Jennifer Smith

A Bit of My Story

In the spring of 2012, a sun-shiny Los Angeles Tuesday, I was married in a private residence in Beverly Hills. Little did I know that in truth, this was the day I became legally entwined with a wanted fugitive on the run from authorities in six different countries and from abandoned wives, finances, and others in more. I had no clue that I’d been sucked in by the hypnotic and invisible influence of coercive control into the vortex of the surreal world of a sociopath.

These demon people who come across as amazing, and incredibly accomplished, and bring with them gigantic promise as seemingly the most fortunate piece of your life to fall into place are not in the room with you for the same reason that you are there with them.

This collision of their deceptive purpose and your pure heart are a toxic mix of deliberate-deceiver in disguise, and our good faith and genuine intention. The deceiver knows what’s happening. We, as targeted prey do not. We see the world and the moment through our great goodness. In the end, when their mask clatters to the floor, and their house of cards life falls apart, this great goodness – that we intrinsically are – is our saving grace.

In writing my website, the podcast, and other articles and books, all the related social media, I use a pen name, Jennifer Smith. This name is meant to represent any and every single one of us gorgeously human, normal people, who might find ourselves entrapped in this very abnormal quagmire.

Many people call the kind of person who pursued and married me with ill intent a “narcissist”. Unfortunately, while some interpretations of a “narc” or “narcissist” can be applicable and useful to the recovery process, at the same time, and all too often, this term carries inaccurate concepts, and notions along with it that in fact profoundly hinder understanding the dynamics of predator and prey and block a full recovery.

For purposes of recovering and restoring your life, these people of no conscience are best thought of as psychopaths – or what’s colloquially called a “sociopath”. This is what’s medically known within the mental health world as an “antisocial psychopath”.

That said, whatever we might call them, these inhuman-humans for all their initial charisma, attraction, draw, promise, beauty, polish, and charm, and when we meet them what seems to be a moment for them of bad luck or a life heavily glossed with accomplishment… These are people who live in a different world than we do, though right here among, and alongside us.

In 2013, after I kicked the nut-bag I’d married out, I was informed by a psychologist that he exhibited the characteristics of a sociopath, a psychopath.

Naturally, then I hunted online for information about “sociopaths” based on a psychologist friend who let me know this is what I had married, but I found next to nothing. This was a piece of what inspired me to start talking, to write, and to take recovery, and awareness of this as far as it could go. I began and still do write very plainly, directly, and clearly about these dependent and parasitic monsters in their full ridiculousness.

My recommendation to you would be to keep seeking until every question, doubt or confusion is settled and answered. Keep seeking until you know your hideous experience didn’t occur due to any lack, weakness, disorder or dream or failure, or hope, or need that you have. – You get to be who you are. Who you are, where you are in your life, none of this gives someone permission or a reason to deceive you and harm you.

When you know they are a criminal… When you can firmly with conviction say they are a fraud – that their so called-accomplishments are a shallow facade, that their stories of abuse directed at them, their tales of being a victim, and their wild accusations about their crazy ex are fake…

When you know that this happened only because predators exist you can get them out of your bones. This is when you are able to render yourself user-proof forever.

We Met and Married In Seven Days…and Only Briefly

It started as compatibility like I’d never known. Introduced by a friend and told his home base was Europe, though he was born in Africa. He was sweet, humble and did things I love and have connections to for his work as well. It looked like I’d found all the things I’d ever wanted at any point in my life and more on every tip. Things I’d not thought about as having in one place, at one time all came together. I thought, why not…? I’d had hardship and grief in my life. I’d been married, and divorced. I felt I knew enough to know this could work, and that this was an adventure I’d paid my dues for.

Then, married for only ten months, the day arrived that the excitement had become chaos. After months of trying to untangle the confusion and the feeling of not being able to grasp … something… I landed on intense fear, mind-bending fear of whatever this… this weirdness that I was living was. I was in something I’d never seen, known, or heard of before. – I had to know the unknown.

