Not Everyone Means Well
I have a kind of spidey sense about people with certain dark characteristics. It isn’t infallible, of course, but I pay attention when someone is too charming, seems fake, is casually cruel, or moves through the world as though other people exist primarily to be useful to them. One unpleasant moment doesn’t tell me much. People have bad days. I have had a few myself. But when I see the same characteristics repeatedly, a red flag goes up in my mind.
In graduate school, I learned that personality disorders are often ego-syntonic. In other words, the person doesn’t experience their way of thinking and behaving as the problem. Other people are the problem. Other people are too sensitive, disloyal, stupid, dishonest, ungrateful, or out to get them. If there’s always someone else to blame, there’s very little reason to look inward. Consequently, these people would not think of attending mental health therapy because they don't need it.
I also remember a professor saying that people with certain entrenched personality traits don’t tend to change easily. I would qualify that now. People with personality disorders can change, particularly when they develop insight and genuinely want something different. But change requires some capacity for self-reflection, some willingness to tolerate guilt, and some genuine concern about the pain one causes other people. A person who feels entitled to behave as they do, benefits from it, and experiences little remorse has almost no reason to change. The people around them may keep explaining, forgiving, accommodating, and hoping. The pattern continues.
I’ve been reading Poisonous People: Psychopathy, Narcissism, Manipulation, Sadism—How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life by Leanne ten Brinke, a psychologist and researcher at the University of British Columbia who has spent years studying psychopathy, deception, and what are sometimes called dark personality traits. She makes the research accessible without making it feel like Psychopathology 101, which I appreciate.
I thought about another book while reading ten Brinke: M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie, which I read many years ago and have never quite forgotten. Peck, a psychiatrist, wasn’t writing specifically about psychopathy. He was trying to understand what he called human evil, a word mental health professionals tend to avoid because it belongs more comfortably to theology and morality than to diagnosis. Parts of the book are dated, and Peck’s Christian framework won’t appeal to everyone. Still, some of his clinical examples are chilling.
Peck was interested in people who couldn’t tolerate seeing themselves as flawed. Rather than experience guilt, they lied, often most successfully to themselves. They maintained an image of themselves as decent, responsible people while projecting everything they couldn’t bear to acknowledge onto someone else. Frequently that someone was their child.
The story I remember most clearly involved a teenage boy whose older brother had died by suicide using a rifle. The parents later gave the surviving boy that same rifle as a Christmas present. When Peck confronted them with the horror of what they had done, they produced explanations. They hadn’t been able to afford something else. They thought a teenage boy would want a gun. They hadn’t meant anything by it. The explanations somehow became more important than their son’s suffering.
It wasn’t only the act that disturbed Peck. It was the parents’ absolute refusal to look at it honestly. There was no real remorse, no horrified recognition of what the gift might have communicated to their grieving child. Their energy went into defending themselves and preserving their innocence.
That is what I remember most from the book. People who do great harm don’t necessarily sit around thinking, I am an evil person. They may be quite invested in believing they’re the injured party, the responsible one, the smartest person in the room, or the only one willing to tell the truth. They build a story in which their cruelty is justified and someone else is always to blame.
Perhaps that is why explaining the pain they’ve caused so often fails. They aren’t missing the information. They’re refusing what the information would require them to see.
This is part of what makes Leanne ten Brinke’s book so interesting to me. She isn’t simply describing the criminal psychopath, the serial killer, violent offender, or obvious monster safely separated from the rest of us. She writes about psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism as characteristics that exist on a continuum. The people who possess them don’t all commit crimes. Some of them marry us, supervise us, work beside us, lead organizations, or run for public office.
They may even be extremely charming.
And sometimes that charm is the first thing that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Ten Brinke estimates that somewhere between 7 and 20 percent of the population has a higher degree of these dark characteristics than the rest of us. That doesn’t mean the remaining 80 to 93 percent are entirely free of selfishness, callousness, manipulation, or the occasional wish to make somebody suffer just a little. We are human beings, after all. The difference is how frequently and intensely these characteristics appear, how readily we act on them, and whether we feel guilt or concern about the effect we have on other people.
Most of us are restrained by more than the law. We have empathy. We care what other people think of us. We feel guilt when we’ve caused harm, even when we didn’t mean to. We generally don’t need a statute explaining that cruelty is undesirable.
Laws and consequences provide another layer of restraint. Someone with elevated dark traits may not feel much concern for the person who would be harmed, but may still decide that the consequences aren’t worth it. That person may be selfish, manipulative, or callous without becoming a criminal. The guardrails still hold.
