Covert Psychopath

On this infinite channel, there's a playlist dedicated to the covert narcissist. And there's another playlist dedicated to its brother, the covert borderline. And there are quite a few videos dedicated to the covert and collapsed states of various personality disorders. For example, the collapsed histrionic.

Today, to the crown of creation, the king of the jungle, the one and only one, the psychopath.

Today I'm going to describe the covert psychopath.

Notice how my eyes are becoming more and more black as I speak.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. And I'm a professor of clinical psychology. My eyes, by the way, are brown, not black.

Okay, Shoshanim.

And as I promise, today we're going to discuss the covert psychopath.

The covert psychopath is a curious combination of both factor 1 and factor 2 psychopath.

Factor 1 and factor 2 relate to the famous test of psychopathy, the PCLR. I'm not a big fan of the test, but that's all we have right now. Almost all we have right now.

And the test distinguishes between two types of psychopath.

The F2 psychopath is impulsive, a bit more emotional and can even possess empathy.

The F1 psychopath is the primary psychopath, the type that you see on television in various true crime programs and of course serial killers.

And the covert psychopath is a combination of both.

Today I'm going to describe this character to you, and I'm sure that you will recognize a few people in your immediate environment and be able to identify them as reminiscent of the covert psychopath.

Do not go around diagnosing and labeling people. You'll not qualify to pathologize.

But you can still listen and form your own opinion.

Okay?

Let's start with the covert psychopath's self-concept and emotional regulation.

Exactly like many other members of the cluster B tribe, the covert psychopath has a false self of grandiosity, a false sense of grandiosity.

In other words, his grandiosity or her grandiosity is embedded in a fantasy. It's counterfactual. It's inflated. It's not real.

And yet, there is this self-perception or self-image as Godlike. There's a sense of uniqueness which is undue.

And this gives rise to feelings of entitlement. I'm entitled to special treatment. I'm entitled to jump the queue. I'm entitled to respect without investing any effort. I should get a degree without commensurate, hard work and hard study, etc.

This is entitlement.

And entitlement goes hand in hand with what is known as alloplastic defenses.

Alloplastic defenses is the tendency to blame other people, the situation, the environment, the government, to blame someone else for one's wrong decisions, bad choices, failures, defeats and mishaps.

But in the case of the covert psychopath, the alloplastic defenses, coupled with the entitlement, coupled with the grandiosity, masquerade as morality.

The covert narcissist displays a rigid, harsh, sadistic, unforgiving sense of morality. He brags about his or her morality.

His morality or her morality, by the way, the vast majority of covert psychopaths are men but there are of course women, so the morality in this case is ostentatious, it's pro-social, it's spiritual, it's communal, but in a kind of psychopathic way.

In your face, look what a good person I am. Look how altruistic and charitable and giving and kind and generous I am. And if you dare to disagree, woe be tied, you will pay the price.

So this is the first thing.

Covert psychopaths, therefore, are likely to be perceived as normal.

And this is exactly what Hervey Cleckley called the mask of normality.

There's also a book by Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door.

We don't use the word sociopath in clinical circles and in academia. But what she meant is psychopaths.

So these psychopaths are our neighbors, our pastors, our medical doctors, law enforcement, our friends, our colleagues. They fit in, they conform, they work from inside the system. And they put on a facade of morality, spirituality, and communality.

The covert psychopath, therefore, is high functioning, and his personality is organized. It's not chaotic, like the borderlines of the narcissists. It's an organized personality.

So what do I mean when I use the word collapse?

First of all to remind you, all covert states are forms of compensation. They're compensatory.

Covert states compensate for failure, for defeat, for collapse, for an inability to obtain something.

Narcissistic supply, in the case of the covert narcissists, and goals and accomplishments in the case of the psychopath.

So the collapse in the case of the covert psychopath consists of recurrent failures to attain goals.

The covert psychopath doesn't care about narcissistic supply he doesn't care about relationships he cares about obtaining, securing, accomplishing goals. He's goal orientated and goal focused.

