Downton Abbey was on TV last night, and Terry and I are among the millions of fans. Last night’s episode (Season 3, Episode 4) ended in tragedy because of behavior that looked so familiar to me.
(Spoiler Alert: The following description gives away the story.)
Lord Grantham’s daughter, Lady Sybil, is about to give birth. Rather than depend on the local country doctor, Dr. Clarkson, Lord Grantham has imported a more socially acceptable obstetrician, Sir Philip Tapsell, to deliver the baby. As the birth approaches, both doctors are in attendance at the estate.
Lady Sybil starts acting incoherently. Dr Clarkson fears that she may be toxemic. He recommends that they rush to the hospital so the baby can be delivered immediately by C-section. Sir Philip insists that nothing is wrong—Lady Sybil is experiencing a normal childbirth. The two doctors argue in front of the entire family and the nature of the argument is why I’m describing the show.
Dr. Clarkson worries that Lady Sybil may be in grave danger, but admits that he doesn’t know for sure. Sir Philip, on the other hand, is totally confident that nothing is wrong. He never wavers. He is pompous in his confidence. He practically sneers at the country bumpkin doctor for being an alarmist, and actually tells him to shut up.
Lord Grantham notes that Dr. Clarkson isn’t sure about the possible danger, whereas Sir Philip is 100% confident that everything is fine. He sides with Sir Philip, and they do not go to the hospital.
Lady Sybil goes into labor and the baby is born. But a short time later, she goes into convulsions and dies.
Argued like a sociopath
Dr. Clarkson was right all along. But Sir Philip spoke with unshakeable self-confidence, unwaveringly certain that he knew best. He argued like a sociopath.
I am not saying that the Sir Philip character is a sociopath. But I am saying that his extreme confidence, his self-righteousness and his hubris are all traits that sociopaths display when they are pushing to get their way.
I write about this in my book, Red Flags of Love Fraud:
How do they do it? How do sociopaths convince you to go along with their agendas, even to your own detriment?
They command it. This is a function of their charisma because they command unflinchingly, with complete self-confidence, they get results. Now, this doesn’t mean sociopaths are always barking orders. Often the commands are delivered on cushions of sweetness, or camouflaged as appeals for sympathy. But in their minds, whatever sociopaths want, they are totally entitled to have. Therefore, when they make their desires known, they show no doubt, only certainty. Compliance is demanded, and targets respond.
Those of us who are not disordered usually aren’t as adamant in expressing our views, opinions or desires. We may think we’re right, but recognize that we could be wrong. We may know what we want, but we’re willing to compromise. So when we come across people who communicate vociferously and forcefully well, we tend to be bowled over. Because of the sheer force of their words, we tell ourselves that they must know what they’re talking about, they’re telling the truth, and they’re right.
My ex-husband’s convincing lies
I’m soon going to be on another TV show I’ll tell you all more when I have details. The producer asked me if I had any more video or audio of my ex, James Montgomery. Well, I found some tapes that I had forgotten about recordings of voice mails, and a recording of our first telephone conversation when I arrived home after leaving him. The tapes illustrate the steamroller tactics with which he argued even when he was lying.
Let me set the scene. James Montgomery swept into my life, portraying himself as a successful entrepreneur. He invited me to be part of his business plans, which, if I could help him get started, were sure to make us fabulously wealthy. He pressured me to lease a car for him it was in my name, and I made all the payments. To feed his unending need for money, I drained my savings and loaded about $60,000 in debt to my previously zero-balance credit cards.
Montgomery also told me he was a member of the Australian military who had heroically served in Vietnam, and still acted as a consultant, particularly on terrorism. He often flew to Florida, telling me he was stopping by MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, home of the Special Operations Command. While there, he was able to get around by borrowing the cars of other military members that were parked at the base.
In December 1998, Montgomery dragged me to Florida, saying he had a contract to open a Titanic show in Orlando. We spent money we didn’t have to move down there. A few weeks later Montgomery admitted he never had a contract. Then, while he was flying to yet another business meeting, I discovered that he had fathered a child with another woman during our marriage. I left Florida, and took the car that he had been driving.
So, here’s part of my conversation with James Montgomery when I was back at my home in New Jersey. (Warning: Contains some profanity.)
