Chat with Dr. Kat

Therapy can start to feel frustrating when you keep showing up but nothing in your life seems to change. Maybe the assignments feel uncomfortable, you avoid practicing new coping skills, or your partner isn’t putting in the same effort. There’s no shame in that—but it may be important information about what feels hard, what you’re ready for, and what is getting in the way.

Dr. Kat talks about why therapy works best when it continues between sessions, whether that means noticing your feelings, trying a new way to communicate, or reconnecting with a partner...

If your marriage feels like a roommate relationship with your husband or wife, this episode is for you. Dr. Kat Derrig-Palumbo, licensed psychologist, walks through the 5 signs of a roommate marriage: conversations that are all logistics, no touch, planning trips but not closeness, separate emotional lives, and intimacy that quietly stopped. Then she gives you the first steps back: the honest conversation, bringing back touch, baby steps, date nights, and courting each other again.

Ready to apply this to your own marriage? The Yellow Room Method: chatwithdrkat.com/yellowroom

New episode every Wednesday. Website: chatwithdrkat...

Living with someone who seems physically present but emotionally elsewhere can leave you lonely, devalued, and questioning what changed. The phone scrolling, flat answers, constant busyness, and sense that they always have one foot out the door can slowly turn a relationship into a place where neither person feels truly met.

Dr. Kat breaks down six common signs of emotional disconnection, including going through the motions in conversation, avoiding time together, and offering little support when a partner is vulnerable. She also looks at the domino effect of ongoing neglect—and why rebuilding connection requires consistently resisting pa...

When performance, money, and public opinion are all on the line, there may be nowhere to put the anxiety. College athletes are expected to compete, build a brand, handle criticism, and keep going—even after a bad game. College football coach, author, and former Penn State coach Jay Paterno talks with Dr. Kat about the human pressure behind the sport’s most visible moments.

Jay explains how NIL, social media, transfers, parents, and the draft process have changed what young athletes carry. He and Dr. Kat discuss anxiety, self-medication, team culture, learning to hear constructive criticism, and the...

When the truth feels unclear, your mind starts filling in the blanks—and often with the worst-case scenario. As questions about UAPs, UFOs, and possible disclosure keep circulating, uncertainty can bring fear, distrust, anger, and concern about what the future might mean for ourselves and our children.

Dr. Kat looks at UAP conversations through a psychological lens, including ontological shock: the unease that comes with the possibility that our sense of reality could change. She explains why uncertainty can feel harder than bad news, how “puzzle piecing” missing information can fuel anxiety and conspiracy thinking, and how to tal...

When a child is struggling with drugs, fear and shame can make families go quiet—especially when a parent is trying to help without pushing their child further away. Mary Cosby’s public grief and openness about her son’s substance use bring that private turmoil into view: the shock, the helplessness, and the instinct to keep loving someone through a crisis.

Dr. Kat reflects on Mary’s response when her son disclosed his drug use, and why honest conversation can open the door to support rather than isolation. She also talks about the many ways people grieve...

Surviving addiction, grief, illness, or loss doesn’t automatically make life feel better. Sometimes you make it through the crisis only to find yourself exhausted, grieving what’s gone, and wondering how to rebuild without simply waiting for the next thing to fall apart. Andrew Minuto, author of Fatally Resilient, shares what it has meant to keep starting over after addiction, the deaths of his parents, divorce, and recurring cancer.

Dr. Kat and Andrew talk honestly about trauma’s physical triggers, why substances can be about relief rather than pleasure, and the difference between blaming yourself and taking...

Splitting the bill can sound fair—until you notice that the cost of a date often starts long before anyone reaches the restaurant. Women are navigating pay gaps, pressure to look a certain way, and safety calculations that can shape everything from what they wear to how they get home.

Dr. Kat looks beyond the 50/50 debate at the hidden financial, emotional, and practical costs women carry. She talks about the pressure created by beauty standards, the everyday vigilance many women are taught around personal safety, and why focusing only on the check can become a form of ch...

