HOW TO FIND LOVE AND NOT A PSYCHO

How to Find Love and Not a Psycho

NOW THAT THE TITLE HAS caught your attention, I can tell you what this book is really all about. It is about love and relationships. Sometimes we meet people who say that they have been happily married for 30 years and, at other times, we meet people whose relationships have gone bad (as I do in my work as a forensic psychologist). When I say relationships gone bad, I mean seriously bad. Couples who have ripped each other apart. Relationships in which someone is a psychological monster hell-bent on destroying their former lover. Relationships in which there has been physical violence or, more commonly, relationships that are psychologically toxic without the occurrence of a physical incident.

When I forensically interview those people who have experienced these terrible relationships, with the benefit of hindsight they often reveal the warning signs (whether or not they recognise them as such). Little comments are made which I see as flashing warnings like the neon lights in Las Vegas. These signs are frequently neglected by people due to the powerful emotional high associated with love. Oxytocin, the love hormone, dulls our conscious mind from harmful patterns while the joyous rush of love begs us to stay for more. The result is a lack of foresight caused either by a lack of knowledge or the hormonal override. It is for this reason that the expression love is blind is still part of modern parlance.

This lack of foresight results in fledgling relationships igniting into turmoil and confusion. The journey is chaotic, traumatic and at times dangerous. Eventually the relationships finish, leaving carnage and wreckage – not just for the couples themselves but sometimes also whole families. Parents, children and grandparents can be dragged into the drama. Dreams smashed. Plates smashed. Problems can continue even after a dramatic relationship collapse. These problems include court battles and conflicts in relation to children and property. The personal toll includes depression and trauma, fear of intimacy, lack of trust and a damaged sense of self.

In the self-reflection stage, you might ask yourself how you got into such a mess. The answer is that some people are master manipulators who can make you believe night is day and that you were at fault. You could be made to feel guilty for not meeting your partner’s needs, or you could have been used to fulfil your partner’s needs while receiving nothing in return because your partner didn’t care about you as a person. The list of possible games is lengthy, and we will revisit some of these themes in due course.

This book has been written for two purposes. The first is to help you avoid making the choices which could land you in that pit of despair described above, so that future stories of bad relationships will refer to others and not to you. I don’t want you to be a chapter in my next book. The second purpose is to shed light on the whole process so that you, who can relate to every sad and sorry word above, can recover and not repeat the experience. I also want to help you to not only avoid the true psycho but to make choices which can make a relationship spectacular.

My strong and positive belief is that we are created to have healthy family units which produce effective offspring. We want to be mated pairs in happy families. A good relationship is one of the best places on earth to be. I do not believe that we were designed to be single, which is why we continue to look for a partner. The key to happiness is to ensure that from the start your mate is fundamentally the right one. People can change, but only by degree, not nature. If you want to build a house, it is important to start with the right materials. This book is a do-it-yourself guide to selecting the right building materials.

How great this world would be if we all had a set of tools which helped us see which features make a good companion and, conversely, which features could result in a roller coaster of despair. We could seek the former and avoid people with the latter characteristics. This book is designed to be a tool kit to help you increase the likelihood of identifying those who will chew you up and eventually spit you out, and those who will still make your heart flutter after decades together.

At this stage it is important to clarify that this book is not just about psychos in a particular diagnostic sense. Some dysfunctional relationships are based on seriously ill people with diagnosable conditions. In the following chapters I will specifically address some of these types of people as they can tear lives apart. Fortunately, most people are not like that. For many of us it is about picking someone who is compatible with our beliefs and attitudes, because if you find someone who is different from you it often results in a hard relationship. It’s about trying to find a good relationship and avoiding ending up with a partner who, through their conduct, will make your life miserable.

I have spent my career working in family law and as a court expert I have assessed over 1,300 families going through difficult and complex separations. I have had the honour and privilege of listening to 2,600 stories of how people met, what went wrong, and why their relationships were a disaster. Internationally, family courts are the repository of society’s most dysfunctional and damaged relationships. Reasonable people can solve their problems without resorting to court proceedings. The Family Court environment captures those relationships with problems and difficulties which are not easily solved. I hear and see the warning signs which were evident but neglected.

Most of the difficulties associated with complex Family Court cases arise from poor choice of partner. An occasional but relatively rare situation is that of a later event triggering the demise of the relationship. Such events can include someone becoming seriously unwell or mentally ill, the loss of a child, or some other terrible life event. The trauma or condition then changes a person and the relationship does not survive. If you are in that situation there is nothing you could have done to prevent it, particularly if it was something that just developed in the relationship. In my opinion, psychologically robust people are better able to cope with trauma and therefore a robust partner is a better choice. As stated earlier, this is a less common situation. In most cases people can usually see with hindsight the warning signs that they had neglected to heed. Generally, the problems stem from who you have chosen to be with rather than from some trauma or event that knocked the wheels off the relationship.

