Healing from an emotional trauma or extended traumatic experience is a like a long, intimate dance with reality. Or perhaps a three-act ballet. We are on the stage of our own minds, surrounded by the props of our lives, dancing to the music of our emotions. Our memories flash on the backdrop or float around like ribbons in the air. Down below the stage, in the orchestra pit, a chorus puts words to the feelings and gives us advice drawn from our parents’ rules, our church’s rules, all the rules from the movies and books and conversations that have ever colored our thinking.
And our job is to dance our way through the acts.
The first act is named “Magic Thinking.” We stumble onto the stage, stunned, confused and in pain. Our first dance is denial — the “it doesn’t matter” dance. Our second dance is bargaining — the “maybe I can persuade whoever is in power to fix this” dance. The third and last dance before the intermission is anger.
This article is about anger.
The emotional spine
Everyone here who has gone through the angry phase knows how complex it is. We are indignant, bitter, sarcastic, outraged, waving our fiery swords of blame. We are also — finally — articulate, funny, re-asserting power over our lives. We are hell on wheels, demanding justice or retribution. We are also in transition between bargaining and letting go, so all this is tinged with hope on one side and grief on the other.
Anger really deserves a book, rather than a brief article. It is the end of the first act of our healing, because it really changes everything — our way of seeing, our thinking, our judgments, the way we move forward. Like the element of fire, it can be clarifying, but it can also be destructive. To complicate the situation further, many (if not all of us) tended to repress our anger before we entered this healing process.
So it may be helpful to discuss what anger is, where it comes from. What we call anger is part of a spectrum of reactions that originates in the oldest part of our brain. The brain stem, sometimes called the lizard brain, oversees automatic survival mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, hunger, sleep and reproduction. It also generates powerful emotional messages related to survival.
These messages travel through increasingly sophisticated layers of our emotional and intellectual processing. One of those layers, the limbic system or mammal brain, is where we keep memories of good and bad events, and work out how to maximize pleasure and avoid pain (often through addictive strategies). The messages pass through this layer on the way to our cerebral cortex.
There in the thinking layer, we name things and organize them. We maintain concepts of community and identity (right and left brain), and we manipulate them continually to run our lives as thinking, self-aware beings. Beyond the thinking brain is the even more advanced area of the frontal cortex, which maintains our awareness of the future, interconnectivity (holistic thinking), and the “high level” views that further moderate our primitive responses into philosophic and spiritual meanings.
What our thinking brains name “anger” is actually a sensation of physical and emotional changes caused by the brain stem in reaction to perceived danger. The spectrum of those danger-related sensations roughly includes alertness, fear and anger. While our higher brain may see a purpose in separating fear and anger into different categories, our lizard brain doesn’t make those distinctions. It just keeps altering our hormones and brain chemicals for all kinds of situations, depending on its analysis of what we need to do to survive.
The point of this long digression is this: alertness-fear-anger responses are a normal part of our ability to survive. They travel “up” into our higher processing as the strong spine of our survival mechanism. There is nothing wrong with feeling them. In fact, paying attention to them is better for us in every way than ignoring our feelings (denial) or trying to delude ourselves about what is happening (bargaining).
The many forms of anger
One of the most interesting things about the English language is its many verb forms, which express various conditions of timeliness and intent. I can. I could. I could have. I would have. I might have. I should have. I will. I might. I was going to.
Those same factors of timeliness and intent can be found in the many facets of anger. Bitterness and resentment are simmering forms of anger related to past and unhealed hurts. Likewise sarcasm and passive-aggressive communications are expressions of old disappointment or despair. Frustration is a low-level form of anger, judging a circumstance or result as unsatisfactory. Contempt and disgust are more pointed feelings associated with negative judgments.
When anger turns into action, we have explosive violence, plans for future revenge and sabotage. When anger is turned on ourselves, we have depression and addictions. The judgments associated with anger foster black-and-white thinking, which can be the basis for bias and all kinds of “ism’s,” especially if the anger is old, blocked for some reason, and thus diffuse or not directed primarily at its source. This typically happens when we feel disempowered to defend ourselves.
All of that sounds pretty terrible and toxic. But, in fact, the most toxic forms of anger are the ones in which the anger is not allowed to surface. The lizard brain does not stop trying to protect us until we deal with the threat, and so we live with the brain chemicals and hormones of anger until we do.
