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
Kathleen, It was I who was talking about all the entitlement in this quickly-becoming antisocial society. No need for apologies. But you are right about the “not accepting” the labels we give to ourselves–“we are pathetic, we are losers”, etc. I believe that just by virtue of waking up to face another day, we are looking that part of ourselves in the face who wants to lay down and die. And we’re saying, “I’m still standing.” This is how I feel anyway. So many of us have had a lifetime of trauma and abuse, but somehow this does not define who we are. I know if I go through 20 days feeling depressed and angry, on the 21st day something will shift. It usually does. I’ll listen to a song and cry and feel better. In spite of all the pain I’m going through (which has little to do wtih the sociopath at this point), I feel I have value, and my life has value. Maybe I believe it today because my counselor told me that. But also, I know I still have useful things to offer to the world.
I think it’s really important to remember our good qualities and who we really are deep down (even if we forgot for a while). This will help us break through the painful stuff.
I have always had trust issues, and they served me very well with the sociopath because a part of me never completely trusted him. I always had a watchful eye, asking my friends, “is this normal what he did?”, looking for answers and opinions. When I was sure that his behaviors were coming from something other than his situation, I didn’t hesitate to walk away. It killed me to do it. I had such strong feelings for him and thought he was the love of my life. But something inside of me said that it would be bad news for me to accept his really bad and bizarre behaviors. I just couldn’t do it. It’s really hard to walk away from someone I was so attached to, knowing that I would be alone, in deep pain, and possibly would never find someone else again. But intuitively I knew if I stayed and let him treat me like that, it would kill me.
I stayed with an emotionally unavailable man for 3 years, believing deep down he still loved me, in spite of his selfish behaviors. I was crushed to learn that he never really did love me. I am determined not to waste my time with someone who treats me badly again.
S.O.S., your post made me smile. I haven’t seen many people around here who’ve gotten their inner sociopath activated so well. Congratulations. It sounds like you’re having a good time with it.
I used to think about it like turning the lights on in formerly dark areas of my brain. I learned a lot from my ex, but one of the most interesting things I learned in that relationship was that I could be just like him, if I wanted to be. I just had to be willing to put aside a few things that I previously considered to be non-negotiable. Like assumptions that everyone deserved a certain measure of respect or consideration or perhaps compassion.
As Oxy and several other of us have pointed out, sociopaths earn an exemption from this sort of social kindness. Or perhaps they lose the free pass that everyone else automatically gets as a matter of social lubrication (until they prove that they don’t deserve it either).
I spent some time torturing my ex, and in a way, I continue to torture him with some swords I keep hanging over his head. I used to really enjoy it. I think it was part of my angry phase, where I was recovering my power. You have to be a certain head space to do this. Anger turned cold. But it’s still anger, because you’re still in the blaming, vengeful, eye-for-an-eye mode.
These days, I don’t want so much involvement with him. I keep the swords hanging, because they keep him out of my life and out of some other things that I think serve the common good. But it’s an issue of maintenance, more than than anything else now.
I’ve written here about learning what we’re capable of in getting over the sociopath. This is part of it. We’re capable of being vicious, ruthless, uncaring and cunning. Everyone is. It’s built in, because we need it to survive. Those of us who get involved with sociopaths tend to be people who have suppressed those abilities in favor hoping that generosity, naivete and perpetual innocence will keep us loved and safe. So the lights are out in half of our brains, just like the lights are out in half of the sociopath’s brains.
But we’re luckier, because we can get all our lights on, while the sociopathic problem of lights out in the “trust” area makes it impossible for them to risk trying anything new. From a vengeance or sabotage perspective, it makes them pretty easy to destabilize, as you note, if we’re in that mood and feel like we’re up to it.
But, in the end, what’s the point? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, unless we’re playing vigilante. And the problem with trying to protect the world against sociopaths is that there are always more willing victims out there, volunteering for the challenge of their lives. Even in the corporate or church settings, it becomes difficult to separate the bad guys from their breathless disciples and stooges, and then you have to figure out how much blood you’re willing to shed.
My preference is to do healing work, and increase the ranks of the awake and the world-changers. Cultivate the good and the strong, rather than spend my energy fighting evil. What is that great line about fighting monsters, that eventually you become what you fight?
That’s why the healing path moves on from anger. It’s only the end of the first act. The second act is tough, challenging, takes the most courage. And the third act is transformation, worth a hundred times the cost of admission.
So what were you going to tell us about sociopaths?
star: I had to cut and paste your last post to my journal, it really speaks to my heart and how I am feeling (except the emotionally unavailable N I was with… I went on and on with that for 14 years and realized he never really loved me). But I did distance myself from the P even though I didn’t want to, and to find out now he has liver cancer has been horrible.
