When we realize that we’ve been involved with a sociopath, and that person has callously betrayed us, we inevitably ask, “Why? Why did this happen to me?”
To help find the answer, one of the books that Lovefraud recommends is The Betrayal Bond—Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships, by Patrick J. Carnes, Ph.D. The book explains the deep psychological wounds caused by trauma, and offers a way for us to identify and overcome abusive relationships that we may have experienced.
When I read the book, I was struck by what Carnes wrote on page 68:
My experience with survivors of trauma is that every journey of recovery depends on the survivor coming to a point where all that person has gone through means something.
I believe there is meaning in what we have experienced at the hands of sociopaths. Here it is: The object of the exercise is to force us to jettison mistaken beliefs about ourselves.
Promising to fill the void
When sociopaths come into our lives, they snag us by promising to fill some void. For most of us on Lovefraud, the void is our missing soul mate, but sociopaths can also promise career success, monetary rewards, spiritual enlightenment—any number of things. (Please note: This dynamic doesn’t quite apply when sociopaths are family members.)
Sociopaths are experts at identifying our vulnerabilities and exploiting them. So the question becomes, why do we have the vulnerabilities in the first place? Here’s where the mistaken beliefs come in.
We believe we cannot attract a fulfilling romance.
We believe people only want us when we do something for them.
We believe we cannot succeed through our own efforts.
We believe we aren’t good enough.
We believe we are unlovable.
We believe there’s something wrong with us.
We believe we cannot cope with life by ourselves.
We believe other people come before ourselves.
We believe someone will come and make all our troubles disappear.
These just a few of the erroneous beliefs that create voids within us. Where do they come from? Perhaps from abuse in our past, as outlined in The Betrayal Bond.Perhaps they come from simple misperceptions. In any event, the sociopath steps right in to fill them.
Feel free to add your own mistaken beliefs to the list.
Critical juncture
So the sociopaths make promises—and break every one of them. At some point we wake up, come out of the fog, and realize that our lives have crumbled into piles of debris. That’s when we ask why? Why did this happen to me?
This is a critical juncture. We can certainly blame the sociopath—they are evil, and they deserve to be blamed. We can say it was fate, or luck, which is sometimes true—there are sociopaths who randomly assault or kill people. But in most of our cases, we believed the sociopath, went along with the charade, for a period of time. Why did we do this?
If we can find the answer to this question, we can discover the meaning in the betrayal by the sociopath.
As much as I hate to admit it, I did benefit from the destruction wrought by the sociopath I married. I am not the same person that I was before him—I am wiser, healthier and happier.
Why? Because I found and released all those mistaken beliefs.
Yes, it was painful. Yes, it was traumatic. But by looking for the meaning and undertaking the healing journey, my life is now much richer than it ever was.
EB, I think you are fabulous!!!!!!
Skylar, have you heard the one about the little girl, who asks her Grandma to do a frog impression? “No dear, I dont think I can do that, but why do you ask?”
“Well, Grandma, Mom says that when you croak, we get all your money!”
Back to the big bad bear in Erins money pit. he picks up the can of bear spray, sprays his fur with it, and then says,”WTF, Bear Spray! I thought it said Hairspray!” LOL. keepin them coming!
Love and {{{HUGS!}}}to all of you! Gem.XX
This is for Star and Skylar and anyone else who is struggling with emerging memories without a therapist to help. I’m just going to tell you how I got through it. I had a therapist, who really said some of the right things, and I’ll tell you about that too.
After I got rid of the S boyfriend after five horrible years, and I decided to figure out what was wrong with me and fix it, I developed a technique for working with my feelings. I would just sit with them, as though they were a friend in pain, and listen to them. The feelings had lots of words — stuff I used to think was just noise in my head – but when I started to listen to them and take them seriously, I started to learn what was underneath them. What I was really mad about. Or what I was really afraid of. And one layer would evaporate to the layer beneath it, and then I would sit with that one and listen.
