Many of you have indeed had the experience of facing getting over the aftermath of a Pathological Love Relationship with very little legal justice. It doesn’t mean that you don’t pursue your own rights. You should always stand up for what you believe in. It’s just that if the universe tilts in his favor yet again, or the courts continue to not support you, you still have to heal—for your own recovery and your own future, you MUST still heal.

It is the same as today’s message—Recovering Without Validation. Sometimes NO ONE believes he was a pathological monster and did the things you said he did. He continues on in his job looking normal and is even successful while you wind up looking hysterical, unstable, and out of your mind. Mr. Pathological schmoozes with your friends, family, or bosses, convincing all those around us he never did what you said he did, doesn’t have the traits you accuse him of, and is just trying to be a good guy to a freaked-out woman.

Mr. Pathological turns friends against you. Your attorney starts to believe HIS version of the story. Cops withhold restraining orders because “he seems like such a nice guy,” and even your children may take his side.

This is the ‘conning’ side of his personality. Most pathologicals are octagons—they have eight sides!—his charming side, intellectual side, friendly side, professional side, rageful side, addiction side, mentally ill side and lying/conning side.  But most people don’t see his negative sides of rage, addiction, mental illness, lying and conning. His positive sides that face outwardly to the general public are charming, intellectual, friendly, and professional. It is no wonder women have to go through the recovery process with very little validation.

Find your validation from others who have also experienced a pathological love relationship. There is a lot of research, countless books, numerous forums, and more and more organizations designed to respond to pathological love relationships. You will find that you are not alone and there are others who have gone through the same experience. Just be sure to exercise due diligence for your safety and security when using on-line resources!

**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information.

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

Part of how people convince themselves to stay in a pathological love relationship is that they think they are making “progress” by managing the pathological’s behavior. Once there is a glimmer of doubt about the pathological’s behavior, the partner begins to do one of two things: they either change their belief system or they change their own behavior. Most of them will change their belief system. That means they will tell themselves there are “ways” to manage the pathological’s lying, infidelity, addictions, sexual acting out, or whatever negative behavior they bring to the relationship. If they can manage the behavior, they can change the person. If they change what they don’t like in them, they have a shot at being happy.

That means they will change how they see the pathological. If they are noticing too much negative behavior, they might look the other way, rename it, minimize it, deny it, justify it, or use any other defense mechanism that allows the partner to change how they see the pathological.

When there is the thought that, by enforcing strong “rules” for the relationship, or by “demanding” their own rights, the pathological will “stop” the behavior, the belief is based on the illusion of management.

When there is the thought that by enforcing the “three-strike rule” for the relationship, or by “demanding” the pathological attend church, counseling, or treatment which will “stop” the behavior, the belief is based on the illusion of management.

When there is the thought that, by “putting the pathological on a short leash,” and checking on them frequently, calling their cell, sending people out to find them, breaking into the pathological’s phone or computer, that the fear of being caught will “stop” the behavior, the belief is based on the illusion of management.

When there is the thought that the pathological is “now working” or staying at home, or being kind, or saying the kinds of things you always wanted to hear, and that the previous behavior is now gone, the belief is based on the illusion of management.

Pathologicals and/or addicts are not managed. Shortening the leash, making demands, watching closer, hiring a P.I. is not managing a person’s acting out.

Pathology is noted for three things:

• the inability to grow to any emotional or spiritual depth
• the inability to sustain the changes that you have demanded
• the inability to develop insight about how their behavior harms or affects others.

People with pathological disorders are not managed—not by you, not by jail or prison, and not by church. The inability to sustain change may show that the pathological APPEARS to do whatever it takes to stay in the relationship, but the disorder itself means they cannot sustain the change that will please you.

People embrace the truth of pathology when they realize that the idea they are ‘managing’ the pathological’s negative behavior or addictions is simply an illusion. Jails and prisons are packed full of personality disordered and pathological individuals because probation ‘management’ or ‘psychological management’ did not work. As they say in 12 steps, ‘When nothing changes–nothing changes.’ Pathology has an inability to change which means nothing consistently changes in the pathological individual except maybe new ‘ideas’ about how to con others.

Managing manipulative behavior, drugs or alcohol, porn or sex addictions, infidelity, lying, and conning are an illusion used by the partner in order to ‘buy a little more time’ to try to figure out how to make the pathological be ‘more normal.’ In the end, it’s your defense mechanisms telling you that by changing your belief system (he can be different, he can do better) you can ‘help them find the resources they need in order to grow into their full potential.’ If you’re over 30, falling in love with ‘potential’ is a crap game risk. People not living up to their potential in adulthood are called–pathologically disordered. By adulthood, either you ‘have the ability for life skills and success’ or you are ‘life challenged’ by addictions or pathology. In either case, partners need to understand there is no ‘managing’ someone else’s negative and pathological behavior. That is an illusion!

Additionally, playing with the illusion of management increases cognitive dissonance in you. It causes a miserable symptom of your thinking “ping-ponging” back and forth between “he’s good/he’s bad.” This is simply responding to both sides of his Jekyll/Hyde nature. The longer you play with the illusion, the more cognitive dissonance (CD) you overload your mind with.

If you have CD, make sure you get treated for it. It increases over time and makes the symptoms worse. Getting a handle on the “illusion” is a first step toward managing your CD.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

Happy 4th of July! With all that flag waving and potato salad, I can’t help but think about ‘Independence Day’—the day that women cut the cords of dependency and exit dangerous and Pathological Love Relationships.

We frequently talk about Living the Gentle Life and why that’s important for people recovering from pathological attachments to dangerous relationships. The Gentle Life is a path choice after the too-much-drama of dangerous men. (Our Gentle Life 8 part series will run soon.)

Independence Day begins the Gentle Life for a lot of women. It’s the day that you ‘come to’ and say:

• How did I get here?
• Is this REALLY my life?
• Where did the real me go?
• Look how much this has cost me to be with him!
• Look what it’s done to my friends/family/children!
• You know what? I’m not CRAZY!
• I don’t believe his lies any more!
• I’m sick of feeling this way!
• I am tired of hearing about how everything is my fault!
• I am sickened by my own staying!

Independence Day is the day you pick up How to Spot a Dangerous Man or any other insight-oriented material that makes you snap out of the trance you have been in within the relationship. It’s the day you read a book, listen to an audio, call a counselor, or pack your bags. It’s the day you pray, “God help me get out,” change the locks on your door, or leave his bags at the curb. It’s the day you book a retreat, go back to church/temple, and confess your sick relationship to others.

Independence Day symbolizes freedom… not only in this country but in ourselves. The freedom to heal, the freedom to choose differently. The freedom to gain insight from someone other than the pathological individual we have been involved with. The freedom to end what is unhealthy!

