#139. Ehren Dorsey: The Psychological Tactics Of Sexual Predators Online

Porn is changing. And so when we're talking about what kids are being groomed with, what is becoming normal, a child's first sexual experience is through the internet. We're not talking about seeing boobs, we're talking about them potentially stumbling upon insanely graphic material that even normal adult people from a fairly sheltered background also might not be able to process.

My name is Benoit Kim, an independent thinker turned psychotherapist. Erin Dorsey is a survivor of online grooming, ex supermodel, and the founder of Red Circle Project, a stop trafficking project to educate the public about the insidious nature of online grooming and how to properly protect our children from predatory acts. Erin was groomed by a predator online from age 13 to 16, using psychological tactics of online grooming and intentional porn desensitization. In 2022, Erin helped testify in Missouri Senatoring to pass the Protect Young Minds Online act to protect other children from intentional porn exposure and online grooming tactics she herself fell prey to 20 years ago.

You can expect to learn about online grooming, how predators find victims online, how sex trafficking works, healthy individuation process and emotional development, what healthy emotional intimacy truly looks like, and much, much more before the episode. Here is the sponsor of the week. Hi, I'm David Freudberg, host of the Humankind on Public Radio podcast.

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Please join us for the Humankind on Public Radio Podcast. Now please enjoy this thought provoking and extremely important conversation with Erin Dorsey. Discover More is a show for independent thinkers by independent thinkers.

Erin, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. I learned from your 2022 Senate hearing testimony for Protect Young Minds online act that the sex trafficking industry is now $150,000,000,000.

That's 150,000 million dollars, because I think we get loose with dollars amount nowadays. And according to the testimony of sexual assaults nurse examiners in Missouri, that over 40% of predators of children are children themselves between age of ten and 14 because of the exposures of porn and denormalizations of certain explicit behaviors. And we'll offer you to take this from here by starting from the macro and leading into some of the important discussions we'll be having today.

There's a lot of misconceptions about trafficking and what that means. Trafficking is essentially extortion, but extortion can happen in many different forms. And even that number that you listed, the 150,000,000 or billion, it's hard to even know exactly how much money actually is involved in what is essentially the industry because so many people are beginning to traffic themselves as well.

It's not always just a predator or a pimp and a person and money and physical abduction. This has changed drastically over the years because of technology and also our exposure to porn and how we as a society are becoming desensitized to so many inappropriate things. Two statistics that I did want to share just to show how maybe people aren't aware of the issues going on right now.

There is an organization called the Internet Watch Foundation. They're based out of the UK. They're a non for profit.

Their job is to remove child sexual abuse content off the internet. And so they also are able to file these yearly reports for what they've seen, what trends they have seen. And for 2021, they saw a three fold increase in self generated content from seven to ten year olds.

That's incredibly young to be doing self generated content that's people children uploading their own sexually graphic images. And then in 2022, they actually saw a 137% increase in imagery featuring boys. So the landscape of all of this is changing.

The other thing that I see people misunderstanding about trafficking is that, again, like I touched on the physical abduction with cell phones. You don't need to do that anymore. There's lots of ways for children to meet predators online and for those predators to engage in conversations with them to where eventually the child is seduced enough that they are convinced to send a picture of themselves.

And with that picture, the child can be blackmailed and held hostage in a relationship that they no longer want to engage in, where that pimp or predator can continue to receive more and more images from the child and sell those images online. So that's just one way that trafficking can occur and exploitation can occur. And what I call it really is the kidnapping of the mind.

There's trafficking and then there's grooming. And grooming is really the kidnapping of the mind. And you don't need the body to do that, especially with technology.

You have the mind right there. And once you have the mind, the body follows. So according to the latest neurobiology research, that for at least boys or girls or men and women, men's brain don't fully develop until age 25, and for women is about 21 to 23 because women's brain develop a little bit more mature and sooner than men.

So is it true that only children are vulnerable for such predatory acts or is that a fallacy? I would definitely call that a fallacy. I think the idea that one vulnerability you can have is just innocence, a lack of education, right? It's not just having a brain that isn't fully developed. That is absolutely a vulnerability as well.

That's one reason children cannot consent to things is because you don't have the ability to information gather to where you can make informed consensual decisions. But I also see adults walking around who are completely innocent in areas in regards to predators and exploitation and they have no idea that they're engaging in predatory lifestyles. Not meaning that they're a predator, but they're existing within predatory lifestyles where they're engaging in behavior that makes them vulnerable to being exploited all the time on a daily basis.

And it really is all around us in a lot of ways. But yeah, you can be absolutely vulnerable. And if you're groomed at a young age, your ability to learn how to consent to things, to learn how to care about your own needs, becomes significantly handicapped.

And it's almost like a weakened muscle that others around you might be strengthening. But during that time where you should have been growing it, it was being handicapped and hindered by a predator. It's almost like the operational point of your decisions and your understanding is very distorted and changed.

So, for example, as you said, if you never been groomed online like yourself, from age 13 to 16, you go through the air, quote, normal trajectory of growth, emotionally, physically, sexually. But then if you've been groomed online, as you talked about by predators, the starting point in the operational process changes it's almost not forever. But there's a study of epigenetics, right? The change of your DNA expressions based on your environmental feedback without necessarily changing the DNA genomes, which is the genes that's the genetics.

And epigenetics is a change of that. But I think that's another example to show that certain experiences, traumatic or otherwise, when you're young, really has this far reaching implications emotionally and mentally for many years to come. Yeah, I think that's where I kind of enter the conversations a lot.

Know Russ, the man that I work with, who is the founder of the Soft Trafficking project, he is all about preventative work, going into schools to talk to kids in an attempt to end it before it starts. But if you are not able to end it before it starts, I think a lot of us like a rescue story, a success story, but let's say you rescue the child. I got away from my predator, he was put in prison.

But where was I left with myself? And where I really see there being a lack of conversation sometimes is really in this idea that I almost call addiction to abuse. There's a lot of shame and secrecy that can be involved with survivors of abuse because the thing that can be the most shameful for us to admit is that we actually miss our abuser. And that might sound insane to some people, but abuse is a complex and nuanced thing.

It's not all bad. If it was all bad, you would never do it. There has to be some good that existed as well.

And so that aspect that I see with a lot of girls I meet who are survivors of trafficking or assault, that's a conversation that we have a lot that we are not always able to have with people on the more surface level of society because it is embarrassing. I love talking about nuances, even though people doesn't like complexity nowadays, right? That's like the narrative fallacy. Oh, if I can explain everything in hindsight, life must operate that simply not so much.

But I would love to create a space for you, Aaron, to unpack the nuances in terms of why certain people grow sentiment or attachment towards abusers. Because as you talked about, feeling something for abusers sounds pretty crazy for most people. So what is the psychological implications behind that? Or just what have you learned from your own experience and your advocacy work so far? Whoever we're talking about, predator, pimp, whoever it is, they have to draw you in.

And I heard a quote from a pimp one time, not a direct pimp, but online I read one that said that I am whatever they need. If they need a father, I become a father. If they need shoes, I buy them shoes.

If they want a boyfriend, I become a boyfriend. These people are shapeshifters, and I don't want to put them in a box of like, these people versus us, but for the people that I'm talking about, they are shapeshifters. And they're very good at casing people, at reading their indicators, reading their tells, and then shifting into the version of themselves that they need to be to attract you.

If they can't attract you, how are they going to get what they need from you? And so that is the first step, is becoming something so attractive and so lovely and almost your first experience sometimes for younger kids, their first experience in what feels like love, that why would you not want to give that person everything that you have? When we talk about trafficking, I don't think it occurs to people that sometimes people don't even know that they've been trafficked. If your boyfriend is the person trafficking you and you're giving your body away out of your love for him, you probably wouldn't call that trafficking, right? You would just call that something that you're doing for your boyfriend, even if he's making money from it. You wouldn't call that trafficking.

