Beware of your friendly neighborhood psychopath

Hint: They're not all serial killers

I have written about why we let people do bad things. Now I want to write about the people who do the bad things.

Psycho

Psychopath = a person who will do anything (including harming others) without guilt/shame to satisfy their own urges and appetites

Psychopathy is a constellation of several traits and tendencies including

• Narcissism: it’s all about ME

• Low fear/guilt/shame: I feel GOOD!

• Sadism: Your pain is my pleasure

Psychopaths are not all serial killers like Ted Bundy and Hannibal Lecter. There are many successful people in business, politics, entertainment and other fields who are what are called “organized” psychopaths (as opposed to the impulsive disorganized type that often ends up in prison or dead).

Successful psychopaths are enormously dangerous and cause great harm to multiple people. They are very good at taking advantage of their intended victims through the use of a number of specific strategies. Here is an overview of how they operate so you can see them coming and hopefully get/stay out of their way.

Impression management

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.  — Maya Angelou

On a first date or job interview, everyone is on their “best behavior”. They smile, they’re agreeable and charming, all in the service of winning the other person’s acceptance if not affection. They are working hard to pass the all-important friend-foe test which is key to building any relationship. Sometimes the friendly performance reflects a real friend. Sometimes we’re dealing with a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Our lives may well depend on our ability to tell the difference.

We humans have limited energy supplies, both muscular and mental. We are smart to conserve energy for a time we might need a lot of it, such as an emergency of some sort. So we are wisely cheap and reluctant to invest too much energy when dealing with the mundane details of our daily lives. We look for energy efficiencies.

One way we conserve mental energy is by forming fast firm first impressions of things and storing those away for future reference. We save even more energy by selectively attending to details that support our first impressions (confirmation bias) and screening out later dissonant data that might force us to do the mental work of re-thinking and editing and revising our opinions.

This is a form of mental automation where routines run smoothly in the background without engaging high-energy systems like focal attention/concentration and working memory. It’s similar to the formation of behavioral habits that work without our having to “think” about them.

Boiling frogs, gaslighting, grooming and mind control

Successful psychopaths take full advantage of our cognitive laziness about revising first impressions. Look at this menu of techniques used by successful psychopaths to create and maintain a “good” impression:

• BIG BIG smile almost all the time (LOL that never quite reaches the eyes) accompanied by laughing and chuckling (heh! heh!) and head nodding (message: I’m good/nice/safe)

• Warm almost hypnotic voice

• Making “jokes” about their targets of attack to continue their happy/nice guy persona and maintain plausible deniability (I’m just jokin’, you’re too serious)

• Blurring the boundaries and lines of propriety by crossing over them and then softening the blow (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”)

• Separating intended victims from the pack and isolating them from allies

• Repeat again and again and … (relentless)

Each time a successful psychopath departs from their carefully curated “good guy” persona and does someone harm, they watch their intended victim VERY closely to see how they respond (for example, do they leave or stay). Normally the subject will experience (at some level of consciousness) feelings of uncertainty and disorientation and anxiety stemming from the cognitive dissonance between their initial impression (nice, good, safe) and the new conflicting information (mean, hurtful, scary) flowing in.

The subject of attack will want desperately to escape those feelings by denying/rejecting the new data, and your friendly neighborhood psychopath is only happy to oblige you by morphing quickly back into their good-guy persona (smiling, warm, chuckling, joking, etc.). When the mask goes back up, some targets will breathe a confirmatory sigh of relief (“Ah, I was right!”) and stay engaged, and the psychopath files that data way for future training sessions.

In a chemistry experiment, scientists will slowly and carefully add something to a solution until they get the desired state change (titration). A good physician will do the same thing to find the “right” dosage of a new medication for a patient. Successful psychopaths are very good at carefully titrating (drip by drip) the dosage of abuse they can deliver without triggering a total rupture and loss of trust/compliance by their current object of desire.

If you try to hold a psychopath accountable for their bad acts, they will strenuously deny any wrongdoing and usually go on the offensive, often by accusing you of doing what you are accusing them of (projection, DARVO). This tactic is designed to confuse their target and put them on the defensive by denying the reality of who is doing what to whom.

Words like gaslighting and grooming convey the methodical mental manipulations used by successful psychopaths to maintain coercive control of another person’s mind and behavior. Their success all depends on their ability to create doubt in their victim’s mind about their own accurate perceptions of the real evil in front of them.

Who ya gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?

After several training sessions by a successful psychopath, some people will become conditioned to mistrust their own perceptions of evil. Cycles of anxiety and cognitive dissonance and the relief of reverting back to naive first impressions reinforce their doubt and disbelief of an emerging and terrifying reality. This is the answer to any survivor’s question of “How did I let this go on for so long?”

The best way to PREVENT hypnotic enthrallment and capture by a psychopath is to plan ahead to pay attention to ALL feelings of fear or threat in any relationship, and to rapidly seek out a SAFE trusted person with whom to process and make sense of those feelings.

We should feel no shame about not being able to do this successfully all on our own. Our minds are designed through evolution and natural selection to resist revising first impressions (energy conservation), and successful psychopaths hack into this mental program to gain control over us. We need the safety and support of another benevolent mind when our own brains are being turned against our own welfare and survival in order to find our way back onto a safe and secure path.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Rx: Define your safe trustworthy go-to person NOW so you will immediately know who to call if threatened by evil.

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