Several Lovefraud readers have written to me recently—annoyed, angry, horrified. These readers had finally realized what they were dealing with—a sociopath. They extricated themselves from the relationships and had no further contact with the disordered individuals. And what happened? Another sociopath came into their lives.
The readers asked: What is going on? Why can’t they leave me alone? Am I a sociopath magnet?
The answer is, not necessarily. Following are some observations to add perspective to the situation.
Millions of sociopaths
These disordered individuals are everywhere. As long as we’re living on this planet, we face the possibility of running into them.
Experts estimate that 1 percent to 4 percent of the population meet the criteria for psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder. But if you add in the narcissists and those with borderline personality disorder, as many as 12 percent of the population are social predators. In the United States, that’s 37 million people. With so many of them out there, we shouldn’t be surprised to come across them.
Faster recognition
The bad news is that these readers found themselves dealing with another sociopath. The good news is that they figured it out much more quickly this time around.
I think these readers should interpret their most recent experience as signs of growth. Yes, another sociopath came into their lives, but they spotted the predator! They know the warning signs and listened to their instincts! This is progress! This is good!
More healing
The fact that another sociopath appeared could also indicate that these readers still have more healing to do. Sociopaths sense vulnerabilities, like sharks sense blood in the water. Perhaps the readers need to look for more injuries within themselves that need to be addressed.
Remember, sociopaths come into our lives by exploiting vulnerabilities. Afterwards, we need to recover from the nasty encounter with the sociopath. But we also need to heal the earlier, deeper injury that enabled the sociopath to target us in the first place. Perhaps we were neglected as a child or abused in an earlier relationship. Or perhaps we had negative beliefs about ourselves—that we were unwanted or unlovable. By addressing and healing our vulnerabilities, we protect ourselves from further pain.
How to stay safe
The bottom line is that millions of sociopaths live among us, so chances are good that at some point, we’ll come across them. So here are the three steps to protecting ourselves:
- Know that sociopaths exist.
- Know the warning signs of sociopathic behavior.
- Listen to our instincts.
Our intuition is designed to protect us from predators. It will almost always tell us, early in the involvement, that something is wrong with an individual. The trick is to pay attention and take action.
All of these readers did that. So yes, it is annoying to find another predator. But at least they got rid of them quickly, before too much damage was done. These Lovefraud readers should be proud of themselves.
speakingup – it is hard, but time, effort, support and grace can change things. through my spath experience I lost all of my close friends and realized that my family was full of narcissists – so i lost them also. i didn’t choose to lose my friends, but i did chose to step back from my sib and father – effectively losing most contact with my demented mom, who lives with my dad.
it sucks. ‘letting go’ has no meaning, when espoused by people who don’t know the devastation caused by spaths. their denial of our reality doesn’t change our reality, only makes us more isolated. I have found much support here, and from really random strangers. we need to persevere. one tiny little step at a time. but it is more than possible to heal. with work and grace, it is probable.
I may be posting something that is very unpopular with some of the above posts but here goes.
I didnt come from an abusive family. My parents were married for 44 years and then my father dropped dead from a heart attack.
Did they have a perfect marriage? Hell no! We had many financial issues and this caused strife in our family. However, both of parents loved us unconditionally and wanted me and my two siblings to all go to college. Something they were never able to do. My mother had 8 brothers and sisters and my father had five. No, we are not Catholic, but their generation believed in large families.
Why am I attracted to psychpaths? Hell, come on, they are exciting people – at first. Many are intelligent, charming, engaging,many are musicians, artists, politicians, pilots, attorneys, and doctors. Who would not be attracted to these folks? The secret is finding the ONES that are NOT psychopaths.
I am a super empath. I believe that until someone shows me “evil” they are not evil. Sadly, the side that most on this post have seen with their ” Mr Wonderful” was charm and more charm. This is what they do. They are very good at it.
Paul Babiak who wrote “Snakes in Suits” even addresses this issue of being attracted and “woven” into the web of deceit by psychcopahts. Basically, Dr Babiak believes that most of us believe in the “good” of all people. I totally agree with this assessment about many women and men.
Does the fact that I married one mean I am a highly disordered person? Absolutely not. I was an “uninformed, young woman that believed in the best in people. I dont see anything wrong with that actually.
The challenge now, however, is that many people are disordered. The population in our country has exploded and we have multiple cultures and ethnicities now in all of our communities. Different value systems, priorities and moralty issues are mixed up in our communities for us to understand and learn to co-exist within.