But that is what it is. That is what's going on. If you're talking about the fact that kids who give themselves away in order to get food, survival, sex, they probably wouldn't consider that trafficking.

That's just something they're doing to survive. There's so many ways that this can be existing and people don't even know that it's happening. So for that first stage, they tend to pretend to be a lover of sorts.

Oftentimes for girls. I know this is a common approach for boys, it's that they are shown they feel like they're talking to a girl, oftentimes it's actually a man, and then an image is sent to them of a girl and they say, you should send one back. And then that's why they end up engaging and getting exploited.

There's so many different ways this can happen, but there is a very beautiful honeymoon stage that occurs that you miss and you're constantly trying to get back and you get glimpses of it sometimes, usually when you're trying to leave. So there's the initial personality and then they become someone else and it's hard to believe that's who they are now. You think, oh, it must have been the first person, and this new person is the stranger, this new person is the abnormality, and you're constantly trying to get back to the first one, and then they'll show glimpses of it when you're trying to leave, and you go, there it is again.

Okay, I'm getting it back. And that kind of keeps you hostage in that merry go round cycle of abuse. My brain's going somewhere weird, but I'm seeing some throw lines between this and even domestic violence or certain toxic relationship dynamics.

And even if you look at DSM Five diagnostic manual, we tend to pathologize victims, but we never really talk about the offenders or predators. And I feel like even talking about sex trafficking, online grooming, porn, whatever, we often talk about, oh, it's a woman, it's their fault, maybe they had daddy issues. Even though that's a real psychological phenomenon with attachment, primary attachment theory, and they never really examined the perpetrators.

Right. But in this sense, I think we need to create a more balanced discussion about yes, we need to examine the psychological situations of the victims, but why aren't we talking about perpetrators and offenders as much? Yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think we put bad people in a box so that they can feel different from us, so that we might feel less threatened by any similarities that we see to them, when in fact people are nuanced, people aren't black and white, people aren't labels.

Right? And actually this idea of black and white thinking splitting is very common in abusive situations in general. And I hear a lot of people talk about it, like, oh, splitting is something that they do. It's not something I do.

But that actually is one of the most common characteristics that I saw in myself and in other girls that I meet who are survivors is that we tend to have very black and white thinking because whether we were indoctrinated into that or we just picked it up from being around it, we learned to think like them. And sort of the chicken before the egg sometimes with this stuff. But I think a lot of times, especially for victims, the abuser is so hated by society that I see it with victims, where they're like, well, I don't want to admit any similarities that I have to them because everyone hates them so much and everyone loves me so much as the victim.

I don't want to lose that love. Right, but then you get into a tricky place where you're almost hiding behind an image. You're almost trying to avoid accountability, just like your abuser did, right? And so the intentions are different, but the behaviors can be very much the same, can become the same.

And that's where you really have to do inner examination after you leave a situation to say, what tools did I pick up from them that maybe I don't want in my toolbox that helped me survive, but now that I'm out of it, really are not healthy. It's like the idea that when bad things happen to us, since people have this illusions that we have a grip over reality, oh, I control life if I think this way. And of course, life is not linear by any means in that sense.

I do want to get more specific in terms of the tactics because you talked about your own experiences, and we'll definitely go into that. But aside from the idea that hurt people, hurt people when you talked about, even if you don't want to embody certain behaviors, that's the only primed examples and role modeling you've seen. So you going to restate that or have that exact same behaviors, and that cycle continues.

But that aside, I do want to go into more into the details of online grooming tactics. Whether some of the patterns that you've seen that you fell prey to 20 years ago or even through a lot of your advocacy work now, that some of the patterns, whether it's evolved over time or some of the big thread lines that we can really create an educational space for. Yeah.

So to touch on kind of both at the same time, I'll start with my story a little bit first. My story is almost 20 years old, which is so crazy to think about. I had a flip phone, and there were free trials for chat rooms on the flip phone.

So even 20 years ago, I went into these chat rooms because I was lonely, because I was vulnerable, and I wanted some kind of attention from someone. And I met a man who was I didn't realize it at the time, but he was 32 years old, and he had just gotten out of prison for actually having assaulted another young girl. And so we started talking.

And addiction and abuse can have very similar themes, and one of those is shame and secrets. And Russ talks about that a lot when he goes into schools and he talks to children. He tells know, you don't want to learn to be a secret keeper.

And you don't want to keep secrets just because you feel ashamed that you saw something, heard something, experienced something. Secrets keep us sick. When I started talking to him, it turned inappropriate very quickly.

But I felt shame about that. And so my shame made me start keeping secrets. And that sort of became the theme in our relationship.

And I see that with a lot of kids nowadays as well. The internet has changed, but the tactics of these people are still exactly the same. They always have, and I think they always will be in some ways.

And so these kids start speaking to someone that's making them feel good. They start getting these sort of classic terms like love bombed, things like that. They get this overwhelmingly beautiful experience that's essentially a mirage.

And after talking to my predator for a period of time, I can't remember it was a few months in that he sent me my first porn video. And I remember when I watched it, it wasn't like normal porn, it was graphic porn. And it made me withdraw.

It made me feel so afraid and uncomfortable. But instead of thinking, oh, there's something wrong with them, they were the adults, I was the child. And so I assumed there must have been something wrong with me because I didn't like what I was seeing and I didn't know why I didn't like what I was seeing.

I should be. And instead of being able to go to my parents to process those feelings, I turned to this man instead. And he let me know that that meant that I might be a lesbian, because normal straight girls don't react to things like that that way.

I should have liked it. And so, just like with me, I see with kids nowadays that this idea of breaking you down, of convincing you that there's something wrong with you so that you need them more, is also a piece of what's going on. So if they can't literally blackmail you, there's this kind of dependence building that happens.

And so he sort of became the narrator in my life. He became the person who I turned to for my identity to understand who I was. And he indoctrinated me with porn.

And a lot of kids nowadays, they are also being groomed with porn. This is a very common tool that's used by predators. Not that the conversation has been heavy enough.

We're really going to get into the meats and potatoes. And I do want to zoom in on the porn desensitization tactic they used to you and many others, even now you said this during our qualitative process. Many people are having their first sexual experience through porn now instead of with a person, especially with children.

Right. You talked about the increase of three fold and 140% increase with children aged seven to ten uploading their own sexual acts online. That is insane to me.

And you talked about if the porn makes you deeply uncomfortable and traumatized, how is that also not a version of molestation, in a sense, which is what you went through? I never thought about the vicarious trauma perspective from porn exposure for children who are not cognitively prepared to process what you're seeing. And in addition to that, you got gaslighted by the perpetrator. Oh, you must be a lesbian.

Normal girls who are heterosexual must enjoy this type of content. Can you elaborate this in terms of everything we just discussed? Yes. So I think when people think of porn just to talk about that first, it's important to define things sometimes, because we can all be using the same word but actually be meaning different things by them.

And so when I say know porn is not what it used to be, it's not your grandpa's Playboy magazines, which I see people say a lot. And it's funny, right? But when you really look at porn nowadays, this is another statistic from the Internet Watch Foundation, that category a child sexual abuse content, which is essentially content that involves bestiality actual penetration going on and sometimes Satanism. That type of content is now 20% of what they are seeing in what is being reported to them.

Porn is changing. And so when we're talking about what kids are being groomed with, what is becoming normal? A child's first sexual experience is through the internet. We're not talking about seeing boobs.

We're talking about them potentially stumbling upon insanely graphic material that even normal adult people from a fairly sheltered background also might not be able to process. And what kids are doing with this because they are too young, with an unformed, not fully formed brain, they're witnessing something that they don't know how to process, they don't know how to understand, and they're now starting to assault one another because they don't even understand that what they're doing is assaulting someone. Sometimes when I was raped, I didn't even think that I had been raped because everything that I experienced I had already seen in a porn video, all of those elements matched up.

