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 Slimone,
There are those like you described yourself that are “addicted” to the rush of the adreniline, consciously or unconsciously. If you read “Women who love psychopaths” I think that many of us are BRIGHT and ADVENTUREOUS which makes us perfect “targets” for psychopaths.
No bright woman I know of wants to date some guy who is “dumber than a pet rock”—and so we will seek out bright guys, also we will seek out guys who are adventureous or interesting=—–sometimes those same guys are “high risk” for psychopathy as well—-Or, it may be that we are “fixers” and have so much caring and compassion that we want to “help” the poor guy down on his luck, to fix his problems with X, Y or Z.
Or maybe it is because we feel unloveable or undesirable and we know the guy isn’t much, but we don’t feel we deserve any better.
Whatever it is that makes us “vulnerable” to being abused, used, etc. finding out what it is, and working on that aspect of our personalities is I think a great idea.
WHATEVER it is, though, IT IS NOT OKAY FOR ANYONE TO ABUSE US—their behavior is NOT OUR FAULT. The shame belongs to them. But, THEY HAVE NO SHAME.
What Kathy said about “there are reasons people never move into this internal network. They live with recurring abuse and they never have the peace of mind to get past anger.” “They’re just not ready ever to deal with old memories….” Those statements bring to mind my life…there was a time when the REALITY of my life was too painful to contemplate and every time it reared its ugly head I pushed it down.
But one day, I got tired of “pretending it never happened” and “pretending we are a nice normal family” when IT DID HAPPEN, and we are NOT a “nice normal family” we are infested with as many psychopaths as a coon dog has fleas!
My childhood was not the idolic myth I had made up, and my egg donor was more like “mommie dearest’ than the Virgin Mary, and my sperm donor was a monster, and my youngest son was just as bad. But I finally got it through my head that it was NOT my JOB to keep up the FALSE FRONT any more. None of the behavior of these people was my responsibility or my fault, and I was only responsible for myself. I did not have to continue to allow others to use me for a door mat….I came out of the FOG–FEAR, OBLIGATION AND GUILT.
I no longer had to feel guilty or shamed because of my family, I no longer had to feel obligated to take care of them and clean up their messes, and I will be damned before I will live in TERROR of them either. I broke free.
One of the instinctive things about prey animals is that when they are held securely, they will stop struggling. If they would continue to struggle they might actually get away, but this self pacification instinct holds them tight. Dr. Temple Grandlin noticed this and used it to design chutes to handle cattle and calm and quiet them by holding them firmly in “squeeze chutes.”
I decided I would no longer self-pacify and I would FIGHT LIKE HELL TO GET AWAY rather than freeze like a deer in the headlights or a heifer in a squeeze chute. The FOG keeps us frozen, unable to muster the will to fight or flee, but when we can start to see through the “squeeze chute” of the FEAR OBLIGATION AND GUILT, we can break free.
If you feel attracted to the “bad guys” then I suggest you read the “Betrayal Bond” about trauma bonding. I don’t think, though, that it is the ONLY reason some of us stay with our abusers. Each of us in an individual, but there are some similarities in us just as there are with them. God bless us all!
LOL! I didn’t mean YOUR writing is bad, at worst you may need to qualify something a bit more. Mine is BAD, often grammatical errors, too simple of language. I hate the verbal word, it is so easy to misinterpret because we hear all our back story in the background for the right context, but the reader often doesn’t.
I AM seeing the point you are making…and then it slips out of my grasp again..
Kathleen,
What you just wrote to slimone about masochistic fantasies is a huge, huge help to me.
I hope you can discuss that some more. That has bothered me a long time . I talked to a therapist once who said “just be glad something turns you on, many women would be grateful for that” and I never dared bring it up again.
In actually reality, I do NOT like that at all!!!!!!!!!!!! Anything resembling it in reality scares me. But I hate those fantasies. They pop into my head unbidden when I AM enjoying sex, and then I enjoy it more, but ONLY as a fantasy. It has really distressed me.
