The relationship to the sociopath, is based on games – not love!

You might look back on the relationship, and think, how did that happen? How did my life change so drastically from just being with one person?

 

Image: http://azcapitoltimes.com/

Isolation often occurs being in a relationship with a sociopath. You might wonder how it happened? Also, and probably more importantly, while you realise that it DID happen, you of course  want it to avoid it  happening again in the future. Rebuilding your life, after the carnage that was created is difficult enough.

How the sociopath captures you

Remember that the most important thing to the sociopath is CONTROL. Without control, they are unable to manipulate you, to get you to do what they want. Other people in your life, are seen as threats to their very existence. Also remember the way that the sociopath lured you in.

• Playing victim
• Acting as a hero
• Being everything you want
• Selling you something that you think you need
• Being your very best friend
• Mirroring you, and being just like you

To be able to do this effectively, the sociopath works hard, and does ground work. I won’t cover this in detail here, as I have written about it in detail on other posts, but they follow the same pattern

• Ask lots of questions to find out what you want
• Snoop for personal information about you, looking at your social networking sites, speaking to friends about you (In a friendly, caring way) checking their responses to questions

Assessing your support network

When the sociopath meets your friends, they will be doing exactly the same as what they were doing when they met you.

• Asking questions (the interview stage)
• Registering responses to questions, what is said, body language, reactions to questions

This gives the sociopath a lot of information

• The friends loyalty to the victim
• What the friend thinks of the victim
• Obtains personal information about the friend, that he can later use, in conversation with  you, to put you off him/her
• Later, at the end of the relationship, he can return to these very friends that he isolated you from, and selling them back information about you, in the smear campaign stage

An example of this, was with the last sociopath, I had taken him to meet a couple of friends. These people were friends that I have known for a long time, the male was a friend of 20 years. I could see him doing his sales pitch. He was gaining their trust by:

• Telling them information that he already knew about me (leading them to believe that he knew me very well, and could therefore be trusted as my partner)
• Complimenting my friends, and complimenting me
• Interesting stories about himself and his background which matched their interests

Everything was going well. A friend of mine is a professional astrologer. So, she asked what his date of birth was?

She looked him up, and her face fell, she went silent for a minute as she drew out his  birth chart on the screen. We were both sat in anticipation, waiting, after all –

• From my point of view I had met my perfect match
• From his point of view – he had met his perfect victim, and didn’t want to be detected

She said simply,

I can see that you have a lot of anger. You become very angry

She mixed the sentence up, with other positive things. But that sentence stood out. I thought perhaps her chart was wrong.  I immediately defended him:

Oh no, he is not like that at all. I have never seen him angry. He is a really positive person, really upbeat and great company.

I had to admit to myself I had never seen that part of his personality, in fact he was so much the opposite of this, he was happy, cheerful, charming.  I struggled to believe that anger existed within him. (she later revealed that his birth chart showed that he was a very dishonest person, manipulative and deceptive and to go careful)

Testing your support network

He obviously felt uncomfortable (fear of exposure), the atmosphere changed and suddenly from nowhere, he made a comment to my friends (made out  as a joke)

It’s like living with Hitler living with her!

I was quite stunned by this comment, as the truth was I had been paying for everything the last few months. He paid for nothing and was living off me (a fact that my friends at this point didn’t know).

The room went silent, it was quite uncomfortable for a moment. I watched him observe my friends reactions. Just for a short time, his mask had slipped. He wanted to go home shortly after this. In the car on the way home, I wasn’t too impressed by what he had said. It had no reflection on how things had been with us.

On the way home, he said negative things about my friends. This led me to believe that they didn’t see the good relationship that we had together. They obviously couldn’t see it. And for my friend to say that he was angry (when I didn’t see it), how could they have my interests at heart? I felt confused.

Over the seventeen months that I was with  him, I watched him repeat this behaviour again and again, with different people.

With another friend at her boyfriends birthday, when we had only been dating 3 weeks, he blurted out after I had introduced them for the first time:

I am going to marry her!!

My friend looked at him, alarmed, and again, I felt embarrassed. Saying this, achieved a number of things:

• Humiliated me – making me look stupid
• Forced my friend to both acknowledge him, and to give a reaction
• Made my friend wonder what had happened to me, maybe I had changed?

