Over the course of the past few years I was targeted and abused by a sociopath in my town. This was no normal break-up or relationship: this was a set-up for covert and insidious murder of my psyche and sense of safety in the world. He is a covert narcissist and a dangerous con man. Sociopaths seek women just like me: Women that are empathetic, positive, very forgiving, want to help others, and people who have been through this abuse before. He preyed on me at the most vulnerable time in my life. I had just found out my father who is a diagnosed sociopath was lying in a hospice bed when I met my abuser, and I was trying to accept that I would never have a father and never have closure there. I had spent my entire adult life overcoming that trauma only to find myself in a new relationship with another sociopath as my father lay in a hospice bed dying. All of the work I did on myself was taken from me as he abused me, and I regressed back into CPTSD because of the abuse I endured by him. I was broken at the end and desperate for closure and to have a voice and to understand what happened to me. I’ve had to wait till I felt it was safe to even speak up about this. I lived in terror of him. My life has almost been completely ruined, and I barely held on to life during this time. I cannot even begin to describe the pain I’ve been through and therefore how passionately I feel about this subject.

I never thought that I would date a person like this and that I could be duped like this. But this can happen to anyone, and it was the most dehumanizing, humiliating, crazy making, traumatic experience of my life.

Narcissism is descriptive and reflects a cluster of patterns and behaviors that hang together like entitlement, lack empathy, arrogance, dysregulation, anger, a need for control, a need for validation, superficiality, sensitivity to criticism, egocentricity, incapacity for empathy, insecurity, and manipulative patterns. He has all of these constellation of behaviors used to determine if someone is a sociopath. According to Robert Hare PHD, the foremost psychologist on sociopathy and psychopathy who created the psychopathy checklist, my abuser checks all the boxes on his checklist. I can give at least 5 examples of things he has done that are examples of each of the things on that checklist. There is a glossary of terms of at least 40 words for narcissistic abuse. I can define each one and give at least 5 examples of how he has acted in that way toward me for every one of those words. I endured hell for two years. I was mercilessly violated, manipulated, lied to, ridiculed, demeaned and gaslighted. My sense of self has been eroded, diminished. I was idealized and then devalued. I was replaced and discarded multiple times, only to be lured back into an abuse cycle even more torturous than before. My abuser thinks he is superior to other people, he has grandiose ideas, he feels entitled, he’s very controlling, manipulative, and deceptive, he gaslights and projects, contradicts, invalidates and devalues you, has zero empathy, is cunning and a con man, is extremely angry and violent, is arrogant, baits you and feigns innocence, pushes boundaries, has no respect for anyone or the law, gets pleasure from others’ pain and from causing it, shuts you down and changes the subject or projects onto you to avoid accountability, uses deconstructive conditioning to control and destroy, says extremely hurtful and terrible verbally abuse things, and he’s all about power and winning, and he plays a very good role as the victim pretending to be normal and charming and wears a good mask to hide all of this, but underneath is someone who cannot feel empathy and just does not care about others and enjoys exploiting others’ insecurities and destroying people for his own amusement.

These people are good at wearing a mask in public and convincing people that they are just like us, and they dupe their victims with that mask and by mirroring, love bombing, and future faking before the abuse starts, and it just gets worse and worse with each cycle (hoovering, devaluing, and discarding) of abuse. It is like the frog in boiling water metaphor. It starts slowly and gets worse and worse and before you know it, you’re in deep and it has broken you. My ex wore a mask and mirrored and love bombed and future faked me while courting me for three months in the beginning. He acted charming and like a gentleman and meek and kind. He was always accessible to me. He acted just like me. He was everything I ever wanted; I thought i met my dream guy. He lied to me about his life, he love bombed me and future faked me claiming I was the best thing that ever happened to him and that he never felt the way he did for a person like he did with me. I was shocked when he just changed into a different person over night and started hurting me. As soon as I became his girlfriend and things got serious and he had gained my trust and I had fallen and was hooked he changed overnight to a completely different person yet always kept me hooked with little glimpses of who he used to be when I first met him which gave me hope, the use of intermittent reinforcement which created a trauma bond, and with promises of change and that things would be different each time he hoovered me. I ended up under his control, constantly gaslit and lied to and manipulated and had no voice and all of my boundaries and my identity and mental health and self esteem got ripped from me.

