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.
Thank you for the volume of wisdom in your comments, one step- my name back means everything to me, to carry his name means I am associated with a liar, cheater and one who discards people like trash and I will not have it! I have started a journal and writing here helps as well, I find however I am leaning on xanax too much and am numbing out, your profound statement, about things are moving and being asked to acknowledge it,yes, this is where I am at isn’t it? Fahrarehi, one of my friends from work is going with me, my daughter doesnt’ want to, she says she will spit in his face
and finally autisticsoul-wow your insight, disconnect if I have to, be someone else for the moment-just to get me through- all such good advice, ideas-the day is coming and I hope he will not show up and if he does pray that I remain firm and outrageousely happy before his eyes so he will not see my pain. I love this sight…has helped me so much!
icanseeclearlynow: the video imagery is powerful.
i say, ‘the sheet of plastic with the soap on it, was pulled out from underneath me.’
i shared a LOT of music with the spath. i listen to it with determination now; she DOESN’T get to keep it; I DO NOT lose it to the likes of her.
I am thinking about making a blog, after i out her. maybe i can call it ‘it’s only words’ and then i am going to use my Adolf Hilter quote as the byline: “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.”
the anger in me is beginning to hone itself. blessed be.
best,
one step
clovis – you sound strong.
maybe you need a naming ceremony – where you take your name back; with a list of the qualities and attributes it will shine lite on within you. and a list of what you are relinquishing in relinquishing the name and qualities and attributes that are not yours. and to speak these things to the earth and night sky and burn the not yours name and the yours name..bury the ash of the not yours name or let it fly on the wind….and smudge your palms, your face, your heart with your TRUE name.
best,
one step
…smudge your palms, your face, your heart with your TRUE name, alchemized in fire and love.
Kathleen – thankyou for the long response. I get it.
I didn’t at first – I kicked around the first time I read it and felt cross (“You mean I can’t blame all this on him?!”) But then I read it again … and again and went to do some thinking. You brought up some salient points.
I don’t recall much of my childhood at all – I don’t know why. Most of what I remember is condensed into vividly real scenes that I recall in great detail – each of them is a drama and each of them is really important in some way. I wrote several of them out triggered by what you wrote and asked what I learned at each stage of my life I could recall. And by plunging I found the very first rejection that hit home in a huge way. I had told the story of this scene to a psychologist and she was astounded at how my present day life had turned out in relation to this scene. Yes there were other smaller rejections that I recall in great detail before it but the big big rejection came at around age four.
My parents had split. And it wasn’t a pretty split – there had been reconciliations and acrimony and drinking and they had split again – only this time it was serious and they were ending things for good. My father didn’t want the relationship to end but nor did he want to change a single thing that was making my mother so unhappy. He drank, had black moods and could go weeks without communicating, he spent all the money and put my mother into debt and shamed her in the small town that they lived in. Eventually with no support around her she said ‘ enough’ and resolved to leave him and raise me herself for better or for worse.
She was filing papers at the courthouse and I was with her. I was well dressed I recall – likely so she could prove she was looking after me well. I was swinging on a bar and playing by myself while she talked with a clerk. Down the hallway I saw my father and I half wanted to run to him – he looked so sad in his suit. But I didn’t. I decided to play it cool and let him come to me. I pretended I didn’t see him and continued to play and hum a tune to myself. I made my face happy and pretty and made out I didn’t care. He looked off somewhere else. All the while I was chanting in my head “Daddy look at me. Look at me. Watch me play and live. Look at me.” Willing him. But he didn’t look and soon I was called over to my mother and we left the building.
In later yrs I pursued stage work where everyone looks at you and your whole being is illuminated by light. For many many years I got involved in drama, musicals and highbrow plays.
A few other things came up while thinking. You wrote about leaning how particular behaviours become linked with shame and exclusion :
And the behaviours I associated with it were creative endeavours ”“ remember the play where Mum came into the changing room before you had to go on stage and you were so nervous. She nagged you in front of others and then told you off in front of them for becoming anxious and irritable with all the questions and conditions. You then walked home with her in silence because you were a bad girl and didn’t you know the night was all about her? Didn’t you know it was her show? You always were such an ungrateful little girl.