I had visited a therapist at the beginning of all this, but decided I wanted to work on my own. She said I could come back when I was ready. And at some point in all this onion-peeling, I realized that I was getting to a layer that just terrified me. I didn’t know what it was, although I suspect it had something to do with my incest background. But it felt like a great black tsunami roaring up behind me, and so I called up the therapist and started to see her again.
I had always been able to talk about what happened to me. But in very general terms. I had very few memories of that period, and those were snapshots that illustrated the way I talked about it. All very superficial and cleaned up to be able to tell someone without upsetting them more than necessary. I didn’t want to upset myself either, so this was all the information that had survived on a conscious level.
In therapy, I not only began to deal with more specific and harsher memories, but I began to re-experience myself as I was then. How I felt and what was going on around me.
My therapist reassured me that the memories were rising because I was ready to revisit them and reconsider what they really meant. Every session, I would ask her if I was doing okay, and she would tell me that I was definitely moving in the right direction. Her reassurances kept me from being afraid of what I was going through, and gave me some confidence in my own ability to process it and use the memories to get better.
The real turning point for me was one session that my therapist later said she wish she could have taped. She asked me about how I was feeling about what I was remembering. I got out of the chair and started pacing around her office, telling her how awful this was for me, to have to live this double life and be afraid that I would be ruined forever and never have a healthy relationship with any man, because I would never be able to tell the truth about my life. I was being forced to lie and I would be a liar for the rest of my life. I talked about how unfair it was, and how I felt like my life was being destroyed day by day. And how I had no choice because I was the one thing that stood between my father and my other siblings, and how I had to protect my mother’s sanity.
That wasn’t the woman of 50+ years talking. It was the girl in her earliest teens. I knew it when it was happening, and she was as real and alive in me as she had been back then. I was speaking her, but I was also listening to her. I could see why she made all the decisions that I was living with now. To hide who she was. To pretend to be someone else, someone who nothing had ever happened to. To be totally independent because she could never trust anyone to love her if they knew her, but also to search endlessly for someone who would protect her.
All of that was huge. As was much of the work I did with that therapist, who was a specialist in adult survivors of childhood abuse. But what came after that was even more important to my healing. She asked me how I felt about what my father did to me. What I felt about his behavior.
I gave her the usual answer I gave people, because I didn’t want to seem like a bad person. I talked about his terrible upbringing and the stresses of his life at the time. I talked about how I loved him despite everything that had happened, although I never stopped being afraid of him. I never got mad. I didn’t know how to get mad, except very occasionally in my life when so much happened to me that I finally felt justified in blowing up. I could count them on one hand.
She very gently ask me if I had considered what he stole from me. I just looked at her blankly. I’d never thought in those terms. I asked her, like what? Well, she said, you were the most beautiful that you would ever be in your life. He stole that. He stole your high school years and the normal development toward becoming an adult woman that would have happened in that time. He stole any sense of safety you had in your own home, any chance of a normal relationship with the rest of your family. He stole your freedom to be honest about your experiences or your feelings. He stole your pleasure in who you are. That’s a start.
I was so accustomed to denying that what any of this mattered. My strategy for survival had been to bury all this and pretend I was untouched. So I heard her words, but it was as though I heard them from a great distance. It was weeks before I gradually began to think about the things she’d said, and imagine whether they might be true. I’d never thought about any of this, much less faced the idea that something had been stolen from me. That I had real and irretrievable losses.
But when I did, a whole collection of things happened almost all at once. One was the simple but very large realization that something HAD happened to me. Another was the realization that I had been harmed, not just then, but in ways that rippled forward to warp my life in ways that I never imagined at the time. I’d understood some of it, but not the strange ways that my coping mechanisms would keep me from understanding my own feelings, lead me into deeply dysfunctional and unhappy relationships, and keep me from ever really owning my life.
