Imagine a book, a novel, that begins with an explosion on the first page. The explosion disintegrates big things into fragments moving away faster than the eye can follow. There is no way to understand what it means, or know what the world is becoming. The people in the book are either immobilized, their stunned brains on autopilot, trying to gather information. Or they are rushing everywhere, trying to find something to save before the dust even settles. In the background, other people may be fainting or crying. But this book is about the people who are alert, struggling to maintain their identities in a falling-apart world.
This is where traumatic healing begins. The trajectory of healing begins at the point of trauma.
The essence of trauma is loss. We may not understand our trauma as a loss at first. It may feel like a painful blow. Or an experience of confusion or disorientation. Or possibly being stretched beyond our comfort zone, and then beyond. Or we may perceive one type of loss, and then discover a more important loss that only becomes clear later. These reasons are hints of why it takes so long to process certain types of trauma.
The personal stories at Lovefraud give evidence of many types of losses. We have lost money and possessions, jobs and careers, family and friends, years of our lives, physical and mental health. And we are the survivors of relationships with sociopaths. Many of us know someone or know of someone who cannot be here with us, because they gave up on their lives through suicide or got lost in depressions, psychotic breaks or self-destructive behavior.
In some ways, what happened to us is like a situation of unrequited love. We loved someone. They didn’t love us back. It’s a sad, but everyday occurrence. In some ways, it is like an investment that did not work out. Another everyday occurrence. There are certain types of losses that are considered “normal,” expected, and things that people just get over, preferably sooner rather than later. Because they are just part of the randomness of the world that sometimes gives us what we want and sometimes does not. And we are expected to have the everyday skills of dealing with losses and moving on.
But this is not what happened to us, and we know it. We may not know what exactly happened, but we know it was momentous. To us. Because we can’t snap back. Our everyday strategies to minimize losses — saying it didn’t matter, turning our attention to something more positive, making a joke about it, finding some quick fix of our favorite “little drug” to make ourselves feel better — don’t work. We are destabilized at a fundamental level.
What happened?
If asked about what happened to us in a love relationship with a sociopath, most of us would probably sooner or later use the term “betrayal.” Or being conned. Or being used by someone who didn’t care about us. Or being led to believe in a love or partnership that never really existed. Or being targeted for exploitation.
But all of these descriptions of what happened emerge from later thought, after we try to figure it out. To understand what happened at the time, it might be easier to just work with the terms “shock” and “disappointment.”
Like the people in the first chapter of the imaginary book, something happened that simply astonished us. In a bad way. The explosion took place in beliefs that are fundamental to our identity. A destruction of the most basic source of our emotional security — our ideas about ourselves and our world that we take for granted.
Reactions to trauma
Whether or not we consciously grasp the fundamental nature of this trauma, our primitive survival system does. And it reacts instantaneously to restore a semblance of stability so that we can go on. Instantaneous emotional responses fall into two basic categories — expansion and contraction.
Anyone who has ever been attacked by verbal or physical violence is familiar with the “contraction” reaction. There is a feeling of retreating inward and condensing our consciousness to a small, tight, still, watchful point inside us. We shut down emotionally and separate from what is happening to us.
If this state continues, we become split inside ourselves, often at war with ourselves because part of our experience is not acknowledged as part of us. The parts that “don’t count” or “aren’t real” can become internal restrictions on what is safe to remember or feel. The fear of experiencing the trauma becomes converted to alienation, anger and aggressive defense.
The “expansion” reaction is related to awareness that our previous boundaries of identity have been breached and partly demolished. Our relationship to the rest of the world, in we were defined by our boundaries as separate and “owned” by ourselves, becomes diffused. We may initially feel euphoric, “spacy” feelings as endorphins flood our brain to counteract pain. Our sudden difficulty in determining where we end and the outside world begins may be perceived as ”˜destiny” feelings of being chosen or that we belong in the abusive drama.
If this goes on, our separate feelings, values and desires may become increasingly difficult to identify, articulate or defend. In our dealings with external reality we may becoming increasingly ungrounded, “fleeing to higher ground” where we cling to high moral or spiritual principles with a diminished ability to recognize or integrate information that does not match our view of life as it should be. Except for these principles, we may become increasingly dependent on others for information about who we are or our role in relationships or the world at large.
One of the reasons that relationship experts strongly suggest terminating a relationship in which we are shocked and disappointed more than once, is that each time this happens, a trauma occurs. They may be relatively small traumas, and we may think we are managing them. But these little explosions can do more than hurt our feelings. If we internalize their implications about who we are or our role in the world, they literally undermine the structure of our identity. Whether we expand or contract in response, we are slipping farther away from an open, healthy understanding of ourselves as separate, self-governed beings with full use of our emotional resources.
