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

If you start a close relationship with Mallory, you may see better-hidden traits. Though they may emerge only late in your relationship. I already explained some of these in The Feeding :

❂ Mallory likes to hear stories about other people. Yet he seems oblivious to their emotional needs. He never asks how you are doing, meaning it. If you ask him how someone else is doing, he gives a bland, generic answer. He does not know, or he does not care.

❂ He texts and chats with a lot of people. Most are unknown to you. You do not see this behavior unless he slips up. He changes his phones often, and hides his browsing activity. If you do spy on him you find a lot of disturbing discussions about sex.

❂ He cheats, a lot, and with a long line of different people. It varies from one-night stands to year-long affairs. He may be bisexual, yet denies this outright if you ask him. He uses his trips away from home as his main cover. Few of the people he sleeps with know he is married. Often they know little about his true life.

❂ He has a family history of strangeness and criminality. This is a well-hidden family secret and emerges only over time. He has a parent who is a lot like him. The other was quiet and unhappy. He has a brother or sister who is in psychiatric care. He has uncles or cousins with personality disorders. There may be suicide in the family.

❂ His relationships with you and others revolve around argument and conflict. He may not speak to family members for a year at a time. He argues with you at the slightest excuse. Every argument becomes a crisis. It is never his fault. He never says sorry.

❂ He is a compulsive and eloquent liar. You struggle to see this. His lies are rich and omnipresent. You think him the most sincere and honest person, for years. When you catch him lying it is like decoding an optical illusion. The shattering of this particular illusion leaves you stunned for weeks.

❂ He is paranoid and often accuses you of plotting what he in fact would do. He accuses you of cheating. Of planning to abandon him. Of giving him STDs. Of lying to you, taking his money, sleeping with your ex. If you make a note of all his accusations, it adds up to an accurate confession.

❂ He fakes his emotions. You can only see this when he switches off a mask. His sudden anger feels real and explosive to you, and is terrifying. When he flips from anger to calm, you may see the fraud. Honest anger does not disappear so fast. The same for affection, jealousy, self-pity. His real emotions are predatory, and alien to you. You do not get to see this personality though.

❂ He is a compulsive rule breaker. He collects traffic violations. He is slow to pay his debts. He accumulates a police record. He appears in court, before judges. Yet he always seems to escape serious consequences. His record is clean. You see nothing of this, unless he slips up.

❂ He prefers nights to mornings. He sleeps less than most people, and can go for weeks with poor sleep. When he sleeps, noise does not wake him. If he dreams of a chase sequence, he is the hunter, not the hider. He does not dream of monsters.

❂ He asks you to invest in projects. These are often difficult, and expensive. He promises to share the burden. That is not how it turns out. These projects leave you financially and emotionally exhausted. Yet you are too busy to see that until much later.

❂ He is chaotic and forces that chaos on you. It is like living with a tropical storm. He comes and goes as he likes, without warning. He assumes you will handle affairs when he is gone. It damages your schedule and your personal life. He disregards your need for a structured life.

❂ He is a hypocrite. He is 100% selfish, and does what he wants. If you assert yourself, he answers with violence. Your needs do not count, yet his are untouchable. If you question this, you are assaulting him. He recites your crimes against him like an epic poem.

❂ He does not ascribe emotions to inanimate objects. Alice and Bob feel their phone is "unhappy" when it is less than half charged, and "happy" when it is 100% charged. Mallory does not do this.

❂ He does not keep his possessions in order. He has no emotional bond to physical objects, neither to people. He is reckless with items. He keeps precious family heirlooms together with trash. If he does clean, it is to sterilize, not create order.

❂ He prefers dramas to horror movies. Dramas show him emotional scenes that he can watch and learn from. Horror movies play on a fear of monsters that he does not share. He does not enjoy jump scares. If you leap out at him, he is liable to punch you.

❂ He does not cook for his own, or others' pleasure. If he cooks, it is a performance for guests. He prefers to eat alone, while watching dramas on television or the web. He does not keep an organized kitchen. His fridge is empty. He prefers eating out.

❂ He gets no pleasure from making others happy. He does not play with babies unless someone is watching. He plays with his own children only enough to make them like him. When he plays with children, he imitates others whom he has watched before.

❂ He does not enjoy card or board games. He does not gamble. If he plays video games they are the kind where he can kill people. He does not enjoy any game with rules that are not his to control. Games of chance where others might win offend him as unfair.

❂ He does not understand gifts with intangible emotional value. He likes getting explicitly valuable things like new clothes, accessories, jewelry, cars, money. Still, he cannot look after his effects, and neglects and wastes them. He may give tangible gifts, when he is seducing you. If you give him intangibles, he discards them right away.

❂ He is afraid of disease, and often appears as a hypochondriac. He collects medicines, and enjoys visits to the hospital. He may feign disease or trauma to get sympathy [71] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome . If he has children, he may do this to them, even making them ill deliberately.

❂ He is quick to use force and violence against you to get what he wants. His techniques will range from diplomatic persuasion to outright violence. Often he will use extreme verbal insults. He will take your possessions without comment. He acts like a child in an adult’s body. Any consequences are always your fault for forcing him into a corner.

❂ He does not apologize when he should, nor does he show remorse. This is often the strongest red flag you may see. No matter how bad he acts, it is always someone else’s fault.

❂ He answers your anger, jealousy, insecurity, and loneliness with cold distaste. His reaction puzzles you. If you ask him why he cannot respond like a "normal" person, he gets angry with you.

The strongest indicator, and the hardest to see, is his plunder of your assets. When you are the frog in the boiling water, it is hard to see the fire. You may see it when Mallory takes from someone else and you spot it. You may just wake up, after a long fight between fantasy and reality. You may go bust and have to seek the causes.

Often you will recall other traits about Mallory, years later. These tend to be invisible to you except with the distance of time:

❂ Mallory is a shape shifter, a face dancer. She wears the mask to suit the company. Her mask is often the caricature of someone Mallory knows or knew. You may see her change masks. Once in a blue moon you may see her without a mask, if she is off-guard.

❂ She often plays the victim, yet the details are vague and flexible. Often her struggles are the fault of her spouse, employer, or children. Her portrayal is perfect, award-winning. It convinces everyone except those who have been through her claws.