In the series on recovering from traumatic relationships, this is the third article on grieving and letting go. It is an extension of the last one, which discussed exploring the past to understand our patterns of belief and behavior. This is about how we do it and what we find. Or rather about how I did it, and what I found
Unpacking frozen memories
This week I reached out to someone whose name is part of my history. She was once the lover of a man I regarded as the great love of my life. He was an alcoholic poet who died when I was 23. She is a poet too. I found her web site, read a poem about the first time they made love, and wrote her an e-mail to introduce myself.
She wrote back, asking about his life and how he died. I tried to answer her factually, but found myself drifting over and over into how I felt about it all.
She asked if I ever wrote about him. I told her that, when he died, it was as thought my memory was wiped. I couldn’t remember his voice or the joking banter that was part of our everyday conversations. Except for photos, I couldn’t remember what he looked like. I was so angry, it took me four years to finally grieve him and let him go. At that time, I dreamed about him, and those memories are more vivid than our life together. If I could write anything, it would be only my story. I couldn’t reproduce him in prose. I wish I could.
I wrote a second letter, apologizing for going on and on about my feelings. I tried to tell her more about our life together, getting lost again in telling her about how it was for me as more and more memories returned. Then, within the same day, I wrote her a third letter. Apologizing once again for dumping all this me, me, me on her, a stranger. Telling her it wasn’t my conscious intention when I wrote her, but I was using her to unpack those frozen memories. That’s what she was seeing in these letters.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Through the years of recovery, I’ve reached out several times to lost people in my history. Always thinking I was just writing to say hi, and then finding memories flooding me. The one the sticks in my mind was an e-mail exchange with my high-school boyfriend, who broke up with me after we begin attending different colleges. It happened at the same time that my mother threw me out, because I’d tried to tell her what my father had done to me and was about to do to my younger sister. My mother accepted my father’s lies about a 13-year-old seducing him. Before this boy broke up with me, I finally told him the truth about me. Then he told me he wanted to date someone else at his new school.
He remembers only the sensible break-up of two teenagers going to schools in different states. But talking to him reopened what I was living through. I was at the edge of adulthood, abandoned by everyone who cared about me. Until then, I survived on an illusion that I could have a “regular life” by pretending it never happened. Now I saw that I was going to pay over and over. I felt how my personality tightened around fear, determination to ward off new monsters, and a hunger for something I called love, but now think was simply safety.
This was one of the foundations of behavior and belief I described in the last article. These events shaped much of what happened later. I didn’t have to think about it intellectually. I felt it. The insight shined like a light on the future of that young adult.
I had to stop talking to him. I was starting to say cruel and provocative things to him, sniping he didn’t deserve. Because in insight, I also saw him as he was, as well as my mother as she was, from the vantage point of the distant future. He too was entering his adulthood, actively shaping his future. How much of his potential could I expect him to sacrifice for a girl who was truly messed up? Would he fight my father? Was there anything fair about expecting him to take care of me, when he never would have gotten involved with me if he’d known the truth? Likewise, my mother, what did I expect from her? She was beaten down, trying to survive with her three younger children, and she was afraid of my father and afraid to leave him. She chose their survival.
I could see how my father’s behavior had damaged me and how my damage burdened other people. It wasn’t my fault or theirs. Whether they took on my burden was a decision about their lives, their resources, what they could handle. I had no choice, but they did. And they had more than me to consider.
I could see how it all came together. Without thinking about the word, I forgave my boyfriend and my mother. Instead of being angry, I mourned for myself, that young girl with no one but herself to depend on. It could have been different. But it was what it was. She had to move on, wounded but with no time or place to heal. She would create a life that reflected the reality of those unhealed wounds. And in understanding this, I forgave myself too. I stopped thinking I was stupid or selfish or incompetent or lazy or anything else. I was someone who lacked the resources that a lot of people took for granted, and I did the best I could.
Inside the myths
The more I crack open the “truths” of my life to discover what is really inside them, the more I come to realize that luck is a big factor. Perhaps that is too light a word for what I mean — the random way that events coalesce at a moment in time.
The great learning of the angry phase is that we are not responsible for what we cannot control. Our traumatic encounters begin with location and timing. If things had been a little different, we would not have been there. Beyond that, we did not want to be hurt or ask for it. Other people have their own histories and structures of behavior and belief. We did not create them and we cannot control them. If they had been different, it would have come out differently.
In the angry phase, we spend time dissecting what happened, finding what to blame on the circumstances and on the people who hurt us. We look outside ourselves for the reasons our good intentions attracted such bad results.
Twenty-five years after this husband died, another man drove me into healing myself. I believe he is a sociopath. In getting over him, one of the things that moved me from anger into grieving and letting go was a jarring realization that there was nothing I could blame on the sociopath that didn’t seem to be equally true of me. He was using me and he didn’t care about my feelings. True, but I also wanted him to be what I wanted him to be. And though my methods of coercion were more socially acceptable as “expressions of love,” their intention was to persuade him or guilt-trip him into giving me what I wanted.
