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
Oxy, I understand that you are taking responsibility for all your possible “errors” in these situations. I also think you have the right to be a lot more annoyed than you’re expressing.
For one thing, he made you an unwilling participant in the abuse of two horses. If this were me, I would be violent. I don’t support this type of behavior, and I sure don’t want someone taking advantage of my friendship to do it. I wouldn’t care what his situation or his emotional problems were. He was making me an abuser by proxy, and I wouldn’t have rested on this until I’d fixed the situation or given myself a heart attack about it. (That’s me.)
For another, he screwed you in the poultry deal. Several ways.
It’s always easier to get mad on someone else’s behalf. So in talking about this, I admit I might not have been as quick off the mark if I’d been you, as I am now in talking about it. But I get angry just hearing about it. Who does he think he is? And what does he think you are, some idiot who will say thank you very much for breaking his promise. Or does he just assume that you have enough resources to just fix it for everyone?
My view is that he was totally disrespectful to you and equally insensitive to the ramifications of his unilateral decision to “change his promise.” This was a contract, with money involved, between the two of you. All of us our allowed to change our mind theoretically, but we have to be prepared for repercussions is our change of mind affects someone else.
He also sounds like someone who doesn’t take responsibility for himself, and expects other people to clean up after him. And then when you object, starts spouting about how insensitive you are to his problems. And what a bad friend you are. And how dare you question his decisions about his life (despite the fact that you’ve inherited the mess).
Do I sound hard? You know, I’m not. Not when people are actually trying and just need a hand. But not when their dumping on me. Or you.
So you may have sailed through this one. But I am angry for you.
Learnthelesson,
WOW, what a powerful post. I soooo identify with every word you said.
“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!!”
I especially identify with this last part. Once I knew what he was, then it was all about ME and WHY I CHOSE to do and react as I did. Thanks for the great post. There has been so many thought provoking post on this board. Just incredible really.
Oh, and Kathleen, THANK YOU for your posts too, because YOU and your interesting posts and theories you toss out has ENABLED me to NOT mop my hardwood floors today, because I have spent so much time reading lovefraud and thinking about the posts. So, my dirty floors are all YOUR fault. lol –Jen
learntheless, you wrote “I OBVIOUSLY WAS PIECED TOGETHER VERY LOOSELY PRIOR TO EVEN LANDING EYES ON MY EXTOX.”
That’s interesting language. I like it a lot. It matches my sense of my own vulnerability (which still exists). But what’s changed now is the desperation associated with it. If I feel myself starting to get needy, I recognize it now as a “state” and give myself a time-out to get my head together. I don’t use other people for fixes, and in fact, don’t like it or feel threatened when someone tries to serve that purpose for me. My relationship with myself is between me and me now.
And like justabouthealed, I encourage you not to beat yourself up. I know you’re a passionate person (just from the number of capital letters in your posts), and you’re working on yourself with hammer and tongs, and doing great work. But one of the rules of the universe is that we’re doing the best we can. It’s not like you were trying to be a dope, just like I didn’t wake up one morning and decide that I was going to become an addict to whatever this guy was peddling.
We all have our own stories. It turns out that, on this site, a lot of us have remarkably similar backgrounds. Just looking for the definition of enabling for my previous post, I wound up on some sites about codependency. And for a moment I wondered why we felt it was so hard to get help in recovering from a sociopath, when most of what we’re learning here actually exists on sites for codependents. How we got this way. The self-destructive results of our accommodating behaviors. And how we have to learn how to take care of ourselves first, before we even think about getting into healthy relationships.
I forget how much my thinking about recovery was affected by the work I did in trying to turn around my codependent behaviors. (Though apparently that work didn’t really “take” until I got the real lesson in what it was costing me from my ex.)
The bottom line here is that we have our reasons. If we go back and put ourselves in the shoes of who we were at that moment, we can recollect what those reasons were. We were doing the best we knew at the time.
