Claudia Moscovici 
On her website lovefraud.com, Donna Andersen has several entries on how to leave a psychopath, step by step. She states that it’s important to build up your social network of family and friends and to establish financial autonomy in advance. It’s also advisable to rely upon external resources—such as a women’s shelter and counseling—so that you don’t go through this difficult and potentially dangerous process on your own. Andersen counsels victims to work up to the goal of no contact with the psychopath. Any communication with him will leave you vulnerable to his continuing manipulation and perhaps even retaliation. Sandra L. Brown M.A. also has a lot of helpful information for victims of dangerous men on her website, saferelationshipsmagazine.com, including a list of resources and centers they can contact. I’d like to focus here, however, on a different kind of escape: one that is in some ways more difficult and takes more time. It’s one thing to get the psychopath out of your life. But how do you get him out of your heart and mind?
Some psychopaths become extremely angry and abusive when their partners leave them. They regard those partners as possessions, as women they own, whom they’ve marked and who belong to them forever, long after they, themselves, have tired of them. No matter how badly the psychopath has treated you—he may have cheated on and lied to you; he may have undermined your self-confidence; he may have stolen your money; he may have physically abused you—it’s clear that he can’t feel genuinely sorry for the harm he inflicted. He can only offer you histrionic shows of regret and empty promises that he won’t hurt you again.
If you take him back out of love, it establishes a precedent in his mind. He will believe that you’re too weak to let him go. Each time you take him back, you give him the opportunity to mistreat you even worse. Given his bad character, he will take full advantage of it. For this reason, Martha Stout advises, “Do not try to redeem the irredeemable. Second […] chances are for people who posses conscience. If you are dealing with a person who has no conscience, know how to swallow hard and cut your losses” (The Sociopath Next Door, 161). Some people improve after hurting their loved ones. Some people feel genuine remorse. Many of us grow from traumatic experiences, including those that we, ourselves, inflict upon those we love or upon innocent strangers. But all the experts on the subject say that psychopaths don’t. They can’t feel empathy for you. Consequently, they don’t feel genuinely sorry for hurting you. They see your love as a sign of weakness, not generosity. They will exploit you for as long as you let them.
Although I’ve said that some psychopaths become furious when you leave them, most don’t. You weren’t important enough to them. Because they form only shallow attachments, psychopaths also detach very easily. They can replace you with someone else within a matter of days, if not hours. Besides, chances are that by the time you decide you’ve had enough, it’s usually when the psychopath has grown tired of the relationship as well. As we’ve seen, once psychopaths lose interest in you, they no longer bother to put in the effort to disguise themselves. Consequently, they’re no longer as charming and “nice” as they were when they wanted you or something from you. Once they unmask themselves, they show their lack of contrition, their coldness, their selfishness and their heartlessness. It’s a very chilling experience to look at a psychopath unmasked. No matter how attractive some of them may be on the outside, all psychopaths are horrifically ugly people on the inside, which counts much more.
Yet it’s still difficult to escape the psychopath in your life, even once you realize that he’s not the sweet, loving person you thought he was. As we’ve seen, psychopaths exercise a hypnotic control over their partners. Brown documents in Women Who Love Psychopaths that they often talk in a smooth, mesmerizing manner, using rhythmic repetitions, like music, like an incantation (Women Who Love Psychopaths, 174-186).
We’ve also seen how psychopaths condition you, through offering and withdrawing approval and affection, to pin your self-worth upon their validation. They separate you from your family and friends, or at the very least discourage meaningful contact with people who genuinely care about you. They undermine your self-esteem, sometimes through overt criticism, at others more insidiously, through subtle disapproval. Throughout the relationship, they have played all kinds of mind games with you. They also filled your life with lies. After awhile, you’re no longer sure of your own beliefs and perceptions of reality.
They also trained you in the beginning of the relationship to expect over-the-top affection, attention and flattery. Now you’re always looking for that kind of pathological interdependency. Normal relationships seem to pale by comparison. In addition, most people are kind enough to give others the benefit of the doubt and second chances in life, especially if they love them. Nobody’s perfect. Most people make mistakes. Many people lie and cheat without being monsters. The problem is that psychopaths are different types of people. They never deserve a second chance. They didn’t deserve the first chance in the first place. Every relationship with them is a failure: a mistake that will cost you everything you choose to invest in it.
As we’ve seen, like other natural predators, psychopaths depend on the isolation of their victims. They require secrecy and loyalty to them. You don’t owe the psychopath any loyalty. Record his behavior and share it with others. Not as a form of gossip, but as a form of truthful information and therapy. The free therapy you give yourself. You also owe yourself the truth. Reevaluate the relationship for yourself, on your own terms, rather than accepting what he wants you to believe. See if reality conforms to his image. See, above all, if his actions conform to the devotion he sometimes professes, when convenient. All this is common sense, of course. But in a relationship with a psychopath you lose common sense, especially when it comes to evaluating your bond with him. Your world becomes a little box of skewed reality he’s created. By extension, you become someone who continually aims to pacify, impress and please him. You focus your energies on struggling to save the precarious, fragile relationship with him from imminent destruction. Escape that box, which exists above all in your own mind. Shatter the false construct of reality he’s gotten you to accept as real.
Notice that the psychopath doesn’t want you to get out of the box he’s built around you. It’s the mental prison that keeps you under his control. Only you have the key to get out. And you will do it only when you’re strong enough and ready. Nobody else can free you, no matter what they say about him and what information they reveal about his personality disorder. It will be up to you to decide when you will take no more mistreatment. Only you can tell when you feel confident enough to see that your life can continue, far better and happier, without him. People who care about you, or those who have been through similar experiences, can only help you once you’re good and ready: once you, yourself, have decided to get out of the box.
When you become more critical of the relationship, discuss it with others or seek counseling. Psychopaths tend to discourage sharing information. To them, therapy is useless psychobabble. Shrinks are crooks. What others say about them and their behavior is garbage. As we’ve seen, psychopaths believe that they’re not only healthy, but also better than everybody else. They’re proud of who they are and of what it gets them in life. However they acted towards you, they rationalize it in their own minds. They believe that you deserved the mistreatment, even if they may occasionally offer disingenuous excuses or apologies, to continue the relationship for however long they wish to maintain it.
Psychopaths want you to accept their unacceptable behavior. They want you to find it normal and appropriate, just as they do. That’s why they disapprove of your efforts to seek support, information and psychological help elsewhere. But you need it, even if you’re a strong and sane person. If you’ve been intimately involved with a psychopath, he’s toyed with your emotions and messed up your mind. He’s stretched your boundaries of acceptable behavior. He’s even altered your perception of truth and falsehood, since so much of what he told you was either a distortion of reality or an outright lie.
A therapist, your family, books that describe his disorder, the internet as a source of helpful information, support groups, all threaten to expose the false version of reality he’s created and diminish his hold on you. Which is precisely why these are also the avenues for you to regain your sense of self and win back your freedom. Write down the facts. Record his behavior. Google his personality symptoms. Reconnect with family and friends. Trust them, and your own intuitions, not him. Above all, be willing to be honest with yourself. Perhaps that’s the hardest thing to do once your mind has been hijacked by this alien force, by this human being who isn’t fully human. To escape the psychopath in your life, you need to escape the one in your mind. That may take the longest time. Because so many of us who have fallen in love with a psychopath really want to believe in the illusion of the perfect partner and of the ideal relationship he initially created. Escaping the psychopath requires, as a first and last step, escaping that fantasy.
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
