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.
Stargazer, spot-on. Marry this person just to establish paternity?! It costs about $35 to enter into a legal binding contract of marriage in less than 3 minutes. With a spath spouse and a child(ren) involved, approximately $12,000 – 20,000 and YEARS (quite literally) of endless courtroom drama/trauma to dissolve this same contract, and NOBODY “wins” except the attorneys. Who’s going to pay son’s attorney’s fees, I wonder?
Truthspeak: I haven’t made up my mind about my son…just yet. He’s always been spoiled, pampered and overprotected. He’s an only child and an only grandchild. And, because of the unpleasant personality of his alcoholic father, he’s always been a mama’s boy, too. And, after his father committed suicide when he was 13, he grew even closer to me and I grew more protective of him. It was just the two of us…through puberty, first loves and heartbreaks, to celebrate his accomplishments, etc. I saw sheer terror in his eyes when he was 17 and I nearly bled to death after having surgery. I had no idea that my life was even in danger, just that I was being taken back to surgery and thought they were just allowing my son and aunt to see me in recovery before they took me back. My aunt later said that he completely broke down and then hit his knees and prayed aloud the entire time that I was in surgery. He’s quiet and shy…always has been. This is something that he would NEVER do in public in a million years if he had no feelings although I know him well enough to know that he tries to hide them. Actually, his personality is a lot like mine. He tries to act strong and he thinks he can fix everyone when he can’t even fix himself. He’s always been drawn to people that he feels sorry for but ends up being more influenced by them than they are by him. He’s never been able to see the people for who they really were…even though everyone else around them could…until he finally removed himself from the situation or they removed themselves. He has an extremely difficult time of saying NO to people, tries to make everyone happy and then ends up frustrated when he can’t. And, I SEE the love he has for his daughter…it’s genuine. He wants a normal family life where the baby is with the parents and visits us and occasionally spends the night with us. He just doesn’t FIT. And, after posting my last post, I was reading about liars, compulsive, pathological and some other forms that I didn’t even know existed. I ran across a lot of information about how being bi-polar and lying goes hand in hand. I didn’t know this. I keep comparing the gf’s claims of being bi-polar to my own cousin’s bi-polar condition and there is no comparison even before my cousin was placed on medication. The gf has quoted the symptoms of bi-polar behavior word for word. Do I believe that she is bi-polar? Hell no! But, I believe that my son does. He has told me if she can just get on the right meds that she will be as normal as our bi-polar cousin who has raised her brother’s children in the role of a nanny and is a wonderful all around person. The gf is just a few credits away from a psych degree but suddenly decided that she wanted to be a nurse instead. Her father verified this to be true. She knows ALL about mental disorders. Her father told me that he had taken her to more psychiatrists than he could count since she was a teen. Some of which placed her on meds and others who told him to check into her habits…meaning drugs. And, I read over a copy of my son’s application for the new job that he just started. He faxed it from my house and left the original. He had to pass a hair drug test. To my knowledge, there’s no way around those. Some claim that a person can bleach or color their hair and pass one but he had done nothing to his hair. And, his upbeat mood that I feared might be due to drugs? I honestly believe he is that happy about getting a job…they are hard to come by around here right now…and he found a job taking care of people with developmental disabilities which is what he did a few years ago and loved. The company he worked for shut down. And, the reason I’m doing all this research is for myself as well as for him. He’s having to retrain by taking all the CPR, behavior management, restraint, and self defense classes all over again. He is in training 10-12 hours a day through the week and doing in house training on the weekends…12 hour shifts. And, no, he will not have any access to medications at all. A nurse comes by and checks vitals and administers the meds as needed. He is not qualified to administer meds. He has always been extremely compassionate when it comes to people who have some type of disability. He developed that when he was around 8 and our neighbor had a little boy his age with Downs. He made sure that he spent time with the little boy every day and defended him when other neighborhood kids were cruel as children can be at times. And, he still visits the people that he took care of that were moved to another facility after the one he worked for shut down. He takes his guitar and plays it for a man around my age that loved to hear him play and he plays very basic video games with a boy that he cared for from the time he was 13 to 15 who is now 21 but functions on the level of a 5 year old. I know how well spaths can appear to be normal people but I just can’t see why he would go out his way to do these things that really don’t matter to anyone. Can you understand why I’m confused about my son? And, it’s not just been the ONE friend that has contacted me to express concern for my son and his involvement with this girl. Yes, that friend has had some serious issues but a couple of other childhood friends of his who have absolutely NO history of substance abuse…they don’t even smoke as much as a cigarette…also contacted me out of concern for his involvement with this girl months ago. These are people who know the girl. My son fell out of the social loop because he was in a live in relationship with another girl that he later married for over 10 years. In the meantime, these people came to know the gf. My son never knew her.
