SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Unknown Number: The Highschool Catfish, stop reading this and go watch it. We’re about to embark on an exploration of the perpetrator’s motives, influences, and psychological profile, and you’ll want to be caught up on the viewing experience first. Honestly the doc is fascinating even if you go in with a play-by-play familiarity with its events, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.

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There’s been a lot of buzz going around about Unknown Number: The Highschool Catfish since it debuted on Netflix this year. As you know (because you watched the documentary before reading this like we asked you to, right???) Kendra Licari sent over 350,000 threatening and sexually explicit messages to her daughter Lauryn and her daughter’s boyfriend Owen from a series of unknown numbers between October 2020 and December 2022. Both of her victims were minors. In March 2023 Kendra pled guilty to two counts of stalking a minor and served 16 months of a possible 5 year sentence before being paroled from prison. As a condition of release, Licari is forbidden from contacting her daughter. Today, Lauryn expresses trepidation over maintaining a relationship with her mother, and doubts she will ever be able to trust her.

There’s a lot of layers to the events covered in Unknown Number, and to the Licari case in general. We’ll focus on the following: the phenomenon of catfishing, Dark Tetrad personality traits, and the definition of Factitious Disorder Imposed Upon Another (formerly known as Munchhausen By-proxy), a disorder that some have referenced to explain Kendra’s motives. The behaviors and attitudes Kendra exhibits align with the “Dark Tetrad,” a set of four interconnected personality traits that psychologists recognize as predictors for harmful and antisocial behavior: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. We can’t diagnose Kendra because she is not our patient, but we can certainly discuss her actions and attitudes during the cycle of abuse, how they affected the people around her, and why Kendra Licari became the Catfish Mom. Trigger warning for discussion of sexual abuse of a minor, self harm, and suicide.

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Catfishing for Fantasy

The title of Netflix’s Unknown Number: The Highschool Catfish focuses on Kendra’s pretending to be, or catfishing as, one of her daughter’s classmates. If she were a typical catfish, or at least the kind of catfish we’re used to unmasking with Nev and Max, Kendra would use the high school student personality to manipulate her daughter by gaining her trust, but in this case, she manipulates her through bullying. The tone and tactics are a little different, but the underlying motivations to become a catfish could still apply to Kendra.

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Why do people catfish? 

Beyond material or social gain, catfishing holds certain charms for those seeking escape into fantasy, or validation of their intelligence and power over others. Successfully pretending to be someone else, especially from the vantage point of an anonymous number, gives a catfisher an enormous amount of creative agency - they can literally say anything they want with no fear of fact checking or repercussions. In a way, they can live their dreams. During her interviews, Kendra describes the experience of texting from the unknown number as “wearing a mask,” or “an escape.” It’s hard to say for sure what she was escaping from, but based on what little we know about Kendra, it sounds like she had become dissatisfied with her work, her relationships, and herself.

In addition to the underlying psychological motivations to catfish, the actions and technology surrounding catfishing can perpetuate and intensify the behavior.

Digital Accessibility and Anonymity: 

Kendra used the app Pinger to send messages from an array of different numbers, making it impossible for Lauryn and Owen to block her, and even making the families wonder whether it was a group of people harassing their children. Unlike social media catfishing where perpetrators have to create a fake profile with photos, catfishing by text allowed Kendra a form of creative freedom - she didn’t have to worry whether someone would recognize a stolen profile picture or question an off-kilter form response. Behind this wall of total anonymity, Kendra could manipulate Lauryn and Owen’s lives without fear of repercussions, which certainly emboldened her. When studying catfishing in general, researchers found correlations between the degree of anonymity the catfisher had access to and the extremity of their antisocial and manipulative behavior. The longer people searched for her unsuccessfully, the more powerful Kendra felt, and the more extreme her behavior became.

