The entertainment industry has the power to reshape how people think — for better or for worse. As two new films about abuse hit the screen this summer, Dr. Jamie Huysman, founder of STAR Network and the clinician who built talk television’s first guest-aftercare program, explains how the industry both helps and harms survivors — and what makes the difference.
This summer, two films about narcissistic abuse reach general audiences: I Love You My Narcissist, Ali Schmahl’s psychological drama streaming on AlefCine Stream, and The Narcissist’s Playbook, a documentary from Mark Vicente, the director of HBO’s The Vow. Millions of people, from general audiences to survivors, are about to immerse themselves in the topic. Whether that helps them or harms them is a matter of choices the productions make.
Dr. Jamie Huysman, LCSW, spent twenty years as the clinician inside talk television — twelve talk, court, and reality shows, through the era when producers put ordinary people’s worst moments on air. He built TV Aftercare, the industry’s first real support program for guests — a national network of hospitals, outpatient programs and therapists that secured more than $8 million in free treatment for over 800 guests — and when the format’s failures turned lethal, he testified as the expert witness in the Jenny Jones Show case that ended in a $25 million jury verdict against the producers. ABC told that story this January in the three-part series Dirty Talk. He went on to found STAR Network, a 501(c)(3) foundation for survivors of toxic abusive relationships. Which is to say: he has spent his career on both edges of the blade.
The edge that heals
Start with what the screen can do when it gets it right, because the record of the last decade is remarkable.
When Netflix released Maid in October 2021 — the story of a young mother escaping a relationship that never left a bruise — the National Domestic Violence Hotline received the highest number of calls in a single month in its 25-year history. “Gaslighting someone or undermining their sense of self-worth is abuse,” the Hotline’s Crystal Justice said as the series aired. “Isolating someone from their family, friends and support systems is abuse.” Viewers absorbed the definition because the story had already made them feel it.
When Lifetime aired Surviving R. Kelly, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline saw calls surge roughly 40 percent after the sequel and nearly 50 percent after the final installment — and prosecutors in two states opened cases within weeks of the original broadcast. Testimony that advocates had carried for years in secret became undeniable once a general audience sat with it for six hours.
None of this surprises Huysman, who has spent three decades working the same lever. “All I’ve done since the early ’90s — in my company, Partners in Health and Entertainment Management — was try and harness entertainment platforms to take the shame and stigma survivors carry,” he says. The method rests on meeting the audience where it lives. “I’ve always started where the person is at. Shame and stigma are so strong in society — and they’ve been such a detriment to the growth and development of healing in people — that you have to slip the messages in in a way that people don’t really notice.”
That, in his view, is the trade entertainment makes possible: “What entertainment does is allow us to provide learned lessons, if it’s done tastefully. Instead of showing people problems day in and day out, we replace them with the hope of solutions.”
Why does it work? Most people in a toxic abusive relationship do not have language for it. The behavior arrives gradually, each incident explainable on its own, and the person living inside it is usually the last one able to name the pattern. Recognition is the first step out — and it rarely comes from a pamphlet. It comes from seeing the pattern somewhere else, on a screen, happening to someone who is not you — and recognizing yourself in them.
Richard Grannon, STAR Network’s International Ambassador, has spent more than a decade teaching recovery from narcissistic abuse to a global online audience, and has watched that moment happen at scale, from both sides of the experience.
“A well-made film like The Narcissist’s Playbook can do more than give a few insights into narcissistic abuse,” Grannon says. “A viewer who has never experienced it firsthand gets an insight, through the story arc, into what the shock of narcissistic abuse and gaslighting can feel like.” For survivors, the screen offers something rarer: safety. “The viewer who has experienced it can safely get insight and validation from other people’s experiences, in a contained way. They can see they are not alone — and it could potentially reduce the self-blame many targets feel, when they see qualified psychologists and specialists can still get sucker-punched by this pathological personality.”
The edge that cuts
The same reach that fills hotlines has a darker side. The talk-show era Huysman worked inside was built substantially on survivors’ stories — solicited, aired, and then abandoned. Guests handed a production their most painful material, and once the cameras stopped, went home alone with the wound they had opened. In one extreme case, a 1995 Jenny Jones Show taping ambushed a guest with a “secret admirer” reveal he had no warning was coming; three days later, the admirer was shot and killed by the guest he had named on camera.
Huysman doesn’t romanticize his years in that world. “Those guests were my first STARs,” he says — the ones who taught him that a production owes its guests protection, not just a story. “As much as I hated the shows, and as exploitative as they were, I knew that if I wasn’t there, I couldn’t get guests help. So I used them and they used me. In the meantime, 800 guests got $8 million of free care — and God knows how many people got inspired.”
The harm doesn’t stop with the people on screen. Every spike in those hotline numbers represents its quiet counterpart: the viewer who recognized her life at eleven at night, alone, with nothing waiting on the other side of the credits. A film powerful enough to open a wound should be powerful enough to provide a first-aid kit.
Grannon sees the risk cutting in two directions at once. “Dramatizing narcissistic abuse has to be handled very carefully,” he says. “On one hand, it could tip into satire and diminish the target’s experience. On the other, if represented faithfully, it could trigger ’emotional flashbacks’ to the trauma and isolation of the abuse.” His conclusion is the standard the genre has mostly ignored: “Ideally, at the end of any film covering this topic, support and community should be offered.”
What makes the difference
So what separates the Maids from the exploitation? Huysman’s test has not changed since the trenches: “Entertainment that exploits is a power relationship — the strong preying on the weak. That’s the line.” What he needed to see from a production before STAR would stand next to it: “Social responsibility and the ability to change the world — creating awareness, transformation, and helping people find self-love.”
That standard is why STAR’s involvement with this summer’s films is built around what happens after the credits — exactly where Grannon says the obligation lands: making sure that on the other side of these films, a viewer can find TAR Anon®, STAR’s free worldwide peer fellowship — meetings across time zones that cost nothing and require no referral, no diagnosis, and no story polished for an audience. A viewer walking out from the movie theater, shaken and alone, can walk into the company of people who understand by the next meeting.
A film can open a door. It cannot be the room on the other side. Somebody has to build the room, staff it, and keep it free — because the moment of recognition does not check whether you have insurance. Asked what he wants waiting for that viewer in the first ten minutes after the credits, Huysman’s answer is the same one he gave the talk shows thirty years ago: “Hope and promise — and most importantly, the ability to begin breaking the emotional bonds that bind them.”
The screen will keep telling these stories; the last decade proved the audience is there. The question, for every production that borrows a survivor’s story, is the one Huysman has been asking since the trenches: what happens to the people you moved, after the credits roll?
If one of these films names something you recognize, you don’t have to carry the recognition alone. TAR Anon meets online, worldwide, free, every week. Find a meeting at starnetwork.org.
