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
I haven’t heard that phrase “panty waist” in a long time. My mom used to always say that !!!! And you are correct. It feels like I have SO MUCH MORE control in my life. And I do!
keeping_faith and OxDrover:
One of the things I’ve come to realize with suppressed anger is that it goes beyond depression. The suppressed anger leads to depression, which leads to a loss of faith in your ability to acomplish anything, which leads to paralysis about addressing your problems, which leads to — a vicious circle.
By the time S got done with me, I really had reached the bottom of my emotional and self-esteem/confidence reserves. There were none.
But, somehow the anger stirred up my survival skills and I did what I had to do — drive S off. That experience must have been a wake-up call that I had to become self-sufficient in every area of my life.
Today I finally resolved the last of my new technology problems — I couldn’t get my Outlook to interface with my email. Back in the old days I would fall into the “I’m so stupid. I’m a technological moron”yada, yada, yada.
Today I got the tech geek to walk me through it step-by-step. And yes. Now my Blackberry interfaces with my notebook. And my email, calendar and contacts interface with my Outlook. It took a couple of weeks, but yes I accomplished it.
I’ve noticed that a renewed self-confidence is kicking in. I’m entering week 3 of unemployment. I’ve been busy networking, updating the CV and seeing what is out there. Yes, I know the economy is bleak. Yet, I feel strangely confident that everything is going to work out.
Not to say, I don’t have those moments where the old self doubt creeps in. But, I’m finding if I think about what is creating that, I generally find that it’s somebody else that’s pulling something on me which is creating the self doubt. And if I get justifiably angry, presto-chango, the self-doubt seems to evaporate.
51 years old and I’m finally growing up.
Realized I spoke out of context re: Henrys post last night. It was late, I was falling asleep and this aft I just recalled he said something endearing to everyone – all the while he had a crap day yesterday. I was agreeing with him and expanding on his kind words.
Kindheart, I also misread that the problem youre having with your medication is an insurance matter. I have no idea if the form in which the medication is given affects the insurance coverage (doubt it – but never know). Also, in some situations when it is medically documented that you are unable to take an alternative drug due to existing underlying medical conditions your provider can make an exception. But the Doctor has to get involved with providing a statement as such.
Oxy, I agree with you about severe mental illnesses/lost souls. I realize a chemical imbalance is exactly that and medication is a necessity to regain the “balance” in order to make the choice (along with meds )to want to begin the journey through therapy and self-help to live a more normal and balanced existence. Your step-father sounds like he was truly a gift to you and others. I bet you miss dearly. He def passed on some of his wonderful qualities to you.
I’m glad the article resonates. Because this topic is so big, I’m doing a second one on being angry gracefully and safely.
When i wrote that anger is about power, I meant that in an almost spiritual sense. Those of us who have difficulty surfacing or expressing anger also tend to have issues with power. Both our own and other people’s.
One of the most often repeated admonitions in my family home — particularly to me — was “Who do you think you are?” I was told I was ambitious, too big for my britches, selfish, not concerned enough about everyone else’s wellbeing, etc. This all happened while I was being made responsible (and accepted it) for everyone else’s feelings and wellbeing, including whether my violent father was angry or not.
I think that a similar thing happens to us in a lot of institutional environments. We are encouraged to be responsible for everything, but to submit to authority which is often vague and inconsistent in its “rules.” So we live with anxiety about what we’re “allowed” to be or feel. As we live with role models of irresponsible use of power. Not wanting to be like them, we abdicate our our own power and never grow up in this key aspect.
One of the benefits of an extended interaction with a sociopath is that it finally makes the case for us that we need to learn to use our own power. That begins with judging that something is a bad thing. For us. And then responding naturally to its negative effect on our life. Those natural responses range from “stop it” to “go away” to “I’m going to do whatever I have to do to make this stop.”
We can interpose all the polite words we want around those statements to make ourselves sound more socially acceptable. But at the end of the day, that’s what we mean. And one of the very good things about natural anger — that is anger that targets the cause of our distress — is that it clarifies that fact that we don’t need to weaken ourselves or our statement in dealing with a real threat.
Specific statements about what we want and what we don’t want, and what we intend to do to get it or get rid of it are the most powerful way to communicate. Because it’s clear. There’s nothing in these statement that can be used to jerk us around by “rules” they think we’ll respond to.
For instance, “I apologize for being so adamant about this but…” open the door to friendly warnings that we’re beginning to sound like a raving b****h, or perhaps we need to see our therapists for some anxiety medication, or we’re hurting their feelings. We are being much more clear if we say, “I want you to treat me with respect. That means I don’t want your opinions about me or your advice, unless I ask for them. If you insist on offering them unasked, I do not want to talk with you.”
