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
KF: The last man, also a sociopath, that I had a relationship with was six years ago now. That is how long it took me to recover. He did not stalk me for long (approx one week or so) but that could have been because he got a job overseas. He rang me (I hung up on him) only once seven months later, then emailed me and then I never heard from him again. The previous significant relationships were with my ex husbands (also sociopaths) They stalked me. One stopped when he went overseas to live and the other stopped when I got a restraining order. I realise now that they were merely acting out according to their nature, I thought at the time that they were doing this because they truly loved me but could not help themselves from abusing me. I am ashamed of how foolish I have been.
April, I understand. But in some bizarre way I thought he was “hanging around” because he was truly concerned or interested or protective, but really, I don’t want a man in my life who sits in his truck revving the motor for attention. Come talk to me and tell me what you think. There was nothing reasonable or stale about him. How do we not let that happen again?
April:
Mine actively stalked me for 2 months. Then, just when I thought it had died down, I made the bad mistake of sending an XMAS card to a couple he he was friendly with who had invivted me to some event.
BOOM! He went on the attack through my brother and then on me.
It’s quiet again, but I’m still looking over my shoulder. If he does get out of line, I do have something to club him with (so to speak), which would expose him to the world. But, I’m smart enough to know if I use that club, he’ll probably retaliate.
KF: I think what also saved me in my recent relationship of seven months was that I did not become intimate with him for two months (but oh how he tried) of those seven. I chose this strategy this time so that I wouldn’t throw my heart and soul into a relationship before getting to know him. I did not let him penetrate my entire life..e.g meet my parents, my work colleagues, some of my good friends. I did not allow him in that short time to partner me at work or family functions. I was determined to proceed differently this time. I suppose the long hiatus that I had before meeting him allowed me to think of this strategy and implement it. Through long periods of self reflection, I discovered that I had allowed previous relationships to absorb my life far too quickly and before I knew it I was in an abusive relationship again. And oh the knowledge of the coming pain of staying and leaving…trapped again!
KF, I think that to avoid getting involved with a N/S/P again, we may have to re-assess how they get us in and at what point. Almost like a time line marked with events. The difficulty will be in differentiating from a normal interested male to a N/S/P. But I think that if we take all the initial sweeping off our feet with a grain of salt whilst still enjoying it and then taking everthing else oh so slowly. Then again I’m no expert…its all trial and error.
Matt: What a way to live! looking over your shoulder. Do they stop if you are in another relationship?
April,
I think you have “hit on” the truth of the matter, we must find out WHAT IT IS IN US that makes us serial victims.
That thing is, I think, that we ignore the “red flags”—obviously you had started to do tht with your last P by not allowoing him to penetrate your entire life and support system. We just have to go SLOWLY with any new relationship, and also to TEST them before we TRUST them.
None I know can keep up the fake front forever without ANY red flag waving, we just have to be SUPER SENSITIVE to the flags. And—run like a rabbit at the FIRST SIGN OF ONE, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. I have never given anyone the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t screw me good. NO MORE. One red flag=get gone!
April,
I’m coming in late on your question about jealousy, but I had some experience with it too.
In my relationship with the S, most of my jealousy was related to the time he was away from me. I wasn’t jealous of his fly-in weekend sexual partners. I was jealous of the good time he was having. Because while he was gone, most of my time seemed to be spent wandering around with a piercing sense of loneliness, whether at home or out.
He seemed to have a genius for dreaming up adventures and fun ways to spend my money. Initially I had plenty of it, and I thought it was great to have a live-in recreation director. I learned to ski, saw flourescence in a moonlit bay in Puerto Rico, sampled most of the top restaurants in NYC and learned to enjoy the opera. (You get a feeling for his taste here.)
But after the initial honeymoon period, which ended when I insisted on taking control of my corporate bank account again, just about anything interesting we did together occurred because he couldn’t find anyone else to do it, or he needed someone to pay for it. We were living together at my place at first, and then he started to go home to his place on weekend. He just disappeared. Sometimes on weekends, I would see his car would be in his parking spot at the garage around the corner.
Those weekends alone were indescribably desolate. I tried to find someone else to date on Yahoo and match.com. I went through maybe 15 first dates, but the weirdness of my situation was apparent to everyone, including me. My weekdays were absolutely dominated by him at work and afterwards. When he left I tried to amuse myself by exploring the city, but I felt like there was a blanket of silence around me, separating me from everything else.