The same was true for lying or obfuscation. Whatever he hid from me, I hid as much from him. I didn’t share what I really felt or wanted. I kept posing as an adult when I had a wounded child’s needs for unconditional love and complete safety. The same was true for being selfishly uncaring about what I wanted. I claimed to be committed to making him happy, but what I really meant by “happy” was him loving me and making a forever commitment. .
If I had accepted what his words and behavior were telling me about his capacity to give me what I wanted, that would have been the time to decide whether I liked or loved him. No blame. No fault. He fit or he didn’t. The truth was he didn’t. I wasn’t lucky that way with him. His life might have been improved by me, but the opposite wasn’t true. This was a frog, not a prince. It was that simple.
Luck turned on its head
As I get older, and keep cracking open the bits of mythology that make up my beliefs about my own life. I sometimes find surprises.
Writing the former lover of my dead husband, my memories opened up. Because I read her poetry and remember a few things he told me, I knew that she wasn’t certain about him and ultimately sent him away. She knew he was an ex-con. She knew he always had a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew he was seductive and smooth. I understand why she passed on him. She had professional stature, life equity, something to lose.
It was different for me. I was barely 20, desperate for a new life. Equally desperate for acceptance, because I felt like a freak. I had a soul-killing clerical job, no money, no clue of what to do next. I had heard things about him.That he had stocked the library shelves in a brand-new prison and was literate, had read everything. He was already a published poet, and people spoke of him with awe and affection.
When I met him, I saw a big handsome man with a background as bad as mine who had made something extraordinary of himself. The booze and drugs, the terminal liver disease, our shared ability to ignore the fact that he was engaged to another woman somehow just added to the mystique. I looked at him and saw a future that was better than anything I could create alone. That night I stayed with him and never left.
I told her how it began. And then I told her about the end. Watching his character and intellect deteriorate as his liver failed, the blessing of his death in a car accident, my angry refusal to grieve him until I had a psychotic break four years later. But, by the time he died, I had a profession. I was a writer. He fed me books, taught me to edit, gave me rules of writing and thinking which serve me to this day. He left this girl, 13 years younger than him, a new future.
That’s the mythology. In the first letter, I wrote “I was lucky.” I meant lucky to find him, but the words stayed with me after I sent the letter. As I told her more in the second letter, I found myself looking at me through her eyes. My myth of a great romance began to shrivel to the story of a vulnerable child-woman and the out-of-control addict she had chosen as a replacement daddy. I would do anything, accept any treatment or circumstance, as long as he would stay alive and keep convincing me that he loved me. Yes, he was charismatic and funny, brilliant and talented, and probably more tolerant of my childish neediness than almost anyone else might have been. But it was a dead-end ride and I wouldn’t get out of it without more damage.
By the time I was writing the third letter, I was not telling her about the times he had hit me. The ways he made me carry his grass, because he was already a three-time loser. How, when we were broke, he wanted me to start whoring. How our open marriage was a license for him, not me. How when he became too bored writing the trash novels that supported us, I did it alone. Or how, at the end, he kept getting into serious accidents with other women, until he eventually died in a car with a woman who barely survived it.
In the myth, these were blips in a mostly charmed life with someone who understood me and who my horrible life into something interesting and glamorous. But now I remembered that the last time he went to prison, it was because of a tip by a woman he was living with, who was supposedly working her way through college as a prostitute. I thought about how people with my background make up the majority of prostitutes. The woman who tipped the police about the suitcase of grass in his trunk had gotten rid of him, like the woman poet, like the wife before her, another beautiful and gifted woman who fell in love with him, corresponding while he was still in prison, but gave up on him after his drinking created grief, chaos and endless expense. Like me, they probably all loved him after he was gone, but they got rid of him, because he was dangerous to them and himself.
Looking back at him, another damaged child with a terrible background, and me, who was hungry and bright but with no boundaries or any idea of what a good relationship looked like, I realized that I was luckier than I knew. Lucky that he wasn’t well and needed someone to take care of him. Lucky that, except for a brief scary period, we made enough money writing that he didn’t go back to dealing or trying to turn me out. Lucky that he was probably more kind than he would have been under other circumstances, and that I had the opportunity to see the best more than the worst of him. Lucky that I came out of it with a way to support myself so I didn’t have to submit to the next “rescuer” that came along.
Like the situation with the man who couldn’t be what I wanted him to be, this was a confluence of circumstances. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I wouldn’t have seen him as I did. Nor loved him and mourned him as the soul mate whose good influence stays with me to this day. If he hadn’t been too broke to escape from Albany, I never would have met him. If either of us had more resources, it never would have happened. But I was lucky. He was what I needed him to be, and I was that for him.
Who is under those sacks of cement?
