Imagine a book, a novel, that begins with an explosion on the first page. The explosion disintegrates big things into fragments moving away faster than the eye can follow. There is no way to understand what it means, or know what the world is becoming. The people in the book are either immobilized, their stunned brains on autopilot, trying to gather information. Or they are rushing everywhere, trying to find something to save before the dust even settles. In the background, other people may be fainting or crying. But this book is about the people who are alert, struggling to maintain their identities in a falling-apart world.
This is where traumatic healing begins. The trajectory of healing begins at the point of trauma.
The essence of trauma is loss. We may not understand our trauma as a loss at first. It may feel like a painful blow. Or an experience of confusion or disorientation. Or possibly being stretched beyond our comfort zone, and then beyond. Or we may perceive one type of loss, and then discover a more important loss that only becomes clear later. These reasons are hints of why it takes so long to process certain types of trauma.
The personal stories at Lovefraud give evidence of many types of losses. We have lost money and possessions, jobs and careers, family and friends, years of our lives, physical and mental health. And we are the survivors of relationships with sociopaths. Many of us know someone or know of someone who cannot be here with us, because they gave up on their lives through suicide or got lost in depressions, psychotic breaks or self-destructive behavior.
In some ways, what happened to us is like a situation of unrequited love. We loved someone. They didn’t love us back. It’s a sad, but everyday occurrence. In some ways, it is like an investment that did not work out. Another everyday occurrence. There are certain types of losses that are considered “normal,” expected, and things that people just get over, preferably sooner rather than later. Because they are just part of the randomness of the world that sometimes gives us what we want and sometimes does not. And we are expected to have the everyday skills of dealing with losses and moving on.
But this is not what happened to us, and we know it. We may not know what exactly happened, but we know it was momentous. To us. Because we can’t snap back. Our everyday strategies to minimize losses — saying it didn’t matter, turning our attention to something more positive, making a joke about it, finding some quick fix of our favorite “little drug” to make ourselves feel better — don’t work. We are destabilized at a fundamental level.
What happened?
If asked about what happened to us in a love relationship with a sociopath, most of us would probably sooner or later use the term “betrayal.” Or being conned. Or being used by someone who didn’t care about us. Or being led to believe in a love or partnership that never really existed. Or being targeted for exploitation.
But all of these descriptions of what happened emerge from later thought, after we try to figure it out. To understand what happened at the time, it might be easier to just work with the terms “shock” and “disappointment.”
Like the people in the first chapter of the imaginary book, something happened that simply astonished us. In a bad way. The explosion took place in beliefs that are fundamental to our identity. A destruction of the most basic source of our emotional security — our ideas about ourselves and our world that we take for granted.
Reactions to trauma
Whether or not we consciously grasp the fundamental nature of this trauma, our primitive survival system does. And it reacts instantaneously to restore a semblance of stability so that we can go on. Instantaneous emotional responses fall into two basic categories — expansion and contraction.
Anyone who has ever been attacked by verbal or physical violence is familiar with the “contraction” reaction. There is a feeling of retreating inward and condensing our consciousness to a small, tight, still, watchful point inside us. We shut down emotionally and separate from what is happening to us.
If this state continues, we become split inside ourselves, often at war with ourselves because part of our experience is not acknowledged as part of us. The parts that “don’t count” or “aren’t real” can become internal restrictions on what is safe to remember or feel. The fear of experiencing the trauma becomes converted to alienation, anger and aggressive defense.
The “expansion” reaction is related to awareness that our previous boundaries of identity have been breached and partly demolished. Our relationship to the rest of the world, in we were defined by our boundaries as separate and “owned” by ourselves, becomes diffused. We may initially feel euphoric, “spacy” feelings as endorphins flood our brain to counteract pain. Our sudden difficulty in determining where we end and the outside world begins may be perceived as ”˜destiny” feelings of being chosen or that we belong in the abusive drama.
If this goes on, our separate feelings, values and desires may become increasingly difficult to identify, articulate or defend. In our dealings with external reality we may becoming increasingly ungrounded, “fleeing to higher ground” where we cling to high moral or spiritual principles with a diminished ability to recognize or integrate information that does not match our view of life as it should be. Except for these principles, we may become increasingly dependent on others for information about who we are or our role in relationships or the world at large.
One of the reasons that relationship experts strongly suggest terminating a relationship in which we are shocked and disappointed more than once, is that each time this happens, a trauma occurs. They may be relatively small traumas, and we may think we are managing them. But these little explosions can do more than hurt our feelings. If we internalize their implications about who we are or our role in the world, they literally undermine the structure of our identity. Whether we expand or contract in response, we are slipping farther away from an open, healthy understanding of ourselves as separate, self-governed beings with full use of our emotional resources.
These instantaneous reactions occur at a deep layer of consciousness, where we may not be aware of them. Even though we are adults who, in reality, are free to act on our circumstances and to choose the meaning we ultimately assign to a trauma, these first reactions are the equivalent of the emergency workers who rush to the scene of a fire, extinguishing it no matter what kind of damage they do to the structure in order to stop the blaze. They provide temporary re-wiring to help us get through the immediate disorientation. Later comes the clean-up and rebuilding.
