NOT EVERYONE IS LIKE YOU
A guide to the people who can hurt you and why
What you will find here:
The Assumption That Gets People Hurt looks at the projection problem, why we use ourselves as the template for understanding others, and why that instinct, however natural, becomes a vulnerability when it meets the wrong person.
What Empathy Actually Is (and What It Isn’t) breaks down what empathy is, how it varies between people, and what its absence actually looks like, including the unsettling combination of people who can read you perfectly and still not care at all.
Cluster B: When Personality Itself Is the Problem walks through the four Cluster B personality disorders, Narcissistic, Antisocial, Borderline, and Histrionic, as clinical categories, clearly and without softening, including the psychopathy and sociopathy distinction most sources blur or avoid.
The Worldview of the Abuser goes underneath the behavior to the internal logic driving it, how people with these disorders think about relationships, other people, conflict, and guilt.
The Tactics names the specific tools: love bombing, gaslighting, DARVO, triangulation, intermittent reinforcement, isolation, coercive control, abuse as regulation, and the use of suicide and self-harm threats as leverage.
What This Means for You is about what it actually means for you that any of this exists: why you didn’t see it, why that is not a character flaw, and what changes when you finally have an accurate picture of what you were dealing with.
The Assumption That Gets People Hurt
There is something most of us do automatically, without ever deciding to: we assume that other people experience the world roughly the way we do. That they feel guilt when they hurt someone. That they are capable of love. That somewhere underneath the difficult behavior, the cruelty, the coldness, there is a person who, at their core, means well.
It is a generous assumption. It is also, sometimes, a dangerous one.
We build our understanding of other people from the inside out. We use ourselves as the template. When someone does something that seems hurtful, we imagine how we would feel doing that thing, and we conclude they must feel it too, or would, if they stopped to think about it. When a relationship feels painful, we assume the other person is struggling too, in their own way, and that if we could just communicate better, love harder, be more patient, things would change.
This is not naivety. It is how human beings are wired. The ability to model other minds using our own is one of the most sophisticated things our brains do. Most of the time, it works. Most people are roughly like us in the ways that matter. Most people do feel guilt. Most people are capable of love.
But not everyone.
Ted Bundy majored in psychology and law. He was described by people who knew him as a great friend, charming, intelligent, easy to talk to. He volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline. He was, by most accounts, someone you would have liked if you had met him at a party. He was also a serial killer who murdered at least thirty known victims and whose crimes went far beyond killing.
The people who knew Bundy, who liked him, who trusted him, were not fools. They were doing what all of us do: assuming that the person in front of them was, in the ways that mattered, a person like them. Someone with an inner life. Someone with limits. Someone with something good at the center of it. They were wrong. And they could not have known it from the outside, because Bundy had spent his entire life learning to look like everyone else.
Most people who hurt us are not serial killers. But the mechanism is the same. There is a spectrum of human empathy, of the capacity to genuinely feel for another person, to be changed by their pain, to love them in a way that costs something. And at the far end of that spectrum are people who, because of how they are wired, simply cannot do what we assume everyone can do. They cannot put themselves in your shoes. They cannot feel your suffering as something that matters. They cannot love you the way you love them; not because they haven’t tried hard enough, but because that capacity is not there.
This guide is about those people and is meant to give you something that is often the hardest thing to accept after a relationship that has hurt you: an accurate picture of what you were actually dealing with.
What Empathy Actually Is
Empathy is the ability to step outside your own experience and into someone else’s. To feel, at least partially, what they feel. To understand not just intellectually that they are suffering, but to be genuinely moved by it.
It sounds simple but it’s not. Empathy is a complex neurological and psychological process. It requires you to temporarily suspend your own perspective, model another person’s inner state, and allow that modeled state to affect you emotionally. It is, when you think about it, a remarkable thing that human beings can do at all.
There are two types that are worth understanding.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what another person is thinking or feeling, to accurately read their emotional state and perspective. It is intellectual. It allows you to know that someone is in pain.
Affective empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling, to be emotionally affected by their experience. It is visceral. It is what makes you wince when someone else gets hurt or tear up at a stranger’s grief.
Most people have both, in varying degrees. But empathy is not a switch that is either on or off. It is a spectrum, and where a person falls on that spectrum shapes every relationship they will ever have.
