You Are Easy to Hook

Some people do not just experience relationships. They enter them completely. They feel the atmosphere, the promise, the chemistry, the story of the other person, and the whole thing can become intensely alive in their mind. That same depth of immersion can be beautiful in art, music, books, creativity, even spirituality. It can also become a doorway for manipulation.

Trait absorption may explain why certain people get pulled so deeply into narcissistic dynamics. Add hyperfocus, dissociation, and emotional dysregulation to the mix, and an unhealthy relationship can feel strangely vivid, magnetic, and difficult to leave behind. You are not dealing with a lack of intelligence. You may be dealing with a nervous system and personality style that can get fully drawn into an intense emotional reality.

That matters, because once you can describe the mechanism more clearly, you stop staring at the wreckage in confusion. You can begin to see the pattern, interrupt it, and build a way out with a bit more precision and a lot less self-blame.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A man was describing his experience of narcissistic abuse to me. And he used interesting language to describe the narcissist and to describe that relationship. The way he framed it, it sounded to me like a psychedelic experience. It sounded like an acid trip or ayahuasca or DMT or something. So he described the relationship and the person. And when he described the relationship of the person, I could see his state was changing in front of my eyes. So he would talk in a normal way, like a normal person. And then when he would go into describing the relationship and the person at the center of that relationship, his tone of voice shifted, the colouring in his face changed, his pupils dilated, his look became more intense. And I could see he was vividly reliving something. And what he was describing to me was this strange reflexive loop where it felt as though the narcissistic relationship was taking energy from him and that he was giving too much the narcissistic person, but that the relationship and the experience of being with that one person made him feel more alive and more truly online, um tuned in and turned on, as Timothy Leary would have said, than normal relationships or normal day-to-day interactions. And what he described to me, it really sounded like a trip. He didn't describe it that way. That was my reflection as I was listening to his story. It's like he was on a drug, a mind-altering drug. And what he described also sounded immersive, like he was in a fully immersive experience. When the relationship went bad, as of course these relationships do, he was told, Oh, well, what you experienced was the trauma bond, or what you experienced, you experience because you're a fawn responder or because you are a codependent. But what if there was a personality trait that's almost never spoken of? I just discovered it a few days ago that if a person had this trait, they'd be far more vulnerable to being pulled into narcissistically abusive relationships than if they didn't have the trait. The trait is called trait absorption. It's a personality trait describing how easily and deeply someone can become immersed in mental and emotional experiences, thoughts, imagery, music, memories, or other people. High absorption individuals don't just notice experiences, they can feel inside the experience. This was developed, he was an American but originally from Holland, and his name was Orc Telegen, which probably should be pronounced Teleg in the 1970s. Um and the first time Orc Tele Telegen introduced it and published the Telegen Absorption Scale in 1974. When I heard about the trait absorption, I became fascinated by it because what I've noticed with my own client base over the last 14 years is there's tons of creative people, musicians, filmmakers, writers, storytellers, singers, um, actors, creative types. And I've always just said, oh, well, they're high in openness and they're high in agreeableness. Now, of course, traits absorption is adjacent to and intersects with openness and agreeableness, but what if this is the key trait that makes the narcissist shared fantasy, the profit, the offered fantasy so appealing and so rewarding? What if for other people who are not high in trait absorption, when that ride, that trip, that experience is offered, they just don't get that much from it. They're just not really experiencing what those of us who maybe are high in trait absorption are experiencing. Because you may have noticed this. Um, if you've ever read or listened to or read about psychedelic experiences, or you've had them, or you've you've listened to podcasts about them. Two people can go through the same experience with the same, uh take the same drug, take the same psychedelic, and report completely different effects. Some people will talk about it and they'll go, yeah, that was cool. I saw some patterns on the wall and that was it. And other people create this huge narrative drama, this psycho-drama, this arc that starts over here and goes over there, and they're like, and this is when I realized my blah blah de blah had bibbledy-booed. And the other person's going, yeah, that was weird. I saw a few flashy colours for a