How to Spot a Psychopath?
Is it possible to spot a psychopath? Or are they just so deceptive you’ll never know? Is anyone looking at the intersection of infidelity and psychopathy?
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An alert chump sent this recent article from the Guardian: “How to spot a psychopath: It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat.”
I don’t think you can spot a psychopath.
Not because I don’t think psychopaths don’t exist, (sadly I do), but because some people are so utterly deceptive, how would you know?
That’s not a very comforting thought, Tracy.
Right? Which is why I tell people to focus on their boundaries and personal resilience instead of trying to preemptively sniff out “Bad People.”
Whoever is in your life, no matter how outwardly nice, or normal they appear, if they want you do something that goes against your values or sense of personal safety, DON’T DO IT.
There. That’s your magic amulet.
I feel like I have to lead with that point, because one favorite criticism of abuse victims is that we’re armchair psychologists “labeling” people. (Big wave to Dr. Kathy!) I do label cheaters — I call them “f*ckwits” because we don’t know what flavor of the DSM they are. We just judge them by their behavior. Which is to say:
You don’t spot a psychopath, you experience them.
You know you’ve tangled with a disordered person when you find your wallet missing, your girlfriend gone, your scout leader indicted. Everything is normal up until the moment it isn’t.
Are you saying all cheaters are psychopaths, Tracy?
No. But I think a lot of personality disordered people display a shocking lack of empathy for their partners and are personally exploitative. I leave the diagnosis and debate to shrinks. I’m here to comfort the afflicted. The poor chumps who tangled with these freaks. And to raise awareness that not everyone is wired the same. We don’t all share the same moral outlook or values. A big shout out to the work of blog friends (who have PhDs from accredited universities! and aren’t life coaches!) Dr. George Simon and Dr. Peter Salerno.
No one is studying across disciplines how these people behave.
This is the part of the article I found fascinating:
It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy. By the late 2010s, she’d spent 30 years working as a consultant on large-scale change in corporate culture. Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same “dark personality” behaviours in other precincts. “Child sex abuse in religion, coercive control in human trafficking and domestic violence and terrorism,” she says. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”
Right? So please researchers, come study the chump experience.
This matters because predatory personalities cause an astronomical amount of harm. We’re bad at recognising them interpersonally, for reasons to be discussed, but we’re also bad at pattern finding in aggregate – mainly because different disciplines have so many different names for these kinds of people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” These are all traits that she argues are part of the same phenomenon, the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.
Here we called them FWs. We’re chumps because we were preyed upon. Deceived. Stolen from. That’s what infidelity is — a conspiracy. I don’t know why more people don’t look at it that way, but if you’ve experienced it, learning about personality disorders makes sense.
- Why are they stepping over your crumpled sobbing body to fix themselves a HotPocket?
- How do they sleep like babies after D-Day?
- Where is their adaptive anxiety?
- Why do they lie so fluidly, so easily?
- How do they turn their “emotions” on and off and cry on cue?
- Why do they look at us with shark eyes?
- Why do they get pleasure from our pain? Why does it give them a contact high of centrality?
- What’s the point of goading us into humiliating competitions they know we’ll never win?
- Why are they so grandiose as to think we want to reconcile with them or they’re a prize worth having?
I could go on and on and do on this blog. Why are our stories ALL SO SIMILAR?
Someone please get a research grant.
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Lots of siloing and the mentality of you cannot play in my sandbox. Plus, the intellectual arrogance that gets in the way. Lots of poor and unhealthy behaviors get explained away because confrontation is uncomfortable and difficult, and it’s easier to be agreeable or conform around these behaviors. Go along to get along…
Boiled frogs all
Continuing this conversation, how do you recognize a sociopath from a psychopath?
When the judge in my divorce case took me into her chambers with my lawyer and FW’s lawyer and told me “did I know that my FW was a sociopath and one of the worst she had ever seen in her courtroom?”.
That is the lovely person I was married to and have thankfully left in the dust years ago.
FW is definitely grandiose but old so much harder to pull off, emotionless, still shallow, deeply rooted only in his childhood, lying and all around absolutely pathetic. Dead eyes say it all.
Definitely the best loss I’ve ever had
I think that now the two are considered interchangeable terms.
