This is the strangest part of the psychopathic bond. Part of the mind knows the situation is abusive and wrong, and must end. Yet the rest of the mind continues to invest in it. It is a psychological addiction.
As with all addicts, there may come a point where the abused mind wakes up. It may decide, "I want out." It is at this point that others can help. The first step is diagnosis, to identify the source of their pain and misery. "It’s not you, it’s him" can be a shocking revelation.
In the family, Mallory has years to build a cage for his spouse and children. This slow timescale makes it almost impossible to see the process. You can see it when you compare "before" and "after." You can see it when you compare two families. For friends and relatives though, it tends to be too subtle to see.
Let me now come to the children. Mallory inflicts long slow mental torture on his children. He neglects them, and forces them to serve him. He dresses them like dolls, to parade in public. He never asks them how they feel or what they want, except to better disappoint them. Every promise he makes, he breaks without explanation. He is angry, and violent with them. Every chance he gets, he leaves them with someone else. He competes with his spouse to make them love him, and then he turns his back.
And then he divides them into winners and losers. This is perhaps the worst violence. It sets the children against each other for life. He treats the winners as if they can do no wrong. He encourages them to steal and lie. He shows them how to hunt. He lets them practice on their siblings. And the losers, they are to blame for everything. They ruined his life. He never wanted them as babies. Everything they do is wrong, and stupid.
It is hard to fit this behavior into the pragmatic selfishness that defines Mallory. Yet that golden child - scapegoat pattern seems universal in psychopaths' families. That means it helps psychopathic genes survive and spread. It is an evolved strategy.
Here is the goal of that strategy, I think. The golden children are those with the most psychopathic traits. Mallory grooms these to become psychopaths. The scapegoats are those with fewer psychopathic traits. Mallory grooms these to seek psychopaths as future partners. In both cases, his psychopathic genes maximize their chance of getting into his grandchildren.
It is a miserable story, yet with a positive aspect. Psychopathy is genetic, yet needs the right culture to develop in. It is like our language instinct. We can all learn foreign languages, at any age. Our first languages are special.
My hypothesis is that Mallory’s presence provides this culture of neglect and violence. His behavior is what pushes young talent to develop towards psychopathy. Once set on that path, they work hard to become the "best" psychopath they can. I call this process "differentiation." It starts young, before the age of ten.
I assume there are several groups of genes responsible for psychopathic traits. These genes work together, perhaps live on the same chromosome. They may express according to gender. Some of these genes delay the growth of empathy and social emotions. Others improve the talents for observation and mimicry. And so on.
If the environment is right, the young person starts to differentiate. It takes older psychopaths who encourage the anti-social behavior. It takes other young people to practice on. It takes opportunity, on the streets. Above all, it takes an anti-social environment devoid of affection and love.
Differentiation is not inevitable. Some people raised by psychopaths show many of the traits and yet are social. Some flutter between extremes, as if trying to be two different people at once.
This hypothesis is falsifiable. Look at the twin children of psychopaths, adopted by other families. In some cases those foster families will also be abusive. Observe the incidence of psychopathy in the orphans, when they are adults.
For Mallory to run this strategy on his children, he must stay around for years. I think this is one reason psychopaths stay in long marriages. Yet it is a precarious place to be. His own incentive is to abandon his family. He is leaving a hot trail of criminality and lies. His spouse may, and often does, rebel and take the children.
And if the children do grow up safe from him, there is much less chance they will be psychopaths. This is significant for those dealing with troubled families. Sometimes divorce is the best thing for the children. And sometimes they need protection from one parent. Mallory is as likely to be the mother, as the father. Social workers and judges should get training to see the difference.
The Empathy Test
Most authors who write about psychopaths start with the topic of "testing" people. It is one of our obsessions, for good reasons.
Popular culture draws psychopaths as criminals and killers, dangerous and insane. In fiction, we project them as zombies, vampires, and monsters. They are the undead, the emotionless eaters of souls and brains.
Yet a successful psychopath looks just as you expect a "normal" person to look. Most psychopaths are successful and hide in general society. The number one talent of a psychopath is to look "normal," as I keep repeating. The number two talent is to trick the observer into forgetting what "normal" means.
Psychopath brains are different in small yet key ways. We almost know how, and I’ve tried to explain why. A brain scan can show what look like significant differences. In a typical description[69], "psychopathy is a personality disorder associated with a profound lack of empathy." Put a willing psychopath into an MRI, and you may see them turn their empathy on and off[70] like a switch.
I am skeptical of such experiments. Not only do they show contradictory results, they seem malformed. Mallory cannot both lack the machinery for empathy, and switch it on and off. How do we know that person in the chair actually is a psychopath? Who decided, and on what basis? What kind of psychopath accepts to sit still and open their minds to inspection? Have we established that Alice and Bob cannot switch their empathy on and off?
Let me dissect empathy. Most people can turn this on and off like a switch. Empathy is not supernatural soul-stuff implanted by alien visitors to test our humanity. It is an evolved tool with a social function. And as such, it is flexible and opportunistic.
This is trivial to show with a quick experiment. Think of a close family member falling on the street, and dying. Now think of a stranger begging you for money. There, you just felt your empathy switch on, and off. In Belgium we spend 10% of GDP on health care, and 0.5% on foreign aid.
The same goes for all social tools. We feel almost nothing for other people. That is, until and unless there is some kind of relationship. That does not make us all psychopaths. It means to understand psychopaths, we must observe how they operate. That means in society, over time, and in a variety of situations. Not alone in a lab.
Here is a better psychopath test, for a researcher with no ethics. Take your test subject and observe them in secret. Now take their close relatives and pretend to torture them. Ensure your subject sees this happening. Ensure they do not realize you are watching and cannot intervene. Observe the reaction. Bob or Alice will squirm in empathic pain. Mallory will watch and wait.
Mallory is a spider, living among ants. He extracts resources little by little, over time. Only the unlucky or dysfunctional psychopath gets caught. Most psychopaths are invisible, hidden among friends and family. They never end on the psychologist’s couch. They do not let others experiment on them. These are the mass of successful psychopaths. To track and identify them means going out into the woods, and hunting them.
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http://www.opposingviews.com/i/health/mental-health/study-psychopaths-can-turn-empathy-and-switch