minute. Maybe it's trait absorption that is the difference that makes the difference between people who can become pulled in to the narcissist's shared fantasy and those who don't. A key element here is to try and understand to move beyond old models. I mean, codependency, it's fine, but it's not clinical and its origins are not great in the sense that they just don't apply well to what we're talking about. The origin of the term codependent, it was uh from out it's kind of evolved out of Alcoholics Anonymous. So you have an alcoholic or uh somebody who's addicted to drugs, and they're the alcoholic dependent, they're the narcotic dependent. And then the person who's in the relationship with the dependent, the person who's dependent on on alcohol, is the co-dependent. And then there were three books, I can't remember the names or the authors, I know that they were published in the 80s and they were very successful by three women. Uh, they were uh three American women, they were very popular inside of America, and they were largely describing uh the emotional misuse and abuse of women by men, and the term used was codependent. And I guess at the time that that worked well. It's kind of adjacent, you know, the narcissist, the psychopath, maybe they're they're addicted to power, they're addicted to narcissistic supply, and then the person who stuck with them, they're helping them get their supply, so they're codependent of them, sure. But it's not clinical and it's not tightly defined to the extent that two clinicians, if they if clinicians do choose to use the term, and some of them are even authors, they use the term in very different and very meaningful ways. And there's another problem there, which is some people find the term stigmatizing, they they find the term codependent, offensive, which isn't helpful. But worse than that, it just doesn't really tell us anything that useful. Now, if we could say, oh, you have you are high in trait absorption, so you can be fully immersed, which could be positive, it could be a positive adaptation, it might help you uh if you know enter meditative states, it might help you if you're more interested in mystical subjective experience, it might help you if you are a creative person. It really might be the place that you draw your inspiration from. But it would be maladaptive if a pathological person got a hold of you and offered you a really intense, really fascinating story and a really intense, really fascinating ride or trip, and you're preloaded to think, yeah, this is I'm into this, this is cool. Give me something different, give me something intense, give me something weird, give me a story or an experience I haven't had before. I live for this stuff, and then you're on Satan's roller coaster all over again. The thing here, I think it's important to try to move the conversation forward. We don't want to be using the same terms and the same explanations without evolving them and moving them along. So I'm going to propose an alternative model to codependency that's rooted in uh trait absorption. And then I'm going to suggest there are two other processes that are responses to uh stress that could even be trauma, somewhere on a spectrum of stress to trauma, that if these three things are operating together, massively accelerate the person's vulnerability to narcissistic abuse. So you have a trait which is absorption. The processes are or patterns, processes or patterns of behavior are dissociation and hyperfocus. Now I mentioned in the last video I got interested when I would hear people on TikTok and I'd hear people on Instagram, and people would come to me and they'd say, Have you heard about this? And they were proposing the idea that people who are somewhere on the autism spectrum are more vulnerable to narcissistic abuse, and people with ADHD are more vulnerable to narcissistic abuse. But I don't want to talk about that because I'm not versed in it and I don't know what I'm talking about, and I don't want to try and bluff my way through autism and ADHD when I've not read the research. So I read a little bit more of the research. There isn't really a hyper focus associated with autism. Some expressions of autism have a special interest, a special interest, and it's typically intentional. So I wanna I don't want to say that's not useful. Probably we should talk about how people who are on the autism spectrum may be more vulnerable towards narcissistic abuse, but I want to just push that to one side because because special interest is not hyperfocus and special interest is intentional. Hyperfocus, if it's in within the ADHD bracket, um, is not intentional. And it can be a way of coping with stress. So because I just did very, very light research on this in the last 48 hours, apparently people with ADHD have a lower baseline for dopamine. So doing boring and repetitive tasks is very hard for them and they lack the um they lack a kind of impulse control containment against distraction. Because if something comes along that's more interesting that does raise their dopamine, and they are getting the dopamine feedback that their baseline is depleted from, they hyperfocus on that and they get pulled away from what they're supposed to be doing to go and hyperfocus on that thing. And you could say, but