This article talks about work we do when we are ready to work on clearing the influence of betrayals from our minds and emotional systems. It is about recovering our feelings of safety in the world and moving forward to create better and happier lives. Those of us who are still battling our betrayers, still clarifying our feelings of outrage or still developing our self-defensive skills may feel outraged by the very idea of forgiving. And so they should. Forgiving is something we do “at our leisure,” later when we have the time to think about restoring our emotional systems to a pre-warzone state. Ultimately we want to be positive, creative, optimistic people — without ever forgetting the lessons we learned in our histories. This article is about what we do, when we’re ready to put it all behind us. — Kathy
“Forgiveness is a dangerous passage.” This is a quote from an unknown source on the white board on my office. It’s been there for years and every time I think about cleaning it off, I think “oh not yet.” The temptation to forgive for the wrong reasons is something I don’t want to forget.
In this tenth article of this series on recovering from traumatic relationships, we will discuss the process of forgiving. It is a bridge between the grieving/letting go and the rebuilding phases.
Why bother?
A lot of people have a lot of opinions on forgiveness. Most religious or spiritual disciplines will tell us that forgiving is essential to our spiritual health. On a more mundane level, we may we aware that our friends and supporters are losing patience with our extended healing process, or may be pressuring us to get over it. On a more personal level, we may want to reenter the world without all this emotional baggage that makes us so hyper-conscious of potential threats that we have a hard time seeing or taking advantage of opportunities for good experiences.
In my mind, the only reason to ever consider forgiving is that we want to free out minds of the residue of anger that hangs on after we grieve and let go. There are other benefits we get out of forgiveness, but the first motivation has to be to improve the “quality of life” in our own minds. It’s a matter of our relationship with ourselves.
In addition, I believe there are a few prerequisites to really forgiving anything. The most important of them is that our suffering is fading. (That doesn’t mean that we’re not still dealing with repercussions of some sort, but that the level of pain has diminished to the point where it’s less important than our desire to get over it.)
The other one is that we have the stability and presence of mind to know that we can forgive without getting back into the situation that caused us all this pain in the first place. If we’re still attracted to that situation or others like it, we’re leapfrogging ahead to forgiving before we’ve done the preliminary work of getting angry at our betrayers, developing defensive skills, and facing the fact that there are things we just cannot fix or change.
What is NOT a good reason for forgiving is some sort of social expediency, because we have to deal with our betrayers or with other people who are not sympathetic or pressuring us to get over it. There are other ways to handle that situation.
Here are some of the things we may be thinking as we approach forgiving:
• These angry or frightened feelings don’t have any place in my life anymore. I want to move on.
• I’m ready to find more interests than this bitterness
• I want to clean up my emotional system so I become more positive and optimistic
• I’m starting to remember how I felt before all this happened, and I want to recover some of that joy of life.
• This just isn’t worth the energy I’ve been giving it
But to forgive, we have to overcome one major obstacle. Fear. Forgiving is actually part of overcoming fear. But we have to face it head on too.
Fear and forgiveness
The progress of healing involves us becoming more and more real about what happened and how we feel about it. In anger, we get closer to recognizing our fear, but our reaction is to throw things at it — blame, threats, vengeance, work on fixing things so it never happens again. In grieving and letting go, we accept the specific losses that we have endured. While that is good work, it also clarifies our vulnerability to random events or to specific threats in the world. We may work on accepting that vulnerability, along with our other losses, but it doesn’t change the fact that it exists.
And so now, our increasing awareness of the costs of our vulnerability raises a new issue. How do we live with the fear?
This question makes sense of all we’ve been through to process the trauma. We may have dabbled with fear in our processing. Asking ourselves “what if” this or that. What if no one ever loves me again? What if I am really too stupid to live? But we never sat down to really look it hard in the eye.
Because fear is an extremely uncomfortable emotion. In fact, if we look at all the so-called negative emotions, including shame and guilt, and do enough digging down, we find fear at the bottom of them. Other than love, it is the most fundamental emotion. And it is the antithesis of love or connectedness. We literally can’t feel love and fear at the same time. One will overtake the other.
