It was just a simple text message, “He’s a liar”. At the time of its arrival on her cellphone, Sarah* didn’t know its value. But, as the days unfolded and the story of his deceit was revealed, that little text message became a miracle. A gift from God. A sign from the angels that her life was about to change, radically, for the better.
When I first spoke with her, she couldn’t see the miracle of that text message. She could only feel its pain. She couldn’t see the gift of knowledge it presented or the freedom it represented. She didn’t want to see it was a gift for a better future. She wanted his love to be true. She wanted him to be true. She wanted time to rewind and take her back to time before the text message arrived, to time before everything went wrong.
“It’s all my fault,” she said. “If only I had….” And then, she listed of the hundred things she could have done differently to keep his love true.
“There is nothing you could have done differently that would have changed him,” I told her. “Tall. Short. Fat. Skinny. Blond. Brunette. Green eyes. Blue eyes. Fair-skinned. Dark-skinned. You could have dyed your hair pink and stood on your head spitting nickles. There is nothing you could have done to change him or make his love true. He is the lie.”
And that’s the challenge of loving a narcissist or a sociopath. There is nothing we can do to change who they are and what they’re doing. Lies are the lifeblood of their trade. They are subject matter experts in human manipulation and they spend their lives honing their craft. They don’t care if they hurt people. People are the fridges of their supply. Open the door, take out what you need and close it until you need more. Keeping their victims chilling on ice is part of their game. Keeping their victims locked up, their minds frozen over ponds of fear and disbelief, that is what they need to ensure the victim doesn’t see the light of their betrayal. They do what they want, get what they need however they can because what they want is all that counts.
For Sarah, the pain of his betrayal has left her reeling. They met when she was eighteen. He was three years older. A fireman. Tall. Strong. Silent. He’s had over five years to weave his web of lies around her, in and out of her psyche. He’s had five years to contort reality, distort perceptions and distend her belief in herself into a bloated bladder of vile pus oozing with self-deprecation and disbelief.
And now she must heal.
“Why would he do this? He said he loved me? Why? Why? Why?” she asked as every woman and man asks when awakened to the truth of their lies.
“Because he can. Because he must. Because he does. It’s what he does. It’s who he is,” I told her. “Lies are like breathing to him. Protecting his ego at all costs is his purpose and in his mind, there is no higher purpose, no greater calling. It is all he can do.”
For Sarah, facing the truth is a raw, jagged journey through the minefield of the past where he gave her the ‘gift’ of his love and wrapped her up in the invibisble bonds of terror of his lies.
Sarah is lucky. That text message arrived two months before they were to share their vows. Two months before they made a commitment to love each other, ’til death do us part.
“Your love was true, Sarah. “I told her as we sat in her parents living room, the dining room table covered in spread sheets and bank statements. Her mother and father have been unravelling the financial nightmare of his deceit. It’s something tangible, factual that they can hang onto. What they don’t know how to do is bring her peace of mind. Ease the burden of the truth she must face in order to heal.
“Your love was true. His was always the lie. There is no truth in anything he said. No truth in telling you you’re beautiful to telling you you’re ugly. There is no truth in his ‘I love you’ and no truth in his ‘I hate you’. He does not contain the truth. You do. And the truth is, he has betrayed you. He has hurt you and you can never say good-bye.”
“But I want to say good-bye,” she wailed. “I want to tell him how much he hurt me. How this has harmed me.”
“The only good-bye will be the slamming of door when you go back to the house to pack up your things. When you leave, slam the door and know, that is the most deadening sound he will ever hear. It is the only sound you ever want to give him.”
“I have to go pick up my wedding dress this week. He’s paying me back for all the wedding expenses. He wants the dress.”
“Good,” I said. “After you get the money, and if it’s a cheque make sure it clears the bank, give him back the dress. But first, take out your scapbooking scissors and cut it up into a thousand pieces.”
“But I promised to return the dress,” she said.
“And you will be returning the dress. Nobody said anything about what shape it had to be in.”