People with stronger psychopathic traits are more likely to be impulsive, indifferent to consequences, and willing to disregard rules when those rules interfere with what they want. But environment matters. A society can discourage cruelty, impose consequences, and protect the vulnerable. Or it can reward domination, celebrate shamelessness, and give people permission to behave in ways they might once have kept hidden.
This was one of the most disturbing ideas in the book for me. Under autocratic leadership, it isn’t necessarily that large numbers of people suddenly become psychopaths. It is that people who already possess some of these characteristics may become more willing to express them. Cruelty is modeled from above. Empathy is mocked as weakness. Rules become things that apply to enemies but not to loyalists. People discover that selfishness, aggression, and dehumanization may bring approval rather than consequences.
Politicians come up in the book, unsurprisingly. Ten Brinke is careful not to diagnose public figures she hasn’t evaluated, and that distinction matters. We can’t diagnose someone from a distance. We can, however, observe public behavior. We can pay attention to habitual lying, grandiosity, impulsivity, the absence of remorse, disregard for rules, delight in humiliating people, and the ability to treat other human beings as objects or obstacles.
I’m sometimes more disturbed by the people who willingly follow destructive leaders than I am by the leaders themselves. History has never been short of cruel, dishonest, and power-hungry people. The harder question is why so many others choose to follow them. What does it say about us when habitual lying, cruelty, corruption, and contempt for the law aren’t disqualifying?
Then there are the people who may not have especially dark personalities but adapt themselves to the new environment. Some remain quiet because they’re afraid. Some go along because belonging feels safer than dissent. Some gradually accept behavior that once would have appalled them. And some appear to enjoy being given permission to say and do cruel things without having to think of themselves as cruel people.
An autocracy doesn’t have to turn everyone into a psychopath. It only has to remove enough of the guardrails, reward the people most willing to cause harm, and persuade enough of the remaining population to look the other way.
Bosses from Hell
Of course, we don’t have to look only to national politics to see this dynamic. Some of us have seen it in the conference room.
I once worked for a division manager in a hospital who was superficially charming with people who had power and condescending or cruel toward people he wanted out. He was selective about it. The people above him didn’t necessarily meet the same man we did.
I was good at my job. My annual evaluations consistently said so. Yet he had a way of making me feel both powerless and stupid. He excluded people, spoke to us condescendingly, and used his authority to remind us that our experience and competence mattered considerably less than his ability to make decisions about us.
At one point, the hospital decided that employees should be grouped administratively with others who did similar work. Our division had been interdisciplinary for more than twenty years—doctors, nurses, psychologists, clinical social workers, and others working together. He used the reorganization to push certain people out. Some were forced into different administrative divisions even though we continued to do the same work together. He wasn’t merely implementing the change. He seemed to take pleasure in the power it gave him, and he was obnoxious about how he used it.
I can’t diagnose him, and I don’t need to. The behavior itself tells us what we need to know. He was charming upward and cruel downward. He used exclusion to weaken people, condescension to make capable professionals doubt themselves, and an institutional change to accomplish personal ends.
Bosses like this often survive because the people with the power to remove them meet only the charming version. Those who experience the cruelty are left trying to explain something that can sound petty from the outside: a tone, an omission, a meeting to which everyone but you was invited. Each act may be small enough to deny. Taken together, they create an environment in which people become anxious, isolated, and increasingly unsure of themselves.
That is one way dark personalities operate. They don’t merely hurt people. They alter the atmosphere around them and then convince their targets that the problem is their inability to adjust.
Charm That Knows Who You Are
I once met someone at an event where I happened to be helping near the entrance. There was a minor problem with the registration, and this person immediately became disdainful and unpleasant. They apparently assumed I was support staff and spoke to me as though I were both unimportant and somewhat dim. They didn’t know I was one of the people responsible for the organization hosting the event.
Several years later, we met again in a completely different setting. The person didn’t remember me, but this time knew something about my professional life. The difference was remarkable. Now they were respectful, charming, and so sweet I thought I might need a shot of insulin.
We’ve remained occasional acquaintances. I hesitate to call this person a friend because I haven’t forgotten that first encounter. I know how they treat someone they perceive as having little importance. I also know how quickly the charm appears when they believe a person has status or might be useful to them. More recently, I caught another brief glimpse of the coldness beneath all that sweetness when I made an entirely ordinary comment they didn’t like. The temperature seemed to drop about twenty degrees.
None of this means that the person is a psychopath. Haughtiness, social ambition, and a chilly response to criticism don’t constitute a diagnosis. But the discrepancy is information. I notice when someone’s warmth depends upon the status of the person standing in front of them. I notice when courtesy flows upward but not downward. And I notice when excessive charm disappears the moment the other person is no longer pleasing them.
