We continue on Leon Walker‘s conversation with Stephanie Joplin about the red flags surrounding Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This time, the two delve into real-life experiences of manipulative partners, discussing how most of them are agents of gaslighting, selfishness, and control. Hear how narcissistic people confuse you with mere words, why they easily fall to cheating, and how they take advantage of your opposing traits. Stephanie also opens up about her past messy relationships, particularly when she experienced being love-bombed by a guy in the Marines and Army (who’s also a potential narcissist). Leon responds to this icky story by explaining how PTSD negatively impacts the way soldiers handle relationships, giving a peek at their unbelievably fragile feelings.

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Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Red Flags and When to Walk Away With Leon Walker, Part 2

Leon and Stephanie discuss the hot button topic of narcissism in romantic relationships. Stephanie reveals one of her biggest secrets.

I do want to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this show, letting you know that this is a trigger warning. You could possibly be triggered by something that I am saying, that Leon is saying. I don’t want to scare you away from it, but just in case you have experienced gaslighting, you’ve been with a narcissist, this could be triggering for you. Please, audience discretion is advised for this episode.

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People are afraid to hear those things and talk about that. That’s why when I do my videos, I’m like, “I know it’s going to be a trigger, but I’d rather trigger you in the video than you go out there and somebody put a trigger to your head.” You’ve got to tell that friend the truth. Try to give them the help. Paint a picture for them. That picture has to be ugly. Build them up with reassuring comments because a lot of times, they fall into this trap with these people because they have low self-esteem. They get isolated.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Don’t give people an ultimatum because they become hurt and angry, which puts them closer to the perpetrator.

It feels like, “They love me, I’m getting this attention.” They’re afraid to let go because it’s love bombing and sex bombing. It’s a mental game, it’s torture. They start to manipulate them. It goes over and over again, then you have a trauma bond. She doesn’t want to listen to you but she’ll listen to him. He’ll say, “I don’t see that girl, that girl is flirting with me anyways. She’s been looking at me too so you’re going to believe her over me?” She’ll go, “Maybe you’re right,” and she won’t go anywhere.

I will tell them the truth. Paint them an ugly picture of losing friends and losing family. You’ve got to make them see these things constantly over and over again, and then they’ll snap out of it. If not, they’ll keep going back to this person feeding them sins, lust and greed, making them feel happy, building their self-esteem, confidence up and feel secure.

Sometimes it’s difficult because if they don’t take your advice, which normally they won’t, eventually you give them an ultimatum. You’re like, “Either you stop talking to Leon or I’m not going to be your friend anymore,” and then they’re even more isolated.

They don’t feel close to that person too.

Would you recommend not giving them that ultimatum and ride it out with them? What would you say?

I wouldn’t give them an ultimatum because then they become hurt and angry. That will put some faults to the perpetrator. She would say, “Do you know what Stephanie told me? She can’t be my friend because I’m with you.” You’d go, “We don’t need her anyway.” She’ll go, “You’re right. I only see her once a week anyway, so we don’t need her.” He’ll start feeding more into her, “She doesn’t even call you at night time. She didn’t call you for your birthday.” She’ll start believing him more. I wouldn’t give them an ultimatum. I never do that. I try not to.

I have female friends and male friends that are going through that. A male friend of mine is going through it and I’m like, “I’ll be here for you.” This is what I do. When we’re together, me, my buddy and his mom are talking. I’ll talk to his mom about why I got out of my relationship about why I travel and do what I want to do in my freedom, but I’m talking about him but he doesn’t know it. I’ll do that. He’ll sit over there and go, “That’s a good idea.”

I would be talking to his mom and she’ll go, “Leon, that’s a good idea.” I’m talking to her but talking to him and getting to him indirectly. You have to stay around that person. Every now and then, go back and reach out to them but never give them an ultimatum because they’ll shut down. They will feel like, “Stephanie, my mom and dad are giving up on me. All I have is Jesse who’s beating my ass.” That will push them closer to that person. Don’t give an ultimatum. When you guys are out, talk around them about good things so they’ll go, “They’re listening.” I always talk to somebody else but I’m talking about them and they don’t know it.

I follow this woman, Michaela. Her tag is Mystic Michaela. She reads color auras. She has a podcast, and she talks about the fact that a narcissist’s love language is gaslighting. I thought that was an interesting concept. Let’s say I’m the receiver of the gaslighting. I’m like, “This guy went out and made up this whole lie to try to keep me. That means he loves me because he took the time to make up this web of lies and come up with something to excuse himself. That blows my mind a little bit.” What do you think about it?

That’s the vindictive part to mask or hide his insecurities because the thing about it is you’re going to find out. When you find out, I don’t give a crap anyway. I know that I’m screwed up. You happen to find out. You’re going to find out and approach me, we go find another person and keep doing it. That’s all we are going to do. I had an issue when I got caught in a lie and made up this grand scheme. I get busted and I walk away. I’m out.

You still try to make up this big lie. I feel that was your way of showing your love. Your love language to that person was to gaslight them.

All they’re doing is to impress you, knowing damn well that it’s not going to last.

They confuse you.

Here’s the trick with that. This is what narcissists do and this is what I did. Once she finds out, I’ll change the conversation and show her something that’s true that I did do. That’s being manipulative of us. It’s like, “I know I messed up but this is going to be even better than what I lied about.” They hear what you’re saying, “Leon, why did you lie?” I’m like, “Baby, I don’t know.” We do it again.

“I’m sorry, baby. You know I love you.”

That’s what happens. Now, you’ve got this grand scheme of what I’m lying about, but then you’ve got this, “This is amazing. You didn’t lie about this.” It’s a sickness. Most men don’t have to lie. Women all say, “You don’t have to lie. All you have to do is tell me the truth. Let me make my own decisions.” That’s not what we want to do. We don’t want you to make your decision, so I’m going to lie to you and I’m going to try to impress you. When you kiss me, I’m going to impress you with this thing over here, which is the truth. That is dangerous.

We laugh about it because we’re trying not to cry and say, “I’m trying not to cry.” I talked about this all the time and we talked about it before. Narcissism, gaslighting, these are all buzzwords. These are hot button words that people are saying and using in their everyday jargon. What is the difference between a narcissist and someone manipulative? What is the core difference between those two?

They’re the same, but a narcissist has plenty of other traits. Once they manipulate you, it goes to being seductive, then it goes to being covert, malignant, grandiose, and you’ve got all these other things. A manipulative person has narcissistic traits. A narcissistic person has all little tricks and traits. They master all of them.

Would you say that it’s a personality disorder as opposed to just a trait that they have?

Yes. It stems from childhood, what they didn’t get, they were left behind, they were lost, bullied, low self-esteem, no confidence, sent to an orphanage or foster care, not trusted, people didn’t believe in them, people gave up hope. It’s like, “I’m going to show these people. I’m going to prove to them that the whole time you have anger issues too.” I was the same way. I wasn’t a physically abusive person but I was verbally abusive. My way of hurting people and women is by using certain words. That felt good to me. I didn’t want to see somebody get their teeth knocked out or their nose broke.

How weird is it for me to say some things to a woman and drive her to want to commit suicide, and I’d be okay with that? I did that too, and a woman almost killed me and her in a car. I played all these games in her mind and I’m like, “I never slapped you.” She’s like, “Leon, you said this and I caught you with this girl. You lied. You dropped the girl off. You came over here and you tried to make love to me after you dropped her off.” I was sick, Stephanie. I had to tell myself that it’s okay to not be physically abusive, “You’re all right. You’re cool. You called her names and you put it down.” I made myself think that was okay. This is sick, if not more sick than being physically abusive because mentally, it was horrible.

Technically, you’re gaslighting yourself as a narcissist.

Pretty much. The thing is a lot of people don’t understand that because they fall into that trap. They don’t know that the narcissistic person is gaslighting themselves. I did that a lot. I did this to women. I said, “You shouldn’t mess with me because I’m no good.”

They then want you more. That would make me want you more. At that time, I’d be like, “Let me get him right away.”

“Let me try to prove him wrong. Let me fix him. Let me get him before anybody else gets him. I can help him. I can fix him.” A lot of times, they gaslight themselves. I did that and I got pretty good at it. That’s another dangerous thing to do. Later on, she’s like, “You didn’t.” I’m like, “I told you.”

“I told you that I wasn’t good to be with but you wanted to be with me.”

Some women think it’s funny. It’s like, “That is weird but for some reason, I’m attracted to that.” I’ve had women tell me that.

I get that. As someone who has been a victim of that, I 100% understand that. If I was in a vulnerable spot and you talk to me that way, I’d be like, “Let me send you a nude.” Why?

Another thing is narcissistic people are cocky. For instance, I would say, “I’m not crap but watch me get a girl. I’m a cheater. I’m a liar.” Who would expect a person to tell the truth like that about themselves and be telling the truth? That’s unbelievable.

You’re being ironic.

Ironic is a keyword. “How ironic is that? You’re telling me the truth about you but are you that person? No way.” I did that a lot.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: You got to make them see these things constantly over and over again, and then they’ll snap out of it. If not, they’ll keep going back to this person feeding their sins, lust, and greed.

I want to talk about love bombing. That’s important to talk about because it’s an epidemic now, especially during COVID because people are getting into what I would call long-distance relationships, sometimes even in the same city because they can’t see each other. Now, it’s getting a little bit better. Here in Houston, it’s starting to get worse.

It’s getting worse here too. We’ve got 100,000 cases in Illinois.

They have camps outside the hospitals because they’re full. There’s so much stuff going on. During COVID, people would have these long-distance type relationships, and I feel people wanted that closeness a lot so they would love bomb even. When you say love bomb to a man that doesn’t understand what narcissism, gaslighting or love bombing is, they think that is the old standby when you’re 18 years old or 17 years old, and you tell your 16-year-old girlfriend that you love them to sleep with them. That’s not the same thing. It’s not what I’m talking about. It might have nothing to do with sex at all. You want to feel that person’s love for you, but then you don’t want to commit to the relationship.

I don’t know if he has a Psychology degree, and I don’t even remember his name, but he’s one of those people who’s on Instagram giving advice about relationships. I got into an argument with him because someone asked a question, “I had a boyfriend and he told me that he loved me. Then he broke up with me two days later.” I was like, “That’s a love bomb.” He’s like, “You don’t have enough information to make that assumption.” I said, “Maybe not, but I do know that if somebody tells you that they love you and you’ve already been with them, no matter how long you’ve been with them if it’s been a week or a year, if that person tells you ‘I love you’ and walks away two days later, that to me is a love bomb.” It’s total manipulation.

He used the words that she wanted to hear. He did that to manipulate her. I agree with you.

All of his followers were coming for me. They were like, “You throw narcissism around. You use it too much.” I’m like, “I never said this guy was a narcissist. What I said was that is love-bombing to say “I love you” and then disappear.” That’s screwed up. To me, that is abusive.

