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
“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.”
Huge bells when I read that! It brought me such relief. I can travel back to specific incidents when my alcoholic Dad and enabling Mom harshly punished me for expressing quite natural anger on any level. Anger was “a sin,” and girls and women who are angry aren’t “natural.” Even typing that, I feel…GRRRR!!!
That “deer caught in the headlights feeling,” of dealing with my drunk Dad, who was the only one allowed to feel anger, much less express it, realizing that only by remaining calm could I hope to protect my Mom and myself. Later, the horrible burden of “niceness” from which “ladies” never waver. And of course, as an RN, one is never angry. Right.
Just watched my cat Ping get a mad on with his brother, Max. Ping raised his paw, laid his ears back, and smacked his brother on the nose. Hard. That was it: cat justice, the end of Max bothering him, and end of Ping’s anger. They both knew where they stood without a doubt; two minutes later, cuddle-fest. Wow: healthy anger. Ping protecting himself: expressing his feelings, getting his needs met, and then he was done. No endless torment or worrying that his anger was somehow “wrong.” I realize I internalized my parents’ and culture’s disapproval so intensely, this “anger is a sin” idea, that I even lost the ability to feel healthy anger towards myself! The little “Hey, Betty! Are you gonna just take that? Move it!” that leads me to take action for myself. I’ve really missed that.
At the heart of it, emotion is energy, and anger is strong energy. When you experience it, in the ways Kathy writes so well about, it actually brings you to action and to healing. It’s the other kind, the grinding, brooding, resentful kind, that has no resolution so that you stay stuck in it, that takes you down. I really, really don’t need that.
Over the past couple of months that I’ve been reading Lovefraud and journaling like mad, my emotions have come trooping back like long lost friends. Not all of them were initially welcome, most notably the “yechy” ones like irritability, but I’ve been getting reacquainted, and it’s been good. It’s pretty noisy round here, because I’m libel to go through the entire set of them in a day, and (contrary to what my parents might have thought) it’s just fine. Feels like life.
Newlife: Have you ever looked at the PCL-R? The diagnostic tool used to determine whether someone is a psychopath? I don’t know if your S/P matches up to a bunch of the traits, but you can look at the list and rate him 0, 1 or 2. This is supposed to only be used by a trained clinician, but I think we can make pretty good estimates from what we know. A score of 30 or more, out of a possible 40, is considered psychopathic. Repeat criminals who are NOT considered psychopathic tend to score about 22, which is to say they are still pretty scary.
If you were dealing with someone who scores pretty high on this scale, you choice to not lash out in anger may have protected you, because you were dealing with a seriously disordered person.
To my mind, anyone who is juggling that many women and that much trouble is a scary person anyway.
Kathleen is so right that we need to honor this anger, but I see it as a tool for us to use to understand our own processes. We have to remember that most of these losers we got snagged by are just not the kind of people you can talk with, negotiate with, or even safely get angry with.
Well, my friends, it’s nice to read all this raging going on here. Just remember that homicidal thoughts are fine, as long as you don’t act on them.
Thanks, truebeliever, for your great follow-up post. You wrote: “Taking a stand has less to do with a specif situation you’re facing and more to do with raising the level of your feeling of self worth.” I would add it also has to do with lowering your tolerance for pain. When it hurts is a good time to say “This doesn’t work for me” or “no” or just leave.
nic, I don’t think your anger is going to kill you. But since you’re in the heat of it now, you might start breaking it down. Not just being angry for “everything,” but start to note the memories or the feelings as they come up, and think about them in terms of how they fell short of what you wanted. I wanted him to be fair. I wanted him to care about my feelings. That kind of thing. It will be useful in the next stage.
Meanwhile, don’t worry about being evil. You’re not, you’re just spitting angry. If you think there might be something magical about putting a date on his obituary, why don’t you date it and burn it while you say “he is dead to me.” Sort of homemade magic, asking God to please help you stop thinking about him. I wouldn’t put his “memorial” under my bed. I’d be more inclined to put it in the kitchen garbage can under the liner. Or maybe under the cat box. Or maybe run it through the shredder and put it in the catbox.
Healing Heart, it’s nice to hear that you are having violent thoughts (as long as you’re not acting on them). If you’d had your anger in order at the time we was abusing you, just think, you might have said, “You’re a ridiculous little man, and your opinions, needs and plans might be funny, if they weren’t so disgusting. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going out to give some beggars a few dollars. At least they know how to say thank you nicely.”
But more important, as you said, is that you’re taking action on your own life. All this healing work is just the prologue to acting like people who like and care about ourselves, as Healing Heart said. You are walking the talk. Hooray!
Hi newlife08, you’re getting there. “Sick, nauseous, disgust and pain” are good, as long as you’re not turn them on yourself. Anger is when you look at the situation and know that, even if you let it happen, nothing would have been like this if it hadn’t been for him. He was the catalyst that turned the whole thing so rotten.
You wrote that the anger belongs to him. I’m not sure what that means, but if it means that you’re not allowing yourself to own your own anger, you might want to give yourself a break. If you think you’re entitled to better treatment than this, then you are entitled to feel angry about not getting it.
