Pieter Hintjens - The Psychopath Code - Cracking the Predators That Stalk Us

Mallory specializes in distorting this process. He expands experimental space far beyond what is safe. He forces conclusions based on too little data. He influences others to accept lies as truth. Mallory’s logic is: you trust me, thus you must invest in our relationship, now.

As I explained, Mallory distorts our social accounting to make us trust him. Despite ourselves, we evolved to want to trust people. The more we work to establish trust with a psychopath, the worse our conclusions. This means that trust is a poor tool for predicting others' actions. It becomes a form of gambling. Most of the time we are lucky. We come to believe we are born lucky. Now and then we have horrid accidents. Then, we believe fate wants us to lose.

Consider this: you can create deep and loving relationships without depending on trust. Not that trust is absent. Rather, that it is not the basis for the relationship. Correlation is not causation. Trust is like happiness. It is a social emotion that you feel to show the other person how much you like them. Like happiness, it can come from real reasons, or fake ones, and we cannot tell.

If we cannot use our feelings of trust to predict another’s actions, what do we use?

The answer is motivational awareness. That is, to develop an awareness of others' motivations and intentions. As part of that, we must also be honest about our own motivations. It is our own lies that trap us.

Why are we in this place at all? What are we looking for? Most often we disguise our own motivations. We do this for ourselves first, and for others thereafter. There is a social process. To put our needs on the table shortcuts this process, and invites rejection. One does not ask an unknown person, "are you single?" or "how much do you earn?"

Thus we often hide our desires and needs. Yet this does not hide them from Mallory. When we push our motivations out of sight, we create denial. When someone sees that denial and pushes the trigger, our response is higher.

So instead, we look for our motivations, with honesty. We accept them, and we then resolve them. There are not a huge number of possible motivations. Indeed the set is small and depends on our age, gender, and circumstances:

❂ We look for people to trade our knowledge and skills with, to learn from, and work with.

❂ We look for people to play with, be it mutual fun, or more sinister bullying.

❂ We look for partners for casual affection, exploratory sex, and possible long term relationships.

❂ We look for people to look after us, with advice, resources, affection, shelter.

❂ We look for people to invest in, with our knowledge, resources, and affection.

❂ We look for people to share experiences with, to make us feel safe and meaningful.

❂ We look for people to like us, follow us, and listen to us, so we feel more important.

That is about it. It comes down to sharing knowledge, power, money, sex, security, attention, love, and care. We can not stop ourselves needing these at times in our lives. Yet how we respond to a trigger undergoes a dramatic change, when we accept our needs. Accept and embrace them, and they are no longer a vulnerability.

Let me illustrate. Imagine a homosexual man dealing with his sexual attraction to other men:

❂ He may deny it, to conform to social expectations. This makes him vulnerable to predators, as he will ignore weak cues. He will respond only to the exaggerated cues that psychopaths are good at projecting.

❂ He may accept and embrace it. This lets him recognize weak cues, and project them in turn. When someone projects exaggerated cues, he can now see these as a red flag.

Mallory picks up on the first case, to flip into a super-stimulus response. When you have hidden dreams and desires, you are vulnerable. Anyone with the talent can guess those dreams. And if they then promise to make them come true, they carve a hole into your mind. Yet if you embrace your desires and carry them in the open, it changes. You will find small, real comforts in most of the people you meet every day. It adds up to much more than any dream.

Normally, hiding our deepest desires, we see a crowd and feel, "most of these people are uninteresting." We narrow our vision and become passive, waiting for others to provoke a response in us. We appear bland, uninterested, perhaps shy and quiet. Every encounter feels risky, and if someone does break through our shields, we treat this as a special event.

When we understand, and accept our motivations, we can shift our perspective to "everyone here is interesting in some way." We broaden our vision and become active, trying to provoke a response in everyone we meet. We become playful, and outgoing. We have no shields to break. We’re like a song bird sitting happily on every round object it sees, blue or not.

It is also healthy to understand the motivations of others around us. You can of course ask out loud, and get an answer. The answer will often be wrong in all the most important places. You have to go past spoken words and borrow one of Mallory’s tricks.

When you are among strangers, practice cold reading them. Every person you see or meet is a story. Something happened to bring them to that exact place and time. What is their story? What are they hoping for, afraid of, dreaming of? Sometimes it is explicit, or obvious. Even then you will see layers. There is the story we show to others. There is the story we tell to ourselves. And there is the hidden truth.

It doesn’t matter how well you guess. It is the perspective that matters. You can see strangers as words, bodies, and faces to respond to. Or you can see them as stories waiting to speak. That viewpoint lets you pick up on details that otherwise slip past you. Things people say, or don’t say. The way they control, or respond to others. Their body language. How their friends act. Whether they appear alone, or part of a group. Whether they keep trying to get your attention, or not.

When you see strangeness, and you will, try to document it. Make a mental note and if you can, keep a journal. Anything that seems unusual. Over time you’ll start to see patterns emerging. Many will be familiar from this book. You will start to see pain and hurt. You’ll see through the many acts people play. You may now and then see Mallory, when she’s not paying attention to you.

One of the core techniques to learn is emotional control. This is essential to escaping a relationship with a psychopath. It is also a useful skill in a broader social and professional context.

Like motivations, our emotions form an identifiable core set. These are universal across cultures, and live in our genes. The psychologist Paul Ekman proposed six original universal emotions. These were: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. He seems to have missed jealousy, loneliness, despair, and self-pity and a few others. Later he added others including guilt and shame. The full list I explain in The Dance of Emotions runs to about fifty emotions.

The emotions evolved to coordinate our bodies for actions like fighting, or running away. They also evolved as a language that expresses on our faces and bodies. This is a universal language that babies can speak before they can form words. They live in the areas of our brain also responsible for empathy. These are the anterior insula and the amygdala. These areas also process our sense of smell. In humans this sense has strong ties to emotions.

Psychopaths do not have the same wiring in these areas of the brain. It’s not clear yet what their anterior insula and amygdala do. Perhaps emotional mimicry that drives facial expressions. In any case, they do not experience the same range of emotions as non-psychopaths. Their emotional range is limited, as I’ll explain in The Dance of Emotions . They have limited empathy. They have no disgust at mutilation, visible or imagined. They have a different sense of smell.