But terrible as all that sounds, I experienced it from a different position that I’d ever felt before. Because for the first time, I felt like I was inside of me, looking at my own life and owning it. It was a troubled life, but it was beginning to make sense. And I looked at the family I had at that time, and particularly my father’s behavior, and for the first time, I began to stop feeling responsible for everything. For protecting everyone, for making excuses for him, and I just felt my own experience, how it was for me. It was like coming into my own skin.
I had done a lot of work on my own in getting over the sociopath. And I’d even finally worked my way through to an angry phase, when I finally realized that there was no excuse of his behavior and I had a right to get made. It was my usual style of getting mad, after I could pile on enough justification which was a thousand times more than it would take an emotionally healthy person to get angry.
But this was different. I looked at what happened to me as a teenager, and for the first time, I said, “No. This has nothing to do with me. It happened to me. It was terrible and it hurt me. But I didn’t do this to myself. And I refuse to take any responsibility for it. I was afraid and ashamed and I worried that it had something to do with some failure on my part. But it didn’t. I was treated horribly, not just in a parent-to-child way, but in a way that no human being should treat another. I was forced to do what I did not want to do. Important things were taken from me. And I don’t care what his or anyone problems were, this was wrong, and I’m not collaborating with this anymore.”
This was a kind of anger I’d never experienced before. It was a kind of anger out of my soul. I keep saying that I was inside myself, but it’s really important. I realized that there was a difference between what was inside of me and what was outside of me. And all this stuff that had happened was outside of me. At the time, I was a dependent child, and it caused me to regress emotionally, because it made me so afraid. But now, as an adult with a sense of how children should be treated I was outraged. And from that new position inside of myself, I looked at the behavior of the people in my history and in my current life and I judged them. And this too was new for me.
This was the beginning of my true angry phase. I had a lot of backed up anger, and I did a lot of raging, blaming and judging. Some of it definitely went to the right causes. Other people got singed by my very prickly self.
But that soul anger was the fuel that rocketed me out of depression and self-hatred, and started me looking at the world in terms of what I wanted and didn’t want, and taught me how to defend myself without a protector.
But the most important thing it taught me — and it took me a while to understand it — was that there was a part of me that had been saying no and fighting back all along, a part of me where my identity hadn’t been corrupted by fear and shame. It had been locked away, because saying no involved admitting what had happened to me and how serious it was, and my survival strategy was to go la-la-la it’s wasn’t really anything important. That is, to lie to myself and everyone else. In other words, there was a me that wasn’t changed. It was hurt, but it could heal. It had lost things, but nothing that couldn’t be recovered, if I faced the losses.
I wasn’t what happened to me. I was me.
So to conclude this, I think that these emerging memories are so scary, not because of the events which admittedly can be shocking and unpleasant, but because of the questions they raise about who we are. Was there something wrong with us? Is there something wrong with us today? Do we need to feel ashamed? Do we have a right to have our own thoughts and protect ourselves? Hard as it was, I found my answers by visiting these memories and learning what they told me about what I was really dealing with and how I handled it.
Now that I have a more clear memory of how it was for me in those dreadful years, I understand my own patterns of behavior a lot better. I also know that I was strong and courageous, and the fears that I lived with that forced me to be so be so strong and brave were also real. It was brave of me to endure it, and brave of me to split my personality in two to attempt to have a normal life. And I can also see the clear difference between my circumstances then and now. Then I was trapped. Now I can choose. I just had to grow up into learning how to do that.
That was really what my recovery was about. I’m sharing this story, hoping that it will offer something to those of you who are dealing with these emerging memories, maybe encourage you to face them with the same courage you showed when you buried them so you could survive and move on. My therapist said our brains have their own wisdom. The memories come back when we’re ready toth them. In my experience, that certainly was true.
Love —
Kathy
I think its great that we can go from funny to sexually frank to talking about our deepest secrets. This is a GREAT place!
