Editor’s Note: The Lovefraud reader who goes by the name of “NomorePTSD” has a request. Can any Lovefraud readers offer her any advice or suggestions?
This is “NomorePTSD.” My blog post, LETTER TO LOVEFRAUD: Escaping my mother, the sociopath, appeared on Lovefraud in June of 2013. I talked about my healing from flashbacks that were a result of my childhood and beginning adulthood relationship with my mother, a sociopath who stalked me for 18 years, motivated largely by envy. We are doing total No Contact, and have essentially erased ourselves from the map of her world.
Now I have a bit of a dilemma with privacy. My husband and I moved to a new place, bought our home in a LLC and our cars are in a different LLC so we can’t be tracked. We are off Facebook. Our PO Box is quite a drive from our actual house, and we go by nicknames.
The issue I am wrestling with right now is what to do with my children (my oldest is 5, my next is 3 and I have an infant an am pregnant with another baby) in terms of privacy. Public school will not offer any sense of security due to the lack of privacy, and the fact that little kids have all sorts of cell phones and it’s a total fad to post everything online immediately. I can’t have my children being posted online by their clueless peers.
I also don’t want to raise neurotic and fearful children, so I am leaning towards home school. But I don’t know how to do this without giving out our personal information. Do you have any books, or people who you know that might have traveled this road before?
Annie, Good for you! Good for you for researching and moving into understanding the darkness of female stalkers so that you could deal with it with your eyes open. People can be SUCH sheep: don’t look, don’t think, bleet in a herd while not comprehending we are being slaughtered(hmmm, onejoy has some unexplored anger to deal with, too…).
I needed to learn as much as I could about my spath’s methods and history, and internet security so that I could feel safe. That sometimes looked like an unwillingness or a driven inability (aka addiction – and it was at times) to be ‘no contact’. But everything I did helped me to understand that what she did wasn’t personal (I was within her ‘pool’, but she used the same tactics and strategies over and over); that she wasn’t going to be physically dangerous to me; that if I confronted her openly she would work to ruin my life; and that the measures I took to protect myself in the cyber world were important.
I have a public work life and am easy to find online. I have scrubbed all private info from the web, but my professional life is out there for all to see. The first time i put something online post spath , I shook. Every time I do something new and it shows up online, I wonder…
but I know she would never haul her lazy ass anywhere near me physically. (I am also confident that I would deal with the situation in a way that i could live with if she did) I am not playing anymore and so no longer meet her criteria for victimization.
But if she does still stalk me, it is only online and silently. it’s completely different than people who stalk physically, or who seek to harm. I have lived through that in my past. I know how terrifying it is. Fortunately that person’s criminality fit within the penal code and the cops were very helpful. I googled him 2 years ago and he was still in trouble with the law – same shit over and over from the tone of the judges’ comments. I googled him this year, and he is dead. Kinda hard to wrap my mind around. He hasn’t been a threat to me for decades, I moved far away. But there is something odd about the finality of the closing of the door on that chapter of my life – somehow it has let the pain of the experience rise up again.
Why all this googling? When i realized what the spath was and a great deal of my narcy family, I started to wonder about some of the other people i had known in my lifetime. The bad ones. After I got over the shock and awe of the spath, I wanted to know more about those other bad people and how I have been prey, so started to research. They are all still bad.
I am less likely to be prey – but more likely to not give people a chance; and to both be tactically offensive when dealing with people who have the fainest whiff of ‘disorderedness’about them, and to offend people because I don’t trust now. I don’t know how the world perceives me now, I don’t know what I am anymore. I have a lot of conflict and fear in my life because of my chemical sensitivities. I am constantly fighting for my right to not be exposed to the things that make me ill, erode my immune and other systems, and that are aging me rapidly. The spath and the MCS was a perfect storm.
I wouldn’t take back the lessons from the spath – I see the ugly in the world now. I would throw the lessons from the MCS back in the lake in a millisecond.
I have now blown off 33 minutes of my work morning – oops!
bye for now, and nice to see you post. you gave some great info and advice!
best,
onejoy
Yes, I feel that the important thing is to maintain NC with psychopaths…any way you can. It “clears the mind” of unwanted psychological influences (allowing victim to regain former self dignity) and negates further confrontations. Anytime one confronts the lies and threats they spew, one puts oneself in great danger. If one needs to interact with them, such as in child custody, ALWAYS have someone trustworthy with you. The victim is the last to realise what danger they might be in! It may make the victims seem cautious or apprehensive regarding future relationships but at least one is wiser. Good luck to all victims, you will all be in my prayers as we each seek recovery and dignity in our own special way.
Great phrase flicka: “clears the mind of unwanted psychological influences!”