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
kindheart – slow down and breathe–you are only normal – it is hard to let go of the love (we) felt. it is hard to accept that he was a lie but eventually we do – but we are still left with emotion’s that we must go through, it will get easier I promise. Calling him is just your desperation for something real from him, you still want to believe in love, even with the illusion it was real for you but not him, they are such great actor’s..it’s going to take some time, maybe months and months but one day the hurt will just be lifted and your heart will be healed and you will be wiser and have more clarity in your decisions, you have not met the man of your life yet, so work on this life lesson and be whole and happy when you do.
Kindheart, you are slipping back into the bargaining phase. Someone once said here that they just imagine every interaction with the S like being punched in the face. That is a good analogy I think. Whatever you do, girlfriend, DON’T DO IT. When you are alone and lonely and hurting, it’s easy to slip into a fantasy world where people are what you want them to be. But the reality is that calling him is like trying to kiss a gaboon viper or a rattlesnake. The wave of loneliness will pass eventually, and you will be glad you didn’t call.
and you have every reason to feel hurt and lonely – sometimes a huge pity party for yourself is ok – put on some (you done me wrong songs) crank the volume up and have a big ole snot slobberin cry – let the pain out – don’t hold it in – don’t try to make sense of this of him – but just allow your self to cry and feel the pain and let it go……….
let it out, let the pain out – dont hold it in – let it out – just you and the universe and your cyber friends….we have to let it out before we can let it go…
thanks guys, im sitting here in tears as i know now it’s pain, grief, loss and im so glad you guys blogged on as i needed to know someone is there , it’s so much like the compulsion i had to drink years ago. Thanks so much for caring. love kindheart
henry, thanks for making me laugh, im going to listen to BJ Thomas version of Somebody Done somebody wrong song, thanks again so much you made me laugh just suggesting the song and i will listen to it. so glad for all you guys. kh
Meg,
You wrote: “I will blame myself for getting depresed in the relationship. If I had not become depressed”“ maybe he would have stuck around”“”
You have written so many things like this. You talk about the “man I loved.” You talk about your wonderful times with him. As though it were a wonderful dream.
You wrote about the way your father appeared in your life, dazzled you with attention and “fell in love with you,” then abandoned you and even ignored you in his will. All for a gesture you made to take care of yourself, well, I can’t help but wonder who you’re talking about.
Like many of us, you have major traumatic history. Many of us discover that we keep reproducing these situations, recreating them and hoping they come out different.
We pick the same kind of people to play them out with. And we try to make it come out differently by being better, smarter, more cheerful, more loyal, more accommodating, more boundaried, whatever we’re trying this time. As though it was our fault that it happened in the first place.
You didn’t make you father abandon you. All of his actions suggest that he was a selfish, self-involved jerk who was using you for fantasy material. When you didn’t agree to do what he wanted, you no longer matched the fantasy, so he dumped you.
I know these are hard words, but that’s what it looks like to me. You may be reading this as your failure to be sufficiently lovable. But that’s not what’s going on here. Unless you were willing to lock yourself into a little bunny suit or Barbie suit or whatever he had in mind, he was always going to abandon you the minute you showed that you were anything but his fantasy.
In talking about his relationship with your ex, you keep going back to talking about what you did wrong. Think about it. You changed for him. You did what he wanted you to do. You didn’t question him. You took care of him. You were grateful and appreciative.
This man couldn’t bear the least evidence that you were not a creation of his own fantasies. If you had an idea of your own, it wasn’t welcome. If you had your own ethics, they were not welcome. You weren’t even allowed to have your own emotions, but had to be a Stepford wife. (if you haven’t seen that movie, you should.)
What he wanted was beautiful Meg, the fabulous actress, playing the role of exactly who he wanted you to be. You were not allowed to get off that stage.
Like your biological father, who was “in love” with you as long as you were exactly who he wanted you to be. When you weren’t, he couldn’t handle it.
And that is meaningful. These people can handle a real human being. You are thinking that you’ve been rejected. Has it ever occurred to you that they’re afraid of a real person. And that they can only deal with the two-dimensional comic-book dream girls they imagine as their beautiful, sexy servants.
As far as the sex being so great, and the chemistry so wonderful, have you ever heard that the most powerful sexual organ is between our ears? What made him so exciting to you? What huge missing part did he fill in you life?
I try to write about this in my articles, but I try not to get too specific, because I want to leave it open for people to fill in their own blanks.
But I will tell you that in my life, I got involved with people like my father over and over again. Brilliant, creative, articulate, funny and viciously bigoted, cruelly selfish, and out at the edge of being prosecutably criminal. Until the last one, every one of them was older than me. I looked to everyone of them to teach me how to run my life better in the “real world,” (something my real father neglected to do, because he was too busy sexually abusing me), wanted them to shelter me emotionally while I healed from my past, so I could finally grow up.
I see that now. I only saw part it of then. But do you know how they all came out? I supported them. I made sure that they got their dreams fulfilled. I hid my real feelings, while I acted like their dream girl. I got so involved with them that I abandoned my friends and previous interests.
Did it come out differently than it did with my father? Not really. I learned some important things from them, because I was there to learn. They got their dreams and desires taken care of. I got years of paying for the pleasure of their company. I never got that break I needed to get healed, and I never stopped feeling abandoned.
The sociopath was just the last and worst of this string of relationships that I set up to meet these big needs I had. I finally found the perfect guy to really reproduce the predatory monster my father was. And I finally discovered what I really needed to know.
