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.
libelle, you sound so good these days. And thank you so much for reading it so well. This one just wanted to write itself, but I really worry about upsetting people.
You’re right, of course, it’s not the end of all recovery. And sometimes when we do a lot of work in one area and get pretty sorted out, we discover that another area that we just assumed was okay turns out to all kinds of things just waiting until the bigger noise died down.
After all the work I’ve done on the relationship with my ex — what I thought was the big stuff that would probably take care of the little stuff — I find I’ve got another round in front of me. Something that just didn’t seem so important before suddenly is important, because it’s creating some chaos in my head and my life. But I don’t mind. Resolving pain is a good thing. And in this particular case, it’s a combination of resentment, self-esteem issues, and a truckload of judgmentalism that I’ll be glad to see the back of.
In my mind, it’s just waves. Sometimes big restructuring ones, sometimes little niggly housekeeping ones. But, I agree with you. There’s no end to it. Just an end to each particular process.
Icanseeclearlynow, I’m glad to hear you can see into compassion from anger. That’s really cool. Based on some of the theories I’ve read (and I what I think myself from discovering that I already “knew” higher levels of processing when I got there), I think we’ve got all the layers working at the same time. Where we “are” is just where we’re hanging out in our mind at any time. But everything else is still in there doing its own job.
I’ve mentioned here before that I had a big metaphysical experience in my 20s, when I first thought that was channeling information from God or something like God. I later realized that the voice and the information was from something in me, and was there all the time. I just couldn’t hear it because of emotional noise and dealing with everyday issues. That was one of the reasons I had some confidence in going into this healing process that it was actually going to come out all right. I believed that there was some part of me that was smarter than anything I could, on a human level, imagine.
I think your analysis of the sociopathic character is right-on. If you haven’t read about affective orders that are common among adopted children, you might find that interesting.
Oxy, I feel for what you’re going through right now. You said something about not feeling like you had the strength or you lost some of the tools. Maybe it’s just that you’re working on one of the hard ones. I hear how self-critical you are about not being perfect. You know, no one else expects you to be perfect.
I have a friend who always wants to figure everything out right away. So she never learns anything beyond what she already knows. My Buddhist friend once suggested to me sitting with the feelings, but shutting off the word machine. It’s hard to do, takes a lot of discipline, but it also turns off the same old stories, and gives the feeling a chance to present its own story. In my case, at least, I usually found out that I learned something about what I was going on with me that I never expected.
recovering, I believe you are working with this stuff. Your point about humility about what you know is something I started to feel when I started moving around here. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem to belong to me, and I’m not sure I truly understand what I’m working with.
Regarding you ex’s means of communications. One of the things I learned when I studied NLP was that people take in, internally process and store things in different ways, most of them related to senses. (Like I absorb information best through my ears, but process and store it visually.) Some people, however, process information in concepts, rather than in a way related to any sense. And these people also tend to be disassociated from their feelings.
Most of the sociopathic types I’ve ever kown have tended to talk in abstract words. It can create the illusion that they’re intellectual, but if you try to discuss anything with them, they tend to link one abstract concept to another, rather than being able to explain the sensory input that led to their concepts. It’s not that they can’t be practical in executing their ideas, but I got the feeling that there’s no sensory ground in the creation of their ideas. And in fact, they often had sensory weaknesses, like bad hearing or inability to taste or smell like other people.
I’m mentioning this, because I think it one of the reasons they gaslight. It’s another area where they can’t compete with people who have a broader ability to sense and process their environments as “real” information, rather than the guessing and imaginary constructs created by someone whose emotional blockages have probably created physical ones.
fahrahi, I suspect you are probably right about doing some bargaining right now. If you have any sense at all that you have the power to make this right, if you could only figure out the right thing to do, or if some other power could make it right if the stars just aligned the right way, you’re still bargaining. It’s good; it’s a lot better than denial.
