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
I think they DO care about our pain: some of them really, really enjoy it. Even when they seem indifferent, that’s another tool in their torture kit. Yes, Kathy, we need to get through it. Good course material.
Yes, two pieces of human wreckage. Though I was devastated by being “wreckage,” and he didn’t even (notice that he was human wreckage. Just another day in the office. In fact, our break up was apparently a lot less dramatic than his other break ups which have usually included a series of interactions involving police and lawyers.
But Matt, like you, I look back and am stunned at what I put up with. Absolutely stunned. And yes, THANK GOD sanity kicked in and I finally extricated myself. I think he might not have ever broken up with me – why would he? Just like yours….He was getting everything he wanted under his conditions. So he had to deal with an unraveling, devastated, girlfriend – but that didn’t bother him a bit.
Rune – I wonder sometimes about whether or not he enjoyed my pain. It certainly didn’t seem to stop him from doing anything he wanted, but I can’t quite discern (maybe this will become clearer as time passes) whether or not he actually enjoyed watching me go deeper and deeper into pain. He didn’t like to hear about it – never asked for the gory details, but I suppose it was in full view – if he bothered to look. I just don’t know if he cared about me anough to profit from my pain. I think I was a piece of furniture to him. I don’t think he even “got” when I was in pain.
Regarding enjoying causing pain —
Mine did, under the right circumstances. Which basically boiled down to destroying someone who was in his way.
He has a photo of himself standing on a the roof of a Brooklyn apartment building, a big cigar clamped in his teeth, and a trumpet in his hand, which he is about to smash on a brick chimney. The story behind that is that his sublet tenant, a musician, got behind in his rent. From his perspective, this was merely a bit of enjoyment he got from punishing the guy by destroying the instrument. He didn’t get, or didn’t care, that he was also destroying the means of his livelihood.
He tried to get me involved in another situation where his intention was to hurt someone else who was in his way. I refused to go along, but I swear I saw his nose twitching at the idea of this set-up, which was designed to deeply humiliate a person who was already suffering from his actions. After that, I used to think he liked the smell of pain that he could inflict.
But with me, who was his pipeline to money and related goodies, I never felt like he was deliberately hurting me for the pleasure of watching me suffer. He couldn’t feel my suffering, and he didn’t really care. At times, particularly when he was criticizing me or informing why he couldn’t possibly love me, I did feel like he instinctively trying to keep me destabilized so that I wouldn’t figure out that none of this was a good deal for me. Not really the same thing.
Even when it was all going on, I knew that his primarily objective was the keep the faucet open. So he’d apply a little “perfect lover” and then he’d apply a little destabilization, and then if it looked like I was falling out, he’d be the perfect lover again for as long as it took to make me forget about it.
And I’m not sure if any of this was really conscious. He just had a very sharp instinct for what it would take to keep me in line, and he kept pulling whatever string was necessary to do that.
None, they do have feelings. But they only feel for themselves.
And virtually all their feelings are negative — boredom, irritation, envy, resentment, frustration, anxiety, and despair. All about their own situations. Everything and everyone outside themselves are just props that are performing more or less according to their plans and desires.
Their positive emotions are very transient, more in the nature of fast thrills than anything lasting. They get a thrill from any sort of win. Some people think they like danger, but I think they get a bigger thrill out of winning in a dangerous situation. If there is anything that makes them happy over an extended period of time, it’s planning and carrying off a big score. If they have any sentimental or nostalgic feelings about anyone or anything, it relates to these same things — whether or not they go what they wanted. And these feelings are as shallow as a greeting card message.
If they’re in a situation where they’re getting constant positive reinforcement, like a relationship or a job, they become used to it and devalue it as coming from fools. (Like Groucho Marx saying he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him.) Instead, they up the ante in these situations — looking for bigger and more dangerous wins — to overcome boredom and reinforce their sense of superiority.
The key thing to understand about them is that their internal system is totally self-referenced, like living inside a mirrored ball. They don’t have the kind of connected experiences that provide pleasurable meaning to healthy people’s lives. So they don’t understand what relationships are. They can only interpret them in terms of getting what they want or winning. Because of that, they see individuals in terms of where they are on the power scale (people they have to suck up to, or people they can manipulate).
What they want tends to be pretty infantile, because the whole spectrum of friendship, love, trust, altruism or social obligation is blocked in them.
If you understand this, you understand why they live with the emotions I listed at the top. Imagine if you lived in a world where everyone else was infinitely smarter than you in the ways that clearly made them happy and gave their lives meaning. But you don’t trust any of it, and because of that you live in isolation, forced to live on your wits.
I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for them, unless you’re capable of feeling sorry for someone and recognizing that they are dangerous and destructive at the same time. You can’t help them. They won’t let you. The only thing they know how to do with anything you offer them is use it and you.
They are people to keep away from you, whatever it takes. But their emotional reality is miserable.
