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.
I still have one “friend” from my years with the SP. It still hurts that she doesn’t believe me and isn’t really my friend. Needless to say, I only contact her when necessary.
After X did his number on me, it would have been very easy just to let go and die, I was so close to it anyway. But I KNEW that’s what he wanted, hindsight being 20/20. He never expected me to be able to recover. Sometimes just that fact alone kept me alive and fighting. Just my being alive, living proof of his failure and knowing what he is, is a win against him. Five years later, I am now happy to be alive on my own account. I stay in hiding and cover my tracks, but it’s a small price to pay to be free of him and his type. Luckily, someone early on directed me to LoveFraud. The support and understanding here makes all the difference.
I hear you romanticfool…I have no friends left. Period. He successfully alienated me the past almost five years. I still hung onto my family which he wasn’t really thrilled over because then he didn’t have free reign over me the way he wanted.
Oh, yah, hindsight is an amazing thing. It reinforces what our common sense is telling us is the truth and separating it from the lies.
Oh yes, the space around us is how we make it. I will NEVER say nor speak another word to him ever again as long as I live. Period. NC is NC. What they do with it is all on them now.
And, TREMENDOUSLY: the understanding and support here at Love Fraud is totally amazing. Completely amazing. It is hard to explain or define what a lifeline Love Fraud has been for me. It isn’t easy finding someplace where you are understood and not thought a psycho. Seriously. Most spaths hope we get lost in those webs and that our minds are weaker than theirs. They don’t like it much when they stand toe to toe with someone who doesn’t obey.
Hope you all have a good night.
Don’t forget to say your prayers so the Angels will surround you as you sleep and in your dreams.
DUPED
Bella:
I agree with Skylar that it sounds like a carefully calculated manipulation to take away something that was really important to you. He knew this would leave you without a support system. What a horrible thing to do.
Everyone here knows what it is like for the people around you to find your story too unbelievable. It’s soooo frustrating. But again, like the other posters are saying, you can’t control what anyone is going to do about this except for you. The way your church has dealt with this is terrible. Having more than one ex using the situation to back their lies about you, awful! You have to establish what YOUR truth is and stand firm in that no matter what the others are doing around you. Get out of the circle of dysfunction and dwell inside your own bubble of peace. Enjoy the small moments when you can.
I hope that you don’t really think God is against you. I read where you said: “My life was my family and my GOD and I feel betrayed by both.” I can understand that. And I believe God understands your feelings too. He can certainly handle it if you tell Him exactly how you feel about it. If you feel betrayed by Him, tell Him so. David certainly did it enough in the Psalms! Yell, rant, and rave if it helps. Also, remember that Jesus never said that life would be fair. He said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” I take this to mean that we will face negative things in life, but that God has a greater plan. I have gotten angry with God over my situation. Why me? Why does my “trouble” have to be something I can’t totally get away from (we have a child)? Not fair! But I know that God was also the one who led me out of the marriage. At least I’m no longer being mentally/emotionally/physically abused constantly.
I’ve had many Christian church people and counselors who thought I was in the wrong simply because I was the one who filed for the divorce (nothing as bad as what you’ve dealt with, bless your heart). But God was the one who showed me the scriptures that taught me He didn’t want me to continue in the abuse. I chose to believe His voice over the others. I found another church that met my needs. I worked at cultivating new friends. I started exercising and lost weight. Above all, I was determined that the ex wouldn’t win! If I kept going, got healthier, was at peace (much more so than with him), it meant he hadn’t destroyed me and didn’t win. He noticed and it drove him nuts. Which of course prompted him to try to tear me down again. But being away from him helped me to grow stronger, and I’ve learned to deal with most of the manipulations. I started a running program, and I would listen to positive music while I ran and think positive thoughts about how I had survived and was getting stronger. Silly, but I felt empowered by taking positive steps.
There is so much good advice and support on this blog. I truly hope you can take hold of it to build yourself back up and keep going forward.
Oh, and using the children against you. 🙁 He has attacked the two things that mean the most to you, the two things he knows you will react to, the two things most likely to destroy you. Don’t let him be successful!
Duped,
I know what you mean about how they start arguments just to see you lose your cool. It’s their specialty.
My spath went next door to the neighbor, who had heart problems. He had been there before, expressing sympathy and recommended that he take magnesium, which is very helpful for the heart muscle, (I had informed him).
On this particular day, he went with the express intent of making him have a heart attack. He came back and told me, that he enraged him just to see if he could make him have a heart attack. He had an excuse about how the neighbor had done him wrong of course, so I didn’t think he was a bad person. – especially since he had tried to help the neighbor before… or maybe that was just a story, and he never told him about magnesium. It’s hard to say since he never let me talk to the neighbors. He said they were alcoholic losers. They were the only neighbors I had that he couldn’t turn against me. I’m sad that the old man did finally succumb to his heart condition and I never got to explain to him.
