Last week I posted two articles related to the Vienna Presbyterian Church in Vienna, Virginia. Between 2001 and 2005, as many as a dozen teenage girls may have suffered sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse from a church youth director. This year, the youth director was long gone, but church leaders felt that the wounds had not be properly addressed and healed. So a few months ago, the pastor and church issued a public apology.
Lawyers for the church’s insurance company warned the church not to accept responsibility for the failings of the youth director. Doing so, the insurance company said, would jeopardize the church’s coverage in case a lawsuit was filed.
The Vienna Presbyterian Church ignored the demands of its insurance company. On March 27, Pastor Peter James preached a sermon that acknowledged the church’s failings.
“Let me speak for a moment to our survivors,” he said. “We, as church leaders, were part of the harm in failing to extend the compassion and mercy that you needed. Some of you felt uncared for, neglected and even blamed in this church. I am truly sorry ”¦ I regret the harm this neglect has caused you.”
Guess what—so far, none of the young women has filed a lawsuit.
Why not? The case would be a slam-dunk. The youth director pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The church accepted responsibility. Several of the now young women have trouble in relationships, because they are still seeking the fantasy that the youth director promised. If they filed suit, they’d win.
My guess is that the women don’t want money. They want to be heard. They want to be validated. And they want to be healed.
Invisible damage
The problem with sociopathic entanglements is that so much of the damage is invisible. Even in cases where we lose money, jobs, homes, and are subject to physical violence, the big wounds are not readily apparent. Before all those obvious injuries occurred, the sociopaths softened us up with emotional manipulation, psychological control and spiritual abuse. These internal wounds not only eat at us, but they make it difficult for us to respond to, and recover from, the obvious physical damage.
After the sociopath, we need to purge our emotional and mental pain. We need internal stability. But when we reach out for help on this level, many of the people around us simply don’t get it.
They don’t understand why we need to talk so much about what happened. They don’t understand how, when we suspected that we were being used, we allowed it to continue. They don’t understand why we are still confused in our thoughts and emotions about the sociopath.
Get over it, they tell us.
These are the people, of course, who are lucky enough to have avoided a direct assault from a sociopath in their own lives. We often understand why they don’t really understand what happened—after all, we were once as clueless as they are. Still, their ignorance of the depth of our pain seems to increase our pain. We feel like we are not being heard, and our suffering is being invalidated.
Debriefing
Karin Huffer, in her book, the Legal Abuse Syndrome, describes this situation in detail in her chapter on “Debriefing.”
Debriefing, she says, is the first step in recovery. In the debriefing process, we tell someone exactly what happened to us, in all the painful detail. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find what Huffer describes as “quality listeners.” These are people who have the ability to hear what we have to say, overriding their own protective filters. She writes:
Protective filters are always at work. If an individual begins to share with another and the data threatens the listener’s feelings of safety, they may try to divert the data or simply not hear it at all ”¦
The function of this protective filter is to maintain the equilibrium of the listener. Victims’ stories shake the foundations that we lean upon in order to feel safe. When it is impossible for friends or family to hear, due to their protective psychological filters shielding them from vicarious pain, the victim feels rejected and alone.
Huffer goes on to describe a formal debriefing process. It’s best done with a quality listener or support group, but an individual can do it alone if necessary.
Support at Lovefraud
I believe that we have many, many quality listeners on Lovefraud. I am always amazed at the thoughtful, comforting and patient comments posted in response to readers who are spilling their traumatized guts.
The reason Lovefraud readers can do this, of course, is because we’ve all been there. We know what it’s like to be deceived, betrayed and assaulted. We know what it’s like to sit amidst the wreckage of what was once our lives. We’re all on the path to recovery, and those of us who are further along help those of us who are just beginning.
Healing, in the end, is an individual journey. To fully recover, we must consciously excavate and examine our pain, and find a way to let it go. But the process is helped immensely when we are heard and validated. I am so glad that Lovefraud offers this to so many people.
