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.
pollyannanomore, here’s the second thought…
You wrote, “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 so relate to this. When I was in the really active stage of my healing, which went on for three or four years, I seemed to attract people who were healing too. I say “attract,” because conversations and relationships that were ostensibly about something else turned into discussions of what I now call trauma-processing. For quite a long time, I felt like the world’s busiest free therapist, with my phone ringing constantly or e-mails coming in. I was the “therapist,” because all these people were not as far along as I was, in terms of processing or insights. And they saw me as so smart and helpful.
I’m not being critical, ironic or imagining I’m superior in saying that. I was still struggling with my own stuff, but recognized where they were. It was clear they other people found me useful. (I wasn’t intentionally “therapizing” anyone, just reacting to what they said from my perspective.) But I did find it kind of humorous, and sometimes annoyingly time-consuming, that anyone would see me as a wise person. It wasn’t, however, without its rewards. Talking through their stuff really helped me understand the universality of the the healing process, as I imagined it for myself, and encouraged me to keep talking and thinking about how healing works.
You’ll note that I didn’t get a lot of satisfaction from helping them, but rather what I learned from helping them. It’s odd, but my old helping persona really faded during the healing period. Sometimes I wondered if it was just burned out by dealing with the ex. But I think the more relevant truth was that I realized that my old life strategy of helping-to-get-loved was something that needed to be dumped, or at least revamped. If whatever I was doing didn’t offer an immediate reward for doing it, there was a very good chance that I was selling myself off again for some imagined future gratification that depended way too much on chance.
Like my old idea of “karmic return” of all the good I did for other people coming back to me. I didn’t completely dump that idea, but I did move it closer to the idea that I was creating my future by what I invested in now. I didn’t want a future of the kind of handouts I’d given other people. I wanted to build something of my own, in the now-moment after now-moment. So if what I was giving these other people didn’t contribute to that building process, then it was just the same-old-same-old of pissing away my time and gifts, imagining some angel was going to show up someday and give me the cosmic Nobel Prize and a lifetime pass to do what I actually really wanted for me.
So this is about me, me, me and not really about what you’re discovering about the potential community of healing that exists around us. Apologies for veering off. I think that the huge gratitude all of us feel for LoveFraud is that it is a place where our wounds are taken seriously, and we can talk about them as though they are “real” and not just some useless junk taking up space and making unhelpful noise in the back of our minds. And I think that you’re right that there is a huge population of people who are struggling with similar issues, but have no one, except maybe therapists or religious counselors, who are prepared to talk about it. And even then, it’s seems to be regarded as something wrong with us that we have to eliminate, instead of something about our real selves trying to break through.
The problem is that denial is such a pervasive cultural issue. I’ve thought about using some of the meeting sites to invite people to a support group. But what to call it? I finally came to “trauma-processing” as an umbrella term. But it would require people to admit they had a “trauma,” which is one of those big, loaded words. Or maybe a group for people getting over bad relationships, but from my perspective, that’s a presenting symptom, not the underlying problem. And I don’t want to sit around and listen to people complain about their exes for months or years, while they “wait until they feel better” on my time. I really want to commune with people who realize that they’ve got a problem that is, at least partly, about them. Not in a self-blaming sense. But in the sense of curiosity and readiness to work on what it is about them that attracted these people, made it possible that these harmful relationships were acceptable enough to continue, and could lead them into the same horror show again.
And this comes back to you and what you’re discovering with a reminder of something I figured out a long time ago. And have to keep reminding myself as life throws me more opportunities to get involved with damaged people. That is, unless they’re ready and willing to work on themselves, unless they’re already committed to changing their lives through changing themselves, they’re not going to be much fun or very satisfying to work with. Not that I won’t get anything out of it. Everything is interesting and educational, if I pay attention. But because my big, personal, selfish objective is to work through the challenges I’m facing now. And to the extent I can find other people working on those challenges, I am wildly excited and grateful.
