Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.
As I was wondering what to write about for my blog article this week, Southernman429 did me a favor and provided a topic. He posted the following on Dr. Leedom’s most recent article:
I’d like to pose a question to Donna, M.L., and Dr. Leedom”¦
Is it normal to go on with your life”¦ develop new relationships”¦ have new goals and new ideals”¦ years go by”¦ basically move on from the sociopathic experience”¦ but yet”¦ still feel a emptiness in a part of your heart, or a tugging at your soul”¦ a sort of grieving”¦ maybe partly for them, or about them, but also about yourself”¦ even though in hindsight, you have gained so much because of this experience and have used it as a springboard to a new life with a new mindset”¦?
Donna, I know that you have since re-married after your sociopath experience”¦ Does that bad relationship ever come up in your thoughts, affect your emotions or thinking”¦ even though you are happily married?”¦ At what point does this “go away—¦ or does it ever?
My experience with a sociopath
Let me answer the question by providing some background. I met my sociopathic ex-husband, James Montgomery, in July 1996, married him in October 1996, and left him in February 1999. In a short two and a half years, he cost me about $300,000, put me in serious debt, had affairs with six women that I know of, and had a child with one of those women. Ten days after I left him, he married the mother of that child. It was the second time he committed bigamy. I suspect he married her to get health insurance, because he had diabetes and I sure wasn’t going to be carrying him on my insurance any more.
I was divorced in February 2000. The judge awarded me all the money that was taken from me, plus $1 million in punitive damages, plus attorney fees. For the next year I conducted an international asset search for his money so I could get back on my feet financially. I never found it, and in May 2001, I had to bite the bullet and declare bankruptcy.
Those five years were the most emotionally tumultuous of my life. Fear, anger, betrayal, dismay, hopelessness, doubt, rage, numbness—I was wracked by every negative emotion under the sun. My stomach was always knotted. I couldn’t sleep. My face, arms, back and chest were covered with zits. Yet I had to hold myself together to deal with the divorce, get my business going again, keep my few clients happy. Frequently it all became too much and I collapsed into a puddle of tears.
I begged God to help me; I yelled at God for letting my ex get away with his crimes; I prayed to God to take away the pain.
The larger purpose
God didn’t take away the pain—at least not right away. I worked my way through it. Luckily, I had a wonderful therapist, a woman who I refer to as an energy worker. She helped me process the pain and see the spiritual reason for the journey.
I haven’t written this on the Lovefraud Blog (although others have), but I believe there is larger purpose for our encounters with the sociopaths. These traumas are opportunities for deep, profound healing. When our hearts and souls are ripped open by the sociopath, not only are we given a chance to release and forgive the betrayal of the predator, but we are given a chance to release and forgive the buried pain within us that made us susceptible to the sociopath in the first place.
But it requires work. The only way past the pain is through it. We must allow ourselves to feel, in all the gory agony, the traumas of our past that were brought to the surface by the deceit and betrayal of the sociopath.
It is a physical experience. It isn’t pretty. I spent many hours in the privacy of my meditation room, crying, raging, and finally collapsing when a piece of the burden was released.
In time, however, the pain within me dissipated. What replaced it? Love and joy.
Starting new chapters
To directly answer Southernman429’s question, in the past two years, there has only been one set of circumstances that triggered the old pain. It came each time I started a new chapter in the book I’m writing about my experience.
To draw up an outline for each chapter, I’d review my files, with all those massive credit card statements. I’d look at old e-mails, in which I tried to find solutions to my problems. I’d re-read my journal, where I wrote with raw emotion of the moment. Reviewing the materials brought back the knots in my stomach, and the incredulity that I let my ex-husband con me. But as I got going on each chapter, the knots relaxed.
I met my current husband, Terry Kelly, in 2001, about the time I finally decided to give up the financial battle and declare bankruptcy. I told Terry my sorry story on our first date—armed with the information that my ex was a sociopath. On our second date, Terry brought a copy of his tax return to prove that, unlike my ex-husband, he actually had an income.
We’ve been together seven years, and married for three. I have never been so happy. My life is full. There is an aliveness within me that I never experienced before. And it never would have happened if all the walls within me hadn’t been shattered.
