Lovefraud recently heard from Janine in Florida. Here is what she wrote:
In May it will be two years since I realized my ex-husband was a sociopath and every day I deal with the psychological nightmare that he has given me. I try so hard not to think about the destruction he has done to me…but every day it is there. Destroyed period.
How can one put this behind them?? Yes I have moved on with my life but every day in my mind what he did to me is there and will be in my brain forever. I have been told to forgive him and I do in a way because I realize how sick he is but it is still there!
Taken, abused, used, destroyed as a woman, as a human being and of course him shoving everything down my throat. Defaming my character, slandering me and doing his best to destroy my life. That is the hardest part, the man I helped the most in my life to live his dreams became my nightmare…I will carry this with me until my dying day.
Sociopaths charm their way into our lives, destroy us, and then leave. They go on their merry ways, and we are left with emotional train wrecks. Anger, shock, betrayal, disbelief, disappointment, sadness, shame, fear, grief, hatred, rage—all adding up to incredible pain. What are we to do with it?
I believe we must allow ourselves to feel it.
Facing the Fire
In 1993, I attended a workshop given by John Lee, author of Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately. Lee talks about anger as a physical sensation that gets stuck in the body. Many of us walk around carrying decades of anger—childhood anger at our parents, anger from adolescent taunts, anger from previous husbands or wives. Unless we do something about it, the anger of the past stays there, affecting our present.
Anger builds into rage. Rage builds into numbness.
John Lee’s book offers techniques for dealing with our anger. Many of us try to intellectualize our anger away. This doesn’t work. Anger is a physical emotion that needs to be physically released. The idea is to do it without hurting other people or domestic animals. Lee suggests pounding pillows, twisting towels, stomping on the ground and breaking old cups and saucers into trash cans. We have to keep doing it until we experience a release.
To learn more on these ideas, read an interview with John Lee.
Experiencing the pain
When I finally learned that my ex-husband was a con man, that he had fathered a child with another woman during our marriage, that the $227,000 he took from me was gone, I had extreme anger—and all of those other negative emotions—adding up to incredible pain.
Luckily, I had employed John Lee’s techniques before—I tried them all, and found that punching pillows worked best for me. I also had a therapist who guided me in experiencing my pain. Because that is what needed to happen.
The pain had to come out, and the way to do it was physically. This meant punching pillows until I collapsed. It meant crying—deep, loud wails. It meant telling my ex-husband, emphatically, exactly how I felt—even though he wasn’t there to hear it.
Make no mistake, this is not pretty. It is best done in privacy, or with a skilled therapist. And it takes a long time, because there are layers and layers of pain—you dig one out, and another one surfaces.
But it works. I can honestly say that the pain is gone—not only the pain of the sociopath, but the pain I was carrying around beforehand that enabled me to fall for his lies.
I have recovered. I am happily remarried to a wonderful man. And I am peaceful.
I have faced my pain for months now. Anger, shock, betrayal, disbelief, disappointment, sadness, shame, fear, grief, hatred, rage…. yep… felt them all, and then some, and then sometimes all over again from the begining. Months ago, I began to pray for her… yes.. I pray several times a day for her and have been doing so for months. Knowing that she is a sociopath, and knowing that there is absolutly no cure, no treatment, no hope for her to be normal, but yet…. I pray for her.. not for a selfish outcome, not for God to bring her back to us, but for her soul, her heart… I mourn her, and not just the illusion of the woman I feel so deeply in love with, but I mourn who she really is, and with that, her cold, cruel heart. I pray to God everyday for her… to look out over her, to protect her, to put his love into her heart. To bring compassion, humility, kindness to her.. to release the hold of the enemy that has such a grasp on her. I pray that He will put his love into her heart, to touch her soul…. to bring her out of the darkness and into the light. She is upon my heart and I can’t help that, I can’t make that stop… I’ve tried. I’ve asked God many times to use people, circumstanses to bring her to Him. If He loves her like He loves me, then wouldn’t he answer that prayer?…….. Yes, He in fact does love her, just like He loves you and I, and all of His children. I know that because she is on my heart, in the way that I spoke of, that’s exactly how she, and anyone else that you may know/meet, that doesn’t know Him, should be. We as His should constantly/consistantly/expectantly be praying for those how are choosing to follow the enemy. That’s very, very difficult, especially when “they” have hurt us so deeply. But, none the less, we are still commanded to pray for His blessings to be poured out in abundance upon them. And, each prayer that I/you lift up, enables God to work in His time, and according to His will. I want to look in the face of selfishness and be unselfish, I want to look in the face of evil, and reflect love. I want to forgive, not just her, but me….I do not want to carry this forever… therefore I pray for her. I have to be honest here. I don’t so much do it to see her blessed and happy. I do it not just because she needs it, and God knows she does… but because I need it more.
