Lori Vallow Daybell (Psychological Analysis)

What in the world happened in this case? Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Lori Valo Daybell. This case is. I mean, it's out there. That's the only word I can think of. You got zombies, you got religion, you got maybe a cult. Who knows? You got a lot of stuff going on with this case. And one of our viewers recently asked me to weigh in on what I thought was going on with Lori Vallow daybell. I mean, this case, complicated. Even the name, it's like five names put together. Okay? So I'm not like a true crime person. I am a psychological person. So I'm not going to go into the whole every single detail about the crime. Because if you're, if you found this video on searches and you probably already know about the case, if you don't know about the case and you're just watching it because you're one of my regular viewers, I'm gonna put the links in the description of some true crime video youtubers that do a lot better job of telling this really complicated story than I can. But I'm gonna give you the really quick. I mean, I'm talking about the super quick overview of a very complicated case because I think what's important here is for us to what in the world was going on with this woman? Did she have a delusion? Was she just mean, is it a religious belief? What in the world is going on with it? And this is a great case for us to take a look at, to really pull apart the pieces of sort of like what I might call deluded thinking. I'm going to tell you, I don't think this is like in the books anywhere. But I'm going to break it down for you into three levels of delusion. And I don't mean types of delusion. There are a bunch of types of delusion. But I'm going to talk to you about sort of the levels. There's like this first level, which you see almost all people, especially people have addictions, can have. And then there's this next level, that's level two. And then we'll move into level three, which is like a whole nother thing. So hang with me just a little bit. So the really quick backstory here is this woman named Lori Vat, Lori Vallow. Now Lori Valo Davell. She's been married five times, okay. And during her fourth marriage, she started following this author who wrote books that were kind of fiction, but they were for sort of targeted for the LDS community. And so which is the religion targeted towards that religious community, because she was in that religion. Well, she started following this guy and she got really obsessed with him. And eventually her and her friend Melanie. We're gonna come back to. Melanie went to, like a conference or speaking event or whatever that he was having, and she just struck it, you know, just immediately hit it off with him. They start becoming fast friends, actually pretty fast in love, I think. And the whole thing gets really bizarre from there. So, like I said, this is the super quick version. There are a bunch of people that have died around this woman, Lori Valo, and her new husband, whose name is Chad Dabel. He's the author, the one that wrote about the religious stuff. So the two of them couple up and she. When they first couple up, she's married to Charles Ballow. And I'm not going to give you all these names because I'm telling you, it's complicated. I mean, seriously, I made a timeline yesterday. I don't know if y' all can see that. Don't look at my crazy. It's like pages and pages and pages of stuff here. Like, just trying to get the names and the dates. It's a lot, trust me. So she's with this guy, but she's still married. Now, there's some pretty strange religious beliefs going on here. And this is where it can get complicated. This is where we're going to really focus in how to tell the difference in, like, a religious belief that might be different than yours or, you know, different than most even, and an actual delusion that's really going to pull apart here is this sort of delusion apart. Now, if you look at her history, she had been married four times before she met this guy. And a lot of those breakups were really bad. So I feel like there was something going on with this woman before she ever even got into this relationship. And we got into this deluded state that we're. That we're going to talk about in just a second. Because every time she got out of one of these relationships, it was these big fights over the kids and custody. I mean, it was pretty ugly and nasty and there was a bunch of them. So I feel like something else was going on, and I can't decide in my mind. You guys weigh in on this and tell me what you think. If it's more personality disorder, like relational attachment kind of stuff, or I have a secret theory that maybe, maybe she's bipolar. And so you have this on and off behavior where she's all in. She gets all about something. And then not so much and off and on, that kind of thing, which is one of the conditions bipolar disorder is that can actually cause delusional behavior. So let's get into that. A delusion, to put it super simple. This is like real time. This is taking super complicated psychological stuff, breaking it down for you here. A delusion is a falsely held belief despite evidence. And that belief really does not seem to fit with the cultural current state even of that person. And this is where it gets complicated, because her delusion started with some religious beliefs. Now, I frequently in my videos, I use the word deluded a lot. Like I used that word when I talked about the Chris Watch situation. You'll often see people, all kind of people can do this, but people with substance abuse problems do this a lot. They delude