Which may sound kind of elitist, but it’s really not. I respect all the stages of processing and value the learning that each of them offer. And I also believe that we keep cycling through them, as more challenges rise. But also also think that our “set point” changes over time. Who I am, overall, is a lot different from who i was when I started this. And I thing, and I think the response to my writing here on LoveFraud would confirm, that our current level of processing is most meaningful to other people who are more or less at the same level.
I watch people who are at similar levels working together and really contributing to each other’s process. It’s not that mentors can’t contribute something meaningful, but I suspect that the most meaningful thing we contribute is validation. People heal themselves; they just need to have permission to be where they are. Every stage of healing includes fear of the learning that brings us to the next level. (I.e., anger wouldn’t be such a battle for us if we weren’t afraid of giving in to the fact that there was nothing we could do about other people’s behavior, and there is nothing we can do now about the losses.) It does help to know that someone else lived through that learning, and is pretty happy about it. But mentors can’t change the fact that we each have to live through our own gradual acceptance of what was previously unthinkable.
So, to get this back to you, I’m not sure what you are thinking about this new community you are discovering. And maybe I’m trying to help you think about what it might mean to you. I have very mixed feelings about the role of guide or therapist I acquired in other people’s lives. Sometimes I mentally line up all my little “trophies,” letters of appreciation and other expressions of gratitude, that “prove” that, even if I don’t ever get this damned book written, I did something with my life.
But honestly, although they make me feel better when I’m struggling with insecurity, they’re just postcards from the past. What does mean a lot more is the friendships that evolved as people got better, the reasons I found to deeply value their insights, the examples they provided, the way they opened up my life to new possibilities. What I value is how people changed me for the better, and the relationships that continue to do that.
One of the things about living in compassion is that we also see the bright central self in everyone, as well as their wounds and their struggles with these wounds. Seeing that potential is one of the things that keeps me interested in this world of healing. It’s a real joy to see the internal static disperse and to interact with the real person behind all that. In a way, I’m investing in my own future, the friends I hope to have, the people who can share and contribute to my life with more understanding of who I really am, warts and all.
My friends, of course, are still healing. We all do, but healing like I am now, mostly as maintenance work. I’ve seen what being in touch with me is like. Like all great love relationships, it takes work to maintain it. But I’m committed to that work, because I don’t want to lose that love affair, because it makes all my other love affairs with people and the world possible.
So I guess the net of this is a caveat for you, and of course, it’s none of my business, but here I am helping again. I suggest that you cultivate relationships with your peers, wherever you are now, and try to figure out the meaning of working with people who aren’t your peers, whatever that may be for you. So you don’t just backslide into that helping-to-be-loved thing. We got involve with the sociopath to unlearn that pattern, and unless you really want another round of learning that lesson, make sure you’re getting something for you every step of the way.
Kathy
autisticsouls, thank you for posting. Your letter was very interesting.
You said your husband was the more functional of the two of you. I’m assuming you mean that he is the one who is best able to deal with the non-autistic world. Because you seem to be to be very functional, very aware and very committed to your very reasonable objectives of keeping your family safe and together.
I’m not sure what you mean about biting, whether you’re physically biting people. And if that’s so, I’m sure you understand that it’s going to be considered unacceptable and dangerous behavior by people who think that violence against other people is wrong. However, I also gather that you regard it as a way that you communicate and enforce boundaries. Hopefully, you’ll develop other ways that are not so likely to attract judgments that can negatively affect your life.
This site is for people who are dealing with the fallout of relationships with sociopaths. I didn’t find that in your letter, except in your people you can smell to be “pretenders.” Nice word for the problem. But you seem to be quite clear about identifying them and dealing with them.
If you don’t mind my asking, What are you looking for here?
