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Individuals with psychopathic traits often fly under the radar, socially skilled, charming, and successful.

While sociopaths may exhibit volatile and impulsive behavior, psychopaths often have no criminal history.

Knowing the signs can help you remove yourself from a relationship before you are harmed.

People high in psychopathic traits are extremely socially skilled, charming, and outwardly successful, yet create disproportionately high levels of conflict in their intimate relationships. Most with these traits are usually subclinical, meaning they are under the radar. They are not usually criminal in the traditional sense and are never really diagnosed in their lives. However, one thing is for certain: high-conflict patterns will inevitably escalate relational conflict and will cause you trauma and emotional harm. These extreme deficits in their personalities sabotage relationships and do not align with healthy relationship dynamics. Worse, they can have long-lasting, detrimental effects on those who partner with them.

5 Subtle Signs You’re Dating Someone High in Psychopathic Traits

1. Charm That Rapidly Escalates Intimacy—but Not Trust

At the start of the relationship, this person may come across as charismatic, attentive, and intensely engaging. Commitment often moves quickly, but emotional intimacy lags behind. Vulnerability tends to be one-sided because you may share your thoughts, feelings, and personal experiences, only to receive little or no emotional reciprocity. Their responses often lack attunement, reflecting a limited capacity for empathy.

Research suggests that individuals high in psychopathy often display superficial charm paired with shallow affect (Hare, 2003). In high-conflict dating, this mismatch often creates confusion: the relationship feels “serious,” but emotionally unsafe. Physical intimacy may be present, but there is no emotional safety, and trust erodes over time because charm masks an inherent lack of emotional depth, as they do not experience emotional depth, layered feelings, or an internal emotional world.

2. Emotional Reactions That Don’t Match the Situation: Coldness and Unavailability

They may remain eerily calm during moments of your distress or become irritated when empathy would be expected. Conversely, they may react with disproportionate anger to perceived slights. Neurobiological research links psychopathy to reduced responsiveness to others’ emotional cues, particularly fear and sadness (Blair, 2005). This emotional mismatch often leaves partners feeling unseen while simultaneously walking on eggshells. They may look at you blankly or even walk away during periods of distress, crying, or duress because of their lack of empathy, which translates into a lack of emotional care, protective attachment, and shared emotional space. Partners will feel emotionally abandoned and alone because their emotional reactions are cold and lack warmth, care, or connection due to inherent deficits in their personality.

3. Conflict Is Externalized—Problems Are Always Someone Else’s Fault (Likely Yours)

In healthy relationships, disagreements lead each partner to reflect and express remorse (even if they don't feel they did anything wrong) because they hurt their partner, and repair due to empathic attunement, feelings of sadness, and guilt. However, with those with psychopathic traits, disagreements rarely lead to reflection or repair. Instead, conflict escalates through blame, deflection, or reframing the issue as having been caused by your sensitivity, irrationality, or provocation.

As they rewrite reality and distort it, the definition of gaslighting, you will feel confused and "brain scrambled." Gaslighting often isn’t overt; it’s embedded in everyday interactions, like being told you don't remember a conversation the way it happened, or that you are “too sensitive.” This distortion allows them to maintain control over the relationship while keeping you off-balance and dependent, a hallmark of high-conflict dating dynamics.

They often do not understand emotional issues in the relationship because of their profound lack of empathy. While empathy "bridges" save relationships in conflict, there is no bridge to build because they lack empathy to take on another's perspective. Low accountability is a core feature of psychopathy, closely tied to externalization of responsibility and moral disengagement (Hare & Neumann, 2008). In romantic relationships, this pattern fuels chronic conflict with no resolution, which is one of the hallmarks of high-conflict personalities.

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4. Pathological Lying Due to Lack of Guilt or Conscience

One of the most striking traits of someone high in psychopathy is their lack of guilt or conscience. In a relationship, this means they can act in ways that hurt you: duplicitous behavior like lying, manipulating, gaslighting, or betraying trust, without feeling remorse. Unlike most people, they aren’t held back by internal moral rules; their behaviors are guided by what benefits them in the moment. This makes high-conflict relationships particularly exhausting because the usual cues we rely on, such as apologies, empathy, and repair, may be absent or completely performative. You might notice patterns of repeated hurtful behavior that seem intentional, yet you rarely see signs of regret or self-reflection.

5. Shallow or Missing Emotional Life: They Lack an Inner World

Another hallmark of someone high in psychopathic traits is a lack of a rich inner emotional world. An inner life requires affective depth, which is the capacity to be internally affected by the experience. For example, emotional reverberation ("that stayed with me because") and self-reflection (which changes behavior in most) are nonexistent. Often, this is because moral emotions such as guilt, remorse, empathy, and tenderness are nonexistent. They may seem charming, intense, or even passionate on the surface, but over time, you may notice that they experience emotions in a shallow or self-centered way.

Those who lack an emotional inner life rarely reflect on their own feelings, your feelings, or the long-term impact of their actions. You may express, explain, and connect concepts, but it is met with an expressionless reaction or even one-word answers. This shows up as the inability to genuinely connect with their partner. Conversations may feel one-sided, they don't follow up with questions about important things, emotional intimacy can feel impossible, and you may notice that what matters most to them is how situations serve their needs, rather than any shared experience or emotional bond.

Why These Patterns Create High-Conflict Relationships

Psychopathic traits such as low empathy, emotional callousness, impulsivity, and lack of accountability are not inherently loud or obvious. As discussed in my book, Adult Children of High-Conflict Parents, in close relationships, they often generate persistent, unresolved conflict, emotional instability, and power struggles because of their emotional immaturity. Over time, partners may internalize blame, doubt their perceptions, and normalize relational chaos due to these toxic behaviors. The fact that their emotional interior is functional and transactional and not relational causes chronic high conflicts and relational trauma.

In sum, high-conflict relationships are not defined by occasional disagreement, but by repeated cycles where empathy, accountability, and repair are absent. Awareness is often the first step toward clarity, and toward choosing relationships that do not require constant self-erosion to survive. If you find yourself in this situation and see these red flags, it is important to know that they are not capable of a healthy relationship and will cause interpersonal violence due to their characteristics. While these are likely due to neurological deficits they cannot control, they will still cause you emotional harm and anguish even though it is not on purpose. Recognizing these patterns is not about diagnosing someone else—it’s about understanding relational dynamics that consistently undermine trust, safety, and emotional well-being.

Disclaimer: Psychopathy is not a DSM diagnosis and cannot be identified without formal assessment. The patterns described above reflect traits identified in empirical research and are presented to support awareness, not labeling. Psychopathy and sociopathy are used to categorize behavior but are associated with a DSM-5-TR disorder, antisocial personality disorder.

A version of this post appears on www.drtracyhutchinson.com.

Copyright 2026: Dr. Tracy Hutchinson, Ph.D.

Anderson, N. E., & Kiehl, K. A. (2014). Psychopathy: developmental perspectives and their implications for treatment. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 32(1), 103–117.

Blair, R. J. R. (2005). Applying a cognitive neuroscience perspective to the disorder of psychopathy. Development and Psychopathology, 17(3), 865–891.

Hare, R. D. (2003). Without conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Forth, A. E., Sezlik, S., Lee, S. C., Ritchie, M., Logan, J., & Ellingwood, H. (2021). Toxic relationships: The experiences and effects of psychopathy in romantic relationships. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 66(15), 1627–1658.

Spagnuolo, F., Somma, A., Fossati, A., Sellbom, M., & Garofalo, C. (2024). Psychopathic traits and romantic attachment: The mediating role of emotion dysregulation. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 21(4), 299–312.

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