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
Dear OxDrover,
I can see what you mean by enabling. I think that it is in our nurturing natures to try to take care of everyone. Your friend took advantage of your compassionate nature.
I think that everyone here has invested a lot of time and energy into relationships that were never going to go anywhere. We care about how other people regard us. I think this is why we stay in relationships with Psychopaths. We want a clean break and we can never achieve this with them. The more invested a person is in a relationship, the more difficult it is to leave it.
Hummingbird said: “Besides the traits of lying, cheating, shallow emotions, involvement with other women/men, parasitic lifestyle, etc., I have a list of behaviors which I experienced and would like some comments.
1. He doesn’t read books. He reads newspaper articles, etc.
2. He watches tv constantly at home, mainly thriller movies,
westerns, and war movies.
7. He only was affectionate when he needed something. He
wanted to cuddle and hold me after a disagreement.
Of course, this often led to a sexual encounter.
Do any of these behaviors sound familiar?
I’m not sure if you are asking if all the behaviors you listed in your post are behaviors, or signs, of a sociopath??
Although a socio or psychopath can use ANYTHING–even the rain coming down outside to manipulate, I will say that I don’t think #1, #2. or #7 is anything you wouldn’t experience with a great deal of “normal” men. I can’t think of a single guy I ever dated who read books, but ALL read the newspaper religiously. I think one subscribed to Newsweek, too, although he didn’t read books.
ALL men I have ever known watched a good deal of tv, and they all seemed to have a fondness for war movies, westerns, action adventures etc. NONE of them cared for romantic mushy CHICK FLICKS, which is why they are called chick flicks to begin with–however, NONE of them were above USING a chick flick as a manipulation tool to try to GET LAID.
With affection, they were affectionate in varying degrees. But there again, every single one of them, after a disagreement, whether s or p or normal, in which there was a bit of make up hugging and/or kissing tried to walk that baby right on down to SEX. Or even if they normally were not all that affectionate, they would use affection to try to make up, and THEN, like I said wanna get around to the sex. Doesn’t alot of huggy/touchy/kissy stuff just sort of naturally move on into sexual desire so lets have sex in alot of mens minds? It strikes me as a sort of normal behavior.
Isn’t some of this stuff just sort of basic normal behavior in alot of guys or have I just known all weird men or am I just a freak? (ok, I may regret asking that! lol)
hummingbird,
I read your post that ended with the tarot reading of the devil. It made me think that it’s time to return to the concept of sociopathic transactions. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what they were or what we name them. What matters is the nature of what went on between us.
I am uncomfortable with naming. I know from my own experiences in life that I have been different things to different people. Part of it results from their projections of stereotypes of me. Part of it resulted from what I wanted from them and the way I went about getting it. In other words — as self-defense teacher once said to me about rape — it’s a two-way dance.
So what is a sociopathic transaction? It is one in which one person uses another in a way that does not include caring about how it comes out for the other person. The objective is not to cause pain or loss, but it doesn’t matter if it does (unless it gets in the way of further usage). The only relevant objective for the first person is getting what s/he wants.
On one side of this transaction is the person who is going after what s/he wants in a fashion that we call anti-social (being all the way to the objective side on the objective-relationship spectrum). On the other side of the transaction is … what?
Most of the postings on this thread characterize us as unwilling victims. And them as the wolves in the Red Riding Hood story, showing up in good-guy clothes to convince us to let them into our lives so they can gobble us up.
And that’s a good healthy place for us to be in this healing process. We want to get clear with ourselves that we did not want this. We did not want to be manipulated for the benefit of another person. We did not want to lose anything without getting something equally important back. We did not want to feel betrayed by someone we trusted. This, in particular, we really didn’t want to feel.
And we are identifying the cause of our problems. Naming it as something outside of ourselves. Taking notes about its characteristics so we don’t make that mistake again. Sharing our stories about the awful thing that happened to us so that we really, really do confirm that it was something outside of us and we didn’t make it up.
This is the angry phase and it’s when we get real that something bad happened. We start naming it without feeling like we have to justify ourselves. And we identify the external cause, and we put our anger on that. Bad cause. Evil cause. Cause that came out of the blue, and I didn’t deserve this. Cause that made me feel bad, cost me time and energy and stuff and some cherished beliefs about how things were going to be. Bad, bad cause.
But let’s get back to the other side of this dance. Just for a moment, not to distract ourselves too much from this healthy expression of anger. Who was this bad cause dancing with?
