“Unashamed Voices” will expose sociopaths in our midst #ebook #preorder

The ebook collection of survivor stories is available for pre-order!

• US Pre-Orders
• UK Pre-Orders
  
• Canada Pre-Orders
• Australia Pre-Orders

Last year, nearly 50 readers and survivors submitted their survivor stories to me. Last month, I edited and published a story a day to my Communities Digital Column. This month, I compiled all of the edited and previously-published stories (plus two previously unpublished stories) into a working draft for an ebook. Yesterday, I designed the cover and uploaded the draft to Kindle Direct Publishing for pre-order status review. Today, the pre-order status was approved, and now everyone can pre-order their copy before the release date of December 31, 2014.

As promised, the book will also be available for FREE upon release next month. The purpose of the pre-order period is to generate interest and profit in hopes of being afforded the opportunity to also make the book available in soft copy.

I thank everyone who visits this blog for giving me the strength, courage and determination I needed to dedicate to this project, which has consumed me for nearly the past 20 months. Our voices would not be able to build the stength and momentum they have without the support we give to eachother. XOXO

Book Description:

“Unashamed Voices: True Stories Written by Survivors of Domestic Violence, Rape and Fraud – Exposing Sociopaths in Our Midst”

Not everyone moves from a place of care and respect for themselves and others, because not everyone has (1) a conscience; (2) the ability to feel remorse; and (3) the ability to tap into affective empathy–the type of empathy that allows one to see and feel a situation from another’s perspective. People lacking these qualities are referred to as sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists. They exist everywhere in society, including our homes where their toxic and parasitic lifestyles are destroying families, children and communities every single day.

This collection of 33 true stories from across the globe written by survivors of toxic and abusive relationships sets out to expose the unchallenged pathological personalities and behaviors of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. These personal accounts will dispel the myths surrounding domestic violence and intimate partner abuse and have you questioning what you thought you knew about crimes being committed behind closed doors. You will also understand the impact to victims and survivors and start gaining an understanding of why so many remain silent and that most, if not all survivors, are walking around undiagnosed and/or under diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression and other debilitating conditions resulting from the physical, emotional and spiritual abuse they endured and continue to relive in the aftermath.

With greater awareness and education, victims and survivors of pathological abuse at the hands of sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists will have a greater chance of experiencing justice and a greater chance of protecting potential victims who are the future targets of these manipulative and malignant criminals hiding behind the false and delusional facade of moral righteousness and victimization.

If you are interested in being a part of the solution to one day see an end to domestic violence, rape and fraud, read this book and pass it on to anyone and everyone you know who has been or is currently being impacted by a sociopath, psychopath or narcissist. With 1 in 25 people estimated to be a sociopath, the chance that you know someone affected by an individual with a pathological personality disorder is extremely high. Allow the many voices of truth in these pages open your eyes to the answers behind the senseless acts committed against you, your loved ones and/or your friends.

Paula Carrasquillo, MA
November 18, 2014

http://www.amazon.com/Unashamed-Voices-Survivors-Domestic-Sociopaths-ebook/dp/B00PUMN6HW/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416430397&sr=1-2&pebp=1416430399152

Survival Stories 12 and 13 – Laura and Mary #domesticviolence #princecharming

October 12, 2014 – Laura’s story: A living hell of domestic violence and pathological abuse

October 13, 2014 – Mary’s story: Stayed with her abuser to protect her children

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Each day during the month of October, column author Paula Carrasquillo will feature a story written by a survivor of domestic violence. At the end of October, a compilation of all stories will be available for free as an e-book.

*All names have been changed to protect the survivor and the survivor’s family and friends.

Ellen’s story: “I was always afraid he would rape me, hit me and be even crueler.”

October 5, 2014 – Ellen’s story: “I was always afraid he would rape me, hit me and be even crueler.”

BETHESDA, Maryland, October 5, 2014 — Ellen* is a survivor of intimate partner and sociopath abuse who lives and is studying to become a doctor in the United States.

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Before I met my boyfriend, I was living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I was a smart, funny, outgoing and independent girl. I had a car and registered for college. I was working and paying for myself. I had had a few instances of drug and alcohol problems and was actively keeping myself out of trouble.

Just before I met him, my grandmother slipped into a coma from diabetes. I was locked out of my house by a controlling aunt. I found myself needing to live with my mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. Read more…

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Each day during the month of October, column author Paula Carrasquillo will feature a story written by a survivor of domestic violence. At the end of October, a compilation of all stories will be available for free as an e-book.

