So I lived in places in like in Europe, where me being a tall, black woman was actually an advantage. and not let's not give black and brown people a free pass. Let's talk about bias across the board The psychological mechanisms work fast on the brain, Hello and welcome to Awake at the Wheel. So in today's episode, we are joined by Dr. Dina McMillan. Dr. McMillan is an author, a speaker and a social psychologist who graduated from Stanford University and has a deep knowledge and interest in how beliefs and biases influence society. She is from the United States and has lived all around the world and currently resides in Australia. So hi, Dina. Welcome. Thanks so much for being with us today. Hello, how are you? Wonderful. So tell our listeners about you, about your work and what's gotten you to this place as far as you're bit in the public eye. So what got you there? Frustration, seeing so much influence, so much coercion, all of the manipulation tactics I learned about in graduate school being used on the public and the average person being completely unaware. And I found that very frustrating. So I decided to do whatever I could to bring that knowledge to the public. First, in the area of domestic violence prevention and now more broadly, just about any kind of social manipulation. And I want people to become manipulation proof. Okay. So I'm going to ask a tough question, I guess, just to start out with here, because I know that a lot of the things that you post on social media often do surround bias, some of the DEI things that are out there and so on. And I know from my own experience because I look a certain way, because I have a disability and because I'm a female, there are expectations that I subscribe to certain notions. Have you found that the same expectations are placed on you? my goodness gracious. I get called all sorts of names. It's interesting though, because I do have a doctorate from a prestigious university. I don't get called as many names as some of my other conservative colleagues who look at D-Ii and see the danger there or don't, you know, subscribe to that, that belief that you should be hired based on an identity factor rather than whether or not you can do your job. We do get mistreated really badly. I cannot count the number of contracts that I've lost because I don't subscribe to that. People have an expectation because I'm you know, because I'm black, because I have braids that I am. Let's be honest and be fair to them. Statistics are written. The chances are very, very low that somebody that looks like me would think like me. But I just. You. Yeah, we get we get treated pretty badly. But as a social psychologist, I know and I have not been surprised that by the studies coming out of the U.K. and the U.S. showing that diversity programs actually make divisions worse. That's not how you do it. Yeah. And you said something really important there that statistically people who look like you don't necessarily think like you. Do you think that's because of manipulation or because of something else? I think most of us go where we're appointed. You know, there's a lot of social pressure. I became very self-reliant even before I officially became a social psychologist. I had to be because I was treated so poorly in graduate school that I had to find a real core of strength to be able to make it make it through. I faced terror rule discrimination in graduate school, both because of my race and because of my sex. So that self-reliance and also what I was learning was showing the outcomes of a lot of things that sound good superficially. And I was learning that they weren't really taking you in the direction you wanted to go. So thinking differently than other people, I had a choice. I could either conform and be very popular or I could stick to my science and just stand back. Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth. It's it's either conform and be popular or not and be a little bit lonely. And I think especially in our profession of psychology, that is increasingly becoming the case. Very much so. And people it's interesting because I know that the first time Trump was president, regardless of whether I was doing work in the you know, because I work everywhere, you know, and right now I'm living in Australia, but I am in April, I'm moving back to the States. So but I work in the States, I work in Canada, the UK, you know, New Zealand, and it's interesting how people would begin a conversation, a professional meeting with a derogatory comment about Trump. Expecting me to join in. And when I didn't join in, I wouldn't necessarily saying anything. And, you know, I wouldn't get angry or anything. I just wouldn't join in. And they knew I wasn't on their team. And all of a sudden the friendliness level declined significantly. And I have I can actually list and count jobs that I've lost because of that. And just so I'm clear, when you said before, when you were in graduate school, you're, you know, dealing with stigma or, you know, discrimination because of the color of your skin and being a woman. Was that independent of your views? Just as a black woman, you felt okay because you didn't conform to what their expectation was? I think the way I didn't conform is they had not accounted for two things. They hadn't accounted for the fact that I'm a military kid. So I had not spent my entire life inside the United States. So I lived in places in like in Europe, where me being a tall, black woman and I was much thinner then, but I told black women was actually an advantage. So I didn't have the self-consciousness in lack of self-worth they were expecting from somebody who had faced terrible racism their entire lives. Also my height. I'm almost six feet tall and there are so many things. If when you really study this field, you see all sorts of factors influence how you're treated right? And one of them was height. The fact that I'm tall. I'm not dismissed as easily as I would be if I were shorter. Even as a woman. Even as a woman. So I'm short, so I'm interested in that. well, all my family is my all the women in my family are more vertically challenged than myself in fact. My older sister is five foot three, so I grew her when I was about seven or eight. But now, romantically, it's a disadvantage business wise. It's an advantage because I can look at most men in the eye. So but I also I guess I had a core of courage that comes from living lots of different places and having that life experience where I wasn't going to allow that discrimination from my professors to redefine who I was as a person. But the discrimination was extreme. I could do a Netflix drama with no exaggeration of how I was treated at Stanford