I just had a counseling session today through my employee assistance program. Fortunately, the counselor knew all about sociopaths. He said something that stands out in my mind. “The best sociopaths are the ones that don’t give any clues.” They are seamless. They are so convincing at their game. He reminded me (once again) that I couldn’t have seen it coming. I can’t believe that after all this time, I was still judging myself for getting involved with a married man (who told me his divorce was filed and coming through any day now). How would I have known he was lying?
This counselor also came from a military family and agrees that the army can be somewhat of a sociopathic organization (with regard to how they used me for my testimony and then discarded me). He thinks I might have a shot writing to the Congressman. But outside of that, there is probably nothing I can do.
The hardest thing (and the counselor pointed this out to me) is that my main support system–the reptile site–was ripped away from me. I don’t know what to replace it with. I can’t even tell my friends there why I left. It’s very frustrating and hurtful. There just aren’t that many people who like snakes around here, and they are such a big part of my life. I really miss the site. I wish there were some way to go back on it and expose/ignore the sociopath. I just don’t think I’m strong enough for that.
The P DEFINITELY enjoyed my pain. And if I didn’t let it show, he would even say things like “doesn’t this hurt you?” (referring to emotional pain, wondering why I wasn’t bursting into tears when he was ripping up poems I had given him and photos). And he would appear almost oppositional defiant at times. He’d say let’s go climb such and such mountain. And I’d say great and mean it. Then he would not do it. We’d go do something he hit on that I didn’t want to do.
I did lots of bargaining and I am stunned not only at what I put up with but even more so with what I did, the pretzel twisting you refer to Kathy. He was FROM my early teens, having come back 40 years later, so I was REALLY recreating trauma, LITERALLY reliving my past, trying to make it come out right this time, without realizing what had REALLY happened the first time (that it was not just a normal young teen break up) and add to that, in choosing him as a teen, I was recreating “love” as I knew it at home, which was with a Narc. And I really think it threw me back into ACTING like a young teen again. (There is a Psychology Today article called “Guess Who’s Back” that talks about how reconnecting with your first love can unleash those old teenage hormones and you are back in the moment in a matter of minutes.) I totally disconnected from reality and having the start of it all be through the unreal world of email didn’t help! What a mess. The most painful experience of my life BY FAR.
Stargazer, I think we all go through recycling about blaming ourselves. Even my post above was a lot about what *I* was doing to myself. But I have to remind myself that I’ve been basically the same person in almost every relationship I’ve had in my life, and he is the ONLY one who hurt me like this. Whereas he has lots of train wreck relationships. So who is the problem?????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I guess that part of my self-blaming is I DID do things that showed a lack of integrity all on my own, that I can’t blame on him at all. So I have some legitimate shame, but as the therapist said, it wouldn’t cause me such shame if I didn’t have such high ethical standards ordinarily, and I’m back in my integrity now.
But as far as the pretzel twisting….being willing to accommodate other’s needs is normally a good, positive trait. But as OxD reminds us, some of us need to remind ourselves to look out for ourselves a bit more or a whole lot more. But if we were only around nice people, there is no flaw in us! The problem is not everyone is nice. Some are evil. By choice or not, they are evil.
I have a TON of wonderful girlfriends, who are TRUE friends, so I know I can’t be THAT bad!
Kathleen,
You two above posts are so right on! My P-son loves the intrigue and the “scoring” and if he can score on me that is even better as I am his “arch enemy.” Any win against me is a big boost to his ego. Even when he loses (to anyone) though, he doesn’t take it as a defeat, but simply a small set back, never his fault, of course.
Star: Yes, we lose all kinds of “supportive” things in our lives, and we have to make new support networks. We have to let go of the old support networks that they have contaminated, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find or make new ones. Just about my whole community and many of my neighbors and friends are no longer supportive of me, and I have no doubt that many of them “blame” or “damn” me for “neglecting my poor old mother in her hour of need, what an ungrateful child I am. I can’t go from house to house telling each of these people the TRUTH, for starters it would make me look “crazy” and the smear campaign is one of those things that the one who “gets their licks in first” usually wins….and since we weren’t out to smear them FIRST, or even expose them, they have done the damage before we even find out we have been smeared.
I wish that wasn’t so, but too many times it is true, we get smeared and when we try to tell the truth, it just makes us look more “guilty” in the eyes of the people they smeared us to. I am accepting that truth, and let the neighbors think what the heck they want to. I will hold my head up and I KNOW THE TRUTH, and in this case, MY OPINION IS THE ONLY ONE THAT COUNTS. I will survive, and will create new support systems, and the rest doesn’t matter. I can’t change what I can’t change and I’m not going to grieve over it any more. “God grant me the strength to change what I can and the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The things I cannot change, I have to accept—I may grieve over it for a while, but eventually I will have to accept it in order to move on down the healing road. I have to leave those things behind if I am to make progress. That’s just the truth of the matter. Remember, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off! ((((hugs)))))
Stargazer,
Regarding your teenage relationship, and trying to get it to come out different, that’s an incredible insight. I think we keep repeating traumatic scenarios in our relationships for the same reason. Setting up the same dynamic and trying to make it come out differently (mostly by hoping other people will be different).