Now we know better. Or we’re learning here, as we go through the recovery. And we’re all learning together, which is a beautiful thing. And you are one of our most inspired guides.
So I know I don’t need to tell you this, but I will for the sake of anyone else who needs to hear it. There is no point in despising who you used to me, or who you are now. It all counts on getting you to who you want to be. And we’re all on the path.
Or were you just giving yourself a gentle boink with a lot of capital letters?
And Jen, when in our co-enabling conversations did you get the idea that I care about getting floors mopped? I have a very friendly coexistance with muddy footprints and dog hair in my home, and particularly with the bacteria. We have a co-enabling deal that if I don’t kill them, they won’t kill me. So far, so good.
I think that you’re just prioritizing until the day you can’t get to the computer and you have to do something about the floor.
Dear Kathy,
Oh, I was plenty angry, I just didn’t behave badly about it when he started “going off” verbally and name calling.
I WAS upset with the horses not being taken care of. I didn’t see them often (sometimes for a couple of months between times) and each time I talked to him he assured me he was feeding them more. I AM ANGRY AT MYSELF though, for NOT doing more. For not calling the SPCA. Kathy I actually attacked a grown man when I was 12 and bit a chunk out of his neck for beating a horse that was down “in an effort to motivate it to get up” (it was trying) I literally climbed on his back and started biting a chunk out of his neck! (got into trouble for making a scene unbecoming to a “lady” too! LOL)
And the one thing I AM usually RABID about is animal abuse. I actually go to the butcher shop with my cattle and stand there so they will not be “scared” when they are put down. I will personally put down any animal of my own so I know it is DONE RIGHT and they “never hear the gun go off.
It actually never crossed my mind to report him to the SPCA. I’m not sure why, because I have the number on “speed dial.” (No joke!) I don’t know if I was distracted by other things or just gave him the benefit of the doubt. I did find them a good home for him, but you know, I’m not sure why I didn’t become RABID about it all…sidetracked? Whatever it was, I am sorry I didn’t act sooner than I did about the horses.
The duck thing, and the only reason I took them, and “let him” weasel out of his agreement was that I figured he would treat them with neglect (and baby ducks and chicks can’t be treated with neglect and live). I shouldn’t have made the deal in the first place.
No I am not going back and bashing myself for what I did or didn’t do, I AM, however, internalizing the lesson from this all. I am NOT grieving about my “lost friendship” and not excusing the “Why he did it” making it “Okay”—he is NOT functioning well, and has “denial” down pat as a LONG-TERM coping mechanisim. I can’t change that and have no desire (now) to do so. I HAVE been a good friend to him, actually too much a “good friend” I suspect, but IT IS A LESSON. Post PhD work in the University of Hard Knocks—tuition $50.
Oxy, sounds like a bargain at the price.
I think I’m so reactive to this because I know someone that sounds like him. I think he had an idea that he was going to marry me, and find a solution to his problems so I got a lot exposure to this “sweet guy.” I watched him throwing around money he couldn’t possibly afford, and then getting his feelings hurt when I was aghast. “Well, isn’t a guy allowed to…?”
I told him that it was his live and he was free to do anything he pleased. But I didn’t want to be around him when he was acting like an irresponsible fool.
You know, I didn’t use to be like this until I hit the angry phase. Now, unless I’m being paid to be nice to someone (work relationships), I just say what’s in my mind.
Sometimes I have to apologize, but there’s a saying in the business world (I’m sure you ran into it in your work), “It’s quicker to apologize than wait for permission.” After nearly two decades as a consultant, I’ve become really good at it.
Anyway, Oxy, I love to listen to your processing. Thanks for not boinking me from my comments from the peanut gallery.
