In the world of healing from an encounter of the P(sychopath) kind, it is easy to forget that there is a world without fear, without lies, without terror, without uncertainty, out there, just around the corner from the insanity of his abuse. It’s easy to forget that people don’t always manipulate, deceive, devalue and destroy you. And, it’s easy to forget — you never deserved their lies and manipulation in the first place.
It’s one of the things that makes healing from these encounters so difficult. We forget who we are as we fall into believing we are who they say… Whatever it is they tell us we are — from beautiful to ugly, impossible to live without, impossible to live with. The most incredibly intelligent woman they’ve ever met to the stupidest woman who ever walked the planet.
In their eyes we become less than we ever imagined possible because, in their eyes we do not exist. At least, not the ”˜we’ we’ve known ourselves to be. Because their eyes can’t see ”˜us’. All they can see is the ”˜target’ of who they needed us to be while they stalked and plotted their way into our lives.
When I was first released from that relationship, I couldn’t believe what had happened to me. And then I had to remind myself — believe it. It happened. “But how could he have done it?” my mind raced. “He said he loved me. Would never hurt me.”
Hah! Face it. He lied.
Facing reality of his lies is imperative to healing from these cretins evil passages through our lives. Believing they did what they did, said what they said, lied and deceived and cheated and coerced us into giving up on ourselves, is vital to our recovery.
And facing the truth about the sickness of their love, and our sickness while believing we were in love with them is critical to soothing our aching hearts and sorrow filled psyches.
So many times someone will say after they’ve told me all the things he’s done to abuse them, “But I still love him.”
And I always ask, “What’s in it for you to keep believing you love someone who treated you like that? Who betrayed you? Cheated on you? Lied to you with every breath? What’s in it for you to keep believing he is worthy of your love?”
Because after they’ve gone and devalued and discarded us one more time, we are the one’s who keep ourselves attached to their machinations with our picking at the scabs of the wounds they’ve inflicted at us, worrying the sore of their abuse with our repetition of their words running through our minds. We are the one’s who keep thinking about them, worrying about what they’re doing or saying after they’ve walked out the door one last time leaving us standing with the pieces of our hearts falling through our fingers into the puddle of our tears pooling on the floor.
It is not easy healing from a relationship with a sociopath. But, it’s a heck of a lot better than being in relationship with one.
When I was with the sociopath, I did not know up from down, left from right, in from out. Every day was fraught with some new terror, some weird and wacky story about why he couldn’t turn up, didn’t have the money to pay, didn’t have the guts to call, or simply didn’t do what he’d say he’d do in the first place. Every day was a roller coaster ride through his crazy-making words and antics, with me constantly searching for truth and order, fairness and kindness amidst the insanity that was his ”˜love forevermore’. In staying with him, I became more and more sick. More and more incapable of seeing that it wasn’t that I ”˜couldn’t leave’, it was that I kept telling myself, “I couldn’t leave.” because…. he loved me. Needed me. Wanted me. I loved him. Needed him. Wanted him. I kept telling myself I couldn’t walk away and trapped myself into believing I couldn’t because I loved him and he loved me.
He never knew what it meant to love. He never had it in him to love me. And, while I walked into that relationship with my arms and heart wide open to love, I stayed because my mind closed down and my heart broke up into a thousand tiny pieces with every moment I remained within his unholy arms.
When I was first released I wanted to believe he loved me, at least at some point in that tortorous ride — it couldn’t all be for nothing, could it? I wanted to believe it wasn’t all a lie or some sick game played out on the battlefield that became my life. In healing, I accept, He never loved me. He never could. It was always a sick game and I was the pawn who could never gain entry into his castle — because his castle never existed. And he was never the prince of my imaginings.
Poison doesn’t kill you because it loves you. Poison kills you because it’s toxic.
And he was toxic to my life. A poison I consumed with every breath I took whether I was in proximity to him or his voice was simply coming down the umbilical cord of the telephone through which he fed me my daily dose of lies.