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is Living the Gentle Life—aspects of a healthy life that can’t occur within pathological and dangerous relationships. There is no life in that! It has all been sucked out of you by the pathological personality that is needy, defiant, deviant, or insatiable. There is no Liberty—he runs the show, your thoughts, your needs, your dreams. There is no Pursuit of Happiness—only his. All pathologicals have an agenda that includes their own perverted entitlement. Your happiness is only an accident if it happens while he is pursuing his own.

People fight to keep us free. Shouldn’t you fight to keep yourself free? Independence isn’t the opposite of dependency. It’s the absence of self-negation where you respect your own uniqueness, self, and life path and that you live first for these values. Independence isn’t selfishness. It isn’t some prescription for aloneness. It’s the foundation of boundaries, self-care, emotional and relational health.

Independence allows and builds interdependence—the structure that allows us to mutually care for one another without pathological suffocation. Independence is most assuredly, Living the Gentle Life.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

William James, an early writer on psychology from the late 1800’s wrote about happiness and reality. I think what he has to say applies a lot to the issues that women face in pathological relationships. Let’s see how…

The crux of James’ pragmatic approach to happiness was rooted in his belief about expectation and its effect on how we come to feel about whether we are happy or depressed. The shortcut to his analogy about beliefs and happiness is:

‘If your reality lives up to your expectations, you experience happiness. If it doesn’t, you are depressed.’

Women who enter into relationships with pathologicals who are notorious for their hidden lives and covert disorders are not dealing with his reality. In her defense, how could she be? She doesn’t even know what his reality is–his disorders, his hidden life, or his pathology that is yet to annihilate her. His charming presentation is anything but real but is effective because it simply hands back to her a mirrored image of all her desires. This mirroring back increases her sensation of attachment because it comfortably reflects herself. Humans feel most at home with the traits that are most like them. However in a pathological, the mirroring, the traits and the resulting connection are not authentic–it’s merely her reflected traits she is attracted to IN him. His mirrored traits are nothing more than a magician’s illusion.

But what impacts her most is not that it is a sham–it’s that she believes it IS real. William James said “The value of any truth is utterly dependent upon its use to the person who holds it.” The value of him being normal is critically important to her in the beginning of the relationship. She will be relationally dependent about his portrayal of himself as true and real. Why? The women we surveyed tested extremely high in relationship investment. What she puts in and gets out of her relationships is almost the single most important thing in her life. The value of the psychopath’s truth is dependent on how much she wants it to BE true. In essence, she sees what he portrays AND she sees what she is invested in: this relationship.

What this creates with a pathological however, is that the first brick laid in the building of this relationship is flawed with all the corrosiveness of his disorder but pressure washed with the glow of his impression management. His mask and skillfully skewed image is built on sand with nothing to build off of. Upon that first brick of reality (or in pathology’s case, unreality), her next brick, which is expectations, is laid.

Her concept of reality about him and the relationship, in the end, can never live up to her expectations she has for them as a couple. Her foundational belief upon which all of this is built is that he is who he says he is, and that he is normal. Her expectations are based on normalcy. Such as–the relationship is going to bring the love, attachment, and joy that she perceives she is experiencing. What woman doesn’t expect that there isn’t potential in the relationship initially? After all, his best performance is always his matinees! Expectations are of a shared life, building a business, buying a home, raising children, growing old together–normal life stuff. Except–the first brick of reality wasn’t what it seemed.

What are realistic relationship expectations for covert pathology? How DO you build a healthy relationship with a narcissist or psychopath?

Most women will never choose in-your-face-pathology for a partner. However, not consciously choosing pathology still does not deter what she ends up with. Her expectations for their relationship are eventually pitifully ignored if not sabotaged. Her time, youth, love, loyalty, finances, trust, and sexuality were all poured into an expectation of a life together. None of this, of course happens for long.

Instead, pathology produces what it always produces: infidelity, a thief of all things sincere, loathing, financial disaster, distrust, and robbery of sexuality and spirituality. As its psychological signature and imprint, it marks her with the all the signs of Aftermath symptoms. Intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, obsessive thinking, stress disorders/PTSD, cognitive dissonance are her hallmark signs of having truly experienced a pathological love relationship.

In retrospect, it is easy to see in pathology how expectations have everything to do with the eventual outcome of unhappiness. When reality is skewed and he is not as he seems, and normal expectations for happy life are unfortunately with an abnormally disordered person, the outcome is misery.

Skewed reality + Unadjusted Expectations = Misery!

Pathological relationships always end in this way. It’s their trademark. While you can’t adjust what their impression management did to you initially, you can adjust what you come to expect from someone this disordered. When he lies, does it one more time, steals, cheats, hides his life—the only adjustment that can be made is ‘were you expecting normal behavior from an abnormal disorder?’ What part of him ‘doing it one more time’ is really a shock? The expectation (once you know his pathology) is what keeps you stuck in the cycle of your intrusive and obsessive thinking. If you dig down into what you are really thinking, you are expecting ‘this time’ the pathological will be different. He will be honest, he will tell the truth, he will pay the taxes, he won’t cheat, he’ll stop porn, he will stop splitting the children against you….

Your expectation of a permanently disordered and low-conscience abnormality is creating your continued depression. Adjust your expectation and you will adjust your future.

If your reality lives up to your expectations, you experience happiness. If it doesn’t, you are depressed.

“Stop Dragging My Heart Around” (Song by Tom Petty)

Women spend years and thousands of dollars trying to heal from dangerous men. If they are lucky, they only encounter one in their lifetimes. If they aren’t, there are many more. That’s because women haven’t really verbalized what they think constitutes a dangerous man. When I interviewed women, most of them thought the ONLY thing that made men dangerous was violence. If there was no violence, well then… he was probably ‘fixable’ in the long run.

For over 30 years I have been the not-so-silent witness to women’s choices. As a therapist, I counseled women whose childhoods included abuse and who grew up to be  adults who were abused. I watched adult women choose over and over again one version or another of a dangerous man. Often only the faces changed, but since there are many types of dangerous men, often women would move all over the continuum dating men from all categories.

The result was always the same:

• They were miserable
• “They were in pain”
• They took a long time to heal, if ever
• They often went on to do it all over again

Before we go any further, answer these questions:

1.  Do you believe a dangerous man will eventually be violent?

2.  Do you believe that, if you were hurt by a dangerous man in the past, you would be able to spot the next one and avoid him?

3.  Do you believe that dangerous men are notably gregarious, aggressive, narcissistic and abusive?

4.  Do you believe that something in your past has predisposed you to dating dangerous men?

If you answered ‘YES’ to any of the above, you are indeed at risk of dating one or more dangerous men.

