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.
Dear Glinda,
“Good Enough Parenting” has become a buzz term for parenting in the “real” world, where none of us are perfect. In a nutshell, it’s about prioritizing. You give your kids what they really need, (Love, discipline, education and adequate food/shelter/cloths/health care). You don’t worry much about a clean house, impressing others or winning at competitive parenting games.
One of the concepts that is integral to Good Enough Parenting is the quality of genuine empathy for your child. This is not to be confused with projecting your own childhood needs or personality on the child. You must know your child well enough to understand their TRUE perspective. When you do this, you pick up on subtle emotional cues and are able to be appropriately responsive.
Here’s an example of failure to correctly discern someone’s genuine perspective: I am cultivating a closer friendship with and acquaintance. She and her pre-teen daughter have seemed glum to me recently. I took her aside and asked her if something is wrong. She insists nothing is, and I believe her. She’s just not the bouncy, vivacious type. I’m going to have to know her better in order to correctly gauge her moods.
Follow-up note to readers of this articles:
Regarding “good enough parenting,” my use of the term in discussing emotional management and daily self-protective skills is my own extraction of adult meaning from this term, which is a commonly discussed issue in parenting and early childhood development theory.
I don’t know if you will find any information on internalizing it, if you look for it. Or if you will have to do what I did — which is come to the logical conclusion that internalizing this style of nurture is what we were supposed to learn from this experience.
The most important element of good enough parenting is self-soothing or self-empathy. Everything we feel, every emotional state we experience that is “aimed” toward something outside ourselves is equally likely to be aimed toward ourselves. In particular, atmospheres of anger, blame and distrust are likely to be turned on ourselves.
It is really important that somewhere in the chaos of immediate and ongoing emotional reactions that we hold onto the clear idea that something bad happened to us and it hurts. This is a mechanical device to keep a grip on an essential truth. The cause of the problem is outside ourselves. The result of the problem is inside ourselves.
At some point in our healing, we will take a look at our own contribution to this mess. That is actually where we get beyond dealing with the immediate fallout to extracting the profit from the experience. But for anyone in early stages of recovery — still dealing with shock, still trying to get a grip on what happened and the damage you’ve sustained — the best thing you can do for yourself is keep a clear understanding that the perpetrator was was something that came into your life, and you are the injured party. The analogy that I used a lot in my healing was that I got run over by a big truck that came out of nowhere.
As in medical events, a good first step is triage. Figure out the damage. That may take some time in itself. As you think about it, the list may change. Mine did. You may figure out actually injury. You may figure out what’s been stolen. You may figure out what you’ve lost. But making this list will help you get grounded in your own experience, and if you’re getting “diffuse” reactions pull back your boundaries into what’s real for you, instead of worrying about anything to do with him.
The sooner you can externalize him — some of us call it detoxing — the better. Just making a decision to do that helps, but it takes time. Their whole modus operandi is to get inside our boundaries and get us working against ourselves to their benefit. So it’s likely you’ll find lots of little tendrils of their influence in your thinking and feeling processes.
Again, if you can ground yourself in the idea that something bad happened and it caused you pain, it helps to externalize these influences and characterize him or her as something that clearly is not you. Not your fault. Not your motivations to create this disaster. Not how you wanted it to come out.
This is a period of life when “victim mentality” is fully justified. And it’s part of self-empathy. Something bad happened, and you are in a state of major “ouch.” If you were dealing with a small child who was crying over a skinned knee, this is the kind of comfort you need to give yourself. (And if you come from a background, where parents weren’t good at giving sympathy and rejected your right to cry over your losses, think about what you wished for then, and give it to yourself.)
You won’t need it forever. But if you don’t give it to yourself when you need it, you’ll keep needing it until you do. And giving it to yourself, believing you deserve it, is the best way to attract support. This also helps you understand and articulate what happened. You were conned. You lost things. You are dealing with a lot of trust issues issues. You are feeling overwhelmed by confusion, grief and anger.
