When Soul Mates Are Old Enemies

How Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Psychopaths Love Bomb Their Way In

Have you been tricked into loving a scoundrel? You’re not alone!

Every one of these women thought she’d found the love of her life. Every one of them was wrong, in exactly the same way. I’ve watched this pattern often enough, in my office, that I can usually see it coming before my client can. I want you to be able to see it too.

Lisa

Lisa was thirty-seven, a doctor, sharp and put-together in every part of her life except one. She came to see me “out of her mind obsessed” over a man. She’d met Francisco, charming and twenty-five, at a downtown salsa club two years earlier. He swept her off her feet, literally. “The sex was so hot,” she told me. “So intense. Real.”

Francisco seemed devoted to her completely. He wooed her with funny, corny musical cards until she fell hard. He told her he was enrolled at LA City College, working toward a degree in architecture. Over two years, she helped him financially.

“I know he’s my soul mate,” she cried. “But he’s gone. And I don’t know what happened. What did I do wrong? I can’t get him out of my mind. I’m going crazy.”

She hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d been love bombed: told she mattered more than anyone else ever had, until she believed it enough to stop asking questions.

Jenny

Jenny was a thirty-five-year-old family law attorney. She found out her husband of ten years had been sleeping with a twenty-three-year-old pole dancer, and she only found out because her doctor told her she had genital warts.

Her whole life turned upside down in that one appointment. Over the following months, she discovered that nearly everything he’d told her about himself, for ten years, had been some version of a lie. She wasn’t just grieving a marriage. She was grieving her own judgment. Who was she married to? And who was she, that she could be fooled so completely, for so long?

Joan

Joan was seventy-six, an Irish beauty who could pass for fifty-five, and a successful Beverly Hills real estate agent who prided herself on reading people well. Craig, young, pretty, and an aspiring actor and real estate agent, charmed his way into her bed, her home, and her life.

“The sex was amazing,” she told me, wiping her eyes. “Exhilarating. It made me feel so alive and young again.” Craig filled a loneliness she’d been carrying for years. Her kids were grown and gone. She wanted something exciting, and here it was, telling her she was the best lover he’d ever had.

Six months in, his old crew resurfaced, and so did the cocaine and the late nights. What had looked like youthful energy started to look like something else. Then Craig stopped pretending. He criticized her hair, her clothes, even how she tasted. When she tried to stand up for herself, he’d have sex with her to smooth it over, or tell her she was crazy and imagining things. Classic gaslighting.

What Joan lived through matches the pattern described by Sandra Brown in her book Women Who Love Psychopaths almost exactly: a man with a history of targeting older, successful women, for sport and for profit. While he was pursuing Joan, Craig was still involved with another woman, Marian, an executive at a multinational company. He’d wooed her the same way, love-bombed her, then slowly trained her to accept worse and worse treatment, the way you’d train a dog with intermittent rewards. Every time Marian tried to leave, he pulled her back with declarations of love and a night in bed that flooded her system with exactly the chemistry that keeps people hooked on people who hurt them.

Joan and Marian didn’t know about each other until one of Craig’s friends finally told Marian about Joan. Craig moved on to find someone new. He’s in real estate. There’s no shortage of people to meet.

What They All Had In Common

More than being my clients, these women all had big hearts. They saw the best in people. They trusted easily, and they had what researchers call low danger aversion, meaning their instinct wasn’t to protect themselves first. They wanted to love. They opened their hearts, and something wearing the mask of love walked in.

The Cycle: Idealize, Devalue, Discard

This isn’t random bad luck, and it isn’t a character flaw in the woman it happens to. It’s a pattern, and it runs the same way almost every time.

Idealize. You’re told, early and often, that you’re the most incredible person this man has ever met. The attention is intense, constant, and specific. It feels less like being courted and more like being chosen. This is love bombing, and it works precisely because it feels so good.

Groom. Once you’re hooked, the small tests begin. A boundary gets pushed. An excuse gets offered. Makeup sex smooths it over. Each cycle trains you, a little more, to accept what you wouldn’t have accepted on day one. Control, especially sexual control, is where a lot of these men get their real pleasure and their real sense of power, and holding onto that control means the demands keep growing. The more you give, the more gets asked of you, until you’ve moved your own boundaries somewhere you never meant to go, and alienated the people who might have stopped you.

Devalue. The same mouth that once called you perfect starts finding fault with everything. Your hair, your clothes, your judgment, your sanity. If you push back, you’re told you’re imagining things. This is gaslighting, and its whole purpose is to make you distrust the only witness you have: yourself.

Discard. When you’ve got nothing left to give, or when someone new and shinier appears, he’s gone often before you’ve fully understood what happened.

How to Spot It Before It Spots You

A few honest questions worth asking yourself early in any relationship that feels unusually intense:

• Is this person calling you their soul mate, their forever person, the love of their life, within days or weeks of meeting you?
• Do they mirror your interests, your values, even your wounds, a little too perfectly, a little too fast?
• Do they push for exclusivity, commitment, or access to your money or home before you’ve had time to actually know them?
• Does anyone who questions the relationship- a friend, a sister, your own gut- start to feel like the enemy?
• When something feels wrong, are you the one who ends up apologizing?
• Does the connection feel less like closeness and more like a drug you can’t put down?

None of these questions prove anything on their own. But if you’re answering yes to more than one, it’s worth slowing down enough actually to look.

How Hypnotherapy, CBT, and Past Life Regression Help You Heal

Understanding the pattern intellectually is a start. It’s not the same as being free of it. I use three tools together, because each one reaches a different layer of the problem.

Hypnotherapy gets underneath your conscious defenses, the same defenses that talked you into “he’s just going through a hard time” for two years straight. Under hypnosis, we can reach the subconscious wiring that made the bond feel so undeniable in the first place, and begin to loosen its grip, rather than just white-knuckling your way past it.

CBT works the layer just above that. It’s how we catch the specific thoughts that kept you locked in: the idealizing, the minimizing, the reflex to blame yourself instead of him. Once you can see a thought clearly, you can question it. Once you can question it, you can replace it.

Past life regression asks the bigger question: why does this keep happening to you, specifically? Not every client needs to go there, but for the ones who do, it’s often the difference between healing from one relationship and finally understanding a lifelong pattern. Sometimes what looks like terrible luck in love is an old agreement your soul is still finishing.

Used together, this isn’t just about getting over one man. It’s about becoming someone that pattern can’t find again.

My Own Turn With This

I’ve been love-bombed myself. Not by a stranger with a pattern I couldn’t see. By someone I let in close enough to matter, who still, even now, occasionally tries to find his way back to my door. I live in an alternate reality most of the time, by choice, and I still wasn’t immune to it. Nobody is. That’s the part I most want you to hear: this isn’t about being naive, or stupid, or too trusting. It’s about being human, and it can happen to the sharpest, most guarded person you know.

What got me through it, and what gets my clients through it, is exactly the work above: going back and finding the actual root of why this pattern keeps finding you, whether that’s a wound from this life or a debt from one you don’t consciously remember. Once you can see the pattern instead of just feeling it, it loses a great deal of its power over you.

If any part of this story is your story too, you don’t have to untangle it alone. I can help you. Please give me a call. (323) 933-4377

Sending you all hope,

Stephanie