that's intentional because they're getting a reward from that. No, it's non-intentional, um, and it's not that they're getting a reward from that. When I say they're getting dopamine from or when it is said, not when Richard says, but when the clinicians say they're getting dopamine from that, they're going from minus two to zero. That makes them feel how other people feel. That makes them feel how everybody else who doesn't have ADHD feels, according to that model. According to that model. Said that. So we all here know what dissociation is. We know that it's sort of a uh a kind of a non-intentional checking out from reality. Um, it could be adaptive, I suppose, if there's really truly nothing you can do in an overwhelming situation, it probably is adaptive to dissociate. Um, but for most people trying to live a normal life, serial dissociation, dissociation is uh disruptive and uh makes life, normal life, difficult to live. So what if the person had the trait of absorption? And maybe that's genetic, maybe it's environmental, whatever, maybe it's both. But then through experiences and through genetic tendencies and through and through certain um innate tendencies interacting with the environment, they develop the pattern or the process of dissociation and they develop the pattern or the process of hyperfocus. So here is a person who is very open, uh, is agreeable, and is more likely to become immersed. I don't know, I didn't I think of this before. Do you like watching the theater? Are you one of these people who can go to the theater and become immersed in the play or immersed in the film? Or do you sit and watch and go, here's a bunch of humans just banging round on a wooden stage, and I'm not immersed in this at all? So the trait absorption would be the person who's fully invested in that experience. They're immersed, they're absorbed in that experience. The hyperfocus would be the person who really wants. So, in the in the context of narcissistic abuse, you have a charismatic, either in a grandiose way or fascinating in a vulnerable way. Um, so either they're bigger than life, they're larger than life, they're high energy, they're wealthy, they're sexy, they're whatever, and that's the source of fascination, or in the vulnerable spectrum, they're they're they're unique and special because they're uniquely wretched, or they're uniquely pitiable, or their story is uniquely sad, or they're uniquely victimized. Either way, there's a payoff for the person who's high in traits absorption. And if life is difficult, and maybe, I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just uh I'm just putting it out there, if they are somewhere on the ADHD spectrum and their dopamine baseline is low, maybe then they latch on with the hyperfocus even further into the narcissistic personality and the narcissistic shared fantasy to escape that lowered uh dopamine baseline. Plus, also you have this third element, which is dissociation. So when that person that you're absorbed in, hyperfocused on becomes abusive, you already have the software there to check out. And in many cases, forget. In many cases, some people find years later they're still remembering stuff that happened, and they're like, Am I crazy? How did I lose that memory? But if you experienced something early in life that was too much for you, that was overwhelming for you, dissociation was a survival strategy. So when it happened again later in life, yes, in my case, I dissociated. And I I forgot, I just had uh memory patches. I still to this day, it's less and less, obviously, as the years go by. I could be doing the dishes, I could be folding clothes, I could be taking a walk, and I'll just be like, bang, that happened. Is there any way I can check whether that happened? I'll go through my phone, I'll go through my photo library, I'll go through, I'll try, I'll find my emails, I'll be like, yeah, that happened. That's a real thing that happened. And I forgot. How did I forget? Dissociation is there. What this would mean is that we have a sort of a I like doing this in an engineering sort of way. I want to map what's up with the system. And when I say it's not good, it's not trauma informed, it's not politically correct, it's not modern, it's not psychotherapy chic, trendy, to say things like, oh, people are engines and we can fix them, it really isn't trendy. But I don't care. I really don't care. If if I can, and I'm not saying I I could fix people or people need to be fixed, but there are systems and processes, it's undeniable that we run that don't work or that cause us pain or lead us into abusive relationships. They could be fixed. Why not? If it's a system or a pattern, or you want to treat it whatever metaphor you like, you want to treat it like software code, you know, then rewrite the code if you prefer that. This feels to me like something you can actually get your hands around. Codependency, it means many things to many people. It was never clearly defined in the first place, and it's not a clinical entity, it's not clinically recognized. Phone responder is stronger, but I've so many people just reject it out of hand. Like when I suggest it to them, they're like, that ain't me. I don't do that. And I'm like, okay. Uh, what's the other one? We talk about trauma