Hi

I am so glad to be here. I have been wrestling with the idea of my husband (34 years) being a psychopath for almost two years. My therapist was the first to bring up the "Psychopath" word. At first it all made sense: His cold, callous behavior toward me--sadistic at times, chronic lying, mind twisting and betryals. Finding out last year that he had a 10 year affair with a co-worker when my youngest was a baby has turned my world upside down. That period was the happiest of my life--now what is it? I was completely clueless. He never went out at night, he traveled little. He was so clever about getting together with her--we even visited her at her home, I just assumed they were friends.

He has subtly treated me badly in so many different ways since we were first dating. I cannot understand why I never put a stop to it. I wish now he had hit me. That would have been easy to leave. I always complained and was angry when he behaved badly toward me. I was never silent. But he always made me feel like I was overreacting, that I was the one with the problem. That I could not take a joke. Now that I see him for who he really is, I regret everything about our life together. What a mistake I made, bringing him into my life and having children with him.

He is a very likeable, funny, bright, successful CEO. Everyone loves this guy! My birth family will not allow me to say a negative word against him. They have offered zero support when I separated from him two years ago, and that really hurts. No one we know would believe any of this, because he is so wonderful around everyone else. I only have my therapist to help me thru this.

Last year, I was able to intellectually understand the idea of him being a psychopath. But it has been so difficult to emotionally accept the idea that the man who I grew up with, who I have been married to for 34 years could be such a monster. That he could have such little regard and concern for me and our children. I know this is a process, but it is frightening to see what I have actually lived thru, not what I thought my life with him was like. This is a difficult place to be in right now. I know my life will get better with him not being around, but he picked wisely when he chose me. I still love him, and I am very sad that I cannot be with him anymore. It is definitely an addiction.

I do have a great therapist and she is very patient with my flip-flopping behavior. She keeps saying I am moving in the right direction. And he wants to be with me very badly. He tells me I am the love of his life. Keeps promising to change and continually fails to keep that promise. I hope I can find the strength to stay away from him permanently. Thanks for sharing your stories.

Welcome to the forum Marsh!

You already have the strength! And we all are with you! And we all have been through the same.

Over 30 years is hell lot of time! But it is NEVER too late to start over.
And I know how hard it is, it is an addiction indeed!

I only had a few years with my Psychopath. But the destruction he managed to make is indescribable.
I can only imagine what it has to be for you, and your children.

If it's any comfort for you - it took me quite a lot of time to separate myself from all these feelings. It's been many months for me, but I realized only recently that I can be happy again. And even fall in love again.
In some way it is all more beautiful now. With Psychopath, its never love. It is addiction, some sick permanent bond with this creeps. I remember someone here describing it as a spiderweb- once you get caught, the more you try to get away the more entangled you get. And I also still loved him, and missed everything, maybe I still miss it a little bit.

But the way I can experience life now, its incredible. Like a total rebirth. I choose my friends wisely now. I enjoy almost every moment, and live to the fullest. I remember last year, when I was so emotionally damaged, suicidal, how I used to compare each day and each moment-to what it had been a year before. And I was getting even more devastated from that.

Right now, I am doing the same... only now, everyday I look at my life and think - I couldn't be more happy. I walk the streets with a smile on my face that I cannot even stop. People around me love me for who I am, they love my positive energy.


What I could recommend to someone who is going through what I went to - is to constantly look ahead and not back on life. And imagine what it will be like when the pain is over. I know it is the hardest thing to do. But if you believe that someday it'll be OK, the patience will come to you and you can make it through.

And every time you feel depressed you can talk to us here, we will always listen and help as much as we can.

What a beautiful inspirational post, NewBird.

Welcome Marsh.

Hi Marsh, welcome to our community.

I am very glad you have a therapist who understands the situation, many times the understanding isn't there even from therapists.

He sounds like a highly socialized Psychopath so it probably would have been hard for anyone let alone yourself to see through the mask. Do you think you stayed because you kept thinking the person you fell in love with would return the feelings you had during the honeymoon state?

