The New Year brings you a great opportunity to change your life for better health and well-being. In preparation for a better life, consider how recovering from loving a sociopath/psychopath is like recovering from addiction. Since the New Year is an opportunity, let’s take the time to focus on recovery.
A good friend of mine is struggling with substance addiction. This addiction is very similar to what many of you face because my friend was highly functioning before the addiction which started at mid-life. Before the addiction, he functioned well and was very productive. There is no obvious reason for my friend to be now at the verge of death from stimulants.
When we recently discussed his addiction, I asked my friend to consider what goes through his mind at the moment he decides that the best thing for him to do with his time is to use speed. I admitted being baffled about why he would make that choice. There are so many other ways he could spend his time and he knows that. He said, “When I don’t use, I feel great”¦ Then I use”¦I am an addict.”
Although I am generally in favor of people identifying their problems, in this case, “I am an addict” seemed like a quick excuse used to avoid really taking responsibility for his choices. After some reflection he did say to me, “You are right, it feels like a compulsion, but I guess it is a choice.”
Maybe you face a similar struggle. Instead of battling addiction, you are battling the love you feel for a sociopath. Just like my friend, even though you feel a compulsion to call the sociopath, you too have a choice to make. You can either choose to spend your time doing things that will bring you health and wellness or you can choose to spend time with that sociopath/psychopath.
During our talk, my friend reflected that he feels empty and bored at the time he chooses to use. The speed is a quick fix for the emptiness and boredom.
Many of you go about your lives just fine, then you end up home alone one day with nothing to do. Feeling bored, it suddenly occurs to you that your best choice is to call that sociopath. At the moment of boredom and emptiness all the pain the person caused you is not accessible to your consciousness. All you think about is the fun you had together. This fun is a marked contrast to the boredom and emptiness you feel in the moment. Since you feel sentimental, you think it is OK to make that call.
If you are waiting to feel repulsion for the sociopath before you disengage, you may be waiting for a very long time. The pleasant memories may always be tied to the love you feel which will be activated when you slow down and give yourself time to think. You have to make a conscious decision to make better choices for yourself. This decision has to be independent of however you feel in the moment. The decision to break away and remain free is a leap of faith in the belief that your future can be better “sociopath free.”
OK so how did you get to this place where you decide your best option is to choose to be with a sociopath/psychopath?
Just like my friend with speed addiction, during the relationship, you gave up on many of the activities that used to be meaningful to you. Also like my friend, you left friends, family members and hobbies behind. Maybe you also now surround yourself with other very dysfunctional people.
Getting free means choosing to spend your time in healthier ways; it means connecting with the love you feel for the friends and family members you abandoned when you chose the sociopath. You have to reconnect to the “you” that existed before this relationship.
You also have to admit that it is very selfish for you to hold on to your love for the sociopath. You likely have people who are counting on you to be a friend, parent or devoted family member. You can’t be there for others who need you as long as you hold on to the sociopath. Stopping then, means thinking of those other people. You do have a duty to them, much more than you have a duty to the sociopath.
You might benefit from combining all your New Year’s resolutions into one: Resolve to live a life of greater physical, psychological and spiritual well-being.
Make a commitment to fill your boredom and emptiness with activities that will build you up and make you healthy. If you are overweight, the CDC says you need an hour of exercise each day. There is a world out there full of fascinating possibilities, you can find them if you try.
Now I’d like to introduce you to a couple of friends who have brought joy, meaning and healing to my family. Each day when we walk and play with our dogs, the dysfunction brought into our lives by a psychopath feels very far away.
Use the comment section below to make your own lists of things you can do in the New Year, rather than wasting your time and precious life energy with a sociopath.
Other articles on addiction to a sociopath:
Ask Dr. Leedom: I am really sick, aren’t i?
How does one ever get over the heartache of being taken by a con artist?
Why is this so hard for us mentally?
A deeper understanding of love, ourselves and the sociopath
Why you can be addicted to a sociopath
I don’t understand why I still care
Hi Cat – I remember the spath charging someone else as a predator – that the other person’s penchant for googling was a form of ‘cat and mouse play’ to hurt the spath.
ahem.
crazy f*ckers.