Southernman, I read your story in another comment…and your above piece is great. I love your last sentence! Good for you. That was really eloquent.
I left my sociopathic live-in ex on Thanksgiving Day 2004, and I am still “healing.” He was a physician, wealthy – and I’m far from wealthy – yet he still managed to steal money and most of my possessions from me. We were together 5 1/2 years and I STILL shake my head in wonder that I got so hoodwinked. But, he had almost 50 years of practice at being manipulative and screwing people over, he was even stealing money and property from his mother.
Even now I still check the obits sometimes for his name, and I went through a time when I dreamed of him dead….some fairly horrific dreams too, where I was kicking and punching his dead body. No mistaking the symbolism there!
A therapist I was seeing for a while was quite ineffectual but one thing he told me was, revenge (I had unstoppable revenge fantasies for a while) would only belittle myself. Absolutely true, of course. And that the best revenge was to move on and succeed with the rest of my life.
I’m still working on that, but I take comfort in the fact that I do have true friends and true emotion in my life. That when I die, I know I did not spend my life being evil, but was a truly good person, albeit imperfect much of the time.
For me – it takes time. Letting go is important, and it’s a process, it doesn’t just happen. I am trying to be selfish, to take care of ME instead of others…I suspect many “victims” tend to be caretakers rather than takers.
My ex was a weak man who preyed on the stregnths and energy of others. He cannot and will not ever see this of course. His arrogance and self centeredness is mind boggling and will be until the day he dies.
However, I am strong and vital where he is not and never will be. I don’t think I’m special, I think this is true of everyone who has been duped by a sociopath. Our vulnerabilities are also our stregnths.
I left my husband over eight years ago. I decided that I had had enough of living with this selfish, cold-hearted, manipulative man. I remember anticipating some turmoil when I left, I never imagined how angry and hateful my husband would become. I never imagined him hurting our own children to hurt me. I never imagined the slanderous lies in court and those passed along to family and friends. I never imagined that almost nine years later, he would still be as hateful as the day I left him. It has been a long, difficult road, and along the way I felt a lot of confusion, sadness and anger.
I went to counseling and met with my parish priests to get help in handling all these emotions. I remember wishing that I did not feel all those negative emotions inside me. I knew they were not healthy for me. I wanted them to all just vanish…but I couldn’t deny that they were there. I remember telling the priest that I wanted to forgive my husband. I knew that was the right thing to do, but I honestly didn’t feel that way, and I didn’t know how to make myself honestly forgive him. The priest told me that instead of praying for forgiveness, I should pray for God’s grace, and that through God’s grace I would someday be able to forgive my exhusband. I didn’t really understand what he said at the time. In fact, I stopped praying and going to church and even thinking about God for years, but slowly over the last year or two, I have come to realize that through all this turmoil, I have become a better person. I feel strong and peaceful…I have never in my whole life felt strong and peaceful! This is the first time. I would never have become the person I am if it wasn’t for my exhusband. So, in a way I am grateful for that. I think what my exhusband has done to me (and continues to do to me) is wrong…no doubt about that, but his bad actions have a much less effect on me than they did a few years ago. So…maybe God’s grace is working within me. I hope so.
421dmb2……..
