Lance Armstrong said, “Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”
When I was in an abusive relationship with a sociopath, the pain was overwhelming. I quit trying to get through it and gave into it. I quit and felt like it would last forever.
“Nothing lasts forever – not even your troubles” so said psychologist, Arnold H. Glasgow.
Trouble is, when I’m in trouble I ‘always’ think in absolutes, like never and forever. When I’m in never and forever land, I tell myself tomorrow is too far away to even bother caring about what happens today. I tell myself to quit moving through the turmoil because it is a forever deal. I’m never going to get through it. I’m never going to get away from it. I’m never going to get away.
When I was with the sociopath, I couldn’t see the possibility of freedom when I was mired in my denial of what was happening in my life. I kept telling myself that because I said I loved him, I had to stay true to my love forever. I had to stay true to him, forever and could never leave. I never let myself think about the alternative, “What if I could leave? What if I didn’t love him? what if….?”
Because I told myself I could never leave him, I couldn’t see that I was the architect of my distress. Caught up in the despair of believing ‘the pain of loving him’ would last forever, I convinced myself to quit trying to do anything different, to think anything different. I told myself there was no freedom for me, just this ennui of dying more and more every day.
I work at a homeless shelter. Recently, I had a friend tell me he believes that many of the homeless in our city ‘receive with the expectation they should receive and see no merit in contributing to the very institution or the society that gives them succour’. While I understand his point of view, and on the surface acknowledge there is some ‘truth’ to what he says, I also understand what happens to an individual when they become so lost they see no hope of ever finding themselves again.
In all of us there is a dark-side to our psyches. That place where light cannot find a foothold in the quicksand of negative thinking that pulls us down. Some will never trip over their shadows, some will never fall so far from grace they lose sight of the light. For those who meet up with sociopaths or who lose their way on the road of life, however, darkness will fall as they plummet into the despair of believing they will always be lost to the light. Devoid of hope, they will not open their eyes to the possibility of letting go of never and forever being there.
My life with the sociopath was like that. I fell into the dark-side and quit trying to swim to the shores of sensibility. I gave up on me and gave into him. The pain of my existence, of being me, of having to walk around in my own body was overwhelming. I wanted to die and thus did everything I could to make it possible.
The sociopath became my escape from living. He was my own personal suicide mission.
I see it happening everyday at the shelter where I work. People on suicide missions with a destiny they fear will never come.
And yet, despite the bleakness of their outlooks their human spirit keeps struggling to survive. To rise above the cesspool of negative thinking that inexorably pulls them into the vortex of their despair.
There is no easy cure for pain. Yesterday my gallbladder flared up and for a moment I felt as if the pain would last forever. I knew it wouldn’t and so I breathed deeply. Let the tears flow and waited for it to subside. It did.
Like all pain, it disbursed, eased, backed-off and was replaced with something else. In my case, a refreshing sleep from which I awoke to a beautiful blue sky-day filled with love and laughter. A walk with the puppies and a wonderful friend. A shopping trip to one of my favourite stores to scope out storage solutions for my new home and a birthday dinner for one of my dearest friends.
It was a day that started with pain and ended with love and laughter. The pain subsided, its memory but a distant reminder I must watch more carefully what I eat. The love and laughter, they live on, forever and a day, to remind me to never give up on living my life on the light-side of my thinking.
DW,
you know what I think. But then I’ve never had a “normal” relationshit, just N’s and P’s. So I know one when I see one.
It’s frightening to know a P, too true.
But recently, I was reading an article in the news near my neighborbood. A 15 year old girl was interviewed because she has been in so many fights in the last few months.
http://www.king5.com/home/Teen-says-she-was-bullied-into-violent-fight-118810824.html
Everyone is trying to get her AWAY from the bullying to avoid further fights. Nobody is trying to TEACH her that she has a CHOICE. She can just say NO!!!! I won’t fight.
There are spaths everywhere and you will find them everywhere for the rest of your life because they can “read” your weaknesses. Our job is to GROW UP. We don’t have to react to their drama. We can learn to live without fear of drama. That is a huge part of being an ADULT. I’m working toward that and I hope to be there soon.
DW, U can do the same. just say NO to drama. The only drama I allow my BF is the kind where I’m in control. LOL. It’s funny.