A marriage license is $100…a divorce is around $1,500. If she won’t marry him, our attorney said it would probably cost a couple of thousand dollars if she puts up a fight and gets an attorney which I doubt that she will. And, yes, we are willing to pay the fees. I will NOT lose my only grand child simply because of some jacked up law. And, DCS is a JOKE here. And, he’s not marrying her JUST to establish paternity…they have been talking marriage for awhile…but once I told my son that he didn’t have any paternal rights, he got a bit more motivated to hurry things along. He actually WANTS to marry this girl! And, we aren’t objecting at all because it WILL establish his paternal rights. Hopefully, he’ll see her for what she is at some point and divorce her! I know it sound crazy but even our attorney told us it was the best thing that he can do at this point and the easiest.
Sigh.
Tami, If your son lost his father to suicide when he was 13, there’s a very good chance that he’s suffering PTSD. The drug use may be an attempt to self-medicate. Furthermore, you describe someone with loads of empathy who has enmeshed himself in the role and identity of care-taker. Now, he’s going to work with the developmentaly disabled. Perfect.
At any rate, his past trauma leaves him vulnerable to the psychological phenomona of “trauma bonding” and, and he is at the very least, codependant. These are all generational things and are easily treated.
Right now it’s a mess, because no one will step up to the plate and start the process by focussing on him/herself.
The very best thing that could happen is for you to lead the process and carry the message to your son….perhaps he would follow.
Forget spathy seeming GF’s role in all this, at least as much as possible and heal the traum, and deal with the rescueing behavior and enmeshment.
I know it sounds too simple, but it is simple. It’s just not easy. In fact it’s damn hard and it take a lot of strength and courage. Trust in God to take care of what you can’t handle, just for one day at a time, and get into some good therapy or a twelve-step group. JMHO.
Tami, my apologies. My marriage license cost $35 and my divorce fees have exceeded $6000 – no-fault with no child involved. In the best case scenario, a divorce may only cost $1500. Do you honestly believe that it would be that simple?
It was not my intention to trigger a mode of defense. I’m going to back out of this discussion, now.
My brightest blessings to you
If your son wants to marry this girl, that is his choice as an adult. And there will probably then be more children involved at some point. It will always be your choice how you handle your relationship with all of them. But if you are overfunctioning for your son, it will probably hinder his chances of ever getting involved in a healthy relationship with a healthy person. No healthy person would ever want to walk into an enmeshed situation like that with all the drama. And this is how toxic patterns proliferate through generations. Interesting to watch, but sounds like not much we can help you with.
Tami, I agree with Kim and Truthy, as long as you are engaged in trying to “rescue” your son and the child from the situation, there is nothing going on that I can help you with. I agree with kim too that Al Anon, or a good 12-step program might help you do the disconnect…but it sounds like you are not ready to do that, so I to am backing out of any more discussion on this. I don’t think what I have to say will be helpful to you at this point in the situation. Good luck and God bless.
