Editor’s note: How can one woman cope with cheating, abandonment, cruelty and worse? A Lovefraud reader has sent the following letter, and would appreciate your insight and advice.
I was the perfect victim for the man who has fathered two of my children, having just gotten out of a relationship with a previous sociopath (power and control was that guy’s motivation and he was cruel, vicious person behind closed doors). I was insecure, looking for a person with integrity and morals, and I still believed in the general goodness of mankind. The first sociopath hadn’t smashed my general outlook on life, though, and I was rising to the challenges I faced.
The second one has, though. He was the ultimate “Nice Guy” and relished his title. He proclaimed himself to be a “giver” and a “people-pleaser” and he certainly seemed that way. The way he told his story was that he had been victimized, as I had by my ex-hubby, by his ex-wife who was controlling and financially out-of-control. In fact, his life-story seemed to be eerily similar to mine and we seemed to have a lot in common. While I liked him as a friend, I wasn’t impressed by the fact that he had no actual skills, had been working as a food server since entering the workplace (he was in his mid-thirties when we met), didn’t know how to drive a standard vehicle and didn’t even have a driver’s licence, owned nothing of any value except what most college-age boys owned, had no savings, had horrible credit (his ex’s fault, of course) and seemed to have relatively little ambition to improving his lot in life. He never paid his bills on time and he had numerous debts that he ignored. I wasn’t interested in him as a potential partner.
Kind and warm
However, my family and friends loved him because of his nature. He was so kind and so warm to everybody that it had me wondering if maybe I was overlooking something more important than physical attraction and the usual prerequisites of success in a potential mate. He certainly wanted more from me than mere friendship. He worshipped the ground I walked on.
He pursued me for two whole years. It was a relentless pursuit with him shedding many tears at my refusal to become more than a friend. He was immensely kind to my very young son from my first relationship. Eventually I gave in and we were married within six months.
Children and change
We had two children within the two and a half year period we were married (he proclaimed he wanted children, as did I, and since I am no longer young, we needed them sooner as opposed later). Unfortunately, it was after the birth of our first child, a beautiful redheaded girl, that things changed. He was extremely displeased she was a redhead. He suddenly stopped being affectionate to me (previously, he practically smothered me to such a point that it was an annoyance). He made enough derogatory comments about the birthing process that I understood he was completely grossed out by it and me, too, by default. He didn’t want to be intimate more than once every couple of months so it was an absolute miracle our second child was conceived about nine months after the first was born. On the rare occasion we were intimate, it was over in less than thirty seconds. I felt like he had masturbated using my body, even before things with him ended. It was when I was six months pregnant that he began an affair with a co-worker who was married herself with three children of her own.
I didn’t know about the affair right away. All I know is that things got weird. He became hostile towards me and his stepson. He complained so much about all his “pressures” (passive-aggresively pointing to myself and particularly his stepson) that I recall at one point telling him it seemed like he hated his entire family. He suddenly wanted to sell our home (his name was not on the deed because of his abysmal credit rating so he didn’t qualify) and move closer to his workplace. I was three weeks away from giving birth when we moved. Yes, I was moving furniture and everything as well and even then he complained and grumbled the whole time. It was Christmas-time, too. He started making unsettling sexual comments about his then 18-month-old daughter.
With the sale of the house and the assets left over, he wanted to pay off all his sizable debts from before our marriage (student loans, personal debts to get out of his first marriage) rather than paying off debts we had accumulated jointly with home renovations of our first home (which were on my Line of Credit since he didn’t qualify for any). Fortunately, the bank forced my Line of Credit to be paid first before his as condition of getting a mortgage on the second house. Along the way, my good credit helped establish him enough that he was included on the deed for our second house. Not only that, because of the experience I shared with him in turning our basement into a self-contained suite (I taught him because I had been raised with a mother and father contractor), he was able to get a new job paying three times more as a Maintenance Supervisor at his job, instead of being a food server as before.
