Letting go is the point at which our recovery turns around from darkness to light. In previous articles, we have discussed all the stages of magical thinking, how we progressively become more and more willing to accept reality.
In a trauma or extended trauma, like a relationship with a sociopath, there is a lot of difficult reality to accept. Here is a recap of our healing stages or strategies:
• Denial — the most “unreal” stage, where we say it is not important, where we are at war with our own feelings
• Bargaining — we admit it hurts, but we still think it is in our power to change it
• Anger — we blame the external cause, we recover our feelings of personal power over our lives, but we continue to maintain the idea that there is something we or anyone else can do about it.
This article is about letting go, the stage where we face our losses and come to terms with our powerlessness to change them.
The light in the darkness
If the last paragraph sounded like a line from an Alcoholics Anonymous book, there is a reason. This transition from anger to acceptance is the key to the AA approach. Facing up to reality that is both the hardest thing we ever do, but also the only possible path to real healing and recovery of ourselves and our lives.
Anger — whether old embedded anger or a fresh reaction —is an expression of the “me” side of the brain. It spurs us to take action for ourselves. Embedded anger is the underlying cause of addictions — because we are “taking care of ourselves” against the forces that threaten our survival at some level. That level may be, and often is, our right to be whole human beings entitled to all our feelings and potential.
Embedded anger is usually about situations in which we feel we cannot act. If we act, we lose something even bigger. A good example of this is childhood abuse, where we “agree” to act, think or feel in certain ways in order to survive. Adult situations may include work or personal relationships where we have something at risk — like our jobs, our children’s welfare, our lifestyle.
Compromising our integrity, a word that means “wholeness,” never comes cheap. Each compromise warps us and evolves into greater complexity over time. These compromises have the full range of negative emotions attached to them — fear, anger and grief. Every one of them sets up a pattern of feelings, a “state,” that recurs in circumstances that remind us of the original situation or just exist perpetually.
These states are linked to our addictive behaviors. What we do to make ourselves feel better. We find our “drug of choice,” whether it is a chemical solution or something more socially acceptable like work or shopping to anesthetize or distract us. Beyond that, we imagine bigger solutions. The love affair that will heal us. The financial score that will relieve our stresses. The answers we might find through some self-development or spiritual pursuit. The “perfect” anything that will magically change our world.
However, unless the solution resolves that loss, eliminating it as a source of recurring states, nothing is really a permanent fix. The states keep returning. We keep searching and buying into “apparent fixes” with hungers that in retrospective seem overly risky or out of control.
The solution here, the solution to all of this complex structure of pain and faulty solutions, is in the cause. The loss. It is through the loss that we emerge on the other side of it as renewed and somehow more than we were before. The loss, in a way that we never anticipate while we are avoiding the pain, turns out to be a gift.
Resisting loss
Sociopaths offer us perfect solutions. In their cleverness at reflecting back our most powerful dreams, they “make real” our best ideas about what will fix us. For the magical moments of their efforts to recruit us, they give us a taste of what we imagine perfection to be. And so, we are relieved of the anxiety, loneliness, resentments and fears that come from our earlier compromises with our personal monsters.
It all feels so natural, so right, because none of us want to feel like we’ve lost anything. In fact, the sociopathic seduction actually reverses our progress in handling earlier traumas. Most of us are at least up to bargaining as a life strategy, and some of us have access to anger in certain circumstances. At minimum, we feel it in relationship to other people’s traumas, especially the ones that remind us of our own.
But in these relationships, we return to denying any of it was important. We lose every reason to remember, to hold onto the lessons we learned. We are free, beautiful, trusting, fully connected, with nothing standing between us and this dream. (And whatever hints or warnings that this is not what it seems get pushed away, because this is our own best idea and it seems worth anything.)
When they start depriving us of this perfect fix, we are in agony. We think it is about them, but it tends to be more than that. All the old states, every reason we wanted that fix is back and it is louder. We start going through all the stages again on all kinds of levels of our lives — denial, bargaining anger — everything that was ever related to these losses. And worse, we are in battle with the addiction, which has experienced relief and wants more.
