Who is Ariana Grande when you strip away the lashes, the ponytail, the baby voice, the music? Well, we’re about to dive in and find out. And Ari is a pretty dark story. We have Nickelodeon, childhood trauma, being a child star, identity fragmentation, rumors of disordered eating, substance abuse, home wrecking, and survival psychology to package it all up.
Really, what I learned through this is what happens when you strip everything away is you have a little girl who never formed a proper identity. You’re left with a child star who learned to survive by shapeshifting. A girl who built her entire personality over what got her the most approval. A performer who never developed a stable identity and she’s been paying the price for it ever since.
But before we get too far into it, hi, my name is Julie Ty. Welcome back to my channel where we break down the psychology behind the headlines, behind the filtered versions of what is put out there so that we can learn more about others and more about ourselves. And today we’re talking about the dark psychology of Ariana Grande.
Not the pop star, not Glenda, not the filtered deeyed version that we see online. I’m talking about the real Ariana Grande, the one with abandonment wounds, a string of chaotic relationships, the girl with child star trauma that really explains everything she does as an adult. And Ariana is really going to open up this miniverse.
I will be diving into a lot of these childhood stars, but you’ll see the same blueprint over and over again. I mean, we touched on it a little bit in my Justin Bieber video, but these Nickelodeon stars are a special breed of it. I think especially in my Justin Bieber video, we begun to touch on it. It feels like we have to learn this lesson over and over again that being a child star is a type of trauma for these kids and it really doesn’t lead into positive adult outcomes, especially when they continuously have people exploit them in
their childhood. They never develop a proper sense of identity. It seems like the younger they start, the worse off that they are. And it seems that they all do have their own version of this trauma. Whether it be substance abuse, whether it be acting out, whether it be clinging on to a sense of control.
And that is a big one that we see with Ariana. You are going to see if I could come up with two pathologies that really encompass Ariana Grande, it would be control and fawning behavior. You’ll see this come up again and again, but before Nickelodeon, there were her parents. So, let’s take a deep dive into that.
So Ariana Grande was born June 26th, 1993. From the outside, Ariana Grande’s childhood is a little different than some other stars we cover. She grew upper middle class. She had more of that privilege, more of the comfortable life. But as we’ve seen with childhood stars um and their parents, usually that driver to make them succeed, it makes things complicated.
And that’s an important thing to know as well. I have worked with hundreds of clients in my career. Now I do it in a coaching capacity, but I have worked in the school systems. I’ve worked as a researcher. I’ve worked in shelters. I’ve worked as a sexual assault advocate, a domestic violence advocate. I’ve had clients from all over the world.
And this is an important thing to understand about trauma. And this is why I use these celebrities for these examples because yes, we’re talking about Ariana Grande, we talk about Beyonce, we talk about the Kardashians, but the important part is that we see ourselves in this. And Ari actually has a lot of lessons that I see in my clients again and again.
One of them is a lot of the times people think that trauma has to be these significant huge life events that happen. What that usually looks like is people think that it means that you were physically assaulted, sexually assaulted, you were in this horrific car accident. And those are types of trauma. Those are what we would call big tea traumas.
And Ariana Grande as she grows up, she does have some significant big tea trauma. But what can impact you just as much as big tea trauma is little tea trauma. This is smaller versions of trauma happening again and again to you that fully changes how your brain forms. So an example of little T trauma is even living in poverty, which this is an Ariana Grande story, but people miss this a lot.
Like your parents don’t have to beat you for your brain to change. Parents who do not meet your needs consistently, who cannot attune to you as a child is little tea trauma. Emotional neglect is little tea trauma. Parent conflict is little tea trauma. Parents divorcing is little tea trauma. Being a child star, I that one’s actually kind of hard to place.
I would say it’s probably a mix of both, but unpredictability is a little tea trauma. And of course, you can have significant life events like parents divorcing. It doesn’t mean that you are doomed to a life of chaos. However, what makes me wonder, you know, what Ari’s childhood was fully like is the maladaptive coping mechanisms that she learned because these come out strongly with her as an adult.
And what that pattern shows me is that things weren’t peachy. She talks highly of her mother, but her parents divorced when she was eight. I do think that this left a wound for her. And just knowing how Ariana Grande was such a perfectionist at a young age, I would really say the Kobe mechanism that began to form here was hiding her hurt with ambition and peopleleasing.
