I am an abused woman. I don’t look it. I smile at the world from behind big brown eyes. I work, I speak to friends, I function. I am not battered and  bruised. I do not sport visible scars of torture. I am well-educated, intelligent, creative, successful, attractive. But, I am also an abused woman.

Abused women come from every walk of life. Since gaining my freedom from my abuser, I have met many of my sisters. We are doctors, lawyers, secretaries, nurses, welfare mums, homemakers, accountants, executives. If there is one attribute that connects us, it is that we have remained too long in relationships that began as fairytales and ended up as horror stories. We all fell in love with a prince and came to the end of the story in fear of the beast who raged before our eyes.

My story of abuse began, like many fairytales, with Prince Charming riding in to rescue me. I didn’t know I was in danger, but when a Prince comes calling, who can resist his charm and promises of happily ever after? I climbed onto his steed and hung on for my life as we galloped off to enter the Kingdom of the P �?Psychopath that is, though he omitted to tell me the name of the land towards which we were racing and I forgot to ask. Blinded by the reflection of my dreams upon his shield, I was too enraptured to see the beast within him. I only saw the beauty and the rosy pink dawn upon the horizon of our everlasting love. And anyway, after numerous failed relationships, who was I to object to Cupid finally hitting his mark?

“P�?Psychopaths are big on promises. They are masters of the grand gesture, but mostly they are custodians of the empty purse. You want a fancy house and shiny new car? Poof! With a flick of his carefully coiffed golden-boy head, the P grants you your wishes. Oh. Did you forget to check the title? Too bad. Easy come. Easy go. You want a trip to the moon? Another flick. Another dream fulfilled. But wait. There’s a catch. The rocket ship got stuck on Mars, aliens invaded the launch pad and, isn’t that awful, the flight got cancelled. Maybe next week? Got another dream I can make come true?

P’s are masters of the illusive art. They are chimera in a chameleon’s skin, capable of changing their colour so fast you will think you just witnessed the second coming of Christ. But wait. Is that a red suit he’s wearing and horns projecting from his head? Gotcha! he will exclaim before gaily skittering off to find another victim.

Meeting a P is like standing on the tracks while a speeding train comes barreling towards you. Blinded by the light, you are frozen in place and cannot move. You can’t believe the train won’t stop. You can’t believe it will hit you. But it does. And it keeps on coming. Caught beneath its wheels you are dragged along until you no longer know up from down, right from wrong, truth from lies. Courage escapes you as quickly as the rushing wheels carry you away from who you were and what you once believed to be true. Living in constant turmoil, you become accustomed to the jolting rhythm and the terror of living beneath a rushing train. Sometimes, you may lose a limb, an arm or leg, but anesthetized by the power of the engine’s roar, you cannot feel their loss. You cannot feel. Eventually you succumb to the pain, the torment, the uncertainty of not knowing when the train will stop. Its destination becomes your destiny, because, while the speed may be erratic, the P is in control, and he never stops.

By the end of my wild ride through the Kingdom of the P, I went through all my dreams and woke up to my worst nightmare. I was stripped of everything that meant anything to me; my relationship with my daughters, family and friends, my emotional well-being, my home, my belongings, my job and my financial security. But I did get to keep the dog.

There is no cure for the psychopath, and no quick exits for victims on their road to hell. Sad but true. Psychopaths do what they do because that is who they are. It is what they do. There is no drug that will temper their destructive force or curb their insatiable thirst for lies and deceit. For normal human beings there is self-restraint, empathy, compassion, love, truth and honesty. Psychopaths feel none of these emotions; recognize none of these qualities. They live only in the kingdom of the P. They take what they want, when they want because they want it. And then they move on to their next victim.

Once gone, the victim awakens to see the carnage of her life left in his wake. Sometimes, the pain of the encounter has so completely decimated her that, if another P rides in at that vulnerable moment of awakening, he will be her kiss of death and she may never awaken again.

