The Female Psychopath’s Use of Devaluation

The female psychopath’s interaction with others is a paradox. She needs them, and will often shower people with exuberant affection, but she gets pleasure when she devalues them. This devaluation may seem unusual and contradictory since, on the surface, it appears that she likes her victims. But this is not true affection or connectedness. It is a consequence of her pathological obsession with herself, and how she uses others to build up a false perception of self-worth. This helps to counter her perception of herself as a victim.¹

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Some forms of psychopathic devaluation

What exactly might this devaluation feel like? It can come in many forms, not always obvious. It may be as innocuous as consistently slighting, overtly ignoring you, not calling you back as promised, or cutting calls short. You feel disappointed, but she feels in control. Upping the ante, the female psychopath may devalue by creating false stories about you and circulating them to others, so as to discredit you and ruin your reputation. In the extreme, the devaluation can be so severe that the female psychopath feels justified in physically abusing the victim.

The female psychopath’s use of the victim stance

When a female psychopath speaks, somewhere in the conversation you will often hear her say how she was cheated or deprived in some way – often with a look of “poor me” in her eyes. This is the classic “victim stance.”² She seeks to have people around her and appears to be social, comical and at times may even seem helpful. She can command an audience with her lively chatter and glib tongue. But this is merely the flip side of her strategy to boost herself by devaluing you.

The female psychopath’s devaluation of her own children

The female psychopath’s devaluation can be especially damaging to her children. They are her objects, her possessions, to do with as she wants. As a result, she often neglects and has little or no regard for them. She may use them at will, ignore them or abuse them, belittle, reproach, and devalue them. If incarcerated, the female psychopath often tries to portray herself as a good parent to interviewers and uses her separation from her children to garner sympathy. But this is a ruse. Recent research concludes that she has little interest in her children, a finding consistent with the way she devalues them.³

Devaluation can be difficult to detect or admit

The female psychopath’s victim often doesn’t know when he or she is being devalued. Small clues are often ignored because of the psychopath’s charm and glibness. Of course, she is always right and never wrong! Those who challenge her will be punished in some way that only she knows. If the victim becomes suspicious of her motives, the psychopath is quick to “swear on her dead mother” that she would never hurt her. As convincing as she sounds, what the victim does not know is that the female psychopath hated her dead mother, and her promises mean nothing.

Having been constantly devalued, when the victim no longer serves the psychopath’s needs, the victim can be discarded. This can leave the victim with mixed feelings that often cannot be pinpointed or explained. These small clues can elude notice because the victim refuses to blame the charming person behind the devaluation. She is often able to fool her victim time and again. But beware, this calls to mind a warning from esteemed psychopathy researcher, J. Reid Meloy, that I received some years ago: “The female psychopath walks among us. She may charm like a songbird, but will sting like a scorpion.”⁴