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
Kathy, this is the first time I have commented after following the site since last year. I had to say what you wrote was so spot on, so good at trying to make clear what is such a confusing situation.
After trying to get the crazy man in my life to leave for the last three years, then being charmed again only to be hurt and then back to square one, I recently started to grieve, waking in the night and crying and realising that it is really not about him, he will never change. I was an easy target because of rejection by my family and an overly romantic nature that craved affection.
I have to heal myself, take care of myself, and I think this has finally started. I have my own business and although this man has tried to control me and wipe me out emotionally, using a see-saw of charm then abuse, I was lucky not to be taken in enough to let him in to my business or bank account.
My savings are gone because he has lived off me for the last four years, but I am lucky that I still have something to build on. The grief has now started to harden my resolve in a really strange way. I have said he is to leave and this time I feel strong about not falling for the ‘charm’ and the tears.
Your writing dropped in to my email this morning as if it was fate. It is such a help to know these things are being dealt with by others and I am not crazy or alone. Many thanks.
One last thing; this is not the same man is it? Lol. I was asked to sell my house and buy a boat to sail off in, but I knew even then that one day i would either come back to port and find it gone, or maybe end up over the side.
One question; why is it that we know even from the start that these are not good people, that we walk right in to it?
I will never understand that.
Thanks again.
Dear Newstart,
Thanks for posting and sharing, and welcome here! This is a healing place as I am sure you know if you have been around lurking and reading for a while! Glad you are here and glad you are making strides in getting this parasite out of your life! Welcome!
Once again, Lovefraud has given me information that is helping with my struggle to be free of the sociopath’s web of deceit. Interestingly, he recently met a friend of mine through an internet dating service. She didn’t know he was my ex-boyfriend but gave me a call. Her initial thinking was…”I hope he’s not stalking you.” He asked lots of questions about how she and I met, when we see each other, when did we last see each other, etc etc. I explained those questions were only to find out how close we were to determine if he should pursue her. When their date was over he responded, “well, I guess you’re going to hear all about me.”
And he lied (shocking!!!). But the lies he told her just made it clearer to me that he was lying to me and using me. He lived in another town when we dated; so, it was easier to lie and not be caught. Now, this is my town that he’s moved to (to be near me was his reason) and it wouldn’t be difficult for people to find me (yikes) or know who I am because of my profession (yikes).
I find I’m at the stage of letting go and then pulling it all back in again…it’s like I’m playing “tug of heart” and I’m on both ends of the rope!
Thanks for this article. I’m going reread it several times. It is helpful. I’m having a difficult time accepting that someone could be so cruel to me and watch him pursuing other women. I find myself jealous while at the same time wanting to protect others from harm.
I do think, however, his life of lies and deceit may be finaling catching up with him. But that is just a thought I have because I want justice. I have to remember that justice occurs but in ways that are often unseen.
Namaste.
Morgan
Thank you Kathy. Yesterday, after weeks of feeling so much pain, I asked God if he would help me. I said “I can’t do this one alone, I’m just not getting it.” And this morning, your post was in my inbox. I guess I was ready to hear what he and you had to say.
My grief is tied to abandonment. I was abandonned by my mother as a child–both in the emotional sense, and in the conventional sense. So I spent much of my life seeking confirmation that I was a good person. My own relationship–with a loving but oftentimes shut-down man–reflected my own inability to acknowledge my own feelings of fear and dispair, and so we functioned (functioned, not enjoyed life–just functioned) for a long time together.
The sociopath I dealt with was not my partner but someone else. He told me what I wanted to hear, and prayed on my need for love/fear of abandonment. When he finished using me, he cast me aside. What I was avoiding was being good to myself, and admitting that these terrible things that had happened in my past actually happened. When I read your post this morning, I knew what I needed to do.
It’s not about forgiving him, it’s about forgiving that part of myself that shut down in response to being hurt so many times. I’ll never have the love I thought I needed from my mother, and my dad, and instead now realize that I have to turn the love that I do have towards me. Towards my own heart, and in doing so, embrace the wonderful person I am. I have given love–lots of love–to many people and I’m lucky that it didn’t backfire as much as it could have. But now I recognize my “need” to rescue others, and as soon as I see someone who fits that “rescue-me” profile I walk a little faster in the other direction. I know now that I am under no obligation to rescue anyone. Rather, I would prefer to be kinder to myself, and be compassionate to the feelings of loss and grief that I am feeling. You’re right–I’m not grieving for someone else, I’m grieving the way I’ve been treating myself all these years. I have been detached from my feelings so I wouldn’t get hurt. Now I’m starting to re-engage my feelings and have an honest dialog with myself. So far, so good.
Thank you Kathy.
Newstart (great name!), your story is inspiring.
Isn’t it interesting how grief pulls us back into ourselves? We cry over what isn’t, and we discover what is. Us. Our reality. Our needs.
And yes, isn’t it weird how they’re all so similar? Did you ever see “Buckaroo Banzai,” a very funny movie about an alien invasion that was made in the 60s or early 70s. There were all these aliens named John trying to “pass” for humans in order to pursue their nefarious plans for the Earth, and they were all so hopelessly dopey and clumsy, because they just didn’t get it.
So both your sociopath and mine had a woman with her own business. I actually tried to make him co-owner of mine, because I needed to replace my partner. But he just wanted the money, not the responsibility. Thank heavens. But he was always trying to figure ways for me to cash out, so we could spend the money. Fortunately I never got my inheritance from my parents before he left. So I had a little money to live on while I had my sabbatical/breakdown after he left.