Over the course of our relationship, he constantly made comments to people. Which would make my friends feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. It made us as a team, and it looked as often he would repeat information that I had said, that I was sometimes disloyal to them. I felt like he was attached to me like a limpet. I guess he was. I was his new source for supply.

Sociopaths are smooth and slick, confident, because they have repeated this behaviour many times over.

The effect of what he was doing, was slow. But it  was deliberate. Examples of other controlling behaviour to give an image to the outside world were:

• To constantly write over the top ‘loving’ messages over my Facebook wall
• Despite he was sat in the same room as me, if I didn’t comment (as I wouldn’t it was too embarrassing), he would say ‘you are ashamed of me’ or ‘why are you hiding me’ making you feel guilt
• Being overly loving in public
• Saying really nice things about me, to people that he knew that I had a disagreement with, to test their reaction

When he wrote on my Facebook wall, over the top loving and gushing (I felt embarrassed), he would complain if I didn’t respond back with equal gushing of love. (Despite being sat in the same room as me). I know that some friends at this point blocked my wall on Facebook, they didn’t want to read it. Why would they?

This was a deliberate act on his part, to give an image to the outside world –

• How happy we were
• How much he loved me
• How caring he was
• That if HE was fake and phoney – well perhaps I was too?

You see, by deliberately engineering this façade to the outside world, other people were fooled.  Isolating you, offers full control over you and your life, and makes it easy to use you for source of supply.

It also achieved something else, long term.  It meant that he could later engineer an easy escape, with little detection of being exposed. After all, nobody else had seen him be horrible to you, he was kind, caring, helpful, and he was so in love with you. Or at least this was the reflection he gave to the outside world.

Two things are important to the sociopath

• Control
• Winning

Whilst at the same time avoiding his two biggest fears

• Being exposed
• Losing control

Creating dependence and isolating you

You might have, isolated yourself further from friends, after being hurt, when he tells you things like:

• I asked your friend to call you and they never did, am disappointed, they would
• I asked them to come over for dinner, and they didn’t (he would be deliberately fake when asking)
• They never call you anymore, you always have to call them
• They don’t care about you
• Have you noticed, how they always spend time with other friends and never invite you anymore
• Worse, I think your friend fancies me – or I find your friend attractive
• To mutual friends, behind your back, they will confide in them, they they are concerned about you, or you have erratic behaviour, they really don’t know what to do to help you?

Telling you negative things about your friends, about their thoughts about you, or creating/engineering events which will hurt you, will isolate you, and create a false sense of dependence on the sociopath.

The sociopath will notice who are the genuine people in your life and who are not. They will quickly learn who  are the people who will stick by you. Those who were not close friends, or failed his test, he will later take as his own, to use as third party abuse against you.

Causing isolation from your inner circle

Your inner circle of  people are more difficult to isolate you from. (usually long term friends, or family). To isolate you from those people, he tries a different tact. He will do something outrageous, hurtful to you, so that they do not like him anymore. Which would mean that mutual visits with him, would be difficult, forcing you to make the choice between him – and those close to you.

Being in love, being manipulated, you will often choose him. After all, you know that your close people will always be there. You hope that you will be able to change their mind about him, at a later date. When things improve. 

But this improvement will never come. it will be more stalling for time, so that he can use you some more, until, at the end he has used you all up.

The sociopath does not experience true emotions and feelings. The words ‘love’ mean simply ownership and control. And dating, is just a game, to use you for whatever they want.

The sociopath will play the game for as long as there is a reward for him. As long as he is getting what he wants. Even if he has become attached to you (while they do not love in the usual sense, they can become attached to supply), he will move on to another victim, when the source for supply is running dry.

The relationship is always about the sociopath, and their needs.You were only a source to be used. But don’t think that when he moves on, he will  be having a happy relationship with someone else. Likely he will say that he has changed, and someone else will benefit from all that you taught him – and thank you!! This isn’t true. He has simply moved onto another victim, it is not a case of if, but when, that he will ruin the new victims life too.

Copyright datingasociopath.com 2013, All rights reserved, this material may not be published, rewritten, broadcast, or redistributed