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.
Good morning, everybody. And Happy Mother’s Day from me to all the wonderful people who have nurtured me, comforted me and taught me in this great place. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
I’m apparently still recovering from this big extraction (one and half hours, wide awake). My sister says it was an insult to my body and it takes my body a while to get over it. Just passed out early Friday night. Tried to have a long, busy day yesterday — travel, haircut, lunch with friends, movie, travel, gallery opening, travel, cook dinner — and passed out again. But I just caught up with this great thread. You people are just awesome.
I want to bounce off something Stargazer brought up, about the isolation. I woke up this morning, just asking God for help for all the tasks and paperwork I have backed up. And God gave me a nice organized list of things to do. Thanks, up there.
But it made me think about the same thing, isolation. I think the thing I most miss about being married is the sense that someone else is watching out for me, but also depending on me to get things done for both of us. It kept me on track. I felt like I was answerable, instead of the way I tend to get now, which is kind of drifty, letting things pile up and worrying about them.
Talking about fear of seeing people, I’ve been thinking about an old memory of someone I used to work for. It was about 15 years ago, when I first switched from journalism to PR. I had just moved from the South to western Jersey where the agency was, and the woman who owned the agency wanted me in New York for a 9 a.m. client meeting. She had a place to stay in the city, but I needed to drive in. Except for a simple trip to Chinatown (which is right beyond the Holland Tunnel), I’d never driven to New York. To get to this place, I had to take the Lincoln Tunnel, find the place in midtown and find a way to park. All new to me.
I give myself three hours, read maps before I went, and still got lost several times getting to the tunnel, got jammed in the rush hour traffic, had trouble finding the place, and arrived 20 minutes late. She threw me out of the meeting for being late. And then when it was over, came down to the lobby where I was waiting and tore me a new one about embarrassing her and telling me to never do anything like that again. I had just quit my old job, moved everything I owned up there, had my son enrolled in the new schools. Beyond that, I was brand new in the business, and she was teaching me. I just stared at her, nodding as she yelled at me, and walked away, feeling scared to death.
I went on to do great work at that agency, but I never got over it. She frightened me. And I don’t like being frightened. I spent all those years in fear with my father, and I interpret it as a kind of rape. I held that anger and fear inside of me. It was the most important causative factor in starting my own agency a year later and leaving her in a cutthroat way that virtually forced her to give me resources (my computer and databases) that enabled me to start my new company without a lot of upfront cost.
Later, when we were at the same trade shows, I would do everything I could to avoid her. Because I was still scared of her. She could just look at me, or I could just anticipate her looking at me, and feel that sharp fear rise. It drove me crazy that she still had that power over me, but it was years before I got over it. And I finally did get over it because I got so good at running my own agency that there was nothing “magical” about her anymore. Maybe nothing parental.
But when I go back and look at it now, all I see is a replay of living with my father’s anger. Having to shut up and take it. Not knowing how bad it was going to get, before he blew himself out. Of being accustomed to being bullied, rather than understood or supported. And having certain responses to it. Like doing whatever I had to do to avoid that anger. Like never, ever trying to explain or stand up for myself or ask for help. It made me very self-sufficient in terms of doing things, but very messed up emotionally.
And all of this relates so tightly to what Stargazer described as her addiction to isolation. It’s not that I expect everyone else to treat me like that. But there’s a part of me that says, “Why set yourself up?” Because I know I can’t handle it. That I won’t respond rationally to anything I hear as criticism or demands, but will just silently eat it and add to the toxic load in my system. It’s just easier and safer to to keep my own company. (And you may wonder how in the world I ever ran for office, but that’s exactly what drove me into therapy after the campaign, because I realized that I was incapable of using all the good and enthusiastic help I had around me at the time.)
And so all that played out as hyper-sensitivity, need for approval, occasional ego collapse when I just needed to be told by someone that I was okay, etc. And I never knew why or where it was coming from. That, in a nutshell, is my reason for going back to early events and re-parenting myself. The fact that I really didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was living with the repercussions of it. Re-parenting doesn’t release all these insights at one time. But it does take some kind of pressure off. And as the fear recedes, I can see more of what it was about.
