By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)
One of the things I have heard from victims of psychopaths here at Lovefraud, seemingly over and over, is that people compare their losses to my losses and Donna’s losses and Dr. Liane Leedom’s losses, etc. and think that their losses don’t “count” because they haven’t lost X, Y, or Z and we did. They seem to think that because I lost a child, or Liane lost her medical practice, or Donna lost a quarter of a million dollars, that they are not entitled to feel as injured as we were/are.
The people expressing this somehow seem to have “survivor’s guilt” about feeling so devastated when their losses were somehow “less.” Or they feel that we are somehow “super heroes” because we survived “big losses.”
I felt that way too when I was reading Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl wrote the book after his years in a German Nazi concentration camp, in which he lost everything except his life, and barely retained that.
Pain is like gas
I felt that my own losses didn’t compare to Dr. Frankl’s losses, and that somehow I should feel guilty for feeling such great pain and desperation. Then I read Dr. Frankl’s explanation of how pain operates like a gas.
In science, we learn that a gas, because it has atoms that are far apart, will expand until it completely fills an empty container. It will also compress easily so that a larger amount of the gas can be put into a small container. In any case, the container is full. It is totally filled.
I realized upon reading this that my pain was just as “total” as Dr. Frankl’s, and that my losses were just as “big” (or “small”) as his were. All pain and all loss is total. If something is important to us, we value it and when we lose it, we grieve for that loss. We feel pain, which is what grief is.
Grief process
The “grief process,” as Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross explains it, is an emotional process where we come to grips with loss, and eventually come to acceptance of that loss.
Dr. Kubler-Ross’s grief process consists of denial, bargaining, sadness, anger and acceptance. These five stages of grief are not processed in a linear 1-2-3-4-5 formula, but in alternating steps, more like 1-3-4-2-3-4-1-2-4-5. Eventually we come to and stay in the last stage, which is acceptance of the loss.
A baby who drops his pacifier is totally in misery and pain. He cries from the depth of his soul’s loss that his grief is total, his pain is total and his life is ”˜ruined,’ because he doesn’t have his pacifier. Of course we know that his life is not ruined, he will recover, but he doesn’t know this at that time because he doesn’t have the knowledge and experience to know he will come to acceptance of his loss and recover.
Pain is proportional
When we lose something that we care about, our pain is in proportion to how much something means to us. If we drop a penny, usually we will not be devastated. We know that we will still be able to buy lunch, pay the mortgage and go on with life. But if we drop the bank deposit for our business and lose it, it is another matter entirely. Now we may not be able to make payroll and things will get very bad, so our loss is bigger and we grieve over the problems this will cause, the bigger loss.
When we are devastated by the loss of a “great love,” or by the betrayal of someone we trusted, depended on and cared for, we have suffered a great and grievous loss that rocks our world. It isn’t anything we can put a dollar value on; it is an emotional attachment that has no price. How do you quantify “love?”
When we have lost something that is of utter value to us, whether it is something that we can quantify, or whether it has no monetary value, only value of the heart, the soul, then we must realize that our grief is total. We must not compare our losses to what someone else has lost and feel that their loss is “greater,” because it isn’t greater. The pain isn’t greater. It is all TOTAL LOSS. The pain is total.
So if you start to feel that your loss is nothing compared to someone else’s loss, Stop! Realize that your loss, your pain, is your loss and pain. No one else’s is more or less.
Thank you Oxy. It is so true – all of our pain is valid. And if we are to move forward, we need to find a way to accept what is.
Thank you, Oxy, for a very important article.
It’s also important to remember that when we compare ourselves to others, what we are doing is comparing our feelings to what we see about and around them. We have no way of knowing what they are really thinking or feeling, unless they tell us. In other words, we are comparing our insides to their outsides.
In reality, we have no idea what somebody has been through. We have no idea of the physical or emotional harms that they have suffered in life.
We have no idea what is behind their smiles or sorrows. We don’t know if they are on their way “up” in life or are coming “down” from what some would think is a better place. We don’t know if they have been in a particular place on all sorts of levels for years or if they just arrived there yesterday.
We don’t know if the smiles are forced. We don’t know if somebody at home is super controlling and is watching for anything in the controlled that will expose that unacceptable behavior. We don’t know if they’ve just lost a child and are totally numb inside.
There are people who don’t know how to get in touch with their feelings. Part of crazy making and denial are constant messages of, “You shouldn’t feel that way,” “That never happened,” and “You don’t mean that.”
Some people are taught to stuff feelings, ignore what happened, or get over it because the people in their lives who they turn to for support aren’t supportive; they don’t want to deal with that person’s pain for all sorts of reasons.