Actually, I did LOSE IT the other day. not sure what went wrong with me. The gas station attendant was rude to me. He didn’t give me my 3 cent /gallon discount and then tried to IGNORE ME when BF was talking. THAT AIN’T GONNA FLY. I BITCHED EVERYONE OUT: BF, gas station attendant and the cashiers. No gas was pumped until I was allowed to enter my discount code. Discount code didn’t even work. days later BF admitted that they charged more than the advertised price. I think I was triggered by a subconscious realization that sociopaths were near.
Still, they all apologized to me in the end.
Don’t take shit from anyone. HAVE BOUNDARIES;.
I realize that I over-reacted but at the same time, I am glad I stood up for myself.
Good going, Skylar! That’s Awesome! Rock on! I want to thank you for sharing the link regarding Humiliation, the other day. I printed out the entire thing. It has helped me in several ways, and it is especially validating. Thank you for taking the time to post it!
Hope you are doing really well!
Much love,
Eden
Sky, over reacting to boundry violations is entirely normal, because it’s a new experience to set our boundry. It feel unfamiliar, and it’s scarey. We defend our “bubble” tooth and nail, because we are just learning that we have a right to have that bubble, and we get damned mad when anyone challenges us. We also don’t have much experience in distinguishing major from minor violations, or in how to deal with either, appropriately. We are in a process of learning, so, sometimes we over react, but eventually we find the balance, the ease and familiarity to stand up for ourselves with out decimating others.
Response to comment by Katydid to Petite way up-thread:
I think it’s very sane to question WHY any of us CHOSE a long distance relationship, or a relationship with a married man, or a relationship with a man in prison, or, as I did, very emotionally unavailable men.
Many of us have unhealed childhood wounds, and one probable result of that is a huge fear of intimacy. I am a true believer in unconcscious motives, and I think it’s quite possible that we are unconsciously drawn to unavailable partners, to 1) fend off the intimacy we so desparately fear and 2) to unconsciously repeat the initial drama so that we can finally succeed in getting what we didn’t get as children. This is simply a repeition of the original trauma.
I realize this all sounds like a buntch of goobeldy-goop to folks who are up to their necks in pain, anger, frustration, confusion, self doubt and yearning for their “beloved”, but it isn’t.
There is an enormous resistance to looking at oneself. One’s woundedness and pain; one’s unconscious drives, and patterns of behavior. There is so much fear.
While I absolutely agree that there is a process of recovery, and that each stage takes it’s own time, and that we can’t hurry it a long, as we might want to, I see a lot of folks “stuck” in the anger, and self-preservation mode.
Folks come here raw, and in pain. They seem to move through denial, bargaining, fairly quickly, and they get a lot of support, in doing that. But, we don’t seem to have much of a support system that moves us through anger and into acceptance.
Often, there is down right rightious anger at the suggestion that it’s an “inside job.” I get THAT.
I wonder if we could maybe have a special section for spirituality, or letting go, or building trust in a loving universe, or moving past blame and into meaning, or something a long those lines.
I am struggling to move on. I need a more positive approach to me, my life, my experience, and my healing.
I understand that may not be good for new folks, still struggling to come to terms with the earlier stages….and I love to be of help to them, if I can, but I wish ther was more support, more introspection, more conversation, on these final stages. I call them stages for lack of a better word. I know there’s really no such thing as distinct stages, but is more like a life-time journey.
I find myself frustrated, at times, wondering if lingering here is really good for me.
I don’t know, LF, what do you think?
Star, I think you are really doing great. You are allowing yourself to feel, and that’s the beginning of trust. If you hadn’t come to some trust in something, you would still be resisting, fending off and denying YOUR TRUTH.
I am SO proud of you!!
I was mlested by a VERY unlikely family member only once, in a very “gentle, loving, caring” way when I was 12. I completely barried the experience and didn’t even remember it til I was 26…mostly because of the confusion and the cognitive dissonance….the WTF moment.
My point is this: expect this time to be a really emotional time. Expect the sadness and the grief. You are ready to experience it, and the only way out of it is through it.
This is the beginning of “getting better” and having a new life, but expect it all to feel a little chaotic and know that feeling will arise unbidden.