This is what’s going to lead to all of the fawning behaviors we’re going to see later on. And you’re going to see in part two, everything in part one is going to bleed into how she has her relationships. But for part one, what we’re also seeing is where did this identity fragmentation start? And I do think it starts in this divorce.
In an interview that she gave, it really tipped me off to this. So she says that she remained close to her mother, but she had a very estrange relationship with her father. So something she said in 2014. Keep in mind this would have been during her rise of fame, so her Nickelodeon era. She says in an interview, “It took me so long to be okay with it.
The thing that got me there was embracing the fact that I am made up of half my dad. So much of me comes from my father. And for so long I didn’t like that about myself. So my first job out of school I was a behavioral specialist. I worked with SEDD kids which is severely emotionally disturbed. And this is a line I heard so much.
This is identity crisis because how do you make sense of yourself and who you are when you are coming to terms with the anger you feel that you have that you are made up of half of your parent who you hate, half of a parent who hurt you, half of a parent who abused you or with a lot of the kids that I worked with, it was both parents. How do you come to peace that parts of you are also parts of your parents, parts of you that are hurting? And then you have this desire to of course love your parent.
We are biologically wired to love them. But so many kids that I had worked with, they were being hurt by their parents. They didn’t trust that love. They wanted that love. They crave the love. And then how could they trust it? Ariana Grande went on in this interview to say what she learned. And she said, “It’s okay not to get along with somebody and still love them.
” And that actually is a beautiful place to get to in therapy. When I would work with these kids, I remember it was like a weight was lifted off their shoulders when I would take them and they would essentially they’re describing cognitive dissonance. It’s how do you love someone who’s hurting you? And I love them but I hate them.
And I would tell them I’m like it’s okay to feel both things. You can love someone who you hate. And that’s what Ariana Grande is coming to in this interview as she speaks about it when she is older that love and pain can coexist. And that’s good that she’s coming to these realizations. I see parts of her that are very self-aware, but I also see parts of her where her behavior is very affected by this identity crisis.
You can be aware of this. I’m glad she came to this. Some not everyone comes to this point in their psychological journey. But that doesn’t mean that this identity fracture didn’t hit with her. And this is just one example in the divorce. Add on top of that everything that happened with Nickelodeon, which we’re going to get into.
all these parts of her being a child star. And of course then when we get into breaking down these insane relationships, these things start to make sense. I get people sometimes they say it’s not that deep. If you’re someone who says that you are not looking deep enough, and I mean we can’t expect everyone to. People can only meet you as deep as they meet themselves.
Some people want to stay on the surface. And I understand why going deep is harder. But for those of you who are on this channel, you value depth. you you value learning about yourself so that you can grow. Well, then you are in the right place because I really believe to change, we have to understand ourselves.
And again, that’s the point of these videos is for you to see yourself in these people. It’s easier to see ourselves in other people. It’s easier to say, “Damn, this [ __ ] is really messing up her life. Oh my god, how could you do that?” It’s easy to be judgmental to people, right? Helps us not look so much at ourselves.
But I encourage you as you watch these videos, it is yourself that you are supposed to look at. It’s it’s interesting to learn about people and and how they are and why they are, but it’s only so interesting as much as we use it to improve our own lives. And that’s what I’m here and I hope to guide you on. So, let’s dive into Nickelodeon because this is very significant.
But what I first want to lay out is child star psychology because really what we’re looking at and what I see in all of them is an identity that was never formed. There’s not really research for child stars. I don’t even know how they would research that. But I can at least tell you theories that I have from doing these deep dives, from looking at all of them.
And really what I see, there is something about being a child star that fractures identity. And that is horrible for the psyche. The psyche is meant to form an identity. A child isn’t supposed to age on camera with millions of people watching and judging, comparing them to each other, and telling them who they should be.
Really what I see from these child stars is that they never had protected developmental stages where identity forms naturally and that really mirrors trauma. We see that with children who have significant trauma, whether that be big T trauma or little T trauma. And psychology calls this identity diffusion. And you really see this with people who didn’t get to explore who they were privately.
So they grow up and they have no idea who they are. They just become whoever is around them. And I think this is really interesting with Ariana Grande because she is amazing at impressions. She is amazing at being a chameleon. She is amazing at molding her identity. And we see this as talent. And it is, but it is also a survival mechanism.
