Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Choosing Safe Partners: Understanding Red Flags in Dating with Dr. David Wexler
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you with the most challenging human interactions, those involving someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host Bill Eddie. We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute and conflict influencer.com, where we focus on training, consultations, coaching, anything to do with high conflict, and you'll find it at one of those websites. We try to look at all of it and help people both in their personal life and professional life. Today we are very excited to be joined by a special guest, Dr. David Wexler. He is the author of a brand new book called Choose Him Wisely, and it has one of the best covers I've ever seen. We'll put a link to the book in the show notes and you'll see what I'm talking about. Speaker 1 (01:01): It involves a red flag down on a very clever way. So today, of course, with Dr. Wexler, we're going to be talking about relationships and dating and making those choices. How do we make them? So first, by way of introduction, Dr. Wexler is a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Diego, California specializing in the treatment of relationship in conflict. He is the executive director of the Nonprofit Relationship Training Institute, which provides education and treatment internationally for relationship development and the prevention of the treatment of relationship violence. He also served as the clinical and administrative supervisor for the NIMH sponsored Research Study of domestic violence in the Navy from 1991 through 96 and again from 2001 to 2006. Dr. Wexler is the author of aid books and many articles in book chapters including the one we're talking about today, choose him Wisely, how to Identify a Safe Partner, and he's written this book with Dr. Donald Eichenbaum PhD. A couple of his other books are the Stop Domestic Violence Program and the Stop Program for Women Who Abuse. So lots of great stuff from Dr. Wexler. So we're thrilled to have him on the program. I'm not going to be there today, but you'll hear Bill and Dr. Wexler talking through some very important points in this book. Speaker 2 (02:41): So David, it's so good to talk about this book. I really appreciated reading it and I thought of various cases that I've had of domestic violence and what the stories were, and it totally fits with what people say, but often what they say is what they figured out after the fact. And my work has primarily been in divorce, so it's been helping victim survivors of abuse get divorced. And so often people say, well, there's warning signs, but I ignored them for this reason or that reason. So I think this book is excellent. I want to add something in particular that I think is helpful is this book can be read by adolescent girls, adolescent boys, as well as young adults, as well as middle-aged adults and anybody who's dating. So I just don't appreciated that. So let me go into asking first of all a little bit your background. If you can tell us how you got here and your professional experience, which I know about the listeners don't know. So I've been Speaker 3 (03:55): A clinical psychologist now for over 40 years. In the late eighties, I was able to get a contract with the military, the 32nd Street Naval Station here in San Diego to run their spouse abuse treatment groups. And from that initial contract, I developed this specialty of dealing with domestic violence. And what hooked me was not necessarily some great passion to pure domestic violence or I mean of course that was part of the motivation, that was the mission of the program. But what really hooked me was hearing the stories of men. And what I had expected when I started hearing these stories is that these were going to be just psychopathic, awful scumbag guys who I would be not want to even be in the same room with. And although a few of them actually lived up to that expectation or lived down to that expectation, that was definitely not the norm. Speaker 3 (05:01): The norm was much more, these were guys who I actually could relate to who felt like they struggled with relationship issues, not much different than I did, even though their choice for how to deal with their unhappiness like becoming abusive was not my choice. But the fundamental meat of what we ended up talking about in most of these groups was something that was very dear to my heart and I feel like I learned so much about men and men's issues from running those groups for so many different years. And from that, my team developed different treatment programs. And the model we have for domestic violence is now, I think there's 70,000 people now, 70,000 offenders, male and female who've been through our programs, all four branches of the military use it all over the world and many civilian agencies. And I've written eight different books about relationships in conflict of various kinds. Speaker 3 (05:56): So up to and including actual domestic violence. And so the origin of this particular book choose Him Wisely, is that my friend and colleague Don Eichenbaum, who's one of the icons and psychology and one of the founders of Cognitive Behavior Therapy, he came to me with this idea that he had