Editor’s note: The following essay was submitted by a Lovefraud reader.
Snapshots
By AlohaTraveler
In our lifetime, we hope to capture the best moments of our lives in pictures. We keep albums of our family events, weddings, births, first dates, proposals, holidays, vacations, and so on. There is another kind of snapshot that keeps many of us longing for our sociopaths. These are the “snapshots” we hold in our minds. They are the ideal moments, the perfect words, the heightened romance that so many of us felt when we were being seduced by a sociopath.
Browsing through my mental album, I see a snapshot of myself and the Bad Man, as I call him, passionately kissing in Safeway next to the tortilla chips. It was romantic, it was silly, and I felt so in love. Never before had I done a thing like that! It was just a kiss but it was so ideal, so out of the movies. I recall during our first kiss, he embraced me as if he were Fabio on the cover of a Harlequin Romance novel. Who wouldn’t swoon for that?
Here’s another snapshot. This time, I am at Home Depot. Why all the retail?! On the radio, Dan Fogelberg’s Longer Than is playing and I start to weep tears of joy. Suddenly, I felt as if I had a deeper understanding of this song about lovers. I know, it’s c-o-r-n-y! This happened during a time that I have referred to as “the happiest two weeks of my life,” or like I said before, “Relationship Crack.”
Another snapshot I have in my mind is spending an hour choosing just the right birthday card for my budding new romance (and more weeping over drippy love songs being piped in over the sound system). God, I was a sap! I ended up with two cards. I saw this as “the first card I would ever give the love of my life” and it had to be perfect. So what’s more perfect than two?
Yet another. This time I am sitting next to my Captain as he skillfully pilots the craft and gives an enlightening spiel about the marine life over his microphone. The guests were rapt with attention as was I, goo-goo eyes and all. I always had a thing for islands, the water, the whales, which were out in full force that day, and of course, the Captain of the ship. Isn’t it perfect?!
I remember looking at the Bad Man with his tanned skin and his Indiana Jones hat. He looked exactly like Harrison Ford back when Harrison Ford still looked good. It was all too perfect. I was living in Hawaii, I had a hunk of a man for my new boyfriend and of course, he had already told me what a “quality woman” I was, asked me to be his exclusive girlfriend and told me he was “seriously considering” me as a “potential life partner” after only a few short weeks! Considering that my move to Hawaii was my idea of an “alternate” life plan since, at 35 years old, my marital dreams had not come true, you can imagine how ecstatic I was to have such a lucky break in love. I had only been on the island 10 days when I met the “man of my dreams.” It appeared to me that my dreams were coming true after all. I looked at him and thought to myself, “We are going to be one of those couples that everyone wants to be like!” and I was on top of the world. I thought I had beat the system by letting go of the quest-for-love and reaching for my dreams on my own… and BINGO! My prayers were answered.
Sadly, the signs of danger were already present but my ideal moments, my perfect “snapshots” were clouding my ability, or perhaps, my willingness, to see them. The Bad Man had already mentioned that he had been called a “cult leader” in the newspapers back in Seattle during his days as a Pastor for Assemblies of God. He had been “sort-of excommunicated” because he was an “out of the box thinker” and he had “thrown off the templates” of the traditional hard line thinking of his former Church. He was a “rebel” and a “hero.” He had a “permanent restraining order” against him and all women’s health clinics in the Seattle area. He was “honest” about the “B.S. restraining order” his ex-wife had against him. He told me mournfully that his ex “stole the children” (escaped under extreme duress, I am sure) and that the court would issue a restraining order to any woman that said she was afraid. “The court wouldn’t even question it” he told me, with indignation in his voice. He called her a “gossip” and talked at length about how couples should be able to work out their problems in private or go “up the food chain” for advice and not down. Now in my defense, this was confusing. That seemed like good advice coming from a former Minister. Perhaps his ex was a gossip. I mean I was keeping all our problems private, just like he told me to. Why couldn’t she? I know as I write this that it all sounds ridiculous but alas, the kiss… the kiss! Now, I say, “Alas… the red flags, the RED FLAGS!!!”
Never before had I been so taken in by someone, so consumed by a man. I thought this was the big love that I had been waiting for. I thought it was finally my time. These were the things I was telling myself in those brief moments of heightened romance. As I write this, I realize that my snapshots were just my thoughts. In fact, in some of the snapshots I describe, the Bad Man isn’t even present… just me and my thoughts of LOVE. I was in denial of what was really happening and I let a few highly romantic moments, snapshots, overpower the truth. My own thoughts about what this relationship was going to mean for my formerly-empty-before-him-life were seductive enough for me to all but ignore the truth before me.