Dear Sweet Kathy,
I can’t even imagine “boinking” you, you have too much good sense! LOL I only boink myself for failing to see the OBVIOUS! and anyone else for being too down on themselves! LOL
But you know, we DO (at least I DO) fail to SEE the obvious! I knew “John”s” lifestyle was not for me. I am more financially prudent than he is, II would NEVER borrow money to buy a “toy” of any kind—to feed my kids, yes, to buy a car, yes, to buy anything NECESSARY yes, but never to buy ANYthing I didn’t NEED. So it actually shocked me when he bought the horses with the borrowed money in the first place AND bought them from a woman I had warned him about (from past dealings with her) that was a CROOK and her animals were poor quality and very high priced because she only sold to “suckers.” But since I had not put any conditions on loaning him the money about what it was “for” I didn’t think I had a gripe so kept my mouth shut about what he chose to spend it for.
I AM being more upfront and confronting things, I DID eventually confront his “changed” deal about the ducks. In the past, because he was a “friend” I would NEVER HAVE CONFRONTED IT, I would have just sucked it up and seethed.
So I DO see some improvements in the way I am handling things, and actually, the fact that I am NOT grieving over the lost relationship, or even wondering what I could have done to have “saved” it….(though when he first went off I did have a twinge of “oh, I should have kept my mouth shut,” but I quickly kicked that “cat” out the door! LOL
I’m glad you “love to listen” to my processing….sometimes I think I don’t make sense even to myself, but I AM making some headway at least. The remaining ducks are healthy and MESSY but should be able to go into a bigger pen on the ground soon and out of where they are now, I hope this cold stormy snap that we are having in central US will be over soon and temps back up above freezing at night at least. I am SO READY for spring.
And you know, I am so NOT traumatized by this situation that I am not going to even try to avoid running into him if he shows up at some of the auctions we went to together, they are large groups and no need to even appear “stuck up,” just stay on my side of the crowd and go about my business.
I have not read this entire thread….just some posts here and there.
I do have a couple of comments though. Re: the word “needy”………… In considering Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we learn that to make progress toward self-actualization (being all we can be), needs must be satisfied at each level in order to move on to the next. Along the way, there will be legitimate needs including love, affection, and mutually satisfying relationships with a variety of people on many levels. It is through this validation that we move closer to wholeness. Without it , we can struggle and become stuck.
Words such as “needy” get into popular use and are carelessly thrown around and misapplied just as many labels/terms are these days. Often, someone who appears ‘needy’ is actually craving an empathic response from others. Empathy is not easy to find in our modern-day culture of narcissism. I think many here are looking for empathy, as are many of our friends who call us with their problems and stories. They just might be looking for someone who knows how to listen and who has the ability to hear what is in the heart and on the mind of another without judging or giving gratuitous advice.
Empathy happens when the listener puts himself aside and merges with the other in a moment of oneness based on an ability to understand the feelings and life situation of another as that person is experiencing it. Validation, unconditional love, and accepting another without judging strengthens that person from within and enables him to find his way with renewed courage and self-confidence. It gently encourages him to find answers and make his own decisions.
People feel “needy” because needs are not being met! No one should engage in self-deprecating thoughts because they hurt and find themselves in a lonely spot and needing some support and empathy. It is normal and okay to want those things from others. Finding the right person is the hard part.
By understanding the signs and behaviors of toxic people, we make ourselves less vulnerable. As they become more recognizable to us, we will make better choices about handling the challenges they present. We have to remember we are in charge and we do not have to turn our power over to others. We do have choices.
They will not change, so we have to change by working from within and by developing a variety of inner resources that strengthen our ability to cope and move on. A good friend who knows how to listen can be a valuable partner in this process.