When you’ve tried therapy, medication, and all the usual advice but still feel stuck, it can be hard to know what else is worth considering. Dr. Kat talks with Myriam Barthes, co-founder and CEO of Journey Clinical, about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy—not as a shortcut or a “magic pill,” but as a treatment option that combines medicine with an ongoing therapeutic relationship.

They break down the practical side of psychedelic-assisted therapy: medical eligibility screening, therapist training, preparation, dosing sessions, and integration afterward. You’ll hear why difficult or anxious moments during treatment are not necessarily “bad trips,” how safety and...

When someone betrays or humiliates you, forgiveness can feel like being asked to pretend it never happened. But holding onto the anger can keep you tied to the person long after the relationship is over—especially when you find yourself choosing the same painful dynamic with a different face.

Dr. Kat offers a “three boxes” way to separate what they did, your own accountability, and the forgiveness that helps you release the emotional grip of the past. She explains why forgiving someone does not mean excusing them, forgetting, or returning to the relationship—and why forgiving yourself matters...

When intimacy fades in a marriage, it can feel like being “put out to pasture”—still carrying the daily responsibilities, but no longer touched, noticed, or treated like a priority. And when you finally say you feel unloved or unappreciated, a defensive response can make the distance feel even worse.

Dr. Kat unpacks her Cow Theory: how couples become disconnected, why resentment can make affection hard to receive even when it’s finally offered, and how consistency helps rebuild trust over time. She also connects this pattern to the Yellow Room, where partners may feel that nothing they say...

When someone you love pulls away — a grown child, a partner, a parent — the easy explanation is to blame a therapist who told them to leave, or call someone a narcissist because a checklist on TikTok said so. But the real story is almost always messier and more human than that.

Dr. Kat breaks down what's actually driving parental and partner alienation, from social media's oversimplified diagnostic labels to the damage a divorcing parent can do by turning children against the other side. She talks about why most of us would meet at least a few criteria on t...

When someone knows exactly how to get under your skin — especially through your kids — co-parenting becomes less about logistics and more about survival. Simi Krishnan, a data scientist and author, joins Dr. Kat to talk openly about leaving an 18-year marriage, rebuilding her health and identity, and learning to co-parent with someone who still wants control.

Dr. Kat reframes the challenge: stop being shocked by bad behavior and start being shocked by the good. She walks through practical tools — writing down every trigger so it loses its power, thanking the universe for each reminder that leaving was the ri...

Somewhere along the way, one person in the relationship kept going — to the gym, to golf, to lunch with friends — while the other quietly stopped. Not because they wanted to, but because someone had to hold everything together. And now, years into parenthood, there's a low-grade resentment that didn't arrive all at once. It crept in, unnoticed, while one partner's life stayed largely intact and the other's slowly disappeared into the household.

Dr. Kat unpacks why this imbalance happens so gradually that neither partner fully sees it forming — and why the person who lost the most often ends u...

Parenting a child with ADHD can feel like you're failing every single day — the meltdowns, the walking on eggshells, the guilt at bedtime — even when you're trying everything you've been told to try. Dr. Kat talks with Dana Kay, board certified holistic health and nutrition practitioner and founder of the ADHD Thrive Institute, who came to this work not as a professional first, but as a mom whose young son was headed toward a fourth medication before she started asking different questions.

The conversation moves through what those different questions actually look like in practice: how ADHD symp...

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 knew how she was getting through each day. It was Tyshawn's dog, visibly wasting away, that finally broke through.

Dr. Kat and LaShawnda talk through what grief actually looks like w...

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 and what it actually costs — financially and emotionally — when there's no plan in place.

The conversation covers what long-term care insurance actually is (and how it differs from health insurance), the real m...

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 with something else entirely, even something generous. She talks through why that dynamic breeds resentment, how the defensive reaction ("nothing I do is ever enough") keeps the cycle going, and what it actually look...

