If the wounds are too fresh and the thought of forgiving the person who abused and upset you hurts too much, honor that. There is no shame in not being ready. It is normal and everyone’s timeline is different. Close the article for the time being or read it for nothing more than future reference, with no pressure or expectations. Allow yourself to feel all that you do, the pain included, with as much passion and purpose as possible. After a while, come back to it. Examine what you have gained, rather than concentrate on what you have lost, even if what you have lost is significant. The hope is that your personal growth is also significant and that the positive things you come to learn about yourself are far greater. Believe it or not, the day may come when you are not only able to forgive, but thank the person who brought you here, but that is all in time…
Forgiveness can be a tough subject to broach when the ones we are considering forgiving are the psychopaths who harmed us. Eventually, however, we should try to find a way to do it.
Why we should forgive
Resentment and anger eat away at us. Even though we may have been seriously wronged by the psychopaths who crossed our paths, holding on to those feelings hurts us, not them. Nelson Mandela once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.” While it seems like an easy enough concept to grasp, putting it into practice may prove more challenging. While in the midst of the anger, confusion, and disbelief that almost always accompanies our brushes with psychopathy, it’s tough to imagine forgiving the person who tried to hurt us. But forgiveness is a funny thing. The reason it must occur has less to do with our wrong-doers, and more to do with us. Forgiving helps us heal.
What does the process look like?
This will not come easy or fast. In fact, it would be wrong to rush it. We must honor each of the stages of the grief process in order to fully heal. But eventually, we have to let go of any remaining ill feelings so that we can grow and move forward. The psychopaths’ acts may have been truly horrible, so we need not excuse them, but we can learn not to allow them to damage us further. As long as we are caught in negative feelings, our offenders are still winning. Hopefully, we can come to the place where we re-empower ourselves and re-gain control of our lives.
Forgiveness does not need to mean forgetting. We should not forget what happened to us or behave as if it never occurred. Rather, we should remember what we went through so that we don’t allow the evil back in or repeat our pasts with others in the future. Further, we need not expect anything from those who did us harm. In cases such as ours, they either enjoyed what they did or to us or were merely using us for their own “advancement.” There are no sincere apologies coming from them….ever, so do not look for one. This is about us and our peace and we can do this without seeing them or exchanging any words. For once, it is actually all about us.
What we come to feel
Recently, someone new to the struggle asked me how I feel about what happened to me and how I feel about the person in my situation. I had to think for a moment, but finally decided that I feel “nothingness.” Where I was once consumed with emotion, I now see this person as a void. It is almost like a chapter of my life that did not exist, in spite of the fact that it was extremely significant.
I know that the situation was real and awful. I care about and acknowledge what occurred, as the storm I weathered hit with a tsunami-like force. However, I lived, learned, and somehow, grew. I think I became a better person along the way, as a result. Without the experience, I don’t think I would have realized that I was only living half alive, realizing only a portion of my potential. I would not have known the strength I was capable of, without this test.
I believe that when we no longer allow them control over us, we come to feel “even” again. At that point, what once existed as love, hate, anger, and sadness disappears, becoming “nothingness.” We come to see our perpetrators as insignificant, even if their acts were not. It is then that we can forgive because what was, no longer matters.
We can move toward the future for ourselves and those we care about. For the first time, probably in a long time, the psychopath takes a permanent back seat, regardless of any residual antics. It takes time and the road is long, but eventually, we can release the demons and thrive. The rewards will come. They may not be concrete or quantifiable, but we will begin to recognize them when we feel them.
Truthspeak;
As a gay man, I have seen a lot. In normal contexts, I consider myself an open-minded person but I 100% share your belief that BDSM, except in its most vanilla forms, is largely rooted in childhood abuse, be it emotional, physical or sexual. I suspect a strong correlation between more extreme forms of BDSM and those who suffered the worst childhood abuse.
That BDSM is generally no longer considered a disorder speaks volumes about the Psychiatric and Psychological communities, if you get my point.
Sociopaths live double lives on multiple levels. In that, my x-spath is textbook. By appearance, he is very clean-cut, soft spoken and polite, British polite. The perfect guy next door that keeps to himself and never makes any trouble — the perfect neighbor. He is the type of person easily brought to meet friends and family.
Yet he has this dark sexual side that is shocking. Apparently, such is consistent with Sociopaths — not only are they prone to sexual deviance, but apparently over time of an increasing nature.
Of course, his profession allows him to perfectly hide is double life. What could be better for leading a double-life than working in the travel industry?
