Because there is so much discussion lately about pity, empathy and compassion in the wake of a relationship with a sociopath, I am writing this article to discuss compassion as it fits into the recovery process.
Before I begin, I would like to humbly remind my readers that recovery, by its nature, is a progression through different stages of emotional learning. If the trauma is major, these emotional states will be intense. And they will color our “sight” or view of the world and ourselves. I’m pointing this out as a warning that, unless you are in late-stage recovery, the material in this article may be irritating and you may find me a holier-than-thou pain in the butt.
If the farthest you have gone in trauma processing is denial, bargaining, anger, or grief and letting go, the related emotions will — and should — dominate your view of things until you learn the lessons of that stage and gaduate to the next one. Each graduation changes your world, and it also alters your perspective on how you felt before. For example, anger looks back at denial as a less empowered, less insightful phase. And denial veiws anger as anger as socially unacceptable or scary. This is just the natural progression of maturing consciousness. We look back from a larger perspesctive. We tend to block or demonize information from levels that are too far beyond where we are now.
So if this article doesn’t make sense to you, or it seems “nice but improbable,” or you find it irritating or nutty, it means it’s not useful to your current learning stage. Typically we can see into the next level of healing, even if we’re not fully there. Beyond that, it’s hard for us to intuitively grasp how it’s going to be.
As we observe on LoveFraud, there is a lot of learning in recovery. This article is about the end of the process. It’s an end so complete that, every “next time” we face a trauma, we know how the processing will end. It changes forever the way we approach healing and the speed at which we do it.
Defining compassion
Most of us grew up in the Judeo-Christian tradition where compassion is understood as a “social” feeling. That is, the feeling is about “we,” not just “I.” It’s associated with ideas about welfare as a community goal, not just an individual one. So we tend to define compassion as concern about someone else’s difficulty plus some level of obligation to help.
This definition of compassion is why the sociopath’s pity ploy is so challenging for us. It’s also why there may be resistance to my statements that I feel compassion for my ex, because I am aware of the painful identity damage he lives with. The assumption, I believe, is that it’s dangerous to feel compassion for an anti-social person, because that feeling comes with implied obligation to help. So it may seem inexplicable that I am aware of his pain, but feel no responsibility for alleviating it.
The concept of compassion that I am presenting to you today is somewhat different. It is more like a Buddhist or Eastern idea of compassion. This compassion is simply a state (of mind), not a process of identifying need and acting on it. This state of compassion may inform our actions — quite literally inform, by providing information — but the actions themselves are driven by other commitments or goals.
That’s all very abstract. Why does it matter?
Here’s why. The state of compassion which is open-hearted willingness to understand other people’s states and situations and to feel whatever feelings that produces puts us into full alignment with “what is.” It’s a vibrant awareness that keeps us gathering information, learning, and accepting reality without judgment.
It’s not that we don’t make judgments on other levels of consciousness. In a compassionate state, we may understand what’s driving a person who is dangerous to us. On another level, we may interpret this person as nothing but a threat and be preparing to defend ourselves or flee. But the compassionate level “sees” their state, our state, and many surrounding details. All that information moves “down” the processing ladder to refine what’s going on at the visceral self-defense level, the pleasure-pain level, our community-feelings level, and the cognitive level where we’re doing logical reasoning.
In other words, this compassionate level of awareness feeds all our processes by providing them with information that is detailed, perceptive and based on openness to active states and connections in our environment.
If this sounds like a hierarchy of consciousness, that is exactly what it is. There are lots of models for this hierarchy, which I’m not going to get into now. But I mentioned earlier that this is the end-state of recovery. That means recovery from a specific trauma. It doesn’t mean that we have this compassionate awareness in every area of our lives, but any specific healing process is over when we have processed through to compassion.
Our changing focus in healing
We’ve talked about denial, bargaining, anger, grief and letting go, and finally learning the lesson that changes our perspectives and/or life rules. This follows the Kubler-Ross model of grief processing. But Kubler-Ross was conceived as a model for people facing terminal illness. It described how people come to accept the ending of their lives. The model I’m working with goes farther, because it assumes that recovery is a doorway into a new chapter of life.
To see the whole picture of recovery, it helps to look at the progressive shifts in our focus. Up to anger, and including part of the angry phase, trauma processing is about maintaining personal control the idea that this is something we can change or affect. First we try to control our reactions (denial), then we try to control how our behavior influenced the situation (bargaining), then we try to control the situation by force of will (anger). In anger, we grasp that the problem is external to us. To control the impact of such externalities in the future, we develop defensive skills and perceptions.