The lack of a solid definition of what constitutes ‘dangerous’ for women is probably at the heart of what keeps us in these dangerous relationships. So let’s nail down what is dangerous.

The word danger means, “the state of being exposed to injury, pain, or loss.” Synonyms for the word include:

• Hazard
• Jeopardy
• Peril
• Risk
• Menace
• Threat
• Emergency

Notice the word danger doesn’t merely mean, “when someone is violent toward you,” nor do the synonyms indicate this is strictly limited to violent behavior. Yet women let lots of men and their behavior off the hook simply because, “well, he never hit me so I didn’t feel like I could say he was abusive.”

Year after year my practice filled up with women who would never label or define the men in their lives. When asked if their men were dangerous, they would hem and haw around, looking for loopholes to say they weren’t dangerous, but not really knowing what dangerous was or how dangerous men behaved. Women are most at-risk for picking, marrying, and staying with dangerous men when they don’t have a concrete idea of what dangerous is like. The words listed above give good clues to what dangerous is like—injury, pain, loss, hazard, jeopardy, risk.

So let’s define that for you: A dangerous man is any man who harms a woman…

• Emotionally
• Physically
• Sexually
• Financially
• Spiritually

This definition immediately broadens the field experience of dangerousness. It adds emotionally, financially and spiritually—three areas where women often let men off the hook from being labeled as ‘dangerous’ to a woman’s well-being.

We already determined that the word danger means ‘the state of being exposed to injury, pain, or loss.’ Simply being ‘exposed’ to the possibility of being injured, experiencing pain or going through loss IS dangerous to a woman’s mental health. Women often discount that merely the exposure to the possibility really constitutes ‘danger.’

Any exposure to dangerousness negatively affects a woman’s:

• Self-esteem
• Future relationships
• Trust in others
• Ability to disconnect and move on

…and inevitably leads to…

• Fear
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Intimacy issues

Some of the women who came into counseling had only one exposure to a dangerous man, and yet the after-effects warranted psychological counseling in order to heal. Other women had experienced multiple exposures to dangerous men, choosing one after another, because they did not spot the signs. They spent years in therapy.

Dangerous men are not just the psychopaths you see on the nightly news. A dangerous man is just as likely to be ‘the nice man at church,’ ‘the smooth boss at work,’ or ‘the girlfriend’s athletic trophy-winning brother’. He is just as likely to be a social worker, cop, doctor, or mechanic. The fact is—he could be ANYBODY.

The only defense is self-defense. And the only self-defense is knowledge. The articles in our newsletters and on our website will help you realize your potential need for future insight into the area of dangerousness. Perhaps they will illuminate areas that you need more knowledge about, more insight, or just information.

If, after reading this article, you recognize your own patterns, please avail yourself to more information through our products and services, or through your local women’s organizations and counseling programs.

Our hope is that this information is used for a woman’s relational harm reduction and education for healthier relationships. Please pass this on to other women who need this life-saving information. Be the beacon to other women.

There are a lot of distortions that go on about the pathological man’s ability to ‘be happy.’ One of the issues of permanent personality disorders and pathology is that, at the core of them, is unhappiness. That is why they have so many angry outbursts, attitude problems, and failed relationships.

Some of them fake the external appearance of ‘happy-go-lucky’ or act as if their lives are fine. Partners need to look below the ‘presentation’ and question what he’s showing at face value. Survivors fall for it the first time by getting in the relationship with him and then fall for it a second time when believing his external presentation of his ‘life without you in it’.

I chanted it like a mantra so I’ll continue to say it, “Nothing changes in pathology because it’s hard-wired to not change.”

If he was horrible with you, he’ll be horrible with her (eventually). If he was at the core of himself, miserable/unhappy/unsuccessful, NOTHING will change. Go deeper than looking at this flash-in-the-pan faux presentation that he WANTS you to see and then feel bad about because you are not with him. Psychopathology does not change and neuroscience continues to teach us why his hardwired brain doesn’t allow for change. If you don’t believe me, at least believe science.  His change is not going to happen now and not simply because he is with someone else. Pathology is not a light switch you turn off and on at will.

The real question is will YOU ever be happy again? Survivors misread their own ability to be happy in the future because they are all wrapped up in STILL watching him, rating him, and gauging his happiness against their own.

A recovery question is: Why are you STILL watching him? What in the world does he have to do with YOUR future happiness?

Do you know why watching him affects your own ability to recover and find happiness?
Because the longer you watch him, the more intrusive the thoughts become, and the more ping-pong brain of cognitive dissonance you keep, the more miserable you stay, and the longer you postpone your own recovery and joy.

When survivors are being honest about what they fear most, it is that he will go on and have this fabulous life and ‘be good to another woman’ and you will never meet anyone. Since you do want to eventually meet someone healthy to love… what healthy guy wants to be with a woman who is obsessed with a pathological man, whose eyes are not on THEIR new emerging relationship, but on what the ex is doing next? Instead of your eyes being focused forward on the future, you have your head turned backwards looking at your past and what he’s doing. What does new Mr. Healthy see? You, filled with regret and revenge—not really good material for a new relationship, eh?

It IS understandable why you are angry that he appears to be happy with someone else and you are not. It is also understandable, after what you have lived through, that you wonder… if you’ll always pick pathologicals… if you’re too damaged to ever have a healthy relationship… if you are even capable of feeling anything other than intrusive thoughts, much less joy. These are totally normal questions considering what you’ve been through. But those answers are not found in glancing over your shoulder at him. There’s no going back.

‘Drag an axe and clear a path’ into your future. Work on yourself (let us help you!) so you understand why you chose someone like that, how you ignored so many red flags, and understand your own personality traits that leave you vulnerable for relationships like that. There is plenty to heal from! Then, when you’ve done all the work, LIVE. Don’t search internet dating sites where PREDATORS live. Just live a joyful life and allow health, vibrance, and joy to direct you. It’s when you aren’t seeking that you find that which you have been waiting for. Joyce Brown, my mother and mentor for this work, said, “A man is not the ‘cake’—a relationship is only the icing on the cake of a good life.”

Heal you! Get a great life… and the rest will fall into place. My mother, when she was dying, said, “I’m not afraid to die because I’ve lived a great life. I’ve had so much fun and I’ve been so loved. Who could ask for more?”

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information).

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

The ‘new’ normal (whatever that is) is code jargon for ‘something in your life that changed and for which you just have to suck it up and get used to’. This cliché kind of phrase has crept into the world of pathology too, and even the recovery movement. So let’s answer some of those questions about ‘the NEW normal.’

“Is ‘How Crappy I Feel’ my new normal?”

In other words, “Will I ever feel like my old self again?”

