True Crime Obsession Explained |The Psychology Behind Why You Can’t Stop Watching
Welcome to the Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching and a psychology-informed life coach. I explore resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth, identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.
Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've watched people move through life in patterns they rarely notice. Patterns that are subtle, familiar, and incredibly hard to see from the inside. Today, we're talking about one of the most fascinating and under-examined patterns of our time. A pattern that most of us share and almost none of us question.
This is Episode 12, Part 1, True Crime Obsession Explained, the psychology behind why we can't stop watching this. Hi, and welcome back. I'm really glad you're here today because I think this topic is one that almost everyone has a relationship with even if that relationship is one that you haven't
fully examined yet let me paint a picture for you it's 10 o'clock on a Tuesday night you told yourself you're going to bed early you're very tired and yet here you are one episode deep into a four-part docuseries about a murder that happened in 1987 You're fully invested in a case you've never heard of three hours ago.
The laundry's still in the dryer. The book on your nightstand has not moved in a week. But you're absolutely unshakably committed to finding out who did it. Maybe yours looks different. Maybe it's a podcast on your commute to work that you can't stop thinking about all day long.
Maybe it's a live court hearing you have streaming in the background. Because you need to know the verdict in real time. Maybe it's a YouTube channel that reconstructs cold cases or even a Reddit thread where thousands of strangers are collectively solving something that police have not been able to in years. Whatever the form it takes for you,
I want you to know something important before we go any further. You're not alone. You're not strange or a weirdo. True Crime is the number one most listened to podcast genre in the world. It generates billions of streaming hours annually. And women are the vast majority of its listeners.
So the question I want to sit with today is not whether we are fascinated. We already know that. The question is, why are we fascinated? The question beneath that is what's the fascination doing to us? In both ways, helping us in ways that may cost us something we haven't even named yet. That's what we're exploring today.
Before we go any further, I would love for you to sit with just one question. You don't have to answer it out loud, but just notice what comes up. How do you feel after you're watching a true crime or listening to a true crime episode? Not during it, but afterward.
When you close the app or you turn off the screen, are you left with whatever emotion is sitting in your body for some time? Hold on to that answer because we're going to come back to it. When I was thinking about this podcast, I started to think about
When true crime fascination started for me And I realized it was long before I knew what true crime was Maybe even before the entire genre was possible I was nine years old It was Thanksgiving break in 1978 And I was watching the soap opera The
Young and the Restless with my mom When the program was interrupted by the news for a news bulletin The reporter said that the San Francisco mayor George Moscone and the city supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated inside of City Hall Apparently shot by a colleague who at his trial became infamous for his Twinkie defense which was a
diminished capacity argument that earned him a dramatically reduced sentence It was just nuts When the news reporter said that the two were assassinated, I remember my mom gasping, and it kind of startled me. The news stayed on in our house for, I don't know, maybe two days, nonstop. I didn't fully understand the politics, but I understood enough,
including how the media tried to minimize Harvey Milk, just focusing the coverage of the assassination on Moscone And then using Milk's sexuality to push him to the margins. I also understood what I saw in my mom's face. The world just revealed something about itself that I hadn't known before.
That regular people in regular buildings at regular jobs could be erased simply for who they were. At that age I didn't have the words for what I was feeling. But I now know it was the first time my nervous system registered that the world contained a category of danger that had nothing to do with me personally and
everything to do with what humans were capable to doing to one another. I don't think that feeling has ever fully left me. I just think it's grown a little more sophisticated over time. Then came OJ. If you were alive and paying attention between 1994 and 1995, you already know. There's nothing I can tell you about the O.J.
Simpson trial that will be new information. I can tell you what it was like to live inside it as a hairstylist in a busy salon because that experience taught me something about true crime and about people that I've never forgotten. The case The trial It was everywhere It was on every television Every radio station
You could not get away from it At home At work In the break room We were all consuming it All the time Without calling it consumption of course It was just life The white bronco chase on the 405 was one of those moments where I couldn't believe what I was watching A man, a famous,
famous man who was beloved, might have killed two people and was moving at a crawl down an LA freeway with the whole country watching live on the news. I've never seen anything like it. None of us have. On the day of the verdict, I actually went into work late.