The difficulty we face in making a statement like that is evidence of the barriers we face in assuming power over our own lives. And expressing our intention to do so.
I think this is a key issue for people who get involved with sociopaths. People talk about this as boundary issues. And it certainly is. But once we say “This is my life, and I get to choose what I welcome into it or what I keep out of it,” we have asserted a boundary. That is all there is to it.
There’s more to this, which I’ll get to in a later article. But what I really wanted to communicate in this one is that we are allowed to make these judgments. And that we have an inborn capacity to do that. There is something in us that knows what is right and wrong for us. To hear it, we sometimes have to ignore all the rules we have been taught about what we ought to think, feel and accept.
Those external rules aren’t always wrong. The ethics and spiritual precepts we are taught can be good basic guides when we don’t feel strongly one way or another. But the more we remove the blockages to feeling all our feelings, the we become authentically ourselves, rather than the puppet of some authority structure. This is the whole concept of emotional freedom.
Being emotionally free challenges people who are not, just the sociopathic interaction challenged us. Sociopaths are actually great models for emotional freedom, because they are totally self-referenced. They have some major failures in processing — i.e. they don’t understand connection or the long-term consequences of not caring about their impact on other people — but their extraordinary power of focus, planning and execution derives from their knowledge about what they want for themselves. It is something we can learn from them.
The more we are free, the more likely we are to get feedback from people around us that we are being selfish, manipulative, insensitive, etc. It’s something we have to deal with in getting better. The rest of the world isn’t necessarily as “better” as we’re becoming.
However, the good news is that we become a good influence. There’s a truism that when one person in a family get into therapy, the rest of the family starts healing. It doesn’t happen overnight. And I know that went I went into therapy, there were a lot of snide comments in my family about being “lucky enough to have the money to indulge myself” and warnings about “not hanging out the family’s dirty laundry.” But my work on myself gradually created a safer environment for honest and healing conversations.
Anger itself is a stage in healing. What we feel is exaggerated, compared to the type of anger that we’ll feeling the future, mostly because we have to release a lot of pent-up resentment and also we have to learn to work with this energy in our emotional system. As time passes, anger will become just one of the emotional voices we consult in ourselves. And the related issue of power will become better integrated into our ways of dealing with the world.
But for right now, I am very happy to watch those of us who are moving from the earliest stages of healing into anger. It’s shows major progress in moving down the path.
For those of us who are new at this, I would offer the advice that, no matter how tempted you make feel to act or speak out of your anger, take the time to think a while or maybe sleep on it, before you decide it’s the right thing to do. The newly angered can be a little extreme in their reactions. As Matt described his new anger, it can be a wild awakening at first, a kind of rebirth. Take it easy until you settle down into knowing how to use it well.
Matt,
You are amazingly strong. You and I are similar in many ways. I think over achievement can be the result of supressed anger. Maybe it was my catholic upbringing that also contributed to the “rules” of being nice to everyone. I too, when I met the S, was at the bottoom of th eself esteem barrell, just separated after 22 yrs of marriage and had lost myself in my x husband my kids, my job and then the S. I do feel differently now and a little more alone. But not so lonely.
I also feel that I have an independence that I didn’t have before as well as the ability to do things that I couldn’t and didn’t do before, because of other demands and now I can do what I want BECAUSE I CAN. I don’t want to trade that for just any man. I’m not giving that power away again.
Kathy,
When I started to have enough response to insults (anger) that I wanted to start to set boundaries, I was very leery of “over reacting” and I would “bounce off my son D” my feelings, my reasons for setting the boundary and ask him if they were “reasonable” in his opinion, because I DIDN’T want to react unreasonably, but not, with a bit of practice, I have set bondaries now without a second though, just like this morning when I received an early “wake up call” from my friend. I wasn’t even really awake (it takes at least 2 cups of coffee for me to be awake and with it) and I STILL saw the problem, and found a solution (a boundary) and set it. (Pat pat!)
I didn’t even wonder or worry “is this going to ofend her?” because I did not care if she was offended….I said things “nicely” and tactfully, but FIRMLY. Formed my lips and said NO! And gosh, it is a heady feeling to do that! My training wheels are off and I don’t need at this point I think, anyone else to validate that my boundaries are “reasonable” because I can validate that myself. If someone says that my boundaries are NOT reasonable, I will discuss it with them, but as long as I am okay with the boundaries that is the maiin point for me at this point. I actively try not to be unreasonable or “nasty” with them, but reasonable and FIRM.
