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.
mo152 ,please read about trauma bonds, and stockholm syndrome- you can google them. Sheds light on why we have tolerated the intolerable.
Wow, what great posts! Thank you all for sharing your thoughts, stories, and the vote of confidence that I can completely extricate myself from this relationship. There is hope out there, since some of you seem to be well on the path to recovery! For those who are still healing, your support will likely make a big difference. Could even save a life.
Fortunately, my relationship never involved money, although I recall that originally he commented that he thought I was well connected in society. When I told him I was good ole “middle class,” he continued to pursue me anyway. However, I noticed he would talk about money sometimes and seemed to know exactly the value of his wife’s assets, even though they supposedly kept their finances separate. She was from a wealthy family and as far as I know, he may still inherit her assets even though they are now divorced. She has no one else to leave her money to.
What has happened over the last few years since our “romantic” relationship unraveled is regular contact almost always initiated by him (mostly emails, occasionally phone calls, and of course the business meetings). Those meetings are what mainly keeps our ties going. Since I no longer see him very often, I have told myself that I could handle being his friend. Who am I kidding?
At a couple of meetings in the last two years he and I ended up being with each other physically after being around each other for a couple of days. The sexual tension was almost unbearable for me. Then the next day I would regret it, of course. All this happened while he was supposedly committed to the girlfriend that ended our relationship! I am sick to my stomach thinking about it. I don’t know why I did this. Yes I have been tested twice.. thank goodness I am fine.
Of course, for all these years he has been a great listener, conversationalist, is very funny, witty, and has kept up with what is going on in my life. His memory is amazing, also. He has always made me feel like our relationship is unique, says there will never be another love like ours, and brings up things we have said or done in the past. He sends flowers or gifts on special occasions also. Yet he has not once asked me to resume the original type of relationship. Not that I would.. He even told me last time I saw him how much he loves me but he is probably telling his girlfriend and his ex wife that, too. It’s always been more about words.. obviously his actions speak very loudly. There’s a real disconnect when I look at him then remember some of the things he has done. It does not seem like it could be the same person!
He is very much a loner, has few friends that he keeps up with, and then there are his children. Although he claims to care for them (three grown children) he will go several years at a time without seeing them. They are from his first marriage that he left when they were very young. The children all live in other areas of the country, but I always found it odd that he did not seem to WANT to see them. Or maybe they don’t care to see him, either.. who knows? Yet he faithfully remembers their birthdays, sends gifts on holidays. But if they did not contact him on Father’s Day, Christmas, or his birthday, he would feel sorry for himself and would seem surprised that he didn’t hear anything.
Kathleen.. your post hit the nail on the head.. . this kind of man is very likely a relationship addict. One woman is never enough! There always has to be the sneak around.. calling or emailing someone else. The thrill of keeping secrets or fooling someone. And he would always comment how great it was in the “beginning” of relationships and how that never lasted.
His life pattern: two failed marriages (that I know of), and a long list of girlfriends of relatively short duration. He doesn’t really have “flings” but intense relationships of several years that usually unravel and end badly. Usually he is the one who finally moves on, but he never ends one relationship before he starts another. After the woman who is left gets past her anger she is willing to take him back or just be his “friend.” Like me! I was even aware of one woman from his past who was still contacting him after 16 years and asking him to come visit her. She was in a helping profession and fit the profile perfectly. Finally she found someone else and got married.
Another pattern is his relationships are with women who are not 100% available. They are either married, live far away, have young children (he doesn’t like children), are not mentally balanced, or are otherwise forbidden like the wife’s friend. This must be a built in safety net for him, as he never has to fully commit to anyone! He can have his cake and eat it too. He claims to want a long term partner and happy marriage but has no idea how to do that or what that is.
A few years ago when he was separated from his wife and started the relationship with her childhood friend, I remember him telling me about the situation during a phone conversation. He had not called for many weeks but called that day and brought it up. After gettng past the initial hurt of him telling me about this person, I later changed roles and became like a counselor as he told me his “tale of woe.”