All of this is about not wanting to feel our losses. Not wanting to lose. Wanting to be whole. We are back in the grief cycle with a vengeance. And all of it is about “no.” No this is not happening to me. No I don’t deserve this. No these are not the rules I agreed to. This is bad. I hate it. It is not part of who I am or my world. I refuse.
Graduating from anger
Anger is that roar. That animal cry that really combines the resistance and grief below it. At some point, we recognize the grief below the anger. It comes when we see that no matter how ready we are to act, no matter how well and appropriately we have responded to the alert messages of our survival system, the deed is done. It is over. There is nothing we can do about it.
In anger, we link the pain to the external cause. The sociopath did this to me. In grief, we link the pain to our own loss. It does not matter what caused it. We can blame forever, make ourselves the victims in ways that relieve us from fault, but we ultimately cannot get away from the fact that a change has occurred. And the change is in us.
Even talking about loss is hard. Ironically, we talk about it more easily when we are in denial or bargaining. I don’t want to feel like I’ve lost my ability to trust. I don’t want to feel like the world isn’t safe. I don’t want to loss the idea that I can manage my own life. I don’t want to feel like no one will ever love me again, or that I will never love anyone else. I don’t want to admit that that the money I lost represents months or years of my life. I don’t want to know that my children or my friends or family have faced losses because of my behavior.
In anger we reject all of it. We use our recovered sense of personal power to try to penetrate these losses, to turn them around. In this, we gain important insight about what happened. But that eventually puts us in touch with the great roaring grief. Our real feelings. The renewed sense of personal power is important. We need to recover our sense that we can do something about our lives. It makes us ready to learn.
The great pivot of healing
Everything that leads up to grief is getting us ready for it. To be real about our losses and how we feel about them. To face the fact that something has changed. To allow ourselves to be human again, not the childish superheroes of our attempts to magically make the changes go away.
Finally this is us being vulnerable with ourselves. Being honest. Giving up our internal defenses and our attempts to medicate our pain. This is a war that we have lost. And also won, because in grief, we are real.
For all the work we put into avoiding our grief, it is a great irony to discover that it is about being kind to ourselves. What keep us from grief are the internalized voices of harsh parents or other authorities that denied us the right to our own feelings, dreams, ideas. We accommodated their demands up to this point, but now we are taking our power back. We are in our own reality. We are finally ready to respond to our losses and to support ourselves through it. We become our own “good parents.”
How do we feel and act in grief? Everyone has their own processes, but here are some of mine:
• Tears over how the reality is different from what I wanted it to be
• Loving feelings toward what I lost or what I really wanted
• Tenderness or understanding toward myself for feeling this way
• Allowing myself to feel the loss until I am truly finished with grieving it
I am comforting myself in a way that a “perfect” parent would have treated me when I was hurt and in pain. I am reinforcing the integrity of my psyche by not denying how I really feel, and giving myself the entitlement to go through whatever I have to go through to finish the loss and move on.
How we let go
Grief is about letting go. We don’t learn that until we surrender to the reality and to our grief. At the beginning, we are afraid of the feelings, afraid of how they will feel. This surrender is always an act of courage, though it becomes easier after we have done this a few times. We do it because is the only course left to us, but many of us avoid it, staying in anger or earlier stages, because we are so afraid of these feelings.
But allowing ourselves to feel them serves many purposes. The most important purpose grief serves is to separate us from the cause of our grief. The loss.
The more we grieve, the more we realize that what we are grieving is not us. What grieves is us. The feelings are us. But the loss is not. It is something we wanted or loved. Something that we may have imagined was part of us, and the loss made us feel like less than we were. But as we grieve, it becomes more and more clear that a difference exists.
The length of time we grieve is exactly equivalent to how long it takes us to realize this. Our grief may be multi-layered in that sense. One of my greatest anguishes after my relationship with the sociopath was the knowledge that he did not love me, combined with all the reasons he gave for not loving me. Most of them were about my age and how I looked.
Grief at his not loving me was mixed up with grief about the years I lost. I met him in blooming middle age when my hormones were wild, I was vibrantly attractive, and I was at the peak of my career. My grief over him not loving me evolved to grief over the losses of age. My appearance was changing. Without being able to provide a child, my relationship with a man was never going to include the protective elements that I valued so much. My likelihood of having the type of relationship that had made me happiest —trophy wife of an older man — was vanishing. That part of my life was over.
