Donna Anderson’s important latest post reminds me that one topic which will never be worn out is that of the psychopath’s lies and their impact on others.
This week I want to very briefly introduce yet another take on this inexhaustible topic. Everyone lies, but there’s something else at stake in the case of the psychopath’s lies.
To illustrate: you might say about any regular (non-psychopathic) person, “Things would be better if s/he was to lie less often. Her/his soul or psyche would be healthier as would her relationships.” That’s true. Now try this on for size and notice how wrong it seems: “Things would be better if the psychopath was to lie less often. His soul or psyche would be healthier as would his relationships.”
Weirdly, this is patently not the case. The psychopath will be just as sick/evil no matter how many or how few lies he tells. It’s not a quantitative but a qualitative matter.
It is commonly said that a defining characteristic of psychopaths is that they are pathological liars. This is right if you mean that they are profoundly dishonest and not to be trusted. It does not mean, though, that psychopaths lie a lot. They do lie a lot and those lies cause havoc. But as I hope my illustration above shows, lying less will not make them better people.
So, how does this work? The thing about psychopaths is that even their truths are lies! Or rather, whether or not they happen to be telling the truth or a lie at any particular moment is not what makes them psychopathic. What makes them psychopathic is that they use and destroy people; truth or lies are for them just so many weapons for pursuing their prey.
M.L. Gallagher said a lot when she wrote this:
He is the lie….
From hello to good-bye. I love you to I hate you. You’re beautiful to you’re ugly.
It was all a lie….When friends or my family ask, but what about this, or what about that, I tell them. It was all a lie. There was no truth in him.
If I spend my time trying to figure out fact from fiction, all I am doing is trying to prove I wasn’t so stupid. See, this was true. That’s why I fell in love with him.
Truth is. I fell in love with him because I believed his lie.
When I discovered the truth, I was so enmeshed in his lie, I couldn’t find the truth in me. And so I sank.
o.k., I was informed this evening, not to post (repeat) the same blog on other links on this web site, and was told not to, by e-mail from the LF administrator. Yet, I need for ONE posting, at least, to stay on this site, if no others after this, and this particular blog spot was the first one I posted to today, so I will post it (and ONLY to it) again, and for the ONLY time I post it (read: I’ll not post it again on any other link on this site; but this was the specific site to which I initially posted my blog, and I think it needs to remain posted, to warn other women. Thank you.) After informed, by e-mail, that I should not post same message to different LF blogs, I understood, but was not, since, informed if my message stayed on any one blog spot on LF, therefore, I post this message to this specific blog, and ONLY to this specific blog (not to any other LF blog on this site.)
I think all Spaths are destructive, thought, I also think that not as many women have had the misfortune to have a DOWN-LOW Spath ruin their lives. Therefore, my blog lines, below:
I was directed to this web site, LF, years ago, when someone posted a comment to my DDHG profile about my ex, who I think was another Spath. I’ve only today decided to post to the LF blog, for the first time up here, and responding specifically to OxDrover’s message to Hen, “Henry, those little turds just think they’re cute—they will just go on to be the next generation of ’Mikes’ and ’Jodies’ and can’t remember what Matt’s X was called—FAKE is a good enough term. Doesn’t matter if they are straight or gay or in between they are TRASH!”
Also agree to one_step_at_a_time’s message, “hens ”“ hi sweetie. young queens are f***ing turds. always have been. always will be. narcissistic little turds.”
My ex, a Spath with whom I lived for nearly a decade, was on the DL. One of his wives prior to me confirmed it for me, ..said that during her relationship with him, her gay male friends (more than one) told her they’d had sex with him. She also told me that he wanted to sex role switch with her, which in long, painful hindsight, I now suspect was what he was trying to have me do, as well.
It has been almost 10 years since ending our relationship. He left without reimbursing me half the security deposit (I paid the whole first extra month of rent, when we rented the house; we both signed the lease), so he left me holding the bag, hanging on to a house, not long after my last unemployment check ran out, he left after I’d helped mentor (if not raise) his daughter for that long, and left not long after she was no longer a minor. I was unable to have children of my own.
