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surrounded by
psychopaths

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Also by Thomas Erikson
Surrounded by Idiots

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surrounded by
psychopaths
Or, How to Stop Being
Exploited by Others

thomas erikson

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1

Vermilion, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Vermilion is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © Thomas Erikson 2017, 2020

English translation by Rod Bradbury

Thomas Erikson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this
Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in Sweden as Omgiven av psykopater by Forum in 2017

First published in the United States by St Martin’s Press, part of
Macmillan Publishing Group LLC, in 2020
First published in the United Kingdom by Vermilion in 2020

www.penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781785043321

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable

future for our business, our readers and our planet.
This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council®
certified paper.

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Contents

Introduction 1

1. What Actually Is a Psychopath? 19

2. Protecting Yourself: A Basic Defense Against Psychopaths 33
3. Who Are the Psychopaths? 44
4. Surrounded by Idiots? This Is How You Get Rid of Them 53
5. Manipulation Is Everywhere 84
6. What Manipulation Looks Like 94
7. The Dominant Red Psychopath 115
8. The Charming Yellow Psychopath 122
9. The Passive Green Psychopath 128
10. The Meticulous Blue Psychopath 133
11. How a Psychopath Manipulates a Red Person 138
12. How a Psychopath Manipulates a Yellow Person 149
13. How a Psychopath Manipulates a Green Person 158

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viii ContEnts

14. How a Psychopath Manipulates a Blue Person 166

15. Common Manipulation Techniques 175
16. Everyday Manipulation and How to Handle It 213
17. What If Nothing Works? 234

Postscript: Some Words to Help You on Your Way 243

Resources 247
Index 249

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Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.
—Warsan Shire

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Surrounded
by Psychopaths

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Introduction
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.
—John Lennon

Imagine that an extremely attractive person of the sex you prefer sits
down opposite you and exclaims with a smile: “You are the most fan-
tastic person I’ve ever met!” You immediately sense that this is for
real, that the person is sincere. They ask questions and want to know
everything about you. They don’t talk about themselves, and they
look at you as if you were the only person in the room. Their atten-
tion leaves you glowing, lit up in a way you’ve never felt before.
This other person says the kinds of things you’ve waited a lifetime
to hear. They somehow understand precisely who you are, the inner
quirks of your personality, your every like and dislike. You feel as
if you have finally found your soul mate. Through some magic, this
person has gotten straight to your heart in a way you have never felt
before.
Can you see it in your mind’s eye? Can you imagine the feeling? It
would be fantastic, right?
And now the question: Can you look yourself in a mirror and
honestly say that this wouldn’t affect you? That you aren’t sus-
ceptible to the lure of romantic nonsense and that you would im-
mediately become suspicious and realize that this person wants
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something completely different? If not your body, then probably

your money.
Think a moment before you answer. Because if you’ve never been
in such a situation, then you’ll never see the danger. This person is
going to tell you their secrets, and they are going to get you to reveal
yours. You will answer all their probing questions, the sole purpose
of which is to find out as much as possible about you.
A few years ago, I wrote a book called Surrounded by Idiots. The
book was about the basics of the DISC language, one of the most
powerful methods in the world to describe human communication
and the differences in human behavior patterns. The book was a
success, which I hadn’t really expected. I believe part of the rea-
son for its success is that a lot of people are, like me, fascinated by
human behavior—the behavior of others and, above all, their own.
And I might as well admit it: ME, I’m an interesting person! At least
to myself.
The behavior categories I use, in that first book as well as in this
one, are based on William Moulton Marston’s theories and consist of
four main types of people, each of which is associated with a color:
Red for dominance, Yellow for influence, Green for stability, and
Blue for compliance. The following chapters provide an overview of
what the colors mean in practice. These categories are a tool that can
help answer many (but not all) of our questions about how people
function.
People are too complex to be described completely, but the more
you understand, the easier it is to identify the outliers. This method of
behavior categorization encompasses perhaps 80 percent of the entire
puzzle. Quite a lot, but far from everything. There are always other
elements that we need to take into consideration to understand some-
one’s behavior: gender, age, cultural differences, motivation, intelli-
gence, interests, experiences of every sort, birth order, and countless

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other factors. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that the puzzle has
an awful lot of pieces.

