Lovefraud received the following e-mail from a woman whose daughter is caught in the web of a sociopath. The woman and her husband are not enabling the relationship—the sociopath, of course, wants money. They are hoping and praying that their daughter will escape.
Here is her question to other Lovefaud readers:
What was the “turning point,” “awakening moment,” “realization point,” that woke them up OUT of the fog, the gaslighting, etc., and what made them realize they needed to RUN, to get away from their sociopaths? Â What finally “did it,” what finally “broke the camel’s back?” Â Where they realized what was happening to them, had been done to them, when they finally realized things were NEVER going to “get better?”
There must be a “trigger” here somewhere. I’m just trying to grasp what it’s going to take. Â What is going to have to happen to jar her awake from this brainwashing/fog?
My experience
I remember the moment for me.
I knew my husband, James Montgomery, was lying to me, although I didn’t realize the extreme extent of the lies. I knew all my money was gone; my husband had spent about $227,000, much of it carelessly. I suspected he was cheating on me, and when I discovered proof, I left him.
Still, even after I left him, I thought my husband was just one of those guys who can’t stay faithful. I did not realize that my entire marriage was a scam right from the beginning.
The real moment of truth came when I called one of the women my husband appeared to be involved with. According to bank records I’d found, she had given him $6,000. The conversation went like this:
“I’m Donna Andersen. I’m James Montgomery’s wife, and I’d like to suggest that you don’t give him any more money.”
“It’s too late. I already gave him $92,000.”
I almost dropped the phone. And with that conversation, I realized that my husband had married me for the specific purpose of taking my money. That was all.
Your moment of truth
This reader has asked a really important question, one that may glean some possible approaches from helping people escape the sociopathic trap. So please post your experience.
What did it for you? When did you finally realize that you had to get out?
They create a hell-on-earth existence for you, never learning from their “mistakes,” causing the victim to feel like he/she is on a constant, unending emotional rollercoaster ride. After the spath walked out and I refused to even reconcile, all the pieces of the puzzle (things that I had noticed in the past and continued to notice) came together, cluing me in that there was something fundamentally wrong with the man. During the separation was when I realized that he was a sociopath (taking months for that revelation to sink in) and over time, this diagnosis has been confirmed to me over and over again, that I tagged him right. It still is unsettling to me that I was married to such a person.
and yes candy!
if any man presents hiimself to me with any history of substance abuse or criminality i will immediately walk away. IMMEDIATELY. i don’t care if its low-level stuff and maybe they really are “ok” (i think those numbers are few, but do exist). but i will not take my chances.
i can’t believe i used to see those things as badges of honor for a life lived on the edge. its just a life lived on the edge of INSANITY. OUR insanity.
Bullheart – Amen to that
When did I finally see the light? I wish I could tell you it was a single moment in time and I got out of the relationship right away, but for me it was a series of events. The spath I married used the right words but the wrong actions. He tried really hard, pulled out all the stops, to keep me hooked.
For years I thought that all of our problems were my fault, I would try to get him to see how he was hurting me but he would use all sorts of logic to tell me how wrong I was. I finally felt so bad about our marriage and myself that I told him I wanted to end it. He told me I was ungrateful. I agreed to go to a counselor and try and work it out.
I think my body knew that there was a disconnect between the reality he was telling me and the truth. I felt sick and my body was telling me the truth. After finding out my thyroid had stopped working and starting on medication, I began to feel better and see things differently.
Fast forward to now, two years later. I found out husband was into porn, lesbian and young black girls. He denied, denied, denied. I took the computer to a forensics specialist and it was a fact. I had him evaluated at the university for sex addiction. He lied but I found out he is narcisstic. I think that the reason he went with me is because he was trying to prove I was crazy. He told the doctor this as well but the doctor said the tests showed that I wasn’t crazy.
This was still not enough for me to leave. He kept saying everything was in my imagination and he loved me so much. He called my mom for an intervention on my behalf. This was after I asked him to take a lie detector test. I found cell phone usage on his phone that I believe to be phone sex lines. Got a subpeona. Stil he denied. I tracked his computer and found him looking for mental institutions for a family member who is resistant to treatment, meaning me. Still I stayed.
