Life Code: The New Rules for Winning in the Real World (6 page)

Simply put, I got conned. I got conned by a well-disguised BAITER who was running a scam and using religion, God, and family to cover it. She knew what was important to me; she pushed what she knew would resonate with my value system. I ignored my instincts and gave her the
benefit of the doubt
. I thought that was “the thing to do.” And in a perfectly just world, it just might be the thing to do. But in the
real
world, where you and I actually live, it simply allowed that wolf in sheep’s clothing to pull the wool right over my eyes.

Just flip through today’s newspaper or go online, and look at the top 100 news stories over the past year to see how many of them involved exactly the kind of people I’m talking about. Here’s a handful of names to make my point: Bernie Madoff, who swindled investors out of billions of dollars in the biggest Ponzi scheme in history; Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl; Jerry Sandusky, who used his foundation and his position on the coaching staff at Penn State to sexually abuse teenage and pre-teenage boys; Wade Michael Page, the white supremacist who committed suicide after killing six members of a Sikh temple in a suburb of Milwaukee; Rielle Hunter, who cheated with Sen. John Edwards and then wrote a book about their affair and went on the air criticizing
his
wife, Elizabeth Edwards, the woman she had victimized, who had just died of cancer; Levi Aron, who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and dismembering an 8-year-old boy who had been on his way home from a day camp in Brooklyn. And how about the endless string of female teachers who had sex with their underage students? I could go on and on.

I know you can make your own list, even though your BAITERs, like mine, probably didn’t make the headlines: your sister who loves to start trouble and cause drama, your two-faced friend who stabbed you in the back thinking you wouldn’t find out, a spouse who cheated and the concubine with whom he did it, the registered sex offender down the street, the co-worker who takes credit for your work, the gossip who betrayed your trust and embarrassed you, the jealous friend who tells blatant lies about you, the service person you hire to work in your home who pretends to befriend you while all the time padding his bill and cheating you, the boss who berates you in front of others, your mother-in-law who disrespects your boundaries and doesn’t seem to understand that her little boy is now 40 with his own wife (you) and three children—and needs to butt out and leave you alone! So, how do you ferret these folks out so you can keep an eye on them or eliminate them from your personal space?

The good news is there are some tip-offs—some patterns, traits, and characteristics that reveal who these BAITERs, these users and abusers, are. These are what psychologists call “identifiers”—things that mark these types of people like a sign on their forehead. By the time you finish this chapter, you should have a keen sense of how to identify people like this, before they get to you. This knowledge is a cornerstone of the new “Life Code.”

As I described in the introduction, I came up with this list of common traits by first doing a really honest (and painful) audit of some of the BAITERs I have encountered in my personal life and then by performing an exhaustive review of the professional literature. I also spoke to some of my most trusted colleagues about their own opinions and experiences. It was really interesting how each and every person I reached out to passionately “dove in” to the analysis. They all related to the challenge because not one of them had been immune! Through this personal and professional analysis and with a lot of great help reviewing and refining the lists I had made, I compiled one list of the most observable identifiers to help you spot these BAITERs coming from a mile away—before they have a chance to do harm to you and your loved ones.

Sometimes, but not always, these BAITERs find their way to mental-health professionals, often because it’s court-ordered, and so they have become the subject of much research, diagnosis, and debate. So, when relevant, I weighed all of that data as well. They have, across time, been referred to as “psychopaths,” “sociopaths,” “antisocial personalities,” “borderline personalities,” and “paranoids” among many, many others. Diagnostically it is certainly not a “one-size-fits-all” situation. But diagnosticians typically tend to try to separate distinct syndromes, not find a composite of many. My goal was exactly the opposite. For me, this is not an academic exercise; it is a real-world “applied” wisdom that I seek—a wisdom you can
use
every day. These people come in different shapes, sizes, and styles, but they
do
come, and if you are like me and everyone else I know, they are very likely already in your life as you are reading this.

To give you some insight into how the psychological and psychiatric professions deal with BAITERs, at least in part, let’s use the diagnosis of the antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as an example, remembering many other diagnoses may apply individually or in combination. The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) states that antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others. The condition is common in people in prison.

In the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
, this disorder is characterized by “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

Those diagnosed with ASPD as adults were commonly diagnosed with “conduct disorder” as children. Fire-setting and cruelty to animals during childhood are linked to the development of antisocial personality disorder.

According to the NIMH, the causes of antisocial personality disorder are unknown. Genetic factors and child abuse are believed to contribute to the development of this condition. People with an antisocial or alcoholic parent are at increased risk. Far more men than women are affected. The effectiveness of treatment for antisocial personality disorder is not known. Treatments that show the person the negative consequences of illegal behavior seem to hold the most promise.

