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.
So, it’s a universal thing with dogs. That’s what I wanted to hear.
Thank you SO MUCH, one step.
mine husband wishes to be normal. it is insufficient for him to simply just coexist and move about everyday peoples. he has a need to want to be normal. he needs acceptance from everyday peoples, he has moved from our world into yours thinking yours as reality and not just an uncomfortable place to visit. thus his issues.
like pretender peoples we are outsiders looking in. only we do not pretend and we do not manipulate or control. this be so to a lack of need, or want or desire and inability to do so. our natures be so fundamentaly different.
mine world is rich. mine world is full and whole and complete. i have naught the emptiness pretenders have and will always try to fill. there be no need to prey on others. i am nothing and everything. i am no one and everyone. i live in no time and everytime. i do not know where i begin or end. for i do not begin or end anywhere. this is mine world. there is little self. Such self as many of you describe seems such a finite and imprisoning concept.
mine husband has identified with his body and what happens to it as who he is. in this aspect he is becoming like everyday peoples. and thus has everyday peoples needs. thus pretender breeds can target and maneuvor and control him just like they do others. mine husband is here with me. yet i do not understand what he goes through. i have little interest in your world. i am trying to understand for his sake and perhaps outline some skills for himself.
we have many everyday people protectors. i have a nurse with me and the dolphin evryday. they keeps us safe. we have weekday nurse and weekend nurse. there is no nurse keeping husband safe. he will have to make everyday people friendships out of necassity for him to be kept safe from others. i have all the people i need thus i seek no more. but life is content and our routine is sacred. i must assist mine husband.
there be however some everday peoples much interested in our success. many of them have autistic children. these everyday peoples much interested in our success and safety. they help fight for the dolphin to stay with us. they much protective of us. hiring attorneys and crying to authority peoples. i would invite them in to show mine gratitude but they make so much noise. they talk oh so very much. so i threw thank you cards out the window and told them to go away.
husband much envious of pretender peoples skills. how they make themselves much liked by others. pretender told husband he will teach him how to pretend and move amongst others like normal. he told husband he will teach him “how to play the game..” he preyed on mine husbands need to belong and fit into your world. and thus mine husband be so taken advantage of.
it be so necassary mine husband needs more everyday peoples to be friends with. and some other skills.
we both go to social skills classes. mine husband does very well. i understand much but hold little interest in the lessons. if everyday peoples ask me “Hello, how are you.” they best be ready to wait for a twenty minute response. i will not simply reply a form “fine. thank you.” as it is dishonesty. i will not compromise mineself over such pettiness. and i will go into mine physical and emotional and thoughtful well being everytime anyone asks me “hello. How are you?” they don’t want to know they must learn not to ask then. but they will not receive an automatic “fine thank you.” from me. there be such silliness in these rules. some i am much uninclined to learn.
people give off scents when they are ovulating and when they are menstruating. it is a strong smell blocking out all others many times. hormonal changes does this too.
it’s a sign of saying hello to some of us to sniff things. i sniff nearly everyone i come into contact with. i am face blind. i will not look at your face as this gives me no information. i identify peoples by smells and movements. mine husband does so by sound of voice and movements. he has little eye contact like ourselves.
in autism there be many documentation of autistics being loving to some and withdrawling or attacking others.
scents are a way of idetifiying a person. the crotch and armpit give good scents on a person, i’m being trained not to sniff people as it makes them uncomfortable. i must do so at an distance from themselves. but if they expect me to shake hands as their way of greeting it be so fair i will sniff. if i can’t sniff you i won’t shake your hand. and thus we will not acknowledge each other any longer.
there be an autistic pointing out cancer cells i have heard. so we be of use to society. we be many of us much primal. everyday peoples much domesticated. many of you have an inborn filtering system we are not equipped with. everything comes in to some of us. many things everyday peoples be so blind and deaf to. we take it all in. too many of us have no filter system, or it is inadequate or does not function the same way.
we be much misunderstood.
Hi Guys..I have been so down lately. I miss the sick psycho, my mind plays all the good things he did, and I have a struggle within myself to bring up the bad so I can move on.