In my mind, I have burned up these snapshots. I recognize them for what they are now. They are my own fantasies, and my own dreams that I pinned on someone else. Why are all my dreams riding on someone else? Now when I am asked, “What are your hopes and dreams?” I feel sad and empty. For some reason, I keep getting asked this question lately. I can’t think of anything. I have plans that are solid and based on reality. I am working toward some goals. I have named the steps to achieve my goals and I am ticking them off as I go. But there are no dreams.
When someone loves you, they don’t set out to destroy you. They consider your wellbeing and they consider how their actions affect others. This is what is normal. They don’t terrorize you until you feel like you are worthless. I knew this but I sort of forgot. I forgot because he said the magic words”¦“I am seriously considering you as a potential life partner.” I became a slave to those words and would do anything, endure anything, ignore anything, because of them. It’s like I was on Survivor. I formed an alliance with him! I bought in to his strategy to destroy me and I joined in the plan. Hey, in the end, I even voted myself off the island! I guess you could say, I escaped the Bad Man by leaving while he was at work, kind of like the way he described the day his ex left him with her 5 children in tow. God Bless her.
If it seems that I make light of my encounter with a sociopath, I do not. My story is lit up with red flags, more than I would like to admit. My lessons from the Bad Man cost me some money, some time, many tears, a few friendships, and maybe one thing that needed to go, like a baby tooth needs to go to make room for the emerging adult one. Perhaps my fantasies of love, and being in love, and what that would mean for my life, were a bit girlish. Now, I have a plan for my life beyond loving and devoting my life to someone else. Where was I in all that, anyway?
I have a real snapshot of myself from my time on Maui. It was taken by the Bad Man. When I saved it on my computer, I gave it the file name, “pretending to be happy.” It looks like I am having the time of my life but the truth is, I was sleepless, anxious, afraid, and miserable. I was being emotionally battered, manipulated, terrorized and stalked. I had been called a long list of names your Mother wouldn’t want to hear you say. I was never good enough, never knew what he wanted or didn’t want, could never guess how to make him happy, because it changed minute by minute, nor could I keep up with his ever changing relationship rules that always applied to me but never to him. I was crumbling under the stress of it all.
I guess it’s never too late to be truthful with yourself.
Author’s note: The concept for “Snapshots” was introduced to me by my friend, Susan Bradley, RN. Susan is a Relationship Coach, and author of “Irresistible Prescriptions for Love.” For more information, visit her website www.lovinguniversity.com.
Valentine’s Day can be tough for victims of love fraud
Reaching a point where you truly are not “curious” about them, i.e. INDIFFERENCE, not wishing them bad, not wishing them good, not wanting to know what is going on with them…to me that is the place to be. With my X-P-BF, and with my P-son, I am there…still feel a bit of anger (i.e. still care some) about my P-by-proxy (enabling) mother, but am “getting there” slowly.
The night I visited her and we “talked” before I went NC with her, we were discussing my P-bio father and how my P-son was just like him, and she looked at me scornfully and said “Oh, you think it skipped a generation, do you?”
The answer to that is a resounding “YES I do” though it is obvious since my son is a P that some of those genes are in my body to enable me to pass them on. Why I am NOT a P is a mystery to me since I obviously got P-genes from BOTH sides of my ancestry.
I think as long as we CARE they still have a hold on us, and the indifference is where we need to “aim” and I think can eventually get there. It took a great while, even after I went NC with my P-son to where I didn’t have a curiosity about what was happening to him…what he was thinking…now that curiosity is gone and I think I am where I need to be with him.
I’m working through the anger with mother, the disappointment that I don’t have a loving and caring mother, and that my mother is such a die-hard-enabler and P-by-proxy that for all intents and purposes her behavior is just as evil because she will protect him, knowing what he has done, protect him knowing that he is evil, just not caring what pain he has inflicted on his victims. Protecting her own P-fantasy that he will get out of prison before she dies. She’s into the P-fog so deeply that if at this time in her life she actually gave up her delusions and denial, she would fall apart, and she must preserve it in order to exist, to give meaning to her entire life.
I know how difficult it is to give up your delusions, to cast away denial, to face reality that someone you love is EVIL, and to realize how you have enabled them, how you have “wasted” your own substance to enable them. Used so much energy to maintain the denial rather than face the painful truth.
I read recently (can’t remember where) that “TRUTH IS PAINFUL, but in the end it SETS YOU FREE.”
Facing my own truths has indeed been very painful, but I am now becoming FREE.
Lil O-
Yes, s/path and claimed he had asbergers—the genius autism. Before that it was ADD. He knew he was screwed up–all projection.
And not that I believe he is decompensating (is that the correct word?) — it’s all hanging out.