And I said, well, this is what adults do. If my first sexual experience in real life, in person somehow tends to make me uncomfortable, well, my needs don't really matter that much as a woman anyway, from the content that he had been sending me, at least. And so you see how this tool really primes children to not really have an opportunity to understand love free from sex first and also not even understand sex in perhaps the more normal, mainstream way that many of us have had the opportunity to be exposed to first.

That's like a microcosm of echo chamber, right, where even adults who are highly educated, you have PhD, doctorate, healthy attachment upbringings, you still fade prey to echo chamber. Look at Silicon Valley and you can extrapolate towards children, right, if you're getting raped at age 13. But rape will never cross your mind, because as you said, that's what you saw, oh, this makes sense.

This is aligned and consistent with the materials I've been exposed to. And I do want to go in to talk about porn addiction very briefly because as a psychotherapist, I truly understand not just the psychological implications of porn addictions, but why it is hard to stop. Because porn addiction isn't just watching a porn incessantly.

Just because you watch porn twelve times a week. That doesn't make you a porn addict. Porn addiction, it escalates.

You start from a very mellow and mild content, and you go up to higher and higher level of graphic level. Right. And you go to Bcality, and then through this iterations when you stop and you realize, holy crap, I'm watching some crazy stuff that I couldn't even fathom or even enjoyed maybe two years ago.

And it's this iteration process that we forget unless you really pause and reflect. Otherwise, most people don't have the ability to snap out of their system one thinking, right? Daniel Kogaman thinking fast and slow because all of us have two systems. The one that's instant and instinctive, and the one that you have to be more deliberate and slow down.

Like doing math problems 14 times 16. You can't just spit that out. But I see this on like a very societal level where you apply this to so many other fields even beyond our discussion.

It's pretty crazy if we really unpack this. Yeah, I think the other thing that happens in porn addiction that people don't always talk about is know, people end up hiring prostitutes because they want to see the fantasies that they've been ingesting for so long. They want to finally experience that.

And one thing that russ has educated me on that I was not aware of is that there are a significant amount of prostitutes know, they experience and incur traumatic brain injuries so substantial that sometimes they're worse than war. Veterans because of the ways that they are being assaulted, from people who have lost the ability to have impulse control and then also are desiring things off the spectrum, essentially, and sometimes become frustrated from a person that they hired not being able to fulfill those desires. So I think that's another aspect to it that people don't always want to talk about.

It makes them uncomfortable, but that can go that direction as well. And more and more people nowadays really do remind me of an addict. We're all addicted to different things, but I think a lot of us are displaying addict like behaviors.

And that can be discouraging sometimes, but there is hope. But I heard a person say one time that, you know, addiction is present because contradictions exist. And I really see that a lot in society nowadays where people are saying they want one thing and I think they genuinely mean it, but their actions are saying another, and their lifestyle is saying another.

And that's really where people remind me of more. So my old self the most. I talked about this a while ago on the podcast, but it's the idea that awareness without action becomes a burden.

If you're aware of certain maladaptive or problematic behaviors because of your self awareness, yet you don't want to do anything about it because addiction is a neurobiological disease. It's a brain disease. Right.

It's a change of patterns in your brain. And because if you're aware of it but you're not doing something about it, you feel guilty. Going full circle to how we started these conversations that over time that guilt becomes shame.

Dr. Brene Brown's Research. Guilt versus shame.

Guilt is action based. Shame is identity based. And identity based is scary.

That takes years to deprogram and unconditioned. With the rise of gurus, Life coaches, all these contents, everyone's awareness on a societal level, I think is leveling up, which is a great thing. But is the level of action also rising accordingly? I don't think that's the case.

Correct. I would agree with that. And what I do see is sometimes it's because people don't know what to do, but that's not always the case.

Sometimes it's because people feel really good saying things. And the Internet provides us with this as well. Right? So much of the Internet is talk, it's words, it's videos.

You don't have to live day to day with any of those people. And so there's no accountability that really has to be had because you can sit and say a bunch of things and then go and live your life in whatever closeted manner that you want to. And that disconnect can absolutely exist there.

Yeah. And speaking of the contradictions, I do want to go personal with your own experiences, and you sort of brought this up in terms of some of the vulnerability characteristics loneliness, lack of love at home, primary attachment, issues with your primary caregivers or parents. You grew up in a very controlling and emotionally unavailable Christian households, Erin.

And I hate using the Christian because I'm a Christian. But of course there's nuances, right. Many people think that controlling their kids is the best way to protect them from outside danger.

But you and I know that is not the case. Controlling does not actually shield them from danger, necessarily. We'd love to hear your thoughts on that with your experiences and tying this to the individuation process.

And just a quick context. Individuation is an emotional and psychological development process that almost everyone needs to go through. It's how you individuate yourself, become an individual from the dynamic of your family.

And research shows that kids and people who have not gone through the individuation process because of helicopter parents or controlling parents or 1 may they actually experience significantly increased future mental health challenges anxiety, depressions, anger, because they're not taught and learned how to healthily express their urges and their emotions and. I sense some of that theme from your experiences as well, when you're talking about how it's basically the opportunity to form your own identity when the parent doesn't allow the child to do that. The way that I would summarize it in almost a different way is that my parents wanted to be the constant narrators of my life.

And so when they started to go away, I looked for someone else to replace that role, someone who I could essentially become subservient to, submissive to, who would do that for me instead, because that was my version of home. And so that did increase my likelihood of being vulnerable to a predator on top of my brain not being fully formed yet. But the other aspect to it is just that you have to understand that just because you have your child's physical body next to you, again, if we're talking about in terms of the Internet and how it's different now, my parents did everything right in that sense of keeping me safe.

I had monitored computer time. I wasn't really allowed out anywhere. And yet a predator still got into our home.

He still got into our home through my phone. And this doesn't mean throw all phones away. It's just understanding that what did he really get to? He got to my mind, right? And I didn't think that he could hurt me because my body wasn't physically next to him.

I didn't understand that he could hurt my mind so much, almost more than my body at first. And my parents didn't understand this either. If parents don't understand how predators work, how can they actually protect their children? But yeah, I do think that my parents attempts to physically control me and in a lot of ways, emotionally control me as well.

Tell me what to feel, when to feel it not really allowing me to be what I needed to be in a moment when I was upset, but instead making it about themselves in a lot of ways. Oftentimes all of that when I first encountered a predator and he really acted very similar in a lot of ways. I was like, well, seems familiar, seems right.

And not every parent who's trying to protect their child is also doing those other emotional habits. But I'm just describing my experience and once again, how it left me vulnerable. And it really didn't serve any purpose at the end because the best way to become stronger in something is to become exposed to it and then go back and have those conversations about like, okay, what did you see? And this isn't saying show all your kids porn or anything like that, but the world is out there.

They're going to experience it. And the best thing you can really do for your child is say that there is nothing you could ever do that would make me not love you. I will always love you, no matter what mistakes you make.

Because we all slip up and we all fail. And I really hope that you feel comfortable talking to me about that stuff because you will always be someone that I love. Your mistakes do not define you.

You are more than that. Yeah, we are larger than the sums of our parts. And I don't personally believe in unconditional love.

I think that's a fantasy that people strive toward, because even if it's conditional, who cares? Who cares, right? Humans are not perfect. We're not saints. People get so caught up in, oh, unconditional love.

Oh, it's who cares? If they love you, they love you, period. I think we get caught up in this idealized version of what love must look like. But in that sense, Erin, I do want to go into the systems of predator or predatory systems because you talked about it just now.

Right. It's hijacked of the mind, not necessarily the physical. So can you unpack the characteristics of predatory system that these sexual predators employ? And also, I'd love to highlight the parallels between predatory system and certain romantic relationship dynamic that we see today.

Yeah. So a lot of times what I see just to sort of talk about things more specifically, a lot of times what I look for to recognize if that's going on is whether they are, again trying to be the sole narrator in my life. They a lot of times want to isolate you and they want to make that happen.

