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
Kathleen Hawk: Healing is ALL about exploring in depth our spiritual selves.
It still makes me cry that our EXs and all like them … have no clue to even look inside themselves for their spiritual aspect of who (we and they) truly are. Of course, if they had some comprehension to the spiritual aspect of life, none of the EVIL in the world would exist.
Yesterday’s inauguration marks the movement towards spiritual awakening throughout the world.
As I posted before, Tolle’s “A New Earth” is a must read … along with listening to his free tapes on all 10 chapters of his book …. on Oprah.com site.
I can’t stress this book enough … along with reading your Bible as the quickest way to heal oneself from what the anti-socials of this world can/have/will do to other’s souls.
Peace.
faith,
that was the way it was for me…i had never in my life had any one take care of me-the idea was so foreign that it never crossed my mind…even then.
it was the ‘stand by you’ thing (mutuality), the implied desire for reciprocity, reliability. the lack of those was why i had left in the first place. unless he got me to doubt myself, he would have never been able to get me to ‘unknow’ what i knew about myself and about is unwillingness/incapacity for ‘being my equal’ he would never have succeeded in convincing me to reconcile.
it was just the bait and switch-i like you you put it, ‘he said he would be [as reliable as i had been to him]…but when the time came he basically gave me the finger’.
yup-they can’t compete with us, in comparison we are too far out of their league in the quality of people that we are.
without the planting and milking of self-doubt, i never would have gone back to him and inspite of my fear over my health affecting my ability to keep up the pace, i would have simply adjusted by slowing down and adapting, just like i always had.
part of the pain for me…is recognizing how he had been able to manipulate a small doubt into a big fear thus leading me into betraying my own belief in myself and realizing that i was not impervious to that sort of trickery after all. it’s chilling how alike they seem to be in their tactics and behavior.
Wini, I understand and respect what you are saying, but we all don’t go about it in the same way.
For me, my recovery was ultimately a reaffirmation of my core beliefs and values. It just didn’t begin that way. What I was dealing with didn’t appear to me as spiritual issues in the beginning. More physical and emotional ones.
Likewise, we don’t all see things the same way. Evil is not part of my mental vocabulary, not in the way I see the world, and not in the way I view my personal challenges. I understand why the concept exists. It just doesn’t resonate with me.
I’m familiar with Eckert Tolle, and was before Oprah did a wonderful job of introducing him to a larger audience. He’s a great teacher, and makes a lot of difficult concepts clear to an audience that isn’t prepared to go through a long training in eastern techniques for spiritual development.
But I personally am not a fan of going to the high concepts when I’ve got immediate, urgent issues to deal with. For me, it’s a way of not dealing with them, a source of temporary relief or comfort, and possibly some guidance on direction, but ultimately I have to deal with what’s in front of me.
My best guidance in healing actually come from several books and the occasional hint offered from a Buddhist friend. And an intense research effort on the Web to gather existing professional views on sociopaths and other types of personality dysfunction.
One of the things I’m learning here on Lovefraud (not for the first time in my life) is that one person’s path may provide inspiration to another, but we’re are different in our issues, inclinations and interests. We each have to find a way that’s right for us.
I’m glad you found something that worked for you, and I think there are a lot of people here who are following something like your healing path.
Kathy
Dear Keeping faith,
I understand MY kind of bitterness (and I posted something somewhere CRS on that yesterday) My bitterness was OVERWHELMINGLY EVIL, I didn’t just want to expose him/them, I wanted to rip their fingernails out from the roots. I felt like I was becoming ONE OF THEM. Bitterness that harsh, that bad was not what I wanted me to feel.
“Vengence is MINE, saith the Lord.” Even for people who don’t believe in the Bible as SCRIPTURE, there are some reeally good precepts on psychological health there. Harboring the thoughts of vengence, which we know actually lights up the pleasure centers of our brains BTW according to research Liane Leedom came up with and quoted here on some thread, will eventually eat away at YOUR soul. Keeping you filled with stress hormones and wrath.
I don’t want to feel like that, I want to feel peaceful.
Now, JUSTICE, is NOT revenge, though they may take it that way. Let’s say you see someone robbing a store and you as a good citizen turn him in to the police and he goes to jail. Like most Ps this robber will be angry at YOU because YOU caused him (in his mind) to go to prison—he does not see that HIS OWN behavior caused him to go to prison.
As for your question about his wife and daughters, they sound pretty much disordered themselves OR they are in the FOG and blame placing on others, or they could be toxic enablers, protecting the poor P from the consequences of his actions.
I thought I was not “enabling” and “protecting” my son from the consequences of his actions. If he got into trouble at school, I didn’t run down and jump on the teacher, etc. and when he got into theft, I turned him in to the police who otherwise probably wouldn’t have caught him….but HE SAW THAT AS REVENGE against him. He thought I was being MEAN to him. To this day, 20+ years later, he still bears me a grudge for that one. The girl he shot and killed in cold blood had turned him in to the police for his crimes (which she was involved in but was 17 and a juvy) so he killed her. That showed her, huh? Now he spends his life in prison, but that too is my fault, because if I hadn’t turned him in when he was 17, he wouldn’t have had a criminal record and none of this other stuff would have happened, his life would have been wonderful if it weren’t for ME.
