Dangerous Liaisons: Red Flags of Dating and Relating

By Marina Bakker

Once upon a time, Marina Bakker was like so many other people who believed if she tried harder, she could make a relationship work, if she ignored the negative traits and cruel behaviour and only focused on a person’s potential, that they would stop the mind manipulation and continual betrayals.

In this book, ‘Dangerous Liaisons – Red Flags of Dating and Relating’, Marina provides you with an understanding of sociopathic and narcissistic personality traits and gives you a step-to-step guide about how to spot them in the areas of dating and love.

Because abusive love interactions distort our reality and impact on our mental health and emotional well-being, Marina offers a step-to-step guide about how to spot the red flags of toxic people. This book provides you with an understanding why healing from these dangerous encounters can at times appear to be almost impossible. Therefore, prevention is better than cure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839786242

Book preview

Preface

Dangerous Liaisons has been written to highlight the realities and complexities of romantic and intimate relationship interactions with Cluster B Personality Disorders. In particular, it deals with Sociopaths, Narcissists and Dark Triads. As a society we have little awareness of the devastation incurred by individuals seeking to be loved who are in the clasp of such dark and destructive personalities. Positive thinking, wanting to ignore their existence and eliminating dating and relationships so we don’t encounter them again are not the answers to our healing and growth. We have been designed to love and be loved because, without this, we cannot grow and move towards our spiritual, emotional and physical potential; our gifts and strengths need to be utilised in order for us to shine our light in a world that needs it more now than ever before.

As a reader, you will gain knowledge and awareness of who Dangerous Liaisons are, why they are difficult to detect, learn the Red Flags of both dating and being in a relationship with them and tactics used to manipulate and control you. More importantly you will identify why we blindly pursue and hang on to what we believe to be love when it is really abuse. Steps to take towards your healing journey and barriers to healing will also be revealed to you. It is pivotal to take responsibility for why we stay in such horror situations and successfully eliminate these dark encounters again by reclaiming our personal power. If we bypass this, we are at risk of living with confusion and heartache, even if we remove ourselves from the Dangerous Liaison encounter/s.

Research for this book started with my own personal experiences in my endeavor to make meaning of my world when I had no conscious understanding of how pathology manifests in dating and relationship interactions. The more I searched through both academic and personal stories the more I became aware that I was only gathering partial truths to complete my understanding and healing of intimate pathological abuse. Partial truths will always leave you with a feeling that there is more and with a yearning to find the next piece of information to complete the whole. In my attempts to do this, new information, people and Dangerous Liaisons would appear to move me to the next plateau of my journey. In this book, I have left out, with only a few exceptions, reference sourcing to make it a more reflective, easier to read book as you journey through to greater understanding of yourself and others. A Further Reading section has been included if you wish to explore certain topics in more detail.

Dangerous Liaisons has been fuelled by my passion to provide people with all the information required to begin their return to their personal strength and power. This book is not about understanding and exploring advancements to assist people who have a pathological disorder. I acknowledge that work in this field is paramount and respect the contributions and advancements currently being achieved in this area.

Our understanding of Cluster B Personality Disorder is still in its infancy and continued research is pivotal if we are to begin to adopt strategies to intervene at the inception of a personality disorder. However, the emphasis of my work at this particular point is working with people who are vulnerable targets and who have a predisposition towards attracting and attaching to Dangerous Liaisons.

Special thanks in writing this book goes to the people who have shared their personal horrors and healing stories of intimate pathological abuse. This greatly contributed to my courage and determination to help others by incorporating the right education and therapeutic modalities towards the prevention and healing of these toxic interactions. Special thanks also goes to the loving special people in my life who listened, supported and encouraged me on my quest to learn, know and do more to achieve loving relationship interactions. My adventures have led me to meet many wonderful academics who continue to dedicate their research to the areas of neuroscience, relationship attachments and the impact and healing of trauma and abuse.

Dangerous Liaisons has been written to help all people learn and do more to achieve safe, secure loving based dating and relationship experiences. However, it has particular reference to women who are at greater risk of experiencing dangerous love encounters than men. There are many reasons for this and, in particular, because the pathological group referred to has a higher male than female population.

You will notice the term target and not victim has mainly been used for individuals recovering from or involved with a Dangerous Liaison. The reason for this is that, in my view, the term victim is disempowering and does not provide me with a feeling that I can make changes, that my choices contributed to what I am experiencing and that I do not have power to make different choices if targeted again. The word target implies that I can and will walk away. Any one of us can be targeted at any time, but it is what we do when this happens, that is a break or make situation.

Many of us have now reached a new level of consciousness and the love we search and yearn for involves us accessing the higher dimensions of love. We can no longer search in another for what we must first personally acquire in our self. If we look to another to provide us with safety and security and we have not first achieved it on a personal level, we will only continue to experience the old – pain and frustration. It is now time for new ways of doing and being in relationships and remembering that love also requires us to walk away from people who are not good for us.

Chapter 1

What Is and Isn’t Love

At any given moment you have the power to say: this is not how the story is going to end.

Many of us are not prepared for relationships or we mistake relationships meeting our needs based on our