She looked at me, her gentle blue eyes opened wide with surprised. For the first time since we began talking two hours before, she smiled. “Ah, now that would be sweet revenge.” She paused and laughed, her eyes lighting up, “I’ll do it!”
Yes, she will do it. She will heal and grow and recover and reclaim what was lost. And in that journey she will embrace the miracle of the text message that saved her life from growing darker and darker as she began to fade into the weave of a narcissist’s lies blocking the light from penetrating her mind.
Miracles are free.
In the gift of their arrival, grace descends as we open up to the truth of their revelations. With grace, we are invited to slip into the healing waters of love so that we can set ourselves free of lies and deception and dance with joy, in harmony with the truth around us. Miracles are free and so are we.
*Not her real name.
Sarah had a text message. God had to use a 2×4 to hit me over the head after 30 years of being in his web. He allowed me to walk in on my “loving” husband boinking his children’s choir director (married, 20 years younger, 3 young children) on my living room couch.
For everyone it is a different wake-up call, but when it comes it is finally the Truth. You finally have it all in front of you and you simply cannot be lied to or manipulated any longer because you see them for who they really are in all that ugliness. I have never been so humiliated, hurt, angry, disgusted, pained and miserable as I was that day but now I can look at it all from a distance of 5 years and a new life. I can laugh at the whole scenario and still be thankful that it happened. I can see how God used that awful time to give me the final push to dump his sorry behind.
Whatever our wake-up call, it is only the beginning of the end.
Honey
The miracle that freed me was the OW trying to break down the front door of his house and the bombshell that she ( a friend of mine) had been with him continuously for 6 years. The second miracle was that I did not fall for the next con that she was a fellow ‘ victim’. I fell for it for 2 weeks before I discovered that rather than get rid of him as she promised, she happily carried on and shared in the profits of the money he had stolen from me. At the time, I was so confused, devastated and almost suicidal at the realisation that I had allowed these people to nearly destroy my life and hurt my husband and children that I did not see it as a gift. Now though I think she did me a huge favour because of her own greed and twisted personality.
Since this all happened, several people have said to me that they knew what was being done to me but they did not know how to tell me. Although I understand their dilemma, it is has made me angry thinking that I could have been saved from this trauma. I feel so strongly that about it that I summoned up my courage yeaterday and went to talk to his new employer. I told everything and provided what proof I have of not only what he did to me but his long history of stealing, drug taking and sexual harassment. I could not go another day thinking that another innocent woman is going to be targeted. I’m prepared for the fact that nothing will be done and that he will be allowed to carry on working, if only because it is so hard for even the most educated person to fully comprehend what they are dealing with.
Whatever the outcome, I have peace of mind now knowing that I have have done everything I can to protect others. All my friends, astonishingly to me, have told me not to do it. They all say people have to find out for themselves but I cannot agree with that. If we all want to live in a decent society, we all have a moral responsibility to share information that may harm others. So no matter what happens, I have tried to pass on the gift given to me and my conscience is clear.
Swallow
Yes, it would be nice if they could all be court ordered and sentence to live in a bottomless pit. Whoever, could scale the walls and get up out of the pit would eventually make it back to decent society … oh, hmmmm live amongst us again. What am I thinking … these are the characters without emotions, hence, no fear … they’d all scale the walls and make it up and out of the pit by breakfast. I’m sure they didn’t collect on any of the bets that were made prior to the big climb. Maybe, we should pray to God to turn them all slime green, since they are really green with envy of everyone else living in God’s light (hence their retribution of destroying our lives before they leave). Back to the books and try to figure out how to change our court systems, change our penal systems and bring in some professionals with the patience of Job to work baby steps with them … walking them step by step down every righteous path they avoided in their lives. The more righteous steps they jumped over and avoided … the longer their incarceration. Release would be in front of the Righteous in our society … based upon the anti-socials quoting passages from the Bible and interpreting the meanings back to the panel. Upon release, they must conduct x amount of years of doing community service to learn the benefits of what it means to do for others with nothing in return. Maybe, just maybe they’d learn something.
