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.
Dear Sky,
In response to the post to me about you going to a therapist, I am so glad that you are making that move. Believe me when I say that it helps to have someone take a look “from the outside” at how your coping is going.
I know that coming to a closure with your parental units is difficult thing to do, I’m still working on mine. Though I hadn’t seen the arsehole In 40+ years when he died a couple of years ago (I guess is 3 yrs now) it brought back a lot of the stuff and I had to work through it all to come to a final closure with it. I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with him or his estate or anything concerning him. He purposely left me and two of my half sibs out of his will/estate and I realized that I didn’t want his money or anything to do with him, it didn’t “hurt” me (which is what he had intended) I felt total disgust for him and everything about him. I also realized that he feared me and that someone of the family or others would believe me, not him. He was right, they did believe me and not him. But then I realized too that others believing me didn’t make my truth more true, or if they didn’t believe me it didn’t make it less true. Truth is truth. A fact is a fact even if no one believes it. Back when everyone on earth thought the world was flat, it did NOT change the shape of the world because no one believed it was round.
Getting ourselves into some form of closure and understanding about our up bringing is like Kathy Hawk said, the psychopathic experience helps us to go back and heal the wounds that we were unable to deal with at the time they happened. The experience with the psychopath brings out those unhealed wounds from the past and makes them painful but that is what we need in order to deal with them.
Your relationship with this BF has sounded pretty “dysfunctional” for a long time, Sky, so I hope that you can work through that too, you deserve more than someone who says they can’t feel love, even if he doesn’t actively “abuse” you, he apparently doesn’t treat you with love and concern. Changes in relationships that are “stable” (even if that stability isn’t functional or healthy) is always scary, but it is only when we reach out and step out of our comfort zones that we can grow! Keep on headed toward the light! God bless.
Eva, a sociopath can con a self-assured, emotionally mature, confident, strong and compassionate individual. Like Robert D. Hare PhD ( Author of “Without Conscience” ) said :
Being conned by a sociopath has nothing to do with being emotionally mature.. it has to do with sociopaths being cowards who play on the heartstrings of compassionate, strong and loyal people. the key word is compassionate here because sociopaths take the easy way out and easy prey is people who are “nice”.
Everyone has weaknesses and fears.. no one is perfect. But no one except the psychopath actively searches out for your “weak spots” ( Note : “WEAK” in the Point of view of the psychopath- kindness is a strength by any other means but in the hands of a psychopath- kindness is “weakness” )
So I propose that we stop psychologizing ourselves, bending our psyches and standards to adjust and fit to the psychopath’s worldview. It is not we that are weak, or ill, or broken, or not good enough- it is the psychopath who is vicious enough to take advantage of the good nature of well meaning people who only want to engage in a loving and reciprocal relationship. It is the Psychopaths PERVERSITY that is the problem, not ourselves…
Becoming aware of how our strengths can be viewed as “weakness” by predators such as the psychopaths is an area we can work on for growth.. becoming aware of our vulnerability because we are good people is a place to focus for growth. Being in tune with our inner voice, and committing ourselves to stick by it and not give in to our jello legs when we feel like we need to be COMPASSIONATE when someone is undeserving of it is an area of growth. But by no means should our kindness be viewed as weakness… because it is most assuredly a strength.
Eva,
I think Dancing is correct. I also think that believing we can spot them ALL, no matter HOW healthy we get, is pretty dangerous.
I think you can be healthy and be LONELY, we ARE human. Spaths feed on the vulnerabilities of others too, and sometimes we might even RECOGNIZE that that’s what’s going on.
I think the real question here is, are any of us, no matter how healthy we become REALLY IMMUNE???
I don’t think so. I think just being aware and healthy provides LESS of an opportunity to fall victim to a spath and if we may just run into these creatures in the future, it would be easier to dump them.
LL
Hi dancingnancies. I agree a psychopath is not going to target bad people because bad people have too many things in common with psychopaths. And you’re right that good people don’t pay attention to vulnerabilities in others. That was one of the first red flags i observed in the psychopath: those demons search for them. Normal people don’t do that, normal people look at others in the set, the virtues and the faults.
Psychopaths are exploitative and egoistic and it’s noticeable very early in the relationship. Who wants a relationship with a psychopath? That’s what i don’t understand very well.
LL
immune? What did i do to the psychopathic monster that teaches? Nothing. The monster chose me and just him must know the reason because i have no idea.
Nobody is immune. If they can’t seduce you, they go direct to beat you. The sick ones are they without doubt because they neither live nor allow the others.
But to endure a romantic relationship with one…a bit of masochism is necessary.
Speaking of trust and teaching…..I was reading today that beautiful teacher Debra Lafave is getting married. Remember her? She was 23 and had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old guy. Seems the guy was a rule pushing, on the edge, mean spirited sort of person, himself, even at his young age. Since he was a juvenile and she was of legal age and in a teaching position she was, of course the only one focused on. This woman was/is BEAUTIFUL! Obviously both of these individuals show P traits of wanting power and worship. And she said her older sister, who was killed in a car accident, was the only one who knew/understood her and could ‘manage’ her. In the caretaker position as we’ve all been with these P’s.