Writers treasure people’s peculiarities. Stories would be boring without them. But, to write well, it is also necessary to dig under the stereotypes of good and evil. My husband’s story didn’t begin with prison, or the dope-dealing or pimping. I knew a few things about his early life, but in retrospect I know more from just seeing how he responded to trauma. He refused to be broken. It was something I loved about him, but it also spoke of entrenched habits of trying to ignore or bury pain. We had this in common.
We thought we were brave, but I’ve come to think it’s braver to face the truth. Which, in our case, was a dance of the walking wounded. Facing truth can take romance out of a story, but facts may be more nourishing. Truth may lead to spontaneous forgiveness, as I forgave my old boyfriend and my mother. It also can show us that we did the best we could. We see the burdens we are carrying and the innocent and good soul who is trying to bear them.
Blaming ourselves is a function of anger. Realizing that we are not perfect, that we live with handicaps, is part of grieving and letting go. Facing it doesn’t mean we give up trying to heal. And forgiveness has nothing to do, ultimately, with the people we are forgiving. It is a choice of what we want to care about, what burdens we decide not to carry. Being mad at a sociopath for being a sociopath and exploiting or hurting us is like hating the sun for shining and giving us sunburn. Facing reality empowers us to deal with it. Wear sunscreen. Trust conditionally.
The best reason to invest in healing from unresolved trauma is because it is crippling. It blocks our ability to mature through experience. It constricts personality structure with fear-based blinders and self-limiting rules that should only be interim strategies, rough protections until we see through what happened. The more we understand the confluence of events, most of which had nothing to do with us, the more trauma tends to lose its glamour and terror. It becomes simply a variety of human experience that we integrate into our knowledge of the world. When we stop mistaking a snake for a goose, because we now know that snakes exist, life becomes that much easier, safer and richer.
In the next piece, we will talk more about the relationship of fear and forgiveness. Until then
Namaste, the unchangeably innocent spirit in me salutes the unchangeably innocent spirit in you.
Kathy
Kathy, thanks for sharing your story so honestly. I think you are very hard on yourself, though, when you compare what you did to what the sociopath did. The key difference is the willingness to exploit someone regardless of the impact on that person.
My S/P/N once accused me of having seduced him, rather than the other way around. Even though that was pure projection, for a bit, I bought it. But then I realized, NO, seduction is high warmth with LOW intentions. I never had LOW intentions towards him, I would have never deliberately, crushingly hurt him. Whereas his high warmth was for the purpose of exploiting me, and if I got hurt, reduced to a fetal position, he absolutely did not care. Incapable of remorse. Big difference.
Thank you all for your wonderful comments. I apologize for not being more present. I’m dealing with multiple writing deadlines.
Just a few comments:
Joy, if you’re still around, the possibility that you might lose your license is reason enough for your to be so angry and anxious. There are two things that I can see that might help. One is what you did by getting out of the house and socializing. Taking a vacation from your worries is not just good for your nervous system, but it’s also when we are more likely to get creative ideas about what to do. Not thinking about it for a while is often when surprising ideas pop up to supplement the reason, right things we’re already doing.
The other thing, weird as it might sound, is to work on getting more comfortable with the outcome you’re so afraid of. If you haven’t thought more about losing your license than imagining it as falling off the edge of the world, then you’re living with a really scary vision. You don’t have to plan what you’d do in detail, just know that you will survive. And that, if forces beyond your control work out that way, then something else wonderful is waiting for you. That may take a lot of faith, but if you can calm down about this, it will also make you more creative about how you approach the battle.
The same personal characteristics that make you a good nurse would serve you well in many other settings. So will your education. I’m not suggesting that you don’t continue to do whatever you can to to hold onto what is yours, but don’t confuse it with who you are. Maybe the lesson of this whole event is about looking at your feelings of powerless and the associated control issues. Maybe the best thing in the world for you right now is to think about adding more things that you care about to your life.
I hope that none of this seems of upsetting. I understand how you feel, but in these crises, we usually discover about us that needs to change. Thinking about that, thinking about you in loving and constructive ways, can also be a way to shift your thinking away from all this craziness that you can’t control to thinking about taking better care of Joy.
usedandabused, I feel for you. What I lost is similar to what you lost. Forgiving isn’t about him. It’s about deciding to let go, because the angry feelings are hurting you not him. You’ll get there when you’re ready to change your life in that way, to take better emotional care of yourself. There’s no rush. Sometimes I think that at least part of the angry phase, for us is becoming comfortable with new entitlements. We are entitled to feel and express anger. We are entitled to fight for ourselves. We are entitled to kick bad people out of our lives and to arrange our lives for our benefit first, before anyone else.
You are entitled. The losses are gone. And at some point, you’ll kiss them good bye and put a nice mental tombstone on them that represents another period of your life. Because you’re starting to look around yourself and realizing that, whatever is left, there are possibilities to make a happy and meaningful life for yourself. You’ll go, “Hmm, do I want to stay mad or do I want to start making my life look like me again, not him?” And then things will start to change inside you and outside you. It will happen, I promise.