My mother has now come to the conclusion that she must protect him from me, becasue I will do my best to see that he has no money, stays in prison for his crimes forever, and that the poor baby suffers the CONSEQUENCES of his crimes.
Yes, people can totally be in denial and can think that black is white, or white is black, or the moon is made of green cheese.
In the end, though, we have to LET GO of the bitterness, the hateful and spiteful wishes for revenge, turn it over to God, and let “karma” take over. Let God or the Universe, or whatever you believe in handle that, because thinking about it, wishing for revenge, hoping for and/or plotting revenge uses energy you need for YOURSELF, and you are giving away that energy to them—even if you don’t do those things you fantasize about ( I never did but it used up a bunch of energy uselessly, counter productively)
The method I used, for what it is worth, was I forced myself to pray for them, out loud. I didn’t mean a single word of it at first. I believe God knew I didn’t mean it, but believe it or not, I came to mean it. Not a gushy feeling of “love” for them, but an acknowledgement that they are human, and while they are horrible, evil examples of humanity, none-the-less they are human and it is NOT my job to punish them. We are a country of law, not men. (supposedly anyway) and I am NOT judge and jury and executioner. That is NOT my job.
My job is to “clean my own house” and keep it clean. My job is to take care of ME with all my energy and resources, and any I waste on them is LOST to me. I DESERVE ALL MY ENERGY, and I don’t want them having space in my head. Let God and the Universe deal with them. My son “got his” and he will “get his again” and again and again, he will DO IT TO HIMSELF, I don’t have to. My mother is making a very uncomfortable bed for herself as she approaches 80 years old, with no one close to her, alone, totally alone except for a hired caregiver that she doesn’t even like so she is engineering her own hell-on-earth, I don’t have to engineer it for her. Her own lies, her own abuse of others, is coming back to bite her in the butt. As many times as she tries to make it someone else’s fault, and as far in denial as she is, I know that in reality she is alone in her home 95% of the time, ALONE, without much satisfaction even if she does “blame” me and my son C for bieng NC. She is desperately thinking of ways to get us to see her, for us to give her control over us, and to make us go along with what has been the family “status quo” of “let’s pretend none of this ever happened.” It always worked in the past, and she cna’t understand why it doesn’t work NOW. I can have a sadness for anyone that is in her shape, and so alone, so powerless to evn know what they need, and no idea of where to get it, much less how to get it. So, because of that empathy, I no longer HATE HER, I no longer want to punish her, I just want to be away from her so she cna’t hurt me.
I hope Keeping faith that helps you some. It is a difficult concept for me to even verbalize, but I will keep on answering questions if you are interested in discussing it. I think talking about these things is theraputic for me as well as for anyone else that they touch. ((((hugs)))) and God bless you.
Kathleen Hawk: I fully comprehend that everyone is on their own path to healing. I found that Tolle hit the nail on the head when he described the human EGO and then went on to explaining our spiritual selves.
My situation with anti-social personalities started in the mid-80’s because I worked with so many of them. It was from the 80s to this date that I read as much as I could about “their” kind. I found the spiritual aspect of healing helped me the most with the aftermath of anti-social personalities doing their destruction in my life.
That’s all. Sorry if I offended you.
Peace.
Ox,
This is very helpful for me. This site is my therapy without a co-pay LOL. It DOES help when you have these otherwise NASTY feelings but you can share them with a group of people who get it, who feel it, yet who are reasonable enough not to act on it. I do feel vengeful and I actually found his x wife’s email address at work, on line last night. I SO considered sending an email but in reality I don’t know her state of mind. i think she too, has got to have issues from dealing with such bad behavior over the years. Even when his x-affair called me a few months ago, when I got off the phone, i worried that the conversation may affect HER in a negative way. (maybe I’m too strong for my own good) FOUR YEARS LATER FOR HER and she still talked about how he treated her like a princess. WTF OX? I STILL don’t think she realizes the extent of his abuse. She is still in a fog…..she kept saying “but he gave me his SEAL Trident pin”. I told her he had one in a box at home, you can buy them.
My therapist told me to picture him sitting on a toilet and his head exploding….. (it’s funny and he tried to add humor when I cried). I don’t think there is real JUSTICE in my case because even the police said he did just enogh to stay above the law. But I DO think that the people on the pownetwork who exposed him, reported him to the FBI. They have little interest in this small minded liar who cons women for love and sex and attention. They have bigger fish to fry, who have murdered, committed benefits fraud and arson….etc…..
But I do believ in KARMA OX and maybe that’s my justice. Since I ditched him, we had contact a few times when our common friend was in an accident last April and even that was a big mistake. He has had even more drama with the daughter getting divorced after five months, telliing her father she married this man, knowing he was an alcoholic, because she was so insecure when her father left her….(It has to be someone’s fault). He moves that x convict into his house with no income. He has a heart attack. He loses his job. And those are only the ones I know about. I’m sure there is much much more. There always was.
