In a post written more than two years ago, Dr. Liane Leedom recommended The Betrayal Bond—Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships to Lovefraud readers. In fact, quite a few of you have been discussing the book in your comments. I finally finished the book, and I strongly agree: The Betrayal Bond, by Patrick J. Carnes, Ph.D., is must reading for anyone who is having difficulty leaving, or recovering from, a relationship with a sociopath.
A betrayal bond, Dr. Carnes explains, is a highly addictive attachment to people who have hurt you. He lists 14 signs that a betrayal bond may be present in your life. Some of them are issues that I’ve frequently seen expressed on Lovefraud:
- When everyone around you has strong negative reactions, yet you continue covering up, defending or explaining a relationship.
- When there is a constant pattern of nonperformance and yet you continue to believe false promises.
- When you obsess over showing someone that he or she is wrong about you, your relationship or the person’s treatment of you.
- When you move closer to someone you know is destructive to you with the desire of converting them to a non-abuser.
- When you find yourself missing a relationship, even to the point of nostalgia and longing, that was so awful it almost destroyed you.
In boldface type—the only time that I saw Dr. Carnes use boldface in the entire book—he wrote, “You will never mend the wound without dealing with the betrayal bond.” He elaborates:
Like gravity, you may defy it for a while, but ultimately it will pull you back. You cannot walk away from it. Time will not heal it. Burying yourself in compulsive and addictive behaviors will bring no relief, just more pain. Being crazy will not make it better. No amount of therapy, long-term or short-term, will help without confronting it.
Then, Dr. Carnes lays out a step-by-step plan for confronting the betrayal bond. He clearly explains how the bonds are formed, and the effects that they have. To help you unravel the damage, the book has a series of exercises, and Dr. Carnes recommends that you keep a journal while reading the book to record your responses to the exercises.
I was struck by a statement that seems to reflect what so many of us here at Lovefraud have found. Dr. Carnes wrote, “My experience with survivors of trauma is that every journey or recovery depends on the survivor coming to a point where all that person has gone through means something.”
This book can help you come to terms with your experience, so that it does mean something.
The Betrayal Bond—Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships
Dear Pesel,
I think I have a PhD in the University of Hard Knocks in psychopath—-but unfortunately, I had to take a lot of REMEDIAL classes because I just didn’t “get” the take home lesson—-LOL
Learning about the psychopaths and how to spot them is part of the learning we need to do, but also LEARNING ABOUT OURSELVES and why we in particular let ourselves be abused over and over and continually—-The Love Fraud Store has several of these books, Women who Love Psychopaths is a great one (even if you are a guy) because it tells us what is it that WE HAVE IN COMMON with other victims….just as the Ps have things in common, so do we.
Learning to set boundasries and to quit enabling and lots of other things that I should have learned when I was a kid and didn’t learn….and learning that HEALING IS A JOURNEY, NOT A DESTINATION is another thing. Also learning about the “grief process” (which is the same in any important LOSS situation) etc. so it is a loooooong hard road to self discovery, and self change. But, it is worth it I think, because I am more secure, more content, and happier now than I have ever been and I am P-FREE!!!!!! TOWANDA!!!!
Yes, a lot in common, just like woman who get raped have a lot in common, like body parts. But there are a lot of women with the SAME body parts that don’t get raped.
And women who get raped usually aren’t martial arts experts. They have that in common. Most of them don’t carry fire arms and are not trained in weapons retention. They have that in common. Most of them didn’t have a personal body guard…they had that in common. Most of them weren’t alert to the fact how easily they could become a rape victim. They had that in common. Most of didn’t size up a restroom, a street, a parking lot, their house, their dorm, their street, etc for safety before walking into the space, they had that in common. Most did not have a big dog with them when they got raped, they had that in common.
Some of those are things they may want to change or improve about themselves, some are not.
My point is, one study is useful, it points the way for more research, but I firmly believe almost any nice, trusting person can become a victim. Truly. Is it easier to rape someone who is frail? yes. Is it easier to emotionally rape or victimize someone who is in a needy spot? Yes. But in neither case would there be a problem without a bad guy.
I’m a broken record, but I know at the beginning, ESPECIALLY, I needed to hear over and over and over that I was a target of a bad guy, that I didn’t deserve years of suffering because I didn’t know how to fight off a bad guy.
And then like Oxy (I HOPE) I have learned how to fight them off!
Oxy, I’m amazed it has only been two years for you. It has taken me two years and what I went through was nothing compared to what you went through!
I think I must be the only LF reader who didn’t get much benefit from this book–maybe I should re-read it. As I remember it, I read this one during the “second shock” period, when I found out that the P had not only lied to me about money, bills, impotence, infidelity, etc., but had molested my daughters. Perhaps I was just too addled at the time to digest the contents.
