I’ve just travelled back from the UK today, and during my journey I read an article that made me sit up and take notice. It’s the story about a teenage girl, Gemma Barker, who created three separate male aliases in order to dupe her female friends in to sexual relationships with her. She had made enormous efforts to develop and maintain these aliases. She succeeded so well, in fact, that not only the victims but also their families were fooled in to believing that Gemma was a boy. Whilst it’s claimed that she suffers from autism spectrum disorder and ADHD, the judge still called her “Cunning and deceptive” and the report states that she showed no remorse when handed her sentence. Ring any bells?
The thing that really struck me, though, was a quote from one of her victims who was 15 or 16 at the time. Gemma was 18, so legally an adult. Saying that she felt “repulsed and dirty” after learning that the boy she loved was actually her female friend, the victim goes on to say
“Nobody understands what it’s like to be told that the person you love and want to spend the rest of your life with isn’t real. It’s like you have disappeared. I just want to stop hurting” She also asks the poignant rhetorical question I know many of us will have asked ourselves: “What did I ever do wrong to you?”
It’s heart-breaking isn’t it? The shame of deception runs deep. Left untreated it can grow, multiplying like a cancer in the soul of those whose only crime was to love someone else. People who trusted what they were being shown, and treated the other person with care and compassion — while the other person just looked on and laughed. While in some cases there may not be any physical scars, the emotional and spiritual damage hits hard in every case. It is far more damaging — and can last so much longer.
I would have hoped that in this day and age, perhaps there might be a little more understanding and compassion for people who have been duped. After all, there are plenty of stories. Accounts from people who have been deliberately deceived and misled. People who, like us, gave all we had to people we believed and loved with all our heart.
You know what, though? Reading through some of the comments that have appeared online after the article, I am disheartened that so many still seem more focused on blaming the ”˜stupidity’ of the victims, or urging us to ”˜take pity’ on the person who deceived the girls. For many people, I know it may seem hard, almost impossible to believe that someone can get away with such a deception. But for those of us who’ve been there, once we work through the pain and shame, we know we were not to blame! We know we were not stupid, gullible, needy, blind or any of the other stinging veiled questions that stab at our soul as we try to make sense of what has happened.
It’s not just deception in romantic love that causes the pain. The hurt of betrayal can hit just as hard when it’s about relationships of trust between friends and family, or perhaps misguided loyalty to bosses or colleagues. Whatever the connection, when hit with the cold hard truth, the horror can be almost overwhelming.
And”¦ in the same way that I had absolutely no comprehension of these sorts of behaviors before it happened to me, I guess the question is how on earth can we reasonably expect other people who haven’t ”˜been there themselves’ to have any level of understanding? Well? It’s a reasonable question”¦. But then, in recent times I”˜ve realized that our natural propensity to be reasonable and understanding is just another of the ways people are exploited while predators continue to thrive. It’s by thinking “Oh, they’re just under pressure!” “Well, you know, we all make mistakes!” or “It’s ok, I know they didn’t really mean it — I won’t say anything it’s not that important” that the abuse is allowed to continue, right under the noses of ”˜reasonable’ people who just can’t begin to comprehend that the attacks are deliberate!
It’s the same reasonable, caring approach by ”˜normal’ people that keeps these heartless creatures free to continue what they are doing. It’s also the thing that hurts the victim time and time and time again — because there is no reason behind why these predators do the things they do. There is no explanation. They’re just like that — and they’re darned skilled at what they do. And that’s all there is to it.
So, these days I’m becoming stronger and more determined in what I am now beginning to see as a crusade to educate and help others. Yes, the numerous judgments and barbed comments from people who don’t know what they’re talking about can grate and often rattle me. But you know what? I’ve also decided that there is little or no point in getting frustrated at those people. It’s fair to say that we don’t know what we don’t know”¦. It’s also fair to say that I now have an unreasonable passion to do something about it whenever I come across a situation where people are being hurt and the perpetrators are getting away with it. I’m determined to help people remove their blinkers and recognize that yes, there is such a thing as ”˜bad people’ who live among us. It’s tough. Because it means inviting people to consider that they have been conned. That they, too, have been taken in by someone who tells lies as easily and effortlessly as you and I breathe.
