A relationship with a sociopath is a traumatic experience. The definition of physical trauma is a serious injury or shock to the body, as with a car accident or major surgery. It requires healing.
On an emotional level, a trauma is wound or shock that causes lasting damage to the psychological development of a person. It also requires healing.
To some degree, we can depend on our natural ability to heal. But just as an untreated broken bone can mend crooked, our emotional systems may become “stuck” in an intermediate stage of healing. For example we may get stuck in anger, bitterness, or even earlier stages of healing, such as fear and confusion.
This article is about my personal ideas about the healing path for full recovery from the emotional trauma caused by a relationship with a sociopath. I am not a therapist, although I have training in some processes and theories of personal and organizational development. My ideas are also the result of years of research into personality disorders, creative and learning processes, family dynamics, childhood development, recovery from addictions and trauma, and neurological research.
After my five-year relationship with a man I now believe to be a sociopath, I was physically and emotionally broken down. I was also terrified about my condition for several reasons. In my mid-fifties, I was already seeing evidence of several age-related diseases. But more worrisome than the premature aging was my social incapacitation. I was unable to talk about myself without crying, unable to do the consultative work I lived on, desperately in need of comfort and reassurance, unable to trust my own instincts.
I had been in long-term relationships almost my entire life. My instinct was to find another one to help me rebuild myself. But I knew that there was no safe “relationship of equals” for me now. I was too messed up. No one would take on someone as physically debilitated and emotionally damaged as I was, without expecting to be paid for it. Likewise, I was afraid of my inclination to bond sexually. The only type of person I could imagine attracting was another predator who would “help” me while draining whatever was left of my material and financial resources.
My challenge
So, for the first time in my life, I made a decision to be alone. Knowing that the relationship with the sociopath had involved forces in my personality that were out of my control, I also decided that my best approach to this recovery was to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it. At the time, I did not understand my role in fostering this relationship, except that I couldn’t get out of it. But I knew that what happened to me with the sociopath wasn’t just about him. It was also about me.
I also made a decision to manage my own recovery. I made this decision for several reasons. One was that no one else really understood the mechanics of this relationship. My friends offered emotional support, but they were as confused as I was about his hold on me and why I could not extricate myself. Second, I found no meaningful assistance from therapists who seemed unable to grasp that this was a traumatic relationship. Third, everyone I knew wanted me to get over it and get on with my life, which was simply impossible to do.
So I was not only alone, but proceeding on a path that no one else supported. I’m not sure where I found the certainty that it was the right thing to do. But I was certain, and I held onto that certainty through the years it took. Today, when I’m essentially at the end of the process, except for the ongoing work on myself that has little to do with the sociopath anymore, I look back at it as the greatest gift I ever gave myself. It was the hardest thing I ever did. And in its own weird way, the most fun.
Here is where I started. I knew that I wanted to discover and neutralize the causes of my vulnerability. I knew that my vulnerabilities pre-dated the sociopath, although he had exploited them and made them worse. I felt like my battered state and particularly the sharp emotional pain gave me something to work with that was clear and concrete, and possibly the emergence from my subconscious of a lot buried garbage that had been affecting my entire life. Ultimately, I did engage a therapist to assist me in uncovering some childhood memories, and then went back to my own work alone.
My personal goal may have been more ambitious than others who come to this site. I not only wanted to heal myself from the damage of this relationship. I intended to accomplish a deep character transformation that would change the way I lived. Before I met him I was superficially successful, but I was also an over-committed workaholic with a history of relationship disasters. Except for a lot of unpublished poetry and half-written books, I had made no progress on lifelong desire to live as a creative writer. I wanted to come out of this as a strong, independent person who could visualize major goals and manage my resources to achieve them.
Because I had no model for what I was trying to do, I did things that felt very risky at the time. For example, I consciously allowed myself to become bitter, an emotion I never allowed myself to feel before, because I was afraid of getting stuck there. I’ll talk about some of these risks in future pieces — what I did and how it came out. I learned techniques that I hear other people talking about here on Lovefraud, things that really helped to process the pain and loss. Some of them I adapted from reading about other subjects. Some of them I just stumbled upon, and later learned about them from books, after I’d begun practicing them.