themselves, but that's really different than delusional disorder. Okay, so this is the level one deluded thinking. And this is just a term. It's not really even a clinical term, that word, but it's a term that I used to describe when someone is not saying the world around them the way that everyone else is. Not like snakes are on the floor and there's not snakes on the floor. That's a whole different thing. That's called hallucination, but more when they shape their thoughts to fit what they want it to fit. So, for example, people with substance abuse problems will villainize people around them. They'll have these victim stories they tell themselves. And it's not so much that they completely like, are in fantasy land making stuff up, but it's more that they, in their own mind, they rationalize and they justify and they see things from this really skewed point of view. But it's all about justify the decisions that they want to make. And like I said, we all do this a little bit. People with substance abuse problems do it a lot. Hey, Paige. Glad to have you. And so that's diluted thinking that we can all have that is different than delusional disorder. When someone has delusional disorder, it's like they are not just skewing things to maybe fit with their own narrative, but they start to see things, things and believe things that are really far out there. And the thought that this woman, Lori Valo had and her current husband Chad Daybell had was that he had these powers to communicate with God. And he would go into a closet and it was like, I forget what they call it. Teleport transfer, something he called it, basically. And receive information. Now, a lot of people talk about hearing the voice of God or receiving information. But this is a little different. He had, like, a station set up. He was. He was getting some commands. Now he believed not only could he do that, but also he told Lori before they were together that they had been together in the past, in past lives, multiple times married. And so it was kind of like this way he was telling her that we're sort of destined to be. Now there's a lot more information out there about Lori, it feels like. Then there is about this Chad. And I'm trying to figure out, you know, does he really believe that, or is he just sort of using that to, like, more like I said, that deluded part, Is he using that to get what he wants out of that relationship? Anyways, so not only do they believe that they have been married in these past lives a bunch of times. I mean, you know what? I can even go with that. I can even, like, say, okay, maybe, so I can maybe follow you there and then. But then it comes into now he's married when they're first talking, she's married when they're first talking, and they're both. Their spouses die in a very short period of time. One of them, her spouse was killed by her brother, and his wife just sort of died of what they initially called natural causes. But she was, like, very healthy, had a cough, went to sleep, didn't wake up. And then they were married two weeks later in Hawaii. Can you see where it's getting a little suspect here? Now, she had two kids, and this is where the case part comes in. She had these two kids. Well, she had three, but one of them was older. And he isn't as much in this case. But the middle one is a girl named Ty. And the youngest one is a son named J.J. who's actually an adopted son of her fourth husband, Charles. I told you, it's comple. Right. Who also had autism. I think he had some special needs. Well, these two. These two kids go missing, and that's how this case comes up. And they find those two kids bodies buried on the property of Chad Daybell. So now they're. They're both in jail. They're facing all these complicated charges, and the case is very complicated. Let's get back to the delusion, because that's my territory. This delusion that they had now, they had the past lives. All these people are dying around them. They're married in two weeks. And not only that, but they had this belief that zombies were taken over human bodies everywhere around them because she said you know, zombies. Her daughter turned into a zombie. Her son had turned into a zombie. Her ex husband's had turned into a zombie. Oh, by the way, not just the one ex husband, the fourth one died, but the third one died too. I'm telling you, there's a lot of deaths around this case. It's complicated. So she's thinking and. And Chad's thinking that there are these zombies that are in these people's bodies. Now this is where I come in to sort of speculate. My thinking is, is that they think, okay, we're killing these people, but that's really releasing their soul because really their bodies are just. They're just bodies that are being housed or taken over by these zombies. So when you watch this case and you look at it and she seems so, like, callous, and it's really. It's really hard to explain, but I think that they think, oh, they're these. She thinks she's a deity. And so they are these people in their own mind that are put here to lead 144,000 people through the, you know, last days. And all these other people are just being taken over by these zombies. And so all these people are dropping dead around them left and right. Now. One of the things that they had predicted, Chad Daybell had predicted is that the world was going to end in July of 2020. Well, it didn't. I will say the world is really weird in 2020. So I gave them that, but didn't end. And so you have this really complicated belief that starts from some sort of smidgen of religious belief. That is somewhat understandable. And that's where delusions