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
Rune, write me offline. Make sure you use “Kathy” in the letter, or it might land up in my spam folder. My e-mail is in the author’s pages. I don’t have a lot of overflow right now, and my subject matter is arcane (not easy to pick up). But I could really use a proofreader.
Guys,
I bought the RV last year (a year and a half ago now) and hauled out for the hills. I moved onto the lots on a lake that were owned by a friend so had no “rent to pay” but did have like Rune says “a minimum” amount to live–food was the same, gas, and insurance etc. so RV (or airstream) living has costs too, but there is a decrease in overhead for “living space.” It also has a net gain in time due to lack of housekeeping etc. which was good for me, and utilitiy costs are way down.
The “great depression” thing is already taking place with 1 out of 10 mortgages in arrears/foreclosure and multi-generational households WAY on the UPSWING already. My sons and I are living here in my house as an economy rather than my son C moving back into his own home here on the farm.
We have “economized” on just about everything we can do so reasonably from “winterizing” the house to keep down utilities to keeping the thermometer at a much lower temp than most people do (64 degrees daytime, 60 at night) Put on a sweater.
We are going to put in a small garden area along with my herb beds next spring and I will shortly here plant potatoes in the spaces that the herbs will go into later in the spring after the potatoes are harvested. I am building a small green house out of salvaged glass windows and doors to start plants in and keep some over wintered. We raise our own beef, and I also barter for mechanical work that my sons can’t do, etc.
I finally found a reliable (I think) wood cutter to harvest some downed timber that needs to be removed out of the pasture (trees that blew over) which will save us the labor of burning them and someone else can get the wood and the use out of it. It will also take underbrush out of the woods which is a fire danger and not take any of my own labor or my sons.’
We are using many of my grandparents’ depression era savings methods and producing as much of our own food and fuel as possible. We have plans for a small bio-diesel plant to make fuel out of used cooking oil (I have a supply for that oil)
Back when I was able to “always” get a job of some kind, I was younger and the economy was not in a DEPRESSION (let them call it a recession if they like, it is those of us out here, not the CEOS with the millions of dollars in bonuses or the crooked politicans, who are in a depression. My 401K has taken a 40% hit. I can’t afford to deficit spend as I have no interest income to speak of, so I have to keep within my (our family income) limits.
My sons want to reload ammuniton (cuts costs 2/3s) and are trading some house sitting for reloading supplies and equipment that we wouldn’t purchase otherwise.
My sons and I are HAPPY and enjoy each other’s company so it is no inconvenience for us to live together, (unless they move my hammer after two weeks of cloudy weather LOL) but many people don’t like each other and blending two or three generations is a stressful situation.
I realize that when you are in “consulting” etc tha tyou have to “keep up appearances” and if you show up for an interview looking like you slept under the main street bridge it would “cut your price.” LOL I used to try to price my meat at “good prices” but I found that the higher I raised the price, the more people valued it, and my last prices before I sold there herd was $7 a pound for hamburger and $22 per pound for steak. Even with 50 cows cranking out calves every year, I couldn’t keep up production for what I could sell. That is CHEAP now for organic or all natural meat.
For us though, we do most of our shopping for work or casual clothes at Goodwill and we take excellent care of our “good” clothes so that they last and still look presentable. We do most of our own car maintence, vet work, etc. to keep down expenses. Right now we have more time than money, and the other weekend when we butchered the two head of cattle for meat, we did it ourselves (two days work for 3 people) and saved $500+ in processing costs. We “earned” about $10 an hour each for our labor. I also traded the unique long-haired hides to the guy who trims the feet of the donkeys for trimming their feet several times.
My son C who is a tool and die maker and machinist used to have NO trouble finding a job in 24 hours, but with the manufacturing jobs going overseas or folding, there is NOTHING available here in the entire state, so he will have to take something else I am sure. Fortunately with the natural gas drilling going on here there is LESS unemployment in our area than most areas, but still, it may be difficult. But whatever happens, we will pull together. Son D works for Boy Scouts of America and does free lance independent film work as well, so we aren’t going to starve or live in the dark, but you are right, times they are getting “tough” for a bunch of folks and prices are going up up up on necessities. We’ll just have to see how it plays out. Our grandparents survived and we will too, but it may take all of our resources.
Oxy: Thanks for filling in some of the blanks.
Perhaps we might also watch out for each other on this site in terms of practical matters. My grandparents had a dairy farm with a kitchen garden. Grammie cooked on a woodstove, and canned everything she grew, so I’m familiar with a lot of basics. But many of us have never chopped firewood or carried our drinking water.
As I said in a different thread, the first thing many of us have to recover from is shame, and in our society that feeling of shame can simply come from changed financial circumstances. We should help each other with that, as well.