Wini,
Part of recovering from a P is to understand once and for all that they will NEVER be good. All we can do is fight to get them incarcerated so that they cannot harm anyone else or stay clear of them altogether and learn the to see the red flags.
When I was doing my nurse training many years ago I remember a lecture on psychiatry from a Consultant Paediatrician. He said to us on the subject of psychopaths ” the only thing you can do is put them in prison and throw away the key”. It sounded so dramatic and callous at the time but he was so right.
Swallow
There isn’t just one “miracle” that set me free–there were several–and I am so grateful for them, for seeing the truth, at long last.
The FOG is so dense sometimes that even if we are warned, we fail to see it, we discount the warnings, thinking we are wiser, smarter, better able to judge, but later, after we start to see the “feet of clay” we remember those warnings.
I read Robert Hare’s book so many years ago, yet I didn’t apply it to my P-son, just my Bio-father-P who was long gone out of my daily life. The coming of the Trojan Horse-P into our lives was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me, yet, in the end, it was one of the best because it finally caused the dynamite lying under my feet to explode, but I had gotten far enough away from it that I wasn’t killed in the explosion. It rid my family of the Ps ALL of the Ps and blew away the FOG.
Not only my vision was restored to clarity, but my son C’s as well, and his personality disordered wife was OUT of our lives as well.
I read over and over the story in the Bible of King David fleeing from King Saul, and then the story of King David’s psychopathic son Absalom and how David reacted to Absalom’s death, and I realized that my enabling mother was so concerned for my P-son, that her grief was not that my life was threatened by him, but that he did not and would not get out of prison before she died. That was a sobering thought for me, and a painful one. Truth can be VERY painful, but it WILL set you FREE if you will follow it.
Finding my OWN Truth, and being able to see God’s truth, though a painful process of self-examination and soul searching, grieving, and healing, is indeed a miracle of no minor proportions.
This site has been a great part of that healing process and I am also grateful for the miracle Donna has put here to help our healing. God bless us all, Tiny Tim.
Swallo, I believed that too, that they could never change. I remember reading the Book “Narcissism, Denial of the True Self” by Lowen, a declared Narcissists. He gives examples of patient of his to explain the condition of not being in touch with one’s emotions. At the end of the book he states something along the lines that “a life devoid of emotions is beyond our imagination”. With that said, I could now comprehend what I was dealing with my then boyfriend in my life at the time … putting him forever at a distance in the “friendship maybe category” and my co-workers … all a bunch of lowlifes with their big egos and no breaking mechanism in their lives to prevent them from trashing other’s lives, destroying careers, free for all mentality of stepping over and stomping on co-workers. The lies they’d report back to the bosses are beyond description. Actually, I’m trying to forget all these characters I once worked with, storing them in the furthest memory banks I can because it does not do my heart good, nor inner soul … if you get my drift. Then earlier this year I read Tolle’s book “A New Earth”. The man is a God send for all of us to get through and past the pain done to our lives and to get back to being the best that God wanted us to be. Read this book … it will do your heart good and make you think about all the egos (some in check and others, as you learned and now know, are out of control). You can also go on Oprah.com and download Tolle’s details of his 10 chapters of the book FREE of charge. The man’s voice is so soothing and kind … it is music to the soul. If you get out of this book what I got out of this book, maybe, just maybe Tolle is on to something that the rest of us who have hit rock bottom haven’t learned yet. So now I’m optimistic again that if these egos are court ordered (has to be court ordered and incarcerated because they won’t do it on their own) to work with professionals to quiet their minds, go silent, be still, and speak with the Holy Spirit (no matter how many years this should take) … then they too can be helped to feel again. That is my prayer for all of us in this world … to rid this blight of out of control egos preying on society forever. It’s time for all the mental health, law enforcement, court appointed professionals to meet with Tolle and look into this. Time to open our eyes and look at this illness from another perspective.
Realising that he cannot change and that he is the lie is immeasurably important to my healing. I still have doubts about my choices and my motivations but I have no doubt that I was not at fault for our relationship not succeeding.
I made a committment to him and I did everything in my power to make it work and to support him in every way I could. He is the lie, he is the one who will never be able to appreciate a woman like me.
