They infiltrate our friendship groups, manipulate social dynamics, and leave a trail of emotional damage that’s hard to explain, because from the outside, they look completely normal.<\/p>\n
“When I first started my research, there was the overwhelming idea that psychopaths are all criminals,” Dr Boddy said. <\/p>\n
“The reality is much more complicated than that. There are many psychopaths who exist under the radar because they look perfectly normal and are charming and sociable people.” <\/p>\n
And for female psychopaths especially, the dynamics can be especially subtle and deeply damaging. <\/p>\n
What is a psychopath, really? <\/p>\n
Psychopathy is a clinical personality disorder characterised by a lack of empathy, remorse, and conscience, Boddy explained. <\/p>\n
These individuals view others not as people but as tools; objects to be used, manipulated, and discarded.<\/p>\n
It’s different from narcissism, although the two can overlap. <\/p>\n
“A narcissist is basically someone who loves themselves too much for their own good and the reason they neglect other people is because they don’t think about other people,” Boddy said. <\/p>\n
“A psychopath doesn’t care about other people because they have no empathy, no conscience, no emotion. So for them, other people simply don’t exist as real people.”<\/p>\n
Boddy explained that psychopathy manifests in two broad ways:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They infiltrate our friendship groups, manipulate social dynamics, and leave a trail of emotional damage that’s hard to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,259,260],"class_list":{"0":"post-131599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}