After he moved into his home, in addition to the mortgage, he already had a line of credit used at $30,000 for tuition for his younger daughter. had another 30K to pay plus promised her another car when she graduates. Also said he was spendiing another 30K on a deck and fire pit. I am confident those would have been my bills.
I think the reason he stopped stalking me was because I told him if he contacted me again or continued following me I would call his daughter and tell her he was sleeping with me when her mother was havign surgery. He is afraid of the wrath of that daughter. His only fear is losing a relationship with them to his x wife. And I know his weakness. Unfortunately, it makes me want to rub it in and that would only make me as sleezy and scummy as him.
Maybe I just need to congratulate myself for knowing the truth and getting out before I lost more. Maybe I should pray for him, instead of hoping for more bad karma to come his way (sorry I’m being honest). I do obsess too much about the people he surronds himself with and it is very stereotypical. We had this conversation before. STILL I don’t understand it.
What challenge is there if you can’t learn from or disagree with others and everyone just bows down in agreement? What pleasure is there in life knowing these people are around him under all kinds of false pretences or financial or psychological need… or is that what it’s all about users use people. They need him and he needs them. It’s the dysfunctional tradeoff. Don’t you think he realizes this on some level? Are they that weak? is he that needy? Maybe that’s why his wife stayed for 25 years and his daughters are in denial. Maybe that’s why I didn’t stay. maybe that’s justice enough.
I know, Wini. I’m sorry I reacted. I wasn’t offended, but I felt like I needed to defend myself. My personality, my problem.
I had an interesting conversation with Oxy yesterday, about the different ways we experienced vengeful feelings. And then about some personal characteristics and the way the we felt damaged by our relationships with sociopaths.
It really woke me up to how our differences in personal characteristics may affect how we’re damaged and how we heal from it. There’s a tremendous amount that we all have in common here on Lovefraud. But it made me realize that “my” healing path may be a guide for some people, but others may do it in different ways or different sequences. Or maybe define their stages completely differently.
This was the kind of feedback I was looking for, and I’m grateful. It doesn’t change my plans to talk about it, but it does help me position it on a broad spectrum of healing approaches.
I meant it when I said I was glad you found something that worked for you. My relationship with my spirituality may be different from yours (another difference). But the Bible and Eckert Tolle have guided a lot of people through difficult times. I know you’re not alone on Lovefraud in finding wisdom and comfort there.
With regard to vengeful thought, I fantasize about pushing him down a steep long flight of stairs and walking away whistling. Obviously I would never ever do anything to hurt him, but the fantasy is somewhat helpful to me. I guess just the visualization of me getting rid of him, and moving on.
Kathleen Hawk: Let me see if I can write this so you or anyone else can understand what I’m trying to get across.
Years ago, the upper management that I had a suit against, held lower level positions in our place of employment. I worked with many of them 20 plus years prior to the suit situation.
Over the years I started reading about anti-social personalities … because back in my 20s … these folks acted like blatant a$$holes and I couldn’t understand why people would act this ruthless and vicious to another person … especially in the work place and especially having positions that oversaw others.
What did I do? I read as much as I could get my hands on about anti-social personalities. Great insight into what I was dealing with … and it helped by putting a label to the personalities I was seeing, plus, it gave me relief that I wasn’t exaggerating the experiences of what I was seeing in these folks.
Not only did it give me power (e.g knowledge is power theory of Oxy’s) to put it into perspective when having to deal with these folks on a professional level … it also helped curb the anger that was filling up in me (hey, I was in my early 20s and folks like this shouldn’t exists … right?).
Reading about anti-socials gives you knowledge and power.
Reading about (my) our spirituality softened my heart again which allowed me to get back to what my true self is all about instead of walling myself off from life after the likes of them entered my life. Not being stuck in the “broken and smashed” mode.
Does this make sense to you?
Peace.
Eliza: I shudder to think of all the times my EX drove into remote off the main road … dirt roads tucked miles and miles into the woods up in Vermont and New Hampshire to go hiking with our dogs where no one lived and no one was around. I shudder when thinking about all the times we pulled to the side of the road “look out sites” to look at the view and no one was around. I shudder to remember all the gorges, faults and waterfalls in the earth we’d look over and the 100s of ft below those things went. I shudder to think of all the times we drove the highest mountain ranges in New Hampshire and how fast he’d drive going close to edges and we were in 50-60 ft motor homes.
I shudder to think … was I just the test person for what could happen in the future with some other unsuspecting woman that doesn’t fork over her money as readily as I did … and he’s got a life insurance policy out in her name and waits a few years after he marries her?
What was great times and memories of things we did together (holding hands and being loving) while they were happening … are now haunting nightmares and I realize just how lucky I am.
The list of who I pray for each night gets longer and longer as I get older and older.
Peace.