This column is dedicated to my sister, who is my best friend and wise counsel in so much of this learning
In Part 2, I wrote about painful shock, our instantaneous reactions to stabilize us until we have time to heal, and the everyday process that we use to resolve trauma.
In a relationship with a sociopath, something goes wrong with this process. We don’t handle “bad things that happen to us” in an expeditious way. It may be that we do not have skills for fast processing of emotional trauma, because we are burdened by residue of previous trauma. But beyond that, the typical sociopathic technique of recruiting us through seductive love-bombing, followed by withdrawal of positive attention, can disable our normal responses.
Instead of clearly recognizing that we are victims of abuse, we become confused about our own involvement. Because we responded positively to the seduction, we are from the beginning volunteers or collaborators in what happened to us. When our “perfect lovers” inexplicably turn cold, critical and demanding, we are left dealing with emotional attachments to our precious memories. This chaotic emotional landscape sets the stage for further emotional abuse and predation.
Adapting to the Unthinkable
Denial is the topic of this piece. In denial, we assume that we have power over certain aspects of our relationship with a sociopath. It is a form of magical thinking. It also plays an important role in recovery.
My friends: Kathy, what do you mean he’s moving back in with you again? It took you months to stop crying over him last time.
Me: No, it’s really okay. We had a good talk. He’s just needs my support. It was my fault for not trusting him. He really cares about me. He was so tender and open. Can’t you hear how happy I am?
Is it any wonder people think we’re crazy? But until we “learn through” this situation, we may feel as crazy as they think we are.
In the Kubler-Ross model of grief processing after receiving a terminal diagnosis, denial is a rejection of reality. “This isn’t happening to me.” It is the same difficulty we face in the loss of a loved one, absorbing the information that a life resource has disappeared. First response to trauma often includes a massive rush of endorphins (the “feel good” brain chemical) that anesthetizes pain and helps prevent us from dying or breaking down. This is why the first response of survivors is often inexplicably confident and relaxed about the future.
But denial is also a psychological state that can endure forever. In denial, we avoid the cause-and-effect reality of our pain. If our sociopath relationship causes us pain, we look for its causes anywhere but in the sociopath’s bad intention toward us. When we look at our situation with the sociopath, we see the benefits and good potential, rather than the disasters that we’re living through.
Swept Off Our Feet
The purpose of denial is not to reduce the pain, but to avoid acknowledging the cause of it. In our relationships with sociopaths, we have at least two significant reasons for denial. One is that, like a drug pusher, the sociopath has successfully pushed past our normal self-protective boundaries and conditioned us to emotional merger in an environment of “perfect love.” We have lost independence of thought and feeling, and acquired a new need to keep us stable — the “perfect love.” We are now junkies.
The difference between this emotional merger and a healthy love relationship is that the development was dominated by the sociopath. It was conducted in a way that rewarded us for fast emotional response and penalized us for trying to slow it down for rational consideration.
As a result, we do not have a well-understood set of reasons for our involvement, except that this person was so accurate in pushing our buttons. Without those reasons, it is harder for us to go back and compare our current reality with any logical choices that we made. We begin these relationships in disorientation that seems to be “perfect” because it reflects our dreams or emotional needs, but does not reflect our well-boundaried, thoughtful, self-caring identities.
The second and even more compelling reason to avoid acknowledging the cause of our pain is the knowledge of our own collusion.We said yes to this.(It is not until later in the healing process that we understand what we were up against, and forgive ourselves.) If we are causing ourselves this pain, our identities are seriously compromised.We don’t know who we are anymore. https://frpiluleenligne.com
If we can’t extricate ourselves from the relationship, the threat to our internal integrity is magnified.
So denial “protects” us from the knowledge that our drug of choice is a destructive force on our lives, and that we are causing our own pain. (One of those facts is true.)
The Impact of Shutting Down
Denial is an act of will. A deliberate not knowing. However, denial does not always occur at the conscious level, especially if we have backgrounds of unhealed childhood abuse. Likewise, major adult trauma — like rape or combat experiences — can overwhelm our everyday trauma-processing skills, making us more likely to “get stuck” at early-stage processing.