Hey Oxy,
Boy I have read the Betrayal Bond, and it is one of the books that got my eyes open. I love that book. Actually doing more of the ‘work’ in it, just this last month or so. I guess at this point I am not far enough along, with eyes open, that I feel I wouldn’t be taken in, yet again. I still have some fear, and I am letting that be OK, and staying out of the frey, kind of living a bit of a ‘cloistered’ life.
I, like you, had some difficulty finding my way ‘inside’. I kept focusing outside to find the fix I needed, to ease my way. I would go in, and HAD to come out because I could only do so much work at any given point before it just hurt too much, or became an exercise in futility, cause I just wasn’t ready yet.
Now. Now it feels like the door is wide open, and there is no closing it for a respite.
I also have read Women Who Love…..another Fab-u-lous book. I do characterize myself as someone who is bright and likes people/men who have a certain dynamism and energy to them. And I get, as you say and the book talks about, how that kind of man is just as likely to have p traits.
As you say it is lots of reasons that we may find ourselves attracted. I find I relate to many of the reasons that were outlined in WWLP’s.
Matter of fact this is just my type: dynamic, smart, verbal, and doesn’t have a pot to piss in. Those that have a**loads of energy and dynamism, and not squat to show for it. Generally those slightly out-of-mainstream creative types: musicians, dancers, painters, and performers. My therapist pointed out that I love an outsider. Takes one to know one.
I know some of these p’s have oodles of belongings, and are dentists/doctors and all manner of ‘successful’. But the one’s I always found attractive were the lost puppies, who had grown up to be strong dominant dogs, but were still pissing in their own beds. Guess even the ‘successful’ ones are still pissing their beds, they just aren’t sleeping bags or futons!
justabouthealed, I want to hug you. Is there an emoticon for that?
In response to your long post. I agree that my path is definitely about healing from old stuff. And that for someone who just got blindsided — and we have a people here who have stories like that — there might not be the need or motivation to do all the work to get clear.
As the same time — and this is not an argument, just me thinking out loud — I think we live in a culture that makes it very hard to be “clear.” The ambient values are unhealthy in many ways, though people who are, either by history or temperament, more stable, happy and self-referenced may be able to choose what’s healthy for them, and what’s meaningful in terms of reaching out through their careers or other work in ways to do good in the world. Reading the biographies of people who started early to accomplish this sort of thing, I see that, for whatever reason, they didn’t live with the demons and self-sabotage that I did.
And then, there is the fact that these relationships are traumatic and force us to deal with the effect of that trauma on our wiring. Martha Stout wrote a book called “The Paranoia Swith: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior — And How We Can Reclaim Our Courage.” It’s on my reading pile, because I’m interested in this. Part of my premise is that the sociopaths make use of rewiring that already exists from previous trauma. But I’m open to the idea that this is new trauma on a previously untraumatized psyche. But in a way, the problems are the same. How do we resolve it? And can we do it completely, extracting the learning and stepping up to greater power and awareness, or is it always going to be psychic baggage?
So, as I said, I don’t know. Don’t know if my path is relevant to anyone. Don’t assume anything about what brought people here. I just found something that brought me where I needed to go, so I’m sharing it. I don’t mean to make it sound like universal truth, or make myself sound like a great guru. I’m not. I’m just one person whacking at the weeds in my head.
Regarding the masochistic fantasies, I agree with the way you feel about them. Except that I went a lot farther than imagining them when I was having sex. And I don’t really feel comfortable discussing it here, but if you want to chat, my contact information is in the author’s section.
From a really simple perspective they’re about power. Polarized power. It’s not hard to understand why we would associate heavy power dynamics with sex. But I think that, with me at least, the powerful draw was directly related to my shame and fear. Stuff I didn’t recognize on the surface of my mind. I was in major denial, imagining myself to be totally in control of myself and my life and totally comfortable with my life choices, no matter how unconventional.
It still kind of astounds me how much internal incongruity I lived with. I was arrogant but totally vulnerable to criticism. I never got angry but I was choked with resentment about so many things. I thought I was just fine and I thought there was something incurable wrong with me. I didn’t trust anyone else and I didn’t trust myself. I was extremely competitive, but I virtually always arranged to lose.