In the article, they don’t make a distinction, but seem to lump it as “predatory personalities.”
Psychopaths take cheating to a new depth. See Donna Anderson at https://lovefraud.com. She has books, a podcast, and a wealth of personal experience.
Just as cheaters seem to have a shared playbook and a lot of commonalities, psychopaths also display consistent behaviors. Yes, the bad behaviors of cheaters and psychopaths may overlap. If you are dealing with a psychopath, once you see the list of characteristics, you will see them and your situation with much more clarity. They are truly horrific people.
I’ve shared here before that his long-term, PhD therapist shared with me that he had accelerated the lean that way just before he quit therapy forever. He took off some months after that. She hadn’t had time to fully explore that in a way that would hold up in court, but her bottom line was RUN! Naturally, I told my attorney.
Some six months into the negotiations, we didn’t seem to be heading toward a settlement, and reportedly my STBX was trying to take control of his own attorney and staff. Given that attorney’s client list and local reputation, NOT a good idea. That attorney used to run full-page ads in the local paper and represented all the rich and famous, even appearing on CNN several times.
So his attorney told mine one day over the phone, “I’m representing a delusional nutjob, and I want to quit.”
Thankfully, he didn’t, and we got it settled some months later. There was a huge amount of drama near the end as my ex’s delusions exploded to include detailed plans for my demise and unaliving himself. But the judge signed off on the negotiated agreement, and I was free-free-free.
At this point, whether my ex was one or not doesn’t matter. The key was ending the marriage. And I’m not responsible for justifying that with anyone. I knew him way, way better than anyone else on the planet, after all.
Yes, deeply rooted in their own brand of childhood trauma. I’ve been reading up on Adlerian theory. Dr. Adler essentially lost the popular narrative to Dr. Freud. Very fortunate for the disordered individuals in that Dr. Adler advocated for personal responsibility and Freud promoted blaming everyone else and your mother.
I think Carl Jung split on the blame the mother and its all about S%x too.
I think most trauma-based models promote some sort of victim blaming, and that there is scant evidence for it. Look at Stephanie Carnes and the whole RIC, who twist themselves and all their patients into human pretzels to justify abuse. Let me try to say this in language accepted by AI-bots: Stephanie Carnes, most of the RIC quacks, and people of their ilk are monsters, guilty of depraved indifference to human life, who make their living on the suffering of victims to the benefit of abusers. In short, boils on the “rump” of humanity.
So true!
I think regulars here already know my FW is a sociopath
I just wish I had known more about personality disorders and psychopathy when I was younger. If I had a clue I would have taken my children and run several years before I did. The FW in my life told me that he had never experienced empathy and he really didn’t understand the concept. That should have been my sign. I was just ignorant. I don’t think I really even believed him. Everybody experiences empathy, right?
You don’t know what you don’t know. I knew enough to give advice on others marriages but completely blind with mine because of “love”. You don’t know you can’t swim until you are pushed into the water. I forgive myself 20 times a day for what I accepted as normal for him
Me too, Elizabeth. I though empathy was part of the human condition, like having a belly button. It just came with. And then when I perceived discrepant behavior I thought he felt it but had trouble expressing it. That went on for a while until finally I realized I was living in hell.
Exactly
I can’t remember how I first learned about Dr. Karen Mitchell’s work uncovering and describing Persistent Predators, but I am sure glad that I did because it was sooo helpful for me to label my cheater as one. (Yes I can label after a yearly 30-year marriage to the guy and observing his many deceptive, unethical, and exploitative behaviors).
I hope her work can be expanded and more cross-disciplinary research can be done. Thanks for bringing this to light, Chump Lady!
I know how to spot a psychopath: marry one unknowingly. It’s a surprisingly effective method that I recommend to no one. And an even better method: divorce one.
Once you spend a year or two fearing for your life, with legitimate reason, and trying to figure out an escape plan, you too will be an expert. If you survive it, of course.
Impulsivity is no part of it for my STBX, who secretly researches absolutely everything that can advantage him. He is intellectually gifted and morally retarded, which is a bad combo.
Our divorce is delayed because he must destroy me in every possible way first. He told me he would. Once the mask drops you will see a creature of such malevolence that you may never recover. That is not a metaphor.
