Hi guys I just wanted to hit a few points and tell you about some stuff I been reading.

I am reading a book called quiet power by Susan Cain. It is really helping understand my personality as an introvert and how my ex (the sociopath) used my introversion against me to play head games and control me.

This book is geared for teens but it is really helping me understand there is nothing wrong with me and that I have strengths and worth too. I can't wait to read the book she wrote for adults.

I now see that my ex used relational agression against me to isolate me and guilt me into avoiding my friends and family and staying with him out of fear of never finding anyone else. This is a tactic typically utilized by preteen and teen girls who bully and abuse thru peer pressure and threats of "you won't be my friend anymore if..." Or "I will tell everyone (blank) if you don't..."

These tactics never worked on me as a youth. I simply avoided making friends if they acted this way. But as an adult, coming from a man, I never saw that it was the same childish behaviour.

I naturally am a loner and introvert, and he latched onto this, using my strengths of empathy and deep thinking against me. He used my need for me time as an excuse to cheat on me. He also used it to encourage me to avoid friends, eventually isolating then abusing me.

I also am reading a behavioral book called Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith. So far some of the book feels confusing, and I'm not sure I agree with everything he is saying, but he does make some good points that explain why people do some of the things they do.

One good case he makes is that he demolishes the notion that everyone is some special unique snowflake. We aren't. Contantly competing and comparing over who is better and who has more is self destructive behavior as well as destructive to relationships. He says Americans are taught to be like this from a young age.

After he bashed commercials and fairy tales with happy endings, I began to come to a huge realization. This is why so many people I meet seem to think that at some point in their life every thing will be perfect, or they always think something external is causing their misery, yet when they get what they think they want, they want something else and are still miserable.

I have had friends and dates who seemed to think that at some point in their life they could just go on vacation and never worry again. In the triggers book, the author explains how unrealistic and unhealthy this is. Thinking like this is not going to bring us happiness. And I mean duh how could it? If you contantly think things will be happy in future then you aren't happy in present. Not saying you can't have goals or look forward to things, you just can't put life on hold and live like things will soon be happily ever after.

When I was with my ex, he conned me alot by making excuses for his behavior and saying things would be better later, when really they weren't ever going to get better because he was a horrible person. I ignorantly thought that all relationships are that way.

Another thing I learned from the triggers book is that your environment is the devil. He explains that a person's environment influences their personality and actions more than they realize until after they are out of that environment.

This really hit home for me in my search to understand what happened to me. My ex's first move to turn me into prey was to demand I moved in with him after 3 weeks of dating. Never having had a bf or knowing anyone to model my relationship on, I didn't know how weird that was. I grew up being fed a steady stream of fairytale bullshit, so I thought we were moving so fast because it was true love or some such. He begged and pleaded for me to move in with him. He threatened to kill himself, he bribed me. Finally I took a few things and said I would come stay, just to get him to stop bothering me. I wish I had never made that choice but I wanted to get away from my abusive mother and job.

That was my mistake tho. By changing my environment I slowly started losing myself. By allowing him to pull my strings to move there, I let him know how to manipulate me. Once he had me isolated in his house, it was a cinch to manipulate my environment to play head games and make me out to have something wrong with me. I allowed so many things to happen that shouldn't have.

In the book, Marshall talks about how a person's morals can even be skewed or pressured and they don't even realize it. The environment is responsible.

This reminded me of something I read in college psychology class about irrational behavior. There was an experiment done with German Shepherd dogs and electric fence. At first the dogs got shocked predictably and were then able to avoid shocks by doing what the experimenters wanted. But then the experimenters just started shocking them randomly for no reason. The dogs just gave up and didn't even try to avoid the fences or escape, they just endured the shocks.

We abused are these dogs. Our abusers manipulated our environment to alter our behavior so that they could isolate, control, and abuse us. We didn't understand or see it coming. Often we thought it was normal even if it felt wrong, because we either didn't know any better or our altered environment and people we were allowed to be around influenced us to do wrong things or let wrong things happen. Don't blame yourself, blame your environment, blame your altered state of being. Stop guilt tripping. We are victims.

I hope some of you read this and go find the suggested books at your local library or online somewhere. I feel like reading these books helped me understand myself and what happened better.

I'm left thinking about those dogs and the animal cruelty. What happened to them after? Did they die? Did they get to go to nice loving homes afterward with children? If so, in how many of those cases did they turn on and attack their new families because they were so messed up? Will that happen to me one day? I hope not.