can be really complicated, because delusions really kind of grab a hold of something that's true, and it kind of morphs and twists until it gets to this way that it's really, really hard to believe. Like the whole zombies thing, right? And so, like, for example, years back, I had this young guy, was like 17, had seen him off and on. He'd had substance abuse, but showed up in my office one day, clearly delusional. We're not talking about high. That's different. We're talking about delusional. He was telling me had paranoid delusions. He was telling me how the FBI was after him, the cops were after him. And it would have been somewhat believable because this kid had been in like a super ton of trouble. He does bad things. And I think the cops were probably, you know, drive by his house occasionally, maybe watching him, but not to this level of this story. That this, this young man was telling himself. So it's kind of like if you're in the grocery store and you're in the checkout lane and you're looking at the magazines that are sitting there on the shelves as you check out, and then you start thinking that magazine is looking at you a certain way. And then you look at the words and then you start thinking that's a message from whoever, from God, from aliens, from whatever. And you start attaching these special meanings to things. That's where it can get complicated. And delusion. Because you start to attach these bizarre meanings to things that you're seeing in your environment. And that's why it can be really not easy to tell if you're dealing with someone that's delusional. Because you think, well, that could be possible even with this young man. It's like, well, Kyle's could be looking at him because sold a bunch of drugs. So that could definitely be happening. But you can tell it just takes this weird twist version of something that's just really not believable anymore. That's how you know you're dealing with a delusion. Now you might be thinking, well, what do you do if someone's delusional? Most people, what they do is they try to reason with the person. Don't do that. Doesn't work. In fact, I'll tell you a little secret about delusions. The more you try to reason with them, the more the delusion like morphs. Like it has like fingers that come off or like spider webs if you want to think of them. It's kind of like if you say, you know, if she's saying there's zombies in these bodies, and I say, well, let me prove it to you. You know, like, let me ask them all these questions that only your loved one will know. They'd be like, well, they, they download their memories. They have a reason. So if you try to reason with them, they'll give you a reason around your reason. Does that make sense? If they think there are snakes on the floor and you say, no, there's not snakes. Look, I'm standing right here. They say, well, you can only see them if you have these special X ray vision abilities from the aliens like I have. So the more you try to talk to someone about it, the more it warps around to make their belief possible in their own mind, no matter what you say. So the more you talk about it, the worse it gets. And that is one of the ways you can tell you're dealing with Someone that has a delusion versus someone that maybe just has a belief that's different than yours, or they're in a really strange situation that you would think couldn't happen. But maybe it did happen because it starts to twist and turn and it's like the longer it goes on, the more bizarre it gets. It grows and it twists and warps in it. Like, no matter what kind of reasoning you try to put into, finds a way around that. Like those spider webs or those tentacles that I'm talking about, if you're dealing with someone that has that, there's really no amount of talking that can get them out of that. In fact, the more you talk about it, the more ingrained it gets, the more sort of webbed out there it gets. So I really don't encourage you to do that. At that point, this person needs to see a medical professional because nothing but some medicine is going to fix that. I hate to say it, but. But that's the case. You're not going to talk. Even as a therapist, when someone's in my office that's struggling with a delusion, I can talk to them about how they feel about the situation. I can be there for them. I can be supportive of them. I can care about them. I can't make that delusion go away. And it's a complicated. Have any of you guys ever dealt with a delusion before? Known someone that had one interacted with one? Let me know what you think. Now, this Lori Valo DeBell case is even bigger than that. We're gonna go to the third level right here. There's actually a diagnosis called shared delusional disorder. And that is when a delusion is shared by at least two people. And it usually starts from, like, this primary person that has the delusion. And then it's almost like it spreads like an infectious disease or something. And in this story, this was absolutely shared delusional disorder. There are a bunch of characters in this story, people. They're not characters, they're people. They're real people who believed these ideas. Lori believed them. Chad believed them. Her brother really believed him. He was kind of like the lynch man, the hitman that did some of these bad things. Let's see, who else believed them. The best friend, Melanie. There's also a niece named Melanie that's in this story. There are a bunch of people in that are in this group who believe this same delusion. You may think to yourself, like, how can that happen? And it can happen because you start, you know, someone starts to Sort of tell you