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

❂ Disgust - the emotion of tasting bad food. Trigger: Mallory decides she’ll cook. She prepares pasta, from a tin. You taste the slimy concoction and try adding more pepper. It doesn’t help. You force yourself to eat some, then you feel sick and you leave the rest. Mallory is offended. She never cooks again. She tells everyone how you hate her food, and prefer to eat in restaurants, wasting money.

❂ Hate - the emotion of rejecting a tribal member. Trigger: you call your sister. She answers, and before you can chat, she’s yelling at you. You start to realize she believes you spent the money on your new car. You try to explain it’s a company car, the money went to Mallory. "Liar, I hate you!" she shouts, and cuts you off. You shiver with adrenalin. You start to hate your sister. It’ll be years before you talk to her again, and you both realize what happened.

❂ Self-pity - the emotion of asking for adult help. Trigger: as Mallory attacks you, it feels so unfair. You start to weep. It surprises you, yet you can’t stop it. You stop the car because your eyes are blurring. Mallory responds by getting out, slamming the door, smoking a cigarette. "When you stop your baby act, can we go home?" she says, without emotion. "I’m getting cold out here!"

❂ Submission - the emotion of offering yourself. Trigger: home, Mallory takes off her coat, and then undresses down to her underwear. She is so beautiful it takes your breath away. She commands, "come here" and leads you to the bedroom. Your heart pounds. You have already forgotten and forgiven.

These emotional whirlwinds are exhausting and traumatizing. For Mallory they are easy, cheap gestures that leave no wake in her mind. Last of all, let’s look at negative triggers for the social emotions:

❂ Like - the emotion of a positive relationship. Trigger: Mallory says he’s going to repay the money. His business deal went well, he made good profits. He needs a little more for the custom fees. Do you have a thousand? You nod. Life is good.

❂ Dislike - the emotion of a negative relationship. Trigger: Mallory says the customs agent is a crook. He shows a letter insisting on payment. You see the figures. Then you see the letter is to you. "Why is my name there?" you ask. "Well, it was your money," Mallory answers. You don’t argue, you’re just trying to understand.

❂ Anxiety - the emotion of preparing for a future threat. Trigger: a letter arrives from the police. They want you to come in to make a statement. Did Mallory make a complaint? Your nose was just bloodied, not broken. You never went to the police. To forgive is to survive. You call and you get an appointment for the next day.

❂ Guilt - the emotion of breaking a social code. Trigger: the police detective explains that your partner made serious claims against you. There was evidence of bruising on his neck, and a medical report. You explain that Mallory punched you. "Was that before or after you tried to strangle him?" asks the interviewing officer. You ask if you can speak to a lawyer before giving a statement. The woman nods. You leave.

❂ Shame - the emotion of humiliation. Trigger: your lawyer talks to the police and they agree to not file charges, only issue a warning. The lawyer seems surprised how easy it was. You return to the police station and the same detective gives you a formal warning. "Any more violence between the two of you, and it’ll be jail time. Understood?" You nod, ears flushing. You want to melt and disappear into the floor.

❂ Remorse - the emotion of apology. Trigger: Mallory is weeping, crying. He says you’re violent and unstable, and he has to leave you. His whole family have been phoning you all day, leaving threatening messages. "If you hurt him again, we’ll be there to deal with you!" they say. You try to make it good. You feel so, so sorry. It was all your fault.

❂ Impatience - the emotion of losing your time. Trigger: you’re going out to see a movie, with Mallory. He is still choosing his clothes. It’s been half an hour. You pace the living room, restless and anxious. Mallory comes out of the bedroom, impeccably dressed. You shake your head and hands. "What took you so long?" you say, "we’re going to be late!" He sighs and walks past you, and gets into the car, without a word.

❂ Amusement - the emotion of a sudden understanding. Trigger: as you leave the movie, you see a couple arguing on the street. The woman is shouting at the man, who’s defending himself. She slaps him, without warning. You see the shock on his face, and you laugh out loud. You know how he feels. He sees you, frowns, and you try to show sympathy, "crazy, right?!"

❂ Revenge - the emotion of punishing a rule breaker. Trigger: on the drive home, a pedestrian crosses in front of you. So dangerous! You honk the car horn and frown at them. Idiots, they could cause an accident like that.

"We start out feeling afraid of something, then that fear makes us feel weak, then that weakness makes us angry, and then we start to hate." — Cracked.com, "4 Terrifying Psychology Lessons Behind Famous Movie Monsters" [84] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWq8j0yXkMI#t=273

We’ve looked at how individual emotions work. In practice, it is rarely as clean as I describe. Emotions cause chain reactions, where one emotion triggers another, and so on. This covers the root emotion. Here are examples of some such chains. You might like to extend this with self-observation:

❂ We dislike someone, and feel somewhat threatened. That makes us angry, and then we feel rage. We then feel guilt, and then shame at our reaction.

❂ We love someone, and we feel eagerness, and then belonging, and then happiness.

❂ We love someone, yet they are not paying attention to us, so we feel jealous, and then sad.

❂ A good friend dies. We feel loss, and then we feel guilty that we did not feel it harder.

❂ We feel loss, and then we feel lonely, which makes us feel sad. People respond to that by avoiding us, so we feel more lonely, and more sad.

Some of these chains are positive and some less so. Some chains turn into cycles that can be hard to break. The usual way to try to break an emotional chain reaction is to provoke a different emotion. For example, to break a sad-lonely cycle, we look for ways to feel happy. The problem is that the original emotions often come back.

There’s a good reason for this. A root emotion triggers off some core belief or assumption. As long as you don’t challenge and discredit this belief, it remains active. It will sooner or later trigger the root emotion again, and restart the chain reaction.

To break an emotional chain, we cannot just link more emotions to the end. Rather, we must find and understand the origin/anchor belief, and then discredit it. When we do that, the triggering stops, and the emotional chain reaction ends. We can then feel other emotions, like happiness, belonging, and love.

Take the example from Cracked. The fear comes from the assumption that the monster is dangerous. Look again, and you see an image, poor computer graphics, and a shaky camera. The fear disappears. Then the weakness, the anger, and the hate vanish too.

How do we find the root belief? It is always hidden under layers of emotions. To see it, you must work back through the emotional chain. This sounds mystical, yet it’s quite banal. Emotions fade away when you analyze them. We feel the last emotion the strongest. So, just ask yourself the question, "what am I feeling, and where does that come from?"

It is hard to stop, when you are feeling strong emotions, and ask yourself such a question. It can be easier with a second person, a therapist. Yet most of the time when you are dealing with Mallory, you are on your own. Get used to asking this question when it does not matter. You can then learn to ask it when it does.