Today, July 4th, is Independence Day in the United States of America. On this day 235 years ago, the country’s forefathers declared independence from the tyranny of a distant king. Today, let us all declare independence from the tyranny of sociopaths.
Declaring independence, of course, is only the beginning of the struggle. In 1776, the tyrant did not want to lose a prized possession—the Colonies—and retaliated by sending an army. The Colonists who believed in independence had no choice but to fight, even though most had little experience—they were farmers, tradesmen and laborers. But they learned how to fight. It took five years, many battles and many hardships, but in the end, the United States of America emerged victorious.
What can we learn from those Colonists that we can use in our own battles? The early Americans believed in themselves, believed in their cause, and did not give up. Oh, they suffered defeats, but they retreated, regrouped, and fought again. They learned from their mistakes, found allies and kept going.
If you’re doing battle with a sociopath—and make no mistake, any interaction is a battle—here are some strategies that will help you:
1. Know your enemy. Be brutally honest in evaluating the sociopath in your life. Remember: The sociopath never loved you. All you ever were to him or her was a source of supply. Once you get over the shock of their soullessness, you’ll begin to see the patterns of their actions. This will enable you to predict what they will do, and plan accordingly.
2. Never underestimate the sociopath. Do not anticipate that the sociopath will act as you, a person capable of love and empathy, would act. The sociopath has no concern for your emotions, your feelings and your welfare. Without empathy or a conscience, the sociopath is capable of doing anything, even the unthinkable, to get what he or she wants, which is to win.
3. Conserve your own resources. You can’t fight if you are sick or injured, so do your best to take care of yourself. Eat right; avoid drugs and alcohol; get enough rest. If you are suffering from anxiety or depression, a good way to relieve them is through exercise. Be gentle with yourself as you recover from trauma.
4. Plan strategically. Figure out what you really want and need, and figure out a way to get them. Never let the sociopath know your plans. If you are living with the person and need to escape, prepare a getaway bag and leave when he or she is not around. If you are going to court, keep careful records and document everything that happens. Keep in mind that you may need to use subterfuge and diversion to execute your plans.
5. Pick your battles. Determine what is really important to you, and what you can let go of. Your life and health are important; you may need to give up on recovering your money, saving your reputation or seeing justice done—at least for the time being. Only take on the battles that are vitally important at the moment.
6. Use overwhelming force. If you do have an opportunity to serve justice, go after the sociopath with everything you’ve got. Do not play nice; do not hold back. The harder you hit, the more likely your chances of success.
7. Seek peace. Remember, the only life you absolutely, positively can influence is your own. Your ultimate objective should be your peace of mind and peace of heart. Achieving it may mean letting go of material goods, people and past traumas. You may need to redefine yourself and how you relate to the world. If you can get to a place of tranquility, you are victorious.
Shameonme,
Sometimes getting wrapped up in the FOG (fear, obligation and guilt) of the relationship with a person who is high in psychopathic traits gets us to do things that we maybe normally wouldn’t do (outside of the law or our moral compass)
It sounds to me like (but your post is not totally clear) that you forged signatures on some divorce papers for her, which is definitely against the law, and frankly, since if this is the case you hurt this man in the process, I think you DO need to contact him and make things right if they can be. Since you were part of the illegal and immoral attack on this man, I think he deserves at least an honest answer from you.
You are not the only one in the world (by far) who has done things that are illegal and immoral in order to “help out” or to appease a psychopath. In cases, though, where we have actually injured others by our actions, I think, that we, like the members of AA, need to “make amends” where we can, and making amends is not so much for the other person’s benefit, but to clear our own consciences, and man up and take responsibility for our own actions. Good luck.
No I just signed papers for her,which might actually be worse because I did not read what I was signing. I should have read exactly what they were. I signed my own name which would not be forgery but I could be guilty of bearing false witness. Whatever I signed and mailed I feel guilty about because I know the walking cold sore used it to hurt someone. Then I was completely under her spell. I was a raving fan and would not hear that she was not gods gift to humanity dispite all the signs that were present. Which brings me to something that has been on my mi
nd of late.
