How Psychopaths Act in Intimate Relationships
By: Simona Rich
Tags: Relationships, Emotional Intelligence, Psychopathy, Dating, Narcissism

(Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash)

All psychopaths follow the same strategy when operating in intimate relationships. I know this strategy well because I was in a relationship with a psychopath for around four years.

I also know other women who dated and are dating psychopaths. Some of them are still abused, some of them had their lives totally destroyed. Only a few manage to break out, and the only reason that they do is covered at the end of this article.

Many people mistake normal persons for narcissists or psychopaths. Many humans these days display psychopathic traits because they believe that only inhumane behavior would allow them to survive in this cruel world.

Because of such reasoning, some people act like psychopaths, but this act is external — deep within they still have human warmth and finer feelings.

Real psychopaths can be recognized by their eyes. You may not be able to see anything different about their eyes at first (though that is possible in some too), but if you keep your attention on their eyes, you will eventually see that behind those eyes there is emptiness.

Looking at their eyes can be compared to looking at the bottomless abyss. You might even feel your spirit wanting to run away from what it sees in those dead eyes.

Their eyes look reptilian — they are as dead as the eye of a lizard. That’s, I believe, the most sure way to tell whether a person is a psychopath or not.

Another way to tell whether a person is a psychopath is to look for the predatory behavior. All psychopaths, like predators, follow specific predatory steps. For example, a spider will follow a specific way to capture its prey; so will the lion. And so will the psychopath.

The psychopaths that I know are territorial. I don’t know if it applies to all of them, but this is very likely to be the case. They will hunt for prey as lone wolves and they will have their own particular territories that belong only to them, from what I’ve observed.

The strategy that the psychopath uses to enslave a victim into an intimate relationship is as follows (though the steps may not necessarily be followed in this order):

Let me go into each stage to explain it more in detail.

The first stage: Seduce

(In this article I choose a male psychopath and a female victim as an example. Psychopaths, however, can be either male or female.)

When a psychopath first meets his victim, he will try to seduce her. He will do so by learning what kind of partner the woman desires. Psychopaths are excellent character readers, so they will quickly figure out what kind of partner the woman desires and he will become him.

Psychopaths can read people like books; through different clues they understand whether the woman prefers a submissive boyish boyfriend, or a very mature and manly partner.

At this stage of seduction the psychopath will also try to mimic the victim so that she finds him interesting and he gains her trust. It’s now well-known through such methodologies as NLP that mirroring a person’s body language, for example, helps to form a friendly tie with a stranger. Psychopaths know this without the study of NLP. It’s in their blood to mimic the victim to gain their full trust.

The psychopath will mimic the victim in many ways. For example, he might adapt a similar dress style (formal, casual, sports, seductive). He might mimic the victim’s speech patterns, smile, attitudes, body language, and he might even use a similar-smelling perfume. He may adopt victim’s values and aspirations.

What’s more, he will attract the victim through his self-confidence and good looks. Self-confident people are naturally attractive, and psychopaths know that they are found attractive because of this trait. So they will try to seduce the victim through their self-confident and daring behavior.

They might also fascinate the victim by their lifestyle which is usually extreme or dangerous in some way. For example, they might be fast bike-riders or be involved in anything else as dangerous; they seek such experiences so that they don’t feel dead within.

The second stage: Exalt and love-bomb

At this stage the psychopath will try to impress the victim to the degree that her entire focus is on him. He will try to become her personal hero, or, I might as well say, god.

He will try to make himself into her only idol; he will attempt to achieve the objective of the victim thinking mainly about him.

He will go more than an extra mile for her; he may act like a perfect selfless gentleman at this stage. He will buy her many gifts. He will tell her many compliments.

He will profess his undying love for her. He may tell that he never met such a special person before. He will spend all his free time with her and she will be his only source of focus.

This, of course, feels amazing and so the victim will indeed think that she is special for him. She’s likely at this stage to start falling in love with him. She will get addicted to his attention.

He wants her to get addicted to so much attention so that later on he could deny it.

The third stage: Bond

At this stage the psychopath will share his deepest secrets with the victim. They are likely to be no secrets at all but lies, since psychopaths are liars and they only tell the truth when they think it would be of some benefit.

