Women who Love too Much Community Group
WHEN BEING IN LOVE, MEANS BEING IN PAIN... This group is to help women through the journey of realizing they can love themselves. To help realize that they are capable of having a happy, healthy, whole relationship and break the cycle of abuse and heartache from loving emotionally unavailable men.
My lil sis... 18 years old. is pregnant. and seems to be following my lead as far as men.
she just graduated high school this past year. she has had 3 boyfriends. she gets VERY attatched and stuck to her boyfriends, 2 of them has cheated on her, one of which happened right in front of her in a party, with her best friend, and she thought it was ok. kept a giant picture of him on her wall, months after they broke up, and continued to do things for him and be his friend. even though she was devastated that they were no longer together. This last one, the one that got her pregnant, is in his senior year. She knows she is keeping the baby.
he wants her to get an abortion, and the first thing he said when she said no, was that his dad would drag her to the clinic. i was angry when she told me this, and told her she should be angry, not going over to his house to cook dinner. i told her that he should never threaten her. especially about that.
a couple days later he breaks up with her, and says that if she doesnt get rid of the baby, ither through adoption or abortion, then he will never come back to her. but if she does they can continue to date. the boy's father, and mother, have told my sister it is all her fault, and that she wil ruin his life. i dont know what to tell her, or how to go about it. she is posting on facebook and such how she never wants to live without him.
after all this, she is picking up his dog on monday to take it to the vet for him, and paid for the appointment already. she is totally blinded by her love for him, and she needs to realize, that what he is doing, is not ok, and to stop blaming herself. and stand up for herself when it comes to him. and set boundries.
a little background on my sister, she has never done drugs, and does not go to raging parties and drink and screw boys. she gets good grades, and is workign towards becoming a nurse in college. she is a hard worker, and assertive in anything she wants. except with her boyfriends. i dont know how to go about being there for her.
she just graduated high school this past year. she has had 3 boyfriends. she gets VERY attatched and stuck to her boyfriends, 2 of them has cheated on her, one of which happened right in front of her in a party, with her best friend, and she thought it was ok. kept a giant picture of him on her wall, months after they broke up, and continued to do things for him and be his friend. even though she was devastated that they were no longer together. This last one, the one that got her pregnant, is in his senior year. She knows she is keeping the baby.
he wants her to get an abortion, and the first thing he said when she said no, was that his dad would drag her to the clinic. i was angry when she told me this, and told her she should be angry, not going over to his house to cook dinner. i told her that he should never threaten her. especially about that.
a couple days later he breaks up with her, and says that if she doesnt get rid of the baby, ither through adoption or abortion, then he will never come back to her. but if she does they can continue to date. the boy's father, and mother, have told my sister it is all her fault, and that she wil ruin his life. i dont know what to tell her, or how to go about it. she is posting on facebook and such how she never wants to live without him.
after all this, she is picking up his dog on monday to take it to the vet for him, and paid for the appointment already. she is totally blinded by her love for him, and she needs to realize, that what he is doing, is not ok, and to stop blaming herself. and stand up for herself when it comes to him. and set boundries.
a little background on my sister, she has never done drugs, and does not go to raging parties and drink and screw boys. she gets good grades, and is workign towards becoming a nurse in college. she is a hard worker, and assertive in anything she wants. except with her boyfriends. i dont know how to go about being there for her.
It is probably a multi-generational illness that runs thorough your family via dysfunctional modeling. I told my own mother this the last time I saw her. She has been an incredible model for me in many ways, but certainly not in the the area of relationships, which is perhaps the most important modeling of all.
Really, what can you do? I know that that she has of complete and utter desperation for another human being. Thinking that you life can not possibly go on without him. And the gall of his manipulations. Regardless if she has the baby or keeps the baby, he will leave eventually her. AND for him to attempt to manipulate her emotions and decisions by trying to 'offer' himself as the grand prize. Sickening.
The only thing I know to advise is to pray for her highest and greatest good, give her the book and tell her about the board if she does not already know about it. Perhaps here she will see her story told repeatidly, and everything can start to make sense. I don't know. I wish her luck and self esteem. She needs a big dose of both.
Professionals in the Helping Industries & Their Personal Pathological Relationships
by Sandra L. Brown, M.A.
