How to Spot a Sociopath

A skill we all desperately need to acquire

Several years before Donald Trump came into our national life, a sociopath came into mine.

A member of our extended family, Tom,¹ had recently come out of another, very troubled marriage and found himself a single father with full custody of their small child, Henry. Although Tom’s mother, Ruby, lived nearby and helped out a lot, I’m sure Tom felt overwhelmed and unmoored. He was definitely primed to rush into another relationship.

When he introduced us to Lori, not long after separating from his first wife, we had concerns about the timing. But we were also optimistic that perhaps he had found a partner on whom to lean. She seemed great—friendly, engaging, smart. We were happy for him.

But before long, red flags started going up everywhere, like a beach during a hurricane. Lori began deliberately picking fights with Ruby over the most ridiculous, petty things, for example, that Ruby didn’t send Lori, who had no children and wasn’t yet married to Tom, a Mother’s Day card. She began restricting Ruby’s access to Henry, who had spent a large percentage of his life under Ruby’s care. Lori somehow convinced Tom that he had been raised by a controlling, overbearing mother from whom he needed to separate. Every Lori-instigated fight with Ruby was reshaped into an example of Ruby trying to control Tom and an opportunity for Tom to finally assert himself as an adult. The idea of Ruby, who is basically a human Golden Retriever, being some kind of Mommy Dearest is a laughable notion. But Lori twisted Ruby’s words around and took them out of context and recast Tom’s childhood memories and used the events of his life to create a whole new narrative. She had Ruby herself second-guessing everything, rummaging back through all her memories, wondering if she was unknowingly a horrible mother.

After Lori and Tom eloped, Lori started in on Tom’s other family members and friends. She found reasons why they could not be around us—minor offenses, scheduling issues, fake illnesses, fears of illnesses, the weather, hair-washing. She convinced Tom she was not able to go over to other people’s houses due to past trauma (although she went wherever she wanted when it suited her, for instance to cheat on him or go on a shopping spree). Little by little, she isolated Tom and Henry from everyone else in their prior lives, completely cutting them off. She controlled all their interactions with other people. Mysteriously, very few of those people were those who had known Lori for very long.

Lori lied with ease, relentlessly, big things, small things, when it mattered and when it didn’t. When challenged, she played the victim, told Tom we just didn’t like her, we were threatened, we were jealous, we were bad Christians. We were always the problem and the danger.

She used Tom’s devout faith against him. Any dark secret from her past that surfaced she explained as a sin from a time before she was “born again.” Tom would tell us we all needed to be patient with her as she grew spiritually and allowed Jesus to heal and to change her. She convinced pastors and church members of the same. She cultivated these ties, even at one point getting an inside track on a baby for adoption from the director of a crisis pregnancy center, who thought Lori was a great humanitarian. Lori was a “Christian counselor,”² at one church they attended.

She plunged Tom into chaos and financial ruin. She constantly wanted a new house, a new car, a new job, a new church. She pulled the kids out of school, put them back in, moved them to a new school, homeschooled. They moved and moved and moved and then renovated and renovated and renovated, losing money on every transaction. She insisted on building an expensive pool at one house, then a few months later, demanded they buy a whole new house.

Long, long story short, it turned out Lori was at times physically abusive or threatening to both Henry and Tom. The extended family was able to get Henry removed from Tom and Lori’s custody, and by the grace of God, he is now a happy, healthy adult. It also turned out that Lori had met Tom while she was his ex-wife’s “Christian counselor.” It also turned out that Tom was Lori’s 10th husband by the time she was in her early 40s.

Tom is still married to her. It’s heartbreaking.