They do know how to pick well, the kind, caring people are normally who they do target. I am very sorry for what life must be like and picking up the pieces is never easy but I sense a strength in your words. Was there a turning point that you can identify that woke you up? You must have tried hard for so many years to see him as others even your own family won't. That is part of the problem most victims face, the rest of the world doesn't see the ugly, evil side of things. Verbal abuse is imo very hard to identify and you are right, they don't use their hands to slap you around but their words to cause harm, I am not sure what is worse. In many ways using their words to twist things around does makes things more difficult because of how you get molded into thinking this is "normal" but yet deep down you now know and can build a new life, block by block.

How are your children in all of this, do they see him for what he is?

Di

Thanks so much for your support and understanding. It means so much to talk to others who have lived in this world.

To answer Di's questions: I am not sure why I stayed. My therapist has asked me that many times. He had so many good qualities that kept me in the marriage. The fact that he was my first love and the fact that we had so much history together, made it harder to leave. In the end, and with the help of my therapist, I do believe it is an addiction. And he does have my number. I told him last week that we are done for good and we are going to have no contact going forward. And within a day, I was getting flowers and a "Thanks for trying so hard to make it work. I will always love you" And I am right back to seeing him. (We are separated). I do feel pretty stupid about that, but my therapist is really pushing me for no contact. I will get there fairly soon.

There were so many little things starting from when we were dating that were red flags. Things he would do to me that were so disprespectful or hurtful. I had a hard time imagining someone could be that cruel on purpose. He would forget my birthday on purpose or would actually create a very amusing, hurtful birthday card. If I got mad, he would say I had no sense of humor. If we were walking in a mall parking lot, he would come up behind me and pull up my dress and would say I could not take a joke if I got angry with him. Why did I stay with such a jerk?

Some very serious things stand out over the years. My two month old son and I accidentally got locked out in the cold his first winter. I actually had my bathrobe and slippers on. I went to a neighbors and called him at work. He not only did not come home, when I drove to his work and sat outside his 15 story building, he never came out to give me the key. I could not walk up to his office in my bathrobe, so I had to go home empty handed. He told me later that he forgot about me and the baby.

I started to have a miscarrige one Saturday morning about a year later. We were putting our bed back together after painting the room the night before. I called the dr. and the dr. told me what to watch for and when to go to the hospital if the bleeding got worse. My husband got a phone call from a friend at that moment and decided he wanted to go visit the friend for the day. There I was, bleeding with a 1 year old, and no bed to lie on. He did not come home until dinner time. No remorse. During therapy this year, I went over that incident with my therapist and decided to confront my husband about that day and how upset I was by his abandonment. His reply? "You make my feel less than human with your comments" and "you should have called me at my friend's house? It was your fault for not speaking up."

I think a turning point for me was about 20 years ago in terms of my feelings for him. Although, with three small children (and now I learn that's when he was having his affair), I felt I could not leave and I knew my parents would be angry with me and not him. I started therapy and shared with him for the first time my feelings that he was emotionally abusive. I reminded him of the stranger that molested me and stalked me when I was 14 and the sexual assualt that I experienced at 19. I said he made my feel like those men did. I was really trying to reach out to him and was trying to get him to talk about this problem. He became outraged and said I was a whore for attracting that kind of assault, he was a really, good guy. How dare I compare him to a rapist! That was my aha moment. He absolutely had no compassion for what I had gone thru and I took my wedding ring off, threw it across the room and said he had better go to therapy or I would divorce him. He went to therapy but lied his way thru that, but my feelings had changed and I have never felt the same way toward him again.

At one point, when I told him I was going to leave him, he threatened me in the very cold, scary way he can get and said he would take me to court, tell everyone I was insane (I am sure he could have figured out a way to do it--he is so, so smart) and take the children away from me. I felt overwhelmed and helpless, and so I stayed.

