Recovery from a sociopath

Happy Independence Day weekend. It is a lucky coincidence that this is our topic, because emotional freedom is truly about personal revolution. It is an end to collaboration with and submission to abuse. It is an end to the emotional slavery of feeling responsible for other people's feelings and other things that are beyond our control. Emotional freedom is something that might be difficult to imagine when we are in the first stages of healing — especially if it's the first time we've ever processed an abuse-related trauma all the way through to the end. At least once, we need to go through all the stages to take a good look at patterns of denial or bargaining that made us vulnerable to a …

After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 13 – Happy Emotional Independence DayRead More

When I first was released from the relationship that was killing me, I felt lost, frightened, alone. I needed to focus my attention on something bigger than me, something beyond the despair of having being abused. I needed to connect to people who didn't know me, didn't know my story, didn't know about the man who promised to love me 'til death do us part and took the death part way too seriously, and so, I decided to volunteer. I thought, if I can give while I feel so impoverished, I will be reminding myself that I am not as “useless” as I feel. And it worked. Once a week, I joined a group of women and men at the church down the street from where I was living to make sandwiches for street p …

Stand By MeRead More

Love is huge topic that spans every other issue that we have discussed so far, and ones we have not touched yet. But for our purposes — to talk about our next steps in healing from traumatic relationships — we have to narrow it down. This article will discuss the most basic and important element of love -- how we love ourselves. We will look at how we our relationships with ourselves are changing. And how that is affecting what other people mean to us What we think of ourselves Years ago, when I was involved with a New Age bookstore, I ran into lots of programs that taught positive affirmations. That is, repeating phrases about how lovable we are, how successful we are, how loved we are b …

After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 12 – Reclaiming Self-LoveRead More

I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you. -- Frederic Nietzsche In recovering from a sociopathic relationship, one of our greatest challenges is to rediscover the meaning of trust. Trust is a kind of glue in our lives. If we are going to be vibrant human beings, living with healthy curiosity and developing ourselves through calculated risks and learning from our experiences, we have to be able to depend on some background truths. When our lives are rocked by unexpected disaster, the impact on our ability to trust our perceptions or our world around us can be massive. This issue comes up over and over on LoveFraud. We hear it most clearly from the …

After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 11 – TrustRead More

This article talks about work we do when we are ready to work on clearing the influence of betrayals from our minds and emotional systems. It is about recovering our feelings of safety in the world and moving forward to create better and happier lives. Those of us who are still battling our betrayers, still clarifying our feelings of outrage or still developing our self-defensive skills may feel outraged by the very idea of forgiving. And so they should. Forgiving is something we do "at our leisure," later when we have the time to think about restoring our emotional systems to a pre-warzone state. Ultimately we want to be positive, creative, optimistic people -- without ever forgetting the …

After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 10 – ForgivingRead More

In the series on recovering from traumatic relationships, this is the third article on grieving and letting go. It is an extension of the last one, which discussed exploring the past to understand our patterns of belief and behavior. This is about how we do it and what we find. Or rather about how I did it, and what I found Unpacking frozen memories This week I reached out to someone whose name is part of my history. She was once the lover of a man I regarded as the great love of my life. He was an alcoholic poet who died when I was 23. She is a poet too. I found her web site, read a poem about the first time they made love, and wrote her an e-mail to introduce myself. She wrote back, …

After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 9 – Returning to Wounded InnocenceRead More

By Ox Drover I flashed on something a while back. I know a man who went into the navy at age 16. When he was 18, he was on shore leave and met a young girl, rapidly fell in love with her, married her, set her up in an apartment and went back to sea for nine months. When he got back to shore, she was gone. He couldn't understand why. Later, when he was 22, he met another girl when he was on shore leave and married her as well. Lived with her a couple of weeks, during which time she got pregnant, and then left her and went back to sea for a year. When he came home, his wife and baby daughter were gone. At this time, he started thinking about “what had gone wrong” with his two mar …

Diagnosing the problems correctlyRead More