In this YouTube video, relationship coach Matthew Hussey analyzes the Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, which reveals a teenage girl being cyber‑stalked and emotionally abused by her own mother. Hussey introduces the concept of “betrayal blindness” with a clip from narcissism expert Dr. Ramani, explaining why victims often fail to recognize blatant betrayal. He outlines classic narcissistic tactics displayed by the mother—love‑bombing from prison, shifting to victimhood, and refusing accountability—while describing the severe psychological fallout for the daughter, including depression, anxiety, and a distorted sense of safety. Hussey offers compassionate guidance for survivors, emphasizing the need to first manage the immediate fallout before processing deep betrayal, and reassures viewers they are not alone. The video concludes with a promotion for Hussey’s free online event, the “Love Life Reset,” aimed at helping people regain emotional control and confidence.
Chapters
This is a video that is super important for anybody who has been traumatized by a narcissist in life. And we are going to be talking about a show that just came out on Netflix called Unknown Number the High School Catfish. This is a story of a young girl who must be, I guess, around 12 or 13, who begins getting bullied by text. She doesn't know who this person is. She doesn't recognize the number. And. And this goes on for a long time. And by the way, let me just issue this now, a spoiler alert. I am going to give the entire show away in this video. If you do not want to know what happens in this real life documentary, turn it off. Now. Go and watch it and come back and watch this. It is everything imaginable about the worst kind of cyber stalking. They are trying to track down this person. They have no idea who it is. And after two or so years, years of this, it turns out that the person who's been doing this is not a jealous girl at school. It is not some boy who has some secret crush or vendetta against her. It is, in fact, her own mother who has been harassing her, relentlessly, bullying her, and even commanding her to take her own life. There's an actual filmed moment from a police cam of the moment where she finds out that the person who has been destroying her life and making her an anxious, depressed wreck for the last two years of her life is her own mother. You see this moment where she finds out, and it's a particularly harrowing moment. And her mom walks over to her, the person who has been the perpetrator of all of this abuse walks over to her and puts her arm around her and hugs her. And you see this young girl not knowing what to do, she shuts down. She sits there and she allows her mom to cuddle her. A term that I learned from a friend of mine, Dr. Ramani, who is the world's leading expert on narcissism. And she was telling me, and she came to talk at my retreat one year. She. She was telling us about a term called betrayal blindness. And betrayal blindness is what occurs when we are unable to process the betrayal that is right before our eyes.
That phenomenon of not looking deeper into an unhealthy relationship relates to something called betrayal blindness. It's not intentional.
You're not like, la, la, la, la, la.
I know he's cheating on me. I'm not going to look at his phone. Because to see this, to register it as what it was meant. The evening goes Away meant the marriage might need to be dismantled. The problem, Dr. Freid argues, is this betrayal, blindness. It's not as like, oh, imagine if that were great. Are you cheating on me? God, I'm gonna pretend that never happened, right? No, it's a bunch of junk accumulating, like, behind. Like, imagine you have, like, a drainpipe cover and there's all this schmutz accumulating in the drain, right? All of that is accumulating. So the more a person does this, the sicker they get. Depression, somatic headaches, anxiety, isolation. Person feels crazy, right? Betrayal, blindness doesn't come without a cost.