I suspect that psychopathy is a spectrum, like pretty much everything in the human experience. The thing is, that psychopaths enjoy the suffering of other people, and once you wire your brain for that , and to need more and more of that, you are damned. Also not a metaphor.
Dear PL- we all learn the hardest way. I pray you come out of this horror, a more empathetic person to make up for what you lost in this disturbed human being. I wish you the peace that I now enjoy after almost losing my life. Keep pressing forward
That’s my FW narcopath in a nutshell but he sure is an expert at feeling sorry for himself!
Other than the obvious psychopaths we see on the newscasts and in documentaries, already exposed and diagnosed, the sad truth is, most of us have to interact with them for a long, long time before we spot the pathology. You might assume normalcy coupled with a personal dislike of YOU, specifically, when in actuality, you’ve got a psychopath who treats everyone with disdain. All of us feel that we are normal, and we extend that feeling to our circle of fellow human beings. Sadly, we overlook most of them. Our charge nurse on Labor and Delivery was a stone cold psychopath and it took me a decade to figure it out – and I work in medicine.
“It be your own people.”
I cannot speak to “true” psychopathy-I deal with the full spectrum of psychotic and personality disorders at work (the people we serve are even worse! [rimshot] I’ll be here all week, folks!). I will wholeheartedly agree that you can’t “spot” psychopathy/personality disorders/narcissism/etc. You have to experience it.
Part of the “problem” lives in the fact that unless something breaks/something goes hideously wrong, they are never, ever going to find themselves in front of the therapeutic or diagnostic viewfinder. “Male Axis-II” as we used to call it is always tricky around these parts-the only ones that get identified are the ones that have already flunked several layers of the “the system” around these parts-and wooo Nelly are they difficult-both as people to deal with and in terms of outcomes.
I’d love to see more studies-your research population is going to be the ones that “got caught.” These people don’t wind up in therapy or in front of a psychologist long enough to get diagnosed otherwise. In fact they seem to take great pleasure in outsmarting your garden variety clinician, getting a “clean bill of health” and going back to what they were doing in my experience. I imagine at least here in America where we have sweeping reforms coming to Medicaid at the start of the year that we will get a flood of data on prevalence rates as people fight to keep their coverage(for better or for worse)….but yeah, minus the ability to require that every man woman and child get a psych eval every year we simply will never know the prevalence rates due to how sampling works.
As we all experienced-these people are very unassuming, very charming, and well, do not gel particularly well with the notion of mental illness/etc that the media trains us on. That’s the tricky thing about ACTUAL mental illness and predatory behaviors. We’re taught to look for the guy with the hockey mask. The killer is already inside your house.
My first clinical director 20+ years ago put it like this: “they seem normal enough. But you stick around them and talk to them for long enough…you start to realize that something is just sort of “off” with them.”
In my experience at least? Something is just fundamentally GONE. Like, completely absent. Not malformed, not critically damaged due to trauma, GONE.
Having dealt with actual sociopaths (did I make the “coworker” joke already today? I did? Crap.) it’s fascinating to see the depths of “lack of empathy. Same job, my first bonafide sociopath-we had someone celebrating the birth of their nephew “on the outside”. The sociopath started crying like everybody else, but you looked into their eyes-they were confused. It was not happiness they were experiencing. It was “emotionally overwhelmed, shut down, ‘I can’t take this anymore’ crying”, not the tears of joy of their peers.
I believe it is often said that while psychopaths rarely end up in a therapist’s office, some of the people who are exposed to them almost certainly will.
You said that something is fundamentally gone. I have been thinking of it as some kind of mental/personality birth defect. It never formed. There’s a kind of otherness about these people that you can’t comprehend until you know one of them really well.
After watching Chase from the Behavioural Panel on this very subject, he says they blame everyone else and take no accountability for anything, and all of their friends are out of town, in other words they have no friends, two huge red flags.
This post hits so close to home. I have a family member who fits this exact profile, right down to the literal predatory iconography. He has leaned so hard into this persona that he actually tattooed his body with the Aliens and Predators from the movie franchise. He is broadcasting who he is on his skin, but people refuse to believe their own eyes until they get hurt.
