Sociopaths like to cloak themselves in a mantel of respect. They seek careers, or pretend to have careers, in fields that people associate with good character, trustworthiness, and authority, such as law enforcement, the military and the clergy.
Pursuing a career in religion or spirituality is particularly useful for sociopaths. People tend to trust religious figures simply because they are religious figures, which puts a sociopath several moves ahead when trying to scam someone. A sociopath claiming an inside track to God has a very powerful tool when it comes to manipulating people.
Plus, for a sociopath, a career in the clergy is easy—the primarily visible job requirement is an ability to talk. With typical inborn charisma, and a willingness to lie about other credentials, the sociopath is a shoo-in.
Lovefraud has written about several pseudo-members of the clergy whose behavior has certainly flouted the Ten Commandments:
Anthony Owens claimed to be bishop of a fellowship of more than 100 non-denominational churches, which was a lie. He was married to eight women at the same time.
Rabbi Fred Neulander founded the largest Jewish temple in southern New Jersey. He was convicted of arranging the murder of his wife.
Terry Hornbuckle founded a megachurch in Arlington, Texas. He was found guilty of raping three women, two of whom were parishioners.
Then, of course, there’s Fred Brito, who impersonated a Catholic priest, even performing a couple’s wedding, when he had no religious training whatsoever.
Lovefraud readers have told us of more cases. AlohaTraveler says her “Bad Man” had been a pastor for an Assemblies of God church in Seattle. Another woman has built a website about the real reason a reverend abruptly departed from the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Lauderdale, Florida—an extramarital affair with her.
Fake believers
Even sociopaths who aren’t clergy put religion to work in their manipulation. Here are some examples from the Lovefraud mailbag:
- A woman married a guy who was a “Christian” teacher (her quotes) in schools for 14 years. He abandoned her after six months and started an affair with another woman, all the while talking about reconciliation. She then found out she was his eighth or ninth wife, and he had previously been convicted of bigamy.
- A guy met a woman in a Christian chat room on the Internet. He was in the process of getting a divorce; she claimed she was also. He left everything and moved to her state to be with her. She taught at a Christian school half-days, and would meet him—for sex—after work. She was still married.
- Girl starts dating guy when she is 18. They belonged to the same Christian faith, which did not allow premarital sex; all their dates were chaperoned. When she was 20, they had a fairytale wedding. That night, he raped her, then started gaslighting her, and convinced a doctor that she was crazy, until she ended up on psychotropic drugs.
- A woman’s ex-husband claims to be a Christian minister. “The church is a fraud to bilk people out of money. He helps the other pastor get money from poor people who can’t afford it,” she writes. “When he raped me and tried to kill me, and when he and his daughter broke into my house, well the cops saw him wearing preacher pants and didn’t believe me.”
- Woman meets a guy on a Christian singles site—they both sang, did music ministry, and had an “intense desire to serve the Lord.” They married, started their own church, then she finds out he owed $30,000 in child support and was addicted to hardcore porn. He became physically abusive.
- Woman marries a 51-year-old Catholic school teacher who is an Episcopalian priest, retired military, widowed after 29 years of marriage. Two months into the marriage, his son moves in with them. The son was selling and using cocaine, and her new husband—the priest—was in business with him.
Predators are everywhere
Lovefraud has heard of many more cases in which sociopathic predators were fishing for victims in churches and on religious dating websites. We’ve heard of sociopaths who quoted the Bible, prayed every day, and emotionally tortured their families.
And then there are the sociopaths who use religion as a reason to keep bleeding their victims. Christian religions, and New Age spiritualism, embrace the concept of forgiveness. Sociopaths use this to claim that they’ve “found God” who has forgiven their transgressions, and you should too.
The key point here is that just because someone claims to be Christian, religious, or otherwise spiritual, does not mean he or she is automatically trustworthy. If your instincts are telling you that something is wrong, no matter what the context, pay attention.
All true.. but I really feel like Lib too even though I have “enforced” no contact now.. I miss his arms dreadfully. I do not miss his bad side, but I miss his warm side. I just hope to god I never give in to these feelings again.
i agree with holy ws….its like a sporting event…waiting for each side to make a play….and that only prolongs the pain for you….you could send an e mail that all his things will be out front for pick up on either blank or blank day…he can email which is better……..if they are not picked up by that date they will go to goodwill or salvation army…the end…YOU control that…..sometime hanging on to his things is a fantasy that things will return to how they were…THEY NEVER WILL..i tell you this A: because you ask and B: because in doing so i am also telling myself……it is not coming from a place of: i have all the answers…it is coming from a place of:we are in this battle together and lets help each other win and find peace……….sincerely, terri
The comment about a “sporting event” and each side making a play, is so RIGHT ON with these psychopaths. When you do X they automatically do Y to counter your “play.”
In reading the letters that my P-son wrote to his Trojan Horse P in manipulating our family, the “plays” were SO APPARENT. He had even coached the TH-P on how to do the religious parts, and advised him of various ways to appeal to my mother’s “pious” side so that she would feel like she had “saved” the TH-P.
