Finally, you realize what is wrong with your romantic partner: He or she is a sociopath.
Finally, the behavior that was so confusing makes sense. The person you loved, and who you thought loved you, has a personality disorder. Now you realize that anything your partner told you could have been a lie. Now you know why your partner could be so cruel, then tell you how much he or she loved you, practically in the same breath. Now you realize that there never was any love, that your entire relationship was exploitation, and nothing more.
Now what do you do? How do you move forward? How do you recover?
Many of your friends and family tell you, “Just put it behind you. Get over it. Move on.” You are particularly likely to hear this advice if you were “only” dating the person, not married.
The friends and family dispensing this pithy advice probably were never involved with a sociopath. They don’t understand the depth of the betrayal. When you split from a sociopath, it is not a normal breakup. The intensity of these relationships makes the end incredibly painful.
Relationship and addiction
The sociopath initiated this intensity in the beginning of the relationship by showering you with attention, wanting to be with you all the time, claiming that you were soul mates, and painting a glimmering picture of your future together. You, never having experienced such adoration, believed that he or she was head over heels in love with you. Even if you felt misgivings, you suppressed them and focused on the promise of happily ever after.
Then, sooner or later, the sociopath did something to make you feel fear or anxiety. Perhaps you caught your partner lying or cheating. Perhaps he or she suddenly became enraged—you weren’t sure why—and threatened to end your relationship.
Whatever it was, the bliss that you felt in the beginning was shattered, and you wanted it back. You asked what was wrong, tried to work things out, perhaps even apologized for something that you didn’t do. Eventually the sociopath relented, and you kissed and made up.
Then, the whole cycle started again: Intense attraction. An incident causing fear and anxiety. Relief. Around and around it went.
This process has a profound psychological effect—it actually makes you addicted to the relationship. That’s why it’s so hard to break up with a sociopath. You’re not breaking off a relationship—you’re breaking an addiction.
Choose yourself
Addictions don’t just go away. Anyone who has quit smoking, drinking, drugs or any other addiction knows that it’s hard work. You must choose yourself, your health and wellbeing, over the addiction. Then you must work on your recovery, day in and day out.
A relationship with a sociopath is the same. You cannot simply “put it behind you.” You cannot fully recover by locking your internal devastation into a closet, never to be opened, while attempting to go through the motions of living. If you try to do this, you simply end up with an emotional cancer within you, eating away at your life force.
The solution is to choose yourself. Make a commitment to yourself that you will recover, and then work it, day by day.
Steps of recovery
The first step is No Contact. Get the person out of your life. Stop seeing and talking to him or her. Block emails and text messages. Don’t visit his or her Facebook page.
This will be difficult in the beginning, because, remember, you are breaking an addiction. You’ll feel a compulsion to contact your former romantic partner. But if you do, it’s just like an alcoholic falling off the wagon. You’ll be back at square one, and you’ll have to start the recovery process all over again.
The secret to breaking the addiction, as they say in 12-step programs, is to take it one day at a time. So commit to yourself that you will not contact the sociopath today. Then you make the same commitment tomorrow, and then the next day.
The longer you stay away from the sociopath, the stronger you become.
Deeper healing
Getting the sociopath out of your life is only the first part of your recovery. The second, and most important, part, is healing whatever made you vulnerable to the sociopath in the first place.
We all have vulnerabilities—it’s part of being human. We have internal fears, doubts and injuries from our past. Or we have dreams and ambitions—these, too, in the practiced hands of a sociopath, can become vulnerabilities, when he or she promises to make them come true. But generally, the sociopaths target our weaknesses, because that’s the easiest and most effective way to hook us.
Usually the weaknesses boil down to a subconscious belief, deep within us, that we are not good enough.
We rationalize that our mother ignored us, or our father abused us, because we were not good enough. We assume that an earlier romantic involvement failed because we were not good enough. These ideas may have been deeply buried, but they still caused pain, and pain created vulnerability. Sociopaths can sense vulnerability like a shark senses blood in the water.
Releasing the pain
How do you recover from these deep wounds? You acknowledge that they exist. You look at them and allow yourself to feel the associated emotions—pain, disappointment, fear, anger, rage, numbness—and then you let the emotions go.