Kathleen –
“Sociopaths have some major failures in processing i.e. they don’t understand connection or the long-term consequences of not caring about their impact on other people” WHERE WE EXCEL AT THAT.
But Sociopaths “extraordinary power of focus, planning and execution derives from their knowledge about what they want for themselves.” WHERE WE SIMPLY DONT EXCEL AT THAT.
BUT… “It is something we can benefit from learning” –
I WAS, AND STILL AM ANGRY ABOUT THAT FACT/TRUTH. The fact that I not only lack the essential ability to be emotionally free and further was guilty each and every time of being newly angered by his Sociopathic behaviors and became quite extreme in my reactions while in the relationship. Further, giving him the ability to view me as a “crazy” person.
I did not act out on my “anger” in the healing process during the aftermath. But I sure experienced it. I credit my mother-in-law to teaching me how to settle down, think, give it a day…and figure out how to use it well. By not giving him the satisfaction of any more attention, albeit negative attention, I feel Ive matured by processing my anger reaction better.
I am angry/envious that Sociopaths have a good quality/trait. lol. It just angers me that I have to learn one of their traits in order to become a more balanced person. But I sensed that he had qualities I didnt and vice versa. Ones that we would both benefit from learning from eachother. As well as ones that we would both benefit from changing in each of our own lives.
And lastly not to confuse matters, but is it fair to say Sociopaths also abuse/manipulate the well intended benefit of asserting a boundary. As an example — when they are directly approached to be held accountable for deceiving us, cheating us, stealing from us, (or whatever the finding is du jour) they turn it all around and all of a sudden play the “This is my life, and I get to choose what I welcome into it or what I keep out of it” CARD – and the masterful manipulation continues and we are CUT OFF without explanation or a shred of remorse – and all of a sudden we are the bad or crazy one for addressing their bad treatment/choices. That angers me too.
BTW, Anger feels powerful to me, when I know its righteousness thats being abused/manipulated. Thanks Kathy.
Work is calling me, but I just wanted to make note of some of the responses to this post that confirm the value of listening to our angry, judgmental and rejecting feelings and using our own power to recreate our lives.
truebeliever: Anger has given me power and I handle situations so so so differently. My S and others that I have removed from my life are no longer Kryptonite to my being!
I love that comment about Kryptonite. Anger is the difference between shriveling up in the “how could he do that to me” mode, and standing up and saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but whatever it is, I don’t like how you behave.”
Matt: I have spent a lifetime of battling depression I am finally seeing that it is attributable to bottled up anger from growing up in a physically and emotionally abusive household, and a lifetime of trying to be the original people pleaser.
Me too, on that one. It’s amazing how depression goes away when we assume our own power.
keeping_faith: Until I could get really angry at the XS, i could not let go.
That’s the movement into the “second act.” We can’t let go until we do it from a position of power over our own lives.
Jim in Indiana: Since I didn’t have that habit [of anger], I used the energy it gave me”got to the lawyer, then to the bank…Anger carried me through”it was a good thing then. Don’t need it now, unless it’s righteous, and can be focused as energy to solve something.
Exactly. It becomes a wonderful power source in our lives that rises to activate us when something needs to be handled.
OxDrover: I find that when I am feeling “irritated” or “angry” at someone or something, it is usually because I am suppressing the anger I feel at what someone has done to me, or is trying to do to me. SO it is “boundary setting time” if I am feeling big anger or “irritation” (small anger). I think EVERY TIME I feel that “feeling” it is because there is a boundary attack, or I have no boundary and need to set one.
Anger=power=boundaries. And anger has an amazing capacity to make us both articulate and creative in fixing things. In this story, Oxy turned an irritating situation into a exercise in creative problem solving. “I hear your problem. Here’s a solution (that doesn’t involve me).” Is this meddling? Nope, not when they come to you for a solution to their problems. She gave them one, and walked away from a potential boundary violation. This is graceful assertion of power.
swerhli: This is where I am! ANGER!! I want revenge and have so many, many “inappropriate” angry thoughts! I’ll be glad when this phase passes though. It takes lots of energy.
Oh, hooray for you. This is such a good development in your healing process. You’re just entering anger; you’re feeling more resentment and envy than flat-out outrage. You haven’t totally given up bargaining (wondering if you could have done something differently). Once you get clear about what you really have to be angry about, I think you’ll find it doesn’t drain your energy, but restores it. You’re doing great!!!
