This is the eighth article in this series about the recovery path, and it is about the second half of the path. This is after we have fully accessed our anger, and begun to grieve our losses and let go. This article may not necessarily be helpful to someone who is still reeling from betrayal and loss, or even someone who is still exploring righteous anger. However, it is part of this series because a growing number of people on LoveFraud are considering the influence of their histories on their relationships, as part of healing themselves and their lives. Please, take what is valuable to you, but if this one doesn’t make sense or, God forbid, makes you feel like you’re being blamed, it just means that you’re at another healing stage. Which is good. Every stage is necessary and good. Be where you are, love yourself and heal. That’s all that matters. — Kathy
In recovering from a trauma or extended trauma like a sociopathic relationship, we often discover that what we lost isn’t what we first thought it was. In fact, our very resistance to letting go — the thing that often keeps us stuck in anger or even bargaining or denial — isn’t exactly what we thought it was.
The traumatic recovery process, if we have the courage to see it through, turns out to be very different from the “he done me wrong” drama it first appeared to be. It’s not about unrequited love. It’s not about us not being good enough or smart enough. It’s really not about anything that is between us and our sociopathic opposite number.
It is really about us waking from a dream.
What is real?
An old friend talked to me recently about feeling so disoriented that she had difficulty finding her way out of her hometown airport. She was returning from her third trip to visit a man in another city. Based on phone conversations with him, she had become convinced that he loved her, wanted a future with her, and accepted her as she was. When she arrived, she discovered that what he wanted was “friends with benefits.” And by the way, would she please invest in his condo because he was having trouble making the payments?
As on the previous trips, he was cold, critical and exploitive, expecting her to pay for staying with him and pay for everything they did together. Knowing that he had less money than her, she did that willingly. She would have given the five-figure investment in the condo, except that her money was tied up in a trust. The one thing she could not do was casual sex, and she could not understand how or why he did not remember that this was a baseline truth with her. If she was in a sexual relationship, it had to be serious and committed. Of course, they had sex before his idea about “friends with benefits” became clear, leaving her feeling used and ashamed.
After the other trips, she had felt wounded and depressed. Half angry at him, half wondering what she had done wrong. This time was different. She finally understood that she had been deluded, and it didn’t matter if he had misled her or she had misled herself. She contacted me to ask me what to do about the feeling of disorientation. She didn’t know how she could have been so mistaken, and she didn’t know what was real anymore.
“I want my old self back,” she said. Then she thought a moment, and said. “No, I don’t. Not if it’s the old self that keeps doing this over and over.”
The broken part
My friend is not stupid, though she has a history of relationships with exploitive people. Listening to her talk about how ashamed she felt about the love letters she had written and her feeling that she was too stupid to live, I could almost see the broken cog in the machinery of her psyche.
With her, as with many of us, this broken part is not really about the exploitive people who take advantage of it. We feel like these relationships are “happening to” us. But what really happened is that a certain set of circumstances triggers something in us that I call a “state.” (Some psychologists call it a ”˜trance,” because it is a form of self-hypnosis. It may also be called a “fugue state,” after a type of music where a single melody line is repeated in many variations.)
A state is a reactive response with certain characteristics. One is a narrowing of focus. Everything else fades to lesser importance. Other, possibly unrelated experiences are interpreted through our intense involvement with this state and its triggers. The anger we have discussed in previous articles is a state. The disorientation of my friend and the distressed confusion of early-stage recovery are also states. Other characteristics of states may be reversion to childlike emotional behaviors — tantrums, outsized hunger for validation or security, confusing the feeling of relief with love.
Another characteristic of these states is often disassociation, or distancing ourselves from objective reality. “Inside” the state, we identify with it. It feels “right,” often passionately right, the truth about ourselves. A feedback loop can evolve. The state becomes magnified by our attention; so we pay more attention to it. If the state is painful, we may start looking for self-medication through alcohol, drugs, video games, shopping, work, etc. If the state provides pleasure, we may do more and more of what we think is creating the pleasure. As we pursue or avoid feelings, learning skills or living with the effects of our actions, the state’s structure evolves into more complexity.
