The Buddhists say that we fall in love with our teachers. I know that in my relationship with the man I now belief is a sociopath, I realized early that I was in a sort of classroom.
He clearly saw the world differently than I did, and operated on principles that were so foreign to me that I couldn’t begin to connect the dots. I was truly in love with this man, had a clear vision of the benefits a good relationship would bring to both of us, and wanted to make it work. So I tried to understand. I kept trying through all the emotional pain that started very early in the relationship. I worked at getting him to appreciate and trust me more than he did. I also experimented with mimicking his behaviors, even though they were outside my comfort zone.
In all of this, I learned one basic lesson. No matter what I did, I lost. I didn’t get what I wanted from him. In negotiations or trades, I came out on the short end of the stick. I invested more than he did. Any temporary gain I won cost me more down the road. I lost money. Career equity. Personal connections. Self-respect. My expectations of the relationship kept diminishing through the five years I knew him, until my efforts were mainly centered on avoiding pain.
Through all this I was still profoundly attached to him. Part of me knew this was crazy, but I couldn’t break away. He was like a powerful magnet. Oddly, there was also a little voice in my mind that popped up occasionally, telling me, “Pay attention. This is important.” I had no idea what it meant, but in a way, it was the thing that kept me sane. It was telling me that this was happening for a reason.
This article is about one of the most important aspects of trauma processing.It is about what we learn as we realize that there is some other reality on the other side of healing.We play with this idea all the way through our healing. https://lamigliorefarmacia.com/kamagra-prezzo.htmlCertainly, the angry phase is about learning to be different than we were, working on not being a victim anymore.But there is more than that.There is also learning the lessons that sociopaths can teach us about winning.
The difference between sociopaths and us
In Strategy of the Dolphin, the book I mentioned in the first of these articles, the authors divided the world into two types of people, sharks and carps. Sharks are addicted to winning. Carps are addicted to being loved. These rough generalizations offer us a wealth of understanding about the differences between empaths (feeling people) and people who cannot bond.
There is another, related concept in this book about the nature of human interactions. That is, in all interactions, we act on what is most important to us — either the relationship or the outcome. If we are more concerned about the relationship, we are willing to compromise or give in to keep things friendly between us. If we are more concerned about the outcome, we will do whatever we have to do to get what we want. Outcome-oriented interactions may include a lot of apparent relationship-building but it is all part of the plan to get the desired outcome.
In the last year of our relationship, after being flattered, charmed and seduced for a few weeks by my ex, I agreed to a new arrangement that equated to paying for him living with me. Once he had the agreement, he reverted to his old cruel, distant and domineering self. (And I was stuck with supporting him, while he treated me like this.) When I asked him why he was so nice when he was leading up to a deal, he looked at me as though I were stupid and said, “We were in a negotiation. How did you think I’d behave?”
What I wanted to say to him was, “I expect you to not use my feelings against me.” But it was pointless. He regarded my feelings toward him as an annoyance. To him, everything was deals. He viewed people in terms of relative power. As long as I had the power in the relationship — such as when he was trying to get me to agree to something — he was going to suck up. When I didn’t have anything further that he wanted, my feelings or desires were unimportant. If I wanted something from him, he had the power and it was my job to offer him enough payment to make it worth his while.
I can write this very clearly now, but at the time, it was simply incomprehensible. My life was about love and all its permutations. I wanted to be liked and accepted. I was highly aware of other people’s insecurities and needs. Most of my relationships had some element of helping and I even made my living helping other people achieve their dreams. I tended to over-perform, because I was worried about meeting other people’s expectations. I worked too hard, over-committed, and took responsibility for everything — other people’s feelings, when things didn’t work out perfectly, and for my inability to take care of myself very well.
Naturally, my clients and lovers enjoyed the intense effort and creativity I put into their satisfaction. And naturally, I attracted a certain type of person, people who needed more than they could get from providers with healthier boundaries. I was perfect for my sociopath. He needed someone who would care about him enough to help him achieve his personal goals. That was me. And he was clever enough to give me exactly the minimum attention necessary to keep me thinking I was in a romantic relationship.
Learning another strategy
The authors of Strategy of the Dolphin talk about a third type, the dolphin, which has two characteristics that are different from the carp and the shark. The dolphin experiments with new strategies, when its standard behaviors aren’t working in a situation. Second, the dolphin will generally act like a peaceable, relationship-oriented carp unless circumstances require acting like a shark. When it is necessary to place outcome over relationship, the dolphin has no problem doing that.
