I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.
— Frederic Nietzsche
In recovering from a sociopathic relationship, one of our greatest challenges is to rediscover the meaning of trust. Trust is a kind of glue in our lives. If we are going to be vibrant human beings, living with healthy curiosity and developing ourselves through calculated risks and learning from our experiences, we have to be able to depend on some background truths. When our lives are rocked by unexpected disaster, the impact on our ability to trust our perceptions or our world around us can be massive.
This issue comes up over and over on LoveFraud. We hear it most clearly from the people in early recovery. But it’s an issue at every stage of healing, including the process of forgiving discussed in the last article.
This article will look at some issues around trust, and offer some thoughts about why a relationship with a sociopath illuminates this issue, and what we can do to recover.
Catching the sociopath’s disease
As readers of my writing know, I have my own perspective of the psychology of sociopaths. It sometimes overlaps current theories, but is based more on what I have observed and lived through. I believe that the core issue in the sociopathic dysfunction is a virtually total blockage of interpersonal trust.
I settled on this, because it can explain other symptoms they exhibit. It also matches the personal stories of everyone I’ve known who arguably could be diagnosed as a sociopath, a psychopath, a malignant narcissist or a decompensating borderline. Their personal stories tend to be about the social isolation caused by their differences in temperament or circumstances, or about massive breakdown in their safety or nurture, especially as infants or toddlers. I believe they skew toward the independent, rather than dependent side of the disorder spectrum because of the developmental timing of these crises, as well as lack of support and validation at a crucial time.
Be that as it may, they not only gave up trusting, but blocked off need for it as dangerous to their physical and psychological survival. And they became chronic, eternal loners, living by their wits on the “mean streets,” and viewing any part of the world based on trust-related structures with envy, bitterness and disdain. Their highest sense of the outcome of relationships is winning, because it supports their survival needs and because getting what they want is the only type of interpersonal exchange they can regard as both safe and pleasurable.
With only transient and shallow human connections, they live with emotional starvation, grasping after anything that makes them feel “real” or rewarded. Except for expediency, they have no stake in the world of mutual agreements, like laws or social contracts, and no motivation to behave altruistically. As eternal outsiders, they assume that anything they own or build is vulnerable. So, they are highly concerned with neutralizing threats and building invulnerability (wealth, social acceptance, etc.). But jumping ship, when necessary, is relatively easy, because their need to feel like they are winning or in control is more essential to their internal stability than their attachment to any person or thing.
All of this is important in the context of contagion. Feelings and feelings-connected ideas are contagious. We know this from mob psychology. Peer pressure. The way the character of an authority figure, like a CEO, can shape an entire organization. Many of us have gotten involved in “project” relationships where we feel like we have the resources to help someone out of depression, addiction or some kind of life failure, and discovered they’ve dragged us down as much as we’ve dragged them up. And of course, we are influenced by emotional vocabularies of our families of origin, as well as our intimate relationships, because we strongly desire to stay bonded.
Relationships with sociopaths put a special spin on the issue of contagion. The sociopath urgently wants to influence us. On our side, we are typically comfortable with sacrificing some personal independence for a positive and intense connection. (All relationships involve some compromise, but people who evade or escape early from sociopathic relationships may more resistant to early concessions.) So we have one partner, the sociopath, who needs us to give up our autonomy and another partner, us, who is willing to do so in exchange for the benefits of intensely positive relationship.
We feel like we are in agreement. We feel like winners. But as the relationship progresses, our objectives begin to conflict. We are looking for ongoing emotional support and validation, to feel loved and to know our wellbeing is important to our partner. They are looking for control of resources in their ongoing struggle to survive as unconnected loners. Once they have won with us, they turn their attention to new sources, unless we threaten to revolt. Then, they may re-groom us with loving attention or try to diminish our will through verbal, emotional or physical abuse. For them, the choice of technique isn’t meaningful, as long as it works. Over time, they are more openly annoyed at “wasting” energy on us, unless they are getting something new out of it.
For us, living with a sociopath’s reality is both a radical re-education and an ongoing demolition of beliefs we need to be true. LoveFraud is peppered with statements that begin with “How could he”¦?” and “I can’t believe that”¦” and “What kind of person would”¦?” One of the core pieces of our learning the sociopath’s reality is feeling alone, unsupported and unable to depend on a supposedly trusted connection. Another piece is the feeling of emotional starvation and being in a game designed to keep us in the loser role. Another is the discovery that trust is a fool’s game, and we have to stop if we’re going to survive.