From your own experience, you probably know people who routinely behave as if the rules of society simply don’t apply to them. It’s absolutely imperative that you develop an urgent awareness of who these people are because they are dangerous to be around. They can get you in trouble just by your being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even worse, the rules they break can be in their interactions with you because you become an unwitting target. I want you to join me in performing what I call a “life scan.” This is an intuitive-based “risk assessment” to start you down the road of listening to and trusting your instincts.

Exercise: I want you, using the following table, to write down the different categories in which you interact with other people. This may include categories such as work, social, family, sports, hobbies, religion, romantic, and even online. Then I want you to make a list of the people you routinely encounter in each of those categories. In just a few paragraphs from now, I’m going to begin to give you some very specific and observable identifiers that tend to make any of these people who might be dangerous much more obvious. But before we get to that, what I would like for you to do is tune in to your instincts: What does your
gut
tell you about each of the people you put on your list? You can categorize them as “safe,” “neutral,” “suspicious,” or “dangerous.” You may need to create more sheets if you know a lot of people because I want you to be thorough.

Remember, all I’m asking for right now is your instinct. Don’t worry about being wrong at this point. Be honest with yourself, even if it feels like you are being harsh, because no one will see this work except you. Once you have some identifiers and some more information, you may change your opinion in either direction about anybody on your list. But right now, I just want you to acknowledge your gut-level reaction. I think when you start listening to your gut, you’ll find some people who end up on your “suspicious” or “dangerous” list are people you’ve always had funny feelings about but you just didn’t know why. I think you’re going to be saying, “Wow, I really do have a strange feeling about this person; I just never acknowledged it because I didn’t want to seem negative or judgmental, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. But now that I’m specifically approaching it with a purpose in mind, I can see that I’ve been ignoring these feelings for a long time.” Give yourself permission to acknowledge your feelings even if you can’t defend or articulate them, let alone offer any proof. By the way, if you feel that way about certain people, I hope you’re wrong. I hope when you do your homework, you find out it was something completely benign that was causing your unease. But if not, I want them to go on your watch list.

Warning Bells

Think of all the people in your current life who give you that “funny feeling,” that nagging sense that something isn’t quite right. List the area of your life in which you interact with them, include their names, and then describe the feeling they give you. Remember, this is for your eyes only, so be honest with yourself.

I don’t want you to have to say later, “If I only knew
then
what I know
now
.” You can “know it now,” and you can clean up your life and get real about people who might pose a threat. Like we say about physical disease, “Early detection and early intervention can be outcome-determinative.” And don’t forget, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” It all fits!

How do you start? You’ve made your “gut-check” list, so now let’s put some science to it. You need to learn the identifiers of the people we’re talking about—the BAITERs who lie, cheat, and steal, and worse, without any regard for anyone else.

This one is hard for most people to grasp. People tell me all the time: “I hear your words, but I just don’t
get
it.” But you have to understand that the BAITERs don’t live in the same world you do. Their world is defined solely by their own needs and desires. Other people, and other people’s needs and desires, just aren’t real to them. You might approach a situation simply to enjoy it, learn from it, or just do it for the sake of doing it. The BAITER is always “on the make” looking for a way to capitalize. A lot of these people are so crooked they have to screw their socks on in the morning! They can’t
not
victimize people if they see an opening. They will lie when the truth would do better because it is just their nature.

And by the way, they’re not going to feel any worse about it than they would crossing the street. Those are nonemotional events to them. If they find an angle to “get ahead,” they will do it and do it right over the top of you. If they can cheat you or hurt you or your loved ones to gain some advantage, they will—without a blink. The goal is getting the advantage, not nurturing some relationship with you.

You might inadvertently invite a BAITER to your home for dinner or drinks. Innocent enough, right? Maybe, but he might also be thinking about how he can “use” this access to your home to his advantage. If you are his boss, he may be thinking how he can drop comments around co-workers about being invited to your home. It is power to him, so how can he use it? If it is a “friend,” she may be looking for flaws that she can gossip about to other “friends” to cause you embarrassment and, by comparison, make herself look better. Or maybe he is thinking how he can criticize you to others concerning your house: “You would
not
believe how much booze she has in there!” “They have a nice room, but their children are so mistreated and abused and crammed into a hole in the basement. They’re so selfish!”

Maybe your houseguest was that woman your husband
worked
with. She wanted to take something from you, something that was yours—your husband. Think back: Maybe months before you found out what was going on, she was at your house, chatting pleasantly with you but all the while thinking: “She has no idea what’s going on between her husband and me. I could get him to leave her with a snap of my fingers, and it would be her fault for not paying attention to him.” And do you remember? She was smiling all the while.