I would love to hear more about how did you come to that realization? And let's talk about more of what's happening inside of a perpetrator that helps shape who they are.

Well, initially, I had no idea that this is what I was investigating.

But when we worked with groups of men back in the 90s, it was one of the things that really stood out for me, that their ability to explain their bad behavior by really wanting to impress upon us that A, it wasn't bad behavior, or that B, that they were entitled to behave badly.

So the first attempt at explaining to us was very dismissive and very minimizing.

So thankfully at the time we had access to all their partners who were coming to a group or coming individually to another session and we documented what their responses were and we heard the women describing things which up to that time women had failed to talk to us about.

The women were all talking about the physical violence or the emotional violence or the financial abuse, the isolation, all those things which we've read of in all the magazines and books.

But actually, when we began to explore their sexual experience, we began to realize that it was much more profound than we had thought.

Yeah, okay, so tell me more about

That's what we

think.

I was doing what we call couples counseling here in Ireland.

I was still working under the auspices of the Catholic church.

And we had a center in Cork City, which is a small city on the south of Ireland.

And while working there, my direct boss, who was a clinical psychologist trained in Chicago, actually, he said there was a lot of abuse and violence going on in families, in homes and that, and maybe we should do something about it.

So we set about studying violence whatever we might do about it for two years.

Like, and they just continue to push and they take no accountability whatsoever for what they just, you know, created like how how they um triggered you but if somebody is listening and they're still struggling to accept that this is intentional this is like what you know so much of what your work is is talking about is how aware these abusers are of what they're doing so how do we begin to accept this is not a mistake this is not a misunderstanding they're they know what they're doing and it's intentional