As many of us have painfully learned, before sociopaths dump one victim, they usually have already targeted another. In the following letter, a Lovefraud reader asked what she should do about the new victim:
I am finally away from the sociopath, although he still continues to contact me from time to time demanding money. He has a new target—as always, a financially secure woman, vulnerable and he has “given her a shoulder to cry on.” Her father just died, her mother has cancer and she stands to inherit some valuable land and she is already “hooked” thinking that he is “so caring” and “has been there for her and she for him.” He has told her I left him took all his money, etc.—the same story I got 10 years ago.
I’d like to be selfish in this, and just let him wander on to the new target, which means he will leave me entirely alone, but I feel so bad knowing he is going to ruin the life of a naive, vulnerable woman. My predecessor told me she “thanked God every day that I came along,” and part of me wants to do the same and let him “move on,” but I feel somewhere I should warn this woman. Had my predecessor told me everything she eventually told me, things would have been a lot different. I lost everything, including my social standing, my reputation, my integrity and self respect, not to mention my company and all my assets through his wild spending and lying about “business deals” and his abilities.
My question is this: Should I contact the other woman and tell her what I know? Or can I just “mind my own business” and let nature take its course. I wish someone had told me what I was facing.
Try to warn
This is a question I’ve heard many times. Should you warn the next victim?
In my opinion, if you can do it safely, I think you should try.
If you believe the predator fits the description of a sociopath, it may help to describe him or her that way. When people realize there is a personality disorder called sociopathy, and the disorder has distinct symptoms, it may make the warning more effective.
For example, if you said, “the guy (or woman) will cheat on you and take your money,” the next target, having already been told by the predator that you’re a disgruntled lover, may assume that you’re just bitter.
But if you said, “I believe the guy (or woman) is a sociopath, and to learn more about the disorder you should read Lovefraud.com,” maybe the person will go to the Internet, look up the behaviors and then recognize the symptoms.
Will the new victim listen?
The key question, of course, is will the new target heed your warning? We all know how good sociopaths are at flattery, soliciting pity and manipulation. The sociopath has already told the new target about all the terrible things you did to him or her. The sociopath may have the new target partially or totally brainwashed. Your words may or may not get through.
Still, you know what will happen to the new target. You know the pain and devastation the predator will inflict. You know what you’ve been through, and you don’t want to wish it on anyone.
In my view, you should try to prevent another casualty. But what do you think?
Should you try? Do you think the new victim will listen? Did someone try to warn you? Did you listen?
Please post your views on the Lovefraud Blog.
I wonder if someone had tried to warn me if I would have listened. The ex and I were acquaintances back in college some 15 years ago, so I *thought* I knew him.
That combined with the fact that he had lived most of those 15 years in another state just up until the time he ‘reconnected’ with me through classmates.com. Pretty much anyone who could possibly have had enough experience with him to know he was toxic would probably all have lived in his previous state; I would have had no idea who they were, if they were truly unstable vindictive vs. a stable, honest person. Although NOW I think – any warning should be at least considered and never dismissed!! If for nothing else than to KEEP YOUR EYES and MIND OPEN to the possibility that they may be right.
The two he thought were the highest threat for warning me were his two ex wives – and he had already convinced me that they were ‘nutty’ and ‘vindictive’ – just as he convinced wife #3 that I was ‘nutty’, ‘vindictive’ and ‘jealous’ about me in the event that I tried to contact her – when I did, that’s exactly how she described me!
They are very convincing. I felt an overwhelming need to warn wife #3. I did it, and it backfired. Felt like crap *knowing* someone who does not know me at all or my history, BELIEVES that I am the one unstable – I mean compare my and the ex’s history side by side and there is NO comparison!! I am anything but unstable – though there was a period of time during and a few months after the D&D when I questioned my own sanity and FELT unstable, lol – the D&D totally side-swiped me; the reality I thought was TRUE was anything but… that is hard to swallow, believe, conceptualize, wrap your head around, etc…
So I don’t know the right or wrong answer re: telling the OW. I think it depends on alot of things – whether she is co-dependent and overly trusting vs. someone cautious. Had to keep reminding myself with wife # 3 that she was in the honeymoon phase where he is absolutely wonderful – exactly where I had been only 5 short months before… and I really don’t know if I would have believed if someone warned me. We had history; I thought I knew him as well as I know myself.
oh, and also – my ex had ED too. He just made 40. New wife #3 is 27. He takes Viagra, which works for him… although I do know heart disease runs in his family… so if he starts developing heart symptoms = bye bye Viagra and any other meds. like it. I am noticing this seems to be a commonality.
What a great study that would be – if ED and Sociopathy / Psychopathy have a high correlation. How about it Docs??? 🙂
loux
Internet can be a weapon against ourselves in the healing process. If I hadn’t came back to see his pages on facebook and orkut, I wouldn’t be so shocked with the fact that he’s doing the same things again, deceiving honest girls with his slut (the same with whom he cheated on my since he met me), and I wouldn’t suffer everything again.
