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
Henry – They really knew how to tug at our heartstrings and play us to end. Words we wanted to hear…hearts we wanted to heal….calgon take me away moments…then BAM!!!!!!!!
Learning that we cant go back to that night at your door. But you can close the door in his face when he comes in your head looking for a place to camp out it. Slam it on him so hard it gets him right in his ummmm crotch… put him out of commission down there for good as you toss him out of your head!! An added extra bonus on his way to the curb…
And about the money – I hear you loud and clear – at one point I lent him for his truck – I handed it to him and he took it and started talking about some random topic – never even said Thank you. I remember it leaving my hand and watching his lips move in slow motion – thinking he didnt even say thank you. Stupid me hugged him and kissed him goodbye when he left. I was in shock. All i can say I spent more days than not in shock with him after the mask fell..
So nice to be free…calm…peaceful.. dramafree…. They do come up with cute nicknames tho — cant tell you what mine was – but its a doozie — gotta wonder how many other Sugarboogers and my nickname are roaming the streets out there!!
His nickname became LUSER!!!! Nite
DebB: Those of us here have been handed an experience we never hoped to have, and the villains in our different stories are very much the same, and also very different.
We see so many similarities in our stories, but some of these terribly destructive S/Ps just wouldn’t risk crossing a line that would bring a cop to the door. Some have made the threat of grave bodily harm a part of everyday life for their victims. Some deliver blows and draw blood and break bones and threaten children and animals as ways to coerce the victim into silence. Some sly devils perpetrate their con in a way that it’s not easy to point fingers, and they don’t use fists or weapons or threats or anything that could be called a criminal act, but they send off signals in the D&D phase that “an accident might happen,” “someone could disappear, and there would be no obvious person to blame.”
We should keep this in mind as we read each other’s stories. With some S/Ps, “setting boundaries” sets a tone that can clarify issues. With other S/Ps, that very appropriate action — for a NORMAL relationship — could set wheels in motion that we don’t want to have to consider.
You said, “I wasn’t dealing with someone I could safely get angry with – I was forced to turn the emotions/contempt/frustration/anger on myself in order to make it through each situation. Then I felt so despicable that I felt the only way to escape the pain, so desperate that I couldn’t see a way out or a way to improve my standing in the world that I thought I should die.”
I completely understand. You have suffered a type of abuse that few people can name. I’m sure it was as bad as you feared. My husband didn’t need to pull the gun out every time to know that I knew that he had the gun. He had already made the threat. He didn’t need to remind me. Some of the negotiating tactics people describe here are just not appropriate or even SAFE in some contexts.
The really scary thing for me is that when we are coming out of that situation, we turn that anger back in on ourselves and gnaw on our own selves, because we still feel afraid to express the anger appropriately.
DebB — I’m very glad you are here. If you are willing to share your own process, you can help others who have been in situations with more physically dangerous predators. You have a great deal to contribute.
But, for you — just for you, right now — I want you to know that you are very valuable, the treatment you received had NOTHING to do with what you deserved. YOU DESERVE LOVE, KINDNESS, RESPECT, SAFETY and PEACE.
Hugs to you.
SOS: I see a couple of major points in what you wrote. I know I’m jumping in late in the evening, but I want to share them.
You said, “1. I wanted to be seen as a good guy by my good boss.
2. I wanted to be recognized for my contributions to his bottom line.
3. I wanted a future with that company.”
OK, so what’s wrong with that? That looks like normal motivations for a guy who is just trying to live a life and get reasonable rewards. You weren’t even trying to get rewards without work — you just wanted reasonable rewards for your effort.
Then you say “The S had been successful at poisoning that boss and others . . . As always, the S tried to impede my efforts. . . . One day [the S] called me outside to join him at the smoking area. I didn’t smoke, but wanted to be friendly. For some odd reason I found myself talking trash about a guy who’d been let go, but who I had been friends with. The look on S’s face changed . . . ”
So, please look at this: The S’s agenda was ALWAYS chaos and destruction. He could take the fast route or work the long con while he played “buddy” to you, but his agenda was NEVER about getting a job done and getting an “attaboy.” It was always about creating maximum damage, and because the boss couldn’t believe that was possible, the S could always step back in to create more wreckage.