Hi Cat: Info on the stages of seduction can be googled — NLP Hypnotic Seduction Secrets. The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene starts with this intro:
“Charm, persuasion, the ability to create illusions: these are some of the many dazzling gifts of the Seducer, the compelling figure who is able to manipulate, mislead, and give pleasure all at once. When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections, and enslaved great minds.”
It is interesting reading.
The “Red Flag” approach will be my guide now for the most part.
My previous way of thinking was to give everyone the benefit of doubt and assume trustworthiness unless given reason not to. The problem with this is you can get hooked in by a N/S by the time you realize that he has a disorder based on what’s happening.
Now, I want to look at everyone new I might date as potentially guilty until proven innocent. I know these are extreme positions, but I haven’t yet figured out a middle ground on this.
That’s the other thing — no need to share my “philosophy” — I won’t be verbalizing my approach, of course.
I just plan to keep it all in the back of mind so I allow myself to go slow, and not allow rapport to matter as much as substance.
Right now, I’m just open to meeting new people in general, without wanting to be in a relationship.
Happy New Year to you as well!
cat, one_step and nature, I shared part of this on another thread: Alfred Hitchcock’s genius in exploring the Shadow side of humanity in subtle ways, through everyday life stories.
One episode involved an actor who seduced a married executive woman, using her to help his career. He convinced her to kill her husband so they could have a life together. The actor then called the police on this woman, leaving her to take the fall, and his scheme included his other woman in the background all while he was love-bombing the executive woman who lost her high-paying job and freedom in the end.
Another episode was about a man determined to expose those he deemed evil, using a power to turn them into gnomes (under 4 feet) at the strike of the clock and lo and behold, the man himself shrunk as his parrot shrieked in the background.
Sound familiar? Just amazing.
recovering – there is some slight possibility that i may be in the actual presence of my spath in the next year, as I have offered to help with a fraud case against her if my testimony is helpful.
I am hoping that a house with fall on her. and her little dog.
one_step — all I can say to that is, “Wow.”
So, she’ll finally be publicly exposed.
Cat – Since they all sound the same, I have wondered if any of us are talking about the same person. Mine is not on probation, but may be in the future. That’s the only way I know that they are not the same. He also never got to 18 months.
Have always heard about other “sick” people in program, but now hyperaware. Read that there are many that have addiction problems and some go to 12 Step programs, or church, for easy prey.
It is up to me to take care of myself, in all good ways. It was important for me to see my own dishonesty. There were lots of instincts warning me away from him, and I lied to myself to make him fit. Lesson learned.
Even thinking lesson learned, am afraid and the awfulness of it all hits me. Two steps forward and one step back. As long as I am going forward.
7step,
This may sound like the weirdest thing you’ve ever heard, but congratulations. I know you feel like you’re falling apart, but I think you’re actually getting a grip.
You said that every time you think about what you want, compared to what you have, you fall back into anger. Nothing wrong with that, except you haven’t yet completed some of the “statements” that anger brings us to.
Try these out:
1. This is not what I wanted.
2. I didn’t ask for it, didn’t create it, this is not about me.
3. It’s my bad luck that I was born, raised, dependent on people who were not able to meet my needs.
4. I am angry about what happened.
5. I am angry that them for not being what I want them to be.
6. I am angry about whatever circumstances contributed to this mess.
Okay, now all of this boils down to a few things. And they’re important, because you’ve been trying to get through this by sheer force of will for a long time. By creating a functional “front,” not only to the world, but with yourself.
(I know about these things, because that’s how I got through my life too, until I bottomed out — in exactly the same way you’re describing in yourself — and couldn’t do it anymore.)
First, your “adult front” is no longer able to keep a lid on your grief-stricken child. All your wonderful, creative, adequate (for a long time) coping mechanisms are breaking down. That child is raising hell in you, and she is going to make you deal with her pain whether you want to or not.
So what does that mean? That means that pretending that everything’s okay is no longer an option. That means stuffing or hiding how you really feel is no longer an option. You know all that.
But here are a few new things. You no longer have the luxury of denying the truth. The truth is that these people will not meet your needs. You can call them names, like sociopath or narcissist. Or you can take the “high road” of forgiving and trying to understand them. You can hire a gypsy to cast some spells. You can tie them to their chairs and scream at the them until you’re hoarse. It doesn’t matter. For reasons that have nothing to do with you and never did, these people will not meet your needs.
