EP 13 - Dr. Kerry, Part 2
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Yep.

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And then I leaned forward and whispered to him, I used to think that you were a good guy who sometimes wore a monster mask.

But what I realized that you're actually a monster who sometimes wears a good guy mask. He goes absolutely white and he starts to sweat and he whispers, I'm glad you know. I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about the people we trust the most and the deceptions that change everything. After the death of her husband, Brad, Carrie McAvoy retired early from her career as a clinical psychologist.

At the age of 51, she started a whirlwind relationship with Cesar. He showered her with affection and brought her into his Mexican culture. It would be a second marriage that promised adventure and expanded her horizons. With all three of her sons grown, she and Cesar decided to start a new life together in Mexico. So she sold her house in the U.S. and packed her bags.

You're basically consolidating a whole life accumulated of all my adult life down to a few, like we took 10 pieces of luggage. That's it. They planned to make a living down there by renting vacation properties in the Yucatan Peninsula. Crystal blue waters, white sand beaches. It was the life Brad wanted for her. I felt like I was trying to build on the best I had with Brad, but make it better. She and Cesar became 50-50 owners in their new business and bought four rental properties together.

all bankrolled by Carrie. So the value of Brad's life insurance has now been spent on properties. But the week before their wedding, Caesar made a shocking disclosure. He starts to cry and he says, it just hit me because we're going to get married five days and I'm still married. We can't get married this week. And I said, what? Caesar had an explanation.

Caesar's last marriage was a roller coaster.

When he finally ended things, she literally refused to let him go. They described how she had clung to his feet as he tried to get out of the house. And he said it was really traumatic and he just put it behind him. I've repressed stuff. I forgot stuff. I can see how that can happen. But I'm not going to be intimate with somebody who's married now that I know. I'm horrified, like speechless and feel

But she had already invested so much, emotionally and financially, in this new life with him. Too much to let one piece of paper derail their plans. Plus, he was adamant that he would get it sorted out and they'd be able to get married the following month. So reluctantly, Carrie let it go.

We got up and had a nice next day together and sort of moved on. And his divorce did go through a month later. After that, he and Carrie officially tied the knot. So get married. It's a beautiful wedding. And then we plan a honeymoon a month later. In a nod to Brad's legacy, she and Cesar went to Jamaica for their honeymoon.

They stayed in a new part of the island. It was a full circle moment for Carrie, a reminder of how far she'd come in the two years since Brad passed away. We get to Jamaica, we check in, and that night we have a great dinner together, kind of romantic, and we're walking back to the hotel room, and I'm excited because I bought something special. We get into the room, he flops down on the bed, and I go into the bathroom to change into something sexy. Starting with night one, their honeymoon did not go to plan.

I hear the TV turn on. I'm thinking, well, that's a little weird. That's not really the focus of the honeymoon night. And I come out and I pose in front of the TV, you know, sort of like I'm better looking than the TV. And he actually almost cranes his neck around me. And I'm stunned. I can't believe that he did that. And I'm now feeling underdressed, overexposed. And just I can feel the goosebumps rising on my body from the chill.

He says, just come up next to me. He passed the bed. Come up next to me. I want to watch this. Okay, so I do. And I'm tired. It's been a long day traveling. And I doze off and I don't even remember falling asleep. But I fall asleep and I come to and I can't tell how much time has passed. But the TV is still playing and he's on his phone. I find that kind of odd. And I'm curious of why he's so interested on his phone. And as I'm trying to like crane my neck without really letting him know that I'm awake.

I see that he's watching something. And at first, my eyes are really blurry because I'm just waking up. And then I can tell he's watching pornography. And I'm thinking, okay, you opted out of having a moment with me to watch pornography. That is soul-crushing. Early on in their relationship, she asks Cesar if he watched pornography. He told her he didn't. Now, on their honeymoon, she saw that he did.

She observed him for another moment, Caesar still not noticing that she had woken up. And while I'm watching him watch this, there's a text that comes in. And he opens the text box and he responds. And then he looks for a photo. He sends a quick photo of himself. Then she sends a photo back of her. I mean, they're just like normal photos. It wasn't like sexting. But on the other hand, I'm thinking, my new husband is sending a photo of himself to another woman.

