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
libelle: I will just rephrase you a bit, then we are a match:
The deal was: Being at his complete and total disposal, to show up when X pleases to have a) sex, b) ego boosts c) someone to control d) sex and control…did I mention that?
e) to vanish on the wink of the eye of his without any sign of sadness when a) he has to be busy, b) he is not in the mood, c) when he has more important things to do or d)he’s made his conquest and has decided to move on…for a year or so, who knows. But if he feels like calling and flirting, for a little ego boost he will.
GOD….all he ever, ever wanted was a sexual conquest, a couple of hook ups and out. So why in hell can’t they just admit that and never get into all the love talk….He just loved the “high” of “being in love” but of course he hasn’t a clue what love is, but has memorized the right words or thinks the shallow stuff he feels (actually lust) IS love. But I don’t think that is true. He told enough jokes about it all to help me see, he does the love talk to manipulate. That is all. Could care less what it does to the woman, as long as she gets in bed as a result.
A lot of guys are jerks like that. Esp when teenagers. But these guys take it to a whole new level. It is the sudden and complete reversal, the switch and bait. The hurting to just see you hurting. The way they convince you they are above you.
The way you can’t win no matter what, even when you have their number. Their total lack of shame, and beyond that, their blaming YOU. They are something else!
I HATE THAT I GIVE ONE MINUTE OF THOUGHT TO HIM. HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kathy,
what a godsend you are, I just read the article and as I read the part “helping ourselves” I broke down and had to leave the pc and had a very big and long moment of tears,rage,anger,bargaining………this is when we make other people crazy. I myself, in a very diplomatic way have been trying to explain to mutual friends(that I met through my N/S) that my N/S is the problem of all the past chaos. The revolving door of all the people she has brought into their lives has one common denominator…….HER!!!!!
Today I get a text(not face to face conversation) from one of those friends saying for me to lose their number and that I was wrong for trying to involve them!!!! This text was from the same person who told me previously that my N/S almost broke his own 10 yr relationship up because of lies she had told about them, it was also the same person that told me that my ex was not relationship material but thought she really must love me because he saw a change in her!!!!!AWWWWWWWWWW And now he is telling ME he can’t be friends with me through a text? I get so frustrated because people are so blind to what they get sucked into(including me) but I do now see. I have derived at all kinds of evil plans to “tell the truth” about my ex. Which if my truths would be believed would cause her job loss(company policy violations) and basically wreck her world. If I had pressed charges on her for every physical assault she dished out to me she would be in prison for 5 yrs minimum ! And the plans seem so fool proof. My problems will be solved right? With every “cause” there is an “affect” and I realize that I am David fighting Goliath!!!! It really sucks! It would be a bigger battle to try and clear my reputation to a few people than to just walk away and let it ride and let fate take over.
I have done ALOT of research on N/S people in the aftermath of my victimization and there was an article I read (Im sorry I cant remeber exactly where) but it talked about how N/S people “mirror” yourselves back to you. You actually fall in love with yourself. (how ironic would that be for your ex sociopath to use) It happened to me. My ex told me everything I wanted to hear. Every little detail of my life, she wanted too. No matter how big or small. So no wonder I believed all of her lies. I couldn’t believe someone was sooooo “in tune” with me. She wanted my same wants, she had my same needs, and I thought I had found the perfect mate even though she “made mistakes”. She used me to “USE ME.” One thing I did get out of that scenario is that I am a good person. I do have morals and I DO HAVE VALUES! She made me realize just who I am and she is NOT deserving of my true love. Everytime my phone rings I still wish it would be her………..but im always glad its someone else!!!! We will heal, ALL OF US
Thank you, Matt. I cut and pasted the recipe. I’ll let you know if I end up making it. Also, you are needed on the “guidebook for recovering” thread. You are very popular. 🙂
Thanks, Matt. That looks really good. And easy. And lucky. (Aren’t beans lucky?)
libelle, I think that’s the relationship they all want. No strings. For them. I used to wish I could be that cool, unneedy person he clearly wanted.
And yes, the boytoy made me suffer for everything that made him suffer. I sometimes think of them as one-way radio transmission towers. They blast their miserable feelings all over the place, and hear nothing of anyone else’s.
