Disarming

Growing up with unhealthy boundaries was dangerous. Without proper modeling of healthy, harmonious connection I didn’t have many defenses against selfish, narcissistic people and their manipulative bids for pseudo-connection. I was thirsty enough for human interaction to drink the relationship equivalent of Flint, MI tap water more than once. My saving grace from a worse fate was my ability to shutdown and ghost people; I never had openings that anyone could hook into my inner-emotional world with.

As a consequence, I was able to remain around several very destructive, narcissistic people’s worlds and experience how they operate. Below I will outline my understanding of the social strategies revolving around disarming others in order to bypass boundaries, gain unearned trust, and access personal vulnerabilities.

A word of caution: while those who pathologically use these behaviors are dangerous people who should be avoided. Other times people may occasionally use them out of learned behavior from their developmental years. Others may just be feeling stressed out and insecurely seeking attention. Or maybe someone could have a genetic disability like autism, in this case they just don’t know any better and there’s nothing malicious.

Lack of Attunement

Before we get into the behaviors themselves, it’s worth examining what they are masking.

At the core of these disarming behaviors is an inability or lack of desire to actually acknowledge the other person’s emotional state. Anyone who needs to rely on disarming tactics in lieu of empathy and attunement is, for one reason or another, focused on only what they desire and isn’t internally concerned about the other person’s feelings and needs at any point in the interaction.

In obvious cases, the person won’t ask how you’re feeling; they won’t ask what’s going on in your life; they won’t be interested in your perspective. The more subtle will ask about you, but there will be no warmth or empathy. All their questions will inevitably gravitate to the aspects of your life that relate to their needs and wants.

Our nervous system runs throughout our whole body, and the neurological wiring in our body, specifically our guts, processes and responds to external stimuli like our cognitive mind does, however the output is feeling, not thought. Humans all have the ability to sense when another being’s nervous system is attuned to their own, or misattuned.

This is why I often reflect back and remember the gut feeling that there was something wrong when I experience one of these tactics used on me. The feeling was always there, and can’t be tricked. It’s all about tricking the cognitive mind into ignoring the feelings. So many times I have fallen victim to these tactics, only to feel a sense of self-betrayal afterwards because I didn’t listen to my own instincts.

But it’s better to be compassionate about our failings and do our best to align our thoughts and our instincts; we can learn to recognize the patterns of disarming behavior cognitively as well.

Tactics

False Halo Effect

The most common tactic used to disarm is to exaggerate one’s life or just outright make up a bunch of lies and delusional tales. This is a “pull” tactic that causes people to gravitate towards the lying individual. It consists of three main components:

First is confidence, the disarmer says grandiose things about their life experience with incredible confidence that makes the listener think that the person speaking absolutely, positively, must know what they’re talking about.

For instance, I’ve encountered “spiritual healers” talking about their fantastical mystical experiences. New Agers claiming alien encounters or being visited by beings of light. A high-school classmate talking about how he rode horses alone when he was 4 years old. When I was 7 going to summer camp a kid on the bus said he was running his own store in the middle of the Runescape wilderness as if he was a developer of the game. No matter the age or the absurdity the confidence is still there.

Secondly, bedazzlement. The person will rapidly jump from topic to topic so fast your head will be spinning and you’ll have no time digest any piece of information before the next one is presented to you.

Since there’s no actual depth to the lies they tell it’s necessary that they move on to the next one as quickly as possible. This plays on our insecurities since most of us don’t live exciting lives, so we want to be accepted in the eyes of such individual.

One guy told me he was an actor, he was traveling the world living at holy sites, and staying in dangerous conflict regions all within the first 5 minutes of conversation. Turns out it was all lies.

Thirdly, incongruence with the actual impact such experiences would have on a person. You’ll get a nagging feeling that things don’t quite add up, but the gamble is that you’ll suppress it out of desire to be in such an exciting individual’s social circle, and you won’t ask too many questions out of the insecurity of appearing inferior or out-of-touch. You’ll see this often in spiritual communities where people will describe these deep experiences that would absolutely transform an individual, but live chaotic lives full of interpersonal conflict and drug abuse.

