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.
When we are in GRIEF, and that is what we feel when we have LOST something that is IMPORTANT TO US….we feel PAIN. The more we love(d) something that we lost, the more important to us it was, the MORE PAIN that we feel. So our pain is an indication that WE loved. Not that what we lost loved us.
The psychopaths are incapable of “love” as we know it, though sometimes they feel “ownership” of us, it is not the same as what we felt for them. They may feel RAGE at their losing control over us, but that feeling of rage against us, the stalking that they sometimes do, that is not “love.”
I loved my son with all my heart, he rages against me with all of his. He wants me dead because he hates me, because he cannot control me. Different “kettle of fish” from what we feel.
Eventually as we process the grief we may feel sadness, anger, the need to bargain, denial, and eventually we feel acceptance when we finally heal….but we will always be DIFFERENT, but different is not “bad.”
When we process our grief we grow, learn, become wiser. People who do not process their grief in a healthy manner may never achieve acceptance of the loss. Sometimes it takes a long time to come to that….especially if the loss was a big one and left a big hole in our lives. We CAN do it and if we want to be healthy we MUST process that grief, and it is a big JOB and hard work…the more important the loss, the harder and longer it takes, but it is WORTH IT! I swear that to you. There is LIFE AFTER GRIEF, LIFE AFTER LOSS, NO MATTER HOW BIG THAT LOSS. God bless.
Louise,
it is confusing.
I can’t describe what the last 15 years were like.
I couldn’t leave him. I felt so much for him, I was trauma bonded, but I wanted out so badly.
It seems like our language is lacking the words to describe what happens when you are bonded to a spath. Love? that’s not the word. Addiction doesn’t encompass the loyalty you feel.
Family. Maybe that’s the word. Only in a perverted sense.
My parents are the only ones who have hurt me more than the spath has. Just thinking about them brings tears to my eyes, but the spath stopped hurting me less than a year after I left him. It’s the sense of having a family member and losing them. It’s the sense of feeling responsible for creating the family tie in the first place. The grief and sense of loss isn’t about them, it’s about us. It’s about what we did wrong and how we were confused and naive. It’s about our loss of innocence.
All of it gets confuddled into a big mess of emotions. We realize that everything we believed in was wrong – throughout our whole lives. We have to reinvent ourselves and start over, even though we had barely begun the first stage.
No matter how much we know, we never feel like we know very much at all. It’s about the loss of our dream and ourself.
there’s a song I used to listen to before I left the spath. It still applies, in a way, even though now I know that he’s a spath. It has to do with me and not him, because I vowed I would never leave him and then I had to because he wanted me dead.
Jezebel by 10,000 maniacs.
http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/17769/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb6EAJlpv5U
The song explains some of the pain, as I said, in a perverted sense.
It’s the most perverted ‘love’ I’ve ever felt for someone… Sky you pinpointed the issue: you feel ‘love’ and ‘loyalty’ and yet you also ‘want to get out, but you can’t’… There were days where I felt I truly hated him, exactly because I couldn’t leave him even though he behaved despiccable in my eyes.
That chained and imprisonment feeling that was always there somehow is not what I can call ‘love’ in retrospect. It’s one of the most yucky feelings I ever had. I make disgusted faces just remembering it.
Louise, this article was so important to me because it speaks the truth – the ramifications of spath entanglements cannot be underestimated, IMHO, and it was VERY hard for me to learn to cut myself some slack with regard to my “feelings” about the whole charade. I caused myself to feel responsible for what the exspath chose to do – and, this is something that I believe all victims-turned-survivors feel, at some point.
What I “loved” about the exspath was a complete illusion. He is not what he presents himself to be, by any stretch of the imagination. THIS is what I had a hard time wrapping my head around. “Cognitive dissonance” is, from what my counselor conveyed, MY attempt to fit inappropriate behaviors (from friends, family, spouses, etc.) into my system of beliefs. He couldn’t have done those things to me because I would never have been so loyal, loving, faithful, and supportive of someone who did.
Darwinsmom, OxD, & Skylar have all spoken to the basic facts about recovering from spath entanglements. It’s hard, it’s cruel, and it’s painful – indeed, it is. Grieving and recovering from a sociopathic entanglement is a process that cannot be compared with any other loss known to man – not the death of a child, not the passing of a loved one, not hte loss of a home in a house fire – nothing compares to the whole-being experience. It’s only been a month out for you – start journaling, if you can, and write down (pen on paper, NOT computer) your feelings, your rage, your disbelief, your sadness, your despair, and everything else that you are experiencing. Do it every day, sometimes, several times a day. This will help you to purge some of that venom out of the wounds. And, you’ll also be able to go back in a few months and read how far you have progressed on your Healing Path.
