Many Lovefraud readers experience the phenomenon of “losing yourself” in the sociopathic relationship. Before meeting the sociopath, you may have been, for the most part, happy, confident, successful and financially stable. You had a network of people who cared about you. Yes, there was some kind of vulnerability—perhaps you were a bit lonely—and the sociopath used the vulnerability to infiltrate your life. But, for the most part, you were okay.
Then, either suddenly or slowly, your life disintegrated, and the problems you face are so immense, and so interconnected, and so overwhelming, that you don’t know where to begin unraveling them. You don’t have the energy to start. Rather than the happy and confident person you once were, you are anxious, depressed and fearful. You don’t know how you are going to survive.
And you don’t know how it all happened. Trying to figure it out, you describe the individual’s behavior to friends or a therapist, and someone mentions the word “sociopath.” Or you do a Google search—perhaps on “pathological lying”—and end up on Lovefraud.
You are in shock. The description fits, and you realize that the individual never cared about you, that you were targeted, and that you allowed yourself to be scammed, either financially or emotionally. You’ve lost money, or your home, or your job, or your support network—or all of it.
Blame game
As you realize the depths of the betrayal, the blame game starts. And whom do you blame? Yourself.
You are furious with yourself for not seeing it sooner. You didn’t listen to people who warned you, or to your own inner voice that was telling you something was amiss. Instead, you believed the silver-tongued liar, the crying and pleading actor, whose real intention was to drain from you everything he or she could.
Besides everything physical and financial that you lost, you are most upset because you no longer have your sense of self. You feel like you lost your soul.
Now what?
The sociopath is responsible
First of all, recognize that you are not responsible for the abuse you experienced.
The sociopath may have blamed you for his or her actions, saying, “You made him (her) do it.” Understand that statements like these were all part of the manipulation. The terrible words were spoken specifically to throw you off-balance and break you down, so that the sociopath could maintain control.
He or she is responsible for the hurtful words—and for all abusive actions.
Commit to recovery
Next, know that you can recover. The key to recovery is recognizing that the fraud and betrayal is NOT WHO YOU ARE. The devastation by the sociopath is something that happened to you. The betrayal was an incident, an experience. Do not allow it to define the rest of your life.
Make a decision, a commitment to yourself, that you are going to heal.
This means you need to allow yourself to experience the deep wells of pain, disappointment and grief that the experience caused. You have to get it out of your system, and the only way to do that is to allow yourself to process the pain, which means feeling it.
Finally, you need to let the experience go. How do you do this? You accept that it happened, and that there is nothing you can do to change the past. This does not mean you excuse what the sociopath did. But you do recognize that the betrayal was an INCIDENT IN YOUR LIFE, and NOT LET IT DEFINE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
It is true that you will never be the same after the experience with the sociopath, and you may have, in fact, lost yourself. But by facing the pain, processing it and letting it go, you can find a new “you,” one with a richer, deeper understanding of the human condition, and more capacity for love and compassion than you ever had before.
You can recover. You can grow. You can acquire wisdom. And you can move on and find happiness—perhaps sharing the wisdom you acquired to help prevent others from going through what you experienced.
Kathie2, what a wonderful TOWANDA moment! The fact that you had the wherewithall to say nothing and do nothing is an absolutely clear indication that you’re well on your healng path! WONDERFUL!!!!
3eyes, welcome to LoveFraud, and I’m sorry that you’re here, but glad that you found this site. Personally, without this site, I don’t now where I’d be – and, I mean that quite literally.
This site and individual counseling therapy opened the door to knowledge about how I was a victim for my entire life, WHY I was easily targeted, and what issues I need to fortify and work on.
Once it can be identified, it can’t then be ignored except through deliberate denial. There’s a lot of work, ahead, but it’s righteous work and results in so many emotional and physical blessings: safety, self-esteem, and the lot.
Brightest blessings
beenscammed2,
It is commendable to think what you may do for others and not focus on yourself, but I want you to hold off a bit on that. It’s avoiding focus on ourselves and being given to others out of empathy and sympathy that got us into trouble in the first place.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on yourself, certainly NOT after you’ve been abused. It takes a lot of self-care and self-loving to heal, and it will take a lot of time. Do no underestimate the effects on you of what you have come to realize over the past week about the spath, nor how much he hurt you. This is not a bad break-up you need to heal from, and the healing won’t be rushed.