You will see this with children who come from significant abuse and trauma. They become amazing chameleons. And it is it’s fascinating to watch. There is a gift to that. If you are someone who grew up with childhood trauma, you might notice that about yourself. I noticed that with myself. I can become whoever in a room.
I’ve said before on this channel, there are certain lessons you can only learn from rock bottom. That is a gift. And at the same time, these are the same people that really struggle knowing where their place is at in this world. And for Ariana Grande, she really started to learn that her real self didn’t matter, only the version that people were clapping for.
So now going into the Nickelodeon era, Ariana joined Nickelodeon in 2009. when she was 16 and her first show was Victorious. She played Cat on here and her comedic timing, her serious vocals, she quickly became a fan favorite. What I really see becoming solidified in Ariana’s Nickelodeon era is her fawn response. And like I said, all these child stars, they have some track that they take.
And people miss this, by the way, in trauma responses. A lot of the times people will just look at fight or flight and those are literally what they sound like. Either people will become the fighter. They’ll lash out. They’ll fight back. They’ll be confrontational. Or you have people whose nervous system literally can’t handle that.
So they flee. What people usually miss is the fawn response, which is more of freeze or people pleasing. It is literally like Ariana when I say she should be in the dictionary next to it. Even how she looks like these big dough eyes, these this please love me, this baby voice and fantilizing herself, taking up less space, being smaller.
I really think this even bleeds into the disordered eating that she has. How small can I make myself? How much can I be a nonburden? How else can I shape myself so that you love me and that you accept me? And it’s interesting when we look at these child stars and them becoming adults because some of them are much more honest in their journey.
Others have a completely different story. And it is sad because instead of looking at how trauma manifests differently in everyone really no one is right or wrong. It’s just how it’s manifesting in them. How how is their nervous system responding to the trauma? Does it respond with being open and messy and more of the like trauma dumping? I’m going to tell everyone what it is.
A need for justice with other people. It comes out and it’s like that didn’t happen. And I am telling you, I have even seen it with clients who when we first meet, they will say, “I had such a happy childhood.” And then we get into it and I learned they had the most [ __ ] up childhoods, the worst parents, the worst fathers.
And they reaccount this though. This is really a coping mechanism. And so I want you to be aware of this when you hear different childhood stars and they say, so Ariana Grande literally had an interview where she is reminiscing about Nickelodeon and all of this and she says, “This is some of the happiest years in my life.” Another child star that I think about is McCauley Kulkin.
When the Michael Jackson allegations were all coming out, there were certain adults who were telling their stories and they said, “When we were kids, I was abused.” Then we had other kids who were saying, “No, no, no, no, no. The this was the happiest moments of my life.” I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there. But what I do know is that McCauley Kulkin showed so many patterns of substance abuse, of horrific coping mechanisms, of horrific self harm that something happened where it was not the happiest time of his life. And I I don’t know in
what scenario that was, but it’s just to say that people cope differently. Like I’ve said, I have literally had clients who have reaccounted and I will bring it up, you know, after we have worked with each other for a more significant amount of time and gently remind them of like how they viewed things.
And I do that usually to show the progress of where they are now. Because people are also reaccounting their childhood as the most happiest time, like literally Disneyland, a lot of the times it’s because your nervous system is not ready to accept the trauma. And so I say that to people who are like, “Oh my gosh, I’m dealing with all this trauma and I’m crying all the time and now I can’t get out of bed and it it’s overwhelming.
It feels like it’s flooding me.” I remind them too that that is power because finally the body feels safe enough to remember. Finally, the body feels safe enough to reaccount the pain that they were in. And I want you guys to know if you’re ever watching this and you want to book a session with me, that is available to you.
I will leave how to do that down in the show notes. I have worked with some of the best clients that have come from you guys watching my videos. And I just want to know that means so much to me. But even if you don’t book a session, I want you guys to be able to just sit and learn and reflect and get as much as you can from these videos.
So I said we’ll see a lot of Ariana’s fawning behavior. And part of that is how she becomes a chameleon. And chameleons, like I said, it’s a great talent, but a lot of it is wrapped around codependency because it’s wrapped in people pleasing. I will become whoever I want so that you like me. And Ari even had an interview where she was talking about being mistreated by a co-orker.
And she says, “I worked with someone who told me they would never like me, but for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So, I started changing myself to please her. I was so unhappy. And these words are striking. It literally shows that Ariana from a really young age as a teenager learned to become a chameleon.
