Book Review: A Practical Application of Dark Psychology

Title: A Practical Application of Dark Psychology

Author: Cole Pearce

Date: 2023

Publisher: Cole Pearce

ISBN: none mentioned

Length: 140 e-pages 

Quote: "[E]very human has a dark side--some people just use this darkness more than others."

That's from the second paragraph. The first "beep" of alarm went off in the explanation of the title! Of course this use of "dark" comes from Jung's idea of the shadow sides of life and self, at which we avoid looking, pushing them back into the shadows. Of course it's not intended to be racist. Of course the majority of humankind who prefer to associate words for our complexions with visual appeal, who revel in being dark-eyed or dark and handsome, and do not actually want to be blond, ought to tolerate the use of "dark" as a euphemism for "selfish"...or should we? 

I call foul. The fact is that although most of us are not consciously evil, most of the time, we are selfish. We're not usually motivated to harm other people but we are usually motivated to pursue what seems good to us at the expensive of what may seem or be good to others. The truth in the premise of this book is that many people can make our experience of Other People a little less like Sartre's Hell if we acknowledge our own selfishness and that of others, and defend our boundaries against selfish, manipulative, even abusive people. 

Nobody's likely to dispute that this premise is true...so why package it in a way that only the blondest ten percent of humankind can like? Psychological writers have too often been tone-deaf in choosing words and phrases for their ideas. This book's "Dark Psychology" is an example. It means the psychology of embracing our own "shadowed" selfishness and using it to protect ourselves from other people's selfishness. When we mean "selfish" it would be better to say "selfish" rather than "dark," even if "Selfish Psychology" in a book title would be unlikely to sell the book.

Anyway, this is a book of encouraging peer-counselling for anyone breaking an "addiction" to a relationship with a selfish, manipulative, exploitative or abusive person...whether, as Pearce mentions, that's the person who became an ex-lover because person hit you, the client who treats you like dirt and owes you money, the church or even (it can happen) recovery group that was driving you crazy, the friend who's slick-talked and guilt-tripped you over what you recently realized has been thousands of dollars over the years...or even the corporation that's continuing to profit from harmful products while stalling and denying and failing to pay the penalties awarded to customers who were just like you only now they're sicker. Most of us have a few relationships like that, if only the kind with corporations and governments. If you're trying to put more healthy distance into those relationships or break them off altogether, it's nice to have a supportive friend who's gone through the same process. Cole Pearce is there for us all. That's a good thing.

The usual problems with peer-counselling apply. It's hard, as Pearce mentions several times, to draw a clear line between "narcissistic personality disorder" and ordinary selfishness. I think any second edition of this book should try to make the line a little clearer than this edition does, though.

In fifty years I've had one friend whom I'd describe as a narcissist reined in by her sincere Christian practice. One. And only recently I've come to realize that I've finally found a living sociopath. People who really qualify for the labels clinical psychology applies to "personality disorders" are rare. But the disorders are, of course, ordinary behavior carried to extremes. As in the old joke:

Psychiatrist: "Can you tell me why your family wanted you to see me?"

Patient: "I...well...I like pancakes."

Psychiatrist: "Well, that's nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people like pancakes. I like pancakes myself."

Patient: "Oh, then you must come and see my collection! I have seven TRUNKS full!"

I may have met more than one narcissist and not known them because active narcissists don't  usually expose themselves in friendship with healthier personalities, unless a lot of material gain is involved. But true narcissists are not just selfish in an ordinary way. They are extraordinary. They carry selfishness to levels most people never imagine. While planning to throw you under the bus they will get you to buy the bus and pay for a special insurance policy exempting them from having to pay if the bus runs over you. 

Narcissists can leave their victims hypervigilant. That's the trouble with this book. Though I've known only the one narcissist in fifty years, as I read this book's description of the selfish behavior that can identify a narcissist--which frequently fails to mention that a person with "narcissistic personality disorder" carries this behavior to extremes--I kept thinking, "That sounds like Jane...that sounds like John..." and "That's something faultfinders have accused me of doing." And of course it does. While only a few people really have "narcissistic personality disorder," the people who become the victims of narcissists' epic scams and abuses are likely to be people who allow ordinary relationships with ordinary selfish human beings to become, if not abusive by any legal standard, at least draining and unsatisfactory. They don't set boundaries. They want to "be nice" so desperately that that friend who's taken thousands of dollars from them over the years can say "But person gave me a new car, person urged me to wear per grandmother's diamonds, so naturally when I wanted to build a dream house I let person help me out, because I knew person would want to!" 