Matt: One of the things I’ve come to realize with suppressed anger is that it goes beyond depression. The suppressed anger leads to depression, which leads to a loss of faith in your ability to accomplish anything, which leads to paralysis about addressing your problems, which leads to a vicious circle…But, somehow the anger stirred up my survival skills and I did what I had to do drive S off. That experience must have been a wake-up call that I had to become self-sufficient in every area of my life….Not to say, I don’t have those moments where the old self doubt creeps in. But, I’m finding if I think about what is creating that, I generally find that it’s somebody else that’s pulling something on me which is creating the self doubt. And if I get justifiably angry, presto-chango, the self-doubt seems to evaporate.
Matt, thank you for these great posts. This is where we’re going. That’s what the sociopaths are in our lives — at least in my life. A wake up call. After all these years, our lizard brains finally got a meeting.
There is so much good stuff already in this thread. I can’t wait to see more.
A few years ago when I was really riding my anger, and it was clarifying so much, not just in my life but in the world at large, I talked to explain this to other people. One conversation stands out in my mind, with a really wonderful woman who sings songs about the earth in elementary schools. She was into a number of healing practices, and had quite a few stories similar to ours.
She could not get it. The word “anger” put her off, and to her it was something to be avoided. I am truly grateful to be sharing my thoughts with a group who understand.
Ultimately we will not be angry, or not all the time. We will be angry when it is appropriate, and we will know it’s appropriate by the evidence of our own gut feelings. We will learn (later in the healing process) about the letting go and forgiveness. So we are not going to go on forever, raging and blaming.
But anger is important in so many ways. And many of us have done ourselves a great disservice by attempting to leapfrog from pain to philosophical or spiritual thinking. The anger just waits for us to deal with it, and take action to protect ourselves from this threat, as well as to learn from the experience and protect ourselves from similar threats in the future.
Finding the courage to be angry and to take care of ourselves is what changes our lives.
Oxy’s last post brought up another thought. Taking responsibility for maintaining our own boundaries — for deciding what we want and don’t want in our lives — also eliminates the problem of expecting people to read our minds. Which is typically what is going on in passive-aggressive communications.
No. It’s a wonderful word. Much underused. Again, you can be as polite as you want to be, but my understanding of sociopaths and really anyone who wants something from you is that they’re not listening to all the social niceties. They’re listening for the yes or no. That’s what they came for and that’s what they’ll take away.
learnthelesson, you wrote about being angry that the sociopath has a character trait that you don’t. Boy, do I understand that.
But I eventually came to think that this was one of those angry-with-myself things. In dealing with it, I had to both accept who I am (a nicer person who will, ipso facto, never been quite as focussed and ruthless as him), and also accept the idea that I wasn’t quite as nice as I used to think I was. I am selfish. I am ambitious. I am focussed on my own objectives. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I need to balance out all my concerns for other people with being equally concerned with myself. Actually, probably a little more, because I have to take care of myself first, if I want to have something left over to share.
Regarding the sociopath’s wonderful way of saying “this is my life” and leaving us hanging out to dry, I suggest the reason you feel irritated about it is because you got yourself into the typical underdog position in these relationships — you were caring about him and he was caring about him. And no one was taking care of you.
You won’t do that again. Even in the best and most wonderful love and friendship relationships, we are expected by God, our lizard brains and the whole world to take care of ourselves. That is part of being a grown-up.
You could not be “bad” for saying what you want for yourself. The sociopathic strategy is to make you question yourself when you do that, so you back off. If a person really cared about your wellbeing or your interests or you growth as a person, that person would be interested in what you want for yourself. It doesn’t guarantee s/he can or wants to give it to you. Adult relationships are ones in which we recognize that we can’t be everything to anyone.
But when we meet someone who makes our needs and desires something about them — “you’re just saying that to make me feel bad” or “I’ve tried so hard to make you happy” or “you’re infringing on my space” — they we have someone who’s survival strategy does not include recognition of other people as separate human beings with our own thoughts, feelings, needs and desires. And we can expect them to use us.
Again, anger (or irritation or even envy of their freedom to do this) is a good way to recognize that an imbalance exists. And we’re getting the short end of the stick.
I’m glad you’ve got a good friend helping you to not doing anything you’ll regret later. But I hope you continue to indulge these angry feelings. You’re doing great work, not just identifying the sources of your pain but also discovering who you want to be. All those feelings of power are not “borrowed” or temporary, they are who we really are. Powerful people who have the awareness and the motivation to make our lives what we want them to be.
Kathy
Kathy – Is two more years enough time for you to complete and publish your book? I would like to give it to my daughter when she graduates high school. So, basically, Im just giving you notice that you have until June, 2011. Your insight is powerful. I would like to give her the added gift of the powerful knowledge that will come from your book. In the meantime I will teach her what I have learned from my journey by seeking out the knowledge and support to have the courage to look within ourselves and accept as well as apply we learn. Thank you.