Because eventually in this healing process, we want self-awareness of our role in this transaction. If we picture the whole deal as a kind of story board or cartoon magazine, and we erase the sociopath from the frames, how do we see ourselves behaving?
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I know that in this relationship I went from being a relatively functional dependency-disorder type to a flaming borderline who had pretty much discarded every other source of happiness, except whether or not this guy performed as Prince Charming. And I was throwing one personal resource after another at the problem, diminishing my integrity, self-esteem, personal wealth, years of my life and ultimately my health, physical and mental, the pursuit of this … what? Demand the the universe provide me with exactly this thing and nothing else would do.
We can blame them for that. But that’s kind of like the addict blaming the pusher for his addiction.
No question they were not nice people. And they were there to leverage our weaknesses for their own benefit. But in my case at least, I’ve got to face the fact that I’d not only lost my grip on reality, but that I’d done it because I’d finally found my drug of choice. When I was getting it, it made me feel better. About the world. About myself. And when I didn’t get it, especially after I found it and got a little used to it, I was desperate to escape knowledge of the world and of myself that starting emerging in its absence.
The world started looking like a scary place full of risk. I started looking like someone who was inadequate to take care of myself. It all added up to a situation I was not prepared to handle at all.
And now, to get back to the angry phase, we are living without that drug. Whatever stage of recovery we are. But this particular stage, the angry stage, is where we get out of the screaming willies or the thinking about going back for just one more hit or the thinking that we can really handle it if we just get rid of a few more bits of ourselves.
This is that stage when we stand up to them. And to everyone and and everything like them in our lives and even in the world at large. And we say NO. No, this doesn’t work for me. No, I don’t agree. No, whatever you are, you are not about me. Not who I am. Not what I want. Not what I intend to have or make of my life. Not what I want remembered as what I stood up for. What you get from me is a big fat no.
I may have to deal with crap like this. Because your existence is evidence that crap like this exists. I may have to get smarter and more self-protective. But I’ll tell you that I don’t like it. The world would be a lot better if we could just trust each other, say what we mean, keep our word, know that if we started to build something together we could finish it without all this disappointing each other. But now I know. I was naive, but I’m not a fool. Of all the things that you stole from me, I’ll probably miss that most, but it was a just another sweet illusion foisted on me by other people who wanted to use me. And the next time I hear, “You can trust me,” I’ll stick that in the memorial incinerator too. Trust exists, but it’s earned.
And finally, I want you to know that you owe me. I don’t expect to collect from you or any of the other incompetent and inadequate people who took advantage of my wish to trust them. But that debt also becomes part of this memorial. It’s that statue over the incinerator of the angel with the flaming sword. You like that? Thanks. I designed it myself. She’s built of all those losses, and she’s there for you and anyone like you. She collects what I deserve.
What’s that? I deserve respect. I deserve to keep what I earn. I deserve fair recompense for my investments, and that includes in relationships. I deserve to be loved. And understood. And most of all, I deserve support for my destiny, which I regret to tell you is larger than being your willing victim. If you’d like to be friends and a supporter of my life, you can make an appointment for an interview with the angel. And if you’re thinking about getting past her with your charm, I’d wear an asbestos suit.
That’s what we’re doing now.
What they are is less important in the end than what we are. Today we are standing up for ourselves. Becoming aware that it’s not just them who are different from us, but us who are different from them. Inside the sociopathic transaction, and outside of it. And if we’re not inside it anymore — not with them and not in our lives — who are we?
Jen 2008,
I agree that some of the behaviors are common among men.
My involvement with a man I believe was a Psychopath involved me losing myself in the process. He lied and manipulated me by using sympathy to control me. He was involved with other women and made up stories to cover his tracks. He borrowed money from me for medical, legal, etc. reasons.
Everything sounded reasonable until I started to question him. He was always defensive about his actions. His ability to explain my doubts away was alarming. The worse thing was that I believed him. I thought that I was the one with the problem.
Kathleen,
I did lose myself in this relationship. He took my affection, my money, my confidence in myself. He made me doubt myself whenever I questioned his motives or actions. I too felt like I gave up everything to this Psychopath in order to please him. I went from being a relatively sane person to someone who was practically spying on him to catch him in one of his lies.
