In my first article on psychopaths, I explained my Two Actor hypothesis of how human psychopathy evolved, over millions of years, in a predator-prey arms race between collaborative and cheater behaviors. I also postulated that human culture emerged from that arms race. In this article I'll answer more pragmatic questions: how can we tell if someone is a psychopath, and what can we do about it?
Before we start, an important caveat: I'm not a trained psychologist. The stories I present come from research and practice in the field, rather than theories of the mind. Dealing with psychopaths, and helping others deal with them, has become an ongoing part-time occupation. I've come to believe that the eusocial-psychopath conflict, far from being a marginal issue for the mental health profession, is a defining feature of humanity.
You can read this theoretical foundation in "Children of the Fight". In this article I want to focus on you and me, and our interactions with psychopaths. Or, for the psychopaths reading this, how you eat dinner.
Spiders and Ants
"There are spiders in Australia that smell and behave like ants: some are so convincing that the ants will allow a spider to live permanently as one of them. This spider will then feast upon its new friends, but it won't eat all the ants, or even a significant number; instead, it extracts resources slowly, sustainably, and over time." — Daniel N Jones, "Snake in the grass"
Psychopaths are long recognized as a feature of our species, yet we are barely scratching the surface of understanding them. Popular culture conflates psychopaths with criminals and murders, and the dangerously insane. Or, in fiction, it depicts them as zombies, vampires, and monsters, the undead, emotionless eaters of souls and brains.
More recently, with medical imaging, some computer-aided phrenologists feel they can diagnose psychopaths by the shape of their brains. Given the hypothesis that "psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a profound lack of empathy," neurologists with handy access to an MRI and helpful psychopath test subjects saw that psychopaths could turn their empathy on and off like a switch.
However, as with related traits like borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders, the examination of the individual is a sterile chase. How can one see, or worse, "treat", a social dysfunction in an individual?
As for examining empathy through MRI, that seems bogus. Most people can turn their empathy on and off like a switch. Empathy is extremely flexible, if not downright opportunistic. It is not some supernatural soul-stuff implanted in us by alien visitors to test our humanity. It is an evolved tool with a social function. And as such, it is brutally selective.
This is trivial to show. Our empathy for starving foreign strangers is close to zero. When we see economic refugees, we close our hearts and our borders. In Belgium we spend 10% of GDP on health care, and 0.5% on foreign aid. Our empathy for a crying child on the corner of our street is much higher. Our empathy for close relatives higher still.
The same goes for all social tools. We mostly feel nothing for other people, until and unless there is some kind of relationship. That does not make us all psychopaths. What this means is that to understand psychopaths, we must observe how they operate socially, over time, and in a variety of situations.
True, psychopaths have no empathy. However more precisely, they have no empathy for their closest kith and kin. You'd have to put subjects into an MRI, observe their empathy centers (the anterior insular cortex, or right supramarginal gyrus, depending who you ask), and then pretend to gently torture their children, parents, or partner. Further, you'd have to do this without your test subject realizing what you were doing. This seems an implausible experiment.
My model for psychopaths is the spider, living among ants, extracting resources slowly, over time. It is the careless, or perhaps badly calibrated psychopath who ends in trouble with the authorities. Most psychopaths are invisible, hidden among friends and family, and it takes deliberate effort to identify them.
So a psychopath is someone who lives off others, in a parasitic fashion, and has the talents and tools to do this all their life, usually safely hidden. It is not easy to convince people to feed you, when you are a capable adult. This also creates significant costs to others, which are visible as debt, stress, emotional anxiety and pain, and depression.
Hunting the Spiders
Like two spiders crossing in a tunnel, a psychopath can immediately sense that another person is playing their game. Yet it's not as simple as "aha! Psychopath!" There are ants who have evolved to imitate their spider parasites, and social humans who can act remarkably psychopathic, at first glance.
Let me list some of the pop-science red flags for psychopaths:
Psychopaths are charming and insincere.
They lie, compulsively and eloquently.
They have no startle response.
They have no fear of authority.
They have no fear of anything, in fact.
They use sex as a tool for control.
They are manipulative.
They fake their emotions.
They have no real character.
They always wear a "mask" to suit the situation.
They are selfish.
They are hypocrites.
They always play the victim.
They have an essentially parasitical lifestyle.
