The Erotomaniac Stalker

[samvaknin]

http://samvak.tripod.com/abusefamily18.html

The Erotomaniac

This kind of stalker believes that he is in love with you. To show his keen interest, he keeps calling you, dropping by, writing e-mails, doing unsolicited errands “on your behalf”, talking to your friends, co-workers, and family, and, in general, making himself available at all times. The erotomaniac feels free to make for you legal, financial, and emotional decisions and to commit you without your express consent or even knowledge.

The erotomaniac intrudes on your privacy, does not respect your express wishes and personal boundaries and ignores your emotions, needs, and preferences. To him – or her – “love” means enmeshment and clinging coupled with an overpowering separation anxiety (fear of being abandoned). He or she may even force himself (or herself) upon you sexually.

Moreover, no amount of denials, chastising, threats, and even outright hostile actions will convince the erotomaniac that you are not in love with him. He knows better and will make you see the light as well. You are simply unaware of what is good for you, divorced as you are from your emotions. The erotomaniac determinedly sees it as his or her task to bring life and happiness into your dreary existence.

Thus, regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the erotomaniac is convinced that his or her feelings are reciprocated - in other words, that you are equally in love with him or her. The erotomanic stalker interprets everything you do (or refrain from doing) as coded messages confessing to and conveying your eternal devotion to him and to your “relationship”.

Erotomaniacs are socially-inapt, awkward, schizoid, and suffer from a host of mood and anxiety disorders. They may also be people with whom you have been involved romantically (e.g., your former spouse, a former boyfriend, a one night stand) – or otherwise (for instance, colleagues or co-workers). They are driven by their all-consuming loneliness and all-pervasive fantasies.

Consequently, erotomaniacs react badly to any perceived rejection by their victims. They turn on a dime and become dangerously vindictive, out to destroy the source of their mounting frustration – you. When the “relationship” looks hopeless, many erotomaniacs turn to violence in a spree of self-destruction.

Best coping strategy

Ignore the erotomaniac. Do not communicate with him or even acknowledge his existence. The erotomaniac clutches at straws and often suffers from ideas of reference. He tends to blow out of proportion every comment or gesture of his “loved one”.

Follow these behaviour tips – The No Contact Policy:

a… With the exception of the minimum mandated by the courts – decline any and all gratuitous contact with your stalker.
a… Do not respond to his pleading, romantic, nostalgic, flattering, or threatening e-mail messages.
a… Return all gifts he sends you.
a… Refuse him entry to your premises. Do not even respond to the intercom.
a… Do not talk to him on the phone. Hang up the minute you hear his voice while making clear to him, in a single, polite but firm, sentence, that you are determined not to talk to him.
a… Do not answer his letters.
a… Do not visit him on special occasions, or in emergencies.
a… Do not respond to questions, requests, or pleas forwarded to you through third parties.
a… Disconnect from third parties whom you know are spying on you at his behest.
a… Do not discuss him with your children.
a… Do not gossip about him.
a… Do not ask him for anything, even if you are in dire need.
a… When you are forced to meet him, do not discuss your personal affairs – or his.
a… Relegate any inevitable contact with him – when and where possible – to professionals: your lawyer, or your accountant.

[blitzen]

A related article:

Predators in Online Support December 2000

How far do they really go?
Over some time I have watched a completely psychopathic personality promote themselves as a kind of “Guru” in the area of online support for victims of mental and emotional abuse. Along the way I have watched, and gathered hard evidence, of this same person, knowingly enabling people who’s sole agenda was to re-victimize anyone who sought the readily proffered support. More genuine people were hounded and crushed, or assimilated into a web of on-line re-victimization.

Mental and emotional abuse is the only kind of abuse that can be fully, and effectively replicated on-line.

It is going too far to accept that our entire support environment must be controlled by people like this, as has been the case. It’s as if we have a microcosm in which it is accepted and assumed that all control will be abusive and we must get on in spite of it.

Why?

Because that is all any of us have recently known, or in some cases ever HAVE known. There IS no valid reason, or set of reasons to accept this.

ONLY pre-conditioned victims would be prepared to accept it, or “try and learn to live with it and in spite of it”. That is what “learned helplessness” consists of, and “learned helplessness” is one thing we ALL need to learn to escape.

It doesn’t matter now how it came about, or who is involved, what matters is to reject that dynamic and find a better one.

Does anyone actually realize that an entire online support network for the victims of mental and emotional abuse is accountable to no one? Any area where you have vulnerable people and no accountability is a control freak’s paradise.

If someone abuses you within this, you can either tell it publicly, where there is a good chance you will be gas lighted and scapegoated convincingly, by a handful of people, or you can stuff it inside yourself the way we all have too many things stuffed. There IS no responsible body to monitor or adjudicate even major abuses. So that abuse thrives WITHIN the dynamic of the support network itself.

Any person of integrity who tries to set up an alternative is harassed ruthlessly, by a handful of people, until they give up. It’s too much to expect anyone to do. The “acknowledged experts” one is supposed to defer to within the support network haven’t got a valid, relevant qualification between them. It is considered “paranoid” to expect anyone to show credentials to back up their assertations in that respect.

It IS NOT paranoia, it is common sense, the same “common sense” healthy people have and victims have been trained to ignore.

I have met SO MANY great people, all crushed and crippled to one extent or another among the support groups, but the only people who sustain control are easily as ruthlessly abusive as any member of my family. We, the real victims are programmed to accept that, or worse, like battered wives, programmed to defend our ABUSERS against any challenge, rather than ourselves against any abuse.

We need a responsible, reputable regulatory body to protect us from our own programming as much as from further abuse. One possibility that springs to mind is “The Samaritans” or possibly one of the big research trusts?

Mental and emotional abuse IS a special case, because it CAN do as much damage online as anywhere else. Whenever I stand outside the mental and emotional abuse support networks and look in, all it looks like is a killing pen. People stuff the hurt and the damage, and blame themselves for it, just the way they are trained to do.

Hardly anybody trusts anybody else ANYWAY because there are so many vexatious and fictitious “false persona” flying around mischief-making.

It would take the CIA a year to investigate and establish half the mischief that has gone on over time. It is close to impossible to get any kind of justice yet when it comes to online abuses. It’s close to impossible to PROVE most of them.

That is why we NEED to find a way to create an environment where it can hardly ever happen, instead of the current environment that enables it.

GD