You weren’t on the stage ”“ she was ”“ you were just the conduit. And it made you sick after she had made such fun of the concept of you acting ”“ she had laughed at you, been shocked that you could be anything like that and probably jealous because she had been so shy ”“ too shy to stand up for herself even to a bully that was ruining her life at College. Had she had some of that confidence you showed her life would have been so very different. She wouldn’t have settled and she wouldn’t have been hurt and she wouldn’t have turned cold and hard inside from the hurt. So it was her show ”“ all about her as the stage mother and your feelings didn’t matter at all ”“ she was jealous of you and the limelight you loved so she devalued it. She only thought of you as an extension of herself rather than a person in your own right. Pulled apart your performance and tried to provoke arguments and upsets before every performance.
What did you learn? I learned not to have her in the dressing room before the show. I learned not to accept favours from her ”“ if I did then she could do as she liked. I learned perhaps most of all that my feelings weren’t important ”“ only her feelings mattered. And I learned to keep my mouth shut no matter what was going on and to portray the ’good girl’ for whom everything is fine. I could never share my pain with her ”“ it was always devalued and debased as though my feelings were laughable in their dramatics and falseness. She even called me a drama queen. Years later a therapist said this was a snide way to devalue what I loved.
Afterwards she would critique me ”“ pull apart all the mistakes I had made and demand better from me. She would tell me that audience members had tittered at me at certain points or that I looked clumsy in dancing. I could always do better. She thought it was a hobby ”“ something to indulge as an interest but nothing to be taken seriously. She didn’t understand that rush I got when the lights came up and I could really be someone else.
She didn’t understand that I loved the whole world of it. She felt like an outsider as I pursued it and came home with more terms I had learned ”“ more techniques.
I was only trying to achieve to please her ”“ she had pushed me in that route because ’you were so shy’ and yet I don’t ever remember being shy. She says ’I remember growing up so painfully shy that I would cry if somebody looked at me the wrong way.’ I internalised this shy story about me but looking back I don’t think it was true. I don’t have many memories about childhood but I do recall always having friends and exploring the world as equals with them ”“ communicating in a relaxed manner.
I guess I was nine or so when she made her shy pronouncement and pushed me into drama to cure my problem. I don’t think I was shy ”“ she just silenced me with a look ”“ she was so angry and threatening and I was so afraid of crossing her. She was all I had in the world ”“ no siblings, no dad, no aunties or uncles ”“ nobody else. I think the shy story belonged to her. Sure I was a little quieter when we moved halfway round the world and I was homesick, but I still made good friends and was accepted into the popular group quite quickly. However it’s amazing how you can believe the only person who is in your life as an adult ”“ I see a correlation there with the P. He isolated me from friends telling me I was defective on account of my ’depression’.
So why would she tell me (and everyone else) I was shy if I wasn’t? I know I don’t want to tread this path, but I’m here now so may as well.
It made me like her
She was lonely and wanted a companion but men and other adults were too daunting for her. In me she had a companion who was always wrong to her always right.There was a power imbalance in her favour – it wasn’t a relationship of equals
If I was shy then I wouldn’t be brave and pursue the really big dreams and maybe someday leave her all alone.
Shyness came with certain other expectations ”“ to read alone a lot, to be clever and intellectual, to not get involved in team sports or social events, to not be rebellious, to remain dependent on her in a symbiotic relationship as the only person who understood me.
Why would someone do that to their child?
The shark faced girl ”“ there are two stories to her. One is about a girl who desperately wanted to fit in with her peers. I am seven here. I know that other children get things that I don’t ”“ they have money for toys and treats and all the special things children boast about in their little circles, but I get none of that. I am poor and am expected to bear it with no complaints. My mother makes a big deal out of me looking clean and polished so nobody can tell from the outside that our little family is poor and struggling.
One day I see something at school sitting in a rubbish bin. It is something I have wanted and it has been discarded by someone else. A huge lollipop shaped like a dummy. It has been opened and probably someone has sucked on it, but I don’t care ”“ I want it. I check to see nobody is looking and I take it. I have a guilty pleasure in eating it and showing it off to my friends. But they are not fooled. One by one they say “That’s not your’s.” I deny it “Yes it is mine ”“ my mum bought it for me.” Then finally someone clever figures out the ruse and says “She took that out of the rubbish bin.”