Denial is not just a stage in healing. It is also a radical coping response to certain circumstances. If we cannot escape a situation, if we are dependent for survival on the perpetrators of trauma, if we can’t exercise our defensive flight-or-fight impulses without increasing our risk, shutting down our awareness of cause and effect is a way of managing our responses to the situation. Like that first endorphin rush after a painful shock, shutting down is a means of survival.
In later life, if we have never adequately processed and healed from these situations, this type of shutting down may still be our best and final response to any traumatic event. Because it may be embedded in blocked memory, the whole mechanism may occur below the realm of consciousness.
If we are using denial as a self-protective technique, we may have an unusual pain tolerance, a lack of awareness of risk, and a constant “hum” of anxiety interfering with emotional or logical activity. Our knowledge of cause and effect of pain is not destroyed, only blocked. Our protective “alert” system keeps generating emotional noise, trying to draw our attention to the situation. Even after it is long past. Because we have not yet finished learning from it, so we can move on with our identities intact. The fact that this painful trauma is still “live” means that we are reactive to anything that looks like a reoccurrence, causing post-traumatic stress responses.
Magical thinking is the idea that we can alter reality by our thoughts. In many cases, we do influence events by envisioning our preferred outcomes, and acting on opportunities to create the future we want. But when magical thinking becomes the attempt to obliterate feelings that originate in our survival responses, we move into the realm of the impossible and self-destructive. We are attempting to magically change the present, not create the future. Rejecting our feelings splits our psyches into parts of ourselves that we accept and parts that we do not. Fear and rejection of ourselves makes us more likely to view the world in terms of fear and rejection.
For all the problems it creates, denial provides us the gift of time. It enables us to postpone trauma processing until the environment is safer or more supportive, or until we can endure facing the cause-and-effect issues. But until we are ready to move forward, everything we might learn and all our related self-protective emotions are stuffed back into a “La-la-la, I’m not thinking about this now” area of our heads.
The more we stuff, the more emotional static builds up in the background. If the sociopath is depending on our insecurity, instability, or high pain tolerance, denial makes it that much easier for the sociopath to exploit us, because we are not acting self-protectively in response to pain.
How to Care for Ourselves
Denial is probably the most toxic phase of the healing process, because we are not only reeling from painful shock, but also blocking our knowledge and feelings about it. However much we are obsessed by relationship with the sociopath, a much larger and more demanding relationship drama is occurring in our own psyches. We are at war with ourselves.
As others have noted here on Lovefraud, getting over a sociopathic relationship isn’t necessarily a linear process. We may be experiencing multiple stages of healing — including anger and forgiveness — alongside early-stage processing like denial. One reason for this is that the experience of a sociopathic relationship is so multi-layered. We experience trauma related to our beliefs about the world and changes in our material circumstances, as well as our relationships with ourselves.
The fastest way to recover our capacity to deal with other traumas is to fix our relationship with ourselves. Self-hatred drains our energy, hope and creative capacity. Part of this despair is instilled in us by the sociopath’s criticisms and now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t “love,” which are part of their program to separate us from our self-trust and make us more dependent on them. But a more important source of our self-hatred is denial itself. Denial creates an environment of fear and rejection of ourselves.
The Healing Facts
In healing, we do eventually come terms with what we did to ourselves. We get there because we face two simple facts.
One is that we were vulnerable. Our vulnerability came out of the way we were taught, our previous experiences that may have left us with unhealed emotional damage, and the quality of our dreams. All of these things are part of being human. All of these things can be reconsidered and improved to makes us stronger, more able and confident in taking care of ourselves, and more creative and joyful in our lives. These improvements occur during our recovery process.
The other fact is that we were dealing with something we didn’t understand. The sociopathic strategy for predation begins with deliberately disabling other people’s self-protective responses. They do it in order to exploit other people’s social feelings, personal resources and dignity, all to fill incurable deficiencies in their characters and lives. They mask themselves as attractive people we would like to know. Until they show their predatory intentions, we are dealing with an actor playing a role. The fact that we didn’t understand is also human.
