By Sarah Strudwick
Sarah Strudwick, based in the UK, is author of Dark Souls—Healing and recovering from toxic relationships.
First of all I want to thank everyone who commented on the posts that I’ve written over the last couple of years. Recently I did a post on How to speed date a sociopath. Whilst I make every effort to move on with my life after the psychopath, occasionally something will come up that causes me to think “Why do they do that?”
So the topic of this post is whether or not any of you have experienced the following:
In my book Dark Souls, I wrote about an occasion where my ex moved my cash card. A week later I found it hidden behind a bottle of sauce on the top of a very tall cupboard in the kitchen. At the time it went missing, I asked my ex if he may have picked it up by mistake, because he used the same. He commented that I was forgetful, and asked me whether I’d left it in the freezer.
This was a very strange comment. Later, I found a book written by a psychopath about how to manipulate people, putting the victim off guard so they question their own sanity. One of the suggestion was to ask victims if they left something that went missing in a freezer!
Being a complete idiot at the time, I looked in there, just to check I wasn’t losing the plot or going mad.
More items not returned
I also lent my ex some books and a heart-shaped crystal. At the time he was leaving his wife. He promised to keep it safe. When I asked for it to be returned, I got the excuse that he had let his children play with it, and one of his small children managed to drop it out of a two-story building and broke it. The story was preposterous—why would he let his kids play with something he didn’t want his wife to see?
I was also in a relationship with a man call Dan. I was doing acupuncture, and he as asked me if he could borrow my acupuncture books and also a book on Taoism. He also borrowed a cassette of a local radio interview I’d done when I was 19 about backpacking in India. When the relationship ended, I asked Dan to send me back the books and the interview cassette. He still has them to this day, and refused to give a reason for keeping them. Looking back, I think it was his way of keeping a little trophy of me.
Happening again
I was prompted to write this is because straight after I ended the speed date, I noticed something strange. Every day I wear a necklace, which I made myself out of resin and crystals. You could call it my “security blanket,” because I always feel happy when I am wearing it. When I bathe or shower I take it off and leave it in the bathroom as the string is made of leather. Lurch commented on the jewelry I make as he saw the resin and paraphernalia on the worktops in my kitchen.
A day or so after getting my head of the washing machine with all the mind games he played, I suddenly realised I wasn’t wearing the necklace. I searched the flat everywhere but couldn’t find it. I soon realised that a photograph of me was missing as well. It was an old photograph of me when I was about 16, dressed in fancy dress and looking reasonably young, fit and attractive. My son had seen it a few days before and commented on how young I looked. The photograph had been next to the computer, but was gone.
I like to think of myself as a rational person and don’t jump to conclusions before pointing the finger. In fact, I searched multiple times only to find nothing. Whilst I cannot prove that anyone took it, these were not items of value like money. But they had a lot of sentimental value, much like the cassette and the specialist acupuncture books, which, incidentally are irreplaceable.
Trophies
I’ve read before that the psychopath likes to closet their victims, and I’ve heard stories about serial killers keeping “bits” of them as trophies. Whilst we expect the sociopath to steal our hearts, money and valuable possessions, the difference is that all these items are irreplaceable. Which begs the question that they will intentionally go out of their way to take such things, because they know how upset we will be.
I am still searching for these items, just in case I haven’t lost my marbles. Whilst it’s easy to let them go because they have no real value, the whole experience points to the potentially sick and twisted nature of their personalities and has “creeped” me out. Even with such a good understanding of psychopaths/ sociopaths, it’s still beyond all my capacity to understand what motivates someone to do something like this.
It’s for this reason that I shared this experience. I wonder if anyone else had experience the same kind of “creepy” behaviour.
Yes, mine stole under clothes and other worthless items. This could be a separate diagnoses. Nothing of real value but strange like tank tops. When I mentioned it, he said stop acting petty and bringing up the past. Crazy making at its finest.
YES. When we first started dating, he jokingly referred to his closet as his “ex-girlfriend graveyard.” Well, when helping him move, I found items of clothing in that closet he said exes had “left” at his apartment, including underwear. As I became more aware of his dangerous behavior and began trying to leave the relationship, my things started to go missing. It was always something from a significant moment: underwear I wore after makeup sex would disappear from the floor. My favorite bra disappeared from my suitcase while I was in the bathroom. On our final encounter, he stole my hairbrush from my house. After the breakup, I realized he had stolen these things and confronted him. He refused to give them back, told me he carried them in his briefcase so that “a piece of me was always with him.” Later told me he believed he was a sociopath, had fantasies of hurting people, and told me he would always come back to me, be it months or years later. CREEPY.
One of these commenters mentioned that serial killers keep trophies. My ex very strangely said, on the stand during trial sitting next to the judge, that he’s been called a serial killer. All I could think was, who in the heck has called you a serial killer?? And who says that sitting next to a judge? Well sociopaths do. And narcissists. Because they tell on themselves constantly, as we’ve seen.
So mine tried to hire a hitman to have me and our kids killed. He walked into his office and told two employees about it, who called police.
Long traumatic story, but he was not arrested for it. Police claimed they would not be able to build enough of a case.
So the day that I ended our marriage, he trashed several important items of mine including my cell phone. I knew he’d taken it, he denied it, but I found it in the trash can outside. Also there was a pair of my lace panties which had obviously been ripped in Rage, as they were stretched way out. Here’s a crazy thing, over time I found 11 more pairs. All lace ones, all ripped in Rage, and hidden stuffed throughout our house. It’s been 6 years and I found one more pair, deep deep in a corner of the closet in the storage room. Not even sure how he got it back there.
Yes. They do keep trophies. My ex spath had a locked cabinet that I found one day. In it he had possessions from all his conquests and affairs with different women. It’s a very common thing with sociopaths. But at the same time it’s weird and creepy.