Now for the Prob lem

As the book became more and more popular around the world, there
were some people who chose to use the DISC system in a malicious
way. This was never my intention. In this book, I want to make you
aware of such individuals, of people who would try to manipulate
you, and to give you the tools to protect yourself. I’m often asked
if an individual can have all the colors—be a little bit Red, Yellow,
Green, and Blue. “I’m a bit of each color,” readers have written to
me in emails. “Is that possible?” It can certainly feel possible. I act
Red sometimes, Yellow and Green often, but on other occasions I am
undoubtedly Blue. The reason why this is possible is actually quite
simple: We all have the ability to use whichever type of behavior we
want, thanks to the fact that we are intelligent beings who can think
for ourselves. As their self-awareness increases, a Yellow person will
learn that it’s time to close their mouth and open their ears. And a
Green person can learn to express their heartfelt opinion even if that
might lead to conflict. But the bottom line is that normally two colors
dominate a person’s behavior.

An Unpleasant Experience

Approximately one year after Surrounded by Idiots was published, I

had a strange encounter. A young man came up to me after a lecture
I had given at a university. He stood right in front of me, face to face,
more or less pushing aside others who also wanted to ask questions.
With an intense gaze, he said that he didn’t recognize himself in any
of the colors. I asked him what he meant by that, and he said that

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none of the behaviors I had described fitted him. He thought he was

a fifth color. He also wanted to know more about how to best interact
with the other colors, but his choice of words was interesting: He told
me he wanted to know “how to take advantage of this knowledge.”
Okay.
I gave him a standard answer since I didn’t have time to start ana-
lyzing him then and there, and when he realized that he wasn’t going
to get anywhere with his questions, he stepped aside. But he didn’t
leave; instead, he remained standing a few yards away, observing me
the whole time until I packed up all my things.
“Observed” is not quite the right word. In fact, he stared at me in
an almost embarrassing way for perhaps ten minutes. I saw people
come up to him, say hello, and smile. And every time he smiled back.
But he wasn’t really smiling at all. He pretended to smile. His face was
distorted into a weird, strange grimace, a sort of imitation of a smile.
Some of the people he smiled at noticed and reacted with a question-
ing look, while others didn’t seem to think there was anything out of
the ordinary. And after every “smile,” he went back to his serious,
concentrated staring. At me. It was decidedly uncomfortable.
And what did he mean by “take advantage” of the DISC system?
It struck me that the young man was right about one thing: the
DISC language doesn’t apply to everybody. A part of the population
can’t be categorized. We should be very careful of such unpleasant,
maybe even dangerous, types of people. We’ve all heard the stories
of the master manipulators, the con men, the imposters. How could he
trick me so totally? their victims wonder. Why didn’t I see that he was
a con man?
The reason? Because these individuals know how they can use
your own behavior against you. They have an instinctive under-
standing of how to manipulate a person to do virtually anything.
And they can con virtually anybody using what they learn about

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them. Their purpose is always the same: to get what they want. They
leave behind a trail of chaos and disorder.
The question is this: If a person doesn’t have a personality of their
own, but simply mirrors whomever is in front of them, who is that
person? They are not Red or Yellow, and definitely not Green or Blue.
Are they all the colors? A fifth color? The answer is none of these.
They are something much worse, something that cannot be catego-
rized in the way we categorize normal people. They are people who
don’t have a personality of their own; instead, they mimic whatever
they see for their own gain. They are a type of chameleon with a hid-
den agenda that only they know of. And we can be certain that this
agenda only ever benefits them.
Instead of identifying these people as a fifth color or a combina-
tion of all the colors, I define them as having no color at all. Because a
person who doesn’t really have a genuine personality, who is always
at least partially acting, is not a real person. They are more a shadow,
a reflection of reality but not properly real. They are a sort of walk-
ing fraud on two legs. If you have met this type of individual, you’ll
know what I’m talking about.
But who are they, these people? What sort of people try to mimic
what other people do? And what can their goal be?