Always-on Culture: 

24 hour access to our phones and our expectation of constant availability make both victims and perpetrators of catfishing more likely to engage with one another. After the texts escalated to a certain point, Owen’s mother started taking his phone at night to give him a break from the harassing messages. Lauryn’s mother, of course, did not, because she wanted her daughter to feel trapped in the exchange. As young teenagers, Lauryn and Owen are particularly susceptible to the perceived pressure of “always-on” culture. 90% of their friendships happen online, so they feel isolated when they’re not able to use their phones, even when those phones are a conduit for sick and abusive messaging.

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What was Kendra escaping from? 

Kendra Licari was working in the IT department at Ferris State University when she sent the first batch of harassing texts to her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend in 2020. Less than a year later, Ferris put Kendra on a performance improvement plan for “nonwork texts and phone calls” during work hours, and she decided to quit without telling her family. People close to Kendra noticed a change in her behavior and personality at that time, reporting that she went from being highly outgoing and social to secretive and withdrawn. The texting escalated dramatically in both frequency and tone as time passed, and Kendra pretended to work from home while secretly spending eight to ten hours a day sending threatening and sexually explicit texts to Lauryn and Owen.

It’s possible that catfishing as a teenager allowed Kendra to feel like a high school student with no responsibilities who deserved to be cared for, rather than a troubled and unsuccessful adult. The overlapping timelines suggest that escaping into the catfish personality allowed Kendra to avoid thinking about her mounting money problems, potentially while “getting back” at her family for the perceived pressure on her to succeed financially. As the hidden financial conflict escalated, her family certainly noticed the instability, and her husband Shawn likely questioned her as to why they were struggling so much. Kendra’s resentment of her responsibilities was likely joined by a resentment of her family, not because they caused her issues, but because their presence in her life threatened to expose her.

Perhaps the most important part of Kendra’s fantasy was the narrative that she created around her relationship with her daughter’s boyfriend Owen, who was 13 when she started sending the texts. Her messages imagined secret meetings between them at hotels and friends’ houses where they gossip about Lauryn and engage in sex acts (again, this kid was 13 and saw this woman as a second mom - yuck). We don’t have a lot of information about Kendra’s marriage to Lauryn’s father Shawn, but it’s likely that her fixation on Owen was at least partially fueled by dissatisfaction with that relationship.

Friends and family indicate that when Shawn brought Kendra to live with him in his home town, she was disappointed that he wasn’t better connected. She struggled to fit in, and ultimately found a way to be involved through her daughter’s athletic activities. However, the initial frustration of being brought to a town where she didn’t have the social resources she felt she deserved may have triggered a deep-seated resentment and given her the excuse she needed to use two children in pursuit of a maladjusted fantasy life.

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Who was Kendra’s catfish personality? 

Based on the texts, Kendra was pretending to be a fellow high school student from Lauryn and Owen’s home town. She positioned herself as a sexually active and popular mean girl, and used insider information to make herself seem omniscient (referencing private conversations, using Lauryn’s family nickname Lo, sharing pictures from private family events). Her texts are crude and confident, claiming she will “break” Lauryn and Owen, that she has police protecting her, and that she is sexually desirable to her daughter’s boyfriend. She is relentless, texting throughout the night and ultimately finding and harassing Owen’s new girlfriend and her mother after he and Lauryn break up. In her catfishing personality, Kendra is powerful, confident, desirable, and unstoppable, qualities she lacks in real life. Perhaps most tellingly, a number of the texts imply that the sender is part of a powerful clique, saying things like “Lauryn needs to take her own life before we do.” It’s part of her deception to obscure herself as the sole perpetrator, but it also feeds into her fantasy that she is a powerful, popular, teenaged girl.

A 2023 study published in Computers and Human Behavior identified the presence of the Dark Tetrad, a set of interrelated negative personality traits, as strong predictors of catfishing behavior. The four traits - narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism - do exist on their own, but tend to crop up together so frequently that researchers came up with this grouping. Again, we’re not able to diagnose Kendra, but her behavior and attitudes during and after the cycle of abuse bear a lot of similarities to those who test high for those traits.

