Search Results for: He is what he does

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

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

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

(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.)

 © www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

Last week I wrote about this natural ability that pathologicals have when it comes to reading human behavior and about how the child’s emotional developmental deficits actually spur him toward compensation in these areas by trying to hide his lack of a full emotional spectrum, lack of insight, and lack of ability to sustain emotional and behavioral changes. He learns to compensate by studying human behavior and ‘mimicking and parroting’ when he wants to fit in. But what about when he DOESN’T want to fit in, or when he becomes an adult?

Erik Erikson studied human development and his theory is that there are ‘emotional tasks’ that must occur before the next leap of growth can occur. These are building blocks of the emotional structure of development.

The first task as a baby is to bond. After that come the tasks, in this order, that must occur to be a healthy and normal person:

• Trust builds on bonding
• Autonomy (or independence) builds on trust
• Initiative (or leadership) builds on autonomy
  Industry (or pride in one’s accomplishments) builds on initiative
• Identity builds on industry, etc.

There are more developmental aspects all the way through old age. But these give us something to look at—all the aspects of emotional development that must occur (and did not occur somewhere along the way) for the pathological—Bonding, Trust, Autonomy, Initiative, Industry, Identity. When these building blocks of character were being laid (and mislaid), holes in the soul developed around those building blocks that were not laid.

Instead of learning trust, they learn to con other people’s trust and yet mistrust everyone. Instead of learning independence they are either horribly dependent and parasitic, or aloof and not the least bit interdependent within relationships. Instead of initiative (or leadership), they feel either inadequate or superior and con others, and the only place they lead others is astray. Instead of industry and finding meaning and pride in their accomplishments, they see their accomplishments as being highly connected to the ability to superbly manipulate and con others. Their pride about their abilities is more related to the ability to manipulate than it is to any other abilities they may have.

Instead of a healthy self-identity, their identity is highly connected now to their choices. Since many of them are delinquent and deviant, their identity is not connected with something positive but, rather, with their darkest character flaws.

All of these developmental tasks that should be completed—bonding, trust, independence, initiative, industry, and identity—are the building blocks established by the teen years. We can easily see how and why their adult years are filled with problems and anguishing relationships. If you don’t bond, trust, have interdependent relationships, your idea of accomplishment is conning, and your identity is linked to your bad character—THERE ISN’T MUCH TO WORK WITH!

Pathologicals have difficult adulthoods AND they make everyone else’s adulthoods difficult too. The child prodigy studying what works with humans is largely squeezed down to ‘WIIFM’ (What’s In It For Me). Studying others to fit in gets replaced by the adult skills of conning, manipulation, lying, embezzlement, and other ‘honed arts’. By the time the emotional development of the teen years have hit, the bonding, trust, interdependence, accomplishments and identity are long tweaked into pathological dynamics. Oddly, the personality ‘age’ stops growing. Rarely do pathologicals emotionally grow to be older than 14 but the behaviors get tweaked up a notch to adult skills of adept conning.

What was once a science project of “Why am I different” as a child becomes “Cool, I’ll use it against them” as an adult. The child prodigy who studied human behavior so well is the relationship idiot-savant. It just takes women a while to figure out that what he espouses in the beginning isn’t really what he’s all about. What didn’t happen in his emotional development will ruin their relationship and her, personally.

(**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

People often want to know why people with personality disorders (pathology) often have the worst and most inappropriate behavior, indicating they are clueless about others’ feelings, AND YET they are often enabled with the uncanny ability to so know human behavior they con even the most knowledgeable of people.

This ‘savant-like’ experience with human behavior reminds me of the Scripture that says, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Cluster B Personality Disorders no doubt rack up their miles in huge emotional and behavioral deficits. (The Lord taketh away.) I’ve discussed this in length in the newsletter and books—that what causes a personality disorder has to do with what DOESN’T happen when the personality is forming from birth through 8 years of age.

Deficits = Disorders

Not getting what a child needs WHEN they need it can be the beginning of a personality disorder. Normal childhood development does not include severe neglect, being raised by a pathological and learning to see the world through the eyes of a narcissist or sociopath, or being abused.

Whatever the cause of the personality disorder (exposed to pathological parents or being born with neurological abnormalities), let’s consider the ‘budding pathological child’ for a moment. Let’s put out of our mind just for now the disordered adult he grows into. Here we have, let’s say, a 9- or 10-year-old child who, through no fault of his own, has a personality disorder.  That means that the child does not have the full spectrum of human emotion, has blunted feelings of love/compassion/guilt/remorse, has impulse control problems, has difficulty knowing right from wrong, is not motivated by punishment when he does wrong, and is tantalized by risk and reward.

His friend across the street is the same age and not personality disordered. His friend has a full spectrum of emotions, feels bonded, love, compassion, is motivated by punishment (and so feels guilt and remorse), has impulse control over many of his actions, and understands the basic concepts of right and wrong. Although he likes risk and reward, he has enough impulse control not to be led consistently by pleasure.