I needed to watch the announcement of his innocence or guilt live on my own television before I walked into a salon full of people and full of all of their opinions they had very strong opinions opposite ones of myself depending on who was
sitting in my chair this is what I know Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were dead and I believed OJ put them there I felt that there was overwhelming evidence that made it hard to think otherwise but I also thought of how horrible it was for their families who were sitting in
that circus of a courtroom cameras like zooming in on every facial expression they made while the rest of the world including myself debated over OJ's innocence or guilt The verdict of not guilty was read and my gut knew that the entire spectacle was wrong. I still feel for those families today. That particular grief,
losing someone you love to violence and then watching the world argue about whether it counts. It's something I think about whenever true crime asks someone of the people it leaves behind. And then last week I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Crash It's about a
17 year old girl named Mackenzie Cirilla who drove her car into a brick wall at 100 miles per hour killing her boyfriend and his friend who were also in the car but she didn't die There were no skid marks no attempt to break
And a phone full of messages and videos that told a story that the defense didn't want the judge to hear. As I watched this documentary, I was disgusted not only by Mackenzie's malignant narcissism, but also by her parents' behavior. Their certainty that their daughter could do no wrong,
despite so much proof of how spoiled and disturbed she was, made me increasingly annoyed as I watched. They joked about her drug use and their own and spent most of the time defending how they raised her to be so incredibly gross and ultimately sociopathic, in my opinion. Everyone in that documentary filmed everything, every minute of their lives,
from doing drugs to throwing tantrums when they didn't get their way, especially Mackenzie. And to performing grief in front of the camera. It felt like a portrait of what happens when no one is ever required to answer for the consequences of their choices. It was horrifying in a way that went beyond the crime itself.
What connects all of it isn't the violence or the mystery. It's actually the people left behind. And no case has stayed with me on that question I'm going to tell you more about that case and about someone who was in the room when justice was handed down in part two of this episode. But first,
let's talk about the psychology because I think understanding why we're drawn to these stories is just as important as the stories themselves. Let's start with the landscape because the scale of this thing is genuinely staggering. True crime is not a niche interest. It is a cultural institution.
Serial is the podcast that many credit with igniting the modern true crime boom. It became the fastest podcast in history to reach 5 million downloads when it launched in 2014. It has since been downloaded more than 340 million times. Staggering. Today though, there are thousands of true crime podcasts. Netflix, HBO,
Hulu and Prime have built entire content strategies around true crime documentaries. YouTube channels that are dedicated to cold cases have millions of subscribers. And then there's live court coverage. Think Menendez Brothers retrial or the Alex Murdoch case or even the Karen Reed trial drives live viewership numbers that rival major sporting events like the Super Bowl.
The best part is women are at the center of it all. Research from Edison Research found that women between 18 and 49 are the most consistent true crime consumers across every platform. YouTube, Netflix, you get it. A 2010 study by psychologist Amanda Vicarry, which we'll come back to,
found that women not only consume more true crime than men, So something is happening here that is specifically resonant for women. I don't think it's an accident. I think it's deeply and profoundly human. I'll explain what I mean by that. The first thing to understand is that there's a name for this pull toward dark or disturbing content.
It's not pathological. It's called morbid curiosity, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. In case you haven't, it's one of the oldest and most well documented features of the human mind. The psychologist Colton Scrivner defined morbid curiosity as the desire to learn about threatening, dangerous, or disturbing aspects of the world,
but specifically in the service of understanding and preparing for danger. Morbid curiosity is not the same as enjoying suffering. In this, the brain attempts to gather intelligence about threats that it could possibly face one day. Think about evolutionary history. For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in environments where the ability to recognize danger, such as predators,
aggression, violence, members of a tribe, it was literally the difference between life and death. The brain that paid attention to the threat that lingered on it that steadied it survived. The brains that looked away they didn't survive they died. We are the descendants of the ones who looked who paid attention.
This means that the same mechanism that makes you slow down to look at an accident on the freeway even though you feel guilty about it sometimes It's the same ancient circuitry that draws you toward a true crime documentary. It's not weakness. It's not a character flaw even. It's an evolutionary inheritance firing exactly as designed.
Scribner's research also found that people who score higher in trait morbid curiosity tend to be better at regulating fear They're not more anxious They're often less anxious Because they've pre-processed threat information Before ever encountering a real version of it True crime on some
level is the brain doing threat training That's a way to look at it My friend Shawn is a perfect example of what this looks like in real life She's been listening to My Favorite Murder for years. She even drove to Oakland to see the host perform live. But here's the thing that tells you everything.
