The Gray Rock Method is a Mental Model
Psychopaths are notoriously difficult to understand. Their thought processes are 180 degrees the opposite of what you’d expect. The best way to understand a psychopath is to use a mental model. The Gray Rock Method is a mental model for understanding psychopaths and their motives when they victimize. Gray Rocking gives you clarity about the psychopath’s addiction to manipulation.
I met the psychopath the year I graduated high school. It took twenty-five years, for me to finally leave the psychopath I’d lived with since I was seventeen years old. I couldn’t get away from him before then because I didn’t understand what he was. I knew nothing about psychopaths. During those twenty-five years, there were few books on the subject of narcissism. The only one I’d read was People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by Dr. Scott Peck. At age seventeen, I didn’t understand it. Twenty five years later, the third time I ran from the psychopath, I met a stranger in a sushi bar who explained that I was living with a malignant narcissist. He recommended Dr. Peck’s book and advised me, “be boring.”
With the advent of the internet, victims of psychopaths, feeling almost safe in their anonymity, had begun to come forward with their shameful stories. Reading them in books and blogs, I put them together like a puzzle, watching the patterns emerge. Then I had an epiphany. I grabbed a sticky pad and wrote the words:
REDUCE TO ABSTRACTS.
I pasted the note on the wall to remind me to find the abstract patterns when I felt confused about what a psychopath is and what they want. Reduce to abstracts means to pare down the patterns to the lowest common denominators.
In physics, you reduce natural phenomena to mathematical equations. Concepts like space, time, velocity, acceleration, growth rates and frequency, all are represented in the most abstract of ways– numerically. When you find different phenomena that adhere to similar equations, you can say that they fit the same pattern. I find that it makes it easier to understand an unfamiliar concept if it fits the same pattern as one that I already know well. Mathematicians call them equations, Jesus called them parables. They are also known as mental models.
Gray Rocks in a row
So, when the stranger in the sushi bar told me about being boring to get rid of a psychopath, I looked for a way to reduce the knowledge to an abstract. I went to the beach, where I like to do my thinking. It was a balmy summer afternoon, there were people walking everywhere. Still fresh from the trauma of betrayal, I looked at the beach goers and wondered which ones were psychopaths. Was there any way to know by just looking at them? I noticed that some people drew my attention. Some looked back at me, others were very animated, engaged in conversation . Those people stood out. Others barely drew my attention, they were bland and average looking, often grouped with other bland people. I turned my gaze to the beach full of gray rocks and the analogy materialized: Be boring as a gray rock on a beach.
Gray Rock Grew Legs
As with a parable, a mental model is one of the most effective ways of teaching. In 2012, I wrote the article, The Gray Rock Method of Dealing with Psychopaths. Since then, the Gray Rock Method has grown legs. Bloggers write about it, Vloggers talk about it on YouTube. I heard it mentioned in a podcast about #MeToo. Gray Rocking has become the go-to advice for getting rid of unwanted attention from unbalanced persons.
With all the discussion, misconceptions have also arisen.
What Gray Rocking is Not.
One misconception is that Gray Rocking can cause dissociation if you practice it too much. That is a fallacy.
Gray Rock Anchor
Gray Rocking is not dissociation. It is the opposite. Dissociation is when you disconnect from reality so that you don’t have to face the truth of what you are experiencing. Gray Rocking is finally seeing the truth despite the psychopath’s dramatic performance. The psychopath presents a MacGuffin and you see through it. You know his real goal is to see the emotional expressions on your face. The psychopath’s goal is to remove you from reality so that he can insert his own reality. When you see this truth, your Gray Rock is an anchor to a rock solid perception of the truth. It reminds you that the manipulator is acting.
