Lovefraud spent the weekend at the Battered Mothers Custody Conference in Albany, New York. Quite frankly, it was depressing. This was a conference of worst-case scenarios. I spoke to a woman whose story sounded like the Clark Rockefeller case, only worse. Her ex-husband was an illegal alien from Germany. He was also a doctor who had a hard time getting licensed because of "missing documents," but eventually did get licensed. Once he got his American residency and license, he dumped the woman and got their 5-year-old daughter in an emergency custody hearing—the woman believes he paid off the judge. The woman knows her daughter is being sexually abused—she screams when anyone touches her. B …
“Emotional blindness” and the sociopath
Editor's note: The following article was submitted by the Lovefraud reader who comments as "Pearl." By Pearl Someone on this blog once mentioned a book by Alice Miller and Andrew Jenkins, and it caught my attention. So now I'm reading The Truth Will Set You Free—Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self. Even though I'm only about halfway through the book, I wanted to share parts of it because it is so important to what a lot of us are working on—forgiving ourselves and trying to understand why this (fraud) happened to us. I know this won't apply or appeal to everyone, but it might help some of you as it has me. Miller's ideas help me understand why I was sus …
Sociopath-proof in 2009
Editor's note: This is the first post by Lovefraud's newest blog author, Kathleen Hawk. She previously posted many thoughtful comments under the screen name "khatalyst." Last year, 2008, was a year in which we faced the cost of sociopathy in our economy. Huge financial firms were destroyed or deeply damaged by their own corporate cultures. Their employees were encouraged to pursue personal gain, without concern about the messes they left behind or the damage they did to other people's lives. The results are loss and suffering, even for people who had nothing to do with these companies. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? Sociopathy taken to a grand scale. But there are people and …
A sociopath will leave you out in the cold every time
The day after Christmas, I got a lesson in respecting the elements. It was about 35°F, not really that cold, but there was quite a wind chill. The kids and I went to the beach to run the dog on the sand at about 3:30 in the afternoon. We got back to the van at about 5 to discover that good old Mom had lost her keys. (Actually, a prior foster dog had chewed a hole in my jacket pocket and the keys fell out.) I ended up calling a taxi, but we waited in the elements for at least an hour total. We were all properly dressed with boots, hats, gloves and heavy jackets. In spite of being prepared, we were chilled to the bone when we finally got home. I said to my daughter, “I can see how easy it i …
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A Sociopathic Interaction
I thought I'd depart from a more standard post and offer below some verbatim interactions I recently had with a client whom I've always suspected as having sociopathic tendencies. I share these interactions (with comments) not for their excitement, because their subject matter is in fact extremely mundane; but rather for the sociopathic elements I believe they instructively contain. My client, T, is a 35 year old male, with a “work history” of voyeuristic, sexually aggressive behavior towards females. My role with him is as a “consulting therapist” for a community agency. T is not psychotic, and has no reality testing impairment. He is a verbally quick, superficially engagin …
Entanglements with sociopaths always have consequences
At a Christmas party on Saturday night, the conversation turned to hot water radiators. My husband, who is mechanically inclined, explained to a woman, who was trying to save money by conserving heat, how to bleed the air out of an old-style hot water heating system. Eventually, the conversation revealed why the woman was trying to save money. She'd purchased an old farmhouse for her business. She secured a $150,000 construction loan to renovate the house and retained a contractor. The contractor insisted on installing the thermostat for the hot water heating system on a wall directly across from a wood burning stove. (For those of you who are not mechanically inclined, this is a really …
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Stop thinking about that sociopath and enjoy a Christmas Movie
A romantic relationship with a sociopath can leave a person sour on the opposite sex, or on people in general. I said last week that sociopaths try to train their partners in their disordered thinking patterns. Recovery involves purging the sociopath's mollifications and seeing the beauty in life again. Recovery means a renewed ability to appreciate the loving connections we still have. Sometimes art, music and cinema can help us do that. This Christmas we were not able to be with our family in California. But it was a “warm” beautiful day in Connecticut, so the kids and I walked the dog on the beach, went to the movies and ate out at a Chinese restaurant. I recommend the movie we saw bec …
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Finally, feeling the joy of Christmas
On this Christmas Day, I am filled with joy, happiness and love. It has nothing to do with Santa Claus being good to me, or the gifts I offered to my husband and family—after all, there is a recession going on, and it has affected us. Rather, I am filled with joy, happiness and love because now, after the sociopath, life is good. In fact, life has never been better. This is a significant, even miraculous, change for me. In the years before I met my sociopathic ex—from age 20 to 40—I didn't feel joy, happiness or love. Instead, I was mostly numb. If anything broke through the wall of numbness, it was longing. Then the sociopath arrived, and promised me what I so desperately wanted—an end to …
Overcoming Evil, Tragedy and Fear
Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. It's Christmas Eve and I am full of gratitude today. I witnessed evil first hand as my father, a sociopath, murdered at least four (4) people and destroyed countless lives. It almost doesn't make sense that I could be so happy and peaceful today, but it is a fact for me. I do not ask or need others to believe what I believe; I only share my personal experience. It is Faith that changed my life. I came to a place, a way of thinking, that was just too painful to live with so I made a decision to try something different. I prayed for help, for truth and …
Life’s Lessons 101: The Knowledge of Good and Evil
Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. By OxDrover In the Bible the story of Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden, in perfect paradise, is a story familiar to most children who have gone to Bible school at one point or another in their lives. If you take that same story, though, and look at it through adult eyes, you can see that there is a great moral to this tale, whether you believe it as a “creation” story or not. Before the “fall,” Adam and Eve had only dealt with a loving God/Creator who had given them a wonderful place to live in peace and plenty. They were naked and innocent in this para …