These instantaneous reactions occur at a deep layer of consciousness, where we may not be aware of them. Even though we are adults who, in reality, are free to act on our circumstances and to choose the meaning we ultimately assign to a trauma, these first reactions are the equivalent of the emergency workers who rush to the scene of a fire, extinguishing it no matter what kind of damage they do to the structure in order to stop the blaze. They provide temporary re-wiring to help us get through the immediate disorientation. Later comes the clean-up and rebuilding.
Why we are vulnerable
If we have early history of trauma, as many victims of sociopaths do, that emergency rewiring may already exist as a result of earlier events when our higher levels of thinking were not yet developed. That primitive adaptive wiring may still be in use, because we did not have the independent circumstances that enabled us to act freely or assign our own meaning without concern about outside influences. First-response emergency reactions may still be embedded as the “best response” in the working structures of our personalities, coloring our fundamental views of our position in the world and our life strategies.
The model of trauma response that I am describing to you is based on a synthesis of early childhood development theory, neurological research, and theories about the environmental basis of personality disorders. It is also the beginning of the entire model of grief processing, where the nature of the challenge that we face is to learn something.
In the event of trauma, the first thing that we learn is that we are surprised and disappointed. The context of this learning is that something happens from outside of us that challenges our beliefs about who we are and our role in the world. Throughout our entire life, every person goes through these challenges. It is part of growing up and maturing as a human being in this world.
However, certain types of challenges are especially painful and difficult to process at any age, no matter what internal resources we may have. The characteristics of these events include:
1. Disrespecting — we are not recognized as worth caring about
2. Devaluing — we are used for someone else’s purposes or experience a “force of nature” event, and therefore not separate or special
3. Abandoning — our world does not prevent this from happening
One of the reasons that an understanding of early childhood development is so important to this model is the concept of “good enough parenting.” The infancy and early childhood years are the period in which we separate and develop a separate identity from the “source of all good,” our mothers or surrogate mothers. In developing this separate identity, we also learn freedom to explore and develop independent knowledge and skills.
Ultimately, we come to recognize too that we are not the whole world. And that we live with people whose feelings and intentions are not always the same as ours, as well as material circumstances — like traffic, the force of gravity and things that are not good to eat — that limit what we can do without damage to ourselves.
If we make it through the “good enough parenting” successfully, the “source of all good” that was in the beginning survives in our view of the world and our perceptions of ourselves as part of it. We learn that we have the power to transform vision to reality through our own efforts. Although our world places limits upon us, sometimes discovered in pain, our foundational belief is that we live in an essentially loving and supportive place. The style of nurture we receive is internalized to become skills of comforting ourselves after an unexpected disappointment, extracting meaning that empowers to better navigate the world, and moving on to new goals.
Unprocessed trauma — that is trauma that is not treated with comfort and support of learning and moving on — literally stops that developmental process. Or throws us back into regression, undoing what we may have already learned. If we don’t have the internalized skills of “good enough parenting” a resource, for whatever reason, our built-in need to complete this developmental “thread” of growing up makes us like homing devices seeking the missing pieces to complete it.
Seeking security. Seeking encouragement and support. Seeking freedom to act without risk of abandonment. Seeking emotional comfort. Repetitively seeking the same missing elements and recreating the same relationship patterns as we try to “make right” something that failed in our histories.
Fast healing
In trauma at the identity level, there is only one way to resolve it immediately. That is to fully recognize that the “problem” is external. To activate self-comforting mechanisms to soothe the pain of the shocking disappointment. To extract meaning from the event that empowers us to better navigate the world. And to move on.
These skills are what we see in people who react quickly to everyday traumas, who recognize threats to their wellbeing or early hints of dysfunction in systems or relationships. These are people who respond with apparent coolness, clarity or rationality to suffering around them, or to other people’s projection of meaning upon them. They are centered in their own identity maintenance processes. It occurs naturally for them. Because they are compassionate with themselves, they have no lack of compassion for others. But they also have perspective about what is “about them” and what isn’t.
All of this depends on unshakable belief that the world, including ourselves, is essentially a benevolent place. As all of us know, the learning opportunities of life become increasingly challenging. As our lives progress, we invest ourselves in relationships, careers, children and possessions. Every life includes losses and failures. The more we have invested, the more we believe that something is part of our identity, the more painful a loss or failure is. Every life includes huge challenges to our beliefs that we can survive, that we are good people in a good world, that suffering and pain are the exception rather than the rule.