I also sometimes think that what we’re getting over is their contagious misery. I mean, there’s no room in the relationship for us to be ourselves. Only for them to be themselves. So the whole relationship is saturated with their feelings, their reactions, their bigotry, their shallow ideas about what’s important.
I think half of our suffering is because we’re starving for validation of our own reality, but the other half is that the substitute reality they enforce is so grim, so based in existential despair.
If I imagine that the terrible way the sociopath made me feel might be the way he really feels all the time … well, it kind of makes me realize why they are so rigid and grandiose and phony, even to themselves. When we come out of these relationships, we have lost our trust and don’t believe in love anymore. Who does this sound like?
I remember when I first got the idea of detoxing. I felt as poisoned as if someone had given me a transfusion of bad blood. It wasn’t just the memory of the wretched things he’d said and done. It was like my whole system was being dragged down by some painful malaise. And I remember wondering if I was going to have to wait seven years for all my body cells to turn over to get rid of it.
I suspect that the toxin we’re dealing with is the deep misery of the sociopathic psychology. Even their “perfect lover” performance is tragic, because it’s all built on observing and acting like they think we want them to act. They don’t feel any of it. They can’t feel it. And it’s an exhausting effort for them to hold it up, because they don’t really know what it means.
What we saw in the anger, the resentment, the envy, the despair, the pretending to be what they think they should be, the hunger for all those shallow things they hunger for is the reality of their impoverished emotional systems.
So here’s where this gets good. In their lopsided way, they’re actually good at a lot of things. They’re good at focusing, planning, holding on to an idea, going after what they want, not letting trivia or distractions get in their way. Of course, they mess it up, because they can’t collaborate, can’t trust, are afraid they’ll be unmasked, have to keep accumating stuff, because none of it’s really theirs. But if you can separate the bad life performance, and just look at the excellent project management, we have also absorbed that, as well as the emotional crap.
In addition, we’re not like them. We actually have feelings. We actually have another emotional make-up and life view that comes from having feelings. There was no support for that structure of character while we were with the sociopath, but that’s our foundation of identity, what we imagine we can heal our way back to after the sociopath.
BUT, here’s the really cool part, we can’t. Because we have new aspects to ourselves now. We can recover all that stuff, but now we’re more.
Here’s an example. Virtually everyone who comes to LF, sooner rather than later, gets to the point where we don’t care what anyone else thinks about the relationship, or what it’s going to take for us to heal, and it starts with not caring about how the sociopath feels or what we owe them, because our wellbeing is more important.
When did we ever feel like that before? When was the last time (before the sociopath) that any of us thought like this. That we were self-referenced, focused on our own objectives, and comfortable ignoring what other people thought or wanted? This may be the sociopath’s legacy in us, the good part of what we absorbed.
When I talked about discovering what we were capable of in the article above, this was where I was headed. Not everything we learned was bad. So we bring that good learning with us, as we recover the parts of ourselves that languished in these relationships.
Imagine — competent, loving, generous and focused, independent, and assertive. Not just in our careers (where a lot of us are stronger personalities), but in our personal relationships. And in our relationships with ourselves. Wanting what we want, conscious of what we can afford, and valuable our own perspective above all others.
So all we have to do is recognize which parts of this “toxin” we want to keep, and which parts are just residue of the half-brain psychology of the sociopath.
That may actually be the work of healing, figuring this out.
anetsu:
Today I was sending out an email blast letting my friends know I had a new email address and new mobile number. i came across the names of “mutual” friends I had with S. I briefly thought about forwarding them the information.
And then I realized there was no point. I have been thoroughly trashed by S at this point.
I think one of the hardest things in life is letting go of a life which not only are we no longer part of, but which no longer wants us. It hurts. But, the best thing you can do is go out and create a new, better life for yourself.
The people from your old life will reach out to you if they want to. And the ones who choose to cast their lost with your S will ultimately learn for themselves whether they have chosen wisely or not.
Enjoy the revenge fantasies for what they are – fantasies. They are part of the anger you are feeling. Ultimately, the anger starts to diminish and you focus on other things. I know. Because I’m feeling the anger starting to leave me.