Kathy
be so how to deal with pretender peoples effectively. this breed so preys on ourselves. not so mineself or the dolphin but asperger husband thus any harm to himself leads to harm upon mineself and the dolphin.
on mine own i be so i tells pretender peoples to keep away from mineself. though be so problemetic when mine everyday sister brought her pretender boyfriend to mine home. his stench most vile to mineself. be so flight/fight response kicked in. hairs raised filled with fear and rage i growled. i paced about searching for order but mine saftey been invaded upon. there be no saftey. just his stench. he done nothing but act like a wagging dog still posed to attack. danger danger danger all this whirls in mine head. i growled and screamed. family surprised. pretender not surprised. he knew what i be. i knew what he be and no place our kind can move in peace. we never meant to live amongst each other, this was mine home. our only refuge from the world. this be an orderly place. not so the chaos of your world. some place we must have for ourselves. our safety, our refuge. a haven for order.
this breed mine sister brings to mine home come to wreak havoc with mine calm. this be so i attacked himself. this not good for me. look bad for mineself. this could have taken me back away behind locked doors. but this breed not allowed in mine space. not now or ever. be so mine sister not know of him. taken in by his lies as everyday peoples do so. found out later what he be. but such breed most common in your world.
i have no defenses for mine husband to deal with these as he is out there in your world be so i am not allowed to bite them and i wont. of course in mine home they must not consider to enter. as i will bite any who enter here uninvited. that be so everyday people and pretender breeds alike. be so the pretender breed will never be allowed or invited. this was an error on mine sisters part as she is everyday peoples with no scents.
be so how can husband protect himself from pretender breeds? with everyday peoples they be some open to understanding. but pretender breeds these wreck havock on husband, be so he be robbed and cheated and lied to. much pain and ulcers husband has in worry. be so he may be found incapable to care for himself be so it be concluded he not be capable to care for us all. and back to guardians we must go.
but pretender breeds can take all under their spell both some autistics and your kind alike. be so not fair mine husband be judged harshly and incapable for something many capable everday peoples have themselves been taken by this breed.
be so if i were with husband the stench i would recognize and alert to. but thus i am homebound and not with husband when he go out into the outside world and be talked to and be pretended too. poor husband not equipped with mine and dolphins scenting. he be so not recognize a pitbull from a pug. danger or safety scents. naught and nothing.
be so husband much capable he can drive cars, tie his shoe laces, dress properly, talk properly, speak in nearly everyday peoples speak. be so he not chase cars like i love to do so. and look near normal amongst everyday peoples with subtleties. but be so out there pretender breeds be so able to prey upon himself. and he has naught no defenses.
be so i used this log as examples of capable intelligent peoples taken in by pretender breeds. if so this sort of taken how so mine Asperger husband, with less defenses and less equipped to defend himself.
but how to prevent abuse of mine husband and protect mine husband as he is out there in your world where pretender breeds love to hunt and play.
this be what i search for. i trust not them nor everyday breeds alike. i interact with none of them and little of your kind. but this be not for mineself but for mine husband who spends ten hours of his day amongst all of you and thus is in their territories.
autisticsouls, I understand. And I have to say that it must be very handy to be able to smell these people. If I had that good a nose, it would have saved me a lot of trouble in life.
However, this car-chasing is probably not helping your case with the social services people, anymore than the biting is. It reminds me of a friend of mine who, though he was raised by a regular family, often seemed as though he was raised by wolves.
So, given that your husband is also autistic, but able to pass with everyday people better than you, I would say that the simplest solution for him is to develop some rules for himself.
One would be to make an effort to expand his social connections at work. Even if he’s not particularly comfortable with chit chat, he could bring in some doughnuts occasionally or a box of cookies to share. Just gestures of good will that will overcome any general perception that he doesn’t care about anyone else, that might be created by his shyness. Predators are less likely to target someone other people care about.
Beyond that, you can find good information here, especially in Steve Becker’s articles on identifying problem people by the way they behave. It probably breaks down into two areas.One is their over-the-top charm or eagerness to get involved with you very quickly. The other is their lack of empathy for other people (third-parties, not their target to whom they can be very solicitous in the beginning) or overblown sense of their own entitlement. Paying attention to these factor can be a help.
But ultimately, the solution is probably more about something inside us, rather than managing something outside us. If we’re so needy or desperate for any particular thing that we don’t take the time to determine the trustworthiness of someone who is offering that thing, predators will identify that neediness and take advantage of it.