*All names have been changed to protect the survivor and the survivor’s family and friends.

Yoga heals the body and the mind

Yoga heals the body and the mind.

Yoga is not just a passing fad for exercise elitists. Yoga is a safe and highly effective form of therapy for individuals seeking relief from post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety in the aftermath of abuse and trauma. Do you know how yoga works?

To learn more, read my latest story on CDN:

Yoga therapy for survivors of trauma and abuse

Namaste!
~Paula

Paula Carrasquilo is a certified yoga teacher, health coach and author of Escaping the Boy: My Life with a Sociopath. Follow her on Twitter and on her Love-Life-Om blog.

 

Liars! Further Dissection of Pistorius’s Anxiety and PTSD Claims

Oscar throws a temper tantrum at the Paralympics, and an expert claims he did it because he suffers from General Anxiety Disorder (GAD)?

First, someone suffering from undiagnosed and untreated GAD would have a difficult time competing let alone losing a race.

Second, those who suffer GAD generally do not blame others for every mistake they make in life, and they certainly wouldn’t know to blame the possible source of their anxiety: their abusive parents. Oh, my!

Individuals suffering from GAD fail to act due to fear of failure and of being perceived as imperfect. Their anxiety is born from feeling like they are not good enough.

Oscar, on the contrary, believes he is very good. He is so good in his eyes that he once fought to be the exception to all the rules in the last summer Olympic games.

Did he care if other athletes considered his presence and “blades” to be an unfair advantage? Not at all. He did not have the capacity to respect the sound and scientific arguments against him competing. Instead, he was quoted as saying:

“I don’t see myself as disabled. There’s nothing I can’t do that able-bodied athletes can do.”

Despite his current claim that experiencing the trauma of having his fibulas removed at 11-months of age and of having a one-time alcoholic mother and controlling father who made him fearful of society, up until the day he murdered Reeva Steenkamp, all who knew Oscar and witnessed his behavior would have argued otherwise.

“I still find it strange when I say to someone, ‘Can you pass me my legs?’ But I don’t ever think about my disability,” Pistorius has claimed.

So which is it? Is Pistorius someone who, for years, has simply been fooling everyone into believing his disability didn’t have a negative effect on his life but actually made him superhuman for overcoming his loss of limbs? Or is Pistorius fooling us now in an attempt to elude justice for the gun-killing murder of Reeva Steenkamp?

If he were truly terrified that night, he would have simply reached over to touch the position on the bed where Reeva should have been. In a matter of seconds, he would have been assured that the noise he claimed to have heard was just Reeva and not an intruder. His fears and anxieties would have subsided. And as a GAD sufferer, this is exactly what he would have done, because, after years of experiencing debilitating and undiagnosed GAD, he would have trained himself to investigate the reasonable cause before reacting prematurely.

But this is not what poor, suffering Pistorius did that night. Instead, according to him, he reached for his gun (not for Reeva) and took more time to stumble over to the toilet door on his stumps, screaming to the person behind the door, “Get the fuck out of my house!”

Reeva surely would have heard that and responded with, “It’s just me Oscar. It’s Reeva.”

He didn’t even speak through the door, “Is that you Reeva? I’m scared. Is that you in the toilet?”

THAT is what someone with undiagnosed and untreated GAD would do, because people with GAD are frozen to respond to situations if there are uncertainties.

Only an arrogant and reactive sociopath would shoot first and ask questions later, because to a sociopath, all of their actions are justified.

And, no, you cannot claim that his trauma response would have been to fight. Why? Because in this situation, there was a door between Oscar and the presumed threat. A person experiencing trauma would hope the door remained intact to continue serving as a barrier. Shooting through the door decreases the door’s value as a barrier. Not only would holes render the door weaker, the chances that the presumed threat on the other side would use their weapon also increased.

Oscar knew the person on the other side of the door was Reeva. He knew she was unarmed. He knew his life was not in physical danger.

But Oscar was scared and terrified in those moments, because he feared his reputation was on the line. He was more than aware of Reeva’s interest in speaking out against domestic violence. Also, he was well-aware that her own reputation and public presence in the spotlight was on the threshold of taking off with her soon-to-be aired reality show and with her Valentine’s Day speech at a local school about domestic violence and intimate partner abuse.

He couldn’t have her breaking up with him. The timing was terrible! She could easily start pointing fingers at his abusive and manipulative nature. Oscar had to do something to shut her up, so he shot through the door, killed Reeva, and today claims it’s because of his childhood.