Unmanageable trauma
Beyond the characteristics of particularly painful and difficult-to-process trauma noted above, there are certain circumstances that magnify the challenge we face.
1. The sense that we have been targeted
2. The intensity or scope of the loss
3. The persistence or repeated nature of the trauma
Of these, the last one is the most debilitating. If we have a pre-existing weakness in our trauma-processing skills, do not respond quickly as we recognize a threat to our wellbeing or cannot escape from the situation for some reason, repeated and continuing identity trauma has the effect of cumulatively weakening both the foundation beliefs of our identity and our ability to process loss.
This is the true risk in an ongoing relationship with a sociopath or with anyone who threatens our core beliefs about the essentially benevolent nature of our identity or our world. Many of us make choices to be educated in ways that challenge our beliefs. Attending a philosophy class or learning to ski or starting our own businesses are all equivalent to volunteering for significant learning experiences that we can expect to push us beyond our comfort zones. But we go into them voluntarily, bringing our identity maintenance skills with us, and have the intention of consciously integrating what we learn into who we are.
A relationship with a sociopath is different. The learning challenges we face in the experience are completely different from what we volunteered for.
Not one word of this piece has discussed the sociopath’s characteristic behaviors. This will be discussed in later parts. But from the perspective of our own wellbeing, in particular our healthy maintenance of our identities and our relationship with the world at large, a relationship with a sociopath subjects us to a series of traumatic blows that become more and more difficult to process, and that essentially cultivate diffusion of identity for the sociopath’s purposes.
The next step of healing
Just as the first step of healing occurs while we are “in” the trauma, the second step is likely to begin when we are still in the relationship. Either literally involved with the sociopath as our partner in life, or still attached emotionally to the sociopath with hope for a good resolution. However it also includes internal activities of trying to reframe the situation intellectually, because its apparent meaning is too threatening to our beliefs about our identity and the nature of the world.
This next stage is when we first begin to process beyond the emergency reactions. In the model I am presenting to you, it incorporates both of the “denial” and “bargaining” stages of the Kubler-Ross grief model.
Until then, Namaste. The deep secure wisdom in me salutes the deep secure wisdom in you.
Kathy
P.S. Here’s a fragment from one of my poems, written in the midst of my recovery process.
They say you can’t learn
until you lose what you love.
They say you can’t get there
until you give up trying.
They say that the way
is through flinging yourself
toward all you ever wanted and loss
that breaks your heart,
dries your spirit to jerking sinew,
and then burns your hope
on the sidewalk in front of you.
They say, through all the waiting silence
you just don’t hear, that it’s not until
nothing is there in the mirror
but a monkey playing its toy violin
that you see
with eyes like windows into another country.
That you see.
Hi all,
I know NC is best but deep down inside all of us wishes we would get that well-deserved apology. My ex could never say “I’m sorry”…ever. So, I had to listen to the apology, even if it was fake when he called last Friday. But, with that said, my energy was getting back to normal when all the sudden I got the call and then I went backwards a bit. But, I am going to move on. I don’t want to sit at home for years pining over the pain. I don’t want to look back and say to myself, “why the hell did I stay home all those years when I could have gone out and met someone interesting to talk to?” I just don’t want to stay at home being a rotting carcus LOL!! Thank God I have a great support group to keep me on the path to recovery. I told my cousin that the ex called to apologize and she said “look me in the eyes and tell me you will never never think of going back with him. think of all the things he did to you and how ill he made you.” This blog helps alot too. You all are very supportive.
If we’re still “involved” with the sociopath at some level, we’re still healing. And people do sense that. We may want some of the benefits of dating — the human contact, maybe the feelings of excitement or the attention — but we’re not really emotional available.
This has been my experience.
I dated while I was still “inside” the relationship, during the breaks when we were not seeing each other. I was trying to find alternatives, but I was still dealing with too much attachment to him, too much confusion about my own role in the relationship, and too much fear that I was walking into something equally bad. Even when the people I dated know about my situation and were compassionate towards me. Absolutely nothing anyone could do at that point could make me feel relaxed about getting involved with someone else.
Now, several years after the relationship ended and I’ve gone through a long healing process, I find that I’m still learning how to “do relationships.” Not so much because of PSTD-type reactivity to every little thing. It’s more that I’ve learned a lot about myself and what I want. What I want out of a relationship is different. At the same time I’m getting to know someone, I’m feeling my way along in my own behaviors, trying to stay in touch with what seems authentic in me.
Every time I spend some time with someone new — whether it’s a date or just a chance encounter — I feel like I’ve learned a little more about who the “new me” is in social situations. The defensive boundary maintainer that I was for a while is beginning to relax. Though I still tend to be a nervous talker and a competitive debater, I’m really working on listening more. Not just for social reasons, but because I’m interested and don’t want to miss anything. I’m becoming less analytical, not trying to figure other people out, but just letting them be.