That means that the covert psychopath has an internal locus of control. He believes that he is the master, he's in charge, he's the boss, he's on top, he's Peterson's lobster.

So he has an internal locus and that sets apart the covert psychopath from the narcissists and the borderline. They have an external locus of control.

The narcissist, the covert psychopath appears to be self-sufficient. He actually emphasizes his self-sufficiency. I don't need anyone.

His resiliency is, as I said, ostentatious. He broadcasts, you're all superfluous. I can live and manage and thrive and prosper and succeed without you.

But it's all compensatory, it's all a mask. It hides a sense of defeat, a sense of pervasive defeat, a sense of failure, a collapse, anxiety, insecurity, an internalized bad object which is harsh, sadistic, punitive, super ego or inner critic.

This internal locus of control, this I'm a rock, I'm breakable, I'm invulnerable, I'm impermeable, I'm untouchable, these messages, this kind of messaging to the environment, I call it invulnerability signaling.

This has to do with a desperate attempt to cover up for the reality of the fragility, the vulnerability of the real person hiding behind this facade. It's a form of avoidance, and it masks dependency.

I mentioned that the covert psychopath has a true, a real internal locus of control, albeit his protestations of self-sufficiency, self-containment, resilience, and so and so forth are fake.

But still, the covert psychopath does regulate his world, his internal world, internally. He does regulate his internal space from the inside, not from the outside.

Whereas the borderline relies mostly on intimate partners and special people, what she calls special people or special friends, to regulate her moods and emotions. While the narcissist relies on feedback from people, narcissistic supply, in order to regulate his sense of self-worth, the covert psychopath regulates his internal world from the inside. He does not depend or rely on people. He doesn't need them, truly. That's not a facade. That's not fake news. That's true.

And he regulates his internal environment via daydreaming and planning of accomplishments in order to conform to some kind of a standard, some kind of what we call an ego ideal.

The covert psychopath has an image of himself as a primary psychopath. You know, the tough guy, the resilient guy, the victorious, triumphant guy or girl. He has this image and he aspires to it. He is asymptotic to it. He always drives towards it. And he daydreams about it and fantasizes and plans. And he sets goals and he tries to accomplish these goals and all this helps the covert psychopath regulate his internal environment.

He is a kind of internalized workaholic. He's all the time involved in some scheme, some plan, some idea, some goal that he is pursuing, he is all the time scheming and cunning and so forth, although a lot of it may appear to be benign ambition and drive, or may be cast in terms of helping the community, altruism of some kind, charity, a lot of it.

But the truth is that it is compulsive and it has nothing to do with other people, it comes from the inside.

The covert psychopath typically has no mood lability. His mood is pretty stable and it is essentially depressive.

Covert psychopaths are possibly dysthymic or alexithymic in some cases.

Anyhow, there's some kind of depressive illness working.

Now, it's arguable whether this depression is a clinical thing or whether it is reactive. It's a reaction to constant failure and constant disappointment, self-disappointment.

Because there's this goal, there's this image, there's this ego ideal, this is the way I should be, this is the way I want to be, this is my aspiration and dream, and then there's the failure.

The failure is constant, recurrent, or pervasive, ubiquitous, and of course, depression is a normal, healthy reaction to failure.

From time to time, the covert psychopath pendulates, oscillates between a secondary state and a primary state.

That's why I open this disquisition by suggesting that the covert psychopath is a combination of primary factor one and secondary factor two psychopaths.

For example, covert psychopaths sometimes become impulsive. They lack impulse control in these situations.

Now these situations, luckily for us, are limited in time and they are rare. In the vast majority, in the overwhelming majority of the life of the covert narcissist, covert psychopath, he's in control, he's in self-control. He's not impulsive.

But there are these bursts, there are these moments similar to the borderline.

The borderline has this state of decompensation and then she acts out. She becomes a secondary psychopath. She becomes aggressive or violent or promiscuous or reckless or defiant.

Same thing happens with covert psychopath.

