DIRTY TALK: When I Became Aware of Toxic & Abusive Relationships With TV Shows - Addiction/Recovery eBulletin

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Jan. 2026 – In the early 1990s, I was a “lonesome licensed therapist cowboy” from South Florida, driven by a simple mission: to help people heal. I never expected that mission would lead me onto the stage of The Geraldo Rivera Show, and eventually, into the heart of one of the most exploitative industries in the world—Talk Television. For two decades, I lived in a paradox. I was a clinician operating inside a traumatic warzone, “dancing with the devil” to reach an audience of millions. People gathered around their television sets daily to watch a spectacle of human suffering. They saw the traumatic hell, the shouting matches, and the broken families, but they rarely saw the path out. I stayed because I knew that if I could survive the environment, I could deliver a message of hope to the living rooms of people who felt they had nowhere else to turn.

While the faces on the screen were often from marginalized or impoverished backgrounds, the hands pulling the strings belonged to Wall Street and global entertainment titans like Tribune, Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Sony. These entities acted as a collective malignant narcissist. The dynamic was purely transactional and deeply predatory:

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