Have you experienced something that felt all wrong, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it so you dismissed it? It could be a small detail, but feels important, really important, and your mind is telling you that it just doesn’t add up or make sense so the best thing to do is let it go. Whatever the conflict, our common sense is not able to reconcile the problem or rationalize what it means. Often times, the reason is, what we are seeing is so frightening that we don’t want to know the truth.
This was my experience with my father and it happened a lot. His behavior was raising flags, big ones that I can see now, but at the time, I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing or feeling so I would re direct my attention to something else that would make that feeling go away.
My parents were divorced when I was just a kid (4 or 5, I think) and my father destroyed my Mom in court. This was 40+ years ago and he got custody of us kids (3), which at the time was unheard of. My Mom was an alcoholic and never fully recovered from the divorce. When I was 12 years old she called me one night drunk and was basically saying goodbye to me. It took me a while to figure out what she was doing, but I came to realize that she was trying to commit suicide.
I went to my father and begged him to take me to her, but he didn’t want to be bothered. I was crying hysterically and he finally agreed to take me to her apartment. Once we got there he refused to get out of the car. I banged on the door and she did not answer. After several attempts I took a small towel from my Father’s car, wrapped it around my fist and broke the jalacy windows in her door to enter her apartment. She was barely awake and heavily drugged from a combination of Valium and alcohol. I called 911 and they sent an ambulance.
Oddly enough, the most disturbing part of that night was my father’s behavior. He simply didn’t care. At the time I think I rationalized that it was because he didn’t love my mom and he was a tough guy, stuff like that. I actually looked up to my Dad because he was so “tough”. He always taught me that that was an important quality for successful men, but this was different and didn’t feel right, even understanding that philosophy. My Mom was trying to kill herself and he didn’t bother to get out of the car to help and showed little or no emotion when I asked him to help. It wasn’t his problem. As I write this, it just struck me for the first time that maybe the reason he didn’t want to help was that he wanted her to die that night.
That “something’s not right here” feeling or thought was not how he reacted to my Mom, but me. I can see it now, but then, I didn’t like the thought of my father being so cold that he could watch me deal with that and not care about what it was doing to me. I guess I tried to rationalize that thought and couldn’t make sense of it, so I went back to the tough guy explanation and dismissed it. I mean really, if I connected the dots the truth was not an explanation I was ready to accept at that time. The truth was my Dad didn’t feel anything and didn’t care. This was an inconvenience and he was pissed because he had to deal with the situation.
The question that I dismissed was “why didn’t dad help me and why didn’t he understand how difficult this was for me?” I was extremely scared and confused. Either he really didn’t care or he couldn’t relate to what I was feeling. I needed him badly at this time and he was completely disconnected. I didn’t like the answer so I dismissed the question and tried to believe that I misunderstood his behavior. I would go as far as to begin to remember events like this differently and blame myself for having these weird thoughts.
The truth was that my father didn’t care because he was not capable of relating to the feelings I was having. As a sociopath, he was incapable of feeling what I was feeling so he didn’t care. He did have the ability to mimic these behaviors when he felt necessary, but rarely when he was mad and that night he was mad.
Looking back that was a very lonely night for me. I was in the presence of both my parents, but deep down I think I knew how alone I really was. Nope, I wasn’t ready for the truth, it was easier to just believe that I misunderstood my Dad’s behavior and everything would be ok. Dad loved me, he was just angry and everything will be fine when we get back home I told myself.
Well, everything didn’t turn out fine. My dad was a con man that would turn to murder as a serial killer later in life and this was just a small glimpse of his soul. There were many others (glimpses) like this, but we tend to overlook them because they just don’t make sense. Or even worse, we sense the truth, but can’t or are not willing to deal with it.
Writing about these events has been a very good experience. It brings things to light that I might otherwise overlook. Someone once told me that it was like exposing undeveloped film to light. Once I do this it no longer holds power over me. Thanks for reading it.
Isn’t that typical that the sociopath gets custody of the children. They are so good at their cons even in court. He was a seriel killer for gods sake. I don’t know the whole story of your mother Travis, but I have great compassion for her. If she had any idea what type of man your father was, it must have really hurt her that he got custody out of fear for you guys. It would just kill me if that happened. Not to mention she was devalued and discarded coldly by him. I am thankful for my lawyer. Thus far I have stayed out of custody court with his help. He is telling me everything I should do to look “good” with the courts if that day (god forbid) ever comes. And I am doing everything he suggests!
Dear Bird,
I am glad to see that you are still here reading, and that you are doing so well. Give my Baby Birdie a big squeeze from “Aunty Oxy” who prays for him every day, and sends postive thoughts to you and him.
Travis, yes, it is amazing how we can “put the spin” on our memories and make them into something that they were not at the time. Looking back at these memories in the “light of day” and realizing that we have “colorized” them to meet our needs rather than seeing them for what they were is in a way scary to me. I have lived this “memory fantasy” for far too long.