When I called out his behavior in the beginning after he changed he said he didn’t have emotions, had never cried, did not feel empathy, has a drinking problem, destroys everything around him, and does not know how to get close to people. He claimed issues from his childhood were the cause of this. He begged me to tell him he could get well. He would look me directly in the eyes and say do you think I can really get better? I know I have these issues, and I should get therapy, and I don’t want to hurt you, I want to protect you from this part of me, and I really want to get better. I want to protect you from my alcoholism etc. It made me want to stay. He said that every time he hovered me back. It was manipulation though. Me holding hope that he would back to being who he was when I first met him and believing him when he said he wanted to get better made me want to stay. The intermittent reinforcement along with the contradictions, lies, manipulation, coercion, Intimidation, and gaslighting also made me confused and made me stay. Sometimes he was very nice to me and sometimes he would abuse me. I would hold on to the good moments thinking the abuse would stop and that he would go back to being the man he was when I first met him. I dared not bring up anything during the good times because i didn’t want to rock the boat. I was scared of how he would react. If i brought up anything he did that hurt me it would bring on his rage against me, and I would have to endure physical and verbal abuse or just plain ghosting me where he would just ignore me for weeks even months at a time. His mother (who he involved in our relationship) would not even listen to me when i tried to tell her what was happening. So I became a woman without a voice. I never had a voice. I was never allowed to express myself. And the abuse got worse and worse. He pushed all my boundaries, he debased me, he took away my mental health, he dehumanized me, and made me feel lost. I didn’t even recognize myself in the end. He had me so triggered constantly. I went from being a classy well put together relatively happy and healthy person after years of fighting to get over the trauma of being raised by someone like him only to find myself broken again by him and having to fight to get well all over again. I developed learned helplessness and was trauma bonded to him.

