• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Bad Vibes About People

Interesting topic. My basic heuristics are (1) if someone feels wrong, avoid them (2) if people try to tell you you're being silly/irrational/unreasonable, move swiftly away (3) if the person in question tries to tell you you're being silly/irrational/unreasonable, run. :)

This stated - I suspect bad vibes from a real-world person are an unconscious processing of ill-intent, possibly body language that is inconsistent with words and/or facial expressions (micro and otherwise). I'd expect women on average to be better at picking up on such things, as most predators are male and we've had a few million years to hone that, possibly as an evolved defence of both women and for their children, and probably introverts are better at spotting a wrong 'un than extroverts, as they are generally better at attention to detail. Slightly neurotic people might be better spotters as well - this is really just heightened a sensitivity to danger.

So an ideal 'spotter' might be an introverted slightly neurotic lady who's had children.

Hypothesis only. :hoff:
 
Someone married a family member, and husband, kids and I all had really bad vibes about this person. But on the surface, this bloke was friendly, "nice", couldn't do enough to help you (which in itself was so exaggerated as to be creepy). Nothing you could put your finger on, to explain why we all had this visceral dislike of him, but we all did.

Now family member's divorcing him and so we've told everyone in the family that we found him creepy and hated him, but were too poltie t say owt (also he made family member seem happy - at first, anyway - so who were we to interfere?) and they're all like "Why didn't you tell us?" or "I'm really shocked you lot hated him all along..."

I've promised next time family member gets involved with someone we hate, even if we can't figure out why we hate them, we'll just tell everyone!
 
Were you right to have bad vibes though? Many people get divorced.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Someone married a family member, and husband, kids and I all had really bad vibes about this person. But on the surface, this bloke was friendly, "nice", couldn't do enough to help you (which in itself was so exaggerated as to be creepy). Nothing you could put your finger on, to explain why we all had this visceral dislike of him, but we all did.

Now family member's divorcing him and so we've told everyone in the family that we found him creepy and hated him, but were too poltie t say owt (also he made family member seem happy - at first, anyway - so who were we to interfere?) and they're all like "Why didn't you tell us?" or "I'm really shocked you lot hated him all along..."
Click to expand...
That seldom works and even if you don't get into a row, if you turn out to be right it'll be held against you!
 
Xanatic* said:
Were you right to have bad vibes though? Many people get divorced.
Click to expand...
Yes, sadly. He's a real shit. Turns out he was screaming in her face when nobody was around, lots of threatening, aggressive behaviour that he made sure nobody else ever witnessed. And now he's dragging her through various courts, refusing to pay for the kids. Stopped paying mortgage so didn't even care if his kids ended up without a roof over their heads. When she tried to get his help with a vet bill for their elderly dog, he told her to 'have it put down, then'... The thing we were reacting to - the sort of fake, OTT nature of his "niceness", turned out to be the huge clue. It was indeed an act, calculated to fool everyone who cared about her, that he was an OK person.

In retrospect, I can see it now - that what we were reacting to was sensing his fakeness (turns out he has huge mental health issues as well that we were all unaware of, throughout). But he didn't let the mask of hail fellow well met slip for a nano-second.
 
Coal said:
That seldom works and even if you don't get into a row, if you turn out to be right it'll be held against you!
Click to expand...
Yes, we had a fairly similar situation in a living history group we were in years ago. And this initially "nice' person my husband had this sort of visceral reaction to (nobody else did, not me, either), turned out to literally rip this previously cohesive group of people in half. My husband was heartbroken as he'd started the group - it was his baby. At first, I thought she was OK but husband just sort of knew she was going to be trouble. My husband had run other groups, previously, and was sort of famous for taking no shit and getting rid of problematic people very quickly. But with this woman, nobody (including me) believed his instincts, at first, and we let her stay til she'd sort of wrecked the whole thing, taking half of them with her. She was a compulsive liar, amongst other things, which I found really creepy. Heard her telling the bloke she eventually married that her parents had been killed in a car crash. They were still alive. WTF kind of psychopathy is that? Years on, I know he now knows she has parents. How did she square that one?
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Someone married a family member, and husband, kids and I all had really bad vibes about this person. But on the surface, this bloke was friendly, "nice", couldn't do enough to help you (which in itself was so exaggerated as to be creepy). Nothing you could put your finger on, to explain why we all had this visceral dislike of him, but we all did.

