Tag: survivors

I met this lady at our local grocery store and we talked just enough to know what had similar experiences .

She’s in dire need now and I wanted to post her story , her experiences that she may be supported in her struggle to survive against such odds as she’s encountered .

I donate cat food as I can and contacted a local group that helps with needed home repairs for folks who are challenged financially

Her story

She sits alone in the old farmhouse, cold and hungry. Her only companions are her cats, who are cold and hungry as well. 68 years old, she was deserted by her husband after 25 years of incredible, sociopathic abuse. He took everything from her – the car, computer, phones, stole her Stimulus payment, and left her stuck with the mortgage he placed on the farm, their home.

After making the mortgage payment to keep a roof over my head, I have no money for food, no cell phone, no communication with the outside world except my computer and a land line phone. Without the local food pantry, I and my cats would have already starved to death. There has been no heat in the house, no running water for nearly 3 years. The stove, the refrigerator, the washing machine, the lamps, the microwave, two surge protectors, the heat pump all shorted out because of the rain leaking into the house for the past 12 years, ruining the wiring. The house is a death trap for me and my beloved cats, but I have nowhere to go.

He was meticulous in his abuse – socially, he made me an outcast without my knowing it. No one in my community, even the church I had belonged to since 1973, will help me. You see, sociopaths know how to ‘isolate’ their victims without the person knowing about it until it is too late. He did not pay my hospital bills, thus shattering my ‘credit rating’; he told the people in our small, inbred community that ‘she was crazy’, ‘she was lazy’, ‘she was a bad wife’, while smiling to my face and telling me every day how much he loved me.

Three months before he left, he had secretly taken me off the credit card, making every effort to ensure I had no access to any money whatsoever. He tried to empty my personal checking account, but failed, because the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ had warned me to change my password, and I did. After he had left, I discovered that he had had a ‘secret banking account’ and had been hiding money and marital assets from me for 12 years. All this time, I had been told by him that there was ‘no money’ for my needed medical care and diagnostic needs.

I quite literally broke my back working at the local hospital in December of 1996; yet he told all his friends that I was ‘faking it’, and that there was nothing wrong with me – I just ‘wanted to sit on my @ss, pet my cats and watch ‘Law and Order’. The damage to my spine caused me to drag my left leg when I tried to walk; the pain was nearly unbearable and the shocks from the pressure on my sciatic nerve were like being hit with a cattle prod. It continues to this day.

Because of the broken back, called ‘Scoliosis’ my spine sharply curves to the left. There are four broken ligaments on the right side of my spine, and only the ligaments on the left side of the spine enable me the small amount of mobility I still possess. Because of the curvature, the vertebrae in my spine have put incredible pressure on the nerves leading out of my spine to my major organs. In 2011, I developed acute congestive heart failure and had my first heart attack. I then suffered a disabling attack of kidney stones, again in 2011, with infection and sepsis, and was diagnosed with third stage kidney failure. Now, the pressure on my spine has caused me to develop constant incontinence of the bowels and bladder, and I wears ‘Depends’ 24/7. All this time, he insisted that there was nothing ‘wrong with her’ and told everyone in the community of Meadows of Dan, Virginia, that she was just ‘sorry and lazy’.

Nothing, absolutely nothing can prepare or warn a ‘neurotypical’ or ‘normal’ person about the sociopathic personality disorder. These people have no conscience, no ‘human’ emotions of love, empathy, sympathy or caring. At the same time, they are ‘Acadamy Award Winning’ actors, who can ‘mimic’ normal human behavior and fool the vast majority of people into ‘being on their side’. I strongly recommend you read a book called “The Sociopath Next Door’ by Martha Stout, PhD to gain some insight on these incredibly dangerous people. I credit her book for helping me to make sense of my husband’s behavior and treatment of me. This book, and an incredibly compassionate support group I found on the website ‘Quora’ saved my sanity. Literally.

Why did I not go to the police? I did. The local sheriff’s department would not take my complaint, because my husband was a Deputy Sheriff with the Patrick County (Virginia) Sheriff’s Department. They would call him, and he would tell them that she ‘ran into a door’, or ‘hit herself in the face opening a cabinet’ or ‘we were playing around, wrestling, and I accidently hit her in the face with my elbow’.