In those first minutes and hours and days away from him, within the protective veil of No Contact, I came face to face with reality and accepted my truth. I never loved him. I wanted to think I did. I truly wanted to believe I did. But, in reality, I loved a mirage. A shimmering creation of his duplicituous creation. He was the chimera. Facilely capable of shifting shape to suit the weather, the time zone, the geographic formations around him.
I never loved him. I loved the thought of him. The idea. The dream.
In accepting the reality of my love of the idea of him versus the truth of who he was, I freed myself to awaken from the nightmare of his embrace. In my awakening, I opened myself up to all that is possible when I let go of living on cloud nine, squeezing my feet into too small high heeled shoes that inevitably trip me up. Feet firmly planted on the ground in my size nine hiking boots, and armed with my shield of No Contact, I strode fearlessly away from my need to hear his voice, to know what he was doing and saying and thinking. To make sense of his nonsense. To understand his machinations.
He did what he did because he could. It’s what he does. It’s who he is.
There’s no rhyme nor reason that can ever justify what he did to me or continues to do to others. Away from him, there’s no sense in spending my precious breath trying to make sense of his nonsense or trying to figure out if there is some way I can make him hear me, see me, look at me. There’s no closure worth being in contact with him. No point in having the last word. There’s never a last word with a sociopath. They’ll always think that one word is the opening to more.
He is the lie and I am free.
He will always be the lie and I will always be free — as long as I stay true to who I am, my values, beliefs, principles and ideals. As long as I stand up for what is right and loving in my life and turn up for me in all my beauty, warts and all and love myself for all I’m worth.
Today, these boots are made for walking. Away from abuse. Away from deceit. Away from anything or anyone who believes they have the right to tell me who I am, what I can do and where I can go.
In walking away from the belief that I loved him, I walk into the truth that I deserve love and joy and all that is good in this world. In walking away from him I leap fearlessly into creating my best life yet, of living this moment without fear that I will fall into the arms of someone who believes they have the right to take my life and make it theirs.
Nobody has that right. And I’m not giving up my right to live my life in joy and love and wonder, creating my best life yet for all I’m worth.
And I’m worth a lot.
So are you.
I survived an encounter of the sociopathic kind. I am no longer a victim of his abuse. I am a victor on the path of success, creating beauty and love in my life today because, I deserve it!
So do you!
Skylar, Ijust read your twolinks,above. Wow. Really interesting stuff.
Although I had read a little bit about mimetic desire, as a graduate English student, I didn’t know a thing about a meme.
How on earth could they leave that out? They simply explained that it had something to do with imitation, ie, miming.
This also makes me think of 12 step groups and how the work.
Wow, good stuff. More food for thought. I think I will digest for a while…………:)
When it comes to cult leaders, the agenda would be to plant their memes, (me mes’) in their followers in such a way that said followers would believe that the cult leader is God himself. This is where such words as enchanted come from. The root of the word being Chant.
The root of the word magician comes from the word magi, meaning wise one. Now I know whey words are magic.
Of course prayer works in this same way.
Decarte spoke of “the evil genius.” Psychopaths are evil geniuses.
I made the comment that your post was “food for thought.”
We are what we eat. Aint that the truth!!
Kim: that’s good too! A little simple humor is fun….kinda Ogden Nash. 🙂
cult leaders/p’s etc….it’s actually pretty base how they build their following…..they offer people a vision…a hope…a unity.
Hi Kim,
I linked it because I’ve heard the abusive relationship described as ‘just like a cult’.
The P creates a cult-of-two mentality. The P first convinces himself that he is special and has a special mission in life.