We ordinarily don’t get clear information about their intentions until we are hooked, addicted and dependent. At that point, our ability to recognize and act on the information is compromised. This doesn’t make us stupid. It makes us victims. It is pointless and it only perpetuates the trauma to hate the parts of ourselves that are innocent, hopeful, trusting and open to love. We didn’t do this to ourselves.
Getting out of denial is a cause for tears. But they are healthy tears for the right reasons. If we have been blocked in denial for a while, we may have a lot of them to shed. They are part of comforting ourselves, acknowledging our feelings and validating our right to feel them. When we’ve comforted ourselves enough, the tears will stop and we will move on to another part of healing. It does not go on forever.
We have reason to feel sad for ourselves. Something bad happened to us. We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know how to protect ourselves. We didn’t know how to get out of it when it got painful. Every bit of it, including our saying yes to it and the emotional addiction that kept us attached, was not our choice. We never would have chosen it, if we understood what was really going on. Grasping the truth that a bad thing that happened to us, rather blaming it on ourselves, is a major part of healing.
To get out of denial, we may have to find the courage to ignore other people’s opinions or embedded ideas about who we “should” be. If we think we “should have been” stronger or smarter, we’re still in denial about our human vulnerability. With other people, we may have to reject with dignity any idea that this is a minor event, that we don’t have the right to take our time healing, and that we were not victimized.
Taking care of ourselves in this way speeds our recovery of self-trust. In our lives, we own the knowledge that this was a major trauma in our lives, and that it is our responsibility to ourselves to fully heal, no matter what it takes, or how long.
Recovering Our Resources
Facing the facts, getting out of self-hate, putting the blame where it belongs frees us to begin the positive work of restructuring our lives. Part of that work is thinking about what the encounter with the sociopath has to teach us. We have learned something about the world. We have also learned something about ourselves. Together, those two types of learning lead us to recreate ourselves in a number of ways.
This creation occurs in an environment of choice, not the desperation that led to denial. We use our new knowledge to develop new habits of self-care and new ideas about what we want out of our lives. All of this is good for us.
Getting out of denial and out of self-hatred also enables us to approach the world a little differently. We don’t feel the need to apologize for who we are. We need to put together a new life. We become more pragmatic, more able to work through our options, more comfortable with temporary failures, because we’re figuring out what works, not struggling to keep the lid on our feelings or to deny part of our history.
Every time we face an uncomfortable fact, we become better at undoing denial. Denial is a temporary tool for managing trauma, but it makes us vulnerable to the sociopath and other avoidable disasters. Becoming more open to truth, even when it is uncomfortable, is our first line of defense of our lives and our real identities.
To recap: A bad thing happened to us. We did not see it coming or understand it when it was happening. We did not cause it. We are survivors, and we’re learning from the experience. In healing, we not only get over our pain, but become better at living than we were before.
Namaste. The courageous, truth-seeking spirit in me salutes the courageous, truth-seeking spirit in you.
Kathy
OUCH. Looking back on “begging for forgiveness” after excusing him for infidelity, ACCURATELY, really stings. And then enrages me.
Henry, your example of your ex S in the store, and Matt, your example of your ex S at the party, are both experiences that ring so true to my experiences. Specifically, your intuitional/emotional/intellectual ways of processing it afterward.
There were multiple times when my ex S disappeared like yours did, and my gut reaction was that he was somewhere cheating on me. I would try to repress it, but my gut was screaming at me….so I would say something to him. And he would be so hurt and angry. And then my head would step in, and I’d think “how could he be cheating? Who on earth would do that?” and I would end up apologizing…sometimes profusely.
It makes me so angry to look back on those times. Because he ALWAYS was cheating….and the fact that he would make me beg for forgiveness and accuse myself of being insecure and crazy (he would agree with this assessment), while I was being insightful and reasonable, pisses me off. SO F–KING MUCH!!!!
How the hell did I let that happen to me???