I endured sexual, physical, verbal, psychological, and financial abuse  including manipulation and gaslighting, projection, coercion, deception, contradictions, inconsistency, intimidation, and moving of goal posts that keep me confused and desperate. He put me through cycles of abuse where he would hoover me in, devalue me, and then discard me and not talk to me for months. He was a walking contradiction. Everything he said he felt about me, about the nature of our relationship, about the world, about various issues in the world, about himself, about his perception of reality changed constantly from one side of the spectrum to the other and everything in between. When I asked him why he constantly contradicted himself he said he did it on purpose to keep people from knowing him. He lied to me constantly. He would start fights with me out of nowhere. He would break up with me out of nowhere. If i called him out, I would get the silent treatment. He would be violent with me out of nowhere. He would hurt me any way he could. He told me I was his sub, and I had to do everything he said. He slowly debased me and made me feel helpless. He told me I was a game to him and that he never cared about me and that he destroyed me for his own amusement. He put a loaded gun to my head once. Once he dared and encouraged me to commit suicide in his backyard, and I took a bottle of pills and drank a lot of a box of wine and blacked out and he left me for dead. My friends came ( I don’t even remember calling them) and made me throw up over and over and kept me up all night to make sure i didn’t die. He wielded a bat and an axe against me. He tried to run me over with his car. He completely shattered my phone into pieces. He kicked out the headlights on my car, slashed my tires twice, and hit the back of my car breaking my bumper. I endured 1000s of dollar in damage to my car my phone and my house. He stole a lot of my possessions and still has them (including at least 7 pair of extremely expensive lingerie that he stole which is just plain weird), and many of the times I sought him out for closure, I was also trying to take back my possessions. Many times I came over and tried to claim them but he would not give them back. He still has my stuff. Once he made me have sex with someone i didn’t know claiming he would never touch me again because i was too innocent and naive and didn’t have enough experience with men. He ignored me for months only to say I had to go have sex with another man in order for him to ever touch me again and be my boyfriend until I finally did it just to make the abuse stop and afterwards he called me a slut. He took hundreds of dollars out of my wallet and burned it in front of me because according to him I was a garbage person that did not deserve to have money. He humiliated me in public on countless occasions verbally abusing me in front of people who could hear him. Once he paraded me downtown yelling at me the entire time and telling me to take off my sweatshirt that he had given me and said he wanted it back. I was wearing nothing but a bra a sweat shirt and a rain jacket and he was trying to take the sweatshirt off of me and make me walk around in my bra and a rain jacket. When i wouldn’t let him he dragged me into a store and said he would find the most retarded shirt he could find and make me wear it to show what a garbage person i am. When I broke down sobbing in the store he finally gave up. Whenever I would cry and ask him to stop he said I looked like a cow. In bed he would choke me and make me do sexual things I was not comfortable and once he forced himself on me. He would lie in bed naked with me and say I was ugly and that he wanted to fuck my best friend and her husband in the ass and that he wanted to fuck another girl I knew and was friends with because she was better in bed than me and prettier than me and let him choke her. He lied and told me she had cheated on her boyfriend with him before he met me. He later told the girl I knew she cheated and was stalking her and her boyfriend and had a mission to tell her boyfriend she had cheated. This was a lie. I never had that intention, didn’t believe him, and didn’t even know her boyfriend. He was triangulating us against each other. He was clearly targeting her next. She is just like me. She believed him and stopped talking to me. He would say he wanted to move to Thailand and fuck “ladyboys” until he got syphilis and died. I could not respond to any of this. If i did he would hurt me further. I was like his captive, trauma bonded and just hoping he would stop being cruel to me. The abuse started slowly but got progressively worse especially as he saw he could not control me and i was standing up for myself and just wanted to fix it and make it better and hope he would be nice again. He left me covered in bruises several times. Once when I went to try and get him to talk to me after triggering me he put his hand in my mouth and knocked my head into the wall and when i collapsed into a ball on the floor he dragged me by my hair across the floor. He pulled off my shirt in the process. Another time, he threw me to the concrete when I was begging him to stay and be rational and left me there bleeding and crying. Once he choked me and shoved me and later busted out my windshield as I was driving 70 down the interstate because I said no to having sex with him. He constantly verbally abused me calling me stupid, ugly, fat, autistic, undeserving of love, a garbage person, said no one liked me and everyone talked badly about me, said I don’t deserve love, I will never be loved, I am a stupid jew, said he hated my skin, the smell of my hair, said my hair is ugly, said my teeth were ugly, said my house smelled bad and was ugly, and that i have no personality and that i just copy others, said i was his little sub and had to do everything he said and made me do humiliating things and i was too scared to do anything about it, he told me i should kill myself deserved abuse from my dad, i am a garbage person, and i mean like hundreds of awful things all the time, and he hates my friends and this community and that we are all bourgeois garbage which is crazy because all my friends are solidly middle class but his family has a ton of money. He said horrible things about like everyone we know too, he pegged me against people by lying to them about me and lying to me about them. I haven’t been able to suss out all the lies. He has even made me get on my knees before and beg him to stop, and since i’d been completely broken down and was desperate, I did it. Whenever he could hurt me with words he did. He triggered me on purpose. He said he had total control over me and that I had to do what he said and that he was always 10 steps ahead of me and I would never win. He constantly treated me like a game he was winning which was confusing for me. I was never playing a game and I never abused him. He found my weaknesses and insecurities and used them against me to trigger me whenever he could on purpose to control me and the abuse just got worse and worse while all the while he would come back and apologize and say things would be different and I would believe him because i was already hooked and wanted to believe he would go back to being the person i first met.  At first he even blamed me for the way he treated me and I spent a long time thinking I was worthless and terrible and didn’t deserve love before realizing he had gaslit me. I told him if he would be cool I would be cool and that I never had this problem with any other friends or any other relationship. He just said I was crazy. If i ever tried to have a voice about what was going on he would interrupt me, use word salad against me where he would just not stop talking and not let me talk and I would be trying to have conversation A while he would just not stop talking and the next thing i knew, i’d be in conversation J. He would just go and go and go and not stop or he would run away or he would seduce me and distract me with sex. I was never allowed to have that conversation or understand what happened to me and it was so crazy making.