Changing her own personality to get a colleagueu’s approval. That is a classic textbook fawn response. And we have to remember fight, flight, or fawn. These are trauma responses. Really, these behaviors are traumdriven urges to survive. And in the case of fawning, it’s a trauma-driven urge to survive from the person that’s usually hurting you.
But even in this interview, Arya lets it slip a little bit that things weren’t happy. But then she goes right back to saying, “Please don’t vilify anyone. No, no, no. This wasn’t any of my Nickelodeon cast. This is someone I worked with on Broadway, but these were just really happy times.” She says, you know, the cast was family to her.
And you might be thinking, “Okay, Julie, maybe not everything is filled with trauma.” Well, here’s the thing. We know what the set of Nickelodeon looked like. We know the monster that Dan Schneider is. We know that the Dan Schneider shows were hypersexualized. They were chaotic behind the scenes.
They were filled with these weird adult expectations on teens and built on silence, power imbalance, and unspoken rules. And we know this because there have been victims that have come forward. Ariana’s experience didn’t exist in the vacuum. Victorious didn’t exist in a vacuum. Victorious was part of the Nickelodeon empire of shows made by one creator, Dan Schneider.
He is who is responsible for I Carly, Zoe 101, Drake and Josh, the Amanda Show, and we have gotten some of the most messed up child stars from Nickelodeon. Amanda Bines being one of them. And if you don’t know, for decades, Dan Schneider was thought to be this king of child stars, like this genius in making child programs.
And when these kids got this big break by Dan Schneider, they felt like the chosen one. So Ariana Grande, like many young child actors, thought that once under Dan Schneider’s wing, she’d be taken care of and in good hands, that her whole life would change. Of course, she didn’t know that years later, former child stars would come forward with horror stories about working there with allegations of abuse and exploitation.
We’re going to touch on some of those stories, but for Ariana, she hasn’t exactly come forward and talked about any of this. She has said that she has support for it. She has also went through some sick [ __ ] publicly publicly that we can look up the episodes and watch. There was 100% in her shows. Child sexualization played off as like it’s just for laughs for Ariana Grande’s character Cat.
She keeps ending up in these bizarre situations. In one scene, and mind you, Ariana Grande is a minor. She is a teenager. and she’s sitting there squeezing this potato trying to juice it. Essentially, she’s fondling it. It literally looks like she’s giving it a And another she is sucking on her own toes.
And this has come out in other things where Dan Schneider apparently had a weird ass foot fetish. If you notice, even the Nickelodeon logo for a super long time with a foot. There’s also one where she’s sticking her finger down her throat in this pseudo provocative bit and then she’s lying upside down on a bed and water is getting poured all over her chest.
Like this is kind of insane when we think of how at the top of her career Ariana Grande is in acting now. Basically being going through this humiliation ritual as a teenager, as a minor, being sexually exploited to millions. You can still go and find these clips and watch this teenager, in my opinion, go through these humiliation rituals where she is just being overly sexualized and honestly sexually abused in front of us by someone who is her boss, who is the person in power. That’s exploitation.
That’s grooming. To me, that’s the problem in this dark, twisted industry. All of these kids were kids trusting that whatever the director said, of course, they would be in good hands. And also most of these kids were the breadwinners of their family. Of course they are going to do what the director said.
These kids are told that they are the ones saving their families. They want this fame. They are being pushed into this. And it’s it’s sad. No wonder that when we they grow up and they become the home wreckers. They become substance abusers. They become cheaters. All so many different like you said maladaptive coping mechanisms because no wonder.
So we look at the environment that shaped Ariana Grande and it’s dark. This Nickelodeon world is horrific and we have had child stars come forward. Janette Mccertie is one of them. So she was in the show Sam and Cat with Ari. So literally Ariana’s co-star wrote an amazing memoir. If you haven’t read her book yet, I highly suggest it.
It’s called I’m glad my mom died. It is such a beautifully written and detailed version two of what child abuse can also look like. Like it reminds me of in the beginning of this video how I talked about little tea traumas because it’s her accounts of child abuse and what she went through as a child.
It’s not this overt she wasn’t like hit beaten. It’s not the child called it book. But you see how it creates so much shame. I relate to her book so much. And she also talks about this shame of really loving her mom, of being her mom’s favorite. We talked about this in my Kim video where I talk about how being the golden child of a narcissistic parent of a of a of an emotionally immature parent of a parent who pretty much can’t show up and love you. There is nothing fun about that.