That’s not all. There is the chronic bitterness, envy and resentfulness. There is the aggrieved entitlement to any behavior that serves them, as payback for whatever forced them to jam their ability to trust into the locked basement of their psyches. There is the whole mechanical modus operandi, rigidly designed to avoid the fear and grief of abandonment. There is frantic need to keep busy, developing new schemes to avoid slipping into a pit of depression that they equate with suicide. Ruthless survivors, at whatever cost to themselves or anyone else, is probably the most accurate way to describe them.
All this is what we have been exposed to.
Understanding the lesson
“When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive,” is a well-known Buddhist saying. Another bit of Buddhist wisdom is that we fall in love with our teachers.
When it comes to relationships with sociopaths, this perspective can be a hard pill to swallow. However, we can agree that falling in love with these people initiates one of the most costly and painful lessons of our lives. For those of us who are vulnerable to these relationships, the lesson is also difficult to untangle and ultimately profound. Eventually, it leads many of us to question some of our deepest beliefs and to find the courage to let go of beliefs that have outlived their usefulness, even though they once gave us comfort and feelings of safety in the world.
Fortunately, that courage pays off for us, though we may not know it while we’re grieving something we loved. The greatest achievements of our lives often involve surmounting fear to take huge risks. There is no more fearful risk than letting go of a foundation belief that we trusted for our survival. But we let it go when we have no choice, because it is clearly no longer adequate to support our survival.
In a relationship with a sociopath, we are immersed in an entirely different human reality than our own. The mutual attraction between people of a sociopathic type and people who have codependent tendencies is a cliché that is probably not accurate to all the people and situations described on LoveFraud, but it does describe an interpersonal dynamic that is reasonably consistent. Even people who have been blindsided by out-of-the-blue personality changes face the challenges of dealing with sociopathic relationships with our non-sociopathic beliefs and survival strategies.
This interpersonal dynamic is a kind of head-on collision of radically different survival styles. The sociopathic partner is committed to depending on himself, no matter what temporary dependencies he or she might arrange. The other partner is oriented toward depending on agreements of mutual support. This doesn’t mean that non-sociopaths cannot survive outside an intimate relationship, anyone who would attract them or even consider a relationship with one of them probably is the type of person who feels they do better in reciprocal, committed and trust-based partnership with another person.
The reason codependency comes into this is that codependents and others on the dependent side of the personality spectrum experience needs (rather than wants) in their preference for mutual support as a survival strategy. The more intimate the relationship, the more they need the other person to become actively involved in the preservation their wellbeing, especially in the emotional realm. Those perceived needs (rather than wants) make it more likely they will bargain away important aspects of their identity, resources and plans into order to obtain that caring attention.
Sociopathic survival depends on other people’s agreements to provide them with resources. We could argue that they are just as dependent as we are, but the key difference is the way we make decisions about our lives. Sociopathic decisions are “me” oriented, whether they are impulsive in-the-moment choices or important long-term choices of change in life direction. Their partners — who are both targeted by the sociopath and self-selected by their tolerance or inability to escape the sociopath’s treatment in relationship — have the tendency to put “us” first in their decision-making.
At this point, I can hear rumbling out there of “Tell me something I don’t know.” I know you know. But I hope this long description clarifies the real nature of our challenge. We have been closely involved with someone who doesn’t trust or connect emotionally, and who uses our need or desire for a trustworthy partner to enforce our involvement and extract resources that he or she has no intention of repaying. We have immigrated to planet Sociopath and our visas are all stamped “loser.”
Since this is their world, what would they tell us if we asked them about how to get this loser stamp off our visa? If we caught them at a moment when they were blissed out with anti-anxiety drugs stolen from their last girlfriend or feeling generous because they were feeling flush after some big win, they might say, “Don’t be such a dope. The world is full of people and situations in which other people win by using you. If you don’t care enough about you to protect yourself and your resources, this is what you get. Save your whining for your victim friends. You must like it or you wouldn’t volunteer for it.”
Ouch. Well, the Buddhists don’t say anything about the teacher being a nice guy.
Power and Resilience
The meaning of this lesson changes as we move through our phases of healing. People in early-stage recovery are terrified by the prospect of a world without trust. People in the angry stage are fighting back, sharpening their skills at identifying situations and people that cannot be trusted, building better boundaries against aggressive users, and getting active in neutralizing threats to them and people they care about.
After we develop and practice these skills, we earn some confidence about our ability to deal with incoming threats. This enables us to gradually shift our focus from vigilance against threats (what we don’t want) to interest recreating our lives (what we do want). We don’t forget what happened or minimize its importance. But we build on what we learned about our power and entitlement to make choices. Maybe for the first time since we were teenagers, we invest serious thought on how we want to feel, who we want to be, and the way we want our lives to play out in this new world.
