Lovefraud received the following letter from a woman who was married to a sociopath for 16 years.
I was a stay-at-home mom until my son entered kindergarten, then I got a job. This was the end of any peace I would have for 10 years. The worst possible thing happened to my husband—the woman he could make fun of for being stupid or having no goals (whatever he would say to hurt my self-esteem) became a huge success. In fact, I made three times as much as Mr. Wonderful. The abuse escalated. He was so obsessed with destroying me that even on a business trip where I was getting an award for being the top sales rep in my company, he was pulling my boss aside and insinuating I was committing fraud and that was why I was #1.
For the last year of my marriage, he had convinced me to hand over all extra money so he could invest for “our” future. I did it thinking it was his ego that was hurt from my success. I didn’t know what he was then.
He spent a year hiding every dime, transferring every debt into my name, making up horrible stories about me to my friends and family. He would go talk to them in tears and say I was stealing all of our money and cheating on him. He would say how much he loved me and ask for advice, then have them swear not to say anything to me because he wanted our marriage to work. He even went so far to pull cousins, aunts and uncles aside during my grandmother’s funeral to say these things.
At the end of the year, while I was packing for a very large business meeting that was to announce a promotion for me, he told me he had cancer.
I believed him. Who besides a sociopath would say such a lie to their wife? That whole evening was spent crying and upset that my husband had cancer. Then I asked him a simple question, “Who is your doctor?” He couldn’t answer. Who would forget their cancer doctor? Then I realized, if he had been going to the doctor for such a serious illness, where were all the insurance bills? I have been to the doctor for a cold and gotten a bill from a lab, the doctor, then a follow-up from the insurance company to pay more, etc. I kicked him out.
I went to my business meeting and the onslaught of horrible screaming calls to the receptionist began from him. An entire week of this, while I was supposed to be there receiving a promotion. I left without the promotion and was basically fired”¦ “maybe you need to take some time to attend to personal problems.”
When I came home, I filed for divorce, cried for weeks and then looked around to find our money to pay bills. It was hidden; not a trace of paperwork was left. Every bill was in my name only. My friends, my family, my neighbors, even customers, no longer spoke to me. I deserved this, in their eyes.
Three years later, I still have nobody who fully believes me. I have one friend. My parents and I speak, but I don’t trust them not talk to my husband. If he has any information on me, he does whatever he can to destroy me. He abandoned our son, moved to another state to live with the next victim. My own sister sends him cards and letters and won’t speak to me.
The smear campaign
This woman was subjected to a smear campaign from her husband, the sociopath.
Abusers often use this tactic to cover up their own behavior and convince others that they are the ones being victimized. In fact, abusers frequently start the campaign as a pre-emptive strike, long before the relationship with the true victim collapses.
That’s what happened to the woman who wrote the letter. As the sociopath was getting ready to move on—he probably had his next victim already lined up—he laid the groundwork to destroy his wife. With his tears and skill as a liar, he convinced the woman’s friends and family of his story. They became unwitting co-conspirators.
What can you do?
Fighting the smear campaign is difficult. Most honest people can’t imagine that someone would be lying when making the outrageous charges that the sociopath claims, so they believe the lies. When the true victim finds out what has been said, everyone has already turned against her.
MSN Psychopath, a forum for victims, has a page about the smear campaign with suggestions on how to handle it. For example:
If anyone tries to talk to you about him, hold up your hand (like a stop sign) and say something like, “I don’t want to hear anything about him. He’s lying.” Say no more. If it continues, say, “My lawyer recommends I warn people they will have to testify where they heard that, should this turn into a libel or slander lawsuit.” Watch them scatter quickly when hearing this. This can cause people to stop cold and have another look at what they’ve been told.
Some more ideas: Say nothing but burst out with raucous laughter, slap your knee and laugh like crazy. “You should have heard what he said about his ex-girlfriend (ex-wife, you, his sister).” You get the idea.
Your own pre-emptive action
Once your relationship falls apart and you realize you’re dealing with a sociopath, or once you start to hear the lies, you may want to take your own pre-emptive action. Warn your family, friends, co-workers and the Human Resources Department at your job that the sociopath may start saying terrible things about you. This may work if their perceptions haven’t already been poisoned by the sociopath.
It may help to be able to explain why a person would say such terrible things. The reason, of course, is that the person is a sociopath. But as we all know, very few people understand what that means. To help others comprehend what you are dealing with, send them a link to Lovefraud.