Superkid,
recovery from a spath is a unique road to travel. Perhaps your average therapist doesn’t get it. It’s more like deprogramming from a cult, because you have to go back over each thing that happened to you and understand that it wasn’t real. Learning that it was all a set up and nothing was real is the most mind boggling thing. Depending on how long it went on, it can really make a person nuts. 25 years of it, is hard to make sense of, so I kept several recordings of my spath lying and manipulating. When I began to have cog/dis I would listen to his despicable words and it would ground me.
I wish therapists would not tell people to let it go, because it’s in the past. That’s what spaths say. It’s what they want, for us to just let the past go and not learn from it so that they’ll be free to do it again. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Bella,
What you describe is the very beginning of a long, challenging process. I can only offer some comfort that I promise it gets better from where you are now. You are at the absolute low point of the process. My thoughts and prayers go out to you, no one deserves to feel that pain. Your heart will heal, and you will gain invaluable wisdom from the experience. I know it doesn’t mean much, but I’m sending you a virtual hug 🙂
Happy healing, stick around here and learn as much as you can!
New Winter
Sky, I can definitely understand why your BF would want “Doug free days”—in fact, a “Doug free LIFE”—but I also understand your need to think about, ruminate about, and heal from 25 years of “Life with Doug.”
My late husband knew my P-sperm donor, in fact they were business partners for a short time, which is how I first met my husband, and it was GOOD for me to be able to discuss my P-sperm donor with someone who actually KNEW HIM….because only those people who actually had known him would even start to believe that he made your “Doug” + my P son together look like Mother Teresa….he was so evil that no one could believe he did what he did and didn’t go to prison.
That is the odd thing is that we are the ones telling the truth and NO ONE BELIEVES US, we SOUND LIKE THE LIARS! LOL
It helped that my husband knew the truth about P-sperm donor, but fortunately at the same time it wasn’t my x husband that I was talking about so maybe he was more understanding and less desiring of “another subject” or a “P-sperm donor free day.”
Also, by the time my late husband and I married, the majority of the trauma from the P sperm donor had somewhat healed, not entirely I think until after his death in 2007, but the majority of it. After he died, I realized that more healing had gone on than I was even aware of….I wasn’t carrying the burden of the bitterness toward him any more.
Sky, your X does remind me of my P sperm donor very much, and my P son as well….they do evil things, but they have to brag about it to someone, i.e. have an audience to “appreciate” their evil or somehow it seems that it isn’t “real” to them unless someone admires or fears them for doing it. He had to tell you (and probably others as well).
I laughed about your X telling people what a “womanizer” he was, my P sperm donor never really had any kind of a “relationship” with any woman, even though he was married 6-7 times, but he wanted his male buddies to think he was some big “cocksman” and his idea of showing someone a “good time” was to take them to a cheap Mexican whore house in “boys town” Tijuana—which he did one time with some guys (all married) from Africa who had accompanied a load of Rhino for a zoo. The men were NOT AMUSED at his idea of entertainment. LOL He had absolutely NO COUTH and he really thought those guys would be thrilled at the idea of going to a cheap, dirty, Mexican whore house and getting laid and would have had a “good time.”
He never got it through his head that no matter how many 10s of millions of dollars he made he could not BUY “class” or “couth.”
SK,
I have kept a slew of my spaths emails too. I do read them, especially when I start to ruminate and now instead of it hurting me, it centers me. The further away I get from what it was, the easier it gets, but I still have really difficult days, yesterday was one of them.
I know eventually I will delete those specific emails, but for now, I keep them for that reason.
Sky, I agree with that. I think that’s the biggest mistake known to man in the aftermath of spath. Sometimes, you HAVE to go over and over it to be able to get OVER it. This isn’t as simplistic as a normal break up. Trying to wrap a person’s mind around evil takes a long long time……
LL
Bella – welcome to LF. You will be heard and believed here. Let it out.
Some churches are a ‘closed shop’ and have forgotten somewhere along the line what the Faith is all about. The above advice is good. Find another church where you can ‘start over’.
I think so long as that person is at your current church nothing will change. So get out there, maybe try a church in a different town.
Flowers can give us great joy. I prefer weeds myself – they take less looking after. And I have the living proof!
Oxy,
I do see some parallels in our lives. We both lucked out to find someone who knew the evil P’s in our lives, so they could listen and KNOW we were telling the truth. Who the hell else could believe us? Only the LF gang, and truly, sometimes I think people here don’t actually believe the extent of the evil being.