If you are clear about the primary cause, it will also help you to target your anger and distrust against your perpetrator, rather than generalizing these reactions against the world. (Later you can figure out how your learning can be useful in a larger life perspective, when you’ve calmed down a bit.)
Again, something bad happened to you and you are in pain. The more clear you are about this, the more rational about your situation you will become.
When I have time today, I’m going to look for more information on the two types of reactions to shock. There are lists with these two basic types of reaction — contraction and expansion — offered in more detail. I tried to track my favorite one down over the weekend, and couldn’t find it, but I’ll keep looking.
Elizabeth, I just Google’d good enough parenting, and found what you’re talking about. This is an extension of the old concept into the whole duration of parenting.
The “good enough parenting” I’m referring relates strictly to the infancy-through-toddler stage when separation, identity development and independent exploration happen. The conclusion of this stage is marked by (early) development of certain emotional skills — including empathy and management of frustration.
This is the most crucial period in parenting and childhood personality development. Children who don’t get through the separation phase successfully, often because of neglect or premature separation from their mothers, are likely to have attachment disorders (like cluster B’s). The phase known as the “terrible twos” is challenging on parents who have to deal with the child’s emerging assertiveness and also provide the emotional home base that the child is still attached to. (Separation is a gradual thing, beginning with awareness of separate identity and followed by experimentation with how far it can go away from the source and still get back to safety.)
It’s called “good enough” because the child is programmed to get through it, and most of the challenge that the parents have to meet is not interfering with the natural development of identity and independence, while contributing a loving safe haven and modeling for empathy and frustration management. (This includes learning to live with limits.) It’s not rocket science, and the great majority of children and parents get through it.
However, if the parents come from dysfunctional families, where they were not taught about emotional safety and comforting, or their parents made the child’s problems about them (“why are you doing this do me?” “Why are you such a pest?” that sort of thing), the early developmental environment may teach the child that its “safe haven” depends only on keeping its source safe, rather than itself. And the separation of identity may not complete.
This is a very rough explanation of the time and the process.
The good enough parenting you were describing takes these parenting skills out into later years. And that’s important. But my hope in describing this process was to explain to us the fundamental identity-maintenace skills that we use all of our lives. Especially self-empathy.
Here is a resource.
My thinking on this was very much shaped by John Bradshaw’s work, particularly a ten-part program that was run on PBS stations about 20 years ago.
He was written several very good books, including “Healing the Shame that Binds Us” and “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child.” The Amazon URL for “Homecoming” is http://www.amazon.de/Homecoming-Reclaiming-Championing-Inner-Child/dp/0553353896. You can get to the other ones through that.
For someone in the first stages of recovery, these books might be particularly useful, because they really are about uncovering our natural processes of self-empathy, and finding support in doing that.
And just to keep us on track, why this fits into our work in dealing with a sociopath and the repercussions of dealing with a sociopath is two-fold.
One is that the sociopaths exploit identity weaknesses that pre-exist their entry into our lives. These identity weaknesses are NOT necessarily clinically pathological (that is, keeping us from conducting relatively functional lives), though they might sometimes be regarded as neurotic. In a nutshell, they are characterized by needs for something external to ourselves to support our identity (or relationship with ourselves).
Our culture promotes this type of neurosis, and to a certain degree these neuroses support community and family connections. We’re actually hard-wired emotionally for connectivity with family and community. But where it becomes neurotic is when there isn’t an internal balance between awareness of connectivity and awareness of independence. That is, if we feel that our choice to make any decision is not just affected, but completely obliterated by our need.
This is the window in our boundaries that sociopaths use. We may not interpret our dreams or desires as “needs” for some external thing. But we act as though they are. Sociopaths identify these needs and our idea of what the solution might be, and then they characterize themselves as the solution.
