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
Kathy,
I took no offense whatsoever at anything you said as regards my post. In forgiving my ex-soc it did not remove the mantle of blame from her shoulders, nor did it remove the anger at what she had done to me and the way in which she did it. But, it enabled me to cease being angry at HER. There is a difference in this. It prevented me from lashing out and exacting revenge, it enabled me to look more objectively at her as a person, as an individual with a serious personality disorder, a pathological one. Before I forgave her I wanted to hurt her, I wanted her to feel the pain that I was feeling, to do something, anything to hurt her. These feelings were justified in a sense but they are not feelings that I wanted inside me for someone that I once loved. I was being eaten away inside by these emotions and I recognized that for me I had to truly forgive her in order for me to get rid of them and really start on the healing and rebuilding process.
This truly was the turning point for me, and I have shared some of my success and failures in these forums. I agree with you that it is an ongoing process, and whilst it is hard it is rewarding. I merely said that for ME the most important thing was to forgive her. In situations like this there are very few hard and fast rules, we each learn what works for us as individuals. That is simply what worked for me. Oddly enough, separating the “person” from the “act” has been beneficial to me in many ways. I have been able to talk with my ex without rancor on my part, without sarcasm, I have been able to treat her with the same respect that I would treat any other stranger, for that is what she has truly become to me.
In the time that has passed since she “devalued and discarded” me many areas of my life have shown a great deal of growth and improvement. Her life has not been so good. I will not go into the gory details of the mess that her life has become but it is not pleasant. In forgiving her it has actually made me able to express genuine sympathy for her as a human being, and to truly feel for her in her plight. But, as I said earlier, forgiving does NOT mean forgetting. Always at the front of my mind is what she did to me. It will ALWAYS be there no matter what. When dealing with her I simply remember the words of Dr Viktor Frankl,
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Before I say anything to her, before I make a comment or answer a question I take time to explore that “space” and I decide rationally what my response will be. So far it has worked, it has worked very very well. For me to treat her as badly as she treated me would indeed bring me to a level shared with her and I refuse to go there. Another way of putting it would be “killing her with kindness”. I would be unable to do this if I had not forgiven her so early on.
I do appreciate your comments as regards my post, mainly because I just might be way out in left field on this one, but so far I have to say that for me it has worked. It might not for others, but it has for me.
Thank you and god bless.
Biddude wrote…“After going through what all of us on here have gone through I feel that a therapist is vital.
I admire and salute you for being able to achieve so much without one, it says a great deal about your inner character.
I’m one of those non-therapist visiting LF members. I did visit a social worker a few years ago, who worked in the small town in Texas that I was living in at the time.
I was struggling with the residual depression that occured along side generalize anxiety disorder and was contemplating anti-depression meds.
I had beat the anxiety disorder over the head with first surrendering my cares to the Lord and then with wee little daily baby steps conquering my irrational fears.
Anyway, the social worker was a sweet lady and seemed interested in my story, but I wasn’t the least bit comfortable sharing my pain with a total stranger.
I answered her questions with monosyllable answers, probably frustrating her to no end!
Since I knew I didn’t want to open up, I switched the interview to talking about her and her life. I wasn’t being manipulative, just wanted to get to know her better as I was less than forthcoming with the info.
Well, this woman had plenty to say regarding her past love relationships with men and her disfuntional daughter (who I now think to be BPD from her descriptions of her personality and behavior).
I gave her my full attention, compassion and concern and I actually left her office feeling pretty damn good!
How’s that for therapy?….haha.
And, for the LF record, I am in NO WAY stronger, wiser, smarter, more capable than any of you folks simply because I choose to not seek therapy from a professional.
I have become resolved, accepting and embracing that I am ridiculously stubborn, annoyingly willful and protectively guarding of my privacy.
Why do you think I love this site so much? FREE THERAPY without having to sit on a couch/chair in an office, resembling a rabbit in front of a car’s heallights, and furiously pondering a means of escape!…haha.
Dear Keeping faith,
When I grew up, terrified of this hateful angry vengeful “god” my mother taught me was up ther ereading my mind, she informed me that I had to “forgive” when someone did something bad to me—but HER definition of “forgiveness” was ‘LET’S PRETEND IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.” and, if someone said a “grudging sorry I did it” you had to restore them IMMEDIATELY to full confidence and trust!