In our healing from relationships with sociopaths, we practice outcome-over-relationship in many ways. We make the decision to end these relationships and then cut off contact. We place our health and survival first.
Our difficulty in doing this — and most of us have a very hard time of it — is evidence of more than the expertise of the sociopath in placing a hook in our hearts. That hook is not of their creation but ours. They take advantage of our internal rules and feelings of need or insecurity. Some of those rules might be that we must be nice people, kind or generous, and we must be fair or tolerant. Some of our needs might be that we want to be liked or appreciated, or that we expect something back from all the investments we made in the relationship. Some of our insecurities might be that we are not really attractive or lovable, or that if we leave this relationship, we’ll never be able to recoup all that we’ve lost. Sociopaths take advantage of all that, but they couldn’t take advantage of these issues, if we were inclined to feel these things in the first place.
But the most important thing that sociopaths take advantage of is our inclination to give up our power. We are willing to allow other people to lead us. We are willing to believe that other people know more about us than we do. We are willing to give up things we care about in order to keep the peace. We imagine that maintaining our boundaries is something burdensome that we only do when faced with “bad” people, and we prefer to be wide open to everyone and hope for the best.
In going no contact, we take back our power at very fundamental level. We make a choice about what we allow in our lives. Later, as we mull through the relationship and start to become clearer about the way that it was structured — that they won and we lost at every juncture — we begin to call it exploitation. Then we get angry, and we begin to pay much closer attention to the quality of our boundaries. Over time, in a successful recovery, we become much, much better at recognizing threats and defending ourselves.
Transitioning from defensive to creative living
A friend of mine who is just starting to go through trauma processing said to me that he feels frustrated because he can’t answer the question, “What do you want?” None of us can really answer that question in any practical sense until we have some feeling of what we’re capable of. In our angry, boundary-building, self-defensive phase, we learn a lot.
Probably the most important thing is that we learn that we’re capable of saying no. And thinking it, too. We say no, when things don’t feel right to us, or when someone offers us a deal that is clearly wrong for us. We think no, when we have an opportunity to do something that leads somewhere we don’t want to go. We start making judgments about what is bad for us. We get better at doing the blessed trio of self-defensive behaviors — avoiding problems, getting rid of them, and doing battle, if necessary.
At some point, we realize that there is a flip side to all this. Because in learning to recognize what we don’t want, we learn about what we do want. We don’t want disrespectful relationships. That might mean we do want respectful ones. We don’t want lies. That might mean that we want truth from people we deal with. We don’t want chaos in our lives. That might mean that we want to be able to work on our own plans, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Developing positive objectives, after we have developed good boundaries and defensive skills, brings us around to having potential characteristics that are very much like those that so frustrated me when I was dealing with my sociopath. Everything was about him. What he wanted. In negotiations, he never lost sight of his personal plans and objectives. He cared about my feelings when they mattered to him, in terms of getting what we wanted. He didn’t waste time or energy on issues that had nothing to do with him.
Many of us wonder if we are becoming sociopaths when we are recovering from these relationships. It is so foreign to us to fight for what we want. When we’re in the angry phase, it’s common for us to feel like we want revenge, because we feel like we’ve been victimized. But later, when we are less inclined to feel like victims, we realize that there are better places to put our energy. That living well is really the best revenge.
I am not suggesting that we become sociopaths. But that they have something to teach us that we, as the particular kind of people who get involved with sociopaths, can profit from learning. Sociopaths are like sharks. They don’t have the capacity to make the choice between relationship and outcome in a personal interaction. They will always look to win. As dolphins, we can choose to be accommodating or take care of ourselves, depending on the circumstances.
In practical terms, what does this mean about our relationships? It means we start viewing our relationships not just as good in themselves, but as means to get what we want. This may sound cynical, but it’s really not when it comes to our good relationships. Good relationships are good because they give us what we want and need. In dealing with people who are more problematic, we become more practical. Not everyone in the world is meant to be our close friend or lover. But sometimes people are good for something else, and so we use them for that. We moderate our involvement. But because we are feeling people, we don’t engage in behavior that is hurtful. If pain starts to be part of either side of a relationship, we either do what we can to fix it or we get out of it.
