I am not sure why I am still shocked when people choose to blame the psychopath’s victim. I have heard that this is normal from others who have suffered from an encounter with psychopath, but I still get a bit shocked each time it happens to me. From friends, to family, to the courts, to complete strangers — people seem to want to find something wrong with me to somehow better explain to themselves how I ended up being fooled by my psychopath ex. It has been happening so long that sometimes I find myself wondering there is something wrong with me that made me ignore the red flags and believe the completely fantastic story he was telling me.
The Judgements:
This week alone, I have experienced both friends and family trying to psycho analyze me and question how I ended up with such a monster as the father of my son. I am not sure how to respond to people when they ask me absurd questions or decide that it was somehow my fault that I ended up being conned by Luc. Here are some of the things I have heard over the past year (the first two were said just this week):
1) “CQ, really”¦how did this happen? What were you thinking? I mean, please don’t feel as if I am blaming you”¦but how did you not see this coming?” – An old friend
2) ”I know what happened”¦.I think CQ must like to be controlled by an abusive man.” – A family member (behind my back)
3) ”Let’s be honest”¦you wanted a bad boy”¦so you are now getting what you asked for and deserve. My daughter, who is your age, would never be in this situation because she doesn’t like bad boys. She is marrying a man who wears suits and collared shirts.” – My Lawyer
4) ”You are not without fault here CQ, what you saw in this man”¦well, it must have been fairy dust”¦and now the fairy dust has disappeared and you are going to have to deal with him for at least the next 18 years.” – The Judge in our Custody War
5) ”You didn’t have a problem with him touching you, so you shouldn’t be so bothered that he is now touching your son.”
– Family member
My Reality:
The hardest thing for people to understand, it seems, is how a person can be conned by someone who is so clearly dysfunctional. My response to that is, “when a person’s full time job is to learn everything about you — your hopes, dreams, weaknesses — in order to exploit and con you — you will likely end up conned.” I have used the analogy before of the frog and the boiling water and in this case I can’t think of another analogy that would prove my point any better. Psychopaths control the boiling water. They know that if they threw their victims into a pot of boiling water, most people would jump right out screaming and cursing at them. Instead, they slowly bring the water to boil with the intension of burning their victims alive.
Every time I walk into court, I feel like I am holding my heart inside of my chest with my bear hands. This process, this war, with Luc has torn me apart from the inside out. Luc’s boiling water effectively ripped me apart, but sometimes I feel as if the judgement and misunderstanding I receive from those I love (and society at large) is worse. I went from being a beautiful, self confident, intelligent, and successful woman — to a victim of a completely misunderstood abuse. Luc burned me alive, but society continues to blame me as if I willingly jumped into a burning fire along side satan.
The Future:
I want my son to know his mama as the woman I was — but wiser. I dread the day when my son might join society and make judgements about what happened with his father. Will he understand how his father used my kindness against me? Will he understand why I tried to hold the relationship together even when it seemed clear to the rest of the world that it was a hopeless situation? Will he understand why I fought so hard to protect him from a man I once trusted?
It’s easy to think about all the horrible things Luc is and ignore the things that attracted me to this man. While many of the things that attracted me to Luc were not real (most of them were completely fake actually), there are good qualities in Luc. (Yes, you read that correctly) Despite the fact that my family refuses to see anything of Luc in baby boy, this is not the stance I will take as baby boy’s mother. Luc wasn’t born evil — he made choices. He took his talents and used them for evil. For example, being charming is not a bad thing if you don’t use it to manipulate and control others. Being a good actor isn’t a bad thing as long as you use it on stage to entertain instead of to lie and cheat.
I love baby boy for everything that he is and that means that I accept the fact that he is the product of what now feels like a violent emotional rape. I refuse to make my son feel bad for carrying half of the psychopath’s genes and I also refuse to lie to him. So while I kick myself every day for not paying attention to the now obvious red flags of Luc’s psychopathy, and I suffer through the constant judgements I receive from others, I would do it all over again for baby boy. I didn’t choose what Luc really is — but I will choose baby boy every day for the rest of my life.
