Chat with Dr. Kat

When you lose someone to sudden violence, the mind doesn't know what to do with that much pain — so sometimes you just try to drown it. LaShawnda lost her 21-year-old son Tyshawn to a random shooting in Cleveland in January 2023, eight days before his birthday. For roughly a hundred days after, she drank a fifth of tequila daily, lost sixty pounds, and — by her own honest account — barely kne...

Most people don't think about long-term care until they're already in the middle of a crisis — a parent who can't bathe alone, a spouse recovering from surgery, a sibling who quietly stopped going to work to help out. By then, the choices feel much smaller. Raymond Lavine, a long-term care insurance specialist, joins Dr. Kat to talk about why so many families get caught off guard an...

You've done everything you thought was kind — and somehow it still isn't what they asked for. That's the friction at the center of this episode: the gap between doing *something* and doing *the thing your partner actually asked for*. Dr. Kat walks through her "Paint the Room Yellow" framework — what it means when a partner gives you a clear, direct request and you respond...

Many women reach menopause already exhausted — from decades of managing everyone else's needs — and then find themselves blindsided by symptoms they never connected to hormones at all. Frozen shoulder. Middle-of-the-night spiraling. A sudden, low-tolerance for anything that doesn't feel right. No one warned them, and the silence around it can make the whole experience feel isolating and...

You love your dog. The problem is, not everyone around you does — and figuring out how to navigate that gap without feeling like you have to choose between your dog and basic social harmony is genuinely tricky. Dr. Kat walks through the real situations where dog owners — even well-meaning ones — tend to get it wrong: restaurants, grocery stores, neighborhood walks, dog parks, having guests over, a...

Most childcare centers open at 7 and close at 6. If your schedule doesn't fit that window — or your child needs more than a standard classroom can offer — you're largely on your own. Antoinette Elliott, founder of All Our Children Elite Child Care Academy in Georgia, built her school around exactly that gap: extended hours until midnight, nature-based learning, vegetarian meals, and a st...

Grief shows up in the body in ways most people don't expect — the nausea, the joint pain, the sleep that won't come, the memory that keeps slipping. When you're in the middle of it, those physical symptoms can feel alarming, even confusing, especially when no one told you this was part of it. Dr. Kat walks through the emotional, physical, and cognitive dimensions of grief, explainin...

When helping others is so deeply woven into who you are that you can't imagine doing anything else — and yet you're exhausted, disillusioned, and wondering if the only logical next step is to give everything up entirely — something more complicated than simple burnout is happening. Les, an LCSW who reached out to Dr. Kat considering leaving her social work career to become a nun, opens u...

You walk into a room and nineteen people tell you that you look great. One person gives you a look. You spend the rest of the day thinking about the one person. That's not a character flaw — it's biology. Your brain is literally wired to prioritize threat over praise, and that wiring quietly erodes self-confidence over time. Dr. Kat breaks down why the brain reacts more powerfully to neg...

Most of us inherit something from the people who raised us — a temper, a coping pattern, a way of speaking to children that sounds disturbingly familiar coming out of our own mouths. Breaking that inheritance is one of the hardest psychological projects a person can take on, and almost no one is given a map for it. This week Dr. Kat sits with Rob Scheer, founder of the international nonprofit Comf...

You asked your partner to paint the room yellow. They bought a new bed, a new carpet, moved the furniture — and now they're irritated you're still asking about the wall. That quiet, repeated experience of being given everything except what you asked for is one of the most common forms of emotional neglect in marriage, and it's what Dr. Kat unpacks in Part 2, responding to viewers wh...

Your kid won't listen to you about skincare, but they'll do whatever a fifteen-second TikTok tells them — and right now that means slathering retinols, acids, and anti-aging serums meant for fifty-year-olds onto teenage skin. Dr. Kat sits down with dermatologist and Mohs surgeon Dr. Angela Casey, who removes skin cancers all day and founded the teen skincare line Bright Girl, to unpack w...