Because I’m so much better touch with my own emotional responses, and so much more willing to share how I feel about something, I’m pretty confident that I can deal with anything that makes me feel uncomfortable on the spot. Sometimes that means I speak up, and sometimes it means that I just decide that I don’t like what this person does or thinks, and I don’t want to be around it.
That’s how important my feelings are to me now. It doesn’t mean that we can’t work it out later, but once I have an uncomfortable experience with someone, they’re on a countdown. If I decide to give them a second chance, the next time is the last time.
The interesting thing about this whole pattern is that it has completely changed my social environment. I really like the people I spent time with regularly, because they are open and authentic too. It’s like I’ve landed on another planet. I’m a newbie here, still feeling my way along. I have old habits that don’t work here — like sarcasm. I’m learning from the example of people around me. It’s not like everyone is emotionally clear all the time, but when they’re not, that’s clear too. I don’t love anyone. I’m not looking for that. I’m looking for companionship and connection. To me, it’s more valuable than that whacked-out thing I used to call love.
But all of this is the result of going through the whole healing process. From the worst of it when I didn’t know whether to hate him or myself more, through surrender to the fact that I had lost a lot and that I was seriously screwed up as the result of this relationship, to getting to know what was real in me underneath all this drama, to learning to take care of myself in new ways, to going through a spiritual reawakening as a result of exercising kindness and compassion toward myself. Then, I was ready to share myself with other people with a sense of what I wanted and who I wanted to be in relationships.
Trying to get into another relationship while all the issues from the last one were still unresolved put me in a situation where I was replaying those issues. I was replaying the broken trust stuff. I was trying to repair my self-esteem by manipulating someone else for strokes. I was putting my needs, in general, on someone else, when I was still trying to heal from not getting my needs met in the previous relationship. In other words, I was needy. Not the way to begin again with any hope of a healthy result.
I don’t know if this matches anyone else’s experience. I know that I got a lot of well-intentioned advice from friends to get out and have a fling, put some good memories between him and me. They saw it as a way to rebuild my confidence.
I couldn’t do that, not after it finally ended. I was too upset. I couldn’t even imagine what a good time looked like, except as something like a drug to relieve my pain. And I knew that acting out of that kind of sickness wasn’t going to make me well.
So I did other well-making things. Worked with energy healers, like reiki and accupuncture. Cleaned up my diet, and adjusted it to improve things like acidity, blood sugar and stress hormones. Found people who had wisdom about emotional healing processes. Developed a relationship with a psychic who both monitored my emotional energy and gave me some good advice. And I went to work on understanding what happened, why I allowed this guy into my life and why it was so hard to detach.
I think what I’m trying to say here is that anything I did to try to short-circuit this process of healing didn’t work for me. Because the pain that the relationship with the sociopath produced really raised some powerful personal issues in me that would not be ignored. I had to heal first, fix my relationship with myself, before I even thought about beginning a relationship with someone else that involved trust and honesty.
I wonder,
You say you want to hear the apology.
What I wanted to hear was this, “I know you were better to me than I deserved. I know how hard you tried to give me everything I said I wanted. It didn’t look like I noticed, but I did. I was just too wrapped up in my selfishness, and I behaved like a spoiled brat. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll do everything in my power to make it work this time.”
I laid awake one night, putting this speech together. It was the thing that would, I decided, really heal me. I didn’t know if I would say yes, if he said it. But it would fix all the pain I was living with. I visualized the whole thing, where it would happen, how we’d be sitting, everything.
I didn’t really expect it ever to happen, but it helped me to just figure out exactly what I wanted. In a letter my wise Buddhist friend, I told him about the exercise. Here is his response:
“Kathy, when are you going to turn to yourself for this kind of validation?”
There were a lot of important moments in my healing path, but this was really a ground-shaker. I could feel some big cog turning in the center of me when I read this letter from my friend. It was a possibility I never thought of, looking inside myself for what I was desperate to get from him.
So, Iwonder, just as an exercise, maybe you could test how it feels to apologize to yourself, with all the compassion of someone who understands every bit of what you’ve been through. Maybe find an adult self inside who can comfort the disappointed dreamer. You deserve that apology, wherever it comes from.
Hi Kath H:
Thanks. It sure is crazy how we approach new encounters after we’ve been destroyed. I’m going through the healing process that’s for sure. And, what we also need to remember is that we don’t know where the other person is coming from when we meet someone new. Perhaps the other people i meet had experiences with sociopaths and are looking at me like I’m a sociopath! LOL!!!