No, you don't do that. Even though they were just selfies, it felt strange. And he was sending them to a woman she'd never heard of before. So I make like I'm waking up. He then plays along. Oh, it's so wonderful you're awake. Oh, I love you so much. And instead of like pulling me into an embrace to kiss me, pull me into something intimate, he starts to touch me. Like he's doing something to me, but we're not doing it really together.

And this just on the tails of what I just saw feels awful. Like the last thing I want to be doing. So I feel like I was like trying to scoot away from him. And I just said the same thing that he said to me. Come sit next to me. I'm really tired. Let's just sleep tonight. It's been a lot. It's a long day. So he does. We fall asleep. But Carrie did not fall asleep. It was the first night of their honeymoon. And she was lying awake, staring at the ceiling. Feeling really hurt and shocked.

Like there needs to be limits in this relationship. And that's not an okay kind of relationship. She decided to address what she'd seen over dinner. I said, hey, I noticed you're on your phone and I noticed you're watching a video. And then also you're texting some woman and you send her a photo of yourself. I'm not okay with that. Then Cesar became very quiet. He just kind of stays stiff, like quiet.

Not okay. We have dinner. We're not really talking. And we walk back to our hotel room. He stopped and he stood in the doorway and he says, I'm going to be heading out. I'll be back in a couple hours. And he turns around and the door shuts. I watched the door shut and I'm aghast, like mouth dropped, shocked. And I think to myself, this is punishment. He's punishing me.

She spent the next few hours pacing the hotel room, hoping she was wrong, hoping he just needed time to cool off. He comes in a couple hours later, and I'm tense. I'm like, have no idea what mindset he's going to be in. And he goes, hey, let's go out to the pool. Let's go swimming. And I said, okay. And he holds my hand as we walk to the pool. We get out there. He says, look at the sky. The moon's out tonight. Remember the night I got engaged with you? The moon was out that night. And he says, couples shouldn't fight.

And you're right. I shouldn't have that kind of relationship with a woman. That's inappropriate. I'm really sorry. Why don't we put the phones away for the rest of the trip and just focus on us? And I start to cry and I feel, oh, he gets it. We're on the same page. This is going to be good. We make a big deal the next day putting the phones away. The next seven, eight days are great. Until the last day of the honeymoon. It was 4 a.m. and Carrie woke up to a notification on her phone.

I can see on my phone that there's a text message from a stranger, from a woman. And she writes, so you're married to Caesar. I guess the joke's just not on me. It's on you too. I've been dating you for the past three months. And then she proceeds to start to describe, is that your sunglass case in the car? It's floral. Are you the person that called him at 3 a.m. in the morning a few months ago? Because I was with him. I was in bed beside him.

That was her sunglasses case. And they were in a long-distance relationship before this. And Carrie knew she had called him late sometimes. With Cesar asleep next to her, she began to panic. Was this woman telling the truth? As I'm laying there, I literally had the flash. I don't know him. He's a stranger. I went into the bathroom and my body just dumped. I was sick. I was sick. What do I do?

My house is sold, my car is gone, I have property now in Mexico that expects me to open. I'm mid-visa process, I have to finish this or I lose all that effort. And I'm literally in transition as if I'm a wire artist and I let go of one wire and I'm jumping to the next and I'm trying to grab and I'm mid-jump and I'm realizing everything that I thought I was building on didn't exist.

She shook her new husband awake and showed him the messages. I say to Cesar, Cesar, Cesar, a woman wrote me. She says she knows you. His first reaction was, stop reading that. Stop reading that. And my thought was, you know, you know her. You know what I'm talking about. I fled the room. I split for the ocean and went down to the sand and I started circling, literally circling.

It was early, like 6 a.m., 6.30. And there was a runner who run past me. I might just look like a crazy woman. Like, I don't know what to do. I'm mid-jump. I'm in transition. I have no home in the United States. I don't know what to do here. So she called a close friend who, like her, also worked in mental health.

And she says, Carrie, I think he's traumatized. I think there's something else going on. I really suggest that you go back and talk to him. I'm thinking, okay, she knows him. In fact, she's the person that married us. Maybe there's something more here. Plus she's a therapist. So I go back in and I get into the room and he's standing there, white, shaking, and

And he just looked at me and he said, I just wanted to know what it felt like to have an affair. And then he said, you know, I have problems because I've told you that I've came from a troubled home and that there have been issues. And I don't know why I did. I know it was dumb, but I don't know why I did that. Then he asked for her help. He felt like his behavior was out of control and needed professional support. In fact, he had asked his ex-wives for their help, too. And they didn't believe me. They laughed at me.

