Search Results for: super traits

Women tell me other therapists have diagnosed them with a variety of diagnosis which has made the women not only confused, but often MAD!  They have been diagnosed, for instance with disorders like Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder, Paranoia, and other not-so-fun labels.

We recognize that this happens a lot which is why we have instituted a therapist training program so that the therapists can understand what they are seeing in context to what you have experienced. (Therapist trainings are Nov 2010 in LA and January 2011 in FL).

To come to bat for the under-trained therapists, the reason you are being diagnosed with various disorders is because your symptoms are similar to various disorders–they are mimicking true mental health symptoms.

For instance, when your moods are swinging all over the place and you are depressed and anxious, you look Bipolar. When you are cranky, highly reactive and want vengeance you look Borderline. When you are scared about what he will do next, fear you’re being followed, or afraid he is sneaking around to see you do something so he can accuse you, you look paranoid. When you think things are happening that you can’t prove to other people, you look delusional.

The issue is, these are ALL normal reactions to what is called Coercion, Stockholm Syndrome, and your basic prisoners of war, or in other words Aftermath of Pathological Love Relationship. In THAT context, your symptoms make perfect sense! You were coerced, your mind was played with, and you felt stuck and held in a pathological relationship against your own spiritual will. You did fear that your emotional and/or physical existence was in jeopardy.  And the pathological DOES do things he never gets caught for and that you can’t prove.

In pathological relationships, women emerge with signs of PTSD, Stockholm Syndrome, and Coercion. Unfortunately, not all therapists understand the overlap between PTSD, Stockholm and Coercion–which is why you are often diagnosed ‘other things.’

The symptoms of Stockholm are:

• Perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the captor would carry out the threat.
• Perceived small kindnesses from the captor to the captive.
• Isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor.
• Perceived inability to escape.

(My note: A lot of this was also discussed in the book ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’ in which I talked about the Pathological World View and how you acquired HIS view of the world and how that entrapped you in the relationship).

In Coercion, these symptoms are:

• Isolation: Deprives individual of social support, effectively rendering her unable to resist.
• Makes individual dependent upon interrogator/captor.
• Victim then develops an intense concern with self.

(My note: This too is discussed in the ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’ book during the Honeymoon and Luring Stages of the relationship).

Monopolization of Perception: The captor fixes their attention upon immediate predicament; fosters introspection in the victim; eliminates outside competing stimuli with the captor so the victim can only focus on him, he frustrates all actions not consistent with her compliance to him.

(My note: In the mid-relationship dynamics in the book, this is talked about. Your Super Traits are very high in what we call relationship investment and cooperation which means you are highly cooperative because you get so much enjoyment out of your relationships that you will ‘bend over backwards’ to make things work. The book discusses when the mid-relationships ‘shift’ and what happens to the woman’s perspective).

Induced Debility and Exhaustion: People subjected to this type of abuse become worn out by tension, fear and continual rushing about in an effort to meet his standards. They must often avoid displays of fear, sorrow or rage, since these may result in ridicule or punishment. Rigid demands and requirements make the exhaustion and ability to resist even worse.

(My note: All the women who show up at the retreats show up in bodily exhaustion. This too is discussed in the book).

Occasional Indulgences: This provides motivation to her for compliance.

(My note: The TCI test we gave the women show that you test very high in compliance).

Devaluing the Individual: Creates in her a fear of freedom and dependence upon him; creates feelings of helplessness; develops lack of faith in her individual capabilities.

(My note: In the book, women who are doctors can’t remember how to care for themselves, women who are attorneys can’t remember how to file their own restraining order, women who are therapists can’t remember why this is sick behavior….)

When you look at it through the eyes of a mixture of PTSD, Stockholm and Coercion your symptoms make perfect sense…at least to me! While that doesn’t mean you ‘can’t’ also have Bipolar or other disorders—it’s too early to know. Very often much of the symptoms of other disorders fall by the wayside when effective and appropriate treatment is begun. Many of the women do, however, meet the criteria for PTSD. PTSD is most associated with war vets (and yes, you too lived through a war!) and trauma victims (yes, you were traumatized)! To that end, you probably do have a disorder but it is related to PTSD or other Acute Stress Disorders.

Our hope is that as we train more therapists we will help you most by making available effective and knowledgeable help for what you have lived through and stop the erroneous diagnosing so often associated with you and your symptoms.

For now though, if you cannot locate a therapist, we do offer phone sessions, telesupport groups, Retreats, and one last 1:1 Intensive Sessions with Sandra.

Be hopeful that what you live with today in symptoms may not always be as problematic as it is in your current life. There is hope and healing available!

If you use a computer you are probably aware of the ‘default settings’ that come on your computer or in various software programs on your machine. A default setting is “The controls of a computer hardware, software, device, equipment or machine which was preset by its manufacturer.”

Items on your computer that are preset are often the country you are in, the time zone, etc. There are also types of ‘presets’ you can choose yourself such as what company ISP is your home page, which printer you assign to your computer, and so on. These selections become ‘default’ settings once you have selected them. Your machine is now set to automatically defer to those choices every time the machine needs to.

But our computers are not the only things that are set on default. Just like computer ‘hardware’ or ‘software’ can come ‘preset’ by its manufacturer, so can our own internal computer—our body and psyche. Our hardware is our genetics that come hardwired into the development of our brain (and body, for that matter). This can include propensities and proclivities to certain traits such as high or low serotonin in our brains, high or low empathy, and other genetic DNA that ‘presets’ our internalized computer.

Just as we have seen the impact of the pathologicals own hardwired symptoms, we too come hardwired with our defaults that want to ‘lean’ us to these preset settings. Our default settings could be set to attraction to stocky dark haired men, or blonde and blue eyed, or black men or maybe your physical default is not all that particular about the physicality of your partners. Maybe your default is set to other parameters such as humor, charisma, or spirituality.

While we don’t ask why we have blue eyes or why we are attracted to tall dark and handsome, we often ask ‘why’ we have too much empathy or too much relationship investment, not understanding that these settings come hardwired within us when we are born. A fact not often understood is that some emotional traits are as hardwired as other genetic DNA.