The last straw was him being inappropriate with our daughter. She didn’t want to be home alone with him anymore and I put her into therapy. He called her a liar as well.
Still, I stayed longer than I should have. I thought if he could see that he had a problem and got help, he would be okay. I thought he was in denial. He always held down a job and didn’t try to con me out of money but he conned me out of 20 years of my life.
Our daughter now believes her father is a sociopath because of how he has treated her. She is better since he is out of the house.
He didn’t want to leave and it took a very long time to get him gone. I started to look for another place to live but he said he would move. He was like molassass.
I wish there was an ah-ha moment and I had the courage to face the truth, but it was a series of events that lead me here. I stayed way too long, it was two years of hell but I finally found my voice and feel the happiest I have in years. I’m at peace and I count my blessings every night. I’m not lonely and every day is a gift.
I know this may not sound like good advice but I think you should continue to support your daughter and keep telling her that she deserves to be treated with respect no matter what relationship she’s in. If you make the spath try and look bad, it will back fire on you. It will be hard to see her in pain but she has to make the journey herself. One exception would be if you think she is in danger, then you need a different strategy. Best wishes, you have support here anytime you need it!
I had repeated turning points that were a slow progression involving loans of money, discovery of other women, and increasing levels of gall and disrespect shown in specific behaviors toward me. He never laid a hand on me, but the gaslighting bluster, deception, unreliability and callousness and casualness about the pain it caused me, and the slightly parasitic “making one’s way by relying on women” factors were all there, as well as the repeated pushing for just one more chance. It was he who faded more and more out of my life until he was gone, but at some point long before, I started standing my ground more and more, but I vascillated with that.
In my case, I was troubled and also completely inexperienced with this kind of human being. What I was MISSING this whole time was persuasive, informed data on this sort of person and their very dim hopes of ever reforming, no matter what they promise or even intend at the moment of promising. I had a therapist who wasn’t telling me this. I did have people telling me “get rid of this guy” but no one saying “R-Ann, I’m experienced with this guy, I’ve seen tons of them, they usually have such and such characteristics, and they do the same s*** to a string of women. And it starts out feeling so real, and they might be exhilirating to be with on occasion, but many of the women that get sucked in by them end up ruined or with many wasted years. Once in a while they even end up dead. Just because he is the one guy that stuck around after sleeping with you doesn’t mean he cares, and this could hardly be called sticking around…”
There was no LoveFraud.com when I went through my troubles either. I knew what a sociopath was from psychology classes, but I didn’t know the expression “lovebomb”, or “No Contact”, fully understand “gaslighting”, and I hadn’t read repeated stories to understand how commonplace my own patterns were.
I also might have benefitted if I had applied more concepts of addiction recovery to myself at the time, because I had a sick addiction to this person, and the high that came from the more positive aspects of his company.
So:
The main things I can think of as turning points were not fixed points at all. One was a growing understanding that I was actually more nervous around this guy and more relieved when I hadn’t been around him for a while (though initially there would be a renewed attachment from new intimacy, and the pain of his disappearing again…). The other was going onto an antidepressant that worked for me, in my case an SSRI. I had tried a few but one finally put my feet more solidly on the ground. It also suppressed my libido somewhat, which helped in this situation significantly. I was less vulnerable to him. So these two things were very significant “curves in the road.”
The whole process would have been quicker if I’d had access to something like lovefraud. You might surreptitiously have somebody turn your daughter onto it in the guise of a fascinating site full of appalling/juici-ish stories about appalling people and the damage they do…(?)
Oxy, I only recently learned the story of your repugnant P-sperm-donor. It made me so sad to read it, and I am sorry that evil experience happened to you. I don’t know if I said it before.
Thanks R-ann, I appreciate that…he was a violent and sick piece of sheet for sure. At the age I was (late teenager) I had no way to know what the heck I had stumbled into….and in retrospect I probably had PTSD then, and the lack of validation and the shame held me back from the growth I should have been doing at this time in my life. I am grateful to God that I even survived emotionally as well as physically. What I do appreciate though is that as bad as he was, he is NOT a “rare bird” either—there is no endangered species notification out for him and his kind–they are everywhere, in every walk of life, every sex, race, creed and of every national origin.
