So I got up and walked outside and crossed the street and rang the doorbell. He opened it, then went pale when he saw me. "Have you seen her?" I asked him. He pointed over his shoulder, into the house. I walked inside, and there she was, in a towel, on the sofa.
She didn’t even blink. She stood up, and shouted at me, "What do you think you’re doing here?" She was screaming at me, "You bastard, almost getting killed! I thought you were dead! It was terrible! How could you?"
What, I said, what the f? Why are you naked here with Jon?
Jon kept saying, "sorry man, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize what I was doing, sorry man." It was obvious he meant they’d been sleeping together. Where’s Judy and the kids, I asked him. "She left, about a month ago, when she found out," he said, starting to tremble.
A month ago.
All the time she’s shouting at me, threatening me. She’s accusing me of sleeping with whores in Iraq. She’s saying I betrayed her from the start.
"Hey," I say to her, "look what I found!" I hold out the book. She lunges for it, shouting, "Mine! That’s mine, give it to me! I swear I’ll rip your eyes out! You piece of shit!" She’s saying the most horrid things.
I tell her, "I’ve read it and taken pictures of every page. I’m going to find every one of those guys you slept with." That’s not the word I used. I tell her, "I’m going to find these guys and tell each of them what kind of trash you are."
She stared at me, completely blank, for about a quarter of a second. I’d never seen her make that expression before. Like her face froze while her brain was doing some kind of calculation. And then she shrugged. "Fuck you, you piece of shit" she said, went to dress, then left the house.
I had a few beers with Jon, months later when I’d pulled myself together. Poor guy never knew what hit him and I wasn’t mad at him. He’d just saved my life. I was so lost. Two years we were together. I loved her so much. When I got back to our place, her clothes and papers were gone, and so was she. I never saw her again, though I spent a while looking for her.
Learning to Read
When we ask why someone acts in a certain way, the answer is a mix of pragmatic logic, learned habit, and emotion. This is as true for psychopaths as it is for the rest of us. Despite appearances, logic and emotion are not opposed. They work together in a complex dance that I’ll explain in this chapter. The dance has many steps, and each step plays out in specific ways.
To learn the dance of the emotions is like learning to read. Emotions are a language. It is an ancient language that we share with many other species. The language flows through us, and between us. We speak it with our bodies and faces. We feel it in our blood as music. We move to the music without conscious decision. We must answer the call of emotion, even when it hurts and damages us to do so.
Mallory can make others dance. This is a talent he does not need to learn. Yet he is as lost as any of us, when it comes to his own music. He does not decide to hurt others. He obeys an ancient logic. He is a rock rolling downhill, obeying the logic of gravity. In this sense, Mallory is an innocent.
In this chapter I’ll explain each step of the dance, and its music. Each emotion is distinct and consistent. Every emotion has a cause, and consequences. These connect in chain reactions. These chain reactions keep us alive. The dance may seem primitive or wasteful. Sometimes it is. Most often it is not.
When we know the dance, we can tell the difference. We evolved for a different world, one with fewer people and more dangers. Much of our mind responds like a idiot savant. It often cannot tell the difference between reality and accurate caricature. Time and again, if you confront Mallory, you will realize this. You know his masks are fake, and yet they hit you in places you cannot defend. Yet other parts of our mind can learn the difference. We can learn which music causes us pain and harm, and we can stop the dance when we choose to.
Learning to read the emotions gives you a new power. This is the ability to recognize and then control the music, both in yourself and in others.
When we can control the music, we become immune to Mallory and to many other causes of stress. There is no magic moment of awakening. It is a gradual process that takes years. Like any skill it takes practice and patience to master.
The Evolution of Emotions
Evolutionary psychology aims to explain our mind and behavior as adaptations. It is a solid theory: we are the products of natural and sexual selection, no more or less. I’ve used this approach to explain psychopathy as an adaption rather than a disorder. I’m going to use the same approach to explain our emotions.
Our emotions evolved over time to help our ancestors survive and reproduce. This is not an original notion. The first champion of evolution, Charles Darwin, used it when he wrote "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" in 1872[78]. Some human emotions date from hundreds of millions of years ago. We see these in many other animals. Some date from more recent times, and seem to be specific to humanity.
It is likely that different species have invented the same emotions over and over. Many birds and mammals share emotions like happiness and sadness. Yet that does not mean their common ancestors already had them. Evolution often rediscovers the same solutions to what look like universal problems.
What follows are my personal theories, developed from observations and research. There are several theories of emotions. My goal is to model emotions as functional tools. I want to understand how they work and why we evolved them, rather than simply describe them. That lets us both understand what the psychopath is doing with their mind games, and how we respond. And that lets us extricate ourselves.
The meaning of an "emotion" can be hard to pin down. Is dread an emotion? Are joy, happiness, satisfaction, complacency, delight all distinct emotions? It’s somewhat like trying to identify colors or smells. The closer you look, the more there are.
I’m going to look only at primary emotions. By that, I mean emotions that do not overlap, and are not flavors or mixtures of other emotions. Much like primary colors.
Further, I’m going to define an emotion in a strict sense. This makes it easy to decide whether a particular state of mind counts, or does not. My hypothesis is that each emotion has its own distinct mental machinery. Each emotion evolved over time, and is coded in our DNA. Emotions are more or less active, according to age, character, and gender. In some people, some emotions are absent or invisible.
Emotions have two general goals. First, they prepare our mind and body for some action. They speed up certain systems and slow down others. I call this "orchestration." Imagine the emotion as the conductor waving a baton to get a hundred musicians to play the same tune.
Second, emotions display our mental and physical state to others. They do this using facial and body language. The language of an emotion is often based in real physiological activity. It may also be synthetic. Emotional languages are universal across humanity.
Some emotions are only about orchestration. Others are only about display. Most are a mix of the two.