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There are a lot of frogs in dating land -- and a lot of wack jobs, leeches, narcissists and other dangerous guys waiting to suck the life out of you.
Counselor Sandra Brown spent 15 years trying to change their dangerous ways, only to burn out and flee to a North Carolina mountaintop.
But she has one thing left to give - the sum of her wisdom about intractably pathological men and the women who seem to fall for them time and again.
"Women just don't know how to gauge when someone is unfixable," said Brown, who hopes to clue them in with her latest book, "How to Spot a Dangerous Man Before You Get Involved" (Hunter House, 250 pages, $14.95).
Brown says dangerous men come in eight flavors - the permanent clinger, the parental seeker, the emotionally unavailable man, the man with a hidden life, the addict, the mentally ill man (especially when they're off their meds or not in treatment), the abusive or violent man and - most dangerous of all - the emotional predator, who can smell a victim a mile away.
What they have in common, she said, is "the inability to grow, change or have insight."
Learning to spot the red flags isn't enough. Instead, Brown said, women need to understand the grim reality of pathology - that men with ingrained personality disorders ( which includes many of her eight categories) are incapable of turning over a new leaf, no matter how much they swear otherwise.
Until women get it, they'll keep searching for loopholes to explain why their bad guy is an exception to the rule. For some women, she said, trust is eternal.
Brown stresses that physical violence is only one type of danger. Emotional trauma - the more common wreckage - also damages women's lives.
"Pathological people screw you up," said Brown, who sounds a bit shellshocked herself as she describes the assaults and threats she used to endure from both male and female clients who came unhinged. (Women, she notes, have the same capacity for pathological behavior as men do.)
"I worked with wacks," she said. "I have been stalked and attacked and my windshield shot out and my brakes cut - and that was by clients who cared about me."
Brown, 48, who says she was once involved with a pathological man herself, began working in victim services after the 1983 murder of her father.
After earning her credentials as a masters-level therapist, she went on to found residential and outpatient programs in Florida for severely traumatized women with chronic histories of victimization. She also worked with perps, including serial rapists, killers and emotional con men.
"It was there that I began to get frustrated seeing the same women come back," Brown said. "The longer the women stayed in these relationships, the easier it was to normalize abnormal behavior. It's almost like the Stockholm Syndrome - the more you're exposed to something, the more you're OK with it."
The gravitational pull between dangerous men and chronically victimized women was so great, Brown had to set aside separate appointment days for male and female clients to prevent her counseling center from turning into a dating service.
"Right in my counseling lobby," she said, "these people were hooking up."
Although she hadn't read Brown's book, June Wiley of New Beginnings, a Seattle shelter for domestic-violence victims, said Brown's overall message sounded like "a lot of good common sense."
Wiley agrees women need to go with their gut when something seems amiss. A book she has read and highly recommends is Gavin de Becker's 1998 bestseller, "The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence."
Wiley was wary, however, of Brown's belief that chronic victims need to examine their own patterns of behavior.
"I tend not to blame the innocent person," she said.
Brown said she's not blaming women, she's trying to help potential targets gain the insight to protect themselves.
"Any one of us could make a bad choice one time and realize a mistake and correct it," Brown said. "I'm talking about women with chronic patterns. My belief is you can't change what you can't name."
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