A guidebook for recovering from the devastation of a sociopath

kindheart48,

I read your posts and I’m glad that you’re forgiving yourself. That’s important, not just for this recovering process, but for all of them. There’s a fine balance we ultimately find between forgiving ourselves and taking responsibility for ourselves. A lot of has to do with the messages of pain.

A few years ago, I read “A Million Little Pieces.” This is a semi-autographical book about a man in recovery from alcohol. A lot of my alcoholic friends absolutely hate it, because he didn’t play by the AA rules and he was a general monster in recovery. But for me, it served as a kind of lightening-bolt direct to the brain, helping me to understand that I am an addict.

I may not look like one. I don’t abuse alcohol or drugs. And I’ve always been the wunderkind of my family, the only one who supposedly wasn’t an addict. But that was just superficial. The truth is I ran my whole life in response to internal pain and fear. In some ways, it wasn’t so bad. I was a high performer professionally.

But in relationships, I just kept reproducing the same two relationship patterns over and over. Either I was being rescued, or I was rescuing. Either way, it made me feel better. Often the relationships had both components. And in one after another, I eventually abandoned them because they weren’t making me feel good enough — that is, the relationship didn’t serve as an antidote to my pain and anxiety.

It took me a long time to detox from my sociopath. Arguably I prolonged the agony, because I deliberately used this relationship and the pain I felt about it to go to work on myself at a deeper level. I knew the pain and the memories meant something more important that just the experience of dealing with a selfish jerk. It was something about me, not him. And I used these symptoms to explore for their real underlying causes.

But as I said this book alerted me to what I was doing in relationships, using them as a kind of drug to mask pain. And it helped me understand something new what was going on with me. I was detoxing from a kind of love crack. Because this guy had been so good, so perfect for masking that pain, that my addiction had reached new levels of intensity. And beyond that, he’d manipulated that need for his love crack to get whatever he wanted from me, as well as turning me into a kind of crack whore, willing to do whatever I had to do to get it.

It’s embarrassing to talk about myself this way. Like most addicts, I’d much prefer to be in denial and point out how very functional I really am and how all of my problems are someone else’s fault. (And none of this particular post negates the fact that we do, at one stage of the healing process, need to surface our anger and link the anger with its source in a programmed way.)

But since you’re dealing with multiple addictions right now (if we can agree to call this relationship an addiction), I think this is a good thing to talk about.

You’re going to AA right now, and you’re going to a therapist. So you’re basically working with two different models of recovery, which are not necessarily contradictory but they work different ways. AA is a behavior modification program that teaches new life skills, including changing the way we think, through a set of rules. The rules are designed to help us hand over our pain and self-destructive anger to a higher power who can help us manage them and recover our integrity. At the same time, we learn to “walk and talk” like people of integrity, instead of people who lie to ourselves while we destroy our lives and possibly the lives of people who care about us.

Therapy, at least most models of talk therapy, is designed to help us understand ourselves better. To acknowledge our pain, find its sources, and do the work of recovering the lost or broken parts of ourselves. And while we’re doing that, to develop better “rules” for ourselves or strategies for living. That last part, developing new ways of living, is often the first part handled, especially when someone is in crisis and needs to find answers to the question “how do I handle this.”

You’re in the midst of both kinds of work right now. What I talk about here is strictly the second kind. It is my therapeutic “bias” to believe that we will develop new rules and behaviors if we can heal our pain. That is how I worked with myself, but I was very dedicated to the belief that my relationship with the sociopath was only a symptom.

In fact, I believed that virtually everything in my life that seemed dysfunctional could be regarded as a symptom. That included the overwork. The overstuffed closets. The excess weight I carry. The smoking. The tendency to spend too much time on the Internet rather than taking steps to get a life.

But a symptom of what? What was wrong with me? After I got rid of the sociopath, that was the question that shaped all the rest of my work. It didn’t diminish the importance of the sociopath, because the biggest presenting symptom in my life was the residual pain from this relationship and the continuing damage that pain was creating in my life. But just the sheer size of that pain gave me something very good to work with. Something I could mentally grab and explore, looking at it, turning it over in my mind, and finally just taking the time to stop running stories about the sociopath in my mind and just listen to the pain.

It turned out that the pain led me to my truth. About where it really started. About how I kept reproducing the circumstances of those initial scenes, trying to make them come out different. About how what it really wanted was for me to revisit those old memories and rethink how I’d coped with those situations when I was a child and not free to judge the causes as I do as an adult. I’d made rules for survival then that were right for the moment, but not right for now, when I was independent and responsible for myself. I could do better now, and recover control of my life in ways that were simply impossible then.