I know he knows he’s f–cked. When I first met him he admitted after I asked my standard cocktail party question: “have you ever seen a ghost?
that he felt he had been possessed by some entity at eighteen.
LilOrphan,
I think the trust thing (at least for me) must have partly come from childhood stuff and partly from bad relationships. But you know, with friends that I really trust, that doesn’t really make a difference in our relationship. I talk to them and realize pretty quickly what their intentions are and everything is okay.
But I feel like the closeness to the sociopath made me look at the subtext of life more closely. Usually for every action, there is a certain motivation or intention behind it. There is a whole other layer beneath the superficial actions that everyone performs, and it becomes obvious if you just pay close attention. For normal people it is usually innocent or not purposeful, but for sociopaths, it is the reality in which they operate.
I will never regret having this awareness. I guess I am sad that there isn’t intrinsic goodness in everyone, but I am not sad that I don’t have that world view, because it would just open me to heartache.
So I guess if people who don’t know me don’t understand me, there’s nothing I can do about it. But when I make friends, they are good ones and I know I can trust them. I don’t really spend time with acquaintances very much. Maybe that’s a really cynical way to look at the world, but it works for me. I think the thing that bothers me is not my own world view, but how much it sucks that we have to be so careful because this world has people like S’s/P’s in it.
Wanted to add– I am now paranoid about my own behavior and others.
I think hypervigilance is normal now.
The rabbit that survives is HYPERVIGILANT, the one that isn’t hyper-vigilant doesn’t survive….
so maybe it is a good thing that we are on the watch for RED FLAGS with people.
Subtext, paranoia and hyper-vigilance are all three things I can relate to, Ariadne, holywater and Ox-D. The P used to act as though every conversation I had with him had some sort of hidden attack or personal meaning, something important I was trying to convey in some sort of weird underlying code or something. As if. I’m as subtle as an anvil, really.
When we were getting along and he hadn’t yet started acting withholding, mean, distant, etc. I recall saying to him as we sat on the couch:
“Not everything I say has some sort of judgment or is anything to do with you, any reflection of you, or me, or whatever. Most of the time I just tell you things to have a conversation. There’s no subtext and certainly nothing threatening. We can’t have good communication if that’s going to be your concern because it’s not how I operate.”
He seemed relieved! I was…shocked. Shocked that it seemed I’d hit the nail on the head.
When I talk to people, unless it’s led by a direct “Hey, here’s something bothering me,” or “hey, we need to talk” or something that indicates importance, it’s otherwise just what I call babbling. I’m chatter-y sometimes, and quiet other times, but I never have conversations with some sort of agenda to them unless it’s made direct and clear.
Could not understand why anyone would think that! Same with actions. I don’t do things with “a plan” or agenda. Most of the time, I just don’t think that deeply, and certainly not deviously, about moving through the world on a daily basis.
But an S does. It’s how they operate.
Being uncertain right now, I tend to look for clues as to how others are perceiving me. God, I hate that so very much. It feels almost S-like. Have always been good at picking-up clues from being empathetic towards people. Both my girls are also quite good at reading others’ feelings in the moment. But I’ve never been so vigilant or socially anxious before.
Even took to asking my very closest friend if she was mad at me…all the time. To the point where it annoyed her so badly she said she would be, fairly soon, if I kept it up!
I still believe most people are good, but that trust is earned, not given freely. That was a huge change, both good and bad in ways.
Orphan,
I get what you mean exactly with the “chatty” part, I am always finding something interesting to talk about—in the newspaper, on the net, or in a book I am reading that I want to share with others…if someone is present…if not I may wait till later to say “Hey, I read something really interesting yesterday”—and like you, I don’t have any agenda with that sharing of interesting tidbits of information.
When I was with the X-P-BF if we were driving down the road (and we did quite a bit of travel in areas I had not visited before) if I noticed a house that I liked or one that I thought was nice I might say “Oh, that’s a pretty house, but I would like it better if it was set further back from the busy highway” he would make some snide remark about me being overly critical—like I didn’t have a right to an opinion that I WOULD LIKE IT BACK FROM THE HIGHWAY. I wasn’t criticizing the house, just stating my preferences.
That was the “start” of his telling me what about me that he didn’t like and that I should change to suit him…and it crept up slowly until the verbal abuse started along with the lies, etc. It crept up so slowly and I was so wanting to “please” him that I didn’t realize he was doing anything until it really started to get nasty.
A really great by-product of my own learning experiences though with the Ps is that my two sons C and D are learning as well, and though D was not as intimately injured by my P son, or my P-BF and not involved at all with my P-bio father he is getting some great lessons in P-RED FLAGS.
C, having been married to one for 8 years, got the “whammy” but I think is recovering more rapidly than you would expect simply because of the information he has learned about his P-brother and the actions he has seen in his X-wife and her P-BF.