They never apologize sincerely, or feel remorse.
They like to associate with important people.
They are fascinated by money and power.
They will casually use violence against people to achieve their goals.
Here are some less well-known red flags for psychopaths:
They are experts in reading other peoples' emotional states.
They are expert mimics and often very talented at languages.
They prefer dramas to horror movies.
They prefer nights to mornings.
They do not get drunk easily, if at all.
They do not keep their socks in clean order.
If they cook, it is as a performance, not a creative act.
They cannot laugh correctly at new jokes: they'll laugh too late, too loud, or too long.
They do not play card or board games.
They do not play with babies or young children unless someone is watching them.
They always dress neatly.
They like to dress other people neatly.
Their hobbies are impersonal: shopping, travel, going out.
These are detailed, and yet ultimately useless lists. "Show me your sock drawer" is a non-starter on a first date. And lots of social humans have some or many of these traits. It is tempting to tick off criteria, yet I think this is a failed approach.
For one thing, it depends on this list being secret to psychopaths, which clearly it isn't. "Are you a liar?" is so unfalsifiable the Greeks called it paradox. A good psychopath will lie so elegantly and convincingly that you simply cannot tell, unless you're looking for it. And then the only sign is "it feels better than true." I call this "fabrication." It seems a consistent talent: to create and project fake realities with full conviction and zero stress response.
So I believe you cannot look at a psychopath and read their intentions. A psychologist would have to interview friends and family to find out, and even then, most of the stories would be false. There is no spider DNA to scan for. From twin studies, the exact same genes and brain structure lead to psychopathy only half the time. The visible traits — like charisma — are by definition unreliable. The reliable traits — like fabrication and mimicry and abusive behavior towards others — are by definition invisible until you are in deep.
Even the psychopath tests we've evolved over millions of years, like a sense of humor, the love of creative works, social chatter and networking… these are always fighting the last war. It is an arms race, and every generation of psychopaths is equipped to at least draw even. You can falsify the theory "is a psychopath" by proving empathy. We do this all the time. That is why I invest stupid amounts of time in my GitHub profile. However you cannot prove "is a psychopath" using any single set of observations.
Let me say this again, explicitly, for as you read this article you will be asking, "was/is so-and-so a psychopath?" You cannot prove someone is a psychopath. "Is social" is not falsifiable. You can falsify "is psychopathic", and you should systematically be doing this: looking for white flags to falsify the hypothesis that the person making your life a misery is a psychopath. Only when you've tried, and failed, to falsify "is psychopathic", can you leave that diagnosis on the table.
This means that identifying psychopaths in any given setting requires a very different approach from going over a list of red flags and getting a score.
To find psychopaths, you look for pain and emotional damage in other people, or yourself. You have to talk to people, a lot, about the social pain they have or had. You cannot ever trust a single mind's statement of history. We all lie. So you have to triangulate: find multiple people who can cover the same history, and then find the focal origin of that pain.
This is slow and hard work, and if you cannot ground your emotions it can be traumatizing. The best way I've found to get others to share is to share your own stories. Which means, experiencing the joy of the psychopath's embrace first hand, and then using that as data. Yay, science!
I'm going to present my toolkit for diagnosing, and dealing with, psychopaths. I call this DOIT, which is a handy way to remember the main tools: diagnosis, observation, intervention, and treatment. In this article I'll cover diagnosis and observation, which go together (you cannot diagnose someone as a psychopath without careful and sustained observation). The next article will cover intervention and treatment, which again go together.
Diagnosis
"We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals." — Immanuel Kant
I've written that psychopathy can be considered a disease that expresses itself in other people as mental damage, from anxiety and stress to severe depression, PTSD, and even suicide. Apart from random encounters between strangers, there are three main contexts where psychopaths operate, and each has their dynamics defined by the depth and duration of relationships. These are: the social or project group, the workplace, and the family.
Psychopaths in Social Groups
Social or project groups tend to be mostly harmonious until they're not. When things go wrong, you will see signs of pain and anxiety in people. It expresses itself as nervousness, fear of making a decision, lowered independence and higher need for consensus, and mostly, the transformation of the group from people doing stuff, to people talking about doing stuff, or discussing why stuff got so difficult to do.
