Last week Lovefraud posted an article that described one woman’s experience of romantic manipulation by a sociopath. Another reader responded with advice.
This woman had been married to a narcissist, which in many ways is similar to a sociopath. Once she divorced him and started dating again, she relied on a list of red flags. “If I saw even ONE flag, the guy was OUT of my life, period,” she says. Here is her list.
Red flags
1) Needing to be around you as much as possible and knowing where you are at all times.
2) Refusing to have any meaningful social life, even with his own family.
3) Telling you what to wear and advising what is “appropriate clothing” for you.
4) Requesting that you spend all your free time with him and NONE with friends. (In the beginning, you can see friends on a limited basis, but he has to be there.)
5) Absolutely NO male friends or hugging any male.
6) Dictating what you look like, i.e., you should wear glasses instead of contact lenses, less makeup, less jewelry, etc.
7) No more going to the gym, men might look at you there while exercising.
8 ) Outright anger when you join a church or any other “institution.” The REAL issue is…he is afraid a priest or other “authority” will tell you what to do and “control” you.
9) Encouraging you to engage in unhealthy habits like not losing weight. They use these “bad habits” later to criticize you.
10) You cannot be “too friendly.” People might get the “wrong idea,” especially MEN.
11) You have the feeling of walking on eggshells, waiting for a blow-up if you say the wrong thing or say the right thing in a way he does not like.
12) You know he thinks he is smarter and better than others by his almost constant criticism of others…words like “idiot” and “slow learner” are a common part of his everyday language as he discusses others.
13) He loves the thrill of a good “fight” with nearly anyone, but when he perceives himself as the loser, he is a very poor one and there are always rationalizations for WHY he lost and they have nothing to do with HIM, of course.
14) He acts like he cares what you think, gives lip service to being “liberal” and open minded but his actions are the opposite.
15) He thinks absolutely NOTHING of lying and will take advantage of anyone at anytime if it furthers his goals.
16) You have never met anyone like him”¦he does things that no one else does…his behavior is simply outrageous to others and they shake their heads and say what GALL!
17) The rules do NOT EVER apply to him…he is above them.
18) He resents, on many levels, having to care for his children unless a woman is around to take on most of the “burden.”
19) He often “forgets” what he is supposed to do for his children (especially when it involves anything to do with money).
20) He says things that simply make NO sense and you, as a rational, logical person, just cannot quite figure it out.
21) He shows up with no notice at your job or home (no common sense of courtesy).
22) When he thinks he is being rejected, he calls, emails, comes to your home or job obsessively and often actually stalks.
23) Early in the relationship you are his “whole world” and he does not want to spend any time with anyone but you.
24) He seldom thanks anyone for anything.
25) These men are VERY adept at fooling others”¦everyone thinks they are just great and love you so much”¦BEWARE!
By the way, the woman who compiled—and applied—this list of red flags has healed and met a wonderful man who is now her fiancé.
yes.. yes.. mine was always stating that he is the flexible one in the family.. first, we were not a family and second, of course, he is a chameleon to fit in wherever it is that he needs to fit to survive…one woman to the next, one state to the next, one company to the next as he does his consulting work..ripping off people…
nothing about him has roots or is grounded.. he is looking to attach … and have that grounding but he has little to offer…he is used to chaos, trauma, stress drama.. we all have some in our lives and when I have it I react, get past it and even out.. he rarely gets flustered… except about things like if I didn’t respond You’re welcome to his “thank you” after I DID HIS LAUNDRY!
Happy New Year to you too, Rosa.
I totally agree with what you say about our advantage. The education may seem expensive at the time, but afterward it’s an amazing thing to be able to understand more of what we’re seeing around us, and to know how easily other people’s problems can become ours, if we don’t have a clear sense of what we want and don’t want in our lives.
You sound great! I meant to tell you that when I saw another one of your posts. I hope your life is going well.
Kathy
I wonder what is the average recovery time….for us? and our children who have witnessed this and must be even more baffled than we are? how do we explain it ? to them…even though my son has seen through it … mom why are you buying Dad a present when its your birthday? how stupid was I ? and how come sometimes I feel like the S/P/N bad nasty meanness has rubbed off on us … I do not feel sick to my stomach anymore because he is no longer spewing the toxic fumes around us but… I do not know if its anger when I keep getting triggered and then I want revenge, and I want /wish that his “luck” would run out and he gets what he deserves…. how could they keep using and abusing others… is that why he always wanted us to move to new cities” fresh meat” new victims?….. My ex -S/P/N actually went to high school with Matt Damon … and I remember vividly.. something innocent happened when we were hanging out in Harvard sq. near Aubon Pan… he out of no where slaps me.. in front of Matt and I could not believe it? He also bragged about him and a friend breaking into his house as teenagers and stealing a radio from his house…..( Matt’s) before he got out of high- school 87 I think they become jealous because they claim to be so Intelligent my ex in the 93rd percentile but they have no ambitions to pursure a true occupation or goal… he must have felt threatened by something… of my walking up to him while talking to Matt.. I can not remember my actually provoking being slapped in public not just his friends but in public…
Happy New Year Kathleen!
