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

Your goal is to work backwards, emotion by emotion. At each step you use the knowledge you’ve learned of how emotions work. You want to identify the most probable trigger. As you identify the trigger, the emotion calms and disappears. You repeat and finally, you come to a root assumption.

The root assumption is often simple, yet powerful:

❂ By displaying this emotion, I will get a response from others.

❂ By displaying this emotion, I will get my parents or family to save me.

❂ By feeling this emotion, I am reacting to a real situation.

And then you can ask yourself the question, "will feeling and displaying this emotion make things better?" The answer is often, "no." As you accept that answer, the root emotion goes away. If you’re experiencing several emotions, each may have its own chain, and root assumption. Many triggers fighting for attention at the same time makes us feel as if we’re in emotional turmoil.

Let’s say someone breaks into your apartment and steals your laptop and camera. You feel intense emotions that become obsessive and consume you for weeks. You can’t sleep because you dream of another break-in. You search online for your stolen possessions. You ask yourself over and over, why me? Your emotions seem to flip around, out of control.

When you focus, you realize you feel hate, fear, and intense loneliness. Three dominant emotions. You analyze each of these:

❂ The hate comes from anger at the thieves. The anger is a normal defense emotion. Except, of course, it’s too late. The event has come and gone, and no amount of anger will stop it. As you realize this, the anger and the hate go away.

❂ The fear comes from anxiety that there will be another robbery. The anxiety comes from self-pity: you are crying out for help from friends and family. Except of course, you can fix this yourself. Once you install a better lock, the self-pity goes away, and so does the anxiety and fear.

❂ The loneliness comes from the loss of your treasured possessions. You loved them so much. If they were people, then displaying pain might bring them back to you. Stolen goods don’t care. They are gone forever. As you realize that, and stop hoping they’ll turn up, the loss goes away, and you stop feeling so alone.

This self-analysis is hard. I make it sound easy, only because I’ve practiced for years. Use a notepad and write down what you think you feel. Learn to name your emotions, using my list, and analyze them whenever you can. Everyone has different patterns. Yet each of us tends to repeat a small set that we’re comfortable with. You’ll find no more than a dozen emotional chains dominate your life. As you get good at this, you can learn to regulate these emotions almost as fast as they happen.

There are other techniques for controlling emotions. For example this Wikihow guide [85] http://www.wikihow.com/Gain-Control-of-Your-Emotions provides five different techniques. Method 4, "Reflecting On Your Feelings" is closest to grounding.

When you are well grounded, several interesting things happen:

❂ First, you become more self-aware. You notice your emotions are flaring up. You analyze why, and you see something that you never noticed before: the triggers. Your own responses become your instrument. Rather than denying your emotions, for the trouble they cause, you now embrace them. They just don’t go far.

❂ Second, this emotional awareness lets you change how you relate to others. Social discourse runs on emotional games, more or less overt. As you learn to observe, you see these games when others play them, and when you play them yourself. You lose your insecurities, anxiety, and need to belong.

❂ Third, it protects you against manipulation. Mallory needs an emotional surface to attack. When you do not respond to his triggers, you can withstand even brutal personal attacks. Your normal response to Mallory’s fury is terror, flight, and anger. To his desire, you feel intense love. These feelings will incapacitate you. Grounded, you see Mallory’s expression and you think, "nice mask."

I’ve explained how our emotions work to orchestrate our body for action or display our mental state to others. I’ve defined six groups of emotion: predator, defense, sexual, family, group, and social. In each group the emotions fulfill a certain role. This functional breakdown gives us about fifty built-in emotions. Each has a universal behavior and physical expression.

We’ve seen how Mallory’s emotional range covers only the oldest group. She is a predator, and sees the world in these terms. Even her sexual behavior is indistinguishable from hunting. Or, vice-versa. When you seek to understand how Mallory feels as she stalks a new target, think of how you feel sexual desire.

Mallory’s attitude to sex is striking for two reasons. It seems neither masculine nor feminine. Mallory is bisexual by opportunity and need, not self-identity. And this seems consistent across psychopaths of both genders. Most of us accept that human minds and bodies differentiate towards male and female poles. Psychopathy seems to be a separate pole. It looks like a distinct gender identity, with its own physical and mental differentiation.

We’ve seen how empathy works from first principles. We usually define empathy as an emotional response to a family, group, or social emotion. Mallory lacks these emotions, and the empathy that goes with them. Yet she does have empathy for the predator, defense, and sexual emotions.

Mallory’s pruned emotional range is no handicap. It’s an evolved feature that lets her use others' emotions without paying the same cost. When Bob or Alice feel anger, they pay a real price in physical effort and stress. The after effects can take hours or days to wear off.

Mallory is often described as a manipulator, yet she is as vulnerable to triggering as anyone. Show her vulnerability, and she responds with aggression. Show her anger, and she responds with fury. Show her fear, and she responds with bloodlust.

Understanding our emotions lets us control them. I’ve explained one way to do this, which I call "grounding." This is not to suppress our emotions. Rather it is to be free to sense the emotion, while removing its power over us. Grounded, we are more sensitive yet calmer. This state of mind lets us confront situations that are otherwise terrifying.

In the next chapter I’ll explain how to do the impossible. That is, to escape a relationship with a psychopath, without trauma.

My mommy and daddy divorced when I was eight. Mommy got to keep me and Daddy told me he could not stand to ever see her again. So he went away. I don’t see him much.

Granny is a lot like Mommy. They act nice to everyone and people just LOVE them. She is always so polite when people are watching. She has a honey voice. "I love you," she says to me like she means it.

Everything is Daddy’s fault, she says all the time. Poor Mommy, everyone is against her. She tells me I have to stay with her, all my life. One minute, she’s praising me, telling me I’m her smart baby. Next minute she’s yelling at me. She tells me I’m an impossible child, I won’t listen, how I don’t know what I’m doing is wrong. Then she starts crying, and I feel bad.

She is never wrong. Everything bad is someone else’s fault.

She always has bills that she doesn’t pay. She tells me: cheating, lying, and stealing are OK as long as you get something out of it. She steals from me, says she’ll give me the money back. She never does. She cries or gets mad when I ask her for it.

She stopped talking to her old friends because they don’t have money to give her. Money, money, money. It is all she thinks about. She used to hit me, and threaten me with horrible diseases. "If you use the phone you’ll get cancer in your brain." Or, "if you don’t eat this food you’ll get a stomach disease and have to go to the hospital." She thinks everything I like doing is shit. When I dress myself she tells me I am stupid, and she changes my clothes.