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.
Alot has been said here recently about our adult pain in relation to our parents….
My father was a very verbally abusive alcoholic. He also threw things around during rages and often dinner time in our house was the “time” for these rages.
As a young adult I had a difficult relationship with my father.
My mother was a good mother and did the best she could in a bad situation. I felt similar to what Kathleen stated in her post. My mother didn’t protect me from my father but essentually she did give me much of what I needed to survive in that household and beyond.
At some point in my 30’s I found myself for the first time in my life angry with my mother (my anger was always directed at my father)…. I was contemplating divorce from my older sons father. Who was an alcoholic.
It brought to surface again why my mother stayed with such an abusive man? All of my thoughts of reasoning (why she stayed) I was now facing with my own alcoholic husband, economics, lack of my having a decent self supporting job, fear of raising a child alone, etc….
My mother was hard to talk to about past “issues” (the pink elephant in the room we didn’t talk about) However I persisted and asked for a REASON why she stayed. I am so glad I persisted as I thought I “knew” her reasons, thinking them very similar to my own, when I faced fear of MY own divorce.
I was wrong….My mother told me that the reason she stayed with my father was because her own father died when she was only 3 years old. She thought (because of HER OWN experience) that my father although not a good father was better than having NO father at all….
Wow….I would have never known THIS (as her reason) if I had tried my whole lifetime to figure this out. I am grateful to know this because although it doesn’t change my childhood it certainly sheds some light to how my mother felt.
Sometimes it doesn’t pay to ask the questions and sometimes it does….
For me this gave me the insite I needed and I was able to retain a good relationship with my mother instead of dealing with the new found anger that was initiated during my divorce.
So although I was never able to have a relationship with my father as an adult, My relationship with my mother was saved I believe by asking one question that she WAS ABLE (thankfully) to give me an answer to.
And I was also in a place in my life where I was able to accept her answer. And understand it to the best of my ability.
Matt: When I read your share above, I was touched for you in a place beyond words. I FELT the precious little boy, the innocent, sweet little child of God. I wanted to sweep him up and hold him and whisper in his ear how SPECIAL he was and how important it is for him to be here in this Universe. I felt God’s love for you, and I now pray that you will take what you want and leave the rest of what I want to say to you. That precious little guy is still within you. He is frightened and bewildered by events he still doesn’t understand -things that were done to him and said to him at the hands of VERY sick people. I am offering up a prayer for you that you will be wrapped in the warmth of God’s love as you come to know the unique person you are with gifts that no one else possesses in quite the way that you do. You are an AMAZING person. My prayer for you today, Matt., is that you will be healed of the Mother wound that has been lying deep within you. You have touched my life in such a deep way today as I see in my mind’s eye that little guy that has been so very brave. Peace, my brother.
I thought about what I wrote in my last post, and want to add one more thing. I once ran into an article online, and I wish I’d saved it. It was about something in Corinthians that the writer interpreted as “loving from a distance.”
When people we love do not act in ways that make them deserving of our love, we sometimes have to distance ourselves from them. Let them live with the repercussions of their actions, including the repercussion of not enjoying us.
We keep the doors in our hearts open, as long as we care to, in case they genuinely learn from their mistakes. But they have to do their own learning, and they have to earn their way back into our lives when they’ve grown up, if ever.
I don’t think this relates to sociopaths, who do not learn from their mistakes. But in dealing with people who are not so irreparably ill, perhaps just weak or needy or ignorant of how their behavior affects others, I think this lesson is about conditional trust.
That is, we trust people if they earn it. We withdraw our trust when they don’t. (And along with trust, all the goodies that go with it — affection, involvement in their lives, etc.) Nothing is permanent, until we decide we just don’t want to wait around anymore for them to step up to our requirements. And our requirements are not about them, but about what we allow in our lives.
We can’t change anyone. But sometimes by making and enforcing our own requirements, we can create an opportunity for them to see a reason to change themselves. If it means enough to them.
