On this episode of Narcissist Apocalypse Q&A, everyone. I am Brandon Chadwick. And today on our show, we have

Brandy Smith. And Brandy Smith is a licensed professional counselor, licensed chemical dependency counselor

with a focus on trauma. And one of her specialties is infidelity as well. She is

a therapist with a non-judgmental environment where clients feel validated, acknowledge and

respected, which as many of you know is not an easy thing to find in a therapist these days.

She's in Texas. She's in Austin. She's online.

Her website is fortifycounseling Services.com. And she is statewide in Texas. Brandy Smith,

thank you for being on our show today. Thanks for having me.

Glad to be here.

So a big thing we'll be discussing today is real intimacy versus fake intimacy amongst many things.

And a big thing in domestic violence and abuse is love bombing.

So we're trying to decipher for a lot of people what is real and what is fake.

So at first, can you define what is love bombing for us?

Sure.

Love bombing is that kind of just showering a person with some really dramatic and over the top kind of attention and affection and not just sort of that honeymoon period,

but with this very, you know, sort of powerful combination of the things that someone would do or say to just be really compelling and that kind of attention that we all really want, just the authentic kind and not love bombing.

So when it comes to real versus fake, how does someone know what is real?

You know, I think it's really important, A, that we trust our gut.

I think there's a lot of a loss of trusting our gut in terms of narcissistic abuse.

That's kind of one of the tools is to throw us off, you know, recognizing who we are.

So I sort of see in my practice, you know, the, I think the merging of empathy and vulnerability

is a great way to define intimacy.

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