So, it’s over. He’s gone and done the dirty D&D (devalue and discard, also affectionately known as ”˜diss and dump’) one last time. You’ve sworn, ”˜that’s it!’ a thousand times, cried your eyes out through the night, poured your heart out into the soggy pillow and vowed to get over him. You’ve ripped up all his pictures, thrown out the tokens (what few there are) of his love, including the dollar store ”˜crystal’ wine goblets and the fake diamond ring. You’ve told your friends, (what few you have left), that you will never, ever talk to the lying, cheating, manipulative rat bazturd ever again. Never. Ever. Period. Finito. Not until hell freezes over, or the Dow Jones climbs above twenty gazillion points.
You are adamant in your resolve. You are firm. Resolute.
And then the phone rings. You stare at it. Close your eyes. Dare you read the caller ID?
What if it’s him? What if it’s not? Dare you look? Dare you answer? Dare you wish it could be him calling to tell you he’s seen the light. He’s seen the error of his ways. You are his one true love. He’s been so blind. So wrong. So selfish. So sorry.
You lunge to answer.
It’s not him.
You rush to get the caller off the phone. Having given space to the thought that it might be him, you become fixated on the fear, he might call and find the line engaged. It’s not that you want him to call, it’s just that you want to know he’s still thinking about you, that he hasn’t gotten over you so easily that he can’t be bothered to even try to play one of his sick and deadly games one more time. It can’t have meant so little to him that he’s already moved on, can it? You can’t have had so little place in his heart that he’s already erased you?
And so the cycle continues. Your heart aches with every phone call, every moment he doesn’t call, doesn’t turn up at your door, doesn’t email or text or at least tell a mutual friend he’s hurting for the loss of you. (You don’t want to ask the friend but you do it anyway because”¦ well a girl’s got a right to know doesn’t she? It won’t really hurt will it? It’s not like you’re calling him yourself?) No matter how fierce your resolve to not see him again, you wish and you hope and you dream that maybe it could have worked. Maybe it could have been different. Maybe he will turn up and this time it will be different. Maybe this time Prince Charming will arise from the ashes of the fires of hell where you sent him to burn in eternal damnation the last time he walked out the door and you slammed it shut behind his cute little butt — and it was cute, wasn’t it? It was so, well just so damn fine you loved him in blue jeans and…. and the thoughts keep cascading as you crumble into tears as the realization hits you, it really is over. It has to be if you are to find any solace in your broken heart.
And in the silence of the vacuum of the space he used to fill in your life, you search in desperation for some sense to what happened. Some understanding of what went wrong, believing that if you’d known better how to please him, how to be who and what and how he had wanted you to be, he would still be there, telling you you’re lovely. Telling you you’re the star in his heart, the moon in his sky the sun that lights up his life. Conveniently and oh so capriciously, in the angst of your despair, you forget about the rest of the time when he was screaming and yelling and calling you names and tearing you down. You forget those parts as your mind fixates on the ‘good times’ no matter how few and far between, no matter how long ago.
In desperation, you come here. To this place where suddenly you find sense to his nonsense, understanding, support, relief. Desperately, you want to believe. It wasn’t you. It was always him. He was a sociopath, a narcissist, a jerk. He was a no-good, good for nothing, nothing to give lowlife of the lowest, most disgusting kind.
You want to believe and though you sorta, maybe, possibly do, you still can’t let go of the thought, it could have been different. Couldn’t it? And even though, slowly you begin to realize it could never have been any different because he truly was an S, a P, an N or some other letter of the alphabet, you can’t understand, “Why do I still feel so awful?”
When the sociopath/psychopath no longer in my life was arrested I stood amidst the devastation of my life and searched for a blessing to count — I was still alive, that counted for something. And while I knew I had gotten away from a deadly blow that would have blasted me into eternal sleep, and while I knew he was no good for me, he was the poison killing the lifeblood of my existence, there was still a part of me that wanted to hear from him, wanted to take him back, if only he’d asked. The reality of those thoughts were stunning. Imagine, he’d almost killed me but I still yearned to hear his voice, to know that he was still wanting me, needing me, thinking of me.
All I could do was keep counting my blessings and looking for things to count on to rebuild my life. One of those ”˜things’ in my life that had some monetary value — which after having lost my home, my life savings, my car, my job, and all my belongings there weren’t many — was the three carat diamond ring he’d given me with the promise to love me forever. It was a big, glittering thing set in white gold. It had to be worth something and with seventy-two cents to my name, even a tenth of its value was better than nothing.
So, I did what any jilted, broken-hearted penniless woman would do, I decided to sell it. I took it to a jeweler to have it appraised and imagine my surprise when the jeweler looked up from his loupe and said, “It’s fake. A good one, but fake nonetheless.”
I laughed and I cried and I vowed to never again put my faith in another man (well that’s another story but at the time, I really, really meant it!).
I was desperate. What could I do?