In the later stages of anger and this is one of the things that moves us out of anger we become aware that we’re dealing with something that was not in our control at all. While the skills-building makes us feel better about ourselves, we are still reacting to outside threats. This focus on the external continues through the grieving and letting go process.
Turning inward
Grieving what we cannot change leads, eventually, to letting go. We can’t fully let go in anger. Instead, we have to revisit the love or great value we felt toward what we lost. (This may be, and often is, something that we now recognize as an illusion.) Reawakening love, even to say goodbye, relaxes us back into ourselves, and opens us to the “lightbulb” learnings that typically release us from previous attachments or ideas of what we “must” have or do to be happy or whole.
In discovering what we don’t need, we gain freedom — more scope of action, feelings, and even intellect. But to explore the meaning of that freedom, we find ourselves “shaking down” our internal systems to see what makes sense now and what doesn’t. With freedom comes responsibilities, and we have more learning to do about how we will act, what we will expect, and how our feelings work in this new world.
As a simple example, a common learning from our experience with a sociopath is that, although we once needed other poeple to confirm our okay-ness, we realize we don’t need external validation to trust our values and perceptions. So flattery and promises, or outside opinons about our dreams or our guilt, may sometimes make us feel good (or bad) but they’re not ultimately as true for us as our own ideas and feelings. So how does that affect every other relationship in our lives? Working this through takes time and experimentation.
More to the point, perhaps, relationships with sociopaths teach us that we have the inborn entitlement and responsibility to take better care of ourselves. To take ourselves more seriously. To assign higher value to not just our survival, but what we do with our lives. And this imperative eventually brings us to a confrontation with how we really feel about ourselves.
Clearing the obstacles to self-love
This confrontation is usually shocking, something like traumatic. It’s mindbending to discover that we’ve been carrying around damage that has caused us to treat ourselves as badly as we accused the sociopath of doing. In fact, we could almost call the sociopath an agent of our own distrust and disrespect for ourselves.
But now we’re experienced enough to know that we didn’t do this to ourselves. We identify the externaliites and note how little control we had. Even working with memories, we can assert our right to our integrity, our right to thrive, and reject the old influences on our lives that once crippled us with feelings of unlovability, unworthiness, insecurity or despair.
This process of restoring self-love is the end stretch of trauma-processing. Our shakedown of our internal beliefs, rules and processes becomes more pervasive and profound. We are in touch with a need that we may have felt before, often masked in background anxiety or in addictive hungers, but we can’t mistake what it really is. We want to clear away anything that keeps us from being in touch with our true self the bright, good, authentic, perceptive, learning, feeling center that has been the source of our best social impulses and also our self-healing impulses all our lives.
When we understand that this center exists and feel its nature, we come home to something that has always been there. It’s an experience that is impossible to describe, but it is the beginning of making sense of everything in our lives. In particular, we see how much of our life story has been about our attempts to heal traumas and get back to who we are. We become more conscious of how unhealed wounds color our perceptions. Though we cannot resolve everything at once, each resolved trauma illumates more of our authentic self, and helps us tell the differnce between what is authentic in us and what is unfinished trauma-processing. In this knowledge, we become more understanding and able to comfort ourselves, and more accepting of our normal human pains, fears, losses, as well as hungers, attractions, and goals.
We don’t have to be perfect to love ourselves. We can make peace with who we are. We can become more relaxed about new challenges, because we accept that, win or lose, we’re going to learn something great. We can acquire a sense of humor about where we’re still developing and are not so good at being all we could be.
We gain a new perspective, a kind of distance from ourselves that relieves us from fear and criticism, but encourages us in our progess as evolving people. That perspective also gradually aligns all the levels of consciousness behind a new “boss,” a new highest, deepest level that is more open and smart, while being more tolerant and supportive of our humanity. All of it our need to physically survive, our genetic attachments to family, our drive to bond and reproduce, our dependence on community, our desire to make our lives meaningful, and all the other needs that come with being human. Compassion is like having an angel in the “top office,” influencing the way the whole company works.
But here’s the thing about compassion. As that open-hearted awareness anchors our internal workings, it also changes the way we see the world. Our perceptions are a reflection of our inner lives. We see from where we are in ourselves.
Compassion and Sociopathy
Compassion is a state of awareness. As I said earlier, this definition of compassion does not require us to act or react. It simply provides a new and more refined set of information to the rest of our systems. In the case of identifying a sociopath or finding reason to react, the identification is made with openness to understanding their state, including the wounded pain of their broken humanity. But compassion feels this pain without becoming involved in it. The information made available to our defensive systems may be simply that this person is wounded, extremely needy for personal support, but is apparently unable to heal or return support to other people. His needs are bottomless and not fixable by us.