Now family member's divorcing him and so we've told everyone in the family that we found him creepy and hated him, but were too poltie t say owt (also he made family member seem happy - at first, anyway - so who were we to interfere?) and they're all like "Why didn't you tell us?" or "I'm really shocked you lot hated him all along..."

I've promised next time family member gets involved with someone we hate, even if we can't figure out why we hate them, we'll just tell everyone!
Click to expand...
I'm not at all good at picking up on people who act friendly but are actually using me or someone else for their own ends,

When the light eventually dawns I must admit I'm proud to have dished out some appropriate words to deal with them, although admittedly other times I think of the right phrase about 24 hours too late. I think the situation has to be so blatantly caddish that I lose 9/10ths of my rag enough to speak direct from hindbrain to mouth without all the normal considerations of possible consequences.

I'm much better at picking up on people you just don't want to be at the same end of the bar with. Or even IN the same bar. Some of them pretty much have 'bad vibes' written on their forehead.
 
Last edited:
Ghost In The Machine said:
Yes, we had a fairly similar situation in a living history group we were in years ago. And this initially "nice' person my husband had this sort of visceral reaction to (nobody else did, not me, either), turned out to literally rip this previously cohesive group of people in half. My husband was heartbroken as he'd started the group - it was his baby. At first, I thought she was OK but husband just sort of knew she was going to be trouble. My husband had run other groups, previously, and was sort of famous for taking no shit and getting rid of problematic people very quickly. But with this woman, nobody (including me) believed his instincts, at first, and we let her stay til she'd sort of wrecked the whole thing, taking half of them with her. She was a compulsive liar, amongst other things, which I found really creepy. Heard her telling the bloke she eventually married that her parents had been killed in a car crash. They were still alive. WTF kind of psychopathy is that? Years on, I know he now knows she has parents. How did she square that one?
Click to expand...
Ouch. Sometimes a good way to spot those folks early is to look hard at their actions and the consequences and ignore their general demeanour. By way of an example, the m-i-l lost quite a bit of money to a couple who rented her house from her. After three months, they simply kept under paying, paying 'nearly all' and so on, always with great charm and regret. When they finally moved out she still thought they were such nice people. "With £1,000 of your cold hard cash." I pointed out...

Compulsive lying is an odd one - although the major problem for the rest of us, is that such folk lie so easily and readily, it's barely possible to tell the lies from truth without knowing the 'ground truth' of the matter in question. Sometimes it's worth discreetly checking that out...
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Yes, we had a fairly similar situation in a living history group we were in years ago. And this initially "nice' person my husband had this sort of visceral reaction to (nobody else did, not me, either), turned out to literally rip this previously cohesive group of people in half. My husband was heartbroken as he'd started the group - it was his baby. At first, I thought she was OK but husband just sort of knew she was going to be trouble. My husband had run other groups, previously, and was sort of famous for taking no shit and getting rid of problematic people very quickly. But with this woman, nobody (including me) believed his instincts, at first, and we let her stay til she'd sort of wrecked the whole thing, taking half of them with her. She was a compulsive liar, amongst other things, which I found really creepy. Heard her telling the bloke she eventually married that her parents had been killed in a car crash. They were still alive. WTF kind of psychopathy is that? Years on, I know he now knows she has parents. How did she square that one?
Click to expand...
I do believe our own @Swifty had a similar experience with a specialist interest group. (Down, @Dinobot! :evillaugh:)
 
Coal said:
Ouch. Sometimes a good way to spot those folks early is to look hard at their actions and the consequences and ignore their general demeanour. By way of an example, the m-i-l lost quite a bit of money to a couple who rented her house from her. After three months, they simply kept under paying, paying 'nearly all' and so on, always with great charm and regret. When they finally moved out she still thought they were such nice people. "With £1,000 of your cold hard cash." I pointed out...

Compulsive lying is an odd one - although the major problem for the rest of us, is that such folk lie so easily and readily, it's barely possible to tell the lies from truth without knowing the 'ground truth' of the matter in question. Sometimes it's worth discreetly checking that out...
Click to expand...
Yes, some FB stalking told me her parents were still alive, but in Grimsby so, you know... maybe that counts as the underworld or summat?
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Yes, some FB stalking told me her parents were still alive, but in Grimsby so, you know... maybe that counts as the underworld or summat?
Click to expand...
She may have blagged the dead parents lie by saying it was her birth parents who died and she was adopted? Or the other way round, I dunno.
It would work because people who drawn in by liars are caught by the sunk cost. They have invested too much in the relationship to give way to their doubts.
It's a mess. People have killed themselves over it.
 
