UPDATED FOR 2024. Editor’s note: Lovefraud received the following email from a reader. She learned the hard way how important it is to listen to your inner voice.
When I met my husband, 14 years ago, I owned my own home, had two children, a great job and life was great. I wasn’t looking for a relationship, however, he would not take no for an answer until I went out with him (1st red flag). He presented himself as financially secure, a family man with a daughter, and who told me family is everything . He was very charming and giving to my children and I.
After 5 months of dating, he started telling me how much he loved me and wanted to marry me. I said that I wasn’t ready to jump into marriage again after being married for 12 years. However, he never let up. He kept saying that I had no idea what a great life we could have together and that all he wanted to do was make me happy and provide a wonderful life for myself and children. We married 7 months later and my life has never been the same.
He changed the very night of our marriage. It was like he flipped a switch — not even consummating our marriage on our wedding night. He immediately got the attitude of “I have you now.” He moved into my house with nothing but a suitcase of his clothes, never even asking me if I wanted anything from his house. He started not wanting to drive to pick up his daughter to see her. Told me he didn’t want to have to go to every family function of his family. He started becoming distant to my children as well.
That was just the beginning of a mountain of lies and deception I started to uncover 9 months into our marriage. I started noticing that any time I asked him a question about anything, he became angry and verbally abusive. When it became time to do our taxes the first year of our marriage, I asked him if he had his own accountant. He said, let’s use yours. So we did. We both sat in front of my accountant and my husband NEVER flinched when asked certain questions. He again was extremely charming, funny and articulate, seeming to be capable of a lot.
Well, a few months later, I received a letter in the mail from the IRS stating they were withholding our refund of $6,000 due to my husband NOT paying his taxes the previous 4 years!! His response to the letter was, “SO!” He used MY interest on my mortgage, my children, my everything as deductions because he NEVER paid his bills, was in serious debt and his house (which he owned with two other people) was going into foreclosure!! I found out it was all a facade. But yet, he kept telling me that I was making more of the situation, that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Oh no, it was much worse.
And here I am, 13 years later, finally getting a divorce because, you see, it is not that easy to get away from a person like this. I went from an outgoing, smart, independent woman to a woman with no self esteem, trust issues and just plain scared. I am ashamed to admit this and believe me, would never, never, have thought this could have happened to me! My story is so much worse and so many other things have happened, that this is just a glimpse into this nightmare. But it has and I am trying to move on with my life to get back to the person I once was.
Please don’t think this could never happen to you. When people show you who they are, BELIEVE them the first time (Oprah) and move on. Don’t ever believe it is in your head, as told to me. It is not. Listen to your inner voice. If it just doesn’t feel right, it is NOT. TRUST YOURSELF MORE THAN YOU TRUST ANYONE.
Learn more: Sociopathic Seduction — how you got hooked and why you stayed
Lovefraud originally posted this article on May 9, 2012.
3 steps to prevent a sociopath from taking advantage of your vulnerabilities
I am so sorry this happened to you. Good to hear you’re recovering.
I love the last lines of your essay:
“Listen to your inner voice. If it just doesn’t feel right, it is NOT. TRUST YOURSELF MORE THAN YOU TRUST ANYONE.”
Amen!!
I keep reading about how women have heard an inner voice warning and ignored if. I just read it in Sarah Tates book web of lies …..I too had this internal voice telling me to get out. It happened while I was riding in the car with him to pick up his children on Christmas. This weird feeling came over me …..in my head I was telling myself he can not be trusted…..get out of the car…..but I ignored it. I felt safer when his son was with us.
The next time i felt it was when I wax at his house in new years eve but didn’t have my car do I was stuck there. I even texted a friend to come and get me….she had been drinking and couldn’t drive so I stayed. Eventually the signs became clearer and I ended it! Although I was sti unsure when it ended, his ex girlfriend confirmed sooo many lies. She recently told me that the emotional abuse she experienced will be with her forever. I was so brainwashed from the idealization phase that I didn’t want to believe what was staring me in the face.
Good luck to you in your recovery!
