For months it was going better than you could have hoped. Your new love interest had been totally charming, and you were head over heels for them. You were getting so much physical attention and affection that sometimes it was almost overwhelming. They simply never wanted to let go of you. They said you were everything to them. You thought you might be in love. You think they might have been too.
Then, out of the blue, they are nowhere to be found. Days pass before you see them again, before they reestablish contact with you. When you ask about their sudden disappearance, they tell you a wild and unbelievable story, but their accompanying body language makes them seem completely truthful. They look you in the eye and are calm and open. The contrast between how they look and what they say feels weird and makes you uncomfortable. When you dig further, their body language grows erratic and seems angry: their body suddenly looks bigger, as if it is taking up more space, and their eyes become intense and lock onto you. You assume they are lying and end it with them.
But they will not go gently, coming back to you expressing their strong belief that you are meant only for them. They have always been so charismatic and are again back to being tactile with you, sweet and charming, until you bring up the details around their disappearance. They won’t give up their crazy stories, though, and now you feel they are actually pushing their weight around, looming over you, controlling, really being quite intimidating. The contrast in the extremes of their behavior is beyond off-putting and feels manipulative and scary. You feel a tightness in your gut and even a little powerlessness as you say to yourself What a psycho!
HAVE YOU GOT IT all wrong?
What’s the difference between blowing a bit hot and cold, as you saw in chapter 6 on playing hard-to-get, and dangerous swings in behavior that make you feel head over heels one moment and intimidated the next? When can we safely and fairly judge someone else’s behavior as manipulative and full-on scary?
Normally at this point we would follow our process and suspend judgment. Well, in this situation, given that you feel it is scary, we do not!
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
False Evidence Appearing Real
Have you come across the idea that fear is just an illusion? Gut feelings like fear exist to save our lives. We all know that in some cases fears are unfounded; however, when it comes to human relationships and a strong gut instinct of being unsafe, buying into popular catchy acronyms such as FEAR (false evidence appearing real) can have extreme and even deadly consequences. You don’t want to gamble your life on such acronyms just because they have done the rounds on Facebook and Instagram. Pressing “like” doesn’t mean you will then be immune from any situations with a potential to cause you harm.
It is very easy to label someone “psychotic.” It has become a very popular blanket term to cover anything from moments of simple and harmless human behavior to out-and-out criminal insanity.
But given that in this case you feel unsafe, let’s stick with your assumption. In fact, in any situation where you ever feel unsafe, you should always pay attention to your instinct, keeping it front of mind.
There is a generally accepted checklist for clinically diagnosing psychopathy, called the Hare PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist—Revised), originally developed in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare. The checklist focuses on whether a potentially psychopathic individual shows selfish, callous and remorseless use of others and partakes in chronically unstable, antisocial and socially deviant lifestyles.1 Based on the parameters of this checklist, if you are getting a gut feeling that someone appears to be a psychopath, they could indeed turn out to be a callous, deviant person who acts with no remorse, and so you and those around you are potentially in big trouble. If, however, you discover they are just consistently very selfish, though at the lower end of the psychopathic spectrum, and you aren’t actually in physical danger, it’s still not so much fun being around them.
Clearly, a psychiatric test of this nature is best administered by suitably qualified and experienced clinicians under scientifically controlled conditions. However, there are some very good tests you can use to gauge the validity of your feelings about someone that may further justify sticking with your judgment.
A great friend of ours and also one of the greatest body language experts we know, Joe Navarro, is a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI, where he served in the National Security Division’s Behavioral Analysis Program. In his book Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People (coauthored by Toni Sciarra Poynter),2 Navarro offers some very useful advice for determining whether you may be involved with what he calls a “dangerous personality.” He talked to hundreds of individuals who had been victimized by social predators. These victims gave descriptive accounts of their abusers’ qualities and actions, in their own words (nonclinical, largely unedited). If several of the following words resonate with you, because of how someone acts or makes you feel, Navarro recommends that you seek help or distance yourself:
abusive, aggressive, aimless, amoral, antisocial, arrogant, bad, bad boy, belligerent, bully, calculating, callous, charismatic, charming, cheat, cheater, clever, cold, cold blooded, con, con artist, con man, conniving, contemptuous, controlling, corrupt, creep, creepy, criminal, crude, cruel, cunning, dangerous, deceitful, deceptive, degenerate, delinquent, demeaning, depraved, destructive, discomforting, dishonest, disingenuous, evil, exploitive, fraud, guiltless, immoral, imposter, impulsive, inconsiderate, incorrigible, indecent, indifferent, insensitive, intimidating, irresponsible, leech, liar, manipulative, mean, parasite, possessive, risk taker, sadistic, self- centered, selfish, shallow, sleazy, swindler, temperamental, thug, toxic, twisted, undependable, unfeeling, uncaring, violent.