Perhaps my caution is unfair. It’s also possible that my spidey sense is doing precisely what it’s supposed to do. I can be cordial. I can enjoy an occasional conversation. I don’t have to hand someone unrestricted access to my life simply because they’re being charming today.
When Attention Feels Like Love
Ten Brinke also tells the story in her book of a young woman who had struggled with self-esteem and received very little attention as a child. When a man came along and showered her with attention, it felt wonderful. After their first date, he told her he loved her and wanted to be with her forever.
From the outside, that sounds preposterous. He didn’t know her well enough to love her, much less promise forever. From the inside, though, it felt to her like finally being chosen.
They had sex, and he disappeared. Several weeks later, he resurfaced with an explanation for why he hadn’t contacted her. He was charming, apologetic, and convincing enough that she gave him another chance. He professed his feelings, they had sex again, and he disappeared again. The cycle happened a third time before she discovered that he had been doing the same thing with several women.
The cruelty wasn’t simply that he wanted sex and didn’t want a relationship. He could have been honest about that. Instead, he learned what each woman longed to hear and used it to get what he wanted. Her feelings weren’t collateral damage he regretted. They simply didn’t matter enough to restrain him.
I’ve seen versions of this pattern in my clinical work. A person who feels awkward, undesirable, or unsure of herself may be overwhelmed when someone suddenly offers intense attention, extravagant compliments, and immediate certainty. She isn’t stupid, and she isn’t responsible for being deceived. But she may be especially vulnerable to someone skilled at turning unmet emotional needs into leverage.
This is often called love bombing, although that term is now used so casually that almost any enthusiastic beginning to a relationship can acquire a sinister name. Genuine excitement isn’t the same as calculated manipulation. The warning comes from the combination: declarations wildly out of proportion to how well the person knows you, pressure to become emotionally or sexually intimate very quickly, inconsistency between words and behavior, implausible explanations, repeated disappearances, and a pattern of returning just when you’ve begun to pull away.
One protection is to slow the whole thing down. Don’t allow someone else’s urgency to dictate the pace of the relationship. Let time reveal whether the person’s behavior matches the beautiful things being said. Stay connected with friends who can see more clearly from outside the intoxicating little bubble. Pay attention to how the person responds to “no,” disappointment, inconvenience, and boundaries. Charm is easy when everything is going their way.
And if someone has already deceived you once, an explanation isn’t evidence that they’ve changed. The explanation may simply be the tool they use to regain access.
What Do We Do With People Like This?
This is where ten Brinke’s book is more useful than a catalog of terrible people. Recognizing dark characteristics matters, but then what?
First, we stop believing that enough empathy on our part will necessarily produce empathy in someone else. Explaining our pain may move a person who cares that they’ve hurt us. With someone who doesn’t, the information may only teach them where we’re most vulnerable.
We pay attention to patterns rather than promises. We document agreements when necessary. We make expectations and consequences clear. We don’t argue endlessly about their motives, because that can become a very effective distraction from what they’ve actually done. In a workplace, that may mean keeping communication in writing, consulting human resources or a union, and staying connected with colleagues rather than allowing ourselves to be isolated. In a relationship, it may mean slowing down, maintaining outside support, protecting financial and personal information, or leaving.
Ten Brinke also writes about using incentives and consequences with people whose behavior is guided less by empathy than by self-interest. I find that interesting, though I would add that no one should have to become a full-time behavior-management program for another adult. Sometimes the most useful intervention is limiting the person’s access to you. Sometimes it is getting out.
I know this may make me sound jaded, and perhaps I am. I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and I’ve seen how much damage one person can do while everyone around them continues to search for a more generous explanation. I still believe people can grow and change. I’ve witnessed that, too. But change requires some capacity for self-reflection, some willingness to tolerate guilt, and some genuine concern about the pain one causes other people.
I no longer assume that everyone possesses those capacities simply because I would like them to.
There’s a difference between cynicism and discernment. Cynicism says that no one can be trusted. Discernment says that trust should grow from what a person consistently does, not from how charming they can be, how moving their explanation sounds, or how much we want to believe them.
I am still willing to see the good in people. I’m simply less willing to invent it when their behavior repeatedly tells me otherwise.
Janet Nash, MSW, LISW-S, Yoga Therapist, CCTP, is a psychotherapist, writer, and founder of Interiority Wellness. Her work explores mental health, generational healing, creativity, nature, and the quiet ways we find our way back to ourselves.
