The question was, “When can you trust your man?”
A reporter who was writing an article on the topic for a major women’s magazine asked the question. It showed up in my e-mail because I subscribe to a service that distributes questions from reporters to experts all around the world who may be able to answer them.
I knew what the reporter was looking for. She wanted succinct little tips like:
- “You can trust your man if he always shows up when he says he will, or at least calls to tell you he’ll be late.”
- “You can trust your man if he introduces you to his mother.”
- “You can trust your man if he shows you his income tax return.”
But, after being married to a sociopath, and hearing the stories of so many Lovefraud readers, I knew that these external signs may not be accurate.
The luring stage
In the beginning of a relationship, the luring stage, sociopaths can be reliable and punctual. They may seem proud to introduce you to their families. They may appear to be financially solvent.
Sociopathic individuals can appear to be deserving of respect, love and trust as long as it suits their purpose. These predators know what they are supposed to do to win over a lover. And they are capable of actually doing it—at least until they feel like they no longer need to.
Once they have their hooks set in you, they may be late—or even disappear for days or weeks with no explanation. Their families may trip over themselves to be good to you—probably because they want you to take the parasite off their hands. And they may flash cash and financial documents—cash taken from the previous partner, and documents that are forged.
So how do you know when to trust your man—or woman? Here’s my answer: You can trust your partner when you can trust yourself.
Trusting yourself
When it comes to romantic relationships, there are two dimensions to trusting yourself.
The first is your own sense of self. You know who you are, what you want, and where your boundaries are. You know that you deserve to be loved simply for being yourself. You understand that a relationship involves giving and taking by both parties, not one person doing all the giving and the other all the taking. You will not jeopardize your well-being in order to have companionship.
The second dimension is trusting your intuition. Your gut, your body, your sixth sense, will tell you when something is wrong. You must have to have enough faith in yourself that you can hear or feel the intuitive messages, and pay attention to them. We get in trouble when we allow ourselves to be talked out of what our intuition is telling us. When a person or suggestion makes us feel uncomfortable, that’s our early warning system, and we must trust ourselves enough to listen.
I responded to the magazine reporter’s inquiry. I told her than the time to trust a man is when we trust ourselves. She didn’t reply. I assume that my answer wasn’t what she wanted.
Great topic. I’ve slowly been learning to trust my gut and to set strong boundaries. This blog is especially pertinent to those of us who are learning to do so! That means every single one of us. It’s been working pretty well so far. Another teachable moment was to be in a relationship with a Love-Bug for 7 years…even though the relationship should have ended early on, I learned a tremendous amount about myself…which is priceless.
Dear LL,
Being “too open” and trusting and sharing our “secrets” with those people puts us at risk….and I’ve done the same thing in the past, but I am learning to keep my cards closer to my chest in sharing things about myself, not just “secret” things but anything.
On the train coming back there was a lady in our compartment who was a CHATTER box and she told us what her income was, what the source of her income was, and on and on with very personal things that I would NEVER have shared with a stranger—she was setting herself up if I had been seeking to take advantage of someone and “telegraphing” for all the world to hear, “I HAVE NO PERSONAL BOUNDARIES.”
I imagine the woman was very lonely even though she talked about her large and “close” family, my guess is that it isn’t really all that “close.”
Sometimes people who want to get “information” about us will “share” their own personal stories/secrets FIRST, which makes us feel more like we are obligated to “share” our secrets etc. with them because they shared with us which means we can trust them. NOT the case.
Sometimes too, we grow up in a family where there are “secrets” to be kept and we are required to keep those DIRTY secrets quiet because if it gets out that daddy is doing drugs he will lose his job and if YOU ARE THE ONE WHO TOLD, IT WILL BE YOUR FAULT he lost his job. My family protected the secrets and anyone who raised an objection to the secrets being kept was a trouble maker….the bad guys had to be protected by the “secret keepers.”
I think I have finally come to a good point where I no longer keep the bad guy’s secrets, however, I do have boundaries about what I share and with whom in my life.
The basic rule is that if I don’t want it printed on the front page of our state wide newspaper I don’t tell anyone else. If it would upset or hurt me for it to be printed then I don’t tell anyone else. LOL I also don’t tell anything that could be used to get leverage on me. I’m careful what I put in writing and no longer write anything in anger and mail or send it. NO COMMENT is a good way to handle most things.
A lot of things that I used to protect as “secrets” I no longer protect as “secrets” but let the chips fall where they may. I do not hide the fact any more that I have a son in prison for murder, but I also don’t stop people on the street to tell them either. So there is a happy middle ground I think. It is a learning process though. So just keep on exploring options and what feels right at the time…but don’t let yourself react in anger, it always back fires on you! I can attest to that!
