Fighting a smear campaign

Fighting the Psychopath’s Smear Campaign

I have shown earlier how the psychopath, as a human predator, attempts to isolate you from your sources of validation and support so that you become emotionally dependent on him. He also sets others against you or persuades them, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, to devalue you. That way, like Adolphe did with Ellénore, he maximizes his chances of gaining sympathy from others when he mistreats or discards you. You can bet that if you’re his wife and he cheated on you, he’s told his girlfriend(s) negative things about you and positive things about his efforts to “save” the relationship.

Analogously, once their ruses are discovered, psychopaths become quite democratic in their lack of loyalty to women and, by extension, in their smear campaigns. They criticize their girlfriends in the same cowardly manner that they did their wives. They commonly present the girlfriends as temptresses without morals—essentially, as sluts—to generate rancor, contempt and spite against them and to exculpate themselves. Notice how unoriginal and caricatural their misogynist representations of women are when they rely upon the tired duality of the frigid prude (the wife) and the salacious whore (the mistress). More insidiously, as we’ve seen in the earlier discussion of gaslighting, psychopaths commonly depict their victims as “crazy” or “disturbed.” That’s partly because they take themselves to be the standard of sanity and perfection. Consequently, they view anyone who criticizes them as necessarily deranged. But it’s also because psychopaths want to malign their victims. That way the valid charges against them won’t stick. If the wife or girlfriend who tells others what the psychopath did to harm her can be persuasively portrayed as “crazy,” the “real psychopath” (instead of him), “disturbed” or a “drama queen,” then her word against his will carry much less weight. This is also why it’s important to fight the psychopath’s smears of you in a calm, honest and rational manner. You need to inform others about what he did and about his personality disorder factually, without flinging dirt back at him. Insults can’t even reach his impenetrable ego. But they risk tarnishing your image in the eyes of others.

Since psychopaths enjoy manipulation and strife, as we’ve seen in the section on Picasso stringing women along, they set the wives against the girlfriends so that the women turn against each other. In addition, psychopaths are very adept at manipulating their own families. They give them false or incomplete information that bolsters their image as good but misfortunate people: essentially, as victims. So, if you’ve been intimately involved with a psychopath for an extended period of time, you’ve probably been smeared, criticized and depicted as somehow inadequate, not just to your face, but also to the friends and family members that could have been your support system. You need to reclaim their respect by telling them the truth. You will depend on them to recover from the damage inflicted by the psychopath. For this reason alone, you need to fight the psychopath’s smears of you. Not in order to smear him back, since the psychopath prides himself on his bad behavior. Not in order to get revenge, since psychopaths have no depth of feelings. Solitary confinement may be the only thing that bothers them. They get painfully bored if they have nobody to use, deceive and manipulate. But since you’re not likely to put the psychopath in solitary confinement, there’s nothing you can do to hurt him back. You also can’t make him feel sorry for what he did to you. In fact, he’s gloating about it. Any complaint you express will only make him feel even better about himself, like he won the match. They say that the best revenge is living well. That’s no doubt true, so that’s what you need to focus on.

First and foremost, be honest with yourself about what the psychopath is and what he did to you and others. Inform yourself about psychopathy. Inform your family, his family, and your mutual friends about what he did: if and only if they’re likely to be part of your support system. If he has already set his family against you, or if they’re not likely to be reasonable people, forget about communicating with them about your negative experiences with him. In that case, the psychopath will only use them to his advantage, to smear you further. The last thing you need is more toxic people to poison your life. Share truthful information only with those who care about you and want to help you, at least by offering emotional support. You will inevitably run against a barrier, however. People who haven’t dealt with such a sick human being may not understand you, or grasp the depth of betrayal you have suffered. Sometimes they’ll tell you, even with the best of intentions, to get over it. The reason why you can’t get over a psychopathic bond that easily is because practically nothing you have lived through your partner was real. It was all misleading and malicious. Woody Allen, the eternal pessimist, once said, “Expect the worst and you won’t be disappointed.” Although this cynical saying doesn’t apply to most people, it applies one hundred percent to any intimate relationship with a psychopath. The depth and degree of betrayal hurts so much more than the natural degeneration of a normal relationship, where people grow apart or realize that they have “irreconcilable differences.” Psychopaths have “irreconcilable differences” with the rest of the human species. No matter how charming they may seem on the outside, they’re all misanthropes on the inside.

 The magnitude of deception in a psychopathic relationship is very difficult to digest. But even if your family and friends can’t fully identify with your experience, if you tell them everything that’s happened, they will understand the essential truth. That he has mistreated you when you did not deserve it. That you are essentially a good person with a heart and he is not. That he cheated on and lied to you repeatedly. That even when you gave him second, third and fourth chances in life, he trampled all over you. If you’ve given the psychopath too many second chances, however, you’re likely to lose some sympathy from others. They may believe that there’s something’s wrong with you if you’ve bent over backwards to stay with such an obviously bad man. At any rate, what’s important is not to present yourself as flawless, since nobody is, but to establish the facts.