He drained me emotionally and financially for years..wasn’t like the ordinary break up (hey, I’d handled those in my 20s and 30s quite well..was able to move on like water off a duck’s back, and I always knew when to break it off with someone, early on, when I knew they were not right for me.) Profiles I’ve posted about him show him wearing the expensive clothes that I bought for him. He “fed” off my family’s good graces for years, attending my father’s 80th B-day celeb, at the beach, where I’d also invited his daughter (she ate well, too, that night!), taking advantage of my father’s V-day present to us as a couple: a weekend resort, with a hot tub, breakfasts served; dinners my father paid for my own B-day celebs, at fine restaurants, where he was also invited..for years.
He denied everything to the bitter end, said there was no other woman, etc. There WAS another woman, a woman who had, for a couple of years, pretended to be my friend. She was married, for the second time, when she met us, through mutual friends of hers and mine. So he USED me and my networks to meet and seduce his Ms. Next, his next victim.
Less than one year after he bolted, I was crime victimized. So..first I was sexually/emotionally/psychologically abused by one Spath, for years, then I was physically assaulted, by another Spath, a felon, at my place of work. Healing was slower, with two “crimes” happening back to back, from two different Spaths, one “crime” from who I THOUGHT I knew, another from a stranger and felon. The combination of the two things left me feeling as though I’d been raped.
Recovery has been slow, but I’m determined to “out” the Spath with whom I lived for so long, once and for all.
On one web site, I posted photos of him from his teens through his 50s, asking any gay guys or guy who’s sexed him to please come forward to say when or where that happened to please comment under any profiles on him. He had two failed marriages before living with me, and I suspect is working on a third that will probably fail (he interfered with her 2nd marriage, and seduced her away from her husband, meanwhile he’d advertised himself as bi on a swingers site.)
It wasn’t his first time trying to destroy someone else’s marriage. His first wife told me he (and by his own admission to her) had seduced their neighbor’s wife. He himself admitted to me, when we began dating, that he’d come on to a married woman while married to his 2nd wife, but she told him she didn’t want his problems to become hers. Wish I had done the same thing. That was my RED FLAG and I ignored it. Took a long time for me to forgive myself for having anything to do with the Spath.
Sometimes, the only relief I get from the residual grief (though much less than it was 9 years ago, and certainly minimal, since it didn’t take me long to meet my next partner, with whom I still live, and who I deeply love) is to try to help other women on those profiling sites. But when I post my standard paragraph, I also keep hoping that those gay guys will respond–you know–the gay guys who his first wife said had sexed him while he and she were married.
Is this “normal” to want this kind of final closure, or “obsessive”? I just think the next woman is putting herself at HUGE risk of possibly contracting AIDS. I care not for HER (female with whom he had an affair while living with me and who he left me for) feelings or HER safety anymore, but care about OTHER women who he might con, after her.
I think he also keeps stalking me by directing SPAM e-mail to my addy, and also suspect that it was he who has vandalized my car four times, within the last 9 years. But I refuse to be intimidated to take down my profiles about him on the net, that warn other women.
My car was, again, vandalized, when parked in front of my home, about week ago, and I suspect, again, that it was him doing it. And that SPAM email? Well, that continues, too. Got one just last night. Sent at 9 P.M. (His current “squeeze” should pay attention to what he does on his computer, at that hour, but she refused to listen to the warnings of her former husband’s former girlfriend who remained his friend, who was the sister-in-law of my ex’s first wife.) I ignore the emails. I just delete them. My neighbors and their teen children (who study into the morning hours) are on heightened Neighborhood Watch, because of the vandalism to my car. I REFUSE to be intimidated to remove my posts on DDHG or anywhere else, because of him or his actions. Somehow, I just know that his family members, or at least several of them, KNOW he’s a Spath, but they’ve managed, I think, to enable him and his behavior.
So, yes, I think the vindictiveness of Spaths, described in LF’s page about Spath characteristics, is right on the mark.