When his plans feel through, and everything came to light and we stopped contact, when he HAD NO MORE INFORMATION, he went ballistic! Shooting in the “dark” without any idea what was going on here. NOT KNOWING which play to make, he tried them all, the pity letter, “Oh, poor me” and then the “angry letter” “you are letting me down” and the controling one “Give me a chance to fix this, I cann fix this” and then wrote to others to get THEM to call us and plead his case. Wrote to a minister friend of ours saying how we were not true Christians because we would not give him “UNconditional love”—I guess that meant that when we found out he was trying to kill us, we quit writing him, instead of pitying him, and horror of horrors, his money supply got cut off. LOL
If they have NO CONTACT, they don’t know which “play” out of the “Psychopaths play book” they need to use. CONTACT and knowledge of how you are doing seems to be necessary for them to figure out the next move. How can you play tennis if you can’t see your opponent? How can you play golf if you don’t know which direction the hole lies? I think the thing that makes NO CONTACT so effective is that it takes away their ability to know which play to put into action. It deprives them of INFORMATION necessary to perfect their ploys. To pick the perfect manuver to hook us back in.
Next week will be the one year anniversary of the arrest of the Trojan HOrse P and my X-DIL for trying to kill my son C. Except for two payments of $25 each that my mother sent my P-son, he has had no contact at all from any of us, no response from any of the telephone calls he conned others into making for him. NO INFORMATION about how we are doing. No information even indirectly about how we are doing. All he knows is that the plot blew up, his two confederates both went to jail and his entire family quit communicating with him.
The information I have had about him, indirectly, and from the letters he continues to write to others, shows that he is FRUSTRATED TO THE MAX. He is furious that he is no longer in control. He is angry because he NO LONGER HAS AN AVENUE TO MANIPULATE US. All attempts have failed. NO RESPONSE is TOXIC to him. It is like pouring salt on his wounds, because he felt like he was SO IN CONTROL and now, NO CONTROL, NO INFORMATION. Nothing he does, no play that he puts out there, has any response. No feed back at all. The ultimate defeat of a psychopath. In my P-son’s case, there isn’t even a new victim available.
There was so long after I had “written him off” that I kept writing to him, TELLING HIM OFF, but that gave him information to USE AGAINST ME. At least with him, I no longer even have a twinge of wanting to “tell him off” because I KNOW HOW IT MAKES HIM SQUIRM to not have any information.
Thank you Ox Drover, newworld view, kat_o_nine_tales, holywatersalt and aloha:
You are right, it does seem like a slow moving tennis match right now, and I’m rationalizing in my head that tennis is better than a fast paced hockey game for a relationship. I know how ridiculous this is.
I feel I need some type of closure. Just getting rid of his stuff isn’t going to be enough. Ox, how long did you write those letters before you stopped? Did it make you feel better to write? How many of you contacted the other “victims”? Did you fell better or worse? I read somewhere “Hell hath no fury like a woman dubed by a sociopath.” I am not a vindictive person, but I need to do something!
OMG Lib I wrote and wrote and wrote.. I called, visited and begged. Then I left him alone for months, tried to forget him.. and lo and behold who should come knocking on my door one day.
Well though I agonized over it, I ended up breaking up with a really nice honest man to go back with him. Unfortunately I didn’t do it quickly enough, or something, because he immediately started ignoring me again, and insisted it was “my request” that he let me go.
Years ago I wrote letters aplenty to my husband to try and make him understand what I was going through. I was later stunned to find him and his P-mother trying to use them against me in court. It hurt and scared me so much that to this day I am afraid to write down any of my feelings for fear someone will find them and use them against me.
Write, talk if ya gotta, but I think these guys are right in saying, get his crap outta your house and it will be a start.
Dear Lib,
I went to visit my son in January of 07, and I saw in that face to face visit that he was indeed PROUD of the murder he committed, not ashamed, not remorseful, that he was actually proud that he was a “billy bad ass.” DUH? And then seconds later, and I mean SECONDS later, the mask came back down and he was saying “But Mommmm, what would Jesus do?” HUH? The words from Robert Hare’s book “Without Conscience” came ringing in my ears—and I knew that I would never visit him again. But I wrote him letters to try to explain WHY until April or somewhere in that neighborhood. All the while he is plotting to KILL ME…he used the letters that I wrote to him to convince my mother I was crazy…and I am sure that many of them would have sounded crazy to someone who didn’t know how my heart had been ripped out. How badly I was hurting, knowing that my son not only was a killer but a stone-cold killer proud of what he did.
I too “wanted closure”—but not only me but many people on this site have BEGGED for some kind of closure from the psychopaths and THE ONLY CLOSURE I GOT WAS FROM ME. I had to MAKE MY OWN CLOSURE. Maybe some people get “closure” from the Psychopath, but my thoughts are that FEW of us do. I got closrue with the DIL and the Trojan Horse of a sort, when they were hauled off to jail. Plus, I didn’t have an emotional relationship with either of them so there was no “love lost” there.
