There are predators among us. There’s something qualitatively different about them. They use powerful tactics to play on your strongest needs and insecurities and to make you abandon your instincts about them, allowing you to eventually become captive. Their true nature often only comes to light when the jig is up.

In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People is now available for download to your Kindle, Nook, Ipad, or other digital device

Most of us can’t simply turn our human sensitivities. While we might utilize certain “defense mechanism” to assuage a certain amount of guilt when we commit a minor transgression, we can’t simply divorce ourselves of all emotion and caring. But psychopaths can.

There’s been a lot of media hype about psychopaths in recent weeks. But true psychopaths are neither as common nor as easy to identify as some in the popular media would have you believe. You have to really understand those devoid of empathy, remorse, and conscience in order to minimize the risk of victimization.

The central tenet of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is that how we think about things has a strong bearing on the decisions we make and the actions we take.