This is a condensed summary of Dr. Karen Mitchell's thesis on how Psychopaths, Narcissists, Machiavellians, Toxic Leaders, Coercive Controllers - they are all subsets of one overarching Dark Personality Type.
The original paper may be downloaded here.Summary done by Claude.ai
I personally refer to these people as Black Hole NPCs. Evil does exist, in plain sight. The "Dark Personality" is not any particular personality type (i.e. MBTI/Socionics, Enneagram, etc.) but rather a spiritual malevolence which wears a human form (like The Thing).
If you're currently dealing with one or more, some practical advice:
Get to Safety - and No Contact
Block them everywhere, stop all communication, and remove mutual connections if feasible. These individuals thrive on access and emotional supply. Starving them of it is the most effective long-term strategy.
If full No Contact isn’t possible (co-parenting, shared workplace, family, legal reasons), gray rock them - become extremely boring, emotionally flat, and unresponsive. Short, factual, monotone replies. No drama, no personal sharing, no reactions to provocations. They lose interest when you stop being entertaining or useful.
Document everything — dates, incidents, messages, financial moves, threats. Save screenshots, emails, recordings (where legal). Pretend you are documenting paranormal activity, because people inexperienced with Black Hole NPC victimization will have no sense or concept of how malevolent these people will get behind closed doors.
Secure your finances, passwords, devices, and important documents. Build a safety plan (especially if there’s any history of violence, stalking, or threats). Tell trusted people what’s happening. Limit or cut off their access to your personal information, social circles, and support network (they often try to isolate and triangulate).
Personal Recovery
Expect trauma bonding, cognitive dissonance, and possible PTSD-like symptoms — this is normal after prolonged exposure. Get support from a trauma-informed therapist who understands narcissistic/psychopathic abuse. Rebuild your sense of self, boundaries, and reality-testing, and connect with other people who have gone through narcissistic abuse (though beware of Black Hole NPCs who masquarade as victims). Many victims feel they “lost years” and need time to deprogram.
Avoid trying the following
Psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, toxic leadership, and coercive control are not distinct personality types but subsets of a single overarching dark personality (DP). Decades of siloed, fragmented research have produced conflicting models that fail to comprehensively identify these individuals - especially higher-functioning ones operating outside the prison system.
Their approach is like persistence hunting in humans where we cannot run faster than a zebra, but we can run a lot further, follow until the zebra is exhausted and then pounce. They are not just trying to win a battle, but they are also getting pleasure out of it which is a different level. One is doing it to survive, and the other is doing it for fun, for pleasure, that reward.
Experts in their respective fields do not like being questioned about their findings and are rarely swayed by other experts. So, the bad guy continues to win.
Prior research has been hampered by several structural flaws:
SILOED FIELDS
Personality researchers (working on psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) and
behavioural researchers (working on cults, coercive control, toxic leadership, child abuse)
study the same population without talking to each other.
UNREPRESENTATIVE SAMPLES
Most data comes from incarcerated populations or college students, missing the vast majority
of people with dark personality who function normally in society.
SELF-REPORT BIAS
A large portion of existing models rely on self-assessment data, but two-thirds of Mitchell's
expert participants considered DP self-reports inherently unreliable, since manipulation and
deception are core features of the personality.
DIFFERENTIATORS MISTAKEN FOR ATTRIBUTES
Researchers have repeatedly built new conceptualisations around surface differences (e.g.,
impulsivity vs. planning) that are better understood as individual variation, not distinct types.
RESEARCHER INEXPERIENCE
Those who haven't been directly targeted by people of DP tend to produce "sanitised" accounts
that underestimate the depth of malevolence. Practitioners with direct clinical experience
consistently rated the danger level far higher than academic researchers did.
Mitchell collected data from 57 senior expert practitioners - including FBI profilers, forensic psychiatrists, cult specialists, domestic violence professionals, Death Row psychologists, and world-leading academics - representing a cumulative 1,000+ years of direct experience (average 22 years per participant). Methods combined in-depth interviews and the Delphi survey technique (iterative expert consensus-building). This is the first study to bring together participants from forensic and non-forensic contexts, and from personality research and behavioural research fields, simultaneously.
A person is selected because they have the requisite vulnerability. Not everyone can be prey. They need to attend to their predator, not ignore them. A person living a fulfilled life on their own terms is more difficult to prey upon than a person seeking something the predator can pretend to fill.
They seem to seek out victims with high emotional responses which they consider as major weaknesses and therefore more vulnerable to their manipulations.