Pretending to Be Like Every body Else

To put it plainly: they are predators in human form. Does that sound
dramatic? The reason for that is very simple: it is dramatic! These in-
dividuals end up harming most people they come into contact with,
and often the victims don’t even know who is responsible for the
disarray.
That, dear reader, is what psychopaths do.

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Luckily, they’re all locked up in jail. Right?

Psychopaths are living in society just like the rest of us. They in-
filtrate companies and organizations, where they get comparatively
little work done and only in exceptional cases do they make any posi-
tive contributions. They rarely offer to get the bill at the restaurant,
and they never have any money when household expenses have to be
paid. They are often unfaithful, manipulative, and duplicitous. They
are notorious liars; most of them lie when there isn’t even any reason
to do so. They can fool anyone into believing them, and they turn
everything you say against you. But they are often extremely popu-
lar. A lot of people like them, place them on a pedestal, and even re-
spect them.
How is this possible? you might well ask yourself. Good question.
How could we like a person who is so duplicitous? Not me, you’re
thinking to yourself, I would hate them from the very start. Exactly.
If you knew their real self, you would hate them. But you wouldn’t
know. Because they wouldn’t allow it to show. With a bit of luck, you
might eventually discover it. In the best case, you’d realize who they
were before things are desperate, when you’ve lost your job, and you
are cut off from all the people you once called your friends.
But hang on a moment, you might be thinking. Psychopaths are
serial murderers and violent criminals. Most of these maniacs are obvi­
ously in prison.
If only that was the case! It is true that a lot of them are behind
bars since they have not been able to control their impulses. They
are violent and sometimes crazy, to put it plainly. When they see
something they want, they simply take it, often with violence, which
quickly gives them away. But the majority of all psychopaths are
not behind bars. The more intelligent psychopaths and those who
don’t commit serious violent crimes are walking around among us
just like everybody else. They are people who will stop at nothing
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to get what they want. And you have certainly come across some of
them.
But are we really surrounded by them?
The title Surrounded by Psychopaths was chosen with care, since
there are far more psychopaths than I think most people are aware
of. I want to show you how to recognize a master manipulator and to
protect yourself, should you come across one.

What Are the Consequences?

The strange behavior of the young man at the lecture troubled me

for several months. Those staring eyes, the artificial smile. It was all
so weird. What happened to him? I got the answer on a subsequent
trip when I returned to the university. I sought out the chair of the
department where I had lectured and asked about the young man.
Who was he? Did the department head know anything about him?
The answer I got was horrific.
The young man was an employee who had been caught embezzling
almost one hundred thousand dollars from the university before he
was reported to the police by the department head. But by then he
had gotten two women in the department pregnant. He managed to
get one of them dismissed for sexual harassment (against him!), and
the other woman tried to commit suicide after the affair was revealed
(she had been married many years). Two postgraduate members of
staff were on sick leave with chronic fatigue syndrome, after the
young man had spread gossip and created chaos among the staff. The
head of the department had resigned, and everything was in turmoil.
Nobody knew what they should do, their research had been forgot-
ten, and the department was falling apart.
But the young man had learned to smile. He had learned how to
give the impression of being a nice, likable guy. He got away with
it for two years before he was kicked out. Nobody suspected him.
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He had an explanation for everything. And it was always somebody

else’s fault.
With a trembling voice, the department head told me that the
young man had been let free after convincing the police as well
as the prosecutor that he had embezzled the money at the sugges­
tion of the department head. And the department head—with thirty-
eight years at the university—had almost been prosecuted himself.
Of course, the money was gone, and the evidence was so vague that
nothing could be done to convict the real swindler. I asked what had
happened to the young man. The department head told me that he
had just gotten a new job at an IT company. He was now in charge of
a project involving a large investment and was going to lead the com-
pany to new heights.
And so I learned that the young man at my lecture had indeed
learned “how to take advantage of the DISC system.”
When the department head had finished his story, tears were
running down his cheeks. It was terrible to see.
If I’d had the chance, I would have analyzed this young man.
What would the analysis show? To be honest, I don’t know.
The most frightening thing is that he is still out there. And if you
bump into him or someone like him, it’s critical that you know how to
react. Because if he can sniff out your weaknesses, he will press all the
buttons he can to destroy you. Not because he hates you or because he
has some personal motivation. But because that is what psychopaths
do. They take what they want from you. Using any means whatsoever.
The consequences don’t matter.
They seduce and deceive. They lie and manipulate. They are
thieves and parasites. And they get their energy from destroying
other people. That is their primary fuel.
Exaggerated? Not at all. After you read this book, you might
find it difficult to sleep at night. If that happens, I apologize in ad-
vance.
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I am going to explain how to recognize a psychopath, how to rec-

