90 Day Fiancé (Nicole and Azan #23) - Therapist Reacts - Control

hey deserving listeners it's time to continue our journey with nicole and isan on a 90 day fiance my name is dr kirkhanda i'm a therapist and a professor as i always say in these videos you should not use these videos as a replacement for therapy if you need a therapist you should get a therapist because you deserve it you're so disrespectful to me so disrespectful the way you talk to me look at me and say something there's nothing why do you only get this far without you just saying something why [Music] so it's a little concerning we've seen that before she's put hands on before in that moment and it was a similar moment when they were in the production i think that's the production van i think that's the van that they rent for the camera crew and everything i'm not because i i don't know why a random like commuter van would be sitting there but anyway as he was trying to get out of the van it stands to reason that she would that she wouldn't want him to leave that she would want to engage with him because she loves him and she wants to resolve this somehow she wants contact with him she's not doing a great job of creating an opportunity for that but it stands to reason and as he was getting up you saw her put that hand out to stop him now he pushed past it or she relented but that's not a good sign of an impulse when someone physically wants to get away and someone is putting hands on to get you to stop that that it doesn't bode well is that the beginning of a intimate partner violence pattern from her i don't know she doesn't seem to have that flavor but i know well enough to know that plenty of women can absolutely perpetrate domestic violence and coercive high control in a relationship and they don't look like the sort of people that would do that so i just want to say that now she has every right to say i don't want you to leave or if you leave the relationship is over or something you know that you can use your words but to use your hands is a an impulse that is troubling [Music] yikes so she's doubling down on the coercive control right now so i want to reverse the gender just to really put a fine point on it imagine if a quiet woman was trying to get away because she was being yelled at by a man the man is yelling at her and she gets up and she's trying to get away and he and the man puts hands on like this and says you're not gonna go okay just imagine that well for most of us that fits our image of what a domestic violence intimate partner violence high control relationship looks like because we're we're generally not shown very many images of domestic violence for a lot of reasons but but the images that we do see it tends to be a man on a woman which makes some sense given that the it's much more prevalent for that to be the configuration in a heterosexual relationship of course there's a lot of there's just as much i don't know the exact stats but there is a fair amount or an equal amount i don't know the stats but of intimate partner violence and high control in same-sex relationships as well uh but let's look at this right now we have a woman who's doing it to a man and it is just as problematic some people will say well you know he's a man he could take her that has nothing to do with it i'm here to tell you it just the the physical ability to fight your partner has nothing to do with it a very small man can intimidate a large woman a very small woman can intimidate a large man now their body sizes actually aren't that in terms of you know physical force might not even be that different i don't know but that is not the issue the issue when it comes to intimate partner violence and terror and control is i have the right to put hands on and i am going to escalate things if you don't do what i tell you to do then i am going to escalate and you don't and you and god knows what i'm going to do if if you don't do what i if you don't obey and that's usually what and for those of you who have been in an intimate partner violence you probably can identify with intimate partner violence relationship you know what i'm talking about the violence might have been a part of it and might have been horrible but often the primary concern is i didn't know what the abuser was going to do next were they going to hit me were they going to hurt my kids were they going to you know drain my finances were they going to spread a bad rumor about were they going to lie about me you know these are the kinds of worries that can really be troubling are they going to stab me in my sleep when when i'm sleeping are they gonna drug me you know that those are the worries that i hear from a lot of people who are in high control relationships so make no joke about it this is not okay you could say that azan is is being a bad fiancee by walking away from her and the things that he is saying totally fine but it is not okay to put hands on when you don't like what someone is doing totally inappropriate and and abusive that is just flat-out abuse to grab someone as they're trying to get away from you is high control abusive relationship not [Music] okay yikes okay look at that face look at that face this is a mode that i'm guessing he has seen a lot of that we have yet to see let's watch this whole thing again let's let's really let this thing sink in now i will say trigger alert before we move forward because this is depiction of domestic violence right in front of our faces some of you might already be triggered and i didn't know this was going to happen because i didn't know that this couple was capable of this but you you might not want to watch the rest of this if if you have trauma regarding intimate partner violence and high control and maybe it's just a good idea for all of us to kind of relax and remind ourselves that this is a tv show and that we're safe and we're okay and we're not in the scene and as always if you know anyone or you yourself are suffering from a high control or intimate partner violence relationship domestic violence go to thehotline.org you deserve to have a resources and people to talk to