Let’s say your girlfriend was driving home late one night, off in thought, and after a glass or two of wine. She was blasting her favorite song on her ear buds. This condition left her not in her most focused self—tired, distracted, a little buzzed, and drifting off to the groove of a good song, when she didn’t even realize the slight bump her car made as she drove over the railroad tracks. Since she had no reason to believe something that could really hurt her was barreling down the tracks toward her, she didn’t even glance to see the oncoming train. Once she realized too late that she was going to be harmed—wide-eyed and gasping—she wondered what she could do to save herself. The answer by then was, ‘nothing.’ In a nanosecond she went from being her old self to being someone entirely new—she became a seriously injured person.

You too were run over by an oncoming train – one with a big ‘P’ on its front. You too may have been tired, distracted, or out having a good time when you encountered the train that was going to run over you, destroy the framework of your life, and nearly fatally wound your soul.

The oncoming psychopath does not apply the brakes for anything on the tracks of his life. Your mangled psyche, broken heart, and your sideswiped joy are the natural conditions of having been run over by a runaway psychopath.

As your girlfriend lay at home recovering from having been in a ‘train wreck’—her broken bones held together with casts, her head bandaged from a whiplash concussion, and being relegated to resting for the unforeseeable future, she does not yet realize she is lucky to have escaped with the gift to heal. Her family and friends, recognizing her extensive injuries, are not likely to say to her, “Very shortly, this will be like it never happened. You’ll be back to your old self in no time at all.” It’s easy to see the girl was seriously injured and it was a gift from God she’s alive.

While psychological injuries are not as evident to the bystander’s eye, they are notably experienced by the victim. You were hit by a train! You were injured—emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, financially, and maybe even physically.

If someone has erroneously said to you, “Very shortly, this will be like it never happened. You’ll be back to your old self in no time at all”… remember—other survivors who have been hit by the same-train-different-tracks will tell you: “No, it will not be like it never happened. No, you will not be back to your old self in no time at all.”

I don’t know if you want the truth or you want that girl’s story whose name is Pollyanna. It is not that you will never heal. It’s that your injuries were serious. You are in the critical care unit of the recovery center. You WILL heal. But it will not be in ‘no time at all.’ If your girlfriend didn’t rise up off the bed in a few days like Lazarus being raised from the dead, you too should not expect that type of ‘miraculous’ healing. Train wrecks mangle bodies, minds, and spirits. Give yourself the gift of recognition that what you have been through is traumatic and life changing. And that you need the time anyone who has been run over by a train would need in order to heal.

The impatient family member who thinks you should be ‘over it’ by now, was not run over by the train. The girlfriends that want you to go on a cruise and meet someone new were not run over by the train. The psychopath train that hit you that thinks you should be through the body-repair shop of what he did to you—was not run over by a train his size.

The problem that exists is that your level of expectation is not equal to your level of harm.

You are expecting to walk away limping but not seriously injured from a psychopath. That doesn’t happen often—so infrequently, in fact, that I don’t even know if I can give one example of that happening with the women I have worked with for 25+ years.

Learning to live with the ‘new normal’ of aftermath symptoms is really a self-nurturing act. It means you have taken the time to really assess your damage and give yourself the things you need in order to heal—time, space, therapy—whatever it takes. The ‘new normal’ following pathological love relationships is called ‘aftermath damage.’ There is a cure for it. But the first step in curing it is to say out loud, “I was run over by an oncoming train. I was critically wounded.” Now, healing can begin.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

“Internal reflecting” guides us to dig in, evaluate, and give thanks. We need to take the time to ponder ideas, gather insights that might have eluded us during the busyness of our lives and slow down to look inward and receive the Light. I hope this week’s newsletter is a little piece of Light that you are open to receive.

Awhile back I got a book written by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Thomas Keating. It’s called The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation. Profoundly, he reminds us that we spend much of our lives looking for happiness through avenues that can never produce it. We create our misery by “looking for love in all the wrong places,” as the song goes.  Nothing can be truer when it comes to pathology. Pathology is wired to produce misery, not happiness. Everyone has the same response to pathology—they are harmed, miserable, and eventually try to flee. It’s a true indicator of seeking happiness from a source unable to deliver it.

Your idea of happiness was probably initially developed around the relationship or the fantasy that was painted for you about him, the relationship, or your future. Instead of understanding that happiness had been sought from someone who, by the nature of their disorder, could never deliver happiness, you were held captive in the compulsion of repeating the same scenario with him. You tried to find happiness in the very person who is hard-wired to NOT produce happiness!

Not all of this seeking happiness in the wrong place is the result of his pathology. Some of it is the result of our own unknowing about where happiness is found. It is not found in someone else. Instead, happiness is found inside our self, rooted in our own spirituality through God. It isn’t about them. It is about us.

Keating says, “What we experience is our desperate search for happiness where it cannot possibly be found.” The key to our happiness is not lost outside of our self. It was lost inside our self when we began looking for it in someone else. We need to look for it were it can actually BE found.

The chief characteristic of the human condition is that everyone is looking for this key but nobody knows where to find it. The human condition is thus poignant in the extreme. If you want help as you look for the key in the wrong place, you can get plenty because everybody else is looking for it in the wrong place too! They are looking for it where there is more pleasure, security, power, and acceptance by others. We have a sense of solidarity in the search, yet without any possibility of finding what we are looking for.

The religions of the world have discovered the insight that (non-pathological) human beings are designed for unlimited happiness, the enjoyment of truth, and love without end. This spiritual hunger is part of our nature as beings with a spiritual dimension. Here we are, with an unbounded desire for happiness and not the slightest idea of where to look for it.

While we may certainly recognize that looking for happiness in alcohol or drugs is looking in the wrong place, do we recognize that looking for happiness even in relationships can be the wrong place? Certainly looking for love in pathology would never produce the key you were seeking, because it cannot be found there. But sometimes people even look for happiness in what appears to be the RIGHT places—marriage, children, higher education, careers, and service to others, only again to find that they are still seeking happiness in the wrong direction.

In religious language, the word, repent means to “turn away from.” I like that concept even from a psychological growth standpoint. As you find your own path of recovery from the aftermath of the pathological love relationship, your recovery calls you to turn away from the very thing that has produced so much pain for you—the relationship, the choices, the person. In essence, in order for you to find happiness in yourself, in God, and in your own (often single) life, you must “change the direction from which you are seeking happiness”.

This is especially true when everything in you wants to turn back to him, to the routine, to the perceived comfort—just to get through the tough times. Changing the direction from which you seek happiness is embracing the truth that happiness cannot be found in pathology. God did not create you for pathology. He created you for Himself—for peace, love, and joy.  It’s not, and never will be, there in pathology.