I would never wish a p-relationship on my worst enemy (if I had one that wasn’t a P LOL) but it is an “ill wind that blows no one good” and so I think in the end if we all use this horrible experience as a learning experience we can come out on the other side with some good things for ourselves in terms of self love and vigilance for our own selves. I don’t mean to sound in any way like a Pollyanna or to minimize the depth of pain we have all felt or the scars that we will probably all carry to some extent or another, but at the same time, I do think that any experience CAN have a positive side if we work at it.
My S has always expressed concern for his mother and siblings. He tries to go home once a month to visit his mother.
Do you think that this concern could be real?
I too believe in the basic good in people. That is why it is difficult for me to imagine people who seek out the trusting and use and manipulate them.
How does one go back to dating after experiencing a S in their life? How can you trust or open up to another person after having your heart broken. It would be different if a relationship just ended, but to have your trust violated and your life manipulated makes it very difficult to get involved again.
LilOrphan: I know how you feel about unfinished business. I keep thinking about the past four years and wondering how I could have been fooled by this man. I am sure that you feel the same way. I thought that this was the man that I would spend the rest of my life with.
hummingbird:
“LilOrphan: I know how you feel about unfinished business. I keep thinking about the past four years and wondering how I could have been fooled by this man. I am sure that you feel the same way. I thought that this was the man that I would spend the rest of my life with. ”
Ouch..yes, that is exactly it. Part of it, anyway. I do not like to dwell on this too much right now. Honestly? Maybe not ever. Can’t really “look it in the eye” just yet, so to speak. It hurts too much. I did believe this was the man I would spend forever with. More importantly, this was the man I *wanted* to take care of, to be with forever, to share all the best of life with. So regardless of whatever his feelings were or weren’t, if he was indeed “acting” as he so cruelly said one day out of nowhere, just a few days before he said he wanted to get married, my feelings are still really raw because they were real.
And I don’t consider things like marriage at all lightly. Seems like some people get married so often it’s almost a hobby or sport, but I’ve been single 12 years since getting divorced. Am so unflailingly earnest about that kind of thing. The first marriage ended in disaster and he was actually abusive as hell, yelling, cornering me, breaking things, throwing plates and dishes and crap over past my head…
My family of origin, or rather, adoption, was volatile. Mostly the adoptive brother who was also abusive to all of us. So I married what I knew without really knowing it. Home.
To think that I totally got fooled by someone who didn’t really love me and enjoyed admitting it after a year…well, you know, it sucks royally. And while I realize this is not my fault or whatever, I have to wonder what needs fixing in ME that I somehow equate loving people with allowing them to treat me in ways I’d not other people.
About dating – I don’t know. I tried it for about a split-second and it raised all sorts of emotional detritus that hadn’t yet settled from the P experience. I will again, though. I feel defiance and anger as I say this: I will date again. I will get married again. I will not allow this man and this experience to rob me of the beautiful future that will be with someone who really wants one with me. Promise me you’ll do the same? I spent five years between encounters with him living this depressing tribute to what I thought I’d lost when first leaving him behind. Now I think…what a waste.
But first, fix and heal, patch and repair, find a way to let go of this man who apparently didn’t mean any of it, good or bad, and get our selves and souls back together, yes?
Ox-D
The house story brought back so many bad memories. Nothing you say to them in passing is heard with innocent ears. That was one of the first clues I had that something was genuinely wrong. He was so suspicious of everything I said or did, from the outset. If I genuinely just cared about something that seemed to bother him, he accused me of digging for dirt or trying to make an “end run” or some such football term that meant I was trying to DO SOMETHING to him. It made me stop talking so much — well, not really that, but it made me conscious of what I was saying sounding stupid, or suspicious, or all sorts of things. It made conversation unbearable. It made me doubt my goodness because he doubted my goodness. Part of that is picking-up people’s feelings and soaking them up, internalizing. Which is my own problem. But part of it was from the unkind things he would say in response.
Wow, do I ever understand what you said. Nobody ever made me feel that badly about myself before, or doubt my own intentions. My ex was a straightforward angry person a lot of the time, but funny and he wasn’t evil or malicious – just messed-up and full of anger he’d never dealt with. We were volatile and young but really loved each other down deep.
This man…well, this man was something else entirely.
Sorry – correction: he said he was “acting” a few days after he said he wanted to get married to me. Out of nowhere, he just coldly said it, as though giving away a confidence. It was like the “reveal” Secret Monster refers to in one of his posts. He was letting me in on his “game” and I still didn’t get it. Just thought it was cruel and cold and weird, said for “shock value” but not really meant.
I have such great capacity for both love and stupidity.