Humiliation-
It feels shameful to accept being fooled and to realize what we allowed to fool us- it comes of understanding perhaps after the fact what we were at the time of it-that allowed us to allow them to be part of us.
And it is something to recognize in this world that wants perfection from women and professionals. Perfection in everything we are, how we look. how we perform and what we say and do per the pop psuchylogy content du jour. No one can keep up with the competitions of whole industries to convince us that if we are more perfectly beautiful or etc we may then have hope but without the most fashionable products or personalities that hope is to be withheld until we obtain or achieve them.
Leaves me somewhere out there like a bull in a china shop.
But the process of retiring to a more humble position in life and self recognition follows this experience. Leaves me seeing vampires in every bush and shadow and learning that there are rules which may not be broken. And there are boundaries of propriety which might be observed for our own benefit.
The burden of it all is not mine or yours alone to carry. All we can be is the best we can be and authentic is as good as it gets.
I observe from the donkeys that the winter shag gives way to sleekness in the shiny coats underneath and that mutual grooming helps relieve them of the heavy hair.
Rather than seek a cape of protection, I’ll ask is not the sleekness of authenticity we are really after and that the process of mutual grooming is what IT is all about as we move from the very humiliated place of being less than perfect for a host of reason which are amplified by the shameful, hurtful and destructive reality of having been fooled falls like cold weather on our shaggy selves?
I won’t be perfect and I won’t focus my life’s work on perfection- but rather on the tasks at hand and the things I can do to enjoy my life and days.
It ends up being about being.
And it is good being hee with others who are or have been as shaggy as me and who are now scratiching off the long hair and becoming sleeker beasts for it.
Hee Haw!
To me, shame and humiliation go together, as a feeling of having been PUBLICLY shown to be “not good enough” or “not worthy” or “not perfect” or that the whole world knows that I am a failure, sinner5, etc. etc. or that I have been “caught” doing something “dirty” or “nasty” and must walk through the community with others throwing mental rotten eggs and tomatoes at me.
And Oh, yes, I have felt like that!
Grooming the “Hair shirt” off (as it were) in the spring to beccome sleek and shiny underneath is I think, Silver, a better analogy, so that the sleekness of our hides, the “slings and arrows” thrown at us will slide off like water off a duck’s back.
The FEELINGS though, are ours to deal with and we can pick and choose who can see us by covering with the invisible cloak, or we can strut our stuff and show our beautiful slick and shiny hide! But we do not have to feel shamed, humiliated or less than worthy because of what has happened to us, or what we have done or had done to us.
I’ll think on this some more. (((hugs))))
silver – for me the cape is an image of being protected by one’s authenticity; one’s (no pun intended) truth and bravery, woven together with the love of friends and the agape of the existence of the earth and sky and water. for me it is a potent image – that of ‘mantle’ and has come up in my writing many times over the years.
your second paragraph speaks volumes, and directly to the external and internal pressures applied at this time re work and the business world. my closest business associate and prime player on team ‘get one step employed’ said to me this week, ‘if you ever want to talk about this’ (he knows i have ptsd and that i am struggling with dis-ease) and i thought, nope. not going there. i need to keep my game face on. i have game face or i have tears. face firmly stitched on for the time being. and i NEED that…not just that i fear repercussions – i need to put my competency forward, i need to exercise my people skills, i need to bring my work self out into the world. I NEED SOME NORMAL. i have done many meetings this week and a lot of networking and talking with people about jobs. i found it really exhausting, REALLY exhausting. but it’s ‘muscle memory’ and i want to be back on the bike, so i practice.
and another part of me needs part of what bulletproof is articulating. i have ranted in pure anger here on many occasions – usually late at night. the night shift is pretty damn good at standing with it. now, one person did take serious offense to my use of profanity and posted in an very negative way, and reported it to donna. so that shut me down in a not great way. but the rest of the night shift had the compassion and sense of objectivity to stand with. as k hawk says, it IS a social emotion and i have been taught from the get go to f***ing hide anger. ohh, nobody likes an angry girl! and you can imagine the amount of dismissive crap that gets slung at an angry dyke. now i am the angry middle aged woman….see, there is a binding for every age! for god’s sake.