Given such a group, if you are trying to understand and perhaps fix it, your starting point is to talk to everyone you can, and get involved in the activities. You are your own best instrument, as I wrote in "The Cretan Method", so that means getting your hands dirty.
You can easily spot potential psychopaths in dysfunctional groups. He or she is always the center of attention. They will be charismatic, and mysterious. There will always be masses of invisible discussions going on. Psychopaths are obsessive communicators, and need to focus attention on themselves so they can control the dialogue. And, I think, to stop people talking about them dispassionately.
There will be endless promises made and never kept. It is always someone else's fault. Yours, perhaps, as you get closer. And often, mysterious money problems that cannot be resolved. The psychopath is the first one to (carefully, and often through others) make accusations of plots and conspiracies, and the last to take blame for anything that goes wrong.
There was a West African lead drummer in one of my dance schools. He was talented, and always smiling. This man ended up with my drums, and money (to repair them, as they'd broken their skins). It turned out he'd borrowed money from each and every of the dancers, causing them to blame the school, and almost destroying the school, which had run for a decade. He did finally leave. I met him one day perhaps a year later, on the street, after he'd played in some event. I was with my daughter, and so I told her, look, a psychopath, he's going to lie to me. And indeed, "I've got your drums, except I lost your number, someone stole my phone. I need fifty Euro to buy the ropes, then I can finish the work." I laughed, wished him well, and we walked on.
The psychopath's attack on a group ends in two possible ways. One, ejection by someone in power who realizes what's going on. Two, the destruction of the group. So we come to some basic traits of psychopaths acting in a social group:
They are dramatically visible, indeed they hide in plain sight. It is an elegant tactic, to draw so much attention to oneself that people discount you as a clown.
They are always Very Important, by some undefined law that everyone accepts. They may be very talented at performance, or very good at complex arguments. In any case they are in charge, or they move on.
They are always the center of attention, even when they are not there. Their name is in every conversation, almost as if everyone is asking the same subconscious question, "are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
They seem immune to the general stress and anxiety infecting the group. In fact the worse it gets, the happier they seem to be. Chaos isn't offensive to a psychopath, it is desirable. Imagine a herd of zebra and a lion. The zebra try to stick together, because in order there is safety. The lion wants chaos, because when the shit is hitting the fan, there is opportunity.
They are somehow connected to financial problems in the group, yet it's never their fault. If you ask, they are investing everything they have, bleeding themselves dry. Yet if you ask for details, the topic will change suddenly.
They are poor organizers, and depend on others to do that for them. They lack the ability to plan events, orchestrate people (lacking empathy), and execute long term plans. Everything is short term, and dramatically last-minute. As good as they are at one-on-one manipulation, they are incompetent at collective works.
Remember what I said about falsification. It can be tempting to stick "psychopath" on every difficult person. That would be bad science. Real psychopaths, as I've said, are experts in hiding from people just like you and me.
When I ran the FFII, a European NGO, for two years, we were infected by psychopaths. They attacked me without pause, assuming that I was like them, looking to make money or power from the organization.
We expelled at least one by the simple tactic of "as of now, no-body will talk to, or work with, this person". In the end though, the FFII was fatally broken, shredded by the endless arguments these people started. It was impressive how hard they worked to stop others from doing useful work. This was a brutal lesson in how casually a psychopath will smash through the lives and works of other people.
Incidentally, I have learned, by trial and error, how to build project groups that resist psychopaths. The key is a well formulated set of rules that remove all scope for manipulation, secret agreements, and power structures. We use such rules in our open source projects. Good rules are like garlic to vampires, though they need enforcement.
Psychopaths in the Workplace
The workplace has a different power dynamic from social groups, as people are paid to participate. It is an environment that should suit psychopaths. If there was ever a parasitic class, it is middle management in larger businesses.
However, most businesses consist of units that tend to mirror the family, and create some kind of stability. Psychopaths don't last long in stable structures. They prefer chaos and confusion and fresh faces. Apart from becoming easily bored, they cannot be relied on, and their bosses will soon move them sideways, or expel them. It is hard to see this happening unless you are close by. "Oh, John? He went to corporate sales." It is also hard to see the pain caused by psychopaths, as the formal workplace seems to wrap a blanket of anxiety and stress around everyone it touches.
