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

Yet, there will be times when Mallory refuses to let go. It tends to be hard to separate children from a parent without evidence of physical abuse. You may see Mallory as toxic and abusive. A judge may see two parents who argue a lot.

You can try to catch Mallory breaking the rules, and get a judgment on that basis. This works only if you can afford it, and if Mallory’s delinquency is dramatic and undeniable. Do not assume a judge will see things your way. No matter how well you explain, Mallory always tells a better story.

A more pragmatic backup strategy is to use Mallory to inoculate your children. This gives them tools to defend against his tactics. It also helps them in later life as they cross other psychopaths. I explained about providing subtitles. You can reinforce this by showing what parenting can look like. Shower your children with affection, love, and structure.

Over years you can teach your children self-reliance and inner strength. Mallory will keep trying to undermine that. It’s just his nature. You use each case as an exercise, until your children have learned to read what lies below the words and smiles.

This is hard to do without asking your children to hate their other parent. Hate is not a useful emotion, when dealing with a psychopath. Neither are fear, anger, jealousy, self-pity and so on. Mallory merits careful observation, analysis, and explanation. If you can maintain this mental state, you can teach it to your children. Mallory has no emotions for his children beyond, "these are mine." It is fair that his children feel dispassionate about him in return.

This sounds cruel, yet it’s making the best of a bad situation. In most families with a psychopath parent, the opposite happens. The other parent becomes the enabler. That is, they defend and justify Mallory, over and over. Minors cannot defend themselves, not alone against a single adult, and not against two.

Being the "disabler" parent has many positives. It teaches you to move forwards, not dwell in the past. To work from the desire to help yourself and others, not to punish from anger. To seek peace, not revenge. To understand and explain, not to blame.

In this chapter I’ve explained how to end a psychopathic relationship from the inside. The key lesson is that if you flee an abusive relationship, you leave as a damaged person. You take with you self-hate and a form of addiction to abuse which can last a lifetime.

As an alternative, I propose a process: Diagnose , Observe , Inhibit , and Terminate (DOIT). Through this process you will untangle the lies and distortions, and rebuild your self-image. By facing and beating your fears, you recover your inner strengths.

It is the deliberate act of freeing yourself from Mallory that heals you. It can take months or years. It will often be a painful and terrifying process. The pain and terror become routine, and then they pass. It is the shifting of power back to you that matters. When you end your relationship with Mallory, do it on your own terms, and as a whole person.

When you can look at Mallory and feel gratitude for making you a stronger, happier person, then you know you are free.

What makes you the expert in dealing with psychopaths?

After millions of years of evolving defenses against psychopaths, I think we are all experts. Some of us are better at expressing it. This book is based on my own life experience, and practice. When I realized there was a pattern to the damagingly eccentric people I’d come across, I could decode it, and explain it. I needed this book for myself.

Was this a hard book to write?

All my books take years to write. This one took less than some, and was easy to put together. Often, the material wrote itself. A solid theoretical model provides answers to questions. Once I had the "predator" model, questions like "how does Mallory hunt?" or "what emotions does Mallory feel?" were just a matter of working through the equations, so to speak.

Why the name "Mallory?"

I apologize to everyone called "Mallory." It’s a name used in computer security for an attacker. If someone breaks into your PC, that’s Mallory. If someone steals your on-line identity, that’s Mallory. The name works for male and female psychopaths.

The term is difficult… are there better terms?

All medical and criminal labels are loaded with the biases of their origins. "Psychopath" is the cleanest term yet it’s so strong that I can imagine being taken to court for calling someone this. I’ve used that term in the book title and text. Yet it often leads to rabbit hole discussions like "why not sociopath " or "such a diagnosis must come from a medical professional."

The French-Canadian author Isabelle Nazare-Aga [87] http://isabellenazare-aga.com/ coined the term "manipulator," and writes in her 1997 book Les manipulateurs sont parmis nous :

Sympathetic, seductive, reserved, and yet tyrannic, manipulators use various means to get what they want. Moving softly, our closest — parents, partners, acquaintances, colleagues — manage to make us feel guilty, inadequate, and full of doubt. Who are these manipulators? How do they keep us in their grip? Are they aware of what they are doing? Are their victims responsible, in some measure? How do we protect ourselves from these emotional terrorists?

The French also use the term pervers narcissiques (narcissistic perversion), invented by Paul-Claude Racamier in 1986 or so. I’m not sure the "perversion" works as a model, it seems rooted in a moralistic notion of normality, where there are "good decent" people, and then there are "perverts" of different flavors.

I’ve used "bad actor" as a euphemism. That’s my way of identifying someone as a psychopath without invoking the arguments over terminology and qualifications. There are other terms we can plausibly use depending on context: "predator," "tyrant," "narcissist," "parasite," "cheat," "abuser," "bully," "professional liar," "con artist," and so on. However, my advice is to use "psychopath" consistently, unless you want to lighten the mood a little.

A lot of the material feels personal. Was this therapy?

It’s a story of therapy. I’d discovered a way to deal constructively with the specific psychopaths in my life, and wanted to teach this to others. The tools and advice I’d found online were a good start, yet not enough. I felt we were mostly blind to the real story. OK, so there is clinical data, lots of it. Yet the only answer I’d get for my question of "how do I deal with Mallory?" was "leave, now!" It is a frustrating and patronizing answer.

Why is the advice to leave not helpful?

Anyone in an abusive relationship is already trying to leave. It’s not through lack of will. The abusive bond has deep hooks into your psyche, and you can’t just rip them out. If you try, it causes real damage. I explain this in detail in Escape from Jonestown . You must extract those hooks one by one. That takes time and insight.

So can you summarize your approach in a few words?

Don’t run away. Stop reacting. Learn your enemy, then stand and fight. Remove those hooks, get your power back, and end the relationship on your own terms. It can be terrifying, yet the alternative is to carry long term damage with you.

It is like escaping a rip current, which is when the sea tries to drag you out and drown you. Rip currents aren’t large. Obviously the entire ocean isn’t moving, only little threads and swirls. However if you try to swim back to shore, you will die from exhaustion. Catch your breath, swim sideways, and in five minutes you’re safe on land.