My friends tell me what you are missing is the persona not the person, will it ever get better? I cried all day yesterday over what could have been…we go to court on Jan 26 and I don’t want to even look at him, I will get nauseous. Any ideas? How should I handle myself. I have a whole list of things I want to say to him, but I know he won’t care, it won’t hurt him one bit because he is sub human…how do you act in a courtroom when the jack….is in front of you after having hurt me so deeply and profoundly…and yet today I found myself missing him…am I going crazy? I know divorce is necessary, important, crucial, I am asking for my name back before we were married because that is my way of getting my self respect back..any help you can send me, I will use. I just don’t want him to know the hurt he has caused me, but I want to exhibit, strength, character, humaness, does this make sense?
clovis – you make perfect sense. i will let those who have court room expereince weigh in on tactics for the court room, but there may be a few things you can do before hand to get you on the road to exhibiting those qualities in yourself that you most want to bring forward.
first – congratulations on going for getting your name back! that is important and a very good idea.
second – try writing letters that you don’t send. see if you can bring the volume down on the emotional charge. spew it all out – everything. and you don;t have to be controlled and collected – in fact, don’t be, let it rip! do this several times. and write about the thoughts and feelings that come up as they do.
third- do some things that make you relax – move your body and try to spend time with friends focusing on anything you LIKE and NOT him.
fourth – as you bring down the volume on the things you need to say, i’d practice saying things/ not saying things aloud. is there a friend who could help you with a little courtroom role play? can you MAKE it REALLY RIDICULOUS so that it is SO over the top that you laugh? is it possible? YOU should play the part of the spath. I have used this method when dealing with disordered institutional systems – and it has empowered me to see HOW dysfunctional they are, and how inhumane, reaffirming my own humanity.
fifth – i am sorry that you are plaugued with ‘the missing hims’ right now. but from your post it seems that you know it is only a fantasy that you are missing, as you are sure your will vomit when you actually SEE HIM. it is important for you to reach out – cause lonliness and isolation is making it worse.
sixth – it is not unusual for the attachments to become magnified when we are letting go. know that it is part of the process and that it does not mean you are crazy – things are moving and you are being asked to acknowledge that this is so. your internal system needs you to acknowledge this.
all the very best,
one step
Clovis…do you have a supportive friend to go with you to court? I know that with my divorce a couple years ago…i had a good friend of mine who was actually my attorney as well..
Funny thing is my ex didnt show up..and he isnt the one who got me onto this post recently but now i recognize he was another one …
I know all too well this feeling of dread and also the missing him. I am sorry that you are having a bad time right now..just keep posting here and getting all the support you can …especially the days before you go to court..
Dear Kathy take two!Your second post was also interesting to me. My life has turned around so much since the P left I can’t even recognise it now. I am meeting all kinds of people and through talking with them discovering everyone has trauma of some kind in their lives that they have had to work through. That’s what I meant about the commonality and community. I see that though I haven’t met another person who suffered exactly what I have, I have met those who were abused as children, those who were cheated on and lied to, those who lost money, those who were abandoned and left alone, those who were betrayed. That helps me to ‘normalise’ my own experience and feel less weird. I had the sense after he was gone that I would always be a little strange ever after and never as whole as others and talking with people about what they’ve been through makes me realise we all are wounded in some way or another. I am not abnormal – true that pathological relationships are fairly rare, but my wounds are no worse and no better than others I see participating fully in life. I have referred to it before – thinking others could smell the defeat and shame on me – not true!
I don’t approach people as ‘Hi I am Polly and I was abused for yrs by a sociopath’ but with certain people, I can share when the time is right. Not the whole story, but a logline from it. And not in bitterness, but just to let them know I am in the process of healing at the moment. I am not making it part of who I am or a badge to hide behind – it’s difficult to explain but it’s just being real when the topic comes up. Lots of people ask me why I am not dating and sometimes I say ‘But I am dating – I’m dating myself first before anyone else’ lol
What I get out of those conversations isn’t a sense of where I am ranked in my healing progress or even the pleasure of seeing I am above where they are or they’re ahead of me. It’s the very simple pleasure of honest communication about ourselves. I had missed that connection with people for such a long time with the P. I had no friends due to the control and great shame I felt about the dynamic happening at home. We moved away to a new place about two yrs into the relationship and I tried to make friends at first, but when things got really bad I let those friendships go. How do you explain to a friend why your eyes are constantly red and swollen? I should have fought harder for those friends, but I was exhausted in trying to manage what was happening at home. They might have validated me a lot earlier.
