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
(((One Joy))),
I wish I was there to give you a real hug.
((((sky – snuggle.))))
superkid10 – just to be clear: the lost friend is not a spath, but i was so traumatized after the spath (and illness) that i lost my two best friends. it was one of them who i saw.
i know if i saw the spath that my response would be high anxiety, and i would either move away or i would beat on her. can’t say for sure which; i have such anger for her. she really fucked me over.
Dear One/Joy,
I hear you about losing your friendship with your two close friends and how you miss that.
It is a fact of life that people come into our lives and then stay a while and then pass on out of our lives. Sometimes we are very close to those people for a time….days, weeks, months, years or decades….and then that friendship just melts or fades away for one reason or another. Distance is usually one reason.
My “best friend” for over 30 years and I only lived close to each other for a couple of years, but even though I have lived hundreds of miles away for most of that 30 years, we have maintained our friendship by phone, computer and visits. This year my trip down to see her is the last one…the friendship is over. She is so depressed she pushed me away, her husband who is abusive to her was also HATEFUL to me, and I left and came home…I haven’t heard a word from her since January. It hurts, I MISS HER, but at the same time, I know it is not something I “did to her” it is HER PROBLEM and yes, it IMPACTS ME because I no longer have a relationship I VALUED. But I am also accepting of the fact that the relationship had CHANGED. It wasn’t what it was years ago, even a couple of years ago.
I also realize that there is NOTHING I CAN DO TO CHANGE THAT RELATIONSHIP BACK TO WHAT IT WAS—time has moved on. She is different now and so Am I. She is more depressed than she ever has been, her abusive arsehole husband has retired and they are fighting, she is more into denial and feels more trapped, is irritable etc. but also I AM NOT WILLING TO TOLERATE HER SNARKY COMMENTS OR HIS HATEFULNESS now in “order to keep the peace” and I will not play the GAMES of “let’s pretend it never happened.”
So, yep, my relationship with this woman was a GOOD ONE for a LONG TIME….and I have good memories of those times, but just like my relationship with the P-son was GREAT when he was a little boy, I can remember those GOOD TIMES with fondness, but I am accepting of the fact that the “relationship is gone” just like I must ACCEPT that my “little boy son is gone” and the MAN is not someone I want to associate with.
My supportive funny friend is GONE, she is not TODAY the same woman I grew to love like a sister—my friendship with my friend “of old” is OVER and I do NOT want a relationship with the woman who is NOW a snarky, hateful, inconsiderate person who thinks it is “Okay to hurt one another’s feelings and then make up, cause that’s what best friends do” My answer to that was “NO, best friends do NOT continue to be nasty and to deliberately hurt each other, that’s why they are best friends.”
I am no longer willing to tolerate people stepping on and kicking my boundaries. I treat others with kindness and respect and I expect others to treat me with kindness and respect, not just be willing to “forgive” and pretend it never happened when they are snarky and hateful and inconsiderate to me. Being my “friend” doesn’t give you the right to abuse me any more than being my son does, or being my DNA donor.
I know it hurts that the people you cared for and trusted didn’t care for you in your time of need and provide support….but just as we must mourn and move on past the “loss” of the relationshit we had with the Ps, we must also mourn the losses of the collateral damage that is done to our lives as a result of our own injuries and “craziness” that resulted.
You’ve come a long way since you have been here, One, I know there are still probably layers of the “onion” left to peel back, and each one exposes a new set of smells and tears but each layer is SMALLER than the one previously and gets us closer to the CORE of ourselves. Keep on peeling, Girlfriend!@....... (((hugs))))
It’s raw right now – i feel like they were ripped from me. I have had no problem understanding it on many levels, but right now i am PISSED with the spath for her role in this. I know they were the ones who couldn’t stand by me, but would they have ever been so challenged otherwise? nope. they made it through my mooning over the n ex for a long time, but they didn’t make it through this. and the spath is a piece of shit who brought this down on my head.
i can forgive my friends and move on. the spath needs more blaming yet. such a different quality of ‘forgiveness and accountability’, and surely fits my triad of forgiveness that i have been working on.
i feel sorry for your friend – how small and miserable her life has become…and she is no longer your friend, and it is a hard loss. but you found oxy, and that is WAY more important.
Dear One/Joy,
Yes, I have a great deal of pity for her…she is in a miserable situation, been there a long time but “functioning in her dysfunction” with her husband away working most of the time so that they could “function” during the short times he was home between jobs (construction superintendent).
They both come from a long line of “white trash” dysfunctional family scenarios so she didn’t have a lot of support or good role models growing up. She has a Borderline P. D sister who has been married 4-5 times and is a “professional victim” that my friend tries to “rescue” periodically. The sister has 4 kids (all BPDs or PPDs and more drama than Broadway in NY!) One of the sister’s daughters just had her first child at age 40 and didn’t know who the father was…after the baby was born, it was shown that the father was a convicted sex offender/rapist who now has no paternal rights (the other one-night stand candidate for “fatherhood” actually wanted contact with the kid until he found out it wasn’t his). LOL (That is not a laugh of merriment but one of pain!)
