Hi,

I’d been to the forum a while back and read some and posted a couple of things, but I wasn’t in such a dire place as I am today. I don’t know what to do and no one in my life understands because they don’t have a psychopathic father and brother. Sure, I have several friends who grew up in dysfunctional families, and their advice is well intended. However, I can’t simply cut them off or ignore them because they honestly will do more harm. I know that’s on the list here as number one, but I don’t understand that. If I cut my father and brother off, they will seek me out and cause more verbal and emotional harm. They will gang up together and make life worse (if that’s possible.) I have a daughter to consider. I also love my brother’s sweet children immensely and don’t want to cause them more harm. They live in a very abusive household. DHS has been called on them three times but nothing ever gets done.

So I guess I’m just venting because I have all of this stuffed inside me and no one IRL who understands. I see a therapist, and I think she doesn’t even really get it all the time. She knows my father and brother are psychopaths, she’s the one who helped me realize it, but she doesn’t know that it really is impossible to cut them off. It might be easier if they didn’t live in the same city. Since I know I can’t cut them off, or that I’m in a strong enough place myself to be able to do that, I really need help on wanting to continue living and having a happy life. My father had and continues to prove me unworthy and unlovable and I can’t fight those feelings. I’ve been in therapy two years and feel like a failure because I’m not any better. Has anyone else spent a long time in therapy to deal with so much trauma? When and how does it get better?

My therapist continues to tell me that if I don’t play his games and don’t react, he’ll lose interest and stop. I only feel like it fuels his fire and he continues to find ways to get to me. I also feel like a doormat when I fight the urges to call him out on something or share with him how I feel. I have to remember my therapists words and remind myself that he doesn’t care, he doesn’t love me, that he’s not capable.

Thanks for letting me vent. This seems like the only place with people who might understand, even if just a little bit.

Hello Suraya,
Having Psychopaths for a father and a brother has to be a nightmare. You are right, people have no idea what it is to have been involved (in any way) with a psychopath unless they too have had the experience.

It is very hard when the Psychopath is a family member. My ex is a Psychopath and in realizing this I became aware of the fact that my mother is also a Psychopath. This explains why I was an easy target for the Psychopath. I have begun to see a therapist but I also do a few things on my own which have helped.

I figure that people who have a psychopathic parent have been traumatized and brainwashed by a lifetime of horrible, destabilizing contact and interacting with the Psychopath.. We were brainwashed with damaging beliefs about ourselves and our lives. We were not born with these beliefs, someone mean and incapable of love and nurturing put them there.

I work daily at reclaiming myself by offsetting and reprogramming the negative input by listening (repeatedly, with a headset) to positive affirmations,binaural patterns and Dr. Henry Grayson on youtube. I am not sure if this would work for you, maybe you can ask your doctor, but I have had no ill effects and I am cautious about things like this. I have managed to get rid of a loop of thoughts that replayed all day every day for the past two years. I thought I would have to live like that forever. It is a lot of work and sometimes I resent that I have to do it but it is helping.

You have a daughter and she needs you to be there for her to the best of your ability. Please be kind to yourself, give yourself all the love,compassion,patience and encouragement that the most loving parent in the world would offer you. You are worthy of all that love and acceptance, especially from yourself. You can and will make it through this. For now just think of how strong you really are. You are smart and good and kind and have a lot of beauty and life in you or your father and brother would not even bother to try to keep you down. Know that your life will get better. On the days when you feel your worst you just hold on, ride it out, the darkness will pass. You are beyond a survivor;failure might be a word best applied to your father and his son, certainly not to you. You have an impossibly crazy situation to handle and you are doing everything you have with the means available.

Maybe since you are in the same city you can keep away as much as possible without stirring their awareness of your absence. Be a moving target, on the go, out and about, off doing something, anything, that makes you believably unavailable. Do you offer just basics in interactions?

It is hard because if a Psychopath has an agenda they will try to provoke a response and if they don't get what they want then they will just have a fit of rage. It's all horrible for us, they could not care less. Your therapists suggestion that your D&B will "lose interest and stop" is off. It is like saying "well, the lion is going to maul you pretty badly, but he will stop before killing and eating you." Whatever the case you're torn up.

