Reclaiming Your Life by Claudia Mosovici

Reclaiming Your Life:
Asserting Your Agency and Your Boundaries
By Claudia Moscovici

This is an excerpt from the last chapter of Dangerous Liasions by Claudia Moscovici. I read this chapter before starting the book.
 
 
Many of the women who love psychopaths intuitively know they’re dealing with a sick man.
Yet they feel like they have invested too much for too long into the relationship to give up on him. In addition, as we’ve seen, their self-confidence and sense of reality have been severely undermined. They may tell them selves, hoping against hope, that their love and patience will fix the dangerous man. Or after spending fifteen years with him, they can’t throw away the entirety of their youth, as if those years together were all for nothing. Sandra L. Brown M.A. addresses this reasoning with a rhetorical question that is actually quite meaningful. She asks: what will the next fifteen years of your life look like with the psychopath?
 
The answer to this question can’t possibly be positive, given the abuse gets worse over time and the disorder isn’t fixable. They like the challenge of destroying a strong person. We see psychopaths use their partner’s strengths against them. They use women’s trust to deceive and cheat on them as well as, more generally, to play mind games. They isolate women. They undermine the confidence of women by focusing on their real or imaginary weaknesses. It’s not unusual to develop neuroses, PTSD and eating disorders while involved with the psychopath. He will even cultivate those maladies and lead you to focus obsessively on them rather than on your strengths and achievements, to keep you under his thumb.
 
We’ve also observed how psychopaths brainwash women who have common sense and psychological perspicacity. Once again, they select intelligent women because such individuals present more of a challenge in their sadistic power games. We’ve seen how psychopaths use women’s capacity to love and their tenacity –their high emotional investment in the relationship- to keep them on the hook. They lure them with strategic withdrawals and empty promises to improve, which are belied by consistent, though often hidden, abuse. They dangle whatever women want most in life before their eyes-true love, fidelity, commitment, a happy life together, returning to the romantic and exciting honeymoon phase of the relationship-only to make conditional demands, that erode their partners’ dignity and self-respect.
 
To conteract these strategies and reclaim your life, you need to reassert your agency, your strength and your boundaries. You need to recognize that you are not just a passive victim of the psychopaths control, even if you were, indeed, victimized by him. You have agency. You wiillingy began the relationship with the psychopath. You willingly stayed with him despite seeing red flags. You may have willingly taken him back after discovering that he repeatedly lied and cheated. You may have also engaged in some immoral behaviors to keep him in your life. You may have hurt or neglected those who loved you for his sake. Eacg step you took as a couple was not just his doing. It was also yours. Brown points out that seeing yourself as an agent in your life decisions doesn’t imply denying the fact that the psychopath has hurt you or minimize the extent of your pain. It just shows that you have the power to determine your life choices. Just as you chose to become involved and stay with a psychopath, you also have the power to disengage from him for good!
 
…You don’t need a psychopath to identify your qualities and flaws. You don’t need his manipulative criticisms that undermine your self confidence. You don’t need his fake and conditional flattery to feel good about yourself. You know who you are. And, deep inside, after so much mistreatment at your hands, you know that it is clearly in your best interest to leave the dangerous man and end the sick relationshiop with him. Your preservation, not just your self esteem, is at stake.
 
Exercising your agency, also implies reasserting your strength and your boundaries. If you stayed with a psychopathic partner it’s because he undermined the strength that he originally admired in you and drew him to you, like a parasite to its host, to destroy you. You can find that inner strength again to live your life free of him. The longer you will be from his noxious influence, the stronger you will grow. The psychopath has strung you along by eroding your boundaries: your moral sense of right and wrong, your sexual boundaries and your empathy. When you draw the line and say NO MORE and mean it, the psychopath loses and you win back your life. By way of contrast, each time what he tells you, each time you override your intuition to believe his lies, each time you violate your sense of right and wrong, each time you hurt or neglect those who care about you, each time you engage in perverse sexual actsjust to please him, he wins and you lose.
 