More than that, we become honest. First with ourselves, about what we want from the relationship and how it fits into the bigger picture of our lives. Sharing this information is done in a context of trust. If we don’t know if we can trust someone, we don’t expose all our dreams and motivations. But in our close relationships, we become honest and take the risk of an argument. Good relationships include disagreements. If a relationship won’t survive an argument, someone is demanding control and/or hiding their true intentions. Telling the truth enables the argument to be about us and what we want, not historical blaming or personal attacks.
We learn to make important statements that begin with “I want,” “I feel” and “I like.” When the other person is making similar statements, we discover intimacy. The conversation naturally becomes deeper and more rewarding. Yes, it’s risky to expose ourselves in this way. Yes, we have to be prepared for disagreement, rejection and possibly the end of the relationship. But for the right reasons. We don’t want close personal relationships with people who don’t like or can’t understand us. But in learning to become more open — and being capable of defending ourselves at the same time — we may discover intimacy even with passing strangers.
Confidence in our ability to defend ourselves, commitment to our own goals and objectives, and honesty are a powerful combination. It can transform our world, our relationships, and our sense of the trajectory of our lives. If this is what we gain from the sociopath’s classroom, we have learned well.
Namaste.
Kathy
Thank you for another powerful, beautiful and so true to life article Kathleen. Your courage and insights are always inspiring. To recover a sense of self with admittedly a few years of therapy and reading this site that I thought my last relationship had destroyed forever, but that honesty integrity and a commitment to one’s own goals dreams and plans has been invaluable in getting on with life free of the last destructive cruel mental emotional ****wit who is irrelevant now. It was never about him, but getting my heart and mind free again. Thanks again for shining your light for others to see, xxoo
Layla, thanks for your inspiring words.
And your use of the word “courage.” I’ve really thought about that word a lot, trying to understand what it means.
I’ve always like the saying attributed to T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia): “The thing is not to care if it hurts.” But my understanding of it has changed. I used to think that we hard to forge ahead and not get distracted by pain or fear or irritation.
Now I think that these feelings are important parts of our consciousness to be welcomed and listened to. Being able to experience everything, to live with ambiguities of multiple feelings (because they come from different parts of our psyches), enables us to be whole. I love my son, find him brilliant and funny, worry about him, find him irritating, hate him occasionally, am awe-struck by his spirit of persistence and generosity, am so grateful for his help in my life, and dream about the day when he leaves to take up his life again and I am alone here. All this is real. It all has its reasons. And there’s no reason to stifle it.
Part of courage, I think, is owning all this and then going on to make conscious choices about where we want to be placing our attention. After lifetimes of voluntary victimhood at one level or another, it takes a great leap of faith to imagine we are free on the one hand to choose, and capable on the other to make something of our own, and occasionally survive the failures. It’s really hard to stop making safety the most important imperative in our lives, and replace it with opening ourselves to experience. Seeing more, feeling more, trying, risking, facing the knowledge that some of it will hurt, but it’s better than living in a self-made padded room.
It’s work to even remember this. Writing here helps me to remember what I’m doing. What’s next on my agenda. I’m really grateful that anyone hears me. I know that not all of us are in the same place, and that so many of us are working through anger. I try, but I know I can’t really build a bridge between this state and anger. Anger is releasing all all that blocked power. In this state, the power is just there, like the potential energy in our muscles waiting to be flexed. Deciding where to direct our attention isn’t just about seeing, but about touching and participating. We know this is what we are, and why it’s important to choose well. We’re not just creating our lives, but adding something to the larger whole with every choice we make.
This is what I’m trying to remember I’m learning. The courage to be a force. For the good, the bad, the confused, the healing, the loving, the resisting, the changing, whatever I choose, however my psyche creates the thought and the reality.
I realize I’m way out there. This whole thread, my part of it, is more about the link between spirituality and reality than I’ve written before. But ultimately it comes to that. Restoring our relationships with ourselves leads naturally to restoring our relationship to what is beyond ourselves. In a totally natural way, because we are part of it. Getting well eliminates the barriers to grasping that, and also feeling it in our lives.
One of the reasons I’ve written this series is that I truly believe we can get that well. We have a lot to deal with, current and historical pain, ancestral pain passed down through the generations. It seems so complicated in us, in our families and the culture at large. But it’s really not that complicated in the end. It’s just about the various things that keep us from feeling our feelings, seeing out of our own eyes, being who we really are. All our talk about self-caring, self-trust, self-love is really just about getting to that. Getting clear about the fact that all the layers of ourselves have their reason, and at the center is a clear wisdom that is connected to everything.