Last edited:
Some 20-odd years ago I was living in Guatemala, and worked as Receptionist/administrator in a Spanish language school; part of the job was giving prospective students tours of the premises and explaining how lessons worked etc. One day an American turned up (not unusual) who practically screamed "military" from his every pore, not unusual in itself - even soldiers have holidays, and he wouldn't be the first I had encountered (off the top of my head I remember running into a British lady, a Swiss bloke and an Israeli who were all military types, and were just on holiday). However, this American made me feel really uncomfortable, although he was perfectly friendly, his eyes were dead. Even more unusually, he had a Guatemalan "shadow" who he introduced as his friend. I greeted his "friend" in Spanish, and would expect the usual formal greeting in return (Guatemalans are quite conservative). The Guatemalan "friend" looked very uncomfortable talking to me, and just muttered "buenas" as a greeting before shiftily looking away. From that point on he said nothing, he also gave me a very strong impression of being military, and also had dead eyes. I was getting some very bad vibes off both of these people, and had the very strong, if irrational, feeling that they had done some very unpleasant things to people. I gave the tour, but just wanted rid of them, and hoped they wouldn't choose the school I was working in. The American evaded all my questions about what he did or why he wanted to learn Spanish. In the end he did choose the school, I knew his teacher fairly well, and she told me that she was unable to get any personal information out of him in the weeks he studied, which is highly unusual, and never found out what his job was. There was something about this American and his Guatemalan companion that screamed "DANGER" to every fibre of my being. I can't explain that feeling, but I do trust it.
 
Last edited:
Quoting myself, from the People Who Feel Wrong thread -

Wandering around Anglesey with my kids and their mates in my ramshackle camper van years ago, we stopped off at some tatty 'attraction' (can't remember what it was now) and a bloke came up to the lads and started talking to them. I took an immediate dislike, for the following reasons -

1. He spoke to them first without greeting me.
2. I listened to how he talked, and he suddenly switched from a normal voice to a quiet, soothing tone. Like a calming, grooming type of tone.
3. He was wearing a Scout leader uniform, for no reason that I could see.

I walked over to him, looked him in the eye and said 'We're off now.' He looked sort of rumbled.
I wonder if he'd been hoping to lead one off to the bogs?
 
SimonBurchell said:
Some 20-odd years ago I was living in Guatemala, and worked as Receptionist/administrator in a Spanish language school; part of the job was giving prospective students tours of the premises and explaining how lessons worked etc. One day an American turned up (not unusual) who practically screamed "military" from his every pore, not unusual in itself - even soldiers have holidays, and he wouldn't be the first I had encountered (off the top of my head I remember running into a British lady, a Swiss bloke and an Israeli who were all military types, and were just on holiday). However, this American made me feel really uncomfortable, although he was perfectly friendly, his eyes were dead. Even more unusually, he had a Guatemalan "shadow" who he introduced as his friend. I greeted his "friend" in Spanish, and would expect the usual formal greeting in return (Guatemalans are quite conservative). The Guatemalan "friend" looked very uncomfortable talking to me, and just muttered "buenas" as a greeting before shiftily looking away. From that point on he said nothing, he also gave me a very strong impression of being military, and also had dead eyes. I was getting some very bad vibes off both of these people, and had the very strong, if irrational, feeling that they had done some very unpleasant things to people. I gave the tour, but just wanted rid of them, and hoped they wouldn't choose the school I was working in. The American evaded all my questions about what he did or why he wanted to learn Spanish. In the end he did choose the school, I new his teacher fairly well, and she told me that she was unable to get any personal information out of him in the weeks he studied, which is highly unusual, and never found out what his job was. There was something about this American and his Guatemalan companion that screamed "DANGER" to every fibre of my being. I can't explain that feeling, but I do trust it.
Click to expand...
Isn't it strange- the first time I met a Mexican chap (he worked in the kitchen where I was in Israel) and he came up to me with a big knife and said ''do you want a fight''. It turned out he was a really decent guy though with a great family. Mexican humour I guess!
 
Sounds scary !! Although all chefs are usually "charecters" in my experience working in those places.
 
