This post is a chapter of the book I am writing about sociopaths, narcissists, domestic violence perpetrators and pedophiles.
As so many of my readers request, this chapter will use the example of Aaron Stewart Heuser, born December 19, 1970 in Anchorage, Alaska.
Everything in this chapter is a true and eyewitness account and provided so my readers can avoid getting involved with diagnostic sociopaths such as Aaron Stewart Heusser.
We live in a marvelous age of innovation for keeping healthy and overcoming illness. We have skin sensors to gauge our blood sugar and phone apps that auto-track sugar levels. Similar technology for heart conditions such as tracking and warning of epileptic seizures, heart fibralation, blood pressure, etc.
What we don’t have is a device for warning us away from sociopaths, predators, narcissists and abusers like my experience with ex-husband Aaron Stewart Heuser.
I was his third wife, by the way, and we married when he was 25. Both previous wives he had abused, lied to and abandonned at the desire and manipulations of his enmeshed mother, Valerie Heusser Bates and sister Christy Heusser.
So based on the science we do have regarding this type of person and their sociopathy, here is a checklist of warning signs that the person you are engaging with might be a sociopath. If I could make it into a smart phone app, with lights and alarms and whistles that go off while you are in the presence of a sociopath like Aaron Stewart Heusser, I would.
Aaron Stewart Heusser was diagnosed by a clinical psychologist to have an Axis II character (personality) disorder called Sociopath, narcissist, obsessive-compulsive and clinically depressed.
And, the perfect modern Mormon male defined by his mother, sister and everyone who came into contact with him.
He had everyone fooled. The perfect gentleman, did and said all the right things at all the right times. Which brings us to Checklist Item #1: A sociopath learns to mimick the behaviors, verbalizations and outward appearances of socially appropriate individuals. It is rehearsed, it is practised, it is an outward costume by design to fit in, become accepted, and then do the nasty. Whatever socially unnacceptable behavior he chooses and has a compulsion to do, disguised by the perfectly poised and prescribed outward behavior.
However, the sociopath such as Aaron Stewart Heusser draws a blank when in a spontaneous situation that calls for authentic behavior, attitudes, responses — Aaron would have a few Tells” — like any conman, there is a behavioral habitual cue that he cannot control in spontaneous, unrehearsed settings. For Aaron Stewart Heusser, he had a slight tremor in his upper lip, slightly to the left. And he compulsively picked at scalp scabs until they bled, and was not able to stop. He would get angry that he was not able to summon up an emotional response, something human and genuine — the anger was a narcissistic wound, hostility that the environment around him was not cooperating with his interior agendas.
Checklist Item 2: Aaron Stewart Heusser could not handle emotions or anything to do with emotions. HIs default emotion in any situation that asked him for an emotionally appropriate response or gesture, was anger that somehow he had been exposed, that the golden boy on the pedestal that his mother and sister kept him since he was born was slightly cracked or worse, that he had slid off. Then his default posture became more than anger — it became, strangling, hissing threats, hits and twisting of limbs and isolation, abandonment, and deviant forced sex.
For Aaron Stewart Heusser, the only way he could comfort himself in his rages was to make me pretend to be his mother during sex.
One time, in a trial attempt at sponteneity, he got us a surprise trip to Disneyland. Everything was wonderful, until that night in the hotel, when I was happily exhausted and wanted to sleep with all the fun memories we had made, Aaron Stewart Heusser wanted to have sex with me while I wore mickey mouse ears and talked in baby talk while he forced sex on me.
I did not let him do that. I refused. He escalated to anger and then I got the brunt of it.
Checklist Item # 3: The Double Life. He carried that off so well, and the object of his affection with whom he carried on the extra-marital affair was his mother. He kept it all from me so exclusively, plus financial hidings, financially stealing my business and personal funds, tricking me into signing investment accounts and the deed on our first house he got into trouble with the real estate agent who saw that train coming — Aaron had used my life’s savings from my private practice as a downpayment for our first house, then tricked me out of the deed and ownership of the house, then divorced me and was able to legally keep all of the house and all the other assests.
I did catch him in the act of manipulating his bosses to hide his pay raises and bonuses from me in the divorce.
Checklist Item #4: The keeping of trophies and souvenirs of past con jobs. When dusting and straightening one day, I found his stash of trophies from each one of his past relationships, right their in velvet souvenir boxes and velvet wrappings. When confronted with this, he became irrate that I would have any kind of feeling about it, and then the violence began again.
Checklist Item # 5: It’s what they’re not saying. Aaron Stewart Heusser was very skilled and adept at hiding his factual past behaviors against women and dishonest cons. When the Mormon church revealed to me — in asking my permission to exit out of the previous temple marriage, a church function — that he had been married not once but twice before, they let me know in a very round-about way. Desperately trying to avoid the topic to prevent themselves from being sued for breaking pastoral privilege, but it was in what they and his ex wives were not saying that tipped me off that there was a deep undertow to this relationship that I needed to beware of.
Which brings us to Checklist Item # 6: What Are You Ignoring but Know Better Than to Ignore.
I was a mental health therapist specializing in personality disorders and abusive personality. The red flags were waving and the red lights of alrm bells were going off.