What about the church? I went to the pastor of the church I had been a member of since 1973. As I began to tell my story, the pastor of the Meadows of Dan Missionary Baptist Church interrupted me and began to lecture me. The words that Shawn Carter, the pastor, said to me are forever burned into my mind. “How dare you come up here and try to make trouble for your husband just because you are mad at him and you two have had a fight?” Then he prayed a long prayer over me, that “God would show her the way to become a more obedient, submissive, Christian wife”. I went home crying. My husband, when he heard how I had been treated, shed tears, too. Tears of laughter. “I told you; no one will ever believe you! I got there first!” You see, he had been, for 40 years, a ‘gospel singer’ with a local group called the ‘Joyful Noise’. The members of this group have been his ‘flying monkeys’ for over 20 years, jeering at me, condemning me, treating me with total contempt because he has them totally brainwashed and under his control.

He had the perfect cover. This is why he got away with abusing me without let-up for 25 years. When I appeared in the local community with bruises on my face, the people of the community would ‘turn away’ and pretend not to see me, even turning and going the other way down the grocery isle.

When he left, he ran out on the mortgage he had taken out of the farm he had inherited from his grandparents. In all those years, he simply did not ‘lift a finger’ to maintain the house or the land. I have been making the mortgage payments for all this time. My only income is my Social Security check of $1,087 per month. The mortgage payment is $777.67 per month. After making the mortgage payment, paying my electric bill, phone bill, garbage pickup, car insurance, life and burial insurance payments, I have no money left to buy food for myself and my cats. If not for the ‘Angels’ on Facebook and the local food pantry (once a month) we would already have starved to death.

It is wintertime now. The house is dead with cold. I have only two space heaters I can use: one in the back bedroom and one in the bathroom. The other outlets in the house have been fried due to the leaking roof impacting the wiring.

I met God face to face in August of 1973, at the age of 19, after hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the first time in my life. I gave my life to God and received the Baptism and the Infilling of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ. I have been and continue to be a Christian in the truest sense of the word, and I have done my best to be a loving, Christian wife to a criminally insane sociopath. I took Abigal as my example and have nearly memorized the Book of Job in my efforts to ‘let go and let God’.

Now, I am old, I am cold, I and my cats are slowly starving, freezing to death. I started a business in 2015, trying to eventually pay off the mortgage my husband took out on the farm, working with feral cats by using the incredible gift God had given me of taming wild animals, which I have had since I was a very small child. Incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2020, the Feral Feline Recycling Project, Limited, takes care of 12 feral cat colonies with over 200 cats and kittens. I go out every day, regardless of the weather, to feed and interact with these wild animals, slowly winning their trust, then their love and affection. Eventually, the aim is to ‘recycle’ these cats as ‘barn cats’, ‘farm cats’, ‘shop cats’ and even ‘house cats’.

At first, for three years, my husband showed great enthusiasm for this work. I would take videos of the colonies and the cats therein, and he would ‘edit’ the videos and post them to my ‘Facebook’ account, which is still up and running under the ‘nom de plum’ of ‘Cat Balue’. He would even put captions and labels on these videos and make posts celebrating this ‘noble work’. What I did not realize was that at the same time, my husband was secretly sabotaging everything behind my back. He, through his ‘sociopathic powers’ was recruiting his ‘flying monkeys’ to cut me down and destroy my testimony to the world that God is real. How else can a mere mortal tame wild animals?

He incited Elizabeth Whitely, of ‘Hulks Helping Hands’, a nonprofit here in Meadows of Dan, Virginia, to launch a ‘Facebook Firestorm’ that nearly destroyed me and my work with feral cats. As a result, my work, my testimony to God and ‘FFRPL’ lost many, many believers and supporters. Now, all I am left with is with many cats and no way to feed them. I pray every day for deliverance to God, and I place all my trust in God and God alone.

I need help. I do not have any money left over, and I just had to represent myself in court to fight off a predatory ‘mortgage recovery company’ who claimed that I was in ‘arrears’ on the mortgage payments. I was smart enough to send my payments through paper checks, Certified Mail, and was able to get an Injunction to stop the illegal sale of my farm. I won the first battle, but the war against Evil is far from over, and I need help.

Please, do not let Satan win. I will testify to my dying breath that God is real, that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and that the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ is here with us right now. These are the Last Days.

I praise God and thank Him.

Amen.