Are you a doctor, nurse, therapist, social worker, female clergy, medical personnel, paramedic, teacher, psychiatrist, Certified Nursing Assistant, day care worker, guidance counselor, speech therapist, missionary, physical therapist, psychology grad student, art therapist, writer, artist, musician, work in parole or probation, or work with atrisk kids? Welcome aboard to the group of people MOST LIKELY to end up in a relationship with a pathological narcissist, sociopath or psychopath. Can your career be a risk factor for finding/staying with a narcissist or psychopath? Unfortunately, YES!
Look at that list again all the hearts of gold kind of people, the salt of the earth women the Mother Teresas of the world AT RISK for attracting and staying with dangerous, dark, and pathological men. Seems unfair doesnt it? Normally, narcissists and psychopaths dont migrate to their own kind and in the rare occasions when they do, you end up with a sensationalized case of a new Bonnie & Clyde. Yet in most cases, they migrate to you!
During a recent media interview I said, I think understanding this represents one of the largest breakthroughs in our understanding of dangerous intimate relationship dynamics. For so long we understood him but we didnt really understand her. She was wrongly labeled codependent but codependency treatment didnt help her. She was wrongly labeled a relationship or even sex addict and addiction treatment didnt help her. She was wrongly labeled as mutually pathological and yet she was never diagnosed with her own personality disorder. Nothing fit and nothing explained her until we found the missing key...her off the Richter scale traits that put it all in perspective. Once we can understand her, we can help her.
What we do understand is that by the nature of your own tender and helpful personality traits you migrated to a career in which you could use your abundant traits of empathy, helpfulness, compassion, resourcefulness, cooperation, and tolerance. Where best do these great humanitarian traits get used? In helping professions like social work, ministry, nursing, other medical professions, psychology, teaching, child workers...all people with big hearts trying to give out of their own abundance of empathy and helpfulness. By virtue that you even ENDED up in one of these professions means you are probably more at risk for these types of relationships than others. In almost ALL circumstances, the women from these relationships are either IN these types of professions or are trying to get in to them (they are in school or trying to move out of their job into a more giving field like these fields).
Many of the women who are in these types of professions ended up with the narcissist or psychopath during the course of their actual jobs. Nurses hooked up with patients, doctors married someone they met in the field, psychologists dated mentally ill men, missionaries dated someone from one of the street missions, prison workers hooked up with inmates, psych nurses dated psych patients. Every once in a while we got stories from very leftbrained women like CPAs but even then, shes not usually a typical leftbrainer. Shes still got a lot of the abundant humanitarian traits or she hates what shes doing for a job and wants to leave and go into a care giving field.
This has HUGE implications for intervention...dont you think? If by nature we know that women with SKY HIGH temperament traits of too much empathy, too much tolerance, too much cooperation end up in jobs in which empathy/tolerance/cooperation is the #1 skill, then we also know THESE are the women most likely to go on to empathize, tolerate and cooperate with severe pathology. Knowing that women in these professions are more likely to have the high risk personality traits means education can begin within these professions. Women need to know that sometimes even their career selection is indicative of what their relationship selection might be as well. I doubt any colleges are going to put in their Academic Handbooks Caution, This Profession May Be Hazardous to Your Relationship Health !! Yet, its the beginning of how to think about WHO needs this education BEFORE they end up in pathological love relationships.
Once we know who this is, the next question is how best to reach these identified groups of women. Who BEST to reach out to their own field than the nurses, teachers, therapists, social workers, etc. who ARE the women who have been touched by these destructive relationships? Why? In the research, almost all the women indicated career and financial harm by the pathological. NO ONE gets out unscathed!
This is a career risk for women. Many women are demoted or lose their jobs because of their inability to concentrate or he sabotages her work situation. Others have lost their entire life savings putting them in financial ruin. Some have lost their licenses and an incredible amount of college work down the tubes. Doctors that are so fraught with PTSD have stepped down to nursing. Attorneys have stepped down to paralegals. Teachers down to teaching assistants. Professors work in book stores. This is why teaching YOUR industry about what these men can do to their productivity, their futures, and their careers is important.
My hope is that someone from every field we have identified as a potential source will become an educational voice in their industry. Are you an Alumni from somewhere? Theres your market...educate your own. Protect YOUR FIELD by peer education by writing or speaking about these issues because you are NOT the only one in your field that this has happened to OR will happen to. Your field is an identified at risk field that needs what you know!