That it was not my fault that my father treated me that way. And trying to make myself better and better so that someone would want me and keep me wasn’t ever going to get me loved by someone who really cared about me. Someone who loved me was going to like the “real Kathy,” not a dream girl I was manufacturing to make him want me. Because otherwise, I was going to spend my life in fear that they would discover who I really was. And anyone who would want or allow another person to distort herself to please him is a kind of monster.
Real men love real women. And vice versa.
Think about it, Meg. Who were you in love with? Not him. Not the real him.
I have never loved anyone like I loved the sociopath. I didn’t even like him most of the time, though when he put the full force of his attention on me, I melted. But I was attached to him in a way that just blew my heart open. That’s what it felt like, and that’s how I used to talk about — my heart just blown open.
Later, when I was trying to detach, it was like trying to yank out some part of my own being. Like we’d been born together as one person, and I was trying to cut myself apart. Even though he insulted me, belittled me, was unfaithful, used me for money, didn’t care how I felt, and abandoned me over and over. Every time I thought about him, I felt this intense rush of combined pain and need, with feelings of unlovability and failure that just made me need him even more. To cure them. I used to think that he made me feel this way, and no one but him could cure me.
It wasn’t true, you know. He didn’t make me feel this way. Someone else did. He just took advantage of my propensity to feel this way, and my willingness to be whatever it took to be wanted and kept.
You know what I did? I made him into an avatar. Like the graphical characters people create for computer games or e-mail accounts. I made him into an avatar of something about me, like the dream analysis. I didn’t know what he was an avatar of. But I knew that he didn’t deserve that kind of attachment that I felt. For me to feel something that powerful, it had to be something that really was about me, something I needed, some lack in me, some missing puzzle piece in my psyche that I was using him to fill.
I knew this attachment was sick. It overrode my knowledge of what a shallow person and unfaithful, uncaring lover he had been. It overrode my need to take care of myself. But it was my sickness. Not like I was wrong. But that there was something wrong inside me, some unhealed wound that was seeking healing.
That’s where I started, calling him an avatar. Something about me. And instead of focussing on missing him, I started focusing on what I was missing in my life, in the world and in myself. What did I want that badly?
I hope this is not too hard for you to read, and that there is something helpful for you in it. I feel for you, I really do. I’ve been there. There is a reason you’re going through all this. And it’s not just about him. It’s about you, something in you that’s trying to break through so you can recover yourself. You sound like an amazing person. When this is over, you will be richer in every way. And if you decide to go back to your artistic life, you’ll go back as a woman, strong and centered in yourself.
And you won’t be fooling around with weak guys who can’t handle a woman who believes in herself. There are men out there who truly will care about your growth as an artist and a person, and you’ll find one who will love your real self.
Namaste, Meg. You can do this.
Kathy
all of us preach about No Contact and that is our final salvation, but there ain’t nothin easy about it….there is no (easy button) for a broken heart..but being involved with a personality disordered freak is like nothing we can explain – it’s more than a broken heart or being rejected – you are fighting for your life – and you will win – you already have…
Oh the songs – somebody looked at my cd collection one time and said You need therapy!!!! Seems like every country song is about a broken heart or a cheater, I heard one the other day that went something like – cheater cheater where did you meet her? that white trash ho!! then there is celine deon now she can sing it like she means it – and then there is whitney houston’s (why does it hurt so bad?) elton can make ya think and then there is Bab’s – now she wont let anybody rain on her parade ~~!! seems to me this love thing is just something society has implanted in our brains, ever feel like the sociopaths got it figured out? stick around until the partner gets sick or when it get boring just pack your stuff in a few paper bags and go pretend to be in love with another fool? and then on to the next and the next? Maybe I am becoming jaded but i dont want to put myself out there again, I must be confused about love and monogomy. Well Hell I am just a fountain of inspiration tonite arent I? I do know I have learned about respect – i will never let anyone disrespect me again. I am sure I will be lied to again but I wont ever ignore red flags. I will never doubt my intuition or gut feeling ever again. I will take care of me , and I will never let any one abuse my kind heart or change who I am…I dont hurt anymore because of what he did – I am waking up to the reality that they are out there just looking for lonely kindhearted peeps to use for whatever reason..they are out there – too many of them, nothing is lonlier than being with someone who pretends to love you..I will take me and the silence the beautiful calm silence, any day….never will I fall like the fool I was again…
“I must be confused about love and monogomy. I do know I have learned about respect – i will never let anyone disrespect me again. I am sure I will be lied to again but I wont ever ignore red flags. I will never doubt my intuition or gut feeling ever again. I will take care of me , and I will never let any one abuse my kind heart or change who I am” – Henry
Henry – When and if you get to the place where you want to put yourself out there again…the difference will be…
1. your newfound self-respect…nobody can use/abuse you…and at the first sight of a red flag you will DO THE RIGHT THING FOR HENRY NOW.
2. you will never doubt your intuition/gut feeling EVER again — do you know how many bad man that eliminates right off the bat — from ever coming close to doing what your ext did!!!
3. you will never let your heart be abused or let anyone change you – do you know how much you just increased your chances of attracting a good decent honest guy?!!!
4. Yes they are out there – but look whose coming out of this new and improved and has S/P radar built in to his self-trust, self-respect and self-love.
TOWANDO! And when you are ready to test the waters again – when you have figured out Henry and what Henry deserves and doesnt deserve – you will be prepared to deal with the redflaggers and pass over the losers (4% ) and fall in love with the keepers – the real good ones (96%)! YOU WILL HENRY, YOU WILL DO IT!!!