amplification of feeling less than perfect…yes, i think that is very true for me too. and that is one of the gifts from the spath (f*** you very much) – i get to see where alllll my hurts and fears and ‘failures’ are. bless her heart.
that i can be fooled – i don’t feel so much shame about this, more it makes me question my ability to take care of myself and protect myself in the world – so it is very destabilizing.
my shame lays in revealing parts of the story, revealing parts of myself that are not for public consumption. how fast do people dismiss spathy? fast. how quickly do they dismiss online? quicker. how fast do they dismiss fetish community? quickest. i have to out myself in so many ways if i tell this story. it does make me laugh though – as ‘he’ was supposed to be a boy, the story makes me look straight. snort!
and then there is the other thing of revealing to people close to me. it has its own challenges (‘cept they know some things about me and are my friends because they are like minded or accepting).
i feel more humiliated about how it has wrecked my life. the ppath came hand in hand with 90% of the chemical exposures i have endured. it is a slag heap – the ptsd has to do with both things. and they both affect each other enormously. i am ashamed about the ptsd, my low functioning, that the anger i feel affects my in the world relationships. i feel burdened by the weight of it all. so much work to dela with everythign and i am so tired to begin with.
another aspect of humiliation – (and this post hasn’t delat with the humiliation i wrote about yesterday – the one connected with a smear campagin if i proceed against her.) that really has to do with humility if i break it done far enough – my friends have abandoned me. this says, really all this says is – they were not strong enough or compassionate enough to stand with me. and THIS is just a function of the relationships not being solid enough to endure this. they endured (and i am speaking of two close friends here – we are a triumvirate) illnesses and job layoffs and major life events – but they were not strong enough to endure this. so, in humility, i know that this is just the case and there is really no shame to be had about it. it is their lack, not mine. *I* am strong enough; *I* will endure.
The smear campaign thing is scary. Apparently the disordered don’t JUST go away.
What feels shameful is having to make the public admission that yep, I got snookered. And Yep there are consequences socially and professionally. And Yep, I’m still me, still going forward. And Nope, the smear isn’t the whole story but, people who hear it need to consider the source-If they don’t, they are snookered too.
The wrecking of my life is a very personal and private thing, It wasn’t really my life, it was just me. It just created a hollow out of the whole of my being.
Are we fortunate that nature abhors a vacum?
Perhaps. We will be filled and if we choose first to refill with the autenticity of our own nature, the love of the divine and the accuracy with which we now see the world from this vantage point is it all so bad-really?
Well, bad and hard are different. Poverty is hard, not bad. Injustice is bad and hard. I see things that are hard not in a light of good or bad, but easier or harder to resolve. And a lot of the residual effect of a SPATH encounter is HARD…………
The loes, the manipulations, the smearing. That’s BAD.
So how do we deal from a place of humiliation and distress, fear and indignity?
WEll, many years ago there was a radio show I used to listen to on the LEFT Coast. And the guy always closed the news report by saying, if ya don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.
And I think that is what we are discussing here. Putting on blinders to manipulation management and going forward with our lives. We can’t control anything or anybody else and there is no point in being fearful of a smear propagated by a not credible source. The facts are what the facts are.
And facts can be revealed without emotional pleading.
Thats what is kind of cool about facts…..
And the fact is that we are challenged to survive and need to be blinded by relentlessness in our quest to achieve it.
So how do we get from here to there?
That is the question: To be or not to BE and the questions about being is one to me that asks are we here, now present in our own lives and attaining our goals?
What help do we need. I need and accountant and a lawyer and an employer and an Angel.
My next stop today is going to be craigslist. Isn’t that where you find everything?
Dear Silvermoon,
Just don’t pick up a guy off craig’s list, I don’tn think there is much truth in advertising there! LOL
Your concept of bad vs hard is interesting.
The smear campaign sometimes starts before we even know we are targets. It goes on behind our backs as part of the abuse sometimes, to discredit us in ADVANCE.
I’ve been FINANCIALLY damaged as a result of a smear campaign by a psychopath, who used it to their advantage over me. It WORKED.
My egg donor and my sperm donors have both smeared me to make themselves appear better by contrast, more sane! LOL
So yes, the smear campaign can be both BAD, and HARD to deal with.
Povery, if it is deep enough, I think can also be both BAD and Hard to deal with. It shouldn’t be SHAMEFUL though sometimes it feels that way. I know people who have felt shame because they were poor, I never felt shame when I was VERY poor. Wondered what I would do, but not ashamed.