for those of you ever heard him speak, he's a great wreck on tour. He tells this story that he was watching The Bachelorette with his granddaughter and he was watching us and the Bachelorette, these women were interviewing prospective dating partners and Don said he started screaming at the TV saying they're asking the wrong questions. They're asking the wrong questions because he felt like he felt like he had acquired over the years so much knowledge about the things to really look for about what predicts a difficult, abusive controlling type of guy. And it suddenly activated this mission that he wanted to pass on to his granddaughters and the other women of the world, those tips. Speaker 3 (07:06): And he came to me with this idea. We ended up combining our various skills and resources and experiences and collective research and ended up with this book, which is designed to, it's particularly aimed at women, although the principles apply just similarly and reverse like men checking out potentially dangerous women or certainly in same sex relationships. But the examples that we all use, the target is more like women learning to see the signs that should serve as red flags about possible danger in their relationship. And it feels like it's the culmination of the kinds of difficult relationships I've been working on and working with for four decades now. Speaker 2 (07:58): I think both you and Dr. Eichenbaum have so much a wealth of experience that is hard to ignore. And I might add, so I'd known you and we're both in San Diego for over 10 years, but I've also gone to seminars with Donald Eichenbaum probably for 25 or 30 years as a therapist and then as a lawyer with a mental health approach. So yeah, I think this is great and I think it's important that it's simple. I like that it's just under a hundred pages and people might wonder, well, could it have much substance that way? And it's got a lot of substance. One thing I really like is the lists. You have a lot of lists in there, and I'm kind of a list person and I went through the list go. Yep, yep, yep, yep. So I know it's really accurate based on my, with women clients. Speaker 2 (08:57): And also I've had a handful of male clients who have experienced the exact same thing, being physically abused, having their head thrown at the back of their head with canned soup, stuff like that, stabbed in the back with a mechanical pencil. So the damages are the same, but significantly more women that experienced this. So let's get into the warning signs, and you do have several list of those then I think those are real helpful. But if I were to ask, and you can tell me if I shouldn't ask it quite this way, what would you say the top three warning signs are of a potentially abusive partner? Speaker 3 (09:45): Well, I guess I would break that down into a couple of different categories. Well, actually in the book we have three main categories. One is behaviors that you observe on an ongoing basis in this relationship, speaking to women in straight relationships, ways that you see this guy handling different situations with you. That's one category. Another category is knowing something about his history. We know that history is a good predictor of the future. It's not an absolute predictor and people do change. And so I would never want to rule anybody out just because they had a difficult history, but it means that the they and potentially you if you're the woman in this story, are at a greater risk because of his history of violence or substance abuse or exposure to violence being modeled in his household, for example. And the third category is just gut feelings, what your gut and your eyes and your ears tell you. Speaker 3 (10:55): Those are the three main groupings that we talk about. But I would say when it comes to that first category, which is probably the most meaningful in my opinion, which is things you observe on a day-to-day basis, the one clear indicator is what people know as being love bombing, feeling like it's too much too soon and it can be really intoxicating for a woman to be getting all this special attention from this guy and hearing, I love you and you're the woman of my dreams and being showered with gifts and flowers and whirlwind trips and things like that. There's something really appealing about that. And if somehow if we knew that that was stable and substantive and going to last, that'd be pretty good. But the research tells us and a lot of clinical observation that those things often happen in a flurry and then they don't really last. Speaker 3 (11:58): And if somebody comes on too strong too early, that should be at least a warning sign. Again, not a absolute predictor that it's, but a warning sign. Another one is any expressions that even that just leak out of contempt and disgust. And anybody familiar with John Gottman's research knows that that's one of the key horsemen of the apocalypse of the four horsemen, right? And his research says that couples in which there's expressed contempt or discussed are basically doomed. His thing is that 91% of those couples decompose in some way and include either become divorced or become violent or something else bad happening. And the contempt and disgust is important to recognize because it's not just couples that argue. I mean, my wife