University. Can you give an example? Are you comfortable getting anything? while you were saying I was, I said, I'll talk about anything when I'm in class. If I asked a question, I was ignored. If we had to have an appointment with the professor, now realize this is a Ph.D. program. So we my year, we only had nine people in my year. Now, often in different courses you'd have people from different years altogether in the Ph.D. courses, but it was pretty small. If I asked a question, I was ignored. If they said okay, you have to have an appointment with the professor, the professor wouldn't show up. They used really shoddy research about how unintelligent black people were to try to lower my self-confidence. Once I'd taken enough statistical analysis and research analysis to be able to actually look at the research they were using. I realized the research was extremely shoddy and they knew it. They were just trying to lower my confidence. I can't help but wonder if I wasn't an experiment. And in fact, at one point a professor told me that I was you know, sometimes they did use the graduate students as sort of an experiment to see, you know, try different principles to see how we responded. And I was mucking up the research because I tested like a white male. And I think that probably further influences people's assumptions about you that, well, you went through all of that, so you must think a certain way. I do think a certain way. I think I didn't put my race on my application to Stanford. I was a social psychologist before I got there. I thought, okay, who's going to be reading this essay? Probably a middle aged, plain looking guy. So I talked about my life experience as a model in Paris, in New York. That's how I got in. Everybody that applied had the grades. It wasn't about the grades. I said, Well, I'll tell them about my life experience being a model. And sure enough, got me in. So, yes, that's manipulative. Ha ha ha ha. But once I got there and they were kind of were literally like this when I showed up because they weren't expecting me to be black. it was bad. I left there traumatized, but I left there with my Ph.D.. Right. They tried everything to get me to quit. So, I mean, if we were trying to. If I had if I had one of those people who was leading the charge trying to get rid of you, if they're lying on my couch in the office and I'm analyzing and trying them to get them to be as honest as possible, and, you know, in the safety of the therapeutic space, what would they say if I said, okay, tell me, why did you need to get rid of her? What would they say? We would say, because I didn't fit in. That's just a in-group outgroup type of bias. That's what they would tell themselves. It's because I didn't fit in because I didn't conform to the norms and expectations. It wasn't academically. I mean, even though they put me on academic probation when I had taken more courses than anybody in my year, just just treating me badly. And it's interesting because right before I left, Condoleezza Rice became Dean at Stanford and was actually black. Female graduate students were being treated so badly across the university, she was actually going to sue the university for it. But then she got promoted into politics and there there went that. But that's how bad it was. But but I grew up seeing people in the civil rights movement. And in fact, they nominated a female chair for the first time right before I graduated. And she asked me point blank, how do you handle being treated differently than everyone else? And I told her, eyes on the prize. I told her people have been set on by dogs, hanged from trees, so I could even be here unless they kill me. I'm not quitting. What gave you that perseverance, That ability to live that way. On the shoulders of giants. Okay. This is why it's valuable to know your history. But not as a victim, as a victor. Right. Look how strong these people had to be. And one day, because I do, I am a person of faith. I fear one day I'm going to have to look at them. They're going to ask me, What did you do? So I know they probably didn't. I don't know if I knew being a person like how strong your how strongly your faith compelled you and propelled you to where you are. So you would put that as one of the like because, you know, Malini, I always try to find out what is it about people who, you know, who do have the adaptive, healthy, proactive, you know, non victim mentality. We're trying to, you know, figure it out. And faith has been something we've seen in a number of people. So would you say that was a little bit a large part? What would you say? I would say it's a very large part because it allows you to draw strength. You don't know. We don't know. You have. I mean, you don't go to this that resource if you believe everything has to come from you. And even if you will, even if the strength is coming from your subconscious, faith allows you to tap into that subconscious part of yourself where if you feel everything has to come from the neocortex, the conscious mind, you're you're going to be more limited. And you also don't think all time now. One of the things about having faith, you have a different perception of time. So I figured I'd get through. And at one point I did tell her they had two choices to get rid of me. They could kill me dead or put Steve behind my name. Those were the only two ways I was leaving that universe. And I have to go through This is ridiculous, you know? Right. So someone hearing the story, so something. Hearing the story, they would assume. Well, given the, you know, everything that you went through so you would be the first person to promote, you know, ODI to counterbalance, you know, the wrongs of the past. Right. So explain to just whether based on experience or on the research or the just the wisdom. So anyone listening on why that approach is wrong and why, you know, we get at having diversity of thought and, you know, and including merit and so on, is the healthiest way to go for a society or for an institution of individuals. Absolutely. Because DNA to easily translate it into didn't earn it. Right. And you had the same thing with affirmative action, which is why I didn't want to put my race on my application. I again, that faith based thinking you have a longer timeline. When I graduated and I knew I would graduate. I didn't want people to say they only let you in because you were black. And all of us have some journey, have some struggles. I've met white males who've had much tougher lives than I that, you know, to assume, you know, someone struggle and journey because you look at the color of your skin or a few characteristics is is weak. And if we want to make up for the past what