Low empathy is not the same as being introverted, emotionally reserved, or bad at expressing feelings. Someone can struggle to articulate their emotions and still feel them deeply. Someone can be quiet and private and still be profoundly affected by the suffering of people they love. Low empathy is something structurally different: a genuine limitation in the capacity to register another person’s inner life as something real, something that matters or something worth responding to.
At the far end of the spectrum, in the territory of certain personality disorders, empathy is not just low. It is functionally absent. And in some cases, the cognitive component remains intact while the affective component does not. Which means some people can read you extremely well, they know exactly what you are feeling, but they do not care. That combination, as we will see, is what makes certain people so effective at causing harm.
Essential: Empathy exists on a spectrum. Low empathy is not shyness or emotional unavailability, it is a structural difference in how someone processes other people. Some people can read your emotions accurately and still be entirely unmoved by them. Understanding this distinction changes how you interpret a lot of what happened to you.
Cluster B: When Personality Itself IS the Problem
Personality disorders are not mood disorders, not anxiety disorders, not something that comes and goes with stress or circumstances. They are enduring, pervasive patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating to others that are significantly different from what is expected in a person’s culture, and that cause real harm, either to the person themselves, to the people around them, or both.
Cluster B is one of three groupings of personality disorders in the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals. What unites the four disorders in this cluster is a pattern of dramatic, erratic, or intensely emotional behavior, and a significant impact on the people in close relationship with them.
The four Cluster B disorders are Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Histrionic Personality Disorder.
A note on diagnosis before we go further. Most people who have been in a harmful relationship with someone who has one of these disorders will never have a formal diagnosis to point to. Their partner, parent, or friend was never assessed, never treated, never sat across from a clinician who gave the pattern a name. That does not mean the pattern was not there. Diagnosis is a clinical tool, it is not what makes someone’s behavior real, harmful, or worth naming. What follows is about the disorders as clinical categories, but the reason it matters to you is the behavior, the impact, and finally, the understanding of your experience with certain people.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one of the most misunderstood disorders in popular psychology. In everyday language, the word ‘narcissist’ has come to mean anyone who is self-centered or vain. Clinically, it means something more specific and more serious.
NPD is characterized by a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, an inflated sense of one’s own importance, a deep need for admiration, and a significant lack of empathy for others. People with NPD typically have a fragile sense of self beneath the grandiose exterior. The need for admiration, what is sometimes called narcissistic supply, is not a preference, but a psychological requirement. When it is not met, the response can be disproportionate rage, contempt, or cruelty.
Romantic relationships with people with NPD tend to follow a recognizable pattern: intense idealization early on, followed by devaluation as the person fails to consistently meet the narcissist’s need for supply, and often a sharp and painful discard. The person on the receiving end frequently spends years trying to get back to the idealization phase, not understanding that it was never a stable state to begin with.
Key traits of NPD:
Grandiose sense of self-importance, often without commensurate achievement
Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, or ideal love
Belief that they are special and can only be understood by other special people
Requires excessive admiration
Strong sense of entitlement: expects favorable treatment as a given
Exploits others to achieve their own goals
Lacks empathy: genuinely unable or unwilling to recognize the feelings of others
Envious of others, or believes others are envious of them
Arrogant, contemptuous behavior, particularly toward those they perceive as inferior
Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), Psychopathy, and Sociopathy
Antisocial Personality Disorder is the formal DSM-5 diagnosis. Psychopathy and sociopathy are not official diagnostic categories, they are terms that have emerged from research and clinical observation to describe subtypes within the broader ASPD picture, and they are worth understanding separately.
ASPD is characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others. People with ASPD consistently lie, manipulate, and exploit. They show little remorse for the harm they cause. They tend to be impulsive, aggressive, and reckless. The disorder is diagnosed only in adults, though conduct disorder in childhood is often a precursor.
Psychopathy, as described in research, involves a specific psychological makeup: superficial charm, high intelligence, emotional shallowness, a grandiose sense of self, pathological lying, lack of remorse or guilt, callousness, and predatory behavior. The psychopath is not impulsive in the way ASPD broadly describes, they are often calculated, patient, and strategic. Their emotional life is not simply muted; it is, in key respects, absent. They do not experience fear, guilt, or love in the way others do. What they experience instead is closer to appetite, and other people are, fundamentally, resources to satiate that appetite.