And I believe from watching this moment that this is the moment that that young girl had. The person who is supposed to be her safety, the person who is supposed to be her protector, her champion in life, someone who shields her from harm in life, is the person that has been betraying her and hurting her and abusing her all along. It is too big. And that's what results in that kind of. That inability to truly process what is going on. When we have been through something like this with somebody, a common tactic that they will use is to turn up the intensity of their affection as a way to scramble our radar about what it is they have done. And when someone knows that they have a degree of control over our nervous system. When someone knows that they have a grip on our emotions, they know they can still impact us as long as they still have contact with us. This is why contact with a narcissist can be so dangerous. I will leave it to the Dr. Ramanys of this world to tell us from an expert point of view whether her behavior falls squarely in the category of narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder, or is somewhere on that cluster B spectrum. But even a casual observation for anyone who has spent any time studying these things tells us that there are many traits of severe narcissism depicted in what this woman is doing. And one of them is the love bombing. Her mum goes to jail for a year and a half or whatever she goes for. And from inside prison, she begins this love bombing campaign of her daughter. She is sending her incredibly sweet texts. And it is a complete obfuscation of everything that has happened as a child who has not been able to process what has happened to her by her mother, is, of course, susceptible to all of that affection and love and perceived protection that her mom is now giving her, which feels like the sunshine and the warmth she has wanted all along. And there is a moment where it becomes chillingly clear that this mother does not take any accountability for the terror that she has imposed on her daughter and her daughter's ex boyfriend and this entire little community in this school. When she says, yeah, I did a bad thing, but you know, people do bad things all the time, and it's really that my bad thing is out there for people to see. And she even uses the example of a drunk driver as a different bad thing that someone else could do. As if someone being a drunk driver in a moment is equivalent to two years of bullying, harassing, and abusing your own daughter and telling her to kill herself. When someone like that cannot hold themselves accountable for it, does not see you and the damage they've done, and doesn't see how wrong what they've done is, it can make you crazy. And more than that, she goes to another classic behavior of narcissists, which is to go straight into victimhood. She talks about the sexual abuse that she experienced when she was, I think, 17, which is all terrible, and clearly she has had a hard life. And I actually believe that people in general, and I'm not talking about the Internet, but people, individuals I believe, actually have an extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. I think it's one of our best features as human beings. But when someone has done a horrible thing and then instead of taking accountability for it, simply points to their past and expects our tears, that is a completely different thing altogether. And that is exactly what happens in this woman. There is no accountability. There is just, I am the victim in all of this. My point of view in all of this is that when we are the one who has been traumatized by someone and that someone is still around continually asking ourselves, can this person change? Is taking responsibility for something that is not our responsibility? It is not our responsibility to try to figure out if someone who has hurt us acutely or continuously and behaves pathologically can change. It is their job to show us that they have changed. And by the way, if the person you're asking this about cannot even take accountability for what they have done, the answer is almost certainly no. They will never change. Because sorry is different from accountability, and accountability is not change. Even when someone takes accountability, all their work is ahead of them in actually changing the behaviors that hurt you in the first place. Look, all of this to me is more evidence of what Dr. Ramany says all the time, which is that people today do not actually understand narcissism. Narcissism is something that is still so poorly misunderstood by so many people in this world. This show was evidence of it. Because the whole way through this show, it was very clear to me and Audrey. Oh, this mum is almost certainly a narcissist. And the people around her couldn't make sense of the mum's behavior. And her daughter cannot even begin to understand right now the animal she is dealing with in her own mother. Which is why she, in her mind right now, is still completely open to and even rooting for a relationship with this woman. Because for her, it hasn't become apparent that contact with this person is poison. And I believe, fundamentally that it is going to be an extraordinary feat for this young girl to come to terms with the size of the betrayal that she has experienced in her life from someone she could not fathom would betray her in such a manner. If you are in that place right now, I want to leave you with this. When someone creates pain and destruction in our life, the fallout from that is usually very, very, very large. And in that time where we're simply managing the fallout, in this girl's case, she's managing her mum having gone to jail, being the subject of every conversation, I'm sure, in her town or high school, dealing with having one parent dealing with her dad's emotions in all of this, just managing the fallout is something that can completely monopolize us. And when that happens, it doesn't really leave much bandwidth for even beginning to process what has happened, the betrayal that has happened. And if that's you, if you've been spending all of your time simply dealing with the fallout of somebody that you don't even think you've gotten around to, processing the reality of what has happened, the depth of what has happened, and how that has impacted you on a deep level. You are not alone. And I will be here. We will be here to support you in the courageous work of unpacking that when the time is right for you. Thank you so much for watching this video. I cannot wait to read your comments on this one. Before you go anywhere, I wanted to make sure that you knew about my final big free event of the year. It's happening online this week in the next few days. It's called the Love Life Reset. And it's for anybody who feels like they want to get back control of their emotions, their nervous system, and their confidence. If that feels like you, whether you're single or in a relationship watching this, it doesn't matter. This one is for everybody, and it's going to be a really healing session for so many people. So I hope you join us it's free and you can join@lovelifereset.com thank you for watching and I'll see you this week. Sam.