As far as my children go, they are all in their twenties. The older two are wonderful, compassionate and very supportive. I believe now that my husband was jealous of my youngest son from the time he was born. My therapist says he must have felt that last child, and especially it being a boy, was competition for my affection. The youngest was not mistreated or hit or criticized. But his father treated him as if he were invisible, as if he were one of the neighbor children. He was shy and I constantly asked his father to spend more time with him. He spent plenty of time with the older son. When I pleaded with him to help, my husband would just get enraged with me, and take the argument to the extreme, accusing me of saying he was a terrible father. He would always twist my words around. And I would give up. I would try to help him on my own.

Long story, short. This beautiful, young man attempted suicide three years ago, and it is the sorrow of my life. The way his father acted after the attempt, was so cruel and callous, that I am not going to bring it up at this time. I really saw him finally to be the monster that he is.

I feel so guilty about staying with his father. My son is doing well now, but he is the only child of mine who is angry and uncomfortable with his father. My therapist thinks he is doing beautifully, but that he of all the children truly knows what his father is.

I am concerned that he may have inherited some of his father's traits. I do not know if these traits he has are genetic or he picked them out watching his dad. His other two siblings are fine.
I am comforted that he, on his own, recognizes that he has a problem. When I talk about his father lying, he says "I lie too Mom, but I am trying to quit" He seems to now recognize that some of these traits of his are a problem, but my concern is that he does not see why they are a problem. He does not see that lying in itself is wrong. It hurts people. He says just that "Girls don't like it when I lie"

So, lots of information, but good to get some of this stuff of my chest. Thanks again for listening.

Hi Marsh, my apologies for not answering sooner. We have been working on setting up a Humane Society here and have been buried in 501c paperwork. Winter is coming so it is urgent to get some things done before it hits and we can provide fenced areas etc. for the shelter dogs. I will answer your post and have some questions over the week-end.

Please don't be hard on yourself for staying, many do thinking things will change.

I'll be back this weekend.

Di

Marsh, your story isn't any different than ours.

I was actually wondering today, how much a Psychopath affects your mind. Why do we stay with these people? Why do we even begin to blame ourselves? I think those are very important questions.
The main point of a Psychopaths work, IMHO, is affecting your subconsciousness. You cannot really control it, once he gets to you this way. You feel that something is wrong, but you cannot tell exactly.
(that's why, one of the most important things Ive learned from this horrible experience of mine is to ALWAYS trust my guts - when I look back on my life, I see that I was actually NEVER wrong about people - whenever I felt something was wrong - in the end it turned out to be true - same for the good people in my life:)).

Second thing - it is really hard to believe someone would be THAT bad on purpose. Because for you - it's almost impossible. That's the thing - we can never imagine what its like to be a psychopath (same as they cannot imagine what its like to be a normal human with feelings). It is MOST NORMAL to assume that they also have feelings. We have been taught to treat people with respect, to give second chances... none of these work with a Psychopath. They only make things worse.

Third - the saddest one - but also the most important one for me - you CANNOT deal with a Psychopath, like with a normal human being. You have to treat them like animals. This requires for you to behave like a cold heartless b... but it's the only way. The moment you treat him as a human you lose. That's why the NO CONTACT rule is the only way. Nobody wants or can behave like this for longer periods of time. You can for a moment, but if it goes on, it's gonna hurt you. I know coz instinctively I felt it and did it with my Psychopath whenever I left him- I knew I needed to be a b... but after a while I felt guilty about it... And that's where I got lost again.


You will reach a point where the doubts and the feelings will be on your hands to control. They will not disappear, but instead of making you weaker like now, they will make you stronger.
Patience dear. I have learned from this like from nothing before, patience is all.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Please don't blame yourself for staying.

Perhaps you stayed because you were duped into staying? I don't think it was a 'free choice' you made, it was a manipulated, calculated choice that was slid in front of you. You also weren't really given a chance to think and act of your own accord, as a separate, independent human being, but had that sense of self gradually eroded in many ways, over the course of many years.