Though not all of us may think about our recovery as deep transformation work, I think all of us recognize that our beliefs, our life strategies and our emotional capacities have been profoundly challenged. We are people who are characteristically strong and caring. Personal characteristics that seemed “good” to us brought us loss and pain. After the relationship, our challenge is to make sense of ourselves and our world again, when what we learned goes against everything we believed in.
What I write here is not a model for going through this recovery alone. I say I did this alone, but I recruited a therapist when I needed help. I encourage anyone who is recovering from one of these relationships to find a therapist who understands the trauma of abusive relationships, and that recommendation is doubled if, like me, you have other PSTD issues.
The healing path
Given all that, this article is the first of a series about the process of healing fully. I believe that Lovefraud readers who are far down their own recovery paths will recognize the stages. Those who are just recently out of their relationships may not be able to relate to the later stages. But from my experience, my observations of other people’s recovery, and from reading the personal writings on Lovefraud, I think that all of our recovery experiences have similarities.
Since my own intention in healing was to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it, this recovery path is about self-healing, rather than doing anything to or about the sociopath. However there is a stage when we do want that. We want to understand who we were dealing with. We may want recognition of our victimization, revenge or just fair resolution. There is nothing wrong with feeling that way. It is a stage of recovery, and an important one.
My ideas owe a lot to the Kubler-Ross grief model, as well as to recovery processes related to childhood trauma, codependency and addiction. I also owe a great deal to the writing of Stephen M. Johnson, whose Humanizing the Narcissistic Affect and Characterological Transformation: the Hard Work Miracle provided invaluable insights and encouragement.
Here is the path as I see it.
1. Painful shock
2. Negotiation with pain
3. Recognition with the sociopath
4. Anger
5. Measurement of damage
6. Surrender to reality of damage
7. Review of identity after damage
8. Rebuilding life strategies
9. Practice
The words here are very dry, and I apologize for that. The experience, as we all know, is more emotional than intellectual, though it taxes our thinking heavily.
From what I’ve experienced and seen, some of these stages may occur simultaneously. We may feel like we’re in all of them, but working particularly in one stage more than the others. In my case, I often found that I was “going around and around the same mountain,” returning to a previous stage but at a higher level than before.
There is no specific mention of depression in this list. This is because I regard it as a kind of brown-out of our emotional system, when we are simply too overwhelmed by facts and feelings that conflict with our beliefs and identities. Depression can happen at any time in this path, but feelings of depression are most likely to occur in Stage 6. Terrible as depression may feel, I believe it is evidence of a deep learning process, where our conscious minds are resisting new awareness that is developing at a deeper level.
This path is a model of adult learning. It would be equally valid in facing and surmounting any major life change. If you are familiar with the Kubler-Ross grief model which was developed to describe the challenges involved with bereavement, this model will look familiar. It is essentially an extension of Kubler-Ross into a post-traumatic learning model. The trauma may be the loss of a loved one, a divorce, a job loss or change, or any of the major stressors of life.
This is all about learning and evolving. If the path is traveled to its end, we emerge changed but improved and empowered. We have given up something to gain something more. The fact that this change is triggered by trauma may cause us to think that it’s a bad thing for a while, but ultimately we come to realize that we have not only recovered from a painful blow, we have truly become more than we were before.
What drives us to heal
The future articles in this series will explore the stages, their value to us and how we “graduate” from one to the next.
Our struggle to get over this experience involves facing our pain, which is the flip side of our intuitive knowledge of we need and want in our lives. Those needs draw us through the recovery process, like beacons on a far shore guide a ship on a stormy sea. To the extent that we can bring these needs up into conscious awareness, we can move through the path more directly, because it programs our thinking to recognize what helps and what does not.
Here are a few ideas about where we think we’re going. I hope they will stimulate some discussion here, and that you will add your own objectives to the list.