I was just a mess. And after the sociopath showed me what a mess I really was, I just had to go back and sort this old stuff out. I didn’t want to live like that anymore.
And in a way, it was all about power. That’s why I have so much respect for what you’re doing. Power is crucial. The incisiveness that goes with it. If we can’t reclaim our power, we can’t move on to anything else. (Well, we can leapfrog it into that kind of ungrounded spirituality that abuse victims do so well, while they can’t take care of their own lives.) But we have to get power down — get from that blast of backed-up rage to a mature, controlled use of anger and power — to ever trust ourselves and trust that we can keep ourselves safe while we move on to the more optional aspects of self development.
People told me that submissives eventually switch to being tops. I never believed it until I surfaced my anger and began to develop my power. I found the sociopath in me, and thank heavens my psyche finally began to be more rounded out. Though I wouldn’t claim I can’t be frightened, I am generally not someone a predator wants to mess with now.
And I think that balancing of power inside of me was what made those masochistic fantasies fade. Except for academically, I’m not interested in shame anymore. My concept of surrender is more about giving in to reality than any big bad man. At my deepest involvement with this stuff, I used to imagine being driven past my tolerance level through some kind of looking glass, where I would be free of tension and shame, awake and alert and loving myself and connected with the world. And I could do that, but it was like a drug high, transient and not real.
This path is the real way to that state, the way to own it, rather than earn it through expensive addictions and ultimately self-defeating excesses. For me anyway.
Kathy
Thanks Kathy, that is very helpful. I will write more after I’m off my deadline project, I’m getting hopelessly behind! But this gives my brain something to chew on in the background. Heavy stuff! More later!!!
I have not read this book yet but I do feel that I need it. I am still married 2 the sociopath. I have been struggling breaking free of this toxic relationship. I cried when I read just five of the betrayal bonds. They all describe me. The last sign.. Longing for and nastalga relationship that almost destroyed you.. He tried 2 kill me in our home and I still 4gave him.. Even though he never said he was sorry, because he wasn’t. It is so hard because he has moments when we do laugh and things are nice. But deep in my heart I do not feel his equal. I do not feel like I really matter. I have a hard time excepting the fact that the past older memories are gone. He is mental and I can’t help him.. I try 2 tell myself, you can except the fact that my son has special needs and as hard as that was to do I did it. I live in reality of it. Why can’t I except the fact that this relationship is so toxic. Recently I found out he had been cheating on me while I was pregnant.. This happenend last month.. Now I believe he is cheating again with someone else. I found a reciept that proved he had lied.. He never explained the hard evidence just the fact that I got in his stuff.. I came our looking like a bad guy.. I do not want 2 have a relationship with someone I have 2 always check their story out.. Not good at all.. Not good for our children.. I really do want 2 walk away.. I just feel that and this is gonna sounds crazy, but I feel that if he has relationship with someone else and both happy that I failed.. That maybe if I had tried harder I cld have made him happy.. I know it sounds sick. I just want 2 be happy and 4 my children 2 have a stable happy home. I so much want 2 break this toxic bond.
It’s late here but I can’t go to bed without acknowledging your post.
My heart cries out to yours. I’ve been “out” for 7 years but I stayed TOO long and my health is shot and so is my money. I could have written your history as if it were my own.
I can only caution you that if he tried to kill you twice already you are not safe. NORMAL men do not try to kill their wives!!!
As for feeling that his relationship with someone else will be good, please look up all the posts about this normal fear. They aren’t capable of feeling happiness (as we feel it anyway) and he will treat a new target the same or worse than he has mistreated you. They don’t change.
YOU are NOT a failure. You were dealing with a disordered person and duped by the lies. YOU are NOT to blame.
This is a great place to come for advice on how to plan your exit. (Don’t reveal your plans, though, to keep yourself safe.)