Our software is the programs that have been added into and onto our machine that tell the machine what to do. These software programs also impact our default settings but in a different way. Software are the messages you learned growing up as a child. These messages about relationships, men and women’s roles in relationships, what power you do or do not have, the impact of choices, violence in the home, addictions in parents are all data and information that is stored on your computer in the software ‘programs’ that run your computer. From your software, the machine (your body, your external life) is run from the programs of that software. So messages about how ‘all relationships are’ or about what you ‘can and cannot succeed in’, tell your machine what choices to make from the software you have.

Software programs other than childhood messages can also come from religious impact, education, and your own experience within relationships—each compounding the existing software message or conflicting with existing software messages. These messages are also loaded onto your software as programs that affect choices which impact your life.

Hardware (hardwiring) preset defaults such as hyper empathy combined with software loaded defaults such as super trust or high tolerance messages (‘don’t get divorced no matter what’) combine in unique yet entrapping ways that cause some people to be more ‘at risk’ of Pathological Love Relationships than others.

We have had heard the arguments of ‘nature versus nurture’ especially regarding pathology. We know some of the Cluster Bs are born that way, some are made that way from their social environments and some are both—born that way and then bent that way further. The same is true for you, the Super-Traited partner of Cluster Bs.

You come into the world with a proclivity towards certain hardwired traits within your temperament that are so strong as to make your ‘bent’ towards attraction to, and tolerance of, pathology extremely high. Into your world with your ‘bent’ you are exposed to lifelong messages that either encourage your bent or try to bend you away from your existing proclivities.

Families with healthy boundaries and healthy relationships model the exact programming that sets a child’s default on a different setting for partner selection. But families who themselves have selected pathological partners, who have the same hardwiring propensity for tolerating pathology, flip the child’s software default switch to tolerance, minimizing, renaming, and accepting pathological behavior. This is largely done through role modeling these behaviors or what we call learned conditioning.

A genetic hard-wired proclivity with a software default program that supports pathological partner selection starts the process of the continued pattern of having pathological partners well into adulthood.

In computers, default settings serve the purpose of ‘minimal user interaction required’ which puts the setting defaults to the most commonly selected options. This is exactly what it does for you as well. “Why do I keep picking these kinds of guys over and over again?” Your default was set early in life and has not been changed. When left to your own programming, your default will automatically select the most pathological partner. Your hard-wiring is already ‘bent’ in that direction and is supported by your software programs to do so. It is so automatic, so autonomic, that just like a computer, ‘minimal user interaction is required.’

By the time women contact The Institute, they are so exhausted by the lifetime of the pathological energy-sucking relationships that they are ready to do what it takes to stop this. Simply stating “I am NEVER going to do this again. I am going to pick differently in the future” doesn’t register with your software program. It’s still set on the default pattern of selection it has been set on for years. If you could look at the software settings internally it would look like this:

• Narcissistic
• Cheater
• Pathological Lying
• Charming and deceitful
• Helps me ignore my red flags
• Induces fantasy thinking of how my future MIGHT be
• Honeymoon cycle followed by D&D (Devalue & Discard)
• Intense, intensely pursued
• Hypnotic, I can’t think or choose differently while with them

These might be some of the traits you are repeatedly selecting through your software default program.

In software programs, it’s noted that ‘Using defaults will tend to increase errors, as users may leave incorrect default settings selected.’ Hmmmmm… yeah. Can we agree that’s true?

The difficulty in Pathological Love Relationship recovery is that women read a book or go to a counselor and talk about the pain of the relationship but never get down to the reprogramming of the software. Hardware comes as it is and will always be there and you will always be ‘bent’ in a direction or proclivity for these relationships. BUT you can put in different software programming that will let you pick from a NEW SET of default choices and not automatically ‘defaulting back’ to what you have always chosen. You have to choose differently in order to get a different outcome.

Controls of a computer hardware or software (or of a device, equipment, or machine) are preset by its manufacturer. Some types of default settings may be altered or customized by the user.

(**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

A few years ago, I asked to be on a national TV show to discuss the issue of psychopathy in relationships based on my book Women Who Love Psychopaths. They had looked at the website, read information about the book, discussed what the rest of the show was going to be about, and booked me for the show.

They didn’t invite me based on my other book, although equally as informational, How to Spot a Dangerous Man, they booked me to discuss and showed the book cover of, Women Who Love Psychopaths.

However, 20 minutes before going on air, a producer told me ‘they’ (whoever that is in TV world) were uncomfortable using the ‘p’ word – psychopath. They found the word to be controversial and sensationalistic and that my example of probably well known public psychopaths who are not recognized as psychopathic was too debatable and un-proveable to discuss.

This was, of course, sad for me to hear since so much of what The Institute attempts to provide is public pathology education. Truly the only way for people to avoid psychopathy is to develop the ability to understand the traits and learn to spot it in others. All of these are why our goal for the Institute is public education.

This is of course, not our first time to hear that the ‘p’ word is offensive, debatable, controversial, or judgmental, and it will not be the last time, unfortunately.

Several victims of incredible psychopathic abuse were also on the show and I was asked to comment on their cases but also asked to not use the ‘p’ word. I asked the producer what she thought those perpetrator’s behaviors should be called, or what disorders would motivate their behavior….or what was she suggesting I should call them? I told her I was at a loss to pick another label or motivation behind their lethal behaviors that would come close to helping others understand “who does that?”

I went on to say to her that psychopathy was a diagnosis, not merely a political argument, a theoretical ideology, or even a criminal judgment of character. I was confused as to why I was there when, what I do, what I write about, who I help, and who I help convict are overtly obvious from my professional background and from our website.

I was reminded again, when I heard “the p word” is controversial, that public pathology education is still in its infancy. I know that victims face this all the time when they struggle to figure out what is wrong with the pathological person only to discover the shocking revelation of the person’s disorder. But the victim trying to teach others what is wrong with the pathological is counteracted when others find the information to be disputable, distasteful, un-proveable, unlikely, and unspiritual to even suggest.

The ‘p’ word is now viewed as the new psychological slur of the 21st century. It’s correlated with the devastating racial slurs of the 1950?s, the cultural slurs of the 60?s-70?s, and the gay/lesbian slurs of the 80?s- s-90?s. Now, we face the ‘p’ word the way we faced the ‘n’ of the 50?s and the ‘f’ of the 60’s-70?s and the ‘q’ of the 80-90s. But with a huge difference!

