Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

by Jackson MacKenzie

You end up having to let go of your past understanding of human nature, building it back up from scratch.

most survivors end up feeling a kind of emptiness that cannot even be described as depression. It’s like your spirit has completely gone away. You feel numb to everything and everyone around you.

It feels hopeless at first, but your spirit is always with you. Wounded, for sure, but never gone. As you begin to discover self-respect and boundaries, it slowly starts to find its voice again.

Your spirit will return stronger than ever before, refusing to be treated that way again. You may encounter toxic people throughout your life, but you won’t let them stay for very long. You don’t have time for mind games and manipulation. You seek out kind, honest, and compassionate individuals. You know you deserve nothing less.

This newfound strength is the greatest gift of the psychopathic experience. And it is worth every second of the recovery process, because it will serve you for the rest of your life.

During these stages, you likely don’t even know that you encountered a psychopath. You blame yourself and feel that you will never be happy again. You act out in ways you never even imagined. You don’t yet understand how the abuse destroyed your confidence and identity—because you don’t even know to call it abuse. All you know is that you’re hurting more than you ever have in your life.

Your sex drive will oscillate between desire for your ex and the misery of thinking about what you no longer have. Psychologically, you are extremely raw and vulnerable from the identity erosion, but at this point you aren’t even aware that your identity was eroded.

You don’t yet understand the extent of the emotional abuse you have suffered. So instead of healing from their tactics, you are still a victim of them. You genuinely believe you deserve this—that you are nothing without them. That you are jealous, crazy, needy, clingy, and everything is your fault.

You feel wor...

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Love should be like a deep-rooted tree, not a sailboat. It should be stable and consistent, not conditional, based on changing situations—especially when half of your “mistakes” were perfectly reasonable reactions to unacceptable behavior.

Cutting contact with toxic people will transform your life. At first, it feels miserable—like you’re going cold turkey from an addiction. But as time goes on, you come to discover that each passing day brings unexpected new blessings. You begin to develop self-respect, boundaries, and true friendships. Instead of running around absorbing and forgiving everything, you spend time with people who do not behave in a way that requires constant explaining.

Given the chance, they will suck you back in with charm, only to resume the nightmare you remembered from the identity erosion.

They will lie pathologically, driving you out of your mind. They will engage in word salad, uprooting your entire healing process. As soon as they get their claws into you again, you will be dragged back into their manipulative world.

Believe it or not, you will reach a period when you could not care less about what they are doing or whom they are courting.

All survivors of psychopathic evil know how extremely difficult it is to cut ties with a psychopath. And then once No Contact is established, survivors find themselves trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered hearts and lives.

The good news is that yes, closure is possible. And no, it will not come from the psychopaths! It must come from within.

let go of the image you had of the person you loved. Unfortunately and sadly, that person never existed. He or she was only an illusion, a mask the psychopath created in order to mirror and manipulate you.

He seemed to understand me so well, and we had all the right things in common. It almost felt too good to be true! Then, when I discovered that he had so deeply betrayed me, in ways I never imagined were possible, I realized it always was too good to be true. All of it was a lie . . . except for me and my feelings for him. I was real, and my feelings were real.

in the midst of the intense pain, I held on to the light—the light of truth—that was just barely left in my soul. Letting go of the “dream man” he pretended to be brought me closer to my own heart.

psychopaths are abnormal! At the time of the encounter, you did not know that such people existed. You were innocent.

By learning to recognize the common tactics and games of psychopathic predators, you will realize that the abuse was never your fault. By learning how the psychopathic mind works, you will realize you were set up from the very beginning. And when it all begins to click for you, that is when you start to reclaim your power!

it is by facing the pain and moving through it that we find beauty, because on the other side of our deepest suffering, we have the opportunity to experience the greatest joy.

Amazingly, if you step into the pain instead of running from it, you begin to see who you are at a deeper level. You develop self-respect and self-love and new confidence. You learn to trust your intuition. And when you are able to trust yourself, then you will start to find others who are worthy of your trust.

I knew that I could not stop him from lying to and manipulating and hurting others. I knew I could not convince his new target of the truth. And I knew I could not make him feel remorse for what he did to me. What I could do was focus on my own healing and my own life. When I made the choice to do that, one day at a time, I gradually felt happier and more peaceful.

You will never receive traditional “closure” from the psychopath. But the light you can discover within your own soul is so much better!