With my mother though, I had to make my own closure…she wasn’t going to admit her own lies, or her enabling of my psychopathic son. The only way we got her to quit sending him money and letters was that my other biological son C told her that if he caught her doing that and found out that he would go NO CONTACT with her as well, and then she would have NO ONE that would even speak to her from the family. She would be TOTALLY alone.
I think making our OWN closure, setting that boundary of NO CONTACT is probably as close as we can come to getting “closure.”
Even after you set a PHYSICAL No Contact boundary, and enforce it, there is another type of “boundary” or No contact and that is “emotional no contact” where you quit renting them space in your head. You quit missing them, quit wanting to “explain” to them, or “get them to see”—Aloha and I both admitted that for weeks, months, we would drive down the road “talking to them” in our heads or outloud, just like we were actually TALKING to them. We both joked that other drivers must have thought we were CRAZY WOMEN beating on the dashboards, and yelling at the windshields.
I’m not sure how long I went on doing that, but for quite a while. But then one day I realized I wasn’t doing it any more. I can even think about my P son now and not feel sad, mad, frustrated, angry, and there isn’t anything I want to tell him any more. I don’t worry about his physical safety, I don’t even want to know if he is healthy or not. I guess if he is dead the prison will notify us, but my sons and I have decided that we will not claim the body. The “boy” we loved is “dead” he just doesn’t have a grave. The prison can bury the “man” that “murdered my son” and took over his body. The “Man” is a stranger, and I don’t know him. I don’t want to know him. He isn’t part of my life. The little boy “disappeared” years ago, to be replaced by someone whose heart is evil.
When my husband died, I knew he would not come back, when my sweet little boy “died” I kept hoping I could keep him on “life support” until the man he became returned to being the son I loved. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. So I had to make my own closure for the “death” of the boy I loved. Bury him in my heart, and accept that he is “gone.”
The person you thought loved you is “no more” and is “gone” though the body may be walking around, just like my son’s is. But the persons we both loved never existed in reality they were a fantasy, projected like a hologram. They looked real, our love for them was real, but the relationship was one sided, it wasn’t mutual. It felt like it was real, and that felt wonderful. But now it is gone. That is our closure, the only closure we can get. We can’t fix it, we can’t return to it, it is DEAD AND GONE. We grieve over the loss. The loss was REAL to us.
We were victimized because we cared, because we could love. We were sold a “bottle of snake oil” as “genuine love” but it turned out to be fake, so we are disappointed, and rightly so. We were scammed, Conned, used, abused, treated like dirt. That hurts. If my son had been killed in a car wreck or an accident like my husband it would have been awful, but I think NOT HALF SO PAINFUL as knowing that the child I bore became a man who wants me dead so he can have my possessions that I worked for, and he feels entitled to.
The sad fact is if I had a magic wand and could get him out of prison tomorrow and give him $100 million in gold, it would not be a week before he had done something illegal, immoral and criminal…it is the THRILL of doing something bad that he loves. It isn’t the money itself, it is the “game” he enjoys playing. Impressing himself and others with what a Billy Bad Ass he is.
The only consolation I have is that NO CONTACT frustrates his plans, his con, renders him POWERLESS and IMPOTENT to accomplish his games. That’s as close to “justice” as I can get for him. That and doing my best to see that he spends the rest of his natural life in prison.
Thank you all for this outlet!
I know I need to find my own closure. I know I will not get closure from him. He brags that he can go back to any of the women he has had relationships with and be their friend. This has made me think in the past that I am whacko or that I must be as stupid as those women. Surely out of the 600 or so women he has been with, one or two of them have experienced what I am going through. This makes me want to contact them for my closure, but I don’t know if I should.
Tonight, a girlfriend from work will be helping me deliver the rest of his summer clothes and shoes to his new place, while he is at work. She is then taking me to a comedy club to celebrate one week since he has been to my home. Baby steps.
Sorry Lib, but I had to do a double take! How many women??!? I think if I found out a partner of mine had been with that many women, I would be running a mile without any conversation whatsoever. Problem is that we dont often know at first what their history is, they will often edit, or omit certain details. During my time with the exN and when we had a break, much to his annoyance, I went and spoke to his ex girlfriend about him, and then as things started to reveal themselves as not right, I realised that he had been completely different with her and I realised that he had modified his behaviour in the relationship, in a sense he had dragged his baggage from his last gf into the relationship with us. If only they came with a log book of prior history, rather like a car, it would be so much easier.
My X bragged about his friend’s. He would call them often and leave messages and they never returned his calls. I even had him a big birthday party and invited his so called friend’s, none showed up. One time when we were arguing I said you don’t have any friend’s and he said “yes I do, If I really pushed it” all of his friend’s are new friend’s they don’t stay around for long. Beside’s he preferred the company of stranger’s.
Lib congrats on the one week!! It is week 16 for me, it get’s better……..