Why we are vulnerable
If we have early history of trauma, as many victims of sociopaths do, that emergency rewiring may already exist as a result of earlier events when our higher levels of thinking were not yet developed. That primitive adaptive wiring may still be in use, because we did not have the independent circumstances that enabled us to act freely or assign our own meaning without concern about outside influences. First-response emergency reactions may still be embedded as the “best response” in the working structures of our personalities, coloring our fundamental views of our position in the world and our life strategies.
The model of trauma response that I am describing to you is based on a synthesis of early childhood development theory, neurological research, and theories about the environmental basis of personality disorders. It is also the beginning of the entire model of grief processing, where the nature of the challenge that we face is to learn something.
In the event of trauma, the first thing that we learn is that we are surprised and disappointed. The context of this learning is that something happens from outside of us that challenges our beliefs about who we are and our role in the world. Throughout our entire life, every person goes through these challenges. It is part of growing up and maturing as a human being in this world.
However, certain types of challenges are especially painful and difficult to process at any age, no matter what internal resources we may have. The characteristics of these events include:
1. Disrespecting — we are not recognized as worth caring about
2. Devaluing — we are used for someone else’s purposes or experience a “force of nature” event, and therefore not separate or special
3. Abandoning — our world does not prevent this from happening
One of the reasons that an understanding of early childhood development is so important to this model is the concept of “good enough parenting.” The infancy and early childhood years are the period in which we separate and develop a separate identity from the “source of all good,” our mothers or surrogate mothers. In developing this separate identity, we also learn freedom to explore and develop independent knowledge and skills.
Ultimately, we come to recognize too that we are not the whole world. And that we live with people whose feelings and intentions are not always the same as ours, as well as material circumstances — like traffic, the force of gravity and things that are not good to eat — that limit what we can do without damage to ourselves.
If we make it through the “good enough parenting” successfully, the “source of all good” that was in the beginning survives in our view of the world and our perceptions of ourselves as part of it. We learn that we have the power to transform vision to reality through our own efforts. Although our world places limits upon us, sometimes discovered in pain, our foundational belief is that we live in an essentially loving and supportive place. The style of nurture we receive is internalized to become skills of comforting ourselves after an unexpected disappointment, extracting meaning that empowers to better navigate the world, and moving on to new goals.
Unprocessed trauma — that is trauma that is not treated with comfort and support of learning and moving on — literally stops that developmental process. Or throws us back into regression, undoing what we may have already learned. If we don’t have the internalized skills of “good enough parenting” a resource, for whatever reason, our built-in need to complete this developmental “thread” of growing up makes us like homing devices seeking the missing pieces to complete it.
Seeking security. Seeking encouragement and support. Seeking freedom to act without risk of abandonment. Seeking emotional comfort. Repetitively seeking the same missing elements and recreating the same relationship patterns as we try to “make right” something that failed in our histories.
Fast healing
In trauma at the identity level, there is only one way to resolve it immediately. That is to fully recognize that the “problem” is external. To activate self-comforting mechanisms to soothe the pain of the shocking disappointment. To extract meaning from the event that empowers us to better navigate the world. And to move on.
These skills are what we see in people who react quickly to everyday traumas, who recognize threats to their wellbeing or early hints of dysfunction in systems or relationships. These are people who respond with apparent coolness, clarity or rationality to suffering around them, or to other people’s projection of meaning upon them. They are centered in their own identity maintenance processes. It occurs naturally for them. Because they are compassionate with themselves, they have no lack of compassion for others. But they also have perspective about what is “about them” and what isn’t.
All of this depends on unshakable belief that the world, including ourselves, is essentially a benevolent place. As all of us know, the learning opportunities of life become increasingly challenging. As our lives progress, we invest ourselves in relationships, careers, children and possessions. Every life includes losses and failures. The more we have invested, the more we believe that something is part of our identity, the more painful a loss or failure is. Every life includes huge challenges to our beliefs that we can survive, that we are good people in a good world, that suffering and pain are the exception rather than the rule.
Unmanageable trauma
Beyond the characteristics of particularly painful and difficult-to-process trauma noted above, there are certain circumstances that magnify the challenge we face.
1. The sense that we have been targeted
2. The intensity or scope of the loss
3. The persistence or repeated nature of the trauma
Of these, the last one is the most debilitating. If we have a pre-existing weakness in our trauma-processing skills, do not respond quickly as we recognize a threat to our wellbeing or cannot escape from the situation for some reason, repeated and continuing identity trauma has the effect of cumulatively weakening both the foundation beliefs of our identity and our ability to process loss.
