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.
I fear that I will be stuck in the “Painful Shock” stage for the rest of my life. For the last year and a half I walk around like an exposed wound, and nothing changes. I don’t get angry, I don’t bargain, I’m just in painful shock.
Overwhelmed, I believe that when we think we are stuck, we’re actually doing a lot of processing under the surface. Both our bodies and our psyches are made to heal.
You may just be having a really hard time coming to grips with what happened. Maybe it doesn’t fit into your idea of how the world works. And the prospect of adjusting your worldview is too painful for some reason.
A lot of us really resist certain realities. Like the fact that there are actually people out there who can use us without caring about what happens to us. Or the fact that we might have been targeted. Or worst of all, the fact that we didn’t see it coming and didn’t know how to protect ourselves.
Even though we know — if we watch the news or read books — that these things happen, it’s easier or feels safer to think that the odds are on our side. And it won’t happen to us. Because we don’t want to think about it. Because it would make the world such a scary place.
I don’t know if this is what you’re dealing with now. But if so, you wouldn’t be alone. We all have felt that way. And it’s why we get into the bargaining stuff. It lets us feel like maybe it isn’t really that bad, and maybe we do have some control over it.
Believe me, you’re not going to be stuck there all your life. Somewhere in your mind, you’re going over what happened. Maybe over and over it. We do this, this mulling it over, while we’re in the earliest stages of healing. Just to try to give it a shape, some kind of meaning.
Here’s is a hint for something that might help you move on. If you start thinking about it as something that happened to you, like thinking about you and thinking about this big Mack truck (I like this image) coming out of nowhere and running you over and disappearing down the road.
Why this helps is it begins to separate “you” from what happened to you. They’re not the same thing. And if you can begin to see that, you are closer to recognizing that there was an external force involved. You didn’t choose what happened to you. You didn’t want it. And you might find that, eventually, you have an attitude toward this outside force. Like getting angry at it for what it did to you and your life.
And if you have difficulty with anger, here is how one of my therapists helped me access mine. “Well are you just the tiniest bit resentful about anything that happened?” she asked me gently.
So I’m asking you.
It’s a process. It takes time. But you will get through it. If you’re here on LoveFraud, you’re working on it.
Kathy
Dear Overwhelmed,
I understand exactly what youve expressed. Please know it does get better, I am just a few months ahead of you and while I can say the “painful shock” days still come and go — for the most part what I have learned is that the only way I can be “stuck” in that stage is if i allow myself to be. I have had to dig so deep – it has been awful – but I made a deal with myself …instead of a deal with the devil (my xtox)… I make commitments to myself to do something each day… walking, taking a beautiful picture in my neighborhood, treating myself special be it a bubble bath or a glass of wine and a good book ANYTHING…for days on end…it gets really lovely after a while…. its life changing to begin to put the painful shock where it belongs…healed and in the past. But it is work, it is constant work to believe in yourself and that you did the right thing for yourself. Life/relationships hurt…but when we are finally able to understand that we dont have to choose to be stuck in that place (and we all do get there at our own pace – we finally reach a place of “acceptance” — that we had a traumatic experience in our past — we got thru it and survived it — and when we are ready we can choose how we want the rest of our life to play out. A partner may or may not be our choice, but one choice or chance we have in the palm of our hands is to make each day count – and to pick ourselves up and HEAL THE WOUND that was made. One day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. By nurturing ourselves we close the wounds. Hang in there. It gets better, and there is no rush, just little baby steps of everyday doing one thing for yourself and more and more as you go.
Dear 2-much,
I’m glad I made you laugh, I sometimes think I missed mycalling as a stand up comedy performer! LOL My kids tell me what a twisted sense of humor I have, and this has come out more and more since I have found the “freedom to be me!” I see the bizarre twists of things sometimes, like with my “translating” P-speak into “English” or riding my donkeys ‘Fat Ass and Hairy Ass”–and those really are their names! I also used to have a cat named “Chairman Meow” and a Neutered female dog named “Sam, spayed” (after Sam Spade a fictional detective for those young folks out there who might not catch this!)
