Taming Toxic People

The Science of Identifying and Dealing with Psychopaths at Work & at Home

By: David Gillespie

Narrated by: Sam Haft

Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Psychopaths are everywhere. They are your toxic boss, controlling boyfriend, lazy colleague, annoying mother-in-law and negligent friend - the person who gets away with bad behaviour time and time again. While often superficially charming, they are also rude, aggressive, manipulative, duplicitous and dishonest.

Five per cent of the population is psychopathic, which means they are missing the critical human ingredient of empathy. Because they are programmed to put themselves first, these people routinely disrupt and even destroy relationships and organisations, seemingly without consequence.

Drawing on the latest science, bestselling author David Gillespie offers a detailed and practical guide to identifying the psychopath in your midst, then managing the behaviour to minimise the effect on your family, workplace, friendship group or community organisation.

©2018 David Gillespie (P)2018 Macmillan Australia Audio

This is a great layman's guide

I liked this. Its accurate and real. Great to have a resource tailored for those getting their heads around this significant danger.

I've experienced the home and the work psychopath. A double-whammy destruction. It led me to years of research and David Gillespie's insights are spot on.

Particularly liked his parallels of psychopaths to the world's failings. It's a view I came to so guessed I liked the validation.

Hope this book becomes a best seller as greater awareness is needed to mitigate the damage.

A truly practical guide for handling toxic people

As a guide to how to handle toxic people, David Gillespie has nailed it. I also feel for the author's own negative experiences with toxicity but have to highlight that it is obvious to me that he comes from circumstances where he had a lot of options socially and economically. The unfortunate reality is that many of those in need of escaping toxicity do not have the options available that he has/had. E.g. Finding new work is easier if your skills are in demand or in an employment culture that accepts people resigning and moving on. It would have been great if he had taken the time to consider alternative circumstances far removed from his privileged circumstances - it is not the ordinary experience of people to be well-qualified, have security of living arrangements and financial fallback.

The other unfortunate aspect of the book is that the use of psychiatric terms is at best a bit shaky. In reading this book, you have to appreciate the gist in order to arrive at the essence. Ultimately, he has correctly identified toxic traits to be wary of and how to handle them.

Helpful and informative

The narrator's tone definitely adds to the positive impact of the author's well-thought out theories and analysis. This book gives insights into how our culture incubated psychopath by promoting the gain of one above the wellbeing of the many. For once, a book on the damage narcissistic psychopaths do to our lives doesn't leave you despondent and acting out of reaction (one such book tells you to block all narcissists on your social media accounts -yeah right!), Mr. Gillespie gives us hope through examples where the collective whole can change their Commons together - reducing the likelihood of psychopaths (those who blame others, show no remorse, never apologize, manipulate by bullying, are morally flexible - lie all the time - are expert in mirroribg the behavior of others in order to win their favor, and money, not community, is the definition of their success - sound familiar?) take control of our lives and futures. Leadership is not for psychopathic narcissists, that's the bottom line. Definitely recommended to all empathic people out there and as the country with the most psychopaths-the US- all Americans (who aren't psychopaths themselves) should heed these words. Action not words, circle the psychopathic wagon, get right with the world. We don't have to let psychopaths win.

A lot of hate spewing out if this book.

The book started out good and I initially thought it was going to help me. However, by the time I got through chapter 2, the writer had bashed President Trump so much that I felt that the book itself is toxic.