I clearly remember the shock of realizing that everything my ex-husband, James Montgomery, had ever told me was a lie. I remember the devastation of discovering the truth: His entire purpose in marrying me was to get a free place to live, take advantage of my good reputation and defraud me of my assets. All the promises, all the assurances, were literally sweet nothings. They sounded good, and meant absolutely nothing.
I remember being paralyzed by my new truth. How could I possibly plan a recovery for my life, when every day I was falling apart? Worse, no one seemed to have an explanation for what happened, or advice on how to handle it.
It’s been 10 years since I left my ex-husband. I’ve now identified what I was dealing with—a sociopath. I read books that explained the disorder, such as Without Conscience by Dr. Robert Hare. But books with practical advice on how to cope with the trauma? They’re hard to come by. One of the best I’ve found, surprisingly, is Legal Abuse Syndrome, by Karin Huffer, M.S., M.F.T., which is now available in the Lovefraud Store.
Eight steps to recovery
The book was written to help victims cope with the betrayals and inefficiencies of the “justice system” after a violent or deceptive assault. Huffer contends that continuous assault by the legal establishment creates post traumatic stress disorder in the victim.
Well, the egregious assault of a sociopath created post traumatic stress disorder in many of us, whether we got involved with the legal system or not. So in the course of laying out a plan for overcoming legal abuse, Huffer also lays out a plan for overcoming sociopathic abuse.
Huffer identifies eight steps to recovery:
1. Debriefing. That means telling someone what happened, and that person listening without judgment.
2. Grieving. It is legitimate to grieve the loss of possessions, or our lifestyle, or our place in the community.We didn’t just lose things. We lost part of ourselves.
3. Obsession. Huffer suggests coping with obsession by compartmentalizing it—only allowing yourself to dwell in it for specific periods of time.
4. Blaming. This means putting blame where it belongs: on the perpetrator. The guilt, anger and rage needs to directed towards the person who deceived us.
5. Deshaming. The dreadful experience has taught us that some of our prior beliefs are false and need to be changed. When we do this, we change our attitude from “I was a fool” to “I’ve been wronged.”
6. Reframing. At this stage, you can look at your experience, define it differently, and then articulate the wisdom you’ve gained.
7. Empowerment. You take ownership of your problems, determine how you are going to cope with them, and go into action.
8. Recovery. With recovery, you are able to move forward in your life.
Protocol works
I spoke to the author, Karin Huffer, at the Battered Mothers Conference in January. It was the first time I’d seen her since finishing the book. I told her that, in my opinion, the eight steps she defined for recovering from legal abuse would also work in recovering from a sociopath.
Huffer agreed. In fact, she said that her program has now been out long enough to have proven itself. “The protocol works,” she said.
When we decided to add the Lovefraud Store to our website, one of the books that I really wanted to offer was Legal Abuse Syndrome. It explains why other people—even those who care about you—can’t listen to what you’re saying. It tells you how to place blame where it should be—on the predator. It tells you how to handle your obsessions. Oh, yes, and it tells you how to cope with legal shenanigans.
Legal Abuse Syndrome is now available, and I strongly recommend it—even if you aren’t in court with the predator who assaulted you.
Gosh i wish i lived where you guys live. Im in the souther part of Canada , close to Detroit
Star: Now I really feel like an ass.
Stargazer-Me too, I’m glad you’re here. I try to use humor to cover the pain. 25 years married to the x, now 3 years away. At this point, I finally don’t think of her much, but the hits and misses of really connecting with people I’d like to spend time with get me down. I’ve been missing more than hitting, lately.
A weekend without my daughter and no plans for tonight…so here I am. Working at being alone without being lonely. Still, I hope better than I was. The nice thing is that the anger is much less, but the “sad” is still here.
I’ve set boundaries, and expect others to have them. And I guess at this stage I am too afraid of trespassing. So here I am.
At least there is this place here, not a substitute for real life, but a place to go when there’s nowhere else.
Like they say, sorry you have to be here, but glad you are. Thanks to all.
Rune, I hope you’re kidding cause I was. I’m sure there is room for more than one Smart Ass here. lol
I also sometimes wish we all were closer and could hang out. Jim, I have given up all hope of meeting a guy again. I am 48, and the options are just not there like they were when I was younger and more beautiful. I don’t even look or care any more. But it’s sad to give up the dream of getting married some day. I have never been married, though I’ve been close a few times. And it looks like at this point that dream is behind me now. I have spent so many years single now. My life is so stressful now, I almost wish I could just marry for convenience to have someone to help with all the heavy stuff that happens in life and all the mundane things like taking out the trash and paying the bills. I think being single is highly underrated.