If anyone could help him, it was Carrie. She believed in recovery. I also, as a psychologist, really believed in the capacity of people to change. Why would I spend my whole life doing what I did if I didn't believe people could actually have a conversion experience? As soon as the honeymoon ended, Carrie started looking for a psychologist, a specialist who could help with trauma, infidelity, and deception. And she got them an appointment the very next day.

And she sees us. She says, Carrie, his issues are really big. He needs residential care. And I'm thinking, residential care? We're moving. Plus, who's going to pay for that? This is not covered by insurance. And he needs months. I worked in the system. I know how much it costs for psychiatric care. This is going to add up to probably close to $100,000 in treatment costs.

Instead of long-term residential care, they planned for a three-day intensive program for couples in crisis. And they flew there right away. So we walk into the intensive program and it was built on accountability model. The focus is more of what are you going to do? What's the reality of your situation? Do you have a plan in place? They're trying to help us really think this through. Although the program was meant for couples to attend together, where both individuals are promised treatment and support,

Carrie felt like her pain wasn't being seen. But we go through the three days and it becomes really clear to me that I'm invisible here. This treatment's about him. And yet I feel like my whole world's been torn apart, that I've been shattered. There's two people here. Yes, he was the one who acted out, but I'm the one who's suffering the consequences. What about me?

Cesar left the program feeling clear-headed and committed to Carrie. He had an accountability plan and an outpatient counselor to check in with him every week. But Carrie felt more confused than ever. We walk out of the program after three days and I feel like, well, he has a better direction. He seems helped, but I'm now more scared than ever. And I'm going into a country that I don't think has this kind of care available.

All I know is now I don't know how much I don't know because that's what they did tell me. This is like a problem, like an iceberg. You just saw a tip, but you don't know how deep this goes or how big this is. So all that you did for me is to let me know there's a whole lot more to this that you don't know. And I don't know what to do. I'm in a mid-leap and I don't know what I'm in for.

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After leaving the three-day treatment program, Carey and Caesar continued with their plan to move into a new apartment in Playa del Carmen and get their business off the ground.

We move into our first apartment and we furnish it. We're watching the construction of the next two and trying to get the business going, you know, get our properties listed on Airbnb. Besides starting their business, their main priority was continuing Cesar's treatment. And it seemed to be working for him. In that period of time, it actually gets good. It gets quiet. You know, he's working a program.

He does his weekly thing. I do my weekly thing. It feels like a partnership. We're buying furniture together. We're setting up a house. Kids are coming in for Christmas. With Cesar's commitment to recovery, Carrie felt validated in her decision to give him another chance and get him help. He was really trying. Their life in Mexico was finally coming together. At night, they would go up to their penthouse roof and look at the stars.

And the stars are out and there's actually even falling stars. And we're talking to each other and kissing each other and talking about how beautiful this is and have like a little blanket on that patio. Just really, really lovely. After a few months, their business started to take off. The properties are now coming online. The business is off to a good start. And I feel really optimistic about all of this.

With their relationship on the mend, they were proving to be strong business partners. They settled into a daily routine. He would set the alarm super early in the morning. Then we would read something together, talk to each other, and then we'd get dressed and get going for our day.

We'd run from appointment to appointment, but there's another half of the company that had to be run, and that is the customer end, who's making all the emails, corresponding with guests. So I'd manage that at night, and then we'd do all the businesses together in the day. So basically, I was like doing two jobs. One day, while running around town to manage the properties... I start to suddenly vomit. I mean, like, I'm throwing up saliva.

And it's really strange. I'd never seen anything like it before. He calmly hands me a grocery bag to vomit in. And then we never talk about it again. We just went on for the rest of the day. And then she began noticing other symptoms. I have really severe diarrhea, real strange diarrhea that I'd never seen before. It's water. It's clear water. It frightens me because I've never seen this before.

And I had white lines like you hit your fingernails with a hammer. I was searching for what causes white lines across all the fingernails. They're called Mies lines. And it only got worse. My toenails were falling off and my urine was now dark like tea and frothing. So they went to the ER. They take one look at me and they hospitalized me.