The title of my book, by the way, is Cracked Open: How marriage to a sociopath led to spiritual healing.
Gemini.
I know that you’re right. My ex-sociopath has his various “types.” There’s the “hump and dump” type — young goth girls with no case and no jobs, and then there’s his long-term targets, like me, the girl before me, his ex-lover, etc. This one seems like a hump n’ dump, to be honest. She doesn’t have money, so I don’t think that she’ll has long — the last hump n’ dump lasted only two weeks. If she were a lawyer or an accountant or someone he could get something out of, I might be a little more wary. I’ll keep you posted …
I had no problem not contacting anyone he associated with — to be honest, I suspected that they had the same sociopathic personality types. One guy’s on the lam from Child Support Services, hooks up with women from Myspace for a prolonged couch-surfing gig. One of the others was accused of rape during one of their last tours, don’t know how that’s going for him. His manager is just sleazy at times, I don’t trust him either. The whole cadre of them are just … ick.
I finally sent him a very brief and cordial email about the “issue” he’s been bugging me about that I don’t even want to go into. Maybe that’ll be that.
Dear Southern–gentle–man,
Praise from you means so much to me, you are gentle and wise, in spite of your continued pain.
I think the losing of our spouses, yours through cancer and mine through the aircraft crash leaves us “set up” for a real fall with the next person we “encounter” that seems to hold out HOPE to us of another wonderful relationship. We were “addicted” to our former spouses, and though they are gone and we want to love again, we are vulnerable, more vulnerable to the Ps than we would have been otherwise.
I met my P 10 yrs before I started a relationship with him, just knew him casually as a nice guy member of my living history group. Saw him at events and enjoyed his laughter and “mr nice guy” “show”–but after his wife threw him out for cheating on her (she FINALLY caught him after 32 yrs of him NEVER BEING FAITHFUL AT ALL and threw him out a yr before I encountered him after my husband’s death.
I was feeling so down and so low and so lonely and so grieving that I FELL and fell HARD AND QUICK. I thought I had the world by the tail. It was like for a few months that my pain of loss and my grief was OVER like MAGIC. How could I have been SO FORTUNATE to meet prince charming right after such a tragic pain? Of course it was all a lie. All a fake.
But the thing is, with the mental, emotional, and chemical changes that the trauma of our prior losses still active, we became “drunk” with Joy and pleasure and anticipation of a new happiness.
When that happiness and joy turned out to be fake, all our prior grief came back 100-fold, now we had suffered TWO tragic losses one right after the other. If anything, the second loss was worse than the first. The grief is multiplied NOT ADDED.
Southernman, it takes TIME to get over any grief of loss, time for the brain and emotions and body to heal themselves. When we have the multiplied pain and loss it makes our bodies and our minds much much longer to regroup.
My worst thing right now is my sort term memory loss. It frusrates the heck out of me every day. Put down a tool and can’t remember where it is. over and over and over, tell and retell the same story like an elderly person with dementia.
Inability to concentrate like I always have. Scatter brained, etc. unable to focus on a task for long times, attention deficit.
Yet, I KNOW I AM BETTER, I am improving. I have accomplished an amazing amount of things in the last nearly a year since I got back home. Yet sometimes, many times, at the end of the day I look back and didn’t get all done I wanted to (too tired, too distracted, some unforeseen something coming up etc) and I berate myself for not getting enough done.
In my culture and in my family “being a hard worker” and accomplishing an amazing amount of work is a big virtue, “Lazy” is the worst thing you can say about some one. I have never been lazy by any stretch of the imagination, but NO ONE can do “enough” to satisfy my “inner child” that I am not “lazy”–that I “should have done more” or that “leisure” is not a capitol CRIME for ME.
Today my son and I got up and did a pretty good amount of work, and then right after lunch as we were going back to work, two of his nice friends that I just love, showed up unannounced and visiting with them slowed down our “work.”
