Working with You Is Killing Me (part 3 of 3)

Fatal Attraction

How did it all go so wrong? It started with so much promise. How do I get the relationship back to what it was?

This chapter draws on, and gives full credit to, Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster, whose book “Working with You Is Killing Me” inspired this article.

When you first met this person, you were drawn to them. You were excited about working together. Something about them met a strong need in you. Over time, though, interacting with them left you emotionally drained and professionally frustrated, and by now you dread the next conversation. You spend your days, and sleepless nights, replaying conversations in your head, trying to work them out, trying to find a way back to how things were. Nothing works. You cannot steer the relationship back to where it started.

Fatal attraction describes a more complicated set of work relationships than the ones covered in the first two chapters. Here, the difficulty comes from something you gain by staying in the relationship. A fatal attraction is a working relationship that started with strong promise and excitement, then grew harder over time. You still get flashes of that early spark now and then, and that is what keeps the relationship going, even though you know it is doing you damage.

Fatal attractions are confusing because the gap between how the relationship started and where it stands now is so stark. At first, this person made you feel charged up. Something about them pulled you in. You may still feel that pull occasionally, though less and less often. You went into the relationship on a high, and that high has become a trap.

This chapter looks at four types of fatal attraction. Each one meets a different underlying need. First, the Exploder, who attracts people needing approval from authority figures. Second, the Perfectionist, who attracts people with a deep insecurity about their own ability, who crave recognition to prove their worth. Third, the Back-Stabber, who attracts people who want admiration and respect from others. Finally, the High Maintenance, who attracts natural carers with a strong instinct to look after people.

In all four cases, the relationship builds through seven stages:

1. Magnetism: The honeymoon period, when the other person is at their best and meets a deep need in you.
2. Consumption: The relationship turns a corner, and the other person starts showing their dark side.
3. Admittance: The first clear, undeniable downhill stage. You accept something is badly wrong, and you spend your time replaying conversations, rehearsing what you will say next, and nursing your wounds.
4. Obsession: Your last serious attempt to save the relationship. You become fixated on changing the other person, spending hours working out what it would take.
5. Exhaustion: You give up trying to change things. You are emotionally spent, and any further contact just adds to the fatigue.
6. Avoidance: You actively avoid the other person. You develop something close to an allergic reaction to them: an automatic physical response whenever you hear their voice or catch sight of them, showing up as headaches, twitching, tight muscles, or neck pain.
7. Learned Helplessness: You give up control over the relationship altogether. You feel, and act, like a prisoner. You have resigned yourself to the treatment, cannot see a way out, and become bitter. You feel trapped in a situation you cannot win.

These stages run in order, broadly, but you may move through them out of sequence, or back and forth between them. This is especially true of stages four and five: a single positive moment with the other person can pull you back into trying to rescue things, even after you have told yourself you have given up.

The Four Fatal Attractions

The fatal attractions tend develop in certain work relationships’ contexts. In every case, the victim experiences a sharp transition in the relationship. Each type carries elements of a mild clinical pattern, or what Robert Hogan calls a dark side. The clinical label and Hogan’s dark-side term are set out below, alongside a short description of each type’s behaviour:

• The Exploder usually holds a position of formal authority, often as the line manager of their victim. They attract people who like dynamic personalities, particularly those who need approval from authority figures. Starting out dynamic and charming, then turning volatile, like dynamite. Early symptoms: sudden, unexpected, but short-lived explosive outbursts. The Exploder maps to Borderline Personality. Hogan’s dark-side term is Excitable: inappropriate anger, and intense, unstable relationships that swing between idealising someone and devaluing them.
• The Perfectionist usually sits in a role that involves critiquing the other person’s work, common in both client-supplier relationships and manager-subordinate ones. They attract people who like being put on a pedestal, particularly those with a strong sense of insecurity about their own ability. Starting out warm and flattering, then turning into a pedantic, controlling fault-finder. Early symptoms: controlling, self-important attempts to manage you at the first hint of possible failure. The Perfectionist maps to Obsessive Compulsive. Hogan’s dark-side term is Diligent: an obsessive focus on structure, order, process, rules, and control.
• The Back-Stabber tends to appear in collegial relationships, and is usually junior to the victim, for example a junior consultant paired with a senior one, where the victim acts as a mentor. They attract people who crave praise, particularly those who want admiration and respect from others. Starting out full of sweet talk, admiration, and near-worship, then turning to sabotage, scheming, and betrayal. Early symptoms: unconfirmed signs of disloyalty and character attacks. The Back-Stabber maps to Passive-Aggressive. Hogan’s dark-side term is Leisurely: covert aggression and contempt, constant scheming and manipulation, hidden behind a show of loyalty.
• The High Maintenance is most common between equals, such as two colleagues at the same level. They attract people who like helping others, particularly natural carers with a strong parental instinct. Starting out nice, trusting, and open, then becoming needy and dependent. Early symptoms: plenty of advice given, no sign of it ever being acted on. The High Maintenance maps to Dependent. Hogan’s dark-side term is Dutiful: an excessive need to please, difficulty making even simple decisions without reassurance, and insecurity that stops them disagreeing for fear of losing support.