Where else could we go and share everything like this? And we can move from onesubject to the other , seamlessly, because we love and trust each other. We are all learning, and all healing. Maybe were at diffirent stages, but it doesnt matter. We all “GET” each other, and we know we are safe here,{except for the odd troll, but they are wayer off a ducks back!}
Thank you Kathleen, for sharing your courageous story. It takes guts to go into these secret places in our brains that we have pasted “no go” signs over for so long. I admire you so much for this.Thank you, and love to all of us. {{HUGS!!}} Mama Gem.XX
3AM and Iwoke up, been trying to sleep since then…
4:30AM now.
Kathleen,
how did that anger help you learn to grow up?
As a teenager, I sensed I was being abused and I was so angry. But after I met the P, I learned to love (him) and forgive and love everyone else. Now I find out it was all a lie.
He was a lie, the P-parents never changed, they were all faking love. How strange and unsettling is that?
Maybe my anger was interrupted. Should I have kept the anger?
Yes, if I had kept the anger, I wouldn’t have stayed with the P for so long.
No, I DID get angry with the P and he fed off of it. He USED it to keep me off balance and trapped.
Either way, I’ve become angry again. I see the p-parents for what they are and what they took from me. As an infiant, there is no other time in your life when you are going to be more lovable, but they didn’t love me. Because they were selfish P’s. But still it leaves a person feeling less than. That feeling stays with you. How do you get rid of it?
I don’t think anger is the key. That’s what the P did and look how he turned out. Forgiveness might work, but I’m not there yet. Has anyone had any success with forgiveness making the feelings of being unloveable go away?
Morning, Sky. Yes, I think forgiveness is key, but I don’t know how possible forgiveness is, until You’ve really experienced the anger.
There was a local marriage counselor on TV the other morning talking about our “”emotional trash cans.” He said that anger is the airtight lid we put on it to keep the stink down, but we carry it around with us, where ever we go. We can’t really deal with it or begin to get rid of it until we take the lid off. Then of course we have to deal with the stench, and all the nastiness of it. The hurt, the loss, the confusion, the frustration. Abandonment, unmet needs, sadness. All of it!
As far as forgiveness goes, I think if you can feel compassion for the damaged person who was also once a child, who is not ABLE to love you, then, it no longer has anything to do with your lovability, but becomes a deficit in the charactar of the person who hurt you!!
Of course, it’s easier said than done, and first you have to deal with the hurt and anger.
I hope you can go back to sleep and have sweet dreams.
EB, I hate your S for saying that to you!! I believe my deepest wounds are sexual, and the damage is irrepreble. The thought of sex makes me physically ill, just because of experiences like yours. God bless you. God bless all of us.
Heaven, don’t apologize. You’re just fine.
Hi Shabby, found anything, yet? Hi Henry. Hi Gem. Bear spray? Shame on you.
Skylar,
I don’t believe it is the anger itself that helps us grow. Growth happens more in the processing of feeling the anger and then finally in its release.
Most of the time when we feel anger, we know what is on the “surface” but as we peel back the layers we find where the serious anger comes from. Or as Kathleen calls it soul anger.
When you look at the Xp and see his anger and see how he “turned out”…..It is like comparing apples to oranges. The personality disordered individual is not looking for growth or processing childhood pain, or on a healing journey of anykind.
And then there is the anger at ourselves, and then the forgiveness. That’s where I’m at, and not managing very well, I’m afraid…..
Dear Guys,
Now that I have my sleep patterns back to “normal” (going to bed at 11 or so) and getting up earlier than I was (7 or so) you guys are really rolling in the evenings with your “bunking parties” and “sleep overs” or I guess I should say SLEEP-LESS overs. LOL
kathy, I think we ALL have to peel back the layers of the nastiness that we have buried, and feel the feelings instead of ignore them. My egg donor’s way of handling things was “lets pretend none of this happened.”
