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.
Tea Light:
I don’t have the money bug either and the last paragraph of your post is what happened to me. I didn’t learn how to survive in that corporate environment; I couldn’t adapt; I was miserable and then spath came along and I was done.
Do you know that the attorney I saw even said to me that because so many people come to see her from my former company, she has realized that the culture there is such that if you don’t fit in or FIND A WAY to fit in, you are an outcast and she is absolutely correct. I always felt like a square peg in a round hole there and I was never able to figure it out…never able to find a way to make myself fit. I’m not loud, flirtatious, “look at me” type of person (this was OW…she wasn’t necessarily loud, but extremely flirtatious and she was sought after by men despite being married…that tells me something right there). Anyway, she is an example of someone who MADE herself fit. She was going to do whatever it took to make it and she has.
Tea Light;
Your post exactly describes my experience working on Wall Street for a well-known Swiss Bank. Senior management was ruthless, always looking for somebody to blame for their mistakes. I never fit into the culture, and I became their scapegoat.
Interestingly, as long as I was useful to them, they kept me, albeit without any bonus. Once their treatment of me resulted in serious health consequences to me, I became viewed as a liability and I was illegally terminated.
Thankfully, I had the strength and determination to fight back and own a significant settlement form them.
Unfortunately, all of the corrupt and incompetent senior managers ended up better off when they left the firm, including a dim-witted managing director who was fired, but of course Wall Street never really fires managing directors. She decided to “pursue other options” and was given a very, very generous severance package.
Privately, these types hate each other. Publicly and to each other, they are all best friends. They have no problem hiring former “colleagues” when they move on, with the thinking that one hand washes another later on.
Sadly, may firms actually cultivate these types, with the thinking that self-serving individuals will rise the firm with them. Jon Corzine, the former CEO of Goldman-Sachs and governor of New Jersey is a very good example. But even better, the simple fact that save for Bernie Madoff and a scant few others, no major players in the financial crisis of 2008 were ever prosecuted.
They care of their own.
One comment, Stalin was a full-blown Psychopath…
BBE:
So good for you that you fought them and got a settlement. If they settled with you, they knew they were wrong. You have read my story that I waited too long and I think I will always regret that. They most likely would have also settled with me.
Louise,
I hope that there will be a time when you will be grateful for that, rather than regret it.
It just depends on what we do with the experience. I’m hoping so, anyway.
BBE-
Me thinks that government and the financial world are increasingly fertile grounds for nurturing sociopaths.
I see it all the time in state and local politics.
Hi, Truthspeak!
You wrote:
” When I was in the throes of the aftermath (about 10 months), I journaled and closed the book after I would write. I don’t know why I did it that way, but I think that I didn’t really want to acknowledge those feelings, at that time ”“ I simply wasn’t “ready” to read my own writings.
About 2 months ago, I picked up the first journal book ”“ the one that began after the exspath left. It was almost surreal in that I don’t recognize that person as being ME ”“ if that makes any sense. I definitely recall the anxiety, angst, fear, panic, desperation, etc”..you bet I do! But, as I was reading the words, I could not imagine who this tortured person was. It was almost like being completely detached from that agony.”
Writing really seems to help. It played an enormous part in the relationship I was in and it continues to be a daily excercise.
Ironic that my spath ex-gf gave me two diaries in the early days of our ‘relationship.’ It did not take long to begin noticing and recording the signs that I should have pegged as Red Flags. But I was just too, too ‘in Love.’
While we were physically seperated for three months in 2011 we continued to write to each other. These were some of the best times I had with her! There was always a sense of anticipation in waiting for a response. The discussions were I thought, frank and honest. And there were realizations and I thought, ‘understanding.’ This led to our rejoining on the day after the anniversary of our first date.
And as things unravelled – and even to now, the volume of writing I have done is enormous!! There is probably 1,000 emails and texts and over 200 pages, single-spaced, of my thoughts and observations.
Looking back now, the instances of deceit and ‘crazy-making’ hit me every few days. They have enough force that I feel traumatized as well as ashamed and stupid. My reaction is usually: “‘Normal people DON’T do those things to other people! People DON’T do those things to the one they love!”
I must have been deluded or blind to just let it happen to me!
She kept telling me to trust, trust and TRUST, her! But what she did and said was antithetical to building trust. How did she not see that? Why the set-ups? As, for instance, spending a romantic evening on the beach while the full moon rose over the water – and then to tell me I am ‘nuts’ and how we needed time apart. So many instances like that! Build-ups setting me up for let-downs! Or, having me help her dad clean out his garage only to dump me two days later. I can give so MANY examples of this kind of abuse. Now, they are all hitting me every few days and I am reeling.
skylar:
I go back and forth between regret for not being able to do it and relief…thinking of how if I did do it, what other problems it may have caused.
When I sit back and clearly think it all out, it is best to be left alone. I know this. The lessons I learned were big enough and I should be grateful for that. I hope you are not annoyed with me.
Moon, me too, it’s dealing with these types (schemers, careerists, bullies, a harrasser) at one workplace that feels like the work. If you are introverted and not motivated by power then many workplaces are very draining I think. Like Sky said these types lack meaning in their lives. They fill the internal hole with their dangerous stupid games to distract themselves from, well a kind of existential dread of being a nothing in what to them must be a God less meaningless world. I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos the violence I have to mute and look away from but it’s a great depiction of a psychopath. Dr Melfi says to Tony in season 2 that anti-socials are like sharks they have to keep moving, swimming(game playing) or they die (crash psychologically into depression at what they are).
BBE your former employer has just laid off many many people I think? My abuser works for a French bank and used to talk about that company.
Fixer are you no contact?
TeaLight, I don’t know “why” spaths do the things that they do, even with all of the research, opinions, data, etc. I read this information, and sometimes it helps to explain things. Other times, it muddies those waters and only creates more confusion.
The exspath married me strictly for money and a cloak of respectability to hide behind. Whom his current target may be, what he intends to take from her, and how he will attempt it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am free of that particular toxin – forever. Do I still a lot of shiat to overcome and manage? You BET I do! LOL!!!
There will come a time when regret is replaced with gratitude for the work that needed to be done. It will cease being about what “THEY DID” and become a series of personal epiphanies and milestones that will evolve into “LOOKIT WHAT I CAN DO!”
Bad people are going to cross our paths in every aspect of our lives. The most painful lessons are the ones that teach me the most. I don’t “like” this fact, but it’s undeniable for me. You can tell me seventeen times a day that the glowing element on a stove is hot, but I will not believe you unless I put my own hand on that element and learn what “hot” means, for myself. That’s just how I’m wired.
Fixerupper, the notes, emails, letters, and other verbal diarrhea was precisely how the exspath hooked me in, as well. It was ROMANTIC for criminy sakes! The words, themselves, were so carefully chosen to present an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned core-values, and I bought it – every word of it. And, because I wouldn’t use words like that unless I really loved someone, this HAD to be true with anyone that I interacted with. NOT.
We built up an image in our own minds of what the spaths were supposed to be. THEY simply used our beliefs, strengths, and vulnerabilities to accomplish that illusion. Be kind to yourself, Fixerupper. You aren’t a dope – you’re in recovery from the ravages of a predator. That’s all.
Brightest blessings
Tea Light:
That’s the word…draining. Exactly. I am an introvert and it’s hard for introverts in a corporate world with the sharks.