It is not my problem to warn the next victims. Maybe if someone had tried I wouldn’t believe it. Specially in the moments when I was so in love with the character he created to me.
I think we just have to accept that such a thing really happened to us and try to build a life apart from it. From time to time I lose my hope in finding someone nice. I cannot even think about getting married because all these dreams are still attached to him after 6 months that I found out about everything and left.
Today I had a thought about why I got to love such a perverse and narcissistic person. It’s a bit polemic, but I would like to share
He is really sick, but there is one serious thing about how I got to love him so much although he never paid attention to my life, my dreams, my history. I realized I have no self esteem and that I cannot love someone who loves me (my ex boyfriend asked me to marry him and caused no effect whatsoever) because someone who loves me would pay attention to what I do with my life and as I’m not taking good care of my life I try to avoid that.
Of course I got to that conclusion after many psychoanalysis sessions!
Although I know that self esteem is the problem – as I miss the life I dreamt to have with the abuser – I have no idea of how to build self esteem.
All I know is that I have to be able to imagine a better life without him than the one I dreamt of having with him…
The recent news articles about the polygamous cult where 400+ children were removed from the compound, I think goes to this thread too about “warning” the victims.
It is obvious to me that the leader is a Delux-24 carat Psychopath, he is in prison for his part in the rape of a 14 yr old, and these victims are totally under the control of their “leaders.”
Trying to “warn them” as the law is apparently doing now, is almost impossible because they are totally and completely in the FOG, some for multiple generations. We at least had SOMETHING to base reality on, even though we let it go for a while, but these poor women who I am sure desperately love their children and are trying to provide for them the lives that they think is “right” and “good” are so devoid of connection to any reality but the one they have been taught of service to their leaders, submission, and work until you drop, that they have nothing to base an alternate (for them) “reality” on.
The Ps have so programed them that they are unable to accept “the world” outside their cult as anything but EVIL. They are raped mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. They are “programmed” as chattel, not as women or humans, but as sub humans, as slaves.
Talk about “resisting the warning”—these women are in a terrible crush between the “devil and the deep blue sea!”children as well. No matter what happens, it will leave deep scars on hundreds of children, and their mothers, all because some P wanted and acheived CONTROL, absolute CONTROL. They have so little reference to “real life” and value for themselves as anything but slaves to other’s control that “reprogramming” them is difficult at best, or impossible. What unnecessary suffering.
Affliction. They often give us warnings THEMSELVES at the beginning. My exN told me within the first 6 weeks that he had ‘Demons in a Box’! At that point I should have not hung around to question that, but i should have run a mile. When I kept probing what this meant, he changed the meaning and said it had something to do with his family history. I think he already knew how his relationships pan out and that when the ‘voices’ kick in, they kind of get possessed.
Because we are not thinking on their wavelength it is difficult to make sense of it. Also they probably get a bit of a kick in knowing that we are lined up to be their prey.
I sometimes think that inside they know they are not “right” that they are “missing something” that others have, and their confessions of their “warnings”–like the “I have demons in a box” (mine did sort of that too) is that they WANT what we have, don’t understand what it is exactly, but want it because they see we enjoy it, they reveal some of themselves (which actually are warnings) but at the same time, we then want to “fix their demons” (DUH!) so it is an odd sort of game that they play, and then after a while, they start to despise and hate us because they know that we are FEELING something they don’t and since they can’t have it for themselves, they want to “kill”us for having it. Smash us.
My son D who was around XBF-P quite a bit, and liked him at first, and was VERY happy that I had “found someone” so “right” for me—said afterwards, “If he could have loved anyone, it would have been you” It was like he really DID WANT to love, but when he couldn’t, he went back to the manipulation of his GFs and wanting a “respectable wife” to keep up the front.
Some of them I think know they are “missing something” that othrs have and they want it, search for it, but never find it, because it isn’t something you GET, it is something you ARE.
In some ways, I almost feel sorry for them, never having “it” and being what must be a lonely life, living among only people that they despise and look down on. My P-bio-father put something in a news article I still have once when he was interviewed. He preached on and on about how he was the smartest man in the world, and he felt like he was “the only human living on a planet with nothing but ‘malicious chimpanzes’.”
That would be a miserable way to live, and I don’t doubt that he really felt that way, he felt that every other human on earth was worthless compared to HIM. Stupid compared to him.