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know during the conversation. My entire marriage was a financial scam. James Montgomery was never in the military. When he travelled to Florida, he was visiting other women including, but not limited to, the mother of the child., who probably owned the car he drove.
Yet listen to how he argued about the car. I was wrong for taking the car back to New Jersey, which inconvenienced him. I was wrong about him using cars from the base. And I was stupidly ignorant about the policy for using military cars. Montgomery was adamant and self-righteous in his argument even though everything he said was a lie.
At the time, the conversation was terribly upsetting. He threw many more accusations and threats at me, which, because of the conviction of his words, made me wonder if he was right.
Later, I discovered that everything he said that day, and practically everything he said during our marriage, was a lie no matter how convincingly the words were stated.
I didn’t know someone could lie with such confidence and conviction. And that’s how I got into the entire mess.
Skylar, thanks for your open ears and for that information, although it doesn’t make much sense to me at the moment. Hopefully you will find enough time to read my thoughts. Sorry this ended up so long again.
The timing some spaths crimes or discards — setting up multiple insurance, waiting patiently for this or that clause to elapse or some legal situation to change before killing, making sure to target a marginalized person ot because the overpowering is most pleasurable that way but because that target is the safest (see the elderly ladies and their insurance fraud murders of homeless men in California — this is an utterly different overpowering imo than one driven by wrath, revenge, possessiveness, sexual jealousy. And the crucial goal was not overpowering or torturing an old homeless alcoholic or fellow Hungarian — all of that speaks to the ease and safety of the mark — but the goal was budget, bling, real estate, lifestyle, vacations, travel back to the mother country, whatever this money was going to buy.) The timing of the guy or women who doesn’t discard until they have their green card is telling. Are these people just coming to America because it is part of their plan to **** over some individual? The very fact that some grifters disappear indifferent to the question of the aftermath of their deeds (bank account clearer outers), or minimize it even to themselves, while some people are there precisely to see the pain or the life passing from the victim (Bundy), while still others are more compelled by the hunt and stalking (BTK), tells me that something is different and that anything uniting them in motivation is so far down in their reptilian brain, and so removed from their own conscious sense of what they are doing or why, that for me there is little meaning in it. some will say, yeah, smirk, I love making ninnies cry. Others will say “what? I think I’m a good person.” (Madoff) These differences exist across intelligence levels. Why do their senses of themselves differ? How is it not better for self preservation or profilers/law enforcement to have a sense of subgroups and differences. I do think some generalizations can interfere.
Cluster-B’s, a-moral, we can unite things under this label. But I can’t unite things under the same level of stupidity or intelligence and the same method of doing harm.
Now the label clusterB. That includes borderline. For some reason there is some degree of correlation between surviving abuse and borderline. I see elements of borderline in myself. See much overlap between BPD premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is chemical, and which I live free from as a side effect of estrogen blockade, and which creeps back when I go too long without the injections that are supposed to be monthly. I have heard advocates discussing the “bigotry”, in their words, that exists in the mental health field against borderline patients. I am not diagnosed as BPD, but watch for elements in myself and see it slightly more in one sibling. Does my “skin hunger” rooted in God knows what inform my fear of abandonment?
But here is something as bad for me. I had someone diagnose me with NPD. And a psychotherapist boyfriend claim that he thought that was correct, and that he himself had some. In his case, the reality is that he found me insufficiently infatuated with him. A gazillion subsequnt practictioners have told me I was not narcissitic since that time. Did I trip a bias-wire of some kind way back with that therapist? Did perhaps my first punishing brush with relationship fraud humble me? Did I maybe just get uglier? Did my SSRI help with my level of desperation?
Was my narcissism partly rooted in the fact that like people here, many other people seem bad or oblivious for their ignorance about what some experiences are like or what some of the world has in it? (I frankly think that people who say life is all in your attitude/snap out of it are idiots, people who misuse the term schizophrenia are idiots, people who like Kathy Griffin who will passionately advocate for gay people and then do standup for 20 minutes ridiculing the hoarders she sees on tv are idiots, people who think I should be thanking folks who signed up after 2006 to participate in our occupation of Iraq are sort of idiots, people who spend all their time watching football and know nothing about what’s going on in Mali right now are idiots, the stepmother breast cancer survivor who supportively said to one of us when her stepdaughter got this diagnosis that she(stepdaughter) was about to go through the hardest thing she’d ever experienced, the reason she said that is she is an idiot. And I still see people here I find more arrogant than myself)
There IS something special about most of us here because of rare and unusual experience, and that can feed our narcissism or potential for it.