Gray Rocking is Not a Superstition
Many people profess to Gray Rocking “without even knowing it”, in response to their abusers. If you don’t know it, it’s probably not Gray Rocking. That’s submission, or it could be dissociation. It’s a response of appeasement where you walk on eggshells. You stop responding so as not to make the wrong move. I know because I did it for 25 years. Just because you see a pattern, doesn’t mean you understand it. When you see a pattern but you don’t understand the cause, that’s called a “superstition”. Psychopaths have long been the cause of many superstitions because they’ve never been understood, they defy common sense, yet, there is a pattern. So, they’ve been called monsters, vampires, soul-suckers, voodoo doctors, witches and demons. All fit the pattern, but none are understood.
For example, when I was with my ex-psychopath, I remember a conversation I had with my mother. I said, “Mom, you know I finally figured out how to make decisions that always turn out well. I just ask Psychopath what to do and I do the opposite. It’s amazing how consistently this works out well! It must be because Psychopath is the stupidest man on the planet.”
I had noticed a pattern but I attributed it to the only cause I could come up with, “My psychopath was stupid.” The truth of the matter was that this psychopath, like all psychopaths, spent enormous amounts of time sabotaging my life. Any decision I made had to turn out badly and he made sure of it, no matter how large or small the decision.
One day he asked me, “When you go shopping, do you like to drive north to the Co-op or do you prefer to go south to
the other store?” He needed to know so he could position his cop friends on the road to pull me over and give me tickets. Of course this was beyond my imagination. So I came up with my explanation and it was a resounding success! Just do the opposite of what Psychopath recommends – and don’t tell him. It’s a superstition because it has nothing to do with REALITY, yet it seems to work.
A superstition is magical thinking. It sometimes works but you don’t know why. If you don’t know that your psychopath is performing, you aren’t Gray Rocking because Gray Rocking is about knowing what’s real. Psychopaths are People of the Lie. They lie all the time, even when they seem so real. Sometimes they might tell the truth but that’s only with the intent to deceive you about the fact that they are liars.
There Are No Safe Topics
Another misconception is that you can find boring topics to discuss with your psychopath. As you can see from the above example, even grocery shopping is fraught with dangers. Laundry topics risk that they will steal your socks leaving you with mismatched pairs. Taxes should be boring but the psychopath will learn too much about your finances. PLEASE don’t discuss car maintenance, it will only inspire the psychopath to sabotage your vehicle. That was my psychopath’s specialty. He would blame the auto mechanic so that I would never trust anyone else but him to fix my car. He also used this ploy on his airplane and helicopter pilot friends, to some very tragic ends. The only safe topics are things you really don’t care about: perhaps your favorite brand of toilet paper, and the proper way to floss.
Tell Them You’re Boring
Telling them that you’re boring is a short cut Gray Rock. It’s also useful for people like myself, who are terrible actors. Sometimes you run into a dangerous psychopath and you’re stuck and can’t get away. You’ve already played your cards by showing emotions and they want more. This happened to me when I was hospitalized for a long-term illness. Most of the nurses were so kind, but one day a nurse who was noticeably evil appeared. She tried to enhance my pain instead of alleviating it. I noticed this too late, I hadn’t Gray Rocked her. I desperately tried appeasement, by being nice. That made things worse. Finally, I remembered my Gray Rock article where I wrote, “Tell them you’re boring.” So that’s what I did.
“I’m such a boring person with a boring life,” I stated flatly. She walked out. I never saw her again. My statement triggered the psychopaths’ knee-jerk reaction to avoid boring people.
Warnings:
There are some warnings about Gray Rocking that should be taken seriously. It is not meant as a long-term method for living with a psychopath, It’s supposed to buy you time to get away. Because while you are Gray Rocking them, they still view you as potential supply. You could get thrown under the bus (figuratively or literally) when they need a sacrificial victim. If you’re in their presence every day, they still see you and if you’re not valuable to them, validating them, or serving a purpose, your days are numbered.
