My flashbacks are not what you see in movies. I don’t hit the ground and start screaming. I can function to a degree. You might never know I am having strings of thoughts strain through my brain sending a fear throughout my body that almost paralyzes me.

Most of the time, when the manipulator casts themselves as a victim, they don’t really see themselves as victimized, they just really want the other party to see them as wounded, injured, or suffering in some way in order to elicit sympathy, cloud the picture about just who is the victimizer and who is the victim, and otherwise impression-manage the real victim.

Persons with disturbed characters don’t act the way most of us do largely because they don’t think the way we do. Some will even advance points of view which they don’t really believe but which they want you to believe that they believe — all with a view to manipulating you or managing your impression of them.

Predatory Aggressive Personalities (i.e., psychopaths or sociopaths) consider themselves superior to the rest of the human race. They view individuals with inhibitions rooted in emotional bonding to others as inferior creatures and, therefore, their rightful prey.

By far the most limiting aspect of traditional approaches to understanding the most character-disturbed individuals among us is that purely behavioral descriptions don’t capture the essence of what is unhealthy and problematic in them.

Aggressive personalities are fundamentally at war with anything that stands in the way of their unrestrained pursuit of their desires.

An offense involves fighting hard enough to secure a goal and remove obstacles to that goal. A defense involves expending just enough energy to ward off an attack or prevent injury.