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Wife killed in head-on crash while pursuing her husband in another vehicle

Originally posted at: http://abc13.com/news/wife-killed-in-head-on-crash-while-chasing-husband/793464/

Saturday, July 23, 2016

HOUSTON (KTRK) —

A woman is dead in a tragic car accident in northeast Houston, after she struck another vehicle head-on. And she was apparently chasing her own husband at the time.

The accident happened at 4pm Thursday in the 13000 block of Wallisville Road. According to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Nancy De Acosta was driving eastbound, while following her husband and his mistress in another car. Authorities say Nancy tried to force her husband’s car off the road, but lost control and spun into the path of an oncoming SUV, slamming into it nearly head-on.

Nancy De Acosta died at the scene. The driver of the SUV sustained severe injuries and was taken by Life Flight to Memorial Hermann Hospital. Nancy’s husband Fredy Acosta and the woman with him were unhurt.

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To Be a Better Leader, Learn This FBI Hostage Negotiation Tactic

Originally posted at: https://medium.com/the-mission/this-fbi-hostage-negotiation-tactic-makes-you-a-better-leader-a4afe919c18d#.h32qerqg5

by Andy Raskin

Before getting to yes, strive for “that’s it.”

As a strategic messaging and positioning consultant, I preside over lots of contentious meetings. They go with the territory: Sometimes it’s just really hard to get leaders of high-profile startups to agree on a single version of their strategic story.

About six weeks ago, I was trying to do exactly that while facilitating a meeting at a Series B startup backed by A-list investors (Andreessen Horowitz, GV and others) — and things were not going well. In particular, a salesperson named Troy (not his real name) would not buy into the strategic narrative framework that I had led his CEO and co-founders in crafting over the previous four weeks. Troy was an important member of the team, and the CEO wanted him excited about the shared strategic vision.

Just as I was losing hope of ever getting Troy on the same page as the rest of his team, the CEO stepped in and began asking Troy a series of questions. And in a shift that seemed almost magical, Troy came around. By the end of the meeting, Troy agreed to fully support the new messaging, and I could tell that he meant it.

Beyond impressed (more like in awe), I approached the CEO after the meeting.

“What did you just do?” I asked.

“It’s a tactic I read about in a book by an FBI hostage negotiator,” the CEO said.

Needless to say, I asked the CEO to send me a link to the book.

The Role of Emotional Connection in Leading People to Embrace Your Ideas

The book, I learned, was called Never Split the Difference, and had, indeed, been written by a 24-year veteran of the FBI named Chris Voss, along with a co-author named Tahl Raz. (I have no relationship with either, and no stake in sales of their book.)

From 2000 to 2007, Voss served in the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit. During the last four of those years, he was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, running high-profile cases in global danger zones like Iraq, the Philippines, and Colombia.

Voss’s game-changing insight was that nearly every successful hostage release happens only after the chief negotiator establishes an emotional connection with the kidnapper. In spite of that truth, the FBI’s traditional negotiations tactics—and most of the ones taught in schools (Getting to Yes, most notably)—were focused on removing emotion from the equation to reach a win-win solution through logic and reason. As Voss writes in Never Split the Difference:

I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the messiah?

Thankfully, Troy, the reluctant salesperson in our meeting, didn’t possess a sense of himself that was that grandiose. But he did exhibit a certain messianic zeal (which I share) about the importance of a well-crafted strategic messaging and positioning architecture. A few days earlier, Troy had sent an email to his CEO and leadership team with the subject “Problems with New Messaging”; it contained a detailed accounting of the deficiencies he saw in the version of the story that his leadership team and I had designed.

The Tactic that Moved Us Forward: Getting to ‘That’s Right’

Noting my utter inability to bring Troy into the fold, the CEO stepped in and took charge of the meeting. He said to Troy, “I have a call scheduled with a New York Times reporter tomorrow at noon, to brief her on on our company and strategy. What should I say when she asks, ‘What do you guys do?’”

Troy wasn’t quite prepared for this question, but he did his best to describe a version of the story that he wanted to tell.

What the CEO did next was the key. He said, “Now, I’m going to summarize what you told me, and I’d like you to let me know if anything is missing or incorrect. OK?”

This was the tactic the CEO had learned from Voss. In his book, Voss calls it “Getting to ‘That’s right.’”

When Voss analyzed the transcripts of his most unlikely hostage negotiation victories, he discovered that the turning point frequently occurred right after his team took the time to listen to the captor’s argument, summarized that argument back to the captor, and then got the captor to say, “That’s right.”

