What up ladies, I'm Lisa Beliu and this is Women of Impact and let's be real every single one of us. Belize, I would never fall from manipulation to charm the twisted mind games, especially after listening to Lisa Beliu's Women of Impact podcasts. But what if I told you, even experts? Yes, that's right, literally forensic psychologists who have been trained in this for years have also been played. And what if the dangerous person in the room isn't always the obvious, sweaty creep, but the one that actually makes you feel seen, needed and oh, so damn special. Well today I'm joined by the absolute damn powerhouse Dr Leslie Dobson. She's a clinical and forensic psychologist and the woman who sat across from the most dangerous murders, serial killers, manipulators, psychopaths out there. And she's got the war stories, the street smarts and the gut level truth that you must hear. And so today we talk about the sneaky ways that psychopaths will size you up. And the habits that you don't even realise make you a target. We also talk about why, just being nice and following the rules might actually put you in more danger. Then we talk about how we are taught to follow the rules, but how that lesson alone is the one thing that actually keeps us stuck and then we of course talk about how the help we actually go about breaking the social norms to protect ourselves. We then talk about the exact strategies that Dr. Leslie Dobson learned from prison riots and therapy sessions with serial killers that actually helped her build her power confidence and safety even after the trauma that she experienced with these guys. Honestly, you've got to listen to this by the end of the episode, you'll literally know exactly how you can protect yourself from any predator, whether that's someone you know or someone you don't know. No matter where they're freaking hiding, you have got your own back. So let's dive in right here right now on the Moon of Impact. As a clinical psychologist, you're trying to work with psychopaths and serial killers. Yet even you were manipulated by powerful psychopath so effectively that it triggered a prison riot. So what tactic did he end up using when you, that formed even an expert? I wanted to see good in people. And this guy in particular saw that vulnerability in me and he recently had found out out that he had HIV and he wanted to have therapy.

He was depressed.

And so I was like, oh, okay, oh.

And he really convinced me.

I really wanted to help him.

He was depressed.

He wanted to move to a different pod.

And to me, I thought, why not?

He said he was being bullied.

He said he doesn't feel comfortable

with his current cellmates.

He wants to move. Hookline tinker. So when the real sheriffs were off duty who really understood these guys and we had sheriffs who were just in different fields, covering, I asked them to move the sky. So they moved the guy to the other pod and then that night there is a riot. Okay, how did he spot that you were vulnerable enough to want to help him? Like what was he seeing in you? Because I think a lot of women, including myself, may leak things that we don't realize. So what was it that he spotted in you? So I'm new to this. It's one of my first years in forensics and he could smell my gullibility. He could smell my eagerness. He was way more convincing. He knew how to engage me. He was charismatic. He was a pathological liar. He wasn't just a gang member. He was the leader of one of the major gangs in Los Angeles. He was a mass murderer, and he was working on me the whole time. So I had this false sense of allegiance with him. So it got to the point of us interviewing him and me suggesting we closed the door so no one could hear the conversation. You don't close your door with a psychopathic murderer in a jail. And there are so many moments that year,

that was my first year really working

with the real psychopathic individuals

and severe schizophrenia,

the most severe things I've ever seen in my entire life.

And so the officers were shaming me,

the inmates were shaming me,

the supervision was shaming me,

saying, I don't know enough,

I'm making these dumb mistakes.

And it certainly was.

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