Toxic People Are Attractive Until We Understand the Language of Addiction

“Rick Von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.” Nick Smith , Metropolitan Nick Smith is a character from the 1990 movie Metropolitan , and he makes a good point: Toxic people are always attractive. Why is that? Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that so many of us in our society are raised by toxic people; and what we know, we gravitate toward. Many of us grew up in households where addiction was a problem. Dad was an alcoholic and mom was codependent on his addiction, or vice versa. We watched and we learned. Addictive behaviors became the norm for us. We didn’t like them, but they became familiar and comfortable. The older we got, the more we learned we could hide behind addictive behaviors and we gradually developed our own addictive personalities. As we grew toward adulthood, we subconsciously recognized the signs ...