Words are powerful and I knew that. I played a dangerous game of listening to a woman. Women like a man who listens. You all love a man who listens and makes eye contact. My thing was listening to see what I can learn about her, what she was missing, what she wasn’t getting, what she didn’t get from her dad, boyfriend, ex or whomever. I did the listening part so I could do what she wanted. I’m going to do the opposite of what she wasn’t getting. It’s a dangerous game to play. I did it and it’s a sickness. It’s all about being manipulative and being selfish.

I had this guy who was in the Marines and Army. He was doing contract work in Kabul. He was after me on Instagram for a solid year. We hadn’t met. He’s like, “Stephanie, you’re pretty.” I left him in the unread box. I was like, “I don’t care.” There was one night that I was particularly vulnerable. I had found out that a friend of mine had passed away or something like that. He reached out to me and his words were super kind and sweet. I ended up talking to him.

Over the course of four months, we were talking. Then after a month, he was saying, “I love you. I want to marry you. You’re the person that I was meant to be with. This is why I’ve found this Earth because of you.” It’s those beautiful words. Me, as a person who says their love language is words of affirmation, I’m gobbling it up.

He came back from his contract and we ended up meeting. He stayed with me for one night. Everything was fine but in my gut I was like, “Something’s off. Something’s going on.” I honestly don’t know if he was a narcissist. I’m going to talk to you about what I think it was, but you can correct me if I’m wrong. He wants to marry me, wants to go look at rings and all the crazy things.

He’s going pretty fast.

He was talking to my mother on Facebook about what they’re going to cook together. It’s that kind of thing. He’s talking to my sister a little bit. My sister is hesitant to talk to any guys that I date. She’s protective. He was even reaching out to her. He left the next day. I was at work and he didn’t tell me. He got on the road to go back to Dallas and left. After a couple of days, he ghosted.

I know he had PTSD, which I want to talk to you about because I know you understand. He has been through a lot in Kabul. He got blown up. His whole camp got blown up. He ended up getting a huge settlement out of it. He was physically sick. He was one of those people who wanted to be deployed constantly. He did not want to be home. I don’t want to make excuses for his behavior because I feel like this is me saying it’s okay that he did that to me, because it’s not. I see and I hear it a lot from people who date in the military. I know it’s not everyone and I don’t want to piss anyone off, but tell me what you think about that?

I served many years in the military. I deployed eleven times. I spent fifteen years on the sea. Half of my career was spent on the ship. We had to come back from deployment and decompress. The minimum I was going was six months. When we are away, we are detached. We had to shift our whole mindset to go from the loving boyfriend and husband to warfighter, to steaming it off the course of Iraq, to being up all night, twelve-hour shifts. Looking on the horizon, seeing bombs going off, worried about a ship coming in, shooting the missile, blowing the ship up and killing you.

We were like this for four months. We’ve deployed for six months, we spent four months in the Persian Gulf and we are not the same. When we come back, we don’t know what we’re coming back to. Some people come back to a house being empty. Some people come back to catch their spouse in bed with another man or woman. Some people come back to their grandmother or their father died, or one of their children drowned at the beach. We come back not knowing who we are, the kids have gotten older and the kids don’t remember us. The mom doesn’t trust us around the kid. We have to decompress. We even got anthrax shots. We took malaria pills and all types of stuff. We have a hard time reacclimating back into society.

When you’re out at sea for six months, when you’re in the Persian Gulf, Kabul and Afghanistan, nobody is telling you they love you. Now we have FaceTime and Zoom. Even now, you may not want to hear, “I love you. I can’t hear that now.” It’s like, “What do I do?” My girl, Toni, told me she loves me because we got mortars and bombs coming in. We got a ship over here. We got a small ship attack on the site. You get back to where it’s calmed down and you want to go to sleep, thinking about your girlfriend or boyfriend, husband, wife, your kids and whomever you’re with. It’s an emotional roller coaster that we can’t do anything about.

You get on that roller coaster when you deploy and you are on it for 6, 7, 8, 9 months or 1 year whether they’re in Afghanistan or they’re in Kabul, they’re over there for years. You’re like, “Let’s Facetime.” “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to get mushed now because I’ve got to be on guard.” When you finally come back, you’re emotional. You want to love. You haven’t been loved. You want to hold somebody. You want to get married. You want to have a family because you’re getting older. You’re tired of the military. Some guys go, “Let me disappear because I’ve got to keep my job. I like Stephanie. She’s beautiful but I’m dealing with these emotions now.”

He was out. He wasn’t going to do contract work anymore. He’d spent over a decade in the military, so it’s not like he was new to it. He knew what it meant to come back from deployment, from overseas or back from seeing whatever he was seeing over there.

We don’t process it like that. I got deployed eleven times to the Middle East.

You’re not sitting there telling a woman you want to marry her when you get back.

We do that. You come back because you’re emotional. You haven’t been hugging a woman and you haven’t had sex. In most cases, when you’re in Afghanistan, you’re not around women.

What I’m saying is when you’re there, would you tell a woman, “When I get back, I want to marry you?”

I’ve done it. I wrote letters. We had to write letters. Think about it, you’re emotional and deprived. You haven’t held or kissed a woman. You are thirsty for that. It’s like when you get out of jail. They have pen pals. They get married in jail. It’s like your ex’s girl or whatever. It’s the same thing. Men get lonely too. That’s their way of saying, “I’m lonely.” They’re not going to say, “I’m lonely. I want to marry you. You’re beautiful.” When you see somebody and you deploy, it seems like everybody looks good. It’s like, “She’s beautiful. Maybe she doesn’t like me.” You then start showing me attention and it’s like, “She does like me.”

Maybe he didn’t have a relationship for two years or he screwed up all of his relationships. He wants to try with somebody else and see if he can still operate in a relationship. We tell women, “When we get back, we’re going to do this. We’re going to travel. We’re going to get married. I want to get engaged.” We talk about all these things. I did it too and then when you get back, it’s like, “I’m back.”

That makes me scared to talk to anyone who’s in the military now.

Don’t take me the wrong way. There are some good men in the military. Not all of them are like that. Most of them are pretty supportive and they provide and protect. We do have PTSD. For the most part, the men and women in the military are good. They are type-A personalities. Sometimes aggressive and some of them can be passive. Some are passive-aggressive. Some of them can be understanding, endearing, they’re listening and they communicate. When you move up in the military, you become a leader, so you have to work on your EMIQ, your emotional IQ, passion, compassion, empathy and courage. That transitions over to your relationship if you do it.

I never transitioned my EMIQ into any of my relationships. I was a provider. I love women. I want to protect and take care of her. A lot of people in the military that are senior leaders have a pretty high EMIQ. Some of them have a low IQ, some of them have a high IQ and a high EMIQ. That’s rare but it happens. There are some good military men and women that you can date.

What am I supposed to look out for if a guy approaches me and he’s in the military and wants to get to know me and talk to me? I am one of those people who doesn’t have a roster. I don’t have a bench. Once I’m talking to one guy, I want to focus on one person. Not that I’m saying, “We need to be boyfriend and girlfriend now.” That’s not what I meant. Personally, I don’t want to get to know five people at once. I want to get to know one person at once. If it doesn’t work out, then I go to the next person.

You know what marriage vows are whether you’ve been married or not. Most people do not talk about relationship vows. People never even heard of relation vows. What are relationship vows? It’s the same thing as marriage vows. You want to be the same way in a relationship as you are in your marriage. You want the same way, “Until death do us part. For sickness and health,” or wherever it goes. You want to talk about relationship vows. You want to talk about the components of a relationship. They say that there are ten. I learned these in therapy. You want to talk about his past. You want to tell him about your past.

I’ve dated and slept with a whole lot of women, sadly. Not one time in all my relationships has a woman asked me about my past. My dad was verbally abusive. My dad was an alcoholic. He’s a great man. He worked and he loved me to death. He loved my brothers and sisters. He loved my mom. My mother has an addictive personality. My dad’s personality was extreme. Nobody knew, “Leon, you have an addictive personality. You have an extreme personality.”

Not one woman asked me about my past. They never knew that my mother was a drug addict until I told them so. “Leon, what are you addicted to? What were you addicted to as a child? Why were you addicted to porn? Do you like older women? Do you like me? Do you like short hair? Do you like lipstick? What do you like?” We don’t talk about those things. The love language is important. You need to ask him about his love language. Ask him about his past life, his exes, why did they break up and how long?

These are interviews. You have to do it. We date, we go to dinner, we go to movies, we look at each other’s eyes, we hold hands, we flirt, I drop you off, get you the next day and we start over. Other things we don’t talk about are seasons and reasons. Stephanie, what season are you in? “I’ve been divorced for a while. I’m in my early 30s. I’m starting a podcast. My season now is great, my podcast and interviewing people. I want to travel here but I want to get a better microphone. My followers are up to 100,000. I want to get monetized on YouTube.” That’s your season.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Most people do not talk about relationship vows. Many never even heard of relation vows.

What can I do as Greg to bring better energy to your season? “Let’s go check for some microphones. Let’s go look for somebody who can edit your content. I found somebody.” We’re working together. You ask me, “Greg, what season are you in?” “I’m getting into fitness now. I want to lose 15 pounds. I want to compete. I want to run a marathon.” We’re understanding that I like what you do and you like what I do. Now, it’s not a problem. When I see you doing a podcast next Wednesday and I want to go to dinner, I’m like, “My girl told me that she’s doing a podcast next Wednesday. I’m going to go get her dinner while she’s on a podcast. When she’s done, we’ll go. Or as soon as she’s done, I’ll order her a fruit basket.”

The thing is it’s about understanding your partner, the season and why they’re in that season. Sometimes you’re coming out of the season because you lost a baby, you got divorced, your child support or alimony went up. That’s his season right there. The financial season is a little jacked up. Are you going to be able to work with him on that?

The thing is being open and honest upfront, “What does Stephanie like? Stephanie likes cantaloupe, kiwi, pink nail polish,” or whatever. You have to know your partner, the components of the relationship, what they like, what they dislike, their past, their mother and father’s past. If you have a son already, “When he comes over, would you allow me to discipline your son or daughter? Who’s going to do what chores in the house? Am I doing the garbage and the dishes? Are you doing the cooking and cleaning of the gutters? Who’s going to do the cars?” It’s the components of the relationship.

When we date, you date a person based on their looks and their status, car, house, job or whatever, but you don’t even know that person. You can tell a lot about a person about what they drive. They’ve got to have a BMW, Louis Vuitton bag, Birkin purses, a $10,000 diamond ring pear cut instead of something simple. Let’s go roller skating, let’s go to the park and feed the ducks. A lot of women don’t get those things because some men want to impress them with their money, their car and their house.

That’s why this show is called The Luxury Dropout because I used to concern myself with how many designer things I could accumulate, and it meant nothing.

That’s superficial. You can get a guy that graduated from UNLV, GPA, he’s a lawyer but he may not be anything. You’ve got another guy that went to let’s say Cleveland State or NYC. He’s got a decent car, a nice condo, great morals, character and integrity, and will make you feel beautiful. Whereas this guy is a graduate from UNLV, got drafted, is an MBA but he’s a jerk.

