Imagine that your car breaks down in a remote spot known to
be close to a Federal prison. Your cell phone isn't picking up a signal,
so you are thrust on the mercy of a passing driver. In this scenario,
would it be wiser to solicit help from another driver yourself or to sit
in the car and wait for someone to notice your state of need and offer
to help?
It would generally be wiser to take an active role in
picking the target of your request for help. If you decide to actively
request help, you could try to screen for certain factors that might
indicate that a particular person would be relatively safe to hail—for
example, a man or woman who appears to be riding with his or her young
children.
Even if you picked at random, without looking for
indicators of potentially safe helpers, you would be statistically less
likely to pick a sociopath relative to the likelihood that a sociopath
might pick you when he or she witnesses your obvious state of
vulnerability.
As threat expert Gavin De Becker explains, “the
possibility that you'll inadvertently select a predatory criminal for
whom you are the right victim type is very remote."* In other words, if
you were to wait passively in your car for someone to help you, you
would most likely attract one of two types of people—either good
Samaritans or opportunistic sociopaths drawn to your state of need.
Sanctuary for the Abused
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Who Gets Targeted
by Kathy Krajco
Like all predators, narcissists target the vulnerable.
Many things can make a person vulnerable. Being smaller than the narcissist. Having less power in the company. Having dangerous enemies. Having a bad reputation. Being defenseless in any way. Being gentle. Being too moral to get as down-and-dirty as the narcissist does. Loving the narcisist makes you very vulnerable. Being the narcissist's benefactor also makes you vulnerable. (That's because we love those we sacrifice for, because to do otherwise would be to devalue ourselves. We also have good reason to expect goodwill from those who owe us gratitude, so we are trusting -- totally blind-sided by their malice.)
A narcissist targets the small, defenseless, or gentle because he can have the most powerful effect on them. It's more fun to bash something small to smithereens than it is to just dent something big. So your narcissist gets the strongest power rush from abusing the small, defenseless, and gentle.
Hence, for example, he feels best when viciously snarling at his tender four-year-old daughter, because that eviscerates her, whereas it would only wound his wife.
If you carry this anti-logic to its conclusion, he makes himself God almighty by stomping an ant. Right?
Wrong. A baby can stomp an ant. Even a puppy can stomp an ant. Demolishing an ant requires no great power. But destroying a city does. Yet every bully on the planet cheats by destroying something small and then thumping his chest as if that proves him mighty.
Sun Tzu, in his ancient treatise On the Art of War, notices the same thing about bullies:
To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight;to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.Yet every narcissistic bully makes the same egregious error of logic. That blasts to smithereens the myth that narcissists are exceptionally intelligent. To the contrary, only a moron makes such an egregious error in logic.
Yet, a minute later, while he's filling out his tax return, the moron is suddenly intelligent enough to do it right.
Therefore his moronhood of a moment ago was just willful stupidity, wasn't it? And who is stupider than somebody who thinks it smart to be stupid?
The Intelligence of Narcissists and Whom They Target
Labels: abuse, abused, narcissist, pathological, psychopath, sociopath, targets, vulnerable
Sunday, August 11, 2019
A Crazy Roller Coaster Ride: Life with a Psychopath from Idealization to Devaluation
by Claudia Moscovici
Life with a psychopath quickly turns into a crazy roller coaster ride. Psychopaths usually retain the appearance of calm, even in the face of great duress. However, sharing your life with a psychopath for any significant period of time means living with constant drama and extreme ups and downs. There are four main reasons for this, three of which I’ve alluded to in previous posts and a fourth that I’d like to examine in greater detail today:
1) The psychopath, not being capable of forming deep emotional attachments, is very easily bored. Consequently, he (or she) will need to provoke constant drama in his personal and sometimes even his professional life, for entertainment.
2) The psychopath, aiming for power and control over others, generally becomes involved sexually and romantically with many individuals at once. This in itself will create a lot of mutual jealousy, fighting over him and drama (among those targets that know of each other), once again, entertaining the psychopath and demonstrating his dominance over his victims.
3) A psychopath will engage in arbitrary displays of power, to maintain control over his targets. If he got upset in a rational manner only for legitimate reasons, this would not demonstrate his power nor psychologically and emotionally unhinge those around him. Psychopaths are always tyrants: be it of their small families or of an entire nation. Whether they wield power over few or over many, their behavior is similar, as are their techniques of maintaining control (deceit, brainwashing, isolation, abuse interspersed with small favors and arbitrary displays of power, manifested from anything to physical violence to gaslighting and emotional abuse and, in some cases, to death itself).