As a side comment, one of the problems with growing up in dysfunctional families is that people keep pushing their inability to cope onto each other. Your father beat your mother. Your mother acted like it took everything she had to manage her own emotions and couldn’t deal with anyone else’s. The children dealt with the violence and disassociation in their own ways.
This is what you came from. You can drive yourself crazy by thinking they could meet your needs if they wanted to. Or by imagining that your needs are so normal and realistic that their failure to respond as you wish is evidence of their mental illness or sadism. But assuming your needs are perfectly normal, what makes you think that you’re dealing with people who do “normal”?
I read what you write, and I can hear the voice in you that wants to impose standards on this situation. That says something is right and something is wrong. That “anyone” would agree something or other. And I’m going to gently suggest that you are abstracting something that is really very personal. This is not about rules or standards. This is about what happened to you. That you had very human needs, starting way back when you were a child, and because of the radical dysfunction in your family, you were trained to stuff and deny those needs.
When I said you were getting a grip, it’s because you’re seeing this now. And that’s excellent. I know you feel like it’s destabilizing, and you feel like you’re stuggling to find reality in a funhouse mirror. But that’s also very good. You’re finally looking at the fundamental breach in your life between who you really are and what you really need, and what circumstances forced you to become.
Very good, little girl. You’ve finally broken through all those defenses and fears of what will happen, acuqired beliefs about how the world works, and acceptance that there’s no other way. It’s getting more clear about why your adult self is falling apart. Because all those coping mechanisms, which were established for survival among people who were so screwed up that they couldn’t take care of you or let you be yourself, didn’t work out. What you learned from them didn’t fix anything, nor did they give you skills to get what you needed as an adult when you finally got out of there.
So, okay, 7steps, what does this mean for you? Well, the obvious answer is that you need to stop fighting this. You’re talking about killing yourself. The only possibly reason to do this is that you want to get out from under all this disappointment. You can get out from the disappointment more easily. Stop expecting them to be different. Accept that you came from a screwed-up family. You don’t have to like or forgive them. You don’t have to accept their behavior. Just recognize that they are what they are, and it’s out of your hands.
Does that make you sad? Well, it should. It’s a bitch. You were a sweet, eager, optimistic little girl (and in some ways still are) dealing with people who were overloaded, miserable, and passing on their problems to anyone they could dump them on. Do you wish you’d been born into a different family? Or that the family you had were happier, more competent, more able to share joy instead of misery. Of course, you do. This is why our anger with other people, for many of us, comes down to an argument with God. Why were you so mean to me, God? Didn’t you love me? I was a nice little girl; didn’t I get any extra credit for trying so hard? Were you just trying to take everything away from me until I got sick and died?
I hope you read that last paragraph, and went woo-ho, is that what I’m doing? Because that is exactly what you’re doing. You may think you’re trying to get sick enough so that you’re mother wakes up, or your siblings wake up, or the medical establishment wakes up, or that place where they keep the saviors spits out another one for you, but really this is between you and God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call the ultimate thing that we blame our bad luck. That is, the grief and loss that arrives in our lives from sources that have nothing to do with us.
And once again, the big question for you is what are you supposed to do with this?
That’s a really good question, 7steps. I’ve just walked you through some thinking, and I don’t want to overload you. But here’s something to consider, if the rest of this makes sense. You are very angry about not getting something. I’m calling it not getting your needs met. (And if you haven’t read the needs lists on http://www.cnvc.com, I strongly recommend it. Because if you’re like me, you don’t even know that you’re allowed want some of these things, or that you have a right to feel their loss.)
But the fact that you’re angry suggests to me that you feel like you do deserve something, are entitled to it. That some part of you, maybe that aggrieved little girl, is actually demanding it in order to get your whole system well.
So if you accept the fact that your family isn’t going to be a source for you, but that you really need to take care of this, then what? God or Lady Luck or whatever put you here and presented you with a problem. Normal human needs, crappy family, a childhood that taught you to stuff and deny and compensate, a smart mind and a strong will that enabled you to keep stuffing all this until you got really good and sick, basically lost everything, and arranged things so that it was just going to get worse. That’s the set-up.
