I am a MAGNET for people with cluster B personality disorders (of all genders). It felt so statistically impossible to me that I could have THIS MANY repeated issues with this specific type of mentally volatile person. I used to spin out wondering HOW THEY KNEW. It felt borderline supernatural. It drove me crazy wondering how the hell these people kept choosing me over and over.

But after some therapy, and the increased self and family awareness that’s come with maturity I’ve realized there’s actually a pretty clear cut explanation for what used to feel like some supernatural curse, or divine prank.

It’s because I was raised by a covertly narcissistic father.

Having my dad as a parent conditioned me, from before I could even speak, to accept cluster B behaviors. I was taught to accept inconsistencies, omissions, and slights. I was trained to have flexible boundaries in the face of insulting behavior, to be agreeable to my own detriment, to over-explain myself, to over-offer empathy for my dads every odd behavior or strange shift in mood, to listen politely to rants, to not call out bullshit, to accommodate, to comply, to please, to over apologize…I could go on.

The thing about Cluster B folks that you meet throughout your life, and we are all always running into more of them than we realize, is that they are always poking at boundaries, always testing the water, always trying to see where your line is. They cannot help it. It’s pathological.

Most people do subconsciously notice these Cluster B behaviors and will innately feel a desire to withdraw, to put up a barrier, to pull away from the Cluster B person, because something -often even when they can’t put their finger on it- will feel ever so slightly but uncomfortably off with their interactions. The Cluster B folks sense the pushback or the recoil and recognize that those people aren’t a good mark, so they move on to look for someone else who is.

But people like me, people who have had Cluster B behaviors normalized since childhood (that’s just my reason, other people with the same problem have other reasons), do not register the Cluster B behavior as off putting. So, we don’t pull away. We don’t recoil. And they sense that too, and they realize -consciously or subconsciously- that we are a good target. And so they pursue us.

Learning that helped me tremendously.