Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.
By OxDrover
In the Bible the story of Adam and Eve living in the Garden of Eden, in perfect paradise, is a story familiar to most children who have gone to Bible school at one point or another in their lives. If you take that same story, though, and look at it through adult eyes, you can see that there is a great moral to this tale, whether you believe it as a “creation” story or not.
Before the “fall,” Adam and Eve had only dealt with a loving God/Creator who had given them a wonderful place to live in peace and plenty. They were naked and innocent in this paradise on earth. They were given an occupation of “dressing the garden” and only given one warning that they must not disobey, and that was to not eat from the tree of the “Knowledge of Good and Evil,” for if they did not heed this warning, they would die.
The original psychopath, Satan, in the disguise of a serpent, like all villains shows up on the scene. We know about psychopaths and we know that Satan personified this personality disorder, because he saw someone who was happy and prosperous, but naïve, and he wanted to bring about their downfall. Not for any gain or motive we can perceive on his own part, but simply to have someone else believe his lies and suffer for that belief. He wanted to enjoy the downfall of someone else. That was his “reward” for telling the lies to Eve, to get Eve to disregard the warning she had received from God ”¦ just as our psychopaths lie to us to get us to not heed the instinctive intuitive warnings we get when we catch them in a lie, or something doesn’t feel right.
How did Satan accomplish his task? The story tells us that Satan was “more subtle than any beast of the field.” ”¦ ”and he said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?'” Satan knew this was not true, but he was setting her up with a conversation starter he knew she would respond to.
The woman said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said ”˜Ye shall not eat of it’”¦or ye shall surely die.”
The serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and she shall be as gods, knowing Good and Evil.” Here the psychopath, as they all do, tells Eve that the warning from God is for God’s benefit, because God wants to “keep the best stuff” for himself and that if she will just not heed the warning not to eat of the forbidden fruit, she will be equal with God.
Here Satan is creating a need in this woman, and holding the hope of accomplishing that need in Eve. Before Satan’s lie to her, Eve wasn’t unhappy, and she had no desires that weren’t met. She didn’t even desire to be “as gods,” but now she has started to desire something that Satan appears to be offering her.
How many times have our psychopaths held out to us a “prize” that we start to desire? A desire that they have created a fantasy of, and lied to us that they know the way for us to achieve this desire, our heart’s desire. Is it a perfect soul mate? A perfect love? A perfect marriage? A perfect business arrangement? A perfect child? The perfect restoration of something we have lost? What was the desire in you that the psychopath created with their lies?
“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat.”
“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.”
Adam and Eve immediately knew that they had been had. They knew they were naked, and they did now know the difference between Good and Evil. They knew that they had been tricked, that Satan had done them in completely, and that there was no going back to naiveté. You can’t UN-ring a bell.
While Adam and Eve tried to find a way to hide themselves from God and the consequences of their disobedience and naiveté, Satan skipped off on his merry way, having accomplished what he desired, the destruction of human kind. The taking away of the innocence of humanity. The bringing of death to the world.
However, though Satan brought evil into the world of man, humanity also received the knowledge that will protect us in that fall from grace. We have the knowledge of Good and Evil. We can choose our path.
The psychopaths in our lives who have attacked us because we didn’t have a proper knowledge of their evil intentions when they started to destroy us for their own purposes, their own selfish games, have given us the same “fruit” that Eve in her naiveté ate, the wisdom of the knowledge of Good and Evil.
While Eve in the Bible story paid a stiff price for her knowledge by being cast from paradise into the world, we also have paid a stiff price for this knowledge, some of us in terms of money and property, all of us in terms of pain and emotional devastation. Just as Eve must have berated herself for being so naïve and stupid for doing something she had been told not to, we berate ourselves for being so naïve and stupid in ignoring the warnings we also generally had all along. Why did we not heed the warnings, just as Eve did not heed God’s warning not to eat the fruit?
Just as Eve, after the fall, had to learn to live in the real world, the world that is not paradise, that contains evil people, selfish people, even her own son, Cain, who killed her other son, Abel, we as former victims of the psychopath have to learn to live in the real world and to distinguish what is good from what is evil. We have to learn from our experience with our own personal version of Satan, and our own version of our fall from grace, to know what is truly important in life. To use this hard-won knowledge of Good and Evil to make us stronger and better people.
