Whilst in the relationship with the sociopath, you no doubt felt on ‘lock down‘, meaning that he knew, and had control about everything that you were doing, who you were speaking to. He will go to extreme lengths to learn what is going on with you. Remember that in the beginning the sociopath assesses you, for your worth? Well he is constantly assessing you, and to make sure that you will not escape him.

What is interesting, is that despite he wants control over your life, he is also very private about his own life. He will do everything to have control over your privacy (there will be no personal privacy with a sociopath), it feels like one rule for him, and another for you. Not only is he controlling, and you feel suffocated, you will have no idea what is really going on in his life in his secret life. He will:

• Hack your email
• Hack social networking sites
• Read your phone messages and monitor calls that have been made
• Read personal diaries
• Ask constant questions to find out what you are doing and with whom
• Expect you to always be open and honest about everything in your life – whilst being secretive about his own

At the same time he will be:

• Extremely secretive –  will have passwords on his computer that he constantly changes
• Have his phone on silent, password protected, and on him all of the time (even when he goes to the toilet)
• Keep you separate from his own private world (people he interacts with)
• Lie, deceive, and feed you false information to mislead you
• Fake Jealousy, fake paranoia…. to control you
• When guilty of something himself, will falsely accuse you, of exactly what he is guilty of himself (to derail you)

It can quickly feel suffocating in a room with a sociopath. Even when the relationship ends the need for control, does not end. The reason why the sociopath does this, is not just because of his need to control you, it is because he see’s you, once he has targeted and selected you, as someone that he owns, he sees you as an extension of himself.

It is not just control, it is ownership. At first when you meet the sociopath, he will seem interested in you, and your life. This can be flattering, later in the relationship, and after it has ended, this intrusion into your privacy and violation of your personal space and rights can be overwhelming. You spend so long, defending your own rights, you hardly notice what is going on in his life, in secrecy from you. You will feel that nothing you do is right. You constantly try to change to accommodate his needs and demands, but it will never be enough. The reason that he is like this, is because he needs to have control over you. I wrote earlier, how a sociopath can have both fake jealousy and real jealousy.Faking jealousy, keeps you under control. You feel like you are living under a microscope. But the sociopath will not show this side of his nature, until much later in the relationship, or indeed until after the relationship is over. It is the ultimate betrayal and invasion of privacy.

A sociopath takes great pleasure at having absolute control over your life, over knowing everything that is going on in your life, whilst keeping his own top secret. He behaves like a military spy. Some can even keep two phones. It is odd, that someone who is so determined to know about everything in your life, is so secretive about their own. This gives the sociopath great joy, as it is the ultimate control, to guard the secrets of his own life, to be doing things behind your back, whilst keeping control over yours. To the sociopath the only freedom that is available, is his own. He has no concern for the rights or welfare of anybody else but himself. But he demands freedom for himself. And will go to great lengths to deceive and be deceptive. The more that he has control over your life, the more he can closely guard his own secrets, and his own private world the happier he is.

You would think that once the relationship is over, that he would give up the need to know everything about your life. But this is not the case. A sociopath hates to lose control, even from ex partners. He thinks that he has the right to move on, to do whatever he wants to do, but will not like it at all if you try to exercise your right to do the same.