Stargazer and Jim, sometimes i thoroughly enjoy being alone esp when i talk to people in relationships who are miserable and stressed out and other times i yearn for what i once had and let slip away(marriage of 17 yrs) as i didn’t know what i had a t the time but i can’t go back and all i can do is learn from the past. I just made a nice dinner for my 25 yr old son who is waiting to joing the military and already has an honours degree and then i think the loneliness will really sink in. But by that time i expect his younger brother (driving cab in Banff alberta) to come straggling home. I’ve been alone for 6 yrs now (not counting the 6 with the s as we never lived together and everything was so unorthodox i wouldn’t call it a relationship) and i am starting to accept that there isn’t going to be anyone for me in this town.
Star, im the same age as you and sometimes i feel like an alien or as one of my gf has said, like we’ve been dropped on this planet. We were both married at one time to bankers and lived in glass houses so to speak and now we look forward to taking baths at night and fudge etc. She has her animals and a younger son and is content to watch movies and is more of an isolater. I on the other hand , don’t care for tv and hate to isolate(probably the ADHD in me) so i’m always looking for some kind of excitment. I’m heading out for some groceries and then going to try and keep myself occupied tonight. I’ve spent so much of my life living through others and wanting people to entertain me that it’s a challenge to learn to entertain myself but i’m trying at least. I think when i get back to work , i’ll blow some steam off of me. I also miss my walking as it’s been too cold and i love to walk at least an hour and a half a day.
Stargazer & kindheart48-well, I guess instead of “lonely”, we could call these “nights for reflection.” But we do have, at least, someones to “talk to” here who understand.
I guess I’m free to run up to a local bar and see if I can find meaningful conversation….on second thought…
Stargazer…48?…don’t sell yourself short. I’m 58, and I see some young women your age who are most attractive in all ways.
I’ve never really been good at “going out looking”. So I go to the grocery store, go to the bank, go to the courthouse, work in the yard… try to be open to possibilities…if it happens, it happens…but this time I don’t want it “wrong” for me or her.
But I force myself to keep trying…not easy.
One of my favorite movie characters was the Cheyenne chief, Old Lodgeskins, in the movie “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman. I think Chief Dan George was the actor.
Anyway, he thought he was ready to die…so he and Jack Crabbe (Hoffman) went up the hill. The Chief laid down on his back to die. Then rain drops started to fall on his face…
he got back up and said: “Well, sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Come on, my son, let’s get something to eat.” I think that was “The End”.
I’ll just keep waiting for the magic to work, knowing it doesn’t, a lot. But it might. I guess I’ll have to there to know.
And Stargazer, the neatest woman I know right now…she’s 48. At this moment the magic isn’t working…oh, well. I guess I’m to old for her, anyway…but there’s Oxy, too…if I can get past the defenses.
I got all my work done today and this week (hooray!) and just popped in to see what’s going on here. I see some of us are dealing with depression and some of us are dealing with what I call “catastrophic thinking.”
I think they’re related. There was a time, in the last half of my five-year relationship with my sociopath, and for maybe a year and half afterward, that I was in what I called my “sitting-and-staring” depression. It wasn’t really what I was doing all the time — I had to work, feed the myself and the dogs, wash my clothes — but it was mostly what I was doing, when I wasn’t doing anything else.
I had memories like postcards or snippets of movies that keeps coming up. As though they meant something, but I couldn’t figure out what they meant. I was in pain. I felt like I’d lost everything I cared about and, worse, everything about myself that was important. I was 55 when it ended, and I thought that I’d never get well soon enough to restart myself. For a while before and a while after the relationship, I was suicidal. And I was physically ill with bone pains, infections, heart pains, headaches, swelling, etc.
There’s something I’ve written here before, but I think it’s important to write it again. I’ve been on the run from depression all my life. I had to keep myself busy and find relationship and pick where I lived and avoid anything sad or scary, because I knew I could slip into a depression at the drop of a hat. I’ve had three major multi-year clinical depressions that stopped my life dead.
At some point in this healing process, I realized I was never going to be depressed again. That black cloud over my shoulder was gone.
I think these feeling of darkness and the catastrophic thinking are part of the recovery process itself. In each one of my earlier depressions, I came out of it with some kind of huge growth spurt, becoming smarter, stronger, more aware, more spiritually grounded. I once read somewhere that depression is actually half-way through a learning experience — when we’ve already learned something but we’re fighting it.