My belief is victims are a certain type of person, successful in their own right, warm, creative, smart, accomplished, have something the perpetrator wants. I believe vulnerability plays a role, is a key attribute of a targeted victim. Vulnerability might be more closely explained as wishing to be loved, cared for, having been hurt—still healing, damaged. Perhaps targeted victims are hard on themselves to do well, be liked, appear together.
The central output of the thesis is a three-dimensional model with three tiers.
The name breaks down as follows:
All 20 attributes are considered universal across the DP population. How they manifest depends on context, opportunity, intelligence, and impulse control - not on which "type" the person is.
When you are provided with new information, you revise. They do not. You can engage in a long dialogue about all the reasons why they should compromise but they have an unwillingness which is steadfast.
Some people are abusive and harm others, but those with a dark personality are set on total destruction on every level, often physically and/or psychologically. They experience pleasure from making your life as miserable as possible, enjoy your pain created by them and make you question if it is worthwhile continuing as the relentless torture is so intense.
Common behavioural tools used to harm while avoiding exposure:
A drive to have power/control over situations and people is the key attribute of dark personalities. All the other behaviours are secondary to this primary goal.
They find loss of control intolerable and may even kill to prevent it. They are most dangerous to those who are closest to them. Outsiders can be tricked into thinking they are brilliant and someone to be admired and emulated and co-opted into helping them to achieve and maintain their control over their targets.
They will harm or punish you if you challenge their control. For example, the DP created a reward system in which sex with the DP was linked to perceived intimacy by the victim [a pimp in a situation of child prostitution].
They keep themselves ingrained in their victim’s life through extremely complex manoeuvring of other people, of circumstances, of facts such that the other person is eventually ‘destroyed’ professionally, reputationally, socially, and/or financially. It is a web of control and destruction which often involves many characters and situations. It can extend for years.
DP engage in an extensive array of strategies to ensure they control their environment including sacking people; creating what I would call ‘big lies’ to undermine people who get in their way or who may expose them or who they don’t like or who they just decide to pick on; cultivating a network of supporters who will stick up for them regardless and who have a particularly positive view of the DP from the way the DP has groomed them or is getting something out of supporting the DP; by withholding information.
These are individual variations that explain surface differences between DP "types" but do not indicate separate personalities. They are why researchers have mistakenly created multiple competing conceptualisations.
I think there is a level of sadism, but my observation is that by engaging in sadistic behaviour the perpetrator sees the pain of the victim and gains a sense of power from the pain inflicted. For example, the nuns who physically abused children in their care saw the pain of the child in the child’s face or upon hearing their cries and this reinforced their sense of power. Many survivors of child physical abuse comment on not wanting to give the abuser pleasure or satisfaction by showing an expression of pain.
They, basically, are out on a quest to either meet their own needs in some kind of perverted way, or to harm others intentionally, and for their own satisfaction and gain and pleasure. The other element of it is the pleasure they get out of the power that they derive from the manipulation and the harm they cause.
They have a cold-blooded sense of entitlement by which the world is a chess board, and all the participants are but parts to be moved around and utilised by the DP with no sense of the impact on them. Other people exist as objects and have little or no value in themselves.
It’s basically an extreme version of arrogance because they regard themselves as superior and the rest of the world as second, maybe a God syndrome.
The perpetrator shows clear enjoyment of causing harm to multiple others yet poses as a heroic "Jedi Knight" type and justifies his actions in the guise of "fighting evil." His entire public personality is a construct, and he utilises aliases to do harm and hide his wrongdoing.
- Target/Victim Selection
- Engagement (Love Bombing)
- Weakening
- Isolation
- Trapping and Destruction
Victim selection is not random. All non-forensic expert practitioners in the study said DP individuals identify and pursue targets deliberately, and 75% of all participants agreed. The remaining 25% said it was mostly targeted with occasional opportunism — no one said it was purely random.
What they look for in a target:
They read people quickly. If they sense a person might see through them, they move on to someone else.
Once a target is selected, the DP initiates contact with behaviours designed to make the target believe the DP is entirely "for them." This is commonly called love bombing in the literature and in practitioner accounts.
This includes:
During this phase, the DP is also building their credibility with the target's wider social network — family, friends, colleagues.
Once the target is fully "engaged," the DP begins undermining them. This is done slowly, often so subtly the target cannot identify it as a pattern. Methods include:
The process is cumulative and slow. By the time the target recognises serious psychological harm, their capacity to escape or function independently has already been significantly eroded.
The thesis draws an explicit analogy to animal predation: just as predators in the wild isolate their prey from the herd, DP individuals systematically separate their targets from every source of support. This is both instinctual and strategic — they know they need isolation to maintain control.