Meanwhile, we don’t wait around for them, but just go on with our lives. It may seem like we’re taking a risk. But really the risk is theirs. We may or may not be interested or willing when they finally get themselves together.
I think the Corinthians piece related to lovers. But I think it relates equally to parents who either cannot accept us as we are, or who do things to us that we find unacceptable.
Steve Becker’s wonderful article about the “silent treatment” is, like many other sociopath tactics, also a description of something we too can do. Not in the heavy-handed, contemptuous, overbearing way that sociopaths do it. But with kindness and compassion. By simply not collaborating with other people’s dysfunctional behavior. Not enabling. Not cleaning up after them. And absolutely not hanging around to participate in something that is harmful to us or anyone else. There is a way to just turn off our lights, or swivel them around to pay attention to something else, rather than engaging in hand-to-hand silliness with someone who is trying to validate their fear- or needs-based behavior by getting us involved in it.
witsend, thanks for the story. I asked my mother too, more than once, why she didn’t leave him. She, unfortunately, didn’t have as good an answer. She was just emotionally broken down. She was an R.N. I think we could have made it without him. We would have been poor, but it would have been a better life. But she might have been right in another sense, because I’m not sure she would have been able to escape him. Between the charm that he could turn on at will and his absolutely belief that he owned us kids for whatever purpose he wanted to use us, it would have taken a stronger person than she was, I think.
You know, even when I was very small, I used to think that part of my destiny was to live the life she might have had, to fulfill her potential, if she hadn’t married him. When she died, she was so bitter and ashamed of what had happened to her children. I hope that she is free of all that now, and if she can see us, she is gratified by how the survivors — my son, my sister, my late brother’s daughter, and me — are working so hard to change the family story now. She gave us these values.
Matt, the only thing I think when I hear you talk about your parents is that they are weak. In a lot of ways. Your mother sounds needy. Both of them sound ignorant.
It’s one of the things I keep thinking when I hear these family stories. Our feelings get hurt. But the reality is that we have so much more information than they do. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, that we’re just better informed because we have better educations or the Internet to keep growing our minds. Or that, in this generation, a lot of us have a belief in a different kind of psychological and spiritual life, one of continuing growth and development.
That last bit wasn’t part of my parents’ understanding of themselves or the world. Especially my father. He just thought you stayed, more or less, where you were born, unless you were smart or crooked enough to get rich at the expense of other people. The idea of going to therapy was outrageous to them, as was asking anyone for help. Between my father’s paranoid fear of exposure and my mother’s tight-lipped endurance, they lived in a closed little world where they did the same things over and over, increasingly resentful that nothing changed.
We really are different than that. Especially the group of us here at LoveFraud. We believe in healing. And in healing, we believe in getting smarter, stronger and wiser. I know this sounds terribly elitist, and maybe it is, but in dealing with these people who seem unable to learn and unwilling to open their minds, I think we’re dealing with an older version of homo sapiens.
For our own sanity and in order to maintain a reasonable courtesy with them, it may help to remember that.
I was glad I called my mother because it alleviated my guilt. It also brought me out of denial, and now I’m dealing with the anger of her narcissism. She would rather cut off a relationship with me than deal with my feelings. I plan to tell her in an email that until she is willing to listen and really hear my feelings, we have nothing to say to each other. Even that doesn’t touch the anger I feel about her betrayal. I spent my entire childhood protecting her feelings and taking care of her. I was the one abused by my stepfather, not her. She has asked repeatedly what I want her to do to make up for what she put me though. But she has never been willing to do anything I asked. I figure I’m giving her the easy way out, only asking her to deal with my residual feelings from the abuse. She doesn’t want anything to do with it. Talking to my therapist today, I got pretty clear that she is a narcissist. I wasn’t sure before, or maybe I just forgot. I doubt an email would even do any good. Either way, I think that conversation yesterday was our last. I feel good that at least I tried one last time.
Sounds like lots of us here are going through similar things with our families this weekend.