JAH, I agree with your determination to place the blame squarely on the perpetrators. It is too easy for some of us to slip back into self-hatred and self-negation when we take on the perspective of the blamers and the shamers. It’s a tightrope walk, and it’s always good to regain our balance with the help of fellow LFers.
Guys, this is not, I repeat, NOT ABOUT BLAMING THE VICTIM, the point is that WE have in common that we are CARING PEOPLE, they have in common that they are NOT caring people, we have in common that we are RELIABLE people, they are not, we have in common that we are LOYAL people, and they are not….and so on….
Sure, we should not desire to become UN-caring, but we should learn to BE CAUTIOUS, and just like the woman who walked down a dark street at night, we might want to decide to stay in the street-lit part of town at night instead of go there at night alone. Even if you walked NAKED IN A BAD PART OF TOWN, THOUGH, YOU DO NOT DESERVE TO BE RAPED, but the flip side is that if you ALLOW abuse from someone, they will repeat that behavior, so we DO need to learn to WATCH for red flags, and we do need to learn to SET BOUNDARIEs and we do need to elarn that if people don’t respect our boundaries WE DON’T NEED THOSE PEOPLE.
We, in some cases, (me for one) need to learn to put ourselves first and to quit trying to FIX someone else who is “broken”—-the only person I can fix is ME.
Tood, sometimes we may read or hear some GREAT INFORMATION and if we are not in the “right stage” of healing to hear it or to soak it in, it will bounce off like water off a duck’s back. I am finding now that I am further along, that some of the books and information that when I first read or heard them didn’t mean a lot, but NOW I see great insight in them. Just like a kid in the first grade might read “War and Peace” and not get much out of it, but later, in high school or college it makes more sense….just being able to read the words doesn’t necessarily make us understand the content, OR it is possible that maybe that book will never have any meaning for you, cause it doesn’t apply to YOU where it might to me.
I think the main thing that we all need to do is to realize that we have to keep on truckin’ and not give up, or think we are “graduated” too soon. I know one of my biggest problems in getting suckered in again is to get “too cocky” and think, I’m “healed” when it should be I AM HEAL-ING. Just like the AA member has to watch out for booze, I have to watch out for getting involved with Ps—one day at a time.
Hi Everyone,
I want to post a ‘question’ that is really just a thinking/talking point for me. And it has especially come up when reading about everyone’s different experiences with the PD’d (personality disordered). And around these discussions about blame and victimization and accountability.
I am wondering if our experiences, our healing and self awakening, and the things we learn about ourselves differs depending on who we are, and where we came from? Some of you are probably thinking, ‘yeah, well, duh!’. Me too. But I am really interested in hearing what any of you might like to say about this. And in sharing my own thoughts–which are totally open to new input!
First, my own history. I have N/P/S individuals in my childhood (molesting grandfather, highly N mom, others). And I have a loooong history of being in short-term relationships with LOTS of these disordered individuals, both love and friendship. In my early 30’s I enjoyed a 13-year relationship with a nice and normal man. As soon as we decided to end it, I went back in for more Crazies. I was SO surprised that I did, as I thought I was ‘over’ crazy relationships. After all I had been in a regular and conventional, nice even, relationship all those years. Thing is I still didn’t know about N/P/S and personality disorders.
I say this because for me this wasn’t a one time thing, that I found myself involved with a Supercreep. It was more like I had a craving and a compulsion for something I didn’t understand, couldn’t identify. It wasn’t cocaine, or booze. It was a particular kind of person, with a kind of energy and pattern that triggered intense feelings and longings in me. It was a repeating attraction. I wasn’t just ‘targeted’, I unconsciously was attracted.
I am not sure any woman is unconsciously attracted to being raped. But I will stick my neck out and say that some women are attracted to physical violence. I also know that there are women who are raped, or brutalized, who have no such historical conditioning. No such attraction, however unconscious. They therefore do not seek out situations that are a ‘reliving’ of their pasts. And I believe those differences, in circumstance, are what differentiate the healing path of each person.
As I repeated my pattern the aftermath got more and more damaging to me. As I got older, wanted something stable, and had more to lose, the loss I felt was devastating. But it felt absolutely compulsive for me. Despite therapy (off and on for 20+years), and lots of self-help books, I still couldn’t connect my past with my relationship present. It wasn’t until this last man, and someone telling me about narcissism, that I started getting it. And at two years no contact AND no relationship, I can honestly write that saying I am ‘clean and sober’ fits how I feel. And so does saying I was taken advantage of by a predator.
But the clean and sober part is resonating more for me. And I think for me this is because of a relationship pattern that springs from my attempt to recreate and resolve the sadness, neglect, and abuse of my early years.
For others I wonder if this may not be so true. That the experience was a more isolated one, that is being dealt with in the here and now, and is less about looking back, and more like recovering from a tsunami, not a 30-year inebriation.