It was actually some discussion on this thread that got me to thinking about these knee-jerk fears I develop. Causing me to take another look at why I’m so darned reactive. And why it feels so much like fear.
I totally relate to strategies that involve making rules, and other strategies about just being ourselves, no matter what other people think. I’ve come to think that saying what I think and feel and letting other people deal with it is generally the best solution. (Unless I’m in a work environment or other situation where I have to be a little more politic.) But particularly with people I care about, I figure it’s better to let them know what’s going on with me. Sometimes, I wait until I think they can handle it better (like after dinner, rather than when they’re hungry). But if it’s important to me, I want them to know, because otherwise the little lies start to build up.
This is one of the reasons that I’m not dead sure that some of the people that I’d like to call sociopaths really are. Because I’ve been creating my side of the sociopathic transaction if I don’t contribute to the relationship by speaking up about how I feel and what I want, pursue my own objectives, demand to know if I don’t understand something, establish boundaries and enforce them, and not just act as though being accepted or loved is my main objective in life.
One of the hard things I’ve discovered about myself is that when I am loved, it frees me to go on to other things. And so I tend to “grow out of” my partners. It’s like I use them for vitamins or fertilizer to take care of some deep deprivation, so I can take off on some big growth spurt that leaves them behind. It’s not fair to them, and it’s one of the reasons, I am so committed to working through this damage in myself and learning how to nurture myself. So I am not going into relationships needy, and so that I can accept people for who they are (and maybe love them for it), rather than what I get from them.
This site is giving me fantastic strength! I have to go to work now but I have so much more to read and say here…what a great feeling…Thankyou for helping me to get my life back and for helping me to be ten times stronger than I was…I NEED EVERYONE OF YOU!!!! xo
Wow, Kathleen,
Your post really hit home for me, especially the last part about outgrowing partners once you feel loved. I believe I have done this many times as well.
But I need more perspective right now, as I’m feeling a little toxic. I have been missing my mom, so I broke down and called her after 2 or 3 years. I won’t go into the entire story of what she did. I always miss her when I cut her out of my life. The conversation started really good. But at a certain point, it deteriorated and became toxic. I feel I did my damndest to communicate well and listen to her. But she just was not able to deal with my feelings. She said the same thing on the phone she said 22 years ago when I (angrily) stood up to my stepfather for the first time: “I can’t handle it! I can’t handle it!” I did not react this time because I see this is about her own issues and inability to handle her own feelings that are triggered by mine. It has nothing to do with me. Though I’m proud of myself for staying so calm and non-reactive, I still felt toxic afterward. Obviously, I’m still internalizing a lot.
Once again, I’m feeling like I have to be the bigger person, the teacher, the mediator in my familial relationships. They are not able to meet me halfway. So either I play this role or I have no family.
Henry, I was reading your post about how your mother should have gone to prison (as mine probably should have too). It made me wonder why I would even want to try with my mom. I feel like she is trying too, but I came up against her limitations. At this point, I felt like I don’t want to be a victim and make anyone right or wrong. I just wanted to see if we can have a relationship. Naturally our relationship would have to be big enough to contain all the pain from our past and get throught it. I am willing. She is not.
I feel like an idiot for trying. I don’t think of my mom as evil, just very unconscious. I don’t know whether it’s better to keep trying or to just cut my losses, as my sister has done. My sister cannot handle a relationship with me or my mother, her last two living relatives. I think she’s the healthier one sometimes.
Stargazer
I am so sorry that your call to your mother did not turn out the way you had hoped.
It does sound like you handled it better than you thought you might handle it awile back. Being nonreactive was likely the best response that you could have had to not be caught up in the “drama”.
I guess even though we can’t “pick” our family members and we are pretty much stuck with who they are, it DOESN’T mean that as adults we don’t have choices.
