- This topic has 6 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 8 months ago by .
-
Posts
-
-
Hi everybody,
I feel really embarrassed and confused about an experience I recently had with a psychopath. I hope writing it here will help me have some closure.
After going to a social event regularly held at a bar a few times, I started noticing a young man in his late 20s who was always there. Strange, a bit awkward and not very talkative, but with an interesting charm, very intelligent, with a successful career and certainly mysterious. I felt myself drawn to talk to him and get to know him. After talking a few times, we exchanged phone numbers.
Bear in mind that I am currently in a relationship so I feel terrible about what happened.
I felt lonely, having serious doubts about whether my relationship was going to work out and I seemed to really click with this guy. I also happen to have an anxiety disorder.We kept in touch over text message, two weeks later we went to another social event together and had a late night dinner afterwards. He was certainly not pushy, we were both eager to spend time together. I didn’t notice anything strange that day. If anything, he seemed the perfect man. I fell for him deeply and way too quickly.
After this we kept chatting and agreed to have dinner a second time and then go to another social event. He started getting flirtatious there. At first I didn’t mention that I was in a relationship and simply did not respond to his attempts to flirt. Funnily enough he seemed somewhat clumsy in these attempts. Late that night we went to a second bar after the social event with some of the people. At that point I knew he was interested in me.
We were both quite drunk and I told him I was in a relationship and that I wasn’t in the market (it was a way for me to try to make sure nothing would happen). His answer was simply that I could call him if it ever didn’t work out with whoever I was with. At that point he mentioned that he wasn’t like the rest of the people and that he thought humans were inherently bad. This caught my attention and wanted to find out more. I led him to a table and asked him what the hell he was talking about and what had happened to him. His answer was something like “I haven’t told many people this – I feel the urge to kill, either kill myself or kill somebody else”. I barely knew the guy and he was telling me this. I was puzzled and immediately realized there was something wrong with him.
He immediately reminded me of the first guy I had dated – abusive and manipulative, he destroyed me and put me through hell. I always thought this first guy I had dated had a borderline personality disorder but after meeting this second guy recently I realized he must have been a psychopath too.
After the ‘urge to kill’ moment, this guy started to tell me sob stories about his childhood – how he’d been bullied, ostracized and so on, how he felt he didn’t fit in, also telling me he was scared of people and had stayed away from humanity most of his life but had recently decided he wanted to date. I also told him my sob stories and even told him that I had dated a crazy guy like him. We seemed to bond over the pain we had experienced growing up and the fact. Now I realize he may have been lying to me but it seemed EXTREMELY real. We ended up kissing and I told him I really liked him.
I heard a loud voice inside my head telling me to get away from him. As he was in the restroom I went out of the bar but he found me a minute later as I was walking down the street. I said that we both had mental health issues and that it was a bad idea for us to date. He insisted it wasn’t but I left anyway.
Next morning I apologized for running out of the bar via text message. I said that even though we couldn’t date I still wanted to be his friend. He didn’t say yes or no, just suggested meeting the next day. And that’s what we did. I told him how serious my relationship was and that I didn’t want an affair, that we could be friends if he wanted to. He didn’t seem interested but in the end said ‘sure, let me know if you are up for a drink’.
That’s the day when I found out, after a bit of asking, he had no friends, barely no contact with this family and that he thought most humans were highly incompetent. I also found out he had lost a job due to his impulsiveness a while ago. During those days I did a lot of research on his personality traits and became convinced he was a psychopath.
Again, I realized I had already dated one so I knew that things would get extremely messy.
At this point I was certain this guy could not give me any love (and I am in a relationship I don’t want to end yet after all) but I still wanted him like an addict wants a drug. I couldn’t contain myself. It’s what had happened in the first relationship I’d had.
