Having problems with message search?
9 Tips for Coping With Stalkers, Including Abusive Ex-Husbands or Ex-Wives
Sam Vaknin’s tips for coping with stalkers - including abusive ex-husbands or ex-wives - will help you and your family stay safe and sane!
“Your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife is likely to cope with the pain and humiliation of separation by spreading lies, distortions, and half-truths about you and by proffering self-justifying interpretations of the events leading to the break-up,” says Vaknin. “By targeting your family, your children, boss, colleagues, co-workers, neighbors, and friends, your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife hopes to isolate you socially and force you to come running back, and to communicate that he or she still “loves” you, is still interested in you and your affairs and that, no matter what, you are inseparable.”
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited - click on the book image for more info. And, read on for his tips for coping with stalkers, abusive ex-husbands, and abusive ex-wives.
Quick Tips for Coping With Stalkers, Including Abusive Ex-Husbands or Ex-Wives
- Be sure to maintain as much contact with your abuser as the courts, counselors, mediators, guardians, or law enforcement officials mandate.
- Do NOT contravene the decisions of the system when you’re coping with stalkers. Work from the inside to change judgments, evaluations, or rulings - but NEVER rebel against them or ignore them. You will only turn the system against you and your interests.
- Do not respond to your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife’s pleading, romantic, nostalgic, flattering, or threatening e-mail messages.
- Return all gifts he or she sends you when you’re coping with a stalker.
- Refuse your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife entry to your premises. Do not even respond to the intercom.
- Do not talk to the stalker on the phone. Hang up the minute you hear his or her voice while making clear to him, in a single, polite but firm, sentence, that you are determined not to talk to him.
- Do not answer your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife’s letters.
- Do not visit the stalker on special occasions, or in emergencies.
- Do not respond to questions, requests, or pleas from the stalker, forwarded to you through third parties.
- Disconnect from third parties whom you know are spying on you at his or her behest.
- Do not discuss your abusive ex-husband, ex-wife, or stalker with your children.
- Do not gossip about the stalker.
- Do not ask your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife for anything, even if you are in dire need.
9 Specific Tips for Coping With Stalkers, Including Abusive Ex-Husbands
1. Don’t discuss your personal affairs. When you are forced to meet your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife, do not discuss your personal affairs - or his.
2. Don’t meet him alone. Relegate any inevitable contact with the stalker - when and where possible - to professionals: your lawyer, or your accountant. To cope with stalkers, protect yourself with mediators.
3. Keep your distance. If at all possible, put as much physical distance as you can between yourself and the stalker. Change address, phone number, email accounts, cell phone number, enlist the kids in a new school, find a new job, get a new credit card, open a new bank account. Do not inform your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife about your whereabouts and your new life. To cope with stalkers, you may have to make painful sacrifices, such as minimize contact with your family and friends.
4. Be prepared. Alert your local law enforcement officers, check out your neighbourhood domestic violence shelter, consider owning a gun for self-defence (or, at the very least, a stun gun or mustard spray). Carry these with you at all times. To protect yourself from the stalker, keep them close by and accessible even when you are asleep or in the bathroom.
5. Protect your computer. Is your computer being tampered with? Is someone downloading your e-mail? Has anyone been to your house while you were away? Any signs of breaking and entering, missing things, atypical disorder (or too much order)? Is your post being delivered erratically, some of the envelopes opened and then sealed? Mysterious phone calls abruptly disconnected when you pick up? Your stalker may have dropped by and may be monitoring you.
6. Notice any unusual pattern, any strange event, any weird occurrence. Someone is driving by your house morning and evening? A new “gardener” or maintenance man came by in your absence? Someone is making enquiries about you and your family? To cope with stalkers, recognize when it’s time to move on.
7. Teach your children to avoid your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife, and to report to you immediately any contact. Abusive bullies or stalkers often strike where it hurts most - at one’s kids. Explain the danger without being unduly alarming. Make a distinction between adults they can trust - and your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife or stalker, whom they should avoid. To cope with stalkers, involve your family.
8. Ignore your gut reactions and impulses. Sometimes, the stress is so onerous and so infuriating that you feel like striking back at the stalker. Don’t do it. Don’t play their game, because they are better at it and will likely to defeat you. Instead, unleash the full force of the law whenever you get the chance to do so: restraining orders, spells in jail, and frequent visits from the police tend to check the stalker’s violent and intrusive conduct.
9. Don’t resort to appeasement. The other behavioral extreme is equally futile and counterproductive. Do not try to buy peace by appeasing your abusive ex-husband or ex-wife. Submissiveness and attempts to reason with him or her only whet the stalker’s appetite. The stalker regards both as contemptible weaknesses, vulnerabilities to exploit. You cannot communicate with a stalker or paranoid because he or she is likely to distort everything you say to support his or her persecutory delusions, sense of entitlement, and grandiose fantasies. You cannot appeal to a stalker’s emotions - he or she has none (at least not positive ones).
To cope with stalkers, protect yourself at all times - but don’t let fear rule your life!
Reprinted with permission from ”Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited“, by Sam Vaknin. To learn more about Vaknin’s nine books about personality disorders and abusive relationships, visit go to NarcissisticAbuseBooks. Visit his website at NarcissisticAbuse.com.
If you found Coping With Stalkers helpful, try:
Offline 
Send Email