Here is an e-mail exchange that recently took place between me and a Lovefraud reader:
Arlene: I was married to a man for 23 years. I found out so much in the last few years. He murdered my soul, my spirit, and financially devastated me. He moved another woman … brainwashed my children. My 18 yr old now is on cocaine…she was a nice girl…he has trashed her also and she is not living with me. The children now that were close to me are not empathetic and cold.
He grew in power and is an intellectual. He spread vicious rumors about me to cover his tracks. I am just to move on. Even though I was such a devoted mother and this family was my life. I have tried everything to recover and I am alone. You see I have no extended family. Some friends but they have their own lives.
For me I cannot forget my children… I am human…I have such pain daily. I feel nonexistent in my life. I cannot recover from the loss of my family and to see them turn out cold and unloving is too much than I can bear. I pray everyday for God just to take me home. Because living life without love is no life at all.
I was more into the connection of my family’s life and he made sure I was disconnected, so well planned. I repeat many of the scenarios I read on your love fraud…so I know I am not alone. Like one day … I was thrown out of my life planned…I was used all those years … and treated like trash and devalued. The loss of my soul…the loss of my smile”¦my hopes…my dreams. I just want to die.
Donna: Please do not act on your statements. I truly understand the pain Ӭand devastation that you are feeling, but you must not give in to it. ӬSociopaths are evil. They are professional manipulators. Whatever Ӭhappened is not your fault. You did not deserve it. The best thing Ӭyou can do is to recover.
Please seek professional help. Make sure whatever counselor you see Ӭunderstands sociopaths, because not all of them do.
Arlene: Yes they are evil. But you see I have been to counseling …and it does not make it any easier. Because normal people have human connections and emotions and they have none. I cannot forget the memories of my children…my children have turned out as manipulators themselves and with no empathy. I never thought it would be possible. But he not only damaged me…he damaged them permanently.
THANK YOU FOR CALLING it EVIL because no one understands but us…it is entirely different than a normal divorce or split up. When you come in contact with evil it seems to change you for the rest of whatever life you have. If you are young…there is a better chance of recovery because you can start maybe with a new family. I am turning 50 years and I was looking forward to the connections with my children for the future and the grandchildren and that is all gone now. It seems that I wasted all those years and all the work I did was for nothing. But thank you for your comments they mean so much as I know that you really understand where I am coming from.
Understanding
I wish there was a formula, a prescription, a therapy, for making the pain inflicted by sociopaths—such as Arlene is experiencing—go away. I don’t know of any.
All Lovefraud can offer is understanding.
First of all, Lovefraud helps people understand what they are dealing with. Sociopaths have no heart, no conscience and no remorse. They feel no emotional connections to other people. They have no family and friends, only prey and pawns. People who have tangled with a sociopath are not stupid, they were targeted.
Secondly, Lovefraud is becoming a community of people who understand and can empathize with the experiences of those who have been targeted. We know what it’s like to be deceived, bankrupted, assaulted and then ignored by people in authority while the sociopaths go on their merry ways.
I can only hope that these two types of understanding can serve as a foothold, a starting point, a ray of hope, so that the victims like Arlene can begin recovery.
Oh I think BPD can be either Bipolar Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder. I meant Borderline, but which one did you mean?
Maybe I have the acronym wrong.
Yeah, my ex was once a cutter. He also hospitalized other people on a regular basis in high school. If I were the psych, I’d have gone with sociopath/P even though he cut himself too. I think he did it because he wanted to look like a “badass” and needless to say, it must have been for show, because the one time he accidentally hit a big vessel or whatever and was bleeding madly, he made sure his parents whisked him off to the hospital. Then again, everything I know about his history is based on what he’s told me…maybe he was never diagnosed…maybe he never cut (though he has scars)….who knows.
I was talking about Borderline, although P/daughter was also diagnosed with Bipolar at one time.
Her cutting did not start until she was over 20 and had moved from home. It started right after she met a girl in the ER who was a cutter. She was very fascinated with this girl, then BINGO, she started cutting her arms. Like I said, the cut marks looked more like scratches and it was always when she wasn’t getting attention from her friends and/or significant other at the time.
When she was in high school, her two best friends were not paying enough attention to her (her words) so she told them she had AIDS. She went all out with this con, and had them believing this for over 6 months. The friends were devastated and she got all the attention she wanted.
Panther
my understanding is that the borderline and the spath behave very similarly but the internal state is different. The borderline actually feels things very intensely and for long periods, whereas the spath feels nothing most of the time and his periods of raging are short lived.
They both will yoyo you though.
Having a personality disorder does NOT MEAN that the person cannot also have other mental health issues from depression to Bi-polar, in fact, MANY PSYCHOPATHS are ALSO bi-polar AND ADHD as well, some are all THREE….and for some odd reason more psychopaths are LEFT HANDED than would be expected by pure chance. The “Trojan Horse Psychopath” that afflicted our family was ASPD, Bi-Polar, ADHD and left handed, all four! Bi-polar by itself can be a real problem, but when a psychopath is also bi-polar, the manic stages especially, can be very problematic with them breaking the law. The mania causes them to feel invincable as well as little impulse control so makes them more apt to give in to impulses to rob, rape or steal without any internal controls at all to stop and consider the consequences.
Ox;
There may be a link with womb Testosterone levels.
Womb testosterone levels? You mean mommas are cooking spaths?
