Many people have asked Lovefraud to suggest a treatment program to help them overcome the personal devastation of a relationship with a sociopath. A friend of Lovefraud, Sandra L. Brown, M.A., offers a program for women who are recovering from such debilitating encounters.
Sandra Brown is the author of How to Spot a Dangerous Man, which was reviewed in a previous blog post. The book describes eight types of dangerous men—most of them are sociopaths, or partial sociopaths. Brown then explains how women override their internal warning signals and get involved with these men, even when their instincts are shouting, “Run away!”
If you’ve been in a relationship with a sociopath, at some point, of course, you found yourself devalued and discarded. He merrily moved on to a fresh new supply. You’re in a crumpled heap, a shell of the person you once were.
Many of you have asked Lovefraud: How can I heal? Will I ever be able to love again?
The answer is yes, you can recover, and yes, you can love again. Sandra Brown’s program may help you.
Healing retreats
Sandra Brown offers four-day retreats at her facility in the hills of North Carolina. The program is called Healing the Aftermath of Pathological Love Relationships.
First, Brown explains pathology 101—adults with personality disorders are hardwired to behave the way they do. They are not going to change.
Then Brown looks at the dynamics of a relationship with a disordered person. The lies, the manipulation, the crazy-making—this is nothing like a relationship like a normal man. The point is to help you understand that you were not imagining things. Yes, the guy really did lie to you. And no, he never loved you.
But then Brown helps you look at your own life to figure out why you were vulnerable to the sociopath. What did you learn in your family as a young girl? How do you view men? What was going on for you internally throughout your life?
Many women come out of the sociopathic relationship with post-traumatic stress disorder, which can be reactivated by future traumatic events. If this happened to you, Brown teaches self-care techniques and symptom management to help you in the future.
When to participate
The most beneficial time to participate in Brown’s retreat is after you’ve been out of the relationship for four to six months or more. “We are a good program for women who have figured out what he is, have left, and need some psycho-education that they did, in fact, make the right decision,” Brown says. The program then helps you identify internal traits that made you vulnerable, and issues from your family of origin.
The program is not appropriate in some cases:
- Women in crisis. If you’re recently out of the relationship, or if you’re still trying to decide whether you should leave, it’s too soon to gain benefit from this program.
- Women using online dating sites. After a relationship with a sociopath, Brown believes you should stop dating for a year or two, until you’re closer to being healed. “If you’re on Match.com, don’t call me,” she says.
Adult children of sociopaths
Some Lovefraud readers have realized that their parents were sociopaths. For you, Brown offers another program called Adult Children of a Pathological Parent.
Space in all retreats is limited—only six participants are accepted for each session. For more information, visit SafeRelationships.com.
Wow Grace63!
You sound FREE! Isn’t it wonderful?!
I would like to do a group like you. I am just afraid at this point. I feel like I should know something more but I don’t know what it is.
Are you considering doing the workshop with Sandra L. Brown? I think I would start there so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I have thought of attending a battered women’s group just to see what they do. The psychological stuff is the same I think but with bruises. :o( That would be hard to see.
I guess I want to do this but I want to have a Therapist oversee it with me as a sidekick. I don’t know what I would say to these people.
You got me thinking about what I would do. I think I would write a flyer that said something like:
Do you know someone that is in a painful relationship? Are you that someone?
Then I would write something like:
Does your partner do any of the following:
Intimidate you with looks, verball threats of aggressive posturing?
Threaten you?
Did he have a sad story that made you feel sorry for him when you first met him?
Was he your Knight in Shining Armor… but only for a short time and now you are wondering where that man went?
Does he call you names or treat you like a possession?
Do you find that you are always defending your character?
Are you always trying to change to make him happy?
Are you unsure about what it is that he wants you to change but it’s always something?
Is he secretive about his whereabouts?
Does he seem to be addicted to the Internet. Text messages, the phone?
Do you have disagreements that never reach a resolution that is acceptable to you or account for your feelings?
Is it, whatever “It” is, always your fault?
Did you know that you don’t have to be hit to be in an abusive relationship?
and so on.
(I am sure there’s lots more.)
Good luck. Let us know what you are pulling together.
Just to add to the above comments… (my story is under case histories)…
I’m three years out now and have no emotional charge on the past.
