Finally, you realize what is wrong with your romantic partner: He or she is a sociopath.
Finally, the behavior that was so confusing makes sense. The person you loved, and who you thought loved you, has a personality disorder. Now you realize that anything your partner told you could have been a lie. Now you know why your partner could be so cruel, then tell you how much he or she loved you, practically in the same breath. Now you realize that there never was any love, that your entire relationship was exploitation, and nothing more.
Now what do you do? How do you move forward? How do you recover?
Many of your friends and family tell you, “Just put it behind you. Get over it. Move on.” You are particularly likely to hear this advice if you were “only” dating the person, not married.
The friends and family dispensing this pithy advice probably were never involved with a sociopath. They don’t understand the depth of the betrayal. When you split from a sociopath, it is not a normal breakup. The intensity of these relationships makes the end incredibly painful.
Relationship and addiction
The sociopath initiated this intensity in the beginning of the relationship by showering you with attention, wanting to be with you all the time, claiming that you were soul mates, and painting a glimmering picture of your future together. You, never having experienced such adoration, believed that he or she was head over heels in love with you. Even if you felt misgivings, you suppressed them and focused on the promise of happily ever after.
Then, sooner or later, the sociopath did something to make you feel fear or anxiety. Perhaps you caught your partner lying or cheating. Perhaps he or she suddenly became enraged—you weren’t sure why—and threatened to end your relationship.
Whatever it was, the bliss that you felt in the beginning was shattered, and you wanted it back. You asked what was wrong, tried to work things out, perhaps even apologized for something that you didn’t do. Eventually the sociopath relented, and you kissed and made up.
Then, the whole cycle started again: Intense attraction. An incident causing fear and anxiety. Relief. Around and around it went.
This process has a profound psychological effect—it actually makes you addicted to the relationship. That’s why it’s so hard to break up with a sociopath. You’re not breaking off a relationship—you’re breaking an addiction.
Choose yourself
Addictions don’t just go away. Anyone who has quit smoking, drinking, drugs or any other addiction knows that it’s hard work. You must choose yourself, your health and wellbeing, over the addiction. Then you must work on your recovery, day in and day out.
A relationship with a sociopath is the same. You cannot simply “put it behind you.” You cannot fully recover by locking your internal devastation into a closet, never to be opened, while attempting to go through the motions of living. If you try to do this, you simply end up with an emotional cancer within you, eating away at your life force.
The solution is to choose yourself. Make a commitment to yourself that you will recover, and then work it, day by day.
Steps of recovery
The first step is No Contact. Get the person out of your life. Stop seeing and talking to him or her. Block emails and text messages. Don’t visit his or her Facebook page.
This will be difficult in the beginning, because, remember, you are breaking an addiction. You’ll feel a compulsion to contact your former romantic partner. But if you do, it’s just like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. You’ll be back at square one, and you’ll have to start the recovery process all over again.
The secret to breaking the addiction, as they say in 12-step programs, is to take it one day at a time. So commit to yourself that you will not contact the sociopath today. Then you make the same commitment tomorrow, and then the next day.
The longer you stay away from the sociopath, the stronger you become.
Deeper healing
Getting the sociopath out of your life is only the first part of your recovery. The second, and most important, part, is healing whatever made you vulnerable to the sociopath in the first place.
We all have vulnerabilities—it’s part of being human. We have internal fears, doubts and injuries from our past. Or we have dreams and ambitions—these, too, in the practiced hands of a sociopath, can become vulnerabilities, when he or she promises to make them come true. But generally, the sociopaths target our weaknesses, because that’s the easiest and most effective way to hook us.
Usually the weaknesses boil down to a subconscious belief, deep within us, that we are not good enough.
We rationalize that our mother ignored us, or our father abused us, because we were not good enough. We assume that an earlier romantic involvement failed because we were not good enough. These ideas may have been deeply buried, but they still caused pain, and pain created vulnerability. Sociopaths can sense vulnerability like a shark senses blood in the water.
Releasing the pain
How do you recover from these deep wounds? You acknowledge that they exist. You look at them and allow yourself to feel the associated emotions—pain, disappointment, fear, anger, rage, numbness—and then you let the emotions go.