Sad for him, and sad for us to know this about him. But it clarifies our response. Compassion tells us there is no potential for a mutual relationship and nothing to be gained by trying to help.
People who have read me here for a while, know that I am committed to changing social systems that, in my belief, create the circumstances in which children develop affective disorders — inadequate nurture, environmental violence and direct abuse. Sociopathy is an affective disorder, which may have genetic factors of predisposition, but is powerfully affected by environmental factors. I can’t change sociopaths, but I want to help reduce future suffering (and all the suffering it causes) at the source, where children are learning despair of trusting anything but themselves.
My way to change those systems is to help individuals stop the cycle of damage for themselves. I believe that we can heal our old damage, so we are no longer perpetuating or supporting the transmission of damage through generations, communities and other human systems. If we don’t get well, we are part of the problem. If we do get well, we become living solutions. Some of us will change the world just by being human beacons, people who inspire other people to learn to love themselves and discover with the powerful rationality that compassion brings. Some of us will use the information compassion brings us to actively work on human systems to create a better world where human potential can flourish.
So that is compassion in my view. I hope this clarifies what I mean when I talk about compassion, and why some of you may find my perspectives and my language so different. I hope that, in my voice, some of you hear the voice of your future.
Namaste. My angel high-fives your angel.
Kathy
PS. This article is not about what’s wrong with you, being a more loving person so you’re treated better, or accepting or forgiving bad behavior. If it even seems like that, come back and take another look at it in a year or so. In the meantime, don’t worry, you’re doing fine and exactly where you’re supposed to be on the path.
Kathleen – just a quickie – you are right about societies that don;t value their families and young children – if children don’t have opportunities to grow the initial bonds they can end up very damaged in later life.
It’s interesting there are only two countries that haven;t ratified the International COnvention on the Rights of the Child…
one is Somalia
The other is the United States of America
Any country that doesn;t value, advocate for and support its youngest citizens is headed for trouble when those citizens grow up.
Kathy,
Thanks a lot! You really made my day, and you have continued to help me through a hard time with your blog!
I will get that book right now….
Thanks again for everything you have done for me and the other people on this board…..
Angela
Kathleen,
Thank you again for your thoughts – especially in your suggestion to trying
the meditation of turning the dialogue with him back to myself. I will post
more about today soon, tonight I’ve got to turn in as it’s been a long day.
I think some progress was made, will find out more about getting my guitar back tomorrow.
And you’re right about the feeling of ‘safety’ – I’ve always had that feeling
with him even when events say he is ‘unsafe’ and then I feel really alone. That hidden self/daylight self you spoke of wants to be integrated -I feel it is happening. It is a matter of getting out of my own way…
Rosa – I’d loan you my brace, am sure you probably have one! For me, it’s
always about preparation – getting the racquet back and ready before I
swing so I don’t get caught hitting the ball behind me. For years I had late preparation and then would have all that force coming at me tweak my arm. You’re probably just playing alot more than I am at the moment! I feel for you, so hard to be on the sidelines when you love it so much! Thanks for your faith
and kind words too, Rosa.
Kathleen,
I really understand your way of compassion. I feel this is good for the hurt ones with the Xs.
What about people like me? A mother of a 37 year old daughter that is a sociapath. How does a mother that brought this child into the world and felt she was the most beautiful child a mother could have. How does a mother do it.
It has been over three years since K and I have spoke. She is the cancer of the family still. I know she is dangerous, she has tried to put her father in prison by lying that he molested his granddaughter. She turned off my pain medicine after surgery in the hospital. Yes she is dangerous!
I feel that I must have caused her problem. After three years of research it goes back to her childhood. I think when I had my son, K was 9 years old. She tells everyone that her brother was my favorite. Did I not pay enough attention to her? She was treated good, normal busy family but I feel I did not give her enough of me and my time. So how do I just shut off the feeling of a mother that misses her daughter.
I know my real daughter has been gone since she was 15. a real long time, and she will not be coming back, but the feeling are still there.
If there is any loving Mothers out there that have had a child that is a sociapath, how do you go on?
Thanks Kathy for all the years of helping me heal.
Your advise will be helpful regarding my daughter.
Hurt Mom of an Air Force Daughter
HurtMom – if this is your first post then welcome and sorry you are in this situation. You will find some good support on this site from knowledgable and loving people who understand what you are going through. I don’t have any children of my own and my experience was with the man I married so I can’t be much help to you. But there are others on this site who post who are also in the same situation as you and suffer the same pain – some have cut ties with their children and some are still in contact and learning how to put up boundaries to help themselves.