You understand psychopathy from the inside out, most professionals are the reverse. They have observed cases, but have not lived through years of trauma, zillions of minute details, subtle strangeness and glaringly obvious negative characteristics which make up the Psychopath. craziness.


What I am doing with my mother is to NOT avoid her, this increases her motivation to contact me. I just give very little conversation, not obvious rudeness, I just offer dullness. She gets bored, makes sure I know she is not happy with me and moves on until next time.

I no longer give a rat's #ss about her opinion of me, why would I? If you can reach this place it helps. I used to wish for a reunion with my ex Psychopath but now I would run the other way. He is cut off, I don't want to know him anymore. Before, I would have leaped at the chance to get back together, not now. I could not have had this strength before doing all my self work. It takes about an hour per day at least(for me at the start)but whatever works.

Psychopaths are horrible, broken, empty people, they have damaging energy that radiates outward seeking others to damage. Your father and your brother are tornadoes of hate. Keep out of the sphere as much as possible.

Please know that your best is yet to come.

Thank you. It is really helpful just to hear from someone who understands. I have not heard of Dr. Henry Grayson and will look him up and ask my therapist about it. I am almost willing to do anything to stop feeling so bad.

I’m so glad you get the part about not being able to just stop contact. It does increase the motivation to contact me and get at me. I’ve been working on being dull and it helps a little, except for the flair ups when they decide I haven’t reacted in a while. I don’t really give a rat’s #ss either about what D thinks, but it still hurts me that he talks so negatively to my other family members. Granted, they all have many of their own problems.

Hearing that the best is yet to come is hopeful…thank you!

Hi...

I understand the issue of not being in a position to cut a psychopath out of your life. Every situation is different, but having immediate family members who are psychopaths means you've had to 'navigate' this all your life and even if you take radical steps to be unreachable once you are able, they can easily still find ways of trying to get to you.

I so feel for you. There is no white washing it and attempting to would be minimizing the seriousness of the situation. My daughters father is a psychopath. I have had to take protective action to protect her. As he is a psychopath, he continues to try to influence and dominate her and it is extremely difficult to prevent this. As I have taken protective action, I am even more of a 'target' for him than before. There is more to the situation my daughter and I are in which I won't go into, but it means that I have been struggling to 'survive' this and get beyond it, on an individual level, for a very long time, while trying to protect her.

One thing I've come to believe, which I thought of when reading your posting, is that psychopaths want something from others, particularly their 'targets' which they will never get- they want the others humanity. You may not agree with this view, it may sound odd and perverse, but with all the pain you have suffered and the damage your D/B have caused, they still have not succeeded or 'won'. I know I risk sounding masochistic but the pain you feel is proof that they have not won. You have your humanity. Value and cherish it, protect it from them but always remember with confidence that they will never succeed in getting it.

It means a lot to me as a mother to read your words. You must have great strength and courage to be at the point you are at now, given who your father and brother are.

Reading other postings on this site, I have been thinking about how much strength and courage it takes to deal with psychopaths. We may feel like we are falling apart, but we are bloody strong.

I am surprised by own strength. I now know that I always had it, but was prevented from feeling and acting on it. It takes courage to acknowledge these problems and issues, to address them for oneself and survive relationships with these troubled and dangerous individuals. It takes strength to choose not to engage in the bazar, futile and yet wildly damaging psychological war psychopaths want us and others to engage in. It takes strength, too, to ensure that we and others are valued and treated with respect and to take action against abuse. There seems to be a lot of woolly, pseudo-liberal thinking and a pervasive culture of denial in many countries today which makes it easy to turn a blind eye to abuse and for abusers and psychopaths to carry on doing what they do. It may be 'easier' to ignore it and not do something about it in an effective way, but taking this easier path leads to a twisted, sole destroying way of life.

Stay strong...

I am a new member and this is my first post. Even in the privacy of this forum I am the silent one. Some day I may gather the courage to say something. I am very much like the Indian Chief in the movie One Flew Over Cokoo's Nest. I stopped saying because there was no point.

The reason for my post is to ask you a question. How come the Father and the Brother have managed to be together and how come their cruelty is directed towards the Daughter/Sister only. I have seen many cases, including my own, that a person will be nice to his/her blood relatives, at least some of them, but always be psychopathic to me.