It's so weird how these characteristics can show up on a societal level just as much as in a romantic relationship. Where I see this occur is, for example, in an abusive relationship, only the needs of the abuser matters. Your needs don't matter.

And specifically during the COVID mandates, that really reminded me of that, where it was like, no matter what choice you wanted to make for yourself, you were still a bad person if you did not make the choice that everyone else wanted you to make. And I've already had people talk to me like that my entire life. So that felt very familiar to me that no matter what my reasons were, whether it was a biological reason or a religious reason, if I didn't do it, I didn't love people.

And I've heard that so many times in abusive relationships as well. If you're not doing this thing, you don't love me. And so that really resonated with me.

And I saw a similarity. There another way is that really with a lot of these predators, because they are also sex addicts, the only way that your love can be proven is essentially through you providing sex or whatever resource it is that they're using you for whenever they ask for it. And if you don't provide that thing, again, you don't love them.

And I see that a lot in society now where we're sort of in this vacuum where movies, songs, so much material everywhere is all about sex and this kind of like love bombing experience or toxic relationship experience, but it's being kind of portrayed all the time everywhere. Even if it's from a negative aspect. Even if it's from a positive aspect.

It's like it's all that's there in front of you and there's always sex being talked about all the time. Not just love on its own, but love with sex. And so I see that really indoctrinating people in general to think of that all the time.

When you hear the word love, you think of sex with it and why to separate them out, I think is really important. Another way that I see similarities is extreme punishment or harsh labels. When you're in an abusive relationship, they really tend to break you down and put you down by giving you a lot of really just harsh labels.

You're stupid, you're not enough, you're broken, you're traumatized. Like all these different things. Well, I see that happening on a societal level as well, where we're so casually calling people toxic when we don't even know anything about them.

We're calling people racist when maybe they just aren't from an educated background and they didn't know that the word that they were saying had the connotations. People aren't asking questions anymore before just throwing these terms out there. You're a bigot, you're a killer.

Right? Yeah. Instead of really trying to examine the nuances of the stories, we just assume that we know people and throw a label on them. And that's a really dangerous thing to do.

And I've seen how that plays out in abusive relationships and it doesn't play out well because again, we're not black and white, we're gray. And those nuances exist for a reason, and that is splitting thinking. Those labels encourage splitting thinking.

Also being strictly defined by your trauma. That is such a thing that happened in my abusive relationships. It's like it's all we talked about whenever there was a problem was, oh, it's me and my trauma again.

My instinct was my trauma, but my trauma was just always coming up. It's like it was all I could think about while I was in the relationship. And I think it's so important to examine it but also move away from it and not let that be your sole identity.

And I see that nowadays in society where everybody either really wants the victim label because of the attention that it can get them, or they also are just throwing therapy diagnosis on people when they don't even know if they actually have that diagnosis, what that diagnosis even actually means. And so we're putting people in these boxes of victim or abuser, victim or narcissist, victim or psychopath. But those are the only two labels that I really hear being discussed.

And that's really dangerous. That's a really dangerous place to be in. What does it even mean to be narcissistic anyway? Can't people have narcissistic and selfish traits and not be full blown.

There isn't a time in your life where you were really selfish and you put your needs over the needs of someone else. You're going to tell me you've never done that? You really have to start looking for the similarities as well to hold yourself accountable. And then one of the last ways that I see is that just like I've talked about multiple times already, the sole narrator isolating the media and really society at large.

It's so important to not just have one sole narrator in terms of what you're ingesting for the news and for social media and all those things. It's good to have a diversified microbiome of sorts of opinions. You need to be exposing yourself to things that you're uncomfortable with.

I think it's really important. I really love the gray because life is in the gray and I love the nuances you're highlighting here. And it's really important for us to extrapolate this beyond this container because I think the phenomena of soul narrator, as you said, can be attributable for the rise of polarity, this deep chasm of hatred towards the other.

I talked about earlier, oh, you don't do this, you're a bigot. Oh, you're a racist. I was like, what? Because I disagree with you? That's crazy.

And I want to provide some more concrete examples where this may seem not related, but I'll tie this together. I used to be an early investor in Tesla many years ago. And one of the things I ensured that I was not in an echo chamber of this fanatic love for Elon Musk because I think he's like a half D 80 status, that guy.

He's once in a generation type, right? I actually looked up a lot of the anti Tesla and anti Elon Musk news purposely to cross reference my data points to make sure that it is the best investment options. And as I told you before recording, I'm a former policymaker. I worked in the city of Philadelphia, so I got very jaded by politics and policy since passing of a bill is not the same as executions or implementation of the bill.

So I don't really watch the news. But news find its way to your newsfeed and instagram social media. But I bring that up because some of the best thinkers and since the podcast is for independent thinkers, many of them, whether they're political or not, even though everything is political, there's no such thing as apolitical.

That is not a thing. Church is political. Families political.

They usually derive their source of information from CNN and Fox simultaneously. Because the truth is in the middle, right? With this sensational headline culture that we live in now. But I just wanted to really contextualize and put this on a messaging board that soul narration is not only a perpetrator tactic, we literally live in this soul narration era in America and in the world.

With the rise of TikTok, like 140 characters and I laugh out loud every time I see random Joe Schmo on TikTok giving mental health diagnostic. I was like, oh, I didn't know everyone is a psychotherapist and psychiatrist last time I checked. You need ten years of schooling.

Oh, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you just ineritably know what a joke, right? When you give out this misdeeds of diagnosis, you're really harming a lot of people. It's horrible.

Yeah, I agree. All that. So on point, we have just like you said, we have storytellers around us all the time.

You have people who go to taekwondo and boxing and there's this idea of physically being able to defend yourself, but what about being able to defend your own mind, right? How many people do examine the storytellers around them to just ask the simple question, why would they tell me that? Do they have a reason to be telling me that? Is there a reason for them to tell me that specific story in that way? Just to sort of even just ask yourself that question instead of just taking the story at face value. And I used to always take stories at face value. If you came up to me and you were fairly convincing and whatever you told me, I was probably going to believe you.

That was another handicap that I incurred from my grooming. But aside from that, I think it's so important to even just start asking yourself that question. I mean, marketing techniques, things like that, on whatever level, what subtle message could be there? And it's not to go through life like paranoid.

I kind of enjoy doing this. It's a fundal exercise for me to just ask the question, why? I have quite a few mentees given the chapters of life I'm in, and I often tell them, especially with this rise of everyone is an expert. Here's my advice, like oprah culture, do not trust the advice, but trust the person.

Because if you trust the source of the information, then I think you can through proxy of that, be more trusting of their advices that's given. Because, as you said, too many people are way too gullible or they just don't have enough resources or educations or exposure. Even with racism, a lot of these societal problems, yes, there is malicious intent and yes, there is dark forces out there.

Of course, I did an episode about psychopaths and serial killers. I work with them. Of course, I know, but a lot of time is just ignorance due to lack of exposure.

But I really love your highlight about asking more questions because I do generally believe that better questions leads to better answers. Yeah, and even what you were just talking about, how people think that they know things after having studied something for 20 minutes online that I feel like is very similar to how we view intimacy in general. You have to spend time with something to know it, to really know it.

You have to spend time with it, whether it's a good book or an entire subject or a person. And we're sort of being trained now to view intimacy as something that you can almost order. Like McDonald's, right? It's this thing that you can get really fast and it'll make you feel good.

And if it doesn't feel good, tell it to go fuck itself. You know what I mean? Because that's not love and that's not how it should be. And it's just McDonald's repackaged, essentially.

But real intimacy has roots. It has roots, and roots take time to grow. It takes time to really know anything.

And people don't want to take that time. They have difficulty taking that time now. And that's okay.