The Exploder

The Exploder is charming, charismatic, and hard to read from the start. They come across as confident, decisive, and sure of themselves. Their drive, focus, and natural authority pull people in, keen to join the success story. At first, the relationship feels thrilling. You believe together you can achieve anything, and you cannot stop talking this person up. Then it changes, abruptly and without warning. One day they hit a problem and lose their temper completely. A new side appears: volatile, harsh, loud, accusing, and irrational. After the blow-up, the charm comes back, but you soon learn it will not last. It only holds until the next trigger.

Impact on you: you become a nervous wreck, tiptoeing around the Exploder, trying to work out how to stop the next explosion before it happens. You stop concentrating on your own job and instead spend your energy trying, with limited success, to manage their unpredictable behaviour.

The Perfectionist

The Perfectionist makes you the flavour of the month, for a while, putting you on a pedestal before pulling it out from under you later. At first, they shower you with compliments, tell you that you are more talented than anyone else, and hold you up as an example to others. For a while, you can do no wrong. But the Perfectionist expects you to act as their saviour: fix the sales figures, restructure a department, deliver the perfect product. As time passes and you turn out to be a capable person rather than a superhero, the Perfectionist starts hunting for faults, and finding them.

Impact on you: you go from chosen one to scapegoat almost overnight. Instead of being the star, you become a disappointment. Confused and hurt by the fall from grace, you try to recreate whatever behaviour earned you the earlier praise. But the Perfectionist’s close tracking of every small mistake wears down your confidence and exposes your own insecurities.

The Back-Stabber

The Back-Stabber enters the relationship as your biggest fan, hungry to learn from you, to copy your style, to become a version of you. Like Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films, they start out as a smaller version of yourself. You feel admired, even worshipped, which flatters your ego and plays into any hidden narcissistic streak you have. As time goes on, faint signs appear that the Back-Stabber is behind things that damage your standing: a big account moves away from you, people start questioning your methods, complaints start coming in. The more you dig for a cause, the more this person turns up as the common thread.

Impact on you: you get a nagging sense that the Back-Stabber wants your job, but they cover their tracks so well that your suspicions never quite hold up. They keep up the same show of loyalty throughout, though the worship dials down slightly. You are not sure who or what to believe. You feel defensive and undermined. Part of you wants to trust them, because you still want the admiration, but you cannot shake the feeling of being stabbed in the back. Confronting them gets you nowhere: they act hurt and deny everything. Each failed confrontation costs you a bit more of the admiration you were getting, and you are hooked, unsure whether you are becoming paranoid, going through a run of bad luck, or onto something that’s actually there. You spend more time chasing evidence than doing your actual work.

The High Maintenance

Early in the relationship, the High Maintenance trusts you with a lot: honesty, vulnerability, more disclosure than you expected. It makes you feel valued and useful, and it plays into your instinct to look after people and your sense of fairness. They tell you constantly how wise, compassionate, and understanding you are, with lines like “I don’t know what I’d do without you” or “you’re such a good friend.” You go out of your way to help them get back on their feet. At first, you might even enjoy being needed. Later, two things become clear: you are spending huge amounts of time and energy on their problems, and none of your advice ever gets taken.

