 Escaping a relationship that you're in with somebody who's on the cluster B spectrum is very very hard. The reason is once you've gone through like a phase where let's say without using the lingo from the field because it does my head in, you will be put on a pedestal. If you're in with somebody and you're in a cluster B relationship, they're psychopath or a narcissist, you will be put on a pedestal. You will be told you're the best man I've ever met. You will be put up high for probably about two to three months. It only takes two to three months of you being up on the pedestal for them to get their claws deep in you whether you're a man or a woman. You are then after that you will be sexually bonded, you'll be physically bonded, you'll be emotionally and psychologically bonded and to escape them at that point you're going to have to pull every hook out. You guys all see the Hellraiser movies from the eighties? Great. The Hellraiser movie came from a book written by Clive Barker who's actually from the same town that I am and the original book was called The Hellbound Heart and it was about trying to describe through a horror story what it meant to pull yourself out of an abusive relationship. The Cenobites come, they're demons from the underworld that you choose to invite there. You remember that narrative? By solving a puzzle box and then when they come they torture you to death and you might love that or hate it. Ship A Totek the main they call pinhead says we are angels to some and demons to others. The puzzle is where the Hellbound Heart comes from and the puzzle for some of us is childhood trauma. If you had a problem with your mum or your dad and you weren't loved in your childhood environment you will spend the rest of your life trying to solve the puzzle box of love. How can I make people love me? What the fuck is wrong with me that stops people from loving me? But you won't choose an emotionally regulated normal person to do it with. You'll choose somebody who is cruel, distant, sadistic, sometimes loving sometimes not, judgmental, shaming, so on and so forth, abusive effectively. So you'll try and win mummy's love in adulthood that you couldn't. You're trying to solve the box, the puzzle box and in doing so you're summoning demons and once those hooks are in you the only way they're coming out is by you getting skinned alive. So you'll be put on the pedestal at first. This is so the hooks can go in and once that's happened I always say this to clients like there isn't a pain-free way of getting out of this. It's going to take time. It's going to be measured in months not weeks and if we can get you through this inside of six months you should consider yourself very fucking lucky. There are people who are so traumatized by this kind of relationship because the trauma is preloaded from childhood trauma that it kills them. Either kills them slowly through a physiological illness that's related to the mental stress that they go through or they'll start doing drugs or smoking or they will actually take their own lives. So the pedestal phase usually about three months is when the hooks go in. Once the hooks have gone in you have to escape. How are you going to do that? Painlessly. It's really hard. All of these hooks are put in your psychological flesh in places where they can see vulnerability where there is a hole in your armor a little hook goes in. It's never one big hook by the way. It's never one. She'll find multiple hooks to get a hold of you on. So if one of the hooks breaks she doesn't have to worry about it she's got another 25 to rely on and she could put a new one in this afternoon and then another one in the morning. So you're going to have multiple hooks and they're going to be around your emotional flashbacks. Whatever your insecurities are that's what she will manipulate. Whatever you're most terrified of that's what gets manipulated. And there are universalities to human terror. One of them is abandonment. Abandonment we all have that. Why? Because we've all been babies I guess I hope at some point and when you're a baby you literally will die without love and attention. A lack of love and attention equals death. You've probably already heard about the psychological research of what happens to babies and orphanages when they're not held. You can feed them. You can give them the same nutrition and same calories. Baby A gets nutrition and calories. Baby B gets it but only baby A is held. Baby B dies. That's how much we need love. That's how much we need attention. It's not enough to just eat food to get the right amount of nutrition to keep the heartbeat thing. You need love and attention. Given that we are vulnerable in that way there is always going to be an abandonment terror an abandonment anxiety. So anybody who's got their hooks into you and you start feeling like hey I need this person in my life all they have to do to yank your chain and start walking in the other direction because they're holding the hooks so just do this. Oh you're not behaving today I'm just going to walk over here and you're like fuck all the hooks the hooks the hooks you start getting pulled along because you don't want to get ripped out of you. Then you will find yourself acting in undignified ways and forning trying to plead your way out of the situation. Please stop. Slowly over time your ego boundaries will start to dissolve if you stay stuck in the relationship and you will go into an infantile state where you'll start pleading which is not good so you want to be careful of your ego boundaries dissolving. The only way out of this that I'm aware of.