“He’s not fighting Michelle or Brittany or Paige Woolen; he’s battling the reflection of his own shame,” says Los Angeles–based therapist Dr Eliza Moore, who watched the June 24 Valley After Show “with clinical fascination.”
Anyone still wondering why Jax Taylor erupted into a tirade about other people’s love lives on Bravo’s latest After Show need look no further than the nearest psychology textbook. According to three mental-health experts consulted by DailyMail+, the self-styled bad boy’s furious dismissal of couples counselling—“That’s crazy to me… you need counselling right when you start dating?”—was not a witty one-liner but a classic flare-up of projection and regression: a 45-year-old man hurling accusations at everyone else to avoid confronting the mess he created in his own collapsing marriage.
Dr Moore, who specialises in personality disorders, calls the outburst “a near-perfect illustration of unresolved projection.” In layman’s terms, Jax spots in Jesse Lally, Michelle Saniei and Aaron Nosler exactly what he loathes in himself—infidelity, insecurity, emotional chaos—then smashes the image before anyone notices it belongs to him. “Every woman is a mirror he’s trying to smash,” she explains. “If the mirror shatters, he never has to see the cracks in his own reflection.”
That mirror metaphor turned painfully literal last season when Brittany Cartwright discovered a distraught DM inbox linking her estranged husband to women he’d met on yet another late-night bar crawl, just days before he checked into what critics branded “Rehab Lite.” Clinical psychologist Dr Marcus Reynolds notes that Jax’s pattern is as old as Freud: “He feels abandoned, so he stages a pseudo-crisis—heart-attack scare, public mea culpa, now this dating celibacy pledge—to lure back the caregiver he claims to resent.” When Brittany refused to play nurse this time, he redirected the performance toward Michelle and Aaron, two relative strangers whose budding therapy journey offered the perfect stage for his outrage.
The regression piece, says New York–based trauma counsellor Dr Aisha Grant, emerges in the childlike absolutes Jax keeps repeating—“That’s a red flag,” “I’ll never date again,” “Everyone’s against me.” Rather than metabolise shame like an adult, he reverts to an adolescent posture, toggling between bravado and victimhood. “It’s playground psychology,” Grant observes. “If I break your toy first, I don’t have to admit mine is broken.”
Behind the scenes, production sources confirm Jax arrived for taping determined to rebrand himself as the reformed anti-hero: 201 days sober, single by choice, allegedly wiser. Yet minutes into the segment he slammed Michelle’s therapy as “too fast,” mocked Aaron’s motives, and vowed permanent celibacy—before reminding viewers he routinely “hangs out with girls” anyway. The volte-face left even veteran enabler Tom Schwartz squirming. “One part pathetic, another part brutally honest,” Schwartz told Andy Cohen, drawing rare applause from fans who still blame him for soft-soaping Sandoval’s scandal.
Where does projection like this end? “Usually at rock bottom,” warns Dr Moore. “Either the mirror finally shatters for good, or he learns to look into it without flinching.” For Brittany, that reckoning is scheduled for July 21, the day their divorce is set to be finalised. Insiders say she has already purged their former home of every Jax-related photo, down to the monogrammed barware. “You couldn’t tell he ever lived there,” notes one friend, “and that’s exactly how she wants it.”
Jax, for his part, still insists he and Brittany will one day laugh about new romances over tacos. Dr Grant scoffs at the fantasy: “Until he stops smashing mirrors, no woman—Brittany, Michelle, or the next Instagram model—will feel safe around the shards.”
And so the mirror waits, cracked but intact, reflecting the only adversary Jax Taylor has never managed to vanquish: himself.
