Forgiving oneself for making bad choices is never easy, and I know there are authors and posters on LF who are true experts in the area of self-forgiveness. But let me come at this from an angle slightly different than my usual Lovefraud fare.
It’s often just plain hard to bust a flat-out liar and deceiver. And it’s often suprisingly easy to effectively flat-out lie and deceive. Let me say this again: it’s pretty easy to live a life of deception, making it no big accomplishment to deceive the brightest, most astute, most sensitive people.
Lying and deceiving, and doing them well, even over long, extended periods of time, duping anyone and everyone in the process—again, my point is that it’s not nearly as hard to do as we might tend to think, and so it’s really nothing for the exploiter, however slick or not he may be, to feel especially proud to be so good at. Because fraud, and deception, just aren’t that hard to perpetrate.
And the converse is more important—it’s often really easy to be victimized by liars and deceivers, again highlighting how relatively undifficult it is to lie and deceive effectively, and NOT how dumb one is to fall for the lies and deception.
The truth is that few, if any, of us were raised to enter relationships vigilant for exploiters and imposters; not one of us, I suspect, ever took a formal course in how to identify exploiters and other sundry disguised frauds in the context of “intimate” relationships.
This just isn’t something any of us goes to school for; it’s not something any of us expects to experience; and so, reasonably, we think we have much better things to do with our limited time than to strive to become experts at imposter-busting.
Seriously, how many of us really want to spend our precious little time in this short life in the paranoid, depressing undertaking to become, if it’s even theoretically possible, skilled at unmasking exploiters?
Sure, there are professions one can enter if this is one’s bag—to bust imposters. But marriage and intimate relationships are not “professions.” We assume, with statistical support behind us, that it’s unlikely that the individual we’ll become (or have become) involved with is likely to be a pathological liar and deceiver.
Of course we know anything’s possible, but it’s still, statistically, a low enough risk not to compel our constant vigilance, anymore than the risk of contracting relatively rare forms of malignant cancers should necessarily compel our vigilance and dread.
Now some pathological liars may be excellent at their exploitation skills, but more often than not they are just good enough exploiters to perpetrate fraud successfully for the reasons I’ve suggested.
Does this abdicate us of our duty to heed signs that may, sometimes, be discernable? Of course not. As I’ve written in prior Lovefraud articles, we want to give ourselves the best chance possible, against odds already stacked against us, to bust deceivers and imposters. And as I’ve written elsewhere, sometimes those signs are present, because many exploiters are really not so good at disguising signs of their venality, and some of them are, in fact, really pretty bad; and sometimes, for many possible reasons, we do a poor, ineffectual job at recognizing and heeding those signs.
But it’s also true (and it’s the emphasis of this article) that often these signs are not present, or not obviously present enough to overcome the basic (and I would argue, healthy) state of trust with which we enter intimate relationships. Because again I note: for understandable reasons, we simply don’t enter these relationships naturally suspicious of, or vigilant for, corruption in our partners.
We simply aren’t on the lookout to be exploited, and for this reason, as I’ve suggested repeatedly, this gives the exploiter an enormous edge for, by definition, he is preying on the least suspicious of his potential victims—those who love him.
Consequently this makes him ultimately cowardly, incredibly cowardly, not his victims foolish or gullible. Let me say this again—this makes the exploiter incredibly cowardly because, among other things, he is preying not on gullible fools (as he may perceive, contemptuously, his victims to be), but rather on those who have entered into a relationship with him on a natural, healthy pretext of trust (thereby making them the least challenging, the easiest, victims to defraud).
This reminds me of the bonding exercise in which one partner, demonstrating trust in the other, agrees to fall backwards in the faith that the receiving partner will catch and protect her. This isn’t gullibility at work but rather natural trust and faith she is risking that her partner will catch her, and not let her fall and injure herself. The exploiter in this analogy as if goads his partner into falling backwards and then, instead of catching her, as she should reasonably expect he will, he lets her drop and so injures her badly. And she, the victim of his deception, is left to feel shocked, betrayed and wounded.
Staying with this analogy, she, the victim, may not discover how treacherously her partner has let her fall this until much later, as the horror of his history of lies and deception begin, shockingly, to emerge.
And so I suggest to all who have been betrayed and exploited by perpetrators of fraud, especially (but not exclusively) in the context of an intimate commitment, I say to you, cut yourselves some slack, some serious slack. You are not naïve. You are not gullible.
We live in a world which makes it relatively easy for exploitive personalities to injure others. If we were all paranoid, living in a paranoid mindset, this might limit our risk of exploitation; but most of us, thankfully, are not paranoid. We are not living in a mindset of vigilance to be screwed-over by others, especially those we rightfully deem least likely to hurt us.
This confers the advantage to (and all shame on) the exploiter—and should leave his victims comfortable in their ultimate dignity and innocence.
