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Human Nature: I believe that we humans are basically good, kind, compassionate and loving beings. And I believe we need to be able to identify that small percentage of humans who function against their own human nature.

Context: Every ten years psychiatrists reevaluate and often rename psychopathologies in a book called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. The classification now called the Anti-Social Character Disorder was previously designated the Anti-Social Personality Disorder, which followed the Sociopath which preceded the Psychopath. Around the world and in most languages this very same type of human personality is known by the archetypal name "Vampire."

Look Inside: We all have some vampire in us. We are animals and we must kill to live. We must predate on something, from an asparagus to a big-eyed cow. We all have some propensity and qualities of the vampire in us. However, some humans grow up profoundly narcissistically wounded in ways that allow vampiric predation to become the primary, driving part of who they are. Approximately 2% of the population fits this identity yet they are responsible for 80% of the pain in the world.

What they look like: Let's look at some of the specific behavioral characteristics that define the unredeemed charismatic vampire. Astoundingly, just about every one of them will exhibit most, if not all, of these traits:

1. Glib and persuasive
2. Highly impulsive, restless, and easily bored, needing constant stimulation
3. Practiced at using protestations of love and devotion to get what he wants
4. Without feelings of guilt or anxiety
5. Full of fake repentance and promises to do better when caught lying
6. Often presenting credible business schemes that will return a large payoff if he can just get XXX dollars from you to get him started
7. Totally lacking in conscience
8. Vague and inconsistent about his past
9. Unable to learn from experience
10. Always blaming others for his failures
11. Unable to bond closely, cheating repeatedly on his partners
12. Insistent on unconditional support and understanding, meeting any questioning with accusations that you are untrusting and unloving.

(look at the first six items and you can see how one like this might be highly attractive - until ....)

No allegiance to truth: Vampires lie with such inner certainty that you often can feel their emotional integrity. This sets you up in various ways. This is what we call a "con game." They do not know they are doing it. And once they have your trust they can manipulate you very easily. Most of us want to trust others, so there are some "vampire" behaviors it would be wise to be aware of.

Learning to "feel" them: It requires being able to trust your intuition to detect vampires in your presence. Often they charm us brilliantly, so we need to be able to "feel" them. You detect something is wrong and don't know quite what it is. You feel a little crazy after you have been with one. Your reality feels strange, uncertain, confused, and it's not an accident. You intuitively know, but talk yourself out of it, with their help of course.

Look at what they do: A great prophet once said, "By their deeds shall they be known." Make a judgment based on what a person does, or doesn't do, not by what they say or convincingly suggest.

Live in the dark: Vampires hate the light of day. They operate in the dark of night. They do not want to be seen. Consciously or unconsciously, they do not want us to know how they suck our life energy. Everything is secret, and accountability is always avoided.

Vampires as shapeshifters seem to know when they are about to get busted and will immediately change and give you whatever they have promised (the hook), or what you want. They know how to be whoever you need them to be, so they can get from you what they want.

Patterns, Patterns, Patterns!!! Vampires shape-shift, live in shadows, often lie with a very straight face, even a very sincere face. To spot one, you must notice patterns. Like after a while, stuff just does not add up. Or you discover in a conversation that someone else observed the same behavior pattern of lies. A pattern has begun to emerge and sometimes you can't see the patterns for months or years.

Vampires set up no-win situations. If you tell, you lose and if you don't tell, you lose. He has set up a double bind which forces you to play at his level. You need to be able to access an awareness place where he can't touch you. Holding the archetypal reality, seeing this being as living out his call/karma may enable you to love him through it.

What, me, vampire? Very slippery creatures. Because vampires live in denial, they do not know that they are vampires. If you ask one, he'll tell you he's a perfectly nice guy like everyone else. They cannot see their own behavior as any different from others. They honestly do not understand what the consequences of their behavior might mean to others. The self-focused, narcissistic wound runs so deep that they often can not feel the pain of others. And paradoxically, they do have a very keen sense of the pain in others to the extent that they can exploit it as weakness for their own profit or self-aggrandizement.

Envy is a vampire's middle name: You can feel someone as a vampire when the envy just oozes off of them. When a vampire envies what you have as a personal quality, recognizing it does not exist in him and knowing it probably never will, he will try to destroy you. We see this happen on a personal level in simple everyday interactions in which one person will "put down" another to "feel a little bit better about themselves." They wanted to hurt someone who has what they want. In adolescent cultures it happens often, yet it still hurts and it feels icky even to be in the presence of such an interaction.

On a large, historic-political level we can see tragic examples of vampiric behavior motivated by envy. When "explorers" came to the new world they encountered native peoples who they recognized as having "soul" which they no longer felt in themselves. So they maimed and killed the innocent, indigenous peoples. They could not steal their souls, so they had to annihilate them. A more current example of this envy is with the Nazis toward the Jews in WWII. In orthodox Judaism, the faithful pray daily and observe the Sabbath by not working for one full day a week to pray and reflect. Such discipline and focus demonstrates soulful being. The Nazis, trained to be highly linear and soulless beings, would unconsciously envy the most soulful of their population. They hated that which they could not have so, as an extension of their inner lies, developed public lies about the Jews. These lies became justification to "cleanse" the world of such "vermin". They created a reality in which they could live without too much cognitive dissonance.

Types of Predation: The vampire might suck out our emotional, sexual, or financial life energy. He/she might suck up our time and attention. With political and financial power they might suck vast amounts of energy out of an entire country.

Push into Power: Because the vampire experiences himself as already dead (he has no connection with his inner essence), he has nothing to lose, so has little or no fear. When he moves aggressively into organizations, those with sensitivity feel him and will wisely step aside. Unfortunately, this allows this toxic energy to advance incrementally into places of power where it hides at the top by controlling everything with little or no accountability to anyone.

The charismatic vampire will enroll you in his reality: We might call this "biting" us, which is convincing us that his way of being in the world is the way to be. Once bitten we tend to . . . duh . . . act like vampires. This may sound obvious and funny but imagine that the vampires were very wealthy and powerful and wanted the whole world to think like them so they could feel good about who they are. We would probably have something like our modern media system.

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