You have to look instead at the activity of people over time, and their records of achievements. It comes down to this simple data point: psychopaths make nothing of use to others. They do not make useful documents, websites, training manuals, or wikis. They do not build projects. If they do get involved in a project, it will be through other people who do the real work, though do not get the credit.
In the workplace, psychopaths will show the same traits as in a social group (self importance, hidden discussions, poor organization skills, need to recruit competence, etc.), and additionally:
They rarely stay on a single project for any length of time, being unable to form long term relationships with internal clients and suppliers. So you'll see people come in, bring havoc with them, and then make a dramatic exit. Bingo! That was a psychopath.
If they are involved in a successful project, they first claim all credit for it, and they then proceed to break the project (out of incompetence more than malign intent, I believe).
They have no track record. No past, and no future accomplishments. They are "one hit wonders", if they are visible at all (and they stole that hit). Truly creative people start young, and never stop.
Their history is one of conflict and blaming others. They have nothing good to say of their ex-colleagues. Indeed, if they read this post, they will be using "(s)he was a psychopath" as their next excuse.
Anyone who has ever worked with them carries a longterm feeling of burnout, or nausea, to the point of not wanting to talk about it. And yet the discussion always returns to these people.
Everyone meets psychopaths at work. It is unavoidable unless you sit in the same office with the same few people all your life. I'd guess, though this is not based on data, that psychopaths would dominate and rise in sales, where cold-reading, deceit, charm, and an insatiable hunger for money are all assets. No-one expects a successful salesperson to be social or stable or even tolerable.
If your colleague or (worse) your boss is a psychopath, you cannot hope to thrive. You can reduce your exposure to damage, by grounding your emotions and presenting nothing of interest to that person. Yet in the end this is sterile, and you will have to move elsewhere to start productive work again.
Psychopaths in the Family
It is at home that the worst slow mental torture happens, by psychopaths onto their partners and children. You may wonder how people with no long term plans except "hide, feed, dispose" can even have children. And yet, our genes are in charge. Psychopaths must have children and their children must be successful, which means grandchildren.
For this, the psychopath has to, I believe, do two things. One is to keep their breeding partner captive and docile for as long as it takes, which can be a decade or more. Two, to put their children on the road to success. And by "success", I mean the essential urge of every gene to make more of itself.
The relationship between a psychopath and their spouse is the abusive bond I described in "The Cretan Method". It starts with a set of lies and promises that the psychopath makes, in order to get investment from the other person. A woman will promise endless fantastic sex. A man will promise endless gifts and financial support. The reality will be very different. Broken promises, utter disregard for the others' needs, mysterious absences, endless random rages, endless crises.
If you speak to someone trapped in an abusive relationship with a psychopath, they may admit it, yet not accept it, and not act on it. This is like telling a smoker that they are damaging their lungs. They will nod, and continue to puff. This is the strangest part: even as part of the mind knows the situation is abusive and wrong, the rest of the mind continues to invest in it.
As with addicts, there may come a point where the abused mind wakes up and decides, "I want out." It's at this point that others can lend a hand. The first step is diagnosis, to identify the source of their pain and misery. "It's not you, it's him/her" can be a shocking revelation.
The psychopathic significant other has a lot of the traits of the psychopath in business or social circles, except their focus is much more on a single person. What you can see is:
They are always the center of attention and discussion. Somehow their simple presence raises everyone's fight-or-flight reflexes.
They look after themselves, and that's it. Other family members get random, fragmented attention, and usually when it's to look good for others ("dress the kids up for church" syndrome).
The spouse shows significant degradation over time: loss of assets, poor physical and mental health, isolation from family and friends, professional problems. Usually this will be in sharp contrast to how they were "before".
They will be visibly narcissistic: their Facebook page showcasing their latest possessions and travels and events. They do not talk about other people unless those people are "special" in some way.
Their hobbies are travel, buying things, meeting new people, and looking good. They do not create for others or decorate their homes. They do not tend gardens, nor make meals for pleasure. If they have a pet, it is as an accessory (and they take abysmal care of the animal).
Their neglect of other people and living things extends to neglect of their environment. They clean by removing everything. They cannot distinguish the emotional value of an object, and so treat old, new, broken, used, and loved objects in the same way. Everything ends in boxes or bags. They are often hoarders.
They are expert in getting others — their spouse and then extended family — to take over domestic chores and childcare. They do this using a mix of incompetence, neglect, and feigned invalidity. This lasts well into old age.