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The Dark Tetrad of Personality Traits

This article from psypost.org describes the Dark Tetrad as being composed of “personality traits of Machiavellianism (characterized by superficial charm, cynicism, coldness, manipulativeness, opportunism, belief that ends justify the means), narcissism (characterized by vanity, grandiosity, dominance, superiority, and entitlement), psychopathy (characterized by thrill-seeking, aggressiveness, impulsivity, criminality, low fear and anxiety, callousness, and limited empathy), and sadism (characterized by experiencing feelings of pleasure in connection with inflicting verbal and/or physical harm to other people).” The Dark Tetrad is not a diagnosis, but clinicians have found that those who score high on the Short Dark Tetrad (SD4) questionnaire are more likely to engage in unethical or antisocial behavior than their lower scoring peers. All four traits share an underlying perception of other people as means to an end, which Kendra certainly exhibits. Here’s how we see the Dark Tetrad manifesting through Kendra’s behavior.

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1. Narcissism

Narcissistic people tend to see themselves as exceptional to the point of deserving special treatment, and demand attention from everyone around them, regardless of how inappropriate the circumstances are. Apparently when the texting began, several friends and family members already suspected that Kendra might be behind it, likely because they had noticed her attention seeking traits. 

Self-Image

We typically associate narcissism with an overly positive self-image, but narcissism doesn’t mean loving yourself unconditionally; it means being focused on yourself over all other things, even if that focus is negative. Kendra clearly struggled with self-image, feeling the need to escape into an anonymous personality to become desirable and feel intelligent and worthwhile. Her obsession with that fantasy and her fixation on her daughter’s looks in the texts indicate narcissistic preoccupation with appearances and proving her superiority.

Ploys for Attention

In an interview with Kendra’s cousin, it’s revealed that while Kendra is a highly active volunteer and a supportive friend and family member, she can’t tolerate sharing attention with others. Paraphrasing the cousin’s words, if Kendra were in the room where someone else was being interviewed, she would be dancing off screen to try and draw the camera towards her. The cousin also admits that while her recent behavior is abominable, Kendra has always been the kind of person who will gladly do a favor for someone in need. This is admirable in some regards, but it actually feeds into the narcissism argument because good deeds are a way to get attention. She exhibits this behavior again by inserting herself into the police investigation of her daughter’s harassment, and by maintaining her role as Lauryn’s main confidant throughout the cycle of abuse. Even when the cops and her husband ask her to leave the house when her role is revealed, she insists she has to stay with her daughter to “protect” her, holding Lauryn like a shield to prevent the consequences of her actions from reaching her. If she’s a “good mom,” she has learned she can receive praise and avoid scrutiny for her actions.

Child as an Extension of Self

During the documentary, the interviewer prompts Kendra to say that she was sending the messages to herself, with Lauryn acting as a surrogate for her insecurities. It’s important to note that Kendra did not come up with this idea herself, and commenters criticized the director for giving her an “out” instead of forcing her to articulate her role in the abuse. However, there’s a grain of truth here in the sense that Kendra clearly saw Lauryn as an extension of herself rather than as an individual. This is a common trait in narcissistic parents; the only way they can become supportive caregivers is by seeing their children as extensions of themselves. They may treat their children very well when it suits them, but as soon as the child’s needs or emotions become inconvenient, the parent may reject the child completely. It seems that once Lauryn was no longer able to fill the role of her mother’s sole confidant and companion (many in their lives commented on their closely enmeshed relationship) she viciously turned on her.