I realize after reading LF for the past year that my life had been in jeopardy. She told me someone was killed on her business property and they never found the killer. Funny how when the spell is present all else is as nothing. With my defense down it would have been easy to poison me or slit my throat,pound me in the back of my head with a shovel. I could easily turned up as a corpse and no one would have suspected her. I remember we were in a fairly secluded place walking. There was a dollar
on the ground that had not been there when we first passed by. If I had picked up that dollar she could have bashed me in the head and nobody would have suspected her. God was with me that day.As far as contact with her X …I would rather not make the situation worse than it is. This is “Bleak House and I’m out of the fog. I can’t risk falling back into her spell.
Dear Shameonme,
Well, I can understand that, and under the circumstances you probably are very wise to NOT have contact with her X.
As far as your life being in danger, I believe you 100%—it is amazing just how many of them WILL rob, steal, cheat and KILL though not all of them are willing to kill, way too many of them that “NO ONE WOULD SUSPECT” would be willing to kill…Scot Petersen, the BTK killer, etc etc. they are numberless and no one suspects them of being the kind of person who would even think about killing someone. I SUSPECT…I know they are all capable of it, some just never do it.
Geminigirl, my ex does not have any contact info except my phone number. He does not get on the computer, and he isn’t the brightest of fellows. lol. I haven’t changed my phone number for a few reasons, but also I do not want him to know that I moved to another state. I will change my number, but I am going to wait until the calls stop or at least mellow out a lot more. I am worried he might go bug family members to get my info, and it doesn’t help that a couple of them would happily hand it out to him, just to hurt me. I screen my calls and do not answer all the random numbers he calls from. He has no money to get his own phone, because he still has his N mommy supporting him at the age of 42 (he is even going grey and still thinks he can live like a teenager and not work!).
Last night the SOB called and I finally answered. I did not give him a chance to talk, but yelled (I am not a yeller) at him to leave me the f*ck alone. Then I hung up. He then proceeded to call me over and over until I did answer it again. Again, I did not let him talk, and yelled that he was a worthless sociopath and I didn’t want to deal with getting a restraining order, but he was leaving me no choice. I said I was going to call the police for harassment and stalking, and then hung up. The calls magically stopped. He is afraid of the police. I think that should keep him at bay for a while. Besides, he only calls me when he is drunk, and last night was the first time I answered his call since May. I didn’t let him speak in May, and just yelled at him to go to hell, quickly then hung up. He didn’t call me again until late July, so maybe it will last longer this time.
I am sorry about your mom, and I do not know if it would have helped to say anything before she died. I wish I could ask my mom what was going on in her head to treat her children so different, but I cannot. I am the scape goat who can do nothing right, and my brother can do no wrong. There was a lot of denial about it all on my part for a long time. Now, I see how wrong everything was. My brother whipped me with a steal bicycle chain, whipped me with a buggy whip, stabbed me in the neck with a fork, and I could keep going on, but he never got in trouble for anything. I told my parents, but neither one every said a thing to him. My brother would lie and say I hit him, and my parents would spank or send me to my room.
Even as we got older things were bad. I went to college, and I was shunned for it. They said everything nasty they could about me going to college. My brother does not have more than a 7th grade education, but they gave him a company which held a huge contract for a very large corporation. It made a lot of money, but he ran it into the ground, and just decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. So, employees lost their jobs. Then they handed him the other company (the one that supports my father) and he is doing a great job at running it into the ground. No one cares what he does. All of the employees for that company are gone in just a matter of 4 months, yet my brother is still making $5000 a month. He still does nothing, and my dad and step monster are in there running it. I just don’t get it. I feel terrible for the couple of employees who had worked there for over 15 years, and now are trying to live on unemployment and find a job in this horrible economy. Both of them had families to support.
My brother leaves a trail of destruction behind him with his conning, lies, greed, and manipulation. They still think he is perfect though (not the ones who ‘were’ snowed and lost their jobs.) My mom finally admitted that she thinks my brother is a sociopath, and she said that all he does is lie to her. This is a huge swing from how she was before. Still he is perfect to her. It is a confusing thing to deal with.
