Introducing a new Lovefraud author, Mel Carnegie

“There are thousands if not millions of people out there who have been targeted by sociopaths and I intend to do all I can to help them!”

That’s what Mel (short for Melanie) Carnegie wrote when she first contacted me not long ago. She, like many of us, had unknowingly married a sociopath back in 1998. It’s a classic sociopathic seduction story they met, he swept her off her feet, they exchanged vows six days later. “I had never felt so loved, so safe, so special,” she wrote. “Of course, I now know it was all a sham.”

Mel and her husband started a business coaching company in the United Kingdom that’s where she’s from and attracted many blue chip clients. They prospered, with a beautiful home in the French countryside and investment properties in the UK.

At the beginning of 2009, Mel’s husband astarted spending more time in the UK, saying that he needed time to himself. The early part of that year was tortuous — Mel didn’t understand what was happening and her husband wasn’t able to give any useful or specific answers. Thinking that perhaps he was ill, she asked her company IT people for the password to her husband’s business account. Even though this was a perfectly normal request, she was filled with guilt about mistrusting him.

Her mistrust was well placed. To her horror, Mel uncovered an e-mail trail that indicated not illness, but massive betrayal. She wrote:

I discovered pages of hard cold evidence that showed he had been living a double life behind my back. Plundering our successful business to fund a high-flying lifestyle, running up debts, indulging in countless affairs and interacting on sordid internet sex-sites, I was hit with the hard cold realization that our idyllic life together had been nothing but a sham. We were even about to have our UK property repossessed because the mortgage had not been paid for over six months.

The moment the truth was out, I froze our business account and called in the liquidators to close the company. It was the only thing I could do.  He was in the UK at the time and I have neither seen nor spoken with him since the night I found him out. Abandoned, penniless and with a 13-year old son to support, I was catapulted in to a living nightmare.

As time went on, the extent of the debts came out of the woodwork — all of them in my name — amounting to tens of thousands of pounds. Nothing, of course, was in his name.

Dealing with the finance problems was, of course, monumental. But embarking on a journey of emotional and spiritual healing was even bigger. Like most of us, Mel realized that the betrayal by her husband was not the only wound that needed to be addressed. She wrote about her journey in her blog called, Life’s Little Lettuces. She’ll be telling you more about it here on Lovefraud.

Mel restarted her company, called The Top Banana Bunch, and it’s now a successful UK-based leadership development company, again with blue chip clients. She managed to save her home. Her husband is now her ex—the decree nisi for her divorce was granted last June, and the final divorce is coming soon.

I think Mel Carnegie will be a wonderful voice here on Lovefraud. She is a neuro-linguistic programming practitioner, an advanced Louise Hay trainer and a Firewalk instructor. She has also studied Reiki, hypnosis, transformational breathwork and other self-development tools.

Since Mel discovered the truth about the man she was married to, she has used all of her personal and professional skills to survive, re-build and ultimately break free of the living nightmare. Mel has come through, emerging wiser, stronger and more determined than ever to help others do the same.

Read Mel Carnegie’s first post tomorrow.