Divorce is no one’s idea of a good time. Divorce is hard, exhausting, and in the case of a narcissist – a sociopath, or psychopath in divorce, it’s treacherous.
Narcissists in a divorce take the proceedings one step forward, eight steps sideways, and five back. What the heck is happening? Why do they do the things they’re doing? I can tell you this, though you do suffer, their behavior is not just to make you suffer. They delight in your suffering, but their motivation is deeper.
Confusion, anxiety, and walking on eggshells takes a toll on our bodies. As does terror, panic, and fear of our partner who seems to be a monster now.
Repairing health after narcissistic abuse is something some of us are aware of as a priority. To some of us there’s a clear connection between failing health and their presence in our lives. Others of us might not realize our bad health is a result of the sustained stress of time spent with a pathological user, that narcissist aka sociopath. These creatures and their effects reach our entire being: mind, spirit, and body as we live in a constant elevated “fight-flight-freeze” cycle.
Rewire trauma sustained during the relationship that wasn’t. Bring up stored deep brain patterns of feeling good.
Rewire trauma sustained during what we thought was a real relationship. During these hijackings, trauma is sustained and prolonged. We undergo an overload on our nervous and adrenal systems.
Simple methods bring us from the dark side and into the healing zone. Humans are amazing. We can rewire our emotional experience for both health and well-being.
What is recovery coaching with me like? What do we do? What’s my approach..? I’m asked these or similar questions sometimes and the simple answer is: we start where you are and go from their. Every session is unique to the person I’m speaking with.
Weeping in despair, grief. Confusion. A shattered life. Depression and self doubt. Isolation. This heap of feelings and thoughts and questions are the beginning of restoration.
We can heal even the PTSD after a sociopath or what many call a narcissist. It includes emotions rolling over us in grand sweeps and simmering cess pools. These turn to feelings and thoughts that are untrue. There’s a is terror in PTSD others around can’t us usually can’t understand… We might not understand it ourselves.
You owe it to yourself to realize what this PTSD is, how it shows up, how to heal and rebalance yourself, and that it’s okay to be in a sate of post truama so that we can restore our gorgeous selves.
Altogether it’s loneliness and fears and doubts that are not the new you but can seem like it. There are many signs of PTSD, but the initial stages are most described by one word.
Con after con, we’ve got novels, films, plays from comedies to dramas talking about it. Entertainment replete with stories of con men and women out doing and undoing the normal “guy” or “gal”.
When a con man – a sociopath – gets the best of you – your impulse s to tell someone or several someones. You have too… It’s part of recovering. Personally, I told lots of people. Most people were amazed. All people eager to listen – to a point.
Quite a few had been in relationships with sociopaths themselves but didn’t realize it. Most were sympathetic, but empathy (really feeling it) was nowhere in sight. Who can know what this madness is…?
Then there was that just didn’t get it at all. They had questions, like: How did you fall for that!?… Like it was a joke; kinda laughing or incredulous. And Didn’t you know he was a scammer?
And one of my favorites when I’d say we met and married within seven days, OooOOOohhhh, while they nod their heads. As if that makes hijacking my life in deceptive crime, okay, and clearly: My fault. – Wrong. But none the less everyone was interested in the story and that’s why there are so many such stories in our pop culture and media.
Fact or Fiction: Everyone Loves a Good Story as Long as It Isn’t Happening to Them
In addition to stories of cons in the news constantly, our entertainment is swollen with con stories. Many of them based on true stories. And yet at a real-life, personal level the one scammed can come into question and – we ourselves can hold onto doubt. We run thoughts through our minds like, Did I do something to make it happen? Here are the answers to both: Anyone can fall for a con. No one can recognize a con man and fall for the con! We did nothing to “make it happen”.
Tales from Real Life or Pure Non-Fiction: Con After Con
It’s a common thought that writers can only write about what they know, so how come so many writers are very aware of cons and yet life targets and prey have another shock and often find the real betrayal in the face of this horrific trauma at the hands of a conman?
Keep in mind, if a friend you’re confiding in isn’t empathetic they are not “bad” – just unaware – and, at this time, not right for you to tell your story to or look to as a shoulder or a rock.
Please, sweet girl or guy – move on to someone who is empathetic, sympathetic, non-judgmental and loves you, as your support person while discovering the surreal reality and resolving your losses and in restoring your gorgeous self.
Discover lightbulb moments. Find your way back to you.
Antisocial Psychopaths: From Killers to Con Artists
Scary stuff and some laughs involving the scariest creatures on earth. They’re here everywhere: Both Sociopaths and Psychopaths are born with the same abnormal brain landing them in the mental health category “antisocial psychopath”, ASP. The psychopath has an extra bit that overrides the rest: They love other’s pain.
And don’t be fooled this Halloween… a covert, overt, or malignant narcissist is a sociopath within our experience of them, just not in that DSM, medical manual – ’cause that thing isn’t written for us. It’s written by researchers who like to categorize things into many splinter descriptions.
It’s constantly changing. It’s for prison sentencing determinations, drug prescriptions and social services allotments. For us, we need to get to the root of their motivation and how they’re alike vs. how they’re each dissimilar for our recovery and freedom.
