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Keep your posture straight, neither smile nor frown. If he wants to “make light conversation” tghere is always the old “Oh, I must go to the restroom,, or back to my car, or something” to get out of his face.

I agree about your mom letting him hug her….I think that is ann insult to you and I would see if I could get that stopped if I could do so without making a big row. I think her demeanor should mimic yours.

Don’t be the first one to make contact or start a conversation.

If you can keep it so that there are long silences by using shoulder shrugs for answers away when he is talkin to youk, so he is talking to the side or back of your head.

Not letting anything he says get you upset, or if you do get upset, do not let him know it. Just showinjg total disinteresst in him, or even interupting him by leaning over while he is talking to you and speak to someone else about a totally different subject.

Anything short of spitting in his face to make him feel unwelcome. If this happens in front of your kids and they ask “why don’t you like to talk to daddy” yhou might just reply “Well, daddy and I are not married any more and I find it uncomfortable to speak to him now.”

Good luck with it. I can only imagine how stressful it must be to co-parent with one of these jerks. (((hugs))))

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Red flags — as you say, Cat “come right from my own intuition.” Like the night I woke up (towards the end) and my gut was just screaming SOOO loud. No one single reason, but I knew that my body was telling me to save myself.

Listen to that gut, my friends. I’ve said this before. But then again, I think I”m preaching to the choir here, when I say that.

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Jake, Louise and EB, All of you make good points about FB. I made the choice to take my page down for awhile. I knew he was looking for stuff because my son told me. The upside of FB is that you can learn yourself. I use it at my discretion.

Welcome back Ox! You have been sorely missed on here, but I’m also glad you took a break and hope you had a wonderful time! I echo your sentiments to Jake on his question. Evil does exist and always has. As you well know, I’m somewhere in the healing process and learning to pick out those red flags. I am finding most of them come right from my own intuition. If something doesn’t FEEL right, it’s a read flag.

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Unfortunately, my S/P and his family and immediate circle of friends joined as soon as they saw my engagement in FB. At first, I thought it was fine, but I thought everything was fine. Then I started to realize what a freakish relationship I was in, and how, suddenly, his daughter in particular was taking great interest in topics that were near and dear to my heart and that she had never, for two years, even cared about. The further I pulled away from him, the more she was (I began to realize) drawing on details about me that she got out of the Facebook profile to keep me in their web.

It was all very upsetting!! And I started getting very concerned for all my friends, since I was beginning to understand what predators my S/P and his daughter could be. So I deactivated my profile. I really want to activate it again, but as Jake has pointed out, it’s very hard to keep from looking. For me, this all happened not too long ago, and it still hurts an awful lot. But I can’t let him rob me of my friends. He’s robbed me of so much else. . . .

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I knew there had to be something useful about FaceBook, because it is so popular.
Everyone always talks about it, so it made me curious.
That’s all.

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Facebook can be a great place to re connect with old childhood friends and also family members abroad. Personally from my experience it has been my connection to all of my cousins in other countries and great people I grew up with… my space on the other hand is blah……with facebook people can search for you but you decide whether you want to add them to your list of friends or family…….

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Welcome to LF, it is a healing place and Knowledge=power and I suggest you go back through the archives and read EVERY article (save the comments for later, just read the articles to start, there are hundreds of them!)

There are lots of “truths” we are taught in Sunday school and regular school, that are FALSE, “there are two (valid) sides to every story” or “it takes two to fight” or “there is good in everyone.”

There are many more of these UN-truths that many people subscribe to in our world.

First off, there ARE people who are EVIL. There are people who do bad things but are NOT unable to repent. There are people who have PATTERNS of abusive behavior that are INCAPABLE OF REPENTANCE. It is, unfortunately, not a SAFE world and just because you do GOOD doesn’t mean you won’t be “crucified.”

Look at the story of Jesus, and his battles with the Pharisees of his day, they were CROOKED “religious leaders and politicians”–He called them out on it (called them hypocrits) and said they were like whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside and inside full of rotting flesh. For this, these “holy” men got false witnesses to work up the crowd and get Jesus crucified. Those men had no “good down in them” because they had “hardened their hearts” and would not repent. They were willing to order Jesus put to death as a criminal because they didn’t like the TRUTH He spoke.

The Bible is filled with men who did some pretty nasty stuff, like King David, an adulterer and murderer, yet he was referred to as a “man after God’s own heart.” WHY? Because when he was chided for his bad behavior, HE REPENTED. He changed his ways. Good people sometimes do bad things, but they can and DO repent and change their ways. EVIL people do not, they enjoy the evil that they do.

Learn all you can about psychopathy, and learn all you can about what it is about yourself that allows these people to get close to you.

You don’t have to become UN-trusting, just cautious, trust should be EARNED not “given until proven untrustworthy”—it is a lesson that each of us I think needs to learn and take to our hearts, and how to WATCH for the “red flags” that signal a predator in human form. Glad you are here, stay around a while. Great people here. God Bless.

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