Editor’s note: The following story was submitted by a reader who we’ll call Mandy. Mandy is 15 years old and dated a sociopathic guy, who was two years older, for over a year. Notice how similar the sociopath’s behaviors are to what many of us adults experienced—an indication that this manipulative behavior is instinctual in sociopaths.
A person cannot be diagnosed a sociopath until the age of 18, but can start showing symptoms at a young age. He was 15 and I was only 13. We lived in two separate towns. We met on the computer off of an Internet website called Facebook and then started talking all the time on phone.
I was a perfect victim. I had no self-esteem when I was younger because of verbal abuse I had faced from classmates. I felt alone and just wanted to have a boyfriend by my side. We were constantly flirting on the phone, but I didn’t want this to be a cyber relationship. He seemed charming and sweet. Every time time I would ask him to hang out he would tell me that there was no one to drive him. His sister couldn’t and his mother would leave him home all day by himself and how alone he felt. So I had asked him, “What about your dad?” He said, “I never met my dad before.” It’s like he would make me feel guilty for asking him.
He started to say “I love you”
Weeks were going by, but the more time that passed, the more we were acting like a couple. He even started to say, “I love you.” I couldn’t handle this relationship because we never have even met! So when I finally decided to tell him we should end this, he told me he would kill himself and that he had written a suicide note. I couldn’t let go after he told me this. Promising me that he would he see me soon.
A few weeks later he started mentioning ex-girlfriend who he said he dated for three years. When I asked to speak to her, he gave me her screen name. I just wanted to speak to her to see if everything he told me added up. I ended up finding the ex-girlfriend on Facebook, which is when I found out from her that he was lying. He lied about never meeting his dad, and they didn’t date for three years, only two months, and that he made up a fake screen name. Also telling me he wanted her back. When the three of us were on the phone confronting him he said that he picked me over her and that he would never lie to me again.
$85 taxi ride
About a month later, with still not seeing each other, he told me to call his mother so we can see each other. When I had asked her she told me, “I don’t mean to be a bitch of a mother, but right now is not a good time. He needs to get his priorities straight.” From her finding out that we were talking, she quickly put a end to it by telling him to stop. But a couple of months later we started talking again. Sitting home sick on March 10th, he wanted me to come to his school to see him. I took a taxi, which cost me $85 for the whole trip with only my money. He was very nice, sweet, and funny and even introduced me to his friends. We finally met after four months, but I had to make the effort.
I started to notice that he was never going out with friends, and every time I would go out he would be mad because I wasn’t giving him attention. When I had asked him why he doesn’t really go out, he would tell me that because he used to be a bad kid his mom doesn’t allow him out very often because she cant trust him yet. Telling me that he changed and is trying to gain all of her trust back.
Yelling at me
So on a Friday night when I was going out, he had called me screaming to never call his number again. Telling me that I sent pictures to his friends. He kept yelling at me and screaming, how could I do such a thing? I kept telling him that I love him and that I didn’t do anything. As he heard me cry for hours to him; he wouldn’t stop yelling at me and told me to forget about him. I called back and said, “You know what? I know I didn’t do anything; just forget about it.” He said, “I love you I want to be with you,” like nothing even happened. I knew the story was all made up though. I didn’t want to let him go because I felt like he was the first real guy who actually liked me.
The next few weeks were fine, but now it was over five months, it started to come down to if this could actually work. The only way I can do this was if I received his mother’s approval of me. We started to argue about the whole thing because he wasn’t sure if he was going to go through with it. He said, “You would get a boyfriend and then leave me. You wouldn’t be able to say I love you anymore. Once you have a boyfriend, you would eventually stop calling me.”
Sexual acts
Basically from here to September, the new school year, all we were doing was deciding to be friends, to being friends with benefits to trying to be together. Just a repeating pattern from month to month. Until one night when I returned from babysitting he had asked me, how were the kids? Asking me if I ever thought about doing anything sexual with them. He tried to get me to share stories of sexual things I have done with the children. I thought he was joking, and tried to brush it off. Then he started to ask me to have sexual contact with family members and then my dog. I would ask him, “Why do you try to talk about these things?” His answer was, “I do this because I know you like it.” I found this disgusting and weird. This continued for months and he wouldn’t stop.