All my life that “let’s pretend” crap had been the way our family handled bad behavior, and I KNEW THAT but when she actually SAID it out loud after the chaos of my DIL and her BF the Trojan Horse P trying to kill my son C and stealing the $24,000 from my egg donor (which theft I had predicted) and I went to her to talk about it she said, “Oh, I only want to think about good things, let’s just PRETEND NONE OF THIS HAPPENED”–pretend she had not D & D’d me, pretend she had had no pity on me when I begged her on my knees that THESE people were trying to rip her off financially, and she looked at me with the most scornful look in the world. Nah, I was never going to pretend she had not done that, and let her off the hook. Let her off the hook for LYING and trying to place the blame on ME. I was the ONLY one in the entire situation who was NOT lying and hadn’t lied, hadn’t tried to rip her off and we were going to “pretend it never happened”? NO ANY MORE.
That was a turning point for me.
Back when I was working in an adolescent in-patient setting with mostly “conduct disordered” teenagers or Borderline Personality Disordered teenagers, one minute they would be trying to stab you with a pencil and fighting like a woolverine, and the next few minutes they would lput their arms around you and tell you how wonderful you were, and how you were their best friend. they did NOT get it that you could not one minute try to seriously hurt or kill someone and ten minutes later “pretend it didn’t happen.”
If you ACCIDENTLY fart at the dinner table I WILL pretend it didn’t happen, but if you get mad and get up and turn the dinner table over and throw a chair through the window I am not going to “pretend it didn’t happen.”
We have to acknowledge our behavior and accept responsibility and accountablity for it, that is the way it should be. So why should we give THEM a “pass” on this?
I treated you like a piece of dog doo because I was mad. I treated you badly and lied to you because I was tricked by someone else. I treated you badly and x, y, or z because this or that. NO!
There are NO excuses for their behavior and there are no excuses for ours.
I let you say horrible things to me because I loved you. I let you beat me more than once because I am caring and wanted to give you a second chance. After you raped me, I pretend you were a good father because I didnt’ want anyone to know what a piece of crap you were. I let you get away with it because I was ashamed.
No, we can’t excuse their behavior and we can’t excuse our own. All we can do is accept responsibility for OUR behavior and stop doing things that allow others to abuse us and go scot free. We must accept our OWN behavior, our own poor choices (allowing someone to abuse you because you love them is a poor choice, let’s face it) We don’t have to go ON making poor choices though, and we don’t have to go on feeling SHAME for THEIR bad behavior. It is NOT our bad behavior.
We can forgive ourselves for poor choices (allowing them to continue to abuse us) and we can forgive them for doing it, BUT “forgiveness” is not the same as approval…when I forgave myself for allowing continual abuse from several Ps, I did NOT approve of that behavior in myself. When I forgave them for DOING abuse to me, I did not approve of that behavior. I simply got the BITTERNESS against them and the bitterness against myself OUT OF MY SYSTEM. I can’t change the past things I did. I can’t change the past things they did, but I NO LONGER ALLOW IT TO CONTINUE. NC is what keeps them from continuing to abuse me (because they will NOT repent or change) but I DID REPENT AND DID CHANGE.
There are several “techniques” that can be used theraputicly to handle this transformation in yourself. Like Kathy suggested, or like Aloha and I did, which was to “talk’ to them, to say the things we wanted to say to them as we drove down the road. Or, you can put an empty chair in front of you, and sit in one facing it and tell the chair (like they were in it) what you think, and waht you feel. Express your feelings of hurt and anger etc. to the chair. It won’t help the P to understand (they don’t understand because they can’t and don’t want to) but it will help YOU to understand how you feel. and you can talk without interuptions and lies.!
As you peel back the layers of what was done TO you, and how YOU FEEL about it, and accept that it DID happen, and that it wasn’t fair or right, and accept that it did c hange the way you responded, the decisions you made, but they were your decisions and you did them, and you can forgive yourself, and forgive the past.
You can also put your younger self in the “chair” and talk to him/her, and tell him or her and “listen” to him or her, or even change chairs and let the younger you talk to the you of today. You can work these things out, and fortgive him/her, and comfort him/her and also your NOW self.
