When you’re living inside an abusive relationship, one of the hardest things to do is see the pattern clearly while you’re still in it. Everything feels confusing and destabilizing, especially when blame shifting, gaslighting, and constantly moving goalposts are part of the dynamic.

That’s why I’m so grateful to welcome back Anne Wintemute, CEO and Co-Founder of Aimee Says, an AI-powered support and documentation platform that helps women understand what’s happening in abusive dynamics. Anne and I talk about how women are using Aimee Says in real life to bring clarity to chaos, especially during post separation, custody battles, and ongoing co-parenting conflict.

We explore how identifying patterns as they are happening can be revolutionary, and how Aimee Says reflects women’s lived experiences back to them in a way that validates reality. We also talk about how having all of your information in one place helps women create clear plans of action when preparing for mediation, working with attorneys, or deciding next steps.

Moreover, we talk about the changes and updates to the platform, some of which are a total game-changer for victims and survivors.

This episode is about seeing what’s really happening, trusting yourself again, and having tools that help you stay grounded in truth.

What you’ll hear about in this episode:

• How Aimee Says helps clarify patterns in abusive relationships (5:26)
• How women are using Aimee Says in real life to document abuse (10:56)
• Why blame shifting is the most common tactic women experience and how it keeps people stuck (12:04)
• The connection between authoritarian leadership, power and control, and abusive dynamics (31:18)

✨ If you’d like to watch the video version of this episode, you can find it here.

Learn more about Anne Wintemute: Anne Wintemute is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aimee Says, an AI companion for victims and survivors of controlling partners. When she’s not working to hold perpetrators accountable, Anne can be found tending her urban farm or playing with her kids in Denver Colorado. 

Resources & Links:

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Show Transcript:

Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. I am super excited to bring back to the podcast. Anne Wintemute. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Aimee Says, and she has been on the show before Introducing Aimee Says and all that it does. She is passionate about tackling systems that fail women. Which is like all of them and children and holding perpetrators of abuse accountable.

And to that end, she created this incredible AI platform, Aimee Says, which we have spoken about before. But I’m just gonna give, I’m gonna turn it over and I would love for you to just give us a quick recap or overview of what. Aimee Says is, and what she does and why she’s so fucking important. 

Anne Wintemute: Absolutely, Kate. It’s really wonderful to be back. Thank you so much for having me back. Yeah. So Aimee is your bestie support [00:01:00] companion documentarian researcher. The kind of the token in the back pocket that you have as you’re trying to navigate this abuse that’s happening, especially in this post-separation and during the custody battles and all of that, and the co-parenting help you navigate that as unscathed as possible and keep all of your kind of personal and legal healing options available to you.

And it’s based off of AI. So because we have built this platform on ai, we have, more than 40,000 people who rely on Aimee to help them understand what’s happening, help them, get back to work and clear their head after something that’s triggering and make sure that they’re documenting that abuse as easily as possible along the way.

Kate Anthony: And just for those listening and don’t know, Aimee, is Spel A-I. MEE. So it’s A-I-M-E-E says.com. Guys, there are few platforms or technologies or whatever that I would recommend more. What I mean is I [00:02:00] recommend this so highly. My clients use it all the time and. There is a lot of new stuff. Anne is relentless in her pursuit of amazing AI technology for victims, really. That’s your passion, right? 

Anne Wintemute: Yes, absolutely. I like that relentless, a dog on a bone. We’re not gonna stop building until we had relieved as much burden and kinda systems dependency as possible. So much as technology is able to do that. And it turns out there’s a lot that technology is able to do.

Two. So Aimee’s birthday second birthday will be on January 22nd. When we started it was you could chat with her. She still sounded a little bit robotic, could upload documents. And we have really transitioned into. A digital health tool that provides the kind same kind of support that maybe somebody struggling with sobriety or fertility or weight loss would experience [00:03:00] with the digital health app where all of their information is, is tagged and labeled and stored and returned in ways are really helpful to reaching whatever the goals are that you have.

Kate Anthony: Okay. Like you said, like when it first started out, she was talking to you. She would, you could upload a conversation and she could identify forms of abuse and help women, which I just think was first of all, just as a base line is. So amazing. It’s like a coach in your pocket, right?