With our power to choose comes increased emotional independence. We start viewing our lives as something we create and our results as something we earned. We still value relationships, but we are less willing to compromise our identities, give away our resources or change our plans. We become more interested in less dramatic relationships with other people who are learning through living. We share stories, validation and encouragement, but we are also conscious of each other’s limited resources. A relationship may naturally deepen. But we don’t need that to survive, and we are cautious, because we don’t want to discover too late that our great friendship did not prepare us for the different needs of a love affair.
When we face the idea of never trusting again in the way we once did, it can be very scary. The scariest thing is what might happen inside us. We don’t want to become suspicious, angry people. We don’t want to live in a constant state of anxious alert.
But we’re not giving up the ability to trust. We’re giving up something else, the trust of a child who has no choice but to trust, because it is dependent. And so that child turns to magical thinking to preserve belief in the trustworthiness of its parents or the safety of its environment, no matter how much evidence there may be to the contrary. This is the mirror-reverse of the sociopath’s survival strategy of blocking of trust. If we are still doing this magical thinking as adults, we also are dealing with blocked development that keeps us in a childlike reality. In learning to trust conditionally, and to limit our investments in other people’s lives to match what we get out of it, we are transitioning to the world of grown-up trust.
The childlike trust is a trust in being loved and supported, no matter what. In truth, we haven’t really believed in this for a long time. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have kept paying more and more to be accepted and loved. Even though we can live in ways that reduce our risk, we already know that no one can really buy an insurance policy against things changing. Everything changes. An awake, aware life creates itself with the knowledge of change. But it doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can trust.
It just means that we trust conditionally. We trust what is consistent, until it isn’t consistent anymore. This makes almost everything in our lives trustworthy. The sun rises and sets. Snarling dogs are likely to bite. Cars eat gas and steel bumpers are stronger but more expensive to replace that plastic ones. Roses like a lot of rain. Tomatoe plants don’t. The leftovers in the refrigerator that smell icky are bad to eat. People who don’t share our ethics or world views are interesting at dinner parties, but risky to do business with or marry. These are background truths we can conditionally trust until something changes.
These smaller, conditional trusts serve the same purpose as our desire for larger, unconditional trusts did before. The real difference is that we trust now in a way that leaves more room for life. Knowing that trust may be transient makes it that much more lovely. We have limited resources — intellectual and emotional — and one of the risks of life is to trust what appears to be stable, so that we can use our resources to make new things grow.
For readers who are not anywhere near ready to feel powerful about their choices, here is a simple rule you can use until you are. Guard your trust as though it were an extension cord from your heart. Don’t give it away to anyone you don’t firmly believe deserves it. And be prepared to unplug the cord at a moment’s notice. You can always plug it back in again, if you find you’ve made a mistake by unplugging it. No one who really cares (or who is capable of caring) about you will mind you taking care of yourself. But your trust in other people and in the world should be a conduit for good into your life. That’s what it’s for.
If it brings anything else, don’t thing twice. Unplug it. A good life should have lots of these extension cords, some heavier duty than others, leading to all kinds of things that bring us good. People, institutions, books, artists, blogs. If unplugging one or two makes us feel lost or destabilized, it probably means we need to find more things we enjoy without our lives depending on it.
In conclusion, you’ve probably all figured out that this is really about “becoming the sociopath,” but in a good way. We use the contagion to strengthen some of our weak spots, and to gain access to the “inner sociopath” when it’s appropriate. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with what sociopaths do, except that it’s all that they do. They can’t respond to love. They can’t trust anything but themselves. They can’t stop replaying their primal drama, because their lack of trust blocks them from ever learning that they are not alone.
Fortunately for us, more dependent types are open to input. We not only can learn, but many of us are truly excited by anything that breaks us out of our limitations. We know we’re not losers, but sometimes it takes a long time to overcome our training. In getting involved with a sociopath, we took the biggest risk of our lives. We stuck our heads into the mouth of the lion, and if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve taken a good look around and said, “Hey, I can do that.”
Next time, unless I get distracted, we will discuss love. This week I will not be available to follow the thread, so I hope you enjoy it, that it makes some sense to everyone, and it makes you feel good about wherever you are now. If you are on LoveFraud, I think you deserve to feel proud of yourself.
Namaste. The spirit of enlightened self-caring in me salutes the spirit of enlightened self-caring in you.
Kathy
end the pain, Rescue Remedy does not make me tired, just calmer. I’ve taken it as needed any time of day. Some days I don’t even need it. I do imagine everyone’s body is different, though. Some medications I can’t take at all. It is a combination of 5 natural flower essences and is advertsed (by the Bach company that makes it) as “the world’s best known stress relief remedy.”
