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.
LL,
yeah, I could leave any time but you know…the trauma bond thing is stronger than titanium chains.
Claudia,
thank you for your kind comments.
I was just reading your blog about Ps and boredom. You mention Cleckley’s observation that they sabotage themselves.
You might like to read “The Imp of the Perverse” a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. You can google it and read it online. It’s about self-sabotage.
You also talked about a spath destroying a woman’s relationship with her husband, just for kicks. I have a neighbor like that. I call her the crazy husband stealer. She told me that she only dates married men. I thought WTF? but I wanted to be nice and said, “that’s nice for you, at least you don’t have them underfoot. You can have my piece of shit anytime you want.” What I didn’t realize is that she already had my spath and her statement was a “tell”. What she didn’t realize – until that moment – was that what she thought was stealing, was actually taking out the trash!!! It cracks me up that I could one-up the spaths just by being honest! LOL!
Lastly, she didn’t realized that my spath was using her, not as a conquest but in order to convince her (using sex) to despise me. He can smell a personality disorder (especially envy) from a mile away. He zeroed in on her envy for other women’s husbands and played her with it. You see, she is a spath too and she has the same desires that your spath has: to break up married couples. She doesn’t want the married man, she just doesn’t want you to have him.
Well, my spath is THE UBERSPATH. He told my BF that he wanted to gut her from her neck to her navel. So much for stealing husbands.
LL, yes, definitely go to the doctor for your… urgent stomach problems:) As for the degree in therapy, maybe you could get a scholarship or a grant. Don’t give up on it, if there’s any way you can get the funding. I’ll offer you encouragement and support.
As for the isolation and undermining tactics, they are Psychopathy 101. All of them do that. The differences are to what degree their targets let them. Some victims put up with it more, some with less. Some don’t put up with it at all and leave. The psychopaths adjust the noose accordingly.
Sky, I love Edgar Allen Poe. I’ll take a look at the short story. Speaking of horror, your psychopath sounds like serial killer, or at least murderer, material.
Sky, what you say about the neighbor psychopath turning competing women against each other, to watch them fight and destroy each other over him (just as my psychopath did between me and his wife) reminds me of a very famous quote by Françoise Gilot about her lover and life partner, Pablo Picasso:
“Pablo’s many stories and reminiscences about Olga and Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar, as well as their continuing presence just off stage in our life together, gradually made me realize that he had a kind of Bluebeard complex that made him want to cut off the heads of all the women he had collected in his little private museum. But he didn’t cut the heads entirely off. He preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who had shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. Even though he no longer had any feeling for this one or that one, he could not bear the idea that any of his women should ever again have a life of her own. And so each had to be maintained, with the minimum gift of himself, inside his orbit and not outside. As I thought about it, I realized that in Pablo’s life things went on just about the way they do in a bullfight. Pablo was the toreador and he waved the red flag, the muleta. For a picture dealer, the muleta was another picture dealer; for a woman, another woman. The result was, the person playing the bull stuck his horns into the red flag instead of goring the real adversary–Pablo. And that is why Pablo was always able, at the right moment, to have his sword free to stick you where it hurt. I came to be very suspicious of this tactic and any time I saw a big red flag waiving around me, I would look to one side of it. There, I always found Pablo.” (My Life with Picasso, 242-3)
Hi Eva,
hmm… that sounds fun, but only if we are chasing them and not the other way around.
Claudia,
My spath likes to arrange accidents when he kills. I do think he has arranged many of them. You see, he makes sure that everyone knows he is almost illiterate but with an amazing affinity for fixing machines. Particularly aircraft. So he tells them that they can save money by hiring him but it must all be done in secret because it’s illegal for someone who is not certified to work on aircraft. When the “accident” occurs, nobody’s gonna talk because they are either dead or guilty. Many people at the airport died while spath was keeping his helicopter there. Including the co-owner of his helicopter.
gotta run out and pay a bill. later.
Skylar,
of course i meant to place the psychos in the place of the bulls. The sacrified psychos should be proved to be bad, because of questions of morallity and correctness.
And surely some women would suddently want to become profesional toreras. Do you imagine? “Hey psycho” while waving the red flag. “Phycho, psycho, look at here. Olé”
Eva, I agree! I’m all for animal rights and vegetarian, but psychopaths shouldn’t have any rights. Plus they produce only bull crap. Olé!
Sky, what do you mean WHEN your psychopath kills??? He’s actually a murderer, for real, not just in threats? And he’s getting away with it? He’s not even been investigated as a “person of interest”?
Claudia,
Thanks. I know that I can apply for scholarships. It’s a part time job! I have grants now, but if I can cut down on my loan amounts that would be LOVELY. University is much more expensive than the community college where I’ve been going. I’ll find out a lot more when I have my meeting. I’m going with little expectations.
I”ve been thinking about my spath today. I think I’ve been doing so because I have this horrendous abscessed tooth and it’s kILLING me, along with an ear infection, so hard core antibiotics, here I am 🙂 Anyway, I think about him a lot when I’m NEEDY. How weird is that? This is also when I’ve craved contact the most. I’m staying put on that, but am really fighting that today.