He said he had a lot in common with this woman and wanted to start seeing her, but his wife was having a big problem with it. They had lived apart for a couple of years so he thought it was strange that his wife would be so upset. I remember that I warned him… foolishly thinking I could make him see that the circumstances of this triangle would only end in disaster. For some reason his divorce was not proceeding, although he said he wanted one.
Months went by. Instead of pushing for a divorce, he remained legally married but continued the relationship with his wife’s friend. They had to “sneak around” so his wife wouldn’t find out, but of course she did, anyway. Finally the friend said she had had enough and ended it, after his wife revealed that he was still sleeping with her! What drama!
Amazingly, he told me he admired this woman for sticking to her guns and cutting off all contact with him. I’m sure he probably tried to stay in touch, but in this case he failed. Good for her! Obviously she is better off and not suffering as many have. Finally, his wife filed for divorce from him after suffering such indignity. The divorce was finalized a year ago but they are still in close touch and I imagine he even has things at her house. She is not a well person and is dependent on him for errands and take care of things at the house they shared.
Knowing about this situation I’ve just described was finally a turning point for me.. when I finally realized how sick our connection and relationship had become. It really was all about him.. and I let it be that way. By comparison my life was pretty normal and I didn’t have the continuing drama. He seemed to thrive on the drama yet he couldn’t see that he was the CAUSE of it! In short, I had given and given until I could give no more. I gave up waiting, hoping and trying to fix this man. I was a shell of a person and had such low self-esteem.
Slowly but surely, I think I am coming out of this fog but it has been very difficult. I allowed this relationship to change me forever… I learned a lot of hard lessons. All I can do is keep my distance as much as possible at the meetings and focus on the wholesome and normal things in my life, which is really pretty full with family, friends, work. There is just no other love interest right now, and I do wish I had that. Most of my friends and family do not fully know what I have been through, as I stopped talking about him a couple of years ago.
I’m so glad to have found this blog to read and learn of others’ experiences. You all sound like caring and intelligent people who are all trying to find a better life and help others along the way.
Dear mol52:
Reading your posts makes me almost have chills as it has so many similarities to my 7 year relationship – long distance at that – with the man I know. And I’ve been confused, always looking back at the fun times we shared and the
seemingly intimate talks – the way he will remember and ask about my kids and how he has really gotten to know me, the dreams we’ve shared even down to how great it would have been to have a child together. But then I really look at the reality and though I haven’t been subjected to actual proof of other women, it starts to get that icky feeling you get deep down when he doesn’t call when he was going to, doesn’t show up, doesn’t (in my case) come through
on that promise to pay you back, and then even acts like a complete weirdo on the phone the next time he calls – using sexual humor and being kind of disrespectful in the way he talks to you – all the while you’re thinking – who is
this person? It can’t be the same person I had these ‘other’ conversations with, the one who seems so intelligent, funny and caring – self-deprecating and insightful, blah blah blah. And there have been times when he’s here when he seems relaxed, you’re having a good time with him – he’s said he’s going to spend rest of the day with you and whoops…there goes that phone of his, a conversation ensues and what do you know, it’s the district manager or fill in the
blank – but in my case, I don’t suspect it’s a particular woman – he just seems to use that phone like his own prop to come up with an excuse to leave or to set the stage for asking for money or whatever – sometimes I’ve wanted to even go over and
take the phone to see if there is someone even on the line!