Actually I was GLAD these young men came to visit, and there was NO reason we couldn’t have set down and done nothing the rest of the day and just visited. Yet in a way I felt irritated that they had interupted our work. (which was just cleaning up some trash actually) But I RECOGNIZED THAT I HAD AN EMOTION that really wasn’t RATIONAL. I WAS glad they were here, it was GOOD for me and good fo rmy son, and so I invited them to stay for dinner, and one of the young men who is a great cook helped me in the kitchen and we cooked a grand meal, then the other young man helped my son unload the truck of the trash, and then the four of us sat down to dinner and we LAUGHED ANDLAUGHED and had such a wonderful time.
Before my husband died we seldom had less than 5 or 8 people for dinner and more bood beef and more laughter has been across my kitchen table than any place I know of.
Anyway, I realized that I was GLAD they were there and we laughed and laughed more. It was a wonderful day filled with belly aching laughter and good will and love and friendship.
The world didn’t fall in because we didn’t get all the trash picked up and hauled off, but we did do a considerable amount of work, and I recognized that I am MY OWN SLAVE DRIVER and I need to some how get through to my “emotional self” that RECREATION, friendship and not working 24/7 is NOT A CRIME. LOL
I may not have quite solved that problem yet, but I have RECOGNIZED that I do have a problem with that that effects me emotionally so I am working on it logically now, and will get through to the emotional parts with a solution just like I did with the forgiving them, and then forgiving myself.
Overcoming what has been “bred in the bone” and trained into the brain for a life time is difficult but we are living proof that we are able to accomplish it. (((hugs and God bless you)))
OxD,
Your story reminds me of one time I was in a therapy group. We were learning a technique called “questioning”. It was a therapeutic process that involved continuing to ask yourself “why” until you get to the root of a thought process. I asked out loud in the group “why do I feel I have to work so hard at everything”? Indeed why? The answer that came to me was that I was always forced to work in my stepfather’s house. I was made to work constantly–cleaning, scrubbing, cooking…..I was not allowed to ever sit down. On the weekends while kids were out playing, I was home working. Once we moved to a piece of land in the country. My sister, my stepfather and I all built a house on it–the 3 of us with our bare hands–that we lived in for 2 years. That was my summer.
Nowadays, I have gone the oppositive direction. I like to lie around sometimes for the whole day and get nothing done. Some days I work hard. Others I don’t. I have set up my life so I can pay my bills working minimal hours. But I still carry the sense sometimes that life is hard work.
OxD, it’s so great to hear of your day filled with family and friends and laughter. Those are such days to cherish. I hope we can all have more of those in days to come.
Hugs,
StarG
Unwilling,
Yes, I have noticed that his one “best friend” seems to exhibit the same characteristics. Interestingly enough he too is divorced, has a child, lives with his parents and seems to have the same criminal notions as my ex-soc (you may have seen that mine had a previous stint in prison for extortion).
I should add in here – I don’t even really no for certain he’s still having a thing with this girl – the minute I saw the Facebook friend thing I deactivated my account to keep my sanity and as I said I avoid an entire area of our city but no matter how hard I try I keep thinking I was “replaced” or that he is still with her.
So you sent him an e-mail? I wrote my ex a long letter shortly after his late night call but have yet to do anything with it. Don’t know if I should send it or not? I mean, it’s not as if he’ll care what I have to say. I just feel like I never got to get my anger out. I went from a very needy, I love you and want to be with you (but get out of my house) expression, to a 2 month long stay out of town with my family to coming back and having to get right back into the swing of things – which is good but I felt like I never had closure.
Dear StarG,
Actually, I LIKE some things that others consider “work”—so the definition of “work” is an individual thing.
Some friends of mine retired and moved to ark to be near us and they lived ina mobile home I had on the place at the time which was empty. Every evening I wold come in from my work at the clinic which consisted of 8 hours in small rooms listening to other people’s mental and physical and emotional problems and trying to find a way to fix them.