Oh,not good for pregnant or nursing mothers, though, without physician’s advice.
I don’t think it is very expensive but I’ve had my one bottle quite awhile and can’t remember the price. It lasts a long time. No expiration date.
Thank you so much to everyone for welcoming me. It feels so good to be able to talk with others who understand. Some days are so much harder than others. I feel so much guilt right now for my children. Especially my youngest because my sociopath husband did not want him. I was so alone through my pregnancy. The doctor would ask where the father was and I would feel so embarrassed. Then I would see husbands with their wives at the office and I would just cry. I kept thinking if I am just nice enough to him, if I just do what he wants then I can make him happy. SO I put up with it and what did I get in return but him cheating on me, lying to me and to our kids. My oldest son has autism. My daughter is 5 and already been through hell with what has gone on. I feel like I am making my kids live this unstable life and I hate this. Why are these men so hard to leave? I know he treats me bad. I know he is a sick person. I know my kids deserve better so why can I not walk away? Anytime I try to talk to him about my feelings he gets irate with me and says “you are starting to act bitchy”. I wish I could just tell him exactly how I feel which is ” You are a piece of crap, alcoholic, lying, evil, sick in the head , selfish, douche bag.. Sorry if that offends anyone but those words as immature as they may sound are what describe him, but I do not want to stoop to his level. I understand that he has a clear conscious about hurting me but how does he live with what he does to our children. One of the whole purposes that we were supposed to be living back together was for our oldest son. The school system where he lives is so much better for our son. I told him how bad he was struggling and I need help with him. He still will not put that first in his life. He would rather see our son struggle then live is sociopath life. All his friends that he has now are single and no kids. I don’t know how he keeps his stories straight between his friends. I used to think that I could tell when he was lying but I can’t now. Why do these types of people get married and have children? Why? They don’t want to help anyone but themselves so why drag children into it. He acted like he wanted a family and then when we had the children he makes it seem like I had them alone.. I don’t want to be with him but I am afraid to move on. That is what I don’t understand about myself. He has told me that I will never find anyone that will want me with 3 kids. I have lost 100 pounds in the past 2 years. He tries to make my self esteem low by making comments about women he dated while we were separated.. He tries to make me feel self conscious about how I look. I know that I do have low self image of myself. I also have issues with rejection from the abuse I went through as a child. Sorry to go on here .. I just have no one to talk with about this. So this is a great place to vent.. Thanks for listening…
Kate, Is there anyone you can find locally? a therapist, counselor, someone who knows about abuse, and what challenges you face?
Autism alone, I know, is a hard thing to deal with and you have such young children. My heart goes out to you. Kate, the people here taught me about NO CONTACT. I wish I’d known sooner. There is no hope for the half – humans. So, we must protect selves and children and count our losses. The S is out to win and control at whatever cost. he does not want or believe in responsibility, but will tell you anything you wish to hear. I think they are the best psychologists of all. Please, don’t be so hard on yourself. Protect yourself for the sake of those kids. I know, mine cries every time I feel even sniffles, because he says he wants me to live and love them longer, otherwise, they are orphans. And believe that when the time is right, you will find that right one. But, for now, you would not want to I am sure, because it isn’t your priority and you are only starting to regain your strength.
I teach my children that they need no one to take care of them, or to share with them. If they are lucky and they choose to make a family, they must do so as an independent human being choosing to share their off work hours with another independent human beings. This idea of wholeness resonates with me so strong recently because my S made me depend on him for emotional support and I resent having fallen for the “you are my other half / soulmate trick”. Anyway, thank you for sharing Things will look up soon, I am certain.
kate09
Here is a perfect place for venting shouting cussing even. Here is a place to share pain and regrets. Whenever we can’t find that physical person to do so with here at LF is just that place. I too know of my shame and guilt for not protecting them more from our abuser and hidden deeper still is the shame I bear whenever I took her side and not that of my own children. May God forgive me for that….
Kate09
Darling Kate. How my heart hurts for you. I wasn’t married to the S and my kids were teenagers when I met him – well rounded and happy – I don’t think there was any lasting damage to them (except I saw ‘hate’ in my darling son’s eyes for the first time ever at the mention of the S’s name).