What we need is education. What we need is to accept the fact that they we are good people. Good people that trusted the wrong people. Do I need to tighten up on my boundaries – absolutely. Do I need to be more wary of the charm of some individuals – absolutely!
I have arrived at a point in my life however, where I am done with men. I spent 30 years with two of the most disordered I could have ever chosen. Do I feel guilty about this choice? Yes, there are days when I hate myself. However, I know in my heart that I believed in these two men and thought it was “love”. Not so much however.
In the future, my plan is to educate young women about these predators. I dont ever want to remove the beauty of the souls of my sisters – I just want them to know themselves and understand that in this life truly the only person that takes care of you – is you.
One joy, remember those visions I had for you a few years ago (and you probably had them for yourself too)? I think they are working. 🙂 Keep dreaming of a better life, my friend, and you will find it. When you start dreaming, ask yourself what is in the way of having the life you want and what you have to do to let it go. Keep asking why and what you can do about it. If you focus on what you want, the obstacles will come up as challenges for you to overcome. You will not be so focused on them because you are focused on your dream – whatever it is. Even if your dream is just to have peace, that is a worthy goal. You will find ways mentally to create that peace within, even in stressful circumstances. Or if you can’t, you will choose different circumstances.
My life is infinitely better now than it was 2 years ago. I used to have dull weekends at home and a lot of internal and external stress. Now every day is fun and interesting, even on the days I work. I have goals and dreams, and I’m working toward them. All the things that are incompatible with my goals must go, so I am carefully releasing them. I seem to magnetize a lot of high energy people – I get invited to a lot of parties and events, and going to them raises my energy level. It’s like an upward spiral. I don’t take a lot of things personally, so I don’t get too caught up into drama with people. If someone is dishing me a lot of their drama, and I’m feeling drained, I will just end the conversation as gracefully as I can, make my escape, and not contact that person again if I don’t have to.
Keep thinking about the things that would be fun and enjoyable for you to do and find some way to do them. A little bit of joy will attract more. 🙂 Stuff will inevitably come up. Process it as you have been doing and keep going. You may need your job to fund your hobbies and your lifestyle, but if you are enjoying your life outside of work, work won’t seem so bad – you can just regard it as a paycheck. Or maybe you will find ways to make work more fun. I dragged many of my co-workers and my boss into Zumba. So we spend work time discussing Zumba and laughing a lot. I put up salsa pics on a wall at work. So whenever people come in, they ask me about them. It can kill a good 15 minutes out of my day to discuss salsa and I get all lit up (in a good way) talking about it. This is one way I make my mindless job fun. I decided to have a big Zumba/salsa birthday party next month and invite my friends from all my different social circles. I spend a lot of time planning the party and I feel excited about it. I also spend some of my work time planning our big work holiday party, which I usually do every year. I really enjoy it. Though it’s not in my job description, it makes my job more fun.
I cannot believe I waited so long to start dancing again. I have always loved to do it. It just never occurred to me. If I had time, I’d find another band (I was once a lead singer in a rock band). I think it would be a blast. But there is only so much time in the day/week. Your new bicycle sounds great! I hope you get to use it a lot! This sounds like one of those fun things that will increase endorphins and help you stay in shape.
On a different note, you know, I still have a lot of nostalgia for my mom, and I miss her all the time. But I know she is a narcissist, so I just stay away. I have had a few dreams with the following theme: I wake up as an adult to find that I’ve been living in a very dull and stagnant environment. The house is ugly; the carpet is olive green shag; the people smoke and are lifeless. They don’t really value me. But somehow, I have been living there for many years and I am part of their family. It’s as though I were unconscious or hypnotized, and suddenly I wake up. I wonder how I spent all these years with these people. It is like a fog. Usually in this dream, it is not my bio family – it is some family who either kidnapped or adopted me. Anyway, I wake up to realize I’ve been sleepwalking through this lifeless existence with these unconscious people for many years. I know I am a special person and deserve much better. But I feel some loyalty to this “family” I’ve been with. Some nostalgic comfortable feeling that makes me feel guilty to leave. I imagine this is how Jaycee Dugard felt about her captors for many years. This is how I feel about my mom. I feel this nostalgic tie to her that makes me want to contact her. And I feel some guilt that I don’t. But the higher part of me tells me that it would be psychic suicide to go back – that I cannot contribute to her life any more than she can contribute to mine because we are on totally different wavelengths. Better left alone. I even feel this nostalgia for my neighbor whom I had a crush on for years. Though now we are friends, and I could probably easily seduce him, I cannot go backwards into unconsciousness. My dream reminds me of the Cinderella story or Sleeping Beauty. It seems to have an archetypal component to it – waking out of unconsciousness to find your true self.