Over the years, I have become pretty good at picking up on those who will “get it” and move on and never repeat the pathological love relationship dynamic again, and those who WILL, unfortunately, not change the direction from which they are seeking happiness. They might change the FACE from whom they seek happiness, but they are still facing the same direction seeking it.

Although there is much turmoil in the world right now, be reminded again that we can always change the direction from which we have been seeking happiness and focus on a brighter future for our self and with our self.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, on-on-ones, or phone sessions. See the website for more information).

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

by Sandra L. Brown, MA

The month of May marks my fairly “official” date (at least in my mind) in which I was thrust into the field of pathology—totally without consent, without warning, and without return to the normal life I knew before May 13, 1983.  That was the day my father bled out in a grungy gutter in Cincinnati just outside his jazz club after a psychopath plunged a knife into his aorta.  I was initiated into a victim-hood that would turn my life and career in a direction I hadn’t much interest in before that particular day.

Much like pathology in anyone else’s life, you don’t get to choose how it plays out in your life.  The best you can do is to learn how to ride the rollercoaster that goes along with the serious group of disorders in pathology—as I have done.  Thirty-plus years later, I still feel like I am just skimming the surface of what can, and should, be done in education, awareness, survivor services, and advocacy in dealing with pathology. Thousands of pages of writing books, newsletters, websites, workbooks, e-books, quizzes, hours and hours of lectures ad nauseum, over a thousand hours in broadcasts, both radio and television, stacks of CDs and DVDs created—and still we are in the infancy of a new understanding about pathology.  It is the virtual edge of just beginning what someday will be a momentous marker that shows when the world turned a corner for a better and very public understanding of pathology.

We’re not there yet but the day IS coming. Every new blog that goes up, every newsletter, every website, every talk, every social networking post, every private moment of knowledge shared with another victim, every coaching session, every class taught, every therapy hour, every group gathering, every prayer muttered, every radio show aired, every celebrity living it and bringing it to notice, every TV show featuring it, every newspaper or women’s magazine article taunting it is another message to another ear that has heard the message. You learned it because someone cared enough to make sure you learned it.

Every May 13^th, for the past 30+ years, I have halted my existence to remember that life-altering second when my life went from being a normal everyday life to a life of being a family member of a homicide victim. This is when my reality was ripped through by pathology—a disorder so conscienceless that altering history is just another day in the lives of the pathological.  While my pathology story includes a brutal ending, yours, no less, includes something similar—all the things lost in a moment of deep betrayal—the kind of betrayal that only pathology can bring.

If I don’t brighten up this newsletter, I’ll get complaints about “too much reality” or “too much negativity” so, I will say this—while none of us choose to become survivors at the hands of very disordered pathological individuals, what we do with what we were dealt is up to us.  Every so often I like to send a message to you that encourages you to “pass it forward”.  Whatever you have learned from the magazine’s website, newsletters, radio shows, blogs, or the books, is probably more than the woman who is sitting next to you knows.  You don’t need to wait until you understand it more by taking a class, getting a degree, reading another one of our books, attending a retreat, or taking our coach training—that doesn’t help the women you sit next to at work. The knowledge in your head is life-saving to her. Next year, when you are better trained, isn’t the time to share what you know—today is!

If we want to move from living on the virtual edge of changing pathology education in the world, we have to open our mouths and tell what we know.  Every pathological hopes you DON’T do this! They hope you keep what you know to yourself. So many women that have shed so many tears have said, “If I had only known … I would have left earlier, I wouldn’t have left my children with him, I wouldn’t have _______.”

Every May is a time I renew my commitment to what changed me. Every May I bother people with my message and prod them and push them to make victims’ rights and survivor education important in the world.  If I don’t, the image of my dad laying in that gutter haunts me. His death should never have been for nothing—and as long as people have been helped, it hasn’t. Frankie Brown, by his death, has touched so many lives through the message of psychopathy. You’re one of them!  Help me celebrate my father’s death anniversary in a way that brings meaning and hope to many. Today, tomorrow, next week, next month—share what you know with just ONE person—someone that you have felt in your gut needs to know about the permanence and the pain of pathological relationships. Then email me and say “I passed it forward” so I can count up how many people have celebrated Frankie!

If this message has offended you, I’m sorry. Pathology has offended my entire life. Thank you for growing in the knowledge of pathology so you are prepared for the day when you can give someone the life-changing information that you’ve come to know!

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about Pathological Love Relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

The new mantra—awareness is not enough.

Our goal has been Public Pathology Education but it does not END there. It’s like Step 1 of the 12 Steps which is a statement of awareness “I am powerless (thus aware) over the effects of someone else’s pathology. I have been powerless (thus aware) over my patterns of selection due to my Super Traits.”

These are the FIRST steps of recovery. They are NOT recovery. Awareness is not action.

LOTS of people come to retreats to become aware of his pathology or her super traits and never put ACTION behind it–they don’t stop contact or work with our counselors to better understand how their super traits impact all aspects of their lives.

Action is recovery. You have to DO something in order to change.

Cognitive dissonance is created by holding two differing belief systems. “He’s good/He’s bad. I’m smart/I’m stupid.” It’s called COGNITIVE because it messes with your thinking abilities and impairs neuro pathways which create recurring thinking patterns. You aren’t going to use that same messed up thinking pattern to THINK your way out of the relationship. “More understanding” of pathology, or just being aware of ONE MORE act of betrayal isn’t the magic line in the sand that becomes the ‘aha’ moment when you start No Contact.

You can’t think your way out of cog diss. You have to WORK your way out. It is counter intuitive or everyone would have already done it to get well. You have to STOP the behavior so you STOP the thinking. Thinking aligns with behavior, which is why the No Contact mantra. NOTHING happens until it is reduced to its least possible amount (i.e., parenting). Cog diss is thereby cured NOT by awareness, NOT by rethinking a million times of the things he’s done, NOT by journaling, NOT by retelling the story in therapy, but ONLY by taking an action and changing what you would normally DO (read another book, tell another person, check his email another time, answer his text again).

Most people have not considered that recovery for cog diss is the opposite of what they have been doing which is why nothing has happened in their recovery. New neuro pathways are created when you change your behavior. New neuro pathways are created in your thinking AFTER they are created in your behavior.

Recovery is both action oriented and awareness based. But if awareness is not leading you to action, you are stuck in your recovery process and need help to change gears.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information).

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

The one adjective I hear repeatedly connected to pathology is the word ‘evil.’ Spiritual, unspiritual, heathens, pagans, Christians, Jews, Buddists – it doesn’t matter. The word ‘evil’ is the chosen adjective-of-choice to describe pathology. But what IS evil? Is it more psychological than it is spiritual? Or is it a spiritual issue that has been picked up and defined psychologically? Are they the same thing?

