This book is a phenomenal resource for helping victims of intense, psychological relationship abuse. It is appropriately titled, as women experience way more often than men the ill effects of these relationships. However, men can easily become victims too and women can just as aggressively display the manipulative traits of the low/no conscience psychopath, sociopath, and narcissist, which I will now just refer to as psychopath for ease of writing. Over the years in my wellness practice, and just through being a supportive person and friend to others, I have helped mostly women and some men see through and overcome psychopathic behavior from their partners. I thought I understood the nature of the problem and had empathy for these people trying to navigate unreasonable love situations. There was a part of me that would question, why they just couldn’t just leave them and how could it be such a big deal given the outrageous negative behavior that was obvious to see with the little or no positive behavior. Why were they so desperately hanging on? However, until I experienced it myself I realized I never could have realized the magnitude of what these people were going through. I might as well should have been asking a heroin addict to just simply stop using heroine! The mental state of victims of psychopaths is similar to an addictive mind disease (although addiction is not ultimately the correct word here) where the victim is in a fog and the psychopath is a professional at using the positive traits of their partner to manipulate them further and keep them from being equals and having them cater to every power dynamic to favor the psychopath and further keep down the victim.
This is a serious problem. It is so serious in fact that a women just came up to me, upon seeing my book, and we had a dynamic conversation about how years later she is still dealing with PTSD from her psychopathic ex-partner who is still acting like psychopath with her 13 year old son. She started to shake at one point and said she hadn’t felt this way in a while and thought that this kind of reaction was gone. They estimate that the victims from psychopathic behavior range in the hundreds of millions just in the U.S. It is so serious because it is not easy to see if one is not educated in how to see it. It is not like seeing a battered person and then throwing the domestic abuser in jail. The psychopath operates in a much more sneaky and covert way. They are experts at not being found out and coming off at first as the ideal partner and then symbolically portraying themselves in a positive light and causing absolute confusion for anyone who thinks anything else. They are experts at recognizing vulnerabilities and exposing them to the fullest for getting what they want. As time passes, victims feel like they are doing something wrong, question every move they make, and become a shell of their former selves while trying to improve the relationship within the confines and constraints and rules put forth by the psychopath which is impossible and not meant to do anything but continue to keep the victim down in a low conscious state. Again, you could say about the victims, “why can’t these people just leave?” Well that is a complicated question which doesn’t offer any easy answer and why this book was written. When something as powerful as emotional love and attachment is involved, and the body’s drug hormones respond effectively for keeping you chemically involved/addicted, asking someone to just pick up and leave such a relationship is like asking someone to stop eating food. It just doesn’t add up in the brain and how the body operates. In this way, the psychopath is a master at knowing how to control and capitalize on positive personality traits, while the victim continually tries to improve love and connection and the relationship, forever trying to get back to the beginning of the relationship when the psychopath was a master at faking an ideal partnership. And this is one of the cruxes of the issue. There is a certain type of person whom the psychopath seeks and there is a certain type of person who will unknowingly and regrettably take on the psychopath.
This is a complicated subject. If it were easy to pinpoint then we wouldn’t have this problem and psychopaths would easily be recognized and people would stay away from them, and we wouldn’t need this book written about what so many people are missing about them. The professionalism associated with the changing nature of the psychopath to use confusion, manipulations, and your vulnerabilities against you is the very nature of why this is so hard to spot. The women I talked to earlier used a lava lamp as a metaphor. Think of a lava lamp and how the material inside is constantly changing giving off light with the different forms of the lava material floating and moving around inside the lamp. Hence is the psychopath. You can never catch the lava lamp in one state where its material is staying the same and not moving around. The psychopath is no different in their efforts to constantly maneuver and adjust around in his incentivized goal to manipulate and have power in any way they can; never allowing for one second to be seen as vulnerable or open as that of course would be seen by them as ‘weakness.’ Avoiding and deluding reality at all costs is of absolute importance. Even if you pinpoint or catch a psychopath in the act they will deny the act, or make you think you didn’t catch them, or were wrong in what you perceived and demean and degrade you for it.
The most common traits of psychopaths include being unmoved by emotional concepts, being devious in communication, using language that is contradictory, lacking any emotional processing abilities related to empathy-conscience-remorse-fear-sadness-disgust, and avoidance of communication they don’t want to have or limiting things that can be talked about. They are very good at smooth talking and hiding communication problems (avoidant personality traits), changing the meaning of words, mimicking or parroting words or gestures back to the victim, and experts at picking up and using non-verbal cues like body language, eye lingo, and gestures/movements. They have a predatory six sense for loneliness, grief, and vulnerability. With the psychopath, communication is reduced to a very juvenile emotional age and decision making skills. They will bring to the communication process other manipulative, dysfunctional and aggravating behavior which include impulsivity, extreme highs and lows of emotion even from one instant moment to another, splitting one person against another, knows-it-all so nobody can contribute any new information, lying, drama (while saying they don’t like drama), extremes in anger which can easily lead to physical abuse, changing subjects dramatically, blaming irrationally, doesn’t take responsibility for behavior/choices and is generally irresponsible and parasitic in behavior, has abandonment issues and acts like a victim, projects behavior on others, causes general confusion overall to avoid getting caught in their schemes, and overall uses gaslighting.
