Unmasking the Mask: 69 Shocking Signs Psychopaths Use to Hide in Plain Sight
You feel it in your gut first. Using a validated measure, and constructing a thorough case history to discuss in supervision – this is how you test your gut feeling. But you feel it often quite quickly.
It tends to begin with just a sense that something is “off”. When you’re doing therapy with someone, we tend to build up quite a strong rapport with people. So there’s lots of micromimicry going on, and you start to “tune in” quite deeply to unconscious body language. When you’re in this state, sometimes you just start to feel very uneasy and you can’t articulate verbally exactly why yet. This is often because of subtle micro expressions (super fast flashes of emotion, lasting fractions of a second) that we perceive, but don’t consciously register. You see flashes of contempt-related emotions and “burglar smiles” – basically emotions related to dominance and deception.
The next thing you’ll notice is a lot of use of projection going on. This starts quite quickly (usually in an assessment session – I mean as an aside, being assessed by someone else can feel quite threatening to anyone’s self image, let alone a psychopath’s). Quite predictably there will be status challenges – asking you about your credentials, your experience etc, and then often some put-downs and digs with plausible deniability (eg. joking that all psychologists are mad themselves), or just turning the tables by asking who’s the maddest person you’ve ever treated. You start to feel on the back foot and like you’re now being assessed by them.
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