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.
Henry:
Thanks. Except for the first date, and a handful of drinks here and there, I never got anything from S. I plunged into the red, like you, “trying to keep him entertained”. Unless I was waving my AMEX card in his face, he had no interest in spending time with me.
And mine was constantly bored or frustrated or irritable. I twisted myself into knots trying to keep the peace and make him happy.
What amazed when I got the letter was that he was disputing a check I wrote on his behalf to the Department of Homeland Security to get him a replacement certificate of naturalization so that he could get a passport.
His response? “I told you I couldn’t afford that trip.”
Afford? I paid every blasted penny of that trip from hell.
But, more importantly, the nitwit doesn’t recognize that by my helping him to get a passport I gave him the means to replace all his other State and Federal identification which was destroyed because — oh, yes, your shiftless ex-partner couldn’t have been bothered to pick it up when you wrere sent to prison.
I’ve really come to see the absurdity in his (their) thinking. I offered S the world on a plate. If he were smart, and treated me even somewhat decently, he could have run a long con and run me into the ground financially and emotionally. He sold himself out for chump change.
KH: Do I want the relationship or the outcome? Interesting question to apply to just about any situation.
I’ll repeat your words, for this discussion: “If you want the relationship, you speak to their comfort zone or motivators, and let the meaning of what you wanted to communicate get watered down to the level they can understand it. If you want the outcome, you stay ruthlessly on point, and if they can’t understand you, you let it be their problem and find someone who will understand you.” And you’re right, in the hierarchy of where we are on our path of growth, those who are a couple of steps behind are likely to react with fear or anger.
I’m still going to raise the meta-question here: as valuable as these insights are, do they pertain when we’re dealing with S/Ps? I actually don’t think so — because they will turn any of that back on us, keeping us thinking that there’s some sort of relationship, some kind of real communication. They will “water down” their (lying) statement to our comfort level, or stay ruthlessly on point and bully us into their desired outcome.
Does that make sense to you? You sound like a gifted communicator with a great understanding of human interactions — that ultimately fail (or distract you) when you’re dealing with one of these slippery sobs.
Matt: I maintain that they are NOT greedy: they’re too disorganized to really be greedy. Like you say, he could have played a little nicer and taken you on a long con. Interesting that his ex-partner didn’t bother to salvage all that personal documentation. Maybe he also realized what he was dealing with and decided to just let the wreckage be as bad as it might.
Something that makes me very uneasy here is that this kind of misadventure makes it all the more difficult for people who truly are in dire straits through no great fault of their own. How to tell the difference between someone with a great pity story who just wants a handout, and someone who is knocked to the ground — for example, by an S/P — who is trying to get back up and into self-sufficiency.
Notice how the ways they burn us continue to impact others in negative ways. Your next relationships — friends or lovers — will have to endure a different level of scrutiny and suspicion before you will let them come close. And that’s conceivably a loss for them and you. Ahhh, their very existence creates such a tar-pit of energetic goo.
Morning All My LF Friends – Rune it is too cold this morning to open the windows. I have cleansed my home of his residue, long ago. Still have few things out doors that trigger emotions, but come nice weasther I will dig those up and be rid of them as well. I keep telling my self to leave the rose bushes and the lillies and iris’s we planted and maybe in time they wont trigger painful thoughts. But after one year I know I have to remove all trigger’s, not because I am mean or bitter but because these things were planted with (a future with him in mind) and they just have to go. I am healing my life, healing all the hurt before he came along. I think he will always be the (reminder) of just how (wrong) I was seeing and living life. In a way my 3 years of frickin bliss with him has changed me into a better person, more aware, more informed, but the rose bushes have too go~~~!!!!!!
Rune:
I have to admit I’ve always wondered what’s going on in his ex-partner’s head. During the entire course of our so-called relationship the ex-partner was meddling and vowing “to win S back.”
The two of them never could disengage. I still remember the first time I met the ex — at an XMAS party hosted by the ex and his new boyfiriend. S and ex shared this very warm kiss, calling eachother “ex-husbands.” The new boyfriend and I exchanged looks. The new boyfriend walked a month later. Smart man.
The ex-partner was still paying for storage of S’s things. At the end I finally decided, “if you want S back, he’s all yours”.