If you go towards the top of the site on the left hand side there is a menu and one of there is a section on female sociopaths and on sociopaths and family. Dr Liane Leedom who is a regular writer here has done extensive research into the origins of sociopathy and what the genetic risks are – look through her posts as well – the authors are named underneath the topic listing.
No doubt anything you read will validate your experience but it’s good to find material that is really pertinent to your particular situation. Please don’t blame yourself – there is quite a bit of evidence that these disorders have a genetic component and also are linked with early trauma and environmental influences – it is a complex mix of factors and concrete answers are not known yet.
Please keep posting your story as you find material that resonates with what you have been through and others with more experience will comment back and share with you. This must be very hard for you at the moment – I hope the other posters who have children respond as quick as possible to you. You are not alone 🙂 Hugs 🙂
Kathy I am going to take a stab at responding to that humungous post you took the time to write in response to me.
I like the idea about a collision – two wounded people banging into each other when all the circumstances were just right. I have often wondered if one piece of my own circumstance at the time had been different or one aspect of my history if I would have hooked up with him and stayed for a decade – it’s pretty painful to think about but I think the answer is no.
There were lots of things in that post (like all of your posts) that I will need to think about some more. But tonight I am going to talk to two aspects that sung out loud and clear. One is his woundedness. I have already addressed some of my own woundedness but what I haven’t talked to is his and it was a major theme in the relationship. The other aspect I want to consider are the circumstances around the time we got together – the immediate history and how I felt about myself. I can probably surmise some of his immediate history too from what he told me at the time – although that could have been lies! But some of it I know happened.
So his woundedness. I know he was a wounded little boy – the first born who was dethroned fairly early on by other siblings who arrived in rapid succession and took the spotlight from him. The first would have arrived when he was close to three yrs old and I can only surmise from seeing three yr olds contemplating new siblings the jealousy and utter devastation he must have felt when this sibliing arrived and took all mummy’s attention away from him. Then came another – in the tradition of ‘stacked’ families, the eldest as soon as able to walk and do for themselves is expected to be fairly independent.
The family was quite poor but he was surrounded by extended family and wasn’t aware of it till he hit teenage yrs and several bad financial disasters befell the family. So he recalls a fairly happy early childhood – well that’s what he recalled initially. I have a tendency to probe people about their childhoods and the circumstances around their upbringing to give me some context to their life in adulthood and help me understand them. That was one of the first red flags for me – he never wanted to discuss it Ditto previous relationships with other girlfriends. The girlfriend thing I can kind of understand – it can create or exacerbate jealousy and insecurity but I haven’t really encountered people who don’t want to revisit their childhoods – even people I have talked with who were abused (sexually or physically) are usually open about going back there although they may put a caveat on certain events they don’t want to talk about.
Gradually a story began to emerge in unexpected moments of sharing from him. He had been terribly afraid of his mother – she yelled a lot at him and hit him for misbehaving. I didn’t think too much of this – my own mother yelled and hit me and many other people are the same – what he described was not excessive, but rather the burned in vivid memories of childhood fear – and most parent child relationships have an element of fear within the respect. Well most I have encountered anyway – I am unsure whether that is a good thing after reading Alice Miller but that is not today’s discussion!
His father was absent a lot for work and would shoo him out of the way when working around the house. I saw an image of a boy desperate to emulate the man he saw and rejected time and again just for the fault of being a child – sad. His mother used to make him watch tv with her. I found this kind of strange = children don’t naturally want to sit all the time. They will protest they want to watch something and then fifteen minutes later have ants in their pants and are ready for something more social. So he was controlled.
The other children got normal support and encouragement – but not him. They got gifts in adulthood for birthdays and christmas but not him. He explained that they did this because they knew he could stand on his own two feet. I always tried to make celebrations very special because I sensed this hole in him. Having read into the disorder now – I read somewhere that early on mothers sometimes sense something is amiss with the child and have great difficulty bonding with them – this makes sense to me but it could have been the other way around too. You see – his mother has the same behaviours as him going on. Exactly the same – the denial, the compulsive spending, lying and covering up, pulling the pity routine – the flat affect and lack of real emotions. So I see he either learned from her or was given a genetic inheritance from her – or both. Development in the early years depends on healthy adult mirrors – he didn’t have that in either parent.