When she hears a case on that podcast, she immediately searches for the documentary so she can see exactly what they're talking about visually. She's not consuming passively. She's investigating. And what she finds most compelling isn't the violence itself. It's the behavior that sits completely outside her own experience. Going beyond anger, acting on your darkest thoughts.
Most of us will never go there. Shawn, like all of us, can't stop looking at the people who do or who did. Professor Gina Stahlhaven, a very good friend of mine, teaches communications at Santa Rosa Junior College, has built an entire course around true crime and told me that she traces her
obsession with true crime to one single afternoon. She was in her graduate program at San Francisco State when she toured San Quentin Prison. She walked in and something shifted She became obsessed, she says, with everything she didn't know about our criminal justice system The gap between
what she assumed and what she saw in that building was so vast that she spent her career trying to close it One class, one student, one case at a time That pull you feel toward what you don't know, toward what you're not supposed to see, that's morbid curiosity operating exactly as designed.
We were built for this and for women that training serves a very specific purpose. So why women specifically? I think this is a part of the conversation that most true crime commentary skips over or handles superficially. Amanda Vicarry's research found something striking. Women are more drawn to true crime that features female victims or cases involving
domestic violence or intimate partner violence and stories where the perpetrator was known to the victim. In other words, women are most interested in the crimes that are statistically most likely to happen to them. This is a totally rational mindset. It's not coincidental. Let's think about this.
Women are taught from childhood to be aware of their physical vulnerability in a way that men, genuinely speaking, are not. We are told to walk to our cars with our keys between our fingers, not to go running after dark, or to share our location with a friend when meeting someone new.
To trust the uneasy feeling in our stomach even when we can't articulate why. We absorb a constant low frequency awareness of danger that most men are not socialized to carry. True Crime feeds directly into that awareness. It's not to frighten us further, but to educate us, I think.
When we listen to a story about how a predator selected his victim, what tactics he used to isolate them, or what the warning signs the people around him dismissed, we're not wallowing, we're studying. We are gathering information that our nervous system has spent our entire lives telling us we need. Psychologists call this safety information hypothesis.
The research supports it. It means women who consume true crime report higher awareness of Personal Safety Strategies They're more likely to recognize warning signs of coercive control in relationships and they feel a greater sense of agency around their own protection. My friend Shawn simply stated that it feels like she's researching while watching
these shows and listening to the podcasts. She sees it as protection because women are usually the victims in most scenarios. Gina said women are probably taking notes to figure out how to avoid getting murdered. It was a funny comment, dark, but it is completely true. The safety information hypothesis describes in clinical language, but never quite captures emotionally.
The vigilance women carry is not paranoia. It's a reasonable response to a world that has given us every reason to carry it And then there's my friend Angie Angie's been consuming true crime since she was a young adult At first it was books on true crime, then documentaries,
then nightly videos and reels She grew up in a community along with myself Where the crimes weren't exactly abstract. Polly Klaas was murdered in the next town over. A girl from our town was murdered and her body was dumped near a local lake right up the street from me.
For Angie, this genre was never entertainment at a safe distance. It was close. When Angie was in her 20s, she walked into a liquor store. Her friends were outside. And the attendant locked the door behind her and started pushing her toward the back of the store Thankfully she picked up a bottle,
looked him square in the eye and told him she would break every bottle in the place and use the glass on him if he didn't open that door immediately He did and she got out I asked her where she thought her response came from
She said it was a fight response that she had always had that never froze but also didn't consider it came from her knowledge of true crime conception for at least a decade but here's what the research tells us her brain didn't file a footnote when
it learns something it just learns it right and Angie has been learning every night for years I then asked her whether before that night she had ever thought about what she would do if something like that happened. Her answer was no, not before the liquor store. But afterward, she started questioning herself,
wondering if she misread the situation or whether she made too much of it. Basically, whether she was wrong. She survived a real threat using exactly the right response, but she still asked herself if she overreacted. I then asked her what she thought a man in the same situation would ever,
if he would ever question himself the way she did. She immediately said no and then added, violence simply doesn't happen to men at a rate it happens to women. So that makes me think that self-doubt isn't irrational. It's the tax women pay for having accurate instincts in a world that has spent a
lifetime telling them that their instincts are wrong. I remember I saw this Oprah episode where there was a homicide detective on it and he was talking about how when let's say you're as a woman you're in the elevator And a man gets in and the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up And
everything in you tells you caution, caution, caution But because we've been told to be polite and kind We try to ignore that Don't ignore it There's also something else happening for women in this genre that I think is equally as important But it has nothing to do with self-protection It has to do with justice
Women are disproportionately the victims in true crime stories, right? Historically, they have also been disproportionately disbelieved, dismissed, and failed by the system meant to protect them. The true crime community, largely composed of women, has become one of the most powerful forces in the modern justice landscape. The Golden State Killer
was identified in 2018 partly because of the relentless work of citizen investigation. Many of them true crime podcast listeners. Countless cold cases have been reopened because of the online communities that refuse to let victims be forgotten. For women who have spent their lives being told their fear is irrational, their instincts are wrong,
And their experiences are exaggerated True crime offers something rare Validation, community, and the belief that what happened matters And that someone is paying So now I want to talk about the dopamine suspense loop Brain chemistry There's a mechanism at work here that explains why true crime isn't just interesting,
it's compelling in a way that's hard to interrupt once it starts. When we engage in a true crime story, the brain enters what researchers call a suspense resolution cycle. Suspense triggers a release of cortisol, stress hormone, which heightens your attention and focus. The body is activated. Every detail feels significant.