Impact on you: as their demands on your time grow, the line between work and personal life starts to blur. Out of pity, or to protect your working hours, you end up dealing with their problems outside work instead. You might agree to talk things through at the weekend, or find yourself invited to, and obliged to attend, family events and holidays, telling yourself they have no one else. When you try to pull back, the High Maintenance accuses you of being “selfish, uncaring, heartless, just like everyone else.” Afraid of being the bad guy, you keep going, even though you are exhausted and drained. They have taken the energy out of you. You are tired of the constant gloom, the constant complaining, and their apparent inability to help themselves.

Unhooking

Unhooking from a fatal attraction is hard. You will probably move through all seven stages of the relationship before you can properly move on. The process itself has four phases.

The first is detection and admittance. You have to admit to yourself that you are hooked, sometimes with a nudge from people around you who can see the state you are in. This stage carries an element of grief. Part of you is still drawn to this person, still wants that early feeling back. Unhooking means letting that relationship go, emotionally, for good.

The second phase is detachment. Once you have accepted, intellectually, that the relationship is over and nothing will bring it back, you need to separate yourself from it emotionally too. That means learning to see the other person objectively, and fully accepting three things. The other person is not going to change. Any apparent change is a manipulation to draw you back in. The relationship will never return to its early promise, because that promise never existed, it was skilful hooking. You will never get the acknowledgement or reward you were hoping for, which means your efforts were spent for nothing, and you need to accept that and move on.

The third phase is depersonalisation. This is about understanding that none of it was about you. Forget the idea that it takes two. This is one of the rare situations where the fault does not sit with you at all: something is fundamentally wrong with the other person. The more objectively you can see them, the less helpless you feel, and the less power they hold over you.

The final phase is disassociation. Here, you treat the relationship as if it never carried any personal weight at all. Keep things strictly professional. Do not let interactions become personal again. Stay courteous, but keep your distance. Give only your professional skills, and only within what an employee is reasonably expected to give: your opinion, if asked for, but not your evenings or weekends, even for something work-related. Talk business when you need to, but avoid anything personal. Keep the relationship as a straightforward business transaction.

The Way Out

• The Exploder: accept that this person carries unresolved anger. Recognise their volatility will keep happening whatever you do. Learn to watch them blow up without taking it personally or letting it affect you.
• The Perfectionist: accept that nothing you do will win back your old status. Recognise that their shaky self-esteem and fear of failure are what drive their criticism of you. Stop chasing that earlier position, with them or with anyone else, and get your approval and support from other sources instead.
• The Back-Stabber: accept that this person advances their career by putting others down. Recognise that they believe they cannot succeed on merit alone, and need to make others look bad to get ahead. Cut the relationship off completely, and keep a record of everything.
• The High Maintenance: accept that this person does not want help, they want attention. Recognise that their problems, whether true or invented, will not go away no matter what you do. Stop trying to solve them. Listen without giving advice. Watch your time, and start putting boundaries back in place.

What the Research Says

Why does the same kind of person keep hooking you? Attachment theory offers one answer. The patterns we form with early caregivers, first described by John Bowlby and later tested by Mary Ainsworth, shape how much we trust other people, and what we expect from anyone who holds power over us. Recent research on adult attachment at work finds that people with an anxious attachment style show heightened threat-detection specifically around authority figures, which fits neatly with why the Exploder and the Perfectionist, both authority-linked roles, can hook people who need approval or validation so badly. People with an avoidant style tend to cope through self-reliance and suppressing their feelings, which can leave them vulnerable to the High Maintenance’s demand for closeness, or slow to notice a Back-Stabber working against them.

None of this means the fault sits with the person who gets hooked. It means the hook works because it is aimed at something that already exists in them. Understanding your own pattern does not excuse the other person’s behaviour, but it does explain why walking away is so much harder than it should be. Separately, Hogan Assessments estimates that around six percent of the workforce behaves in ways that would be described as toxic, and that avoiding toxic hires could save US employers close to 292 billion dollars in a single year, a reminder that these relationships are common enough to be worth naming, not a personal failing.

References

Crowley, K. and Elster, K. (2006). Working with You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work. Warner Business Books: New York.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment. Hogarth Press.

Ainsworth, M.D.S., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E. and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hogan Assessments (2025). The Hidden Cost of a Toxic Workplace Environment.