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.
Tami, you have certainly had more than your share of spath experiences, and I’m so sorry that you have.
You are “allowed” to vent – rant, rave, post whatever you need to to purge that venom out of your system! YES – post as often as you need to, and rant!!
The “enabling” isn’t meant to sound like a slap in the virtual face. But, having voluminous experiences with spaths doesn’t make it a given that I’m going to be able to managed a situation that’s as emotionally charged as one that involves an innocent child. The urge to act, act quickly, and act “now,” is “normal” within manipulations, and that’s what these two parents are doing. Kudos to you for seeing it for what it is.
So….I firmly believe that your ability to vent, rant, rave, and get it out of your system (with some feedback to validate your feelings and offered suggestions) is going to help you TREMENDOUSLY to get that emotional stuff out so that pragmatic approaches will follow.
No, they are going to abuse whatever their drugs of choice are, lie, cheat, steal, and manipulate whether there was a baby involved, or not. The baby just happens to be a very, VERY unfortunate victim in this whole ugly mess.
Please, keep posting back, and rant and vent when you need to!
And, like I posted somewhere earlier, one doesn’t have to have a license to reproduce, and that is one of the unfortunate drawbacks to “reproductive rights.” There are simply some people who should never, ever be allowed to reproduce, but we’re not deities and that “right” is guaranteed.
Brightest and most sincere blessings to you, Tami
Tami, when I used the word, “enabling”, I meant that you are actively involved in this manipulation….you are complicitious….we all were…..and yes, you feel as if your hands are tied.
It’s clear that you are dealing with addicts….you are in up to your neck in co-dependant thinking and behavior, and it’s making you crazy….you feel like the other shoe is about to drop, and you are the only one who can stop that from happening….you feel like all the responsibility is yours….Why not do something to help yourself and go to a meeting, if for no other reason than it will help you to make wise decisions and to see clearly what is happening.
There is nothing you can do to fix these people, but you can get some excellant advice on how to live your life free from their drama and chaos. Just sayin’
Tami, I can recognize the need to vent. This is also a good place to vent. If we respond the way we do, it’s because the venting contains a lot of shock on her callousness, defensive and explanatory about what you are trying to do (as if you feel you are in front of a judge with her accusing you).
It’s good that you express your feelings and thoughts about it, including the defensive ones, but also try to learn to see it as a sign on how you are reacting towards her merry-go-round. It’s a diffrent stage than purely observing her and judging her and not doubting yourself over it. The first state is emotional, the second leaves the emotions out. Yes, you might feel slimed and disgusted, but those are sensations of opinion about her rather than insecurities. It’s not about shutting down your emotions, but what you respond emotionally to for yourself.
I know how difficult and even strange that sounds. I used to respond emotional to pupils for example. I knew I couldn’t show it to them, but still inside those feelings came and it took all energy out of me to not show it. And then I vented once home, and then people would tell me I shouldn’t be so emotional about it, and I thought to myself, “How can I not be emotional about this. I care!” I observe a similar response to what we’re trying to say, because you cannot not care about the baby.
Of course you care about the baby. But I learned that you can still care and yet be less emotionally responsive (not just appearing to be less emotional, but truly less emotional). And it all has to do with deciding who and what you are responsible for and who and what you can be responsible for. It’s obvious you feel responsibe for the baby and you are willing to take up full responsibility. Someone needs to be fully responsible over it, because neither your son and certainly not the mother are taking responsibility for it. But then your emotional responsiveness must be between just you and the baby.