Oxy,
Great post and a lot to ponder!! Your story about the woman on the train would not be me and I’d consider her a chatter box too, BUT, I have been FAR too trusting and open with others about what goes on with me when I “feel” like there is trust. Keeping “secrets” was also a big BIG deal in my spath fam too. And boy were there a TON of them!!! I vowed NOT to keep secrets, but after what happened with MY son in being a former juvenile sex offender, I kept my mouth SHUT. RARELY do I reveal that information. RARELY. You tell people your son is in prison for murder? WOW! I’m so impressed with that. I wonder how it feels to you when you say it? When you’re asked for “details” do you give them or is it just a statement? Oxy, I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I oftentimes think that my son having committed the crimes that he did, with the societal noise behind what a sex offender is, IS WORSE to tell anyone than that he murdered someone. They’re probably about the same level, but I’m careful because societal perspective is also VERY uninformed when it comes to sex offenders and their crimes. I thought THE SAME THING, until it was MY son and then I got a crash course education in what NOT to say, how the system works and how treatment works (in this case VERY effective because my son DID NOT have a personality disorder THANK GOD), but how to keep my mouth SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!!!
I feel perfectly safe here revealing. AS WEIRD AS THAT SOUNDS about some things I’ve NEVER shared anywhere else. I DO understand the risks, but I have NEVER been to a site like this before where there is LOTS of protection and sharing that is deeply personal stuff. I’ve learned A LOT from just having read so many heartbreaking and tragic stories here. BUT I would NOT share that anywhere else. NO WAY!!!
Right now, I’m pretty isolated. How I’m going to approach school about this, is another thing altogether. I’m seeing my therapist tomorrow, so I’ll ask him what to do about giving information with regards to what is going on with me. I’m struggling with that.
ANyway, not being completely open feels WEIRD, like I’m LYING and that comes from my childhood too. ANYTIME I spoke up as a child, I was lambasted. You would have thought I would have learned from that, but instead it went polar opposite. I’m VERY mindful now about things I’m saying. Also, Oxy, I reacted CONSTANTLY to exPOS in rages. text messages, emails, IM…..he constantly provoked me. Then turned it on me in that I was crazy. That the poor baby just didn’t “deserve” this kind of treatment out of me. Bastard. I believe now, he knew perfectly well what he was doing and ENJOYED my anger and rage at him.
UGH!!!
One baby step at a time Ox.BTW, got an appt. for Thursday for antidepressant. This chica cannot pick herself up alone anymore
LL
Donna:
One of my self-development seminars taught me – keep it simple, keep it easy, keep it fun! And your answer to when you trust a man (or for some of us, a woman) is exactly right on – it is when I trust myself. Totally, fully connected to my inner heart speak, recognizing my inner peace and recognizing dis-ease. To trust myself means to me, KNOWING myself and being fully present. And because all of us are on our own journeys, it cannot be any more simple than that. Some of us require a long time to know ourselves; it took me fifty years, lol!
Donna, I really like this post, and the thread has been really good. Oxy, I can just see you packing your knives and walking away, when you decided that you’d had enough.
It was a great example of what I was inspired to say by Donna’s post. I think that the only way to really spot and get rid of sociopaths is to have some standards about what we want and don’t want in our lives. And this cuts both ways — knowing what we want in our relationships is just as important as knowing what we don’t want.
An awful lot of us come from difficult and abusive backgrounds, and it affects our standards. If we’ve grown up with people who treat us with disrespect, expect us to be responsible for their feelings and wellbeing, blame us for their abusive behavior, neglect their obligations and expect us to endure it or (worse) clean up after them, promote the lying and hiding that keeps us from ever being able to be honest with them, the rest of the world, or even ourselves… well, how in the world are we supposed to have standards? We’ve been taught to tolerate things that aren’t good for us, and to fear punishment or withdrawal of love if we don’t follow these crazy rules.
I bring all this up because we can go on like that for a long time. Getting into relationships with people who may be just dysfunctional, and not pathologically abusive or dangerous. Thinking that we’re not worth enough to demand that people treat us with respect or fight for what we really want. And we might blame ourselves for picking the wrong people. Or feel sort of incompetent in life. Or maybe believe that love is about swapping neediness (I’ll take care of your weaknesses if you’ll take care of mine), which gets us into all kinds of strange bogs and corners.
But we don’t see that there is something that we’re not doing. We’re not really thinking about how we want to be treated, and how much that means to us, and how hard we’re willing to work to get it, and how much we’re willing to walk away from if we don’t.
Sometimes it takes a sociopath to wake us up to the fact that we’re too focussed on other people’s issues, and not focussed enough on what it’s going to take to make us healthy, whole, serene, confident, optimistic.
I think that everyone who gets involved with a sociopath eventually comes to realize that we gave our power away. Not really, because no one can take that from us. But somehow we got brainwashed for some part of that relationship into believing that someone else was smarter about who we were, what we needed and what was good for us that we were. Or we became convinced that keeping that person happy was more important than taking care of ourselves. We became submissive (because that’s a lot of what it always is with sociopaths — dominance and submission) in ways that were subtle at first, and then not so subtle. A little awkward at first, and finally mindblowingly painful.
The important thing here is how hard it was to take our power back. Oxy talked about worrying whether she was being excessive or unreasonable when she wanted to protect herself — not ask for a favor or try to be loved, just simply protect herself. I went through nearly a year of cogitating about whether I was entitled to get mad at the heartles opportunist who left me distraught, humiliated, much poorer, physically ill and suicidal. I listen everday to friends and female relatives explain their inability to exit from abusive situations because they are “needed,” they want to be nice or good people, they are horrified and frozen with anxiety at the idea of asking for what they want, and it’s like climbing Mount Everest for them to get up their nerve to say, “No, this doesn’t work for me.”
