Welcome to the board! You will find lots of support to get you through the early stages of NC. You might want to start by visiting Group Home on the Home page. You'll find lots of articles there that will explain what you are going through and clarify so much of what you are dealing with.I'll copy and paste one for you........


Relationship Time Cycle

From Women Who Love Psychopaths, by Sandra Brown



While she is having the romance of her life, the psychopath is in various phases of contact and relationship with a multitude of others. Even

if she does not find out about others, it doesnt mean they dont exist.

Sometimes, it years later that women come across the evidence of what he

was really doing.



Given his extraversion, dominance, brain malfunctions, lack of moral

reasoning, and hyper sexuality, most psychopaths dont even know the

true meaning of monogamy. We sarcastically refer to their concept as

serial monogamy, they are monogamous in many relationships at one

time! Since they hate to be alone, bored and cant say no to a perceived

reward of extra, curricular sex, infidelity is imminent even in the beginning

of her relationship with him.



The stages of the relationship time line listed below are multiple stages existing at one time with multiple people. The women in our survey

were just ONE of many that were involved in these stages of relationship

with the psychopath.



The Psychopaths Relationship Circle

Pre

Middle

End

Post



The PreStage: He is trolling. Online, out in the physical world, at work, in the neighborhood, anywhere. He is looking and testing the waters of connection with other women and men. He measures his possibilities by

eye contact, boundary violations, and other cues and clues that hint to him

someone is an open target. He could have many women and men that he is

in this testing phase with;trying out the waters before he moves in to

lure.



The Early Stage: He moves in to make more contact with those he has his eye on. He may have multiple cell phones, multiple email accounts or a dozen other ways that he keeps himself available for contact with other male and female potential sex partners. (Even psychopaths who allege they are not gay may engage in same sex activity.) In the early stage partners are ruled in and out by their levels of availability. He will only troll for so long and will then look for those who are willing to take it to the next level.



The Middle Stage: He is having regular contact and sex with numerous partners which can include another semi full life with these other sexual partners. The woman who is in his life may begin to find unusual behaviors while in their romancing or luring stage. He may be 24/7 with her and then she will not have contact with him for days.



Plausible excuses he gives cover for where he was, but texts, pages, phone calls, emails and other suspicious behaviors from others can begin even as early as the honeymoon phase with her. Thats because he has multiple relationships that he has been in for quite some time probably before her.



The End Stage: He is constantly ending the relationship with someone at some time. The end of the relationship comes for various reasons, some are on to him and confront, others wont give him money or sex any longer, he has enough other relationships going and needs to cut some off. Various reasons can exist why someone gets the relationship axe from the psychopath.



The Post Stage: A time period extending after the formal end of the relationship with her or with others. Those that the psychopath has

broken up with are never off the speed dial and never out of the

Relationship Circle even if he has not contacted them in years! Women in

current relationships who find out about his affairs often feel that if he

says he has stopped fooling around than he has stopped contact with

others. While he may take a hiatus to try to win back one of the womens

loyalty, no one ever really leaves a psychopaths life.



Women have said they have heard from him out of the blue 6 months, 10 years LATER after the break up. He calls as if nothing has happened, says she popped into his mind and he wanted to check on her to tell her how much he always cared for her. Given both his boredom and excitement seeking, women must know that they, nor any other lover, ever really flies off his radar for long.



Conclusion

The relationships circle exemplifies the strategic targeting that psychopaths use of multiple relationships at one time. While woman #1 is basking in the hyper focus of his attention, he is trolling, in the middle of, and ending, multiple other relationships with men and women. His multiple relationships that are beginning, enduring, and ending no doubt play into her relationship dynamics with the psychopath. Of course, woman #1 is high on oxytocin and believes she just met her soulmate

WHY YOU ONLY REMEMBER THE GOOD STUFF OF A BAD RELATIONSHIP
PART I

by Sandra L. Brown, M.A.

Over and over again women are puzzled by their own process in trying to recover from a pathological relationship. What is puzzling is that despite the treatment they received by him, despite the absolute mind screwing he did to her emotions, not only is the attraction still VERY INTENSE but also the POSITIVE memories still remain strong.