They assert ownership over everything, and especially family finances. This is often tragic, as they are careless with money and neglect bills and reminders. When a psychopath gets his or her hands on the family money, the typical result is impoverishment.
Most of what the psychopath does, you simply cannot see, and cannot detect in advance. It is not easy to trap an adult human for years of their life. You must work very slowly, and carefully, to isolate them from all other choices. That means cutting their links to friends and family, one by one, so slowly it's unnoticeable.
Let me now come to the children. Psychopaths inflict endless slow mental torture on their children. It is hard to fit this into the "pragmatism" that usually defines a psychopath. The answer lies, I believe, in that 50% heritability of psychopathy. These genes must pass down the generations to survive. Psychopath's mental abuse of their children is, I think, a strategy to maximize the spread of those genes into the next generation.
There is a classic pattern in families with a narcissist parent (a euphemism for "psychopath"). The parent divides the children into two groups. One, they groom and teach how to become psychopaths in their own right. The second, they break so that they'll always be more attracted to psychopaths than other people.
This strategy makes sense genetically. Let's say you're Joe Random Psychopath, and you have two sons. One has more talent than the other (always). You take that kid, and make him the Golden Child. He can do nothing wrong. He's brilliant, gifted, special. He gets to treat other people like dirt. Especially his brother. And you praise him for it. He grows up to be a charmer, a bully, a serial abuser of women and men alike, and does pretty well at it. Oh, he'll hate you, yet he'll spend his life trying to outdo you. Excellent!
Now to the second child. He's the Scapegoat. Nothing he can ever do is good. He is stupid and ugly and you make sure he hears this every single day. Your little ally, Golden Child, taunts and bullies him mercilessly. Scapegoat suffers and takes it, as children do, and grows up believing this is "love". As an adult, he looks for abusive, psychopathic women. And when he finds them, he bonds strongly, and makes more little psychopathic kids.
It would be naive to think that psychopaths don't have some kind of grandchild strategy built in to their genes. We all do.
Though this story seems miserably sad, it's an optimistic one. My point is that psychopathy needs triggering, at a young age. Like language, the instinct is born in us, yet it needs the culture to develop and grow.
This is an easy hypothesis to negate: study twins, separated at birth, where one twin is raised in a normal loving family, and one is "Golden Childed" by their biological family. If the incidence in later life of psychopath is the same in both cases, my theory is wrong. I predict that the family culture will have a significant influence on the development of psychopathy (even though the traits are crafted by genes).
Observation
The most significant data point you can get is, "this person is causing me pain," followed by "they never apologize, ever." However, if a psychopath targets you, they will be very careful to make your encounters pleasurable and rewarding (if rather empty). By the time you're hurt by the abuse and lack of remorse, it is already very late.
This is from personal experience: I've crossed paths with psychopaths many times. Every single time, until I was about 50, I fell into the same trap. I'd accept the promises on good faith, invest, and then be bitterly disappointed when things went sour. The thing is, accepting promises on good faith is a successful strategy with 96% of people. And despite having a genius level IQ and a skeptical nature, I could never see the liar in front of me. The spiders are awfully good at what they do.
It took me a conscious and deliberate effort to start documenting and decoding psychopathy, before I could begin to recognize it ahead of time. Careful observation is the key to decoding any animal behavior, and this is especially true of other humans. Most people know a psychopath or two, or three. We tend to try to avoid them. However I've found it more useful to study them, even carefully prod them in various ways to see how they respond.
If you were a fly on the wall, you'd see a psychopath change moods, attitudes, and behavior depending on the person they are talking to, and the state of their relationship. You will thus see different traits depending on whether you are the target, or not, and how far you are down the python's gorge, so to speak.
Let's review the general pattern and break it into phases. We'll use "Bob" (the target) and "Alice" (the psychopath) to make this more digestible.
Alice has to remain invisible and undetected, while moving around general society. Let's call this hiding.
Alice has to rapidly explore potential targets to find the ideal Bob. Let's call this hunting.
Alice establishes a relationship with Bob, with a series of tactics we can call seducing.
Alice hammers in the abusive bond, which we can call slaving.
Alice takes resources from Bob, which we can call feeding.