S told me his ex couldn’t be bothered to pick up his identification. A friend of the ex’s told me the ex called him on the way to the prison to pick up the things. Who knows? I think you’re right — at that moment he realized what he was dealing with and decided to just let the wreckage be. Problem was, he never achieved the clarity we did and S still has his hook in the ex.
Henry: So there will be a time when the weather is warmer when those plants will want to be transplanted. They can be a gift to a school — let the kids take this on as a nature/science projec, or maybe you know someone else who would be happy to receive the plants. The plants aren’t at fault, and that way you can move their energy forward for some good.
I think you have something to look forward to, in letting those plants go! Perhaps you want to think about what you will plant in their place? Maybe NOT narcissus!!
Henry,
You keep talking about “he DID give me money”—NO! NO! NO! He did NOT “give you money” he contributed a LITTLE to the upkeep of the house, groceries, utilities etc, but NOT EVEN ENOUGH TO PAY HIS “SHARE.”
When my husband was alive, we both had incomes, he did not “GIVE me money” if I asked him for money (cash) to run to town to buy anything, even if what I bought was for ME alone. HE CONTRIBUTED TO OUR MUTUAL UPKEEP, I CONTRIBUTED TO OUR MUTUAL UPKEEP.
Since my husband’s income was more in large chunks from his consulting, and mine was in a weekly pay check there were times (months even) that my husband had NO income, but over all the years it turned out to be pretty much 50/50. In one contract that he worked for 6 months, he paid for our entire home, hangar, barn after taxes. He made like $240 an HOUR on that contract for six months. He didn’t work again for nearly a year at a paid job and I worked every day. Was I “supporting him?” NO, of course not. We pooled our resources in such a way that I gave 100% and he gave 100% of what we each had at the time for our mutual upkeep.
The last few years of my husband’s life, I made more money than he did, and he actually spent more than I did, but like I said it was a PARTNERSHIP, so during those few years I didn’t feel like I was “giving him money” we just bought what we both needed, and paid for it with OUR resources. I paid the bills (writing the checks) and so actually knew more about our financial position than he did, and sometimes he would want to buy something that I would inform him he didn’t need to buy right then, or to show him that it wouldn’t give a good “return” on investment—we worked things out so that each of us had 100% of what we NEEDED and the majority of what we wanted. WE COOPERATED.
Before we married we had a pre-nup, because at the time we married he was still reeling from the psychopaths that had stolen his business and was pretty broke of assets. It was more to protect my assets from his children in the case I died before he did. After his death, it turned out that his kids were wonderful to me and it wasn’t necessary. In fact, the Family Trust that my husband and my parents and I set up with the farm was to protect ALL OUR ASSETS from C’s wife (that none of us trusted then) and from my P-son to protect him from himself. (turned out though that our attorney had not been as wise as we thought and there was a LOOP HOLE in there that P-son tried to circumvent by having me killed before my mom died so he could not be “disinherited” completely.
In many relationships one partner makes more money than the other one, or one makes ALL the money and the other one “lives on the income of the other party.” There isn’t anything wrong with this if that is the way both of them are happy. Lots of “stay at home moms” are “supported” by their spouses. I even know some “stay at home dads” that their wives make the living.
What I did l ook at though was when I was a “stay at home mom” and then my P father in law took advantage of my mentally ill husband I ended up BROKE WITH NOTHING AT ALL, literally living in the back of my pick up truck with my kids and nothing but a camper shell between us and the elements. It HAPPENS. So, when I married my late husband, I took in to consideration that “Chit happens” that we don’t expect and I kept a “reserve of cash” that was in my name ONLY. He also had a reserve of cash in HIS NAME ONLY. (at my insistance) We were INTER-DEPENDENT, not dependent.
I will never trust my financial independence to ANYONE except myself. I will never again be financially DEPENDENT on anyone. I will paddle my own canoe even if I were in a relationship with someone I trusted and loved. It isn’t about lack of “trust” it is about COMMON GOOD SENSE. CHIT HAPPENS. Emergencies. Things no one could foresee.
I will never spend down to my last dollar again. I will never go into debt again. Even if it means that I live in a tent and eat out of McDonald’s dumpsters. No one owes me a living and I don’t owe anyone else a living.
If someone has reached adulthood WITHOUT A RECORD OF GOOD MONEY MANAGEMENT and RELIABILITY IN EMPLOYMENT, why on earth would I want to SUPPORT A MOOCH?
