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
20 years, yeah, that is a really nasty story. My stomach has been upset about it all day. I am really nauseated between that story, and, I think, my own pain. It is strange how emotional pain translates into physical pain. I can’t get over it. I wish I knew how to get rid of it. I feel immobilized.
Athena
GIS,
I am sorry for what happened to you. Boundary violations everywhere. Totally inappropriate.
I have been renting and watching movies about spaths. I am probably up to 20 maybe 30 now, with 10 more movies I found today about spaths and I added them to my queue. I never saw it before my spath, and now, I see them everywhere. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but it’s true.
Somebody posted something on here earlier today that made me think.
I used to think that most people were good – basically, solidly good. Yes, they might have a little bit of badness in them, but that the “bad” only poked out occasionally, rarely, under strange circumstances.
It never dawned on me to that there were people who were FUNDAMENTALLY bad out there.
I just want to throw up that I was so blind, and I didn’t see it, and I got slimed. I am trying to run around and forget and be good and enjoy life but wow, the slime is suffocating and hurts.
Athena
Athena,
I was thinking, after posting the above, that during that time I knew absolutely nothing about psychopaths or sociopaths.
The worst I thought somebody might be was an alcoholic. This wasn’t alcoholism.
I had absolutely no clue what kind of monsters I was up against. They were spinning stories to everybody and anybody who would listen. They turned a lot of my family members against me. They were trying to get their hands on my house. They were telling people that I was going to end up a street person and that I was crazy. I was so alone.
My child, the one I battled cancer for during my pregnancy, was at risk of being killed. I was at my wits’ end.
Furthermore, I was constantly being asked, “These people are your family; can’t you learn to get along with them? Maybe you’re expecting too much from them?”
I was very lucky that I had all my Al-Anon tools and years of Al-Anon training (detachment, one day at a time, just for today, the Serenity Prayer) because they got me through it all. Al-Anon is how I survived.
HOWEVER, we suffered needlessly because everything was being reduced to, “What did you do to deserve this? Families don’t this to each other. The courts don’t award custody without good cause.”
I wasted so much energy. My son and I both suffered horribly.
I trusted the therapists because therapists are supposed to be people that clients can trust.
What we went through simply underscores the crying need to get this information out to the general public so people can take effective defenses and actions.
I just posted that I had a story that could pertain to the work survey. As I was writing it, it crossed my mind that people are going to think that I know a lot of Ps. Why is that so odd? There are so many of them out there.
Athena, you’re right. They’re everywhere.
yep.
I also think that certain people attract them more than others. They watch for people who react emotionally and easily. That’s how they feed.
They watch for people who care a lot, who respond, who are sensitive. That’s how they feed.
They watch for anyone who is good. Yes, they can see it on your face. When you have a trusting nature, they know that you are fundamentally a good person, that’s why you trust –because you assume others are like you. It gives you confidence in humanity and in yourself. They hate that. They really envy that.
There are other things they look for too, like the limp. They look for people who are unbalanced. Anyone who relies more on emotion than intellect, or vice versa, attracts their attention. If you tend to take more responsibility than is within your power, they love that too, so they can leave you holding the bag.
All we can do is be aware of them and their defective “values”. Then we can use them as an example of how not to be.
g1s,
your personal therapist was a total calculated whack quack. WTH? She was a sexual abuse specialist and yet she thought there were no issues about therapists dating their patients or clients (even if your son was the patient, as his parent you were a client). It’s a professional relationship where one has ‘power’ and the other does not (needs help, so under position). Sexual abuse is not about sex, but power! And her spirit guides told her? She was also a fortune teller?! WTH was HER degree in?
And per Sky’s point about how her spath would set up such therapists for his victims, I’m now bound to ask… how did you come to choose both of these therapists? By recomendation? And if so, who recommended them?
Darwinsmom,
AFAIK, my exspath never set up any therapists, but he intervened with cops, lawyers and pharmacists to get them to attack his victims.
It blows me away that he could convince people to do these things.