As Bob reaches empty, Alice begins to destroy Bob, which we can call wrecking.
Finally, Alice discards Bob. There's no process here: Alice simply moves on.
In all psychopath relationships, this is the pattern: hide, hunt, seduce, feed, slave, wreck, and move on. Even psychopath parent to child relationships, which have a different dynamic, are essentially seduce-slave-wreck. Let me now take these phases one by one.
Hiding
A psychopath cannot survive exposure, and so must from an early age learn to act "normal". This is pretty much impossible, as human normality works as a massive psychopath filter. One successful hiding strategy (there may be more, I've not seen them) is to be so loud and lurid that people don't look more closely. Histrionic behavior, thus.
I'm not claiming that every loud, flashy, extravagant person is a psychopath. As I said, normality is not a falsifiable theory. However, if you think psychopaths are cold, gray people, you're wrong. They are dramatic, unpredictable, mysterious, ineffable, passionate, highly emotional, etc. It is all an act, and it fools pretty much everyone except other psychopaths.
Let me draw you an illustration to make this clear. You're in a party, with some friends. There is a woman who doesn't laugh, makes no expression at all. She looks at you clinically. Now and then she looks at others, and then looks back at you. She smiles, and it's not a gentle smile. This would be a psychopath not wearing any mask. It is a frightening thing to see.
And there's a guy, wearing a stupid orange hat, dressed in lurid colors, who's laughing constantly, huge stupid grin on his face. Everyone loves him. He's the life and soul of the party, roaring loud and happy, his face and hands animated. That's the psychopath wearing his colors.
Psychopaths learn their masks from friends and family. They will mimic voice, speech patterns, facial expressions, body language. They are professional actors immersing themselves in their roles. They keep these masks, fine-tune them, and wear them as needed. It is always a caricature, yet almost totally convincing.
The point of this is to distract and control. It's the technique used by a stage magician. Drama, music, and smooth words get the audience looking one way. And so to miss what is really going on, which is that the psychopath is scanning everyone, never laughing at anyone else's jokes, working the crowd. It works with a single person, and it works with a roomful.
Hunting
Psychopaths are not asocial basement dwellers. On the contrary, they live hypersocial and charismatic lives in public view. They have to be out there, in order to hunt.
I don't know if there's a particular kind of person that psychopaths prefer. Indeed, as relationships are heavily gender biased, I'd expect there to be four principal types of psychopathic targeting: female to female, and female to male, male to female, and male to male. These do not necessarily have a sexual element, yet it's often present.
Alice presents an attractive package. Her narcissism helps her invest significant time and effort in looking good (and I suspect, though without data, that genes for certain sexually attractive features correlate with psychopathy).
The ants just don't stand a chance, individually. After all, the spider has nothing else to do. It doesn't have to do any real work. It can spend all its effort looking more "ant" than a real ant. Those front legs, folded up as fake mandibles? They look fatter and sexier than the real thing. Supernormal stimuli FTW!
In conversation, Alice says whatever she needs to. Her first task is to quickly read Bob. Does he have something she needs, and does he have any obvious vulnerabilities? She's supremely confident. Bobs are opportunities, not people. If Bob tries to initiate some thread of discussion, she'll hijack it, and turn it back into stories about herself. She's a talker, not a listener.
She can drink, a lot, and never lose control. She enjoys seeing Bobs drunk, silly, telling her stuff they really should be more careful about. How much they earn. What their parents do. Where their family lives. How long since they broke up with their last girlfriend.
If she thinks she has an interesting Bob, she'll move rapidly to sex. Make it exciting, dangerous, perhaps. Certainly, memorable. Depending on the Bob, one night can be enough to hook him for years.
Seducing
When she's decided she wants Bob to be hers, she'll focus on him. Before that, what he saw were intermittent flashes of attention, already powerful enough to knock him out of his comfort zone. The full focus of a psychopath's attention is shocking, disruptive, and addictive.
Alice knows exactly what Bob wants, because she's asked him, and she's read him, and she's seen lots of Bobs before. She spins a theory of lies and magic, and then gives him this theory, and watches as he buys into it. It might be, "I'll be yours forever," or, "I'll make you rich," or, "I'll give you ultimate power."
Or, if Bob sees himself as strong, Alice will become the victim, the damsel in distress, waiting for Knight Bob to save her. Alice plays the victim very well, and will later turn to Bob's family and friends, tears in her eyes, to explain how he abuses her.