Secondly, Gray Rocking is dangerous when you have children because they will likely become the next victims. The psychopath needs supply and will take it where they can get it. Children are easy sources of supply. Depending on their age, it’s difficult to teach a child to Gray Rock because they are not as grounded. That’s normal for a child, that’s how they’re supposed to be. Explaining to them that mommy or daddy is just manipulating when they spank or when they take away their privileges is not healthy. Also, children don’t have good control of their emotions. Adults are supposed to help them control their emotions, they shouldn’t have to help the adult narcissist. The solution to this is “Selective Gray Rock”. This is analogous to what birds do when they have fledglings and they see a predator. They feign a broken wing to detract the predator’s attention from their babies. Do this carefully and convincingly or else you are giving the predator a road map to what you value most, your children.
Gray Rock is a Mental Model.
mirror rock
The Gray Rock mental model is about understanding the psychopath’s world view. It has nothing to do with who you are. When you channel the Gray Rock or “become” the Gray Rock, it’s only from the perspective of the psychopath, not your own. It is a fallacy to say that you will become a boring person if you pretend to be boring for the psychopath. The Gray Rock Method is a way to place boundaries on your emotions. If you think that having boundaries on access to your emotions is unhealthy, then you will always be a victim to psychopaths. They look for victims who crave drama as much as they do.
Rene Girard, in his book, The Scapegoat, describes how persecutors take control of the narrative to trade places with their victims. They claim to be victims so that they can justify the murder of their real victims by blaming the victim. This is the 180 Rule, the blurring of boundaries and trading places phenomenon. It’s human nature to scapegoat when we want to rid ourselves of guilt and shame. The psychopath, being full of bypassed shame, requires victims who will act chaotically, dramatically, out of control. This proves that they are guilty. Gray Rocking first sees through the projection and then refuses to accept responsibility for the psychopath’s shame. Next, Gray Rocking puts up a boundary on the psychopath’s attempt at emotional contagion. Even if we must witness the drama, we don’t acknowledge it as our own. We don’t react as if we own it.
The Gray Rock Method is a Tool for Clarity.
A person who practices the Gray Rock Method without understanding it, is like someone who practices a religious ritual without understanding the meaning. For example, the Jewish Pharisees who criticized Jesus for healing the sick on the Sabbath. Through magical thinking or hypocrisy they believed that the value is in the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Then the hypocrites crucified him.
You’ll know that someone doesn’t understand Gray Rocking when you see the incorrect statements they make about its dangers. We cannot assume why they make the statements, but we can decide to be wary. Gray Rocking is anathema to drama addicts. If everyone has boundaries, they don’t stand a chance of getting their fix..
In The People of the Lie, Dr. Peck describes malignant narcissists as willful people who cannot submit their will to anything or anyone. He says that they are so willful they won’t even submit to reality. They consider themselves above the truth. This is a tremendous revelation. We cannot Gray Rock without first understanding this. The psychopath’s determination to create his victim’s reality is the source of the victim’s cognitive dissonance. Victims know the truth but they can’t fathom how anyone could lie so convincingly, so they doubt themselves, repeatedly. The Gray Rock is how we anchor ourselves to reality and reject the people of the lie. Attempting to co-exist with the psychopath long term is what causes dissociation whether you go Gray Rock or decide to succumb to their false reality.
To someone who has not experienced a psychopath, it’s not an experience that can easily be relayed with words. The psychopath will hide their evil under the 180 degree opposite mask of love and kindness. This is because they know that we rely on our instincts to decide whom we can trust. They want to undermine our instincts, our core. And so we need to look for red flags which show a lack of consistency, a lack of integrity. In short, be alert for hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is when a person’s actions don’t match their words, they display behavior that’s incongruous with stated values. When we try to fit the opposing realities into our perception of the person, it causes cognitive dissonance. It just doesn’t fit, it makes no sense. The narcissist’s favorite place to hide is in these opposing realities. Confusion, chaos, disruption and dis-regulation is their agenda, but it begins by presenting the opposite: Certainty, order, assistance and guidance. Hypocrisy is a huge red flag.
