This article continues our discussion of anger as a stage of healing after a trauma or an extended trauma, such a relationship with a sociopath.
I have a friend who has been angry for all the years I have known her. She talks about being insulted or scapegoated at work, despite taking responsibilities well beyond her job title for the welfare of the company. She has been instrumental in eliminating several people who managed her. More people were hired and she is still talking about how she is mistreated.
I have another friend who calls me to talk about how his boss doesn’t appreciate him. He details how he has been swindled out of bonuses, how there is never a word of praise, despite the fact that his personal efforts have been responsible for major changes in the company.
Both of these two have been working for these companies for years and refuse to leave their jobs. Instead, they “practice” their resentments, gathering stories to defend their feelings, performing their jobs in ways that prove them not only blameless but deserving of praise, and sharing their grievances with anyone who will listen.
To prepare for this article, I had a conversation with one of them, who reminded me of when I was in a similar situation. Working for a CEO who refused to give me a title or credit for marketing work that put his company “on the map.” Since I left there, two other people have taken credit for my work in their resumes and public statements. Just talking about it with my friend brought up all the old stories related to the resentment and injury I felt at the time.
Embedded anger
Although these were professional situations, the feelings that my friends and I experienced were not different from the ones I experienced in my relationship with a man I believe to be a sociopath. Beyond all the usual feelings about lack of appreciation, acknowledgment or validation, these feelings had another characteristic. That is, we lived with them for a long time.
My two friends are still living with these feelings, and when I talk to them now, at least once in the conversation I suggest, “You’re an angry person.” Though I’ve said this to them before, they usually pause as though it were the first time they ever heard it. Then they either ignore it (because they don’t think of themselves as angry, only aggrieved), or briefly defend themselves against the comment, saying they have reason to be, before they start telling their stories again.
The fact is that they do have reason to be, as I did, but their anger is a lot older than their work situations. They were practicing it before they took these jobs. They were accustomed to dealing with people who triggered their anger, and they were accustomed to living in circumstances that made them feel hurt and resentful. They “handled it” by trying to do a better job, or getting into power struggles about what is due them, or by telling their stories to sympathetic friends.
What they were not accustomed to doing was deciding that their internal discomfort had reached a level where they needed to make a change. At least not before things got really, really bad. When they got sick. Or started blowing up over small things. Or got so stressed they began making mistakes. Or got in trouble with drugs or food or shopping to make themselves feel better.
It’s not just that they were habituated to abuse. They were habituated to living with old anger. They lived as a matter of course with resentments that would have made healthier people run for the hills from the situation that was causing their distress, or to reframe the situation as a temporary necessity while they searched actively for alternatives.
Paradoxical responses to abuse
A therapist once explained to me a “paradoxical response” observed in some victims of abuse. Rather than responding appropriately — either defending themselves or fleeing — they engaged in “caring” behavior. They became concerned about the wellbeing of the perpetrator, and began providing service to cheer them up or relieve their stresses. As all of us on this LoveFraud know, this response is based on our desire — no, our need — to believe that our abuser is really a good soul or that s/he really loves us or both.
Many of us are paradoxical responders. And what happens to those feelings of anger that we are not experiencing or acting on?
Until these relationships, for many of us, the question didn’t matter. Many of us also are high performers, the “success stories” coming out of backgrounds that might have turned other people into addicts or underachievers or emotional cripples. Instead, we develop a kind of genius at survival through giving. We believe in salvation through love, and we create our own success through helping professions of various sorts.
We do the same in our personal relationships, seeking emotional security by giving generously. We deal with the paradoxes of depending on people who are needy as we are, burying our resentments at their failures to understand how much we have invested or how well we are making up for their weaknesses or how, in arguments or in careless statements, they characterize us by our weaknesses.
When we do get angry, we express our grief at not being understood or appreciated, our disappointment that we are not getting what we hoped from our investments, our frustrations that the other person doesn’t perform the simple requirements of our happiness — a little more attention, affection or thanks. It doesn’t occur to us to rebel against the structure of these relationships, to say we are sick and tired of tiptoeing around their egos and their needs, because we feel we have no right to say these things. We are asking the same thing of them.
