This may save your life: please listen

The headline was meant to grab your attention, admitted. But it wasn’t a cheap grab; I mean it.

If you are someone with a crazy, unstable family member who scares you, this message is for you.

If you are from a normal, healthy family and you have a hard time imagining other families where someone is dangerous, I’m hoping you’ll listen to me, too.

The minute a family member puts hands on you, that’s God giving you a screaming red flag. Get out. Throw them out. Call the police if you have to. Change the locks. Do whatever it is your life requires to put physical, financial, and all distance between you and this person.

This is your chance. Take it. You may not get another. You may end up in a coffin.

Even if it’s your child.

In the two years I’ve been offering coaching and consulting to those dealing with abusive families or colleagues, I have had three clients whose lives I feared for. That’s only about 1 percent of the number of clients I’ve worked with; thankfully it’s rare.

But it’s real.

What has horrified me with these clients is how they couldn’t see that their lives were in danger. The’ve been abused for so long, so consistently, with so much gaslighting, that obvious signs of incipient murder completely escape them. “My son could never do that.” “She’s my daughter, though.” “I don’t think my mother meant to try to kill me.”

Normies reading this—it’s real. Yes, there are people around you right now, people you may even know and like, who are facing this at home. They really, truly, are numbed to the danger they’re in. While I’m not a therapist, I do try to practice genuinely therapeutic approaches with clients. I want to help them walk through and talk through their lives so that options and possibilities become clear to them. The goal for this is for them to come to their own conclusions, and to make their own choices. No matter how much I want to be able to fix their problems, I cannot. Only they can, but they need perspective and tools to do it.

That means that I don’t make definitive statements to clients about what they “should” do. There is one exception, and that’s when they’re in danger and they can’t see it. In these rare cases, I’ve said something like, “I’m asking you to trust me, take me seriously, and do what I say because I think your life depends on it. Your son is going to kill you. Wake up right now. No one has ever been this candid with you, I know, and you’re around the bend in denial. If you don’t change the locks today there’s a good chance you’ll be dead tomorrow.”

The details below are changed or disguised to protect privacy, but the changes are accurate to the danger of the situation.

1. “Shandra” had a daughter with an 11-year-old friend, a boy. The boy lived with his single mother whose behavior was completely borderline personality deranged. There was clear evidence of ongoing sexual contact between the boy and his mother, plus much more. The boy began to ideate out loud about how much he enjoyed torturing then killing cats.

   
   One day, he made a “joke” to my client’s daughter about what killing the girl would be like. It wasn’t a joke. But my client had been so beaten down by her own abusive parents, and was so uncertain, that she talked herself into believe that she was overreacting.

2. “Jeremy’s” son was 21 with a history of addictive and potentially borderline personality behaviors. He was also trooning out (starting to “transition to become a woman”). The son was often homeless, constantly on drugs, and had taken to sometimes living under a tarp in the woods. Among his other behaviors, he threw his piss jugs at his father when his father made his way to his son’s outdoor lair to drop off some food.
   
   The next time they saw each other, his son had a gun. Jeremy agreed to drive his son to places to do errands. During the drive, Jeremy’s son brandished his gun at his father, then jerked the steering wheel in an attempt to make the car crash in heavy traffic.

3. “Bill” was married to Jane, and they had one daughter, Sophia. Sometime in high school, Sophia took a dark turn. What started as “an attitude problem” became delinquency and truancy, sleeping around with older unsavory men, then alcoholism.

   
   At home, Sophia lied repeatedly, claiming to be in danger and needing help in order to get money and attention from her parents. When it didn’t come, she blamed them for her lies. There was also frequent screaming of the most vile obscenities and accusations at her parents, as well as false smear campaigns that damaged the reputation of her parents.
   
   Sophia was involuntarily committed at least once (and it should have been done many more times), but only after the cops discovered her drunk, passed out next to her car left in the middle of a road in broad daylight.

   
   Bill told me the story of his last in person confrontation with Sophia, noting blithely as if he were describing the weather, that “that’s when she started strangling me.”
   
   Bill literally did not understand that Sophia meant it, and that Sophia really is likely to kill him. I hope he understood it after our talk, but I will never know.

This is what personality disordered people are so often capable of. This is not “manic depression,” or “an anxiety disorder” where someone “just sometimes acts out.” This is hardcore, incurable character disorder. This is, at least intermittently, psychopathy. The drugs, I’m sorry to tell you, aren’t the genesis of the problem, either. The drugs didn’t “ruin them.” They had deep and severe and dangerous character flaws that preceded the drugs-character flaws that those around them denied or refused to look at for what they were.

Until a knife was at their throat.

If someone you love is angry and out of control enough to slap you, punch you, choke you, pull a gun on you, throw urine or feces on you, you are in an acute emergency. This person absolutely has the capacity to kill you, and usually wants to.

Get out now. Protect yourself at all costs. Nothing matters, and there’s nothing to talk about, until you put that protection in place. There will be plenty of time later to go therapy about it.