I’ve written elsewhere, (many times actually) that two factors keep a person stuck in toxic relationships. I’m now adding a 3rd that I realized I’ve been omitting.
- a rigid personality and self-image of niceness, nobility, loyalty and forgiveness (aka toxic positivity)
- a habit of dissociating from emotional pain at a level that would be NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to achieve with physical pain (also an aspect of toxic positivity)
- hyper-resistance to admitting you’ve made a mistake
If it were not for these ingredients, “abuse victims” would be similar to every other adult on the planet, who gets into a relationship with a selfish asshole.
They would say to themselves:
“whoops, this guy/gal cannot behave reciprocally, symmetrically or empathically; I screwed up; time to make a change”
And then they would end the relationship (painful though it may be) and get on with their lives.
But when those other ingredients are in place, they can fight with reality and stay stuck for many years. (don’t get me wrong; these ingredients intermingle with other personality strategies like codependence and [homeostasis preservation](https://www.quora.com/search?q=homeostasis%20preservation&author=84795924 “www.quora.com”) to make leaving even more difficult; if you read my other work, it should be quite clear that I’m not [victim blaming](https://www.quora.com/search?q=victim%20blaming&author=84795924 “www.quora.com”) … simply describing accurate causal mechanics )
People who claim that ANYONE can be duped by an NPD, have not studied the causal mechanics very closely, and simply DO NOT know what they are talking about. I challenge any of these claimants to debate this with me in the comments for all to see. Given the absence of takers to this challenge over several years, you can surmise that they have zero confidence in their claim. Which should tell you two things:
-
they make the claim for psychological reasons
-
that reason is very likely correlated with the strong resistance to admitting any mistakes
Other posts I’ve written about niceness, rigid personality or dissociation are listed here. I’ve not yet written anything about the massive resistance to admitting normal human mistakes but you can see this pattern running in EVERY VICTIM who claims that “anyone could have been fooled” … that’s simply not true and it’s quite easy to disprove to the willing and curious.
https://www.quora.com/search?q=good%20person&author=84795924https://www.quora.com/search?q=victim%20blaming&author=84795924https://www.quora.com/search?q=homeostasis%20preservation&author=84795924https://www.quora.com/What-subtle-behavior-is-an-indicator-that-someone-is-not-a-nice-person/answer/Dewey-Gaedcke-1https://notonarcissists.quora.com/What-type-of-person-stays-with-a-narcissist-long-term-6?ch=10&share=d1132bfb&srid=kfKFhttps://www.quora.com/search?q=nice%20rigid%20dissociate&author=84795924