Just as a point of reference, a healthy personality is conscious of his or her needs, but takes responsibility for getting them met. That means, if they are not met in one relationship or environment, we seek other relationships or circumstances to get them met.
Typically, our lives become wider and more interesting because of this, because we do not place too much expectation on any one person or circumstance. (No single thing or person can be a complete reflection of our personality or our needs. The more our needs are are focused on a single solution — i.e., a relationship or circumstance — the more we are likely to approach that relationship or circumstance with too much expectation and too much need.)
Second, in recovering from any kind of assault on our identity — that is, in dealing with a situation in which we face demands that we change or be different than we are — the internalized good parenting is actually another type of mini grief processing round.
We feel resistance and pain. We acknowledge our own feelings through the comforting process. Acknowledging those feelings is a form of self-validation that calms “pay attention” noise out of our emotional structure. That enables us to move into the rational/intuitive consideration of exactly what we might be losing and how we feel about that. If we think it’s a good trade — that is we are willing to lose something to gain something else — we can move forward into the challenge (and the further discomfort we will face in learning and changing).
If we don’t think it’s a good idea, we can decide to pass up the opportunity and accept the losses involved with a road not taken. Like, if our job requires us to develop new skills and a new direction, and we prefer to stick with what we’re good at, we may need to give up on a management track or may need to find another job, but we do it understanding exactly why we are doing it, and having confidence in our own actions as the best thing for us.
How this comes into post-sociopath processing is an after-the-fact evaluation of whether we would have made these changes if we had known how it was going to come out. Even though we were conned and fooled, we can go back and reframe the decisions we made. We don’t have to beat ourselves up about the mistakes we made. The truth is that we didn’t have all the information. But in a kind of backward-looking process, we can “take back” those decision in the light of new information, and give ourselves some comfort for making an honest mistake. There are a lot of benefits from doing this including reinforcing our self-comforting skills and also learning from the actual circumstances.
In doing this, we may also gain some perspective about what need — expressed through dreams and desires — they were exploiting. Sometimes are needs are what I call “implanted” or “inherited” — that is acquired from environmental values or ideas that are not necessarily our own. For example a need for the latest fashions or a hot new car may be ways we have learned to be socially acceptable. They mask an underlying need for personal acceptance, which is the real need.
This process of self-empathy can help us to uncover the real need, rather than the implanted or inherited interpretation of it. The fashionable clothes or car may be a possible strategy to gain acceptance, but we can reconsider whether they’re getting us the kind of acceptance we’re looking for or whether they’re actually a good use of our resources. They may be or we may decide to invest some resources in other strategies for getting this need met, like finding more people or groups who share our values.
Here’s another example, though a little more abstract. We may think we need a lover or spouse in our lives, when what we need is love in our lives. We need to give love and receive it. Understanding our fundamental need can help us to react more honestly and appropriately to here-and-now events, rather than selling off pieces of our identity to pay for a “solution” that really isn’t meeting our needs. Likewise, this honesty can help us work through the issues in a relationship that is salvageable, or help us become clear that it’s not. (Like when you discover with clarity and finality that the other person doesn’t care how you feel, but just wants what he or she wants and is perfectly willing to do damage to you to get it. Which is, more or less, the definition of a sociopathic relationship.)
Being able to easily and naturally kick in this mini grief process for self comfort gives us the skill to rapid evaluate how/whether we want to associate ourselves with the causative circumstances. It makes it easier to distance ourselves (detox) from the cause of pain, and it makes us more functional in discerning when relationships and circumstances do meet our needs. It also helps us to untangle mistaken beliefs that a whatever-it-costs, now-and-forever “solution” is what we need, rather than taking ongoing responsibility for getting our needs met.
