If there is a single category of memories that still can make me squirm, it is the remembrance of what I did to make my sociopath love me. And what I did simply to keep him from hurting me. And what I did to try to understand the things I must have done wrong, because he didn’t love me. And all the ways I pretzel-twisted my brain to excuse him for his lies, deception, disrespect and greed.
The topic of this article is the next phase of healing from a sociopathic relationship: bargaining.
We are in the process of healing from the moment we sustain any emotional trauma. Relationships with sociopaths typically involve many traumatic events, both large and small. Some of these events are the “blows” of insults, coldness and various types of violence or violation of our trust. But these blows, however painful they may be, are less damaging than the events that threaten our identities by making us question our own values and ability to trust ourselves
Bargaining is one of the two ways we negotiate with pain. The first is denial, which was discussed in the last article, Part 3. Denial enables us to postpone facing trauma, until we’re ready, or until we’ve found support that can help us think it through. In denial, we make a temporary deal with ourselves not to think about it and to block our normal feelings. It’s an interior mechanism, a way to control our own reactions.
Shifting Denial to the Outside World
Bargaining is an advance on denial because, at least, we are beginning to negotiate with the outside world, rather than our own psyches. But like denial, bargaining is magical thinking. We’re still not dealing directly with the facts as though they were real. We are finding reasons to make them unreal, and looking for ways that we can influence the situation so that it becomes we want it to be.
“She’s just acting cold, because she’s had a bad time and needs to get over it. If I am more loving, she will warm up.”
“He is being so rude to the waitress, because he came from a background of uncaring people. If I show him how much better service he’ll get if he’s courteous, he’ll see that it’s true and become the gentle, caring person I know he really is inside.”
“She’s sleeping around because she’s insecure about her looks or afraid that I don’t really love her. If I try to be more supportive and more complementary, she’ll come to recognize that no one has ever loved her more.”
“He’s telling me that I don’t deserve to be loved, because he secretly feels he doesn’t deserve to be loved. If I convince him that he’s lovable, it will open his heart.”
“He never shows up when I need him, runs profiles on dating sites, and disappears for days or weeks. He says everything would be better if I trusted him, so I’ll try to trust him more.”
In each of these examples, we are faced with evidence that the person is, at minimum, behaving in ways that we don’t like. If we want to analyze it further, we could say that this person is behaving as though they don’t care how we feel. Or if we wanted to characterize the person by his or her behavior, we could say that he or she is acting like a selfish, out-of-control sleezeball. But we don’t have to do any analysis at all to simply check our own feelings and determine that we are not happy about it. Or that it causes us pain.
In the bargaining phase, we are ready to acknowledge our own pain and the material fact that is causing us pain. However, we are not yet ready to connect all the dots in the sense of recognizing that we have a serious and unmanageable problem on our hands.
The Three Elements of Bargaining
The components of traumatic bargaining are three very different things. One is acknowledgement of the trauma. This is an important new stage in our healing process. It’s the first time since the trauma occurred that we consciously accept that something happened to us. That “something” came from outside of us. It was not something we did to ourselves.
The second component is our vision of how things ought to be. This could be how things used to be — like when we had our perfect lover. But it might be a vision of how we want things to be in the future — like when we and our perfect lover settle down in a “happily ever after” relationship. There are all kinds of possible visions of reality that we are trying to get to, or get back to. Particularly in relationships with sociopaths, where there are so many different types of trauma — identity, emotional, physical, sexual, financial, etc.— we may be holding tight to any one of a variety of visions.
The final component is the bargaining itself, which is a kind of bridge between the unwanted reality and the desired vision. That bridge is made up of all the things we are willing to do to earn that reality.
Bargaining is a basic skill of life, an everyday event in which we negotiate with family, friends, employers, customers to find satisfactory shared outcomes. We even negotiate with inanimate objects, like regularly changing the oil to get longer service from our cars. These little trades in life are so common we hardly notice them. We make little deals all day long, as we pragmatically navigate around and through all the things we have to accommodate in our lives.