You can't look away because the brain has registered an unresolved threat and it will not fully relax until that threat is resolved. When the resolution comes, maybe the arrest, the conviction, the ID, dopamine is released. This gives you relief and satisfaction. A small but real neurochemical reward is given to you for staying with the
discomfort long enough to reach the end. This cycle of tension engagement resolution finally reward is the same loop that makes narrative fiction impossible to put down. It makes gambling compelling. It makes any story with a strong narrative arc feel so satisfying to complete. True crime uses it exceptionally well because the stakes are real.
These are not fictional characters. They're real people. And that reality raises the emotional stakes in a way no drama can fully replicate. This is also why true crime that ends in unsolved cases is particularly disturbing to many listeners. That dopamine reward never arrives. The cortisol has nowhere to go.
So you're left holding that tension of the cortisol with no release. So the thread is always there, but it's never ending. Which is one reason why cold cases generate such intense audience engagement. The brain wants to finish what it started. Let's give this genre its due before we examine the cost to us.
I've already mentioned safety awareness and justice advocacy, which those are great. Phenomenal. But let's talk about empathy at scale. True crime at its best is an exercise in radical empathy. It asks us to enter the experience of a victim, maybe to imagine their fear, their confusion,
Their Trust That Was Betrayed But To Also Hold That Reality Long Enough To Actually Care About It In A Culture That Often Moves Way Too Fast And Values The Abstract Over The Personal True Crime Shows Slow Us Down They Force Us To Sit With The Weight Of A Single Human Life
Research from the University of Illinois found that people who engage regularly with narrative nonfiction, including true crime, show increased scores on measures of empathy and perspective taking. The immersion in another person's experience, even a dark one, appears to build the emotional muscle that allows us to connect more deeply with people in our real lives.
So that's a few points towards the pro column of watching True Crime True Crime has also been one of the most powerful popular forces driving criminal justice awareness in the last decade Documentaries like Making a Murderer The Jinx The Central Park Five have forced national conversations about wrongful convictions prosecutorial misconduct
And racial bias in policing Conversations that academic papers and advocacy organizations have been trying to start for years without traction True Crime gave those conversations an audience of millions My friend Gina has built an entire college course around exactly this idea Her class guides students to do a deep dive into specific cases that examine how a
victim's identity, race, class, gender, sexual identity, how it shapes what happens to their case. The students look at what gets investigated and what doesn't, who gets justice and who doesn't And at the end of her course, each student advocates for a specific policy change rooted in something they discovered.
One student for this semester in her class found that in one state, I believe it was Idaho, you can't request a change of cause of death on a death certificate unless you do it within two weeks of the original filing. That means that if someone realizes a year later that a death was actually a homicide,
they can't legally correct the record. That student is now advocating for a policy change. That's true crime doing exactly what it should do, turning fascination into action. I like that. So what about processing fear in a safe container? There is a therapeutic function to true crime.
