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.
Lostingrief: God knows what is in every one’s heart when they do anything. It basically means … you did what was right (righteous decision) … even though you are made financially poor for doing so. Being poor or wealthy is an illusion on the human playing field. Spiritually you are very wealthy because you did a “Christ like” action… what God would do.
You won, your EX is damming himself. God knows what your EX (and all the EXs) of the world do … and when it comes down to judgment day … well, let’s just say … you wouldn’t want to be standing in the lines where our EXs will stand (smile).
We are only on earth for a few short years (human years of life) … your spirit goes on after you die … we are to live righteous lives the way Jesus came down to earth … lived as a man … showed us how to live and died for our sins. God gave us a manuscript of how he wants us to live. It’s called the Bible. The Bible comes in common every day language that is easy to understand. I’m sorry I wrote a difficult version of the Bible.
You can go on-line in your search engine and look for the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. If you have trouble understanding what you read ask God (meaning pray to God) to help you interpret the meanings. God will help you by bringing people into your life to help you understand. The more you read the Bible, the more you will understand it. God loves when man seeks knowledge from the Bible.
Peace.
LIG you are very valuble to me. I never thought I had wealth or money enuff for someone to take advantage but I do.
swehrli,
That fact that you’re asking the question “why is it so hard to detach” means that you’re on the road to detaching.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that you’re going to have to heal from some damage, whether by this situation or some previous damage (that he exploited and made worse). And that it’s going to take time to heal, and during that time, you’re going to have to do some work on rebuilding your relationship with yourself.
Right now, the best possible thing you can do for yourself is pay attention to how you feel. He’s creating a lot of drama. The only thing meaningful about it is how it makes you feel. If other people get involved with the drama, keep coming back to yourself. Check your internal feeling-meter every you feel blindside by his behavior or by your memories.
You asked why you can’t detach. To a large degree, it’s because he’s gotten you to stop paying attention to your normal feelings, and to shift your attention to what he gives or doesn’t give you. So the most intense things you feel are related to whether or not you’re getting what you need from him.
Your job right now is to undo that. It’s going to take a little time, but the more attention you give to this task, the faster you’ll get better.
Journaling helps. Talking about it with the people you trust (like here) helps. Learning to link the feeling to an event is what you want to do. Like when he said I was stalking him, it made me feel astonishment and outrage. Like when I realized it was Friday night and I am alone, it made me feel lonely and afraid.
This may seem like it’s just magnifying the bad feelings, but it’s actually putting you back in touch with yourself. It evolves into independent (from him) understanding of what you want and need in your life. The more you do it, the more you become focused on yourself, not him. It can also clarify what you wanted from him, and that actually makes it easier to recognize whether you can realistically expect to ever get it from him.
All of this may sound too intellectual, and like it doesn’t exactly match with the out-of-control emotional intensity that you’re going through. But a big part of that emotional intensity is the screaming pain of unmet needs. Shifting your focus away from him and into yourself is also a means of reducing that pain. Your emotional system is screaming at you, because it’s not being heard. You’re making him more “real” than you are.
People talk here about being brainwashed or hypnotized. That’s a way for you to understand what has happened to you. He has taught you, though a very clever technique of intense seduction, followed by withdrawal of emotional support, to be dependent on him. He deliberately made himself your “drug.” You can learn more about this if you do some Web research about the neurological research into the brain chemical changes of Stockholm Syndrome.
So in a very real sense, you’re detoxing. That’s why NC is so hard. People talk about wanting apologies or explanations. But what is really happening is that they’re having withdrawal symptoms. They want contact, because they think there’s some relief there.
So, two other things you can do for yourself now are these. First, do whatever you can do to support your healing process. Good food, sunshine, exercise, comforting things like massages or warm baths or funny movies. The other thing is look for distractions, preferably things that are safe, pleasant and make you feel good about yourself. Even if it’s hard to even think like this, make the effort.
It will be a lot easier to think clearly, and get some perspective about where he belongs in your life and your memories, when your normal focus on yourself is recovered. Trying to understand now, when he’s still in your head, is just going to keep you on a hamster wheel of recognizing over and over again that he’s a sociopath. Believe me, you already know that. You’re just obsessing on it and him, because you’re still trying to get relief.
The more direct path is to focus on your own healing. Your mind will become a lot clearer when you’re detoxed. Just give it time. You will get out of this morass.
I don’t need to tell you how NC fits into this. Every contact gives him a chance to reinforced the programming. Everything he says to you is designed to do that. If he can keep you brainwashed, he can keep whatever he wants coming. He has every reason to keep doing that. So you don’t want to give him the opportunity.
