Lovefraud received the following e-mail recently from a reader, who we’ll call “Iris.” She was married for 20 years to a man who she now realizes is a sociopath.
I avoid talking to my ex-husband as much as possible, but he is 4 months behind on court ordered spousal support as I am in school getting my business degree and working. He has to pay $600 a month for 3 years. The court also ordered the support to pay me back for $11,000 I had to put into our house and property to make it “sellable” after he left me in the dust and moved to another state. He left me with 5 acres, a house falling apart, a barn with code violations, and our 3 family dogs. I went into survival mode and got it all fixed and sold and re-homed all of my dogs (who I love and miss very much) through a wonderful adoption agency. He also owes me for a mortgage reimbursement check he forged my signature on and cashed after he talked the mortgage co. into sending it to him in Calif. I filed a police report.
I was hoping you could help me. I e-mailed him with the threat of taking him to court and he called several times before I answered. I try to avoid talking to him because I always feel I am being manipulated. Within our conversation, he was mean, evil, nice, ugly and caring and same old guy. I brought up that I know how he operates and that it took distance for a lengthy period of time to see that he was a sociopath and smooth talker and that his agenda is to “win” and manipulate. I said many other things also. HE ADMITTED THAT HE OPERATES DIFFERENTLY AND DOESNT FEEL THE SAME AS OTHERS. I was blown away. The only other time that he ever came close to this was when I was about to leave him several years ago when I found out he was cheating on me again. His exact words were, “I can’t help it; I’ve always gotten a RUSH out of getting away with stuff. It’s been like that since I was a kid.”
I guess what I “need” to know is, why did that hit me so hard? Why did it make me so emotional when he said he operates differently? Why did it make me feel sorry for him? Why do I feel so exhausted and why can’t I stop crying now? Does his admission make it that much more real? Did the reality that he really is a sociopath and my whole marriage was meaningless overwhelm me? I have been divorced for a year and a half and apart from him since Nov. 2008. We have a 21-year-old son. We have not even had to communicate much.
All I know is, I am still affected in a very dark way because of being with him for so long. I’ve been to a psychologist once a week for quite a while. It helps, but she doesn’t KNOW what it actually feels like. Do you have any words of wisdom to help me move on? I am ok most of the time, but I don’t trust anyone and can’t even think about dating. I feel paralyzed sometimes and felt that way throughout my long marriage. I still find myself resorting back to thinking, “maybe it was me.” Am I damaged for life? I am usually pretty busy, but when I have time on my hands, things still get dark and I am tired of feeling like this.
Extreme difference
One of the hardest things to wrap our brains around is the extreme degree to which sociopaths are different from us.
On the home page of Lovefraud.com, I state that sociopaths have no heart, no conscience and no remorse. Think about it. Sociopaths are missing all the qualities that make up the core of our humanity.
This is why coming to terms with the idea that sociopaths exist is so difficult. In order to grasp the concept of sociopaths, we have to give up some of our most cherished beliefs about what it means to be a human being living in our society.
Exploding myths
In our society, we may have differing points of views as old or young, men or women, liberals or conservatives, religious or secular, management or labor, or any other polarity. Still, some cultural ideas are so widespread, and so entrenched, that they are regarded as axioms.
When sociopaths are factored in, however, these axioms are nothing but exploding myths. Here are a few:
1. We all want to be loved. Sociopaths don’t care about love. They don’t even feel love. They certainly do not feel empathy for fellow human beings. When they appear to be acting out of love, it is probably nothing but manipulation, a tactic to advance their agenda. Sociopaths only want three things: power, control and sex.
2. There’s good in everyone. This, unfortunately, is not true. There are people in the world who are rotten to the core, and they’re the sociopaths. But unaware of the inherent evil of these predators, we believe that everyone deserves a chance, a second chance, and even more chances. Sociopaths milk this belief by promising to reform, but they never do.
3. Parents love their children. Most of us probably believe that, even if our childhoods were imperfect, our parents loved us and did the best they could. We don’t want to consider the idea that some parents simply don’t care about their kids. But if sociopaths have any concern about their children, it’s roughly equivalent to the concern they feel for an inanimate possession, like a flat screen TV. There is no real love.
4. Truth and justice will prevail. Many of us end up in legal battles with sociopaths, such as filing for divorce or claiming fraud. We approach the legal system assuming that we’ll get a fair hearing and justice will be served. But for sociopaths, court is show time. They lie to suit their agendas, and judges either don’t see it, or don’t care. Court isn’t about truth, it’s about winning, and sociopaths are wired to win.
5. We should live according to the Golden Rule. “Do to others what you would like them to do to you—”this rule of ethics is at the center of every major religious tradition. But if the “others” are sociopaths, living by the Golden Rule sets us up to be exploited. Treating them as we want to be treated, we’ll eventually find ourselves drained, and the sociopath on to a new source of supply.