This is personal to me, my reality. Whether it is the truth about me in anyone else’s view is not the point. It was a massive piece of how I navigated the world. It incorporated a great internal complex of “rules,” of expectations about how the world would treat me, and of accommodations I’d made to early compromises of my life. Letting it go was terrifying to me, because I had nothing to replace it.
But in grieving his not loving me, and then all the linked losses associated with it, I found them firming up in my mind. From murky anxieties and resistances and resentments, the real nature of my fear and losses coalesced. I could “look at them” and see them as something I wanted and treasured perhaps, but there was another me that was looking at them. A more central me that was measuring if I was going to die of it or if I had other resources, and that eventually decided that was then and this is now. So now what?
It didn’t happen overnight. But it got a lot healthier and a lot more direct, as a process, once I let myself cry over the loss of his love. Or the loss of belief in the honesty of his love. Or the loss of belief in him as someone I could trust or even understand. Every time I started somewhere, grieving something, letting myself feel the loss, I got to a letting go.
It didn’t matter who caused it, because it didn’t change what I was dealing with. This was between me and me, and my need to be whole, to be real with myself.
Getting stuck in grief
Sometimes we feel like we have more losses than we can deal with, and we become muddled in despair. This is obviously a time when an anti-depressant may help us manage an overload of sadness, so that we can process our way through it. But here are some other suggestions for dealing with grief that we feel is not progressing.
The single best technique I found to process grief is to follow my feelings. Often when we focus on an event that gives us strong feelings, we are not really clear about what aspect is triggering them. If we turn our attention to our feelings, essentially asking them what they are about, we can often get a clearer idea. Like I thought I was grieving him not loving me, when I really was grieving a loss of what made me lovable to men. Paying attention to my feelings helped surface those insights. (I should probably add here that in rebuilding, I found a lot of less transient things that make me lovable.)
Another technique is to listen to our own resistance to the loss. Grief that goes on and on is usually about a battle within ourselves. We refuse to let the loss go, because we have some internal rule about its necessity. Again in my own case, I was afraid of becoming hard or bitter. To be attractive or lovable, I had a rule to be cheerful, no matter what. I looked at that loss, and saw it was something I learned, not something I really believed. Letting go of that rule was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
A third technique that I used with particularly sticky losses was arguing with God. It took me a while to see that I was doing this. I kept getting stuck in anger and feeling like a victim, because I felt that I’d done my part. Even if I couldn’t trust the sociopath, my parents, or anyone else, surely there had to be some rules I could depend on. Surely God had not put me here to just be a straight man for other people’s pathologies. For me, conversations with God set me back on the right path, because God’s response was always, “What are you going to do with this? That is what interests me.”
What we learn
Grief teaches us something that literally changes our world. That is the difference between what is transient and what is not. What is us and what are simply changing circumstances.
Something inside of us endures no matter what we lose. This central self is whole and invulnerable, no matter what happens to us. A great deal of what we imagine to be our true identities are things that we learned, often through threat to our survival or rules about what it takes to be accepted or loved. We identify ourselves in triumphs or failures, appearances or things that reflect these learned rules of existence.
Grieving clarifies that we belong to ourselves. All those other learned rules may have some reason for being, some use to us. But in grief, we gain new perspectives, seeing them as more or less functional guidelines and not who we are. We are what is grieving, surviving, identifying our feelings and what triggers them. By coming home to our own reality, we become comfortable and confident in a world of many realities.
We become more authentic. We are more in our skin, seeing through our own eyes. We are also freer to build lives that reflect who we are, rather than what we are afraid of.
In the next article, we will discuss rebuilding. In the meantime, for those who are making this transition from anger into grief, I reassure you that you truly deserve kindness. You have been kind to so many other people. It is time to give it to you.
Namaste. The brave and tender spirit in me salutes the brave and tender spirit in you.
Kathy
ps. Yesterday my son D discovered a red-tailed hawk nest almost in my yard (which is mostly forest) which is very unusual for them to nest so close to people. He picked up a hand full of juviinle feathers underneath it, so they have apparently raised at least one clutch successfully there.
My parrot, Oliver, “does” the hawk’s cry so I know it has been around quite close for some time. Neat-o!