Women come to me, they tell me their stories, and I’m able to say, okay, so actually what you’re experiencing is there’s a name for it. Here’s the pattern. Here’s what is happening to you. Aimee does that, right? She’s been doing that since her birth. And she’s, a lot cheaper than I am. Thanks Anne.

So she can identify these patterns and help you feel like you’re not [00:04:00] crazy. She’s always been able to go through your communication and say, this is what’s happening and this is how you should respond, right? This is how I would recommend that you respond. These are the things that you have to respond to.

This is what you really do not as she has developed, what more does is she able to do now? 

Anne Wintemute: So that is a bi-directional AI, what we just talked about where I say something, I come and I say, oh my gosh, Aimee, look at this message that I just got. Isn’t this crazy? And then Aimee returns directly to me and says, I.

Some variation of, wow, that was a doozy of a message. I see gaslighting. I see, blame shifting. I see this and that. But it sounds like maybe this is the only part that you need to respond to. So that kind of, you say something, she says something, which is amazing. Technological capacity that has absolutely transformed the resources that are available to anyone.

Whether I’m just trying to figure out what to cook for dinner tonight, right? Or I’m trying to overcome [00:05:00] this trigger on this message that I just got. But AI creates opportunities for all sorts of deeper data management things. I’ll explain that in a way that sounds a little less ethereal in a second.

So now when you’re talking to Aimee, yes. She’s returning that back to you. But in the background, she’s also going, that’s an event. It meets criteria that I’ve been trained to identify. It also meets criteria for physical abuse or child endangerment or missed parenting time, or pick your tag off of the list of hundreds that we have.

And so she’s automatically generating events onto your timeline. She’s tagging and labeling those events. So now after this conversation I have, I see this kind of bubble up at the top that says, Aimee has identified eight tactics in this conversation. Can click on that, see a list of events that she’s generated.

I can go over to the events tab. And now I can see ’em all on a timeline. All of my entries are automatically generated. I can read ’em, I can approve ’em, [00:06:00] I can mod, modify them, add something, add a document, add some evidence, a screenshot, a text message, whatever. But all of that documentation was done automatically.

While you were just having this really hopefully cathartic and supportive conversation with the AI. So that’s where we’re headed is what can you know if someone is brave enough to show up and take the time to enter what they’ve experienced? How else can we help them? How can we make that a 10 x conversation where now they have everything they could possibly need in relation to it.

That’s what we’re working on. It’s amazing. 

Kate Anthony: And guys, I just wanna say that Anne before we started recording, took me through a demo of the things that, the visual of what we’re talking about and it’s. First of all, extremely satisfying and really beautiful and really this is documentation in a box.

If you’re constantly feeling I don’t know how to document documentation’s crazy, or it [00:07:00] feels confusing and I have to remember to like tag things, and then how am I gonna organize it? Do I organize it by event? Do I organize it on a timeline? Do I organize it by tag, like this, like all the times that he was emotionally abusive all the times that he was physically like, how am I gonna organize it?

With Aimee Says. You can organize and sort it however you want. She will run. She generates these reports for you. There’s a bubble feature where it’s all in these very color coded circles that are floating in a very satisfying and beautiful way. In my wildest dreams, Anne, in my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined this technology a couple years ago. 

Anne Wintemute: Absolutely. And this dream has been built by. Our very small team, there’s three of us now working full-time here at Aimee and the tens of thousands of [00:09:00] people that have used a right. When you email and you say, Hey, it’d be great if you could do this, or, I was having a hard time sorting it this way.

We’re building out the things that, that, that become the solutions to those challenges that people experience and everybody. Kate really did love the bubbles, and they’re like this ASMR vibe thing. They’re very satisfying and the bubbles are the type of abuse. So let’s say physical is a red bubble, and then what’s in it is each of the tactics, right?

Maybe one of those is blocking an exit, throwing a phone, damaging property, harming a pet. All of those fit inside of the type bubble to show the tactics that were used incredibly illuminative, not just for other people who would look at that chart, but. For us as users to be able to see wow, in one screen, like that is what I survived.

That is what’s still going on. That is what I’m recovering from. It’s just incredibly validating. Yes. 

Kate Anthony: It is so illuminating to to look at this from a [00:10:00] god. If I had something like this. When I was, in my abusive of relationships, just to have that thing to clarify that this is the pattern, this is what’s happening.