Henry,
Yes, I agree that those of us who have read many books and articles written by researchers about them, and have actually lived with them, may actually be in a better position to “call it” than just a general therapist would be. That is why I said a qualified professional actually trained in the plc-r, and who has actually MET and interviewed the s or P and reviewed his or her records and done some other interviews etc..
But at any rate, my point really is that it doesn’t much matter what we call them if they are toxic, and it doesn’t much matter whether someone who shows up at lovefraud was with an actual socio or psychopath or not, because for all we know, in spite of what we may “think” we may not have been with one either.
Take me and my ex P for example, yeah, I’ve read volumes about psychopaths. For him, I could give many examples on ALL the items on the pcl-r and on some of the items give literally hundreds of examples. And then there was the high score on the P-scan. The stuff that could be corrobarated thru records such as education, job history, criminal, relationships is all there and could be easily provable so it isn’t as subjective, but with some of the items on the p-scan it would still be VERY subjective–based on MY perspective of him, since “I” was the one completing the P-scan questionnaire. I actually left a coupla questions BLANK for that reason. Now granted I also had written out for the therapist about 20 pages just hitting the relationship highlights, and once therapist finished reading that she was like wow, getting you to do the p-scan really wasn’t even necessary. Guess the “highlights” pretty much answered all the questions, or she was completing the p-scan mentally as she read or something. But at any rate, even the P-scan is not a “diagnosis” really of psychopathy, but just an indicator that the person appears to be psychopathic, then you have to refer the person to a qualified diagnostician for evaluation.
So, in spite of all that, for all I know, my ex could be examined, alonged with interviews of others and corroborating records used for other stuff, and he might actually be some other disorder, and who because of that disorder his behavior may just play out to look like a psychopaths. Not that it matters. Like others has said, what matters is they are toxic.
Oxy, I love this story of you and your friend.
We don’t talk a lot here about enabler-on-enabler transactions, but we probably should. Because when we scratch the surface of enabling, we find demands.
I say this as a world-class enabler. Wait a minute. Who am I talking to? We could rename this site Enablers Anonymous. Thank you, Oxy, for bringing up the topic.
But back to enabling and demands. Somewhere in my recovery, I realized that the sociopath and I had something in common. We both wanted what we wanted from each other, and in the end, we didn’t care what each other wanted. I wanted Prince Charming back, and I didn’t care about his vision, his plans, his real character or whether he was capable of it. I’d paid for Prince Charming and I wanted him.
How had I paid for him? Well, by giving him everything he wanted. By probing to learn more about what he wanted, so I could be even better at it. And then by assuming I could train him out of any characteristics that didn’t match what I wanted. And assuming I had a right to do that, because he had accepted all the gifts I gave him. Which, of course, meant he was in on the deal that I was going to be his perfect source of what he wanted and he was going to be mine.
When it turned out that this was not his deal, I was totally offended. That is, after I didn’t believe it, gave him some more, and tried harder to change him.
An uncomfortable thought that kept popping up in my recovery was that, no matter how much I wanted to make him a bad guy, I was being seriously disrespectful. But I had trouble holding onto it for a long time, while I was still in my “bad guy hurt me” phase.
Enabling isn’t just letting people or helping people in their behaviors and habits that are not in our best interests or theirs. It is doing it because we have a set of unexpressed expectations that this is going to bring us back some reward. They will like us. They will see the error of their ways. They will become dependent on us and keep us around. They will fulfill some need we have in exchange for all this good will we are showing toward their needs. Including tolerance of a lot of stuff we really don’t like at all.
In other words, enabling tends to be us doing a deal that isn’t what it appears to be. We are not saying, I won’t complain about your coming home drunk with DUIs if you love me forever for being the one who doesn’t bug you about it. Or I will let you gamble away our vacation money if you don’t get mad at me for questioning you and beat me up. Or I will give you the benefit of the doubt when you break your promises and say that your doing the best you can if you keep telling me and other people that you’re my friend. Or I will give you the money you owe me, if you will be ashamed that you’re acting like a jerk and apologize at least for not paying me back.
But we don’t say what we expect. Maybe it’s because, as we say, that “anyone” would understand, anyone would be playing by these rules. Maybe it’s because we don’t feel entitled to ask for what we really want, so we “arrange things” so they can’t help but figure it out.
When we doing this with someone who is overtly self-interested, we just get clear disappointments. Too bad, they say, you were dopey enough to give it away. You didn’t ask for something back in the deal. If you want something back after the fact, that’s too bad.