Fear is designed to stop everything else until it is resolved. It generates the noises of anxiety and need for immediate relief, while blocking or compromising our ability to see into the future, our ability to fully recognize and enjoy what is around us, and our ability to take the normal risks involved in forward movement in our lives. It eats up our energy in a million ways and drives us toward behaviors that are about nothing but self-protection and relief from the mental noise.
This is why facing and acknowledging the fact that we are afraid can be such a powerfully transformative thing, all by itself. It is a form of clearing away all the intermediate structures of trauma-processing and getting down to the center of it in a totally authentic way. So we are no longer lying to ourselves or pretending. So that we are no longer trying to talk ourselves into irrational ideas about being stronger or safer than we are. So that we are finally clear about the fact that the universe whacked us and we don’t know when it will whack us again. It is out of our control.
This is tough stuff, the toughest of the entire grief process, and until we are ready for it, we can’t do it. Our minds won’t let us. We will slip and slide away into denial or bargaining or anger or another round of grieving and letting go, all the things that we know made us feel better than the stage before. And that is fine. Our minds have their own wisdom, and we face this issue when we have the structural underpinning in place to do this. It’s why the healing process is progressive.
But one way or another, when we come to think about forgiving, we’re going to run into this issue. How can I safely forgive if I really don’t know when I’m going to be facing the same thing again, or something worse? Or vice versa, how can I experience my fear if I’m relaxing my angry alert and protection systems by forgiving?
This trauma was nothing compared to the first one
The experience of trauma is built into our emotional histories. In a way, every trauma we experience is a replay of the primal trauma that every child experiences, the transition from life inside the womb to life out of it. It is the fundamental “expulsion from the Garden of Eden” which transfers us from a situation where we are fed, warmed, held, connected to our source to a new situation in which we are separate and dependent for our survival on things that are out of our control.
The developmental activities of the first four years are actually about the child navigating that separation to acquire certain basic intellectual perspectives and emotional skills necessary to healthy personality formation. It is our first experience of trauma processing. It occurs both on a macro level of gradual emotional acceptance of separation from the “source” and on a detail level of dealing with separate events that trigger fear, disappointment and uncertainty. If all goes well, we maintain steady bonds with our caretakers that allow us to ease into independence, self-soothing skills and the beginnings of empathy.
So we “know” what trauma means from a very early age. One way of describing trauma is that it is an unexpected breach of the rules we took for granted. Or the rules we depended on for our survival and sense of security in the world.
A whole series of emotional reactions to this breach are reasonable and normal. All the emotional stages we discuss in trauma processing, as well as others that we have not discussed in depth, such as feelings of betrayal, rejection or shame. If we go back to the nature of the first trauma, it makes sense that we would feel offended. One day our life is one thing; the next thing it’s another. What are we supposed to think? At minimum, it would be reasonable to think we are being unreasonably screwed with.
This brings us back to the primal argument. Because who, ultimately, is screwing with us? To cut a long discussion short, our big argument is not with any one persecutor in this world, not our parents, not our selfish lovers, not with the truck that hit us. It’s with God or the universe, or however we look at the overall intelligence that organizes this place. Because clearly that big intelligence has forgotten that we were previously important enough to have the suite at the center of the universe, and for reasons not made clear, we have been demoted to just one small, helpless life form in this place full things and life forms that clearly do not recognize our centrality.
Welcome to the first time we felt the fear of being vulnerable and alone. And to the basic human challenge of living with those feelings at the same time we experience love, trust, some kind of internal dignity, and the ability to risk moving forward with our lives.
There is no human being who has not been through this. And there is not one of us who doesn’t live with this challenge on a daily basis in some part of our consciousness.
It’s important to know this, because as we move forward with dealing with our own fear, we also know that some people have found ways of managing it more effectively than others.
The cost of doing business.
We have these bodies. They have their own intelligence and they want to survive. Our spirituality has its intelligence. Our intellect has its intelligence. Our emotional system has its intelligence. (See Daniel Goleman’s books on various forms of intelligence for wonderful discussions of this topic.) They are all integrated and mutually supportive, but the body is the instrument and the house where it all plays out, and one of the body’s primary vocabulary words is fear.
We cannot get away from this, but we can decide what we’re going to do about it. And that is where forgiving comes in.