This is a process, and is best done in private, or with the help of a competent therapist. You’ll find that you have layers and layers of pain, and as you release one, another rises to take its place. You may find yourself crying, wailing or stomping to release anger. You work your way through the layers of emotions, acknowledging, feeling and releasing.
You can’t do this all at once—it’s too draining, and you still have to live your life. In fact, you should intersperse these sessions of releasing with times of treating yourself well, and feeling joy at whatever goodness you experience, no matter how small.
True recovery isn’t easy, fun or instant—it takes work and a commitment to yourself. But the rewards are so wonderful: Release from old traumas. Life lived with peace and lightness. The opportunity for true love and happiness.
It all begins with making a decision to recover.
I totally understand all this, but the more I think about it, the more I think that it means that I must just turn my feelings off altogether and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be a robot. From what I am reading, I am taking it that I must pretty much tell myself that I don’t really care about anything or anyone and have no feelings. I do try that from time to time, but it never ends up working in the end. It’s all about associating feelings with events. It won’t work unless I tell myself to not “feel” whatever way about a person or a situation. It’s hard to do.
Louise you can’t EXPECT for everyone to like you (can you?) because if you do and someone doesn’t like you for whatever reason, you would be crushed. So you can be more “reasonable” with your expectations and think “Some folks may not like me, but that’s okay” so, when someone doesn’t like you, you are not crushed and don’t “take it personally.”
So another example. You can EXPECT that someone who doesn’t like you will start to like you IF YOU ARE NICE ENOUGH TO THEM. So you are SUPER DUPER NICE to them and they still don’t like you, and so you are CRUSHED.
Or, you can say “you know some people are not going to like me no matter what I do, so I can expect that there are some folks I just can’t please” so when you run into someone who you just can’t please you are not gob smacked by having your expectations tat if you are just “nice enougH” everyone will love you.
Then if you get down to specifics on people, say the psychopath. You can say “Well, I WISH he would stop chasing women and drinking but I don’t EXPECT he will” so when he keeps on drinking and chasing women you are NOT SURPRISED.
Louise,
you are feeling that this has been oversimplified because it has. Here is a different way of looking at it.
http://180rule.com/apocalypse-of-the-psychopath/
BTW, apocalypse means “unveiling”
Louise
Short note I’ll hit this some more later might be tomorrow.
It’s not about turning off your feeling but getting control of your feelings. Taking them back from the whims of the outside world.
You are therefore you feel. But just because you feel it doesn’t mean that what your feeling is accurate for the situation.
When you get rid of the triggers that compel you to do things. Those buttons that anyone can push. For some it’s as simple as a look from someone and it runes their whole day. With the triggers gone…You become more you. The real you.
It’s the ability to take a bad memory and flip it so it no longer adversely affects you.
You can still laugh – cry and everything in between.
It’s never to late to have a happy childhood.
Got to go
spoon
Louise,
There’s no reason to stop feeling, it’s also imo not about ‘control’ over your feelings, but keeping objectivity.
The past spring and summer I was confronted again with an ex-lover expressing feelings for me. In a way it was a declaration that answered my yearlong longing and dreams for him. Or more thruthfully: I always knew he loved me as much as I love him, but I had always longed for him to be able to admit it fully to me and himself, and actually consider the option of ‘us’. A part of me was feeling that joy. And yet I knew and could see that it was not a declaration that either two of us could make decisions about at the time: he made those declarations while going recovering from what looked to me a pre-suicidal reactive depression. He had reached out to me and I had been supportive and probably gave him the push he needed to recover. I didn’t doubt his declaration was sincere either. But it still wasn’t appropriate for myself or him at the time to reshape his life based on these feelings. And had I let him, I would have been in the wrong.
Months later it turned out that after my response of ‘now is not the time’ that he had sought closure with the woman who had broken his heart. They both had found closure, but it was an end for the both of them nonetheless, and he’s been rebuilding a new life the past months.
