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.
Sarah999,
Thank you for making that excellent point. I was thinking along the same lines myself. I was specifically thinking about Donna’s page on the main site “How to Spot a Con: The Pity Ploy”, and wondering how much of this ‘community-invalidation’ damage happens as an incidental byproduct of manipulative people who ensconce themselves within victims’ organizations and spend all their time crying “Poor me!” with no intention of trying to help themselves or others – there just to soak up attention and create drama.
I’ve done a lot of researching over the years – I’ve conducted information interviews of quite a number of victims groups. I’m astounded at the fairly high percentages of narcissism and self-centredness in some of them – people who only seem to want attention for people with ‘their’ kind of suffering, and seem to have attitudes of “hang the rest of you – get your own attention”.
G1S, re: your question for Oxy; I was wondering the same thing.
Great article Oxy,
I especially always enjoy the baby and his binky analogy.
When we are hurt, we become self-centered. We are nursing an injury. We become like babies and narcissists. Perhaps it is appropriate to do so in the first stages of an injury. We should attend to the wound. It is our wound and our primary responsibility is to ourselves or else we are no good to anyone else.
Annie, it might be that you are noticing this aspect of human nature. Or it could be that the person who is wounded just can’t look outside themselves anymore because of the constant wounding. My study of shame has enlightened me on that. Shame tends to focus our attention on ourselves. It feels like the whole world is observing and judging us, we are in the spotlight. Though it is actually only our own spotlight and our own internalized judgement.
That’s what I like about sublimation as a defense mechanism. It takes the focus off of ourselves and says, “ok, this hurts, how can I make it less dangerous to others?”
oh crap. he’s back again. just got an email.
skylar:
Oh, no. What did the email say?
Sky,
Deep Breath.
Delete is an option…..
It’s a pity ploy. He says he dreamt that I was being held prisoner and he couldn’t rescue me. He really really wants to know if I’m ok.
lies, he wants a response. MOFO.
Skylar:
Block email. Change email address. Use pretend name. I did.
Skylar,
You have been here a long time now. So you can recognize a pity play for what it is… he doesn’t really care. He just wants access.
DELETE.
Aloha :O)
Aloha,
yep. whatever he wants most is what he’s NOT going to get: Contact. I HAVE THE POWER!
Sarah999,
Dr. Frankl mentioned in his book that when some of the people returned from the camps and told what they had experienced, the German people said the same thing “we had it hard too, we had to ration butter.” LOL You are right, it is a HUGE RED FLAG.
Many, repeat MANY “victims” who present themselves as the victims of psychopaths or hard luck or whatever, are in fact themselves PSYCHOPATHS presenting with the pity ploy.
I have been duped a “million:” times by the pity ploy of a psychopath who was on the con. they are good at it.
We have even seen it here on LoveFraud, and someone will come here posing as a victim when in fact, they are just the loser in a battle between two psychopaths OR they are the psychopath whose victim got away and so they pose as a victim. I dont know how many of you remember the guy whose victim GF got away and he wanted us to help him write a letter to get her back….LOL and in the end he admitted it was so he could CONTROL her.
It is difficult on LF or any other blog to “spot” them but they usually out themselves eventually. We’ve had others show up here and Donna eventually had to ban them because they would not give up and they were attacking other posters. That’s why we have the “report abusive comments” link over on the right side of the screen.
People who are in pain also sometimes present as “testy” on the blog and see offense when none is intended so it takes time and patience with other bloggers to see what is going on with them, but the pseudo-victims (psychopaths using the pity ploy) out themselves eventually or just go away because they don’t get what they want here.
In real life we are able to see more of the red flags than we can on the blog. On the blog we take people at “face value” and if they say they are a victim, we accept that they are. In medicine the doctors and nurses used to decide what pain a patient was feeling and if we suspected that their pain wasn’t “legitimate” we would label them a drug addict and refuse to give them narcotics. This has changed now and pain is considered a ‘vital sign” just like blood pressure or heart rate. so when you go to your doctor the nurse will ask you if you are in pain and for you to rate it on a scale of 1-10. Your pain will be addressed by your physician and YOUR perception of YOUR pain will be treated, not your doctor’s or the nurse’s perception of YOUR pain. That may not mean you get narcotics but your pain will be addressed and treated.