psychological vampires

Vampires have little energy to sustain their emotional lives, and thus lean on others to energize them. As they lean, however, they extract the energy of that other life.

This leaning can be very subtle. Those who try to extract some of your energy by leaning will often, quite literally, lean in towards you, if they happen to be standing nearby. If they are walking, their path will meander closer towards yours, until they almost collide with you (and yet seem oblivious that they are doing so!) Such people are used to drawing energy from those around them, and they are used to producing very little energy that could drive them to settle and reflect upon their lives.

Many many be wealthy and yet try to create the sense of their emotional victimhood to draw your energy from you.   They will make out that everything is actually going against them, that the flow of life shows no sympathy for their urgent needs.

Psychological vampires leave you feeling weaker and less certain upon their departure. In their tendency to take a shape in relation to their attraction to power, they absorb energy and form but do not give any back. Yet their leaning allows them to adopt the forms that would be easily associated with convention and normality, perhaps whilst attributing to you the notions and identity of their irregular self.

Psychological vampires seem to be giving something by their very gestures, but actually they are taking something -- warmth and life. The psychological vampire, whilst outwardly successful, has no inner life of his own.