I am not sure if his deviance is part of his shame or not. I agree that deep-down, he knows that it prevents from normal relationships, or limits the pool of possibilities. I am certain that “emotionally” my x-spath is seeking a lasting relationship; whether he knows this is impossible for him, I don’t know.
Most likely he knew that his sexual deviance would be an issue in a relationship with me. He not only hid his deviance, but actively cultivated a mask of being reserved and proper and so doing put me on the defensive.
Thus, as I learned here, we become their part of their mask of respectability. Even an ego boost. Back home in London, he could boast of his New York “boyfriend.” My guess too is that emotionally, if you can call it that, I was probably as close as he could get. But that did not stop hi m from pursuing others and casting me aside when I inadvertently got close to the other thing he was hiding — his HIV status.
Yet, he still wanted to remain friends and I see that as another one of his levels — keeping people on the hook in unrequited relationships with him. I know he maintains at least one of these with one of his best friends.
Despite my issues, being in an unrequited relationship is something I will not do. Nor will I allow others to fall into such with me.
BBE, you’ve come a long, long, LONG way in your recovery, and I don’t know if you realize this, or not.
The insight and inspiration of your recovery is unmistakable. I just wanted to pass that observation along to you and THANK you, sincerely, for sharing so openly. It’s truly helpful in my own recovery.
Brightest blessings
Tea Light;
Since I am totally gay, I do not have much exposure to the straight sex scene other than off-handed comments made by friends, stuff I hear at straight bars when watching sports and by studies.
The former indicates compared to straights, a higher level of BDSM in the gay community: 50% higher among gay men and interestingly, twice as high among lesbian women.
In the gay male community, BDSM is virtually synonymous with the “Leather” scene and every major city has at least one gay Leather Bar and many have several. “Bears” are often part of that scene too. I simply do not like it. I do not even like looking at it and I really go to such venues.
I don’t know if it is a “problem” among consenting adults. However, I do see BDSM as a Red Flag to possible underlying personality disorders and a “normal” person with mild erotic interests in BDSM should be very cautious when meeting self-professed practitioners of BDSM.
BBE, my issue with that culture is that it can get way, way out of hand in very short order.
Prior to marrying the exspath, I had found questionable floppy discs (remember those?!) with many, many, MANY oddball images on them. Some of them were the generic photos of female genital exposure, but the majority of them were of a nature that I really couldn’t grasp. There were women in fetish costumes that weren’t so perplexing – okay, I sort of “got that.” But, the images that REALLY were inexplicable were the ones of people (?) in rubber hazmat suits and gasmasks. LOTS of these types of images with obvious sexual references. I just didn’t “get this,” at all, especially the gas masks and zipper heads.
It was at that time that I told the exspath that I was NOT going to compete with porn and, if he had a predisposition to porn, I needed to know so that I could make decisions. My mistake, at that time, was to alert him that a decision would be made. I should have just packed my stuff up and left without a word.
Years later, the imagery was so graphic, so violent, and so thoroughly disturbing that it was evidence that material and interests had gone from bad to repulsive.
I’ve got some SERIOUS issues to overcome and manage as a result of the stuff that I found. LOTS of work to do. EUGH….
“I have a number of friends who are gay and roughly my age. The porn industry has created an even more difficult canundrum for the gay community in that YOUTH is most desirable. The men that I know are interested in loving and committed relationships, and it’s become nigh-on-impossible for them to find someone who has NOT been tainted as a result of uber-deviances.”
Truthspeak;
I agree with you 100% here. The “youth” and “twink” thing came out of the AIDS crisis. Before, then was a more natural look to gay porn and more varied. ln the 1970s, when steroids became available, the porn look switched to muscle but still of a wide age range. When steroids became widely prescribed to those HIV+, “muscle” became a stigma in the gay community and was viewed synonymous with being HIV+. The community and porn community responded by embracing thin, boyish young men as the model of beauty. This is particularly true in the UK.
My x-spath fits that thin and boyish model, which is among the reasons why he is HIV+ — the wrong look at the wrong time.
Gay porn is changing a bit, at least in the USA to a more “Frat” or “Straight Guy” look. Yes, not 40-somethings but not barely legal twinks.
You have, however, hit on the biggest single issue in my life. Every time I go out to a bar or club, I typically meet people. This is because people go by look and I do not look my age, even close to it. However, most of these guys are too young. How ironic, a gay man complaining about meeting guys that are too young.
Online, people rarely respond to me. Or, I get asked for a “current” picture… I am at my wits end about how to meet people near my age who are still reasonably attractive. They seem to be mostly taken.
