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.
myheart,
I’m glad you are here and that you find validation and comfort here at LF….it has been a “life saver” for many of us.
Since the issue of sociopathy/psychopathy prevalence in men more than women has arisen here, thought I’d chime in.
The personality disordered person in my life is female. Perhaps that has tainted my view, but I will say that it may instead be a matter of an automatic response to focus on men as being more often afflicted because of several reasons, such as a) their brain differences (higher levels of testosterone, etc.) that make them more prone to physical manifestations of violence, which are more conspicuous, b) the fact that a preponderance of psychopathy experts’ studies have been on the male prison population, and c) women’s brain differences, such as the more refined “social gene” detected, according to studies, which allows targets to communicate their pain & trauma more readily and culprits to commit their violations more subtly.
This is sincerely not a criticism of this site nor its member participation for more frequent discussion of women suffering & recovering from the devastation of male romantic partners than most other angles. Indeed, I, too, am forever grateful for the insight & support expressed by Donna and members here. Instead it’s to validate (appropriate considering this thread’s title article, no?) the experiences of others here and outside this forum whose run-ins with PD people don’t fit into the same category, except for their being similarly direct or collateral damage of PD people.
Frankly, I find little in common with many members precisely because romantic involvement with a PD person has never been a problem for me. What I do relate to, however, is the ensuing devastation, pain, horror, and danger inflicted by a psychopath, plus some degree of sympathy, as well as empathy, for her romantic ex-partners, having heard them speak in-depth of their hurtful experiences.
So I was glad to see a few others speak up in this thread who appear to be men, and more broadly anyone speaking up about the PD women they’ve encountered in this and other threads. As a target fending off the destruction wrought by the psychopath/sociopath whom I grew up beside, I appreciate the validation of my past and ongoing experience.
Thanks Ox,
As you know it is all about roller coaster and we all need to accept the roller coaster life. One thing I did notice, if I take my vitamins and do excercise, eat healthy, I feel less hurt and don’t rememeber him as much. So I guess we all need to take care of our physical health more now to feel good mentally. We do have control over our physical well being, mental will follow itself.
I tried to get charges filed. The guy did not defraud me but he did others. 3 cities refused to file. Some people are to ashamed to admit what has happened I think. It is up to sites like this and the media to out these cons.
Thank you Donna for the incredible service you provide. I’m sure you’ve saved many lives, including mine.
Sociosibs. I have to agree that it’s important to focus the dialog on the spaths and not on their gender, sexual orientation and race or creed. It’s not easy because it’s human nature to try to make sense of what we experience and with a spath, well… that’s an oxymoron. We will never fully comprehend their evil. That’s part of WHY they have been successful for so long. Humans will try to put together a complete picture by taking all the elements of the spaths and seeing what they have in common. It’s tempting to add gender, sex, race, creed, eyecolor, shape of head (large?) and neck (big), as factors. I don’t know if human beings will ever be able to stop doing that. We want, need and desire a quick way to spot them (because we fear them). We want a visual cue because that’s the one that, as humans, we’ve evolved to use most to avoid danger.
But with spaths, that doesn’t work. I have discovered two tools, which DO work: The gut feeling (which comes from your emotional self) and the red flags (which we learn here on LF). Used TOGETHER, these are adequate, but not perfect. I wish we had more and better tools.
tool 3) know your own weakness that made you leave all caution to the winds.
For me that was the sudden evocation of sympathy I felt incredibly strong out of nowhere. He didn’t use words, nor excuses… it was body language. Esepcially empathic people read people not by the words, but by body language, because with normal people it comes naturally, and it’s even hard to hide.
A spath who studied facial expression and body postures of people expressing their emotions that way, would have exercised them and test the responses.
So tool 3 for me is an unreasonable high feeling of sympathy evoked, as if I just stumbled across a stary kitten, for no apparent reason and at a moment too early in the acquaintance to have actual info to back up this extreme form of sympathy.
Skylar, thank you for responding, and for your further validation, so to speak.
I concur with your assessment of the usefulness of the 2 tools you named, and would add a 3rd, which is mainstream education to raise public awareness.
My gut’s pretty good, and I’m usually quick to spot red flags, especially having learned so much more about what we’re dealing with and changing my mindset from “deep down everyone has a heart” and “all people are born good but circumstances can be conducive to their turning to bad behaviors” to realizing that there are genetic anomalies among some people that disprove such assumptions.
Just as the general population has come to a greater understanding of the battered-woman syndrome and other newly brought-to-light phenomena, not just those who’ve been so impacted, it can come to grasp this concept of personality disorders and the ravaging of its targets.
Ok, I’m starting to have another anger, and it has to do with validation.
I’m starting to be annoyed with the new victim. She hasn’t said anything bad to me of course. And yes, I recognize she’s being conned as much as I was being conned, and that is why she ignored three warnings of 3 different ex-es. I’m not jealous of her for being with him, gosh no. But her being with him, when knowing he turned out engaged to me and professed his love and wish to be with me while he already was with her for a month, in some way upsets me. It feels like she invalidates the seriousness of the relationship. Of course HE was never serious, but I didn’t know that until the day he broke up with me. And it was VERY serious to me. And the fact that she can shove that aside, thinking “he never loved her then, nor the others, but he loves me for real,” makes me feel anger towards her.
I think it has to do with my own respect of previous ties. I have never dated anyone I knew to have been in a committed relationship (don’t care whether they live apart, together, engaged or married). It has always been my principal and believe ‘that if a partner leaves his significant other for you, then he’ll leave you for someone else down the line.”
And I have been tested on this rule with one of my lovers. There was an attraction, and he was saying his relationship was going bad. I did not ask for specifics, and halted the conversation there almost. I refused to do anything else than talk at a public place, very occasionally, until they had broken up.
Of course, at first she believed him to be single when she met my P (cause he lied), but once she knew the truth from 3 independent witnesses, I find it hard to blame just him for conning her.
Grrrrr
darwinsmom:
I get what you are feeling. Totally.
just talked to the crazy boy’s mom. she is soooooooooooo weird. omg. drunk? dunno; just so flaming weird. she talked about how her husbands son (who used to live here in the same apt (hens, that’s the ‘gay’ boxer)) used to ‘tattle’ on her son, and ‘provoke’ him. um, noooo, your son’s behavior is down to him. but really the rivalry was between her and her bully husband, also a drunk. omg i feel like i fell into a soap opera. ew ew ew
crazy boy will be moving out. turns out he has never had a real assessment (he’s 24, and bonkers for about 6 years already – jayzus) and she is trying to get him to take himself to the hospital tomorrow night.
she also paraded him around the building making him apologize to everyone. i didn’t accept his apology. i told him i understand that it is very hard to live inside his head, but what he did was not okay. period.
i heard my neighbor who teaches little kids saying, ‘you know we are not mad at you, we just want everyone to live and get along well, blah blah blah…of fuck someone hand me a coca-freaking cola. I swear that sweet neighbour – i just want to pound her sometimes.
i can’t imagine what genes crazy boy’s momma gave him. god, she’s weird. ick ew.