I suggested going together to one of those social events we liked together, which was a total flop. He was going to leave and I suggested going for a drink together, which turned into three drinks and a drunken conversation. After -again- some provoking on my end he started telling me that he had recently stopped talking to his mother because he found her really annoying (over something stupid), and the fact he just didn’t care about affection or love and that he didn’t feel any guilt or remorse. Yet he told me he wanted to find a girlfriend since he had never had that and was eager to date. I plainly told him he had all the characteristics of a psychopath. He admitted being a psychopath but mentioned that there were a lot of misconceptions about psychopathy. That night we didn’t kiss but I was being very flirtatious with him. He said that he knew I was in a relationship but he wasn’t and was fine with whatever happened. He even said: “that’s one of my psychopath traits: I don’t care whether that is right or wrong”.
After that evening we kept in touch over text message. I said I didn’t want to go out at night anymore since it was not good for my anxiety and that I’d rather meet him during the day – drinking and anxiety don’t go together, I found out through therapy. Indeed he ignored that. I felt my feelings for him started to shift. I knew he could not give him love and I convinced myself I was alright with that. And, perhaps most worryingly, I started to feel very strange in general. Like I was a different person who wanted to hurt and manipulate people like I thought he did. I wanted revenge. But at the same time I still liked him sexually and wanted him close. A very toxic mix of feelings I cannot quite unpack. I was confused and felt a strange darkness growing within me.
Then comes the last time we met. Yesterday I went to another of these social events. I was certain he would be there but didn’t tell him in advance I’d go. At that point I just wanted to surprise him and mess with him. I purposefully ignored him for a while and talked to him towards the end. I think I surprised him. After the event he was going to go home but I insisted on going somewhere else for a drink (it was just one drink this time). It was me calling the shots on where to go and what to do. He just let it be. I started talking about how people were so easy to understand and manipulate. I started talking like him, but more weirdly I felt like him! I do not really know what got to me. I felt possessed and powerful.
This last conversation centered around his psychopathy and the fact it was difficult for him to date people if he had no empathy. At that point I asked him what he wanted from me since I could not give him what he wanted (a girlfriend or sex), so he said that at least through these conversations he could understand better how to talk to people and he felt less lonely. And of course, he secretly hoped to have sex with me someday. I said I only talked to him because I was curious to know more about him, but what I really thought is that, for me, he was like a drug and a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve. I pretended to be psychopath for some reason, even my boyfriend texted me ‘I love you’ and I replied ‘me too’ while laughing and telling this guy how stupid my boyfriend was. I feel really disturbed by this.
I was teasing and flirtatious and we got into a ‘who is winning’ kind of funny but aggressive conversation, which ended up in him pulling me closer to him and me ‘reacting’ by somewhat violently pulling him from his hair and purposefully spilling some beer on his jeans. Again that is something I never do, not sure what even got to me or what I was thinking. The whole thing just seemed sexy and empowering. He said he wad ‘won’ as I had to play dirty and then I left the bar in a rush feeling sassy and in control (I was planning to leave soon anyway).
Today I didn’t text him (I felt tempted to). Apparently he must have deleted my number from his phone, since he asked the organizer of one of the events we had been to if he cold send him my number. The psychopath knows I am in touch with the organizer via text. Of course the organizer asked me if I wanted to give this guy my number before actually giving it to him. I said he already had my number but he responded saying that that ‘my boy’ had told him he had lost my number. I think he might have been mad and deleted my number from his phone.
I thought this was a good chance to gain back control over him.
This evening I felt tempted to call him and apologize for my behavior at the bar (like spilling half a drink over his jeans and those things) but I realized this is just an endless game where I am always losing. Only going cold turkey will do. So I deleted our conversation via text message and his number. If I have his contact details, I will just go back to him and ruin my current relationship and the rest of my life.
I still feel like a terrible person for what I did to my current boyfriend and scared he will find out somehow and leave me. I am concerned the psychopath is going to seek revenge. I told my boyfriend I meet a person who was trying to manipulate me and was crazy, so that I have a cover-up in case this psychopath finds him and tries to tell him for revenge. And I feet weird that this psychopath technically did not do anything outrageous. It’s just that I realized he is a psychopath.
I feel guilty and confused. I feel like a terrible person.