Gray Rocking is a tool for clarity when you first sense the emotional contagion of the disordered abuser. It’s a confusion you feel in your gut if you’re alert. Don’t try to rationalize it or explain it away. At that moment, put up emotional boundaries, both inside yourself, and as a boring persona.
Once you have clarity, maintaining Gray Rock can still be difficult if the psychopath is a good actor and director. It’s like watching a horror movie, you know it’s not real, but it affects you anyway.
My ex- psychopath told me about an old girlfriend, Teri, who committed suicide. He said she stepped off a curb,
right into traffic. I thought that was odd. She had been a parking enforcement officer – a meter maid – so she must have been aware of traffic and its consequences. On a separate occasion, he told me something else. He said that when they were dating, someone broke into her apartment one night while they slept. The intruder chased them both around the apartment, slashing at them with a pizza cutter. The cutting wheel had been welded so that it didn’t turn, creating a better slashing tool. Hmmmmmm…. Psychopath happened to be a welder…and if he was being chased by a slasher in the night, how could he see the welding on a pizza wheel? I strongly believe he had set up the entire episode to destabilize his girlfriend into panic anxiety. I also believe that she encountered another slasher out on the street and ran into traffic to escape him. Interestingly my ex-psychopath displayed an intense hatred of meter maids. He would rage because they were always giving him parking tickets. Perhaps that’s how she first became his target. It was the setup, then the fall.
There’s no doubt that psychopaths are a horror movie in real life. They can produce the most convoluted chaos you could never imagine. They employ props and minions to create your new reality until they get what they want from you. You have a much better chance of escaping them if you can Gray Rock them from the very beginning. Remember the Gray Rock mental model. They want your emotions. Stay calm and don’t feed the psychopaths.
Copyright © 2012-2018 Skylar
hi Skylar;
this is an excellent article and description of Grey Rock, what it is and what it is not. Thank you for posting! I have tried to explain it to my 12 year old daughter to help her deal with bullies at school. Whether these kids are really psychopaths in the making or not, they are motivated by the same drama addiction. Grey Rock can help her to distance herself emotionally from the situation, which has been a big challenge. I think I will read through this article with her to help her understand the concept more fully.
One point. I have recently read the book The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl. It is really excellent, it reads well even though it is presenting a lot of science. He works in prisons studying psychopaths. He was able to show how their brains are structurally and electrically different, using functional MRI and EEG. They have a deficit in emotional intelligence which explains their behavior. But what I realized when I read the book is that based on the actual definitions, a true psychopath has no impulse control. The people we have discussed on this site are very conniving and are able to hide what they are. The psychopath Dr. Kiehl discusses would not be able to do that. Perhaps there is a spectrum, as with all things. but maybe the kind of person who is capable of so much destruction based on their ability to blend in and hide what they are, is actually by definition, a sociopath. I suppose it is all semantics. but I have wondered about these things, not sure what to call these people. by the instrument used, a psychopath has to score 30 out of 40. my spaths score around 23-28. I have considered writing to Kiehl to ask what he thinks about these people who have so many psychopathic traits but have cognitive empathy such that they can mimic empaths and maintain the subterfuge about who they are for years, and can stay out of prison.
Hi Mnav, It’s good to see you again.
Your question brings up several topics that would make great articles.
For one there is the question of children being psychopaths/narcissists. Since the narcissist is an emotionally arrested person, they have the emotions of a child – generally a very young child. And that explains the lack of impulse control.
I think that child bullies are scapegoating to compensate for the feelings that their own parents slime them with. I find it very very sad. They don’t show empathy because they weren’t taught it. Hopefully it’s not too late for someone to help them, but I don’t recommend that your daughter be that person. Because once the bully has gotten a taste of a scapegoat, it’s like a budding alcoholic who has their first taste of booze and feels the wonderful release from their anxiety. They feel powerful and that’s an addictive feeling.