When we finally do walk away — from the job or the relationship — we have feelings we do not feel comfortable expressing. We discuss our past in understanding terms. We understand the other people. We understand ourselves. But deep inside ourselves, the thing we do not talk about is contempt. That emotion that is so close to shame. We feel contempt for their shortcomings. And because we too were in the room with them, we feel contempt for ourselves. And this is difficult to contemplate, much less talk about it. But like a song we can’t get out of our minds, this feeling is like a squatter we have trouble shooing away.
Emotional contagion
I know why these friends are attracted to me. I am a good listener. They also think I may have answers to their situations. But the more interesting question is: Why am I attracted to them? Why are so many of my friends people who see themselves as aggrieved, but who I see as people whose lives are shaped by a deep level of buried anger they don’t even recognize?
My conversations with them tend to bring up old memories of my own. In fact, these friends like to refer to my stories. Times when I felt badly repaid for good efforts. My girlfriend, in particular, who knew me through the years of my relationship with the sociopath and employment with that CEO, likes to bring up these stories and sympathize with me or offer advice. It’s what she wants from me, and assumes it is what I want from her.
But it’s not what I want. I get off these calls feeling my anger. Seeing it all again. And I do what I do with anger. I dive into it, searching for knowledge. I value the anger, because I have the habit of forgetting it, forgiving too soon before I really am finished with learning what it has to tell me. I’ve done the exercise so often now that I know what I’m going to find. First, I am angry because of what I lost — the investments, the time, the benefits I expected to get back. Then, I am angry with myself for not standing up for myself or exiting these situations when they became predictably abusive. Then I am angry at something I can’t name — My rules? My sense of the world? What is wrong with me?
Finally, I am visiting a place that I need to return to, again and again. It’s where I keep my oldest stories, ones I would probably not remember at all, except that my anger leads me to them. I see these memories like home movies played on an old projector on a raggedy old screen. I watch a bit of myself as a child, dealing with some situation that changed my understanding of the world. In the background, there is a calm voice saying, “Do you remember what you learned here? Here is the new rule you made for your survival. And here is how the rule affected your life.” And suddenly I am flying through the years, seeing how that rule played out, linking cause to effect, cause to effect, over and over. Until I am finally back in my here-and-now self again, aware that another “why?” question has been answered, another connection made that makes sense of my life, another realization that I can undo that rule now. I’m not a child anymore.
Difficulties with anger
Many, if not all people who get involved with sociopaths have difficulties with anger. We don’t welcome the message from our deeper selves. We don’t recognize it as something that requires immediate attention and responsive action. We don’t communicate it clearly with the outside world. We frequently don’t even consider ourselves angry until so much emotional response has built up that it’s eating us alive. We don’t recognize irritation, frustration, resentment, confusion, hyper-alertness and anxiety as feelings on the anger spectrum — messages that something isn’t right.
This generalization may be too broad, especially for those of us have dealt with people who we think were completely plausible until the end of a long con. But most of us faced many circumstances in these relationships when our emotional systems alerted us that something wasn’t right. And instead of taking it seriously and acting on it, we rationalized it, using our intellects to talk ourselves out of our responses.
How would we have acted if we had taken our anger seriously? We would have expressed our discomfort. We would have demanded or negotiated a change in the situation. We would have said “I don’t agree” or “this doesn’t work for me.” We would have walked away. We would have made a plan to change our circumstances. We would have made judgments that something wasn’t good for us, and acted on those judgments. We would have taken care of ourselves — which is what anger is all about, taking actions to deal with a threat to our wellbeing.
Why we have difficulties with anger is something related to our own personal stories. It is a good idea to search our history for the day when we decided that it wasn’t safe to express or even feel anger, so we can undo that rule. We all had our reasons, good reasons at the time. Even today, there may be occasions when we choose not to express our anger, or to defer thinking about it until later. But eventually, if we’re going to get really well, we have to recover our ability to connect with our own feelings.