He wants the rest of us to see him as the real victim, a victim of his childhood and uncontrollable circumstances, while we are to feel nothing for the woman he killed.

Who does that? Childhood victims of trauma and abuse?

No. Real victims of trauma who commit heinous crimes and murder would ask to be punished. There would be no denial. There would be absolute blame and shame. There would be no pleas for understanding or pity. No victim would make such an outrageous claim that killing a loved one was a reasonable response to an unknown threat. Reasonable because 30 years ago your fibulas were amputated? What’s next? All circumcised boys who commit murder will claim trauma, too? (Get f%$#ing real!!)

Namaste!
~Paula

Where’s Oscar’s self-hatred and remorse?

Many Oscar Pistorius sympathizers believe he fired blindly at the toilet door because he suffers PTSD due to childhood trauma and because he was a victim of violent crime as an adult.

PTSD symptoms of hyper arousal may lead a PTSD sufferer to lash out violently, unexpectedly and uncharacteristically. In the aftermath of this hyper-aroused state, the PTSD sufferer is overwhelmed with feelings of remorse and self-hatred.

Pistorius sympathizers believe Pistorius was in a PTSD hyper-aroused state when he shot through the toilet door killing Reeva. If one believes this, one should then wonder, “Where is Oscar Pistorius’s self-hatred and remorse for murdering Reeva?”

He has not expressed either. The only emotion I have witnessed coming from Pistorius is self-pity, which is NOT the same emotion as self-hatred.

I stand firm that Pistorius’s outburst was not PTSD-related. Rather, his rage, his deliberate shooting of Reeva, is a textbook sociopath temper tantrum. His self-pity is a textbook sociopath diversion used to manipulate the collective empathy of society in order to avoid facing the consequences of his shitty behavior.

My empathy and sympathy will not be ambushed. I reserve my empathy and sympathy for the actual victims of Pistorius’s crime…the family, friends and loved ones of Reeva Steenkamp.

Pistorius is a victim of his lack of conscience. Nothing more.

The Aftermath of the Sociopath and Identifying Signs of Abuse and Trauma in Yourself

Once the toxic relationship with the sociopath or narcissist has ended, we don’t immediately tend to our healing and recovery needs. Why? For starters, we simply fail to recognize our need to heal and recover. Although, we are good at spotting desperation and unhappiness in others, we are either too proud or in deep denial about our personal need for care and attention.

When I escaped the sociopath in January 2011, I was numb. My mind was unable to clearly process what had happened to me during those three (3) short years with the sociopath. I was lost. I struggled to make sense of the chaos of my thoughts. I struggled with shame and blame. I struggled with nightmares and cold sweats. I struggled with discussing what had happened to me, what WAS happening to me.

I struggled.

In my struggle, I failed to grasp the severity of the abuse and its impact on me. I failed to ask the right internal questions about how I was feeling. I failed to see the signs that I had suffered serious mental and emotional anguish that needed attention.

I ignored my needs, because I was desperate to understand ‘him,’ and I couldn’t bare the additional burden of facing a broken self.

Instead, I read and re-read every blog entry and website page that discussed and detailed sociopathic and narcissistic behaviors. I had many ‘ah-ha’ moments about ‘him’ and the relationship but not about me.

In the aftermath of the toxic relationship, most of us who have left or been discarded by a sociopath or narcissist spend an exorbitant amount of time learning how to recognize the signs, behaviors and red flags of the sociopath and narcissist.  We do this for a couple of reasons:

1. To make sense ‘the source’ of the mental, emotional, physical and sexual abuse and exploitation we experienced.
2. To hopefully avoid falling victim to another sociopath, narcissist or Cluster B personality in future romantic relationships.

There is great empowerment in educating ourselves about ‘him,’ but we can’t forget about educating ourselves about us.

Although I was seeing a counselor immediately following my escape, I rarely spoke to my counselor about the toxic relationship or ‘him.’ I stuck to discussions about my current life and mending my broken marriage and re-establishing trust. I spoke to my counselor about my struggles with alcohol but never talked about why I chose to self-soothe, self-medicate with booze. It just didn’t seem important to me, I thought.

Now, I realize that I was in deep denial. I just wanted my hatred for ‘him’ and his behavior to magically disappear, so I didn’t have to talk about it. Little did I know that I was directly ‘damaged’ by the relationship and had to face that ‘damage’ in order to move past the destructive aftermath.

How did I finally see that I had to start paying more attention to myself? Probably because I was becoming a person even I didn’t like to be around. That was tough to admit. I hated who I had become. I hated being angry. I was always such a happy person. I was always dreaming and thinking about the future. I loved being alone with my own thoughts.