Black Lives Matter should have been doing rather than just taking money and supporting the black trans movement, which is what, 40 people and blaming police for everything. When crime is out of control in urban black communities, they should have been figuring out what aspects of black culture are toxic. How do we fix them? How do we get black culture to be education oriented? Black people very competitive. If you give us a competition, we're going to do our best to win it. So why we compete on academics? Why don't we learn how other cultures master those standardized tests to do it ourselves? Why don't we have scientists at the at the Democratic Conference instead of workers and people who are hypersexual former prostitutes? Why don't we have those sort of things? So there's no win with DNA. There's just no win. So to that point, speaking of white people, what do you think is a more unified approach that we can take that doesn't just blame white people for everything that's happening? Well, first of all, we we all have privilege. I mentioned at the beginning that I have the height privilege. People take me more seriously because I'm tall. There are all sorts of things. If you were born in the United States, I don't care how broke you are, you are privileged compared to someone else, so I tend not to use that word. I would say instead of DEI, if you're trying to rectify the pain of the past or discrimination, figure out where the shortfalls are and decide how to mitigate them. Add tutoring programs to ghetto schools. You know, one of the things that Trump has talked about is having the Education Department have bonuses for teachers who improve the scores in the education levels of their kids in their school make it merit based for teachers to really teach the kids. Have you talked to anybody who's not completely brainwashed in Hollywood? And if they are brainwashed, let's replace them and let's start having more content that shows smart people winning, that shows people earning their way. That doesn't have young women who use being foul mouthed as a replacement for being competent and treat every male with disrespect. Let's change the cultural norms. And we already have a huge we have a huge advantage. Now, I'm not sure I don't think you guys are quite as over-the-top patriotic as Americans tend to be. We tend I lived a lot of places. People look at us funny. You have to have flags everywhere, really. But one advantage of that is that by focusing on being American instead of whether you're black, white, short, tall, fully abled, differently abled, you know, whatever, it gives us a unifying point to build a team. Just like with the Olympics, we can spread that out during at a team, at a company. And I it was my Healing the Roof program. That's exactly what I do. I talk about I teach people how to reduce bias, positive or negative, show the shortfalls and the disadvantages of using bias to make choices and decisions. And then we emphasize on how to build a really cohesive team with people who may think very differently from each other. Tell us more about that program. well, as I said, I developed it in 2020 after watching the disaster of Black Lives Matter and I just saw guilty whites being coerced to to donate money and perform these gestures that were not going to actually assist anybody. I knew at that time, the only ones that were going to benefit were the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement. They were encouraged in urban, poor black people to burn down their own neighborhoods, and I knew they weren't going to be able to rebuild. And I looked at that and I said, okay, why are people conforming to this? What is the underlying goal? They feel judging people on race is wrong. And this program comes along. These people come along with their signs and their strident behavior, and they're saying we can give you a solution, donate money to us, and you know, everything will be okay. So I went back and said, what are these people looking for? They're looking to find a way to end bias. Why don't we do that and not let's not give black and brown people and young people and red people a free pass. Let's talk about bias across the board and what it cost you and how you can reduce it and how people can work together. It seems simple, right? Not too complicated, but somebody had to actually look at it and say no. So in 2021, there were people in the UK that found out because I'd offered my Healing the rift program a few places and somebody from the UK found out about it and was attempting to get my program to replace the DCI program, which they call E.D. in the UK, trying to get my program to replace it. They're still trying to do it. And then, of course, three years later a study comes out showing the DCI programs actually cause greater divisions between people. Well, my program doesn't because we don't use words like privilege and we don't make white people feel bad for being white. We don't even talk about that. Yeah, it is talk about the norm of bias, why we all have it, and how you can minimize it when you're making choices so that you're more fair and just simple, easy breezy. Okay, so what's not so simple? Maybe. And I think anybody I've been in communication with a number of people who've been trying to implement similar types of strategies where it's diversity of thought, not of skin color or sex or race or anything. So I'm curious, how did you the how did you get that? You said someone approached you, but how do you convince the people in charge that this is the right way, that they're not going to be a heretic, that they're you know, they're not going to lose their jobs by implementing what you promote? How do you do that? I hate to say this. I have an advantage when I'm talking about getting rid of bias. People are more inclined to listen to me because they believe I have a vested interest in getting rid of those right. So sometimes I do shock them a little, but they're often very relieved to know that I'm not about vilifying anybody. And also I don't necessarily focus on diversity of thought. Okay? I believe wholeheartedly that diversity of thought improves a team, as with with certain caveats, same fundamental values. And the the difference the diversity does not include somebody that is hyper negative. You know, of course, that having a one hyper negative person in a group lowers productivity, makes the group less effective. So you don't want that? But mainly, I just talk about bias because people can see their biases external to themselves, so they're not as defensive, I would say, and should be followed by somebody who comes in talking about diversity of thought. First, let's get rid of the bias and let people