Mastering anger
For those of us who have difficulty with anger, there are several gifts we get from the sociopath. One is a reason to get mad that is so clear and irrefutable that we finally have to give in to our emotional system, stop rationalizing and experience uncomplicated anger about what happened to us. The other thing they give us is a role model of how to do it. Though sociopaths have their own issues with historical anger, on a moment-by-moment basis they are very good at linking their anger to the cause, recognizing and responding directly to threats to their wellbeing or their plans.
Beyond that, in the course of these relationships, a kind of emotional contagion affects us. By the time we emerge, we feel ripped off and distrusting. We are at the edge of becoming more self-sufficient than we have ever been in our lives. To get there, we have to move through several phases while we overcome our obstacles to learning. One of those hurdles is overcoming our fear of our own anger.
People who have been suppressing anger for most of their lives have reason to fear it. Once we finally get angry about something, once we recognize the validity of own emotional reactions, there is a history of moments when we should have gotten angry that are ready to move to the surface of our consciousness. We are afraid that we will be overwhelmed or that, in our outrage, we will destroy everything within our reach.
Here is the truth. We will stop feeling angry when we acknowledge our right to feel angry in each and every one of these memories. That self-acknowledgement is what our emotional system wants. The message is delivered, and we naturally move on to what to do about it. If the circumstance is long gone, the simple recognition that we had a right these feelings is often enough to clear them.
The other truth is that we will not remember everything at one time. Once we allow ourselves to have these feelings, there will be an initial rush, but then the memories will emerge more gradually as we become clearer about our need for respectful treatment or about our grief at something important we lost.
Beyond recognizing that we were entitled to have our feelings, another thing we can do to clear them is have conversations with the causes of these feelings. We may want to speak to people, alive or dead, face to face or only in our journals or our thoughts, to say that we do not condone what happened to us. That we have feelings about it, and we want those feelings recognized.
We may think we’re looking for apologies, but the real benefit of these conversations is that we are validating ourselves and our own realities. We are getting real with ourselves. Eventually some of these conversations often turn out to be with God. Don’t worry about it. God can handle our feelings. Even the Buddhists encourage experiencing this human incarnation fully through all your senses and feelings.
The goal here is to clean house emotionally, so that you can experience anger in the here and now that is not tainted with old anger. So that you can plan and live your life in ways that are not unconsciously shaped by anger, fear and grief. Mastery of anger begins with the ability to link anger to cause, instead of expressing deferred anger in situations that really have nothing to do with it. Perfect anger is like the tit-for-tat strategy. It’s an appropriate and measured response that is equivalent to the threat or the trigger.
Beyond that, anger clearly felt in all its subtleties and permutations opens a new world to us. We find a new range of speaking voices — snappish, impatient, cold and unsympathetic. (Sound like anyone you know?) All things we need to deal with certain situations. We find new facial expression and body language. In allowing ourselves to become judgmental about what is good for us, we become more grounded about who we are and what we need.
Most important is that anger opens our ability to become powerful in our own lives. Without the ability to respond to threats and obstacles, we have no ability to envision and plan our lives. Anger is not only the voice of what we don’t want, it’s is also the voice of what we do want. What we want badly enough to work for, to fight for, to build in our lives.
Later we will talk about eliminating the residue of anger, learning how to forgive. But for now, our work is to link cause to effect, to honor our feelings, and to become real with ourselves and our world.
Namaste. The calm and certain warrior in me salutes the calm and certain warrior in you.
Kathy
Hi, everyone, this thread is just great. I don’t know when I’ve seen us stay on topic for this long. Clearly we’ve got a common issue here.
Betty brought up something — the question of contempt — that I think is important. I was trying to keep the original article under control, length-wise, but I was hoping someone would ask about it.
Some of us who grew up with inadequate parenting — which is a nice way of describing the experience of growing up with caretakers who were abusive, addictive, emotionally disturbed or unavailable, or just unable for whatever reason to provide the kind of healthy, caring guidance that we needed to become functional adults. And so we came out of these family environments “unfinished.” This is another way to view the problem of getting stuck in a coping mechanism or life strategy that our child-selves developed to deal with situations that were painful or threatened our survival.