Ongoing responsibility doesn’t sound like much fun, I admit. And if we’re struggling with a massive burden of pain, it may sound like an additional responsibility that’s just out of the question right now. It might help to replace the word “responsibility” with “choice.” And the understanding that we do have them, and no one can take that away from us. We are surrounded by choices all the time, and the more consciously we view our options, and the more we recognize our power to shape our lives to to meet our real needs, the more we become who we want to be. That includes becoming people who are sufficiently nourished by our lives to have “excess resources” to share with the rest of the world. But first we need to get our own houses in order.
(And once again, if you haven’t already done it, I encourage you to visit http://www.cnvc.org/en/what-nvc/needs-list/needs-inventory for a list of normal human needs. You might be surprised, and it might give you a break from arguing with yourself about what you’re “allowed” to want into your life.)
Becoming more aware of our real needs and exploring our environment and options for ways to get them met draws us toward the genuinely rewarding and memorable experiences of our lives. (And helps us to categorize and deal effectively with the experiences that don’t meet that criteria.)
Namaste.
Kathy
That URL didn’t come through properly. Here it is again.
http://www.cnvc.org/en/what-nvc/needs-list/needs-inventory
DEar Kathy,
The above post is GREAT and explains a great many things about our NEEDS as humans (the naked ape) and BTW the book “The Naked Ape” is another great book from years ago about how we (humans) are as primates, not as “civilized” beings. Some good insights from that book on our body language and our primal needs.
From reading your post above, it reinforces some things that in the past I “knew” but didn’t APPLY to myself.
I know that for any “choice” we make, or any “exchange” we give up one thing for another. It is just like when we go to a store and we see an item we want to buy, we “give up” the money which could be used for a different purchase, so if we go and have X amount of $ to spend, we can buy the RED SHOES or the BLUE SHOES but not both. Or we can buy the PINK Shoes AND the GREEN shoes BOTH. We have to make the choices.
Our resources (besides money) of time, effort, energy, etc. are also LIMITED and if we spend the day reading, we cannot also spend the day running. Or we can choose to spend half the day reading and half the day running, but we have to allocate our energy and time in some manner of choosing what is important to us, or compromise some.
I want to spend the day with you. I don’t feel like running. You want to spend the day running. so there are several options, depending on our relationship in how to structure that day. I can run half the day with you (even though I don’t like it) or you can give up the entire day and be with me sitting and talking when you would rather be running. etc etc. Or, I can sit all day and read, and you can run all day. How each of us feels about the compromise or lack of it is up to us as individuals.
When I was teaching my sons about how to budget money, I turned it into a “time” thing. I make $5 per hour. Therefore if I spend $10 I am “spending” 2 hours of my time. Do I want the object I am buying enough to spend 2 hours of my time at my job to acquire it?
If I buy the radio, I will not have enough money to pay the electric bill when it comes due. If I save the money for the electric bill, I will not have money to buy the thing I WANT, because I spent the money on things I NEED.
My son C is quite good at budgeting his funds. Son P just started stealing! LOL
A few years ago before my husband died, I made a deliberate decision to budget my TIME vs MONEY in a different way. I took a job that I worked only 2 days a week, but allowed me to have insurance and 2/3 the previous salary I had had working 60 hours a week.
Now, I was home M-F and worked only saturday and sunday. In order to do this , I had to give up the weekend living history events that I cared about very much, but I decided that spending time with my husband and son D and with my dogs and animals was more important to me than the extra 1/3$ in salary. As it turned out, 6 months later my stepfather got diagnosed with cancer (which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been able to spend more time with him than I had before I changed jobs as I picked up on his early symptoms that he had been ignoring) it also gave me time to go to his physician visits, time to spend quality time with him, time to grieve with him, etc. The job change had also given me the last year and a half with my huband evry morning M-F fixing breakfast for him and his flight students, and our son, time to train my dogs, etc that I hadn’t had before. It lowered my stress level and no matter how bad a weekend I might have had at work, my son D or my husband would listen and then put their arm around me and say “Well, you don’t have to go back for 5 more days.”