Whatever Bob's fantasy, Alice brings it within reach, with promises, stories, flattery, and hints. The only way to resist such a sales pitch is to want nothing and to believe nothing, above all your own voices. Alice's lies only work on Bob because he is constantly lying to himself.
As Bob begins to believe, and commit time and resources, Alice starts to create crises. Something is going terribly wrong and it's all Bob's fault. Bob has to try twice as hard, to make things right. Yet no matter how hard he tries, there's always another "it's over!" crisis.
At every crisis, Alice withdraws her affection, goes cold and distant. If Bob was smart, he'd watch Alice go and wipe her number from his phone. Of course, he is desperate to get her back. He is an addict. He tries harder, and she returns, yet it's never like it was at the start. Instead of that original intense attention, there is anger, abuse, and bitter pain.
Slaving
By this time, the relationship has entered its slaving phase. The more Bob tries to make things right, the more he is investing in the relationship, and the more trapped he becomes. As Bob gets sinks into the tar pit, Alice jumps on his shoulders to push him deeper.
Alice isolates Bob from his friends and family, either by telling him lies about them, or vice-versa. By the time they move in together, Bob depends on Alice for all his social life.
She lies to him about things he remembers, "gas lighting", to make him feel he's losing his mind. He starts to distrust his own memory. She is so utterly sincere and convincing. She is hypersensitive to Bob's possible insults or faults, so if he accuses her of any wrong doing, she packs her bags and leaves, until he begs her to come back.
Meanwhile, she starts to accuse Bob of the worst possible things. He denies these emphatically. She sees what he denies the hardest, and focuses on those. She shotguns her way past all his defenses, until she's gotten into his psyche like no therapist could ever do. Except her goal isn't to heal, it's to control, and to hurt.
She breaks into his life, in the same way. His family, his work, his friends, his things, his car, his hobbies: they all become hers. We share everything, is her mantra. Except, and Bob feels this yet does not realize it fully, all the sharing is only going one way.
Feeding
Alice doesn't work. Perhaps she's still studying. Perhaps she's been studying for a long time, and somehow never finishes. She's ambitious! Luckily Bob is there to support her.
Alice's goal is to empty, slowly yet completely, Bob's savings, and the savings of his family. She may also be considering him as a co-parent. The two are not contradictory.
For every wallet, there is a story that will open it. Sometimes it's being the tragic victim of a cruel world. Sometimes the wallet opens for false promises. Let's invest in tulip bulbs! I've a cousin who's importing them. We should build an extension, my friend will come and help.
Sometimes it's just blackmail. Give me a new car, or I'm leaving. No matter, Bob is a generous person and only stops giving Alice things and money when he is close to ruin. Long before that, he's trying to spend his way out of conflict and using extravagance as therapy for his unhappy relationship.
Sometimes things just disappear. Who took the money from my wallet, asks Bob? No-one knows. Things vanish, and Bob learns to lock his stuff up and not leave cash lying around.
"You have to try harder," say the people he asks for advice. "She's a lovely person, you're so lucky!" Yet when he comes home, it's to verbal assaults, emotional violence, and more and more, broken objects and even physical assaults.
Wrecking
Alice has her hands deep into Bob's social network, and she plays with it, and breaks it, and continues without apology. If Bob does complain, she will launch into a tirade of his past insults and attacks. And she will repeat this to everyone who will listen.
She's a powerful speaker and will twist and turn the discussion endlessly. Bob cannot defend himself, and cannot attack. He is reduced to either leaving, taking the abuse silently, or exploding into angry shouting. There is no dialogue.
Bob starts to realize there never was a dialogue. His worst fears — she wanted me for my money, she's been cheating on me, she's lied to me — have come true. And yet he sees no way out. He's so used to this abuse that he confuses it with "love". And anyhow, he has little left for her to take. If it wasn't for his dog, and being a coward, he'd probably kill himself.
Alice, however, isn't done. She is making plans to leave Bob, yet first she makes sure he will never speak of this to anyone. She neglects him, except when she's abusing him. She tells him, repeatedly, how all this is his fault. She tells him he's ruined her life, and how she will get revenge.