What you reveal when you vent about the mother is that somehow you feel responsible and care about what the mother does, says or thinks. But it is there that you need to learn to draw the line for yourself. It starts with 100% accepting who and what she is. First of all, she will then be less able to shock you. You won’t stop thinking she’s wrong, bad, shameless, gross, etc… but at least you will remain more emotionally balanced. And when you are more emotionally balanced it’s easier for you to regard her opinions, her words, her actions as hers and hers alone. You are not worsening or causing the situation, not one bit of it. She is! She’s not having a temper tantrum because you called her at work, or called her at all, or because the baby is fussy. She’s having a temper tantrum because she wants to have a temper tantrum. She’s not making it difficult for you to care for the baby, because you are making mistakes, or because you’re good at it… She’s making it difficult for you to care for the baby, just because she likes to make trouble for others. And though it has an impact on your personal life, schedule, worry and anxiety about the baby, it actually has nothing to do with you or the baby at all. You are all but tools in her eyes to make life more interesting and less of a bore.
It may be helpful to indeed see a therapist to help you reach that less emotionally responsive state, to be able to use a mental mechanism where you stop feeling responsible for whatever dramarama she comes up with next, care about her temper tantrums less.
It is very important to be able to get to that state, because if you need to settle this in court or present yourself to other official departments involved with child custody, you will have to be able to be like a duck where her temper tantrums and shocking behaviour fall off your back like it is nothing. It enhances your chances to be believed and to come off as a stable force in the baby’s life.
It will also enhance your ability to see through the trees sprouting out of her with each tantrum and see what lies behind it and enable you to see what is important and what is not. For you the details shouldn’t matter to recount them. With the details you’re creating a “she said – I said; she did – I did” situation by yourself, and basically helping her to twist the situation into that. The logging should help for you in that. Log things for yourself, necessarily in a diary for example (the whole she said, I said, she did, I did venting). Then read it again the next day and ask yourself, what of this was actually important? And highlight those things. Then ask yourself, what was really going on? And label the event with a max of 3 words… kinda like a title: “blaming others”, “making stones fight”, “getting rid of annoyances”, “control my schedule”, etc…
In the past I would have recounted the whole Friday evening in detail, how and what my best’s friend possible spath bf said or looked, etc, thinking it would be the only way to convince others of the grossness of it. And as long as I start relaying people what happened exactly word per word, look per look, action per action, I reveal to people that I think they might not believe me, and just because of that alone they’ll doubt me (not that anyone here doutbs you). Now I know I don’t have to anymore. I can just split the whole evening into “making sure I’m not a threat” – “acting as if he was my pimp” – “testing the ground for a threesome or sexual encounter with me” – “regarding me like a juicy piece of dead meat on his plate” – “portraying himself as very desirable in other women’s eyes” – “nearly confessing he’s still having sex with the ex-gf he left for my best friend” – “possibly testing me to see whether I will run and tell my best friend.” And when I tell it like that people I did tell this to hardly doubted me at all. They may ask me why I think or came to such a conclusion, and then I relay a few particular example actions.
So, in short, yes vent, to yourself, to a diary, on here, but also try to push yourself beyond venting. Try to label the actions yourself, and you’ll notice that it will help you distance yourself emotionally from it.
As for sociopaths you cannot control them or change them. But you can manage the impact you allow them to have on your life, both emotionally and practically. You do this by the amount of control you have upon yourself, realizing what lies behind her temper tantrum trees sprouting rapidly.
We have an expert in this: she’s a grandmother raising her grandson instead of her daughter who is a spath. She applied grey rock and the pretense of business like duty in order to win custody and manage visitation rights from her spath daughter.
I also thought of something with regards to the info you got from the friend, the person we warned might be a trojan horse. What did you learn out of it that could help you?
That when she has a day off, she goes on an “errand” to buy drugs. This will very likely happen again. So, basically you can PLAN a bust. When you know she has a day off and is back home by the evening (or the morning after), that’s the ideal moment for child services to pay her a visit. Find out how long it will take them to respond, if possible plan with them and explain why. There is a pattern and schedule there and I believe it’s possible to find out when – how – where – and who.
Strengh, hugs, and all the succes you need to get the baby safely away from her.