to talk you through the steps of getting safe and maybe getting out of the relationship [Music] essence [Music] [Music] god wow so where does that come from where does that entitlement come from is that something that was modeled to her i don't know we didn't hear anything but it wouldn't be surprising we didn't hear anything because it's not like the family would want to talk about that is this an outgrowth of her preoccupied attachment maybe is this an outgrowth of her dependency and her sense that she deserves more than other people because she has a younger self-hood if you will 13 year olds tend to believe because they're 13 which is fine not always but they tend to have a bigger sense of what they deserve than someone who's 25 or 45 as you age you learn oh i'm not the world doesn't revolve around me and that what i want doesn't necessarily mean that i get to have it and for some dependent people because they're they're you know kept at a certain age because the family treats them at that age then they retain that sense of entitlement later on in in life i don't know what i don't know what's going on there that would be my suspicion that would be my main hypothesis that last thing if i were to take a speculation speculated guess as i always say on this show on all these shows i am always completely speculating on very little data that the show decides to show us and that the people in the show decide to show the cameras so everything should be taken with that in mind but this is very troubling now i will say that this doesn't mean that the relationship is doomed i've treated couples like this before and turn them around from this style of abuse because for her for nicole that they often don't frame themselves as abusers or high control people but we but that doesn't really matter because we don't have to frame it that way we can just frame it as she was being triggered and she resorted to dysfunctional behavior to manage that trigger and then we talk about it and we help both of them learn how to not trigger each other and it it usually works so i could imagine that working with them i i always wish that the show would just give him a couple's therapist but of course if they did that it would reduce the drama and reduce the reality tv gold that they're getting right now so now i will say that i feel really bad for azan i mean just watch that i mean so when you're watching it or at least from my eyes from my cultural pocket it would seem like well you know he's a guy he can he he's strong he what's he's not really threatened by her and that could be true but that is usually not the case for someone to for someone that you love that that is supposed to love you for them to just put hands on you and i mean she was really laying into him and and really trying to physically wrestle him to make him stop that is extremely scary for anyone even for men take it from me i've treated male victims of domestic violence of this exact sort and it is it is terrifying it's scary it's just like whoa like you're what are you doing like are you gonna are you're gonna throt are you gonna kill me if you're capable of this amount of anger can i sleep at night knowing that you have this in you are you gonna what are you gonna what else are you gonna do to me so make no joke this is this is extremely abusive and not okay behavior but i want to watch it again because i i really want to keep that if this might help so if you don't have in your mind a a sort of template for a male victim from a female abuser really try to put yourself in azan's shoes let's watch that scene again and again if this is triggering any trauma make sure you don't watch or pause it take a breath and take it [Music] easy [Music] [Music] i hate everything [Music] tough to watch really really tough to watch that does not bode well for either of them it's really awful now i will say that i've also treated perpetrators of abuse male and female and i have compassion for them and i understand often if we work long enough together where it comes from it comes from their own traumas and their own issues being triggered in the moment people don't usually want to do that kind of thing but some of these behaviors can be pretty ingrained in one's personality meaning that the person really just doesn't see what they're doing is unfair because of the way they're raised or because of these really deep schemas that they have and it can take a long time to unravel that so i don't have any compassion for the behavior but i have a hundred percent compassion for people who do that kind of thing because like i said no one just wakes up in the morning or very few people wake up in the morning and say you know what i'm going to be a jerk to people because i want to it's usually because people are being triggered in the moment everything i hate [Music] everything oh my god he worries about everything i say i swear to god he can't even look at me as a single person i am just a bunch a group of americans i'm just american to him okay trump so right now she is in a high distress state you can tell viscerally and so is azan in all likelihood he doesn't show it because he learned early in life total speculation that he didn't need to show it because no one cared anyway so it's just better not to show it's also better not even to notice it but i'm guessing that he is in a high stress bodily state as well for her it's much more noticeable because she didn't shut down her emotions when she was young she might have amplified them because she needed to in order to get people to pay attention to her because she might not have been getting her emotional attunement needs met in life total speculation so there's a lot of things she's going to say in this moment that she might not say other times or she might be a little discombobulated so you know just have to take everything that she's saying with a grain of salt bizarre president i'm a racist i see something about the bootleg dvds i'm making fun of their culture like it's something everything i say is a insult to him and apparently everyone else wants to just talk about me because apparently