In January he came to my house; he actually made half of the effort this time with paying and getting in a taxi for me. We had to sneak to do this though. He wanted me to have sex with him, but I had told him no. He forced himself on top of me holding me down trying to get me to have it, but I kept screaming to stop and he finally let go. And you would think I wouldn’t want to be with him, but I was in denial because I didn’t want to be alone and believed that he loved me.
He had a new girlfriend
A month later I wrote a letter to his mother that I am a good person and telling her that I want to be with her son. She turned me down and basically two weeks later he had a new girlfriend and told me he just wants to be friends with me. We will never be together and all we were doing was fighting. Along the way, though, he made up lies after lies and manipulated me into believing that we could be together. He promised me for over a year that once he will be able to drive he could see me, but that never happened. He made promises to me that never happened.
It took me three long months to get myself out of depression about the question, did this really happen? I found myself crying every day and needed to go to a social worker in school. My dad knew some of the story, because along the way I told him bits and pieces. My dad warned me though. I got hurt.
Traits of a sociopath
He has all the traits of a sociopath, which my social worker thought too.
Glibness and Superficial Charm, Manipulative and Conning, Pathological Lying, Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt, Shallow Emotions. When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion, it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.
Callousness/Lack of Empathy. Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them. Promiscuous Sexual Behavior, Infidelity, Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts
He showed all of that along the way. This went on for over a year. Now he has stopped talking me for good, but I still feel like he will come back. His new victim, or would you say girlfriend, is a new girl who was new to his town who just had moved on. Perfect target.
Broken heart
I had to sum the story up, but it was really more to that. There were a lot of tears and me crying over him for a year and a lot of fighting. I took a lot of verbal abuse from him. My life revolved around him, with me blowing off homework and studying to talk to him. Me trying to make the effort to be with him. I loved him and I put my everything into him because I convinced myself that he loved me.
It’s been seven months since he stopped talking to me, but I still think about him everyday. I am traumatized by him, and still have a broken heart. I did spend a lot of my money on him, but did it cause I believed the lies he told me, but he just used me to get to what he wanted. He wanted me to go along with his sick fantasies. He never cared about me, and never will.
Hi Mandy,
You are one awesome young lady! I am so glad you shared this story and I am sorry that you got hurt by this boy.
You said, “I didn’t want to be alone and I believed he loved me.” Every single writer here could say the same thing. When we are low, that is when we are most vulnerable. Sociopath’s can always detect a women/man that is hurting or has low esteem. Most of the readers here were in a vulnerable state for one reason or another when they met their Bad Man.
I am 40 years old… and I am working on my self esteem. I was in a very low place in my life, deep inside, when I met the Bad Man.
Anyway, I think your story could help a lot of young women. Where I live, there is a Domestic Violence Organization that offers a “Healthy Relationships” class for teen girls. You would be an amazing resource for other young women in a class like that. I’ll tell you why… because teen girls are more likely to listen to you than to us.
If you ever feel strong enough, ask your school Social Worker if she thinks you could do a workshop like that at your school. You could explain the traits, the manipulation and the things to look out for and the School Social Worker could be your advisor for the group. You could be an amazing peer advisor at your school for other teen girls. Sharing your experience and helping others is a huge part of healing. I should know.. I started my healing here at LoveFraud. I don’t write too often now, but if you dig around.. you will find my healing journey imbedded here.
Take your time to heal. It is very painful to be deceived in the way that you have.. and confusing.. to be treated this way by someone that says, “I love you.”
A good friend once told me, “Never go for the first fish that bites.” This is good advice when it comes to men. When you walk into a party, beware the man/boy that is the first to swoop in on you.
I am sending you a big hug now!
Thank you! I learned so much in general from this. Even to this day though I still cant believe this happend.
Mandy, this is another place where you have so much more power than the rest of us: That power is in the stage of life you are at, along with your peer group.
You are soon going to be making a decision on what you want to do with your life and so are your friends. If you are sufficiently inspired by what happened to you and by our stories, you might want to become a psychologist, criminal profiler, a victims advocate, a writer or a senator. Your friends may read the books and be inspired the same way.
The fact is, the world is always changing and it has to get better or else it will get worse (as if it wasn’t bad enough already) I’m not dumping all this on your shoulders, but the time you have on earth is likely greater than ours. The more people working toward fixing the sociopath problem, the more likely we will succeed. We have no choice, if we don’t we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.
