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
I posted this question yesterday on a different article I think. Anyway, I didn’t receive any responses so I thought I’d try again and post here. Any insight you guys may have would be helpful. Thanks!
I was wondering if any of you have dealt with an ex s who actually shows a good deal of compassion and caring toward other people but not their spouse? Mine has two friends that she has known for over 20 years, and she would do anything in the world for them. She is also very generous towards her mother and grandmother, and she even routinely donates clothes to charity. I wonder how someone who has the ability to show that kind of consideration for other people can be so cruel to the person who actually lives with her.
yes…they offer superficial compassion and caring toward others – often go through life with the mask on to those they dont live with…and as Kathy said at times, they actually may have bouts of realness (caring/feeling)….But when the mask is off and their defenses are raging and their inability to function in certain enviornments are tested – the person closest to them or in their way or representing some selfish value to them on the receiving end gets to see their true unmasked soul.
Or, Kindred, this person may be a sociopath of the type who maintains a group of people they trust and care about. I can’t remember the terminology right now, but this type was identified originally in gang behavior.
Another thought. You are equating compassion with generosity. They are not necessarily the same. Compassion is more like empathy, being willing and able to understand another person’s experience. It doesn’t necessarily lead to action, and often doesn’t. Or it may lead to action that may look ungenerous, such as deciding that the other person is best served by learning their own lessons without our involvement.
You ex seems to have active involvements with these other people or organizations, and clearly gets something out of it or she wouldn’t be doing it. It’s not clear from what you wrote what motivates her, or what motivated her in her relationship with you. We all have needs, even sociopaths, and we act to get them met. Even our generosity reflects some need or want.
But your ex’s psychology is less important her than your need to heal. You feel what you feel, and whatever it is, you are entitled to feel it. Sociopath or not, we never can truly get inside another person’s mind, only our own.
All we can heal is ourselves. I understand the desire to understand her behavior, because it triggered these feelings. But your description of your history suggests that you’ve felt these feelings before. That they’re part of your emotional make-up. And the more useful question is why. What is so important here? What did she represent to you, and why is the loss so important?
You may not be ready to think about all this right now. Right now, you may still be arguing or bargaining with this reality. Saying you want it to be different, and trying to make it come out different. But I’d suggest that no matter what she said to you, if you finally got her to sit down for an explanation, it wouldn’t change what happened. She made a private decision that reflected her needs and not yours. And now you are dealing with the loss of an important resource in your life.
It’s hard. Every one of us has been through this in some way. We’ve lost money, time, people we loved, beliefs about the world that we didn’t want to lose. And all of us have resisted it, because we didn’t want to loss this stuff. It was not our choice. And the longer we resisted it, the longer the misery went on. Eventually you just have to surrender to the fact that something is gone, so you can figure out how to make a life with what’s left.
Getting to that point is when things start to turn around for us. Because what’s left turns out to be the whole rest of the world. And who we are without what we lost turns out to be just as good as we were before, and often a lot better because we’ve learned something.
I’m so sorry you’re going through this. You’re at the worst part right now, and it will get better, if you want to heal. It’s a path. The beginning is the hardest. It really will get better.
Kathy
Dear Kindred,
OH YES!!!! Many psychopaths APPEAR to be so “caring” it would make you puke, but what they are doing is to “fake it” but they are NOT really caring and compassionate, but going through the MOTIONS because it makes the look “good” to others. The outside world may view them as a “saint” but behind closed doors they may be a total monster to their spouse.
My “egg donor” for example is a “saintly” woman who gives money and used to give time as well as money to any “good cause” and will help anyone with anything, but she was a BEAST to me, and only me. Showing malice, devaluation of me and finally, discarding me in favor of my psychopathic son and my psychopathic X-DIL—it is too keep up their “mask” just like Ted Bundy was “such a wonderful guy, so caring and nice,” but once in a while he killed women. Oh, yes, they can keep up a really good “mask.”
Thanks to all who responded.
Kathy – no, I’ve never had feelings like this before. I’ve never felt anything remotely close to this. Of course I’ve experienced sadness and disappointments in life, but nothing like this. So it’s not that her behavior triggered feelings that I had already experienced before. It is important to me because my relationship with her was the closest thing to happiness that I had ever felt. Yes, I know I have to find my own happiness in myself. But my reality at this moment is that I did not feel happiness until I was with her (during the good times), even if it wasn’t real from her end what I felt was real. So going for 30 years without that, then having it and having it snatched away in such a painful way is why it’s important to me. I do want to clarify that I don’t think getting answers to my questions will make anything different. I don’t think she would magically become a different person or that we could attempt being together again. They are just questions that are important to me because I spent a good amount of my life with this woman. I shared a home with her. I have faced reality and I know that she is gone and whatever I thought we had is gone, but my questions about certain things haven’t just disappeared because of that. I’ve equated it to losing someone through death. Yeah, in your mind you know intellectually that the person is gone and there is absolutely nothing that will change that. But still everyone once in a while, you may still find yourself asking why and how things played out the way they did, and feeling the sadness of that loss.
OxDrover –
That’s EXACTLY what I’m talking about. The ability to look so wonderful and giving and caring to so many people. To always show that happy mask to everyone except the person you (supposedly) share your life with. It’s just bizarre and in my mind it’s evil. And my ex would often make these extremely self-righteous comments and not even realize that her behavior was completely contradictory to her comments. Or maybe she did realize and just didn’t care. Either way, I often felt that she had two different people living inside her. The loving sweet giving person, which she showed me in the beginning and appears to show everyone else on a regular basis. And then the evil persona, who I guess is reserved for those of us with whom she shares her life and home.
Kindred,
I’m having a little difficulty getting a grip on your story. Forgive my probing, but if you don’t mind talking a bit more about it, I’d be grateful.