If the psychopaths were removed from the planet, 99% of the evil things that happen in this world would be GONE…the troubles of mankind, wars, rape, crime, would be GONE. Think about it. If the only problems we had in this world were earth quakes and floods how wonderful this world would be. Earthquakes and floods and even nuclear melt downs pale in comparison to what is going on in the world with wars, slavery, rape and pillage. If all we had to worry about was disease and natural disasters, this would be HEAVEN COMPARED TO NOW.
Think about it…no child abuse, no addictions, no robbery, no rape, no assault, no domestic violence, no war, no crime of any kind to speak of, all of the “human ills” just GONE! Makes you stop and think doesn’t it about the damage that these CREATURES do?
My turning point was not a moment in time, but a series of events last summer. They were typical things like discovering his bold-faced lies, enduring ever-more-violent rages, seeing him drop his mask of kindness and begin to refuse my simple requests to help, then seeing him REFUSE to pay bills he clearly owed, finding things he had stolen, having him purposely ignore my birthday, catching him stealing my money, threatening my daughter.
This is all beside the issue of constant sexual assaults anytime we were alone. The thought of being around him was becoming more and more disturbing, to the point that I lived with constant panic attacks and PTSD, and I did not want to even be in my own home when he was there.
Anyway, I knew that something was dreadfully wrong, but I didn’t know what in the world was going on. I have never been around a situation like this in my life. The answer – my turning point – was that I began to search for information. I started by googling “opportunist” because this is the only word I could think of to describe him. I learned more and more; I hit upon “narcissist” but that didn’t entirely cover it. When I found the sociopath and psychopath descriptions, I knew I had found the explanation for everything. I sat in the computer chair, just stunned.
Still, I wanted some real-life examples to compare to my own situation, just to be sure I was correctly understanding sociopaths. When I found LoveFraud, and the stories here were so very real and similar to my own, I KNEW what the problem was… it was not me, it was HIM!! This knowledge enabled me to move forward knowing I was right, and I wasn’t going crazy anymore! I learned what the cycle of abuse was, and I could clearly see what was going on.
KNOWLEDGE=POWER
Oxy, I wanted to say I had not heard you use the R-word in reference to your sperm donor until a few days ago. I wasn’t aware of that, and I am SO SORRY you had to go through that. You are an inspiration.
I can not identify a turning. Rather like a poster above, I had a thousand points of light. Little incidents occurred, NONE of which anyone would end their marriage over – until the BIG incidents which NO ONE would tolerate.
Just a couple months after marriage, I started keeping a journal. I did this b/c I had too many incidents where something was said and then I was told it never happened or happened differently than I recalled. I told myself, that’s normal. Everyone see things from their perspective. So when things happened and didn’t make sense, I wrote it down. When the journal was full, I read it. That revealed a PATTERN.
My husband would lie. Not big lies, just little lies for no reason. He’d say something gossipy about an older lady. Then deny he’d said it. He’d answer my question about something with a lie. And when I asked WHY did you LIE to Me? He prevaricated and finally said, “B/C you presssured me into it by asking questions.”
Any surprise that my marriage ended TERRIBLY, with my husband having multiple affairs and destroying my reputation?
I learned. 1) If someone will lie about a little thing, (not talking about social lies here) they will lie about BIG things. 2) It gets worse. They DON’T learn to trust you and then stop lying so don’t even try to tell yourself THAT LIE.
Funny thing is, sometimes he told me the truth and I pooh poohed it. He told me about his sexual fantasy that he “heard about from one of the guys”. Put your penis through a hole and someone on the other side takes you to heaven. YEARS later I understood the ramification of this and my husband’s favorite hotel in a seedy part of San Francisco, which he said was b/c hotels were SO expensive and a good choice so he could save money when he was on his own.
In the end, the thousand points of light were so bright, the truth was ablaze.
I cant even begin to count the times I had reason too end it. I cant count the times I did end it and still always took him back. I think my turning point was when my oldest son came over to talk too me, when he broke down in tear’s and said “what’s wrong with you Daddy” he hadnt called me daddy in 20 years….the next day I changed numbers and never spoke to the X again….