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.
Dear witsend,
Thank you for your very kind words.
Hi, all, I just wanted to apologize for not responding to posts today. I had to get back to work. But I also think that I’ve probably said enough. Or maybe I’ve just talked myself out for the moment.
I’m going to try to stay away for a few days, so I can catch up with my client work. But I wanted to say one last thing.
Compassion is, like all the stages, something we learn into. We may get flashes of it as we’re learning through earlier stages. But just like the other stages, we don’t really get our feet down there until its our previous processing makes it the logical next thing. And of one of the things that makes it the logical next step is where we get really solid on loving ourselves, when we realize not only that we “ought” to love ourselves, but that all this acquired junk in our heads has been keeping us from a natural state that emanates from a bright loving center that’s always been part of us and there for us.
At that point, compassion just comes naturally. We’re not perfect. We don’t look to the world to be perfect. Everything is evolving. Everything is connected, but it has it’s own stories. We get a better sense of where we are and where we want to be. And it’s not that we don’t have any challenges anymore. Life is full of challenges, and we have to go through. But how we go through them is different, because we are home with ourselves.
Everyone here has areas of their lives in which they are like this. And here at LoveFraud, we’re working through a big healing process in an area where, if we get through the whole healing processes, we will come to be at home with ourselves in another part of our lives, a really important one.
I’m going to try to get another piece written on compassion-based power and will. And then a final one on love, and hopefully that will be the end of this series. I kept promising you one on love, and I just couldn’t do it before compassion, and I kept hesitating about writing about compassion. Because I was afraid it would sound too airy-fairy.
But so many of you got it, and I’m really grateful for the wonderful posts on this thread. And now I’m disappearing again for a while.
Much, much love and gratitude —
Kathy
witsend:
How are you doing? I hadn’t seen you online recently.
I was thinking of the irony of your situation the other day. You were basically physically dragging your kid to school each day — a place he didn’t want to be and made it clear that he had no intention of staying a minute after he turned 17. Then he turns 17 and moves out. And where does he want you to drive him to each day? School. Go figure.
kathy, your soul sings. you be healer. mineself in this aspect is difficult. hard to heal others with no real understanding of their pain. i know no real loss, nothing is ever broken to me. i have no concept of death. i be so logical. and logic reigns over mine emotions. i feel as impotent here amongst you as the angels all around everyday peoples who are yet invisible to them. be so i don’t move well here. hard to develop normally when remaining in watching mode. watching not enough to move about this world. must interact with it. took too long to reconcile mineself here. be so i be but a reminder of that part of everyday peoples that they have forgotten about. be so that pretender peoples and everyday peoples do so move together in the same world. but it be so everyday peoples are just as much part of ours. our world is yours too. all roads lead home and we can wait forever if need be. we be watching and we be waiting. be so awareness is just a matter of time to everday peoples. you hear that whispering? it sings:, “…there’s got to be more than this… i know it’s got to get better than this…”
everyday peoples at their core know of and envision a better world, they know it is within their reach. and they yearn for it and reach for it. they be so tired of repeating the same mistakes. they made a decision at their core and it may take awhile to surface onto all their other selves. but they already decided. we wouldn’t be here so many of us now if they had not. could be many obstacles in their way. be so the many of the breadcrumbs their souls have left behind for their other selves to find have been stolen or taken up. could be much misled by pretender breeds and their self negating self distructive patterning and routines. could be a thousand things or more.
but at their core they made a different decision. the essence of who they truly are have chosen something different. even if at the moment they naught memory of it. it be so now. and nothing can get in the way of that soul decision. just a reconciliation of soul decision and fleshtime confusion coming together and meeting. birth is much painful, like a death almost. somehow someday no matter what happens, no matter what illusion gets in the way, everyday peoples are going to find their way home. and in that moment we will create a new future together. and it is splendid history indeed. and it is everything we have all dreamed about.
be so you will meet someone who will need some understanding. be so a asperger friend will have soothing words for you to pass on to them. http://www.williamstillman.com, http://www.williamstillman.com/books.html
Innocence. I was reading this morning, and had another thought to add to this thread.
I think that one of the things that is so painful to us in the wake of these relationships is the feeling that we have lost our innocence. That might not be the way we say it, it’s another way to describe the feeling of not being able to trust or love again. We’ve had a close encounter with the inarguable fact that “there be monsters.” And this knowledge makes vigilance and hesitation to enjoy anything, for fear that it is a dangerous ruse, part of our everyday consciousness.