Sadly, there is a huge conundrum in the gay community: it worships youth and beauty yet the majority engage in lifestyle that accelerates the very thing they fear most, aging, be it thru smoking, tanning, drinking and drugging.
In fact, the only lingering issue I have with the x-spath is that in the four years since meeting him, he is the only person near my age that I was attracted to, even though he did not look particularly young anymore.
The other day, I met a person who mentioned his “big” birthday was coming up. I was shocked to learn he meant 40th — I thought 50th, due to the lifestyle I mentioned above. When he asked me how old I was, I lied, even though I typically do not. I said 32 (I am 42), because I did not want to make him feel bad. He told me that I was “lucky that I had a way to go…”
I fully intend to keep taking care of myself and maybe the right approach is to stop thinking about soul-mates and life partners and as the song goes, “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you are with.”
BBE,
Looking at the cycle the spaths put us through: idealize, devalue and discard, I can’t help but think that your exspath had a plan to idealize you, infect/devalue you and discard you.
By getting sick, early on in the game, you sped up the process – at least that’s what he thought.
Do you make a habit of dodging bullets? It seems to me that I do.
Truthspeak;
I would be wrong in saying that my x-spath is into “BDSM” he seems to be more into unsafe sex and humiliation.
I concretely know that he likes movies like “Bareback London” since that was on his Xtube profile. His “friend” on Xtube likes movies that also depict bareback sex along with various acts of urination. One can only presume that birds of a feather watch porn together…
Oddly, my x-spath seems to link “dating” profiles with porn ones. Hence, “XYZBoy25” on both a dating site and Xtube. I do not know if this was intentional or accidental. Regardless, once I saw the x-spath’s Xtube profile, many, many questions were answered.
On another dating site, the x-spath goes by “Cluessless Lad” and there is a profile on a Bareback Porn site of the same name. Unlike Xtube, I am not 100% sure these are both the same person, other than the fact that the last day the x-spath was active on the dating site coincides with the first time the Bareback Porn site was active.
Thus, while I strongly suspect this person is the x-spath, I am not 100% sure. But the porn taste is very similar — mostly bareback, with some other raunchy stuff including fisting. Several London bareback videos and several vile videos like “Infect the Boy” and “Pozing Him.”
If this person is not the x-spath, he too is certainly a Sociopath. Some of his video favorites also include some paraphernalia but is not overly BDSM. I am not at all sure of the “attraction” to this but your x-spath’s decay into more disturbing stuff is typical due to their becoming easily bored.
Any smart person, gay or straight, will stay away form porn. Obviously, most stars are selected on physical attributes that are above the norm. It is depressing even for viewers as in the end, few physically are equal to what the are watching. In addition, watching porn makes finding a real partner that much more difficult.
Finally, the notion that porn is harmless fantasy is totally false. Porn is a corollary to the saying “in vino, veritas.” In wine truth and the same with porn. They only reason way the porn is “fantasy” is that the viewer, for whatever reason, cannot act on there desires. Thus, if a man has a penchant for porn involving teenage girls, that is his real desire. Only the law or his own physical unattractiveness will prevent him from acting on the desire.
Skylar;
I agree that the x-spath never had any long-term intentions for me, other than perhaps having me as an unrequited “lover” to boost his ego. My getting sick absolutely sped up the process and really, really underscores his dysfunction.
Let’s presume for a moment he is what he was telling me — reserved and sorted, but due to an unfortunate mistake, is HIV+. He likes me, and looking for a real relationship, but feels shame due to his status and fears that I will reject him…
I get sick and not only because he asks me what is going on, but because I respect and admire him, I tell the doctors really fear that I am HIV+.
Under the presumption, this would have been an ideal moment for him. He could have said something like: “Wow, I admire your honesty and trust in me. This is very hard for me, but maybe now is the time for me to be honest with you…”
Instead, all he says is that he agrees with the doctors that I should be tested asap. And never says anything else about HIV. The next day he tells me he only wants to be friends…
The lack of empathy is stunning. He even dumped me by email. Of course when I called him, immediately there was blame shifting…
This is how sociopaths work.
have I dodged other bullets? Hopefully, I can dodge one last one right now and never again. Unlike Sociopaths, I learn from my mistakes…
BBE and Truthy, thanks. This is ironically a very cleansing discussion for me, both of your viewpoints are full of lucidity and integrity. My abuser psychologically and physically pressured and indeed imposed dominant and sadistic acts and fantasies on me and it is reassuring to read your posts. Thank you both. Truthy, me too, long way to go.
BBE, a gay student told me once in a tutorial about “chickens” in gay porn; that would be the same type of performer as a twink? Very thin, pale, very young man was the example my student gave.