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
well i didnt violently get bit but my ‘s’ wanted to mark me in some way or another when we had sex. scratch marks, hickies which I refused to be somewhere that is shown. Never thought much about that until now hmmmmm. ive got to sign off. Its after one and my alram goes off in three and a half hours. I will definitely catch up tomorrow. goodnight
That is VERY interesting. My S definitely found causing me pain or discomfort during sex stimulating in some way. The biting was the worst, like a test to see if I would put up with it. He humiliated in other ways. I am very curious to see if anyone else has experienced biting/other violent acts with sex with sociopaths?????
Kathy,
my comment about ‘cognitively distorting thinking into a positive slant’ had nothing to do with your wonderful healing process post. it was from my own experience, at a time i had made the mistake of trying ‘therapy’ and the approach had been a misapplication of CBT theory [imho] to trauma.
additionally, must clarify…i am not depressed. i don’t test out depressed on any of the evals (had do take a neuropsych for ss). i do have ptsd – dxed in 2006.
Ox, thanks-what you said about the denial makes sense-if i apply again, i will list MS and PTSD. and thanks everyone for your heartfelt responses. it is nice to be in a place of such understanding.
i can see how what i wrote looks like it came from a place of despair…it didn’t. to me, it is simply a realistic take on what i lost and how my experiences and losses affected my vision of a future. perhaps on the pessimitic side but pretty realistic, none-the-less.
may have to go to a shelter means if i have to, i will but that also may not turn out to be the case. just not a place i ever expected to find myself in life…i would have laughed 10 yrs ago if i had even entertained the idea that could happen to me-so, just another loss really-the loss of stability and the illusion of invulnerability.
the losses, i listed, like ever involving myself in a reltionship or having chidren, finacial security, career, the loss of primo health, were things that had at one time been important to me. they are a reminder of how much i have changed from the experience of the abuse because they have ceased to matter…so i guess that is a sort of mourning the loss of who i was but will not be again.
i am an athiest,more intellectual than emotional and my life views are rather existential, always were – my type of temperment contributes to a very different way of coping with trauma and the experience was pretty severe -all factors that come into play with resiliency, along with social support, cherished goals, etc.
we will always have vulnerabilities which can be exploited, that is what being human is. all of my life, i had been ‘too’ strong and self-relient, invincible, it seemed. i never needed anyone, yet i valued the relationships in my life. ambitious, driven and always reaching higher. there wasn’t a challenge in my life that i hadn’t met head on and overcome. i succeeded at almost everything i set out to do with very few failures. i took on major battles (denial of treatment with my hmo was one) and won, where some might not have even tried. i was tenacious. in a way, i was fearless. i over-acheived, valued my intelligence, had a strong identity and a very high sense of self-worth. i had risen so high, it would be a long way down, were i to fall. i was extremely confident in all areas BUT one…my health. i was confronting my own human frailty,mortality (for the first time) and the possibility of failure. so, i guess you could say that my vulnerability lay in my own narcissism, an unrealistic view of myself- as we are all human, we all may get sick, one day we will die and we all sometimes rely on others.
i had already been with my partner for 10 years before i fell ill. i stood by him through many struggles (his own health issues, for one) but had reached the conclusion that i was not getting what i needed out of our partnership and i was in the way of his taking adequate responsibilty for himself, i had seperated from him.
my capability in light of my health, was the fear he targetted and exploited. the fear of failure, of losing it all, he put into my mind…a few months of brainwashing, creating and growing this fear, cultivating self-doubt during the separation. his 9 months of steady full time work, many supportive conversations (charm offensive really) worked. when he told me he had appreciated everything i had done ‘for us’ and that we had made it through the hard part, he was in a position to ‘return the favor’ and he wanted me to ‘come home so he could stand by me while i got better’ i agreed. it truly seemed and felt genuine. he hit on that part of me that believed in the ability better yourself, the belief that change is possible, the possibility that i had been mistaken in my reasons for leaving/misjudged him, that we all deserve a second chance, that i could choose to rely on another, that those we give our love and support to, reciprocate, that there can be happy endings. this too was the result of the brainwashing, for i had been about to make the separation final and stay were i was…my thinking had changed so subtly and gradually.
and that was it…the nightmare began. it had been a setup. i had been groomed into trusting him and lured back so i could be set up to fail-so that he could make my worst fears become reality. punishment for having left him, punishment for ‘living in my shadow for all those years’, punishment for ‘having what he did not’, and on and on and on. the depth of his hatred for me became astounding. with malice and intent, he set out to destroy me, to make me pay, to bring me down, to take my life away, to blow holes in my self-concept – to show me ‘what i really was’. betrayal of the worst kind. and he enjoyed it -making a ‘fool’ of ME was power.
not only did my world view crumble, but my identity was erased, for what had once been true about me, was no longer true. if anything, i suppose now i know failure, illness, abuse can happen to me like it could happen to anyone – i was never invulnerable to it except in my own mind.
Stunned: I relate so well to what you are saying. No one can understand that kind of patient malice unless they’ve lived it.
We deserve a hand up. We didn’t deserve this.
I’m glad you’re here.