That never felt right to me. In fact, after I realized my mom’s brother was a monster (though not even 1/10th of how big a monster he was) I didn’t want to associate with him, and ever holiday my mother would go into one of these guilt inducing crying jags about how I was going to hell because I didn’t “forgive him” (pretend it didn’t happen). So I came to hate the holidays, and also started having holidays away from my mother as I could not face uncle Monster.
When all this crap happened and mother had literally burned down my house (emotionally speaking) I wanted to reconcile with her, but she REFUSED to talk about it and she actually said “Let’s just pretend none of this happened and start over.”
WTF? You set fire to my life, almost get my other son killed and you want to PRETEND IT NEVER HAPPENED? I looked at her and I said, “Well, if we are pretending let’s pretend daddy and my husband aren’t dead and set a place for them for supper tonight.” (it would make just as much sense) But that started me on a journey of learning a NEW DEFINITION for forgiveness.
I have several good friends who live at a distance who are very good and learned Christians ministers so I approached them by e mail and I read and read and read the Bible, and other articles about forgiveness.
I realized several things and one is that ANGER at injustice is not bad. Jesus was angry and he said “Be angry and sin not.” So you can be all the angry at injustice and bad behavior that you want to be and still not “sin.”
Jesus also said, though, “let the sun go not down on your WRATH” Well, I looked up the definition of WRATH, and it isn’t “just” anger, it is bitter, burning vengeful anger that has boiled for a long time.
So what Jesus was suggesting, I believe is that we can be angry judtifiably, but the nasty hateful burning anger is not good for us. I agree. Because I would lie awake in my bed at night dreaming and fantasizing about how to get even with these people, how to make them suffer as they had me. It was some pretty nasty crap I was fantasizing about, it didn’t make me feel good. Jesus also said “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Did I want to be that kind of wrathful, vengeful hateful and bitter person? ABSOLUTELY NOT!
So first off when I found myself thinking about vengence or revenge or wanting them to suffer, I stopped msyelf and said, “tht’s not good, don’t do it.” And I didn’t allow myself to fall into these day dreams of revenge and mayhem.
Then I started to pray for these people. And believe me I DID NOT MEAN A WORD OF THOSE PRAYERS. I would actually write them down on a piece of paper and say them aloud and I knew God knew I wasn’t meaning them in my heart, but I forced myself to say them. I did eventually come to mean them.
I still don’t have a “gushy feeling” for these people, and I don’t think that is what is meant by “love your enemies.” I interpret the “love” in “love your enemies” as to not wish them harm, or do revenge on them. If you see your enemy’s cattle straying, put them up. If his house is on fire don’t delay calling 911, etc. It doesn’t mean you have to have a gushy feeling for him.
TRust is not a part of forgiveness, especially on those people who have NOT repented.
The story of Joseph is a good example, after his brothers had sold him into slavery and he had had a hard life in Egypt, been in prison for years unjustly, eventually Joseph got out of prison to save Egypt with his plan to store grain in the 7 years of abundance. He realized then that God had sent that on to him to put him in place to serve humanity and he forgave his brothers.
However, if you will notice, when they showed up later, he STILL DIDN’T TRUST THEM until after he had tested them to see what kind of men they had become in the years since he had seen them. He put them to a pretty good test to see if they would try to protect their father from grief, rather than like they did by telling their father that he had been killed when he was a kid. He saw that they had become more caring men and would actually sacrifice themselves to prevent grief for their father.
At that point he revealed himself to them as their brother. They were not “perfect” men, but they had improved. After their father died they automatically assumed that Joseph would THEN kill them in revenge for what they had done to him. Of course they were wrong in that assumption.
I realized I COULD forgive (get the bitterness) out of my heart, and still NOT TRUST THEM, not FORGET what they had done, but just no longer be BITTER and filled with malice and wrath.
I’m not sure if you can make any sense out of this, but I also prayed to God that he would help me with my bitterness and to help take it away. It was a difficult spiritual walk, and one that was filled with back steps. I am much more calm now, and more peaceful, and have so much less continuing stress and bad thoughts concerning the past. It is helping me keep it in the past, and not letting it stand in the way of my own healing.
Whatever one’s spiritual philosophy, we have not just been wounded physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, but SPIRITUALLY as well. As long, I think, as we harbor BITTERNESS they still own a piece of our soul. ANGER can stay there as long as you need it, it need not be TOXIC to you,, but BITTERNESS and WRATH are toxic emotions.
