The Behavioral Corner

Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano. And this is the Behavioral Corner; you're invited to hang with us, as we discuss the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and wellbeing. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while.

Steve Martorano

Hey, everybody, how are you doing? Welcome to the Behavioral Corner, Steve Martorano hosting guide here on the Corner. What we do? We talk about, well, it's a podcast about everything. That's what the Behavioral Corner is about. It's about behavioral health. And that is everything. It's all the stuff we do, the decisions we make, the situations we find ourselves in. How we react to them, and how that affects us emotionally, physically, and psychologically. we do all that thing and we're really lucky here on the Corner because we keep running into fabulous people who have terrific stories and life experiences to share with us. And then we share them with you as soon as you come out of the bodega across the street and hang with us on the Behavioral Corner. So made possible by our great partners Retreat Behavioral Health. So here's the story today and unfortunately, you know, at the end of the day, all of these stories are worth listening to, even when they're not particularly happy stories. We've had the occasion to talk to people in horrible circumstances with substance abuse and all kinds of difficulties mental issue wise, but at the end of the day, they're here to tell you that they've survived that. And we certainly have a survivor today. Erin Riley has had a fascinating career in entertainment. She has been an event producer, she's a media executive, she had a rock and roll school, community theater, and years in broadcasting, which is where friends of ours all intersected. And that's how I come to know Erin. A lifetime of self-sufficiency. Really. This is a woman who could take care of herself. So she's here today to talk about what wound up being the worst experience of life, I'm guessing in a toxic relationship of the first order. And she joins us to talk about that because she hopes it will be a cautionary tale. So Erin, thanks for joining us on the Corner. Did I get most of that? Right?

Erin Riley

You certainly did. Thank you so much, Steve, and thank you for having me.

Steve Martorano 

It's our pleasure. So, you know, we don't have to go into a real deep dive on your background. I think I summed it up pretty accurately. This is this marriage you were in, that ended so horribly. How did it begin? How did you meet this fellow?

Erin Riley 

Well, I was about 40 years old; this was a second marriage for me and I met this gentleman online on Match.com, I guess that was 1999, so 22-23 years ago, in the very early days of Match.com, so online.

Steve Martorano

Yeah. Well, you know, what used to be a huge stigma attached to that, who would do that? I would always be of the mind. Are you kidding me? The idea is to meet people why don’t you go where the people are. And they're all online. There's nothing unusual. But did you feel funny meeting somebody under those circumstances?

Erin Riley

It was not my actually my idea to go online to meet somebody, I actually did this to help out my assistant. So, I was working with a young woman who had just broken up with her boyfriend and she was thinking, “Oh, I'm never going to meet anybody,” and I said, "Why don't we try that new online thing together?" I did it as support for her and I was the one that ended up meeting someone, she actually met somebody in real life.

Steve Martorano

So from the contact online, to, you know, the meetup, and then a relationship. How would you characterize that period of time before you got married, the courtship? What was the courtship?

Erin Riley

Well, our first date, I will be really honest with you, Steve, I felt something a little off on the first date, I felt as though there were there was some secretiveness or something that didn't really add up and that's an important thing to take note of, because you've got to trust your gut when it comes to making emotional decisions for yourself because your brain will tell you a bunch of lies. So that said, the first several dates were just as romantic as you could possibly imagine. Flowers, Tiffany bracelets, trip to Hawaii, you know, just all the most romantic things. It felt like he was hanging on my every word, just like, "I'm just drunk on you. You're so interesting." Much later, I find that is what they called "mirroring," and they're studying you. You know, this gentleman was studying me to try and match up with all of my likes and dislikes so that I would think that I had met the love of my life, but it was very carefully calculated.

Steve Martorano

Yeah, we're gonna find out how you discovered that because that's a that is not an uncommon story. People that are disturbed in a relationship sense, are calculating and they're operating on a different wavelength, but somebody listening to this, maybe another young woman would go, "Well, you know, your gut was telling you from the jump, watch out. If you're so smart, how come you were overwhelmed by the romantic stuff?" You look back at that and go, what a dope I am?

