The Unifying Predatory Pattern Behind Narcissists and Psychopaths
Transcript from video
Should we be rethinking what we have learned about and how we’ve come to understand dark personality types? I’m asking this because in her thesis, Dr. Karen Mitchell identifies high functioning dark personalities such as narcissists, psychopaths, toxic leaders and coercive controllers and so on, as subsets of one overarching predatory type, what she calls persistent predatory personality, or PPP.
These people aren’t on a spectrum or a continuum as I’d previously believed. Rather they are categorical and they are hardwired for malevolence rather than connection.
Their drive is innate and they see others, especially kind, empathic people or high achieving people with status as potential prey. They enjoy the hunt and they don’t experience remorse.
Now, although it’s fair to say that not every manipulator is a brilliant, high functioning person in a position of power and responsibility, the most dangerous ones, however, often are.
They are convincing, intelligent and admired. This is what can make them so incredibly effective as predators, and the disturbing thing is they often appear completely normal and unassuming.
However, these are individuals who actively violate social norms and harm others with intent. Dr
Mitchell analysed data from international experts which included FBI profilers, practitioners, cult deprogrammers, forensic psychologists and domestic violence specialists. Even professionals who work in religion, business and politics, and according to her data, these individuals comprise roughly 10% of the population.
So I’m going to outline the different groups and attributes of predatory personality as set out by Dr. Mitchell, and these attributes are shared across all dark personality types that don’t just describe an individual. Rather they describe a repeatable hunting strategy that scales from one person to an entire group.
So first of all, in group one, we see what fuels the blind ambition and the relentless pursuit of power and control. Why PPPs always seem to steer situations towards their own benefit.
For instance, the person in work who sabotages their fellow work colleagues or cult leaders who demand loyalty. So what we see is a drive for control, power and dominance because there’s a view of being superior, special and entitled.
There’s also a pathological explosive response whenever they’re challenged or compromised. They can also be highly vengeful if things don’t go their way. And here we would see vindictiveness and holding on to grudges for a long time. Lastly, in group one, there’s being uncompromising in getting what they want, so it’s their way or the wrong way.
No debate, no hesitation, no negotiation.
Group two shows the predators in action. They’re both motivated and operate differently and more darkly than other people. They exploit vulnerability for gain, and here we would see the targeting and the grooming of others.
There’s being predatory by exploitative or calculated means. We also see sadism and this would be cruelty to others either for their own pleasure or just to dominate through fear. Sometimes it’s both. There’s a low regard for rules, regulations, even agreements, and a low regard for moral codes.
The rules don’t apply to them, even the ones that they may enforce on others. There’s no respect or acknowledgement of other people’s boundaries, sexual or otherwise. They can cross lines without hesitation and they can be very demanding and have unreasonable expectations of others.
Group 3 underpins long term planning. So here we would see a level of impulse control and being able to blend in and avoiding detection and making descent difficult. So they can be chameleon like to fit in. They can create a facade to be accepted and trusted.
There’s lies and dishonesty which isn’t always easy to spot at first, and they can be devious and
manipulative, Misleading others into becoming complicit in their schemes. There’s an unwillingness to accept responsibility for any negative impact of their behaviours on others, and typically here we would see exaggerated victimhood and DARVO tactics. Because high functioning predators can create convincing public faces, many victims either doubt their own sanity, they fear potential backlash for speaking up, or they fear being disbelieved because these traits can create a personality that is highly effective at harm while remaining difficult to detect
Lastly, in group four, there’s an emotional deficit. They don’t experience feelings the way others do. So they can lie, coerce, manipulate and isolate and punish without feelings of guilt or remorse. But they can be good at mimicking emotions. So any emotion they do show tends to be performative. They can be both callous and unremorseful in the pursuit of their goals or in their targeted destruction of others. They are profoundly self interested because it’s all about them.
They are brazen. They will act with boldness whenever they think they can get away with it. In fact, in many cases, the more they get away with, the more they do.
Dr. Mitchell also outlined the tactics they use to control, isolate, confuse and destroy others while evading accountability. Among others, those tactics include using intimidation to create fear, creating a false sense of deep connection with others, usually through mirroring and copying to build a false rapport. There’s isolating their targets from support networks and weaponising the rules or the justice system in order to control, dominate, or punish and, deter others from speaking up or speaking out.
