I wrote the following nine months after the p formerly in my life was arrested. I was asked on another thread, was there a moment you ‘knew’? Knew that you would be okay. Knew it was okay to let him go.
Yes and no. In those first heady days of freedom, every moment was filled with knowing I was okay. And every moment was filled with the fear I would never get through the pain to find the light of love within me. I had to make a choice. Had to decide — what do I want more of. Lies and deciet. Truth and harmony.
I wanted to share this piece with you because it speaks to the power of one word to release us from fearing life without them so that we can surrender and fall in love with life within us.
As night settled into its soggy wet blanket, the pooch and I went for a walk. The rain beat a sibilant hiss upon the shiny black road, the streetlights glowed iridescently, casting golden orbs of light, punctuating holes into the dark shadows of the night. I was wrapped in the misty blanket of a rainy evening, my skin moistened by the water-laden air, my breath a frosty vapor leading me silently forward. The pooch pranced happily by my side, her tail a constant metronome displaying the tempo of her happiness as we journeyed forth into the dark.
It was a mystical, magical evening. A night for quiet thoughts that drifted through my mind as effortlessly as the raindrops falling one-by-one from the pearl clad branches all around me.
I thought of love found and love lost and moving on. Of new relationships and old. New found love and love that never fulfills its promise of growing old beside me. Of promises made and promises broken. Journeys taken and voyages lost because the voyageur could not see by the light of the moon and lost his way among the stars. And I thought of my brother to whom I had never said good-bye and the P to whom good-bye was just another word for the door is always open until I say so.
For such a little word, good-bye carries a mighty wallop.
Good-bye can mean, see you in a while, or see you in a year. It can carry us into the night on the hope of tomorrow or it can sweep all hope away as we look back and see there will never be a next time, another day, or a new tomorrow.
For those who have journeyed into the valley of the S or P or N, good-bye is a word fraught with the fear that once spoken it can never be returned. It lays frozen upon our tongues, our minds numb in the fear it might slide out on a breath of air and change our lives forever. Terrified we might slip, we pack our hopes and dreams into that one little word and stuff our pride and dignity into the cracks of our pain seeping in beneath the door held fast against our fear that he will leave before tomorrow ever dawns. And all the while, we search for the perfect last words that will either make it all right or make him hear us, just this once, before he slithers off into the dark from whence he came.
And as we flounder in the depths of empty words and promises, we pray that there will never be a time to say good-bye but rather, welcome back, I’ve missed you. Spiraling into the darkness of the painfully long good-bye they began when they said, hello, we silently hold onto the word that will set us free and stumble through the words of begging them to please not say it.
But in the land of lies, the door we thought we held so firmly closed is always open, no matter how hard we push against it. Eventually, when we have worn ourselves out upon the welcome mat of our desire to be all they will ever need, we must face the reality that we will never have the chance to say our fond farewells. They have already left. Gone in search of new tomorrows. Of some other happily ever after which we never saw coming.
In their passing, we are left holding the shreds of our battered hearts in the basket of our dreams, frozen in time. Alone, forlorn, we whisper, good-bye, into the empty space that lays before us, hoping they will hear the soft promise of our hopes they will find out there, that which they could never find in us. We peer into the darkness of the lengthening shadows, our tears puddling around our feet, forming a river into which we fall, in fear of drowning as we cry out for one last chance to say good-bye.
Good-bye. It’s such a little word but it keeps us stuck on the dream of wanting them back so that we can have the last word that will close forever the door to our hearts they so easily open.
In the end, the best good-bye is the quiet hello we whisper within our hearts as we pick at the scab of our wounds that never seem to heal as long as they keep walking through the door to our dreams. Good-bye lies. Hello truth. Welcome back to me.
In our good-byes that are never spoken we will never find the key that will unlock the secret door to their understanding. It resides somewhere in the dark, beyond the edges of the light. But, beneath the scabby, jagged-edge scar of our disbelief, new skin is forming with our welcome home. If we leave it alone long enough to heal from the inside out, we will understand that he could never hear our good-bye. He could never cherish our hearts because he was always and forever, a figment of our imaginations. He was never true.
