Many of us may be dealing with a psychopath and not realize it. The person’s behavior is so inconsistent — one minute he’s calm, and the next minute he’s raging. She can seem so warm, and then she’s cold and uncaring. So we wonder, sometimes they’re just fine — do they just need therapy to help them stabilize? The answer is no. I’ll explain six behavior modifications that psychopaths will never internalize.
Training with Dr. Robert Hare
Back in 2004, I traveled to Great Falls, Montana, to attend a workshop with Dr. Robert Hare, a top psychopathy researcher and author of Without Conscience — the disturbing world of psychopaths among us. The book perfectly describes my ex-husband, and it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand exploitative personality disorders.
Dr. Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), an instrument that evaluates a person’s level of disorder. Workshop attendees came to learn how to use it. Most of them worked in Montana’s prison system.
Dr. Hare himself started his career working in prisons, and the original purpose of the PCL-R was to estimate an inmate’s potential for re-offending when released. So he began the workshop by explaining the basic philosophy of most correctional systems: Offender problems were due to socialization problems.
Prison officials viewed antisocial behavior as the result of inadequate parenting, a bad childhood environment, disruptive social forces or simply bad luck. Their objective was to re-socialize offenders to get them back on track.
But psychopaths, Dr. Hare said, never were on track.
Behavior modifications that psychopaths will never internalize
The core symptoms of psychopathy are strongly determined by genetics, along with the parenting at-risk children receive and the environment they grow up in. Therefore, by the time they are adults, the disorder is part of their identity. Dr. Hare said that attempting any of the following behavior modifications with psychopaths is a waste of time:
Correcting deviant attitudes
To make a correction, someone must come to think that there’s a problem with the attitude they have. Psychopaths are perfectly satisfied with themselves. In fact, they consider themselves to be superior to the rest of us. They see no reason to change.
Getting them to look at the victim’s perspective
Psychopaths view the world as predators and prey — they are the predators, and everyone else is prey. Do they care what the prey thinks? Absolutely not. If anyone is stupid enough to be manipulated, that’s the victim’s problem, not theirs.
Training them to be less self-centered
Most of us have the ability to love and care about others. Psychopaths don’t. They feel no loyalty to any person, group, code, organization or philosophy. They are loyal only to themselves, and they aren’t going to change.
Having them adopt a pro-social philosophy
Psychopaths can sometimes engage in pro-social behavior, meaning they can help people. It’s not that they believe in doing good works, they’re just doing whatever they think will accomplish their objective. They always have an ulterior motive.
Focusing on emotions
Psychopaths do not have a natural understanding of emotions. Often they don’t feel anything at all. Dr. Hare explained that psychopaths experience emotion as a foreign language that needs to be translated. Typically, the only emotions they feel are anger and rage.
Instilling a sense of empathy
It’s often said that psychopaths lack empathy, but this may not be quite accurate. Researchers have found that psychopaths have the capacity for empathy in their brains, but it’s usually turned off. They can be empathetic when they focus on it, which is why they sometimes appear to be caring.
Read more: New research on psychopaths and empathy
Fundamentally different
When it comes to understanding psychopaths, one of the hardest things to grasp is how fundamentally different they are from the rest of us. It’s not that they were once loving and kind and went bad. They never had any ability to love to begin with.
Therefore, psychopaths have no internal foundation for therapy to build upon. Attempts at behavior modifications for psychopaths that focus on emotions, empathy and morality are destined to fail.
My pet sitter pleaded for help then stole from me