At the present time, I look at what happened as an important life-lesson… it seems that I had been spending a great deal of my life (family, romantic and career) putting up with the sociopathic behaviors of first, my mother, then several husbands and boyfriends and numerous people at work.
It wasn’t until the last encounter that I woke up to the fact that these ‘DIFFICULT’ people in my life were sociopaths-psychopaths and that I had spent most of my life tippy-toeing around their quirks and constant demands. What a wake-up call it was when I discovered what they really were! and that I didn’t have to put up with them any longer.
I realize that I had been ‘indoctrinated’ to be submissive to their demanding behaviors and crazy-making from the time that I was a little child – so it was easy for me to graduate to boyfriends, husbands, co-workers and bosses whom I just considered to be ‘difficult’ people.
Healing took a lot of self-searching, recounting and remembering old relationships and how I succumbed in order to co-exist.
I am left with one thought – I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been aware of the behavior patterns of those around me and made appropriate changes…???
HI LouiseRosen,
My childhood was dominated by a domineering and volatile Mother which set me up for future failed relationships with the wrong kind of people. Luckily, I made a very good choice when I married my husband but I failed to recognise that I still carriage ‘baggage’ from the past which led me to fall prey to another P.
Like you, the passage of time is diminishing the trauma and two years on, I feel that it has been a vital wake-up call and an invaluable lesson learned.
I hope that our contributions through these posts can give hope to others that are still struggling with the effects of a disordered personality.
Swallow
The aspects of the “people pleasing” and “self-depreciating” personalities that we get from a childhood in which we are expected to “overlook” or “forgive”(read: Pretend it never happened) does in later life tend to make us over look RED FLAGS in these personality disordered individuals.
Dealing with that aspect of why we were “chosen victims” and others weren’t I think is pivotal to our healing PERMANENTLY not just getting away from the “latest” P that has been in our lives.
If a person in AA didn’t realize it was the ALCOHOL and only thought it was the “vodka” and quit drinking that and went to “whiskey” instead, their life would NOT change. I laugh at that when folks who had a big problem with alcohol quit whiskey and go to BEER–as if that makes a difference.
LOL
I think we must MUST find out what inside ourselves made us vulnerable to these people. Why we did not leave the FIRST time they “got out of line” or challenge them the FIRST time they lied to us. Would totally “with it” and “healthy” people put up with what we have put up with? I don’t think so.
That was another big hurdle for me to “get” was that I was COMPLACIENT and allowed the second abuses from these people.
The old saying “crap on me once, shame on you, Crap on me TWICE, shame on ME!” I am the first to admit that I ALLOWED the abuse to continue. I didn’t start it, but I didn’t STOP it either.
I am doing my best at setting reasonable boundaries with every person in my life, who is close or not so close. “This is the way I expect to be treated.” If you do not choose to treat me that way–GO AWAY.
When people cross those boundaries it is at their peril. I have a choice in life in how I will deal with or not deal with people. I can choose who I associate with, whom I love, and whom I do not associate with. I do not have to please YOU. If I choose to please you and it i s within reasonable boundaries, that is a choice I make, not something I am compeled to do.
it is okay for you not to like me. Not everyone will like me. Not everyone will agree with me, and that is okay too.
You can have a difference of opinon without it being a differnce in principle. Having differences of opinons, or likes and dislikes though, does not give anyone the right to disrespect you or me. I treat or try to treat each person with respect, and I expect the same courtesy and respect in return.
One of the biggest pains in life has been when I loved A, and A loved B, and I did not like B, and A insisted that if I “loved them” that I had to also love “B”—I now realize that I can love you, and you can love B, but if I don’t like B that is okay, and if you insist that I must love B in order to be your friend, then, too bad—it isn’t going to happen. I don’t make that kind of demands on others and I won’t fall prey to that kind of demand either.
I am sorry to say that when my exN started his (I now know) deviant behaviour, I just didnt consider it to be abuse. Uncomfortable yes. Cancelling arrangements/tired (that’s his right), going on holidays alone (he needs space), 12 mobile phones (he works nights, he needs new playthings), sexy comments to female workers (everyone has office banter), female’s phone numbers on his phone (they are married/no threat), doesnt want sex (thats his choice), he asks me ‘ in our sex life – would you xxxxx’ – (HANG ON A MINUTE – WHAT IS HE SAYING??.