1. To relieve the pain
2. To release our unhealthy attachment to the sociopath
3. To recover our ability to love and trust
4. To recover confidence that we can take care of ourselves
5. To recover joy and creativity in our lives
6. To gain perspective about what happened
7. To recover the capacity to imagine our own futures
Finally, I want to say again how grateful I am to be writing here on Lovefraud. As you all know, it is not easy to find anyone who understands our experience or what it takes to get over it.
I have been working on a book about this recovery path for several years. The ideas I’m presenting here have been developed in solitude, and “tested” to a certain extent in coaching other victims of sociopathic relationships who entered my life while I was working on my own recovery. But I’ve never had the opportunity before to share them with a group of people who really know and understand what I am talking about.
I respect every stage of the recovery path — the attitudes and voices of those stages, their perspectives and the value they provide to us. So if you find me more philosophic, idealistic or intellectual than you feel right now, believe me that I have been through every bit of it. If you had met at different places on the path, you would have found a stunned, weepy, embittered, distraught, outraged or depressed person. I was in the angry phase for a very long time. I had reason to feel that way, and it was the right way for me to be at the time.
I believe the stages are a developmental process that builds, one stage to the next, to make us whole. I also believe that this healing process is natural to us, and what I’m doing here is describing something that has been described by many people before me, but not necessarily in this context.
Your thoughts and feedback are very important to me.
Namaste. The healing wisdom in me salutes the healing wisdom in you.
Kathy
Just half an hour ago someone asked me if it was possible to heal from this. I couldn’t give him a definitive answer.
The most important thing you may be saying here is that YES it is possible to get through this, and to even be better for the experience. I look forward to the discussions here, and to your coming material as well.
DEar Kathy,
Excellent article. I first came into contact with Kubler-Ross during nursing school, and I have patterned my healing on her “grief process” as well. I very much like the expansions you have made on this.
I am so much farther down the healing road than I was a year ago even and starting to acheive joy and peace in my life. My recent brush with my mother and the stress it caused made me realize that I HAVE come a long way down the road.
I also conceptualize my “strengths” as a reserve, much like a bank account that has continual deposits and withdrawls. We must keep a positive BALANCE in our “account” so that when the sudden emergency comes along we will have sufficent “balance” in our “strength account” to cover it.
When I first started healing, I had a large DEBT load and was in a negative balance, so that ANY even TINY stressor would dig me deeper into the HOLE. As I started to pay off my DEBT and get into the positive balance in my account, I still didn’t have much in RESERVE to call on and frequently even small things would put me back into the debit catagory, but as time moved on and I made consistent deposits into my strength and healing, with less “withdrawls” the account started to accumulate a reserve and that reserve began to grow.
Just like you worry about “money” when your bank account is low, and don’t worry so much when you have a little “pad” in your account, in my strength account, I worried daily, hourly, if my account was low because I knew that any little expenditure of “energy” would deplete my tiny reserve. Now that I am increasing the balance of my account, I am not so terrified that I will need reserves I just don’t have.
A day that goes by with peace and calm and a tired satisfaction from a day well lived as you crawl into bed at night adds to your balance. As each day goes by in which you go to bed satisfied with that days activities and how you handled them keeps on adding resources to our energy/strength accounts.
I have noticed a difference now in that when I have a “bad day” like the one the other day, even if it draws out a pretty good sized chunk of energy to pay that debit, I have enough reserves that within a short time I am feeling good again, rather than a tiny expenditure making me “in the pits” for days or weeks.
Today when my sons and I were cutting up and processing the meat, we worked 9 hours straight. It has been a while since I have stood on my feet basicly in one place for 9 hours and I started to get really tired. As time for dinner approached, I asked son D to drive and get us pizzas for supper because I realized I didn’t have enough physical energy left to fix food for dinner and I didn’t have any left overs for us to warm up. (conserve physical energy)
WE left a heck of a mess of bones and meat scraps in the processing room, bringing in and washing only those items that would be harmed by the blood etc. We will get the rest tomorrow.
We have a finite amount of energy, both physical and emotional, so we have to conserve and prioritize how we spend it to “get the job done.” Today was NOT the day for me to decide to start a jogging program, I needed ALL the energy I could muster for the job at hand. Today was NOT the day to decide to put on a seven course meal for dinner.