It sounds like your mother isn’t ready for a healthy adult relationship with you. And some relationships are big enough to contain the pain of the past and work through it. SO DON’T BLAME YOUSELF FOR TRYING.
I think that both people have got to be in the “right place” to do so though. Maybe she is not in that place.
When people get older sometimes they just do not wish to “go through” the pain to get past it. No pain, no gain is something more understood of our generation.
Please don’t beat yourself up for trying. It is natural to think of your mother on Mothers Day.
Witsend, that is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you. I was feeling stupid for trying.
I guess you can’t win ’em all, can you? I still feel kind of numb from this interaction with my mom. I couldn’t even tell you what I want from her. I guess I just want to be able to be myself with her and have her be herself too. Naturally I will be different depending on who I’m with. Other people don’t push my buttons the way my mom does, even if they’re talking about the same topics. But it seems like almost everything she says pushes my buttons. I can see where this would be hard for her too.
Stargazer: Please don’t feel stupid for trying! Witsend is right, it is natural to think of your mother on Mother’s Day.
So far my day has sucked too. It is 4:40pm here and my daughter has not called me and did not send a card. I have no idea why.
The lonliness is killing me. I try not to isolate… but friends are busy or do not call back.
My sister is the oldest and she is an Alpha Dog and is getting worse and worse. I play a role with her (as you mentioned) just so I will have a sister, I just smile and don’t say anything most of the time, I’m sick of it, if I disagree about something or if I get angry… it could turn into a “we don’t speak for the next 5 years” and I can’t go through that agony so I just let her be a bitch, I stay calm like you did, but I have to do it every other day! Ugh.
Happy Mother’s Day, SC! I’m sorry you haven’t heard from your daughter. Maybe the card will get there tomorrow. Mine are often late. Even when I want nothing to do with my mom, it hurts me to think that she is alone without a card or call on Mother’s Day. Even when we weren’t speaking, I always send a card on that day, and that day only.
I have played the role of the therapist with my sister. It still never kept her in my life. She hasn’t contacted me in about 7 years. I just found out from my mother today that she (sister) is in San Francisco (where I once lived) and isapparently a very high profile person in the insurance industry. I think she once was a bank president. I was glad to hear that my mother apologized to her and that they talked for the first time in 20 years. But my sister now wants nothing to do with her (or me either). My sister and I never bonded, though I tried for many years. I finally gave up. Yesterday was her birthday. She is something like a bank president. I am a massage therapist. I can’t imagine there’d still be sibling rivalry. She obviously has done quite well for herself. But in abusive families like we had, it can feel toxic just to have the memories dredged up.
Joy, on running into your x, I ran into my egg donor unexpectedly in the store one day and it knocked me for a physical AND emotional loop for about 18 hours, but you know, it also let me know that I am NOT under that kind of stress 24/7 any more—before lately, I felt that way ALL the time, now only once in a while, so actually, this is PROGRESS FOR YOU, ,the way I see it anyway! (((hugs))))
Star, the UNhealthy ones, for me are OUT of my life…it isn’t worth it to ME to put up with the “drama” of trying—they are not going to change into healthy, caring people, and I am not willing to deal with unhealthy uncaring jerks. No omatter what the relationship is—if that is “family”—then I don’t need it.
Star: My brother and sister did not speak to each other for 15 years, mostly it became my brothers fault because after a while she was like “get over it”. When our dad was sick and in the hospital in 2003 they were forced to be in the little hospital room together and finally started at least speaking to each other. I’m the middle child, does that mean I’m a peacemaker? Because I feel like a blob. I don’t react to much of anything anymore, probably why I was so attractive to the S.
IMO this goes on in a lot of families, we just don’t hear about it, people don’t like to talk about it. So you’re sister is something like a bank president… BFD.. LOL. I don’t even have a job. Jeez, she didn’t talk to your mom for 20 years??!!
My family put the “fun” in dysfunctional, LOL.