The Disguise

Excerpt from Me and My Shadow:

"Manipulators have to hurry. Their goal is to get you in too deep to easily escape before you can see the truth. Suddenly you may be living together, married, engaged, having children, merging your finances, and you find yourself asking, did I agree to this? Urgency, speed to advance the relationship is a red flag. The rules that we place upon ourselves that were created outside of ourselves become the wonderful tools that the sociopath or abuser will use against us. These men will leverage your fears and shame, your sense of duty. Somehow they convince us that if we are not willing to move quickly we must not love them…and so to prove we love them we begin to jump.

Over time, their goal is to make us have the sense that now our whole survival depends on them. So they may encourage you to quit your job and trust them, or buy a bigger house and they will take care of it…or move to another area where they can make more money to provide, meanwhile you are now far away from any support system you may have.

In reality, if you could just speak sociopath it means, “I want to remove from you all sources of independence you might have. I want to eliminate everything that can take care of you from your life, so that suddenly, you feel as though all you have as your source of survival is me. I want to separate you from your friends, your money, your family, your job and anything that might be deemed a provider of your security. I want you alone, completely and totally to myself.”

One of my abusers used to say, “I want us to be in our own little cocoon of love. I want the kind of love that when people think of me, they automatically think of you. I long for people to not be able to think of one of us without the other, almost as if we are one.” I believed this to be a statement of undying love …but now of course I can hear it as the truth—isolation. Having lost all sense of community and independence, you now feel exactly what they hoped you would feel: helpless.

Consciously or unconsciously, these abusers see who we are and know that we will let them in. They test us on a small scale and we pass with flying colors. They test to see if we will feel for their sad situation or bend our plans or ideas because of them. They see us because we choose to be a target. They test to see if we are vulnerable to them, and act once they are certain we are. If you look at your life, the part of it that is behind you, you can likely see that you have had a pattern of allowing others to control you at some levels. Those that have not had that pattern can still be susceptible. Often we become susceptible to engaging with a sociopath after we have a traumatic experience such as a death, divorce, job loss; anything that shakes our stability and makes us vulnerable, makes us a more likely target for a sociopath or someone who wishes to control us. These individuals troll for vulnerable people. It is like they can smell us; we are bait.

The soft and charismatic beginning often shifts to what we see as passion, although it is really just anger and control. We believe that their jealousy is understandable; they have been hurt in the past. We will gladly remove any remnant of a past relationship such as a photo or keepsake at their request or more likely, their demand or insistent pleas. We are surprised by how few friends they have or how they are alienated from their family. They tell us it is because of their past. Their past mistakes perhaps—everyone loves a good redemption story. Perhaps they lost everything through no fault of their own. They spin a tale of victimization, something we can relate to. They tell us they had wealth, had success, but it was taken from them. In contrast, they may be quite successful when they enter our lives. These people will claim to have earned their success like many who have gone before them, but in truth, these people have littered their paths to success with the destruction of others.

I speak of these men in my past as if there were never good times, but there were. Perhaps recognizing the abuse would have been easier if there were not glorious breaks from it. The moments of joy sustained me, as I hoped and longed for the next one. I have spoken of the fairy tale beginning to these relationships. They were full of grand romantic gestures, soul-bearing conversations, and laughter. This charade would often be repeated if the abuser suspected I may be pulling away. However, the illusion of romance was not only for my benefit, it was so that everyone we encountered, friends, strangers, relatives, would think I had found Prince Charming. They saw the dinners, the flowers, the limos, the vacations. What they couldn’t see was what went on behind closed doors.

We stay in these relationships tolerating the intolerable because of the moments where they show us love, that is just as powerful as their hate. We do not see their hate as malice, but as wounds they long to heal. To gain that love feels so good. We keep hoping that we can heal them enough so that someday the love will be our life, the hate will melt away, and our fairy tale will come true.

Those moments that capture our heart and bring us into the delusion of their love so deep, a tenderness so seemingly real, that we stay hoping for another morsel, another moment that gives us the illusion we are loved. Those are the moments that set the hook ever deeper.

To me, the abuse I experienced was nothing more than a demonstration of his pain. Asleep, I was unaware that what I was experiencing was in fact abuse. I saw nothing wrong with occasionally sharing with a family member an interaction that illustrated this pain. I would tell them of his tormented soul, and I expected compassion for his suffering. I was confused when these stories were met with the occasional suggestion I should leave him. I didn't understand their perspective. Obviously, I never listened. It wasn't until I could see for myself that I was being abused, that I was willing to walk away.

I see why others struggle to understand why we stay. Why would someone choose to be in an abusive relationship? To those of us who stay, it is not a conscious choice, it is an outcome. Everything happens so quickly! In some of these dangerous relationships the victim, like I was, is completely unconscious of the reality that they should fear for their life. If they became conscious of this fear and felt they could not escape, they would be terrified. Neglecting to experience this fear helps to keep us asleep.

How safe these abusers must feel knowing they can harm us in any way possible, while also knowing we are devotedly concerned with their safety. We do all we can to help them avoid consequences or harm. And even when they inflict harm upon us, we will never call the police, or if we do, we may also bail them out. They know we will never give the full details of the gravity of what they have done to others or to us. We will minimize the harm they have repeatedly caused. In fact our most compelling lie, aside from the one we tell ourselves, would be the one told in the interest of protecting the abuser whose spell we are deeply under.

Once Awake, all of the distortions in our views vanish, seemingly like magic."
~excerpt from Me and My Shadow.

Copyright © 2014 by Diana Iannarone

If this strikes a chord with you, consider buying my book:

Me and My Shadow

Move from Fear and Control to Love and Freedom.

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