Because it allows us to experience fear or threat and a moral complexity in a control bounded container. The danger is real, but it's not happening to us right now. We have the safety of the screen or the earbuds between ourselves and the content. This creates what psychologists call safety threat experience or a way of
metabolizing fear and building emotional resilience without real world risk. It's very hard to say. For survivors of trauma in particular, true crime can serve as a form of narrative processing, maybe as a way of approaching experiences that feel too close to examine directly. You could examine them through a story that's familiar but not exactly identical
Full disclosure this is not universally true and should not replace actual therapeutic support But the research is real for some people engagement with true crime is part of how they make sense of a world that feels unsafe My last item in the pro column of true crime watching is community Shawn sitting at
a live performance of My Favorite Murder was also surrounded by people who felt exactly the same way about it Think about that for a moment A podcast about murder became a shared experience in a room full of strangers bonded by the same fascination That's community The true crime community is one of the most active, engaged,
and connected online spaces that exist Maybe people who would have never met otherwise are bonded by shared investment in justice, truth, and the belief that victims deserve to be remembered For many people, especially those who feel isolated That community offers something real and sustaining. That gets my vote.
But now here's the part that we don't really like to talk about. The hidden cost of what true crime can actually take from us. Because the same genre that builds empathy, raises safety awareness, and creates community can also If we're not paying close attention Quietly erode things We can't afford to lose
That leads me to Anxiety and hypervigilance As many of you know I was born with a genetic bone disease That has meant a lifetime Of physical vulnerability My nervous system Has always carried A certain level of baseline Alertness It had to So I understand viscerally the difference between useful vigilance and the kind of
chronic low level fear that simply exhausts people. If you recognize that low level chronic fear, that feeling that true crime feeds anxiety more than it calms it, that's worth paying attention to. The safety information hypothesis cuts both ways. Yes, true crime increases safety awareness, but for a significant portion of the audience,
especially women who are already carrying a baseline level of threat vigilance, it can tip safety awareness into hypervigilance, a chronic state of nervous system activation that makes the world fundamentally dangerous. Research has found that heavy true crime consumers show elevated anxiety scores, increased distrust of strangers, and a distorted perception of the prevalence of violent crimes.
Those are the people that are in a chronic state of nervous system activation. But here's a fact worth sitting with. Violent crime rates in the United States have fallen significantly since the 1990s. The average true crime listener perception of personal risk has not followed that trend. Maybe it's because the content never stops.
The stories keep coming and the brain which cannot distinguish between a threat it is watching and a threat it is living can stay activated. There's also a concept in psychology called habituation. or meaning the process by which repeated exposure to a stimulus causes a decreasing response to it.
The first time you hear a story of extreme violence, it usually shocks you. The fifth time, slightly less so. The 50th time, you may find yourself eating dinner with a, I don't know, forensic pathologist describing a The specific gory details of a homicide and feel nothing at all. I hope that's never me.
My friend Angie watches true crime every single night. Fully relaxed. No sleep disruption. And by her own description, completely desensitized to the violence. As she, and she functions well. She feels no chronic anxiety from it. She's a real counterpoint to the research pattern Not every person experiences the
genre the same way How it lands in your body depends in part, I guess, of what you bring to it But here's the distinction worth making There's a difference between desensitization to the production of true crime content Such as the music, the narration, the pacing and desensitization to the reality underneath it.
I want to be careful about the second kind, the kind that makes it possible to treat a real human tragedy as background noise. The next con of watching true crime, listening to true crime is, and it kind of seems obvious, is sleep disruption. And I think we underestimate how important this is.
Study after study has found that consuming distressing content, including true crime, in the hour before we sleep, it elevates cortisol, it delays sleep onset, And increases the frequency of disturbing dreams Because true crime is specifically engineered to be bingeable The one more episode pattern that we watch with is
particularly seductive at exactly the wrong time of day I know this and yet I also know my I know this from me But I also know my friend Gina who has completely studied the psychology of this genre professionally watches these shows before bed specifically to relax and she
means it there is a real individual variation here but sleep deprivation doesn't just make you tired it impairs emotional regulation increases reactivity it reduces empathy and It increases anxiety. So in my opinion, the genre you turn to partly as a way of managing fear can, when consumed in excess at the wrong time,
I think make the fear harder to manage. For those who engage deeply and frequently with true crime content, there's also a real risk of what clinicians call secondary traumatic stress. That's the accumulation of trauma responses from repeated exposure to other people's trauma. It's the same phenomenon experienced by emergency room or emergency responders,
journalists who cover disasters and therapists who work with survivors. Symptoms can include intrusive thoughts, emotional numbing, difficulty sleeping, Increase startle responses and a pervasive sense of real dread that doesn't quite have a specific target. If you've ever found yourself unable to stop thinking about a case or feeling
fearful in situations that would not normally frighten you or maybe even carrying a sadness you can't quite trace or Secondary traumatic stress is worth considering if you are a avid true crime viewer. So let's consider for just one moment an ethical question concerning victim as content.