Erin Riley

Um, yeah, a little bit. But you know, everybody comes into a relationship with their own set of baggage, especially at age 40 like I was, you know, all my past experiences from childhood and my first marriage, and your brain is super powerful, your brain can convince you of anything that you actually want it to. So you will sort of override your own gut reactions to say, well, this person is handsome or generous or reliable, or has a good job or a nice car or is so attentive or whatever, and that's your brain, making a list of things to convince yourself, to sort of rationalize away what you're...

Steve Martorano

Absolutely, yeah. It's a great example of confirmation bias. No one goes into a relationship looking for it not to work. So you begin looking for evidence that it is working, even if the evidence is sketchy, or non-existent. And this is important for people to know that because otherwise, it sounds like well, how could that, that couldn’t happen to me… it could happen to anyone. You rationalize your way through whatever misgivings you might have had. How long did you date or live together before we decided to get married?

Erin Riley

Well, we didn't get married for about five years, but we did live together within about a year and a half. So the first year and a half was all of, you know, romantic flowers, love bombing, beautiful everything. Let me help you with your house and everything you need, I'm at your beck and call. So that went on about a year and a half and my soon to be husband convinced me that we should move in together, but I'm the one that owned a home and he rented a home, he was also divorced and lost his house and everything in the divorce. So I owned my own home so he convinced me to sell my home and then we went in on a home together, but he had no money to put down. I'm the one that put down all of the money with my house sale. But he had a decent job, so that's how we were able to qualify for the mortgage that was the additional amount of money we needed to get the house. So that was about a year and a half, and from that day forward, everything just started to go downhill. There were more fights, there was more manipulation, control, triangulation with his daughter, and, you know, negativity and arrogance coming out and stonewalling and silent treatments, weird behaviors that just completely changed once he had everything set the way that he wanted where...

Steve Martorano

You're now convinced that his goal was to entangle you financially.

Erin Riley

Absolutely. 150%, yes.

Steve Martorano

Yeah, yeah. And then the mask came down. And you began to have problems. Now we're characterizing this as a "toxic relationship." And I know at the end of your story, it'll be clear to people why we call it that. But listen, I would guess that financial disputes if they're not the number one, marital problem, they're certainly in the top five. So when did you begin to go, well, I think there's something else going on here. You know, when did you go from just a young woman who's having a bad relationship to someone going, you know, there's something going on here that I'm not really paying attention to? Did that happen immediately, incrementally? Tell me about that.

Erin Riley

Well, I don't mean to correct you, but we did not fight about money at all. So I willingly, lovingly put all my money down on this house because I wanted the beautiful, you know, romantic story of a family. So it would be myself, and my soon husband-to-be, my son from my first marriage, his daughter from his first marriage, and we would live happily ever after with a yard and a puppy and everything. So there wasn’t fighting about money; the first fighting happened mostly about his relationship with his daughter from his first marriage. He would set she and I are up against each other in competition for his attention. And so that was what we would fight about. In fact, that's all we fought about for the first several years, was the way that he raised his daughter to mostly be afraid of me and view me as competition for her. And he also had very inappropriate behaviors with his daughter, and he would lock himself in her room with her in the evening for daddy-daughter alone time, we would fight about that, basically. So that's what we fought about. And we fought about that for many, many, many, many years. I think over the time that we were together and fighting, he realized that one of my biggest childhood injuries is not feeling seen or heard. So that's what he started to do was started to withhold supportive statements, not reply to me, take a big long pause, What are you doing honey? -------------------------- <<long pause>> -------------------------Nothing, you know. So he would recognize that that would create frustration in me and then that's where he would exert his control over me is to kind of make me feel insecure, so I would walk on eggshells.

Steve Martorano

What's interesting about that is, again, if you've not been there and done that, I imagine you sit and listen to a story like that and go, "Well, does a building have to fall on you? He was manipulating you. He was setting you up, to behave in a way that he wanted you to and not the way you truly felt. Now you were married for how long before this thing came apart completely?

