one who has that answer. We're going to take a short break here. And when we get back, I want to ask you, one of our listeners wants to know about the physical relationship between Mark and Meredith and the fact that he said it wasn't as often as people would have thought. We'll be taking a quick break and come right back.

Okay. We're back with Dr. Ramani Jervasala. And it is okay that we call you Dr. Ramani, right? Of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what people commonly call me, yeah. Familiarity is earned and also respectful. I appreciate that. So here's a question somebody had about the physical relationship. And it's interesting that they noticed this little nuance. You think of an affair. You think people are just having sex all the time, you know.

Mark said on several occasions, and what little confirmation I could find, it does seem to be accurate that he and Meredith didn't have, it wasn't a crazy physical relationship. He said they only had sex a few times. He was almost 50. She was in her early 30s. She was in her prime. He's getting older. Did that have anything to do with his hesitancy to leave Jenea and go to Meredith?

You know, I think that what's interesting, we forget about extramarital affairs or any form of infidelity. It takes many different forms, right? And this is an interesting research out there that shows that in a heterosexual relationship, when a woman is – when a man is – when the husband or man is cheating on – is the one who's cheating –

Women are more put off by the emotional elements of the infidelity than they are about the sexual. Like it's as though a person can get their head around a one night stand, but not around the day in, day out communication, in essence, falling in love.

it's hard to know. I, I never read the way I read the case. Wasn't that there was this ambivalence that Mark felt he couldn't keep up with Meredith. I think that it was, I mean, remember, I think that the agony of being the, the other person, the scorned person in an affair is to know how delightful it is to fall in love with someone new, right? And that your partner is going through that experience. Well,

with somebody else is that emotional piece. And that really seemed to take a toll on Janair, if I recall. It did. And interestingly, she was able to forgive when he was younger, when he went on a business trip, she was able to forgive that one night weekend fling. Yes. But this was different. Yes, it was different because it was a relationship. So the frequency of the sex is

is, again, I think that that's a trope that extramarital affairs are people going to hotels and lingerie and champagne bottles and it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I don't think it's that. I think it's actually this idea that somebody who's in a committed relationship has become deeply

emotionally entangled with someone else. Like I said, that was really a big part of sort of Jenner's unraveling and his unwillingness to admit the depth of what that was with Meredith. I think anything that was sort of his ambivalence, I still hold to is this idea of him having to be the good guy and not wanting to be the executioner. Yeah, yeah. Well said.

Scorpion CYM. I too was fixated on relationships. Also having recently ended a relationship partially because I was getting cheated. I was getting cheating and lying vibes. And yes, I took them back after similar issues early on.

What was missing in Janair's makeup in her...

in her thinking, in the help that she was getting, people were telling her she was going to be fine. She couldn't hear that. Why? Because I do think that there were very deep-seated issues for Janair around abandonment. I think so much of her identity was locked into that relationship. She derived her identity from being married to Mark. She'd almost crafted a very childlike love story around the whole thing, and she stuck with it.

Right. I mean, everyone has their sort of Disney moment, maybe when they meet someone new, but the Disney moment gets replaced with dishwashers and all the other stuff and all the problems and the stuff and the regular, you know, stuff of life. But she really got caught in that. And I do think that Jenner's identity was I am Mark's wife.

This is not from a listener, but it just brought this to mind. This question came to mind. If generic – because she didn't have a job. She was feeling horrible about herself and getting older. If she had had a job, if she had had good self-esteem, if she had had children along the way and had that –

Would this story have – could this story have ended the same way? Very likely it would have because that would have implied a different psychological organization to her. Remember, and it's not that – I'm not saying that just because a person has a job that all of a sudden they're psychologically healthy. If she had a job, if she had children, if she had other sources of meaning and purpose and she was able to regulate her emotions and have –

and be able to tolerate the stress and frustration of disappointment and have a stronger sense of self and identity that wasn't solely defined by her marriage, yes. And that ability then to maintain those other identities of, for example, having a career, being a mother, those other identities would have created an identity outside of the marriage, but she didn't have that. This comment, though, actually brings up something very interesting about the podcast I hadn't thought about.

