This week I received a letter from a woman asking, ”What is wrong with me, why would I feel bad and believe his twisted stories? I am really sick, aren’t I? I fell for him 2 times! After almost losing everything, including my life with the first one?”
I have answered this question before but the issues raised by these questions are so important that I’ll discuss them again.
The real question here is, what exactly is love? Love is the glue that binds us together as a social species. Without love, we would all live solitary lives, husbands and wives would not stay together, parents would not care for children and none of us would have any friends. Scientists have found that the social glue we call love has at lease four different ingredients.
Attachment is the first ingredient of love. Attachment is defined as a compulsion to seek proximity to a specific special other. Seeking proximity means trying to get near the other person, i.e., calling him/her on the phone, driving by his/her house, sending emails. A compulsion is something a person feels he has to do. It is an unconscious force that drives behavior. Typically, once a compulsion starts, it will produce a great deal of anxiety/fear until it is acted upon. For example, people with obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, have urges to do things and will feel overwhelmingly anxious until they do what those urges tell them to do.
Having sex with someone, sharing emotional intimacy and time, create attachment. This attachment means a compulsion to be with that person. Typically, people with an underlying tendency to have anxiety have stronger attachments because they experience a compulsion to be near the other that causes anxiety until it is acted upon. People who already have anxiety, have anxiety on top of anxiety, and feel more compelled to give in to the compulsion.
Generally speaking, it is good to be unconsciously compelled to be near loved ones. These compulsions remind me not to get too busy to call my dear parents. They also remind me to keep track of my teenaged daughter, even though she is more independent now. Problems only arise when one has the compulsion to be with a person with sociopathic personality traits. There is nothing worse than a compulsion to be near a psychopath!
Sociopaths and psychopaths are con artists. They entice others to form attachments to them through deception and trickery. The problem is that our unconscious minds do not distinguish between attachments made after deception and those made legitimately. Furthermore, the anxiety psychopaths create in their victims only serves to strengthen attachment!
The woman who wrote me asked, “What is wrong with me, why would I feel bad and believe his twisted stories?” When a person is under the influence of a compulsion, he has to adjust his view of reality to fit that compulsion. For example, people who feel a compulsion to repeatedly wash their hands see germs everywhere. If we feel the compulsion to seek proximity to someone, we automatically believe that person is good. In these instances our beliefs are caused by our actions, not the other way around. We may think we love someone because he/she is beautiful, when in reality he/she is beautiful because we love them. (There is a song from the musical Cinderella, Do I love you because you’re wonderful or are you wonderful because I love you?).
What I have written explains why attachment/love is like addiction. Really, it is addiction that highjacks the attachment pathways in the brain. All this explanation is of little value unless it can help us deal with ourselves better. So the real problem is, what does a person do when he/she discovers a compulsion to be with a sociopath/psychopath?
It is very important to recognize the role that anxiety plays in compulsions. Combat anxiety and you combat compulsions. Start by not drinking alcohol and avoiding excessive caffeine. Alcohol temporarily relieves anxiety, but the anxiety intensifies when the alcohol wears off. Next, get enough sleep. Will power is required to fight a compulsion; lack of sleep impairs will power. Fight anxiety by exercising and cultivating quality friendships. At least, have a dog to take walks with! (Louise Gallagher’s dog has helped her to recover; she wrote about this in Dandelion Spirit.)
Many people who are fighting compulsions to maintain proximity to a sociopath/psychopath become so self-absorbed that they fail to honor important obligations to self, work, friends and family. This reaction only magnifies the attachment compulsion, because guilt only increases anxiety. Furthermore, neglect of children makes genetically predisposed behavior worse, and children who behave badly are a source of stress/anxiety.
To all of you who are parents, your relationships with your children can either hurt you or help you when it comes to recovery. If you focus on loving your child and spending quality time with him/her, your anxiety will go down for three reasons. First, if you are emotionally distant from your child, your own unconscious mind knows this and makes you anxious. Second, quality time with your child will make your child easier to live with over time. Third, real intimacy with your child will relieve your anxiety. This is healthy, not unhealthy, you and your child need each other, especially during times of stress. Intimacy is what family is all about.
I bring up this issue of our children because what I find is that many parents, especially mothers, become preoccupied with their relationship anxiety and withdraw from their kids. This response only makes them more anxious. It only serves to create a more dysfunctional family for the children.
We are challenged in life to do the right thing for ourselves and our families in spite of anxiety and compulsions. Start today to get well by seeking your own true well-being.
For more information, see:
The post in which holehearted describes her feelings about herself and feeling as if she’s lost herself, rings true with me, also.
Psycho told me I was an alcoholic so I didn’t drink and started to go to AA and WFS meetings. (He was a RAGING alcoholic most of his life). Since I left him, my drinking has spiraled out of control. I had trouble with depression and anxiety throughout my life but since
I left him and started therapy, I find myself suddenly diagnosed with BPD. And I fell for it and started DBT with a licensed clinician. And a nasty shrink put me on some serious psych meds and won’t take me off of them.
She thinks I’m crazy!
Now I’m wondering whether the power of suggestion is at play here. I’ve never been so messed up in my life and I’m getting worse instead of better.