For us, the people who get involved with sociopaths, that coping mechanism was what a lot of have been describing in this thread. But I’m going to say it in a different way. We behave in “good” ways — that is generous, supportive, attempting to heal other people’s stresses or help them get what they want — in order to get them over whatever problem is keeping them from being attentive and caring parents with us. As children, we needed the best level of nurture that we could obtain, and we turned our efforts to getting it from caretakers who apparently wouldn’t give it to us unless we made this effort. Our life task at that point was to develop and grow, and we did it with whatever we could get. But this “switch” from being the natural object of parenting to essentially being responsible for reminding our parents that we were there, that we needed them, and making it possible for them to pay attention to us, also retarded our development in certain key areas. Instead of being self-involved through the years a child is supposed to be self-involved in its own development, we were doing work that was entirely wrong for our state of development. And so didn’t go through stages that we should have.
It was a double-whammy, because our parents didn’t follow through on certain parenting tasks. Like teaching us how to deal with the world, how to love ourselves, how to interact with respect for other people’s separate identity, and how to protect our own identities in a random and not-always-friendly world. And they didn’t teach us this because they weren’t particularly functional themselves.
The net of all this, I believe, is that in our relationships we were attracted to surrogate parents who would finish these tasks with us. I realize that may not make entire sense, because there were lots of other factors in these relationships. But I think that the huge, unmanageable attractions really originated from deep within us, a sort of demand from that area of unfinished development that we find the replacement source for that nurturing and sheltered guidance that we needed to become a fully formed human being.
I don’t know if this is true for everyone else. But I believe that my preference for a certain type of love object — stronger and more competent than me, someone that I trusted more than I trusted myself, someone who was better than me at healthy selfishness and at completion of things that required more self-discipline than I thought I had — was based on this need to find someone to teach me how to navigate the world. As well as someone who would give me the emotional security to let me unwind from a lifetime of paying too much for survival. I’ve talked about it here as looking for a relationship environment in which I could heal and recover who I really was. But what I really wanted was a time-out, a chance to rest with someone who appreciated how much I’d already put into it, how very good and strong I’d been to survive it all, and was ready the carry the load for a while and give me a chance to remember who I was before this craziness started.
I think the people here on LoveFraud are largely a special subset of the people who get involved with sociopaths. I think we are the ones who are not only the survivors and determined to get over it and recover our lives as they were before. I think we are also the ones who have the idea that we can recover more than that. That there is another version of ourselves that exists somewhere, a version that is less inclined to throw our lives away in exchange for some transient security or inadequate love.
I also think that this idea is another facet of the same attraction to the sociopath. There is no sociopath that I’ve met who didn’t see himself as living the wrong life, as though he were a lost prince in a fairytale whose cruel fate brought him to a place where he wasn’t recognized as the royal child he was, and his life was all about getting back to the position of his entitlement. And in that, we are similar. Not that we feel entitled to wealth, fame and general adoration; that’s not our pathology. But we feel like we are not who we were supposed to be. We see other people who are more confident, more able to navigate the world successfully, able to have a different kind of love relationship than we create, and we feel like we are always trying to arrange things so that we can be like that too. And always failing because we are always giving too much of ourselves away, or because we really don’t understand or can’t compete with people who are self-interested or unafraid of saying or taking what they want or who use power easily without wondering if they’re allowed. We connect with the sociopath on this level. It’s something we have in common. Not being who we really are.
So we’re searching for someone to parent us through these bits we didn’t get. And we find someone who is good at the parts that we’re not good at.
As it turns out, for some of us, we get what we actually came for. That parenting or classroom that teaches us what we missed about self-interest, self-protection, preserving our identities, expressing our feelings, identifying and getting what we want, putting other people’s opinions and feelings in their proper place (second to ours), and understanding that the world will bring us both good and bad experiences, and we are supposed to be emotionally responsive, experience and learn from both.
But we don’t get it the way we expected. Because the sociopath doesn’t love us, doesn’t give us time or shelter to rest, forces us to grow up to survive. That’s who we are here on LoveFraud, the ones who are growing up to survive.