There are a lot of dictionary definitions of forgiving, but for our purposes in this article, we are going to experiment with a new one. That is, making a decision about how much energy we want give to a certain source of fear in our lives.
This is not about minimizing the damage or our struggle to get over it. It is not about condoning other people’s bad behavior or the real dangers we face in the world.
Rather it is about recognizing something about ourselves. We have done all reasonable work to identify the problem, to protect ourselves in the future, to let go of what we have discovered is now gone, and to face our fear. We know what we are afraid of. Now, we consider a decision about reclassifying the issue as something we may or may not run into, something that is (to some degree) out of our control. We begin to consider whether or not we are served by continuing to let fear of this thing drain resources that could be spent on positive forward movement.
Forgiving is not the same as denial, because we make this decision with full awareness of our losses and our future risks. It involves no forgetting. We respect all the information we have gathered, in case we need it again. We respect all the feelings we have gone through, because they are part of the truth of this experience. We just decide to start withdrawing our energy, turning off that faucet, and shifting our attention to other things.
What forgiving is and isn’t
Forgiving is a decision we make and then gradually follow through, adapting that decision to our own comfort level. It is a decision we make from a position of power over the one thing we truly have power over, our own choices. Especially that supreme choice of where we place our attention.
Forgiving is something we do, knowing that we cannot totally control fear, because our bodies have their own agendas and they will generate fear if they feel it is necessary. So it also involves a deal with our bodies that we will listen to their fear, that we will not become airy-fairy pseudo-Buddhists who try to stuff their fear because they think it’s unfashionable. But we make a deal with our bodies that it’s better for the entire organism if we manage our fear, reducing our investments in fear about things we already know about, and saving our big extravaganzas of fear and anxiety for the surprises.
Forgiving is about trust at two levels. First, trust that certain bad things will happen. We can look at this statistically, if we’re inclined. A certain fraction of people we meet will be destructive emotional cripples. A certain fraction of things we buy will turn out to be unusable junk. A certain number of conversations with our relatives will include uninvited comments about our choices, our characters or our weight. Trusting that these things will happen eliminates the surprise factor and enables us to plan around these statistical likelihoods.
Second, forgiving is also a kind of trophy we get for doing the work and coming out the other side of the trauma processing. In that sense, it is about renewed trust in ourselves and in the universe. What was once a huge deal is now fully digested and just a learning experience attached to some unpleasant memories. We are whole again and on generally good terms with the big intelligence that runs everything.
In all of this, you’ve probably noticed how little I’ve talked about the perpetrator. And I’m sure you understand why. Because this is really something between the various forms of intelligence in ourselves, and it is something between us and the big intelligence that runs everything.
But still we need to get down some practicalities too. So here is what forgiveness is NOT:
• It is not condoning or acceptance of anything we find hurtful, unethical, uncaring or anything else that is bad for us. (We may find ourselves releasing negative feelings about something, when we come to understand why it happened, but we don’t have to. This is not ultimately about them. It is whether we’re ready to move on.)
•It is not about compartmentalizing or denial. We are not “stuffing” it or pretending it never happened. We’re not trying to convince ourselves that we haven’t just been through a battle or deluding ourselves that we’re more powerful than we are. We are just gradually shifting our attention away from it, as we feel comfortable doing so. We are gradually reclaiming our interest in other things.
• It is not a reason for re-involving ourselves with people or situations that hurt us. We don’t forgive so we can jump into that pool again. The only reason we would do that is if we have evolved past the point of being hurt by what hurt us before (something that doesn’t often happen) or if the person or the situation has gone through some kind of cosmic surgery and is now something else. Remember, forgiving comes AFTER we have learned self-protection in the angry phase and let go of whatever got us into this situation. If we forgive because we want to do the same thing all over again ”¦ well, you don’t need me to tell you what you’re volunteering for.
• Likewise, it is not a social cure. If we’re forgiving because we’re embarrassed about being such a bore, or because our bad feelings are alienating our families, or because we want to get along better with people who just don’t get it, we victimizing ourselves all over again. We’re giving away our authority over our own feelings, and trying to force ourselves to feel something we don’t, in order to be accepted. If it’s really important that we not communicate the full force of the outrage or grief we’re dealing with – like in a work situation or in court — we can do that. We can selectively choose where, when and how much we share, while we continue to work through our trauma privately. The ability to do this — letting some people in and keeping others out — is good practice in developing the skills of conditional trust.