Welcome, geminigirl. Poor you, you’ve really been through a lot with your daughter. Congratulations on closing the bank and dropping a hard boundary. These kinds of changes are really hard to do, especially when there are other risks like your relationships with your grandchildren. But once we start to change, it usually sets other changes in motion. What we get back at first often seems very negative, but ultimately taking care of ourselves often turns out to be a good model for other people who needed to find the courage and things work out in expected ways.
There is a principle of loving someone from a distance. If their behavior around you is unacceptable, you hold back the gift of your presence until they behave acceptably. It’s the underpinning of tough love. Your daughter may never behave acceptably, but you can keep your heart open and at the same time maintain your standards of a healthy relationship. Things like courtesy, reciprocity, trustworthiness. You can let her know, and let anyone else in the family know — like your grandchildren — so it’s clear what’s going on. You sound like a strong woman. I’m glad you found us.
henry, as usual, your post set a whole other train of thought in motion for me. This business of passed-on burdens is what they mean about incest — and other types of abuse — being the gift that keeps on giving. I like the concept of being short on resources. My father was resourceless because of what his father did to him, and he took it out on me, tried to use me to help himself feel better. In doing so, he took resources from me, and I became needy.
Getting help to put ourselves back together is an instinctive thing we do. We look for helping people. We look for situations that are more tolerant or giving than other people would be require. We land up paying in other ways — with our freedom or our ability to care for ourselves — in these “helping” or “safe” relationships. The whole unbalanced thing keeps lurching along, recreating itself.
What we interpret as pain is actually loss. Something was stolen from us, maybe a whole construct of related things. If we get to understanding that, we can begin processing trauma. Respond appropriately with anger, accept and release the losses and start rebuilding ourselves, including growing up through some developmental phases we missed because we were protecting ourselves or holding our wounded selves together.
Ultimately, the most effective help for us is with this process. Nothing they did to us changes us at the center. We actually have the capacity to be everything we would have been, with the addition of some valuable experience and knowledge about human nature and the power of our survival instincts and our ability to heal. But until we look for the right help, identify what we really need to heal, we are carriers. Not because we are bad, but because we wounded and unclear about what’s wrong with us and what we need to fix.
Or that’s how I look at it. I’m afraid I’m being too conceptual here, but I’ll leave it.
housie, I’m glad you feel emotionally free. That’s a huge thing. You’ve been working on healing for a long time. It’s an amazingly cool thing when your find your instincts saying “No” in a calm way that isn’t about them, but about what you want in your life. It sounds like that’s what you’re doing. Hooray!
JAH, I don’t think I’m hard on myself, just realistic. If I hadn’t been so engaged in trying to get the sociopath to be what I wanted him to be, rather than being accepting that his character was out of my control and not what I needed, the whole thing would have played out differently. The reason I did this had to do with a couple of things out of my background. One was that I was used to doing whatever I had to do to obtain emotional and physical safety. The other was that I was rigid in these demands, knowing that they were unusually outsized but never having examined the real cause of them.
What he did ultimately interests me less than what I did. He is what he is. He attaches himself to emotionally damaged women because other women see relatively quickly that he’s incapable of emotional reciprocity. I wanted to know what it was about me that attracted him, made me vulnerable to his techniques of exploitation and control, and kept me imagining that the relationship had potential that it didn’t.
I went through my blaming period as a necessary part of separating myself from his issues and behaviors. But doing that was only the half the work. It still left the other person in the relationship, me. In blaming him, I kept finding evidence of my own issues and behaviors. Yes, he was seductive and smart. But all of that was less important to me than ensuring, at a deep level, not just with a list of rules that might or might not save me from the next seductive and smart user that showed up, that I was not vulnerable in a more fundamental way. And that meant deconstructing my own outsized need to find and fix what was underneath them.
Bottom line, in my view, this is ultimately less about him than about me. He was a catalyst for my change and growth. That, for me, is the lasting truth of this relationship.
Namaste to you all,
Kathy
One more thing. I just reread that last post, and think I can make a point better.
Having good boundaries is not about them. Defense is just a function of creating the lives we want, making positive choices. Those boundaries are about our standards and desires. Bad people are ultimately unhelpful people. We’re not getting anything from them that’s useful. Or they may be draining our resources for their own purposes, but not giving anything in return.
This definition of “unhelpfulness” includes theives, liars, users, rapists, abusers of any sort, anyone who doesn’t provide fair return for my investments in their good, anything I find hurtful or disrespectful of my needs, anything that brings uninvited changes into my life (either directly or indirectly through people I care about), rules that minimize my autonomy or effectiveness without balancing payback, and anything that elevates greed over compassion.
These things are unhelpful. That’s all. I don’t want to make them bigger than that, because I want to conserve my attention and energy for better things. Situations and people that take repeated energy, that won’t go away, that keep on draining my resources or those of my environment, that are just chaos machines, may require some concentrated attention to deal with them. Maybe a lawsuit or the police or some kind of sabotage to convince them to go away. But it’s one more way they’re draining my resources and I’m giving it the extra energy only to get them out of my way.