The other sister is a sweet chronic victim who just hunkers down and takes the abuse she receives from everyone around her including her live in BF.
My friend is NOT going to divorce her husband, or even openly confront him…she will just continue to become more and more depressed and INVESTED IN DENIAL. For several reasons, she is not able to confront this, and probably as much for financial reasons as any thing else…he controls the purse strings completely. She has a roof over her head, but is getting to be a HEAVY DUTY HOARDER to the point that you can hardly walk in her house now. She is “ashamed” of this but unable to do anything about it except feel more shame and depression. I think too, that she views my new-found “independence” from abuse as a threat to her, or that because she “can’t” stand up for herself with her husband some how me being able to stand up for myself is threatening to her. Maybe that is just me projecting, not sure, but in the end, the bottom line is that the RELATIONSHIP, THE FRIENDSHIP, is not working for either her or for me any more.
I really AM sorry that she i s choosing to live in such depression and pain, but I do sort of understand what is going on with her and empathize with her. Her “failure” to take care of herself is a sad thing for me, but I am not and CANNOT take “responsibility” for it, and I REFUSE to allow her to be snarky to me because she is in pain. I reached out to her for a while, letting her know that I “understood” that she was depressed and in pain and that I didn’t come to see her house and I wasn’t “criticizing” it in any way. Yet,, she projects this “criticism” on to me (mind reads it like my egg donor “mind read” the fact that if she had told me the truth about giving money to the Trojan Horse to buy a new vehicle I would have “thrown a fit.” So, therefore she had to lie to me….it was all my fault. LOL
There is no way I could convince my friend I was not critical of her hoarding etc. because SHE “read my mind” and therefore had a “good reason” to be snarky toward me. I kept my mouth SHUT (believe that or not!!!! ROTFLMAO) until her husband went off on me at which time I just packed up my butcher knives and asked her to take me to the train station for my trip home. I would have been out of there several days before the episode with the husband if I had taken my own vehicle down there or was even where I could have called a taxi. When you are out in the middle of NOWHERE in West Texas, and the nearest Taxi stand is 150 miles away you sort of keep your yap shut if you can. By the time the husband went off I was ready to start WALKING and hitch hiking or call my son to drive 500 miles to come get me. There wasn’t even any cell service for a mile or two up the hill, I would have had to walk there to even call my son. But, you know, I still have many wonderful and fond memories of all the things she and I did together and our friendship. She was here for me the week my husband got killed, she was here to help me with my step father’s illness and death. I couldn’t have made it through those times without her love and support. I will always be grateful for that.
She is not a psychopath, she is a woman who has been criticized and abused most of her life who is coping the best that she knows how to cope and is feeling a great deal of pain, and very ALONE because there is NO ONE she can feel comfortable talking to about how she is emotionally abused by her husband. She feels the SHAME I have felt when others abused me, she doesn’t want anyone to KNOW how badly she hurts because she assumes the responsibility for her own abuse. She is “trauma bonded” to the situation.
It IS PAINFUL to confront these demons, One, you know that. And yes, I feel anger at her husband. He isn’t a psychopath either, just an asshole who drinks to drown his own problems and makes himself feel better by emotionally beating her down.
Too many times I have assumed the responsibility for “fixing” other’s problems but I can’t do that now. Even on LF sometimes I feel way too much for other posters who are unable/unwilling to work on the real problems they have, but distract themselves with excuses for why they continue to engage in self destructive behavior. I’ve been there, One, and so have you.
As much as you can, focus on meeting your own needs for companionship and friendship by getting out and meeting new friends. I’m doing that and I’d really rather have my old friendships back but they are just as “dead and gone” as my Sweet little boy is. The memories of those past friendships are good though, just like the memories of my sweet little boy are good, but the MAN he is today is not good and so I disengage from the bad, remember the good, and move on toward making new good memories.
I went outside today in the beautiful spring day, walked into the woods and looked at the wild flowers, and saw something I’d never seen before. We have a hawk nest on the edge of our “yard” in the woods, at the top of a big and I mean BIG pine tree. We sent to see if it looked like she was going to nest there this year again, but didn’t find any feathers on the ground or any sign she was using the nest. So today we went back again and noticed something DIFFERENT in the tree next to the hawk nest. A HUGE nest of some kind out on the END of a big long limb. (the hawks build in a fork up close to the trunk) and it had been built in the last 48 hours, it was a squirrel nest. We have been watching 3 little gray squirrels play and eat and chase each other in the front of our house for several days. They must have been the ones to build the new nest out on the end of a limb but they did it SO QUICK!!! We were amazed. We spent a couple of hours over there in that spot, just looking at wild flowers and different ones, and piling dead limbs in a spot that is “washing” out on the steep slope to slow down the run off of rain water so it won’t make a “gully.”