• There is no reason that we have to forgive people to their faces or even let them know about it. In fact, if we’re really ready to stop wasting energy, we probably won’t. We don’t just stop bothering with them in our heads; we stop bothering with them in real life. We avoid engagement. If we have to spend energy on some kind of mop-up or dealing with continuing drama from their side, we handle it with an eye toward ending all of it, because we want to be done with it.
Finally, forgiving is not an all-or-nothing thing. Nor is it a carved-in-stone solution. We don’t say, “Oh, I’ve decided it’s not worth caring anymore about what he (or she) did to me, and now I have to not care about the new thing he (or she) is doing to me.” It doesn’t work that way. Forgiving is a way of allocating our own resources. If new circumstances require us to grab a sword and slay a few dragons before dinner, then we do it. After we come home and shower, we can decide whether we’re ready to forgive the loss of our afternoon, or if we need to spend more time processing that little irritation.
And if we absolutely feel like we must announce our decision to forgive to the sociopath, here’s a suggested forgiveness note:
I’ve decided not to give you any more attention. I’m not going to track you down, hire a hit man or sue you for theft or mental suffering. I’ve dealt with my losses by myself. But don’t confuse this with weakness. The next time you show up, it won’t be such a pleasant or profitable experience for you. I also advise you to you grow up, for your own sake. Not everyone is as forgiving as me. As Henry the XV said to a murderous friend, “I pardon you, but I also pardon whoever kills you.”
In the next article, we begin on the wonderful topic of becoming who we want to be.
Namaste. The wise emotional accountant in me salutes the wise emotional accountant in you.
Kathy
Betty, Kathy, Matt et al, Thank you! I have worked very hard to forgive and get my P/S ex-wife out of my thoughts. Unfortunately, she bought a home 1 block from me when I divorced her 3 years ago. There she lives with her 4th husband (nearly 2 decades her junior) and I must drive past her home daily. I see her and the unemployed tattoo artist / drug addict that she supports; my 19 year old step-daughter with a 30 year old boyfriend trailer trash guy with bad teeth lives there also. My 14 year old step-son has watched his mother’s drug use and trashy behavior. So, the physical closeness of the situation triggers all the bad feelings. It is like an unfolding nightmare that I am forced to watch ”“ day after day after day ”“ which become years. And it can be crushing.
No, I cannot move away – for 100’s of reasons. I would if I could. I was shocked when my ex decided to stay in our tiny community. I now understand it was part of her sickness.
Forgiveness is good – but hard when they live 275 feet away from you.
Ken
Hello all…I always think that I am well on my way toward being over and done with all the anger, but then out of the clear blue sky, he comes in full force to rain on my parade. I get really mad, not so much at myself anymore (thank goodness) but at the very idea that someone who said he loved me with all his heart could do the things he did to my family and me. Of course everyone in my family has no idea why I am not over thinking about it, and want me to just get over it. The mere mention of his name or a specific event that I suddenly recall evokes anger from the people who I think should be the most understanding. So, I have Love Fraud to listen, and you all get it. When I get an eyerolling response from the people I confide in,( and I’m sorry for what I am about to say)but I still want to hire a hitman. I think I could forgive myself were it not for that one thought. And I hate to think about needing to forgive my peeps for not getting it. Love Fraud is truly the only place I can discuss my feelings, so thank you all for that…On a lighter note, I have come up out of my cave and gotten a job as a taxi driver. Step by step, the healing process continues….love to all and I don’t mean maybe.
Ken, I think the most important point in your letter is that you’re being triggered everyday. A new challenge to process, over and over and over.
The fact that it’s essentially the same challenge is probably meaningful in the long run, but the kind of internal will required to step back far enough to see that is huge. You really, really have to want to stop being victimized by this situation. Because the devil is in front of you every day, saying “I know I can screw with your mind.”
