Few, if any, walk away from their experiences with psychopaths completely unscathed. They may leave us bankrupt, homeless, or destitute. They may feign victimization, as they continue to wage their assaults, further insulting what we actually endured at their hands. Their thirst for destruction may be almost insatiable when it comes to us.
Those are just the tangible losses. Let us give equal time to the emotional confusion and trauma. Many of us suffer from PTSD, depression, or serious physical medical concerns, as a result. Living through experiences with psychopaths, or those with such features, is an incredible feat.
While we tend to focus on the negative consequences, we should also take time to examine the positive ones. It’s important! Here’s why….
Defeated? Don’t answer yet
Human nature and our culture tend to leave us concentrating on what we do not have. If a psychopath enters our world and then exits, leaving us in turmoil, we think this is a bad thing. We mourn our losses, feel bad, and wish things were different.
This is normal. Typically, we don’t enter relationships to leave them. However, when these folks touch our worlds, no good can come of the connections. As a result, as we progress through our journeys, we can come to learn that we have actually been given second chances by their departures.
The little things that are not so little
For example, from the day the person I learned my life lessons from entered my world, I spent a lot of time sick. I am not talking about major issues. Mainly, I experienced lingering colds, strep throat, unexplained fevers, bronchitis, pneumonia, and the like.
It seemed that I visited my doctor frequently for minor, but legitimate, concerns that needed some level of attention. Almost a year and a half ago now, I saw my doctor for a regular check up. She told me that she was surprised to see me. She assumed I had left and gone elsewhere.
I must have looked at her strangely, because she backtracked, explaining that she only mentioned that because she had neither seen nor heard from me in that time. I thought for a moment. It was true. I had not been sick at all.
Similarly, several years ago, my dentist advised that I should sleep with a mouth guard. Apparently, I was grinding my teeth fairly seriously. I recall waking many mornings with my teeth clenched shut. I remember trying to convince myself, while half awake, to unclench my jaw, but could not. I had to fully awaken first and consciously force myself to separate my teeth. The result, serious headaches that sometimes last lasted for days.
Last year, even at the height of two separate court battles, the same dentist indicated to me that he could tell the grinding had stopped. So, what does this indicate? These individuals bring undue harm. Their departures, even if only partial, can change us for the better.
One day at a time
I am not saying that all of the bad magically disappears one day. We may carry many of the scars for years or even for life. However, we can re-emerge with the help of our attitudes and awareness. Even if they persist and seem truly unable to move on, we can work toward freeing ourselves from the burdens. They no longer have to matter to us. It takes time and can be very difficult, but know that it is possible. Once, we invested in relationships that were destined to fail. Now, we can concentrate on rebuilding ourselves successfully. It truly is an example of gain, diguised as loss.
Hens, our children started laying eggs again today….they took a real long vacation and I was digging out my recipe for duck gumbo when today I got two nice duck eggs.
One of the three girls disappeared one night here a while back…guess a possom or a coon got her through the tiny wire mesh some how, but two nice fat duck eggs every day will keep me and son D flush with eggs.
I’m going to set a “have a heart” live trap for him….see if I can’t catch him, but all I may catch is the outside cats! LOL Son D. nailed a skunk the other day that I thought was a wal mart bag blowing across the driveway, looked closer and it was a skunk that was almost all white. Had black legs, but everything else was white. That could also have been the duck murderer.
Hope your new job is going well!
Darwinsmom, I’m sorry you find my comments defensive or portraying me to be “light years” ahead of everyone. I hope I now have not misquoted you. I reread my respond to hens’ comment, which was actually pretty lighthearted (hence the smiley face), and I didn’t see anything defensive or inappropriate about what I said. I felt it was a response to my earlier post where hens was trying to give me advice to be less busy because I stated I was overwhelmed. I was actually not seeking any advice; I was simply stating that the process of growth can be painful and it can bring out lots of inner demons to be faced. My response to that is not to become less busy to avoid the demons. It is just to face the demons. After all, I asked for them by taking on a big chunk of life. Given my intended meaning, having anyone tell me I should become less busy or just be myself, etc., completely misses the point. Never did I mention that I wasn’t being myself. My goal is to be totally and completely myself and more of it! And I have no problem changing, growing, and reinventing myself when the situation calls for it.
Again, I’m sorry if I offend you or give an unintended impression. When I read a comment that resonates with me or makes me feel as though I’ve been understood, I am very open to it. But I feel as though my meaning was/is still misunderstood. If you think it’s because I think I’m “light years” ahead of you, well, that’s a projection which has nothing to do with where I’m coming from. Just being honest.
I hope you all have a great night. I just returned from the salsa club, and it was pretty fun, though I’m a little discouraged about my dancing skills. But that’s another story.
And contrary to what you said about not attacking me, I did perceive your comment as an attack.
Oxy!!!!!!! 🙂
OxD…..the joys of livestock and yard fowl……
LOL!!
quack quack
Hens ~
Scrambled or over easy? I think the least Oxy can do is send some of those eggs your way.