And while I'm admitted, the nurse comes up and says, you don't understand. You're super ill. Your white count is extraordinarily high, but we can't find the infection. You're very, very sick. You don't understand how sick you are. Caesar comes in that night to sit next to me and he sits there and he goes, I realized something today. I realized if something were to happen to you, I would really miss you. That's a weird thing to say.

After a few nights in the hospital with IV antibiotics, Carrie was feeling better. The doctors ran dozens of tests, but ultimately couldn't figure out what was causing Carrie's symptoms. But I get discharged and we continue to kind of do normal business, you know, running day-to-day life. Cesar thought Carrie's sudden illness could be stress-related. After all, she'd had an incredibly busy year.

So they decided to go on a weekend getaway to relax and reconnect with each other. So we go to this resort for Thanksgiving weekend, and the first night we get there, he heads in for a shower. And while he does it, he leaves his phone on the table. I don't know why, but I pick up his phone and snoop for the first time in my life. She didn't find anything concerning in his photos or texts. But then she opened his email. This is the first I...

Earlier that day, he'd written a long email to this woman. It sounded like she was an old flame. He told Kerry he wasn't talking to any other women, that the help he was getting was really working.

What did he mean this marriage was a prison? She'd been working so hard to hold it together. She sent herself a copy. And then... I send it to our counselor that we saw at the intensive and say, we need an immediate appointment. He's breached his contract with me and he said he wasn't doing this.

So we have a therapy appointment with our therapist and he confronts Cesar about this. And Cesar doesn't really have a good excuse. He goes, I was just dumb. I was reminiscent. I was feeling nostalgic. He said he'd been missing his ex Maria and that they once spent time at the same beach.

He said, I thought of her and I reached out or I shouldn't have. I know it was really bad. And then the therapist turns to me and says, so what are you going to do about this? What's your consequence? We talked about this. You need to have a consequence. And I'm thinking, what do you mean? I can't kick him out. I'm in another country. We're starting this business up. Things are in construction. I depend on him. I can't run a business without him. So instead of a consequence, she opted for a solution.

So we both get into therapy. That's my solution. He starts to see a therapist. But that didn't quell her anxiety. And I'm starting to feel increasingly paranoid. Enough so that I'm now like trying to break into his phone or I'm now looking for a second phone. It's weird. I'm like feeling crazy. And while all this is happening, he's just getting harder to reach, feeling really distant to me. He told Carrie he was going to his regular therapy appointments. But then she found out... He didn't go anywhere.

He apparently stashed the phone somewhere near the therapist's house and did something else. I have no idea what he did for that hour and a half, but he didn't go. So I'm catching him in lies now, and I know something's up. This lie was disturbing. She started to doubt if he was really committed to changing. Repeatedly catching Caesar in lies became a vicious cycle. But then one day, she got news that pulled her out of it.

Carrie had three sons, who were now all adults. Two of them were living together, and one noticed his brother Cameron wasn't acting himself. He was observing Cameron's behavior and called their mom out of concern. He said, "He's been staring at the wall all weekend, Mom. Just staring at the wall. Like, hours, staring at the wall." And then he'll say weird things, like he doesn't know what time of the day it is.

I'm thinking, oh no, this is a serious neurological sign. It's an emergency. I'm frightened. This is bad. Something's really wrong. She flew back to America to be with Cameron. When she got to the hospital, all of her boys were there. And they've been waiting for me. I can tell they've been waiting for mom to show up. And he says, mom, it's leukemia. And then we fall in each other's arms and just start to cry. And I think, oh, I've been here before. Cameron was scared.

She said, mom, don't leave me. Don't leave me. And I say, I'm not going anywhere. It wasn't even a decision for Carrie. She knew she had to stay and take care of him. She spent entire nights awake, keeping an eye on her son's health as he started chemotherapy. But you have to see if the chemotherapy is going to work.

So he makes it through the first round, which is a big deal. He has to be hospitalized. It's given every 12 hours for five to seven days. It's round-the-clock chemotherapy.

And meanwhile, the treatment team tells me he's going to need this for upward to 18 months and he needs you here. This is a big thing and he's going to need your help. Cesar had come with Carrie back to the U.S. and right away, she noticed that he was distant. He didn't seem interested in staying in America long term or in supporting Carrie and Cameron. Instead, Cesar started complaining. He wanted to go back to their life in Mexico.

