5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities

I love Bill Eddy’s books and really enjoyed reading this one. And I love the 90% rule offered.It is an easy read that explores how those disguised as awesome, charming, smart, popular, productive, successful, and talented may be extremely toxic and dangerous. It addresses how they miss detection, how they connect with certain-others, and how they positively present themselves. It describes how they later engage in efforts to destroy their targets of blame, and offers how to identify toxic personalities and how to protect yourself from them.I have found that most don’t seek out truths like these until they’ve experienced the toxic’s destruction, and only then to self-improve. Most want to understand their role in it, how it happened, how they misread the toxic’s motive and agendas, and learn how-to prevent it from happening again while protecting themselves and others.I have learned so very much reading Bill Eddy’s books and I frequently visit his website ‘ highconflictpersonalities.com ‘ and subscribe to his on-line articles. I absolutely recommend this and his other books, and his website articles, classes, and tools, etc. to all who enjoy public service, or who mediate, represent, or judge, or who are in a position of authority (supervisors, leaders, clergy, parents, etc.), and to those who simply enjoy helping others.The End.

Seriously. Just do yourself a favor and read this book. It will help you pick up on behaviors that can save you endless time and energy dealing with toxic people and people who could potentially ruin your life. It also has wonderful tips on how to deal with the different personality types in unavoidable situations. There’s probably no book I recommend more in my day to day life than this one.

I really like the practical format of this book, but I don’t think it’s possible to say that someone who had repeated bouts of bad luck with employment has automatically a HCP (high conflict personality). I think toxic working environments are more common than the good ones so asking around for proof of “problem personality” can be simply an exercise in confirmation bias. Sometimes you don’t know what environment you are walking into and the motivations behind your hire. In one of my jobs the plan was to pit me against a person they wanted to manage out. But things worked the other way around/ I left instead. Now my former colleague will happily say something negative about me, but if the person inquiring is the author then he may conclude I’m an HCP too!

This book was fabulous, absolutely magnificent. Not only did it demonstrate how to identify high conflict personalities amongst you, it gives you detailed information on how to deal with each type/subtype. Not everyone in the world is straight up and honest, there are people who are dramatic and live to watch people squirm. This excellent book covers all those who want to watch the world burn. Highly recommend, especially for work.

I read another review that said people seek information about this topic after they have been burned. That is true for me and the results were catastrophic. Advice from the book is to not confront the difficult person but placate them because to confront them may feel good in the moment but in fact you have become targeted for bullying and destruction and things get so much, dangerously, worse. I find an entire roadmap in this book of what just happened to me and it is helpful after the fact to help make some sense of the devastation and loss. I only wish I had known sooner so this pain could have been avoided. This book is easy to read and gets to the point. My thanks to the author.

Terrific book, wish I had read it 10 years ago. I just left a job where a person with both narcissistic personality disorder and border line personality disorder spends her days tearing down excellent people to boost her mediocre self. Six months of that, daily, including on weekends as she never stops emailing, and gets offended when her emails are not answered in 5 minutes! I found this book and finally understood what she was doing, and that she could not be helped at work, the best thing was to leave, so I did. Thankfully, the job market is hot and I got another job within days, but how sad that one very ill individual is destroying the workplace for so many people. I have recommended this book to all of those who remain there, and have already received two emails from people thanking me for giving them a game plan on how to deal with this sick individual. Thank you Bill Eddy for your insights, they are valuable to all in the workplace.

There’s some internal repetition as well as repetition with this book and his others which was a little disappointing. At the same time, understanding Eddy’s practical methods for dealing with high conflict people (HCPs) and effectively putting those into practice are two very different things. It takes a while to internalize his proven methods and this book does an excellent job of keeping it all simple and straightforward.

This small book explains in detail how to handle very toxic people. Most books describe difficult people, this book also give really good examples on how to politely slip away from them at any gathering.