Bargaining eases into anger, as you begin to get a grip on the fact that he did this to you. As I write the words, I wish I could put the right emphasis on them. Let me try it this way. HE did this to YOU. It’s a bit of a step to get there, but when you do, you’ll know it. It’s good that you’re not worried about rushing it. Our minds have their own schedule with healing. And you’re definitely on the path.
onestep, you are doing so well!!!
Star, you’ve made such progress, since I first started reading your posts. One of the best things for me is coming back after being gone for a while, and discovering that someone (you) has moved so far.
About no one loving you, they did. So did you. People do what they are capable of and, as you point out, they stumble over they’re own unfinished healing. But don’t think there’s no love around.
As far as God, self-love and this article, I think that you’re working this through. What I didn’t say here, but I think it’s implied, is that this central self we discover gets us very close to the divine in us. I was nibbling at a book on Kabalah today called, “God Is a Verb.” And the point the author was making is that God is being and becoming as we are. Creation is in action all the time. We are gifted in many ways, including this loving “center,” which I believe is really just our human-level perception of this divine life force in us, and also in the drive to be, do and create.
As you get more into the compassionate state, you’ll shift from seeing that lack of love to the existence of it. And the fact that we all stumble over our unfinished business. If we become patient and understanding with ourselves, it also frees us to let other people be who they are. The whole construct includes other things like letting them go, as well. And recognizing where there is something for you to do with them, and when there isn’t, or what it’s limits are.
(The tragedy of sociopaths is that there is really nothing to do with them. I used to try to figure out if there was any way at all to make use of them, so they could find a place in society despite their emotional problems. Bu the difficulty with sociopaths is that you just can’t trust them an inch. They will do something for you, if they think it’s in their best interest, but then they will manage to twist it somehow so they get more out of it and totally destroy the “contract.” It’s their own inability to trust creating their own untruthworthiness. But the net of it is that there is nothing you can do with them.)
Rosa, hugs to you. No happy endings. No unhappy endings. No endings. The story just rolls on. As far as finding that empath good guy, I think it might finally be time for me to write about love. I just couldn’t do it until I wrote about compassion.
But as a hint, your empath good guy will have all the self-intersted stuff too, if he’s really functional. And so will you.
Kathy
My car was just reposesed……………………how in the hell did I get here??????
kathleen, ty. 🙂
i am tired and trying to get more sleep. i am feeling my tired. my hyper state is cracking, and falling. i have been though, very chemically toxic the last days and i am so sad about this. i don’t know when this whole situation will change – when i will bring the resources in to change it. but as i let the sad up and in, no doubt it will be affected.
i have been very busy in a good way, the last few days. i spent friday working on a resume for a job and getting the app. in. it is a fundrasing and governance job in the area of food justice.
you know, my career counsellor furrowed her brow the other day, when she asked, ‘okay what do you want to do’? (my contract is over soon), and i said, ‘m, it doesn’t matter what i want, this is XXXXXX town and there is no work here and i have to get what i can to get on. and it’s true. and i vlaue her outside the box thinking – that’s where i usually live – but right now i am starting to move back from the edge a bit and i want to keep moivng back from it.
it has been hard to read heredays the last few ….i fly over the posts, catching lines and intensity. and i feel good deep conversation. and am truly grateful that you are all here raising the vibration in the mire.
i want to do some completely different work. and m had a suggestion of someone i can connect with about the sort of stuff i want to do. i don’t wanna do grant writing and blah blah blah – i want to work one on one with people with disabilities. and THOSE skills that i posses inherently and as response to living in dysfucntion and with people who have no language and no way to process states cause they have no awareness -are one of the reasons i was with the spath. the beauty boy character – he was disabled in most ways.
i checked out a b.pysch program here a few weeks ago — the cost – i coudl never do it; i don’t have enough working years left to pay off the loans. that was a rather sobering realization. but i am going to go talk to the director anyway.