The process of healing and personal development is ultimately about recognizing the “wants” under the “don’t wants.” A “don’t want” keeps us in a relationship with things that are not useful for us, except that it is a challenge for us to better define our standards, desires and healthy needs so that we can make better choices. So we are attracted to the good and it is attracted to us.
Anger is about rejection of what doesn’t work, is harmful or dangerous. It’s an instinctive thing, but it is also simply a call to action. Either to say “no” or to adjust our environment so it supports us. Old anger is more difficult, because it frequently comes down to recognition that we’ve been carrying damage because we failed, for one reason or another, to say no or adjust our environment. And often, the resolution is simply found in that recognition and adjustment of our boundaries — our standards, desires and needs — to ensure that we’re on the right track in the future.
Ultimately, life is about creation. We are creators and we are creating all the time. By what we want, think about and do. We are not all-powerful. There are lots of random events happening around us, and other other creators in our environment. But the less passive we are, the less confused about our entitlements, the more well-defined about our identities and visions of what we hope to create in ourselves and our lives and the world, the more effective we become at using what’s around us.
My experience with my sociopath really shook me up. He made me look at what I was creating in my life, and get interested in what caused me to build what I didn’t want and to support things that I didn’t like or believe in. I saw him as a clear message that I needed to figure out why I was doing this and change, if I wanted a life that matched what I really wanted.
I don’t know if anyone else sees things this way, but I think I manifested him in my life for exactly that purpose. He was a “false fix” for all the residue of trauma, all the self-destructive beliefs and needs that I was living on. And he showed me the results of false fixes in my life. Pain, loss, dysfunction. He wasn’t the first relationship like that, but he appeared at the right time. I was ready to get it. This wasn’t about him. He was a symptom. It was me.
And a big part of this work was changing my focus from protecting myself from what I didn’t want, and getting whatever would replace all those losses I lived with (like the loss feelings of safety, self-confidence, belonging), to figuring out what was really true about me. Strengths and weaknesses. Hopes and fears. Resources I had and resources I needed to develop. Visions of what I truly wanted. And the truth about how much I really wanted it, or whether I preferred to keep focusing on the past instead of the future.
This was hard work and it took a long time. I had to overcome a lot entrenched internal obstacles. But I was motivated, because he was also a message about my own future. That’s what I was creating, and had been creating for a long time. I could have that, or I could change.
I’m still working on it. I have deeply carved neural pathways related to trauma and self-protection and those outsized needs that I return to at the least provocation. The same issue, for me, as addicts saying they will always be addicts. Those neural pathways, those patterns of belief and behavior, were created to protect me. And when I feel challenged or endangered, I automatically go there. But the gift of the sociopath, for me, was to create another neural pathway, a clear link between those beliefs and behaviors, and the fact that they lead me to bad results.
The questions I keep asking myself today are: “What do I want?” “How do I really want this to come out?” “Does anything of this have anything to do with the life I want to live or the things I’m building now?” “How much attention is it worth?” And more of that sort of thing. I don’t feel compelled to involve myself in things that aren’t about the reality of my life, except to extricate myself with minimum drama from unhelpful situations and to keep my physical and mental environment cleaned up. If it doesn’t support my personal goals, dreams, values, etc., it doesn’t belong in my life.
And if I find that I can’t get rid of something that is toxic or non-supportive, it becomes a situation for trauma processing. I go after the learning in it — whether it’s something I need to learn about myself, or something I need to learn about the world. My primary vision and goals — that we are all full of potential, that we have a God spark in us that we can use to create good in the world, that I want to facilitate that God spark in me and help other people get in touch with their own — these things are solid against changes in circumstance. I knew a woman who lived in a Japanese concentration camp for a long time during WWII. They were starved. She built a garden of hot peppers that helped them all fight off infection and that garden kept many people alive. There are opportunities to let the God spark express itself through our actions, in any situation, no matter how awful or impoverished.
In doing all this work, I made some surprising discoveries about myself. In particular, I discovered that I had actually being working all my life in support of what I really wanted at the same time as I was sabotaging myself. Because I was so focused on the bad, I didn’t realized how far I’d gotten in acquiring skills, learning and resources to achieve my positive visions. I was better, more competent, richer than I knew. There were all kinds of gifts in my history that were just waiting to be unwrapped and set into motion on what I really wanted to be and do. When I work with other trauma survivors, I see the same “secret wisdom” in action in their lives.
What I want is what I find profitable to attend to. What I don’t want is something to be removed, neutralized or turned into learning as quickly and with as little drama as possible.
Dear Geminigirl, I have a 38 year old psychopathic son, who is in prison for murder, and when I cut him off (finally!!!) He tried to have me killed to inherit from me and our family.
sigh, and I DO NOT love him any longer, he is “dead” to me, just as if he had stopped breathing. He has been in prison most of his live and has no children (thank God!) I am 62 and have recently become WHOLE myself. Take care of YOURSELF, believe me, I am so much better off because i have no contact with my psychopathic son. I’m glad you closed the MUM bank, but i don’t doubt that she will use her children as collateral to try to get a “loan”—
I definitely know how you feel on that one, giving birth to “Rosemary’s Baby” is not an easy lot in life. ((((hugs)))) and my prayers for you.