I too believe that I would not be the person I am today, which is more fully rounded and healthy had it not been that I had encountered a sociopath. Going through all of the turmoil with her, both during the year with her and the year apart from her has changed me for the better. In fact, I can honestly say that I’m thankful to have met her and have gone through the pain about her, as it has strengthened me as a man. I have learned many new things about relationships because of my experience with her, and I know that I can really love another in a better, healthier way next time. I still believe that God placed her into my life for many reasons, and those reasons were to bring me to Him, and to help me grow as a man, and to prepare me for the next great relationship that I will have with a woman. I still think about her everyday, and even though it’s mostly with sadness, I can be happy to have lived, loved, lost and learned. Spring will be here soon, and I’m so glad. It’s been a long winter, but with Spring comes renewal, and I feel the same way with my life. My experience with my crazy has been a long hard road, on top of the loss of my wife and that ordeal now just four years ago, but I’m thankful to have come out of it a better man, and to have learned from my mistakes. Like I said above, I do not want to carry this forever, and I do not want to live with a guarded heart. Yes, for quite awhile, I wallowed in my pain, and in self-pity, but that has passed. I have given this to God, and I know he will take this horrific ordeal, and make it a good thing in my life.. He already has.
For some, releasing the pain becomes a life long process due to the PTSD that sets in. Its not wallowing – its real.
It can take years to learn to trust again and some never love again and that’s o.k. Its often a big lesson to learn to be alone and happy.
Additionally the VALIDATION from others is crucial in realizing – it was NOT your fault and you weren’t stupid. You were targeted and there really was no way you could have known at the time.
Great article Donna.
Donna once said in an email to me that I would need to process the pain in order to move on. I guess I have not processed the pain, it is still there although I do not allow it to enter my conscious world – I push it away and I do not allow myself to think about the hurt.
So what are the implications of this all? Well, the 4 year horrific experience has fundamentally changed me. In addition, it has taken me three years, after the relationship abruptly ended, to finally push him out of my life and to open up and start talking about the truth. Talking about his horrific experience comes in waves. Sometimes I will be able to talk about it and other times I do not want to go there at all.
On the positive side, I am actually happy, and it does not bother me to be on my own, where before I could not stand being alone. I do not feel angry and I do not really think about him at all; however, the pain is there and it manifest itself when I am faced with meeting and allowing other men in my life. My fears of having to be vulnerable again are holding me back. My whole thought process is hung up on the past.
I stay out of the dating scene, because I do not want to fall in love again. And although I am very well aware that not everybody is a psychopath, through the experience in away I lost faith in mankind … So I stay on my own, sheltered from the good and the bad ….
For some reason, lately, I’ve been getting value out of seeing psychos represented in film. I rented “American Psychopath” at the suggestion of a friend. I had read many terrible reviews of the novel and of the movie.
Well, after having been involved with a psycho…I saw many of his traits (non-homicidal) represented in the film.
The narcissistic body building and grooming, the hollow recital of odd pop cultural opinions, the unwanted opinions on how dates should dress, the sex addiction, the reading of several newspapers at the same time laid out in the apartment (that one was very creepily familiar), the occasional odd babblings of gibberish, and many other even subtler details.
Brett Easton Ellis must have known one himself, because the film (despite all the cultural metaphors critics tried to heap upon it) could have floated very easily as a simple character study of the psychos we have been involved with. Granted, the movie psycho was a serial killer, but his overall personality, lifestyle, conduct was so familiar to me that I applauded the film. I think the critics didn’t get how nuanced the film portrait of the psycho was. Maybe, because they themselves have never known one? It wasn’t an “anti-feminist” film. It was an “anti-psycho film,” at least from my perspective.
I kept thinking when I watched the “extra features” and heard all the producers etc. discuss how this film affected them, that NONE OF THEM got it! None of them had ever known a psycho personally, because if they had, they would have commented on how dead on the representation of the main character was in all its detail. Only someone who has known a psycho could have included all of that. At least, that’s how the work came across to me.
Whatever the case, I found viewing that film, and Taxi Driver, for that matter, as valuable for my recovery, in that the characters were so accurately drawn. My experience didn’t seem so isolated after viewing those films. They both had a chilling effect and God knows I have felt that chill in person.
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I cannot be grateful or feel that spending four years with a sociopath has made me a healthier person. It surely has not. I may have had needs and vulnerabilities that allowed me to fall for one, and worse yet, stay with one, but the only good thing out of the whole thing was that I got away. I am working on the why and how with a therapist and understand them, but that does little to restore the self esteem that he chipped away at day after day, hour after hour…so much so that I could not, nor would not leave him. I stayed four years. I cannot believe that anyone can feel that living through horrific experiences with a sociopath has value. I am not saying that my experience is any worse than anyone else’s on here, but the idea that this guy is out there having a ball with a slew of unsuspecting women, makes me sick
When I got mine out of my life, I was not as angry with him as with myself. I made up my mind to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it.