I can say AMEN to this, the inner voice is so important. In my divorce I didn’t listen to this voice and I was blind sided….I DID NOT WANT TO BELIEVE that my husband did not love me. I was blinded by my love for him.
I DID listen (finally) to my inner voice when I was dating the P BF after my husband died…but I was pulled into wanting a relationship so badly, because I felt no one else would ever love me after my husband died…thank GOD I did listen that time.
I didn’t listen to my inner voice with my P son Patrick…for so long, but finally I realized if I didn’t run his Trojan Horse psychopath would kill me.
so sometimes I listened and sometimes I did not, but EVERY time I did not, it was a DISASTER of huge proportions.
That inner voice is our intuition warning us…just like the rabbit senses the fox, and if he listens, he stays alive, if he gets distracted he does not.
I watched a rabbit grazing once…and as my son and I approached, we could see his ears turning every which way, and the birds above us chirped out a warning to him, and we saw him become tense and move closer to a brush pile in which he could find safety from a fox or other predator. We stood still and the birds became quiet and the rabbit relaxed again…if we had been a fox, he might not have survived. so listen! LISTEN!!! LISTEN!!!
Oxy,
I wish I could articulate those feelings better….all I know is that I would find myself staring at him thinking to myself who is this man and why am I here! He told me his ex gf would stare at him too.
A couple of times when I watched and listened to him as he was speaking with me…..I swear I saw a glimpse of the devil in him…..evil eyes and this cackling laugh….definitely a moment when the mask was slipping
What I know now is that while he was pressuring me to leave my husband and when I did leave, he was still pursuing any chance he had to get with another woman. He had no intention if being exclusively with me. I finally started to SEE it!
I will never ignore my inner voice again!
Snowwhite when someone is pressuring you to do something that you know is wrong that inner voice is your conscience….and it is ALWAYS wrong to not listen to it. The psychopaths though are so slick sometimes that they make us believe that they are right and that we should go against our conscience, our moral compass.
They make black seem white and white seem black…but we need to listen to that still small voice and not tell it to shut up.
The psychopaths have no conscience because they have no moral compass so they have no trouble doing what they want to do no matter who it hurts. they can steal candy from a baby and not feel any guilt.
I think I ignored my inner voice because I was trained to do so as a child. So, I went thru life ignoring or doubting my voice within but eventually I finally realized that I allowed myself (consented) to be held captive by Ns & SPs. Then (Thank Gd) something happened & I woke up and then I finally began to listen to my voice within and to never ignore it again.
Clair, I think when parents teachers and leaders don’t allow us to feel our feelings,
“You shouldn’t feel that way”
We learn that our feelings don’t matter and shouldn’t matter….so we learn to quiet the inner voice and accept the reality bestowed on us by our “betters.”
Oxy
Thank you…I do see what you mean about th not having a moral compass. What scares me is that he eventually eroded mine. It was bit by bit…until right from wrong was blurred. He even made a comment to me that haunts me. He said that at first I was reluctant to even hug him and now I had sex with him x number of times….almost degrading me for doing it with him. But I thought we were making love….obviously he thought different.
I’m seeing a new counselor this week. I hope I’ll get more help from this one….the last one I saw doesnt really get what I went through and doesn’t want to talk about what happened and help me process it. She only wants me to focus on my marriage. I think before I can do that I need to work through what happened with me and the path, right??????
There was a man I thought I could fall in love with, but something held me back.
He wasn’t married, but he was my son’s therapist.
When my son was taken by my P sister, the therapist locked the door to his office, which he had never done before, and sat so close me on the couch that our thighs were almost touching. He had never done anything like that before. He had always sat on the other side of the room.
I rationalized that he was doing this because I was so upset over my son being taken and was offering me comfort. For a few brief seconds, I wondered if he was coming on to me, but I shook it off because it would have been so preposterous under the circumstances.
OMG-know what I realized just now as I wrote that? He never locked the door before or sat next to me because this was the first time we had ever been alone! My son had always been present the other times.
Anyway, he did it again the following week, locking the door and sitting very close to me.