C’queen, very good article and I think one that many of us if not ALL of us can relate to.
We are blamed for “being stoooopid” or for “wanting it” etc.
I think part of the problem though is the fact that in way too many cases two personality disordered people will hook up, then the “gasoline and fire” relationship EXPLODES…..and the losing party of the two PDs presents themselves as a victim.
I’ve heard cops talking about how they hated domestic violence calls where the man is beating the woman because many times when they try to restrain the man, the woman attacks them.
THAT is the kind of thing that gives “victims” a “bad name”—that and I think that people’s own arrogance in “MY son/daughter would never do THAT!” or “I would never do THAT”–yea, right! It makes the person who is looking down their nose at your “stoopidity” feel better about THEMSELVES.
It makes them feel SAFER.
(head shaking here) but it makes you feel worse.
One of the things I was taught as a nursing professional was to NEVER SAY to a grieving person “I know how you feel” because it is an INSULT to presume to know how someone else feels.
A few days after my husband’s death a “friend” said to me “I KNOW how you feel” and it “flew all over me”—I know she didn’t INTEND to be offensive, but she WAS very offensive with her comment. She did NOT know how I felt. She COULD not know how Ii felt because NOTHING EVEN CLOSE TO THE EXPERIENCE I had had in losing my husband the way I lost him was in her life.
Many times here on LF though we DO say “I understand your feelings” because we have been through the same HOT HELLISH FIRES WITH PSYCHOPATHS and while we may not “Know” exactly how someone else feels we do UNDERSTAND their feelings, we know WHY they feel like they do.
People on the “outside” who have not dealt with a psychopath really don’t know what they are talking about, but they THINK they do, and that’s the worst part, and they are “judgmental” about it as well.
Unfortunately, this is something that we must learn to expect and work around or ignore.
Good article C’queen!
June 2011, I sat at my mother’s kitchen table with a big swollen black eye and stitches in my face. I don’t even remember exactly what we were talking about other than that it was about my relationship, but mother looked at me and said, verbatim —
“I never knew you were so desperate for a boyfriend that you were willing to be abused.”
I’m truly disgusted by people’s comments. Each time I loose my respect for them and I think they are so stupid. (my anger goes off again…)
I’m not a very christian person, but the words of Jesus: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” suddenly strikes another meaning to me.
Well, the best comment I’ve got from several friends and family are:
“Ok, so you got raped. You let it happen.” and then they laugh at me.
WTF???!!!! Yeah sure I did it just for the fun of it! IDIOTS!
Capqueen,
There’s always an ignoramous in the room! You are not flawed, failed or any other word against you.
I looked in the mirror and had some insight last night and I know I am going to be looking through my eyes with wisdom as I age and that was alot better than the sadness I have been seeing.
I, too, thought the world was more evolved than that. I have had the same stuff flung at me. It hurts but with time you will feel they just don’t get it no more than you could understand being paraplegic or something.
The parents of my high school 18 year long spath came to my door 20 years later and apologized to me saying they never wanted to believe it was their son. It was too little too late as I was hurt by all of them but it was bitter sweet and validating and I did appreciate their efforts.
My father said to me when I was fairly young “I could see your sister going through this but not you” after a DV incident. I said, “I guess we’ve found my weakness”. It was true. It was more about how I was programmed and less about “smarts”. My choices were more about empathy and non-judgement than about IQ. Remember the “type” of women who are targetted.
As far as your son goes, you just need to be you. The most terrifying part of my 10 year old daughter being forced to meet her bio-hazard dad, was that I protected her innocense and I knew it was about to be stolen at age 10! It was. But she is wiser for it. I would have laid my life on the doorstep of that courthouse to stop it from happening as my fears were much like yours. I felt I had failed her by protecting from who and what he was. Now I was ordered not to speak of what he IS or it would be PAS. We went through a lot of tears and talks in the past 3 plus years. She hates him. It isn’t because of me. It’s due to his determination to tear me down in her eyes to bring himself up. Maybe I should thank him someday. As your chlid gets older, he will be wiser than the kids who don’t know of these types. He will see kind smart girls falling for the spaths in training at school. He will know what happened to you and he will understand.