And if it is more a tsunami experience for you, then knowing about tsunamis and knowing when they are coming, how to get to high water, is what is important. In addition to healing the broken bones and emotional trauma of living through the catastrophe.
It is the same for me. I need those things too. But I am, admittedly, like the drunk. I also need to know that I will take another drink if I don’t identify my own attraction to the toxic, and work on untangling my own toxic past and deprogramming myself from the terrible messages of my upbringing. My first tsunami came when I was too little to make sense of it, and it became a kind of twisted fairy tale for me. My wounds healed poorly and crookedly, leaving me walking wounded. In my ‘ongoing’ fairy tale I finally find the one who will protect me, heal me, cherish me, and make everything OK. AND, in my fairy tale this person is ‘just like’ the ones who inflicted the original wounds. So, my strategy does not heal, but instead inflicts more wounding. Tearing open the old losses and heaping new ones atop.
Some of here really didn’t have lots of neglect and trauma in our backgrounds. Our stories and reactions and development are different. So maybe all of us fall to either side of this ‘dividing’ line with compulsion on one side and natural catastrophe on the other?
Either way, we are all here to find what works for us, not to follow someone else’s healing path. So we have MUCH to gain from each other (for which I am Grateful).
In love and discovery……
I started to write this in response to justabouthealed, but then I saw your post. slimone, and it might be a response to that as well.
I was raped too. Over and over for about four years. It was what I went home to from eighth grade through the day I left for college, and my choices were to kill him and ruin my life or run away and live on the street and ruin my life. So I gritted my teeth, learned to disassociate, to shove it into some closet in my mind and pretend everything else was my “real” life until I could graduate from high school and talk some college fare away into letting me go there for no money.
And I didn’t realize until this round of healing, this determination to figure out what was wrong with my life and fix it, how much of my life had been shaped around proving this was not my fault. Some part of me kept thinking that I should have been able to fix it. That I should have been able to figure it out. To say the magic words that would have stopped him, or found a better place to hide, or maybe I should have just found a shotgun somewhere and killed him. Except then, I would have been a murderer. If I’d run away, I would have starved or turned into a street person who lived off her body. But not running away meant that I would have to protect everyone I cared about for the rest of my life from the truth about me.
In reopening those memories, I had to face exactly what you’re talking about. That I really had no choices that would have saved me. And more, that the only reason it happened to me was bad luck. I was run down by the proverbial Mack truck. It was totally out of my control. And the truck drove off, leaving me to bear the damage. And that damage affected more of my life than I can begin to describe.
But in getting over the relationships with the sociopath, I began to think that what happened to me with him, nearly forty years later, might have something to do with all that horrible history. That maybe it had something to do with why I was vulnerable to the sociopath, the reasons I didn’t recognize what was going on, why I tolerated things that I knew at the time were abusive, and why I couldn’t get away. And if it was related, maybe I could do something to change how it was affecting me now.
It wasn’t blaming the victim. It was trying to understand if there was something I could do that would make me more of a survivor, someone who valued her life and resources more than I apparently did, someone who wasn’t so inclined to find a rescuer outside myself, and who was more able to envision, plan and control my life.
There were times when I was frustrated with myself. Times when I beat myself up for being too stupid to live. But the more I looked at what happened with him, the more I saw beliefs the world and about my place in it that originated in that awful time. And I saw how the surrounding circumstances — circumstances in my life that made me want someone like him — also came from all that.
It’s not that a totally balanced, secure and confident person couldn’t have been bamboozled by someone like him. He was attractive, amusing, plausible and clever at finding the areas of need where he could set his hook. All of us have dreams that can be exploited. But I’d seen other woman walk away from him. The difference with me was that, when he started to hurt me, I didn’t react. My tolerance for pain was so high, my need for safety and love so huge and so unmoored from a normal self-protective instinct, that instead of running for my life, I just kept giving more.
Which is why I say that he was the lesson I needed to change my life. He was the worst person I’ve ever been involved with. But the involvement itself followed a pattern that ran through my whole life. Seeing my lovers as the carriers of personal transformation, emotional safety and help with my unmanagable life. Not valuing myself or my life, because I was supposed to be doing better. Being willing to pay so much for validation and security that always came from outside of me.
I don’t assume that anyone else here got into relationships with sociopaths and couldn’t get out for the same reason as me. But it turns out that there are a lot of us who have found reason to look at our own participation in these relationships — not because we were bad or stupid people, but because we were carrying damage that the sociopath could exploit.
I’m reading Emotional Rape, because you recommended it, in relationship to blaming the victim. The author writes that we may come to look at our own roles in these relationships, but only after we’re clear that this was not our fault. We have reason to be angry, and to learn how to identify these people and defend ourselves. That comes first.