My mom is a confusing person to deal with. She has said so many cruel and hurtful things to me throughout my life, and I just do not know how to take her anymore. It is a very unique situation with her. She has admitted that she was a bad person and did not have empathy for others before she had gotten cancer. She said she was jealous, mean, and didn’t care about others. My mom was very N! Then she got cancer and it moved into her brain. They had to do brain surgery and removed part of her brain. She also had radiation to it. This changed her a lot! After she had come off of years of morphine and no longer had cancer (she spent almost 10 years of being “terminally ill”. I was there when they gave her 3-6 months to live, and then she lived another 9 years after that.) she became kind and was fun and loving. She was nice and we got along great.
Then she had to get another surgery to fix the hole in her face and remove her dead eye from the radiation treatment. She had osteoradionercrosis (sp?). They had to do something with her dura (lining of her brain), and she came out of that surgery different. Also, after that surgery, she developed acute pancreatitist and almost died. Her lungs collapsed and she was resurrected. She was originally supposed to be in the hospital a week, but it turned into months.
I did visit her every day in the hospital, and I had noticed she was very mean. The last surgery changed her a lot. She is hard to deal with now. She goes from honestly caring to very cruel with the flip of a switch. She cannot handle her emotions and is a lot like a young child with no control. She really does not have anyone else around. She loves my brother more than anything, but he doesn’t have much to do with her. She is a burden to him, and his sociopathic wife is insanely jealous of all his family members. So, my mom feels stuck to me. She tells me I am the only one who is ever there for her, and she is right. She is alone with no one else and a mind like a child half the time. I cannot say anything about the way she treats me as she does not understand, and her memory is really screwed up!
My mom does have empathy now, and she is very insecure. She only has half a face and one eye, so that is understandable. My mom doesn’t act like she has mental retardation or anything. She swings between being kind and an abusive sociopath. Each side of her is genuine, and not a mask. It is the weirdest thing, and it has something to do with her brain surgeries. I just do not know how to deal with the hurt from her sometimes. Has anyone ever dealt with someone like this before? Any advise.
Dear Jen,
As a medical professional I have seen the changes in people from strokes and surgery on the brain….they become different people, some “better” some “worse”, some just “different.”
My mother in law who I dearly loved and who was my “best friend” had a stroke and I became the “anti-Christ” is her mind and she came to hate me, to the point that she could no longer live with us and went to live with her granddaughters. It hurt to lose that relationship because I loved her, and she had loved me, but I realized that her hatred was fueled by her injured brain.
I’ve worked in head injury rehabilitation and seen the same thing.
If someone is brain injured (by stroke, radiation, or trauma) I don’t hold it against them whatever they say…but at the same time, let it go in one ear and out the other.
As far as what the relationship with your mother was BEFORE the inujry, to me that is the “real” relationship.
My own egg donor was “alert and oriented” when I realized she didn’t care for me, hadn’t ever cared for me, etc. so I cut off contact with her except for business….and carry that on by e mail. No matter what happens to her now, or how she changes as a result of a stroke or whatever, it will still be, for ME NC with her, and though I am her only child, She canceled my power of attorney 4+ years ago when she decided the psychopaths would do her bidding better than me, but then when they went to jail, she tried to get me to “let’s just pretend none of this happened” and for me to take back over her POA and the responsibility for looking after her needs. I declined that “honor.” When she took away the authority, she also took away the responsibility, so I have no obligation to be her caregiver any more. She has enough money to hire those services from others. My cousin who is her POA can over see that if necessary.
Your situation is different from mine though, and each of us must make up our mind of how much relationship we want with the parent at this time, but neither of us have to let their abuse from the past continue to haunt us.
It doesn’t surprise me though that your brother, the “golden child,” has little or no use for his mother who doted on him. That’s the irony of the golden child vs. the scape goat. The scape goat is much more likely to care for the parent in old age than the golden child.
Oxy,
not this scapegoat. I’m the scapegoat run amuck! 🙂
Sky, you and me both! My egg donor’s “golden child” is in prison, she hooked her ass to the wrong wagon I think….that one is not going to look out for her.