We explain away the abuse and the uncaring parents. My P bio-father got custody of his other three children when he beat their mother so hard on the back of the head that he blacked both her eyes. She was not a citizen of the US and she fled back to her native country and left her children in his grasp. I know that must have been a heart wrenching thing for her to do, but at the same time, I do understand the fear she had if she had stayed or tried to get custody of them.
My father was also a killer, at least two I know of, but he claims others, and I don’t doubt that he would have killed her if she had fought him. My oldest half brother was terrified of him, because once when “daddie dearest” called him he didn’t run fast enough to the summons and DD grabbed him by the stomach so hard that he left a hand print in a bruise that lasted for weeks.
Justice is not always in our courts or our laws, and too many times the “stronger” one wins, no matter what the RIGHT thing is. I am glad that your father is on death row, I am glad that my P-son is in prison. I hope neither of them ever get out.
I just mailed a letter to the warden of my son’s prison a couple of days ago, informing him and enclosing a letter from my son to my mother, that indicates that my son has access to a cell phone to call her with. At first I worried about my son finding ot that I was the one who “ratted him out” but now I am looking at things a little different, I did request the warden to not tell him, but if he does let my son know, or my son guesses that I turned him in, so what? If he doesn’t know is he going to love me more? Is he going to quit wanting me dead? NOPE. So no matter what happens he will not be appeased if he doesn’t know I turned him in, and while he may be madder at me, he’s already wanting me dead, planning my death, so what’s it going to hurt if he hates me a bit more? By hopefully keeping him away from access to a cell phone at least for a while, I might be able to keep him from that resource to plan my demise.
Oxy and Travis: Like I’ve written before, God Bless both of you for having to endure a parental figure as a child that lived in their BIG egos … but, and there is always a but, you did do everything in your power to love them … So what you made excuses for them for years or you took the blame. You did what you were suppose to do. That was love them to your best of your ability. When you no longer could tolerate their erratic behaviors, no longer could keep the blinders on, no longer turn the other cheek … is when you had to put your feet down…. and the rest is history.
I commend both … like I’ve told you before for keeping your heads on so firmly. You are both credit to all of those that have to endure the likes of your relatives.
God Bless both of you. I am in awe of both of your spiritual strengths.
Peace.
You have a gift in your ability to know, even now, that “something’s not right.”
I have a friend who is an energy healer. He pointed out that when we move from the pre-verbal stage into verbalization — at about two or three years old — we start to explain things to ourselves in words, and we start to lose the essential trust of the moment. As we “explain” the “not right” to ourselves, we cut ourselves off from the truth. For you — and I understand this all too well — the impossible truth was that your father really did not care in any way at all, and that your mother was so distraught that she was gone as well. It’s “better,” easier on our belief systems, if we tell ourselves lies to try to match this impossibility into some fictional “reality” that we can tolerate. So without trying to lie, we use our words to lie to ourselves, and so we set ourselves up to accept the lies that are told to us later.
And notice, sometimes we can only survive through believing the lies. One of my sayings is, “False hope is better than no hope.”
But what we need is real hope. And that only comes out of knowing the truth and integrating that into our reality.
I believe that we have access to the major TRUTH when we can acknowledge our body responses, our “gut feel,” our “heart,” and our “head,” all together. If we stay stuck in words and inner explanations, we’re only accessing what our brain knows.
You know the tickle on the back of your neck? The roiling in your guts? the chill at the lower end of your spine? That’s the rest of your intelligence — your body intelligence — trying to get through to you. And if you’ve given your verbally driven brain the sovereign rule in your life, you’ve cut yourself off from what you need to know to defend against these predators.
Check out Steve’s blog on exploitation, and look at “Quest’s” comments. Quest knows how to trust his body-knowledge, because he learned to read people outside of language.
It’s kinda funny that while you were posting this article, I was having a talk with a relative about one of those “something doesn’t feel right” people in our lives. We were comparing notes about each of our private “eureka” moments concerning a particular P in our lives.
It was one of those rare times when two adults comparing notes really did clinch the diagnosis. I know this relative to be so rational, so honest and so loving that there is no possible way she could be lying or that her memories could be colored by hatred. We’ve got a very clever P in our midst.
As she talked abut her childhood experiences with the P, my heart went out to her. No wonder she had seemed so angry when we were young. She was dealing with evil, while I was living in a far more benign fantasy world.
Like everyone here, we marveled at the Ps remarkable ability to throw up successful smoke screens, confuse honest people and drive their targets stark staring nuts! They do win in court. They do find allies anywhere and everywhere. They do perpetuate property crimes against people who can not or will not prosecute.
As I look back on 27 years of watching the P’s targets act irrational, hostile, and downright stupid, I realize I was blind. It was her, not them, but I never understood what was going on right before my eyes.