I can’t remember who said it (probably several sources) but it is much more difficult for us if we use our “jobs” or our houses, or our profession (external things i.e.) as our source of self esteem. I realized after my husband died that my role as “M’s wife” was a big part of ME, actually more than it should have been, but he was such an outstanding man in his flield and had “disciples” who constantly flocked around him that it made me feel “important” by his reflected “glory.”
He had at one time been a multimillionaire by his own efforts, and I know that the financial down turn had made him feel really LESS THAN HE WAS. He never totally got over the anger from the cons ripping off his business (and I think his self blame for letting it happen was a big part of that.) He was REMARKABLE for himself, and people of any character respected him for THAT not how much money he had made in the past, or how many magazine articles were published about him, etc. or how many world records he had accumulated, or the vast number of credentials….he FINALLY realized that the “stuff” wasn’t what was important (though he never gave up the anger about being conned) and our much less “glamorous” life out of the “fast lane” was very satisfying for him. He was a remarkably accomplished man in SEVERAL fields. I missed being “Mrs. Drover”—
I think too that it is more difficult for people who have “had stuff” or “position” to realize that THAT is not what was important about them, it isn’t THEM. Not the clothes, or parties or cars, or houses, etc.
I think too that part of the financial mess we (US and the world) are in is people trying to “live above their means” in order to impress others with the “stuff” they have.
There was a time when I thought that “money” and “fame” would bring happiness and security—it doesn’t. There is some old “Irish” saying about “I wish you ENOUGH”—but NOT TOO MUCH.
Look at all the stories about the lotto winners and how it has RUINED the lives of many of them because they came into sudden wealth they didn’t earn.
If every “dream” you ever had was instantly fulfilled by a genie WHAT WOULD YOU WISH FOR? What would you dream of? The wishing, working for etc. is 2/3 of the “joy” of having a DREAM! IMHO
I find a LOT of wisdom in the Apostle Paul’s advising his disciples to BE CONTENT. He even explains that if you are a SLAVE and there is no way to get your freedom, to BE CONTENT as a slave. It is our strivings for “impossible dreams” and our setting ourselves up for disappointment by wishing for things, dreaming of things we will NEVER GET that make us “unhappy.”
Look at what the psychopaths did to us. (or we allowed them to do) EVeryone of them promised us HAPPINESS from EXTERNAL SOURCES by offering us LOVE. My P son, your X BRF, my BF, all of them promised us something we thought we couldn’t get but we desperately wanted. We were NOT content with what we had, we were willing to “sell our souls” to them for the IMPOSSIBLE DREAM they held out.
Sure we all want love, and that is GOOD, but we CAN BE HAPPY and content without this “Prince/ss Charming” in our lives.
None of us should give up all our “dreams” but we should make sure that our dreams are realistic and NOT PUT OUR WHOLE SOUL IINTO GETTING THEM OR DYING. If you want a child and you are barren, don’t let that dream being impossible ruin your life, if you really want a child, adopt one, or mentor one, or work with kids. Modify your dreams to meet reality.
I wanted to be the world’ls first female airline pilot, but I never made it, I went off in other directions. My life didn’t lay out in the orderly plans I had at 18 or 19 or 35, or 60–but the ONLY “dreams” that THREW ME INTO THE PITS were the unrealistic ones that the Psychopaths would CHANGE or I would be able to fix them. When those strongly held dreams failed, I fell into the abys of despair because I had staked EVERYTHING on those dreams. I was not content with the GOOD LIFE I had, I wanted MORE AND MORE AND MORE and when I didn’t get it, I was destitute and didn’t even appreciate what I DID have.
The BETRAYAL of our trust and the stomping of our dreams hurt us all, but I think if we had been WHOLE (rather than needy and depending on dreams) we wouldn’t have invested EVERYTHING into that “fantasy dream.” We would have been more cautious. We fell for the “easy, get rich quick scheme” of happiness from an external source. Just like those guys on late night TV infomercials promise you that if you’ll send them $49.95 for their “method” you can get rich and not have to work, all your dreams will come true. We wanted the easy way and thought we had found it….and it blew up in our faces.
Oh, Kathy,
My point about the “work” on the farm and the enjoying the simple things was that “work” is something you do to pay the bills, it isn’t physical labor or ahything else that you ENJOY doing. If it makes money OK if not, that’s okay too…but it “pays” your soul. My job was OK and paid the bill, but the physical labor of the farm fed my soul. It would NOT have fed the souls of my friends though, because they viewed it as drudgery and didn’t understand why I did it.
I have a friend who is a terrrible, nasty housekeeper (or not keeper as the case may be) she views houseworkk as slave labor so she just doens’t do it. I view it as like taking a bath because I like to be clean. I like a clean house (most of the time) but I am not so anal about it any more and will leave the dishes over night if I need a break, so I am getting more BALANCED.