ognize people with psychopathic traits, and most importantly I will
show you what you can do about psychopaths.

Another Book About Psychopaths?

After Surrounded by Idiots was published, I gave lectures throughout

Europe on the DISC system. The book put focus on certain things I
had always taken for granted. People are different. Obviously. We
already knew that. But how different, and in what way? And, above
all, how do you deal with those differences?
The color-based DISC language that William Moulton Marston
laid the foundations for explains quite a lot about how people func-
tion. But, as I mentioned earlier, it does not explain everything.
Marston was one of the first well-known psychologists who car-
ried out research on healthy people. Both Jung and Freud primarily
devoted themselves to the mentally ill. Can you fit everybody into
the DISC system? No, actually you can’t. It only works with neuro-
typical persons—the type of people Marston studied. If you have
some sort of diagnosis such as borderline personality disorder, severe
autism, schizophrenia, or the like—or psychopathy—it simply does
not work.

How Many Psychopaths Are There Really?

But hold on there, you might say. Psychopaths are so rare that they’re
hardly worth worrying about. They can’t be more than 0.1 (or even 0.2
or 0.3) percent of the population. I can understand why you would
think that. But there are more psychopaths than you imagine. Ac-
cording to the latest scientific findings, they comprise between 2 and
4 percent of the population. That is a significant number of people. As
a point of comparison, I devoted quite a lot of pages in my previous
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book to people that are completely Red in their behavior, and they
only comprise about 0.5 percent of the population.
Just think about it: if you were a shepherd with one thousand
sheep and you heard that there were two wolves in the vicinity, what
would you want to know more about? The sheep . . . or the wolves?
Of course you would want to keep track of the wolves. Even though
there aren’t that many, and even if they aren’t going to kill all the
sheep they come across, it’s a good idea to understand how a wolf
thinks and to know one when you see it. Because once it has decided
to attack, it’s already too late. Then it will take whatever it wants.
When it comes to psychopaths, we’re concerned about not only their
primary victims but also the effect they have on their surroundings.
An enormous number of people are affected by psychopaths’ behav-
ior, because the impact is vast. The damage they cause has far-reaching
consequences. They always drag many people down with them.
This book is about how you can protect yourself from this behav-
ior. As my starting point, I will use Marston’s system with the four
colors to show how the strengths and weaknesses of different behav-
ior types play into the hands of an evil-minded psychopath. They
will turn your weaknesses against you. That is one of the reasons
why therapy does not work for psychopaths. They cannot be healed.
If you haven’t read Surrounded by Idiots, I will explain some of the
science behind the four-color system in the coming pages so you will
have a better grasp of the terminology in the book and the reasoning
behind the examples. If you’ve already read my previous book and
think you already know the system 100 percent, be patient. Remem-
ber repetition is the key to knowledge.

