Terror Talk: True Crime, Serial Killers and Horror

If knowing about cognitive bias could protect you from a cult, why didn't it protect the Zizians?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of murder, the murder of children, suicide, sexual coercion and branding, coercive control and cult trauma. Listener discretion is advised.

Lori Vallow Daybell in Idaho and Arizona, Keith Raniere's NXIVM in Albany, New York, and Ziz LaSota's Zizians in the San Francisco Bay Area: a cult of two, a self-help company and a network of rationalists who believed they were the smartest people in any room.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy close the Cults series by asking whether anything about modern cults is new, or whether it's the same mechanism in a new costume, and what actually protects you.

CHAPTERS:
0:00 The most rational people in the room
0:59 Cults Part 3: same mechanism, new costume
2:28 Bounded choice: why didn't they just leave?
4:23 Coercive control, Biderman and a sheriff's department case
10:31 Hillman's soul loss and open door moments
13:55 Lori Vallow Daybell: the cult of two
20:08 NXIVM and Keith Raniere
29:09 The Zizians, and two corrections to Part 1
37:43 Why knowing about bias didn't help
40:57 What changed and what didn't
42:33 What actually protects you

IN THIS EPISODE:
- Janja Lalich's bounded choice, from inside the Democratic Workers' Party
- Evan Stark's coercive control and Biderman's chart of coercion
- Cathy on coercive control at a systemic level in the LA Sheriff's Department
- Why cults recruit capable people at open door moments, not weak ones
- Zombies, JJ Vallow and Tylee Ryan, and spiritual reclassification
- DOS, collateral and the brand as the point of no return
- Therapy speak as moral justification, and a Teal Swan callback
- Vegan anarcho-transhumanism, unihemispheric sleep and a leader with no title
- Six deaths: Vallejo, Chester Heights, Vallejo again and Coventry, Vermont
- Why marginalization, not identity, is the vulnerability
- Keep one relationship the group does not control

CLINICAL TERMS: bounded choice, coercive control, entrapment, chart of coercion, DDD syndrome, thought reform, loaded language, doctrine over person, milieu control, commitment and consistency, moral disengagement, dehumanization, cognitive dissonance, mana personality, participation mystique, soul loss, escape from freedom, love bombing

CORRECTIONS TO PART 1:
- The six deaths linked to the Zizians were three in 2022 and three in 2025, not 2025 and 2026.
- We've retired "undead" and "p-zombie" as descriptions of Zizian doctrine until they're better sourced.
- Everyone charged in the Zizian cases is presumed innocent.

SERIES: Cults Part 3 of 3. Part 1: CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians & Jonestown Part 1. Part 2: CULTS: Charles Manson, the Solar Temple & Adolfo Constanzo Part 2.
Related Episodes:
Season 3 Episode 9 Published Sept. 30, 2020• CULTS: Lori Vallow Daybell & Chad Daybell — The Doomsday Couple

RESOURCE: If you recognize yourself or someone you love, the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) lists therapists experienced with former members.

SOURCES: Lalich (2004) Bounded Choice · Stark (2007) Coercive Control · Biderman (1957) · Farber, Harlow & West (1957) · Hillman (1975) Re-Visioning Psychology · Moore (1992) Care of the Soul · Sottile (2022) When the Moon Turns to Blood · US DOJ · The Vow (HBO) · San Francisco Chronicle. Full APA list on Patreon.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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Why would members of the Order of the Solar Temple kill a three-month-old baby they had never met?
⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of murder, ritual killing, the murder of an infant and of children, mass death, cult trauma and coercive control. Listener discretion is advised.
In 1994 the Order of the Solar Temple, led by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, killed a baby in Morin-Heights, Quebec because his name made him the Antichrist, then left 53 dead across Switzerland and Canada. Cults Part 2 follows the same question through Adolfo Constanzo's Narcosatánicos in Matamoros, Mexico and Charles Manson's Family in Los Angeles.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy ask what changes psychologically when the killing is the ritual, and why the victim in a ritual murder is never really the target.