Looking back at that decision to cut down to 2 days a week, I think it was one of the smartest moves I ever made in my life and I am SO glad I got to spend that last year and a half with my husband and my step-father. I also at the same time made a deliberate and thought out decision to spend more time with those I truly felt close to and to let other more casual friendships “drift” away. I also don’t regret that decision in the least either. Spending more time with the ones that are really CLOSE to me is much more meaningful than spending time with people I am only superfiscially attached to.
I literally “quit taking applications for friendship” for a year or so there, and if I met new people who “applied” for a “close friendship” I was nice but rejected their offers because it took away time I wanted to spend with those I LOVED.
IN taking a “business-like” approach to meeting our needs, and looking at what works and what doesn’t (and actually APPLYING what we know to our lives) I think we can successfully meet our needs for love, closeness, recognition, and all the other basic needs for a satisfying life.
This allowed me to spend more TIME with my family
Thanx Kathleen.
Sorry I confused matters.
Thanks Oxy, that was a really wonderful story of restructuring your life to align with what you really cared about.
You also took a risk. It could have come out badly. (I’m not sure how, but it’s always a risk when we step into the unknown.) It didn’t and now you view it as a smart decision.
But if it hadn’t worked out well, the decision would have been no less smart. Only less successful in meeting your needs. A learning experience. So back to the drawing board.
I’m really you got that quality time with your husband and stepfather. It must make your memories richer and your settlement with their passing more peaceful. I read your post as a lesson for me.
Writing what I’ve learned on Lovefraud helps me remember it and find right-now applications in my life. Likewise hearing everyone else’s stories and going through my reactions and thoughts.
One of the things I look for now in relationships is life companions who enrich my life with their presence. Thank you, Oxy and all of us.
Elizabeth, I didn’t properly thank you for your contribution and showing me that the phrase “good enough parenting” had more meanings. You not only caused me to clarify, but also motivated me to go find my original sources. I had totally forgotten that Bradshaw was the original trigger to my thinking here.
Kathy,
I think putting our thinking, reasoning, etc. into words to demonstrate them to others also helps us to rethink these things ourselves and shoot holes in them if we find holes that weren’t well thought out.
I used to tutor various classes in the hard sciences, and I did more and better learning than most of my students (although they were generally very successful as well.)
When teaching, I try to use as many of the student’s senses as possible; hearing, sight, touch and taste if applicable. Since on LF we don’t have hearing and touch or taste, I think the next best thing here is that people can look at DIFFERENT angles of each topic. And just as some people see “forgiveness” one way and some another, by “defending” my perceptions, it makes me THINK long and hard about my own definition, and I may change it, rethink it, or see a different perspective, just as you did about the “good enough parenting” concept.
Words are symbols, especially the written word, and don’t have the exact same meaning from one person to another. Especially the higher conceptual words. Some words, too, in say English have ONE word (depending on the context) that may have 100 different meanings, like the word “love” for instance.
I’m not sure if it is true or not, but supposedly, the Inuit have 100 different words for “snow”—where we have only one with modifiers like “wet” “dry” or “powder.” I know when I was in South Africa the native Bantu had words for things that we would take 20 words to describe in English and still not be as specific as their word was for that thing.
Add in the differences in words, the differences in customs, and even the different interpretations of what’s “right” and “wrong” and so we have to overcome many hurdles in communicating with each other here. Add in the emotional burdens on our individual beliefs and it complicates the matter even more.
It amazes me how little “flamming” and crap goes on here on LF. How accepting of each other and our differences, that we have as a group. How supportive, empathetic and sympathetic the LF bloggers are to each other. It gives me a warm feeling that makes me want to hug each of you in one great big ((((((“group hug”)))))) I have come to “know” you by your writings and your personalities and opinions, your likes and dislikes and in general as special individuals. Thanks very much to you all for letting me share your journey and for the wisdom that you have all imparted to me. I have surely gained 100X more than I have ever given here. God bless you all!