Gottlieb explains what could have propelled Martha and Donny’s behaviors, and what the ending revealed.
If you’ve opened Netflix or spoken to just about anyone over the past few weeks, you’ve likely heard of a hit new series called Baby Reindeer. If you’re like many members of the Katie Couric Media team and me, you’ve also devoured this dark show about a tormented man and his stalker, and how his earlier traumas impact his response to being stalked. I was floored when I found out everything depicted in Baby Reindeer actually happened to the creator and star of the show, Richard Gadd.
If you’re as obsessed with Baby Reindeer as I am, you probably can’t stop thinking about Donny and Martha and might have some lingering questions. I certainly do. So I enlisted my friend and psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb to break down these damaged and complex characters, and what the ending reveals about them. Warning, spoilers abound ahead!
Katie Couric: I was interested in dissecting this show with a therapist, so thanks for doing this, Lori. First, let’s talk about Martha’s character. What would cause someone to be a stalker or obsessed with someone the way she is with Donny?
Lori Gottlieb: It’s not that unusual to have strong feelings or fantasies about another person, whether it’s a potential romantic partner, a celebrity, or even an ex you’re hoping to get back together with. But these feelings can become obsessions if they’re taking up a significant portion of your emotional life, and they shift into stalking when you act on them. The difference between someone who has a wish to be with someone or an internal fantasy about a relationship they hope for and a person who becomes a stalker is that the stalker has lost touch with reality. Stalkers can’t accept that their feelings aren’t reciprocated and believe they have the power to create the reality they’re wishing for. Stalkers might feel some sort of emptiness, and they fill that by focusing all their energy on the object of their obsession.
It’s possible Martha had a lonely childhood, and it seems she has a lonely adulthood. Donny reminded her of a beloved toy reindeer that gave her great comfort and companionship that she might not have been getting elsewhere. In her desperation to feel seen and loved as an adult, she projected those old feelings onto Donny. Although she couldn’t see this, she wasn’t pursuing Donny as much as she was pursuing those feelings she longed for. Because these are such primal needs, her pursuit was relentless. Projection and idealization are what fuel the pursuit of stalkers.
One disconnect for me was the fact that Martha was a lawyer but the spelling and language in her emails didn’t seem like they came from an educated person. Do you have any insight on that?
Martha would go into these states of intense dysregulation, including angry outbursts, and extreme mood swings. When a person is dysregulated, they become completely out of control and are guided by more primitive parts of the brain. The prefrontal cortex, which regulates our executive functioning, goes offline when the primitive parts of the brain take over. The simplest way to put it is that Martha would go into states of intense overwhelm in which she wasn’t able to think clearly — emotionally or cognitively.
It seems Donny is really conflicted when it comes to dealing with Martha. What could he have done differently and why didn’t he?
Well, as much as Donny is the victim of a stalker, he also plays a role in perpetuating the stalking. If you’re being stalked, it’s common at the very beginning to downplay the behavior or to feel sorry for the stalker and try to deal with the situation compassionately. But even when it becomes glaringly obvious that Martha is troubled and possibly dangerous, Donny doesn’t protect himself by reporting her or even letting friends and family know what’s going on so they can support him in getting help. It becomes clear that Martha’s attention and idealization of him — as off-putting as it is — distracts Donny from the challenges in his own life, and gives him a bit of an ego boost he seems to crave. He should have gone to the police early on and gotten a restraining order. Instead, he waits six months, doesn’t give the police relevant information they need to act on his report, and then continues to engage with Martha. The last thing you want to do with a stalker is to engage with them in any way.
Meanwhile, Donny is clearly a very damaged person. It didn’t seem that he was the victim of childhood trauma but clearly was traumatized when he was sexually abused by the TV producer who was “helping” his career. That seemed to set him on a path where he was questioning everything but particularly his sexuality. Can you help us understand what might have happened?
He does have loving parents, but remember that there’s a big family secret that’s revealed to him near the end of the series: His father was sexually abused in the church. Kids who grow up with family secrets usually sense on some subconscious level that something feels “off.” This creates a sense of unease, of not quite trusting the world, and can lead to generational trauma being passed down, as it was here. It’s possible that because of his own trauma, his father might have been less affectionate with his son, which might have left Donny longing for male approval from a father figure of sorts, making Donny even more susceptible to Darrien’s grooming. The family secret could have set the stage for Donny’s difficulty setting boundaries with Darrien, someone who found him special and talented, and the shame that resulted from the abuse and his own role in coming back for more left him particularly vulnerable to Martha years later when he felt completely depleted of self-esteem. When you’re filled with self-hatred, your sense of self feels very fragile. You start to question everything: Who am I? Who do I love? How much am I defined by what happened to me?
We hear at the end that Martha had a troubled childhood with her parents fighting. Could that alone explain why she had these abandonment issues on steroids?
“Abandonment issues on steroids” is often a sign of borderline personality disorder, and Martha indeed behaved like someone with borderline personality disorder: the intense rage, abandonment terror, threats of self-harm, and rapidly shifting mood. But she also lost touch with reality and might have been suffering from psychosis, along with mania (a person with mania might send 50 texts in a row). While we know that Martha felt lonely and scared when her parents fought, we don’t know much else about her childhood, and certainly not enough to understand where the intensity of her abandonment rage comes from. People with personality disorders often have a history of childhood attachment disorders and I think we’d need to know more about Martha’s childhood and also the mental health history in her family to understand where her profound sense of emptiness comes from.
Donny returns to the scene of the crime at the end, which I had a hard time understanding. He also seems to once again feel empathy for Martha when she explains why she called him “Baby Reindeer.” I was confused and disturbed by the ending. What did you think of it?
The ending felt like an unsettling reminder of how much Donny had been complicit in the dynamic between him and Martha, and how much he was getting out of the emotional dance they were doing. Throughout the series, we were rooting for Donny to be free of Martha’s harassment, but in the end, Donny still isn’t free. In a way, he misses her and her voice still keeps him company. We see in him the loneliness and longing for love and care that we saw in Martha, especially in that last moment when he’s so moved by the bartender’s kind gesture to offer him tea as he’s crying on the barstool. It’s a haunting mirror of how he met Martha, but with Donny in her role now. What a powerful way to show the complexity of their relationship.
As a therapist what did you think of the show?
I thought it was important to show what happens when people don’t set boundaries early enough and the havoc that can wreak. If you get an uneasy feeling about someone, the lesson here is to listen to that. Don’t rationalize it to yourself with, “It’s not that bad” or “I feel sorry for this person.” Act early and decisively by setting boundaries, and if that doesn’t work, get outside help to keep yourself safe. Don’t try to solve it yourself. I also hope people will see the importance of getting help when you’re the one struggling. I kept wishing that both Donny and Martha had gotten therapy years before any of this had happened because so much of this nightmare could have been avoided. If you don’t deal with your issues, they’ll come out in other ways.