I can’t minimize what P/S/N’s do as “unhelpful”. My rape as a 12 year old was much more than unhelpful. And what happened to you was much more than unhelpful I think ! I guess I understand the point, but for me, minimizing what a S does was a big part of the problem in my life and a big part of the problem in society. I had to recognize abuse as abuse.
But I do agree that minimizing the S AFTER they are gone is good! And essential. And feeling strong against them in the future is good too. And you are writing about a step 9. What is useful then is not always useful in the beginning.
I used to believe in what you call a “God spark” but now I truly believe that science is showing us that S are literally brain damaged…and thus far as unfixable as those with Down’s syndrome who are brain damaged also. I suppose an S can accidentally do some good, but the damage they do far outweighs that. (I used to teach Down’s syndrome children and mean no disrespect.)
I wish the S had the distinguishing features that Down’s syndrome causes. They needed to be recognizable….that would so cut down on the damage they do.
Educate!!!!
JAH, I’m not minimizing. I’m making a decision about resource allocation. I totally agree with you about recognizing abuse as abuse.
Brain-damaged or psychologically ill, it doesn’t matter from my perspective. Their sickness is self-perpetuating. They have blocked off their ability to heal. And that makes them tragic characters, in my cosmos, because of their inability to activate so much of their human potential. They are cripples and what I call rolling chaos factories.
I think the good they do depends on our use of the experience. I agree with your comment about problems in society. And my belief is that they can help us, especially some of us who are suffering from post-traumatic over-training to be afraid, submissive, unwilling to experience anger or use our own strength, to start questioning who benefits from this training. And to discover we have more choices. My experience with this guy opened up my emotional spectrum, made me more independent, focused and powerful in terms of goals, ethics and boundaries. These were his strengths and my weaknesses before I met him.
It also made me more compassionate. Because when I was living as a collaborator in my own victimization — and I was doing that long before I met him — all my unmet needs blocked my ability to empathize. I related to other victims and got involved in a lot of Drama Triangle stuff. I related to a lot of things about defense from abuse. But I didn’t relate to strength or the meaningful issues that arise around personal power. Things like responsibility for the costs of my desires on other affected people, the difficulty of making ethical choices, and the obligation to give back. I understood a bit of this, but when I was living with a defensive victim mentality, I kept getting distracted by worries about where the monsters were and whether I was being used.
Sociopaths are part of our lives, just as predators are part of the natural world. Being aware that they exist and deciding that we don’t want to be victimized lead us to take some precautionary steps. But the biggest precautionary step, I believe, is getting and staying healthy. And if we want to help others, helping them to get and stay healthy. That in the informing principal of my work.
Other people may want to hunt the predators. Unless one is threatening me or mine, I don’t find it a good use of my time to give them that kind of energy. If I worry about them, I take it as a message from my nervous system that I need to do something else in terms of precautions. But my main interest, the thing I want to get back to, is facilitating people out of victimhood and into a comfortable and positive relationship with their power to care for themselves and change the world. My longer term hope is that these powerful and compassionate people will naturally develop a culture of shared compassion and support that makes it less and less likely that sociopaths find easy pickings among us.
I also suspect it will make it less and less likely that we keep on generating sociopathic adaptations in future generations. I realize I’m a dreamer, but I like this dream. It makes sense to me.
All of that doesn’t mean I don’t respect your position, admire what you do and care about. and even envy your intellectual certainty about certain things and the forceful energy it enables. My strength is, at least partly, in my ability to manage ambiguity, but no one in their right mind would put me in charge of anything like a corporation or an army, though I’m a wonderful consigliere. You, on the other hand, could probably do either one of those big jobs, I suspect.
We can travel the same road and see it in different ways. And besides, there are a lot of important jobs in this battle or this evolutionary project.
Please forgive me if any of this seems too personal. I feel like your posts are letters to me and you share what you think about what I say. It makes me want to respond in kind.
I agree….education and awareness is KEY to exposing the behaviors so ‘society’ can recognize them.
The role we play in educating and raising awareness is individual, but none less important.
Unfortunately, from what I have lived…..people just don’t ‘get it’ until THEY have been a victim. (And they are aware they have been duped).
So……peoples own unwillingness, denial or natural ‘instict’ to believe ‘all people are good’ is societies own worst enemy!!!
I have 3 great friends that ‘got it’…….right off the bat. But they were subject to the S’s antics and witnessed them first hand. They all were able to relate ‘my’ experiences with their own lives and happenings with people in them.
Other people ‘see’ him for a scum/lier…..but don’t ‘get it’.
There is a difference between not liking and S and ‘getting it’.
Once you ‘get it’…..you see ALL the behaviors.