Eye
In my handful of prior relationships nobody ever challenged my self-respect, my self-trust. There really was overall mutual respect involved. Sure there were arguements with others and difference of opinions but I can say I either was strong-willed enough to not have to back down when the territory was open and fairplay or I was able to realize when I was wrong and apologize. There was never any need for me to cowar or retreat or question myself
Nobody ever had such extreme pity stories in my past. Nobody ever was in need, the way I viewed him. Nobody ever asked me for a financial favor . Nobody ever made me suspect they were cheating – they were consistent with overall truth and consistency. I had jealous tendancies in each and every relationship. But healthy enough to be teased about it or understood thats my nature/one of my flaws. Never anything major, just a comment here or there. But nothing that caused relationships to end. I had sexual experiences that were mutually fulfilling…enjoyable…loving. My point is my being was never challenged in a negative “what are you gonna do now” way prior to the S. Or I guess i should say in a “what should I do now” way —
I think what happened to me a few hours ago was ANGER or DISAPPOINTMENT inward. Ive had my fair share of anger about the relationship. Ive had few years of anger at the S. Ive had my anger about all the loses I experienced with him – but Im experiencing either anger or disappointment at not having the tools or knowing the most important person in the world to love respect trust protect was me, myself, my well-being. How come i didnt know that? How do I teach them something I was so unaware of?? Im angry or disappointed at something – but I dont know exactly how to verbalize it or answer what it is. Im angry I was or am co-dependent or so loosely pieced together in terms of my inner self.
I cant get to who I want to be, until I get to know what I need to be to protect myself yet remain open. I guess your right maybe I dont really need to know the who I was/why I was the way I was. Just focus on becoming who I want to be. But when I was challenged I didnt have much of SELF-anything inside of me. Its an eyeopener and a tearjerker and a trigger, i guess.
Yet on the outside I was a successful strong and determined business woman , mom, friend, familyoriented, religious person. But when matched with someone who lies, cheats and steals and gave me so very little to be proud of – I gave myself away to try to save the day. I think when I read the post before mine and saw “he took” from me- yet have concluded i also willing gave (after the mask fell) when i knew who and what he was- and when I read “he made me” – but Ive concluded i also willingly CHOSE (after the mask fell) to continue – and I lost myself because from the get go I didnt have SELF- ANYTHING IN PLACE – i got pissed off at myself, my parents, my past.
Apologies if I appeared too hard on myself in my post. I just felt I needed to be so I never go back to that weak of a person – i dont want to ever lose myself again – I WANT TO GET IT- SO IT STICKS – SO I LEARN. I WANT TO TEACH MY KIDS. I WANT TO KNOW HOW TO BE GOOD TO ME AND AT THE SAME TIME BE CARING GIVING LOVING COMPASSIONATE, ETC.
Im just ready to stop putting it all on him. I want to be more than I was. But getting angry at myself isnt going to get me where I want to be. I thought it would. But gently boinking myself would have been so much better. Thanks Kathy and Justabouyhealed. But dont you think somewhere in the journey Anger is ok at ourselves when it used to project us forward in the sense Im angry because I made a mistake too or I made bad choices too – so I learn from them?
Really not looking for empathy or pity. Always appreciate understanding and positive / negative feedback. Dont want to depend on anyone for what I need. In fact I feel the S was the needy one in our relationship. I was just full of bad choices. Think I needed him to be the things I wasnt for myself – but in fact now need to be!! And I wanted him to be true to his word and honest and caring and loving. But I was with the wrong guy. Sumtimes I feel stuck, sometimes i feel breakthroughs and sometimes Im just venting .. other times I feel what I share may be insightful valuable to others here … and truly am on a journey for answers and insight and a place to write whats on my mind and share it. And i enjoy sharing and offering all the same to others. thx!
learnthelesson, there’s a lot in that post, a lot of observation and insight. Here are a few thoughts.
You wrote: dont you think somewhere in the journey Anger is ok at ourselves when it used to project us forward in the sense Im angry because I made a mistake too or I made bad choices too – so I learn from them?
Anger, like all emotions, gets mirrored inside and out. It’s one of the reasons we eventually get out of anger. It’s a state. Once we’re aiming it at outside targets, we are as likely to aim it at ourselves. And it’s not just the anger, but everything that goes with it. Particularly judging and blaming.