You will become so consumed by psychopathy that you’ll actually begin to understand how the psychopath’s mind works. You’ll recognize not just the red flags and verbal abuse, but the sadistic pleasure they felt when they destroyed you, the silence—even laughter—that you received when you were begging and crying.

You feel disgusted. You realize you were never loved—just another target in a never-ending cycle. You start to see that you’ve never behaved like this in any other relationship, and it wasn’t because they were special. It was because they were actively working against you from the moment they chose you.

You look back at all of the things that once made you feel paranoid, now able to see that every instance of abuse and neglect was calculated and intentional. And finally, you come to the horrifying realization that the love of your life—the person you trusted with all your heart—set you up for failure since the very beginning.

Because they have no identity of their own, the psychopath is able to become exactly what their target seeks in a romantic partner.

During this time, they are simply listening to you describe your hopes and dreams, and then producing an exaggerated mirror image of everything you’ve shared with them. They use this manufactured “connection” to build immediate trust, quickly leading you to believe that you’ve found your perfect soul mate.

They start to lure in denounced former lovers and potential future mates with ambiguous hints and inside jokes, subtly ensuring that you see it all. You begin to feel like you’re playing detective, when actually the clues are being spoon-fed to you. These hints make you feel jealous and crazy as you watch your soul mate openly idealize other targets.

If you point out the fact that something has changed, you will be deemed “crazy” or “hypersensitive.”

psychopaths are keenly aware of the impact that their behavior has on others. That’s half the fun for them—watching people suffer. They pick up on insecurities and vulnerabilities in a heartbeat, and then make the conscious choice to exploit those qualities.

They know the difference between right and wrong, and simply choose to steamroll straight through it.

They did not feel even a small amount of love for you, even when they claimed you were the only one who ever made them feel this way. No, the entire time they were just closely observing you, patiently waiting for the fun to start. Did you notice that as soon as you fell in love and became comfortable in the relationship, that’s when the emotional abuse started? From there, you spent the rest of the relationship frantically trying to revitalize the soul mate they once pretended to be.

The problem is, many survivors equate the psychopath’s insatiable drive for attention with some sort of childlike insecurity. But they’re not insecure. They love themselves. They love the way they look, the way they can trick everyone around them, and the way their victims beg for them.

They have no soul. They want to be worshiped and nothing else.

They want your attention so that they can consume you and then destroy you. They saw you as disposable trash.

They call you needy, jealous, clingy, controlling, evil, and crazy, and you may start to believe you actually do act this way. But let me ask you this: Have you ever felt that way in any normal relationship or friendship? Do you feel that way around your Constant? No.

You became a receptacle for the psychopath’s poison. But with time and No Contact, you begin to see that you don’t display any of those characteristics when you’re not around them. In fact, you seem to become more gentle, empathetic, and compassionate—closer to your most genuine self. That is the real you.

boundaries and self-respect are completely foreign to you at this point. So when you begin to manifest these things, you feel like a selfish, abrasive jerk. When in reality, you’ve just stopped playing the role of a selfless doormat.

Just because you have to tell someone off or demand a bit of respect does not make you psychopathic. It makes you stronger. Every time you stand up for yourself, a part of your spirit comes back to life.

Don’t let your understanding of how you were manipulated stop you from enjoying one of the nicest things in life: positive energy.

Only now are you beginning to realize how much you truly lost. How much you uprooted in your own life to make room for this evil person. Not just friends, money, and life experiences—but also your happiness. Your kind understanding of the world has been shattered. Instead of giving people the benefit of the doubt, you suddenly have trouble trusting. You begin to notice a constant feeling of dread and tightness in your chest—the demon that wraps its claws around your heart, always there to remind you of everything you want to forget.

eventually, this alone time actually becomes quite pleasant. Without so much feedback, you finally have a chance to focus on some pressing internal struggles. With no one’s judgments but our own, we have this great opportunity to discover who we truly are. It is during this alone time that we begin to rebuild our identity from scratch, after being wiped out by whatever darkness we encountered.

You find that the most obscure triggers set you off, unable to enjoy a date or some time with an old friend. You’re on high alert the entire time, constantly looking out for manipulation and red flags.

That feeling of dread in your heart never seems to go away—warning you that anyone and everyone could be out to hurt you.

Your opinions of others will oscillate between positive and negative, just like they did for the psychopath. You are now applying the horror you experienced to every aspect of your life, even though the psychopath has been gone for quite some time.