There is nothing wrong with the ‘p’ word the way it was intensely wrong with the ‘n,’ ‘f,’ and ‘q’ words of decades gone by. But it is treated as if we are being racially insensitive, culturally inappropriate, or gender ignorant. We are looked at as the skin-heads of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual that we would dare to call someone a psychopath.

We are viewed as the rock throwers at the psychologically–disabled people with pathology, the Bible thumpers of the poor spiritually disenfranchised psychopath, and the socially clueless that we would spew a power-packing psychological label like psychopathy around that might actually strike and land on a human being.

I know, I know… after all, it’s daytime TV which we all recognize is about ratings and keeping pace with society’s Attention-Deficit-Disordered need for topics to be covered in three minutes no matter how riveting the storyline is. Daytime TV covers tsunamis of natural science as well as the tsunamis of psychological trauma in the same fast fall swoop of selling hair dye and lipstick in the same 30 minute segment.

After all, what did I expect?

… Well, I always hope that a victim’s trauma is recognized and embraced for the emotional and spiritual strength it took to not only survive, but to show up on that TV stage in order to tell their story to help others. …

…Well, I always hope that the need to teach others how to spot the devastating disorders that created the victim’s trauma is the guiding motivation behind why TV shows exist and that it supersedes the mere ‘storyline-as-business’ of TV.

Yes, I recognize that daytime TV is not the spokesperson for the planet, that there ARE those who really want to hear more of the victim’s story and learn more about how to spot them in their own lives… but I have to tell you, it IS a cold-water-splash-in-the-face, like a “wake-up-Sandra-we-aren’t-as-far-as-you-think” call that we are whispering the ‘p’ word backstage and off camera and are editing it out for public viewing.

The whole segment of discussion about low empathy, no conscience and “who does that” was removed. Not one word that explained the behavior of those lethal people was leaked to the viewing audience for public pathology education.

We still have miles and miles to go in educating the public that psychopathy is a disorder, not a verbal tirade. You know what… as offensive, debatable, controversial, judgmental, OR… as disputable, distasteful, un-proveable, unlikely and unspiritual as it felt to those merely producing a nano-second based TV show to say the ‘p’ word, the victims who have lived with the ‘p’ are the true authorities here. They would probably beg to disagree with the nay-sayers that the ‘p’ is a profound psychological slur.

I am sure the victims found the p’s behavior to be more offensive than TV-land will ever understand. The victims surely wrestled with their own need to overcome the debatable-ness of the disorder, or the controversy that swirled around the lethal behaviors of the psychopath. And I am sure the victim’s incurred their own judgmental views of outsiders.

I doubt today the victim’s find their story to be un-proveable or even disputable. After all, some of these stories ended up in murder or attempted murder.

All the adjectives that are associated with psychopathy as controversial as TV-land felt the ‘p’ word was do not even compare to the victim’s overwhelming need to shout from the roof-tops what the pathological IS ….a psychopath.

Using the ‘p’ word of psychopathy is not a slur. It is an education, a prevention, a DIAGNOSIS, and the reality for millions of victims in the world.

(**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

“How sick is TOO sick?”

One of the characteristics of women who have been in Pathological Love Relationships is that they are very forgiving and tolerant of less-than-stellar mental-health qualities in their intimate relationships. That’s because, according to our research and to name but a few, the women have very elevated traits of compassion, empathy, tolerance, and acceptance. These are excellent and humanitarian traits to have… except in a relationship with a pathological person. These traits can then create ‘super glue’ that keeps you in a relationship you should NOT be tolerating, accepting, or being empathetic about. The problem is, women often don’t realize that someone can simply have ‘narcissistic traits’ or ‘psychopathic traits’ and still be a danger to them in a relationship.

That’s because it doesn’t take much pathology to dramatically and negatively affect her and the relationship. It only takes a drop of abnormal psychology to really screw up the relationship and the others around him. This is why even ‘just traits’ are important to identify. ‘Just traits’ means he has SOME of the criteria for, let’s say, narcissism or psychopathy, but not enough to fully qualify for the full diagnosis. But let’s not split hairs here! A few traits are enough to qualify for being TOO pathological. It DOES matter that he is a tad bit pathological because any of the traits of pathology are negative and harmful.

A little or a lot?

Would it matter that he had a little or a lot of low empathy? No. The result is the same–low empathy and the pain he causes others. Little-to-none is almost none—it doesn’t matter if he is a little unempathetic or a lot. Not being able to have empathy is the bottom line.

Would it matter if he had a little or a lot of poor impulse control? I doubt his poor impulse control affected his sexual acting out, his drug use, or his wild spending habits.

A little goes a long way in poor impulse control.

Would it matter if he had a little or a lot of rebellion against laws, rules, or authority? Probably not. Even just a little bit of rebellion has the propensity for getting him arrested or fired, ignoring a restraining order or refusing to pay child support. How about ‘just pathological enough’ to really screw up your children with his distorted and warped worldview? Or his chronic inconsistency, his wavering devotion to you or them, his role-modeling of his addictions, or his display of “the rules aren’t for me” attitude?

Minimizing

I watch women look for loopholes to minimize the pathology he has instead of looking at the ways he meets criteria for the pathology he has and finding reasons to get out. Indeed, they find reasons “it’s not THAT bad.” But just a little bit of a ‘bad boy’ is probably too pathological – too sick for a normal relationship. Since pathology is:

• the inability to sustain positive change,
• grow to any meaningful depth, or
• develop insight about how one’s behavior affects others

…even just some pathology is too much.

If he can’t sustain change (you know… all those things he promises to change about himself) or grow or have insight about how and why he hurts you… he’s TOO pathological—TOO sick—TOO disordered to have anything that resembles a normal relationship. Why would you want a relationship that has NO capacity to grow, change, or meet your needs?

Bad-boy enticement is very real… that edginess he has makes many women highly attracted to him. But beyond the edginess can be anything from ‘just traits’ to ‘full-blown pathology.’

Nonetheless, women must learn to draw a line in the sand that even ‘just traits’ is enough to guarantee their unhappiness and put them at risk for harm in the hands of a guy who is ‘too pathological’ for her!