Name him Andrew
Three weeks after moving into the new home, our baby was born, a boy. We had long since settled on a name for him but a week before his birth, he wanted to change his name to Andrew. I didn’t know why and ultimately didn’t agree. Three weeks later I found out he was having an affair (and had been for the last six months), he moved out and never came back.
That was bad enough, realizing my life had changed dramatically. I was a single, unemployed mother of three children now. The father didn’t want to be bothered with them and had hardly any contact with them. He moved in with his mistress (apparently, her husband found out about two months before I did and as soon as I found out, she moved into an apartment by herself) within two weeks of our separation. I contacted her ex to find out what he knew and together we pieced together the ugly details, and we both concluded we’d chosen very poorly indeed. One of the things I found out about was that his mistress’s child’s name was Andrew. Imagine: he wanted to memorialize his affair by naming his newborn son after his mistress’s child. How sickening.
Refuses support
So my situation was this: I was on maternity leave from a job I couldn’t return to. (Maternity leave pays only 55% of my previous income of $24,000). His $40,000 income left with him. He refused to pay or share the mortgage on the house. He also refused to pay for any of our sizable family debt (his vehicle broke down four weeks before he left, requiring $5000 of repairs). He refused to pay child support consistently. He claimed he “couldn’t afford it” and also claimed to my face that he was “couch-surfing” (so he didn’t have to pay rent). He completely rejected any and all contact with his stepson, whom he’d known since a toddler five years before.
I wanted to keep the house because I could foster from it and also do daycare, keeping me at home with the kids and providing them with stability. At first he seemed to be cooperative although so lost in “new single guy who’s living it up” mode that he really wasn’t that interested in dealing with the loose ends (us) in general. I couldn’t figure out how he could have just dumped his whole entire life like it didn’t even exist, so easily and quickly. It was at this time I was able to get him to agree legally to a limited access schedule, though (by some miracle, in retrospect), and for that I’m eternally grateful.
So he went his way and I worked on going my own way. He was remarkably easy to get over and I did it quickly. I didn’t waste time “mourning” him. And that’s when the real troubles began. When I established “No Contact” (via phone, e-mail, and even going so far as to keeping myself hidden when he came for his limited access to the kids), he just went nuts.
Smear campaign
Suddenly, he refused to fairly negotiate any buyout of his share of the house with me. I had to accept his terms or he’d demand more. With two of his proposals (there were probably six), I did agree, and he STILL turned around, rescinded his previous demand and demanded more. Eventually he told me it benefited him to keep his name on the deed as long as possible. Later still, he told me he didn’t care how much it cost him, he just wanted me out of the house. He contacted my first ex-husband (the other sociopath) and started having pow-wows with him, which completely destroyed the fragile but stable co-parenting relationship I’d established with that guy and completely emotionally derailed my oldest son. He began broadcasting to everybody that I was having a “relationship” with his current girlfriend’s ex. He attempted to separate my own family and support network from me by outrageous bad-mouthing. He worked overtime to redeem himself and get back his “Nice Guy” reputation (which is hard to do considering he had an affair while his wife was pregnant) by accusing me of being cold, overbearing, controlling and unemotional. Lots of people bought this because he comes across as such a victim, and a warm one at that.
All that stuff, horrible as it is, is stuff I could have dealt with. The worst was yet to come.
Sexual molestation
Just days before Christmas last year, my young daughter – two and a half at the time – had a breakdown of sorts and revealed she’d been molested by her father. Since separation from her father, I’d noticed some red flags but nothing I could put my finger on. Certainly nothing I could specifically target her father on. But after a weekend visitation with her father just before Christmas, she had all the classic signs of abuse (although I didn’t know what they meant at the time): withholding bowel movements, complaining of stomach aches, obsessed with a boo-boo in her pee-pee, extremely emotional, sudden extreme nightmares. I didn’t know what to make of her behaviours and I was concerned. The coin dropped when she was told she was going back to visit her dad and she suddenly became terrified and screamed “poke me with a penis!” while viciously jabbing her finger into her crotch. She’s only a toddler but she’s been speaking clearly since she was ten months old (in short sentences, no less), so I had no doubt what she was saying.