Hope that clarifies it, but will be glad to discuss this with you again if you’d like. (((((hugs)))) and God bless.
Well, Oxy, I don’t want to get into a protracted arm-wrestle here. (Maybe just a short one.) But I got a got a lot out of my bitter, vengeful thoughts.
Maybe it was just because I’d never let myself do that before, but once I got into that state of mind, it became relatively easy to tear through the whole relationship in memory and figure out what had really been going on.
But I think that, more than that, I got honest with myself about being bitter and vengeful. I really felt that way, and had for a long time. It was at an intensity that there was no way around.
Dramatizing my losses, calling him the worst names I could think of, dreaming up satisfying revenge scenarios, this was cathartic at a time when I was still feeling attached to him. And I believe that it prepared me for letting him go.
I can’t say that it was pleasant to feel like this, but it was something else. Maybe illuminating about a layer of myself that I didn’t know.
As I’ve said before, I didn’t “do anger” before this. (Not that I’d never gotten mad, but I could probably count my lifetime history of getting mad on the fingers of one hand. Maybe two fingers of one hand.) And like most people who don’t get mad, I was afraid that if I ever did let that monster loose, I might destroy more than I intended.
What I discovered what that the part of me that got angry was like the big, guard dog in my personality. It snarled and showed its teeth, and it was prepared to rip out the throat of anyone who hurt me. But that’s it. It wasn’t an out-of-control psychopathic monster that would destroy everything in its path. It was there for me.
Likewise the bitterness turned out to be something I hadn’t expected. Another protective mechanism, but one with a memory. I would have thought it had something to do with my whining about wishing things were different. As it turned out, it was a very rational part of me that kept records, and decided who could be trusted. The “bitter” part of it was because I kept getting into the same position with some of these people, not because they were being what I already knew they were.
And the vengeance, well that was fun. Creative imagining of what I’d do if I didn’t care about it’s impact on my life. Some of the very few laughs I had in this recovery process came from dreaming up lovely scenarios to drive him crazy. None of which I’d do, because they didn’t really match my character. But several of them have been worked into poems or stories.
The net of all this is that I never found feeling my feelings to be a waste of time, or harmful. There were times when I really wished I could speed the process up. Especially, when someone from “outside” called to find out how I was doing, and I had to say, “I’m still in bitterness, and but I believe I see the light at the end of the tunnel” for the third or fourth time. But it took me that long to sort things out.
When I stopped needing to feel that way, because my processing had moved to another level, I stopped feeling it.
Bitterness in particular is something I’ve never returned to, because I think it’s foundation is anger with myself, rather than him. I’m pretty well settled now about why I did what I did. And I feel relatively secure about not doing it again, because my needs are different now. I’m not trying to heal myself through relationships anymore.
So I don’t know if all of that makes sense. I respect your handling of your own stuff. But in my case, I can’t imagine getting to where I am now without indulging in bitterness for a while. It was there. I had to go through it.
Kathy
An article by Frank M Ochberg on Recovery
http://us.mc369.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?&.rand=362452749&da=0
It has to do with Journalists reporting on tragedies but goes into the fact that sometimes there is no ‘healing’ after horror.
this is true in my case (but not in all cases). for me there is no ‘healing’. for me, i have not ‘recovered from a painful blow…to …truly become more than [i was] before.
i had been a highly successful, financially well-off career woman, who appreciated herself and her achievements and was enthusiastic about life. i am not even sliver of who and what i was before the annihilation.
the torture my psychopathic partner perpetrated during the 4.5 years I was disintegrating under the effects of 2 major illnesses, is nothing i can speak of and the experience alienates me from the world.
my losses were total, every penny, every possession, my clothing, every friend, my home, my pet, my health, my career. and those losses affected my future.
i was often told to look for the hidden gem in the experience . cognitively distorting my thinking to view it in a positive light does nothing to change the reality of that abuse/destruction or the reality of my life now.
my life and future, simply ended with that experience and there was not going to be any moving on, getting past it, surmounting the damage-it was too much damage, too much loss at a time when i was too sick and too old to rebuild or bounce back. no resiliency. the horror of it was too much.