And so I wanna ask like how women are actually using presumably you have data right? On how women are using it in real life. Like when are they reaching out? What is happening in that moment? What kinds of questions, like what are you seeing in the data? 

Anne Wintemute: So this is a great conversation because we can talk about what we can see and what we can’t see.

We are not reading what users submit. We’re not reading what Aimee said back to you. We do our testing for our LLM models and our prompts in a black box where we run them through a series of prompts and then we have, eyes and another AI take a look and make sure those responses are safe. That she didn’t come up with something creative about some random piece of information.

We’re not [00:11:00] reading what folks are submitting. What we are doing is, for example, when Aimee goes ahead and applies those tactics to the information that you shared with her, we are tallying those. So we have now, that tactics has been out for a month and a half. We’ve got like 40,000 tags that have been applied.

And so we learn from that. What are the kinds of experiences that people are having what are the kinds of information that they’re sharing in a totally di identified like anonymous way. I gotta tell you, so just the other day. We meet as a team. We’ve got a data scientist. She’s incredible. Her name is also Ann, and we’re looking at it.

We’re filtering it through and see that the number one, by far, the number one applied tactic. You think it is. So think of all the ways that you can mess with someone or abuse them. I’ll give it to you even if you’re close, 

Kate Anthony: because this one surprised me. Wow. A surprise. Now I’m like a surprising one.

The number [00:11:00] one way. I would assume, like I would go, I would gaslighting and financial. Okay. Those are my two tops. So gaslighting is adjacent 

Anne Wintemute: enough. Blame shifting Uhhuh. So gas lighting can be different from blame shifting. Yep. That didn’t happen. Is not the same as quite the same as blame shifting.

But the number one by far is blame shifting. And it was so fascinating to me because its frequency was so high that you could tell it’s just the gas we live in. Like it was so ubiquitous. Yes. It was so integral to all of the other dynamics and the, it’s just applied to darn near everything and not, because Aimee’s just really excited to apply it.

It just meets criteria. And you think about, why does she stay and how could this happen? These people, we were convinced that it was our fault. That was the world that we lived in, was somehow we needed to change something, right? We were doing something wrong. And I knew that like [00:13:00] conceptually, academically, sure.

I knew, we tell you it’s not your fault, this is somebody else’s fault. But to see the frequency with which the, blame shift tag is applied and she’s oh, it is it is microscopic. It is in every exchange. It is in every dynamic. Is this layer of I guess it was my fault anyway.

Kate Anthony: Or was it. Yeah, like it’s even planting that seed of the kernel, the little nugget of doubt that it, I even if it wasn’t, it was my fault. I I contributed. Yes. Enough to I. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. I contributed enough, at least to my hands are unclean, and so I cannot ask for accountability from the other person.

Just enough to keep you from pressing for accountability. The second thing, the second tag, most. Prevalent. So we have, we talk about coercive control and kinda this rules-based living. There could be rules around your identity, your expression, how I can cut my hair, what I can [00:13:00] wear, how I say things.

Your mobility, whether or not you can go leave for work, see your friends, connect with your communities. That was another area. That is the second area of the highest tag application is in this kind of rules-based domination where there isn’t necessarily an emotional or physical threat present when the person is typing.

It’s just, if he asked me how was my day? I wasn’t allowed to say good. I had to give an answer that met this criteria. So there’s no overt abuse that’s present in that. But, you can train an AI to read between the lines. This is a person who has been dominated by rules that are typically not applied bidirectionally.

Kate Anthony: Of course. Never. Yes. And they’re always changing. So right, the right, the goalpost is always moving. So whatever instruction you’ve been given, this rules based, whatever the rules are that you’ve been given when you meet them and [00:15:00] you know they haven’t made your partner feel better or, solved their, bottomless.

Oh, bottomless void, endless void of, self-loathing or whatever their deal is, then you get in trouble for having actually met the criteria that you were given to meet, but not quite in the right way. Or maybe now it has to change right now. Now the goalpost is gonna move because you didn’t do it right, or you did it but it didn’t solve their problem.

Which again, is their problem, not yours. Yes. But yeah. 