I’m so glad to read that you’re helping yourself, Louise. Remember to metion PSTD and abuse when you’re asking about a counselor. Please, avoid identifying the spath AS a “sociopath.” If we go into a counselor’s office or physician’s office talking about spathy, it’s often misunderstood. If you need to refer to the spath by any “label,” try to use “Fits The Profile Of…” And, let’s start calling it “emotional health” instead of “mental health,” why not? Or, maybe, “whole-health” because my WHOLE SELF has been compomised: physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually….
Brightest healing blessings to you, Louise – you’re on your way and you’ll soon realize how precious you are to this Universe!
Louise, here’s a LF link to an archived article by Kathleen Hawk that speak directly to what you’re experiencing, right now:
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2009/01/25/after-the-sociopath-how-do-we-heal-part-2-%e2%80%93-painful-shock/
hens:
OMG, what you said is exactly IT! The love was so intense, but it was manipulated; it was a mind fuck. Then I was rejected…the pain is horrible…trying to see it for what it was…I am getting better at that, but then like you said, the truth hurts…seeing it for what it was is when the pain REALLY comes in. I have to stop trying to make it more than what it was. I AM trying and I AM getting there, but man, it is tough.
skylar:
Thanks so much for the song…I love, love, love Natalie Merchant; one of the best, most unique voices around.
I’m so very sorry you went through so much pain with him and your parents. It’s horrible. Starting over and letting go is the hardest things we will ever have to do I think.
The loss of our dream and ourselves…so well said. You do have a BF though, right? You were able to find someone. I am not sure that will ever happen to me. I do feel that he ruined my life. Hopefully not forever, but at least temporarily although I don’t know how long this “temporary” will last.
Hugs to you skylar 🙁
Great discussion. Was it love? It surely feels like love. Or was it something else?
Well, I think it was both. It was love for the man I thought he was…the love was real, the illusion of him was not. It was also a traumatic bond, instilled in me by the man he really was, and the resulting contradiction was crazy making.
Still, to this day I can’t completely dispell the image I had of him and his love for me. When someone idealizes you, then without warning begins devalueing you, you automatically want to have some control over the situation…you want it to go back to the way it was before, so, you are willing to believe it’s your fault, and you start trying to get it right. You invest more and more and the return on your investment is less and less. It’s a chipping away process. It chips away at your self esteem, you sense of mastery and competance, and your selse of living in a safe and sane world.
If you are in a position where you feel there is no way out, you will accept the blame, and deny what is happening…you feel like your life depends on the abuser.
Interestinly enough, the abuser, (spath, narc, jerk, etc. etc.) is also trauma bonded to you. He erodes your sense of security, in order to claim it for himself. You start out feeling ok about who you are, but he enters in knowing he isn’t much to write home about. He is insecure…he claims security by threatening yours. He is addicted to the power he hold over you. He will treat you with disdain, until you try to leave. Then his fear rises up and he will do anything to win you back. This reverses the power dynamic, and now you pull the strings (you think) and as Dr. Cairnes said, this adds exponentially to the strength of the trauma bond….that lovely illusion of power….that we have finally made him see our value and changed him….now we can get back to “idealization”
At this point, it is not love. It hurts more than any thing has ever hurt, but it is not love. It is being hooked into a psychological process that leaves us hood-winks, confused and battered.
Truthspeak wrote, yesterday that finally leaving them behind is about having self-respect.
That was the most painful recognition for me, because I had self respect, but I had to swallow it because I had no way out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr64boWSOZ8
This song captures the essence of what it feels like to find out you are in love with a lie…early stages of sadness.
Louise,
I dont remember the time line of your incident, how long it’s been etc. ,,but YES it IS tough and it hurt’s like hell. But I promise that in time it will stop hurting. It may take year’s but everything will fall into place and you will see that the relationship was doomed from the beginning.
I am still in love with the first 3 months of that relationship, I always will be and that is ok because it was what I had always dreamed of,,,but in hindsight I told him my dreams, it was like handing him the script of my desire’s, needs, want’s…he became my dream for awhile….3 months of bliss and 3 years of hell ( trying to recapture that first 3 months ) and then 3 years to recover. = a life lesson.
Great song Sky. Natale Merchant is one of my favorites. I’m going to google her and post one of my favorites that speaks to me about the wonders of recovery.
See ya in a sec.