People who don't get it have often asked me why I didn't run away, or ask for what I needed from him. It took me ages to think of an answer to this. Now my answer would be something along the lines of 'because these people are all about actively taking all your choices away from you'. Some of the ways in which they do it are incredibly subtle. And yes, we can't ever imagine someone could be like this because we would never act this way to another human being.

Once you start stringing things together in the way that you're doing, things will change for you. I think you will recover a sense of who you are, a sense of being separate from him. But please don't blame yourself. I think I read somewhere on this forum that dealing with a psychopath is like trying to protect yourself against a nuclear attack with a brown paper bag.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful responses. Reading the discussions on this forum, sharing my story and getting your support does so much for me in this fight, and I do mean fight, to separate and heal myself. I feel more resolved when I learn that I am not alone with all of this.

I have been doing a lot of reading on the internet lately about relationships with psychopaths and one woman shared something that has really stayed with me. She was speaking of a relative, a psychopath, who she had finally learned to turn her back on and was choosing to never see again. She said that she felt sad for the psychopath, because in the end, the psychopath was a human being. And she felt sad that she was turning her back on a fellow human being.

I understand what she means. And I undertand what NewBird means also. These people are not like us, so we need to treat them differently as if they were animals. But I interpret that to mean as if they were some kind of alien beings.

I am trying to be a good person thru all of this, I hope I have always tried to be a good person. And it sounds like, in reading this forum, that we victims tend to be people who work really hard to do the right thing, to treat others with respect.

And because of that, I am finding some empathy in myself toward my husband and other psycopaths.
Who would choose to be such a horrible, destructive person? Who would choose to be cold and callous? I believe many psychopaths are born with this pre-disposition. I believe most psychopaths do not fight the temptations to hurt and deceive other people. They make terrible choices. And they should not be forgiven when they consciously hurt people. They are not good people.

So the question I want to ask you all is: should there be any empathy for the psychopath?

I want to be clear. No one should have a psychopath in their life (that is my goal). Zero psychopaths. Zero tolerance. And I do think, we victims who finally escape, are really, really strong people. We grow emotionally when we suffer and boy do we suffer! We are the kind of people who have the strength and ability to look out for other victims, help prevent harm when we see it, whether we are speaking about psycopaths or any other area where people harm others. Are we strong enough to eventually find empathy for these people? Or maybe not?

Good point Marsh!

It is because we ARE the good people, that we get so confused, so depressed.

It is a mistake to think a Psychopath is any different from a wild dog trying to bite you. It doesn't even think about it - it just hurts you. This is how Psychopaths are. They really don't think, they just do. You can observe that on any occasion. They act with their instincts, just like animals. For a wild animal - every being is an enemy - animals don't get together and have a party or start a family tree... The power of human beings is in our ability to socialize, to get together, build relationships, friendships...

Psychopaths are exactly like animals - there is no sign of any normal human feelings. They behave like animals and should be treated like those.

And us? We even treat our animals like humans! We see good in every living thing.

I would even go this far and say a dog is more socialized than a Psychopath.
You can at least train a dog. You cannot ever train a Psychopath.


I had the hardest time believing my ex my a Psychopath. I would give him as many possibilities, forgiveness as I could. I would bang my head against this wall until I could not take no more. But you know what - I do not regret it! Damn, I was just doing what a good loving person does - give second chances. It is most normal to forgive! And most normal to believe in others. There is nothing wrong with that!

So I tried, even after all the horrible things he did, I still tried to give him chances to show that he is a human, but he just did otherwise... I remember when I realized that this is it - I can not go any further - and I laughed. At myself, at all this. It was stupid and useless, but now, in the end, I'm glad. I showed my heart to a person this evil, and even after he had almost killed me. It led me astray, it broke with the greatest pain, it made it impossible for me to go on for so long... but I am still glad I have one...

Coz without this great hearts of ours, that brake and hurt, we wouldn't also see the hope in our children's eyes, the warmth in our friends' faces or the simple beauty in the morning sun.