Anger can also be healthy. The anger of Jesus toward the money changers in the temple is a model of righteous anger. In response to trauma, righteous anger is a crucial part of the healing process. Anger has these characteristics:
• Directed at the source of the problem
• Narrowly focused and dominating our thinking
• Primed for action
• Intensely aware of personal resources (internal and environmental)
• Willing to accept minor losses or injuries to win
Anger is about taking care of business. At its most primitive level, anger is what enables us to defend our lives, to kill what would kill us. In modern times, it enables us to meet aggression with aggression in order to defend ourselves or our turf. We expect to feel pain in these battles, but we are fighting to win.
However, anger also has its exhilaration, a sense of being in a moment where we claim our own destiny. For those of us who have been living through the relatively passive and self-defeating agony of denial and bargaining, anger can feel wonderful.
As it should, because anger is the expression of our deepest self, rejecting this new reality. We are finally in speaking-up mode. We are finally taking in our situation and saying, “No! I don’t want this. I don’t like it. I don’t like you for creating this in my life. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like what I’m getting out of it. And if it doesn’t stop this instant, I want you out of my life.”
Getting over our resistance to anger
Of course, we don’t exactly say that when we’re inside the relationship. In fact, we don’t exactly think it, even when we’re out of the relationship. And why is that? Because — and this only my theory, but it seems to be born out here on LoveFraud — people who get involved with sociopaths are prone to suppress their anger, because they are afraid of it, ashamed of it, or confused about its meaning.
When faced with a painful situation, they suppress their inclination to judge the situation in terms of the pain they’re experiencing, and instead try to understand. They try to understand the other person. They try to understand the circumstances. They try to interpret their own pain through all kinds of intellectual games to make it something other than pain. To an extent, this could be described as the bargaining phase. But for most of us, this is a bargaining phase turned into a life strategy. It’s an unfinished response to a much earlier trauma that we have taken on as a way of life.
Which is very good for the sociopath, who can use it to gaslight us while s/he pursues private objectives of looting our lives for whatever seems useful or entertaining. Until we have nervous breakdowns or die, or wake up.
We can all look at the amount of time it took us to wake up, or the difficulty we’re having waking up, at evidence of how entrenched we’ve been in our avoidance of our own anger. It retrospect, it is an interesting thing to review. Why didn’t we kick them out of our lives the first time they lied or didn’t show up? Why didn’t we throw their computer out of the window when we discovered their profiles on dating sites? Why didn’t we cut off their money when we discovered they were conning us? Why didn’t we spit in their eye when they insulted us? Why didn’t we burn their clothes on the driveway the first time they were unfaithful?
Because we were too nice to do that? Well, anger is the end of being nice. It may be slow to emerge. We may have to put all the pieces together in our heads, until we decide that yes, maybe we do have the right to be angry. Yes, they were bad people. No, we didn’t deserve it. And finally, we are mad. At them.
Anger in our healing process
Anger is the last phase of magical thinking. We are very close to a realistic appraisal of reality. The only thing “magical” about it is this: no amount of outrage or force we can exert on the situation can change it. The sociopath is not going to change. We cannot change the past, or the present we are left with.
But anger has its own gifts. First and foremost is that we identify the external cause of our distress. We place our attention where it belongs at this moment — on the bad thing that happened to us and the bad person who caused it.
Second, we reconnect with our own feelings and take them seriously. This is the beginning of repairing our relationships with ourselves, which have often become warped and shriveled with self-hatred and self-distrust when we acted against our own interests in our sociopathic relationships.
Third, anger is a clarifying emotion. It gives us a laser-like incisiveness. It may not seem so when we are still struggling with disbelief or self-questioning or resentment accumulated through the course of the relationship. But once we allow ourselves to experience our outrage and develop our loathing for the behavior of the sociopath, we can dump the burden of being understanding. We can feel the full blazing awareness that runs through all the layers of brain, from survival level through our feelings through our intellect and through our eyes as we look at that contemptible excuse for a human being surrounded by the wreckage s/he creates. Finally our brains are clear.
And last, but at least as important as the rest, is the rebirth of awareness of personal power that anger brings. Anger is about power. Power to see, to decide, to change things. We straighten up again from the long cringe, and in the action-ready brain chemicals of anger, we surprise ourselves with the force of our ability and willingness to defend ourselves. We may also surprise ourselves with the violent fantasies of retribution and revenge we discover in ourselves. (Homicidal thoughts, according to my therapist, are fine as long as we don’t act on them.)