Stepping in to discover what was happening, and engaging my Buddhist practice, I prayed intently to pull whatever this was into the light. I decided to chant for three hours, three mornings in a row for the truth to show up. Immediately, the first morning the truth began to roll in, like a breakthrough in the cosmic fabric of the universe. “Impossible” evidence of what was true showed up. The prayer for “truth” to show up was answered and answered again, and again, and with each answer, the bottom broke away from my world…

Confusion to Discovery

He stayed ten more days. One of those days, standing only inches apart, he showed me what he was. We were face-to-face. Looking at one another, directly in the eye. There’s no memory of how we came to be in this position because I’d been keeping my head tilted down and my gaze away from him. But there we were. I showed no fear and let him look into me, but also gave away none of myself – no feelings, no emotion, no thoughts. I made myself an open blank as he allowed me to see… invited me to see what he was. His eyes had become bottomless black pools.

The room disappeared, and my focus zoomed into this huge and horrific intimate moment. With a little internal stumble, a hiccup of a natural impulse to reach out, I made a conscious effort to pull back from my instinct to connect. This so quiet and tiny moment showed me how profoundly hard-wired we are to connect, in all circumstances, in all things.

I hoped he didn’t notice as I steadied myself and looked into his eyes. As I scanned this face that I’d once thought so handsome, it morphed into a human vessel filled with something else. This being in front of me was harder than stone or steel… there was nothing soft. No one to talk to. Just – no one. No one to reason with or lean into, no one. Nothing touchable, nothing reachable that I would want to reach.

I knew that nothing I could say would land anywhere within him to change anything that had happened. Nothing I could say would make me safe. I was on the edge of an abyss. At a portal to another world. One I wanted no part of. This tiny peek-in was enough.

Evil Shows Its Face

Looking at him, my mind kept trying to define what I was seeing… it kept saying, there’s nothing there. There’s nothing… nothing there. It was weeks later that I understood those words in my head. There’s nothing there… there was nothing recognizably human in front of me. There was nothing recognizably human inside of him.

Letting it be, and only looking, in this quiet and calm…it was clear… what I saw in him was infinite, endless destruction. Pure evil. This thing in front of me, animated as something covered in human skin and bone was evil itself. There was no mistaking it.

This shifted the dynamic between us into a reality worse than any imagined moment on American Horror Story… He exposed his true world. The place he’d always lived while pretending to be here in this one with me. To survive, I had to join in his.

To escape and live through it, at risk of losing my mind, I had to do what these creatures do: I made things up. Inside their brains, reality is entirely made up, and what you make up, no matter how often you change it, is what is real. So, the single most significant life-saving thing that I did was lie to him. And lie more.

Following instincts I didn’t know I had, I went into an unfathomable realm of fear and at the same time rock solid focus to maneuver him out. As horrifying as it was, once he did go and the door closed on him for the last time, then came an avalanche of hell and even more terror.

I swore to myself that this would be the best thing I’d ever done, just exactly as I’d thought marrying him had been. I would make sure it still was. Even with this sickening unbelievable twist. My last direct communication with him was weeks after he left. Before changing my phone number I sent him one final text you fucked with the wrong person this time.

And New Horizons

At the foundation of all things about my life is the philosophy within Nichiren Buddhism and the SGI. My thinking in these hijackings is based on the dignity of life itself, the inherent power within our lives, and the ability we all have to direct our lives and manifest our unlimited potential.

I’d thought marrying this amazing man was the best thing I’d ever done. I decided that being married to this con man would also be the best g.d. thing I’d ever done. I do hope that you find some value in your nightmare, and attain a breakthrough in your recovery and in creating your best life. You are worthy of every happiness.

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As a certified coach, upholding industry standards I strive to inform, educate, invite thought and dialogue, to co-plan, co-strategize, advise, consult, refer, recommend, train, teach, guide and coach people in guided recovery and discovery specific to these crimes, and from hell and broken in the aftermath to whole again, and more. You decide what winning is.