Anyway, that’s been my craziness and of course there’s more but I’ll just end on this note…He called Mother’s Day, sounded like the kind person I’ve ‘loved’, asked what the kids were doing with me (kids are grown…we ended up not doing anything, I ended up in my studio working on project for my daughter’s wedding…) and said he’d be able to come up day after for several days and then didn’t call back until late the next day with excuse and now haven’t heard from him. He is Kryptonite for my otherwise healthy but probably fairly boring life, one that I’m in process of revamping and making more fun and fulfilling for myself. I won’t call him, I’m reading alot of these posts and worry a bit
that I’m getting too absorbed in them but however I do it, I just want to make myself see how perverted it’s been to prolong this torture! And none of you commented on it, but I had mentioned my sister who has Lou Gehrig’s Disease
and is almost now completely immobilized – I don’t tell you for sympathy but to tell you how inspiring she is to all of us who know and love her – she has been an intelligent and capable woman, too caring of charismatic, cheating
men in her own past, caring of our mother (who died this past Sept.) who was worthy of love and caring but who had complicated relationships with men and with her children, etc. etc. My sister is now on her way out and inspiring
others with her continued strength and humor in the midst of her own tragic circumstance. And her situation and handling of it makes me feel even more like I, or anyone who knows her has even more of a responsibility to seize
their own lives with renewed gratitude and resolve to live a happy life with all their faculties and passion – good passion, not lustful or tawdry – and to live with grace and dignity now – and not later.
One last thing, my friend has always used the phrase that I’ve ‘always been in his corner’ and how he appreciates that as he has few friends. I think there is a reason for that, there is a reason my daughter won’t allow him to be at
her wedding, there is a reason I no longer want to be ‘in his corner’ though I feel I still love him – I’m going to feel bad possibly for even posting this as it feels like emotional infidelity or I fear in a way that he may even see this
-isn’t it bizarre how your thinking gets so skewed). And bad boys and girls do end up in a corner, usually by themselves.
Dear Persephone,
Thank you for such an inspiring and heartfelt post. My sympathy to you regarding your sister. She sounds like an amazing person. What she is going through does put things into perspective. Truly what goes around comes around.
On the subject of your “now you see him, now you don’t” friend, I can very much identify with how you are feeling and certainly understand the push-pull dynamic of these strange relationships.
When you look back over the seven years of knowing him, there were probably so many things that registered as strange or uncommon about him, but those “flags” were pushed aside in favor of the “intimacy” and the rush that comes with someone paying attention to you with an intensity only a S or N can provide. It’s as if they are filling an empty vessel (their victims) in order to be rid of themselves for a while.
They also love being with those who are successful or very well-liked, as it reflects back on them. They truly do absorb the characteristics and good qualities of whoever they are spending time with. Maybe that’s why I thought he was really a good person at times (ha). Seriously, what I noticed is if I was feeling very up and happy about life, he would love it because it made him feel pumped him up. If I was down, he would listen and try to empathize, but it seemed to make him uncomfortable. If he truly didn’t know how to be empathetic, then showing empathy would just be an act.
Once I asked him what the color of his first wife’s eyes were and he didn’t even know. This is a person he was married to for 9 years and had two children with. I thought that was telling. Also, one of his best features is his expressive eyes. But looking into those same eyes while close up was like looking into the eyes of a reptile. I noticed this at first but kept thinking I was imagining things. Until I read about others who had a similar experience.
OMG, here we go again. A lady from the court called as I had left a voice mail for her from last week when I had questions on the incorrigibile petition.
Evidentaly mentioning that I was refered to file through his psyciatrist WAS THE WRONG THING TO SAY. If the court deems his issues to be mental health then he will NOT be considered incorrigible and will be refered RIGHT back to the same facility he goes to NOW for counsceling.
I said that when I originaly brought him to this facility to begin with it wasn’t for depression it was for the issues of behavior at home and school.
I swear to GOD no matter where I turn to they want to refer me right back to RIVERWOOD the place he is currently going for help. And RIVERWOOD in turn is refering me to the courts……This has been going on for MONTHS, every phone call I have made to any agency. Try Riverwood.
WHAT is WRONG with this picture?
The school doesn’t want to deal with my kid either. This lady asked why they are allowing him to fail in school and why the school isn’t giving him more testing….? Good question.
I had to keep on them weekly to get the test he had done last year.
I am loosing hope here….