In addition there were issues with marital discord, financial problems, substance abuse, stress, difficult relationships with extended family, lack of support etc etc. Both parents had low education and no real aspirations to attain anything better for themselves or their children – mama’s behaviours set them back several steps with every crisis she introduced. He recalls having money he earned early on taken for the household – yet I had the same experience and willingly offered it. I hold no bitterness about it – it was my way to give some small measure back.
So this is just a sample of the woundedness in him – he was unwilling to explore it or even consider that trauma from then could be contributing to self defeating behaviours now. So nothing to be done about it. I on the other hand spent many nights looking for threads – what happened and what did it mean and what did it make me and how did that contribute to the decision I made here and what I did next? And what is still unhealed? I was quite aware that I had some holes in me and was actively trying to heal them. The problem was by the time I was with him, I could no longer focus on that. And I didn’t realise the full extent of my vulnerability at the time I met him.
When I first met him, I was recovering from a long string of disasters not just lousy relationships, but poor life decisions and traumas inflicted on me by others. I was being actively abused by a family member I had tried to support through a very difficult life transition and I felt like crap about myself after internalising all the messages this person gave me as true. Without going into all the gory details – this person basically blamed me for their life imploding and as boundaries were blurred I took on the blame, which then allowed them to release all guns on me. For more than a year I took constant verbal and psychological abuse while trying to care for this person afraid they would end their lives. This person would not seek medical or psychological advice and warned me if I did for them they would cut me off forever.
Yes now I know I should have walked away but it wasn’t that simple at the time. I couldn’t see the woods for the trees and was desperately throwing whatever I could think of at the problem in an effort to find solution. This pattern was later repeated in the relationship with the P – the blaming and abuse, the trying to fix the unfixable. So at the time I met him, I was at my lowest ebb – I had suffered through major life traumas (many of which would have caused anyone to kill themselves) one after another with no break in between – in survival mode – going to work so I could pay the rent for this week and unable to even take a week off to grieve and heal. Horrific and life has continued like that ever since when I look back on it all. But I digress.
So he met me in a state where I was desperate for someone to rescue me. That’s the honest truth. And that’s what he promised to do – he told me he would come and I would never again suffer such awful experiences – he would protect me and ensure my life was lived on my own terms and every day would be a happy one for me. I lapped it up. I so wanted to be away from that situation but I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself by myself – I needed someone else to tell me what to do. I was so used to being ordered around by someone else by that point and I didn’t even really realise it.
So another element of the context was I had just moved to a new city and knew nobody there – no friends there and had left several good friends in another city. I felt unsure, unstable, unhinged – similar to how I feel now – unanchored is how I describe it to others and myself. I can recognise now how ripe for the plucking I was – at one word from him I was willing to jump as high as he liked and do as he wished – anything so I would be safely married and protected and never have to suffer pain again. Little did I know …
What about him? Well his life can’t have been going so well before he met me because within a few months he was suggesting moving to my country to live instead. He wanted to make it in a particular industry and his country was flooded – he saw an opportunity to be ‘different’ by being a foreigner here and perhaps have an advantage. I promised him my full support to achieve his dreams and I did deliver on that – I put the full strength of myself against his dreams to push them towards success and after a while began to see that no matter what I or anyone else did to help him, he always managed to sabotage himself and end up playing ‘hurt’ about the failure.
Why would anyone move to a foreign country to be with someone they hardly know after such a short period of time? I guess that is the impulsiveness – it was echoed in my impulsiveness to get him into my life. I shopped and cleaned and scrubbed and prepared a little love nest for his arrival pinning all my hopes on this once upon a time working out – just for once after all I had been through. I reasoned with myself that God could not be so cruel as to disappoint and hurt me again …a fter all I had been through. I almost had a similar sense of entitlement to him – not for material things, but for love and happiness.
“After all I have been through surely I deserve some happiness now.” Really? Why do you think that? Where is the correlation between hurt and love?
Other elements of him were mirrored in my irrepressible hopefulness and blind faith that this would work out. The glibness and superficial charm – I was so gloatful (word? The action of gloating as a personal attribute lol – just invented one) “Oh my husband and I are going to … ” “Oh no – that’s not a good idea … my husband says …” I thought it was pride – maybe it was more like him even though I had good intentions at the base of it.
His lies …. well didn’t I lie too? To myself? Yes for a long time. You are right about the two aspects of ourselves. I had an element within me that would come out when he sucker punched me in the guts yet again – this voice had incredible clarity about what was going on and yet still couldn’t name it – she would say “Your words and your actions just don’t match” “I can’t trust a word you say” “When are you going to grow up and have some integrity in your word” And perhaps most prophetic of all “You don’t love me” He always protested this one and I would respond “No …. you don’t – your actions toward me say you hate me”.