This is the true risk in an ongoing relationship with a sociopath or with anyone who threatens our core beliefs about the essentially benevolent nature of our identity or our world. Many of us make choices to be educated in ways that challenge our beliefs. Attending a philosophy class or learning to ski or starting our own businesses are all equivalent to volunteering for significant learning experiences that we can expect to push us beyond our comfort zones. But we go into them voluntarily, bringing our identity maintenance skills with us, and have the intention of consciously integrating what we learn into who we are.
A relationship with a sociopath is different. The learning challenges we face in the experience are completely different from what we volunteered for.
Not one word of this piece has discussed the sociopath’s characteristic behaviors. This will be discussed in later parts. But from the perspective of our own wellbeing, in particular our healthy maintenance of our identities and our relationship with the world at large, a relationship with a sociopath subjects us to a series of traumatic blows that become more and more difficult to process, and that essentially cultivate diffusion of identity for the sociopath’s purposes.
The next step of healing
Just as the first step of healing occurs while we are “in” the trauma, the second step is likely to begin when we are still in the relationship. Either literally involved with the sociopath as our partner in life, or still attached emotionally to the sociopath with hope for a good resolution. However it also includes internal activities of trying to reframe the situation intellectually, because its apparent meaning is too threatening to our beliefs about our identity and the nature of the world.
This next stage is when we first begin to process beyond the emergency reactions. In the model I am presenting to you, it incorporates both of the “denial” and “bargaining” stages of the Kubler-Ross grief model.
Until then, Namaste. The deep secure wisdom in me salutes the deep secure wisdom in you.
Kathy
P.S. Here’s a fragment from one of my poems, written in the midst of my recovery process.
They say you can’t learn
until you lose what you love.
They say you can’t get there
until you give up trying.
They say that the way
is through flinging yourself
toward all you ever wanted and loss
that breaks your heart,
dries your spirit to jerking sinew,
and then burns your hope
on the sidewalk in front of you.
They say, through all the waiting silence
you just don’t hear, that it’s not until
nothing is there in the mirror
but a monkey playing its toy violin
that you see
with eyes like windows into another country.
That you see.
Henry–you said “he will never know the new person that I am”
That’s right. But it’s not a sad thing. Now that you are a new person, you’re living/vibrating at a higher frequency and can meet other people equal to the new you!! I think that’s a really good thing.
Rune, I don’t know.
Mine manipulated my feelings, treated me like s**t, had a nasty sadistic streak, didn’t care what happened to me, cost me hundreds of thousands, not to mention my business, and did the worst damage when I was in trouble and needed help. And then there’s the recovery time and what that cost.
But with a few notable exceptions, he got me to do it all to myself. If those notable exceptions didn’t exist, I’d have no evidence at all that I wasn’t just a middle-aged crazy in self-destructive love with a younger man and trying to pay him to stay with me, rather than a woman who was targeted for fun and profit by a dangerous predator.
I don’t know whether your S was a different breed or if you are still in an early stage of recovery, which is being drawn out and exacerbated by having no resources. I don’t know if you have resources but you’re too traumatized to try to recover them, or if he’s succeeded in converting everything into his ownership.
I’m not asking for details. But if you do have resources and you’re too scared of being re-traumatized to recover them, is it possible to work on that? I’m just asking, not trying to be challenging. I know you’re dealing with a lot. It just seems, from what you’ve said, that this might change your life. If you could find the surrogate equivalent of a tough family member to face him down and recover whatever can be recovered.
When I was deep in the weeds — still with him but falling apart and unable to see much beyond whether he was giving me positive attention or not — other people could see what I was going through. I was living in New York and several “connected” friends offered muscle to scare him off or worse. There were several other offers to help me in other ways, all of them designed to get him out of my life using tactics that I was incapable of using. I wasn’t ready to understand how much trouble I was in or the necessity to get him away from me.
Later, I found that muscle in myself, just long enough to clear him out, but you’ve heard that story. The situation allowed me to pull it off. I was by no means emotionally stable, but I was focused on what I needed to do. At the time, I thought I was doing damage to myself to do it. But the ends were important enough for me.
I’m not suggested that you do that. I understand you’ve got PSTD issues, but could you find help? Maybe someone who would take on the job for a percentage of what was recovered?
I’m sorry if these are upsetting questions. I keep asking them in my mind when you describe your circumstances. It just seems like it would help you.
If shock and anger are still taking a huge toll on you, and you’ve got the focus and energy for it, it might help to start listing exactly what you lost. And what you might possibly recover with help, and what good it would do you. It might help shake out what’s possible and what’s worth the trouble.
When you get to the overlap of possible and worth the trouble, that might help you devise a strategy for recovery. Or if there’s nothing that meets that criteria, to begin to let it go, because it’s not worth your mental health.
He’s a bad thing that happened to you. A really bad thing and he hurt you. But you survived it. A lot of what you had and were didn’t. But you are here. The smart, awake, furious, articulate, persistent, wise woman we know.
I don’t want to keep on flattering you, though I could go on, because I think a lot of you. I’ll just leave it by saying that if you’re PSTD is standing in your way, maybe the first challenge is to find a way around it.
