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.
The XNP used to acuse me of being “crazy, nuts, a whack job, etc.” I found my self second guessing everything as a result. He would acuse me of all kinds of things that were not true such as cheating, spending his money, taking food out of our kids mouths because I paid child support for my eldest from my previous marriage. Nothing I ever did was ever good enough or was ever going to be…even though I did everything and paid for most of our bills. He rummaged through my things and even went into a purse I kept in my trunk which had a checkbook that was my mothers (that I had access to) and tried to gain interest in the account when we divorced knowing it was my mothers money. You mentioned trophies, he knew nothing meant more to me than my children so he did everything in his power to gain custody once the divorce was finalized…He is a sick and demented individual who is violently abusive labeled with intermittent explosive disorder, BDP, Narcissistic, depressed, adjustment disorder, etc.. This man went so far as to have me killed which was all caught on tape by the local police in 2007-he was never charged for the crime due to obstruction of justice. He has utilized my children to traumatize me as he has total control over whether or not I can visit or even speak to them on the phone. He is in the process of taking me to court to have my parental rights terminated or get my visitation supervised….It is only through the grace of God that I breathe because I would sure not call this living, knowing what my children have been subjected to 🙁
I hear that alot, that healing is a journey and not a destination. My feeling is that what is broken or scarred sometimes isn’t able to be altogether repaired. What I can do is accept that and be ok with loss, scars, what is broken, and incorporate that into my feelings and be ok with that.
I’ve spent many years rescuing horses, and some were so emotionally damaged by abuse they had walls that would not come down regardless; a little trust would peek through at times in varying degrees and at certain moments here and there, but scars were so deep much emotional damage was permanent and nothing was going to tear down those walls. I accept and love those horses’ broken and unreachable places, and it has helped me accept my own broken places. I do, however, have to reach into my unreachable places because I can’t offer healing if I don’t reach in and make even the most terrifying memories and feelings ok and accept my own scars. I’m a realist. I’m never going to be the person I once was after what I experienced, but I can accept that. The horses have also been instrumental in showing me that it’s ok to be “not healed.” The amount of love which is shared, and the unconditional love and respect for the broken places seems to be all that matters in the moments, and there is no destination. There’s only love and acceptance for what is. I call that a bulletproof heart.
What?! You rescue horses?! Ancient, we should be writing YOU for advice and comfort! I can’t think of a more healing activity, have done some work myself but had to abandon family home in mtns and am now close in town. Send for me and I’ll be both rescuee and rescuer.
Disclaimer: I am 60 now so 15 hands is about max. 🙂
Hello to all. I am a new “poster” to Love Fraud although I have been reading the articles and reader comments on this site for about a year now. I am very grateful to LoveFraud and all of you for helping me to understand what psychopathy and narcissism is and this has helped me more than anything else to understand who and what my ex-husband is. It is because of all of you that I now realize that I am not the crazy one and I am not alone.
I was married to him for 24 years and we had one daughter together. It was not a happy marriage and over the years I saw many “red flags” but at the time, I did not recognize them for what they were.
There is no doubt that he “love bombed” me when we were dating and I believe now that he targeted me as “the one he was going to marry”. I was so flattered by all of the attention he gave to me, the expensive gifts, flowers, constant notes and cards. We had only been dating a few weeks when he showed me a journal he had started and every entry in it was about me. It was obvious to me that he was extremely proud of his journal and he wanted to make sure that I knew that I was in it. He wrote….”the first time I saw her walk in the office, I told God, I’m going to marry her.” Knowing what I know now, that should have been a huge red flag to me, but I was so flattered by it and thought that he was a deeply spiritual 30 year old man who knew what he wanted. He told me right away that he knew I was his soul mate. After the first time we had sex, he wrote in his journal…..”God blessed us last night”.
Right away we seemed to have so many things in common, and my impression of him was that he was a man of high integrity, loved God, was well educated and extremely driven. I was very attracted to his energy, his charm, his wit, he was interested in so many things and was very easy to talk to. On our first date, I learned that he graduated from Auburn University, he had two Masters Degrees, and he was a former Air Force officer. He also told me that he was in the Green Beret. He broke down crying at one point and told me that on one of his “missions,” he had shot and killed a young boy. I could see how deeply he was affected by this and I never spoke to him about it again during our entire marriage. He also told me that he was previously married to a woman he had met in the military, that she was an “enlisted” and because he was an officer, he chose to get out of the military so that they could marry. (I always wondered about that because he loved the military and wanted to make it his career.) He told me that after a few years into their marriage, he had come home early from a business trip and caught her in bed with another man. He told me that she served him with divorce papers on his birthday (he thought that was so cruel), but that he did not want the divorce. I believed it all.