i'm a horrible person and he can't see me the way i am the way i've always been to him the way i am to him all right so we're hearing some details about their fights is that he thinks that she's racist because she's an american and that she is not respectful of his culture i think that it would stand a reason that both of them would have some culture shock with each other so do we call it culture shock or adjustment or do we call and or do and sort of disrespect because of ignorance or do we call it just flat out being a racist bad person who purposely wakes up in the morning to have bad thoughts so anyway let's continue watching it doesn't defend me at all i defend him to my family i don't let everything be seen i may try to make sure that everything is fine because i love him and i want everything so she's really hurt and she is expressing that hurt so he must have really hurt her i didn't really care about me i know i made mistakes but i wish he would just try it's not fair for him to be just trustful and disrespectful to me just because of what i did you know before i cheated on him things were amazing after i cheated it changed yeah as i've said before in other videos that is not uncommon for cheating and infidelity to really create a lot of turmoil in a relationship and research shows that the cheater often is very confused as to how much turmoil it causes they the cheater will often say i had no idea that i'd be dealing with the fallout from that one night stand for so long afterwards it it just is crazy to me that we're still talking about it and if i knew that it was going to be this much turmoil i never would have done it and i don't know why that is i don't know why people have such a hard time predicting that i think a big part of it is we don't talk about it much in our culture we tend to say well if someone cheats you got to leave them but the fact is is a lot of people don't leave their partner because cheating happens sometimes particularly when you're together a long time particularly if you have attachment injuries and you have issues and a lot of people have issues that can result in cheating or at least distance that can result in a temptation for cheating so for her she's she's saying that she's like i had no idea well let's hear that again to me just because of what i did you know before i cheated on him things were amazing after i cheated it changed now the issue here is not that she deserves to be disrespected because she cheated that that is not what i'm saying what i'm saying is that the hurt runs really deep and the period of time of trust building and repair that a relationship has to go through is a long time and there can be anger that can come from the cheated on partner that can feel very confusing to the to the cheating partners it's like why are we still dealing with this because it often does take a long time to recover now but i'm not saying that she deserves to be yelled at or disrespected or rejected or something like that what i'm saying is that there's a lot of emotional discussions that need to happen now i don't know how well azan is at identifying his hurt feelings and communicating that saying something like so i just saw you look at that guy at the market i know you're not flirting with him but it triggered the cheating trauma that i have from you and i had this wave of anger but when i look deeper it's it's a wave of fear of losing you and it's a fear of hurt that you did that to me so can you apologize a few more times because i kind of need to hear you say it again that you care about me and that you're never going to do it again so i just role played a functional healthy way of recognizing your emotions communicating it and giving the other person an opportunity to rise to the occasion to enhance the relationship i'm guessing that's not what azan does i'm guessing that he shuts down because he shows that pattern on the show he gives her the cold shoulder and maybe even starts to snipe at her and criticize her for various different things she gets hurt she feels the distance she starts to yell he shuts down and the cycle you know continues and yeah i've gotten loud pushed him but the way he talks to me is not fair yikes okay i mean that makes sense that she would have that attitude given the prolonged nature of her hands-on session earlier but she says yeah i put hands on but he deserves it because of what he did that is a big yikes so what nothing i'm not talking to you because you don't know how to talk i don't know how to talk are you serious the only thing that you can do no no no no no don't even don't even just crazy no don't even say i'm crazy when you don't more yikes so she just put hands on again pulling his face up that's not a good impulse and she also is talking over him now he's not being helpful he's just accusing her of being of not knowing how to talk which is not a good way to open up a conflict resolution discussion but the fact that he was just abused and is continuing to experience abuse it makes sense that he's not going to be you know fantastically enthusiastic about having a conversation with her and she's talking over him which is another forceful thing that we've seen her do we've seen this mode that she gets into and maybe this is what her family talks about when they talk about her being a bulldozer i don't know so this sort of behavior typically doesn't emerge in a vacuum it's usually modeled in some respect or rewarded in some respect or or needed as a defense in some respect in our family of origin i could only speculate as to why that would happen but uh this is troubling but i've seen them pull out of a dive before they've managed to uh you know communicate better to express love but i don't know they they seem to be saying that they've been in and they've been fighting a lot lately so maybe their love for each other has eroded i don't know let's find out don't even try to tell me how i am example if even like we're talking at house you even know speak nobody i was trying to talk to you i was trying to get you to talk to me and to listen to how i was feeling but you didn't care