Becoming conscious demands so much of us it seems. We have to let go of so many past comforts if they are not in sync with our spiritual path and our goals and aspirations. People who have too much drama in their lives, habits that are unhealthy, old limiting beliefs about myself and the world……….they don’t serve me anymore. I hope what lies ahead is really fantastic for all the things I’m giving up. But I know I can’t go back. It would be like Jaycee Dugard going back to her captors because it is comfortable and familiar. So I am venturing into new territory, and I’m not sure what it is yet. But I’m enjoying the ride at the moment. The relationship stuff is a little difficult, but I’ll get there, too.
Hope,
my parents have been married for 50 years plus.
I have 2 spath siblings and one normal one.
If I told you about my grandmother, you would not believe it was possible for a woman to do what she did to her son’s mind. (my uncle)
It is my parents’ dna in addition to the way they brought us up, that made my brother and sister into spaths. My other sister and myself, just became supply for spaths.
It’s hard to judge what normal is when you’ve been raised by n parents. I thought my parents were my best friends, until I realized what my spath was. Then I saw the truth. They do love me, in their own way.
My spath also loved me, except that he experienced love as hate and planned to kill me. His addiction to drama and his sadism over ruled his addiction to me.
We all try to understand our experience in our own way. It’s not easy. They aren’t like us. They will always do things that we don’t expect. Their reactions are 180 degrees opposed to what we think is normal… but they hide it, so then we have a 360 degree behavior. I know, it’s confusing.
I just met someone who is disordered. At first it was hard to tell, he’s so charismatic and young and happy. But he reminds me so much of my spath brother. The more I know him, the more I see the similarity. A few tests have proven me right. What is scary is how my brain just overlooks what I know because a person seems so normal and familiar.
In the last few years, what I’ve learned and ingrained into my mind is that my emotions cannot be trusted. Only my knowledge of spaths can be trusted.. If it has red flags, it’s a spath. Unfortunately, we tend to go with what we feel over what we know. Spaths know this. That is their power.
Skyl… I do believe what your grandmother did to your uncle. My mother did the same to my very young mind and onward. I cannot seem to rid the tapes but the worst part is how she blackballed me from the entire family. She was brilliant.
And then so was my sister…she learned from the master.
Tonight I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from my granddaughter! Yee haw! Maybe all hope is not gone.
And, it’s my b-day today and I had so many good friends send me wishes.
I picked my friends and I am so grateful to them. They know me more than my own family knows me. My family knows me through an evil woman’s interpretation of me. My mother. And it wasn’t pretty. Even though she is dead her hatred and campaign against me lingers on through others like her in my family. Although my father was a diagnosed psychopath one thing about him was he never put me down or degraded me the way my mother did.
speaking up,
they all have their tricks.
My grandmother got her son to marry a hermaphrodite. He didn’t realize until the wedding night. He was innocent until then and so horrified that he didn’t marry again until over a decade later.
That’s what she wanted. He was her favorite and she didn’t want to lose control of him.
He still doesn’t realize it and he’s about 70 years old!
So if you ever wonder what these creatures are capable of, let that be a guide for you.
Today I had a revelation about my own spath… another revelation.
It amazes me that they are coming on so slowly. They are obvious, once you understand, but the truth is so horrible that you stay in denial, even years after you’ve accepted the truth.
Someone on LF once accused me of thinking I had “the BEST spath.” HA! I think what I have is the BEST acceptance of the utter evilness of them. And even that isn’t good enough.
I still can’t grasp their audacity. I still don’t imagine how evil they are, even though I see right through them. 3 years later and I’m still accepting that there are so many of these creatures (both male and female) who despise women and whose narcissism is unfathomable. Though I know what they are and how they think, each time I encounter one, I am flabbergasted. It doesn’t seem possible.
Is that my own narcissism, causing me to not be able to accept that there is so much evil out there?
PS
sorry to be a downer on your birthday.
happy bday and let it be a spath free day! It doesn’t matter what they do, it only matters how much we let them affect us.
Speaking_Up, I can only imagine what you’re experiencing – I don’t know, first hand, but I DO know the damages that spaths create.