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 shameful.

Meredith Gonzalez, founder of the Hive Women's Collective and a self-described midlife concierge, joins Dr. Kat to talk honestly about why that silence exists and what changes when women stop navigating it alone. They discuss the emotional weight of feel...

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, and the question of cleaning up properly (yes, including the pee on the pillar). She's not anti-dog — far from it — but she makes a case for reading the room on your dog's behalf, kn...

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 staff trained in crisis prevention through the Marcus Autism Center's model, which teaches teachers to look beneath behavior rather than react to its surface.

In this conversation, Antoinette and Dr. Kat get into what that actually look...

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, explaining why the brain locks onto loss the way it does and what that "rabbit hole" spiral actually looks like neurologically. She covers both the five-stage Kübler-Ross model and a seven-stage fra...

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 up about a lifetime shaped by caregiving: an adoptive family that raised her to serve, a profession she pursued with genuine integrity, and a growing disenchantment after watching fraud and ethical shortcuts endanger the clie...

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 negativity (tracing it back to our fight-or-flight survival instincts and the role of the amygdala), and what you can actually do to start retraining it — including a straightforward "confidence chal...

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 Comfort Cases, a CNN Hero, and someone who entered foster care at 12 carrying a black trash bag and walked out homeless at 18 carrying another one.

Rob talks op...

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 who recognized themselves in Part 1.

She works through what's happening when a partner deflects with "nothing I do would make you happy," why "I just do it myself" sounds empowering but is...

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 why the products promising clearer skin are often making it worse.

You'll learn which trendy ingredients actually damage a young skin barrier, the one step that matters at every age, and why "smart skin starts no...

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 sentence said in passing in seventh grade that somehow kept playing for the next three decades. And the people who said it often didn't even believe what they were saying.

This episode opens a...

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 compete in women's sports, she sits down with Dr. Kat to explain why, in language that doesn't soften for either side.

The conversation moves from the actual biology Daviana has lived inside — testosterone levels, muscle density, lung c...

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 generous to everyone but the one behind them.

Working through five everyday driving scenarios — crossing three lanes at a light, stopping in a live lane to check a phone, blocking intersections, the In-N-Out line, and...

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 is so common, and why waiting tends to cost more than the problem itself.

Abigail explains what speech therapy actually covers — far more than lisps and stutters — and why the toddler years are such a crit...

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 wants you to understand is that you might be living inside a state your nervous system has tricked you into calling rest.

She walks through what anxiety actually is in...

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 most of it has nothing to do with your hair.

They get into the everyday toxins hiding in your products, why your lab results might not be telling the full story, how...

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, so what they're feeling must just be who they are. 

Dr. Kat breaks down the types of depression most people never learn about — from major depression and dysthymia to postpartum, PMDD, and the surprising crash that...

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 about what he's actually seeing right now: post-COVID isolation at an all-time high, comfort zones that have shrunk to a screen and a bedroom, and teenagers turning to AI chatbots for the emotional support they us...

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 message that lands isn't "I'm trying" — it's "what you need doesn't matter."

Dr. Kat breaks down her Yellow Room Theory, a framework for understanding why couples keep missing each other even when both people are genu...

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 the very thing keeping your loved one stuck — and why families unknowingly become the "bad guy" in a dynamic that makes addiction stronger.

Dr. Kat and Amber break down the difference between guilt and shame and why one...

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 your kids — before the weight of unspoken frustrations becomes too much to carry.

You'll hear the specific questions to ask (and the order matters), why asking permission before sharing your own needs comp...

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. 

They explore where AI can be useful, where it can quietly reinforce unhealthy thinking, and why it falls short when serious issues like suicidality, abuse, domestic violence, p...

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 menopause-related changes can make it easier to dismiss symptoms and delay care. This is a grounded, honest conversation about self-neglect, awareness, and why taking your own pain se...