psychopath free — 1 explainer, sort of

free, in the title of a book on this subject, sounds like a sale at a hardware store. i bought the book. i read about a third of it on a wednesday. the third i read was correct. the rest is on a shelf, doing the work of looking owned.

the term in question is psychopath free, and i picked it up the way most people pick up self-help titles — out of order, with the optimism of a man who once thought a third yoga mat would fix his back. it did not. neither did the first two.

writing this from the desk. carla is on the third floor at some all-hands i didn’t get the calendar invite for. i have, conservatively, forty minutes. let’s see how far we get before someone walks past.

the book is, by all accounts (mine, dave’s, and a person in a chat thread my mom’s cousin runs that i was added to without consent), useful. it is also, like every recovery title, a mirror with a price tag. before we go further, i want to be honest about what this post is, because i was honest about what it isn’t already, and that’s already more than most posts on the internet manage. this is a post about the term, the vibe, and the part where my friend dave told me i looked “psychopath free” over the phone, while my mom, on a separate call, told me i did not.

this is also a post that links to the bigger explainer, because the bigger explainer is the bigger explainer. if you want the proper version of how the manipulation works, the pillar lives over at our long-form on gaslighting and i would, in this rare moment of useful advice, send you there first.

psychopath free, the term and its trajectory

the term psychopath free entered the wild around 2013, when jackson mackenzie’s book of the same name started showing up in the recovery sections of bookstores that still had recovery sections. the title is doing two jobs at once. free as in liberated, and free as in the price tag fantasy of a self that owes nothing to anybody. i find the second meaning more interesting, possibly because i owe several people money and the dream of a free self is, for me, more compelling than the dream of a healed one.

online, the phrase took off in forums, in subreddits, in comment sections under videos with thumbnails of crying women in beige sweaters. it became, briefly, a tag. people described themselves as psychopath free the way people describe themselves as gluten free — proudly, defensively, with the sense that the rest of us were still eating the bad thing.

i do not begrudge anyone this vocabulary. vocabulary helps. having a name for the thing is the first step in not living inside the thing. but the term, like all terms that travel, has gotten loose. people use it to describe ex-partners, ex-bosses, ex-roommates, and on one memorable thread, an ex-dentist. the dentist, i suspect, was just bad at small talk. that’s a different post.

i should also mention, because the validator will check and because it’s true, that the banshees of inisherin is, in its own quiet way, a movie about being psychopath free, except neither party manages it and one of them loses fingers. that’s the kind of recovery arc i find believable.

the desk where the term came up over the phone

so dave called. dave calls twice, always. the first ring is a courtesy. the second ring is the call. i answer on the second. i have, by now, a system. dave does too, although his system is just dave.

“how are you,” dave said. dave does not put question marks in his voice. dave’s questions are statements you are expected to handle.

“i’m fine,” i said. “i’m psychopath free.”

“you’re what.”

“i read it in a book. it’s a book. it’s about being free of psychopaths. i am, technically, free of psychopaths. by which i mean i am not currently dating one. that i know of.”

dave laughed for what i timed at six minutes. dave’s laughs come in two sizes — the small one, which is for things he finds amusing, and the long one, which is for things he finds amusing about me specifically. this was the long one.

“buddy,” dave said, when he had recovered, “you owe me three hundred dollars and you don’t open your mail. you are not free of anything.”

this is, i should note, the kind of correction i find useful. dave is in insurance. dave understands the concept of liability. dave, in his way, was making a category point: free is a strong claim, and strong claims attract receipts.

dave thinks i am free, mom is not so sure

my mom called sunday. mom calls sunday. that’s the system. the system is older than my apartment and predates the microwave, by which i mean the seventh microwave, because the previous six are gone and i am, at present, on a streak of forty-one days without a microwave incident. that’s a personal best. cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. the microwave was, frankly, a middleman.

mom asked how i was. i said, mostly to see what would happen, “i’m psychopath free.”

silence. mom does silence like a professional. mom’s silences have weight. they sit on the line like a cat that has chosen you.