CHAPTERS:
0:00 A baby called the Antichrist
1:02 From Part 1 to ritual murder
2:03 Ritual as the delivery system for moral disengagement
5:04 Expressive or instrumental: where ritual murder fits
11:20 Milgram, participation mystique and Hillman
20:18 The Order of the Solar Temple
28:30 Adolfo Constanzo and the Matamoros killings
35:16 Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murders
46:35 What makes ritual murder different
49:34 Coming up in Part 3

IN THIS EPISODE:
- Three ways ritual moves agency, turns a victim into a symbol and dissolves the self into the group
- Milgram's obedience variations: 65%, 92.5% when someone else throws the switch, 10% when two peers refuse
- Gina Perry's archive work and Haslam and Reicher's identification reading
- Jung's participation mystique, from stadiums to robes in a circle
- The Solar Temple: Cheiry, Salvan, the cosmic child and 74 dead by 1997
- Constanzo, Sara Aldrete, Mark Kilroy and the checkpoint that broke the case
- Palo Mayombe as a legitimate Afro-Cuban tradition Constanzo distorted
- Why Manson was not at Cielo Drive, and why that matters
- The Stanford Prison Experiment and what survives the critiques
- PIG on the door: dehumanization that happened in language weeks before

CLINICAL TERMS: ritual murder, moral disengagement, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization, expressive and instrumental homicide, obedience to authority, participation mystique, soul loss, thought reform, social proof, cognitive dissonance, mana personality, self-dissolution, situational evil

CORRECTIONS:
- Luc Jouret was the Solar Temple's co-founder and public face, not Emmanuelle's mother. Her mother was Dominique Bellaton.
- The Solar Temple member was the mayor of Richelieu, Quebec, not the mayor of Quebec.
- Le Texier's critique of the Stanford Prison Experiment ran in American Psychologist in 2019, not 2007.
- Bugliosi and Gentry's Helter Skelter (1974) is nonfiction, not a novel.

SERIES: Cults Part 2 of 3. Part 1: CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians & Jonestown Part 1. Part 3: a brand burned into a woman's skin, a mother who decided her children were zombies, and the full story of the Zizians.

SOURCES: Milgram (1974) Obedience to Authority · Perry (2012) Behind the Shock Machine · Haslam & Reicher (2012) PLoS Biology · Salfati (2000) Homicide Studies · Le Texier (2019) American Psychologist · Reicher & Haslam (2006) British Journal of Social Psychology · Zimbardo (2007) The Lucifer Effect · Bugliosi & Gentry (1974) Helter Skelter. Full APA list on Patreon.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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Have you ever left a relationship more confused about yourself than about the person you were with?
⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of emotional abuse, coercive control, gaslighting and intimate partner violence. Listener discretion is advised.
Therapists Shannon and Cathy open Season 9 with the question everyone asks and almost nobody asks clinically: what does it actually mean to call someone a psychopath, and what does it feel like to be in a relationship with one?
This is not a diagnostic checklist for your partner. It is a map of a pattern, from the inside.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- Why psychopathy is not a DSM diagnosis, and what antisocial personality disorder actually covers
- Robert Hare and the PCL-R, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised
- Factor 1, the interpersonal and affective traits: glibness, charm, grandiosity, shallow affect, no remorse
- Factor 2, the antisocial lifestyle traits: need for stimulation, impulsivity, irresponsibility, early behavioral patterns
- Prevalence: under 1% of the general population, roughly 25% of incarcerated populations
- Subclinical or "successful" psychopathy, and Snakes in Suits by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare
- Why corporate, legal, political and even mental health environments show elevated rates
- The honeymoon phase: love bombing, mirroring and future faking
- Why mirroring works, and why it is a performance rather than recognition
- The shift: devaluation, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting and isolation
- The slot machine effect, and why unpredictable reward builds anxious attachment
- What gaslighting actually is, and how "you should get some therapy" gets weaponized
- Why an outsider can see it and the person inside cannot
- Trauma bonding as a neurobiological response, not a weakness
- Why couples therapy is contraindicated, and what to ask a couple's therapist before you start
- Safety planning, and why leaving is the most dangerous period even without physical violence
- Trauma informed care, somatic approaches, trauma focused CBT and EMDR
- Karin Huffer's work on Legal Abuse Syndrome, and litigation as a tool of control
- The closing thought: the grief is real, even though the relationship wasn't
CLINICAL TERMS: psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, PCL-R, Hare Psychopathy Checklist, narcissism, sociopathy, coercive control, love bombing, mirroring, future faking, devaluation, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting, isolation, triangulation, trauma bonding, anxious attachment, betrayal trauma, plausible deniability, safety planning, EMDR
RELATED EPISODES: Stalking, Surveillance and Coercive Control Parts 1 and 2 · How to Identify a Narcissist · Spiritual Narcissism: Twin Flames on Fire · CULTS: Heaven's Gate, the Zizians and Jonestown
Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.
🎧 LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/terror-talk-true-crime-serial-killers-and-horror/id1435529687
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/07JEm5Qm7cohukkEUOYt7P
PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/terrortalk
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrortalkpodcast/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newterrortalkpodcast
🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dark.psychology.girls?_r=18_t=ZT-99iWlxm05in
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