One day Pathology Pete is over at Normal Ned’s. While playing in the house the boys knock over a vase and break it. Ned knows the story behind the vase: It’s the only
thing his mother has left from her mother. His mother got it as a gift on the deathbed of her mother. She always prized it and felt her mother’s presence when she looked at it.  Ned’s mother begins to cry and Ned has empathetic feelings that his mother is sad and experiencing loss because of the broken vase. Ned goes to her and tries to comfort her while Pete looks on.

Pete has NO idea (a) why Ned feels bad that the vase was broken (so what, go get another one), (b) why Ned would go to his mother and hug her and pat her (why does she need that?), (c) why Ned offers to replace the vase, and (d) why it was even wrong to be playing with a ball by the vase in the first place.

Pete stands off to the side watching this ‘unusual’ reaction and interaction between Ned and his mother.  In comes Ned’s brother, Normal Nathan. He sees his mother crying and also goes to her to comfort her. Pete wonders, “Why? He didn’t even break the vase.”

Pete stands awkwardly off to the side watching what is like a sci-fi movie to him—all these feelings, actions, behaviors, and motivations he doesn’t understand. Over and over throughout his childhood and into his adolescence this incident is repeated again and again.

Pete witnesses people having feelings he doesn’t experience. They have emotional reactions that he doesn’t understand. They have reactions, behaviors, and motivations that are foreign to him. Pete’s bright—he is a smart child and can’t figure out why he doesn’t ‘know’ what other kids know—how to act, how not to act, how to feel certain emotions and when and why. A pathological child figures out early that they are ‘different’—they just don’t know why.

Having a need to appear normal and fitting in like everyone else does—he watches. When someone cries, this is what other people do in response to the crying ___________ (behavior). The person who made the other one cry has a facial expression like this ___________ (“I’m sorry” look). People appear to cry for these reasons: _____________________ (motivations/consequences).

Children who grow to be pathological are little psychologists by the time they are teens. They have so watched other people that they understand (on a manipulative level) what makes people hurt and how to get out of consequences for having hurt others. These little child prodigies who have studied human behavior since they were 5 or 6 years old, are emotional savants.

On one hand, they do NOT have the full spectrum of emotions and so are sort of emotionally retarded towards the experience of others. On the other hand, they are so bright and have honed in on studying others so well that they have learned how to develop a mask for any occasion. This is the Lord giveth part—they have such a knack for paying attention to others’ reactions that they learn to mimic other people’s facial gestures and behaviors and parrot the language and lingo of what others say.

This is why they are a mirror image of you in a relationship. They watch and listen and mimic and parrot back all you say and do. This is why they feel like a soul mate—because you are essentially looking at a mask of yourself.

These skills are then polished over years of use¬—using them on his mother, sister, Sunday school teacher, girls at school, bosses… anywhere he can tweak the manipulation and look normal enough to fit in.

What began as a simple adaptation in childhood—learning to understand how normal people relate and behave—turns into manipulation later. At some point, the child/teen must come to the conclusion that he DOESN’T have these feelings, limits, boundaries, and experiences. “What the hell… just gotta go with it” is his normal reaction.

The adaptation is no longer simply to understand normal people and compare and contrast them to his own experiences. It is now a survival behavior that helps him to get what he wants since his deficits will now give him the skills that others have to get the same thing legitimately.

Pathology Pete simply produces more masks—one for every emotion he doesn’t sincerely have.

(**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

Many of the Institute’s clients want to know ‘when will this ever end?’ — ‘this’ being the aggravation from a pathological in the form of:
•    Constantly harassing you
•    Stalking
•    Stirring the pot
•    Making up allegations against you
•    Not paying what they are suppose to
•    Going back to court for the 1,000th time
•    Turning others against you
•    Turning you in to Social Services for child abuse
•    Lying to the judge
•    Paying others off to lie for him in court
•    Gaslighting you or others
•    Making others dread him, you, or your situation

The truth is, this IS what pathology does. If court evaluators, child monitors, judges, attorneys, batterer intervention counselors, anger management therapists—all those working in the field— knew that this IS what pathology does, it would heighten everyone’s awareness about pathology. Instead, euphemisms are used for this kind of behavior:
•    Drama cases
•    Trauma cases
•    Dead beat dads
•    High conflict divorces
•    Jerks
•    Snakes in Suits
•    Con artists
•    Custody Battles
•    No resolution cases

Behaviors related to making allegations, lying in court, hiring others to lie, hiring others to stalk or spy on you, putting spyware in your house/car/computer, and harassing social services/child services workers eat up an enormous amount of court hours and are all behaviors ASSOCIATED with pathology—not drama, not trauma, not dead beats, not conflict, not jerks, not snakes and not cons, but Cluster B personality disorders such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Anti-Social and the other Low/No Conscience disorders such as Socio/Psychopaths.

We are continually flooded with inquiries about ‘how to’ survive until ‘this all stops’. Women aren’t finding help with ‘how to’ survive, ‘how to’ appropriately communicate with him to have the least ‘aftermath,’ what to do when he alleges things to child services, judges, and courts, how to document well for court now and in the future, what dissuades them, how to angle the situation so he exposes his true self/disorder/motives, how to take care of herself until some of this slows down, stops, or a miracle occurs.

