Lovefraud recently received the following email from a reader: Your website has been very enlightening. I was dating a psychopath for a few months. Luckily I escaped before too long. He fits the traits TO A TEE! Everything this man said was a lie. I could go on and on about the things that happened but I am typing on my smart phone and am just looking for your advice on one thing for now. One of the things I found out he was lying about was the fact that he went to prison for murder. He is on parole. After I left him (I am now 3000 miles away) he has been calling me sometimes 30 times a day. I had to call block and text block him. I am considering calling his probation officer to …
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Before marriage, do your homework
Editor's note: The following article was received by the Lovefraud reader who posts as "Adelade." It's been over a year since I discovered that the man that I married had been living a double-life before we ever even met. My vulnerabilities were the beacon that he gravitated towards: exiting an abusive marriage, loving to my children, spiritually "grounded," artistic and creative, and all of these attributes and vulnerabilities in addition to a "socially connected" family with a colorful history were exploitable and desirable. I believed his words and assertions because I wanted to. I "needed" to feel validated and valued because I couldn't provide this to myself, on my own. I've …
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Society Blames the Victim Instead of the Psychopath – I’m Sick of It!
I am not sure why I am still shocked when people choose to blame the psychopath's victim. I have heard that this is normal from others who have suffered from an encounter with psychopath, but I still get a bit shocked each time it happens to me. From friends, to family, to the courts, to complete strangers — people seem to want to find something wrong with me to somehow better explain to themselves how I ended up being fooled by my psychopath ex. It has been happening so long that sometimes I find myself wondering there is something wrong with me that made me ignore the red flags and believe the completely fantastic story he was telling me. The Judgements: This week alone, I have exp …
Society Blames the Victim Instead of the Psychopath – I’m Sick of It!Read More
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: He assured me he would never, could never hurt me like that again
Editor's note: Lovefraud received the following story from a reader whom we'll call "Bernice." I had been out of an 18-year marriage for a year when I met my lovefraud. My husband was a selfish man who enjoyed his pornography. At the beginning I tried to be the good wife, experience things with him. The pornography I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy. I explained to him that for me it was a major turn off, almost sickening some of it. All that accomplished was him watching alone. When the children came along we only grew further apart. Over the rest of the marriage he became more and more independent from the children and I, often treating us like we were an inconvenience. He would …
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Mary Ann Glynn, LCSW: Why We Don’t Believe in Badness
By Mary Ann Glynn, LCSW, located in Bernardsville, New Jersey Throughout graduate school for social work, when the professors were teaching us about how to establish a working therapeutic relationship with a client, they repeatedly drove into us to “have unconditional positive regard for the client.” Implied in that phrase is the stance that we cannot accurately help someone we have prejudged. We learned first and foremost to see the valuable human being behind the behavior, to have compassion, and understand the reasons that brought a person to their present circumstance, even if it is criminal behavior. People in the helping profession are there in the first place because they are hopeful …
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Revisiting prevailing myths about sociopaths
As I work with partners and other victims of sociopaths, I see regularly the persistence of certain myths about these destructive individuals. These myths can retard the process by which partners fully recognize the sociopath for who he is. They can protect him by supporting his “mask” or, at the very least, supporting the “rationalizations” his partners and victims sometimes use to “cut him the slack” he surely doesn't deserve. For instance, commonly I hear the position, “Well, he's not always like this. He doesn't always act like this.” This supports the notion that sociopaths are continuously flaunting their disorder. But this just isn't the case. To begin with, we know that many soc …
10 things sociopaths want (besides money)
A Lovefraud reader recently asked the following question: If the sociopath is not in it for money (he pays for everything with no access to my accounts) then what are other reasons to stay in a relationship if he doesn't live with me nor do we share anything financially? Many of the posts I have read involve financial fraud. If a sociopath has targeted you, it's because you have something that he or she wants. Often it's money, but not always. Here are 10 more things that the sociopath may want: 1. Sex Sociopaths crave stimulation, and sex is highly stimulating, so they pursue it. However, sociopaths are not slaves to their physical urges. They often use sex primarily as a tool of …
The Psychopath’s Enablers
By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) Psychopaths do a great deal of damage to their victims. The fact that there are people who are aware of what they are doing and choose to “look the other way” or to “sit on the fence and do nothing” enables the psychopaths to continue to abuse their victims. If the bystanders would stand up and assist the victims, even acknowledge that they are being victimized, the psychopaths might not be quite so successful. One of the most famous of these enablers who chose to look the other way was a man named Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect in Jerusalem in AD 33. When Jesus was brought before him by the Jewish leaders, Pilate stated that he found “no fault” in J …
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: His most lethal weapon was disarming ‘innocence’
Editor's note: The following story was sent by a Lovefraud reader whom we'll call "Beatrice." The name of the perpetrator has been changed. Its now four months since I've found out the cold, hard truth about my ex, and I really want to move on, but would also find it cathartic to share my horrific experience with as many people as possible also if I can help one other person to avoid the pain and trauma of the past two years I will not have wasted my time. Please feel free to share this with as many people as possible, the more people know about these dangerous predators, the less their power to destroy others lives will be. Four months ago on 15 May 2012 I had a phone call which …
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Soldier allegedly fakes divorce and commits bigamy
Army Staff Sgt. Zachariah Siemers allegedly dumps his wife of 20 years, and their four children, with a bogus divorce decree, then marries another woman. The Army charged him with seven violations of military law—then dropped the case. Read Woman divorced from suspected Army vet bigamist, on Military.com. Link provided by a Lovefraud reader. …