So where do these states come from? Especially the painful ones. Anyone who has been reading this series of articles knows already. They are residue of unprocessed trauma. One of the simplest ways to grasp this is to ask, “When was the first time I ever felt this way?” We may not immediately remember the first time, but most of us can track the state backwards through events in our history.
My relationship with a sociopath was not the first time I’d felt completely subsumed by a romantic attachment. (It was just, unfortunately, the first time I’d done it with someone who felt no ethical responsibility toward me.) I realized, fairly early, that what was happening with him wasn’t “different,” but only a worst-case scenario of something I’d been doing my entire life.
Leaving Las Vegas
Few of us on LoveFraud would consider ourselves gambling addicts. But if we think about what gambling addicts really want, we might see a bit of ourselves in it. When a gambler is winning, the emotional payoff isn’t the money. It is the sense of basking in a kind of sunshine of divine acceptance, where s/he is magically doing everything right and being loved for it. The love may be expressed in financial winnings, but the thrill is that big, loving, supportive “yes” from the cosmos.
From the book “Leaving the Enchanted Forest: The Path from Relationship Addiction to Intimacy” by Stephanie Covington and Liana Beckett, here is a brief description of the progression of an addictive relationship:
1. Experiencing the euphoric high of a new relationship, which enables us to focus on another person, rather than dealing with our true emotional state
2. Seeking the positive mood swing, looking forward to it, being willing to make sacrifices to get it, suffering occasional feelings of dejection or jealousy or panic, but the pain is still manageable
3. Dependence, where focus on the lover crosses the line from choice to need, and life becomes narrow, unbalanced, unhealthy with obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors
4. Maintaining contact just to avoid being in a state of chronic depression and emotional pain, because there is no more euphoria and the inner balance is in shambles
Is this a state? It actually sounds like a series of states with a common thread. If we return to the gambler, we can see a similar fundamental story. A pursuit of magical redemption in which we get the prize if Lady Luck smiles on us, or fall back into a kind of emotional hell if she doesn’t.
But is that a fair analogy? Games of luck depend on the random distribution of a shuffled card deck, the end of a wheel’s momentum, the way dice fall. The gambler is essentially passive, beyond risking the stakes. In our relationships, we do so much more, don’t we? We don’t just show up and hope. We go out of our way to be charming, agreeable, enthusiastic, compliant, understanding, tolerant and supportive, while we kiss, cook, make love, arrange our schedules, dress to please, help out with their finances, children, careers, leave behind huge chunks of our lives as they were before. We’re actively building, investing, sacrificing, trying.
Still, the gambling analogy holds, because of one thing. The success of it all is out of our control. All we can do is our best, and hope that we earn a happy ending. In sociopathic relationships, we learn several very tough lessons. But primary among them is this: if our happiness depends on something outside of ourselves, we are living a gambler’s life.
The crumbling foundation
A recent show on HDTV was about the crumbling foundation under a house. Contractors mortared cinderblock up against the old walls and dug trenches around the outside of the foundation to divert the water that had weakened the concrete. In all, they managed to preserve the rooms of the house above by shoring up the old foundation.
What we face in getting over a sociopathic relationship something like the same problem, although our solution may be quite different. Our “states” are like rooms built on the foundation of old coping responses we adopted when we faced an overwhelming event when we were younger. When I was very small, I learned that no one would protect me from my father’s unreasonable verbal and physical abuse, and in fact, I was responsible for keeping him happy. At three years old or so, I developed an immediate coping response that involved alterations in patterns of feeling, thought and behavior, designed to manipulate circumstances and myself in order to survive. All of it was founded on an awareness of impending danger. But it also included a memory of the time before the danger, a dream of a better time, when I was loved, safe and could thrive as who I was.