Pathology is exhausting. This isn’t something ‘unique’ to your case. It’s standard in cases with pathologicals. You didn’t cause it — it’s the disorder just being what it is. Too, some of the things that are done in ‘normal’ cases aren’t in the best interest of your case simply because using what ‘works’ with normal people, NEVER works in pathology.

(**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).

Is it any wonder that so many religions or cultures celebrate the ‘Light’?

Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwansaa and Hindu Diwali – all Holiday celebrations of Light. Whether it is Christ as the Light of the world, the miracle of the lighted lamp in Hanukkah, the seven candles of the principles of Kwansaa, or the celebration of good triumphing evil in the festival of Light in Diwali—there is something about Light that illuminates our path. (Yes, we’re past the Holiday season, but bear with me here…)

Cultures too – Sweden, with St. Lucia Day following the longest day of the year, is lit ablaze in candles, St. Marten’s Day in Holland with lighted lanterns, and Loi Krathlong in Thailand with wishes tied to candles and set afloat in the sea. The issue of Light as a deep metaphor for guidance seems to be universal.

Any particular religion does not have a corner on Light, yet all believe they do. It is clear that despite each religious belief, there are other beliefs that see Light as applicable to theirs. And so the issue of Light is universal as it represents that which is ablaze with humanity and hope.

Not long ago, an Institute team member passed away. She was a pagan and I am a Christian. She asked me “Why are you friends with me? I am pagan, you Christian.” I asked her, ‘Why are you friends with me? I am Christian, you pagan.” And she would roar with laughter at what she thought was ironic, although I did not.

In her all-too-short life, she used her stealth computer skills to locate pedophiles online and turn them in to the FBI. Her life was often threatened in that line of work. She used her feminism to help rescue women from domestic violence and sex trafficking. She used her compassion to house the homeless and emotionally burdened who could not find housing. And in her last years, she used her big heart to drive cross country transporting animals to no kill facilities—for free.

The purpose of Light is to clear the darkness. Most of the time, that darkness is metaphoric. We bring what we care about to the task. We light the way for others to find the lighted path out of homelessness, addiction, sex trafficking, or lives stuck in puppy mills and dog fighting. We bring what we have—our own empathy and humanity—to help the abused, teach the illiterate to read, or comfort the dying. We are the hands and feet of Light. Not a metaphoric Light but a literal one. What illuminates someone’s darkness is the breath of humanity, eye ball to eye ball, caring, reaching out, and touching. We don’t bring a literal candle to feed the homeless, we are the candle.

Being the candle makes us a Light Bearer—lighting the path for someone who is searching, expelling the darkness. No wonder God proclaimed ‘Let there be Light’! It was His call to every person to be Light to expel darkness.

I wrote my friend’s eulogy in which I declared her a Light Bearer—to the victims of pedophiles, to the victims of domestic violence, to the victims of sex trafficking, to victims of homelessness and emotional woundedness, and to the furry victims. She used her Light to expel darkness, to illuminate the way out for countless. My eulogy was encountered by various religious as ‘nice’ but it did not meet the criteria of their religion of ‘The Light’ who then attempted to discount the lives that were saved because her light was perceived to not be their light.

She answered the call when God said “Let there be Light” and she said “I will be it!” and she was.

The universal call to be Light Bearers is applied to each us. It is not just Jews or Hindus called to bring their celebrations of Light to the world, but all of us. And if my celebration of Light is different than yours, so be it. Just be it!

As we round out another year, I hope you are finding that your own recovery is a form of Light—a path out of darkness that has been illuminated by what you have dedicated yourself to—recovery. Strong recovery always produces the next generation of Light Bearers—in your own traditions and beliefs that dispel someone else’s darkness just by giving what you have—the strength of your recovery. You might think “I am still so broken” but what has grown in you through recovery is more than the person you encounter may have. The knowledge of your experience is a Light. The books you read, the videos you watch, the websites you know—all Light.

Each of us is a Light Bearer and can be the very thing that dispels the darkness for another. Before you discount how far you have come, it is not yours to redirect the proclamation of ‘Let there be Light’!

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
(I know you are singing it….)

I’m gonna take this light around the world and I’m gonna let it shine.
I’m gonna take this light around the world and I’m gonna let it shine.
I’m gonna take this light around the world and I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

I won’t let anyone blow it out, I’m gonna let it shine.
I won’t let anyone blow it out, I’m gonna let it shine.
I won’t let anyone blow it out, I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Songwriters: SCOTT, STEPHEN H. / DP,

Go light someone’s path in the coming year, starting with your own!

One of the most frequently asked questions in pathological relationship coaching is “Did I make the person behave like this?” The clients often believe they bring out ‘the worst in him’ or so the pathological wants them to believe. The pathological likes to label his own acting out or cheating or other inappropriate behavior as someone else’s fault. This is called projecting. One of the characteristics of a number of permanent personality disorders is the trait that they don’t take responsibility for their own behavior. They have a victim mentality and blame others and the world for their short comings and ultimately, their bad behavior. Normal people ‘own’ their own behavior; pathological people project it onto others.

By the time the client comes to coaching from the aftermath of effects from the relationship, they believe the relationship, its problems and its demise were all her fault. She believes the pathological’s propaganda and has a lot of remorse, guilt, and self depreciating thoughts about herself that ‘if she only acted differently then so would he’ and the relationship would be on better footing.

