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.
I probably shoudnt be saying this, and I know its not the recognised way to think, re recovering from a serious illness, but, I have to be honest and say, that in a way I hope that God takes Lily quietly and peacefully in her sleep. Even if she recovers from the huge trauma of such major surgery, she still has to deal with the fact that her P children and P sisters and P brother dont really give a rats behind about her. I feel this is an emotional wound which will go on bleeding without end, and I think God knows shes suffered enough in this lifetime. I really hope that He calls her home. I dont feel she has the psychic stamina for any more torment from her family.There Ive said it.She is desperately lonely, not well off financially,weak from the surgery, I feel her torment will never end till Jesus takes her to Heaven.. Sorry, but its what I think. Love, Gem.XX
sstiles54,
I’m amazed at everything you’ve done in your life! My family often treats me like I’ve accomplished nothing — but I wrote down all things I have done, and it was an eye opener.
I used to believe the entire list of things Donna wrote in this article was true about me — but I no longer do. I heard that it’s beneficial to visualize a “split screen” when one has these painful feelings as an adult: on one side of the screen you see your present situation and feeling, and on the other side of the screen you see how you were treated as child that brought up this feeling. It took a while but by following the feeling, I was able to remember the origins of most of my negative feelings about myself.
I discovered I was TAUGHT to think badly of myself (and most likely, my parents were taught similarly) and when I made my inventory of what I’d accomplished, I discovered that I’m a human being who like most people has had failures and successes. Not so bad really. I realized that much of my sorrow came from the way I was still treating myself — just as my alcoholic parents had — and that I can change that. I could change the way I spoke to myself in internal conversation.
When I began speaking to myself like I would my dearest friend, I began to value and respect myself. That was an awesome discovery — that I was growing self-respect from the inside out! I’d peal another layer of the onion, remember more trauma, and support myself through it. It takes time, tons of reading (I love this site! So many people here have written things that saved my bacon! I really like a site called http://www.bravenewkitty.com because though she speaks a lot about substance abuse recovery, the focus is really spiritual and emotional recovery. She is a gifted writer and her attitude is positive. As always, take what you need and leave the rest).
I have a long way to go, but I have discovered that healing is possible, has massive rewards along the way — and you get to meet fantastic people who have come through really tough times and grown stronger, wiser and more compassionate. Lots of them on this site!
You have done so much for so many people, so now, you take some time to take care of yourself and find your answers. This can be challenging if you’ve believed your worth came from what you did for others — but if you can do for others, you can learn to apply that knowledge and ability to making life better for you. I find this challenging, but it is very possible to learn to do it.
Try to take some time every day and read at least one thing that uplifts you! If you find yourself at the bottom of your list, do some rearranging — understand that this is just an old habit, something you were taught and required to survive as a kid, but no longer need. If you can’t think of positive things to do for yourself, think of what you’d do for one of your kids or a dear friend — then do it for you.
What I hold onto when I’m stuck is this: “Do the next right thing.” It’s hard to go wrong when you’re thinking this way, and it helps me to keep from falling back into old habits of treating myself like I don’t matter, and only other people can be on my list. A much healthier equation is “Others and Us” – it offers better balance. Try not to isolate – it seems we’re often alone just when we most need some companionship. For instance, I recently started going to Al-Anon since both of my parents were alcoholics. I’m going for me, to help heal my life so that I can make better choices in the future. It helps to be in a place where people mostly talk honestly about their lives, then it’s easier to see yourself as a human being among human beings. Even when I’m bone tired, a meeting can really help. I’m not pushing that organization, but I am saying that connection in a non-threatening environment with others can help with healing.
There’s lots of solidly good advice to be found on this site. Writing here helps me more than I can say, and I’ve been amazed at how supportive, kind and open people are here.
I very much hope you find your answers soon. Be patient and tender with yourself – it really does help.
Take care!
Betty
Gem:
I had a similar conversaton with my Auntie Yesterday….about life/death/living.
My uncle is in poor health, but still able to travel around. He went to europe for 2 weeks last month with wife/SIL/BIL.
He broke his hip, has parkinsons etc….the flight home was horrid…..for my aunt…..he was yelling about terrorists being on the plane etc…..you can imagine the horror. He halucinates. Thank God they didn’t land the plane and restrain him…..EESSHH.
She is feeling trapped for him…..he was always a person who lived life, now he is sitting in a chair, cant’ see a tv, can’t hear a radio, can’t walk to the terrace to see the world go by…..just sits and waits.
I blurted out…..that I have given this alot of thought and if I had another stroke that took me ‘down’…..at my age, I would NEVER want the kids to change diapers, turn me every two hours, and have to care for me for the rest of my life…..NO WAY IN HELL!
