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.
Sociofree
“Even when I see a car like his, I look twice. The name of the town where he lives triggers a certain feeling in me. Guys with his name, same pangs. Shows we used to watch, same pangs. Things in life we used to complain about, same thing”on and on. It will be a while, I’m only 3 mths NC”…… I STILL GO THROUGH THIS TOO.
The hard part for me, the sick part, the inexplicable/still somewhat confusing part is that twisted and intertwined between all the dysfunction, deceit, bad treatment, flaws and the personality disorder etc… there was this kind of dance of intermittent realness. His guard might have been down, his chemical imbalance- balanced, his mood stable, whatever it was – but over the years – there were just times shared of nice interaction, shared moments, a genuine belly laugh, a quirky off the cuff comment about the situation. With no guise or need to control or want something in return. Dont get me wrong, these were rare happenings. But they stay in my memory too.
There is no question a greater percentage of his make-up is quite challenged and dysfunctional. But there was something about him that got the best of me. And the worst in me. or maybe I will discover something about me that gave him the best of me and gave him the worst of me…
But he was never anything consistent or genuine beyond a moment here or there. Except if he wanted or needed anything – there he would be – as present as ever in my life — for his ultimate benefit/gain to manipulate having his want/need fulfilled – or to get his fix of control and manipulation or pure and simple entertainment from doing so… and then back to Jekyl he would become.
learnthelesson,
Yes I completely agree, “there is never anything consistent or genuine beyond a moment here and there, except he wanted or needed anything, then back to Jekyl he would become”.
Loved the way you termed it “dance of intermittent realness”. We were being jerked around to the utmost degree, by a skilled expert at it, ANS at the most intimate level of our core being. It’s rather easy to analyze now from a distance, but when we were in it, it was pure hell to take in, decipher, deal with. As a result, and as Henry said in another thread, this led me to toxic behaviour of my own towards him. Like Elizabeth Conley, I agree that dealing with him made me “irritable, grim, haggard”, to say the least. I would add otherworldly, out of my skin at times, so much so I didn’t even recognize myself while acting out.
On your other point, remembering times of nice shared interactions, albeit few and far between. This is very tempting BUT it can potentially set us up to cave in a weak moment down the road, EVEN if we have progressed away from our past, EVEN if we are armoured against these evil devils. EVEN if we have garnered a strong self of who we are and what we deserve, EVEN if most memories of them turn to disgust.
EVEN if intellectually, I know in my head some very damaging truths about S’s, amongst toehrs are:
– that the lights are out in half their brains
– that their social peer group does not resemble me at all
– that they are clueless about intimacy
– that they don’t want what consitutes a relationship
– that they were always looking to profit from their entanglement with us
– that they were conniving while they were with us to ensnare someone else – or many other people
Sociofree – 🙁 Good post. The reality sometimes shakes me to my core.
I no longer “dwell” on the memories of the good dances/bad dances. Sometimes revisit it briefly if triggered.
I also realized part of my coping skills from my childhood were to BLOCK OUT the bad memories. Literally wipe my slate clean day after day after day to cope. Im very aware, especially with Kathleen Hawk encouraging us to “feel our emotions, our anger grieving” that I need to devote some time to visiting and revisiting that anger place in my mind (or I will knee-jerk response it and shut it down/block it out/avoid it) and it will come back to haunt me.
I may be “slowing” the process by tossing into the mix, “as screwed up-unhealthy – toxic- as majority of it was – the fact is we did have the intermittent dance of realness (throughout the years) and I will not bury that either (I AM STRONG(er) now, I AM more TRUSTING OF MYSELF TO BE ABLE TO GIVE AWARENESS TO THAT FACT, AND TO NOT LINGER, STAY IN THAT PLACE OR GIVE ANY CREDIT TO IT HAVING ANY MEANING – OTHER THAN YES, WE EXPERIENCED AN UNHEALTHY CONNECTION WITH EACHOTHER (with a bit of everything mixed in it).
I was worn out by the end. I am disgusted by all of the truths about him. Some of which I knew and denied. And others which he blatantly chose to be deceiving and verbally abuse/scare tactic me into questioning my gut and continuing along entangled in his evil ways.
Live and learn…and Lovefraud to remind you to stay on track… thank you Sociofree.
