In my post of 2-17-12 (See: Manipulators Can Make You Feel Crazy) I mentioned that I'd be presenting additional examples about why folks sometimes doubt their gut instincts or harbor misconceptions and therefore allow themselves to be victimized. And just recently, I received an email from someone who realized after-the-fact the kind of person they'd been dealing with but who was still finding it difficult to shed some notions about human nature that probably contributed to the victimization they experienced. This email was very similar to several others I have received in recent months and prompted me to fashion this post.

It's in the very nature of decent folks to find some things unimaginable. And it's also common for all of us to use our own experience and self-reflection to conjecture what the underlying motives of someone else might be when they engage in behaviors that perplex us. For example, we might feel ashamed of ourselves when a thoughtless or insensitive comment we made about someone comes to light. As a result, we might deny we ever said what we did, or attempt to put as positive a "spin" as we can about what we meant by the comment. It's natural, therefore, when we see someone else engaged in some sort of denial or even some "covering their tracks" sort of behavior to presume that their motivation for doing so is the same as ours would be.

It's very hard for most of us to accept the notion that for all the things we have in common, human beings differ on a wide variety of personal attributes. And there are vast differences between folks whom I describe as relatively "neurotic" (i.e., excessively conscientious, inhibited, anxious, etc.) and those whom are best conceptualized as character-deficient or disturbed to some degree (i.e., uncaring, brazen, fearless). I discuss the major differences in my book Character Disturbance. I also provide a poignant example of how our typical preconceptions about human nature (many of which have been promoted by "traditional" psychologies) cause us to completely misinterpret the disturbed character's behavior and set ourselves up for victimization. Here's an excerpt:
A young man who had sexually molested his sister decided he wanted to talk about the abuse. As he began to describe in detail the things he had to do to force his victim's compliance, tears began rolling down his cheeks. As a young and naive therapist, I prepared myself for what I anticipated would be an emotional flood of regret and remorse for the pain he had inflicted. My co-therapist (crying herself) wanted to interrupt the session, assuming the sense of shame he had to be feeling might be "too much" for him to bear.
You get the picture. This is a therapy session and someone who's giving the details of how he forced himself on his victim starts breaking down in tears. What would you assume? Isn't it natural to think he must be feeling badly about what he'd done. Isn't it also logical to think he must be feeling ashamed and having some remorse and regret, out of empathy for his victim? Why else would he be crying? What other explanations could there be?

My co-therapist and I made the assumptions our training had taught us to make. Underneath it all, and behind all their "defenses," people harbor shame and guilt about the bad things they've done. Give them a safe atmosphere to talk about it, and give them reason to let their defenses down, and their underlying emotions will gush forth. That's exactly what we were witnessing, right? WRONG! In this particular case, the perpetrator was feeling badly about something all right - badly enough to cry about it - but he wasn't feeling badly about the pain he'd caused the victim. He was crying because telling his story re-opened a wound of his own, which he would eventually tell us about. To further quote from my book about this story:
It turns out that his victim put up much less overt resistance to other (older and stronger) extended family members who also abused her. The added resistance she put up to him and the level of revulsion she showed made him feel like he wasn't as "worthy" as the others, inviting him to feel rejected and inferior.
More would become apparent. This guy was feeling sorry for himself. And as if that weren't enough, he even proceeded to express how much anger and resentment he still had toward the victim for making him "look like a bad guy" when he was actually a really good guy. Her resistance and apparent disgust also made him feel ugly and undesirable. He was already struggling enough in the self-image department. How could she do that to him. He could not forgive her for that.

What a shock it was for me and my co-therapist to realize that the tears we saw and assumed were for the victim were actually for himself and that he was actually still angry with and faulting the victim for what happened. Prior to this session, (which, for all it's sordid nature I have come to regard as a gift from God) I could never have imagined it. Five minutes earlier, we were thinking about stopping the session because we were so sure this man might become too overwhelmed with shame to continue. Moments later, we were doing our best keep our outrage in check. And we were also struggling to make better sense of what had just occurred in our midst.

I simply can't say this enough, so I'll say it again: Our preconceptions about human nature, most of which have been endorsed or promoted by traditional psychological schools of thought, are actually our worst enemies when it comes to understanding the disturbed characters among us. It's hard enough to "get it" in the first place when it comes to them. But it's even harder when we cling to notions that are for the most part correct when it comes to "neurotics" but are way off base when it comes to understanding the character-impaired. And the more serious the character disturbance is, the less the traditional rules apply.

A part of me is uncomfortable with picking such a poignant and perhaps unsettling example. But in view of the almost two dozen emails and blog comments I've gotten recently on this matter, I felt I needed to drive the point home. We get victimized for many reasons. The fact that we don't trust our gut instincts is one factor. And the fact that disturbed characters are often very skilled at their tactics of manipulation and impression management is another factor. But we also get victimized because our well-meant but nonetheless erroneous perspectives make us inordinately and unnecessarily vulnerable. Hopefully, this post will help some out there whose preconceptions have made them vulnerable in the past become less vulnerable to future abuse or exploitation.