 My name is Sam Bartley, and I'm the author of Malignan Selflab, Narcissism Revisited. Psychopathic bullies and abusers regard themselves as artists. Their bullying is a form of perfected art, an art form, and their abuse, the epitome of craftsmanship. These people are proud of their achievements and happily recount instances of pain and hurt inflicted by them on their victims. There is a glint in the psychopathic Narcissist's eye when he describes the helplessness of his targets, their doomed attempts to explicate themselves, the traps he sets at every turn, the fear that he inspires in his prey as his prey succumbs. In the psychopath's palette there are several primary colors. There is of course overt abuse, this is the open and explicit abuse of another person, threatening, coercing, beating, lying, berating, demeaning, chastising, insulting, humiliating, exploiting, ignoring, silent treatment, devaluing, unceremoniously discarding, verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, all these are forms of overt, open abuse. But there is of course covert abuse, controlling abuse. Abuse generally is almost entirely about control, it is often a primitive and immature reaction to life circumstances in which the abuser, usually in his childhood, was rendered helpless. Abuse is about re-exerting and re-asserting one's identity, re-establishing predictability, mastering the environment, human and physical. The bulk of abusive behaviors can be traced to this panicky reaction to the remote potential for loss of control. Many abusers are hypochondriacs and difficult patients, because they are afraid to lose control over the body, its looks and its proper functioning. They are obsessive compulsive in an effort to subdue their physical habitat and render it foreseeable. They stalk people and harass them as means of being in touch, another form of control. To their abuser, nothing exists outside himself. Meaningful others are mere extensions, internal, assimilated objects, not external ones. So losing control over a significant other is equivalent to losing control over a limb, or one's brain. It's terrifying. Independent or disobedient people evoke in the abuser the realization that something is wrong with his worldview, that he is not the center of the world or its cause, primary mover, and that he cannot control what to him are his mere internal representations. So he sees people as internal objects, as part of himself, and then when he cannot control them, he feels that he is losing self-control. To the abuser, losing control means going insane, because other people are mere elements in the abuser's mind. Being unable to manipulate him literally means losing his mind. Imagine if you suddenly were to find out that you cannot manipulate your memories or control your thoughts. It's like marriage, and that's how the abuser feels more so than time. In his frantic efforts to maintain control or reassert it, the abuser resorts to a myriad of fiendishly inventive strategies and mechanisms. And here is a partial list of what I call his primary colors. Start with intermittent reinforcement, unpredictability and uncertainty, ups and downs of adrenaline. The abuser acts unpredictably, capriciously, inconsistently, arbitrarily and irrationally. And this serves to render other people dependent upon the next twist and turn of the abuser, his next inexplicable whim, his next outburst, denial, smile, temper tantrum. The abuser makes sure that he is the only reliable element in the lives of his nearest and nearest by shattering the rest of the world through his seemingly insane behavior. He perpetuates his stable presence in their lives by destabilizing their own lives. He does that mainly by using disproportionate reactions. One of the favorite tools of manipulation in the abuser's arsenal is the disproportionality of his reaction. He reacts with supreme rage to the slightest slight, or he would punish severely for what he pursues to be an offense against him no matter how minor, or he would throw a temper tantrum over any discord or disagreement, however gently and considerably expressed, or he would act in ordinarily attentive, charming and tempting, even over-sexed if need be. This ever-shifting code of conduct, and the unusually harsh and arbitrarily applied penalties, these constant changes in the rules of the game that the victim thinks he's playing. All these are premeditated. The victims are kept in the dark. They are kept of balance, neediness and dependence on the source of justice, immediate and judgment-past, or the abuser are, this way, guaranteed. But the abuser doesn't treat his victims as full-fledged human beings. He dehumanizes them, the objectifies them. People have a need to believe in the empathic skills and basic good-heartedness of others. By dehumanizing and objectifying people, the abuser attacks the very foundations of human interaction. This is the alien aspect of abusers. They may be excellent limitations of fully-formed adults, but they are emotionally absent and immature, almost as infants. Abuse is so horrid, so repulsive, so phantasmagoric that people recoil in terror. It is then, when they take a step back, when they are horrified, that with their defenses absolutely down, it is then that they are at the most susceptible and vulnerable point. The abuser's control is at its maximum exactly when the victim's psychological state is at its worst. Psychological, verbal, and sexual abuse are all forms of dehumanization and objectification, treating other people as objects. Abuser's abuse information, from the first moments of an encounter with another person, the abuser is on the prowl, he spies, he collects information. The more he knows about his potential victim, the better able he is, the abuser, to coerce, manipulate, charm, extort, or convert the victim to the cause. The abuser does not hesitate to misuse the information that he gleaned, regardless of its intimate nature or the circumstances in which he had obtained it. This is a powerful tool in his armory, in an important color in his palace as an artist of pain. The abuser engineers impossible, dangerous, unpredictable, unprecedented, or highly specific situations in which he is solely needed. The abuser makes sure that his knowledge, his skills, his connections, or his traits are the only ones applicable and the most useful in the situations that he himself had wrote. The abuser generates his own indispensability in the victim's lives. If all else fates, the abuser recruits friends, colleagues, mates, family members, the authorities, institutions, neighbors, the media, teachers, in short, third parties to do his bidding, and this is called control and abuse by proxy. He uses these people to cajole, coerce, threaten, stalk, offer, retreat, tempt, convince, seduce, harass, communicate, and otherwise manipulate his target. He controls these unaware instruments exactly as he plans to control his ultimate prey. He employs the same mechanisms and devices, and he dumps his props unceremoniously when the job is done. Another form of control by proxy is to engineer situations in which abuse is inflicted upon another person. Such carefully orchestrated and crafted scenarios of embarrassment and humiliation provoke social sanctions, condemnation, problem, even physical punishment against the victim. Society or a social group become the instruments of the abuser against his prey. And then there is, of course, the famous gaslighting and the intermuse. This is the fostering, propagation, and enhancement of an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, instability, unpredictability, and irritation. There are no acts of traceable, explicit abuse. There are no wounds, marks on the body, something that can be used as evidence in the court of law. There are no manipulative settings of control. There's nothing there. Yet the irksome feeling remains kind of a disagreeable foreboding, premonition, a bed omen, an ill atmosphere, nearsome. And this is what is sometimes called gaslighting. In the long term, such a sick environment erodes the victim's sense of self-worth and self-esteem. Self-confidence is shaken badly. Often the victim adopts a paranoid or schizoid stance, and thus renders herself exposed even more to criticism and judgment by society. The rules are thus reversed. The victim is considered mentally deranged, the abuser, the suffering soul. What did I tell you? Psychopaths are artists. Artists of pain.