One thing victims of psychopathic abuse will notice, often looking back, is the increasingly outrageous behaviour and boundary violations that the psychopath carried out as their relationship with them unfolded. The sort of behaviour that leaves the victim wondering “Did they just say that? Did they just do that?”
Yes, they did just say that, or do that. Increasingly unacceptable behaviour and boundary violations are a deliberate tactic psychopaths use on their victims. It is part of the “gas-lighting” and identity erosion for which they are renowned. The victim starts to think they must be going mad, for no one would just act that outrageously and expect to get away with it. They start to question their own sanity and think they must be misreading the situation.
It is important to trust your own judgement when dealing with toxic people. If something doesn’t feel right something probably isn’t right. When you understand this type of behaviour for what it is and you see the intentions behind it, it becomes easier to resist and call the psychopath out on their behaviour. Let’s look at this facet of psychopathic abuse in more detail.
Why Do Psychopaths Do This?As we mentioned above, psychopaths love to “gas-light” their victims.Gaslightingrefers to behaviour which is designed to chip away at a person’s sense of reality and question their own judgement and sanity.
It derives it’s name from the 1938 stage playGas Lightand its two film adaptions in 1940 and 1944. The films feature a murderous man who plays a variety of tricks on his wife to make her think she is going crazy, including dimming the lights in the house without telling he that he is the cause of this by switching on the normally unused lamps to conduct his clandestine activities in the attic.
In typical psychopath fashion the husband tries to deny to his wife that the lights are dimming at all, despite knowing full well that they are dimming and he is the one that is causing it. He is playing mind games with his wife to erode her sense of reality. The gas-light metaphor has made it’s way into psychological literature.
Engaging in increasingly outrageous behaviour in the form of invasive, underhand or otherwise unacceptable comments or behaviour is just a slight variation on this general theme of gas-lighting. It is part of the identity erosion process and you will find it tends to be a gradual process as the psychopathic treats it almost like a game.
It will start with just the odd underhand comment here or there, which is laughed off as “just a joke” or “banter”. If you express offence then they will try to make out you are just over-reacting and move on. The first couple of times you may be able to write it off as a “bad day” for them.
Gradually though you will find the boundary violations become more and more common and they gradually chip away at your self esteem and identity. If they get away with one little thing, they will try a little more and then a little more still. They slowly wear you down psychologically with incrementally more unacceptable behaviour, but just gradual enough that kinder natured people will not notice or want to kick up a fuss.
Someone who manages to take a step back and look at the issue from a broader perspective will see that it isn’t acceptable though. If they compare what they accepted as “normal” treatment 3 or 6 months ago , or before they met the psychopath, versus what they routinely accept now, they will see the game the psychopath has been playing.
Keep reading. It's fascinating, but you'll also need to protect yourself from the psychopath's gradual erosion of your identity.
Psychopaths often don't have regular jobs. Or maybe they have jobs inside bureaucracies where they get to prey upon polite and kinder coworkers. Their jobs often involve lots of time off. For them, every day is a holiday. They will devour your time. And perhaps the most unforgivable sin you can commit against them is to out them as a fraud, in part, because their production levels are superficial oftentimes. They're all about narrative.
Now, you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat. [From the 1881 publication of The Adventures of Pinocchio. Disney did the animation in 1940.] I think this one is based on one of the Marx Brothers actually, Harpo Marx who I believe never said anything, but be that as it may, there are these ne'er-do-well characters, the fox in particular. Now, the fox is a standard trickster animal. it's a classical animal, maybe because it is good at hiding and good at hunting. I don't know exactly why but coyotes are like that too. They're classic trickster animals. He's kind of like Wile E. Coyote in fact. The Warner Bros cartoon character whose genius at large and whose arrogance continually gets him walloped, and this characters has a lot of features like that. He feigns being an English gentleman of the 1890s and pretends to be educated and he has that high-blown way of talking, and he's a fraud through and through. And he's got this sidekick who is barely there at all and he doesn't treat him that well but he's got someone to lord it over so that keeps his dominance-hierarchy thing going well, and the fact that he's a second-rate companion, he never really notices that although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gets the chance.
So anyways, they're walking down the street, and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done and how he pulled the wool over someone's eyes and he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence and one of the things that you see . . . and this is worth knowing too. If you're preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life, the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid and that you deserve to be taken advantage of, because you're naive and stupid, so it's actually a good thing that he's doing it. And his proof, and I say he because there are more male psychopaths The proof that you're naive and stupid is that he can take advantage of you. And so if you were wiser, you'd be, you know, you'd know his tricks and then it wouldn't be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what. And so the psychopath will use his ability to fool you as proof of his own grandiose omnipotence, omniscience, and narcissism. And the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath and virtually anybody can, so that Robert Hare, for example, who studied psychopaths for a long time and interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them, and videotaped many of the interviews, said that when he was talking to the psychopath he always believed what they were saying, and then he'd watch the video afterward and see where the conversation went off the rails, but you know the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong and if you're polite you don't object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy, you know, and psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate people, and the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low. Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on YouTube. That's bloody . . . that's enlightening, man. Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video. He gives the cops hell. He gives the lawyers hell. He protests his innocence. He basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy because they don't trust him . . . because he did a few little things 17 years ago. And he gets away with "a few little things," right? I mean he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his then-girlfriend, and he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer, but he basically goes, "Well, you know, that's a long time ago! We're past that, aren't we?" I mean I'm having a discussion with you. I'm trying to help you solve the crimes, (which by the way I committed) but we won't bring that up, and you're accusing me of being a liar. You're not playing fair, what's up with you?" And then when they answer, he just looks at his fingernails, which is like--that's a lovely little manipulative thing because it basically means whatever happens to be under my fingernails at any moment is a much higher priority than listening to your foolish story. And you watch, you'll see people do that to you, and you get an insight into what they're up to. He's very good at that. Or, he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window, immediately dismissive in his non-verbal behavior. It's brilliant. The courts were forced to release that, by the way, but look it up, Paul Bernardo on YouTube. Wow! It's just mind-boggling. It's just . . . he's so good at what he does. And he's good-looking, and he's charismatic, and he can really pull it off. You can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers, whether they're just letting him play his routine to get some information from him or whether he's actually setting them back on his heels. And I suspect it's a bit of both. But it's a masterful performance. If you didn't know who he was and you were watching it without the audio, you'd think he was the CEO of some company giving his employees hell for not being up to scratch. That's all his body language, his eye contact, everything just speaks that. It's amazing.