She rejected the daughter and the grandsons that would have been there for her…and hooked on to the very one that would have killed her without a backward glance to obtain what she owns. Oh, well…she had a choice. She made her choice. My other sons and I made our choice!
Thank you Ox! I was sitting here about to cry (again gag), and your post made me feel better. I still want to cry, but it is probably good for me.
My mom has flipped again. I do not think she will try to cling to me anymore. My brother came over to her house for an hour the other day, and now she hates me again. I have no idea why, and I just do not care. A big part of me is relieved.
I think a part of why this screwed up, abusive dynamic with my mom is even happening is mostly my fault. I let her do this to me knowing perfectly well how it will end each time. I was put into the role of care taker with her since I was very young. Of course, I did not understand this at the time, but I loved my mom, my brother, dad, family, etc.. I bonded with my mom, but I do not think she bonded with me. She told me things like my dad didn’t want her anymore after she became pregnant with me. Then she seemed upset that he “supposedly” loved me more than her or anyone after I was born. She also said that I rejected her as a baby and only wanted my dad. I finally told my father some of this this past year, and he was shocked and said it was all bs. Also, I knew my brother came from her, because I was 2.5 when he was born. She told me “God put him in there.” I asked her where I came from, and she told me that “aliens dropped me off on the doorstep, and I was an egg in a basket. They left a letter saying to name me Rose, but she didn’t listen.” WTF? I was an egg from aliens. I was confused for sometime, and I thought I was a freaking alien! BUT my brother came from my mom and God. I was 3 when the alien story came about. 3!
*side note- I have something odd where I can remember things when I was very, very small. I have 1 or 2 memories of right before I was a year old. I have more memories of being 2, but it seems like my memory is very intact from the age of 3 on. I think it is odd that I can remember so far back, and I am unsure if it is a good thing or not.
Anyway, I know that in my family (on both sides of my parents) girls are not good enough. Boys are wonderful and perfect and smart. Girls are nothing. That is a big reason for the way I was treated. The other part, I find disturbing, my mom has always said that my brother is just like her, and I am nothing like either one of them. IMO, thank God!
It is me, now. It is my fault. I have to come to grips with the fact that my mom does not love me. I have been trying for years, and I get very close to being okay with it. Then something happens and I get sucked back in. I let her. Who wants to honestly feel unloved by their mom, even if you know the reasons why?
I do feel better getting this crap out of me. I think I will just go have a cry, and get it over with. Then I am going to eat and get my butt back to work on this horrible economics class. I have my kids that love me and I love more than anything ever imaginable. I am thankful that they are not around my screwed up family. I am also thankful that I didn’t turn out like my mom, and I am able to be loved and love back in return, at least for my kiddos’ sake.
If anyone has any advise on how to stop myself from getting hurt by my mom, then I am all ears (eyes lol). I cannot do the no contact thing with her (I am cutting it way down though) due to the issues with her brain. I need a way to get my brain to not let her hurt me so.
Sky
It’s so weird (eerie?) how you mention your mom had no values except to attempt to appear pios, and display wealth.
My mom was similar. She was an education junkie, a PHD, even signed her letters TO ME as from “Dr. XX XXX” how ridiculous! Even with all that education, she had as much INSIGHT into things as a gnat.
Further, every time she bought something she’d say, “oh, I will get so many compliments ON THIS”, and twirl around….as if having certain STUFF is what made people like her.
Always new clothes, new furniture, new jewelry, new decorations, new cars, over and over again. She put on the image of SMARTS, MONEY, PERFECTION to all, but inside she was shallow. Indeed.
Values? Who knows.
Thanks for the comment. It made me realize…..
I have been NO CONTACT with my ex-spath for about three weeks – I can get to this point, and then he usually starts reaching out to me again. Not that he’s changed or anything, he just wants something. I don’t know what. Attention?
In the last few days he’s emailed/called three times. I haven’t responded. I have been tempted to. I need to stay strong.
I *SO* want to lash out and tell him to get lost, to forward these god damned “I love you, I miss you” emails he sends to me, to his new WIFE.
I know I shouldn’t respond, Oxy says don’t create drama.
But I am so angry.
I wish I just didn’t care, but I do.
HE HURT ME SO MUCH.
Superkid