Ox, I dated 4 (pretty sure) sociopaths. 3 of the 4 were left-handed. Only the last one was AMBIDEXTROUS which somehow just sounds even more ominous now that I put it into context with the rest of him. Yet, he was primarily right-handed. I actually remember being relieved when I learned he wasn’t left-handed, which might hint that my subcon was on to the left-handed connections ages before the rest of my brain caught up with this pattern in my partner selection. It had associated left-handedness with danger, which was just too abstract back then, so it didn’t really help me understand what was really going on much better.
Panther;
Pre-natal exposure to higher than normal testosterone levels is linked to sociopathy, autism, left-handedness, homosexuality, ring finger – index finger length ratio and a number of other conditions.
I am a gay male and my observation is that in the gay community there is a higher prevalence of sociopathic behavior than in the straight community and this is somewhat evidenced by high HIV rates even though every gay male is very educated regarding HIV prevention…
Hi blue_eyes,
Wow, interesting. So, is it the high testosterone levels naturally in the mother, or does the father have anything to do with that? I am guessing it must be the mother (oh, this explains SO MUCH about my ex….his mother’s side of the family is a long line of psychopaths/sociopaths).
I find your observation of the gay community very interesting. The fact that you are on LF tells me that you must have encountered a sociopath, right? And was it a gay sociopath? I hadn’t even put a lot of thought into what that might be like. Now, this might sound very close-minded, but I was aware of the higher HIV rates in the gay community, but I had attributed that to that old cliche: When two men are together, who puts on the breaks? I mean, traditionally, the stereotype is that women put on the breaks and men hit the gas pedal when it comes to sex. I have had many many gay friends (I am from California for goodness sake), and they have always seemed about 10 times more sexually active than any women or even straight men I knew. I don’t know if this has something to do with sociopathy (they didn’t seem like sociopaths at all) or to do with a high libido plus poor impulse control. My gay friends are some of the most promiscuous people I’ve ever met in my life. Maybe it is just the ones I know, but I’d always associated the higher HIV rate to promiscuity, not sociopathy. The promiscuity almost seems like a defiant “middle finger” to the societal pressure telling the gay community that they shouldn’t be enjoying their own sexuality. Still, I don’t think I’d lead that to sociopathy.
However, I am curious as to whether or not you’ve encountered a gay sociopath and what that was like (probably devastating, since he was a sociopath, no matter what his sexual preference)
Panther;
Yes, I did have an encounter with a gay person who I believe was a sociopath. This short-term relationship came at a very bad time for me and i was deeply affected. I thank many here for not only support but being able to accept that this person was in fact a sociopath.
Interestingly, this person was more a “female-type” sociopath than the typical male sociopath. He not physically violent but he was manipulative, lying and “covert-agressive,” also prone to odd and inappropriate actions, the best example being is storming out of a very nice restaurant merely because I asked him back to my place for a beer. Outside he protested that “offended his British reservedness…”
Later I would learn that I would learn that at the very time he was protesting his “innocence,” online he was very active in numerous gay dating and porn sites. One profile his hobbies were listed as “boys, beers, talk, then some fooling around…” Apparently, this kind of behavior is a trait often seen in female sociopaths: playing innocent with while simultaneously being promiscuous on the side…
Regarding the gay community in general, yes, a good deal of the promiscuity come from there not being anyone to “put on the brakes” as you say. However, this alone does not explain why HIV rates are 20 times higher among gay men who are very well educated regarding HIV prevention. Since promiscuity, risk taking and substance abuse are defining characteristics of sociopaths, and these three traits combined are often seen in gay men, its possible that higher levels of sociopathy in gay men contribute to the high HIV levels among gay men.
Statistics support this as well, with about half of new HIV infections coming in those with many, many sexual partners with the other half of new HIV infections coming from those who are not particularly promiscuous but “unlucky.”
I believe that promiscuous HIV+ individuals have a much higher than normal percentage of sociopaths among them and on more than one occasion I have heard somebody who I know to be HIV+ talking about have insertive unprotected sex with people and not telling these people of their status.
BBE,
A person is actually “more kin” to the mother than to the father. The Mitocondrial DNA is passed intact from mother to child…and the male has ONLY his mother’s M-DNA, but his children will inherit their mother’s DNA so there is that aspect, but also as you mentioned, the mother’s womb is an environment totally controlled by the mother. Also “environment” even inside the womb for even IDENTICAL TWINS (Identical DNA) is not exactly the same as one child may get more or less blood supply or nutrition, etc. than the other.
Research has shown too, that if a child is nutritionally deprived enutero they will be born somewhat mentally retarded, BUT because a female’s eggs are formed before birth, HER children will also be retarded for 3 generations even if they were to get ideal nutrition after birth…but a male, even though MR himself, will NOT pass on the MR to his offspring (if it is caused by starvation) so a famine where children are starved before they are born, will effect that population for 3 generations, on the female side, with mental retardation.
Even in areas where there is available food, when you consider how some of our teenagers EAT—and how their children are deprived of proper nutrition before birth—you wonder why these kids are slow? If you add in that the lack of folic acid causes ALL cases of spina-bifida and also many other defects of the spine and brain…I sometimes wonder how we have as many NORMAL kids as we do.
I think as science advances, BBE, we will find all kinds of issues with “enviroment” and “nutrition” in what goes on with our children. BTW, I agree with you that there are a higher number of People with high P traits in the gay community, and I think it gives “gay’s a bad name”—-sort of like the high number of People with High p-traits in lawyers gives lawyers a bad name. LOL
What’s the old lawyer joke about “99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name.” LOL I love to tell Matt (our gay lawyer on LF) all the lawyer jokes, but I dearly love that guy, he is really a sharp cookie….I wish he posted more frequently now, but he’s going on with his new life, new love and his new job, so I am sure he is busy!)