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……..
Your blog post is a very exciting topic, not only in terms of the presentation you have crafted, but also in terms of the wise responses from others. Thank you!
Dear Rune,
Some initial random thoughts. Kathleen wrote……”. And the outcomes that you envision will pull you forward.” I think this is critical. You have to believe you have a future; you have to know you can be the architect of that future even though there will be times it might not feel that way.
I find healing is an organic process. It will not be a consistent straight line UP. We will stumble and fall on our faces. We will have times of running in circles and getting nowhere. We will go down dead ends and follow rabbit trails. We will go through seasons of change with times of dormancy when everything seems barren and hopeless, and we don’t see or experience the slightest sign of life or recovery.
Julia Cameron writes that success comes in clusters and I think this might be true of progress with healing too.
As for the financial losses that are so devastating, this is a bitter blow and hard to accept. I am right there with you in that boat. I will not be able to retire. But, do you know what…..it forces us to redefine “net worth” and what is necessary for our happiness and personal fulfillment. As first I was mad as hell, now I see it as a gift and I am grateful for a simplified focus in life that enables a less complicated approach.
My friend, the grief counselor, says there is a zombie stage in recovery………numbness and confusion, along with anger and the struggle to accept the loss as a life-changing event. She says the depth and duration of the zombie stage depends on the suddenness and the acute nature of the shock to the individual. She developed a recognition about the zombie stage from her own experiences, when she talks of having been a zombie for two years following her daughter’s sudden accidental death, and before she could begin to recenter and find a new direction using the intensity everything she had experienced to energize her days and her goals.
Julia Cameron also says we must we midwives for one another’s dreams. We must be believing mirrors.
A simple little book on friendship says ” My friend sings to me the song in my heart when my memory fails.” That is what we must do for one another here at LF. Everyone’s journey will be different. There is not a universal map out of the pain and loss. The road to recovery is full of obstacles; it is slow and painstaking, yet one thing does lead to another.
You have what it takes, Rune, and until you can find it within yourself to know that without question, we will keep holding up the mirror to all who need that assurance and affirmation.
I believe in you and in everyone here that we can all become self-actualized and rebuild successful lives that are S-free and that enable us to bring our gifts to the world!
Towanda! Let’s go for it!! 🙂
For those who wonder what in the world is “Towanda”, a word which several of us have used, this will help explain! It’s from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes” starring Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy. It’s meant in fun, but the point is important. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Ai_3_XfPA&NR=1
Thanks EyeoftheStorm, you clearly have done the path too. I look forward to hearing your contributions to future articles.
Rune, I too will not be able to retire. My inheritance from my parents is gone. My business which was a thriving agency in New York is down to me in a bedroom in upstate New York. And that I rebuilt after stopping work for a year and a half. There were times I had to borrow money to pay the mortgage, and other times when I squandered what I had to make myself feel better.
I agree with Eye; it is an organic process. There were times when my progress and insights seem to be popping like popcorn. Other times, when I seemed to get stuck or regress. Other times — which drove me crazy — when I seemed to be learning all over again what I thought I’d learned a year before.
But it’s cumulative, work that we direct by our personal objectives, but work that is also powered by our innate healing nature. There is something in us that wants to be well, wants to come home to our best selves.
All of that doesn’t solve the financial issues directly, but it plays into them. I used to think I “loved” my work. Now I can tell the difference between what I do for money, and what I do for passion. Sometimes they overlap, but I find myself to be more pragmatic than I’ve ever been in my life. And more able to recognize opportunity, and manage it so that it works for me, instead of vice versa.
It sounds like you are dealing with challenges at a lot of different levels. And if you could sort out your financial stuff, it would make it easier to sort out your emotional stuff.
If I could offer one piece of advice, it would be to give yourself a break once in a while. Make time to get out and be with people with no particular objective. I still have to force myself to do this, but I always come home with something good. Some new insight. Some social thread that leads me to rewarding new experiences. Some validation that I’m okay and there are a lot of other people that are too. A remembrance that most of the world isn’t what we’ve been dealing with.