I just had lunch with an acquaintance I hadn’t seen for two years. I told him what happened, and he was so surprised ot hear what had happened and what I had tolerated. And I barely told him the half of it! He was actually more understanding and compassionate than most. But just hearing myself tell the story, I can’t believe that I allowed all of this to happen.
Never again, never, never, again.
I forgot too mention that the store clerk also was no where to be found either, after walking everywhere looking for him – about a 45 minute ordeal then going out to my truck and waiting. I remember having a anxiety attack because I knew exactly what was going on and even if it was my imagination, then what the f–is going on that I am living like this? On edge all the time? I must be a crazy lunatic to think like this – but in hindsight myintuition was saying ” I am not crazy – this guy just cheated on me right under my nose~!” and that is just one of many similar experiences. But Matt the one that freaks me out the most is the old hag next door – yep a female – and I ignored that suspicion as well. But one thing that was always a given – I would never of turned my back or left him alone with my 3 small grandchildren for one second – now how can I have loved someone and wanted a future with him and at the same time had the smart’s enuff to not trust him with my grandkids? Telling the store episode has helped me, has been one of those things I ruminate over and over – only here can I mention it…..thanks ya’ll
Rune: I told him I want a divorce. I keep walking into this wall hoping it will become an open door. With a coldness he said fine, let’s get a divorce. There’s nothing I can do to change him, and keep him from cheating. There’s nothing I can do to make him into a real person.
I have to create that open door and fly away. If I stay, it’s on me. Any more time I waste with this pathetic excuse for a human being is on me. The torture I put myself through allowing him to abuse me is on me.
I feel so ill, so desperate, so sad, so scared, so hopeless, and so completely alone. I don’t know how to turn off and shut down. I don’t know how to shut off the thoughts in my head that tell me just to shut up and quit rocking the boat.
The fear of the unknown is crippling me. The fear of having to figure out what to do with the rest of my life scares me beyond belief. I wish so badly that I was already on the other side looking back thanking God I made it.
All: You cannot negotiate directly with him. You really need to be away from him and have an attorney to get this process in motion.
I don’t know the divorce laws in your state, but I do know that if he is abusing you, you need him totally out of your life. His personality disorder is ABSOLUTELY making you feel ill, desperate, sad, scared, hopeless.
You are not alone. And right now you are “in the boat” with a maniac.
The unknown is absolutely better than this.
I see two choices right now: Get him out of the house or you leave the house. Is he physically abusing you? or just emotionally (not like the pain of emotional abuse is less, but it’s harder to prove to the rest of the world that doesn’t know).
Henry:
I can relate to you’re never wanting to leave him alone with your grandkids.
I felt the same way about leaving him alone with my nieces and nephews. He proclaimed how much he liked kids and how much they liked him. Yet, my nieces and nephews steered a wide berth around him.
Looking back, there were two episodes that I now realize fit into that protective instinct. One was when I saw him jam a sock over a puppy’s head and LAUGH at its confusion.
The second was I remember him telling me about a friend’s nanny who was so envious about his relationship with th friend’s kids. I suspect the nanny saw something that her employer wasn’t and was not going to leave those kids alone with him.
All Pain–one reason it truly is hard to leave is that bonds have formed between you. Trauma bonds that are biological and neurological.
You said that you wish you were already on the other side looking back. That is a great thing to visualize!! Imagine that YOU ARE on the other side–that it is 6 months from now or one year from now, then 3 years from now. Visualize what you want your life to look like. Give yourself the gift and the freedom to imagine a better life.
I do that alot. I also send myself love–my younger self missed out on alot and was not treated lovingly, so I am trying to take care of her now. My parents weren’t able to, so I am trying to do so now.
Best wishes. You can make it. Stick with us here and we’ll carry you through.