Sociopathy, by contrast, is thought to be more environmentally shaped, emerging from early trauma, neglect, or chaotic environments. The sociopath may have some capacity for attachment to a narrow circle of people, but the disregard for others outside that circle remains. Their behavior tends to be more erratic and less calculated than the psychopath’s, and they tend to find themselves incarcerated more often.
Ted Bundy was a psychopath. The charm, the intelligence, the total absence of genuine remorse, the predatory patience, these are the hallmarks. Most people will never encounter someone at that extreme. But the same structural features exist on a spectrum, and even at lower intensities, they produce relationships that are deeply damaging. You will encounter the successful executive who just doesn’t care that his decisions impact the people who work for them, you will encounter the well-loved public figure who abuses the people they perceive as weak, and you will encounter the parent who exploits their children for financial gain.
Key traits of ASPD, Psychopathy, Sociopathy:
Persistent lying, deception, and manipulation for personal gain
Disregard for the rights, safety, and feelings of others
Lack of remorse, may intellectually acknowledge harm without feeling it
Superficial charm that masks emotional shallowness
Impulsivity and failure to plan ahead (more prominent in ASPD and sociopathy)
Calculated, predatory behavior (more prominent in psychopathy)
Aggression and irritability, often escalating to physical altercations
Consistent irresponsibility in work, finances, and relationships
Failure to conform to social norms and legal behavior
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
Borderline Personality Disorder is characterized by pervasive instability in mood, in self-image, in relationships, and in behavior. At the center of BPD is an intense, often overwhelming fear of abandonment, real or imagined, and a desperate effort to avoid it.
Relationships with people with BPD are often described as the most intense of a person’s life, in both directions. The idealization can feel extraordinary, like being truly seen and chosen. The devaluation, when it comes, can be equally extreme. This is partly explained by a cognitive pattern called splitting: the tendency to see people and situations as entirely good or entirely bad, with little room for the complexity in between. Someone who was perfect yesterday can become a villain today, not because of anything that actually changed, but because the internal state of the person with BPD has shifted.
People with BPD often experience genuine, profound suffering. This is worth acknowledging because it affects the dynamic: the pain is real, and it pulls for care and rescue in ways that can keep a partner locked into a relationship long after it has become harmful. The impulsivity, the self-destructive behavior, the emotional dysregulation are not performances. But the impact on the people closest to them is nonetheless significant and real.
Many people with BPD are good and responsible people, and they will get the help they need to feel better and do better in relationships. There are however BPD patients who will never do that, and will continue to harm themselves and others. They are the second largest incarcerated personality disordered population, after ASPD and NPD.
Key traits of BPD:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
Intense, unstable relationships alternating between idealization and devaluation
Unstable self-image: sense of self shifts dramatically and frequently
Impulsivity in areas that are self-damaging (spending, sex, substance use, reckless behavior)
Recurrent self-harm or suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats
Severe emotional dysregulation: mood shifts that are intense and difficult to control
Chronic feelings of emptiness
Intense, inappropriate anger that is difficult to control
Dissociation or paranoid ideation under stress
Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD)
Histrionic Personality Disorder is perhaps the least discussed of the Cluster B disorders, but it is worth understanding, particularly because it is frequently misread as simply being dramatic or attention-seeking in the everyday sense of those words.
HPD is characterized by a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking behavior. People with HPD are uncomfortable in situations where they are not the center of attention. Their emotional expression is often theatrical, intense in presentation but shallow in depth. They use their appearance and behavior to draw attention to themselves, and they can be highly skilled at creating emotional atmospheres that center them.
In relationships, people with HPD tend to be seductive and charming early on, creating intense connection quickly. But the relationship often has a performed quality, intimacy that looks real but is driven more by the need to be desired than by genuine feeling for the other person. When they are not receiving sufficient attention, the response is typically escalation: drama, crisis, emotional intensity designed to pull focus back.