something that's kind of plausible. Then you believe into that and it's kind of like, then it gets a little further and a little further and a little further. Now, one of the things that might be really interesting for you is to listen to the interview of her best friend Melanie. And I've put the link for you in the description because when I watched that, I was like, I want to hear what this Melanie has to say. Because Melanie's the one that took Lori to the conference to begin with and she was kind of there all along. She has the same religious beliefs and she was following along with these ideas up until the point that these kids went missing. And then she's like, whoa. So I'm thinking, when I'm about to watch this interview with her, I'm thinking, this, I'll be good. This woman, I don't know about her, like, what? How are you gonna let your friend get in that? That's what I was thinking. But when you listen to her, she sounds pretty smart, she sounds pretty put together, she's well spoken, she's, she's not dumb and she's fairly assertive. And you think, dang, she's got her stuff together and she went almost all the way into that rabbit hole. Luckily not all the way. She got herself out of that. She's like, whoa, this is too much, it's too far. Like, I can't go along with this. Thank goodness, because I think she's the one that maybe called the police to say, hey, she called and asked me to lie about the kids. And I'm worried, that kind of thing. So watch that because I think that'll give you an idea about, like, you're looking at her, you're thinking you're pretty normal, like you got your stuff together. If she could believe all that, then you can see where that can happen to you. You think, oh my gosh, like, that can never happen to me, or that can never happen to someone I know. But I've seen delusional disorder happen almost out of nowhere. I've seen it happen to teenagers. I've seen it happen to 60 year old people who've never had a delusion before. And once it happens, it's really hard to get rid of. Like I said, you have to do some medicine. But even after you get someone better from that, this is just my own personal, like experience with it is it kind of lingers. And so let's say it's a year later, the person's better, they're not really having that active delusion anymore. You don't really want to bring it up with them because it's kind of like for them, that experience was very real. And when you bring it up, they still feel like this. Like, I don't know. That felt really real. Like, they don't. They have a hard time differentiating it. So even when they get better and it's not like, growing or getting bigger, if you ask them about it way down the road, they'll kind of go back into that thinking a little bit. So you have to be careful with that. Hey, Anita, thanks for joining us. Hey, Paige. Hey. Butterfly kisses. So that should help you understand those are the three levels. You got deluded thinking. That's kind of like rationalizing and justifying to make a situation fit what you want it to fit. Like, like in the Chris Watts case, saying, like, I really like this. Like Nicole Kessinger says, I really like this guy. I bet he's got, like, this terrible marriage and he's unhappy and he wants to get out of it, and I'm just going to save him. That's deluded thinking, and that can happen to us. Delusional is really pretty far out there, but it has grains of truth in it, and that's why it's hard for people to tell the difference. And shared delusion is when multiple people have the same delusion, which is really rare, but that's what you see in this case. And I really had to think about, because I'm like, well, maybe it's just a religious belief, but to me, it's where you have that. Where it's changing. You know, religious belief might be, you know, if you believed in reincarnation and you believe that you were married to this guy 10 times. Okay, that's cool. I can go with that. But when you're like, and now this person's a zombie, and this person's a zombie, and this person's a zombie now you have delusional disorder. When multiple people share that, that's shared delusional disorder. Thank you guys for hanging out with me. If you want me to do more of these videos, you guys just let me know. These are a little different, but I think sometimes looking at a movie, even if it's a character or a real story, a real person can really help highlight some of these mental health things that are hard to put your finger on and hard to explain without, like, a solid story or person to point to. So I don't know what's gonna happen in this case. Like, I said I'm not the crime reporter but looks pretty suspect. Pretty sure they did all that. It's just way too much to be coincidence. So some really bad things happen. It's super unfortunate and very very scary. Charles iii, the fourth husband before he died, tried his best to have her committed and she talked to anyone around her and talked him out of was just really complicated so she functions normally outside of this delusion. That's what makes it really it's not like she's running around screaming and acting like super crazy. It's just this one delusion which she may or may not tell you her thoughts about that so you might not see it. That's why so many people got sucked into this. Alright everybody, I will catch you next time. Our regular Tuesday video will get released about the science and psychology of addiction and we will be back live next Thursday at 1. If you want to learn more about addiction so you can stay five steps ahead of it, I've got some videos coming up for you next. I'll link them right up here for you.