(**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

A large portion of emotional and physical abusers (although not all) have some similar identifying disorders, traits, or diagnosis. They are not all created equal. That means each one of them brings a unique combination of traits, challenges, and problems to the equation of the relationship and even therapy. Therefore, not all abusers treatment is going to be effective because not all psychological problems are treatable. For instance, batterer intervention has often failed to make this distinction and lumps all violent behavior or psychological problems together as if they are not differentiated by their differences.

Some of the disorders have biological and neurological root causes that are not curable. Ultimately, not all problem relationships have a solution especially those that have biological/neuro problems at their basis. That’s not popular to hear. We live in an Oprah-age of psychology that believes all disorders are curable and if not curable, at least highly treatable. ‘Law of Attraction’ type thinking pulls many people into believing ‘if they think it, they can make it happen’ (their relationship will work, the pathology will be gone, or something curative will happen that will drive away the symptoms.) Like medicine, psychology faces the same challenges that not all disorders have a satisfactory treatment or a cure.

If people who are in problem relationships want to avoid future problem relationships, they must understand what contributes to some of the disorders and the signs within the behavior.  There is no doubt that chronic personality problems wreak havoc in relationships and the worst of these do have commonalities related to impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and violence. (No abuse is mild. I’m not suggesting that. What I am trying to hone in on is the chronic and lethal nature of some of the relationships and what some of the contributing factors can be to those problems.)

Some of the more recent research in neuroscience helps us to understand the problems related to what Otto Kernberg (one of the renowned writers and researchers of pathology) wrote about as ‘severe personality disorders’ related to Cluster B disorders (see his books Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions; Severe Personality Disorders; Aggressiveness, Narcissism and Self Destructiveness in the Psychotherapeutic Relationships–to name a few).

However, neuroscience over the past few years has helped us understand the additional possible biological and neurological roots of some of these severe disorders as well as the disorders of sociopathy and psychopathy. MRIs of various Cluster B disorders and sociopathy/psychopathy have lead the way noting similarities in brain formations, brain activity, brain circuitry, brain chemistry and its relationship to the severe disorders, impulsivity, poor treatment outcomes, and poor relationship outcomes. Where therapy has spent decades (if not a century) focused on the very psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches, we have missed the very real potential of neurology and brain functioning challenges.

While the origin and etiology of these disorders has been widely debated for decades, neuroscience is providing many of the answers to biology that we previously didn’t have. This helps us delineate between the mind as a structure and process, and the brain as an organ. The brain as an organ has all the proclivity of being born with differences, challenges, and problems as any other organ in the body. Unfortunately, up until now, the view has been a very ‘psychological’ approach to the brain and its disorders without looking at the possible contributions of ‘nature’ such as being born with physical predispositions. While we don’t question that, when it comes to the heart or immune system, people can be born with abnormalities, people certainly have a BIG reaction at the thought of psychology being related to brain organ issues and not merely emotional issues.

When looking at the behaviors associated with problem partners with what is referred to as ‘severe personality disorders’ and the problems of sociopathy and psychopathy, we have to look broadly at the symptoms, but not so broadly that we find loopholes. Normally, one symptom off a behavioral list does not constitute one of the ‘severe personality disorders’ or even the no/low-conscience disorders of sociopathy or psychopathy. However, they don’t need to have ALL of these traits in order to be problematic in a relationship.

Those in relationships with problem partners often fall on the side of ‘too much empathy’ and give the problem partner more credit for not having these symptoms than what is warranted. Somewhere in the middle of one trait-too-many/and no-they-don’t-have-problems-at-all, is a snap shot of relationship problems and problem partners. Here are some of the behaviors associated with what is referred to as some of the severe personality disorders as well as sociopathy and psychopathy.

From the Diagnostic Statistical Manual–DSM V:

• Disregard for, and the violation of, the rights of others
• Failure to conform to lawful social norms
• Deceitfulness Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
• Irritability and aggressiveness as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
• Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others
• Consistent irresponsibility as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations

(Above are related to Antisocial Personality Disorder)

• Lack of remorse as indicated by being indifferent about having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another
• Glib and superficial charm
• Grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self
• Need for stimulation
• Pathological lying
• Cunning and manipulativeness
• Lack of remorse or guilt
• Shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness)
• Callousness and lack of empathy
• Parasitic lifestyle
• Poor behavioral controls
• Sexual promiscuity
• Early behavior problems
• Lack of realistic long-term goals
• Impulsivity irresponsibility
• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
• Many short-term relationships
• Juvenile delinquency
• Revocation of conditional release
• Criminal versatility

(Above are related to Sociopaths/Psychopaths)

• Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
• Intense and unstable personal relationships that over idealize and devalue
• Identity disturbance with unstable self image or sense of self impulsivity in at least two areas (spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
• Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-mutilation
• Emotional instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (intense episodic irritability or anxiety)
• Chronic feelings of emptiness
• Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger

(Above are related to Borderline Personality Disorder)

• A grandiose sense of self importance
• Exaggerates their achievements and talents
• Expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements
• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believes that he is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should only associate with, other special or other high-status people or institutions.
• Requires excessive admiration
• Has a sense of entitlement, unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his expectations.
• Is interpersonally exploitative within relationships and takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends
• Lacks empathy and is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him
• Shows an arrogant, haughty behavior or attitude

(Above are related to Narcissistic Personality Disorder)

This list is not mild relational infractions, or merely what Dr. Phil refers to as ‘deal breakers’. In some of the more chronic features and behaviors, this pathology causes debilitating partner aftermath symptoms.

The Institute is involved in offering recovery to those coming out of relationships with narcissists, antisocial, sociopathy and psychopaths because the chronicity of their disorders often causes chronicity within their relationships. If that weren’t true, 60 million people would not be negatively affected by someone else’s pathology. We wouldn’t have support groups for “Partners of Narcissists” or “Adult Children of Narcissistic Personality Disorder”. There wouldn’t be self help books for those harmed by anti-socials or psychopaths. The Institute wouldn’t have felt it necessary to write ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’ and offer coaching and retreats for survivors.

Some of those listed above are the abusers who are not created equal, who have permanent neuro, emotional, behavioral and psychological disorders that bypass what psychology can do for them. Anger management–nope. Batterer intervention–nope. Intensive psychotherapy–nope.

