Escaping the clutches of a psychopath…

Editor’s note: This topic is sexually explicit, although totally relevant to Lovefraud’s discussion of psychopaths. Please skip this posting if you would find it offensive.

I just escaped the clutches of a psychopath
Just today I’ve gone “no contact” with an abusive manipulator. I have always known that I was empathic, and I have always tended to attract predatory people. But I have been pretty good, for the most part, at discerning them at one point before too much damage was done. That being said, I have never actually done any extensive RESEARCH on the topic, until I started to have my doubts about this guy I was recently dating.
It was strange, because from the very beginning, I had this almost preternatural feeling that something was off. I could not exactly put my foot on it, but it just felt as though there was something about our relationship that didn’t set right. I pulled background reports, I investigated his past and social media, and I didn’t find ANYTHING that sent up any red flags.
I think it’s important to also mention that he basically admitted to me that he was a psychopath when we first started corresponding. I went back through our text messages, and he told me that his heart was black and cold, and that ice ran through his veins. And I actually told him that *I* saw something behind all that blackness that was there, that I saw a glimmer of something good behind the cold. Now though, as I look backwards, I have to ask myself if I ever did see anything, or if that was just his cunning manipulation at work from the start.
The relationship spanned about 3 months, and during all of that time, he claimed that he wanted to spend all of his hours with me. He told me how much he missed me, and he texted all of these really heartfelt, beautiful things.
I should also mention that I work as a male escort. It’s funny, because early in the relationship, after our first sexual encounter, I told him what I did…. and he told me that he was glad that I had not said something before, as he would have probably not pursued anything with me. (damn damn damn damn)
Anyhow, as the relationship began, he showed a genuine effort to really try to come to terms with how to date an escort. He researched literature, and he really touched me in that he seemed to really be working towards coming to grips with it. In hindsight, I know now that this was actually a perfect scenario for him to manipulate, because I began the relationship at a significant disadvantage as he was the guy who had to “deal with” the fact that his partner had sex with other people. HE only had desires for me and was faithful(so he claimed), but he was trying to understand how our sexual encounters were different. He appeared very vulnerable and I had a great deal of compassion and love for him because dating as an escort is not easy, and noone has really stayed along as long as him. I know he was gathering information to use later now, but at the time I was very touched and it really worked to feel he was genuine.
However, there were certain things that I picked up on, that always had me feeling that there JUST wasn’t something right going on . He said all the right things, yet we kept having the same types of arguments about the same things over and over again. And it was always to do with my escorting, and how when I had to see clients, he felt like he was always secondary to these guys. He really made me conflicted about this, and it got to a point that I began to actually see less clients because of it, which of course caused me financial worry. He always made these offers to lend me some money if I needed it, that it was no big deal… but I refused to do this, as I do not like to be indebted to any one. I have been self sufficient for some time now, and I took pride in that. But he wanted nothing more than to get me dependent upon him.
My uneasiness became so pronounced, that I actually purchased a GPS tracking device with the intention to surreptitiously place on the bottom of his wheel well, to find out if he was indeed telling me the truth or not. I got the device, and then on the day I planned to do it, we had some great conversation and I actually made the decision to come clean to him as I was doubting my doubts at this point, and I showed him what I had got and what I was planning to do. I will never forget the look of surprise on his face when I pulled out that device. He was stunned that I had even procured such a device, and he was obviously surprised that I felt compelled to do so. He didn’t make much of a big deal of it at the time, but the following day, he used it to create some huge emotional blowup that was exhausting and to me, came from nowhere. This is where I pinned down the tell of his dishonesty.
Whenever he got “emotional”… it just didn’t ring true. He claimed to be feeling hurt, he could even produce tears, and yet I didn’t seem sincere. It was so disconcerting, because he had the histrionics down pat… it was just missing any sort of conviction. It was such a bizarre experience. Such a disconnect and I was stumped. He seemed to just be contrary for the sake of being contrary.