I immediately took her to the doctor, visitation was temporarily suspended and the Child Protection Agency was called. When the Social Worker visited her that evening, she told him her dad poked her (and pointed at her crotch). In the weeks that followed, she told me a lot more (spontaneously and without me trying to pry the information from her): he touched her pee-pee in the bathroom, he came into her bedroom when she was sleeping and touched her, he “pee-pooped” on her, it came from his crotch (she pointed) and it was “gray-white” colored. Then she suddenly stopped talking. When I read the safety books to her (bought specifically because I feared she’d been abused and wanted to teach her how to protect herself) and got to the part about telling someone, she told me she couldn’t – and wouldn’t – tell anyone because “Daddy will get in trouble.” She’s had loads of sexual behaviours since then and I don’t know if it’s because she’s still being molested or what.
The investigation by the Agency stopped. The case was dropped for lack of evidence. She still gets to see her father as before. She, as a toddler, has to protect herself more than an older child would (because an older child has more credibility, I suppose). He accused me of “false allegations” and has set the groundwork for her to be disbelieved when (if) the time comes she can point a finger at him and be more “credible.” He has set the groundwork to continue to molest her and get away with it because I’m “vindictive that he had an affair and left” me.
This has almost destroyed me. I was on the edge of madness. I had to fight myself: homicide is wrong, but so is sending my daughter (who was such a bright, bubbly, cheerful person before this happened and isn’t like that anymore) to a predator. I forced the quick sale of the house (by refusing to pay any more for the mortgage), spent massive amounts of money seeking permission from the courts to move from the area (under the guise of going to school again) and have reduced the access to bi-weekly instead of twice weekly as it was before. I’m so hoping the tremendous distance between us becomes so onorous to him that he’ll get bored and go away. But she’s still at risk and I can’t do a damned thing about it.
How to go on?
And now it’s Christmas again. I feel no joy and have no reason to. What happened a year ago is back in my mind again, vivid as if it were yesterday. I’ve lost all faith in the goodness in humanity. I don’t trust anybody. I have no friends in this new place because I’m afraid of people. With every person I meet, my instant thought is, “They want something from me, that’s the only reason they’re talking to me.”
Honestly, I don’t know how to go on. My entire perspective on life has changed. I used to be optimistic, easy-going, giving people the benefit of the doubt. I was a caregiver, too (I’m getting out of that line of work – it seems to attract sociopaths like bees to a hive – my former ex-hubby was a nurse, of all things). How do you do it? How can you pick up the pieces and stop continuing to be victimized by these predators without becoming completely cynical and suspicious of everyone? How can you both protect yourself and open yourself up? How can you see through the mask? Nobody saw it coming with this guy I married. Nobody. How could I possibly expect to see it again when I was on high alert already from my experience with the first sociopath?
BEVERLY contributes the following:
What a truly horrible experience. You have to watch your back when you are vulnerable, that’s when they get you again. For me, what I realised is that you cannot ignore the proof of how they live, you must not listen to their words, you must make a judgement on what you see. If they live in squalid conditions and have no money, as mine did, then that is the proof. You must believe what you see. They cleverly talk you out of what you see. You must believe what you see and take immediate action and get out. I saw, but I didnt act on it, that was my mistake, and the more I didnt act, the more he thought I was weak and mouldeable. I feel so sorry for what you have suffered.
I, too feel so badly for you and your plight. It’s awful to go through these kinds of situations and all you have is circumstantial evidence, but you know in your knower it’s all true, but no one will believe you, because they don’t see scars or blood. To be with someone who takes sadistic glee out of breaking a woman then turning it around and making it look like you are the sicko.
There was a movie many years ago called, Gaslight, and it shows just what some people will do to another’s mind. They mess with your mind to the point where you start questioning your own actions. Because of the double standards in my life, I became rather obsessive compulsive over many things. I knew there had to be something so wrong with me, even though there was no evidence to prove it. It was all about what couldn’t be seen. The subtle eroding of our self esteem and worth, that we begin to doubt if we are human and are doing this life thing all wrong. No wonder people who get involved in cults sometime never come back.