Anger doesn’t have to be yelling, waving our arms and calling people names. It can be as simple as saying this is disgusting behavior, and I don’t want it in my life. Or you hurt me, and I don’t like it or you for doing it. Or I reject you and all of these things you did to me and my life, and I’m glad you’re gone. You don’t even have to say it to him. But you have to be clear that you don’t like it. That clarity helps in the moments when your attachment to him pops up. Then you can say, yes, you were seductive and I miss being seduced by you, but I don’t miss how you were the other 99 percent of the time and good riddance to that.
kindheart48, if I were you, I would sit down and have a talk with this urge. Really, I’m not kidding. When it rises next time, ask it what it wants from him. What does it think it’s going to get out of calling him. Don’t argue with it. Listen to it, as you would listen to a friend who’s telling you about something she needs really badly. If you can give the urge what it needs without calling him, take care of it. If you can’t, you may have to comfort it. “I know it’s hard. I’m so sorry you have to go through this. But all the other parts of me are right here with you, and we’re going to survive this and find a better way to live. You’ll find new things to love, I promise. And meanwhile we’re all here for you. You’re an important part of me, and I love you.”
It may sound silly, but it might be what you need.
hopeful, I loved you post. I keep trying to get to writing about how we are magnetized to the solutions to our greatest needs. It’s hard to think about sociopaths that way, but in the end, I think we find that we are healed in ways that were hugely important to us.
I’ve written here before that my deepest desire in my relationship with the sociopath, in all my intimate relationships, was to get back to my “real” self. Because the self I was living was not accomplishing anything I really wanted to do with my life. I was all caught up in people-pleasing and over-committing and needing rescuing because I was always so overwhelmed. I thought I needed someone who would give me a breather so I could concentrate on myself for a change.
Well, I did finally concentrate on myself and my own healing, after this guy so destroyed my self-esteem and made shambles of my life that I didn’t have any choice. My personal bottoming out. I laugh now thinking about asking God to please send me the right guy who would help me get back to my real self. And God scratching his or her head, sending one after another, saying okay, maybe this one will work. Well, I finally got the one that worked.
Betty, I so related to your post. My mother was an RN, and she was a master of stoic endurance. Great under pressure, but it broke her down eventually. She became embittered, depressed and simply couldn’t find a reason to like herself. My father was the rageaholic, but she was the one who taught us that it was our fault if our father got mad at us.
I loved what you wrote about getting reacquainted with all your feelings. It took a lot a courage for me to allow myself to feel bitter and angry. And like you, I did it during a period that a therapist would call “labile.” I was zooming from emotion to emotion so fast I could hard keep track of myself. It sounds like you’re movig down the path at a speed walk.
Namaste and love. I’m off to bed.
Kathy
Nic: I love the obituary! Let’s see, did you mention that he was “larger than life”? That his expertise covered more areas than could be covered in the single full page that the newspaper was willing to give you? Did you remember to mention that he was a Navy SEAL? That he liked to “spread his love around”?
I truly hope you can laugh. He sounds like such a sorry excuse for a human, I look forward to hearing that you are finally free of him. And I think your obituary idea is a brilliant exercise for you to get over him.
Kathleen: “Anger . . . 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.” That is a rallying cry!
Thank you for another thoughtful travelogue to guide us on this path of healing. I really had not claimed that positive power of anger. This may be what I need to practice this week — tapping into that profound energy so I can apply it in positive ways.
Hi Rune, nice to hear from you.
Actually I wouldn’t say that most of these guys aren’t safe to stand up to. Some of them are physically dangerous, but mine wasn’t. And I think that a lot of them are what my family would have called connivers. If you push back, they’re likely to try to talk you out of it, but it they can’t, they’ll disappear. They’re looking for easy, pleasant scores, not hard ones.
Standing up for ourselves is a state of mind, as much as anything else. We don’t have to be aggressive about it. In fact, the more confident we are, the less aggressive we become. It’s just not necessary.
I talk about anger as the whole spectrum of our internal alert system. The sooner we respond, the more likely we’re going to be responding to something minor. Obviously that’s not always the case. There are extreme situation when our lives are in danger right from the get-go. Then we’re not talking about anger; we’re talking about fear.
More common are gradually testing of our boundaries. Measuring how serious we are about maintaining our own ideas, values, plans, identities. Probing to see whether we will compromise something in order to get some dream dangled in front of us. Or how susceptible we are to a pity ploy.
The point I made at the end of the article is that being responsive to our own alert systems is almost a precursor to having an identity and life that we want to defend. It’s all part of the construct that includes knowing what we want, taking responsibility for getting it, valuing ourselves and our lives enough to be extremely cautious about who we allow to meddle with it. It all comes under the heading of having a life. But in a way, it begins, for many of us, with learning how to have boundaries and how to defend them. We need this to ground ourselves in our identities.
Then, once we get that work done, we can take a deep breath and start thinking about who we are, what we want, and how we’re going to get it.