He's telling me he's not staying. I can tell already. One night while Cesar was sleeping, his phone alarm started ringing. So Carrie got up to shut it off. So I go in to get the phone and turn the alarm off. I pass through the passcode and it opens right up to the text messages. He'd been texting and had fallen asleep with it beside his head. The message is between him and Maria. And it says, my sister had cancer. She's recovered. She's just fine.

Her son will be too. He's young. He's 28. He's got the advantage of youth on his side. And Cesar writes back, yeah, I know, but I got to be supportive for Carrie. Carrie's really worried. That's not how she feels. And then he says, but I'll have to be careful because I'm with her now a lot. We're going to have to really be careful around these conversations. And then she texts, but what I'm really concerned about is that Cameron's care is going to eat up your half of her money.

It was so callous, calculated even. Not only had he been betraying me and seeing women, but he has been communicating with her about a lot, including the money and what's happening with the money and that there is this money. Reading these texts and seeing how dismissive he was of her son's care and the concern for Carrie's money, half of Brad's life insurance money, finally sent her over the edge.

It's money that paid out on Brad's death to a person who never earned it, didn't know him, didn't love him, and is trying to exploit and manipulate me. He's going to capitalize on Brad's death. Talk about enraging me. Hell no. I loved Brad. We spent 33 years together. He died from something catastrophic. Be damned, you're not going to get half of that. I sat there with Brad. The morphine didn't work.

and him pleading for another dose. Your half of Brad's life insurance? What do you mean your half? There is no your half here.

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You know you can spend 40 plus hours swiping 1,500 times for one date? Why are you still wasting time on the dating apps? You've got to try Talkify. This is not a dating app. Talkify has real human matchmakers and dating coaches providing you with all the resources, info, and tools you need to find a real connection. Think it's all talk? Their proven process goes beyond profiles to help you find your person with less stress and more success.

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In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her, and she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is the Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

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After she saw texts between Caesar and Maria, Carrie was furious. She finally saw Caesar for who he really was, or at least she thought she had. We're at a restaurant having a meal, and I finally say to him, you know what, this can't be good for you. It's certainly not good for me. I think maybe we need to separate. And I walk away. I get up and I walk out. She spent a few hours alone to process everything, to grieve the life she envisioned with Caesar.

After all, her first marriage was a fairy tale. It was solid, joyous, and honest. Eventually, she made her way home to continue the conversation with him. I said, so what's going on here? Do you want a divorce? He said, yes, I want a divorce. The following morning, they sat down at the breakfast table for the next hard conversation about what this divorce would mean for both of them financially.

He starts to list all the properties that the company owns, one by one. And next to them, he writes their market value. And then he adds the column up in front of me, draws a hard line, so hard that I think he's going to scratch into the wood table. That's how firm he pressed. And he points at it. That. That's what I'm owed. Half of that. I have a right to half of that.

And I look at him and my mouth dropped. And I said, but that's Brad's legacy. That's what he gave to me and the kids to give me a new start. And he says, life's never been fair to me. Why should it be fair to you? When Carrie and Cesar sat down to discuss the terms of their divorce, she watched her soon-to-be ex-husband become an entirely different person. He's basically saying he has a right to something he has never worked to own before.

He didn't come into this relationship with anything. And he's going to walk out with half of everything Brad and I spent all these years with all these decisions to get to. He feels he has a right to it because life's not been fair. I'm enraged. I can't believe this is the way this is. And I can't believe this is actually legal. I'm speechless, like floored. I feel like I don't know him. This is another level of a stranger. I don't know who this person is.

She was not going to let him take what Brad had worked so hard for. After all, she'd only been with Caesar for three years. So my first thing is, is I pull all the documents together proving all the money I brought in, proving that it had been my assets, my capital that had been invested. And I make an appointment with the best divorce attorney that I can find in town. And I sit down with her and she looks at me and says, none of that matters.

According to Mexican law, he's 50-50 owner. Unless you can prove he's broken the law, he's owed half. He's owed half, I realized. I better start making copies of the deeds to prove that I actually own the property. So I get smart and start making photocopies of stuff.

Carrie was going back and forth. In the U.S., taking care of her son, Cameron, whose cancer treatment was going well. And in Mexico, untangling her marriage with Cesar. They moved into separate apartments while Carrie collected the evidence she needed for their divorce. Cesar had not invested any money into their shared business. But like the lawyer told her, her case didn't look promising. I'm frantic. I don't know how to get the company back.