Kathy
Kathy,
You said it so well… something happened to us but we aren’t sure what.
That is exactly what I was trying to figure out from the moment I got on the plane to leave until I found LF more than a year later.
I still can’t describe it concisely to people. I have resorted to “I had a stalker.” People get that right away. I rarely talk about it but when I need to package it up neatly and feel understood quickly, “stalker” does the trick.
Aloha
Aloha,
I went right to sleep after reading your last letter, and dreamed about it. I was on a plane, sitting next to a man who just asked me how I was.
“To tell the truth, I’m not well. I’m getting over an experience that sort of ruined my faith in human nature. I’ll get over it, because I don’t want to live like this. But it will take some time.”
He asked where I was going, and I said LA. He said, “Oh, Hollywood. Well, that’s where you go to get screwed. They hold out that brass ring, and everyone turns into panting idiots.”
It was something like that, I said.
“But this guy was special. His mother abandoned him as a baby, and he’s been paying back any woman who’ll hold still for it ever since. His specialty is making them feel like s**t. He does nothing of value. If he were a dog, we’d put him down.”
He smiled at me, and patted his jacket. I realized he was wearing a gun in a shoulder holster.
And then I woke up.
Clearly I’ve been reading too many detective novels.
But the dream was also instructive in terms of how to talk about this.
I got in the way of a guy whose mission in life is to destroy women, because he was abandoned as an infant. He didn’t destroy me, but he did some damage. It’s taking a while, but I’m getting over it.
The other thing I thought when I woke up is that it’s really, really important to get over generalizing this story to fear of men or the world.
This guy is a monster. The evidence of his monstrosity is all over his life. He writes stories about using women or various types of moral suicide. He leaves behind people who are stunned and dealing with damage. He spreads his disease of bitterness and despair like Typhoid Mary.
But he’s not everyone.
He is a lesson and a warning that people like him do exist. And that, ultimately, is useful to know. Learning to take better care of ourselves, learning some caution about giving ourselves away, or being too quick to trust, or getting charmed by someone who tries to railroad our boundaries or principles or standards of living, is a good thing. It’s about become more firm and ultimately more secure about who we are.
But it’s also a lesson that we’re better than that. We don’t have to stand for it in our lives. In fact, we can’t stand for it in our lives. Tolerance of this kind of destructiveness only perpetuates it.
I keep coming back to the fact that there are more of us than there are of them. And that the more healthy we become — emotionally, morally, spiritually — the less chance they have.
And how the very encounter that almost destroyed me has also made me well. Whole in ways I never was before. Confident and caring with myself, compassionate but with a sense of my own limitations. Focused, disciplined, grounded.
The first big encounter (with my father) left me weakened, messed up for life. The second big encounter was like a vaccination.
Because instead of internalizing it, making it about me, I recognized it as something bad that happened to me. It was not about me. Just a big, bad problem in life that I encountered. A predator that recognized me as a weak one in the pack, and tried to eat me. But he didn’t finish me off, and I came back stronger for the experience.
He’s still out there, and there are more like him. But he’s not part of the pack, no matter how much he tries to fit in.
The ones they don’t finish off get stronger and wiser.
I lived in Europe for five years when I was a young woman. It was a tremendous learning experience, a lot of which I didn’t really understand until I came back to the states. One of the first things that struck me was that there was advertising everywhere. Another thing that struck me was what Disney did to fairytales that actually were profound psychological learning stories. (Read “Woman With Wolves.”)
These cartoon movies were characterizing “deserving” women as pretty, weak, passive creatures dependent on men and waiting for happily-ever-afters with some prince that began as the credits started to role. I was already widowed when I came back. Widowed since 23, when I had to restart my life in another country and learn to live on my wits, as a writer when I could find the work, but making money wherever I could.
I knew that happily-ever-after was just the beginning of a big, often difficult life adventure. And even if Prince Charming didn’t die, there were new challenges to happiness all the time. And it took a lot of work to live, and make a good life.
And it just really tee’d me off that Disney and the advertising and all kinds of mass media were brain-washing girls to imagine it was their big goal in life was to find the perfect guy, and then everything else would take care of itself. It was like we were creating a generation of passive, hopeful incompetents at life. It was like the flip side of the sociopath coin, though I wouldn’t have phrased it that way.
I missed the feminist movement, because I was in Europe. But I developed my own analog in my head. At least partly, because I used to dream of being rescued, of some white knight or Peter Pan or anything to airlift me out of that hell I grew up in. Magical thinking was what kept me upright and fighting for a future.
But then, once I got out, I learned there are no easy answers. Everything requires thinking and risking and learning and hard work.
When my sociopath showed up, I thought that the universe had sent me some kind of big present. I didn’t know why I deserved it. In fact, I knew I didn’t deserve it. But I was overwhelmed and my life was out of control, and he just seemed like part of that big out-of-control mess. I overlooked all the signals that he was a wrong guy, and just jumped on that big train toward happily-ever-after that he seemed to be.
