Here’s more proof that total No Contact is the way to recovery. A new study finds that continuing to follow a former romantic partner on Facebook after breaking up makes it harder to move on. Read:
Study: Stalking your ex on Facebook is bad for you, on ZDNet.com.
Story suggested by a Lovefraud reader.
skylar
Kim,
That is sort of what happened to my spath sis and I was the one who did it.
My mother would force me to cater to my little sister. Whenever something was too hard, she would cry or scream or whine or complain and my mom would command me to go help her.
This basically taught her that she was weak and helpless and the solution is to get someone else to do things for her. How? First find someone in authority who can force others to do what she wants. Mom was the authority and I was the solution. But it got to the point where I was so well trained, that I didn’t even wait for her to fail, I watched her attempts and fixed what needed fixing for her.
In the end, I wrote her college thesis. She got an A- and a note:”spath sis, did you write this?”
Teaching someone that they don’t have to be responsible for themselves and constantly rescuing them, is a disservice to them. It teaches them that they are powerless. Like a butterfly forcing its way out of the chrysalis, if you help it, its wings never become strong and it can’t ever fly.
Depression is one option when you feel powerless, but there are other options, including becoming a manipulator. That’s one of the reason, I think that my sister turned into a spath and unwittingly, I had a hand in it.
skylar
Oxy,
I think C just hates women. I know a lot of people like that. It’s hard to understand it, but it’s a type of prejudice that some men have because it makes them feel better about themselves.
I started to read a really good book that i think addresses this. It’s called The Descent of Woman. But I didn’t finish the book, I misplaced it and now I don’t know how it ends.
It seems to me that the author was going toward a theory that men envy women because we don’t want sex as badly as they do and it makes them feel rejected. It makes them feel like we have the upper hand (remember, whoever cares the least, wins)
This all began way back before we were even homosapiens. Since women don’t orgasm as easily as men, we just weren’t that motivated to copulate. So men had to use a club on our heads or lure us with a tasty meal they had just clubbed. So sex and violence kind of got mixed up in the caveman’s head. But still, they resent being the one who has to pursue and cajole. They get over this resentment by telling themselves that we are whores that have to be bought with trinkets and that they are tricking us into sex.
I can so clearly see this in the way they talk about us.
Once I told a spath, “women can get sex whenever they want.” I think we can all agree that this is true. But this spath said, “no that’s not true.” I reiterated my position but this spath disagreed. Then I added, “spath, all we have to do is lower our standards.”
he had no response to that. His method for getting sex has usually been to pay for it. I guess he never thought of just lowering his standards? Oh wait, that IS lowering his standards…and yet he still had to pay the whore.
It really makes you understand why some men hate women.
LOL.
Edit:
sorry Oxy, I screwed up. 🙁
Ox Drover
Sky, please edit out the name you put up in your above post and use the INITIAL ONLY.
Thax
darwinsmom
The crippling someone by over-helping them and therefore making them beieve they can’t do that themselves:
My mom could do that at times… Well on one thing only: on my writing (and that will make you smile Sky no doubt)
Whenever I had to give in a paper or some self-written story for Dutch in HS, my mom would disect my stories or papers word per word, first telling me how to rewrite it. At some point I’d be crying non stop because I had put so much hours of work in it, and she was (a) totally destroying it imo (b) I felt I couldn’t write even one sentence right for her. SHe would then take over and rewrite it herself for me to copy. UGH! She kept this up until I was 17 or something and I eventually revolted so much and got the support from my father to leave me alone. By then I had the argument that in final exams I had to write papers too, and she wouldn’t be there to help me at my desk in HS, and I’d come across a fraud otherwise.
I loved coming up with concepts and thrillers and psychological drama short stories in HS… but I hated the whole ordeal of writing and editing.
This is the main reason that when I write, I write in English :p My mom can’t write better English than I do.
Of course when I had to bring large papers and a thesis in my masters, it was just way too much for her to read and edit, so she stopped doing it altogether. And I got my confidence that I could write Dutch well enough from that (cum laude on my theoretical thesis about creativity).
Somewhere early 2000s she once remarked on an email I had sent her during a trip in Thailand that my Dutch had clearly improved on account of my English fictional writing in my spare time.
Of course I didn’t write all that well when I was younger: too many ideas going through my head all at once and ending up in a knot in a sentence to try and express what I wanted to say. But I needed to better myself, rather than copy her perfect adult writing.
skylar
Darwinsmom,
LOL, yeah that cracked me up.
There is a difference between being a teacher and what I did.
I just did the work for my sis. She didn’t even UNDERSTAND what I had written. That’s why her teacher, who knew she was a bit dim-witted, asked her if she had written it. It never occurred me to dumb down the thesis. I wrote the best one I could, given that I had read that Don Quixote book, the night before.
I noticed though, that you rebelled against your mom’s corrections. My sister never did, instead she accepted the help and felt entitled. So that is one very big difference. Perhaps it is because you have a different temperment or maybe it’s because this was a single thing (your writing) that your mom focused on, while my sister made me her slave since she was an infant in anything she couldn’t do perfectly. She is also a perfectionist BTW.
Now that you are a teacher, in your profession, you are probably very aware of the distinction between teaching and enabling. It is hard for me sometimes to make that distinction. I’m so accustomed to enabling.
callmeathena
Kim, what movie?
Athena
Louise
Athena:
The movie is “War of the Roses.” Remember that? It’s old, but it was referred to in the link Kim posted above.
Truthspeak
OxD, you’ve made an interesting observation about people who, as children, were raised in an environment that causes them to display Borderline symptoms. That someone could be driven crazy, literally, by the abuses that they experienced as a child makes sense to me.
So, having said that, how do professionals make the differentiation? How do they determine who’s truly disordered from individuals who were so severely damaged? More importantly, how are these people “tested” for this condition? Is there some pattern of responses that’s a clear indicator?
I ask because I honestly don’t know this, and it would be informative to understand how these people are determined to be Borderline as opposed to sociopathic. In reference to this, how would any professional ever be able to peg the exspath as a “disordered” person during an intial session or through the generally accepted evaluation tests? I don’t want precise indications as to how these diagnoses would be rendered simply because I think that many people with agendas read this blog, daily, so I don’t want them to have any information that they could “use” for their own benefits, if that makes sense. I’d just like to know how and when a professional comes to a conclusion.
Louise, “War Of The Roses” was marketed as a comedy, and there were definitely a couple of scenes of wry humor. But, I found that movie to be painful and absolutely tragic. I saw it only one time, and I can’t ever watch it, again. LOL!
Brightest blessings
Louise
Truthspeak:
I felt the same way about that movie.
As far as childhood damaging people. I agree 100%. I have always said that people act the way they do due to what happened to them in childhood, but no one ever seemed to agree with me saying that people still had choices, etc. Of course people have choices, but how can anyone argue that what we are exposed to while we are in our forming years doesn’t affect us for the rest of our lives?
kim frederick
I agree. War of the Roses was hell. I’ll never watch it again, either.