I knew he was having fun. Everything he did was programmed in some way. And I just felt … inadequate. As though I had failed to be interesting enough.
Much later, when I made him leave for the last time, he had already recruited my replacement. It was upsetting to have him still in my life everyday, living in a cottage directly outside the office window behind my computer monitor. We’d stopped sleeping together after I’d tried to throw him out a few months before. He’d talked me out of it and negotiated a more “distanced” relationship. But he was still working for me four hours a day in exchange for the cottage, utilities, health insurance and something like $1200 a month. (Good deal, huh? As usual, negotiated in a post-orgasmic haze when he was worming his way back into my life, after I’d sworn never again.)
I wouldn’t even have known about the other woman, except he called when he was out somewhere asking me to find a phone number on his desk. I never went in there, but that afternoon I found his e-mail up and I went through it. And then I checked his answering machine, and discovered a string of breathless messages from a woman who was clearly infatuated. My first reaction was “Oh my God, she sounds like me. Poor woman.” My second was one of those zooming-backward-into-myself reactions, like I was looking at the world down a long tunnel.
I had no claim on him at that point. But I spent every moment that I spent with him struggling with overwhelming feelings of love. Knowing about the new woman, knowing how he was basically costing me in total about $2500 a month, knowing that however I felt wouldn’t matter to him at all, I just felt like I was shredding more inside me, if it was possible to be more shredded by this thing.
But the hardest thing was imagining them together. I was pretty sure I knew exactly how he was treating her. I’d been through his let’s-make-a-deal charisma, attention and sexual ingenuity enough times. I felt like I was going to die. At some point, I told him I knew, and after taking great offense at my breaching his privacy, he gave me sneery little smile and said, “You’re jealous aren’t you.” And I said no, “I’m envious. I wish I were her right now.”
But the real truth was that I was jealous too. If jealous is the word for that sinking feeling of being less than enough to deserve to be included. It was a feeling that dogged me through the whole five years, and one of the best things about being far down the recovery path is that I don’t live with it anymore. It stuck around for a while after he was gone, while I was living with the idea that he just didn’t love me because I wasn’t what he wanted.
Much later, I realized that his constant complaints and put-downs and suggestion that we “might” have a relationship if changed five or six fundamental things about myself, were just part of his regular relationship dynamic. Why his last girfriend lived on Xanax in a non-stop panic attack that made her unable to make a decision about anything. And she was everything he said he wanted in a woman, before she crumpled.
I’ve had jealousy in other relationships. It was always the same thing, feeling inadequate, feeling that it was likely that my partner would fall in love with someone else, worrying about what all kinds of things meant. Some of the nicest people in my life took the time to sit down with me and reassure me that that they weren’t going anywhere and that they loved me. Most of them convinced me, but it didn’t stop my anxiety about not being good enough.
But this relationship offered me nothing like reassurance. When I tried to explain how I felt, I got the “specimen” look. Or he would look down his nose with Olympian disdain and ask if I wanted to get out of the relationship. Or he would put his hands over his ears. Once, in a squeaky doll voice, he mocked me, “But I loooove yoooou.”
All of this was of a piece. I don’t think I would have gotten involved with him if such insecurity wasn’t part of my make-up, or stayed with him. The longer I was with him, the more convinced I became that I was ruined and no one else would ever love me. When I tried to think rationally about what was going on, I didn’t trust my own thoughts or feelings and got lost in second-guessing about what was right.
Sometimes I think that this emotional vaccuum they create, with nothing that any human being needs in terms of validation or kindness, is part of what gets them so entrenched in our psyches. There’s some automatic process that, in the absence of positive feedback, searches for meaning in their words, gestures and actions. It assigns hope to anything that could conceivably be interpreted as promise for what we’re starving for. And the more we’re starved, the more we internalize their opinions of us and become addicted to those occasional moments of kindness or approval or warmth. I suspect this is related to Stockholm Syndrome.
I never really got a good look at the weaknesses in my psyche before him. Everyone else I’d ever been involved with had gone out of their way to communicate that they’d valued me, even when I needed them to repeat the message because I in some kind of crisis. My previous partner did such a good job of boosting my fragile ego and promising loyal support, that I found the courage to start a PR agency, when my life experience was almost entirely as a freelance journalist. I didn’t understand how truly dependent I was on outside validation and how I would implode without it.
