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
Hi Henry, glad to hear you are doing good. I am long past HIM, but alas my health has been wobbly to say the least. I think I am in for another bout of treatment, and thinking about it all, although I am convinced that the trauma he put me through triggered it, I am trying to scoop up some responsibility for my problems, by saying that it was not all down to him, it was a CONVURGENCE of stress from alot of quarters that ruined my health. But I have to accept that I am in the driving seat and that to some extent I have allowed some of this to happen and whilst I try not to kick myelf for my wrong choices, there is a part of me that should have know better. But Hey, I have to live with what is, adapt to it and somehow make it good – that is my challenge.
Suffice to say that I am treading the ricketty rope bridge that spans a very deep crevice – at the moment – and its like one of those dark moments you see in cartoon films. But I am still here, so I keep going.
Bev – your in my thoughts and prayer’s – I also would like to blame every bad thing on the X – my finances, my health etc. but it was me who volunteered to be his victim – so I will carry on with a new understanding of myself and be nobodys victim ever again….
Thank you Henry, its like every level I have fallen through seems to be the worst one, then I fall through another level which is worse than the one before. I was trying to explain this to a chaplain at the hospital where I work, today, and he just didnt understand. I said, its like discovering a womans, phone number on your husbands phone – the shock – then the realisation – falling through another level of shock – then seeing them together – etc etc. Its like Eckhart Tolle says, when you have a pain body – every one wants to have a kick at you!! Know what I mean??
yes Beverly I know what you mean – I have read Tolle – he is some what of a guru to me – he makes alot of sense – and he says there is no such thing as a relationship, that we are all on our own. So everything we were taught and learned was wrong I guess. Yep I have one of them pain body’s and I avoid the fire’s….have nipped a few new user’s in the bud – it’s like ok I have learned from the previous fire’s and I am not going there again. Like waking up from a coma and learning to walk an talk – but this time we have new teacher’s and we don’t want to repeat the past. It’s all good – make the most of each day – each moment – carry on –
I also have to say that I gave up cigarettes a few months ago, and I remember when I gave them up before, all this anger spewed out, its like the cigarettes were a way of suppressing the angst. Ooh I have said a few things to people this week that I wanted to say, one of which was I told the cleaner at work to stop gossiping about me – ouch. !! Eee, arrgh
Yes Henry, many of us that had painful childhoods, carry that pain (pain body) and It still haunts me, but I am trying to get my head around leaving the past behind, easier said than done. Sometimes, I feel like I have this grey cloud which drags along behind me, everyone else seems well adjusted and happy and I just gag when I hear people say how happy they are – a guy at work today said that every day he had come into work over the last twenty years was a joyful day every morning. What a different experience I thought and those people know nothing about other people experiences – do they?
IndigoBlue, you’re talking about them. We’re talking about us.
Bev and Henry, it sounds like you’ve been working on this for a while. I too have residual health issues that I relate directly to the stress of those year and the early part of my recovery. At least one of them appears to be a chronic condition that will change my lifestyle permanently.
I’ve found a good resource in the book “Full Catastrophe Living” by Jon Kabat-Zinn. It was written for people with cancer to help them manage pain, and it has turned into a classic for positive life management in the face of potentially overwhelming challenges.
I too found that looking at myself in this relationship, first seeing my own contribution to it, and then trying to understand its causes was pivotal to my healing. It helped me move from self-hatred and self-distrust to understanding both the immediate issues and the underlying causative factors, and give myself a break.
That made it easier for me to be able to give myself comfort and compassion, which was probably a big factor in learning to take care of myself in ways that weren’t based in fear and anger.
It’s really a big step, I think, to turn this attention onto our own participation. It takes a lot of courage, especially when our minds are tuned to anger in blaming the sociopath for everything. I think we feel vulnerable to our own anger, and afraid that it will simply add to our emotional burden, giving us more reasons to feel bad.
But once I started working this area, I was surprised and relieved to find that it wasn’t like that. It actually gave me a chance to “unclench” my emotional system, and relax into more forgiveness and tolerance toward myself. As Oxy has said in many of her posts, we’re human. We don’t know everything. We make mistakes, and we make them do the best we can do at the time.
I think it’s really interesting how the concept of taking care of ourselves evolves as we move through the healing process. Last night I was looking for something in my writing over the last few years. I could see how in the beginning, I desperately needed other people to acknowledge my situations and provide support. Then there was a period when I was reasserting my control, and was highly critical and judgmental of the sociopath and a lot of other people too. Then I pulled back from relationships a bit, and took some time with myself to evaluate my behavior, my motivations and what there was to learn about that.
