Lovefraud recently received the following e-mail from a reader who we’ll call “Lillian.”
Yes. It happened to me. It took him six years but he left. He left me holding two mortgages in both our names. He left me once I ran out of cash. He left me when I got laid off. I am almost 50 years old and I have nothing. I haven’t heard from him in over a year. He encouraged me to buy a bigger, more expensive house than I would have on my own and came up with half the down. He moved in. Wouldn’t pay anything. Got us a joint account and credit card. I worked. He didn’t even buy groceries. He bought himself a boat after three years of hell as I got angrier and angrier because he just lay on the couch. Then he sailed to Mexico and didn’t come back. His rich widow of a prominent heart surgeon called me one day. He had told her he owned property up here and that he had ended a relationship—which he hadn’t. He got really angry then and cleaned out the joint account of my funds, of course, since there was never any joint about it. He lives in Mexico on his boat and has a house in Oakland. She feels like Cinderella right now and thinks I am the evil stepsister.
I had $400K in cash. No revolving debt. Two retirement accounts and supported my husband and kids. Well fast forward. I have no cash. No retirement accounts. $70K in revolving debt and no job. I am ruined. I am so traumatized and messed up that I can’t function. I just cry. I reach out and no one is there. I am extremely isolated. I want to die. He is living in Mexico and suing me for half the house. He isn’t done with me yet. And I am just two months away from living in a tent. No one cares. No one understands. Everyone thinks that somehow I either deserve this and or it’s my fault. I am done for. I don’t know that I can be helped even if I knew someone who could help me. That’s the story. Sad but true. I wish I were dead.
After a devastating encounter with a sociopath, the most important thing we have to do is stay alive.
We may have lost our money, our homes, our jobs, our health, our self-esteem, our hopes and our dreams, but we cannot lose our selves.
This is basic, but crucial. We cannot die.
Not everyone succeeds at this essential task. Not everyone is able to continue living in the face of monstrous personal betrayal. In these cases, the sociopath truly wins. Dr. Leedom calls it “murder by suicide.”
There is an old adage, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” When dealing with the aftermath of a sociopath, this is the truth. A sociopath’s goal is always to win, and sometimes to destroy us in the process. When we stay alive, we deny the sociopath’s victory.
We can also start a process that, over time, will enable us to claim victory for ourselves.
It doesn’t seem that way in the blackness of despair as we survey the wreckage of our lives. But as many of us have learned, amid the wreckage we may discover that our broken ideas and beliefs actually needed to be broken and thrown away. We were operating under false conceptions of ourselves, conceptions that made us vulnerable to the predators.
We learn that if we stay alive, we can begin to rebuild our lives, and when we do, we will be living our own truth.
So how do we do it? We keep putting one foot in front of the other. We cry when we need to, then we pick ourselves up and push on. We keep going forward, even though we don’t believe we can.
The road to recovery takes time and patience. It takes recognizing that we may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD). It takes caring about ourselves and being kind to ourselves.
The first step is staying alive.
Please, Lillian, we know your situation is very, very bad. But don’t let him win.
Hi Lillian: It is good to hear from you. Was very sorry to read what happened to you, just horrible, but I am glad you are here, I have read a lot of articles and posts on this website and it has helped me a lot. I am happy to read that you are feeling a little bit better. I too trusted the wrong people, that is maybe all we did “wrong”, I wasn’t taught to pay attention to red flags, I just wanted love.
I know what you mean about loving your children so much it frightens you, I felt that way when my daughter was born, I did not know it was possible to love anyone that much!!!!
I hope you will write again and soon, it helps you heal to write about everything and this is a safe place.
Lillian: Good morning (or afternoon, depending on where your are). Just wanted to let you know I am thinking about you and you are in my prayers. I hope today is a good day for you!!! 🙂
Lillian: I was wondering how you are doing with the feelings of being isolated. When I read the posts here at LF I don’ feel so all alone. If you reach out here… there will be a “cyber-hand” that reaches back, it can be very comforting!
Hi SC2; It is nice to hear from you. And to know that someone is thinking of me. I had an okay day. I took my kids to school and then they go back to their dads so it was a healing day. I ate frosting off of the cake and took a nap. I am in a bit of a limbo due to the lack of a job, finances and the real estate issues so I do nothing. I feel like everyone is waiting for me to get back up and save the day. So it’s a waiting game. Even if i could fix everything my therapist says I shouldn’t. Even so it is an empty feeling because saving the day is what i’ve done for years now. I’m trying to make it feel like a decision, a choice, not a failure. That is hard. Everything is hard. Even feeding my children is hard. But, loving them isn’t. That’s a good thing. Thanks for writing. I appreciate it a great deal. Lil
Lillian: Frosting off the cake sounds good!!! I am not working either, and this is the first time since I was 16 that I don’t have a job. I stay home a lot, and it makes me feel like a blob. If I remember correctly, don’t you live in a beautiful area with farms? Or was that someone else? I’m loosing my mind. I am also trying not to feel that what happened to me was a failure, my biggest fear was being abandoned, but I guess I am facing that fear… and I’m still here!
Lillian,
“I feel like everyone is waiting for me to get back up and save the day. So it’s a waiting game”
Oh boy do I get this. Being the one that others look to for strength and solution and getting up and getting to it again. And the sense of failure. It is probably the MOST difficult feeling for me to sit with. It has taken me quite a while to get to the point that I don’t hear it as a continuous background noise to my other emotions.