If any of that sounds like criticism of you, blaming the victim, believe me it’s not. You have all my sympathy. It’s hard enough to stop imagining things, when we’re trying to detox. Having it thrown in your face just makes it a thousand times harder.
But in a way, it redefines your challenge. When this becomes so repetitive and so clearly out of your control, at some you may have to face the issue of your own reactivity. Not that it’s not reasonable and warranted. But whether you want to keep participating in this ugly drama.
There are a lot of things to balance here. Can you still care about your stepchildren and yet make some internal peace with the face that you can’t rescue them from certain aspects of their lives? Can you still care about you own quality of life, your feeling of being “home” in your own town or neighborhood, while maintaining awareness that this folly is going on in your vicinity?
Surrendering to unpleasant realities is always difficult, but giving up fighting about what we can’t change often releases our energy in interesting ways. We get more creative about what is in our power to affect. We start seeing new options that simply weren’t visible, when all we saw was what we hated.
But the first step is really to decide what you want in your head.
My articles are about “inner landscape” work. It’s why they are so different from the more practical, real-world discussions here on LoveFraud. Both are important. We need to do whatever we can do in the real, material world to help ourselves and the people we love, and especially our children who depend on us.
But after that, after we’ve done what we see there is to do, the only thing to work on is the inner landscape. And we have more choices there. We may be so impressed by what’s going on outside in the real world that we don’t see it immediately. But ultimately, taking our lives back happens in our heads.
Because I’m writing so much about this right now, I have a tendency to translate what other people say to me to “where they are.” And if I had to guess where you are right now, it’s at the edge of grieving and letting go. This situation is what it is. The actors are all involved in their own dramas, which you can get upset about, but can’t affect in any way that changes it to what you want. Anger is an impulse to do something. But when you can’t do anything, there is no where to go, but grieving and letting go.
This is what your post looks like to me. And it sounds like you’re moving between grief and anger, not quite ready to give up, but getting closer.
Later, after you let go, you can think about forgiving as a mop-up function. You’re not accepting or condoning any of it. But you don’t want to keep giving energy to feelings that don’t go anywhere or accomplish anything.
None of this is about giving up love or caring. Your interest in the wellbeing of those kids survives, but it waits for an opportunity, if one ever comes, to give them some resources. There may come a time when they turn to you for encouragement, affirmation that they have a right to question the fairness of their growing up experiences, help with processing their own traumas, or something more material like a leg-up in getting started in adult life. You just don’t know, and you don’t have to know. Someday you may have an opportunity to express your concern, or you may not. But the feeling doesn’t die. It just waits inside you for an opportunity to express itself.
That’s how forgiving goes. And you’re not that far from it now.
Namaste.
Kathy
christie lee, I feel for you. Your situation is something like blindsided. What’s that line from The Godfather movie about “I keep getting out, but they keep dragging me back”?
Anyway, here’s the thing. You’re not done with your anger, because you still haven’t accepted certain truths. That’s okay. You’re getting there. Every piece of evidence adds to the pile, and the lightbulb will eventually light up in your head.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re struggling with. You write “the very idea that someone who said he loved me with all his heart could do the things he did”, and that’s part of what you’re struggling with. But not all of it. There’s always a kind of mirrored reflection of being mad at ourselves for something that we’re also mad at them about. As a guess, maybe you’re mad at yourself for being taken in, for not being more careful or reacting more quickly when you first got a sign that all was not good.
These are guesses, but it’s not a guess to say that you’re not finished with your anger. There is some hard truth that you’re still resisting. It’s about him and, on its flip side, it is about you.
I can guarantee you that you’ll get through this faster if you start playing with a very simple idea. He was a bad guy. Here are a few more simple ideas. You were unlucky to run into him. You deserve better. You made a mistake that anyone could make. You don’t know everything and have to learn some things the hard way.
Eventually you’re going to settle down with these truths, or something like them. Or maybe the truths you have to settle down with are that you lost what you lost and it was the cost of the lesson. Or maybe you have to settle down with the truth that you family and friends have their own issues, and you can’t depend on them to be exactly what you want all the time.
These experiences, for all of us, are little mountains of hard truths that kick us out of our comfort zones. They force us to think about our assumptions about a lot of things.