For me, I’m actually scared to give myself to anyone anymore. I will most likely go to my grave a married old maid. If our boundaries our shaky, we end up losing ourselves in a man and they end up trying to own us and we are helpless to resist. It really is important for a woman to have her own source of income and be as independent as possible. I’m not a man hater, but the men in our society, and women too, just don’t understand what their rightful place in society is and they don’t know how to do the man/woman part. You read about the personality disordered, arrested development, commitment phobes, etc. Then they mask themselves to appear human until they get you sucked in, and you can’t find your way out of the maze.
My heart sure goes out to you and your children. Best of luck, for what little consolation that brings.
To the Author,
I have a little experience with Child Protective Services because I used to be a Supervising Social Worker. I think you should demand that your ex husband have supervised visits. I don’t know how you would set that up because all the children I know that have that have been removed from their parents and are in Foster Care. However, I am in the process of getting hired to do Supervised Visits for the YWCA and as far as I understand, all those families are in Family Court with one parent retaining guardianship and the other being required to have visits supervised due to issues like Domestic Violence.
In the past, I have had to do supervise visits for children that have been sexually abused and one can always pick up that something isn’t right. If your child is acting out sexualized behavior, plus the things she told you, I think that should be enough for a court to demand that visits be supervised.
Honestly, I am totally disgusted that something like that happened to your child. The perpetrator should be in JAIL. Get a lawyer. That child should not be subjected to visitation with a molester. This is so damaging for her.
I will check with a friend of mine that has WAY MORE experience than me and I will post what she says to do in the next couple of days. I would call her right now but I am sure she is asleep.
Also, I know a lot of the kids that I worked with were in Foster Homes for “failure to protect.” It sounds to me like you feel positive that your child was molested. You need to stop the visits or it might come back on you as “failure to protect.” I hope I am not scaring you or giving you wrong advice.. like I said, I don’t have as much experience as my friend. I have about 10 months and she has about 10 years.
I wish you the best…. Aloha
Pitanga, I dont want to prempt what the Dr is going to say. But even if this man behaved perfectly for 7 years and he is an ordinary guy, he has cheated on you, he has betrayed you and abused your trust. He is using all his tricks to keep you as his target, one of which is to manipulate other people into thinking you are the bad one. You can never trust him anyway, after what he has done. Dont believe him – believe yourself.
Thanks for all your support. It means so much to me.
Alohatraveler, I have already been through the Child Protection Services. They said there wasn’t enough “proof” (even though she told the Social Worker her father “pokes” her while jabbing at her crotch). I have documented everything she has said and submitted it to the Child Protection Agency as she says it (she just told me the other night, when we were reading a book together about safe touches, that her Daddy doesn’t do that anymore – but he used to. I didn’t bring it up, she did).
When I applied to Court for permission to move out of the area over the summer (300km away – wish I could have moved to the other side of the world, frankly), this issue did come up. My lawyer advised I not bring it up myself because judges have a pre-conceived idea that women falsely accuse their ex’s all the time about molesting their children to take the kids away, even though recent extensive and legitimate studies have proven that’s not true.
Regardless, HIS lawyer brought it up in the context that I was smearing him and trying to take his children away from him. Not surprisingly, the judge ruled that I was “falsely accusing” him of molestation, even though he heard NO evidence from me (not even a peep).
I was still given permission to move because of the financial situation I was in (having lost the house and having no supportive career and the area that I was in was very affluent and completely unaffordable to me now) and I guess that was a blessing. But at this point I doubt I can demand supervised access although I definitely think that should happen.
There just isn’t any support for my daughter for this (other than counselling after the damage has been done). I was actually told by the Social Worker that unless I have “proof”, nobody’s going to do anything because HIS rights as a parent matter more than her safety.