Woman after woman says the same thing that when it comes to remaining strong in not contacting him (what we call Starving the Vampire) she struggles to pull up (and maintain the pulled up) negative memories of him and his behavior that could help her keep strong and detached.

But why? Why are the positive memories floating around in her head freely and strongly and yet the bad memories are stuffed in a mind closet full of fuzzy cobwebs that prevent her from actively
reacting to those memories?

There are a couple of reasons of which we will discuss today only the first one. Lets think of your mind like a computer. Memories are stored much like they are stored on a computer. When there is pain and trauma, memories are stored differently then when its a positive memory. Pulling up the negative memories from your hard drive is different than pulling up a memory that is on your desk top as an icon emblem.

Traumatic memories get fragmented on their way to being stored on the hard drive. They get divided up into more than one file. In one file is the emotional feelings, another file is the sights, another file the sounds, another file the physical sensations.

But a WHOLE and complete memory is made up of ALL those files TOGETHER AT THE SAME TIME what you emotionally felt, saw, heard, and physically experienced. Not just one piece of it and not just the positive memory of it. A memory is good + bad = complete.

But when things are traumatic, (or stressful) the mind seperates the whole experience into smaller bits and pieces and then stores them seperately in the mind because its less painful that way.

When women try to remind themselves why they should not be with him, they might get flashes of the bad memory but strangely, the emotional feelings are NOT attached to it. They wonder where did the feelings go? They can see the bad event but they dont feel much about what they remember.

If you are playing a movie without the sound, how do you know what the actors are passionately feeling? Its the same thing with this traumatic recall of memories. You might see the video but not hear the pain in the voices. The negative or traumatic memory is divided up into several files and you are only accessing one of the files in a place where you have stored the positive aspects of the relationship.

To complicate things further, positive memories are not stored like negative memories. They are not divided up into other files. They do not need to be they are not traumatic.

So when you remember a time when the relationship was good or cuddly or the early parts of the relationships which are notoriously honeymoonish, the whole memory comes up the emotional feelings, the visual, the auditory, the sensations. You have a WHOLE and STRONG memory with that. Of course that is WAY MORE appealing to have a memory that is not only GOOD but one in which you feel all the powerful aspects of it as well.

Now, close your eyes and pull up a negative memory can you feel the difference? You might see it but not feel it. Or hear it and not see much of it. Or feel a physical sensation of it but not the emotional piece that SHOULD go with the physical sensation. No matter what your experience is of the negative emotion, it is probably fragmented in some way.

Negative and traumatic memories are often incomplete memories they are memory fragments floating all over your computer/mind. They are small files holding tiny bits of info that have fragmented your sense of the whole complete memory. These distorted and broken memory fragments are easily lost in your mind.

If you have grown up in an abusive or alcoholic home, you were already subconsciously trained how to seperate out memories like this. If your abuse was severe enough early on, your mind just automatically does this anyway if you get scared, or someone raises their voice, or you feel fear in anyway your
brain starts breaking down the painful experience so its easier for you to cope with.

You'll find these articles in the NEWS section on the home page. The following article was a life-line for me in the early stages of NC. I had the title...STARVE THE VAMPIRE.... as screensavers on my phone and laptop. It was on my fridge and the bathroom mirror. You can do this. One day at a time. Unplug that umbilical cord that he has stuck into you and cut off his supply. I used to picture him with his shark eyes, wandering around looking for the next victim to plug into and start sucking the life out of them.


STARVE THE VAMPIRE

by Sandra Brown, MA


Pathological persons are energy and emotional vampires. They live off of your emotional content. Part of their personality deficit is the lack of a stable and consistent inner core of a self concept so they need constant attention, distraction, and identity management from which they draw their identity.

Lots of their identity is acquired from their relationships since internally there is so little core self to draw from. This is part of the reason they are so exhausting. In order to get their emotional blood supply from you, they hook you into conversations or arguments or any kind of response they can get from you. They live vicariously thru your own emotional expressions of love, frustration, confusion, etc. It does not always matter what emotion is fed to the vampire (although narcissists like adoration) but just that there is SOME content is enough for them, even your tears, or your screams, or your insults. It does not matter, they just need something, anything from you in the way of content. If they do not get the blood supply/emotional content from you, they will seek elsewhere. (Remember Dracula? He just moved from town to town taking it where he could get it?)