My face reddens and I become hot. I frantically deny it over and over maintaining that my mother bought it but nobody believes me. They all laugh and show their disgust that I could take something dirty that was discarded by someone else and make it my own ”“ the dirty cast offs are fit for me. I suffer great shame and it takes a long time before my little group moves onto a new target and I am forgiven and accepted back into the fold.
Lesson? Claiming something for yourself can backfire. I am only worthy of the crumbs left by others – and not even worthy of that. Social humiliation is the worst pain ”“ to be avoided at all costs. Taking chances is dangerous. It is better to accept my poverty and place in life than pretending to be something I am not. Tell the truth and don’t lie.
There are more scenes coming up and I am writing them down to analyse through my adult mind – I figure out that each scene changed my approach to life in some way so they are pivotal – my quest is to find what each contributed to the growing child and how they affected my strategies and thinking. In going through this – I do still think the P had something to do with it – but maybe it was just conglomerating all those messages together and raising them to the surface…
One Step – congrats on the job!!! Woooohooo! And I raise my hand as an artsy fartsy kind of person but not a leftie 😀
Kathy, husband quit this morning. last 2 weeks ago pretender friend of his joked that husband looked like a character in a movie he saw on The Movie Channel called Spiral. be so comparing mine husband as the character Mason. be so there be much similarities. i be supposeing mine husband not blend in as i previously thought.
some there at his work who saw the movie laughed and said it be true husband looks much like the character portrayed. be so we watched the movie this am at 7:40 am. husband much hurt by it. as many peoples had laughed upon the comparision. the comparison i would guess may be somewhat insulting. took awhile to understand the offense. be so one would have to see things in an everyday peoples sort of view. there be a time such things would have been met with indifference be so now husband much injured by the incident. how be it so being made fun of by others be something to be harmed by today whilst it not do so in yesterdayland.
be so he not be returning there. he be so short sighted in his individualistic pains and emotional injuries. be so such individualistic obsessions and preoccupation with this individualized “Mike” self. this be such everyday peoples characteristic. focused so much on their fragmented self.
he be forgotten why we come here. be so we sing all in soulsong together. dolphin and others we sing all across but all together where there be no space or time to bind us. be so he not join in. be so i ask why. be so he says he forgot how. we used to communicate without verbal words drifting off into our worlds. people used to startle how we would not use words to communicate and yet have knowing of each others. be so he has forgotten to soulsing. be so now i have to use mine verbal words to communicate with himself. he much traumatized by this. be so now he not hear dolphins soulvoice no more. And she has not no verbal voice in this world. we leave ourselves leaving the prisons of our bodies and rise up to the edge of this world to hear her soul song and thought songs. she be so non verbal in this world. i push mine thought song out but he be so not receiving no more. be so he says being everyday peoples be so like death inside. as he be so cut off from us now. be so it be difficult to live in both worlds. he been given voice to better navigate here. but we lose many autistics this way. this be like sort of a death for many of us. as another describes in her poem here: http://www.aspires-relationships.com/writings_sondra_i_live_in_a_crystal_world.htm
there be no connecting of soulsong or thought songs in everyday peoples from what i have seen. But this not be true though. be so an everyday friend did so soulsing with us. called out in dream song she did and we come to visit her. thought songs and souls singing we sang together. she laughed and soulsang coming together all complete, in all her selves. soul self and body self. then flutterring she leave her body complete as the cancer took it’s final hold. is this be only time everyday peoples soulsing? in death?
be so husband had wanted to become everyday peoples. thus it seems he will be afflicted with everyday peoples afflictions. he must make his way in your world now. and yet he is not wanted there. pretender friend of his painted your world so much brighter than what it truly is. he sold the illusion. mineself in wonderment that husband be walking in one world now.
goodbye for now. needing to visit your world some later be learning to tie mine shoes today.
Polly, I don’t want to interrupt this great self-research run. The work you are doing is good, and your efficiency at doing it is prize-winning. But, yeah, of course, the sociopath had something to do with it. My orientation is search for meaning.
When I was in heavy processing, I used to wake up every morning with something. And very often it was a kind of time-line or tapestry, where connections were being visualized. Sometimes it looked like a Gant chart. Sometimes it looked like a Bruegel painting. I saw my family years and my life afterwards. I saw my life in society and the sociopath’s life. I saw the layers of class and power in which all of our lives were caught but also floated in that years of the ’90s when the Internet bubble was like a tsunami of money that, in my professional world of financial technology, was creating instant wealth and a kind of sudden financial aristocracy that could do anything it could imagine.