We are no longer naïve people who don’t know about red flags of warnings of psychopaths. We are no longer willing to trust others indiscriminately or lightly as Eve trusted the lying words of her own Satan. We are no longer willing to fail to listen to the instinctive cries of our own intuition about danger.
We have knowledge that we have gotten the hard way, and hard-won knowledge is a lesson that will stick to us forever. It is up to us to use this life’s lesson in Psychopath 101 for our own and others’ benefits.
aloha….
LOL… why so “Shocked”?…..and thank you for the compliment…I’m waiting to see a picture of you..smiles…Actually, you should have seen me before the sociopath…I’m afraid she took some years off of my life…
I had always been a rather deep person, but the sociopathic thing took me into the depths of myself….. As Oxy pointed out, the trauma turned into a spiritual journey, I think that with me, all the ropes that had been keeping me up all my life, were cut when my wife died…. I was able to get out of that fetal position, start to thrive, only to meet a sociopath and once again, the ropes that I had re-attached myself to, were totally severed.. and I didn’t get up for a long time…
I had a lot of dissillusionment about life and God, but I did choose to go to God because the pain was so unbearable…. I needed healing of my soul.. and I needed something true to hold onto, after the total lie of the sociopath… As Donna and ML, has described here in the past, the road to healing isn’t a pretty one……but one has to go through it. these are some quotes that I have kept and would go to in those darker times.
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus
“The world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it. ~ Helen Keller
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” ~ Helen Keller
“”Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only for wallowing in.” ~ Kathrine Mansfield
“What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The best way out is always through.”
~ Robert Frost
Happyness is a choice , Not money , not things , and most importantly not a person! You Choose to be happy regardless of situations , events , and issues! LOVE JJ
Beautiful Ox, I loved it :O)
Southernman,
you WILL love again with the innocence of a child. You will always be that child, no matter how many days have passed. You just haven’t found the right person, or perhaps the timing is not right for you at the moment, but I believe in my heart that you WILL love again, as you did, but in time, to someone who will reciprocate and is deserving of your love :O)
Oxy Another great article! And thank you southernman for your favorite quotes I really like the one about regret. And the comment about never loving in such an innocent way again. I feel that way – sometime’s I feel cheated – maybe my ideal of love was ignorance and not innocence. But all the same I feel like I will never experience love the way I thought it would be. Did my experience with a sociopath rob me of my innocense or cure me of my ignorance? I remember Big Dude saying ‘this was his last chance at love’ why do we want that connection so bad? Is my ideal of love all wrong. I remember telling my x when I would leave for work that I would like to put him in my pocket and take him with me. Maybe this is part of the struggle, my ideal of love has always been wrong from the beginning, maybe I loved him too much, maybe I was too much for him. After I discovered his lie’s and cheating I turned into a lunatic trying to catch him at it – I should of stopped at the first lie but I put up with them for 3 years, he said he loved me and I was trying to prove to myself he didnt or couldnt or he wouldnt do what he was doing.
Southernman,
Wow. I can relate to your story. I don’t remember hearing about it before. I was with a man that I totally loved for 5 years but he decided I wasn’t the one. I fell on my face and didn’t get up for three years… then, I moved to Hawaii and almost instantly fell in love… with the Bad Man… and I didn’t get up for about three years… but I am BACK! I am totally back… almost.
It is true though, that love will be different now. Remember when you were a teenager and you just didn’t know about the world like you do now and so you felt invinceable? That’s how it is with these kind of experiences… we never imagined that someone could be so aweful and then they were and now we know.
Anyway, I loved your garden of Eden. I can’t believe something so beautiful exists. WOW! I imagine you can do lots of healing there… and it looks so southern… at least how I imagine it… since I haven’t been to the south. You have created a healing sanctuary.
I am moved by your myspace page and that you have dedicated it to the Father. It really is beautiful. I plan to spend more time there. I was having trouble with my computer the last time I visited and I don’t quite have the hang of the MySpace thing.. my “space” is a mere shell. I put it up so I could communicate with my sister who is younger and more hip the the whole social networking thing.
