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 …
After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 12 – Reclaiming Self-Love
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 …
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After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 11 – Trust
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 …
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A society where everyone is a sociopath
This week I want to reach out to all of you who feel that you can no longer trust people. Imagine a world where your worst fears have come true, a world where everyone over the age of 15 is a sociopath. What would it be like to live in that world? If you only read one book this summer, I strongly urge you to read Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes by Frans de Waal. I have said before that I think the social-brain of sociopaths is similar to that of chimps. Now having read that book I am even more convinced. Chimpanzee Politics is the true life story of the relationships between individuals of the Arnhem Chimp Colony. Scientists carefully observed, photographed, filmed and …
After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 10 – Forgiving
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 …
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After the sociopath: How do we heal? Part 9 – Returning to Wounded Innocence
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, …
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Diagnosing the problems correctly
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 …
PTSD, defeat and the victim identity
When I was a med student, I studied animal models for human stress and depression. The best animal model of what a psychopath does to others is that of the rodent resident-intruder paradigm. In this model, males are introduced into the home territory of other males, they experience social defeat and are removed before they are injured. Repeated exposure to this situation produces a defeated animal who is chronically submissive and gives up without a fight whenever he encounters other males. Below is the posture of a defeated mouse. The physiology of this defeated rodent resembles human depression very closely. The defeat state can be reversed with antidepressants. Defeat is associated …
Sociopathic priests and abuse of the spirit
The Reverend Charles Newman, former president of Archbishop Ryan High School in Philadelphia, was sentenced on Friday to three to six years in prison for stealing almost $1 million from the school, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. As if that isn't bad enough, prosecutors say that Newman gave about $54,000 to Arthur Baselice III, once a student at the school, as “hush money” so he would keep quiet about their sexual relationship. Authorities contend that the abuse began when Baselice III was 16-year-old junior at the school. He graduated in 1996. Ten years later, on November 30, 2006, Baselice III died of an overdose in a drug house. During Newman's sentencing, the young man's mot …
The Fantasy of Unconditional Love
By Ox Drover I was led to believe as a child that we should “love unconditionally” and that we should “forgive unconditionally.” This was the rule around our house. I did start to notice, though, that while I was to apply this “unconditional forgiveness and love” to others, those same people did not always apply it to me. When my children were born, I felt the first real and true “unconditional” love I had ever felt for anyone. I would gaze into the crib and watch my child sleep, little fists curled up, ten perfect little fingers with ten perfect little finger nails. The warmth of this truly “unconditional” love swept through my heart and made my eyes tear up with joy. Even when my …