Those two words, Voss asserts, may not seem like a big deal when you hear them, but they mark a crucial turning point in any negotiation. That’s because they signal that your negotiating partner feels heard and acknowledged, which opens the door to previously impossible solutions:

It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. When your adversaries say, “That’s right,” they feel they have assessed what you’ve said and pronounced it as correct of their own free will. They embrace it. … Reaching “that’s right” in a negotiation creates breakthroughs.

As his leadership team and I watched, the CEO summarized what Troy had said. Perhaps most importantly, he did it with total openness and lack of judgment and anger, which is impossible unless you truly make yourself open to what the other person has to say. When he finished, Troy added a few points that he felt the CEO had missed. This happened three or four times.

Finally Troy said, “Yeah, that’s right.”

How Everything Changed After Troy’s “That’s Right,” and My 3 Big Takeaways

The really interesting thing was that, when the CEO finally arrived at the version of the story on which Troy signed off, it wasn’t that different from the one the team and I had originally drafted. There was one key addition — some (very good) detail around recent global trends that made the company’s solution more timely (an element of strategic messaging that I call “Why now?”).

Everyone agreed that Troy’s addition strengthened the narrative, so we incorporated it into the final version. That became the one the CEO told to the New York Times reporter. It’s also the story that powered the company’s funding announcement, their new website, and their new sales deck. The company’s VP of Product presented the new strategic story to the entire company and received rave reviews — including one from Troy.

In the end, the project left me with three big takeaways:

#1. Leadership is a negotiation that depends on emotional connection

By starting with the team’s draft version (his adversary’s position) and asking Troy to suggest changes, I left Troy feeling unheard. It didn’t matter that we weren’t that far apart; until Troy felt understood, there would be no forward movement.

Interestingly, I had never thought of leadership as a negotiation before, but in a very real sense, it is: team members want a story they can get excited about, and the leader wants everyone’s “that’s right.”

#2. “Active listening” is the key to establishing that emotional connection (and, therefore, to leadership)

A lot of business storytelling experts talk about the importance of listening as a leadership skill. While I always assumed listening was important, I realize that, until now, I basically considered it the art of sitting there while the other person talks, not saying anything, and doing one’s best to look interested.

Voss’s technique shows that to really reap the rewards of listening, you have to not only take in what the other person says, but also prove that you’ve accurately received the message. As Voss says:

This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.

I now make active listening — that is, Voss’s summarizing and repeating back until you hear a “that’s right” — a core part of my business storytelling workshops for leaders, as well as a standard part of my strategic messaging and positioning facilitation.

#3. There’s still more I want to learn from Voss

I’m still wrapping my head around everything Voss has written, and I have a feeling it’s going to continue to affect my work, my approach to leadership, and my personal relationships in profound ways.

About Andy Raskin:
I help leaders craft strategic stories—for better fundraising, sales, marketing, product, and recruiting. My clients include teams backed by Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, GV, and other top venture firms. I’ve also led strategic storytelling workshops for leaders at Uber, General Assembly, HourlyNerd, Neustar, and Stanford. To learn more or get in touch, visit http://andyraskin.com.

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Castimonia Purity Podcast Episode 55: Conversation About Finding Hope in Living Without Addiction

A listener calls in to talk with Doug about his take on choosing recovery and the hope that comes from living without addiction.  Creating new patterns and new choices can be freeing, but there are still patterns of codependency and negative habits that will take time to work through.

Listen in to find elements that you identify with and look for ways to grow to find your serenity.   Email us at puritypodcast@castimonia.org for more information or visit our podcast page at castimonia.org/podcasts.  You can shop for the books mentioned on the show as well!

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Is My Spouse Really Narcissistic? How People Are Commonly Overpathologized

Originally posted at: https://drlorischade.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/how-spouses-are-commonly-overpathologized/

“How much do you know about Narcissism?” asked yet another female client, on the same day that a male client asked, “How much do you know about Borderline Personality Disorder?” It seems like therapists I supervise or I am asked a version of these questions at least weekly.  I can confidently state that I likely know more about both of them than most of my clients do.  I believe that these labels are used prematurely and inaccurately in short, because they simplify complex problems for people who are desperately trying to make sense out of the seemingly nonsensical.  Here are some reasons why they are incorrectly overused:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BDD) are labels that describe sets of behaviors and internal states identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).  This is a tome published by the American Psychiatric Association for the purpose of categorizing and typifying groups of mental health disorders in order to conceptualize diagnoses and treatment options for various clinical presentations.  The book is the best we have for making sense out of mental health disorders.  As a collaborative clinician for the most recent issuance (5th edition), I have respect for the amount of study and diligence that goes into refining the descriptors as an attempt at treatment accuracy.  The problem is that the taxonomy is clumsy, largely subjective, politically influenced, and always controversial among mental health and medical professionals.