Today, almost everything about my self-caring is associated with something I call compassion. It’s one of those extremely high-level words that means different things to different people, or maybe different things to me, depending on the circumstances. But in my mind it’s associated with connection — the inside connection of my spirit, mind, body, will, intent, available resources. And my connections externally in the great fractal landscape of events, circumstances, people, etc. I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s the opposite of fragmentation and alienation.
That compassion supports self protection, but that largely works through changing the focus of my attention from things that hurt me to things that reward me. It equates to freezing out sociopaths and other contributors of chaos and dysfunction to my life. But it doesn’t feel like that internally. I’m just making choices to focus on things that support my interests and wellbeing. It also helps me develop evolving visions of who I am, what I want to do now, and what kind of future I want to create. It gives me a quality of focus, intent and follow-through I never had before.
I really don’t know when these ideas become meaningful to someone who is processing through losses and grief. Or if they make any sense at all to a person who is overwhelmed by a sense of loss. I think we have to go through anger (which is the antithesis of connection), because we need to both reassert our power and define our losses, before we can take the step of letting things go. So I don’t know if anything I’m writing here makes sense (or should make sense) to early-stage recoverers.
But what might make sense is that, ultimately, our attitude and our view of ourselves and the world helps determine what we find there. If we’re in grief, we will find more things to grieve. If we’re in fear, we find more things to be afraid of. And if we’re in anger, we find more reasons for outrage. Ultimately, if we’re going to become creators of positive change in ourselves and in the world, I think that we have to see the world in terms of learning and choice. So that is maybe a goal to keep in mind.
These days, I cultivate compassion as psychic “food” in the same way I make sure there is food in the house for dinner. It makes it possible for me to have a great relationship with the woman in the mirror, and well as be alert, incisive and positive in navigating the world.
I still make mistakes. I don’t know everything. But compassion makes learning just a part of living, like driving from one place to another.
And to go back to Kabat-Zinn’s book, he promotes mindfulness meditation, which is a simple practice that helps us get in touch with ourselves, regain composure and maintain perspective. I don’t do it daily, but I go back to it whenever I find I’m being challenged in ways that trigger fear and anger.
I know I shouldn’t be amazed by his lack of conscience or feeling, but I am. Sometimes I sit and cry wondering how he can do this to me.
Sabinne, I feel for you. I want to say, you poor baby. What can possibly be worse than to discover that someone we loved and trusted has betrayed us.
And not for some reason that would at least let us feel like it was a sacrifice to a greater cause — like he had to choose between us and saving the world. That would be hard enough, but no, it’s nothing like that. It’s just because he is selfish and shallow and incapable of thinking about anyone but himself.
The word “disappointment” seems to small to describe it. But that’s what it is. A disappointment that just takes your breath away.
But here is something else to cry about, something that may help you feel less like an abandoned child, and more like you’re seeing things through a woman’s eyes. You are crying over the end of an illusion of love that he encouraged you to believe in. But he didn’t belong in it. He claimed he did, and you believed him. But he lied. He wasn’t anything like the person he claimed to be.
What a loss! Of course, you’re crying because he is such a disappointment as a human being.
Thinking “how could he?” gives him the power. Thinking “what in the world is wrong with him?” gives it back to you. There is something very wrong with him. You know this. You’re emotional system may still be dealing with shock, but your head knows that he is not just behaving like a bad person, but also like a fool who leaves destruction in his wake when he could have built something wonderful. His vision is so narrow. His values are so shallow and wrong-headed. He never deserved you, and he knew it. He lied his way into your heart.
You didn’t know that. It’s still hard to believe. So you also cry for the time and energy and attention and care you wasted on him. It was a mistake. Maybe it feels like something has gone wrong with the world. Like you’re luck has run out or you did something wrong. And so you cry because you’re hurt and confused. And for this part, in particular, you should be telling yourself “oh you poor baby” and giving yourself every kindness you can.
You’ll get through this. What you know intellectually will finally work its way down into your emotional system. You will absorb the fact that there is something seriously wrong with him. That the behavior that surprises you today is just “normal” for him. You won’t expect him to be different, and you’ll detach. You’ll realize you’re lucky to be free of him, and whatever you lost was less than you might have lost. Because you’ve encountered a human predator and you came out of it alive, able to talk about it with people who care about you, and you’re healing.
There a little distance you have to travel to get there. To move from a feeling of unrequited love for an unbelievably thoughtless person to a feeling of having survived an attack on your identity and your life’s resources. But you’ll get there, and your whole attitude will change.
He’s not a nice person. In terms we understand, he’s not even a person. He’s an emotional cripple who is incapable of surviving on his own in this world, and so finds smart, capable, generous, sensitive people to exploit. Not a nice person.
This is the worst of it, Sabinne. It gets better from here. You’re on the way to becoming smarter and stronger in ways you can’t even imagine now.
Namaste.
Kathy