That is a quick illustration of the foundation under a “room” in my psyche. I developed through my childhood and adult life with that “state” ready to be triggered by any circumstances that seemed to “fit.” Through the years, I furnished this room with more experiences that supported its reality, learned more survival skills for a world of impending danger, and once or twice, learned that I could relax and be myself in certain circumstances, thinking I was making big progress in my life.
But the twilight-zone reality of this room, which began with the original decision about how to handle an overwhelming childhood event, is what allowed the sociopath to take residence in my life. A coping strategy that was designed to help me survive danger as a child turned into a vulnerability to tremendous danger as an adult.
My friend who kept going back to a man who is incapable of loving her and uses her for money isn’t trying to hurt herself. In fact, she is trying to help herself out of other circumstances in her life. Because of her family background, she has a life strategy of being very, very good and helpful, because love must be earned and the alternative is punishment. Her dream is that, if she earns love, she will be able to recover the lost state of being accepted for herself and the right to her own identity. In this “state,” she is vulnerable to interpreting small kindnesses or seductive behaviors as “love” and acceptance. Especially if the other person meets certain other criteria, like bearing psychological resemblance to her pathologically selfish father.
All of us have gone through these perfect-storm situations when the right stimuli and our old coping strategies come together to throw us into a “state” that seems exciting and redemptive. But for my friend, on her final encounter with this man, something new emerged from this relationship — a realization that she was deluded. She was understandably disoriented because this realization potentially affected not just this relationship, but the structure of her entire life. When she said “I don’t know what to believe anymore” or “maybe I’m just too stupid to live,” she is talking about cracks in the foundation. Not just in the way she understood the world, but even in her ideas about her own identity.
How much can we lose?
In dealing with the residue of a sociopathic relationship, we feel separated from parts of our identity. We talk about not being able to trust again or love again. We talk about the loss of ourselves as lovable or attractive people, as trustworthy to ourselves or others, as believers in the goodness of the world or in a benevolent deity. We have feelings — like bitterness, anger, vengefulness — that we fear or dislike in ourselves. It seems like our rules of social engagement, romance or personality integrity have become broken or unreal.
It is no wonder that many of us need time before we jump back into the world again. With so many basic realities up in the air, a larger question emerges. If the world is so different, if we are so different that what we imagined, then what is real? Or more importantly, is real about us?
As profoundly disorienting as this may be, it is also part of the grieving and letting go stage of trauma processing. Because as we start to allow ourselves to face irretrievable losses — like the loss of the person we loved and the loss of the dream that person represented — we often discover that those losses are just the superficial veneer over deeper losses we have not yet grieved and let go.
In my case, grieving the loss of this man also brought me to the realization that he, and all the other lovers of my life, were band-aids I used cover a very old wound. That was the too-early loss of supportive protection when I was a child. I saw how much of my life was constructed around my coping with impending danger, and especially in my search for safety and restoration of a sense that I belonged and was welcome in the world.
In healing, I had to revisit that child who still existed in me, who was still holding up the foundation of that now-dysfunctional room that welcomed my sociopathic lover as a savior. I had to grieve with her about the childhood she lost while I reassured her that I was taking care of her now. That she could drop that weight finally, stop holding together all those coping strategies like a little Atlas with the world on her shoulders.
If you had asked me five years ago who I am, I would have given you a list of all the characteristics I developed in that room. Hardworking, responsible, trustworthy, generous, tolerant, kind, polite, presentable — all “virtues” that were really highly developed skills to earn the acceptance and approval I needed to feel safe. If you had thought to ask me who I was underneath all of that, and I was feeling particularly honest, I would have told you I was scared and tired and alone. Chronically and unfixably, except for the temporary respites I got from diving into another relationship, winning some praise for my work, or buying or eating something that made me feel better.