I would come home at 5-5:30 get on my shorts and tee and go out and work spraying weeds or weeds in fence rows, I hired my hosuework done so I could build fences and clear land. My friends chided me for “working so hard” and what they didn’t realize was that the PHYSICAL WORK, HARD WORK, was my “going to the gym” it did two things, worked my body physically and let my mind rest and I also felt a sense of accomplishment that I was improving the land that has been in my family since 1833. I lvoe this land. It is (again) sanctuary to me and my sons. It is my special pllace. I know every tree, and most of the squirrels and deer that frequent here. I watch the insect population change as the land after a “generation” of neglect started to be healthy again. I celebrated when I saw the first pile of loose dirt beside a pile of cow chips–the DUNG beetles were back. They were doing what dung beetles do, they take a piece of cow manure and roll it into a ball and lay their egg and then dig down 3 feet and bury the ball of manure, fertilizing the land, removing the dung (which keeps down the fly population) etc. Thge land is fertile again, healthy again. The wild turkeys are back here, the deer are here, the coons, squirrels, possoms, and even a bear frequents the place. I’m affaid the coyottes which were such a healthy population but disappeared suddenly have been killed off by the chemicals left around the natural gas drilling sites that now circle my place. I used to listen to 3 separate packs howl and yip at night and then SUDDENLY they were gone. Not a yip, not a howl, just GONE. It makes me sad, but at least my 120 acres is an island of healthy soil and since I am up on top of the hill there isn’t any run off that reaches my place from the pollution of other’s lands. That’s some consulation I guess.
I love natural things and watching the changes in the animals that live here or move through, the changes in the flora, from season to season and year to year, depending on the amount of rain (or not) etc is interesting and soothing to me. But when you are in such emotional pain that you can’t see “the nose in front of your face” taking joy from any of these things is impossible.
In spite of all the pain I’ve had, I’ve also had a great deal of joy, and I think I have more joy now than I ever had, and enjoyment of what blessings God has given me. I love sharing those things with others “a sorrow shared is halved and a joy shared is DOUBLED” (don’t know where I heard that years ago but it is SO true!)
Yes, it was SO GOOD to have laughter and friends and good food at my table. I think I will put the leaf back in the table. I think it is about time! ((((hugs))))) and THANKS to every one here on LF.
OxD,
Your story has made me a little homesick – even though I was with my family for 2 months. I’m from a tiny little village where the minute you are there and you tell your “people” your problems they sit you right down and buy you a drink or you have a meal and oh the laughter.
Thank you for all that you share. You help put me at ease at times when I’m so high in anxiety.
xoxoxo
Dear Gemini_fairy,
The nearest “town” from me is 13 miles away and it is only about 5,000, though the area is growing with the influx of natural gas drilling going on here at a very rapid rate. Personally, I wish they would take their money and their polution and GO AWAY. It will eventually benefit me with money, and I know the country needs the energy but gosh, it is so different here in the last two years since the drilling really started going full speed ahead.
For years I had no idea where the key to my front door was, I never locked the house. We had an alarm system but we never turned it on. Now it is lock the doors and use the alarm if we are gone, lock the gate by the road, etc. Very different.
I am fortunate that all my neighbors are 3-4th or more generation neighbors which is good and though I was gone from here I am either friends with or kin to most of the natives here. I KNOW the area, the people and the local culture, for the most part they are “good” people, though we have enough of the Ps here as well as the better sort.
Most of the people are either Scots-Irsh back ground (mine) or Italians who moved to this area in 1860s. Until the 1960s there was almost no intermarriage. Now the two groups are merging with many intermarriages.
I have studied the history of the Scots-Irish (not half scots and half irish, they were the Low-land Scots who were moved into NOrthern Ireland (they were protestant) and took over the lands of the Catholic Celtic Irish and a hatred that started in 1609 between the Scots in Ireland and the Irish in Ireland that goes on there today (it is more group than just religion) but it transferred to the US with the waves of the Scots Irish prior to the american revolution.
We are a clannish people, with a fierce independence. Also I think (though I have no data to back it up) that there is a high rate of Alcoholism and drug addiction in the Scots Irish, I know I can trace the alcoholism back to before 1860 in my own family with some pretty nasty court records showing abuse and drunkeness that came on down to my mother’s paternal grandfther, and her brother, both of whom were horrible mean drunks, and I THINK my uncle was also Bi-polar, I have no doubt at all that he was a psychopath.
Since I hung out with the “old folks” and my grandparents a lot I heard all the “stories” about “Uncle Joe’s drinking” and “how Sam beat his wife with a club” and on and on. Since my family has lived in this area so long and I a kin to most of the people here at least distantly I am privy to a lot of the stories they would never have told to outsiders.