I have to ask. How was the movie, “Sherlock Holmes”?
I thought I read that you went the other night?
Is is worth seeing, or shall I wait for the DVD?
I ((LOVE)) Robert Downey, Jr.
Style… mine had weird sleep pattern and also would tell me what adult goes to bed at 9 or 10 p.m. they kind that work asshole…..for me I had been hooked since I was 17 and then decided to have my baby at 27 of course I left when I got pregnant but he had to keep his hooks in me and came back then left 3 days before I had the baby always an excuse being an ex con they may be looking for him petty criminal that he was ….his grandiose fantasy that he was actually that important….it is co dependent… an addiction… we get sucked in and its hard to let go… we have poor boundaries but they do not have any and makes it harder for us, they critiicize, demean, humiliate, they always look for bigger and better never satisfied with what they have….ugggghhh
Spirit.. it was just in the beginning.. it was like he didn’t need much sleep and I needed my normal amount.. and he was inconsiderate of my needs… Yes, I know what a surprise…
Then later he slept long.. not as varied as bi-polar.. but definitely an energy change.. when I am consistant in my needs for an amount of sleep etc..
He wore me out in the beginning.. exhausted me.. and I told him so.. and he just kept on.. let’s do this and that.. and going back and forth and dealing with his mother’s needs.. and here I was wanting to rest after my move and focus on my house…
when he would leave I would dance around singing.. “I’m free! I’m free! This is my house! This is my bed!
It was like his energy just took my house, my property and my energy over.. and I let it for awhile… Crazy me!
For me, many of the items on the lists, esp. Oxy’s, were things I had normalized, since my mom would do the silent treatment, for example, for a week or longer….to a child! So I was programmed to minimize or discount red flags. Now I’m probably way over on hyper alert but that’s fine with me.
Spirit–HOW LONG is recover? As long as it takes, there is no calendar limit or fast way around it that I know of. It takes each of us different amounts of time. It isn’t like a “gestation” period that is fairly well set in months or days. Plus, I just thought too, just like a baby though, it can be aborted….unfinished, or die, so we must work hard to keep our healing going.
I view it as a life long JOURNEY, not a destination as well. But at some point, we will “give birth to a “new US” and that new baby us must be nurtured so that it continues to grow. I wrote an article about this analogy, so if you want to read it, search on LF for Ox Drover, and it will pull up my articles all together.
Rosa, you do sound wonderful and I am so glad for your progress and growth!
Dear JAH, yes we get sort of hyper about the flags, but my own choice has been to SEE ONE FLAG—out of the “inner circle of trust” with that person. If I must deal with them in RL then it is at a DISTANCE that is SAFE FOR ME! Literally not trusting them at all, not allowing them to weasle their way into my EMOTIONS so when they do crap on me, I am NOT SUPRISED OR HURT emotionally.
If the relationship has been a close one, I usually go NC with them pretty much and that helps. But I am not in the BUSINESS any more of dispensing “second chances”—I shut up shop on that one and WENT OUT OF THAT BUSINESS. If people don’t like that, tooo bad. Not my problem. My stock is gone. LOL
I didn’t need to look for red flags on this latest guy (that I found out after just a few days). He actually made a total ass of himself and showed he was a player–all by himself. It wasn’t until after the fact that I went back and looked for the red flags. Sure enough, they were there. He should have at least waited the month or so to “hook me in” before showing his true colors. This one was a little on the stupid side. He didn’t have the patience to wait to hook his latest victim. lol
Spirt40, you asked how long recovery is.
For me, it took more than a year to get really angry. Not resentful. Not hating myself. Not struggling to understand if I had a right to be angry or if I was just being childish or if I should have handled it differently. Getting to the point where I realized, in no uncertain terms,that I was dealing with someone who didn’t give a s**t about me, and who had used me without caring what happened to me for his own selfish purposes.
Uncapping the anger was complicated. I never felt entitled to get angry about anything. I always felt like I was supposed to understand everything and be “above it.” So once I finally took the lid off, there was a lot of backlogged stuff. And I loved being angry. It made me feel like I was living in my own body, and not giving up everything to make everyone else okay. I used to have conversations with my “spiritually evolved” friends about how important anger is. (Of course, they were horrified.) But I started teaching other perpetual victims how to be angry, and for a while I thought that was going to be my new life.
So it took maybe another year and half to get through that into facing my losses and grieving, and also starting to make decisions about how much anger I wanted to live with and learning how to stop giving energy to things that were just making me unhappy.
At that point, the recovery turned into something about me, not about him. It become more positive, more creative, more a matter of changing my life for the better, and using what I’d learned from the experience. I still had to deal with the occasional painful memory or face the fact that I’d lost a lot of money and other resources, and that required another round of trauma-processing. But I’d become good at it, knew the way it worked, and didn’t get hung up on the hard parts.
So for me, it was about three years before it turned into something positive. Maybe another year and a half before I felt pretty certain that I’d turned the disaster into a personal triumph, and was actually glad it happened. I know that sounds strange, but he was the catalyst for the greatest leap of personal growth in my life. It doesn’t change my opinion of him, but the whole experience turned out to be a good thing.