I would stronly urge you to consider individual counseling therapy with someone that “gets it.” You’re waling around with a load of guilt on your shoulders that you don’t know how to shake off – nobody can really tell you how to do it on a blogging site. What you’re experiencing is beyond nearly all of our skills to assist you. Each one of us has found things that work for us, individually, but seeking the trained ear of a professional that “gets it” would be the most priceless step you could take for yourself – your Self, that is. Self = soul, or that which makes us each individuals.
You’re never going to alter other people’s perceptions or deflect their blame. People, as a rule, require SOMEONE to blame, and it’s so much easier for people to blame you rather than the perpetrator. Why that is, I cannot say, but it’ is almost universally true in human behavior. “Scapegoat.”
With strong counseling, you will learn to manage the accusations, the guilt, the shame, and everything else that goes along with spath experiences, and emerge and recover with, or without, the rest of your family.
Brightest healing blessings to you
Speaking_Up….I meant to add: Happy Birthday, dear one. The only gift that I can give you is the fact that you are priceless and precious in this vast Universe. Nobody can replace you – you are unique. Take that fact, embrace it, and may this year be a Year Of Discovery And Healing for you.
This article is so on point for where I am in my own recovery. Just two months after my divorce from the s-path was final, I met another s-path. He came on REALLY STRONG! If I hadn’t been living with my s-path mother at the time, I probably would have ended the “relationship” much sooner than 4 weeks in. Mother invited the s-path to live with us the first day I met him. Mother only put him out when he didn’t pay rent to her on time, and didn’t follow her “rules.”
I really felt like a failure after that “relationship.” How could I end up in another abusive situation so soon after getting away from the x-husband s-path? Well, the answer was that I was trained to be what others wanted me to be, and I was willing to allow my boundaries to be crossed just for love.
Not long after the second s-path, I realized that mother is an s-path. She threatened to kill me many times as I was growing up, and almost made good on her threat when I was a teenager. She tried to kill my stepdad. She abused my daughter verbally and physically. I had no idea what love felt like, but I spent my whole life trying to earn it with compliance, good grades, support and encouragement – later with sex, outstanding job performance and accumulation of status symbols. I realized at 39 that I was tired of working so hard to make everyone else happy. I didn’t know who I was, or what I really wanted from life, other than to just stop trying so hard all the time.
I finally moved out of my mother’s place, and I am happily living on my own. When someone of the opposite sex approaches me now, I don’t try to make them like me anymore. I think about how peaceful my life is, and think about whether I want what this person is peddling. I still care about others, but I can now turn someone down if he is not what I want. It feels pretty good. I’m learning to love me, finding that I like me, and that makes me less desperate and less of a target.
As the article states, we won’t ever stop running into s-paths. However, I know much more than I used to, in part due to authors like Donna who are exposing these monsters for who and what they are. I see the red flags much more quickly, and I listen to my intuition much more readily. I made the decision to believe myself, instead of excusing away the behavior of others in hopes that they will like me or love me.
I went from bad husband to a worse one. I have no doubt the 2nd was spath, 1st one was disordered for sure. After the 2nd, I was convinced that I SHOULDN’T get involved again lest the 3rd would probably actually kill me or my children.
I managed to put out a “hell no” vibe so strongly that I didn’t even get ASKED out for 4.5yrs. I wasn’t sure I was “ready” for when I did. I thought I was – I even emailed Donna and that was a post about 18 mos ago. In some ways, I was ready.. I was ready to identify a sociopath faster/better/sooner. I wasn’t REALLY ready to believe someone who WASN’T a spath could ever be interested in me.
I looked for ways that new guy resembled a spath so I could write him off and thereby not risk getting hurt (or worse). I wasn’t prepared to deal with his baggage as I was still mired under mine. Both of our issues made us terrible communicators.
From all this, I’ve learned not to assume the worst needs to be balanced with watch for red flags and you have to communicate. You don’t have to pour your heart out, or discuss every embarrassing, destructive thing the xspath did to you, but the other person needs a little something to understand your potentially unexpected reactions. After a, well, frankly, rocky romance, I broke up with my bf. I had him all figured out…. at least, I WOULD have IF he’d been a spath.
It is “easier” to presume a potential lover is out to get you than to truly open yourself up for a relationship again. It’s SCARY…. be careful out there. Be careful not to sell yourself short – remember – the spath probably chose you because they believe they deserve the best and you had it all “going on”. For a genuine person, you ARE someone special.