Have to run for now… anyway, it was great to put a face to your contributions. Now I will be able to imagine who I am reading. I have made up pictures of Oxy’s farm house n my head… I always imagine a swinging screen door like my Grandma used to have.
Me… Aloha
Thank you Aloha…you should have left your myspace url here , so I could find you and add you….you should also read my blogs.. they are very popular… I have come to learn that so many christians have come to faith as a result of trial or tribulation… and through their faith, the leaning into him, they are healed.. again, a slow process, that requires obedience, hard work and the constant renewing of one’s mind.
“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
Romans 12:2 NIV
Letgoletgod, thank you for your kind words and thoughts, but the total innocence is gone forever.. but.. it’s ok… the way I see it, the next time, for every once of innocence I place into love, there will be pound of discernment…. Actually, that is the smart way to love.
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
Proverbs 4:23 NIV
Dear Iwonder,
The Bible also says that a man SHOULD LOVE HIS WIFE AS HIMSELF….and obviously men who quote the “submissive” verses didn’t read the other one! LOL
That is the thing about people who twist scripture or any writing to justify their own ideas of how things should be.
The FBI just arrested a man named Tony Alamo who was a “minister” that developed a cult here in Arkansas 20+ years ago. His then wife, Susan, and he were partners in this “church” and she died and he claimed that he was going to raise her from the dead! Yea, right! As I remember it, they kept her in a glass coffin for years at the “church” but somehow Tony never managed to raise her from the dead. Now he is arrested for sexual misconduct with children in his cult—I think he said he had a vision from God that all these young girls at puberty should be “married” to old men in plural marriages. That and beatings administered to those in the cult who didn’t do as he said.
It still amazes me how many people fall for this kind of cult situation, and how twisted these psychopaths and child molesters can be in convincing their victims. How any religion can be twisted to promote mayhem and malice, hate and revenge is something I have a hard time getting my head around, yet my own mother twisted my view of God and Christianity to make it something ugly and hateful. If nothing else good came out of all this chaos, it was that my eyes were opened to a loving spirituality that I didn’t have before.
Throughout my life I have studied most of the great religions of the world and have taken good from all the writings. Yet, how many people have been killed, burned at the stake, etc. for their beliefs. In our world today we see the same thing, people dying for a twisted religion. Putting bombs on their bodies and blowing themselves and others up for “God?”
Yet, these misguided souls really believe that they are doing “God’s will” by killing themselves and others….egged on by twisted psychopaths who are out for power and control at any price—and someone else always pays the price. You notice that Osama bin Laden doesn’t strap a bomb on HIMSELF and throw his OWN life away in the “cause” but he gets others to do it for him.
Dear Ox Drover,
“You notice that Osama bin Laden doesn’t strap a bomb on HIMSELF and throw his OWN life away in the “cause” but he gets others to do it for him.”
That’s the most amazing thing about Ps, Ss, & Ns. They can get people to do just about anything. Droves of people can be bent to their will. Their social standing can be very high.
We should all be thankful that we have been made aware of the pitfalls the S, P & N represent.
The Bible does teach about Ss, Ns and Ps, and tells us how to cope. Unfortunately, most of us dealing with an S/P/N cannot gain the support of the church, or even “one or two others”, because S/P/Ns are so good at spin. That’s fine, ’cause if s/he is sexually immoral, greedy, an idolater, slanderer, drunkard or swindler, you must not associate with him/her. MUST NOT. I don’t think it gets clearer than that. Note by the way that we are talking about “anyone who calls himself a brother BUT…” If such a person isn’t an S/P/N, I don’t know who is. So NC isn’t something new, edgy or morally questionable that we should feel guilty and/or anxious about. We aren’t simply compensating for our own weakness when we practice NC. Paul invented it to deal with the age old problems S/P/Ns present.
1 Corinthians 5:11
But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.
Matthew 18:15-17
“If your brother sins against you,[a] go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
S/P/Ns seem to think of church as their playground, and Christians as their natural prey. We don’t have to be. We can do just fine if we study the Word and apply it to our lives.
Matthew 10:16
Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.
A favorite of mine ;^)