Kathleen wrote….
“It’s one of the things I keep thinking when I hear these family stories. Our feelings get hurt. But the reality is that we have so much more information than they do. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing, that we’re just better informed because we have better educations or the Internet to keep growing our minds. Or that, in this generation, a lot of us have a belief in a different kind of psychological and spiritual life, one of continuing growth and development.”
What a brilliant, enlightened theory to state! I completely agree with every word.
I love my mother, I do, but I have felt for some time that I have grown spiritually, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, the entire gambit of beneficial evolvement, compared to the place where she is.
Once, this bothered me because after all, she’s my mother, right? I thought she should be wiser than me as she is older, has had different experiences that caused me to admire her, feel in awe of her when I was a child.
Now, it is what it is. I no longer concern myself with whether she is proud of me or not. I’m proud of me and I don’t live up to anyone’s idealized expectations of me because this is my life and I will emphatically do whatever I want to do with it.
I’m resistant to advice, obstinate because noone knows me like I know me. Noone knows what’s good for me, what is beneficial to my own growth but me.
So, our conversations are light and I take the back seat in them and just listen to her discuss what she considers important to her. I really don’t mind. In fact, I enjoy listening to her as she does has wisdom to impart and I appreciate it.
I confronted her years ago regarding her sometimes snide, sarcastic tone by firmly declaring…”if you’re going to treat me with unjustified disrespect, treat me with inconsideration….then I can no longer communicate with you. I’ve had enough!” I said bye and then lowered the phone receiver back to it’s cradle.
I WAS done. She called me a few days later and sincerely apologized. I quickly accepted it, ending her misery, and we became closer than we were before. She doesn’t use that “tone” with me any longer. Nope.
But if she wouldn’t have apologized, sought to repair the damage she caused…..I would have loved her from a distance.
I accept my mother the way she is and she has finally accepted me the way I am.
I’m serious regarding not allowing anyone in my life, whether they are family, friends, acquaintances or lovers who doesn’t treat me with the same respect, appreciation, consideration, kindness that I gleefully give to them.
Reciprocity is the golden word for me and I’m not dismissing it’s value ever again.
Thank you, lovely Kathleen, for again sharing your profound thoughts with us. Gets me energized, motivated and eager for more inspiration!
🙂
Matt,
I still think that my mother gets the “mother of all mother awards”. Can you imagine how much nastier/evil your mother would have been confined to a wheelchair?
I just remembered that my 30 year old daughter, when she was 16 she said to me, “you don’t really know me at all mum”. I wondered what she meant at the time, but it was from that point on that her behaviour and abuse toward me got worse and worse. All the nasty, evil, degrading and humiliating things she said to me in front of people were so hurtful. Yet I blamed myself! I gave her 15 thousand dollars once, when I really couldn’t afford it, and she immediately went to my mothers and conspired with her to make me look crazy, then cut me off and went travelling overseas first class.
Once I said to her, when she was complaining, ” I love you, and you know I would die for you “. She looked at me and said “why do you always have to wreck everything!” And stormed off. That was 15 years ago!
It took me all this time to work it out. But I still feeel a lot of fear around the whole issue.
Stargazer:
“It also brought me out of denial, and now I am dealing with the anger of her narcissism.”
You took a huge step by contacting your Mom yesterday, and I can tell that you are still reeling from it emotionally today. It is OK!
Even though your anger is justified, PLEASE DO NOT ACT OUT OF ANGER.
You do not have to do anything right now. You did it all yesterday.
Please do not sabotage yourself by acting out of anger and giving ultimatums where the outcome could be the finality of never contacting each other again.
Give yourself the luxury of leaving the door open for yourself, so you can contact her in the future if you want to. And you probably will.
The reason I responded to your situation is because I could see between the lines of your posts that you really want a relationship with your Mom. And you said your Mom was trying, too. When Mother and daughter are both trying there is always hope.
