Is he narcissist or a sociopath?

[oana]

I am Oana, i am 36 and just ended a relationship with a narcissist that lasted 4 years, from which i was married to him 1,5. I am currently divorcing him, hope is going to be ok.

My story in little words:

I met him 4 years ago, he was a charming guy, he was working as an expat in my country.
I met him through friends and he found me attractive( i was then very beautiful and happy person, i cry for that me then now).

He was just getting out of a very ugly relationship, he was blaming his ex of being crazy, a narcissist that was using his own child to get revenge on him or squeeze for money. He left his gf at that time and the 2-3 year old child in Ireland. I thought this is not a good sign at the beginning but he showed me the full hatred messages of his ex and all the tantrum and i can honestly tell you that person was not kind either. So i believed him.

We moved in together and was amazing between us for some time. Until things started to happen.

He was having moments when he was accuSing me of lying, he cannot trust me( and the reason was i drank an extra shot with my friends and forgot to tell him), he was creating huge arguments over nothing, that were escalated to the point he was putting me outside of the door in my pijamas and begging him to let me in.

Things got worse and worse but i still
Loved him and tried to help him, i got into therapy, and asked him to go too. We got married.

After we got married, his mother came by, and i realized a very strange dynamic between them: he was all over his head on impressing her, exaggerating with extra care and making me feel bad for not doing things right for our guest. Even if i did my best, i ended up tired and consumed, and a mess i ruined his time with his mother.

Also, he started to tell me i do not bring value to him, i do not cook enough, do not make him nice surprises, do not care enough for him to make it better. He was insulting me constantly, calling me sour bitch, eastern european puta, idiot, calling my parents poxy people, telling me i am a failure ( even if i am a Treasury Manager and worked my whole life and i have all the things i worked for).

He was being also aggressive, i never quit without trying to reason with him when he was accusing me. I tried several times to explain to him he is not ok, and he needs to talk about this. And when this was happening, usually he was telling me: i am the boss, i will say how is done, you shut up or leave, you are warned – another word and you know what happens to you, threatening all the time with divorce also. He was punching doors, left a hole in the door once, breaking his hand too. Another time he switched the couch i was standing on, on top of me. Another time took a kitchen knife telling me to stab him, I thought is just an act and ignored him.

He sometimes locked me on the balcony and went away, preneding he doesnt hear me. Another time when he had an angry moment, during an argument, he cane very close to me screaming at me and tell me he will throw me out of the balcony if i do not shut up. “ He is the boss! Either i shut up or leave! If i continue talking is going to end up bad for me! I need discipline! I am being disrespectful! Life is pain!” – these are some of his outburst.

I got pregnant, and he treated me horribly. He suggested abortion since first month, after he said he is the happiest man alive for a couple of weeks. He was constantly upsetting me, not carrying i was sick at all. He was telling me i poison his air with my misery, and that i will not be a good mother cause i am too weak and life is pain. He said he will end up
Leaving me cause i do not provide sex anymore that much, that he will go to prostitutes and that he doesnt want to have a sad life like this. I can tell you, that i cried all the time, i was feeling trapped and guilty for that child… was a terrible moment for me when i terminated the pregnancy. I will always carry this pain with me.

I moved out immediately after, in August and i started researching and i found Quora and changed my therapist. I found out that he might be a sociopath or narcissist but never got it clear.

Thank you

• This topic was modified 6 years ago by oana.
• This topic was modified 6 years ago by oana.
• This topic was modified 6 years ago by oana.

[Donna Andersen]

Oana – the guy is a sociopath – he likely has antisocial personality disorder. Everything you describe is typical sociopathic behavior. He will never change.

As painful as it was, I am glad that you terminated the pregnancy. First of all, sociopathy is highly genetic, so there is a possibility that your child will have been disordered as well. Secondly, he would have used the child to control you forever.

I am glad you have left. Do not return, ever. He will never change, no matter what he says and what promises he makes. Do not let him back into your life.

[oana]

Thank you so much for reading my story. I am currently in the divorce stage, i took space for the last 6 months, we do not have anything to share – house or money. I hope the divorce is going to be ok and fast.

[Redwald]

Yes, Oana, this guy is definitely disordered. I am sorry about the loss of your child also, but Donna is quite right about the risks attached to bearing a child to a guy like that. Your sad loss could be what we call in English “a blessing in disguise.”

One further point. Just because someone like this guy claims that their ex was “crazy,” a “narcissist,” “abusive” or anything of that sort, that’s no guarantee that the person making that claim is an innocent victim themselves! They may be genuinely innocent, but it’s by no means certain. There are several other possibilities.

For one thing, sometimes two disordered people get together, and they’re both as cruel and violent as one another!

For another, as Donna was discussing recently in the light of Stevie’s post, sometimes partners of abusers end up getting angry because they just can’t take the abuse any more. Then they react with all the rage they’d been storing up for the last few years. And the abuser points fingers and says “See? It was my partner’s problem all along!” when it was their own abuse that drove their partner to act out so angrily this way.

Finally, narcissists, psychopaths and other abusers project. They accuse their partners and other people of doing the very things they’re guilty of themselves–when their accusations are quite untrue! A very common example is of the abusers who are always accusing their (innocent) partners of “cheating” on them—when it’s the abusers themselves who are carrying on with some other man or woman! This sounds just like your husband.

