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
Thank you Matt and Rune, I appreciate the feedback.
EC & James: Daniel Amen also has his critics, but he’s got some interesting information. Unfortunately, I thought Amen was telling me something that would help with my inexplicably lunatic (manic & illogical) BF. That was before the purported BF, the psychopath, dropped the mask.
I don’t believe Amen has anything especially helpful when it comes to understanding the S/P. Don’t get distracted by thinking that extra seratonin is going to fix the monster under the mask.
Kathleen, everything you write so resonates with me. Mine was my social director too. One therapist pointed out that I had very little (try almost none) fun in my life before the bad guy. And she thought that was one of the main messages I needed to get, to put more fun into my life MYSELF. AND to look out for my self-interests. I’m trying to….
Me too, justabouthealed.
It’s really hard for me to break out of my work, work, work thing. But I’ve begun to reframe some of the stuff I do, that I used to think was work. The truth is I really enjoy it.
And the stuff that doesn’t fit that category, that I’m just doing for the money, I try to finish in as little time as possible.
My ex actually had an interesting idea about this. He talked about when he was in college, he’d listen on the first day of a class to understand what it would take to get a “minimum A” from that professor. And he worked to that level.
I thought it was a cynical approach. (Like what happened to the joy of actually learning something?) But when it comes to dealing with things you have to do, it makes a lot of sense. Figure out the level of performance that gives the return you want, and then do it.
You wouldn’t believe the unnecessary work that I’ve trimmed out of my life with that approach. It hasn’t actually evolved to me being my own recreation direction, in terms of arranging big adventures for myself.
But it does give me more time to hang out at Lovefraud.
Rune
“I don’t believe Amen has anything especially helpful when it comes to understanding the S/P.”
With this I agree, in fact we should be careful thinking it would be so easy to “fix” someone with sociopathic traits by changing diet or AD. The reason I wanted to read this book was for myself and how my brain works. As for the s/p were they are on their own…
Yes, James, we’re on the same track here. I’m glad you weren’t distracted. You might really enjoy reading “The High Performance Mind,” by Anna Wise. It’s another way of looking at how our minds work, with some great insights that I’ve found helpful in healing.
Kathy,
“Work” is simply another word for “activity” with a purpose.
It has sort of become a “four letter word” to some people who see “work” as something you hate but you have to do to get money to live.
Some friends of mine retired and moved from California to Arkansas and for a few months they lived in a mobile home I had on this place until they found a house to buy. Every evening at that time I would come in from a high stress job of being in examining rooms all day with people’s lives in my hands, no windows or sunlight in the clinic and plenty of stress. I would come home and as soon as I could change clothes get outside and do PHYSICAL LABOR, hard physical labor, clearing fence rows, etc. until it was too dark to see.
They kept on me about how hard I “WORKED” and keep telling me to “take it easy, don’t work so hard.” But what they didn’t realize was it was like “Farming and the art of Zen” I WAS RELAXING when I was doing the physical “work.” I was also getting satisfaction in cleaning up the fence rows, making the place better. I would sit out on the runway in the evening after the sun had gone down and watch the calves nursing their supper from their mothers just before dark and them lying down to sleep. Or watching the cows as the walked along the banks of the pond with the western sun making their golden reflections in the still water.
Your ideas of doing what you have to do (that you don’t enjoy so much) as quickly as you can and then move on to something else you like better.
People who have professions that they don’t like or jobs that are boring etc. need to reassess I think about what they do for a living. I have done jobs I hated or didn’t like as a “Means to an end”—but I was always working on something that I found INTERESTING and liked doing. I loved my nursing but it was stressful and at times taxing, but I did get good feed back from it and enjoyed it. Farming didn’t pay as well, but I did get a great deal of satisfaction out of it.
Aviation was my husband’s life time love and he made his living in it for his entire life. Sometimes he had to do other things too to make money but he did things he was good at and that he liked doing (and it was usually also aviation related in one way or another.)