He was abusing me in small ways, over practical matters, then working his way up to more risky ones. He was abusing me to my face, right under my nose and although I didnt like what he was doing, I put up with it…..then tension would mount in me,, I would over react and he would punish me by withdrawal. I kept accepting his excuses. Then as I started to suspect he had/was cheating on me, I started to check up on him – thinking – well I have no proof – I cant accuse him of anything. I thought if I did put my foot down, I would lose him or he would accuse me of being jealous/insecure, which he did accuse me of.
I started looking on websites for how to determine what signs a cheater would give. Then I thought – damn it – I dont need any proof. That is when I came to my senses. He is making me feel uncomfortable and that is all I need to know. Then the day before we finished, I am convinced that he invited me somewhere for me (a) meet one of his women (b) or he met a woman there – and that was the last straw. Even if I was imagining it, I thought the scene is so real that this is what he will end up doing to me – which equals taking a crap on me – and I am not taking it ANY MORE- GOODBYE
After going on the cheating signs websites, I found my way to tears and healing website (the descriptions were so accurate), then I found my way here.
I think we all did rationalizations…Your rationalizations sound just like mine. Now I call it suffering from hope.
Righteous woman,
Another web site on dealing with Ns and Ps calls it “malignant hope” and I think that sums it up pretty well.
That “hope against all reason” is what sustains us in the relationships. I now that in EVERY P encounter from my P-bio-father, to my P-son, and my P-X BF, it was the malignant HOPE that kept me falling for the “fantasy” of how it COULD be if I COULD JUST SOME HOW FIND THE MAGIC WORDS TO FIX IT ALL. DUH!
There is NO Santa, there is NO tooth fairy, there is NO Easter Bunny and there is NO FIX FOR A PSYCHOPATH except DISTANCE and NO CONTACT.
I have to come here everyday to read all of these reminders… no contact, no fix for a psychopath, no more thinking “if only I read him this letter I wrote him, then he’ll come to his senses”. A friend asked me today how is it that we get sucked in by these people? I wasn’t able to answer her. It’s something about their being master manipulators. It’s frightening, really. All the signs were there for all of us, yet we chose to ignore them, rationalize them. Hindsight is 20-20, they say, and now looking back it all makes perfect sense that I was being completed used and emotionally abused. I wish there was some scientist out there looking for a perfect psychopath to research, because my ex-p would be heaven for them. Perhaps this could go on his license somewhere (“Certified Psychopath”), so that when he dies and his brain gets donated to science, the scientist could really take a look at what makes a psychopath tick.
Clearly, I need a break from all this thinking about this man that has uprooted my life, made me question the genuine goodness in people, and made me realize that true evil does exist in the world, and it’s not always far away or someone else’s problem.
Here’s hoping we all start taking better care of ourselves and thinking about our own lives and values, and put them behind us, as much as is possible.
The first night I spent with my exN, I did something I have never done before – I went into my kitchen and hid all the knives. That tells you something doesnt it?
For days and weeks I have been quietly stewing with a jealous curiosity about his current gfriend. Less ups and downs with her, less over reactions, more calm, no turbulence. I have even thought if only I had been less reactive. Then today, I suddenly realised that she may be less reactive and he will have modified his behaviour off the back of the experiences with me. I am in no doubt that somewhere in him, he must have been hurt when we parted, but he has fast tracked himself past that. There has probably been no ruminating or him, no tears, he has schemed on how he can find a quick replacement for me. I know they are weak inside and all these elaborations are defences.
I am glad I was reactive, it just brought things to a head more quickly and lessened the longer lasting impact, although the impact has been bad enough. She may be more accepting of him, he may not yet be manipulating and getting into his deviant behaviour, because he knows what it did to us. But the bottom line is that all people in his life are narcissistic prey to him, whether he takes the longer route or the shorter route. She is yet unaware of what he did to me and what mental cruelty he subjected me to for being concerned about him and loving him.
I realised that with him, things go very calmly when you play by his rules – he makes it clear what is acceptable and what is not, if you assert your needs or cross him in some way – bang – punishment – all so subtely executed – like Pavlov’s dogs. It can never be a two way relationship with him, he has to be completely in control of all aspects of the relationship, but if at times you are in control, it is only because he is letting you be, to keep you sweet. That is, until you suddenly realise what his game is actually about!!