Difficulty with Accountability

Perhaps most damningly, Kendra agreed to participate in the Netflix documentary as a way to tell her side of the story. The filmmaker admits it wasn’t easy to secure Kendra’s cooperation, but the resulting footage mainly features her making excuses for, or outright lying about her actions. One of the reasons Kendra gives for agreeing to be interviewed is her desire to communicate with her daughter, who the terms of her parole forbid her from contacting. Her determination to violate those terms through the documentary and her inability to to see herself as the villain both qualify as narcissistic behavior.

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2. Machiavellianism 

People who score high for Machiavellianism perceive and use others as means to an end. The term comes from the name of the author Machiavelli, who wrote The Prince, a political text promoting cynical manipulation of others to achieve your goals. People who exhibit this trait are sometimes called “High Mach” personalities.

Value of Relationships‍

We still don’t know much about Kendra’s personal life outside of the catfishing incident, but there’s some evidence that she evaluated others in her life based on their value to her rather than their relationship with her. Since she couldn’t use Shawn to advance socially when she arrived in his home town, she ended up using her daughter by enrolling her in sports and becoming a coach. It’s normal to seek connection in a new town by getting involved in important community activities like high school sports, and if Kendra hadn’t gone on to exploit the children in her care, no one would have been concerned. However, in view of later events, this could represent a kernel of Machiavellian behavior that existed before she committed her crimes.

Others as Objects

Kendra’s view of her daughter as an object to use rather than a person to relate to is evident in her explanation around messages she sent encouraging Lauryn to commit suicide. When the interviewer asks Kendra whether she was worried that Lauryn would harm herself in light of the messages, she dismisses the concern claiming that she “knew” Lauryn well enough to manipulate her without hurting her. Perceiving Lauryn as so easily manipulable - she can push her to suicidality and then pull her back from the edge - indicates a radical simplification of Lauryn’s personhood. In Kendra’s mind, all she has to do is push the right buttons and control the behavior; she can’t imagine Lauryn having enough agency to act against her intentions. This outlook is indicated in her interactions throughout the catfishing as she attempts to frame Lauryn’s classmate Khloe and manipulate those around her to protect her from exposure.

Fixations 

Kendra’s sexual obsession with Owen is also an indicator of Machiavellian traits. Her inappropriate behavior towards him only began after he started dating her daughter, and witnesses from their social circles noticed that Kendra not only supported the relationship, but seemed fixated on keeping it going. Owen’s mother witnessed Kendra looking at Lauryn’s texts with Owen on her phone and writing to him as Lauryn, and said she talked about the kids as if “they would be together forever.” It seems that being romantically involved with Lauryn somehow made Owen more attractive to Kendra, and from this perspective, her possessive and manipulative behavior over the kids and their relationship had more to do with her need for control rather than her need for sex or affection. Kendra used Owen to make herself feel powerful and desired, and used her daughter to make herself feel like a sexually superior mastermind.

3. Psychopathy 

Psychopathy is not an actual diagnosis; rather, it’s considered the most extreme manifestation of antisocial personality disorder. Individuals with antisocial personality disorder exhibit emotional immaturity, tend to lack regard for themselves or others, and often get involved in criminal activity as a result. 

According to Kendra's husband Shawn, Kendra managed family finances and was responsible for keeping up with bills and house payments. After she quit her job, she pretended that she still had things under control, but the family had to move four times in two years and lost a lifetime's worth of belongings in a storage unit Kendra failed to pay for. Those who knew the couple speculate that Kendra used insurance fraud and credit card debt to maintain the facade that she was still holding everything together. Criminal activity to conceal wrongdoing in combination with Kendra’s indifference to Shawn’s financial strain are both consistent with psychopathic lifestyle traits: irresponsibility, poor behavioral controls, and to at least a degree, parasitic lifestyle.