Sometimes my “gallows” humor has been all I have had left of my “self” when I felt there was nothing of me left. Now, I can laugh AT myself (but in a good way) even if it is sometimes sort of “dark humor” and I can BE MYSELF without worrying “Oh, my gosh, what would the neighbors think?” I lived too much of my life worrying about what the neighbors and my egg donor thought of me rather than just being myself. Okay, so it isn’t “dignified” for an “old lady” to ride a big black jack ass in a big wide-brimmed hat—-SO WHAT?!!!! iS THAT GOING TO DESTROY MY “REPUTATION” IN THE COMMUNITY? Are people going to “laugh at me?” If people do laugh at me is that going to destroy my self esteem?
Personally, I think I’m a pretty cool old broad and I’m having fun instead of sitting home alone being “dignified” and I am retired so it isn’t going to effect my career, so YA-HOOO!!!! Ride’em granny.”
Off topic…OxDrover is there any easy way to get back to my old posts…I have a hard time keeping track of them.
Also… I have a question about NC with the P. Is it really hiding your emotions and not letting them get to you if you send someone in your place to pick up and drop off?
I secretly wonder if they know seeing them bothers you so they get a kick out of you sending someone in your place.
PS: last time I dropped off DS, STBXP shows up with OW, but I was cool as a cucumber : ) Yea me!
Dear Banana,
I don’t know about finding your old posts, you might e mail donna, the site owner, and ask her.
As for your question about NC—my opinion about iNC is that there are two kinds:
First NC is physical, where you do not answer them on letters, etc. and the ONLY contact you have is a curt e mail like “You can pick up Junior at 5:00 p.m. at my sister’s house”
NO discussing them with anyone, except your trusted friends who will support you, but NOT CARRY TALES BACK TO THEM. No listening to anyone telling you what the X is doing, his new OW or anyting else in the form of news. If someone calls you or tries to tyalk to you about him you simply say, “Jill, I do not want to discuss X with anyone.” If they keep on trying to tell you something, you walk away or HANG UP. If they are trying to give you a message from him, do not listen. do not read his e mails (unless it is about pick up time for the kid) but keep them in a folder where if there are threats or anyting you can use them in court. do not reply to any e mail.
The only contact you have with him is essentially what is court ordered about child visitation. anything else is by e mail (facts only, no “discussion”) and child drop off and pick up is only through a 3rd party.
The point of this is that if he cannot see YOU he will lose interest in seeing your child (babies are not much fun for a P) and if he cannot upset you or get into arguments or give you excuses or call you names, WHAT FUN ARE YOU ANYWAY? LOL
EMOTIONAL NC is where you don’t get emotionally involved with what is going on in his life, and that is further down the road. It will come in its own good time.
Good fo ryou for being cool, that is another thing, you must never let them see you upset, because THAT IS THEIR PAY OFF, THEIR REWARD, JUST WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.
Banana, I hear the strength in your posts, and though you may be hurting now, or confused or whatever emotions go through your heart, you are going to do ofine!!! Hang on, read and learnn here (read all the old articles) and educate yourself, KNOWLEDGE=POWER. (((hugs)))
Oxy-Granny, you go girl!! I don’t give a rip what my neighbors think. I want to get along with them but I was out raking my front gravel trying to level it and my neighbor said “dont you wonder what your neighbors think when you are raking rocks?” I said”nope”, I don’t care what they think, I want my gravel level!! She was shocked. I get on good with my neighbors. But have to keep boundaries or they will try and ride rough-shod over me. ie: use my pasture without asking. Letting their friends use my pasture too! I just told them it didn’t work for me. Have to be careful. Give ’em an inch they take a mile!! OKAY FRYING PAN TIME!!! LOL. That visual was with me all day!! It has helped me get out of my negative thinking. Along with the humming and counting, and stepping into the pain. The nice thing about stepping into it and feeling it is that you can actually step out of it too!! Ox- my brother said he will be there with me and knock her on her ass if she bothers me. He said she has bullied me all my life and is jealous of me. He won’t have it. Good Lord, I can’t believe I even have to THINK about this at my Aunts funeral. Stupid drama.