Okay, y’all are really going to think that we’ve just gone ahead and slipped off the deep end but I made an “inquiry” call to DCS this morning…no names mentioned. I learned that because my son and the gf aren’t married that my son has absolutely NO parental rights in the state of Tennessee despite the fact that he is listed as the father on the birth certificate. SHE is considered the full custodial parent. I was informed that she can take the baby anywhere she pleases, never allow my son to see her again but make him pay child support, she can even allow a family member or friend to adopt the baby without his permission or knowledge. And, we, as the grandparents have NO rights whatsoever and she doesn’t even have to allow us to see the baby NOW if she chooses not to. Oh, and my son can’t even get emergency medical treatment for the baby without HER permission even though she apparently has set it up with the pediatrician’s office that he can get treatment for her there! My head was spinning when I got off the phone with the social worker. Part of me knew the man HAD to know the law but the other part of me couldn’t accept what I had just heard. I then spoke with a family law attorney who is also a family friend and he confirmed this. He asked if there had been any talk of marriage. I told him yes, but the girl insisted on having a ring before she would marry my son. He jokingly asked how many diamonds the grand child was worth and went on to to say that if they got married, my son would then have equal rights to the child and we would become legally recognized as the child’s family even if they got a divorce. He also said that it would give us, as legally recognized family members of the baby, more leverage if the baby was ever removed from their care due to their addictions because my son would have a say in where he would like the baby to be placed instead of just the mother. Welcome to Tennessee!!! I asked him if that was the ONLY way my son could gain paternal rights. He said there was another option or two but one would require the full cooperation of the mother which we doubt we could get. I told him her cooperation was out of the question. He is calling me back tonight to discuss the other options. He asked me if my son was aware that he had no rights and I answered that I didn’t think so.
I spoke with my son about what I had learned about his not having any rights and he flipped out and said he thought his name being on the birth certificate ensured his rights. I told him NOT. I asked if they still had plans of getting married and he said that SHE still wanted to. I asked him what he meant by THAT. I was amazed when he went on to tell me that he had suspected that she was using drugs again for the last month or longer and when he learned that she had started the crap again with us about HIM needing help for treatment to get money from us that he KNEW she had to be. He said she kept telling him that she was either exhausted and would come home and go straight to bed and not get up for hours or that she was feeling really “manic”. He told me he had learned that she was not running errands Friday morning but that she had made a trip with her friend to get drugs. He said, “she’s back on the shit, mom”. I told him that I suspected that he was, too. He told me absolutely not but that he had slipped up and gotten really drunk Friday night because she spent most of her two week paycheck on drugs and the rent was due. I didn’t say anything about the “blackout”, the call from the friend, etc. He told me that the reason he kept trying to get us to take the baby on our weekend trip with us was because she was so messed up on benzos by 9:00 Saturday morning that he couldn’t handle her and knew he couldn’t handle her and the baby. He said that’s why he was also late picking up the baby…he was waiting on her to pass out and assumed that we’d go ahead and take her with us if he was late like I said I was going to. He said he was so relieved when I called and told him to bring the baby back. He said that he drove the baby around with him and finally took her into Walmart with him just to ride her around in a buggy because the AC isn’t working properly on his car and he was afraid that it was getting too hot for her. He WAS checking out at Walmart when I called him and he was back here and gone in a flash when he dropped the baby off. I asked him what he was planning to do about her drug problem other than get so drunk that he didn’t have to think about it. He said that he had had a plan in place for awhile and that’s why he got a job. He said he thought that if he had a job, was clean and sober and had a place to live, that he would be given custody of the baby because she was “too far gone”.
He asked me to please find out what his options were other than marrying her and thanked me for having his back. So, we shall see what happens now. I could tell he was sincere. He was first communicating with me by text but called me as soon as he got his first break.
Tami,
he is in as deep as she is and he is using her as a scapegoat.
He knows that as long as you have someone else to blame, you won’t blame him.