Let me ask you this….”If he had a brain tumor would you feel responsible that his body produced a brain tumor? Would that be your responsibility?”  I doubt it. People do feel bad that someone else got a brain tumor but they don’t feel ‘responsible’ or ‘to blame’ because someone got a brain tumor.

The often shocking aspects of Cluster B personality disorders are that what is driving their behavior is not a brain tumor but it is a brain disorder—in many, many forms. We expect that a brain disorder would be ‘noticeable’ to others. It is–in time. By the time the relationship ends, you DO know that there are behavior problems you just don’t know how, why or where they are generated.  Cluster B personality disorders carry with them an astounding array of problems stemming from the brain and their own neurology that are driving their impulsive, out of control behavior and distorted thinking processes.

Even a decade ago, we didn’t have the information we have today about the wide reaching neuro problems associated with pathology and personality disorders. While for many years we may have ‘suspected’ a very physical reason for the behavior–the pathological lying, spending, cheating, violence, addiction, and other behavioral problems, we didn’t have the concrete knowledge that is now generated from neuroscience, neurobiology, brain imaging, and other brain studies.

Here is a tiny snippet of the kinds of information being generated about brain dysfunction in personality disorders. This in no way covers all of it–but it gives us some place to begin looking at it as being as much a medical brain syndrome as it is a psychological syndrome.

• Genomics–molecular building blocks of DNA affected by pathology.
• Proteomics–location, interactions, structure, and proteins affected by pathology.
• Neurotransmitters affected.
• Hippocampus–part of the brain that is related to impulsivity affected by pathology.
• Amygdala–part of the brain that is related to impulsivity affected by pathology.
• Neuroinformatics -A library data base about thousands of different brains and what is unusual about them including pathological brains.
• Cellular signaling show involvement of genetics in pathology.
• Low levels of brain enzymes are related to violence.
• Genes on certain chromosomes create schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. New research wants to find out if it contributes to pathology.
• Genetic vulnerability causes significant differences in neurological development in children with psychopathic tendencies.
• The number of copies of different genes has already been linked with a variety of medical conditions and the expectation is that these copy number variants will be very significant in personality disorder research.
• A complex array of varying genes underlies the many different outward manifestations of personality disorders which can be seen in early childhood despite a loving and stress free environment.
• Stressful/abusive environments can push a milder case of personality disorders into a full blown active personality disorder.
• Phenotype images the size and shapes of brain organs related to personality disorders.
• Serotonin reception 5-HT plays a role in controlling offensive aggression (or not!)
• The lack of transporter molecules predisposes people towards impulsivity, emotional instability, etc.
• Polygeny (a single trait that can affect many genes) seems to underlie personality disorders.
• Those who metabolize dopamine faster are at higher risks for anti social behavior.
• An enzyme that helps break down dopamine and serotonin are linked to impulsive and aggressive behavior, substance abuse, criminal behavior.
• MAO-A gene is linked to Cluster B personality disorders.
• Neural circuitry problems are related to trouble with reinforcement learning so they are not likely to learn from punishment, also related to impulse violence.
• TPH brain enzyme is related to behavioral problems associated with anti social behavior.
• MRI imaging shows that areas of the brain related to excitability respond differently in psychopaths.
• Certain words cause psychopaths to respond differently than normal people (blood, sewer, hell, rape, etc.)
• Some parts of the brain show higher activity in psychopaths, some areas lower activity in psychopaths.
• Weak limbic regions of the brain in psychopaths cause them to grapple with emotional language.
• Corpus callosum is different in psychopaths so they process information between brain hemispheres differently which effects interpersonal skills and low reactions to stress, high reactions to aggression and unregulated behavior.
• The amygdala in psychopaths have less reaction to fight-flight responses, causes them to feel restless, spurring them on to raising hell just for the excitement value.
• Slower neural reactions are related to their lack of fear which is also genetically based.
• Lack of fear throttles the development of the conscience.
• Orbito-frontal portion of the brain causes psychopaths to have trouble organizing their behavior, reduces their ability to control their impulses and the ability to learn from punishment.
• Difficulty with abstract meanings like the word ‘justice’ generated from right brain quadrant, also problems with nonverbal cues related to emotions.
• Dorso-lateral Prefrontal Cortex affects some personality disorders ability to think logically and rationally.
• The anterior cingulate cortex affects some personality disorders ability to focus on something they don’t wish to hear thus being able to block what they want to hear, it also produces (or doesn’t) the feelings of empathy.
• The limbic system which is affected in some personality disorders negatively influences their ability to regulate their emotions through emotional reasoning.
• The hippocampus is affected in some personality disorders which negatively impacts the emotional response system.
• Hyperactive amygdalae cause intense and slowly subsiding emotions when they suffer even just a minor irritation. This can cause an overreaction to a minor constructive criticism.
• Lowered serotonin levels in the brain affects increased impulsivity.
• Smaller size of right parietal lobe in some personality disorders.

