Lessons from Dirty John

 

 

By now you might have seen the Netflix series, Dirty John, and/or heard the podcast by the same name, done by Christopher Goffard, an author and writer for the Los Angeles Times. 

 

The lessons from this story apply to men and women, straight and gay, from any culture, socio-economic class, basically anyone anywhere in the world. The patterns of abuse are nearly exactly the same across the globe and among people of all walks of life. 

 

The predator in this particular story is a 55yo man named John who meets a 59yo beautiful, successful single mom who is a loving, open-hearted woman with dreams and a yearning for love. Her name is Deborah and fortunately she’s alive to tell the story. 

 

They met on a dating app for people over 50 and Deborah quickly started to believe that she’d met the man of her dreams, the one who finally knew how to love her and cherish her as she dreamed of. John claimed to be a doctor who just got back from Iraq working with Doctors Without Borders. He was tall, handsome, charming, attentive and very interested in listening to Deborah, a trait she assumed was a good thing. It was the typical psychopath meets empath story that started with intense love-bombing, quickly escalated, and within a short time took a sharp left turn. 

 

I want to focus on 3 aspects of this story, which I believe are the most valuable lessons that can help people to avoid being in Deborah’s position and also that serve to educate the public on the current global epidemic of psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism and the kinds of inevitable harm that these characters cause in the lives of their victims. 

 

 

 

John found his victims online because that is the easiest, fastest, largest selection of potential prey for predators. It was a numbers game and he had thousands of women, on numerous dating sites that he would try to hook. 

 

 

If you’re online dating, you need to find out who people are, get their full name and google them. As John’s first wife, Tania said, when you go to buy a house, you don’t just buy it because it looks nice. You get an inspection, you really check things out before making that kind of investment. Likewise, you need to research the people you date and especially those you marry. She and many other people have said “the biggest decision you make is the person you choose as a life partner.”

 

I’ve been there and I’m speaking from experience. Don’t look for a life mate online. Sure there are some stories of people who met their husbands or wives on there, but so did Deborah. The vast majority of people on those sites are not life partner material.

 

 

1. When you need to date to figure out what you don’t want, it’s great for that. You’ll meet plenty of people who will show you what you don’t want in a life partner. Sometimes that’s how we figure out what we do want. You’ll get better at recognizing what’s not okay for you, you’ll have the opportunity to create new standards and practice setting boundaries when people cross the line. And they will. You’ll get a lot of practice saying no, and for some people that’s something they never learned growing up.

 

2. Online dating is also useful for developing your discernment abilities. You’ll get to scan through thousands of photos and profiles and so you’ll have a lot of opportunities to identify predators and build your confidence in recognizing the red flags. Those red flags will be alllll over the place! Look for predator behavior and also for undesirable qualities like emotional unavailability, immaturity, need for newness syndrome, materialism, addictions and more. 

 

 

Deborah was discouraged with the dating prospects that she was finding online and in person. She’d been divorced 4x. She’d been on a lot of bad dates. Then she met John who was a guy with a perfect profile: doctor, handsome, heroic stories of Doctors without Borders… who on Date #1 built intensity, which created a sense of connection, however it was fake, all hype. Deborah took him home for a nightcap and that’s when he revealed his first major red flag. He entered her bedroom uninvited and threw himself on her bed. She got uncomfortable and asked him to move back into the living room. He was pissed that he didn’t get his way so he stormed out of her apartment angry.

 

Right there is where you want to draw the line. There’s no Date #2 with someone like that, no matter what they say later to try to smooth it over. That’s a one-and-done sort of behavior.

 

Also, never take someone home after a first date. You have no idea who that person is, no matter how intense the chemistry is. It’s really better to date in public places for the first month (at least) that you’re getting to know someone. That also weeds out quickly those who are just trying to get into your pants and pocketbook.

 

Don’t date when you’re lonely or in the early healing stages after another abusive relationship. That’s very dangerous. Take your time to focus on yourself when you’re feeling vulnerable, when you’re processing a loss or grief because you are like a bleeding fish to a shark who will smell you a mile away.

