50 People Who Met A Psychopath Share The Chilling Moment They Realized It

I fell in love with this guy who did a lot of hardcore sports. Dangerous stuff. All the time.
I went through a seriously traumatic event when on my way to meet him for vacation. He had been so charming, and made a lot of grand romantic gestures back then. He impulsively got us tickets to a cruise. I got to town a day before him to visit family. I went out with friends the night before he arrived - things went way wrong.
When he got off the plane he found out that I had been attacked. Instead of coming to me at the police station, he told me I should have fought harder and had ruined his vacation. He went on the cruise without me. Went straight to the ship and didn't even bother to see me.
Broke my heart at one of the lowest moments of my life.
When we got to talk about it later - I told him I had noticed his lack of empathy, thrill-seeking, impulsive behavior. I had also noticed that he was always "happy".
He looked at me without a mask for a moment. And told me I was very observant. It was chilling. He could move so easily from this charming guy who seemed almost altruistic to someone I didn't recognize.

I’m a storm chaser. In 2011 I was with a chase group that got extremely close to the very deadly joplin tornado. Was a very sobering event. Several days after was speaking to another member of the group who informed us that the best part of the trip was seeing the town get destroyed. He also cheered watching a different tornado hit a house. Even crazier? His wife cheered too. Two psychopaths — and they found each other.

I have a sibling who is a psychopath.

They are just... empty. They try thing after thing after thing to fill the emptiness and move onto harming people or themselves when they can't.

And there's an uncanny valley quality to them because of the emptiness. They do not respond in a normal, expected way to anything. They are cold, like someone doing an impression of a human.

They're good at acting and putting on the charm but most people catch a whiff of something that's not right, something off and strange. So most of their relationships are entirely superficial. It's very much a "you know it when you see it" situation. You know in your bones something is wrong and your brain says, "Run," even if you're having a totally banal conversation. And they have ALWAYS been like this, they've just gotten better at acting to fool whoever they need to.

I am technically still married to one, although we have been no contact for over three years. I can name a thousand different things, but I will stick to one in the interest of time. One night...one of many similar nights, we argued and he assaulted me, generally this meant him biting me and choking me. I was at perhaps the lowest point in my life, brainwashed, gaslighted, torn down, so I got up the next morning and decided to make the best of it. I cooked all day and he stayed in the bedroom. I remember listening to music and just really being in a good mood. I made his favorite dinner and brought it to him in the bedroom. He was looking at his phone. I said I made your favorite dinner 😃, and he looked at me and said Your so simple. That moment changed my life. It was a gift, because I left the next day and never looked back.

They are incredibly selfish but they don’t make you feel they are being selfish. Instead you eventually see they don’t care about you and that when they do nice things, it’s actually for themselves more than you. You are easily ignored when you have no value left for them.

I suppose that some of these people are good in that they can move on from you and you can just completely forget about them even though you are related. .

He was my friend in high school. He literally saw himself as an apex predator. He was kind of a weird guy in general but it was high school, we were all a little weird. But he was one of the most selfish people ive ever met and would creep out any girl we got near. He would always make jokes about how he could just k**l someone if he wanted to and they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Anytime he tried to be emotional with someone it always felt really fake and forced and it was typically an attempt at manipulation.

Honestly, he was a fun guy to talk to when we talked about video games and such but being a teenager I just completely ignored so many red flags. It wasn't until college when I was doing a research paper on psychopathy that I had an "Oh my God" moment of realization.

I lived a few years in a state mental hospital where I lived on the same ward with one.

She outright said to me that she was a "dignosed psychopath," but in reality thats not a diagnostic term. She most likely was diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Anyway, she would say or do anything as a means to an end. If she wanted something, shed go for it. Relationships, s*x, cigarrettes, clothes, food. Everybody and everything was dispensible to get what she wanted and often at a moments notice. A lot of the patients had been used at some point by her for something.

Another "fun" thing about her was she would self harm by swallowing objects. She had a ton of deep scars on her stomach where they had to surgically remove potentially deadly items. I watched her as she swallowed long wires she had dug out from the patient phone, and she once swallowed the batteries from my CD player when I wasnt looking. Good times.

I like to think I'm pretty good at reading people but they'd stare at me sometimes when we were in bed together and I'd simultaneously feel like they cared for me and that they were about to attack me at the same second. I could never fully read that look behind their eyes, it was like it was ebbing and flowing between love and hate.

It would create this push and pull in my gut where I was drawn to them but afraid of them.

I started to catch out lies. I watched their movements change when no one was looking. Every word was calculated to manipulate something or someone. Their emotions were mimicking others rather than their own.

I got out before they hurt me and in the process found out what they'd done to many, many others.

If you're reading this, you and your sibling should be in jail. Both of you should play in traffic.

I work in a prison and have dealt with literal psychopaths diagnosed and all that.

The best way I can describe it and keep in mind this is coming from someone who knew what they were going in...there is something missing in their brain. Like you can see it in their eyes that there is a void behind them and when they talk to you it's just a big game. I'm not talking "oh, that's a lack of empathy" (which it is) but an emptiness that just is not natural. Like inmates plays games (lies, manipulation, playing dumb to see what you know, it's part of their world) but with them there is a lot of deliberation and measuring in their interactions with you that just doesn't exist with regular inmates. Like they are sizing you up and man you gotta be very aware of what they are doing and just go along with it sticking to policy, procedure and your job. They love control and they are trying to get some of it with you and you have to not allow it.