I want to show you what I am seeing from you online:
1. THIS AFTERNOON you posted: “I plan to tell her in an e-mail that until she is willing to listen and really hear my feelings, we have nothing to say to each other.” (If this is how you really feel, you would have told her yesterday, and you did not.)
2. LAST NIGHT you posted: “I always miss her when I cut her out of my life.”
3, LAST NIGHT you posted: “I couldn’t even tell you what I want from her. I guess I just want to be able to be myself and have her be herself, too.”
The posts between yesterday and today look like they were written by 2 different women. Your emotions are all over the place right now. It is OK! Just let yourself calm down a bit.
P.S. I don’t know you Stargazer, and I don’t know the intimate details of your relationship between you and your Mom. If you don’t take anything else from this post, please do NOT act out in anger. Nothing healthy or constructive ever comes from it…..And ultimatums never work.
3
Hello, I have been reading comments on the various threads of this blog for over a week now and find some of the stories fascinating. My friend (not sure if he is a true narcissist or sociopath, but certainly has tendencies) breezed into my life on a chance meeting six years ago. I was married and so was he – and feel like he targeted me somehow, as if I was “safe,”just from the way things happened. Once the relationship started, it become very intense very quickly even though we live in different towns.
The first year was wonderful. I was head over heels and could not get enough of him. I was going to change my life for this man but soon the red flags began to show up; but at first I denied them. He would promise to visit me or do something together and then would sometimes cancel at the last minute. He would tell me things that I later found out were lies. Like the time he said he was going to a therapist but made the whole story up. When I confronted him about the lies, he acted hurt or tried to make me think I was crazy. I started thinking maybe something was indeed wrong with ME… I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt. I became obsessed and was not myself.
So I tried pulling away and told him I couldn’t do this anymore. He would respect my wishes for a while then would call and beg to be in contact again. He would then pull me in with long talks, romantic poems, music, flowers, then he would turn on me and say I expected too much from him!
When we would go out, I would notice him staring and sometimes flirting with other women when he was with me. It was subtle but still I couldn’t miss it. He would also strike up conversations with complete strangers and become so obsessed with them that he would almost forget I was there
He would also “slip” and let me know that other women from his past were in touch with him occasionally.
Then it became weirder. He gave me the password to his email and cell phone accounts, supposedly so I could look at a message from one of his kids or see how many minutes we had talked… and we talked a lot! I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but when the relationship began to unravel later, I had the tools to check on him… and discovered he had not changed his passwords. Hmm.
Even after he separated from his wife, he would still check in with her by phone when he was with me and at times would spend over an hour with her on the phone at bedtime! If I became upset about this, he would seem puzzled, almost cold, and would comment very little. He continued to do this even though it was so blatant and bothered me. Once we went to a casino and he excused himself to go to the men’s room. We were with another couple and were all standing there waiting for him. After he had been gone 10-15 minutes, the other gal and I decided to go to the ladies’ room. We saw him down the hall talking on the phone! Again, I got upset and he told me I ruined his evening!
By this time I was not myself at all. I was separated from my husband and although I had hoped to be with this man, I found that I was often miserable, depressed, and suspicious because of his occasional strange behavior… but his good qualities seemed to outweigh the bad so I hung in there. It had now been three years and he said we would soon be together forever. Part of me was certain this would work out.
One weekend he had scheduled a trip to see me and I called to ask a few questions about a certain food he liked. He answered the phone and immediately sounded funny. I could tell someone was there. He asked if he could call me right back. Well, it was two hours before he did. When I asked if someone had been there, he said I was crazy, that no one was there. He sent an email later saying I should apologize to him for being so suspicious. Again I thought I was the crazy one!
Things went along for a couple of months but I sensed something had changed. Again we were meeting for a long weekend but his personality was different than ever before. He seemed crass, kind of edgy, stressed.. but I passed it off as work-related. But there really was someone else he was seeing.
Now that I think back on it, he set me up to find out about in a very cruel way. She was texting him and he put his phone in his jacket then draped it around the table where I was putting on make up. I heard the beeps. When I confronted him and asked for the truth, he packed his things and stormed out.