I’ve read about Dr.Kielh, he uses functional MRI. The book sounds really interesting, but it may be limited by the population he studies, prisoners. As you said, what about people who don’t lose control? Or those who are so manipulative that they don’t get caught for decades, like Jerry Sandusky and all the pedophile priests?
That topic is about labels, how we use them and how they affect our perspectives.
In People of the Lie, on page 75, Dr. Peck described Sociopaths and Psychopaths as people without conscience. But he says that the people of the lie are different, these are people who find it unbearable to be less than perfect. Like Satan, they compare themselves to God and they can’t bear to not measure up. They scapegoat as a way to deal with this intolerable sensation. He calls these people the malignant narcissists.
Their masks are the lies that keep them feeling good about themselves. They believe their own lies. He says that evil is not a lack of conscience but in fact it is the mental gymnastics the malignant narcissists perform so that they don’t have to feel their shame, guilt, conscience, or whatever discomfort. This causes them to scapegoat, to project their sinfulness/shame/imperfections on others.
I know a malignant narcissist like this. In response to a question I posed, they said, “I’m going to tell the truth, Skylar! The truth I made up.” This person has epilepsy so they’ve had many MRIs and EKGs, but not any fMRIs that I know of. The person appears to me to have semantic aphasia, (they don’t know the meaning of words, though they speak fairly well). They have temporal lobe epilepsy, with damage to the left anterior temporal lobe and a very reduced hippocampus.
Their psychologist indicated that they have a personality disorder but that it can’t be diagnosed as such because there appears to be an organic cause: the brain damage from epilepsy. According to the DSM, if you have an organic cause it’s not considered a mental illness.
It appears that Dr. Kiehl is not describing or measuring changes in the different parts of the brain, rather he is describing how the parts work together. How the parts send info from one section to the other is what creates our perception of reality. In a sense we can choose and we can change how we perceive. That’s a human gift/curse. The malignant narcissist I described above once said, “I’m not going to be sad anymore, instead I’m going to be angry.” It is this willful refusal to suffer that Dr. Peck was talking about which defines the malignant narcissist. They change their perception of themselves and reality so that they can see themselves as perfect. That’s why Dr. Peck called his book, The People of the Lie. It’s a mental model too.
hi Skylar;
sorry I was gone so long. my log in didn’t work a few years ago, like I’d been kicked off the site. now all of a sudden it is working. whatever my password was, my computer remembers it and now the site is recognizing it again. I don’t know what happened.
my spath got cancer and died 2 years ago. I have completely re-imaged my life, and I’m getting the child the spath scapegoated into a better place mentally than he was before. I fear he could be permanently emotionally damaged though. but this event surely saved our lives. I couldn’t have survived much more of the drama the spath created.
I would definitely recommend Kiehl’s book. I do think that he is looking at the far end of the spectrum. exactly, what about Sandusky? and Nassar? the way Kiehl tells it, his population definitely appear to have a sort of brain damage or disability, and they really don’t have choices, given the twisted way that their brain perceives the world. He talked about a therapy program that was reducing re-offenses. he was mainly worried about homicides. I’m concerned that teaching these people not to kill just trains them to do all the other horrible things that Kiehl doesn’t really look at, since they have to get their jollies somehow.