One more time I had to learn that lesson. No happily ever afters. Everything is a learning experience. Everything has it’s ups and downs. The most terrible things have the most wonderful upsides. But you have to take the risks, learn, do the work.
This is life. I took a big risk. It turned out to be something astonishingly bad that happened to me. Then, it turned out to be something amazingly good.
Now I’m in the next chapter. Using what l learned to take another big risk. Becoming a teacher, when I barely have learned all the lessons. But I know enough to helps others who are still in the woods find their way.
This is a story, an important fairytale of psychological realities and finding redemption. Women with Wolves.
KH: You gave me a wonderful response and the answers are, no I have no resources, yes I tried. Every effort I made to ask for help backfired in some fashion.
Two years ago, knowing I was dealing with someone who had “left bodies behind” (I had no idea how close I was to the truth!) through his weird and ungrounded “business ideas,” I tried to have an “intervention” with the aid of someone I knew the S/P liked who I also (thought I . . . ) had reason to trust. He sat through the whole 8 hours or so while I named bizarre action after strange venture after unlikely repeated destructive behavior (overspending and bounced checks). (I actually thought he was bipolar and really out of touch.) He looked like a man in pain. At the end, some energy leaped up out of him — to me it felt like grief, remorse, love . . . call it whatever you like. I thought that somehow I had gotten through to him. Of course he held me that night, patting his shoulder so I would rest my head “just there,” as he wrapped his arms around me. That was how we slept every night. Eighteen months.
Several weeks later he got up to an early alarm. I asked why. He said, “Busy, busy. Got things to do.” When I got up an hour later, the coffee pot was still warm, but the house was empty in the way that says something more is missing than just the gym bag and the guy. I started a search and found receipts for $5000 course materials put on by scam artists. I found his hidden worksheets showing that he was trying to take a crash course in what I had learned in 10 years in business. When he had closed the door to his office, he had been cooking up even more destruction. God only knows where he got the new thousands of dollars he was shredding in his latest pointless exercise. He had flown to LA for a 3-day workshop that he attended for 1 1/2 days because he had to get back to pick up his children for visitation. He never told me anything about where he went to; I figured it out from the receipts.
Three days later I walked out with my suitcase to go on my business trip. I had spent 15 minutes asking him “Why?” and I listed a litany of space he had coopted, the fact that he was on the phone ordering expensive gourmet food, while I had no money, etc., etc. He looked at me very directly and said, “Maybe you should have made better decisions.”
I had planned to be back within a week. I started to go into shock as I processed all the inexplicable events. Just getting away from him and his words, his influence, gave me space so that I felt like my own mind was coming back. I had suspected that he was capable of some strange mind influence, perhaps from his sales training. I have found reputable research that suggests this is true.
It was more than a month later when I was able to even re-enter the state. I went to the police: “well, we can do a civil standby, but we can only give you 15 minutes. And if he says anything is his, you can’t take it.” I had furnished the whole house: 5000 square feet. My clothes, antiques, oriental rugs, books, writing, . . . I went to social services to try to undo my unwitting support of him when he’d been charged with molesting one of his children. Knowing what I knew then, I knew he was fully capable of doing what he’d been accused of. Social services didn’t care — the case was closed. I tried the DA: “This is a civil case.” (There certainly was nothing CIVIL about it!) I tried the battered women’s shelter: “Have you tried talking with him?” I tried a restraining order: “Did he rape you?” the judge says. “Every moment of every day that he lied to me like that,” I tried to explain.
I was living in motel after motel. 11:00 a.m. is another trauma moment in every day for me. Every effort I made to try to recover somehow fell apart. It was like the little S/Ps showed up to take advantage of what was left. I ran into a woman who worked out at the same gym. She said she had seen him about the middle of March, a week or so after I had left, and she’d asked about me. He had responded with a big grin (his trademark grin, I’m sure). “Oh, we’re not together anymore!” he had said, all bright and happy, as she described it. While living in the house that had my (and my parents) money in it: down payment, monthly payments, new appliances, etc., etc., sleeping on my sheets, using my coffee mugs, with coffee I had bought . . . My clothes, my shoes, my . . .
In some way it’s not even about the things, it’s about how every moment of every day is laced with poison because I’m trying to figure out how to survive, while he blissfully defrauds others from the stage that I built. And I have to figure out every moment the tiniest elements of survival. I’m in my vehicle. I don’t face 11:00 a.m. checkout, but I do want to get to McDonalds for the $3.13 breakfast. (They have a clean bathroom.) I run the engine to charge up the battery to run a small heater, but the exhaust system needs repair and I’m breathing fumes.
The “interventionist” — a man of God — became another predator in yet another chapter of the protracted death of my business. The S/P was a leader in AA. My parents resources were also devastated. Only in the past several months have they realized that I did not engineer this myself to destroy them. They have stopped screaming at me, and are trying to help with the little things they can do. No I can’t live there — no room, community covenants, my battered little van.