The more I get to understand this subject, the more I believe that the self-righteous outpouring from people who have never been in that situation, stems from fear. The fear that perhaps, in the same shoes, they may not be quite so streetwise as they’d like to think. Perhaps they are not as invincible to the surgically accurate deceptions of a person who does not have the same emotional wiring as we do. A bit like children hiding under the covers when they’re afraid, it’s a good short-term fix but it doesn’t get rid of the bogeyman!
The thing is, though, hiding away or going in to denial will never get rid of the bogeymen — or women. All of us here know that from our own experiences. I’m determined to do all I can to ensure that ”˜first hand experience’ does not remain the only way to be certain that the person who is causing the harm is usually a harmful person. I know there’s a long road ahead — I also know it’s a road that’s well worth travelling.
Great article Mel. I had read the news reports about this situation and seen the pictures of the girl as she posed as a boy, and read some of the snarky comments that people had made about the victims.
You are right we KNOW what it is to be BETRAYED….and we have been there.
There is an old saying “there is no fanatic like a convert” and we have been CONVERTED to healing! We are MISSIONARIES to healing. We are rabidly interested in healing, and spreading the word around the world.
An I think that is as good a fanatic cause as there is! We want others to know the truth, to be WARNED that in truth there ARE EVIL people out there masking as “nice” people! BE WARNED, watch for the RED FLAGS! You go girl!
Your best article yet, Mel, IMO. You’ve addressed the most important aspect of psychopathy: they do what they do because we let them get away with it. When the victim is blamed for being stupid, the rest of the crowd can rest assured that it won’t happen to them, because afterall, THEY aren’t that stupid! right?
That’s the typical scapegoat mechanism and the reason it works is because it’s a HIDDEN mechanism. The rest of the crowd must be utterly convinced that the victim is to blame, that she brought it on to herself because of some defect in her being or because of some DIFFERENCE in her from the rest of the crowd. That reassures them that they are safe from the evil that happened to her.
The only way to open people’s eyes is to show them how this mechanism works and how to recognize it whenever, whereever it appears.
Another problem with getting people to open their eyes is that nobody wants to admit that they were so close to evil, themselves. So they keep treating the perpetrator as if they “just made a mistake” or “there are two sides to every story”. NO. There is evil and all evil should be shunned. Period.
Spaths keep doing what they do because they aren’t shunned even when they keep showing the same behavior over and over and over again. The rest of the crowd wants to believe that there was a misunderstanding. My own spath once asked me, “do you think I’m thoughtless?” That is his mask, thoughtlessness. The truth is that there is more thought put into each of his evil cons than most people put into planning their entire lives. When someone is thoughtless, they apologize AND make amends. If you don’t see that happening, IT WASN’T THOUGHTLESS.
Hi Mel,
Awesome article.
I was just posting on another thread about how our reasons, meaning making and excuse making prolong the relationship…
and then I saw this:
“our natural propensity to be reasonable and understanding is
just another of the ways people are exploited while predators continue to thrive. It’s by thinking “Oh, they’re just under pressure!” “Well, you know, we all make mistakes!” or “It’s ok, I know they didn’t really mean it ”“ I won’t say anything it’s not that important” that the abuse is allowed to continue..”
And you said a version of my favorite… they don’t know that they don’t know.
This is at the root of why people do not understand this.
Thanks for the great article.
Aloha
Thank you Mel. Yes, we are all fighting the good fight. I am so glad that you have added your voice.