The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself,
when it can be used, is the best lie.
— Isaac Asimov

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An Example of Psychopathy

My first example of everyday psychopathy is one I experienced my-

self. I have written several novels in addition to nonfiction, and after
my first thriller had been published a young woman who wanted to
be a writer contacted me via email. She had read my book and thought
it was fantastic and asked if I could help with her own writing. My
interactions with readers are simple. I really do appreciate all the mes-
sages from people who have read my books, and I encourage you to
share your opinion of this book with me. I’d love to hear from you.
But I don’t normally respond with more than one message. I don’t start
long dialogues, for the simple reason that I don’t wish to work 24/7. I
responded to her with a sort of standard answer and didn’t think any
more about it. But this woman continued to email me again and again,
her tone becoming more aggressive when I didn’t reply.
Some time later, my then-partner received an email from the same
young woman—now using another name—which claimed that she
was in a relationship with me and that we were going to get married.
Both my partner and I were flabbergasted. In addition, the email con-
tained a long list of nasty accusations against me. For example, the
young woman claimed that I had had relationships with almost one
hundred women and had gotten at least twenty of them pregnant.
All within a few months. (This eventually led to my reporting her to
the police.) There was far more of this craziness, but I can’t describe
everything. In all, my partner received about fifty emails with vary-
ing content, but all on the same theme.
While this was going on, I was also receiving deeply romantic
emails from the same young woman. She missed me so very much.
She longed to see me again. Shouldn’t we go and have a look at that
apartment in the center of Stockholm together? From my Facebook
profile, which at the time was completely public, she had gathered

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a large amount of information about me and my private life, which

meant that some of things she wrote sounded quite credible. (Be
warned: you don’t know who sees what you do on the internet or
what they can use it for.)
This went on for about six months before the police managed to
stop her. It was a case of severe stalking. With the help of social
media, the woman managed to cause me a lot of problems, particu-
larly with a large number of writer colleagues. For me, it was all
very embarrassing and horrible—at first, I didn’t even know who
she was.
A mental case, you’re thinking. An ordinary maniac. There are lots
of them out there.
Could be. But the pattern was there. The police investigation re-
vealed that the woman had done the same thing at least once before.
In that case, too, the man was much older than she was and a writer.
You’ve probably heard of him. He took it so hard that he retired from
his job. I talked with him several times to try to understand what
was happening, but neither of us could fathom what the woman was
really trying to achieve, apart from some sort of wild revenge because
I hadn’t helped her fulfill her writing dreams.
In their book Female Psychopaths, Lisbet Duvringe and Mike
Florette write, “Revenge tastes good and they [the psychopaths]
delight in destroying; they enjoy it. Female psychopaths especially
seem to delight in looking for emotional revenge, social aggression,
and then wreak havoc in the form of rumors that create manipula-
tive, uncertain and threatening relationships. It is a type of destruc-
tive revenge that is not as visible as physical violence and is thus
harder to identify.”
I know exactly what it feels like to be at the receiving end of that
behavior. The police finally took the young woman in for question-
ing, and after that, all the harassment stopped as if by magic. Remark-

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able, isn’t it? When she was questioned by the police, she tried to
suggest that someone else had been responsible, which reinforced my
belief that she wasn’t mentally ill. If she had had a diagnosis, some
sort of disorder or compulsion, then she wouldn’t have been able to
stop herself so suddenly. But the entire time, she was fully aware of
what she was doing. Things started to get too hot for her, and she
presumably moved on to new hunting grounds, where she could con-
tinue her perverted behavior.
The police said that they had never met such a believable liar be-
fore. The woman seemed to believe her own words. Despite the fact
that the police could show concrete evidence that she was responsible
for the harassment and stalking (they had gone through her computer
and found all they needed), she denied everything. And it didn’t stop
at that. She went on the offensive, by accusing me of threatening her.
Suddenly it was me who was harassing her. She accused me of threat-
ening to kill her, of having hired professional hit men that I, for some
bizarre reason, had contact with. Serious allegations, to put it mildly.
The only thing that saved me from being linked with this person
was that I could easily show that I had not been in the various places
where she claimed we had met.
The pattern of psychopathic behavior was there. This psychopath
aimed to destroy my life and my writing career. She sought revenge
for my refusing to communicate with her about her own writing, I
guess. This time it didn’t succeed. But she did manage to destroy my
relationship with my partner. Our relationship was so badly strained
by the whole exhausting nightmare that we finally went our separate
ways. By that time, my former partner had become so scared that she
developed true paranoia. She sat for hours every day on social media,
searching for the woman and waiting for her to post. Nothing I said
could stop her.
The young woman in question continued her life. On Facebook, I

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