In doing that, and in particular in learning that we can and should experience our anger as part of developing our personal power and effectiveness, we open up a big can of worms. Because once we allow ourselves to become angry for ourselves, to have feelings about something that happened to us, we release a lot of memories that have been waiting to be dealt with.
One important group of those memories fits under the category of “caretakers.” Those caretakers include everyone that has ever been in a position of authority in our lives, people that we depended on because they had power over us that made their decisions important for our wellbeing and development. These include teachers, bosses, ministers, spouses, lovers, parents and all the people to whom we may have surrendered some authority over our actions, thoughts or feelings.
This is a big concept, no? Kind of brain-rattling when you first think of it. It incorporates all those ideas about people who have problems with authority, codependents who trade compliance for love and a host of other common concepts about power and submission. But I like the word “caretaker” because it incorporates the idea that we placed our wellbeing, in some way, under their care.
So we have memories about people who abused our trust or, for some reason of their own, were unwilling or incapable of behaving responsibility with the portion of our wellbeing that was in their care.
This is becoming very long, and I’ll just jump to the punchline. I know that everyone who is following this track can fill in the middle of the story from their own experiences. Here’s the end of it. Virtually all of these situations were under our control. We actually owned the power over our lives that we were giving away. We had the choice to take it back from anyone who didn’t handle it as we wanted them to, didn’t give us back what we wanted. We could have left the jobs. Ended the love affairs. Told people what we really wanted, rather than expecting them to perform by our unspoken rules of swapping services or feelings. We could have looked for something better or just said “screw this” and stopped being so cooperative.
But we didn’t. Instead we lived with resentments and feeling aggrieved and used and overwhelmed, while we tried to figure out what we were not doing to get them to behave the way we wanted them to behave. And where did we learn how to do that?
You already know the answer. It was when we had nowhere else to go. When we had no choice but to try to get these caretakers to do what they’d signed on to do when they had children, to nurture and guide and pay attention and to care that we were okay.
And when you get to that point of realization, when you’re inhabiting the experience of your childhood self and trying to see it through the eyes of a person who has choices, who doesn’t have to accept this as all there is, and whose concern about their issues is a far second to your urgent and non-negotiable requirement to grow and develop as a whole human being… well, if you are ready to feel empowered enough, you feel contempt. Contempt for them and for the whole situation. You not only needed more, but you deserved better. You were made to have better. It’s wired into your being, as the needs of childhood development that were thwarted and blocked by the inadequacy of your upbringing.
And by experiencing that contempt, we also set in motion a domino chain of other feelings as we reopen the development path. We feel relief for the contempt we felt for ourselves for not being good enough or lovable enough to attract what we needed. Because intrinsic in contempt is a kind of giving up that anything will be different, we end a lifelong argument with our caretakers, ourselves and with the universe about how it’s not fair and how we want it to be different. We open ourselves to grief for what we lost, the childhood, the years of wrong-headed approaches to getting what we wanted, the failure to be and achieve what we might have.
But we also experience, a long last, a sense of understandable reality. We see what happened. We understand. We observe the we survived to put this right inside ourselves. We understand that we are recovering now who we were, and beginning now to develop through that blocked path. We become alert to the deep changes that are gradually reshaping our emotional responses. We find ourselves rethinking our memories, our interpretation of our lives. We begin to practice, like children learning how to walk, being who we are becoming.
Contempt is an emotion that has more intrinsic power in it than most. To feel it requires us to stand back and really consider what this means to us, from a position of feeling that we have the right to judge. And it incorporates a willingness to give up on anything being different. As I described it in the first article in this threat, it was only half-formed. More like disgust, which is only reactive to something that is toxic or bad for us. Contempt includes a readiness to give up, something akin to despair, which can happen when contempt is turned on ourselves and there is no answer for it. But despair is passive. Contempt turns away from something that has become useless. Contempt gives up and moves on.