Erin Riley

We were together for 20 years and we were legally married for 15 years...

Steve Martorano

Fifteen years.

Erin Riley

...and I would say it was about 17 years of time together before I really realized, you know that I was in a very hopeless and dangerous situation...

Steve Martorano

Yeah.

Erin Riley

...escalating at lightning speed.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, I'm gonna get into the specifics of what you've learned as a result of that 15-year process, you know, but before that, just to end, that story -- which never really ends -- can you talk about what was left in the wake? I know, there was a gigantic financial hit you took in. But just give us the thumbnail of the wreckage?

Erin Riley

Well, let me also just say that the behavior of a person with narcissism is intermittent. So you get little nuggets of you know, I might bring you coffee, and you're like, “Oh, isn't that sweet,” and then slam something terrible happens. So that does feed into that cognitive dissonance in your brain where you're going, Well, maybe it's not that bad, they just brought me coffee, or they just gave me a lovely birthday present, or whatever that is. So that's kind of how it can get dragged out for a period of time before you really realize. You'll see individual characteristics like boy that person's really depressed or arrogant, or dependent or negative or whatever. But you just think about the individual characteristics as separate and not altogether as a pattern of behavior.

Steve Martorano

This is not who he really is. These are just ways he's behaving. Because after all, you're right. He's nice over here, but he's not nice over there. So you know, you took an awful financial hit.. 

Erin Riley

Yeah, so I can tell you about that.

Steve Martorano

Yeah, go ahead.

Erin Riley

So he and I decided we were going to retire on an island off the coast of Panama. And we built a house over a period of eight years out of beautiful local hardwoods in the Panamanian rainforest jungle, overlooking the Caribbean, just a beautiful home, that was going to be the payoff for my entire life's hard work and the dream I'd had since I was 15 years old to retire at the beach. So we each put all of our money into it, you know, whatever money we had access to, from our work lives and we invested and invested and invested and we created this beautiful, beautiful custom home with gorgeous stained glass and just gorgeous things, that we were going to retire peacefully hopefully, and he constantly promised me, you know, I'm going to be different in Panama, I'm going to be happy in Panama. It's because it's so stressful here, and I don't like it, and it's cold and people are mean, and I'm going to be so happy then. And so of course, I want to believe that, you know, I have all this time spent in, all this money, and it's escalating, and it's getting worse and scarier and I've seen, you know, dissociative moments with him, where I really thought he could hurt me. Like I thought in a moment, he could absolutely hurt me in a major way. So that all said, they call that future faking. So, he was actually setting up this entire thing so that he could get away with basically pulling the rug out from underneath me and taking all of it. And that's because his father was a federal judge, so he really understood the ins and outs of legalese and setting up the Panamanian Corporation we needed to do to create this home and this property, and he was also fluent in Spanish, and I was not. So it's probably why he chose Panama is so that he could actually get a Panamanian bank account, transfer the money down there. Get the corporation started. I found out seven years into the process, that he had set up the corporation to give himself a majority interest in the corporation in Panama without telling me. (He) Made himself president and the secretary and I was the vice president and the treasurer, and the secretary had signing privileges. So he gave himself permission to sign for me to give me a minority interest in the corporation, and I never knew.

Steve Martorano

In your own money, he was giving you a minority position.

Erin Riley

That's right. 

Steve Martorano 

And I only mentioned the money because I knew you were going to draw out the details of how methodical a personality like this is. This psychic and the emotional damage, I don't think we have to go into. I should ask though, was he ever physically abusive to you?

Erin Riley

He was never physically abusive. But I will tell you, Steve, that the mental and psychological, and emotional abuse that I suffered is just as bad if not more so, because it goes on longer. If somebody hit me, I would know to leave, okay. But if somebody is constantly projecting that you're cheating, or blame-shifting you, or not answering questions, or gaslighting you and challenging your reality, you just get confused, your brain turns to mashed potatoes, you can't make a decision, you're afraid to do anything, you know, and it goes on a whole lot longer. So coercive control is actually something that people in Europe are actually suing for now and winning court cases on this because it is so psychologically damaging to a person, it's like taking your soul away. So these people, they really can't regulate their own emotions, and they don't really have empathy, so they just suck it from another person, basically. And so yes, it just, destroys who you are as a person. And I've been working very hard for the last two years to recover myself and I'm happy to say that I feel really great now, I really do.