Great list, SocioFree. I might add one thing. That they are incredibly needy, which we can actually pick up on if we are aware of what they are demanding from us. When I think about them, I sometimes relate them to professional beggars on the street in NYC. They can be charming, chatty, even charismatic, but they have one objective, to move your money into their pocket.
learnthelesson, I so relate to what you’re saying about the good moments. But I’ve broken them down in my own mind into two categories.
There are those fleeting moments when their all their negative stuff seems to settle down — often it’s when they’re right off a win — and they act like normal people, open about themselves, capable perhaps of bonding. I have my own memories of intimate and honest conversations with my sociopath. In his case, it was usually when he had taken some heavy-duty anxiety meds that he’d stolen from his his last girlfriend before me. But whatever precipitated it, I learned a great deal about him in these conversations, though I can’t say that they involved any greater-than-usual interest in me or my feelings.
The other type of memorable moment was when he was being Mr. Wonderful. These usually happened when he was on the “incoming,” setting me up for another deal of some sort. Then, I had the man of my dreams.
What I try to remember about this second type of event is that I was looking in the mirror. What he was projecting back to me was me. What I wanted, what I dreamed about, what I needed to make me a whole person. I was in love with myself. And that was what made the bonding experience so powerful. That was why I couldn’t let go of wanting it.
In my healing process, I experimented with doing Jungian dream analysis on these hugely seductive memories. That is seeing him, me and everything else that might be meaningful in the scene as facets of myself. It was a very interesting exercise. It virtually put me squarely in touch with the shadow side of myself that he was playing at being. I was manifesting what was lost in me.
I know it’s sort of hard to imagine a sociopath as a therapist. But if you could convert these memories to an imaginary therapeutic session, where someone is doing psychodrama with you, and you guide them to be everything you ever wanted, you might see how I view this.
And you could play with talking with this “other half” of you. Maybe asking it what it wants from you. What it would take to bring it up fully into your life.
When I was involved with my ex, there was a weirdness in the relationship that I didn’t understand at the time. We interacted in what I called our “daylight” way, which was the basic sociopath-collaborator interaction. He controlled things; I gave in. But in the e-mails I wrote him, I was talking to an entirely different person. Someone who knew me, understood me perfectly, had as much stake in my feelings and my life as I did. And it just flowed from me so naturally that it was like some part of me knew that he was like that.
It was very confusing at the time. Because I had no evidence, beyond the occasional appearance of Mr. Wonderful, to justify that belief. In fact, he ignored these e-mails for the most part, or made snide comments about my writing or my feelings. I didn’t get anything meaningful back from them, except he occasional stiff demand that I tell him exactly what I wanted, like he was willing to compromise some small bit of his independence if I really insisted it was part of the deal.
It took me a long, long time to untangle this. I kept thinking that I wouldn’t be writing these e-mails, if something in me didn’t instinctively know that something in him really, deeply cared about me. I tend to trust instincts like this. But the reality never matched.
I had to finally surrender to knowledge like the list SocioFree wrote to stop believing that it was true. To understand that there was nothing in him that was capable of understanding, valuing or caring about someone like me. Even the “lost baby” centers that I believe are deep inside these people, protected by the big bad sociopathic construct, wouldn’t recognize anything about me beyond it’s need for its lost mother. (The underlying reason in my opinion why we find ourselves in one-way caring for them.)
So, when I let go of imagining that this person is who I’m talking to, the question remains, who am I talking to? I’m not sure when in my processing I figured out that I was talking to myself, a part of myself that I thought I’d lost or that I’d buried in order to cope with trauma.
Does this make any sense at all? Anyway, in my mind it explains the intense bonding. And it also gave me a strategy for dealing with those memories, by moving them right into dream analysis or therapeutic mode, where instead of being a source of pain and confusion, they became part of the path of recovery.
I am now looking at “healing” as not only a journey but a TWO part process….the FIRST part is to get over the ACUTE GRIEF over the loss, the SECOND part of the process is to FIX OURSELVES so that we will NO LONGER be vulnerable to Ps in the future.
I realize now, looking back, that I have done the FIRST part of the healing process OVER AND OVER AND OVER, but never kept on the “road to Healing” long enough to come to the SECOND part of the process, which is where I am I think NOW on that road.