I believe that for many of us the sociopath will be our last attempt to replace our inadequate parenting in a relationship. The reason we need to do it will be resolved. Besides forcing us to learn in order to survive, the relationship with a sociopath, despite their not caring about us, gives us a close-up view of someone who has those skills that we didn’t develop when we started to become responsible for convincing our parents to parent us. And as we sift through the residual pain of these relationships — which is no different, but maybe more intense than the pain we’ve been living with all our lives — we have lots of raw material in the memories to use as models we can test for ourselves. Can we be this self-interested? Can we be this assertive? Can we be this calculating? Can we be this self-protective? Can we be this disciplined? Can we be this unsympathetic? Can we be this committed to ourselves?
In all of it, we are challenged by the competing internal voices who tell us that our acceptance and survival in the world is based on doing what we’ve always done. And we have to find our own baseline or balance between being self-interested and being cooperative. From my own experience, I can tell you that it’s normal to become a little “out there” in terms of being selfish, angry, uncaring, etc. while we’re finding our way. And I think that’s okay. Because we want to learn what we’re capable of. We want the full extension those internal muscles first, so we can learn how they work, what we get back for exercising them, how to make judgements about the competition between relationships and personal achievements, and eventually to integrate it all back into the more familiar collaborative skills we already had.
Eventually, it all smooths out. We become flexible inside ourselves, able to flow easily from self-interest to relationship maintenance in micro-seconds, to speak authentically about our needs and our caring in one breath, and to manage on a conscious basis what must the greatest challenge of life — that is, how to act out of our best selves, doing good for the world with compassion that grows out of compassion and respect for ourselves.
So this has been quite a sermon, and I hope it makes sense. Ultimately, compassion is what this is all about. Even compassion for all inadequate caretakers who are products of their own inadequate caretakers, who are all products of the inadequacy of the big cultural models. Because this, too, is what we are healing from here. A lot of wrong learning that didn’t just come from our parents.
But we’re getting there, getting free, one step at time.
Namaste.
Kathy
Kathy – IT MAKES SENSE. IT ALL MAKES SENSE. IM SENDING AN AIRPLANE OVER TO YOU TO PICK YOU UP AND WHISK YOU AWAY TO A REMOTE ISLAND SO YOU CAN FINISH THE BOOK PRONTO!!!!!
ITS EITHER THAT OR BEGIN DAILY SERMONS IN NEW YORK ! YOU CAN CHOOSE 🙂 THANKS FOR SHARING AND BRINGING TO THE SURFACE, TO THE TABLE, SO MUCH OF WHAT I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED WAS PART OF MY TRUTH AND POSSIBLY TO SOME DEGREE PART OF HIS TRUTH.
“Ultimately, compassion is what this is all about. Even compassion for all inadequate caretakers who are products of their own inadequate caretakers, who are all products of the inadequacy of the big cultural models. Because this, too, is what we are healing from here. A lot of wrong learning that didn’t just come from our parents”
BUT I/WE CHOOSE TO CHANGE AND LEARN AND GROW. THEY DONT!
BABY STEPS FOR US… AS ALWAYS…THANK YOU!
Kathy – I agree with so much of what you just wrote. But the main thing that struck a chord with me was this….You said: “But what I really wanted was a time-out, a chance to rest with someone who appreciated how much I’d already put into it, how very good and strong I’d been to survive it all, and was ready the carry the load for a while and give me a chance to remember who I was before this craziness started.” This is exactly how I felt when I met my ex. Dysfunctional and abusive does not even begin to describe the home I grew up in. I had always felt like an old woman in a child’s body while I was growing up. I vividly remember my 12th birthday, and telling my mom that I felt like I had been in the world for so much longer than 12 years. When I met my ex, she offered to take care of me, and did it in such a way that she truly convinced me that she was honored to do so, and I remember thinking “I can finally rest.” I just wanted to rest for a little while. I wanted to be taken care of because I felt that I had never been taken care of before by anyone. And I don’t mean financially, I mean genuine care, consideration, acceptance, love and protection from a hateful world. I craved it. And that was my downfall. I understand that now.
Kindred – Learn’s right, the love and acceptance you thought you found was an illusion. Trust me, when an S walks out of your life you haven’t lost anything worth having.