When ever I start thinking that he is a Psychopath, I see his nice behavior towards another member of his family and that throws me off track. If he was a psychopath, will he not be a psychopath to every one? Why pick on me. What is so special about me? Why is he attracted to me only? Why not pick someone else?

The Silent.

Hi TheSilent, welcome to our community. I am very sorry for your situation. You bring up a great question that doesn't have any logical answer. I know in my case my mother had a personality disorder, not as severe on the spectrum as Psychopath but the dynamics were off growing up. My sister was treated well and my brother and I were the outsiders. I wish I had an answer why people choose some to treat well and others like outsiders and endure their rath.

What I learned from it after many years of therapy and thought is that it never was about me. I hope you can understand and not take it out on yourself like I did for many, many years.

I hope you can find a way to get away from these people.

Di

Dianne,

Thank you for those kind words. It was a pleasure to get your email. It was a pleasure to know that someone can relate to me.

They say in the research articles that around 1% of the population is Psychopath. I read it in some paper. May be the number has gone up by now. But the way I have seen it, they come in droves. It is only now that I have started to recognize them for what they are or have been and they have been all around me all my life. I am close to retirement. Can you imagine suffering silently all my life.

I will probably talk on an intellectual level for quite some time before I get in touch with my emotions. There is a volcano out there and it just explodes. There is no way to capture all those emotions in words. I just have to take one emotion at a time if that is at all possible.

I have used some of the techniques to deal with a Psychopath without even knowing that I am doing it, For me the no contact rule was not a strategy but an inevitable consequence. Why to have any contacts. There was no point. Why to talk. There was no point. As president Obama quoted Lincoln that "I am driven to my knees because I have nowhere else to go". That is how I have come to the No Contact strategy because there was nothing else to do. But still I can not completely isolate myself.

I will stop here.

Thank you for listening. It is a brand new experience for me. Some one can listen. Boy!

The Silent.

Hi TheSilent, I am glad to hear you are on your journey and hope only the best for you. I didn't really get it for a very long time and let it have a very bad impact on my relationships, I didn't know what I was dealing with until I was older. It did make it easier, not pleasant but at least in perspective to the actions.

As far as the 1% that is a very old estimate based on prison studies a million years ago, I think it is much higher than anyone would expect. I don't think I just see them everywhere but do believe the number is way higher. The main issues is the perception of the "Ted Bundy" effect that gets people thinking that all Psychopaths are on the extreme edge. I think it is just the difference that the more socialized ones fly under the radar and may not use knives or guns, but their actions have an equally devastating effect. In some cases I think it would be easier if they did pull out a gun, that way at lease we would know what was up. Mental abuse is a very awful thing to deal with and the isolation is the worst part, imo.

Di

Dianne,

Thank you for your reply.

I started the posts in a response to Suraya's initial post on this thread. She was the chosen one.Her father and brother found her worthy of their attention. I too was and am the chosen one. Very special.

Let me go back to Suraya. Now a days, there is no way to separate from our loved ones. Physical distance does not matter. There is this telephone, the internet and occasionally the plane. They will find you. Even when a brother lives in Alaska, he will manage to find you. Even if he does not come to you physically, he will manage to stir the pot. I am not in any way trying to undermine your suffering. What all I am saying that it is a no win situation. Tough to be in one.

No matter what I do, I loose. I just keep loosing and loosing and loosing. After loosing all my life, one day, I came to a conclusion and made a firm commitment to my self. There are two and only two things I want to save. The rest I will loose. The first is my sanity. The second is my dignity. I will prefer to loose my image. Let everyone think that I an a demon. Let everyone think that the Psychopath is an angle. I will loose that battle no matter how much I try. But I am going to protect my dignity. I will not loose it. Sanity and Dignity are the only two valuables I am left with and those two are the only ones worth protecting. The rest. I do not know.

Thank you for listening.

The Silent One.

They do want something from others...CONTROL. When you cut them off and they no longer have any form of control, it drives them mad, but it is totally possible to cut off ALL CONTACT even when it is a parent. If he would have put his hands on me one more time I would have ended up killing him...guess he failed to realize that we share the same blood and I can be just as crazy as he can....I just have a conscience.