But when we do it with another enabler, things get really complicated. Because there is the surface interaction, in which we both are being so nicey-nice and generous, and bonding over how undependable other people are and how they don’t follow the rules. And then there is the underlying expectation, where we think we’ve got an agreement because we “understand” each other. Even when these relationships go well, they are stressful, because we both know how this works and we’re trying to be what the other person wants, while we continue to hope that we’ll get what we traded for. But when they go bad, things can get really crazy.
In Oxy’s story, she really wasn’t an enabler, though she says she was in earlier encounters with him. In the story, she was drawing a line, saying it’s not okay with me if you “change” your promise. We had a deal. If there was any enabling at all on her part, it was possibly agreeing to some aspects of this deal, knowing that he wasn’t the most dependable person in the world but figuring that he knew better than to mess with her. But we don’t know that for sure, from what she said.
So what was going on with her friend? What was his secret deal with Oxy? Why did he acted betrayed and blow up at her when she tried to get him to stick to his promise? What was his unspoken demand of her that he figured she’d agreed to?
Any takers?
Dear Kathy,
It wasn’t any BIG “deal” about a lot of money or anything else. But it brought the whole thing to a HEAD, and today when my other friend sent me an e mail that “clarified” what had happened, I had an “ah ha” effect with the information she gave me, and then I “processed” it all by looking BACK into the past where I HAD ENABLED my male friend to continue to make poor financial decisions by loaning him money. (He did pay it back, wth interest, and the loan was secured).
Part of the thing was, with the BORROWED money, he bought some young horses he could not afford to feed, AND then didn’t feed them and the horses actually got VERY thin and malnourished. I kept “nagging” him about feeding them more. What I SHOULD have done was say something ONCE and if he didn’t immediately change his not feeding them, then I should have called the SPCA and had the horses picked up and him heavily fined. I eventually did find a nice buyer for them when he finally decided to sell them (losing probably close to $1000 bucks). But me loaning him some money was actually the thing that enabled him to buy the horses in the first place….his poor financial decisions led to his “inability” (according to him) to buy them enough feed, but I did notice during that time he had plenty of money for OTHER things he wanted while the horses went hungry and malnourished.
We had a “deal” to buy some poultry together, and I was going to buy the feed for some baby ducks, we each paid half the price of the ducks, he was going to raise them up to where they didn’t require “hand raising” and I would buy the feed. But 3 days after the ducks got there, he “changed the deal” that he didn’t want ducks any more so I should buy his half and take them and raise them myself. The reason I hadn’t wanted to raise them in the first place was I had GIVEN him all my good cages (free) and didn’t have a proper place to raise them. The second night the cats got into the makeshift cage I had and age $50 worth of ducks. (half of them)
So, I should have said something earlier, but “restrained myself” (wrong move) and told him that I was unhappy with the changed “deal” and that half the ducks had died because I didn’t have proper cages. (which he had my cages and had rabbits in them) and the reason I “took them” was that I had seen him underfeed and neglect the horses badly and I wasn’t sure he would have taken care of the ducks at all because I had seen him neglect and under feed the horses.
Well, anyway, I acted at the WRONG TIME, and in the WRONG WAY, and today I realized I had been enabling him all along. That I WAS still upset about his treatment of the horses he bought with money I had loaned him (that I shouldn’t have loaned him) so I was as disappointed at myself as I was in him. When he blew up and name called, called me a liar etc. I was suprised (I shouldn’t have been) but NOW I can see (thanks to the wisdom of my friend who e mailed me this morning and BOINKED me lovingly on the head) that I CREATED THIS SITUATION MYSELF by my own POOR CHOICES.
This situation didn’t upset me like it would have with a Psychopath, and I only lost $50 in the deal (I went ahead and paid him for his share of the ducks) because I didn’t want to “renig on my deal” even if he had renigged on his. It never was about the $50. But at the same time, I realize that I had acted inappropriately with him from start to finish. I loaned him the money knowing he spends money “emotionally” not logically as a matter of habit. I didn’t call the SPCA when I knew the animals were suffering malnutrition. And I should never have made the deal about the ducks in the first place.
We had never had a “cross word” in all our years as buddies, but I sure wanted to say something CROSS about the horse, but I was loath to “rock the boat” and I SHOULD HAVE ROCKED THE BOAT, BECAUSE WHAT HE WAS DOING WAS CRUEL TO THOSE TWO YOUNG ANIMALS. I knew that, and I still didn’t take appropriate actions. (calling the SPCA) So BOINK!!! BOINK!!! on me, and I have learned a lesson over this. One I obviously needed, that I need to work more on boundaries and appropriate behavior and not let my “kindness” become my problems later.