As I have read the comments on this post, I think I have finally realized why I was preyed upon by the s. I have always been devastatingly hard on myself to be so perfect. Anything I failed to do less than perfectly left me in a state of depression. I never demanded perfection from anyone else, just myself. At 44 years old, the year I met the s., I was desparate to have someone take care of me. I was sooo tired, worn out, of being everyone’s everything. My kids even used to joke withme that I should have a red “S” on my chest, & where a red cape. They even called me Xena, the warrior. I was working an ungodly amount of hours at the time, sometimes 60-80 hours a week. I was in the middle of a nasty divorce from my second husband, & I might as well have been jumping up & down shouting pick me, pick me. I let my own exhaustion & beaten down mind & body rule my thought process, to let him into my life, to take care of me. Little did I know that trusting him would lead to my losing everything-my self, my house, my finances, my soul, all gone. A heavy price indeed, to just want help in surviving.
Stunned,
Thanks for the follow-up letter. You sound good. Rational. Realistic. As I said before, I truly hope some kind of support comes through.
There’s was a stage on my healing path, the surrender to the reality of damage, that I’m not looking forward to writing about. But in my mind, it is truly the turning point. It was when I started to process what happened differently.
I’m not an atheist, but my take on “God” is something I developed from a point of no belief. I had a psychotic break in my mid-20s from an overload of unmanageable experiences and daily stress. While I was journaling through my recovery, I started writing things that seemed to come from nowhere I understood. A friend, who was one of the researchers on the government LSD experiments, recognized what was happening and called it a metaphysical experience.
It went on for a few weeks. I got a lot of writing done. I talked to other people with more of a Christian orientation who had similar experiences and they called it being born again. But my interpretation of it was different. I came to think that I was accessing a layer of my own mind that linked to some larger reality. The information was non-verbal and I had to find a means to verbalize it. I used a combination of physics and some of the more abstract concepts I’d learned growing up Catholic. Later I learned that my sense of it pretty much matched the abstract bases of Buddhism and most world religions.
I’m mentioning this to you, because a lot of us here have found that recovery also involves a kind of spiritual renaissance. This was certainly true for me. I didn’t lean on my spirituality to get better. I used an analytical process involving my intellect and emotions. But as I got better, I saw a clearer path between my conscious mind and that layer I accessed during the metaphysical experience. It gave me a stronger sense of myself as grounded, focused and essentially good. It also made me feel as though my emotions and my intuition were real sources of guidance.
I don’t know if that will happen for you, but I know that it’s given me a different take on my world. Opened it up, got me more out of my head, and I’ve started to feel gratitude again and a kind of aesthetic joy for how fascinating and beautiful the world is, despite all the suffering and dysfunction.
I didn’t lose as much as you did. But it felt like it. I lost what I cared most about. I battled to keep it. I tried to turn back the clock and recover what I had lost. But I was just too sick emotionally and physically, and it turned into something like an addictive process where I was looking for anything to convince myself that it wasn’t real. It became into an exercise in making myself feel better, rather than facing what was true.
I’m deeply impressed by your evaluation of your situation. Your vision seems clear. I also think you’re still grieving. How could you not be?
I think visually, and there was a time in my recovery where I saw myself as kind of dark stick figure stumbling to my feet from the ashes of my former life. I didn’t know what was left of me, but there was something. And in a way, I was relieved to begin again. I lost what I loved, but what I lost also defined me in ways that may not have been an accurate representation of who I really was. I wasn’t sure who I really was, but this was an opportunity to discover it, and to rebuild from scratch.
My five-year relationship with the sociopath ended when I was 55. I am 60 now. I’ve had to toss out a lot of inherited notions about the trajectory of my life. I’ve had to make peace with things I would have found unthinkable ten years ago. I have my moments of bitterness, especially when I’m tired and have to face my limitations. But mostly I like this stripped-down self and stripped-down life. I think I left behind a lot of stuff I didn’t really need, and in the process, gained a sharper awareness and more feeling connection with everything around me.
I don’t know if this will happen to you. Your financial struggles and your health issues are going to be big voices in your mind, demanding attention. But I know that I had similar fears and challenges through most of my recovery. And somehow this process went on, as though it had its own momentum. It’s why I started that article talking about our innate drive to heal ourselves.
I’m really glad you’re here. This is a great place to gain knowledge, perspective and the community of people who are healing. We get to know each other, and it’s an unbelievable relief to be able to talk about these things and be understood. And respected for what we’re attempting to do.
Many people don’t make it. We are the survivors. You are one of us.
Kathy
I’m like everybody else here — wanting so desperately for somebody to take care of me. In my case, I’ve been working since I was 13. I worked 2 jobs to put myself through college and law school. I worked my ass off to buy a nice place to live. I worked like a madman to build a career.
But, while I had all the trappings, I felt so hollow inside. And I lurched from one relationship to the next, one bed to the next. Until I met the S. And he demolished me.
I can so relate to the comments of so many on this thread about feeling absolutely overwhelmed by everything. For me, the only way to cope with that was to literally break apart every task confronting me into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until I could tackle it one piece at a time.
I remember a quote I read from a Holocaust survivor. He said “Our revenge on the Nazis was to live.”