Never again, Elizabeth. I’m with you.
Stargazer, it was you. I remember it didn’t sound exactly like you when I read it. And I worried for a moment that you were catastrophizing, only in the sense that you might seeing the world through the eyes of grief and possibly adding to your pain, before you were healed enough to go out and start fighting injustice.
But I trust you to know what you’re doing. What you see is real.
Something I don’t talk about much here is the process of discovering our passion. Another factor in this business of giving ourselves away too easily is that it can be hard for us to identify what we really care about, what we would be doing if we weren’t managing our lives so we get what we need from other people. If we were totally free, financially independent and able to draw all the support we need, what would we be doing?
I had a sort of epiphany in my healing process, one day when I pushed aside all the rules and self-criticisms and self-questioning and just listened for what else was there. I found myself at a level I recognized as the me I was as a child. And I remembered — that isn’t quite the word for it; it was more like a lightning strike of personal truth — that the first commitment I ever made to myself was that I would work to teach people the value of compassion. I made it as a small child, observing the world around me and deciding that the grown-ups just didn’t understand how much better their lives would be if they felt compassion for one another.
There are a lot of healing insights that shake up your memories and make you see things differently. But this one was like a light that shined through everything, all the years, all the learning, all the trying and striving. I could see that it’s what I’ve been about all my life. But not really knowing it. It was just the underlying thing that shaped everything. And that insight made it easier for me to understand what I do now, and to prioritize the various facets of my life.
Maybe this preoccupation of yours right now is a hint of what you’re about. Maybe it would be worth the time to write more about it, what you see and how it makes you feel. Beyond the obvious thing that you don’t like the unfairness. Or if that’s it, the truth of it, maybe you can flip it to find what you do like or want, what you want enough to put energy into when you’re feeling more powerful and less occupied with healing.
This isn’t the work of an evening. You’re still working through your stuff, and like they say in AA about not getting involved with a new relationship when you’re still in early stage recovery, it’s not the time now to be making life commitments. You’re not who you will be, and there’s no way to anticipate what she will want and what types of power she will find in herself.
But maybe it’s a message from the future. Something to think about as you move along.
Namaste, Star.
Kathy
Kathy,
You said, “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.”
ACK!!!!!!
*sigh*
I resemble that remark.
The thing is now.. I can see myself separate from what other people do. I am not the source of other people’s actions.. whether they are nice… or stinky… it’s not about who I am. It’s about whom they are.
That is the lesson.
I still struggle with it but I can now distinguish this better. Before, I just didn’t know. Imagine how bad I was feeling about myself when taking the responsibility of being the source of how people treat me.
You know what I mean?
Thanks for your brilliant article!
Namaste and Aloha!
E
Hi, AlohaTraveler,
I learned something in the last few days that you might find interesting, given what you just wrote.
Someone really close to me has been attacking me verbally. Criticizing the way I talk to him. Telling me I’m not supporting him. Telling me I’m not listening to him. And sometimes getting really angry about it.
I know this person is depressed. I also know that none of what he says is true for me. It doesn’t represent my intentions toward him, or the energy I’ve put into the relationship. So my reaction has been to try to defend myself (internally) against buying into this, and to become much more careful about saying whatever triggers these outbursts.
A couple of days ago, someone familiar with the situation suggested a whole new thought to me. That what I was taking personally might not be personal. That I might be a symbol for this person of the world. That what he was saying to me was really how he felt about his world right now. I just happened to be the person he was talking to when he expressed it.
I wanted to hit myself on the forehead and say “duh.” I know this about myself, how I project my mental state onto the world, seeing things that make me sad when I’m sad, seeing things that make me angry when I’m angry. But because I’m so close to this person and care about him so much, I forgot to think about that. I was still feeling and defending myself from those feelings that I was responsible for his emotional state.
Does this make sense?
The really amazing thing about this insight was that it not only allowed me to let go of those feelings of responsibility, but in doing that allowed me to care about him in a better way. To feel sympathy and compassion I couldn’t afford to feel when I felt cornered by his anger. And to give him back something better than the solutions I would ordinarily be generating in some desperation in order to relieve the pressure I felt to fix him. Now I could give him comfort and understanding. Which he really needs right now, more than he needs my ideas about what he needs to do for himself.
This business of letting people be who they are is so hard to learn. I don’t know how we got so socialized thinking it’s our job to rescue people. As my Buddhist friend told me once, “It’s dangerous to interfere with people’s dreams.” Everyone’s on their own path. Even our sociopath’s next victim. We all have our own ways of dealing with our traumas and pain. We also envision our own ideas of the big brass ring in our lives. We all create our own healing adventures.