Walking my journey with all the serious medical crap i have dealt with, if things looked bleak for me…..if the cancer came back……stroked out or whatever…….DO ME IN!!! If I can’t live a life that can offer some pleasure of living…..I sure dont want to affect the kids living either.
It’s a decision I believe we all should have a right to make…..
I understand your feelings of not wanting Lily to suffer, and I know that if it’s her ‘time….then it will be her time.
There is a reason she fights on……
I know at 39…..I could have given it all up…..easily…..but look at me now…..
Kicking ass and taking names! It wasn’t my time.
She’s had a nasty hand dealt…..and i’m sure we will all learn from lily’s journey.
We all want peace and healing for Lily…..whatever form that is supposed to come in.
XXOO
EB
lostnsad said:
“I never used to take photos of myself. I do now” All the time and it helps” To see yourself and know you aren’t ugly” Yes, we can all be unattractive after we cry, or haven’t gotten a lot of sleep” But I take pictures all the time” with and without makeup it’s helped a lot about seeing myself differently.”
I think that’s a great idea! I’ve been a photographer since I was about 14, and I am especially good at portraiture. There is so much you can learn about yourself by really looking carefully, seeing how your image changes in time and in relation to various events in your life. We are not static beings, and we are not only capable of change but we are also incapable of NOT changing. We can be conscious of this or not, and using photographs in this way is a healthy step toward full awareness of who we are in relation to the world.
It’s also important to see ourselves through the eyes of others who care about us. Maintaining just a few strong and healthy life-affirming relationships is very important.
“We believe other people come before ourselves.”
I don’t think this is necessarily an erroneous belief. Being a Christian, this is, to me, a desirable trait. The problem is that it needs wisdom to temper it, and many of us (myself included) get involved with the sociopath before we’ve had a chance to gain that wisdom.
It’s an unfortunate side-effect of being a selfless person that selflessness attracts selfishness.
One part of the healing process I’m going to have to go through is learning how to be selfless without being taken advantage of. It’s difficult to learn to trust again. It means I will most likely be alone for a long, long time (if not forever, which I suppose isn’t such a bad thing when you’ve got a small child and can’t risk bringing a stranger into her life), because no one wants to hear that you’re going to make them wait a year or two before you’ll trust them even a little.
My eyes was wide shut when it came to the S, I wanted a man to come in a take some of the pressure off of me, to step up an be the man in my life. Ive been a single parent since 1994 its been so hard doing it all alone. I had a monkey on back so strong that it was breaking me down, in the beginning he love me so right I felt the monkey let loose. I just need someone to love me again and be there for me. I gave him control and he used the situation to his favor. I’m mad at myself for believeing it was real, I mad at myself for trust and loving a liar. He let the monkey out the cage and he chocking the hell out of me right now! but this time I have a broken heart!!!!!!!
SStiles54:
I am so sorry for what you endured in your childhood. With an abusive father and a mother who couldn’t protect you, you didn’t have a chance as a young person, and it is completely understandable that your life took the direction that it did.
Now is the time to put the burdens down.
You carried the burden of trying to protect your mother and appease your father. Then, when you rebelled, you ended up with a child who needed to be protected, then multiple children who needed to be protected.
They are all adults now. It is time to focus on yourself.
Do not carry your past on your shoulders. Let it go.
About the two jobs – can you survive on one? Can you downscale so that you don’t need the extra income? Everybody’s doing it these days.
Still, the main burden is the mistaken beliefs. Can you identify them? When you do, let them go.
Funny, I’ve always hated having my picture taken but as I started to contemplate leaving the N I started doing self portraits. I think it helped me to finally see myself, literally and figuratively, as a separate person.
I learned that I chose emotionally distant men so I wouldn’t need to reveal myself fully. Also difficult men so I could be so busy with all their needs, problems, etc that I could ignore my own issues. I spent years of therapy hammering away at all his stuff–everything would be fine if he would just straighten up and fly right. Now I see it was just so I wouldn’t have to face myself. Thank gawd for the therapist I have now, she’s been able to really help me break through that.
I’m terribly scared of intimacy because some deep part of me doesn’t feel I’ll be loved if the whole truth be known. I busy myself being competent, showing what I can do, what a great partner I can be, at the expense of not looking at what kind of partner I’m facing. I can see that I still do the former but at least now I’m also heavily evaluating the other side of it too.
One of my big goals is that when someone I trust asks me how I feel I’m able to answer straight from the heart, without all the fear and hesitation I have now about being that truthful. That will be a big step towards intimacy for me.
sstiles54. your family dynamic was very much like mine. Big charming, explosive Irish father, better educated but more reticent mother. I too was the oldest, and from a young age took it upon myself to protect my mother and my silblings.