I think that philosophy is applicable to all of us. Our Ss expect us to curl up and die. As a matter of fact, I think that’s why they start hanging around our old haunts, moving to our neighborhoods, etc.
Oh, I’m not going to deny that they also do that to jack us around. They’re pathetic. But, the end of the day, by ignoring them, they are the ones who curl up and die. And we get our revenge by living.
Matt,
What you are saying is very important. That’s why I keep going back to the reliability factor. It’s a big one for me. I have not had that in my life. I want it. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for someone to be as reliable as you have been to them. My x husband said he would be, but when the time came he basically gave me the finger. The S/P lied about how he earned his homes, said he worked three jobs…..NEVER HAPPENED. the things he has were given to him a few years ago by aunts who had some money. Lied about what he earned. he is recently unemployed and had a heart attack from years of steroid abuse.
They feed off of people like us and I think they know deep inside that they can’t possible keep it going for any length of time. I have an advanced degree, all paid for myself. I have always worked and have a nice home, good job. I took him to one corporate function and he was like a small child in a suit. he was very uncomfortable. Now I understand why. He can’t comete in that environment. That’s why his new girlfriend is an x stripper with no job and three kids she can’t afford. and he lives in a beautiful hime we built together with her brother who was incarcerated. He can’t possibly afford that now either.
It took so long for e to understand why he would lie about these things and why he chooses the kind of friends he now has…… because he is their hero. These people could never have lived like that if not for him. It just grosses me out. I was lucky. I almost sold my home and moved in with the jackass. As if this isn’t hell enough.
Matt, i do believe in karma now and I think we will find what we want and can manage to take care of ourselves. Maybe our appreciation will be greater because of this horrible experience. There must be a reason why bad things happen to good people.
OX,
May I ask you to go to my post above from 4:21 yesterday. I respect your thoughts on this issue of forgiveness and I want to resolve this issue of vengefulness that I feel. It’s so out of character for me. Maybe I am still so angry but I want to let go of this. I think on one hand I am proud of myslef for questioniong the lies, investigating him, dealing with the stalking even when the police didn’t help, and I want (even in all my embarrassment) for other people to know about him.
And on some level, I know it’s not my place. The truth will hurt others as well as him. Does that make sense?
Looking back at the Trauma Bond, the part about how in an effort to be loved we become super acheivers, (outside) taking care of everyone else, but INSIDE we want so desperately for someone to CARE FOR US. Yep, that’s part of it, at least in MY case, and sounds like several of you have the same MO.
And you know, I am aware that my own mother in her toxic enabling has a trauma bond, and always appeared the “super acheiver” but now that she is becoming physically feeble she is DESPERATE to have someone sign on as her “caregiver” who will take orders from her on JUST HOW TO DO IT. With total self sacrifice.
I actually did that total self sacrifice when my step dad was ill and mom was also ill at the time with surgical complications that wouldn’t heal. I still don’t regret taking care of my step dad those 18 months before he passed away, He was a JOY to be around and as we grieved together for his passing, we also shared so many many laughs and good times. He was never demanding or pity play, he was accepting of his coming demise, and a truly loving Christian man. It was “quality” time with him, not negative. With mother it is different, she wants someone to entertain her, jump to her demands and wishes, and at the same time be subservient and thank her for the opportunity to do so. Totally a different ball game.
You know I was thinking this morning that if you “graphed” our healing, the line seems to run almost flat for so long, making tiny upward moves, then some down, but once you get along the way a bit and get a little ways UP the chart, the “ah ha” moments come faster and more, and the line starts to move upward at a steep slope and each day you gain more than maybe you did in a month at the first when you were so DOWN, so VERY DOWN.
I agree with Kathy’s post to Stunned, and I am SO RELIEVED to realize that Stunned is not in the “sea of despair” like the first post yesterday led us to believe.
Stunned, I do think that a SPIRITUAL aspect to healing is necessary, whether or not you believe in “God” or not, because humans are IMO “spiritual” by nature. I am a believer in God, but because of early religious abuse, I couldn’t reconcile that belief with what I had been taught, now I can and am comfortable. Even if I am wrong,, and there is no God, that’s okay, because it hasn’t hurt me to believe as I believe now, but actually comforted me.
In the past though, the twisted beliefs that were crammed down my throat as a small child were TERRIFYING to a young child. A form of abuse that was unconscienceable in my opinion now. I think it was part of the “trauma bond” to my mother. Maybe part of her own trauma bond. Who knows, but the pont is that NOW in the HERE AND NOW, I can let that go, and move on in a spiritual manner that is comforting to me.
There is order in the Universe that is a spiritual order inside of us, inside of YOU. If THAT is what your spirituality is, or any other concept besides the physical realm, then that will be I think a “spirituality” that will help you heal, but whatever it is, it must be someting that YOU see value in, see comfort in, see reason in. Even our instincts, or as I call them “ancestoral memories” from the days of the cave men, are in a way spiritual. If that makes any sense. I hope it does, but in any case. Welcome, and we are glad you are here. The learning and support you will get here in your healing are just amazing!!! ((((hugs)))))