I don’t know what immediate material challenges and tasks you’re dealing with. But I wish you Godspeed in sorting them out.
Referring to the You Tube link I posted above, did y’all notice that when the punk almost knocks down Evelyn (Kathy Bates), in the grocery, she says “Excuse me” as though she was the one at fault?
Did you notice she keeps asking the punk “why are you being so mean to me?”
I think “Towanda” is a mntra for sense of one’s personal power to take action.
That’s what we have to do. “What action can I take?” Something! Anything! The point is to develop the HABIT of making decisions and taking action on our own behalf even if it’s cleaning out a drawer. It does not have to be great sweeping career changing dramatic progress. The idea is to get past being a victim once we are able to do so. There is no timetable. If someone’s zombie stage takes two years or longer, that’s what it takes.
Kathy,
Thank you for this article. I may be at stage 7 or 8 in the process realistically but some days I feel as though I regress, like anyone here. Since I have been reading and posting here the last few months, I feel so grateful for the therapist I found last february. More than anything, in this process, I needed to feel protected. It’s what my x husband was supposed to do but never did. It’s what the X S/P promised to do but did more damage than anything. I am finding that capability in myself now. My friends (except for one) didn’t get it. Everyone was/is frustrated with me still.
My therapist was that one person who I felt protected me. he understands disprdered individuals. He understood and treated people with PTSD. I needed to feel protected in that someone got the hurt I felt and knew how hard it was to heal form this. No one understood that this was not a normal breakup.
I have learned so much about myself int his process. My life has changed completely in the last three to four years. I am 48 and had also been in long term relationships before I met the S/P. I was/am devastated emotionally by what had happened. I was almost financially devastated as well. I was lucky. I ditched him before I sold my home and gave him any money. I was lucky to find some of the resources who helped me to investigate him to learn the truth. I can’t forget that either.
I found that rather than focus on keeping busy or filling my life with other men I could date, that it’s OK sometimes to feel sorry for yourself and go to bed early on a saturday night. My priorities other than my teenagers are to 1. find the good in my work and stay focused because it has and does create a nice lifestyle for me and my kids. 2. Prioritize extracurriculars like working out, socializing with friends…. I work out at the gym 4 times perweek. 3. Eating healthier and feeling better about myself….. 4. Finding things of interest or things I normally would not do to meet other people and create some diversity in my life. I started doing dance class. If any southerners are familair with “the shag”, I was doing that for a while. This week i start salsa.
it takes time to find pleasure in all the things life has to offer. It takes time for the fog to lift and for it to become perfectly clear that life with the S/P is and always was disordered and continues to be that way. THere is no room for improvement there. It takes time to forgive ourselves. Which is more important than ever forgivng the S/P. i will never forget. But I will be OK.
The part I am stuck on is number 3. Recovering our ability to love and trust again. i think that will come in time. I just don’t want to have so little tolerance for error that i miss a good opportunity, but I think that will come in time as well.
I liked being married and I want to again. i am good at relationships and maybe one day I will have someone in my life who will protect and care for me. But I have to be good at it myself first !! PATIENCE>………..
Kathleen,
Thanks for a very helpful article. I’d like to add, for those who are just beginning the process, that victims can face several cycles of these healing stages. In fact, the worse your S/P is, the more cycles of revelation and shock you might have to process.
As it stands now, the only thing left in my case is to discover that he was a serial killer. I have taken to calling this level of shock my “Mrs. BTK” feelings.
Because the perpetrators are who they are, and do the things they do, victims should remember that there is never really a place of “closure,” of “certainty.” You might be hit by fresh shocks once you have cycled through the healing process. I know I was.
I took me several years to process the initial shock and pain at discovering that my ex was a fraud, a liar, a con man. Once I had regained my footing somewhat, I was hit by revelations from my children that he was also a child molester and rapist. And so began the stages of recovery once again. For this latest series of shocks, recovery includes trying to heal not only myself, but my entire family. It is an incredibly steep mountain to climb.