OxDrover:
Your story about the red-tailed hawk just made me think about my walk through Central Park this morning. As I was walking through Strawberry Fields (John Lennon Memorial) I was a cardinal in the middle of a patch of jonquils, snowdrops, violets, crocuses and daffodils. The red, yellow, white and purple combo was absolutely gorgeous. A harbinger of Spring. Then, it STARTED SNOWING!!!
Anyhow, I continued through the park. As I hit Fifth Avenue, I glanced up at one of the buildings, and saw the hawks which have taken up residence, swoop down into their nest. One of them was carrying a dead pigeon. Of course, while I applaud their efforts in pigeon eradication, it is a losing battle against those rats with wings. Still, it was a really amazing sight.
Regarding getting rid of clutter — living in NYC where storage bins are expensive forces me to keep it to a minimum. My rules are simple:
(1) for every new thing that comes through the door, one old thing must go out;
(2) unless it’s a signed first edition, I will never read a book again, so once it’s read, it goes off to the “lending library” next to the laundry room;
(3) you wear 20 percent of your clothes, 80 percent of the time, so if you haven’t worn it in a year, you will probably never wear it again;
(4) go through your closet and batch our clothes by color and with the hangar hook facing toward you. Each time you wear the piece of clothing, rehang it the normal way. End of 1 year, any hangars still facing you are proof you haven’t worn it;
(5) if it is in storage and doesn’t have sentimental value, ask yourself if spending 1200 bucks a year to store a table worth 200 bucks is a wise way to manage your money;
(6) get rid of all articles torn out of papers and magazines. You can find it online;and
(6) if you can’t identify what’s on the plate, it has no business going past your lips. This is very effective for (a) cleaning out your refrigerator and (b) a good rule to live by in the case of airline food.
Dear Matt,
Sounds like you are a sensible man! Good rules! I got rid of all the clothes that don’t fit (a bunch of them) then cut down to what I will reasonably wear–a church dress, a funeral dress, a go-to-the-doctor dress—the rest is “around the farm” wear. The “good things” that I have (especially winter clothing) I pack into two cartons (I have plenty of storage room now) and get out carton A one year, and carton B the next year. These wonderful wool sweaters etc. should last me the rest of my life.
I do read books again, but am becoming more selective about what I keep. I have many reference books that I use occasionally, mostly medical, that I keep, but have donanted a great many of my history books that I used for research purposes for my living history group, or for the three local history books I wrote and published, to our local library.
I am OCD about keeping old business records, but they are in plastic tubs, labeled and sealed (and BTW they have come in very handy in the past with the IRS etc.) The kids can chunk them when I am gone and save the tubbies.
I very much agree with your #5 rule!!!!
Someone once told me that “hoarding” is a sign of greed, and in some ways I think they are right. I know lots of people that are “hoarders” of the most outlandish things in the world that they NEVER use, and live in DELUSIONAL STATES about it all.
I’m not a “neat freak” by any means, but I want to know where my stuff is so I can find it when I need it, otherwise no reason to have it. With my short term memory problems now, it just about HAS to be that way or I am continually looking for things.
Even “sentimental” things are not so much sentimental any more. I gave away all the gifts that my “egg donor” had given me through the years—just didn’t want them any more. Why should I look at something every day that just reminds me of her? I asked my sons if they wanted them and when they declined I gave them to people hwo would enjoy them as objects not just as “sentimental” things.
Most of the stuff we save as “sentimental” things we don’t look at once in 10 years and when we die our kids don’t know who all those people in the pictures and old high school annuals are anyway…so I’ve even been chunking a lot of that kind of stuff. I get a box full of it and let the guys go through it and take anything that they want, then toss the rest.
Decluttering my life is a good feeling, and all the neatly labeled boxes in the closet so I can find things is reassuring that my life is assuming some order now. I didn’t realize how many of some things I had and I donated a lot of them to the tornando victims last year as well. I had bunches of almost or new sheets, towels, etc. and enough cook ware to start a college kitchen, so out it went to a good use for people hwo lost everything. I only need two sets of sheets per bed, and a few towels, it isn’t like I don’t have a washing machine and they last almost forever anyway.
Now I have room enough in my kitchen and bathroom cabinets to store what I really use and need.