Feelings don’t go away if we ignore or stuff them. They fester. They stay there until we can bring them into the light of day to be examined, acknowledge their existence, and processed. That is when we can let them go.
In keeping with the gas expansion example, sometimes we can’t feel happiness until we have unloaded the painful feelings to make room for the happiness to move in.
We don’t know if the sad story that we is listening to is a pack of lies coming from a P with no truth in it whatsoever.
I feel an extremely important part of any recovery is realizing that we are equal with everybody else. That means my feelings and experiences don’t get shoved to the back because somebody else’s experiences may appear more extreme or sensational.
If it hurts, it sucks.
When I first got into Al-Anon, people used to tell me that I was very brave to be there. I’d always answer, “Bravery has nothing to do with it. I just want the pain to stop. I am willing to do whatever it takes or address whatever needs addressing so I am in control, not the pain.”
This is a great post Oxy, thank you. I think it’s such an important point, especially when the media will only cover certain types of abuse/suffering, while others remain untouched, undocumented, unacknowledged.
I think everyone’s experience of suffering is equally deserving of sympathy, compassion and healing.
For instance, in my recent research I’ve found references by experts in the field of traumatology that state that not only is physical abuse as damaging as sexual abuse, but they also acknowledge that emotional/psychological abuse can be as damaging as sexual abuse, in some aspects worse because the person has no physical evidence, and the majority of people still think along the lines of ‘sticks and stones…’ and feel entitled to humiliate anyone ‘only’ complaining of psychological abuse. The only type of child abuse which seems to get ‘validation’ by the public (and in social services) is sexual abuse and yet, in a recent Justice Canada report, sexual abuse constitues ~ 3% of all reported child abuse cases (but garners – so a social worker told me – ~ 80% of the funding). Of course, there are many more examples of ‘politically incorrect’ suffering than just the distinction between sexual, physical and emotional abuse…
I’ve found that for those victims whose suffering doesn’t fall within the ‘socially sanctioned’ definition of acceptable abuse victims, their experience of suffering is so boxed in that they literally look like compressed people, in their carriage, their attitude, their lack of willingness to speak up about what they’ve experienced, etc… I believe that it’s this experience of feeling that they’re not entitled to feel suffering or pain, or to healing or assistance, that does even more harm than their original traumas.
Thanks for a great article that gives those people hope.
OxD, thank you SO much for the affirmation that “Loss” is “Loss,” regardless.
Oxy,
Thank you so much for this article. I think this is such an important part of healing/recovery and you explain it so well.
For me, juxtaposing Dr. Frankl’s losses with a baby losing a pacifier and then explaining how gas “completely fills an empty container” makes it clear that whatever loss we experience, the pain fills us completely. We each have different losses, but the pain fills us completely. And, we should not feel shame or guilt because someone lost more than we did. Whatever our loss is, our pain fills us completely.
“All pain and all loss is total. If something is important to us, we value it and when we lose it, we grieve for that loss. We feel pain, which is what grief is.”
This idea helped me to stop second guessing whether I had the right, the justification, to feel the pain of my loss. Until Oxy presented this concept, I minimized my loss & felt shame over feeling my pain: My loss wasn’t as bad as X’s loss, so I am wrong to complain. NO! I have every right to feel my loss and the pain, but, of course, I want to move out of pain and not dwell there. And yet, it’s hard to move out of the pain if we believe our pain is unjustified. IMO, if we cannot acknowledge, face and accept our losses, we cannot fully heal, recover and move forward.
Another very important point you make is that grief is not linear: One step forward & 2 steps back.
Most importantly:
“We must not compare our losses to what someone else has lost and feel that their loss is “greater,” because it isn’t greater. The pain isn’t greater. It is all TOTAL LOSS. The pain is total.”
Amen. Great article, Oxy.
I just thought of some other points too in this vein. While our losses are ours alone, and big or small depending on the value that WE put to the loss, rather than what the community sees, when we are invalidated by the community by them telling us to “get over it” or “it is time for you to move on, it was just a break up” we are DOUBLY betrayed.
While the stages of grief as defined by Dr. Kubler-Ross http://www.businessballs.com/elisabeth_kubler_ross_five_stages_of_grief.htm are the way we “should” grieve and come to acceptance, many people never complete the cycle and instead continue to piing-pong between the bargaining, sadness, anger, denial and do not come to acceptance. If grief is not fully processed, it will destroy our lives.