So, even though she is a pre-schooler (and when this happened she was a toddler), who isn’t old enough to be “coached”, the onus is on her to protect herself. If she were ten years old, more could be done (she’d have more credibility). It’s absolutely wrong that the younger they are, the more vulnerable they are, but for the young ones there is even less help and the job of protecting these babies lies squarly on their own tiny shoulders.
The law is warped in other ways, too. My ex refused to negotiate about dividing the property, demanding a lion’s share of the assets and basically using the fact that I was vulnerable financially without that house (because I planned to use it as my means of income through fostering since my previous job wouldn’t have paid enough to support me and three children) as extortion. In order to support myself now, I’m having to switch careers, go to school and get a massive student loan to survive.
By our separation, he has increased his net worth by two thirds (his new career thanks to me) whereas I will be $30,000 in debt with student loans when I graduate so I can have a job that pays the same as what he’s already earning.
But the law won’t look at the fact that he deliberately caused me financial harm by refusing to negotiate because “it benefits him to keep his name on the deed as long as possible.” It won’t even look at the fact that he made NO payments to the mortgage after three months of living in the home. It will ONLY look at the fact that his name is on the deed and he’s entitled to half of it. There may be a slight reapportionment in my favour but he’ll be getting WAY more than ethically he is entitled to.
I have decided that I will never get remarried. Even if, on the remote chance I meet someone I “think” is decent (and decent in every way – financially, credit rating, etc because I guess those are clues, in retrospect), if I decide to live with him, he will be paying “rent” and I will never, ever, ever have him on the deed of my future home, if I can afford to ever buy one again. I will never mix my finances with another person again.
Despite everything, I am determined to rise above it and be successful on my own terms so neither of my sociopathic ex’s won’t have any power over me financially.
And while that may sound strong and assertive, it doesn’t change the fact that emotionally I’m broken. My daughter had such an incredibly beautiful spirit before she was molested. Strangers in stores or wherever would comment all the time about her bubbly, happy personality. That’s all changed. And I’ve changed with her. I’ve lost Faith (ironically, that is my daughter’s name, too). I need help getting it back.
It is so despicable that a man could do what your husband did to his child. He needs to be castrated and never be able to do to anyone what he did. When someone takes away another’s right to say no, they deny them the right to life. To exploit another and to prey on such precious innocence, is the lowest side of evil. Once that innocence is gone, a hard shell is created and the sweetness is gone. But with time and lots of prayer for God’s healing, the sun can shine again. You can’t be expected to just get over it. There’s a process to go through and the mind has to heal. The body can forget but the heart and mind can’t. That takes time and distance.
I was a grown up woman, who had gone through verbal, emotional and mental abuse and I’m finding now that even what I thought was a normal sex life, was abuse at times. Then after being so broken from all the years of that kind of living, to come out in the world to work, feeling like I had no worth of any kind. In that process I met a man who noticed me. He was so handsome and he saw me. He made me feel like a woman and if he thought that, then I must be. I was so terribly naive and unlearned in a lot of ways where men are concerned. But in my innocence, I told this man I was starting to feel something for him, that I shouldn’t and I didn’t want to ruin a friendship that I thought we had. I said I was having feelings of desire for him. Instead of talking about it with me and help me understand the logistics of it, he taunted me and taunted me, and kept asking me what I wanted to do with him. He was doing everything he could to turn me on to take care of him. He went so far as to say that friends have sex and I said no, not if they wanted to stay friends. We didn’t have sex, but he found out that he could turn me on, and instead of apologizing for what he did, he used it against me. I was so dumb and naive, that I couldn’t understand. I was very child like at that time. I had no experience and he exploited that. He used what might have been called a sexual attraction, to get money out of me. It was like he was using that as bait, and he knew I wasn’t going to have some cheap affair. But he took that little moment in time and built a mountain out of it and really did a number on me. I was so blinded by my own despair of my wreaked marriage and other problems, that I didn’t see what he was doing. While I thought he was waiting for me to get the rest of my life in order and just waiting for me, he was out doing other women. What a fool I was. The experts call what he did, emotional rape. He raped my emotions and mind and used it all against me.