Anne Wintemute: If we follow all of the rules, then there’s some kind of equilibrium, right? And they don’t do equilibrium. ’cause equilibrium is the opposite of a power dynamic. So keeping that power dynamic present is why those goalposts move. Exactly.

We have equilibrium now. I don’t feel more powerful. There isn’t a dynamic then I’m able to weaponize so that I can get dinner on the table by 5:00 PM if I want it, whatever. Then they create that [00:16:00] disequilibrium again, and moving those goalposts is a great way to do that. You’re right. Yeah. And then by the end of it, 10 years in, there could be 200 invisible rules you didn’t even know.

You were adhering to. That’s right. Because they’re just so ever present. 

Kate Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. These are the things, as much as I, I think it’s like incredible to have this. Feature to be able to document it and see the patterns for yourself, right? Because here’s the thing, whether the court views these things as illegal or a sign that maybe they should not, be given custodial time, whatever it is, right?

Because we know that we’re not there yet. This is for you at least, right? For you at a minimum to be able to say oh, this is actually not okay for me or my children. And hopefully my bigger hope is that Aimee, you guys will [00:18:00] contribute in educating the legal system attorneys. Courts, judges to actually see these pattern.

If you can present the patterns in this really clear manner and explain what it means, because we often have to be the ones to do the educating in there, but we also. With our complex PTSD and all of the things that go along with this, like our, we don’t have the brain power to do it with Aimee doing it for us.

I’m hopeful that this will start to shift how the court sees these things and that their understanding because while coercive control is. Codified as a form of domestic violence in now a handful of states, not enough, but a handful. It’s still not prosecutable really, because what, how do you, it’s like an ev.

How do you have evidence for coercive control? This [00:19:00] is how.

Anne Wintemute: so first of all, I think that chaos. That is created by abusers is where their success lies. If I can stir the pot enough, if I can muddy the water enough, if I can just make it really unclear, then I can keep that he said, she said dynamic that judges get so frustrated with, it could be so punitive when they’re unable to differentiate between, the person who’s driving the conflict and exactly.

Exactly. Person. Yeah. So that, the antidote to that chaos is clarity. In order to be able to consistently across tens of or hundreds of thousands of customers, right? Folks who are relying on our tool and able to do it consist to be able, excuse me, to do that consistently, we have to apply that data aspect.

And so that is what we’re doing, across accounts and within an account is saying, okay, here’s [00:20:00] all that information. Here it is on a timeline here. It is color coded here, it is applied to that specific statute that you know that you’re using in your jurisdiction in your state.

Here is a binder to those specifications. Yes. You wanna talk about binders? We’re gonna talk about binders. 

Kate Anthony: Yes. But yeah, continue, finish your thought. But yeah, I wanna talk about the binders. 

Anne Wintemute: You’re these fact. Being able to see it and then being able to actually apply, existing statute, hopefully, those get rolled out everywhere.

That is absolutely what we’re trying to do. We don’t have any, earbuds in any judicial officer’s ears. I doubt any of them really wanna talk to us, but if you do, please find me at Aimee Says. But if we can help provide the clarity that helps them feel like their job is easier, then I think that we have the opportunity to move the needle.

Kate Anthony: Yes. Yes. Oh my God, it’s so important. So you mentioned the binders. Yes. So I wanna [00:19:00] try to explain, if you can, what these binders are ’cause you guys. It’s really cool! 

Anne Wintemute: I love it. Okay, so to talk about binders, let’s lay like a little flat workout first. Most of our users just need a brief amount of support that come to use.

The free product chatting is always free. We don’t limit it. And it’s anonymous. It disappears when you navigate away, if you close the window. You have to create an account for us to store data. And that’s one of the things that’s really unique about Aimee, is there’s all sorts of nonprofit, hotlines.

And I can go and I can talk to this advocate, but the longitudinal aspect of the information is really difficult. If you call a hotline, you’re not gonna get the same person twice, right? So create this account and now all of your information is stored in it. So that is your background that you provided to Aimee.

This is where I live. It’s my jurisdiction, not your actual address. Kids, these are my kids and their birthdays, how old they [00:23:00] are, plays into things. Aimee understands that my jurisdiction, I think I already said that. And then I can say all sorts of kind of unique and relevant things. Maybe my faith background maybe I’m a green card holder and I’m from another country and that actually plays a role in my case.