know that they lose by it. And then you can come in and encourage the diversity of the first. Let's get rid of the. And people are just so defensive right now. Right. When you talk about bias, because, you know, there was a whole you know, I believe in it, but it's it's a hard to measure. And the test to do measure, it's supposedly have been shown not to be valid, but implicit bias. We all have it. Everyone has implicit biases or unconscious biases. Right. Do you focus more on those or you focus more on the explicit ones that people can access? Or do you say kind of like it's a foundation? Like it's it's a foundational belief. We all have biases. Let's accept it. It's not that this group has any more than the other. We all have the. How do you approach the concept of bias? Yes, that that's how I do it. Basically talking about and then using things. And I taught one course one one time I was offered a contract and I actually pulled in my one of my sisters who is at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota. And politically we are at opposite ends of the spectrum. So we were actually implementing what we were teaching but just having us work together. But it was interesting that she does some programs on this, although there's incredible bias in what she does because the woke is infected everything that she's done. But it was interesting how similar some of the things where we use things like talking about what sports team you like and what kind of bread you prefer, and you know, whether the toilet paper goes over or under. So using things that will make people laugh, make people feel safe, not judged, open to disagree, and without feeling like there's going to be any stigma associated with it, and then discuss the topics that way, making it into really I don't use these terms, but making the room into a safe space by just not saying, Well, you're probably racist against me because you are, then none of that or like Ashley Shackelford in her little ensemble where she goes, your professional does a professional presentation in a one piece like suits, you know, like a you that I'm sure she's seen her outfit. look up. Ashley Shackleford. Well. She's a really heavy woman and she's wearing like a onesie, like a low key tights that you would wear at a yoga class maybe. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The white board, it says all whites are racist, but, you know, our number underneath. And she talks about how whites are basically demonic. And these people have paid her to stand there and insult them like that. So that is not a Shakespeare. What I offer is a safe space where people can look at the fact that, okay, I do kind of not like Charlie because he likes the Dallas Cowboys and who normal likes the Dallas Cowboys. I mean, you know, this kind of thing where everybody loves, you know, all the toilet paper she got on her and she got over. People laughed. They joined together. The groups, the people who are aligned with each other are often very different. And I think the safe space. So I try to interject for a second. That's what a safe space should be, right? I feel like that term has been bastardized and twisted into something. It's never happened since. Yeah, so I meant what you're. Describing is saying. Yes, by discussing bias, by using examples that make nobody feel self-conscious, make no one feel like I can't really admit what I really feel. Although people who back the Dallas Cowboys might feel a little self-conscious on stage, but anyway. But just making people laugh, you know, my sister had done something similar talking about what kind of bread? What kind of bread are you? You know, in talking about it, this type of bread is this personality and that kind of bread is that personality. And it gets people to feel a sense of camaraderie. And but what differs with what I do is for the last 25 years especially, I've noticed since 2005, anything woke wins. So whenever you're in a group, an organization or government office or whatever the woke ideology seems to be the thing that is being promoted by the people in charge of it. For instance, you see an interview I remember in Australia when they were talking about marriage equality and every person doing the interview was an advocate for same sex marriage. The few people that they actually interviewed who opposed it, they got really, really religious people and like the UK, Australia for the most part is not religious. So those people were viewed as outsiders anyway. They gave no valid points about how it would change the social structure, what would it would usher in and what was associated with it. If people even understood the different culture, cultural differences and how changing marriages changes society, nothing. So nobody got to make a fair choice. And I'm not saying the people should vote one way or the other. That's their own values that should decide that. But what I've been seeing is only one type of value of getting the promotion from the people in authority, only one type of poster going up on the wall, only one type. So as a social psychologist, studying how people are influenced, these are really heavy duty influence mechanisms. Yeah, so I've just tried to take those out of my Healing the Rift program and we need it so badly. I just saw that the FBI has decided to take most of the FBI agents out of the DC area and spread them across the country, and they're sending a huge amount of them to Huntsville, Alabama. And the person was laughing saying, How are these very left wing FBI agents going to handle being in Trump country? So I was already going to write to the FBI again because they wanted to hire me back in in 2021, early 2021 for my domestic violence training, because, of course, law enforcement deals with it. There's a lot if you know about mass shooters, mass shooters, domestic violence plays prominently in that they have and law enforcement have domestic violence rates in their own relationships. It's about double what the public has. So they were hiring me and Australia wouldn't let me out. So I figured we had really strict rules. So I figured, okay, let me go back again and then I saw this and I said, Hey, I could teach the healing the rift as well because they're going to have to learn how to work with and deal with being in a culture that doesn't support the woke values that dominated the D.C. area. They're not in the majority, nor. The those those. Differing. Opinions. How are they going to handle that? Absolutely. About the they've gone back. They've they've gotten used to always having their way. Donnie Yeah. So you mentioned earlier like 2005 ish onwards, woke wins. So from the social psychology perspective, what, what changed