I make sure to let my daughter know, it’s not her fault and I stress the fact that she got all his “good genes”. I also let her know she has been raised differently than he was or I was which I find empowers her to stand as her own person. Every sane court psychologist has loved my daughter and speak of the bond we have and how she articulates her feelings better than a professional. You are going to have these opportunities too. The childhood trauma specialist I took her to said my daughter totally sees who and what her father is. All I cared about was the affect this all was having on her. I have also seen my clients raise sons from birth out with a psycho on their butt the entire time and they love their mamas. You will see.
If you buy any of those ignoramouses christmas gifts, make it “snakes in suits” or “sociopath next door”. It may just scare the crap out of them…….
Queenie,
I went through many of the issues that you’re facing.
For starters, what I told my son depended on his age. When he was younger, say six through twelve, I would tell him that right now, Daddy chooses not to make us a part of his life. Why? I do not know, but for now there is nothing that we can do about it.
I was extremely cautious with what I said to him because I did not want to give him false hopes or impressions.
I made sure to add, “If Daddy changes his mind and wants us in his life, we will consider it, but we cannot forget that Daddy has hurt both of us and how much. You are safe when you are with me. I will protect you. Before I let him near either of us, I need reassurances from him that isn’t just to hurt us again and that he has really changed. If he can prove that to us, then we will welcome him and include him in our life.”
One of the things that you are up against, as you will discover as your son gets older, is he has a fantasy of his own that if he just says or does the right thing, Daddy is going to love and want him some day.
We saw a prime example of that with my son’s oldest half-brother. He got an apartment in the same neighborhood as their father thinking if he lived close enough, Daddy would visit, want him to visit, and they’d have a relationship. It doesn’t matter if he lives in the same house or on the moon. The man doesn’t care about his children.
Phrasing things very carefully protects your child. My son now understands that his father, his aunt, my P sister, and my S mother, were born bad. He understands that they are all missing the part of the brain that governs remorse, compassion, and empathy and that the part of the brain that remains drives them to hurt others and they don’t care.
Teaching my son this enabled him to give up the fantasies that he must have done something wrong, that there must be something bad about him that makes these people not want to love him, and that some day this will all be over, everybody will love each other, and we’ll be one big happy family. That’s not true. It will never happen. Explaining things to my son in this way has made no contact much easier.
I was very careful not to badmouth his father in front of my son and I was adamant that nobody else ran his father down in front of him either.
Children absorb things incorrectly and one of those things is if they hear that a parent is bad, then they must be bad as well so I wasn’t setting this boundary because of any love for the P; I was doing it out of love for my son. I knew he was going to have daddy issues later in life.
Anything that I could do to mitigate those issues now I was willing to do. You need to reassure him that he is safe with you and you will protect him to the extent that you can. Since I cannot anticipate everything that they might do, we can protect ourselves by recognizing them for what they are, accepting that they lie, and having no contact.
I was very fortunate that my son’s paternal grandmother saw his father as I did. She despise him for hurting his children the way that he did. They were her grandchildren. She was very good to my son when he was alive and very loving to both of us. I used to call her “the best mother-in-law I never had.”
My son is now 19. My P sister attacked us when my son was 14 and drove him to thinking that suicide was his only solution to dealing with the family. He was hospitalized twice within nine months for suicide ideation. Other things happened as well.
Fourteen was a little young to let him know that yes, these family members were born bad, but it was necessary. He didn’t buy it immediately, but he certainly gets it now. In fact, he nicknamed my sister “Satan’s Daughter.”
People are going to say all sorts of crap to you and about you. Believe it or not, there are also going to be people who have drawn the same conclusions that you have, have seen the bad behavior, believe you, and support you.
If somebody had made a comment to me that suggested touching my son inappropriately was all right on any level, that person would have been immediately out of my life.
You cannot change what people think. You can control who you are willing to listen to and include in your life. If you take anything away from what I am saying here, please take away that last sentence.
I had to choose between protecting my precious son’s life or pleasing people around me. It was no contest.