Another example I’ve never forgotten, years ago on another message board about abuse, was a wretched female calling herself “Dahlia” who claimed she’d been a “victim” of a narcissistic husband. Yet curiously, Dahlia never told us what her ex-husband was actually supposed to have done that demonstrated his alleged “narcissism.” Dahlia was an overt man-hater among other things, but her obnoxious, arrogant behavior on that message board drove half the posters crazy! The moderators were forced to boot her off in the end. It was Dahlia herself who was a classic narcissist! I’ll bet her husband was a perfectly good guy, and thankful to be rid of this horrible shrew.

Most likely your husband’s ex-girlfriend in Ireland was another innocent victim of this disordered man, and lucky to be rid of him!

Sad to say, you can bet that once you’re rid of this poisonous husband of yours, he’ll be battening on another victim soon, and telling her the failure of his most recent marriage was “all your fault.” But that’s something you can’t control. The main thing is to free yourself!–as you’re already doing.

Sorry, I just realized I might be using terms you’re not familiar with. “Battening on” someone (not to be confused with “battering,” which is quite different) means to fasten onto someone like a leech and feed off them parasitically. I was going to go back and change it, but it struck me that your English is excellent anyway, and if you’re anything like me I’m sure you’re perfectly capable of using a dictionary if necessary to expand your vocabulary–and probably enjoy doing so! So out of respect for your obvious intelligence I won’t try to dumb my language down to fit some guess at whatever your knowledge of English might be. I could very well be wrong! Anyway it’s always interesting to see how many people come here whose native language is not English, but how easily shared are their experiences.

We all learn from one another here. And not just about disordered personalities, but other topics too. I ought to mention that one tiny little thing, so hard to notice–your use of a comma rather than a period (“full stop”) as a decimal separator–prompted me out of curiosity to look up what countries do that. I always knew they do it in France, having had plenty of dealings with France in my own career, but I already knew you weren’t French. Pretty much all of continental Europe uses the comma, way over as far as Russia. The interesting thing to me was Latin America. It’s a patchwork quilt. Some countries do and some countries don’t–and it’s often hard to figure a reason! Very intriguing! I’m always grateful for things like that, things that make me think and learn.

Speaking of countries and language, I was also curious about your (hopefully soon-to-be-ex) husband’s nationality. Why was his previous girlfriend in Ireland? Was he Irish himself? What puzzled me here was his use of “puta.” An ugly insult, to be sure, one that you never deserved! Nor did your parents deserve to be called “poxy”! But “poxy” is a common enough British insult, which makes it Irish too, since the Irish no doubt learned much of their “bad language” from their erstwhile conquerors, the English they hate so much!

But “puta”? It’s not an English (or an Irish) word, and as far as I’ve been able to find out, it’s not a Romanian word either. I may be wrong, and for all I know it could be borrowed into Romanian also, considering the shared “Latin” or “Romance” etymology. Where did this guy pick this garbage up from? Does he just travel around Europe, picking up bad language from Spain or wherever he goes?

Well, never mind. I wish you good luck in getting out of this ghastly marriage, and most of all, better luck next time! May you find the happiness you deserve!

[oana]

Thank you so much Redwald for your nice message, made me cry a little when you said the “ blessing in disguise” thing, i try to convince myself and even my therapist to think this way.

I am romanian, in here we use comma like that, i see your point and just realised as i had no idea about this 🙂 i am working in an american multinational on treasury side, which helped me to improve my english, stayed in UK for an year with my job too and maybe that helped too a little. I plan again to Move to UK or Holland shortly, the only reason i stayed was for this man that liked it better away from His country or UK. I think je wanted a fresh start where no one knew how mean he is.

I am so glad you guys wrote me, i see is not such an uncommon thing i met a horrible person like this. I felt something is off but it was a schock for me to find out is actually DSM 5 thing….. i did not have any knowledge about this people and that live among us like that. Only always thought i see them on Murder Channel and so on.

Related what you asked, indeed the guy is irish, and he travelled a lot, and he always had gf from other nationalities. So he knows how to insult in any language poasible i guess. What i noticed is that his cycle is repeating each 4 years, when he ends up the relationship.Like now, he is planning to move to Malta.
I can see that his ex is still trying to get him back after so many years, i cannot get why but i hope she will get sane and move on. She has a child with him and maybe she hopes he changed.

With me now, he is super nice and very collaborative on the divorce side, he also wrote me a very nice Thank you message on how much he learnt from me and that he values our time bla bla… That i deserve to be with someone who treats me nice and makes me feel safe. Why is he so nice now?

He always like to bully on different subjects on FB, realted rase, class, and also politics( huge Trump supporter). He likes to enter into quarrels and make a huge tornado, where he spits his anger. Sometimes he was like that with me, trying to convince me to agree with his ideas and if i was not on the same opinion he was calling me an idiot, which needs to be educated.

I think he forgot when he pulled out knives in the house, threatend to throw me off the balcony, that is going to end up bad for me. I always thought he has somehow of a crisis in those moments and never believed he would really actually do that to me. But now i wonder why i was so sure i was safe. I wasnt safe at all.

His own reality about our relationship is that i was lazy. Not providing enough value to him. And of course selfish. And he needs a woman who can show him more love than i did. I was actually cold as a fish… things that hurt but i realize that i really dont have to listen to his bullshit anymore. Is just that i helped him, loved him very much ( he was a wreck after his separation and i constantly gave a lot of support on his health, sleep) and did my best. I realize i stayed with someone who never gave a damn about me. Lost 3 years of my life and maybe the opportunity to have a nice family.

I hope i will be ok soon and back on track, i will start loving the nature and people and life around me and stop focusing on this person. That is all i did since i met him. Lost myself. I used to love little things to be happy with not much, and now i see that i changed.

Thank you

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by oana.
• This reply was modified 6 years ago by oana.
• This reply was modified 6 years ago by oana.

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