i have a stack of debt and no way to pay for school – but i will go anyway, because there IS grace in the world, and onyl by walking will I see it.
i miss him. the beauty boy. my avatar raised her head today, for the first time in two months. she wants to know what exists out in the world. she wants to see the new.
i have constant fantasies about outing the spath – and how to do it anonymously – and so that it has the biggest bang in terms of the MOST exposure on the net. when i walk or bath – any time that my mind is not engaged it wanders there. i tried to write about it today and no luck. maybe tomorrow. or the next day.
but today i also had a little fantasy – ever since someone mentioned a lovefraud convention – have been thinking about live web feeds for it. and showing up for the convention – a tiled screen on the wall – all of us who canna be there in the flesh having a little tile with our screen names printed on the screen over our hearts. it makes me happy to think of this.
going to go have a nice hot epson salt bath and go to sleep. I am going to try to spend some time here in the morning.
best,
one step
Kathy thankyou for this – I don’t know exactly where I am at in the journey of recovery from this but sense rather than a going back to where I was before it is more of a rebirthing of a newer person forged by the fire of experience. I like your idea of compassion as being a state where you can recognise the woundedness in others without compulsion to step in and recognise them – this is kind of where I am learning at the moment. I have a tendency to want to help and relieve suffering and maybe that’s just to take the focus off my own suffering. My job is to fix myself not others and paradoxically I am fine just the way I am.
I have told several people the abridged version of my story with the P and what they seem to hear is ‘you will need loads of time to recover and learn to trust again’ and I say no to that. Yes I will be careful in future with who I trust, but after this ordeal and the subsequent soul searching, I feel healthier than most people who skim the surface of life and never realise their own wounds or capacity to change their lives. So maybe this is one of the blessings of the sociopath – they force us to get real with ourselves and stop perpetuating the myth that everything is fine. The funny thing about sharing the story is it empowers others to share their hurts too – and community is forged in this way – hurt children recognise other hurt children. Maybe my hurt child recognised the hurt child in the sociopath.
I do recognise their vast emptiness and cannot in all honesty contemplate what it would be like to live like that – with no sensory feeling and no appreciation of the beauty in life. But like you say there is nothing to be done with them. I recognise that some people are unfixable and those that do want to be fixed have to do it themselves and engage in a process similar to what we are all going through. There are no short cuts.
I am going to read this a few more times to really let it all sink in. Thankyou 🙂
i have a stack of debt and no way to pay for school ”“ but i will go anyway, because there IS grace in the world, and onyl by walking will I see it. – by this i meant, that i will go to see the director of the program.
Good! And there are scholarships around … what will you study? Life is for the living 🙂
polly – not so much in the way of scholarships as collegeshere are not private, but public. there would be more possibility if this was a university – but there are only a few programs like this in the world. now, having said THAT – it makes me think that there might be some possibility of encouraging a scholarship as it is so specialized.
once again, thankful for your hanging out outside of the box, polly.
best,
one step
and i dig the ‘life is for the living.’
a bit ago someone from the community on the website, where i met the spath’s characters, emailed me and said a bunch of stuff that freaked me out and i blocked her email address.
i know i over reacted. i could have just let it be 24 hours and breathed. it feels more dangerous not to know what she is saying cause SHE is the only one who knows that I am the one who, on the website, suggested one of the dead characters didn’t die and never existed.
and yet – the longer i am away from all of it the more i see life outside of all of it. doesn’t mean that a chunk of my day isn’t spent in revenge fantasies- but i am not hooked into the ongoing story line.
my story line is now: when does the bitch go to court? what is the dance i am having with the other dupe? and how quickly can i get a new job, so that she had no supposed power over me, my fear levels will drop? how will i out her? is it necessary? (i hit a big stone wall about that all the time. i am barely able to have a conversation with myself about it- safety IS important. AND there is something else – some way of self identification or bravery or courage that i need to understand about for myself.)