Also, in my experience and opinion, people only can actually help others when they have good and proper boundaries. In order to set up boundaries you must become aware of your own needs and feelings, center on yourself, and have no issues at all to stand up for your needs and feelings, even if that means not being able to help out someone how they’d like you to help them. Without proper boundaries people pass their problems onto us, and the solution is us having the problem and them not anymore.
I’ll give a simple example. I’m a teacher, and while I was temping for a math colleague of mine the past half year, another teacher’s class had become unsafe (light fixures). Anyway, without anyone telling me they had set her up in the math class, because I had a second class (IT class). So, when I arrived at the classroom to my pupils waiting in a row, I learned what had a happened. So, I took the pupils to the other class room (losing time). But the math teacher I was temping had everythign perfectly organized in the math class. I realized isntantly I couldn’t just move all of his organisation to that other class. Not to mention how the IT class is one of the worst classrooms to teach math: a whiteboard is smaller than a blackboard, it’s darker, it has damning accoustics, and no individual benches but a meeting table for discussions of projects. While the first group was a very cooperative one and not too big in numbers I could wing it for that hour. But I knew I’d be fucked all day with the other classes. It would be a day of hell teaching math in that classroom.
And that’s when I realized something: in order to keep my colleague from having a teaching day of hell, the problem had only been passed onto me… Her problems may have been solved, but simply dumped onto me. And I realized that simply wasn’t right. So, I went downstairs and complained about the decision that had been made the day before without even notifying me about it. I immediately got the consent to get the math classroom back, and I informed my colleague of it at the start of the second hour. She had to move all of her pupils, her stuff and install all over again at another classroom while having a student teaching (someone who is learning to be a teacher). That was quite a mess, but I did not feel an ounce of guilt for reclaiming the classroom, because it had finally dawned on me that I didn’t need to get problems because of her having problems, even though her problems weren’t even her own fault. What I did do to help though was return downstairs at the start of the 3rd hour (I was free, no class to teach) and together with the administration there went searching for available classrooms (free ones) for the rest of the week and wrote down a plan and options for her. And I gave her those.
Had this situation happened to me in the initial stages of healing from the spath (the most painful one) or even before knowing the spath, I would have felt too guilty to reclaim the classroom and would have rowed with the oars given to me to row a sinking boat (in other words useless), and I would have gone home horribly frustrated with the pupils for lack of attention, a pounding headache because of the noise of an overpopulated and unsuitable classroom for that, and ultimately angry over a day of wasted overexertion.
Do you see by this example how focus onto yourself can actually be a key to boundaries and how they are needed to come with a truly helpful solution?
Hypnosis is like a meditation. And there can be great healing in meditation in my experience, especially when it’s a journey into ourselves. Meditation can have superb effects if it helps to face the pain and feelings inside. But they can also be erronously used to pacify ourselves, give us some feeling of peace and wellness while nothing is peacefull and well at all. Do you know that sociopaths use a type of soothing hypnotis onto us when they talk to us? Ever knew something he did horribly wrong, and you promised yourself to not let yourself be swayed by his words and lies when you confronted him about it? Only to have him repeat some mantra in a soothing voice that everything would be allright and all the anger and worry about it was gone all of a sudden? Meditation and hypnosis can be used by spaths to give us a fall sense of peace, even though we fully know and see it’s just one big mess. And people can use it the same way onto themselves.
Why am I cautioning you so? Because you have been out of the relationshit just very very recently based on what you told us. I’m VERY glad that you are feeling empowered and better than several days ago, but please give yourself, your brain and your emotions time (at very least a year) and focus onto yourself to heal fully from this. 🙂 Hugs
Darwinsmom, SPOT-ON!!!!!
Yeah, it’s our compassion that made us vulnerable in the first place. Not to say that maintaining compassion is “wrong,” or “bad.” It’s just an in-road for predation.