For the victim, it is important to know what kinds of traits put them at risk that attract psychopaths and make such relationships continue. These traits include extraversion in themselves and yearning for it in others and generally high excitement seeking traits and high values for relationship investment and being socially positive. Other values include sentimentality, attachment, competitiveness (you will make the relationship better!), concern for others, and harm avoidance for themselves and others. The victims character traits also align with cooperativeness, empathy, tolerance, friendliness, compassion, and supportiveness. They also include initially being very self-confident, responsible, reliable, resourceful, goal-oriented, un-pretentious, humble, and fulfilled, and overall very self-transcendent (big picture thinking). Also, most victims exhibit the tendency to ‘believe in miracles’ and have low impulsiveness as this makes them think the psychopath can change while never act on their impulses to, ‘leave’ the relationship.
You can see how everything mentioned above about the intersecting traits of psychopaths and their victims will completely enable the psychopath to operate effectively while the victim questions all their positive traits they bring to the relationship and hence feels absolutely crazy! The attempts at communicating further or going deeper or working towards empathy and being met equally and reciprocally are crazy-making for how ineffective the results are, and will cause the victim to question their communication skills as more ideas for communication and expression and providing an accepting and non-judgmental environment only produces such for the psychopath and leaves the victim in a crazy, depleted, crisis mode for it never being returned. Inevitably it makes them view themselves negatively and their sanity soon plummets. The blame continues to come implemented by the psychopath who degrades the victim for trying to make things better, while the victim internalizes it all and self-criticism runs to unbounded heights! In this way, the only solution with a psychopath is 100% total disengagement or as close to that as is feasibly possible. Nothing will ever change unless you yourself turn into a psychopath and beat them at their own game which is most definitely a lose-lose situation.
Describing these two types of people in the psychopath and the victim seems like complete and utter opposites and ironic that they would be together. However, that is precisely the reason they are! The super temperament and character traits of the victim are offset by the horrendous deficits of the psychopath. The masterful camouflage of the psychopath’s emotional bankruptcy in the beginning combined with a fake presentation of themselves, while displaying a vortex-sucking attracting and draw, and basically being on good behavior, does wonders for them for accumulating emotional vulnerable knowledge for later leading to utter disaster for the victim.
As you can see, this is a very serious subject that takes some insight and inquiry and contemplation to understand what exactly is going on, and with it affecting into the hundreds of millions in our country it clearly is leaving an outrageous path of victims. The psychopath benefits from the fact that society, people, the legal system does not take a deeper look. Looking at the surface, how many of us have been duped by psychopaths? Over the years, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it as I was never educated on such matters and didn’t even know what narcissism meant until a few years ago. The word psychopath made me think of the movie ‘Psycho’ and somebody who knifes people in the shower who is obviously physically attacking people. Regardless of my past short comings, I am a pretty intuitive person and inner gut feelings would come up here and there with certain types of people about how I negatively felt around them, how everything was centered around them, how they were domineering and would always get their way, how they created drama, how they were irresponsible, how you were always confused and would feel negative around them, how they spun reality, how they would refuse to communicate, how they would refuse to stop talking to listen, how they would take advantage of your friends and family, how they were irrational, how they would make ruthless/black-or-white world thinking comments, how they would avoid all important emotional processing matters like the plague, how they would bully, the list can go on and on.
I don’t think it is wise to now look at EVERYONE in your life as a psychopath or be paranoid of psychopaths, however, I do feel it is smart to do a few things. Pay attention to what kinds of psychopathic traits are within you and walk towards them and explore and get help with therapy for whatever arises with them. Pay attention to these traits in all that you surround yourself with and most especially those you share an intimate partnership with. Share your experiences with others about what psychopathy, sociopathy, and narcissism are and vehemently defend whoever comes to you with such traumatic information about their partner. I never thought I would have been blind-sided by such things EVER by people who were unwilling to look within, communicate, participated in gaslighting, etc. I am a wellness provider and I help people with this sort of stuff and it happening to me completely blew me out of the water. I have fully felt what the disease mentality is and it how it persists in us and how these types of dysfunctional relationships function. However, it also gave me clarity on the negative personality traits I had been witnessing over the years and, also, what I have had to explore in myself. It has empowered me tremendously but the PTSD effects will still be there from at least time to time at the heights that the psychopath will go to hide, avoid vulnerability and communication and emotions, confuse, distort, lie, basically do everything they can in a low conscious, reactionary state to create manipulation and power dynamics that favor them in every way while making it seem like they are doing exactly the opposite!
I escaped without any kids or houses shared or anything of the sort so I am a lucky victim but I feel extreme sympathy for the people who will have to deal with these people for the rest of their lives. They will be forced to turn into some of the strongest people I will have ever meet, and it will be a slow process to get there (at least in the beginning or until they find the right approach to process their situation and trauma). It is a new nightmarish reality in my life to know that this sort of thing exists and the relevance of it in our society (our psychopathic president in Trump for one), and how it goes largely unnoticed and unchecked. I am glad overall, though, that I now know more intimately the nature of this outrageously abusive problem. The amount of vigilance that is required today in order to not be taken advantage of seems like it’s at an all-time high. Screw the idea of allowing it to slide and dropping it and letting it go unnoticed, hence playing into the psychopath’s world and strengths. Screw catering to stupid ass behavior in stupid ass people and being responsible for their change and being easy on them in an emotionally unintelligent way that only enables them to further cause havoc and trauma and parasitic behavior! Without exposing such behavior, and educating as many as possible on these matters, and taking whatever legal means necessary to be free from psychopathic influence, it persists and plays into psychopathic strengths. Bringing such things into light and relying on intelligent emotional processing is a positive way forward. Spreading the word, standing up for myself and people who have dealt with this trauma and dedicating a portion of my wellness practice and life focus on the matter seems like the natural thing to do.
The Avid Fan 
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