My healing process is NO LONGER ABOUT THEM, but about ME. Because if I don’t fix ME, and stop struggling to find my own “chink in my armor” I will get right back into another situation where I will allow myself to be re-injured by ANOTHER FREAKING PSYCHOPATH.
When I first came here to lovefraud my healing was still very much in the acute grief mode, to heal the CURRENT injury/loss, to get out of the denial about my egg donor’s part in it all.
My egg donor was NOT the “Beast of Budapest” but she was NOT a good, nurturing mother to me, though my P-sperm donor WAS the “Beast of Budapest” as is my P-offspring. Yet, my egg donor’s early conditioning of me to endure abuse and to “let’s pretend it didn’t happen” and “let’s pretend we are a nice, normal family” SET ME UP to endure amazing amounts of abuse before I finally GOT IT that SHE was “requiring” this of me and I had to NC her in order to EVER get beyond the FIRST stage of healing and make myself P-PROOF.
The “Siren Songs” that float across the air and lure us back into the fray with yet another P, and yet another P, over and over—and these “Songs” may be specific to each of us as individuals—“the mirrors” of our dreams, as it were—are so TOXIC and addictive that only when we come to see what they were, are we able to resist their calls to us.
I can see where the “Siren Song” of my intense desire for a loving partner in life (after my husband died) let my P-XBF hook me in, I can see where the “Song” of my love for my P-offspring hooked me in to denial of what he really was, etc etc. all NORMAL and admirable desires, but twisted by my own denial of FACTS, of REALITY, into allowing of abuse.
It is normal and natural to have desires for loving connections to other people, but it is IMPOSSIBLE for the psychopaths to reciprocate our love and connection, so it is imperitive for us to remain P-free, and since they are predators, WE must protect oursellves, WE must learn the signs and LEARN TO HEED THEM rather than be hooked into a destructive, one-sided relationship. WE must become wise enough and strong enough to PROTECT OURSELVES from our own deeply held desires when they are presented as “Siren Songs” by the psychopaths. Not an easy task, but one at which we must learn to excel, or forever be doomed to alternately walk the healing road and the road to hell.
Kathy – There hasnt been a single statement or comment or suggestion that you make that doesnt make sense to me!!!!!
There were times when I would actually subconsciously “see” myself talking to myself via my emails to him. Not conversations with myself, but in trying to fix “HIM/US” what I was writing about in my emails to him were things I needed to do to fix/help the buried me or the prior trauma in me. At the time, I didnt quite get the big picture as you have helped to uncover it more clearly – but there were times I was sensing there was more going on with everything going on…
To understand that there was nothing in him that was capable of understanding, valuing or caring about someone like me, HURTS LIKE HELL. But all of his actions equate to that fact. For me I wanted to believe that he cared about me as best he possibly could (what that is for an S – Im not sure).
And reality is I never got any meaningful bonding experiences back from him from my efforts, emails, or support to him. Maybe some one-liners, or making a light hearted joke or making a subject change. But nothing of meaning – he wasnt capable of meaningfulness.
I will follow your suggestion to begin asking this “other half of me” what it wants from me, etc. But Im scared to find out. or scared I wont know how to give it what its searching for.
But I am comprehending more and more now that what I “thought” was this unbelievable intoxicating connection with him, was really me looking in the mirror, loving myself. Now I need to learn to do that without “having to have a mirror” in front of me.
Thanks again. Im off to do volunteering with my 8th grader for a student council project. We are preparing and serving meals for the families staying at the Ronald McDonald House for Childrens Hospital. Im looking forward to sharing this experience with her.
Have a beautiful day all..
Kathy and learnthelesson:
I find it interesting the number of us who fell into the trap of communicating with our Ss by email, text messaging, etc and then used — what were nothing but words on the page to conjure up a relationship.
I had dinner the other night with two friends and we brought up this very topic. One of the guys told us that he had a date with someone. He was waiting outside the restaurant and got a text — “Have to cancel date. Went home with the flu and am going to bed.”
He looked up a the bar across the street. And who do you think he saw going in? YOu got it. His date. So, he texted back “I hope you sleep well at X Bar.”
Another woman said she had gotten a text: “Have to cancel date for Saturday night. Have to go to Tennessee because my mother is very sick.”