However, post-traumatic bargaining has a different flavor that puts it squarely in the realm of magical thinking. Instead of negotiating for some future outcome, we are trying to change a here-and-now fact. The fact is not what our sociopaths did, but what their actions say about them. We don’t want them to be what they appear to be.
In this bargaining, we are appealing to someone or something that we imagine has the power to change that fact. In attempting to solicit its cooperation, we are hoping or believing that we can convince that power source to care about us.
Please, God, if you’ll only”¦
That beginning of a supplicant prayer ends with “and I promise I’ll”¦” Please, God, if you’ll only help me pass this test, I promise I’ll do my geography homework forever. Or we may not bring God into it. We may wear our lucky underwear to the game, so we’ll sink more basketballs. Or if I sign over my paycheck or dress like a floozy or rush to get you another beer when you toss the empty over your shoulder, maybe you’ll love me.
Doing a rain dance may not appear to equate with trying to have a happy relationship with a sociopath, but it has similarities. One of those similarities is that we are depending on formal rules that we imagine are something like infallible. So, if we are very, very, very good, and follow the rules punctiliously, then the result will be that the sociopath loves us or that the sociopath will be zapped with some cosmic healing ray that makes it possible for him to love at all.
While bargaining is a developmental advance over denial, it has one big similarity with denial. That is, we still feel like we have some power, even if we now recognize that most of the power resides elsewhere. In terms of our volunteering or collaboration, we’ve stepped up to the “can-do” plate, and we’re trying to fix the situation. Maybe this will work. Maybe that will. We’re operating on hope or faith in our own magic.
Our approach to this is childlike, in the sense that we are defining that outside power as something there to fulfill our desires. As all of us have learned one way or another, trying to elicit “love” from a sociopath is like trying to get attention from the devil. We may get the attention, but it is very, very expensive.
In fact, our very belief in these rules — whether they are the rules of courtesy or Christian behavior or how we imagine lovers are supposed to act — is something that sociopaths use against us. They make us feel guilty for not trusting them. Or concerned about how pitiful they are. Or crushed because we are doing all the right things, and still not succeeding in being loved.
The Craziest Phase
The bargaining phase is characterized by hope and frustration. It is also the first real learning phase of recovery. We have acknowledged that there is something wrong, and we are experimenting with solutions to fix it.
Until we’ve learned enough to realize that we can’t avoid the unpleasant facts, we are in what might be characterized as the “craziest” part of our recovery. We’re throwing good energy after bad. We’re doing the same things that worked for us in other relationships, over and over, without getting results. We don’t understand the rules of the game. We don’t know what else to do except be better and nicer and more giving, and our judgment about what we can afford to lose goes haywire.
Our pain and disbelief about the nature of this relationship are only one kind of bargaining trigger. We are probably in the bargaining stage with other traumas, like the loss of our money or possessions or jobs or professional credibility or our children’s safety or our privacy or our hope of simple break-up. We can become absolutely frantic with bargaining. We may feel like we’ve got so many plates in the air we can’t even remember our names.
This can be particularly true in after-effects of a sociopathic relationship, which can seem more traumatic than the relationship itself. As we detox from the hypnotic effect of the sociopath’s influence, we may finally emerge from denial about our losses. We may attempt to negotiate recovery of things we lost. We may appeal to other sources of power, like the police or the legal system, only to discover that no one believes us because the sociopath has done such a good job of characterizing us as unstable or untrustworthy. Or because no one knows anything about sociopaths, and assumes that we’re exaggerating.
In dealing with sociopaths, one of the most difficult things is to determine which situations we can control and what is out of our control. Our own histories as competent and effective people make it hard for us to give up trying to find a solution. Before we give up, we are likely to lower our expectations of fairness, understanding and support, not only from the sociopath, but from the legal system as well as our previous social support systems, like friends and family. As sad as this may seem, it is all part of the great information-gathering exercise that bargaining is.
The First Clarity
Just as denial gave us the gift of time, bargaining has its own gifts. One is a great deal of new factual knowledge about the world we live in. Many of us say that we wished we never learned what we learned in these experiences. But like them or not, these are realities about the people and circumstances we may face in our lives. Knowing them will eventually make us smarter, stronger and more confident in taking care of ourselves.