Kathy, hugs back to you. The “good shepherds” say WOOF!! When I lost my way for a little while today, they pointed me toward the water, the kibble, and the need to be petted and told they were good dogs. In the process, I got back in touch with some essentials, including the truth of uncomplicated devotion and how much we compassionate folks need to both give and RECEIVE. My dogs are always ready to give back at least as much lovin’ as they get. I can use the reminders of what that feels like!
Learnthelesson:
I never really thought about kicking the sociopath out of my head. I can’t help that he pops in there from time to time. But I stopped inviting him to stay, have coffee, and spend the night. LOL
For DebB: I grew up with a sociopathic stepfather. Not only was I never allowed to get angry, but I wasn’t even allowed to say “no” when asked if I wanted to do something. I had to pretend I wanted to do it. The rage built up in me over the years, and when it first started coming out, it erupted like a volcano. The more you are able to express in a safe environment, the better you will feel. You can certainly be as angry as you want here.
Thanks to all who responded to me last. I’m still here. Starting another day.
Rune,
You mentioned something about negotiating tactics being dangerous with certain people. If this was based on anything I said, I’d like to clarify a few points.
One is that we “negotiate” many times in any day. Negotiating is deciding what position we are taking in a “transaction,” based on what we want. That may sound like a big drama, but it isn’t necessarily. When the UPS man comes to my door, I walk outside and shut the door. Because I don’t want my dog to jump on him. Because I like him and I want to share a pleasant greeting. With a number of variables in play, I take control of the moment to get what I wanted.
We also “negotiate” in the early stages of relationships. And this is particularly important in our vulnerability to sociopaths or anyone else who wants to exert their will on us. Knowing how we want it come out is the most important power we have over our lives. Not just the individual transaction, but also the longer term accumulation of events that create a life.
This is fairly obvious, but I think that a lot of us can look back at these relationships and see how we didn’t hold onto what we wanted about the character of our lives, our long-term goals for ourselves, and even the kind of people we wanted to be. We got seduced into someone else’s dream for us. The benefits we gain from these relationships is that we learn a lot more about who we are and what we want. But now that we know more, remembering it and acting on it, even in the face of persuasion or bullying, is what makes us strong and effective people.
Which is why I keep saying that phrases like “I don’t agree” and “that doesn’t work for me” are means of establishing boundaries early and keeping them. However, I am not saying that these boundary-making techniques are appropriate when you’re enmeshed in a situation where you are already in danger. That equates to confrontation with a power you are not prepared to fight hand to hand.
However, the only real way out of these situations is based on the same idea. Knowing what you want. A lot of us flee from what we can’t tolerate anymore. And we flee with a lot of emotional baggage — fear, anger, grief. All normal under the circumstances. We may get away physically, but the emotional baggage endures. And because of it, we are still living in the nightmare.
Ultimately, what changes things for us is examining these feelings about what we don’t want, and discovering what they tell us about what we do want. We cannot effectively negotiate life or even work with our own emotional reactions unless we have a sense what we want to preserve (the positive aspects of our identities and our resources) and what we want to achieve or create.
Turning this switch in ourselves — changing from focusing on what we don’t want to what we do — can be a huge wrench when we’re awash in don’t-want emotions. All those negative emotions are the normal result of trauma, and moving through them are what I’m discussing in this series of articles. But that switch is when things change for us — when we change from being reactive to active creators of our own lives.
Though we may not be consciously aware of our objectives, the reason we leave these relationships, however we extricate ourselves physically or emotionally, is because we believe in something better. No matter how despairing we feel on the surface on our minds, something deeper believes in something better, or we wouldn’t be fighting for ourselves.
Acting on what we want doesn’t have to be a matter of confrontation, especially not in a dangerous situation. In fact, as we get more accustomed to exercising our own power, we discover that confrontation is seldom the best option for exerting our own will against someone else’s. The basic question is always “How do I get from here to where I want to be?” As I’ve written before, if the sociopath or anything else is in your way, it is an obstacle to be removed or gotten around. This is a mindset, but it’s important. To the degree we imagine anyone else’s behavior being the primary controller of our happiness, we hand over our power.
There’s an old metaphysical rule that what we worry about, we attract. In more “serious” terms, as SOS would put it, this means that the more attention and involvement we give to the machinations of the sociopath or anyone else who wants to exert their will over us, the more we agree to enter a game with someone who is probably better at the game than we are. In early-stage relationships or non-dangerous relationships, we just don’t give it attention and find something else to attend to.