I have a really super good friend (male) that I have known since college when we were buddies then. He is a GREAT guy, but his money management is pitiful. Though he has always worked (sometimes two job) he manages his money for squat and is always in the red or down to his last penny. He does own a paid fo rhome, etc. though, but I declined an offer of romance with him because Iknew he would always be on the thin edge of down to his last dime, and that would drive bananas. He and I just don’t have the same ideas of money management. I am glad to loan him money from time to time and he always pays it back, and ALWAYS GIVES ME COLLATERAL to hold (usually in the form of Gold coins) in case he were to die before the debt was repaid. I also charge him interest at double the rate I get on my CDs. B ut as great a guy as he is, I know that there would be no way we could be compatible with financial issues. That may sound trite to some people but I am wise enough and know him well enough and myself well enough to know that we would be fighting over money from day 2 after the marriage. LOL
My mother is at a point in her life now that she thinks that GIVING or loaning money to others is her only way to get them to do her bidding…so she is willing to cast me aside and PAY others (unfortunately she has picked Ps who don’t come through with their part of the bargain) to do her bidding. She isn’t able to see that what I would have GIVEN for love, she cannot BUY with Bill Gate’s money. She didn’t trust that she could have had my love and care as a GIFT. So, now she has nothing.
Another thing about what we WRITE to them. Back before the “big chaos” in our lives, I kept writing to my P-son, POURING OUT MY HEART, begging him to help me convince my mother to “get off my back” with her demands and failkure to respect my boundaries that I was trying to set. I was CRAZY AS A CHIT-HOUSE RAT, and guess what, brothers and sisters! He sent her copies of these letters to inflame her against me. He was o nly “concerned” that I was going crazy and trying to “help me.”
He even went so far as to DIAGNOSE A BRAIN TUMOR was the reason that I was “crazy” and not doing everyone’s bidding. A BRAIN TUMOR FOR GOODNESS SAKES. LOL I could not believe the arrogance of a man who had been in prison his entire life, who had a GED “diagnosing” a brain tumor in all his medical training and wisdom! LOL ROTFLMAO But believe it or NOT, she bought that and agreed with him. Didn’t keep her from abusing me though, or make her have PITY on her daughter with a “brain tumor” just made her treat me worse!
In fact, this whole situation is so OFF THE WALL it is enough to make me LAUGH MY BUTT OFF NOW, but at the time, I was “crazy” with pain and grief. The more they persecuted me the more I tried to “make them see how they were hurting me.” The more I tried to make them see, the more AMMUNITION THEY HAD.
When I went to court to try to get the Troan Horse Psychopath and sex offender thrown out of her house (I did get a temporary order from the judge) I even had a letter from my psychiatrist inserted in the documents saying I was “not crazy” and that I was RATIONAL and in touch with REALITY and that my judgment appeared to be sound.
She and the Ps were trying to use the fact that I was seeing a psychiatrist as “proof” I was “crazy.” (and that nothing I said was rational.)
Letting them have ANY information is a BIG “NO NO”
yes Oxy I know – just enuff money to apease me – just enuff money to keep me from feeling like a sugar daddy – just enuff money to keep his name on the mail box – sometimes I think my computer was the only reason he ( paid rent)
Rune, in response to your question of whether the relationship or outcome approach is relevant to dealing with sociopaths, here’s how I think it is.
For us, dealing with a sociopath is a long exercise in cultivating relationship. After the love-bombing, when they’ve got us hooked, they withdraw relationship perks to control us. They communicate that if we do what they want, they’ll dole out some emotional goodies.
I know in my own experience, the relationship overtook every other outcome in my mind. In the pain associated with his withdrawing positive attention, it became the only outcome, as I did everything I could think of to make him care about me. To get some emotional security from him. To even get some positive attention.
This is a sick situation because we lose touch with what we want. This is a very simplistic way of saying it, but our normal “I want” perspectives become more and more diminished, as we become more and more focused on curing this one issue in our lives. It’s why we talk about compromising ourselves. We think we can live without one thing after another that was previously part of our baseline expectations of our lives.
Something that happens when we change our minds about these relationships, and again that’s a simplistic way of putting it because it isn’t usually so cut and dried, is that we start recovering our sense of our own objectives. Those objectives may be as conceptual as recovering our dignity or self-esteem. Or it may be very concrete, like wanting to use our financial resources for our own good, rather than being bled off by someone we don’t even really like.