Yeah, I know–that’s a lot of science to wade through but maybe you get the point…you didn’t break him and you can’t fix him. This fascinating decade of science has answered so many questions for so many—people who can let go of the guilt and fantasy that what’s wrong with him is merely ‘willful behavior’ or ‘a bad attitude’ or ‘needs more counseling.’  Personality disordered brains are different in their genetic make up, in their chemistry, their circuitry, regional brain development, their neurobiology and the list goes on. In fact, we are realizing so much of the brain is affected—in borderline personality disorder, in anti-social, in psychopathy–so much of Cluster B is traced now to significant brain impairment. (For more information read the book ‘Evil Genes’ available on our magazine).

For many years I have been teaching the Three Inabilities related to pathology: The inability to grow to any great emotional depth, the inability to consistently sustain positive change, and the inability to develop insight about how their behavior affects others. I developed these inabilities from 20 years in the field of providing services to the personality disordered. Although I suspected there was hard-wiring and hard science behind it, it wasn’t until recently that I was finally able to find out why the Three Inabilities are actually correct and why they don’t sustain positive change. It’s not because they want to screw with your head….it’s because of their head.

You didn’t produce anything–you’re not that influential to set up his genetic patterns.  Sorry–you’re not strong enough to ‘will’ his amygdala to change. Bad news here–you are not gonna ‘love’ his limbic region into correct functioning. ‘And hate to break the news that all the ‘Law of Attraction’ books aren’t gonna get his brain chemistry to be normal.

And you might as well cancel the relationship counseling because being tolerant it isn’t gonna change the size and function of various brain regions. If you stopped nagging or tried the relationship ‘just one more time’ it isn’t going to alter his brain enzymes and neurotransmitters.  Even Batterer Intervention groups aren’t gonna change his corpus callosum and make it less aggressive.

He doesn’t have a brain tumor that you are responsible for ‘giving him.’ He does have a brain disorder and you aren’t responsible for that either–how his brain did and did not form. In the medical world, we seem to accept some of the disorders much more easily like Cystic Fibrosis or Mental Retardation–of course, you can often tell by looking at the person that something is wrong. But even in pathology, that too becomes evident…in time but not through external medical conditions but through relationships. And while it is odd, where we DO find the symptoms of psycho-pathology related to brain dysfunction is right in the middle of your relationship.

From Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day people relapse and go back into relationships more than any other time of the year. Why? So many great holidays for faking it! Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day… then PHOOEY! You’re out! Why not be out now, stay out and save face? You’re not fooling anyone … not yourself, them, or your family and friends.

Here’s a secret: Even if you go back, you’re still alone. You’ve been alone the entire time because, by nature of their disorder, they can’t be there for you. So you’re alone—now, during the holidays, or with them. With them, you have more drama, damage and danger—your choice.

• The holiday season is an extremely stressful time. It’s a time when it is more likely for:

• Domestic violence to occur or recur

• Dysfunctional families to be even MORE dysfunctional

• Pathologicals to be overt, blatant, and to target your joy and ruin your holidays

• Former pathological partners to magically reappear and try to hook you back in

• People to eat, drink, and spend too much

• People to not get enough rest

• People to feel pressured to “be in a relationship” and accept dates or stay with dangerous persons “just until the holidays are over”

It’s an idealistic time when people have more depression and anxiety than at any other time of the year because they think their lives should be like the picture postcards and old movies we see this time of year. Depression creeps in, anxiety increases, and to cope, they eat/drink/spend/date in ways they normally would not. But you can’t make a “picture postcard memory” with a psychopath!

Those with the super trait of “sentimentality” will focus on the past when they had that one perfect Christmas with the pathological.  The other drunken, absent, or abusive 14 Christmases are forgotten, forgiven or overlooked. But what IS focused on is that one year when it was nice and the pit-bull stronghold on the hope it will be this way again.

But we know that pathology is permanent. The bad 14 years are a much better and more realistic presentation of what pathology is like during the holidays than the one fluke of a year he held it together. Pathology is very stressful to experience under any circumstances. Add to it the expectations for a pathological to be different (i.e., act appropriately) this time of year, and the pathological’s and everyone else’s stress is then through the roof. Sometimes even our hope can be “pathological” when it is focused on something that cannot and will not change.

The glittering fantasy that resembles your Christmas tree lights places not only you in the path of misery, but all those you plan to spend Christmas with—your family, friends, kids and pets.  It is much kinder to unplug your glittering fantasy and tell yourself the truth of what will happen if you expect a serene and joyful time with a pathological than it is to drag others through your fantasy.

Here’s a mantra to say out loud to yourself: “I’m pretending that staying/going back with a psychopath will make my holidays better.”  Pretty ridiculous thought, isn’t it? Something happens when you say the REAL thing out loud. It takes all the romanticizing and fantasy out of the thought and smacks a little reality in your face.

“I want to be with a psychopath for the holiday.”  Say that three times to yourself out loud …  NO!! That’s not what you want. That’s what you got LAST YEAR. You want to be with a nice man/woman/person for the holidays. And, as you VERY well know, they’re not it.

“I want to share my special holidays with my special psychopath.”  ???  Nope. That’s not it either. But that’s what’s going to happen unless you buck up and start telling yourself the truth. It’s OKAY to be by yourself for the holidays. It sure beats pathology as a gift.

