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.
You know what? I would go so far as to say that whenever I feel shame, and I stop to take a look at it and determine that it’s NOT related to guilt or remorse or something that I am responsible for, then that is a huge red flag and I need to remove myself from the situation, ASAPThis is almost always a power play and an attempt to put me in the one down position.
this is the kind of situation that causes my gut to turn over and now days, my blood to run cold. I go all popcycle on em…have no reaction or emotion at all.
yeah, I got a comment!
spaths sit around diners A LOT. Denny’s is a favorite. The all night places are their favorite hang outs.
My exspath told me that he and H, his sidekick, were at a restaurant. The waitress came up took the order and left. Spath started to put her down in front of H and call her a c**t. Within a short time he had H hating this woman’s guts for no reason and calling her a c**t behind her back.
That’s what spaths do. They seed hatred. You did the right thing by gray rocking them. Once that is done, do not warm up to them again. BE BORING, until they are gone. A tip is not worth the spath’s attention.
My spath got the nicest man I’ve ever met, to start hating his own innocent vaccuum cleaner so much that he took it up in an aircraft and dropped it from altitude, just to see it smash. Then they landed and did it again. several times.
They called the vaccuum cleaner names and spouted venom at it.
He did the same thing to my BF. Made him shoot an automatic rifle at a car that had been a reliable (though ugly) source of transportation for years. Nothing wrong with the car. He could’ve sold it. Instead it got riddled with bullet holes, and sat abandoned in shame, on the property for years.
Spaths love to seed hatred. It’s weird what they can convince us to FEEL.
Yeah, I agree they seed hatrid, but their minions are cowards and wimps. They are so hungry for communion and acceptance they trip over the scandilon and sully themselves. Spaths and narcs have a way of knowing who they can gather into their lair.
I got a lot out of the article, Skylar. Thank you for posting it.
What really hit me was the description of the P needing to control the mother, which is exactly what happened with my P sister and S mother.
My P sister had to rein my S mother back in. My S mother had committed the unpardonable sins of liking and admiring me, and frequently praising my son.
Compounding those insults was that people were telling my sister that her daughter, who eventually was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, needed help and she needed to get her under control. Whoa, baby! This was all my fault. Nobody was saying that about my son. Everybody loved him.
My P sister resolved that I was doing down and S mother was going to see just how horrible I am. She was going to make sure that the world was ordered according to how she thought it should be.
I was so glad to see the psychopath described in the summary as, “He remains a frightening member of our species, present in all walks of life.”
The Kernberg quote is from 1984. In terms of knowledge in the psychological field, that’s somewhat dated. “Shame” may not have been defined to the degree that it is today.
I agree with Oxy that shame comes after feeling remorse. However, I wonder if shame used in that quote meant feeling different from others, as I understand that many Ps are aware that they somehow differ from most.
“Shame” may have been the term that Kernberg ascribed, but it may have been an off-the-cuff or perhaps Kernberg didn’t go deeply into considering that might not be the best description and another term would better describe what Ps feel. Don’t forget that we really didn’t know a whole lot about psychopaths then.
I don’t know anything about Kernberg. The first time I saw the name was in that article. For all I know, he may have meant it another way. I’m just thinking out loud, again.
Maybe we haven’t come up with a term yet to describe this particular feeling of Ps, i.e., knowing that they are different from most and feeling disconnected in the sense that they do not belong. I can see how that might be unsettling, disturbing, and upsetting, but do these collectively amount to shame? I don’t think so.
Maybe there is more than one definition for shame. I’m going to stick with the one that requires remorse.
Skylar, I’m pretty sure that “projection” has a different meaning in psychology than what you described. When it comes to Ps, I don’t think the slimed feeling you described is projecting. I would say that is feeling manipulated or used. In other words, I wouldn’t say that they “projected slime” on us because that isn’t my understanding of projecting.
As I understand “projection,” it is when one person refuses to admit to a certain feeling and ascribes it to another person. It’s a defense mechanism, because the person doing the projecting doesn’t want to admit to the feelings or thoughts. Rather than owning those feelings or thoughts, the person will say that the other person has them.
For example, if I am afraid that Person X might reject me, I might tell (either Person X or another person) that “Person X is afraid that I might not think that Person X is good enough for me.” It relieves my anxiety because it puts the subject out into the open without it being obviously related to me. I’m fishing for a reassurance. If I am lucky, I’ll get back, “Person X thinks very highly of you. Person X is glad to know you and values your relationship.”
That’s projection as I know it, i.e., throwing (projecting) my feelings onto somebody else in the hopes that my secret fears will be addressed without me needing to state them.
That sort of projecting Ps do.
I know that my P sister told lots of people that I was jealous of her. I wasn’t jealous at all. I thought she was totally screwed up and wouldn’t exchange my life for hers for anything, even though she is obviously much more successful financially than I am.
I felt I had the things that really mattered in life, e.g., the ability to love, friends, caring, and kindness. I thought she was very jealous of that.
I think Ps project, often, when they make excuses for their behavior, like “I had to beat up the guy because he had an attitude” or “I took the money because it was going to be gone anyway the way that guy was handling it.”
I don’t see the above as a defense mechanism. I see it as bad excuses for bad behavior. But I can see how the Ps are projecting their thinking onto somebody else in those cases.
I’m pretty sure that homophobia is a form a projection. The person puts down gays and has all sorts of derogatory thoughts about homosexuals because the person secretly fears he or she is gay and feels these feelings are what people would say about him or her if that ever came out.
Another form of projection, I think (not sure,) is when somebody can’t admit to mismanaging something so he or she blames others for the failure. Of course, things can fail for many reasons. Blaming a business failure on the economy wouldn’t be projecting. It could be the real cause of the failure.
I guess what I should do is ask you what you mean by projecting.
Oh I think they are masters at projecting shame. They don’t want to feel the shame of less than ism…or of being damaged goods or of being not good enough, or of being defunct, or of NOT BEING GOD. They project this same feeling of shame on others, believing that everybody is ashamed that they aren’t GOD and because they know this shame intimately, they know how to work it…they project their short-comings onto others.
Oh, and I forgot to add that projection allows the projector not to feel what is projected….so that when a spath or narc, slimes you, they have effectively not felt their own shame….that would be annhilation to them,,,to feel their lack and their difference and their less than ism….they must be GOD to survive.
Grace,
the way my spath projected was: You are evil, you have no limits, you have no EMPATHY, nobody will ever want you.
These are descriptions of shameful BEING. it describes rotten inside and it describes HIM. But he was telling me that I was these things. It came out of the blue.
So he must KNOW his own rotten core.
Again, I don’t think people are getting that they don’t FEEL shame. To them, it doesn’t exist at all. But the fact that they choose these words to describe US means that they are projecting those things on to us because it is there inside them.
Seriously though, I’m not telling you about my opinion. Many professionals have spent their lives studying shame. Read about it and learn from people who have dedicated decades to this topic. I think it’s important if you want to understand spaths.
Skylar, I think we’re on the same page.
Yeah Kim,
we are. shame is like dirt. If you have it on you, the best way for other people not to notice it, is if they ALL have it on themselves too.
spread the slime around. Then we’re all in the same hell.
What I’m figuring out is that there are lots of things going on under our radar. Shame is the biggest one. We can only see it in it’s disguises because nobody wants to admit to being ashamed. It’s too shameful. Shame is recursive.
The thing is, though, that victims DO feel it. They take it on. I don’t know why, exactly, but real people do feel shame….they feel authentic shame that they own, but they also feel projected shame…maybe because humility won’t destroy them. but humility is anethama to spaths.