As this point, I’m probably at the edge of being really annoying. Because even my words have that effect sometimes. Especially if anger feels more comfortable right now than surrendering. I understand that too. I have a lot of things I still get angry about, although I’m processing them out as I recognize them.
You will too. If you want to get this over with, get the learning out of it, and move on to better chapters in your life, you will.
It’s just that it takes time. The bigger the lesson, the more resistance we often have to accepting the reality that goes with it. If you really don’t want to accept that he’s a bad guy, I know exactly how you feel. It’s hard, and it’s even harder to accept that bad guys are out there and you can run into one. And somewhere in accepting that is accepting that he is totally oblivious to you, how you feel, what you’re going through. It makes us feel so small.
But we’re not small. Everyone of us has tremendous power and potential to change our own lives and do good in the world. And this whole experience is largely about learning what we’re going to allow to keep us from that. From our real potential for happiness, self-confidence and achievement.
He’s not going to do that. Not in the long run. You’re just in the middle of learning that. This sick, sad, incompetent and unattractive person is not that important in your life.
Namaste.
Kathy
First, let me apologize in advance for the nature of this response; I switch from the 1st person narrative, to the 2nd person narrative, to the 3rd person narrative – in the missive below.
Christie Lee encapsulated it perfectly. You, Kathleen describe the detritus quite accurately; I realize that it is the “inner landscape” that I need to take care of. And yes, the daily triggers do not help. Like Christie Lee, it is like a sudden Tsunami or lightning bolt out of nowhere. And often, due to the small (close knit) nature of our town (population 907 people) — neighbors will remind me, often inadvertently, of the multiple traumas I experienced and the “raw” deal I got. For example, at the city hall the other day, I saw a neighbor who introduced me to his friend thusly:
“Remember I told you about the guy who’s wife went bi-polar, had a personality disorder and totally F****D her husband and family over? Well, this is that guy, this is Ken.” ”“or- “Ken, how are you? You know, to this day I still think of you as getting the rawest deal I have ever seen in my 75 years on this planet. Not only were you the best husband we ever saw ”“ but we were shocked when (your ex) lost her mind and destroyed your family” On and on ad nauseum. They all mean well; and, I do try to respond and move on to the next subject. However, they are additional triggers.
In fact, when I have taken vacations away from home – the problem(s) disappear. I just spent 12 days in Costa Rica and never gave (my personal holocaust) a second thought. Consequently, I would like to envision myself as being over the grief – and on my way to forgiveness. BTW, while all of your suggestions vis a vis the step-children are heartfelt and quite nice — they will never come to fruition. My ex made the 2 kids go incommunicado from the moment we separated. She has forbade them from speaking to me (or waving hello). She stopped them from communicating with their step-sister of 10 years (my biological daughter). Even though the “girls” are older, college, students now – my step kids know that if they attempt to communicate with me (or my daughter) the repercussions will be severe. For example, 2 ½ years ago my stepdaughter wrote me a (short) email saying how much she missed me and how she wanted to just talk. When my ex learned of this email, she:
1) Took her daughter’s car away from her and traded it for 10 pounds of marijuana (as a result my step-daughter lost her part time job as she had no way to get there).
2) Stopped contributing to the child’s college tuition. This meant that my step-daughter had to quit the main University (here in Missouri) & move back into my ex-wife’s home. She is now driven (by her 30 year old boyfriend) to her job at Quick trip. From an aspiring (pre-med) student to a job that pays $7.35 per hour.
3) My ex also made her get a new email address and set it up so that any emails from me are blocked.