In our awakening to the light of a new tomorrow without him we discover, it was only the darkness of being without him we feared. And without him, we have nothing to fear.
In seeing the gift of his departure in the light of a new day dawning, we lift our heads and see, the sun is shining. As it beckons, we step into the light of finally knowing, the only way to say good- bye to what never was, is to accept it never will be.
kathleen, I read the article AFTER I posted it here for you. That article veered off topic a bit. There are various (shorter) reviews on amazon.
Still, this book is a hard row to how. Not light reading, at all. I had to read most of the pages more than once to fathom some of what he was saying. so I don’t blame you if you choose to forgo it.
As fascinating as I find the subject of the P, I’m more than ready to begin examining N-supplies and my own issues.
Despite emotional abuse by my P-parents, before I met the P, I was not afraid of anything. A few weeks ago, I told the psychopath that invaded LF, that I had met the green river murder and made him apologize to me and call himself a horny toad. It’s true, that did happen when I was 15.
I was a free spirit and very self-assured and nothing, I MEAN NOTHING, was gonna stop me. I made things happen. Other than one guy, that I became engaged to for a couple of years, (and then broke his heart) I never expected my boyfriends to say “I love you”, I just liked having lots of boyfriends. I was not looking for prince charming to rescue me, I could do that on my own. But then I met the xP. He said he didn’t like to share me with all those guys and wanted to be exclusive. He said he loved me. I was 17, I didn’t know a man could be so sweet. Then he sucked the life out of me for the next 25 years. I have so many fears now, I’m tired all the time, I have no energy. The only positive thing he left me with was my new found ability to spot a P a mile away.
I know you’ve helped me before to try to overcome my fearful thinking. Any books along that line are exactly what I need right now.
Blue, Kathleen and lost:
WOW…..that’s all I can say!
Your way of putting raw emotions in poetry is inspiring!
Blue:
You are such a dear….such a compasionate person withwarmth! It’s a honor to be in your ‘company’ here!
Kathy:
I’ve told you this before…..you are quite a woman! I so enjoy your words, aproach and insight! THANK YOU!
Style, I read your blog on another thread. Welcome. your description was so extensive. It reminds me of me right now. All I want is sex and someone to help me with chores. LOL.
My new beau is becoming a dissappointment in those departments. He is so busy with work and not as sex starved as I have been celibate for 15 years. LOL. He is nice but now I’m beginning to feel like he’s playing with my emotions. Oh well. Been there, done that.
Everytime I read a blog on LF I can’t believe it still! that what I have experienced is written all over this site, so many ppl have experienced the exact same thing. I always felt like a weirdo or a freak because these things happened to me. For instance, Kathleen said: “As far as your job goes, welcome to the club. I am among the many people here who virtually destroyed our careers, because we were so emotionally twisted up and distracted by pain. The fact that most of us are such over-performers and over-tolerant of pain adds up to eventual disaster when we can’t keep all the balls in the air. Our grief and anger starts to bleed out in situations that have nothing to do with it. In my case, I simply imploded professionally. Couldn’t keep up the calm and helpful front that was necessary.” This makes me feel SO much better, I certainly am not glad it happened to you or to many of us here, but it happened to me nearly 2 yrs ago and I STILL beat myself up for it! I worked at a hospital as an RN for 25 yrs, the last 10 I spent as the Director of the Home Health department. It was a very stresful jot, juggling patients, referrals, staff, doctors, insurance companies, etc etc etc. I did it very well for those 10 yrs, and the last few months, I imploded also. I couldn’t believe it, I was shocked. My own staff turned on me and said that I was constantly stressed, sad, depresed, and ‘we all have problems too but we dont bring them to work’. NO ONE could understand what it was like to live with a narcissistic P husband, I did not even know how to explain it all. At the time, my VERY narcissistic mother was dying, and I was her primary caregiver. I was so stressed out. My husband had moved out after another affair I had caught him having, and my youngest daughter had just left for college, 2000 miles away! I had some big time empty nest, my mom, my husband’s affair (which was ALL MY FAULT by the way) and my job suffered as a result, and I LOST MY JOB. I couldn’t believe it. Since that time, I have been floundering around, and like Kathleen said also ” like if you were in some helping profession, customer service or consulting work it might be a good time to take a hiatus, write a book about everything wrong in your industry, or get a disagnosis of PSTD and get on some kind of subsidy and get used to a downscaled lifestyle until you get through this. In other words, don’t underestimate the importance of what you’re going through.” I am in the helping profession, and it makes me crazy to think about going back to it. I could write MANY books about it, that is for sure. I WAS diagnosed with PSTD. What do you mean by a subsidy? I just need a break to sort out what I wanna do with my life. I was a nurse for so long, I cannot imagine being anything else, yet the thought of going back to it, all the raw GIVING you have to do, I know I am not up for it yet. I have been thinking and thinking about what else I could do.