…now I’m rambling.
Yup, the separating you from friends and family is a standard procedure for many personality disorders. I wasn’t left with any friends, but luckily my daughter and I are too close to budge, even though we have our problems. She was the one who first noticed that my health had improved since X left She was also with me when he returned for the first time and blew up at me for confronting him. It scared her so badly she hit the door running. Luckily we had left the room and didn’t know that, so X still thought he had a witness. Afterwards he told her he still loved her and would always be her father, like she didn’t know a thing. Of course, he never saw her again. At least in learning how to recover from a SP my relationship with my daughter got even stronger. We both survived my mother and then X. Oh, those mother/daughter bonding experiences!
I think the worst part of the whole thing for me was I lost my faith. I thought the relationship was a gift from God, so to find out how terribly wrong it was shook me badly. I simply didn’t know how to live without it. Now I see that X had become the center of my world to the extent I pretty much worshiped him. Certainly I sacrificed much for him. Sadly, my daughter never regained her faith.
I had an alcoholic boyfriend, and he would continuously set me up. He’d pester and torment me in private, then wait until we were in public and trigger me so I lost it. I came off as the bitchy nut case while he was always cool and calm. It was just a game to him. By the time I met X, I’d figured that out, but he still managed to get past my guards a few times. I knew he was lying to everyone around him, so when I had to call him at work (I had no other way to contact him) I was always sweet, reasonable and cheerful. He even told me one of his co-workers commented on how happy I sounded. I was miserable and terrified but even more afraid of what would happen if I showed it. After all those years of manipulating me, I hope it confused him. At any rate, it didn’t give him the reaction he wanted. I got all his stuff out of the house so I wouldn’t even have to deal with his long drawn out leaving process and changed the locks. Once that happened, he never came back for anything or contacted me again directly.
About a year later I started getting calls with no one on the line. No breathing, just dead air. I started joking about Mr. Nobody. Oooh, how are YOU, Mr. Nobody? Gee, can’t you even breathe heavily? What are you wearing? Hey, you are calling later than usual today! What’s up? I honestly thought it was a problem on the telephone line until someone told me he had been in town those days. I had the phone line checked, there was no problem that could cause my phone to ring, so they changed my number for free to stop him. Some phone companies will let you list yourself under a different name, since I couldn’t afford unlisted. Later he sent a supposed “accidental” email to my daughter, bragging about how well he was doing and saying he hadn’t been in a “serious” relationship during the time we were together. We laughed about his ego and didn’t respond. My daughter changed her email address and that was the end of him. NC is bliss!
….. I am sooo trying to “live well” as my means of fighting back. I sooo do not want to have self-pity. I just miss my girls… I told my Spath everything of my life, and when the truth about him was coming out and my daughters WERE believing me he went to them in private and told them everything I had ever done in my life. Things repented of many years before. Then he used that to tell them I was crazy when I was making claims that he drugged me, etc. I believe in my God, it is just so hard to have had them ripped from me.
I WILL continue walking forward when I hear what others are walking through as well on this site.
I am thankful to have this site…..
I left my pathalogical relationship with “whatever-he-is” (malignant Narcissist? Sociopath? I am never sure which category fits him best) 5 years ago. Apart from reeling from not understanding how anyone who appeared to be so perfect for me could be so heartless, ruthlessly cruel, and dismissive of me as a person; at that point I had no real knowledge of NPD, Sociopaths or that there were people like this out there living apparently “normal” lives. It was spending hours, in my abject misery, scouring the internet looking for answers that I came across sites like this, and others, where it was reading others experiences and hearing their pain, so like my own, that I began to find some solace. At least I wasn’t alone. I didn’t know how to explain how I felt to people who hadn’t been there. I didn’t know how to describe the insidious feelings of fear, doubt, uncertainty, isolation, constant anxiety in the face of what appeared a normal individual. I couldn’t make anyone really understand. I began to find I couldn’t talk about it, because to hear someone say “why on earth did you stay then?” or “didn’t you see what was going on?” would make me feel angry, hurt and so confused I began to feel I was mad. Literally I felt like I was going mad inside my head. I couldn’t get rid of the flashes. I would find myself re-living moments at the most unexpected moments. I once found myself in a supermarket and suddenly it was as though I was back there, re-living a moment. I went into meltdown, left my trolley of food, and fled home to the safety of my bedroom where I could hide alone and cry my eyes out in frustration and rage. This went on for a long time. No one could really understand why it was taking me so long to recover from leaving this man. Get over it. Move on. He isn’t worth it. etc. Means diddly squat after an experience with one of these characters. You want to scream at them “of course I want to get over it – of course I want to move on – I know he isn’t worth all this pain – but I can’t!! I simply can’t seem to get all this “stuff” out of my head”. I can remember breaking down one day and just saying “someone please – help me with this”.