But my ownership of something he didn’t have, the accomplishments, relationship, ongoing education that came out of it, drove him crazy. He criticized me and it as stupid. He whined about how “disempowered” or “belittled” he felt when there was any evidence of my competence. And he got really nasty when, fresh from some healthy and reasonable business transaction that give two-way value, I suggested that he step up to being a full participant in this relationship.
I wish you well in getting rid of him, and hope it goes relatively easily. If he’s like mine, you can expect a song and dance routine with lots of different songs. You’re so cruel. I have no money and I’ll have to live on the street. No one will ever love you but me. I knew I couldn’t trust you. Maybe you’ll even get the grand finale that I got as he walked out the door, with imaginary violins playing in the background as he choked back his tears, and said, “But you said you loved me.”
I promise you’ll see the humor in time. Meanwhile, take care of yourself. They can get nasty when someone tries to take away their feed bowl.
Kathy
Hi, Morgan.
It sounds like you have some grieving to do. Though you may have to get really angry first, because you may be still bargaining with him, yourself or the universe about whether its really true that he’s a world-class user and an unpleasant one at that.
We grieve when there’s no way around it. When we stop having difficulty accepting it, and face the inescapable truth. Then we’re sad. For what we lost. For the dream of something better that didn’t work out. Maybe even for him for being such a loser, when he could have been so much more.
I’m glad he contacted your girlfriend, and you had the opportunity to gain more insight. Thankfully you were both just able to observe and not get hurt. Maybe the truth hurts you now, but nothing like it hurts to be actively involved, still trying to make the relationship work.
I wish you Godspeed in moving from this disgusted to getting well and truly pissed about the way he wasted your time. You didn’t deserve any of this.
Kathy
So far, very good, Flagstaff. As my therapist used to say to me (and I’m passing it on to you, because I was so thrilled when she said it), you’re on the path and moving in the right direction. Gold star for you.
I hope you’re liking the you you’re discovering. We children of abandonment tend to carry around a lot of internal criticism. We became vulnerable to other people’s rules, when we felt as children that we failed in some way to hold onto our parents’ love. I found that I could at least turn down the volume on that noise, if I decided I didn’t want to listen to it. It’s a good thing to find out who we are underneath all the rules and the internal critics. Then, we find out a reason to love ourselves, because at center, we are wonderful — aware, ready for joy, feeling the newness of every moment of our lives. It’s impossible not to love ourselves.
I hope you keep posting on how it goes for you.
Kathy
Kathy,
Thank you for your comments. I have always had difficulty getting angry because it wasn’t a safe emotion to express. But I’m starting to feel movement toward anger and sadness. I know what I must do…my intuition told me that from the beginning of the end…but the rest of my heart and mind have some distance to go to catch up with the wise part of me that says: you deserve respect, you did nothing to deserve such utter contempt, you are bette without him, etc etc etc.
I also think he represents a major “catalyst” for growth within me. It seems like all my previous losses and disappiointments were presented to me in an explosion of agony during the discard period of the relationship. Now, instead of calling him by name, I am going to refer to that experience as the “catalyst” because the change must come from within me. Catalyst, to me, implies a great sudden movement that “I” and only “I” can adjust to. I’m doing the work.
I will trust my intuition in the future so that I won’t end up in this state of agony again. This suffering is unendurable at times. But the good news is I’m coping in healthy ways and not returning to harmful strategies of the past that only makes the situation worse!
Thank you, Kathy. Your words are a tremendous help in getting through another day!
Namaste.
Pam
hey im so fed up im angry and im not comfortable with it but i also know it’s the only thing that motivates me into reality and helps me to not accept the shitty treatment. I want the anger to stay this time and i hope it stay s for quite some time. I will not let him know how angry if the s decides to call, he would love that , im going to not give a rats ass so to speak. My son is downstairs sick with fear as he has been waiting to get into the military and has been getting set back and with the economy he’s just so stressed and this poor kid has a degree , wouldn’t lie if you held a gun to his head and has more integrity than anyone i know an d this should not be happening to him. The s daughter called yest for ride for groceries and stupid me takes her and you know i was shaking when i dropped her off. she’s a meth addict and there was an elderly 80sjomething year old man killed a few weeks ago and she let it out that the guy who killed him gave her his atm, card, cheques pin number and some cash. She also mentioned him giving her la senza lengerie and i was sick and said why did they hav to kill that poor man and she could have cared less. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t hit the guy who had the money(one in jail now whom she says is nice and would like to visit). No concience, i was sick and i calle d her grandmother as she lives alone and said that’s it , she’s rotten to the core like her father. I look at my son and these hardships and that piece of garbage daughter and i think how could i ever have been involved with such trash. I hope they both rot in hell as they deserve it.
KH, you have to stay away from these people. This isn’t just about exposing yourself to sociopathic behavior. You’re putting your life at risk. There is a difference between being kindhearted and being irresponsible with yourself. Shut this door now.
As far as the anger goes, it should be about what happened to you. The more you focus on what they’re doing, the less you’re focusing on what you’re doing with your own life. A lot of us going through a period of trying to figure out if these are “bad people,” and whether we’re allowed to think badly of them.
I’m going to try to shortcut this for you. The answer to that question is they are bad for you. Whether they are bad otherwise is their business. Your business is what’s bad for you.
Do you like being around these people? Do you like what you get back for whatever you give? Do you like the way reacting to it is eating up your life? Do you like the repercussions you are living with now?
That’s what you want to be thinking about. Go ahead and get mad at them, but get mad about what they did to you.
And I’m not sure what anyone else thinks about this, but I’d think seriously about going to the police with what you know, and asking for some protection. If that murderer knows that you have that much information about killing that man, you may have bigger problems than not liking to be around the meth-head girl.
Take care of yourself.