Again, I could feel the parts of me that were the source of feelings of jealousy and disappointment and ‘poor me’ when he told me about the summer of closure with this ex of his. Those feelings were inside my body, like bubbles. I didn’t deny those feelings. I didn’t ignore them. I didn’t control them either. I allowed myselt to feel for a few seconds what was in those bubbles. But then I also had insight: I knew that he had done the right thing by himself, by her. I also knew that it had absolutely nothing to do with me. And why would I be jealous of a woman he said his goodbyes to and spent a summer with that I never had any intention of spending with him anyway (I told him ‘now is not the right time’ remember?).
I could have stepped fully in those bubbles of jealousy and pity and disillusional rejection. But these were just bubbles. There were bigger, higher and more all-ecompassing feelings: happiness and peace and love for him seeing and making the right fundamental decisions in his life. I was mostly happy for them. And with every update I’m getting on him rebuilding his life, or my very occasional chat with him, my faith in him doing the right things with his life in a spiritual and physical way is getting bigger. I can fully see and feel he’s at the exact right track with himself.
Anyway, I didn’t deny those small bubbles within the giant bubble of my love for him. But I could also see those smaller bubbles of feelings were a distortion of reality. So, while I could acknowledge the existence of those feelings of jealousy and self-pity, I did not allow them to distort the thruth, what I knew to be the thruth, nor allowed them to govern me. And what happened to those bubbles? They passed on without hindering me much at all.
It’s similar with spaths: they prickle and create bubbles of feelings that either make us feel great (lovebomb), or like shit (devalue and discard). But they are just bubbles in a bigger bubble. And spiritual recovery means to me that you can see them in their correct perspective, without denying them to yourself, or making yourself feel bad over them.
So, it’s not about avoiding to feel, ignoring feelings, denying feelings, controling feelings… it’s about regarding the big picture and giving your feelings an appropriate position in it: they’re not unimportant, but not the most important either.
Reality “IS” VERY plastic.
My life has been very hectic and still is.
Love and think of you all ~
With prayers ~ Dupey
hugs, Dupey!!!!
I don’t think reality is plastic, but very very real. If there wasn’t a reality, there wouldn’t be lies (to others, to one-self). But there can be many perceptions of reality.
I regard all of this in chakra levels. Chakra’s are believed to be energy centers in (and outside) of our body, each being a center of a certain part of our selves. Within the body the 7 main ones are: root, sacral, solar, heart, throat, third eye and crown. Root, sacral and solar are regarded as the personal life levels. For Freud root and sacral would be “es” (to be) and the solar the “ich” (ego). Heart, throat 3rd eye and crown would be the “uber-ich” (higher self). While Freud made the solar (the ego) the key holder between the Es and the Uber Ich, in the chakra system the center is actually the heart, the first seat of the higher self.
One of my last chats with the ex-lover of mine couple of weeks ago was about this. He felt guilty for a sudden spike in having personal desires, and this idea that in our spiritual evolution we must drop those basic 3. I told him – (a) your personal desires (physically, emotionally, egocentrically) will never cease while you’re alive… the point is to learn to live with them without making them governing you (b) you cannot have much of an effectual life at all without those three: the ego gives the power of will, the emotional part helps you be creative and come up with ideas how to possibly implement the will, and the root gives you the ability to ‘do it’. Those 3 are to me the vehicle to implement the higher self into reality.
Now while the heart is the center, the others above it are linked to those underneath it. It’s a balance exercise. In the chakra model, the chakra’s are aligned on your spine. Now think of a lever with seven circles on it, and in the dead center it coincides with the heart. The lever thus can spin or move away to the side: for example the crown would circle to the right, and the root would move to the left, and that would make them all imbalanced.
Of course a lot of people do mistakenly regard their ego/solar to be their center of total self, and operate and live from that supposition. No wonder, since the ego loves to make itself the most important of all. I thought so too for a long time. And because a lot of people assume the higher self is mainly the heart, and the highest level there is (which ime it’s not… and I had a discussion about that too with the ex-lover).