This is a process, and is best done in private, or with the help of a competent therapist. You’ll find that you have layers and layers of pain, and as you release one, another rises to take its place. You may find yourself crying, wailing or stomping to release anger. You work your way through the layers of emotions, acknowledging, feeling and releasing.
You can’t do this all at once—it’s too draining, and you still have to live your life. In fact, you should intersperse these sessions of releasing with times of treating yourself well, and feeling joy at whatever goodness you experience, no matter how small.
True recovery isn’t easy, fun or instant—it takes work and a commitment to yourself. But the rewards are so wonderful: Release from old traumas. Life lived with peace and lightness. The opportunity for true love and happiness.
It all begins with making a decision to recover.
Oh my 1steprs, does the smell of diesel turn you on too?
Hens, it’s not the smell of diesel, it’s the sound the truck makes. It sounds like it’s boiling oil – because it is. It has the same engine as the humvee.
Guys envy the heck out of it. It was one of the things my ex-spath wanted to inherit. too bad for him.
Hens,
BTW, my spath has an identical truck except it is a short bed with a gas engine. Mine is a long bed with a diesel. Both are crew cabs.
When I was getting ready to leave him, I had to remove some things from my house but I was sure he had bugged my truck. both of us usually drove our fuel efficient cars.
So what I did, was use HIS truck to move my things, I was taking no chances since he had bugged my cars before. He never suspected a thing until the very end. lol.
While I was driving his truck I noticed something unusual: it drove like a sports car. I don’t know what he did to it, but it had mega-horsepower. He is a mechanical genius.
It was kinda funny, when he realized I had used his truck. He had this look on his face:
http://180rule.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/envy.jpg
Bwahahaahahhha!
Sky, did you have any trepidation about going to meet a guy from CL on your own? This is not something I would have done. You are more trusting than I am in some ways. I would have brought a male friend.
I know they’re out there, Sky. A few years ago I did meet a couple on CL that appeared to be very lovely people – Christians – looking to rent out their basement apartment in exchange for massage for the husband who had fibromyalgia. They invited me to their home and cooked me dinner. We played guitar and sang together for hours, and then I gave her a demo on how to give a therapeutic massage in exchange for some nutritional products they sell. I was considering selling my place and thought I’d need a cheap place to live, so it seemed like a possibility. I thought we’d at least become friends. But the next day the husband emailed me on a separate email and asked if I would want to “explore sensual massage” with him and that his wife was okay with it. I was so disgusted. I’d felt betrayed, duped, and angry with myself for letting myself start to bond with these people. That happened two years ago. Since then I’ve been really careful about the people on CL I will go out and visit for any reason.
There was a time when I attracted every psycho in town. They were my friends and my roommates. Everywhere I went, I’d find them. I found a psycho guy sitting in the food stamps office in 1986 and let him visit me at my home! Looking back, I have done so much healing that the quality of people in my life has greatly improved. The men I’m meeting these days are very kind and decent. I’m reasonably sure I will meet my future husband through this social circle (if I have not met him already). I’m trying not to get too ahead of myself with this though and just enjoy my life.
There was an article here whose theme was something to the effect of “what you put your energy into is what you get”. I believe this to be true that what you are seeing in your outside world is a reflection of where you are at inside. If you focus on all the spaths and psychos out there and imagine them to be everywhere, this is what you will surely find. If someone compliments you, you will consider it love bombing. Or if a random person does lovebomb you, it will become the focus of your day instead of a blip on your radar screen before you move on to meet more positive people. For every spath out there, there are a hundred really decent people. I know because this is my experience on a daily basis. And I’m not so naive that I just blindly think everyone is good. I can spot a toxic person a mile away. I can sense their energy. I also now know the telltale signs of a spath, where I couldn’t 4 years ago. But mostly I meet a lot of really wonderful people. I went to breakfast with a friend this morning and had a fun conversation with two of the waiters (one noticed my Zumba pants and we talked about dance and all kinds of fun stuff). Then the lady at the cash register and I struck up a conversation about salsa dance, and I gave her my card because she seemed interested in massage. All of this raised my energy (which was already pretty high) and made me feel good. The rest of the day at my friend’s pool was great. This is what my days are like – I don’t seem to attract a lot of bad people anymore. Not that I’m naive and can’t spot them – I can. I just don’t attract them and I don’t gravitate toward them. There are a lot of them in my neighborhood. So I just don’t get friendly with them anymore. Also, I don’t believe you should have to be kind to toxic people. I just cut them out. I will literally just go NC with them and stop returning their calls.
