FWIW: I believe you that Brent cultivated you, and I think you talking about that has been really useful in educating people (including me) about how toxic people do that. I do think it had to be some damn strong cultivation to overcome the baseline expectations set by his FB posts, and I’d be interested in hearing you talk about what he did to overcome that baseline- not because I think you were especially susceptible, but because whatever he did worked on a lot of people, and that makes it useful to understand.
Well, for starters, I had unfollowed him on FB by about 2016 as a result of being just continually frustrated by his relentless pessimism. So I probably missed a whole lot of what others saw as red flags.
FWIW: I believe you that Brent cultivated you, and I think you talking about that has been really useful in educating people (including me) about how toxic people do that. I do think it had to be some damn strong cultivation to overcome the baseline expectations set by his FB posts, and I’d be interested in hearing you talk about what he did to overcome that baseline- not because I think you were especially susceptible, but because whatever he did worked on a lot of people, and that makes it useful to understand.
Well, for starters, I had unfollowed him on FB by about 2016 as a result of being just continually frustrated by his relentless pessimism. So I probably missed a whole lot of what others saw as red flags.
This indeed changes my opinion a fair bit, and I should have had it as a more active hypothesis.