Forgiveness, sociopathy and choice

Midlife, you’re getting great responses here. I just have a little bit to add.

You wrote: “I would have been happier to have not met him and continued in my ignorance thinking the world was a great place and all people have some good in them.”

I think that you will eventually fall in love with the world again. It is a great place. Not without its dangers, but also full of beauty, opportunity and insight. And you will be wiser about all that, because you will be more alert to the dangers, more skilled at handling them, and more aware of the full breadth of your capabilities to handle the good and the bad.

You may also come to realize that there is good in everyone, but in some people it’s been so effectively locked away that it might as well be dead. They are tragedies and they are also dangerous. And you probably will develop the capacity to understand both things — the tragedy and the danger — and to respond appropriately to people you can’t heal and who offer nothing but a bottomless hunger to suck resources out of other people’s lives.

You wrote: “I wonder sometimes if the ’greater self knowing and what a blessing it is’ is just a story I tell myself to make me feel better about being so used and abused.”

I think we all feel like that, once we’ve encountered the idea that we might just get more out of this than the losses, but we’re not really there yet. It takes a while to get through counting up our losses, judging the other person as the cause of them, and getting our anger on right. During that period, it’s a pretty dream that this is going to work out well for us, but not really credible.

One of the things that helped me hold onto the idea was when I got really angry about the fact that the whole game had been set up for me to lose. And I just made up my mind that this MF was not going to win. Whatever he got from me, I was going to get a whole lot more out of him. And part of that was wanting revenge. But I knew that revenge, in the end, wasn’t going to give me back the money or the years or everything else I lost in this relationship. He changed his life on my back. I was going to change my life on his. I didn’t know exactly how, but I was going to make these losses investments in my life, not his. And they were investments that were going to pay off for me!

You wrote: “My mind keeps coming back to wanting to do something ” healing by itself in isolation isn’t enough ”“ I want some form of social justice and some change so this doesn’t happen as easily to someone else.”

I’m with you there. And though I have come to think that the best thing I can do is to help victims heal, because I have a vision of victimhood as a kind of global problem that needs to be addressed by helping people regain their understanding of their own power, there is a lot of other work that needs to be done. Education, changes in law, attention to social issues like family welfare, etc.

I know that there is a lot of discussion on this board about the genetic issues around sociopathy. I know they provide comfort to parents of sociopaths, but they frustrate me because they divert us from the larger social issues. We live in a world that dominated by sociopathic interests. They are a small minority, and we have the power to stop it. To fight for compassion, fairness, justice. Predators are short-sighted, because they are focused on short-term profit. People who care are not. They look ahead at the outcome of legal policies, business practices, social values and the everyday manifestations of these things on the common good.

And the voices of everyday people can make a difference. I work in PR, and I know how possible it is to move mountains. I’ve moved a few myself. Most of all, it takes speaking up, having a point of view and expressing it. There is a book called “The Starfish and the Spider” that I have recommended many times here. It is about how effective movements are started, and one of the most powerful truths in it is that, if we speak up, we attract our natural allies. The other people who care about the same thing. And this is how groundswells are built.

A lot of people here talk about how hard it is to find someone how understands or is willing to listen. My theory on this is that, as long as we are looking for understanding, we’re asking something from other people and they feel it and back away. And often the people who back away are the people who are struggling with the same issues, but trying not to let them take over their lives.

When we start talking our own truth, the dynamic changes. We are giving them something, which they can take or not. But for our natural constituency, the ones who are ready to become aware of victimhood or who are struggling to articulate the meaning of their own experiences, it becomes easier for them to say, “I know what you’re talking. I think it’s wrong too.”

Which means that we can’t really make changes until we’re solid with ourselves. When we’re not longer apologizing, or hating ourselves for our mistakes, or feeling like outcasts or like there’s something wrong with us. I used to feel like that about being an incest survivor, until I learned the numbers. And then I learned to say, “My father raped me for years.” Because I refuse to participate in the dirty little secret that keeps so many people in shame. If they try to tell me how sorry for they are for me, I shut them down, and tell them that one of every ten people they meet comes from the same background. It’s an epidemic, and the next time they go get a flu shot, maybe they could give a thought to what they’re going to do about protecting their kids or the kids next door.

Some people think I sound angry. Sometimes when you tell the truth, especially if it’s a truth other people don’t want to hear, they put on their la-la-la hats, because it’s easier to be oblivious. That’s especially true of people who have their own secrets. The truth is, of course I’m angry, as you are, but not just about what happened to me. I’m angry because the numbers aren’t changing and because what’s known about the causes of incest, just like what is known about precipitating factors (that are not genetic) about affective disorders like sociopathy are not driving changes in public policy. I’m also an attractive, successful, smart, articulate person who respects herself. So when I walk away, I leave them with something that may not click that day, but it will click someday when sexual abuse affects their lives, as it inevitably will, one way or another.

Midlife, it takes courage to be a catalyst. But one of things we learn from this recovery is that every person’s life is a creative event. We affect the world just by being here. The way we affect it reflects what is important to us. We don’t have control of everything. We don’t know where everything we do is going to lead. But the power we do have is to infuse the dominoes we tilt over with our own spirits and wills. We can choose the direction we push them in, and that make a big difference, especially when more and more of us start pushing them in the same direction.

You wrote: “Bah! I am hormonal and icky today.”

I say, take advantage of it. I’ve always believed that I got my best thinking done during hangovers and PMS. These are your own internal dominoes you’re tilting now, making choices about new directions, testing how it feels when you try new feelings and perspectives. You’re learning, and you’re learning the most important thing, the first thing you have to learn before anything else is going to make sense. And that’s who you really are, what you’re capable of and what you care about.

I’m on the sidelines, cheering. Go for it!

Kathy