The whole point is to come to peace with that younger you, and the things that younger you did or felt, and the Now you and how you feel today.
Accepting that TODAY I can be what I want to be and I do NOT have to let myself live in regret and bitterness either against them or against myself. I think the biggest and best part of Christianity is that it fosters a sense of forgiveness, for others and for ourselves. If God can forgive me, why can’t I forgive myself?
King David in the old TEstement was not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination. He committed adultery with another man’s wife, then arranged to have that man murdered in war. Yet, the Bible says David was a “man after God’s own heart.” WHY was David who had done such terrible things a “man after God’s own heart?” Because when he was CONFRONTED with his sins, he sincerely REPENTED and acknowledged his sins and did the best that he could do to NOT repeat that sin.
If we bear a grudge against ourselves or others, it taints our spirits. We must learn from our mistakes, and like David, acknowledge them and then FORGIVE OURSELVES. As the customs of the Jews was at the time, they put on “sack cloth” and “ashes” to show their repentence and sorrow, but they didn’t wear this forever, after a period of time they got up and WASHED THEIR FACES of the ashes, and put on regular clothing.
We, instead, I think many times continue to ware the hair shirt and ashes the rest of our lives because we made poor choices in the past.
Get up and WASH YOUR FACES and live your lives in JOY AND PEACE because you are NOT the same person who allowed this person, this psycholpath, to abuse you. You have changed, they have not. You are stronger, wiser, and have owned your mistakes, your poor choices, and can now live a life of JOY! Free from the ties to the abuser. That is my wish and my prayer for us all!
Skylar, anger helped me grow up, because it finally enabled me to absolutely difference what was me and what was them.
Anger is not the end game. It’s a stage. But it’s a crucially important one if you’re dealing with identity issues, such as feeling less-than, feeling unlovable, feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions, and all the other ways our identities are not clearly definitions of ourselves, but reactions to other people’s issues.
When I wrote the piece above, I realized that there are some other people who respond to situations like mine by magnifying anger and becoming early warriors. When I saw the movie “Monster” about Eileen Warnos, I could understand how and why she was reacting the way she did. But that’s not what happened to me. I buried anger, and found safety through acquiescence. And so my task was to resurrect my healthy anger.
But you asked how to use it. You use it by welcoming the clear-sightedness it brings, the certainty that you are not doing this to yourself, and the understanding that your anger is the voice of your own survival instinct telling you that what is happening is harmful to you. It may be in a small way, just an aggravation, or it may be a literal threat to your survival.
Some people confuse anger with violence or abuse. Violence may be what we decide to do to deal with the situation, but usually it is not. When faced with a situation that is harming us, in most cases the logical and appropriate response is to stop it, fix it or get out of it.
People who are first learning how to experience anger in a natural way tend to have a lot of backed-up anger. I did, and I suspect that you would too, given what you said about your background. This means you have a lot of old stories that haven’t been dealt with with stopping it, fixing it or leaving it.
Some of these situations are just over and in the past. And the way to deal with them is simply to revisit them, clarify for yourself that it wasn’t you that created the situation, take a new mental position about how you want to view it now, and make a decision to take back whatever you lost in terms of your relationship with yourself. In the childhood situation you mentioned, this may be recognizing that you were lovable, deserved more love and support, and committing to give it that small child in your memory as your own parent. You know what you lost, you know what you wanted, and you are the only one in a position to talk to that part of yourself to provide nurture and reassurance.
The deep problem with these situation is that their effect is not just to make us questions whether we were entitled to better treatment, but also to make us lost trust in ourselves because we have compromised our legitimate needs in order to survive. So the task here is really to rebuild that inner trust. To gradually rebuild our own trust in our commitment to take care of ourselves. Not just in a defensive way against potential sources of harm, but in a warm and loving way that restores the creativity and joy in living, the sense of experiment and play that is normal to the child’s experience. It’s a two-sided thing. We learn to defend ourselves so that we can pick up the thread of personal development that we dropped when the trauma (including lack of nurture) forced us to become too grown-up too fast.
