Oct. 19, 2026
What is a trauma bond?
#narcissist #traumabond
Videos
Sept. 29, 2026
Why Good People Defend Leaders (and Others) Who Contradict Themselves: Identity, Bias & Belonging
Tony Overbay, LMFT, starts with a kid raised in an East Coast fishing town and another raised hiking Arizona trails. He uses them to show how beliefs tend to form through family, community, and identity, with the reasons showing up later. Then he brings the same lens to politics from…
Sept. 18, 2026
Death By 1,000 Cuts Pt. 12: Why Sometimes it's Easier to Say Nothing (Waking Up to Narcissism 167)
Narcissistic relationship patterns can teach you where to stop, long after anyone has to correct you. Tony Overbay, LMFT, shares the 12th installment of the "Death by 1,000 Cuts" series from the Waking Up to Narcissism podcast (episode 167). Tony uses the image of an invisible fence to describe how…
Aug. 6, 2026
You Can Borrow My Nervous System
What if one of the greatest gifts another person can offer you... is their calm? When we're babies, we can't regulate our own nervous systems. A calm parent picks us up and, without saying a word, communicates: "Until yours settles... you can borrow mine." That process is called co-regulation, and…
Aug. 1, 2026
Are You Only OK if Everybody Else is OK?
Do you only feel okay when everyone around you is okay? If someone is upset..you feel responsible. If someone is disappointed...you rush to fix it. If someone pulls away..your nervous system goes into overdrive. That's what I call other-validated intimacy. Your emotional state depends on everyone else's emotional state. The…
June 5, 2026
When Forgiveness Is for Them, and Acceptance Is for You — Waking Up to Narcissism
You can't forgive a narcissistic or emotionally immature partner—and you think that makes you a bad person. It doesn't. For anyone who's been on the receiving end of years of criticism, betrayal, or being subtly "nothinged" in a relationship, the well-meaning prescription to "just forgive and forget" can sting more…
June 4, 2026
I'm a Therapist. It Took Me 56 Years to Understand My Emotions
For most of my life, I thought I understood emotions. I'm a therapist. I've spent years helping people navigate anxiety, trauma, relationships, and healing. But recently, something unexpected happened in my own therapy that completely changed the way I think about feelings. It started with what I jokingly called a…
March 9, 2026
You’re Not Bad — You’re Carrying Shame That Was Never Yours
What if the problem isn’t that you’re broken… but that you were taught to believe you are? In this clip from The Virtual Couch, therapist Tony Overbay explores the powerful difference between guilt and shame, why shame becomes an emotional operating system for so many people, and how early childhood…
Feb. 25, 2026
Your Memory Has Been Turned Against You: Lying, Gaslighting, and Confabulation (Oh My!)
Your memory has been turned—and the double agent is inside your own mind. After years in a relationship with someone emotionally immature or narcissistic, the damage isn't just that they rewrite history. It's that you stop trusting your own ability to know what happened. This episode unpacks confabulation—the unconscious, real-time…