I had a very difficult time separating all of the positive “self-” things from being “self-ISH.” Self-love, self-affirmation, self-esteem, self-awareness, etc….I had never been able to experience the POSITIVE “self-isms” throughout my entire life – they were always correlated with being “self-absorbed,” “self-serving,” and “self-ISH.” These are the things that I was programmed to believe, early in my life, to my detriment.
Now, at my age, I’m having to redefine myself using the healthy and boundary-constructing “self-ISMS,” and it’s way out of character for me and a serious challenge.
Beenscammed2, right now, you are feeling the intense exhilaration of having gotten the hell out and placing a “name” on what caused the carnage. But, use caution as this euphoria is temporary and all of the rest of the “normal” emotional experiences are going to follow. It’s okay that these inevitabilities occur – otherwise, there is no forward momentum on the Healing Path.
Right now, I’ve been out for several months, but only physically. I’m STILL having severe anxiety issues and emotional breakdowns. And, retrospect of the years that I spent with the exspath are compounding these events, along with upcoming events over which I have no control. I am not managing these issues very well, but I AM managing them, to a degree. And, I really, really, REALLY have to understand that this is all a part of the “normal” processes of healing.
If someone wants to label me as being “self-absorbed” during my times of intense healing, that’s fine. So be it. We MUST be somewhat self-absorbed because the damages have been perpetrated upon our “Self.” (Self = soul, or whatever)
So, just be prepared, Beenscammed2. And, be gentle with yourself, kind to yourself, and good to yourself. YOUR healing comes first, above everything else – and, that means everything, even your children. We do not have the “power” to heal anyone else, and this goes for our children, as well. But, we can assist our children in their own healing processes, but only if we’re doing some hard work, ourselves.
Brightest blessings
In clarification of my current state, I’m breaking down into spontaneous fits of crying, anger, and despair. My levels of anxiety are at a fevered pitch, and I’m fighting this on a minute-by-minute basis. These reactions and “feelings” are a result of my traumas – I “know” this, and I am still locked in this mode of desperate, pre-programmed fear. What I “know” to be true on an academic level has no connection to what I’m “feeling,” and that’s the basis of all of this anxiety. So, I’m fighting, struggling, and practicing things that I’ve learned even this far out from the physical separation.
Just because we’re out does not mean that “it’s over.” The Exit is only the beginning. The aftermath requires a long, long time to process.
My girls, young teens, asked me if I would ever get a boyfriend again….and I told them “maybe”.
I told them that I am ALWAYS “on guard” in my life now, after being too trusting and making mistakes. I told them that it is NOT because I am not intelligent…I was just “emotionally weak” and trusted too easily.
I also told them, that…”In life, there are always sneaky people that will stab you in the back….even your best friend will someday. So NEVER trust anyone outside of our home…family. Sorry to have to say this to you….but the world is NOT full of all good people…it has good…but it also has EVIL. You need to always be “on guard”. Thats my lesson for the day.”
I know its harsh to tell young idealistic kids the facts of life…but I wish someone would have taught me. I was lucky enough to meet my good friend Paul when I was 22 yrs old. We taught together…and boy was I naive!!!! I would argue with him about men I met…who he said…”He’s lying to you, 2b”…etc.
He KNEW…He was 30 yrs older than me! I DID toughen up and listen to him a little bit…but not when he met my xhusb. He warned me….but I didn’t listen.
So, I will always be cynical and cautious and teach my girls to be. They are smarter than I was when I was their age. So, I hope I can “save” them somewhat…..by teaching them to ALWAYS be on guard. …with co-workers…(who stabbed me in the back) and with “friends”….DO NOT TRUST ANYONE!!!!
I think schools need to have workshops for children about the psychology of people…basic stuff…introduce it early on….to teach our future generations to be CAUTIOUS, WISE, and TOUGH.
Too many kids have low self esteem, parents who don’t teach them the ropes….of life.
We need to toughen our kids up now….times aren’t getting easier out there.
I am so different..so much stronger now….than I ever was. Had I been this tough when I was younger….things in my life would be much easier.
Now its my mission to teach my own children as much as I can about “people”.