I am not going to translate the lists below for you. They are self explanatory. I have taken the list from Old Testament (of the Jewish faith) and New Testament (of the Christian faith) as examples of the definition of ‘evil.’ You could most likely find similar definitions of evil in other religious texts.

Draw your own conclusions

Other Characteristics (also mentioned in the Women Who Love Psychopaths book)

It is clear in some spiritual texts that spiritual evil has almost no separation from psychological evil, or vice versa. There are some things we don’t totally understand such as how the spirit realm can affect the psychological realm, or how one’s pathology may taint their spirit. But it has been clear to me, and hundreds of survivors, that ‘evil’ straddles the vocabularies of both psychological definitions and spiritual ones as well.

The spiritual union of souls when united to a psychopath, is like none other. Those who have united in the spiritual realm can attest to the evil witnessed in that sharing.

There is still much to learn about how psychology and theology meld. A large portion of one of the chapters in Women Who Love Psychopaths as been devoted to this issue. Please check the chart in the book for a better grasp of this concept.

At the heart of pathology is a lack of remorse, empathy, and conscience. It sounds horrible on paper (and it is!) but it looks different in action. Sometimes women wish they were more like THAT—less empathic—as a way of getting less hurt.

They don’t really mean that (unless they too have a pathology bent). They are exhausted by their own mental activity of intrusive thoughts, heartbreak, hypervigilance and hurting. They just want the pain to go away, and if that means they become callous and don’t ‘give a rip’—then so be it—they’ll opt for his pathological character traits.

Cluster B Personality Disorders (Borderline, Narcissistic, Anti-Social, Sociopaths and Psychopaths) have, at the center of their disorder, a complete lack of, or at least a reduced capacity for, remorse, empathy, and conscience. (We will use the space-saving acronym, REC, for a lack of these traits—Remorse, Empathy, Conscience.) To a certain extent, only the degree of a lack of REC distinguishes one disorder from the other. Psychopaths and Sociopaths are at the high end of the spectrum with the most of these traits. But all four disorders have some of this in them because these disorders overlap each other.

So what does a lack of remorse, empathy, and conscience look like? On the surface, from your perspective, it looks like either he’s carefree, or he doesn’t care what others think of him or his behavior. It looks like confidence in his choices and his behavior. It looks like he enjoys his choices and behaviors even if they are negative. It looks like he has an unwavering commitment to his own thoughts (even when they hurt someone else). On the surface, it looks good to not be harmed by the thoughts of others. You get to do your own thing and then be unaffected by how it affects others. You coast along in a cloud of impenetrable numbness from any negative consequences—social, emotional, sexual, financial, spiritual, or physical, from his behaviors.

However, a lack of REC is the only thing that differentiates us from some animal species. (Ever try to guilt a cat?) Our ability to feel appropriate guilt is a reflection of our humanity. That various levels of psychopathology LACK these elements points to the pathological’s own diminished ability to act humane in certain situations. Why are we surprised that people who have impaired REC go on to abduct children, hurt pets, steal, lie, cheat, and act unfaithful? Conscience is related to consequences and the emotional guilt that accompanies the act. Guilt is the RED LIGHT of our behavior—we don’t do something because we don’t want to feel guilt. In the end, guilt saves us from hurting others and ourselves, and living with that awful feeling of regret.

But a pathological, who doesn’t have that hardwiring to feel remorse or guilt, hurts others, hurts society—and himself—although he may not have the insight to recognize it as self-harm. He leaves a trail of wounded women and children behind him as he goes off golfing, picking up other women, or to the tanning bed—all the while humming a little song to himself.

His ability to hurt others and go on is NOT something you should admire in him. In a recent retreat, a woman kept bringing up that she thought this was GOOD—that a pathological remained unscathed by his own belief system and therefore, if we were more like him, we would be happier because we would react less to what we did.

That’s a sad thought. It’s the only line in the sand that separates us as caring human beings from a pathological. Our ability to have insight about our behavior is what makes us somewhat un-pathological. Even though you are hurt and would welcome a bit of numbing to get away from the pain, you will never be able to throw yourself into the pit of pathological REC to escape your pain, intrusive thoughts, and other symptoms you wish would go away.

For those women who are not mutually pathological, the only way to get OUT of pain is to go THROUGH the pain. Embracing that you can still tell the difference between right and wrong, and you don’t covet his pathology as something to be admired, means you are not pathological yourself! Others who have now embraced his worldview of hurting others, seeing it as good, and wanting to a live a life of power/dominance/status, need therapy surrounding their ‘consumption’ of his pathological worldview.

A healthy REC is one of the differentiating aspects that separate us as the fabric of humanity versus the pathological alien. Embrace that about yourself. Stay positive!

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

In 2009, the world was rocked by the death of Michael Jackson. He is likely to be remembered, not only for his creativity as one of the world’s most talented people in music, but also for his bizarre behaviors, appearance and abuse allegations. It seems at odds that someone so talented might also have been fairly disordered in his personality.

Michael appears to meet the criteria for Schizotypal Personality Disorder. There have been many other articles written about the possibility of Michael exhibiting traits of this disorder (just Google sites on this topic).

The Institute’s mission is to provide public pathology education. Schizotypal Personality Disorder is a permanent personality disorder which is being highlighted this week to help educate the public.

Traits of the disorder include:

* Acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships
* Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with cultural norms
* Unusual perceptual experiences
* Odd thinking and speech
* Suspiciousness or paranoid ideas
* Inappropriate or constricted emotions
* Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar
* Lack of close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives
* Excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgements about self

Through the years we watched as a mega-talented, child prodigy slowly turned into a reclusive and eccentric man-child. Exemplifying the oddities of the schizotypal personality, he continued to alter his appearance past the point of normal cosmetic surgery – often implying the stranger it got, the better. He used other behaviors as ways of accentuating his eccentricity and uniqueness. He was often seen wearing a germ mask, claimed that Bubbles his chimpanzee was his closest companion, and created his property into Neverland – based on Peter Pan’s “never wanting to grow up.” There, he remained highly reclusive drawing mostly children to Neverland. The stories about sleeping in an anti-aging chamber along with his growing odd appearance, dress and behavior, sadly attracted the moniker “Wacko Jacko” for Michael.

His two sexual child abuse cases, while dismissed, did expose some of his bizarre thinking. As he stated in an interview, “It’s the most loving thing to share your bed with a child.” The inability to see the inappropriateness of some of his comments, especially while under investigation, established much of his thinking as disordered. In the public’s eye, his comments demonstrated that he was out of touch with reality to our cultural norms and laws.

Celebrities often give their children bizarre names. And certainly non-celebrities name their children after themselves or give them a family name. However, Michael’s children’s names reflect a glaring narcissism. His first child was given the name Prince Michael I, his second child, a daughter, named Paris Michael, and his third child, Prince Michael II.