To counter the false-halo keep in mind that healthy individuals are going to keep their most meaningful life experiences for those whom they trust. People who are passionate and committed to specific topics like to talk about them in detail and you’ll feel like you’re actually learning from them when they do so.

This is the key distinction: does interacting with the person actually make your life richer, or does it just make you feel “good” to be around someone so seemingly full of confidence and excitement.

The Group Disarm

An insidious sub-category of this is by using social proof wherein if one member of a social circle is disarmed and seems to vouch for an individual, others will also override their social defense mechanisms and ignore their feelings of unease in order to remain in harmony with the group.

Love-Bombing

Close relationships don’t spring out of the ground overnight. True compassion comes from a place of understanding, and that takes time. A small gift or a gesture of care is certainly healthy and appropriate when you’re just getting to know someone. But if there’s too much offered too soon it’s time to raise your guard.

Love-bombing is not a one-off gesture of care. It’s rapid and repeated attempts to gain your trust by bending over backwards to provide for you all your needs in the formative stages of a relationships.

I’ve had someone offer me free food, drinks, drugs, to stay at their property, and lots and lots of compliments about how great I am. It feels amazing at first, especially since I have had such a deficit in human connection. But wait just a month or so, and the true nature of the transaction becomes clear.

Once the initial honeymoon passes, you’ll immediately be guilt-tripped for taking so many of their resources. It turns out everything was offered on credit and now you’re expected to pay it back with interest by enduring their abuse.

Here’s how to detect love bombing. See if someone is constantly giving you things you didn’t ask for. Think on that. It means they don’t know what you actually need. Maybe it is what you need, we humans have a lot of common needs that are easy to guess. But if you didn’t ask for it, and you hardly know the person, why are they giving it to you?

Gushing

Related to love-bombing, but a bit more subtle, gushing is when someone is over-the-top attempting to connect with you by inflating your ego with compliments and praise. It’s not always malicious; maybe they’re just insecure and in love, but that not exactly a healthy basis for connection.

If someone is coming out of left field with excessive compliments and frenetic positive energy, especially if you just met or rarely speak with them, it’s a sign that there some sort of imbalance in their inner world. Uncontrolled positive energy is like a live wire. Even if the charge is positive, be on guard; it can shock you just the same.

The First Impression Blast

Some people use a tactic where they gush a huge amount of positive energy within the first 30 seconds of meeting you. They enthusiastically ask you your name and repeat it or deploy other persuasion tactics they learned from the self-help section of Barnes and Noble. These people are either salesmen, abusers, or just desperate for validation.

Fishing

Be wary when individuals of either sex make a bid for your contact information too early. This gives them a hook to start fishing.

When I worked as an Uber driver there were people who asked for my phone number, I was naive and gave it to a few of them, and they always had something weird going on. Thankfully I learned my lesson before anything too bad happened.

Basically, if someone isn’t in your close social circle and you don’t have a moderately strong reason to be in regular contact, then they shouldn’t be asking for your phone number or other personal contact information. Especially in the day and age of rich group communication platforms.

When they do get it, you’ll experience weird contact attempts that come out of left field. There will always be strange excuses and indirect reasons for the message.

For example, someone I hadn’t talked to in over 3 years recently texted me making up a story about a 3am group text that never happened. Then proceeded to a multi-text life update. Another time someone left a message saying they thought they had seen me around a town I hadn’t lived in for over a year. Obvious lies like this aren’t necessary when a healthy person is trying to reach out and reconnect, because a healthy person isn’t trying to exploit anyone and doesn’t have to act in a weird, incongruent manner.

To avoid biting on the hook, just ask yourself if the person is being upfront about their needs when they are reaching out to you. “Hey do you want to reconnect? It’s been a long time, let’s get a beer.” is very different energy than “Wow that was weird that there was a group text at 305am. I was totally sleeping.”