Covert psychopath suffers in silence, is patient, it's an act, he's play acting, he is never himself.

Covert psychopathy is an extreme form of self-denial.

Of course, this generates or engenders a lot of internalized aggression and resentment.

And sometimes the volcano erupts. And then we have episodes of impulsivity and the rationalization of reactance, defiance, in your face, contumaciousness, hatred, and rejection of authority, and then the covert psychopath is indistinguishable from the primary psychopath.

And exactly like the primary psychopath, the covert psychopath has a low threshold of boredom, low tolerance for boredom. He cannot tolerate boredom.

And while the covert psychopath internalizes aggression, which might explain the depressive state, the background depression, and as I said, in certain cases, at certain moments, moments in time, certain circumstances, certain environments, the covert psychopath becomes a primary psychopath and then he externalizes aggression.

But the difference between the primary psychopath and the covert psychopath is a difference of etiology whereas the primary psychopath externalizes aggression because aggression is the number one determinant of psychopathy, aggression is who the primary psychopath is.

The covert psychopath externalizes aggression because aggression is the flip side of frustration.

Dollard in 1939 taught us that frustration is convertible into aggression, often becomes aggression.

This is the etiology and the mechanism at work in covert psychopathy.

The covert psychopathy does not include any features of borderline.

So there's no affinity between the covert psychopath and the borderline, or even the covert borderline.

There's no suicide ideation. And if there is aggression that is externalized, then others suffer the consequences.

It's very rare for the internalized aggression in covert psychopathy to drive the covert psychopath to self-annihilation or even self-defeat or self-destructiveness.

We'll come to it a bit later.

The covert psychopath is hypochondriac and has addictive behaviors, substance abuse, alcohol use and abuse, etc.

He's an addict, a typical addict, and he's hypochondriac in the sense that he's very worried about his health, his body, looming death, aging, and so on and so forth.

So that is the exact opposite of suicidal ideation. It's the exact opposite of self-negation. It's the exact opposite of self-destructiveness.

And indeed, the covert psychopath is none of these things.

The covert psychopath has no dissociative self-states and no dissociative, no dissociation, no memory gaps. His memory is continuous, it's perfect, both short-term and long-term memory, both episodic and semantic memory, there are no memory disturbances in covert psychopathy, there's no selective attention, no confabulation, no repression, no denial, well, abnormal repression and denial, and none of the things that are very very typical of borderline and to a lesser extent of narcissism.

The covert psychopath has a protector self-state, exactly like the borderline. The borderline's protector self-state is a secondary psychopath. The covert psychopath's protector self-stateis a primary psychopath.

A protector self-state is a self-state that takes over when there is a perception of imminent or environmental threat. That's why it's called a protector state. And everyone has a protector state, by the way, including healthy people.

In the case of the covert psychopath, that is a primary, the protector state is a primary psychopath.

So this kind of person, basically a facade, a walking, talking, breathing, living facade. Behind the facade, exactly like in the case of the narcissists, there's nothing much, except frustration and aggression and pretension. There's nothing much, except frustration and aggression and pretension. There's nothing much there.

And so, how would that affect the covert psychopath's interpersonal relationships?

First, it's important to understand that the covert psychopath entertains paranoid ideation. He is subjected to paranoid ideation.

And the reason that he is immersed, drowning, I would say, in paranoid ideation is a discrepancy between the fact one component and the fact two component of the covert psychopath's psychopathy.

The covert psychopath realizes that the primary psychopath in him or in her can take over and then drive the covert psychopath to act in ways which are dangerous to the covert psychopath, self-destructive, self-defeating, and could have extreme adverse consequences, such as, for example, incarceration or worse.

The paranoia or the paranoid ideation in the case of a covert psychopath is therefore inward directed, internalized. It's as if the covert psychopath perceives himself as some kind of volcano or fault line. And it's as if the covert psychopath is a seismograph and he anticipates fully an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. He knows that something really, really bad is going to happen.