Another example of Michael’s bizarre behavior was the dangling of an infant Prince Michael II over a hotel balcony. Today, this child is referred to as, “Blanket.” While celebrities try to shield their children from the negative effects of the media and possible kidnapping, Michael’s was most extreme. Given his schizotypal approach to life, his children, who were rarely seen in public, wore elaborate masks or had towels hanging from their heads. While other huge celebrities have faced the same threat (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Elvis, John F. Kennedy), none responded by dressing their children in bizarre ways with masks and towels, or prohibited any known information about them.

Michael stands as probably THEE most talented person to change the racial divide in music — changing MTV and pressing excellence in music far beyond what anyone had done. But talent does not mean that it is not co-mingled and intertwined around a rather severe disorder. That is not abnormal in pathology. People’s pathology is often dismissed when it is compared to their achievements. As The Institute has discussed before, various disorders with pathology SEEK careers in which they receive a lot of status, attention, money, or exposure. Many forms of pathology are laced with excitement seeking, risk taking, and high achieving traits that help the pathological over the bar and up the career ladder. We shouldn’t assume the pathological person to be working only at the grocery store or the car wash. While there are blue-collar patholgicals, many (and those most undetected) are successful — some attaining extreme success. Certain disorders migrate to various fields such as medicine, the legal and criminal justice system, banking, psychology, theology, and even the entertainment field.

While it is tempting to take our eyes off of who the pathological is underneath the talent, it is just as important for us to remember that talent and disorder aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s as if the Creator gives greatly on one side, and takes greatly from the other side. There are talented excesses and devastating deficits. Michael’s talent exemplifies what it means to be a prodigy. His personal life and deteriorating behavior also shines a light on how pathology is not a respecter of persons — any talented person can be harboring the life-altering effects of pathology.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw him moon walk, or the goose bumps I had when he sang “Thriller.” I’ll also never forget the first time I saw his face so altered from surgery and thinking that this was the result of a bigger problem. I won’t forget the mortification I felt when he was fighting sexual abuse allegations. In any case, we will all remember something “BIGGER” than life about Michael.

(Last week we began discussing the WHO of certain behaviors and crimes often perpetrated by Cluster Bs, and how the various systems who come in contact with Cluster Bs have differing names, thus views, of their destructive patterns. How convenient for pathologicals that each system is only focused on its identified behavior, which helps pathologicals continue to fly under the radar. Instead of seeing the big picture of pathological disorders in action, the systems are focused on the sub-directory of behaviors associated with only their system and one small aspect of each pathological’s destructive nature.

When teaching about Public Pathology, I always provide education about the pathological disorders of Cluster B (Borderlines, Narcissists, Anti-Socials, Sociopaths, and Psychopaths). No matter who hires me to speak, they all get the training on Cluster B. I teach this to nurses, the military, therapists (who seem to have forgotten), the criminal justice system, law enforcement, judges, custody evaluators, prosecutors/lawyers, and mediators. I teach it to clergy, addiction professionals, and social workers, victim advocates, and DV programs.  I teach it to every frontline ‘system’ that is likely to encounter various forms of behaviors that fall under the category of Cluster B, but are referred to within each system’s own labeling vernacular.

All these systems deal with the same disorder, with different faces, different statuses in life, different careers and titles, with money or without, different crimes and different charges against them, different social services requests, different spiritual confessions, different story lines, different excuses, different projections of their behavior onto societal causations. But in the end, it’s the same disorder over and over again.

When I teach about Cluster B, I see the moment of “aha!” that comes across their faces when they recognize their own clients within this cluster of disorders. Learning the emotional, physical, psychological, behavioral, financial, sexual, and spiritual behaviors of these disorders quickly helps them to affirm who does that. Looking across the room and seeing law enforcement, judges, therapists, and mediators all nodding in agreement rushes them into the center of reality that we are all dealing with the same disorder in our offices, courtrooms, therapy offices, and pews. That whether they are a defamer, cyberstalker, repeat domestic violence offender, financial con artist, or killer, we are still talking about the Cluster B of disorders.

• When asking my audience of sexual offender therapists if any of the pedophiles aren’t within Cluster B, no one disagrees.
• When asking batterer intervention programs if the chronic repeaters aren’t Cluster B, no one balks.
• When asking forensic computer professionals if trolls, cyberstalkers, defamers and bullies are Cluster B, they readily affirm it.
• Sexual assault counselors don’t argue that rapists are largely Cluster B.
• Judges don’t rush to defend that high-conflict cases (those people who file case after case, as many as 60 times to court) aren’t Cluster B.
• Mediators don’t disagree that those most likely to fail mediation are Cluster B.
• Custody evaluators affirm that those most likely to tamper with evidence, perpetrate parental alienation, and require supervised visitation, are Cluster Bs.
• Programs that deal with stalking can easily see that stalking is primarily a Cluster B occurrence.
• Repeat criminals clogging up jail, probation, parole, and prison programs are often diagnosed within jail as having a Cluster B disorder.
• Terrorists, school shooters, and bombers are easily identified as Cluster B.
• Those who stay for years and years in counseling, using up mental health resources without ever being able to sustain positive change, are Cluster Bs (excluding here those with the chronic mental illness of schizophrenia or developmental disabilities).
• Those prematurely discharged from military service are often Cluster B.
• The overuse and misuse of most major societal services and systems are related to Cluster B.
• Some of the most brilliantly contrived insider trading crimes of the century have been planned and executed by Cluster Bs.
• Are there many murderers who aren’t Cluster B?

Who does that? If we take all the behaviors listed above (and often crimes from those behaviors), put them in an analyzer funnel and watch the behaviors clink and clunk down the spiral DSM Identifier, it would spit them out in an Axis II file with Cluster B printed on the front.

The Cluster B’s behaviors are generated out of a complex interweaving of emotional, developmental, neurological, biochemical, and even genetic, abnormalities. Obviously, this is not a simple disorder, or there would be less ‘inevitable harm’ associated with everyone and everything they touch, and they would be cured or even managed consistently and well.

This complicated group of disorders single-handedly sets society on edge. It keeps us in court, in therapy, in prayer, in the lawyer’s office, in depression, in anxiety, on edge, on the offense, ready to off ourselves to simply be away from such menacing (yet often normal appearing) deviancy.

Who wreaks more emotional havoc than Cluster Bs? Sixty million people in the U.S. alone are negatively impacted by someone else’s pathology. It drives people to therapy, to commit their own petty acts of revenge to avenge their own powerlessness. It drives people to drink, to run away, to take their children and run and, sadly, leads to uncountable numbers of suicides every year.