To this day I will make no apologies for doing what I think is right or best for my child.
As far as the Ps go, I will believe it is finally over with them when they are dead and buried or put away in prison for life.
G1S
I full on agree with what you said. I have done the same and while my daughter is 13 and the hormone party is just starting, we are doing well at this time. I used the word “choices” a lot. I made choices, he made choices and so on. I was advised to do this. I also had learned through many years of counseling that my feelings were not up for debate and are mine. Same for others feelings. That seems to have been a very good lesson in our lives for my daughter as she’s aware of something I wasn’t which was “you MAKE me feel like this or that”. Um no I cannot MAKE you feel anything.
There are a few other things but I also did not speak poorly of her father and didn’t allow anyone else to either. She did get impressions I feel that people who cared for me didn’t care too much for him for some reason.
They will be wiser.
Eralyn,
Right you are.
Another thing to get over is fairness. This has nothing to do with fairness. Ps do not do what they do out of fairness, ergo, we didn’t (and cannot) do anything that causes others to act the way that they do. We ran up against that when my P sister and S mother attacked, and also with the courts, e.g., the courts wouldn’t decide…
Yes, the courts would decide because they can’t be bothered to ascertain the facts and the court system is terribly flawed.
Ask your teenager to point out what you could have possible done wrong to deserve what happened or the pain that either of you experienced. My son couldn’t think of anything. I told him that’s because these people don’t need a reason. The way their minds think they hurt others just for the fun of it, like kids who bully other kids in school. That helped him get it.
We still have contact with some family members, but they are very few. My S mother and P sister did a good job spreading their venom about me and nobody bothered to ask for my side of the story. The relatives who listened to them are from my mother’s side of the family.
It turns out, once I started talking about what they did, that my father’s side of the family doesn’t care much for my mother at all and never did. My father’s side of the family is much smaller than my mother’s so that’s why we have contact with so few of our relatives.
What I did that helped my son a lot was tell him to envision our family all riding in a plane that crashed and burned with no survivors. That does happen in real life and people learn to make new lives without these people. That’s what we need to do and what we have did. We’re several years out now from that decision. Our lives are calm, happy, and if an issue pops up, which it has from time to time, we can deal with it swiftly. We cannot keep them away, but we know what to do to send the message that they are not welcomed in our lives.
I take after my father’s side of the family both in appearance and personality, as does my son, so that helps him a lot establishing a base of where he belongs.
I read a book by Kevin Hearne a few weeks ago. One of his more astute observations came from Oberon the dog: “But you said this is America, where opinions are shouted as facts and facts are dismissed as mere opinions.” (I had to paraphrase. Sorry if I didn’t get it exactly right.)
There’s something about our society today that makes folks think as though it’s their God-given right to weigh in on any matter, regardless of how much a person actually knows.
I have had a similar experience with telling people I have fibromyalgia. Even total strangers tell me it’s because I’m not taking care of myself. I stopped telling people unless I absolutely have to.
Coralducky,
There are still medical professionals who do not believe that “fibromyalgia” is “real” and ones who do not believe in “Chronic fatigue” but that doesn’t mean they are not real.
I frequently remember that there was a time when essentially Columbus was the “only” one in the world who believed it was round, but that did NOT CHANGE THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD.
Truth is truth and facts are facts, even if you are the ONLY one in the world to believe them. We must learn to validate ourselves.
G1S,
That’s great advice.
When my daughter felt like this was all her fault and became suicidal and self harming for a short stint, I said to her, “can you make this stop?” She said, ‘no”. I said, “there’s the proof it is not you”. I also spoke to her this way when she was younger about why her dad left her or she didn’t have a dad. I was hearing things like “was I a good baby?” and I had a feeling she was wondering if she ran him off. I said to her she was the best baby I could’ve hoped for or dreamed of. I also told her from time to time there’s no way we can make anyone stop doing something we don’t like any more than we can make them do something we want.
That childhood trauma counselor said she would probably have the hardest time understanding rejection from the extended family not knowing why they didn’t “pick” her and stood by him.