Lori is a sociopath, we know that now, and honestly if we had been more educated about sociopathy, we might have been able to do something at the beginning. But most people aren’t aware of what it is and how prevalent it is. They think sociopaths are super creepy murderers or rapists, and some of them are. But more of them are just normally acting people, at least from a bit of a distance, and there are many more of them than you think. About 1 percent of the population are sociopaths (some studies have that number as high as 4.5%), and most of them never commit violent crimes. It’s not that they wouldn’t; a sociopath has no concern for any rule or norm or other human being. It’s all for the taking, all for their exploitation, to get what they want, or simply to amuse themselves. Lori would foment drama just for kicks from what I could tell. We were all playthings in her toy chest. Sociopaths do what they calculate they can get away with, when the benefits outweigh the costs for themselves. That’s their only concern. I have zero doubt that Lori would kill any one of us if she felt she could get something out of it and get away with it.

When Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and began making his way around the country, I recognized him immediately. “That’s Lori,” I said to Ruby. “He’s going to do to America what she did to our family.”

And that’s exactly what happened. The lies, the distorted narratives, the persecution cos-playing, the religious devotion schtick, the shamelessness, the brainwashing, the corruption. The ruin. Large parts of America are still with him, co-dependently going along, while everything valuable they have is set on fire, with their permission.

And that’s also what has happened over and over and over in evangelical institutions and cultures, not just in the US, but around the world. And probably in many other religious cultures as well, I am just not as familiar with those. There are smarmy mega-church pastors who are a hairs-breath shy of full blown cult leaders everywhere American evangelicalism has been exported. In America, people like Bill Gothard have spawned movements in which women and girls are routinely subjugated and abused. Others like Joel Osteen have built mansions and bought yachts with the hard-earned dollars of the faithful. There are many more Joel Osteens in Brazil and Nigeria and Singapore and any number of other countries with large evangelical cultures. In Kenya, a supposed Christian leader convinced hundreds of his followers to starve themselves to death last year.

While many American evangelicals have expended great energy to ensure the propagation of “correct” doctrine, here and abroad, it seems they have engaged in little dialogue about correct leadership and accountability, judging from the results anyway. In fact, sociopaths have used and continued to use the obsession with doctrine to their advantage, as a shield to hide behind. Meanwhile, they aggrandize themselves and lay waste to trusting people.

Donald Trump and other sociopathic leaders have done the same in the political realm. All he had to do was get a couple of issues “right” by the majority of the most loyal Republicans (white evangelicals)—abortion, immigration, sexual mores, guns—and he bought the party base at a bargain price.

If only evangelicals would obsess about character and ethics the way they do biblical interpretation and doctrine. The fruits of the spirit are apparently the correct views on abortion, gender roles, sexual morality, and inerrancy.

As usual, I’m picking on American evangelicals, because they are the folks I know best and because, well, as a collective they are causing an awful lot of trouble these days for our democracy. But over and over again, on the individual, community, societal, and global levels, people have repeatedly fallen for the sociopath’s schemes throughout history. And still we never seem to learn.

Why? There are various reasons—poor critical thinking and a massive underestimation of the prevalence of sociopathy being a couple.

But the key reason is that normal humans simply can’t comprehend a person without shame. The rest of us are so extensively wired for it, some of us spend our whole lives trying to get out from under it. If we’re caught in a lie, we stammer or turn red. If we do something wrong, we feel sick to our stomachs. If we hurt someone, we feel guilty. Shame can be overdone, of course; I for one never want to go back to a time when people were shunned for getting a divorce or having an affair or some other such personal screw up.

But some shame is a natural human restraint and a glue for human society. We all count on each other having some, and we all trust that we do. A person like Lori or Donald Trump? Our human brains can’t comprehend that someone would behave in such a way. We lack the imagination to conceive of it. And many of us aren’t aware of the real explanation. So we fall for their excuses. It’s their enemies. It’s their virtuous cause. It’s a corrupt system. It’s their difficult past. It’s Satan and his minions.

I realize the mental health profession has standards and rules (and after various run-ins with “Christian counselors,” I’m a fan of those), but I wish those folks had taken more of a leading role in public life the past several years, particularly at the beginning (it’s probably too late now, as Trump’s victim narrative is well established). Because you don’t need to personally treat a hardcore sociopath like Donald Trump to diagnose him. He’s a walking diagnosis. I mean, when they update the DSM, they should just put his picture a bunch of places, it would clarify things.