Here’s the thing. You and I grew up with two problems. One was a tolerance for fear and brutality (because we had to become used to it). The other was an inflated sense of our own responsibility and power to change things for other people. We literally became the sacrificial lambs of the family. And in going out into the world, our ideas of our own limits were completely warped. We thought we could live through too much. We didn’t recognize impossible situations and dangerous people. In our understanding of survival skills, we had no training to recognize that respectful relationships, self-love, peace of mind, decent pay for work, and other things that were simply out of the question in our family homes were actually necessary. Not luxuries but necessary.
And now you feel like you’re burning out. Welcome to the world of the sacrificial lambs. If we don’t get completely destroyed by users who recognize that we don’t have healthy boundaries, we burn out. Because of the way we were trained as children, we basically structure our lives as self-abusers. We don’t ask for anything. We don’t expect anything. We give too much. We don’t feel like we deserve more.
Donna wrote this post about extracting meaning from abusive relationships. You’re still working on this. And right now, you’re at the confused, self-hating phase. Where you can’t understand why these things happen to you, but you’re still trying to take responsibility for everything, which means that you are the problem.
On a certain level, you are the problem, but it’s not what you think. It’s not that you’re too stupid to live, which is what I used to say about myself. It’s that you were trained in childhood to survive in an environment of fear and brutality.
It took me a long time to get mad at my father. I didn’t want to be an angry person, and I didn’t want to get lost in blaming. So I’m not suggesting that you need to do that right now. But what you do need to do is take your feelings seriously. Don’t wish you didn’t feel like this. Try to understand why you do. This isn’t the first time in your life you’ve felt tired and hopeless. Go back in your memory and start listing those moments. Go back as far as you can to the first time you ever felt that way, and look at what those moments have in common, what was going on.
You are a good, strong human being. The fact that you survived the difficult life you’ve had speaks volumes about the fundamental strength and hope that exists inside you. I know at this point that you probably feel like a pack mule, and I know what that feels like. I’ve been there. But you are more than that. Inside of you is the bright, happy, confident person you once were, the person who believed in her own dreams, and trusted that she could achieve them on her own efforts and the help of people who cared about her.
That is the truth about you. The rest of this is the burden you’ve been carrying since you first abandoned your natural state as a child and began taking care of your family.
You’ve gotten some advice here to make time for yourself. I know that’s hard when you’re tired and you just want to rest or distract yourself when you’re not slogging through the daily responsibilities. So I’m going to make a suggestion that’s almost the same, but a little different. Make time to get to know yourself. Write here or write in a journal. If you draw, make pictures of yourself in all the environments you can remember. Give yourself the gift of time to begin to take care of yourself in the way that other people haven’t. Search inside of you for what you wished other people had seen and understood. Speak up for yourself, if it’s only to yourself.
Sacrificing yourself for the good of other people may have made sense at one time. But when you get the the point where you’re sacrificing yourself for your own good, you’ve crossed the line into self-abuse. You need someone to be kind to you, to appreciate you and to tell you what a good job you’ve done. Because you really have. So start taking care of yourself in this way. And later it will make it easier for you to ask for help from other people, and to place a higher value on your time and work.
If there is a single thing that changes our relationships with other people, as well as our prospects in the world, it is coming to value ourselves and believe we should be appreciated and supported. I know it’s not an overnight thing to develop this capacity, if we were trained to be sacrificial lambs. But if you can look at this as a goal, a belief that you want to develop in yourself, you will begin to move toward it. You can change, and your life will change as you do.
Love —
Kathy
sstiles
I like this, it sums up exactly how I feel about my own life. “I’ve been the rock for everyone for so long, & now that I need a rock,there’s none.”
We are there for everyone, giving and giving and they are taking and taking. All of a sudden WE are in a position where WE need someone to help us, and everyone scatters like cockroaches when you turn the light on. This is depressing as hell for me right now. Took care of both of my parents when they were sick and died, my brothers were no where to be found, and now the brothers are ‘mad’ at me and have disowned me, because I did not do it all quite right. They actually wanted my mother in a nursing home and mom and I had talked and she dreaded being put in a nursing home, so I took care of her in my home. THAT made my brothers mad. They wanted her in a home. THis makes no sense to me, I would think it would be the other way around. After she died, I had a much needed back surgery, a big surgery. They completely ignored me, did not even acknowledge the fact that I had surgery. These are the same brothers who said my husband was a “good man” and that he did NOT ‘beat me up’ if I did not end up in the hospital. I took it all personally and felt like everything was my fault. I am just NOW beginning to see (after reading this site) that my brothers are assholes.
You are in a difficult place in life, I feel for you. I agree with Donna, is there SOME way you could quit one of your jobs? Doing that stuff for your landlord, you probably feel that will be hard to get out of. But you need to look out for YOU, as I have learned, NO ONE ELSE WILL. You need some well deserved time off to just rest, read, piddle. Don’t worry about what the landlords will think, worry about what YOU think!! That is taking care of yourself!