So in other words, the paranoid ideation of the covert psychopath is essentially a form of catastrophizing.

This is the background when the covert psychopath approaches other people in order to have any kind of relationship, intimate, romantic relationship, intimate friendship, workplace relationship, any kind of interaction, any kind of interpersonal exchange or intercourse, forgive the pun, is kind of painted with this white brush of paranoid ideation. It's imbued with paranoid ideation.

The covert psychopath approaches people from a position of hypervigilance.

And so he can never have a really deep, really intimate relationship because that would mean that would require the exposure of vulnerabilities.

And so he ends up having numerous but shallow relationships.

The covert psychopath's attachment style is avoidant dismissive or dismissive avoidant.

There's no real bonding. There's no commitment. No investment.

He goes through peremptory and perfunctory stable pseudo relationships and many unstable ones.

So regardless of the stability and the longevity and the alleged ostensible profundity of the relationship, these relationships are always peremptory and perfunctory, pretend, fake, facades, as we say in German.

The reason the covert psychopaths relationships are pseudo relationships, not real, imitation of the real thing, of ethereal relationships. The reason is not because he is incapable of empathizing or understanding people.

Unlike the narcissist, the psychopath has a very good grasp of people, even emotional grasp.

He is not possessed of emotional empathy, but he is possessed of a much more evolved, much more developed form of called empathy than the narcissist.

The covert psychopath's empathy is reminiscent of the covert borderlines empathy.

The secondary psychopath, the F2 psychopath component in covert psychopathy contributes a modicum of empathy or a remnant or residue of empathy and the ability to access positive emotions.

So the covert psychopath is able to very efficaciously emulate real empathy. Very, very, very convincing.

So it's not a problem of empathy deficit.

He is, or she is, the covert psychopath, psychopath is unable to go deep, to truly commit to a relationship, to truly build something together, to have a togetherness, because it would mean exposure. It would mean disclosure. It would mean vulnerability. It would mean fear, dread, constant threat.

This hypervigilance, this paranoid ideation prevent the formation of real in-depth relationships, and of course, they're a derivative of the dismissive avoidant attachment style.

Similarly, the covert psychopath is unable to genuinely participate in group or team activities. He is a disruptive presence.

And most of the time, the covert psychopath is simply silent. Sullen, sulking, and every other is. He does not contribute. He stands aside. He observes.

There's this perception that he knows something that you don't know, that he is criticizing you silently, inaudibly, inside himself. And this, of course, generates or engenders very bad dynamics in a group or in a team.

So he's not a good team player. He's passive aggressive. He's sullen. He's surly. He's self-denying in some respects.

He knows that in order to maintain his facade of communality and prosociality and morality, he needs to participate in group and team activities. He knows that, but he has to deny himself.

So in an attempt to square the circle to somehow fit in without fitting in, somehow fitting in to fit in without exposing himself to a to the threat and menace and danger of intimacy and disclosure and vulnerability, how to square the circle, he does it by conning with cunning. He's a very cunning and scheming person.

The covert psychopath is also vengeful. He is malevolent in a premeditated way.

So in this sense the covert psychopath is similar to the covert narcissist.

The covert psychopath is part of his ploy, as part of his stratagem to somehow manipulate groups and teams and collectives to do his bidding, to somehow create a cult environment in his family in the workplace and so on so forth, uses all the classic techniques of bullying such as intermittent reinforcement.

If you come across a bully, a bully that is able to organize a gang, a gang, a clique, a group, not a single-ton bully, not a bully who acts alone as a lone wolf, but a bully who gangstalks and acts in groups, you are likely talking, you're likely confronted with a covert psychopath.

Deep inside, of course, the covert psychopath being grandiose, is contemptuous. He has scorn and disdain for other people, but he masks it. He camouflages it with what is known as pseudo-humility, false modesty.

The covert narcissist does the same.

There's a very interesting dynamic in covert psychopathy which is absent in classical psychopathy. And absent in both Factor 1 and Factor 2.