My awakening was a miracle. One sunny morning, the police walked in and arrested the P for fraud, violations of a conditional sentence and a host of other charges. I look back upon that moment and am in awe of the wonder, the miracle, the incredible gift I was given in my freedom. I do not believe I could have survived much longer the living hell of existence in the Kingdom of the P. I had become the walking dead drowning under the murky waters of his lies. I lived and breathed but I was no longer part of the human race. In those last excruciating months I wanted death to come and take me away but even there I was foiled. Death was too busy helping worthy souls rise above this earthly plain. Death had no time for me.

Since his arrest and my being granted the incredible gift of my life, I have asked myself, again and again, how could I have been so blind, so stupid? How could I not have seen what he was doing? Why did I keep on believing and believing until nothing was left of me, only the empty receptacle into which he dumped his lies? Questions I have heard countless times from other women who have also been a psychopath’s target and lived to tell the tale. It’s part of the trauma of encounters of the P kind, your sane mind, what’s left of it, looks for answers in the insane world of the P

The kingdom of the P is built on deception and illusion. Like a pimp trawling for his next ‘girl�? the P draws you in with the delicate web of the dreams you have revealed in moments of intimacy. And then, he severs you from your life by weaving the horror of his darkness into the nightmare of the life he spins around you.

Unraveling the web of lies and deceit is a challenging and exhausting task. If I had gone to war and returned shell-shocked, suffering from post traumatic stress, people could relate to the label of my discomfort. But abuse, particularly the psychological abuse Ps inflict, is outwardly undetectable and, to most of us, incomprehensible. It is difficult to comprehend how a once vibrant, caring, talented woman could become so powerless.

For me, the root cause of my vulnerability lay beneath 40+ years of believing a lie buried deep within my psyche. Abused as a child, disbelieved by those who cared for me, I contorted the truth into a child’s simplistic understanding. Bad things happened to me because I was unworthy of being loved. The challenge of getting stuck in a child’s perception is that the child grows into a woman, but the understanding stays stuck in the past and is dragged through time like a security blanket to a child’s first sleepover.

Standing on this side of the divide that separates me from the road to hell I am grateful for the gift of mature understanding. Today, I know I am loveable. I know I am worthy of more than he ever could or would have given me. I believed in the P because I didn’t believe in me. I bought into his lies because my truth was twisted deep within me. Tied to the rocketing caboose of his misdirection I lost the light of my life within, and looked for someone else to dispel the darkness. A Herculean task, but one a P will always venture into because a P feeds off the weaknesses and strengths, vulnerability and kindness of anyone caught in his net of lies.

Ultimately, I was susceptible to his flame because, unlike theatre-goers who go home at the end of the horror flick, I suspended my belief a moment too long. Opportunistic abusers, the P leapt into the gap of my magical thinking and his lies took root in the untrammeled soils of my psyche. In the end, however, goodness prevailed. I got my happy ending. I have my freedom. In my Beauty and the Beast, I finally encountered the beast in the dark forest of my mind, buried beneath the dirt of my past beliefs. I get to rewrite the story that transforms him into the love of my life.

Today, the beastly P is gone from my life forever. He languishes in jail, awaiting his day of judgment. I am free. Free to heal, to grow, to love anew. Free to rebuild my life, my relationship with my daughters, my family, my friends. Free to make amends and move forward in my life of beauty.

The P will never have that freedom, in or out of jail. The P is a captive of his disease. He is trapped within his soul sickness that erodes his humanity and short circuits his ability to be real. And so I pray he receive a miracle. Without it he will continue on his dark path of destruction leaving only pain as his legacy, devastation beneath every step.

Today, I choose to forgive him. In forgiving I receive forgiveness for myself. With forgiveness I can let go of the past so that I look at today with eyes of wonder, grateful to be alive, thankful for the beautiful sunrise, and the gift of freedom from the lie within me.  Today, I know there are many beasts out there in the world and I must keep my eyes open. The most damaging beasts, however, are those who travel the corridors of my mind, holding my freedom captive, keeping me from my truth: I am a miracle of love, beautiful in all my imperfection. I am perfectly human.

I was an abused woman. I have been to hell and I have survived. I am strong. I am courageous. And I am healing. Think I’ll go for a walk with my dog.