The permanent forms of pathology are noted for their Three Inabilities (Brown, 2005):

* Inability to grow to any authentic emotional or spiritual depth

* Inability to sustain positive change

* Inability to develop insight how their behavior negatively affects others

These inabilities are the hallmark of chronic disorders that create chronic problem relationships.

** Footnote: Research articles related to this topic: ‘Neural foundation of moral reasoning and antisocial behavior;’  ‘Into the Mind of a Killer: Brain imaging studies starting to venture into the research of criminal psychopathy;’ ‘Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire data on alcoholic violent offenders: specific connections to severe impulsive cluster B personality disorders and violent criminality” ‘The Relationship Between DSM-IV cluster B personality disorders and psychopathy according to Hare’s criteria: Clarification and resolution of previous Contractions;’ ‘Brain imaging abnormalities in borderline personality disorder’ (video)’ ‘Potentials implicate temporal lobe abnormalities in criminal psychopaths;’ Hypomanic symptoms predict an increase in narcissism and histrionic personality disorders;’ and ‘The Brain and Personality Disorders.’

(**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

I heard a universal ‘sigh of relief’ go out around the world as women read the title of this article.  Don’t you feel better knowing there really IS some science backing the whole issue of having way too much empathy?

When we began writing about women who love psychopaths, anti-socials, sociopaths and narcissists, we already ‘assumed’ that maybe you did have too much empathy (as well as other elevated temperament traits).  We just didn’t know how much, or why.  When we began the actual testing for the research of the book ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’, we learned just ‘how much’ empathy you had.

Do I need to tell you?  WAY TOO MUCH!

By now you have probably already suspected that your super-high empathy is what got you in trouble in this pathological relationship.  But, did you know there is hard science behind what we suspected about what is going on in your relationship with your super-trait of high empathy?  It really IS all in your head – and your genes.

In fact, these genes influence the production of various brain chemicals that can influence just ‘how much’ empathy you have.  These brain chemicals include those that influence orgasm, and it’s effect on how bonded you feel, while also influencing some aspects of mental health (No, no!  That is not a good mix!).

Other brain chemicals influence how much innate and learned fear you have.  However, females don’t seem to assess threats well, and the chemicals then increase her social interactions while at the same time she is not assessing fear and threats well (This is not a good thing!!).

One of the final chemical effects delays your reflexes (like not getting out of the relationship), and also impacts your short and long term memory (how you easily store good memories that are very strong, and how you store bad memories which are easily forgotten).  And, since it is genetic, it can run in entire families that produce ‘gullible’ and ‘trusting’ individuals who seem to just keep getting hurt.

Of course, the reverse is also true.  Genes can influence the absence of various brain chemicals that influence ‘how little’ empathy a person has.  We already know in great detail how this affects those with personality disorders.  Personality disordered people (especially Cluster B disorders) struggle with not experiencing, or not having any empathy.

Over the past few years, the magazine has been writing about various aspects of personality disorder and the brain.  This has included the issue of brain imaging.  What we are finding out is how brain structure and chemicals can affect personality, empathy, behavior, and consequently, the behavior in relationships.  As advances are made in the field of neurobiology, we are learning more and more of what The Institute has always believed – that there is a lot of biology behind personality development issues such as personality disorders.  Genetics and neurobiology are proving that behavior associated with narcissism, borderline, anti-social personality disorders, along with psychopathy has as much to do with brain wiring and chemistry as it does with behavioral intent.

The Institute has long said to survivors that personality disorders are not merely willful behavior, but brain deficits that control how much empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, insight, and change a person is capable.  Autism and personality disorders share a common thread as ’empathy spectrum disorders’ now being studied extensively within the field of neuroscience.  But, in some opposite ways, the women also share a common thread of an empathy disorder – hyper-empathy.  We are coming to understand that hyper-empathy has much to do with her innate temperament (you come into the world wired with the personality you have), genetic predispositions to high or low empathy, and brain chemistry configurations that contribute to levels of empathy. The old thinking which assumes women with high empathy are merely ‘door mats’ is not scientifically correct when looking at current studies.

Neuroscience, with all its awesome information, has the dynamic power to blow us all out of the murky waters of assuming that our behavior is merely a reflection of our will.  As neuroscience graces our minds with new understanding of how our brains work, it brings with it incredible freedom to understand our own traits, and the pathological traits of others.

For a mind blowing book on the genetic and neurobiology of not only personality disorders, but ‘evil’ as well, read Barbara Oakley’s book, Evil Genes, or her latest book on hyper-empathy entitled, Cold-Blooded Kindness.

Last week we began talking about the difference between fear and anxiety. Real fear draws on your animalistic instincts and cause a sincere fight/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 deBecker in the classic book ‘The Gift of Fear’ is a Danger Anaylst and has much to say about the preventableness of most bad outcomes. He says there is Always Always Always a Pre-incident Indicator (a PIN)  that women ignore. In my book, 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 20+ years I’ve been doing this 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 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 am I 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 on 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 woke up 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 cut off 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 panicking, 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 911, 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. “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 of 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, lead 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 talked about cultural conditioningand how women feel they should be polite and at least go out with them once. If you’re saying yes to a psychopath, once is all he needs. Women also have HORRID and NON-EXISTING break up skills. What in the world is more important than having good break up skills? You are likely to date a dozen men in your life time 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 Glamor Shots picture of themselves for a dating site then learning how strong boundaries can protect them.  Women who are attracted to the bad boys don’t need the book ‘How to Attract’ — she’s already doing it. But how can she get rid of the predator she DID attract? (See our new book ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths).

Women buy our books, do phone counseling, come to retreats all with 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 can not 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 this week that we may have missed something in our discussion about PTSD and it’s relationship to fight/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 reactions usualy COMPELLS people into fight//flight.

With PTSD, I see how we have lumped more minor reactive reactions like ‘PTSD induced fight/flight’ with the real in-the-moment reactions of fear. I see them as different now. If women are 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 gong 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 animialistic/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. Your body is smarter than your brain.