I hope this helps. I realize that last item is difficult. We sometimes don’t learn about how vulnerable we are until that need has been used against us. And then we face the long healing and learning process that we discuss here. Perhaps you and your husband could talk about what is so important to him that he would behave recklessly in pursuit of it. And maybe you two could think up solutions to ease that anxiety on his part.
I hope this helps, and I wish you well.
Kathy
I am convinced that animals can also smell bad people. My cats growl, hiss, and run away when a bad person comes into my house. This is usually how I know they are a bad person. Even when I was dating that sociopath, my snake must have known, because the snake bit him in the face! Even snakes do not like sociopaths.
Stargazer:
I agree with you. One of my uncles had a dog. When daughter #1 brought home her fiancee, the dog liked him and their marriage was good. When daughter #2 brought home her fiancee, the dog liked him and their marriage was good. When daugter #3 brought home her fiancee, the dog went for his throat. Seriously, we had to pull the dog off him and lock it in a bathroom.
Anyhow, the marriage was a disaster, and within 2 years my cousin divorced the SOB. Years went by, and Ginger (the dog) got older and older, and closed in on 20. One day daughter #3 came home with a new fiancee. Ginger painfully hauled herself to her feet, meandered over, studied the guy carefully through her cataract clouded eyes, then licked his hands. The day my cousin came home from her honeymoon, Ginger died. As for my cousin, we just celebrated her 25th anniversary.
Kathleen – I am feeling a bit special about getting TWO big long posts from you – sorry for your sore shoulders for typing all that!
I find when I read your words and thoughts I get a sense of my post graduate year. I had a research supervisor who was eons ahead of me in her understanding of the topic and for some reason thought I was able to handle the highest level concepts. It was the first time I ever struggled in education and found the cliff face. What is the same is that I wouldn’t necessarily understand all she said in the first thinking through of her words. I often had to go away and think about it some more. I have even found that some of the concepts I ‘got’ on an intellectual level but not a visceral lived level, I have ‘gotten’ them a year or more later when some random event in life illuminates what it really meant. I often felt with her that she was at the summit giving me wisdom and I was trying desperately to pull myself up the mountain with my fingertips in order to hear her. Do you know what I mean?
I say this so you will know that although I tend towards thickness at times, what you are saying here and other places will stay in my mind for a long time … and while I may not really get every element of it right now, I will in the future. I’d like to say I ‘get it’ right now, but am thinking that’s just me being an eager student! And maybe related to the wanting to please. Hopefully not.
I don’t exactly know where to start in responding … so I will start with the fact you aren’t editing your thoughts to me and are allowing them to come as they are and trusting that I will understand and not be hurt. I am honored by that. I truly do understand that point because it’s something I have tried to live my whole life. I don’t know where I got it from, but I had the idea that presentness was being authentic as life unfolded moment by moment. So in my personal time and as much as possible at work, I try not to censor myself – well I do censor, but only so I don’t hurt or offend others – it’s more of a rephrasing rather than putting on a totally false front. When I am really present with this practice, life is so energised. And I feel authentic. So I really truly get this point – thankyou for doing that.
I never thought about it as a kind of trust – but you are right. It does mean taking a risk with the other person – most people don’t open up their stream of consciousness for others to see, and many are not truthful. I don’t have a problem about doing this so I never realised I was already trusting. And it really is that simple. I guess when I think of trust, I think of this big built over time dynamic between two people who have gradually let down their guard. I never thought about it as a concrete action before or a behaviour or something we ‘do’ in our physical bodies. I think I had thought about it as more attitudinal before – whether you ‘choose’ to trust or not. Don’t know if that makes sense. It does help to know it is an active word rather than just a decision.
I think this openness was one of the reasons I attracted a sociopath – it was food for him when I recounted my woundedness about what he had done with terrible clarity. So in reflecting all of that I don’t want to lose the openness but I have a big responsibility to myself – so I don’t get unbearably hurt again. I think I have to do as you have done – read the person and start to form some reasonable assumptions as to whether they are ok to be fully open with or partially open with.
