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
“Protect me from what I really want” is cute. But it’s important to know what that really means.
What we want is the expression of our soul, filtered through the learning of our material life.
If there is some learning in our material life that is blocking the true expression of our soul, then we are going to be attracted to experiences to unblock it. Like these big “love affairs” with the sociopaths.
I read tarot cards for a living for a while, and I really like the symbology of the cards. The cycle starts with the Fool following an butterfly right off a cliff. This is us deciding to go after something we want. And then the sequence of the cards is all about the completion of that journey or lesson. We go through learnings, masteries, losses, friendships, love, insights, divine guidance, temptations from our lower selves, and ultimately complete the course. We have evolved through the experience and our wants have stepped up a level. We are ready to want the next thing.
For me, the sociopath represented a “brass ring” that was particularly precious to me. It was all about wanting to be a writer, but not learning to write. I’d already done that. Or having something to write about. I’d done that too. What I needed was to be able to focus on a long project and complete it, when someone wasn’t holding a gun to my head (money-related deadlines). I needed to have enough confidence in myself and the mental discipline to follow-through.
That was really what this relationship was about. In retrospect, the huge attachment to him, the depth of pain I felt, the fearful resistance to change, it was all ultimately about how powerfully I wanted this dream and what was keeping me from it.
I admired him for his commitment to his identity as a writer, and his single-minded lifestyle that put everything else second. When he paid attention to me, I imagined I was returning to my old life as a writer in a shared life with another writer (what I had in my 20s with the second husband who died when I was 23). The dream was all in my own head, but it was so powerful that I overlooked everything — all the clear signals that this was going to come out badly for me — because I wanted that dream so much.
And I got what I came for. Not how I imagined I was going to get it. Not the life with another writer. But the confidence and the discipline and the belief that I could and should do this. It was hell getting here, but that wasn’t because of him. It’s because it was so traumatic to give up the rules of living that were born in childhood trauma. I had to revisit those traumas and undo those rules. And it was the most fearful and ultimately courageous journey of my life. And it was the best, and possibly the first, really meaningful thing I ever did for myself.
Now, when I want anything other than the pursuit of that dream, I ask myself why do you want it? I’ve had plenty of temptations to get distracted. Including men who showed up after the sociopath (sex, romance), and work opportunities that would have involved a “real job” where I work full-time for someone else (more security, money, health insurance), opportunities to get deeply involved in other people’s lives in other ways (being needed, emotional security, the satisfaction of doing good). I look at their impact on what I’m doing now, and either turn them down or strictly control their impact on my life.
So, I’m on my next Fool’s journey, going after another thing I want. With all the adventures to comes with that.
The thing is, when we want something, we make a choice. We deliberately choose a path. That path will change us. And having chosen the path, we will also change the world. Just in doing it. We will leave behind people who can’t come with us. And we will use the resources we find to move us forward, resources that may not now be available for someone else. We may have to fight. We may have to lean on other people. If we believe in the importance of this “want,” we do these things.
Some people keep hesitating about wanting anything. What if I make a mistake? I thought that for a long time. But then I realized that my life was there to be used. It was better to make a mistake and possibly leave some mess in trying to accomplish something that just sit around worrying about what to do next. Every day is worth as much as we put into it, or as little.
So what am I trying to say here? I guess if I’d known how expensive and hard it would be to change myself through this relationship, I never would have done it. But I also know that once I made the commitment, there was no turning back. I thought I wanted him. But what I really wanted was this — the me I am now, what I am capable of, what’s going to come out of it.
It’s not my last “want.” There will be more. But this is the one that I’m on right now. And it makes me alive. Stretching, growing, living through the growing pains, learning something everyday. I thought he was the most vibrant experience of my life, however painful it was. Now I realize, he was the beginning of a life lived more fully and a record of my life that truly reflects who I am. Who I want to be.
So, yes, fear your wants. Or at least recognize that your deepest desires are going to take you on a wild ride, especially if this is your soul’s effort to clear the deck of some old stuff that’s keeping you from being your best self. But love it for the education.
I keep returning to that quote by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in response to a question from a journalist about how he could accomplish so much in the hardships of desert life. He said, “The thing is not to care that it hurts.”
That’s the last thing to worry about.
Kathleen: LOL…put it in the garbage, cat liner, shred it that was so funny. I think that is a good idea.
Rune: He is a sorry excuse for a human being. My lawyer wants to file all kinds of petitions and take his depostion, etc. She just doesn’t know who she is dealing with. I want to give in to be free from him but I have to think of the long term since our child is only 2. But I know it is going to be a long battle since he is a pathological liar and he will fight to the end. I will definitely let everyone know when I am legally free of him!
