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Welcome back to another episode of Better Call Daddy! Today, we have a powerful and deeply personal story that explores themes of obsession, trauma, mental health, and the complexities of family dynamics. In this episode with Kate Wallinga, our speaker takes us on a journey through her experience as a psychologist, a parent, and a grieving individual. We delve into her encounters with a patient who stalked their professor, the challenges of diagnosing and dealing with manipulative behavior, and the weighty decision to cut off ties with their own mother. We also explore the importance of support systems, the impact of negative experiences on personal growth, and the difficult process of grieving a loved one who died by suicide. Get ready for a raw and thought-provoking conversation as we dive deep into the complexities of human relationships, personal struggles, and finding strength in the face of adversity. So, grab your headphones and get ready for Better Call Daddy: The Safe Space for Controversy.\n\xa0\nKate Wallinga is the host of Ignorance Was Bliss podcast. This is a podcast about how we become who we are \u2014 about making just about anything sound normal, from PTSD to podcasting to serial murder. It\u2019s about people\u2019s stories. Are you sure you really want to know?\nKate spent her entire professional life in the fields of mental health and criminal justice. Her favorite, hardest and most important work was specifically in the fields of correctional psych, forensic psych, and crisis assessment.\nShe grew up in upstate New York, and went to college near the Canadian border; her first psych internship was actually immediately next to the bridge between Ogdensburg, NY and Johnstown, ON. After that, she studied criminal justice and mental health counseling in Boston, then spent several years in New Hampshire. She\u2019s worked in the NH State Prison system, a couple of different locked psychiatric facilities, and then several emergency rooms and eventually all manner of community settings.\nKate broke her back in 2014, and while she can move around a whole lot better than she could then, she still often feels stuck, as an acquaintance once pointed out, sitting on her couch listening to true crime podcasts all day. One thing I\u2019ve noticed is that, quite often, she would hear someone ask, \u201cBut why would he do that?\u201d or, \u201cHow could that happen?\u201d or, her personal favorite, \u201cWell, that\u2019s crazy. That could never happen to me.\u201d After a while of talking back, alone, long after they had moved on to new things, she decided to give the podcasting thing a try. She does give some background, of course, but she\u2019s not trying to create a deep-dive, detailed, narrative style podcast. That has already been done, brilliantly, by so many people she admires. She can\u2019t see any reason to try and compete with them, or even just add to the noise, when she already cannot find enough hours in the day to listen to everything she\u2019d like to hear. Her goal, instead, is to try and answer some of those questions, at least from her own perspective. She doesn\u2019t pretend to have all, or even most, of the answers\u2026 but she can usually come up with one or two.\nOver time, the focus of her show has widened to include the normal, the average, the ordinary, that all of us can understand\u2026 but we continue to think of ourselves as somehow screwed up, weird, wrong. We\u2019re not. You\u2019re not. Honest.\nJust make sure you really want to know. Because the most important certainty I carry, from all my time working with inmates and patients and onlookers, is that the only real difference between \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d is a key. And that everything we experience, from crippling anxiety to serial murder, is maybe not rational, but there is a logic to it. Kate can make things understandable.\nAnd once you learn just how easy it can be to fall into the darker parts of life, you might think,\u201d\u2026I felt better before I knew that.\u201d\n\xa0\nBecause sometimes\u2026 Ignorance Was Bliss.\nConnect with Kate\nhttps://iwbpodcas