Since the psychopath probably involved you in some of his bad actions, and since he’s acted in a way that’s deeply humiliating, you may feel too ashamed to share with others what happened. Don’t cower to him. Don’t feel ashamed. Reclaim your power and your voice. If you spread truthful information about the psychopath and his personality disorder, you’re not only setting the record straight, but also you may help others who are in a similar situation to yours. The more you hide the truth, the more you remain in the psychopath’s grasp, on his terms, covered in shame. If anyone should feel deeply ashamed, it’s the psychopath himself, but he’s incapable of it. He’s the one who deserves contempt, once people find out what he is on the inside, beneath the nice facade. Psychopaths don’t feel any scruples themselves, yet they’re very skilled in projecting blame unto others. Don’t fall for it. The stronger and more self-confident you become, the better equipped you’ll be to get the psychopath out of your life for good.

Sharing information with others also carries the additional benefit of depriving the psychopath of the mask he needs to keep his main sources of narcissistic supply—of love and admiration—close to him. As we know, psychopaths thrive in superficial relationships. They prefer promiscuous liaisons and casual acquaintanceships with people whom they can charm, use and discard rather quickly. But psychopaths also need others who care about them in order to feel more powerful. Who those others are doesn’t really matter, since people are interchangeable to them. It can be a wife or a girlfriend. It can be one girlfriend or another. Without other people’s love to feed on and abuse, psychopaths are just empty souls blown about from place to place, engaging in various excesses and misdeeds. Consequently, telling the truth about the psychopath in your life not only helps you reclaim your image in the eyes of others, but also chips away at the phony mask of decency that enables him to use and abuse all those close to him.

Telling the Other Woman (or Women) about the Psychopath

I’ve shown in a previous section how psychopaths use women against one another to string them along as back-ups and to play puppet master. The more subtle psychopaths also use them to keep their hands clean, so to speak. If a psychopath criticizes his wife to the girlfriend (to justify his cheating and prove his trustworthiness to her) and, once discovered, the girlfriend to his wife (to exculpate himself), then the two women are too busy fighting each other to focus on his wrongdoings. Aside from the entertainment value of jealous women fighting over him, the psychopath gets the additional advantage of not having to engage directly in a smear campaign. He allows the women, who now disrespect and maybe even hate each other, to do it for him. They can spread false or selective information to family members and friends, thus sparing him the dirty job of doing it himself. He’s lied to them both and cheated on them both. He should be exposed, not only to the other women, but also to his own family members.

The tricky part is how to do it most effectively. Because such manipulative men antagonize women against each other, it becomes difficult to share information in a civil manner. Once she realizes that she’s been mistreated and that something’s seriously wrong with this man, how does the wife tell the girlfriend about it (and why would she do her rival such a favor?) or the girlfriend tell the wife? Both are likely to suspect the other of ulterior motives, such as wanting to get the man for herself or petty revenge against him. Moreover, the wife, or the psychopath’s main partner, has been morally wronged most. The girlfriend with whom the psychopath cheated on her has wronged her almost as much as her own partner (except more impersonally). She’s therefore not likely to respect the girlfriend (or girlfriends) enough to even want to communicate with her (or them).

I followed with interest the thread on lovefraud.com on this subject. Numerous women have shared their experiences of trying to tell the other women about the psychopath and his personality disorder, once they have opened their eyes. The contributors reported mixed results. Some of them were able to get through to their “rivals,” which were really fellow victims. Others received further insult and abuse, only now from the woman or women they were trying to help. Obviously that didn’t ameliorate the situation. The main reason, however, why some women reacted so negatively to the truth about the psychopath was not the rivalry he created between them, but the power he exercised over them. Victims of psychopathic seduction don’t all awake from their spell simultaneously, like in a fairy tale. They don’t all realize at the same moment that they’ve been duped and used, just as their rivals were. In addition, as we’ve seen, psychopaths generally undermine the boundaries and self-esteem of their long-term partners in a more profoundly damaging manner than they do those of their short-term girlfriends.

Trying to awake the girlfriend(s) from the psychopathic bond presents a different sort of challenge. Those women are probably being treated “better” than his long-term partner because the relationship is newer, because they don’t have to live with a psychopath day-to-day and because they’re being maintained for sex, entertainment and romance: meaning the most pleasant and light aspects of a relationship. Even psychopaths who are so stingy that they won’t spend a dime on their wives often spend lavishly on their newest girlfriends. A woman who’s been treated like a “princess”—wined, dined, pampered and romanced—is likely to be deeply under the haze of the psychopathic bond. How do you tell a girlfriend who’s apparently treated well the sad truth? How do you let her know that she’s only a temporary pampered pet who’ll soon be devalued and discarded?

In my opinion, it’s important to tell other women about what happened, but only in a way that doesn’t hurt you or tarnish your reputation further. After having suffered the trauma of being involved with a psychopath, the last thing you need is more people insulting you or machinating against you. To determine whom to tell and how, follow your intuition. Timing is key. Obviously, you can’t tell anyone about the psychopath unless they’re willing to listen. If you catch them still in the honeymoon phase of the relationship, when the psychopath’s acting like Prince Charming, you’re not likely to convince them. If you catch them after they’ve been so severely psychologically damaged by their psychopathic partner that they’re too weak or dependent to face reality, you won’t get through to them either. You’ll only get through to a person who retains enough autonomy and strength to face such devastating facts and who’s been through enough unpleasant and disconcerting experiences with the psychopath to understand what you’re talking about.

Dangerous Liaisons/Legături Periculoase, Editura Vremea, http://www.edituravremea.ro/leg–turi-periculoase–cum-s–recuno–ti-un-psihopat–i-s–scapi-din-mrejele-lui