And I realize, belatedly, that I did write this article and much of the subsequent posts to ease the concerns of people who are coming to terms with that shock and fear, without saying something that is much more important. The compassionate state is also innocent.
When I say there is no judgment in it or that we feel feelings in it that we wouldn’t allow ourselves to feel otherwise — empathetic knowledge of people who are in trouble in one way or another — I neglected to saw how much awe and delight and fascination there is there. It is a state “before fear.” All that openness to everything isn’t just a chaos of input, but rather more like a child’s awareness of the wonderful variety of the world, which sparks our own creative impulses to imagine patterns and delight in connections. We can find a reason to love everything from the great living energy that grows things and changes things to its more complex manifestations in the struggles against difficulties and troubles.
This is a layer of consciousness. We still have all the other functions that are largely driven by our need to survive. We still feel fear and anger and grief. But it’s easier to understand our other feelings once we’ve returned to contact with this layer. And it’s also easier to discern where we are in the patterns we see around us, to trust the reality at large, and then see where we can trust the smaller parts of us to provide whatever we need.
That’s very abstract, but it goes back to what I wrote earlier about recognizing when other people are in trouble in ways that make it impossible for us to help them or them to help us. And that would be a non-judgmental description of sociopaths, but also people who are so caught up in their internal dramas that they cannot see anything, except in terms of those dramas. And our relationships with them are necessarily going to be limited to taking roles in those dramas.
To an extent that is always true. None of us are completely clear of internal dramas that we project on the the world, not seeing what is, but rather seeing what fits into this story that’s captured our minds and feelings. And in fact, just the business of staying alive, causes us to filter information in terms of whether it will help us or harm us. It just goes with have a mortal body.
But if you can understand the concept of innocence that exists before fear, it may help to understand what we are undoing in this trauma-processing. We blame the sociopaths for appearing to be something to love, and then turning out to be something that doesn’t care about us and will use us without concern about what it costs us. And I’ve talked about this as a reproduction of a primal drama.
Maybe I can make this more clear. As most of you know, I’m an incest survivor. The trauma of incest is largely about betrayal by someone we depend on. We are used in a way that makes no allowance for what we want or for what is good for us.
But perhaps more upsetting and ultimately damaging is how the experience affects our understanding of the world at large and our place in it. Whatever innocence we had — in terms of looking at the world as someplace that is full of potential, as a place where we can pick and choose our experiences, and as a generally supportive environment — is shattered. And we, as we imagine ourselves, are changed. Instead of being owners of our lives and choosers of experience, we become reactors, aware that everything can change at any moment and our lives depend on vigilence and, perhaps, our ability to find a safe place.
I know from my experience of talking about it, and also the experience of my siblings, that incest is a form of child abuse that is totally unambiguous. People react in uniform horror and sympathy for the victim. And though this may sound strange, it was probably a blessing to me that the abuse in my family escalated to incest for me. I was the only one of my siblings to be incested and the only one to have total clarity that I came from a sick and abusive background. The others, who endured endless emotional abuse and lived in fear of physical violence, internalized it as “normal” and lived with the untreated trauma. I fought its results, trying to create an “anything but that” life, trying to learn myself well, and trying to relieve dysfunction in other environments.
But what I never changed, because I did not understand it until recently, was the altered sense of my place in the world, the theft of my sense of ownership of my life and joy in living, and the replacement with a sense of vulnerability and obsessive search for safety. Fear is a normal human emotion that is part of our survival mechanism. But growing up in my family — and this was instilled long before the incest — was like being in a fear-generation machine. And despite books and church and school and exposure to the neighbors and other friends, what we came home to every night was this hothouse of fear that was our “normal.”
Even writing this, part of me wants to say that I’m overstating the case. That it wasn’t that bad. That everyone lives like that, or other people had it worse. And rather than argue that point, I’ll just say that maybe it’s so. But if that’s the case, it doesn’t say much about our world.
And the real point of what I’m writing is that, in getting involved with the sociopath, many of us were really not in our first round of betrayal by someone we trusted and needed to depend upon. But that we were — and probably not for the first time in our lives — trying to come home to a home where we were safe, loved, appreciated, where our idea of who we were was valued, as were our dreams. And that the immensity of our reactions to our disappointments when this was so patently untrue and the rug was pulled out from under us once again, was not because of the size of the betrayal by the sociopath, but because their efforts to appear to be what we wanted, combined with our soul-hunger to return to a better world, returned us to that state “before the fall.”