Most pro athletes are not great. Whenever I’m talking to someone that I care about, I always ask them, “How can I support you? How can I help you? What can I do to support you?” The bar is low now and men still can’t get over the bar. That’s what frustrates me because it’s the littlest thing. For example, I had this boyfriend who I broke up. He would leave me hanging until 4:00, 5:00, 6:00 on Saturday not knowing when or if we’re going to hang out. Me, being the person that I am, I was waiting, “When are you going to be off work?” He’s creating work to avoid real work, which is the relationship. He was leaving me in the wind.

How long were you dating?

It was for six months. Honestly, his mother was trying to get me to stay with him so she would make all kinds of excuses. It was a crap show. His father is a good guy but stern and throws money at everything. If there’s a problem, he would throw money at it to make it go away. He’s a generous guy. He has two other daughters with a different wife. The family is a little dysfunctional.

He didn’t know how to relate to you at all.

He didn’t know what gaslighting or a narcissist was. He got angry when I tried to show him the movie 50 Shades of Grey. He’s old-school like Italian mentality. He was like, “This guy is taking advantage of this girl because he has money.” I was like, “Why are you angry? It’s a movie. Are you okay?” He would act irrationally and he was weird about sex. Sometimes he’d be like, “Can we cuddle?” I’m like, “Yes. Are you all right?” It wasn’t anything to do with me.

Was he abused?

I don’t know. He would never tell me if he was. I have no idea.

He was closed off.

The thing is he’s a mommy’s boy in the sense that he doesn’t love his mommy like that but he talks to her every day. She goes over to his house, cleans his house and does his laundry.

That wasn’t going to last. That wasn’t going to work with you.

With me, it was like, “Can you order this for me off Amazon? Can you order Uber Eats for me? Can you order my groceries to be delivered?”

You’d have been more successful, which is negative, by being his mother.

The bar was so low that if you would let me know what we were doing by noon, I was like, “He loves me.” That is not even a thing. He’s back with his ex that terrorized our relationship, his baby momma. It was his fault too because he would lie to her and be like, “I’m not with anyone. What are you talking about? You’re crazy. Who’s Stephanie? I don’t know who that is.” He would gaslight the crap out of her. She was already crazy and went even crazier because she knew that he was lying.

I had to get a cease and desist against her and for my company. She still didn’t cease and desist. Four months later, she’s texting me and messaging me. She’s made up 50 different Instagram accounts asking me if I’m talking to him. I don’t respond but I’m like, “I’d rather eat broken glass than talk to that guy.” If I’m going to be in their life forever, poor them. That ghost of all this lying and craziness is always going to be there for them.

What messed her up is when she saw you. There isn’t any problem. She was done because what happens is he can say whatever he wants to her, “I don’t like her.” She looks at you and she sees you and you look better than her, taller than her. She can’t handle that. She’s going to do whatever she can to keep him away from you. She’ll be around until you find a man and go away.

He was like, “I would never want her. I don’t want her back. I know where I’m going to bury her body.” He’s being hyperbolic. He’s not legitimately going to kill her, but he’s telling me how much he hates her. His family hates her. The mom hates her. They have this whole drama where when she was moving out of the house when they’d broken up originally, she took footage of his mom going crazy because he was out of town.

She was trying to get her not to take all his stuff. It’s like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. She left hooks on the wall. She was screaming frantically. This girl posted the mom going frantic on Facebook for all the Italian community to see. Everybody hated her but now he’s going back to her because she’s a pick-me girl. She’s a, “Pick me. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll order your groceries. I’ll clean your house. I’ll wipe your ass.”

She is his mother. I talked about that in a book that I wrote before. I wrote a relationship book about men that look for their mother in the women that they’re dating. It can go 1 of 2 ways. They can look for a woman that acts as their mother and gives them everything, does everything, listens to him, makes sure that they’re right and doesn’t tell them that they’re wrong. They can find a woman that is nurturing, solid, strong, caring and they get used to that. They look for that in a woman. They look for those traits.

It can go either way. It can be where he wants a good woman or one that kisses his ass as his mother did. They do that. In my case, I lost my mother. I was always looking for a nurturing type of woman that could be there for me, listen to me, wouldn’t put me down, believed in me and gave me restoring confidence. That’s what I look for. I’m an independent guy. I’ve been independent since I was eleven. I don’t need you to do anything for me but if you want to, I’m fine with that. I don’t need you to wash my clothes. I can do that and I can fold. I clean up the house and do all those things. We look for that type of woman by emulating our mother, but it could be good and bad.

Talking about childhood, I know that you were born an empath. You have empathy. I had a great childhood. I thank God for that. I’m happy that I had the childhood I had. I was sheltered. Something that you said resonated with me when we were texting. You said, “Settling creates anger.” In those relationships, I didn’t get what my parents were embodying or taught me about. Can you talk a little bit about that?

You got it but the person that you’re with didn’t have that. You attract and select certain men. I’ve had all good women. I was always a bad person. My ex-wife had character, integrity and morals. She expected me to have that because she was taught that. When you meet a person like you who has character and integrity, morals and your parents are still together and they taught you all this stuff, you expect the world to be like that.

You get out there and it’s like, “You did what? How could you do that?” It’s foreign to you but people like me have been in the weeds, out here in the streets and dysfunctional as hell, that’s all I know. I look at you like you were square. You’ve been sheltered, “You don’t know anything, Stephanie. What’s wrong with you? You don’t have any street cred,” all that type of stuff. Those women are great women and they always meet the opposite.

They say, “Opposites attract.” They do but the opposite subtracts. A person that you’re meeting is going to drain the hell out of you. It’s going to take from you. You wind up being somebody that’s manipulative, vindictive, covert and all these traits, and then we make a fool out of you. You can settle with this guy because the sex is great and now you’re angry because he’s a piece of crap. You’re coming from this great family with these morals like my ex-wife and then she met me. I turned her life upside down. That’s what I say when you settle, you become angry and now you’re into it.

Women love quality time, and they love time and relationships. You guys don’t want to break it off so soon. It’s like, “We’re building on something.” Men are like, “We’re not building anything. I’m good. I’m out.” When you come from a family with morals, character, integrity and your parents working on their 35th or 40th-year anniversary, and you meet a guy like me whose parents got divorced years ago. My inner moral compass or my outer moral compass is all out of whack, spinning out of control, dysfunctional and disoriented, and then you meet me.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A lot of women don’t get the real things that matter in a relationship because some men want to impress them with their money, their car, and their house.

If you meet a guy that’s like you, it’s going to be boring. It sounds weird but when you meet a guy who’s got character, integrity, is a Christian, a family man, his mother and father probably are married for 40 years, you go to church, they’ve got the nice house, car and everything is solid. I’ve met women to tell me, “I want someone living on the edge, somebody to take me out and go have fun. Let’s go drink, run the streets and get chased by the police.” Some women want a little bit of that.

Do you remember what happened to Bonnie and Clyde?

They got destroyed. Before they got caught, they were good. Some women want that edgy type of guy, rough around the edges, that bad boy type. Look at Whitney Houston. She had Bobby Brown, had a kid with Bob. She’s dead. Her daughter is dead. Her daughter’s boyfriend and her husband are dead. She was raised in the church and she sang in church. All of sudden, she meets him. Maybe she was doing drugs before him but when she met Bobby Brown it got worse.

Women with morals, integrity and character are great women to have, but then you meet that person, you get out here and you’re like, “My mom and dad didn’t tell me this.” It’s not that they didn’t tell you but they were raised like this and this is what they saw. This is what we believe. It’s all this other stuff. You’re not going to encounter that. Then you do and you’re like, “Crap.” The bar is so low now.

I would rather be alone the whole rest of my life than deal with it again. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’ve been dating for many years. I feel like it’s been a lifetime. I’m like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

A lot of women feel that way and it’s getting worse. It’s not getting better. It’s more women than men. I know a lot of women who are professionals. It’s like, “Leon, what do I do? I’ve got a job. I’m a professional. I’ve got my own house, my own car and my credit score is 800.”

You literally described me.

You’re single. It’s baffling to me. I can’t imagine what you all are going through. You said, “I’ve done everything. I even lowered my standards.”

It’s funny because when men ask me, “Why are you single? What’s wrong with you?” That’s what they say. I’m like, “Nothing is wrong with me at all. I’m perfect.”

I see a lot of men that when they go into a relationship wanting longevity, and if they have staying power, they can have a good woman. These guys, from their 20s up to 45 years old, are still playing around. I was in a relationship but I wasn’t serious about it. I didn’t settle down. I always have great women in my life. I see women now and I’m like, “Why don’t you go talk to her?” They’re like, “No.” It’s horrible out here. The men that are single are not single really. They might not be in a relationship with one person but they’re probably in a relationship with 3 or 4 women. You won’t find out until it’s too late and you get heartbroken. Women are coming at you to pee in your car and all that stuff.

I’ll tell you a quick anecdote. I dated a Texans player a few years ago. He was married but separated. It was all over the news that he was separated, so I knew it was a legit separation. He and I were pretty close. We would go on trips and spend time together. We would hang out after his games all the time. He would get me tickets to sideline passes and all that stuff. Even over Christmas, we spent Christmas together. It wasn’t me making up a scenario in my head. We were dating.

I remember, all of a sudden, my ex-friend who worked for the Texans at the time, was like, “You can’t go on the sidelines anymore.” I’m like, “Why?” I couldn’t reach the guy. I won’t say his name and I don’t want to out him. I was like, “He’s probably busy.” It was during the Playoffs. This was when the Texans were doing something with themselves.

I was like, “It’s during the Playoffs so he’s busy. It’s fine.” She was like, “You can’t come on the sidelines because so and so’s wife says you can’t come anymore.” They’re trying to sue us. I’m like, “They’re separated.” Apparently, they had gotten back together and he forgot to tell me. When she found all our messages or whatever, he probably was, “She’s crazy. She’s obsessed with me. It’s nothing.” I don’t know what happened. I’m guessing.

They tried to get me kicked out of Texans games. This girl that was my friend was like, “Do you know how much Stephanie spends with us every year?” I was in clubs, season tickets, whatever. She was like, “She doesn’t come to the games for free. She pays for seats. He gives her sideline passes but she pays this much money every season. She has her PSLs.”

They were trying to kick you out of the whole stadium.

They had tried, so I couldn’t go to the sidelines anymore but they were also trying to kick me out of the games. This woman was threatening to sue them. I don’t know on what grounds. She was threatening to sue them because it was my fault or whatever. A couple of years later, he got traded to the Seahawks and he was messaging me again on Snapchat, the covert app. You know how it is.

He’s like, “I wanted to tell you that I’m so sorry how I treated you. It was super unfair. I should have been honest with you. I cared for you.” He didn’t love-bomb me ever so that was good but he was like, “I treated you like crap and I’m sorry.” I was like, “I appreciate that. How is your wife?” He’s like, “She’s in Los Angeles,” meaning they broke up. They don’t live together. He’s like, “Can I fly you out here?” I was like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

He sends me $1,000 and he’s like, “Book yourself a first-class ticket. I’ll bring you to the game. We’ll have fun.” I was like, “I’ll think about it.” I booked a ticket. It gets to me two days before I’m supposed to leave and I’m not hearing from him. I had blocked his wife on Instagram since back then because I didn’t want her or her friends stalking me because they were coming on my page talking crap to me. I unblocked her and she’s way pregnant with his kid, and they are still together.