There’s nothing fun about being the golden child. I love Janette Mccertie. I probably will never even do a deep dive on her because of how honest and amazing she is at telling her own story. She gets it. I can tell she’s done so much healing and work. And in Janette’s memoir, we also get a look at what set was like for these child stars.
In the memoir, she refers to this guy as the creator, who it’s kind of understood that it’s probably Dan Schneider, and she describes how this man made her drink alcohol when she was a teen, would massage her shoulders without consent, was very pushy to have her in a bikini at 15. Alexa Nichols is also a Nickelodeon alum and she quoted that Dan Schneider is literally the creator of childhood trauma.
In 2022, she was protesting with a sign that says Nickelodeon didn’t protect me. Her and others have accused the network of turning a blind eye to predatorial behavior and we saw Amanda Bines Drake Bell spiral with addiction issues and many now trace those struggles back to unseen child abuse. Just to be clear so I don’t get sued, Dan Schneider has denied any wrongdoings.
In my opinion, which I’m allowed to have, I don’t believe him at all. But in 2018, they said they investigated him and they claimed to find no evidence of sexual misconduct. The only thing they noted was that he was prone to tantrums and verbal abuse, which also imagine a grown man having tantrums and verbally abusing.
Imagine a grown man being unable to control your emotions to the point where you can’t even help but throw a temper tantrum on set and that’s who you are allowing around children. You can’t even control your emotions. So, you’re saying you can’t control yourself as a grown ass man. This is who you let protect children.
But you found no evidence, no evidence of all at all of sexual misconduct. You just are allowing someone with a pattern of being unable to control themselves around children. Got it? So, with all of this and what has come out, we also got the bombshell docue series, Quiet on Set. If you haven’t watched that, it is another one I really recommend.
I wish so much they would have had Amanda Binds on that. But it really details the sexual abuse that Drake Bell went through. It is horrific. It is horrible. And just to be clear, even if all of these people haven’t come out, if even one child was subjected to this, it shows that the system failed. It shows how much the system did not protect these kids.
And then you see so many of these child stars as adults and we wonder why are they addicts? Why did they kill themselves? Look at Jesse McCartney, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan. We have so many. System failed them. System failed to protect them. And I do feel like you guys might come for me a little bit in part two.
I’m going to be harder on Ariana Grande cuz she did grow up to be an adult and I think she is making a lot of mistakes. But in that, if you actually listen to everything I’m saying, no [ __ ] Of course, no wonder. We have to have empathy for these people. Look at the environment that they were raised in. And this is Ariana’s world in a nutshell.
Blurred boundaries, no agency, not feeling safe enough to speak up. So, how did this affect Ariana Grande personally? Well, she has never actually come out and said any transgressions towards Dan Schneider personally. So, I won’t sit here and speculate beyond what we know as facts, but consider this.
She was a teenage girl asked to perform sexual acts for gags and laughs. And to me, given what we know about Nickelodeon and its dark underbelly, these child stars had to learn how to survive. Again, I think this is where Ariana Grande’s fond response came in. She learned to be sweet, obedient, cute, agreeable, non-threatening, probably because speaking up would have been dangerous.
And keep all of this in mind because this is how Ariana handles controversy that she comes up against in her adult world today. She denies, she deflects, she used those fawn eyes, the baby voice, fake confusion, I didn’t do anything wrong energy. It all started here. So, Ariana Grande continues to grow up.
And how does a young woman fresh out of a toxic TV career regain control? Well, she started to double down first on her music career, but as she did, she carried the invisible baggage. Trauma responses and coping mechanisms formed in childhood and honed under Nickelodeon’s pressure cooker. This is really where we see these maladaptive coping mechanisms become more and more of her personality.
We’re going to start to talk about the identity fragmentation. And this makes sense that the concept of identity fragmentation comes in. Ariana had been living many lives and many different personalities. She was the beautiful daughter shielding her feelings at home. The eager to please actress contorting herself into whatever Nickelodeon wanted her to be.
And now the emerging pop diva trying to craft a brand. And identity fragmentation really makes sense for it to developing in child stars because especially when you are playing a certain role yourself is supposed to be developing while you’re playing someone else. And I feel like Miley Cyrus is a great example of this and she talks about this especially when her character was Miley was herself and the persona was Hannah Montana but also who is Miley in the show who was actual Miley and she talks about how difficult this was.