We also learn the lengths to which we’ll go, if there is something we want badly enough. Some of that is good news and other parts make us uncomfortable. But like the facts about the world, this will be useful information when we are farther in our recovery process.
The most important gift of knowledge comes from our successes and failures in bargaining with the sociopath. We learn that we “succeed” when we’re willing to give up anything we have and everything we are. We learn that we “lose” when we attempt to hold onto our own identities and independent resources.
Eventually, those of us who are going to be survivors come to recognize a very important fact. It’s a fact that was in front of us from the minute we realized that we were not happy with what was going on or that we were in pain. That fact is that the sociopath causing our pain.
There are a few additional facts that we may figure out at this point (depending on which trauma we are working on). One is that the sociopath doesn’t want to be fixed. Another is that the sociopath doesn’t care about our pain.
In this knowledge, we face the reality that nothing we can do will make the sociopath behave like a feeling human being. No matter how many opportunities we have to please the sociopath, or earn love, or prove our worth, or gain trust, we cannot change the wiring of the sociopathic emotional system. And worse, our attempts to “bargain” for love or any form of caring tend to cause us more losses. Whatever we give, whatever we do, whatever pleas we make for compassion or understanding, it is like throwing ourselves against a Teflon wall.
Helping Ourselves
These insights open the doorway into the next big phase, anger, which will be the topic of the next article. In the meantime, it’s a good thing to remember that we may be experiencing various phases at the same time, especially since we are likely to be processing many different types of events. All of the phases have their reason and their importance in healing.
As the “craziest” of the phases, our bargaining phase is the time that we are most likely to be making other people crazy too — whether we’re still inside the relationship or we’ve stopped it but are still trying to fix it some part of it. Our family, our friends, anyone who cares about us may become frustrated with us or even cut us off. When everyone outside this relationship can clearly see that something is wrong — either with us or with our lovers — they become understandably impatient with us, if we are acting like we in the middle of a great work in progress, rather than in the middle of a train wreck.
If the bargaining phase can be characterized as addictive behavior on our side, because we’re totally focused on getting love or validation to “fix” our pain, it’s unlikely that we’re going to be open to intervention. Likewise, finding the power in ourselves to intervene is not likely.
But if we could, or if there is a part of us that is watching aghast at what’s going on, it would be a good time to start keeping a ledger of losses. Even if it’s only a mental record, but writing it down would be better. Start keeping a list of the betrayals, the financial losses, the insults, the lies, the sabotage, the demands to compromise our values, all the things that make us less than we formerly were.
Keeping this list may be the hardest thing we ever do when we’re inside the relationship, because it is exactly the kind of thing a sociopath would view as disloyalty or distrust. To the extent that our feelings are co-opted, we may feel guilty about doing it. But if we can do it — and it’s equally valuable to do after the relationship is over — we reestablish connection with our own identities and feelings, instead of seeing the world though the lens of the sociopath’s intentions.
Keeping the “black list” or the “sad list” or the “list of disappointments” will help us move through the bargaining stage faster. It will help us find our anger, which is where we start to regain our power over our lives and our hearts.
Namaste. The courageous healing spirit in me salutes the courageous healing spirit in you.
Kathy
If I only make sure that his eggs are scrambled, because I know he hates it when I break the eggs “easy over.” If I just hadn’t said that thing about helping to pay the rent, since he lives here. I know he’s jealous because he loves me, so if I only hadn’t stayed past 5:30 to have that meeting with my boss, the VP of Marketing, so he could hand over everything I need to do for the next 3 weeks. If only I were good enough, . . . then everything would be fine, right? God? Right?
This betrayal is on such a level that it defeats our rational exercises in bargaining. I did my homework, I was a good person, I produced miracles over and over, in the face of his disdain, his laziness, his stupidity. I never imagined that he actually COULDN’T care. That is like saying that gravity doesn’t pertain to him. That he can’t sweat.