This is a fantastic site, wish I had known about it looooong ago. It has been more helpful getting me through the initial stages of NC, and just understanding the S and P, than any book I have read, anything. Everyone on here is like an expert on the subject because they have been through it. You certainly cannot get this much good info from a shrink!! Just being given the permission to FEEL it all and to think about it and learn about it has been empowering to me. Thanks to all!
(cripes- the poem wasnt mine, I meant to put her name at the bottom- its by MayAngelou*blush* – I dont write so good:)x
Thanks, Erin. It’s mutual.
Skylar, here are a couple of suggestions about things to read. They’re not exactly about sociopaths, but they are about getting better. One of them was something that helped Matt a lot: “If You Had Controlling Parents: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Take Your Place in the World” by Dan Neuharth. It’s a surprising book about the baggage we carry and how to dump it. It’s not the typical self-help book and I really loved it.
The other one is completely different, “Opening Love’s Door: The Seven Lessons” by Diana Kirschner. It’s a charming book about getting over old dramas, written like a novel. After I read it, I send copies to most of my friends, and then they sent copies to most of their friends. It’s that kind of book.
Neither of them is going to be a magic bullet for you. Because you need time to pull yourself together again. As you said, you’re drained and it takes time to just replenish the blood supply. And even though we all know intuitively that this is really about us, not them, it seems to be an important part of healing to get a grip on what we were dealing with. Not in the threoretical terms you get in a book. But in the context of our own memories. We need to do some thinking about how they acted and figure out how different it really was than anything we or anyone else we know (other than our toxic parents) would behave. So we have to go through that period of mulling over things.
As far as your fear goes, the only answer that makes sense is that you survived. Here you are. I know that at the beginning of my recovery, one of the reasons I made up my mind to get well was because I was really scared of what was in my future. I’d always been a pushover for bad boys, but until that last really bad boy, I’d usually screened them pretty well. Now I was so beat up and desperately needy for comfort and emotional shelter I knew that I was nothing but bait for the bottom feeders. And I had to fix whatever the hell was wrong with me, if I didn’t want things to get worse. So I organized my own private psychiatric lock-down unit here in front of my computer, and went to work on myself.
Doing this is better than your other choices. One is that you can try to run for safety into the arms of someone interested in taking on a teary, scared, bruised woman. (Did I mention the bottom feeders?) Two is that you can give up and kill yourself, which is a common occurrence in the aftermath of these relationships. I considered it during my darkest days, but I ultimately figured that it was an option I could postpone until I figured out whether I could fix myself. (Besides I didn’t want to leave my son with that legacy.) Or you can hang out with yourself for a while, and try to learn to understand and care for this complicated and seriously upset character.
And just in case you didn’t read my series, here’s how it goes. First you have to face the fact that you’re in pain and it’s because of him. You have to get really into the idea that you’re were a victim, and indulge yourself in self pity and general whining while you bump up your simmering resentments into fullblown outrage. You can dump some of that on any other abusers in your past as well. (And yes, you’re allowed and supposed to do a lot of whining and fuming and blaming and calling them names in this phase. You have to, before you can get on to the next phase.)
Later, you’ll leverage that good, sharp, focussed angry energy into building the kind of boundaries that are so much a part of you that you don’t have to keep pushing them into other people’s faces. Because they’re solid and hooked into your nervous system, which flashes alerts when anything makes you feel uncomfortable. And you’ll get interested in improving your skills at avoiding, deflecting or getting rid of problems.