I did what many, many women do — I suspended my judgement, blamed and questioned myself for “being too paranoid because of my work” or “being too perfectionistic” or, “being so negative. Why can’t you just enjoy being with this perfect man — are you that ungrateful, Heidi?”
Twenty years later, after he lied, cheated and stole my son away from me, manipulated him against me so he could let his mother, Valerie Heusser Bates, and sister Christy Heusser, “have him as a prize.”
Which leads me to Checklist Item # 7: A sociopath like Aaron Stewart Heusser owns people. He cannot relate with people. He either owns them or rejects them. Our son was his right of ownership, and it was not out of love or fatherly relationship, but a trophy, a souvenir to own, a person to own, from 2 years forward.
He wanted to own our son like some men want to own a Jaguar or beachfron getaway cabin in Mazatlan. Aaron Stewart Heusser just had to own our son, and then, in the one big act of worshipping his mother and sister, present our son to them to raise.
This is why having a Sociopath detector is so critical. There are more I can add to this list — I haven’t even started on the many benign-looking duplicities and multi-faceted, deeply cowardly and criminal acts.
I’ll get to them later in my book.
Checklist Item # 8: A sociopath feels no remorse, no regret or repentance for his deceitful, manipulative, abusive and dehumaniing behavior.
When caught, a sociopath like Aaron Stewart Heusser will respond with insult. Like, “How dare you see the truth and reveal it? How dare you call me out? How dare you hold me accountable. Then the insult, stemming from deep and psychotic-level arrogance and overly-inflated sense of his own importance, and his assumption and requirement that everyone around him play those games, join in with his deceit, play along the con, go along with their manipulation.
And it works! True sociopaths like Aron Stewart Heusser can read a room and in two minutes know whom and how to manipulate, con, decive, and engage with for his silent agendas.
Sociopaths do not like to be held accountable. This is like Kryptonite.
In one phase of our divorce, which was to divide up assets, I, pro se, deposed Aaron’s bosses and like the honest normal men they were, told me the truth, that Aaron Stewart Heusser had conned them into hiding his pay raises and bonuses so they would not become a part of the divorce settlement.
On the day I called Aaron Stewart Heusser to the stand, his mother had him dressed out like a little lord fauntleroy — new, tailored tweed suit, a new and dry cleaned button down ralph lauren olive dress shirt with a cosmopolatin tie and new preppy brown loafers.
And then he lied on the stand.
Then I called up his bosses to witness, and they told the truth.
So Aaron got caught, and worse, got caught in public. This may have been the first time in his 26 years of having his con and manipulation outed. He burst into gulping, sniveling, hicuping tears when the Judge threw his pen down on the bench, pounded the bench three times and shouted at Aaron three times, “Do you know what a scumbag thing that is to do to your wife, the mother of your child??”
Holding a sociopath like Aaron accountable and exposing his nasties in public can be very dangerous — make sure you have a safety backup for later when he retalliates.
A socoipath’s sense of entitlement borders on the psychotic — they feel entitled to make up their own rules and entitled to not get caught and entitled for everyone around to agree with his perversed reality and go along with it. They cannot feel remorse, so don’t waste your time tryingt o find their humanity — they are simply missing those cog wheels, and now we know that brain science reveals sociopaths such as Aaron Stewart Heusser are missing brain features that regulate conscience and remorse.
In other words, from birth, they are neurologically damaged.
I’ll close this article with telling you of one night when it really began to dawn on me the monster I had married.
It was friday night, and Aaron Stewart Heusser had isolated me so much we never got together with friends or my family or even went out of the house. Friday night was date night, according to the marital guidebooks, but Aaron was so obsessive-compulsive and rigid that the onloy date he would engage in was to pick up McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese meals – my meal had to be the same as his, and play Playstation games.
I wanted to go to a movie, so I went and saw a movie about a man who thought he was a tough outdoorsman, and ventured into the interior of the Alaskan brush with an older man as pilot and guide. The plane wrecked, the older man was too wounded to move, and the younger outdoorsman made the decision to go and try to find his way through the brush, without equipment, but having discovered that the older man he trusted had been having an affair with his wife.
So it became a moral question — if he succeeds in finding help, the older man would likely get his wife back in society and leave him. It was in his hands to let him die of his wounds and nobody would ever know the difference between the death via accident or death via focused neglect. And if the man died in the woods it would, in the view of the wiser, older woodsman, death due to realizing that his inadequacies that for all his life he had been hiding from, overcompensating for, were actually real and true and would be the cause of his death on their exposure.
The last words the older man spoke to the younger man, giving him some survival wisdom, is that most people lost in the brush do not die of wounds or exposure or the elements, but they die discovering the truth about themselves that is the core of their greatest fear.
When I got home from the movie, Aaron Stewart Heusser was naked in bed curled up in a fetal position, whimpering and giving me the silent treatment, obviously manipulating me to — once again — comfort hime like a mother would.
It was just too creepy for me, so I silently got a blanket and slept on the couch. Awake al night for what he might do because I wasn’t playing into his manipulative game.
And I thought of how similar the younger man was in the movie to Aaron Stewart Heusser. In the movie, what killed the man was his deeply authentic cowardice that had led him to a life of manipulating and conning others.
And that’s when I knew I had to get out for my life and the life of my son.
—– Heidi Hansen, a true and factual witness to the repulsive duplicity of the perfect gentleman sociopath.
the trauma project 