Like us, Claudia Moscovici had her run-in with a psychopath, one that almost destroyed her marriage. Since then, like many of us, she has thoroughly researched this destructive personality disorder. She started a blog called “Psychopathy Awareness,” and wrote two books: a novel called The Seducer, and an upcoming nonfiction book called Dangerous Liaisons.
In her review of my book, Love Fraud—How marriage to a sociopath fulfilled my spiritual plan, Claudia writes, “I didn’t think I could learn much more about the subject, but Donna’s book proved me wrong.”
Read the entire review on Psychopathy Awareness.
Love Fraud is available in the Lovefraud Store.
I just saw blogger T post some stuff. LOVe it when he does. blows my mind and give me ALWAYS something to think about.
SKy…Not CLOSE to what my spath is.
I’ve yet to see anything that resembles him in spath world insofar as covertness.
This is why I’m NOT believed.
Even here, there is some hedging. He can’t be THAT bad….
It just seems what everytime i try to share how stealth he is, I’m blown off or made fun of? I must be projecting……………………
HE KNOWS THIS. Who the hell sends you an acknoledgment of an invite to their IM long after the relationshit is over?
I’ve already tried to explain the stealth moves here.
Not that it falls on deaf ear……it’s just that he even appears “healthy” here.
Bastard. I HATE THIS MAN!!!!!!!!!!
LL
sky – i know that i get upset when i have to deal with my folks, and always afterward too. i have managed to see the n sire only once in the last year and a half. but even spending a few moments with my mom will affect me as all of the tensions are brought to the surface.
your mom sounds really odd. i am wondering if you should share things like the fake holy letter with her – i don’t think you will ever get your emo needs met with her, and it will always hurt. GOING AGAIN AND AGAIN TO AN EMPTY WELL IS A FORM OF SELF ABANDONMENT.
Take it easy and try to minimize the damage of the visit by giving them nothing of you – grey rock!
How can you invalidate everyone else’s experience?
Stealth is a very interesting concept.
It is used in many different ways.
Lesson:
I don’t see evidence here of people hedging “he can’t be that bad.” We know better. There are little differences, but spath is spath.
What is different is that many of us stopped asking WHY once we figured out that our abusers were spaths. So if you want to know WHY he’s doing anything, it’s b/c he’s an spath. Seems You’re the one who has a hard time accepting how bad he is, seems hard for you to resist no matter all the evil he has revealed as his character. Did you really think we have not endured our spaths trying to come back for encores?
Lesson, I want you to take a little time and think how your words have been not very nice, criticizing your daughter for not validating you, and then telling us how your spath is more stealth than ours. You’ve been supported and you dissed that. And then you diss our abuse experience. You’ve had many “crisis”, (left me hanging on New Years Eve in terrible anxiety worried about you) but there has been support every time. You get very dramatic and then when people reach out to comfort you… Being dismissed by you, well that’s not very nice.
it’sjustme –
“I’ve so completely lost myself. I can’t feel my flame anymore and all I want to do is lay and sleep….I am going to die of a broken heart. I see it happening, feel it unbearably but I can’t seem to get out of this dark hole…..My father is a p,histrionic, most selfish brat I have ever met. large, mean man….My mom is abroken victim that has lost her way into selfishness, or something. … I don’t know, but I can tell you that she was the reason I stayed in my fathers life….I can’t breath. …I can’t cry enough, I can’t sleep enough, I can’t scream load enough and I know I’m going to have a stroke or heart failure if anything pushes me…..I pray that he will find the lord and his heart will change and he will come back and make the years of lies come true.”
Sweetheart, you could have been describing MY life just there. I know the mean father and the weak mother. I know the wishing he was dead so I could just see her without his influence. I know the feeling of wanting to sleep forever and truly believing I felt my physical heart actually snap.
I am not alone here, in recognising these things you have posted. Sometimes, even now, when I think back on everything I went through (and I’m STILL going through some of it…) I marvel that I am not only alive, but reclaiming who I am; which I had thought I had lost forever.
I, too, prayed and prayed, on my knees and flat out on the ground when I could not stand and curled into a ball when my stomach pained and churned and I thought I was dying on the spot. I asked for my spath to “see the light”, “get the help he needs to change”, “make amends” – and on and on and on….
He didn’t do any of those things because he is a spath and he thinks he is special and clever and right and he thinks that I am evil and stupid and dirt. That will never change. He will never change. So – in the end, I had to do the changing. Your grief process will change you and you will find the strength you didn’t know you had (just like I did) and it will pass and one day you will look in the mirror and you will be there. You will be back.
