Sociopaths keep the charade going for awhile

After my spath left, while grappling with his behaviour towards myself and my children, old memories surfaced relentlessly, sharply, and it was jarring to realize that all the best memories were from such a long time ago – a time when our “love” was new and exciting, a time when our “love” did not include responsibilities and obligations. It was not those specific memories, but rather the bonds formed while making those memories, that made me blind, in the early days, to the red flags rippling in the wind, and made me deny, in the later days, that those red flags were really there, and flapping wildly to boot. While I had filed away the specific memories long ago, the feelings had laid the foundation for what I thought was a deepened love.
My ex spath often had trouble recalling childhood events, and even when he did, it was always descriptive, as in he described a memory of what happened, not how they felt. But somehow, when describing those events, he managed to convey feelings – he has the gift of the gab for sure. And most of us listening were enraptured with his gentle tone, his liberal use of adjectives, and his broad smile, and surely infusing his stories with our own emotions. But eerily, now I realize why he had such difficulty extracting those precious few memories from his brain, and why those memories have no bearing on his treatment of others – he attaches no emotions to those memories, so they are insignificant. As are the players, including those of us that loved him the most, and forgave and excused and enabled.
It has taken me a long time to reconcile those good memories, with the knowledge that none of it was real, and has been the thing that has had me in knots during my recovery, the thing that has made me question what I know, and question my own sanity over and over and over.
Now, there are no good memories for me. Occasionally, I will relay a story to the kids about something that happened, when it relates to something that is happening now, and I can do so with a smile on my face, and laughter in my voice, and it is bittersweet because I see how easy it is to give your listeners the sense that you have shared an emotional bonding moment with them, when in fact, there is no emotion there. For example, recently, my child asked me if I had ever been to a certain part of the world, and partaken in a certain sport which I had, with my spath. I answered that I had been there with the child’s father. My child, wide-eyed with wonderment asked me to tell her about it, and I was able to recount the experience to her, infusing my story with the magical vibe I knew she needed to hear, wanted to hear, and deserves to hear, since it is an experience she wants to have herself one day, even though for me, the memory is flat, despite the exotic nature of the activity, and now invokes in me a numbness that is no doubt some sort of defense mechanism – not unlike the spath himself.
The best I can come up with is that at some point, all those years ago, as Nora said, the spath actually convinced himself of his lies. I am witnessing it now as he prepares to remarry and has convinced himself that this time, he really is in love. That this time it will be different. And it might, if he and his new bride live a completely stress-free life, wherein he gets whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, regardless of how often his “needs” change. As his sister said to me once, “he stopped loving you the day you brought DD home from the hospital”. And she is right. Because even though we had another child, and lived ten more years together, in what I thought to be a relatively happy marriage, I am hard pressed to pull up any memories where he was so intensely happy that he showered me with love as he did in those early days – strange in and of itself, considering that a normal person’s feelings would intensify with the birth of the children…
The longer I have been away from him, the more I have realized that our relatively happy marriage was frought with abuse. Of all of us. And that he was always happiest when he had something going on that was nothing to do with us, something that made him feel like “the winner”
It is a bitter pill to swallow that years of your life can be eaten up, and that you can not even rely on the good memories to assuage the pain, but the bad memories can be used for fuel.