To this day, he is the most convincing person I have ever met. He comes across like an “All American,” boy next door type of guy, but he is anything but. He has very few male friends and those that he has he uses. He never socializes with men unless it is for business or will help him with his career. I asked him once why he doesn’t have any friends or ever wants to get together with his “so called” friends, and he told me that he doesn’t need friends. However, he has always had many female friends over the years.
He asked me to marry him after one month of dating, and he promised me “the wedding of my dreams” and that I could have anything I wanted.
I began to plan the wedding and it bothered me that he did not want to be involved and he would get very irritated and sometimes just blow up when I tried to talk to him about it or involve him in any way. He would explode if I even asked him for his opinion. His explosions seemed to come out of nowhere and would always catch me off guard. It shocked me to see him get so angry over something that should have been so personal and joyous for both of us. I learned very quickly not to say anything that I thought might push one of his buttons…I just didn’t know what those buttons were. I struck it up to “wedding nerves” or job stress. In the end, we ended up having a very small wedding, because he suddenly didn’t have the money to pay for it. He wasn’t interested in hiring a photographer or having a video made of our special day (which I never understood), but he did want me dressed in a beautiful dress (which my mother paid for), he wanted Chamber music, and he wanted us to drive away in his Rolls Royce. Nothing else about the wedding mattered to him, including meeting any of my friends or relatives who had travelled a great distance to be there, or spending time with any of my family.
We did not have a honeymoon as he didn’t want to take any time off of work, so we spent one night in a cheap, local hotel after our wedding. I knew that night, after we had sex, that something was very wrong. I remember putting all of my heart into it and feeling nothing from him. He was emotionally vacant and he put no effort or thought into making it a special night for us. The next morning, he was eager to leave the hotel and get back to our condo. I was so deeply hurt by this and how little our time meant to him.
From that day on, he was a different person and treated me totally different. He rarely did anything with me and showed no interest in spending time with me. He never did anything that I wanted to do, such as have a date night to the movies or a romantic dinner out. He thought it was a waste of money. If I talked him into seeing a movie with me, he would complain and be so awful the whole time that I couldn’t wait to get back home. He hated spending money on time together, but he didn’t think twice about spending money on his cache of guns, his collectible cars, militaria, and other things he collected. He did buy me some nice jewelry over the years, but I began to feel as if he just wanted to dress me up so that he could look successful. I never felt like they were gifts from the heart. In fact, soon after we were married, he started to complain about the way I dressed, the color of my hair, my shoes, my nails, everything. Little by little he chipped away at me until I changed my hair color for him, wore only red nail polish, had my teeth straightened, and dressed in clothes that he picked out for me which were always, grey, khaki, army green or black. The funny thing is, he told me when we first met that he was so attracted to me and that he loved all the bright colors that I wore.
He did all the right things in front of people and could be very charming, but at home, he was a totally different person. He would get very irritated with my daughter or me if we laughed out loud. It really bothered him to hear us laugh. He had absolutely no sense of humor, but if others were around, he would turn on the wit and charm and could actually be quite funny. That is the only time my daughter and I enjoyed being with him. He kept us so off balance all the time because we saw two different sides of him….the way he was at home, and the way he was in public. He could never laugh at himself and he would get very angry with us if we poked fun at him. He was ultra sensitive if people did not take him seriously. He was very critical of everyone (to us) and was always saying terrible things about people.
He spent our entire marriage earning more and more degrees. He currently has 3 masters and 2 doctorate degrees, even though they will do nothing to help further his career in the construction business.
I could go on and on and give you so many examples of our how difficult he was to live with, but that is not the reason why I wanted to write today.