Thats why I am content with my kitties and my dogs and my guinea pig….lol! Oh….and my James Patterson books..and my bike…and my hot tub…and my paints and easel. lol!
Not letting too many new people into my world these days.
(((Truthspeak)))
I understand you completely. It’s like an ‘unraveling’ of the soul. What we have just experienced was a brush with the devil himself. There is no explanation other that it “IS” what it is. Once we pull ourselves away, the ‘sorting’ of all logic is what takes place. Ruminations, inside ourselves and we search, frantically, trying to make sense out of it all but there is no sense other than the truths. I know, for me, personally, I was trapped in almost five years of psychosis because of JUST THE ASSOCIATION. Unbelievable. And, although I recognized it as psychosis, I was trapped and couldn’t escape it without help. I was so bad off, I should have been in a hospital. That is how bad I was. And, then, one day, I was watching televison, and I saw this woman, and her story and it was so similar to mine, I had to find out more.
Donna: look at how many people you are touching with your goodness….
The ‘exit’ is the easy part. It’s the ‘reprocessing’ and the ‘new beginning’, inside, that is the hardest to achieve. We will find different ways of processing this experience. It will end up being alright. The fire is almost over.
I spent two solid years, locked in my room, sobbing. I mean, soulfully sobbing from the inside. I could go no where, see nobody; even going out to the market was a huge effort because I would be standing in the vegetable aisle, and suddenly, start sobbing for no reason at all. People came up to me: “Are you alright?” Well, no, I wasn’t alright. But how do you explain that? Hm? I left all my groceries and came back home. FOR TWO YEARS SOLIDLY I was like that. I couldn’t sleep; lost MAJOR amounts of weight…ended up having a massive heart attack that required two separate surgeries to fix and it’s all directly attributable to “IT”.
Sometimes, minute to minute, is all we have. Cling to each one and realize that you escaped the mouth of the shark. I tell myself, all the time: “Yes, it hurts; yes, it’s hard, but nothing like it would be still trapped in that nightmare.” LET SOMEONE ELSE HAVE IT THAT WANTS that dysfunction in their lives. I do not. That is CHOICE.
Hang on Truthspeak. EFT Tapping helps. ALOT.
I am finally on lexapro for my overwhelming depression. It helps me a lot to settle down and ‘focus’ on MY WORLD instead of “ITS”. “IT” took an already depressed person and preyed on that to the point “IT” almost took my life, in more ways than one.
I consider myself BLESSED every day when I wake up that I do not have THAT DRAMARAMA in my life anymore. Truly. I am not prey.
The most important part to healing is getting the ugliness out of your life. It isn’t ever going to change no matter what you sacrifice. Trust me, I know. We are entitled to live our lives without the sickness and ugliness.
Yes, we need to educate our children about these kinds of people so that we have some sense of ‘safety’ when it comes to our children not becoming food to these beings.
I don’t let too many people into my world anymore either. I don’t go out in the world much anymore either.
I know what evil lurks outside my door NOW.
We are in a battle with evil itself.
Stay strong and remember who you are and your value and your worth.
Don’t give up the ship.
There ARE rainbows after the storm.
Greetings all… It’s been another good day.
TruthSpeak — I am so sorry you are having such a hard time. I think that BackfromtheedgeDU said it right when she said it’s like an “Unraveling of the soul.” That’s exactly what it is — but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I just got back fro therapy — and while we agree that this situation is unraveling — it’s also an opportunity to get rid of the tangles than have us so enmeshed — and that make us targets for people like these, as well as adding our own drama, which is often unnecessary.