The reason he discloses such “secrets” is so that the victim would disclose her secrets also, so that this would be used against her later on. He also does this to further bond with her.

Furthermore, he will try to find out her weaknesses by careful observation and indirect questions. When people share their weaknesses with others, this strengthens the relationship bond.

Another reason a psychopath would want to know the victim’s weaknesses is so that he would use them against her at a later stage to totally crush her self-confidence.

At this stage he will also try to involve her in a sexual relationship because he knows that sex deeply bonds. Psychopaths crave raw and intense experiences so sex is likely to be frequent, fierce, and maybe even violent.

The psychopath will try to get his victim addicted to having sex with him because he wants her to become addicted — he wants her to become his slave.

He might be excellent at love-making, since he is likely to have had many victims to practice on. Sex, in my opinion, is one of their greatest tools for enslavement of the victim, since most people become easily addicted to sex, and psychopaths know that very well.

At this stage the psychopath will spend a lot of time with the victim to get her total trust and so that all her doubts about him disappear. Thus, the victim will become fully trusting of the psychopath and deeply in love with him. And when this full trust and total love are achieved, the psychopath will deal the first blow.

The fourth stage: Trauma-bond

After the psychopath is certain that the victim loves him and she fully trusts him, he strikes the first blow — he either suddenly becomes indifferent, or violent, or involves her in a love triangle.

He might use any other strategy too. The main purpose of that strategy, whatever one he chooses to use, is to cause intense emotional upset or shock in a victim.

He does this because of a few reasons. First, trauma bonds the victim even more to the psychopath. This is because the victim starts associating intense feelings experienced during trauma with the person who caused it, and this creates a very strong bond.

The same scenario can be witnessed in captives who begin supporting their captors due to intense traumatization; the same can be witnessed in some rape cases where the victim becomes so attached to the rapist that she even thinks she loves him.

The second reason the psychopath uses trauma bonding is because the victim discharges intense emotional energy which he absorbs. Since he is a dead spiritual being devoid of feelings, he enjoys feeding off the intense feelings of others.

Another reason he uses trauma-bonding is to put the victim into an altered state of consciousness. The victim gets into a spellbound state because of cognitive dissonance — the brain cannot comprehend how an absolutely loving person can suddenly turn violent or indifferent.

This is incomprehensible to the human mind because humans don’t act this way. And since most victims do not know that psychopaths aren’t normal humans, this causes a sort of split in the mind which puts the person into a highly vulnerable and suggestible state.

The psychopath will use this state to further enslave the victim — he will use hypnotic speech patterns to rationalize his unpardonable behavior, and the victim, being in such an unwholesome state, is likely to believe in the psychopathic lies, getting further imbalanced and confused.

If the victim doesn’t understand the game of the psychopath, he may keep her in this trauma-bonding stage for years, until she loses her mind or is destroyed in other ways to the degree that he is no longer able to use her and therefore discards her.

I recently heard that the end goal of all psychopaths is to make their victims die in some way, and I totally agree with that.

But he won’t rush the process. He wants the energy source — he doesn’t want to kill fast. So he will let the victim recover from the shock by profusely apologizing and being exceptionally nice with her, spending all his time with her like he did in the early stages of bonding.

When the victim feels recovered and happy again, the psychopath strikes the blow again. And this trauma bonding may go on for years, until the victim is totally destroyed.

This strategy will never change, though it might take time for trauma bonding to be repeated depending on how long it takes for the victim to recover and regain her trust in the psychopath.

Should the victim decide to end the relationship, the psychopath will do everything he can to get her back. He will go through all the entrapment steps and will keep repeating them until the trust is regained.

He will love-bomb her, buy many gifts, use hypnotic language to change her mind, shed crocodile tears and promise to never do it again (whatever he did).

He will send multiple messages or will call many times. He will use such strategies every day until the victim decides to give him another chance. And then he will strengthen the bond to the degree that the victim fully trusts the psychopath so that the next trauma causes her to again discharge intense emotional energy which he will absorb.

The fifth stage: Entrap

At this stage (this can also be done earlier in the relationship) the psychopath will try to entrap the victim but will remain free himself. This can be done in many ways, depending on the circumstances.