Also, we need to have compassion for ourselves; compassion for the little children we once were. Making statements to yourself that you are so F’d up, or will never get well is NOT compassionate, and it only reinforces your lack of faith.
Belive in yourself, and believe in believing.
I am saying to you what I most need to hear, right now. I have been saying a lot of shame inducing things to myself as wee, lately, and I NEED TO STOP THAT, NOW.
It may not feel great, but YOU are doing great Star!!
Kim, I agree whole heartedly that the different stages we need different things…different advice….part of the problem though is that the stages dont go 1-2-3-4 Acceptance, they go 1-3-4-2-4-3 acceptance-back to anger—then sadness then acceptance again, then bargaining….until eventually we get to acceptance and STAY there.
Sometimes when we are wanting to shift all the blame for all the pain in our lives to the psychopath (and accept none of the responsibility for our decisions for ourselves) when someone tells us, “hey, you are repeating the dysfunction here” we DO NOT WANT TO LISTEN….we become angry at the messenger because we don’t like the message.
We must come to a point (in order to see the big picture and heal) that though the psychopath had no right to treat us the way they did, we didn’t set appropriate boundaries, we allowed the abuse to continue for weeks, months, years, decades….or we left that relationship and found another one just as bad (and repeated the problem again). Until we accept our part in at least allowing abuse to continue repeatedly we aren’t going to prevent the PATTERN from repeating itself again, and again and again.
Learning the red flags, learning to honor our gut, seeing when we are acting like we are in denial, and being “good and loving parents” to OURSELVES….protecting our emotional selves from being “gang raped” by bad guys…..those are all part of the healing process.
Learning what are appropriate boundaries and learning how to protect them. Realizing that when we set a boundary we must be prepared for the person who disrespects that boundary to be removed from our lives if they do not respect it. At first we are like kids learning to ride a 2-wheeled bicycle, pretty wobbly and we fall to one side, over correct, and fall to the other side,, but pretty soon we get to where we are pretty steady on our seats and feet. Our boundaries are thought about, they are reasonable, and we defend them in a calm and cool manner, and people who refuse to respect us, to respect our boundaries, they disappear from our lives.
Once in a while we get “blind sided” but most of the time, we are pretty good at predicting problems before they become BIG problems as we get further down the road toward healing.
That guy I dated a time or two that I cut off because he wanted to fly my plane illegally (no insurance or inspection) which would have put ME AT HORRIBLE FINANCIAL RISK or jail for allowing it if he’d crashed and hurt himself or someone else, and I said to myself “Hey, he’s irresponsible and dishonest—not for me” and then didn’t see him any more —well, he showed up this past week or so out of the blue, married 4 months, complaining how “hard” it was….and I think is already on the prowl for someone else. I might have been married to that IRRESPONSIBLE AND DISHONEST guy…he had charm, looks, enough money, etc. so he isn’t a decrepit wino…but he showed me he wasn’t honest and he wasn’t responsible and he was impulsive. So that was a BULLET I DODGED by having boundaries, by listening to my gut, and by being willing to honor and protect those reasonable boundaries.
Sky, protesting that the place was charging more for gas than they advertised is reasonable….I would suggest though that you call and report them to the proper authorities for that, my state has a pretty BIG FINE for doing that kind of chit. And I would have gone somewhere else for my gas…if you were OUT I would only have bought a few dollars worth then moved to the next station.
One time I rose absolute hell with a phone company, when I went to use a pay-phone and it took my 50 cents. I was absolutely furious, because it had a customer service number posted on the phone, and it was my last 50 cents, and it was an important call, and they said they would mail me a refund.
I lost all perspective, and let the loss of that 50 cents steal my peace. I was furious because I wondered how many millions of dollars they were able to steal from people 50 cents at a time…It was just plain wrong. (They never did mail me my refund.)
It was a reaction to injustice and my feelings of powerlessness. Sometimes, keeping peace of mind and staying in serenity; acceptance and faith are more important than letting a small bondry violation ruin your day.
Oxy, Wow. It must have been so validating to you to see Mr. Airplane reappear with all his discontent about 4 month marriage, and sensing he was probably on the prowl. You’re right, you DID dodge a bullet.