While psychopathic individuals may develop intellectually over time, their emotional growth remains stunted. We’ve discussed Kendra’s actions and motivations at length, and everything from concealing her lost job to catfishing as a high schooler tracks as emotionally immature behavior. Her sexual fixation on Owen could fall into this category as well. While 50% of pedophilic individuals actually harbor a sexual attraction towards children, the other 50% lack the maturity to relate to adults and try to find a surrogate relationship through a minor. Kendra’s immaturity in other areas of her life combined with her fantasy relationship with Owen supports this theory. Her relationship with Shawn exposed her shortcomings as a stunted adult, and she imagined that a relationship with Owen - who, again, was 13 when the texts started - would be more free and fulfilling, or at least more aligned with her own emotional maturity. 

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4. Sadism

Among the Dark Tetrad traits, sadism has been identified as the strongest predictor for catfishing behavior. While narcissistic, High Mach, and psychopathic people may have no problem harming others to meet their needs, sadists harm others specifically because they enjoy it, even if it causes pain or difficulty for them. A lot of commentary around Kendra’s actions focuses on her inability to respond appropriately to the pain of others, at least from an authentic and lasting place. She could be so consumed in her own narcissism that she literally can’t perceive the pain of others, but accounting for possible sadism, there’s compelling evidence that she actively enjoyed hurting other people and sought this behavior out as a way to do so.

Turning Proximity into Power

As her victim’s mother, Kendra not only had access to information that aided her disguise; she also had the opportunity to witness the chaos and suffering it caused up close. If Kendra was primarily motivated by the desire to see someone suffer, her daughter represented a highly accessible, impressionable, and vulnerable victim. The fact that Kendra used specific insecurities that Lauryn confided in her as part of the harassment, and that unlike Owen’s mother she left her daughter’s phone with her overnight, adds a sadistic twist. She made specific choices to isolate and trap Lauryn in an abuse cycle, possibly to “punish” her for growing up and setting boundaries. Even when Lauryn and Owen were broken up, Kendra continued texting both teens, and even widened her net of abuse to hurt his new girlfriend and her mother - her enjoyment of the pain she was causing existed independently of her desire to manipulate their relationship.

Reenacting Trauma

People sometimes develop sadistic tendencies in response to past trauma, re-creating the situation but taking on the role of aggressor rather than survivor. Kendra indicates that she experienced a sexual assault at seventeen, and that seeing her daughter reach puberty brought her back to that place mentally. Regardless of how it affected Lauryn, Kendra may have felt compelled to recreate her own trauma in her daughter’s life as part of an unconscious drive to revisit the problem and master it. We don’t know much about what happened to Kendra, and survivors of sexual assault deserve compassion for its devestating psychological impact. However, only a small portion of survivors go on to become abusers themselves, and while this kind of trauma is identified as a risk factor for becoming abusive, it looks like Kendra’s Dark Tetrad traits played a more active role in her actions than her past trauma did. Telling her daughter to kill herself goes far beyond recreating past sexual trauma, and the fact that Kendra didn’t worry whether Lauryn would actually follow through with it indicates that she doesn’t see her daughter as a person to care for, just as an object to create, manipulate, and destroy in service of her psychological drives.

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Munchhausen By-proxy: Factitious Disorder Imposed Upon Another

In the documentary at least one person mentions that Kendra’s behavior resembles something we used to call Munchhausen By-proxy, now known as Factitious Disorder Imposed Upon Another (FDIA). Essentially, sufferers of this disorder seek attention and connection from caregivers, family, friends, and the general public based on the supposed sickness of someone close to them, typically their child. 

The most famous case of FDIA in recent history is Deedee Blanchard, mother of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. From infancy, Deedee insisted that Gypsy Rose was terminally ill and suffered from muscular dystrophy among other problems. In truth, her daughter was perfectly healthy, but Blanchard was addicted to the attention she received due to her daughter’s supposed disability. Some have argued that Kendra pursued a similar goal by creating a fake catfishing/stalking crisis around her child that gave her access to and attention from law enforcement, school officials, and the family of her other victim Owen. Rather than engaging in the medical abuse that typically accompanies FDIA (forcing unnecessary surgeries and tests, poisoning or overmedicating, etc.) Kendra engaged in psychological and sexual abuse of Lauryn and Owen, opening a role for her in their lives and the lives of their families as a champion and protector. Some have also commented that Kendra needs to feel needed, hence her insistence on managing family finances despite lack of ability and interest, and her instigation of a crisis that would force her daughter to lean on her more. Seeming like a hero meets Kendra’s need of feeling exceptional, powerful, and praiseworthy, and this could be especially important to help Kendra displace or deny her inadequacy as the family breadwinner.