I’m babbling on, but it takes a lot of courage to do this work. To not despair. To face truths like the fact that our little addictions and band-aids to make ourselves feel better aren’t making us feel better. To face the fact that we’re being paid to pretend that we’re stupider than we are, and to accept that we may need to do it to eat, but we don’t have to believe that it’s really who we are. To learn that humility and service are not demeaning, but the way to experiencing the awe and gratitude that turn the lights on in our lives.
And all of this exists, because we did the work of learning to take care of ourselves and take our power back. Because we got mad, built boundaries and learned to say no. How amazing is that?
So now, I’m going to get out of here, get some dinner, have an hour or two with my son before I got to bed. I know I’m getting harder to read. I’m not sure any of this will go into the book when I finally get it done. But it is important. If we want to get well, and we have the courage to abandon despair… I can’t even finish this sentence. There is just something wonderful waiting, and it is us.
Namaste.
Kathy
Kathleen, I so appreciate your discussion on courage. It’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.
In Spanish, the word “Valor” means Value.
It also means “Valor” as in Courage.
I started to ask myself: Is there some reason why the Latin languages use the same word for courage and value?
This week I was seeking an answer to how to get past the way my parents deVALUED me and then XP finished the job.
I’m at a point where I don’t have the COURAGE, to do anything for myself. Everything seems overwhelmingly difficult and I feel tired and depressed. I realized that I have no VALOR, because I need someone to VALUE my efforts, since I don’t. The only reason I was able to call a lawyer last week was because Matt EXPECTED ME TO.
Oxy spoke of needing to have someone else VALIDATE her until she learned to VALIDATE herself. (“validating my own opinions, my own space, my own rights to my thinking.”)
In my case, it was just that no one has ever validated my right to be happy and successful at being ME. Except my teachers. I think that’s where I got the little “edge” which kept me from completely having no self esteem. All the same, that little bit of self-esteem clashed with the large amount of devaluing from my parents. I’m still sorting out the wreckage, but I have very little courage anymore.
Skylar,
I felt where you are. Don’t stop believing. It is amazing the courage, validation, fight , and drive I got when I was told I had a case against the S. And when he put up a road block, I barged through with another case. The legal cases could have gone many different ways over the course of the last 3 1/2 years; but things happen for a reason, and the way it has played out actually exposed him more than if some of the other scenerios had taken place. It has been a roller coaster ride, but right now I am so glad I did what I did and not walk away. Keep the faith.
If there is anything I can help you with, I do come out that way every so often. Just because I had the bad experience out there, it does not keep me away.
thank you EMJ for encouraging me. It does help.
I would love to meet you next time you are up here, I’m in Seattle now. We can swap stories and you can hear all the freaky conversations I recorded with my xP.
it will send chills up your spine.
I’d love to hear the details of how you won your case against the P. The most wonderful gift of being N-supply is the opportunity to meet and bond with so many other N-supplies, the most amazing, grateful, loving, kind and tender people on the planet. I’ve said before, as much as my encounter with P’s boggles my mind, knowing all the people on LF is just as mindblowing. I met a woman the other day, who was n-supply for 5 years. We didn’t speak for very long, but we instantly bonded, the moment we realized we had both met P’s. And we each both knew that we could trust the other. She’s moving to LA but i still consider her a gift.
skylar, deep down inside you is COURAGE! You are a survivor!! Right now you are healing, don’t pick the scab off!! You are pulling yourself up out of the pit!!!
skylar, here’s a thought.
Think of all the people who didn’t do a good job of validating you. Who gave you backhanded compliments. Or used sarcasm to try to give the impression that they really knew you. Or said things that you knew were phony. Or who just gave you a stone face when you were just bursting to hear what a good job you did.
Can you remember how it felt? Like you just wanted to coach them on how to be a friend. Or to say, “What in the world is wrong with you? What is so hard about saying…?”
skylar, you know the words that you need to hear. I don’t know what they are, but you do. The ones that fit that puzzle opening in your identity, the thing you need to be told to be sure of. So get out your pad of Post-its, and start papering your house.
