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, your son may be correct in that he doesn’t have a lot of unresolved grief over his father’s death because perhaps he never received much love from his father in the first place. If his father was an alcoholic then he probably has an empty place inside where he didn’t receive healthy love or healthy bonding. Children of alcoholics grow up feeling that they need to take care of their alcoholic parent. Your son’s rescuing behavior could have come from trying to rescue his father, and the suicide just a confirmation that he was unsuccessful with the rescue. So therefore, he must try to rescue another lost soul with the hope of being successful this time. What he needs to to face the pain of his own emptiness and loss of his father’s love, not to find another lost soul to rescue. This may be true in your own history as well, that perhaps your overfunctioning for your son has to do with a need you are trying to fill from your past. It sounds like a family pattern. This is not to say both you and your son aren’t extremely compassionate people. But if the compassion is not given to yourself first – to heal the wounds that cause you to rescue others – then it is not healthy.
Instead of the both of you individually working to heal the family pattern, you both want to bring in a dangerous and unstable person – possibly a sociopath – into your family in an effort to have control over a baby. It doesn’t sound like either one of them is healthy enough to raise a baby in the first place, and I don’t know that your stepping in will make the situation any better. I don’t see how this path will bring any happiness into your life / lives. It will bring a certain amount of control and drama for the rest of your lives until she finally destroys you or commits suicide herself. If they marry, there will likely be more children before all the damage is done. This means a lifetime of manipulation and misery for both of you. You will both be playing control games for the rest of your lives.
That being said, if your son wants this baby so badly, then it is up to HIM to get his life together so he can take care of him. This has nothing to do with you or what you want. Your wanting the baby does not make your son a fit parent. Only he can do that. You can’t do it for him.
I don’t hear much in your posts about your own life, your own happiness, or your own healing. It sounds (once again) like you are so enmeshed in your son’s life that you cannot separate yourself out and live your own life.
I wish you all the very best, Tami. I don’t know if anyone here can help you until you get to a point where you truly want peace and healing. Real healing involves facing some painful things and letting go of control. You may not want to go there, and I respect your choice. I hope you can at least be aware of the choice you are making and what you are sacrificing to do it. We can’t make different choices if we don’t truly know we have those choices.
Stargazer, one of the most painful truths that I’ve had to come to terms with is that “healing” is not a pain-free or easy event. It isn’t the warm and fuzzy, new-age experience that just allows all of the “bad” to evaporate to be replaced with “love and light” for all humanity. My personal healing has been dammed painful, and hard-fought, to its present state (such as it is).
In counseling, I had to hear some hard, ugly, mean, truths about myself. It was then my option to either take that information and facilitate changes, or not. Because I wasn’t functioning in my previous system of beliefs in anything that remotely resembled “healthy,” I made hard choices.
But, what I finally understood through counseling was that I do, indeed, have choices. Even if all of the choices available aren’t what I “wish” was available, the options were there.
Wishing gets nothing accomplished, in my mind. “If wishes were fishes, nobody would ever go hungry.” author unknown
Brightest blessings
Truthy, yes, it’s damn hard. Letting go of the belief that I can fix what’s wrong in my life, if I just expend all my energy on focussing on what’s wrong with everybody else…if I just try hard enough, if I can just get it right, if I can only make them behave, if I can only convince them….yada, yada, yada…..it’s a distraction from my own powerlessness over my own problems and my own pain. Simple, but very very hard to face.
Stargazer, I’d say you’re right about about everything you said. I KNOW I tried to be just to opposite kind of parent that my abusive mother was yet I chose to have a child with a man who treated ME exactly as she did. Duh??? I also have tried to overcompensate for the fact that my son really never had a father even when he was living! And, because I learned about loss at a young age myself, I lived in constant fear for years that something bad was going to happen to my son…thus, the overprotecting. I STILL worry about my son a bit more than parents without my history worry about their adult children and of course, his drinking didn’t help with my concerns. I HAVE gotten a better grip on that in the last few years. I no longer lay awake at night and imagine that he’s out driving around drunk, been in an accident, and harmed or killed someone else or himself. He FINALLY got a DUI a couple of years ago and that seemed to put a little fear in him about driving under the influence. Also, there’s a madness to his drinking. I could bank on him calling me when he was drunk to talk and talk and talk or simply look at his Facebook page and see cocky, smartass posts. I truly do believe that he has cut way back on his drinking and possibly may have stopped altogether. His close friends say that he has…they hadn’t seen him sober in years and they’ve told me that they haven’t seen him drunk in months now. So, that’s ONE positive. Also, I possibly may have been way over focused on his drinking simply because of his father’s drinking. There’s been several times that he has lived with me and I KNOW he wasn’t drinking and he never showed the first sign of withdrawals/DTs. But, I DO know that he definitely drank way too much…maybe he just hadn’t reached that level yet…or maybe not all alcoholics have extreme withdrawal symptoms…dunno. My mother has never been “there” for me so I go WAY overboard to be there for my son. And, I can tell you, he’s not exactly happy with me about that. The girlfriends that he’s had in his life REALLY resented it although every single one of them were just as dependent on their parents. I don’t think his feeling of needing to be a caretaker comes from his need to feel that he had to take care of his father but more so from witnessing MY trying to take care of his father and his feeling that he had to take care of me and protect me from his father. He told me just a few weeks ago that the only man that I’d ever had in my life that he was jealous of was his father. He said that his father’s problems took up so much of my time and attention that he resented it because he needed more of these things from me. I was aware of this when it was happening but there was only so much of me to go around. And, yes, I carry some guilt about that and have tried to make up for it but have realized that it needs to stop and have been weaning him for the last couple of years. One example is that I no longer provide him with anything that he doesn’t have to work off or pay back. And, I certainly haven’t handed him money in years but I have paid his rent a few times, his electricity bill and put gas in his car BUT he has worked it off or paid me back. The thing that I can’t figure out how to handle is his emotional dependence on me and it drives me nuts. He’ll come to me for advice but when I give it to him, he ends up upset because I don’t tell him what he wants to hear. I finally put my foot down and told him to stop asking me for advice regarding his personal life period.