Peace, gratitude, and all the spiritual reflections that are supposed to happen during this time of year cannot be found in pathology. They were not created there but they do end there. If your goal for the holidays is to find some peace, joy, hope and love, don’t spend it where and with whom it cannot be found. After the holidays, you will be a lot happier for not having attempted, for the millionth time, to find happiness where it does not exist.

Here’s a real gift for you—some tips!

TIPS FOR A HAPPIER/HEALTHIER HOLIDAY

• Stop idealizing—you are who you are, it is what it is, pathology is pathology. If your family isn’t perfect, they certainly WON’T be during the season. Accept yourself and others for who they are. This includes accepting that pathology cannot and will not be different during the holidays simply because you want the Christmas fantasy.  “Emotional suffering is created in the moment when we don’t accept what ‘is.’” (~Eckart Tolle)

• Don’t feel pressured to eat more/spend more/drink more than you want to. Remind yourself you have choices and that the word “No” is a complete sentence. Don’t be held hostage to exhausting holiday schedules.

• Take quiet time during the season or you’ll get run over by the sheer speed of the holidays. Pencil it in like you would any other appointment. Buy your own present now—some bubble bath—and spend quality time with some bubbles by yourself. Light a candle, find five things to be grateful for, repeat often.

• Take same-sex friends to parties and don’t feel OBLIGATED to go with someone you don’t want to go with. People end up in the worst binds going to parties with others, and get stuck in relationships they don’t want to be in, because they feel obligated. Find a few other friends who are willing to be “party partners” during the holidays.

• Give to others in need. The best way to get out of your own problems is to give to others whose problems exceed yours. Give to a charity, feed the homeless, buy toys for kids.

• Find time for spiritual reflection. It’s the only way to really feel the season and reconnect. Go to a church service, pray, meditate, reflect.

• Plant joy—in yourself, in your life and in others. What you invest in your own recovery is also reaped in the lives of those closest to you.

• Pick ONE growth-oriented issue you’d like to focus on next year for your own growth on January 1.  It creates hope when you know you have a plan to move forward and out of your current emotional condition. Invest in your opportunity to grow past the aftermath of this pathological love relationship.

Happy Holidays from The Institute!

Last week we began talking about the difference between fear and anxiety. Real fear draws on your animalistic instincts and causes a sincere fight-or-flight reaction. Anxiety causes you to worry about the situation, but you aren’t likely to bolt.

Anxiety can develop as a counterfeit trait to the true fear you never reacted to.

Gavin de Becker is a Danger Analyst and, in his classic book The Gift of Fear, has much to say about the preventability of most bad outcomes. He says there is, “Always, always, always a pre-incident indicator (a PIN) that women ignore.”

In my books, I call them red flags—the wisdom of your body that recognizes primitive fear and sends a signal to your body to react.  In that split second, you can run or you can rename it. Renaming it causes your body to react less and less to the messages it does send. Not one woman in the 25+ years I’ve been doing this has said there wasn’t an initial red flag that she CONSCIOUSLY ignored. Almost 100% of the time, the early red flags end up being exactly why the relationship ended. You could have saved yourself 3, 5, 15, 20 or more years of a dangerous relationship by listening to your body instead of your head!

Let’s go back to more stories by Gavin…

Dorothy says her ex-boyfriend, Kevan, was a fun guy with a master’s degree and a CPA. “He was charming, and it never let up,” Dorothy says. “He was willing to do whatever I wanted to do.”

Eventually, Dorothy began to feel that something wasn’t right. “He would buy me a present or buy me a beautiful bouquet of roses and have it sitting on the table and that was very nice, but that night or the next day he wanted me to be with him all the time.”

As Dorothy shares her story, Gavin points out some of the warning signs, starting with Kevan’s charm. “A great thing is to think of charm as a verb. It’s something you do. ‘I will charm [Dorothy] now.’ It’s not a feature of [one’s] personality,” Gavin says.

What happened next stunned Dorothy. “I was out visiting my sister in California, and he was calling me, calling me, and he asked me to marry him over the cell phone,” she says.  “I thought, you’re kidding. I’ve always said I would never get married again. And I said, ‘That’s the last time I’m going to talk about it.’”

After rejecting Kevan and coming home, Dorothy says he remained persistent. He showed Dorothy the picture of a diamond ring he wanted to buy, and told her he wanted to buy a house. “And he had it all mapped out, how it was going to work for us,” she says.

When Kevan refused to listen when Dorothy repeatedly told him no, Gavin says it should have raised serious red flags. “Anytime someone doesn’t hear no, it means they’re trying to control you,” Gavin says. “When a man says no in this culture, it’s the end of the discussion. When a woman says no, it’s the beginning of a negotiation.”

After four and a half years and many red flags, Dorothy finally broke off her relationship with Kevan. But that wasn’t the end. “He kept calling me, calling me with repeated questions. ‘What are you doing now?’ ‘What are you going to do tonight?’” Dorothy says. “And that’s when I realized I am in trouble here.”

On the urging of her son, Dorothy got a restraining order against Kevan, which she says gave her peace of mind. “And that was a huge mistake,” she says.

