The moment it clicked was in a therapy session, somewhere in the second month of working together. He was more put together than most of my patients, if anything. Articulate, calm, reasonable. The kind of man you would never look twice at on the street.
Then the subject of his criminal past came up. I knew he had served time, but I had assumed it was something minor. Turns out it was two separate prison sentences, both for physical debauchery. The exact thing we are all afraid of.
A guy lurking in a dark alley, jumping a drunk girl. He told me about these moments as if he were describing what he had for lunch. No guilt, no shame, no hesitation. When it dawned on me that he expressed no remorse whatsoever, I got the same cold, gut-wrenching primal fear you feel when you are out for a walk and almost step on a snake.
That was when I knew I was treating a psychopath. That story alone brought out dozens of similar experiences. Because everybody thinks of psychopaths as clever, devious, Silence of the Lambs types. But plenty of them are thick as two short planks.
It is less “Oh no, my primal fear receptors” and more “Oh no, I have to listen to Barry the boring earwax lyrical about himself for another hour. ” One woman said her ex was a perfect example of a psychopath who wasn’t the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. He was only out because the justice system refused to do much about him, and he managed to move before things caught up to him. Last she heard, he was still hiding from some of the things he had done.
A psychologist recalled a student exercise where a woman came in to speak with them. She had killed her baby child with a handgun because it cried so much that she couldn’t take it. At first, they weren’t told that she was a psychopath. They were just told to listen to her side of the story.
She read from a journal she had kept while institutionalized. Not once did she mention being sad that her baby died or that what she did was bad. She just read angry thoughts about her husband, who had left her and turned her in to the police. She justified the killing because the baby was so unbearable.
Once, she mentioned being angry and mad that her husband did not believe her, that she didn’t have any other choice but to kill her baby. She was smart and well-spoken, and the whole time she spoke, she was trying to make them feel sorry for her for being locked up. Later, they learned that sometimes she lied about not killing her baby, and other times she just bragged about it, depending on who she was speaking with. Very normal-looking person.
Very good speaker. That always made her think about how many people like that she had already interacted with in her life. Another psychologist mentioned an eleven-year-old boy who told her, quite plainly, that he kept thinking about how killing people would be more fun than lame animals. Stray cats, stray dogs, everything else he could catch.
Only eleven years old. A prison psychologist said she had worked with three individuals within the last two weeks who would have met the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. One commonality was that they used behaviors as tools to benefit only themselves. Self-harm, but not because they wished to hurt themselves.
They did it to lure staff into the cell to incite violence, or gain extra medication, or be sent to the shoe, which came with a certain status. Everything was a tool. Nothing was real
A woman recalled being in the room where her mother was being evaluated. Well, not exactly in the room.
It was like a police interrogation room with one-way glass. She was there because they needed to interview her for an outsider’s perspective. Her mother had been arrested on suspicion to commit a violent crime. To set the scene, she was handcuffed to a table and she was heavily pregnant.
She had always had volatile anger issues due to heavy drug and alcohol use. They questioned her for about three hours. The mother kept running the lady in circles to divert her from the actual problem. She was insanely calm answering questions about various things that would scare a normal person.
She barely showed empathy for anything. It was terrifying to watch. The daughter knew her mother wasn’t right in the head anyways. She had been abusive to both her and her brother.
But seeing how she handled the situation at hand, she was glad she got out of there. It would have gotten much worse. She hadn’t talked to her mother in about four years, but the mother had tried to get in contact. She could not trust her and didn’t think she ever would again
A mental health professional in a max security correctional facility described the predatory stare.
Especially when they are trying to manipulate you. It is completely unnerving, hard to describe to someone unfamiliar with the population. They also tend to be narcissistic and overly charming, making a point to be overly friendly with you. One nurse who saw way too many psych cases described a patient brought in after trying to break into a family’s house while they were home.
He was on the telemetry unit because his electrolytes were out of whack. He acted like he didn’t remember trying to bust into an entire family’s house with them home. He was getting antsy, but the hospital had a stupid fall risk policy that kept patients in bed, even if they were young, healthy, capable of being responsible. Mental health patients like to pace, especially when they start to feel like they are using it.
