Recovery from a sociopath

The trauma that a sociopath inflicts on those who love him/her can be exceptionally difficult to overcome. In the wake of a relationship with a sociopath, former partners can suffer with clinical depression, generalized anxiety, PTSD and panic disorder. All of these conditions are said to respond to SSRI antidepressants like Prozac and to psychotherapy. However, many people have written to Lovefraud.com lamenting that antidepressants and psychotherapy have not been particularly effective for them. The one good thing about a crisis is that it can be an opportunity to make major life change. I am a firm believer that it is possible to come out of a crisis better and stronger. I am also …

Exercise to treat depression and anxietyRead More

On Monday, May 21, 2003 at 9:14 am, a miracle drove up in a blue and white police cruiser and set me free. I was in hiding with the sociopath who was trying to escape Canada into the States where he said he had money hidden. I didn't really believe him but I didn't care what happened to me. By that point in our 4 year 9 months relationship, I had completely given up on me and given into him. It was only a matter of time before he killed me as I had become an albatross holding him back from getting out of the country - at least that's what he kept telling me. I know he wanted me to take my own life, but why bother? I was already the walking, breathing dead. What difference would it make if I …

I am Blessed. A Victor’s Story — Four years after the sociopathRead More

On Monday I had lunch with a friend from my past. In our early twenties we worked together. Just the two of us at first in an office that eventually grew to +20 people. For my friend, Leslie* and for me, this was an exciting, and a stressful time. We both grew up in similar circumstances where alcohol played an enormous role in our formative years. We both had older siblings and we both had dreams we were too afraid to speak. My friend Leslie was the first woman I knew who married an abuser. I remember at the time I didn't go to her wedding because I could not in good conscience wish her well -- I knew the things he did to her before they married. Why would she marry him, I …

Finding grace in the healing journeyRead More

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."---George Santayana Imagine a tape running through your head that has all the things that ever happened to you playing on a continous loop through your mind. Now, imagine that every time you look forward, every thought, idea, word, motion is filtered through that tape, again and again. Every time you think about the future, you have to look through the past. That's what happens in our heads, every day, when we remind ourselves that something which happened yesterday is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That's what happens when we don't question what we learned in the past, and drag it forward with …

Without the sociopath, a better future does not require a better pastRead More

A reader wrote in with the following: I have a question for you related to the sociopath and the therapeutic relationship, and how to regain trust in the therapeutic process when it appears to have failed you during the relationship. I have been in therapy with a therapist I trust and have bonded with for more than two years, as well as in group therapy, most of which was also parallel to the duration of my marriage to a sociopath. For a short period of time, the sociopath was in therapy with me in order to try work out the issues in our marriage. I am currently struggling to regain my trust in therapy, when I view it as having eroded the very instincts that were telling me to get …

ASK DR. LEEDOM: What about therapy?Read More

Something I struggle with on a daily basis is to be free of the past. To fearlessly let go of all that was so that I can live joyously with all that is.The Twelve Steps teaches you to become accountable and responsible for yourself. To not look to fix someone else's problems but rather, to face your own behaviours, to be accountable for your responses to someone else's behaviours and to own your responses.One of the most challenging steps for me was the 4th step -- To make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.I would make the inventory, and when it got to those things for which I carried great shame, I'd sugar coat them, dress them up, pretty them up. I wouldn't let them …

It would be a shame to let the sociopath winRead More