If you're going to call a spade a spade, if you're going to admit that you struggle with that, at least admit at the same time that you probably don't know what you're talking about if you really haven't spent the time with it. It's like going on a date with a person and then after that one date, calling them a narcissist. How do you know that? How are you deducing that? Yeah, even for a psychotherapist like us, it takes us one or two sessions to identify people with narcissistic personality disorders.

So if we're trained professionals and experts takes time for normal folks, it's almost impossible, right? Yeah. I really love what you talked about. I really think it's important to understand that most things, like contextualizing, takes time and preparations.

I had quite a few people tell me that. Oh, Benoit, I can tell that your episodes are probably well prepared and well researched. I can tell the rapport.

I could tell the free flow of information and conversations since this is unscripted. And I said, yeah, I spent hours preparing for the conversations, back and forth with the guest, the due diligence, the qualitative process. So you are correct.

We are able to have this conversation because it takes hours of preparations. But of course, that's a very superficial example. But yeah, relationship takes time.

It takes time to make something good. To make something good. It takes time.

It's not an instant thing. Like, so much of commercialism has taught us that good things come easy. They don't.

They just don't. Yeah, good things. It's like the fast food.

I just posted a video about fast food dating culture, like the rise of superficial relationships in the United States, which is exactly what you talked about. But speaking of taking the time, I do want to ask you something that I think it's a highlight of your healing journey. Of course, it didn't end there, but it was like the beginning or the genesis.

So when you work with FBI, Aaron, to finally put away your first predator at age 16, I want to briefly talk about that experience, since not everyone gets to work with FBI, especially on such a personal and sensitive experience. And did you learn from FBI at the time that the pervasiveness of online grooming and did you learn that was online grooming or sex trafficking or things that we talked about is actually a lot more bigger and a lot more common than you previous thought? Yeah. Again, my story is 20 years old, so some of this will sound a bit outdated, but what I essentially did is I went to a local police station, right, and they were the ones who ultimately contacted the FBI.

But after they took all of my information down, the officer walked me around to meet everybody on the team. And there were so I can't even remember, I think it was like ten or 15 police officers where what they did is they basically sat there all day long and they talked to predators pretending to be young girls in order to get enough information for a subpoena, essentially. And that's ultimately what the FBI agent that I worked with did.

As you know, these men were fathers, and to have to listen to that stuff and read that stuff and engage in that stuff all day long, I still have the utmost respect for them that they did something sacrificial like that to put people away who needed to be put away. Some of them had pictures up of the people that they were talking to, and I remembered being surprised that some of them were like my age. And I remember asking them about that, and they were just like, yeah, everybody thinks that at the time it was the old man.

That was the thing that people didn't understand. And they were like, they think it's an old man. And a lot of times we're dealing with 20 year olds.

At the time, it was 20 year olds. I'm sure it's changed even since then because my story is 20 years old, but I remember being shocked by that. And I am still also so grateful to the FBI agent that I worked with because I would tell him we would chat sometimes, and I would ask him how it was going because I had to introduce him to the person who assaulted me.

I had to pretend he was my friend so that they would chat. And I would ask him sometimes how it was going because I was really nervous. And I would tell him, I don't think he raped me.

I feel really bad about this. I feel like I'm putting maybe a guy away who just doesn't really know what he did. And he was like, okay, well, I want to show you something so that you don't have to feel that kind of guilt.

And he basically showed me a screenshot of his chat between him and the man who assaulted me, where the man who assaulted me was basically making fun of me, talking to him about how stupid I was, that I actually thought he loved me and things like that. But as upsetting as that is. It was what I needed to understand.

That was the moment where I realized I'd been raped. That was the moment. I'm still grateful that I got that information, because that also was a part of my beginning of my journey to understanding, okay, there's bad people out there who will lie to you.

And I needed to get that. I needed to understand that. So I am so grateful that he did show me that.

Wow. Once again, that's the essence of psychological tactic and warfare that makes you the victim. Doubt your own victimized experiences.

That's some powerful stuff. That's insane. Yeah.

There's so many people out there who what I struggle with is that I'm so grateful today that I'm sober and I'm in a stable enough place that I can tell my story. And what I feel really sad about is the amount of people out there survivor sisters, survivor brothers who the trauma is so deep that they can't talk about it. They can't even tell their own story because they can't even get sober or regulate themselves enough to where they can process it.

And so I am also very grateful for that today to where I even have the ability to speak on a platform like this. I want to take a soft pivot but still encompassing what we just talked about, because you just talked about you're grateful that you're in a safe space, but we know that that wasn't always the case. You actually got lost once more after you worked with FBI to arrest the first perpetrator.

So you became an internationally known model quite fast. You were on Magazine, Inc. A bunch of big, high end magazines.

But of course, that actually represents a fairly dark chapter in your life. And I want to ask you this question, Erin. How did the unprocessed accumulative trauma show up for you during your modeling years, especially with your realization that you actually walked away from modeling knowing yourself less and hating yourself more? Because I've interviewed supermodels before, actually one Melissa Tan, and we both acknowledge the dark, hyper sexualized culture that modeling represents, generally speaking.

Yeah. So I know that everyone who models has a different experience, just like anything else in life. So when I tell my story, it might not be the story that every single girl experienced.

One thing that started me off on the wrong foot was the fact that I had no money. That really impacted things. But, yeah, I essentially went from being an object to being an object, but I was used to being an object.

I was used to being dehumanized and reduced down to my body. That's pretty much what most of my conversations with the man who groomed me were like. And so, again, you go from what I call a home base to a home base to a home base, and my actual home life prepared me for a predator to feel fairly normal and then that experience.

When I entered into the modeling scene, I didn't know how to have standards for myself. I didn't know how to care about my own needs. That wasn't even a thought that really occurred to me.

What occurred to me was that I wanted to please whoever was currently in the room. And so my standards for myself, if it's based on whoever's currently in the room, that's going to fluctuate a lot. And so what that ended up doing to me was it ended up creating a lot of identity issues, not really knowing who I was even more.

It almost broke me down even more because I had that tendency to depend on other people's opinions and I couldn't please everyone. And you're not supposed to be able to please everyone. You're different from people.

There are going to be some people who don't like you. There are going to be some people who do like you. That makes sense.

But for me, living in that splitting black and white, thinking it was all or nothing, right? And I wanted to be all in and please everyone. And I ultimately was not able to do that. And that had a significant impact on my self esteem.

The other part of it that I'm not sure if everyone in what I call almost famous culture experiences, but it was very lonely. It was very lonely. I traveled all the time.

I was almost always alone. There were people that I would meet in countries who I would form such a connection with and I would finally feel like I had some version of intimacy finally developing because so much of my job was being around strangers all the time. And it's not safe to be the intimate version of yourself around a stranger.

You have to be the more artificial version of yourself. That makes sense. But when you're doing that all the time, that also made me feel like I was forgetting who I was, who the baseline version, intimate version of myself was.

And so I would meet people that I would finally start to feel like I could be more intimate with in a friendship and I would have to leave again and I would have to go to a different country. And I was just being shipped around all the time. And on top of that, I started using substances to regulate myself because I was so depressed and I didn't know how to regulate myself.

If it wasn't people regulating me in the sense of liking me, I was like, Well, I must be worthless. So I turned to substances and there was a lot there that was just very chaotic and very unhealthy. And so at the time when I quit, I really thought that I was a failure.

I really thought that I had peaked at 22 and there was nothing else in my life that I could ever do that would be substantial. I really genuinely believed that but looking back now, I'm actually very grateful that I got away from that. Because I think if you're not a strong enough person and if you don't know how to navigate that in the most effective way possible to keep yourself mentally and emotionally safe, it will eat you up and it will spit you out.

Because it is also something that is easily bored. It gives up on people easily. It wants new content all the time.

And how do you survive in that as a person? That is an experience from eleven years ago for you now, right when you quit modeling, give or take ten to eleven. But it is equally relevant, if not more relevant today. I laughed when you said almost famous culture.