It took years for me to realise, but eventually saw that they never spoke a single word from their mouth that wasn't intended to manipulate and control others. Every single conversation and interaction was manufactured and not genuine - no 'genuine' version of that person exists. They also took every opportunity to subtly put people down if they were threatened by them. Made people (including me) doubt ourselves deeply.

Also, everything they did to control and manipulate others had plausible deniablility because they were so clever and careful about it. Everything was done in between the lines so it was hard to prove.

Eventually those people almost always give themselves away though, in my opinion/experience.

My friend’s child.

When our kids were in elementary school, I met another parent and we became fast friends. Adored my new friend and our kids were the same ages. My kids, social and friendly, didn’t love going to play dates with her kids.

She had a crazy tall staircase, like a story and and a half, one long straight run. The kids playroom was at the top. I was half way up the stairs to check on them, my daughter was standing at the top looking down at me.

My angle kept me out of sight from the playroom, and I saw my friend’s son sneaking behind her, maniacal expression of glee as he was about to shove her down the stairs.

I yelled, he startled and then reset his face. I saw him transform from evil to cute kid. I grabbed my kids and never talked to her again. I was afraid to have my kids in his presence and the sweet mother would never believed what I saw. I tried a million times to figure out how to explain my actions, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

My mom. She made everyone think she was the best mom in the world. My classmates would say “your mom’s so cool, she’s great, etc.” But behind closed doors, she would sit me down every night for up to 4 hours (I know,bc I’d watch the clock in agony), while she explained what a terrible person I was while reading scripture.

She also didn’t like our fish tank, so she put a towel over it and waited for the fish to die.

"I got so angry I decided to shoot my wife. But then I thought to myself that if I k**l my wife my son will be lost in this world so I have to k**l him too."

I work in inpatient psychiatry.

Pro tip: if you ever go to the psych hospital and meet someone and you decide you want to be friends with them on the outside DON'T!

I am no specialist and fully aware that ASPD cannot be diagnosed in a minor , but having said that-

work with children with behavioural issues and encountered a highly intelligent preteen with zero empathy. It was really quite unsettling - would utter the most horrific , personal insults with a near-reptilian look and, when facing a consequence ,merely lament that he would be bored during time out.

Consulted with the police when he started sending chat messages of himself torturing his pets as some intimidation tactic.

This person hasn't been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect she is. She can be very charming superficially, good at ensnaring/luring people in and very believable in spinning a good story to get people to side with her and believe what she's saying. She has very limited emotional range, it's just fake happiness/contentment and rage. There is nothing in between. Can also fake cry on command which I find very disturbing. She does it to the cops whenever her partner and her have had a DV incident. I usually believe most women when they say they are victims, but not her. She is cunning and evil. She has gotten away with her behaviour her whole life and I don't see it changing. She knows how to manipulate people into bowing to her demands and if they don't, she flies into a rage where she attempts to physically harm them. Also, if you don't side with her, you're against her and she will launch a campaign into smearing your name and reputation.

I used to work across the road from a State Hospital (mental health hospital) at a big box store.

They treated all walks of illness, including psychopaths and the criminally insane.

Those that were allowed due to having a day pass or whatever they were called would come either on their own (rare) or with case workers to do shopping. This didn’t include prisoners, I guess obviously, but sometimes we’d get patients that were just…off.

So I’ve interacted with a few. For me, the usual giveaway was the sticker name tag, lol. But there were some who didn’t wear them, or who “escaped” and wandered over on their own.

For me, it was their laugh. They actually tend to laugh a lot, but ONLY at things they themselves have said or precipitated in.

And then, it’s an…almost naughty-child snicker, like they think they’re the most clever person in the room. I can’t say if this is a medication side effect (because I assume all those I interacted with were medicated?) but that’s how I’d tell.

The other way is that they seemed to have a momentary delay in replying to things, like they were referring to a script or buffering. Again, may have been a side effect from medication causing delayed cognitive processing, but it was a tell for me. Usually I’d interact and see these tells and then their case worker would pop up to direct them back across the toad.

We had a boy at the school I teach at who would lie, about things that we literally saw him do, with such calmness that it was chilling. 

He would mess with kids stuff, like hiding their bags, and then just stand in the distance and watch them panic.

One day he got in trouble for throwing some boys clothes into the toilets. The next day his mother wanted to know what we were going to do with the boys who broke his fingers. 

We didn’t know what she was talking about as we’d seen him carrying heavy books and using his hands fine after the incident.

She showed us the x-rays to confirm it though.

We think that he had broken his own fingers to get out of the initial trouble. 

He was 10. .

It ran in his family and he was always worried I’d find out “what he’d become one day”, but he already was one, because he was so cruel. Every plan to help or impress me had some ulterior motive of purposely making me insecure or diminishing me in some way. He also thought k*****g pets were no big deal and he always tried to tower over me and pretend to be angry to intimidate me.

It’s something about the eyes and the micro expressions. I just get a vibe from them. I am autistic and spent 20+ years studying and watching people, so I am hyper aware and have fairly decent pattern recognition in general. There have been a couple of people who flew under my radar initially but caused intense anxiety to be around. But the veil always lifts eventually.

Talked to a guy online who after two weeks of conversation told me sometimes that he wanted to k**l someone just to see what it felt like in random conversation, and told me that when he was younger he had a plan for k**ling a girl in his class he thought was annoying and that “no one would miss”. Could he have been an edgelord? Maybe. However, I am not taking my chances. Pretty sure he was literally psychopathic.