My x n/p had a strange way of making me feel incredibly cared about and like he was so into my life BUt at the same time equally so self absorbed, like I was only a side kick- I was Robin to his Batman. I cant figure out how I could of felt at times so IMPORTANT to him by him pretending to be committed to me, BUt in most instances, my wishes/desires/feeling were nothing to him. He was always star of the show- even angered him if someone gave me a beautiful compliment. He would either walk away with disgusted look on his face- OR ignore it to start talkin about him again. The relationship definately reeked of split personality, but mostly the dominate personality was pure premeditated evil.
Mine also held on to old relationships (called supply) to feed his insatiable EGO. He could never get enuf of himself- (ENOUGH about u-Lets talk about me )
Witsend just read this- dont give up, talk to another person if you need to. like you said, the priority here is incorrigible behavior, if the mental health facility is refering you to courts ,then they have dismissed him and found no mental health issue-
probally better, i just talked to my atty. (also friend) about my son, he says he can get judge to order some mental health testing for him. (due to fact that my son calls in daily for mandatory drug/alcohol testing from DUI charge and he could easily while in the system be made to do additional testing. I will probally persue this. try not to panic- it aint over till its over. I dont beleive they can refuse help if he has no more treatments scheduled at mental health center.
Ad Nauseum…Isn’t it amazing how similar our stories are? I was told these men are from the Cookie Cutter Messiah School. mo152, don’t be surprised if you waffle back and forth between denial and acceptance. It’s all part of the grief process. I had such a fear of abandonment (interesting I picked a man who was totally unavailable, except for when he was, and then did he shower me with attention and compliments. I was the best everything to him. I loved the adulation and especially feeling so special. I found out he sent the same poem he wrote to 3 different women, and they all thought they were the only ones getting it. Gag!! It just feels so damn good to be free of him, especially emotionally. Please, mo152, know you are in a safe place surrounded by people who have been there. We are all in different levels of recovery and healing.
Thank you all so much. I feel stronger today (but emotionally drained, too). Recovery and healing is hard work. One step forward, two steps back. Had I known then what I know now, but we can’t look back, right? Have to keep marching forward to see where that leads.
Just amazing how they (the S/N types) flit from relationship to relationship and never seem to suffer angst or guilt. We are the ones who question ourselves and take on the shame and guilt they offloaded. I am still feeling ill thinking of the things I did for this man. I was not myself!
Interesting, he always acted like these triangular “situations” just happened to him by chance. But he is such a meticulous planner when it comes to his self-centered existence that I knew everything he did or said was calculated to achieve a certain result, including dating his wife’s friend. That was no “accident.” He is too smart and knew the havoc dating the friend would cause. But he also probably banked on the fact that his wife would finally file for divorce. He could then escape being the “bad guy” who filed.
Likewise, the current girlfriend was chosen because she is a convenient fallback when he wants company. But because she has two small children and related responsibilities at home, he doesn’t have to be with her all the time. She can’t move in with him nor would he move in with her. Therefore the relationship will remain static until he gets bored and finds something else.
When I’ve seen him the last few meetings he always makes a point to tell me what a “boring” conversationalist his girlfriend is and how there is no “challenge” in their relationship because she is not educated. I became irritated and replied that he shouldn’t be seeing her if he is going to constantly degrade her to another. That just rolled off his back. Disgusting.
I see the patterns so clearly now that I am not with him. What in the world was I thinking for those years?
Kathleen wrote…..
“The book will make you feel good about yourself (because we are generally pretty wonderful people), and it will also open your eyes to the common patterns of sociopathic relationships.”
We are always pretty wonderful people. I think you all are AWESOME. I think I am awesome and I tell folks repeatedly how awesome I believe I am…….haha…jk.
We just gotta work on those quirks you discuss. Mine are to not project my good qualities, good character traits onto others, especially the men I mingle with.
They aren’t me and I should not expect them to be me. It is naive, foolish and arrogant behavior. I’m no Saint but I am a super gal with oodles of goodness to share with the right people.
Oh, yeah……
🙂