Interesting history and especially in light of the fact that the medical community is proving that alcoholism/addiction and pswychopathic behavior and other “mental” problems are very highly influenced by GENETICS.
I am fortunate that I know the medical and “eotional” (or at least behavioral) histories of both sides of my family for generations. How long they lived and what they did for a living and a lot of information about their behavior and their attitudes. My paternal grandmother was such a WITCH that everyone who knew her hated her completely including my grandfather (divorce wasn’t an option for a country doctor though) and her father was a bigamist and I think a P as well. I know he was married (and deserted) at least 4 women. His life pattern seems to reinforce the P-ness in the man although I know little else about him.
My bio-father was a violent P but because he was wealthy he got around many laws.
I have a P son in prison for murder. I also have a loving and good son and an adopted son who is wonderful.
My mother is a TOXIC enabler, and how much is learned and how much is (if any) genetic I am not sure, but she is so TOXIC I am NC with her too.
It is almost funny that here I am 61, almost 62 years old (where did the time go!?!) and I am just now “getting it together” but I am determined to live a life of laughter and joy for whatever is left to me. My life has not been all hell even though I have had Ps in it “forever” but I’ve enjoyed a lot of things in spite of it, not even realizing really that a lot of what they did to me was “abuse”–I just accepted it as “normal” problems. Of course they weren’t but the roller coaster rides were some pretty good “highs” and the lows were horrible. I tend to wear rose colored glasses (I was told by a therapist) but I think (I HOPE) that I am looking at things more realisticly now, I know one thing, with the Ps ALL out of my life, I have started to feel better than I have ever felt in my life. It’s been a long hard road of self examination as well as figuring out finally that people who LOVE YOU DO NOT TREAT YOU THE WAY THE Ps DO. Once you get that figured out, and really believe it, you can start to find your way.
I wish you well, Gemini_fairy, hang in there, it DOES get better and each of us does it in her/his own time, you can’t rush it (though you want to! LOL) but it is IS IS WORTH IT!
Gemini,
A couple of weeks ago, he was back in town (he fled the city when things got tough), calling me like gangbusters and doing creepy things like driving by my place late at night. Backstory: When we lived together, he had me put some things in our storage unit. When he took off, I told the storage facility to do as thou wilt. They sent him notices: “Hey, come get your stuff.” He didn’t, and they auctioned it. Hey, it wasn’t my job to tell him.
Whe he was in town, he wanted his beloved pile of crap — receipts he needed for taxes, he said. Taxes that he IRS are apparently coming down on him to pay. I guess he didn’t even read the certified notices.
I think it was all a scam to get me to see him … he wanted me to meet him at the unit at NIGHT, and when I didn’t he became very scary, threatening me with a lawsuit, police report, etc.
I sent him an email letting him know about the status of the storage unit and what became of his crap, that’s it. I would have responded to the voicemails or texts had he not been so creepy-scary. Sorry, but when you threaten me and ask me to meet you in dark alleys? NO.
Hi Unwilling: My ex S of 5 mos texted that he was going to pick up his stuff from my garage either yesterday or today. He texted he got a storage facility. This is so comical. What do they do? Put their stuff in storage so when they leave their victim they can move it out easier? It’s only 3 tv’s. I wonder why he can’t just take the crap to the OW’s house where he lives now. He has a key to my garage. I texted him to just take the stuff and leave the key inside the garage. Today is Saturday and I hope he gets his crap and is gone forever. If he knocks on the door, I won’t answer. I can’t even look in his face for what he has done. I don’t want to show him my hurt and anger and listen to anymore filthy lies.
Of course, he has to borrow the girlfriends car because he doesn’t have one. I wonder who is paying for the storage facility? User.
You know what really gets me annoyed? This guy moved into my home March 07 after 8 mos of dating. 6 mos later, he moved in his 12 yr old son. I took care of them both on my paycheck, cooked, cleaned, laundry, etc. That man used me to take care of his son. One time, I couldn’t get out of work to pick up his son and I wanted him to. You know what he did? Called the OW and had her pick him up. He lied about who picked her up and screamed at me, “If you can’t get my son, I will find someone who will!” Hmmm…did it ever occur to him that his son was his responsibility? What an A.H.