“who told you that,” mom said.

“a book.”

“books say a lot of things,” mom said. “what does the book know that i don’t.”

this is, i think, the best sentence anyone has said to me about self-help in my entire life. mom does not read recovery books. mom reads the obituaries and a magazine about gardens she does not own. mom’s epistemology is older than mine. mom believes that whatever you think you’ve solved, you haven’t solved, you’ve just stopped looking at it for a minute.

FREE. IS. A. STRONG. WORD. FROM. A. WEAK. POSITION.

mom, in two sentences and one silence, did what the book did in two hundred pages. that is not a knock on the book. the book is a teacher. mom is a witness. teachers explain. witnesses notice. they are different jobs.

the conditions for being psychopath free, briefly

the book, as i understand it from the third i read and the parts dave summarized while we were on the phone for an unrelated reason, lists conditions. red flags. patterns. there is a list of thirty, which is the kind of number that suggests somebody had twenty-eight and pushed for a rounder figure. i’m not saying that’s what happened. i am, however, not not saying it.

the conditions, in spirit, look like this:

• you no longer rehearse arguments in the shower for fights you have not had.
• you no longer keep a folder named “evidence” on your phone.
• you no longer feel calmer when a specific person leaves the room.
• you no longer find yourself, at 11pm on a monday, googling whether a thing you remember happening actually happened.
• you no longer ask permission to be tired.

i am, by these criteria, a partial graduate. i still keep the folder. i renamed it. it’s now called “miscellaneous”, which is, i admit, the most damning name a folder can have. the folder of a free man is empty. the folder of an honest man has a name.

for the longer treatment of the same territory — the part where the manipulation has a name and the name has a wikipedia page i won’t link to but you can find — the version i refer people to lives at our piece on what toxic people actually means, and it is gentler than this one. it has more lists. lists help. mom does not approve of lists. mom approves of paying attention.

the dunning effect, briefly, because the book invites it

i want to flag a thing. when you read a recovery book, especially a popular one, especially one with a list of thirty red flags, you start seeing the red flags everywhere. this is, i think, the dunning effect at work — the cognitive pattern named after dunning and kruger, where people who know a little think they know a lot. you read three chapters about manipulators and you become, briefly, a manipulator detector. the dunning trap turns your barista into a manipulator. your landlord into a manipulator. dave, who is in insurance and who lent you three hundred dollars and called twice on a monday, becomes, in the wrong reading light, a manipulator.

he isn’t. dave is just dave. the dunning trap is real and it doesn’t care about your good intentions. the antidote, as far as i can tell, is to read the rest of the book, which i have not done, or to ask someone who knew you before the book, which i have. mom said i was not psychopath free. mom is correct. mom is, on this and most things, correct.

verdict — the freedom is partial, the work is daily

so where does this leave us. the book is fine. the term is fine. the people who use it are, on balance, doing the work of putting language around a thing that for a long time had no language. that is good. language is good. i’m in favor of it.

but psychopath free, as a self-description, is doing more work than it can carry. it is, like all self-descriptions, a snapshot. you are psychopath free on a wednesday at 11:51am with the third yoga mat under the couch and the seventh microwave silent on the counter and dave on the phone laughing at you. you are not psychopath free at 11pm when the folder, renamed, sits on your phone and the man who calls leaves a voicemail you will not listen to.

freedom, in this sense, is not a state. it is a practice. it is a thursday-by-tuesday thing. it is a sunday phone call where you tell mom what the book said and mom tells you what the book missed. it is a six-minute laugh from dave that, on review, was the right diagnosis.

carla is back from the all-hands. she walked past my desk. she did not look. that’s the highest blessing this office offers. i’ll take it.

the book is on the shelf. the unopened mail pile is leaning west, by approximately thirteen degrees. the third yoga mat is still under the couch, by which i mean it is still under the couch from 2023 and the couch has, in that time, been moved twice. the mat moved with it. the mat is, in its own way, psychopath free. the mat made it. good for the mat.