They single-handedly cause financial disruptions to the working class, who are demoted, or go on disability because of the ‘scrambled eggs’ for brains they now have due to too much Cluster B exposure.

It drives the legal market by keeping attorneys in business through never-ending court cases, child custody, and restraining orders.

It employs judges and prison systems. And keeps forensic computer analysts and forensic accountants frantically busy.

It funds domestic violence shelters, rape centers, and children’s therapy programs.

Pathology is big business. It is what our large service systems in almost every field are driven by… the need to protect, defend, prosecute, or treat the effects of Cluster Bs.

It employs threat assessment professionals to ward off stalkers and reputation defenders’ online programs to repair cyber attacks on people that Cluster Bs rarely even know.

It employs social workers and halfway houses trying to get Cluster Bs “the help they need to turn their lives around.”

It drives the media of TV, radio, and talk shows. Who do we think are often the people on daytime TV and reality shows? Cluster Bs. Who do the media often want to talk about in the celebrity world? The Cluster Bs. What kinds of crimes do the media flock to? The crimes often perpetrated by Cluster Bs.

It drives the medical field due to stress-related disorders and diseases normal people develop as a reaction to the abnormal pathology of Cluster B.

Surely pharmacology is partially driven by medications for depression and anxiety perpetrated by the no-conscience disorders of Cluster B.

It generates new products every year to track, expose and identify Cluster Bs who are hacking computers, sending viruses, or putting chips on phones and cars to invade others lives.

While, clearly, pathology generates jobs for many, it is still the single most destructive group of disorders that exists. And until all the major systems—judicial, legal, and mental health—get on the same page about who does that, we will be stuck in this maze of pathologicals flying under the radar, undiagnosed, unrealized, and wreaking havoc in millions of people’s lives.

Wake up Law Enforcement, Positive Psychology Therapists, Judges, Custody Evaluators, Mediators, DV Batterer Intervention, and Lawyers! Who Does That?

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information.)

 © www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

Part of our goal at The Institute is not only to help survivors heal from the aftermath of a PLR (Pathological Love Relationship), but also to help prevent future relationships with pathologicals. In prevention, The Institute helps survivors to spot overt, glaring pathology. The overt pathology is easy to identify:

• Few would argue that mothers who drown their children, like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates, aren’t terribly disordered.
• Those who shoot people they don’t know, or commit a drive-by shooting clearly have pathological motives.
• Those who sexually abuse children and then hide the sexual offenders, like the Catholic Church has done, are the face of evil.
• Horrendous hate crimes that torture hundreds, thousands, or millions of people— like war crimes or the Holocaust—illustrate that severe pathology is behind the motivation of that type of hate.
• The deranged that break into homes to beat the elderly for money, like Phillip Garrett who terrorized those in assisted living facilities, have a notable bent of sheer brutality.
• Terrorists who commit the taking of hostages and inflict psychological torture, like the infamous Stockholm Bank Robbery (which resulted in the term Stockholm Syndrome), are identifiable as probable psychopaths.
• The rapist who preys on the vulnerable, or the rapist who rapes a woman in front of her own husband, is overtly vile.
• The violent anti-socials that are frequent gang members or thugs, like James Manley, who murdered my father.
• Serial killers, like Ted Bundy, who raped and killed at least 36 women, leave no doubt that he was the worst of the worst psychopaths.
• The ordering of killing a pregnant woman and her unborn child, like schizophrenic psychopath Charlie Manson did, makes our blood run cold.
• Cult leaders who usher hundreds to death, like Jim Jones, remind us of the power and persuasion of pathology.
• Chronic re-offending domestic violence abusers, like O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson, convince us that all DV is not treatable, and some abuser brutality increases with each crime, and are obviously disordered.
• The babbling grandiosity of narcissism, as seen in Charlie Sheen, reminds us that even the rich and famous carry and display their pack of pathology for all to see.
• White-collar scam artists, like Bernie Madoff, who rob millions of dollars from thousands of people, remind us that not all pathology is physically violent—some do it with panache and a tie on.

These forms of pathology are recognizable by most of society. Many would agree that these people are horribly disordered and probably dangerous for life.

But being able to spot pathology in less overt and even frequently hidden acts, yet equally as damaging, is where most of us fall short—including professionals in the criminal justice and mental health systems. It’s also where survivors of PLRs are likely to trip up yet again, since the types of behaviors pathologicals perpetrate can vary, causing confusion to the unsuspecting, highly tolerant, and emotionally understanding survivor.

Low empathy is at the core of a cluster of pathological disorders that correlates to inevitable harm when it crosses the paths of others. Low empathy has its roots in reduced conscience, remorse, and guilt. Without empathy, pathologicals find pleasure in harming others. While they might not cackle aloud in public when a dog is hit by a car, they nonetheless live in the shadows of enjoying the physical or emotional destruction of others.

Sadistic? Absolutely! But often it’s sadistic behind closed doors, or as sheltered reputations behind fictitious names, or online identities.

Why aren’t these pathological disorders better identified? That is the million-dollar question, since the main judicial, social, and mental systems of our society deal with this particular cluster of pathological disorders day in and day out. Why are they actively dealing with Cluster Bs?  Because these disorders represent the majority of white- and blue-collar crimes that cataclysmically smash into our lives, even if they are never identified as crimes. The reason society has not cohesively named this cluster of disorders as the center of their focus is because each system has its own view of the behaviors associated with the pathological’s disorders:

• Law enforcement calls them the bad guys (if they are even caught).
• Mental health systems call them patients.
• Domestic violence organizations call them abusers.
• Batterer intervention programs call them perpetrators.
• Criminal defense attorneys call them clients.
• Sexual assault centers call them rapists or sexual offenders.
• Financial institutions call them swindlers.
• The online world calls them trolls.
• Victims call them predators.
• Children and adolescents call them cyberbullies.
• The swindled call them con artists.
• The judicial system calls them criminals (or not, if they are never identified).
• Churches call them evil or unredeemed.
• Website owners call them hackers.
• The defamed call them cyberstalkers.
• Parents call them pedophiles.
• Jails call them inmates.
• Prisons call them high-security risks.
• The FBI calls them targets and terrorists.

As each system deals with its own view of a specific act the person has done, we miss the wider category that these people fall under. We miss the bigger implication of what goes with that category. We miss the fact that those with these pathological disorders have largely low, or no, positive treatment outcomes. Each system dealing with a behavior only sees the person through their own behavioral specialty. Yet we are all talking about the same disorders in action.

When we ask “Who does that?” we immediately become brothers and sisters in the same battle against pathology. We begin to see the who within the act, the disorder that perpetrates these same acts, behaviors, or crimes. It’s the same subset of disorders that have different focuses, but the same outcome: inevitable harm.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know.  The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships.  Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions.  See the website for more information.)

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