Isn’t it amazing how socios can run around smearing people, telling insidious lies with impunity….THEN……when WE try to warn others (with the TRUTH) about possible danger of the socio, it’s “Kill the Messenger” time….and we are the “Messenger”.
What’s up with that?
It’s a good thing that the truth has a way of revealing itself in the end….and it does…..it just takes longer than we’d like sometimes.
Yea, KILL the messenger! LOL It’s actually almost funny to me now, Rosa, because I really don’t give a big rat’s behind about what the neighbors think. Let her and that dumb biatch that cleans her toilets tell the whole world what a witch I am and how I tried to steal money from my egg donor. I DID care at one point, but you know you just get to the point that IT DOESN’T MATTER ANY MORE.
When you do the best you can and you still get slapped, sometimes you just get tired of trying to pull a wagon out of a mud hole when it is NOT GOING TO BUDGE and you just QUIT CARING if it gets out of the mud hole or not.
I figure if you spend all your energy running around trying to convince people that the psychopath is lying anyway, all you are doing is giving them PUBLICITY—and people who don’t even know about their smear campaign will learn about it and say “what’s up with this? where there’s smoke, there must be fire” and all you are doing is SPREADING IT!
Sort of like that bunch of folks trying to smear Nora on her thread yesterday. She didn’t smear them, THEY
SMEARED themselves! So I figure that the best thing to do is to just let them rage, rant and go on and on about their carp and the folks who know me and really care KNOW the truth and the rest of the folks, I could care less about what they think!
Ox,
NOT TROLLING for men on CL- OMG that would be where to find the bottom of the proverbial barrel of humanity for absolute sure~!
So bad its funny! My once upon a love is still on a number of sites including Plenty of Fish and Dating Cupid, Zoosk and Datopia. Obviously we know they are hunting grounds!
I think I am done with personal relationships on the internet but I am glad you expressed the concern. LOL!
I did put up an ad for garden tools and plants. maybe I will get some response and some stuff to start a garden with.
That would be so cool.
Rosa, you are right about linger than we want to – Its that concept of how to function independent of someone else’s timing that occurs to me.
Anybody who is going to buy into a smear campaign without evaluating that the smearer has previous fraud convictions deserves to believe I guess. There ought to be a boundary there.
Its hard when we look to our life relationships and as one person here wrote, their friends told them just just get on with life after a systematic emotional abuse – you can’t just get on without working through it.
Its bad when people who don’t get it blame us for the choice that got us there, We weren’t the liars and the thieves. We were the victims. But that allows the get on with your life to be the next words.
We are getting on with life a phase of healing at a time and with all the travesties of fear and smear on top of it.
The disordered don’t go away. The tools we have for stopping them are limited and in fact it often seems like they get away with so much.
But the in the end statistics aren’t so good because so many of them die poorly and I guess we just have to get on with our lives no matter what.
So, getting on with it means having a story to tell the world based in fact, clear of emotional hooks and true to the real. And if that story is repeated, it will be repeated and one day, the truth will land in a place at a time that triggers some point of turn around for the victims.
But time passes – we don’t control it. We just have to forge ahead within it don’t we?
Sometimes, you have to let others show themselves before you gain the credibility you deserve. I wish there was another way but if there is, I haven’t found it.
Yea, I think I’lll go down to the septic tank and go fishing before I will troll for men on CL!!!! LOL ROTFLMAO
Just the thought of it is enough to make you puke, right? LOL
Oh, I need to go outside into the sauna and check on the cats, dogs and ducks. I put them little paddle footed kittens out in the barn today in a crate to get them used to the sights and smells—they had learned to climb thje shower curtain in the bathroom and climb up my legs with their little 7-toed feet OUCH! Got my 2 eggs this morning, must have 10 dozen in the fridge! Up to 900 calories so far today, and will eat another 300 before I go to bedtime. I AM SO FREAKING HUNGRY!!!!!! I want ice cream!!!!!
Ox Drover:
These are DELICIOUS from Breyer’s…..only 130 calories per bar.
Smooth & Dreamy Bars come in 3 flavors.
http://www.breyers.com/products/Smooth-and-Dreamy-Bars-and-Sandwiches/Triple-Chocolate-Chip-Bars.aspx