I don’t know exactly why these 3 people got it……but I THANK GOD they did…..because the support and protection they have offered us has been a huge, vital asset in going through hell. THey stood by and held hoses to cool me off. They brought tissues, always had their hearts open for me, looked out for us, and were ALWAYS available to listen and ‘counsel’ me. etc…..
I really think I would have cracked without THIS ‘got it’ kind of support.
Oh, don’t think the S didn’t attack this support system……he did. The key for me, was he wasn’t successful with THEM.
I, periodically ask myself WHY I am not ‘fetal in the corner’. I really should be.
My therapist say’s it’s a choice.
I didn’t feel, when I was at my lowest, that ANY emotion was a CHOICE. Some days I became paralyzed, morphed into the recliner and just ‘was’. After a few of those days/weeks….I could recognize the feelings coming on and ‘braced’ myself to just give in to it. Allow it, go with it. I set a time frame for myself to do it…..then I got up and got angry and moved into action!
My way of keeping myself away from the ‘fetal corner’, was to stand up, be extremely vocal, take care of myself, protect my kids, regain my health and FIGHT LIKE HELL to shut the S’s avenues down legally!!!
I mustered up any energy I could (some days I had/have none), but I keep strong! I WILL NOT BE DESTROYED BY SCUM!!!! I WILL NOT, I WILL NOT, I WILL NOT!!!!!
I- WILL- NOT!!!!!!!!!!
I have learned, over 3 decades, that everything does work out for the best……
I just have to look at my life NOW. I’m wounded, but I am healing…..he was unsuccessful at taking me down. I have ‘avenues’ to help me financially recover, my health is GREAT!!! I AM A SURVIVOR!!!!
Cancer was easy…..strokes were easy……A Sociopath during all of it could have been MURDER!!!! But I chose to hold the weapon through it all.
I look at how things turned out for me and the kids, I look at the doors opening for me, the doors I am able to PRY open.
I have always had a certain tenacity…..but now it’s just soooo much stronger and bolder. I have come close to death, losing it all…….and I fought for myself, my kids, my life, my ‘things’.
I have removed many fears from my life…..I roll with the punches, I don’t react immediately…..but I stand up for my rights. I handle things much differently now. Way more productive and effective.
I make good decisions, work hard, direct my life and what comes from this will ‘be’.
I am RELENTLESS and VERY AGGRESSIVE towards the S.
I feel that I kept the blinders on for way too long…..I REFUSE to keep secrets for him. I owe him NOTHING. I will expose him and narcissistically injure him. I am NOT afraid of him……..Quite the contrary….He should look out for ME now.
This is the point I must make……..I will not lay down for anyone.
If he goes away and stays away, out of our lives completely…..I will let up. The minute I get wind of any threats or abuse by proxy……it’s reported to authorities. His own behaviors have gained attention for himself…..I will not keep it to myself….I will not allow him to dictate HOW I live, where I live, who I live with. Who I choose to be friends with, who chooses to employ me……My life will not be run by a S!!!
I spent my life showing compassion and empathy for him and was abused to no end!!!
NOW…..it’s FU. I will give my compassion and empathy to humans that deserve it……Mr. S…. YOU ARE NOT HUMAN!!!!
You are a snail, and NOW I HOLD THE SALT!!!!
I take any opportunity to educate people about these behaviors. I have approached the judiciary, neighbors, therapists, the newspaper, media outlets……..I believe in awareness to avoid the devastation.
EDUCATE, RAISE AWARENESS and educate again!!!!
We, as survivors, have the opportunity to do this.
Erin,
I related to and applauded so much of your letter. There are a few things in particular.
You wrote about being “extremely vocal,” sharing information with your friends, and keeping the authorities informed. I totally agree. Telling our truth is important. And the less we fear what other people will think, the more we feel that we have a right to tell it, the better we communicate.
This really struck me, because a number of comments about this article (above) included something about my willingness to share details of my life. As though this were some kind of big deal. And I wondered if people thought I was doing something dangerous or releasing information that other people would be ashamed to share for one reason or another.
I am not ashamed of my life. I actually think it’s pretty interesting. There are things I wish were different and a few things I regret, because they hurt other people and I possibly could have accomplished what I needed to do without the damage. But whatever I did had its reasons. And I am not responsible for other people’s behavior or marked with shame because of things they did to me. Based on what I knew and the resources I had, I did the best I could to have a life and leave some good behind me.
That kind of attitude makes me a truth-teller, as you are a truth-teller. The one and only truth that we really know for sure is about ourselves. How we feel, how things look to us, how we experienced what happened to us, whether we are richer or poorer after certain experiences, what is good for us and what is not. We can also talk about our decisions and why we made them. This is the truest talk we we can say, and the most powerful information we can share in every way. If we learn to talk like this, we become participants in how things come out that go far beyond ourselves.
Erin, the other thing that struck me was something I also related to, and powerfully. Which was your attitude of wanting to win, refusing to be a victim.