All Bob can think about, day and night, is Alice. It's not always nice thoughts. He wants to hurt her, and feels terrible about that afterwards. Oh, but Bob has been in an emotional blender for the last years. He's gaunt and haunted. A little more guilt on top barely counts.
Finally, Alice leaves, and Bob sits alone in his small apartment. They've divorced, she got the house, and the car, and the dog. He's paying her alimony, even though her new boyfriend earns five times more than he does.
Conclusions
I've explained the main pattern of the psychopath's embrace: hide, hunt, seduce, slave, feed, wreck. In each of these phases you can see different behavioral traits. Extreme charm and attention during seduction. Extreme brutality and neglect during wrecking. Although Alice is quite systematic in her tactics, and predictable once you know she's a psychopath, she is a shape-shifter. At some level, there is no Alice, just a sort of anti-Bob.
The goal with this explanation was to help you observe groups and individuals, before making a conclusion: this person is a psychopath. That is a damning accusation to make. Even professionals get it wrong, quite often. In any case, the diagnosis only makes sense as an answer to pain in some group, or relationship.
I asked on Twitter what people wanted to know about psychopaths.
Frank Rousseau asked how to spot psychopaths and deal with them. The main answer is not very helpful: keep doing what you do. Your ancestral genes already evolved a sophisticated range of psychopath detectors and coping mechanisms, and mostly, these work just fine. That is why psychopaths hover at around 4% of the population instead of 30% or higher.
I believe I'm much better at spotting psychopaths than I used to be. Simply learning that such characters exist, and how they operate, is powerful knowledge. I've had many conversations with people who described people in their past, or present, that were clearly psychopaths.
When conducting a postmortem examination of my own life and career, I can clearly see the psychopaths, now underlined with bright yellow marker. These are the incessant trouble makers, the ones who never made much of value, yet were always at the heart of arguments and disputes.
There are many online resources that cover psychopathy, more or less accurately. The best resources I've found are forums where people tell their stories, for it turns out that psychopaths are highly consistent and predictable in their strategies and tactics.
However, as I explained, it seems impossible to diagnose a random person as psychopath without entering into a relationship of some kind with them, or triangulating off sufficient other people who have already gone through that ordeal. You simply cannot tell, based of what you see in front of you.
However, since you are insisting, here is my short guide to "is this person I just met in a bar a psychopath or not?"
They are genuinely interested in you. They really like you. They make you feel good. They seem almost too good to be true.
They've interviewed you before you had a chance to focus. They know your background, family situation, availability, income, profession.
If they talk about their history at all, it's grandiose and spectacular. They can barely keep the sales pitch out of their conversation. You don't notice, do you.
Things weren't as simple as you thought. He or she is rather "difficult". Yet, you're stubbornly attracted and if anyone criticizes your choices, you reject them.
You end up planning big projects together, committing suddenly and massively. Everything is urgent. You find yourself rearranging your life around this new person and their needs.
This is all about how this person makes you feel, rather than about them directly. You are flattered, addicted, confused, distracted, protective, and committed. This whirlwind is the sign that you are entering the gates of hell.
How to deal with psychopaths you are already entangled with is another story. I'll cover that in my next article. It is, to put it mildly, not an easy thing.
Frank Rousseau also asked how to help Alice when she seems depressive. You can certainly help a Bob, simply by listening to him and telling him, "it's not you, it's her." However if an Alice comes to cry on your shoulder, you should move to safe distance and then leave. When Alice plays the victim, she is seducing or slaving.
αλεx monadovič asked, how people keep tolerating psychopaths, after their destructive behavior. The answer is, I think, that psychopaths are so good at hiding the bodies. Their new targets see innocence, vulnerability, and opportunity. Psychopaths, like con artists, play to people's weaknesses. Almost everyone has a weakness, and can be exploited.
nomosyn asked, are they necessary? The answer seems to be "yes", for without psychopathy there would be no human culture. That's my theory, at least, and you can falsify it: find me a human cultural activity that is not a plausible psychopath detector.
Lastly, ᴊᴇᴢᴇɴ ᴛʜᴏᴍλs (what's the Unicode fascination?) asked, what their business cards look like. That is an excellent question. I'd suspect, something "sales", or "vice president" of something. It depends on the country. In Europe, even using business cards in 2014 is a highly suspect sign. In South Korea, it's banal.
by pieterh