Another important aspect of FDIA is the perpetrator’s control over the victim’s life, which seemed to be a huge part of Kendra’s MO. Kendra started texting initially when Lauryn began dating Owen, interrupting their codependent relationship. Kendra may have seen her control of Lauryn slipping away, or simply feared they would not be as close, so the theory is that she engineered the catfishing crisis to keep her daughter in a tight orbit. FDIA sufferers don’t typically seek greater connection with their children through their actions; they are much more interested in the third parties who become concerned for the dependent they’re abusing. Lauryn’s crisis gave Kendra access to and attention from community and authority figures; Owen’s crisis gave Kendra access to and attention from Owen’s family, particularly his mother Jill, who recalls sitting up with Kendra late into the night dissecting the messages and trying to help their kids. While Owen doesn’t fit the typical profile of the victim of FDIA (he’s not a dependent directly related to or reliant on Kendra) her actions and their results mirror the typical cycle of abuse for this disorder.

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Conclusion

Seeing extensive discussion of Kendra Licari in videos, podcasts, news articles, and more shows how fascinated and horrified we are by the idea of a mother who would cyberbully innocent children, particularly her daughter. The visceral and sexually explicit content of the messages is shocking, particularly when you imagine young children reading them in distress and confusion. It might feel conciliatory to consider Kendra’s motives from a mental health perspective since at the end of the day she abused two children for her own satisfaction. No matter what was going on in her head, what she did was cruel, harmful, exploitative, and selfish. 

Kendra Licari clearly had unresolved psychological turmoil of many kinds, and rather than reflecting on why she felt the way she did, she acted impulsively and compulsively to relieve her mental discomfort. While people with Dark Tetrad traits are highly unlikely to seek treatment due to their limited capacity for self reflection and empathy, understanding their blind spots, instincts, and reflexes is important for all of us. There’s no need to start a Dark Tetrad witch hunt, but researchers do recognize a higher incidence of antisocial behavior among those who score high on the SD4. Being aware of warning signs that someone is operating from a place of sickness can help protect you and your loved ones from being victimized. Here are a few warning signs that you’re dealing with someone under the influence of compulsions they can’t and won’t control.