And the collapse of that illusion was … first we fought it, holding on despite all the evidence to the contrary. And then we reeled, trying desperately to cope in all the ways we learned to cope when we were younger, with the denial that it was so bad and the bargaining of trying to live through it and make it okay with our own efforts. And then, because we are grown-ups now, and supposedly responsible for our own lives, and supposedly able to make contracts and expect them to work, and even supposedly able to interpret what’s going on around us with the wisdom of some experience, we finally got to the whole new stage of recognizing betrayal as betrayal and getting angry.
And in anger, we began to fight back, and began to learn how to reclaim our lives and recover who we are in the world. Gradually leaving the psychology of victimhood, where we are hyper-aware of the potential to be battered by every passing wind, to feeling more confident about what recognizing threat, knowing what we can handle defensively and what we need to escape before it escalates, and feeling like we just might have the capacity to build something of our own.
And then feeling brave enough to discard what is no longer useful to us (or really restructure our ideas of appropriate responses to life.) Rethinking personality or survival strategies that are based on denial and bargaining, questioning self-definitions that are all about acquiescence and dependence on what is stronger, and taking a really hard look at what our search for absolute security has brought into our lives. And then going through the gradual, sometimes shocking, but generally delightful process of discovering who we are, if we are not intrinsically victims, but if we can actually take ownership, first of ourselves and then of our lives.
And in all of this, which is a progressive change of awareness which reduces our level of fear and its influence on our lives, we are also gradually reopening our awareness of ourselves “before fear.” Because fear is only a normal reaction to certain circumstances, not a pre-reactive state. The pre-reactive state is openness, awareness, gathering information through our senses, and something more. That something more is hard to describe, but it’s being inside our own joy and excitement in being alive, our sense of the potential of it all, our knowledge of being connected with an endlessly alive and changing world, and in all of this a knowledge of ourselves as embodied creativity. We can move, we can reach into the world and write our names by our actions, we have meaning just by being but we have so much more meaning than that, because we are here to do our lives in ways that ripple out to leave our changes on the great whole.
I realize how abstract I’m being, and how this may sound like a sermon that sounds good in church but may not find a lot of practical application when we leave. But healing does, inevitably, integrate all our parts, including the spiritual, which we may previously have assigned some meaning that was more to do with our post-trauma dramas than as a normal and accessible layer of our internal world.
Our innocence is never lost, but only masked by the emotional noise of unresolved trauma. Healing brings us back to the capacity to feel love and trust first, as our set-point in experiencing then world, and then interpret the world’s “pieces” in terms of whether we want to get involved with what they offer us. And even when we’re blindsided by some flying bit of unexpected reality, we can experience it first without judgment and then interpret it in terms of what it means to us from a pre-fear state, determining what we should do about it, how it is most useful (or interesting or fun) to react, and then proceed with all the inner resources that we were born with.
If this sounds like an entry to another round of trauma-processing, it is. But access to this pre-fear level even changes the meaning of that. Trauma processing is really just dealing with unexpected reality it. If our original set-point was unresolved post-trauma fear, then we are interpreting first out of that state. If our set-point is pre-fear awareness and openness to the world and ourselves, we can marshall our various resources more consciously, without losing our sense of ourselves as owners of our own lives. And without losing the wonder and joy of being alive and learning and creating.
This is something to look forward to. It is why we are healing, why this feels so important to us, and why the relationship with the sociopath may have finally been the trigger that drives us through the whole process that we couldn’t do when we were younger. The path just brings us home to who we really are.
Kathy
I read this today and thought it good:
Clarity is Freedom
The wonderful thing about walking through a painful situation is that it’s your choice whether or not you go through it again. Most of the time, you’ll find that there were warning signs at the outset of this painful lesson. If you can isolate when you ignored your intuition, you will unlock the key that will set you free. It’s a small nudge, a quickening of the heart. It’s a tiny guide deep within that gets quieter each time it is ignored. But if you can see where you turned away, you will beckon it back to you. It gets louder each time we honor it.
If you feel that there were no warning signs at all, look again. Nothing comes from nothing. Perhaps people around you were concerned when you rushed into a new relationship. Though they had compelling reasons for you to take it slow and get to know the person better, you thought, ‘I will be the exception.’