Gee. You’d think both of those would have merited a phone call.
S was the king of texting. If he called, he would never leave a message on my voicemail. And stupid me, if I saw a hang-up from him, would return the call, instead of assuming that he had called by mistake and hung up. Had me trained perfectly, that one.
But, the point I’m trying to make is that it is way too easy for people to manipulate and lie by text and email. It is way to easy to cheat on someone by text or email — all you have to do is excuse yourself from your newest victim, go into the bathroom and text.
I”m not saying the occasional text isn’ acceptable — (i.e. “I’m running late — will be there in 15 minutes). But, as a method of communication, it isn’t acceptable. Of course, Ss love it — because they can say the words, but don’t have to worry about conveying the emotion.
My policy now is if I want to communicate with someone — I CALL. If I don’t get him/her, I leave a message on their voicemail. And I expect the same in return. Caso cerrado.
I guess I am a dinosaur, have never texted anybody. I have too look for my bifocals if the cell phone rings to see who is calling so I just answer it. I changed numbers first thing when I went no contact a year ago. Mostly because I didnt want to sit and wait on the phone to ring when I knew it wouldnt. I never got a letter in the mail or a email either. He did show up in person a couple of times but I just shut the door on him. I am sure he would love to tell me how happy he is and all about his new life etc. and he would delight in the pain it would cause me. That is why I had to go no contact, I don’t want to know anything about him, good or bad. I have to accept the financial and emotional devastation he left behind, too even consider asking him to repay me what he owes me would get my house burned down or worse..I learned early on in the relationship I was in danger – so far so good – now if I could just get rid of his skinny ass ghost. The dafodils we planted are blooming – this spring I didnt mow em down – not yet anyway…..
Me neither, Henry. I don’t text and I don’t IM. Texts are too short form for me. IM-ing is just nerve-wracking. Too fast. Too easy to say more than you meant to. As far as he went, his written communications were very very sparse.
There are a few real gems, like the one where he made a comment, about someone else, not me, how some people are so suggestible that they’re hardly any fun. Now why didn’t I run that through my inner Rorschak test?
And some pornographic responses to my impassioned love letters when I was out of town. What do you think when someone responds to “I love you” with “I want to do you”?
Uh oh, I’m at the edge of one of those “I’m too stupid to live” attacks. Better change the subject.
Caso cerrado, Matt? I love it. You could use that as an online name. I hear the gavel banging down.
BTW, at least you got a text. I’d get awakened in his bed (after driving 100 miles down to Brooklyn to take him to the opera) with “I need to you to leave now. I’m otherwise committed for the rest of the day.” Or just going incommunicado for days when he left for a meeting. Or telling me he was going to Europe for three months in a week, and then leaving to spend the weekend with someone else. Or visiting to use my bed, money, borrowed furniture, cellphone and time for a couple of weeks while he was subletting his apartment in Brooklyn, and then coming back here to arrange on my phone to meet his ex-girlfriend for a week in New York when he left here.
My blood pressure still rises when I go back to these memories. And I find myself in that same old round of question-asking. What was wrong with this guy? What was wrong with me? And I have to breathe, nice deep belly breaths. He’s gone. It’s over. Thank heavens.
But you know it wouldn’t have mattered if he had written or texted or hid it from me. Because that’s the way it was. There’s a great scene in “Postcards from the Edge” when Dennis Quaid is in the shower, and Meryl Streep is complaining about the way he communicates with her, and he’s sneering that women are always complaining about the “way” men talk but what they really don’t like is what they’re saying. As I recall, she was in police uniform for her role in a movie and she pulled out her gun and shot him with blanks, while he was standing in his towel in front of his house. Nice scene.
Breathe, Kathy.
What were you saying about talking on the phone? Oh, yes. Well, that does help if you’re trying to figure out what’s going on.
But if you already know, and you’re still in the deal…
Oh, I’m so glad I’m not there anymore.
before I changed numbers he called and said he missed me and wanted to try and work things out – so I thot about it all nite and next morning hit redial – he answered – we talked a while and he was all nicey nice and baby talk – I said Do you know who this is? And he said yes it’s Robert~~~~~~~~~~my name aint robert – the next day I had new numbers – he shows up the folowing sunday morning asking why I canged numbers? I just shut the door – why bother…