Your situation is so very difficult with all the responsibility of such small children and one with very special needs. Kathy Hawk wrote ‘I was lucky enough to be able to take a year off from life to concentrate on the healing’ (or words to that effect) – well you don’t have that luxury and nor did I – so you have to try to get strong to rid yourself of this half-human and all his destablising cruelty almost from within the situation. The first thought I had was ‘this girl needs PRACTICAL HELP’. In the sorting out/healing, we have to START somewhere, whether it’s the emotional, spiritual or physical and until you can get some PHYSICAL help, I don’t see how you’ll get the strength to accomplish the healing of ‘you’. I agree with Katya about finding a good counsellor to help you. Perhaps if you are able to address what is your foremost fear about cutting him out? Is it that, financially, you won’t be able to cope? If so, maybe see what your position would be without him (if you haven’t already). Take ALL the help you can get. As for the children – it doesn’t sound like he’s of much use where they are concerned and whilst they are growing up seeing their mother increasingly depleted, their perspectives on life and what’s normal will be affected. (I can tell you have an awareness of this from your final comments about your own childhood).
Sorry if I’m sounding bossy or ‘stating the obvious’ but you say ‘I don’t want him but I am afraid to move on’. Maybe try to identify your biggest fear about that and address THAT one first (remember: baby steps, one at a time, and then the next and the next ….). His nasty words – all designed to undermine you ‘who would want you with three kids’ – well, even if you can’t come back at him with anything (and it’probably best not to – they always twist everything to gain the higher ground), try to make his words irrelevant ‘like, someone wanting me isn’t the highest priorty on my list at the moment, I’ll deal with that one later’ – does any of this help you? He’s controlling you with these undermining comments and keeping you stuck in the situation and feeling powerless. Take back your power – it’s YOURS – not his to play with. You’re in charge of you NOT him or anyone else. You don’t have to think about things that he is manipulating you with if you don’t want do and what he says isn’t in anyway ‘law’ – Steve Becker talks in his broadcast about the ‘pathological confidence’ of an Narcissist – this is well worth listening to and you can go to the link – see left hand side of the home back for the link to this.
As Gemini Girl said in her post above ‘When you know better, you do better’ – what wise words – so very true and when you actually start believing that and living it, it gives you tremendous strength.
As for ‘why’ – I read a post a few days ago from a contributor and she told a story about the Scorpion and the Frog which really resonated and helped me to put the ‘Whys?’ into some kind of perspective. The story basically went that the Scorpion asked the frog to take him across the river because he couldn’t swim but the frog said ‘no, you’ll sting me and kill me’ the scorpion assured the frog he wouldn’t, smiling and charming her – anyway the frog finally agreed and when they got to the other side the scorpion raised his tail and Bang! STUNG HER – while she was lying dying on the bank, the frog asked ‘why? ‘ the scorpion said ‘because it’s what I do….’ – It’s that simple – it’s what THEY DO. We’ll never understand it and the healing really begins when you thing ‘Don’t even want to try to understand it’ – make him and all his cruelty IRRELEVANT – YOUR TRUTH NOT HIS LIES.
Kathy also wrote a very thought provoking post to me (see above Friday, 26th June) about how she came to view the relationship with the S as an attempt to recreate the relationship with her father, only make it come about better. She was talking about latent issues and how they possibly affect how we ‘choose’ a partner in later life. She also dealt with the fact that ‘we have to care about them more than ourselves’ – I don’t know if this is pertinent to you at this stage but it is full of very very thought provoking points in terms of answering some of the questions about yourself. It may help you.
Sorry this post to you is so long winded. Keep posting here for strength as much as you need. There are so many kind and genuine people on this site and James, to name but one, has been through the whole mire of getting the S out of his life and always has very compassionate insights to offer on this.
All love
Katya
Right on about the ‘soulmate’ trick. I was wholly independent before I met the creep and over 4 years he isolated me from all my friends, work colleagues etc. The constant sniping about other people, the crucifying criticism. Should have known from the start when I was so very uncomfortable about how he talked about his son, who was 20 at the time – he’d refer to him and say “is it too late for an abortion?” – he thought this was very smart and funny. It made me squirm – red flag – you know the very BIG BRIGHT RED RED KIND that you totally ignore. Never again! He tried to start the same crap about my beautiful boy (who was a similar age at the time) – his ‘thing’ seemed to be the total ‘alienation’ of all other males in his sphere – but he was very careful to show the ‘great guy’ face to colleagues and anyone who he thought might be ‘useful’ to his career – or anyone he could ‘use, con etc’. He intimidated two of his neighbours (a new place he’d moved to) – one lady who was on her own with a young son (aged 9) – complaining about the kid – who’d done nothing except play out near his front gate – she just upped sticks and moved. The other one, a guy, he fell out with, provoked and kept going back to antagonise him. Picked a fight with a drunk on a train (that was a pretty easy target for him) while with a work colleague – showing off – punched the guy in the face and managed to get away with it and told the story like he was the hero of the hour. Told me that he and his wife once had an au pair who ‘snuck off in the dead of night’ – no wonder – got knows what kind of intimidation/bullying she’d been subjected to. Had not a kind word to say about his ex wife – found out later that he’s introverted her and constantly criticised her/bullied her. What a jerk! The list of incidents is endless – the paranoia – the gun under the bed, the OCD, the fits of temper about a crumb left on a work surface etc etc.