When I finally tried to stand up for myself and demand respect and have any kind of voice and unmasked him realizing what kind of abuse I was going through, he took serious revenge on me. Dr Robert Hare says there are three types of women that get involved with a sociopath. One will walk away, one will become subservient and just lose everything that makes her who she is, and the other tries to stand up for herself and this kind of woman gets the worst of their wrath and vindictiveness and revenge. All I ever wanted from him was to have a voice, to stand up against the abuse and understand what was happening to me. In other words, I wanted closure. I am a writer, and I have a voice and to have that taken away along with my character and dignity was the most traumatizing experience of my life. Desiring closure and loving someone who cannot be loved was all I ever did wrong. I was desperate to understand and confused from the constant contradictions, lies, gaslighting, control, and manipulation. I called and texted and went to his house all because I just wanted closure, and I wanted the stuff back he had stolen from me. He didn’t like that I was trying to have a voice and stand up against him, and he took out an order of protection on me because I was demanding closure. Just closure! He even told the judge that. Besides not having adequate representation, I was terrified to be in such a situation as to go to court to defend myself against my abuser after being blindsided by being served after I thought this was just another typical discard situation that I had been through with him at least 7 times before. He had always come back after this and apologized and said things would be different. I thought it would be just like the last times. What I did not know was when I unmasked him and said I know he is a narcissist and begged him not to go down the path of a sociopath like my father it would be my final discard because he knew I knew what he was. The day I unmasked him, he said he wanted to meet my father to learn how to be better at being a sociopath. He even called my father! Now, the last memory I have with my father being somewhat awake and lucid is him talking to my abuser and thinking it was me! I thought it would be like every time before when he came back after months of ignoring me to say he was sorry. Instead, he slapped me with an order of protection for begging for closure. He knew he could not control me so he used the justice system to control me by telling lies and acting like a victim when he is actually the abuser.  I had a panic attack that whole day in court, and I had not eaten, and I couldn’t emotionally handle what I was going through and therefore could not defend myself. To boot, his parents came to court with him and LIED for him.

He and his parents used at least 6 lies to make that happen:

1. He claimed we dated for two years straight and that when he broke up with me i just wouldn’t let him go. That is not true. I told him in the beginning i don’t get physical with a guy unless i’m in a monogamous relationship, and he said he wanted to be with me. As soon as i was intimate with him and became his “girlfriend” the abuse started. He broke up with me over and over, would ghost me, discard me and not talk to me for months, and moved the boundaries of our relationship and the label of our relationship and lied to me and others about our relationship over and over.  We dated for a few months  and after that it was all hovering devaluing and discarding me and not talking to me for months and then starting the cycle over again. He confused me about the state of our relationship constantly saying we were together, we were never together, telling people we were together, telling people we were not together, telling me he doesn’t use labels after calling me his girlfriend, breaking up with me at random for weird reasons and ghosting me and then apologizing and getting back together with me and even once when a friend of mine said to me he said he is dating me and I said yes we are dating he broke up with me for saying I was dating him. I honestly was in constant confusion about the state of our relationship. I really have no idea how long we dated or if we ever truly did. And its not that I wouldn’t let him go. I just wanted closure!

2.He also said i tried to run him over in a car but that never happened. But he tried to run me over twice when I came over asking for closure. When once he told me I was a game to him and he never cared and he destroyed me for his own pleasure he left, and I went after him in my car and begged him to talk to me because I wanted closure. I didn’t try to run him over. I tried to get him to talk to me. When I went after him and followed him, I passed him on the road, and he sped up and hit my car on purpose though, and when I entered the subdivision I stopped my car and got out and went to his car and begged him to help me understand why he was treating me this way and to give me closure, and I put my hand on his heart and said please have empathy and help me understand and you are hurting me, and he grabbed my hand and bent my fingers all the way back and he broke one of my fingers.

3. In court he said i broke my own finger. Obvious lie.

4.He showed a picture of me at his door and said I was breaking in. He snapped a screenshot of the exact moment I knocked and his parents opened the door and said I was breaking in, but what had taken place is that they open the door and I talked to them in the doorway for about 5 minutes and left.

5. He said I am an alcoholic but that is also a lie. He is the alcoholic, I am not, and he used to tell me he had a drinking problem when I first started dating him, but I never saw it until I became his girlfriend, and he would drink a shot of whiskey throw up and drink another shot and throw up again and so on and so forth and would say he was going to drink himself to death one day. He drinks everyday, and he knows he is an alcoholic.

6.  He tried to paint me as some kind of sex fiend by showing texts of me begging for closure and saying please just have sex with me. It was humiliating! He knew it would be! I only asked him to have sex with me as I was begging for closure because I thought if I gave that to him he would be nice enough to me afterward to let me have that conversation. He used sex to control and debase me but after he had sex with me he would be nice to me. So I thought if I asked him to come over for sex, I could get him to talk to me and help me understand what was happening. I was desperate!