For nearly 3 decades I sat there scratching my head and thinking “something’s not right, but I can’t quite put my finger on it!”
It took me awhile to realize that the result of my relationship with this S/P was that i gave up my good intuition and when things didn’t seem right I let them roll off my back. Even friends had said to me “you don’t take shit from anyone, why him?” I didn’t know why. One of the things I did that helped me to heal in the aftermath is to write things down. So one day I wrote a list of all of the red flags from the day I met him, including the things he told me from day one that turned out to be lies. To my own amazement I filled four written pages.
The first day I met him he topld me he wasn’t married. Yet weeks later when I asked for his home number he told me he had no privacy. His younger daughter (20 at the time) was in and out and he didn’t get his kids involved in his personal life (which turned out to be the exact opposite. He later told them every intimate detail and got off on the explicitness. He asked them for advice…again a control issue with them to keep them tied to him with seemingly importantness). All these things should have hit me like a ton of bricks…..but he spun everything in such a responsible light that made sense to me, being a responsible adult. Then would say something like “You really shouldn’t allow men to call your home. it’s not good for your kids.” (creating some embarrassment for me and being the consientious person I was…..fell into all this).
This is one simple example of something not feeling right and twisting reality but it became worse. The lies were worse. The stories were bizarre. The more i questioned him the more he discarded and dismissed and punished me, until the verbal and emotional abuse was unbearable. It came by way of him abusing me and then his adult daughter abusing and manipulating me.
I read an article recently that helped me to understand how this can happen to me or anyone. I have an advanced degree and a good job. I am not stupid, yet I came to rely on the words of this individual who, in some ways, I didn’t REALLY believe in the beginning. i didn’t understand why it hurt so much when I finally told him to get lost. It still hurts a year later. I am attaching the article I read although most of you seem quite educated in psychology issues. I have read a lot this past year and have learned a tremendous amount about sociopathy/psychopathy. I am still learning.
http://skepdic.com/cognitivedissonance.html
This helped me to understand how strong people can be deceived and roped in by sociopaths. I was one of them. There were SO MANY things that didn’t seem right, even in his relationship with is daughters. What i thought was jealousy was fear of his inability to control. Yet i spent SO MUCH time trying to convince him that I didn’t do the things he said. i didn’t cheat. I didn’t flirt. I wasn’t sleeping with people at work. Why did I work so hard when I KNEW THE TRUTH. I had nothing to prove to him. But I spent so much time tryng to please him that I almost lost myself.
Travis,
Thank you so much for sharing that! I spent over 30 years w/ my ex-N and would even say to our friends, “do you think there is something wrong with me or is it him?” I had one friend tell me AFTER I left that years before her husband had told her he thought that one of “our friends” was in an abusive relationship, and she immediately thought of me. But noone ever told ME this!! I was stupid to not see it, but I had lived w/ an abusive mom, and then married at 18 to an abusive man. I never knew any differently, and since he never “gave me any stitches or broke any bones” (this is what I told my counselor when I first started going…) I didn’t classify him as abusive! But I always knew there was something terribly wrong in my gut.
He had zero empathy for anyone and that included his children. We were all possessions to him, only to show off or brag about. Or to make him furious if we stood in his way. My one daughter made the cheerleading team of a professional indoor football team, and before he had always degraded her cheerleading as if it wasn’t a sport. She over heard him bragging about her and it made her so mad. She said, “mom he never talks to ME about it, never asks me about it, and is not interesed in it, but he brags to friends.” She was disgusted by him.
As I read these blogs and realize the truly horrendous things some of you have gone through, my hearts prayers and thoughts go out to you. You’re survivors that now help others that are coming to grips w/ whatever their hell has been.
(As a side-note, when I left after 32 years I didn’t know how I would do. Would I be depressed, scared to be alone, would I make it? I was so scared!!! I did great!!! My little apartment was my peaceful safest of havens. I would be at work and think about going HOME! Home is a wonderful place now. I recently bought a little doll-house (not an actual doll-house, but my own little home, it seems like a doll-house to me:) and I have two wonderful cats that share it with me. I see my kids and grand-kids all the time and I’m the most blessed of people. God IS good!!!)
Take care everyone, and keep the faith!
Oh, also, Travis, could you expound on your thoughts that you began to
“remember events differently and blame yourself for having the weird thoughts”? I
relate to this somehow, but I have to think about it more.
Thanks!
Daisy
You Made Me Grin from ear to ear! Thanks! I am so Happy for you ! Does’nt It feel Fabulous to be Free! LOVE JJ
Indigoblue
Yes! It is wonderful to be free. and be at peace with the world. It’s been almost 3 years since I left. I’m officially divorced since May. I’m total NC and since my kids are grown there’s never a reason to talk to him. I’m still mulling over years of stuff, but at least I have a wonderful home to do it in. I’m just sittin in my relcliner watching it snow out. It’s so pretty!
I’m glad I made you grin:)