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.
One other thing, for those of us who have loaned money or bought things for the sociopath because the poor soul was jobless or short of cash or simply wanted it—read Harvey’s book. He touches on that sort of thing too. I can practically hear Harvey having a stroke at the very THOUGHT of a woman financing or giving a man money for ANYTHING he can’t afford to purchase himself–and he explains WHY too. –Jen
Hello Kathy,
One of many great articles, but this one will take some careful thought, because I see so much of me in this one too. I printed it out to digest it completely-thanks so much for your wonderful insights.
newworld view, that’s a great question — “why do those of us who lost support/protection at such a young age or never really had it to lose”.in coping with impending danger and searching for safety, led us to these sociopaths?”
I think the nutshell answer is that they provide the illusion of safety. Not physical safety necessarily, because that’s not our issue. Rather emotional safety. They make us feel understood, and they feed our need to be accepted and loved for who we are.
I think that’s a universal need but, if we come out of dysfunctional family backgrounds, we grew up adapting to other people’s needs at the expense of our own. It makes us very strong in some ways, but it leaves us with huge unmet underlying needs.
And that makes us vulnerable, as well as a little wonky in the way we perceive things and how we navigate the world. We’re over-sensitive to other people’s needs, rushing to fulfill them. We over-perform in other ways. Our self-esteem is too dependent on other people’s view of us.
These are only a few of our characteristics, if we’re coming out of the dysfunctional family with a skew towards caregiving and “earning” love. I don’t even think that sociopaths have to be as clever as we give them credit for to play into this character set. In “Strategy of the Dolphin,” the book I mentioned in an earlier article, the authors break the world down into sharks and carps. Sharks are addicted to winning. Carps are addicted to being loved. If we’re giving out carp signals, and someone can figure out a few more things about us — our tastes, our socioeconomic background, our hobbies or interests — it could be pretty easy to get our attention and then hook us with love-bombing. That’s our drug.
When I was listing myself on dating sites, it always surprised me when a certain percentage of guys clearly had me pegged as a submissive type. My profiles were funny and clever, and I usually worried that they’d scare men off. But people who were looking for it could see through to my need for approval, along with my obvious career success. A nice combination for a sociopath.
Which is why I keep hammering on the point that we ultimately have to become emotionally self-sufficient. That is the difference, I believe, between people who get sucked in and the ones who don’t. Easy to say, not necessarily easy to do. Because vulnerability and need for emotional support do not only emerge from difficult childhoods, but from circumstances in current life.
Which makes it even more important that we develop skills for self-care that extend to our state of mind. Stress management, meditation, maintaining supportive social contacts, etc. all contribute to our resilience and ability to maintain our equilibrium in the face of difficulties.
Hi Friends,
Kathy..The top post was so timely. I recently (3 wks ago), ended emotionally and physically a 42 yr relationship with a S, my husband of 20 yrs, and apart 17 yrs, than back together 4 months. When we got back together I had changed so much, and I quickly saw red flags everywhere. 3 weeks ago, when I had my “aha” moment, I grieved my heart out, but I was finally on the outside looking in. I had left the “cult ” of R, but the “cult” hadn’t left me. As I saw the relationship for what it was instead of what I wanted it to be, I felt feelings I know are familiar to many here. We were involved in a religious cult for 16 of the years we were together. We exited that together in 1987. In 1996 I went to Wellspring, and was told that R was a S, but didn’t “get” it until I “got” it 3 wks. ago. I feel I am well on my way to recovery, out the other side and along the path.
I have been coming to another realization these past few weeks. My 35 yr old son has been living with me for 4 months and he has MOST of the traits of his dad, the S. Of course knowing the DNA factor, I am going through another shell-shock event in my life. I feel like I am on the battlefield, and don’t even believe this or know how I can internalize this. This means not only have I lost my husband, but also my son. It would be so much easier if they had died in a plane crash, because then I would know that they loved me. All I ever wanted was a sweet family to make it different than the sick family I grew up with. I am still stuck with beating myself up for picking the S and the ramifications it has had on what I thought was our family. All I have left is my daughter, and she has ended up healthier than any of us.
I know this isn’t all about me, but right now I am in the battlefield, glaring at the casualties, and trying to avoid the landmines. I sit in the rubbish, feeling like a soldier in Saving Private Ryan. The ruins are everywhere – and they cause me to feel so much SHAME. These are not respectable losses. They are losses that evoke such deep feelings in me of how it used to be when I was young, and how similar I felt dodging Daddy’s madness and the trauma and terror I felt when Dad told mom he was going to cut her up in little pieces and throw her in the river when we were out camping. I was little and had no place to go be safe. I thought I might be next. Perhaps it was the time Dad knocked mom’s teeth out, and he came to me with blood all over his shirt and told me to watch the other 4 children while he took her to the hospital. When my mom came home she had no front teeth, and she didn’t look like my mom anymore. I lost my mom as I knew her. Thank you for letting me feel my feelings now from that. I cry so deep as I write – am just writing free-flowing. I was robbed of my childhood, and I now realize my whole life. I am 62 yrs old, and I’m just waking up out of the ruins of my life. I spent my whole life blocking reality as best as I could. Well, it’s HERE!! I feel myself changing so fast now. I feel like Rip Van Winkle when he woke up. I am just trusting the process.
It’s interesting. I’ve had an eating disorder my whole life, and I got abstinant 3 months ago. It was when I put the food down that this sanity that feels like madness started happening. It is a good thing I am in a 12 step program to facilitate my healing, and that I have a strong faith.