Turned out that he really meant SOULESS MATE. What a vacuum he must live in – glad the B****** is gone from my life – now just need to keep going to get him out of my head.
hi my LF friends. i need some advice. feeling pretty bad today.
i have had NO contact with my ex-s/p/n for almost a year now. i also cut off contact with EVERYONE i have known through him, including his family (which i was VERY close with).
yesterday, i was walking and his nephew pulled over in a car and yelled my name. i didn’t recognize him immediately. he had a big smile on his face. ‘it’s me, tony! i cut my hair! i have NEVER not greeted tony without a big hug and kiss. i have known him since he was 4 years old; he’s now a 6’ tall and 28 yr old. i was horrified that it was him. i went into shock. it is the first time i have been confronted with any of the spath-hole’s crew.
i looked a HOT mess … 30 lbs fatter, hair frizzed from the weather, wearing rags. i was astonished he even recognized me!
anyway, when i realized it was him, i saw someone sitting in the passenger seat … a guy … also smiling. i don’t know who it was, but i was so freaked out by seeing him, and NOT wanting to communicate, that i just waved and walked away.
i feel terrible! tony and i loved each other very much. he always understood my deep love for his uncle and for his grandmother — my ex’s mom — who was my best friend until she died three years ago. he was like a nephew to me, too.
he simply drove away. i am so sad that i disregarded him that way. he didn’t deserve it, and i’m sure he didn’t expect it, but i felt that i had to. i’m sure he knows all about the circumstances of why his uncle and i broke up (his new baby (#4) with his new girlfriend).
i know he will tell my ex that i was rude and that i looked like crap. i’m hoping that he’s astute enough to realize why i couldn’t go talk with him.
did i do the right thing? and if so … why do i feel so awful!?
thanks, and blessings to all.
Escapee,
Thank you for your validation. Mine did exact same thing. The bastard criticized and invalidated all people in my life who I thought were a support. All of us have many deficits and shortcomings. But, he made them stand out brighter than a rainbow. Yet, I was “too good for any of these people” and it would be he, the savior to show me the road. THE harshest was his criticism about those who ever cheated. Laughable. He tried to sleep with my best friend and she did not tell me out of fear that I won’t believe her. She’s right: I wouldn’t have, he’d turn it around and present it to me in a whole different light. Speak of Power: if he got his way, he’d have nailed her to do whatever he’d want just not to compromise the chance of being discovered…. And then, My dearest slept with two women who live ON THE SAME STREET, and did not know each other. All that while pretending that he’d been at work and never bringing the money into the family. I should not say never, they are like human trainers. They give these tiny reinforcements and leave you waiting and hoping for more. I am proud to have had flowers in my home on a weekly basis. He was such a romantic. What a guy!!
Kate09, these people are beyond help and beyond repair. They do not care about a soul, even when they attempt to become religious and show their faith (Been there, apparently, graveyard was the only place of comfort for my ex loved one) What helped me is to turn the tables and to see him as a thing. It felt weird at first, but I am continuing to train myself to accept him as I would a rock on the road. I still have feelings of love and betrayal and tremendous hurt, but when I come to this site and read posts like yours, and realize that these beings have no soul, I realize too that my feelings don’t have a basis for they were for someone else, someone he’d pretended but never knew how to be. Hey, just had an idea: do you like George Clooney? I do. So, liking the S is like loving the actor. We don’t know much about him, never met him (at least, I did not) and fantasize about him, giving him attributes he surely does not possess. Mine was such a great actor, I think that he would have won Oscars for sure had he been responsible enough to stick with one thing in his long and entirely useless hurtful life. And the other day I felt very sorry for his Mother. I am a mother too and I so hope my baby won’t be a monster. That is another reason I fight for him so hard. You will make it ok Kate09, as long as you know that no one else will do it for you. And that’s ok because we are the responsible adults with three kids and a bucket full of pain.
lostingrief,
What we see in the outside world is a reflection of what is going on inside of us. Or rather what it means. How we interpret it.
On the most objective level, you see this guy you know in a car. You have some history with him. He says hello in a voice that sounds like he’s glad to see you. These are the “big” facts, though there are a few other details. He looks a different from the last time you saw him.. Maybe there is someone else in the car. The whole thing is very brief, and so there isn’t a lot more information than that.
