11. An Interview with Dr. George Simon: How to Deal with Manipulative People

Tracy: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Tell Me How You're Mighty. I'm your host Tracy Schorn, otherwise known as Chump Lady. And I'm here with my co host Sarah Gorell. And today we're talking with psychologist Dr. George Simon, who I like to think of as the godfather of decoding mindfuckery. Excuse my language, but he is. He's amazing.

He's the author of the international bestseller in Sheep's Clothing understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, which is an absolute must read if you're dealing with a cheater or any sort of disordered behaving person and you can find him and links to all his work at drgeorgesimon.com.

Welcome, Dr. Simon. One of the things that I found absolutely revelatory about your writing when I was in the early stages of chumpdom was that you had the bravery to call out disordered behavior as character disordered.

And I think the needle is moved on this. But years ago, and it was about 17 years ago when I discovered my then husband's double life. All the therapy resources, all of them, had an I'm okay, you're okay perspective. There was no mention of character, but there was a lot of woo woo theories about toxic shame and subterranean influences. And it was a sort of dual blame for any issues in the relationship. 

And now I find it offensive that victims are asked to untangle the skeins of their abusive partners. But that's another topic.

But you had a radically different take. First, you pointed out an obvious truth that my cheater and I had fundamentally different worldviews, and second, that he had a different operating system of self interest. And third, that me thinking that we shared the same view made me much easier to manipulate because I felt shame.

I questioned myself, and I had a conscience to appeal to. So can you discuss how people and even therapists get stuck thinking that there's an insight problem? Like, oh, hey, we'll explain that this is bad, and they'll change versus it's a character problem? 

Dr. Simon: Thank you. And the situation you describe is really what prompted my work in the first place. I was very fortunate to be mentored by a student of the premier researcher in the area of personality and character. And I was mentored by this person at a time when the medical model was dominating and the traditional insight oriented psychotherapy model was dominating other allied mental health professions.

And the whole idea of personality or character was being pooh-poohed to the point that many folks wanted to just simply not consider it or consider it a false construct. 

So when I was doing workshops in the early days -- this is an honest truth -- I did several grand rounds, especially in medical schools where people walked out. They didn't want to hear it. They thought I was just full of you know what.

But I have been vigorously listening to my clients and their reports of heartbreak as they experienced two things.

One, the crazy making feeling that we now commonly call the gaslighting effect, where they just knew something was just not right with the worldview and the modus operandi of their partner. But that partner had them feeling like they were the crazy one for even suspecting it. And worse than that, sometimes they couldn't point to anything objective that would convince any reasonable person that this person that they were dealing with was as awful as they were beginning to feel. So that made me absolutely, I described this effect long before we had a commonly accepted name for it, in the opening pages of In Sheep's Clothing. 

And boy, my whole life changed overnight because all of a sudden people kept saying, yes, that was my feeling. I'm like you get it.

Tracy: Even when you have evidence, you can stick your head in that blender and be spun around to not believe what you see.

Sarah: I'm just quite intrigued by the concept of character. So I think what keeps people in bad relationships being gaslight, being cheated on, is the idea that they can change someone's fundamental character. They think, oh, they were a good person when I met them. They were lovely. That will come back.

This whole thing of were they always a bad person? Did they become a bad person? Did their character change? And I think it's such a complex issue that can you be someone that's done something good, done something bad, who is fundamentally a good person, who can then go back to being a good person? It's not terribly straightforward, is it? 

Dr. Simon: No, it's not. And you're touching on the other thing that really inspired me to really study the phenomenon in depth and to write about it from my experience, and that is that character disturbance is a spectrum phenomenon.

It's very real, it's very serious, especially in the zeitgeist of our time, which is an atmosphere of incredible entitlement, moral relativism and self indulgence. We live in that kind of world, unfortunately.

And so we've always had character impaired people among us. But the problem is so much worse than it used to be because of the zeitgeist of our time. And what I came to appreciate is that the spectrum is very broad.

Character dysfunction varies as to type and degree of severity. It's kind of like the autistic spectrum. Not everybody on the spectrum is the same and the prognosis is different.

