Off, Not Broken: Charm, Lying, and the Criminal Personality

Some people lie for sport, and everyone likes them more for it. What Yochelson and Samenow’s The Criminal Personality got right, what it got wrong, and why the most charming ones end up in couples counseling instead of in the data.

Part of The ShieldMee Guide: Emotional Intensity & Personality Patterns →

The clinical case in this essay is fictional and is not based on a real client or clinical record.

Eleven words

She apologized twice for wasting my time.

That was the intake. Twenty-some years married, hands in her lap, and she could not name one thing that was wrong. Couples come in and one of them does the talking. She didn’t.

Then she got to her car, and turned around, and came back, and gave me eleven words.

He lies to people for sport. Dead serious face. And they love him.

A dinner party. Another couple. He told a story about a summer he spent somewhere he has never been. Details. A landlord with a limp. A dog named after a president. Twenty minutes, and the table was his. Nothing was at stake. He wasn’t covering anything. He wanted to see if it would run, and it ran.

She lost count years ago. She has never once seen him lose the room.

And here’s what she needed me to understand — she said it three different ways trying to get it into me: everybody likes him more afterward. The lie isn’t a flaw in the charm. The lie is the charm. He is the best guest they have ever had.

That night she touched his arm under the table. A small thing. She wanted the story to stop.

Rage went across his face. Less than a second. Then he leaned in, the way a husband does, close enough that no one else heard.

Fuck you, I’m having a good time.

Then the smile. Then he sat back and picked the story up mid-sentence, the landlord and the limp, and the table laughed, and the other wife said later what a lovely couple.

She told me it wasn’t the words. She said it was all three — the face, the sentence, the smile — and how fast. She kept trying to give me the speed and couldn’t. She’d say it, then say no, faster than that.

So she has spent two decades as the only person in the room who knows the room is fake.

The best guest they ever had

Then he came in.

He shook my hand and asked about the drive over. Three weeks earlier I’d mentioned my knee, and he remembered, and he asked. He is funny in the specific way that makes you want to be funny back. He is the calmest man in the building, and everyone reads that as peace.

I liked him.

He has probably been in therapy before. It probably went fine. Prompt, insightful, kind things about the work, and the file closed with everyone satisfied. Nobody has a word for him. Least of all her.

Session four, I got close. I said something about the dinner party. Not an accusation — an observation, the softest version I had.

He agreed with me immediately.

Then he gave me his father. Twenty minutes, unprompted, and it was good material. A man who was never impressed. A boy who learned the only reliable currency was being interesting. He connected it to the lying himself, before I could, and he did it better than I would have.

I wanted it. That’s the part worth writing down. It was a clean formulation. It explained everything. It would have made the next two years pleasant for both of us.

That’s the door.

What The Criminal Personality actually found

Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow published The Criminal Personality in 1976. People remember it as a declaration that criminals cannot change. That’s not quite what they wrote. They began by admitting failure. They had tried the therapies that worked on other patients and found themselves getting somewhere they didn’t trust: their patients could supply psychological explanations faster than the clinicians could. A man could hand you a childhood, a wound, a theory, a reason. Not as a defense — as a service. Give a man a why and you’ve handed him a door, and he will walk through it warmly, and thank you on the way.

So they quit asking why. They dictated long notes after every session, usually with the man sitting right there, and had them transcribed, until there were some 300,000 pages of it. Then they read the pile instead of the theory. They stopped trusting the story and started counting the words.

That instinct was fifty years early. It also explains the knee. Meloy has a term for it, malignant pseudo-identification: the patient takes on the clinician’s traits and concerns so the clinician will feel recognized and stop looking. My knee was available. So was the dinner table. Liking him wasn’t a failure of objectivity. Not noticing would have been.

Thirteen out of thirty

Here’s where the book stops helping.

