Not long ago, Lovefraud received the following note from a reader:
Your articles have given me a lot of peace and the ability to see good in life again, though I’ll never go back into the mainstream of society because of the abuse and betrayal I’ve experienced. It’s sad that the vision and understanding one achieves after being victimized by a sociopath prevents you from ever being able to get close to anyone again. I’m working through that though, so I just take it one step at a time. Maybe you could write some more about that?
Yes, dear readers, we do need to take recovery one step at a time. But know that we can go back to the mainstream of society. We can recover to the point of allowing ourselves to open to love again.
For each of us, the experience of the sociopath was probably the most traumatic of our lives. The betrayal shakes us to our souls. But sometimes what gets shaken loose is the negative beliefs that enabled us to fall for the sociopath in the first place. Beliefs like “I’m not good enough.” “Nobody loves me.” “There’s something wrong with me.”
Those were my beliefs. They were buried deep in my psyche, hidden by my brains, writing talent and management ability. But my ex-husband, James Montgomery, plowed through my life, crushing the structures I’d built to present myself to the world—like my career, bank account and credit rating. With the structures gone, I came face to face with the beliefs.
The beliefs were wrong. It was the sociopathic upheaval that enabled me to realize that and let them go.
How did I do it? Quite honestly, it was painful. I cried. I raged. I released layers and layers of negative emotion. And finally, on April 19, 2001, I gave up the battle to make my ex pay me back.
Nine days later I met Terry Kelly. We dated. We fell in love. We married.
Friday was our fifth wedding anniversary. We still love each other as we did when our romance was new and fresh. Today, we exchanged mushy Valentines.
These have been the happiest years of my life. We enjoy each other’s company. We comfort each other in times of stress. We support each other in everything—in fact, without Terry, there would be no Lovefraud.
So yes, there can be life and love after the sociopath.
Please do not give up on life because of the terrible experience. If you do, then the predator will truly have won.
Instead, give yourself time and permission to heal. Find the blind spot within you that made it difficult for you to see the sociopath’s agenda. Recognize that you are now educated about this personality disorder, and you won’t be fooled again. Trust your intuition.
When we’re in the midst of the pain and trauma, it is difficult to believe that life can turn around. But we really do need to believe it, and allow ourselves to move, day by day, toward our own healing. Because healing can bring us love.
OneJoy,
You have a very healthy attitude about your grandma: accepting what you can’t change. That’s what I’m working on for myself.
Sky – it’s the attitude she wants me to have – and there is a big lesson here about letting go – something that i used to know how to do. it’s weird though – another loss and i am going to grieve hard for her.
onestep – this will be a loss that you can grieve for in a healthy way – I grieved for Harley – i miss him so much but my tears and sadness was my way of saying good bye to a good friend.
My grandmother was more of a mother to me than my real mother, she was 95 when she died..I could let her go and remember the good times – I will never have that feeling with my mother – she will haunt me forever…
hens – she is seeing my grandad with her everyday. this is good, regardless of the reason. she is also seeing people on the TV pointing at her and talking to her…she says, ‘one of them is Indian’. she is seeing our ancestors…either by spirit or delusion.
i wrote down a lot of what she was saying. it’s the way that i can cope with it and ‘save’ it….i need to write it sometime in the future.
onestep write down all you can – my grandmother told us storys of her father who was in the civil war – it was quite a story – i am sure she embelished but she was a great story teller…
hens – a few years ago I asked her to write things down for me. she never completed it, but the last time i saw her, i took everything that she wrote. she isn’t a particularly reflective person and i know that writing things was emotionally difficult for her. but she did write some things – it’s all out of order, but at least i have some. i’d love a recording of her voice.
hurray for the grandmothers!
Dear One/Joy,
I have a recording of my grandparents and their cousins sitting and talking and telling old stories. It is one of my most precious things.
