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Kyle Richards seemed to throw some shade at Lisa Vanderpump as she discussed Sutton Stracke‘s need for validation from her mother after the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
While Sutton, 53, admitted to feeling misunderstood by Reba and noted that she wants to feel loved, Jennifer Tilly, 66, suspected that her mother was “deflecting” as Kyle, 56, revealed that she’s made excuses for Sutton due to what her castmate has gone through with her last-living parent.
“I remember when Sutton was opening her store and she really wanted that validation from her mom and wasn’t getting it. So, just hearing ‘I’m proud of you’ meant so much to Sutton. I can’t imagine what that does psychologically, and if you can’t get that love and affection from home, you would want it from somewhere,” Kyle reasoned on the February 11 episode of the RHOBH: After Show.
According to Kyle, once she learned of Sutton’s strained dynamic with her mom, she began making “a lot of excuses for the things that she has done.”
“She’s someone who needs validation. Or attention, maybe. Maybe her being hurt by, for example, Magic Mike, feeling like she’s being excluded and walking off. I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. All I know is I’m just making a lot of excuses for her and things are just clearer to me,” she explained.
As for her apparent shade towards Lisa, 64, Kyle recalled a former cast member in a “similar situation, where her mom didn’t say ‘I love you.'”
“I find myself going, ‘Oh, okay. That’s when someone really needs outside validation.’ Starts with an L!” she declared.
In her own segment of the RHOBH: After Show, Sutton told Jennifer that she doesn’t think Reba “gets” her.
“When people say, ‘Oh you’re so much like your mother,’ I’m like, ‘I’m so not like my mother. I really want people to love me and I need that. I want love,’ where my mother is like, she can take it or leave it. So of course she’s confused,” Sutton explained. “My mother was … unlike any other of the women in the South.”
After hearing that Sutton described her mom as a working graduate who appeared to want a family, Jennifer suspected that Reba’s standoffishness toward Sutton was a “deflection” for what she went through with her late father.
“She doesn’t want to claim responsibility for your emotions in terms of what happened with your dad … She wants to be sort of, a little bit [be] like, ‘I raised her to be an independent Southern woman. Like, you have to be responsible for yourself. Don’t come to me for emotional support,’” Jennifer wondered.
“Absolutely,” Sutton replied. “I think you just psychoanalyzed the psychoanalyst perfectly, and I think she raised me to not be this needy, married, no job, stay at home, I mean, I am the antithesis of who she is and she doesn’t get me.”
Jennifer then added, “[Or] perhaps she’s protecting herself. She wants to raise a strong person that’s not needy but people are needy. It’s the human condition.”
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 14 airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.