Everything else, all the rest of this story is about what is going on in your own head. How it shapes your view of him. How you project it all into his head, to imagine how he sees you. The meaning you give the encounter at the time it happens, and later.
One of the difficulties of being upset — as in us having a lot of unresolved emotions bouncing around in our heads — is that the more upset we are, the more difficult it become to separate objective reality from our projected interpretations. And especially, that we start assuming that the outside world has any specific awareness of what is going on inside of us. Or that they are even interested, unless they have some reason to be (which almost always is about something that they need or want from us).
Am I making this too mechanical? It is a kind of mechanical perspective on things. And one is not particularly empathetic to the realities of highly energized emotional states.
But let’s make it more empathetic. You are not finished working through the pain related to a relationship that links you, in memory, to Tony. You encounter him and it brings up all the feelings of unfinished disconnection. The interaction is like a mini version of what you would feel if you ran into your ex. Not quite the same, but similar. The challenges you face are similar. You don’t know the right thing to say or do, not only in dealing with him but in protecting yourself. The shame you feel — which is a really complicated shame about being somewhat out of control while you are in mid-transition — is part of this reaction. The confusion about what to do and how to maintain some external semblance of being “together” gets layered onto the confusion you feel about him personally. You have good memories of him, but he’s still connected with that painful experience that you’re still trying to sort out.
So you make a quick decision to stop it. Stop the confusion, the challenges to your unfinished process, and you escape this situation. You do this for yourself.
But all the other things that are going on inside of you — all these mid-transition feelings — continue to be projected on the encounter. Because it is related, genuinely related, to what you’re processing. It’s a trigger to remember the pain, the confusion, the shame, the difficulty of finding a way to appear “together” to outside people, as well as the hard work of processing through this important experience. If when you encountered him, you were taking a momentary vacation from all this healing work, it all floods back.
This is arguably a PSTD experience. But not a classic one. You’re not being reminded of the traumatic experience, as much as you’re being reminded of the fact that you’re still mid-stream in processing it. It’s not over. And processing can be painful. Here you are back in that pain.
And so, you look at the encounter and you’re projecting all that on the experience. You worry that you can hurt Tony. You worry that he is confused. You worry that this experience triggers his insecurities. In the very complex business of projecting, you imagine there is an exchange of information about this pain. A kind of psychic handshake, so that he drives away knowing that he’s okay, and all the emotional stuff you were projecting didn’t have anything to do with him.
Was there a psychic handshake? Maybe. Maybe if he is a empathetic person who had reason to care about you, some information may have been passed between you two. Maybe you shared the information that you are not okay right now.
Or maybe not. Maybe he just saw someone he used to know who didn’t have time to stop and catch up, who had other things on her mind today. Who had time for a friendly wave before she hurried away. Who acknowledged their shared history in the friendly wave. And that there is always another day.
You just don’t know. What is more important about this encounter is what it showed you about you. If this were a dream and not a real encounter, what would you think the dream was about? Maybe that certain aspects of your history — ones that are probably benign but still too close to that big disaster — are still to hot to handle in a friendly, confident way. Maybe that you are not ready to deal with people you previously felt close to, because you can’t deliver the good news yet that you are finished getting over this thing.
And maybe, more importantly, that you are feeling shame about not being over it yet, or not being perfect, or still feeling like a loser (or something like that). Maybe this is a message from you to you that you need to work on that shame. To decide whether you have a right to your feelings, all these difficult feelings of recovery, and the disorderly, imperfect nature of your life right now. Because it makes perfect sense for where you are in all this. There’s nothing wrong with you, except that you’re going through a healing process.
You don’t have to worry about Tony. He has his own life. You are just a memory to him, an idea of a previous nice relationship, that can be reactivated anytime you want it to be. Whatever happened for him in that encounter will get processed in his reality, whatever it is. And you don’t know what that is. Really. Seeing you may trigger something in his life. Or it may just be forgotten as the next interesting thing happens to him. You don’t know and it doesn’t matter until or unless something loops back around to affect you again. And until then, it doesn’t matter.
Unless you want to reach out to him, look up his phone number or drop him a note, saying that it was nice to see him, but you couldn’t talk. And opening the way for a little more contact. But all that depends on your readiness.
In the meantime, you did the right thing for yourself. The only person you are responsible for is you. And you need to take care of yourself as someone who is mid-stream in healing. In some cultures, people who are grieving get to wear special clothes, so everyone else understands that they are in a special state. Other cultures recognize that people have to go through a kind of temporary craziness to deal with certain big losses. It would be nice if we had that, so you wouldn’t have to worry about how you look.