and I argue we've been married for 42 years, but there's a level of arguing that is nasty if you get sarcastic a lot and do a lot of eyerolling and out and withdraw or say to your partner things like, what are you stupid? Speaker 3 (13:15): Anybody should be able to figure that out. Those kinds of things that should really qualify as red flags. And I would guess if I had to maybe take only three, I would say another one that I think is really of concern is what I would label entitlement issues, where the message starts coming through from this guy that he's entitled to have your attention whenever he needs it. And that if you really loved him, if you really cared, be there, you would change your plans and be there because he's feeling kind of lonely. If you really cared about that, he's had a hard day, you'd have sex with him and there's all this, if you really cared and I need this from you and I'm entitled to get it, I need it. We all have a little bit of that, but if that's a pervasive pattern in the relationship that's right up there on my list of top red flags of things you observe on a day-to-day basis, even fairly early on in a relationship. Speaker 2 (14:25): Now one of the things that you're saying is you can see this early on, and I've had several clients that tell me, I saw these things, but I didn't want want to rock the boat. I didn't want to lose this person. And now I realize I should have lost that person early on. And I'm wondering how do we help women in that position or possibly men say no, say, okay, I'm drawing a line, I'm setting the limit. What should they do and what can they tell themselves? Because one of the things we do with High Conflict Institute, we do a lot of training for high conflict situations and we teach people to give themselves encouraging statements. And often I find in abuse cases that just last week was talking with a woman and she said, well, but I feel like I made bad decisions and that's why I'm in this situation. So I don't have the right to really stop everything now or whatever. So how do you help people feel confident and what can they Speaker 3 (15:40): Do? Boy, that quote you just gave is so familiar to me. Once we go in this book, once we go through all the different things to look for and all the different signs and the history and the behavior, whatever, we have what I think is actually the most potent chapter of the book because a lot of the signs I'm talking about, it's not rocket science. I mean it's things that a lot of everyday people would they recognize that these things could be a problem and we may organize it in a way, but it's not groundbreaking. But one thing that's really essential I think is this chapter we have called Reasons why You might Disregard this Information. In other words, even though your intellect may tell you, yes, being expressions of contempt are bad in a relationship and entitlement, I don't want to be with a guy who's really entitled and things like that. Speaker 3 (16:38): There are so many things that could often block this woman from really integrating and acting on that information and some of the classic things that serve as what I would call obstructions towards really paying, not towards paying attention, but towards taking seriously these issues. Number one is attachment issues. I mean, a lot of times the woman we're talking about does recognize that there's problems, but she's saying, but I love him and I don't want to lose this relationship. My heart goes out to them, to that woman because in a way, we're all in this situation. Even the people with successful long-term relationships have made certain compromises have said to themselves, well, these qualities about my partner are not so hot, but there's so much else that's of value that it's worth it and it I'll ignore or not focus on the things that I'm unhappy about because he's not perfect, she's not perfect, I'm not perfect, et cetera. Speaker 3 (17:43): That's actually pretty healthy. But what we're talking about is when somebody has more of an anxious attachment, an insecurity about attachment, when they get attached, they don't want to let go. They're afraid of losing that attachment. And as a result, they put on major league blinders about what the problems are. And for anybody who's familiar with research with domestic violence about the cycle of abuse, the three stages of the cycle of abuse is tension building explosion and the honeymoon or remorse period. And part of what the research has shown us about victims and with that cycle is that they get really attached to that honeymoon period. Really cool. It's really sweet. And every time they tell themselves, oh, this time it's really going to change or he's really going to change, he's really going to stop drinking or He's really going to not blow up at me anymore because look at how great it is what we have right now. Speaker 3 (18:45): And that can become real. The attachment to the good times in the relationship can serve to block her memory of and access to an awareness of the bad times. So attachment one of them, another one, and this I think it goes along the lines of the example you were talking about is self blame is saying, yeah, it's true. He doesn't treat me really well a lot of times, but sometimes I'm not that easy to get along with