But here's the real key when it comes to intervening either with the victim in a dysfunctional relationship or the character impaired person.

This model that we have had for so long about how to understand and help people, it applies to the folks that we have traditionally called and I'm going to use a word that seems to have a negative connotation. But neurotic is the term that we have used for the overly conscientious, the folks that worry themselves to death unnecessarily about everything, who want to get everything right, who make excuses for everybody, who want to see everybody as benign and make themselves sick basically with their own worry.

Tracy: We call those people chumps. 

Dr. Simon: And they get chumped, right? 

Tracy: They do get chumped. I'm raising my hand here.

Dr. Simon: The intervention strategies for such folks is radically different from those folks whose problem is the lack of conscientiousness, the lack of character development. And so where we got it so wrong is trying to paint with this broad brush and with these sweeping over generalization psychology and psychiatry did more to harm people in these relationships than anybody else with our crazy models. 

And what I learned very quickly is that I could use everything that I was taught traditionally to help the person who was chumped. But I had to reinvent the wheel when it came to dealing with character impaired people. And in some cases, even the best of the right efforts are probably not going to make much difference because the person is so seriously disturbed and so ingrained in their dysfunctional patterns. 

But for some who are not so bad, whose character is capable of some repair, there is some hope, but not with any of the methods or models that we have been used to using.

And that was a huge light bulb moment for me. And it changed everything. It changed the whole game. I can't tell you the number of folks who at 50, 60, 70 years of age, and after doing it wrong for so many years, have finally come to terms with themselves and who will write me and said, you know, most of my life I've been a creep. And only today have I come to grips with the fact that it really hasn't worked anywhere near as well as I thought it had.

Now I have no idea what to do. How the heck do I change? 

Tracy: Well, probably as a result of consequences. And that was going to be my follow up question to you. Years ago, I interviewed you about how to divorce a character disordered person. And one of the things, the takeaways I had from that was that consequences. If you want to change your character, you're going to have to feel the pain of what you've done.

And I think a lot of the discourse, particularly around infidelity, is doing everything in your power as a chump to not get the person to feel that consequence.

You don't leave them, you don't ask them hard questions. You hide your pain. I mean, it's completely the opposite of the advice you give, which is if you're divorcing them, use the heavy boot of the law. Did they abuse you? Heavy boot of the law. Consequence, consequences, consequences.

You've got to feel that. 

Dr. Simon: Yes. And you're actually touching on the most fundamental principle that I operate with. We know this cognitive behavioral paradigm has been with us in psychology for a long time. We know that the way we think about things, the attitudes that we have, our general approach to the world, and the way we tend to want to see things and operate, we know that those attitudes and those thinking patterns influence how we behave.

So if we really think that our partner's job in life is to please us, to gratify us, to serve our needs, if that's our mindset, we're going to behave in a certain way.

Okay, here's the mistake that every therapist makes. They make the mistake of wasting time and energy just like the chump does, trying to get their partner or their clients to see differently as opposed to insisting that they do differently right here, right now.

Because that change in behavior is what will possibly eventually change the mindset, not vice versa.

The problem with our field is that we've had it exactly backward,

Sarah: But that's still not really changing, is it? If you look at all the advice out there, it still seems to be like, go to therapy, see what's wrong, talk to them, have reasoned discussions. And even listening to you now, there's still part of me thinking, oh, how do you know if you've got a terribly disordered individual or just a mildly disordered individual? And is there hope maybe if it's just a mild individual, that you can change things
and get them to see the error of their ways. 

It's so difficult, isn't it, when you initially are faced with this, to know quite how to react? 

Tracy: The answer is the behavior. 

Because, Dr. Simon, if you're saying, okay, in therapy, instead of talking about what made you a cheater and all your sad feelings and whatever, instead if you get the prescription, okay, you've got to dump the affair partner. We're going to call them right now. Everybody's in on it. Here we go. We're dumping you. If you did the things... I like to talk about sorry is as sorry does. Get a postnup, if you want to reconcile, put your money where your mouth is. If you do the things, isn't that an indicator of where you are on that spectrum? 