10 days ago my ex- wife was driving by my home, as I waved – my step-son (now 15) waved back. My ex wife grabbed his hand, forced it down to his lap and then smacked him across the face — all while driving past me at 15 mph (in our residential area). The psychologist told my ex – “…these children are going to suffer long term consequences if you use them as pawns and deny them access to their step-father of 10 years.” Her response to the psychologist? “They are my pawns to use as I like”
Or how about this one, last Monday: I walked into a local tavern where a group of friends were all talking and eating lunch with a person I had never met heretofore, “Rusty.” Upon sitting down, my friend “Marilyn” introduced me in the following way: “Rusty, this is the guy we told you about. The one whose wife was so crazy and his divorce so ugly and difficult — that it makes yours look like child’s play.” (Rusty is going through a divorce with a “Tri-polar” woman who shot him in the shoulder with a handgun and stabbed him too). So, I have become the “gold standard” for, relationship, dysfunction. I have become that guy that will make you feel a lot better — once you hear my story. In a certain sense it is nice because, after a 10 minute conversation with me, most folks going through relationship troubles feel so much better about themselves. Usually muttering things like, “Gosh, I thought I had it bad. Mine is nothing compared to what you went through!” In fact, that is precisely what Rusty told me after we compared notes. Imagine, a guy who was shot and stabbed by his wife felt that his experience was, “Nothing compared to the hell you went through.”
Please, do not mis-understand me, I appreciate and agree with every thought you convey in your, well written, letter. I can still, seriously, say that if my ex were run over by a Mack truck and killed – that I would be totally non-plussed. AND I DO NOT LIKE TO BE THAT WAY. IT IS LIKE BEING HELD HOSTAGE IN YOUR OWN MIND. Believe me, I really, really, really do not want to be victimized over and over.
These triggers are there ”“ but I want to be bigger than that. If only I could move away”
One final analogy: Imagine a Jew that was held in a concentration camp for 5 years. He survives, only to learn that he has to construct the apartment building in which he has to live (as his home was destroyed by the Nazi’s). Not only must he build this apartment building, but 19 of his 20 neighbors are the death camp guards that he had to see every day while incarcerated. Now, imagine that he is forced to live in that apartment for the next 40 years. Knowing that the guy above him killed his parents. The guy next to him killed his children, and the guy 2 floors above raped and impregnated his wife. I feel like that Jew.
Thanks for listening and the empathy.
Ken
Blindsided: Your ex is the extreme end of the spectrum of psychopathy as you describe her, and you are making a conscious act of courage with each breath in that environment. I honor your honesty in telling your story. I am amazed that you survived the time with her, and that you survived the divorce.
We should have ways to deal with people like her, who poison the air we breathe. She is toxic for you, toxic for her children, toxic for the neighborhood, toxic for the entire town — people like this are toxic for society. And the worst of it is that we have no clear legal or societal recourse to insulate ourselves from the predations, and we have virtually no support in our recovery process.
Oh, Ken. What a writer you are.
Well, I don’t know what to say. You have a terrible story. The whole world seems to be conspiring to never let it end, and worse make it the most interesting thing about you. And you can’t get away from it. It sounds like something out of Kafka or maybe Twilight Zone.
I could come up with a lot of suggestions and advice, but they wouldn’t make any difference. It’s all going to change someday. For you. For the kids. The town will find another story. She’ll find someone more interesting to torture or overdo herself to death in some way. But in the meantime, it is what it is.
The fact still remains that, from my perspective, which I hope is somewhere far, far from this whole thing — including this loony woman and this town with its elbow-in-the-ribs sense of humor — it’s still up to you to choose what you want in your life.
If it were me, I’d leave whatever I had to leave behind and move. Nothing would be worth dealing with this on a daily basis. But then, one of my life skills is exiting from unpleasant scenes, abandoning whatever life equity I have to, and recreating myself somewhere. My reputation among my friends is that I have reinvented myself more times than Madonna. I know not everyone is like that.
At the same time, the experience is Costa Rica has meaning. You can stop thinking about this and being famous as Ken the Guy with the Worst Divorce Story. The possibility exists in this world. And now you know it does.
Sometimes the hardest thing we face is to let go of our stories. Even though I’m so good at jumping ship, I’ve had my own difficulties doing that. For most of my life, I defined myself by my history. In public, I used the parts that made me look interesting or smart. In private, I justified a lot of dysfunction in my life by blaming it on my father. I wasn’t necessarily “wrong,” but like a lot of what we are discussing on this thread, these definitions named me in ways that weren’t just sexy or expedient. They also said something about my choices of who I wanted to be. Not just to me, but to other people I deal with, and to the universe as it listens to me and responds to the energy I’m putting out.