“I should be able to lean on God for everything and I do but I need a companion”friend, what ever, you know, it is not good for man to be alone” ??”
Honey, PTSD – which you SURELY have (hell – why should YOU be the only one on here who HASN’T had it???) – amongst other things, affects your spiritual beliefs and relationships. It is very, very common to feel a disconnect and a disinterest in those areas, whilst in the throes of PTSD. It’s part of the shock and the dissociative state that occurs with trauma.
When you grow back, so will your spirituality. Take it from someone who has been exactly where you are now. xxxx
Lesson –
My Superspath spent over 10 years in management in the same company. Some of them can.
I am just now reading “Snakes in Suits”, co-authored by Robert Hare (who wrote “Without Conscience” and developed the PCL scale for assessing and diagnosing psychopathy). If you have not yet done so, I would strongly suggest that you read it too.
“Without Conscience” was a mesmerising read for me, but “Snakes in Suits” goes further into the machinations of those spaths who “look” successful and stable in work and in business.
Good girl for not contacting. x
LL,
You are going through withdrawals, and it is like a drug addiction. This is the worst part, so hang in there. If you can just stay strong, you will get through to the other side of it.
And this is totally without judgment on my part, but I notice you are seeking validation from others, whether it be us or your daughter, etc. It’s good to have people who believe you (I assure you we do) and support you, but also seeking validation can also become a dependency trap. This is part of where you may be stuck, in looking outside of yourself for approval. At some point, you will need to validate yourself. My sociopath didn’t fit any of the molds either. I don’t even know if he is a true sociopath (and I don’t care).
I wish I could expand on this but I have to go to work, so just giving you something to think about. We all have the answers inside of ourselves if we turn our awareness inside and just look.
Love,
Star
I think this issue corresponds to Oxy’s quote from Dr. Frankle.
I paraphrase: All pain is complete pain. It fills you up like gas.
I think we all believe that our particular spath had to be the best at what he did, otherwise he never could have got to us.
All spath is complete spath.
Money and success maybe stealth, but it’s not the issue. Mine was an utter loser, but he had ME hook, line and sinker.
He was good at what he did…dupe me. Why? Unless I want to be a potential target again I better quit looking at him for the answer, and start looking at me.
Don’t misunderstand, I am NOT assigning blame to the victim, here. I am suggesting that it’s important to find my own hooks and vulnerabilities, not continually ruminate about how good he was at lying, conniving, cheating and deceiving me.
He’s history. Not my problem.
LL, if you go back to your psychopathic ex all you’ll get is further manipulation and even more sadistic humiliation (at least on an emotional, if not physical, level) than you had before. Because you’d be proving to him that you can tolerate his mistreatment.
I had some additional thoughts.
Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. No dogfood any where in sight. He provided a stimulus, (dogfood=reward), and rang a bell (secondary stimulus) at the same time. Did it over and over again. Eventually the dog didn’t even need the reward at all to stimulate the behavior.
LL your POS has just rung your bell. He has provided the necissary stimulus, and he is waiting for your trained response.
I sincerly doubt if there’s any real reward in it for you. Maybe a temporary rush of feel good hormones, that will quickly be replaced with more humiliation, frustration confusion and dispair. You will feel even more shame and worthlessness and pain then you did when you first came here, because it escalates every time we re-engage. We also become increasingly unable to get out. We weaken.
Remember the story of the two wolves? One is good and one is evil…they are fighting for their lives….which one wins? Answer: the one you feed the most. Feed=attend to.
I want to substitute healthy for good and sick for evil. Think of it like this: you are split right now. You have a healthy side that is fighting for your life and you have been doing all the right things in attending to that side of you. It is growing and getting stronger everyday. But you still have that unhealthy part of you that is grappling for your attention. POS just thre it a bone and stirred it up. He fed it, and gave it energy. You didn’t feed it, he did….but all he had to do was throw a bone, and now you are doing all the work for him, attending to your unhealthy side. This is one of their best tricks and we fall right in line.
He has you dramatized and traumatized and all he (thinks) he has to do is sit down and wait.
He thinks that because that’s the way it’s been in the past. Always worked before, right?
Now is when you need to pull back the energy from the unhealthy side of you and fight like hell for the healthy side. Attend, attend. attend.
In AA they say we are not responsible for the first thought, but we are for every thought after that. What this means is that the thought of drinking comes unbidden, through no fault of our own, sometimes. Not our fault. But if we romance that thought, entertain it and obsess about it we are flirting with disaster. We are feeding the unhealthy part of our selves and it will probably result in something really bad.
I hope I made some sense.
I’m sorry you are going through this. It sucks. Been where you are right now many, many times!