I did not have adequate representation (an acquaintance who didn’t handle that type of law agreed to represent me for free). I didn’t get to show any evidence because the lawyer didn’t tell me to timestamp my photos, I didn’t get to show his abusive texts because my abuser objected and said verbal abuse isn’t grounds for an order of protection, and I told the lawyer say its harassment, and he didn’t say anything! I didn’t even get to give a testimony! I couldn’t talk! I could barely keep myself together that day especially after I saw I would not have any evidence and it would just be my word against his and had heard all the lies he and his parents said. I was still confused from the abuse anyway, and I collapsed and couldn’t say anything and the lawyer didn’t prompt me or anything!

After the order was placed on me, I endured an even more traumatic smear campaign and then bullying from people who believed his lies. A girl I thought was a friend who was with me in court believed his lies and spread them around our circle of friends.  She never asked me for explanation, and I was so broken on the day it happened I just wanted to die. She ended our friendship that day and I was never able to talk to her and tell her what really happened.  Our town is small and rumors spread fast. People turned their back on me. Because I was emotional and broken by the abuse they used that to justify the rumors and say obviously i was the crazy one. I would walk into public places where I had been going for years never having done anything wrong and be told I was no longer welcome there. I have been banned from 6 places. I was approached by people I didn’t even know who would say is it true you are a dangerous stalker who runs people over in cars and breaks into peoples houses.  His mother threatened me twice with losing my job if she went to court, and the day of court I lost my job. Coincidence? My whole life was destroyed. I was suicidal for a long time. I couldn’t work. I lost numerous friends. My mental health collapsed and I lived in fear that at any moment the cops would take me away. I didn’t know what he was capable of, and I didn’t feel safe in my house and i didn’t feel safe in public. My nervous system was fried, and I was constantly exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally and constantly feeling intense pain. I still get bullied from time to time a year later. I don’t have an order against me anymore, but I have to avoid most places I used to go and live mostly isolated except for a small group of friends who have supported me. I still suffer very bad depression, a loss of faith in humanity,  I cannot trust people at all anymore, and I still have bad CPTSD symptoms in general. Now he is even fucking a 50 year old man who is also a known narcissist in town (though I don’t know how long this will last and it may be already over) and that guy has begun to bully me whenever he sees me.

This man had used a law that is there to protect me to further abuse me just because I stood up for myself and called him out as a sociopath and demanded respect enough to have closure. He never felt like a victim but someone who wanted control over me, and he and his family violated the justice system to do it in order and further abused me. That is over now though and please understand I don’t want revenge. Also, I am legally safe now and I want to stay that way. I have no contact with him now. I doubt he will try to make amends or give me closure which is sad but I guess he is not capable of it. He wants that power and he knows I know what he is and doesn’t want to be confronted with that. So there is no danger of me being abused in the future.

Now, I know narcissists never give closure but their victims most often need it badly because of how confusing and how much of a mind fuck the abuse is and how they are left with more questions than answers. The order is off me now though but now my dad has recently passed. I am starting to heal kind of, but I feel so helpless. I cannot understand why his parents would not only be so cold towards me  and not show any empathy but also enable him and lie for him. I cannot understand why they don’t apologize for their son. Why will they intervene to hurt a victim but they won’t to get their psychopath son help or make him take responsibility for his actions? I wish there was a way to get through to them that they helped to destroy an innocent girl’s life. I wish they would read this. I wish they would know I don’t want revenge. I wish they knew I am just an innocent victim and I only want to be treated with respect. I want apologies and answers. Will that never happen? Will they never reach out to me and apologize or anything? I am in so much pain and they don’t even care? How could they just coldly destroy someone’s life?
Is there nothing I can do? I know better than to try and approach my abuser. I won’t approach him call him text him or go to his house. It is too dangerous. I know he will probably never give me closure, but what can i do? I can’t try to find answers? I can’t clear my good name? All I can do is walk away from this without ever getting any kind of apology from him or his parents and just move on with my life with this huge wound? There is no avenue I can take that leads to any kind of respect from him or his family? Nothing I can do? There is no making amends, no empathy, no closure?

I don’t understand how people would treat someone this way. I tend to be idealistic and perhaps naive. I guess I just need someone to tell me they won’t ever do the right thing and all I can do is move on and try to heal. It just all makes me feel so helpless. Is there truly nothing now except to move on and work to heal with none of the respect and apologies and understanding I deserve?

How do i fully heal from this without any answers or closure or respect and after my good name has been dragged through the mud and my life has been nearly destroyed? I feel lost and helpless and just do not know how i can fully heal. Any help and advice is appreciated.