After reading holehearted’s post, I’m beginning to believe that my change in personality is due to psycho’s
projection. Somehow I lost myself and BECAME HIM!
I’ve gotten so ‘crazy’ that psycho has ended all contact with me! In his eyes as well as his therapist’s, I’m the
one with the problem!
Almost from the beginning of my relationship with him, he started feeding me benzo’s, (a crazy-making drug) to help me sleep whenever I stayed with him overnight. He got up so many times through the night that I started suffering from insomnia. He quickly but methodically brainwashed me. I met him in June and by the following November, I admitted myself to the psych ward for the first time in my life. He’s been admitted countless times throughout his life.
I truly believe he would like to see me dead. We have a legal agreement that keeps me on his health insurance (due to the HPV he gave me) and he has to pay back to me $8,000.00 of the $38,000.00 I lost to him.
I feel I’m fighting for my life and not one of the professionals I’m working with get what’s really going on.
At this point I don’t know what to do besides backing off of all therapy and weaning myself off of the psych meds.
I’m so scared for myself–what is happening??
smellycat
Stay in therapy and work on having more ability to love, impulse control and morality in your life. If sociopaths pass on thier disease it infects these three areas. Use your ‘wise mind’ particularly to help you gain more impulse control.
Smellycat:
I am right there with you!
I can’t tell anymore if I was always like this and hid it well until he brought it out of me OR
If I was always a good person with some issues and he infected me with his insanity.
Now, I tell you I spoke to his new victim’s father who is a cop and knows his daughter very well.
He told me point blank, “My daughter is just like him… and their disease is infectuous… if they had AIDS, you would stay away from them… they will destroy you and you should move… now that they are together you have no idea the insanity that is about to ensue…”
I have to say that I am so not who I used to be.
I have no desire to try to get my life back together.. I feel what is the point…?
This is from someone who was becoming a successful Yoga teacher with student who really mattered to me.
I feel like I am waiting around to die.
The therapists and psychiatrists I have spoken to seem like they just don’t get it, don’t care or are condescending in some way or another.
I am so sure he would love to see me dead, totally insane or completely destitute or all of the above.
But at the same time, I say why should he leave me with his mess and go and be happy and start a new life with someone else?
I am waiting for someone or something to come and save me… but that’s not happening.
My head and heart are destroyed.
Will it ever just be normal again? I feel like I have no future and no hope for anything in my life anymore.
I look around and don’t even feel like I am home anymore.. like everything looks foreign to me even my own face.
Maybe I was always like this and just ignored it and now I am having to look at myself because there is no one there to blame or judge but myself.
I don’t feel any amount of therapy will help.. maybe Yoga will help, but I don’t even have the desire to do any of it anymore.
holehearted, depression can make you feel as if things have always been this awful but for me, that’s not the case. I didn’t feel crazy until I met psycho 2 years ago. Before I met him, I had a successful art business and had raised 2 disabled kids on my own, took care of my own home, was close to my family and friends.
I left my psycho in March and it’s only been the last few days that I can say I feel a slight change within me. Not surprisingly, this feeling coincides with not having any contact with him. Having him in my life only served to keep me down and addicted to him. I have determination to take back my life and not let his sorry-excuse-for-a-human destroy me.
Smellycat
(I’ve been listening to Gloria Gaynor’s, I WILL SURVIVE all day today and I’m growing stronger. . . woo-hoo!!)
Hi Girls, I check back her periodically because I too went through a relationship with a sociopath/NPD. I tried to keep a journal when I first left him because I didn’t know what was happening to me. I escaped and yet I yearned for him. I hated him but I was dying to see him. All of sudden I was alone and real life was suppossed to be lived again and I had forgotten how from living in the bubble of his sick world for too long.
I can tell you that the feeling of unrealness gets better. Nothing felt real for me. I was like a zombie. I dreamt of him. I isolated. It’s a blur now but it took months to heal and I’m not all the way there. I want to tell you to hang in there and let time do its work. I cry to this day often feeling I have lost my identity, self worth and purpose. I couldn’t tell you, how in the name of God that happened to me or how I let it happen, but that is the curse of life with a socio that only the victims can understand. I hate that I, the healthy one, now has to heal. But when I read what you write, it shows me that I have made progress. Because I felt like you and now I am better. That means, you too will recover. Please, please give yourself time.
You have to start a whole new life and maybe it will be even better than the one before he came and turned it upside down. I’m still waiting, hoping for that, because honestly my new life ain’t so great. I lost a lot of friends with him, lost passions I once had and lost the verve for life. I am now in pure apathy, which I know is a few steps up the ladder from where I was before. Yeah, it sucks, but that’s what happens. And the more time you spend with him or contacting him (which I did) I can tell you it just prolongs each step you take toward becoming the woman you should be.There is a reason we put up with their behavior, that reason is what we will change hopefully about ourselves.
I know it’s hard to suit up and show up, to go out the door, to do the yoga and all those things we’re suppossed to do to heal when your vitality is completely depleted. So don’t pressure yourself to do them but give yourself time to ruminate, read the blogs, obsess, cry and then tell yourself “that’s enough for today, for right now.”
