Demean, Diminish, Destroy

Demean. Diminish. Destroy. That’s not a horror movie tagline. It’s the actual playbook, and if you’ve ever loved a sociopath, you know the dance steps by heart.

I hand my clients a copy of Martha Stout’s “Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door” more often than I hand out my own book. Stout spent her career studying people with no conscience, and her math is sobering. Roughly one in twenty-five of us walks around with zero capacity for guilt, empathy, or remorse. That’s not a monster in a mask. That’s the charming guy at the office holiday party. That’s the one who “teases” you in front of your friends until you start apologizing for existing.

Meet Bonnie

Bonnie is 34, red-haired, blue-eyed, and sharp enough to have built a genuinely great career in IT, the kind where people value her and pay her what she’s worth. She earned every bit of that. She grew up with a “broken mommy,” lost to addiction, and a dad who wasn’t around enough to notice. Bonnie escaped the torture of her home at sixteen and built her own foundation, brick by brick, with nobody holding the level for her.

Then she met Brad. Forty-eight, with a crazy ex, kids, but sexy and magnetic. He love-bombed her, and they spent two years “teasing,” i.e., demeaning her just enough so that she started to doubt the very things that got her out of that childhood alive. Brad never hit her. Sociopaths rarely need to. He just chipped away, teased, and diminished until the strong, successful woman everyone else saw started to feel like a fraud in her own house.

The Life She Almost Repeated

By her third regression session, Bonnie was ready to go deeper than the current relationship. We went looking for the root, and she landed in Paris, sometime in the 1600s, a young woman born into wealth and married off, against her will, to a rich older man her family had chosen for her.

She recognized him instantly. It was Brad.

There was no love in that marriage, only obligation and control. Bonnie described it as miserable, in that flat, matter-of-fact way clients get when they’re truly inside a memory instead of performing one. Then something shifted. She saw herself walking off with another man, finally free.

And then she stopped.

“Oops,” she said. “I think I poisoned Brad.”

I have been doing this work for more than twenty-five years, and that session still made me smile, right along with her. But underneath the humor was something worth sitting with. In that lifetime, divorce did not exist. A woman born into that family, married into that fortune, had exactly one exit available to her, and she took it.

You Don’t Need to Poison Him to Leave Him

Here’s where it got even more interesting. The father in that seventeenth-century life, the kind man who couldn’t protect his daughter from a marriage she never chose, showed up again. He’s now an ex-Marine and a VP at Bonnie’s company, the one who keeps stopping by her office with technical questions he clearly doesn’t need answered.

“Sweetheart,” I said, “he’s flirting with you.”

In the work I do, we travel with the same small circle of souls across lifetimes, something like two hundred of them, trading roles as we go. The controlling husband becomes the demeaning boyfriend. The powerless father becomes the kind colleague who finally sees you clearly. None of it is random, and none of it is a life sentence. It’s information.

I told Bonnie what I tell every client sitting across from a version of Brad. You have free will now. You don’t need poison or permission. You need honesty, mostly with yourself, about the fact that the love is gone and staying is costing you more than it’s giving you.

Why Good People Stay Too Long

If Bonnie’s mother had given her a foundation of self-love, self-respect, and self-esteem instead of addiction and absence, she never would have let a man like Brad get two years deep into demeaning her. That’s not a knock on Bonnie. That’s the real tragedy of growing up in a toxic home. You get so conditioned to absorb bad treatment that a sociopath doesn’t even have to work hard. You’ve already done half the job for him, because you’re used to abuse.

Bonnie is planning her escape now, and she’s going to thrive, since she already has everything she needs. Her only real problem was never realizing how special she is.

That’s the actual work I do. I don’t fix broken people. I show already amazing people the parts of themselves they’ve been trained to overlook, until they fall back in love with the person they were always supposed to be.

About Those Shoes

When I asked Bonnie for permission to share her story, dressed as she’d been in that regression in French silk and a truly enormous skirt, her first response wasn’t about Brad, or the poison, or the freedom on the other side of it.

“Oh,” she said, “but I had such beautiful shoes.”

I love her for that. Some part of us remembers the beauty even inside the cage. That’s usually a very good sign for what happens after you walk out of it.

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Ready to explore? Call or text me at (323) 933-4377 to schedule a FREE CONSULTATION.

Sending hope and love.

Stephanie