While he had malignant hopefulness I would fall for his ruse every time, I had malignant hopefulness he would somehow grow
1) a spine
2) a set of balls
3) a heart
4) a conscience
5) some empathy
If that isn’t magical thinking then I don’t know what is! DOn’t they talk about sociopaths having delusional thinking – delusions of grandeur? He certainly did – again for material things and positions of prestige and power. But didn’t I have delusions as well? You bet I did – I had delusions of grandeur – dreaming he was in love with me in some magic affair when it was closer to indifference or contempt.
What about the lack of empathy? And lack of conscience? Those are trickier but I am sure I can even find a mirror there as well. Lack of empathy … well I had no empathy for myself – sure I suffered but where was my empathy for that girl? Why didn’t I have the good sense to protect her from him? Lack of conscience … I stood by and did ineffective thing to try to defend myself while he did evil to me – that’s all that is required for evil to flourish – for good people to do nothing. And I took on his guilt and shame as projected on me – had my conscience been functioning correctly, I would have clearly seen that those belonged squarely with him and would have had the peace of mind to do the right thing rather than the easy thing, which was to put up with it.
I still don’t blame myself and I don’t accept that the abuse was deserved or provoked in any way by me. But I can clearly see how he was a mirror for me on so many levels. Also the things that attracted me to his false self were things that I needed to develop within myself – that’s why I jumped at them and they were so shining and attractive. I knew their worth to me – I perceived strength, confidence, spontaneity, fun, charm, romance, leadership – why didn’t I just save myself the bother and get to work on myself back then?
We can’t see what we can’t see. And back then I was so tangled up in the emotional rape happening with the other person that I was desperate to escape that prison. I didn’t see that I was stepping into an even smaller cage because in the beginning the bars were invisible … and then when I perceived them he denied there were any bars. Hindsight is a beautiful thing … but I don’t want to always live with learning after the wreck is made. I would rather develop foresight now – looking into situations to consider ‘What’s in this for me?’ and ‘Is that acceptable for the price I am paying for entry and the participation that will be expected of me” then ‘What’s negotiable here and what isn’t?’ ‘How fair an arbitration partner will this person be and how can I protect my own camp should they turn shifty?’
It’s not selfish … actually it might be, but who cares? I can still care about others too but without looking out for number one there won’t be no me to help others. I am responsible for my own life and nobody else’s.
It’s strange that in writing this I didn’t intend to talk about mirrors – they just came up by themselves and I hadn’t thought about those correlations before. But I can see them quite clearly now. He was a total distorted reflection of me with all my flaws and yearnings and holes. That is all that wants to come out at the moment … almost bedtime! Thankyou Kathy for your provocation and caring – you kind of put people on the fast track and it feels good to make some progress in my thinking 🙂
Learnthelesson, thank you for your heartfelt post. You are feeling a lot of things right now, in a really busy learning process.
One of the things you said, about someone not deserving compassion, struck me. This is not the kind of compassion I’m talking about. You’re talking about the kind of compassion that engendered action, the Christian model. I’m talking about compassion as a state. It’s just open-hearted information gathering. If you feel that it must impel anything in you, including feelings that you can’t manage, then you’re not finished building boundaries, and clearly grasping what is inside of you and outside of you.
But you are getting something else that’s really important, becoming compassionate toward yourself is crucial. That means understanding and accepting why you did what you did. Developing the capacity to comfort yourself, not beat yourself up, for your mistakes. And grasping that every single thing you feel is important, because it’s something about keeping you well or about learning.
Hurt Mom, welcome to LoveFraud and thanks for starting to speak. You will find lots of support here.
The one bit of advice I can give you right now is that you’re probably not doing yourself any good by trying to figure out “why.” You can’t get into her head, and what’s more important now is figuring out how to maintain your own equanimity.
As far as this articles goes, this type of compassion comes after you go through the whole healing process, including getting mad and building better boundaries, accepting the reality of the thing, and considering how you want your life to be, no matter how this other person is. When you’re that solid in yourself, you can afford to be wide-open to other people, because you’re psychologically able to accept that information without getting emotionally involved in it.
The best thing you can do for yourself right now is take it seriously that YOU are wounded. And start working with that. I know how tough it is, when it’s your child, to do this. But if you don’t get the focus on your feelings and your life, and get yourself in a stable, centered condition, you’ll never be able to respond effectively to her. If she really is a sociopath, you can’t communicate with her and not get hurt if you’re coming from feelings, only boundaries and self-interested logic. And though that might sound like turning yourself into a sociopath, it’s really not. It’s just finding the resources within yourself to deal with a certain type of situation.