Their sample was 240 men. Ninety-three of them got less than ten hours. Seventeen got the thousand-plus hours the method actually asks for. The number the field remembers — thirteen changed — comes from the second volume, out of the thirty or so who went all the way through. For thirty years that number was cited as thirteen out of 250, proof this population is untreatable. A convenient reading, since untreatable means nobody has to do the work. It was never thirteen out of 250. It was thirteen out of thirty, and two hundred who wouldn’t sit still for it.

Because what they asked for was total. Not adjustment — demolition. A tearing down of the whole way of thinking and a rebuild from nothing. Sit in the room with what that would require of the man in front of me. I’d have to tell a forty-eight-year-old that the father story is a lie, the charm is the pathology, the marriage is a performance, and the whole self has to go.

He’d agree with me. Warmly. And I would never see him again.

He was also never in that sample. Those were men at Saint Elizabeths found not guilty by reason of insanity, then men on parole, and later a few off the street who were active and hadn’t been caught. Caught men, mostly, whose pathology arrived with a chart attached. The checklist the field built afterward loads onto two broad factors: an interpersonal-affective one — charm, pathological lying, shallow affect — and a lifestyle-antisocial one — impulsivity, criminal versatility, a record. That sample ran heavy on the second. He runs heavy on the first, which is exactly why there’s no chart and never will be. No arrest. No wreckage. A marriage that looks good in photographs. Nothing to count. And the men that ward never held are the ones who end up in couples counseling.

The deeper miss isn’t the sample. It’s development. Refusing causation also meant refusing stages — moral reasoning grows in sequence, unevenly, and can arrest somewhere along the way. Kohlberg was publishing exactly that, at exactly that time. His name isn’t in their references. They weren’t interested. And once you refuse development, you have one tool left.

Nobody realigns a compass by smashing it.

What the newer evidence says

What came after is better. Randall Salekin reviewed forty-two treatment studies and found the untreatability consensus was never well supported by the evidence people thought they were citing — the pessimism was inherited, not earned. The Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin ran an intensive model with high-psychopathy adolescents and cut violent recidivism against comparison groups. Be careful what that means. It supports sustained, structured, high-dose contact producing change. It does not tell us the mechanism. Anyone selling you the mechanism is running past the data.

So I did the other thing. I told him the father story was good, because it was, and I asked him to tell it to me again the next week. He did. It was better. The week after that, better still — a new detail, a line that landed, a pause in a smarter place. A true story gets shorter every time you tell it. His got longer. I wrote down where.

Off, not broken

Which leaves why bother, and the answer isn’t him. It’s the daughter learning that this is what love looks like. The employee who thinks the boss who remembers his birthday must care about him. The next person who mistakes composure for peace. The next marriage, already forming out of view.

And her, in the parking lot.

She was never the confused one. She lost count. She caught a rage that lasted less than a second at a table where nobody else saw anything, and she carried it for two decades with no colleague, no instrument, and no word for what she was seeing.

His compass isn’t broken. It’s off. It points somewhere with total confidence — it just doesn’t point north, and he has never once had reason to doubt it. Alignment is possible. Alignment takes years. Both are true and neither cancels the other. But nobody finds north without saying out loud that the needle is wrong.

She told me it wasn’t the words.

She’s wrong about that. It’s almost always the words. She got to her car, and turned around, and came back, and gave me eleven.

Questions

What does it cost?

It depends on your insurance plan. Most clients pay a copay or coinsurance. You’ll see your estimated cost on my Headway page before you book.

Do you take insurance?

Yes. I’m in-network with Aetna, Cigna, Florida Blue, UnitedHealthcare, Oscar, and other plans through Headway. Check your coverage and book on my Headway page.

¿Atienden en español?

Sí. Sessions can be fully in Spanish, fully in English, or both, the way many couples actually talk at home.

What if my partner won’t come?

It depends on your insurance plan. Most clients pay a copay or coinsurance. You’ll see your estimated cost on my Headway page before you book.

How soon can I start?

Usually the next day, and almost always the same week. Sessions are available every day except Saturday.

Related: Couples Therapy