I think the chaos that we have lived in for so long has effected us in more ways than one. I never had the energy before to even CARE about all this crap and stuff, now I have energy to tackle it and I CARE about how things are rather than just saying “Oh, I’ll take care of that later.” LATER IS NOW!
When we are so physically and emotionally TIRED from the chaos and pain of our lives with the Ps, just sapped out of all kinds of strengths nothing is important to us, even order in our lives. Having energy and the ability to FOCUS it is a new thing for me right now, it has been years since I have felt so energetic and it is getting better and better over the last year. If I get any better I won’t be able to stand myself! LOL
OxDrover:
One of the few decisions I came to when I was in PV was that I would have less stress in my life if I bought redwelds and manila file folders to sort out the stuff related to the job search and the IRS audit I’m going through. Hmmm. IRS audit, job loss and relationship with a sociopath. All I need is the bluebird of happiness to swoop in and make this picture complete.
It’s funny, I’m finding the more stuff I get rid off and the less I have to maintain, the happier I am. I have a beautiful watch collection. Not the time to sell, but when the economy picks back up, I’m sending them to auction. They are beautiful pieces, but everytime I have to take them in for repairs, I break out into a cold sweat out of fear for what it may cost me.
I agree with your chaos theory. I always say that my mother’s kitchen cabinets are a metaphor of her. The kitchen is completely orderly on the surface, but you open a cabinet drawer and the junk cascades out on you. Actually, now that I think about it, S’s apartment was cramed to the rafters with junk, and he kept acquiring things, even though he didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Since my drawers and cabinets are organized, I’ll assume that I’m more ordered than I give myself credit for.
Matt, my house usually looks “lived in” but not dirty or too cluttered, and I clean and de-clutter at least a couple of times a week most of the time. When I am really depressed though, Ii don’t do anything, don’t care about anything. It gets pretty “bad” by my standards.
When I am feeling well, and energetic, unless I am in a big declutter mode (which I am right now with bankers boxes stacked by the front door which are labeled to go to the auction) it is usually ready for company at any time. Different people have different standards of what is “clean” and what is not. I’m not obscessive about it but do want it “sanitary” at the very least, and not a lot of “stuff” out of place. I know people though whose house and environment is so cluttered that it is impossible to “clean” around it, and they actually just have little “pathways” between rooms. I can’t understand how they can live like that, and it makes me wonder WHY?
I saw a show on PBS once about people who are compulsive hoarders, and there are actually support groups for these people, and apparently it is an anxiety disorder, and if they get rid of their stuff they go into an anxiety attack. I’m not talking about those people who have a “real problem” with their anxiety, but it does make me wonder about others who have so much stuff. My old college buddy that I recently told to kiss my grits because he broke his word to me, lives like that. Stays broke all the darned time because he is continually buying stuff at auctions or projects (BIG projects) that he will never complete. He bought an entire metal house and it is delivered, but he never has enough money to build the foundation much less get it assembled. He “thinks” he can put it up himself (he is 65 years old and has no equipment or knowledge to do this job, much less the money to do it with) so it makes me wonder sometimes why he runs his life “emotionally” rather than logically. Emotionally he apparently wants to do this, but logically, the “ain’t no way” it is gonna happen.
I actually DO complete projects, though not always as fast as I would like, but don’t hang on to things there is no way I COULD complete with either the funds, knowledge or strength I have.
Yet, in other ways, I was as (or more) “delusional” than my buddy, because I kept my P-son “project” and there was no way that was going to be “fixed” LOL I guess we all have our foibles and our emotional blind spots. ROTFLMAO
I “need” (logically) Fat and Hairy like I “need” another hole in my head, but they give me pleasure and hearing them bray in the mornings is better than a rooster crowing!
I’m thinking right now, (” I needed”.) I hate that fact.
What I KNOW, now is. I’m going to be okay. I have a wealth of so called friends. I think, I may, end up believing in them.
Today driving home from my NEW job, I sensed a despair and Acted on it. I cried all the way home. I can’t believe that I, at 47 yrs old has fallen for this crap.
A Friend of mine’s/ours son was seriously injured in an accident( no acc inssurance) on Sunday. He will make it! I hope, I pray. One of my ‘real’ friends found him basically, dead , after his Quadding accident. She is blaming herself.