This is a choice that learnedthelesson speaks about eloquently. It is also a discipline that we ultimately learn if we’re going to be happy and effective people. If we have a major trauma that needs attention, we may not have the choice to turn away from it until it’s resolved. But once it is, our thoughts are like our interior television set. We can choose the channel, to a great degree. And I’m suggesting here that focussing on what we want — how we want to feel, what we want in our lives, what plan we’re working on now — is going to create more good in our lives that focussing on what we don’t have and don’t want.
If we are being sabotaged by other people’s wills at work or enmeshed in our personal lives, removing our attention may be more complicated. In SOS’s case, once I understood what was happening, I probably would have gone straight to the boss and said, “This is what I want out of this job. Is it possible to get it, and what is it going to take to get it?” If I’d gotten an unsatisfactory response, I would have found another job. As I did in the situation I talked about. I don’t want to play the game, and if the boss does, then I’m in the wrong place.
In a personal relationship with someone who is dangerous, we have to figure out how to get out of it. This is equivalent to escaping from prison. We are somewhere that we don’t want to be, experiencing things we don’t want to experience, and we need to get away. This is also deciding to stop playing the game. The danger of our situation is a factor we have to work around. We may have to pretend to be cooperating while we are planning our escape. But it doesn’t change the fact that we are making a choice for ourselves to stop playing.
I hope this makes sense. I realize that it all assumes of level of awareness of our personal power that we may not feel at the time, because our emotions are so engaged. At the same time, we have that personal power and we know we do or we wouldn’t be trying to change things. Every single person here on LoveFraud is exerting that power, and that particularly includes our efforts to work through our feelings. We want something better for ourselves.
Namaste.
Kathy
Kathy: You point out a powerful tool, which is our ability to ‘”negotiate” an “impossible” situation by taking control of what is inside ourselves — our internal choices. The moment I decide that I’m going to do everything I can to get free of the “bad man,” I have “renegotiated” the situation. It’s importnat for us to recognize this power, because that is where all our ability to consciously change our environment begins.
I intended the term “negotiate” in the simpler sense: “I won’t cook dinner until you get the beer cans out of the kitchen and take the trash out.” And I’m remembering a scene from my own kitchen. His girls had spilled something sweet and sticky all over the kitchen — counters, floor. I couldn’t walk without sticking to the floor, and walking in it created the likelihood of tracking it throughout the house, onto carpet, etc., creating a much bigger mess. I had already asked for his help. I hadn’t eaten dinner, neither had he, and it was 10:00 p.m. I asked for his help cleaning up the spills that were in a 10-foot square area. He disappeared. Five minutes later he came back with a giant mop, a bucket with a mop-squeeze attachment, Lysol — a full janitor kit. He then soaked down the entire kitchen floor as if he was swabbing the deck of an aircraft carrier. For half an hour he dominated the space, methodically “doing what I had asked” in the most destructive way possible.
An hour later, the floor still was not dry, the kitchen stank of Lysol, and the floor was still sticky. If he had been a slightly different “flavor” of P, he would have used the mop and bucket as direct physical weapons, instead of the horrific psychological weapons that he turned them into.
Notice how he was being helpful and “above reproach”? This was, I’m sure, after a hard day of writing bad checks, creating orders for workmen to do things that would be expensive and destructive that I would only find out about later, and encouraging his daughters to make as much mess as they liked. All with a smile, because, remember “He’s such a good guy!”
Kathy, your points are well-crafted, and incredibly valuable. I was speaking, shall we say, on the “kitchen floor” level!
Rune, thanks for the clarification.
I think that some definitions might be in order here. My use of the word negotiation is, as usual with me, conceptual. It’s process of using available resources to get the result we want.
What you called negotiation here is an ultimatum, or a no-flexibility swap of cost for value. If you want this, it will cost you that. If you don’t pay, you don’t get it. It is an offer and a threat. Ordinarily ultimatums are used in circumstances when we need to be exceptionally clear with someone that we do not trust to conform to any unspoken agreements. And also, when we are prepared to live with the consequence of them turning down the deal.
An ultimatum is a form of negotiation, but it often creates more risk for us than it does for the other party. If they turn it down, we need a back-up strategy. Like, if we say, “If you keep sleeping with other people, I’m out of this relationship.” If they keep sleeping with other people, what are the actual changes you’ve organized if you’re “out of the relationship”? If you haven’t thought that far, then you’re playing brinksmanship not just with him, but with yourself. The rule of doing ultimatums is always to be prepared to lose.
