Editor's note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud's statement on Spiritual Recovery. A Lovefraud reader recently sent me the following link from Wikipedia: Psychological manipulation The author of the article on psychological manipulation based most of its information on three books: Who's Pulling Your Strings?, by Harriet B. Braiker; In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, by George K. Simon; and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, by Martin Kantor. The first two sections of the article are excellent. First, the author discusses the requirements of successful manipulation: According to Simon, successful …
Somewhere Inbetween Time: Between Past-Perfect and Future-Perfect
By the Front Porch Talker Somewhere along the time-space continuum we have space-time. Space is three-dimensional and time is in the fourth-dimension, with different spatial dimensions. According to perceptions, the universe has three dimensions of space and one of time. By combining space and time, we have the freedom to describe life more accurately—from the quantum level to the super galactical levels; thus, expanding our entire perceptions of time and space, and life ultimately. Everything is relative, of course, even our own experiences and perceptions of life. Depending upon where we are observing an event, how close and how distant, and depending on the gravitational forces, we s …
Somewhere Inbetween Time: Between Past-Perfect and Future-PerfectRead More
Letters Home: Letter to a Sociopath
Editor's Note: Here's another essay by the Front Porch Talker. For background about her experience, read her initial post, called “My life with a sociopath.” By The Front Porch Talker From “Letters Home,” my series of unsent letters to fictional people about fictional topics—for real. Dear DOC #...., Well, I bet you never thought that I would find you, but here we are sitting across an imaginary bolted-down table in the visiting room of your new home. Do they still call it prison, or do you prefer the term penitentiary? I like the sound of Correctional Institution. It has an optimistic tone to it: a college for “change” or “correction,” as though either option were ever possible w …
All I wanted was a date
Back in the summer of 1996, when I logged onto the America Online Love section, I had no idea that it would be the beginning of a journey that would change my life. I was single, had never been married and was about to turn 40—yes, I heard that biological clock ticking very loudly. I ran my own copywriting business and finally, after 13 years of struggle, I was making good money. Maybe, I hoped, it was finally time for me. When I logged on to AOL and looked at the personal ads, all I wanted was a date. Enter the sociopath What I found was James Montgomery, who turned out to be a con artist—a sociopath. Like many Lovefraud readers, when this man crossed my path, I had no idea what a soci …
When He’s Just A Bad Dude
It's easy to get obsessed with, fixated on, “labels” and diagnostic categories like sociopath, psychopath, malignant narcissist, narcissist, etc. To be sure, labels and diagnoses can be important and informative. In the case of “sociopathic” individuals, for instance, we know that there's no changing them; we know that there's no real hope for their redemption; and so, if you've correctly identified a sociopathic type, you can know that it's pointless, self-destructive to invest another minute of your time in him. And this is a good thing to know. But it's also the case, I'd suggest, that an overfocus on labels and diagnoses can sometimes be a distraction, a form of avoidance, sometim …
Bureaucrats say victim is too upset for counseling
A woman in England is brutally raped. She is diagnosed with PTSD. When she goes for counseling, she cries. And amazingly, because she cried, she is denied further counseling. Read Rape victim is denied NHS counseling after officials rule 'it might make her upset' in DailyMail.co.uk. Link submitted by a Lovefraud reader. …
Love Fraud books mail today!
To everyone who ordered my new book, Love Fraud—How marriage to a sociopath fulfilled my spiritual plan: Your books are mailing out today! You should receive them soon! I am so excited to see my book finally in print. It is gorgeous. The hardback cover is deep red, with the title embossed on the spine in gold foil. The dust jacket design is striking, with the bold and powerful words, “LOVE FRAUD,” above our heart-in-a-target logo. Waiting for the shipment to arrive, I was actually nervous. But when I saw the book, encapsulating the story that took me four years to write, I was thrilled. I have to admit that this process of publishing a book has taken longer than I thought it would, but …
On Being Someone Other
By Ox Drover Yet Being Someone Other is the title of one of my favorite books and sometimes I think that title applies to me as well, at least since I recognized the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that has become such a part of my life these last six years. Now I'm “someone other” than who I used to be. I'm not the same person at all. I no longer think like that other person did, that FIRST ME as it were. The NOW ME is different. This was a very disturbing thing for quite some time as I had to get used to things being gone that I had depended on previously. I had to make adjustments to the changes in myself, sort of like a teenager has to make adjustments to larger feet and lon …
Mind Your Own Business: Etiquette for Entertaining Sociopaths and Other Bad Eggs Your Mother SHOULD HAVE Warned You About
By The Front Porch Talker “Hurt people hurt.” (“Greenberg”) Don't expect a sociopath to steal the silverware, or anything untoward in that regard. No, they will be too busy stealing your whole life out from under you! But, as I like to say: That's no excuse for bad manners! Luckily for us all, I am writing my own as-yet unfinished etiquette book called, Mind Your Own Business: Etiquette for the Clueless! It is written in that easy-to-read style, with bullets and cute reminders and hints, just like those ”˜Dummies' books that presently insult your bookcase, along with your eight-track tapes and picture frames you got at Goodwill—the ones that still have somebody's family pictures in t …
Life support
By Ox Drover A thought struck me the other day as I was musing ”¦ many people today have at least thought about how they want things to proceed when they come toward the end of their lives. Do they want to be “kept on life support” with feeding tubes and ventilators and lying unconscious in an intensive care nursing unit? Is that kind of “life” really anything but prolonging drying? Or, is it possible that if you stayed there with mechanical life support, that you might actually wake up and heal, and go on and enjoy more time in a healthy life? Many of us have made decisions which we have placed into “Living Wills” and have appointed someone to be our decision maker if we can't make our …