Emotional energy must be conserved and spent well just as our physical energy is. I think in the past I have gone “bankrupt” of emotional energy with the involvement with the psychopaths. I am learning to manage my emotional energy as I have tried to manage my finances and STAY OUT OF DEBT. Keep the positive “net worth” and conserve it as much as I can. Plan wisely in order to keep down emergency expenditures that are preventable.
I am like you, Kathy, I am at a point now that I really am not interested in a “relationshp” because the energy necessary for a relationship investment is not available right now. I need to build my reserves before I consider “investing” in another relationship. Right now, it is just like a new Mercedes, it might be nice, but I CAN’T AFFORD ONE! LOL
Oxy: I love your story of an honest day’s work, and I know the feeling of being staggeringly tired. The P drove me to that point on a regular basis. But it was OK because I knew my effort was putting “money in the bank,” creating the reserves that would pay back later. Except his agenda was different, and I had no clue.
I’m not just bankrupt on every level, I’m in a deep deficit, with no replenishment. How to heal from this position? How to even kickstart my creativity to begin to imagine a better future?
Hello Kathy: If you would care to review a case history, I would point you to “Love’s Executioner.” The first chapter of the book is available on Amazon. When I read it, standing in the psychology row at B&N, I thought I would get some insight into what sort of freight train had hit me. The title had caught my eye, and I read the first chapter. I was not comfortable with it, and over the past year I’ve thought about it many times. I think the story addresses some important issues about where we are in the process and what it takes for us to move forward.
BTW, I do not feel that the author knew what he was seeing.
DEar Rune,
Bankrupt doesn’t begin to say how I was at the beginning. I was so far in the hole I couldn’t even see the light at the top. I was buried in a coal mine as far as how I felt. It was slow.
The effects of the stress effects on our immune system and the accompanying infections I got put me further down the coal mine as well.
The old saying “when you are in the hole, STOP DIGGING” is a good piece of advice.
NC (physical no contact) is the FIRST STEP I think. It gives you some room to breath wihtout digging deeper into the hole. As you progress, you start to make a bit of upward progress and you eventually get to a level where you are EMOTIONALLY NC. At least I did anyway.
I no longer obscess over the loss of my son, my mother, or my X BF-P. Of course I didn’t have a loving relationship with the other Ps to start with so there was no “love lost” there which helped. They screwed me but they didn’t betray me, I never trusted them much.
I tried to conserve my physical energy while still getting enough exercise to burn off stress hormones (very important) but things that were not NECESSARY to life I didn’t do if I didn’t feel like it. Leave the dishes until you feel like doing them. Even if the house gets a mess, that’s okay.
Right now my house IS a mess because we have been busy with the killing and butchering the cow and bull calf. Tonight we left the butchering room a mess, but it won’t hurt a thing and we will get to it tomorrow. Haul off the tubs of entrails to feed the coyotes and scrub off the tables etc. No sense pushing past the point of “staggeringly tired.” Emotionallhy tough it was a wonderfully satisfying day, working together with my sons at a task to benefit us all, and one that needed doing when the weather was at least acceptable.
So even though we worked ourselves physically “into the ground” we still ended up the day with a very satisfying feeling, and tomorrow we will do only the most pressing things, after we sleep in until we feel like getting up. Do the rest the next day or the next. Tonight I did a couple of loads of wash after I woke up from my 4 hour nap, but felt good enough to do it so thought, “why not?”
Building back your emotional energy account I think is pretty much like Aloha has described building back up her own financial status after the Bad Man experience. She is working very hard at it, using her income well by keeping her “living expenses” low and paying down on the debt.
I think the emotional energy account is the same way. Keep your expenditures at a minimum. This may mean cutting out people who are emotionally draining if at all possible, or limiting contact with them. I had to do that with my OCD ex-friend by setting strict boundaries. At first to set boundaries “cost me” emotional energy, but once I had learned how to do it, it became a NET GAIN as I am not having a continual drain on my account from associating with this woman.
Look at anything in your life that drains “emotional energy” from you, cut it out if you can. Look at things that give you positive energy deposits and do those things more often.
