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    Don't Date a Psycho: Don't Be One, Don't Date One
    Don't Date a Psycho: Don't Be One, Don't Date One
    Don't Date a Psycho: Don't Be One, Don't Date One
    Ebook138 pages1 hour

    Don't Date a Psycho: Don't Be One, Don't Date One

    By Dr. Keiron Brown

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    About this ebook

    What are you, some kinda PSYCHO? How many times have you said this to someone? Probably a lot. How often has someone said this to you? Hopefully, not so much! Truth is, we’ve all dated or been involved with someone who drove us nuts or, if we haven’t, chances are that we were the ones who got on the other person’s nerves. Now, the question is: who is the Psycho; you or the other person? Don’t Date a Psycho: Don’t Be One, Don’t Date One looks at why we behave in the ways that we do in relationships, what makes us stay with the person we’re with and what makes us leave them, and how to tell who is safe to be in a relationship with and who is unsafe. Done with humor and written from more than two decades of clinical experience as a psychologist, Dr. Keiron Brown helps us to gain a clearer understanding of who we are as individuals, who we are as partners in relationships and what makes each and every one us prone to acting a little nuts sometimes when our hearts are at stake.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDr. Keiron Brown
    Release dateAug 24, 2014
    ISBN9781310635564
    Don't Date a Psycho: Don't Be One, Don't Date One
    Author

    Dr. Keiron Brown

    Dr. Keiron Brown is a practicing clinical psychologist with 25 years experience conducting therapy and working with couples, and is an expert on relationships and with psychological testing. Dr. Brown has helped individuals and couples to understand themselves better, to become aware of the motives underlying their behavior, and has helped them reach a point where they can be happier and more functional individuals, and have healthier and happier relationships.

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      Book preview

      Don't Date a Psycho - Dr. Keiron Brown

      Preface

      What is a Psycho?

      First things first: When I use the term, ‘psycho’, I am absolutely not referring to anyone with any kind of mental health issue. I repeat: ‘Psycho’, as it is used in this book, never refers to anyone with a mental health issue.

      A ‘psycho’ is someone, whether it’s you, your partner or spouse, a friend or a relative, who makes a relationship unsafe by their actions, by their perspective on things, by their habits or by their motives. In this book, anyone who makes a particular relationship unsafe for the person with whom they are in, that unsafe person is the psycho. You can’t have a successful and satisfying relationship with a psycho if he or she remains a psycho. It’s impossible to have a stable relationship with an unstable person. Identifying the issues that create instability in a person and that make him or her unsafe is crucial to then working out how to improve yourself, your partner or your relationship.

      Be Careful

      Many people who read this book will immediately think of someone else in their life who is the psycho: their current or past partner, a relative or a friend. The fact is, though, the psycho could be you! Yes, you might be an unsafe person, for whatever reason(s), and you’ve gotten on people’s nerves, sent them into therapy, or made them swear that they’ll never date again. Yes, you!

      The Goal

      The purpose and goal of this book are to highlight and examine relationships, our behavior in them, what works and doesn’t work, how any of us can behave like a psycho at some point, and how to avoid being a consistent psycho, break away from a current psycho in your life, and how to avoid getting caught up with a psycho in the first place. Finally, the intention of this book, while having a little fun along the way, is to help you to lead a better and less distressed life, and to have better, more satisfying and more fulfilling relationships.

      Part One: How We Become Psychos

      Chapter 1: My Mama Was a Psycho and My Daddy Was Too

      Psychos are made, not born. No one was brought into this world being a psycho, anymore than anyone is brought into this world already being able to speak. People are typically born with the capacity to speak, but they actually have to be taught and learn to speak. Likewise, we are born with the capacity to act like a psycho, but we probably won’t unless we are taught and learn how to behave this way.

      Strangely enough, there are similarities between learning to speak and becoming a psycho. We tend to be taught how to do both by growing up around our first teachers: our family. As babies, we pick up how to speak by observing, listening to and repeating what we hear from family members. Similarly, we learn how to act like nut jobs by observing, listening to and repeating what we see our family members do. Growing up in a family system in which there is a lot of discord, conflict, criticism, neglect, sarcasm or intensely abusive emotions and behavior can put us on the track to engage in all of that same kind of behavior when we get older. To paraphrase comedian Redd Foxx, Follow a psycho kid home from school, and watch a psycho parent or family member open the door for him.

      As with learning to talk, learning how to act doesn’t seem like anything unusual. It’s ‘normal’ because it’s normal for you and for the people you’re imitating. Even in a given household in the middle of the United States, Spanish isn’t a foreign language if everyone in the home is speaking it, and it will be considered a native language for the baby who is first learning to talk. In this sense, any language that the baby learns outside of the family home is the foreign language. When we see kids acting up in school, or being disrespectful, aggressive or inappropriate, it’s not uncommon to see family members in the home acting the same way.