Forgive me, if it sounds like I’m dumping all the responsibility for this on you. I’m really not. You’re dealing with a lot of bad luck here. What appears to be a huge challenge. But maybe the challenge, while huge, isn’t exactly what it seems to be. Maybe all these circumstances reflect what is essentially an inner battle between a part of you that is entirely rational and is just trying to get you to take care of yourself, and a part of your that is still demanding that you get rewarded for all the sacrifices you made for a lot of people who were emotionally and spiritually impoverished and never had anything like the capacity to make a fair swap with you.
This is just stuff to think about. Healing from traumatic relationships, whether current or historical, eventually requires us to face the fact that we didn’t get what we wanted or needed. And there’s not a damned thing we can do about that, or about people who were incapable of being who we want them to be. The big question is, who is left in your life who knows exactly what you need (or is capable of figuring it out) and has reason to make sure that you get it?
And if you can understand all that, something that would be very good for you, I think, would be to start thinking and talking in terms of what you want. It may take a little work to get out of the habit of talking like a victim, and start talking like someone who is entitled to want something, but that too is part of getting well.
Forgive me if I said anything that was too hard to take. I really do understand and feel for you. I’m just trying to pull you down the path a bit.
A big hug —
Kathy
RECOVERING –
“I shared part of this on another thread: Alfred Hitchcock’s genius in exploring the Shadow side of humanity in subtle ways, through everyday life stories.”
I will have to look those up – I know I have never seen the ones about the GNOMES! Creepy!
Alfred Hitchcock is the MASTER. His movies are some of my favorites and are clearly depicting sociopathic manipulation and seduction, whether in one on one relationships a la “Strangers on a Train,” or the institutionalized/politicized sociopathy of the communist Soviet spies in “North by Northwest.”
“Vertigo” is also a great one – a woman plays a part and seduces an ex-cop so that he can witness a “suicide” that is actually a murder scheme. He becomes obsessed with her – he meets her and then she disappears, changes her appearance. He tracks her down, and little by little REMAKES her (makeover) to dress, look, and act like the woman who disappeared. It is quite a good portrayal of OUR OWN complicity in buying into the fantasy. He overlooks a perfectly compatible, employed, attractive and trustworthy woman friend to chase after the fantasy woman. She finally makes ONE mistake – and that is when he realizes he has been HAD.
The people who are the “heroes” in his movies are intelligent, attractive, professional, wise to the ways of the world – and STILL GET VICTIMIZED. Streetwise ex-cop, New York City advertising executive – starting to sound familiar, huh? When I have watched these movies again and again it strikes me how clearly Hitchock can depict these people in every strata of society, and bare their sick motivation for money or power or destruction with such clarity. Where did this man get such a clear vision? He started making movies like this in the 1930’s!
I can barely watch television anymore without getting by turns both fascinated and disgusted with the narcissism, anti-social behavior, and the rewarding of predatory and manipulative behavior with THE BIGGEST PRIZE! Anyone who has ever worked in sales and marketing knows it is all about lying and manipulation. Watch “Mad Men” lately? The sociopaths will always be the ones saying “they are just giving the people what they want!”
Bread and circuses, bread and circuses.
One step – your spath sounds like a GREAT story for a movie, kind of reminds me of “The 3 Faces of Eve” or “Sybil.” But sicker and with cunning and intent. Too bad old Alfred isn’t around anymore!
Oy! Happy New Year!
Holy Cow people –
I just hit post turned the channel to Turner Classic Movies, and there’s Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window!”
TCM – my most favorite addiction!
Anyone seen “Avatar?”
7stepstoheaven — You provide good Hitchcock examples and other media overviews about this topic. Of course, most of us probably hadn’t even heard much about the definition of sociopath when Hitchcock did his films. But the accuracy of characters, subtleties in behavior and other innuendos…Hitchcock brings it to life in ways that are just fascinating to me. I so get this stuff now — a whole other world of people in our human social enviroment — and yet there was very little about sociopaths in depth when I studied in the early 1990s for my master’s degree in counseling.
I have been on this site on and off most of the day — very unusual for me, even when I am off work.
I wonder if Donna will allow us to get professional education credits for this. LOL.