and I can be kind of difficult. That may be true. I mean join the club, people can be difficult, but what happens a lot of times is that you got, at least in the examples I'm thinking of, you've got the woman who is sometimes difficult or irritating, okay? And you got the guy who's controlling possessive and abusive. And so somehow they collude in their fo do kind of way to think, oh, we're equally responsible for the things that go wrong when in reality it's like one person's contributing like 15% and the other like 85, but it gets blurred and she gets blamed for since she sometimes does things wrong, she sometimes says something provocative that she's just as responsible for everything that goes wrong and she blames herself for causing him to react to her in the negative way. Speaker 3 (20:21): And I would just say another key area is that a lot of women I think are unfortunately very susceptible to is what I call unrealistic hopefulness, really believing, yes, he has problems. Yes, sometimes he can get really moody and can get aggressive, but nobody knows him like I do and nobody can really reach him like I do. And when he's with me sometimes, he's so sweet and so tender and I really believe that if as long as we stay together, I'll bring out the best in him. And again, up to a certain point, I think that's lovely. I think it's great what somebody can hang in there even when their partner is imperfect and try to see past some of the imperfections and find a good person within. But the stories I'm talking about are ones where that's not a realistic goal in this particular case, it's like she keeps trying or believing that she'll be able to finally bring out his consistently good qualities and sometimes she's successful but it doesn't last, and she keeps believing that she can be the one to do that and therefore minimizes the impact of what she's experiencing. Speaker 3 (21:40): So I mean, I have more examples of that, but there are these factors that prevent the, what I would call the victim in this particular couple from really clearly seeing or clearly taking seriously the various red flags that we're talking about. Speaker 2 (21:59): I think some of it may be educating people about what a healthy relationship looks like because they'll go, well, he's got these nice parts, but there's also these down parts, and yet you can have a relationship with a lot of those nice parts. I think Gottman's, I'm glad you mentioned them, one book emphasized I think five to one ratio of the positive to negative interactions in a healthy marriage. You get that one out of six I suppose, but it doesn't become physical abuse and it doesn't outweigh all this other stuff. And I think I've seen so many cases of domestic violence or intimate partner violence, IPV, same thing really functionally that they are kind of stuck with thinking I can make it different and that I can't deserve better. And that's such a trap and it's not true, but that's because all the feedback they're getting, they're kind of isolated as they get more and more isolated self-esteem goes down. Anyway, this leads into the next question I'm going to ask you, and that is you talk about psychological abuse in the book and that in many ways it's worse than the physical abuse. And I wonder if you could say some about that. And of course the physical abuse could lead to murder, which would be the worst, but I think you're saying the lasting effect is often the psychological abuse. You could say more Speaker 3 (23:45): About that. That's something that we didn't used to really understand, but over the years of interviewing and treating different victims, we just hear that quote again and again that the physical scars heal, but the psychological scars never do. And that's a little, I'm always cautious about that quote because I don't want to minimize the physical part. Of course that's undeniably awful, but even when there is not physical abuse or it's what we call relatively mild physical abuse, not one that really causes injury or creates profound fear, sometimes the psychological tactics that the partner uses can just be so deeply damaging, can just erode the partner's self-esteem, can make her feel like she's responsible for excessively responsible for the problems in the relationship, can lead her to feel like she doesn't really have legitimate options. Who would want you think you're going to leave me, you think and find somebody better? Look at yourself. Nobody's going to want you and you better appreciate what you got with me. A lot of the men we're talking about may not be quite so blunt about saying that, but that's the message that often comes through and that not only is damaging to the woman of course, but also undermines her capacity to take action in terms of either changing or leaving this bad relationship. Speaker 2 (25:32): Yeah, it makes sense. What I think what goes through my mind is, and I've been thinking a lot about this lately with bullies since I've written a book about bullies and teach some about that is bullies always have a story and the story is you're in a bad situation and you're a mess and I'll save you and that kind of thing in the workplace, et cetera. It's chipping away in self-esteem like you're saying. So I like to call it the bully story, which is bs. People need to