Recovery from an abusive relationship with a narcissist involves learning to set boundaries and it's possible that Pearce, like many survivors of abusive relationships, started setting boundaries that are narrower than more fortunate people ever want or need. Among the tools in narcissists' arsenals are legitimate everyday "tricks" that narcissists' victims can ethically learn to use for themselves, like listening to people and focussing on the interests we share with them. True narcissists may seem to be doing this more effectively than other people do, because they may not have as much of a life of their own and may genuinely be more interested in enlisting a new friend (or victim) than in any actual projects they might accomplish on their own. But at times this book seems to suggest that listening closely to a prospective friend, client, or lover is always and only a narcissistic scheme to recruit another victim, rather than honestly opening the door to a mutual process of bonding as friends--which, at least among introverts, is more likely to be the case. 

It's possible, too, that this tendency for survivors to overreact is what can make some support and recovery groups so toxic. I once knew a man who said he was living in hiding from an Alcoholics Anonymous group he'd joined. He was an alcoholic, he said, and by focussing on his relationship with God rather than his relationship with the group he was staying sober, but his relationship with the group had become toxic. Group members weren't interested in a level of spiritual commitment beyond vague general talk about a Higher Power. They resented that he still had the mental capacity to concentrate on advanced Bible study; when he wanted to go to classes instead of group meetings, they accused him of narcissistically trying to do something "better" than the group. Well, studying for a second career is better than sitting around endlessly rehashing addiction stories. So the group had started actively sabotaging his efforts to stay in school and find work. Hello...who was the abusive narcissist, again? 

In fact spiritual teachers have long recognized that it's our own selfish, prideful, even narcissistic, tendencies that make us hypersensitive to any possibility of those tendencies in others. Narcissists want to believe they are superior to others (some of them genuinely do, and some only want to do); they want to believe that the losses they've survived and the hardships they've overcome are greater than those others have survived and overcome. Right. But people who need help, as you'll see if you've been able to start reading Althea yet, may in fact be superior to others in many ways and have survived and overcome more than others; they may still need help, and although social workers should in theory feel no need to worry about which disabled senior citizens' incomes are furthest behind their requirements, if they do it is their own narcissism that causes them to want to proclaim that, e.g., a world-class athlete is "no better than" or "no different from" a drug whore. Inability to deal with the fact that people are not in fact equal either in talents or in achievements, and although some of us meet our natural superiors more often than others do it's always possible that the next person you meet may do something better than you do, is narcissism. 

So, if Pearce were hiring an office assistant, and a well qualified applicant says, "I didn't fit in with the crowd at the big firm I'm leaving. Well," (preening), "looks might have had something to do with that," person might be telling the truth, no narcissism needed. Or person might be deluding perself in a non-narcissistic way; person might have been envied and shunned less for per looks than for per superior productivity--productive people can easily be so focussed on how much they can enjoy accomplishing (for the sake of accomplishment, no narcissism needed) that they don't even notice how much less others are accomplishing. Or it's possible that the person, let's say an average yuppie type who does look better than average just because person is young and rich, was neither perceived as better looking than others nor in any danger of being resented for being more productive, that "interviewing well" is per only outstanding talent, and that person is in fact a narcissist, and also an embezzler. How can you tell? 

You can't. There are few guarantees in this world. That's something Pearce can help you with. You can protect yourself from being chosen as a victim, if the person is a malevolent narcissist, by learning to stand your ground in conversations with more aggressively selfish people, cultivating a confident assertive manner (it's not spelled out in detail, but what "mainstream" Americans consider a confident assertive manner may be what you were brought up to see as a conceited obnoxious manner), cultivating a social cushion of friends so that nobody can exploit being your best or only friend, and taking care of your physical health so that mood swings don't overwhelm you. And handle your own money.

I would have liked to have seen more about self-care in this book.

So, is A Practical Application of Dark Psychology all that a psychological self-help book should be? No, but if you still have a copy of Your Erroneous Zones or Co-Dependent No More, by now you'll notice the ways in which they're not all that they should have been either. We do not live in a perfect world. For someone who has, say, escaped from an abusive family into an abusive group house, close friendship may be found in reading what like-minded people have written before it can be found in actually working with congenial people. Pearce is as good a companion on that sort of journey as most.