I chose the name because that literally used to be me. I trusted indiscriminately – I literally looked for the good in all people – partially the fault of my training to be honest. I applied my professional role to my personal interactions but forgot that adults are not children. Children need unconditional positive regard – adults sometimes need consequences and boundaries to come up against. I don’t know what the right balance is – I may completely change myself to defend against sociopaths and never run into another one in my life and that would be a waste. But what I do know is I did something that didn’t work for me – something in the trusting indiscriminately and hoping and looking for the best in every situation left me in a dangerous dynamic that I couldn’t get out of. So something has to change in me – either I change the openness and therefore change what is authentic in me, or I get my radar going again and be careful about who I am open with.
I realise now the sociopath himself was not the problem. I was. I thought I had ‘done the work’ of attending to the old hurts and clearly I hadn’t. What I had done was stuffed them down deep and created a pseudo character who was as upbeat and chirpy as if there had never been any childhood hurts. He was just a lesson on my path – an alert. And the biggest wake up call I have ever had. Had it not been him, it would have been something else – maybe a different kind of disorder. I got so many lessons during that time.
I haven’t shared much of it yet though I have written extensively here – five yrs into the relationship, I had experience of professional mobbing in a workplace. The people I worked with (all women) must have picked up on my psychic distress about the relationship and seen the vulnerability I displayed that I thought I was hiding so well. I had eight women all engaged in covert warfare against me for a little over a year. And just like the relationship, I denied it was happening and stayed in that place when in reality the only viable option was to move on. It eroded my confidence even more and you can guess that the sociopath was no support through it – a few glib remarks here and there but never encouraging me to take any real action about it. I got to the point that I thought I would never be able to work again – that everyone would know what had happened.
I had seen this dynamic in the past in all female workplaces (it probably happens in others but I have worked with all women all my life) where one person was targeted and everyone joined in whispering about them and critiquing everything they did. I always tried to stay out of it. I have seen women broken down from a campaign of whispers, exclusion and nastiness – unable to work and signed off on sick leave due to psychological distress. At the time though, I didn’t know the name for it – how can you feel upset about someone whispering when they deny it? How can you measure a filthy look or a refusal to make eye contact? How do you describe disrespectful facial expressions? I couldn’t see at the time that this was just another mirror of the situation at home – the lesson I wasn’t getting was being shown to me again and again. I see it now. And I get it now.
I am going through all the horrible stages of getting over this. I am digging deep and consciously remembering and finding correlations from childhood for almost every single hurt. The lessons I didn’t get will continue to be presented to me in alternate forms and I have decided it stops here. I want my life back for the first time ever. I want to live for myself free from guilt and manipulation and all the silent signals I have been controlled by my whole life.
I know this is a long journey – this is a journey to falling in love with myself – and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic selfish way – I mean having a solid sense of value about myself that doesn’t waver when someone hassles me about something or I gain a few pounds. I want to have a sense of myself that doesn’t depend on someone else’s validation of what they see in me. I’ve never had that before so it’s like learning to walk and talk and see with new eyes. Before I was always valuable because of other people’s uses for me or perceptions of me – the ‘good’ daughter, the ‘pretty’ wife, the ‘supportive’ friend, the ‘sexy’ girlfriend, the ‘dependable and creative’ colleague. I want something for me I can live with then I can choose to accept or reject other people’s perceptions and at the very least won’t be hurt by them anymore.
Thankyou Kathy – I think I did ‘get’ most of that, but hidden jewels will bob to the surface over the next wee while 🙂
I really love dogs, and they love me, too.
But, on several occasions, I’ve had big dogs run up to me and smell my crotch.
Obviously very embarrassing. What is up with THAT?
Has this happened to anyone else, or is it just me???
It’s probaby just me……never mind. I don’t think I want to know.
As far as I’m concerned, dogs are like men…just a little more loyal. That’s all.
Not that men run up to me and smell my crotch, but you know what I mean.
polly: was thinking this today myself ‘”“ this is a journey to falling in love with myself ”“ ‘ not sure how to do it. but wouldn’t it be grand.
rosa – you are funny as hell! its what dogs DO! do not be disturbed.