If you look at the description of the tactics of Matt and Henry’s ex’s, they are trying to control the conversation in a way that compels their victim/sources to participate in a relationship mode, rather than an outcome mode. They are trying to shift the focus away from what Matt and Henry want from a position of healthy self-interest into a kind of quasi-communal appeal. (I use communal loosely here to mean any kind “we” orientation.) They are calling on social training as lovers, friends, “good” or “nice” people, and subliminally threatening them with exclusion because they are failing to behave in a way that would be communally acceptable. This is one of sociopaths’ primary gaslighting techniques.
Now, I’m talking in very high-level terms, and generalizing wildly. I understand that, but I’m trying to present a model of understanding that you can play with.
When our healthy self-interest rises sufficiently to demand (our) attention, it causes us to focus on outcomes rather than relationship. It’s an internal choice, or a switch we turn inside ourselves. The switch may be for the duration of a single interaction, when we demand to get our needs met, or it may be for eternity, when we look at that person and realize that there is no potential at all to get our needs met.
Here is a dialogue from my history that might be an example of what I’m talking about:
Me: I can take care of my own finances now. I want full control of my corporate bank account back. I’m writing the bank to remove your signature from the account. (outcome)
Ex: You’re breaking our agreement. I knew you weren’t trustworthy. (relationship)
Me: I’m sorry you feel that way, but this was a temporary situation, and now I want to manage my own money. (outcome)
Ex: I don’t know why you insist on making me a victim of your anxieties. You know that we’re happier as a couple when you let me take care of these things. (relationship)
Me: That may be true, but I’m not comfortable with anyone else, including you, having access to these funds. I’m responsible for the salaries and bill payments, and if anything goes wrong, I’m going to have to deal with the repercussions. So I want to manage this myself. (outcome)
Ex: Well, then I’m not sure that I want to be involved with you anymore. You clearly don’t trust me, and that is really demotivating. Since you don’t really care about the relationship, I guess I should just cancel our vacation plans. (relationship)
You’ll notice that everything he says is designed to shift my attention away from what I want to threats or promises related to the relationship (all of which depend on my compliance). When I don’t shift my attention, the threats and promises escalate, or he brings in additional factors that may work to shift my attention.
But in this transaction, what I was doing was a technique that I learned a long time ago from a friend that took some Parent Effectiveness Training classes. It’s called the “I want” strategy. The way it works is that, no matter what the other person says, you acknowledge it and then return to your original “I want.” This is objective-based communication in its purest form.
With children, it helps to shift their attention to the fact that there is another person who may have a different set of “I want” feeling than they do. It’s gentle, but persistent, and is part of training them to look for win-win solutions.
However, it can also be an educational experience if you are engaged in a sociopathic situation. Because it will eventually evolve to something like this:
Me: Well, I’d hate to see us break up over this, but I really want sole control of the corporate money. It is my money. I do have my reasons.
Ex: You, you, you, it’s always about you. What about me?
Me: This is not about you. This is about me and my money. Don’t you care about how I feel about this? Or the fact that I’m at risk here?
Ex: No, I really don’t see what that has to do with the situation. All I see is that you are demoting me, distrusting me, and treating me like someone you can push around. This is now how you treat someone you care about.
Through all the gaslighting that’s going on here, something has become very clear. He doesn’t care about what I want. He doesn’t care about my feelings. He doesn’t care about placing me at risk. That’s the kind of thing you frequently learn in insisting on pressing your own outcome on a sociopath.
Not always. If they view your outcome as something they can acquiesce on in order to get a bigger prize, you may see them comply with bad grace. Or with some other form of cooperativeness that has a strange false air to it. And if they do comply, they’ll probably make you pay for that “win” later, in order to restore their sense of dominance.
But what you will not see or hear is genuine acknowledgment of your feelings, concerns and wants. First because they can’t do it from any position of true empathy. Second, because it would weaken their negotiating position, and that’s against their internal rules.
Knowing that they don’t care is a powerful bit of knowledge. It takes most of us a long time to understand that, as much as they manipulate us with communal rules, they don’t operate by them. When we realize that everything they do is based on self-interest and have they have no concern about its impact on anyone else (except in keeping their sources breathing so they can keep on giving), that knowledge helps keep us from being divertedinto relationship-based talk, rather than sticking with the topic of our objective.