 

 

In the later episodes of the series, you’ll see John is desperately seeking narcissistic supply through online dating sites. He’s throwing bait to tons of women to see who will bite. He practices refining his seduction technique with every rejection he gets. That scene alone should make you really cautious of online dating. 

 

Most importantly, if you’re dating, slow down. People reveal themselves in time, even the most covert wolves in sheep’s clothing. Let people reveal themselves and believe them when they do.

 

If you choose to confront someone on their manipulative behavior, be prepared for a total lack of self-responsibility. They often won’t admit it. They’ll use the DARVO technique (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender — YouTube video on that ), they’ll minimize, rationalize, justify their behavior and if you still don’t subscribe to their version of reality, they will flip it around on you and make themselves out to be the victim. Expect this 100% of the time when you reveal a manipulator and trust yourself.

 

The second valuable lesson from this story is: Educate yourself on predator behavior (AKA narcissistic abuse or what they refer to in the podcast as coercive control). 

 

A manipulator always moves quickly into the love-bombing phase. They’re charming, often interested in you and what you have to say, which Deborah thought was a good sign. Unfortunately that was just part of John’s Interview & Study of his prey.

 

Manipulators are sweet-talkers, always knowing what to say. Sometimes they gain this information through the data-mining they do when they meet you and other times they seem to know impossible things about you. Like the previous man Deborah met told her she wasn’t his type. John told her “you’re so my type.”

 

 

Manipulators are always selling themselves through their stories! They try to convince you that they’re good people, that they’ve been wronged by others, that they’re deserving of your time, energy, body and resources. Notice how their stories don’t add up.

 

Within the first few weeks of dating, you’ll notice how you keep catching them in lies and half-truths yet they always have a perfect explanation for why they said that. This is not a good sign. These same scenarios will also often involve a great deal of ambiguity. You’ll notice they won’t like your questions and that’s another bad sign of someone who is pretending to be someone they’re not. You’ll notice inconsistencies in their words and actions, another huge red flag. Of course all of this can appear to be very subtle at first, and especially with the covert types, it can be very sophisticated and hard to put your finger on exactly what’s wrong. 

 

Most predators will tell you they love you very early on, like the first few dates or weeks. They will seem to read and fulfill all your emotional needs, yet this is usually a seduction and an attempt for them to get their own needs met. In the series, John said to her “no matter what happens, remember I love you.” I heard that exact same line from a psychopath I met years ago. It was a trailer for the coming attraction, so when he would start gaslighting and deceiving, it was harder to realize what was happening since he had already programmed me to believe that he loved me. 

 

As Christopher Goffard narrated, John’s trap was to find people’s vulnerabilities and use it against them ruthlessly. He speculated about John’s motives being money, sex, control and power, the pleasure he got by tormenting and destroying people. This is called narcissistic supply. John was seeking narcissistic supply in the form of other people’s emotions, attention and resources as well as his ability to control how and when he got that supply.

 

Narcissistic supply is the motive of every manipulator and abuser. They are hopeless addicts of that supply, both positive and negative forms of it, to keep trying to fill the empty hole in their soul. 

 

Manipulators will convince you to prove you’re worthy of them. They’ll do this in overt and covert ways. They might straight up tell you how their ex was and what you need to do like them or not like them. They might say this in a very subtle way that you’re left feeling somehow not good enough and like you need to start meeting those needs for them otherwise you’ll be put down or discarded. 

 

John had said to one of his prior victims, “you’re such a surface person and you can’t have intimacy without sharing the more vulnerable things about you. What are the ugly things about you?” A psychopath once asked me a very similar question when he was trying to figure out my vulnerabilities in order to use them as weapons against me.

 

Predators will always prey upon your fears, dreams, hopes and past pain. While it’s true that deeper human connection can only take place where there is vulnerability in both people, be very careful when people are trying to coax this kind of information out of you when they haven’t earned that level of trust yet. 