When somebody listens to a podcast like this, and it came out in this person's comment, there's what we call a vicarious identification with the story, meaning that we put ourselves in the story. And someone like this person who said, you know, at some point I chose dignity. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. People were almost looking to Janair wanting to shake her like, girl, get out, you know? And there is this, when you get vicariously identified with a person, especially a person who's victimized or betrayed in a story, you

You want them to be that hopeful person when it goes the other way and it's actually quite dire and dark and defeatist and despairing. It's a bummer. You know, you want we that's what people were rooting for. Is that like, yeah, bad things happen. But like, you know, go out there, be the warrior, like, you know, take your half out of the middle. You show him, you know, the fantasy being that someone does that to you. You leave you. You lose the weight. You get the makeover. You look fantastic.

fabulous. You make a lot of money. That's the happy ending, right? That you're like a badass at the end. So it's that I can imagine that many listeners, especially listeners who had been through infidelity and were watching this are like, leave, like screaming at whatever device they were listening to. And so, but I think that she just derived

all of her identity. And this is the danger. This is where this podcast is a cautionary tale, that one should never derive their identity from another human being. And when that happens, you are on very treacherous territory. Well, and interestingly, one of the most important things I think that you said during the podcast was when I was interviewing you, I said, I

Don't you just want to go back in time and shake Janaire or something? And you said, no, she didn't need that. What she needed was a place to feel safe. Yes. Yes. And that was her to feel safe and feel safe with herself. Right. The greatest human victory that any human being can have is to create an absolute sense of safety and comfort within themselves so that other people become merely an enhancement and not a necessity.

Well said. Let's talk about the last words Janair said after she killed Meredith. She called someone that she knew in the apartment complex, not even a really good friend, and she said, I've done a bad thing. And we're assuming that that was the timeline. Maybe she – we don't know, but that's the assumption. So she says, I've done a bad thing and hangs up. Is there any psychological aspect of that that's intriguing to you? Is it just –

Why is she telling someone that she's done a bad thing? She's done it. She's got it. She's on a mission. What did that mean? Or did it mean anything? Did it signify any kind of... If I were to hypothesize, and I'm spitballing here. Yeah.

So it's a couple of things. The first thing that comes to mind is a strange release of tension. Right. So when a person engages in or has experiences, emotional states that are at odds with who they are. Right. Whatever it is, frustrates us, angers us is, you know, again, she's not she's not a murderer. She's a serial killer. There's this tension that builds up in a person.

And that's why we get confessions out of people. They just want to release that tension. And in this case, I think it was a tension reduction because she knew what she was going to do next. Yeah.

She is not a remorseless person. That's not how I read the case. That's not, it didn't have that feel. She felt very fragile, very despairing, you know, psychologically quite immature, very dysregulated, but had these narcissistic defenses where she had to look like the hero and he had to look like the bad guy and all of that. So it was complicated. The adult-like parts of her were very antagonistic and

And a lot of her was quite childlike. But I wasn't getting the read on this of I am a, you know, I'm a remorseless, heartless killer, right? And so part of it, too, is to do something that's so foreign to what a person's character is. Most of us, if we even committed a small crime, let alone a big one,

crime would not be able to hold that secret for long. The tension would build up enough in such a way that we would come clean. You just described the reason why one listener said, I don't know who to root for here, but yet I can't stop listening. It's a fascinating case. And usually in a story, you want to root for somebody. And that person went on to say they ended up rooting for the cat, Gypsy. Oh, yeah. Always root for the cat. Janara was asking in her suicide letter for people to take the cat out. Right.

Was that any kind of a psychological –

It felt a little... Misfire? It felt a bit more like this self-righteous, victimized identity she was creating. The cat, you know, the cat left in the care of Mark or someone else. It could never be as great as it was with her. She was the only one who could adequately care for the cat, you know. And so it did feel like almost like this strange kind of martyred identity that you could ask someone to harm an innocent animal, your innocent animal at that. Yeah. And...

because as though she was the only one. Like I said, that victim identity for her, that idea of I'm the one who suffered, look what a bad guy, that definitely, it was there, episode three, episode four, like, you know, there was that kind of, that sort of self-righteous stance. Again, that's something we see as part of a narcissistic defense. Well, and it was when I read that suicide letter for the first time, you know, you hear the pain, you hear the sorrow, and you can understand it. But when I got to the part with the cat, that's where I thought, oh, this is where she really went off the deep end, because this is

Makes no sense in any realm other than a narcissistic. Yeah, it is. It's very self-righteous. Like, you know, this cat can't live with all of you bad people or with Mark who's a bad guy, you know, rather than – and it shows – and it's interesting. I never thought of it this way.