It has been less than a year since the child molestation disclosures, and I find myself in the rumination/obsessive thinking stage, as my mind processes this new information and re-frames all my experiences of the past 20+ years. Because of articles like yours, Kathleen, and places like Lovefraud, I now understand why my mind must cycle through this stage. And I accept that, for the immediate future, I will be in this stage again. When it is complete, I will be stronger, smarter and better able to help others, and my children in particular.
Having a place like this is invaluable.
Great video! Something you can also see in the video is how anger is so valuable in itself, but also part of a larger regeneration path.
“And if you won’t listen to reason, there’s always Towanda.”
I love it.
Tood, that is so hard.
I think I mentioned in another thread that my last therapist told me that, if my incest experience had happened today, that my life would have been different. Because there are resources available today that were not available in the 60s.
If you’ll forgive me, you know that you cannot heal your family. You can provide an environment of compassion, a willingness to “be with” other people as they process their pain, your belief in their honesty and your support of their desire to heal. But they have to move through their own healing.
If you feel responsible, I understand. I live with painful regrets about the impact of my actions on other people, and never more than when I was involved with the sociopath. But I’ve come to believe that healing myself is one of the best things I can do for the people I love, because it makes me sensitive to the right things and gives me the ability to be truly compassionate, without getting sidetracked by my own stuff. It also, if they’re looking for it, provides a model for them.
Sometimes, I comfort myself with the idea of a grand plan. If I didn’t have the childhood that I did, I never would have become the person I am now. I wouldn’t have built my life around the beliefs and behaviors — many of them dysfunctional and continually driving learning experiences — that brought me to this moment.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I also know that sometimes the most awful things turn out to be the greatest gifts. And being open to the gift — while never ceasing to reject the badness of the event itself — can become a rewarding discipline. It sounds like you and your children trust each other enough to be able to talk about it now. Even if it may be rocky going, that’s great news for them and you.
My heart is with you.
Kathy
Thank you all for your generous compassion. I’ve been practicing the “envisioning the future,” and watching every large and small envisioning also sputter and die out.
Wini said: “Basically, no matter how horrific our situations are on a human level and what our human conscious tells us it is ” go deep into what your spiritual level is and stop clouding your mind with the superficial human existence stuff ” and you will heal. Our lives may not be what we thought they would be ” but, every time God closes a door ” he opens up a window. Know this and believe this.”
Wini, I feel your certainty. Several more doors slammed shut in the past few days. I’m looking around for that window.
Thank you all for sharing the extremity of your situations. It helps to not feel alone in this.
Again, I say WOW! What wonderful insights to ponder. I so agree with Kathy that EACH STAGE is essential, and anger, being one of those stages motivates us and gives us adrenaline surge to take action.
The Zombie stage for me hit after the break up with my X-BF-P about a year and a half after the sudden death of my husband and a year after the death of my beloved step father. My son D and I both stayed in that stage for nearly a year before the “chit hit the fan” with the increasing demands from my mother, and the P-attack, which knocked us to our knees at the weakest point.
For me that Zombie stage was one of inaction, inward-focused attention, playing 1000s of games of solitaire on the computer to just NOT THINK. It was also depression, deep deep depression with no concern for my own needs at all. ?Didn’t eat, didn’t get out, didn’t interact with anyone except my house mate son D but even then most of the time he was in his world, I in mine. Minimal physical self care, and about the only thing either of us did was to feed the dogs.
I didn’t have suicidal ideas, but I had no love for living. Even on heavy doses of antidepressants, I had no energy to do it if I had had the desire to kill myself. I was as close to GIVING UP completely as I have ever been. I have seen that stage in prey animals when they are “caught” but actually not injured, and they COULD get up and run again, but they give up, they “self pacify” and go into shock so deep that they actually do not feel any pain as the predator starts to consume them, while they are actually still alive. This is a fortunate thing that prey animals seem to have the ability to do when their expectation of suffering becomes too much. I think I must have reached that stage, what ever got me going I don’t know, but I am grateful to God that something did! I came so close to lying there and dying—
Looking back and thinking about it, it WAS MY ANGER that the Trojan HOrse P had lied to me. ANGER, ANGER!!! TOWANDA for anger!!! (a little ah ha moment there!)