Kathleen , thanks so much for the post last night. The urge which still is underneath goes like this”i want him to know what he’s missing and what a kind, loving person i am and with all my faults and imperfections i still have people who love me unconditionally. I want the urge to know that other men find me attractive and worth something. And last i want to know why the urge can’t see what a good male friend has told me over and over again that i am special and not just like all the rest. love kindheart. thanks again Kathleen(my beloved grandmas name) for giving me a new spin on the urge.
Kathleen, Thank you for your articles, your reply, and your validation. My heart issue began when I purchased a home full of toxic mold. I don’t know if it was the mold or the stress of losing my home and all my belongings and the constant battle with lawyers, the DA, and everyone who wants to excuse the lie that was sold to me. I had a great home inspection which revealed no issues. I had a property disclosure which denied knowledge of any problems with water or moisture. The fact is that my home inspector had been sued and lost 2 times before for poor work. My real estate agent claimed this guy was a great friend, a good Christian man, and an excellent inspector. The other fact is that the sellers had a contract on my house that was rescinded due to a bad home inspection where water was found to be in the duct work. No repairs were made and I was given the same property disclosure as the first family with the exact same date stating no knowledge. So is it the mold ? Is it the stress? Is it both? That is the million dollar question. This case is dragging out due to continued health problems including Asthma, COPD, allergies, year long resistant sinus infections which produced teaspoon sized blood clots which I coughed up and every family member is sick in some way. The heart issue was discovered while I was being treated for all this other stuff. My heart rate runs 100-170 all day long. If I get upset it goes up, If I move around it goes up. It goes off when I sleep. It is very random but stress does increase my rate. My Bp is actually text book good or very low. It was 78/62 one night at work which led to a near fainting spell. So for now, it is simple tachycardia, high rate. The monitor is for 30 days over first week of April. My sinus infection is back even though I have had 6 weeks of Levaquin and Avelox. Which followed 3 weeks on Z-pack. I notice that when the infection gets stronger my rate also increases. Basically, it is a mystery. I started therapy and he wants to put me on Klonopin to calm me down and help me sleep. Between the stuffy nose and stress I can’t relax. I’m on 300 dollars a month for allergy meds which don’t really help. No matter what the cause my Mom knows what it does to me to have to hear about the ex and his whore. She does it because it makes her feel big to say without saying, “see he cares about me still. He doesn’t care about you or your kids.” We ignore him and he ignores us. She greets him like a long lost lover and he uses her to make himself look like a swell guy at work. She seeks him out. I try to avoid him. It is a very small town I could see him every day if I sought him out. I seek to know where he is to avoid those stores. He works for a man who owns practically every store in this town and the surrounding towns so he is hard to escape. I would love to leave but I have been here over 20 yrs. My kids were born and raised here and I don’t want to take them away from their friends, but My daughter who has been homeschooled is trying to get accepted to a boarding school far enough away from here to be away from him but close enough to visit friends. My son graduates college this May and he had planned to stay here since he has his own apt out back of the main house, but he could move to Raleigh to seek work when he graduates if I were to leave here. I put my Mom on notice that she is to not speak to me or be in my part of the house. If she violates my conditions, I will leave her here holding the bag on a house she cannot afford. She can feel free to leave at any time but it is a joint lease and I can’t force her out. So basically, I have set the rules of the ship and I am the captain. All who seek to due me harm can and will be forced to walk the plank. LOL. Love the mental picture of that.
Joy, write me offline. My e-mail address is on the author’s page. I know something that might help your health, maybe.
Congratulations on cutting off your mother. Your story sounds like there’s freedom in the air. Raleigh is a nice town.
Dear Kathleen, thank you for your reply, food for thoughts! Maybe the last sentence from Lawrence not to care if it hurts is THE key. Not to become a masochist or even liking being a masochist, but to aknowledge that growth has to come inevitably with pain. Even the tiny bud that has to turn into a beautiful rose on my balcony is now a fragile bunch of twisted foilage barely visible and has to overcome the cold of a snowstorm now covering all the streets of my town. But it will make it!
And maybe I just have to change the players instead of switching to whole other brand new game I am not aware of the rules yet? Not to give up my aces in the sleeve but to learn how to play chess and keeping the aces in case I need them? (in analogy to the saying: “four aces in your sleeve won’t help you win in chess”) I think that I am now “learning the rules of the universal game”, and in the end it is irrelevant which game I play exactly, they are interchangeable. The rules and to learn how to apply them; and most important: knowing the players, whether they cheat or try to have a good time with me. I often talk with my patients about THEIR work situation, and it is everywhere the same, basically. People, even the best of the best get duped, even in cloisters, restaurants, by husbands, and also in hospitals where everybody is SO altruistic!