The women who stay with psychopaths may be strong women yet they lack sufficiently strong boundaries. They may strong in other areas of life but they become weak as far as their personal relations with the psychopath. Staying with a psychopath indicates that they’re willing to compromise their values, their relationships and their standards to please a very disordered man.
 
To reclaim your autonomy and your strength, you need to reassert your boundaries. The negative experience with the psychopath has no doubt made you more aware than ever of what you stand for since you were repeatedly pressured by him to lower your standards and violate your principles. Each time you did that it hurt because you lost not only part of your vales, but also- and more importantly-part of yourself.
 
Asserting the limits of the person you are and what you stand for constitutes an essential step towards rejecting the psychopath. Most likely, he won’t even stay with you if you assert yourself and don’t give a single inch to him anymore. As a narcissist, he can’t tolerate any real equality in a romantic relationship. He has to be “top dog.” He constantly reaffirms this status through the power he exercises over you. Because he doesn’t regard you or anyone else as his equal, the psychopath can’t offer any genuine respect for your values, your activities, your needs, and your identity. His fake charm, his controlling and possessive attention, his disingenuous and manipulative flattery and empty romantic gestures ARE NOT the same thing as genuine love, mutual caring and respect.
 
As’ we’ve seen a psychopath is incapable of having a caring and equal relationship with anyone. For this reason, psychopaths seelk women who are strong but exceedingly flexible; women whose boundaries they can erode and whose identities they can distort. If you regain your sense of idenity and boundaries, you become much less vulnerable to psychopathic seduction and control. Psychopaths are parasites who want to suck the lifeblood-the emotions, confidence and strength- out of you. As you identiy blends into his, revolves around his ever changing needs. The more you violate what you stand for and who you are to please the psychopath, the more you dissolve into the dangerous relationship with him.
 
As Brown states: “Boundaries are indicators of where we start and end, and where other people atart and end. We set limits-or boundaries-in relationships to protect our bodily selves and dignity…Drawing your identity from a dangerous man…will have dangerous outcomes.
 
Not every misfortunate experience has a silver lining. Some, like fatal illnesses, may be purely tragic. Fortunately, overcoming a relationship with a dangerous man is one of the experiences that does have a silver lining. After having been involved with a psychopath for whom love means conquest, ownership and dominance, a normal relationship with a decent, respectful and honest partner will seem almost miraculous by comparison. Nothing about healthy human bonds can ever be taken for granted again after one has experienced the worse life has to offer.
 
Clearly, in choosing a psychopath you lost part of yourself and wasted part of your life.  Such a destructive relationship came at a cost. Fortunately, you still have the power of choice as to how your life will continue. You don’t have to throw away the rest of your life to him. This experience may have weakened you in some resects. But if you utilize it the right way, it can and will make you a much stronger person. Whatever time, energy, and emotion you spent on the psychopath weren’t completely wasted. They have taught you how to know and defend the limits of your identity and values. They have taught you to appreciate and love in life and who to reject and keep out. They have revealed your strengths and your limitations. They have made you more independent, since you’ve seen how flattery and criticism by others can function as a form of mind control.
 
It’s now up to you to decide if you will allow the psychopath to continue to undermine your dignity and the quality of your life or if you will rely upon your strengths and true emotional bonds with others to live the kind of moral, honest and fulfilling life that you deserve. The psychopath has kept you under his control by narrowing and intensifying your range of experiences. You consequently focus only on him and on how to twist yourself, like a fish on a hook, to please him.  You can reverse this process. You cab broaden the sphere of your existence by expanding your interests and focusing on those who deserve your affection including yourself. In fact, you can do more than that by helping inform others suffering at the hands of psychopathic partners about this dangerous and camouflaged predator. Any of us can be adversely affected when we allow distorted individuals into our lives. Therefore, knowledge is the most essential form of self defense for all of us.
 
Widespread information about physical and emotional abuse has saved millions of people from domestic violence. Spreading information about psychopathy may help save millions of additional lives from harm. Ironically, the disordered man who wanted to destroy you both morally and emotionally can give your life a higher, more other-regarding purpose. In the past, you may have relegated too many of your decisions to the psychopath. But, ultimately, the power of choice in what you do with the rest of your life lies in your hands, not his.