Dear TB,
Well, she is a sexual abuser regardless of how “willing” her partner was, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also high in psychopathic traits, many of them are sexually active very early and in inappropriate relationships. I feel sorry for who ever she is marrying. She may appear beautiful on the outside but I don’t think she is all that Beautiful on the INSIDE.
Skylar, thanks and hugs as always. The way you read me always leaves me feeling good about both of us. You too, lesson learned. If that post feels right to you, it says great thing about what you’re doing for yourself now.
Oxy, I love you. And there’s something about what you did that isn’t in your control, but it’s really important. You may have done your friend a great good. We can’t know for sure, and the truth of it may not emerge for a while. But by dealing with the situation out of your own needs and reality, you gave her honest feedback about what’s going on in her life. It may take a while to sink in and have an effect. But it will be meaningful especially since you two are friends.
Sometimes cutting off people we love is the best thing we can do for them. Or refusing to participate in dramas that are not healthy or simply beneath us. I’ve been in situations more than once where I’ve said to people, “Don’t call me when you’re drinking.” Or “I’m interested in you sexually and romantically, but if you want to explore that, there are some messes you need to clean up in first.” Or “I don’t want to have these converations that involve nothing but your complaining. Call me when you have some good news.” Or as a a friend of mine with two small children said to her husband, “You want to fool around with other women, you have a good time. But get out of my house and don’t come back until you’re ready to be the real man I married.”
Sometimes it’s said and sometimes it’s assumed, but it’s always true that we see something better in these people. That we believe they are more than what they are showing us. And that we want to have a relationship with the “more,” not the weak, sloppy, whiny, irresponsible, self-destuctive front they’re showing us. It’s not just disheartening, it’s boring and a waste of our time. On a deeper level, it’s disrespectful to both of us.
For anyone reading this post who may feel like this is a jab at you for being in a kind of weak and whiny condition right now, please believe me, it’s not. That state is part of the healing process and I respect it as such. But it’s an early stage, and no one wants to stay there. It’s a miserable stage in which we hate ourselves and feel immobilized by anxiety and confusion. The fact that it’s so darned uncomfortable is supposed to motivate us to get to later stages, like realizing that we’ve been abused and getting angry.
And the truth about the help that our honest reactions sometimes provide is that is a jumpstart into anger. Except they get angry at US! Which can be a little hard to take when we’ve been handholding them for a while, and only finally admitted that we’re getting tired of it. But it’s actually a good thing for them to get angry at anything. To get that instinct moving. And it’s easy enough to tell them that they’re getting angry at the wrong person, because we’re not the one who’s abused them or caused this anguish in their lives that they’re blaming on us or themselves or anything but the real problem.
As I said, they may not hear it right away. We may have to accept that the relationship is apparently damaged for a while. If we’re being honest with someone like a sociopath or narcissist who is determined to use us and to separate us from our own intuition and common sense, we may find ourselves being attacked, criticized, belittled, gaslighted (and that’s a big hint that it’s time to get out of Dodge). But whatever happens, this is a time to be comfortably grounded in our own reality and recognize that their reactions are not about us. And that includes their apologies, excuses, justifications and anything else that falls short of awareness that their behavior is affecting us and our relationship with them.
We are not their judges. I don’t want to sound like that. We are only judges of what is good and not good for us.
When we hide how we really feel, we lie. And like all lies, it pollutes the atmosphere, makes it impossible to know what’s real, degrades trust. Our honesty may not be welcome at the time, because people are invested in their own denial or manipulative agendas. But no matter how invested they are in their coping strategies, what they getting back from us is evidence about how well their strategies are working, in terms of giving them what they want. Even sociopaths, the worst learners in the world, can figure that that they need to change behavior to get what they want. The people who actually feel love and care about people have reason to learn from other people’s reactions in a deeper and better way.
So, to conclude, the key is not to withdraw love, not to give up on what we see in other people, but to refuse to collaborate in what is non-productive and beneath us both. This is not arrogance or unkindness on our part. Quite the contrary. It’s a kind of investment in their future and our own, as well as the relationship. And if we understand that, we don’t have to be defensive or even angry (unless it seems like the best way to communicate). Some investments take a little longer to pay off. And some pay off when we’re far away and we never know about it. But we are doing good here all around.
So Oxy, this turned into another long monologue. I’m sorry. But I wanted to make the point that you did a good thing, not just for yourself but for your friend. And you do the same kind of good thing here all the time. You help us move on in our healing by your reactions.
Your enthusiasm when I write something tells me I’m doing something right. The one time we got into a tangle and you told me how you felt, it caused me to do some hard thinking about my expectations and my language. It took a little time to get over myself but I finally did. If change were easy, we’d all be angels.
Kathy
What an interesting thread! Thank you all for your insightful comments.
I want to elaborate on the idea of being able to trust yourself. In my view, this is not an intellectual exercise. It is a deep knowledge, combined with a deep feeling, that we are connected to our own core selves.
This certainly wasn’t how I felt before I met the sociopath. At that time, I had no doubts about my ability to achieve, but serious doubts about my ability to relate to people.
But the experience of the sociopath was like walking through the fire. It had two effects: It burned away a lot of useless internal debris that was blocking me from the life that I wanted, and it tempered my sense of self, like fire tempers steel.
The process has put me in touch with my inner core, and that’s where the trust in myself lives.
There is no doubt, after we make it thru all this, we tend to know who we are because we’ve got an advanced degree in what isn’t!