Before you move on, take some time to give yourself props for everything you did right. Perhaps you extended patience, kindness and hard work. Perhaps you discovered a hidden talent or new hobby. Just because you lost the house doesn’t mean you didn’t enjoy painting it! Perhaps you had a rocky relationship with a musician, but the best parts where when you sang together. So take singing lessons!
The situation has as much power as you give it. Take your best assets with you. You’re stronger and your experience is deeper and richer because there is no other outcome of growth. The universe wants us to experience love and abundance. Path-correction isn’t easy, so tune down the inner critic. Reward yourself for walking through this and take a big breath. Better things are on their way!
Kathy.
I will admit I struggled at first with fully grasping/understanding “How do we heal – PART 16 -THE END OF RECOVERY” For whatever my reasons, perhaps my trying to define the different types of compassion or being unable to grasp the concept of compassion that you were presenting as simply a state of mind.. and/or maybe I am still healing/processing through to that state of compassion??? Not sure but I am inspired to continue on the path I am on…
Your post TODAY – was truly enlightening. I really do feel I have been through and am going through as you say “a progressive change of awareness” and gradually reopening an awareness of myself. Thank you.
I know I tend to copy and paste some of your paragraphs in my posts, but I do so because it has such an impact on me..with regard to understanding and putting together all that I feel but cant express. This hit home like no other ..
“getting involved with the sociopath, many of us were really not in our first round of betrayal by someone we trusted and needed to depend upon. But that we were and probably not for the first time in our lives trying to come home to a home where we were safe, loved, appreciated, where our idea of who we were was valued, as were our dreams. And that the immensity of our reactions to our disappointments when this was so patently untrue and the rug was pulled out from under us once again, was not because of the size of the betrayal by the sociopath, but because their efforts to appear to be what we wanted, combined with our soul-hunger to return to a better world, returned us to that state “before the fall.”
Oh my goodness, I would copy and paste ALL the rest, because it just all hits home to read it. And I must remember to have a box of tissues beside me when I read your articles/comments.
It seems so silly to keep thanking you…but I really do thank you for sharing all that you do. Including breaking it down, piece by piece, making it abstract, and taking the time to clarify so many intricate parts of the puzzle.
Its so inspiring and exciting to read the writings of someone who has found their way “home”. Im glad so many of us are on that path… there is much to look forward too!
LTL.
Kathy and Style1 — Nice additional posts in illuminating this incredible and humbling path to newfound awareness, clarity and inner freedom. Awe-inspiring. Enough to weep with joy.
We do not have to take someone else’s issues personally.
Present-moment consciousness becomes possible when old wounds are healed — no longer blurring our vision about what is real.
It allows us to stay more in the moment so we can pay closer attention, as life unfolds.
It allows us to respond from a place of strength derived from being true to our core self.
Matt,
Thanks for asking…I haven’t been posting alot lately but I’m still reading here most days.
I am doing ok. I am trying to DEAL with the irony of it all. It is good thing, that he is in school, regardless of what it took to keep him there. As it is better than the alternative.
It is good that he has a roof over his head, regardless of how that came about. I am trying to make the best of this situation. Almost thinking of this as a “temporary” break.
But the temporary part is the part that keeps me unsettled.
When he wears out his welcome at the “rescuers” or things happen at school….Or elsewhere, it is still me that recieves the call and has the responsibility to deal with it.
Obviously it wasn’t as if I had much control over what he was doing when he lived here. However I was more aware of what he was up to and what was going on and so was able to assume SOME control over what was happening. Or I was able to at least “sense” that something was going to happen and brace myself.
Now my hands are tied, yet the responsibility is still all mine. This is the biggest irony of all. The law. Something that should be more black and white.
I still cringe when the phone rings. No news is good news.
aspergersouls, we were writing at the same time. And writing so much about the same thing. Every time I read one of your posts, I feel like you are part of me, talking to me. When I tell you I wish you well, it means more than the words can express.
Thank for the link, too. I read parts of the website, and I want to learn more about this man’s work. After reading it, I had one of the most connected and fruitful conversations with my son that I’ve had in a long time. And was reminded – again, again, again — that inside our greatest challenges is our deepest learning. It is very difficult for me to absorb that, while thinking I was about helping him, I was facing a ” family therapy session” that challenges me to recognize, deal with the repercussions and do something about patterns of emotion and behavior that continue to reproduce my history in my present life.
Getting free is the work of a lifetime.
style1, thanks for your very on-point and practical suggestions. You bring this all down to the real world in such a positive and loving fashion. I’ll take your advice.
Kathy