I sought councilling. Over time, on the surface, I healed. I toughened up. Time ( a lot of time) makes the pain manageable. I got to a point where I could talk about it without going to pieces. I became “detached”. But even the councilling i had didn’t really understand my inner world as it had become from this experience. I still didn’t feel I had control of it. I still felt he was controlling my thoughts, even though he was no longer a part of my physical world, he was still pulling strings in my mental and emotional world. How do you stop that?
I am 5 years on, I’ve learned bookshelves of stuff, I’ve read all the books and more. I understand, thanks to this site and others, a lot more about the type of person he was, about the signs and signals to watch out for in future, and I can give a wealth of empathy and compassion to anyone I come across who is facing similar pain.
But am I healed inside? no. Do I feel heard? no. Do I feel validated? no. Do I still struggle to find me, the person I was before all this? Yes. I make a good show of being ok, because in essence I am ok, but part of me is still buried inside, in pain, and frightened by the knowledge that if he walked in front of me now I would still probably be hooked into his head games before I could blink. Why?
He still makes occasional contact, and I have (stupidly) believed I am over it and can match him step for step as he plays his little game of insincere concern over my welfare. And me? For all the books, wisdom, knowledge gained? WANT TO BELIEVE IT. I want to believe that he is sorry, he does care about me really, I was special. How dumb is that? Even I know that is dumb. But the “pull” is still there and that is what tells me I am not fully healed. I still have an ache inside I can’t fix.
There are elements of my story I have never talked about because I don’t know how to. It’s like having a virus invade your system. You get rid of the main symptoms eventually, but some of the infection is still lying dormant inside and threatens to errupt every now and again. That’s the part I can’t seem to exorcise. There is a little part inside my head I have closed off because I don’t want to open it up and let it out.
I don’t know how to deal with that.
Ellejay
tobehappy: Do you have more information on the place in Florida? if anyone has or knows of some counseling or a specific counselor….. i am so open to it. I have tried two different counselors. Went one time and when you begin to mention psycopaths and tell your story they just look at you. I have not had good luck in finding someone who understands this type of person.
Skylar and imustacheyouaquestion: Absolutely! He planned and calculated this for months…from the minute we met! I cannot begin to tell you all that he did. When the realization “hit me” that he was doing this, and planned to do this it was so surreal. I have become a fan of Criminal Minds…because that truly is who he is. He destroys one life after another, and I have no doubt that in the future someone else could possibly be killed. He DID drug me to achieve his purposes. He is an incredible “gaslighter” and also very seducing in that one minute he is screaming and destroying you and the next cherishing and adoring you. Very manipulative, and cunning. He is EVIL. He is escalating in what he is doing, and he is doing it quickly in relationships so I am just watching and waiting for the next poor soul to fall into his web of lies.
Romanticfool: thank you, it sounds as though you too have been through so much, as well as many others that have responded. I can’t say I have lost my faith. I FEEL betrayed by God and question why he could allow the most precious thing in my life to be taken……but I allowed it by falling for this snake,and bringing into my home and I know that. And He has been so silent this whole year as this has been happening…….. that I am truly walking by faith in his mercy alone. I can’t walk by feelings. My faith in people and Churches and institutions is SHAKEN. It is a one-on-one relationship with God right now. I will not allow one more “Pastor” to decieve me…..but I wish I could find a true one to show me they are not all like this.
OxDover: I am thankful to have my son…but I am also a little scared as my whole life has been trying to be the one to point him in the RIGHT direction, so he not turn our like his abusive, manipulating and selfish, lying father. I have seen some things that a really concerning me. It is also not easy to raise a 17 year old son, when he sees that his older sisters have cut me off and do not listen to a word I say, so why should he? He SAW all that the spath did to me, and he hates him. SO he is caught in the middle of loving me and his sisters, of having seen much more than they did….and adolescence. Yikes! As if raising a teenage son isn’t difficult enough! I do feel he has tendancies towards his biological fathers make-up and pray everyday for God to intervene in that as well.
Ellejay….. I understand and you so eloquently put into words EXACTLY what i feel too. I am so sorry and I am sending you a hug. I “make a show too” and go through all the motions of what to do so he doesn’t win, but inside I am crying, broken, confused,and angry. I hear you and you are not alone today in what you are experiencing. I am sorry as it is so painful and all the books and knowledge of their problem do not take away what they have done inside of us, possibly forever.