• Superficial charm: some people really are just that cool and friendly, but once in a while you run into someone who is a little too perfect. Watch out for excessive flattery, name dropping, and extreme familiarity that comes on too quickly. Normal people have little flaws and your first interactions with them probably won’t be that smooth, but that’s natural. If things feel too good too fast, they likely are. To test your theory, try setting a boundary, which brings us to the next sign.
• Violating boundaries: Dark Tetrad personalities are “habitual line steppers” (thank you Charlie Murphy). Typically we respect one another’s boundaries when they’re set, but for someone with Dark Tetrad traits, setting a boundary can trigger an outsized response, or at least an immediate push back to see if they can break the boundary. If you try setting a gentle boundary with them and they don’t immediately accept it, or at least understand why you’re setting it and respect your wishes, that’s a red flag for something potentially darker. This is especially true if they start lying to manipulate you into breaking your boundary, which leads us to the next sign. 
• Excessive lying: Lying is a means to an end and people with Dark Tetrad traits are very comfortable altering the truth to get what they need. They may also lie spontaneously over nothing; for example, where they got lunch today or who they spotted on the subway. Some of these lies are pretty harmless but as the saying goes, “what a tangled web we weave,” both for the liar and the liar’s victims. After a while, you start wondering if anything about them is real, or if you can count on any plans you’ve made with them. If you notice a preponderance of lies in your relationship with someone, that definitely indicates that they’re seeking to control the relationship by controlling what you know about them and the world around you. If you confront people with these traits they will continue lying to cover up their deception and find ways to explain that it’s not their fault. That brings us to the next sign.
• Victim mentality: To people with Dark Tetrad personalities nothing is ever their fault. Even if they do or say something that upsets you, they will insist they wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t driven them to it, or that your reaction is inappropriate. This is both a tactic to protect themselves and their personas and a sign of their inability to accept responsibility for their actions, which, you guessed it, leads us to the last and final sign.
• Poor long-term relationships: Reviewing all the signs above, it’s not a surprise that a person who acts and thinks this way would have trouble sustaining a long term relationship of any kind - friendship, romantic relationships, or even long term business partnerships. They likely jump from job to job, and/or from relationship to relationship. At first they’re able to spark deep connection and attraction through their superficial charm and any benefits they gain from their dishonesty. Later they may inspire pity or concern as they give you a variety of stories and excuses for their actions, but ultimately they will reveal themselves as being emotionally shallow and manipulative. 

When you’re the child of a parent with Dark Tetrad traits, you don’t have the perspective of an independent adult in that relationship, so you can’t evaluate it on those terms. Like Lauryn, you will do everything in your power to find a benevolent explanation for lying and manipulation. In the initial aftermath of Kendra’s arrest, Lauryn expressed a need for her mom that overcame her horror at her behavior, and even wrote letters to the judge asking for her mother to be released. It’s normal to need your mother, even if she can’t fulfill that need physically or emotionally, and this naturally human bond will keep people in relationships with Dark Tetrad caregivers for their entire lives. 

Fortunately for Lauryn, it seems that building a stronger relationship with her father, who stepped up as much as he could to support her through this ordeal, gave her the safety and guidance she needed to separate herself from her mother. She now recognizes that her mother needs help, and during her final interviews she shares that she hopes her mother gets that help before she sees her again so that things “don’t go back to the way they were.” It’s hard to tell whether Kendra is capable of seeking and benefitting from professional support now or ever, but if she does, we hope that Lauryn can receive whatever closure she may still need as she continues growing into an independent person. 

If you believe you are in a family, friend, or romantic relationship with someone who exhibits Dark Tetrad traits, finding time for yourself to gain clarity on what you need outside that relationship will help you recognize worrisome signs and navigate the confusing and tragic events that may follow. A therapist can help you identify healthy boundaries, build your sense of self, and ultimately empower you to identify and avoid close relationships with people who will likely hurt you. 

If you recognize the Dark Triad in your own thoughts and behavior and have the desire to change one or more of those traits, a therapist can support you through that process as well. Dark Triad personalities who seek treatment have found success in working on interpersonal relationships and changing the way they interact with others. Specifically, therapists work with the person to develop their capacity for “agreeableness,” or their desire to get along with others. Over time, these small steps add up to a more functional person whose life isn’t overwhelmed by the chaos they feel compelled to cause. A Dark Triad person in treatment may not fully appreciate the pain they cause to others, but they can recognize the difficulties in their own lives that stem from being unable to connect with others authentically. A mental healthcare professional can give you the tools to repair your relationships without ripping up and remodeling your whole personality. 

All of us struggle with dark traits of one kind or another, and even the most disengaged and self-centered of us desire connection as part of our human experience. We all have the room to grow and improve ourselves, and while we may have different reasons for doing so, from a desire for companionship to a desire for social advancement, the results can be beneficial for everyone around us. Schedule an appointment with a therapist to identify areas of your life where you struggle, unhealthy or destructive coping mechanisms you may have developed in response, and ways to put our emotional turmoil in its proper place so that we can help and support one another through even the most trying times.