learn it's bs, but I can see what you're saying is the psychological impact in many ways has the story, whereas the physical abuse is like an oddity like this, wow, oh, that just doesn't fit. He's not like that. So they don't have a story about the physical abuse, the story they hear every day that they're not competent. Speaker 2 (26:33): The other person has to save them and get their attention. So it seems to me maybe that's why, because I really agree, I see the psychological as what they carry. And I've had clients say that even about child abuse, they say it was a psychological impact even though there was physical abuse, right? So let me go to a different angle a little bit, and that's where you talk about family history and that you want to find out some about family history. And I didn't realize this, that if someone has a lot of ACEs that's adverse childhood events and that's been studied and measured and stuff like that, it makes them more at risk to be an abuser or to be a victim. And I wonder if you could talk Speaker 3 (27:25): A little about that. For people who don't know that particular study adverse childhood experiences, there's 10 items that are on the research for this about one's childhood experiences, exposure to different kinds of trauma or chaos or dysfunction. Were you physically abused? Did you witness domestic violence? Did somebody in your family go to prison or jail? Did you feel like there was nobody there looking out for you on a day-to-day basis? Things like that. And the higher, the more points you have on that, the more likely you are to have a whole range of symptoms as an adult, either mental health type symptoms, physical and medical symptoms, behavioral symptoms. The research was just astonishing when this was first identified about the correlation between a high ACE score and a lot of symptoms. But what's relevant for this discussion is that the likelihood of committing acts of domestic violence increases geometrically and rather astronomically with the higher ACE score. Speaker 3 (28:37): And I actually have not seen research specifically about being a victim of domestic violence from ACEs, but I would say from a lot of anecdotal experience, I would say the same is true. And one thing I think that that's helpful in terms of understanding that phenomenon is we talk to a lot of victims in different kinds of relationships who have grown up observing intimate partner violence in their household, and as a result, that behavior has been somewhat normalized. Now, I don't mean normalized like they say, oh, I saw my parents physically fighting and I want to have a marriage like that too. I mean, nobody thinks like that, nobody wants that. But when it does happen, when somehow they have chosen a partner where this takes place, they are a little more likely to put into this category called, well, it's not pretty, but that's what happens in relationships or that's how men get part of life, right? Part of life. And that's how men get sometimes when they're upset about things and it's just something, again, it's not desirable or pretty, but it does come with a territory of intimate partnership, and so they're more likely to minimize the impact of it and have greater tolerance than somebody who had the good fortune of growing up in a family where none of that stuff took place. So that history can really, well, the history can shape us. To put it really simply, Speaker 2 (30:21): It makes a lot of sense to talk about the generational passage of these kind of behaviors, father to son or father to daughter to be a victim. So let me think of another question that listeners might be wondering about and I wonder about too is early in the relationship, there's a lot of attention, a lot of texting and calling each other, how are you doing today? What are you doing now? How can people tell where the line is between a sweet connection and obsession? That's a warning sign of abuse. And I wondered, how do you know where that line Speaker 3 (31:04): Is? My truest answer, which I will only tell you and my closest friends is I don't really know. Okay, that's my truest answer. But if I was pressed to give some answer, I would say, and this is something we talk about in the book, that even though it is difficult to come up with an exact measure of when is something good, too much of something good, one way to get your bearings is to conduct observational tests of your partner. Now, I don't mean purposely arranging some situation and seeing how they act. I think that's manipulative to do that. If I was dating somebody and I found out they picked a fight with me or presented us a situation just to see how I'd react, that would piss me off. That would feel, I don't like that. But for better or for worse, life gives us plenty of tests in every relationship. Speaker 3 (32:10): People are consistent, certainly in the earlier stages as they're making a decision about their relationship, they're observing how does this other person handle situations? What do they like when they meet my family? What do they like when something doesn't go their way? What do they like when I'm in a bad mood? And if the partner passes enough of those tests, then we got a pretty good thing going here. So the kinds of tests I'm talking about are times when, and I would