When men are doing that, they’re still trying to cheat. When a man is in that mindset, they have no fear.

Bold as hell.

Bodacious and bold. No fear. I was thinking about what I was doing and I was like, “How did I even have the heart to do that?” She is pregnant.

I was like, “I guess I’m not coming up?” He’s like, “Yeah, some stuff happened.” I was like, “I’m sure a lot of things happened.” Now they’re actually divorced, and I’ve seen it. I’m like, “They are divorced because he’s a cheater. He’s horrible.” I don’t know anything about her. She could have her own problems. She went through it, for sure. She has to be attached to him forever because they have a kid.

I think about all the things that I’ve done like that. I don’t know how I had the nerve, heart or mindset. It goes to show where I was. When men are doing that, there’s some sickness too because he blocked everything out, “What if I get caught? What if she finds out? I’ll make up a lie and she’ll be fine. She can stay. She’s not probably going anywhere.” He wanted you. She’s not going anywhere. In his mind, he’s like, “We’re going to get divorced three years from now. I’ll pay her. I want Stephanie.” That’s how they do it.

Pro athletes are off my list. We don’t play that game anymore. My mom says to me, “The more you have in common, the better it is.” I’m like, “I thought opposites attract.”

Opposites subtract.

I need to be with someone as learned as me that has done as much self-reflection and work as I have.

That’s why we talked earlier about how he needs to know what you like and what you’re doing. It’s a support thing. When you’re doing a podcast, “How can I help you with your podcast? How can we get your viewers to go from here to here? How can I help?” You say, “Maybe he wants to open a carwash or whatever. Let’s think of a name. Let’s get an LLC. Let’s get a sign. Let’s go look for land. Let’s go look for a lot.”

Your mother is right. I was with a woman for a long time and we had nothing in common. When you don’t have anything in common with anybody, you’re not compatible. There’s no chemistry. Being physical with each other sucks. You’re unhappy. You don’t listen. You take turns talking and don’t communicate. The more you have in common and the more you talk, you talk about seasons and reasons, love languages and relationship vows, you’ll be fine.

Loveship: Friendship, Courtship, Companionship, and Leadership for a healthy relation

Speaking of that, Leon, how can we support you? How can my readers support you?

I would like people to ask me questions. When I post a video, it starts off slow and sometimes it just goes. I asked to be here. God put me on this journey. I go in because women have questions that they want to know answers to. It takes me days to get through all of them. Sometimes, I won’t get through all of them. Support-wise, as far as asking questions, I don’t mind commenting. I’m cool with that but always ask questions because I like to help people. I try to get to all of the questions that I can. It may take me days and I may not get to all of them because then I post another video and that may post other questions. I enjoy it. Thank you, Steph, for having me. I enjoyed being here. You have a great show. It’s good.

In 2019, I did 37 interviews, radio, TV and podcasts. I was driving from Chicago to Cleveland because I’m from Cleveland. I had a PR, “You’ve got an interview in Cleveland on Wednesday 9:00. Can you get there?” I’m like, “Yes. This is about my first book.” I’m telling this because these older people have had these podcasts for years. You remind me of those good ones that were doing well. You engage with the questions. You need to stay right where you are with the show and look for some good people to interview because you’re doing a good job.

Thank you so much. I’ve been trying to get Ginger on my show. She’s the Loving Me After We. She reposted your video on her grid. That’s how I found you.

Is that on Instagram?

Yeah. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her to get her on my show. Maybe she’s looking for monetary opportunities and that’s why she’s not responding. I would love to speak to her because a lot of what she posts resonates with me. The fact that I found you through her means a lot to me because I’m happy to know you. I would love to continue our friendship.

You can always reach out to me if you have any questions. I would ask you to do this. If you meet a guy say, “Leon.” I do that for my female friends now and they’d be like, “No.” I make them think. I’m like, “He’s taking you to dinner?” She’ll go, “Yes.” I’m like, “Where is he taking you?” “We’re going to go to Hooters.” I said, “You better not. If he’s taking you to Larry’s, Gordon’s or Mike Ditka’s, better. He’ll get you a $100 tomahawk steak and he pays.”

It doesn’t have to be fancy but not Hooters.

Thoughtful but not Hooters. Hooters is for him, not for her.

Put some thought into it.

I said, “You let him take you to Hooters?” This is a friend of mine who’s retired in the Navy and she’s an entrepreneur. I said, “Let me talk to him.” Whenever you have any questions, Stephanie, because you know I’ll give you the truth, reach out and say, “What do you think?” I got you.

Thank you. I do have one more question for you. It’s something I asked every guest on my show. If you were walking down the street and you saw twenty-year-old Leon walking towards you, you gave him a big hug. After you left his embrace, what is one thing that you would tell twenty-year-old Leon?

At twenty, I had been in the Navy for two years. I would tell him to stop being promiscuous.

That’s a good one.

I was stationed in San Diego with palm trees and women. It took twenty minutes from Mexico, Tijuana, deploying to Australia, Singapore and Thailand. At twenty years old, I have been exposed to a lot of women and a lot of places. I would tell him to stop being so promiscuous. Meet a good woman and keep her.

That’s good advice.

When a man goes to the military, we get exposed to the world. They rolled out the red carpet to a nineteen-year-old little boy and he got to pay for nothing, women and liquor.

I feel like God put you on this path to get to where you are now.

I went through all that stuff. I got here and I got to continue to perform. That’s why I know women are like, “You’re triggering me.” I have women come up to me and I’m like, “I’m sorry.” The next thing you know, they’re like, “Okay, Leon.” When they come at me and I’ll be like, “Go ahead. Get it out. I get it.” I don’t meet them with fire or attitude because I know I’m a trigger. I remind you of your ex because your ex has a bald head, your ex had a beard or a big nose. I look like your ex. I get it. Go ahead and let me have it.

You do look mine, for real.

It’s been two other women who said that and I’m like, “I’m sorry. Let me apologize to him.”

You don’t trigger me at all. You empower me.

Thank you. I’m glad I can do that. Anytime you have any questions, reach out. I like helping women. I like helping men too because they have some issues with women that they don’t know what to do or how to handle. I talk to people every night. I got phone calls coming in at night. When that video went out, I wasn’t ready for anything viral like that.

That’s TikTok for you. There’s nothing like it.

Reach out. Let me know. You’re doing a great job. You made it fun and engaging. You ask some thought-provoking questions but you have a good show because I can see you going up and up.

Thank you. That means so much to me. I’m excited. I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you. Bye.

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That’s it with this episode with Leon. I hope that you enjoyed that. To be honest, I feel like a different or changed person after that conversation. We probably could have talked for another hour. We spoke for two hours. It could have been more. Leon and I will continue to be friends. He even told me he was going to vet the guys that I want to date. I’d be happy to send over the resumes as they come rolling in.

What a great guy. To be able to talk so openly about his past, his discretions, his dark times, and be able to listen to me and to what happened to me as well is truly something special. I hope you bonded with him just like I did when you read this. I hope you’re going to take away something with you, a lesson learned, something that will appeal to you in the future and you will say, “I remember reading on The Luxury Dropout. Leon was talking with Stephanie, and this came up.” Also to be able to use it in your everyday conversation.

It’s an important topic to keep in the frame of your mind. If you’re watching on YouTube, please like, comment and subscribe. Let us know your thoughts. Have you been with a narcissist? Have you yourself been the narcissist and are also recovering? Are you in treatment or therapy? What are your takeaways? If you are listening on any streaming platforms, pls leave me five stars. I’d love the feedback from you. I’m glad that you’re here. That’s it for me. I love you, guys. Until next time.

About Leon Walker

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is more common than you think. Who knows, you may be in a relationship with a narcissist right now and simply not aware of it – or just afraid to admit it. For Episode 2, our guest is decorated Naval Veteran, author, and speaker Leon Walker. In this first part of his conversation with Stephanie Joplin, he talks about the manipulative telltale signs of NPD, pointing out why it is one of the main causes of domestic abuse and toxic relationships. This eye-opening episode is also not free from triggering topics, as Leon walks down memory lane to unravel his experiences with NPD. Listen as he dives deep on his many traumatic experiences, from being molested as a child, dealing with porn addiction, suffering from PTSD after his Navy service, and the many encounters with self-proclaimed empaths.

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Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Red Flags and When to Walk Away With Leon Walker, Part 1

Leon and Stephanie discuss the hot button topic of narcissism in romantic relationships. Stephanie reveals one of her biggest secrets.

I do want to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this show, letting you know that this is a trigger warning. You could possibly be triggered by something that I am saying, that Leon is saying. I don’t want to scare you away from it, but just in case you have experienced gaslighting, you’ve been with a narcissist, this could be triggering for you. Please, audience discretion is advised for this episode.

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I spoke with one of the most interesting guests you will probably ever come across on a show. He is a former narcissist. He is a recovering narcissist and has made a difference in many people’s lives by speaking out on platforms like TikTok and Instagram about the signs to look for, what to do if you are dating a narcissist, some of the red flags to look for when you’re out in the dating game, what to expect from a narcissist about gaslighting, all of these buzz words, hot button topics. What the difference is between someone who’s manipulating you and an actual narcissist.

We even go into some of my own personal experiences in dating, and actually my experience with dating a narcissist and how deep and dark that journey went. Let’s get right into it. This is a long episode, and debatable that it might need to be split up into two episodes because the content is that fire. Let’s go ahead and welcome Leon Walker to the show.

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Leon is a 32-year Navy veteran. He is a Command Master Chief. He is an author, motivational speaker, TikTok and Instagram legend. He is booming. I was excited to sit down with him and hash things out and get into the mind of a narcissist, and understand where these behaviors come from and how to protect myself and how to best approach the dating world nowadays. It’s not fun out here in these streets anymore. You’ll hear a lot of good information. This one is very important for all women and all men to read. No matter what you identify as, no matter who your partner is, even if you aren’t a great relationship, I highly recommend that you educate yourself.

Without further ado on this subject, it is truly fascinating, truly important, something that’s relatively new when it comes to psychology and relationships. I do think that taking this knowledge with you and being able to help a friend, hypothetically, it would be really important.

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I want to welcome a guest that I’ve been looking forward to speaking with. His name is Leon Walker. Leon, welcome to the show. I’m so pleased to have you.

I appreciate you having me.

We “met” on social media when one of the accounts that I follow posted one of your IGTVs. It was talking about how you were a reformed narcissist. It piqued my interest because narcissism is such a buzzword, even with the Gen Zers all the way through to the Millennials. I don’t know about the older generation than me. They don’t talk about it a lot. If I talk about narcissism with my parents, they’re like, “What are you talking about?” It is a hot-button topic. You honed in on a subject that’s triggering to a lot of people but also, they want to know more about it. Tell us the story about how you jumped online to start speaking about this.