one step
pollyannanomore, thank you for your thoughtful post. As always, I find a lot in your writing — both validation of my thoughts and new angles to think about. A few responses…
You mentioned learning to trust again. I would put it differently. I think we’re learning to trust better. The reference to pollyanna in your name is meaningful, I think. Pollyanna in literature was actually an example of someone who was in a wonderfully advanced state, but we wounded people interpret her ability to attend to the potential of good as encouragement to fly into hopeful commitments without enough evidence of the necessary ingredients to be successful. It comes, I think, of trying not to let the “temporary lessons” of unhealed trauma overcome our ability to trust. Maybe, in a way, it is a decision NOT to become a sociopath, but then we become anti-sociopaths, in the sense of forgetting to adequately consider what works and doesn’t work for us.
Wow, that sounds awfully complicated as I write it. But the point is that trust isn’t just a verb. It’s a it’s also a noun, and a very important personal resource that we have to respect in its power to both help or harm us. It’s also a process that we have to learn how to do.
For example, I have evidence of you. Who you are. I’ve been gathering it since I began reading your posts. That evidence provides me information to support decisions about what I can reasonably expect to do comfortably and successfully with you. As I result, I’m writing you as someone I can reasonably expect to understand exactly what I’m thinking. No filters, or no more than I would ordinary exert to just be comprehensible to someone that isn’t me. But it’s straight peer-to-peer communications.
Now, is this about trust? In my mind, yes. Because if I expected that you would not be able to understand, I would also be writing in all kinds of careful explanations so as not to hurt you, so that you would not hurt me in return. I don’t have a great deal at stake here, in terms of being hurt. But there is something at stake in terms of watching this dialogue go off in other directions, related to someone’s hurt feelings. And losing the fun, for me, of seeing it develop.
Instead, I’m taking a chance with you, and just writing what’s in my head and not exerting a lot of relationship-management discipline on myself. I think that’s a lot of what trust is, is being about to relax into some assumptions about who the other person is and how s/he will behave under certain circumstances. So we can just get on to doing something with them.
But if we move too fast onto just doing something, and take too many chances about our assumptions being right, and those things involve too much potential risk to us, then we’re really not trusting — at least not in my sense of the word — but being a little lazy and foolish with our responsibility toward ourselves. Or showing the impact of previous damage that made us imagine that trust was something that we leap into, because we’re so desperate to rediscover a state of trust, at the same time that we really haven’t processed through an experience of betrayal that left us with a profound distrust of trust itself.
Whew. Does that make sense?
So anyway, at some level, you’re right. We are learning to trust again. But the problem is not the sociopath. The problem is what led us to trust the sociopath in the first place, and continue to trust him or her, despite mounting evidence that this person not only couldn’t be trusted but was all about betrayal as a career.
Referencing my article above, the relationship with the sociopath was only a situation that our inner selves led us into so that we could finally grok this. The earlier learning, the “temporary learning” from the unresolved trauma, was a learning of denial. We were not going to let this affect us in terms of being trusting people. This is one of the typical levels of learning from childhood trauma. As children, we simply don’t have the experience or emotional maturity to process through to more advanced learnings. So we get as far as we can with the resources we have.
I wish I could remember where I read this, but I was digging through some book listings last week, and ran into a line about how the fortunate among us are presented with small enough traumas in childhood, and supportive enough environments, that we learn to process through them and learn that we can move forward. These would be environments, I suppose, in which we could safely experience anger and grief and the discovery that we were actually okay again. That certainly wasn’t my childhood, and I suspect it was not the childhood of many people here on LoveFraud.
So in this healing, we actually have to go back and finished processing that old trauma. Blame the perpetrator. Do the righteous anger. Do the grief. Do the letting go and putting it into perspective relative to our survival. And recover our feeling that both we and the world are good and full of potential. And at that point, when our valuations of ourselves and the world become more healthy and sane and maybe less defensively rigid again, I think our ability to reason through the process of trust becomes more natural.