Anger is really about self-nurture. We pay attention to our own anger, and we understand that it means we need to do something to take care of ourselves. If we continue to feel anger, we’re getting a message from our substrates that there is still something that we haven’t attended to. As I said, some of it may be past and gone, but the alert messages are still coming. And they will keep coming until we find their source and settle within ourselves that we recognize the issue, that we are ready to defend ourselves if something similar arrives in our lives again, and if there were losses, that we are committed to restoring ourselves to whatever we lost (in identity terms).
For me, this meant going back and recognizing that none of this was my fault. That it was simply my bad luck to have parents at that time who created this situation for me. I dealt with it as I dealt with it at the time, because it was the best I could. But now, looking at it, I can see that if it happened to me now, I would stop it, fix it or get away. In identity terms, I recognized that although my coping mechanisms at that time proved dysfunction when I was out of that family and living as an independent adult, they didn’t mean that the fundamentally healthy, smart, loving and lovable person that I was before had changed. Neither the thing that happened to me, nor the coping mechanisms I adopted, were who I was.
As far as anger itself went, I did have to go through what I called my “firethrower phase.” I had a lot of backed-up anger and when it finally emerged, there was a time when I was extremely prickly to put it mildly, and was arguably paranoid about everyone’s intentions around me. I saw intent to harm or criminal thoughtlessness where it probably didn’t exist, or existed in a much smaller way. But unpleasant as that may have been to the people around me, it was also a long-delayed developmental stage for me. I was learning be perceptive to threats and to react to them immediately.
That overblown period passed as I found the real sources of my anger. I worked very hard at this at the time, questioning myself about what I was really angry about. I could see from other people’s reactions to my reactions (not the S, but people I had trusted before) that they found my reactions too extreme. So this feedback helped me a lot to understand when I was redirecting anger that should have been going to another source, the real source. And that kept me searching in myself for the real causes.
The real causes — the insights that defused this explosive stage — tended to be just a few major things from my deep past. I don’t even know if my memories were totally accurate. They were more iconic. It turned out that the one that sorted me out more than anything was one dating from my early childhood, when my mother, rather than protecting me from my father’s unreasonable and violent rages, told me that it was my responsibility not to make him angry and that it was also my job not to make her suffer by making him angry. In one fell swoop I became my mother’s caretaker and basically responsible for the behavior of an out-of-control rageaholic with problems I couldn’t begin to understand. And I took that on at the age of three, just to survive, stopping all kinds of normal developmental processes that I had to restart at the age of 50 something.
Anger in corporates aspects of blaming and judging. And when I recovered that iconic memory, I did blame and judge my parents. But these are tools to separate my interests from theirs, that’s all. In this instance, I took back my right to speak up for my needs and wants, to pursue my own interests, to play and experiment and make mistakes without feeling like a I was sinning against the wellbeing of my mother and the rest of the family, etc. It wasn’t that I gave up fear. Fear, like anger, is a part of our survival mechanism. But I put down the burden of feeling responsible for what other people did and felt.
Of course, this didn’t happen instanteously. These issues are called “developmental” because they are progressive. We get an insight. It percolates down into our emotional system. We begin to feel and perceive differently. We try on new behaviors to see how they work for us. We gradually develop new tenets, new habits and they grow into new assumptions about how the world works and who we are in the world. But there is a infinite distance between assuming that I was so powerful and responsible and burdened with the wellbeing of everyone else at the cost of my own, to assuming that I was just one person doing the best I could to create a meaningful and satisfying life and that was my true responsibility.
I understand the attraction of forgiveness. It may seem like a shortcut to avoid anger, and particularly the depressive effects of self-hatred. But I’m really not a fan of premature forgiveness, before we really understand the causes of our feelings and have worked through taking ourselves back.