then? I don't know, because it was even before Obama came into office, but I just noticed that there seemed to be a unified movement of woke values that seemed to take over the media, that seemed to take over corporations at that time. Television shows like Criminal Minds that have been quite accurate about what psychologists have found. When you're studying predatory behavior, all of a sudden everybody was only looking through the woke lens things. For instance, in I think it was 2000 to 2003, it was mentioned that men who cross-dress, whether they consider themselves transgender or not, are significantly more likely to have some sort of a predatory paraphilia, some predatory kink compared to the rest of the population. And if you look in the UK, 47% of the trans identifying males in prison are in for sex crimes. And we've known this for decades. But all of a sudden there was silence. Anything about LGBT was all positive, not negative. And as somebody who was working six years in the LGBT community, I was seeing a lot of things that even now are still never mentioned. It's like there became like signing like the Official Secrets Act during World War Two, where you just had to pretend you don't notice. Yeah, yeah. And in 2005 it really came to a head and I was just seeing it everywhere. Government agencies started putting the rainbow on everything and working in the community. I told people point blank that I found that whole rainbow thing to be very manipulative because rainbows were, first of all, associated with God's promise. So it's a very Judeo-Christian symbol. You see it a lot with kids because it's how they learn their colors and to use it for us to represent a sexuality that goes against Judeo-Christian beliefs, I felt was like spitting in the face of people who had traditional faith. And it also was trying to appeal to kids because kids love rainbows. I said, This is wrong. Also putting pressure on people not to disagree something, you know, if you have a good point about why you should not be discriminated against, make the point. Don't bully people into accepting things because they're going to be backlash. Right? This is usually enough. I was accepted even with my odd views. For the most part. I didn't get hassle about it because I did. I never pretended. Now I don't think I don't want anybody to be in a toxic relationship, whether they're straight or gay. I you know, I had a I was a agony aunt for a men's magazine, Gay men's magazine. And I had a call back radio show on a gay and lesbian radio station. So when I said I was immersed in the community, I was right. And I got to see things close up and I was like, my goodness, there's a lot going on here that's extremely toxic and nobody's allowed to talk about. Well, that's what I want. I'm just going to say, wait, because I'm just being mindful of time. I want to really touch upon one of the things that you, you know, a big area of your work about the domestic violence. So I'm just going to say when you talk about not talking, when you talk about predatory behaviors, I was going to throw this in there as a, you know, my preamble about the Segway. It's it might be clumsy, but, you know, one of the things that people have said is, you know, when you talk about the manipulation, when you talk about not being able to talk about things, you know, that kids are being taught or young girls are being taught to ignore their gut instinct. When you talk about predatory behavior, which I will say change rooms where if they see, you know, someone that's their body saying danger, danger, whether it's you know, whether it's a bias or whether it's just, you know, it's an inherent, you know, response where they realize, like, again, it's just a deep down in the DNA kind of, you know, danger response. They're being told, no, you're a bigot for having that. So they're going against their evolutionary priming and, you know, 100 thousands of years of of evolution, basically saying, no, no, ignore it. The most unhealthy thing you can do. So that's my segue way to when you talk about domestic violence, where people either ignore red flags or the the what you would expect to be the safety behavior, the save yourself, extricate yourself from an unhealthy, from a dangerous but may potentially life ending relationship. But the person just can't do it. They're so enmeshed in it and you know, their sense of self has become so deteriorated or they feel so excluded, they don't feel they have the resources to, you know, to free themselves, to save themselves. Okay. That's kind of like, you know, some of the darker aspects of domestic violence. So I was going to ask you that's again, that's my clumsy segway to throw this to you. What would you say in either A in the programing that you do and the the change that you try to advocate for, what do you do? That's either effective or different from what others are doing that's not effective and or B, or number two, what would you say is the greatest myth when it comes to domestic violence that you have to kind of overcome, whether it's policymakers or the people involved? So two giant questions to throw at you. Well, I would say let's start with the second one. The biggest myth is that you have to wait until the relationship becomes very dangerous before you can intervene.

unmasking the abuser. And if anybody wants, just type in Dr. Dina TedX and you see my unmasking the abuser where I talk about my program, but still, sadly enough, remains the only prevention program for domestic violence in the world. Because what I have done is isolate the manipulation tactics used by abusers at the initial stages of the relationship. Now they use them again later. So it works well with survivors as well to keep them from going back, to keep them for help them understand how they got trapped. But it also is primary prevention. So you can actually see the indicators. If somebody pointed out to you and I would link that with what you said initially a year ago, the icon conference for Supporting Girls and Women's Sports invited me to Denver to give a talk at a conference because someone saw my TEDx talk and noticed that the things I was talking about was abusive relationships were being done to girls across the board in order to get them to accept boys in their safe spaces, telling them they're bigots. A and a naked male is a threat. A naked male is a threat unless you he's invited into your space. He is a threat. So girls are naturally feeling no, this isn't right. And to teach girls that they have to ignore their survival instincts is turning them into prey. It's. It's turning off that switch and this person noticed at the icon's conference that one of the organizers noticed