I think you LF bloggers might, by now, know who I am, or at least who my Spath was, especially if you read womansavers.com or DDHG profiles, as I do daily (like others read the daily obits in their newspapers.) I come to this blog, finally, because, what the Spath did to me was diminish my friendship circles (he FED ON THEM, to find his next victim!), to leave me feeling very isolated, and it has been a long haul for me, out of the hole of depression.
I’m not a homophobe (as he accused me of being in his last, vulgar e-mail to me.) In fact, I am trusting and putting my faith in my Higher Power, that some KIND gay guy (or guys), that is, who HAVE A CONCSCIENCE or consciences, come forward to help expose him for the DL Spath/fraud he was, is, or has been for years, ..hope that the gay community (at least those gays who believe in monogamy) will help me finally..to expose him, so I can have complete closure.
He refused to get an AIDS/HIV test, when I asked him to, after he decided it was “over.” Though I am cleared (had to wait six months between each test), I am very concerned about other victims of his, after the fact. He had a huge hemorrhoid in his anal area, which very well could be a HUGE red flag, that he might be a “bottom” (or a “versatile”, someone who is both a top and bottom.) He had a gay male porn addiction while living with me.)
Spaths on the DOWN-LOW are the worst!
To the LF Administrator and bloggers. I did not intend to seem redundant, so sorry if I seemed like I was. I was not sure to which LF blog I should post, about my story, but I will stay here, on this specific blog spot.
More difficult it is, I think, for women in middle age, who have experienced Spaths, and worse, if they met the Spath at vulnerable moments in their lives, i.e., after divorce, between jobs, after the death of a loved one, etc. My Spath targeted me when I was freshly divorced. Though I had no children, he had two, one biological, another, an adopted son, and I think he targeted his second wife (with a son out of wedlock) because of her vulnerability, too. I did not gain my Bachelor’s degree until I was age 40, which put me at a disadvantage, as it was, in the workforce, to compete with others, for the fewer jobs there were, during the 1990s, and meanwhile a major recession was in place, in the aftermath of the Reagan administration, and that continued through the second Bush administration.
Can’t go into history right now, but I think you get my point, that I think the Spath in my life was a fraud, social climber (even though he didn’t have any formal education, when I had), and finally, “resembled” to me, a gigalo or a pimp.
This was written to me today after I emailed him and simply asked him to “spell it out just what he wanted from me”. Wow
Any comments or questions are welcomed.
Dear 8/3/2010
I find it very hard to talk face to face with you. You have got your mind set on the idea that all of the problems we have had in our marriage are of my doing. I don’t agree with your conclusion. That being said, when I try to talk to you and you won’t even listen, or try to understand my point of view, we both get frustrated and sometimes angry. We both have faults in our marriage.
No matter what kind of money I am earning now, it has no bearing on what I was earning in the past. What I have earned in the past has been significantly less. You have blamed me for making bad decisions financially. You have to. For example. You bought that Nissan when you did not make enough money to pay for it. And you didn’t even stay at the job you had so that you could help bring money into the household so we could pay for the car. When I made the decision to make the payment on my truck, it was the only decision that made since. I owed less, and the payment was less. Yes I bought a dog. It probably wasn’t the best decision but it wasn’t enough money to be catastrophic to our financial situation. Your inability to co-habitate with your fellow stylist or the management of the salon, was much more significant and destructive to yours and my financial situation at the time. You need to be able to take responsibility for your actions as well as I do. While I am on the subject of you working or the lack of you working. I reject the accusation that you make that because I called you at work you couldn’t keep the job or that you lost a job because of it. I never have, nor never would want to keep track of you. I am more secure of myself than that. I was just trying to communicate with you because I liked you and wanted to talk to you. I believe that you probably made your co-workers, or managers uncomfortable. You have definitely got a way of doing that. I am not sure why it is. You are either so insecure about yourself that you make others insecure, or you may be verbalizing your religious beliefs to people who are not ready to hear that kind of talk. I wasn’t there so I don’t know for sure.