As far as who he’s told what, I’m still not sure. He didn’t seem to be a braggart about his murders, like your donor and son. His revealing to me was more in the form of sociopathic tells, projections and also the fact that I began to notice a familiar type of behavior when he was working a con. Then I remembered all the other times I had seen this behavior and I realized there was more to the story.
On the other hand, he had recruited an evil couple to live across the street (the wife was the head sociopath, the husband was an idiot), and the wife, Christa, called me one day. Apparently, the wife of a friend of Doug’s had died when her plane crashed that day. She had her neice with her and they both died. This was a wealthy woman whom Doug had befriended, along with her husband, only months before. He visited them often up to that point. Christa called to ask me if I knew them, and she said, “I used to babysit the niece! Can you believe that? blah, blah, blah.” I explained to Christa that I had never met any of them, but Doug had been friends. She just went on and on harping about it.
I have no idea why she would call to say those things to me. I never told her I knew those people and Doug pretended not to even KNOW Christa or her idiot husband. There was some connection – he must’ve said something. All I can think of is that he told them that he was going to kill that woman through arranging an accident and now she was gloating in a psychopathic tell. None of it made sense to me at the time, so it went into the WTF? bucket.
I can say one thing for sure. They were recruited to help him create a horror scenario where I would run for help and find myself surrounded by backstabbers. So it’s possible that he told her about the murder he was going to commit and then did it, just to impress the spaths about how easily he could commit murder and get away with it. She may have called to find out what I knew? His need to impress her was so that she would be even more willing to help him with my own murder/suicide or whatever.
I love the fact that he ended up with egg on his face, unable to kill that really dumb woman (me) he was living with and all his recruited sociopathic friends saw this. So he slithered away.
Thanks for the hugs…. truly. This happened right before summer last year and I did not leave the house all summer…… so this year to try to take on all the yard work would do me in, so I “felt” from WISDOM to just take care of the front yard this year, which last year I could do nothing……. well, I have put so many flowers out and the grass the is green…just in the front, But the neighbors have taken notice, and one even asked me at Home Depot if I still lived ther or if I moved!! Maybe if my girls drive by it will draw them in…… rather than see a run down home. As I see the neighbors who choose to shun me over lies, and get in their cars to go to church, I just work with the flowers that are giving me a little joy. I also take beat-up old antiques and paint them and make them new and sell them in a shop downtown. I guess it’s called redeeming and restoring things that others have thrown away….I relate to them I guess. I do these things, and I am o.k……until I think about not seeing my 2 year old Grandaughter walk, or my daughters in over 1 year, and cry myself to sleep every night. I never knew there was such aloneness!!! And I was an orphan!!! I do not blame them ….I brought the psycho into the family and exposed them to him. I bought his lies first, so how can I be angry that they were taken in by him and his charm and “concern and love for their Mom who in private is Borderline personality”. It was all done with so much “Godliness” on his part, that the child porn I found on his computer only made me look “so disconnected that how could such a wonderful man be accused of such things!” I will take all your advice. I know I have PTSD….and lately it’s all I can do to get out of bed when I don’t have to go to work. Hoping to get insurance to go to Dr. and get on something….. Thanks all. Just feel so alone.
Bella – I’m going to throw this in, see what you think. You said that you were an orphan. Could it be that those feelings of abandonment/loneliness are re-surfacing too. I think counselling will help.
As for the porn, mine did that, and when I told his employer, the guy blamed ME for throwing spath out and that spath had to sleep in his car cos I threw him out! WTF
Bella,
Did you say you were married to this spath for only ten months? I would like to respond to your posts here, but want to make sure I’m understanding the background completely. How long did you know this spath before you married him?
LL
Bella:
Bless your heart. I’m so sorry that you have such a burden to bear. Hopefully it will help to have many people here who do believe and understand. I agree with Candy. Some churches have forgotten about love and mercy and grace. Many Christians only pay attention to the scriptures they want to pay attention to. But I believe there are still many out there who want to help people heal. I hope you can find the support you need here and elsewhere.