And here is your superpower: other people. When you talk to others you’ll find that many have similar experiences. When you get evidence of abusive behavior you can publish it and file police complaints. Your abuser can only hide when others excuse and forget his or her behavior.
Above all, patience and calm. You need to learn a lot and change some deep assumptions about your life. You are not to blame. Abusers choose their victims, not the other way around. Read the book slowly, and take your current situation as a chance to become a stronger, wiser person.
How this Book Works
The Psychopath Code has eight chapters, each telling part of the story. You can read these in any order. I’d suggest you skim the text rapidly, then read it carefully a few times. Then discuss with people you trust, and let your new knowledge sink in slowly. Do your research, read psychopath forums and other books. There is a lot to learn, and it will take you time, maybe years, to digest it all.
In Chapter 1, we get the core hypothesis of the book, which is that psychopaths are social predators of other humans. It is not a new idea, indeed it is becoming mainstream. I’ve just taken the idea further than others.
In Chapter 2, we see how psychopaths hunt. It is strongly driven by gender and age. In each case the psychopath uses stealth and deception to get close and make their prey trust them. Learn these patterns, and you become immune to them.
In Chapter 3, we see how psychopaths capture their victims, and build the abusive bond. The psychopath isolates and manipulates their target into giving them anything. Again, knowing these patterns, we become immune to them.
In Chapter 4, we see the most brutal phase of the psychopathic relationship. In this stage, the psychopath drains their target, while abusing them into silence and acceptance.
In Chapter 5, we begin to turn the tables by tracking and identifying psychopaths. We see over a hundred traits and behaviors you can identify, including how you feel in the embrace of a psychopath.
In Chapter 6, we examine the human emotions. This is the key to understanding psychopathy and our response to it. We work through about fifty universal human emotions, of which psychopaths have nine.
In Chapter 7, we see how to break free from the embrace of a psychopath. The material explains step-by-step how to regain your power, and disable your abuser. It is not an overnight process, so patience and calm are essential.
In Chapter 8, I answer frequently-asked questions that follow from the material.
The book is available for sale on Amazon.com and Kindle, and for free from psychopathcode.com. Please do share the free PDFs and ebooks with your friends and family.
How this Book Came to Be
I’m a geek who writes software, articles, and books. My degree was in computer science. I studied psychology only a little at university. It’s not the usual starting point for a book about psychopaths. So let me explain how it came to this.
Over my career I’ve worked with thousands of people. I’ve built hundreds of teams, and many small businesses, not-for-profits, and on-line communities. I’ve had to learn human nature. Some lessons are obvious. Some are well hidden. We are such a complex species. And yet it is possible to decode, understand, and predict human nature.
It was in Culture & Empire[1] that I began writing on psychology. My expertise, and what fascinates me, is social psychology. That is, how groups work, and how people work within groups. It is the core of my work in open source community building. Software is all about people, it turns out.
In Culture & Empire I also looked at conflict as a force for change.
We dream of peace and stability. Yet throughout history the most ambitious leaps forward have arisen from conflict and chaos. We build a world of human rights. We work to protect the environment. We build legal systems and courts and police forces to protect prosperity and peace. You may not realize this from the daily news, yet globally, violence falls every year, and always has[2]. Humans are not good, or evil. We are survivors. We do whatever it takes to reproduce and make sure our children flourish. Most of us succeed by hard work. A few of us live as parasites, taking from others, like vampires. I call these the "good actors" and the "bad actors."
As I finished Culture & Empire, I was facing some bad actors in my personal life. Being a writer, I didn’t run away, and I didn’t deny what was going on. Instead I started taking notes and conducting small experiments. It is not every day you get psychopaths to play with.
I found that my work in social psychology was incomplete. I’d focused on the good actors, and only skimmed the surface of bad actors. Yet these two strategies are not alternatives. They intertwine and work together in a long and mysterious arms race. This arms race lies at the core of what it means to "be human."
There is a lot of material about psychopaths on the web. It is a topic that is trending year on year[3]. There are thousands of stories from those affected. There is research from psychologists and psychiatrists. There are papers from criminologists, and from on-line dating experts. There are even blogs and forums written by diagnosed psychopaths.
There are some huge questions that have no agreed answer. To start with, what causes psychopathy? Can we cure it, and do we even want to try? Can we identify psychopaths "in the wild," that is, without a psychiatric examination? Are they always violent and dangerous, and if not, what factors affect that? Is it a spectrum of behavior, like intelligence? Or is psychopathy more binary, like gender? How do psychopaths think and operate? Can we protect ourselves from them?
The authority on psychopaths is Dr. Robert Hare, and I use the term as he defines it, though more broadly. His checklist[4] focuses on males and misses many female psychopaths. Classic psychopath research has focused on convicted criminals: habitual law breakers, and violent offenders. In the mid 1990s researchers started looking at psychopaths who hide in the general population. These are the "subclinical" or "successful" psychopaths who stay away from violent crime. They are rarely arrested.
What we see is a figure of around 10%, in both genders. ‘A handful of empirical studies suggest that … subclinical psychopathy is much more common than its clinical counterpart, with base rates ranging from 5 percent to 15 percent." — Jay C. Thomas, Daniel L. Segal, speaking of work by Gustafson and Ritzer in 1995 and Pethman and Earlandson in 2002, in the Comprehensive Handbook of Personality and Psychopathology: Personality and Everyday Functioning (Google books).
Clearly some psychopaths are more harmful than others. I’m going to use a figure of 4% as the cut-off point. This is somewhat arbitrary. Too low, and we miss the majority of psychopaths and the damage they do. Too high and we trivialize it.
While many psychopaths look entirely "normal", I’ve also come to think, and research backs this up[5], that psychopaths also hide behind other personality disorders. Those are: narcissistic, borderline, and histrionic PD. This especially applies to female psychopaths. When you include these, the picture becomes clearer and more detailed. As a plus we get usable models for managing the damage caused by these disorders.
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https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=psychopaths%2C%20psychopath%2C%20sociopath&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-2