When we get past the bargaining with the impossible, maybe we can start to make sense of our lives again. As Keifer Sutherland said, in the season finale of “24” that I watched, weeks after I walked away from the S/P who had stolen my life: “You can never negotiate with a sociopath.”
In this phase of healing, we may still be bargaining with ourselves, with our view of God, with our sense of reality. I understand that. In my case, the conscious, malicious betrayal was so clear, I never had that illusion. I guess my bargaining is that somehow I think that “the system” or “my records” or “my rights” will prevail, if I can only get my strength and courage back.
I know that the S/P will never keep a bargain. He will never agree to anything with any intention to complete. Without a witness, his words are as significant as the stale air in a motel room. With a witness, well, who knows . . . it depends on the witness, and the person who judges the situation, and whether following through somehow matches up with his disordered agenda. And then my life is still stuck in the hands of others, who probably don’t “get it” about his dysfunction and the evil that ensues.
Kathy, you are laying out a pathway to healing. OMG. How do we turn our backs on everything!?
If I can just be patient enough, then . . .
I’m bargaining again.
Thank you for your soul-delving insights. As ever, you give us so much to consider, and you frame it so that we can work with it, re-examine, struggle, and return to the template you give.
Namaste.
Wonderful article, the series of articles have really helped me. This one really describes me to a T… with the addictive behavior and bargaining phase. I have kept a journal this past 9 months, I wrote down almost every conversation, and it was all bargaining on my part, and I wrote what I was feeling at the time. I do look at it now with disbelief that I am so tolerating and naive.
Kathy,
As always a very VERY good article with a great deal of wisdom in it.
The “magical” thinking, the MALIGNANT HOPE, that I held on to for so long, resonates in every paragraph in the article. Giving up that HOPE, when there IS NO hope, was extremely painful for me, but it has also freed me from the continual anxiety of wondering “what to do to fix it” and the frustration of continual failure of all my “fix it” plans.
Thanks for a wonderful article! Namaste and TOWANDA!!!!
Oxy, Chic and Rune, thanks for your kind comments. I’m glad it makes sense.
Rune, I too found myself in a stage where I realized that I was having an argument with God. It wasn’t exactly bargaining, but more on the order of “How could you do this to me?” Probably in one of my revolutions through the angry phase.
There were a lot of them, and I think that if we stick with it, we eventually do come to that seminal anger with the universe about the unfairness of it all. To my mind, it’s the most important and productive stage of anger, because it gets us right down to the issue that’s probably been dogging us since childhood, especially if we come from less than optimal backgrounds, the one that keeps us feeling like victims, as though we’d been selected for the role.
What I came is that that no one gets “fair.” Some people just get luckier than some other people. When we’re adults, we arguably can contribute to our own luck, as well as choose our circumstances that increase our chances of being treated fairly. But we didn’t choose our parents or the other circumstances of our childhoods that left us traumatized and developmentally blocked (in, for example, areas of self-protective skills).
So we can beat on that door and demand our share of fairness without divine response for a long time. What we get instead, in my understanding, is the eternal question: What will you do with this?
As far as the sociopath stealing your life, well, you seem to be here — smart, funny, creative, learning. What he stole was your stuff. That stuff might include some beliefs about the world or yourself that apparently were things you could live without.
A lot of the work I did on myself was to figure out who I am now without that stuff. Not in negative terms, like I am now a woman without x, y, and z. But in positive terms. What do I have left.
I know that I did a lot of bargaining in this process. Some of this stuff I really didn’t want to lose. There was a stage when, embittered and grief-stricken, I decided that I’d lost everything about myself that I cared about. This was actually helpful for me, because it really forced me to figure out what was left after that. It removed a lot of illusions about what I had to have and be in order to be acceptable to myself.
Later, when I discovered that things weren’t quite that grim, I accepted that I still had some of the stuff and characteristics that I’d thought I’d lost. But I didn’t take them so seriously. They’re not me. Me is that fundamental, stripped-down center that I discovered when everything else was gone.
So, yes, to your question of letting everything go. If you’re holding onto it emotionally, you probably will have to let it go if you’re going to heal fully. Later, you may discover that it’s not really gone (or you may not). But your relationship to it, yourself and the world at large will be different. When you’re grounded in the knowledge that your central identity is invulnerable and eternal, your orientation switches to choice, rather than need.