we're training these young women to be domestic violence victims because they're learning that they know they have boundaries that don't have to be respect, that they're learning. They always have to ignore their instincts about safety. They're learning. They always have to concede to any male that's in their space. We're raising a whole generation of domestic violence victims. And that's how I got to know railing against because I gave a talk right before she was on the panel and she's one of the people that I'm talking about, about my my Unmasking the Abuser program, because she works with young women rolling it out in high schools and universities across the country because they work fast. The psychological mechanisms work fast on the brain, you know, relationships, when the dynamic is set, it's quite resilient. So to get an understanding of what that looks like early so that you can pull away before it's set will save so many lives. And by the way, in case you think I'm only looking out for women, I am not once, you know, these tactics, you can spot them whether they're being used by a man or a woman. And I don't I also don't want boys to think because cultural norms over the last eight, 15 years with regard to women means the domestic violence rates for males has gone up. I'm not leaving the boys behind. I don't want abusers to win. So my work focuses on that. So this is how I do for nobody else is showing you exactly how it's done and why is it done that way. It's universal. My book is published in 14 countries. My Unmasking the Abuser podcast is aired in 19. Why is that? Because psychologically, if you don't put the pieces together, if the choreography isn't exact, the conditioning doesn't take. So they have they learn from trial and error or from actually looking it up, but even from trial and error, by the time they're in their late teens, they know how to behave to pull someone into a relationship that's extremely toxic and where the abuser has all of the control. Yeah, I mean. I was just going to say it's visible. You can see it. But nobody told you to be careful about this. You won't know how serious it is. Right. So, yeah. So on the one hand, it's insidious because people don't if they're not aware of the cues and the clues and. Right. So they get so enmeshed in the relationship and, you know, their neurotransmitters are fooling them and they think they're in love and so on. So they miss all these spots. And then at one point now it's over. So invested in cognitive dissonance kicks in. And, you know, they can't they can't fathom the fact that they could have made such a horrible mistake, even though everyone else could have seen it because they weren't smitten. They didn't have the same biases that the person in love has. So it's it's insidious on the one hand, but it's so obvious on the other if you know what to look for. So I've been teaching about this for over 20 years, and I've been saying I say, I don't know. It seems like there's a Domestic Violence for Dummies manual out there because it seems that they follow the same pattern. Right. It's so, you know. I think it's interesting you say that because my book. But he says he loves me, which in 2023 I actually put in an audio version. It's in two voices on the left hand page. In the book, it's in the voice of the abuser has, he says to guys, This is how you train your woman. And on the right hand page, it's my voice. As I say, this is what it looks like when he's luring you in and trying to trap you. And if you look at the title on the left hand page at the top, it says The abuser's handbook. And I even put a quote in there from a woman I work with in the domestic violence industry who said, you know, regardless of what the victim survivors look like, sound like where they live, when they talk about what they've gone through and what they've experienced. It's so similar. It's like these guys all read the same handbook. Know you're absolutely right. And what it is, is this trial and error shows them what works. And if they're going to condition successfully condition someone to remain in the relationship even after the the mask comes off and the ugliness is not hidden anymore. They have to take certain steps at the beginning where it doesn't work. So they learn. They learn and they talk to each other. It's why the emotional abuse often goes up after men participate in behavior change programs because they teach each other, right? Yeah. You know, this is what you can do and not, you know, not get called up, you know? And what happened with me is that in various guises, I was working with both sides, both victim survivors and the abusers, the perpetrators. And but in my role with the abusers, I was working with them where they just they got signed off for talking to me. I had no role in anything that came afterwards. So they had an understanding that they could tell me anything and there was nothing I could do about it unless they actually threatened to kill themselves or their partner or in my office. I had to take what they told me to the grave. And so they were extremely open with me and it was just extremely shocking. my goodness. They were they were so well aware. Here's a myth. They convince people that their behavior is spontaneous. It is not. They are well aware of what they're doing. They're well aware of the impact it will have on their victim. Yeah, they feel entitled to do whatever they want, but they also know how effective it is to be erratic in their behavior. The level of manipulation we're seeing was stunning. Why do you think prevention is not out there? Like, I was shocked when you said that your program is is the only prevention program out there. Because it takes social psychology to actually define it. This isn't clinical. This is social psychology is the evil science. If you ever watch my heart and mind, you'll see I in fact, somebody said that that slide is scary because I always have a slide where a tie, it says social psychology, and it has a woman kind of looks like me with lightning behind her head. And and then the evil scientist laughs at the whole thing. I belong the evil science. I mean, we are about how do you how do you manipulate people and change your beliefs and behavior and convince them that they did it on their own. But your work influences our work, right? The clinical and the social go together. And so what? But, you know, most of my people go into marketing so they convince you to buy something you really need, or they go into politics to get you to vote for somebody you don't really trust. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not about, you've had a trauma, let's heal you. It's about, hey, let's convince you of something that's not really true because it benefits us. I belong to the evil science. But I decided to take it, you know, be on the side of the angels and actually show people what this looks like. And then one of the most important ways to show people is by going into domestic violence, because unless you studies, this is not the wisdom that comes with age. I have not met a single victims survivor who realized they were being manipulative even before they met the guy. The guy was selecting them based on how they carried themselves. The manipulation starts really early. I only met a handful that actually realized that they were being manipulated at all and those who knew they were. But it happened later. So I know that if people want the full details, they can certainly watch your tactics, which will link in this video. But can you tell our listeners what some of those early warning signs are that people typically aren't picking up on? I think the number one warning sign, because sometimes I've done interviews and somebody will take a microphone and say, okay, we have 3 seconds left. Can you give us one thing that that the person can do? And I would tell them, look out for too much, too soon, too many promises, too many compliments, too many girls, too much talk about the future with somebody who's so new that they're still relatively a stranger. It's just too intense. Now, here's a couple of things. Number one, the brain loves intensity. So if you're talking in a romantic, romantic context where your brain has to choose between something that vacillates up and down and up and down, it's but it's really intense versus something that's moderate. And in the middle, your brain will choose the intensity every time. And because it is so important for me to not be seen as somebody with a sexual bias, the reason there are so many more female victims of serious domestic abuse, I'm not talking about the you know, somebody acting out once in a while. I'm talking about a relationship with a dynamic where it is a regular occurrence of serious emotional abuse, coercive control, a threat of violence, physical violence. Usually it's it's it's a woman. It's like an 80% or, 85% female. And the reason is social conditioning. From the time we're little girls, we have fairy tales where the prince kisses the sleeping beauty and she goes off and marries him to his castle. He's a complete stranger. She doesn't know this guy. How many times Look at look at Beauty and the Beast, where we're teaching young girls. You can change the worst sort of guy with the power of your love. Your boys are not brought up with that. That that imagery that there's myths in their brains. So if you watch that movie, How to Lose a Guy in ten Days, which I have to admit I find incredibly amusing, I think it's just adorable. And then Jill, But she does everything on purpose that would make most guys run. If you reverse the sexes, a lot of women would say, So we have so many romance novels where a woman gets swept off her feet, where somebody taking control is seen as masculine, especially most abusers. By the time their late teens, early twenties, they have what the tactical I call misattribution. They have a down to find science where they can explain away every negative thing they do and turn it into a positive. Wow. Or they can either, but they can or they can rationalize and justify in that it's not what you think it is. They they become the victim or the gaslighting or darvill, as people like to call it. Rather use misdirection where if that doesn't work, then they'll do a big loving gesture and usually do it in front of her friends or her work colleagues. you're so lucky to have a guy that's, you know, that does this sort of thing. This sort of thing doesn't work as well on males. We could have a whole different talk about how to protect males from abuse of women. Well, because I'm mindful of time. So two things I would say are the one thing there is the male. You know, there are men who do. I mean, it is it's not the same type of mythology, but there is the white Knight syndrome. Okay. Where? So, you know, I've had a lot of men who. Yeah, I mean, they just have to say they're the savior they have to rescue. And, you know, they get themselves into an unhealthy relationship dynamic because of that. So there is that. But not, again, to the same extent. And it's not as prevalent, you know, as you say, with girls. But I would like to ask you then, what would you say is the number one difference in manipulative tactics between males and females? We know the male tactic. What is the female the difference tactic? I think one of the things that happens with most female abusers is that often they will seek out guys who really want to be with them. There's a level of desperation there. So if the woman is significantly more attractive or if she's very sexually skilled, but she does something where the guy is willing to turn off his brain for a while to be with her, and while he has his brain off, she's putting together all of the manipulation to actually trap him in the relationship. So yeah, it is important. We have all of our fairy tales. We have our chicks licks that that set the groundwork for the male abuser with males. I think it's a sense of invulnerability. For instance, when I was working, coordinating the domestic violence fatality review team in Orange County for the Superior Court, the men, the men who had been killed by abusive wives, the males were all significantly larger than the women. So they felt and I've seen this happen so many times, I even have an ex partner that this happened to. The woman who was abusive, was very petite. And so they felt safe. They felt like, doesn't matter how bad she is, I can protect myself against her. So one of the issues is that men also tend to feel like their physical strength will protect him, but not against a gun or a car. So and also there's that emotional and psychological abuse. I'm doing my show on on Tuesday night on narcissism and dealing with narcissists in a relationship and having a narcissistic ex makes your life hell. So that's something where a lot of men have to deal with that, but they get trapped because they think that they're masculine and they keep them safe. Right? Okay. Yeah. And we talk about playing the victim. I mean, that is another again, the male, especially the narcissist, play the victim so skillfully and keeps the person off balance. One moment they're the aggressor, then they're the victim, you know, and they frame it as such. But women as well, they're much better at playing the victim also. And people are more inclined to believe them, you know? That's right. That's a huge to me, that's a huge tool for