Stargazer,
I note how you intermix flattery and compliments. For me there is a distinct difference between the two. Flattery is never genuine, because flattery always implies praising someone for your own benefit with the attempt to influence them. Compliments are always genuine.
So when it’s genuine, I consider it a compliment. When it’s got hooks and strings attached it’s flattery. In other words, someone can tell me I look beautiful in that dress and I will consider it a compliment, but the next person who says me the same thing I will consider to be trying to flatter me.
So, how can you tell the difference? A lot has to do with self-validation. First of all, compliments and flattery by others do not determine how I think about myself, nor how I feel about myself. I don’t feel any need of feedback confirmation by other people to know what I’m doing is right, or feels good to me, or looks beautiful, etc… Just that self-validation seems to give me the ability to sniff out when someone is giving my positive feedback with or without hooks.
Another consequence of this is that since whether I like myself is independent from another person’s opinion of me, it also implies that my opinion of people is not based on how much they tell me nice words. In other words, flattery doesn’t make me bite. And when it’s a compliment, the other doesn’t expect you to bite, nor needs you to bite, because there simply are no hooks.
That attitude leads to the reveal. Since it doesn’t truly influence me neither on my opinion of myself nor on the one telling me something nice, those who flatter realize I’m not biting. They will then either press on, overdoing it, OR they will turn 180° and start insulting me. Anyway, they will be crossing boundaries galore very quickly. You then have confirmation the nice words were just hooks.
And often the first flatteries already cross boundaries and are often very inappropriate either in subject or presentation or timing. Like that spathic bf of my friend commenting on my breasts at each opportunity, while it’s the 3rd time I see him and he’s supposed to be wildly in love with my friend. Not that his obession with them would have been compliments to me if he were single either.
It’s like that street-scapegoating-game… the men ask your phone number, telling you how beautiful you are, but the moment you say ‘no’, they start callig you a whore and slut. That doesn’t make any sense at all… A woman who says no to such easy proposals is the opposite of easy. A woman who says yes is easy. And if you were to really believe a woman beautiful and think her proper to ask her out, then you wouldn’t namecall her 5 secs later. It’s word salad, projection, etc Of course the street-scapegoating-game of these men is a VERY obvious example.
I had a Mexican friend comment on the incident of two days ago, where he pretended to be a Mexican touting me on the street. I told him that was actually completely different. Latin American men whistle and say nice words to women passing by all the time too. But they don’t require a response from a woman, at the most a smile. And when you smile at them for it, they won’t jump and suddenly start following you around, wanting more. If the woman ignores it, she won’t be called names over it either. It is a macho thing to tout, but in Latin America it still respects boundaries. It’s a street-game but not a scapegoat-game. It’s part of their masculanity to do it, but it’s also pays respect to femininity. Hence it’s a compliment.
I’m guessing that a lot of the men you are salsa dancing with are of Latin-American origin. I wouldn’t let my value nor my feelings of femininity depend on their compliments, but it’s a nice confirmation of how you feel about yourself already, and it is freely given, rarely without strings attached.
not a big fan of exhaust of anykind hens….like sky says, its the (sound)power that attracts me. and size does matter.
sky,
I have that genuine, honest, sunny, smile face. Freckles and a noisetip pointing in the air add to that majorly. There is one advantage about it… I rarely do say barbwired things and I rarely use my smile to accomplish things, but when I do nobody ever sees me coming.
I’ve given my malignant narcistic aunt a barbwired comment ones, at the coffee table after the funeral of my grandmother. I was 23-24 and normally a kind and generous person, so she totally underestimated me. One of her pet peeves was touting the female line: grandmother to her and to her only daughter who had a daughter too (4 generations of first born women). And she was piping that tune again at the coffee table, sitting opposite from me. With the most innocent face I suddenly said, “Oh, that’s right, I’m the last one of our family who carries our name!” Sky, I swear she had that same face right then and there of the old hag pic you linked to. My grandfather, next to me, was chuckling, and my mom stared at me and hid a grin. My father (who was always my aunt’s scapegoat) was seated somewhere totally different and couldn’t have heard it, but my mom told him afterwards and said I had done absolutely stellar. And my aunt couldn’t find one way to reply to it, since I was this young innocent cousin, who had ‘blurbed’ out the most innocent realization. It’s one of the last times I ever spoke to my aunt.