Because I live in La. I have influencer and celebrities on the show. And I also got lost in that sauce because you forget that just because you associate with celebrity doesn't make you a celebrity.

That's something I had to really uproot and reground myself in the last few months. It's quite a weird emotional journey for those who just can't relate. But I do want to talk about the implications or the topic that we've been writing on in terms of this far reaching implications from certain experiences in the beginning.

And I do want to go really deep and personal, as we talked about briefly before recording about your modeling pictures that's online. And I usually don't like to re ask the questions, but I do think this is an important topic to be discussed. And what I mean by that is you talked about your body left this famous modeling life at age 22, which is eleven years ago.

But your mind still continues to be exposed to the legacy or to the decisions you made as a model. Because you're a quite public figure. At least you were.

So your pictures can be searched online. So I do want to talk about the mind body connection in terms of just because you stopped doing something, it does not mean that that decision does not have some far reaching consequences beyond your grasp. Yeah, so I think just to touch on that first part, it's just like tattoos.

You don't know who you're going to be in ten years, you don't know what you're going to think, you don't know what you're going to believe. You evolve, you change, you're supposed to. And a lot of times people think that that's not going to happen.

And so they make a lot of decisions based on this idea that I'll always feel this way, right? And I'll always be this person. And I feel like that's just kind of how young people think about stuff. But it's like, no, there really could come a day where you wish that you didn't do that.

And that didn't occur to me. But what I really tell myself now more than anything, just because somebody sees my body doesn't mean that. They actually took something from me because that is still separate from me.

I think it's really important for me now to separate my body from my mind. Again, more so for the value of myself, but also in what I allow people to take from me. Just because somebody takes a glance of my body doesn't mean that they took something from me.

And it's just the fact of the matter. That is how I feel about it. But yeah, there is a part of me now that really wishes that I had not done that, that I hadn't given so much of myself away just to please someone else, because there are repercussions for that now and it's just the fact of the matter.

So the financial motives aside, since as you know, it's not just modeling but all sectors, right, it's always the top 1% makes enough income, for the rest 99%. Generally speaking, it's known as called the Pareto Law 2080 rules, where even if you look at the natural laws in the jungles and the animal kingdom, 20% is always a predators and they have ownerships and control over 80% of prey. And you can look that across real estate, socioeconomic status, aggregated wealth.

It's the same phenomenon. It's called the Pareto law. That aside, I do want to go into this topic that you're really passionate about that we briefly touched upon before.

Recording is only fans and this rise of illusions that a lot of so called air quote, feminist type women find this air quote empowerment in doing these content online by generating high income, which is good for them financially. But as we just talked about, certain decisions have unintended consequences that you may regret. Especially I see all these like 1819 year olds who are cognitively immature.

They're not well developed, they live in their own echo chamber of validations. Oh, you're so cute, you're good looking, why don't you monetize that? As you said, they're not taking anything from you. You're just posting content online.

What's the harm? Every time I see that, part of me dies inside because I see where the things are going. And your field was modeling and you were internationally famous and you still live with these consequences. I would love for you to just take where you see fit from here.

Again, several things to touch on at once. The first is that I know so many girls are probably like, don't shame me and my body. Part of my freedom now as a woman is that I get to choose what I do with it.

Yeah, you're right, you do get to choose. You do get to choose. But the thing is, you have to understand that what you constantly absorb and practice ultimately becomes you in a sense.

So what that means is that if you're constantly dehumanizing yourself and teaching yourself that your worth is tied strictly to your body, that is how you get gratification. And if you somehow start thinking, because these two things do tend to bleed together, that there's some kind of intimacy in that, that that is intimate in some kind of way. You are priming yourself to be prey for a predator.

You just are, because you're weakening that muscle in your mind to where you can be proud of yourself for other things as well. I can't even imagine the amount of dopamine that gets released from this stuff, but it also ties into just your ability to start behaving like, an addict and like a narcissist a bit. There's so many unhealthy behaviors that come from this stuff, and that's where I see contradictions in society nowadays.

So there's several categories where I see contradictions occurring. The first is just specifically with women. I'm a woman.

I can speak to women. We, as women, say that we don't want STDs, we don't want abuse. We want to be treated respectfully.

We don't want to date a narcissist. We don't want to get raped. We don't want to be sexualized.

Right? All these things. But then you look at how women are engaging in dating, which is a little bit of a side tangent over from that app, but it still is sort of closely married, and it's contradictory. If you really want to stay safe, if you don't want to be raped, if you don't want STDs, why are you going out and going on dates with people in very provocative clothing that tells its own story, and then you're getting inebriated with them and taking a complete stranger back to your apartment who you know nothing about? So now they know where you live, and now you don't know if they have an STD.

You don't know anything about them. And this person has now been invited into this very intimate space with you. You want to talk about unsafe dating and how we have once again become normalized to something that is so obviously unsafe and so obviously the opposite of what we say as women that we're standing for.

There's a glaring red flag right there. And then when you want to talk about, on a societal level, how there's contradictions, we judge people for being narcissistic. We judge people for being psychopathic.

We say that we want to be loved and fully known, and yet we're engaging in all these types of behaviors, like only fans and so many other things that cultivate narcissistic personalities, that cultivate narcissistic behavior. That's what social media does. That's what addiction does.

It turns you into essentially a version of a narcissist. And so that is also incredibly contradictory. We're saying that we want all of these things, but we're not actually working for them.

In AA, they say that where you look is where you're headed. If you're driving a car and you look over to the left, you're going to find yourself veering that way, and it really is like that. So if you spend so much of your free time selling your body online, thinking about your body, taking pictures of your body, obsessing about your body.

What are you really cultivating inside of you? You're going to be thinking about your body. You're not going to be thinking about your mind. You only have so many hours in the day.

What are you spending it on? And that's the main thing that I try to talk to girls about, is that you're living in contradictions. You're living in unsafe ways. And then you wonder.

I used to wonder why there was a cycle in my life of abuse. Why do I keep running into the same guys? Why can I not seem to get out of this cycle? And at some point, the bad thing did not come from me, but I did have to turn and examine my own behavior. It's like driving your car into an unsafe area, leaving the keys in the ignition, leaving all the windows down and walking away from it and then wondering why your car got stolen.

There are other contributing factors aside from just literally looking at the predator and bashing on them alone. You have to look at your own behaviors and the lifestyle that you're cultivating for yourself as well and really ask yourself, what do you actually want? What do you actually want as a woman, as a person, as a man, whoever you are. Do you even know or do you just have a giant list of things that you like judging people for that you don't want, but you have no idea what you actually want for yourself as a person? I appreciate that passionate, Ted talk, and I do really want to put that on the messaging board where as a psychotherapist, one of my favorite questions that I ask my clients and my patients, I call it the behavior analysis gap is the incongruences, right? You call it contradictions in psychotherapy, you call it incongruences.

A part of you is saying you want to show up as this version of yourself to your friends, family, and coworkers, but a part of you is behaving differently than what you're saying. So which part of you are you trying to abide by because you're saying something, but you're doing something else? And that's incongruence. And unless someone point that out in an unbiased, impartial, objective way, like we said, it's echo chamber.

You're not going to realize your behaviors because it's the byproduct of iterations. And since this is a social science podcast, I want to share some psychoeducations is. It's a pretty basic concept called neuropathways.

That's what neuropathways are. It's this neurological pathways in your brain that are primed based on your consistent and behaviors over time. If there's a bike path that's well defined, you're going to inevitably go towards that bike path.

And our brains are about 3 million years old. 3 million years old. Our civilization is maybe 4000.

The US is maybe 400 years tops. So it doesn't matter how much willpower the thresholds of your disciplines, how much education that you have? You can have what, 40, 60, 70 years of educations and cultivated practice. You think that 70 years? And we're talking about children and adolescents and people in their twenty s and thirty s.