There is an article about Gray Rock somewhere on this site. It’s kind of long but it explains in depth what gray rock is and why it works and how it works. I think it might be helpful to you.
tami,
I don’t think you went off the deep end, but instead that you finally took matters more in your own hands by inquiring from people who can advize you legally about your rights. Now that was a proactive action! Very good… sadly enough bad news. It’s a good thing then you didn’t confront her yesterday nor reported her yet. Sorry the news about a father’s legal custodial rights are as they are in Tennessee.
But now that you know more, you can with better knowledge.
Darwinsmom, my last post bypassed yours but you hit the nail right on the head. I have been giving this girl exactly what she wants by allowing her to use me to get her kicks. I had started to realize this by the time I placed the inquiry call to DCS…that’s why it was an inquiry rather than a call to report neglect or abuse. I learned a lot from that call and am SO glad that I had settled down enough not to make it a report. The idea of setting up a bust has been discussed between my husband and me but after having learned that my son has no parental rights therefore I am not even recognized as a relative of the baby, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea at the moment but it’s certainly something that will be kept in mind later down the road once my son gets across the legal hurdle his parental rights. It’s kind of odd that my son has actually been giving me the same advice about her comments and insults that I’ve received here only in the context of “ignore her, don’t let her get to you, you know what you’re doing and take care of the baby as you see fit”. He has actually told me a time or two that I was acting as crazy as she was and between the two of us, he was about to lose his mind. So, she will not be getting any kind of reaction out of me. She can insult me all she wants and I’ll just smile…might even thank her for calling my shortfalls to my attention. And, when she drops those lines about giving the baby to her sister? I’ll tell her unselfish she is for wanting to give her baron sister such a wonderful gift as a child! That’s more admirable than donating an organ! However, if she shows up here to pick the baby up and is so pilled up that she’s out of her head. I can’t let her take her…what’s she gonna do…call the police? That wouldn’t be too smart on her part. So, I can have some control over that. You know, I KNOW all these things and the way sociopaths are but yes, I’ve been allowing my emotions to control me more than my brain because this precious little bundle is looking at me with her big blue innocent eyes day in and day out. It’s clicked for me 3 times prior and I removed those S’s from my life and eventually from my thoughts. It FINALLY clicked for me with the gf. Now, let’s just hope that my son learning that the baby is totally at her mercy right now lights a fire under his butt enough to prompt him to take some action!
Sklar…you might be right but it is SHE who has done all the finger pointing ever since they’ve been together. He’s always been very reluctant to talk or blame.
Tami, I’m glad that you took some action, even if it was an effort to get some information.
Having said that, I know NOTHING (emphasis, not yelling) about Family Law in your State, and yours is the first State that I have ever heard tell that doesn’t allow for a biological father’s “parental rights.” But, what I do know is that any resolve for filing for custody of this child might require the services of a Family Law Specialist. Not just an attorney in Family Law, but a “specialist,” and you can find the names of these types of attorneys by calling your local Bar Association.
I don’t want to sound harsh, but it may come across that way: why, oh why, did you even tell your son about what you learned? Now, he knows that you took action to inquire through CPS, and he is going to alert the spath mother. If he truly doesn’t have parental rights, then the onus of learning about his “rights” sits on HIS shoulders and should have been his responsibility to learn about – if he were interested to find out.
I think that this is what I was trying to nudge you away from doing by suggesting that separating the emotions from this situation would be more helpful, in the long run. No, I do NOT believe that you’ve slipped a cog, but the emotional anxiety surrounding this whole situation is in Ultra-High-Gear and there’s nobody at the steering wheel. When you learned about this legal situation from a CPS worker, the emotions went berserk and you immediately informed your son – this is where we get into trouble with our emotions by ending up telling people things that are not immediately necessary. But, what’s done is done, and be prepared now that the spath mother knows. This doesn’t mean that she wants to maintain physical custody of this child – she’d throw that baby off of a bridge if she wouldn’t be arrested for murder. No…..now, the baby has “value” in every sense of the word: emotional, physical, financial……
Oy-vey….brightest blessings