By Joyce Alexander RNP (retired)
Back when I was a teenager, I had an opportunity to travel to Africa, where I met a man who was to become world famous, and was almost single handedly responsible for the saving of both the black and white rhinos, Dr. Ian Player (the brother of golfer Gary Player.) Recently, the belief of rhino horn as a “cure all” has gotten to where the price for a single horn can top $400,000. This has caused the poaching of these wonderful animals, which still number less than 5,000 black rhinos and about 21,000 white rhinos, most of them located in South Africa.
I feel very privileged to have known Dr. Player when he was simply “Ian” in a pair of green parks department uniform shorts, with a wonderful library of African history in his home that he freely shared with a very young and very green little girl from Arkansas. I have also been privileged to know “Dr. Player” a very wise mentor who has loved me all these years.
Dr. Player and I have stayed in touch by e-mail for the past 15 or so years (isn’t the Internet wonderful folks!), and though he is now nearly blind and very frail, he still writes and speaks about his passion, the rhino. He recently sent me a copy of an article that quoted him:
Ilegal poaching and the endangered rhino, on Condé Nast Traveler.
In the article, Dr. Player talks about how he is emotional about the salvation of his beloved rhinos, but he is not sentimental. WOW! I thought “How profound!” As Dr. Player points out in the article, while the embargo on selling horn may be “sentimentally” right, the sentiment is killing rhinos as more and more are slaughtered to meet the high dollar demand for the rare horn. But if all the stored up horn were dumped on the market, it would meet the demand for product and bring down the price and stop the slaughter. (It would be hoped, anyway.)
Results of sentimentality
Well, what, you may ask, does that have to do with psychopaths?
Our emotions are bound up with the psychopaths in our lives. In some cases our DNA is shared with these people as well. But we must not let the sentimentality of the situation overcome us. We can maintain our passion, our emotional response, but we still have to do what it takes to handle the situation in a realistic manner and not be overcome by sentimentality.
If you were here a few years back, you may have heard me rant about the “no horse slaughter” bill passed as an add-on to a Senate bill that forbade the slaughter of horses by USDA for human consumption. The people who pushed this bill through had the greatest of intentions (and we all know what the road to hell is paved with), because they loved horses. They did not really take into consideration what the real life result of their sentimental law.
In 2007, 100,000 horses in the US were processed into meat. They were old horses, horses who were injured and unable to be ridden, horses with bad dispositions, and just horses that should never have been bred. Each one is 800 to 1200 pounds of meat on the hoof, just like my cows, and the meat is prized in many countries. It takes between $1,000 and $3,000 per year to feed and vet a horse. So multiply those 100,000 horses by say even $1,500, and you’ve got a substantial amount of cost to care for horses that have no use or worth.
So what happened when the “market” price for these 100,000 horses went from 75 cents per pound for meat to $5 per head? People turned their unwanted horses loose in the national forest to starve, or out on the roadways to be hit by cars. Then after the ban went into effect, a new market niche developed where these horses were now rounded up by dealers, put on trucks and shipped to Mexico for Mexico’s version of “humane” slaughter.
The unintended consequence of the sentimental decision to outlaw the humane processing of horses for meat for human consumption was that more horses suffered much worse deaths than a stun gun. I have personally bred animals (cattle) for beef, and there is no one who is more passionate or emotional about the care and keeping of her animals than I am. I accompanied my animals to the USDA slaughter facility and stayed there with them so they would not be afraid. And God help the stockyard yahoo who tried to use an electric cattle prod on my animals! I was very emotional about my animals, but I was not sentimental.
Sentimental about psychopaths
Unfortunately, where it came to my family members, I clung to the sentimentality of dysfunction. With my animals, I wanted them treated well, but at the same time, if an animal was wild, aggressive or tried to hurt me, I had no problem with sentimentality, I sent it to the butcher on the next truck! But not so with my family members who gored me!