I have asked my son to move soon. Of course I feel guilty, as he has Bi-Polar disorder and can’t get his meds until his insurance kicks in at his place of employment in a month and a half. His life has been chaotic (wonder why). I am trying to support him w/out enabling him. I feel sorry for him because he has a S father and a mother who has not been there for him emotionally his entire life.
Thanks for allowing this site to be a safe place, where I am not judged, and there is mutual love and respect. We are kindred spirits all traveling the path at different places.
Thanks Kathleen Hawk,
When reading your entry all I thought about was Reinhold Niebuhr pray:
O God and Heavenly Father,
Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed;
courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
When I learned of this pray when I was but a child, I never forgot it. And really can’t tell anyone just how much it help me to understand that there are things about ourselves and others that we can’t change but their are things that we can and must change. Only through wisdom can one understand the difference and then learn to live with that with serenity and courage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_prayer
kathleen tks sooooo much for your response…….i love that you have paved the way for so many i hope to try some of your self care ideas towards finding peace we are such a curious bunch here at lf, so tks for you patience in answering our questions terri
Thanks so much, Kathleen Hawk! Very helpful perspectives. I haven’t had a chance to read the comments, but I did want to say that your insights are helping me in my process to let go of the self-pity I often felt for myself and my lonely, scary childhood and to start to feel some true compassion. And this compassion makes me want to take care of myself instead of “buck up” constantly and try to please others, which I believe now, in this context, is actually a weakness, not a strength. Thank you.
Dear Housie,
To me, losing my family to the personality disorders, especially my P-son, has been the most painful of all the losses. Coming to grips with the fact that the people whom you WANTED to trust and love so badly, being abusive of you is the worst of the loses. Over and above the financial losses, the perception of safety lost, etc.
Coming through the “fires” of the pain and disillusions eventually does quit “burning” our minds, souls and skins, and peace does come to our souls and minds. A new view of life, the new priorities we should accept, and realizing that we ARE important and that those losses are not the loss of our selves. Our self is still there, waiting to be nurtured.
Hang on, and take care of yourself! You are no longer responsible for the “others”—even your son is no longer your responsibility. ((((hugs)))) and always prayers.
To OxDrover, I notice you’ve been writing here for some time and enjoy your posts. I’ve had a situation today which I’m not proud of – and after reading my own post, I realize I’ve been looking at this site for several years and am STILL involved in a relationship that has had some wonderful moments but that I once again have been hung out to dry. And what do I expect – I stood my ground the other night, he seemed to listen though turned most of it back on me – I wouldn’t accept the blame and told him he had alot of nerve to always say that I could call him back (I’ve done it with varying response) or that I always seem to want to ‘bring up the past’ in our relationship. Well, just because it is the past today doesn’t get around the fact that it was just recently the present for
me to live through and deal with – and he is the one who puts things out to me that he’s going to do (or call) and then does not follow through. And now I go back to an old self that second guesses herself and thinks perhaps I am being petty and just need to go about my life while he’s busy – which I do…but at the same time, isn’t it healthy and polite to have consideration of another person’s day and life, especially when that
person is supposedly the primary person in your life?
And yet I stood my ground last night but wouldn’t say those words, ‘Yes,
I want to be done with this relationship” because in fact, I don’t want to – something in me still does not wanr to really say goodbye to him and even thinks that I may have taken the easy way out in labelling him a sociopath – and yet so many traits fit his behavior with me.
And 7 years of this – it’s now 10 years since my 2nd husband died and
I swore to myself that I would not go down the road of drama and murky
scenarios any more with anyone, or love that is not founded on trust and
actual week-to-week fun with one another.
Anyway, just feeling low and I know that’s part of the deal. I’ll get back
up again- maybe be back here. He called earlier today and we seemed
back on track, and he said he’d call in a couple of hours and come up –
and now nothing for 4-5 hours, this is so familiar and I really feel as though I’m being punished for my words to him last night and then acting
more ‘normal’ today (as he did) – and I feel as though I deserve it at
this point. Just when I was feeling strong and clear, I allow myself to
get knocked back down. I just emailed a friend who many years ago
was my sponsor – she helped me through my 2nd marriage to an alcoholic and I met her through Al-Anon – I want to get rid of my own
addiction to bad love.
Housie, welcome to LoveFraud. I read your post this morning as I was running out the door to a dentist appointment, and didn’t have time for a thoughtful response. The time with the dentist turned into an unexpected and very complicated extraction, so I came home and went to sleep. All this is apology for being so long to respond.
Your clear and unashamed talk about your painful background sounds like you’ve been through a lot of therapy. Good for you. And good for you too that you were able to judge and decide what was right for you in this second round with your husband. You said that you feel like you are looking at the ruins of your life, but it sounds to me like you have ownership of the most important things. Your sanity. Your understanding of what is right and not right for you. Your ability to take care of yourself in ever-developing ways.
I hope you have some therapeutic support right now. It sounds like you’re handling a lot, and you’ve been handling a lot for a long time.
I feel for your bipolar son too. I’m not a big advocate of psychotropic drugs, but there’s no question that they really help bipolar people get centered, if they’re willing to give up the highs of the manic swing. (It’s a hard thing to give up.)
I hope you look around the site, and read more of the articles. My series is on recovery from trauma, but there are many good articles here.
I wish you well with pulling your life together and finding some peace.
Kathy