I guess it’s time to forgive and heal.
-
-
This is all very mixed up, as you realize yourself, so I can sure understand why you’re so confused about it all!
I think there’s an enormous piece missing from your story. Two pieces, actually. One piece is about your relationship with your regular boyfriend. You’ve said you have “serious doubts” about that relationship, but nothing about the nature of those doubts, what the guy is like, any problems between you, what (if anything) you think might be “wrong” with him, or at least why you may be finding some aspect of the relationship insufficiently fulfilling to you, so that you’re attracted in some mysterious fashion to this psychopath guy instead.
But that may not be the main problem, and what I think is far more significant is what you called your own “sob stories” and the pain you yourself experienced growing up. Childhood experiences are enormously influential, for better or for worse, and you haven’t disclosed any details about those either. It sounds like you had a rotten childhood.
It’s striking how many people become attracted to, and then become victims of, an abusive partner in adulthood, largely because they themselves were victims of abuse in childhood. Logically it doesn’t seem to make sense. We’d think anyone abused in childhood would run a mile from any similar experience in later life. But that’s not the way it works in practice. There can be several reasons for that.
One reason can be that people raised in dysfunctional or abusive families have been conditioned to tolerate abuse instead of rejecting it. Or they don’t know what a healthy relationship should look like, because they’ve never seen one. Then they can’t tell the bad from the good. Or they’ve never been shown the concept of “boundaries,” and allow their own boundaries to be trampled all over. Or the abuse has left them with low self esteem, so they don’t believe they’re “worth much,” and they’re willing to settle for a partner who mistreats them rather than no partner at all.
And that’s not all. It’s a strange thing, but some people abused in childhood gravitate in adulthood toward abusive partners in preference to more normal, healthy partners!–in spite of the pain it causes them.
Some of them may imagine they’re “not worthy” of a healthy partner, but there’s more to it than that. Some seem to find a normal healthy partner “boring,” while the drama of being with an abusive partner is “exciting,” as miserable as it leaves them feeling much of the time. If the relationship is turbulent, at least it’s what they’re accustomed to from their distant past.
The most tragic example I ever heard of that was from Erin Pizzey’s remarkable book, Prone to Violence, of a woman who couldn’t help returning over and over again to her brutal lover “because he’s the only man who makes me feel alive.” In the end, this woman committed suicide.
Then there’s bonding over a perception (at least) of “shared pain”–which is what you’ve described with this psychopath guy. Commiserating with one another is all very well, but the trouble is, imagination to the contrary, that it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “twin souls”! A chronically abusive person may or may not have personally suffered childhood abuse. With psychopaths particularly, it can be a sob story they’ve made up to gain people’s sympathy.
Mind you, I don’t believe that’s true in the majority of cases. Psychopaths tend to come from screwed-up families whose treatment only made them worse than they might otherwise have been. But that’s beside the point. People react differently, often in opposite ways, to a history of abuse. While some people become accommodating to it, others store up a reservoir of rage than they then proceed to vent on others as adults. Many abused children react by becoming abusers themselves. Adolf Hitler was only the world’s most notorious example of that.
In short, just because you have “shared pain” with someone, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to go on being kind to you! They may end up dumping their pain and rage on you instead. And there’s something else. It may be something I’ve come to think of as the “Codependent Contract.”
I can’t be sure what drives it. Maybe someone abused in childhood thinks they’re “not worth very much,” and “nobody will ever love me. It’s no use looking for a normal partner.” Then they run across someone with “problems,” who seems to be in pain, and they think “I know what this person’s problems are all about, because I’ve suffered the same thing myself. I know my love can cure them–and then they’ll be so eternally grateful, they’ll love me forever!”
Except that it doesn’t happen that way, and they only end being abused all over again.
Or maybe they’re just innately full of love and compassion for the human race, and they can’t resist helping someone with “problems.” “Why waste my time with normal people? They don’t need my help. But this mixed-up person–this is my destiny, to help people like this to reform! It’s where I get my sense of mission and fulfillment in life!”