It is no wonder that, for many of us, the angry phase is when we learn to laugh again. Our laughter may be bitter when it is about them. But it can be joyous about ourselves, because we are re-emerging as powerful people.
The main thing we do with this new energy is blaming. Though our friends and family probably will not enjoy this phase (because once we start blaming, it usually doesn’t stop at the sociopath), this is very, very important. Because in blaming, we also name what we lost. When we say “you did this to me,” we are also saying, “Because of you, I lost this.”
Understanding what has changed — what we lost — finally releases us from magical thinking and brings us face to face with reality. For many of us this is an entirely new position in our personal relationships. In the next article, we’ll discuss how anger plays out in our lives.
Until then, I hope you honor your righteous anger, casting blame wherever its due. And take a moment to thank your lizard brain for being such a good friend to you.
Namaste. The healing warrior in me salutes the healing warrior in you.
Kathy
Witsend – I understand, completely. I get that “TINY kernal of truth” with what your son tells you. My daughter is the same way. There is almost always, like you say a teenie tiny inkling of truth mixed in with all the lies.
I also understand your interest (and mine) in what came before adulthood. I think we may be looking for what we missed while we were in the moment.
Best to you –
There are so many treasures on this site, and this is one of them.
I have been trying to avoid or deflect my feelings of anger, thinking that they were bad or negative and would only be harmful now that I am free of my ex. I was having inner battles with myself, angry for not leaving sooner, that I had wasted time believing that he was someone different. But at the same time thinking that I had no right to be angry now because I have everything to look forward to, even if I am lonely.
This blog puts it back in perspective, I can stop fighting myself and see that when anger comes it is part of the healing process, as long as I direct it back at him and not at myself for not leaving sooner.
The jigsaw of emotional healing is so much more complex than you think, even when you are on the ‘winning’ side. And now I also see that I shouldn’t feel guilty for times of happiness or pleasure when others tell me he is gutted and unhappy without me (he is a good actor too and gets lots of sympathy).
I am so lucky that I have not had the extreme experiences of spaths that so many of you have had. He was essentially a nice guy and there was no physical injury and even the psychological manipulation was comparitively mild in comparison with what so many have endured. But lies, manipulation and lack of comittment also destroy hopes and dreams and other lives.
Thank you lf contributors, you have helped me reclaim my life.
Witty and Milo,
Rat poison is 99% PURE CORN MEAL (truth) and only 1% poison (lies) but it will still kill you if you eat it.
The things the psychopaths tell are “lies” indeed, (poison) meant to deceive you, but there is always a kernel of truth in there on which the deception is “spun” around like a spider’s web is tied to SOMETHING.
Back when the Trojan horse psychopath showed up in my front yard with a new truck, after I had declined lending him the money for one, and he had recently moved into my egg donor’s house as her live in caregiver…I asked him “did mom give you the money?” and his answer was “well, I have friends in texas.”
Later when I learned that he HAD gotten the money from my egg donor Ii called him to my house to have a confrontation with him about the deception. He DENIED lying to me because he hadn’t said “yes or no” but had said a TRUE STATEMENT, he does indeed have friends in Texas. But if you look up the definition of deception and lie they are the same. Saying ANYthing that is to deceive someone is a LIE regardless of what the words are.
Just as Sam Vaknin “Doctor” Vaknin LOL with his “internet doctorate” LOL pads his resume and tries to present himself as something he is not, so do all psychopaths in one way or another. They have an internet “degree” which no self respecting person would pad their resume with, but a psychopath will. My son has in his prison records that he has a BS degree in computer sciences….it’s BS all right…Bull shiat! He didn’t finish high school, he was arrested and spent two years in prison from age 18 to age 20, then was out 5 months before his arrest for murder, so WHEN DID he have TIME to get a BS in anything at a college? LOL But because he put that on his records, he can’t get into college classes in prison because he ALREADY “has” a degree. LOL yea right! So my egg donor kept trying to get him to take college course and she would have paid for them but he kept saying this or that was the reason he didn’t, but when I got his prison records I SAW why he was never able to “get” a class….hee hee he shot himself in the foot trying to impress the guards in the prison with how smart he is.