 

Abusers will also usually tell you very early on that you need to trust them. Trust is not something that can be demanded. Trust is something earned little by little over time, and it’s also something that can be destroyed in an instant. Check out a YouTube video I did called The Extortion of Trust. 

 

Abusers will twist reality around on you. John was a con-artist who was always after other people’s resources, a true parasite of society. Yet he told one of his victims “you’re a gold digger.” That was a projection and also a form of gaslighting, where the manipulator distorts your perception of reality, convinces you that your perception of reality is wrong, to the point where you really start to think you’re going crazy so you subscribe to their reality instead. 

 

Keep in mind there are many levels and archetypes of predators, abusers, and manipulators. Not all of them are as extreme and smart as Dirty John was. But that is not to minimize the destruction that one of them can bring into your life, into their family’s life, into the lives of their coworkers and social circles. Of course the intimate partner relationships and families are the ones who will suffer the most as they are the ones with an inside look at who these characters really are.

 

Manipulators can destroy your health, sanity, peace, success, wellbeing and everything good you’ve worked hard to build in your life. They don’t always kill their victims, but they will inevitably try to kill your individuality, your soul, and your physical health will eventually begin to deteriorate in chronic illness after years and decades of psychological abuse where a person never put their hands on you. This is the great risk that you’re taking when you continue to allow a manipulator into your life after they have revealed themselves for who they are. 

 

While all people can change, most people choose not to. Most especially people with disorders of the conscience like psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists, will not change. When you meet people, and even when you get to a point of suffering in a long-term relationship, it’s best to assume they won’t change. If they wanted to change, they would have. So get real and ask yourself if they never changed, would you still want to be with them? Do not assume that your love will wake them up and change them. That’s nothing more than a fairy tale and a dangerous lie propagated by Hollywood. 

 

The most dangerous tactic that manipulators use is the love-bombing. That’s part of what hooks people into the trauma bond (more on that shortly in the 3rd lesson). It’s the love-bombing and the memory of the earlier love-bombing that keeps victims stuck in the abuse cycle and coming back for more. It looks a lot nicer than the devaluation part of the abuse cycle, and that’s exactly why it’s so dangerous. I did a podcast episode on The Dangerous of Love-Bombing if you want more on that topic.

 

Through the love-bombing and manufactured intensity at the beginning of the relationship, predators take control of your life but in a very sneaky, seductive way that can fool you into thinking you’ve met the man/woman of your dreams, just like Deborah thought. 

 

Remember the physical abuse isn’t always there. Of the hundreds of clients I’ve worked with personally, only a small handful of them had ever experienced physical abuse. Coercive control, or what we refer to as narcissistic abuse, is mostly invisible. That’s the worst part about it. If you were bleeding or had bruises you could point at something that’s wrong. Others on the outside could point at it too. When it’s invisible you feel like you’re going crazy, which is why it’s also called crazy-making. You simply can’t put your finger on exactly what’s wrong and it’s very hard to explain to others who often think you’re crazy, or minimize and rationalize why a person might have said or done what they did. This is how they get away with it for so long. 

 

What makes people turn into Dirty Johns? That’s the debate in the scientific community: nature vs. nurture. It seems that some of them are simply born with a genetic anomaly, lacking a human conscience which is really what makes us human. Others and probably the greater number of them, were made through abuse, neglect or idealization of the parents/caregivers. When you look at cases of men who become serial killers of women, like here in Latin America where I live we talk about femicide, killing of women simply because they’re women, what you find is most of those men have a deep hatred toward their mothers. Dirty John, just like the serial killer from Ecatepec, Mexico said that their mothers cheated on their fathers. That might be where their hatred for women began. Sometimes serial killers have controlling, emasculating mothers. In the series, it portrays John’s abusive, con-artist father who does horrible things to his kids and other people, and it was clear that John learned through his example. While John seemed to hate his father, many other abusers idealize their disordered parent who taught them how to manipulate and abuse. Being a parent is indeed a great responsibility, and while the parenting isn’t always the cause of how people turn out to be manipulators, abusers and predators, early life programming definitely has a lot to do with how we turn out as adults. 