The nurse was trying to keep him in bed because if his feet touched the floor, a loud alarm would go off, pushing his crazy butt closer to the edge. She went in to talk to him and de-escalate. They got to talking, and he told her he was a bad person. He said his cat had been mutilated, and his sister asked what happened to it, and he told her the dog did it.
But, he told her, his secret was that he did it. He killed the cat so bad that it looked like a dog ripped it to pieces. He also shared that he knew what he was doing when he tried breaking into the family’s home, and that he wants to hurt people. Of course, she shared this info with the hospitalist, and the psychologist.
And naturally, he was discharged free and clear the next day. No follow-up with the law or outpatient psych. She said she was awake at five in the morning reading this now, and she wouldn’t get any sleep. She had just double-checked all her windows and doors.
One commenter joked that the psychopaths were in there taking notes on how not to get caught. The plot twist, it was a psychopath who wrote the question in the first place. Twist twist, it was you. But another psychologist chimed in with a more clinical perspective.
She said you feel it in your gut first. Using a validated measure and constructing a thorough case history to discuss in supervision. That is how you test your gut feeling. But you feel it often quite quickly.
It tends to begin with just a sense that something is off. When you’re doing therapy with someone, you tend to build up quite a strong rapport. There is lots of micro mimicry going on, and you start to tune in quite deeply to unconscious body language. When you’re in this state, sometimes you just start to feel very uneasy, and you can’t articulate exactly why yet.
This is often because of subtle microexpressions. Super fast flashes of emotion lasting fractions of a second that you perceive but don’t consciously register. You see flashes of contempt related emotions and burglar smiles. Basically, emotions related to dominance and deception.
The next thing you’ll notice is a lot of use of projection going on. This starts quite quickly, usually in an assessment session. As an aside, being assessed by someone else can feel quite threatening to anyone’s self-image, let alone a psychopath’s. Quite predictably, there will be status challenges.
Asking you about your credentials, your experience. Then often some put-downs and digs with plausible deniability. Joking that all psychologists are mad themselves, or turning the tables by asking who’s the maddest person you’ve ever treated. You start to feel on the back foot, like you’re now being assessed by them.
As time continues, they will attribute a lot of their own emotions to you as the projection deepens. Commenting that you look sad, asking if you’re okay, or conversely asking why you got angry just then. As time passes, their affect turns from micro-expressions to more overt dominance displays. Leaning back, smirking, getting up and striding around.
By that point, your initial gut feeling is getting more supportive evidence, and it’s time to bust out the validated measures. The biggest sign of all is a general unwillingness to show any vulnerability at all, or to be in a one-down position. The engagement will be superficial, often paly or matey, with lots of banter and joking, always flying close to the wind of outright mockery and contempt. They will start subtly, then increasingly become overt in their need to control and dominate the therapy sessions.
If the therapist maintains an aloof control, the ante may keep being raised and even end up with overt intimidation of the therapist
Someone replied to that with a joke, saying “I’m on to you, OP. Manipulate the psychologist into telling you how to avoid being caught out. Classic psychopath maneuver. ” And the psychologist replied back in kind, saying trying to undermine OP and make him doubt himself in your never-ending drive to manipulate and control others.
Then someone asked a clarifying question. What’s the difference between psychopathy and narcissism? People seemed to be focusing on how most psychopaths are narcissistic, but they weren’t really mentioning anything else. One user, autistic, said that because of their very low empathy, they come across as mildly psychopathic.
However, they have very low self-esteem. They do not manipulate people, as far as they can tell. Their former roommate, on the other hand, was a narcissist who would trash step tea, to the point where she abused and manipulated them in so many ways over the course of a year. Yet, the descriptions in the thread were conflating.
So what other traits of a psychopath are there? What differentiates them? Someone answered. The eyes.
When they believe they’re supposed to put on an emotion. You have to understand, it’s like going out when you bang your funny bone, even though it doesn’t hurt, because all your life people have cried out in pain when they’ve banged their elbow. You meet enough people like that and you find yourself hating any obligation or situation in your life when you have to lie, like being asked how you are and saying good when you’re not, simply because all you can associate it with is them. I say ouch when I get hurt in a video game or someone punches a table unpredictably
Another psychologist shared an observation.
When describing some of the awful things he had done to people, he didn’t express remorse, regret, or even anger. He expressed disdain. He was disdainful of people that he had irreparably harmed because he did not get enough out of it. He used them for his own ends, and he genuinely believed that they had failed him.
