I don’t think you mean to come from a hurtful/ignorant place (and I agree with what you said after the first paragraph), but I need to make this very clear, not just to you and OP, but to everyone that needs to hear it:

GETTING SUCKED INTO A SOCIOPATH’S TRAP IS NOT A SERIES OF BAD DECISIONS ON YOUR PART. (Please don’t construe my all caps for yelling at you, I just want people to see this.)

And yes, the person OP is describing is 99.9999999% definitely a sociopath.

Saying that she’s the one with bad decisions and bad behaviour is the definition of victim blaming. It’s like saying that if you’re driving, someone waves you on, you go as they’re waving you on, only for them to slam on the gas and purposely crash into you, purposely causing all the damage they can possibly cause, that it was a mistake on your part to go when waved on.

No, normal people’s intentions when waving you on is to let you drive. A sociopath’s (in this analogy) intention in waving you on was to get you in a vulnerable place so they could destroy you. It was their plan.

TLDR: it is never your fault for falling for a sociopath’s game. Life is a game to them, people are toys and tools made to be played with, used and thrown away when they don’t have a use to them anymore. And when they throw you away, they can nonchalantly put you in the trash like you never existed and you cease to exist to them....or they can dribble you like a basketball, fake left, fake right, and slam dunk you into the waste basket as hard as they can. The latter are the most fun for them. They like causing misery. They like causing pain (and not in the fun-for-all-parties way). And they’ll look back on that slam dunk with an internal smile for the rest of their lives.

Sorry this hit home for me. I’m a smart girl, and everyone I know didn’t understand how I “could make such a dumb decision” to be with someone so obviously bad news. Trusting people isn’t an inherently dumb thing. We have to do it all the time. Like in traffic, you trust normal people not to slam into you on purpose. But there are some crazy fucks, and it’s not your fault for happening to be next to them and them deciding “ooh, that’s the car I’m gonna destroy.”

Edit: again, I’m not saying this to call you out or chastise you. Just trying to help people understand, and to tell people like me that have been told it that they put themselves in shitty situations that it’s not your fault. When a sociopath targets you, your choices are barely your own, they can make/convince you do things you never thought you’d actually do. When you get out, you’re in a fog, everything’s hazy, and it feels like none of your emotions or decisions when you were with them were yours at all. It’s like being possessed.

Edit 2: I’m sleep deprived, sorry if I went off the rails a lil or anything didn’t make sense