A sociopath will call us selfish in these circumstances. It’s one of the most amusing ironies of dealing with them (once we get our sense of humor back). For them, another person’s healthy self-interest is the biggest enemy to their life strategies of vampiring off other people’s resources.
That’s why statements like “what’s in it for me?” or “this doesn’t work for me” are good blocking tactics to their gaslighting. What these statements really communicate is the fact that we have private objectives, separate from maintaining our relationships with them.
In relationships with sociopaths, the power of their communications is that they are so objective-driven. They know what they want, and they are all about getting it. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that virtually all the attention they pay to us is related to going after something they want or complaining because they’re not getting it. When they’re basking in the temporary pleasure of getting it, we may imagine we’ve pleased them, but for them, this has nothing to do with us. It’s their win. They work hard to keep us relationship-driven, but except for when they are after something, their techniques are either withdrawal (abandonment) or punishment.
The exit from this pattern is to start making concrete (not feelings-based) objective-driven communications. I want you to be faithful. I want you to pay half the household expenses. I want you show up when you say you’re going to. I want you to stop sending pornographic texts. I want you to keep your opinions of me to yourself.
Whatever difficulty we face in being this assertive is evidence of how successfully we’ve been gaslighted by the sociopath or by previous experience into believing we don’t have a right to choose the circumstances of our own lives. Or into believing that communal acceptance depends on our compromising who we are and what we want.
Finally, the introduction of assertive “I want” statements into a sociopath relationship (or any relationship) is not necessarily all that’s needed to rebalance the relationship to include both persons’ objectives. I’ve written here about the use of threats. What I meant, in most instances, is repercussions. Saying we want something is just noise unless we’re prepared to back if up. So if there is no response to the “I want” statements, the next step is to communicate the repercussion and be prepared to enforce it.
Such as: I’m not sleeping with you again, until you stop sleeping with anyone else, and I have proof that you’ve ended the two other relationships I know about. I expect you to pay your own way in this household, and until you do, I’m removing the wireless router so you’ll have to find your Internet connection elsewhere. If you continue to make insulting comments about me in public, I’ll arrange my social life without you.
This is upping the ante. It’s similar to tough love. Or simply drawing boundaries. If you’re dealing with someone who cares about you or values the relationship, it can work to help them understand that their behavior is putting the relationship at risk and they have the choice of deciding what is more important to them.
A sociopath’s understanding of this type of communication is very different. The sociopath interprets its in terms of what he has to do to get what he wants. If his objective becomes too expensive, he is likely to fade away and look for lower-hanging fruit. There may be a lot of drama at first while he tries to derail your intention. And that drama may include any of the tactics he uses to keep you “down the totem pole,” emotionally destabilized, uncertain or afraid. But they are tactics to derail your intention. To keep his “win” as easy and cheap as possible.
In my experience, the introduction of “I want” statements into a relationship with a sociopath has a subtle but immediate impact on the dynamic. Even if I was derailed, and didn’t hold onto my intent. They provide evidence that the “source” is slipping out of the role. That the situation is becoming unstable for them. They do react to this, and we should be aware that they will. One of the things that may happen is they may speed up their efforts to fleece us, because they see they may have less time to pull it off.
To conclude this, I want to make it clear that all of this discussion is related to a certain type of situation, which is characteristic of a relationship with a sociopath. That is a situation in which we have all the power to say yes or no on our own behalf, but are being deliberately manipulated by the illusion of relationship. The sociopath wants us to give up that power and to dedicate ourselves solely to the sociopath’s interests.
We would look at outcome-and-relationship perspectives very differently in relationships with other power dynamics — such as peer relationships or relationships in which we are cultivating the attention or favor of someone with more power than we do. The thing that makes sociopathic relationships or interactions unique is that the power dynamics are so muddled, and that our personal challenge is to reassert our private objectives and recover our own power.
So these are my thoughts in answer to your question. I hope they made sense.
OxDrover:
Well said.
I do agree with you that they better have a good credit history and a good employment history. The S had neither.
I always said I didn’t care if the person I was was with made less than me. I’m not so sure anymore. Granted the S was sponge in every sense of the word, so maybe he’s not a good yardstick to measure by. But, I’ve found that money ends up becoming an issue more often than not. On the other hand, if one is in a true partnership, like you were, than I’d like to believe that it can work.