4) However, there’s an aspect of the roller coaster ride–the constant ups and downs, the extreme idealization and the bitter devaluation–which is even harder for victims to accept. It’s nearly impossible for victims to understand why somebody who made such a great effort to seduce you; who couldn’t praise you enough; who gave you so many romantic gifts; who said “I love you Baby” more often than “hello”; who seemed to be lost in your eyes could all of a sudden perceive you as a nothing and a nobody; insult your appearance, accomplishments and intellect; criticize and stab you in the back to others and–above all–hate you as the worst enemy of their lives. I believe that this dramatic and seemingly unmotivated shift from high to low regard absolutely stuns victims of psychopaths, leading some of them to wonder what they did wrong to provoke it.
The answer usually is: you did nothing wrong. In some cases, the flattery and gifts were only a ruse the psychopath used to get whatever he may have wanted from you: be it money, sex, or a cover of normalcy. In other cases, however, the flattery was genuine: which, of course, also means genuinely shallow. It was a sign that the psychopath’s pursuit of you was extremely exciting and rewarding to him. You were (for a period of time) a very high priority because of the immediate gratification the relationship with you offered him.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that he didn’t cheat on you, that he didn’t lie to you, or that he treated you well. It only means that he took the trouble to deceive you and hide his secret lives far better because that was the only way to get from you whatever he wanted at the time. He couldn’t have obtained your trust, your love, your commitment, or your wealth without doing everything possible to convince you of the lie that he, himself was capable of trust, love and commitment.
The high in your relationship is therefore explicable in terms of the time required to lure you, to get you to buy the false image and bond to him. The low is explicable in terms of his need to control and dominate you. Later, it’s also the manifestation of the final phase of the relationship–the discard phase–when the psychopath finally exposed himself for what he is. At that point, he either left you or you left him. Usually, however, psychopaths never leave you for good, but return from time to time to probe for more supply and to destabilize your life.
But it seems as if the psychopath’s devaluation of you is so filled with bitterness, hatred and sometimes even violence that it can’t be fully explained in terms of him tiring of you and moving on to other promising victims. Loving couples can grow apart and leave each other for better matches and lives. Non-loving couples can grow apart once they’re no longer useful to one another. But a psychopath takes this process one step further, to discard his ex-lovers with a degree of vitriol and hatred that astonishes his victims and exceeds any boundaries of normality.
This becomes most obvious in those cases when psychopaths kill their ex-partners and dispose of their bodies as if they were a pile of garbage. Fortunately, this only happens rarely: and when it does, we tend to hear about it on the news. However, even psychopaths who don’t engage in such extreme behavior manifest an inexplicably strong vitriol towards their former partners, particularly towards those who left them of their own volition.
It’s as if a psychopath feels doubly betrayed in those cases: not only for being rejected by you, but also for the fact you’re no longer living up to the unrealistic ideal of the honeymoon phase of the relationship. He projects the blame for the diminished excitement in the relationship unto you. What’s wrong with you that you don’t thrill him anymore, as you did in the beginning of his hot pursuit? Is it because you’re not beautiful enough? Is it because you’re not smart enough? Or rich enough? Or sexual and sensual enough? What do you do wrong and how do you fail to meet his needs?
Failing to accept any responsibility for anything in life, a psychopath never really blames himself for any failure in his relationships. Someone else, or circumstances, are always to blame. Like a child who tires of an old mechanical toy and smashes it to the ground when it no longer works, so the psychopath destroys old relationships (along with their positive associations in his mind) after he tires of each of his partners. For a psychopath, it’s not enough to end a dying relationship. He must also demolish that person and what she once represented to him. The higher you were initially idealized by a psychopath, the lower you will fall in his eyes when the relationship inevitably fizzles out. Hatred and contempt will fill the place in his empty heart, which was temporarily filled by shallow admiration and lust.
Labels: brainwashing, devaluation, discard, hatred, idealize, love bombing, narcissist, psychopath, seduce, seduction, smear campaign, sociopath, targets
Thursday, March 01, 2018
THE DANGERS OF ONLINE DATING
by Donna Anderson
1. Worldwide, there are 1.8 billion Internet users. It is reasonable to assume that, as in the general population, 1% to 4% of them are sociopaths/narcissists or psychopahs. That means there between 14 million and 72 million sociopaths/narcissists or psychopaths online—all trolling for victims.
2. Sociopaths, Narcissists and Psychopaths target lonely people. If you’re looking for a relationship online, you are advertising the fact that you’re lonely. You are setting yourself up to be exploited.
3. When filling out an online dating profile, you provide information about yourself and what you are looking for. Sociopaths, Narcissists and Psychopaths take the information and pretend to be the person of your dreams. They use the information that you posted to seduce you.
4. Sociopaths, Narcissists and Psychopaths typically register on multiple dating sites simultaneously. They keep baiting the hook until someone bites.