Oddly enough, trust is really about very simple concepts. Yes and no. Good for me or bad for me. Inside or outside my world. It may be one of the least complicated things we have to deal with in life. It’s just our response to old traumas, in particular our residual confusion about old betrayal, that makes it complicated.
I hope this makes sense. I’m thinking as I go. It’s the first time I’ve thought this through.
Affectionately,
Kathy
perhaps we be buddhists? not knowing. such as it is. don’t dwell on what is done. as what is done can not be undone. dwelling on such seems much a choice to suffer mine thinks. as such remembring tomorrowland not the same as remembering yesterdayland. as both not really exist to me though yesterdayland be so settled and thus tomorowland be so unsettled. though both all happens at once. mine sense of time be such warped. but our issue be so mine husband be so Asperger Syndrome and work and must be dealing amongst the everyday people and pretender breeds.
no defense he has for either really though he be the only one amongst us functional enough at present to work and provide monies for us to use to buy our rights to live the life of liberty and pursuit of happiness. generally up untill just some years recent our choices were either an institution or residential home, or group home. whatever everyday peoples best decided to throw us into in the interest of what they decide is best for us of course. mineself not particurley wanting to eliminate the group home option as husband, mineself and our child dolphin makes up a group, mine thinks. but as a child the dolphin not to be living in a group home with us and can be taken from us. and we need to look like we can care for her proper under everday peoples rules. thus mine husbands ability to work and make monies buys our freedom,our rights and our ability to choose our own life; his and mine and the dolphins. it’s interesting see. pretender peoples would be inclined to have the dolphin taken from us by sheer malice to do so. whilst everyday peoples would do same such thing by their good intentions and by deciding that they know what is best for us. the end result is usually the same and as such everyday peoples and pretender peoples are both dangerous to an autistics life.
i have concerns for mine husband as he has no scent defenses. mineself and the dolphin we have sense of scent. we can smell predatory animals, the human kind not immune to us. we are though homebound though and no need or wanting to mix about with everyday peoples or even pretender peoples. live and let live just don’t get in mine space and i won’t bite them. i bit mine sister’s pretender boyfriend when she brings him to mine home to meet me. i growled first see. so i did warn him before i jumped and bit himself. thus he was fended off before any harm to me and mine. mine mother had him checked out when she knew not why i reacted so strongly. i don’t usually bite people. i don’t regard them or look at them or acknowledge them but i don’t usually bite them so that worked well. as some pretender peoples with records not usually inclined to press charges.
our dolphion who be so non verbal and is described as severely autistic be so also has good scent of a person. she still bites if you don’t smell right. we can also tell if you have cancer, diabetes, irregular heart beats, hormonal issues and depression and other such things. so our scents not only just in smelling out pretender breeds our everyday peoples going through their shifts. be so at any time everday peoples can become dangerous.
be so thinking this scenting we have may be compensatory skills we may have. different versions of autism have many differences and different skills. some notable some not. mine husband although the more functional and the one most in contact with the world of everyday peoples and pretender breeds has no such defenses. i think i should go with him to keep him safe and i promise i won’t bite. i don’t usually unless they get in mine space, or invade our saftey refuge. our home be a no no. be so under mine roof a quick okay if i don’t like your smell you are going to get hurt. so we don’t have folks over much and mine sisters boyfriend was safe until he crosssed mine door.
mine husband just recent had car stolen and monies stolen. be so he had not his wife or child to sniff out danger for himself. and perhaps he be so foolishly naive. he be having many skills. but he be not skilled to survive you all everday peoples and your pretender breeds alike. be so i am not sure how long he be able to survive and coexist with everyday peoples and their fickleness much less the pretender breed that dweel amongst you.
be so i know not our options for some will have our dolphin taken from her home and her parents if we be so not equipped and return to states care.