The further I get with this work, the less I want to be defined. I want to do what I want to do. I want to be happy. I want a clear mind. I want a certain amount of laughs and a certain amount of risk in every day. I want a life that maximizes my choices.
And I want that all in the context of making a living, sustaining my lifestyle, and staying healthy.
Some of these wants I could never satisfy in your life. Unless of course you’re joking with me, and every time you think about this woman or see her, you start to chuckle and sometimes absolutely fall down with unrestrained hilarity. I think, if I couldn’t get away from her, that would be my temptation. If something is going to drive me crazy, I think I’d rather do it that way.
Namaste.
Kathy
I can relate to blindsided’s dilema and anger though my current (emphasis on current) situation is perhaps not as bad as his as I don’t see my ex-husband himself though he does harrass me by email every six months without fail. The challenge I’m having is that I brought two of his dupes to my workplace as part-time employees several years ago. At the time I considered them friends. I understand they – like most people – are taken in by his smooth stories, pity plays, and status as a respectable member of the community.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been advised by counsel and by a therapist who does “get it” to keep my mouth shut out of concern that as Oxy once put it – if you poke a sleeping tiger he’ll turn around and maul your child.” My case was fairly bizarre – as they all are – and had a novel element that I’m not comfortable discussing on a public forum. Arguably I came out well compared to how these cases all too often go. Yes, there was signficant financial, physical, emotional, social and professional harm. But I didn’t lose what matters most, and he is out of our lives. That said…I still feel absolutely furious that the wife of the bagman (my ex-husband’s enabler and business advisor) who handled the negotiations for the extortion (not a figure of speech) and a clown who occassionally does consulting for my ex-husband are around and that I no longer have the authority to get rid of them. I doubt my posting makes sense without the background details and given that I seem to be fairly inarticulate about these matters. So there may not be any words of wisdom. I have thought for some time about addressing matters with the wife of the other PDI, despite admonitions not to do so.
I will not be in a position to start looking for another job for two to three years. I guess it’s the old “I want closure” lament added to my anger at myself for having been such a doormat. I’d like to at least say “This was wrong.” I know there is no chance I’d obtain “justice”or recompense. But I might feel better for not lying down like a dog – yet again. The level of probable retaliation is the unknown. Psychopaths and their narcisistic enablers make a great team. 🙁
Ken, apologies if that was too flippant. I’m hitting the time of day when I’m half-asleep in my chair.
Thanks for your generous sharing and for the wonderful humor in it. Nobody walks in anyone else’s shoes. There are probably a dozen good reasons why you don’t flee. And probably another dozen reasons why the rest of the town doesn’t do something about shutting down that woman’s abusive house of horrors. From this distance, she’s clearly over the line in so many ways that it seems like the children’s services people should be camping on her lawn.
And finally, there may be character-building benefits to enduring this kind of thing that I just don’t grasp. For me, endurance of unbearable circumstances is .. well, unendurable. I act out. I’ve got stiff-upper-lip types on my mother’s side, but I don’t think I inherited that gene.
So again, forgive me if I seemed insensitive or snarky. And just be glad I’m not on the premises. I’d probably be packing your bags for you, slipping you a mickey if you didn’t want to go, and shipping you to some resort town where you’d wake up under the palm trees. Just because I can hardly stand it vicariously.
And then I’d go stand in this woman’s front yard, laugh at her until she came after me with a gun, and hope I could get a police cruiser there to pick her up and throw her in the loony bin before she shot me.
You know, there really is a sitcom in this.
Kathy
Leah & Blindsided: I’m not sure which of your situations I would prefer, but I’m fairly certain you would not want to trade places with me. I understand what it means to be dealing with the demolition of life as we thought it should be.
I also cannot talk to the dupes of the psychopath — his smear campaign was very effective. His actions have even alienated me from my own parents. I don’t have co-workers who have ties to the P, but I don’t have any guarantee of income, because the P ensured that he completely obliterated my business and all my assets. At some point it becomes all but impossible to start over — because you have nothing to build on.
And I truly believe that no one really understands the extreme toll that these relentless, daily, moment-by-moment reminders take on the human spirit. Four years ago, before I met the P, I had a hard road in front of me, but I was strong, creative and full of hope. Compared to then — today I feel like roadkill.