In covert psychopathy and absent in both factor one and factor two in covert psychopathy there are schizoid or avoidant phases that alternate with bursts of histrionic attention seeking.

So mostly the covert psychopath would act as a lone wolf. He would appreciate and court and seek a loneliness. He would be single and he would rarely socialize. He would give the impression that he's shy or introverted when actually he's not.

But then unexpectedly, abruptly, suddenly, mysteriously, there's a day or two or three or a week of outgoing histrionic attention-seeking flamboyant colorful behavior. It's like a burst, colorful burst, a supernova and schizoid and avoidant phase is completely forgotten. It's as if another personality has taken over.

But as distinct from the narcissist, the covert psychopath does not engage in sustained impression management and does not need narcissistic supply at all. His sense of self-worth is regulated from the inside and it's pretty stable in the sense that it is reactive only to actual failures and defeats, similar to a normal, healthy person.

The covert psychopath is rarely defiant or reckless, like the primary psychopath or the secondary psychopath who acts out. This behavior is very rare in covert psychopathy. On the very contrary he appears to be stable, he appears to be sagacious, he appears to be wise, he appears to be reliable, you can rely on him, he gives you a sense of confidence and he maintains this facade in the very long term, sometimes for decades. He becomes a pillar of the community or at the very least someone whose advice you seek when you're in trouble. He's trustworthy.

So as distinct from, as opposed to the psychopath, the covert psychopath is rarely, as I said, reckless or defiant.

But when he does, when he does deploy, when he does use recklessness, when he behaves recklessly, it is aimed, it is goal oriented, it is intentional. The timing is intentional, the intensity is intentional, and the idea is to destabilize everyone and to frighten them, to control them, to hurt people, to affect other people, to modify other people's behaviors.

Whereas the primary psychopath, the secondary psychopath, the borderline in the secondary psychopathic phase, the narcissists in the antisocial phase, whereas in all these clinical cases, recklessness is intimately linked with self gratification. Novelty seeking, thrill seeking, risk seeking behaviors that are very pleasurable and gratifying.

So reckless behaviors in psychopathy, in classic psychopathy, are linked to the pleasure principle. They are intended to bring on gratification and to uphold, buttress, and demonstrate ostentatiously the psychopath's grandiosity. See if I care, my way or the highway.

And so in the covert psychopath, the recklessness, when it makes a rare appearance, the recklessness has nothing to do with novelty seeking, thrill-seeking, risk-taking, self-gratification, nothing to do with.

The recklessness is a manipulative Machiavellian tool. It's an instrument intended to induce changes in behavior people around the covert psychopath and to ensure favorable outcomes.

In other words, it's an element in the covert psychopath's self-efficacy.

The covert psychopath uses all the behaviors of the psychopath, again, rarely, but when he uses them, he uses them to accomplish some goal.

He could be sadistic punitive. He could triangulate. He could torture people. He could be frighteningly reckless. He could be defiant. He could be contumacious. He could imitate the primary psychopath.

Because in the covert psychopath there is a component of primary psychopathy but the motivation is 100% different. In this sense the covert psychopath is actually much more goal oriented than the primary psychopath because the primary psychopath is sometimes impulsive, sometimes loses control. Sometimes loses control. His aggression takes over. His wish to impress takes over. His delusions take over.

The primary psychopath is not in control, a lot of the time, whereas the covert psychopath is in control almost 99.9% of the time. So he is very invested emotionally and otherwise, operationally, functionally, in maintaining discipline. It's like living in a barracks or a boot camp all your life.

Socially, the covert psychopath is awkward and inept, which is precisely why he keeps failing, and why he keeps enduring and experiencing a continuous state of collapse.

But it has to do with his character traits.

Desultory work, no work ethic, he's a slacker, we call it pseudo sublimation, he's a slacker. There's no overall ambition or even direction and purpose. He focuses on narrow short-term goals.

He is indolent, lazy, but lazy as a philosophy, as an ideology, part of his entitlement.