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Gender Disclaimer: The issues The Institute writes about are mental health issues. They are not gender issues. Both females and males have the types of Cluster B disorders we often refer to in our articles. Our readership is approximately 90% female therefore we write for those most likely to seek out our materials. We highly support male victims and encourage others who want to provide support to male victims to encompass the issues we discuss only from a female perpetrator/male-victim standpoint. Cluster B Education is a mental health issue applicable to both genders.
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Part of the problem we face in trying to get to the nitty-gritty of pathological love relationships is that ‘how we do it’ or ‘what we call it’ is judged so severely that it impairs sharing the valuable outcomes that are learned.

There are groups of professionals, women’s orgs, and service agencies that tip toe around what we ‘call’ patterns of selection in relationships. There are unspoken rules and heavily weighted opinions about ‘what’ we can discuss and ‘how’ we discuss the outcomes.

What am I talking about? Since the 1970’s and the women’s movement, discussing the specifics about women’s choices in relationships, patterns of selection, personality traits, mental health, sexual addiction/deviancy has been largely discouraged and ‘semanti-sized’ as ‘labeling the victim’ or ‘victim blaming.’ It has put the victim off limits for any in-depth understanding other than a victimology theory that was developed in the 1970’s.

It is hard to get around the billboard image of ‘victim’ to talk about any kind of relationship dynamics or other psychological aspects (including biology or temperament engrained traits) that is happening in the pathological love relationship. We may study him but we already have a ‘theory’ for her which is not to be disturbed.

Compare this to any other field of mental health and it’s absurd that we would say ‘We already understand depression, no more theories, no more studying! Don’t call it depression or you are blaming the patient for their own depression.’

To study her is to blame her. To measure her traits to see if there are vulnerabilities or pattern typing is to suggest she is flawed.

* The victim assuredly has been through trauma.
* Studying the victim in no way says they have not been through trauma.
* The victim is not to blame for what happened to them.
* Studying the victim in no way says they are responsible for what happened to them.
* The victim did not ‘choose’ the victimization, but in relational dysfunction, she did pick the victimizer.

Could we learn something about that?

How will Cancer be won or a cure for AIDS be found if we don’t study the problem from all angles? If we conclude that studying the victim blames them, then we have cut off one entire segment of research that can help us in prevention, intervention and treatment–whether it’s a medical disorder or a pathological relationship.

Studying victimology, including aspects of the victim, is not victim character asassination. It might be trait examination or pattern of selection analysis. It might be a lot of things that have nothing to do with blame and shame and everything to do with understanding or creating new paradigms in which to see these relationships. It might piggyback
off of theories developed in the 1970’s…surely we have learned SOMETHING new about relationship dynamics, pathology in relationships, personality disorders as intimate partners, violence and addiction and their part in these relationships…surely we can UPDATE a theory without our own assassination or that of the victim?

In some ways, I envy the Scientific and Research communities that look at the data and pass all the d*@amn political correctness and emotional politics of ‘labeling’ it something that certain groups find offensive. They test and crunch numbers and put it in a journal without all the rig-a-ma-roy. But in our case, where we are a notch below the researchers, what we study, how we describe what we found, is subject to so much scrutiny that many clinicians and writers hesitate to publish what they found.

So it has been with many of the things that The Institute has studied, found, reported, and written. In many organizations the first book ‘How to Spot a Dangerous Man’ was rejected for looking at family role modeling, patterns of selection, and other aspects that women themselves said contributed to their pathological relationship. (On the other hand, it has been hailed by many domestic violence agencies and used widely in shelters, treatment centers and women’s prisons.)

We stepped it up a huge notch in the ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’ in which we used testing instruments to test women’s traits to see if there were temerament patterns in women who ended up in the most dangerous and disordered of relationships. This caught huge attention from some groups as the ground-breaking trait identification that it was and yet still; the victim groups saw it as labeling. How can we help women if we don’t understand their own biology?

Ironically, what we found was significant–super-traits so perfectly and symmetrically seen in 80 cases. Did we hurt a victim by studying that? Or have we helped now thousands of women who have read the books, been counseled by our trained therapists, come to our treatment programs? How would we have gotten here today without daring to look deeper…to even risk looking at her! Not to blame her, but to understand her.

Some of the biggest break throughs that have been happening are in understanding the biology of our own brains and the consequences of our biology on our behavior, choices, and futures. We know that MRI’s are being done on psychopath’s brains–revealing areas of brains that work differently. Some day, I think that may cross over and other personality disorders and chronic mental illnesses will be MRI’d as well so we understand how those disorder effect biology and brain function.

But what about victims?

* If we put the word ‘damaged’ away and instead used the word and looked at how ‘different’ brain regions in victims function, over function, under function, are influenced by stress, PTSD, adrenaline, cortisol, and early childhood abuse–could we come to understand how their brain might function in their patterns of selection in dangerous relationships?
* Could we come to understand that even temperament traits might give proclivity to how the brain ‘chooses’ or how the brain categorizes (or ignores) red flags, danger, or is highly reactive to traumatized attraction?

* Could we understand brains that have higher tolerance levels because of certain brain areas that operate differently than other people?
* Could we understand traumatic memory storage and why good memories of him (even as awful as he might be) are so much stronger than the abuse memories?
* If we know what part of the brain distorts memory storage, can we work with that?
* Could we come to understand trait temperaments as risk factors or certain brain functions as possible victim vulnerabilities?
* Then would we know who is at risk?
* Would we understand better, how to TREAT the victim in counseling?
* How to develop prevention and intervention?
* Or how intensity of attachment could be either a temperament trait or a brain function instead of merely ‘victim labeling.’

I am not only interested in the psycho-biology of the victim but how the psycho-biology affects patterns of selection and reactions in the most pathological of relationships. When we start really dealing with an open dialogue about these survivors, looking past ridiculous theories that asking questions is victim blaming, then maybe we can really offer some new theories into victimology that by passes band aid approaches to complex psycho-bio-social understandings. This is what The Institute intends to do….

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Gender Disclaimer: The issues The Institute writes about are mental health issues. They are not gender issues. Both females and males have the types of Cluster B disorders we often refer to in our articles. Our readership is approximately 90% female therefore we write for those most likely to seek out our materials. We highly support male victims and encourage others who want to provide support to male victims to encompass the issues we discuss only from a female perpetrator/male-victim standpoint. Cluster B Education is a mental health issue applicable to both genders.
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Another words, ‘How sick is TOO sick?’