You’ve got issues, but so do most people. Show me a person who has no baggage and I’ll show you a person in denial. I think the key in any relationship is to limit the baggage to carry-on only. You carry your bags, I’ll carry mine, if your bags get too heavy it’s time to lighten the load, but they’re still yours to carry.
Also, being an introverted homebody is not an issue in and of itself, you just need to find other people who are introverted homebodies. Now that tends to be a little more of a challenge since introverted homebodies like to stay home. I have a small group of friends, but most of them are introverted homebodies that have found each other over the years. My sister is not easy to deal with, she’s very smart, very forceful, very upright, but at the same time she lacks empathy and has difficulty understanding emotions, but she found someone who is very laid back who likes it when she takes control. Guess what I’m trying to say is there are people out there for everyone, you just have to look for them in the right places. If you’re not very mainstream then you’ve probably got some unique hobbies or interests that appeal to like-minded individuals. I met my husband at a renaissance faire that me and my group of friends were working at. We’re quiet people who like to stay home, but we go to renaissance faires, japanese animation conventions, etc. Some people look at us like we’re freaks, and I guess by their standards we are, but those aren’t the opinions that matter to us.
Hi Midnight. I don’t think being an introverted homebody is an issue at all. That’s why I mentioned that I like who I am, but I’m not mainstream. Unfortunately, I have come across many people who do think it’s an issue. True introverted personalities are not readily understood by most people. I could literally stay at home for days and be perfectly happy just hanging out there if I wasn’t forced to leave for work or food or some other such nuisance :-). And I am just not comfortable in crowds at all. I don’t do parties or anything like that. I just don’t need nor do I really want a lot of people in my life. So it is difficult finding someone who is understanding of my particular personality. I do agree that we should minimize our baggage as much as possible. But one point that I disagree with is what happens if the bags get too heavy. For me, I feel that if I’m in a relationship then I should be able to depend on my partner to help me either carry or lighten the load. And she should depend on me to do the same for her. I don’t want to be in a relationship where I can’t look to my spouse to help me carry the load. I want a true partnership.
Kathy – Great post. I especially like the part where you talk about stretching the muscles of our anger before everything smooths out. We’re like children who had broken bones that weren’t set properly and our legs grew crooked, we learned how to walk on those crooked legs, but we could never run, now we have to break them and set them properly so they can heal, but we also have to relearn how to walk properly. We’re creatures of comfort and habit, but the coping mechanisms that protected us hold us back. It’s really hard sometimes to admit you don’t know how to function like a healthy adult. As I set about trying to become a healthier person, I had to admit that I didn’t know how to say no to people. I didn’t know how to let someone take care of their own problems. I didn’t know how to express anger without bottling it up until it exploded. In my experimentation there were times when I went overboard in the opposite direction, saying “no” to everything, or expressing too much. This can be scary, and embarassing, but eventually you figure out what is “too much” in either direction and find a middle ground. Sometimes over time you find that the middle ground isn’t even really the middle ground, and you have to adjust again, but when things get out of alignment you put them where they’re supposed to be and eventually everything starts running smoother.
Kathy:
I’ve also been grappling with so much of what you said so eloquently in your post. Your comment about wanting a time-out really rang true to me.
I’ve been out of work 7 weeks. In that time, I’ve been trying to push myself forward in the job market — non-stop. In the last 3 weeks alone, my back has gone out twice, I’ve gotten the flu twice, and a strep troat once. I am emotionally frayed and physically wiped out.
I woke up yesterday morning to get ready for yet another appointment with my outplacement counselor. And I literally fell back into bed. I realized I just can’t do it anymore.
I’ve been running on empty a long, long time. I now see that my complete and total physical and emotional exhaustion predates my last firm and the S. I am depleted from growing up in survival mode in an exceedingly abusive household and pretty much having had to take care of myself my entire life.
And I’m so tired. So very, very tired.
When I met S I knew he couldn’t take care of me fiancially. All I wanted was somebody to love me and let me feel that all the hard work was worth it and we could build that safe, secure future I had always dreamed about. Instead I got an adult version of the fun-house that was my parent’s home.