FunkyTT said:
Sounds scary !! Although all chefs are usually "charecters" in my experience working in those places.
Click to expand...
You aren't kidding. My uncle Doug had a scar on his head where he narrowly missed a knife thrown by my chef granddad,. My Dad, an Escoffier trained chef, was also an ex bare knuckle boxer and Cumberland wrestler. He, like me, had a very long fuse but in the kitchen - well, you wouldn't want to let the soup catch. On the other hand, he didn't usually sack people, they got the Ferguson hairdryer treatment. And he didn't need to swear to do it.
 
escargot said:
Quoting myself, from the People Who Feel Wrong thread -

Wandering around Anglesey with my kids and their mates in my ramshackle camper van years ago, we stopped off at some tatty 'attraction' (can't remember what it was now) and a bloke came up to the lads and started talking to them. I took an immediate dislike, for the following reasons -

1. He spoke to them first without greeting me.
2. I listened to how he talked, and he suddenly switched from a normal voice to a quiet, soothing tone. Like a calming, grooming type of tone.
3. He was wearing a Scout leader uniform, for no reason that I could see.

I walked over to him, looked him in the eye and said 'We're off now.' He looked sort of rumbled.
I wonder if he'd been hoping to lead one off to the bogs?
Click to expand...
Though I don't have kids, I too am leery when a stranger addresses children first when an adult is present. Warning sign to me.

If I happen to be around children I don't know, I only speak to them if I've been introduced to them, or if they speak to me first. I would never approach first.

And excessive charm and niceness turns me off immediately. I immediately become wary of a person. Someone who may be "rough around the edges" is a person I would trust more easily than the charming sweet talker. Ick. I stay far away from them.
 
brownmane said:
And excessive charm and niceness turns me off immediately. I immediately become wary of a person.
Click to expand...
Also fake 'old-fashioned chivalry'.
Back in the '70s some men would greet a woman they were introduced to grabbing her hand and kissing it. While this was almost indescribably creepy, women were supposed to find it charming.

Jimmy Savile, King of the Creeps, was seen on TV doing this to appalled but intimidated women. Other men copied him. It was sort-of normalised. Brrr.
 
escargot said:
She may have blagged the dead parents lie by saying it was her birth parents who died and she was adopted? Or the other way round, I dunno.
It would work because people who drawn in by liars are caught by the sunk cost. They have invested too much in the relationship to give way to their doubts.
It's a mess. People have killed themselves over it.
Click to expand...
Yes, she must have found some way of squaring it. She had lots of tales of woe and tragedy and none of it rang true.

I think you're right - the husband had invested everything into her at that point, that there was no going back for him.
 
brownmane said:
Though I don't have kids, I too am leery when a stranger addresses children first when an adult is present. Warning sign to me.

If I happen to be around children I don't know, I only speak to them if I've been introduced to them, or if they speak to me first. I would never approach first.

And excessive charm and niceness turns me off immediately. I immediately become wary of a person. Someone who may be "rough around the edges" is a person I would trust more easily than the charming sweet talker. Ick. I stay far away from them.
Click to expand...
I was always very wary of any unsolicited physical contact when watching out for my kids - no-one has any business doing that.

escargot said:
Also fake 'old-fashioned chivalry'.
Back in the '70s some men would greet a woman they were introduced to grabbing her hand and kissing it. While this was almost indescribably creepy, women were supposed to find it charming.

Jimmy Savile, King of the Creeps, was seen on TV doing this to appalled but intimidated women. Other men copied him. It was sort-of normalised. Brrr.
Click to expand...
There was a chap at uni in the 1980's who used to do this, it was creepy and false. But some were taken in by it.
 
Coal said:
I was always very wary of any unsolicited physical contact when watching out for my kids - no-one has any business doing that.
Click to expand...
I once had a discussion on'ere about whether adults of passing acquaintance to a child should touch them. This included patting on the head, stroking their hair, kissing them or anything that would be appropriate between close relations.

The other poster, male without children, saw no problem with this whereas I stated that I would not allow it.
We become quite irate about it: I could not believe what I was hearing, that this person thought it OK for adults to approach and touch kids they don't know.
Actually made me wonder if he had something on his conscience. :thought:

Sadly the thread seems to have disappeared now.
 
escargot said:
I once had a discussion on'ere about whether adults of passing acquaintance to a child should touch them. This included patting on the head, stroking their hair, kissing them or anything that would be appropriate between close relations.

The other poster, male without children, saw no problem with this whereas I stated that I would not allow it.
We become quite irate about it: I could not believe what I was hearing, that this person thought it OK for adults to approach and touch kids they don't know.
Actually made me wonder if he had something on his conscience. :thought:

Sadly the thread seems to have disappeared now.
Click to expand...
I think this is a cultural thing. In the UK it's a definite no, but in Latin countries, for example, it is viewed as normal.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top