One of the charactersistics of women who have been in pathological relationships is that they are very ‘forgiving’ and ‘tolerant’ of less than stellar mental health qualities in their intimate relationships. That’s because the women have very elevated traits of compassion, empathy, tolerance, and acceptance according to our research and to name but a few. These are excellent and humanitarian traits to have….except in a relationship with a pathological person in which these traits create ‘super glue’ that keeps you in  a relationship you should NOT be toleranting, accepting, or being empathetic about. The problem is women often don’t realize that someone can simply have ‘narcissistic traits’ or ‘psychopathic traits’ and still be a danger to her in a relationship.

That’s because it doesn’t take much pathology to dramatically and negatively effect her and the relationship. It only takes a ‘drop’ of abnormal psychology to really screw up the relationship and the others around him. This is why even ‘just traits’ are important to identify. ‘Just traits’ means he has SOME of the criteria for, lets say narcissism or psychopathy, but not enough to fully qualify for the full diagnosis. But let’s not split hairs here…a few traits are enough to qualify for ‘too’ pathological. It DOES matter that he is a ‘tad bit’ pathological because any of the traits of pathology are negative and harmful.

Would it matter that he had a little or a lot of ‘low empathy?’ No–the end result is the same–low empathy and the pain he causes others. ‘Liitle-to-None’ is almost none–it doesn’t matter if he is a little unempathetic or a lot. Not being able to have empathy is the bottom line.

Would it matter if he had a little or a lot of poor impulse control? I doubt it if his poor impulse control effected his sexual acting out, his drug use, or his wild spending habits.
A little goes a long way in poor impulse control.

Would it matter if he had a little or a lot of rebellion against laws, rules, or authority? Probably not…even just a little bit of rebellion has the propensity of getting him arrested or fired, ignoring a restraining order or refusing to pay child support. How about ‘just pathological enough’ to really screw up your children with his distorted and warped world view, his chronic inconsistency, his wavering devotion to you or them, his role modeling of his addictions, or his display of ‘the rules aren’t for me’ attitude?

I watch women ‘look’ for loopholes to minimize the pathology he DOES have instead of looking for ways he does meet criteria for the pathology he does have and find reasons to get out. Instead, they find reasons ‘it’s not THAT bad.’ But just a little bit of a ‘bad boy’ is probably too pathological…too sick for a normal relationship. Since pathology is the ‘inability to sustain positive change, grow to any meaningful depth, or develop insight about how one’s behavior effects others’ even just ‘some’ pathology is too much. Because if he can’t sustain change (you know…all those things he promises to change about himself) or grow or have insight about how and why he hurts you…he’s TOO pathological–TOO sick–TOO disordered to have anything that resembles a normal relationship. Why would you ‘want’ a relationship that has NO capacity to grow, change, or meet your needs?

Bad boy enticement is very real…that edginess he has makes many women highly attracted to him. But beyond the edginess can be anything from ‘just traits’ to ‘full blown pathology.’ Nonetheless, women must learn to draw a line in the sand that even ‘just’ traits is enough to guarantee their unhappiness and harm in the hands of a guy who is ‘too pathological’ for her!

(**Information about pathology and your recovery is in the award winning Women Who Love Psychopaths.)

I was recently asked to be on a national TV show to discuss the issue of psychopathy in relationships based on my book ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths.’
They had looked at the website, read information about the book, discussed what the rest of the show was going to be about, and booked me for the show.
They didn’t invite me based on my other book (although equally as informational) How to Spot a Dangerous Man, they booked me to discuss and showed
the book cover of, Women Who Love Psychopaths.

However, 20 minutes before going on air a producer told me ‘they’ (whoever that is in TV world) was uncomfortable using the ‘p’ word–psychopath. They
found the word to be ‘controversial’ and ‘sensationalistic’ and that my example of probably well known public psychopaths who are not recognized as
psychopathic was too debatable and unproveable to discuss.

This was of course sad for me to hear since so much of what The Institute attempts to provide is public pathology education. Truly the only way for people
to avoid psychopathy is to develop the ability to understand the traits and learn to spot it in others. All which is why our goal for this agency is public education.
This is of course, not our first time to hear that the ‘p’ word is offensive, debatable, controversial, or judgmental, and it will not be the last time, unfortunately.

Several victims of incredible psychopathic abuse were also on the show and I was asked to comment on their cases but also asked to not use the
‘p’ word.  I asked the producer what she thought those perpetrator’s behaviors should be called, or what disorders would motivate their behavior….or
what was she suggesting I ‘should’ call them? I told her I was at a loss to pick another label or motivation behind their lethal behaviors that would
come close to helping others understand ‘who does that?’.  I told her that psychopathy was a diagnosis, not merely a political argument, a theoretical
ideology, or even a criminal judgment of character. I was confused as to why I was there when what I do, what I write about, who I help, and who I help
convict are overtly obvious from my professional background and from our website.

I was reminded again when I heard ‘the p word’ is controversial, that public pathology education is still in it’s infancy. I know that victims face this all
the time when they struggle to figure out what is wrong with the pathological person, only to discover the shocking revelation of the person’s disorder. But
the victim trying to teach others what is wrong with the pathological is counteracted when others find the information to be disputable, distasteful, unproveable, unlikely,
and un-spiritual to even suggest.

The ‘p’ word is now viewed as the new psychlogical slur of the 21st century. It’s correlated with the devastating racial slurs of the 1950’s, the cultural slurs of the
60’s-70’s, and the gay/lesbian slurs of the 80’s-90’s.  Now, we face the ‘p’ word the way we faced the ‘n’ of the 50’s and the ‘f’ or the 60’70’s and the ‘q’
of the 80-90s. But with a huge difference! There is nothing wrong with the ‘p’ word the way it was intensely wrong with the ‘n,’ ‘f,’ and ‘q’ words of
decades gone by.

But it is treated as if we are being racially insensitive, culturally inappropriate, or gender ignorant. We are looked at as the skin-heads of the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual that we would ‘dare’ to ‘call someone’ a psychopath.  We are viewed as the rock throwers at the psychologically-disabled
people with pathology, the Bible thumpers of the poor spiritually disenfranchised psychopath, and the socially clueless that we would spew a
power-packing psychological label like ‘psychopathy’ around that might actually strike and land on a human being.

