After my book The Destroyer came out, I have received large amounts of emails and thoughts and stories from others. It is very instructive and the subject; to be exposed to a person with psychopathic traits, or in short; en ”psykopat”, seems inexhaustible. It has something eternally fascinating about it, the phenomenon of people who in every way seem to be like the rest of us – but which hides so much more, who is constantly playing with everyone and in a way that we can neither predict nor imagine – before we have decided. And most of the time we do not have the result until we are spit on the other side. If we do not have special knowledge.
But what we all, which has been exposed, have been told when we have finally managed to free ourselves from the confusing disoriented hell we have lived in – where we have tried to find order and logic and honor, such as we recognize from other relationships, which has to do with ordinary basic agreements between people, but which cannot be found in a situation with a psychopath – is that we have been naive. So naive, snorts some smugly – certainly not all! absolutely not – they themselves would never be! They could never end up in a situation with a psychopath who entangles one. Nej, they are not so reckless and blue-eyed! It's just naive, reckless and blue-eyed people who can fall victim and do not belong to themselves.
I probably thought so too and all the others who have been / are exposed. We probably thought each of us could recognize the sinister intentions of a fellow human being, we all thought we could handle a person who might at least sometimes seem to have a hidden agenda, we all thought we could take responsibility for ourselves in a situation with anyone – except perhaps one who indulges in us physically. I will not list all the situations, which could be thoughtful, where we have all thought we understand that we have control but where we have been unable to have it.
En sak vet jag – and all those who have been exposed to a psychopath – it is naive to think that you are safe. It is blue-eyed to think that you yourself could not end up in and get entangled in and maybe even be destroyed by such a person. ( Destruction can happen in many ways, it's not always about money, but it is the transfer of money through deception that is prosecuted. ) This is not a subjective conclusion. In psychiatry, it is well known that anyone can fall victim. It's like being unlucky enough to be hit. It is not a certain kind of people who get hit. If you explain why someone ends up in a car accident, you will discover that it is a long line of small ones, small decisions that have gotten in the way. No one blames the person hit for it. But really, it's the same as having the bad luck to get in the way of a person with psychopathic traits.
It is naive to think that you would not make the very decisions that make you snag a psychopath, for precisely the decisive decisions are the result of a lengthy preparation in which thousands of small, seemingly innocent decisions have been made, such decisions that are constantly made in interaction with others and that never lead to any disaster, but which one nevertheless takes uninterruptedly. When people confidently claim that they ” never would” do this or that, so they seem to believe that the decisive actions, where the psychopath puts his claws in one, is free-floating, detached from an already built history. My very own psychopath was aware of how he worked. First, build trust. Touch the human heart. It could take a long time. He was prepared for that. Long time. It required his patience and his sensitivity. Which road was most passable? Once a trust has been built, you can strike.
In my case, I was reluctant and averse and tried to get him out of my life for six months. But in the meantime, he held on, and showed, among other things, what a bravely fighting and loving father he was. Then he won my trust. So he managed to touch my heart. The foundation was thus laid. It took patience. Time. Waiting. Strategies.
If you understand that, that the decisive decisions ( to get together, to have children, to hire someone, to become a good friend, to let someone into their private sphere, to tell a trust, to promise to help etcetera) always preceded by a carefully constructed story, one may not so assertively assert ”it could never happen to me!” And what we forget when we say so, is that we all can, all of a sudden get out of balance and thus become more receptive to a person of this kind.
So unfortunately, it is naive to think that you are safe. And the one who thinks she / he goes safe is de facto a very promising – and also enticing – byte.