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.
miranda,
I can’t speak for your friend but I will tell you how I feel about it.
If someone, knows and understands that my spath is a SPATH, then WHY would they want to associate with him at all? It makes no sense. He is an emotional vampire whose only mission in life is to see other people in misery. If people really believe me, when I tell them, then they should RUN RUN RUN away from him.
If their “solution” is to keep us separate, then I know they don’t really see the truth and it’s very disheartening.
My spath is a murderer. Which makes it even more appalling to see that people don’t shun him. This is the problem and the reason why spaths continue to have power: THEY AREN’T SHUNNED BY THE COMMUNITY.
But it doesn’t matter if they have the BALLS to kill or just want to bully someone into suicide, they are still MURDERERS. The only difference is the size of their balls. Do they murder covertly or do they use suicide to place the responsibility on the victim for their own murder?
The reason spaths can continue to operate with impunity is because we let them. We have the power and we hand it over to them for the simple reason that we don’t want to be rude.
They are laughing at us because they know this.
Holy cats…..I’m off the radar for a while and it’s Katie Bar The Door!
Welcome to the new readers and I’m sorry that you are members of this “club.” I’m glad that you all found your ways to this site.
Read, post, respond, recover, heal…..this all takes time and a whole lot of self-examinations. I’m one of those people who advocate engaging in counseling therapy in the wake of sociopathic entanglements. My belief is that we don’t have the capacity to process our experiences, alone. And, a good, strong counselor will point things out, give us techniques, and help us along our healing paths until we are strong enough, emotionally, to trust our own judgments and decisions.
Stormy – I read your personal epiphany, and I want you to know that these things are often painful and may seem harsh. But, setting the painful feelings aside and viewing my layers on a pragmatic basis – trying to detach from this, emotionally – provided me with a general roadmap to how I became the best and brightest victim for “bad people” and their exploitations.
This is going to be a painful process for a while, Stormy, it just simply is. But……once that painful shock is past and we can clearly see how our own boundaries were either in need of repair, or simply non-existant, the World Is Our Proverbial Oyster. We begin to feel empowered with our own positive “Selfisms.” Self-love isn’t narcissisitic! It’s accepting the truth that we are deserving of love and acceptance. Self-validation, self-awareness, self-esteem, self-worth……all of these powerful, powerful “Selfisms” were missing from the times of our childhoods, in some manner. So, it is an almost indescribable power that we are given in these challenging counseling sessions.
Brightest, brightest blessings to you on your healing path
Thank you so much for your responses Skylar and Stargazer. The cog-dis makes so much sense now. Why has it taken me 2 years to fully understand this concept? lol
As far as time goes, I again feel like a loser because it’s been 16 years since my last entanglement with my ex. I know I didn’t face any of the pain or was honest with myself until 2 to 3 years ago. But it has still been a very long time. I understand it takes time and everyone has their different rates of healing. But 16 years to heal? I’m getting a bit frustrated.
I am trying to be gentle with myself knowing that I am making great progress. And, as Oxy and so many others have pointed out, it is a journey not a destination.
The most frustrating thing I am dealing with right now are these terrible dreams about my ex. During the day I feel pretty good and aware, but my dreams leave me feeling vulnerable and like the one at fault. I’ve been given ambien, but it makes me so sleepy during the following day I really don’t like taking it.
Any suggestions on how to handle the dreams?
TheSisterhood, hugs to you, my dear. Sounds like PSTD, perhaps. Even though it’s been many years since your experiences, that’s why they call it “post” traumatic stress disorder, instead of “right-the-hell-now” traumatic stress disorder.
The cog/diss is something that I never understood (much less, knew about) until my counseling sessions. My attempts to fit my head around the bad behaviors of other people (excuse, denial, whatever) were rampant. “It wasn’t THAT bad, was it?”
It may be that your cog/diss events and dreams/nightmares are intertwined and a good, strong counselor might be able to help you sort them out. For me, in lieu of counseling (dammit), I try to write them down as soon as I wake up. Later, I can sort of decipher the symbolisms, etc. But, I have to move through a couple of days before taking a look at my notes.
Dreams have many purposes. Some are simply purges of the daily grind. Others are attempts to work out past issues/experiences. Still, others (IMHO) are foresighted warnings. It all depends upon the individual, their experiences, and the feelings that these dreams generate.
