Part 4 – Your Own Personal Lightning Rod
As you read over your list of vulnerabilities, you can have some varied reactions:
‘This is something good about me that I like. I don’t want to change.’
‘Eeek. This is not good. I don’t want to be like that’.
‘I think it’s good to be like that and it’s never been a problem before…it’s a shame that it’s been my downfall with this person.’
You can highlight the things in yourself you’d like to change, or maybe just ‘tame’ a little. It’s good to care about other people’s opinion of you, to want to be liked; it’s just a hazard if it starts to warp your view of yourself or your own behaviour. And it’s a major weakness if it makes you vulnerable to manipulation. All someone has to do is praise and stroke you and they’ve got a hold on you.
There may be other things on your list that represent fantasies or beliefs. It might be things like wanting the perfect lover, friend, or colleague, or the person who will step in and solve all your problems, or protect you from the threatening aspects of life. While this is natural, it’s unrealistic and it makes you vulnerable in a slightly different way: people who are skilled at reading your desires and insecurities can identify how you can be ‘bought’ and influenced by presenting them (‘accidentally’) as the very solution you were looking for. So you might want to reserve your fantasies just for your inner daydreaming, and approach the outer world with a bit more grit and realism.
As for those qualities that are good, like caring about having evidence before you accuse someone or wanting not to humiliate people, there are two steps to making yourself less vulnerable. One is being better able to identify those who will take advantage of your virtue. The other is having ways of maintaining your integrity without it being used against you. I’ll have more to say on this later in the series.
For now, you can reflect on your responses thus far and draw up your own list of inner warning signs – not qualities in the other person, but feelings or reactions in you.
Here’s a sample personal lighting rod – yours might be similar different:
How I feel – my emotions and mood when or after being with them:
- Often my mood plummets, I feel a sense of depression but ‘for no reason’
- I lose confidence in myself
- I feel more helpless or powerless, inadequate or incompetent
- I find myself having little fantasies that, on inspection, seem to be compensating or trying to restore my attacked sense of self
- I feel irritated or hurt, disrespected, unfairly treated
- Or other little signs that I have been punctured or pricked without quite noticing it happening*
- Or I might feel elated at first (in the ‘honeymoon period’) that I’ve found a great new person, who magically is just what I was looking for
*Dr George Simon has a great phrase about it being like ‘whiplash’ – at the time you don’t notice the injury, it’s only afterwards that you really discover the damage or injury done to you.
Sweat the small stuff
- Notice something that feels ‘off’ even if it is tiny and trivial.
- I try to dismiss it because it’s only a small thing.
Only later did I learn that the trivial things are the most important things to notice (you’ll find out why).
Coming soon:
‘Tells’ to flag up the Dangerously Destructive Person
Your Protective Factors
Testing your gut instincts in reality
Principles to follow in dealing with a Dangerously Destructive Person
Cool Responses to Verbal Aggression
STOPP – a method for the heat of the moment
SPA – a holistic method for emerging, like a lotus, clean despite the mud
Back to the Dangerously Difficult People series.