Blue~ I used to manage a deli with the senoir citizens. I am going to go and look one of them up!! She writes to me. She lives in town and I am going to go and see her. That will be a first step!! And Blue- the nose thing? Her friend told me she was on it. And I believe it because no normal person would do that out of thin air. Her boyfriend was driving around her house and her girlfriend was literally freaking out. They wanted us to stay the night and I wanted to go home cuz I had just flown in the night before from taking care of my folks for 4 months. I was tired and said no. We think that might be what got her. Okay frying pan time again!!! You guys are great. Much peace to u all.
Dear 2 much,
I don’t, and never have, gone LOOKING FOR TROUBLE, but I am no longer going to back down from it to “keep the peace” either—-as much as I can I AVOID the psychopaths and their dupes, and in my case, I did not go to the funeral or wake of one of my cousins because I figured that my egg donor would be at one or the other and I didn’t want to make a scene and upset the cousin’s family. I thought the best way to pay respect was to keep my butt at home.
However, I am no longer living in shame and keeping secrets. If someone asks me “how’s your mom?” I tell them, “I have no idea, I have nothing to do with her.” I used to make a neutral statement that was “misleading” like “She was find THE LAST TIME I SAW HER” leading them to think I saw her not long ago.
I took care of her and my wonderful lstep dad for 18 months while he was dying with cancer, but I haven’t had anything to do with her since I realized she was still sending money to my son and supporting him (he is in prison) and triavilizing the fact he tried to have me killed.
She has plenty of money to hire a driver and housekeeper, so though I am her only child she is not staying in a flea bag nursing home. One of my cousins has her power of attorney so she is HIS responsibility now. He isn’t too happy about that and thinks if we would “just talk” it could all be worked out, but that is typical thinking of people who don’t “get it” about what a psychopath is. His father, my egg donor’s brother, that I call Uncle MONSTER abused him, his mother and sisters, his entire life, but he still doesn’t “get it” about what a psychopath is.
I found out that you cannot appease these monsters, and the only thing you can do is to stand up for yourself, avoid them the best you can, look out for yourself and don’t give a rat’s behind about what the neighbors think as long as you are not hurting anyone, (even yourself) not doing anything illegal or mean.
It’s odd, except for my egg donor and the psychopaths, most people like me and think I am fun and funny and enjoy being around me. so I don’t think I have lost any REAL friends by just being ME. I have “weeded” my garden of life, however, by pulling out the people who hung around for what they could get from me—haven’t missed a darned one of them!
You’re gonna do okay, 2-Much, chin up!!!! and keep reading (hugs)
At the end of my relationship with my psychopath ex boyfriend (dentists)’ his two most common phrases were, “whats in it for me?” and “I don’t care”.
He used to say these at least half a dozen times every day. At first I thought he was joking. Then he started telling me the answer he wanted to hear from me each time and he would ask me to say it. Sometimes he would say, “say, a “blow job” honey”. I would laugh at first. Then when he kept saying it everyday, I realized that he was serious.
He had become so confident and arrogant in his treatment of me that he didn’t even try to pretend anymore.
Sometimes I would say, “I’m so happy that I’m getting fit and losing weight” or ” God I feel sick today”, to both of these, he wouldn’t even look up,but he would just say flatly, “I don’t care.”
When we used to watch the crime channel he would feign “horror”. At the very end of the relationship, he started to send himself up.. i.e. of how he used to “feign horror”. I was confused and terrified.That was about two weeks before we split up…THANK GOD!!!!
This article is extremely helpful. It made me realize that no matter how much progress and self work I thought I had done in my life, I am still obviously sending signals through my body language to abusers that I have been a victim from way back and that I am still damaged from it and vulnerable to it.
These points especially gave me pause:
“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”
I think you are right on that this goes back to early parenting. There is so much in this article, I know I will be coming back to it over and over again to take away more insights as I heal and grow.
Thanks!