The Shoes. One of my earliest memories is of learning to put on my own shoes. The first time I put on my black Mary Janes by myself, I proudly went to show my big brother. I was three and he was four. He just looked at me and didn’t say anything. His lack of [...]
Have you ever had anyone plot to kill you, try to drive you to suicide through bullying or plan your financial ruin? It’s hard not to take those things personally. It certainly feels personal. The attack is maliciously planned, often executed over years or even decades. They observe you for your reactions so they can [...]
We’ve all had the experience of waking from a dream that’s particularly disturbing. Nothing made sense, it wasn’t even real, yet we wake up emotionally rattled. There’s a nagging feeling that our mind is trying to tell us something important because we are so intensely affected, but the meaning eludes us. That is exactly what [...]
The word psychopath is derived from the Greek words, psyche meaning “mind” or “soul” and path, meaning “sickness”. An encounter with a psychopath certainly leaves one feeling sickened. Scars from psychopathic encounters leave a person and community indelibly traumatized and transformed as the contagion reverberates through the social fabric and forward through time. Anytime a [...]
I’ve recently learned something interesting about caterpillars. Inside the caterpillar body, there are clumps of cells called imaginal discs. These discs, which carry the butterfly DNA, are dormant for most of the caterpillar’s life. Once the caterpillar enters the pupa stage, embryonic cells called imaginal cells begin to sprout from the imaginal discs. The caterpillar’s [...]
Those who have experienced it, agree that psychopath encounters leave you feeling “slimed”. It’s a sticky, contaminated feeling on your psyche. It’s as if you’ve smelled something foul. I’ve come to understand that the feeling of slime is actually shame. Shame is a feeling so often misunderstood and unacknowledged that most of us don’t recognize [...]
The story of Adam and Eve, examined through the lens of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, describes what it’s like to meet a psychopath. It is the experience of knowing evil. In the garden there grew every kind of tree that was good for food. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree [...]
Seemona Sumasar’s story may seem incredible to most people, but I propose that it happens more often than we realize. It is a classic tale of an involvement with a psychopath. I’m particularly interested in this story because the psychopath I encountered also had a propensity for using the police to do his dirty work. [...]
Gray Rock works on the theory that psychopath behavior is fueled by envy. The moment they see something shiny, they have to have it. By using Gray Rock, we remove the shine from anything we truly value. Additionally, we can use Selective Gray Rock to make something we don’t value, seem valuable to the psychopath. [...]
When dealing with malignant narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths, borderlines, drama queens, stalkers and other emotional vampires, it’s commonly advised that no response is the best response to unwanted attention. This is often true and No Contact (the avoidance of all communication) should be used whenever possible. There are some situations however, when No Contact is not [...]