Kathy said: “I mean, there’s no room in the relationship for us to be ourselves. Only for them to be themselves. So the whole relationship is saturated with their feelings, their reactions, their bigotry, their shallow ideas about what’s important.”
Absolutely right – the relationship was all about him. Well, it seemed like the first three months of our relationship were about me, and then he turned it completely on its head, and became all about him – and in the worst ways. When it was all about “me” it the falling in “love” honeymoon where it was laughs, cuddles, kisses & lovemaking, and then when it became all about him, it was just a swamp of misery. He was always resentful, irritated, listless, or enraged, and I was constantly catering to him. I didn’t even have my own feelings any more – I just tried to soothe him, to appease him, while he abused and neglected me. It was all about him. Even while cheating on me and abusing me, he was bringing his despair to me and I was holding his emotions for him. It was all about him all the time.
I remember saying to him once near the end that our relationship had turned into one long therapy session for him. When I said that he suddenly went white, seemed unnerved, and agreed with me. He actually took pause……and then we returned to the extended therapy session. The relationship continued to be all bout him and his misery. He was having honeymoons with women outside of our relationship, but then used our relationship as a place to dump all of his misery.
I remember after finally throwing him out on March 8th (anniversary coming up!!!!) I felt like my house became much lighter and brighter. I remember thinking how wonderful it was to not be feeling terrible all the time. He was gone, and so was the horrible misery. My toxic fog in the house cleare. Then after a few weeks of light, the house filled with my misery. But at least it was mine. I was handling my own despair rather than his.
My house has become much, much, lighter. It’s not all clear, but so much better.
anetsu, you wrote: “it talked about how N/S people “mirror” yourselves back to you. You actually fall in love with yourself.”
I love that.
Your comment on your revenge fantasies and Matt’s wonderful response got me thinking about a new skill I had to develop in the aftermath of my relationship with the sociopath. It was giving my attention to things that gave me happiness.
Part of this was realizing that all the energy I was giving the sociopath and the related losses and damage were eating up resources I could be investing in better things. I didn’t get this right away. I think we have to go through the angry period in recovering our sense of power over our own lives.
But ultimately, the real power comes from awareness that our personal resources are limited. And our options of where we can place our attention are unlimited. It just makes sense to go for what gives us what we really want.
I don’t think I grasped this until I went through a forgiveness class. I did the class because I was tired of being angry all the time. And the class was really about deciding whether we were going to let painful memories shape our vision of the world, or if we were going to take control of our minds back by deciding what we wanted to be thinking about. It was all about attention.
None of this means that we can short-circuit the grieving process. We have to honor our losses, if that makes any sense. Say goodbye to things properly with respect for the good times we had with them, and honesty about the fact that we feel a little bereft without them.
I had a really smart friend once who taught me to throw things away and give things away and just turn over my life with more freedom than I had before I knew her. She was a a rich woman who was a model of the prosperity consciousness she taught. She said you had to get rid of the old to make room for the new.
we can never go back to who we thought we were before them. That person does not exsist anymore. We are forced to deal with us and think about us first, something we never did before, always it was someone else’s needs and want’s and desire’s that came first. We have done this over and over all our lives and thought that was what we were supposed to do, that is what good people do. I will not be anything like I was before. Maybe i am a bit jaded now, I still have good values and respect other’s, but I will not be used or disrespected ever again , this is not something I will have to work on, it is a given, show me disrespect and your history, if anything I have learned to respect and love myself…
Matt, thank you because as of today I know I have to differentiate between friends and “real friends” It is like you are sitting there with an eraser going…..there in, they are out and the ones that are out will never understand. but you are absolutely right. If they contact me later, then they are my friends. which I know they never will
Kathy
it is funny, today I told a friend that my new motto was “out with the old, in with the new” I have had enough painful memories to shape many lifetimes and many others Ihave wanted to include… What is done is done!!!! and there is nothing I can say, do or manipulate that to change the outcome.. I am getting there a little at a time.
kathleen, you said:
>When did we ever feel like that before? When was the last time (before the sociopath) that any of us thought like this. That we were self-referenced, focused on our own objectives, and comfortable ignoring what other people thought or wanted?