5. The Internet is anonymous. It is impossible to know for sure with whom you are corresponding. Some people post gorgeous photos in their profiles, which are actually photos of models stolen from elsewhere on the Internet.
6. Experts believe that 65% to 90% of human communication is nonverbal—facial expressions, gestures, body language, tone of voice. That means in communication via the web or e-mail, 65% to 90% of the meaning is missing. With so much information missing, people interpret a communication to mean what they want it to mean.
7. Because communicating over the Internet is anonymous, it creates a sense of safety. You feel like you can confess your hopes and dreams to a stranger.
8. Sociopaths, Narcissists and Psychopaths say what their targets want to hear. Often, they are lying. But humans can detect a lie only 53% of the time—the same as flipping a coin.
9. So here’s what happens when you look for romance online:
- You provide information about yourself by filling out the dating profile.
- You communicate with someone, but 65% to 90% of the meaning is missing.
- You pour out your heart and soul, and it feels good.
- The person responds, and you interpret everything to mean what you want it to mean.
- You fall in love with your own fantasy.
SOURCE
Labels: affairs, anonymity, dangerous, fantasy, lying, narcissist, online affair, online dating, online predator, online stalking, psychopath, sociopath, targets
Monday, February 19, 2018
Unresolved Trauma = Attracts Dating Predators
Address old wounds before jumping into the dating pool
For individuals with unresolved traumas, the mate-selection
process often carries a double risk. That is, unhealed wounds of past
trauma in your life lead to a higher likelihood that unsafe people will
pick you, and if you actively pick a partner, it is much more likely
that you will end up with an unsafe person.
In other words, if
you have experienced a trauma, it is often true that you will
unintentionally emit certain signals and behaviors that chum the water
for the psychopathic sharks in the dating pool. Part of the “chum” in
this analogy would be body language.
Research shows that there are
differences in the body language of those identified by anti-social
prisoners to be target victims and those who are not judged to be easy
prey.** Anti-social, dominating, power-abusing individuals have a strong
radar for those who are impulsive, those who do not respect themselves,
those who are desperate to find love at any cost – basically anyone who
will play opposite them in a submissive role for any number of
reasons.
I’ve intentionally selected sharks for my analogy here
because the behavioral patterns of sharks can show up in interactions
between those in the dating pool. That is, before a shark attacks, it
first circles and then bumps into its potential prey, feeling out its
possible victim before going in for the kill.
In the same way,
sharks in the dating pool will bump up against those they are getting to
know, putting out feelers in the form of little tests to gauge the
potential for dominating someone. There are many, many forms that these
tests can take. Here are three examples…
- A person who shows blatant disrespect by flaking out on plans at the last minute with no reasonable explanation… (testing whether the other person will allow him or herself to be treated disrespectfully)
- A person who asks someone he or she has just met on the internet to “come visit for a weekend” (testing things like impulsiveness and how much the other person is willing to invest in a relationship that has barely begun, which may be a indicator of desperation or low self-esteem)…
- A person who pressures someone into physical intimacy early in a relationship, before trust or safety has been well-established over a lengthy period of time…(testing level of self-respect, impulsivity, desperation, etc.)
A shark gains information about the potential
to take advantage of someone by observing how that person responds to
these kinds of tests. So, if you’ve ever met a captivating person who
suddenly dropped out of your life with no explanation, one possibility
is that a shark in the dating pool may have taken a pass because you did
not show yourself to be easy prey.
Even if your goal is to have a
healthy love relationship, if you have experienced certain types of
past traumas, you may have a difficult time recognizing sharks when they
present themselves as suitors because somehow they "feel like home." If
we are sometimes drawn like moths to a flame to potentially abusive
partners, could there be any logical reason for this pattern?
Some
have argued that we select certain partners in order to re-stage trauma
scenarios that mirror what we have experienced in the past, presumably
with the hope of getting a different outcome. For example, the son of a
verbally abusive mother will often end up with a verbally abusive wife.
So, maybe this is an attempt to re-pave over an old trauma in order to
emotionally correct a deep psychic wound? Whether or not this is the
underlying psychological drive, the end result of picking someone you
hope to change almost never leads to greater wholeness and emotional
well-being.
Ultimately, in relationships, as in politics, if you
ignore your history, you will tend to repeat it, so if you have not
addressed and achieved healing from your trauma experience(s), doing so
in a safe relationship with a treating professional is recommended as a
first priority.
*De Becker, G. (1997). The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence. New York, NY: Dell Publishing (a division of Random House, Inc.), p. 65.
**Grayson, B. and Stein, M.I. (1981) Attracting Assault: Victims' Nonverbal Cues. Journal of Communication 31 (1): 68-75.
Labels: abuse, c-ptsd, disrespect, emotional rape, fear, narcissists, predators, psychopaths, ptsd, sociopaths, targets, trauma, unresolved