Anyway, I have the face of a naïve tomboy… so I’m often regarded as abolutely harmless, and usually am. And just occasionally I turn it into an advantage of being underestimated.
Darwinsmom,
that’s so funny! lol.
That picture is a portrait done by a “medical artist”. The model was institutionalized for chronic envy. Here is an interesting history about it:
http://www.jmpweb.com/cm/articolo.jhtml?param3_1=N10f5702e6cf8456fdce¶m2_1=N10f75e8bdc0a2d3fc20¶m1_1=N10f759c4f3cc28bd714
Very interesting!
I don’t make a fuss really about last names, but it was the truth… I was the last and youngest generation of my paternal line with the paternal last name (as my father was the last male to pass it on). My aunt’s daughter didn’t have her name, and the great-granddaughter certainly didn’t have it. My dad, my mother and I didn’t care, but I knew my aunt cared a big deal about it! Heck she’s so fussy about her last name that she even had it altered in spelling because she believes it was originally spelled with an ‘y’ instead of ‘ij’. That was some story my grandfather had made her believe, but he never bothered to alter the spelling of his last name. Since there are a few element in him that point to a selfish, manipulative man it’s quite possible he made it up to make a fool of herself by having her alter her last name.
Anyway, I knew that when I said that ‘oh so sudden realization’ that I was giving her one of the ultimate narcistic blows that would make her blood boil from envy. But that I would know this and would this very consciously was something she never expected from me nor could ever have proven. And since keeping up appearances and mask was immensely important to her she could not respond without making a fool of herself in front of the rest of the family (my mother’s family)
Of course she made sure we could never ruin a funeral for her anymore. She made sure none of us knew about my grandfather’s death and yet put our names on the death letter invitation for the funeral. Not that we much cared about our name with that stock of the family, and my father rightfully choice to go NC with my grandfather when he started his D & D.
Star,
no I really don’t have trepidation about craigslisting on my own. I do it all the time and 99% of the people I meet, are sooooo nice. Many of them give me a hug when I leave. We bond. My craigslisting is so fun and interesting that BF and I are always saying we should write a book: Tales from Craigslist.
Most of my craigslisting, I just drive up to a porch or other public place, grab the stuff and leave. I did not expect the situation with the long winding road, but since I was there, I didn’t want to back down. Spaths will choose to hurt the marginalized people in society, so I made comments indicating that several people knew I was there, that I know connected people, I have a boyfriend, etc…
So, it’s not that I’m scared of people, I’m LESS scared than I should be. What I’m describing is red flags purely in the interest of science. Learning. These 2 encounters were filled with red flags and I posted them so that newbies, can read about them and understand that an encounter which may seem on the surface to be innocent (the christian looking for a woman to marry and a man who gave me a flower and expressed concern about my safety), were not innocent at all. The CLUES ARE THERE.
A real gentleman, would not have been so forward upon first meeting and given me a flower. That’s boundary crossing because we don’t know each other and he has attempted to manipulate my emotions. Also, a true gentleman would not WANT me to walk down the path with him. He would have said, “wait here, I’ll load them in my truck and bring them to the side of the road.” He would understand that I’m vulnerable and would want me to feel safe.
The last clue about what he is, is how he made me feel. I am STILL thinking about him. And so I emailed him last night and gave him the name of a contact, an expert on salt water intrusion, who can help him get a well on his property. (It’s on an island and some places cannot be built on because of salt-water intrusion, but I know a guy who has invented a method that will fix that).
When he responded to the email, it began, “Hi Skylar, I’ve been thinking about you.” Of course he knows how that will affect me: I’m feeling flattered.
I’m not immune like Darwinsmom, I’m very affected by spaths. So I observe my feelings and let them inform me. In addition to being a participant, I become an observer.