He is not preoccupied with appearances, like the narcissist and to a large extent the psychopath and the border like.

But he is not preoccupied with anything, not only appearances.

His only obsession is with his failures, with his defeats.

He so often fails. He's a loser.

He is not self-defeating. He is not self-destructive.

So the failure doesn't feel good.

When you are self-destructive and you destroy yourself, it feels good because it means you're in control.

When you're self-defeating and you defeat yourself, you deny yourself something, it feels good because you're doing you're in charge.

But if you're not self-destructive and you're not self-defeating and the covert psychopath is not, then failure, defeat, loss, they feel horrible.

And they are the outcomes, as I said, of indolence, entitlement, a preference for shortcuts, inability to commit to invest to delay gratification, impulsivity, recklessness.

It's not someone you would like to employ or to do business with, let's put it this way.

And the problem is not only in work ethic or work schedules or work discipline.

The problem is ethics, standards, ideals.

While the covert psychopath virtue signals day in and day out, he spends all his life virtue signaling. He pretends to have rigid, non-compromising morality and to impose it on everyone around him.

Actually, in reality, deep inside, the truth is that he is idiosyncratically and unevenly moral.

He is a kind of caricatured morality, coupled caricatured modesty, pseudo humility.

His activism, his apparent enthusiasm for social justice or sociopolitical affairs, they're all fake, they're all manipulative, the Machiavellian strategies.

His morality is actually inordinately relative, relativistic. He has relative morality or relativistic morality.

He has a core, he has a strong core of morality, but when you delve into this core, when you study it, when you observe it, you realize that this is self-benefiting morality, self-justifying morality, a morality that is intended to further the aims and the goals of the covert psychopath.

It's highly personal. It's a law unto itself. And its aim is to promote the covert psychopath's interests, period, nothing else, often, very often, at the expense of others.

The covert psychopath affects or pretends that he is contemptuous of money and power and access and status. He mocks people who are invested in these kind of things.

But in real life, this is feigned and fake. His spirituality is fake.

Many of them become gurus and coaches, but they're fake. They're fake to the core.

They can give great imitations and mimicry of the real thing.

Because they do have access to empathy and they do have access to positive emotions through the secondary psychopathy component.

But it's fake. It's an illusion. It's a form of entrapment. It's a facade. It's a theater play, theater production. It's a movie. It's not real. None of it is real.

Deep inside there is contempt. The driving force inside is contempt because the contempt is compensatory.

The contempt goes hand in hand with the grandiosity.

All other people are inferior. All other people are stupid. I can manipulate other people at will.

There is irreverence and even hostility towards others, especially others who are superior or in authority. This makes interactions with other people, interpersonal relationships, love, sexuality very difficultIn the covert psychopath's life, there is marital or relationship instability. There's a cold and greedy seductiveness coupled with aggressive entitlement to sex. It's reminiscent of the insult community in some ways.

There's many extramarital or extradyadic affairs, promiscuity, uninhibited, often kinky sexual life. And it's all very auto-erotic. It's all very masturbatory, masturbating with another person's body.

And finally, what goes through the mind of the covert psychopath?

Like all other Cluster B personality disorders, and quite a few other personality disorders, the covert psychopath is subject to dichotomous thinking and splitting.

But whereas a typical split, typical act of splitting, splitting is a primitive, infantile defense mechanism, where we divide the world. We say, I am all good, everyone else is all bad. I'm all bad, everyone else is all good. This is all black, this is all white, this is all right.

All, like all or nothing thinking, dichotomous thinking.

So whereas typically when someone engages in splitting they split the world into bad and good, evil and good, good, black and white, right and wrong, and so forth, the covert psychopath splits the world into helpful and unhelpful or obstacle.

So his view is utilitarian. Someone who is helpful is all good in a way.

But he doesn't think in terms of good and evil. He thinks in terms of, oh, great, this guy can help me.

And if someone cannot be of help, or even worse, if someone poses a threat to the accomplishment of the goal and it becomes an impediment or a hindrance, an obstacle, then it's an enemy.