I have harbored fantasies about having some kind of relationship trauma group – or holding public meetings about psychological abuse, but I recognise I am not brave enough or strong enough at the moment. My work is to work on myself for now not try to save the world! I pass on information where I am able to and if I see bad patterns I ask cup emptying questions and validate the experience the person is going through. That’s what I would have wished for, so I feel a moral obligation to do it. But I couldn’t imagine people really depending on me for bigtime support. I am not strong enough to provide that. And at the moment that is not the path I am drawn to – it might be in time – who knows? But for now I have other dreams and through my own dreams there will be opportunities to take action. I think that’s the broad thread here – after a victimisation it’s common for people to want to change the conditions that lead to that victimisation in the first place – activism can be a good thing. But you’re absolutely right – nobody should use it as an excuse not to follow their own path.
I am meeting people who are much healthier than me mostly – they give me things to think about in discussion and take my mind away from the pain by making me laugh and diverting my attention back to life. For someone who was isolated for many years it is such a blessing and almost like a fairground. I am appreciating the marvel and diversity of the human race all over again and feel so lucky to have rejoined the human race after all those years living in purgatory.
I hope someday I will be able to help people struggling with these kinds of relationships in some capacity whether through raising awareness or through giving practical support to someone who is ready to change their life.
That’s one thing the P taught me though. You can’t heal people and they have to want to change their life for themselves. My rescuing was a defensive tactic to avoid taking responsibility for the very real flaws in myself. My only responsibility is to fix myself and if everybody did that the world would be a much better place.
I get what you are saying about there being value in peer to peer dialogue – I am finding that here too. I get the most from engaging in meaning making with people who understand the bad relationship was just a cover for what was really wrong. I also get a lot from welcoming new people and reading thoughts from people like you who are waaay waaaay down the healing track. But I find endless giving to those who don’t ‘get it’ exhausting – a never ending hole to be filled with no appreciation, insight or growth. It’s a waste of air, time and life and I don’t want to spend my very short life throwing pearls before the swine (not that I have many pearls you understand!).
I have been to counsellors and psychologists in the past about the bad relationship and about the childhood and personal issues that lead to it and honestly … I didn’t get much from it. I get far more from dialogue with people here who understand the feelings and thoughts these relationships bring up. And who understand the relationship was just a signpost or symptom of the deeper underlying illness. I think we are doing more than just validation of one another – certainly that is a profound aspect of what happens here. I think though the meaning making and friendship and camaraderie are huge.
There’s a big warmth here from people and to me it means so much more than regular warmth from people who haven’t been harmed. WHy? These people were harmed BY and WITH their warmth so if anyone had reason to tuck it away and become Ice Queens (and Kings – just for you Henry and Matt!), it is the posters here. To see the outpouring of support and empathy although we are not in each other’s physical lives is just so …. precious and beautiful. That’s what life should be about – the moments that take your breath away (ah getting a bit choked up about it!) We mirror one another’s experience – we name the things we went through thinking we were alone in the world and then five other people say ‘Me too!’ – that’s the validation aspect. The support comes when we think we’re sliding backwards or struggling with a hard day and the meaning making when we articulate our fledgling theories and dare to share something original with people who understand what we’ve been through. I wonder if Donna ever imagined when she set up this site that it would turn out to be such a wellspring of healing for so many?