I know, I know….afterall, it’s daytime TV which we all recognize is about ratings and keeping pace with society’s Attention-Deficit-Disordered need
for topics to be covered in three minutes no matter how riveting the storyline is.  Daytime TV covers tsunamis of natural science as well as the
tsunamis of psychological trauma in the same fast fall swoop of selling hair dye and lipstick in the same 30 minute segment. What did I expect afterall?

…Well, I always hope that a victim’s trauma is recognized and embraced for the emotional and spiritual strength it took to not only survive, but to show up
on that TV stage to tell their story to help others. …Well, I always hope that the need to teach others ‘how to spot’ the devastating disorders that created the
victims trauma is the guiding motivation behind why TV shows exist and supercedes the mere ‘storyline-as-business’ of TV.

Yes, I recognize that daytime TV is not the spokes person for the planet–that there ARE those who really want to hear more of the victims story and learn more
about ‘how to spot’ them in their own lives….but I have to tell you, it IS a ‘cold-water-splash-in-the-face’, like a ‘wake-up-Sandra-we-aren’t-as-far-as-you-think’
call that we are whispering the ‘p’ word behind stage and off camera and are ‘editing it out’ for public viewing. The whole segment of discussion about
low empathy, no conscience and who does that was removed. Not one word that explained the behavior of those lethal people was ‘leaked’ to
the viewing audience for public pathology education. We still have miles and miles to go in educating the public that psychopathy is a disorder
not a verbal tyriad.

You know what….as  offensive, debatable, controversial, judgmental,  OR …. as disputable, distasteful, unproveable, unlikely and un-spiritual
as it felt to those merely producing a nano-second based TV show to say the ‘p’ word, the victims who have lived with the ‘p’ are the true
authorities here.  They would probably beg to disagree with the nay-sayers that the ‘p’ is a profound psychological slur. I am sure the victims
found the ‘p’s behavior to be more offensive than TV-land will ever understand. The victims surely wrestled with their own need to over come the
‘debatable-ness’ of the disorder, or the controversy that swirled around the lethal behaviors of the psychopath and I am sure the victim’s incured
their own judgmental views of outsiders. I doubt today the victim’s find their story to be un proveable or even disputable —after all,
some of these storys ended up in murder or attempted more. All adjectives that are associated with psychopathy.

As ‘controversial’ as TV-land felt  the ‘p’ word was, does not even compare to the victim’s overwhelming need to shout from the roof-tops
what the pathological IS….a psychopath.

Using the ‘p’ word of psychopathy is not a slur. It is a education, a prevention, a DIAGNOSIS, and the reality for millions of victims in
the world.

I heard a universal ‘sigh of relief’ go out around the world as women read the title of this article.  Don’t you feel better knowing there really IS some science backing the whole issue of having way too much empathy?

When we began writing about women who love psychopaths, anti-socials, sociopaths and narcissists, we already ‘assumed’ that maybe you did have too much empathy (as well as other elevated temperament traits).  We just didn’t know how much, or why.  When we began the actual testing for the research of the book ‘Women Who Love Psychopaths’, we learned just ‘how much’ empathy you had.

Do I need to tell you?  WAY TOO MUCH!

By now you have probably already suspected that your super-high empathy is what got you in trouble in this pathological relationship.  But, did you know there is hard science behind what we suspected about what is going on in your relationship with your super-trait of high empathy?  It really IS all in your head – and your genes.

In fact, these genes influence the production of various brain chemicals that can influence just ‘how much’ empathy you have.  These brain chemicals include those that influence orgasm, and it’s effect on how bonded you feel, while also influencing some aspects of mental health (No, no!  That is not a good mix!).

Other brain chemicals influence how much innate and learned fear you have.  However, females don’t seem to assess threats well, and the chemicals then increase her social interactions while at the same time she is not assessing fear and threats well (This is not a good thing!!).

One of the final chemical effects delays your reflexes (like not getting out of the relationship), and also impacts your short and long term memory (how you easily store good memories that are very strong, and how you store bad memories which are easily forgotten).  And, since it is genetic, it can run in entire families that produce ‘gullible’ and ‘trusting’ individuals who seem to just keep getting hurt.

Of course, the reverse is also true.  Genes can influence the absence of various brain chemicals that influence ‘how little’ empathy a person has.  We already know in great detail how this affects those with personality disorders.  Personality disordered people (especially Cluster B disorders) struggle with not experiencing, or not having any empathy.

Over the past few years, the magazine has been writing about various aspects of personality disorder and the brain.  This has included the issue of brain imaging.  What we are finding out is how brain structure and chemicals can affect personality, empathy, behavior, and consequently, the behavior in relationships.  As advances are made in the field of neurobiology, we are learning more and more of what The Institute has always believed – that there is a lot of biology behind personality development issues such as personality disorders.  Genetics and neurobiology are proving that behavior associated with narcissism, borderline, anti-social personality disorders, along with psychopathy has as much to do with brain wiring and chemistry as it does with behavioral intent.

The Institute has long said to survivors that personality disorders are not merely willful behavior, but brain deficits that control how much empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, insight, and change a person is capable.  Autism and personality disorders share a common thread as ’empathy spectrum disorders’ now being studied extensively within the field of neuroscience.  But, in some opposite ways, the women also share a common thread of an empathy disorder – hyper-empathy.  We are coming to understand that hyper-empathy has much to do with her innate temperament (you come into the world wired with the personality you have), genetic predispositions to high or low empathy, and brain chemistry configurations that contribute to levels of empathy. The old thinking which assumes women with high empathy are merely ‘door mats’ is not scientifically correct when looking at current studies.

Neuroscience, with all its awesome information, has the dynamic power to blow us all out of the murky waters of assuming that our behavior is merely a reflection of our will.  As neuroscience graces our minds with new understanding of how our brains work, it brings with it incredible freedom to understand our own traits, and the pathological traits of others.

For a mind blowing book on the genetic and neurobiology of not only personality disorders, but ‘evil’ as well, read Barbara Oakley’s book, Evil Genes, or her latest book on hyper-empathy entitled, Cold-Blooded Kindness.

(**Information on your super-traits is in the award-winning Women Who Love Psychopaths, which is also taught during retreats, in phone sessions, and to mental health professionals.  Please go to www.saferelationshipmagazine.com for more information)