Today, if you asked me the same question, I would just smile. The question doesn’t compute. I am my “states,” and yes, they still exist. I still have knee-jerk responses to the stimuli that remind me of my old “world of impending danger.” But increasingly, I recognize them as responses to trauma. I observe myself slipping in and out of these states, being tempted to behaviors that are band-aids for pain.
In getting outside these states, I stopped limiting my identity to characteristics based on arranging my life around impending danger. I freed myself to grow into a larger identity. It includes characteristics — like selfishness, undependability and anger — that were forbidden before. I am more fluid and accepting of myself and other people. But most important, I find that my center has shifted. It’s hard to describe who I am now, but it includes this “observer,” as well as more awareness of the world around me, and more openness to feelings of joy, awe, gratitude and compassion.
I let go of a lot of things. It wasn’t always easy. There was backlash from well-intentioned “rules” and critical voices designed to keep me safe in a world of impending danger. I had to feel my way along to discover what rules were reasonable and which were obsolete artifacts of coping with a scary daddy.
This process of letting go of parts of myself will, I believe, never end. But, to my surprise, it becomes increasingly enjoyable. I once grieved over the discovery that I was not always trustworthy and that, despite all the effort I put into it, I could not make everyone like me. Now, when some inner voice tells me “I have to” do something, my inner observer frequently pops up and decides whether that “state” is useful or whether we have better options. More and more, everything about me is optional, because every moment is new with new challenges and new opportunities that have nothing to do with my history or with some frightened little identity that is really just baggage from that history.
As far as impending danger goes, that’s another issue that we’ll discuss in a future article. Fear, the natural fear of the dangers of a random universe, is something we still have not addressed in this journey of recovery. Grieving and letting go paves the way for that next stage.
Namaste. The joyous awakening spirit in me salutes the joyous awakening spirit in you.
Kathy
P.S. I owe a debt of gratitude to the writing of Stephen Wolinsky, Ph.D., for many of the ideas in this article. You can find his books on Amazon.
Thanks, LTL, I’m so glad this makes sense to you. I love your writing on self-care. Especially that you’re not writing out of anger now, but out of healthy commitment to yourself.
There is some great writing in the area of codependency, which I read a long time ago, so I can’t remember the exact words. But there was something about not being to give what you don’t have. Like airlines tell us to put our own oxygen masks on first, we have to take care of ourselves first in order to build up enough interior resources to share.
So selfishness is a good thing.
I can remember my father’s bitterness and scorn at the contributions of wealthy people to churches, libraries and museums. His people came from some borderline of poverty and working class, and they quite right felt exploited. And it is perhaps my own good fortune in having learned to make a better living that gives me the freedom to think like I do. Poverty and the fear that goes with it is a grating thing that constricts our spiritual and emotional life.
At the same time, it doesn’t have to. Compassion, tolerance, acceptance, sharing of resources can be found in all kinds of cultures that are happier than ours. Even though they live with a lot less. There’s a really good article in the New York Times right now about living in the Netherlands, which is not exactly a third-world country, but at the same time, their community values are so different from ours. And their children are so much happier.
I’m rambling here, off topic. But I think that when we get back to who we really are, we discover that we’re better people than we ever imagined. That our values are really good. Fear is the corrosive thing, not freedom.
This is my last post on this topic, I swear!
Recovery doesn’t have to be followed by healing or growth. Sometimes all that is needed is learning self-defense tactics and getting busy with positive activity that you love. AA says “Get busy, get better”.
And recognizing that no matter what awful things happened in your past (mine includes a childhood rape and an attempted murder by bombing and me being covered in bricks from the explosion, a loaded gun held to my head while I was pinned down by an angry group, multiple attempted rapes…all of which were not as bad as the emotional rape), those experiences have given you unique strengths today. Including incredible sensitivity, empathy, ability to compartmentalize….You know, there are times and places where those traits are useful! Like in doing film editing of disturbing scenes, like in being a nurse or doctor, etc etc etc. Autism can even be a unique strength. Look at Temple Grandin. Viva la difference, as long as you are not evil!