In my mind, it wasn’t that he had nothing to do with it. But that what happened was like a collision of two lives, that also involved a kind of psychic magnetism between two personalities with complementary emotional damage. Here, we are so into our feelings as victims, because it is how we experience that collision. The other person’s modus operandi is all about winning, about gaining relative power, about using resources (including other human beings) to achieve his objectives, all of it informed by huge damage that creates a psychology whose engine rides on cold steel rails of solitary outsiderness, distrust of anyone’s else intentions, the deep psychic grief an abandoned child, the hunger for extreme experience to compensate for the end of human connection, all of it adding up to a kind of vicious selfishness, greed, grandiosity, shallowness, envy and disdain for feeling people.
And then there was me, and of course, I was a victim. I was trained to be a victim, a kind of lifetime servant in the pursuit of acceptance and safety. It wasn’t what I looked like. I was smart, cultured, accomplished, professionally successful. I had gotten as far away from my background as I humanly could, and I was not to bad at holding onto what I had built for myself in terms of a “shelter of business, home, and money. But to me it was all upholstery, something to preserve me against the monster around the corner, and I never believed I was safe, loved, or even competent or aware of what was going on around me. I kept negotiating deal after deal to prove my value, deals that were opened ended on my side and designed to make me indispensable to clients, friends, lovers. There was never enough safety or love for me, and I was always looking for a savior, and willing to dig deeper and deeper into myself to make that savior believe he couldn’t live without me.
When we met, it took him very little time to recognize me as the big, fat perfect score. He had a list of things he needed to advance his plan to become rich and famous, so that no one could ever reject or ignore him again. Money to stop working and write the books that would establish him. “Rich” experiences that would enable him to move among a better class of people. Life accessories that change his visual name — better car, better clothes. The list evolved as he grasped the potential of my money and the era of extreme social mobility. But I was his ticket. Not only because of my money, but because of my emotional neediness, the mess of my overcommited life, the way he could make himself indispensable to me.
I didn’t want to see him that way. I really didn’t, and in looking back, one of the most dramatic elements of the beginning of it all was my agonized struggle against my visceral response to the ever-refining deal he was laying on my desk. He was too young. His values were too shallow and his alcoholic, women-exploiting background just repelled me. He was my employee. The battle with myself started in the first months, and never ended. I was out of my own control, and the part that wanted him could make an excellent case, because he was, literally, offering me everything I needed and everything I ever wanted.
I always fell in love with my saviors. It was the way I internally managed the absolute, open-ended investments I made in keeping them loving me, keeping them wanting to keep me. I experienced it as deep-diving. That was what I called it to myself. A kind of long, fast dive into another person’s world. I almost always chose well, people who would enrich my mind, my perceptions, my skill set for life. I defined my life as a series of relationships. All of which I left after some years, when they proved to “not really love me” in the boundariless commitment that was necessary for my safety.
So, of course, I was the victim in this relationship from my perspective. And from his, of course, I was the source.
I tend to write as though I’m generalizing my experience to everyone else’s. And I really don’t do that in my own head. I view myself as someone who lived through an extremely damaging childhood. It left me with patterns of behavior and belief that were far from any kind of personal equanimity or ability to move easily among people who were not so damaged. My whole life was about unmet needs, my own and trying to take care of other people’s — in both personal relationships and professional ones.
I’ve observed carefully on LoveFraud, trying to discern if this same pattern of complementary damage finding each other is common in these relationships. And likewise, to see if these relationships provide the same opportunity and likelihood of a healing of the damage that creates a kind of chronic psychology of hopeful servitude and inevitable victimhood. I really don’t know if it’s true for everyone — that we had a predisposition to have this kind of sociopathic relationship. Or if it turns into a learning experience that can be positive and healing, even for people who are not living with what is effectively PSTD from long-ago traumas. But the more I observe, the more I realize that there is something about all of us that magnetized us into these relationships, something that wanted to stay while our more rational parts wanted to go. And in my own model of thinking, I belief that it was the emergence of a part of us that needed to be healed.
We process at a lot of levels. And the angry level is not wrong in identifying all the ways that we were used and betrayed, and in claiming that a contract — whether the common social contract or our private expectations of how we would be treated in return for our caring and investments — was broken. But I also have another, equally strong level of awareness about all this, and particularly about him.