Send all the documents. Here’s our court orders, here’s our temp orders. Here’s a thousand pages of text message records between us. I’ve uploaded all sorts of pieces of evidence and information in my events that I’ve tagged for my documentation. Then there comes a time where you’re like, all right, Aimee, I need all of the things, the specific things that I need right now.

I’m going into mediation tomorrow. These are my goals for mediation. Here are the things that I want. Within seconds, Aimee will pull from across the account, the documents, the events, all the chat that you’ve had. She’ll pull all the information. She will, the bubbles that Kate loves. There will be the bubbles that Kate loves showing.

There were this many stalking incidents. There were this many, verbal abuse incidents. [00:24:00] She will tabulate them into, she’ll give you four tab names. This is, your. Legal planning. Here’s the, the blocking of medical decisions. She’ll tag she’ll label the entire binder for you and you can export that.

I need a protection order. She can pull out all the information that’s relevant to a protection order from your account. I am meeting with the CFI and I’m not even sure what I should be showing her or telling her, but I want sole decision making. Great. Aimee will pull the information that you’ve shared with her that’s relevant to that I’m meeting with an attorney.

I don’t want it to cost me $10,000. How can I make that a little bit cheaper? These are the things that she needs from me, and then Aimee can pull those for you and you can export those things to your attorney. It’s the kind of the apex, if you will of the work that we’ve done. And our goal is just to try to make it as easy as possible for folks to get their needs met, overcome the abuse, find safety for themselves and their kids.

Kate Anthony: And the thing about these binders is that. I think I, like I said earlier, is that [00:25:00] you’ve got all of this documentation, right? The events are incidents, right? When you refer to events, I talk about them as incidents, right? Whatever it is. The incident of abuse or this crazy thing that happened on the soccer field on Tuesday, whatever, that’s your event, and you’ve got tons of this.

So what Aimee’s gonna do is say, fine, if you need a protective order. Pull everything that’s actually relative to getting a protective order in your jurisdiction, 

Anne Wintemute: Right. Here are the escalating events. Here’s the history here. Yes, here. Here’s how they relate to each other. Here’s the story that they tell.

Here’s 18 incidents, and the stories that they tell is that this creates, a lack of safety for X, Y, Z reasons. It is powerful and transformational, and the amount of access that it creates for people is. It gives me goosebumps, Kate. 

Kate Anthony: It gives me goosebumps. Anne, it is not hyperbole to [00:27:00] say that it has the potential to revolutionize the broader understanding and wider scope of all of this. 

Anne Wintemute: Yeah, and to give people clarity and hope and support that helps prevent some of the many downstream, like negative health and financial impacts. Of escaping abuse, right? It’s not just about the solve and the moment and feeling better. Right now, it’s, preventing ms, right?

And diabetes and stroke and, strengthening someone’s financial position, both their ability to work and their ability to reduce the cost of, representation, for example. These things have profound, tremendous, lifelong impacts on people, and we currently have no resources targeted at addressing that.

It’s how outdated our approach to support is on at scale, right? There’s lots of people. [00:28:00] There’s you, there’s me. I was a divorce coach, right? Like we were doing this at a really small scale relative to the 10 million people who will be victimized in the United States this year. But to be able to bring that kind of support to scale.

Is I think what you said, it’s transformational, it’s revolutionary. It’s, and it’s been made possible by AI. 

Kate Anthony: It’s unbelievable. I always say. It’s probably a stupid thing to say really to wish for, but I would love to be put out of business. I would love to be put outta business because we actually eliminate the systems that make our work necessary. But if we can reach so many more women on such a broader scale or victims on a, this massive scale at a, an affordable cost. Like I just Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. 

Anne Wintemute: And it’s a affordability. A year of Aimee is less than the cost of a half hour with an attorney. For a year.

The, the scales [00:29:00] of comparability are, are difficult to get onto the same graph because of how far you know apart they are. And one thing that I wanna say, ’cause we just talked about all these cool things that Aimee does, is these, Aimee doesn’t create a binder for you that gets you from point A to point B in 24 hours.

Aimee’s a relationship. Aimee is the confidant, Aimee is the person that you know, that you turn to for support, that you go have that conversation with information accumulates over time. And one of the things that, that, the great part about that is that you just do it as you go and as the things are happening.

