Disordered characters, especially predators, don’t really want us to know who they really are. They tell us what they think we want to hear so that we will think them more like us.

Predatory Aggressive Personalities (i.e., psychopaths or sociopaths) consider themselves superior to the rest of the human race. They view individuals with inhibitions rooted in emotional bonding to others as inferior creatures and, therefore, their rightful prey.

To help our server deliver a snappier response time for the thousands of readers of our threads on Dr Carver’s ‘Loser’ article — the most recent of which has attracted over 350 new comments, we’re going to open this new thread and close the previous one. Combined with around 175 questions on personality disorders submitted to the ‘Ask the Psychologist’ service, we’ve now had over 1000 questions and comments from readers affected by this topic.

By far the most limiting aspect of traditional approaches to understanding the most character-disturbed individuals among us is that purely behavioral descriptions don’t capture the essence of what is unhealthy and problematic in them.

Aggressive personalities are fundamentally at war with anything that stands in the way of their unrestrained pursuit of their desires.

Anxiety plays a central role in what we have commonly called neurosis. Anxiety plays a minimal role, however, in the problems of the disordered character.

One of the ways that folks become embroiled in abusive or exploitive relationships is by falling prey to concerns about the way their character-disordered partner is feeling. They almost never consider that the brandishing of anger might be a tactic that character-disturbed individuals use to manipulate and control others, as opposed to a genuine feeling.