One night, Dorothy was asleep in her bed when she awoke to the sound of her name being shouted. “I turned to my left shoulder, and I saw a knife [about 10 inches long]. I could see the reflection of my TV in the blade. Then I saw that he had cutoff surgical gloves, and that was scary,” Dorothy says. “I put the covers right over my head and curled into a fetal position and started praying. He said to me, ‘Are you scared?’”

Rather than panic, Dorothy says she got out of bed, stood up and told Kevan he was leaving. As she walked calmly out the door, he followed her to the parking lot. “So I said, ‘You’re leaving now,’” she says. “He turned, went down the street, and I didn’t see him again.” Dorothy immediately called 9-1-1, and police later arrested Kevan. He was convicted and is serving a four-year prison sentence.

Gavin says when Dorothy stood up, spoke firmly to Kevan and walked out, she was accepting a gift of power by acting on her instincts. “The fetal position is not a position of power, but you came out of it with a great position of power. And the pure power to say to him, ‘You’re leaving now,’ is fantastic,” he says. “Of all the details in that story, the one that stayed with me the most is that you saw the reflection on your little television set on the bedside table in the knife. And what that told me was you are on, you are in the on position. You were seeing every single detail and acting on it.”

Just like ignoring your intuition, Gavin says the way women are conditioned to be nice all the time can lead them into dangerous situations. “The fact is that men, at core, are afraid that women will laugh at them. And women, at core, are afraid that men will kill them.”

This conditioning and fear, Gavin says, leads many women to try to be nice to people whose very presence makes them fearful and uncomfortable. They often believe that being mean increases risk, he says, when, in fact, the opposite is true.

“It’s when you’re nice that you open up and give information, that you engage with
someone you don’t want to talk to,” he says. “I have not heard of one case in my entire career where someone was raped or murdered because they weren’t nice. In other words, that’s not the thing that motivates rape and murder. But I’ve heard of many, many cases where someone was victimized because they were open to the continued conversation with someone they didn’t feel good about talking to.”

In my own book, How to Spot a Dangerous Man, I talk about cultural conditioning and how women feel they should be polite and at least go out with a man once. If you’re saying yes to a psychopath, once is all he needs.

Women also have HORRID and NONEXISTENT breakup skills. What in the world is more important than having good breakup skills? You are likely to date a dozen men in your lifetime and not likely to marry but one of them. What are you gonna do with the rest of them?

In this culture, with all the books on how to attract men, very little is written about how to break up. Women spend more time on a Glamour Shots picture of themselves for a dating site than learning how strong boundaries can protect them. A woman who is attracted to the bad boys doesn’t need the book, “How to Attract a Man”—she’s already doing it. But how can she get rid of the predator she DID attract? (See my book, Women Who Love Psychopaths.)

Women who buy our books, do phone counseling, come to 1:1’s and retreats, all have a primary motive: “Help me to never do this again.” While you definitely need insight about your own Super Traits that have positioned you in the line of fire with a psychopath, you also need most the ability to reconnect with your internal safety signal. Everything in the world we can teach you will not keep you safe if you ignore your body. Our cognitive information cannot save you the way your body can. That’s the bottom line. This is something you have to do for yourself.

This issue, of real fear vs. mere anxiety, is of utmost importance. It has really struck me that we may have missed something in our discussion about PTSD and its relationship to fight or flight reactions. Gavin helps us to see that fear happens in the moment—it’s an entire body sensation—the flash of fear followed by the intense adrenaline and fight or flight. The intensity of the body’s reactions usually COMPELS people into fight or flight.

With PTSD, I see how we have lumped more minor reactive reactions, like PTSD-induced fight or flight, with the real in-the-moment reactions of fear. I see them as different now. If the woman is THAT afraid of him and compelled by real fear as opposed to worry, (“He might harm me in the future, but he isn’t mad right now and not going to hurt me this second.”), she wouldn’t be with him because her animalistic reaction would be to flee.

Real fear IN THE MOMENT demands action. Our own ability to tolerate what he is doing suggests it’s not TRUE survival fear. This is the difference between animalistic/survival fear and our common-day PTSD reactionary fear.

Sometimes our body has reactions to evil or pathology. Normal psychology should ALWAYS have a negative reaction to abnormal psychology. So your first meeting with him should have produced SOMETHING in you. It may not have been the true fear reaction that COMPELLED you to run away, but you may have gotten other kinds of thoughts or bodily reactions to be in the presence of significant abnormality and sometimes, pure evil.

Listen to your body. It is smarter than your brain.

Women who have been in pathological relationships come away from them with problems associated with fear, worry, and anxiety. This is often related to Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or what we call ‘High Harm Avoidance’—being on high alert, looking for ways they might get harmed now or in the future.

PTSD, by its own nature as a disorder, is an anxiety disorder that is preoccupied by both the past (flashbacks and intrusive thoughts of him or events) and by the future (worry about future events, trying to anticipate his behaviors, etc.). With long-term exposure to PTSD, this anxiety and worry begins to mask itself, at least in the mind, as fear. In fact, most women lump together the sensations of anxiety, worry, and fear into one feeling, and don’t differentiate between them.

Fear is helpful and safety-oriented whereas worry and anxiety are not helpful, and are related to phantom ‘possible’ events that often don’t happen. To that degree, worry and anxiety are distracting from real fear signals that could help you.