You have to “budget” carefully I think, since you are so far in the RED. I actually started to keep a journal of “energy credits” and expenditures so I could sort of keep up with it.
Stressful things are expenditures, and good things are deposits. Just like I mentioned in the Holmes and Rahe stress scale. A good day without undue negative stress is a + and a day with high stress is a withdrawl. I suggest that you go to my article and click on the link to Holmes and Rahe stress scale and give yourself a check, then use those figures as a guide to your “account” balance or deficit. 300 points over a 3 yr period put you “at risk” for effects of stress (illness or accident) so what you are working toward is a (IMO) a period of 3 years that is more positive than negative. I am about a year to a year and a half into the three year period, so I know I will remain vulnerable until my score is below say 150 for the previous 3 yrs. It may take me 5 years to get to that point but as long as I am making progress I know I feel better. That one stressful episode made me realize that I HAVE BEEN DOING WELL and not having that washed out and wrung out feeling ALL the time for quite some time.
Rune you are a smart cookie, and you are getting there, I can see the difference in your posts over the last little while. Hang in there my friend! It will take a while, but you are getting there, I think we all are!!!! ((((Hugs and God bless you))))
First allow me to thank you for taking the time and effort for this article….
As my personal healing and learning progresses I see that it really has more to do with me then my past S/P…
In a way I see it as an island or strange land that I once visited. Other then some pictures and memories (Emotional Memories) that I took when on this island is all I have to recount the time I spend there. But like all of our travels the more time passes the less I remember. The culture of this land. The many rituals of this place. The society of it’s people and it’s form of government. In short I spend less and less time thinking of my past visit there. For now I try to spend all my time and effort on another island or place of consciousness.
This is my home my land and my place of being. This land I call self-reality. And the more time I spend there the more I learned of this place. I see building that need to be fixed or torn down. I see open field to be cultivate and seeded and then other fields with poor dirt and that will bring forth no crop. Roads that need to be build and some in need of repair. Still other roads I put up signs that warm of it as a dead end. The more time I spend in my land the less I remember that place I once visit called sociopathic-reality. I still hold pictures and memories of my visit there but these too become fainter and fainter as I build my own land and my society of self-reality.
Rune,
I’ve got a very heavy work week, so I’m not going to show up much, but I did want to comment on your first post.
If you want to heal, you can heal.
A lot depends on your definitions of healing. I think those definitions evolve and change as we move down the path. But ultimately, we want to be happy again. We want to feel like we’re in control of our lives, and able to move forward with positive choices without feeling like a boogie man is around every corner.
Oxy is far down this path. There are a few other people who write on Lovefraud who seem to be moving toward the end as well.
One of my reasons in talking about this path is to help others visualize it. We can’t rush our healing. We can’t leapfrog the stages. They’re all important to the ultimate outcome. But there absolutely is an ending, an other side. And knowing that, and perhaps understanding where we are on the path, can provide some comfort and perhaps confidence that we’re moving in the right direction.
There’s a natural desire to “get this over with.” When I first started, I wanted my life back right now. I didn’t want to feel the way I felt.
But understanding that you’re in a deep learning process that will ultimately make you stronger, more flexible in approaching life, more aware of what’s going on around you, and more secure and peaceful in yourself may help you be patient with the length of time it takes.
I talk a lot on Lovefraud about processing grief. To me, that is the same thing as processing the unthinkable. The types of experiences and events that shake us to the core. Our grief may be due to a broken heart or material losses. They may also be due to a realization that some part of ourselves — some deeply held belief or behavior pattern — has collided with a reality that proves it’s no longer working for us. And we are left trying to pick up the pieces, not just in our lives but inside ourselves.
Well, here’s some good news. If we get through this grief process, or any grief process, we learn how to do it. In the future, we do it faster and easier. We become more resilient. We move from “ouch” to “what did I lose” to “who am I now” fluidly and in ways that add to our resources, not diminish them.
This is the wisdom in the old saying, “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” It not the strength of anger and rigidity, though that is part of the path. It’s ultimately the strength of expanded awareness, new skills and a more grounded confidence.