Suddenly, I recognized that I was no longer behaving like the ‘me’ I had grown to know. I didn’t like myself and certainly didn’t trust myself. How did I expect anyone else to love or respect or trust me? I couldn’t.

Because I didn’t want to lose my family, I was determined to find myself and to learn how to trust myself again.

If I had been more aware and honest with myself, I would have recognized the following red flags of depression and despair sooner rather than later and would have been equipped to tackle and beat these after effects of pathological love:

• Feeling depressed.
• Feeling numb.
• Loss of friends.
• Nightmares.
• Cold sweats.
• Destructive forms of self-soothing and self-medicating like eating too much, not eating enough, drinking alcohol, abusing pain killers, etc.
• Loss of enthusiasm for activities that were once a substantial part of your identity and existence.
• Feelings of inadequacy in your abilities, skills and job performance.
• Constant rumination; reliving episodes of abuse and trauma.
• Avoidance of certain people, situations and places.
• Inability to control anger as a result of a threat, real or perceived.
• Constant need for validation from others in how you are feeling.

Many who read this will think, “Everyone experiences these types of feelings at some point in their lives.”

That is true, but we aren’t talking about fleeting feelings. We’re talking about constant, chronic, never-ending feelings that just won’t go away, regardless of our efforts to make them vanish. We’re talking about feelings and emotions that lead to self-destruction. No kidding. Self-destruction!

When we recognize the recurrence and insidious nature of our thoughts and emotions, we must realize it’s time to start making a plan to help ourselves by seeking help from others.

• Reading a book isn’t always enough.
• Joining an online support group isn’t always enough.
• Talking to a counselor isn’t always enough.
• Joining the gym isn’t always enough.
• Practicing yoga isn’t always enough.
• Getting out and doing things for the first time isn’t always enough.
• Taking medication isn’t always enough.

Healing and recovery is a unique and individual path. What works for ‘her’ may not work for you. What worked yesterday, may not work today. Getting to the bottom of ourselves in order to change and better ourselves is a long and sometimes arduous journey. The first thing we must learn to do is to be patient with ourselves. Baby steps are required. Just because you recognize the effects, doesn’t mean they can all be remedied overnight.

What do I recommend?

Visit the website for The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and Public Pathology Education for free and low-cost therapy and recovery assistance.  Founder, Sandra L. Brown, has over 25 years of experience as a psychoanalyst with expert knowledge and understanding of helping men and women who have suffered trauma as a result of pathological love.

You are not alone. Don’t be ashamed. There is help and hope for you!

Namaste!
~Paula

(image source: http://pinterest.com/pin/118289927683868545/)

NO MORE: My Post, Your Support, and The Healing Process

I found an amazing organization a few weeks ago: NO MORE. NO MORE’s goal is to bring more awareness to domestic violence and sexual assault in hopes of ending it for good:

“NO MORE is a simple idea with the power to unleash new, major  attention to the people all around us who are hurt – directly or indirectly — by domestic violence and sexual assault every day and every minute.  We all know someone who has been touched by this violence but still, domestic violence and sexual assault remain hidden and misunderstood.” (from nomore.org)

NO MORE’s website site provides a toolkit of images and messages to anyone with a blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, and any social media account or outlet to spread the message. All you need to do is fill out an online form to request the toolkit. I requested my toolkit last week and was asked if I would be willing to write a personal account of why I support the NO MORE campaign. I did. And they posted it on their site.

For me, sharing what happened to me has been empowering and has brought me back to me. Not everyone can share their experiences with domestic violence/intimate partner abuse or sexual violence. I share because it helps me heal and find internal; peace; I have no interest in anyone’s pity. I share and continue to share what happened to me because being silent helps no one, except the tormentor/abuser.

I ask you to support NO MORE by requesting a toolkit. You don’t need to be a victim/survivor. Just someone who is tired of turning a blind eye to suffering that is happening right under our noses every day. Namaste!

Paula’s post on nomore.org

Namaste!

A Baby Changes Everything

The abuse of her son at the hands of the boy surely couldn’t be topped. Could it?  Will the woman ever get the courage to leave? Will the boy ever be convinced that he is the one with the problem and stop blaming others for his misery?

Discover more of the dirty, mind-bending tricks the boy enjoys performing. Pick up where you left off, readers, or start from the beginning if you’re just joining the story.

Enjoy!

The Birth and Evolution of a Narcissistic Sociopath