In his book, The Gift of Fear, which is now a classic on predicting harmful behavior in others, author Gavin deBecker delineates the difference between what we need fear FOR and what we DON’T need anxiety and worry for. In some ways, the ability to use fear correctly while stopping the use of anxiety and worry may do much to curtail PTSD symptoms.

deBecker, who is not a therapist but a Danger Analyst, has done what other therapists haven’t even done—nix PTSD symptoms of anxiety and worry by focusing on true fear and its necessity versus anxiety and its false meaning to us.

Freud used the term ‘fear’ (in contrast to anxiety), to refer to the reaction to real danger. Freud emphasized the difference between fear and anxiety in terms of their relation to danger:

~ Anxiety is a state characterized by the expectation of and preparation for a danger—even if it is unknown.

~ Fear implies a specific object to be feared in the here and now.

(Anxiety is: “He MIGHT harm me;” whereas, fear is: “He IS harming me—with his fist, words, actions, etc.”)

If you heard that there was a weapon proven to prevent most crimes (including picking a dangerous partner) before they happened, would you run out and buy it? World-renowned security expert, Gavin deBecker says this weapon exists but you already have it. He calls it “the gift of fear.”

The story of a woman named Kelly begins with a simple warning sign. A man offers to help carry her groceries into her apartment—and instantly, Kelly doesn’t like the sound of his voice. Kelly goes against her gut and lets him help her—and in doing so, she lets a rapist into her home.

“We get a signal prior to violence,” Gavin says. “There are pre-incident indicators— things that happen—before violence occurs.”

Gavin says that, unlike any other living creature, humans will sense danger, yet still walk right into it. He goes on to say, “You’re in a hallway waiting for an elevator late at night.  The elevator door opens, and there’s a guy inside, and he makes you afraid. You don’t know why, you don’t know what it is. And many women will stand there and look at that guy and say [to themselves], ‘Oh, I don’t want to think like that. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lets the door close in his face. I’ve got to be nice. I don’t want him to think I’m not nice.’ And so human beings will get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone they’re afraid of. There’s not another animal in nature that would even consider it.”

Gavin says that “eerie feelings” are exactly what he wants women to pay attention to. “We’re trying to analyze the warning signs,” he says, “and what I really want to teach, today and forever, is the feeling of the warning sign. All the other stuff is our explanation for the feeling—why it was this, why it was that. The feeling itself IS the warning sign.”

What happens over and over again is that women dismantle their OWN internal safety system by ignoring it. The longer they ignore it, the more ‘overrides’ it receives and this retrains the brain to ignore the fear signal. Once rewired, women are at tremendous risks of all kinds… risks of picking the wrong men, of squelching fear signals, of impending violence, shutting off alarms about potential sexual assaults, shutting down red flags about financial ripoffs, squeaking out hints about poor character in other people… and the list goes on. What is left after your whole entire safety system is dismantled? Not much.

Women, subconsciously sensing they need to have ‘something’ to fall back on, swap out true and profoundly accurate fear signals with the miserly counterfeit and highly unproductive feelings of worry and anxiety.

LADIES—WRONG FEELINGS!

Then they end up in counseling for their fourth dangerous relationship and wonder if they have a target sign on their forehead. No they don’t. They have learned to dismantle, rename, minimize, justify, or deny the fear signals they get or got in the relationship—as if their ability to ‘take it’ or ‘not be afraid’ of very dangerous behavior is some sort of win for them, as if their ability to look danger in the face and STAY means they are as tough or competitive as he is.

No—it means they have a fear signal that no longer saves them. Their barely stuttering signal means it’s been over-ridden by her. She felt it, labeled it, and released it, all the while staring eye-to-eye with what she should fear most.

Then later, another day or week passes, and she has mounting anxiety, “over what?” she wonders. She has a chronic low-grade worry, wisps of anxiety that waft through her life. She can’t put two and two together to figure out that ignoring true fear will demand to be recognized by her subconscious in some way—an illegitimate way through worry and anxiety that does nothing to save her from real danger. Her real ally (her true fear) has been squelched and banished.

When coming to us for counseling she wants us to help her ‘feel safe’ again when actually, we can’t do any of that. It’s all in her internal system as it’s always been. Her safety is inside her as is her future healing.

She will sit in the counselor’s office denying true fear and begging for relief from the mounting anxiety she is experiencing. She doesn’t trust herself, her intuition, her judgments—all she can feel is anxiety. And with good reason! True fear is her true intuition…not anxiety. But she’s already canned what can save her, and now, on some level, she must know she has nothing left that can help her feel and react.

Animals instinctively react to the danger signal—the adrenaline, flash of fear, and flood of cortisol. They don’t have internal dialogue with themselves, like, “What did that mean? Why did he say that? I don’t like that behavior—I wonder if he was abused as a child.”

An animal is trained to have a natural reaction to the fear signal—they run. You don’t see animals ‘stuck’ in abusive mating environments! In nature, as in us, we are wired with the King of Comments, which is the danger signal. When we respond to the flash of true fear, we aren’t left having a commentary with ourselves.

“The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.” ~John Schaar