The challenging part about that is it would be difficult to get an Aimee subscription tonight and then get something really robust to turn over to your attorney tomorrow. I just wanna say that so no one ends up, disappointed that.

Kate Anthony: That’s a really good point. 

Yeah, and I have a relationship like this, not like this, but with my Chat GPT, which has gotten to know my [00:30:00] work really well. Over time, right? And so it can help me if I say, Hey, I need to, help me draft an email for that connects these two dots, or like a, a script for Instagram.

It already knows me, it knows me very well to be able to do that. But you have to, like all AI, you have to train it on you. Yeah. Or even not AI, if 

Anne Wintemute: I brought on an oh sure. Assistant tomorrow. My assistant’s gonna be like, okay, I have a tremendous amount of experience here. ’cause of course I’m apparently able to hire an assistant with a lot of experience.

That’s a joke because it wouldn’t be true. And there’s a learning curve, right? Like she learns your systems, the things that you like, but that through building that relationship, now, your assistant becomes your second brain. Yeah, I think that your, example of chat GPT is very apt.

Kate Anthony: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You build a relationship over time. This is not gonna be an automatic thing, no matter where you are in your process right now, [00:30:00] start now. Because if you’re, I think if you’re down the line, you have a lot of data that you could upload, right? You’ve got protective orders, or you’ve got, an MSA, whatever it is, right?

You’ve got. A of information. And if you’re at the very beginning, start now and you can start building that timeline, I think it’s un unbelievable.

Kate Anthony: I am seeing, I don’t know, I think you’re seeing we’re probably all seeing a rise in domestic conflict as we are entering this more authoritarian.

Regime that we’re living under. Are you seeing this in use in Aimee Says with it almost feels to me like there’s just more heightened and overt power and control. It’s been, glorified sensationalized approved of, at the highest level. And it feels like all the pretense is off now.

We’re not even pretending that we’re not misogynist [00:31:00] anymore. How we’re in control is having a minute. We have different spheres of influence over acceptability, right? What might be acceptable in our culture or in our politics might be unacceptable at home. It is a safe relationship. Or the kinds of things that we’re seeing in a broader sense may also be dynamics that are present in the home.

Anne Wintemute: And what I see and as a person doing this work is where even, five, 10 years ago, I felt like there were clearer boundaries between the work that I did and the culture that I lived in. There’s a boundary collapse now. Such that I think anyone could go to Aimee and be processing their cultural and lived and social experiences simultaneously with the reason that might have brought them to Aimee.

So what I am absolutely seeing is a collapse between what is acceptable and I’m using air quotes, what’s [00:33:00] acceptable in a power and control dynamic and what is now ubiquitously acceptable in a cultural context. And that gives like when someone who chooses to use a particular tactic or form of behavior can look to someone that everyone else knows and say, I’m no different from him, right?

Or. It’s acceptable and I see that it is, it strengthens their confidence in utilizing those tactics and it further diminishes the sense of support that the victim has. It’s, it is scary, the pervasiveness and the weaponization of these kind of long standing tactics that create dis equilibrium like we talked about, that create power disparities and that accelerate the way in which those power disparities grow.

Kate Anthony: I love the way you put that before about the disequilibrium and that as soon as there is equilibrium, the abuser has to [00:34:00] disrupt the equilibrium because they’re not interested. In equilibrium, and this is the thing that I think so many victims don’t grasp for so long, right? Which is that you are constantly working to quote, fix a problem, right?

You’re like, oh, we have a problem in the relationship. Let me work to fix it because your goal is equilibrium. But until you recognize that like their goal is the exact opposite, they’re not there to solve a problem. They’re not there to actually work on the relationship. They are there to create more power and control for themselves over you.

And until you really grasp that, I think it’s almost like that’s the turning point. That’s the point at which what victims can go oh yes. Now it all makes sense. 

Anne Wintemute: And I’ve actually I’ve talked about this a lot. [00:35:00] In my work directly with clients, it’s primarily, the relationship has ended.

The communications are written. And evaluators, the court system will throw out. I don’t really care about those communications. I’m sure it’s he said, she said, but they are so illuminating because someone is trying to foment, create, maintain conflict because it is only through the conflict in which someone is able to dominate.