I had a few moments this morning replaying my “fun” moment of yesterday — and I actually found myself feeling BAD for the creep… how sick is that — part of my own codependency. I can;t change him — HE needs to WANT to change — and while I know he felt terror yesterday — that was probably replaced by the typical “poor me” martyr complex that he is so good at — and I am sure he fed himself on that the rest of the night. The shame I saw on his face, and the shock that I did not expose him right then and there made me feel a bit of sadness and compassion for that man we thought we knew — maybe he is in there somewhere — but right now he DOES NOT deserve my compassion or pity. I think he was just afraid that he was CAUGHT –certainly not remorse…
Anyway — after a few weepy moments — and then some rational self-talk to get my head on straight again — I committed my self to take one step at a time today — just do the thing right in front of me — and not worry about what’s next. Keeping focused on the moment at hand was very helpful — then I didn;t have to wonder what he was thinking or feeling — or when I might run into him again. I know it’s very simple and I in no way mean to minimize what you are feeling — or to say that there is an easy answer — there is NOT. It just plain HURTS — and sometimes we just need to FEEL that hurt — but then get busy again. At least that’s waht is working for me.
I do not have the profound comments that some here do have — I am new at this, and learning moment by moment what helps me to survive. Please know that you are in my prayers.
Kathie2
hi kathie2: happy to hear you had another good day today. It HAS been an ‘unraveling of the soul’. It isn’t necessarily a ‘bad thing’ but it’s been very difficult for me. More than I can ever describe. I have been stuck in shock for the past five years, with a type of Stockholm Syndrome. I am trying to find my way back to life and so far so good.
Ha: ‘replaying fun moments’ is great; isn’t it?
I can fill up a whole day replaying those great moments.
Don’t fall into that trap of ‘feeling bad’ for them; it’s part of the ploy and they will play it as far and as long as you let them. They are ALL ALIKE. It’s like they are being mass produced in China, or something. Isn’t it? Amazes me.
You just need to take the garbage out and realize that being the nice and kind person you are deserves more than leeches. I give my attentions to the WORTHY people from now on. I don’t have time for the leeches and the soul suckers. Not any more.
You have PLENTY of profound comments, kathie2…every word you say is important. Happy you are with us on our kayak journey…
Blessings for a peaceful and happy evening…
Dupey
Tami:
Speaking as a lawyer, you need to talk to a family law specialist – stat. It’s clear you’re under seige from all sides, but the paramount issue here – and will be in any legal proceedings – is “what is in the best interests of the child?”
For starters, most every state out there now recognizes grandparents rights. I say that with a caveat. Typically this issue arises when either one of the child’s parents has died and the surviving parent is cutting off contact from the decedent parent’s parents. Courts have also been trending in the direction of permitting ongoing relationships of grandparents, step parents and other significant people in a child’s life when the court realizes it is in the best interest of a child for that relationship to continue. Courts are still reluctant to interfere in the child-parent relationship, but, as noted above, that is no longer an absolute.
It has been a long time since I did any family law work, but I can tell you that even when a child is placed in foster care, the courts will permit visitation from grandparents and other significant individuals who are not a threat to the child.
Clearly you’re faced with a situation where you have two more or less unfit parents. While I think it is great that your mother took the child for a month, and you are bending over backwards to help, the biggest question in this whole equation is “is this bouncing around in the best interest of the child?” As an outside observer, it’s pretty clear it isn’t. Also, the other big question here is whether you want to, at this stage of your life, start raising children again. I’ve been posting a long time and am familiar with your story. And I know it took you a long time to find happiness, which you have with your second husband. As hard as it may be to let go, you may have to, not only for your own sake, and the sake of your marriage, but most importantly, for the sake of this child.
A good place to look for a family law specialist (you want a specialist here, not a general practitioner who handles basic divorces) is to start with your county or state bar associations. Also, a lot of law schools now run legal clinics and have a family law section. They can often provide you with the either help or the name of someone.
I agree with the poster who said avoid calling in child protective serves at this time. Find out what your rights are, what the child’s rights are, etc. Also, the child’s mother cannot unilaterally assign away your son’s rights as a father. Every state has enacted laws which protect a father’s rights in these situations.
I don’t envy you this situation. However, knowledge is power, so make an appointment with a good family law specialist, find out what your rights are. Also find out what could happen to you legally if you don’t report this situation to child protective services. Wilful blindness is never a defense in the eyes of the law. Especially where children are concerned.
Good luck.
HA!
Matt, I don’t mean to be rude, but that is exactly what the law did regarding my suicidal son, my P sister, and my S mother. Talk about wilful blindness.