We don’t all have to change or heal. We can be who we are and take advantage of our unique strengths and celebrate them. AND learn self-defense to keep evil from taking advantage of us again.
My brother was hit by a car. He approaches crossing a street a lot differently now than before he was hit. But he was in the cross walk at the time, with the light. But he takes even more precautions now and did not spend a lot of time in therapy figuring out why he wasn’t more like that in the past, what led him to take his safety for granted, why he ignored the red flags of cars in the street, whether or not his mom had held his hand crossing the street etc, etc etc etc.
Kathleen, I’ve loved all your writing. But if you haven’t read Emotional Rape, I hope you do.
I guess I’m saying that what I think helps the most is simply MINIMIZING what happened…this guy effected 7% of my life, it is over, and how I acted then does not define me anymore than how I would act if my house were burning down defines how I normally am. Out of control situations bring forth extreme reactions…..I wrote down my list of self-defense rules that will make it pretty darn impossible for this situation to happen again….I figured out what makes me feel alive and wonderful, and I’m doing it.
It seems to me that every therapist helped me by making me feel GOOD about myself. Not making me feel like some part was broken, or I was like an addict. I can apply those analogies and say “right on”. But why?
I’ll never forget this really happy woman I met who said she tried therapy once but gave it up. And I asked why. And she said: ” All that talk about myself was boring!”
Can too much self-absorption actually impede spiritual growth? Interesting question.
Justabouthealed…
I agree with you …in that what works for you is all that matters!
For me I didnt have things happen to me that were in essence “out of my control” ie. A car hitting me, a rape, a bomb…and Im so sorry to hear all that you had to endure (and your brother too)… well, I was run over by a bicyclist when I was little standing in a group of people and I did not hear him say Coming through, watch out… and I never ended up in fetal position nearly wanting to end my life because of it… and with the bike accident I sort of did what you mention…minimized what happend, got over it, didnt contemplate it much..and got on with my life.
But with my Emotional Rape – I absolutely could have been in better control of so many things. I, by personal choice, absolutely take 50% of the responsibility (GUILT FREE BTW) for not having the tools and/or SELF-AWARENESS of what another person is capable of doing with someone who has limited or no self-respect, self-trust, self- worth. Could that all be another word for Self-Defense?? I guess so, but more for me it was SELF-AWARENESS which includes self-defense. You see I wanted to go deeper to enable myself not to ever put myself in the position again to ever have to use self-defense with a person who lives their life emotional raping others. In order to do that – I had to get to know myself. If I minimized what happened — I would recover and go on and get into another relationship and be giving and loving and caring to someone who may choose to use and abuse me.
Self absorption? For me its Self-freedom…and my spiritual growth has flown off the charts with my finding and creating who I am and who I want to be — whereas before I was searching for someone to love me and I was willing to endure whatever it took to remain with the man I loved.
Ive gotten busy, Ive gotten better. Ive gotten to know myself and how to protect myself, defend myself, trust myself and turn away from unhealthy people and situations in my life. When I was with him, I didnt know any better, let alone know myself…I just knew I wanted to be loved and I wanted to believe anything that came out of his mouth.
You said and I wholeheartedly agree..
“We dont all have to change or heal. We can be who we are and take advantage of our unique strengths and celebrate them. And learn self-defense to keep evil from taking advantage of us again.”
But I would add We can also recognize our weaknesses, our history of both circumstance and choice, without fear and trepidation — and gain an infinite amount of strength, wisdom and spiritual growth.. if we so choose to do so.
Thank you for your views Justabouthealed. I think self-defense is something akin to what I call self-respect, self-trust and self-love.
Have not had a chance to read the comments yet. The article was awesome and timely as always. Wanted to share an event from yesterday. I walked into a store and slam into the ex. The sound and sight of him left me shaking so badly that I could hardly pay for my purchase. Heart racing and shaking uncontrollable. Totally did not expect this reaction. This was the most violent physical reaction to his presence that I have ever felt. What is this about? Why now? When will he stop having this power to traumatize me? He did not speak to me and walked away and still such an overwhelming physical reaction to his presence. Does my body now recognize him as far more dangerous than my heart ever could? Thoughts please.