I went out to gather a cart load of manure from the horses, and picked up trash that had blown onto the pasture….and the foals that the renter had brought over came up to investigate what was in my cart (they were disappointed that it was not feed) but they stayed around to investigate me and the dog….and Fat Ass and Hairy Ass came up to see if there was feed but were shy and wouldn’t come up to touch me (and possibly be caught up and made to work! They are not stupid!)
Today was a good day, spent with my son D just making a good memory and sharing the wonders of nature and the animals. Come inside and eat a nice low calorie, no salt dinner and rest. Contented and peaceful and take one last look outside my window at the wild flower blooms closing up for the night like tiny little doors, to open up again in the morning.
You are right, One, I have found Oxy and I enjoy spending time with her. She’s a good friend to others, but mostly she is a GOOD FRIEND TO ME. (I((hugs))) and my thoughts and prayers for your peace and JOY!!!!
Oxy
I was thinking about you on my way home from work today. One of the great things i think you bring to this website is your full explanation of your thoughts and the strength of your conviction. You’re really a role model. I’ve visited LF several times over the last year, and now that i’ve made the decision to kick my SPATH out of my life, I’m here very often. Each time you impressed me.
Tonight, I practiced what I would say to him when he shows up. I’m not angry any more. I’m sad for him – what a sorry excuse for a human being. I’m sad that he’s not who I hoped he would be. And i know I don’t want anything more to do with him.
I wish my emotions would stay constant – right where they are at right now. I’d be a lot happier if I didn’t slide backwards, which I’m sure will happen sometime in the next week.
Superkid.
Dear Superkid,
Sugar, we have ALL “Backslid” from time to time….NO CONTACT is the best, and that means that while you may write him letters or think about what you’d like to say to him, YOU SAY NOTHING. You don’t read his e mails, texts, or listen if he phones you, if he shows up at your door, do NOT open it.
I wrote a bunch of letters and SENT them to my egg donor and my P son too, and EVERY ONE BIT ME IN THE ASS….here not long ago a couple of weeks ago, my egg donor LURED ME IN AND I BIT ON IT. She e mailed me that she had found a nice PENCIL PORTRAIT of my husband (made from a photograph my P son had) by one of his inmate buddies and asked if I wanted the picture….and I BIT. I sent a friend of my son’s to pick it up and I wanted him NOT TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS SHE ASKED ABOUT ME—NONE!!! Well, she didn’t ask him about ME she asked him about my other son C…if he was still living here with me. The young man was nervous and ANSWERED her that “no he wasn’t”—THAT WAS THE POINT SHE WANTED, SHE GOT INFORMATION she wanted. I WAS SO ANGRY AT MYSELF FOR FALLING FOR HER LURE….The drawing was pretty good, about 16 x 24 but every time I looked at it it made me ANGRY with myself that I had let my guard down and she had tricked me and gotten information about me and my son C.
So I didn’t want the picture as every time I looked at it I got angry, but I figured my husband’s grandson would LOVE IT so I boxed it up and sent it to him and HE WAS THRILLED. He doesn’t have the “trigger” of thinking about My P son, all he sees is a lovely pencil portrait of his grandfather standing by an antique aircraft he restored in 1999. So the picture will bring pleasure to my husband’s grandson and so at least I can comfort myself with that. But we ALL get lured back in by something but you CAN just do the best you can. Write the letters—but do NOT mail them. Rehearse the speech but do not give it. NO CONTACT NO CONTACT NO CONTACT. gives YOU control over YOU. If we respond, they are in control of us.
I’m glad that my rambles help you to grow and heal from this mess that they leave our emotions in. There will come a day when you can reach out to someone else in pain and pass on that comfort and support. But I am still here because Ii GET MORE FROM LF than I give, believe me when I tell you that! (((hugs))))
Oxy,
So, I’m reading Victor Frankl’s book and in two days my attitude changed for the better. How can it not after reading this? I got off my rear end and started exercising again, which also helps with feeling better mentally.
This morning as I was getting in the shower I was repeating: find one small thing today that is good/positive. Then of course if you find one you tend to find two, three, four and so on. Thank you so much for recomending! I must of seen you write it twenty times and the twenty first time I went to the bookstore and bought it…duh– lol.
Dear Ana,
TOWANDA!!!!! THAT IS GREAT!!!!! I am such a NAG!!!!! But that book did more for me to lift my spirits and kick me in the arse than anything else I have done or read or heard!
I figure if he can come through 4 years of Nazi prison camp and have a good attitude what the FARK AM I DOING sucking my thumb and feeling sorry for myself. Yep, I got a bad break, I made some bad decisions, but I am FREE NOW and I am not going to let the PAST DICTATE WHAT I AM FOR THE FUTURE!
I am so glad for you! Keep on doing ONE thing every day that is positive!!! It helps. It won’t fix it all immediately but it will HELP!!!
So I guess that this means I can keep on NAGGING EVERYONE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!! DO I HEAR AN AMEN, ANA!!!???