The poor boundaries. Okay. So when I say boundaries, I don't mean just like don't come in my house. I mean boundaries, like human boundaries. She was entirely enmeshed with Mark. She didn't know where she ended and Mark began, right? That's not an adult relationship. The only time our boundaries should be that poor is when we're an infant. And the whole idea of infancy and toddlerhood is to create our separated boundaries from our adult caregivers. Okay.

The boundaries just didn't exist. So the idea that Mark may be going away meant she no longer existed. So it was almost like that. Does that make sense? She was going to destroy the thing that took him away and she was going to destroy herself. The wanting to destroy the cat was probably the only other beloved creature in her life. The poorest boundaries between her and the animal. It's interesting. She didn't. And thank goodness. I'm a huge cat person. So the idea that somebody could harm a cat is it would it would have been too much for me. But she...

that she didn't harm the cat to me was interesting, but then still that porous boundary of like, but the cat has to go. And maybe just didn't have, you know, again, Meredith was viewed as a, you know, as a perpetrator to her and not the cat. So she was able to, she was able to probably come up with a narrative around why Meredith needed to be destroyed, but not the cat. She didn't want to be the one responsible. And it is just so interesting. A lot of listeners responded to that moment in a suicide letter about her wanting to

Was it more that she wanted the cat to be with her or that she didn't trust the world that it was too hard for the cat? It was, yeah, the world's a terrible place. I'm the only one who could take care of the cat. Like, you know, take, save the cat from the terrible world kind of, you know, mentality. Yeah. Hence the title of episode six, Save the Cat. All right. A couple more questions here. And then we have something very unusual that's going to be happening in the next moment.

bonus episode. We'll talk about that in a second. It says here, narcissistic, Dr. Romney mentioned narcissistic tendencies in both Mark and Janair. Is narcissism necessarily a bad thing? Like, is that trait bad? Mm-hmm.

Some people talk about something called healthy narcissism. I don't care for the term because narcissism at its core is a personality style characterized by feelings of inadequacy, lack of or inconsistent empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, arrogance, dysregulated emotion, sensitivity to criticism. None of that's healthy.

I think when people say healthy narcissism, what they mean is somebody who may have a strong sense of self, who may be capable of self-advocacy, who may be assertive. Then use those words.

Don't call it narcissism because narcissism is a big bucket word, right? Like any word, like love, right? There's a lot of things that come into that bucket. So because most of the narcissistic bucket is an unhealthy personality style that not only is not good for the person who has it, it's also not good for the people who are in the wake of it. It's really hard for me to get behind this idea of narcissism is healthy. It's interesting. Like I said, pieces of their story, the...

Adult parts of Jen-Air, like the ability to...

talk about, you know, how difficult her story is, but then not put out to the world how damaged and despairing she felt that that that was her narcissistic defense. Right. That would shore a person up for a minute. And so those were her sort of most, I don't know, advanced parts of her. But even that wasn't healthy. It was very two faced. It was very mask like. So I don't I mean, I cannot get around this term healthy narcissism.

because it's not. And it's a...

It's an inherently unhealthy pattern. It's interesting. I talked with Mark after the first episode aired and he was normally very talkative and he was in a weird position and he wasn't talking and I asked him what was wrong and he said he was bothered. He was rattled a little bit about some of the things that he was hearing. He hadn't heard all of the tapes, hadn't really heard the letter being read like that, so that was shocking. But he also, it bothered him that

some narcissistic tendencies in him. So we are going to ask, we've asked you if it's okay that we bring Mark in here and we'll talk to him about that and we'll unpack some of that stuff. Thank you for doing that. And I want to leave you in this episode with something just for you. They said, I'm hooked on this podcast. It's so good. It's so tragic and fascinating. I'm a mental health clinician who is obsessed with criminal profiling and personality disorders and

And I am a major fangirl of Dr. Romney. When I heard her name, I let out an audible scream. Thank you. Poverty. Thank you. I'm so flattered and honored, really. Thank you. And we feel the same. You're just a treasure and a brilliant mind. And yeah, we had tried to have you and Mark in the room together before when we started with the interviews. That didn't happen for various reasons, levels of discomfort. It is going to happen now. We're looking forward to that. Thank you. Thank you. And join us for the next bonus episode.