The falseness of that ring represented something. It was a symbol of all that was fake about him — and that was everything. Like him, it too was a lie. He had given it to me as a symbol of our eternal love — “Nothing’s too much or too good for you, Louise,” he’d said when he slipped it onto my finger. “You deserve beautiful objects like this diamond because you are a beautiful diamond, a real gem.”
Of course, that was the second time he’d slipped it onto my finger. The first time, surprise, surprise, it had been too big and he’d taken it to be resized but then it had disappeared and then reappeared two years later — after the other woman had had a chance to wear it ‘proudly’ for awhile, I later discovered.
But back to the ring. I had believed it was real. I had believed it meant something. I had invested great meaning in its beauty. I had to do something to disconnect from the ”˜story’ of what that ring meant so that I could let go of my need, my want, my desire to believe it wasn’t all a lie, he hadn’t really meant to hurt me.
I decided to throw it away. Into the ocean.
On a picture perfect summer afternoon, a girlfriend and I headed to a cliff overlooking the sea and performed a ceremony to send the ring off into the waters of life. I had the ceremony all mapped out. It was perfect. I’d written a letter, read it out loud under the clear blue skies, burned it, and blown the ashes into the wind. I had done all those things, had released him and myself from the hold of his lies. Had said I forgive him. Had promised to love myself enough to forgive myself too. And yet, when it came time to cast the ring into the ocean, I hesitated. “What if”¦ the jeweler was wrong? What if it really was real?”
I stood on the rocks, the waves crashing below me, the sun beating down and I cried and I cried for fear, it was all a mistake. The ring was real and so was his love and it was me who had been so wrong all along.
See, we want so desperately to believe in the perfection of what we perceived their love to be we fear letting go, just in case it’s all some cosmic mistake that will be set right the moment we open our eyes wide enough to see, he really is the prince of light — it was just a dark cloud blocking his true love from illuminating us in the rosy glow of his promises of happily ever after.
In our need to believe we didn’t make a big mistake, or even worse, fools of ourselves, we cling to the faint, lingering hope that the cosmos got their wires crossed and left us to clean-up their mistake. If we could just find the magic crumbs that will lead us back to our happily ever after, every thing will be okay and he will once again appear on the horizon of our dreams.
Reality is: Ain’t gonna happen. Just ain’t possible.
I threw the ring into the water that day and as it spun and twirled in its descent I still wanted to grab it back. I still wanted to hold onto it, to never let it go.
That ring has long ago washed up on shore somewhere far away, or been eaten by a giant man-eating shark and I have long since let go of ever believing there was anything about him that could possibly have value in my life today.
But I remember. I remember those moments of wishing and hoping and fearing that what was, really was. I remember wishing upon every star that he wasn’t really a liar and cheat. He didn’t really consciously, knowingly, willfully do the things he did. He didn’t really lie and deceive and manipulate and destroy everything and everyone around him.
In my acceptance of the truth — he was the lie, the ring was a fake — I let go of ever having to hold onto the hope, it wasn’t true.
In my acceptance, I stepped into the truth of what happened to me and let go of thinking about him as anyone other than a liar, a cheat, a manipulator, a deceitful, deceiving and destroying being of the human kind.
In my letting go of that ring, I set myself free to explore the possibilities of who I can be when I no longer look for my truth in someone else’s lies and instead, spend my precious breath finding the truth in me.
Reality is, when we ask, “How do I stop loving him?”, we are avoiding asking, “How do I begin to love myself enough to stop believing I will find the truth in him?”
If you are attached to believing you cannot stop thinking of him, ask yourself, “What in it for me to keep believing I can’t?”
If you are running the story of him through your mind again and again, ask yourself, “What’s in it for me to keep the story of him alive? What’s in it for me to avoid writing a new story of my life, a story where I am the architect of my joy and happiness, where I am the heroine of my story of love?”
We are our thoughts, our thoughts become our reality. What we focus on becomes stronger in our lives. If your thoughts are focused on him — change them into thoughts that support and love and honour you. As Louise Hay writes, “It’s only a thought and a thought can be changed.”
Change your thinking. Change your life.
Flyspeck, we will never know how many are driven away by all sorts of things that may happen on here, why dont you help us not lose any more by calming down, not attacking anyone and presenting your opinion calmly?
I think calling someone’s opinion on here BS, then saying people are not treated with respect is quite an inconsistency in itself.
Flyspeck you must read more of the posts, no one said all of them, I think were all pretty much agreed on that.
I think there is a pattern of ‘quote and attack’ here fly, and lack of real information coming from you that I find a BIG red flag. so I will no longer engage in this thread.
To Flyspeck and all who are involved in this debate,
One of the things that is hard to remember here is that all of us are in our personal stages of healing. We carry that baggage, and we are processing through certain emotional states. In different stages, we see the world through different emotional lenses.
One of the reasons I have disappeared for a long time is that I couldn’t tolerate some of the things that were going on here at LoveFraud. It’s not that I decided they were wrong, but just that I personally didn’t want to be around them anymore. I was finding myself alternately irritated and drained.