What do I want? What is my dream? My horoscope (I do NOT believe in horoscopes!) says for this week to keep cool and postpone the rage (how do the stars know THAT??) or transform it into something constructive. In my work I sometimes am confronted with “last wishes”, and I often find no answer if I am questioning myself. Most probably I would carry on with my life not making a fuss.
I have to remind myself of the rosebud in the snow, and live on! The solution will reveal itself with time. It is unwise of the rose to start growing because of the calendar ignoring the weather. Patience! I wish you all a wonderful day! Namaste!
Thank you, Kathy. It’s been several years and much therapy to get to where I’m at in my recovery. Your articles have offered both poignant, yet quality, points of reflection and affirmation at times of relevancy, prompting further growth. I am certain there is greater meaning and purpose to your suffering that benefits others, as I am one of them. Nemaste
This is off topic, but of course “gaslighting” causes anger too. This is an excerpt from a political rant at the democratic Underground…it struck me how what is described as political power and behavior is exactly like P behavior. Especially the “alternate reality”… which is easier to achieve than most might think. Enjoy….
Excerpt
“A couple months ago I wrote a DU post titled “The GAME”, which I began by noting the many unmentionable things in U.S. politics, and I concluded that the purpose of the censoring of so many important issues is the creation of an alternate reality among a critical mass of the American people. The belief in that alternate reality is necessary in order to convince the American people to continue to play the GAME that has been laid out for them by the GAME’s masters. For the actual reality of the GAME’s methods and purposes, I believe, is so terrible that if people consciously recognized it they would refuse to play, and the GAME would have to be radically altered or come to an end ”“ peaceful or otherwise. The ultimate purpose of the GAME’s masters is to arrange the world to their advantage or according to the way that they believe things should be. In pursuit of their goals we have wars, overthrow of sovereign governments, and obscene wealth accumulation into the hands of the GAME’s masters and prime players.”
Any of this sound familiar?
Peace to all LF’ers.
Kathleen Hawk, so much I can relate to in your lines:
“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.”
WOW!
As of right now, THIS IS the root that I need to examine in my own issues. What is my discomfort level? Where do I say “enough” and leave? What kept me going with the s?
Fortunately in my current job I am happy.
It is my personal relationships where I trap myself into impossible situations.
Thank you for the thought provoking article. You have looked this issue right in the face.
Thank you, duped, for the kind words. That, too, is what I hope.
Eyeswideshut, I was thinking last night about some of the previous posts, and yours certainly applies here too. There is something from us to think about in “withholding.” I was talking about withholding trust. There are many people here who talk about the sociopaths withholding love or sex. And now you are talking about withholding elements of truth — the kind of obfuscation that sociopaths are so good at, but it’s also not so different from the work I do in PR, focusing on certain elements of truth to shape people’s awareness. (Like, if I’m trying to sell software, I’m not going to put out a press release to talk about the difficulties a client is having in development, but rather the benefits a buyer will get from their product.)
I talked in this article about anger’s relationship to power. The fact that the capacity for anger — that is to respond to threatening or challenging circumstances — is a necessary piece of personal power. And that the flip side of anger (what we don’t want) is knowledge of what we want.
Well, withholding is also part of that. Withholding is an exercise of personal power. It is choice to use our personal resources as we see fit. Or as suits our purposes.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I know that my outrage about the withholding exercised by my sociopath was caused by an imbalance between us. He felt free to withhold, while I was giving, giving, giving. In his infidelities, he withheld sexual exclusivity while I had given up all my other relationship options for him. In his making private plans that had nothing to do with me, he withheld the openness of communication that was a matter of course for me. Likewise in hiding details of his history or excluding me from his relationships with his closest friends. My life was an open book and, except for work, dedicated to him. His life was only as open as he felt necessary to deal with me. It was a choice he made, and when told him that I wanted him to act more like me in the relationship, he would say “that’s not part of my deal.”
I went to a therapist in our first years together, who said that he was a hard negotiator and, with him, I would have to read the fine print on any agreement we had. She smiled when she said it, as though it were amusing. But it was not amusing to me. I didn’t have any fine print in my contracts (to my knowledge). I didn’t know how to play that game. There were only two ways I approached relationships — on or off. And there were times when he shook his head at me, especially when I complained about something, and said, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you stop doing it? What is wrong with you that you don’t take care of yourself?”
I had no idea what any of them were talking about. I do now.
I have listened to people talking about “giving up power” for years. I sort of got it, especially the part about assigning people authority, making them in charge of some aspect of knowledge. (Like one of my husbands was the one who took care of the car maintenance, and I didn’t want to know about it. But then I was dependent on him in that way.) But what I didn’t get was the idea of simply giving up all my choices, by giving myself away entirely, and then being dependent on the other person to appreciate that, to being honorable about the vulnerability I was exhibiting, and to act like he valued the resources (of me) that I was putting in his hands.