That’s all very well, but the “mixed-up” person is not usually amenable to “reform,” and the would-be reformer only ends up getting shafted.
Another theory about this is that people who had unresolved conflicts in childhood with an inadequate or abusive parent or other caregiver, instead of avoiding such people in adulthood, are actively attracted to someone with the same personality defects that their father or their mother had, say–with the subconscious hope that by reenacting the conflict they had with that parent they can “make it come out right” this time, and finally dispose of the issues that have nagged them all their lives.
Except that it usually doesn’t, and they end up stuck in the same old conflicts over and over again.
Well, there’s a whole grab-bag of ideas. I hope you might possibly find one or more of them helpful. It does seem to me that you’re acting out some very old conflicts and power struggles in your interactions with this psychopath guy. It’s significant that you felt attracted to him even though you knew perfectly well that he’s a screwup, and potentially dangerous to you. I don’t for one moment suppose he’s healthy for you as a partner, so do be careful. But I wouldn’t say this interaction is necessarily “bad,” as long as you handle it with caution, and examine the reasons behind your own fascination with him. It is giving you insights into yourself, if you can figure out what it all means in the context of your own life. Though it could be risky, I think it’s a growing experience that might bring you important revelations.
You have had a relationship before with a probable borderline, and there’s something wrong between you and your current boyfriend. Taken together, all this does suggest that you might have a misguided attraction toward men who are unhealthy and wrong for you as partners. But this is something you can sort out and correct, and make a good life for yourself. Your current boyfriend too is an enigma. Where are the problems there? They could go either way. It might be that he’s the real problem, that you picked another dud, like that borderline guy, only not quite as bad. Or it might be that he’s OK, and any problems between you are the consequence of your own unresolved issues. I have no way of telling.
What I do advise, as long as you can afford it, is to get therapy with a competent counselor who can help you sort this stuff out. Untangle the knots of your own life.
Good luck for the future!
-
happyunicorn3 – Wow – what a story. First of all, please stay away from the guy. He knows he’s a psychopath, admits he’s a psychopath. He is obviously toying with you. The only answer is No Contact.
But the fascinating part of your story is how you responded to him — you said you actually empowered in your banter, and you found yourself beginning to engage in some behavior that seemed psychopathic.
I think this happens more often than people admit. There is something about the energy of psychopaths that is both contagious and addictive. I’ve seen some descriptions that psychopaths are able to use their energy to hook others; perhaps that is what was going on.
So it is very important that you stay completely away from him. Do not feel like you can “be friends.” You can’t.
-
-
keep it simple
stay away from him. and dont get drunk on dates, thats just dangerous for you as a woman.
-
Happyunicorn3,
Please do stay away from him, as you already know you must. He will bring you, in the end, nothing but pain and sorrow, perhaps even real physical harm.
And, may I say how much I admire your honesty about how you felt around him, and how it changed some of your behaviors. I too have had those feelings and changes. These magnetic people can have a very strong effect on our feelings, and lots of us here have done things that were completely out of character. I remember feeling really high and energized (at least in the beginning), and free from any social constraints.
I also suffered from high levels of anxiety, and was being treated for PTSD (from my childhood experiences).
I think that the power I felt when I was first around him replaced my anxiety with something that felt BIGGER and stronger. But, like all things with these types of abusive relationships it didn’t last long. And, was NO genuine substitute for dealing with my own issues and fears.
But, initially, I felt like I was hanging around with someone who had some kind of key to freedom and strength. Little did I know that the ‘key’ is simply not having a conscience or any empathy for ANYONE, at ANYTIME.
There is no need to care, or act with care, if you don’t feel any repercussions from your actions and words. You are, in a totally dark sense, free.
It didn’t take too long for the excitement, the flirting, the feeling of losing control (and loving it) to turn to complete exhaustion and despair. In the Lovefraud sense, many of these types like to take you to the highest mountain, without ropes and safety gear, and then, when you turn to look at the view with them, shove you off to your emotional death.
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.