Guidelines for Psychopaths

a chance to discover human intimacy

This information probably does not apply to you.

This article only applies to you if you are in the 1% of human population lacking a connection between your mind and your heart, between your feelings and your thoughts. The name for this condition is psychopath, derived from observing that people with this condition lack remorse, empathy, compassion, the application of moral considerations to actions, and the ability to learn from mistakes.

Without the basic conscience that allows a human being to live in social harmony, psychopaths cannot be authentically touched. Mental health professionals rarely treat psychopathic personality disorders as they are considered untreatable. No interventions have proven to be effective, not even punishment, because punishments are not associated with the behavior is being punished.

The reason this note probably does not apply to you is that psychopaths derive satisfaction from their antisocial behavior and would not typically read an article about learning how to feel.

Photo by Neil Moralee

Psychopaths typically tend to assume there is nothing wrong with them, and think (often rightly) that they are too smart to ever get caught. Learning how to feel would never make sense because why should you bother to fix something that is as successful as a CEO, a Senator, or a President? On the other hand, it could be that you are an atypical psychopath. You may have noticed that something is missing and you may want to try to find it. You may be tired of trying to hide your handicap, ready to stop being so terrified of everyone else. If so, welcome.

In addition to applying to the 1% true psychopaths, this note could also apply to you if you are in the 8-10% of modern humans who see hierarchical power positions going to people with psychopathic behavior patterns, so you adopted those patterns yourself. You learned to survive in the service of psychopathic leaders by imitating their behavior and attitudes, pretending to be one of them. This way you gain power and status in the patriarchal empire yourself without actually being a true psychopath, a common but risky strategy. The risk was identified by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Mother Night, when he said: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Regardless of whether you are a true psychopath, a chameleon psychopath, or not a psychopath at all, here is the note: If you are willing to admit that you are missing the link between thought and feelings (or if you behave as if the link is missing) you still have a chance to live humanly. The way is to use your remarkable cunning to catch yourself at your own tricks. Only you are clever enough to do this.

Turn your ruthlessness into ruthless self-honesty.

Reveal your handicap heartlessly until your world crumbles around you and you hit bottom. Then do whatever it takes to stay there. Do not let your psychopathic certainty put itself back together again. Stay broken. Stay vulnerable. Stay in uncertainty, completely undefended, because that which is authentic about you cannot be hurt.

This is a long and pitifully lonely process, continuing over a year or two. The process can neither be shortened nor made more comfortable. I am truly sorry about that. I went through this process myself in the early 1990’s with the support of my men’s group, and there is no other way that I have ever found that works. Believe me, I have looked.

The process of becoming more human needs to take its own time. It can help if you decide now, in this moment, to endure the process through to its completion no matter what. By already establishing a commitment you proactively disempower the clever reasons, excuses and justifications that the psychopathic Gremlin throws up as obstacles to your success. They no longer have a place to grip into. Put your faith in the process itself. Trust the process.

During this time, your job is to take care of yourself in these simple ways:

• Stop trying to be in relationship with the opposite sex (or same sex if you are homosexual).

• Eat simple healthy food in modest amounts, mostly vegetarian.

• Strictly avoid alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, sweets, coffee, sodas, etc.

• Exercise well.

• Sleep more than normal.

• Learn some form of silent sitting practice and sit at least thirty-five minutes a day, same time, same place. No breathing exercises or mantra. Be still, keep your back straight, and don’t sleep. That’s it.

• Participate in a regular weekly marshal arts training program if you can. Classic Aikido works well for this.

• Take up a simple handcraft to give your body something useful to do when your mind is driving you crazy. Hand sewing, wood carving, pottery, stained glass, macramé, beading, etc.

• Make only small positive promises to people and be hyper-attentive about keeping each one.

• Do not engage in revenge, paybacks, or low drama, even in your own mind.

• Buy almost nothing so you avoid debts.

• Pay your bills on time or early.

• Work a simple manual-labor job that does not require your clever defense mechanisms to come back into play as part of your profession.

During this time you won’t know who you are. You won’t recognize yourself. Even your close friends might question your lifestyle. Life itself may not even make much sense. That is simply how it is in this time. I’m sorry.

Only after six to twelve months of relentlessly staying in an apparently broken condition – with your carefully orchestrated deceiver hopelessly cracked and withered due to starvation and exposure to radical honesty – could you perhaps become reliable enough to ask for help. Asking for or accepting help before then won’t do you much good because your Gremlin would easily devour whoever offers to help you.

Help could at first be meeting with other men in an ongoing weekly men’s group (if you are a man, or women’s group if you are a woman). Try to avoid any groups that are new age or touchy-feely or religiously fundamentalist. The group should be simple and respectful of the value of human life. In such a meeting you would be asked to both listen a lot and share a lot. A fine example of this is the New Warrior Circle, a small local group of men that you can join after participating in the New Warrior Training. Information is available at the ManKind Project website <www.mkp.org>.

When the time comes to ask for help, ask if there is someone (or better, a team of two or three), neither psychopathic nor pseudo-psychopathic, who are willing to be your Seeing Eye Dog with respect to feelings. This would be a one to two year commitment.

If someone commits to help you, your commitment to them should include a ritual vow in which you promise never to deceive them. For their help you must pay full price. The price is sustained defenselessness towards them. Regardless of the intensity of your screaming demons, you sacrifice your conscienceless survival power for the chance to taste what you have never before had: human intimacy.

Day in and day out, reveal your lack to the person serving you as your feelings detector. Fiercely use your own guile to catch and expose your own guile.

You don’t have to do this shamefully, just relentlessly.

Allow no deception to go unadmitted. Live in the constant uncertainty of not knowing what is dignified, what has integrity, what includes empathy or what generates true warmth. Be an ongoing request for guidance. Ask about each gesture, each thought, each word. Be willing to ongoingly not know.

Trust your partner’s feedback, even if you disagree with it, even if you do not understand it, even if you feel scared. You will feel scared. Consciously feeling scared is fantastic! Fear is one of the four feelings. You are getting somewhere.

With each move, each expression, ask, What should this feel like? What is the appropriate feeling here? Anger? Sadness? How should that feel? Why should it feel like this?

Such ineptitude is maddening. Frustration is a form of anger. Ahah! Anger is one of the four feelings. You have detected another feeling. Excellent! Keep going.

You are blind. A blind person craves the company of one who can describe to them a panorama with poetry. Give your guide plenty of safe space and time to bring the world alive for you. Let them expose you to a world that combines thoughts with feelings. If you are truly psychopathic, conscience and remorse will never be yours. But through respectfully listening to your partner speaking to you with heart and soul, you can come to authentically appreciate the world of intimacy. Your patient attention will bring you nuance and pregnant moments, the possibility of wonder.

After some time you may find yourself in a moment of joy, and then a moment of sadness, and then a moment of joy again. This is called gratitude, grateful to be alive, grateful that someone would care enough to help you, grateful to have a chance to open to life. Sadness and joy are also of the four feelings.

Through a measured cadence your handicap can be transformed. You can use your own painful lack of remorse to serve another person. Your weakness becomes a chance for your partner to use their feelings in ways they never imagined. Through sacrificing your defendedness and trusting another human being, that person can occasionally function as an external living circuit for you, using their own conscience to bypass your inner void and join your heart with your mind. A richer world of experience can come together in you.

You can learn to avoid acting until your conscience speaks. The other person serves as your conscience. If you succeed, then between yourself and your friend you have nurtured a precious collaboration. Congratulations.