I was in the parking lot of the grocery store down the street from MY house a few nights ago. I started to shake at the thought of walking in for just one or two things. If I had seen him, I don’t know what I would have done.
In many ways I’m blessed to have a spiritual underpinning and an intellect to sustain me. But that doesn’t give me a paycheck, hot-and-cold running water. I’m also blessed to have my computer and a wifi location. Unless I told you all this, how would you know?
No I don’t have “muscle” I can bring in on this. Too many years as a single mom, everything I had going into just working and being there for my kid. The S/P picked me very, very well. The only way to go after him to get MY just due is with plenty of reinforcements and heavy artillery (so to speak), and he did a great job of ensuring I had no resources to do that.
Bernie Madoff has done me one huge favor. I now can now say, “This guy was really likable, really believable, just like Bernie Madoff.” And people start to understand how someone like me could have been taken like this. What they don’t get is the rape of it.
When I rise out of my misery, I know that there are others like me who also need help. Devastation is devastation. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as this to be a complete destruction of someone’s life.
We deserve to have help, and we deserve to have some recourse. I have not been able to find it. I wonder if Bernie’s social contribution may be that people will finally understand that these are NOT normal people, and normal avenues of recovery or retribution just do not apply.
And to the men here on Lovefraud, apologies if I always seem to write you out of my writing. It’s not that I don’t see you as victims, or don’t see woman as potential sociopaths.
It’s that the traits on both sides seem to be associated, at least, in my mind with stereotypical gender traits. The victims seem to be giving people with permeable boundaries and a paradoxical, expansive “give more” response to certain types of stress. The perpetrators seem hyper-logical, emotionally out of touch, performance-driven types, whose view of performance sees nothing wrong with leaving road kill in their wake.
In getting better, I’ve discovered that these stereotypes are really more about hormonal responses and right/left brain dominance, surely related to hard-wired reproductive roles, but also not a universal description of gender-related character traits. And that there are a lot of men who are emotionally aware and expressive, as well as a lot of women who seem permanently stuck and acting out all kinds of destructive emotional dramas.
What’s the old line about generalizations always being false, including this one?
One of the things about my recovery is that my own stereotypical feminine behavior has faded. A lot of that was survival tactics based on embedded beliefs that I had no power, and I had to operate as someone who cultivated and lived on other people’s power. A lot of getting well, for me, has been getting over that.
In the beginning, it was about angrily standing up to abuse of power, something I’d been doing all my life, but now it was standing up to something that had somehow permeated and poisoned my life. But then I abandoned that as a waste of time, compared to recovering my own power. Taking back authority over my life, and learning to live inside and with absolute knowledge that I had this power. A kind of neverending fountain of creative capacity that played out in the choices I made and the way I spent my life. It came with the responsibility to use it well. For myself. And for everything I touched.
The difference was that, instead of fighting power, I was power. And the good I could do was not about making abuse the center of my life, but removing the obstacles to making things work better. It’s a fine distinction but a real one.
I’ve always been attracted to high-test men and butch women. I’ve also been struck over and over again, but the terrible trade-offs in their character. The focus and control came at the cost of emotional vibrancy. They were out of touch, lived with more awareness of what was wrong than what was right, had shaky egos supported by grandiose self-mythologizing, and were irretrievably lonely unless they were getting massive fixes of attention and reinforcement.
Really, not much different than me, except that I played the femme role in all my relationships. By the time I met my sociopath, I was practically Scarlett O’Hara, flouncing around and using emotional blackmail to get what I wanted, pouting and having little tantrums, and controlling everything because I was overcommitted with no boundaries and wasn’t aware of anyone else’s. I felt like a total victim. The people I served loved me and thought I was brilliant, but the people who were dependent on me were also terrified of me.
When he met me and for a long time afterward, my sociopath told me I was the most feminine woman he’d ever met. It wasn’t a lie. He was truly bemused by it. And he finally settled what it meant in his own mind when he decided I was a 1950s type of woman. Not a bad analysis for a guy who was born in 1968.
But we’re talking about gender stereotypes here. And maybe how they are enforced by circumstance until our characters are warped into using stereotypical behaviors to get along.
I thought he was the most masculine character I’d ever met. We weren’t like Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. We were more like a scene from an old movie, with a baby gangster and an abandoned little girl surviving together on dark streets where there was no shelter or anyone else who cared about us. That was my psychological reality. I was a drag on him, but I was better at begging and milking the suckers, so he reluctantly kept me around.
On another level, it felt like the teenaged big romance I never had. With the tough rock’n’roll guy in his hot car who stole me out of my father’s house and talked me into things I never would have dared to do before and made me laugh so hard I thought I’d get sick. He was life and rebellion and big ideas. I was crazy about him, out of my mind crazy about him.
I look at all this now, and realize that this was a healing process, right from the beginning. A confrontation with embedded beliefs and cultural stories, going home to the point in my character where everything stopped because of an unprocessed trauma. Not a confrontation but more like the frog dropped into the cold pan of water with the fire under it. Would I figure it out before it was too late? Would I role that big boulder away from the entrance to my unprocessed history, or would I just die there in front of it, like the head-no-evil-see-no-evil monkey going la-la-la I’m not going to think about it?