Steve Martorano

And I would suspect that that's one of the reasons you decided to speak out publicly about a bad relationship. Because you're right, there is the obvious damage that's been done to your finances, and your emotions and everything. But the...listen, with luck you build up, money's money. The other thing is harder to build back up confidence, trust, all of that damage, most of this relationship, I get it. So I know that you went on a quest, not so much to figure him out. But to figure yourself out, we guess, like, how did I get involved in this? Who was that guy?

Erin Riley 

Yes.

Steve Martorano

Where was he at? What level was he operating on? And you've arrived at what a lot of people are now talking a lot about this notion of malignant narcissism. The number of times we've heard that beginning, you know, and it spreads across the culture from entertainers to presidents of the United States who exhibit this behavior. And so it's not so much a new thing, it's probably been around forever. But it's certainly one that's now been examined. And I know you've examined it. I know you have taken a real Look at that. What did you come away with looking at what a narcissist is capable of?

Erin Riley

Well, I will say that not all narcissists look like potentially former presidents or are malignant or grandiose narcissists, or like an OJ Simpson, or someone like that, or Don Draper or somebody. You know, that you look at and you go, well, there you go, that person really is outwardly arrogant and clearly cold-hearted and out for themselves. You can see it. Well, my husband was not like that at all, he was like Eeyore. He was like a sort of a little sad sack. He had a sob story. He was very shy and hardly spoke at all, and, you know, seemed kind of agreeable, and kind of a nice, quiet guy, so they call that Covert Narcissism. And, it's the same patterns of behavior, but it's a lot harder to recognize, and you can get in a whole lot deeper before you realize what's going on.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, yeah. Now I really got to get to the meat and potatoes of this, as I said, at the introduction, that you're not here just to let your hair down and tell us what a bad time you had. You want to help if you can, and let other people know. And you were first to point out, you know, this is not just a female thing that guys can run into this personality type as well. So, share with us some advice or sign, red flags, that you might tell folks in this kind of relationship to keep an eye out for.

Erin Riley

Okay, well, first and foremost, trust your gut. Right? Your intuition is there to tell you what's right for YOU. You know, when you're born as a little infant, you're completely blank, you have really no -- no knowledge of anything, you’ve got a supercomputer in your head and it's just downloading all of your surroundings. So, you know, it's getting from your caregivers and your surroundings, how you get your needs met, etc. Basically, that's when your intuition is being developed as we're starting to grow. You know, when you're a young child, you can even be an infant and you know, starting to have an understanding about if you cry, does somebody come to bring you food, you know, or then how do you get your needs met? So, that is the most important and hardest to put a finger on aspect here is, trust your gut. If something feels off, it's off. If something seems too good to be true. It is. It is.

Steve Martorano

Yeah.

Erin Riley

That's not a normal way people get together, the way people get together is, they build trust in a relationship over time. So if somebody starts bringing you flowers and telling you you're the greatest thing in the whole wide world and starts to escalate the relationship to move very quickly on a fast track, either we're living together or we’re intimate very, very quickly, those are signs to look for. If you find yourself making a list in your head about all the good qualities they have, okay, you're rationalizing. If you find yourself repeating, well, but they're really nice, they did this terrible thing but they do this and this and this, and this and this, you're in trouble. So... right?

Steve Martorano

Yeah. It was interesting when you begin with the trust in your gut, it sounds metaphysical. But it really isn't. You know, that's almost an evolutionary thing. That gut is the same instinct that told people millions of years ago, to run.

Erin Riley

Right. There's a bear coming.