Once you jump off the diving board into the water, even though the ocean is a big place and all you can see is just water in every direction, the intial shock of being alone eases. You start to notice the sky, the birds that pass above seeming to notice you in their song, the sun above you with all of it’s invigorating rays seem to warm and comfort you. Therefore you are now feeling some of the fear is gone. You made the leap, altough many times you had been on the diving board and had gone back because the jump and the fear of looking down into the unknown were too much to bear. Then a boat has come has come into the distance and appears to be coming closer. As you are swimming you feel good, you can do it, your arms and legs are kicking hard to keep you moving, you realize how strong you are to have survived this jump. The memory and the relief, I had to make this horrible jump no longer feel as if it did when you were at the very tip of that long, high diving board. The boat is your innerstrength that like your arms and legs were your true strength that was always there. You made it. Now getting closer to the shore you see there is a gathering on the beach. The rays of the sun have come into the peak of the noon, the sand with seashells waiting to be found, the palm trees lightly blowing in the breeze, and a group of people once in focus of your eyes, are there in tutus, tiaras, and hip length boots. They have had that same jump and are smiling to welcome you to the other side of the ocean. Now realizing the diving board and the memory of the excruciating jump you had no experience with before, was the very best thing you could ever do. You are stronger that you stayed afloat in that big ocean. The memories will fade in time of the diving board and remain there, but you are now grateful you had the choice of jumping. It had become part of the new strength you have. And the palm trees remain still blowing lighly in the breeze and a beachful of seashells of pretty pastel colors are waiting to be found.
Dear Matt, dear Henry, dear Healing heart, are our guts not one kind of wonderful instant alarm system?? I always wonder why the gut is still working when the brain is washed each gyrus and sulcus very thoroughly since our very early infancy, as the heart is kept in the fog from the same time on?
We try to behave as adults and not admit to be jealous of a shop keeper or a man who just happens to help the friend getting out of a sweaty shirt. We try very hard to believe in the good of humanity.
Or I must not be jealous of my colleague who can give me the silent treatment and gets promotion after promotion, and the height of hypocrisy she got appointed to our ethics board to evaluate ethically correct procedures in our hospital! It is just sickening: another gut-reaction!
Today I read “De profundis” by Oscar Wilde, and there he quotes Goethe translated by Carlyle: “Who never ate his bread in sorrow (Tears), Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow,-He knows you not, ye heavenly powers” . I have not finished yet, but it seems that Oscar Wilde did a very long “Lovefraud Thread” without the internet.
Matt: I can so relate to you, as I also got a very harsh reprimand in December 08 on my performance during the last 6 months. The breakup was in April last year. My boss was informed by me and very aware of the break up, (he even made some “funny” comments as “no more theatre?”, as I used to go regularly to theatre performances with my x-p/n). The bullying of my “colleague” got also worse, and now she seems to have infested my other two colleagues of the team so they ALL do give me the silent treament as well (including my boss, and he says as I informed him about the ongoing bullying that I have to look at MY behaviour! It was already a problem a year ago, and he told my colleague that she has to talk with me. But she lured him in by reading all his wishes from his eyes, and he now he is completely dependent on her, and she behaves as she pleases). Furthermore he can exert his powerplay on ALL of us.
I can also relate to Allpainnogain, “The fear of the unknown is crippling me. The fear of having to figure out what to do with the rest of my life scares me beyond belief. I wish so badly that I was already on the other side looking back thanking God I made it.”
I love my profession, but I feel I have to go away from there and I do not know where to go. But as Rune says, all is better than stay and get more damage done.
I am a firm believer of “the making thoughts while talking/writing”. Venting here on LF helps me a great deal. I can sort out my thoughts and get great advice and validation. I do not want to share these thoughts with any of my friends or family right now. Maybe when I come up with a solution. To them I must seem like a pathetic helpless hopeless who can’t come to terms with “IT”. My friends also do not get the whole meaning for me about the “silent treatment”, as nobody does when I tell about. (“Fine, so you must not worry about things that are not your business”). Fact is that they are cutting off ALL information and carefully watch that I do not get ANY information which are also my business, as we are supposed to be a TEAM (5 people including the boss), but in the same time they let me know in a very subtle way that they are doing IMPORTANT things, by talking a lot but shutting up as I join them.
I once used to say that curiosity is my biggest vice, but I am weaning from that vice too, the hard way. I get really a very thorough peeling of all my soul/brain right now!
