“Psychic vampires“, or also “emotional vampires”: it sounds pretty frightening, doesn’t it?… Yet, all of us had — and possibly have daily — to be dealing with a vampire of energy. Even, these monsters are so close to us, that sometimes each one of us should better ask himself: “Am I a psychic vampire against someone else? Can I identify any of the psychic vampires symptoms in my social behaviour? Is it possible that I have become such a monster?”
Then, what are vampires of psychic power? What kind of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) are they? How to recognize the specific psychic vampires traits? But before giving any “emotional vampire” definition, I’m going to tell you one of my personal experiences with such sort of extremely unpleasant people.
Interview with the Vampire
Do you remember the 1994 pretty good movie by Neil Jordan, with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea and Christian Slater? Now, the vampire whom I interviewed was worse.
Some years ago I went with my wife to a Book Fair in a small ancient town called Bagnacavallo, which is near my hometown, Faenza. Incidentally, ‘Bagnacavallo’ in Italian language sounds like ‘washhorse’; I don’t know if somewhere there is a place with such a name, do you? But this is another story…
Well, we were wandering among the stands of the publishers, when we stopped at one, and began to browse some books that seemed interesting. Then, the man who was sitting beyond the desk started a conversation; and so far this is normal, since the man (i.e. the publisher, we learned) was there just to contact interested people and to sell them books. I don’t even remember neither what kind of books we were browsing, nor his excuse to buttonhole us, but this is not important. Having exhausted the initial pretext, he kept on talking about his publishing house; the town where it was based; some history of both the publishing house and the town; who were the authors he had published, why and when; any other business…
I am usually a friendly guy, and I never deny a conversation with a stranger; nay, not infrequently I even enjoy it. But it has to be precise, delimited, not too long possibly; and above all, it has to be a conversation. Not a monologue. That was a monologue. After five minutes, I had listened enough for my liking, and I would have preferred to move on to visit the other stands. After ten minutes, having uttered only few syllables, I began to be tired and a bit nervous. After fifteen minutes I was totally fed up. After twenty minutes I began to be angry. After twentyfive minutes my brain started to smoke. After thirty minutes I wanted to scream at the top of my voice: “Shut up! I don’t give a **** about all this!”
But I didn’t do anything. Why, you ask, I didn’t stop the conversation when that was enough for me? I’ll tell you. I think I am a polite person, and I’m sure you are too; therefore you know that politeness commands to wait for the right conditions to interrupt a conversation, i.e. that minimum gap between two words of your interlocutor, such as to allow you to say “Ok, thank you, but I have to move on, good bye”, without appearing rude. Right? Well, that gap did never occur. He never gave me the chance to catch such a gap and insert my words in it, like a knife blade to cut that endless thread. Never. He unconsciously knew it; he knew that talking uninterruptedly he would have nailed me, in that place, to the cross of my own politeness. When I realized, during that monstruous conversation, that I was allowing him to crucify me through my own politeness, I start to be even more angry. It was my fault, not his. Right?
I don’t even remember how that torture ended. Nobody is perfect, not even a vampire of attention. Maybe, eventually, I was able to take advantage of a short break to swallow or breathe, and the conversation was over. But I was completely exhausted and consumed by anger.
Definition of a psychic vampire
Now you know what is it, if you have not yet met – quite improbable. From the above story we can draw this first definition of psychic vampire:
A person who feeds on your attention in order to gratify his ego.
Of course such a person has a problem, a big problem, and he would do better to seek treatment. Unfortunately you cannot do anything for other people (unless you are a relative or a friend of his, and hardly even in this case). But you can do ALL with yourself: you can and you must learn how to deal with psy vampires. Here the Law of Attraction comes into play.
In subsequent posts we will discuss how to deal with psy vampires, and we also see that we can be vampirized also by things, not just people. But first I would like to hear from you what are your experiences with psy vampires, and how you dealt with them.