 

If you’re with a manipulator, you’ll need to sneak away. Don’t ever confront someone who you suspect would hurt you if you did. Don’t ever tell them that you’re leaving them. That’s when most abusers become physically violent because they have nothing left to lose. The best way to leave a psychopath is to move out when they’re traveling or at work, and simply go dark. Deborah did this when John needed emergency surgery. She moved everything out and went into hiding. Unfortunately she went back to him, as most victims do. And that brings me to the 3rd lesson from this story.

 

 

Abuse becomes a trans-generational pattern that gets carried on not only through the abusers but also through their victims. This is not to shame victims but rather to educate people who have been victimized so we don’t continue to experience similar relationships and so we don’t unknowingly spread this dysfunction to the next generation. 

 

It’s important to understand there’s a difference between fault and responsibility. The abuse was never your fault. That’s 100% on the abuser. However, you are also responsible for your life and your choices.

 

Codependency, which is really about people-pleasing, self-abandonment, sacrificing one’s wellbeing, feelings and needs for others, is also a toxic behavior. It may look a lot more noble on the surface, especially around certain cultural or religious expectations, but people-pleasing will lead to actual physical illness and death. Look at the work of the Canadian physician, Dr. Gabor Maté for more on that. People-pleasing and modeling a lack of healthy boundaries while one tolerates abuse and exposes their kids to abuse will program the nervous system of those kids to perceive abuse as “love” and “home.” So they will grow up to either become abusers or victims.

 

If you’re staying in an abusive situation “for the kids” understand that you’re not doing them a favor. You would be helping them much more if you got yourself a plan for independence and safety and raised them as a single parent than to continue modeling the example of love and relationships to them by accepting an abusive situation. 

 

In the story of Dirty John, Deborah’s kids didn’t like him. They didn’t like any of her boyfriends or husbands who yelled, hit and stole money from her, always moving very quickly into her life. When this is the case, the problem isn’t the kids not liking your choice of mates, the problem is the mates you’re choosing.

 

In the series, they portrayed the therapist sessions with Deborah and her daughter as “the kids don’t have a right to rule her life and she deserves to be happy.” That’s all good and true, but in this situation the therapist was apparently uninformed about abuse and didn’t focus enough on why the kids didn’t like these men. When your kids are more emotionally mature than you, that’s gotta be a wake up call. In retrospect Deborah says she has “wise children” and that’s true. In the series you can see how her older daughter fiercely protects her, investigating John’s past, tracking his present movements, and trying to plead with her mother “can’t you see something’s wrong with him?”

 

In the series, Deborah's son sets healthy boundaries with her after she takes John back and shows up uninvited to her son’s family’s home. He asked her to leave and he said he didn’t want his wife and kids exposed to that. The scene was a fantastic example of healthy boundaries that her kids set with her.

 

Sometimes we want to save someone we love from an abusive relationship, but when they don’t want our help and they don’t want to see the truth, we have to protect ourselves and hope they figure it out. Victims have to come to that realization and decision on their own. There’s no convincing or rationalizing them out of it. 

 

Why is it so hard for victims to leave? This was one thing not covered in the series or podcast and it’s very, very important to understand about the nature of abuse.

 

A trauma bond is caused between a victim and abuser, much like a captor and hostage. The trauma bond is also referred to as Stockholm Syndrome or the Betrayal Bond as Dr. Patrick Carnes’ book title. He also describes it as “insane loyalty” because a victim will defend the abuser despite everything that happened.

 

This does NOT mean the victim is stupid. That was one thing that pissed me off when reading a lot of the Dirty John podcast reviews. So many judgmental people saying how dumb Deborah and her family is. That’s not true at all.

 

 

It’s a survival mechanism built into the brain where the victim will empathize with the captor or abuser in order to survive.

 

THIS is why people stay.

 

THIS is why the average amount of times people go back to an abuser is 7x.

 

THIS is why Christopher Goffard said Deborah’s behavior was hard to explain and this is why most people don’t understand why a victim would stay or go back.