Anger should be a reactive state that stimulates some kind of action. Even if it’s just paying attention to its cause for a moment and deciding it’s not worth worrying about right now. It should be a here-and-now state.
But sometimes we have to clear past anger, and it sounds like that’s what you’re doing. When we start getting mad at ourselves, particularly about past behavior, we can go into the same kind process going as when we get mad at anything else from the past. We look at it with “now” eyes. Stand with our past selves and see if there’s anything we can tell our past selves that will help with the situation, help our past selves to cope and to grow through it.
Punishing or berating ourselves is not ordinarily the best form of help. Just as researchers have found that children “disciplined” by this kind of treatment are more likely to become resistant and sneaky. We are setting up a power struggle inside ourselves, rather than adding resources to a past situation to empower ourselves to deal more consciously and effectively.
In this sense, we can rewrite the past. And we can change the meaning of past events. An obvious case is me going back and looking at situations with my parents, where I was scared for my survival and shut down my ability to talk about what I wanted because it drew verbal attacks or physical punishment. Going back, I look at the situation, and tell my younger self that these people were afraid of her. Her problem was to work around their fear, but to privately hold onto her ideas about what was important to her. It was going to be an inconvenience for her until she left there, but they were lovable in other ways and it would be worth it to her to learn how to deal with people like that. Later it would be really important for her to know what she wanted and to be able to speak up about it.
I couldn’t have said that to my younger self until a year or so ago. I had gone back and reparented her before, but my advice gets better and better through the years. I think that last time I told her something like “ignore those jerks,” because I was in my angry phase. Then, I empowered myself to feel angry about being having ideas of my own, and it processed up through the years. This time, I’m more confident of my ability to hold onto myself and more capable of compassion, so I shared that with her, and it’s growing up through the years.
We can go back into more recent history and do the same thing, but I think it’s equally valuable to go back to these scenes with the sociopath and give ourselves some understanding. I actually think we are vulnerable to these situations because we have a lot of carping voices in our heads. That makes us vulnerable to confusion about what’s right and who we are (though that vulnerability might not be triggered by someone who is less aggressively trying to recruit us or throw us off balance).
Adding some kindness and understanding is a good way to add resources when we’re off balance. If warm and trusted parental figure had been in the room when I was feeling simultaneously crushed by and attracted to this “too good to be true” character, a little encouragement and some reminders of how well I’d been doing before he came along might have gone a long way toward pulling me back together.
The unfortunate truth was that I didn’t have a warm and understanding parental figure in my history. The only parental figure in the room was him who was telling me that he knew better than me and I wasn’t particularly bright.
Now I can provide that to myself. I understand what happened to me, and why I responded the way I did. I’m okay with that, but I’m smarter now. So I can go back and be my own good parent in past painful situations that come up in memory. I didn’t do anything wrong. I never did, and I don’t think you did either. You just didn’t have the resources to handle the situation. Next time, you will.
When I first started this series, I talked about us not being good at comforting ourselves. This is part of that idea. We’ll get into it more in the “letting go” section.
All that said, I understand why you are being very emphatic with yourself about this. You want to learn the lesson. Of course, you do. But I’m suggesting here that wanting to learn the lesson may be good enough. The next question is what you can do to help yourself hold onto it, beyond being a harsh parent.
And as always, I believe that figuring out what you want is the most powerful thing. You want to be whole and you want to be stable. You want integrity that you can depend on in any circumstances. You want to be free from fear. You want to be able to move through challenging situations with certainty of who you are and what you want out of it. All of this I read in your writing.
Oh, and who said you can’t be a whiner? Sounds like the same person who makes you responsible for being right all the time. Or makes it your fault that something bad happened to you. Remind me one of these days to write about chatting with our inner voices. Meanwhile, see if you can’t give this one something else to do — like reorganizing your mental file cabinets.