Our culture encourages this kind of thinking through our modern mythology. This mythology puts forth the idea that an individual’s “true” nature, which he was born with, is superior to any demands and constrictions placed on his personality by society. This idea “rings” so true to the P that he uses it for the basis of all his beliefs and his justification for creating his own ‘reality’ (just like the guy who didn’t “believe in” the dictionary)
This idea has become a meme in our society. I don’t actually have to explain that meme to anyone here because you all know what I’m talking about. In fact, when I brought up the subject, everyone probably got a “gut” or emotional reaction to it – that reaction was either a tendency to agree or disagree with this belief that a baby’s nature is inherently good and that to be fulfilled, an individual must resist the external demands of society and be true to himself.
In “the myth of irrationality” the author says that as babies we really aren’t much more than animals and in fact, if we don’t learn language by a certain age, we remain animal-like in our thinking for our entire lives. Learning language allows us to think complex thoughts and even to understand concept such as time, yesterday, today and tomorrow. But language itself carries memes in the words we use to describe our world and our concepts. So, just learning a language transforms the individual’s thinking from “his own” (that of an animal) to “society’s” (that of our culture). In other words, there is really no such thing as an individual apart from the society that he lives in because we’ve all been infected by memes just to become human.
Every cult leader wants a disciple. But it really doesn’t matter who it is, just has to be someone who believes in him whole heartedly – someone in whose eyes they can do no wrong. (That sounds like a description for an infants mom.)
That disciple feels “special” or “chosen”.
From here I can see that the healing that needs to happen is just like that of a cult survivor. But I don’t know what that is.
I still haven’t finished reading Violence and the Sacred.
hi guys, sitting here wondering what the heck to do. no jo, b , no benefits , i can’t beleive im at the age where i should be thinking of retirement and i cna’ t even look after myself. This dam girl called from detox and i told her i beleive it’s the diabolic al freak she got tangled with that called my employer to the accusation of theft charge. The mental health issues i tried to explain to my area manger and this Corp security guy went on deaf ears. They don’t understand and could care less. Just meeting this socio when the girl had me over for coffe was enough for him to f*** with my life. They sure are evil. love kindheart, im not sure other that i have appt with gp and shrink next week for meds to stock up what i should d o next. depressing as hell.
Yes, and the word “infant”, means without speach. Children are hard-wired to learn language, all their receptors are geared toward this end, especially between 18 mos and 3 years…but there is a window of time. That is why it is so easy for children raised in bi-lingual homes to become bi-lingual. It is much easier for a young child to learn a second language than it is for an adult. There are some really interesting documentarys about feral children, and it’s true that if they dont have language by a certain age, they never will.
The school of thought you are expressing is called Marxism, and there is an entire feild devoted to it in Literary theory. The idea is that we become puppetized by language, itself. We can’t think outside of the realm of language.
I said earlier that I wondered why the concept of memes’ didn’t come up in my studies. Well, maybe the meme spreaders were my professors, and they didn’t want me to know that I was being infected….by them…………..
I suppose all education is a motivated spread of memes’. Don’tcha think!!!
At any rate, it’s interesting stuff.
Kindheart, Did you get my post about Voc-rehab?
yes i did and im not sure what’s out there im taking it one step at a time going through process when i get my papers i can attempt to get unemployment ins and then they i think will be the ones to talk to. my head is spiinning with it all. just thinkin go f this girl who called bafk in detox,
a friend of mine who works emerg said she’s a mess. She told me he cleaned her out and sh e said you took what little i hav e left and changed locks, he threw 25 dollars at her. nice eh. hope he rots in hell. kh
She might want to look at a long term halfway house thing for people in recovery. That might be her best option.
As far as you go, it sounds like you have a plan…That’s good. Vocational rehab is an option, though, as they are one organization that works to help alcoholics. It’s worth lookinginto.
Try not to let this rattle you too much. Let go and let God.
kindheart, We’re going to get through this! I don’t have a job, my Cobra Insurance runs out soon, I never thought I’d be in a position like this. I am hanging in there with you! I am thinking that good things are going to happen, whatever happens we’ll be ok, my heart goes out to you. God Bless You.