You were saying this morning that I would be paying the money I am paying to live whether you were there or not, and you didn’t think that by having your mother in the house was any extra cost to me. I disagree with that as well. In fact I will start back at the time we started taking care of Kelley. I will use what you used to say about taking care of Kelley and Devin before we even met. You always told me how difficult and how expensive it was to take care of them, and that you didn’t receive any help from anyone. Do you agree that is what you said about that? Then we can just turn that right around and apply it to our situation. You may not understand it, but there is significantly more expenses going from one person in a home, to two, three, or even four. I am the one who pays the bills. I sacrificed as well as you did. Because of these additions to our home in such a short time of being married, is probably going to be the cause of us not being married. I have tried very hard Joanne to give you and your family what I thought was the right thing. I was (excuse the expression) shit on by your daughter. I put up with her crap a whole lot longer than anyone else would have. I didn’t even get any kind of thanks from you or Kelley. What gets me is I was stupid enough to do it more than once.
You said this morning that if you were working that I would just be burning through money even faster. That is not true either. I have been very responsible. Before your mother came to live with us we had come to an agreement that we were going to pay less to live, and you would get a job to pay the utilities and food. Now we are paying three hundred dollars more a month in rent and a bit more in utilities, and more in food, and you can’t get a job. You and your family have also neglected to get all of the resources needed to take care of your mother properly and to allow you to get a job.
What would happen if I weren’t here? The answer to that question is my point.
It is also the reason you are still with me. I believe, if you were able to, you would have already asked me to leave or you would have stayed in New York. No matter who is around you, or wherever you are, in the end we are responsible for being able to take care of ourselves. You always said that I didn’t help enough around the house when you were working. I don’t know how you came to that conclusion. You were never employed long enough to find out. You say that you are overwhelmed taking care of your mother. I can understand about not being able to leave but as far as what you physically do when it comes to taking care of her and our home, I don’t understand. I also don’t understand your view on what love is. You never would answer me the other night when I asked you if you were still in love with me. I also find myself for the first time not feeling like I can trust you. You have already told me you don’t trust me. Without trust we don’t have a marriage.
So what are we going to do? If I move out, how will you be able to pay the rent and utilities and food? I will give you the ranger and all of the furniture. Unless like you said your brother is going to buy you a car. I still don’t see how you will be able to pay the rest of the bills. I don’t know what your mother gets. You had said 1200 then 900, and this morning it was back to 1200. How much more money a month will you have to have to be able to live in that house? I guess you need to think about it and try to figure it out. I don’t want either one of us to be in a bad situation, and I sure don’t want to continue on like we are. What would you do if your mother falls?
I am not some kind of a monster. Nor am I the cause of all the problems in our home. I can admit to my shortcomings, you don’t seem to be able to. I have been praying very hard for us. It seems sometimes like there is a big elephant in the room when we are together. I have started feeling resentment towards you, because of the finger pointing that you seem to feel necessary to do. I guess this letter is my time to finger point. It’s not in blame, but in hopes that you may see that there are two sides to this relationship. I feel like I have been doing all the sacrificing, and you feel like you have. I pray that God shows me his will for me, and that he shows you yours.
Well you asked me to spell it out for you. There you go.
I would like to add that after 4 years of marriage, this is the very first time ever he gave me any sort of constructive feedback, notice how he does this as it’s obvious in his email that he has concluded it’s over.
JoyFull,
I suggest that rather than e mail back and forth with him, that you spell out what you want and feel you are entitled to VIA YOUR ATTORNEY and do not have direct contact with him. The back and forth between you and him is not constructive (they lie) so I suggest that you go go NO Contact and let your lawyer do the talking.
Just have your attorney forward a letter to him saying that all communication will be between you two via the attorneys from now on.
style1 says:
“faked adoration— I have been reading this thread and that stood out.. the incredible amount of attention that he gave me. That is what I miss.. ’normal’ people do not act as he did.. even in the first rush of attraction..I have never experinced what he did with me.. phone calles, texts, flowers, touching and it was creepy in that it was too much.. but he conditioned me to this..