When a kid comes home from school upset, most parents brace for the wrong thing. They worry about the kid who's throwing punches — but Dr. Kat Derrig-Palumbo, a licensed psychologist and former advisor to Dr. Phil, sees something different in her practice. The adults in her therapy room aren't 30, 40, even 50 years out from the kid who hit them. They're still carrying the words. A s...

Few cultural debates have gotten louder or more polarized than the one over trans women in women's sports, and most of the loudest voices come from outside the trans community. Daviana Memont — a former Marine, competitive powerlifter, and strength coach with nearly a million followers across her platforms — is the rare exception. A trans woman who argues other trans women shouldn't comp...

You've watched a driver wave in pedestrian after pedestrian, pause for someone backing out of a driveway, smile and gesture generously to everyone around them — and then the moment you try to pass, they speed up so you can't. Dr. Kat Derrig-Palumbo, a licensed psychologist, builds a whole episode around that contradiction, sparked by a line from her youngest daughter: that person is gene...

Your toddler isn't talking much yet, and you've started to wonder: is this just their pace, or is something actually wrong? It's a question that can quietly eat at a parent for months — and most of the worrying happens before anyone reaches out for help. Speech-language pathologist Abigail Skegin-Sipes, founder of Sunshine Speech LA, joins Dr. Kat to talk about why that hesitation i...

You're not the type who'd describe yourself as anxious. You sleep okay, mostly. You handle stress. But your heart sometimes races for no reason, you wake up at the same time every night with your mind spinning, and you've started thinking that buzzing, low-grade hum is just how being a person feels. Dr. Kat has been hearing some version of this from clients for years — and what she...

Hair loss is one of those things that can quietly reshape how a woman sees herself — and most of the advice out there stops at "take biotin" or "try rosemary oil." But what if the real problem isn't your hair at all? Dr. Kat sits down with Diana Robinson, a hairstylist of 25 years turned hair loss consultant, to talk about what's actually behind the thinning — and mos...

You go to work. You take care of your family. You show up, you function, you get through the day. But the moment you're alone — the mask drops, and the sadness is right there waiting. Most people living with persistent, low-grade depression don't even recognize it as depression because they're still "functioning." They assume depression means you can't get out of bed,...

Your teenager barely leaves their room, answers every question with one word, and seems to be drifting further away no matter what you try. You're not imagining it — and you might be accidentally making it worse. Dr. Kat sits down with clinical psychologist Christopher Fulton, Ph. D., who has spent 30 years working with teens and families at his collaborative practice in Calabasas, to talk ab...

Your partner buys the new bed, replaces the carpet, upgrades the headboard — and you're standing there thinking, "but I asked you to paint the room yellow." It's one of the most common and quietly devastating patterns in relationships: your person puts in real effort, sometimes enormous effort, but it's never aimed at the one thing you actually asked for. Over time, the me...

If you love someone who's struggling with addiction, you've probably tried everything — the confrontations, the promises, the ultimatums, the cleaning up their messes while resenting them for it. And none of it worked. Amber Hollingsworth, a Master Addiction Counselor with nearly a million YouTube subscribers on her channel Put The Shovel Down, explains why the instinct to help is often...

Most people only have honest conversations about their relationships after something goes wrong — after the blowup, after the resentment has been building for months, after that one small thing finally sets everything off. But what if you checked in before any of that happened? Dr. Kat walks through a simple set of questions designed to open up real dialogue with your partner, your friends, even y...

As AI becomes part of daily life, more people are turning to it for advice, reassurance, and even help with deeply personal struggles. In this episode, Dr. Kat talks with Robert Scholz about how AI is changing the therapeutic landscape, why so many people are using it in place of real human support, and what happens when a tool that sounds empathic starts to feel like a substitute for therapy.  Th...

Women are often taught to push through discomfort, take care of everyone else, and keep going even when something feels wrong. In this episode, Dr. Kat shares a personal story about ignoring knee pain after a fall, only to learn later that she had been walking on a broken kneecap. From there, she explores a deeper pattern in women’s health: how being used to pain, monthly discomfort, and even meno...