N/C w P. So, I want to donate P’s things from MY storage
for the Benefit on our friends behalf. I will put his name on all and give him the noriority that he always wanted. Do you think this is a bad thing to do? I feel it is the right thing to do.
LOST: That sounds a bit like “selling the Porsche at the garage sale for $15,” but it sounds like a good cause!
At 47 y/o if you got fooled by a mental disorder that has been fooling researchers and mental health professionals for at least several hundred years, then you should pat yourself on the back! Good job! You figured it out EARLY!!!
This wasn’t even about you “needing.” This was some person with a twisted brain who looked real, but really isn’t in the same reality as the rest of us. Cry, rage, congratulate yourself for figuring this out . . .
And if you’re going to donate those things for charity — that might be a good out! Just make sure it doesn’t come back to bite you.
Dear LostinAZ –
I often wondered what in the world the people on the highway thought was wrong with me whenever I would “lose it” in the car. There was a good stretch of time, I would be driving and a song would send me over the edge or just a thought of all Ive been through — and I would let it out. Think it was some of the best therapy I ever gave myself! Sunglasses help alot too ! 🙂
Im so sorry to hear about your friends son. My prayers go out to him and hope you are doing ok.
As far as donating the P’s stuff – I dont think its wise to do. I think it will lend toward greater trouble for you.. perhaps even unnecessary legal trouble if he gets angry enough. Not to say he will win, but he just might get angry enough to do something drastic. You may want to consider giving him notice in writing to have his items removed by the end of the month, and if they are not removed that you will donate the things for charity. Thereby giving you legal coverage…. again the point is to avoid him having a reason to come back and haunt you — by you “donating” HIS things without him knowing sets up a whole new can of worms.
Sometimes the NC rule can be broken by means of legal notices or intent to collect, etc. And the reason to inform him now that he has 30 days to remove his stuff or donating it….. means you are getting a head start on the inevitable contact. Because once you donate his stuff without telling him, he inevitably will contact you for his stuff and you will have to tell him you donated it — and then the drama will begin.
So, yes there is a way to accomplish donating his stuff…once you’ve given him notice and he does not adhere to the deadline.
Dear Lost,
I agree with learned. While your friend’s son is a “good cause” the thing is that by letting him have his stuff in your storage and by you agreeing therefore to “care for” it, he might even have a legal case. If you NOTIFY HIM that he has 30 days (get a return-receipt letter) and THEN he does not get his stuff, THEN you can donate it to anything safely.
My suggestion is to get another unit and move your stuff out if you decide you need to get a place to keep your stuff in, because if you let him get into a “mixed” storage he will either purposely hurt/destroy or steal your stuff just for spite (I don’t need a crystal ball to predict that one! LOL) so I would move anything I wanted to keep OUT so there was nothing but HIS stuff in there, and give him the 30 days, and then have informed the management that it would not be paid any more. That way I think you would be “off the hook” legally AND “morally.”
I have some stuff in a storage facility that is my facility, and I had been letting the store the stuff there for free and I intend to tear down the facility starting June 1 (part of the roof blew off) and I gave them notice that they needed to have their stuff out by that date. They acknowledged that they would (that was 60 days ago now) they have made no effort to do so, and actually I don’t expect them to do much. But at that point, it is off my back. They are “hoarders” and most of the stuff they are hoarding is JUNK, though some of it is not. But there really is nothing there of any real value. But the point is that though I tried to “help out” these people, they expected me to take responsibility for their storage of their junk, and ENABLE them. I set limits and boundaries, however.
Many times people whe are Ps will NOT respect your boundaries, and these people though NOT Ps still did not expect my boundaries, so I have had to ENFORCE the boundaries and I will continue to do so. No extensions on time. I will simply remove the doors on the facility on June 2 and the stuff will be “open” to whoever wants to come in there and steal it. So if that doesn’t prompt them to get it and it disappears, too bad.
Thanks guys, for the inspiration. I’m leaving today for Sedona just for Overnite but getting out of here even for one day will do me some good. I have to work Sat, otherwise I’d like to get out of here for GOOD, forever. Hopefully I will find the so called vortex thats supposed to be there!
Hey Meg..are you out there? I will say prayers for you..I pray to hear you sing.
Namaste