What is at stake if you feel your way deeper into one of the toxic relationships or in the case of sociopaths and psychopaths, pathological love relationships, is your very mental health, well-bring and personhood along with potentially your physical health as well.
Cluster B personality disordered or wounded people do not know how to relate in what are considered as healthy. Therefore, the experience for the targeted person, the loved one, is a very painful and confusing one. I work with loved ones or those who have dated and now need healing of their own due to the abuse of a person with BPD, NPD, or ASPD.
People with BPD, (some – not all) and those with NPD or sociopaths or psychopaths target those they seek supply and fuel from. Often targeted are Empaths, people with very high empathy and compassion who care and often put their loved ones needs ahead of their own. For some this fits with Codependency. For many, it is about having what Sandra Brown has referred to as super traits that impair one’s own ability to be aware of their own need for harm reduction.
Learning to trust your confusion is one of the best pathways to learn more about what your confusion is trying to tell you. Your confusion is Cognitive Dissonance. That is very painful. Cognitive Dissonance, in psychology, is, anxiety that arises or results from holding (believing) contradictory or incompatible feelings and/or thoughts and beliefs simultaneously that lead to confusion and/or emotional distress. For example when one really likes or loves a person but is simultaneously hurt, confused, and very hurt by their harsh words, gaslighting, projecting, and by their very inconsistent presentation, affect, and/or behaviour.
Learning to see that massive confusion as a stop sign by trusting that confusion regardless of what you think or feel that will include a lot of cognitive dissonance is a very pivotal way to begin to understand that you are hurting and that no matter how much you want to deny what is really happening relationally, you really need to pause and become more focused on the inconsistencies to outright manipulation and gaslighting abuse that may be clouding your ability to create much needed change and to take care of yourself.