If all of this makes you think that maybe he’s a scary guy, he is. Even if he’s not physically violent, he’s an emotional abuser and you don’t want to be volunteering for more of that treatment.
As far as what anyone thinks, just keep in mind that he’s bamboozling them as much as he has bamboozled you. They’ll figure it out or they won’t. In the meantime, spend time with people you trust to believe you and care about you. That’s the kind of world you need to build around you right now.
I hope this helps.
Kathy
Kathleen Hawk: Thank you for giving the insight of communicating with an S. They make alot of sense. The perceptions you have shown of how the S character mind is driven, and how they use their own “unique” self talk in obtaining selfish driven goals is enlightening. This strategy of using “I want” and giving the reprucusions may prove to be very useful.
Thanks.
well, me either, my dear.
i have never had wealth — i own nothing now — but i’ve always been very generous with that i have had, knowing that giving is a joy and a blessing. of course, i didn’t anticipate ever being unemployed for so long and it wiped me out.
i gave that spath-hole tens of thousands of dollars to ‘help’ him over the years, with barely a ‘thank you’ in return. actually, i did get my thank you — his cheating, lying, deceiving, nasty comments and derogatory remarks toward me when he found someone younger, prettier, thinner and richer.
but it doesn’t matter.
we are the solutions on this earth. we are the lights of the world.
maybe there’s something to be said for having nothing left to lose.
wini …
thank you for the clarification. it’s not that i don’t know what’s in the bible (i go to unity chuch which offers a metaphysical interpretation; we all carry the christ consciousness within), it’s just difficult to read imho.
i am a deeply spiritual person, but don’t believe in heaven and hell, or a judgmental god. i do however, believe in karma and so know that the ex’s will all get their comeuppance whether we witness it or not.
i appreciate your p.o.v.
blessings.
lostingrief : My perception is WE are ALL GIVEN CHOICES.
The intention for us by the Divne, the higher power is to do the right thing, LOVE thy neighbor, help and give if we are capable and Blessed to do so.
Giving is not wrong, but not realizing who we are giving to clouds the perception of giving, especially with an S. I have been clouded and given to someone very involved with sin. It is a way of life and S’s induge in sin.
We are human and make mistakes, learning very harshly from my own giving to an S shall not stand in the way of doing what I was trying to do while I thought I was truly doing the right thing, to carry out the way of the higher power.
Forgiveness to myself for not helping someone who truly needed it such as a homeless family with no food or coats for the family.
But there still is time to redirect Giving to those who need it, even though I may not have the resources as I did before the S to do it now. But there is tomorrow and I will Give to someone who has the need.
Lostingrief: There is much more to that scripture … but, the basics is what I told you.
Oh, by the by … it’s the “lake of fire”. There is more to this too.
Believe it or not, our EXs are living their hell right this very minute. They just aren’t aware of it or at least, won’t acknowledge it. Just sit back and be patient … in God’s time, not man’s.
Peace.
Is opn: Yes you do have your Eye’s Open.
We did what was right. Our EXs on the other hand … conning and deceiving … God knows what’s in all their hearts we do everything.
Excellent explanation. Give, for you are giving to God. Love, because you are loving God. Etc. etc. etc.
Peace. I have this gut feeling that when we die, we relive our lives over again … except, we are on the receiving side of our choices we made in this life … then of course, our spirit goes on to the next level. Step by step.
Peace.
In reading about all these great women (and men) who have been the victim of these lousy guys (and I know there are some great guys here who have been hurt by women too), I wonder how these S’s can make their choices to dump, or abuse enough to be dumped, such great partners. It seems that they would have been offered so much by the people here – I would love to have a relationship with one of you! You would all be so caring! Why doesn’ t he just eat that up?
And when I think about my ex S….after I threw him out, he tried to get me to be his Tues-Thurs-Saturday girlfriend. He tried to make me one of his harem. I am so glad that I refused to play ball at all where that is concerned. I knew what he was doing. So as I have learned, he juggles a bunch of different women at one time – goes back and forth to their various homes, has sex with them all, yet still is always pursuing hook-ups. Again, here’s me being a non-S….but how can that be fulfilling? How can that be a good life? It sounds exhausting. And to have to maintain relationships with several “loves” at once as well as lie to everybody about where you are and what you are doing? Seriously, it sounds incredibly draining to me. How does this energize them? The driving alone would annoy the hell out of me.
It seems like these guys, who are quite lazy where work is concerned, have endless energy where promiscuity is concerned. I can see having a couple of partners (though I wouldn’t do it), but juggling ALL of these partners? What the hell? If you are going to be a sketchy exploiter, why don’t you find one sugar mama with $$$$, and then have one or two on the side? Why the stream of partners??