I never had a problem setting boundaries for my oxen, and I stayed alpha in the pack of collies. If an ox even touched me with a horn (this is a real “no no” for a lower member of the bovine herd to do to a superior member who will respond with force) I had to respond immediately and with enough force to make them remember that I was the boss. It isn’t really very smart to sentimentally let a 2,000-pound animal be the boss or even think they might want to try to be. It also isn’t very smart to sentimentally allow a spouse or other abuser continue to use and abuse you, no matter how much you love them.
We may be very emotional about our situations, we may be emotionally devastated by what has happened to us as a result of what the psychopath has done in our lives, but we can’t afford to be sentimental about it. We have to make reasonable and rational decisions, devoid of sentimentality, about what to do to “fix ourselves” and “fix” our situations.
That may mean leaving in the middle of the night with a suitcase and our purses, or it may mean any number of decisions that we may not have even considered before. It may mean finding new homes our dog or cat because we can’t take them with us, or it may mean a divorce when we took vows that we meant “for better of worse, til death do us part.” It may mean going no contact with our parents, sibs, lovers, husbands, wives, children or friends.
We may be very emotional about some of these decisions, but we can’t afford to be sentimental. We have to do what we have to do.
This was one of THE biggest lessons for me, from my spath-encounter. I had always been very sentimental, living in kind of a dream-state around ‘love’ and ‘romance’, etc…..
I continued this well into my adult years. And I think it was a real ‘attracter’ for the disordered people I let into my life. I think they likely sensed that I would glady ride off with them into their ‘delusional sunset’. They pegged me, quite rightly, as a sentimental ‘fool’, a love junkie.
I know when I finally was able to separate my emotions from a more sentimental viewpoint I was able to use my emotions to my benefit, instead of feeling this incredible emotional burden- that seemed to confound the situation.
Sorrow was transformed into real pain. Longing into true revulsion. Anger was not sadness and depression. My feelings became assets, not liabilities.
This was something I was not able to do in childhood, because I had no recourse. Feeling my anger, my pain, my revulsion was punished. I think, for me, this is when I learned to be sentimental. It was one of the ways I learned to soften, and ‘escape’, the reality of my family’s abuse.
Taking ‘back’ our emotions is empowering.
xo, Slim
Really excellent article, Oxy. Sentimentality is, in a sense, a wallowing in emotions, rather than using the emotions to direct our reason.
It would be a good exercise to watch ourselves and see when sentimentality is getting the best of us.
I know my spath liked to wallow in his fake emotions. It was part of his performance and it was meant to draw me in to the drama, so that I would be vulnerable to acting irrationally.
Sky, I have seen so many people who were “sentimental” over a suffering animal that the person couldn’t bring themselves to put down and end its suffering….but I also admit to doing exactly the same thing with RELATIONSHITS that were totally dysfunctional and the “suffering individual” was myself, but I just could not bring myself to quit being “sentimental” about the situation and ACT rationally, sensibly, and reasonably and put the relationshit “down.”
That may not mean though that you don’t mourn that poor dead relationship, but at least if you are out of it you can heal. (I guess I am “mixing metaphors” here a bit.)
Joyce, this is an article that I have needed to read for MONTHS. Thank you, THANK you.
Grieving is “normal” when something is lost. I never even considered sentimentality being a factor in recovery until this very moment.
PRECISELY what I needed to read, at precisely the exact moment that I needed to read it.
Brightest and most sincere blessings
Truthy, you are very welcome. Isn’t it amazing how so many times the thing we need (in an article) just “pops up” on LF? LOL
I got that e mailed article yesterday from Dr. Player and when I read it it was an AH HA moment for me as we ll. I realized how many times sentimentality gets in the way of rational action. In many aspects of our lives….in laws passed like the “horse meat” ban which resulted in much more suffering for more and more horses instead of what was intended.
I also realized that I who THOUGHT myself unsentimental, was in fact, in many IMPORTANT ASPECTS of my life totally guilty of the same kind of sentimental, well-intentioned bad decisions.
It was a definite “ah ha” moment for me as well.
Oxy,
Thank you for posting your story about Dr Player and the part sentimentality plays in keeping us in a bad situation.It’s oh so true,but often it does take an ah-ha moment,so long after we should have done something!That sentimentality nearly killed me!
