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.
Iwonder: Maybe he’s only pretending that’s it’s vindictive or mean … maybe it’s really insecurity at work here.
Iwonder, He knew all about the last loser. I found out months into our relationship he had even somehow got his hands on the last guys information. Phone number, address, etc. He (the other loser) had been calling and bothering me a lot.
The x socio kept reasuring me he wasn’t going to let him do anything to me, and would talk about how he was a loser and how he was nothing like him at all. When in fact he was worse because he was so much more subtle and smooth with him lies. Don’t get me wrong – thinking about it – I think the other guy is a socio too but he was just not as “polished” with it as this last one.
Wini,
I know mine is insecure. I heard and experienced his sob story firsthand. I think he uses a combination of “I’m a bad ass/oh my life has been so hard” ( his dad is in prison for murdering his stepmother) to lure and trap women and to everyone else everything in life is roses. I know because I’ve witnessed it.
I remember once his boss saying to me “he’s my guy. my right hand. Don’t know what I would do without him.” It took all of my willpower not to say “yeah until he doesn’t show up because he’s passed out drunk somewhere.” I’m sorry but as you may have seen me note earlier I’m feeling very full of HATE today. I just feel like calling him, or emailing or sending him the letter cursing him out. I was so numb the last time he called that I couldn’t even muster a response to his stupid words. Now after 2 months I just want to scream at him.
I’ve I said thank you enough to everyone. It’s so good to have this space to come to but I also know I need to get out and be living my life. It’s just so hard. I’ve thought about leaving the area. I’ve thought about it in the past but not so much as I have since all of this has happened.
I’ve found in the 11 years I’ve been in this area it’s very difficult to meet people. It’s a very transient city. I get very lonely and depressed because I just want to have a friend I can call up and say “hey let’s go out.” I’m that type of person but pretty much all of my friends are either married, married with kids, or have kids and so it’s not something I can readily do. This further depresses me because it makes me think of my stupidness in allowing two losers into my life for the last 5 years total and being 34 and seeing all of my friends “leaving me behind.”
Iwonder,
He is getting exactly what he wants from you too, by going into that store every day. Even though you didn’t see him, he is having exactly the effect he wants to have, which is to control you and make you think about him. Think about it. If he was so happy in his life, why would he feel the need to control you? Who would have the time to shop at a store every day, on the off chance that their ex would see or hear about it? You’re right. It’s sadistic and disgusting. I don’t even know why you feel you owe him the courtesy of all these chances to pick up his things? I would have given them away to a charity or burned them. And then when he called to ask where they were, I’d say, “I’m so sorry, I had all your things in a room waiting for you to pick them up. But someone broke into the house last night and took them!!! I thought it was one of your friends who was picking them up for you.” I would have no compunction whatsoever about lying to a sociopath, especially to get them out of my life.
I really think the best way to get this guy to stop manipulating you is to stop reacting to him. Do not show any anger toward him. Just say the bare minimum of what you need to say and get off the phone as fast as possible. If he cannot manipulate your feelings any more, he will eventually stop trying.
Stargazer,
You and Win are so right. Control. That’s all that is. I have friends that think it was so coldhearted that I dropped him and his crap off to his mother’s. I keep trying to tell them that coldhearted would have been me leaving his crap on the doorstep, burning it, dumping it at his job or even leaving it at reception at his mother’s apartment complex.
I agree. No more chances. Iwonder. Are you saying he still has access to your place. I would be weary of that. Get your locks changed. These S have no logic and who knows what he could potentially do.
And yes, they love it when you react and hate it when you don’t. When I got my first call from mine (3 weeks after I put him out) he said asked me why I hadn’t called him. I oh so casually said “oh I was on a trip to Puerto Rico.” He responded immediately by saying. “do you think I care. I don’t care.” ah okay, sure you don’t.
: )
Wow, did all of our exes go to the same Sociopath school? They all seem to say the same things. When the S I was dating saw how badly some other guys had treated me in the past, he used to say that he is different from those guys and he will never treat me like that. He was right. Those guys are angels compared to what he did! In fact, after I broke up with the S, I was easily able to forgive some of the other guys in my life that had burned me.
I really wish a bunch of us lived in the same city–we could get together and go out instead of sitting in front of the computer. I have friends I can hang out with, but I cannot talk to them about what I’m going through because they don’t understand.
Oh, and here’s another gem from my ex’s mouth. After the first no-call/no-show, I was hurt and confused and sent him an angry email. I got a voice message from him saying the following:
“Sherri, I’m not gonna try and make any excuses because I’m more of a man than that…….”
Right! A real man.
Star,
LOL! You just made me laugh so hard my eyes are watering. I think the same thing when I read these post. Either they went to the same school or someone had misfortune of meeting mine and they’re one in the same (not possible I know but sometimes so errily similar you have to wonder.).
I was also thinking to myself I wish some of us were in the same locale. As I mentioned i don’t have a lot of friends I can hang with. And work is out of the question. There’s only 6 of us and that includes the husband/wife CEO/COO.
“more of a man?” really? seriously? come on.
The ex is borrowing a “friend’s” van. He has no friends. …not males anyway. He never had one. All of his “friends” are women who are on deck waiting to get up at bat. He borrowed his “friend’s” SUV to move his crap into my home in March 07. That “friend’s” SUV was the OW’s.
The friend with the van is the next victim after the one he is with now. Obviously, she has a supply.
Stargazer said: “I would have no compunction whatsoever about lying to a sociopath, especially to get them out of my life.”
I agree with that statement. Honesty is great when dealing with a normal type person. When dealing with a socio or psychopath, particularly the dangerous, vindictive type, if you have to resort to some lies to get away, I wholeheartedly endorse it. I certainly lied my a@.......@ off a few times when dealing with mine. I felt a few twinges of guilt over being dishonest, then I thought, well, if I were being held hostage by a dangerous stranger would I be completely honest with them, or would I do or say whatever it took to get away.