That was almost three years ago. No matter how started, this healing process has turned into the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself. I came to understand myself better. I learned how damage I’d carried from my childhood created a weak ego structure that allowed him and his opinions become more important to me than my relationship with myself. In this work, I’ve learned how to be the center of my own world, and to work at staying connected with the spiritual and ethical center of my character.
It was really hard to neutralize all the terrible things he said about me. To listen to someone you love telling you how stupid, ugly and unlovable you are for five years, and even the fact that you feel hurt is evidence of your disgusting weakness, is emotional battery that’s hard to heal. But at some point, I realized that, strange as it sounds, it wasn’t personal. He would have done the same thing to anyone, because it’s his disease. And that realization also helped me to heal some childhood issues. It wasn’t me that would hurt other people to make myself feel better. And I am not responsible for how he behaved. I am only responsible for doing a good job of loving and taking care of myself, and now I’ll be better at it. Not just in relationships, but in my whole life.
Like others, I’ve isolated myself, at least as far as dating goes, while I’ve gone through this. For a long time, I was simply afraid that I couldn’t relate to a man except as a deeply damaged woman. Then I just felt very cautious. These days, I’m emerging my shell a bit, but I feel like I’m learning to date, to take care of myself, and to know what I want from a relationship all over again.
There are comments on this board about being targeted, and how difficult it is to withstand this, even if you’re emotionally healthy when it begins. As I look back at how my experience began, I don’t really think I was as emotionally healthy as I was today. I was looking for a rescuer, a big strong white knight. It was the type of relationship I’d always had. That was the opening that let my psychopath into my life, and I can see now that he carefully cultivated me, learning exactly what kind of rescuer I wanted, and then playing the role until I fell in love with him.
I don’t want that kind of love anymore. And I’m grateful that I was forced me look at how I ran my life. It was an expensive lesson in every way, but it changed my life.
A man approached me at a party last week. He clearly was interested, and he wanted to tell me his life story, including the women who had misunderstood him, how famous and well-respected he was professionally, his temporary difficulties needing a place to stay. Need I go on?
When I got home, I was really scared for a few moments. I thought to myself, what if I hadn’t recognized him? What if he hadn’t made a few crucial mistakes while he was sizing me up? Would the whole nightmare have started again with a different man?
But you know, it wasn’t the crucial mistakes that turned me off. It was his complete self-absorption. His disinterest in anyone else, with the exception of his traction-beam eye contact with me. He already knew I owned my own home and had a good job when he came to talk. But he never asked one thing about my life or how I felt or why I was at that party. He was just doing that performance thing, the projection of charisma, that was almost a kind of personality test. Was I the kind woman who responds to that?
Not anymore. Now, if I ever let someone into my life again, it will be a true partner who is interested in sharing on spiritual and emotional levels, as well as in the practical aspects of our lives. These people can’t even fake that. They try, but their cynicism, selfishness and power issues always bleed through, if you’re listening.
I read somewhere about a woman who used to do speed-dating before she got married, those parties where you spend five minutes with someone before jumping to the next table. She had a mental test she used to disqualify people. They had three minutes to ask a question with the word “you” in it. The man she ultimately married did it in the first sentence. I like that almost as much as the “three strikes” rule in The Sociopath Nextdoor
Mickey…I left my ex over eight years ago. Maybe time is on my side. I do still fear that I may have vulnerabilities and needs that allowed my to stay as long as I did, but I deal with that by not opening myself up to relationships. I just focus on my kids and career.
I started to feel better and more in control of my life about a year or two ago. It was at this point that my career started to take off, I became a little bit more financially stable. I also went to court to challenge my ex’s visitation because of his hateful, eratic behavior. The court action did not end up limiting his visitation but it did improve his behavior a bit and it sent the message to him that I was not going to take any more ****. So, I think I have come a far way from the person I was when I first met my ex. Because of all my troubles I am definitely a stronger person.