And I didn’t understand it until much later in the recovery process. At the time that I finally got him out of my life, I only accomplished it because a shared friend, someone I trusted to care about both us, finally said to me, “Kathy, I wish you could find a way to keep helping my friend continue with his writing. But if your wellbeing is at stake, you have to take care of yourself.”
I had to get someone else to give me permission, but I got him out of there.
It’s hard to talk about all this. It still brings up so much shame about how stupid and incompetent I am. I never feel like that anymore. But talking about this will do it.
So where do I leave this. Oh, jealousy. I think that jealousy is about fear of losing what you don’t really think is yours. I also think that my jealousy was tied to a lot of envy, envy of his ability to make a good time, to arrange his life any way he pleased, to not care about how it made me feel, when I was trapped in obsessing about how he felt. I didn’t want to be him, but I wished I could be more like him without losing the good things about myself.
Over time, long after he was gone from my life, I learned how to do that. I still could probably use a recreation director.
But not that badly.
OxDrover and Kathleen: Thankyou for your responses. I am clinging to this site for survival. On Tuesday after me maintaining NC for a few days (S had been stalking me), S rang my brother and my brother told him words to the effect of “Only someone with no self esteem and pride would ever take you back.” S tried the pity thing (crying and choking) on my brother and telling him that I was the love of his life and he had just made a mistake (a concurrent relationship with his secretary and taking out numerous other women). My brother told him to leave me alone and just get on with his life. After this I didn’t hear from S for 24 hours. And the intense pain, sadness and longing started, I could hardly function. I so wanted to call him!!! I went into my pain and realized two things. One was that I desperately missed the attention and validation. Two was that I turn to the source of my torment for comfort. I understand that this relates to my childhood upbringing (thanks to Kathleen’s articles). Sadly, even though I know that stalking is wrong, emotionally I was comforted by his attention. And then it was gone! What is wrong with me? I wanted him to stalk me! For attention and validation?
Is this what N/S/P detect when they first meet you? The missing pieces? And that you will do anything to complete yourself? I must now ponder on what my missing pieces are. They could also be my vulnerabilities.
Wednesday, in this feeling of sadness and longing, I answered my phone without screening it. If I am to be honest, I was hoping that he would call. And it was him. So I told him to call me later when I could freely speak to him (sorry, I just couldn’t help myself) . I had had a few drinks in the interval between the calls. When he called, I vented all the rage, anger, humiliation that I felt. He just took it and kept saying he was sorry (I would have fallen for this if not for info on N/S/P). Finally my cell battery went flat and that cut the conversation. This morning he rang me again trying to convince me to be with him and that it was all a big mistake and that the rest of our lives would be great (Just like a true businessman that he is). Well thanks to this site, he failed to close the deal. I told him to let me grieve for the man that I loved and lost even though he was fictional. I told him that I couldn’t meet up with him because he was a stranger to me now and not the man he presented himself to be and that the whole relationship was based on lies. Therefore, it wasn’t real. He finally agreed to leave me alone. I have not heard from him since. Of course I want to call him just to keep the attention going! But I have not and will not. I feel such pain and only contact with him will relieve this! And I’m still jealous of the relationship he has with his secretary even though he has told me that he has ended it with her (I don’t believe him). I understand that my jealousy/envy could be because he is having a good time without the restrictions of morals, responsibility or thought for anyone else. You are right Kathleen, maybe I just want to be like him. What a paradox!
Thankyou, all of you for not letting me feel alone in this ordeal.
April:
Welcome to LoveFraud.
April,
I know what you’re going through. We all do.
But that was really outstanding. It’s so hard to deal with the the different layers of reality. You love him. You know he’s a fraud. You’re addicted to the attention or excitement. You’re listening to all the compliments and promises you really want to believe. You’ve got painful recent memories of what he really does. You know if you say “yes” again, you’re walking right back into agony.
You made it through this encounter. Even though NC is important, because you have to detox, you did a good thing here. You saw through him. The smart, self-protective side of you won over the needy, self-destructive side of you. It’s a big win.
You asked if we attract them. I’ve thought a lot about that, and I think that the answer is partly yes and partly not exactly.
It’s yes if we have certain characteristics in our mannerisms or our lifestyles or our careers that indicate that we’re people-pleasers. From reading the posts here, it seems to me that a lot of us are in helping professions (therapists, medical people, case workers) and a lot of us are in the commercial equivalent (lawyers, consultants, bankers, advisors of one kind or another). Not all of us have shared what we do for a living, but those of us who have seem to be in professions where we listen and help other people to get better or achieve something.