So. At 27, I had a nervous breakdown. I was completely naive to the fact that I had this diagnosis, and that it would be passed on to this medical facility. I was put on a tricyclic antidepressant at a high dose which had a progressively more agitating effect on me. I paced and paced all day in the hospital, and as I got worse (actually readmitted), I was treated like some sort of hystrionic manipulator. Toward the end, as I was close to being discharged in serious distress, one of the techs met with me on her rounds and in our conversation she said that “we all met with Dr. M**** and we agreed that we weren’t going to… to…” And I asked “indulge?” and she said “yes, that we weren’t going to indulge you, and bla bla bla”
By my last day, I had a weird sensation of a pumping in my abdomen every 15(?) seconds or so. I had met with my sister and had a pass to eat at a diner with her, she had flown out to help me exit the hospital, we protected my mom and people who would blab to her from any knowledge of where I was. In this diner this discomfort and intermittent sweat waves were so excrutiating (not pain, but a discomfort I would have to call excruciating if that makes any sense), that I couldn’t concentrate on something my sister my sister was blabbing away about and decided that I would go back to the hospital, ask for my toiletries, go to the shower, and gouge my flesh off of my wrists to end this discomfort. I was so uncomfortable and unable to concentrate that all I could come up with for a goodbye note was “series of family members names, I love you and I am so sorry.”
I probably was not nearly in enough torment to go through with it. Who knows how much my sisters touch strengthened me without my even noticing. And I must have had some sort of sense of something being unfair, or just a healthy irrational 27 year olds underlying optimism, and so back at the hospital I called the therapist who had first escorted me to the hospital — and who had given me that diagnosis — and once I reached her and tearfully explained what was going on with me, she had me entrust my razor to the desk.
The following day in saying goodbye to a fellow patient I mentioned what was going on with me and the sweat and the repeated stomach pumping sensation (like how your stomach would jump if you realized you had just left $500 dollars in that cab), and he said to me “Oh, that happened to me with schnozzoryl.” (some drug I don’t remember)
Only outside of the hospital for a day did I start to understand that what was going on with me, my agitation and discomfort in combination with anxiety level, were largely external to who I really was and my body’s natural state. i stopped the medication abruptly and in two days the physical experience was already waning.
It took maybe five, seven, (?) more years for me to suddenly see that this past diagnosis must have largely influenced what ended up happening to me.
I can’t say anything here “triggered’ this memory, because I have others like it, including in a community where over time a great number of my stances or perspectives end up adopted by others or vindicated. But I mention it here as an example of one place my concern about conflation of labels comes from, as well as my concern over conflation of all clusterb with chronic liars, lovefraudsters, serial killers, child molestors. There is the potential to create great harm in the misapplication of some of these ideas to real living people who are trying to live some sort of life. Certainly my experience was not appropriate for someone who needs to try to stay functional in order to be there for family or a beloved ailing mother, either by presence or financially, or who has been able to help others in various ways — including in ways that got me used by a spath of course, but also in other ways people value me for, and in my possible role in making my most recent abuser a better member of society than he would have been without knowing me, and than he would have been if I had gotten him locked up or on a sex offender registry and cost him his job and his health insurance. I don’t think my possible suffering is a joke just because I might be clusterB. Or worse, just because I have the ability to spot it in myself (rather than delude myself how I could never do certain things or someone else mistakenly characterizes me as that. I don’t think that suffering was deserved either, just because I tested positive in someone’s eyeball evaluation for NPD. Nor do I think I should be or have ever been exterminated, seeing as clusterB’s are apparently ultimately the same as pedophiles in that author’s view. I know myself capable of bad things. Specific ones. I also know myself capable of heroic things others will fail to do, and turn away from.
(tangent: I mentioned a father’s abuse. If he didn’t have his career and now highpaying job, he wouldn’t be helping provide for his ex wife despite having no legal obligation to do so. None of this stuff is cut and dry for me. I know there are evil monsters among humans, but not all of the outrageous and disordered harmdoers I have encountered have been cartoon villains, and this is out of their mixed nature rather than deviousness)
This again was not edited. I find this exhausting. I appreciate your interest, and have noted the stuff you suggested I look at. It IS possible we will never come to agree with each other, though.
