Although psychopaths were long associated with the great serial killers, capable of committing heinous crimes without batting an eyebrow, the truth is that most of them do not engage in criminal behavior and go unnoticed. Psychopaths are fully integrated into society and… no! being a psychopath does not imply being a murderer, and vice versa.
“In the end, psychopaths are not stupid,” psychotherapist Luis Muiño told us in an interview with Muy Interesante. “Scientific police have come a long way and today it is almost impossible to commit a crime without getting caught, so luckily there are fewer and fewer great serial killers.” The problem with psychopaths is that, although they do not exercise physical violence, they are motivated by control, and this can be easily obtained without the need to commit a crime, but rather by accessing positions of power, for example in a large company or in a politic charge.
So if most psychopaths go unnoticed in society because they don’t commit great crimes, how can we recognize them? “When I have people who are victims of a psychopath in therapy, I see that the big problem is that, many times, they are the ones who end up feeling guilty,” Muiño told us. In the end, psychopaths are specialists in looking for our weak points, and their victims tend to feel that they are the ones who are continually failing. The key point, therefore, is to know how to identify psychopaths, because if we manage to do it, we will emotionally free ourselves from guilt: we know that it is the other person who has the problem and not us.
In addition, we must be calm. The psychotherapist explained to us that psychopathy works well, but in the short term. “ If you have a boss who is a psychopath, you have to think that he will do well, but only up to a certain age. There comes a time when the psychopath ceases to be an adapted person, since we all end up recognizing that this kindness is superficial ”.
Do you want to know more about the mind of psychopaths? In this gallery we have compiled knowledge about the functioning of the brain of these people who scare and fascinate us in equal parts. Go for it!