So after it is gone.. who can compete? I have been dating some and normal men don’t act this way and when one does began calling and texting too much.. I feel alarm.. that it is a rush and I pull back and I am correct.
Real things, don’t need to happen so fast. Real is slow, constant and enduring. It is respectful of my time as well as his.. and this man was not respectful of my time. He just wanted to capture me as fast as he could and he didn’t care how he interrupted my life. It was all about him and his needs. I was there to fulfill his needs. His need for a partner, love, to attach to someone. GeeZ! These awarenesses just keep coming at differnt levels.. I guess until they are totally released.
Style;
This is why I gave up on getting a job and keeping one. He love bombed me at work especially, calling me all day long, even after several times I asked him to stop at it was causing friction for me and distrupting my focus. He made it so stressful for me and just yesterday told me that the reason he did that so much was because he just like me so much and wanted to talk to me.
They stressed me out to the point where I lost my hair and I went bald. I say “they” cause I attracted one abuser after the next.
They are “home invaders” . They cause you to feel unsafe in your own home. Jim barged in my door any time he pleased. He barged in my bedroom to wake me out of my sleep when I met someone new. He barged in when I was showering. He even pulled the shower curtain open to get a ‘view’.
I finally put the “breaks” on him when I threatened to call the police. He went away! He really went away!
He was only hanging around because I was bullied by him. I was convinced that involving the police was taboo. Once I told him I would involve the police he vanished.
If I had only said those words 5 years ago!
I would have those 5 years of my life to do something differently with those years.
5-years of my life wasted on that piece of shit!
Ox,
OMG…..In reading through a lot of the posts, I got a picture of what had happened in your life, references to P child, but this is extensive. I can’t IMAGINE the pain you must have gone through. I believe one of my children has “traits”, but she has two of my grandchildren and DEFINITELY shows tons of empathy towards them and believe me I know the differences too….but if my child were a full blown outright P….I related to your childbirth analogy, the pain of it. I guess in some ways, if you don’t feel that “fire” anymore, which is a good thing for you now, I’m feeling it for you…I just can’t imagine that kind of pain..I have had squabbles with my child already to say the least. We didn’t have contact for about six months because I could NOT take her abuse anymore and set my boundaries with her. Things were worked out, but I am cautious. As parents, I hope to GOD we love our children….and I hope to GOD our children love us too….I just can’t imagine Ox…..your story and surviving is nothing less than truly amazing….
But I’m truly feeling that pain FOR YOU right now…and I know it’s because the impact of details is hitting me.
Wow, what an incredible amount of reading, reflecting and relating here on this forum tonight.
But ………….thanks for sharing Ox. I’m just amazed….
The solstice has come and gone. The days are getting longer now.
A year ago I married the man of what my dreams were and was forced to wake suddenly to the harsh reality that the man was a liar and a cheat and worse. I the last to see it, to know it.
And I was lucky to find out soon.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t cut me into pieces of the person I knew myself to be when it happened. It shattered my reality and my trust and the breaking fell all over all of my family and close personal relationships.
Across the devastation, I have been grateful to your stories, expertise and wisdom for the light that shines on what is truer than the lies. Ity has been a privilege and a gift to be in this company and grow in it.
And now as the days wind out and the light is shining in the night, I look back on the wonderous gift of your friendships in the ether and know that without them, I would have been and might still be lost in that pain.
I hope we will all take a minute on this silent night and send love and healing to our sisters and brothers who are this night, this minute embroiled in the lies and snares of the disordered and send them out the hope that there is somewhere to go and there are people who understand.
Once we are come here, it isn’t just about ourselves anymore it is about the healing community of which we become part and into which we welcome those in the throes of agony and disbelief.
To all of you, Merry Christmas. The light here is bright and beacons hope and renewal to all. Without you, the world would be a very dark place.
Shine on!
Dear Silvermoon,
Your post made me cry, tears of empathy and compassion. Thank you for a wonderful post, and you said what is in my heart much better than I ever could have said. Boink me for a sentimental old bat! (((hugs)))) and my prayers for us all, for healing and peace in our hearts and lives! (snivel)