After that, and not before, you’ll move onto the next stage which is completely different, because you’ll start looking at your own role in what happened. Not when you were a kid, but when you were a grown-up. You don’t do it earlier, because you don’t want to do until you feel a little more confident about taking care of yourself first. If you’re not confident yet, looking at your own participation will just feel like self-abuse. And that’s not what this is supposed to be. This is an inquiry about how your screwed-up background with unfeeling creeps when you were a kid predisposed you to vulnerability to the type when you were an adult. And what you can do now to change those obsolete coping mechanisms from childhood.
This, when done at the right time, turns into the fun work of recovery. Because we’re really healing ourselves. Learning what was wrong with the lessons we took from childhood, and what would work better now. Seeing how the world looks through these new viewpoints. Reconsidering who we really are and what we want to do with ourselves.
At this point the bad people because a lot less threatening. It becomes easier to see how fundamentally crippled they are. And how, for us, they are obstacle to our happiness, but ones we can generally avoid or boot out of the way.
So all this is what you’re looking forward to. For right now, if scared is the biggest problem you have, dig into it. Why are you scared, Skylar? And what’s beneath that? And what’s beneath that? Stay with the presenting problem and just get to know it. It’s part of you. It has a reason for making all that noise in your head. It’s trying to tell you something important, about you and about what your trying to figure out about your life. It’s never quite what we thought it was, when we dig down into it. But the enlightenment is always good. It’s better to know ourselves than to try to hide.
Finally, I don’t know any of the details about what happened to you, but if all this just gets too scary to do alone, I really recommend finding a therapist. If you can’t find one that deals specifically with recovery from sociopathic relationships, find one who treats adult survivors of childhood abuse. The healing process is pretty much the same. We’re dealing with narcissistic wounds that have affected our sense of our identity.
I hope this is helpful, and that it makes some sense, and that I haven’t stepped on your toes or sounded patronizing. I’m sorry, as usual, that it’s so long. You’re going to be fine. You’re resourceful, strong and smart. You just need to give yourself a break so you can heal.
Kathy
here is a blueskies poem to make up for it its a couple of years old:
THE FABRIC OF DREAMS – a tale of procrastination and hesitation
We’ve come so far, rattling dreams behind us,
some still bright in the mind’s eye , some ghosts, some barely seen
we carry dreams like hidden jewels
in the lining of the fabric of our being.
I have a pack, with things marked “yet to do”.
and those visions are jammed in so tight,
so many dreams, so many schemes which up ’til now
I have been saving up, as the time was “not quite right”.
I was waiting
for someone who dashed my hope,
and laughed.
Sometimes it was just too hard to cope
was that just a another day-dream?
Forgot what it was I wanted anyway-
not such a good idea now! Stupid.
The dream was packed away again ”“ for another day.
And ”“surprise- the days still dawn, bright and full of future,
and endless sky ”“sunny days stretch out to a far horizon
and is easy to think that so long as the dreams are held close
the rosy days will always greet me red and gold and full of endless skies
and nothing need be risked or spilled or broken yet ”“ awhile.
why should I measure time
it is always now and there is always a future.
Maybe next year make a start ”“ everything will be fine.
As each enticing chance glides by
I have no need to grasp it yet ”“ do I?
Life goes on for ever – so it seems
And my soul is sewn quite tightly to the hem of my dreams.
Oh blueskies, that is so good. I love the writing, and I really relate. But wait until you pass 50. I had to thin them out, and then get serious about what was left. Facing your own mortality really concentrates mind.
Kathleen you are so right:)x I am thinning out, and weeding, and getting serious about what’s left:)x Its a wonderful step change, ‘to let go’, even if it is to some of my dreams too, the path is clearer, I have only now to walk it. No more waiting:)x
Dear Kathleen, Skylar, Erin, Blueskies, Stile, Ann. Thank you so much for this incredible, inspiring, helpful, wonderful thread. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing a crisp inspiring motivating possible path out of my stagnation I feel at present (specially the procrastination and fear from changing resonated with me!).