I’m telling you all of this, because you are grateful that I told you to forgive yourself. When you say that, I hear that you are at war with yourself, and that is a very common thing that we understand when we’re in early recovery. A lot of our addictive behaviors are about exactly that, masking the pain of being at war with ourselves. Because the pain is also about part of us wanting to rise up, wanting to recover the power that we lost in these old traumas and our resulting coping mechanisms, which tend to be that we submitted and gave up and agreed lie about how bad something really was.

So I am going to tell you something about yourself that you don’t have to believe right now, but maybe you can just frame and hang it on the wall somewhere in your mind, like a kind of “Home Sweet Home” embroidery sampler. Inside of you is not just a good person, which you already know, but a strong and certain person who is at peace with herself. She exists right now. She is real.

What is between the suffering you and this clear-headed, certain self is all lot of drama that she is actually creating in your left to help you heal. All of this stuff is lessons she’s creating to help you find the path back to her. Does the booze work for you? No. Does the perfect-drug guy work for you? No.

Why these lessons? Because they match the coping mechanisms that you have to undo. Those coping mechanisms not only enabled you to survive a long time ago, but they also included ways to deal with the pain. “I can deal with this, if I do that.” The extremity of the these attempts at self-care suggest how much underlying discomfort you’re dealing with. How hard it is to maintain these coping tricks.

So here’s something else to think about. You have a right to feel this pain. It has a reason for being. It’s normal, natural pain that comes from dealing with trauma, and secondarily that comes from trying not to deal with trauma, trying to stuff it and go on as though it’s not real. This is your life, you’re feeling it and it’s important. This is you telling you that something is really not right, and that you need to do something about it.

If what’s most prominent in your mind is the pain from the sociopath, you can work with that, as I did. But if trying to fix that relationship doesn’t do the trick — if cutting him off doesn’t relieve you — then you might want to ask yourself why? Not with anger or frustration with your self, but with genuine curiosity and interest in your own workings. Why do I feel this way? What’s going on with me and this pain?

This may sound strange, but I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with you, except that you’ve got some old unresolved trauma. Trauma can be resolved. If it’s big trauma — like I had to deal with a background of incest — going back there, unpacking the memories and reconsidering how you really feel about it and how you judge the circumstances that forced you to cope — may be a big emotional experience. I needed some professional assistance to get through it, because the force of those buried feelings were pretty powerful. I had to cry and get angry and grieve what I lost.

But I also took a good hard look at the situation, and easily came to the conclusion that none of this was my fault. That I was the only sane person in a group of people who were out-of-control in dealing with their own pain. And while I had to submit and cope and stuff my own pain to survive at the time, now I had the capacity to see how strong and stable I was, how smart to make the decisions I did, how loving I was to try to protect the family, and also to recognize that I didn’t have to do any of that anymore. I could stand up straight, tell them that they were all crazy and irresponsible toward their children, and that I was making me the authority in my life now, and if they didn’t like it, it was their problem. (This was all in my head, because my parents are dead, but it did the trick nonetheless.)

I had to do this a few time with a few different scenes in my life, when other people’s action and my feeling that I was trapped lead me to some coping mechanisms that no longer worked. But I’ve gotten pretty good at it now, and when I find some big pain rising, I can usually get to the bottom of it fast (in a moment or a few days). Trauma can be resolved.

This is a very long note, and I probably should get back to forgiving yourself. It’s important, but it’s important because it interrupts the internal war, and gives you a chance ask yourself with genuine curiosity and caring, what’s really wrong here? Why do I feel like this?

This is the beginning of a lot of things. It’s the doorway to healing. And it’s the first step on the path of learning to appreciate and love ourselves for the amazing people we are. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t ready to step onto that path. Everyone comes here because they want to heal. The path includes coming to understand that this is about you, not him. And learning that the love you feel for him is just a diversion, one of those things we do when we’re not sure we have the right to love ourselves.

You do have that right. Beyond that you have the right to expect to be loved, and to live with the integrity of someone who wants a life that makes sense. All of that is in your power, and all of that is who you really are. Your work right now is just clearing away all the junk — the dysfunctional coping mechanisms, the wrong things you learned when you were dependent and trapped — to get back to your strong, clear, peaceful, powerful self.

Namaste, sweetie. I believe in you.

Kathy