Well, guess what? That was about me. When I’m inside an emotional state, it’s easy to point a finger and say that someone else is bombastic or needy or stuck or otherwise responsible for how I feel. But the reality is that I’m the one who’s getting triggered. And there’s a reason for that, a reason inside of me.
So I dropped out because I was getting so triggered, I needed a time out to figure out what was going on with me.
One of the really wonderful things about LoveFraud is that we have a lot of very smart people here who are working through fundamental issues in their lives, and we’re all at different stages. The obvious thing is that newer people can learn from people who have been at this for a while. But it’s also true that those of us who are farther down the road get reminded by the newer people of issues they still need to look at.
Like flyspeck, I have a lot of difficulty with anyone who tells me, directly or indirectly, that I “should” be doing anything. On the flip side, I am equally uncomfortable with telling anyone else what they should be doing. I think that all of us are our own authorities, our own source of wisdom. But I had to go through a lot of healing to get to that perspective.
I also understand that we don’t feel like that in the beginning of this healing process. We feel pretty much the opposite. We feel like we haven’t managed our lives very well, and even all this blaming we do against the sociopaths is kind of a mask for our fear about being inadequate about running our own lives. If we were this stupid and this foolish with ourselves and our resources, how can we ever trust ourselves again? So someone who has a strong voice, who gives advice with a ministerial air of authority, can be a very comforting and helpful thing.
All of us have our roles here. We talk and the people who need to hear what we have to say are the people who hear us best. And maybe the people who really aggravate us are the people who are helping us get in touch with something we still need to work on.
For example, why did I find myself become aggravated by someone who shares personal opinions as though they were universal truth? What was my vulnerability?
I’m still working it through. But at this point, I’m playing with the idea that I think it’s rude, disrespectful. That it changes the character of our dialog to a leader-and-follower game instead of an open discussion in which everyone is equal.
But even in getting that far, I see I am still pointing fingers, rather than understanding why it matters to me. Rebuilding trust is an important part of our work here, and at a certain stage of our healing, we need teachers and leaders we trust. Later, when we take our power back, we’re not looking for surrogate parents anymore. We’re looking for companions, buddies. But that’s later in the game.
So I’m going to switch this to something else. Instead of blaming, I’m going to change it to a personal preference. I would like it better if we shared our opinions as opinions. Saying “this is what I think,” rather talking like our personal truth is universal truth, seems to me to be a more gentle way of dealing with each other. More respectful of the fact that we don’t all see things the same way. And less confrontational which, I think, gives the other person a chance to absorb the our ideas at their own speed, rather than feeling like we’re being challenged to agree or fight.
I say this as someone with very strong opinions of my own. I’ve had to learn in my life that it’s better to share what I think or feel, rather then letting it stew inside of me. But if I do it in such a way that makes other people wrong, they’re more likely to get defensive than to really hear me.
Finally, a lot of us are feeling defensive here. For good reason. And there is no way that we can speak carefully enough to avoid triggering someone sometime. If we’re dealing with a person who has unresolved pain, is confused about the real causes, and maybe dealing with a lot of feelings of inadequacy or self-hatred, all those complicated emotions can cause that person hear criticisms where none exist.
We all know this, and it’s one of the reasons our language with each other is generally so gentle, caring and supportive. But things do happen. We may slip. They may hear the wrong thing. People get upset.
As I said in the beginning of this note, we’re all at different stages of healing. And the healing never stops. None of us are perfect, though we’re working on it. Knowing that we’re probably learning something important from the things that really aggravate us can help us get through these dramas. And perhaps being forgiving toward people who are still struggling with their own issues is a good step toward healing ourselves.
Forgiving doesn’t mean deliberately exposing ourselves to something we find painful. NC is a skill that we take on to the rest of our lives. Giving ourselves permission to withdraw may be one of the most important lessons of healing. But I also believe that our emotional reactions important signals about unresolved some drama in ourselves. Discovering and sorting out those inner dramas is where the real healing occurs.
I hope this makes sense.
Namaste.
Kathy
Oh Kathleen,
You put it so eloquently!
THANKS!
Kathleen,
Wow we really have missed you! I agree with ErinB….Your way with words and what you have to say….!
Thanks, Kathleen. I couldn’t agree more.
blueskies says:
I think there is a pattern of ’quote and attack’ here fly,
I quote so peeps know which post and what I’m replying to… but I’m not attacking anyone other than one person’s attitude. And that’s a BIG toxic attitude that needs to be addressed.
ErinBrockovich
You see red flags? Do you? Really? The INFORMATION I have posted is BS? Really? I’m sorry you feel that way. I, on the other hand care what the new people run into here.
Thornbud – Yes….I realize now that we can’t live in that “moment”. For so very long I was living in that moment. Reaching so desperately to find it again. The moments of the past that were just a very FEW of the good moments. Grasping at the straws of FANTASY – because I’m now learning that there was never a REALITY with him. Only the picture that he painted and then destroyed.
Sarasims:
You’ve come a long way baby!
Keep walking your walk….you’re on a healing path!
XXOO