Someone else typed out a long response to that, but then deleted it because they couldn’t really describe it without giving too many details away. One thing they did say was that psychopaths aren’t all your classic murderous criminals. Sometimes the nicest people you’ll meet are psychopaths, and it’s all an act to manipulate you to do what they want or think a certain way about them, because that makes them feel like they’ve won, or that they are superior to you. Watch out for the nice guys.
Someone else said they knew a few, having studied it extensively, with a sister who worked with mental health and the police. One of them told him he tried to care how people feel, but he doesn’t know how that would even come about. How do you know you care for someone? How do you not feel indifferent?
He said he has three emotions. Indifference, anger, and pity
After reading through the whole thread, one user felt the need to sum things up. First, psychologists rarely even use the term psychopath anymore. Those disorders which fall under the umbrella of psychopathy are preferred to the otherwise generic and easily confused term.
Note how many people frequently conflate psychopathy with narcissism. There’s a narcissistic personality disorder which fits many models of psychopathy, but not all so-called psychopaths are narcissists. Second, it often doesn’t take training in psychology to spot so-called psychopaths. Formal training is needed to diagnose and treat, but our brains are highly tuned to pick up on small things that our higher consciousness is often otherwise unaware of.
This isn’t to say that we should purely trust our gut. We are more often wrong than we’d like to admit, but how we feel about first impressions is often very important. Third, far more people exhibit features of various psychopathic personality disorders than most realize. The vast majority of these people, however, live fairly ordinary, productive lives and don’t exhibit violent tendencies.
It has even been argued that psychopaths are an important evolutionary element, giving us people who can detach themselves from the human experience in order to provide valuable insights or behaviors the rest of us couldn’t fathom. Fourth, most of us will go through periods in our lives in which we often exhibit many symptoms of a personality disorder, but these are merely moments. They don’t truly impact our lives in the way that a true disorder does
One counselor told a story that made the room go cold. A client was talking about a disagreement they’d had with their partner.
An accidental spillage of water onto some electronics. It could honestly happen to anyone. As calmly as if he were describing changing a channel, he started saying how he pinned his partner up against the wall and started trying to strangle her. No emotion.
No change of tone. Just as if it were a normal thing. The counselor was a trainee at the time and not qualified to deal with domestic violence. Needless to say, they transferred the client to another therapist.
However, they were not allowed to end the session,and had to sit with him for another twenty minutes. They said they had never been so scared in their life. They felt like a small prey animal trapped in the room with a predator. He just didn’t care.
If you met him, you’d think he was just a normal, successful, kind of average dude. They were ninety-nine percent sure he was a sociopath, because he kept trying to get certain reactions out of them, kept changing his tactics, kept trying to charm them,and when they wouldn’t rise to it, became weirdly, coldly irritated. They had never had a client like that before or since
One woman said she didn’t know until years into dating a psychopath. But a lot of what appears as emotion is simply mirroring emotions they see others exhibit, and how they believe is the socially appropriate way to respond, whether or not they actually feel that way.
This is how they blend in and appear normal to the average person. They are narcissistic, and everything revolves around them. They are always able to place blame on other people. Nothing is ever their fault.
However, anything positive in their lives or others’ lives is because of them. Because they are narcissists, they believe they are much more important than they actually are. They have strong influence over others because of their ability to feel nothing when manipulating others, and this is how they exert control over others. They will do whatever it takes in order to come out on top of a situation with no actual regard for others’ lives or feelings.
They may fake their feelings or reactions to continue to manipulate those around them, and they get pleasure over having control over other people, feeling like they’re pulling all the strings. A good saying she heard went something along the lines of, you never truly know someone until things don’t go their way
One commenter shared a story about a neurologist that did a brain scan on himself and found out he was a psychopath. He wrote a terrible emo book about it. His wife was not surprised, if she recalled correctly.
And then, as these threads always do, someone joked about being visited by the IT lizard. Upvote or experience bad internet for a month. The thread had run its course. But everyone who had shared their story, sitting in their own homes, rereading their own words, felt the same quiet shift inside themselves.
They had all met someone like this. They had all felt that cold, primal fear. And they all double-checked their locks that night