YOU CAN BREAK THIS TOXIC BOND. All of us that have gotten out already have done it. You can, too! Trust your instincts.
kate09: May I gently suggets that you read an article that is in the May 2009 archives? It is called Marriage to a Sociopath Ends in Murder. I’m not trying to scare you, but you did say he has tried to kill you twice. If you are still sitting on the fence wondering what to do, please read the article, it was written by Kelsi’s Mom.
Kate09:
You are not the one…..it’s not you. EVERYTHING you have described is what I too have lived. EVERY PART OF IT!
It’s the crazymaking, it’s the gaslighting, it’s that you will never please him. Life is a game and you and the kids are pawns……Read, read read……all the posts, all the articles, just ramble on through LF. You will connect. You will find answers, you will find a way to plan an exit strategy.
IT CAN BE DONE…..I ASSURE YOU.
You owe it to yourself, and your children.
You are not crazy, you are not imagining these things….I think this is why we get so good at ‘recon’…..because we are always ‘chasing’ after their stories…..they say we are wrong, we have proof, they say we are snooping and they will ‘leave’ if we don’t trust them…..it’s all a throwback….its projection.
DO NOT EVER QUESTION YOURSELF!!!!
IT”S EASY TO DO WHEN YOU ARE SCARED AND NOT SURE WHAT TO DO….IT seems easier to stay…..BUT I ASSURE YOU…..YOU WILL PAY THE PRICE, YOUR KIDS WILL PAY THE PRICE!!!!!! THIS IS A GUARANTEE!!!!It sounds as if it could be with your life!!!!
I did it for 28 years…..I am no different than you. None of us are. We all have similar stories, all horrifying to the outside world. DIfferent players, same game.
Its not ‘sick’ to want the father of your children and your husband to be the man you ‘imagined’, the give and take in a relationship, the loyalty, the honor, the love……..YOU WILL NEVER GET IT FROM HIM!!! HE HAS SHOWN YOU HIS TRUE BEING!!!!!!
HE WILL NOT CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I heard this for YEARS, and each time we could laugh and ‘share a moment’, I thought…..gee, see he is making progress…..IT”S ONLY TO APPEASE YOU WHEN HE FEELS HE IS LOSING HIS SUPPYLY (YOU). It’s temporary, you see this. It manipulative, you see this.
I suggest you educate yourself all you can on the S, and plan an exit.
You need to be stealth and do not let him know what you are up to…..play along with him, don’t address the ‘other’ women…let him think your ‘happy’…..while you put money aside, remove jewelry or valuables out of the home, copy bank records, titles, investments etc, get a P.O box in another town…find a safe place to go, find a good therapist and a good attorney YOU MUST BE STEALTH ABOUT IT,…..There will be times when you get so pissed at his actions you will want to confront him…..DO NOT…..HE WILL NOT CHANGE, you will only be feeding him information about WHAT you know. SLITHER LIKE A SNAKE, and strike when the time is right (with leaving/divorce). NEVER LET THEM SEE YOU SWEAT! EVER! It will all be used against you. STAY IN CONTROL OF YOUR EMOTIONS (hard part), but he will set you up to look like the ‘crazy’ person to the outside world…..DO NOT FALL FOR IT!!!!!
if you read back on threads…..you will find some wonderful advice you can relate to……DON”T DO ANYTHING RASH AND GIVE YOURSELF AWAY….YOU MUST BE SMART ABOUT THIS!!!!!
Change email passwords and internet passwords, get a CC in your name only, change the title on your vehicle into YOUR name only. Send all mail to your new P.o Box.
Make a decision and never look back. Life does get better, BUT it takes some work and educating yourself on what your dealing with.
Please do not wait until it’s too late….your kids need a healthy and happy mamma. You are NOT NEVER EVER GOING TO CHANGE HIM!!!!! Let him do his thing…..thinking he is getting away with it all…….as YOU DO YOURS!!!!
It won’t be easy, BUT……..
You will never regret leaving.
We are here, bounce of us…..read all you can, ask questions and take control of your life/emotions and future!
You will never be judged here.
XXOO