We can volunteer to participate in someone else’s healing adventure, but if they let us, then we’re accepting being healed by them, as well as our healing them. (And by that, I don’t mean it’s necessarily going to be pleasant to learn the great lesson that this adventure will offer it. But then again, it might be wonderful. One way or another, we’ve just volunteered for another lesson.)
So you are now standing back. Choosing not to get involved. Letting them be who they are. Until something comes along sometime in the future, when you’re ready, that you just can’t resist.
Hooray for you, Aloha. I send you persistent energy so you can keep it up. Would you please send some back to me? I know we have this hard-wired into us, to an extent, in order to take care of our children. Maybe that’s why this is so hard to get. This need to stop feeling responsible and to stop feeling that we have to meddle or we’re not good people.
Namaste. I’m really glad we’re in this one together. And now I’m off to bed.
Kathy
Thanks for the welcome guys. Some responses and more stuff…
Traits:
When sizing up a new associate I’ll do at least a two way typology (using MBTI, Big5, TCI, or other useful trait analysis method) after I’ve gotten a feel for that person. Most psychopaths are ESTP or similar, but since not all ESTPs are psychopaths I’ll ’red flag’ them mentally and try to find out more about them. I also begin journaling. Over time, I’ll keep adjusting my notes. High extraversion is very easy to see, but agreeableness is more difficult. Conscientiousness can also be difficult to figure out. If I’ve determined that they have very high extraversion, very low agreeableness, and very low conscientiousness ”“ I watch out. They may still not be extreme enough to be ’legally’ morally insane, but will quite likely be trouble eventually and cannot ever be trusted.
Revenge:
I’ve kept a very close eye (from a safe distance) on the worst of my three S’s. I found out some years later that she had gone into local politics, and knowing her MO well, witnessed via my sources that she was attempting to play her usual dirty tricks to publicly smear, and possibly force resignation of, three members of her town’s council. They knew she was part of their rival group, but appeared unaware of her role as chief instigator in their troubles. I sent all three an anonymous warning letter, which presented fairly solid proof of one of the tricks I believed this person was pulling on them, plus every tactic I’d seen them use personally, and references to Babiak, Cleckley, etc. I hoped that these people would then discuss amongst themselves the validity of my perceptions. Later, and not so mysteriously, this persons rising political star in that community began to fall. I did feel great self-satisfaction at this self-empowerment, but self-defense through getting the word out is much more gratifying to me.
As far as ‘becoming the monster you’re fighting’, I’m not so sure. Some say plasticity is a trait which all people have, others say that innate temperament and childhood environment will set behaviors up pretty hard. Still others believe psychopathy is an addiction, like alcoholism, which some are more susceptible to than others, where once that domain is entered, there’s no going back.
I can get into more detail with my stories later. The closest I’ve had to a close personal relationship with a sociopath was when I dated a BDS (borderline) for a while, but they’re more emotionally impulsive / out of control, than coldly evil. But some of the dynamics are the same: infatuation with their lively charm and personal attention followed by a slow growing painful realization that something isn’t quite right…
Anyone here right now? Sabinne on “Ask Dr. Leedom” can use encouragement.
SOS: Wow, your story about the S that went into politics is very interesting, and your work behind the scenes was very perceptive in that the three members would begin discussing her amongst themselves! Sounds like you put a lot of thought into that! Turned out good!
I am not familiar with the trait analysis methods. There is a lot to learn. To use them in both ones personal and professional life would be an asset. Sometimes I forget about people I’ve worked with that were trouble! It is such a good reminder to be aware of who is around us, and to think about who we can trust.
There’s something in this thread that reminds me of the rules:
1. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
2. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
3. Have a plan.
4. Have a back-up plan, because the first one probably won’t work.
5. Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
6. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun whose caliber does not start with a “4.”
7. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
8. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral & diagonal preferred.)
9. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.
10. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.
11. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
12. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
13. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating your intention to shoot.
Conflict is conflict. Really and truly, most of us would rather not live in conflict. However, if we’re dragged will-ye nil-ye into conflict, we should wake up and remember how to fight.
Personally, I usually get so PO’d with someone who insists upon a fight that I could cheerfully gut him/her with a rock. Power/conflict driven people are boils on the backside of humanity. I know, it takes all types to make a world.
The Rabi in “Fiddler on the Roof” said it best. He was asked. “Rabi, Rabi! Is there a proper blessing for the Czar?”
He replied. “Why yes. May the Lord bless and keep the Czar… FAR AWAY FROM US!”