So, I definitely see this in Ari and not really understanding who she is and being able to mold to all of this. But I also in this what starts to happen too is who are you with your identity, self-worth issues can pop up? Because truly, how does self-esteem develop when the self hasn’t developed? And this is where like in the beginning I said we’ll see a lot of her fawning behaviors.
We’re also starting to see a lot of her control behaviors. And this makes sense. Of course, she felt out of control. Literally, especially when you’re a child star, what is there for you to control? But you also see this really with kids with trauma. That’s why I’m absolutely convinced being a child star that is a type of trauma to them because they mirror each other so much.
So, we also see this in kids who grow up in very dysfunctional homes, who grow up in traumatic homes, is this need for control. So, it actually is not unlikely to develop. And I know people are going to get mad at this. I know no one wants to talk about this topic, but guess what? It happens.
It is very likely for girls who grow up in this environment that they will develop eating disorders. I am 100% on the train where we shouldn’t talk about women’s bodies, where that is not the makeup of this. But I’m a little bit over no one even being able to talk about this topic because it is in relation to a woman’s body because guess what? Eating disorders exist.
Not only do they exist, but they are one of the most deadly mental health disorders that can happen. People die from having an eating disorder and a lot of people are very confused about how eating disorders start. Of course, yes, there is a part of it. And this is where people go for the most obvious of women having pressure on our bodies.
And I I mean, I can imagine, especially when you grow up in the spotlight. I’ve done reality TV. I’m on YouTube. I I trust me, I feel it. But to heal something like this, it goes beyond just losing weight and fitting the beauty standard, especially when it is rooted in this control. Because that means how it is developing.
It is developing as a coping mechanism. It’s developing as the coping mechanism for you feeling out of control. So yes, you could even perfectly and Ariana Grande does. She perfectly meets the beauty standard. But the reason why meeting the beauty standard doesn’t magically cure her what I believe to be disordered eating is because what would she do if she didn’t have this coping mechanism? And I’m going to talk about it and I’m sure I’ll get backlash to it, but in my eyes, this is foundational.
And also, it is something that so many people struggle with. For some reason, we have been able to talk about depression. We talk about anxiety. We’re getting much more better about talking about personality disorders, narcissism, even borderline. And eating disorders are something we’re like absolutely not. But I just want to remind you Ariana’s early social media career, she was reblogging thinsspo. She was on pro Anna Tumblr.
If you don’t know what that is, the And if you weren’t part of it, I was part of this era, by the way. the full proia pro- Anna websites. Um, and they were horrific. Pretty much they were these websites that were just brainwashing you to have an eating disorder. Like literally indoctrinated and especially if you had an eating disorder, you loved being on these because they helped you be skinny.
They helped you really have so much hatred towards fat bodies, towards yourself. They taught you how to self-punish yourself. They were so toxic, horrible. I myself am ashamed I ever took part of this, but no [ __ ] It makes sense. It’s like when you’re young and you hate yourself and you are looking for any type of sense of control and even almost a sense of community, the sense of identity that you don’t have if you grew up in trauma.
Ariana’s social media posts, her repost, the likes, they were pro- Anna. They were glamorized starvation aesthetics. And I’m truly not judging. I am talking about patterns because it’s not talked about a lot. And it’s important for us to know that eating disorders are rarely about aesthetics. It’s about control. Think about it.
When your life is managed by adults, your schedule is not yours. When the world has a say about your body, when your self-worth is tied to applause, food becomes one of the only domains that you feel like that you can govern. And in psychology, we call this control reclamation. And having an eating disorder is also something that Janette Mccertie openly and honestly talked about in her memoir.
It reflected some of what I’m about to say. If you’re curious why eats especially form in child stars, it’s because the adults decide everything for them. Their body is almost public property. The pressure to be tiny and to be young is constant. Their perfection gets awarded and thinnest becomes their only safe place of power.
And by the way, there have been blind items for years that she has a severe eating disorder. She has not come out and flat out said it, but in 2023, she did reveal something startling. Basically, people were comparing her current body to past photos saying that she used to look healthier. And she came out and said actually those photos that we were comparing were her unhealthiest version of her body.