Raggedy Ann,
Narcissism is a state of emotionally arrested development.
It is like being retarded, emotionally. That’s why different spaths seem so different to you. You are looking at their intellectual development and the outward manifestation of that. Many of them are quite intelligent, but they all have the emotions of an infant. In some cases, it’s almost like they are fetuses.
The infant/fetus feels entitled to take what it wants, to be taken care of and to shit on others without any remorse. That is how it should be, because it is an infant. Spaths will develop intellectually but retain this sense of entitlement, long past the appropriate ages.
I don’t think you are BPD. Have you considered looking at the Cluster A’s? IMO, you are more likely to fit into one of those, maybe schizoid. It makes more sense to me for several reasons, but one of those reasons, is your mother. People who have a close relative who has schizophrenia, have a higher incidence of schizotypal, but you aren’t seeing or hearing things, right? So schizoid seems more likely.
You also mentioned a possible asperger’s diagnosis, I think. I would also agree with that. Aspergers looks similar to schizoid PD. But please recognize that everything looks different in women than it does in men, so you might want to research these specific disorders in women. The aspergers women who have blogs online (that I’ve read) are very empathetic and intelligent. They just have a rather black and white outlook.
Finally, there is a connection between gluten and asperger’s and also between gluten and schizophrenia. Your mention that you felt an oppressive feeling in your gut, indicates to me that you were actually having problems in your intestine, possibly caused by gluten and other food allergies.
I’ve been reading and researching the connection between schizophrenia and autism. There are lots of articles about these disorders and they often are connected to each other and to gluten (from wheat or other grains) ingestion.
http://www.sott.net/article/257165-60-Years-of-Research-Links-Gluten-Grains-to-Schizophrenia
http://celiacdisease.about.com/b/2012/05/15/maternal-antibodies-to-gluten-linked-to-schizophrenia-in-children.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/07/06/schizophrenia-autism-may-be-linked-in-families/
I gave up gluten about 20 years ago and I’m so glad that I did. I believe it helps me think more clearly and also to feel more empathy for others. 3.5 years ago, I accidentally started eating gluten again, and all my rashes came back. I couldn’t figure out why I had such terrible eczema again. It turned out, the barbecued pork I was indulging in had soy sauce, which contains wheat gluten. I gave it up 1 year ago, but I’m still trying to recover from it. Once the intestines are damaged, it takes a long time to get better.
I hope you will consider researching gluten and reading about its effects.
skylar, i just don’t see everyone being emotionally retarded as being that interesting or helpful. Sure these folk have distorted senses of entitlement, have tantrums when they don’t get what they want, have many things in common. Saying they are the same thing or their deep down limbic motivation is the same is to me like saying we are all the same thing because we all come from the big bang and are made from stars, or we are all driven by the need for sleep and food and warmth.
It’s odd that the idea of being driven by shame comes up so much, because I am used to hearing that being subjected to shame from outside or from within is tragic, is unfair, is a cruel experience. this is usually expressed with an implication of compassion for the person with the shame. Which is a controversial thing here if the person is a spath.
Thanks for the gluten tip. Carl Pfeiffer had a lot to say about gluten and schizophrenia, but elsewhere I read that his thinking has been somewhat debunked. I was an avoider for a while, and had my mother avoiding it for awhile, but she has never lived in the same state as I since she first became medicated. She stopped avoiding, and I’m not sure there was discernible effect at the time.
I have digestive trouble from time to time, and a chronic pain condition in my lower abdomen surrounding the bladder area. It doesn’t seem to correlate with wheat consumption. Nothing dietary has ever triggered sensations like the spasm/jump you would feel if you suddenly realized you had just lost $500 in a cab, or had them recurring every 15 seconds. That was unique to that one harrowing hospital experience, and did not even reappear when I had a second hospital experience where I suffered differently from a drug called buspar until it got switched to neurontin. I the one other case I know of of someone esperiencing what I was experiencing was that other guy, who attributed it to a drug as well.
Even if it had been some celiac issue, it was taken as manipulative drama and histrionics because of the label I arrived with. Rather than something to be addressed other than with “we aren’t going to indulge you in your attention-whoring” while it grew so consuming that I was contemplating draining the blood from my body to end the physical experience.