But even if you're 70 years old, you have zero chance against the evolutionary traits of your brain because that thing is 3 million years old. I really want to emphasize this because people have this illusions of control that I get to dictate my behaviors and I get to regulate whatever I do. Not really.

A lot of times we are just a byproduct of our evolutionary process, especially since most people don't have any sort of cultivated mindfulness practices or therapeutic practices. Do you see, though, to ask you a question, since you're more of an expert in the brain than I am, do you see how the bottom brain, which is more primal, eventually the top brain can talk to that and it can be quieted. Yes.

So it's like, generally speaking, the bottom up and top down, right? So bottom up is people who will think with a reptilian brain, which is like the more evolutionary fight or flight, very emotional. And neocortex is a thinking brain where you can sort of slow down, like system one and system two thinking by Daniel Cogman. It is possible, but it requires a lot of self awareness and cultivated practices because once your amygdala goes offline and your reptilian brain takes over, you're in this reflexive, instinctive fight or flight or freeze.

In that moment, there is no regulation, there is no thinking. You're just reacting instinctively because humans are evolved optimally to survive. So in that sense, survival instinct trumps all rationales and neocortex and all thinking.

That's why it requires a lot of tremendous work. Yeah, I do think the thing that I saw that helped me the most was when, if we are in a vacuum, I really stopped watching a lot of romance, movies, rom coms, anything like that. And I also stopped listening to a lot of mainstream music just to stop absorbing all of that messaging all the time.

And then I saw a significant benefit from that. But yeah, I definitely have seen everything that you're talking about, for sure. I mean, our brains are very old.

What separates humans from animals is that we do have a higher level of regulations or regulatory ability than animals. Just because you want to have sex with a stranger doesn't mean you have to. There is a pause in between if you have the self awareness to but I do want to use this in going to talk about your intimacy and emotional development since that's what you brushed upon right when you were modeling.

You fell prey to this limited belief that your worth is your body. And of course, you learned later on that that is not the case and shout out to you for having the courage to quit that lucrative field, especially you're in the almost famous category. So it is not easy to do to literally fight against that dopamine.

It's probably even harder to do that now in 2023 with the rise of social media and social proof era that we're in. But Aaron, how has your belief on emotional intimacy evolved over time since your first online grooming experience, to you becoming a famous model and to now? Now that you're further onto the healing journey? There's so much to unpack from these experiences. There's so many layers to all this stuff.

You really start with one, and then as you move through one, you're like, oh, there's another one. So it really was within the last two years that I realized that my definition of intimacy might be skewed. That was just, like, mind blowing to me.

And when I really started examining that, I was like, oh, I'm still kind of thinking like a predator taught me to think that just like I talked about earlier, intimacy is all about just throwing all of yourself out there up front right away. Like trauma bonding. Essentially, you just give it all away as quickly as you can, and hopefully they like you after getting all this stuff.

They don't walk away with the gift basket. They keep it, and they want to hang out for a while. And I just thought that that's how you did it.

I thought that you overshared and you just gave all of yourself. And then hopefully they hung out and really flipping that logic for myself, I was like, no, those are really valuable things. Just like my body is a really valuable thing.

Those intimate pieces of my story, those intimate pieces of my personality, those are valuable, and I shouldn't just be giving them away to strangers who I don't know at all. Even within the first month, just for the first 30 days, let's just hang out. When I was younger, I didn't see any point to like, I don't know if small talk is the right term, but talking about things that weren't like, super trauma based, and now I see the point of that.

It's existing together because that's what life eventually becomes anyway. If you stay in a relationship long enough, it's practicing being friends. It's all these things that I had never considered before.

And so intimacy for me now is something that's earned it's something that I don't give away right away, and I slowly give it away over time as I see that it's safe to do that. And the person I care about them enough that I want to give them that piece of my heart or that experience or that conversation. How has that changed approach influenced your life since? Is there anything that really comes up for you? Dating is a little bit lonelier now, but that's okay.

And then I think it's also that it gave me a chance to really Learn Boundaries. You hear that term all the time. But to really practice it not in a way that's, like, paranoid and scared and angry.

And you're like, here's my boundary, and you don't get to cross it because I'm mad at you. Nothing like that. Not like an ultimatum, not like a game you're playing, but really saying, here's kind of where I'm at right now.

I'm like over here. Are you okay with that? You learn more about people when you have a conversation that way and you really see who actually does care about you, because people will be like, oh, yeah, that fence is so cute. I really like it.

And whenever you want me to walk through it, I'll just go on in. But until then, I'm fine staying over here versus people who will be really upset with you for having a fence. Like, really, genuinely upset.

And I had never used this approach before. So when I first started doing it, my natural go to is to doubt myself. Or it was more so in the past.

And so I'd be like, wait, am I wrong for having boundaries? It was sort of this nothing grows overnight. Nothing happens overnight. Nothing changes overnight.

And so it's been a really slow thing that I've had to develop. It's felt wonky. It's felt weird.

But I really appreciate that I have this skill now of boundaries. Essentially, this is very relevant to my current stage in life because I'm seeing a therapist as well and just a quick rent all psychotherapists. And if you're a life coach, doesn't matter.

All helpers need helpers. If you're a therapist and life coach, and you don't have a life coach or a therapist of your own, you're a hypocrite. Full stop.

I'm seeing a therapist to sort through some of my repressed emotions of abandonment issues from my biological father. Now I have a stepdad. I've had him for 18 years.

But a lot of my repressed situations are coming up, and I'm having some disproportional anger and resentment towards my stepdad, which should be rooted in my biological father who abandoned me and my sister at a very young age. But I say that because as part of that healing therapeutic process in the last four or five months is I learned to put up boundaries for the first time as an Asian American. And I grew up with a single parent single mom.

And I was parentified as an older brother to my younger sister. So similar to you. I think Enmeshed dynamic sense seem like the norm to me.

Right. Oh, when your family needs help, you're supposed to drop everything into their rescue. Of course.

That is great. That's better than not rescuing or negligence, for sure. But if you perpetuate that dynamic into your adulthood because I'm 30 now, it has some unintended complications and consequences.

But I'm sharing this because my therapist called me out last week. And a good therapist just like a good friend. Just like a good romantic partner.

You need to learn the art of confrontation. You need to be each other's speed bump by slowing you down and by calling out on your bullshit in a loving way. Yes man and yes woman doesn't help anybody, right? And she told me that, hey, Benoit, you've come a long way.

You went from having no fences to having this very high fences. I think my fences might be too high right now, not as pretty as yours. But she said that if you're not careful, that fences will become walls and you're actually going from a place of boundaries to becoming avoidant because killing requires confrontations of your trauma.

If you were broken and hurt in a narcissistic relationship, since I have a few patients in that scenario, you're not fully healed until you're confronted with a new narcissist. And you can actually walk away from that relationship without being overly triggered. And being triggered is fine, but it's about how you react to that trigger.

And this is a very relevant discussion given my current situations in life, but also tying that to what you just shared. Yeah, it definitely was like that for me as well, where I kind of pendulum song the other way, kind of developed some anger issues that's okay. And then kind of like, came back down into the middle.

And it's almost like stages of grief sometimes where you're kind of like bargaining and reckoning with these things, these old habits that are inside of you, these voices that you picked up and collected that weren't the best and didn't have good intentions for you. You pick up all this stuff as you walk around, and then you're the one that has to deal with it. And so sometimes I'll get really frustrated that I still have all these old habits, but it's frustration with myself.

It's frustration with other people. And then it's coming back down and entering back into that place of forgiveness and trying again to see the similarities between myself and other people. So I don't slip into a judgmental place of, like, I'm better than you.

I'm on this pedestal. I can never be like that. Whatever.

It's interesting that your ego can attach itself to almost anything. Spirituality, healing. You could also be the woke Olympics.

Oh, you're not healed enough. I'm more healed. Oh, your trauma isn't big enough.