I guess you know the end of the story. It’s a nice neat story as I tell it, and I’ll probably get a novel out of it about a girl and her sociopath that might make a good movie. As well as the guide to healing, which may or may not be useful, but if I can figure out a good title will be salable.
But for me, one of the richest and most interesting outcomes of all this is the rethinking of gender roles. How collaboration and cooperation and focus and control are all really about what we do when faced with challenges. And how get smarter really means being able to move around those options, even on a moment by moment basis, without getting stuck in one idea of who we are or what is our default tactic for survival or success.
It’s also coming to terms with the fact that I’m a tough, cleared-head, compassionate woman. That’s always been the truth of me underneath all the eyelash fluttering and pretending I’m just interested in being tucked under the arm of someone bigger and stronger. The alternative is not being the whore with the heart of gold, or the mean old fishwife with the heart of gold, or any other stereotype out of Hollywood or comedia dell’arte or the woman-hating church in which I was raised. It’s just being me, as purely as I can make it, as well I can understand it in terms that have no limits of what I can be.
And that is true for everyone else. Sex and sexual attraction have lots of odd hooks into our hormonal systems and hard-wired reactions. For me, it will probably always trigger some role-playing and maybe that’s just normal. But those roles are not who I am in the rest of life. Or they are only part of it. Because part of me is still Scarlett O’Hara. And part of me is also the sociopath, who I sucked dry as much as he did me, learning every little secret of who he was and what his life strategy was good for so I could use it in my own life to grow up through the blocked and blacked-out places places in my psyche.
Your challenges may be no different than mine. Or they may be something like mine. Or you may be going through this to learn something entirely different.
But I believe that we’re all here for a reason. That in taking on a sociopath, something in us was challenging us to grow up and become more whole than we were before. And in that, we’re all in it together.
So if I sound like I’m being sexist, I am but I’m not. The stereotypes, like the saints and the loa and Greek gods, all represent some iconic bit of the human experience. But there’s not one part of it that not in all of us.
Kathy
Rune,
I’m going to be a little persistent here. It it becomes uncomfortable, just skip the letter.
The resources you went to were not helpful. Not just because they weren’t helpful, but because they weren’t the right resources. Not because you picked badly, but because they didn’t help. Circular thinking, but correct. If they didn’t help, they weren’t the right resources.
Think about this. First, you have records. If the situation were reversed, he’d sue the pants off you for equity in the house. And he put down his canceled checks, his loan documents and get a judgment for forced sale of the property and distribution of equity. And this is not a judgment that he has to comply with, it goes right to the mortgage company.
Second, he is not there all the time. If you can’t go into that house, someone else can. If your name’s not the the mortgage, you’re looking at potential B&E. I’m not encouraging you to break the law, but if you make up your mind to get in there, you may be able to find a way around this that isn’t illegal. Has anyone told you that you can’t go in there? Has he got a restraining order against you? If you send an agent into there, it’s no different. If it’s still your house and there’s a security system, call up the security company and cancel the service. Then drive up with a big van, and empty the place.
I know that’s unlikely or there are reasons you think you couldn’t get away with it. But just thinking about it can get you closer.
You are saying no way, and it’s causing you to stop thinking about finding a way. Okay, so he’s Bluebeard. He still leaves the house. And you still have documentation. If you weren’t married, all the better in some ways. Your checking, credit card, tax and other financial records are a powerful thing. The only reason you’re not a resident now in that house is because you fled in fear of him. For good reason.
But your fear and his viciousness are only one factor here. It doesn’t add up to total annihilation of you and your history.
If you feel like you’ve misplayed any part of this, been too emotional to tell your story properly, wasted opportunities to fix this with people who can’t or won’t help, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it better from a position of more internal clarity and intent.
The reality is that you can’t undo it all. You can’t go back to a series of mistaken decisions and undo them and their repercussions. But what those repercussions are is still evolving. And sometimes taking a mental position of wanting something helps a lot.
Not wanting someone else to do something. Or wanting anything about someone else. But wanting what is yours. Wanting what is left of it. Maybe what is left of it is you as a clear-eyed, wiser, stronger person with a slimmed-down lifestyle that enables you to move faster and respond quicker. Or maybe it is also recovering what those bad decisions didn’t burn up, and using them to fund the evolution of that new you. Maybe getting them back is an exercise in discovering what you are capable of.
And maybe it’s not. I’m not pushing you or suggesting any right thing for you to do. But I am questioning some of the conclusions you have come to, and suggesting that there may be options and choices beyond what you see right now, because he seems so big and bad and the world seems to offer so little support.
The truth is that he’s an emotional idiot. They all are. He’s a power addict, and all addicts are blindered by obsessive need. If you this this guy is in control of himself or isn’t a slave to his needs and impulses, you’re letting your feelings get in the way of your knowledge.