For me, the magic words were, “I love you, you’re doing a good job, and everything’s going to be all right.” I used to have ego meltdowns when I felt I’d done something wrong, and I would just fall apart because I needed to be reassured. When I discovered my magic words (a friend said them to me once and it just made the meltdown disappear), I taught every husband and lover to say them. I told them it didn’t matter if they meant them. If saw me start to implode, I just needed to hear them.
They all thought I was a little crazy, but after they saw my whole personality dissolve into anxiety jello once or twice, they thought it was less crazy to say the magic words. Everyone except the sociopath, who just couldn’t agree to say them. It was stupid. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like he loved me at the time. Why lie to me about how well I was performing, or that fact that it probably wasn’t going to come out right? What a dip.
When I got rid of him, I wrote them across the bottom of my computer monitor. I have bookshelves on the hallway outside the kitchen door, and I cut up Post-Its to write the magic words across the spine of the books that were at eye level. I put a Post-It on the inside flap of my pocketbook. I hung one off the light cord in my closet.
And then later, my fabulous Buddhist friend told me something that changed my life. I was telling him a long, involved fantasy about meeting my ex and in the stairway outside of my loft in New York. He sat me down on the stairs and told me what I longed to hear. That he’d always loved me but just couldn’t express it. That he knew how hard I’d work on the relationship and he was tremendously grateful. And if I’d just give him one more chance, he promised that he would make me glad I did.
My Buddhist friend gave a long sigh, and said, “Kathy, when are you going to start looking for that validation inside yourself?”
It was one of those lightbulb moments. Well, actually the lightbulb just started to glimmer. I couldn’t quite believe it was that easy. But the more I thought about it, the more it started reminding me of something else I was thinking about.
You know what’s really annoying about trying to get other people to take care of you. The truth is they never really get it right. It makes me laugh in retrospect, but I was always nudging and hinting to these people I’d recruited to be the big, strong, much smarter partner in my life to do things just a little differently. Be a a little more affectionate. Nibble on my ear, not my neck. Add more salt and less pepper to the chili. Leave the window a little more open, or the curtains a little more closed. Drive faster or slower. Say this, not that. I had this endless list of things that would make me just a little bit happier. More than one of them complained about how I’d given them so much responsibility in my life, but I was always telling them how to do it.
I may sound pretty smart sometimes, but I didn’t figure out who really knew how to take care of me until a couple of years ago. I don’t even like to think how much time and energy and costly manipulation (like slathering them with great cooking and pretty posturing and telling them how wonderful they were) I wasted trying to talk the latest contender into being my perfect partner. And it may sound like I was manipulative and controlling. I was. But you know, it was because I was doing things backwards. If I was taking care of myself, I could have stopped being the perfect Barbie and let other people be themselves. And we could have just negotiated stuff like who pays the bills or takes out the garbage, without it being about whether they really loved me.
And I think it’s pretty much the same thing with validation. I frankly don’t trust most of the compliments I receive. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment. But no one really walks in my shoes or understands why I do what I do. I’m glad, really glad if something I do touches someone else’s life in a good way. And absolutely humbled if they tell me. But if they tell me I’m smart or kind or arrogant or a bad communicator, I hear the admiration or love or annoyance or frustration their communication. But they don’t really know who I am or why. I’m the one who lives with me in the daytime and dreams my dreams at night. The only one whose compliments or criticisms I really believe is me.
So validation really comes down to how I feel about myself. Or more, how I feel about how I’m doing. Am I doing my best? Am I a little queasy because I’ve got my foot on the ethical line or maybe outside it? Am I feeling like I’m not being fair with someone? Or that I’m getting overexcited by something I didn’t even know I wanted that badly?
That’s the kind of feedback I need to pay attention to. Back when I really needed those magic words, I was worried about whether I was a good person and worth knowing at all. I was still carrying around all the guilt and shame from being incested. I felt broken and I needed someone outside me to reassure me that I looked like I was doing alright. I needed everyone, sooner or later, to play the good parent who really loved me no matter what.
Now, I think that good parent is inside of me. I’ve always known what I needed. When we’re little and we stuck in dependency with people who have the power over whether we eat or have a place to sleep who scare us or relieve us with their criticisms or encouragement, it’s different. But part of leaving our parents’ house is internalizing our parents, doing it for ourselves. And part of getting well after an abusive background is switching out those incompetent internal parents for ones who are better at the job.