Dr. Simon: Absolutely. When the focus is on behavior and on behavior only, the resistance to change tells you how seriously ingrained, how deeply ingrained the character pathology is and how resistant it will be to change.

So the proof, so to speak, is in the pudding. And like I said, we've had it backwards for so long because we've had this broad brush. We've had this model that tells us everybody is basically the same and everybody is struggling with the same things that we're struggling with. No.

Tracy: To me, the other part of it is power. I mean, we see this in the world at large, and maybe we don't think that our intimate relationships are capable of these power dynamics. But if you don't have empathy for your partners or your children or whoever, and you can behave with unbridled self interest -- let's say you don't feel empathy or it's impaired -- it feels great to have all the cookies. It feels great to be king or queen. It feels great to get all the goodies and have somebody invest in you and not have to give the same. More for me, less for you. I got mine.

Dr. Simon: It also enables you to stay morally about four years old. 

Tracy: Right, but I got the cookies.

Do I care? I mean, if my values are better than morality, I'll take the cookies. Thank you.

That's kind of where we're at with a lot of the discourse.

Sarah: Yeah. What intrigues me as well is when someone's having an affair, and I know this is a very common thing, so when my husband was having an affair, he was constantly accusing me of having an affair. So he was projecting his own shoddy behavior onto me. And I think we, as chumps, project our own moral behavior onto them. So we think that deep down there is that empathy and then there are those standards, and they've just sort of got lost somewhere along the way.

Dr. Simon: Yes. Well, Sarah, let me address that, because you use the word there projecting his own stuff onto you. The classic notion of projection is that the person who's doing the wrong thing feels so horrible actually, inside.

It is so repulsive to them at some deep level that they are acting so badly that to unconsciously quiet the inner pain that they feel, they have to project their pathology onto you as a way unconsciously. They don't do this consciously of feeling better. 

Well, I don't think that model holds up. More often than not, when folks are doing such things, they're still engaged in the business of impression management, manipulation and control, and it's conscience.

They actually know very well what's wrong and what would need to change, but they don't have a heart for it in their sense of entitlement.

I don't care what's behind it. It doesn't matter. There's a different way to go about addressing if there's an issue, they're a legitimate issue. There's certainly a different way to go about it.

What makes a person not want to take that way?

Well, the biggest reason is because they feel too entitled to take the easy, selfish, uncaring way. 

Tracy: So when he's saying that Sarah is a cheater, he absolutely knows she's not a cheater.

Of course it hurts her. And the best defense is a good offense, is that what you're saying? 

Dr. Simon: He's aware that this is painful. Many times, and he's not trying to justify himself because inside he just feels horrible. Just horrible. No, he feels great. 

These models, I have to tell you, it wasn't that long ago. I know I'm old. I'm almost 76 years old, so I know I'm old, but when I was in my clinical training, they were still teaching such things as autism was the result of cold mothers. Mothers who were cold when they were nursing their infants.

We actually believed that poppycock. 

Tracy: Same with schizophrenia, right? 

Dr. Simon: Wasn't that schizophrenia was caused by mixed message giving mothers? They called these mothers schizophrenogenic mothers. Mothers who gave their children love hate messages and wrecked their lives are to blame. Yeah, it's interesting.

Tracy: Mothers are to blame for everything. That's a universal theme. 

Sarah: But I'm just wondering, this whole being character disordered, is this that something that's genetic? Is it something that goes back to your childhood? Where does this all come from? How can you talk about a spectrum? Is this just something that someone's born like, then?

Dr. Simon: Well, here's the thing. Like I said, I just enjoyed the great good fortune of being mentored by a student of probably the premier researcher into this area. And that researcher adopts a multidimensional approach to personality and character formation.

Character being that moral side of personality and personality being defined as the way a person operates in the world, the way they prefer to operate in the world, the way they want to see things and do things and define themselves as a person. 

And there are several contributors to this. One has to do with nature biological predispositions empathy deficits can be there just naturally. Irascibility can be there just naturally. Temperamental, differences in people, all kinds of things nature predisposes a person toward.