What I understand so far is that you’ve got a mood disorder, and that you come from a difficult background. That you don’t remember feeling this sort of grief in your past. That you lived with a person who said she would take care of you, and then supported you for a certain amount of time. That you were happy in the relationship and feel that you gave something in return. That your ex at some point said she was tired of taking care of people and ended the relationship. That you are upset that ended and that you don’t know why it ended. And now you suspect that you ex was a sociopath.
What I’m not getting is how you were abused, beyond your ex deciding to end the relationship. I do understand that you have feelings about that. I respect those feelings. But the sole fact that someone decides a relationship isn’t working for them is not evidence of a being a sociopath. Not even if they didn’t do it in the nicest way. Ordinarily relationships break up after a time of gradual growing apart, and the end of it is often awkward and painful.
Did your ex abuse you physically or emotionally? Did you ex scam you out of something? Other than dealing with the break-up, are you worse off in some way than you were before. Such as, did you give up a career with the understanding the ex was going to provide for you if you kept house, and then she reneged on this promise? Did your ex, in the course of the relationship, show herself disinterested in your welfare or your needs, but persuade you not to leave by occasional shows of charismatic seductiveness so that she could continue using you in some way?
These would be the characteristics of a relationship with a sociopath. The fact that she is inconsistent in her words and actions, or a bit bombastic about her opinions, isn’t enough. Nor is the fact that she is generous with someone else, but not with you.
From what I hear, you are mourning the end of a situation that made you feel cared for, which was what you wanted. I can imagine how you feel about that. I’ve been through similar situations myself. But all of these involved some sort of trade. In exchange for being taken care of, I was expected to perform some role in that person’s life. And I was as likely to leave them myself, because I didn’t like the trade, as the relationship was to be ended by the other person.
What I’m hearing from you reminds me more of how I felt after my second husband died. I was really angry with him, at the same time that I missed him desperately. It went on for years until I had a breakdown, and finally made peace with him and the fact that the course of his life wasn’t all about me. I too had a difficult background and some large personal needs for emotional security. I felt betrayed by his leaving me.
But the truth in my case was that I had a background of betrayal. A lot of unfinished business around the issue. And in grief, that’s where I landed. Feeling betrayed. I wanted to make it about him, and his behaviors that led to his death. I wanted to blame someone — him, God, because I was angry and afraid of the prospect of life without him.
But this real issue I was dealing with was his loss. It was grief at a loss. He had been kind to me, and we were a good emotional match when we were together. I knew (and I was right) that I would never find another one like him. It took me years to accept that he was gone, and it didn’t matter who’s fault it was. It’s what anyone goes through when they lose someone they love. But it didn’t make him a sociopath, or my experience with him anything like the progressive demolition of self-esteem and personal resources that happens in a relationship with a sociopath.
You are welcome here in any case. This is a site for processing grief, and I’m sure you’ll find something of value here, whether or not your ex was a sociopath.
But if you really thing she was, perhaps you could tell us a bit more about it. Because I’m really not certain of how to respond to you.
Kathy – I came across the symptoms of sociopathy online while searching for information on people without a conscience. Based on what I read and my experience with her, I can say that she has many of the symptons on that list, not only based on what she did to me but also things that she has done to others. No, she did not take money from me. I even mentioned that in a previous post, that she did not take from me financially. Maybe she’s a sociopath and maybe she’s not. I was simply going by what I read, and it wasn’t my understanding that every condition had to be met in order for that to be the case. Maybe some people exhibit some of the characteristics but not all. Yes, I feel that I was emotionally abused (at the end). There was betrayal and infidelity and manipulation involved, but I am not comfortable with going into great detail about what happened to me on a blog. Maybe this wasn’t the right place for me to end up after all.
Learnthelesson – Thanks for all of your responses. I think I’ll take what you said to me yesterday and use that as fuel for my journey. You told me that you weren’t completely sure whether your ex was a sociopath or not, but you knew that you had ended up with a bad person and that he was toxic to you. That’s what I’ll take with me. Regardless of what label is or isn’t put on it, I have experienced a terrible trauma and was the recipient of behavior that I don’t think any “normal” person would use in a relationship, and I need to heal from that.
Thanks to all who have responded to my various posts, but I think I’ll bow out now. Best of luck to all of you.
Dear Kindred ,
If your journey was with a toxic person, then you are going to need to re-fuel as you go!!! You just got here. Stay with LF as you heal and re-fuel. We all try to help eachother, and troubleshoot and try to get a sense of what eachothers experiences were.
I agree with Kathy, and with you, maybe she is a sociopath and maybe she is not.. But I can see why Kathy needed to clarify more and asks direct questions, because she truly wanted to help you and give you the best advice she possibly could. As she does with so many.
We all agree the reasons we end up at LF dont matter nearly as much as the reasons we stay here – to learn and grow and heal… three of the top ingredients for living well.
Take this amazing journey with us, if you can! !
Kindred, I didn’t mean to chase you away.
learnthelesson, thanks for your post. It’s exactly what I feel too.
Its what make LF so special. Nobody takes offense to people points of view, or varying opinions – and if they do, they have an outlet in that they can contact the website owner Donna Anderson and she can handle it.
I also liket and hope that we cotinue to appreciate each of our individual passionate comments on different subjects, and openly and compassionately accept the potential for making mistakes or misreading posts and/or receiving them the wrong way.
And re other thread – Maybe the child abuse call needs to be directed to other organizations and services as well that deal directly with child abuse and mental illness to provide even futher insight and support to Rosalyn.. I collectively we were all able to offer her some sort of comfort and guidance. Whatever her choice, I know her best interest is in her neice, because she reached out to LF!