Dear Joy,
Shock? Maybe you and your system had a shock response…Even seeing an x of mine that was a healthy person, still made have a funny kind of feeling (awkwardish, unexpected)…
I imagine with an toxic -x our beings get stirred up a bit with all the trauma and turmoil and craziness we went through. This was probably about your reaction to the unexpected, the fight of flight response to the fear and mixed emotions that his being represents to you in general.
So out of sight, you are able to deal with it so much better. In his presence it all resurfaces again. And then to be ignored just compounds it all.
Sorry that happened to you. You havent shared if you had an emotional response or not as well? Im curious how you got through the rest of your day?
ps Justabouthealed…
I was selfless prior to my recovery and healing journey…I was so far removed from self-anything that I was a blob of self-nothing except selfless to the point that I didnt have an awareness of what I deserved, and what was right or wrong in a relationship involving “love and commitment”..
HE was selfish and self-absorbed in an unhealthy way…to the extreme…totally limiting his spiritual growth and growth in life in general. Stagnantly self absorbed!!
Now I am a healthier selfish person and a healthier selfless person because I am self-aware. Self-absorbed means when it always only about you, yourself. And I suppose here at LF as we are learning and growing and recovering and healing (or I atleast) am sharing my journey about self much more than I ever would in any other setting… but Im sharing it in a healthy way…about how its changed my life for the better to really know myself and have boundaries for first time in my life and learn and know self-respect, self-love, self-value, self-trust and when i leave here I get to know others who are on that same path and I give and care and share in a whole different way now….one thats respected and reciprocated and one where I respect and continue to reciprocate too. A balance. I was missing that balance of self-awareness!!
Ok, different topic, so I will post.
Joy, I think you nailed it when you said “Does my body now recognize him as far more dangerous than my heart ever could?” YES!
To me, I think that is your sub-conscience reaching out grabbing your conscience attention! And I think our sub-conscience takes into account all kinds of things that we are not consciously aware of. That’s what lets us “suddenly wake up” as we are driving along and notice a child about to step into the road. Or pick up that someone is having a bad day, though we aren’t sure what is making us ask “Are you okay?”
And some of us have a very strong body/mind link. There memories I can pull up that make me almost faint with fright. Great actors have that ability too…..Certain memories can help them experience and express true terror, even on a perfectly safe shooting lot with cameras all around,etc.
Pain warns of us danger. Good for you! I think it is a wonderful sign! No way is your body going to let you have anything to do with that monster!! Hurray!!!
Kathleen…So much gratitude for your wisdom. I can relate to your writing today re: finding myself. I am totally finished with S and even most days past the anger. I am not willing to donate any more of my time to analyze why he is the way he is, etc. Frankly, I don’t care. But where I AM at is at a place of self-discovery. I met him when I was only 19 and am now 62. I feel completely detached from myself. I experience a lot of “floating” feelings – like I’m not here. I hear the words coming out of my mouth and I see the journaling, etc., but I am disconnected from myself. I have been for years, maybe even before I met . I come from a horrendous childhood, and was running from it into the arms of the S – (a not so unique story from others on here). I’m sure that under the S fog, which has just been cleared, is another layer of trauma that, although in therapy for years, couldn’t be reached. It feels like dissociation, and some of it is called floating, a term I learned in Wellspring when I left a cult I was involved in w/the S for 16 years in 1987. The exciting part is that when I got tx. for recovery from cult issues, I was not only out of the cult, but the cult was out of me. Now I am not only out of the cult of the S, but the cult of s is out of me.
Thanks to all of you who make my journey a lot easier.
OOPS! Missed an S in 7th line – also a LITTLE OCD too!
justabouthealed, thanks for your post and for questioning.