The original article from Sarah Strudwick is about “creepy trophies”. My ex had a large photo album that contained only women that he had known through the years. Page after page of different women, all young and very attractive. Some photos I could tell were old, probably from high school and college days. When I asked him about it in the early years of our marriage, he said they were all “just friends,” but I always thought it was so odd to have an album with ALL women friends, and no men. Shortly before we were divorced, I took the photo album out and noticed that he had put one photo of me in the book along with all of the others. When I was going through his clothes closet, I found a file folder that contained two photos of his first wife on their wedding day that he had kept hidden from me throughout our entire 24 years of marriage. There was also an envelope in the folder that he had written down the names of about 15-20 women. Two of the names I recognized as his old high school girlfriends, but the others I had no clue who they were. Why does he need to keep a list of women, I wondered, and what do they mean to him? Why did he keep a photo album of only the women he’s known in his life? I found another envelope, a padded one, that contained lots of photographs of the same girl, who I knew to be his old high school girlfriend. On each one he had written a note to her on a post-it note saying things like…”this photo of you went to war with me”, and on another one “love those long legs of yours”. There were also newspaper clippings about her marriage, awards she had won, and other misc articles about her. One was a clipping of her mother’s obituary, which had a date on it the year after our daughter was born. Obviously he was obsessed with her and had collected these things throughout our entire marriage. Finding all of these things, the photos and notes to her, the envelope with the handwritten names of women, and his photo album with all the women was very concerning to me and I began to wonder if he was a stalker or a predator. Were they his trophies?
By the way, I divorced him because I learned (by way of Facebook), that he was having an affair with a woman who had no idea that he was married. She has two teenage daughters and a 10 year old autistic son. It is a long story but another woman (whom I had never met), contacted me on facebook and told me that he had been seeing this other woman and the story that he had told her was that he wasn’t married, that I had divorced him years earlier and had taken all his money, that our daughter is not his, and that he was a current Green Beret officer and had to leave to go away on various “missions”. I asked her why she contacted me to tell me this since she didn’t know me, and she said it was because she couldn’t allow him to get away with it again; he had done the same thing to her. She told me how to get in touch with the woman he was currently seeing and so I called her and told her who I was and asked her if she was seeing my husband. She confirmed everything and was devastated by this revelation. I am sure that he targeted her because of her autistic son. When I confronted him, he told me that she was “just a friend” and he was only trying to help her and her family, and he denied any wrong doing. I called her and asked her to send me some kind of proof that he was having an affair with her. She sent me 7 letters that he had written to her at Christmas time. All of them were written from our home over the holidays. In the letters, he spoke of his undying love for her and told her that he was away on a “mission” in Texas and it was Christmas morning and he had soldiers to feed. He told her about having a fear of being alone in the dark and that only another soldier would understand what its like to be shot. When I asked her about that comment, she said he had told her that he had been shot in the shoulder on one of his missions. He had even shown her the scar on his shoulder. I told her that his scar was caused by a football injury when he was in college. She and I spoke many times over the next few weeks and compared notes. I learned that he too had broken down in tears with her on their first date and told her about the boy that he shot. She said he was also very quick to share his personal journal with her and showed her all the things he had written about her. She told me she was so touched when he wrote of how God had blessed them when they had sex for the very first time. Amazing that 24 years after he pulled that line on me, he is still using it to woo his women. It’s so sick.
She broke up with him immediately after finding out he was married, but she and I remained in touch. She still had a key to his place and she and a friend broke into his place months later, as she wanted to retrieve some photos he had of her and her daughters. She said she found piles of letters and cards that he had sent to her and to other women, and some that women had sent to him. He had made photocopies of them all and had them in neat, organized piles. She told me that he had told her once that he always kept a copy of every letter and card he sent to her because they were so special to him. More “trophies” for his collection?
He stalked her for many months, showing up at restaurants and movie theaters where she was at, and even showing up outside her door at 2 and 3:00 in the morning. He did this at the same time he was trying to persuade me not to divorce him, promising me that he had cut off all contact with her. He had no idea that she and I were talking to each other. I did not tell him because I was worried that he might hurt her if he found out.
It is now two years later since I first learned of his affairs and one year since our divorce, and to this day, he still has shown no remorse for what he has done or what he put my daughter and me through. He has told everyone he knows that I was the one who had an affair and that I wiped him out financially. He has never once admitted to me of his affairs. He begged me not to divorce him and told me he did not want to lose his family. He even called me one day and asked me if the life insurance policy was paid up, that he had a gun to his head. I told him to go ahead and pull the trigger.