be here as I'm speaking to the woman in the relationship with a guy, times when you want to do something that isn't, he's not particularly interested in, you want to go for a hike, you want to see a certain movie, how does he handle that? Is he able to shift gears and go along with your plan and be a good sport about it? Speaker 3 (32:58): Or does he either get really controlling or pout and withdraw when you want to do something independent of him with your friends, with your family, with some work event or whatever? Is he able to graciously handle that and not feel threatened by that? If he's interested in sex and for whatever reason you're not, how does he handle that? Does he take it out on you? Does he try to make you feel guilty? Does he pout to withdraw? All of these are opportunities to really observe whether or not this person has, the psych term would be the ego strength, the inner resilience and security to be able to handle things not going according to plan, and a partner who acts badly in those situations. And where if you as the other person in the relationship, if you feel like you have to really restrict yourself in order to keep him happy, those are failed tests. Speaker 3 (34:09): In my mind, that doesn't directly answer the question you ask about how do you know when a nice behavior becomes love bombing? But I would say that when you start seeing some of these, for example, even with the love bombing, if he's texting you a lot while you're at work and you're busy, you're not able to respond real promptly. And he cops an attitude about that, that's a failed test that says that it's not just he's so in love with you, he wants to just make contact with you. It's saying he has a need for you. He wants to control your behavior and the flow of input that he needs from you, and he doesn't really have much flexibility to tolerate it when something doesn't go his way. That would be to me one way of trying to make that assessment. Speaker 2 (35:09): I guess in a way, what you're making me think about is the part of your book where you talk about the gut feeling kind of test, and in a way a woman doesn't have to meet a standard as much as does it meet her standards? In other words, if she's uncomfortable, then it's too much. Like you said, if he doesn't back off when you say no, and that's uncomfortable, that's too much. So in a sense, it's okay to have your own standard of how close or how obsessive I'm willing to tolerate so that it's not an external standard. And I find often that women and sometimes men think there's an external standard for these things and that they don't know what it is. And I like the gut feeling part because it should be okay for them to say, Hey, everybody else might tolerate this, but I'm not going to tolerate this. Something like that. Does that kind of fit what you're saying? Speaker 3 (36:15): Very much. And one of the strategies we recommend in the book is called The Line in the Sand, and that's where we ask women to make a contract with themselves. Like if there's certain behaviors that they've observed and their partner that are not cool to say, I'm committing to myself that if that behavior continues, I will have no choice but to leave this relationship. And you can fill in the blanks of what that behavior is. It might be if he blows up at me, if he continues to drink or use drugs excessively, if he keeps visiting his child porn sites, whatever the offensives are, it's just a matter of personal self-respect to say, I'm committing to myself and we actually have a contract where they sign it and keep it and try to remember this commitment that they've made, that these behaviors are ones that I cannot allow myself to be in a relationship with somebody who continues to do this. If they've done it once and they've totally reformed just like that could happen with infidelity or other offensive behaviors in a relationship, maybe we got a chance, but if that continues, this is a commitment I need to make that I'm going to stick to. Speaker 2 (37:41): So it almost seems like if they indicate that I did something that I regret and I'm working on change, or I often say, go to counseling or tell them they need counseling, and if they say, no, I refuse to go, the chances of change are very slim. And so is that change possible? On the other hand, couples counseling in these situations often is not really a good idea, or actually, if you could comment on this because there's the potential for the abusive partner to just reinforce the abuse and to the couples therapist who only gets to see them together when they're on their good behavior. So a couple thoughts about couples therapy, then I have one more question and then we'll be wrapping up, but thoughts about couples therapy? Speaker 3 (38:39): The couples therapy issue is sort of a mixed bag because in the more extreme cases where you have a really abusive controlling partner, then everything, the concerns you just said are totally founded that couples therapy is likely to be manipulated. The people may not feel safe, really being fully honest, people, meaning the victim may not feel really safe and it can actually exacerbate the problems. But I would say that a lot of times if his behavior is he gets jealous, for example, or he overreacts to feeling like things aren't