Then, of course, there's learned experience, early formation, the environment in which someone grows. But here's the key. It's not nature and it's not nurture and it's not just a combination of both. There's a dynamic interaction between those things over time that helps a person put together a sense of who they want to be and how they want to operate in the world.

We can't do anything about the formative experiences and we can't do anything about the biologically based predispositions either. But human beings have one capacity that no other creatures on the planet have and that is an unbelievable capacity to learn. 

And for some, especially those with biologically convert deficits and especially for those whose formative experiences were horrible or absent good moral instruction for some, the learning curve is very steep, if not impossible, at least by current standards.

But we all have the capacity to learn, including basically the folks that have been chumped and who have a lot to learn about self love, right? You can learn.

Tracy: I think sometimes you can learn for good or for ill. I mean, I think a lot of times in my experience character disordered people or however you want to refer to them, they learn how to manipulate you better.

They'll go to therapy, they'll learn all the lingo and they'll use it on you.

Tracy: We got a question left to us from a woman. We'll call her Jay. We won't use her (full) name. 

J: Can you talk about families that embrace the fuckwit over the chump? I was married for 14 years to a man who led a complete double life.

We're talking stolen funds, sex workers sex workers during high-risk pregnancies and family illnesses.

My support system. My mom, brothers, sister in law know about his abuse, but they have embraced him. They regularly socialize with him, and he attends family functions. I am no contact with them. Please help.

Tracy: It's got to be really difficult to not have support among your family and your friends. Impression management -- is it that strong? And what do
you do when the people around you who know that this person has been abusive still side with them?

What advice would you give to Jay?

Dr. Simon: Well, as I may have mentioned in some correspondence earlier with you, what I'm about to say may not sound all that understanding and empathetic, but it is really meant to be. My experience has taught me this so vividly because I get hundreds of emails and consultations that basically ask the same question why is it that everybody else seems to be so okay with this person who just nearly destroyed my life? 

And how do I even manage to stand being in the same room where I see people acting as if nothing horrible has ever happened? It just reinvites the whole trauma, I think, and it reinvites the whole gaslighting effect whereI begin to question my own sanity because I know what this person has been capable of and what they've done.

And this is hard, but here's the message I want to really impress. There is a behavioral formula for most depressions that aren't strictly of a biological origin, like a postpartum depression where the hormones the hormones have gone kind of crazy and other chemical imbalances occur, and a person is depressed and they don't even understand it.

There are these strictly biologically based depressions, but most depressions have a formula for them, a behavioral formula, and it is this.

It arises out of the classic learned helplessness paradigm. (Here's my vocal cord dysfunction acting up.) But it's when you have your energy and your attention and a deep emotional investment directed toward people, places, and things that you don't have the power to exercise control over.

It breeds frustration, anger. Eventually you'll try to express that outwardly, but also inevitably, you will turn it in against yourself because you realize that you're your own worst enemy.

Nothing you do seems to make a difference. Nothing you try seems to make a difference, and that is inherently depressing.

You first feel helpless, and then you get to feeling hopeless.

And so my advice is don't pay attention. Don't go there. It's strictly behavioral advice, because it will change your mindset. If you don't want to be depressed anymore and you don't want to hurt anymore. When you start witnessing that stuff, don't pay it attention. 

Turn your attention where you have power. Start loving yourself. Leave him and the rest of them alone.

Go away.

Tracy:  It sounds like Jay has done that. So she said she has no contact with these people and there's got to be grief about that. It's like, I got healthy, I cut this person out, but, oh, my God, now I've got to cut all these other people out. Or maybe I have to have a very superficial relationship with them. That pains me because they're not the person I thought they were. 

Dr. Simon: Exactly. But in time, many times folks come to their senses. As good an impression manager as your chumper might have been. In time, if there's decency about these other folks, they are going to realize the difference between your character and your abuser's character. And if they
don't have that capacity to appreciate the difference between you and them, then you are better off without them.

Tracy: I completely agree. But what a hard, sad lesson it is. 

Dr. Simon: Yeah. And you have to find the people, I guess, who share your values and who will make you feel better, who will love you the way you deserve to be loved. 