Pollyanna, good for you. I’m glad you’re seeing the mirroring. As you probably noticed when you were writing this, all the details of his life are less important than how you related to them. And I think that wounded children respond to wounded children. We often feel that we can do for them what we can’t do for ourselves, in terms of healing whatever is keeping them from their full potential. It’s a visceral reaction that sometimes we don’t recognize until after the fact, and it usually comes with some kind of hope that they will do the same for us in return.
The circumstances of the time when it started was, as it was for me, full of draining, painful, unmanageable elements. If you think about how much stress a person can tolerate before s/he starts looking for just about any solution to get back to something like center, you can imagine how strong the need to find a solution becomes when load is three times or ten times that. The more pain and stress, the more likely we are to throw ourselves into something that looks like a positive solution.
And I think that one of the big learnings that comes out of these things is how to recognize our own emotional states and limitations. When it gets that bad, we need to take a break to heal and comfort ourselves, not trying to find magic bullets in the outside world. Not that our comforts may not be from the outside world, but we have to somehow maintain perspective that we’re in no shape to be making big commitments or big changes.
If I look back at when I got involved in my ex, it would have made a lot more sense (and it’s what I would do today) to start offloading the causes of my stress. Get rid of the problem people, replace them with professionals I could trust. Build more regenerative, private time into my life. Just start taking care of myself better, instead of looking for a third-party to serve as the manager of my life.
I couldn’t have done it at the time. I didn’t have the self-trust or the emotional stability. I though my problems were me, and when I handed over my problems, I also handed over myself. It’s a mistake I’ll never make again. I’m the one with the stress. I’m the one who needs to get back to center. I’m the one who needs to take care of myself better. And if I’m turning that over to someone else, I’m just adding one more layer of stress to manage someone else’s taking care of me.
Is that too complicated? I’m on the run this morning, and don’t have time to think about this too much. But keep at it, you’re doing great. If you can see the mirroring, you starting to shake up some beliefs that are keeping you from moving from victim to manager of your own life.
Much love —
Kathy
Kathy –
When I read your paragraphs about defining compassion and why does it matter…I thought I understood 🙂 I have now reread it several more times and am trying to understand it more clearly.
Initially I thought your meaning to be this…
When I first met him all I ever knew was the Judeo-Christian “type” of compassion – where it became “we” for me and I felt obligated to “help”, “alleviate” some of his problems and “act” on things I felt I could do to make his life easier (ugh ugh ugh UGH UGH)… now in my healing process my level of “compassion” and understanding of what it is/should be – is simply an AWARENESS that he is the primary cause of his problems, he makes conscious choices to not help himself, to take the easiest road possible and constantly finds himself in a bad place. And while I sympathize with his state of being – I no longer feel an obligation/responsibility to do anything for him. He is the only one who can change/better himself if he ever wants to.
I think my level of/understanding of compassion changed when I was in front of the judge. I still to this day have compassion for the UNDERSTANDING OF HIS DYSFUNCTIONS/BAD CHOICES/TROUBLED WAYS…but I no longer feel obligated to “help save” him, make excuses for him, fix his problems.
If I am way off, I apologize for not grasping this part of the process. You always have a way of reminding me to continue to push myself- just when I think my work is complete. 🙂
Maybe Im getting close to the end-state of recovery. But Im not quite there as I struggle with …
“In other words, this compassionate level of awareness feeds all our processes by providing them with information that is detailed, perceptive and based on openness to active states and connections in our environment.
If this sounds like a hierarchy of consciousness, that is exactly what it is. There are lots of models for this hierarchy, which I’m not going to get into now. But I mentioned earlier that this is the end-state of recovery. That means recovery from a specific trauma. It doesn’t mean that we have this compassionate awareness in every area of our lives, but any specific healing process is over when we have processed through to compassion.”
Other than the fact that I have a disconnected compassion for him/his life. One that requires nothing of me, other than an awareness that his life is his own to straighten out or F@.......@@....... -UP…. A level of compassion that enables me to heal simply by accepting that what he chooses to do with his life are choices he makes because he either believes in them, has no problem with them or knows no different. So I can either waste my time with him in my life or I can start a new chapter of my life making better choices for myself, believing in myself and know the difference between good choices and unhealthy choices and work on conscious compassion vs active compassion with others for my own well-being.
Im rambling, but processing at the same time. Thanks for your comments about managing feelings, finish building boundaries and going deeper to grasp more clearly whats inside me/outside of me.