In my model, if you’re mad at God, you’re in the later stages of anger. I had some interesting conversations with people when I was in this stage. A friend of mine who is a devout Catholic told me about going out into her backyard under the stars after her teenage son died. She shook her fist, yelled and called God all sorts of names. As an ex-Catholic myself, I was slightly shocked. “Are you allowed to do that?” I asked.
She laughed. God doesn’t mind, she said. God loves us, no matter what, and it’s not like God has to be afraid of us. If anything, he’s afraid for us, that we’ll get stuck in anger and hurt ourselves. If it helps us heal and rediscover our sense of beauty and love, God’s all for it.
This amazing woman has a party every year for her son’s friends to celebrate his life and theirs. She also helped me get out of one of the worst depressions in my life by telling me I had to forgive myself for making a mistake.
And I guess that is maybe the last round of anger, with ourselves. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes. If we survive them, we learn. If they’re really big, bad mistakes (and I’ve had my share), we learn a lot. Not about how terrible the world is, but how amazing we are.
There it is! I’ve been waiting for the fourth installment – thank you Kathy!
Another terrific piece. I wish I could have had these four essays a year ago – but having them now is pretty good.
I remember the bargaining stage very well, and it certainly went on for a long time. Most of the bargaining seemed to be with myself. My gut would be screaming at me that he was lying, cheating, and just generally abusing me – but then I would talk my gut out of it with my head. I’d say “He couldn’t possibly be doing that – he’s a good guy, he loves me.” And I would take “We’ll see” perspective that really was bargainese for “I will find some tiny scrap of an indication of good behavior in the future, ignore the vast majority of horrid behavior, and decide that this is ample evidence that he is a good man.” Or, I would tell myself “when this stressful period ends…..” “when the seasons change….” “when he gets over that cold…..”
So many bargains. Guess who got the short end of the stick each and every time? Guess who got a big stick to the head each and every time?
Kathy said about important things to realize:
“One is that the sociopath doesn’t want to be fixed. Another is that the sociopath doesn’t care about our pain.
In this knowledge, we face the reality that nothing we can do will make the sociopath behave like a feeling human being.”
This was absolutely critical for me. It still is. I found it hard to believe that my ex S didn’t care about my pain – HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? But there were so many glaring examples of it, one after another, that eventually, even with all the denial and bargaining I could muster, I simply had to face the horrifying truth that he just didn’t care if he hurt me. I didn’t know it was humanly possible to “not care” about the pain of someone else, particularly someone you loved. But there it was – there it is. It’s terrifying.
Thankfully I am moving through these phases – two steps forward, one step back.
The other day I was driving home from work and the thought just came to me “I got out….I am actually out.”
Kathy – thank you for another terrifically insightful, articulate, and helpful essay.
Kathy:
Great article.
Looking back, I realize I spent the last third of our relationship in the bargainning phase. Praying to God, caving in to S, the works. I look back at my craven capitulation and it makes me physically sick.
I grew up in a house where physical and mental abuse were the norm. I”ll credit S with one thing — kicking and screaming I was finally dragged into adulthood.
Thanks, HH. I’m so excited. The next one is anger. We’re going to have so much fun with that one.
I like your point about the bargaining dialogue being with ourselves. It’s part of that terrible drama that’s going on inside of many of us in these relationships. Part of us is going “What’s wrong with you? Get out!” and the other part is engaged in trying to make it come out better. It’s no wonder we come out of these things uncertain if we can ever trust ourselves again.
And like you, it was the fact that he didn’t care whether he hurt me that gradually penetrated my thick skull. For a long time, I just didn’t believe it, and I kept trying to explain myself to him. And I couldn’t understand the dull, uncomprehending look I got in return at first. In the early days, I used to joke that he must have been brought up by wolves. Later he got irritable, and after that abusive, when I brought my feelings up.