No, of course, you don’t have to use recovery as a personal growth experience. I am doing this, because I saw the correlation between the pain created by this relationship and a lot of garbage I’ve been living with all my life. I wanted to change.
My initial reaction was “never again” and then to figure out all the new rules to enforce that. Which is very good stuff. Learning by experience. Definitely part of life — not keep shaking hands with the hot stove. So I did a lot of early research on sociopaths and narcissists, and viewed them as the problem, and made efforts to adjust my behaviors and expectations to accommodate the possibility of another showing up.
In this I totally agree with the posts that talk about gut instincts. I’ll be writing later about taking care of ourselves, and what techniques are meaningful for me. Some of them are extensions on self-defense training I’ve done in the past. Others are a lot more intuitive.
The thing is, I didn’t trust myself to enforce these defensive rules. There was something in me that responded powerfully to this guy. I had rules before, and my attraction to him overrode them all. Until I fixed that, I wasn’t safe. This was extremely clear to me, and it left me with no other option that to start excavating my own interior to figure out what was going on. And that turned into the great adventure that I write about here.
No one has to do this entire journey. And many people don’t. Denial and anger are two of the common places to stop, and they both have their attractions. They are extremely functional in many ways. People in denial tend to be great helpers of the world, sorting out other people’s lives. People in anger tend to be great warriors, disciplined fighters of the “dark side” or empire builders. Behaviors that anesthetize or distract from painful internal dissonance can be an excellent tools for living and achieving, as long as they don’t become expensive addictions.
I’m just really ambitious. I want to be clear. I don’t want to be carrying around historical baggage that limits my perceptions and emotions. I also absolutely refuse to be the loser in anything. If it appears I’ve lost, I’m going to keep bulldogging it until I get a profit out of it. Sometimes that takes a lot of work, as it did in this situation, but to me, the work has been worth it. I have a new definition of happiness that isn’t dependent on outside circumstances. And though I can’t say that I’m fully conscious all the time, I know what it means now and I see the benefit to clearing obstacles as they arise.
If this series is beginning to lose value for you, I imagine you’re not alone. One of the reasons I had so much difficulty writing this article was that I knew I was going to start having some significant fall-out, beginning with the last one on grieving and letting go and increasing with this extension of that topic. Grieving and letting go is a pivotal stage, where people’s perspectives really change, but it requires overcoming a lot of resistance to feeling sadness. I think we’re culturally programmed to regard sadness as weakness. It’s worth it to some people to break through that, and not to other people.
And as you say, some people might find it self-indulgent to pay that much attention to our own psyches. They might even find it dysfunctional. I can’t disagree. Paying this much attention to the internal landscape requires us to disengage a bit from external life, either taking a vacation from it to sort things out or doing some daily discipline like meditation. It’s an investment that only makes sense if you’re on some kind of path.
Beyond that, the process of becoming emotionally self-sufficient may have other dysfunctionalities in terms of consensus reality. Become more involved with our own reality may cause us to feel less cooperative with some cultural structures based on external authority. Over time, I think, we actually learn to navigate these structures more effectively, but things can be a little rocky when we’re in transition and trying to figure out who we are now.
We may feel a little messy, ungrounded. It’s a kind of second adolescence, and that may not be attractive, especially if we’re heavily invested in maintaining a rigid structure inside of ourselves. (Oh hell, we’ve all got rigid structures inside of ourselves, and they fight back when we take a pickax to the foundations.)
So maybe you feel self-sufficient enough. Maybe you sorted that out a long time ago in the cauldron of a lot of violence and threats to your survival and sanity. Maybe you see the causes and effects of everything around you as much as you want to. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people feel the same way. and if they done and back out in the world feeling confident and able to love and trust again, I applaud them. It just didn’t work that way for me.
I’m just one person, talking about what I think. The only authority I have is based on whatever benefit people get from my writing. People get something out of it or they don’t. To the extent they do, I’m grateful to be understood.