One of the most profound factors I have observed is that the warning signs of a dysfunctional relationship were present either from the beginning or very early in the relationship, but the people involved didn’t know how to read the signs. As you read through this book you will discover that there are different ways in which people present themselves that obscures their pathology. However, there are several tests and signs which will allow you to more accurately ascertain whether your partner will make your life heaven or hell. Each chapter concludes with a summary of love finder tools. These are essentially summaries of those things to do or to look for to help you to make good choices or recognise potentially bad choices. These are your tools.

I would like to reiterate that I believe that a relationship with a close and loving partner is one of the best places on earth. In other words, it can be heaven. However, a relationship with someone whose personality is generally destructive, or destructive to your particular nature, can create a living hell. With certain types of personalities that living hell can escalate with separation and, in more extreme cases, the victim of the rage and blame is never free from the conflict generated by their former lover. Life is therefore miserable with no possible escape.

It is often said that the opposite to love is hate. That is not actually true. The opposite to love is indifference; you no longer care about the other person. Hate is a separate relationship. There are some people who would rather be in a hate relationship than in no relationship at all and, therefore, can make your life a misery. The type of person who makes you the target of hate is also likely to have made your relationship with them exceptionally difficult. As you will discover, the journey to hell did not start like that. This is because the first stage is one of deceptive impression management – they treat you better and make you feel more special than you have ever felt before. We will return to this in later chapters when discussing how impression management colours our judgement.

With the breakdown of the village structure in society, it is much harder to identify a healthy and functional partner because a lot of community information has been lost. We no longer have access to local reference checks. This personality knowledge over the lifespan of an individual has been lost. We are therefore starting with complete strangers. This allows sinister characters more latitude to practice their art of deception.

Of course, modern technology has evolved in parallel with the breakdown of the village. An important concept I will describe in more detail later in the book, is how the use of the internet for dating has been a blessing (in that it allows for more opportunities to meet a variety of different people), but also a curse (in that it allows people to create personae or avatars which are either altered or completely false representations of themselves). Catfishing is a term which has appeared recently. Internet predators who fabricate online identities and entire social circles to trick people into emotional or romantic relationships is becoming a common phenomenon. It is not only necessary to screen for catfish – I want you to avoid anyone who is a bit fishy.

To get the love you want is a complex process, but the starting point is to find the right material with which to build a relationship. As will be explained later in this book, many of the problems brought by people into a relationship are perpetual problems which don’t go away. Before you can see somebody’s problems, you have to get past their façade – the games people play, and the distortions made possible through the internet and other electronic media. This is no easy task, so there are several chapters based on this topic.

In my opinion, a fundamental part of being human is the desire to be loved and share your life with somebody who values and respects you. The purpose of this book is to allow you to apply some of what we know from psychological science, forensic psychology, the great research into difficult-to-live-with personalities, together with my experience and observations obtained through dealing with high conflict personalities in the Family Court. Understanding this information will provide you with the power to find the ideal partner and to enter into and maintain a long-lasting and fulfilling relationship (rather than have a short distressing relationship or be trapped in a long-term complex and difficult situation where you battle for years to try and break free).

The only way to do this is to create a tool kit for assessing potential partners. As you develop your love finder tools, you will become equipped to screen your future partners in ways that you may not have considered before. This set of tools will give you the psychological x-ray vision to pierce through the façade and image management to see what lies beneath. Through understanding something about dangerous personalities, you will be able to spot markers of dysfunction early enough to do something about it.

The book also aims to provide some strategies about what you should be looking for, and why that could be important when choosing a partner (that is, a person who will treat you in ways which are psychologically healthy and will enhance your own functioning). Ultimately the choice will be yours alone. You can use the information to assist you to choose a desirable and emotionally supportive partner. Conversely you could ignore the tools and increase your risk of making a wrong choice. This book will not guarantee success, but it will increase the odds in your favour once you know what you are looking for.

As a society we say: I was falling in love. It is the falling I want you to avoid, not the love. To achieve success in a relationship you have to use your head – not just fall blindly. If you can analyse like a psychologist, and not disappear in a mist of hormone-induced love, you have a chance of lasting success. Therefore, a fitting starting point is to examine how your brain operates and then provide you with some information about how the brain can help you with your choice of partner.

Love Finder Tools:

While the notion of romantic attraction is wonderful in movies, happily ever after can only come from analysis or good luck. Analysis is an important tool to maximise the probability of a happy long-term outcome. Therefore, it is time to analyse and not romanticise.

Use Your Brain

THE HUMAN BRAIN IS THE most astonishing, amazing and beautiful organ. Did you know that it has more neuron connections than there are stars in the universe? With all due respect to the rapidly growing body of neurological science, our understanding of the brain is still primitive. I consider the study of the brain to be one of the great frontiers of knowledge for this century. For the purposes of this book we only need a very basic understanding for me to make