Thanks Oxy, your timing for this article is perfect. “family members who gored me” is what I have been dealing with in the spath’s wake of destruction, and when I thought it couldn’t get worse it did. I am left betrayed and bereft by those I expected to love and support me, including my best friend of 17 years, 2 other close friends, my brother, and most painfully my mother. No one but other LoveFraud survivors would believe the sick and twisted sequence of events that has occurred in the past 2 years, much of it involving interrelationships between the above people. I am emotionally devastated, but not sentimental about limiting/eliminating exposure to their toxic presence in my life.
Valleygirl, it is important that we not allow “sentimentality” over anything to make our decisions for us.
I see it in so many instances, not only the ban on horses for meat, but in people who will keep a dog that is suffering terribly alive because they are too sentimental to take a logical and rational decision for the poor suffering animal.
I see it in wives who stay with abusive husbands because of the sentimental attachment of their vows…even though they and their kids are being damaged daily.
I have a friend who has a criminal son and she is still trying to believe that if she prays hard enough he will not go back to prison. He has been out a total of 2 weeks between arrests for years. She can’t let go. She isn’t doing him any good but she is hurting herself every day.
Just because we share DNA does not give a person a pass to abuse us or use us, and we can’t let that sentimental attachment to our biological family keep us in the cycle of abuse.
I know the emotional devastation, Valley girl, been there/am there and have little to no contact with anyone with whom I share DNA…and have also thinned out my rolodex until it isn’t very big any more. Lots of “friends” were not friends, and that hurts too.
Oxy,
Even before the spath I knew to some degree that I was somewhat “damaged” and came to learn post-spath how my spath uncle affected my childhood and into my 20’s. It has come as more of a surprise to me to learn how unhealthy nearly all of my relationships have been, not just “romantic” relationships, but with my family and friends as well. Out of love and a misplaced sense of loyalty (on my part) I hung in for far longer than was good for me. Though I have moved on from the spath, the ripple effect goes on and it has been much more difficult to move on from people who have been in my circle for such a long time. On a side note, the former best friend was bi-polar, which I never before considered a factor while we were friends (i knew she was bossy and demanding but thought “that’s just how she is” and her command/authority played into my need for an older sister/mother figure) but wonder now if her diagnosis formed her personality, do you know much about that? I suppose if I was vulnerable to the spath then I was vulnerable to other unhealthy people as well. Right now is such a time of great sadness for me as the losses continue to pile up, most recently the estrangement from my mother and brother, neither of whom have acted maliciously but still their actions and lack of understanding have caused great pain and led me to put considerable distance between us. It’s total self-preservation and certainly justified!
Valley girl,
People who are psychopathic are also frequently bi-polar as well. Even Bi=polar alone can cause problems with a person’s personality and behavior especially if untreated or poorly treated, but with your friend being “bossy” it sounds to me like bi-polar or not, psychopathic or not, she was not a good friend and the relationship while it might have met a need at that time in your life for a mother/big sister role, is not a healthy one.
It sounds as if your family of origin relationships are not healthy as well. Even your mother and brother are not actively abusing you for them to not be supportive is very painful I am sure.
Yes, when we have a horrible P-spath experience once we LEARN about them, and then start to LEARN ABOUT OURSELVES there is a RIPPLE effect with ALL other relationships in our lives, and as we start to get HEALTHY ourselves we have to cut these unhealthy relationships out of our lives, and sometimes these are the people we grew up with, or share DNA with, or have been close “friends” for a long time, but we can no longer tolerate people who are not healthy relationships.
I call it “peeling the onion” in layers and as we peel down one layer of understanding and get to the next layer and so on, but eventually we come to a much more healthy level. It is work to STAY at that healthy level too, I will tell you that. It isn’t just about “getting healed” and everything is lovely from then on, we have to continually WORK at keeping ourselves healthy.
Oxy where are you? Are you alright? It’s me Lillian. I’ve been having a very low period again so I was off the site. I came to look for you, louise and a few others that I got to know the past couple of years and none of you seem to be here. Let me know if you’re okay. Love Lillian