Things progressed, and we took a couple of trips together, and although I was making the gestures, I was still feeling some sort of ominous foreboding that something wasn’t quite right… We actually got to the point where I believe he was planning on cutting some of our time together. However, on that evening, we had a conversation that took a dark turn and it changed everything for me. He was talking, and he told a series of stories that were obviously geared to manipulate. He started off by making a comment about how we had met. It was a sort of anonymous thing in which he left his front door open, and I let myself in and came into his bedroom. He made a comment basically asking if I had did any research on him prior to going that first night. Had I googled his phone number or done any checking on him. I said no, I didn’t start that until after we were starting to see each other. I didn’t think it was going to be anything more than a trick. But I did tell him I had a stun gun in my pocket, so HAD it gone down bad, I would not have hesitated to drop him and split… He then went on to tell me about this guy he knows who is a masseuse, who has a boyfriend in an open relationship, and even though they are open, he still cheats, and he said this guy made a hookup on one of the apps, but when he arrived, there were three guys there who proceeded to beat him senseless and rob him, then discard him in the alley… said they took his phone and he had to beg someone on the street to borrow theirs so he could call his partner and confess what happened to get picked up… I was starting to feel a little uneasy, and I made some sort of comment that reminded him of a movie, his favorite movie, which happened to be requiem for a dream. I asked him some of his other favorite movies, and EACH and every movie he named was some sort of dystopian film that ends with a tragedy. he said he loves to see films where at the end, it’s completely silent in the theatre as everyone has to process the tragic ending of the film. I made a comment about how I preferred to see films that had some sort of positive feeling at the end… I liked to leave feeling good. I asked his favorite song, and he replied with a song I had never heard before. He started talking about how he had started listening to it first as a kid, and didn’t really understand the lyrics, but as he grew older the lyrics took on a much more powerful meaning. He really stressed just how AMAZING the lyrics were. It was called “December Sunlight” by the the… I pulled it up and saw immediately that it was released in the year 2000, and I uttered a puzzled ‘huh’… I asked if maybe there was another version he was thinking of, as this was released in 2000, and he was decidedly not a child at that time… His reaction was almost comical… he literally jumped up straight and looked at the screen, and his eyes got all crazy looking, and he just said oh I must have just thought it was earlier than that… I don’t know how I could have made that kind of mistake… but it was such an ODD mistake and it seemed such a weak answer, and it was now probably about the fourth time I had caught him in a little lie like that… so it had an impact… then as I read the words, my veins got cold and my reaction was visceral… I literally felt my blood go cold…
And there was a time when she would pray
That each teardrop that rolled down her face
Would represent a day of pain for him
But she’s changing the way she feels
About wasting her time and tears
Cried out, cried out, cried out
Cried out, cried out, cried out
And all the tricks and all the lies
He tried to pull over her eyes
Kept running through her mind
She looks back in disbelief
In confusion and in grief
At what his secrecy was revealing
You can scream into your pillow
You can pray into the night
But you can’t switch off your feelings
Like you’d switch out a light
It was a song about a woman who was picking up the pieces of her heart after a man had tricked her into loving him… It was like he told me at that very moment… what he was doing to me… and it all clicked… and I got really quiet, and I told him I didn’t feel comfortable right now, and that I needed him to leave… I asked him to leave…
He then jumped out of my bed, and had big alligator tears in his eyes, and he told me how HORRIBLE it was that I took that song and I made it about me and I turned it into something horrible. He told me that HIS heart had been broken, and that song was about picking up the pieces of his heart, and it had gotten him through some dark times… and he cursed me for having now RUINED that song for him forever… he stood there and just berated me about how I took that from him and he would never get it back…
And of course… I feel absolutely awful, because further down she does start singing about the sun shining again and how she wants to love again… and I started to feel absolutely horrible that I did this… But I *STILL* couldn’t figure his reaction… It just didn’t seem right for someone who claimed to love me… why would he want to make me feel so bad about myself for that. If he couldn’t see that I could take that song and connect with the part where she’s being decived, as we HAVE HAD this discussion where I am still being uncertain of whether he is truly who he says… And I had convinced myself that I was just making connections that weren’t there… I was delusional… But when he had that reaction and just seemed to keep PUNISHING me for this over and over again even after I said I was sorry and that he said he forgave me… he STILL kept twisting the knife… And then my eyes opened WIDE… I got very still… and I said… leave now… don’t ever come back here… GO.
He looked horrified… he started to stammer… saying how could I do this… and I told him to move it… I said get out now or I’m calling the police… I want you out of my house right now! And he made his way to the front door…. all the while saying how crushed he was… how I had NEVER LOVED HIM AT ALL…. and the histrionics… and I just shut the door in his face… and fell to the floor sobbing… an utter mess… broken if you will… in pieces…
After he left, the texting began… horrible texting with me the villian… I blocked him… I just couldn’t take it… Then I stumbled across this audiobook, “The sociopath next door”… I started listening to that book, and it was like a fucking play by play of my life over the past 3 months… My jaw was literally on the floor as I heard the recounting of EVERY SINGLE DEVICE he had used on me… it was TEXTBOOK… it was the most horrific and yet at the same time BLESSED thing I had ever heard… I wasn’t crazy!!!! They could have wrote that book on how he behaved… it was UNCANNY… IF ONLY I had that knowledge prior to meeting him… It was cathartic… And I have to say… once I realized just what he truly was… it helped me heart to heal… It was like a hyper-driven healing… by the time I finished listening to the other people recount their stories which were my story, just experienced by a different person, I was clear eyed and I was resolved.. Angry but also oddly clear-headed as well… I am a very logical person, so I was able to see what happened pretty rationally… and I couldn’t BELIEVE that I had never run into someone like this before…. and I was DETERMINED to share this experience with as many as I could to hopefully save someone else the horrible experience of this raping of the soul. I felt that he stole from me, he raped my soul, and I want vengeance. I was getting scared as I listened, as it was starting to sound like *I* was a sociopath as well… but I distinctly saw the difference… my conscious is what separated me from him… And I understood now WHY I was such a desirous target for him. I represented the WHOLE verson of him… I represented to complete version of him. I was able to experience love and compassion where he could not. I was actually capable of ALL HE WAS but MORE… and he couldn’t stand it…
I’m still no contact with him… but I don’t plan on letting this just slip away. I need personal closure… and I want to make him sweat a little… He didn’t realize what he was dealing with, and of that I’m sure he’s pissed… but I want to shake him a bit… I want to make him uneasy… I want to turn his world a little upside down somehow…