The people at the center of the true crimes are not characters, right? They are or were real human beings. They have families, habits, favorite foods, inside jokes, and fears of their own. Most of them did not choose to become the subject of a podcast, a docuseries, or even a Reddit thread. Their families almost certainly did not either.
There's a growing movement among crime journalists, victim advocates, and even some within the true crime community that asks a question that the genre has largely avoided. At what point does our engagement with these stories stop serving justice and start serving our entertainment at the expense of people who are still living inside the
worst thing that has ever happened to them? Gina's students wrestle with this directly. They examine how victims are framed by race, class, gender, and sexual identity. Not just in the crime themselves, but in the coverage. Which cases get told by the media? How are the victims described? Were their lives tragedy or a plot line?
That critical lens is exactly what this genre needs more of And it's striking that it's being taught in a public speaking class to students who just love true crime podcasts So win-win, they got more than they signed up for Back to Angie, who consumes more true crime than almost anyone I know Well,
maybe she and Shawn are tied She said something that surprised me After everything she's watched, she said what stays with her isn't rage at the perpetrator. It's the sorrow that she feels for the families. The people who love someone who turned out to be capable of the worst thing imaginable.
That kind of empathy extended even to the people we're not supposed to feel for. is what this genre can produce at its best, I think. Which makes the ethical question that follows all the more important. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't engage. I am arguing that engagement without reflection is a form of carelessness that this
genre or the victims and the victims' families do not deserve. So ask yourself with honesty. Am I engaging with this story because I truly care about justice or because I find the horror compelling? Both can be true simultaneously. That's the complicated reality of being human. But it's worth knowing which part is driving you.
So where does all this leave us? I'm not here to tell you to stop watching I'm not here to make you feel guilty for something that provides genuine comfort community intellectual engagement even what I'm here to do is what I always try to
do in this space I want to help you to be a little more conscious of your patterns so your patterns are working for you instead of the other way around here are questions I would encourage you to bring to your true crime habits one
Does this content leave me feeling more empowered and informed or more afraid and helpless? Both answers are valid data. Two, am I watching at times of day that support my sleep, my mood and my nervous system or am I using it as a way to avoid something I should be feeling? Three,
Do I find myself consuming this content even when I don't want to? When the pull feels more compulsive than chosen? Last one. How do I treat the victim in this story in my own mind? As a human being whose life mattered or as a narrative device in a story about someone else? Those are not gotcha questions.
They are the questions of someone who cares about both the genre and about herself. I asked you at the very beginning of this episode how you feel after the viewing or listening, not during, of a true crime episode. I hope by now you have a clearer sense of what that feeling is telling you.
And I hope you'll decide with intention what to do with it. Because that, more than any specific habit, is the work of the original self. Choosing what you let in, knowing why, and staying honest about what it costs you. I'll also offer this. If you notice that your true crime consumption is feeding anxiety rather than calming it,
consider time limiting it. Choosing content that ends in resolution rather than a cold case. Or pairing it with something that actively restores your nervous system afterward. A walk, a conversation, something that reminds your body that the immediate world around you right now is safe.
And if you find yourself carrying something from a case that you just can't put down, I don't know, a heaviness, a grief, a rage that won't resolve, honor that. That is your empathy speaking. You don't have to perform detachment to be a thoughtful consumer You just have to
know what you're holding and then decide intentionally what to do with it Next week on the Original Self Podcast I'm bringing in someone to this conversation who didn't just follow a case from her couch She got on a plane, booked a hotel, and walked into a courthouse in Idaho to sit in the room where Lori Vallow Daybell
was sentenced for murdering her own children. My friend Rhonda is going to tell us what she found when the documentary was gone and the music stopped and then it was just a room full of people and the unmediated reality of what one human did to two others who called her mom. That's part two. The Witness.
True Crime Obsession Explained. What happens when you stop watching and walk into the room? I'll see you next week. Like always, if you need to speak to me or you want to check out my website, please go to decotalifecoaching.com. Until next time stay curious stay honest and keep coming back to yourself.