He is a very intelligent man and extremely convincing with his lies and deception. He has fooled many people over the years, men and women alike. The story he is currently telling people is that he has prostate cancer which I know for a fact is another lie. He was just recently fired from his latest job and he is already telling me that he is out of money and will not be able to send me alimony. He has everyone feeling so sorry for him. In the last 13 years, he has been fired from every job he has had. For fraud, over billing, working without having a contractor’s license, stealing business, etc. He denies everything, of course. He is never in the wrong, and always the victim. His ex-partner told me that all of the staff was afraid of my ex because of his explosive temper and Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde personality.
He makes no bones about how much he despises his mother. He did not like my mother either for reasons I will never understand. She was always very kind to him and accepted him into the family with open arms, but he treated her with such disdain and barely spoke to her. He hated for me to spend time with my family and he would act so horribly whenever I had them over that I rarely had them over, for fear of being embarrassed by him. He was the same way with my friends and I was always having to turn down invitations from other couples, always having to make an excuse for him. On the rare occasion that I did accept an invitation, he would suddenly become too ill to go.
My 17 year old daughter doesn’t understand how her Dad could abandon us and she feels like he has rejected her. Although he sends her texts on a regular basis, they are always the same message, and she doesn’t respond to them because she doesn’t know what to say. He says things to her like this….”Thinking about you and my prayers cover you today.” Last year he saw her only one time. He lives in another state but that should not stop him from seeing her. She has developed so many health issues in he past two years and sees a therapist and psychiatrist regularly. He calls me to complain that she doesn’t respond to his texts, but he never asks how her health is, how she’s doing in school, etc. It’s always all about him.
My attorney told me the first time I met with her that she thinks my ex is a psychopath. That was shocking to hear because I had always thought a psychopath was a Charles Manson type. I do not know if he is a psychopath or not, but I do know that he is extremely narcissistic and impossible to live with. He lies so convincingly , he deceives, he plays on everyone’s pity, he pretends to be a Godly person and uses it to get people to trust him, he is never wrong, he is always the victim, he is a possessor and I believe he views women as only objects, he is emotionally vacant, and relationships mean nothing to him. And he is incapable of empathy, although I have seen him fake it.
A friend of mine saw his profile on a dating website recently and showed it to me. I can see what he does to lure women by the carefully crafted words that he uses. He uses his military career making sure to highlight that he was a Green Beret, he talks about being a family man and that he loves all children and grandchildren, he writes about being a man of God and church is very important to him, he posted a pic of himself shirtless (he is also a body builder), He posted a pic of the cabin he lives in (rents) because he knows how charming it is and that women love it. He talks about how educated he is and he says he lives by the motto “I will leave no man behind”.
I just wish I could understood why he does these things. I wish I could understand who he is and know how to explain it to my daughter. This has been so hard on her and she just doesn’t understand how a father could not love his daughter. I will never understand it.
Thank you for letting me ramble on and on.
Kim, that’s a terrifying experience that you posted – it’s not so much “off-topic,” either. It goes to show the lengths that some of these people will go to in order to mark their territory. Breaking into someone’s home?! EGAD – what a sense of entitlement this guy has! And, that kind of disorder is quite dangerous, IMHO.
Skeery, skeery…..and, how would one go about protecting themselves from someone like that? When I was being stalked and harassed by the former business partner, the police actually said to me that, unless a clear threat of harm had been made, I didn’t have much of a chance of seeing him charged. Well, this went all over me because scattering nails, screws, and other small sharp objects around my vehicle was enough of a threat to me! And, when the windshield wiper was disabled, this was also a threat to my safety – the bolt holding the arm onto the wiper motor had been removed and the wiper simply stopped working in the midst of a blinding snowstorm and the mechanic that examined it said that he had never seen anything like this in the 15 years that he’d been working on cars.
Stalking and trophy-keeping are one and the same type of behavior. It’s to keep the conquest of the victim fresh and alive for their own entertainment.
Brightest blessings
SouthernGirl, welcome to LoveFraud and I am sorry for your experiences.
Most people associate sociopathy with individuals like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy. But, the fact is that the greater majority of sociopaths NEVER see the inside of a jail cell, much less a prison. They are everyday people: mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, supervisors, coworkers, religious/spiritual leaders, and even our own children.