I have a really hard time thinking of people who are so destructive, as human like I am. I just can’t perceive that anyone would intentionally harm another person and not feel guilt and then keep doing it, unless they were completely devoid of empathy and remorse, due to cognitive damage of some sort, something permanent. I just don’t think that people like this are able to be recovered. I think the idea that they could be is part of what they use to continue abusing people. I don’t think that they are cognitively like us at all, and that it is a mistake to project anything about the way we are emotionally onto them. it is not understanding this stark difference that allows us to be victimized by them. if we cannot understand that these people exist, in order to imagine it, then we remain vulnerable to their mind games. maybe I am a little Asperger and I see the world in very black and white terms, but my mother is a spath, and she revealed some things to me such that I think I understand a bit about how they think. they really don’t have shame. she thinks she has a right to make up her own rules, and has nothing but contempt for other people. I appears that these people have a code of silence, they recognize each other, and they hide what they are. and so I think that we are really in the dark about the scope of the problem. they mimic us and pretend to be whatever, and as long as we use our own selves as an instrument to measure their behavior, we are missing the big picture. I fear that the people we think are narcissists are just the ones who are really good at hiding the fact they are sociopaths. Kiehl thinks he understands psychopathy because he studies the ones who are so disordered they can’t keep themselves out of trouble. but I just don’t think it’s from abuse alone, I think there has to be a cognitive defect that is present from birth. there are a lot of people who have been badly abused but they don’t turn out to be narcissists or devoid of empathy. it’s just not an excuse for harmful behavior. I was raised by 2 narcissists and I am the complete opposite of them.
Mnav,
I’ve been gone for a few years too! Life gets crazy with spaths everywhere, it’s hard to keep up and do anything else.
I can’t say I’m sorry for your loss… since you lost that long before he died, but I’m sorry for the trauma. There is never closure with spaths. It’s so good to know that you’re making your life better.
There are many good authors on the subject of narcissism and psychopathy. Authors like Drs. Peck and Cleckley had amazing insight into the minds of the psychopaths. They do a great credit to their profession. But it seems like they’ve missed a few spots here and there. I think it’s because they were never traumatized by the psychos like we were. We have a special insight that others do not.
Your example of the training Kiehl offers the prisoners reminds me of my ex-spath. He’s like the Tony Robbins for spaths. He takes loser drug addicts and, because he knows how their minds work, he inspires them to clean up their act and figure out a way to blend into society. He’s been successful with a few that I know of. Then, they become his minions. He can use them for his own ends. The reason is because they are still evil, and as you said, it has to come out somewhere.
I do think the spaths are here for a reason. We have to look at the entirety of the human race, really zoom out, to see it. They are extreme, pathalogical examples of how the human mind works. By studying them, we are also studying ourselves. Scapegoating is ubiquitous. When Dr. Peck says that psychopaths and sociopaths in prison have no conscience but that the malignant narcissists that he diagnosed in his office are evil because they are suppressing their conscience, I think he is missing half the picture. All of them wear masks, all of them are projecting, all of them feel entitled, they are all suppressing their shame and envy. It appears differently in different people, in different settings because they’ve found different ways to deal with whatever pain they refuse to feel. An alcoholic looks different from a compulsive shopper or a compulsive worker. These are different coping mechanisms. With the personality disordered, human beings are their supply.
I like your analogy to addictions, with humans as the supply for the personality disordered. They are very predatory. I think that people who don’t understand spaths don’t really understand their sexuality. they don’t approach it the same way as those with empathy. if a spath has a homosexual encounter, you can’t say they are a homosexual. They would use anything to gratify themselves. they are the center, and it has nothing to do with the object they choose. They choose the object based on their ability to be used. they also need the rush of doing something risky. therefore they may commit pedophilic acts, but are they really pedophiles? children are just easier to use and manipulate.
I guess the spaths are a variant of human, but I think that empathy is a very human trait. and the less of it you have, the more reptilian you become. I have seen individuals become very narcissistic after a cognitive injury. it appears to me to be a more primitive state of the brain. the more you remove the oversight of the frontal lobes, the brain becomes closer to a primitive reptilian brain. One of the “tells” for these people is that reptilian stare. I have seen it in children who have not learned to mask it yet. So I am not sure this is really a “human” trait, but a throwback that comes out when there is a brain insult. However these people make very good soldiers, because in a military they are sanctioned to do things (kill) that they otherwise would not be allowed. They are faster to pull the trigger than those with empathy. Chosen to be the protectors of a people, they fill a niche that would allow them to have adaptive power to survive. As long as there is war and a need to fight to protect ourselves, this trait will be selected for and it will persist.