Key traits of HPD:
Uncomfortable when not the center of attention
Inappropriately sexually seductive or provocative behavior
Rapidly shifting and shallow emotional expression
Consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention
Impressionistic, vague speech; strong on emotion, light on substance
Theatrical, exaggerated emotional expression
Highly suggestible: easily influenced by others or circumstances
Interprets relationships as more intimate than they actually are
Manipulates through emotional performance, crisis, or seduction
The Worldview of the Abuser
Understanding the clinical categories is one thing. Understanding how the people inside those categories actually think, the internal logic that drives the behavior, is something different, and in many ways more useful.
Because one of the most disorienting things about being in a relationship with someone with a Cluster B disorder is trying to make sense of their behavior using your own frame of reference. You assume that they want what you want: connection, honesty, mutual care, a relationship that feels good to both people. You assume that when they hurt you, it costs them something. You assume that the version of them that was loving and attentive is the real one, and that the version that is cruel or indifferent is the aberration. None of those assumptions are necessarily true. And as long as you are working from them, the behavior will never quite make sense.
Here is a closer picture of how the world tends to look from inside a Cluster B disorder, not in every case, and not all features apply to every disorder, but as a general map of the territory.
Relationships are transactions. Other people are primarily useful or not useful. Relationships are evaluated in terms of what they provide (status, supply, pleasure, security, control) rather than in terms of genuine connection. This does not mean the person never feels anything for you (although sometimes that is the case). It means that what they feel is structured differently than what you feel, and it is far more contingent on what you are providing.
The rules apply to other people. There is a profound double standard at work in most Cluster B relationships. The person expects loyalty, honesty, and devotion while feeling entirely entitled to deceive, betray, or abandon. This is not hypocrisy in the way most people experience hypocrisy, as a gap between values and behavior that produces guilt. It is something closer to a genuine belief that different standards apply to them.
Other people are either powerful or weak. The Cluster B worldview tends to sort people into those who are worth something (strong, useful, admirable) and those who are not. Compassion for weakness is rare. The person who is struggling, who needs something, who shows vulnerability is often held in contempt, even as the person with the disorder may demand care and attention for their own struggles.
Winning matters more than connecting. Conflicts are not problems to be solved together. They are contests. The goal is dominance. This is why attempts to have rational, good-faith conversations about problems in the relationship so often go sideways: you are trying to resolve something, and they are trying to win something.
Guilt is a performance, not a feeling. When expressions of remorse appear, they tend to be instrumental, designed to achieve something, whether that is stopping the conflict, keeping you in the relationship, or managing their image. Genuine guilt requires the ability to feel someone else’s pain as real and important. For many people in this territory, that capacity is simply not there.
Essential: You have been trying to understand their behavior using your own internal logic as the guide. But their internal logic is different. The behavior that seemed inexplicable, contradictory, or cruel was consistent, it just followed rules you were not aware of. That is not your failure. It is what happens when you assume someone is like you and they are not.
The Tactics
The worldview described above produces a recognizable set of behaviors. These are not random acts of cruelty. They are, in most cases, effective strategies, whether consciously deployed or simply the natural output of a particular way of relating to people.
Love bombing is the intense, overwhelming affection, attention, and idealization that often characterizes the beginning of these relationships. Constant contact, extravagant gestures, declarations of love that arrive far too fast. It feels extraordinary because it is calibrated to feel extraordinary, it creates attachment, dependency, and a sense of having found something rare. It also creates a reference point that the person can spend years trying to return to.
Gaslighting is the systematic undermining of your perception of reality. It makes you question what you saw, what you heard, what you felt, what you remember. Over time, it erodes your confidence in your own judgment and makes you increasingly dependent on the abuser’s version of events. It does not always look like dramatic denial. Often it is subtle: you’re too sensitive, that never happened, you’re imagining things, you always do this.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. When confronted with their behavior, the person denies it, attacks the person who raised it, and positions themselves as the real victim of the exchange. It is a defensive maneuver that is so effective because it happens fast, it creates confusion, and it exploits the confronting person’s empathy. You came to the conversation wanting resolution. You left it apologizing.
Triangulation introduces a third party, real or implied, into the dynamic in order to create insecurity, jealousy, or competition. It keeps you focused on proving your worth rather than evaluating the relationship clearly.