So, yes—some of those words could apply to any one of us some of the time, and in fact, a few of them, such as charismatic, charming, clever, describe characteristics that are also attractive to us. And obviously, just one or two of these behaviors does not make for a “toxic personality.” But as Joe says, “Where a person consistently demonstrates a large cluster of behaviors as cited in this list, we are most likely looking at someone who is a social predator.”
Let’s put our story in the context of this list by picking out a few of the words associated with your being around this person: charming, overwhelming, uncomfortable, absent, head over heels, intimidating. Notice anything interesting? When we are thinking about behavior and meaning, whether nonverbal or verbal, one of the areas that stands out is contrast. It is often the contrast—stark differences in signals that occur in the same time frame—that confuses us and alerts us, much more than any single sign. For example, in our story, if the person was always charming, you would not necessarily be alarmed; however, what you see is a change from charming to intimidating, from overwhelming to absent, and from head over heels to uncomfortable.
Our primitive brains are alerted by high contrasts of all kinds. Contrasts signal a potentially unstable and therefore inhospitable environment. Also, we can note the stand-alone extremes: weird, long absence, wild stories, charismatic, only for them, won’t give up, really quite scary.
To decide whether we should approach or avoid a situation, our primitive brains look out for extremes in any environment, as extremes have the potential to work against us and could prove detrimental to our survival. So of course all of this is scary.
If you know or are in a relationship with someone like this, you need to seek help in order to protect yourself from becoming traumatized mentally or psychologically; and obviously if there is violence, and often there is, you need to seek help or even shelter. What else do you need to know here? Nothing. You don’t need to ask anything. You don’t need to make a new judgment about this situation. With the extremes in the behavior, the situation feels quite unsafe for you, and that is enough.
But what is the next step? Get help—from someone you trust. This could be a friend, family member, colleague or someone in your community who you always feel very safe with. It is important to avoid the temptation to give feedback to or test the person with whom you feel unsafe and look in turn for their feedback to you. Remember: You already called off the relationship. It’s now time to get feedback from others on how to maintain that distance.
SHOULD YOU GIVE THEM THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT?
Here’s something more from our dear and trusted friend JOE NAVARRO that we hope you will keep in mind for yourself and everyone you care about. If you read any part of this book twice, make it this part, as it could save your life or the life of someone precious to you.
People tell you all the time “Don’t be judgmental,” and for the most part they are correct; nevertheless, we should try to be aware and attuned to others’ behavior to gain insight into what they are transmitting (communicating). After all, our bodies communicate effectively what we feel, think, desire, intend and fear. There are times when we should not suspend judgment, and that is when our bodies speak to us with unease, uncertainty, apprehension, anxiety, caution or fear. It is at those times that we must listen carefully to what we sense.
Our brains process the world around us mostly subconsciously; in doing so, the brain senses things we don’t have the cognitive attention span to notice (a person following us, a door unlocked that shouldn’t be, etc.). There will be times when your stomach will tighten, your hairs will stand up or something inside you says be careful, something is wrong, don’t go near this person, stay away, you are in danger. It is this warning system Gavin de Becker spoke of in The Gift of Fear. My years as an FBI agent talking to victims and being a witness to crime have taught me to never stop listening to those messages from your body—they are there to save your life.
QUICK SCAN
S: Suspending judgment is not always the best course. When in any potentially dangerous situation, go with your gut instinct.
C: Fear is designed to save your life when in the context of danger.
A: When feeling fear in a potentially dangerous situation, ask nothing more of it.
N: Don’t wait to form a new judgment when your safety may be at risk. Instead respond in a way that moves you away from the potential danger. Seek further help from anyone you feel you can trust, and as soon as possible.