When you begin to break up (read my How to Break Up With a Dangerous Man E-book) he will fear the loss of emotional supply. He wont fear losing you so much as he will getting his identity and his sense of self from you and/or the relationship. He fears the loss of self or who am I without her? This is a very fragmented ego state, one which only exists thru relationships with others.

So when you try to break up, he will continue to contact you which is why they are hard to break up with (read my book). They are predictable in their approaches to get you to respond to them (you are feeding the vampire his emotional blood supply every time you talk to him). These are some of his approaches and if you can get a bag of popcorn and just watch it like it was a LifeTime for Women movie and detach from it, you will see a whole movie pan out like this:

One contact he is angry, blaming, shaming
When you dont respond to that verbally or emotionally (think like you are lobotomized with no facial expression, that is what I want women to do with these men)

Then one contact will be sweet, loving, buy you things
When you dont respond

He will promise to do what youve asked for years. go to counseling, church, take meds, be nice, go to anger management
When you dont respond

He will get angry again--say you arent working on the relate which is why its gonna fail
When you dont respond

He will quit calling for a while to make it look like hes moved on (They are boomerangs, they ALWAYS come back a few times.)
When you dont respond

He will indicate he found someone else or had sex with someone else
When you dont respond

(Are you enjoying the popcorn and movie about now??)

He becomes sick, he doesnt know what this mysterious illness is, or he has prostate cancer, MS, some other lethal disease
When you dont respond

He will just go back to drinking/drugging/dealing/driving too fast/etc.
When you dont respond

He will kill himself, leave the area, never see you again
When you dont respond

He will take the kids, drag your ass thru court, threaten to physically harm you
When you dont respond

He will tell you he is dating someone you hate or his previous girlfriend or wife
When you dont respond

It will come full circle and will begin again, at the top of this list.

When I do phone counseling, its all the same stories. I know that women think that their experiences are unique. But pathology is all the same--these people arent very creative and dont deviate much from the strict internal structure that is associated with pathology. They ONLY react in certain ways so for me, its pretty easy to predict. Once you are able to understand this, you can predict his sad/silly/stupid reactions to a break up.

Since they live off of your emotion and NEED it, the sooner you starve him out by having no contact and if you have to because of your kids, no words exchanged and no emotional content on your face, the vampire will flee to the next available source to be fed.

When women dont disconnect once they understand the feeding and maintenance of pathologicals, they are doing it because SHE wants to remain. The ball is then in your court to figure out where you are still hung up so you can disconnect. This is not a judgment about women not being able to leave. It is a POINTER to a place where the disengagement has hit a snag. Simply notice where the snag IS so that something can be done.

As soon as you are ready to really make the break, buy the Break Up book and then starve THE VAMPIRE. I am going to have fridge magnets made with that on there so women remember daily to not feed the vampire who is lurking near by.

Courtesy Sandra Brown at
http://saferelationshipsmagazine.com/

Thank you so much for all of this laundrygirl. It does really help to keep reminding myself of what's driving his behaviour. I think the key comment for me is

When women dont disconnect once they understand the feeding and maintenance of pathologicals, they are doing it because SHE wants to remain. The ball is then in your court to figure out where you are still hung up so you can disconnect. This is not a judgment about women not being able to leave. It is a POINTER to a place where the disengagement has hit a snag. Simply notice where the snag IS so that something can be done.

I want to start focusing on this and not on him. I think that's the only way out of this?

It is the way out, otherwise, it is years later and you are bitter, angry and you are STILL not over him OR you have found another guy just like him.
The Law of Attraction--we have to re-program what we are actually energetically attracting.
It is hard, hard, hard work and it's scary because we have to face our fears of abandonment, rejection and ultimately being alone.
I miss my ex every day but I am aware, in only a short time, that my life is better without him in it. It was too hard, chaotic, sad, frustrating and empty. I had no security and who needs that?
He had me and I'm not done but I am taking care of myself in this better than I ever had--in part because I have this forum to come to. There are not enough ears to have listened to me throughout this process and it's too hard on friends after a while.
Blessings.