And, as far as my husband and I “wanting” the baby. I can’t really say that’s the case. We’d prefer that her parents get their act together and raise her but we feel that we need to protect the baby and if raising her is the only way to do it, then we’re more than willing to do that. We certainly don’t want a baby because of our desire own desire to have one. Not at our age. We are having a blast with her during the times that we can lay the nonsense aside and simply enjoy her as a grandchild.
The mother openly admits that she knows nothing about babies. I’m not sure if this is an excuse not to take care of the baby or stems from real fear. At any rate, since she has made this statement several times, I’m going to suggest that she and my son enroll in some parenting classes. She may take offense but she seems to be all about education and I’m going to approach it from that angle. I sincerely want the two of them to be a functional family and raise their child but they have a lot of work to do on themselves first.
Tami, your post is very heartfelt and soul searching to me. I really respect you for looking at these things and listening to what people are telling you. I know you are here for a reason. I really hear how you tried to make up for the lack of fathering in your son’s life by giving so much to him even long into adulthood. I applaud your efforts to wean him off of his dependency on you, because I think you already know that continuing to mother him is not what he needs and is not going to help him. What people need – what your son needs – is the technology for how to heal and a good support system in the community. He may know he has issues but he doesn’t know what to do about them. Just stopping drinking does not fix the problem. Same with you – you know you have co-dependency issues. You recognize it. But I don’t know if you have a clear picture of how to fix it. Abstaining from the addiction (in your case overmothering) is not enough. It’s a start. Just like NC from a spath is a start.
The thing is that the addiction – whatever it is, whether it’s to a sociopath, to rescuing, to alcohol or drugs – is a form of self-medicating. For what? For a huge amount of pain and emptiness that is very very difficult to face. It’s very likely that your parents and their parents’ parents could not face it either. You mentioned that you are glad your ex husband at least wasn’t violent. I had a violent person as a parent along with them all being narcissistic. From my own perspective, the healing from the violence was much easier than from the emotional neglect. There is always emotional neglect in alcoholic or narcissistic families. It leaves a huge emptiness, and it’s very difficult to wrap your consciousness around it because it becomes the motivating force of your life. It feels insurmountable. But it CAN be healed. You have the option of breaking the family pattern and healing these things that perpetuate it.
I’m saying this, Tami, because I feel the best way you can support your son is to pull back and do your own healing. You can even describe to him a little about your process. In this way you can teach him how to do it himself. Though we need support, healing work is something we can only do alone. You can encourage him to get into therapy or rehab. But in the end, only he can make the decision to heal. It is out of your hands. If you do your own healing, I will bet he will be affected in a positive way, and it will change the family dynamic. But you can’t count on that happening either, because he has free will choice, and his healing is in his own hands.
I completely appreciate your desire to help this innocent baby who is a member of your family. I don’t know that I would make the choice of inviting a toxic – and possibly sociopathic – person into my world in order to do it, if it were me. But you are not me, and your choices are very personal, and I do respect them.
Truthspeak, amen to everything you said. Healing is really not easy. It’s been a rude awakening for me as well.
“If wishes were fishes….”
I like that as much as sky’s “WTF BUCKET”.
Dupey
Dupey,
my WTF? bucket is empty. I’m gonna put my wishes in it now. thanks for the idea.
Lol.
Star: ‘rude awakening’ is putting it mildly…
I have been literally shocked out of my mind for the past five years with all of this. It has been going on for almost ten now. My therapist keeps telling me: “No wonder you had a heart attack! You need to keep this monster away from you.”
Yah, she’s right.
But it isn’t enough for me to just say it was ‘his fault’…
I have to change myself, within, to never allow this to happen to me again. It’s destructive. Destructive to care so much. (How ironic is that?)
I am going to be alright or die trying.
That’s all I know.
I hate my life as it currently is being lived.
It’s empty and seems pointless to me.
I know there are people who love me and would suffer tremendously and that is the only thing that keeps me hanging in there and hanging on…I am tired and worn and my brain has short circuited. It’s just fried around the edges from the whole experience.
And, I wonder, every day…is the next one going to be just like the last one?
I wonder: is tomorrow really going to be like all the rest of those days, only some more? I am the only one who can make it different and that takes a whole lot of strong. It takes determination and convincing yourself you are going to make it. That there are two alternatives: TRY or GIVE UP and I have never been a quitter. That’s probably what got me into all this in the first place….
Not wanting to give up on someone…
Not wanting to stop believing..
I see now that there are predators feasting on the very essence of our lives…all of our virtues and sense of right and wrong. WE HAVE CHOICE TO: to find it all unacceptable.
I don’t know if I am ever going to be ‘healed’ again.
But I do know that all of this ‘going off violence’ we see going on is INEXCUSABLE.
We ALL must be able to discipline ourselves in this lifetime in order for it to mean anything.
“If fishes were wishes, nobody would starve.”
Sounds like something Dear Old Gramps might say.
Thanks for listening..
Every time I think that just maybe the stalking is starting to settle into stopping, it pops right back in again. I know this is intentional and I just keep on logging and ::blocking:: There will never be a response from me, again, as long as I live.
I think more of myself than that which was inflicted upon me and my life, thanks…
mwah!!
xxoo
skylar: yay! your wtf bucket is empty!!!!
fill that baby up with all them wishes and run with it!!!!!!!
mwah!!! xxoo
Dupey