Broken: A Memoir

What happened was I started posting on Instagram and Facebook back in 2016 talking about life. I started with fitness and things like that. I wrote my first book called Broken. It’s about my childhood because I was dysfunctional. I was molested, had addictions at a young age, and I lost my virginity by the time I was eight. I wrote a book about it, then I found a PR.

A friend of mine read my book and he’s like, “I know a PR. You need a PR.” I’m like, “I was just writing a book. I didn’t think about ever writing a book.” I did a book tour in 2019 and it started going from there. I stuck with the childhood dysfunction thing, being molested and all this stuff, which is a big deal as well. All of a sudden, I started talking about relationships in 2020.

I said, “Let me tell people what happened to me, who I was, why I was cheating, why I was lying, why I was deceptive, how I messed up all of my relationships and my marriage.” I posted a video about my narcissistic ways. I was afraid to talk about it. I’ve been talking on social media for years but this one was deep, but I had to face my truth. I had to face my issues. God put me on this journey. I tell people that there was a time when I didn’t believe in God and I was believing in the devil because he gave me what I thought I wanted in life.

It was making me sick. I wasn’t healing mentally and physically. Going back to my PTSD and all the other issues I had when I was retiring, I was seeing psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists and social workers but nobody was giving me answers but I knew something was wrong. By posting the videos, I knew that it started catching on. People want to know about these things. That’s when I was like, “I need to keep talking about this.” Because of me being a narcissistic guy or having narcissistic traits and never been diagnosed by medical officials because they misdiagnosed me, I had to read myself.

I had to look up and research. I was looking at all these categories, malignant, covert, seductive, vindictive, vulnerable, narcissistic. I’m like, “This is me but I’ve been hiding this stuff for years.” I was wondering why I was messing up all my relationships because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. They misdiagnosed me. The video is helping me and other people. The video is therapy for me because people are like, “How long have you been in therapy?” I was in therapy for seven months in 2015. My therapy is talking to you. My therapy is helping men and women daily. That helps me out. That’s where it started. It started growing and growing.

I know you’ve gotten a lot of support. Do you ever get any people trying to cancel you all the time or not really? Are they mostly support?

What happened was I haven’t had anybody try to cancel me but I have a few women who always say, “You triggered the hell out of me. You triggered me but I need to hear this.” There was one lady that had a platform. She’s saying that there are a lot of men out there who are in this narcissistic group who are doing certain things. I’m like, “I’m not one of those dudes.” I’ve been talking about narcissism for a long time but I haven’t. I’ve been living it, talking about relationships but I didn’t know why I was screwing them up. I haven’t had anybody try to cancel me yet. They’ve been responding but it hasn’t been brutal at all.

It’s such an important message, but you never know how people are going to respond especially men. I feel like men could come for you in a way and be like, “What are you talking about? This is all psychobabble.” People don’t believe in psychiatry. A lot of men don’t believe in psychiatry. Usually, those men need to do a lot of work on themselves.

When I talk about these things I’m talking about myself. There was a time where I would always preface my videos and say, “I’m talking about Leon,” because I would have guys like, “You’ve given up the man code,” then they unfollowed me, but I stopped caring about this. I don’t even say, “I’m talking about me.” I do and say, “I’m in character and this is what I’m talking about.” They’ll unfollow. I’ve had a lot of men reach out to me and say, “Thank you. This is helping me.”

That’s so nice to hear. I want to go back to the beginning and let everyone know that you spent 32 years in the Navy. Are you a commander in the Navy?

Command Master Chief.

That’s a pretty high rank if I’m not mistaken.

What happens is the highest you can go in the Navy is Command Master Chief. Master Chief is E-9, but there are three other levels from Command Master Chief. Force Master Chief, Fleet Master Chief and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, so the highest you can go is E-9.

Congratulations, that’s fantastic. Even before that, you talked about having a hard childhood. You and I have talked about your relationship with your mother being strained and how she self-medicated. She probably had some issues. You’re not sure what they were. She was a little absent in terms of not noticing that things were going on with you like your babysitter, for example. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Throughout my Navy career, I will talk a little bit about it because I was still embarrassed to say, “I was molested by my cousins,” first was when I was five. I was afraid to talk about losing my virginity at eight. I was afraid to talk about being addicted to porn at seven. I was afraid to talk about a male member of my family touching my private area.

The further I moved up in the Navy, there were other people like me who had those issues. I said, “Let me share a little bit with them and see how it works and how it helps them.” I started helping people when I was sharing my story. I then became more confident in telling my story and seeing how it’s helping people prevent them from committing suicide. I too had suicide ideations as a child when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Narcissistic people don’t like to lose. They have to win by any means necessary.

My mom didn’t know because I was afraid. When I did my book tour, I met a lot of people, a lot of psychotherapists and psychologists, and they want to know about my story. I started looking up. I started doing a lot of reading and research on child molestation, dysfunction, how divorce affects a child and things like that. This number could be different by now. I found out that 90% of the perpetrators are somebody you know or trust. This was in 2019.

The key thing was 80% of the cases go unreported. The people that I was interviewing with in the podcasts, TV shows or radio interviews, nobody knew. Even the psychotherapists didn’t know why 80% of the cases go unreported. My reasoning for not reporting and not telling on anybody is because first of all, I didn’t know how to report it. When my babysitter was molesting me, she helped me with my pain in my parents fighting and arguing. She helped me get over the fear of my father coming home drunk and beating my mother. My mother is shooting at my father trying to kill my father.

She helped me to master that pain and I suppressed it. She was giving me money, quarters, food, and she was having intercourse with me. I decided not to say anything because I didn’t want it to stop. Eighty percent of the cases go unreported because that child develops a relationship with the perpetrator. It can be because the child is not getting anything from their parents.

My parents are great, don’t get me wrong. Being bullied doesn’t have an outlet. My outlet was to be in love with my babysitter, that’s why I didn’t report it. A lot of young men and women don’t report it because of fear of retaliation, fear of the family not believing them, or fear of losing that person showing them what we think is love.

I know that a lot of people don’t report rape when they are in a relationship because they’re like, “He’s my boyfriend. She’s my girlfriend. We have sex all the time. Who’s going to believe me?” It’s the same idea. I understand that.

It’s not just kids but older adults that are in abusive relationships and are afraid to report. Sometimes, they don’t even believe that it’s happening to them. They don’t believe that they are abused.

We’ll have to touch on that a little bit later. I was telling you that I had a relationship with a narcissist and that’s exactly what happened to me. Please continue with your childhood.

My dad was always working. He worked at Ford. He was gone a lot but he was there. He provided. My mother was the one who has given the parties, the birthday parties and all that stuff. She was there. Between the 5th and 6th grades, my parents’ divorce started. When you’re going through a divorce, the male is asked to leave the home. He left, so there was no discipline in my household.

When my father left, probably 80% of the family income was going too. We didn’t have lights, water or gas during the divorce proceedings. We barely had food. I’m going through this thing where I’m addicted to porn, being molested, I’m hungry and angry. I have anger issues. I’m starting to steal. Everything was compounded by the time I was twelve years old, and being bullied by a male member of my family.

Once we lost our house in the sixth grade, my family was split up. That was the end for me because I was on my own. I was sent to live with a lady that I didn’t know. I got to know her. My mother and brother moved to a hotel. My sister was sent across Cleveland to live with another lady. By the time I was twelve years old, I was on my own. My mother eventually got us back when I was thirteen, but we were living in a one-bedroom apartment and there were four of us.

From 1st grade to the 6th grade, I wet the bed so much that I couldn’t sleep in the bed. I was put on the floor. I think that wasn’t abused. I couldn’t sleep in the bed because on the top bunk, I would always wet the bed and it was tripping down on my brothers, so they put me on the floor. Now I’m sleeping on a piece of carpet from probably the 1st grade to the 6th grade.

Was that anxiety-induced? Do you remember?

What happened was I started getting therapy in 2015. The social worker asked me a bunch of questions. I was in therapy for seven months, “Tell me about your childhood.” I started telling her and she said, “Do you realize that you were abused?” Even at 50, I didn’t process that I was abused. I had no idea. A symptom of abuse is bedwetting. That’s when I found out. I didn’t know, so I was wetting the bed.

I didn’t either. If you’re wetting the bed, do you remember a feeling of anxiety at all? Do you remember anything?

It went from peeing on the bed to peeing on myself when my father came home. Anxiety was there. I love my dad. I still love my dad. He died in 1999 as an alcoholic. When he would come home, I knew something was going to happen. Either I was going to get a spanking or he and my mom were going to fight. My anxiety levels were extremely high. It was all of that. It went from peeing on myself or peeing on the bed to just peeing because that was the only outlet. I had no control over it. I didn’t realize I was abused until I was 50.

I have generalized anxiety. I didn’t know what that was. It runs in my family. From kindergarten, I have a memory of being anxious. Now, I can define it as anxiety. I didn’t know what that was until I was maybe 30. I was like, “Why am I feeling this feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’ve got to go to the bathroom? My heart races. I feel like I want to rip my skin off of myself.” I read about it and I was like, “What is this?” Finally, it was anxiety.

A lot of things come with that. I stopped washing up. I stopped brushing my teeth. My teeth are turning green as a kid.

That’s depression.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Many young men and women don’t report rape because of fear of retaliation, fear of the family not believing, or fear of losing someone showing them what they think is love.

I didn’t know what to think about. I didn’t know about depression, anxiety, PTSD, abuse, none of that. I’m going through life. I joined the Navy later on and I’m still going through life like this. The only thing is I started washing up, brushing up my teeth and stop peeing on the bed, but I still had these issues from my childhood that I’d never got help with.

At the time, the stigma of having a “mental disability” or a mental problem made you cuckoo. “You’re crazy,” that’s the thinking of the older generations. I’m sure that if you had told your parents, “I have anxiety or I’m depressed,” they would have been like, “Get out of here.”

I’m glad you brought that up because when you get a chance, look up the USS Stark. When you pull it up, you’ll see a picture of a ship sinking and it’s on fire. I was 21 years old and I was on a fire team on another ship on the USS Reid. We had to go render assistance to USS Stark. We were in the Persian Gulf that time for four months. It got hit by two missiles. I’m telling you the story because as the leader on a fire team, you had to go fight a fire. It’s like we’re a firefighter. When we got there, we had to fight one fire. When you look at the picture, you’ll see the smoke coming from the ship. That’s the fire we put out, but there were 37 men who were burned to death.

Did you see that?

Yes. I had to walk around with a plastic bag and pick up fingers. You have no choice. I tell you this story because I had to go see a psychiatrist then. I was on that ship for twelve hours putting bodies in body bags, picking up fingers, feet, and peeling people off the deck that were burned to death. When we peel them off, a part of the arm will come off. We decided to peel them off and keep going. We put them in body bags and carry them. It became my norm. You can smell burnt flesh. Have you ever smelled burnt flesh before?

When I burned myself, yeah, but not dead burnt flesh.