Great article-I hadn’t heard that story. I don’t have a television so I don’t get news from all over the world. There really is a lot of blaming the victim going on. It happened in my scenario. Some of my situation was definitely MY fault for making the choice to get involved but it doesn’t diminish the fact that the spath is still evil and I was the fourth one, that I know of that he duped. A lot of my coworkers had a sense of self righteousness about the whole thing-thinking that they could NEVER fall for it, but it comes from not being in the shoes of the victim. None of them really knew me, or how I was raised, or had any idea of the worthlessness that I felt about myself that allowed me to make that choice. These people can lay it on so thick and make someone that feels worthless feel like the are on cloud 9. Those endorphins come in and the bonding hormones and then you’re afraid to end the relationship because you’re afraid of the pain you’ll feel if you do it-even though you are experiencing a certain amount of pain from actually staying in it. I made my mistakes sure, but it doesn’t diminish the predatory nature of the spath who continuously duped young girls because he knew he could get away with it.
The SHAME of deception, indeed! This is horrible! I hope these victimized girls find their way to information about PD’s, so they can arm themselves, and have their experience/feeling validated.
The uninformed public puts the shame on them for the deception. Sad.
It is the deceiver who should feel this shame, the shame of who they have become, and how their evil ways harm everyone and everything that they come in contact with. And the guilt of having behaved this way over and over again!
I have a confession to make, something that is really just getting clearer to me: that these folks DO know, very precisely, what they are doing. They are not, as Sky writes, thougtless. They are fully aware of their actions and motivations. I kept seeing them as having a kind of ‘compulsion’, a neurotic dysfunction. But this isn’t an unconscious neurosis. They are fully aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it.
It’s like this bulb of understanding was only at a few watts for me. Now it is bright.
This girl’s calculating and perpetrating this makes that even clearer for me. Like One-steps story. No one can do these things without clear and directed thought and action.
Here’s an article about one of the victims
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2111535/Gemma-Barker-Jessica-Sayers-duped-dating-2-boys-realising-SAME-GIRL.html
I had a realization today about the WAY that spaths lie. It is always the 180 degree rule. It is always the exact opposite of the truth.
If I were to lie about anything, I would try to make the lie seem plausible. If I don’t like someone, but don’t want to make it obvious, I might be nice to them or at least very polite. But a spath would LOVE BOMB THEM, make them his BFF, propose marriage etc… He puts them on a pedestal so that when he brings them down, they have further to fall. My spath actually told me that was his M.O.
Furthermore, by doing 180 degrees the opposite of the truth, nobody will suspect the EXTENT of the lie. because WHO DOES THAT!!!!!!!!!!!! Nobody does that right? Who tries to marry the person they most hate? WHO?
That’s why nobody believes us. And spaths know this.
In this case, the spath Gemma Barker, pretended to be 180 degrees the opposite of what she was: a male.
In the interview, the teen victim said that for 3 years nobody would believe her. Only 5 people stood by her, she said. Even the police were duped until they strip searched Gemma. That’s the only reason that the girls were finally given justice: because the police were also “victimized” and they couldn’t just “blame the victims for being stupid” anymore. The hidden scapegoat mechanism doesn’t work when there are too many people looking at it from the scapegoat’s side of the curtain.
The end result, is that the teen victims were SLIMED. Yes, they felt shame at being duped, but even more because they were “attracted” to another female and that is not their sexual orientation. I think that was the entire motive for the con. The spath has shame issues of her own and she needed to spread that shame around so she wouldn’t feel so lonely in hell.
It doesn’t matter what they do to her, she’s in hell and she’ll always be in hell.
skylar;
I agree. When the spath lies, it does seem to be a “180” or at least far more extreme than necessary. My x-spath plays the “clueless boy” act even though he is near 40. Told me he was “reserved and sorted” when he was far from that.
Good one, Mel.
The choice is not to be understanding but, for our own protection, to understand the way in which the perpetrator works. Understanding ourselves is an important part of our recovery process.