Six documentaries, two therapists, and one question running under all of them: what does the camera do to a case? Shannon takes Betrayal: Dirty Secrets, EDP445: The Sick Mind, and Joe Berlinger's Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes. Cathy takes The Hillside Strangler, Maternal Instinct, and The Crash.
⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of child predation, violence against a pregnant woman, sexual assault and murder. Listener discretion is advised.
SHANNON'S THREE
Betrayal: Dirty Secrets (Hulu). Colorado Springs police officer Joel Kern held a decorated career and a family man image while running a secret sexual double life with roughly fifty people, using his badge and his schedule as cover. His wife Karoline found out while their daughter was hospitalized. He retired before he could be fired, kept his pension, and was never charged.
EDP445: The Sick Mind. Bryant Moreland, a YouTube sports commentator with millions of subscribers, caught in a sting run by the vigilante group Predator Poachers. The clinical ground here is parasocial attachment, predatory persona construction, and the uncomfortable question of what vigilante predator catching actually accomplishes.
Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes (Netflix). Berlinger's fifth and final entry, built from 137 previously unheard prison phone calls Manson made to a retired detective across the last nine years of his life. Survivors are centered: Dianne Lake, Catherine Share, Stephanie Schram. One detail stays with you. Manson learned his mind control technique from Dale Carnegie.
CATHY'S THREE
The Hillside Strangler (MGM+). Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono killed ten women and girls across Los Angeles in 1977 and 1978. The first on camera interview with Bianchi, and the first-time lead detective Frank Salerno has spoken publicly in over forty years. Bianchi claimed amnesia, submitted to hypnosis, argued his confessions were fabricated, then turned on Buono. Watch how a man relates to his own story across four decades.
Maternal Instinct (Netflix). Taylor Parker faked a pregnancy for months, with a silicone belly, false ultrasounds and a gender reveal party, then murdered Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was thirty-five weeks pregnant. She is the youngest woman on Texas death row. This one is genuinely difficult.
The Crash (Netflix). Seventeen-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla drove into a brick building at over a hundred miles an hour, killing her boyfriend and his friend. No skid marks, no braking. Convicted of murder as an adult.
All six are streaming now, and the discussion is better if you have already formed an opinion.
Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.
🎧 LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/terror-talk-true-crime-serial-killers-and-horror/id1435529687
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/07JEm5Qm7cohukkEUOYt7P
PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/terrortalk
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrortalkpodcast/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/newterrortalkpodcast
🎵 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dark.psychology.girls?_r=18_t=ZT-99iWlxm05in
🎶 Music by Mannequin Uprising

What does horror actually do to the person watching it and do this season's releases earn the reaction they're going for?
Season 9 of Shrink Chat opens with Evil Dead Burn, the series Silo and The Shards, and a run through the rest of what's landed lately: Disclosure, Obsession, They Will Kill You and Passenger.
Therapists Shannon and Cathy review them the way nobody else does, not on scares per minute, but on whether the psychology holds up: what the films get right about fear, grief, control and the way people actually behave under threat, and where they reach for a cheap shortcut instead.
Reviewed in this episode:
Evil Dead Burn
Silo (series)
The Shards (series)
They Will Kill You
Disclosure
Obsession
Passenger
Forbidden Fruit
Whistle
Plus, horror trivia and games with Cathy

More from Season 9:
S9E1 CULTS Part 1: how a group turns ordinary people into killers
Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT.
Until then... sleep safe. 😴
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