This process I’m describing is not just sorting through trauma, but also coming to know ourselves deeply. When I say that I am not what happened to me, nor the coping mechanisms that I developed to deal with it at the time, I mean that I am something else. Discovering who we really are is, I believe, the great gift of this recovery process, if we commit it fully. We are not just loving and loveable people, we are also powerful. If we are not familiar and comfortable with our anger, we are also not fully aligned with our power. The ability to recognize threat and defend ourselves is only the reactive side of our power, the ability to change what we don’t like. The proactive or positive side of our power is the ability to imagine and create, the actually choose what we want to be, what we want in our lives, and the impact we want to exert on the world.
Together these things completely changes our realities from the experience of victimhood to the experience of perceiving and judging as actors, rather than chronic reactors. The defensive skills are important to preserve what we have built, but the real meaning of our lives is building, internally and externally. This is what we were made for, and this is what unresolved trauma keeps us from. In large or small ways. If we want to be everything we were meant to be, we need to free ourselves from these chains. And experiencing anger is part of this.
Later, when we’ve revisited these issues and recovered the identity pieces that we lost, we can forgive. Or something similar, like accept what was as the circumstances that had their own reasons for being, that had nothing or very little to do with us. We can honor the experience as a classroom in ourselves (particularly oru adult experiences). We can empathize and understand the circumstances of people who seemed only like abuser at the time. We can make a decision not to give the experience any more energy in terms of fear or anger. All these are options on the “forgiveness” spectrum.
Finally, if you happen to be a person like Eileen Warnos, who acted out her unresolved trauma through explosive fear and anger (and we don’t have to be serial killers to understand that dynamic), the healing mechanism is really that different. It is still to search down into sources and find a way to reparent ourselves, to give our younger selves the nurture, support and encouragement that we did not get. My saying this does not mean that someone as damaged as she was can do this by herself. In dealing with these deep issues, I think that a therapist can do a lot of good in serving as a surrogate parent, guiding us through our tangled feelings, until we get to some of these key insights. Like it was not our fault and it was just our bad luck. Like we had a right to better treatment and we are entitled to be loved. And teaching us how to do it for ourselves.
But we can do a great deal of this work for ourselves. Particularly if we believe that we can be well. That chronic fear, pain, insecurity, resentments, anxiety, physical issues like fibromyalgia are not diseases in themselves, but symptoms of deeper issues that we may be able to resolve. Even if we can’t remember when we felt clear, happy and confident, we may be able to believe that it’s waiting for us, somewhere deep inside us, deeper than all these circumstances and memory. It was how we began.
To end this very long post, I want to reiterate something Oxy said. Eventually this comes down to a spiritual journey. Some people depend on their sense of God to hold onto that belief that we can do better that I described in the last paragraph. But even those of us who have a more free-form spirituality or perhaps no sense of God at all do find ourselves opening up to something larger than ourselves as we rediscover who we are beyond the traumas and what we did to cope. Getting well is also getting connected, because trauma-coping isolates us.
Anger, ironically, is probably the most isolating stage of healing. It is all us and them. I know that as long as I was angry — including my depressive period of being so angry with myself — I was really out of touch with my own spritual layer. But it is also the gateway to getting connected again. Because when we learn how to identify threat and defend ourselves, and especially how to use trust as a tool for measuring our feelings of safety, we open ourselves to interaction again. If we feel like we can deal with 99 percent of the monsters, we don’t have to see the world in terms of monsters around every corner. We can see it as it is — beautiful, triumphant, sometimes tragic, full of opportunity for us to live. Gratitude begins to bloom again naturally and then we’re back in touch with our spiritual realm.
I hope there is something here that you can use. Anger is one of my favorite topics, and if I have time, I’ll probably write a book about it someday. Everyone’s healing path is different, but learning how feel, use and master anger was a huge part of mine.
Kathy