Sarah: Right. I think what I've found is, although you think that these people are really important, there will always be those people that share your values. You might think that they're not, but sometimes they're discovered in unlikely places. And sometimes when your partner has an affair and your whole life changes forever, you realize that some of the people maybe that you didn't think were your good friends are your good friends. 

So the people that have got the same ideas as you did all along, even if you didn't necessarily know it.

Dr. Simon: Yes. Very true, Sarah. Very true.

And so it's eventually, albeit painful, experience. It's eventually a potentially very empowering experience to have to go through these dark nights of the soul, basically, and maybe come out the other side a stronger, better person for it. But if your focus is on yourself and getting this loving thing right, especially starting with yourself, eventually a whole different kind of world opens up to you. A world that's governed by a lot of the different principles than you've been used to following for much of your chumped
life. 

Sarah: Yeah, I love it.

Tracy: Can you tell us a bit about what you're working on now? You have a new book that's coming out? An audio recording. You said this is your life's work. 

Dr. Simon: It is my life's work. A while ago, I was approached by another publisher to expand upon a section of my second book, Character Disturbance. There's a section in that book on what I call the Ten Commandments of character. The life lessons that we have forgotten about that are so crucial to decent character formation in human beings. 

Socialization is a process, and we are not born self respecting, decent people. We're actually kind of born savages. We have to learn to be decent people. And there are some essential axioms, important, time tested teachings that we not only have to learn, but we have to take them into us. We have to embrace them in our heart, and we have forgotten the importance of this. 

So I first outlined them in my book Character Disturbance, and this publisher said, you really need to focus on this and write a whole book about it. So we began development of a book called The Ten Commandments of Character and we have retitled it called Essentials for the Journey.

These are the most essential lessons in life that we need to make this journey, that we're all undergoing the most profitable experience that it can be not just for ourselves, but for the whole world if we don't make character matter again.

And seriously. So we're just in a deep well of trouble.

We've actually been there for a long time, but I still have some hope, I dare anyone to find any human problem, political, community, relational, any problem that isn't rooted ultimately in the character dysfunction that we've been experiencing for so many decades now.

I just dare you from anything you read in the news, for example, we have these crazy mass killings and stuff like that, and people point the fingers all over the place from the availability to weapons to the inadequacy of laws to the way the justice system works, blah, blah, blah, blah,blah. 

But I'll tell you what's not new.

Feeling lost and alone.

Not new. Feeling offended and hurt and mad at the world because something horriblehas happened to you. 

Not new. Feeling like you want to lash out at everybody and make everybody else hurt as badly as you do. Not new.

What's new, what's really new and so tragic is that people come to the inevitable challenges of this life lacking the internal resources to control themselves or deal with these things or put something else into the picture that keeps them from doing the unthinkable. That that's new. 

That we have so many people so character impaired. 

Tracy: We have systems that are character impaired. Well, that's why
we don't have the social safety nets for these people. We don't have the mental health. We don't have the will to change it politically.

Dr. Simon: I agree with you. I think a lot of it all boils down to what kind of person you're going to be, going to the chump issue. 

Tracy: There's so many messages out there. I'm constantly making fun of them. There's a deep vein of humor, but a lot of them are defeatist or they're hey, cheat on your spouse. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, no big deal.

There's just a lot of selfishness. And where I thought you were going with your thing about mass shooters is that what's new is they feel entitled to do it. Sure, I might have a dark thought that I can do it, but now there's kind of a glorification of the serial killer. There's a glorification of the commando guy who's taking everybody out, being, I guess, a lousy person. Being a bad character person is somehow darkly admirable. Or we have anti heroes.

Dr. Simon: What you're speaking to is this vicious cycle that has been turning between an enabling culture and character.

Aspects of the culture have been for decades, encouraging and reinforcing poor character development. And as more and more character impaired people populate the culture, the worse the culture becomes, the more toxic the culture becomes.

And the more toxic the culture becomes, the more character impaired people. Right. You cannot reward the toxic classic vicious cycle. And it's been going on for several decades now, and it has to turn around. And that's the reason for essentials for the journey, because there's only one way it's going to get turned around, and that's the same way we got here.

Incrementally, slowly.

One heart at a time.

One heart at a time.