For the holidays, give yourself the gift of honoring your experience

How do you get through the season of joy and hope when a lying, destructive, individual has wreaked havoc in your life?

First, be gentle with yourself. You are a normal, caring, person. Perhaps you wanted to love and be loved, as all normal people do. Perhaps you felt sorry for the individual and wanted to help. Your intentions were honorable, but the exploiter took advantage of your humanity.

Second, honor your experience. What does that mean? It means accepting that it happened. Much of the pain and confusion of tangling with a sociopath comes from not wanting to believe that these individuals are what they are, and they do what they do. Accepting that yes, they exist, and yes, you were targeted, sets the stage for moving forward.

Finally, as painful as these encounters are, they usually contain an opportunity for healing. Sociopaths target vulnerabilities this doesn’t make you weak, because everyone has vulnerabilities, even if it’s simply wanting something. Take an honest look at yourself where did the exploiter set the hook?

Usually, the vulnerability that you find is linked to a prior situation or experience in your life. So as you process the experience of the sociopath, you can also process the experience that made you vulnerable to the sociopath. And that’s where you’ll find the true opportunity for healing, and the opportunity to move into wholeness.

In this holiday season, Lovefraud is taking a break. We will resume publishing articles on January 3, 2017. But the Lovefraud Forum is open and you can still comment on previous blog stories, so feel free to post and support each other.

Lovefraud wishes you the happiest of holidays and continued recovery in the New Year.