I have thought a great deal about the concept of evil in relation to these people. It is easier to say that the ones who cannot control their impulses do not have a great deal of “free will” regarding their actions. But for the ones we are concerned about, the ones who hide what they are, I think you can say that they ARE evil. If they would hide, it means they know that what they are is not socially acceptable. They know that they should not act on their impulses. They know right from wrong. If they do wrong regardless, to get pleasure out of being cruel, that is the definition of evil.
It’s not really an analogy, it’s a fact that people with a narcissistic personality are addicted to manipulating other people. The bottom line is that it’s an addiction, just like any other and that’s why it appears so strange, so compulsive. All compulsive disorders appear strange. They make no sense to the person who observes but doesn’t have the compulsion. Did you ever read this article I wrote about a comparative study of OCD and religious rituals? https://180rule.com/rituals-ocd-and-psychopathy/ OCD and rituals have the same outward behaviors.
Rene Girard wrote that all religious rituals were attempts at controlling compulsive violence by recreating the violence in a controlled environment. He said rituals didn’t really work for controlling violence because it required constant re-enactments.
There is a school of thought that the sociopaths make good soldiers. Historically that may be the case but there is more to the pathology – they have a need to betray. Killing may be enough for a while but even that “high” will wear off. When it does, if they survive the war, they turn on their masters, they can’t help themselves. They simply cannot be trusted.
I don’t believe that psychopathy is born, I think people with tremendous willpower are more susceptible to it, but from my study of it, it appears to be a contamination, like a virus. If you observe what they do, how they feed off the victims that they terrorize, you can see that they are transferring their humiliated rage onto the scapegoat so that they don’t have to feel the rage, the victim shows it on their face. This is not the only scenario, it takes many forms. The victim then carries it with them and will turn around and scapegoat someone else. And so it continues. It’s emotional contagion. That’s why the myth of the vampire is so apt. The vampire bites a victim and the victim begins to transform into a vampire themselves. Then the vampire will keep coming back to feed as the victim allows it because they’ve become addicted to feeling of being fed on. If the victim survives, they become a vampire that feeds on and contaminates others. Now THAT is a good analogy. That’s why we call them emotional vampires. And it’s why Gray Rock works. If you don’t respond correctly, if you are immune to their disease, there is no point in biting you.
that’s interesting you use the word contamination. my grandfather was some type of spath, and his daughter (my mother) also. my aunt, his other daughter, had completely disowned the family because of his abuse of her. at one point my mother was trying to have a relationship with my aunt, and my aunt flipped out and said “you are contaminated” before she never had anything to do with my mother again. I tried to call her once and she wouldn’t speak to me, even though she didn’t know me at all.
now, my aunt was not a spath, but she was abused worse than my mother was. and my mother was terrible, but my brother and I have normal empathy. I still don’t think it’s entirely contagious. I think the science has indicated that callous unemotional traits appear to be present from very early on, and if a child with these traits is abused, they are more likely to remain this way in adulthood. like it’s a one two punch. my ex was abused by his mother. his mother is a piece of work. his grandfather was a Nazi and raped his daughters. so it certainly runs in families, whether it is genetic or learned or a bit of both.
I can definitely see how this emotional currency was going on in my marriage. he used to brag about how he was able to “motivate” people. he would use his manipulative powers for good or evil, depending on his mood and intention. there were so many who thought he was wonderful, because he would use this to encourage others, however his intent was to be worshipped, not necessarily to do good. he could always get a rise out of me, and he must have been addicted to it, because he kept playing the game up until he died. I was terrible at Grey Rock with him because he used my children to try to hurt me. I just had to pretend to not care if I could manage it, but if it was important enough, I couldn’t.
my mother however, scores higher on the psychopathy checklist, but she appears to have a perceptual disability when it comes to other people’s emotions as well as her own. she cannot read others’ body language to know what they are feeling, and she displays inappropriate emotions because she is just faking it in order to get her way in arguments. in most situations she would just fly into a rage. she likes to use people for her purposes but she wouldn’t bother to stalk them. I think there has to be a spectrum of spath, depending on their ability to perceive others’ emotions and to have impulse control. maybe someday we can have a more detailed classification of these people.