Even though you are in the hard waiting place that you currently occupy, and many of us would choose to be in suspended animation rather than go through the kind of helpless feeling states we experience after the trauma/awakening…… I am so glad to hear from you…..and that you have 20 months of distance, time, healing time. I am happy that you have ‘chosen’ to sit, to wait, to talk with a therapist, and to register…..that you are eating frosting off a cake.
I am glad you are alive.
Lillian,
I’m so glad you have posted. Please know that we all understand where you are, because we have been there too. Right now, doing nothing isn’t really doing nothing, it is allowing yourself to come to terms with what happened, and to begin gathering your strength to move forward. So much of the recovery process is internal, and that is what you are doing.
Dear Lillian,
Oh, yes, I too was the “saver of the day” the “fixer of all the things wrong” the one that “the world couldn’t revolve” if I didn’t spin it…..I THOUGHT! But Lilian, dear Lillian, it is NOT our responsibility to fix everything that is wrong with the world! Or even within our families! That is a job waaaaay too big for any one person. Yet, we feel SO RESPONSIBLE for doing this impossible job!
Sitting, waithing, healing, those are ALL good things. If you had a broken leg with a cast on it, you would not feel responsible for getting up and running a foot race would you? You would give yourself time to heal. You have a different thing that is “broken” right now, that needs time to HEAL and needs comfort, quiet and peace. Your spirit is mangled, broken, and healing it is okay, you are NOT neglecting something else that you are responsible for by healing your spirit.
I can also relate to your love for your children, as I too am a parent.
You most likely feel like everything in the world is attacking you at once—the old it is difficult to drai the swamp when there are alligators nipping at your butt!
You need to heal yourself FIRST, so get out of the swamp, quit trying to drain it, and lay on the shore away from the alilgators for a while and gather strengh and healling so that you can go back into the swamp and squash the alligators and drain the swamp! ((((hugs)))) and prayers! We’ve all been in teh swamp my dear!!! Keep on reading here, read the old articles in the archives and keep on posting, it will help. My prayers for your peace and healing. Oxy
Lillian, thank you for posting. I, too, am really glad to hear from you.
What you describe about yourself is what I used to call “sitting and staring.” I did it for a while, waiting with myself. I didn’t exactly know what was going on with me, except that I felt immobilized. Everywhere my mind went seemed to be another problem or another reason to despair. I had a hard time coming up with a reason to live.
But at the same time, I was healing. Maybe from a really wounded place, where what I was going through was a kind of shock reaction. Too much to handle, so I was out in the ozone. But inside, I was gradually working through the overwhelm.
What I eventually came to think was that my feelings were the keys to healing. They were the one thing I had a lot of, even when I couldn’t seem to hold a thought.
My therapist once told me about “sitting with.” She said that sitting compassionately with someone who was in pain without attempting to fix them was one of the hardest things in the world to do. Just being a companion to them. But it was a deeply bonding thing to do, and that the ability to do that was the cement in many long-term relationships.
So I “sat with” my feelings. Letting them be, letting them say whatever they wanted to say, listening without judging them or myself.
I don’t know if this makes sense as a I write it, but paying that sort of attention changed the whole character of my recovery. I made friends with myself in a new way and learned about myself at a level I’d never known before.
It took time. I had to overcome some obstacles. Like letting myself feel angry and bitter for a while, when I’d never let myself have feelings like that before. But I discovered that those feelings had their reasons and would actually protect me if I let them. It became easier to regain my trust in myself and a feeling that I actually could take back control of my life.
As I said, it didn’t happen overnight. But it was good work. Exciting in a way. It helped me separate “me” from the bad thing that happened to me. I didn’t choose it. No matter how I might have participated in it — from misguided love — I was not the one who created all this damage and loss. It was not my fault. I needed to know that.
I’m glad you have a therapist who understands what you’re going through. It does get better. In fact, the healing process gets pretty wonderful as we move through it. We find new ways of looking at the resources of our lives and of dealing with residual issues with the sociopath. So you can look forward to that. But in the meantime, you have every reason to feel kind of blasted.
I feel for you and, like everyone else, I send you lots of healing energy.
Kathy
Good morning to all: Thank you again so much for your thoughts and wishes. I need them as you probably know. I am on the verge of losing everything but it isn’t gone yet. It is agony. Like a festering tooth. I just want it all to be over. I wonder why no one cares about me after I have spent so much time caring for others.
Is it me or them that has the disorder. I read one thing last night that helped me clarify that. If someone drives themselves crazy it is a neorosis or pschyosis. If they drive other’s crazy it is a personality disorder. I have been so confused reading everything wondering if I am the one with the personality disorder as I have been so angry and depressed.
The good news is that I am just neorotic and have been driven to these neorosisies by my loved ones with personality disorders (oh yes there were others. This is a pattern apparently and by far the worst). I am grasping here. I apologize for the spelling but I am not familiar with medical terms so much. For what it is worth this was a relevelation for me and I am clinging to it and trying to believe in it. As I believe in so little right now.
I do know that I am terribly needy and I hope that I can support others on this site at some point but I am not that clear yet. Thank you so much for being here for me. My friends in cyberspace. xoxo Lil