If we’re just standing next to each other with no conflict between us, no one is dominating. Abusive. People want power. They want to feel that power. They wanna feel that control. They have to maintain that disequilibrium to make sure that they have the opportunity to feel dominant. Absolutely. And so sometimes what you’ll see is, there are systems trying to hold political leaders accountable.

And so if they start accelerating the pace at which they cause harm, frankly, because that [00:36:00] becomes the reason that you can’t find equilibrium. ’cause there isn’t even an opportunity to come to a shared agreement about what happened shared language about anything. So we see both of those things and we see where, we maintain a certain amount of conflict and then we see where, maintaining con.

Conflict starts to get called out, that they accelerate the wi the rate at which they create new types of harm because that’s how they get you back on your heels again. So when you see stuff with your abuser oh my gosh, it’s just he’s machine gunning me right now. He’s just burying me.

That is what happens when the other tactic doesn’t work. That’s right. 

Kate Anthony: We touched briefly on this before we hit record and because we were talking about. The broader political sense. And DARVO, for those who don’t know, is a, an acronym used to describe one of the many tactics that abusers use.

And it is the blame shifting one, which is deny attack, reverse victim, and offender. [00:37:00] So first they’ll be like, that didn’t happen and actually you were the one who did X, Y, and Z. And actually I am the victim. If you think about so much of what’s happening in our political landscape right now, that’s it.

That’s it. I, I’m, I am, I was really heartened we’re recording this on January 12th, on January 11th. Heather Cox Richardson, who sends out. An email every single day outlining what’s happening to our country right now. And she’s been doing it for many years. She named it DARVO.

And I thought I was reading it in bed this morning with my coffee and I was like, oh, wow. There it is. There it is. Someone not just on our side. ‘Cause the, because I think domestic abuse. Victims advocates have been naming this for a long time, but for someone on the other side to [00:39:00] name it, the thing that we’ve all known that it is, I was like, oh, here’s where we start to hopefully maybe make a change.

Anne Wintemute: I, it. Just in the last five seconds of what you said I was reminded that the word gaslighting was popularized during the first administration, and it, everyone knows what gaslighting is. Now. Everyone knows what gaslighting is now and maybe. Maybe the kind of silver lining is the kind of growing accessibility and normalization of language that people don’t have, and that’s part of why they’re more easily victimized.

We figured out gas lighting, now everyone knows what that means because we had, someone who’s doing that at the national level to the populace. Maybe DARVO gets that too. Yes. Maybe the silver lining in this. Maybe we’re gonna, we’re all little more 

Kate Anthony: educated. Maybe DARVO will be the 2026 word of the year.

Yes. What was it? What gaslighting was the 2020. I can’t remember what year, but it [00:40:00] sure made me was it was, yeah. Yep. Very happy. Maybe it was 2022. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was all right, Ann before we go to what’s next for Aimee Says, 

Anne Wintemute: doubling down on that data. How do we make.

10 x value of out of everything that gets shared with us how do we expand? Like right now we don’t take audio or video. That’s gonna change, right? You can upload those screenshots. We want you to be able to put in your audio, have that transcribed, put in your video, have Aimee understand what happened in that video.

So really deepening all of those features. In partnerships, like our goal in 26, if you know an organization who wants to support this work if you work with an organization that has a progressive HR or employee resource group, we wanna be a part of it. If you happen to know an angel who wants to fund our work we are a highly investible company.

I our goals this year are to continue to grow and scale through those partnerships and to just get [00:41:00] better at. The solutions that we already have. So they’re more helpful, 

Kate Anthony: more useful. Amazing. Amazing. Anne, thank you so much. I think you said you have a code for two free months that you can give to our listeners. Is that true?

Anne Wintemute: Yeah. Anyone who is listening to this podcast use the Code Survival Guide at checkout and you will get two free months of Aimee, so it’ll be the seven day trial plus two free months. That is plenty of time to, for you to really start building out that documentation and seeing if Aimee’s gonna be able to help you.

Kate Anthony: Amazing. So Survival Guide Guys use Survival Guide at Checkout. That’s wonderfully generous and incredible, and thank you so much for being here. I am so excited for all the things to come and I’m obsessed with Aimee. 

Anne Wintemute: Thank you so much, Kate. It was great to talk to you again.

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