      Now that we’ve looked at psycho beginnings, fast forward to adulthood. Whatever patterns of behavior, expectations of self or others, and what is considered ‘acceptable’ and what is not have been learned from family, from people we hang out with, and from the media. It’s sad to say, but none of those sources of our ‘education’ may have been healthy or functional. Without some kind of change of mindset that could lead to a change in behavior, we are likely to enter into each of our relationships engaging in the same behavior and holding on to the same expectations that we were taught. This would be a good if what we were taught was to show good manners, treat others kindly and respectfully, and to be committed and devoted to the person with whom you’re in a loving, monogamous relationship. It doesn’t work out so well if what we were taught was to be selfish, mean, entitled and deceitful.

      Where Does This Leave You?

      There is a ‘good news/bad news’ scenario if you act like a psycho because of how you were raised or because of your past. The good news is that, regardless of how your ‘training’ started out, you can learn and train to be better and different, right now. How you started out, no matter how dysfunctional, does not dictate how you continue to behave or how you live out your future. The bad news is that change can be hard. In fact, some people are so opposed to doing something as difficult (but necessary) as changing their behavior, that they are content to continue to engage in all their crazy, ineffective and dysfunctional behavior for years and years, relationship after relationship, regardless of how unsatisfied they are and regardless of how much hell they might’ve taken others through. They willingly stay miserable, broken and unhealthy, instead of taking a stand and making a change. Now, that’s psycho!

      Chapter 2: Emotional Hoarders

      Some people never get rid of anything; they never throw anything away. Some call them pack rats, but nowadays they’re called hoarders. In television shows and documentaries, their houses or apartments are completely filled with whatever things were important to them over the years, and they’ve chosen to not get rid of any of those things. So, things just keep piling up, taking over tables, closets, kitchens and the entire house. To the hoarder, having all this stuff is important, even though it’s completely consumed their lives, even though it’s alienated them from others, even though they can barely move around in their own home, and even though they barely have a life outside of their enormous collection of stuff. To them, all of this makes sense. To the other people in their lives, however, to the people who care about them, this is insane.

      There are also people who never get rid of anything on an emotional level. These people I call emotional hoarders. They collect and hold onto emotions, experiences, ties to dead relationships, grudges, crushes, and so on. They never actually process and examine these emotional items to work through them, get past them and get rid of them so that they can move on in their lives. They hold onto them and collect them, keeping them at hand just in case. Emotional hoarders can hold onto emotional issues, grudges or hurts for years, if not for a lifetime.

      You may know some people like this. She’s the middle-aged woman who still wonders how different her life would’ve turned out if that one guy from her 11th grade chemistry class, the one with whom she had never actually had a conversation, had asked her to the prom. Then there’s the middle-aged man who, despite his many professional accomplishments and achievements in his adult life, still harbors anger towards his deceased parents because they didn’t come to that one track meet he ran when he was in the eighth grade. As much as these two examples might seem crazy to a lot of people, they make perfect sense to the people who have stored these hurts in their collection of life experiences.

      Emotional hoarders are likely to have a difficult time in relationships with other people. If you think about it, never letting go of things is the absolute enemy of change and growth. How can you have a healthy, satisfying and fulfilling relationship with someone who never got past that one argument the two of you had several years ago, and still brings it up, dusts it off, and uses it against you in a current disagreement, as if that old argument happened yesterday?

      It’s true that meaningful change and growth are very difficult for emotional hoarders to achieve. Past issues and experiences keep piling up until it consumes them, their lives, and their ability to interact well with others. Eventually, there’s so much emotional clutter in their lives, there is just no room for anything or anyone new because their hearts and minds are littered with outdated, unused, irrelevant stuff.

      People are not meant to retain everything forever. Think about your body: If your body didn’t process wheat you eat, take from your food what was necessary and important (such as vitamins and nutrients), and then eliminate the rest of it (by your going to the bathroom), then even something as necessary as food would accumulate inside your body so much that it would turn toxic and become detrimental, if not deadly, to you. This same principle applies to relationships, whether they’re romantic or familial, or otherwise. Parts of these relationships are usable and parts are not. Parts are healthy and good, and parts are not, and as you go through life there are some relationships, people, experiences and feelings that you simply have to let go of. If you don’t, they will interfere with your current life, negatively affect your current relationships, and prevent you from being emotionally healthy enough to move on and enjoy your life and the people in it.

      So, what do you hoard? What do you hold onto that hurt you in the past? What emotional injury, what unfair treatment or painful relationship do you still think about now, even though it happened a long time ago? Do you hold onto more than just one thing from your past? Is holding onto old stuff a pattern for you? What’s in your emotional collection? Remember, these emotional hurts and experiences, while important at the time that they occurred, may be important only to you today. The person who hurt you, whether they knew it or not, or intended to hurt you or not, may have just moved on with their lives and the thing that they did is not even a memory to them. You may be

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