going his way, I've seen times when couples therapy actually, it's very effective for dealing with the dynamics in that relationship. And a lot of times even the people who are in full on domestic violence programs complain like, I wish I could work on these things with my partner in the room. I think that would really help us, so that one can really go either way. Speaker 3 (39:45): A couple things I just would want to say to help us put all this into perspective. One is I am hoping that all these things we're talking about about advice for women and looking at the red signs, the red flags and taking action does not come across as victim. Blaming. The message here is not, well, you didn't pay attention to these signs, so it's on you now and you're at fault. Well, that's the furthest thing we're trying to communicate. The person who's at fault is the person who's doing the destructive or abusive or controlling type behavior. We just want to help women in particular recognized situ that might turn out not well for them, and that requires some education. The other thing I just want to say also to put it in perspective is that you could also come away from hearing us talk like this or reading this book and thinking, whoa, there are a lot of bad guys out there. Speaker 3 (40:46): The world is a dangerous place. Every guy who's ever said or done anything that's not exactly kosher is I should stay away from, and that would be overkill. The reality is I've decided in my brilliant oversimplification of the world that for our purposes, there are three kinds of guys. There's one men I think who are dangerous, and basically you just want to stay away from 'em and hopefully you see the signs as quickly as possible. Category two is men who have issues and have some tendencies that might be troublesome, but they might be able to turn that around. And although you want to be on alert, it wouldn't necessarily mean you should totally give up on being with a man like that. Speaker 2 (41:37): It's their openness to change. That's the fact is there. Right. Okay. Speaker 3 (41:42): And the third category is guys who don't even who are cool, I mean cool meaning are safe respect. Women have the security to be able to handle difficulties in relationships and are not in any way dangerous to women. And my advice to women is if you're in a relationship with a guy like that or you discover that the man you're involved with has most of those tendencies, that's what we're looking for. We hope that, and I actually think most men are in category three. I would say that the conclusion would be stay away as soon as possible. If you see the signs, stay away from the really dangerous guy. If you see the signs that somebody is really trustworthy, check out the possibility that this might be the right relationship for you and maybe proceed cautiously with some of the guys who are in the middle and see what happens. But certainly I wouldn't want w to hear this talk and think that basically all men are dangerous. We're just talking about some of the ones who are, Speaker 2 (42:45): Yeah, it seems to me, and I haven't seen numbers on this, but we're talking about maybe somewhere around 20% of men that engage in domestic violence. And so you're talking about 80% of men that don't do that. Some may be controlling, maybe that's another 10 or 20%, but let's say 60% of men are okay. What's interesting to me is I've been on some podcasts for domestic violence and abuse podcasts by women who dominate this field in terms of educating people about this. And I think it's kind of interesting and maybe nice for people to know, here's two men talking about this, reinforcing the same messages. And that's true with you and Donald Eichenbaum. Well, let's wrap up. I did want to mention, and I won't make it a question, I'll just mention that throughout the book you talk about the Gabby Petito case where she was murdered by her boyfriend they met in high school, and that her parents have actually endorsed your book, and I just wanted to give you a lot of credit for that. And I think telling that story, I'm warning signs Friends said were there that she missed, really reinforces the need for a book like this. So you've got Choose Him Wisely by David Wexler and Donald Eichenbaum, and I want to thank you so much for being on and for working on such an important project. So best wishes to you and to Don like and Don. Speaker 3 (44:22): Okay, thanks Bill. As always, it's a pleasure to exchange ideas with you and I learn something every time. Speaker 1 (44:37): Thank you for listening today. You will find the link to Dr. Wexler's book. Choose him Wisely in the show notes and it is on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Also, we'll put a link to the Relationship Training Institute, and if you're looking for training or consultation about a high conflict situation, whether it's in your professional or personal life, please visit us@highconflictinstitute.com or conflict influencer.com. Until then, keep learning and practicing skills, be kind to yourself and others while we all try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece. It's All Your Fault is A protection of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True Story fm for high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.