This week we received the following email. I am sharing it with you because what she reports is very common on a number of levels that I will discuss.
I was married to a sociopath for 25 years. They were horrible years because most of that time I had no idea I was married to a sociopath. I was deeply in love when we met. He told me everything I wanted to hear. Knowing all my weaknesses and fears he fed them, made me totally emotionally dependent on him. He helped me get great jobs, pumped me up so I would keep making more money, while of course he lived off me. But at the same time kept telling me I was ugly, fat, sickly. He had affairs. All of this and I still kept hoping he would change and someday really love me. He even encouraged me to do some illegal stuff — which I did — just to make him happy.
Twenty five years and when I finally couldn’t take it any more I left (8 months ago) Thought that was the end of it — but I actually kept worrying about him. He didn’t have a job or enough food to eat.
Well, he had used my computer one day when he was visiting and his email site was left on. I got curious and started reading his emails. He had been seeing other women, started relationship while he was still with me, telling them the same things he had always told me — but what I found most hurtful was that he was talking to these women about me in derogatory ways. That I was a psycho, unattractive, that I didn’t inspire him to do anything, etc. In many ways, this should have been good. Had I not seen that with my own eyes I would have never believed that my husband of 25 years who told me every day that he loved me more than life itself was bad mouthing me to these other women. I feel such anger and hatred in me that I know is not healthy”¦but I don’t know how to let it go.
I cut off all communications with him, but I still check into his emails. It’s like watching a soap opera — I’m hooked on this and don’t know how to stop. Every day when I see a new email where he’s dragging my name through the mud, it just makes me feel like crap. Even though I know he’s heartless and I should just not care what he says — I do. This is the man I slept next to for 25 years. I’m 58 years old and I can’t even think of starting a new relationship with all this distrust and hatred in my heart. How in the world would I ever trust another man? The duplicity that men are capable is incredible and every man I meet gives me the creeps.
Is there any hope that I could ever get over this? I just don’t know how to move forward.
First of all 25 years is a long time to spend with another person, might as well be a lifetime. To come to grips with that, a person has to focus his/her attention on all the other things he/she did and accomplished during that time period. Usually the relationship was not the only part of life. Since the outcome was so bad the mind naturally wants to focus the attention on the bad and recovery means fighting this natural tendency.
Second, worrying about the sociopath is extremely common. Again overcoming this means focused attention. Attend to what this says about you. You are a person who cares and naturally worries about those you have loved. Just because you have a feeling does not mean you have to act on it.
The third issue, spying on the sociopath. I have seen that behavior a great deal so don’t feel you are unusual because you do this. I have also observed that the spying is often linked to anger, as is difficulty letting go.
Why would spying, anger and difficulty letting go be linked? I think this relates to a need for power and mastery over the situation. How many times have victims said, “I just didn’t want him/her to win”? I think recovery starts with admitting that we “lost” and the sociopath “won.” In the same breath though we have to question what the “prize” for winning was. If we don’t go on with our lives and recover, we give the sociopath a real prize!
The fourth issue is trusting again. That will come with recovery, but perhaps the trust for others will always be different. I will say that evil people tend to capture our attention. Some studies show that the good has to outweigh the bad 4 times in order for good to capture as much attention as bad. Evil men are much more visible in society, so make it a point to focus your attention on the loving empathetic men you know. This is difficult for many women who are attracted to power because they do not find less powerful men very attractive.
I would rephrase, “The duplicity that men are capable is incredible and every man I meet gives me the creeps.” To the duplicity of every man I focus my attention on… I am working on a book, both discussing love and empathy in men and telling the stories of men who have been victimized by sociopathic women. I am doing this to help both men and women realize that loving behavior is the norm for men. We just attend to evil/powerful men more, the loving man goes unnoticed. He is invisible to us.
That gets me to recovery and some tough advice. Recovery takes a great deal of work and self discipline. In order to have the mental discipline you will need to stop reading the emails and move on, you have to work on your physical health. If you are out of shape, smoking and/or using alcohol, you may have great difficulty recovering. The part of the brain that is responsible for will power and impulse control is easily affected by poor health andxiety and lack of sleep. Start with a total health program. That program will go a long way toward lifting anxiety and depression. Keep a healthy diet and exercise every day. I would really like us to have a virtual exercise club and I put up Fit and Smart for that purpose. On that web site you will find a free program to help structure your exercise routine.
Fill your free time with activities that build you up mentally and spiritually. Build yourself up mentally by reading and perhaps taking a class. Build yourself up spiritually by volunteering or participating in a spiritual community. If you do all these things, you will have the health and strength to focus your attention where it needs to be. The writing of M. Louise Gallagher may be an inspiration to you.
Great advice Dr. Liane.
I am still working on parts of recovery. The “total health” part is key.
I noticed my health went downhill for awhile…I am now trying to get back to basics.