This is a distinctive smell. After we left, they flew us back off from that ship. We caught a boat from that ship to my ship and towed that ship back into Bahrain. Finally, when I came back in San Diego, we had to go see a psychiatrist. I went to see a psychiatrist for two weeks and I stopped. It’s like, “Either we can continue seeing you and process you out of the Navy, or you can stay and keep taking medicine and try to remain in the Navy.” I said, “I’m not coming back,” and I left.

My thing was I didn’t want to keep going to see the psychologist because people would make fun of me. They will call me crazy. That’s when I knew something was wrong with me because I still have nightmares because of that. I have a bunch of pills that I take for sleeping disorders and nightmares. I didn’t know there was such a thing as taking pills for nightmares. I didn’t find out that I had this severe PTSD until 2015 when they misdiagnosed me with everything else. I didn’t want people to make fun of me for being cuckoo or crazy, so I stopped going to the psychiatrist and I kept this.

Especially being military too, not only the generation that you were in but the military specifically. You may get fun of. You get, “Come on. What is it?” It’s basically saying, “Are you even a man? What’s wrong with you?”

You hear those things. Maybe the type of person I was back then, and I’m still this way, outgoing, social, funny and making jokes. I was always joking with other people. Now, if I go back to the ship and they process me out, they will make fun of me because I’m crazy. I was losing my mind because even now, I have to sleep with the light on. I can’t sleep in darkness. I still have nightmares about that incident that happened in 1987.

I was in a car accident. Sometimes, I’m on the road and I panic about it, but that was a car accident. No one died. I can’t even imagine what that was like for you.

We had to see men stacked up on each other burnt. Facial features are burned off, even to the side of their neck. Arms snapped off and bone sticking out. At 21 years old, I wasn’t ready to see that. The thing about it is we got there and we’ve got to carry the bodies, pick up body parts, peel people off the deck, put them in the bag, take them off and ship. It was like handing off meat. We’re handing off bodies.

That’s someone’s husband or someone’s son.

One lady was there. She had come to Bahrain because her husband was retiring. He was going to fly back to California. I never got a chance to talk to him. He was one of the first bodies we found. He had been burned in his bed.

God rest his soul. I can’t imagine.

That’s why I didn’t continue seeing the psychiatrist because I didn’t want people to call me crazy.

I know you said you have this porn addiction. Were those magazines? What was that?

No. Those were straight-up movies like 8MM. A family member started showing me those movies. That warped my little mind. I started seeing men and women, black men and white women, black men and Asian women, Latina, everything. What that did to me was it looked at women as being docile and subservient to be dominated. That’s what I saw. I talked about this in my book Broken where my family member drilled a hole in my mother’s bedroom wall, which was adjacent to the bathroom.

My mother, father threw parties every Friday. We would watch the women come in there to undress, adjust their bras and use a restroom. I would sit there and look through it. I was 8 years old, 9 years old. I started seeing things at a young age that I shouldn’t have been seen, the body parts of developed women. Now, I’m seeing how women are looking at 30, 35 years old.

Narcissistic people pay attention to what you’re not getting and weren’t receiving.

Young girls my age couldn’t do anything for me because I saw well-developed women. Instead of being with these young girls and maybe riding a bicycle or playing sports, which I did, I looked at them and they couldn’t do anything for me because they weren’t fully developed. Now, I developed a sense of loving, liking and being attracted to older women. With the porn, I saw women as sex objects and just toys. It did start coming out because I had watched porn all through elementary school.

I didn’t have any in junior high school because we moved so the 8MM cameras were gone. However, once I get into the Navy, the images of the porn and what I saw came back to me because we deploy to go to Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippine Island, Hawaii, Hong Kong, now I’m seeing these women that I have access to and the porn came back to me. I looked at women as, “You’re just sex to me and nothing else.”

It’s like a way to cope.

That’s all it was. I was suppressing things. I was lusting for women. My cousins and babysitter had hurt me. I didn’t want to hurt women physically. I’m not a physical type of guy to hurt women but I was hurting them verbally. I was hurting them by dating them and leaving them. I was leading them on, I lied to and deceiving them. I use them as objects, as toys. That’s all I knew.

Did it turned you on to degrade them a little bit?

Yes. When I was a child, I saw women being degraded. They will be smiling and performing. I’m like, “This is what they do.”

“This is what they like.”

That coupled with losing my mom or my mom sent me to live with another lady. I had emotional issues dealing with emotional dysregulation and detachment issues. I didn’t want to love. I don’t want to hold, hug, cuddle or hold hands because I lost that nurturing from my mom. As I got older, I never regained that. I joined the military and I was like, “Why should I hug a woman in the Navy? Why should I hug a woman in Thailand?” I’m not. It’s just sex and that’s it. I’m not going to hold your hand. We’re not going to cuddle. That damaged me and my relationships because I never liked to cuddle, hold hands or hug. I didn’t want to hug because I was dealing with emotional detachment from my childhood from my mother giving me away.

Hand in hand with that, I want to talk about how oftentimes for me, specifically and I’ll speak for myself, I can’t speak for everybody. A lot of the times people will say that they’re the best sex of their lives was with the most toxic guy, the most narcissistic guy. That was what happened to me until I realized that it was because that was the only time I had his full attention. His full what I thought was love. He was touching me. He wasn’t a holding hands type of guy either.

We never connect like that. The reason why narcissistic people are so powered up sexually is that means they have power over you. Especially if you say, “I like this. I like that. My last boyfriend didn’t do this or didn’t do that.” Narcissistic people pay attention to what you’re not getting what you weren’t receiving, not from your ex but your parents or your dad. In our minds, we become better than your ex. In our minds, we become your dad. You don’t even realize because you’re being love-bombed and sex-bombed.

The narcissistic person when it comes to being seductive because they are seductive narcissists and they are vindictive narcissists, what they do is make their energy levels extremely high when we know that you need us for sexual purposes. We study. I studied women in porn to hurt women outside of porn. I studied women to understand their bodies better than they knew her body.

When I do that, I can control their mind. That’s what narcissistic people do. They study everything about you physically and mentally. They won’t tell you because they want to win. We want to win at any cost by any means necessary. Their highest level of energy and I call this the energy light zone when it’s a sexual thing. We’re not holding hands or cuddling, we want to please you sexually because that does please us, you definitely know that afterward that if you want to cuddle, that’s pleasing you. We don’t want to do that. Narcissistic people are selfish needless to say. It’s all about us, what we want and what you need and our ability to give you what you need just to control you.

It’s interesting what you said about control because I’m sober. Not that I’m an alcoholic or recovering. I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I also don’t like the taste of alcohol, for example. It’s not something I was ever into. Don’t get me wrong. I went to UNLV for college so I definitely drink not because I liked it but because I was peer pressured into it. When my ex and I were dating, oftentimes if there was a night where we were staying all night, he wouldn’t force it down my throat. He was like, “Come on. Do this.” There was this drug called GHB. It’s a roofie. He’s like, “It’ll relax you. It makes you relaxed.” I’m like, “Okay. I could try it.”

He would give it to me to make my inhibitions go away then he would have more control over me. I was not addicted to it but I almost got addicted to us having sex on it or being together on it because he was loving to me on it. It lowered his inhibitions and he was able to express more even if he didn’t mean it. He would be like, “I love you so much, Stephanie. You’re the one for me.” It was the drugs making you happy being on ecstasy or something.

Had you held on and told him, “No.” Sometimes he’d find other people.

He would have been pissed off.

They get mad because they don’t like to be defeated. They don’t like for you to tell them no. If they have to add a roofie or anything else or lie to you, they’re going to do whatever you need to do to feel like they are winning and have accomplished something.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Most narcissistic people are very complimented. They’ll tell you nice things. They’ll charm the hell out of you. They know what you want to hear.

He would do the domination kind of stuff in bed with the choking and things like that. I was okay with it. I consented to it. There was one time where I wasn’t consenting. He was in my home without my knowledge. He’d come inside hiding in my guest room. I came in and he was like, “Why aren’t you answering the phone?” As soon as I take the control away, he’s like, “That’s not okay.” He’s waiting for me in my home. For some reason, us fighting turned him on.

That’s the switch because now he triggered you. That controls the trigger. It’s making it intense and keeping intense. As sick as this may sound, after doing that they’re going to try to be very seductive. While the argument is going on, while you’re fighting, they get turned on. They start hugging and kissing you. Next thing you know, you’re having sex.

What happened was I didn’t want to have sex with him but my body was reacting to the whole relationship. My body wanted to have sex but my mind didn’t want to have sex. When he grabbed me and he started touching me, he’s like, “You’re turned on.” I’m like, “I don’t consent. I don’t want to have sex with you,” verbally but my body’s saying differently so he took that as a green light. I tried to record it on my phone. He threw the phone across the living room and he ended up choking me and having sex with me against my will.

Ultimately, I did go to the hospital and report it but funnily enough, the SBU detective was like, “You said you guys had sex the day before. You allowed him to choke you then so the marks on your neck could be from that.” I told that officer, “You’re the reason why people don’t report.” I told him that straight up.

He could be a narcissist too. I’m not saying a lot of people are like this but I’ve seen people like this. When you report it to a certain person and they see the marks, that can turn them on too.

Maybe, I don’t know.

When I was writing my book in 2016, it was graphic. I describe the scene with my babysitter. The publishing company told me to pull it out because pedophiles can read it and get turned on.

It’s important to the story.

I did the best I could to convey what I was trying to say. With self-reporting, those people can get turned on, too. There have been doctors that have touched women, that were raped or put them to sleep and touch them inappropriately. You have to be careful with that, too.

There is nothing exciting about a raped kid. Nothing at all. It is absolutely horrible. I’m like, “Please stop touching me now.” The funniest thing for me for going to the hospital to report, I was by myself because my sister was 8 or 7 months pregnant. I didn’t want to tell her and then my parents were obviously wrapped up in their own thing. I was like, “I’ll drive myself to the hospital.”

When I got there, I was walking up to the desk and I was like, “I have to tell them what happened to me. I have to say the words.” You don’t want to admit it to yourself because that’s your boyfriend but then you’re just like, “I have to say the word rape. I have to say that because otherwise, they don’t know the importance.”

You have to say those words like now, dealing with narcissistic people, you have to call yourself out. You have to say, “I’ve been abused. I’m being stupid. I’m being used. I’m being lied to.” If you don’t, you’ll keep going and think it’s okay. That’s the problem, definitely.

I’ve never talked about this publicly. People that are in my inside circle know but I want to put this out there and let people know that I was manipulated. He was seeing another girl on the side and I was like, “He’s not. She’s being crazy. This other girl’s making it up.” I remember he and I were in bed one time just laying there, this girl walks in the door and she’s like, “We had sex there earlier today.” I was like, “Whatever. You guys didn’t.” I got mad at him like, “Is she telling the truth? Did you guys have sex today?” He kicked me out.

This is the manipulate part of the way that I was. A manipulative narcissist will tell the truth and make you think that it’s a lie but it’s the truth. They hope that you think it’s a lie and they’ll laugh. I’ve done that a lot. I’ll go, “You’ll go sue somebody?” In my mind I’m saying, “I just warned you,” but I don’t say that.

Narcissistic people are very selfish. It’s all about them and what they want.