For example, the psychopath may choose to impregnate the victim and thus the dependency/trap is created through the child. The psychopath may marry a Christian but then cheat her, and the Christian woman would be kept in the marriage because of her conviction that divorce is wrong.

The psychopath may isolate the victim from all her friends and family so that she only has him to rely on.

Basically, he will assess the victim’s circumstances and will decide what’s the best way to entrap her so that her freedom is limited yet he himself remains free.

This will allow his other pursuits to be kept secret (he is likely to have many victims as such) and will give him flexibility in seeing the victim whenever he chooses. The victim, however, might be denied such freedom.

For example, I know one Indian lady who got entrapped this way. She got sexually involved with the psychopath before marriage, and that’s a big taboo in India.

Although the woman loved him and wanted to get married to him, he didn’t share the same future plans. Instead, he told her that he could not marry her because she was one year older than him (!). So the psychopath came up with a plan to get her married to his relative. She agreed.

Now he has easy access to her at any time, because he, as a relative, can visit her home without any suspicion. She, however, cannot visit the psychopath because she’s a married woman, so she cannot go to his house.

This allows him to have multiple women and remain uncaught most of the times (since he has many women, she still ends up catching him sometimes).

He impregnated her and told her to abort the baby, and she did. When, during her pregnancy, she found out that he was again cheating her, she almost committed suicide.

She’s totally trapped, yet she continues clinging to him because she thinks she loves him. The reason she thinks so is because he got her addicted to sex, closeness, and she also associates intense emotions with him. Since she’s an uneducated village girl, she doesn’t understand the real causes of such a bond and therefore in her mind she thinks that he’s the right person for her.

He also hypnotizes her with his speech patterns. Since she doesn’t understand that he’s not like a normal human being (I tried to explain that to her but it just goes over her head), she continues hoping that he would someday fall in love with her and that he would change.

So that’s how cleverly psychopaths can entrap their victims. They are smart, and they will premeditate the best plan of action. Since they are excellent actors, their suggestions that finally entrap you may seem as though serving your best interests, but that’s never the case.

The psychopath will use different entrapment strategies on his victims depending on their circumstances. Then, like a spider, he will freely move from victim to victim within his own created net to suck out their life energy and money.

If a few victims are located close to each other, the psychopath will try to set them against each other so that they never become friends and therefore are unable to exchange information. This way the dark deeds of a psychopath may remain undetected for years.

The sixth stage: Use up

As I’ve already mentioned, the psychopath will regularly use all his victims to get their emotional and sexual energies as well as money. He will give some time for the victims to recover, and then will deplete them again.

He will do this as long as there’s anything left to benefit from his victims.

The seventh stage: Discard

Finally, when the victim is unable to be used for some reason (old age, poverty, illness), the psychopath will coldly discard her. He will do so in the most hurtful way, to deal a final, sometimes deadly, blow to the victim.

The victim, if she’s not aware of psychopathy, will never comprehend how a human being could be so cruel. Some victims will commit suicide. Some will start consuming alcohol or drugs. Others may self-destruct in other ways.

Some will recover, but will never be the same; as ghosts that haunt houses, the thoughts about the abuser will visit the victim for the rest of her life. Only very few victims fully recover, and these are the ones who have their priorities right, as you will read below.

The only way to protect yourself

The only way a victim can protect herself from total psychopathic destruction is by having her priorities right. That’s the reason the psychopath that I was in a relationship with was unable to destroy me.

He got to the stage three, and he even tried trauma-bonding me, but that didn’t work in a way that he planned. That’s because he was never number one in my life.

Psychopaths will attempt to make themselves into victims’ personal gods. They will try to appear as the most indispensable people in their lives. And when this is allowed to happen, the victims have just based their whole lives on a very shaky foundation.

When the psychopath understands this has been accomplished, he will keep traumatizing the victim until she’s totally destroyed. But if the victim refuses to make him into her idol, she may get hurt because of his inhumane behavior, but she will never be fully destroyed.

Spirituality was always number one in my life. Then came my business. And only then — my ex-partner. That’s the reason I escaped from his deadly clutches.

Yet another thing that helps to survive psychopathic abuse is the firm understanding that a psychopath is not fully human. He operates through the reptilian brain, in a predatory manner.

When you really understand that, it’s much easier to get detached from the abuser, heal, and move on.