At some point, maybe later after we get through the healing model, I’ll do an article on rhetorical devices and how different ways of talking create different situations and different likelihoods of outcome. It might be useful in understanding how sociopaths accomplish what they do in recruiting people, and also how we can use language more effectively to be authentic and get the outcomes we want.
As you can gather from my previous posts, I am a big fan of using the power of where we put our attention. In your kitchen-floor story, I would have figured out what I want (beyond getting him to do something) and then put my attention on that. It’s work to do this, to move beyond the irritation of the moment or our habitual feelings of being victimized or overwhelmed. But let’s say you walked into this situation cold, with no previous history, feeling fully empowered by everything else in your life, and accustomed to focusing on what you want.
If I imagine that scene, I can imagine you saying one or more of these things to him:
1. I want to walk on a clean floor
2. I want to work in a clean kitchen
3. I want to be sharing this house with someone who contributes to its upkeep and takes responsibility for his own messes
4. I want my dinner
5. I want to be able to trust you
Whatever you get back, you match its usefulness to getting you what you want, and then you negotiate from there, or you take responsibility for yourself. You don’t argue about your wants, which is what sociopaths will try to get you to do. They are non-negotiable. What you can negotiate is how many of your wants you will take responsibility for, and how many he will.
If he takes responsibility for none of them, you take care of yourself. And you have some useful knowledge for the future.
“I want” is an extraordinarily powerful thing to say. I think that our resistance to saying it is related to our fear of that power. I think I’ve mentioned before about teaching “Power is Not a Four-Letter Word” workshops to women in the south, and dealing with their horror at saying they want anything. It was unladylike, rude. But I think that was a mask for saying it that it broke their deals with the men in their lives to pretend that they were powerful while the woman managed huge responsibilities in the background. Taking care of their little-boy egos. Which kept these women in relationships where they felt secretly superior and the whole thing was a mutually disrespectful mess of lying and passive-aggressive behavior.
It took me forever to get the nerve to start talking like this, to say “I want.” But it went badly in only one type of circumstance. That was when the other person didn’t care what I wanted, and in fact was dedicated to separating me from my certainty about what I wanted and a lot of other things that it was in my interest to hold onto. Otherwise, “I want” makes negotiations easier and faster, because the real stuff is on the table.
I don’t know what would have happened to you in this situation if you had said “I want.” But if the truth is that you couldn’t risk it because you were afraid of what he would do to you, then you were in a dangerous situation that you needed to get out of. It’s that clear and simple. People who can’t deal with other people’s separate wants, and who get abusive either physically or psychologically in the face of evidence that other people are not extensions of their needs, are not people to hang around with. They are dangerously unstable, and we need to walk away.
This is what you did. You decided this guy was dangerous and you walked away. And I know it was a big and complicated drama in your life. But the bottomline in the quality of any relationship is whether you and other person can cope with the fact that you are separate with separate needs, desires, values and objectives, though some of them may overlap. If either of you cannot accept the other one for who they are, and negotiate terms and situations where your differences pop up, then this relationship has toxic elements.
Sometimes our insecurities or open questions related to unfinished business from other traumas make us uncertain about our own judgments in these matters. And that’s certainly true in our relationships with sociopaths, and something they leverage in their plans to use us. But optimally, these experiences teach us how important it is for us to be clear about our own wants, and to judge our prospects of getting what we want from how other people respond to our statements. Whether they are willing to negotiate or even recognize that we have separate feelings and needs.
That is essential information for us to decide what to do next.
Kathy, very very good “article” above Rune’s post. Also, Rune, I totally agree with your assessment of the PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE behavior of your X—“appearing” to “help” while actually being DESTRUCTIVE. That continual “passive-aggressive” approach is very wearing on the nerves and they use it EVER SO WELL…not only Ps but other people also use it. I’ve used it myself, but I now realize it is not what I WANT TO DO, OR HOW I WANT TO ACT, so I am now much more direct and up front.
People who use the passive-aggressive treatments on a frequent basis are not people I can deal with, and confronting them, setting boundaries against their “self-righteous” play of “well, I was DOING what you asked” is difficult to “fight” and turns always into chaos.
I agree totally with Kathy’s “negotiations” and her manner of doing them openly—but I also know Rune’s frustrations when “negotiations” are done from a standpoint of dishonesty by one of the parties.