Like Ogdon Nash said in one of his poems, in some ways we are all living in “solitary confinement” inside our own skulls, and can’t ever truly touch another, or let anyone in, or go into any other person’s “cell” of bone—yet, we come so much closer than the Ps could possibly do. In a way, I think they are in solitary confinement because they can’t connect and bond properly to ANYONE else. Since “solitary confinement” is the harshest punishment that the prison systems use against humans (probably except for some physical tortures) and even the most hardened criminals and Ps will do anything to “mingle”–humans are obligate herd animals—it would stand to reason their “solitary confinement” and lack of connections would make them “mean”—manipulative—vengeful, etc.
I don’t know if any of l what I am saying makes any sense. I’m not sure it does to me. LOL
OxDrover. You so caputured the ‘feeling’ of it in your first paragraph, your description of the game they play. They know their history – their performance – they know they dont function in relationships in a normal sene (if there is one). But I tried to rescue him, because I too was a lonely child who came from a dysfunctional family (schizophrenic mum and narcissist dad) and I understood what it is to be an outsider, I have always fended for the underdog and I thought I could raise him up and give him a chance to improve himself and to have joy in his life, because I felt for him. BUT I didnt know what I was messing with. it turned out that he had a tremendous amount of manipulative power and that he had obviously known how to use that.
I felt sorry for him, because he had a solitary existence, working long hours at night alone and living alone in a squalid room – I thought I could bring him some joy – and he BIT me – I didnt expect that.
I think they do crave love and affection (my ex was always asking for me to hold him in a tender sense). But then something clicked in his head (his voices) and he began to use that affection against me – like I was mirroring that part of society that he despised – that warm part of society he so wanted but so despised at the same time. He was always mentioning the ‘voices’ and I really think that these voices plagued him and were so strong that they directed him and the more he tried to ignore them the stronger they got – is this a type of possession?
I just remembered at the start of when I knew him, he told me he had a very bad childhood and I wanted to help him. But he kept rejecting my offers of help, saying I should accept him as he was, but I kept thinking I dont know who he really is. So I kept asking him about himself, I asked him about his dreams and thoughts, BUT he kept all information about himself very closed, so I then fell into that trap of thinking I could be there for him. But he continually rejected offers of help, because I think he knew that he had a personality disorder and knew that it is not treatable, so why go through all the anxiety of sharing all that personal information if the relationship is not going to last. He carefully vetoed every aspect of the relationship, his thoughts, he never shared any form of intimacy, he said he didnt dream. Every now and again he would lead me to believe I was getting somewhere, but then I was shocked to realise that I was expending huge energy for someone who was actually travelling down a different road to me and I realised how naieve I had been and how misguided I was in my do-gooding.
Beverly, if he was indeed “hearing voices” he could have been psychotic (out of touch with reality–bi-polar or schizophrenic) as well as psychopathic. They are not mutually exclusive I don’t think–maybe they are, but I don’t think so. Liane might could answer that. Probably would also depend on HOW bad his psychosis was as well—treated or untreated, etc.
If he was talking about the “internal dialog” (our own inner voice) then he wasn’t psychotic.
Yea, “do-gooding” also called “enabling” is a lose-lose situation for both parties—that is also one of the things I have done, but funny thing, ONLY with my family members, not men I dated, or most others–only very mild form of not setting boundaries as solidly as I should, but nothing like taking on the “loser of the month” LOL I might have been better off if I had gone and picked up a homeless wino and tried to reform him! LOL rather than my P-son. LOL
I’m not sure why I pretty well confined my worst enabling behavior to family members, I’ve always been very willing to give a “helping hand” to people–have hired a lot of them to work for me here on the farm (it’s about all the help you can find now unless you want an illegal alien) but have not given them a “hand out” but a “hand up” and some of them have appreciated it, and others have stolen from me…but you know what you are getting yourself into most of the time.
I think we are all here on this forum because we were in one way or another naive, too trusting, too caring, not firm enough boundaries, etc, but good people. I don’t want to loose ALL of that, just be a bit more selective and wiser. Better able to place boundaries, and more sure of my own RIGHT to good treatment from EVERYONE in my life.
Part of it is philosophy, part is spirituality, part self-esteem, and part hard knocks that we don’t want to repeat.
I agree totally that being in a better healing state helps if you are going to warn the other person. I wish I had waited, because then I would have had more knowledge, better arguments, better rebuttals.
All he did was counter with that I was some rich woman who wanted to have an affair with him. I did send her a final note saying that we had been together for a number of years and that I was sorry that our communication had deterioriated. She may never had gotten it; she changed her e-mail during this time (probably at his request) and she is still with him. Found out that whenever he comes to town and is asked about this woman, he discounts her and says that he barely knows her and that she has been engaged for five years to the same guy.
This was also the same time that he told someone that he had lung cancer. It just never ends.
The “bad childhood” story seems to be a recurring theme with these folks. My concern is that since they lie so easily, how much can we really believe?
If the stories I have heard ARE true, then he is just perpetuating the pain done to him by others by doing just as much pain and damage to everyone else in his life.