These tactics are used consistently in many different environments, relationships and contexts, whether that’s in home or the boardroom. They get themselves into positions of trust and positions of power, and they wreak havoc. And many victims of predators describe being relentlessly coerced, manipulated, attacked, and pushed to the edge, only to be either labeled as crazy or being punished somehow for not complying.
I read the essay outlining Dr. Karen Mitchell’s thesis on Persistent Predatory Personality – PPP – and it stopped me cold. Not because it was new information, but because it named, with clinical precision, the man I was married to for over twenty years. The one who turned our home into a hunting ground while the world saw something close to normal.
Dr. Mitchell says these high-functioning dark personalities – narcissists, psychopaths, coercive controllers – aren’t on a spectrum we can nudge toward better with enough love or counseling. They are categorical. Hardwired for malevolence rather than connection. They hunt kind, empathic people, especially those with status or something worth taking. They enjoy the pursuit. No remorse. They wear convincing faces. They comprise a significant slice of the population, according to her data from FBI profilers, domestic violence specialists, cult deprogrammers, and others who’ve stared at this evil up close.
Her breakdown into four groups of shared attributes and the repeatable tactics they use hit every mark of the unseen domestic abuse I endured from the late 1970s until I finally left in January 2000.
Group One – the drive for control, power, dominance, entitlement, explosive vengefulness when challenged, uncompromising “my way or else.” That was the grand church wedding in the ivory gown my mother pushed for, followed by the strip club honeymoon surprise that made me feel replaced before we even started. The sledgehammer taken to the car my daddy gave me. The stalking, the windows shot out, the beloved bulldog removed from behind a locked gate, the vehicle stolen in the night after I fled the final slugfest. No debate. No negotiation. Just dominance enforced.
Group Two – predatory and exploitative, sadistic cruelty for pleasure or fear, low regard for rules, boundaries (sexual or otherwise), unreasonable expectations. Twenty-plus years of measured, intentional harm behind closed doors. No alcohol, minimal police reports until one of the children ran to the neighbors. The rules he demanded of me never applied to him. Fear was the atmosphere I breathed.
Group Three – the facade of normal, chameleon-like ability to blend in, lies, devious manipulation that draws others into complicity, refusal to accept responsibility, DARVO tactics that make victims doubt their sanity or fear they won’t be believed. This is why, when I finally wrote Bones Beneath the Prairie at age 70 and told the raw truth, two of my adult children called it a lie and blocked me. The predator’s public face held. The truth-teller looked crazy.
Group Four – the emotional deficit. No authentic guilt or remorse. Performative emotions. Callous. Unremorseful. Brazen, especially when they get away with it. That tracks with a man who could terrorize me for decades and escalate after I left, with no apparent conscience.
The tactics Dr. Mitchell lists – intimidation to create fear, false sense of deep connection through mirroring, isolating the target, weaponizing rules or the justice system, pushing victims to the edge then labeling them unstable – read like the script of my first marriage. I returned after early incidents out of attachment and denial. My rational engineer father saw it clearly, hired a detective, and offered to “get rid of him.” I chose to stay longer than I should have. Safety was not oxygen then.
I left for good after the last violent confrontation. Met Ken years later – steady, clear, safe, the opposite of predation. Married 25 years happily retired on the beach in Mexico.
Right now the ex lies in a San Antonio hospital with dementia, waiting for long-term placement after weeks of the system finally seeing the danger it missed for decades. I’m drafting notes on “He Needs a Prison” because the irony is thick. Vindication arrives late and feels lonelier than I imagined. But Dr. Mitchell’s framework helps me see it clearly: this was never going to change. Categorical. Hardwired.
To the women reading – especially those in faith communities where we’re quick to urge endurance and slow to name coercion and domination – trust the pattern when you see it. Safety is not optional.
Truth-telling is not disloyal. The God who met me as a three-year-old in a yellow ruffled nightgown, who never left me through the worst of it, still speaks: “Feel it. Deal with it.” Honest forgiveness doesn’t mean pretending the evil wasn’t real or reconciling with an unrepentant predator. I forgave the man but never stopped hating what he did. He is evil. Vengeance belongs to the Lord.
My memoir Bones Beneath the Prairie and this Substack TEXASOIL: A Tangled Witness exist because I finally refused silence. Dr. Mitchell’s work gives language to what I lived. It validates every survivor who’s been told they’re exaggerating or that “nobody’s perfect.”
If this analysis helps even one woman recognize the hunt before it buries her under twenty years of bones, then sharing my story was worth every cost.
The prairie remembers. So do I. And I will keep telling it true.