Milo, He paid his “duck support money” in THREE DOLLAR BILLS with President Obama’s face in the middle! The feed store wouldn’t take them so with the price of duck food going up and up, it is PRODUCE OR BE GUMBO! LOL
The whole wall behind my desk is used as sort of a cork board for pinning up my favorite objects and stuff, I have all kinds of stuff up there from the shirt tail they cut off me the day I took my first solo airplane flight to an 1840 map of Arkansas and included in a place I see it every day is the envelope and the three dollar bills pinned on it and I think of Hens and his crazy sense of humor and I smile.
Star,
It’s not an attack to hurt you. But I am frustrated with these type of comments and defenses that come across as condensending, not for myself, but for you.
Yes, I know you often feel misunderstood. But you also often misunderstand others: over the past half year when you bring up something about your personal life (a man you meet, the salsa dancing) you often automatically assume we’re judging your lifestyle, and make overgeneralizing condescending remarks that people here do not want to enjoy life.
I know this perception of yours of others here is not a correct one (although I know people in the past have tried to hurt you). And no matter how often people here have posted reassurances to you that they are inspired by your efforts to enjoy life (as did Hens right after my confrontational post last night) you act deaf and blind to it and persist in this belief.
I know that if such a misunderstanding persists it comes from within. And I would suggest that instead of believing your perception to be correct, you examine where it comes from. I suspect it’s an imbalance at the solar plexus where there is space for growth for you. Have you been brought up thinking it was wrong to enjoy yourself?
I used to be preconceived in similar ways about people in my early 20s. I felt misunderstood and as if I had to constantly needed to prove I had a right to feel this way or that way, choose this way or that way, live this way or that way. I was trying to re-assert my right to be myself by assuming others would not allow it or look down on me for it, regard me as weird (and I believed almost everyone would regard me as weird a belief created by the majority of children in my classes), thereby creating a conflict myself which I then could win by proving myself to be unqiue/special. During group therapy of my identity crisis between 24 and 26 someone confronted me about this attitude. It forced me to examine the source of that attitude and those beliefs. There was a battle within myself at the time, but I projected that battle on my surroundings and so battled people around me, instead of myself. This introspection helped me to evolve it into something positive: self-reassurance that I was doing the right things for myself, but without the need to prove or explain it to others. It gave me peace.
I do not deny I’m being confrontational right now, and I completely understand that feels like an attack. I am confrontational because reassurances and clarifications by others and myself have not worked. And I hope to shake you awake.
Please, for your own happiness and growth and peace, do something with the energy for yourself I’m giving you by confronting you.
Darwinsmom:
I don’t want to interfere in your discussion with Stargazer first off all. I’m not interested in hijacking your discussion either. Just as you know.
What you just posted awoken my attention to what you actually were saying.
You are talking about how we manipulate our selves, aren’t you? How we manipulate our own perceptions baced upon feelings we carry inside of us such as inferiorty- shame-guilt etc? How those emotions can twist it self on its way into the perception and acted upon? Eligibility.Self-justification.
So my question to you is- how to “fix” it? What did you do that worked for you?
Yes, Sunflower…
I think you have worded it marvelously… it’s self manipulation.
I was ignored or pestered by children all my youth from 7 until 14-15. I always felt the odd one out, even with people who tried to do right and take me in their group of friends. It became this belief that by rule everyone would regard me as weird: with one very large group rejecting my weirdness, and a small group liking me for it and calling it ‘special’ (which to me was just a positive twist to the same meaning: weird). This belief, this self-manipulated perception to keep some shred of self-esteem may have been correct on the schoolground, but it wasn’t anymore in my adult life. I was actually making friends easily. I saw them as people who like weird/special people.
My therapist during the individual therapy preceding the group therapy had already clarified this for me: my younth’s loneliness had been the scale dipping totally to one side, and now I was making it lean to the opposite side: instead of accepting I was weird, I was shouting at the world that I was special.
Then came that confrontation: this fellow group member blatantly told me she thought there was nothing wrong with me at all, that I was completely normal and healthy, and why was I even following therapy at all.
Instead of actually hearing what she was trying to tell me (that I was not a weird, fucked up person, but a ‘normal’ person), I regarded it at the time as a “rejection” (the nth rejection in my life) of her telling me I had no right to be in therapy. The therapist did intervene and told us I had the right to be there as much as anybody else. The thing is: it was the first time that someone told me that I was “normal”. While that didn’t fully register in the way it was intended at the time, it did plant a seed nevertheless.
Later on I had come across an article on borderliner and I worried I might have some attributes of it. The therapist told me I wasn’t at all, and then explained me that everyone can recognize themselves somewhat in some pathology, because pathologies are abnormal levels of normal feelings and behaviours.
What fixed it? My therapy gave me a third option: I wasn’t weird, I wasn’t special, I was normal. This idea needed time to take root, but it did.
Of course I’m a “different” person than a lot of people, and I do stuff and live a life that is “different” than a lot of other people. And some people (a minority) still express a perception of regarding me as weird/not typical. But now I regard that as them saying “I lead a different life”, but it doesn’t mean I’m weird. I’m still normal. It sure doesn’t affect my attitude my behaviour or how I think about myself anymore.
So it was the confrontation and growing concept of myself that I was blind to (“normal”) kinda like a middle road that helped my mind to be free from living in this black-white weird versus special perception.
I’m not sure whether you can pierce that blindness yourself, because it’s a blind spot. You can normally not become aware of a blind spot without outside help. You need feedback to discover it.