People with personality disorders or emotional damage are not always driven by that damage. All of us have parts of our life that we do in a less encumbered way. Maybe it’s cooking or driving or chopping wood or ironing or gardening. We can be in the moment, and involved with the task without it being about us and our old pain. I think that one of the reasons people drink or become engaged in other addictive pursuits is to get away from that pain, and be able to do more things in relative freedom from the emotional noise that make things so complicated. He was not always the sociopath, and I was not always the needy pleaser.
But our dysfunctions really dominated things. And in struggling with them, I came to see the structure of his dysfunction. And it was sad and scary at the same time. At locked away from the world by a shell identity of purpose-driven armor which provided for the survival of that child and whatever it imagined would relieve its pain of being cut off from necessary nurture. For anyone involved with him, there was an agonizing dichotomy of dealing with the occasional appearance of this childish facet that was so hungry and eager for affection and safety (not unlike myself) who seemed to be able to make the commitments/deals for ongoing relationship. But who, when it actually came to making life decisions, was pushed into the background by the great, dark, rigid, clanking superstructure that “knew better” about the world, its untrustworthiness and its ultimate reality that nothing mattered but power and winning.
It would probably be helpful to mention that his history was abandonment by his mother at an age when he was old enough to remember her face, a year in an orphanage, and ultimate adoption into a family that he never bonded with. He was a textbook case of someone who didn’t successfully get through the “good enough parenting” phase of successful separation from mother/source, and development of identity and sense of safety to explore and learn in an expanding world. His capacity to bond and trust shut down, I think, either because of the loss of the primary source (his mother) or neglect at the orphanage.
Children are, in a sense, survival machines. They adapt to survive. And for him, I believe, the drive to bond and trust, which is part of the developmental path that is inborn in all of us and the primary emotional reality of early childhood, became a source of grief and pain, rather than a platform for future development. So, to survive, he shut it down. Just as I shut down my need for autonomy and self-expression in my primal trauma at a slightly later age.
When we were together, I sometimes felt like our relationship, whatever was going on at the surface, was really about the interaction of two wounded children. There was a kind of reverb in all our communications that I could almost hear, as though we were talking at two different levels all the time. I didn’t understand a lot of the structure of all this, at least not in a useful way, until a point in my healing, during the angry phase, when I would be writing lfurious letters to him (unsent) about what he had done to me, and even when I was writing them, I could see that there was nothing I could accuse him of that I wasn’t equally guilty of myself. Our style was different. How we defined ourselves and our goals were different. But we were doing the same thing, and largely for the same reasons.
We were both manipulative as hell. I could see his manipulation of me, giving me whatever he could understand that I wanted, so that I’d give him what he wanted. And then not bothering when I didn’t have something he wanted. He was at least honest with himself, and sometimes (painfully) with me, that this was a game of “please the fool” to advance his private objectives. I was manipulative, trying to give him as much as I could without bankrupting myself financial or emotionally, to get him to love me. It was a more socially acceptable objective, but it was no less a matter of ruthless self-interest.
Neither of us respected the other at the level of our dysfunction. I thought his values were infantile, and his behavior self-indulgent, short-sighted or just disgusting. He thought though I was a self-destructive idiot who couldn’t do anything that wasn’t saturated by my need for stupid emoluments to my out-of-control feelings or repayments for my insane sacrifices for other people.
Neither of us ultimately cared what the other wanted. He was there to advance his private plans, and all my demands that he consider my feelings were basically an annoyance he had to deal with to get what he wanted. My support of his plans, his view of his future, and whatever else he wanted was entirely dependents on whether it included me, and whether it included me in the future. The fact that it wasn’t what he wanted (for objectively good reasons, like the unlikelihood that our age difference would pan out in the future, or the fact that I was to old to have children) faded before my absolute adherence to my life strategy that I make myself indispensable so that I was needed and loved and kept around.
I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job here of drawing this picture. I didn’t have anything like this depth of perspective while it was going on. I was deep in the experience of victimhood, and my personal pain attracted lots of people who related to it and were ready to get involved in calling him a terrible person. And from the perspective of people who depend on trust and social contracts, he was a terrible person. But long before this relationship ended, it was showing me that there was something very, very, very wrong with me that long pre-dated him.