As far as acting on our anger goes, it’s just a matter of resisting what doesn’t work for us. That may mean a confrontation or negotiation or just a request for clarification about what we’re getting out of this. It may be getting away. Or it may mean a long term plan to get something better than what we have now. Anger isn’t just about what you don’t want. It’s also about what you do want. It’s about our power to change things.
But if it’s physically dangerous to say “no,” then it’s physically dangerous to be there at all. And that’s a special case. That’s when scared trumps angry. If you’re scared, a whole other set of rules come into play.
Rune, we were writing at the same time. And thinking along the same lines.
You made me think about something I learned in non-violent communication (NVC) training. They say that you can make a request to someone, if you want them to meet you needs. They have the choice to say yes or no.
We’re so afraid of people saying no, because we think it’s about us if they refuse. But actually, according to NVC, they are giving us a gift by saying no. Because they are expressing their own needs. If you turn over a “no,” there’s a need on the other side of it.
Like I if ask someone to please tell me they love me once in a while, that person might say no because he feels it infringes on his autonomy. Then, in NVC, we try to figure out how to get my need for reassurance and his need for autonomy met.
But in terms of anger, when we resist something, because our alert bells are ringing, we can turn that resistance over and see what it is that we want. If we hear our partner promising something that we know he can’t deliver and our alert goes off, we can turn that over and think about what we want. We want a partner that is honest. We want someone who can be trusted. We want someone who respects our honesty enough to not be conducting dishonest business in front of our face.
I really didn’t understand who I was until I lived with my sociopath, and found myself getting stunned and then confused and then horrified by a lot of his behaviors. I wasn’t like that, and I didn’t want that around me. But those emotional reactions really illuminated what I was like, and what I did want.
It was a hard way of getting this self-awareness, because I really had to fight for it against the influence of his grandiosity and arrogance. But once I realized that I didn’t agree with him in many, many ways, I started to get the hang of it. I was me, and he was him. And I liked me a lot better.
Kathy- I wanted to sit down and read this article when I could give imy undivided attention to it. It was worth doing so. I have such a long list of SELF-IMPROVEMENTS and now I can add one more —
SELF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.. Probably one of the most important ones in the actual healing process. Taking time to acknowledge that we have to deal with old anger (Be it childhood/careers/friendships/relationships) thereby no longer allowing us to carry it suppress it or transfer it to present day…
Doing so enables us to become powerful in the moment – with our feelings – especially getting angry in the moment – about the moment – ultimately protecting ourselves right there on the spot – no more rationalizing situations that otherwise deserve to be addressed with anger, and remove ourselves. All because we finally will become in touch with our feelings…up to and including anger.
Lastly – I witnessed the S be able to “speak up for himself” express his “anger” in perfectly healthy situations in daily life..with others… as you said recognizing and protecting their own well-being in moment to moment experiences. AND on the flip side, one dreadful night, I witnessed him unknowingly bringing “old anger/past rage” right into the room with us – his actions and reactions were so extreme -out of left field – I even said to him – whatever happened to you in your past is right here in the room with us right now – because the way you are punching the wall, and yelling, and raging – is so unwarranted toward me right now and you know it. He just said his heart was pounding out of his chest. And I knew I had to walk out the door that night. I was in shock.
But for me, self-acknowledgment is a new term and a new goal I must add to my Healing Journey list. This article was very helpful and brought insight to me about both myself and my extox in our unhealthy relationship. Thank you.
Thanks Kathleen, I love your articles. Expressing anger has come easily to me since the Sp came into my life. Every hateful thing that I have ever thought about him I was able to express. I gave wrath because he gave no answers. Or if he did try to explain it began with a lie that I knew was a lie which only made me madder. Now I am consumed by rage. At first I felt it toward myself and him. Now I feel it toward all the people in my life who taught me to devalue myself and my needs. Lately, My rage is toward my Mom who throws him and his whore in my face constantly, who invites crack addict relatives into our home when I have made it clear they are not to be trusted and are not welcome here, and who will not leave a room where I am doing something because she would rather stay and play power struggle games than respect the fact that I’m on a heart monitor and need to have peace and her very presence makes me want to hurt her. I may seriously need to abandon my home again and start my life somewhere else away from all my family because not one of them is healthy or functional in any way. I would take my kids of course but everyone else has to go. I know that it sounds drastic, and I can just hear the relatives talking about how sick and crazy that I am, but really making excuses for people just because they share a blood line is not something that I want to do anymore. I keep hearing that I’m nuts because of the ex and can’t move on. I actually think that the truth is that there is nothing to move on to in my present life except dysfunction without eliminating the root cause of all my issues, The Crazy Mom that had to always be accommodated because that was just her and she wasn’t going to change. I know that I must make changes for my health and for my kids who have come to hate their Grandma and just want her gone. Since I know that she will not willingly leave even though she cannot begin to afford this house alone and I can afford it without her, She will not let me win by going without a fight. So I will just have to plan to uproot the kids again to be rid of her. Wish me luck.
Wini,
I thought you might find these two links (one is a recent lecture) interesting in regards to the scams you have posted about:
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/03/the-art-of-the-con/
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/487