Dr. Frankl mentioned in his book which was about the emotional turmoil suffered by the victims of the Nazis some victims that had been through the same trauma that he had exprienced just gave up and literally turned their faces to the wall and died. Others became angry and bitter, hurting their fellow men because they felt “entitled” to be angry and vengeful because of the losses they had suffered.
I know from my personal experience that I have “struck out” at others when i was in deep pain after my husband’s death. One of my son’s friends had driven 7 hours to be here for us after my husband’s death, and she was so upset that she was very anxious and nervous and she kept talking and talking one night when I needed to sleep, and I kept asking her to please stop talking, in her own anxiety and inability to stop talking, she was irritating the ca4p out of me. I became so upset that she would not stop talking that I literally threatened to knock her block off. I told her if she did not shut up that moment, if she said another word I would hit her. I deeply wounded this young woman, but at the time I was in such deep pain that I felt justified in doing whatever I had to do to get her to hush. I had no compassion or understanding of her deep pain and anxiety.
I think I have told this story before but maybe some of you have not heard it.
If yiou had a little dog that you loved and it loved you and it was hit by a car, and lay with a broken leg in pain. You went to pick the pup up, and it was in such pain it reached out and bit you. You would not hold it against the dog because you would recognize it was not trying to hurt you it was just in such pain it struck out at you. We do the same thing sometimes, and strike out at those we love just because we are in such horrible pain.
That was what I did to my son’s friend that night, I struck out at her reaching out what she felt was a “helping hand” because of my own pain.
Thank you Annie and G1S and donna for your comments.
G1S,
These are verbatim from my childhood:
“Part of crazy making and denial are constant messages of, “You shouldn’t feel that way,” “That never happened,” and “You don’t mean that.” Bleh!! Stockholm Syndromed and brain washed. I didn’t have the right to feel what I felt. My feelings were wrong. I think this is one of the most detrimental things that a parent can convey to a child.
In my upbringing, there was always comparison with other people:
X has better grades, X is thin, etc. Bleh!
Since this stuff was embedded in my brain since childhood, it’s no wonder that I fell prey to personality disordered people.
Clair and Truthspeak, we posted over each other….clair you are so right and I am glad that you are able to see that your pain, your emotions are JUSTIFIED because you suffered LOSS.
Part I think of the worst pain we feel is that our pain and our loss is INVALIDATED by the community, our friends, by others. It helps to have someone say “your loss and your pain is valid” but so many times we get the opposite effect instead, making our loss DOUBLED.
A joy shared is doubled, and a sorrow shared is halved.
When someone discounts our sorrow instead of sharing it, validating it, we are doubly hurt.
Back when I didn’t realize my egg donor was gaslighting me, back when she was telling me what I thought and how I would have behaved (to justify her own lies) I begged her to believe me, and she scorned me, which was so painful in itself that I cried and cried, literally got on my knees begging her to believe me. I think that was the worst pain I experienced in my life. I wanted her to believe me so much. her scorn and sneering hurt me to the bone. later, when she refused to acknowledge it, and said “let’s just pretend none of this happened” I realized I was NO LONGER WILLING TO PRETEND THAT SHE HAD NOT HURT ME to the core.
Sometimes we must experience that hurt I think in order to come to the point of saying STOP! This pain is more than I am willing to bear. I will no longer allow this person to invalidate me.
My P/N/A/S mother-in-law, as well as some other P/N/A/S I know do the exact opposite. They claim their pain . . no matter how minute or inconsequential is equivalent to yours. For example I told to my mother-in-law about a friend who had lost her entire family (over 40 grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces nephews) in the holocaust because they were murdered by the Nazi’s. Her reply was, “Well, we had to ration butter”. It stupified me!
Also in relating this same story, about the women (left without any relatives) to an N/P/S/A (that used to be a) friend, she said “I don’t have any relatives either”. When in fact.. She has 2 children, 2 sisters, their husbands, and 4 nieces and nephews.
My x-husband (a true N/P/S/A) refused to pick me up from the hospital when I gave birth to our son because he said it was INCONVENIENT. PS…The hospital was 10 minutes away from where he was, and it was his first born son.
My point is . . . if you find that a person is comparing their slightest pain or trivial inconvenience to a huge loss, as if they are in any way equal . . that is a BIG RED FLAG. They are Psychopaths/Narcissists/Sociopaths/Anti-social and IDIOTS!
Oxy, are you sure that she didn’t believe you?
Is it possible that she was just saying those things because she was getting off on how upset you were getting and/or she enjoying the lengths that you were willing to go to “convince” her?
I ask because I eventually realized that is what my P sister and S mother had been doing to me.