Dark People

Psychopaths, Narcissists and Labels that Don't Help

Harm is not best understood by labels.

Harm is better understood as patterns of behavior that sin requires in order to function.

Click for the Karen Mitchell’s full thesis.

Some people regulate themselves internally. Others regulate themselves by controlling, diminishing, or dominating others. For the latter, regulation is not achieved through conscience or restraint, but through the subordination of someone else.

When that form of external regulation becomes chronic, camouflaged, and morally justified, there are many ways to explain what may be happening inside the aggressor. Scripture collapses those explanations into a simpler truth: sin is one machine in many skins. Partiality wears many masks.

Accusation does not require cruelty. It does not require planning. It does not require criminality. It requires only that another person’s autonomy be broken or absorbed into the assaulting story. That story is not incidental. It is the structure that allows the aggressor to remain regulated. It is the means by which they survive.

Harm does not require intent.

Dominance can be justified as care. Tyranny can present as moral certainty. Abuse can be enacted through claims of victimhood. Because these systems do not announce themselves as violent, institutions, workplaces, churches and even families are often unaware of what they are hosting. This is why the naive and loyal are so easily recruited without conscious consent.

The problem is not that unrepentant sinners are all evil monsters. It is that human beings possess a capacity to organize their personalities around the persistent projection of fear, power, control, and relational domination. When this structure is in place, the behavior that follows is both destructive to healthy relationships and, over time, remarkably predictable. The damage is not done only by overt predators. All too commonly—and more difficult to name—is the quiet killer of coercive control.

Cults of Attribution

Attributes describe what a system requires in order to remain stable. Tactics describe how that requirement is met in the real world. The distinction is the difference between an engine and its tools.

An attribute answers a single governing question: what must be true in the environment for this person to feel regulated, safe, or intact? If the attribute is a need for dominance, then the environment must contain subordination. If the attribute is entitlement, then others’ boundaries must be overrun. If the attribute is callousness, a lack of empathy, then harm to the other does not register as an emotional brake.

Attributes are not chosen in the moment. They are structural. Surface morality, stated values, and even vocalized intentions are unreliable indicators. Attributes operate below conscience. The liar does not experience herself as lying.

Tactics, by contrast, are flexible. They are situational, culturally shaped, and opportunistic. This is where popular psychology tends to fixate: gaslighting, triangulation, narcissism. This is also where victim posturing, charm, character assassination, intimidation, withdrawal, and surveillance appear.

Crucially, the same attribute can produce different tactics, and the same tactic can arise from different attributes. This is why tactic-based diagnosis so often fails to bring healing and is easily hijacked by the cultural moment to enable the very behaviors the terminology is meant to expose.

A person may lack sadistic intent and still enact persistent, high-impact harm, because harm is not the objective. Survival is. The attribute—the felt requirement—demands regulation. Harm is simply the cost of achieving it.

Patterns not Incidents

Motive is irrelevant. What matters is what persists. What matters is what is demanded, what is required, and what is produced over time. When an attribute such as entitlement, callousness, or dominance is present, any number of tactics will surface so long as they meet the underlying emotional need. When one tactic fails, the sin does not repent. It adapts.

This is Mitchell’s quiet, devastating implication. You cannot negotiate with an attribute. You can only refuse to feed it. In genuinely hostile environments, that refusal takes a concrete form: mark and avoid.

Mitchell therefore organizes tactics into functional groups rather than exhaustive lists, which is both accurate and useful:

Psychological Weaponry

The goal is not persuasion. The objective is disorientation, because disorientation restores dominance. Reason is not the weapon; confusion is, introduced by induction, expressed doubt and continual questioning. Facts do not matter. What matters is destabilization through the assertion of reality.

Resolution is impossible because contradiction itself becomes power. Emotion is weaponized, swinging from flooding to withdrawal, not because it feels good, but because it works.

Moral and Victim Framing

High-functioning coercive controllers frequently present themselves as misunderstood or wronged.

Human empathy is a powerful accelerant in deception, and it is routinely exploited. When a person appears morally concerned and principled, when the bid for control is framed as care, dominance is free to masquerade as virtue so long as there is an audience willing to receive it.

Relationship Engineering

Together, these dynamics transform relationships into environments of control. Over time the effects become somatic and field-resonant, a habitation of spirit rather than a series of isolated incidents. Far from the caricature of overt abuse, what appears as good will instead produces an incremental erosion of autonomy.

Shifting goalposts are difficult to see on a cloudy day. Conditional affection is more addictive than most drugs. Loyalty tests summon the steadfast as proof of devotion. Isolation, whether subtle or overt, gradually breaks even the strongest men.

Recruitment and Social Shielding

Resistance to coercive control raises the stakes and often draws forth escalation. The most potent response is defensive expansion: recruiting allies, pre-seeding narratives, and invoking authority figures.

The triangulation of only a few people can sustain deception for years. When institutions are successfully leveraged, the true scale of the cult’s power becomes visible.

It is important to remember that this is not always a conscious strategy. It is a learned, sinful pattern of regulation, reinforced precisely because it works.

Adaptability and Impact

Tactics shift by domain.

This is why outsiders often miss the pattern: they encounter only one mask. The split is not in personality, but in revelation. Control is not enacted in the same way within intimate relationships as it is in the workplace or the church. What appears winsome and charitable in a leadership context can be the very same dynamic that is quietly enshrining the destruction of a spouse at home.

Coercive control is a blunt weapon, but its effects are unmistakable. Chronic self-doubt, memory confusion, identity erosion, somatic hypervigilance, and deeply ingrained worlds of self-shame are not anomalies; they are outcomes.

This inversive wounding produces a double bind. The actual victim begins to present as unstable, while the dominant person acquires the calm credibility of superior composure. “See, they are crazy,” starts to look and sound reasonable.

Who would ever doubt it? Even the victim is convinced to play along.

The Solution

The persistence of sinful behavior across psychological categories is explained by the presence of survival needs operating as attributes. Labeling tactics may account for surface variation, but it offers neither healing nor reliable diagnosis. Harm—and its severity—is not determined by overt aggression, but by high-functioning, covert control.

Traditional assessment often misses the destructive power of dominance because nothing occurring is obviously criminal. Systemic, persistent coercion can present as kindness, while the accumulating wounds of abuse are misread as emerging pathologies in the victim.

Mitchell’s work is therefore especially useful for psychologists, pastors and Christians alike. A needy church is a sitting duck, vulnerable to weaponization by a personality whose stability depends on persistent external regulation through control, dominance, and relational subordination.

Such “sinners”—individuals who are not overtly antisocial but are socially camouflaged—do not operate with the same internal regulation as the emotionally mature. They may quote orthodoxy, follow the rubrics, and smile warmly at the weak. Yet their need for control is impulsive rather than strategic. Their cruelty is not self-aware but reactive. Their unifying pathology is not intent, but survival. Those they harm must yield, must be dominated, must be wronged, in order for the aggressor’s self-perception to remain intact.

According to Mitchell, when this pattern is present, harm is inevitable, insight is insufficient, and disengagement is the only effective form of protection.

We all know it. Leaving a cult is not failure. The challenge for the modern Christian is to learn to spot the pattern.