I was thinking about your above post, as well as many others here where the main theme is the same, they just want to destroy others. I remember the story of Pablo Picasso. He destroyed not only women’s lives, but his children and grandchildren. Kind of reminds of an artist form of Charlie Sheen. He was flaming. I think what hit me the most in one of your posts is that Pablo would try to keep each woman from his life in the past on the thread or make sure she was still tied to him in some way, as if he still could have power and control in her life even with the simplest of “contact”. I often wonder if that’s what my spath was doing this past week with his contact. He has a gf, he’s on his dating site…..he has contact constantly because he has joint custody with his ex….this is part of why it feels so disruptive to me. He let COMPLETELY go of his first wife. She RAN from this man back home to her original state. They had a daughter together and eventually he signed over his parental rights. I could NEVER Understand why and he wasn’t specific about it. It always bothered me. He acted so pained about it…but he really wasn’t. I remember once his ex sent him a letter or two earlier in his marriage to wife 2. I don’t remember why she did, but he painted the scenario as being out of the blue and that this woman was annihilating him in the letter. I asked to see it many times and he refused to allow it. He said wife 2 sent a really nice letter to wife one, defending her husband. He said he was “so proud of that and thought it was really nice of her”. But from what I remember of that was that he had this LOOK on his face while describing it….like one of POWER….like a cat who had just had his fill of a VERY OVERWEIGHT MOUSE. I wonder now if he contacted her FIRST rather than wife one just writing a letter out of the blue…there were so many lies…..she told him she wanted NOTHING to do him and that he COULD NOT see his daughter again. He never contacted her again. Nor his daughter. Never bothered. All that crap about how much he loved her. Crap. He saw her once at a wedding (his daughter) and said she was an absolute ‘little snot, just like her mother’. He hated wife one. HATED her.
I wonder if she knows about his last divorce. Should would validate her, I bet.
Anyway, off on a tangent again….I guess I’m still bothered by it because I can’t understand why he won’t do me the same favor. I have no children with him, never lived with him. There are NO ties to me.
Thinking that he wants to destroy me or have me around as a potential back up is nauseating. It’s best just to let me go altogether, and he’s stealth in his tactics.
I want to move on. I’m working hard at it…but today has been a rough day, yet still my feet are on the ground…ear infection, abscess and all…
LL
LL, he keeps pursuing you because something in him tells him that he hasn’t expended all your use value. You must still have a lot of vitality and hopes and dreams in you. You must still have the power to attract other partners and to move on with your life. He senses that and he can’t stand it. In my novel, I made the comparison to squeezing a tube of toothpaste, until all of it is gone and the tube is empty and flat. That’s what these psychopaths want to do to us. Keep that in mind when you feel needy, and rely on us.
As for your education and degree in social work/therapy, I believe it’s a key to your regeneration. It’s not the only one, but without having a sense of purpose and accomplishment it’s much more difficult to recover. You’ll find the money if you become resourceful enough. But this may be your last chance to pursue your career dreams.
Claudia..
What a frightening thought! And such an enlightening one too….that’s what got me away from him in the first place. I LOVE THIS BLOG! You just reminded me why I wanted my escape in the first place. I had been trying to extricate for a year, going to school, getting sober…I wanted MY life…and MY DREAMS…he KNEW what my dreams were, Claudia, and when he knew I meant it and put my dreams and school before him, he was MORE demanding, abusive, cheating and lying…he WANTED to hurt me!! He sabotaged my efforts. he would NOT leave me alone! Yet at the same time, he was trolling his heart out at the same time. So now he has someone else to destroy. I thought FOR SURE that would be when he would cut me loose and let me go forever….another victim, maybe two that he was messing with….I could go ahead and heal and then pursue my dreams….this is where I have such difficulty understanding his “pursuit” (if you can call it that). It is SO frustrating, but I’m so gray rocking the situation. He can’t take what I REFUSE to give him. I still had life in me. And he knew it. And I think it fueled his rage, to the point where I thought that he may want to literally kill me (I put what he did to me on another thread called Nothing says I love you like a glock-I think), and it SCARED the hell out of me!!
I needed that, Claudia. To keep focused on my dreams and my hopes. Part of the emotional burden is still trying to wrap my mind around someone who so hates you that they would want for your destruction, not for your growth and happiness….it is astounding…the awakening has been unreal and a rollercoaster ride from hell, but I have determination and I WON”T give up my life for any of these soul sucking creatures again….
I’m going to that meeting. I have enough credits built up now, and only three more reqs required, that I will finish this next term at community and if all is a go, apply to the school for fall term. I have excellent grades and am a good student. That helps a lot too. I really WANT this very much, but I also know that life is life and sometimes God has different plans than those that we have for ourselves. So I want to go in with an open mind and heart and continue to ask for God’s leading and guidance.
Claudia, your post has been a very big blessing for me. Thank you for your willingness to share your experience and words of wisdom with me. It’s needed.
LL
LL, I wish you well and hope to see you flourish. Even if you have to sell your car and get a cheaper model, do whatever you can to get that degree and accomplish your life goals.