If you want to know about what a young psychopath is like, get books or information on “conduct disorder” or “oppositional defiant disorder” or read the book “Columbine” which I am reading now. That will tell you what a young psychopath is like when they hit puberty. Of course there are some differences in them, like all psychopaths, there are some individual differences, but that will give you a start in learning about them as youngsters.
lovelost: thanks so much for your post.
it is so nice to hear when someone else ‘gets it’ and appreciates this blog, the same as i have….i wish you all the very best in your life. the things we have come through surely won’t ever leave us during our lifetimes but these things will make us stronger and more resolved individuals. what life we have now, after the ppath/spath will be a true one. no more lies, no more deceptions, just peace. it’s okay to be lonely with yourself, lovelost…i listen to the silence ringing in my ears every moment and i thank the heavens for it – that is something i haven’t had for many years now. i so cherish my time. every day is a gift. to be relished and treasured.
*BLESSINGS TO YOU*
Dupey
Hmmm, Perhaps I just missed something, but I have never seen a single post by Michael that seems grandiose or manipulative or offensive in any way nor have I ever seen him attack anyone unprovoked, as others have attacked him. And I’m kind of on the lookout for it. The minute I see it, I have no problem with NC. I find the conversation very useful in more ways than just learning about sociopaths. I apologize if this offends anyone. But from my perspective, this drama seems really unnecessary. It’s too bad there is not just an ignore button you can use to tune people out.
I agree with witty that whenever you post on the internet, anyone can be lurking and do whatever with that information. I think we have a false sense of security here. It’s very possible that if Michael is banned, he will still be lurking anyway. I’d rather hear what he has to say.
Best to all.
Star, I don’t mean to start an argument with you about Michael being rude, obnoxious or hateful to people on this site, but he has been on here MULTIPLE TIMES and engaged in NASTY behavior, and Donna has asked him nicely to please stop…he has refused. She has blocked him, and he will come back with another IP address and keep on posting nasty and rude..that does NOT show respect for this site or for the posters here.
Sure, we know he is lurking, but so are 1,000 other people who are lurking for knowlege and are too shy to post yet. Have you noticed the people who come here and say “I’ve been reading for a year and this is my first post?” Plenty of people read who do not post. I imagine some of them are the psychopaths from scocio world or psycho place whatever the name of it is, some people here have gone to the site, which Michael usually touts when he comes here I guess to drum up business. They laugh and refer to us as “sheeple” but my suggestion is that for those who want to talk about healing, blog here and for those who want to converse with self proclaimed psychopaths, go to the web sites where they hang out and converse with them there.
Love Fraud is like a church I think. We know that there are people sitting out there who are bad folks….but we don’t want them in the pulpit preaching or teaching the sunday school class. So why have self proclaimed psychopaths here seeking attention and we give it to them?
That is kind of like saying about Ted Bundy “he is so nice when he is not raping women.”
My suggestion is that we NOT do things that we know will upset others or bring problems to the blog. Even if we have the RIGHT to interact with Michael, IS IT A GOOD IDEA for the BLOG AS A WHOLE? If you can’t answer “yes” to that or anything else you want to do here on LF, then my suggestion is to not do it.
Being considerate of the blog as a whole, considering it is a space that people who are RAW come here, and if those people see us “old hands” CHATTING AWAY with a self proclaimed psychopath and giving him “kisses” and so on, what does that say about LoveFraud?
I don’t doubt the man will come back, with another name, another IP address and pretend to be a victim again, or bring his “friends” with him, but actually his friends that keep the conversation going with him when we don’t respond are getting pretty easy to spot. I’m not sure if I am better on the uptake now or if they are just getting less sneaky and more obvious, but either way,, they are getting pretty easy to spot now. I may miss them for a few posts but I’m catching on pretty quickly now and so are others, but the trick is, if you want to call it a trick…is hit the “report abusive comment” link and notify Donna to keep an eye on them, which she does. People also e mail me on the g mail account by my author’s listing and tell me that they are disturbed by people blogging with Michael (or anyone else who is disruptive). Just by his very nature of saying “I’m a psychopath” but then going on to say “I’m a nice one though” is like Sam Vaknin doing the same. It is a LIE. Why talk to people who LIE?
MiLo,
OMG the lies are pretty amazing aren’t they? Compulsive lying was the very first issue that “presented” in my son during puberty. It was as if overnight he had forgotten how to tell the truth.
And he was a late bloomer, so to speak….So after he “became” this big liar… I had to think really long & hard to remember if and when he had even told any of those little white lies kids tell in childhood.