Brightest blessings
sisterhood,
My advice about dreams is to welcome them as a way for your mind to deal with what’s going on under the surface. The only thing that never is symbolic in a dream are the feelings and emotions, and therefore are suspected to be majorly used to heal you emotionally. In order to heal from trauma you must feel the emotions. If our daily life or we ourselves do not permit ourselves to confront emotions of a past even, the emotions end being confronted in dreams.
When I’m hurting a lot, I tend to seek sleep and dreams, because I know it’s the fastest, easiest and most direct route for myself to make sense of my emotions.
I know it’s hurtful and frightening, but you have to face the painful emotions somehow. You can choose to do that in the day, and if you don’t do it awake, it will happen in your dreams.
Sisterhood, Dreams are the psyches way of bringing unconscious material into consciousness.
I took a “Dream Interpretation class in college, and ever since, have paid very close attention to my dreams.
When I was first becoming aware of my x hubs secret life of dasterdly deeds, I had a very telling nightmare.
It was sometime around Halloween, and we had watched, “Nightmare on Elm Street.”
When I went to bed I dreamed I was in a beautiful park…the weather was lovely, spring flowers all around, a warm breeze, children with helium baloons….when, all of a sudden things began to change, insidiously, so that I hardly noticed, until the weather was dark, cold…the wind was blowing, the baloons were ripped out of the hands of the children, they were running away crying…it was very scarey….there was a man there, who looked like my husband, but he was evi; and I knew it. I managed to wake up from this nightmare, but when I went back to sleep, it repeated itself.
I realized, my husband who was known as Fred the recruiter, was being symbolized as Freddy Kruger, and that the cycling nature of the dream fit the process of seduction and betrayal that Patric Carnes writes about in “The Betrayal Bond”.
There are many good sights on Dream Interpretation and you can learn to analyze your own dreams. Pay special attention to recurring dreams…they are recording change and progress. Also, if someone speaks to you in a dream, listen carefully.
Look for archetypes….you can learn more about them by googling C.J. Jungs theory of DI.
If you study your dreams as a daily journal of progress, and as a source of wisdom, maybe you won’t find them so disturbing.
Good luck.
She’s beginning to dig in to the affair and find the lies one by one but my perception is that it is exhausting and i wonder if she ought to break off once in a while and rest. I have run into persons who worked with him and let her do the questioning so she does not have to hear it all from me and this seems to work best for her. but she looks SO TIRED after a little digging. still encouraging though, i see a tiny bit of her old resolve, or moral core or independence flicker back to life each time she goes digging. she’s getting back together with old female friends and laughing more. its like watching her win a race in slow motion but i will try to be patient. she’s asking more about you folks here on LF and after reading the above by Donna she said it all matched. she said”thats him, to a tee”
as her husband, how do i best help her if at all?
I mean, any of you fall into this in an affair while married and make it work? i mean. if i hadnt studied and learned how these freaks work i’d have given her the boot long ago. it was just to freaky to understand unless you know the kind of influence they can exert on decent people.
Sisterhood,
I think Kim is right. You might best be helped abotu your dreams when you start to understand the purpose of dreams in general more and start trying to interprete them.
I wrote two extensive blog posts on the science of dreams several years ago… they are a synopsis on what is out there with regards to sleep and dream science…
http://ssr-spirihumanism.blogspot.be/2009/10/short-overview-of-dream-science.html
http://ssr-spirihumanism.blogspot.be/2009/10/content-purpose-of-dream.html
rgc,
I understand your need to want to help her heal and see… but she needs to do this steps herself. It’s not really something you can do for her. I think you help her the most by focusing on your own healing from this for now, and aside from that experience the present relationship between you two. Do things together you would otherwise do.
Darwinsmom & Kim, I take my dreams and nightmares quite seriously. My psyche unloads stuff all of the time while I’m sleeping.
Rgc, what Darwinsmom said kind of preempts how I was going to respond. I am still reading about HER (CAPS are strictly for emphasis and not to be interpreted as online yelling) healing processes, and NOTHING about your own. She is going to have to sort this out, herself – or, not. Your introduction to LoveFraud is well-meant, I’m sure, and I hope that she finds her way here to increase her chances of recovery. But, I am perplexed by the absence in discussing your own healing. Are you spending precious time holding her hand and propelling her down her healing path while your own path lies yonder? I’m just asking – not accusing.
Brightest blessings