I find a walk outside with nature is probably the best you can do for yourself when the howling in your head begins. Sunlight, fresh air and some spiritual awakenings are better than self help, therapy and regret, at least that’s what works for me.
I did contact him for too long after, thinking I could win him at his game, and yes, I became like him. Ugly and manipulative lying to his face like he did to me. Don’t bother with that battle because you won’t win. He will always ride off into his sunset with some new girl who can’t see the forest through the trees. He will do to her what he did to you and on and on and on. I know you always think she is making him happy, they are going to have all that he promised you. But he is incapable of giving anyone a beautiful life. No woman can change a socio.
The Dr’s are right, we forget the bad and get nostaligic for the good which was all a LIE. I shame myself for letting him define my happiness. It is up to us to find our way and not wait for someone else to pretend to make our dreams come true. You are healing. Take your time. Ask for help, but it’s a pretty solo journey unfortunately. If you believe in God or Source this is a good time to avail yourself. Check back on your own blogs, you will see how far you’ve come. You WILL GET BETTER! I send good and loving vibes out to all of you. It’s good to know we aren’t alone.
Hey there I CAN appreciate what you are trying to do,however that Tim guy is correct ,YOU make some pretty wrong diagnotic assessments about personality and behavioural traits… Basically you sound like a man hater,with your puritan casterating idiologies of men … Wake up ! YOU know scitsophrenics attract psychopaths… so fix your self up YOUR psychosis, STOP YOUR behaviours that lead him into responding as he does…STOP attracting them, you women on here sound like a bunch of submissives who are pissed off that he didnt play the role exactly as you wanted ,then you rape queens yell out OH ABUSE… not looking at your role in the process… 90 % of the traits you say are psychotic arent…
ADVICE: Curb your anger and paranoia
Focus on your greater goals,your purpose in life
chasing your shadows only makes them bigger
p.s in my experience with women who have a past history of abuse in relationships,well if a Nice and caring guy comes along then Her being so used to abuse and if HE doesnt abuse or disrespect ,then well she becomes the predator because thats the mindset she is familiar with… those who are common to abusive relationsips are just as predatorial as the other… peace ,respect … let love fill you and be independant .not needy for relationships…
Alex
ps you cant go by stats , anyone assessed by a court dr. is considered psychopath, even if he isnt. thats the way the courts work THE BIG LIE… even if you flip on a charge which if you want out you just take it… example cop beats people up then charges the victim , then the courts say if you flip on this chrge we let you out today but if you try to fight it we are putting you in for another 6 months .. then they say he is a psychopath for beating up a cop… so yOUR stats are 150% LIES … This website is a great idea so people can be aware,of that there is truly psychotics but its rare…. everyman is considered psychopath by the very nature of being a man… but if a man does this such and such ,doesnt make him psychopath… gee I wish I were a psychopath then I too would have no conscious then I could be a cop or join the military, or be a childs aide workere who abuse children marketing them off through the system… but I do give a shit , and i see what this world is run by… it aint pretty ,the lies the government is psychopathic by ALL definitions.. hey look at the parent who is a psychotic by putting her /his kid on drugs , saying oh he is A d d . or hyperactive,so these parents drug up their kids,cuz a dr. says… now thats abuse of the worst kind or the parent whop puts their kid in a religion to learn abuse to the extreme…. but hey no one wants to be responsibility for shit…why is the psychopath the way he is … apparently its a learned behaviour by not being raised with love… by thier parents, then the kid groes up and you are blaming him still … as this website does…
gettingoverthetrauma – I get the same feel in regard to holehearted.
DBT treatment as an OUTPATIENT sounds like a really good start for this individual.
I hear poision spewing out of cultmember’s words. What is a scitsophrenic? An attempt to spell schizophrenic?
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness and has nothing at all to do with “attracting psychopaths” .
I agree it is important to focus on the greater goals .
I don’t believe we are “man haters” (the majority of us anyway)
Hate is not condusive to healing: understanding is, however.
Peace be with you all.
Thank you for the original post. I know it old now, but I just read it and very comforting. Helps me make sense of things without feeling like I’m totally flawed. That is what my gut has told me over and over. That he is TOTALLY the problem, that with a normal person, my actions would have been just fine. On the otherhand, I also recognized in my gut that some women would have “woke up” a lot sooner. I DO tend to anxiety, and can admit that without feeling TERRIBLE about myself..or totally f*cked up….and it makes sense how that contributed to me being so determined to make it all work and how hard it was to deal with the silences, etc. It also gives me a direction to go on….dealing with anxiety better is probably what I need to work on next. Also explains why I will still crave him at times….those are times filled with anxiety!
Justabouthealed: It’s OK to waffle. Anytime you find yourself wanting to talk … just blog on with us. Anyone on line at the time you write, will gladly write you back.
Peace to your heart and soul as you heal. For now, just pamper yourself. Be easy on yourself … don’t judge yourself so harshly. I like to take long bubble baths … I turn on some jazz and soak for hours … never answering the phone or jumping for the doorbell. It’s my hours to spend pampering myself.