Lying sure didn’t fit into what his personality was before this issue came “out” in puberty. So I was pretty blind-sided by this at the time. Yet somehow I knew instinctively that my life was going to change in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.
And before I knew it he presented with so many issues that I wasn’t sure where or when that other shoe was going to fall. And what I should be most worried about.
Did your daughter ever go through a period where she would just take off for days without any contact? This is his new thing that he does. No one knows if he is dead or alive for days…Usually about a week. When he does show up he looks rather perplexed as to what all the fuss is about?
As if he just steped out for a few hours and now he has returned.
Witsend,
The only time Patrick “stepped out” for a few days was when he and his buddy who was my foster son, got caught at school with a pistol and they took off because I was going to give up the foster son, I couldn’t handle them both at the same time. So, they ran. Stole a motorcycle and got caught on the stolen MC…a couple of days later. So I never had the problem with him just “disappearing” and then coming back like “what’s the fuss?”
I do know that other troubled kids (some Ps and some not) that belonged to some of my friends did that, but it was usually related to drug use or criminal behavior of some kind.
Getting it through their heads that this is not acceptable behavior is difficult. Just as changing any other self centered behavior is. With some of them I actually think it never crosses their mind that they SHOULD be worried about what someone else would be worried about.
Star
If you remember, Michael admitted the obvious, that the game is his thing (“WINNING!”). And that manipulation is an ingredient in the game. So ask yourself, what would a psychopath want on a blog populated with a bunch of people trying to recover from tramatic abuse perpertrated by a psychoath? MICHEAL HAS ULTERIOR MOTIVES. He is MADE that way.
It’s not fair to blame the VICTIMS of SPATHS for FEELING Triggered. Telling VICTIMS to just ignore making a psychopath welcome is not kind. A little empathy is desired.
And yes, it is triggering to be BLAMED while reading your defense of what he has done, rubbed the faces of VICTIMS of psychopaths into the dirt while claiming to be innocent. We know LOTS of things about spaths, one of which is they are NEVER innocent. To trivalize the feelings of VICTIMS is offensive. Michael USED your good heart to do so. He twisted intentions, as a game player would, as psychopath would. Many therapists define his conversations as “grooming”. Pedophiles are easier to identify as Groomers, but psychopaths do the same (pedophiles ARE psychopaths imo). Did you really buy into his altruistic reasons? Really believe that a psychopath is ALtruisitc? I understand Michale has a site to explain himself, so why come here? Answer: to do the quiet evil that gets him a little thrill. To play the game. And “WIN”.
If you want to talk to a psychopath, why make him welcome here among the traumatically wounded victims? Why not be a little considerate/thoughtful/concerned for the victims of psychopaths… kinda like you wouldn’t force a child who’d been raped by a pedophile to have to be thoughtful about the feelings of a pedophile and make a pedophile welcome right? It as traumatic as that. And I don’t believe you intended that. He was SO calm and quiet that you didn’t see what was happening. Which, since psychopaths have NO empathy, he was able to do with great success. Michael was able to make you seem like you didn’t care about VICTIMS of psychopaths as much as you cared about HIM. That was manipulative and Slimey of him.
Just thought you deserved to know why your continued conversations were so hard on others.
Katy,
Because he has admitted he likes to play games is not in any way offensive to me. I’m sorry if that triggers you. Thank you for taking responsibility for your own issues being triggered – I respect that. I also got played by a sociopath, and I grew up with some pretty nasty people. And there is still nothing in his posts that personally threaten me or trigger me. My triggers are not the same as yours. My neighbor triggers me. But if he showed up here and blogged respectfully, I would not ask anyone to avoid him because that’s my issue and not theirs. I spent many years avoiding my family members’ triggers because they couldn’t handle very much. I cannot live my life like that anymore. It doesn’t mean I don’t care. I have followed your posts for quite a while, and it doesn’t take much to see the pain you are in. I feel for you more than you know or will probably ever know.
I am able to separate out this person blogging here from the people who have hurt me. They are not the same people, though they may have some similar traits. I’m sorry if you can’t. I do care about the members here or I wouldn’t be here. But it is not my job to protect them from being triggered. Attacked maybe, but I expect people to take responsibility for their own triggers.
But you may get your wish after all because I don’t really care to hang out in an environment where I’m being attacked for blogging with a respectful poster and being accused of being thoughtless and inconsiderate. Good way to get rid of me.