After some reflection today on the Psychopath & Communication I did some research and what I found didn't surprise me but it gave me an inner glimpse into the workings of the Psychopaths Communication Skills and how he utilizes these skills on others to gain what
Sandra L. Brown (MA) calls "The Central Three: power, status, and dominance"
Words are a contract between two speakers, an agreement of meaning when two people exchange those words. But the Psychopath doesn't honor his contract, and the meanings of their words are perverted. You are being suckered - lured - into a prepared trap by the dishonest perversion and secret agenda of the Psychopath.
Communicating with a psychopath is like speaking to a brick wall, you will never break through to a pathological with words, or speech much less understand his.
Reasoning, Logic and Rationality do not enter into a psychopaths world view at all mainly because they are forever making up their own rules of Logic and Reality.
Communication with a pathological is difficult, because they cannot associate words with the appropriate emotion ie:
"A psychopath can use a word like 'I love you' but it means nothing more to him than if he said 'I'll have a cup of coffee'." He feels no different towards you than he feels about "a pencil" or "A cup of coffee" You are a means to an end my friend and nothing more.
Word Association The Psychopath's brain shows that emotional words are processed the same as neutral words. Ie: "How could you do this to me?" registers similar to "Please grab me a sandwich"
The Psychopath can parrot or mirror our speech such as "I love you" but it means no more to him than a plate of food, it is simply just another "source of narcissistic nutrition he can gorge on in order to inflate his ego and feel godly, special, wanted and satisfied"
The psychopath/ Narcissist has a great hunger and thirst for "your compliance" not love.... "COMPLIANCE & DOMINANCE" are "his thing" and when he doesn't get this from you by using his vocabulary he becomes famished and resorts to gaining this from Hypnotic Trances, suggestion and seduction techniques (nlp). These tactic are are oftentimes employed and used against the victim in order to feed "the ravenous wolf."
The psychopath instinctively knows what words bring about the desired effects he covets and what words don't
Professor Hare said: "Language and words for psychopaths are only word deep, there is no emotional colouring behind it."
Hare then carried out brain scans on psychopaths while they were exposed to graphic and upsetting images. Once again, he found almost no activity in the part of the brain activated in healthy people exposed to the same images.
Professor Hare believes that psychopathic treatment and "therapy" only simply makes psychopaths more manipulative.
The psychopath hoovers the information he gets from talking with the therapist, he mirrors him, parrots his speech and behaviour and then uses that information to his advantage Ie: uses it on others and his therapist to tweak and refine his "manipulation" skills.
The psychopath may say "love" or "hurt" to his partner but he doesn't understand what it means, this is due to the psychopaths lack of empathy and relating to others emotions.... why? because he has NO emotions. He is in fact an "Empty Vessel" "hollow" and "shallow" with "nothing inside of it but empty promises"
Empathy Empathy is the ability to understand how and why other people feel the way they do. it is commonly defined as ones ability to recognize, perceive and feel directly the emotion of another such as:
"Being able to walk in another persons shoes" Healthy individuals can imagine themselves (to a point) another human beings emotions, if someone is going through pain and turmoil an empathic person can relate to that. A Psychopath cannot relate to this in the same way, he cannot imagine himself in anyone else's shoes where emotion and empathy are concerned. However he WILL mimic and mirror the empathic person in order to APPEAR empathic towards others.
Oftentimes someone with a lot of empathy "An Empath" can literally feel the emotions of another person or persons, whereas a psychopath cannot.
Right Vs Wrong - Emotional Control A Psychopath emotionally can’t feel the difference between right and wrong. With psychopaths, contextual fear conditioning plays a part in learning the concept of what to do and what not to do, It is learning what is right and what is wrong in a certain situation, not feeling what's right or wrong.
The sub criminal psychopath (Gareth Rodger) for example won't kill because he knows he will lose his freedom, or be incarcerated , it's not because he feels murder is wrong, or feels sorry for the death of another human being it is because he knows murder is an act punishable by death or prison.
The psychopath who does kill , kills due to "Poor Impulse Control" he isn't thinking of "what's right and wrong" he is losing control. He kills for Power, dominance, control and out of pure psychopathic rage.
The differences between the sub criminal psychopath and the criminal psychopath is that the more successful (sub criminal) ones have a greater ability to learn fear of getting caught and to therefore guide their own behavior to minimize the chances of getting caught.
So now you know it has nothing to do with "Emotions", although a psychopath feels rage, and anger it is not in the same way as we feel those emotions.