Mnav,
I always thought that my ex was stupid. He played that card. He acted like he didn’t know he was being hurtful. One time he asked me, “Do you think I’m thoughtless?” He assumed I would say, “Yes, you’re always hurting my feelings with your hurtful words and actions!” But I was on to him by then. I knew he was hurting me on purpose. The things he did were things even the most obtuse person wouldn’t do. I just didn’t know WHY. Very few people would really fall into the category of being so emotionally stupid that they hurt your feelings over and over again. In fact I would say that nobody does. It’s an act.
Supposedly the most emotionally mind-blind people are Autistics and even they will quickly apologize and make amends if you explain what they did wrong. If you know a smart psychopath, you might be surprised to learn how many of them play dumb. It’s the most common trick in the book for them. They do it in so many different iterations.
My spath, in one of his tells, once described to me a street kid he knew. He said the kid sits on the sidewalk begging for money, drooling and acting developmentally disabled. But one day he saw him at a party and he was perfectly normal.
I really didn’t even know what to say because the part that struck me the most was: What was my spath doing a party with street kids in attendance and when the heck did this happen?
It’s all about the focus. Which part of the story do they want you to focus on and which parts are the tells.
mine never acted “dumb”, he just said he didn’t remember the conflict and so then he wouldn’t apologize because he pretended it didn’t happen. I actually wondered if he had a split personality for some time, because it seemed like he had 2 personalities that didn’t know what the other was doing. I admire you for figuring your spath out before you got away. mine kept people in thrall with him, and I was for sure, until about 6 months after he moved out. then the veil suddenly came down and I could SEE what he’d been doing, and doing from the moment he met me. for a DECADE at that point. it’s just sickening, to know my entire marriage was a fraud. anyway, I couldn’t see it until he was no longer in my space on a daily basis, keeping up the confusion and fear to block me from imagining the truth. it is a truth that most cannot imagine, and it is their camouflage: the idea that they are just like you and me cognitively and emotionally. The most important thing for society is to somehow convince people that these people exist, and that they are so different from normal humans as to be a different species. Once we realize it is possible, we will be able to recognize their tells, and people can begin to protect themselves. Family courts especially need to be able to recognize this. so many children are endangered by the court system approaching divorce conflict from a neutral perspective.
Mnav, in your defense, you only had 10 years to figure it out and I had 25 years. And yes, it was sickening to know the entire time was filled with only lies, about everything. Then I realized that my family of origin was also disordered and I felt even worse.
You know, their masks are only as good as WE allow them to be. When we’re young, we have to be blind to our parents’ abuse because it’s the safest way, so we trauma bond. Then, when we’re adults, we use that as a coping mechanism whenever we meet dangerous people. But I don’t do that anymore, I just pretend to. It throws them off while I make my escape.
Like you, I want to inform the world about these creatures, but I’ve come to recognize that many people already know and they just don’t care because they’re the same. Look at who we elected president. He made no secret of what he is and what he does. Yet nearly 50% of Americans thought he’d make the best possible president. Before the election I wondered how many people were really disordered. I thought that either there were a lot of them or else I was attracting them because they seemed to be everywhere. Well, the election gave me a statistic. The spaths cast their ballot and said they were happy being slimed. The ballots were counted and (unless the election was rigged!) the numbers were nearly half.
So the issue is not to unveil how many of them exist, the issue is to unveil how their minds work and how we can derail them. That leads us to the institutions that enable psychopathic thinking. That’s where they’re being created.