Staying in a job that “pays well” that you hate is I think pretty short sighted unless it is just a means to an end and you see a light at the tunnel. Not everything we love will “make money” and we have to be somewhat practical about things, and we can’t realize every dream we have, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t change professions in mid life, or even late in life. We need, I think, to give ourselves PERMISSION TO LIVE LIFE TO ITS FULLEST, and that includes what we do for a living.
I have cleaned other’s houses, been a telephone operator, a wild life photographer, a dog groomer, a registered nurse practitioner, a sales person, a dog trainer, a horse trainer, a farmer/rancher, a vegetable and plant grower/supplier, I’ve “chopped cotton” and picked cotton, been a fish and rice farm manager, a waitress, a baby sitter, a nanny, a secretary, a turtor, and those are just the things I have done for pay, starting at age 12. LOL
I’ve never been without a job for more than 24 hours if I wanted one, because I was flexible and willing to tackle anything with interest. I worked my way through college, and carried a full load and raised two kids at the same time. It never occured to me that I couldn’t do something if I tried….that attitude though, didn’t extent to “fixing” the Ps…and maybe because I AM CAPABLE and was able to succeed at anything to which I put my shoulder, that it didn’t occur to me I couldn’t “fix” them too.
Maybe a bit of “failure” is good for our souls…sometimes I think we don’t learn from the things we succeed at, but we learn from the things we FAIL AT. I do know that we sure don’t forget the lessons taught by failure.
Life is tough, she gives the test first, and the lesson afterwards. (don’t know who said that, but I found that in my husband’s papers in his hand writing that he had copied from somewhere.)
Ox-D: I’m flexible, a hard worker, and completely at sea in a dog-paddle with no hint of land.
I say this not to take from you, but to suggest that we are living in unusual times. I’ve always been able to invent another way to make money: a new job, a new way to consult, something of value that I can sell, even if it is books at a bookstore, or junk at a flea market. But I haven’t been able to figure anything out for months now. Strange, strange times.
I do believe that many of us will be thrown into unexpected relationships out of necessity, perhaps living on the land together, or sharing houses. The local newspaper ran an editorial piece calling up people’s memories of “the Great Depression.” It may be all the more important for us to recognize predators more quickly, as our lives change, our society becomes less stable, our assumptions are shown to be ungrounded, and the wolves come out in this unearthly twilight.
Oxy, I’m not sure where you were going with that piece, but I loved reading it. Especially the visuals of you watching the sun set after your work day was done.
My commercial work is fascinating and I love my clients, but it’s increasingly the way I subsidize my mortgage and keep things afloat while I gradually move back to writing for a living.
It’s a path, and I’m just moving down it, watching for opportunities to do more of what I want to do, and ease back on corporate work. The universe always sends me what I want eventually. I just never know exactly what form it’s going to take.
Everyday, I look at the new travel trailer postings on eBay. I used to joke that when I was old, I’d live in an Airstream in an orange grove in Florida, reading Tarot cards for a living.
I’ve always kept a few too many lines in the cosmic stream. It makes it hard to look ahead, but it keeps things interesting.
KH: I have a “minimum cost to live” philosophy that I’ll share here, since I’m almost living your dream. (Maybe I’d better pull out those Tarot cards and see if I can drum up some business!)
My philosophy said that you had a bare minimum that it cost to live, and you could work around the pieces but the minimum still worked out to be about the same.
For example, you could “save money” by moving further out of town, or into a less desirable neighborhood, but you’d pay the difference in gas and time, or in loss of safety and damage to property. You can live in a house on wheels, but you still have to pay rent on your space in the orange grove, and it gets harder to make the money to pay the rent when you don’t have your regular internet service, or hot running water, so your costs may go down, but so does your ability to make money. And as your circumstances look, shall we say, “less expensive” you appear to have less justification for charging your usual rate.
As long as you have the mortgage to pay, you can say, firmly, “Of course this is a fair rate to charge for my services. I have bills to pay and a mortgage to cover, just like you!” and people snap to, and agree. But if you were late to the appointment because you were scrounging for a shower, the new client might expect to pay three nights rent at the KOA in exchange for a week of work.
Here I would have to agree with the S/P: It is very important to manage those impressions, because impressions translate into dollars.
Do you want some help with that corporate work? I can coach you on “Airstream living.”