I just joined this site. These are some amazing but really difficult things to read. It's been my life for 3 years. I have tried to leave so many times. He has almost completely ruined my life. My friends (the few who know) have tried to get me to leave but there is something so strong that I always called our "connection." Wow, reading the above is just intense.
I guess I keep questioning, even if he is doing a lot of stuff I don't know or understand, are you saying psychopaths are always cheating?
Are they always that intensely cheating? I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter in some ways but I would like to believe he had some of the character I felt he did.

krainer they are not always intensely cheating, but the way in which they manipulate your emotions, making you feel sad, or guilty, or apologetic for being who you are, is actually the more telling aspect. Even if someone is not cheating you by being in another relationship, they can still have you tip-toeing around them for fear of their unrpredictable moods and reactions. They can also withdraw from a relationship with no warning AFTER they have got you hooked to them like some form of emotional drug. Most of us are recovering from such effects of being in relationships with dangerous, insecure, narcissistic men who are often quite charming, intelligent and otherwise undetectable to the casual observer.

Fisherking...welcome...you will find so much support and wonderful information here...keep coming back, this place has been a llifeline to me for the past few months.
I also was married to an abusive alcoholic for 20 years. Believe me this fact is not to be minimalized or discarded. When you are ready, begin to look at the issues from the marriage. It is very likely that these are the real issues that are caussing the addiction. And make no mistake...it is an addiction...one of the worst...but No contact will help you to heal...and you can do it. I know you can, because I am doing it and I didnt think I could...
Hugs and Blessings to you.

Thank you cndy2010, I'm sure you're right about the effect of my marriage. By the way my husband was never ever abusive. But i have struggled to come to terms with what feels like an abandonment of me and our children. Drinking is more important to him - and, guess what? He, too, tells me he loves me - whilst being incapable of being loving in any way.
So, I'm sure it's no coincidence that I ended up with my xn, who was full on loving straight away, wanted to marry me and, get this, had changed job and moved in with me within three months of meeting. I must have been crazy. But, it really was like a high, I felt soooo kind of safe and wanted. And I still remember the very first time he turned on me, becoming really hating and angry over nothing. It felt like a knife in my stomach and I really thought I'd done something wrong.
Of course, it became a horribly predictable pattern after a while.
What I wanted to say was that I have been NC for nearly 2 weeks now. But he keeps ringing and leaving messages. One even came through whilst I've been writing this. It seems really obsessive behaviour and is starting to make me nervous. Should I contact him to tell him to stop or will that make it worse?
Thanks to everyone

OMG thank you to Laundrygirl for the awesome post concerning the psycopath lover and Relationship Time Cycle. I am absolutely REELING from the truth and familiarity of the patterns outlined here. How could I have lived so long and not connected the dots to see this. It hurts so much because I am taking it personally at first glance, and then I think--WAIT, it's not about me, I'm really just another notch on his belt. I think because we gals really LOVE these heels, and for some reason believe they will love us back, we keep taking the current crap in anticipation for it to be over for the worst. After we've peeled the onion and cried all the tears, a prince charming is going to jump of of the pit of the onion. NOT! All we'll get is the pits. I know it, I know it IS like an addiction. I truly believe that this group interaction can help, heal and save us from ruining our lives and those of our beloved friends and family, who look on in horror and disgust. I thank God I found this group. Love to you all!

all i can say is WOW....words can not explain how enlightening this information has been. Its means so much to me to finally find somewhere that not only understands what I've experienced with that man, but can explain a diagnosis... thank you!! 'starve the vampire'... i CAN and WILL do this

Fisherking...IMO it's probably best to not contact him at all, he already knows, especially if you havent had contact in 2 weeks. Your safety is of primary concern.

As far as abuse goes -- your one of the lucky ones. I've attended many many AlAnon meetings over the years and abuse on many levels is prevalent among substance addicts.

@ shabari, thank you. I was extremely emotion as I wrote that. It's funny how even 2 days since I wrote that I am further along in my journey. Thank you!