you didn't want to listen and yeah you say let's talk at night but i know what happens when we go to talk at night you don't want to talk okay so it's a classic preoccupied avoidant uh dynamic right there as well i can't tell you how many times i've heard that okay fine you know you say you don't wanna you don't wanna talk now and you say you wanna talk later but then later you don't wanna talk then so what's going on there well to the preoccupied person they are very often the preoccupied meaning they're worried they're they're anxious they're worried about like do you love me is our relationship safe and the preoccupied person their solution is to seek conversation because they often believe that if we could just talk about it then i can feel safe now that's not a bad impulse but sometimes what i try to do with preoccupied people is try to disabuse them of that being the only way that they can achieve safety because to the preoccupied person and some of you out there are a law of averages in all likelihood preoccupied as well there's this belief system that if i can just get my partner to do x y and z then i'll feel safe but the fact is is that probably isn't true it might temporarily relieve you but you probably have just a baseline fear or a baseline notion that you're going to get hurt and that you have been hurt you might have abandonment traumas or some kind of lack of attunement traumas in your past that are that are really affecting you and there's nothing that a current partner can can do to heal those things in the short term anyway and so what i often will say is good you know communicate your feelings try to get contact pursue there's nothing wrong with pursuing in a healthy way you can pursue as long as you don't accuse and put hands on for god's sake but there's also another strategy which is a whole set of other cognitive strategies of well okay what am i feeling right now what i'm feeling is i'm feeling worried that i'm going to lose him and i'm feeling very i'm i feel a lot of distress and i have this impulse to chase him and to tell him what to do and to make him love me right now is that really going to solve my problem maybe it won't maybe i have to sit here and reassure myself or maybe turn to another attachment you know there's other kinds of strategies that don't involve chasing your you know target your object of of relations in that moment so i don't know if i explain that very well but anyway let's continue watching this is what happens when you don't want to just talk okay it happens somewhere public and why can't you just do it in the freaking bedroom why is it so hard [Music] why is it so hard to talk to you my god more hands-on so this is even more troubling so in the moment we could imagine maybe that nicole just temporarily lost sense of herself and put hands on but this is minutes later and she doesn't seem as distressed she's she's distressed for sure but not as distressed and here she's doing it again and even potentially more forcefully this is this is not okay as i've been saying you can wage a complaint against azan for just walking away it's kind of uncool but people should have the right to go where they want to go and walk where they want to walk now you can say if you don't talk to me i want to break up you could maybe say that you could say walking away from me really hurts my feelings you could say that you could say walking away from me isn't going to help us resolve this conflict you could say that too but you don't have the right in the same way that azan doesn't have the right to tell her to have a different body she does not have the right to stop him from walking where he wants to walk [Music] stop running away from me okay okay no stop trying to blame me that i'm crazy and then i start yelling when i didn't start yelling [Music] all i've asked is for you to talk to me why do you make it so hard to just talk to nothing hmm why oh no just so i would speculate that is in a high state of distress right now that his higher mind is not getting enough blood and that he's confused and he's hot and he has a lot of anger on the inside that he doesn't want to express because he doesn't want to be destructive that he doesn't want to reveal his vulnerability in front of anyone particularly in front of the cameras and he might be scared of that he might be feeling extremely controlled right now and threatened by her physical body right now so so i want to point that out because when you look at him he just seems like he doesn't care and that's the trick that the avoidant people often will pull on everyone it'll seem like they don't care like it just doesn't matter like they they're robots they don't have emotions but of course they do they have just as many emotions if not more unmet emotional needs because they've avoided because they learned they had to avoid early in life and then they didn't give anyone a chance to take care of them and so they have all these unmet needs on the inside and all these emotions that are happening on the inside so i just want to point that out and i just have to again just double down to say how troubling it is that she is controlling his physical movement right now and putting hands on and if and and it's working last time he actually managed to get away from her and this time she she is winning and you see her i mean just look at that stance and for those of you who have a hard time imagining a woman being a abusive uh you know partner let's reverse the roles here let's say azan is doing this and she she's trying to get away and he's stopping her he's standing in the doorway and looking down on her i think most of us could identify that situation as abusive this is as abusive it's exactly the same make no doubt about it because it wouldn't want to i don't care if you don't want to because you saved a little time i need you to talk to me because it's not fair the way you get to act and then when i get upset i'm the problem so great nicole you have every right to have this conversation you can't do it in a coercive environment this is not an even playing field you can't intimidate someone