What happened with the sociopath was the he picked and chose which parts of me he wanted — the sex, the money, the professional assistance — and just left the rest of it on the table. He wasn’t interested. And when I more or less demanded that he be interested, he accommodated me in a wooden, false way, and clearly was unhappy about having to deal with all this emotional drama. And more, he spent effort telling me why he wasn’t interested in the rest of it — all the disparaging comments that destroyed my self-esteem. Because I expected him to want all of me, if he was willing to take any of me.
If there is one thing this guy was good at, it was making choices about what he wanted and what he was willing to give to get it. It totally destabilized me. I remember crying on so many people’s shoulders about how I was being used. And how he wasn’t playing by the rules. And all my friends comforting me, and telling me what a bad guy he was. At the same time, I had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew something I didn’t know, and that he was exhibiting power over his own life that was beyond anything I had ever seen or imagined.
Yes, he was withholding. But he was also making choices. In fact his entire life was about making choices. Not just about what he didn’t want to do, and therefore refused to do. But also about what he wanted. He spent more time than anyone I’ve ever known thinking about what interesting thing he could do next, or what could be an amusing or feel-good experience, or how to limit the impact of work on his life so that he could spend more time on what he chose, rather than what he had to do.
It simply blew me away. I resented the hell out of it. How could his life be so different from mine, which was all about fulfilling commitments, keeping people happy, and mostly a kind of bottomless garbage can into which I poured the hours and energy of my days. And there he was with all this freedom. Not just of time. But of will.
So, to wind this up, here’s what I’ve come to think about all this. All of us have will and the power to make things happen. All of us have the power to give or withhold, and the ability to make the choices that match the objectives of our will. If our objectives are “being loved,” then we make choices that influence other people to act in a certain way toward us. Always a risky business, since other people have their own will and objectives. But if our objectives are about ourselves, getting something, accomplishing something, being a certain kind of person, we are working with something we can control. (We can’t control all the outside circumstances, and some things are harder work than others.) This is the first time I’ve ever written this, and I’m not sure if I’m being clear, but it’s part of the fact that we create our own lives.
The other fact is that we’re dealing constantly with other people and things that have their own will. And part of life is standing up to that, enforcing our will as best we can against all these other wills. Like heating our house to fight back against the winter cold. Or staying “I don’t agree” or “this doesn’t work for me” when someone communicates their will to us, and then coming up with clear statements about what we want and holding onto our intent to have our own thoughts, feelings, resources and plans. And of course, in getting our own objectives me, we develop all kinds of other skills like persuasion, negotiation, collaboration, etc. But it all comes down to using our resources to achieve our ends.
Surrender is the opposite of withholding. And I think it’s one of the reasons we are so angry with the sociopaths and so angry with ourselves. We gave up our resources — love, sex, money, time, plans for the future — without getting an equal return. And it’s possible that’s exactly what they were looking for, someone who would do that, someone they could sucker into an emotional response to surrender ourselves and our resources and our power, if they could just figure out what was important enough to us to elicit that response. Instead of keeping our choice-making hats on and never taking them off.
I once knew an aging lesbian couple, who were two of the smartest and most respected people in the lesbian community where they lived. One had money. The other one was a well-known feminist writer, and had very little money. The writer said frequently, in front of her partner, that she made a daily decision whether to stay or go. They had been together for nearly two decades, and they had legendary arguments. The writer never stopped making that choice, and she wasn’t kidding. At her request, the wealthier partner created a trust fund for her so that she had the freedom to stay or go. When my friend, the writer, died a few years ago, they were still together.
Now this may not be a relationship model that works for women in child-bearing years, unless they have money of their own. But it’s something to think about. My writer friend withheld any promise of forever, and in doing that refused to surrender a profound level of choice in her life.
The truth is we all have that choice. It shows in the high divorce rate, the decisions all of us are making today stop loving someone, to get them out of our lives. But some of us just aren’t conscious of how much choice we really have, until we get to this point, of having to untangle ourselves from an emotionally and materially complex situation. Perhaps if we had stayed conscious of our power to withhold ourselves, to know that we always have a choice, and part of taking care of ourselves is to not act as though we can really give our future away, it would be different for us today.
We can always change. And learning to withhold — that we are entitled and responsible to do that, as part of managing our resources — may be an important change we make for our own wellbeing.
And that includes taking responsibility for withholding our belief of what anyone tells us, until we feel comfortable with them and what we are hearing. Like eyeswideshut’s story about the “game.” Can we live in such ambiguity? Of course, we can. Life is full of ambiguities. Things that we don’t know and we’re waiting for more information, before we decide how we feel or what we believe. What is not ambiguous is that we belong to ourselves.