I started going to therapy after a long time of being back and forth about it.  I was skeptical of it, and I had one pretty bad experience, so I just simply did not go back to this one woman. I was going thru the list that was printed out for me and I called many of them, but I saw one on the list, I saw her picture and had an intuitive push to go to her.  So I did and it did seem to go well.  I could not believe, however, some of the things that I learned, nor could I believe the things that I was saying.  I still can't believe this is my life-that I was the person saying the things I was to her.  Where do these awful things happen-the movies?  No, not just the movies, I guess they happen to everyday people like you and me.  Here, I thought that I didn't need therapy, yet I could not believe what was  pouring out of my mouth. It was like I was watching someone else outside my body.  

I guess it's good to talk to a professional, someone who really understands sick people, if you just can't get a handle on it.  I was telling her stories of what has happened with me (something I'm told not to do in my support group) yet the stories have turned out to be incredibly valuable in understanding and filing in the blanks in this episode that I know as "my life."  I didn't like what I heard, but my whole existence became suddenly clear, all of the misery, chaos and destruction.  And then she told me something that I'd heard before from someone I knew well who was professor of psychology at our state university-that certain people in my life were sociopaths.  I just simply could not believe or fathom it.  It's like I heard something click in my mind and all the missing pieces came together. There was just a simple clarity to the whole thing: the police involvement, the brutality, the threats to kill, the lies, the times he and his friends would find people and beat them to a pulp for fun and enjoyment, the mocking bragging about how skilled he was getting at his beatings of me, of how much he enjoyed it. Yeah, it makes sense.

I remember the day there was talk in the family of summoning a psychiatrist to examine one of my relatives (there were two in the house that were like this, one took after the other).  Talk of serious derangement in behavior on the part of one of my siblings, that a doctor would be consulted to examine his behavior as everyone was perplexed about the things that he would do.  I remember him, once, pretending to be a homeless person at the bus stop just to get money (we were well off). He would do things like this frequently.

I ended up reading the book, "The Sociopath Next Door." I pretty much devoured it in one week.  One of the most enlightning books I have read in my entire life.  All of the behaviors, including the charm, being the top one, fit the bill. The doctor who wrote the book stated that patients would frequently come to her after a suicide attempt (victims of sociopaths).  And yes I fit this bill.  He even came to the hospital to see me.  She then told me that she thought I had ptsd, and asked me if I ever had anxiety attacks. I didn't until this weekend. But I'm just learning the extent of my repressed emotions (yes I guess that's the word) when I went to a book event with a friend and the author went way overboard talking about child abuse.  I left to my car, I just could not hear it anymore, and started hyperventilating when I got out there.

Lately, I don't see my being so emotional as a bad thing, but it sure is inconvenient to be crying all the time.  Hopefully this will taper off. Whatever has brought it all up now, I don't know, it just is.  I really thought I was living a great life, just busy and doing things, being productive, meeting goals, little did I know that my past was going to come and bite me in the a** big time when I least expected it. I had just developed worsening of my migraines, and when I went to the dr. for a shot, because the migraines were so bad...they recommended therapy, which I just didn't understand.  They thought that the migraines, while physically caused, were being made much worse by emotion and stress, and then the dam just burst when I did start therapy.  It was having a sexual predator at my work that triggered all of these buried things and deeply destabilized me.  It may be crystal clear to me now, that despite all of my positive motivation stuff, my spiritual beliefs, law of attraction stuff, blah blah, etc. success and good handling of affairs, why certain things may not be working.  Even though I think I've done "work," the reality is that I've been blind as a bat as far as people I've gotten involved with.  On the way out I told her, "I dated a guy that was diagnosed as a sociopath...I don't know how I attracted that."  How incredibly, amazingly insane of me not to see how I did attract it.  In retrospect, after this conversation we had-it makes perfect sense. I suppose when you live with the devil you are quite accustomed to him and all of his ways, after all, I used to live in the same house with him.  I would have been perfectly suited to accommodate another.  I suppose the one silver lining is realizing my sheer lack of sanity in this case. From what I understand it's people who doubt their own sanity who fare better overall, rather than being firmly convinced of it. You can always improve upon your flaws, but if you are convinced you have none down the well you go.  At least that's the way I see it.  I just need to come up for air.