Intermittent reinforcement is the pattern of unpredictable reward and punishment that creates the strongest and most persistent attachment known in behavioral psychology. The relationship is not consistently bad, it alternates between warmth and coldness, approval and contempt, connection and withdrawal. This unpredictability does not weaken attachment. It strengthens it, in the same way that a slot machine creates more compulsive behavior than a machine that pays out every time.
Isolation is the gradual removal of the target from their support network: friends, family, colleagues. It happens slowly, often framed as preference or jealousy rather than control. Its effect is to make the person more dependent on the abuser and less able to get outside perspective on the relationship.
Coercive control is the broader architecture that many of these tactics serve. It is the pattern of behavior that seeks to take away the target’s freedom and autonomy, controlling finances, monitoring movements, dictating appearance, regulating contact with others. It is not always accompanied by physical violence, but it is always a form of abuse.
Physical, emotional, sexual, financial, spiritual and other forms of abuse. The abuse has two main roles: (1) it’s the way disordered people self-regulate their own emotions (release their dysfunctional emotions from their bodies), and (2) it’s a form of punishment for the victim’s lack of perfect compliance (it can also be pre-emptive to make sure the victim doesn’t feel strong enough to leave).
Suicide and self-mutilation threats. These are more common in people with borderline pathology and they are meant to make the other person pay attention to them, rekindle the relationship, or just come very close very fast, in order to take care of the person’s needs. In the case of people with BPD most deaths by suicide are accidents – the patient usually just wants to attempt the act in order to make certain people react, but sometimes they are unintentionally successful.
Why these tactics work:
Love bombing activates attachment and creates a powerful emotional baseline the target spends the relationship trying to recover
Gaslighting exploits the human tendency to trust close others over our own perception, especially under stress
DARVO weaponizes the target’s empathy, and activates their willingness to consider that they might be wrong
Triangulation hijacks the attachment system’s response to perceived threat of loss
Intermittent reinforcement creates trauma bonding through the same neurological mechanisms as addiction
Isolation removes the external reality checks that would allow the target to see the situation clearly
Coercive control operates cumulatively, each element seems manageable in isolation; together they constitute a cage
Abuse weakens, hurts and frightens the victim, making them think it’s dangerous to resist
Suicide and self-mutilation threats make the victim feel responsible for the BPD patient by activating their most noble, responsible and empathetic core
What This Means for You
You were not naive. You were not weak. You were not someone who should have known better.
You were a person using a reasonable assumption, that the people close to you were, in the ways that mattered, something like you, and you encountered someone for whom that assumption did not hold. You brought empathy to a relationship with someone who experienced your empathy as leverage. You brought good faith to someone who experienced your good faith as an opening. You tried to love someone who was, at a structural level, not able to receive love in the way you were offering it. None of that is a character flaw. It is what happens when a normal human being encounters something outside the range of what normal human beings are wired to expect.
What changes now is not that you become harder, or more suspicious, or less willing to trust. What changes is that you have a more accurate map. You know that empathy is not universal. You know that the person who hurt you was operating from a set of rules you were not told about. You know that the connection you felt, however real it was to you, was built, at least in part, on a projection of capacities that were not there.
That knowledge is the beginning of seeing clearly. And seeing clearly is where healing actually starts.
Alexandra Penescu is a Romanian clinical and forensic psychologist living in Bucharest, Romania. She is also a survivor of complex trauma and a narcissistic family, as well as a survivor of abuse perpetrated by a therapist. She studies psychopathology with a strong tendency towards perpetrators, and works with victims of narcissistic, relational, “therapeutic” and domestic abuse.
Read on:
It’s not funny - a memoir of complex trauma and surviving a narcissistic family - HERE.
The child in the mirror: narcissistic abuse and the families it creates - HERE.
You’re not supporting him. You’re supporting the abuse - HERE.
The narcissist’s adult child and the uninformed therapist - HERE.
The HEAL program: healing from narcissistic and relational abuse - HERE.
The struggles of children raised by parents with Cluster B personality disorders: Eleanor’s story and why I do what I do - HERE.
The Book of Becoming - fiction - a novel based on real trauma, written during my personal therapy - HERE.
Looking into the Dark - nonfiction - Narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. How do we recognize them and protect ourselves? - HERE.
A tale of a toxic therapist - How a narcissistic therapist ganged up with my narcissistic father, whom he was “treating,” to achieve a common goal - HERE.