This post is about what Donna wrote, even though it may seem to go far afield. I totally agree what she wrote about trusting ourselves, and taking care of our own wellbeing.
But Donna has always been a self-empowered person, as far as I can tell. And for some of us (including me until a few years ago), some of what she wrote may not make sense. The parts about knowing who we are, what we want, and where our boundaries are. Some of us aren’t sure about all that.
If we’re not, we’re vulnerable. The only real defense against a sociopath is to know that we are our own caretakers, and to spend the time really thinking about who we are and what we want that enables us to recognize when something isn’t right for us.
We’re going to run into people who are smarter and sneakier than us, who see us a source. Trying to outsmart them seldom works. What does work is taking care of ourselves, and being committed to having life that surrounds us with people and things that nurture and empower us, and encourage us and help us to be our best selves.
Joyous, creative, productive, self-defined.
If that is not a decription of you right now, it’s probably time to develop a better relationship with yourself. Start examining those arguments in your head. Start questioning the internal voices that diminish you. Start thinking about what you really want to be doing next year and five years and ten years from now.
And if all you can think of right now is what you don’t want, that’s a start. “Turn over” each of those don’t-wants to see what it’s telling about what you really do want. Don’t want to be criticized and belittled? Maybe you really want to be appreciated and encouraged. Don’t want to be leached on financially? Maybe what you do want is to be allowed to keep what you earn, so you can invest it in your own life and future.
Like that.
A sociopath can be a really good thing for opening our eyes about our less-than-perfect relationships with ourselves. They find where we don’t love ourselves and they use it. It’s our job to go to work on those issues, because if we don’t we’re just waiting for another lesson from the universe. But if we do, we get very good at doing what Oxy did. Just walking away. And having a great story to tell our friends.
Apologies as usual for the long, long post. Love from me —
Kathy
Dear Kathy,
Glad to see you back, and thanks for validating my take on this situation. I have been sort of ruminating over the last two weeks while I was gone, and the whole situation, and I do believe I did the right thing. I also have a great deal of empathy for my friend, because I know she is SUFFERING and she is DEPRESSED and her self esteem is in THE PITS, and her husband is emotionally abusive to her—but I also realize that SHE IS NOT GOING TO HELP HERSELF….and that means I cannot help her either. I don’t feel responsible for helping her or for her feelings either, which is a BIG step forward for me. That NOT feeling “responsible” for her plight is a good feeling. Sure I am sad that she is in this position, but I also realize and accept that SHE is the only one who can rescue herself and my failure to be able to rescue her from what is to me VERY OBVIOUS DYSFUNCTION is not something that I should feel guilty over.
I also realize that she is aware of her depression, but she is not taking action to deal with it except with denial which is NOT helpful at all. I am sad that the relationship between her and me is not going to be the one I wish it was, the one it has been in the past, but it isn’t something I can change so My job at this point is, I think, to ACCEPT what IS rather than worry about what is NOT.
My own trust in myself has grown to the point now that I can feel good about my choices in protecting myself, and I realize that the thing I lacked most in my growing up years was learning to trust myself. Learning to VALIDATE myself and my own needs and desires and decisions. To own up when I make bad or poor decisions, and to work on making better ones next time. Just as I learn to trust others by how they demonstrate trustworthyness, I must also be trustworthy to myself and worthy of my own trust that I will not give too much ground to others who have not proven that they are worthy of my trust by how they behave toward me and toward the world in general.
Like someone said on another thread if you can’t trust someone like John Edwards to treat his wife with respect and honesty, how can we expect him to rule the country with respect and honesty? BTW did you see where the grandjury may indict him for financial problems related to giving a “job” (money) to his GF while he was running for president. To the tune of several million bucks! I hope they send his sorry arse to prison!
Kathy,
I do love the way you get to the heart of the matter.
You said,
We’re going to run into people who are smarter and sneakier than us, who see us a source. Trying to outsmart them seldom works. What does work is taking care of ourselves, and being committed to having life that surrounds us with people and things that nurture and empower us, and encourage us and help us to be our best selves.
Joyous, creative, productive, self-defined.
These are the words of direction I need to hear. This is what my parents were unable to give me, these values and directions. God bless you for being here.
I’m printing that out.
Kathy
Your sharing that helps me feel better about where I’m at. This is all new to me now, and I’m learning to be okay with just having set my feet back onto terra firma.
Thanks for your post!
LL
Donna
I like this short article very much because it points out something very important: a sociopath can not really con people who know themselves well, are realistic and are emotionally mature enough.
Maybe this is one of the reasons psychopaths are so painful, because they show to us our weakness, our fears, our immaturity.
So maybe to point out this to us is their usefulness. But gosh how repugnant they are.
Bird,
The exploitation of a person’s desire to live according to altruistic moral principles, Christian or otherwise, is very disgusting.