The signals we put out could well be those of openness, friendliness, warmth, tolerance, willingness to help. So that would be an attractor.
But I also think that these people cruise like sharks. I watched this with my ex. When we weren’t together, he dated a lot, mostly people he met through dating sites. We all look for a “match” in these kind of dates, but with him, I think that he was looking for someone who responded to certain things and didn’t respond to others. People who responded to a combination of big attention and his sad story and complaints about how terrible some people are. And people who didn’t respond defensively to suggestions that they or their lives might be improved if they made some changes that he could suggest.
I was really interested in whatever information I could get from him in these dating experiences. One of the most interesting to me was that he dated a lawyer for a while that really wanted a baby, and was prepared to do it on her own. He was interested in creating a child too, and if you were looking for good-looking, smart genes, he might look like a good candidate. After a couple of months, she broke it off with him, even though he was available for the job. Something in him put her off. She decided she didn’t want the long-term association that a child would create.
He had continual profiles running on dating sites. His profiles characterized him as “smarter than you,” funny, a really good time, but critical. There were strong elements of what he didn’t want. And I think that anyone who responded to those profiles would have had to either overlook those clearly critical elements in his personality, or not been sensitive to them. I know of three of his ex-girlfriends who had deeply submissive and self-critical characteristics. Of course, they both came from abusive backgrounds.
So I think they’re always cruising and testing boundaries, seeking people who don’t recognize love-bombing as intrusive or evidence of bad judgment, who have secret yearnings to change themselves or their lives, and how have kneejerk reactions of helpfulness to other people’s sad stories. Or people who are willing to submit to things they don’t understand. People they can hypnotize into sitting still long enough for them to start “selling” themselves into their lives, plans and pocketbooks.
You can see from the postings of people here who have done a lot of work on getting better that they’ve taken the lesson from this experience to toughen up their boundaries. And also to value who they are and what they have more consciously. They become more skeptical, more inclined to say “no” until they have a clear reason to say yes, and a lot slower to give their trust.
A lot of us resist this at first, thinking that we’ve lost an openness that we valued. Later, we come to realize that we’ve gained something really important, a discernment in our lives, a level of control that is actually a good thing, not just for us but for the quality of our lives and future relationships. It doesn’t make us any less loving. It just makes us a little more thoughful and more careful in choosing what is right for us.
Finally, this business about becoming more like the sociopath is something I wanted in my life. It’s not becoming a predator, but it is learning to better use the resources we have to get where we want to go. In my own life, I lost a kind of passivity about dealing with whatever came at me without adequately considering whether it helped or hindered me. I involved myself in a lot of things just because someone else wanted me to.
Now I have clearer ideas about what’s important in my life. I judge whether what I’m doing is useful or not. It’s not all selfish. I have things I care about in the larger world, changes that I’ll put some energy into. (Like I recently became a member of the local planning board.) But I’ve distanced myself from a lot of people in my life who were just time-wasters for me. I want everything I do now to support something important to me, and I’m not wasting myself anymore.
In that, I’m learned from the sociopath. His selfish “what’s in it for me” attitude has become part of my inner process. And I think that’s a good thing. It doesn’t make me totally cold. I still deal with other other people’s emergencies, if they land on my doorstep. But I’m very conscious of my time, and how much energy I put into it. Because it’s a distraction that takes energy away from what I’m “really” doing — like making a living, working on my book and poems, and cultivating the relationships I care about.
So, this post talks about the beginning of recovery (detox) and the end of it. In between is a lot of processing about how and why we got into this thing, and what we need to learn and change in ourselves. It’s painful at times, but really good work.
And it doesn’t mean that we never have another encounter with a sociopath. I fully expect to deal with more of them as I pursue some of my goals. And I still deal with situations that could turn sociopathic on an everyday basis. But knowing what I want, having the ability to say candidly “this doesn’t work for me” and demand win-win solutions (rather than me rolling over to other people’s needs or demands), is the kind of behavior that actually makes non-sociopaths respect and trust me. And it makes the sociopaths — at least in my business and personal world — fade away (often with parting comments about what a b****h I am). I’m not down anyone’s totem pole and have I no interest in experimenting with that position again.