Oxy-1 Bad guys-0
Eden,
Hi. It’s funny but I’m kind of going through something similar as you. It’s what Oxy described: for a while I feel strong then I go back to an earlier stage where I feel vulnerable again, then I talk myself back to strong. I’m glad that I’m ABLE to watch this happen within myself, as opposed to just riding my emotions up and down like I used to. That said, the surge of adrenalin surprised me and once it came on I was steaming for several minutes. I just about abandoned BF, in fact I told him I wanted to leave him.
What pissed me off most wasn’t the price, it was when BF noticed that there was shenanigans going on and he just wanted to fill up and get it over with. So he tried to override my request. And the attendant just looked at him and they both pretended I wasn’t there and wasn’t talking. I had to slam the gas lid down on the truck and said, “no gas will get pumped into MY truck until I SAY so – got it?” I’m glad that I let everyone have it, I just wish I had done it without getting all emotional about it.
My problem is not with demanding good treatment from strangers, it’s with demanding good treatment from people I care about. If someone wants to abuse me, they first need to be nice to me. That gets me to the point where I feel affection for them, then they can abuse the hell out of me and I won’t jump out of the boiling water.
It’s possible that I hold back too much with BF, because I care about him. Then when the attendant got involved in the abuse, that was my opportunity to explode because he was a stranger. I then felt entitled to explode at BF too.
Dear Kim,
Yea, I can understand your fury with the phone company over that one. You are right though, we must not let the boundary violations STEAL OUR PEACE….and that takes practice. And patience.
Yea, I was totally surprised when Mr. Airplane knocked on my door. Then when he began to tell me he had gotten married 4 months previous, but didn’t seem happy about it…didn’t even tell me her name…then said “it’s really hard” (or words to those effect) then tried to keep the conversation going about something else…LOL
Yea, I dodged a bullet on that one, but I’ve finally seen the light that people who are irresponsible or dishonest in a few things are usually dishonest and irresponsible in MANY THINGS….so avoiding them is best. I’m not going to make excuses for folks’ bad behavior any more.
I’m not going to let enforcing those boundaries ruin my life either…just like I’m sorry I had to enforce boundaries with my friend in Texas who had been my best friend for 30+ years…it hurt,, but not like it would have in the past, I didn’t let it “ruin my life” and send me into a tail spin. Now I realize I can set a boundary and enforce it with an assurance that I am protecting myself from other people’s problems. From other people’s issues.
Back when I first started to set boundaries I cried for 3 days because I caught a “friend” stealing and I was afraid I would hurt HER FEELINGS! LOL I can actually LAUGH AT MYSELF over that one! I was all about hurting HER FEELINGS BECAUSE ***SHE*** WAS A THIEF! Commmmmme on! I was afraid of hurting the THIEF’s feelings?
Well, I would handle the situation totally DIFFERENTLY TODAY for sure. But you know, I bet I am not the ONLY one here who has been in that same mind set….catch the bad person doing something horrible…and we apologize or we take on the blame or we worry about hurting their feelings!? Yea, right! Like OUR feelings don’t matter. Well, my feelings do matter to me, and if they don’t matter to you, then maybe we aren’t friends then, and if you aren’t my friend and my feelings don’t matter to you, why should I get so upset because you need to get out of my life?
“Learning the red flags, learning to honor our gut, seeing when we are acting like we are in denial, and being “good and loving parents” to OURSELVES”.protecting our emotional selves from being “gang raped” by bad guys”..those are all part of the healing process.”
Thank you Ox Drover– I needed to hear that.
Kim,
Lately I’ve been thinking about LF as a community of wounded healers. Like the mythological centaur Chiron, it’s our own wounds that give us wisdom which we share with each other.
Most of us suffered some kind of wound as children and parts of our personalities got stuck, unable to grow up, even though other parts matured. I think that those stuck parts make us “unbalanced”. That’s where the LIMP comes from.
That is also what the sociopath observes and targets in us. The sociopath is SO completely stuck in his childhood that he recognizes ANY AND ALL immaturity. He is intimately familiar with the feelings of the arrested childhood development because he has never matured at all. So he can zero in on any aspect of us that matches his own immaturity. He targets our wounds with mirroring and then, later, with his slime.
What is so great about LF is that we help “parent” each other. Where our parents failed us, we have each other, the wounded healers helping each other grow up. Hopefully, it isn’t too late to acheive balance and stop limping.