A Classic Comic Film Example of How a Con Artist Thinks
In the Steve Martin, Michael Caine comedy classic: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the first 13 minutes of the film reveals the utter truth about con artists. At 11 minutes and 52 seconds in, we hear the kernel of a con artist’s functioning affably, nonchalantly voiced by kind, goofy, and lovable funnyman, Steve Martin.
As the audience we have seen both Michael Caine and Steve Martin set up and pull off mini-scams, The two men are strangers to one another, both passengers on a train to a village in France populated by notoriously wealthy inhabitants.
Michael Caine has observed Steve Martin’s scenario scamming a woman out of an abundant meal in the dining car using a story about his sick grandmother. Finally, they meet in a private passenger car. Michael Caine hiding his own true-scamming-self feels out Steve Martin – con man to con man:
Mr. Martin, a “regular, good-hearted guy” entering the train compartment where Mr. Caine, a “dapper nobleman” reads a newspaper:
Mr. Martin: …Forgot I had a first-class ticket. (Opens blinds.) That bother you? Mr. Caine: No. Mr. Martin: (Blithely singing) “I love to love you in the night…” Mr. Caine: I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation in the dining car.My condolences to your grandmother. Mr. Martin: Hhuuuh? Oh! (Chuckles.) Oh Ha… Right. Mr. Caine: Didn’t you say she was taken ill? Mr. Martin: I tell ’em what they wanna hear if it gets me what I want. Mr. Caine: Rather a shabby trick isn’t it? Mr. Martin: I can tell you’ve got a lot to learn about women. Mr. Caine: Yes, I’m afraid I am a bit naive when it comes to the weaker sex.
End Scene. – And Con Man 101 Class.
But what the thing is here… Both of them, both characters in Dirty Rotten Scoundrel’s played by Steve Martin and Michale Caine are con men. And they team up, and con one another and a woman comes into the picture and she’s con artist too… and
For fun: Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, directed by Zach Braff, cast members of a bank robber caper movie, “Going In Style”, interviewed by The Guardian
Films and Novels
Films: Con Artists… People Who Aren’t Who They Say They Are and Can and Do Kill, but Killing Isn’t their Main Jam
Paper Moon, Starring Ryan O’Neal and Oscar winner, nine-year-old, Tatum O’Neal
The Grifters, starring Annette Bening, John Cusack
The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman
Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams
Black Mass, about Whitey Bulger, played by Johnny Depp
Fracture, with the gorgeous Ryan Gosling, in an incredible performance, and the ever-perfect-psychopath, Sir Anthony Hopkins
Episodic Television Chock Full of Sociopaths
Dirty John, the first season is based on a real-life situation in Newport California
Succession
Sneaky Pete, with Giovanni Ribisi
Game of Thrones, King Joffrey
The character Smurf, played by Ellen Barkin in Animal Kingdom
Peaky Blinders, though they tone it down, show them “loving” and you love them all.
Films and TV with the Psychopath Bent
Joker, Joaquin Pheonix, playing the most current psychopath
American Psycho, starring Christian Bale, on the psychopath end of Antisocial Psychopath
The Silence of the Lambs, a classic, of the Chianti and fave beans and Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster
Mindhunter
Dexter, though in real life Dexter would not genuinely love anyone
Norman Bates, from Bates Motel, is often confused with a psychopath… He isn’t. He’s schizophrenic and psychotic.
Documentaries Showing the Effect and Ruin of Sociopaths
FYRE, The Biggest Party That Never Happened, Netflix: an amazing non-romance scam that shows us everything we went through objectively
Gringo, The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, on Netflix: about security software developer and gazillionaire, John McAfee
Leaving Neverland
Surviving R Kelly, Netflix: this one is definitely haunting, I thought of it for three days after; view with caution and the stop button handy
Holy Hell, on Netflix: still out and bout functioning as a predator, another self-appointed guru, and spiritual leader; only Andreas (or whatever name he’s using today) can show you God
Wild, Wild Country, on Netflix: Bhagwan Shri Ragneesh who now days goes by Osha. Yah, I grew up in Oregon, these orange garbed followers were everywhere
Bikram, on Netflix: a Beverly Hills-based “hot” yoga instructor and self-appointed guru, prosecuted for sexual harassment and rape
Know any great videos or books?
Books Centered on Sociopath Characters
Tess of the D’Ubervilles, written by Thomas Hardy
East of Eden, written by John Steinbeck
The Lodger, written by Marie Belloc Lowndes – This one’s a psychopath
Match Stick Men, written by Eric Garcia also a film with Nick Cage
Catch Me if You Can, written by Frank W. Abagnale
The Talented Mr. Ripley, written by Patricia Highsmith
Watching These Can Be Upsetting or Informative
As you can and want to, watch anything that helps you sort through the crazy and come to terms that these kinds of people exist. That they’re like this and will be for the foreseeable future. They aren’t here for the same reason we are.
Once we get into accepting and profoundly understanding their quite simplistic motivation that is unrelated to our interpretations most often… We can be free. When we know what they are and recognize them we’ll not fall into their hypnotic vortex. We won’t be lunch. The predator moves on to other things. – We win.
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As a certified coach upholding ICF standards and ethics, I strive to inform, educate, co-plan, co-strategize, advise, consult, refer, recommend, train, teach and coach people in guided recovery and discovery specific to these crimes, and from hell and broken in the aftermath to whole again, and more. We decide what winning is. We win.
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