This column is dedicated to my sister, who is my best friend and wise counsel in so much of this learning In Part 2, I wrote about painful shock, our instantaneous reactions to stabilize us until we have time to heal, and the everyday process that we use to resolve trauma. In a relationship with a sociopath, something goes wrong with this process. We don't handle “bad things that happen to us” in an expeditious way. It may be that we do not have skills for fast processing of emotional trauma, because we are burdened by residue of previous trauma. But beyond that, the typical sociopathic technique of recruiting us through seductive love-bombing, followed by withdrawal of positive attention, …