My trauma is bigger. It's like, why are we having a dick measuring contest about getting better? That's some crazy talk. Yes, that was something I wanted to say on here is just this tiny snippet that when you worship victimhood, you're worshipping trauma.

And that's kind of weird. Like, why are we worshipping something in a sense that we're all saying that we want to avoid and we don't want any part of? But then I see so many people being almost apologetic nowadays when they don't have trauma, when they had a stable life. I just think that that is so warped with where we're living now.

Yeah, everything oscillates. We went from ten years ago, nobody ever talking about trauma and mental health and siloing everything and just depressed by yourself to now. Everything's only about trauma and feelings.

And of course, as we said, the truth is in the middle, and you need to own up to your trauma. You need to express it. You need to talk about it.

You need to seek help, but don't confine your identity and the essence of who you are with the worst thing that happened to you and vice versa. So, Erin, how do we prevent this victory cycle of us versus them mentality? So I might answer it in a way that's kind of strange, but this is just sort of the phrase that popped into my head that I learned when I was in recovery, which is that, well, there's two phrases, but one is that you can't give away what you don't have. And the second one is that you received without cost, so give without charge.

And what I really mean by all of that together is that if you haven't worked on yourself, if you haven't sat down and done some serious inner examination, how can you demand that of other people if you haven't held yourself accountable to the things that are growing inside of you, essentially, how can you expect that of others? And on the flip side of that, one of the things that has been the most helpful for me as a survivor is the amount of forgiveness and grace that I have been shown. While I exhibited such chaotic, detrimental behaviors that my family had to watch me go through, even if it wasn't literally always towards them, even if it was directed towards myself, that was very stressful for them and for friends of mine who care about me. And so if I've been given all of this grace and all of this forgiveness, how selfish is it of me to keep that for myself and not give it away? And so, really, I think at the end of the day, those are the things that are missing right now that we all need to come back to.

We had these things. I remember when we had these things, and we as a society are being pulled away from them by this black and white societal thinking. It's happening on a societal level, and I just really implore everyone to not fall for it.

Don't take the bait and remember that we are all nuanced. We're not labels. We're people.

We are not labels. We are people. You're not an influencer.

You're a person. You're not a model. You're a person.

You know what I mean? Like, whatever label you attach to yourself all throughout the day, that's still not who you are. It's something that you do and that you have the opportunity to do, but you can lose that in a moment. I watched people lose it in a moment, and they were lost because they got attached to that identity, even if it's being a good person.

And then in a moment, that becomes lost to you because you became an asshole for a minute or two or for maybe for more than a few minutes. Don't hide in that. You know what I mean? Understand that there's a nuance inside of you and you just need to examine that and look at that, because that's what you would want someone else to do as well.

All of us are multidimensional, and all of us have different colors, and we all live a very uniquely different colorful life. And it would be a shame if all of that colors get confined into a simple word or simple labor label. Words are powerful, but humans have the ability to transcend words.

We have the ability to transcend this soul narrative. We have the ability to transcend this black and white societal splitting because we are not animals. We still have that neocortex when you're not in a trauma fight or flight or freeze response.

But I love that message, and I just wanted to echo that very loudly. And Aaron, to end today's conversation, I want to ask you or I want to create a space of hope for you to share some hopeful messages, because you are the embodiment and the byproduct of someone who went through something traumatic, horrific. Yet through consistent and grace and forgiveness and love for the self, you're able to reinvent yourself in the last 20 years.

So to start anew, it requires to take the first action to leave the current circumstances, whether that's domestic violence, toxic relationships, abuse, or online grooming. Do you have any messages of hope or encouragement for those who want to reinvent themselves, yet they feel like they can never do so? It is literally one step at a time. And that's the main thing that I have to remind myself of still every single day, even today, is that it is one step at a time.

And while we've been talking about not getting into grandiosity and black and white thinking, it's just as important to not hate yourself and to not think that there's no hope for you whatsoever to ever change just because you've existed in a certain state for such a long time. It is one step at a time. And the people who can help you with that are the loving, trusted people around you, people who you trust, go back to them and you can do this.

I've done this. I've watched my friends do it. I have female friends who are also survivors.

And if you are a girl, I can speak for girls, for men, I can speak for men, but just find for me, it's finding a survivor sister who also is working on recovery. If you know someone in your life who also has been through experiences like you, whether that's addiction, sexual assault, whatever it is. And you happen to be lucky enough to have someone who's also trying to pursue recovery, build each other up, help each other with that.

And you're not always going to be in the same place. But we have to learn to support each other in our endeavors through our flaws. And that does require being more open, but being more open with trusted people.

But there is hope. You can get there. You can do it.

But it is literally one step at a time. And one step at a time while looking inward and understanding what about you is actually something you want to keep. And what about you maybe came from a person who didn't care about you, didn't want good things for you, and is maybe something that you should get rid of.

That reminds me of my favorite mental health adage. The opposite of depression is expression. What you don't express gets depressed.

And because creating meaningful relationships requires you to open up about your own experience. And I know it is tough and the medias and news make the world seems more dangerous than it is. And of course there are dangers at bay.

I promise you that once you have the courage to open up whatever that feels safe to you and appropriate based on your circumstances, I promise you that there are people that reciprocate and your effort will be reciprocated. And to discover more meaningful relationships, you have to be willing to engage in open dialogues that requires to express what's in the inside. And that's a beautiful, beautiful way to conclude today's conversation.

Aaron. And like I said, I really appreciate your thoughtfulness, your willingness, since with this almost famous culture, we have all this also this curated vulnerability culture where vulnerability is cool. Now this is just another marketplace for content that really hurts me.

But I really appreciate your time today and for everything that we shared and for you to really open up. Speaking of opening up yourself up, thank you. I appreciate it.

Yeah, secrets keep us sick and it's knowing who to open up to and in the right ways. But I agree with everything that you just said. It's telling our stories.

Is there any really important message you feel like we haven't touched upon today that you really feel called to share? Before we close out this week's, amazing episode. I guess the last thing that I would want to say is because porn is so inextricably linked with trafficking, if you live in a state that does not currently have legislation to protect children from accidental exposure to porn online, you can reach out to your senators. You can reach out to your legislators locally, and I'm asking you to please do that.

They're totally accessible. A lot of us aren't educated on that process. You can Google their name, you can search your address.

There's a way to look. Up who is over your specific area, reach out to them, email, call them and please get legislation passed to help protect children from exposure to porn online. The Internet has been around for over 20 years.

There are no regulations. Everyone right now is only one or two clicks away from graphic porn, and that's horrifying. And so that would be the last thing that I would say.

Marxism aside, I do believe that there is power in the masses. One thing that politicians care more than anything is the opinions of their constituents because they want to get reelected. So I really want to push that message forward, that there is a call to action and to create hope, you must do something about it, which is the way we started this conversation.

So I appreciate you sharing that message and I'll also encourage everyone to do so. If you've been inspired and want to discover more action items and impact, where can people connect with you? Maybe ask you more questions, not just follow you for the following sake, because you don't do that anymore, but really engage in important and meaningful dialogues for change. So I have a website.

It's Redcircleproject.com. It's not anything fancy. And also, if you want to learn more about this kind of advocacy work, you can go to the Stoptraffickingproject.com

That's Russ's website and he really is the expert in that field. Specifically, if that's something that you do want to learn more about how to get someone into schools to educate children, I also have a YouTube channel. It's Aaron's Journal if you want to watch more videos by me.

And then I also have an email address, it's redcircleproject at proton Me. To everyone listening, I just have one favor to ask is if you can share this episode with one friend, it is free for you, but it is priceless for the show's growth and that will continue to motivate me and inspire me to keep having amazing people like Erin to share their stories and spotlighting really important discussions that is not commonly held. And as always, I hope to see you again in the next week's train of Discover More, where I hope to choose curiosity and love over fear.

Thank you for tuning in.