The smear campaign: when sociopaths lie about you

My heart goes out to you, Jan7. I hope you are finding some peace and healing.
This site would have helped enormously with the isolation, loneliness and fear I have experienced dealing with “paths” in my life. I had no awareness of my vulnerabilities to psychopaths or sociopaths and had only encountered them at corporate jobs, not in the world of romance. I married a charming “savior” who was, actually, a manipulative, lying, impulsive, erratic and destructive man with money and high-powered connections to toss about at his discretion. Struggling to understand how and why I was taken in, it’s taken years to speak about it. Yet, it isn’t all that hard to grasp why and how it happened: this was familiar behavior; I was in a new place where I knew nobody, working for not very nice people; I wanted love and protection from a world that had sucked me dry of the old chutzpah that swatted at posers and loathed liars and walked from emperors with no clothes. (The wearing down has something to do with the likes of Enron, WorldCom, nuclear polluters and bigoted men.) To think, when I thought I had finally found a soft landing, a peaceful, less worry-filled life, a decent life in a beautiful place, I was, in truth, entering into a psychotic nightmare. I kept holding on. Unbelievably. I would think of the good times, and could not make sense of the crazies; my family didn’t understand. My father believed I was a “bad wife.” (That is a haunt belonging to an entirely other website. It was not until later in my doomed marriage that my stepmother informed me that the “path” (it pains me to identify him as my husband) was sending lengthy and multitudes of emails to my father complaining about me, such as my failure to please my husband sexually. Ah, just what a woman wants her father to read about, her sex life.)
I was embarrassed to have brought this problem into our lives. I called the erratic behavior “going off the rails.” One Thursday afternoon while I was at work, he called my cell to insist I join him on a road trip, a day vacation. I said I couldn’t, and he became threatening and nasty. I spent a lot of energy and time trying to manage these attacks. I got better at predicting incoming and recognizing triggers, but not very good at it.
Still, despite the attacks, I would point out his lies and inconsistencies, as is my way (this, a downside to authenticity with no filter); that aggravated him all the more.
Of the many traits about “paths” that I read about on this site, the one that has brought me up fast is the quickness for tears. I mistook it for feelings. When the pre-nup backfired, because I said I couldn’t sign it and feel good about the marriage or his children given the terms in it, he blamed everyone else, especially the probate judge who’d written it, for telling him to do it. He was sobbing, in a public place. He was, by his accounting, kind and giving and caretaking; he used his ‘faith’ (a popular cult) to belittle my spirituality. He used his money to buy gifts when he’d been un-nice, such as the ceramic lamp he gave me when he filed for divorce, the first time. (If a divorce that’s filed just to get a wife to do what you want her to do merits a ceramic lamp, how bad does the behavior get to merit something nicer than pottery?)
It was the trampling of boundaries, along with the lies and manipulation, that flattened me. And the lies? Why lie about small, insignificant things? Why manipulate daily life? The lies came fast and furious and to address each one, impossible. It was as if he lived in a parallel reality of his own creation.
I was a mouse to his cat, batting me about until I literally could barely function. I had no sense of me, and the one core strength I could count on in life … the ability to get up and get on … no matter the odds … was gone.
This man behaved like a dry drunk, one minute effusively supportive, the next in a rage. He bought a book on BPD and made notes about me in the margins, and left it in our office desk for me to find. I was going crazy and lashed out twice, physically, along the way, which is out of character, mortifying, and after which, both times, he became calm. Now, I realize that he had achieved what he wanted — me, unhinged and weak. Later, in more counseling, he used my outbursts to “demonstrate” how I was crazy, and he, a put upon victim. (The marriage counselors were useless. They couldn’t, or didn’t, simply say “run, you fool, before it’s too late!” And by the time of the outbursts, I’d say I was unhinged. Limp. I started to take anti-anxiety meds — prescribed by his MD who refused to talk about the marriage stress with me and wanted me sent to another state for analysis. These meds are dangerous, I now know. I’ve since found a holistic doctor and am healing without the drugs.)
This man could never commit to a plan, and so, you could count on nothing. (He has two emotionally damaged, grown children. When we met, and onward, he described them as beautiful (talented, gifted) and was unable, incapable, of acknowledging their profound problems (severe alcoholism, autism, depression) Sometimes he was grateful (tearful) for my help with them; other times, he’d turn on me in a rage, accusing me of being emotionally disturbed because I wanted boundaries drawn for the daughter who was calling at 3am, 6am and all day long.)
His former wife had died two years prior to our meeting; one “friend” of his, someone I respected, commented to me far too late into the drama this man perpetually created, “I would have checked out, too, if I were [the wife].” I am amazed that people didn’t tell me anything about him. It took time to realize that I had entered a world where he had created a social circle and a community where he could perpetuate an image, intimidate or flatter people into giving him his way, or with the service trades, keep them on the payroll.
He trotted out select people to meet me during the engagement. Looking back, I he likely told them what to say. One past girlfriend was threatened into not speaking with me. Only one person during our engagement indicated that there was a problem with his perfection (his term). “He’s crazy, you know,” said the jeweler. Oh, we all laughed, me thinking “fun, crazy” not “wacko, crazy.” Everyone else, it took me a long time to recognize, who might have seen him for who he was, had something to gain or lose by playing into his game, or feared him and kept a distance. (When we met the marriage counselor who didn’t tell me to run like the fool I was, told him his demeanor was threatening and if she were on a street with him and not in the safety of her own office, she’d get away from him as quickly as possible. Another woman would have left him on the spot. Or sooner. Not me!)
He filed divorce three times in four years, the first time after a near-fatal car crash and concussion, after which he became even more erratic. During the final year in communication with this man just the mention of his name set my whole body shaking. I could barely address the paper requirements of a divorce. (It’s called a nervous breakdown.) You’d think that someone who’d filed divorce three times would want nothing to do with me. Yet, he would text me that he’d found something I’d left behind, or he’d email something about his travels overseas. And still, I didn’t get it. It was just bait, like cheese. I blocked his email. He’d create a new one. I’d block that one. The airwaves have been silent for almost two years now. At least I can write about it here, or think about him and that horrible period of my life, without shaking. Let’s call that progress.
I may be flawed, but not crazy, or borderline. I am a wee bit wiser, poorer and still a bit freaked out by it all.