And also that, while he left a lot of pain and loss in his wake (and I wasn’t the first one), he had some perspectives and skills that made it possible for him to articulate what he wanted in concrete terms and unapologetically organize his life to get what he wanted. This was what was blocked in me, so blocked that I couldn’t even interpret what I was seeing in him and other people, just that they had some sort of magical ability that was the primary attractor for me in my previous relationships.
So when it was over, my top priority was figure all this out. Like everyone here, I had to climb out of a pit of feelings of victimization. I also had to figure out the relationship of those feelings with other things — like my background and my alife strategies. I also had to get to a point of simply refusing to be the loser that this story — as I first interpreted it — made me, and keep working at this until I not only got back a good return on my investment in this relationship, but left him in the dust as far as what either of us got out of it. And in all of this, I had to discover why he could do what I couldn’t do, locate those undeveloped capabilities in myself, and heal what I had to heal to release them as emotional and intellectual resources I could use.
I keep talking about the stages of healing, but there is also a way to look at it as chapters. Because our set point does keep changing, even though we keep cycling through processing stages as new material rises. What I described above probably brought me to a place where I could really begin to start changing my life. Not just taking care of myself, but going to work on the habits and internal patterns that kept recreating trauma, so that my experience and actions could reach out beyond that. It was probably when I also began to play, beyond the theoretical and into real feeling and influence on my life, with the idea of loving myself.
So you’re initial comment was about whether this had nothing to do with the sociopath. And I’ve written a lot to answer that. As you can see, it did. If he hadn’t shown up, the whole big drama would never have happened. But the stage was also set for this involvement. And in retrospect, I consider myself fortunate that someone so far out on that end of the damage/disorder spectrum showed up, because the polarization of that relationship — my Barbie doll and his gobbling PacMan — illuminated things about myself I really needed to know if I was every going to heal that damage.
The irony or perhaps the symmetry of the story is that we both got what we wanted, although it was more expensive than either of us imagined. If he’d known it was going to last for five years of milking a woman he really didn’t want to be involved with and who demanded so much emotional service, or if I’d known how much pain was going to be involved in me becoming more functional and changing my life, I don’t think either of us would have gone into it.
At another level of meaning, I did win and way more than he did. At least in my estimation. But then I was a lot older, wanted a lot more in terms of personal change. If he had the ability to judge the relationship in the same way I do, he’d say that he won more, because he did change his life in concrete terms. He’s published now, teaching part-time at several universities, admired by a growing group of literary types, and pursuing his doctorate. His writing doesn’t indicate much change in his inner life, but he wasn’t looking for that.
aspergersouls is writing posts that reflect my own feelings about sociopaths and their prevalence and dominance in society. But I also think that they can serve as catalysts for those of us who are ready to wake up, maybe those of us who are ready to reconsider our victimhood and servitude at a deep level. And I suspect that being a deeply damaged survivor is almost a prerequisite for that. Out of those ashes rises not only uncommonly broad perspectives, but the capacity to reconsider the meanings of love, trust and even our responsibilities to ourselves and each other.
She talked last night about waking up, that there are more of us than there are of them. I dropped by my computer late to see what was going on, but didn’t post. Nevertheless, I was tempted to say, “First we heal, then we take on power. Power in the hands of the unhealed leads to misuse of power. Look at the post-colonial nations. We need to understand our own will in the context of self-love and compassion. And then we’re ready for revolution.” But then I thought, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First we heal.
Kathy
aspergersouls, I hear your pain and I am so sorry. This is very difficult and sad, and but maybe it can be undone.
Here is what I’m thinking. It sounds like aspergers people have very good connections to their centers, where the link to everything resides. And their boundaries to the outside world, or maybe their way of gathering information from the everyday world, is shaped by that. Because they are so connected with everything, it’s hard for them to filter input, and they have to develop techniques to manage what they let in. This connection with the center, perhaps. also lets them communicate through a different channel, a dimension that is opened up by that connection. (I know something about this because I had a long, several weeks, experience in this kind of state many years ago.)
So here is something for you to understand. Everyday people have replaced that connection with a kind of internal parent, called a superego. It is constructed of all the ways that they are controlled, through shame and exclusion, by rules. These rules are produced by systems that are largely in control of the masters of hierarchies. In my mind, and probably you would come to this conclusion too, these masters are the pretenders who create and enforce power structures for their own benefit.