I mean i have my life for guys and relationships but right now it just sucks that I gave my heart and my soul all my love to the person who LEAST deserved it. Is it weird that i feel like i dont have closure on this?
No, Mandy, it’s not weird. We all feel that way. I do.
It’s because there is no “script” for how we are supposed to proceed.
For instance when you get cancer or get hit by a car, there are hospitals. There are others who help you and others who are in the same boat. When someone dies (mom, dad, husband, sibling, pet, grandparents), there is a funeral, people wear black, send flowers and say “i’m sorry for your loss”. These are “scripts” we follow. They don’t really help your situation. The hospital may or may not help you regain your health, but at least we know that THE ENTIRE WORLD UNDERSTANDS YOUR PREDICAMENT and there is a (somewhat) predictable course of events which will follow.
But in our situation, NO ONE EVEN BELIEVES US!
All this is kept hidden in our society. Child molesters get away with it for that reason. No one WANTS to believe that such evil exists in our families, work and friends and in our clergy, our senators, our CEO’s. So we are stuck trying to figure out what the best “script” is for us, alone, by ourselves with only the people on LF. It gives a whole new meaning to the words “living in the shadows”.
That’s why I’m encouraging you to become part of the solution for change in our society. Be someone who contributes to the “script” of life after the sociopath.
No, it is not weird. It is normal. We’ve all been there and gone through that.
Our brains have trouble processing things that turn out to be the opposite of what we thought they were. If a loving family dog suddenly grabs you by the throat and almost kills you (RARE!!! Maybe a brain tumor let’s say!), you can bet that you would keep thinking about it, especially if you couldn’t quite understand what made the dog do that. And even after you do understand it, you would keep thinking about how you used to feel about the dog and then have to remind yourself what the dog is today, and your mind would keep going back and forth.
The dog (or boyfriend) can’t give you closure. Only you can give you closure.
I finally had to accept that the P/S is emotionally retarded, just like some people are mentally retarded, and right now we don’t know how to un-retard someone.
The trouble is emotionally retarded people can ACT normal in many situations and fake anything for a bit. But if you are in a supposed love relationship, after awhile you see who they really are, and it hurts.
The more you understand that what he did had NOTHING to do with you, NOTHING to do with anything you said, NOTHING to do with what you did or didn’t do, and that his explanations are LIES because he himself can’t see the truth about himself….then the sooner you will realize you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But unlike many of us, at least you were able to protect yourself physically and get out relatively fast !
After awhile you will realize all the things he did or said had NOTHING to do with you, but were just symptoms of his emotional retardation.
HE was NOT in a relationship. You WERE. You really cared. He never did. He can’t. He never will. With anyone.
My therapist had me visualize going across a bridge and meeting him in the middle to say a final goodbye. I realized I was finally accepting reality when I realized there was nothing I wanted to say on the bridge to him. My words would mean nothing. Just like explaining calculus to a mentally retarded person. They might listen and nod their head, but they really CANNOT get it. And I realized that anything he would say to me would be meaningless, because he LIES without even knowing he lies, he LIES when he knows he is telling lies, he distorts, he projects….his words mean NOTHING.
That is how I got closure. By realizing I saw no point to meeting him on the bridge, even if my imagination. I put him in a file drawer in my mind, all wrapped up in chains, and labeled it “The Past. Over”.
And, because you got out so soon, because you stood up for yourself physically, I don’t think you will get involved with one of these guys again.
Mandy… having no closure is very common. In fact, just when you feel resigned that you did the right thing, they will often say something to you that will cast doubt in your mind and then they will disappear. They want to leave you with feeling like this is al your fault.
I was thinking about my comment about doing a workshop or something. Maybe wait until you are a Senior. :o) I wouldn’t want you to become victim to all that teen trash talking that girls do. I work with teen girls and I keep wondering.. at what point do women become advocates for eachother? It might not be in highschool!
Anyway, this experience you had can feel very isolating. That is what LoveFraud is for. One stumbling block that many of have felt is wanting to feel understood by our friends or family. This is one of those things where my favorite saying fits: You don’t know that you don’t know!