the manipulative women and men as well. Again, playing the victim, really, it is. And it does mess with the person's mind whether they know they were aggrieved. But after 10 minutes or 30 minutes of an intense discussion with the other person, somehow they walk away like, wait, how was I tending to their emotional needs? How you know, how was I consoling them? I was the wrong party. Wait, am I am I the abuser? And it really does. I've worked with many people who have been gaslit. It's a word that's used way too frequently these days. But I've seen people who've actually had that experience in Orlando as well. It's just, you know, just a few months, a few weeks even of intense gaslighting weakens your grasp on reality. And then if you imagine someone for months or years, and especially if they were raised by narcissistic or abusive parents. Right. And, you know, their grasp on reality from the earlier days is fragile and then as they get older and someone, you know, as you said, the abusers find their victims, they're able to, you know, delineate the the victim, the easier victims of the people. That's easiest to manipulate. And if you've had a history of that, of course, you know, it's much easier because you've already had your and your your reality shaken up from the beginning. So anyway, I just want to throw that out there, as you know, for people, because for anyone listening, I hope it does resonate because, you know, again, in our clinical practices, we've dealt with many people male, female, gay, straight, old, young. Right. And, you know, there are so many people who've had unfortunately different levels of abuse, domestic violence, manipulation, gaslighting and so on. So I hope some of the thing, you know, if it resonates with them, they realize there are patterns, there are things you can do to help yourself, are warning signs. And, you know, I think when we talk about how abusers, one of the first things they do is, you know, to alienate the person to, you know, make them feel that they don't have the supports and everything and and doing like doing your best to make sure that you can corral the resources and make sure that, you know, you do feel that you can, if necessary, get yourself well if you're in an abusive relationship is necessary, but get yourself out and you know, and find healthy supports healthy people, you know, people to to build you up. So well. You know. Of advice I would give people it would be to remain wary when you're meeting someone new, no matter how nice you seem. And it does if somebody is your genuine soul mate, they will not mind you being careful. But so much of our mythology encourages, especially women, to collapse themselves into a new relationship. And that is so dangerous to do because abusive partners, male or female, don't wear a sign. You have to actually look for indicators and you won't do that if you're riding on that endorphin dopamine high of us and oxytocin of having this new person and they're talking about the future together and all of that. That's why I'm teaching people what to look for specifically when they first get involved with someone so that a lot of the supposedly positive things, they'll see them as warning signs like like love for me. Yeah. Right. So I feel like we could talk to you for hours. You know, there's so much that we've covered today, and I've just really, truly enjoyed it. And that was some good, I think, kind of closing wisdom to share with our listeners, but kind of taking into account everything we've spoken about today. What are some last night's last words you want to leave our listeners with? Well, is hope. You know, one of the things I've done and I've been like out in the wilderness yelling out in the wilderness, one of the reasons I'm going back to the States is because they're in a mindset now of, Hey, let's change things up, let's shake things up. And I look at the fact that nobody has ever reduced the risk for women of being in an abusive relationship. It's 25% in it's lower in Canada, by the way. But in the United States, it's around 25%. So one in four women in some states like Oklahoma, which has the highest domestic violence rate in the country, it's 49.1% risk. My goodness, being in an abusive relationship. But we can change that. My program can actually change that, teach someone that being wary is not be the same as being negative. I teach them even how to differentiate this. You know, we do play little games on this person really likes you and this person's trying to manipulate you. So in my workshops, we make it fun, you know, so that you can actually tell the difference between somebody who behaves a way because they think you're just the best ever, or if they're doing it as a ploy to try to get you into a toxic relationship. So there's hope. Okay. So lastly, tell our listeners where they can find you. Find your work. if you go to my website, it's www.drdinamcmillan.com or if you go on rumble you can look up Heart and Mind with Dr. Dina McMillan and you can see my show you can follow the best way to reach me. Follow me on X It's @drdina1. So it's @drdina1 and you can follow me on X and I tell you everything I do. I even upload some of my shows, actually, right straight on onto X, so follow me there. And we'll put all that in the description so people can easily access those links. I know I follow you on X and that's how we came to know about you and I got to say, I really do appreciate the work that you've done on X, for example. I mean, that's what what an audience and just being, you know, someone out there just saying, hey, there, there are problems in the system. There are problems. And, you know, not just the system but the belief systems. And, you know, there are other ways to think about these things, whether we're talking about diversity or we're talking about domestic violence or anything else. So I do really appreciate whenever I see voices speaking out and, you know, trying to try to fight back against the, let's say, the ideologies and the agendas that have been poisoning society. So I really do appreciate that. And I, of course, appreciate you coming on and speaking with us. So it's been great. Thank you. It was great being here. And if I can make just one suggestion, let's have a show. Just talking about risk for men in relationships, because I think that guys get neglected sometimes. And we would love to have you back for that. And that fits into a lot of the work we've been doing surrounding men's mental health. So we will take you up on that. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Christina. Thank you. And on that note, everyone, until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands up on the wheel.