I may have taken too much upon myself in the previous post. By suggesting that we all might agree that we’re enablers.
Just to clarify what it means, here’s a definition: one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behaviour (as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by helping that individual avoid the consequences of such behavior.
Enabling is a term that comes under the codependency realm of addiction recovery. There is a lot on the Internet about codependency and enabling. There is also a wonderful book, Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie.
I think it was presumptuous of me to assume that everyone here views themselves as enablers (when I suggested we could rename the site Enablers Anonymous).
So if I’ve offended anyone, I apologize.
Kathy
“I did lose myself in this relationship. He took my affection, my money, my confidence in myself. He made me doubt myself whenever I questioned his motives or actions. I too felt like I gave up everything to this Psychopath in order to please him. I went from being a relatively sane person to someone who was practically spying on him to catch him in one of his lies”
– I could quote who said this, but I would rather ask how many of us could have said these EXACT same words!!!!! This happened to me word for word, sentence for sentence. And yet when I read it coming from someone else I saw something in it that I never saw all the times I was verbalizing these words to myself and others and even to my extox.
“He “TOOK” my affection, my money, my confidence in myself”
BUT AT THE SAME TIME I GAVE IT! AND WHO CAN TAKE MY CONFIDENCE IN MYSELF AWAY ? Only me.
-I made the choice to give my affection, MY MONEY, and my love — in the face of no reciprocity esp. after the mask came of – Where in gods name was my self-confidence, my self-respect – WHEEEEERRRRRRRRE??
“He made me doubt myself whenever I questioned his motives or actions”
I ULTIMATELY MADE THE CHOICE TO LET SOMEONE TALK ME OUT OF MY OWN GUT INSTINCT, MY OWN INTUITION, MY OWN PROOF, – WHERE WAS MY-TRUST IN THIS DEAL? WHEEEEEERRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEE!!!!!
“I went from being a relatively sane person to someone who was practically spying on him to catch him in one of his lies”
I OBVIOUSLY WAS PIECED TOGETHER VERY LOOSELY PRIOR TO EVEN LANDING EYES ON MY EXTOX – I OBVIOUSLY DID NOT HAVE VERY MANY BOUNDARIES IN PLACE, AND WAS FAR FROM SELF-AWARE OF HOW TO VALUE MYSELF, LOVE MYSELF, RESPECT MYSELF, TRUST MYSELF… FOR IF I REALLY AND HONESTLY HAD MY SHIT TOGETHER – MY BOUNDARIES IN PLACE – MY MATURE ADULT OPERATING AND FUNCTIONING WITHIN – THEN I WOULD HAVE NEVER GIVEN MY EX THE CHANCE TO PICK THE MASK UP AND PUT IT BACK ON EACH AND EVERY TIME IT FELL AND WAS PLACED BACK ON AGAIN IN FRONT ME… THE OLD ME HE MET…THE NOT FULLY MATURE ME HE MET…THE THOUGHT I KNEW IT ALL AND HAD IT TOGETHER ME HE MET…THE WEAK ME HE MET….THE CHILD IN ME HET MET…THE DEPENDENT ME HE MET…THE INSECURE ME HE MET… AND AT THE SAME TIME THE CARING, LOVING, COMPASSIONATE, GIVING, ME HE MET.
THE S WAS A BAD MAN IN MANY WAYS. A SELFISH PERSON. DEVOID OF CARING, LOVING, COMPASSION, GIVING, EMPATHY….ETC…AND HE HAD IS OWN LIST OF CRAP AND LIED AND CHEATED AND STOLE…
BUT I STILL SAY, ONCE THE MASK FELL…IT BECAME ABOUT ME AND MY CHOICES, MY FLAWS, MY WEAKNESSES THAT I LOST MYSELF AND FOUND MYSELF LOOKING, ACTING AND BEHAVING LIKE A LUNATIC!!
Wow! That is being awfully hard on yourself. How many other times has your behavior caused you to suffer this much pain? How many times have your actions and the way you relate to others trustingly caused good things to happen? You’ve learned some red flags to watch out for, and you won’t let it happen again. These people are great at brainwashing etc. Ease up on yourself. The shame belongs to him NOT you. Well, that is me lecturing me too!