Their (the psychopath) anger is always acute, permanently present, often suppressed or repressed. Healthy anger has an external inducing agent (a reason).
When a healthy individual gets angry or feels rage he is she has an internal control factor running, which is kind of like a stop sign that signals for the person to gain back control instead of losing it and resorting to criminal activities. It is an inner warning system.
A psychopath does not have an "Inner Warning System" when he rages or kills it is because of poor impulse control, his rage and anger are NOT emotions but "A Drive" a "Reaction" and just another way for the psychopath to exert his dominance, control , power and rage towards another human being.
Impulse Control means controlling our reactions to the impulses that come from our basic drives and emotions. Impulse control is about choosing instead of reacting. A person with a lot of impulse control or will power can resist his drives and control his actions.
Impulsivity is the opposite of impulse control. Impulsivity is "A pre-disposition toward rapid, unplanned, reactions without regard to the negative consequences of these reactions
The Signals To Stop & Go "The brain in a healthy individual have well developed systems to tell them what to do ("GO!"), and the brain systems that tell us "STOP!"
Much of our behavior is determined by pleasure. Pleasure is the "GO! signal. The "GO!" signal comes from the mesolimbic dopamine reward system in the brain.
Because our "GO!" signals are so strong, learning how to activate the "STOP!" button is very important! This learning should begin as soon as the drives begin (around age 2).The "STOP!" button is a person's impulse control center. The impulse control center is located in the frontal lobes of the brain and in a brain structure called the amygdala. These specialized parts of the brain develop during childhood and adolescence. These parts of the brain may also be strengthened with practice during adulthood. The frontal lobes and amygdala are weakened by many things including, head injury, psychiatric illness and substance abuse (particularly alcohol)."
A Psychopath however has NO "stop signal".... "no red light"
Impulse Control Reforming The Psychopath Trying to reform a Psychopath is about as effective as getting an ant to understand why you stood on it.
What you see is what you get: they have no better nature. The fundamental problem here is that narcissists lack empathy. They don't understand the meaning of what people say and they don't grasp the meaning of the written word either -- because so much of the meaning of anything we say depends on context and affect, narcissists (lacking empathy and thus lacking both context and affect) hear only the words. (Discussions with narcissists can be really weird and disconcerting; they seem to think that using some of the same words means that they are following a line of conversation or reasoning. Thus, they will go off on tangents and irrelevancies, apparently in the blithe delusion that they understand what others are talking about.) And, frankly, they don't hear all the words, either.
They can pay attention only to stuff that has them in it. This is not merely a bad habit -- it's a cognitive deficiency. Narcissists pay attention only to themselves and stuff that affects them personally. However, since they don't know what other people are doing, narcissists can't judge what will affect them personally and seem never to learn that when they cause trouble they will get trouble back. They won't take other people's feelings into consideration and so they overlook the fact that other people will react with feeling when abused or exploited.
If you try to straighten the Psychopath out, by telling them that your feelings are different, beware: their idea of sharing their feelings is to do or say something that makes you feel the way they're feeling and, as they make a point of not sharing anything desirable, you can expect something really nasty. The sad fact seems to be that narcissists feel just as bad about themselves as they make others feel about them.
Don't expect changes, The personality of a psychopath is "carved in stone." There is little likelihood that anything you do will produce fundamental, sustained changes in how they see themselves or others.
The Impregnable Fortress (The Brick Wall) im·preg·na·ble = "Difficult or impossible to attack, challenge, or refute with success:" "an impregnable argument". / "an impregnable fortress"
A lot of victims of psychopaths and the pathological will spend months if not years trying to "relate" to the psychopath, they will exert tremendous amounts of their energy and emotional well being in trying to "Get the psychopath to see the situation through their eyes"
If you have ever heard the term "It's like talking to a brick wall" you are not alone, that's exactly how a lot of victims would describe "trying to get through to the psychopath" Your words will either be used against you, to trap you, or used to distract you from the conversation.
Try thinking of it this way...
The psychopath is like a cracked vessel, anything worthy of meaning or emotion will filter out and spill to the ground, it will become empty and never able to be refilled.
Unlike an un-cracked vessel that you can refill and replenish, the psychopath cannot be refilled nor replenished, he will forever exist as an "empty vessel" because anything of "meaning" will have leaked out.
The empty vessel is useless, shallow & hollow.
The Psychopaths language As Sandra L. Brown (MA) explains in her remarkable book
Women Who Love Psychopaths"When we communicate, we are for the most part, talking apples-to-apples when talking with a person who is not a psychopath. However with a psychopath, we talk apples and he hears oranges."