Today was a recreational day for me–sunshine and exercise outside. Tomorrow probably will be too. I’ll leave the houseowrk for another day. Probably saddle Baldy up and go for a ride—feed my soul.
Hi everyone! This is just the article I’m looking for. For those that have read my story on other portions of Love Fraud, I too am finding it difficult to develop some type of healing routine in order to try and deal with what happened. I know that I have to really make this part of my daily schedule because those that know what happend, in my opinion, are beginning to get a little irritated because I havenet gotten over what happened yet. Well, I realize that you develop certain routines when you’re with someone for a period of time (10 years in my case) and now I have to de-program myself from thinking about her, thinking about things we did, and whether or not she’s in a happy place with her husband. I also have to come to terms with the fact that I allowed this to happen and somehwre along the line of trying to be there for her emotinally and financially, I lose my self respect and my identity, which is what she wanted in order to put the crews to me. This article lays some ground work and it may be what I need to get started. Thanks!!!!!!!
Plowman:
Good to hear from you. Regarding your obsessing about your ex–read “The Betrayal Bond” — I think you’ll find it helpful. What we all are dealing with is betrayal bonds. When you’re involved in a traumatic relationship with a S, you form physical and emotional bonds which, for lack of a better term, program us so that we keep on worrying about these people.
I’m reading it now — second read, actually, and starting to work through the exercises. One story, in chapter 2, which discusses traumatic bonding jumped out at me. Ths guy, who divorced his lying, socipath wife, found himself considering buying her a snowblower because he wasn’t sure she could deal with the snow at her new house. A conditioned response. Sound familiar?
Wow, I need to read that book. While I don’t feel this way over the S, I still feel so much compassion for my mother who abused me, neglected me, and let my stepfather abuse me for years. I have waffled back and forth my whole life over her. I finally cut her out of my life but still send her Xmas and mother’s day cards, which gives her hope that maybe some day I’ll “come around” and just “forgive and forget.”
I had my first real boyfriend when I was 20. He was quite a bit older and emotionally mature. The first (and last) time I ever brought him to meet my parents, we got back out to the car and he started crying. I’d never seen him cry before. He was crying for me that I’d grown up with people like that raising me. It sometimes helps to see our abusers through others’ eyes, because abuse feels quite normal when you’ve gone through it for years.
Plowman: First … you are not the fool … your EX is.
With that said … call a spade a spade and stop beating yourself up for being a loving, supportive, real and caring person.
As for healing … pray to God to get you through this maze of deceit. God will handle this for you. God hears all our prayers … all you have to do is ask.
Peace.
Dear Plowman,
Glad you are still sticking around and learning. It really IS a “RE-programming” of how we live, think, etc. because for so long we have been SO involved with the P that it has “taken over” our lives/minds/souls/hearts/thinking.
I have noticed lately that I have gotten over another “stage” but I am not sure exactly what it is…I am “chewing on this” one to see what has happened, but something happened, and I realized “I AM DIFFERENT” than I was not long ago. This “I’m different” thing has happened over and over as I made progress in the healing….one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t so angry any more, one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t bitter any more, one day I woke up and laughed, one day I ______(fill in the blank) but with each “awakening” I realized I had moved on to another stage in the healing. Sometimes there were some back steps, or places I was stuck for a while, but with each awakening, I was gaining insight, gaining new strength….and you will too.
Sometimes it seemed like a long time between new insights, but if I was patient they did keep coming.
Hang in there Plow man, it isn’t an ‘Instant” fix but if you keep learning about the healing process, applying it to yourself, taking care of yourself, time and your work will put it together so that you are a better and stronger individual than before this terrible experience. There was a time when I actually felt that my P-eperience(s) were the most horrible pain and most terrible things I could have experienced emotionally, but you know—though I wouldnt wish this experience(s) on my worst enemy—I realize now that the pain I felt with this episode has allowed me to BREAK FREE of the chains of misery, abuse and unhappiness I have had binding me my entire life….it was like “lancing a boil” (if you will excuse my nurse’s analogy) and a lot of CORRUPTION and STINKING PUS came flowing out, but unless it was drained, and until it was drained, it would NEVER HAVE HEALED OTHERWISE.
Matt’s suggestion of reading the Betrayal Bond, is good. I would also suggest Robert Hare’s “Without Conscience” and several others of the books here about psychopaths.
God bless.
Oxy: That was a great testimonial you wrote to Plowman. So true. We can and will … all make it through this horrific maze. Like you said, it isn’t an instant fix … because we have so many layers to who we are … so the fixing part takes on all these layers … to be the best that we can be.
I am so very happy for you. You are such a shining star.
Peace sweetie.