(This article is copyrighted © 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of male gender pronouns is for convenience’s sake and not to suggest that females aren’t capable of the attitudes and behaviors discussed.)
Of course, pork. That would be okay I guess, if we put some of that hot chinese mustard on it.
How do we kill it? Force it to commit Spathacide?
That way we would starve. You know they don’t use to spathacide themselves.
We would do it brutus style. Sorry, skylar but…don’t be fussy. 😀
I go to sleep, skylar. You think of more porkspath recipes if you want.
good night Eva, thanks for the laughs.
anyone up for a moon dance?
Well…..I would if I could SEE the moon!
Low clouds and SNOW!
I’ll do a snow dance though……
It sounds soothing to a wounded heart. I’m sorry I missed it
it’sjustme – The full moon is great for a wounded heart – it wash’s alot of negativity away, helps us get in sync with the universe. Help’s repair wounded spirit’s.
Hi Hens,
I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to say something to me.
You are right about the moon, It really does smooth and balance the spirit, I think
Roses ~ It is still early in your recovery process so I understand the “pull” that you suffer from. After 7 years of the “I want to be with you” “I don’t want to be with you” crap, my head was spinning. Each time he upted the anty. He even went and talked to my pastor as though he was going to change. At the time I thought he was, but as usual it was just a dangling carrot to reel me back in. The last straw for me was back in September 2010. He was now divorced at this time and so was I. We could be together now without any interferences. We spent two weeks together that were wonderful. We spent our last time together at Lake Michigan for the day and watched the sunset. It was a treasured moment (for me anyway). The next day, Sunday, he texts me and says we are over. No explaination. I was like WTF? Just yesterday you were professing our undying love for me. Making plans for our future. What the hell is your problem? Now this is before I knew anything about sociopaths. I called and cried to a friend and I had an emotional breakdown. Cried so hard my ears were ringing and my eyes were swollen shut. Anyway, my friend told me that he sounded like a psychopath. Thats when my research began and I found LoveFraud. It was at that moment that I had to stop HIS damn madness or I was going to lose myself in the abyss.
NC was very difficult at first. I wanted so bad to talk to him, to touch him, to hold him but after 7 long years of the “push” and “pull”, I had to make it stop. My mind had turned into tapioca. I didn’t recognize me. My family didn’t recognize me. And so from that point on my NC started. I will never allow this man, his exwife or kid bend and twist me emotionally or psychologically.
My story is that of mental anguish and emotional torture. Never physical abuse. Never called me a bad name. Just mind effen me for 7 years. Really messed me up emotionally. It is a struggle everyday, not missing him, but trying to understand how I got so caught up in this mess.
Hi Eden and Roses,
have been reading your posts and Eden thanks once again for the timely advice few days ago when it was late at night in your part of the world.
Meeting the wife and ex’s and getting validation does help us in healing, I have also thought that it can give us huge relief that it was them, their nonsense, their game and we were duped.
Eden you knew the guy for 9.5 months and me for one year. I think we saw the red flags soon enough and I spoke to Oxy and came to this site and we were saved and should consider ourselves blessed.
Mine is an N, told to him by his therapist, though he thinks there is nothing wrong with him. I remember when he told me he had cheated 6 times in the past on the wife, he said it with such a blank look on his face, there was no remorse, regret, guilt, shame and I thought he did not want to dwell much into it and gave it a pass. He did not say that I feel so bad, that I did this to my wife and family, nothing of that sort, instead he kept saying, I don’t know what happened to me, I cannot recognise that part of me, I do not want to see that part of me again, more like he was saying it was a mistaken identity or that he was posssessed rather than accepting that he was impulsive and did not care for his family and jumped into bed with the women when he was overseas at meetings and then went home and was the lovely husband and father as if nothing had happened. this went on for few years, and as Oxy said one can cheat once as a mistake or wrong decision, but 6 times !!, there has to be something intrinsically wrong there.
to think that this guy is such a renowned specialist in a world famous medical centre in the USA and behind that medical profession is a man whose moral values are non-existent.
Oxy has drilled it into my head and she is 100% right, that rule no 1 is : honesty from the man, if he does not fit into rule #1, all other attributes are meaningless.
I feel so fatigued by the whole experience, there were so many red flags even quite at the start and I thought it was just his way of expressing his love, when it was all fake. I once wrote to friend in Canada about him and showed her one of his emails to me, and she said – Gosh, he sure can write well for a guy, looks like his words are right out of a novel” she was right, they were from a novel, the novel named “Narcisssists play book”. often when we were close he would say the words ” I am yours, you are mine”, the first time I thought it came spontaneously, however, later, it was as if the words were pre-programmed, everytime we were cosy with each other – the same words were said.
I was so stupid, how I got fooled.
Roses and Eden, I think we are at about the same stage in healing, I think we are making decent progress.
you both and others here have been so helpful, it would have been very difficult to come out of the fog, without your help.
thanks again
petite