When I was healing, I worked very hard to hide it, dressing as conservatively as I could, trying to use make-up to cover the fact that I was crying or not sleeping well, struggling to mask the fact that I’d lost a lot of hair. But as I got better, I realized that other people aren’t really paying attention. The things that seemed so telling about the way I looked were things that other people look like when they’re perfectly normal. Unless I was walking around reeking of body stink, brandishing a knife, or having arguments with the air, I could handle my casual social contacts without anyone thinking twice. Even people who knew me from before. They might ask if I was feeling okay. I’d answer, “Just tired” or “Still getting over that thing” and that was enough.
So what I’m saying in all of this, lostingrief, is maybe it’s time for you to be thinking about taking it easy on yourself. You’re in the middle of something big. Take that seriously. Take your own needs seriously. But don’t look for reasons to beat yourself up. Figuring out why you got involved with this person and what you have to learn from it all is enough for any one person to deal with. The rest of the world isn’t doing anything more important than that, and it’s not part of your big challenge to worry about whether they understand or don’t. You’re going to come out of this absolutely shining, and then you can explain when they ask you why you look so good.
Namaste.
Kathy
Kate09,
I’m with Escapee. Reading your two posts, I had to think long and hard about how to sort out and prioritize the issues in your life.
But the first one, the most important one, is what you’re going through emotionally. That may not seem right to you, since you’re dealing with so many practical issues and trying to keep so many balls in the air. But if you think about, everything you face would be easier to manage, and easier to think through, if you were not in so much emotional pain.
The simplest fastest solution for this is to find a support system for abused women. You may not want to name yourself in that way, but these support systems are designed for women who have been emotionally involved with men who are unable to maintain healthy relationships and who take out their incompetence on their partners. The effects on their partners are serious.
Right now, a lot of your writing describes your internal battle with accepting who he is. That’s something that all of us struggle with. We can’t resolve the contradictions between how they sometimes appeared to be able or willing to meet our needs, but they mostly act differently. As though they don’t care, or as thought they are actively trying to hurt us. It is a big day for every one of us when we realize that they are not what we need them to be. It’s heartbreaking in a way, but our hearts have already been broken for a long time, and this is just admitting that it’s not going to change. And in that knowledge there is freedom. We are alone, but the rest of our lives belong to us.
As far as your practical challenges go — and there is no question that they are substantial — facing the fact that you’re on your own also enables you to think more clearly. You do need help. You need every bit of help you can find.
You sound like a wonderful mother — responsible, caring, very able to seek out resources and the best possible circumstances for your children. You have a hard history that is affecting your expectations for yourself, and you need some support in that area. But you’re having no trouble at all in being strong and holding onto your hopes for your children. And that’s good. That’s a strength you can leverage to improve your whole life.
The big challenge in your life right now, as I see it, is to let go of your hopes related to his behavior. He is not going to change. He may come back and mess with you a little more, for his own reasons. But he’s not going to change at a character level.
And if you still question that, here’s what will let you know he’s really ready to be different. He will come back talking about his shame at how he has treated you and how hard it has been for you. He will show he is sincere by making efforts to earn his way back into your life with real and meaningful actions to make it up to you and the children. And these will be real sacrifices he makes, not flashy gestures to try to talk you into thinking he’s a good guy.
I have no doubt that one of the hardest things about giving up on him is that he looks like your best chance to make a better life for your kids. If not him, then what? Without him, you’re future looks harder in ways that you can’t even bear to think about. And that’s why you need help with your feelings. You are stronger than you know. The world has a lot more resources than this deadbeat that you will discover when you stop focusing on him. But you’ve got to get over that hump, that fearful feeling that he’s your best chance.
The truth is that he’s your worst chance. And you already know that. Even if he decided to share resources with you, what would you have? A selfish, lying, greedy emotional child who would tax your time and emotional system much more deeply than your children, because at least they love you. At least, with your children, you get the satisfaction of seeing your love and caring do some good. He would be like a fourth child, but one who would embitter and age you.
You can do better, and you will do better. You are a good person who deserves more. He was a bad choice, a mistake you made while you were trying to do the right thing. Everyone here on LoveFraud made the same mistake.
Stay with us, and keep talking. Getting over these relationships take a little work, but you can do it. And you have three good reasons to do, not counting yourself. I don’t know if you would trust me right now, if I told you that you are going to come out of this smarter and stronger than you’ve ever been in your life. But you can do this.
Along with everyone else here, I’m sending you encouragement and welcome. You came to the right place. Things are going to get better.
Kathy