But, truly, the American public—and human beings world-wide—desperately need an education on how to recognize a sociopath (or a malignant narcissist—there’s a couple shades of difference but they are quite similar) so we can all steer very far clear, which is the only remedy in dealing with one. George Conway, the husband of Trump co-dependent Kelly Anne, has been the leading voice in this area, maybe because his loved one’s allegiance to a sociopath destroyed their family, much as it did mine. But he’s an attorney, not a mental health practitioner. We need a nationwide PSA campaign by experts on what sociopathy is and how to recognize it.

Certainly, American Christians need this. Churches should have classes on how to recognize it. And American missionaries need to pass this education on right after they give out a Bible. Of course, too many spiritual leaders ARE sociopaths, which complicates things. Because toxic, exploitative, narcissistic leadership is clearly A THING in evangelical Christianity. It may be a thing in more liberal Christianity, but I haven’t see it clearly yet. There seems to be some correlation in the level of hard-core, certain belief and susceptibility to bad leaders. Again, because such belief systems basically hand abusers a How-To guide for manipulating people. Honestly, my liberal pastors can’t even get a decent percentage of our congregation to show up for services on Sunday, much less have them following them off various cliffs. That’s another whole discussion.

I’m no expert, but based on sad experience, here are some signs that you are dealing with a sociopath or a malignant narcissist or someone of that ilk from whom you should get as far away as you can.

1. Constant lying. We all exaggerate sometimes and tell white lies on occasion. But when you see a person who routinely manhandles the truth, Run. Lying is the tip of the iceberg, there’s a Titanic-wrecking mess under there, trust me.

   

2. The need for control. At work, at home, everywhere. Those they are trying to control, they will isolate. Trump has done that for his base. He’s estranged them from family and friends. He’s turned them into an insular subculture. On January 6, he put many of them in jail. Narcissistic evangelical leaders have similarly used a culture of fear about the secular world to put up ever higher walls around evangelical communities (homeschooling being a big one).

3. A long chain of broken relationships. Or no relationships that go back more than a year or two. As I have told mentees at work—when you have 1 or 2 conflicts with people, the problem might be mainly them. When you have 22 conflicts with people, you must ask who is the common denominator. In a democratic society, no one is always the victim, that’s just mathematically impossible.

   

4. Zero interest in other people unless there is something to be gained. Zero empathy either. Bullying behaviors. Abuse. In religious contexts, beware of the altruistic narcissist, who does many good deeds but has not love.

   1. Gaslighting is a common control tactic, but at bottom, it’s a denial of another person’s experience. Bad sign.

5. SHAMELESSNESS. See above. When caught, a sociopath will instead explode, double down, and make YOU the problem. Or they will avoid direct confrontation like the plague.

   1. A decent, normal person is able to APOLOGIZE. A person who can’t apologize or admit fault or failure—RUN.

6. Hiding behind religion or ideology. This is a dead giveaway. All the best dictators do it. People’s belief systems are the easiest thing in the world to manipulate. Child’s play.

   1. Inventing or magnifying enemies OUT THERE is a big part of this. Similarly, an inability to grapple with nuance.

      

7. Rampant consumerism (or altruism). These folks have zero boundaries of any kind. They think they should have every single thing that they want. Houses, cars, countries. Profligate spending, corruption, bending of rules, promiscuous sexual behavior, etc. Rampant altruists are addicted to portraying themselves as good. They have no boundaries in doing what they consider good deeds. They will break rules, disregard reason and practicality, and endanger their own children in pursuit. I’ve seen this so many times on the mission field.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and again, I’m not a mental health expert. I am sure I have more to learn, and we ALL need to learn. Because history has more than one disastrous tangle with a sociopath. Donald Trump has in fact put on a clinic for us. Sadly, too many people have missed the point.

1. I’ve changed all the names in this.

2. This is a common racket in evangelical circles. Lori, like many of these folks, only had an online course certificate rather than a degree or professional licensing.