So skylar, for just this moment, I’m going to show you how a dream parent operates. Pay attention, little one, because this is important and true. I love you. You’re doing a great job. A job that only a courageous person with the gift of indomitable hope could do. And everything is going to be all right.
Sweet dreams.
Kathy
Skylar: I enjoy reading your posts and in just a short time, my impression of you before this last post (and still, maybe more now) is that you’re a very strong and interesting and inquiring person – it surprised me that you’d express these feelings of not being courageous. But maybe that’s a part of all our growth, just knowing that we’re seeking validation and how we’ve tried to get it in the past. And expressing that need to others – and even if they turn away, it’s there for us to see in the light of day. As Kathleen quoted, ‘the thing is not to care if it hurts.’ So it is about hurting -and we’re not denying it. It means we’re truly alive and we’re here helping each other to heal into happiness- and we’re doing a good job of it!
Thanks Kathy for all you wrote – you’re able to express so beautifully what
so many of us have felt – so comforting to read this tonight.
Thanks persephone for your touching post. I’ve probably told you this already, but I love your name.
Maybe it’s good to get these insecurities up into the light. Maybe that’s another form of courage, to ask to be encouraged.
Oh, what a cool word. I never saw that before. I guess it means that we can give each other courage.
Looking back. think my Mother,{whom I adored all my life,} was seriously depressed. She was trapped into a marriage that I think she knew from the word go, wasnt working for her.She had grown up without a dad figure, as her Father was away most of her childhood. Her French Mother, homesick for the island of Mauritshuis, where shed been born and brought up, was broke most of the time, and had to take in foreign student lodgers. This was in Edinburgh, Scotland,in the 1920s My grandad lived most o his life in England, where he was an Anglican curate,{minister}. he and Granny had 5 children, dont ask me how, as he was seldom there! Mum was the youngest of nine children as Granny had had another 4 kids by her first husband,, who had died. I think Mum married my dad as a father figure for herself, I was never allowed to get close to my Dad, she prevented it.Anyway, I have this very clear image of me, as a very small girl, around 4 probably, in a pink and grey knitted suit, Mum had knitted for me.The year was 1942. I was helping Mum to polish the huge mahogany dresser, I had a yellow duster in my hand. I remember MUm screaming at me.”No one will like you! You drive everyone away! Youll never get married!” I can still see that little girl, frozen with fear,, her fat, chubby cheeks red, tears running down them, my mouth an open,”OH”., still clutching the yellow duster. Next, I remembered she used to , every day, give me a penny, for my bus fare home, and told me to “disappear ” for the whole day. I remember, walking, walking,walking to the village, walking down to the railway line,{disused, except for the odd coal train.} I remember huge cow parsley flowers towering over my head. I remember walking up endless white stone steps, under a white bridge,over the water of Leith.to Colinton Village. {I forgot to mention, the railway line ran parallel to the river.} I remember finally getting to the bus stop, waiting for the number 8 bus home, handing over my penny, getting off at the right stop, then the long hike up the hill, and home.Isnt it amazing that the bus conducter never questioned why a very small girl would be travelling alone! I was always home before my dad got home from his teaching job, my brothers were babies, age one, and 3, I think. I did this every day, for a year. Thankfully this stopped when I started school, but still had to make a very long bus journey there and back by myself, from the age of 5, to 16, when I left school. I never told Dad about this abuse, but years later, in 1978, when my Mum, then around 66, paid a visit to Australia to see me and her 2 grand daughters.I confronted her with this sad tale, she flatly denied shed ever done it! “I would never do such a thing!”In 1990, I went back to the village of my birth, near Edinburgh. I walked, by myself, down to that disused railway track, {now a nature trail.} The metal bridge was still there. I stood there,on the bridge, and said out loud,”Mum ,I forgive you for the mental torture this poor litle girl went through,51 years ago.I see this little girl, I pick her up, I comfort her, I place her in my heart. She is safe now, she is loved, she is secure. Nothing bad can ever happen to her, like this, ever again.”. Then, I got the bus back into town where my kind, concerned 2nd husband was waiting for me, outside jenners store. “I had to do this myself,for myself” I said. He understood, and hugged me better.GeminigirlXXPs God knows how I was never molested. I had Hypnotherapy around 1985, to see if Id been molested,and had blocked the memory. But, thankfully, it seems I not.I was very lucky!