Kim Frederick, you hit the nail on the head! I took my son to 3 different therapists and a psychiatrist after his father’s suicide. I needed it after my own father’s suicide and assumed that he did, too. I THOUGHT I understood exactly how he was felt because when I lost my father at 16, especially to suicide, it was beyond devastation. It affected me to the point that it changed the course of life entirely. After several visits with each, the therapists kept telling me that he was just fine as did the psychiatrist. I KNEW he couldn’t be “just fine” and would seek another therapist for him to see after one would tell me they didn’t feel that he needed to see them any longer and finally resorted to the psychiatrist. And, he DID seem just fine but I believed that he was surely either in denial or suppressing his grief. His grades remained perfect, and his attitude and behavior positive. It wasn’t until 4 years after his father’s death that he gained a new set of friends and started having a drink here and there and smoking pot and he and I started having disagreements about it. Back to a therapist WE went! He and I met with the therapist individually and together. End result: “Mom, he’s a normal teenager who is trying to grow up and you HAVE to let him.” I was told that he had a good head on his shoulders and was just sowing some oats like most teens do. I did a lot of soul searching around the fact that I was a chronic worrier and had always been so overprotective of him and assumed that the therapist was right. By the time he was 19, he had pretty much ditched the pot and was drinking heavily. I tried for years to get him to go to rehab but he refused. And, my past experiences with his alcoholic father told me that if he didn’t WANT help, rehab wasn’t going to work anyway. I finally had to accept the fact that my son was an alcoholic and there was nothing I could do about it…only HE could fix that. My only comfort was that he wasn’t a violent alcoholic as his father had been. And, yes, he did some dabbling with other drugs but bottom line he preferred drinking. I KNEW he was self-medicating because every time he drank, all he talked about was his father…not in a reflective manner but about his actual death and the day it happened. I kept thinking he was grieving simply because of the grief that I felt for my own father. I FINALLY realized that he wasn’t grieving at all! I’ve been reluctant to say this here because I have assumed that if I did, you all will DEFINITELY feel that my son is a sociopath but he wasn’t grieving at all! It finally became clear that he felt an overwhelming guilt surrounding his father’s death but his guilt was unlike the guilt that normally accompanies losing a loved one to suicide of thinking they should have seen or done this or that and maybe they could have prevented it. My son felt guilty because he didn’t care that his father was dead! And, I only made him feel worse by thinking that I could compare his feelings to my feelings around MY father’s suicide. I talked to his older half brother about my suspicions and he confirmed that the two of them had talked about not caring that their father was dead. He said that he didn’t feel guilty about it but that my son thought there was something wrong with him because he couldn’t grieve for him and instructed me to stop comparing my loss to theirs because unlike my own father, theirs had made our lives a living hell BEFORE he died. And, he was right! I, too, was glad that he was gone and I’d never had to fear him or walk on eggshells again! The 3 of us sat down and had a long talk about our feelings and my son seemed to get the confirmation that he needed. After that, I never brought up the topic of his father again and especially not in a glorified manner! But, by this time, my son was a full blown alcoholic!
My son grew up witnessing my co-dependent behavior with his father and has mimicked my behavior in EVERY relationship that he’s ever been in! All of this just surfaced within the last couple of years and I’ve tried to encourage him to seek therapy regarding the co-dependency. He can’t see the similarities because he isn’t being physically abused by these women nor is he living in fear but he is allowing himself to be manipulated and intimidated exactly like I once did. And, now, the entire family is allowing this particular girl to do it to all of us simply because there’s a baby involved. He is also being love bombed by this gal where other family members aren’t. He fully believes that her work prevents her from taking care of the baby and that her outbursts are due to her self diagnosis of being ADD and bi-polar and hell, she MAY suffer from these conditions but she continually speaks of just needing to get back on her meds so she can be a “good mother” for these things but NEVER seeks help! She arranges to come here and visit the baby before she comes to work and now that my son is working and not present to accompany her, it never happens! He text me from work yesterday to ask me if we were going to be home with the baby last night so she could see the baby…said that she told him she was missing the baby so badly that she felt physically ill. He asked me to text (she has a text only phone) her to let her know that we planned to be home and that she should free to come and see the baby. When I never got a response, my son was baffled and feared that there was something wrong as she refused to respond to his texts regarding the visit, too. By this time, I, too, had sent her a couple more fearing that maybe she hadn’t gotten the first one. At one point, he asked if I could go check on her since they live only a couple of miles from me and he was 40 miles away working a 12 hour shift. Shortly afterward, he finally heard from her and she said that she was sick and feared that she had strep. However, she went right on to work last night. He expressed some anger around her claims of illness. She works at a nursing home and is not supposed to go near the place if she suspects that she is ill. He said if she felt like working that she could have spent time with the baby as she had claimed that she had so badly wanted to.