I didn’t hear from him for two months. When I did hear from him, he sobbed uncontrollably and asked for my forgiveness, saying it was a fling and would never happen again. He degraded her, saying she was from a poor background, uneducated, etc. He begged me to take him back and asked me to go on vacation with him the following month. Stupidly, I did. We had a great time – until we returned from dinner one evening. The message light on the hotel phone was flashing. There was a message from his (ex) wife, saying she was lonely and calling him “Honey.” I was out of my head at this point and totally lost it, cried, and told him I didn’t understand why he still had that kind of relationship with his ex. I cried myself to sleep. I was so mad at myself for putting up with this.
The next morning he played the victim.. said I was disrespectful and degrading and we should end our trip a day early. We could not get a flight back so we stayed on as planned. Our last night he said he was going down the hall to get a soft drink out of the machine. He was gone over 15 minutes! When he finally returned he had a funny look on his face. Then he told a story about having to go to the front desk to get change for the machine. But I really figured he was on the phone with someone.
Later I found out he called the girl with whom he had the “fling.” Turns out she was very much still in his life, too, although at the time I wasn’t sure and could not prove it. Just a gut feeling. After a very bumpy couple of months, I finally ended the relationship. That was three years ago.
Fast forward to today. We have remained in contact and have even seen each other occasionally at business meetings. Ever so slowly we have evolved into being “friends” but there is no denying the chemistry is still there. If I compartmentalize I can handle it, but if my emotions take over it’s very difficult. He can be very sweet, charming, and is a lot of fun to be with, yet I would never trust him (who would?).. yet I find myself feeling jealous of the other women he is spending time with.
In the last three years, he dumped the “fling” girlfriend for about a year while he carried on with an old friend of his ex- wife’s. When that gal had enough of his shenanigans, she broke it off, so he went back to the “fling.” All the while he remains in close contact with his ex-wife. It seems he never ends any relationship!
So what is the diagnosis for him? Is he a narcissist or a sociopath.. or both? I am feeling much stronger these days but not a day goes by I don’t think about him and the effect he has (had) on my life. It’s almost as if I was in a trance. I did things that I would NEVER consider doing now.
Someday I will be healed, but I know in order to fully heal there should be No Contact. So far I have not been successful with No Contact. Ugh.
mo152:
My stomach turned as I read parts of your post, because it reminded me so much of my ex-boyfriend, who was a sociopath.
I am not a psychiatrist, but a lot of sociopaths have narcissistic tendencies. So, he is probably a little bit of both.
It does not really matter what the diagnosis is, he is TOXIC, BAD NEWS!
GET AWAY ASAP!
ESTABLISH NO CONTACT!
P.S. You already have 6? years invested with this person? That is way too long already. Hopefully, you are not in love with him or anything. Get away!
Unfortunately I was in love with him and probably part of me still is. That’s the strange part that I cannot understand. Even though I am aware of the toxic aspects to him, he has a side of him that seems so normal. He’s never yelled, cursed me, or laid a hand on me. But I know that it was emotional abuse – which can be just as bad – and some of it was very subtle. It does make you feel that you are the one losing it!
Last month I saw him at a business meeting after not seeing him for a while. At first I thought he seemed better – calmer – and we did some sightseeing afterwards with a group of colleagues. That evening he asked me to meet him downstairs in the lounge for a drink. What the heck, I said yes and went to the lounge at the time he suggested. Well, you guessed it! He showed up about 45 minutes late!
This time I said nothing (what is the point?) but told myself I absolutely could not be friends with this person. No doubt he was on the —- phone again!
Unfortunately I will see him at another meeting before the end of the year. I cannot change jobs right now so this twice a year contact will continue to occur until one of us does change jobs. (That is how we met). I have to change the way I relate when I do see him. Otherwise I will not respect myself. The last time it took me a week to get over seeing him again.. it is very difficult.