Thanks for leaving a comment! Totally agreed! I have the same anxieties — like I’m going to be found out and then the healthy person is going to leave me. But for some reason, I don’t have these anxieties when I’m around person that I know that I don’t actually want to be around, yet I stay around them.

What do you do when you feel terrified that healthy people might discover that you’re part of the “sick” population? Any grounding or DBT techniques? Anything that helps you to be curious to how you feel in the moment or afterwards? For me, I don’t think CBT works but maybe I can dive deeper into this negative belief and try to understand it.

I identify with dysfunctional people for some reason and also feel the same sense of justification for them even though I’ve read many books and have gone through therapy. Sometimes I feel guilty because I’m abandoning them in some way. A new mental/image exercise I’m going to try is that every time I think of calling a red flag person or see the red flags and find myself justifying it away — I’m going to imagine myself drinking expired milk. I think this imagery can be helpful because it’s pretty hard to justify drinking expired milk — it’s literally rancid. I wouldn’t want to drink expired milk so why would I hang out with problematic people?