To add insult to injury, in the middle of this financial untangling, she received news. Caesar's ex, Maria, was back in town, and they were back together. And not only has she been in town, but they put a deposit on a property together. They're going to buy a house together. She and Caesar had rarely spoken throughout the divorce. They were still in a bitter legal negotiation about dividing their business. But one day, she got a text from him. He sounded desperate.

She thought maybe this was her chance to offer him a settlement that he would accept. Use it.

So I meet him at a coffee shop nearby, and he starts to tell me he's in trouble. And then I lean forward and whisper to him, I used to think that you were a good guy who sometimes wore a monster mask. But what I realized that you're actually a monster who sometimes wears a good guy mask. He goes absolutely white, and he starts to sweat, and he whispers, I'm glad you know.

She finally saw him for who he really was, and she knew she needed an out. So Carrie told him she would help him through the next few months financially if he agreed to her terms. I say to him, I will help you, but I want all of the company back. You have to sign the company over to me. And he says to me, so what are you thinking? How much? And I said, how about whatever I have sitting in the bank right now, which is one third of what he wants.

You can have that. You can have the car that you're driving. I'll sell the other car. You can have whatever is in the house. That's what you can have. Cesar didn't like the deal. He wanted to split their company's profits for the next two years. He leans into me and he whispers, "You don't want to make me angry."

In the moment, she pretended to agree to the deal. I shake his hand and I say, OK, I promise. But in my head, I thought, I promise as much of a promise as any of your promises you've ever made to me. She never intended to give him half the profits. Once he signed over the company, she sold it. In the end, she settled their divorce and paid him out. It was a big sum, but not nearly what he wanted. Not even close.

He never got any more money out of me other than that settlement that I made, the agreement I made with him with the attorney. After selling the properties, she packed up her life in Mexico for good. So I packed myself up. I throw most of it away. I don't want it. Anything that reminds me of this house, this life, this person, this relationship, I took to the trash. And people, scavengers came in and got it. And it was like, go for it. You can have it.

She found evidence that he and Maria had been meeting up every few weeks for their entire relationship, even back to when she first met Caesar. And then when we break finally up, he's texting her about the half of the money, and then he sees her right away, right after we break up. And she also found some things that made her suspect her entire relationship with Caesar had been orchestrated. Like he said...

He had been researching widows. I found cliff notes he kept on women. He literally was keeping track of stories, what to say. He planned things out. The guy I met never existed. She found note cards with names of women he dated and on the cards he'd written information about each of them. This is one of those strange details she'll never get an explanation for.

Shocked, ashamed, and betrayed, Carrie flew back to the U.S. She focused on her family and settled down, moving close to her son, whose cancer was in remission. She was rebuilding, but there was still one piece of unfinished business. She wanted to know who Caesar really was. So, she tracked down his ex-wives.

I get a hold of wife number one who lived in Mexico, heard her version, then I heard the one who'd been married 17 years. But the one I couldn't get a hold of was the one that was the shortest, that he had the least to say about. So six months after I sent her a message, she contacts me and says, "Yeah, I'll have a phone call with you." And she says, "Because one of the things that happened is I got really sick." I said, "What?" She said, "Yeah, I got really sick and I don't know why. And I got better when I got out of the relationship." And I'm thinking, "Well, that's really strange."

It was strange. Carrie's symptoms also got better after she left the relationship. The vomiting and diarrhea, the lines on her nails, they all disappeared. She says she'll never know why she got so sick during her marriage. What she does know is that that relationship was literally toxic to her body.

Living with somebody who's constantly deceitful, this chronic state of being in a fight or flight with all the cortisol levels does terrible damage to the body. Back in the U.S., she joined support groups and relied on her three adult sons. Cameron was cancer-free, and the family had become closer than ever. I did have a moment with my sons, and I said to them, you must be so ashamed of me. And my oldest looked at me, and he said, no, Mom.

Caesar used your best qualities against you. We're not ashamed. And I just wept. That was the start of her healing process. And the next step was writing a book about what she went through. I just started writing. I wrote the story as fast as I could. It took me nine months to write Love You More. And I found it really, really healing.

