Why Yellowstone Hits Me Wrong

I have spent most of my adult life inside work that does not leave much room for shock. Forensics, behavioral analysis, trauma therapy, law-enforcement training, criminal psychology, and animal-cruelty investigations expose you to the kind of decisions people make when they believe they are cornered, justified, or invisible. You see what violence looks like without lighting or sound design. You also learn that real danger does not need theatrics. It announces itself in quieter ways. That background shapes how I respond to media. It also explains why I cannot sit through “Yellowstone,” even though many people assume I would be the perfect audience for it.

The first misunderstanding is about language. have a steady baseline. I do not run hot or dramatic. It takes a long chain of events to push me into anger or upset, but once I get there, my vocabulary can rival the parking lot behind a long-haul diner at 02:00 AM. I do not take issue with profanity and never have. Words do not disturb me. Patterns do.

My own family makes the contrast clear.

My brother-in-law is a pastor. He and his wife loved “Yellowstone.” My husband reacts to a single F-word that I let slip out occasionally as if I committed a major crime, yet he enjoys the series without hesitation.

I find that contrast useful. It shows how moral filters often sit on language rather than behavior. People who avoid coarse words may still feel comfortable with televised cruelty, domination tactics, and coercive loyalty, especially when those behaviors are framed as tradition, identity, or “what strong men do.” That is not a moral accusation. It is an observation about what different nervous systems and value systems prioritize.

I am structured differently. My line has never been built around syllables. It has always been built around harm.

When I attempt to watch “Yellowstone,” my system reacts before my thoughts do. Part of that is professional conditioning. Part of it is my autistic sensory profile. Either way, the result is the same. I process tone, posture, pacing, and relational threat at a level that does not stay in the background. My mind begins tracking sudden shifts in tone, facial tension that contradicts the dialogue, contempt packaged as humor, escalating hostility with no point of resolution, and group dynamics held together by implied threat rather than trust. These signals land like alarm tones. Trauma science supports the basic mechanism. The body remembers what threat feels like, and once the recognition system activates, it is hard to convince it that what it is seeing is “just fiction.”

The show’s version of masculinity creates another barrier. In real forensic and law-enforcement settings, strength is often expressed through calm behavior, measured force, and situational awareness. People who have actually protected others tend to think before acting because they have felt the cost of harm. In “Yellowstone,” much of the so-called strength reads as reactive aggression, pride used as emotional armor, intimidation as a shortcut for leadership, and loyalty extracted under pressure rather than earned over time. Those traits show up across criminal psychology, threat assessment, and corrections work, and they do not signal confidence. They signal instability. When a series frames them as admirable or necessary, it collides with what experience teaches about consequences.

The family systems inside the series also run close to real-world structures I have seen in trauma therapy, juvenile justice, and complex cruelty cases. The story leans on loyalty tests, unspoken rules, and enmeshment. In practice, these conditions produce long-term psychological strain. They weaken identity, create distorted attachments, and blur responsibility. You see adult children who never fully separate from family control, parents who treat dominance as protection, boundaries dismissed as disloyalty, and cycles of harm interrupted only by dramatic gestures rather than genuine repair. When television uses that design as atmosphere, I cannot disconnect from what it means for real people.

Trauma research is clear on what repeated exposure to threat does to the mind and body.

• Sleep shifts.
• Trust erodes.
• Attention narrows.
• The startle response changes.
• Cognitive patterns reorganize around survival.

When a series stacks event after event with no psychological cost to the characters, it breaks contact with what we already know from psychiatry and neuroscience. That disconnect is jarring. I can watch dark content when the psychology stays honest. I cannot sit through storylines that treat trauma as a scenic accessory.

The glamorization of cruelty adds one more layer. Violence is not new to storytelling. The problem arises when harm becomes aesthetic. “Yellowstone” folds humiliation, retaliatory force, and coercive loyalty into its identity. Media research across decades suggests stylized violence can influence belief patterns even when it does not produce direct imitation. For people who have worked in real trauma, that framing can feel careless rather than compelling.

Once I begin tracking power, threat, and relational stability in a narrative, I do not stop. This is not a habit. It is an automatic calibration shaped by both autism and forensic training.

I notice:

• who controls the room,
• who absorbs the hidden cost,
• who violates trust without repair, and
• who the story asks me to admire.

When those answers repeatedly point toward admiration of behaviors that damage people in real life, the viewing experience collapses.

So when people ask why someone who is not disturbed by profanity refuses to watch “Yellowstone” while a pastor who is also my brother-in-law and my husband who dislikes hearing me swear enjoy it, the answer is simple. Their filter is linguistic. Mine is behavioral. If the structure of harm is distorted, glamorized, or framed as heritage, my nervous system rejects it long before the story reaches the next scene.

And I am not the only one who feels that gap.

Sources That Don’t Suck

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. Media Psychology, 3(3), 265–299. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Huesmann, L. R. (2007). The impact of electronic media violence: Scientific theory and research. Journal of Adolescent Health, 41(6), S6–S13. Elsevier.

Klin, A., Volkmar, F. R., & Sparrow, S. S. (Eds.). (2000). Asperger syndrome. Guilford Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.