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China Elevator Stories
5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life (by Bill Eddy)
Bill Eddy describes the personality traits of people who can ruin your life in his book “5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities”.
15/10/2024
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
According to Bill Eddy, the five types of people who can ruin your life are the following:
“Narcissistic HCPs: They often seem very charming at first but believe they are vastly superior to others. They insult, humiliate, mislead, and lack empathy for their Targets of Blame. They also demand constant, undeserved respect and attention from everyone.
Borderline HCPs: They often start out extremely friendly, but they can suddenly and unpredictably shift to being extremely angry. When this shift occurs, they may seek revenge for minor or nonexistent slights. They may launch vicious attacks against their Targets of Blame that involve physical violence, verbal abuse, legal action, or attempts to destroy their targets’ reputations.
Antisocial (or Sociopathic) HCPs: They can be extremely charismatic, but their charm is a cover for their drive to dominate others through lying, stealing, publicly humiliating people, physically injuring them, and, in extreme cases, murdering them. Antisocial HCPs are remorseless and are said to have no conscience.
Paranoid HCPs: They are deeply suspicious and constantly fear betrayal. Because they imagine conspiracies against them, they will launch preemptive attacks against their Targets of Blame, hoping to harm them first.
Histrionic HCPs: They can have very dramatic and exciting personalities. They often tell wild and extreme stories (which are sometimes completely false). Over time, they can be very harmful and emotionally draining to those around them, especially their Targets of Blame.”
HCP means High Conflict Person. I can identify a few of these traits within the more malignant personalities I’ve had to deal with; can you?
In Bill Eddy’s words:
“Not everyone with a personality disorder is a high-conflict person because not all of them attack Targets of Blame. (…) Others are randomly destructive, such as people who walk down the street smashing car windows.
It’s the combination of someone having a high-conflict personality (people who have Targets of Blame) and a personality disorder (those who never reflect on their own behavior nor try to change it) that creates a human being who can ruin your life.”
Usually, a lack of conscience is a main factor that determines how dangerous a person can be—the more severe a person’s lack of conscience, the more harm they can cause. Other factors to consider may include the following: Is the person generally greedy, jealous, and filled with hate? Are they someone with a ‘scarcity mindset’ (believing others always have more and have it better than they do, even when they don’t), wanting to take away the money, possessions, or even the children of others? Do they like to destroy others to feel better about themselves?
According to Bill Eddy, people with personality disorders are often those with high-conflict personalities. He has observed that different personality disorders usually share three key characteristics:
“Interpersonal dysfunction: The person causes repeated problems in their relationships, usually by attacking others, withdrawing from others, exacting revenge, or expressing extreme anger.
Lack of social awareness: The person is oblivious to how they create many of their own problems with other people. They can’t see their part in the problem or how they contribute to most of their own issues.”
I have found this to be the case with the incel who has stalked me for half a decade.
The third key characteristic is:
“Lack of change: The person rarely changes their behavior, no matter how much trouble it causes others or themselves. They constantly sabotage themselves. They’re stuck. Instead, they defend their actions and get angry at those who want them to change. However, on rare occasions, some may promise change, but they usually can’t follow through. Even rarer are those who work very hard at it and succeed in changing. Most don’t think they have a problem, so they don’t try to change themselves. They mistakenly believe that all their problems just happen to them—as if they dropped from the sky—and that there’s nothing they can do about it. They chronically feel like victims in life.”
I must add here that if you have encountered extremely problematic situations in life, these problems may have felt like they simply dropped from the sky. In such scenarios, we need to consider two factors: Are you a genuine victim, or are you a perpetrator who causes problems for others?
One example would be incels who blame women for everything—in this case, incels are not victims but perpetrators, as they generically blame women and generally treat them poorly.
When I told the stalker to leave me alone, he could have acted differently by actually leaving me alone. But he didn’t and then blamed me for having healthy boundaries with him.
He also blames women for being greedy and wants them to care for him as if they were his mother (or his slave), including taking care of him financially.
In this case, we are dealing with unrealistic expectations and a real ‘little emperor’: You don’t want to treat a woman to even a coffee on a date? These are normal social norms; most men who have been successful in relationships would do this and not blame a woman for asking to be treated to coffee. But this person does—he’ll call you egotistical and arrogant and tell you that you only think about yourself. Love flows more freely between two people when there is a healthy give-and-receive dynamic. A woman shouldn’t have to give all the time while the man expects to receive. This is not very masculine behavior either. We can easily see how he creates his own problems by thinking he doesn’t need to contribute if he wants to have a relationship with a woman and that certain social norms don’t apply to him.
A lack of change in a situation like this would mean that the incel still wouldn’t think treating a woman to coffee for a date is necessary. A person who recognizes their own faults in not being able to attract a woman would understand that treating a woman to a date is normal and to be expected. This kind of behavior also shows a lack of social awareness.
However, minor issues like this don’t define a personality that destroys other people’s lives—usually, there are other factors present, such as a lack of conscience regarding destroying another person’s life or even killing them, as well as a lack of compassion for others, devaluing them, and treating them inhumanely.
Most people who destroy other people’s lives are malignant narcissists. Some may be malignant but not narcissists. However, in most of the HCPs mentioned above, narcissism is usually also at play, as these personality disorders often overlap, and one person may have a combination of different personality disorders.
In my opinion, normal paranoia may not always be a problem, but extreme paranoia could be, as well as schizophrenia.
What were the traits of the person who destroyed your life?