i am 4 years out, living below the poverty level, no medical insurance, still sick with the MS, no income, too exhausted to fight social security’s denial of disability (now-might change), losing my sight, going on 46 yrs old, isolated, nothing to offer any kind of relationship, will never have children, will never be able to have sex again due to his sexual abuse, afraid to be around people, about to be on the street, nightmares and flashbacks for all that time (unresponsive to treatment). that is simply the reality. my possibility for a future was too adversely affected.
sure, i may go to a homeless shelter, maybe eventually get public assistance but my ability to live a meaningful life no longer exists. my ability to take pride in myself and my accomplishments…gone. when the future is also destroyed and the victim left hopeless with no way to make meaning out of the experience, then it can be impossible to “heal”.
from a tech industry wonderkid to a ‘blind’, homeless bag lady i am not the stuff that ‘feel good’ victim/survivor articles are written about. i’m the one we would all like to forget, because the way it has gone for me, will make no one feel good and contains no myth of surmounting adversity, no paean to the indestructible human spirit. no hidden gem, no positive life lesson. and the way it has gone for me, is the way it goes for more than any of us care to admit. we tend to prefer the happy ending.
oops wrong link for the Ochberg article. the Ochberg link is below:
An article by Frank M Ochberg on Recovery
http://www.giftfromwithin.org/html/threeact.html
Ox, You make me laugh out loud (the part about setting a place at supper).
Thank you for that clarification. I think I may be on the same path. But I do still feel a bit vengeful. You know some of my story. I do fantasize about somehow telling his wife all that I know about his lies and previous affairs….. telling his daughter that when her mother was in the hospital and the S/P was still married (I did not know this at the time) and living with his wife that he was sleeping with me overnight as she was suffering a bad infection from surgery. I want her to know that he took his girlfriend years earlier to New Mexico when his father died. His wife didn’t go. He told me she refused to go with him (to generate sympathy) told his affair that he was in process of a divorce.
THen reason sets in and I feel like although they (his daughters) were so nasty and vile that they too are victims and HAVE TO HAVE SOME SENSE for his dysfunction right? Could he really have been married for 25 years and she and their daughters not have a clue???? Could it always be someone else’s fault in their minds??? Does this man REALLY look like a hero to these people????
I don’t want to have a conversation with him or be friendly. I will NEVER trust him. Tried that and he worked hard to suck me back in. I don’t want to even see him again EVER. I just want the nightmares to stop and the pain of all the bad things he did to me to purposefully hurt me and my kids.
YOu said: “As long, I think, as we harbor BITTERNESS they still own a piece of our soul. ”
I got away before he sucked the soul out of me and I know I was on the edge of that happening. I can’t let that happen. I want that bitterness gone so I can think about him someday and roll my eyes or just shake my head and not dwell on the behavior.
I have not ventured into this discussion with my therapist and maybe it’s a good topic. He was the one who gave me permission to be outright pissed of at this vile man for being such a dick. (sorry) Hugs back at you !!!!!!!!
Stunned: I appreciate your honesty. I’m in a similar situation, but older than you. Perhaps I am in better health.
What does society offer those of us who are beaten this low but who still have the spark of life. You clearly have the gift of articulation, you are intelligent. You are not the typical soup-line homeless person. Yet I know, from my own search, that resources are invisible for people like us.
I ask the group . . . other than the resources that we normally think of, what exists for those of us who fall this far? If we can reclaim our lives, then Stunned and I will have the great success story to tell. But she has been struggling a bit longer than me. We need a vision of hope that comes with some practicality.
Resiliency is not something that comes easy to some. I do not know how to teach it and I do not know how to obtain more of it than I was born with.
I am just thankful that I have any left at all…
Stunned, Rune, Fleeced Ewe….
I have no practical advise, no counsel to offer that would be beneficial, a consolation to you in your current despair.
What I really would like to do is gently hold your hands, maybe softly stroke your hair and listen, listen, listen, in person as you share your pain and suffering with me.
I would be honored by the trust you would give me, instinctly knowing that my only purpose, my only motive was to help in anyway I can to alleviate the pressure, to simply be a true friend.
What I can say, what has saved me time and time again, from succumbing and offing myself, is my spirituality.
Forget the religious affiliations, beliefs. But focus on the fundamental spiritual aspect of yourself. It DOES exist and it is an essential, valuable, important part of who you are.
Tap into that joyful spirituality, grasp onto it like it’s the only life-line you have because in truth….it is.