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, With regard to the psychopath’s wife staying with him: I knew about Stockholm Syndrome before, but those were cases of kidnapping or of being held hostage at gun point to a psychopath by force, at least initially. I’m just now learning, from you guys, about trauma bonds and how powerful they can be without any need for actual “chains”. Many of you mention staying for a long time with emotionally abusive men because of trauma bonds.
But I still think that the women who want to get out of bad relationships with personality disordered people eventually find a way to do it, as did everyone here, on lovefraud. There’s a lot of information out there, there are support groups, there is help. If you choose to stay with a psychopath your entire life, then there may be other reasons for that as well.
In fact, out of curiosity, I’d like to look further into the phenomenon of “extreme dependency syndrome,” which I first heard about a few weeks ago on Investigation Discovery. It was mentioned by a forensic psychologist on an episode of “Wicked Attractions,” which featured some women who colluded with psychopaths because they were psychopaths themselves (and they murdered people together) and some women who colluded with them, and did everything those evil guys wanted, because they were suffering from “extreme dependency syndrome.”
Basically that means that they got all of their self-esteem from the psychopath and their relationship with him, so they obeyed him blindly, even if it meant engaging in very immoral or illegal actions. Psychopaths are great at manipulating people to collude with them in hurting others. This may explain why some women stay with psychopaths as well. There are many possible psychological explanations for this because there are many different types of victims, and some of them can be very similar to the psychopaths, or form with them one larger parasitic organism, so to speak. If either part of the parasite leaves or dies, the other part can’t survive either.
Good monring Claudia.
I’m one of those who stayed with the P for 25 yeas.
I’ll try to explain why I did.
The first couple of years there was trauma bonding all day long. By year 7 I remember wanting to leave because I had heard the term “7-year-itch” and I thought that must be what I had. I was ashamed to be so disloyal. My P really needed me, I thought. He seemed to be helpless without me, yet he would always come to my rescue when I needed him. I thought that a good person should be loyal. Obligation and guilt made me stay with him, although I longed to leave him long before I finally did. I thought I had made a commitment and I was going to honor it.
God I was so deluded. The fact that I met him when I was so young, made it difficult to see how evil he was. The fact that my parents were also controlling N’s (yet I loved them) made it seem normal to live that way.
My loyalty was to the point where I would have done anything he needed me to AS LONG AS IT WAS FRAMED CORRECTLY. They test your boundaries and then slowly push them until they have moved way past where they used to be. Further more, the loyalty and love you feel for this person, makes you think that if they did it, it must be OK, because this is a fundamentally good person. So you lower your moral standards as well.
This is what it’s like to live with a person of the Lie.
Skylar, you are one of the most collected, introspective and articulate persons I met online. You’re changing my perspective of victims who stay with psychopaths (without being beaten or coerced into staying). What Kim wrote also helped me understand this trauma bonding better, as did Oxy’s article link on this subject.
I think someone (maybe one of you?) needs to write more about trauma bonding because there’s not enough information out there about this. Besides, if most of the information is written by specialists in technical psychology journals, people won’t read it. And nobody knows better what it feels like to be trauma bonded to an evil person than the victims themselves: not even the therapists if they haven’t experienced it.
But, to clarify, the women featured on this Wicked Attractions ID show murdered in order to prove their loyalty to the psychopath. I’m hoping that trauma bonded victims wouldn’t go that far despite the pressure and the erosion of their moral boundaries.
Thank you Claudia, that’s very nice of you to say.
I was one of those people who couldn’t fathom why a woman would stay with a man who beat her. I had NO SYMPATHY for such stupid behavior. All the while I was no better, in fact much worse. So I’ve had to rethink on this subject and introspect on why I did what I did – and what else I might have done if he had asked. I really don’t know how far I might have gone. Thank God for His protection.
There was a story in the paper about a woman who was so beaten down after so many years of torture that one day while the spath was berating her, she grabbed a knife and chopped off her own finger and gave it to him. At some point, her kids came and saved her and he went to jail.