Anyway, about the apology, the ex did apologize. He contacted me out of the blue last Friday to pour out his heart felt sorry for what he did to me. It wasn’t a dream but just as well may have been because who knows if he really meant what he said. Who knows for what diabalicle reason that apology was given. I keep thinking he only wants to re-connect because the OW is running out of money.
I wonder,
You hit the nail on the head. You’ll never know if he means it. And the reality is, he’ll only “mean it” if he think it will work to get something from you.
That’s why nothing we get from them helps us heal. All they project is illusions. Because you are a sincere person, it’s hard for you to grasp. But once you get it, they’re relatively simple to understand.
When you look for something to hold onto, something that’s not an illusion, you’ll find it in yourself. You may not understand that right now, but you will as you progress with your healing.
He is not real. Nothing he says is real. Nothing he does.
But you are. You can depend on your own truth, and your own wisdom. It’s there for you, and you’ll find it. When you do, you’ll think about him, or look at him and see that there’s nothing there. Just a shell, a mask with nothing behind it, but a weak person who has to use other people’s feelings and other people’s achievements and other people’s good qualities to pretend to be someone.
And you are nothing like that. You’re going to be amazed at how strong you are at the center, and at what you can do.
This is where you’re headed. And you’re on the path right now.
KH: Interesting that you mention sarcasm. I’ve heard from a number of sources that the Universe operates from simple, plain communication. Irony, sarcasm, anything that throws a twist or a kink into the communication is something that can garble our transmission of intention.
I noticed that the more I worked with energy, and the more clear I felt, the less I could indulge any sort of twist in my conversation? (Ya think! Hand slapped to forehead as I come up with a sheepish grin!)
So I’ve been practicing. I had someone accuse me recently of being sarcastic when I was making every effort to state the plain truth in the simplest and least judgmental terms. Imagine if I had actually been trying to communicate a put-down! The person didn’t care for the statement of fact, but the fact needed — in that context — to be stated. At least I could be clear with myself that I had made every effort to eliminate a negative spin in my communication.
I’ve been working on this plain communication for a long time. To have had a pathological deceiver step into my zone, and fool me for so long, was a shocker on so many levels. But I see how I needed to learn that this sort of (so-called!) human exists, so that I can be appropriately wary.
Kathy:
“What I wanted to hear was this, “I know you were better to me than I deserved. I know how hard you tried to give me everything I said I wanted. It didn’t look like I noticed, but I did. I was just too wrapped up in my selfishness, and I behaved like a spoiled brat. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll do everything in my power to make it work this time.”
You’re right it will neve happen.
Today I got a lette from S, in response to the collection letters I’ve been sending out to him. Nasty. Self-serving. Manipulative. When I saw it on the page in black and white, something in me died.
One word of appreciation? No. On word of gratitude. No.
Something in me died today, when I read that letter. And then something in me sprang to life.
I wrote a response in which I responded to every blasted thing he said. And I have to admit there were some really good zingers.
Then, I realized I will never hear from him what I want to. And I also decided I wasn’t going to give him one more ounce of ammunition to use against me.
So. as we used to say in the screen-biz, I killed my darlings. All those good lines were deleted. My response was pure business. Bloodless. Cold.
I hung him with his own words. He didn’t realize by replying in writing, he gave me what I needed from a business/tax pespective to nail his sorry ass to a wall. (I’ll discuss all this in an ariticle I”m writing for this site).
Maybe he wasn’t at the top of his game when he wrote that letter because he’s on drugs. Maybe he’s as stupid as I always suspected.
Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I got my answer — painful as it may be — in writing — that I was nothing but a source of supply to him.
Hey Matt: Good for you. The less you give them, the less they can manipulate, and the more of your own self you keep where you can draw on it for your OWN strength.
I’m glad you can take steps to reclaim, recover. And I’m glad for you — painful as it is — that he didn’t leave you with a tease of hope that maybe, just maybe, this could work out.
You deserve someone who is truly present, not this shell.
Rune:
When he wrote — direct quote — we were “together”. Together. In quotes. Demeaning? Understatement. I felt like such a fool for how much I put into our relationship.
The letter was also vintage sociopath. These creatures are really like walking wires — he spouted back — verbatim — statements, convesations, etc.
I saved the intitial letter I wrote him. In my article I’m going to use it as an example of what NOT to write in business dealings with an ex-S. But, damn, I did get off some great lines.
Ah, Matt. Big of you to admit that you fed him info that he then used. Golly — no matter how smart we are, they get at us because they NEVER think the way we do.
Such material we have!