bonds, but not many people know that there is a step-by-step process for uh coming out of a trauma bond. Um, mainly because I've done a horrible job of letting people know that I have a step-by-step process for coming out of a trauma bond. And if you've been through that process and you thought it was good, can you write a comment below? Not so that other people can see and then go and heal, so that I can get narcissic elation from being recognized for my cleverness because wait, before you turn the video off and get angry with me, um, it's probably one of the few things I've taught or developed that's actually truly original. Nothing that I that I've developed or taught is is original. It comes from Freud, it comes from Jung, it comes from Adler, it comes from TA, it's there in internal family systems or other styles of parts therapy. That's taken from Gestalt therapy, that's based on, I don't know, you know, it could even be from uh NLP or, you know, I I take from anything and everything. And very little of what I do uh when it comes actually time to do the coaching and to do the processes that move people on. Very little of it is original, but the trauma bond procedure is original. So if you did it, don't tell me whether you liked it. I don't care if you liked it. I want to know if it worked. So put in the comments, yeah, I did the trauma bond bonding exercise, and yes, they worked. It was a rare moment of genius for me. And it we might if you know, maybe people, maybe some people are gifted, but gifted doesn't mean infinitely gifted. That might have been my one thing this lifetime that I could do, and it's out there, and I have done a horrible job of telling people about it because it's actually original, it's actually really good. All right, I think that's enough. Um, that's trait absorption. The other drivers uh are dissociation and hyperfocus. When we have a good description of what the problem is, then the solution becomes um much, much easier to find. You know, you the quality of the answers you get is defined by the quality of the questions you asked, you ask, type of a thing. So here we have something that we can maybe actually get our hands around and go, okay, if it is if trait absorption is a thing and I can find out if I'm high in trait absorption, and I know that one of my processes is dissociation. And that so these things are accelerators, these things are all accelerators. There's a it's not just absorption, it's absorption times hyperfocus multiplied by dissociation, and I guess the equation would then be divided by uh emotional dysregulation. So then these are all things that lead to states that drive the behavior. So if you are, let's say, one um common non-volitional, non-intentional behavior, post-narcistic abuse is rumination, and you go, I'm ruminating all the time, and I don't know why. And we say, okay, absorption times dissociation times hyperfocus divided by how emotionally dysregulated are dysregulated you are the reason for the rumination. Okay, so what do we need to do about that? We need to work backwards through the equation. You're too emotionally dysregulated, we need to emotionally re-regulate you. There's too much dissociation, we need to uh bring you back to reality. Disassociation from reality, we need to re associate you. You're dismembered, we need to remember you back into reality. There are processes for that. Hyper focus. There are uh procedures from um different therapeutic modalities, like uh, but one of the big ones that's used frequently is cognitive behavioral therapy that help people to. Overcome the tendency to have hyper focus take over their lives and then absorption if it's a trait, well, it's not like we can really change a trait, but what we could do is say, Hey, let's shift the perspective and let's shift the awareness around this. You are very high in trait absorption. That's cool for this, this, this, and this. However, my friend, it might make you a little bit vulnerable to this, this, this, and this, and just have that as a piece of awareness, as a piece of software that's now running that lets you know, oh, I'm really enjoying this movie. I'm really immersed in this book. Oh, yeah, some people can't read. That's even better than the theatre. What's wrong with my brain today? The books. Like, do you read books? Okay, you're probably high in trait absorption. I love books, and then other people read a book and go, This is boring. Why am I sitting here staring at a page? I'm like, I'm in another land, man. I'm in another dimension. I'm living with the elves, homie. What are you doing? I was like, I'm just reading letters on a page. And so I'm going, yeah, technically you're just reading letters on a page, but there's wizards out there. What are you doing here? You should be there. That's that's probably books. If you're a book reader, then you're probably, we could probably say uh you're you've got that tendency for absorption and immersion and experience. Yeah. Good. All right, well done everyone. Um, if you stuck with me this far, you deserve a gold star. Come to the front of the class and I'll give it a gold star. I gotta start taking my job more seriously. Right, that's enough. Thanks for your time and for your attention. I look forward to speaking to you soon. Cheers.