LTL
Kathy,
Just want to say I LOVED this article! After two years, I am at the end of my recovery. I said to a friend the other day that I do feel sadness for him, but it stops there. There are no other thoughts, emotions or feelings I have for him. It has been a long road to get to this point, and had I read this article a year ago, I would not have understood it as well.
I understand now that I carried around such pain with me for so long, and I allowed someone to treat me so horribly. It was all I thought I deserved… due to the neglectful childhood, alcoholic violent father, etc. And, now, for the first time in my life, I am making my own choices, feeling confident and happy about the future. I know there will be more pain to come my way someday, from something, but I will be more ready to deal with it than ever before.
I went zip-lining for the first time the other day – hanging from a wire going 60 mph about 160 feet off the ground, and I don’t like heights! It was exhilirating. After all I’ve been through, I knew I could do that. And now, I can’t wait to do it again. I felt a new sense of freedom as I was flying through the air that I had never felt before.
I wish the same for all of you struggling with the pain of being abused by a sociopath. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And, when you reach it, a part of you will actually be grateful that you went through the pain (just a small part!)
Peace.
HurtMom,
There are alot of differences of how to deal with your feelings and your pain, when the s/p is your own flesh and blood.
There are a few moms on this board that are dealing with the same things you are. I guess the first thing is acceptance. This is a very difficult thing to accept about your own child.
And just accepting this is sometimes a very long process. It sounds like you have accepted this as your reality.
From what you wrote it sounds like you are struggling with guilt. This will eat you alive if you don’t deal with it. I still struggle with what I might have done to “contribute” to this. What should I have done that I didn’t do? But I am doing better with this now than I was before. When I look back into my sons childhood, everything seemed pretty normal. He seemed like an active, very inquisitive, spirited little boy. So I “parented” him pretty normally. We actually did spend alot of time together. Because there was a 10 year age difference between my kids.
All that changed at about 15 years old. I noted that you said that you “lost” your daughter at the same age. I don’t think this is uncommon. Puberty seems to be the age that the troubling traits seem to show up in this disorder.
And I noticed them immediately. But this seemed to escalate at a pace that just blindsided me. And it became apparant to me that “normal” parenting didn’t cut it with my son any more. No matter what I did, it didn’t work. He didn’t live in reality. The compulsive lying was one of the first things I noticed along with the lack of reality. And he seemed to believe his own lies. And became VERY angry at me for not believing his lies as well. Initially this confused me to no end. I had never before encountered someone who lied about everything and EXPECTED you to believe the lies and was angry when you didn’t. The only time I encountered people in my life that lived in such a world were addicts. So much of what I saw in him initially, was similar to addictive behavior w/o the actual addiction. However as things progressed (quickly) other disturbing things also surfaced.
I have forgiven myself the best I can. I don’t believe that it is my “fault” anymore. I believe it is a genetic thing and there is nothing I could have done differently. Even if I knew that he was genetically pre disposed to this disorder, (and I didn’t) when I was raising him, I don’t know what I could have done different.
Now I try to be grateful that I do have the memories of him, back when he was a child and he wasn’t the stranger he has become.
I don’t know if this will work for you or not but emotional wise, the only way I can cope RIGHT NOW is to seperate my feelings and emotions. I love him and I fear him. That is a NOT the way a mother should feel about her child. It is un-natural. It is such a huge counterdiction. My feelings and emotions don’t even make sense to me. So I try and understand them, accept them and in order to cope with them I seperate or compartmentalize them.
I love the boy he was. I fear the stranger he is now. In order to make sense of that I try to understand that it is difficult to love this stranger, this person that has such a dark side, even though he is my son. Yet I do. So I allow myself the conflict of feelings and emotions by seperating them as best as I can. Knowing that I have conflicting emotions and un-natural feelings in a very UN-NATURAL circumstance.
My son is alot younger than your daughter. He is only 17 and has recently moved out of the house. I feel kind of numb right now about that. But I am trying to re group and use this time as almost a “resting” period. The daily drama and crazymaking, is absent right now from my life and I am recovering a bit of my sanity by being away from it.
Again this is my reality for the time being and I am trying to accept it. It doesn’t end when this is your child.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It is a hard road to travel. Having a child with this disorder. No one can understand that hasn’t been there. Not your friends or your family.
Forgive yourself. Let go of the guilt. You didn’t cause this and you can’t fix it. Embrace your good memories that you have when your child was young.
There are a few other moms on here that have adult children with this disorder. Hopefully they can share with you, (they are further along in the process than myself) what they have done to get through this.
Be good to yourself.
xxxx