 

I did a podcast episode on the Trauma Bond if you want more information on that topic. 

 

People who are judgmental of victims of abuse and call them dumb and stupid, are coming from a place of ignorance. They’re either clueless because they haven’t ever met evil face to face so they have no idea what it’s like or worse yet, they’re abuse sympathizers and what we refer to as flying monkeys, doing the bidding of abusers. 

 

Another part of the Legacy of Abuse was personified by the grandmother who forgave the unforgivable when she comforted her son-in-law after her daughter told her he was controlling her, and then continued to forgive him after he killed her daughter. In the series that event was painted as “he loved her so much he killed her because she wanted a divorce and he couldn’t live without her. That’s NOT love. In the series the grandmother also explained to John how that tragic event brought them much closer through forgiveness. That’s not healthy, that’s codependent forgiveness and it’s the kind of forgiveness that leads to more abuse and modeling poor boundaries for the rest of the family.

 

You’re allowed to set boundaries and you’re allowed to not forgive people when what they did was unforgivable. Most definitely you’re allowed to decide you don’t want to reconcile a relationship with someone who hurt you and/or your family. 

 

Develop boundaries to protect your value and what matters to you. You’re allowed to have boundaries and say no to people. You’re allowed to meet your needs first and not sacrifice yourself or abandon yourself to caretake others. You’re allowed to draw the line when someone’s behavior is unacceptable for you.

 

Boundaries protect what’s valuable and if you don’t have boundaries, you won’t have self-worth, which makes you a prime candidate for abuse. If you grew up in a family where the Legacy of Abuse was spread, chances are you didn’t learn how to have boundaries. I also have a podcast episode on setting boundaries with manipulative people that you might want to check out. 

 

There most definitely needs to be more public education about coercive control, narcissistic abuse, invisible abuse and the red flags of it. In the podcast they suggested a MeToo movement for domestic violence. Most people who are being abused don’t know they’re being abused. We need to learn the warning signs of abuse, which is the external piece. Most importantly we need to learn the internal piece, which is how we must protect ourselves from predators like Dirty John or anyone else cut from the same cloth.

 

When we develop self-worth through having standards and setting then enforcing boundaries, we don’t accept abusive treatment. When we have zero tolerance for manipulation, use and abuse, we are repulsed by characters like Dirty John, just like Deborah’s oldest daughter was the moment she laid eyes on him in the doorway. 

 

When we see people for who they really are and not their potential or the fantasy we want to believe in, we can let go the moment a manipulator reveals themselves, no matter how much love-bombing they used earlier on, no matter how many redeeming qualities they may have. 

 

When we stop hoping and waiting for people to change, we can move on with our lives when we realize someone has behaviors and/or values that are incompatible with us, instead of wasting time, energy and potentially our life trying to love someone into changing. Your love can’t save anyone but yourself. When you’re in an abusive relationship and you want the person and you want the relationship but not the abuse, you’ve already taken a big step out of reality. 

 

Get real. Stop looking at people’s potential and look at what’s actually in front of you, reality. Stop indulging in the fantasy of what you wish or hope it would be. Anytime you’re in any kind of relationship, even with someone who isn’t a manipulator, as soon as you say the words, “they’re wonderful if only…” that’s where you know it’s a no-go.

 

 

The more we grow our self-worth, the less we tolerate abuse, use and manipulation, the less supply those characters will have to feed on. By opting out, we will eventually ostracize the manipulators, abusers and predators. We will starve them of the fuel they need to survive and keep doing what they do. 

 

The power is actually in our hands. The greatest tool we have is the self-responsibility that each of us need to own over our own lives. As each of us works to educate ourselves, to heal ourselves, and to own and change the patterns of our own behavior, we are helping to heal the world, one individual at a time. This is no small thing. 

 

Thank you to Deborah, her family, Tania and the rest of the victims who came forward to speak their truth bravely in order to help others and also thank you to Christopher Goffard for putting the story together so well in the articles and podcast, which eventually became a series. If you haven’t seen the series or heard the podcast yet, I highly recommend it.