His red flags started in early elementary school with stealing money from relatives, constant lying, and threatening a school shooting. By middle school, he was stalking a kid from church with a knife. Once he got unfettered access to the internet and gaming in high school, he pivoted into a full-blown online edgelord persona. Before even graduating, he had a violent altercation with his female boss, was fired from his next job for stealing from the safe, and bragged about manipulating doctors for ADHD meds to fuel gaming binges before turning to steroids.
Because he looked like the gym-bro action heroes he idolized, people constantly excused his severe violence—including when he beat his pregnant sister, and when he nearly choked a man to death with a swing chain after being caught as the “other man” in an affair. He fled to the military to dodge consequences, barely avoided multiple dishonorable discharges, and weaponized veteran status as a shield by fabricating graphic trauma stories no one dared question.
His pattern with women has always been pure predator behavior. While deployed, he lured in women on Tinder who fell for his charismatic persona, only to leave them traumatized when they tried to end things. He once locked himself in a bathroom threatening suicide when a woman he flew out broke up with him; another time, he had a friend pose as a photographer, drive a girl into the middle of nowhere, and abandon her without a phone as a vindictive “gotcha” for ending things. Whenever a woman set a boundary, he became forceful or violent, then immediately flipped into playing the victim. He was even reprimanded by military higher-ups about alcohol and consent—which he just turned into a funny anecdote of zero consequence to him.
He loves playing armchair psychiatrist to pathologize any woman who tells him “no”—not just exes, but female relatives, too. He routinely diagnoses them with Bipolar or Borderline while twisting events to make them look unhinged. When questioned on his cruelty, he gives dismissive, nihilistic replies like “let people enjoy things”—completely blind to the fact that others “enjoy” basic things like bodily autonomy, safety, and a violence-free life.
Then came his wife, whom he also met on Tinder and moved in with weeks after getting out of the military. She seemed “nice” initially, but underneath lies the same cold, calculating, off-putting vibe. A severe alcoholic who fits the whole “nose ring theory” trope, she matches his level of manipulation perfectly. She manages his PR to the family while pushing to become foster parents—where she does all the work, he games and shows up for photo ops, and she accepts the dynamic. (Case in point: she willingly accepted a “proposal” where he dangled her ring on a cat toy, then made him redo it publicly just so she could brag online). Together, they’ve escalated to systemic financial abuse: helping him commit fraud with a deceased relative’s estate, while isolating his widowed mother and angling to take total control over her life and finances.
Any real pushback triggers immediate ostracization, heavy DARVO, and a scorched-earth smear campaign until everyone is bullied into silence. He shows the world exactly what he is, yet people still fall for the dazzle until the mask slips.
Oh Tracy CL Supreme! There is none like you. You keep the focus, the spotlight on the target of your mission and don’t get sidetracked by the diagnoses and PHDs out there that write books and go on shows to spout out what they think they know but they don’t.
We are flooded with bad therapy bad advice, bad people. You stand tall in the center. Remaining INCREDULOUS, semi shocked at the psycho- dynamics of pure PREDITORS that no one wants to label with yellow caution tape..or beware of Dog that bites signs. I thank you for staying with us, warning us to.BEWARE OF ANYONE who’s behavior shows a rabid foam around the lips. Stop. Right. There.
Id like to mention another warning to chumps out there…that both my cheaters did not evolve for years.. one started changing at the 10 year mark of marriage, the other took 12..but each slowly evolved into users, coercive controllers and liars. It seemed insidious shift from innocent to deception, pure to lies. You could not tell who they were in their 20s, not 100% but in their 30s to 40s to 50s there it was moving to full blown.
I’ve been with two men who seemed kind and loving at the start… but both had years of emotional affairs and then in your face YOU DESERVE IT — abuse. Where is the incubator for that?
Hopefully a true Chump researcher will fill the gap and help this cause. Until then, thank you Tracy. You put humor into an international subject of widespread abuse..That crosses all cultures. Thank you.
Easy – you can tell by the stare. The way the stare at you when they first see you and size you up as your next target. They want you, cuz they can sense the good in you, the chump in you and all the while you didn’t even know you were a chump. But THEY DID. They can pick a chump out of a crown of 100k people in mere seconds!
And they will ruin their own lives just to tear you down for the fun of it. That’s how they get off.
Scary people, these disordered folks…