Remember the line ‘You’re known by the company you keep’? Well, I don’t think that ONLY includes the pathological and dangerous man… it also includes your ‘friends’ and ‘family’ members who may be emotional accomplices of his.
Someone wrote me awhile back and said, “Please write about this — when your own friends don’t get how sick he is and think you should go back, or they think you’re over exaggerating his faults.”
There are a couple of things to consider here. First of all, your pattern of selection of dangerous, pathological, or not quite healthy people probably exceeds just your intimate relationship selections. It might also include your friends, cohorts, buddies, family members and even bosses. Women who enter recovery from pathological relationships and attend the retreats quickly figure out that their lives are LOADED with other pathological people! Not just him!
That’s because those temperament traits in you that I’ve talked about are just as active in ALL your relationships as they are in your intimate ones. Don’t be surprised to find these types of people hidden in all corners of your life. Many women realize they have some house cleaning to do in terms of clearing out all the unhealthy people from their lives once they recognize what pathology is and WHO it’s in.
Secondly, the dangerous and pathological people often attract people to them. If your friends and family members have your emotional characteristics, they are likely to STILL see him how you USED to see him. They haven’t been hurt up close and personal by him to ‘get it’ the way you do. Since these are Jekyll-and-Hyde guys, they have one face for you and another adorable and charming one for everyone else. Women get confused when they gauge whether they should be with him based on what OTHERS say about him.
Intimate relationships are just that – personal and PRIVATE! Others don’t see him behind closed doors the way you do/did. Their take on this charming charismatic guy doesn’t include everything your gut has told you about him or that you have come to recognize by experiencing his bad/dangerous behavior.
When you are ending the relationship, he’s likely to pour it on to all your family and friends — the tears, the confusion and shoulder shrugging (“What did I do?”) and pleading (“Help me get her back!”) Those family and friends who have the same HIGH traits of empathy, tolerance, and compassion as you do are likely to fall for it. Top it off with the fact that almost all pathologicals also proclaim to be ‘sick or dying’ when the relationship is ending. This makes for a cheering squad lined up to backup his sad and pleading stories.
Then there’s the ‘finding religion’ guy who blows the dust off his Bible and is sitting in the front row of church week after week telling your pastor/rabbi how ‘unforgiving’ you are of him.
Yup. Your friends are likely to point to all that pew-sitting and think there’s something to it. But YOU know better… you’ve seen it all before. Remember – the core of pathology is that they aren’t wired to sustain change so this too shall pass.
Getting confused about what other people think of him goes back to the central issue of you having ignored your red flags when you met him. Don’t ignore those red flags again when people who don’t have a clue about what true pathology is tell you that you should ‘give it one more shot’. You know what you know. Tell yourself the truth and let the cheerleading squad fall on deaf ears.
(**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).