With time, she could look back on the relationship with clarity. She applied her expertise in psychology and began to understand that what she experienced was narcissistic abuse.

They consider a narcissistically abusive relationship a cult of two. They're really the same tactics that cult leaders use. Highly predatory people use the same to create fast rapport, build trust, and also create a very highly almost addictive relationship that's very difficult to leave. It's intoxicating, but also terrifying. It's like a connection on fear.

Through her work in therapy, she came to a big revelation, one that went back to the abuse she experienced as a child. And she realized that violation might have played into the cycle she found herself in with Cesar. I realized that when I was little and I suffered the abuse with my sister, even though I was only like five and she was four, in my head I had made her a promise that I would never abandon her again.

And I approached that promise that I had made that was really unreasonable as a child, but I sort of applied it to him. And to leave him felt like I was abandoning her all over again. And that was what made it really hard for me to

truly break free, break out of this. And coming to that conclusion felt like it broke so much of my paralysis, my confusion. She wanted to know how she'd missed the signs with Caesar and why she stayed in it for so long. It wasn't like her. I cannot begin to describe to you the agonizing paralysis I felt about making a decision. The mind literally says, I can't compute.

Both realities seem true. I can't compute. So it makes no decision as if that's a decision. She turned to books and research on coercive control and narcissistic abuse to help give her perspective.

I came across a book by Don Hennessy called How He Gets Into Her Head, highly recommended, Irish law enforcement. He writes about the grooming practices. In the first part of the book, he describes working with domestic violence victims for years. I mean, like many, many, many years. They kept trying to do all these studies, finding a consistent pattern among victims that would predict that this is a person vulnerable to abuse. They couldn't find any. There was no consistent pattern among all of the domestic violent victims.

It wasn't until they started looking at the predators that the pattern fit. The pattern is with the predator, not with the victim. She's been able to let go of her shame about the decision to stay with Cesar.

The betrayal community has shown her that no one is above being deceived. I'm a psychologist. Everyone somehow assumes that psychologists are like above human, superhuman. We should know, we should be excellent reads of people. Yeah, I'm good reads of people, but when it comes to myself, I'm not always so good. My personal life, my personal perceptions get involved. It's very easy for us to criticize victims and say it's the victim's fault.

But you're just showing your ignorance because anyone can fall for something like this. You just haven't met the sophisticated enough predator. When she was at her most vulnerable, grieving Brad's death and desperate to have that kind of partnership back again, at that very moment, she happened to meet the right predator. Her trust in Caesar is inherently linked to losing Brad. Nobody prepares you for what it's like to lose a partner.

You know, we often think, if you say they're my other half. I'll tell you, it felt like I was ripped in half. And to think about the future, I've got maybe what, 30 more years of no one in my life and I'm going to be alone. And this big critical person who was my partner, my husband, my lover, my best friend, my co-parent is gone. I can't even begin to describe to you the panic I felt.

We talk about love bombing and it's too good to be true and it happens super fast and you're suddenly with this person for forever. But you know what? Sometimes love looks like that. That's what love with Brad looked like. We end all of our weekly episodes with the same question. Why did you want to tell your story? For Carrie, it comes back to letting people know no one is above deception or betrayal.

And by the way, I've had many psychologists who've now since reached out to me to tell me it's happened to them. And an excellent book is Kristen Milstead, Why Can't I Just Leave, who's a PhD in sociology, and it happened to her. But there are many professional women and men who've gotten trapped by this. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. On the next episode of Betrayal... I look up one of his email addresses, and it shows that he has an Ashley Madison account.

And I just nearly threw up. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal team or want to tell us your betrayal story, email us at BetrayalPod at gmail.com. That's Betrayal, P-O-D, at gmail.com. We're grateful for your support. One way to show support is by subscribing to our show on Apple Podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review Betrayal. Five-star reviews go a long way. A big thank you to all of our listeners.

Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a division of Glass Entertainment Group in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The show is executive produced by Nancy Glass and Jennifer Faison. Hosted and produced by me, Andrea Gunning. Written and produced by Monique Laborde. Also produced by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristen Malkuri and Caitlin Golden. Our iHeart team is Allie Perry and Jessica Kreincheck.

Audio editing and mixing by Matt DelVecchio. Additional editing support from Nico Arruca and Tanner Robbins. Betrayals theme composed by Oliver Baines. Music library provided by MIB Music. And for more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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