Was it sex or CPR? A man comes home early and finds his wife half naked by the pool with their handsome young gardener on top of her. She says: “It’s not what you think! I got dizzy and started to pass out. He saved my life by giving me CPR.” She sticks to her story so convincingly that her husband starts to believe her version of the truth and not his own eyes. He ends up thanking the gardener and tipping him generously for saving his wife’s life. 2. Change TheyRead More

7 signs that your partner is feeding your self-doubt on purpose. The term “Gaslight” comes from the Academy Award-winning 1944 film by the same name in which a man systematically sets out to drive his wife crazy by making her doubt the reality of her own perceptions. Today that term has been expanded to describe a wider range of behaviors, in which one member of a couple tries to manipulate the other person to accept things as true that are patently false. Generally, modern-day gaslighting takes place in the context ofRead More

Are you the victim of a narcissist’s toxic manipulation? Check out some of their most common approaches to twisting your mind. ho among us can say that they haven’t sat in front of a computer screen for hours, playing armchair psychologist while trying to diagnose a friend, lover, family member—or themselves—with some kind of mental illness? As humans, we love to categorize and to pathologize, but while every individual may contain traces of a number of diagnosable personality disorders, this doesn’t mean they actually have the disorder. Personality disorders exist on a spectrum,Read More

Triangulation To make themselves seem more credible—and to dismiss their partner’s feelings—narcissists may bring another person into the mix in an attempt to “stack the deck” in their favor. They might say, ‘Well it’s not only me who thinks this way.’ This is an especially insidious technique when the narcissist uses someone you personally trust or admire to diminish you. iStock ‘They might say, ‘Well it’s not only me who thinks this way. Did you know that Mary said the same thing? In fact, she told me that she hadRead More

Having Daddy Issues is not a flattering psychological state. It’s a bizarre blend of hyper-sexualization, whereby the daughter of a toxic father is treated, in essence, better than a wife or mistress. Little girls with Daddy issues grow up to be toxic parents themselves, plain and simple.  They say a woman has “daddy issues” when her behavior or mindset indicates that her father was either absent in her life completely, or physically present but emotionally unavailable. This includes the father who overindulges their biological daughter or a preferred little girl forRead More

I’ve actually never seen the show Friends, due to a very strict upbringing in the cult of Friends Is a Stupid Show, No You Can’t Watch That, but if I have correctly pieced together the clues via Google, it seems that taking a break actually did work for Ross and Rachel. You want to know why? Because it’s TV. Most of us are doing breaks wrong. For non-NBC-affiliated people like you and me, going on a break does not work. Breaks are for people who don’t want to work on the problems in their relationships.Read More

Individuals with psychopathic or narcissistic traits* frequently use false personas to interact with others, sometimes tailoring their masks so that they appear to share the interests of their targets. From small talk to bombastic speeches, any spotlight presents the opportunity to craft a mask, and to test, dominate, or even malign unwitting interlocutors. Fortunately, there are conversational clues to such extreme duplicity: a person’s focus on you is *too* intense; his self-disclosure too early, too pat. The tactics below may read as at odds with one another (i.e. asking no questions or asking too many probingRead More

3) Asks no personal questions or asks very pointed questions. You may walk out of a social encounter or a date and realize you have not been asked one single question about yourself, despite having learned a ton about the individual (see above). Pay attention to the degree of informational asymmetry: Does he disclose an enormous amount without asking or expecting you to reciprocate? What’s going on: If nothing is asked of you and no interest expressed, then script delivery is the entire point of the encounter. If he asks a ton of questionsRead More

NEW ORLEANS — Women undergoing radical hysterectomy for early cervical cancer had a significantly higher risk of disease recurrence and worse long-term survival with minimally invasive surgery (MIS), including robotic-assisted procedures, two separate studies showed. The number of disease recurrences after laparoscopic or robotic-assisted procedures was almost four times higher than the number of recurrences after open surgery, although the absolute numbers were small: 27 recurrences versus seven in more than 600 patients. The difference translated into a hazard ratio for disease-free survival (DFS) of 3.74 (at 4.5 years) forRead More

With regard to the retrospective analysis, Uppal encouraged continued monitoring of survival data for the more recent years of the study period, looking for potential alternative explanations for the declining survival and to confirm the association with MIS. He also presented data in response to his rhetorical question: “What will happen if we abandoned minimally invasive surgery?” Referring to the National Inpatient Sample for 2015, he noted that a return to open surgery for all patients would result in 85 additional complications, 70 transfusions, and approximately two deaths per 1,000Read More