Steve Martorano 

There's trouble here, run, flight, or fight syndrome. And now because we don't like to think of ourselves as animals, we want to rely on our reasoning. And then as you so perfectly describe, the instinct is overwhelmed. Because you're going to think your way out of this, you're going to rationalize your way out. I mean, it's a really instructive description of what happened. So, and I don't know whether you've to avail yourself with it, but I know you want to maybe start your own thing. But there are lots of groups and organizations now that are set up just to deal with people who are in this crisis. Have you availed yourself of any of them?

Erin Riley

I found many, many helpful people on YouTube, believe it or not, for free. So that's what I did with my pandemic year is I studied narcissism, codependency, and the unique relationship between those two personality types. You know, a person with some level of codependency like myself, we're other-focused, we want to help people, we want to fix people. We don't want to even really have needs. We want to be focused on meeting other people's needs. You know, caregivers, etc. And people with narcissistic, high level of narcissism, either narcissistic personality disorder or very high level of narcissism, those people are self-focused. So, what a perfect combination. So there are, there's a woman named Dr. Ramani on YouTube, who is a psychologist or psychiatrist, I believe, and she is well-versed and that's her specialty is narcissism and sociopathic personality types, etc., dissociative personality types. And another woman who just really saved my life, her name is Lisa A. Romano. And she also experienced a similar kind of marriage. So, 13 years to a covert narcissist, and just couldn't figure out what was wrong, you know, just had health issues and stress, couldn't sleep, couldn't get an answer, couldn't feel connected, just couldn't really put her finger on it. She has a million videos on YouTube. There are other organizations like CoDA, which is a national organization for codependent people, and they have meetings and they have online meetings all over the country. Hugely helpful organization.

Steve Martorano

That's terrific. Because we want to leave people with the sense that if they're going through this they're not alone facts, they get a growing club, just horrible to think about. But you know, on the Corner, on our website, we will post some of these names and people will be able to avail themselves of that. Erin, you started out a strong woman, you went through a couple of bad things here -- really bad, but you still look like you're hanging in there. So that's to be applauded, good for you.

Erin Riley

Thank you.

Steve Martorano

Your relationship to men, I don't want to get real personal here. But if you've been able to trust any men since this happened?

Erin Riley

Um, I think my lack of trust for men honestly goes back a lot farther than, you know, than my second husband, a lot farther. I was primed to be taken advantage of by somebody like him, who presented himself as very safe, protective, safe, quiet, you know, low-key, not overtly aggressive or assertive. So, to answer your question, it's always been an issue for me going back to when I was probably a teenager, in trusting men. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing to carry forward with me, you know. Trust but verify, you know. I want to believe in people, but I have the tools now to recognize these kinds of behaviors…

Steve Martorano

Yeah.

Erin Riley

… in other people and not just romantic partners, in some of the friendships that I've had throughout my life, most of my friends are wonderful people that I have a wonderful equal relationship with where it's very reciprocal. And a few of my friends feel a little bit like he did.

Steve Martorano

Yeah. Well, you know what, it's great. I mean, in the wreckage of this whole thing of, I think the best thing that comes out of our conversation, at least from my perspective, is that after you know, the dust settles, if you're smart like you are, you begin to do the real work, which is on yourself, and getting a perspective on how this happened to you. And then sharing that story is terrific. So thank you so much.

Erin Riley

Thank you, Steve. You’re… that's, 100% spot on. That is, it's all really about me.

Steve Martorano

Yeah. 

Erin Riley

You know, the other partner in this kind of a situation, but to look at yourself and say, how did I get here? That’s the work.

Steve Martorano

And more importantly, how do I not go there again, Erin, thanks so much as this thing moves on with you. I know you want to tell the story even more broadly, maybe write a book or something. But when that happens, you'll come back and we'll talk about it again.

Erin Riley

Terrific, thank you so much for having me, Steve, it was a real pleasure to chat with you today.

Steve Martorano

Thanks. Thanks so much. Hey, everybody, thanks again, hanging on the Corner. Don't forget, you know the deal. Like us, follow us review us. We appreciate it. The Behavioral Corner. Catch you next time.

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