It is about control, win/lose….and you’re right there’s no win for us…b/c normal people don’t play their game. I will say I had a bit of justice and you know what- while it was appropriate and fair- I didn’t feel necessarily better. Even now more confirmation they are a psycho…doesn’t console.
I just have to work on mving on, and in my case it’s from a life-long pattern of tolerating abuse. Not easy.
Just yesterday though I went to one of those “forced socialization”events at work– we weren’t required, but I was hungry so I dropped in…a game of bingo lifted my spirits. Just fun with no “games.”
i logged into xS’s email too. i wanted to find his location from the ip adress. i also changed his password. somehow he got back into it. i wonder how.
i guess i still have to keep trying and do the things like dr. leedom described. but one thing i struggle with is my sense of normalacy. i feel that he devastated it. for everthing i knew and believe he put his twisted stamp on it and now it is as if it that opinion and informtion are lost.
genny:
that sense of normalcy comes and goes for awhile. it’s still like that with me, only i have weeks of fine and then a few days of crap, usually. by crap, i mean the sense that i am not quite the same woman i always was.
thankfully, i learned the last time, time will take care of this issue. in those years apart, you return fully to your whole, strong, healthy self.
just make sure those years apart don’t end in a reunion and all will be fine!!
Without trying to “over simplify” moving on, I think it is the absolute “grief process” just like when someone DIES. The emotions are the same, denial, sadness, anger, bargaining, self blame, and finally acceptance.
If anything is “different” it is that BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT DEAD, physically, we have more trouble getting out of the denial part, then we get stuck–if you have a coffin, and a “funeral” you at least get some “closure” in that you know that NOTHING YOU DO WILL BRING THEM BACK, but with a “living death” it isn’t so quite cut and dried and I think that makes it worse for US.
I’ve sort of made my own “funeral” for the Ps…by realizing that the P-Man is NOT my “baby boy”–the baby boy is DEAD.
The P-XBF is not the man and never was the man I imagined him to be, and the X-DIL I never liked from the first, I sensed that she was deceptive and she went to great lengths not to blend into our family, so I didn’t lose an “affectionate” DIL that I loved and trusted. With the Trojan Horse P, I guess I am somewhat “emotionally involved” with him, in trying to influence the parole board to keep him incarcerated for the duration of his sentence instead of let him out before that on parole….but at the same time, on that one I “rationalize” or “justify” that in my own mind at least by the fact I am afraid of him.
My “P-by-proxy” mother I’m dealing with with very limited contact and am getting to the point that I can have “emotional NC” even if the physical NC is not absolute. I realize that she sees ANY contact as potential for re-opening a “relationship” at some point, but I DO NOT WANT THAT, have no desire for one. Business only. I can deal with that pretty well.
In dealing with the grief process with those people I loved who died, it has always taken me one to three years to fully “complete” that grief process, a little less with my stepfather because we knew he was dying 18 months before he did, and both he and we went through the majority of the grief BEFORE he died, together. That was kind of a “new” way of grieving for me, as all other deaths in our family had been rather sudden, without any warning. The suddenness seemed to me to make them worse in dealing with the grief.
The physical exercise, and the other healthy changes we can make in ourselves do indeed, I think, help with coping with the grief process. Also, as long as we realize that the coping, the healing, and going through the process is not linear, but back and forth from one stage to the other, over and over, so that we don’t think as we back step a bit that we are “losing” or not advancing in the healing process.
In many cases I think when the “chaos” has been going on for months and years, and the stress level for us during those times was HIGH AND LONG, we suffer physical ills as well as emotional woes that cause a cornucopia of problems that we must deal with in order to heal. The “fighting off the alligators in order to drain the swamp” becomes a way of life, so anything we can focus on besides the 100 small alligators attached to our back sides at one time will help. LOL
“9. Know that by being so critical and harsh about myself, is being self-abusive and not loving. Break the cycle”
i like that one the most, free.
it’s weird. recently i hve been thinking about S more.
after he left we were still ‘together.’ so the communication would effect me. i didn’t miss him. the thought of being with him turned my stomach. then i cut him off. i had so many relationships after him. it distracted me. i wonder if i partly did that in order to forget him more… there was a lot of drama. now i am mainly alone so i am thinking about him more maybe?
Free and all,
I would like to add that being alone right now to me has become a LUXURY! On my good days it is blissful, and on my bad days, at least I am not in full view for others to judge.
Gong into my marriage I had always feared being alone, and had spent 9 years as a single mom, was a latch key neglected kid growing up etc, so being alone felt like FAILURE it equalled +nobody loves me.
After 27 yrs,. with my P/S/N I turly learned how to be devestatingly alone. He was there but not present, he said the words but didn’t deliver the feeling. And yet i lied to myself – right along with him.