For example, one of the identifying specifiers for NPD is “Requires excessive admiration,” (p. 669).  What?  Who decides how much is “excessive?”  Another feature is, “Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes,” (p. 670).  Do you see the problem?  What exactly is “arrogant or haughty?”  What is the context for such behavior?  Many of the remaining identifiers are equally ambiguous.  The lack of precision throughout the DSM is an enormous problem because it is so subjective and can vary tremendously from clinician to clinician.

Let’s look at BPD.  The first listed criterion is, “Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment,” (p. 663).  So, what, exactly, is “Frantic?”  Does that mean if a spouse is threatening to divorce and walks out the door, the panicky reaction of a partner is “BPD?”  The 7th identifier is “chronic feelings of emptiness.”  Huh?  How empty?  Does “emptiness” mean the same thing to different people?  How about “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger?”  I have seen plenty of that in partners who experienced betrayal, or a number of other emotionally-laden events.  This does not mean the individual has BPD.

Hopefully, most clinicians are very careful in using these labels.  Unfortunately, I see way too many who are not.  Many clinicians use the labels as a way to dismiss clients when they are overwhelmed with the behaviors, particularly in couple cases where the emotion is notoriously high, and the dynamics exceed the therapist’s competence and skill level.  Personality disorders are by nature considered durable and nearly unchangeable.  If a client has a legitimate personality disorder, in a sense, the clinician can just write off the case as untreatable.  Many do.  To be honest, sometimes I think it’s laziness at best and negligence at worst.  This is a particularly egregious practice when a therapist has diagnosed a spouse based on the report of their client, without ever actually meeting that individual (and yes, this happens, not infrequently).  I’m not a DSM expert, but as a licensed clinician with DSM training, I believe the actual prevalence of these cases in a population is far lower than they are diagnosed by mental health professionals, at least informally, behind closed doors.

Among the client population, the overpathologizing might be more pervasive.  Currently, the ability to easily research anything on the internet has provided fertile ground for spouses to gain just enough information to be dangerous.  Most of us are guided by confirmatory bias, meaning that we have a tendency to give more credence to information that supports what we already believe.  If I think I’m married to a narcissist (or an autistic or a bipolar individual or…) then I will find all kinds of information supporting my viewpoint.  Ditto for borderlines.  Then, if I read that it is not very treatable, I might prematurely give up on the relationship.

Much of the highly emotional behavior observed in panicky, anxious pursuing partners (often wives who get labeled “Borderline”), is exacerbated by, if not a direct result of, the withdrawing or stonewalling behavior by spouses who are flooded.  Likewise, the withdrawing husband who numbs himself because he doesn’t ever feel like he can calm down his wife’s emotions, may appear incapable of empathizing (Aha!  Narcissism!), when the apparent lack of empathy is really a conditioned response generated from years of feeling helpless to impact a partner’s emotional reactions.  The pattern becomes cyclical, more pronounced, and anticipatory until partners can and do appear to be Narcisstic and Borderline.  In short, protective behaviors of stonewalling and withdrawal that make sense in an intense situation are incorrectly labeled, and desperate, clingy, panicky emotional behaviors that come as a result of not knowing what else to do to save a relationship are prematurely pathologized.  Various trauma responses based on previous client history can also be prematurely lumped into a personality disorder.

I have no illusions about my self-indulgent blog post changing anything in general.  That would require a readership larger than three people.  However, I want to be on record somewhere articulating and highlighting this problem because it is endemic with therapists who don’t place behavior in a highly emotional couple context, and it is a problem with spouses who are desperately trying to make sense out of painful marriages they feel powerless to change.

Don’t get me wrong.  I have seen clients who I believe meet criteria for both of these disorders.  However, far more often, I see people who are very reactive to each other after years of feeling rejected, and their behaviors look like some of the personality disorder specifiers.  In other words, I see more instances which are treatable than those which aren’t.  If you think your spouse has a personality disorder, you could be right, but it is more likely that you are incorrectly labeling contextual, reactive behavior.  Be very careful in your unofficial diagnosis.

Now it’s time to return to my real life of being mom to 7 children, or, as I like to call it, my “Acute Stress Disorder,” or my “Circadian Rhythm Sleep-Wake Disorder,” for which the recognized treatment is “birth control.”  Oops….too late!  Happy diagnosing!

Reference: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (2013), American Psychiatric Association: Arlington, Virginia.