If we’re talking about ‘being in love’ and it’s desires, we’re talking about the sacral chakra. The higher self chakra that balances it out is the 3rd eye. The 3rd eye is pure obectivity. It sees situations as they are without any emotion. In contrast the sacral regards situations only from the emotional satisfaction it can give. The trick is thus to balance the two: you can see thruth of a situation objectively, if you allow yourself to feel (you recognize the needs, but regard them as just one of the elements of the situation that has no graver meaning than the rest)… and you will feel appropriate feelings if you can accept the thruth (because you know when those feelings are a distortion and making a lot of pooha and meaning where there is none).
BTW I don’t believe there are actual such energy disks in our bodies. But they function symbolically for me, and when I have sensations and feelings and such it helps to source them: if my stomach is upset, butterflies… that’s the sacral one; feeling lightfooted would implicate not much grounding; knot under the perineum, that’s a defensive ego; choaking throat… blocked growth and healing, etc..
Darwinsmom,
I like your explanation of reality. I agree that it is not plastic, reality is as hard as a rock, but our perception of it is plastic.
Scott Peck explains that spaths willfully deny reality. That’s why he calls them “People of the lie.” And they inspire us to believe their lies by believing their own lies themselves. They know that our perceptions are plastic and they take advantage of it.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to become committed to reality. We will always be at the mercy of our limited perceptions and the human (and animal) tendency to “fill in the blanks” by assuming that things are what they appear to be. It simplifies things for us. Yet, as we grow in experience we have more options for filling in those blanks.
Each of our past experiences adds to our current perceptions. Each is a piece of the puzzle towards understanding reality. No one piece negates another, each piece adds to the whole picture. If we weren’t loved by a spath it doesn’t mean we weren’t lovable. If we can see that the spath is not capable of love, that’s what it means. That’s all it means.
When we look around and see that there are a lot of manipulative and malicious people out there, we might deny what we are seeing because it’s hard to accept. Commitment to reality helps us get past denial.
Sky said: “When we look around and see that there are a lot of manipulative and malicious people out there, we might deny what we are seeing because it’s hard to accept. Commitment to reality helps us get past denial.”
I realized something tonight which made me want to post. I haven’t been around the past couple of weeks. I was just living life: taking walks with a friend, having people for dinner, helping friends out with moving, etc, working on a physics project, prepping for classes I give… For a few weeks I wanted to concentrate on my current life. Psychopathy and sociopathy et all are a major part of my perception, but I didn’t want to focus on it much.
Tonight I was watching a movie (Silence of the Lambs) and some TV shows (including Dexter). Of course I noted the mistakes in the scripts, such as the ward of the psychiatric institution with Hannibal Lector stating “He’s a true psychopath. They’re so rare to get your hands on” (paraphrasing). I smiled at that and thought “bollocks! They’re pretty common!”
Anyway, those thoughts weren’t so new for me. But what struck me the most was how easily I had those thoughts without being phased by it. What I noted was how much the reality of the common existence of spaths has become an integral part of my perception. While I think they behave wrong and everyone should better avoid them, I have fully accepted their existence, their make-up, what makes them tick…I make note of red flags with as much mental energy as I would notice someone’s hair colour. In other words, it doesn’t take as much energy anymore.
Darwinsmom,
actually I think that pure psychopaths are rather rare, maybe. The spaths I see are usually a combination of cluster b disorders including some psychopathy. I wouldn’t call them pure psychopath because they have crappy masks – we can actually tell that they are disordered, pretty easily once you know the signs. That’s what puts them on a sliding scale: the mask and their dedication to it.
A pure spath is harder to discern. They seem so normal. Better than normal. A guy who says, “I’m an asshole” is probably a narcissist among other things. A psychopath would NEVER EVER admit to any such thing.
My spath went out of his way to regale me with tails of how GOOD he was. He cared about animals, kids and women. lol.
I guess what I’m saying is that it appears to me that disordered characters are everywhere and I feel that they are evil, no matter which disorder they have. This is so sad. It makes little difference to the victim which disorder his/her abuser has and what caused it. The pain is still there.
The only thing, I think, that makes a pure spath more dangerous is his ability to gather minions and to get away with murder. He can inspire people who would otherwise be “run of the mill assholes” to do horrible things, including commit murder.