So it's very primitive. It's like friend and foe, and enemy with me against me helpful obstacle.

The covert psychopath could appear to be very, very impressive, impressively moral, impressively selfless, impressively knowledge, especially on esoteric or arcane topics. He's deep.

The covert psychopath is actually deep if he says he knows something he has learned it, he does learn it.

He is very bad at committing himself to external frameworks. So he's a slacker, he's very bad at holding a job. He's very bad at having a relationship. He's very bad as far as discipline with external, externally oriented things, with frameworks, with public facing activities.

But internally, he could be actually very deep, very committed.

So if he wants to study some topic, he would spend days and weeks and months learning the field.

So in this sense, it's very reminiscent of autism, autistic spectrum disorder, autism spectrum disorder.

But his perception of reality is very egocentric, egotistic, what's in it for me?

And he has a fondness for shortcuts, shortcuts of acquisition, shortcuts to acquire knowledge, to acquire possessions, to acquire relationships, to acquire status and access.

So he would prefer, in the majority of cases, he would prefer headline news and headline information to deep knowledge. And he would prefer to steal than to work hard in order to buy something. And he would prefer to fake a relationship or to emphasize sex rather than have a truly intimate, romantic relationship.

But he has also an autistic feature.

If something does capture his interest, he suddenly switches and becomes profoundly embedded and involved and invested and committed to the topic, to a person, to a job, not a job, but to a task that he assigns to himself, self-assigned task, and so on.

So he has this duality or dualism of personality.

Most of the time, he's lazy, laid-back, indolent slacker, entitled, refuses to commit, refuse to invest, never works hard, never studies, more often a time.

But then suddenly, there are periods, and there could be long periods, where he falls in love with something.

He becomes emotionally invested, emotionally cathected in something, some topic, some period in history, some personality, some idea, some concept, some relationship, some location.

And then he changes completely.

He becomes extremely hard work, super discipline, and he attains real accomplishments but everything is internal he would not go to the university for example he suddenly became interested in I don't know economics he would not go to the university to study economics autodidact he would learn at home by himself, alone, and he would reach a level of knowledge and expertise equal to any professor.

But he would do it his way and never with others, never succumb, never give in to an authority or a framework or an institution or demands from the outside.

It's kind of defiance, it's a form of protracted extended defiance.

Because he realizes that in the vast majority of cases he is shallow, is a pond pretending to be an ocean, the covert psychopath as opposed to the classic psychopath is indecisive and not opinionate.

The classic psychopath is super decisive, crazily decisive.

That's why many psychopaths are good leaders. Or I wouldn't say good leaders because they lead their followers to oblivion, but they are natural leaders, charismatic leaders. They are opinionated. They know what they want.

And so on.

The covert psychopath is exactly the opposite.

He's indecisive, not opinionated and so on.

And this gives the false impression, the wrong impression of openness, open-mindedness.

He is open to learning it.

It's not.

It's simply that he distrust himself, remember, covert states compensate for innate sense of inferiority and vulnerability and fragility and shyness in some cases.

And covert psychopaths make use of language.

They love language.

They often strikingly articulate.

And they invest in language.

And because they're rigidly and highly moralistic and so on so and so forth they're the kind of people who go around correcting everyone's spelling and everyone's pronunciation and so on so forth they use language because language is an internal scheme they use language to interact with the world and influence it somehow.

All in all, it's a very sorry state and a very sorry diagnosis.

This kind of psychopath possesses the potential to be, I wouldn't say healthy and normal, of course, but to be a member of society, contributing member of society, a member of society that could have a life.

But the fact of one component doesn't let the covert psychopath go on with life.

And from time to time, the covert psychopath rebels against this.

He becomes a secondary cycle, replete with emotions, empathy, you know, but it doesn't like impulsivity, but it doesn't last long.

And it's sad to see these transitions from coming alive, suddenly the perpetual death-state-like, depressive ambience that constitutes what would have passed for a soul had psychopaths possessed one.