Hopefully in time, your precious one will be able to forget what the monster did to her. It should fade in time, as long as he has quit doing it, because little minds don’t hold on to things like we do. But with me, this man did such a number on my mind and emotions that it took me many years to overcome. He used sex as the proverbial carrot. He didn’t want me but he wanted me to want him and he exploited my innocence. I wish I could forget.
I’m with you too about getting remarried. I can’t ever see myself getting into that bind again and sharing a mortgage. I want my own place with just my name on it. That way I don’t have to share anything. It will be my haven.
I do pray for your daughter that her happy spirit will once again emerge and she will forget and you too will find peace with this awful occurence.
We did nothing wrong, yes we were naive, but why should we have known if we are kind and not manipulative. As one half of a ‘partnership’, we played decently, we loved the other, we gave, we were kind – we did nothing wrong. We know now, it was the other that was the fault in this dance. We thought we were in the same dance, but they were dancing to a different tune, and because they had danced this before, they knew how to dance two different tunes at the same time. But somewhere deep inside us, we knew the rhythmn was wrong, things were not right (red flags) and if there is a next time – we will be much more alert and we will be more cautious whom we invite to ‘dance’ with us. Our filters will be sharper, we will listen to our bodies and intuition like never before. We will know that if someone leaves us feeling good, then feeling bad, exhausted and drained, then they are setting us up to drain us of something – and will remove ourselves. This is not only true of romance but of all relationships. We have an emotional manipulator – a woman – at work, but we are all wary of her and we are all refusing to dance to her tune. The filters we are learning to protect ourselves from deceitful energy will be much stronger and sharper.
Some of us are saying ‘I dont know how I will trust again’, I will never marry again, that is a decision some may take to keep themselves safe. If that is what we have to do to keep ourselves safe from future predators, but why should we limit our lives in the shadow of their damage. For me, I want to date again, but I shall be much more wily next time. The test of course will be distinguishing between those who are genuinely nice and the manipulators, without sabotaging the displays of affection (and receiving genuine love) with the echo of mistrust set up by our abusers.
Some of us have had to learn from scratch, because even our parents and family could not love us unconditionally, and because of that, we did not have the template to align ourselves with. We have had to suffer and learn some hard lessons because of it. In Buddhist thinking, we want things to be nice to be even and not to have pain in our lives – we reject unease, we think our lives should be different. Some of us learn that we have to develop the courage and wisdom to hang loose whatever the climate, not to get too attached to good feelings or bad ones. If someone buys me a gift, I am appreciative but I do not attach to the thought. I always see myself as the captain of my boat, sometimes the sea is calm, sometimes not. We are not alone on the ocean, we have God behind us also.
People with a spiritual take on life, and why we get hooked into particular relationships, may be interested in the information posted on http://www.famousrabbis.com
Well jofary,
I suspect you are correct. That is so sad.
I guess the best you can do is to teach her what to do if something like that ever happens again… God forbid. I feel so sad for that little girl but she sounds like a strong spirit.
I wonder if there is a way for you to have your child visit at a relatives house like an Aunt or Grandma. I bet these solutions are lame. I mean a sociopath often has a lot of people duped or “under the spell” as I used to say.
I don’t understand the “failure to protect” thing because we had kids in the system because they were being molested and the Mother knew about it and did not stop it (hard to believe, I am sure).
It sounds like you are doing all you can. Document and report. If all else fails, open a new credit card, charge a couple tickets to Mexico and get the heck out of here!
After what you have been through, I think it sounds very wise not to want to be finacially entwined with anyone.
Best wishes for you are your little angel.
Aloha… E.R.
Are you keeping a journal? It helps later when you need dates and situations described. Seems like you are a good listener for your daughter, that is great!
When the perp knows that you know everything he did, they trip over themselves to “prove” you wrong. Then they make mistakes and do themselves in.
It will come out all right.