As an example of my rescuing … I took in an unfortunate young man we’ll call D. He was being kicked out of my friend’s house as a flatmate but nobody could articulate why clearly. I got statements like ‘Oh he’s just impossible’ ‘I can’t stand him’. So ole Pollyanna says ‘Well you can come and live with us even though you have transient work and few prospects’ So he moved in and true to form he was a nightmare. It became apparent in the first few days he was severely depressed so I took him to my doc, paid for the consult and for the meds he was prescribed. He had raggedy clothes so I bought him some new ones and shoes and underwear and night clothes. I encouraged him to get more stable work and start getting his life together. He had no transport so I gave him a bike that was lying around. I talked endlessly with him about his ‘traumas’ – his family was a strange situation – hadn’t seen mum for yrs and dad was in another part of the country. Initially he seemed to make good progress – he took his meds and said he felt better and seemed to be getting somewhere through talking. Then abruptly he stopped taking the meds saying ‘I don’t like them’ – fell into the depression again and was sleeping through the whole day doing nothing. Bear in mind he wasn’t contributing anything to the household – not financial or anything else. He ruined the clothes I gave him, the bike got left outside and was stolen. He lost things every day, never helped around the house and even stopped showering. He did nothing about work and actually lost the job he had. He picked up a girlfriend and within a couple of weeks she was pregnant. He got into drunken fights in town and came back injured. He became very strange in conversation – was cleaning his fingernails with a knife one day and then joked around about sticking the knife in me!That was enough for me. I found out he had grandparents living nearby (that conveniently he hadn’t told me about) so I told him he needed to leave and suggested he contact them.
That whole episode was the last time I went hardout rescuing. I saw the guy about four yrs later – still exactly the same. DOing casual work because he doesn’t like to commit to fulltime work, unshowered and wearing tattered and unclean clothing. What a waste of my time and effort! People won’t change till they are ready and even then all we can do is be there to support them – we can’t do it for them no matter how hard we’d like to.
So I see what you are saying and I think you’re giving me some good hints here. I recall you said on a previous post to someone else that the man they were looking for would be self interested as well as lots of other things. I could be wrong here, but I took self interested to mean not selfish but rather interested in his own development and insides? Was that the correct interpretation? Because that is one of the delightful things I am finding – I am meeting people who are so unlike the P – they truly are interested in making their insides better. And the P never was – maybe that’s because there is no inner self to heal or it’s so buried down deep that it has been forgotten about. I remember trying to get him excited about his insights about himself, but he didn’t have any and didn’t see what the big deal was about self development. Now I see everyone else is self interested and self aware – they actually analyse their own behaviours and attitudes and the P had me thinkng I was the weird one for doing that!
Thankyou Kathy – you may not see yourself as wise, but I do = sometimes I look at what you write and wonder how you get to be so insightful and clever – and wording and expressing it all in just the right way. I sincerely hope you DO get that book out – I’ll be first in line in my country to buy a copy and I guarantee all the other LFers will be the same 🙂 You’re awesome!
On Step – delighted to see you are planning a new adventure. And why should we not fall in love with ourselves ? I don’t mean that in an arrogant or selfish way to the exclusion of other people, but truly appreciating all the great things inside ourselves – maybe then we won’t be quite so flattered and falling over ourselves when someone else recognises them!
My dog is a whore – he goes to anyone tail wagging for affection lol And both dogs loved the P – he tormented one of the cats though. This cat was wild as a kitten and I spent a lot of time calling him ‘beautiful’ and approaching him at his pace – sometimes one stroke and sometimes three before he let me know he had enough. The P would go beyond that and get into a little smacking game with the cat. I told him not to – the cat was showing he was stressed but he thought it was funny. I thought he was a pig and protected the cat as much as possible – it wasn’t hurtful to the cat but it was very disrespectful. I always respect his cues and back off when he shows me he wants space.
Anyway – the cat has calmed down since he left. He now comes inside the house a lot more and just now climbed on my lap for a cuddle and sit down – I was stroking him for a good ten minutes and no problems – lots of purring. I am so glad to see he’s settled and coming right. It’s only taken four years to see this progress! No doubt the P had something to do with that with his constant violation of the cat’s boundaries though. Looks like me and the cat are both healing lol
polly: i don’t mind if it is arrogant of selfish. 🙂 I could use a little of both!