I have my good days and my bad days but one thing I know for sure is that I’m a stronger woman now than I’ve ever been. I’m rid of the beast and I fully intend to realise my potential and create a happier, more fulfilling life for myself.
I realised recently that I am finally ready to make application to adopt a baby and I’ve started my research. I know I can provide a safe and loving home to a child and that I will be a good mother. Ironically I have the beast to thank for making me see that I’m capable of so much more than I thought I was.
Odette,
It is always inspiring to read how survivors turn their experience into something as positive as giving a child a good home. Good Luck with your adoption palns.
Swalow
Yesterday I had a long and deep conversation with a woman a couple of years older than me, a very bright woman, who was married to a psychopath, gave birth to children that were psychopathic, was a poor parent herself, and even some of her grandchildren were psychopathic….in fact, one of her granddaughters is in prison now and she is raising the 3 year old daughter, her own GREAT granddaughter who is probably one of the prettiest little girls I have ever seen.
This woman grew up in a dysfunctional family, became a dysfunctional mother and grandmother, but now at 60+ she is GETTING IT, and she is making every effort to give this VERY AT RISK LITTLE GIRL a home and give her every chance to grow up into a loving person. The child was in foster care from birth to 2 and never bonded, the ggm took off from work to spend a year bonding with this child. It gave me HOPE for even the MOST DYSFUNCTIONAL of situations that there may be some changes for the better.
As I was leaving, the lady told me “It will STOP with this generation if I can do anything about it!” This woman with very little formal education herself has EDUCATED herself about Ps and about parenting. I watched her interactions with the little girl, her husband and the little girl, and the three of them and I left with such a warm feeling in my heart. These people are not wealthy, but they are kind and loving and are giving this child a chance at life that otherwise she would never have. She may still turn out to be bi-polar and/or psychopathic (she has many bi-polar ancestors and psychopaths as well) but she HAD A CHANCE FOR A GOOD LIFE.
While it would be “nice” if we could sterilize all the Ps and lock them up on an island so they couldn’t reporoduce or hurt others, there will always be a “supply” of these people, but we can make a START with ourselves and one child at a time, with educating parents, being advocates for women and men and children in abusive situations.
Mother Theresa didn’t get rid of all poverty and all the lonely deaths of the people with no one, but she worked to do what SHE COULD and that is all we can do. We can’t heal everyone, but we can start with ourselves, and continue to advocate for and support others as they heal, and as each person is healed and goes out to help others, the healing will spread like “bread cast upon the waters” sending ripples outward and far away.
Odette will give a child wihtout parents a good home, and the lessons that she learned as a victim of a psychopath will give her a greater insight into parenting and loving than she might have had without the experience. [QUOTE] “I have the beast to thank for making me see that I’m capable of so much more than I thought I was.”
I have a little book called “Crones Don’t whine”—a Crone is an old English word meaning “wise older woman”—I want to BE a CRONE…I want to be PROUD OF MYSELF, I want to not pretend to be some young sex pot, this is a new stage in my life—my cronehood. I’ve had my other stages, and I can’t move backwards, and I don’t want to–I want to move FORWARD into my cronehood proudly, a better and wiser woman.
I saw a woman the other day that frequents the local auction where I go sometimes, and she is referred to by other people there as “Botox BArbie”–she dresses like a Barbie Doll, and has long platinum hair suitable for a 16yr old, and she is probably 50+ She is not willing to move into the Cronehood, but continues to try to be the Barbie Doll that she outgrew a generation ago. It really is pathetic that her maintaining her youthful looks long after they have gone, and dressing like a teenager seems to be the center of her world.
I want more than that for myself. I want my beauty to be internal where it will never fade, never need Botox to work the “wrinkles” out. Peace
M.L. Gallagher,
Thank you for posting this… It also applies to the cop who lied to me from the first day he met me, and explains him…
May EACH of us hurt by one of these soul suckers be able to heal and know that WE can be true, no matter how false they are, that THEY are not mirros of some inadquacy or unworthiness within us. They are just who they are – damaged beyond repair.