I think this is bargaining at a very deep level. We’re trying to undo a past trauma. Each time we recreate it, we bring in new resources. But each time, our success is dependent on someone else behaving a certain way. (Maybe he’ll love me now.)
I don’t think we’re really bargaining with them in the big picture. I think we’re bargaining with our destiny or with God or something like that. We want to change the story line.
But ultimately we come to realize that we can’t change the story line by getting other people to act the way we want them to. We change it by just getting real about not liking certain things, being angry with people who hurt us, and then going on to make smarter choices.
And yes, a “seamless” sociopath is going to be very hard to spot. Except for one thing. Eventually, they start trying to talk us out of taking care of ourselves. And then everything depends on how committed we are to taking care of ourselves.
Most of us here have backgrounds of trauma. It’s understandable that we had issues that made us vulnerable to gaslighting and promises of dreams come true.
However, this healing process is about learning to love and care for ourselves. Every piece of it that brings up self-hatred, or self-distrust, or lack of self-esteem is doing its job. Because that’s what we’re working on. Whether we deserve better from ourselves.
These weaknesses in self-caring are what the sociopath used to get past our self-protective instincts. And that’s what causes us to be vulnerable to a lot of things, and to make decisions that protect our feelings rather than protecting our lives.
BTW, my big trauma period was my teenage years. And though I was 50 and he was 30, I felt like I was 16 and he was the boyfriend I never had. This guy connected right into my core trauma. It made the relationship experience incredibly powerful (and all the more painful), but it created the potential for massive healing.
Just About Healed,
If you haven’t read my post above, you’ll find something in there about acting outside of our usual integrity. The things we do in relationships with sociopaths often surprise us in good and bad ways. But sometimes the behavior we thought was bad is a hint that we’re capable of more than we thought, or that the rules we’re living with may need some rethinking.
Not that we should become bad people. But that we may need to become more assertive or more self-interested people. You can’t always surround yourself with nice people, and besides if you’re intended to accomplish anything in the world, sometimes being nice isn’t enough.
Kathy
Dear Kathleen, thank you for this marvellous post! It described my bargaining to the point (including most of the horrendous examples you described!).
My gut got it after two months, November 08, still in the honeymoon phase, reacting with panic one night (I was waking up in the middle of the night in greatest horror I never have experienced before and I had no idea where this could come from, as I was next to my beloved soul mate). The brain started working only after a long bargaining phase of nine months, last April 08, when X revealed to me what he thinks of our future “relationship”, being basically some kind of Escort service; then I turned my back on him and left him on the railwaystation and have not seen him ever since.
My heart really “got it” on this Valentine’s day when the anger kicked in by reading his last card, when I discovered that ALL THE RELATIONSHIP FROM THE BEGINNING WAS ESCORT TO HIM!!!
Then I was able to toss all the things in my huge garbage bag, and my diary and the last email for him (my last try to fix him, written on Feb.6 2009, shame on me!) will be burned in 7 days in the wooden stove of our little holiday hut in the Alps.
I also can so relate to the examples of Healing heart, Rune, Justabouthealed and Matt, our X have all been to the same psycho prep school!
I think they use pain as all the other feelings to get control; it is merely a game to them, and the feeling of control the feeling of the other is particularly rewarding. I always tried not to seem too happy because I knew he would deliberately destroy this feeling in a short time after he discovers it by annihilating it or make me believe that this particular feeling is wrong.
“So he’d apply a little “perfect lover” and then he’d apply a little destabilization, and then if it looked like I was falling out, he’d be the perfect lover again for as long as it took to make me forget about it.
And I’m not sure if any of this was really conscious. He just had a very sharp instinct for what it would take to keep me in line, and he kept pulling whatever string was necessary to do that.”
So true, exactly as X acted on me too. Maybe it is instinct; I am not sure. Maybe he is just SO perfect in reading others and playing them, or the perfect mirror. I got so angry at X because he made me break NC and made me to reveal to him that I still care pretending he had changed! Just to prove with his last card that this too was a lie.
But as Matt put it, I got the basic soul insulating skills the parents were not able to provide to me as a child. It catapulted me finally to adulthood at the sweet age of almost 47!
Star: it is very difficult to let go of support systems. We had a long way to go with my 6 year old niece to get rid of her millions of pacifiers she carried with her; and my other niece at age 9 was still carrying her comfort cloth “with hole to kiss through”! And it would be deavstating for me thinking NOW that I will be without Internet for a whole week next week and not being able to do Lovefraud browsing, but I have to face THAT too, without that no skiing! Maybe you can find some substitute for your virtual snake site, for instance meet real people who love snakes? Put up a group with gatherings at one apartment a time, with invitation to see the snakes, putting up a topic on snakes for lecture and food?
I thank you all for this insight you all gave; you are truly my therapists! I wish you all a very nice P-free evening!