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This Is What It’s Like To Date An Actual Narcissist (And You Never Want To Do It)

Originally posted at: http://thoughtcatalog.com/%tc-coauthor%/2016/07/this-is-what-its-like-to-date-an-actual-narcissist-and-you-never-want-to-do-it/

Last winter, I ended a relationship with a man who I came to realize was narcissistically abusive.

Our six-month partnership began with the “love bombing” that characterizes any relationship with a narcissist. He lavished me with constant attention, meals, and gifts. Within a matter of weeks, we developed an emotional connection that made me feel as if I had known him forever.

Although I had always been a skeptic when it came to romance and relationships, he insisted we were soul mates.

But in textbook fashion, the love-bombing phase ultimately gave way to one of gradual and inevitable “devaluation.”

When disagreements arose, he would increasingly erupt in anger, unleashing a torrent of often alcohol-fuelled verbal abuse against me.

During one argument, I remember realizing with matter-of-fact detachment that the man who claimed to care so much about me was willing to say absolutely anything – maybe even do anything – in order to hurt me, in order to “win.”

Yet I struggled to reconcile this behavior with the person I believed I had fallen in love with.

How could such a charismatic and compassionate man – a health care professional who presented himself as a “healer” – become so angry and hurtful behind closed doors?

This cognitive dissonance ultimately made me doubt my own perception and even my memory of what had happened.

Besides, he would always apologize – sometimes even breaking down in tears – blaming the verbal assaults on his ADHD medication or the alcohol. Then he would accuse me of not being “supportive” enough.

I became convinced that if I just tried harder, things would go back to the way they were.

But, eventually, it seemed as if any perceived slight would upset him and even enrage him, especially if he had been drinking: a flat tire, misplaced keys, a client cancelling, the barista making his latte too slowly.

I walked on daily trails of eggshells, praying that nothing would happen to ruin his fragile mood.

I stopped confronting him with things I was unhappy about, knowing that he would either explode in anger or stonewall me by emotionally withdrawing or leaving his own apartment – once for hours.

By this point, we were practically living together, and I had become consumed with the relationship. I worked from home more often now (his home). I rarely saw friends or colleagues.

But the constant waiting for the other shoe to drop, the persistent feeling that things were never completely stable began to far outweigh the intermittent reinforcement that kept me tethered to him. I was finally able to end the relationship — on the third try.

Characteristically, he made more excuses and insisted I was to blame.
I should have made him give up alcohol. I should have spent more time with him instead of working on my damn Ph.D. I was too cold and heartless to “fight for love.”

But, the important thing was: I was free. Or so I thought.

As I entered therapy and began to pick up the pieces of my self-esteem and my heart, I naively expected everything to fall back into place.

Thus, it was especially painful for me to realize the first hard truth about narcissistic abuse: that an abuser will never, ever acknowledge or take responsibility for the pain they have caused you. Especially if they are a narcissist.

Although you thought you had left the crazy-making and emotional invalidation of the relationship behind, you get to experience it all over again once the relationship is over.

Because the only other individual in your toxic relationship – the only other person in the world who was “there” and saw it all unfold – absolutely refuses to accept your version of events.

Instead, they continue to make excuses and minimize their behavior, attempting to “hoover” you back into the relationship.

Despite blocking the narcissist from my phone and Facebook and never once responding, he continued to contact me for months after the relationship had ended – by email, letter, a different phone number, and even online sites it hadn’t occurred to me to protect, such as LinkedIn and Pandora.

But most insidiously of all? Eventually, the abuser pretends as if nothing ever happened.

Five months after the break-up, the narcissist announced in an email that he would finally leave me alone. He ended the message with: I love you.

Basically, it didn’t matter that this man’s behavior had constantly made me feel unstable and unsafe because he “loved” me.

And now he had finally decided to stop months of unwanted and unreciprocated contact…because he felt like it.

That is when I learned a second hard truth about narcissistic abuse: that the abuser always gets the last word. That the abuser is the one who gets to decide when the abuse stops.

Only they get to carry out the ultimate “discard.” Because they don’t just require the upper hand during the relationship, but all the way until its bitter end.

I wish I could say that I have moved past all of this, but I am still coming to terms with the realities of narcissistic abuse. And yet, I still have hope.

Just as I am a bit of a skeptic, I am also a rather stubborn optimist.

I am hopeful that someday, it really won’t matter that my abuser will never take responsibility and acknowledge the pain he caused – because I will be able to validate my feelings and perception of reality, for myself.

I am hopeful that someday I will get to the point where I get to decide that the abuse is over. That eventually it will all just be a memory, as will the constant fear of him unexpectedly showing up at my door.

I am hopeful that someday I will be able to trust people again.

Because, hard as it is, simply knowing the truth can also be beautifully freeing. And, for now, that will have to be enough freedom for me.