and and control their movement and then expect okay now let's have a conversation like you can't do that that's he is now in a state of just like i don't know what he's going through but i imagine he is in a high state of distress and a high state of of hurt of like you're now i can't now i can't go where i want to go now you're going to physically control me and this makes me wonder how much more this has been happening because if she's willing to show us in on camera this behavior what's been happening in the previous month while the cameras weren't around this is really troubling ridiculous you know that ridiculous the way you act i don't know if it's over or not now i'm right now i'm just really mad at him i also say that i i off the top of my head i can think of some other couples on the show where the american looking for a foreigner who they assume wants to come to the united states the american person will eventually reveal this side of themselves which is high control or abusive or entitlement or something and just a hypothesis i have no idea but it makes me wonder if people who have that personality trait and it plagues their dating relationships and makes it so that people who have power will run away from them eventually the american is like well maybe if i find someone in another country who who depends on me for a green card i will be able to control them even more because that's my strategy is to control i'm not saying that americans are prone to that and other people aren't i'm just saying that because the americans on the show anyway at least they might perceive themselves as having some kind of control economically and put politically over other people privilege wise over other people and maybe that's what attracts them to date people from other countries i don't know because this is this is not the first time we've seen the american on 90 day fiance exhibit high control and intimidation this isn't the first time that i've thought i wonder if the non-american feels like they have enough power to fight back i don't even know how i feel about the situation going forward i don't know [Music] [Music] that poor hand she sees the camera oh hi now i want to be clear i'm not justifying azan's behavior i'm not saying like yeah his behavior is fine and he is justified walking away he's justified being cold he's justified in what he said i'm not saying he didn't contribute to the conflict i'm saying that it is immoral and totally crossing a line when you put hands on and do high control and so that's that's what i'm saying i'm putting a fine point on that that particular behavior is that behavior part of the system you know you could argue maybe but it's still crossing the line and that's got to stop when i have couples that come to me and they have an element to this i target that first i say okay you're here to reduce conflict you're here to increase your intimacy all that has to be sidelined because i'm hearing abusive behavior i'm hearing eye control behavior that's got to stop and once that stops then we can start working on the other things because in order for us to work on your you know your relationship and reducing conflict you both have to have equal power there can't be someone that feels like they they have less power than the other person so let's work on it now i might not word it that way i might uh you know socratically work our way through that or sugarcoat it a little bit but i'm definitely going to be targeting that behavior before other things because clinically it you can't have a couple therapy session in which one person that the underpower person is worried about saying certain things in sessions because when they go home they're going to be punished for it i don't deserve to be talked this way if you wanted to stay with me after cheating and and try to fix things then he should be good to me like he said he loves me and he wants to be with me so why can't he try to compromise and talk to me and let me talk to him [Music] so it makes sense that she's hurt and she's entitled to that hurt i want to be clear and it sounds like she he's been hurtful to her and that i'm not going to take away from her that does not give her the right to put hands on come talk to me may talk to me no i don't want to can you talk to me no i don't want to just go go please go so i don't know what he's going through if he is saying to himself the relationship is over then that's one thing but if he's saying no i'm still in the relationship i just don't want to talk then what i would recommend azan say is i don't want to talk right now because i'm really upset we can talk about this later for sure because i'm still in this relationship and i still want to give this a try but i just don't want to talk right now so that's the coaching that i usually will give to the avoided person is you're entitled to your space for sure if you if you need space absolutely do that but you want to throw you want to give your spouse a you know something to reassure them saying something like i love you i want to talk later but just not right now all right well that does it for that episode of psychology in seattle in which i watch 90 day fiance and react to nicole and azan very troubling stuff what do you think do you think i'm on point do you think i'm off do you think that and always be nice to me i have thin skin and what do you perceive this situation as high control intimate partner violence at least to some degree have you been in relationships like that before have you seen this maybe share your experiences so other people can read them and understand what it's like to be in a high control relationship of course take care of yourself don't trigger yourself and please take care of yourself and take care of others because we all deserve it we really really do

Channel: Psychology In Seattle

Views: 99,017

Rating: 4.9466181 out of 5

Keywords: 90 Day Fiance, Nicole and Azan, therapist reacts, reaction video, commentary, couples counselor, family therapist, psychology

Id: YRgTmHvGgNU

Length: 37min 37sec (2257 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020