In a way, this self-examination is an extension of learning to defend ourselves. But it’s never, ever blaming the victim. It’s about doing some kind of alchemy — lead into gold — that gives this pain meaning in our lives. It changes us from victims if we find a gift in this experience that outweighs the pain and loss that sent us looking for it.
There is no “official” ending place in recovery. There’s no rule that we have to go beyond knowing it wasn’t our fault, getting really angry, and using that anger to take back our power. That’s a lot.
But when we get tired of carrying the damage, or we imagine another life on the other side of anger, or we see that this is still too important to us, it may be reason to start turning our attention toward what we can change in ourselves. We get there when we get there. And there are reasons people never move into this internal work. They live with recurring abuse, and they never have the peace of mind to get past anger. Or they make careers as great warriors. Or they’re just not ready, ever, to deal with old memories that were put away for good reason.
There is no hierarchy of healing, except what makes us happy and peaceful with ourselves. If we see a piece of the recovery path that seems to offer a little more, we may decide to explore it. Or we may be fine where we are. There is no right or wrong of it, only what we want for ourselves now.
slimone,
That really didn’t respond to you. And yes, I know exactly what you mean.
I had masochistic fantasies all my life. When I talked to therapists about them, they seemed to brush them off as less important than my PSTD issues. Now I understand why, but at the time I would have done anything to get rid of them.
I knew I was on the right path, when those masochistic fantasies lost their power. I saw through them, and they were just one of the ways that I’d tried to relieve the confusion, shame and pain about not being able to escape.
Like you, I realize that I’m an addict. Not to anything in particular, but more to seeking relief when I get too stressed, too overwhelmed, too afraid I’m going to finally terminally mess up and lose everything. I have to keep training myself to look inside me, rather than outside me for solutions. To say, “Okay, Kathy, what have you done to your life, and how are we going to take better care of you.” Releasing the self-judgments. Practicing compassion.
The inside of my head is in pretty good shape, but I’m still learning how to live it.
Kathy
Kathy,
Yes, I think your response does speak to my ideas and questions regarding individual healing paths. And I think your path is a similar one to mine. So for me I have been able to absorb much, if not all, you have written.
And I think I can say that any of us, whether with more compulsive involvement, or less, can find places in ouselves that need our loving attention and redirection–to avoid future predatorial entanglements, and to generally improve our lives. IMO it is in degrees. My ‘complicity’ however unconscious was of a high degree, and requires much of my attention and understanding. I would guess for others this piece of the work may take a less pronounced role, if they do not have as much of a ‘need’ to recreate and resolve old traumas.
I think it is incredible that each of us can come here, and to other sources of knowledge and healing, and find our own way, to our own healing.
Alone together.
Thanks for reading that book. He writes “They do not recognize that what happened to them was rape (emotional rape); rather they rationalize that is was simply an instance of personal failing. This is a destructive fallacy.” He other words about that elsewhere. I’m way behind in my work, so rushing here.
Are you saying that everyone who didn’t avoid your bad man has healing from their childhood to do? That everyone who avoided him was “chit together”?
I agree with what your wrote above that some of us are carrying damage that the sociopath could exploit. But your second to the last paragraph is where I start saying “wait a minute”…Because not EVERYONE is carrying damage that caused the Bad Man to be able to get to us. Some were just vulnerable…physically sick, or too grief stricken about something else to be thinking straight. There are things that make people vulnerable besides childhood issues.
I think you want honest feedback, because you are trying to make sure you communicate your meaning clearly. So if I tell you where I start getting lost, maybe it is me, but there will probably be some other readers like me when your book comes out, so I hope the feedback is helpful, not hurtful. I’m used to having an editor tear apart my writing (and my writing often IS bad), so I don’t take it personally anymore and I hope you don’t either.
I think you outline a wonderful path for anyone carrying childhood issues of abuse or previous trauma and I thank you for it. You have truly helped me many times.
Another path might be living with a mentally healthy role model for 40 years and you gradually “get” it. You get what integrity is about. You get what REAL love is about. You get what self respect is about. One day your past just simply loses its power to define you today.
LOL!!! Maybe I just have a huge chip on my shoulder that says NO ONE, even someone who is kind and loving and on my side, and who says there is no right or wrong, still raises concerns if they hint at a path to take. I guess I have the part down about not blindly accepting anyone else’s opinion. LOL! So forgive me. Sad part is, if you were a man, I’d probably just be saying how wise you are. Sigh. Actually, I think I’m getting better about that. Not perfect, but better. Sometimes I’m great. Other times, I slip again.
PS…I was a couple of years younger than you the first time I got raped. But it was years before I was attacked again, by someone else. I can’t imagine your pain, but I do understand some of it, and I am just in awe of the woman you are today and your tremendous gift for writing.