I was a little flattered this time. We knew that my son was going to be returned to me. That crisis was over.
I decided that if the therapist did that a third time, I would lean over and offer him a kiss.
I was very vulnerable.
Not only did he do that, but he found the attorney who helped me get my son back. This therapist was rapidly turning in my personal hero.
Lots of other things happened, but that was as physical as it got.
For example, he emailed at all times of the day. He called my therapist while he was on vacation to talk about me. (I had given him permission to talk with her about how to help my son recover from his kidnapping.) He never brought up my son.
He made my son’s appointments personally rather than letting his receptionist handle them.
Even my therapist got into the act. She was pushing for us to become a couple. Her “spirit guides” told her that we were meant to be my son’s parental unit. I thought she was nuts so I ignored that.
This man kept calling my therapist. It became a standing joke, “Has he talked with you about my son yet?”
We had many things in common. We ended up attending the same church.
He offered to help me sign my son up for Sunday School.
We had a small conflict, so at 5:25 AM on the Sunday morning in question, he sent me an email saying not to let the conflict keep us from showing up at church. He’d meet us there. He was a no-show for the Sunday School sign-up, but later I saw him glaring down at me from the balcony after the church service.
I wanted to flip him the bird, but then I found myself switching into a stupid romantic mode calling him a poor man for suffering so much at my hands.
He would later twist this around into “some stalking behavior” on my part, except the moron didn’t realize that I had originally joined this church in April 1986, long before my son was even conceived.
Throughout all of this, my warning bells were going off.
I knew that my saying he was suffering because of me was way off. Why did I do that?
He blurred so many boundaries that my therapist and I nicknamed him, “The man for whom boundaries have no meaning.”
Something was very wrong. My therapist should have called a halt to it. I tried to. I told him that I was terminating him. She was furious that I did that and pushed very hard for me to return my son to him.
My warning bells were accentuated by the fact that I knew that I would have normally thrown myself into a mad, passionate love affair with such a kind and brilliant man. (It really didn’t help that I thought he was jaw-dropping gorgeous and reeked of breath-taking masculinity from the first day that we met.)
Eventually, I began sensing that this man was capable of hitting a woman. I don’t know where I got those ideas from. I still don’t have any real reasons for thinking that, but that’s what I felt. I had never picked up on that from any other men that I knew.
What finally did it for me was that one time when we were walking out together from a session, I instinctively held back and bowed my head to let him go by. That ticked him off. He angrily waved me to go first.
As soon as I realized what I did, I recognized my behavior. Those were “safety” actions that I would take to protect myself from my mother. I was protecting myself. I was expecting to get hit. If she went first, there would be no unseen blows coming from behind.
So, for all the insanity that I was going through because of my P sister and S mother, I had these two therapists to contend with as well.
Things ended very badly between me and my son’s therapist.
Before they ended, my son ran away for a night and ended up being hospitalized again for suicidal ideation. Then this therapist ended up abandoning my son while he was in an outpatient program.
The degree of betrayal almost killed me, literally.
I told the therapist that I came “this close” to committing suicide because I couldn’t imagine how horrible I must be that a therapist would abandon a child, who had been through so much and who was in such a vulnerable state, because of that child’s mother. I must have been a monster, and all the messages from my P sister and S mother must have been true.
My gut served me well. Despite all the pressures pushing me to having a relationship with this man, my warning bells told me to hold off, hold off, something is wrong here.
My son was devastated by the deep betrayal of his therapist (who told the outpatient program that he wasn’t that important to my son because he had only seen him off-and-on during the nine years that he had been his client.)
It was very hard on me when all this happened, but ultimately, I came out of it with my head held high and my son safe.
Snowwhite, you need to work on what YOU need to work on in counseling is my opinion, so changing counselors is what you need to do since YOU feel like you need to work on the spathy events.
You can’t work on your marriage til you get that out of your head is my opinion as well. I think maybe you and hubby might also see a counselor so you could work on them at the same time, but you need some private time with a counselor for the spathy episode I think. Just my opinion.