I have never been told I was schizoid in any of the years I have had contact with the mental health field or by the clinicians that are friends or family. Or by the person who administered the hours long questionaire for that childhood abuse and PTSD study. I am more likely to have some version of mild female Asperger’s.
But I see my problem *here* as precisely the opposite of what you are implying. I seem to see vast areas of grey and Escher art where others here see black vs white, (possibly false) dichotomies, or universal unifying truths. I read blanket statements and either have doubts or already know what dtata or experience my own disgreement/quibble with them is coming from.
I appreciate your interest in talking and explaining or offering possibly helpful information.
LPMarie, I hope the same for you too. And of course she might not be one as wel, and present behaviour suggests she will. There’s your genetic material too.
Yep, expath too would argue with best of them in top arrogant fashion. It was an attempt to ALWAYS bring me down. I would often just shake my head and let it go.
It was frequently in the car. What route was best? when to stop for gas? what restaurant to choose? Petty petty very petty stuff, but it was his way, he was right or life was miserable.
Donna, I also have an old tape recording of a nonsense argument where if I listen it actually makes me laugh. I don’t know why I keep it. Hopefully some day I will pitch it ALL. I sometimes think I want that little reminder in a weird day. The reminder is: Never again.
I have boundary lines now.
honestkindgiver,
it’s often in the car, isn’t it? They know they have us trapped in the car.
I didn’t know what he was, but I knew what to expect.
So I found some homeopathic mints, called “Stressed Less” and I put them in the car right before a short trip we had planned. I knew he would make me miserable, so I thought I’d try an experiment. I drove.
As I sat in the car, I grabbed a few mints and chomped on them. In true mimetic fashion, the spath couldn’t help himself, if I had it, he wanted it. He began to grab them by the handful.
Well, many people believe that homeopathics are just a placebo, but you know, you have to know what you are getting for you to believe it will cure you and spath didn’t know what these mints were.
Suddenly, he asks, “What are these?”
I responded, “They’re mints.”
“What are they for?” asked the spath.
“they are stress mints” I said, “Why?”
“because” said the spath, “They are making me feel different.”
“How?” I asked.
“I feel less stressed and I don’t like it.” said the spath.
The rest of the trip went very quietly. Nice.
Spaths always take advantage of close quarters to drive us crazy. I had decades of that experience and that day I took care of it.
Skylar & HonestKindGiver, a vehicle is a containment vessel for a spath. The first abusive exspath would use the vehicle to terrorize me by driving like a maniac and blaming ME for having caused him to become so angry. He wouldn’t stop tailgating and road-raging unless (and, UNTIL) I apologized for “making” him do it.
The second exspath would use the car to captivate his audience. He would drone on, and on, about this envisioned plan or that one – his feeble writings – ANYTHING that was about him. He tried to terrorize me using a vehicle, as well, and I recognized what he was actually doing and called him on it by saying, “Are you trying to terrorize me in this car? Either stop the car and let me out, or drive like you have some sense.”
Skylar, you are 100% spot-on that close quarters combined with isolation are the best places to conduct the crazy-making and verbal/emotional abuse.
Brightest blessings
I don’t know if anyone has experienced this, but another pattern is starting conversations and then whenever they aren’t going the starter’s way (whatever that might mean), reminding the other person that you/we aren’t supposed to talk when I’m driving, stop distracting me when I’m driving, or some more abusive version of that.
Mine complained about how I drove all the time. I have a great driving record. He is the one with the bad record. When we went somewhere I always rented the car and he would complain about my driving. I finally told him to rent the car so he could drive. Solved 2 problems. He finally payed and it shut him up. The first time he got into my little manual shift truck he immediately made a comment about how I shifted. I reminded him that as a teenager I was a little wild and always had a boyfriend with hot cars. I used to race them a little bit. Manual shifts. He was very subtle in his criticism of me. Never over the top.
Kmillercats, interesting about the manual shift – exspath used to do the SAME THING! ROTFLMAO!!!! He beat the crap out of every vehicle that we owned, and I was always very careful to treat the vehicle as a piece of machinery that required specific care.
That subtle destruction of self-confidence is almost imperceptable, isn’t it?
Brightest blessings