You are the same woman with the same talent and intelligence that gained success before. You didn’t get that success because it was handed to you. You worked, planned, calculated, overcame obstacles, got other people out of your way when necessary, found ways to piggyback on other people’s ambitions, and knew exactly how payback worked in both positive and negative terms. People don’t become successful in business without learning all these things. Performance and good work is only what gets you in the door. Gaining credibility and power requires learning to use the system, as it exists.
So you met someone who isn’t your idea of a human being. He isn’t. He’s half a human being. And he didn’t play by your rules because he’s emotionally cripped, and he only has one set of rules, rather than the fluid, adaptable reality that the rest of us live with. But I don’t believe you’ve never encountered another one of these characters in your life. And I’m hard-pressed to believe you never learned anything about how to sabotage them and neutralize them inside the system, by maybe pushing the right buttons or twisting the right levers several degrees of association away. Being Machiavellian isn’t reserved for bad guys.
You sound totally rational, right up to this point. Where you start talking about how impossible it is in virtually the same sentence that you talk about getting the shakes getting close to the house. You are still in recovery. You are nowhere near through learning what you’re going to learn from all this.
But one of the things you will learn is that you are strong and they are trying pretend that they’re not incompetent, underdeveloped, endless failures. They think that power is their key, because it’s all they figure out. But the truth is the only power they have is as false as the rest of their masks. They talk people into believing it, but it’s a never-ending story with them. They’re addicted to their fixes because they are weaklings, unloved and unimportant, and there are not enough wins in the world to convince them otherwise. But they only have one strategy for convincing themselves. It’s their strength, but it’s also their vulnerability.
Now you don’t have to believe that. It doesn’t matter. But you do have to believe that there is nothing more important than what you want. Nothing. This is the only way to pull yourself back together. If you can’t get what you want right now, you store the want on an internal shelf until the universe opens a path. And you start working on another want. And I know that your current situation makes simple survival wants a major challenge. But it’s not always going to be like this, and you need to start cultivating the more advanced “I wants” for when the road clears.
This is important. If the best thing that you can think of is vengeance, understand that it’s a point on the path of healing. You’ll get past that. The true “I want” statement are about yourself. Who you want to be. What you want to do. What will make you satisfied or gratified or reopen awe and joy in you. And you work on your “I want” collection to develop things that work for you, things that may be in reach or close to in reach, and steps toward things that are further away. No matter how demanding your survival issues, this is the other work of your life now.
Because it pulls you back inside of yourself. Because it confirms the existance of a “you” that has nothing to do with this mess, except experiencing it as one of life’s many learning adventures. Because exploring this central, unchanging you solidifies and firms up your identity again, so that whatever you look at in your life becomes a resource or not important or something that touches you and surprises you and adds something new to your thinking. Those are the three categories of what’s outside of you that are worth thinking about. Helpful, not helpful, interesting.
Okay, I’ve been lecturing you, and I apologize. But I feel you are so close to getting a grip on this. PSTD is about having a hole punched in your boundaries that keeps letting in reminders of the event that punched the hole. You can go back and reframe the event. But sometimes it’s more expeditious to go back and get in touch with yourself.
You are not what happened to you. That is the powerful, eternal, healing truth we all come to. And beyond that, the bad thing that happens is a challenge that forces us to go back and discover who we really are. Or rediscover it, because we really knew it all the time. We just got distracted by an emotional idiot who saw us only in terms of his addictions, and who created a mess that forced us to do some housecleaning. We learn what we can afford to lose, and often are surprised to discover that much of it was albatrosses that were dragging us down and keeping us from moving on to a much more interesting life.
This comes with a huge hug. And I hope that this will be a kind of vitamin pill for your soul. It may not change the world today, but it might start a few tiny dominoes falling that help you climb back into the light.
Namaste.
Kathy
Dear Aloha,
Yes, the “I had a stalker” routine does “explain” things for a while to folks that you don’t want to go into any deeper explaination with, and it works. they can “get that”—
Very good article. It speaks to my inner child that went thru such turmoil, abandonment and rejection from my father. I now carry it with me into my adult life (unfortunately). I’m not sure that this is the place to ask; but I’ve been apart from my S for almost six months altho we had contact by phone until a few weeks ago when I found out he had moved in with another woman. He has now filed a complaint against me with the dept I work for (a trumped up charge) so I am now being investigated. Anyone ever have the S come back and do something to them like this?
I was betrayed. My generosity was used. My emotions were exploited.
For me, there was one single moment of betrayal — the details still too painful to recall — when he was laid bare before me for all he was and for all he was not.
That was the end, the breaking point, the moment of realization.
I tend to be a fixer and a problem solver but I save myself from this by telling myself that I cannot fix what I did not break.
Some one above stated that you may have “cared for him . . . better than you cared for yourself.” I did.
Now I try to accept the calm that comes from protecting myself.
I still experience an inclination to contact him when I feel lonely or when I feel empty or even bored.
Then I read LoveFraud to sober me.