Before I read your letter I was thinking about being brought up by a sociopathic father. I think that one of the things that happened in my family was that he regarded the children as competitors for dominance and went to work early on smashing down any inclination we might have had in that direction. He was pretty successful at that, but another consequence of that treatment was that he taught us a win-lose mentality.
I remember growing up thinking that I wasn’t going to let him destroy me and holding onto the vision of life after I got out of that house when I could control my own life. Later, relative power became a major theme in my life. I didn’t necessarily need to win all the time. My exercise of power in relationships was more subtle. I made people dependent on me, and used their dependence to get what I wanted from them. All in the name of “love” or “caring,” of course. And all the while believed and advertised myself as an oh-so-helpful, basically accommodating and supportive personality.
It was the relationship with the sociopath that straightened out these tangled wires. Or rather recovering from it. Just concentrating on healing myself was the first time I’d ever gotten anything major in my life that I hadn’t finagled someone into giving me. It was my first taste of direct power and taking control of the outcome myself, without thinking I was doing it for someone else so they’d do something for me.
I don’t know if you’ve always been this way, or if you used to be more like me. But I love reading your determination to have it your own way without apologies or trying to sound like your really not that selfish or self-interested. It makes me want to stand up and cheer.
Beyond that, your positioning yourself as his antagonist, someone he should watch out for, takes it a few steps further. This is not about vengeance but about taking control of your own life. And your interest in education feels related. As long as other people can be caught unawares, it creates more risk that damage is somehow going to show up on your doorstep. And I don’t mean that this part of it is that self-interested in intention, but more that we are all in this together. The damage affects us all. It could be your sister next time, your neighbor, your doctor, anyone you depend on who gets co-opted, possibly becoming a sociopath by proxy for a while, and then a falling-apart victim with losses that eventually everyone shares.
I think Liane might have written about this some time, but I think the resistance of people who don’t “get it” is about being in denial about being victims themselves. What my sister calls “La-la-la-la. I can’t hear you.” Or like what I tried to do with my incest situation, thinking that if I could act as though it never happened, then I could have a “regular life.”
And maybe the word “sociopath” puts people off because it’s been so sensationalized in film and TV. It’s also off-puttingly scientific sounding. What we mean are dangerous users. People who leave damage behind them and don’t care. I think the question for anyone who doesn’t get it is whether or not they’ve ever been angry when someone lied to them or left them in a mess. Or whether they would get angry if someone stole their best friend’s money, brainwashed her into thinking she was ugly and stupid, and then disappeared. Sometimes we can bypass people’s denial by making it about someone else.
In any case, thanks for the fabulous letter.
Erin and Kathy, You inspire me. I have gone on a mission to expose the Sp for what he is in the last week. I took his criminal record to the Magistrate, the chief of police in our town. Not the county cops as he has them all snowed. And lastly to the domestic violence shelter. To them I stated that they do great work for true victims but that he had used them and fooled them into believing a lie. I told them this info was for the next woman to walk through the door that there would be a next woman and that had I had that info available to me 5 years ago when their counselor encouraged me to press charges when he assaulted me instead of feeling regret at the damage it would do to the life he was trying to rebuild that I would not be in the position that I’m now in. This was not about revenge. This was to enlighten my community about the wolf in our midst parading in sheep’s clothing throughout our town and wrecking havoc everywhere to all who do not bow to his will. I just really want people to SEE him and then judge him accordingly. It is his ability to reinvent himself as this awesome dad, great employee, pillar of society that I find nauseating. I had been crying until I read the last few posts and now though scared to my core and feeling quite ill, I will channel your power and support tomorrow. I will mentally plug myself into all the prayers and all the positive thoughts that the good people in the universe are sending my way. I will feel the hands of the community of victims holding mine. I will hold my head up high for all that I am guilty of is loving the wrong person for too long. That is all. There is no shame in that. Maybe some stupidity:) but no shame and no crime. I am claiming the victory. Regardless, I come out of this loved by others and valued as a cherished member of the community of GOOD PEOPLE. That is all that is required of us that we leave a place in this world a little better than we found it. That we pay our Earth Rent for the time that we reside here. Namaste! My friends the humble servant of the Almighty in me salutes the servant’s heart in all of you. Towanda! I claim the victory regardless of the outcome!
JOY:
I hope you get this prior to court….not sure where you are in the country/world….
But, I am proud of you…..PROUD that YOU stand up for what is right. PROUD that you are a beautiful woman that is taking a ‘beating’ and still walking tall. PROUD that you are aware of humanity and doing something for others, in spite of the judgement of you.
YOU WILL DO FINE!!!! I feel this in my heart.
Keep your thoughts as they are, go into court tomorrow and bury the bastard. But do it in your graceful, beautiful and informed way!!!!
You will have us with you, I am sending my mojo direct!!!!
You have a great outlook, this will take you FAR!!!!!
WE AWARD YOU VICTORY!!!!!!
Will be waiting to hear………
XXXXXOOOOOOO