Now I am content and unlonely. Fortunately I have support from good friends and family (few but precious) and many many interests and talents, which I developed when I had the luxury of time when I was alone in my marriage. During the last 8 yrs, I withdrew to other interests, outside myself interest, became an activist on issues that were imrtant to me, met new people, studied new areas of knowledge, learned to paint and so on.
As bitter as I may be presently about my relationship, I did have that luxury of time, even tho’ all through that time I felt incredibly abused by constant stress from how he chose to run our life, and terribly vulnerable as he had cut me off from my roots and made sure I had no access to financial freedom.
The things I taught myself then are valuable now and help me feel “okay” with solitude for the first time in my life. The most satisfying of those was getting involved with causes that helped others, there are so many. By focusing intellectually on problems bigger than my own I think I slowily developed the courage to say “BASTA’.
I still regress and slip back into emotional shakiness, but am hanging on to the idea that like quitting smoking, these relapses will become less frequent with time.
I wonder if any of you can comment on what to do about the ambient abuse. My P is heavy on that at the moment, with my kids and friends etc. He is only saying nice things about me I am told. Like how much he “worries” about me because he cares so much. Nice things like he doesn’t really think I will be happy where I am, and he worries about that..you get my drift.
I shocked a mututal friend the other day who communicated some of this by saying “I know for a fact that he does not give a rat’s ass about me”.
But still, words like hysterical, emotionally unstable etc. are being bandied about (with reference to me) I can’t treat these people to the “potted plant” method because they are innocent and I love them.
Do any of you have good ways to handle this kind of situation, to calmy validate yourself without seeming vindictive?
Especially when it comes to my kids (adult men), it is so painful to see him working them to see him as the victim.
This is in the context of me having recently taken legal action that set some boudaries and gives me some measure of protection, so he is lashing out to hurt me whereever he can. And he is very smooth and rational sounding and convincing when he makes the effort. If I counter any of this with the truth, of what he really is, well of course I seem the disordered one. Aaaagggghhhhh!!
I guess that is why during times like this we need to be our own best company! ; . )
I agree with Free; thoughts of the Thief come to mind more readily when I am struggling with a new phase in my growth. I now consider him a “guard dog” to the things that are necessary for me to deal with in order to grow. The guard dog does not want us to get beyond the gate, so we have to come up with our own tricks to get beyond it. I carry my own strength as a “treat” and when that doesn’t work, I get a big “stick” and push on.
Free,
I totally agree with you about the thinking if we are “on our own”—having time to spend only with “ourselves” is threatening sometimes as there is no one there to distract us from the things we DON’T want to think about (face).
Becoming the kind of person that WE enjoy quiet time alone with is a challenge sometimes. Being a hermit because you don’t like people or are fearful of people is one thing, but quiet contemplative time alone with yourself, your own thoughts, I think is necessary to fully develop ourselves. If we don’t enjoy spending time with ourselves, who else would? If you love spending time with those you love, why WOULDN’T you love spending time with yourself in quiet conversation?
Warrior, that is a great analogy about the “guard dog”–and yes, they do NOT want us past the gate. LOL
I have read on this site that people have moved on from their experiences with a sociopath. I wonder if these people feel that they have totally forgiven the people who took advantage or abused them? In my church, they define forgiveness as restoring a relationship to what it was prior to the offence. Is that possible with a sociopath? I recently listened to a series of lectures presented at my church about forgiveness. They mentioned the story of Joseph. His brothers were so jealous and hateful that they trapped him in a ditch, sold him as a slave and then told their father that he had been eaten by a wild animal. Years later”Joseph rose to power and he ran across his brothers. He was totally forgiving of what his brothers did to him years earlier. He said something like, “you acted with evil intent, but God allowed it to happen for my benefit” Hearing this was helpful to me. My ex has mistreated me with evil intent, but maybe God allowed it because he knew it would make me a better person.
I wonder if Joseph would have been so forgiving if he had not risen to power. What if he stayed in prison for the rest of his life? What if his brothers did not come to him with atonement in their hearts, but with additional plans to do him harm? What would Joseph have done then? Moving on and forgiveness is hard because sociopaths are not the norm. It doesn’t seem that what I hear about moving on and forgiveness will work for me”or should it and I’m just really that stuck? I feel I must maintain as little communication as possible with my ex for my own protection”.(not physically, but emotionally) but this is not how the typically divorced couple, who has truly forgiven each other, would behave.
I think, since attending this lecture series, that I will be able to forgive people who have misjudged me based on what they have been told by my ex. These people really don’t know what they are doing. If they knew the truth they would not act unkindly toward me. They are acting on what they believe to be true. I really feel I can let this hurt go, but it is different with my ex because he does know what he is doing. He knows exactly what he is doing and the ill effects it will have on me and our children”so forgiveness is not coming easy. I wonder how other readers deal with this?
Fran,
Please google “Narcissists suck” this blogger is a Christian who may help you understand. Read her many entries.