She literally said, “I was on a lot of anti-depressants and drinking on them and eating poorly and at the lowest point of my life when I looked the way you considered healthy.” Which is great. It’s a raw moment of vulnerability that we finally have from Ari. She’s essentially saying, “Don’t be fooled by appearances that at a time that you thought that she was at her best, that she was numbing with food, with alcohol, self-medicating, and drowning in trauma.
” But this revelation is also crucial in understanding Ariana Grande psychology because it here it actually does reveal that she struggles with mental health, with depression, with PTSD, with not knowing a healthy way of how to cope with everything that she’s feeling. It also shows how at that time then how tightly she controlled her image.
She wanted us to see her as perfect, that it’s important to her and that then she couldn’t let it be known that she was struggling, that she needed help, that she was drinking with anti-depressants. She made it look like she was perfect until years and years down the line and she said, “Actually, no, no, no. I’m good now.” Deflecting.
I’m good now. It was then when I was sick, now then when I also acted perfect. I’m telling you right now that you can’t base everything on looks, but I’m also saying I was bad then. To me, it’s almost like, is it a cry for help now? Is it still her way of like she can’t let go of this perfectionism, of this control, of needing people to view her as perfect right now? So she is giving us Easter eggs pretty much of saying okay well maybe in the future I will admit to how bad things were but I can’t do it right now because she has to
maintain this image of perfectionism this image of control and really as we’re talking about the formation of Ariana Grande I touched a little bit about identity fragmentation talked about fawning about control but let’s also look at mirroring it really makes me reflect on some of her biggest controversies um you know she’s been hated a lot for like changing races, changing voices.
People are confused by her. Hey, what happened to that voice that he wants to ; Komi? Get your ass in here. ; Come on, girl. ; Said anything to you about Mac. ; You know, I love my MAC lipstick. [laughter] This is the Mac I’m here to talk about today. Girl, come on. I’m like, [ __ ] that’s my cookie. That’s my juice. Okay, thank you. Next.
That’s what this baby picture says. Used makeup as a disguise. Whatever. And I can be so beautiful at times. thieves, pirates, [laughter] crooks, illegal. ; But this is common with people with identity fragmentation. People with fragmented identity, it’s really common that they pick up on accents, they mimic mannerisms, they adopt personalities, they change aesthetics, they mirror partners, they shift values, they basically become who they need to be.
This, by the way, is very indicative inside of personality disorders, especially people with BPD because the main driver of BPD is please don’t leave me. Please don’t abandon me. I will become whoever you want me to be to so that that doesn’t happen. It’s almost like we’re seeing this with Ariana Grande on a very grande scale of this because she’s a superstar.
She wants to be liked by absolutely everyone. So yes, this 100% happens with people with BPD inside of a relationship. Not diagnosing her. I’m not saying she has BPD, but a girlfriend definitely does have patterns of someone with identity fragmentation. Identity fragmentation does make up personality disorders because if you know, personality, lack of self, lack of personality, who am I, identity fragmentation, it’s all kind of connected.
And like I said, Ariana does this constantly. She has changed her skin tone, her voice, her hair, her aesthetic, her personality, her humor, whoever her boyfriend is. Basically, she changes it to whatever partner she has at the time or whatever project she is working on at the time. And I’m curious what you guys think because one of her biggest controversies is the race swapping allegations.
Does this make you view her any differently? And I’m all for people being held accountable. It’s up to you. Uh what I see in this is it’s definitely identity mimicry taken way too far. When a person never gets to form a core self, they just build it around whatever environment that they’re in. But the psychology behind it is actually really sad.
Mirroring is a sign of someone who never got to learn who they really are. And you guys, this is just the beginning. Let me know what you think. Do you see yourself in Ariana Grande? Do you have more empathy for her? But what I’ll say is it actually continues to get much darker. The dark psychology of Ariana Grande does not end with Nickelodeon.
It’s only the end of our first part because all of this will become the blueprint for every relationship after that Ariana Grande has had. Part one is about the childhood wound. Part two is about the adult consequences. Because when you take a child star with no identity, a trauma history, an abandonment wound, a fawn response, emotional intensity, and fantasy based attachment, and then you put it into her adult relationships, you get impulsive marriages, chaotic breakups, unhealthy attachment partners, love triangles, home wrecking scandals,
unhealthy attachment patterns, mirroring partners, and an entire wicked era PR halo trying to make her look innocent through this and in part two we’re going to talk about it. So, if you’re not subscribed already, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell for when part two drops. You are not going to want to miss it.
And I will see you guys in the next