We never stop learning. There will always be more challenges in our lives. Learning to learn, to cycle these challenges fluidly and knowing we gain something, is acquisition of one of the most empowering skills of all.
So, the answer is yes. You can and will do this, if you want to. And the outcomes that you envision will pull you forward.
Just as a balancing point, I want to apologize in advance if anything I say sounds as though I’m denigrating anyone else’s current position on healing.
In particular, I offer this apology to anyone who feels really angry right now. And who may feel like I’m suggesting that their anger isn’t warranted or appropriate. I am not. It is warranted and appropriate.
I’m going to discuss anger in a future column. I don’t want to get deeply into it before then. But I just want to say that I regard it as crucial piece of the work. You can’t get to the end without going through it.
And for this comment, you can thank my wise and wonderful sister, who reminded me that I can sound like a holier-than-thou know-it-all to someone who isn’t feeling and thinking like I do.
So if I do sound irritating, I’m sorry. I just have to tell this whole story, as I see it. It includes anger, but there’s more to it.
Kathleen Hawk: Since you’re on line right now, I’ll blog this to you. For the last few days I’ve been getting hang up calls. The phone rings once, and of course my caller ID isn’t picking up the number. It happened again last night around 5:30 p.m.
Someone definitely is trying to tell me something?
Coincidence that attorney won regarding my complaint to the Georgia Board?
If calling long distance … and you let the phone ring a couple times on your end … by the time it reaches my state … it’s one ring and they hang up. Of course, I don’t hover around my phone seeing if a number is coming across the caller ID…. so if it is him, I know and he knows he’s a sick freak!
Rune: I lost everything to due to anti-social personalities. I lost my career, I lost getting my degree (I was 3 classes away from graduating, 2 electives … swimming and aroebics or some type of physical exercise and my last programming calls (COBOL). My fiance did me in financially … due to taking advantage of my PTSD … I wasn’t paying attention to my bank statements, didn’t think I had to with him … totally trusted the loving and so kind and considerate man (PUKE) … now I now the truth … after he kissed me goodbye and told me he be back from his business venture (he was supposedly starting a business … and I had to find out, I was his business). Sorry to repeat the synopsis of my life … but, as for the healing process.
I believe in God. Truly, believe in God. I was like everyone else … went to church when I was a kid … and just normally said “yeah, I’m a Christian, I believe in God” … and didn’t think much more than that … until all this with the anti-socials.
Anyway, I wrote before how I read the Bible cover to cover while going through the lawsuit with my bosses … it helped keep the stress down … because they made sure I was stressed out to the max every day of the week and trumped up more charges that they blamed me with on Friday … yup, you guessed it, so I’d have a rotten weekend. It was overload to say the least on the stress level … which was their game plan … have me so stressed out I’d quit, or give up … or jump off a cliff.
Then I found out 2 1/2 years what my fiance did to me financially … plus, he was taking thousands of dollars out of my bank account slipping my bank card out of my wallet and going to the ATM … that’s neither here nor there now … so when I found out about my fiance I gave it up to God. Immediately I said to God … “this is too much for me to handle, this double whammy in my life, I don’t know why it’s happening, nor do I care, just get me through this pain ASAP, cause I can’t go another 6 years stressed out and in pain.
Instantaneously, like that … the pain stopped. I then had to realize in that moment … what I thought life was about … going to work, collecting and saving what you could out of your paycheck, college degree, savings for retirement, my retirement home in GA, my upcoming marriage, my life with my fiance … was all man made concerns. Superficial man made concerns that we buy into because we are living this human existence. We are not just humans experiencing this life and what we do with it … is over and done with when we die. We are spiritual beings, experiencing life … and for us not to focus on God in all we do … we’re fooling ourselves.
Basically, no matter how horrific our situations are on a human level and what our human conscious tells us it is … go deep into what your spiritual level is and stop clouding your mind with the superficial human existence stuff … and you will heal. Our lives may not be what we thought they would be … but, every time God closes a door … he opens up a window. Know this and believe this.
I hope this makes sense to you.
Peace.