When I do it, when it comes out I’ll say, “I told you that two months ago.” She’ll go, “You did.” Now, you’re not going to get rid of me and be mad at me. You’re going to give me another chance because women like honesty. In my mind, I made you think that it was a joke or lie but it was the truth because of my facial expressions and the way I laughed about it when I told you. That’s a very manipulative and dangerous way to come across a woman that narcissistic people do.

I thought it was funny that he had cheated on me and then he kicked me out for asking if he cheated on me.

At the time, he didn’t answer the question because he knew that had he answered the question, you would have probably broken up with him or left. This thing is, “Let me kick around now because I win.” I tell people all the time, narcissistic people have to win by any means necessary. They don’t like to lose.

He kicks me out, I drive off and then he’s calling me to come back.

He’s not ready for you to defeat him. They’ll call you back because you left, you got away. They say a serial killer is somebody that kills three or more people. We never talked about serial cheaters. Somebody that cheats three or more times, 1 time, 2 times. I call myself a serial cheater because I related myself to a serial killer. I wasn’t killing females, I wasn’t hurting anybody but I was killing hopes and killing dreams for 3 or more people, probably 50 or 60 women.

We never talked about serial cheaters, which is what I was. People are like, “There’s no way.” How can I not be one? I’m being honest. I have nothing to hide. I don’t want to hold this back anymore. I was a serial cheater. The manipulative part of me could have been saying that to women before so that could be easy for me to seduce them. It was a tricky way of doing it and talking to them and getting what I wanted. “You’re so honest. Leon, it can’t be true.” It was true. We never talked about serial cheaters.

That’s true. I used to cheat when I was younger but I feel mine was because I had bad self-esteem. If I was with someone, I was like, “Men still don’t like me, I need to make sure they liked me.” That was my reason for cheating. I had bad self-confidence.

You wanted somebody to pay into you, to talk to you, compliment you and make you feel better. With this guy, he’s not doing that enough. It’s like, “You need to feed me. I’m vulnerable.” This guy, he’ll say, “You’re beautiful. You’re cute,” whatever. You’re lured to him and you leave the good guy but because you have self-esteem issues and it’s not their fault. I get that too.

My ex-husband, I’ve been divorced for many years. Before we got married, he’s like, “I’m the only one who’s going to love you. Who else will love you?” We were both so young. I got married when I was 22. I was a baby, in my opinion. I don’t blame him. I did mess up stuff too but what I think happened is because of that, that was in my head.

Anytime anyone would pay me attention, I didn’t cheat when we were married but before we were married, we were engaged and he cheated too. I don’t know what his reasons were. I can’t speak for him but I would want to look for any guy that was like, “You’re hot.” I’m like, “I am? I’m hot? Let’s go make out.”

As soon as you do that, that’s when he’ll start to abuse you, use you or maybe not. If he’s a narcissist type of guy and you fall for that, which a lot of women do, that’s when it starts. Most narcissistic people are very complimented. They’ll tell you nice things. They’ll charm the hell out of you. They know what you want to hear.

What I used to do is it was all in my conversation. I listened to what she was saying. If she didn’t think she looked good and she told me that, I told her that she looked good, she was hot, beautiful or pretty. I’m feeding her ego while she’s stroking my ego by being all in my face and listening to me and continuing the conversation. Next thing you know, we’re off and going into a hotel or in the woods, somewhere.

Anywhere. I remember with my narcissistic ex, wanting to please him sexually all the time. It’s like, “Let me do this for you.”

A lot of women do that.

I don’t know what the deal is but it’s not necessarily what you physically look like but it’s like a spell that a narcissist has.

It’s how they make you feel. In 1991, in February, I woke up that morning and said to my girlfriend, “I don’t like you. I don’t love you and I’m going to cheat all over the world.” I was 24 years old and so I did that. I was all over Japan, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Many women don’t ask about a man’s love language, and a lot of men don’t ask that. This leads to a relationship mismatch.

What did she say though?

I left that morning at about 7:00 and headed to the ship. She started crying, she hit me and I walked out. I was like, “I don’t like anymore.” I called back a month and a half later at 5:00 AM and a guy answered the phone in my apartment with my girl.

I bet you lost your crap.

I lost my mind. The first time I had cried and I don’t know how many years. We were in Japan at the time we pulled back into San Diego, May of ‘91. Normally, when a ship pulls in, the families are on the pier. The girlfriends, husband, wife, she wasn’t there. She came to see me hours later. Now, she took the control back from me. She started telling me what to do because she had her hair cut. She had on lip gloss, eyeliner, always looking good. I’m like, “You look good.” She’s like, “Don’t compliment me because they don’t mean anything.” Long story short. I wind up seeing a picture of this dude that she fell in love with and I call him an ugly guy but he had her.

He took her from me because he was doing the things that I wasn’t doing. He was holding her hand. He was complimenting her. He was hugging her. He was buying little gifts. I’m a provider for my girl but he was doing the little things that I wasn’t doing. He was telling her he liked her and he loved her. When I told her I didn’t like her and I didn’t love her, he did the opposite.

When I got older and got into my manipulative and narcissistic ways. I started remembering what I did to my girl and what he did to her to take her, I pushed her into his arms. I started being very manipulative too back in the ‘90s. I studied these traits. When he started doing the things that I wasn’t doing, he swooped her right off her feet and I was devastated. I lost my mind.

I bet you were so angry.

I still talk about this now when I talk to people about relationships, about not hurting your girl if she’s vulnerable because she tells me she’s vulnerable and I’m like, “I don’t care about you people.” When a woman tells you that, listen. You got to step your game up. You got to change something. You got to be more supportive of her, understand, listen and communicate. I wasn’t doing any of those things because I’m like, “We both look good. Sex is great.” That was it. I wasn’t doing anything else.

I could take her on a nice weekend and shower her with gifts but when it was time to be intimate or kissing her on the forehead, holding her hand, walking through the park or walking through the mall holding hands I’m like, “I’m good.” She was needing that so everything else I could do didn’t matter. The money, cars and the nice apartment didn’t matter. She didn’t feel like we were as a couple. She didn’t feel close to me because I kept a distance.

I’m an empath. Unfortunately, I trust a lot of different types of personalities. With my ex, he had no money. He had just gotten out of prison and I’ve known him for ten years. How we started even hanging out was he had an ankle monitor on and had to stay at home. I was like, “I’ll come to visit you.” It ended up escalating from there and I didn’t plan on it.

He didn’t have hardly any money except for the drugs that he was selling, allegedly. It was always me buying the things, doing the things and the gift-giving. Trying to fix him, help him, trying to get him job interviews and driving him to a job interview and things like that. Have you had any experience talking with people who are self-proclaimed empaths? What do you think about that?

I get a lot of women. Not inappropriate DMs but conversations about being an empath. Here’s the thing with them and with you being an empath. What you forget is that and I talked about this in the video I posted, it’s not that you attract these people. it’s that you select these people. What happens is where you get lost at, a lot of people including myself, I know now but years ago, I didn’t know what my love language was. Your love language is probably acts of service, communication, physical touch. It could be more. You meet people and women do not ask a man about his love languages. They don’t.

I do now. Before I didn’t.

If he says, “My love language is receiving gifts.” Probably selfish as hell.

9 out of 10 it’s physical touch, literally.

Physical touch and that’s for him, not for you.

That’s what he likes to receive.

If he stops there, you can believe that you’re not going to get much out of a relationship.

You’re in one box.

We talk about the seductive narcissist energy level is up when his love language is physical touch because that’s what he wants to do, what he wants from you, how he wants to control you. The physical touch goes into his narcissistic trait of being seductive and being manipulative. They all intertwine with each other. A lot of women never asked the man what his love languages are.

You have to know what the love languages are if you want to get together with somebody.

I do now so that’s a great conversation because you get to know a person either you’re compatible, you have energy and not compatible. You don’t have chemistry, you have chemistry, whatever but a lot of women don’t ask about a man’s love languages and a lot of men don’t ask that. What happens then is you have a relationship mismatch. You’re in it and he’s out of it. You’re all the way in and he’s halfway out. He’s never in.

I talked about the love languages, seasons and reasons and things like that. You have to know the love languages are if you’re going to get with this person. Empaths and I talked to the woman that called me or text me about that, I say, “Do you know what his love language is?” She’ll go, “No,” because you’re a giver. You’re a provider. You support, you protect and you’ve given this to a person who is pretty much a 35-year-old child. In the end, when he’s all running around and leaving, you give him everything and he doesn’t want to stay in a relationship and he’s treating you’re like, “What happened to me?” Women always say, “What did I do wrong? What’s wrong with me?”

Nothing. You’ve done nothing wrong.

This person that you chose, it’s not that you’re attracted to that person, you selected that person. You want to rehabilitate them, train them, nurture them back to good health and here you are. Your heart’s broken. You got wrinkles on your eyes, you got bags. You don’t think this can hurt anymore. You make yourself unhealthy. You’re eating garbage. You’re not working out. You’re drinking and smoking. All because this person that you selected, you tried to rehabilitate. I get that a lot. That’s one of the main things I get in my DMs about, “Why doesn’t he like me? Why doesn’t he love me?” He’s incapable of loving you.

I’m sure our readers now are feeling personally attacked by what you’re saying.

I get that. I am not trying to trigger anybody. I’m telling you all the real deal, the truth. When I first did that video, it’s like, “You trigger the hell out of me.” I’m like, “I can’t help it. I’m going to trigger you. Not on purpose but what I’m telling you is the truth but you cannot see it because everything I’ve done, a majority of women in this world have experienced.”

You need to be self-aware. I used to say my love language is words of affirmation but it is not. I thought it was because I love to hear all the sweet sticky stuff. That’s not my real love language I like quality time.

I talk about that too but a lot of the empaths contact me like, “What’s wrong with me, Leon? Why doesn’t he like me? Why did he go to this other woman and not me?” It’s not you. I did this. A lot of times I went to the other woman because it was a path of least resistance. She wasn’t going to stand up to me. She wasn’t going to say anything. I come and go as I please. I was never physically abusive but I was verbally abusive. Made and watch her cry then she apologized to me after I made her cry.

“I’m sorry that you didn’t,” I’m like, “Whatever. I’m out again. I’ll be back in three hours.” When I met a woman that didn’t take that from me, I was very uncomfortable. I didn’t like it. I was like, “I feel like a little boy. I don’t have any control.” The only thing they’re going to do is cheat. They’re going to go find somebody who’s going to stroke their ego, build them up and make them feel good. All because he met a woman that was good for him, good to him, strong, supportive and all of that but narcissistic people can handle that.

Why do you think that six cycles of toxicity is so addictive?

It’s because they give you a little bit of what you want and you’re like, “This feels good,” then they disappear. Your last boyfriend didn’t do it. We listen to what you say. We listen to what your last boyfriend or your ex-husband didn’t do. We listen to the fact that your dad wasn’t there. You don’t know how to do this. You want a daddy. You want to look up to a man. You want to take care of a man. Your father was gone. You feel he’s been absent all your life. You don’t know how to understand a man.