Recovery
So how do we deal with the loss of what we thought were unshakeable truths? I think recovery has three aspects to it.
1. We accept that they are what they are. It is extremely unlikely that any sociopath, by the time he or she is an adult, is going to change. We must give up feeling guilty, or responsible, or even concerned. We may need to release grief or anger over what happened to us, but we must realize that there is nothing we can do about them.
2. We are grateful that we are not them. Although sociopaths probably don’t realize it, theirs is an empty, barren existence. They do not feel love, they do not feel human connection, they do not feel the warmth of belonging to anything. We may be in pain, and temporarily feel paralyzed, but we can recover our humanity. They don’t have a chance.
3. We resolve never to be exploited again. Now we know that sociopaths exist. We know how they think. We know how they act. We will never lose this knowledge, and knowledge is power. We take back our power, establish our boundaries and move forward.
Yes, the experience of a sociopath rattles us to the core. But it is possible to learn from it, gather ourselves and live again, with much more wisdom than we had before the nasty encounter.
Kimmy,
I love it when you post articles or share poems…whatever you’re learning and researching, it’s so invaluable! Thank you!
LL
lesson learned,
There are a lot of amazing people in our world, including yourself. You’ve had a lot to contend with (in the past and present) and you’re doing it, not being in denial about anything, being a positive role model. I wish the best for you, hoping that more positive things come your way.
Ox,
very funny that of petting the snake. Such a simple truth and so hard to accept sometimes.
An article with the tittle “Do not pet the snake for God sake or he’ll bite your ass, leave you without house, in debt, multiple pregnant and nuts” is neeeded. 😀
superkid
you aren’t the only person who has been drawn in even while they made you feel “less than” what they are “attracted to”, they know just how to make you feel like you are LUCKY to be in their presence even though they are STEPPING ALL OVER YOU just to get themselves a little bit higher.
my spath would point out women looking at him while we were out, tell me why they were attractive. none of them looked anything like me. he told me how attractive the other women he had been with were (that he was with between his ex and me). i was constantly told how NOT sexy i was and why, which would be followed by demands for sex! yet i felt SPECIAL being objectified by someone who made themselves seem like they could’ve had anyone but “chose” lil old pathetic me.
he told me of the women he had met recently, i “won”. i believed him! i thought he was so dashing and bright and handsome, what a prize!
YEA RITE.
the only “prize” i got was PTSD and an STD and the mounting bills from both.
a friend of mine said, “greens, that man is truly cancerous”
i thought about it. these people are just like cancer cells. they’re just enough like you to attach, to in some kind of way seem like they are part of your life, but everything else about them is mutated and wrong and they will take over if not cut out!
Oh yes agreenbean, i forgot the STD. Yeah petting snakes give also STD.
Still somebody has doubts petting snakes is counterproductive? All are disadvantages!
Dear Superkid,
Please listen to Oxy, Kim, and Hope – they know what they are talking about, and they are speaking truth.
You asked why he is doing this – like Hope said, he is doing it because he can. but it’s also more than that, he’s doing it because he WANTS you to hurt, because knowing that he is ABLE to hurt you, knowing that he has control over you and the power to hurt you gives him self-satisfaction, which is the closest he can ever come to feeling pleasure. Mine used to entice me with every promise under the sun. He would hold these promises out to me like someone enticing a starving child with a beautiful cake. And when I reached for that cake, sometimes it would be plastic, sometimes it would be only a beautifully frosted dirty sponge, and sometimes it would be real, but after I took one bite of that real cake, he would hit me with a baseball bat. You would think that I would have learned, but because I was starving, I always HAD to take the chance that this time, the cake was real, and that THIS time I would really be able to have a piece, HE KNEW THAT – WHICH IS WHY HE KEPT DOING IT AND LAUGHING WHEN HE DID!!!!
You asked how to stop the cycle? The only way to stop it is to stop allowing them to KNOW that what they are doing is hurting you. And the ONLY way to do that IS NO CONTACT. That is the only way to take away their power to control and know that they hurt you. Have absolutely no contact with them or with anyone else that could possibly let them know how you are feeling. Do not contact them at all, in any way, either yourself or through anyone else. Do not answer their calls, do not even read their e mails, because they are either lies or cakes held out only to entice you. If you have to have contact with anyone who knows them, you have to pretend that everything is just fine and peachy in your life. No matter how much you hurt, you CANNOT let them or anyone who knows them know that you are, because if you do, they will start the cycle all over again but even worse, because then they will know that they got you to give in once, so they will keep trying to get you to give in again. He may have the power right now to hurt you, but please remember this, YOU CAN take this power away from him. YOU HAVE THAT CHOICE – NOT him, and if you do choose to take his power away, you have others here to support you.