Devaluing

Someone who makes a habit of devaluing your struggles, experiences, and desires is someone to avoid. Unhealthy people tend to constantly have stories about how much worse their struggles are, or how you don’t really have the grounds to talk about your struggles because of your financial status, your family, your job, or other characteristics.

Devaluing also comes in the form of one-upsmanship. Oftentimes people always have a better story than yours, or appear to be more knowledgable about a subject than you are, or have achieved much more success with less work than you. These all subtly induce shame and disarm you by making you feel insignificant.

When someone constantly does this, it means they are detached from the shared human experience. This is a complete lack of compassion. Anyone who makes you feel ashamed about your past and events you couldn’t control doesn’t care about you. Anyone who makes you feel ashamed of yourself isn’t someone who should be part of your life.

If you have concerns, when someone constantly bulldozes past your worries without addressing them it likely means they only want to use you to meet their own needs. If someone always has a better story than you, it means they want you to remain squarely in their shadow.

If the person’s direct communication with you is constantly invoking shame, if you feel like you’re suppressing a cocktail of incredulity and frustration every time they open their mouth, it’s time to cut ties.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is very well known today. When someone constantly is making you question your perceptions of reality, it’s time to withdraw from the relationship. This is different from someone expanding your perspective, anyone who cares is going to help you grow and look to teach you, not fill you with doubt. These doubts will lead to you disarming yourself and exposing vulnerabilities too early in a relationship.

Exploiting Vulnerability

Pain and struggle provide opportunities for connection as those who love and care about us offer support. They also allow those who wish to exploit these struggles opportunities to hook into our lives. Everyone of the previous tactics I mentioned revolves around exploiting vulnerabilities and insecurities.

But I think exploiting vulnerability deserves a category of it’s own. There are people who use events such as a physical injury to draw uncomfortably close to you often get a sense of satisfaction about playing the role of the “savior.”

The sick part of this is that they don’t want you to get better, they want you to become dependent on them. So it’s vital to distinguish between healthy support during your struggles and induced dependency. Anyone who cares about you in a healthy manner wants you to become self-sufficient and will ask about your progress and growth. Those who don’t will get moody and distant as they see you beginning to reassert strength.

Other Signs of Incongruence

Often the lives these individuals lead are completely out of touch with their stories and deeds. If you ignore the words and look for the signs, you’re more likely to see who someone truly is.

Here are some I’ve seen:

• Constant streams of failed and broken relationships
• Large amounts of acquaintances “every knows them” without any deeper relationships
• Reliance on drugs into adulthood (usually while fronting as spiritual)
• Lack of depth in their thoughts.
• Readily sharing personal things like their journal
• Stories of extreme spiritual experiences readily offered
• Divorced coupled with uncomfortable, sickly, or depressed children
• Fuzzy reality, constantly misremembering details and stretching the truth regarding events you witnessed
• Constantly shifting interests and priorities
• Readily shares grandiose plans that don’t appear to be realistic and abandons them easily
• Subscribes to magical thinking philosophies such as the law of attraction
• Rarely, if ever, vulnerable about their current struggles
• Takes poor care of animals (rowdy or sick pets)
• Lack of self-reflection
• Constantly repeating the same stories to you

I’m sure there are many more I’ll learn as I grow a bit wiser.

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So to wrap up this lengthy post, all of these behaviors disarm social self-defense mechanisms by forming a wedge between the cognitive mind and the feelings. They play on doubts, fears, insecurities, cognitive biases, and moments of weakness to stealthily form one-sided connections whose purpose is only to meet their own needs.

I hope this list helps you learn from the many mistakes I blundered into when I was younger. As always, judge individuals in context. People have rough patches, insecurities, and blind spots that don’t reflect the true state of their heart. But even then it is healthy to be guarded against these types of behaviors to prevent unhealthy patterns from spreading; don’t open up and be vulnerable in the face of unhealthy, one-sided bids for connection.

Wisdom is being compassionate and cautious.