I have tried to gently explain to him that she doesn’t have a normal interest in the baby and that he should pay much closer attention to her actions than her words. But, I get met with his defending her because he believes her excuses. He’s in the middle of the situation and I’m on the outside. Also, I know from what I learned from my own therapist and here on LF that I can’t BEAT the spath gf. There’s been times when I think that he might be catching on and he has expressed disgust for her behavior and lack of interest in the baby but she always manages to turn it around by using her self-diagnosed conditions as an excuse which leaves his feeling sorry for her or guilty! I’ve pointed out to him that she has never taken care of the baby for over 2 hours by herself and that is only to take her to her parents’ and put on a show for them. I’ve even pointed out how single mothers that we know have managed to raise kids and work at the same time. But, I think it’s something that will finally have to click for him and I pray that it is before she discards him. The only time that I’ve felt that he has shown any signs of acknowledging her behavior is when I told him that I had learned that he had NO paternal rights despite the fact that he’s listed as the father on the baby’s birth certificate.
I know I get aggravated with my son and vent about him because he has had some issues of his own but most of my frustration surrounding him is the feeling of helplessness in that I can’t get him to open his eyes and see this gal for what she really is. This site is about dealing with spaths and because of the baby, NC is just not an option for us. We’ve witnessed the girl’s outrageous outbursts when she doesn’t have things her way and insisting that she care for the baby in my son’s absence and knowing that she flies into a rage even if the baby cries, my husband and I see her as one who would shake the baby to death! We just don’t feel that we can risk that. And, choosing marriage over court? Marriage is flattering to her while my son taking her to court will put her into total defense mode. However, we strongly suspect that she will refuse to marry my son although she’s said that the only reason she hasn’t married him is because he’s never bought her a ring(?), or she’ll accept a ring but make excuses to not marry him right away. That’s when the only other option will be court and it will be nasty but we have now been assured by THE judge that will be reviewing the case that he will NOT be denied his paternal rights. We’ve been so caught up in trying to figure this out that we totally forgot that my husband has done HVAC and electrical work for this judge for YEARS. It finally dawned on us to speak with her yesterday afternoon. She was extremely helpful but said if my son WANTS to marry this girl, then let it be and they’ll eventually end up in HER court anyway. She also encouraged us to seek help through the court rather than DCS if we continue to be the primary caretakers of the baby and decide to seek custody of her. She said that she has the power to overrule DCS anyway so just leave them out of it.
All in the world we want is for this precious little baby girl to have a chance in life and to grow up feeling loved and secure.
Stargazer, we WANT my son to marry this girl simply to establish his custodial paternal rights. He’s living with her anyway and his marrying her and having his rights at least will ensure that she can’t allow her sister to adopt the baby without HIS permission AND that I will be recognized as a legal relative of the baby. This gal is a ticking time bomb, it’s apparent that she doesn’t want the baby or she’d take SOME interest in her instead of having her live with us. And, you know how spaths are. She may decide to at any given moment that she’s going to give the baby to her sister and take great delight in telling my son and us that there’s not a damn thing we can do about because we have absolutely NO legal rights where this child is concerned. She’s in control and that’s exactly how she likes it.