I know from my own experience that it is terribly hard to do this. I know it hurts to do this. But I also know that it really does get easier with every passing day. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen. First your mind begins to clear and you start to see things as they really are instead of how you want them to be. You can actually begin to think again! Then the anger for what they did to you sets in, and then you begin to realize in your mind that being away from them really IS better than being with them. And then (I hope, because I am not there yet) your heart begins to really understand that too. I think we will always have the scars, and in a way, I think that even that may be good, as they will serve as a permanant reminder to us to never again allow our hearts ALONE to blindly lead us anywhere except to God.
Dear Eva,
Thank you for the suggestion about the “don’t pet the snakes” I actually just send Donna an article about that so it is there as soon as she gets time to get it up! LOL Thanks for the suggestion!
Star loves her snakes but they are NOT POISON snakes so she can go on petting them, but still THEY WILL NOT GROW HAIR NO MATTER HOW MUCH SHE PETS THEM, and they will never become puppies! LOL (forgive me Stargazer!) LOL
To whom we call Iris
Love fraud medication and mental health workers have just brought me to my senses after crying everyday for two years for someone who will never be mine or never was. I realized the child I raised and loved for 37 years that I thought I new I never new at all. Or I denied that I new her is probably more accurate. Love is blind weather it is your spouse or your child.The pain and the crying will stop in time as it is a grieving process and I have learned that it is way easier to grieve for the dead then it is to grieve for the living as they are still there to deal with. It was the longest hardest process I had to ever go through not to mention the most painful. I am not a young women and have been through a lot in life. It hurt me more to lose my daughter then it did to lose my three grandsons. I hurt no more for her just my grandchildren. I will always hurt and cry for them until they are free. You will learn when the pain is gone that there are still good people in the world. You will be careful in choosing all friends and will start to see the signs in people that you have learned from experience. Hang in there it will all fall into place. I know this is hard to believe a month ago I would not believe what I am saying right know myself but it happened. My daughter is not able to hurt me manipulate me or use me and I will never believe another word that comes out of her mouth without proof first. This is the hardest choice in my life that I had to come to but I smile again and feel a sense of freedom that I have not felt in years.
Ox,
Thanks to you for the laughs.
Snakes, like all animals, are beautiful (some psychos, too), but here we know we’re refering to poisonous snakes…
Very good idea, Oxy. Donna will probably publish it: Do not pet the psychopathic snake because he just wants to snack you. And they snack frequently….
Dear Grandmother,
My biggest hugs to you, and I am so glad to hear you in your post above….it will go back and forth for a while, up and down, left and right…pain and then acceptance…then pain again, and back to acceptance, but it will eventually get to where you can accept what IS the way IT IS. Gemini girl and I have both been there (are there) with you and as time goes on it does get somewhat easier. Gem and I have both been angry, sad, mad, bargaining, trying to find something positive about them, then to acceptance and back again to “madder’n hail” to back to peaceful again.
You are right, I think, it is harder to mourn the living than to mourn the dead.
When I first found out my son had killed a girl, I was nuts-o for months, locked my self in the house, saw no one, didn’t answer the phone, cried day and night, went 7 days without sleep, went 14 without eating a bite of food, just drank cup after cup of coffee and cried and cried…lost 35 pounds in 4 weeks…I never felt pain like that in my life. Yet, he sucked me back into the web, and then I’d crawl out again, only to be sucked by in when he wrote me or called and cried everyone had deserted him and he was alone in the world (booo hooo) and in prison….until one day almost 20 years later I finally realized what a MONSTER HE IS….that he hates me, he would see me dead if he could, he tried to have me killed….and still I grieved over and over again until finally I saw that the man in the cell, is NOT THE BABY I LOVED. Not the little boy that was so cute and sweet. The man is not the child. The child is gone. Just as if he died back when he was 10-12 years old. I threw away all the photos of him after that age, I “buried” that baby and had a memorial service for him. I do not know that STRANGE MAN, he is no friend of mine. He is just a convict in texas who hates me and wants me dead. My son, that little baby is gone. I miss him, but all babies “go away” they never stay little, any more than a kitten stays a kitten, puppies become dogs, babies become men and women, and those men and women may not be what we hoped our babies would become, but we dont’ have to let them abuse us any more than we would let any other STRANGER ABUSE US.
We let that baby go, we mourn him/her and let them go…remember the good times, and let the rest go. There won’t be anyone else there at the “memorial service” when you bury your baby…just me and GeminiGirl, and Witsend are there with you in spirit, and all the other mothers and fathers who also had to let their babies go. God bless you, Grandmother. (((hugs))))