As for your gram, I truly do believe that the “delusions” that they have are a COMFORT to them, and as they lose their touch with “OUR REALITY” they go back to an earlier time in which they were happy and content…so their “senility” isn’t all bad. It took me a long time to realize this professionally, but sometimes OUR “reality” is pretty GRIM, but their reality is less grim. So embrace your grandmother where she IS….and I hope it will give you some comfort as well. ((((hugs))))
hi oxy – i am mostly good with her being so delusional. the stuff she is saying is actually a comfort to ME. It let’s me know she is going soon (the sooner the better, as she doesn’t want to end up in care); that she is seeing our ancestors (i am trying to figure out if it is the sign language interpreters on the bottom right hand corner of the screen are who she thinks are talking to her and ‘pointing’ as her.); and she IS having fun with this. she keeps trying to explain it to the women who look in on her, and of course they are freaked out. But, she thinks the people speaking to her are funny (mostly – she does think they want her address because she was brought up speaking french and they need someone to interpret, and she says she doesn’t speak it well anymore, because’ you lose it if you don’t speak it’, and ‘anyway, ‘i don’t want to get involve din all that’ . 😉 these are all things she would have said before the senility (such a gentile term), so i was having a devil of a time figuring out if these people were outside (well, until she mentioned the address thing), in the hall of her building or in the telly…but i think they are on the telly.)
Her brain wore out in her 90’s, mom’s in her 60’s. Grandmas longevity gives me some hope.
she told me some more stories about my materanl grandfather (the man i grew up with as my Grandpa was the man she married after her son killed her first husband). She was saying how her son is avoiding her as he doesn’t deal well with death, and has never seen anyone dead. Son is in his 70’s…So, i said, he saw his father dead…so she riffed back into that story. Of her husband saying to the son (new info for me), ‘when i am finished with her, you’re next.’
I know that one of his gf’s had sent a card to him at home and gm had cut it in pieces and sent it back to her. I didn’t realize (as per last night’s story – which may or may not have an accurate timeline) that this happened just before gp tried to kill her. Grandma wrote his gf and told her that if she could serve her husband to this girl on a platter she would, she was welcome to him, but that she should understand that he wouldn’t make the gf his 2nd wife, that he would run around on her, too. So,according to last nights story, his strangling my grandma was a reaction to her sending the letter…he told her she ‘didn’t have to do that’ and she said she wasn’t sorry and she’d do it again.
gf had her in a head lock when her son shot him. his face close up to hers, her head only inches away from the gunshot wound. she said, ‘i let him slip to the floor and walked over to take care of my son, because he was the one who needed caring for, not the other one who was best left to die.’ I don’t know if she was so pragmatic before she married this man, or if his abuse drove her there. I have her cajones. I will miss her so much.
grandfather=person frustrated and murderous with not being able to reach the bon-bon because someone is blocking his way….sounds like a spath to me. which explains why mom married an n – she was trauma bonded to a spath.
i wish i had had more time with gram after i started to understand about spaths. what a cesspool my gene pool is. but i know i am talking to a sister choir mate on that one.
(((((hens – you have had a couple of significant losses lately. be taking good care of yourself.)))))
Dear One/Joy,
Yep, we sing in the same choir on that score for sure!
The senility sometimes is hostile, my MIL’s senility (after several small strokes) made her (who had been my best friend) hate me, and become paranoid…but I realized that it was not “her” that hated me, but her injured brain malfunctioning. She had lived with us for about 10 years before this started…and she ended up going to live with her granddaughters, the children of her P-daughter that she had raised. They were and are “nut jobs” I think, but they did take good care of her for the time she was with them before her death so she never had to go into care.
I am by her just like I am my P son, I remember the good times before the “morphing” into someone who hated me. In the case of my MIL it was the brain injury from the strokes, in the case of my P son it was maturing into a psychopath. With my own egg donor, I realize that the relationship I THOUGHT we had was a FANTASY on my part, not real, so I don’t have many good memories of time with her. It is all different “compartments” with different contents, but I don’t focus on the bad times, but on the good things. The little boy I loved. My husband’s mother telling me stories about her childhood, or the meals she had ready on the table when I got home from a long day at the clinic or hospital. The trips we took together.
Your grandmother must have gone through some horrible experiences with your grandfather that was shot by her son. The trauma of having someone shot with a shot gun as they were holding you in a head lock must have been horrific. Sounds like poster children for the dysfunctional family from hell. Your mother obviously repeated the dynamics in her marriage to your father by marrying a man who was so selfish and self centered.
Neither you nor I apparently followed the “script” laid out for our lives as we revolted against the story line of being permanent victims and enablers of psychopaths.
Whatever path your grandmother’s physical form takes from here on out, I think she has mentally and emotionally passed onto the other side, or is in the process of doing so at least.
I can’t remember where I read this or memorized it which I did as a 14 or 15 year old, but here is a scrap of poetry that has some meaning for me.
“first, our pleasures die, and then our hopes, and then our fears, and when these are done, the debt is due, dust claims dust, and we die too.”
Your grandmother’s fears are done…she is at peace. What more could you ask for her?