Everyday people are not fundamentally bad, and probably have the same capacities as you if they could unlock them, but they and their worlds are shaped by these rules that keep them in fear of shame and exclusion. They feel, because they are taught to feel, that these are rules of survival.
I don’t really believe it was always like this. But I’m not sure. I sometimes think that the human race has never grown up through the necessary stage of learning to use power with compassion. They still, both the pretenders and the everyday people, only see power in terms of individual survival or competition for survival. There are people who are more evolved, but across the whole commonality of Western culture, the power resides in the hands of people who see things in terms of up and down, winners and losers. It’s a pretender mentality that is inevitably forced upon the “serving” classes.
You have the advantage of perspective in this. If you look at what happened to your husband in the everyday world, he began to identify with this wall of rules that gets in the way of connection with everything. It also is designed to block the awareness of personal value and trust in our place in the great circle of life and love. The pretenders don’t want people trusting themselves. So all the values they teach are based on accountability to external rules, not internal truth and values.
I think, if he wants to, you husband can undo this wall and recover his connection. Or maybe a better way of putting it, he can see this wall for what it is, only a collection of rules for getting along in the everyday world that is not really him or about him. It’s just stuff he needs to know, if he going to spend time out there. Because it doesn’t mean that he has to accept their ideas of what’s important, only understand what’s going on with these everyday people.
Nothing is personal to him, even their comments about him. It is only their fear and insecurity being projected onto each other. The equivalent of a lot of frightened people reassuring each other. “You’re doing okay. Am I doing okay? What about him? Is he doing okay? Are we more okay than he is? Well, if he’s less okay than we are, then we must be doing okay.”
As you can see, this is really silly stuff. And it’s only hurtful if you accept the premise that our okay-ness is about all these rules created by the pretenders. You know it’s not. But he, after struggling to succeed out there, has forgotten who he really is, and come to take all this nonsense much too seriously. Most everyday people are brought up to serve masters willingly. You two, for whatever reason, managed to grow up with the capacity to hold onto your connection with your deep selves.
Maybe you are maintaining it so beautifully by keeping yourself secluded from that noisy, damaged world. And maybe he wasn’t so certain as you are that what you have is a huge advantage in perception and values. It’s easy enough to feel yearning to be an insider when you know that you’re part of a minority, no matter how gifted.
But perhaps, at this moment in his life, your husband can gain some perspective on all this. If, as you say, he can move more easily in the outside world and that provides you with money and him with self-respect, he has reason to go back there to work. But he is only going to get hurt again and to feel more loss of who he really is unless he gains some perspective. These comments about him do not come from any authority that he would want to accept, if he thought about it. They are not insightful or compassionate or connected. They are the noise of people who have been separated from their own centers.
He may have to deal with them, and be kind enough not to laugh at them, and be smart enough to attempt to fit in on a superficial level, but even if his connection isn’t working too well right now, he has the memory and knowledge that goes with it to know that he doesn’t have to take any of this seriously. It is not about him, but about them. And he can move through that world, cloaked in his own knowing, without diminishing himself.
I hope this helps. I think about you often, and send you best wishes.
Kathy
for your understanding maybe this will help.
Kathy: I can’t articulate feelings the way you do, I only know your words
say what I feel right now and that is nearly enough. But what hurts the most is that when I hear his voice it takes me back to the illusion that we are still somehow in this soul exchange ‘together’…and I don’t want to give up what we’ve had or have, yet he’s forced the issue that we’re really on different wavelengths, have different ways of doing things that are so glaring that how can I look away?
Now no callback again and think I’ll just make the drive, deposit the stuff – I’ve already told him my plans – for his own strange reasoning, I think he’s choosing to go AWOL again and will probably not show up – I may be on receiving end of his anger if his things are disturbed or the fact of my taking it upon myself to just bring them and leave them there on neutral ground. (and unsafe for him if they end up stolen (sorry about that!…) but he’s never given me a physical address to deal with – I could go to his new employer but that would be rude, not quite sure where it is but could probably find out in future…At any rate, what hurts the most is after the guitar situation is that he would still play these games with me, is so disappointing. I have to remind myself as Erin said and I know…IT IS WHAT IT IS… right now though I just feel so disappointed, so disappointed and hurt. And he’s on to a new job, new people who will find him perfectly engaging and charming.
Guess I better just go hit the road, thanks for listening – and having a place to share.