He’ll say, “This is what you need to do.” Now he’s teaching you because you want your dad to teach you but he couldn’t because he was gone. He died, he was in jail, he was on drugs but your mom is saying this and this. “Mom you chose my dad so how can you tell me?” Now you want to listen to this guy. They give you a little bit and make you feel good. They’ll stroke your ego. It’s playing on all of your emotions.

Are you talking about breadcrumbing? I’m talking about that cycle of, it’s super high-high and then it’s super low-low.

When it’s super high-high, that’s when he or she is at their best and then what happens is they feel themselves getting close to you then they move out of the way, you drop, fall and hit the ground.

Like your analogy with the amusement park.

There you go. The amusement park playground. That’s exactly what it is but then we’ll come back and get you so you feel like, “He’s still here. He does like me.” We hold you and pick you up then right when we feel we’re getting a little close to you and you get too comfortable, “I need to put you on a sliding board. I need to put you on a merry-go-round. I need to put you on the see-saw.”

I feel like I’m laughing so I don’t cry.

It always goes back to my childhood. Being emotionally detached, dealing with emotion dysregulation. Scared to love, to hold and to get close to you because, “My mom left me so you’re going to leave me one day.” I’ll get so close, draw you in and make you feel good to make me feel good. If I feel like I’m getting too comfortable or you’re getting too comfortable, you call me babe, you text me all day. “I’ve got to cut this stuff out. Get off the sliding board, fall on your ass. Get off the merry-go-round, bump your head. I’ll come back and save you. Let me hold you and nurse you back to health. Baby, I’m sorry,” and it starts all over again.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: It’s not that you attracted that person. You selected that person. Now you want to rehabilitate them.

It’s hard to see a friend go through that because I had a good friend and it was pretty well known that she was in a very abusive relationship. He tried to kill her. He’s serving prison time. It was this relationship of super high highs and low lows. Every time he would beat her ass, he would have the day after where he would take the day off work, stay home, take care of her, massage her feet, get her blankets, watch their favorite show and it was fine for a week. After that, he would bang her head against the dash of the car and knock her teeth out again. It was a cycle.

I saw something like that. This MMA fighter and that pretty girl.

That’s who it is.

I was like, “How do you hit a woman?” He beat her like a guy and he’s a trained killer.

She’s very tiny. She’s 5 feet, at the time she was 105 pounds and he was easily walking around 200, 210 pounds at the time.

He’s an MMA fighter. My sister and I talked about that like, “Did you see this?” I’m looking and I’m like, “Jesus.” It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a cat and mouse. They have fun with it and then when a narcissistic person becomes drained and participated in that, they’ll find a different person because a different person is starting over with new energy with them.

He found a wife from prison. He’s married and the woman has a kid and brings the kid to the prison to see him. My mind is like, “I can’t.”

I saw his name tattooed.

I don’t know what he did to cover it up but he had her last name across forever. I was called to testify in that trial. It was so crazy. Thankfully, they didn’t end up meeting me but I was going to be there to help, no matter what. Going back to what I was saying, I knew that he was doing that to her but she’s not the type that’s going to tell me, she’s just not. I knew he was verbally abusing her because I heard it myself firsthand. I was in the car with them when they would fight and he would talk so ugly to her.

When the district attorney’s like, “Did you ever see any bruising?” I’m like, “Yes but it could have been from a coffee table.” I don’t have a first-hand account of him physically hitting her because he hid it. That’s a whole different ballgame. My narcissistic relationship was different because he’d never hit me physically.

I’ve never hit any of my girlfriends either. I used to pride myself on saying, “I’m not taking her money. I’m the one who gives some,” but I was taking her heart.

What advice would you give to say a friend of a friend if they witnessed this cycle of abuse going on or if they feel any inkling? What advice would you give to that friend to talk to their friend about their partner? Is there anything you could say?

You have to give her examples of other people who’ve gone through this. You have to tell them about the end result, which could be death, mental health issues, rogue, being permanently scarred, somebody may throw acid in your face and make you look ugly so that nobody else can have you. You got to be real with them because they do those things. Cutting her hair or things that happened to your friend. As the end result, you got to paint a picture for people.

Important Links:

• Leon Walker
• Broken
• Video – Leon Walker’s Instagram
• @LeonRWalkerJr – Facebook
• @Iinspireone – Instagram
• LinkedIn – Leon Walker
• YouTube – Leon R. Walker Jr.

About Leon Walker Jr.

Command Master Chief Leon R. Walker Jr. hails from Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in the inner city of Cleveland and East Cleveland where he struggled with numerous set-backs, downfalls, learning disabilities, addictions, lack of confidence, low self esteem, losing his home, and his parents divorce. Leon, through his trials and tribulations, became self-sufficient, driven, focused and wanted something out of life, so by the age of 13, he worked several jobs to take care of himself and help his family.

Leon ultimately graduated from Shaw High school in 1983 from a class of 466 students, however, of those 466 students, Leon was the only to take the military entrance exam (ASVAB) 5 times, he was also the only one to fail it, four times. He eventually passed the military entrance exam on his fifth try, by 1 point. He scored a 31(the minimum) out of (a maximum) of 99. That 1 point would change his life, forever. Leon attended boot camp at Naval Station Great Lakes (then Naval Training Center) in November 1983. He at-tended Seaman ATD (now Boatswain’s Mate “A” School) from January 14,1984 until March 14, 1984.

Upon completion of Seaman Apprentice training School, he reported aboard USS Reid (FFG 30) stationed in Long Beach, California in March 1984. The ship then changed homeport to San Diego. Master Chief Walker spent two years in deck division and became a Quartermaster (Ship Navigator) in 1985, without any formal schooling. He was promoted to E-4 and E-5 onboard USS Reid and completed numerous tours to the Persian Gulf.

In May 1987, while patrolling in the Persian Gulf, his ship was called to assist the USS Stark where his firefighting team fought fires then recovered and transferred 37 de-ceased Sailors that perished in the explosion from two missile attacks fired from an Iraqi aircraft, in the Persian Gulf.

In December 1987, Master Chief Walker was discharged from the Navy, and returned to Cleveland, Ohio where, after 72 days, he returned to the Navy.

In March 1988, Master Chief Walker reported aboard USS Mahlon S. Tisdale (FFG 27). In 1989, he was selected as Sailor of the Quarter, and Sailor of the Year, ranked #1 of over 80 other candidates. He spent four years onboard and was promoted Quarter-master First class (E-6) in December 1991.

In June 1992, Master Chief Walker reported to Navy Recruiting District Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1994 he was selected as Recruiter of the Quarter, and Recruiter of the Year, again, ranked #1 over 144 other candidates. After his four-year tour in Cleve-land, Ohio, Master Chief Walker reported aboard USS Carr (FFG-52) in 1996. Master Chief Walker spent four years onboard and was selected as USS CARR Sailor of the Quarter, and Sailor of the Year.

In addition, he was selected as DESTROYER SQUADRON 2 Sailor of the Year, Regional Support Group Sailor of the Year, and then, COMMANDER NAVAL SURACE FORCES ATLANTIC Sea Sailor of the Year where he was ranked #1 of 25,000 eligible Sailors. He was ATLANTIC FLEET SEA Sailor of the Year finalist in 2000, finishing #2 of over 100,000 other Sailors.

Upon completion of that tour, Master Chief Walker reported to Quartermas-ter/Signalman “A” school in Great Lakes as an Instructor. In 2000, he was selected for Chief. In 2001, Master Chief Walker became the Leading Chief Petty Officer of Sea-man Apprentice Training and Signalman “A” school. He Led 18 Instructors, that trained over 10,000 newly reported Sailors.

In April 2003, Master Chief Walker was selected for Senior Chief Petty Officer, that year, there was only 7 selected Navy-wide, out of 149 eligible candidates. Master chief Walker then reported to USS Kearsarge (LHD-3). In March 2004, Master Chief Walker attended the Air Force Senior enlisted Academy, and was selected as the Vice Presi-dent of over 400 Senior Enlisted Academy students. Upon completion of the 7 week course, he reported back to USS Kearsarge and served three years there. He was ranked #1 of 21 Senior Chief Petty Officers.

He was then selected for Master Chief in April 2006. That year, the Navy only promot-ed 2 Senior Chiefs out of 19 to Master Chief, Master Chief Walker was one of those se-lected. In October 2006, Master Chief Walker was selected to become a Recruit Divi-sion Commander (RDC/Drill Sergeant). He was selected to the Command Master Chief program in February of 2007, completed RDC school in April of 2007, where he led two divisions of recruits, comprised of 176 newly reported civilians, and in Sep-tember 2007 he accepted orders to USS Lassen DDG-82 homeported in Yokosuka, Japan where he led a crew of 300 Sailors.

Master Chief Walker served for two years onboard USS Lassen, and then reported as the Command Master Chief of Naval Station Great Lakes where they employed 10,000 Sailors and civilians. In 2010, Master Chief Walker, and his fellow Sailors started men-torship program at a local elementary school for various 5th graders, teaching them numerous life skills. In November of 2011, Master Chief Walker was informed that he was a match for an African American woman suffering from a form of cancer. In Janu-ary of 2012, Master Chief Walker was transferred to the local hospital in Washington DC, where he underwent a very painful, but extremely rewarding stem cell procedure, where the Doctors transferred 700 million stem cells from his body over a period of 6 days and into the body of the woman he was a match for.

Upon completion of his tour at Naval Station Great Lakes, he was selected as the Command Master Chief of Naval Service Training Command where they employed 42,203 Sailors and civilians. Master Chief Walker retired on August 7th of 2015, and in January of 2016, he was hired at the Chicago Military Entrance Processing Station where he managed 4 civilians and 4 Sailors processing 80-90 Sailors per month into the Navy. In July of 2016, now retired Master Chief Walker was selected as Civilian of the Quarter of over 80 other civilians, and In September of 2016, retired Master Chief Walker was hired as a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (military Instructor) NJROTC, where he was responsible for teaching, leading, mentoring, and grooming 120 high school juniors.

His awards include the Meritorious Service Medal (2) Navy and Marine Corps Com-mendation Medal (4), Navy Achievement Medal (2) and numerous other awards.

In retirement now, retired Command Master Chief, Leon R. Walker Jr is now a Motivational speaker and advisor on many topics to include:
• Developing mindset
• Relationships
• Mental toughness
• PTSD
• Child Abuse
• Domestic violence
• Health
• Overcoming Addictions
• Drive and Passion

In addition to being a speaker, Leon R. Walker Jr is an Author of three books and more following. His books that are in print are:
1. Broken, The Survival Instincts of a Child. Released in April 2018
2. Keeping kids safe from Porn, Released in November 2019
3. Loveship. Friendship, Courtship, Companionship, and Leadership for a healthy relationship. (To be released in December or January- 2020/2021.

His contact information is:

• Facebook: Leon R Walker Jr
• website: www.iinspireone.com
• Instagram:Iinspireone
• Linkedin: Leon R. Walker Jr
• Youtube: Leon R. Walker Jr
• Google: Leon R. Walker Jr