People just can’t really fathom how damaging this kind of manipulation is to ones innner being. To be led down a false road to phoney Love… well it is quite undoing! The thing is, I think this kind of stuff does happen to young women more that we like to think. I have noticed that some of our first loves are often quite dramatic. The thing is, a real love relationship won’t be a rollercoaster of pain and anquish.
Look for someone slow and steady. :o)
I know women my own age who still don’t feel in love unless there is a big dramatic element to the relationship.
Good luck sweet one. You have learned such a powerful lesson at a very young age. At your age, this will help you in life more than it will hurt you given some time to heal.
Does anyone agree?
thank you for that well i deffinatly agree. So basically the s/p will never return back.
Skylar and JustAboutHealed and Mandy.. :O)
I love your advice to Mandy. I might even save these for my files… yep.. I am doing that LoveFraud Gems. There is so much here that is beyond amazing when it comes to support. Thank God for this site. Thank you Donna for this site!!!!!!!!!
Mandy, for me, the closure, and the final word, was understanding this nightmare just the way that JustAboutHealed said… to understand that this is a disorder person and that they have no understanding of your feelings.
Here’s the hard part… the sweetest words… are the disorder… the hate words.. are the disorder… All of it is the disorder. So the things that made you feel love… were fake and phoney. I know that hurt.
The Bad Man often brought me elaborate leis after an episode of his anger. Looking back now.. they mean nothing. Neither do his passionate words and promisses.
There is a great essay called “Onions and Scrambled Eggs” in the book “Tears and Healing, the journey to light after an abusive relationship.” I think this book is for sale on this site. This book was my starting point toward healing. It was the first thing I found before I found LoveFraud.
Anyway, “Onions and Scrambled Eggs” is about the notion that the good and the bad are all mixed together and can not be separated out. In the early stages of our healing, we often believe that the good part is.. who the Bad Man really is… and the bad part is just his wounds or something that can be healed. But by definition, disordered people are a package deal. You will not be able to get one without the other.
And like I was trying to say… the good part.. the part that made me think I was falling on love with the man of my dreams… was just as much the disorder as his rages and abuse.
And the flowers.. the beautiful leis, that he placed around my shoulders… it’s just like trying to put pretty make up over a black eye. The flowers became a symbol over time that meant to me… I have just suffered an intense cycle of abuse.
Anyway it’s great to have you as part of the LF family. You won’t see me too much but I am lerking in the shadows, trying to keep up with the reading. I am glad I was able to stop by and hear your story. Keep reading and learning all the nuances of these disorders and you will never fall for this stuff again.
:o)
Aloha
The s/p almost always returns back….unless you have made it VERY clear that he is nothing to you, that you will not talk to him, that you will not see him. Otherwise, the next time he is at a low point, needing someone to massage his ego and make him think he is so irresistible that even a girl he tried to force himself on will take him back because he is just so hot (NOT!), he will be back. It may be 5 years from now. It may be tomorrow. It will still have nothing to do with you. Any girl who will let him hurt her over and over will do.
That’s why I say have a plan. KNOW that FOR SURE if he calls you, you won’t answer. Or if you do and hear his voice, you will hang up without saying a word. That you have already blocked him on fb and email. You want to AVOID having to know ANYTHING about his life anymore. He can win the lotto tomorrow and come to you with roses and you should KNOW that for SURE you would slam the door in his face.
The guy is poison. I know you can think of things still that you loved about him, but he will HURT YOU ON PURPOSE OVER AND OVER AND OVER if you ever let him back in your life for any reason.
So hope and pray that he got the message and that he won’t be back. Since I think he doesn’t go to your school, it should be easy to avoid knowing anything about him. Strive for that.
But if he does come round, SHUT HIM OUT before he can say a single word. No second chances. Actually, with him it would be more like no hundredth chance.
Somewhere on this site, you will see the phrase “Believe people the first time when they show you who they are”.
It is HARD to change. People have to WANT to change. They rarely do, really! Especially if they are at the bottom of the barrel to begin with. The personality disorder he has is not curable. Therapy would not help. It is hard to accept that we humans don’t know how to fix some problems. He is NOT fixable.
Celebrate if he never contacts you again. That means he got your message….that you will NOT put up with being treated like his yoyo, that attempted forceful sex or rape is NOT forgivable. That is one strike and you are OUT. If you never hear from him again it means he got it through his thick skull that you refuse to be treated like crap.