The memories that keep floating around — they’re for you to use. Especially for the people in early recovery, like swehrli and akitameg, it can be hard to find your position relative to what happened. I spent a lot of time in the early days trying to figure out if my ex was a bad person. And if I was, as I feared, just too stupid to live. Or if it was just a case of him not loving me as much as I loved him. Or if I should have done this or that. Or if I misunderstood him, and maybe I could figure out what he really was about.
The memories are all you have to work with, other than your feelings. But at this point, the feelings don’t seem helpful, so we go back again and again to the memories, trying to make sense of it, trying to make a story out of it that makes sense if we tell it to someone else.
Everyone has their own way of resolving these things, but I can tell you a few things that help me sort it out. One was that I stopped trying to understand it, and just came down to the fact that a bad thing happened to me.
Another was that I really tried use some advice I got from a wise friend, who told me to “turn off the words, feel the feelings, but turn off the story-making machine in your head.” He was right. The word were making things more catastrophic and keeping them that way. Silencing the word machine in my head — even if I could only do it for a few minutes at a time at first — put me in better touch with my feelings. It helped me to understand that this story was about me, not him. He was just something that happened to me, but I was here forever, and this was a chance for me to become a better friend to myself.
One of the best things I did, whenever I thought that I’d lost everything, was to imagine myself rising like a phoenix from the ashes. I didn’t know who I was going to be now. But I did know that I was alive, and time was still moving forward. I realized that I was shaky and scared, but underneath all the feelings of loss and wounding, there was also something solid in me. It was that part that was here, telling the story, angry, sad, moving into the next chapter of the my life. Beyond that, I didn’t know who I was, and I had to let that be okay for a while.
As Oxy said, losing everything is an illusion. Or maybe a feeling. Early in my recovery, I thought a lot about a friend of mine who had been a competitive diver. She broke her neck when she was a teenager and became a quadrapalegic. When I met her, she was serving on the city commission, doing very good work, and had been living with a woman lover for many years. I thought about her. I thought about a friend who went blind. And another one who lost a leg in a car accident. All of them having memories of another life, and yet coming to terms with what was left and finding the capacity to build a meaningful new life. And in all of their cases, their “new” lives included loving partners and active involvements with their work or their communities.
I knew that I had to do whatever it was that they had done. Find my way through the losses that I couldn’t change, and possibly find myself as someone different than I used to be. People lived through these things. The loss of a spouse. The failure of a business. The discovery they are HIV+. Some people stayed bitter and acted like cripples. But most of the people I knew were extraordinary people, and I suspected that they were even more extraordinary for having lived through these losses. They found something new in themselves.
These were thoughts of my early healing process. I was so messed up. So depressed. In so much pain. So embarrassed. So grieving. In the beginning, I wasn’t even really angry, because I wasn’t sure I had the right to be angry. I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t right about everything he said about me, or if the whole mess hadn’t been my own fault somehow.
But I knew other people had gotten through this.
That is one of the great things about LF. People here are getting through it. We’re at all different stages, from just starting to really far along. And it give all of us a chance to get what we need.Whether it’s recognition and comfort, or role models to show us where we’re going, or a chance to give a hand or a hint to someone whose not quite as far along the path.
I said that I wasn’t afraid of depression anymore. I didn’t explain why. My depression was because I hated things that had happened to me in the past, and I hated myself for being in these circumstances. I thought I was ruined.
What I came to realized later in my recovery was that I had to let go of some fairytale dream about myself and my life. All that stuff about being ruined was just about not being what other people told me I should be. It had nothing to do with who I really was. All those thing I lost (and even the things I have today) are not who I am. Nor are my relationships. Or my disappointments. Or my son. Or my family. Or even my dogs. Even the memories are not me. They are all things that add or subtract from my happiness and accomplishments, but they are not who I am inside.
Who I am is something much simpler, clearer, wiser and stronger than any of that. It is what I was born with and what I’ll die with. And if there’s an afterlife, it’s what I’ll take on.
And it’s what I begin each day with, asking myself what will I do with this now?
In early recovery, when we ask ourselves what will we do with this now, the answer is probably, “I will try to make sense of this pain.” But as we search for that answer through the whole path, the answer changes. First it is about what you lost. Later it is about what you let go of. Later it is about what you gained in the surprising freedom that comes after letting go. At some point, you discover that you have so much that you want to give some back.
That’s what you can look forward to. I wish, like all of us who have been through what you’re going through, that we could leapfrog you over the stages. But this is like being born again, and unfortunately you have to go through the labor of it. Getting to the point of letting go is the hard part. After that, things get good.
Namaste.
Kathy
Kathy – Your posts here, let me just say this ….you cant ever leave this website! Thats all I have to say. One post that reach so many and enable so many to relate to , learn from, grow from is something you do eloquently and effortlessly. Thank you.