Brightest blessings
EDIT ADD: There’s no easy way to explain to your daughter what’s wrong with her father. Telling her details about what he’s done won’t help until she is much older – old enough and mature enough to process the information. From my experiences, telling the truths to a child who is the product of a sociopath can cause more harm than it can help. There is a trauma-bond (typically) between a socipathic parent and their offspring that is nigh-on-impossible to break. The child must come to their own conclusions, right or wrong, in their own time. “Some people just don’t care,” is the most truthful, honest, and benign response that a parent can provide. “HE doesn’t care about you,” may be TRUE, but it’s a horribly painful truth that a child simply cannot process – they do not have the benefit of maturity and Life’s Experiences to help them to process an ugly truth like that.
Dear southerngirl thank you for sharing your story with us. Your ex husband is a text book psychopath, God bless you and your daughter as you come to terms with the aftermath of the realisation that he is profoundly disordered, great to read that you broke free and divorced. My experience is of being the woman who was told by my abuser that he and his wife were seperated and divorcing, I was the love of his life, his angel, in his prayers, we were to marry this June etc etc. In reality he was living with his wife and son, writing me endless bs filled cards and notes, calling me from their bedroom emailing me day and night under her nose. Mine sexually assaulted me and has harassed me by text email and phone including christmas day since I saw the light and tried to end all contact in november. I’ve now been no contact for 18 days with much support from the wonderful people at LF and by praying like my life depended on it. I’m struggling over whether to inform his wife and your post was very relevant for me many thanks and peace and love on your journey to recovery
TeaLight, congratulations on 18 days!
Out of curiosity, did you ever file a formal complaint of the sexual assault? I only ask because I endured spousal rape with the first abusive exspath, and I never filed a complaint because of my intense shame-core. I wish (in retrospect) that I had.
Brightest blessings
Thank you Truthspeak! One week felt like a considerable acheivement, and two weeks too felt very significant. The past few days have felt less like an acheivement and more and more like a hour by hour struggle, I have been itching to listen to the voicemail messages he’s left and which I just recorded without listening too, and to look at emails and the text which came last Fri, all of which I did not even read. A little voice in my mind keeps saying – just read and listen top find out where his mind is at; I guess I feel out of control and don’t know what his next move will be.
Maybe there will be no more attempts by him to contact me. But my gut says there will be. Since the ‘relationship’ started there has never been this long without me responding to him. He is so controlling and obsessive that I think there will be more to come and it makes me very uneasy. I suppose I think that reading and listening to the messages will give me insight into where his head is at and help me prepare, but that might be me kidding myself – maybe what I want is the illusion, I realise that’s a possibility and I need to be alert to that.
I’m still wiating for the referal to the SV organisation to result in an appointment with one of their workers, so I can ask for someone to accompany me to the police. The thought of making any kind of report terrifies and shames me, as you appreciate.
I’m very torn, daily, hourly, between ” no contact of any kind, forget him” and ”send the letters to his wife, she has a right to know, and go to the police”. I go back and forth back and forth. It’s tiring.
Thanks for your support truthy, as ever x
TeaLight, strong ((((HUGS)))) to you, seriously. You’re doing FINE, sweetie. It’s “normal” to vascilate back and forth, but the key is to avoid the temptation to take any action other than legal action. Letting his wife know all about him isn’t going to help her, on any level. I have no doubt that she already “knows” what she’s dealing with, but that she’s probably so trauma-bound to him that she may not believe that she has options.
I’m very, very proud of your choice to file a complaint, even if it’s going to take some time to get it done. I know (and, I mean that I truly KNOW) how frightened you’re feeling – it IS scary, TeaLight. But, as a victim-slash-survivor, you will have a host of resources available to assist you, including legal help, etc.
Today, replace that false sense of “shame” with a feeling of power and accomplishment. It is NO easy task to face these devastations, and it takes tremendous courage to get where you are, right now. There will be challenging and daunting times, ahead, but those are bridges to cross when they come into view – try every technique to avoid any attempts to “predict” outcomes, here. Just take it one day at a time, and (when necessary) one minute at a time.
Good for you, TeaLight. Yes – your LoveFraud ID name is appropriate!!! You are your own brilliant light on your Healing Path.
Brightest blessings