How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists

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Healing after the sociopath — a long bridge over painful memories

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By Eleanor Cowan I awaken this first day of 2018 to a winter world of snow. Outside my window, sunshine brightens a yellow bus full of passengers lumbering over a mile-long overpass. Even though layers of heavy slush still cover its roof, it’s plowing along. The bridge, dripping with glistening icicles, allows the access to town that otherwise would require a long overland trip. Thanks to hard-working night time crews, the road is clear. It’s been twenty-eight years since I awakened from a freezing burrow of long-term disassociation and managed, with wonderful help, to escape the pedophile I married — a confused, disturbed exploiter who hid behind the respected academic letters stuck …

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Lovefraud reader writes: ‘I hate holidays with a narcissist’

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Editor's note: A young reader has contacted Lovefraud on several occasions. She has realized that her father is disordered, which set her up to meet several disordered boyfriends. I used one of her letters in a video — you can see it here: "How do I avoid dating a sociopath like my father?" This reader writes: I took your advice and stopped dealing with my father because he always has ill intentions. I’m not sure if you recall the last time I spoke with him and saw him was over the summer of 2017. I will reiterate the story. He snapped his Achilles’ tendon trying to show off while climbing a mountain and I became the blame. He compared me to several women on the mountain, stating …

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Once your life has been entwined with a sociopath, there may be no easy fix

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Every week, a chapter of  my book,"Husband, Liar, Sociopath: How He Lied, Why I Fell For It & The Painful Lessons Learned" (available via Amazon.com, just click on the title or book cover) will be published here on Lovefraud. To read prior chapters, use the links at the bottom of the post. I’ve also just released a new ebook titled Narcissists, SOCIOPATHS & Wolves: Lessons From Little Red Riding Hood. (Just click here to find it on Amazon.com Narcissists SOCIOPATHS & Wolves.) Chapter 57A:  No Fairy Tale Ending--Yet  I do not want to disappoint, but there is no fairy tale ending, not yet anyway. That is why my story and similar cautionary tales are so important and why it …

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My sociopathic husband and isolation in my marriage

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During my fourteen years of marriage, even though I could see and hear, I was blind and deaf to the messages coming in all the time, information that slowly, over time, eroded my hope that marriage and children would solve the unresolved grief in my life. One morning in July 1976, I was nursing Teddy while watching the Montreal Olympics on the TV our landlord had kindly loaned to us. In an instant, the pillows that supported my back against the attic wall felt like stone as I listened to a flash news report. Our newborn was asleep when I whispered to Stan, “A child has been sexually abused by her own grandfather in Guelph. What a horrible, unspeakable thing.” All conscious memory of my …

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A sociopath will use what you want and desire to inflict maximum pain

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Every week, a chapter of  my book,"Husband, Liar, Sociopath: How He Lied, Why I Fell For It & The Painful Lessons Learned" (available via Amazon.com, just click on the title or book cover) will be published here on Lovefraud. To read prior chapters, use the links at the bottom of the post. I’ve also just released a new ebook titled Narcissists, SOCIOPATHS & Wolves: Lessons From Little Red Riding Hood. (Just click here to find it on Amazon.com Narcissists SOCIOPATHS & Wolves.) Chapter 56C:  It's Not Over Until Paul Says It's Over It was beyond my control. Finally accepting that, and forgiving myself for the mess that, despite my best intentions, my life had become, brough …

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Here we go again — holiday drama time

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By Amber Ault, Ph.D., MSW Our ancestors in Northern latitudes exercised deep wisdom when they burrowed in during the dark of winter, reflecting on the turning of the wheel of the year through its previous cycle of renewal, harvest, and loss, gathering with loved ones to share warmth in myriad ways, and beginning to dream of spring. Many in the US feel a deep disconnection between our intuitive need for rest, reflection, and re-connection at the end of the year and survival demands, the cultural push of consumer capitalism to buy our way into "getting it right" with loved ones, and the tiny amounts of "time off" or "time away" we can create. Too often, even people here who have the luxury o …

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11 Answers to questions about sociopaths

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I heard from Lovefraud reader who realizes that she's been in a relationship with a sociopath. She's in the phase of trying to wrap her brain around about what these people are, and sent me the following email: What happens to these people?  These sociopaths?  How do they end up in life?  Do they just go from victim to victim?  Have any of them ever realized the affliction of which they suffer?  Do they ever realize they are not capable of love?  If they are not capable of love, they will never be happy, right?  So...you could present “Red Flags of Love Fraud” to a sociopath and they would not see themselves in it, correct?  Do they ever see the error of their ways?  There is a rather crypti …

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It’s never a fair fight with a sociopath, and that’s how they want it

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Every week, a chapter of  my book,"Husband, Liar, Sociopath: How He Lied, Why I Fell For It & The Painful Lessons Learned" (available via Amazon.com, just click on the title or book cover) will be published here on Lovefraud. To read prior chapters, use the links at the bottom of the post. I’ve also just released a new ebook titled Narcissists, SOCIOPATHS & Wolves: Lessons From Little Red Riding Hood. (Just click here to find it on Amazon.com Narcissists SOCIOPATHS & Wolves.) Chapter 56B:  It's Not Over Until Paul Says It's Over A month before Daniel’s half-sister was born, and after a sleepless night at his dad’s, Paul woke Daniel early and demanded he help Paul paint th …

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My sociopathic husband denied – with outrage and tears – what turned out to be the terrible truth

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In our tiny upper flat, I took all the vitamins and folic acid tablets never available to my pregnant foremothers. I ate well, our table a rainbow of green, orange and yellow every day. I drank a concoction called Tiger’s Milk, thrilled to nourish the growth of my child within, a baby I loved with all my heart. One sunny day, while Stan, my then-husband, subbed for the Toronto School Board, I sat on the carpeted floor near our tiny attic window, a pillow to my back, and gazed at an astonishing Time Life photo of a baby inside a mother’s womb. I had no idea how it had been taken, but it inspired me to draw a woven basket so full of colorful spring flowers they toppled over the sides, a wel …

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