Isolation tactics include:
Even family members of the target are often successfully groomed by the DP and end up siding against the target, reinforcing isolation.
With the target weakened and isolated, the DP moves to trap them — physically, emotionally, financially, and psychologically — in a state where escape is extremely difficult. Forms of destruction reported by practitioners include:
Two research participants in the study who had been targeted by DP individuals were diagnosed with cancer and died during the course of the research. An oncologist participant noted that extreme, prolonged stress from DP targeting appeared, in his experience, to precipitate serious disease.
"Their pathological, hot anger is something that you feel, a visceral feeling that you know is there, so when I started to sense that in my current job I took myself off the electoral role and I changed my social media settings and I tried to disappear publicly because I felt these people are dangerous and could definitely harm me, even though there was no threat to do that."
HIGHER-FUNCTIONING DP IS EQUALLY DANGEROUS
Those outside prison are more intelligent, have better impulse control, more convincing
facades, and cause harm through subtle, accumulative methods ("death by a thousand cuts")
that leave no evidence and are nearly impossible for victims to convey credibly to others.
PRACTITIONERS EXPERIENCE GENUINE FEAR; RESEARCHERS OFTEN DON'T
The "calculated ferocity" of DP only becomes visible in the relational dynamic between
predator and target - something most researchers never observe directly. This experiential
gap is a structural problem in the field and likely explains why academic accounts tend to
understate the danger.
VICTIMS ARE THE MOST KNOWLEDGEABLE SOURCE
56% of participants ranked speaking with targets/victims as the best way to understand DP,
above interviewing the DP themselves or reviewing academic literature. Victims' accounts are
routinely disbelieved precisely because the behaviours are so calculated and the perpetrator's
facade so compelling.
PEOPLE OF DP ARE DRAWN TO POSITIONS OF TRUST AND POWER
Medicine, law, religion, teaching, domestic violence services, and similar professions provide
ideal cover and access to vulnerable targets.
NORMAL PERSONALITY CONTINUUMS FAIL TO CAPTURE DP
The majority of expert practitioners - versus academic researchers - held that you either are
or aren't a person of DP. Normal personality scales miss the specific, subtle, and deeply
malevolent features that define this population. The malevolence is not on a spectrum; it is
categorical.
SELF-REPORT DATA IS COMPROMISED BY DESIGN
People of DP lie even when they don't need to, because manipulation appeals to their need
for control. This has substantial implications for the accuracy of existing models and assessment
tools, many of which were built from self-report data.
The PPP model is proposed as the most comprehensive unified framework yet developed for identifying adults who actively violate social norms and harm others by conscious choice.
The impact on victims of people of DP is profoundly damaging and life threatening, even in those who are the victims/targets of those of higher functioning DP. Adults and children can both experience suicidal ideation as well as suicide attempts, in the context of depression and anxiety and they can also start self-harm behaviours including disordered eating issues, drug and alcohol dependence and cutting. These behaviours emerge to cope with the immense overwhelm and despair they are experiencing.
There are times adult victims feel they are going to go ‘crazy’, and they feel so trapped and stuck like there is no way out of ‘this hell’ except to die. Even once an adult partner has escaped a marriage the behaviour of the DP continues toward them because they share children and sometimes custody access. There is no escape even post separation. The torture continues and the family court system cannot help the victims once final orders are made. Victims often do not know who to turn to for validation and support. Victims do not feel believed and start to despair at the isolation of their experience. Adults can sometimes cease to be able to work or quit their jobs. Children struggle to attend school and engage in meaningful peer relationships. Some children develop extreme behaviours such as conversion disorders (pseudo fainting) as a way of managing overwhelm. Interpersonal relationships become strained and ruptured between the non-toxic parent (victim) and their children which creates an added layer of despair for the victim which can become unbearable. Honestly, I am surprised that the victims I have worked with are still alive.
It’s probably one of the most readily apparent differentiators in my experience from other forms of extreme maladaptive coping or personality issues. For example, I’ve met people who were nasty, who have said hurtful things, who have caused me grief.
But often when I sit and reflect on how I felt during the interaction, the transference I received, and what I know of them as a person, it doesn’t feel "nasty," for lack of a better word, but rather like receiving an intense emotional state of calculated ferocity, rather than uncontrolled pain and anguish.
Mitchell calls for:
The thesis's central claim: humanity's ability to protect itself from predatory personalities depends on having an accurate, nuanced, and unified model - which no single existing framework currently provides.