Now, when I sometimes wonder if he really was a sociopath, this is the one fact that consistently confirms it for me. No one with normal human feelings could have endured being the cause of so much grief, anger and visible pain in another person. Any healthy person would have stopped the relationship, left it for both our wellbeings.
But of course he couldn’t. Because he was busy draining my bank account and leveraging my lifestyle. However I felt was just collateral damage.
Don’t worry about the two steps forward/one step back thing. I used to think about it as going around and around the same mountain, as I processed the various traumas. Each time around, I’d be higher up the mountain and have a wide, more comprehensive view.
Congratulations on getting out!!!
Kathy:
“And I couldn’t understand the dull, uncomprehending look I got in return at first. In the early days, I used to joke that he must have been brought up by wolves. Later he got irritable, and after that abusive, when I brought my feelings up.”
Ah, the progression of “looks”.
In the first phase S would wink at me across the dinner table and laugh at what I said.
In the second phase I got the dull, uncomprehending look.
In the third phase I got the irritation.
And in the forth phase the abuse.
Abuse. The gift S kept on giving. And I kept taking.
You’re right. We ARE going to have a lot of fun with anger.
Yes, yes, yes! I used to wonder why my ex S didn’t leave me. He seemed to either be irritated at me, enraged at me, or disgusted at me. Yet he didn’t leave. And I was distressed all the time in the end – which seemed to irritate him – yet he didn’t leave. I wondered why – still wonder why sometimes…but I suppose all the feelings of distress really didn’t mean much to him. My distress meant nothing – I know that. It either didn’t register at all, or annoyed or disgusted him. It certainly didn’t register as being hurtful to me. If it registered, it was as an obstacle for him.
He just kept training me to keep it to myself, and for a while I was a star pupil at Sociopath obedience school. He would yank the collar, and I would whimper and shut up. And then I learned not to whimper, but to just shut up.
The things he did to me at the end were incredibly cruel – cheating on me on Valentines day – yelling at me because I suddenly needed a surgery that threw off his day (his sex schedule), and abandoning me when I needed someone to help me through a painful recovery. I needed someone to be with me, but was too ashamed to ask any one else because I would have to admit to them that my “partner” had actually abandoned me to have sex with another woman instead of following the doctor’s orders to help me. I left him shortly thereafter. As soon as I was medically well enough…..I demanded he leave. And I changed the locks. But he didn’t leave until I threw him out. Even though our relationship seemed horrendous to me. I guess it wasn’t to him.
Kathy – I am so psyched that the next installment is ANGER! This is where I have been for the past two months. I feel enraged at him (still can’t believe I wasn’t at the time), and feel somehow resentful that I lost the opportunity to tell him off by going NC before I was out of denial about what he did. But I know NC is more important.
I need to read this installment a few more times as I always get more and more out of your essays each time I read them. Plus, the posts by LF members to your essays are so terrific too, so I want to soak those in. But I have to admit, I am eager for the ANGER installment!
Kathy and Healing Heart:
“…this is the one fact that consistently confirms it for me. No one with normal human feelings could have endured being the cause of so much grief, anger and visible pain in another person. Any healthy person would have stopped the relationship, left it for both our wellbeings.”
Doesn’t that just sum it up?
By the time I sent S packing and changed my locks (I really need to invest in a locksmith company — 60 percent of their business comes from people ending relationships) I was broken mentally, physically, spiritually and financially was closing in. S had been locked out the night before for not paying 10 grand in back rent, was using cocaine, was drinking excessively, was dodging creditors and was in ill health.
Two pieces of human wreckage. The phrase “stop the madness” would have been an understatement.
However, in a moment that gives you an idea of where I was on the insanity scale, I remember asking him “Is the door closed?” Note how I didn’t say “The door isn’t closed if YOU…”.
S said, in his most pious, pompous, pedantic manner “It is if things go back to how they were in the beginning.”
No sane person would stay in that relationship for their own sanity. Which, I now see, was my sanity reasserting itself when I sent him packing. And the fact that he would even consider wanting to stay in it is a pretty strong clue on his level of insanity.
Then again, he had no incentive to leave. He still had my money to go through, my life to wreck, my career to tank. So much damage to do and not enough time.