Life with a Psychopath

When I first decided to start a blog site, my prime reason was to have a place to vent about all the things that were annoying or frustating me. Prior to then, my poor Swedish family were having to bear the brunt of me, and that wasn't right. By letting off a bit of steam here I could make a bit of sense of things and get rid of the emotional baggage that they were creating. I hope that I'm a bit of a better person to live with today as a result. With that in mind, this entry falls into that category. It's not news, it's just something that I think I'll feel better merely in getting it out there.So I apologise in advance.

The subject of the day is every divorced person's favourite, the Ex. Despite being seperated and ultimately divorced from my first wife for 12+ years now, her influence in my life just doesn't seem to want to die. Primarily it centers today on the one remaining link I have with her, my son. There's also the small matter of her being a Brothel madam (no, I kid you not) while still using her married (read MY) name. She uses her maiden name for everything else, but retains her married name when it concerns the industry of female exploitation and prostitution. According to her it's a great industry, all perfectly legal. It's so wonderful in fact, that she doesn't want any link that will connect her family name to the business. I can't force her to change her name, so I'm stuck with that one.

My ex-wife is a clinically diagnosed Psychopath. I guess that most people think that their ex-partners are psychopaths, but not many have the medical documents to prove it. The dangerous part about a psychopath is that they are not easy to spot at first. By the time I figured out that there was something definitely wrong, I was married and we had a son. By that stage stubborn pride had kicked in and I wasn't going to be told by anyone else that I had made a mistake. It was very much about image. I take responsibility for continuing in the marriage for as long as I did. I could have made the choice earlier.

Psychopaths have classic symptoms if you know to look for them. I guess it's easier for someone on the outside to see these symptoms. When you're in the middle of things, it's not so clear. The worst effect on me was the pathological lying. The lies were not straightforward. They were lies, but they contained anough shreds of truth that you were left thinking that it might have been possible. They are very clever in that respect. "I saw a guy on a unicycle while on the way to work today". Well, she did go to work today, and I guess it's possible that there was someone riding a unicycle. You tell one such lie to a person and they can't really think of a watertight reason not to believe you. People don't automatically assume that a person is lying, so they don't look for the part of the story which doesn't quite hang together. It is only when you are subjected to the same type of lying over and over again, that you start to see a pattern emerging and then you start seeing the holes in the stories. The lies were only ever designed to get rid of an immediate problem, they were never planned out well enough to stand the test of time. That takes time to notice that. People who had limited or infrequent contact with us as a couple, thought that my ex-wife was wonderful. She could tell them exactly what they wanted to hear and behave exactly as they wanted. Those people were convinced that I must be the problem. People who knew us socially or professionally over a period of time started to become suspicious of her. Being the stupidly loyal husband that I was, I always defended her publically. As a result, we never really had a deep circle of close personal friends.

Employers were a different matter, and they weren't bound by such feelings of sentiment. She walked into fantastic jobs, way above her skill level, by virtue of her ability to win people over in the beginning. Extreme displays of superficial charm and extreme self worth, as I wrote about above. Again, classic psychopath signs. The problem is that psychopaths lack self-control and long term vision, so she was never able to hold the facade for long. It typically took an employer about 6 months to figure out that she wasn't what she said she was. Sometimes less if the employer bothered to take notice. I had a quick count up and figured that she had 20 different employers in the 14 years we were together, and that included 3 years when she didn't work at all. She had a valid reason (it seemed at the time) as to why she was going to be changing employer, and all of those were the fault of the employer. Classic psychopath symptom, lack of responsibility or guilt. It would take me years to find the truth out which invariable involved her being caught out by the employer lying about her work.

Psychopaths are adrenaline junkies. They are the blackbirds and magpies of the human world. If there is something new and shiny, they have to have it. They lack the ability to anticipate long-term consquences, it's all about the short term fix. As such, she was always hopping from one exciting thing to another, leaving a trail of discarded toys behind her. Being in a relationship with the same person for years is not always bursting with excitement every day. For most people, that's understandable and people are happy being comfortable with the person they are with. Sadly my ex-wife is not one of those people. The affairs started quite early on, and continued through to the day when I finally convinced her that she was better of being somewhere else. I learnt over the years that in order to get what I needed, I had to make her think that it was her idea. Naturally she was very eager to grasp the opportunity to display power and control, so she never bothered to look at what I was trying to do. I think I was one of the few people who had enough of an understanding of her mind to be able to achieve that. It was the one part of her I was able to control, because she never concerned herself about what other people were doing. It was always about her. The major weakness of a psychopath, grandiosity. Being almost childlike in her inability to foresee the consquences of her actions, coupled with an extreme view of self-superiority, she wasn't very good at following her tracks. Hotel receipts and cellphone messages were often in plain view, clearly forgotten about. While I knew about most, there were several which I only learned about years later from other family members. At first I was angry with them for not telling me at the time, but they replied that I would have likely defended my wife to them. Which is true. Like most short term relationships, the men involved would start to see through her after a couple of months and attempt to distance themselves. They were all married men which I think helped raise the excitement level for her.

Psychopaths are also drawn towards criminal activity. I think it must be for the feeling of superiority and adrenaline, the cornerstones of psychopathic behaviour. My ex-wife was caught by the authorities very early on in our relationship. Being young and niave, I thought that everyone makes one mistake and deserves a second chance. I didn't know at the time that this wasn't the first occassion. I took her at her very believeable word. It wasn't going to be the last time either. Future occasions, which I would only find out about later, involved theft from employers. The employers in question tried to avoid bad press by giving her the choice to resign immediately. Personally, while I can understand their need to preserve their company name, I  think it was a huge mistake. Giving her the choice to resign meant that there was never anything on record to serve as a warning to future employers. She could convince a new employer (and me) that she had chosen to leave her job of her own free will, in order to achieve future dreams (or some such crap). She left a train wreck of employment behind her, which earlier employers could have prevented by being tougher.

You can only burn so many people in a small country being word eventually gets around. That time has come for my ex-wife. Her professional world has spiralled downwards over the last decade and has come to rest where not many people would choose to be. Personal relationships have followed the same trend. As a true psychopath, a source of responsibility for everything which has gone wrong must be found. And that something, as it turns out, is me. Whereas I previously wasn't worth wasting a thought on, I seem to have bocome the prime thought. She no longer has any control over me, but what she can do is to influence the relationship between myself and my son. To this end, she has thrown herself into her work. I have to take my hat off to her, she has proven to be very successful. There is no way I can defend myself against her lies from this distance. As I said at the start, a psychopathic lie contains just enough truth to be taken as truthful at first glance. I know that there will come the day when my son will have heard enough of the lies to be able to see and understand the pattern. As everyone in the past has done. Until that day I'm just going to have to sit it out and hope that the damage is not ireversible. I wish I could say that I know for sure that I can undo this malicious mess, but right now I'm not convinced. And that hurts.