He wouldn’t choose them, he simply sought them out and convinced them of his victim’s guilt and deserving of being attacked. So for example, if he wanted to have Grace have problems with her therapist, he would show evidence that Grace had been lying or Grace has a hidden agenda.
I couldn’t believe how many men started to flirt openly with me when I joined the water association. I’m convinced he had spread the word that I was a porn star (I think he took a sex video of me when I was 25). But whatever the case, near the end of our relationshit, people started to act very very strangely.
Who knows what all he did! He could be very convincing because nobody could imagine that a sane person would lie like he does.
Darwinsmom,
My therapist had two Master’s degrees. At least that is what she told me at the time.
I sent a link about her to somebody the other day. I noted in that link, she was listed as having only one Master’s degree. Odd. If I had two Master’s degrees directly related to my field, I’d make sure that was included in my public online resume.
She told me that she started out to become a psychologist, but “something happened” (voice trails off…) I don’t think that “something” was a good thing.
I am so nice that I said, “Awww. I understand.” What did I understand? Was I about to start pressing the issue?
That’s why I hold her more responsible for what happened than I do my son’s therapist.
Yes, he messed up on a lot of levels and I wouldn’t want his karma (maybe it can speak to my therapist’s spirit guides LOL,) but she had a secret agenda and lied to both of us.
God only knows what she told my son’s therapist and what she failed to do to help me/us.
G1S,
I am nearly speechless. The sheer volume of lies, manipulations, and BAD people you had to simultaneously juggle is mind numbing.
I am SO sorry to hear it. I am so sorry you had to live it, and are now, sort of, reliving it.
I had such a wonderful and loving therapist, who had impeccable boundaries, that is really saddens me to hear these awful stories. I am not sure I would be here, were it not for my lovely therapist.
But just like all other professions, they harbor evil doers. I know spathy nurses, doctors, a fund-raiser for needy families, and woman who runs a women’s shelter….geez. And they are all, to a person, snakes.
G1S, I send you my mightiest wishes for love, peace, and contentment.
Slim
Sky,
I know you didn’t mean it as something that actually happened, but your response to G1s’s story was about getting the feeling it seemed like a set-up where someone had a hand in. And this is the growing feeling I’m starting to get about g1s’ therapists.
G1s
Your personal therapist definitely had a plan, but was it all by herself, or did it coincide a 3rd’s goals? The other therapist, if he had been innocent and actually did have feelings could and would have gone about it another way, not the creepy power lock the door way.
There was seed planting (well pushing) from your own therapist; there was seed planting of feelings from your son’s therapist. Both my ex-spath as that Peruvian guide were teases… They’d plant the seed of attraction, but hang around as available, without making the actual first move to kiss. I never kissed the Peruvian guide. But with the ex-spath I was eventually the one who pulled him by the shirt to me to kiss him. He chased me, but I was the one who had to voluntarily initiate the first kiss.
Allegorically it reminds me of the vampire myth… the vampire may want you as his or her victim, but cannot enter your house except by yoru own voluntarily invitation. That way they can then blame you for giving them access to your home. It’s the same thing with spaths imo who’re angling for a sexual victim.
So, she wasn’t a psychologist. Was she a psychiatrist (medical training)? Or what is her master about?
BTW it’s not that I have anything against spirit-guides. I don’t even look down on ‘fortune telling’… Yes, I’m an atheist, I’m science minded, but I read tarot cards, and have done so for people who requested it once in a while. And I’ve experienced certain things that would be explained by others as spirit-guides… I just have another atheist explanation for it, and yet the info that I became conscious of through it I regard as valuable and useful. But there’s just no way I’d ever condone psychological guidance therapy be mixed with the other. As for fortune-telling goes… it’s more like holding up a mirror for the questioner to make sense of, rather than “this is what is what you must do”. I’ve never known an honestly meaning fortune teller who’d tell the one with the question what to do exactly. It’s more like: these seem to be issues or opportunities, these are the possibilities, these are the blocks or the themes you need to work about…
So, imo she’s a wacko therapist AND a wacko fortune teller.
GIS,
if you had it all to do again, how would you do it differently?