The psychopath is missing emotional comprehension. Our language differs tremendously from the psychopaths.
The word "love" to a psychopath means to him "An act of her compliance to his dominance"
“Language is a weapon of self defense. It’s used to fend off, hide and evade, avoid, disguise, shift semantics, say nothing in length, use evasive syntax, disguises the source of information, talk ‘at’ others and lecture, use his own private language, emphasizes his conspiracy theories, rumors and phobias. Language is not to communicate but to obscure; not to share but to abstain; to disagree without incurring wrath; to criticize without commitment; agree without appearing to do so. Language is a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a mistress to be gang raped. Language is a lover, composition but not content.”
The partner of family member of the psychopath will try daily to really understand what he is saying, she/he will even interpret the psychopaths words and assume he means what she means but can't express it.
Speaking His Language - The Psychopath Next time you’re listening to someone, pay attention to how many times you think, “Huh? Oh, he actually means this” or “He actually means that.”
That’s great. But when a particular person requires you to do too much of that, look out: it’s no accident. It just someone blowing a wall of blather at you.
It’s full of extraneous gobbledygook that makes it hard to follow what they are saying. Characteristically, these people put so many miles between the subject and verb, interrupting the thought with everything but the kitchen sink, that by the time your poor cerebral software gets the verb, it has forgotten what the subject was.
You are supposed to get confused and think, “Well, I don’t understand it but it must make sense.”
No it need not make sense! Run a logic check on everything people say before you let it into your head.
That’s why communication with a narcissist is impossible. Communication is another thing on that long list of things that the poor babies call “threats” to themselves. So, communication with them is impossible simply because they block it, throwing up this wall of flak to prevent anything you say from getting through.
Malfunctioning Mind Researchers have long known that brain imbalances can alter language. Psychopaths may sound as though their sentences have been run through a blender. The jumbled speech , sometimes called
Word Salad at it's most extreme clearly reflects problems with brain chemistry and thinking.
The Psychopath perverts and misuses words , where words have meaning to us, it is only another tool the psychopath can use to pervert and misuse to their advantage.
He will use language in order to fend off communication, pervert it and to fend off understanding.
He is a language anarchist. He is the antithesis of civilizationWired Wrong Psychopaths' brains are wired differently than the brain of a psychologically healthy individual. Brain scans done on Psychopaths revealed that when shown pictures of violent acts, or human beings in pain their brain reacted in the same way on seeing an image of an object such as a cup or plate.
There’s faulty wiring going on in psychopaths. They’re wired differently than other people. they are wired wrong! They are not like you or I and cannot react to different emotional situations.
A lot of women in relationships with psychopaths have said "he almost seems alien to me" , "He is so inhuman" or "It's like he's not there"
Ever wonder why he feels different? or almost unique to other men? and why he makes you feel like he's watching your every move like a predator does when circling & stalking it's prey?
Kathy Krajco sums up the Language & The Narcissist beautifully
When we interact with others, we are usually trying to communicate. Only rarely are we trying to make an impression instead. Narcissists and psychopaths are always trying to make an impression. They are never trying to communicate. In fact, they block attempts to communicate.
Remember when you were a teenager and met that cool guy or gal? In that situation, we are so busy trying to make a good impression that we do embarrassing things. We are so busy trying to SOUND clever that we say the stupidest things. Our mouths get ahead of our brains.
While we are putting on this star-studded performance, we aren't listening to him or her. We are interested only in the KIND of thing they say and the tone of voice they say it in. Their gestures and body language - we don't miss a beat. We aren't interested in their face, only the expression on it. Why? Because we are studying their continuing reaction to our actions: Ah! a smile! Oh-oh, a frown! OK - there - I got the smile back again. Oh good, s/he stepped closer to me.
Now imagine yourself doing this EVERYDAY with EVERYONE you meet? exhausting just thinking about it right? A psychopath does this 24/7 , 365 days a year .
That's a lot of practice. Through sheer trial and error, you will become an expert at what produces a smile in another person, or a frown or a look of fear or dejection or shame or anger or whatever you want. You will become an expert at what makes them get mad at some third party you are talking about. You will become an expert at what pushes people's buttons to do a whole list of things you want in various situations. You will be an expert at controlling people this way.
They aren't paying attention to any of that in a conversation. They are just studying facial EXPRESSIONS, body language, tone of voice, and gestures. What you are saying and what they are saying gets tuned out because it doesn't matter to them. Neither does the matter you are discussing. They will say the sky is purple if they think it will draw the reaction from you that they want.
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