Fortunately I feel no bitterness at all, as I see them all as a bunch of S/N/P who are playing their miserable powerplay and will end in misery and alone in the end of their lives. I definitely do NOT want be a “member of the pack”!
I already had a little victory: there is a 61-year old head nurse who also does “silent treatment” on me since a year or so, and I always kept being polite and never complained about it. She took my orders which were in writing, my requests were being served and all went just fine with me.
She then took her silent treatment a bit too far. She locked the only toilet of the diagnostics department with a key so that I could not go to it, it is near my old office and offers more “privacy” as the actual one which is in full sight of the patient’s waiting area and the patients can figure out exactly what I am doing in the toilet. So I went two three times to the old toilet which is hidden.
I did not know about the fact that I was not allowed to use this special toilet and was not informed about it as well, I just saw that it was always “occupied”.
The head nurse told everybody except me that she locked the toilet because of me. Unfortunately for her I could go to any other toilet and I did of course, but all the staff members of her department, including 6 consultants, 10 nurses and aids had to show up in HER office to ask for the toilet key. One consultant then ended the game after heavy complaints of the staff. The clou is that I do not belong to this special staff and I was NOT aware of supposedly being “punished”. I never asked for the key, and it was clear to everybody who was the nutcase! NOT ME, as I get along very well with most of the staff there! It was really Kindergarten at its worst. Even my bossy boss had to admit as I informed him about that too, that I may go to any toilet in the hospital as I please. Nobody ever mentioned the case again, they all did play “let’s pretend it never happened”. (I said as she had reopened the door, that for me the case is closed. I did not want my boss to interact with her on my behalf; two “bully silent treatmenters”??!). I did not want to give her any importance.
Towanda!
Allpain – Please stick it out! It will get better! I am six months out from when I last saw my ex S, and I am so much better. And, I recall 7 months ago…at one point lying on the floor in the fetal position, sobbing, because I believed I could not live without him. I was devastated because I knew he was horrible, but also felt like I simply could not live this lifetime without him.
I can. Here it is six months later and I am SO MUCH better off than I was then. I have had so much less pain in my life with each passing day. Sometimes I backslide – two steps forward, one step back, but there has been a clear trajectory of progress, and I am so much better.
People always write about NC, and I see now just how critical that is. If you stay away from him, in every way possible, the addiction will break, and you will not want him so much. SUCH LIBERATION!!! Hang in there with us! I thought I couldn’t live with out him…I was SO WRONG!
Dear OPN and Pear,
Thank you. I’m looking for a way to love that little girl in me. I’m the little girl in the black and yellow tutu searching for that field where all the other good parts of me are dancing in the sunshine where there is freedom to be myself without fear of criticism, degradation or shame.
I wanted to tell S how I was feeling a few minutes ago, but as I started to say something, he stopped me by saying “all I want to do is take a nap and you want to get into some philisophical discussion”. I just wanted him to listen with an open heart, but I forgot he doesn’t have one so I’ll say it here.
Dear Chuck,
I realize that what once made us happy can end up making us miserable. There’s no guarantees that anything will make us happy forever. As much as it breaks my heart, your heart is somewhere else. I love you and want you to be happy. And even though it tears at my soul to think of being without you knowing you’re loving someone else, I’m letting you go to live the life you want to live.
This life is far too short to give up hope of having and experiencing true joy, peace, love and contentment. I wanted mine to be with you. What was once our fortress of solitude has become a prison cell to both of us. Somewhere neither of us want to be.
There’s nothing left here but anger, pain, and sorrow. Mine because I but don’t truly have you or the love I need from you, and yours because you’re stuck in a relationship with someone you don’t truly love. Let’s not do this to ourselves anymore. There’s nothing left here for us to work on.
All we can do is move on and do our best to find the peace and joy we need in our lives. Whatever that is to you I hope you find it, and my wish for you is that you search for it in the right places. The truest love, peace and joy comes from within. I hope you go there without ever having fear of dancing the dance. I’m on my way.