After I finally dragged myself out of bed yesterday I decided that I had the right to give myself a time-out. While my severance won’t last forever, I finally realized that if I don’t give myself a time-out now, I’m going to get a permanent time-out in the form of a coronary or worse.
I also realize that my whole life I have been the caretaker. Of two self-absorbed, disordered parents. Of every troubled man I have ever gotten romantically involved with. Of every lost soul who has happened to cross my path. It’s time that I take care of myself — not only because nobody else is stepping up to the plate to do so, but because I now see that some healthy narcissism or self-interest is necessary for my own survivial.
Thanks, learnedthelesson, for getting it. I felt like standing up and cheering for myself when I wrote it out. Parts of this are very well developed in terms of talking and writing about it. Other parts like this are just being born out of experience and into words. Knowing that you hear me and that it fits your experience is huge for me. Thank you for telling me that, from the bottom of my heart.
Kindred, thank you too. For reading that long piece and for grasping it. What you said about being your “downfall” is something I disagree with. You are succeeding at something here. The “problem” reflects some unfinished business in your own consciousness. You did a brilliant job of finding someone who seemed to offer the antidote to your pain. The fact that she wasn’t, in the end, the antidote doesn’t matter as much as the fact that the experience helped you identify this pain.
This is the normal course of healing. First we we blame the sociopath for not meeting our needs. Then we start to go back and take a more conscious, interested look at the needs that are screaming at us. What are they about?
There is nothing wrong with you except that you are living with unmet needs. You just joined us, so I’m going to repeat something that everyone else has heard a few times. There is an excellent list of human needs on the http://www.cnvc.com website. As well as a list of the feelings when have when they’re not being met. You might be surprised to see what normal human needs include. I was. The list blew me away. I was calling friends for days, saying “Guess what? Did you know that we’re allowed to need to be treated with respect, compassion, acknowledgement, appreciation?”
Guess what? You are. And you’re allowed to run your life so you get those needs met.
I have a feeling that you’re going to have a very good time healing from this. Here’s a fist bump for you both.
Kathy
Kindred – I agree to a point that a true partner should either help you carry your bags or help you lighten the load when it’s too heavy. A partner should help shoulder your burden in times of need, as long as it’s temporary (or lightening the load fixes the problem) and you acknowledge they are still your bags. The reason I say they’re still your bags is I’ve seen many relationships where someone starts off being helpful and lessening the others burden, but the other person never takes the bags back. If someone is always carrying around their own bags, and someone elses, it will wear on them. A true partner should help you learn how to manage your own bags so no one is overburdened.
Bravo to you, Midnight. It sounds like you’re out of the woods and making time on the path. I don’t think that experimentation ever ends. Trying to figure out if we’re overdoing it and being obnoxious. Living through the ouches when the universe pushes back. Wondering if this time we should hold onto our will and keeping bulling through, or if we should adapt to circumstances that don’t support our dream because maybe there’s something more interesting brewing… well, that’s the work of a lifetime. You expressed it very well.
Matt, Matt, Matt, I love you and I cannot believe that you’ve been driving yourself this way. It’s like you don’t even need a sociopath in the room to make you crazy. But who am I to talk? We’ve got the same disease.
I’m glad you decided to give yourself a break. I hope you make the most of it. Rest up, and then put exactly the same amount of energy into enriching your life as you do into finding a job. Split it right down the middle. (I’m talking to myself here, as well.) Get some sunshine, take a class, hang out at the cafe, plant a window box, paint your living room, hang out in a toystore, make a big batch of mac-and-cheese and give it away, etc. Have fun. Get rich in your mind.
And do this: Write “I deserve to be paid for doing what I love” on a bunch of post-it notes and put them everywhere in your place.
One of the things we lack is true prosperity consciousness. We don’t expect good to come to us, and we’re always choosing compromise solutions or arranging things so we won’t get hurt. If anyone deserves good to come to him, it’s you. Ask anyone on this site. We all love you.
Can you stand it? Too bad. That’s the way we feel.
Go have a good time. What would you do if you knew you could not fail?