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.
I also remembered now that when I spoke with the woman he was with before me, my ex used to take her to shop and would point out the women there to her and say, “see her?” “I used to date her..” “See her? She has a crush on me, etc.” Perhaps he wanted the OW to see me and say, “there’s my ex.” Who knows. But for whatever the reason, he definitely wanted me and the OW to see eachother. Maybe he feels like a real man with all the women he can point out that “love him.” Ewwww.
You know I’ve posted before about how God is looking out for me. 1st when I found out the OW’s name & address by a fluke like a month before he was going to split which helped me get the car back. Then the OW’s paycheck stub in the car so I used that as leverage/blackmail to get the deed to my home back threatening to contact her & tell.
Now this morning. This lady whom I really do not know or remember at all, happens to work in the store that I’m writing about. She came up to me out of the blue & asked if I am separated from my husand (S) and asked how i am. Then I told her he had another woman in town he was living with at the same time. She then told me they go to the store everyday in the afternoon. Tell me God was not sending me this information for a reason. See, I was just getting comfortable in going to that store to shop again. God was warning me not to go there anymore. I’m telling you guys, when you receive messages like this there can be no other explanation!!
Iwonder,
I sometimes wonder if blackmail and threats are all these people can understand!
Believe me … I’ve thought of telling the Ex-S that I’ll tell every single woman he tries to hook up with about his misbehavior (including the current one, poor thing), if he doesn’t repay me and pay me for my proceeds from the book. I don’t know if that would jolt him into action, but it might be a “language” that he understands. One of his other OW loaned him money — I asked her how on earth she ever got him to pay it back, and she was honest and said that she had to threaten him with exposure.
Whatever …
It can suck though that they are such vermon that YOU have to alter your routine because of them. I haven’t been able to go anywhere remotely in the area where he works and we used to hang out just because I’m afraid I will run into him “literally, as in with my car.”
It sucks!
Mine owes me nothing ( I mean technically he has my cell phone but I got it turned off so it’s of no use to him except as just something he probably thinks he can use to get me back) but when i even remotely mentioned I would say something to the OW or that I would expose some info that would certainly land him back in prison he in no uncertain terms threatned something could happen to me.
My thought on that that, not now though, was “yeah, let something happen to me and I can assure you that EVERYONE I know will have all of the information that will lead all the way back to you.”
I guess my thought is you have to be very careful with some of them.
Gemini: I agree regarding blackmail because some of them may do something awful like physical retaliation. But I knew my S enough to know he’s a coward about prison. He wouldn’t do anything crazy to hurt me to wind up in prison.
Unwilling R: If you know this guy is not a violent threat, I’d use that blackmail to get my $ back. My leverage worked because if I called the OW, he’d get kicked out and have no where to live.
Gemini:
I read one of your posts on another blog and you wrote thank God you did not get pregnant from this guy. Did he want you to get pregnant? Mine did…like within the first 6 months of our being together. It could have happened. Thank God it did not. He would accuse me of not wanting to get pregnant, tell me I should take supplements, etc to get pregnant. All the while he had another woman on the side. Sick. Again, God was looking out for both of us.
Here is what he would say “if I had money I wouldn’t mind if you got pregnant.” He would also say – this was often in the middle of sex – that if you got pregnant YOU ARE going to have my kid, etc. etc. Then he would flip it around and accuse me of trying to get purposely pregnanat by him. I have a good male friend who thinks that (especially towards the end) he wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to get me pregnant (even with the OW) because that would guaranteel him a place to stay, and a car, etc. etc.
So the long winded way of saying “yes I think he did want me to get pregnant.” I remember he once bragged that he had an uncle that supposedly had 50 children. I don’t know about all that but I know his father has including him about 8 or 9. When his father went to prison for murdering his stepmother she was in the process of filing for divorce on the basis of adultrey.
Yes, God was looking out. I was not on any birth control the entire time.
Gem: Same story here. My ex’s dad had 8 kids out there with different women. My ex has 7 out there with different women.
For all I know HE himself has more than the 1 son I know about from his ex-wife. His girlfriend has none that I know of though as much info as she has on her Myspace page on all those damn pics of him she’d make sure that info was out there. Then again, knowing him if he did have more kids he’d probably make sure to talk about it. Bragging all the time about how smart his son is and all that. In the entire year I knew he never once saw his son. Using the excuse that his ex lives out of state.
For as much as he was running around getting drunk, high and being out with other women – cause he certainly wasn’t with me – he could have seen him. It’s a shame. His son is almost 4 and absolutely adorable. Too bad he has the fool excuse for a dad.