When asked why she did that, she said, “because I knew that’s what he wanted me to do.”
Spaths have a thing about chopping off fingers… not sure why. Mine did.
Skylar, your psychopath chopped your finger off??? I can relate to what you say, as well as to what Kim said, in this respect: although I wasn’t trauma bonded to my psychopath, and left him as soon as his mask of “Romantic Prince Charming” fell off, nobody in my family could understand why I fell for his ruses in the first place. People who haven’t experienced being bonded to a psychopath can’t really understand the experience.
The same goes for what you’ve been through, which is a few steps (or should I say miles?) beyond what I experienced: trauma bonding. Have you ever thought about writing about this experience, to explain it to others?
Hi Claudia. I just checked out http://www.answers.com and (typed in co-dependent in the toolbar). I scrolled down and listened to the guy doing the video I realised it was me! There are ’10 points/questions’ and I fit 9 of them. Ok, so now all I have to do is ‘fix’ me. Thanks
Candy, thanks for this link. I’ll look at it right away.
You are right Claudia….what is it they say? Something about having to walk in a man’s shoes. Here’s a bit more. Makes for interesting reading.
Origin: 1987
In the 1980s, even if we did not wake up with a hangover, we learned that waking up next to a significant other (1953) with a hangover is a hangup in itself. The hangup of the non-addicted is addiction to the addicted. Get it?
If that’s confusing, maybe we needed a new word. So we put it this way: In such a situation, we suffer from a condition known as codependency or codependence. That is what we learned from the 1987 publication of Melody Beattie’s book Codependent No More, along with countless articles on the subject. We discovered that we had grown up in dysfunctional families (1981), where one of the adults was addicted to a substance like alcohol or drugs or to a behavior like gambling, sex, watching television, or even exercise, and the other adult was addicted to the addict. By helping the addicted one get through the day, the non-addicted family members were being codependent.
Since so many people can be said to exhibit some sort of addictive behavior, we discovered how normal it is to come from a dysfunctional family and be codependent. The codependency spreads because it makes children dysfunctional, leading them to enter into dysfunctional relationships as adults, either as addicts or as their codependents.
Fortunately, the 1980s also gave us the tools to combat codependency. We went to counselors, clinics, and support groups (1969) to share our feelings as “adult children” (1983). At the end of the decade, self-help reached its epitome when we learned to get in touch with our “inner child” (1990).
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/co-dependent#ixzz1Fpglwahh
Candy,
LOL, no he didn’t chop off my fingers but he wanted to.
There are 3 things that happened that point to this.
First, he would watch me type and was envious. I can type very quickly (which explains my prolific posts!) He stood watching with his friend Harry, while I typed something for Harry and they both said, “wow” then spath said, “imagine if she had learned to play the piano” That last part was a jab at me, because he knew I took a piano class once and never actually learned. While he was a virtuoso with the guitar.
Second, when I was figuring out that the spath wanted me dead, I had to pretend to love him all the more, so I asked him if we could take a nap together on the couch. We layed in the spoon position and I had taken a sleeping pill so I started to doze. I had the strangest dream. This is the only dream I’ve ever had in which I was looking at myself from behind and outside my own body. And there was no emotion. I dreamt that he was chopping off my fingers, but I felt nothing. Then, in the dream, he ripped off my blouse and whipped my back with a whip. again, no emotion, no pain. The only thing I can think of is that I was receiving his own thoughts or dreams, rather than my own.
Thirdly, months after I left him, I went through the shed. There was a box, I opened it and OMG it was full of fingers! Not real fingers, but I couldn’t tell at first. They looked rotted and bloody at the stumps. It was some kind of “prop?” I don’t know, but it confirmed to me that my intuition was right, he is obsessed with fingers.
I would love to write a book but I wouldn’t know where to begin.
Candy – there is a very good self help book titled, ‘co-dependent no more’, by Melody Beattie.