Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators with Author Steven Wolhandler

As you know, good people are ideal targets for abusive, manipulative people. They will prey on the sensibilities of nice people to gain control while the nice person excuses the bad behavior and thinks the manipulator can change. Guess what? They won't.

For emotional predators, life is a strategy game to dominate and control, and you are either a player to be defeated or a game piece to be used. Before you know what’s happening, they’ll ruin your life without empathy or remorse –and traditional approaches will make things worse.

Today's special guest Steven Wolhandler, JD, MA, LPC specializes in helping clients deal with seriously difficult people. He has been learning about abusers and manipulators – emotional predators – professionally since 1984, first as an attorney, then as a psychotherapist, mediator, arbitrator, and family court custody evaluator and neutral between parents, and in the last decade as a consultant and author. He has helped hundreds of people learn the true nature of the problem of toxic people, why traditional approaches and normal reactions make things worse, and practical effective ways to neutralize them.

Steven is the author of Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators: Neutralize the Users, Abusers and Manipulators Hidden Among Us. The book offers a comprehensive approach to both correctly understanding and strategically protecting yourself from manipulative and abusive people. Wolhandler explains, “The many types of these disturbed and disturbing people have been called narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, borderlines, hysterics, character-disturbed, malignant personalities, toxic personalities or covert-aggressive manipulators, but all of them are more accurately called Emotional Predators because they all prey on the emotions of decent people."