For people who feel like their love lives are lacking, Valentine’s Day can be really miserable. I know. I spent far more years of my adult life alone than I spent attached.
Pining for romance makes us vulnerable to the sweet nothings of the sociopath. Of course, we don’t realize when we hear those smooth, silky words that they literally are nothings—empty promises. We think they’re the answers to our prayers. Our dreams come true.
Then, at some point, we shockingly discover that our “relationship” with Prince or Princess Charming is nothing but a cruel mirage. We’ve been tricked. We find ourselves once again single, but now we’re also carrying whatever additional devastation the sociopath has wrought—embarrassment, rage, doubt, illness, debt, a multitude of losses.
The pain and emotional turmoil are so overwhelming that we feel like we’ll never recover. Or, perhaps we passed through the worst of the trauma and now we’re just tired, too exhausted to care about Valentine’s Day. Or, we still want to fill that empty hole within us, but our faith in our own judgment is severely shaken. How can we feel better?
The answer is always to heal our own hearts. Much of my book, Love Fraud—How marriage to a sociopath fulfilled my spiritual plan, is about discovering how to do exactly that.
Deciding to heal
The first step is deciding to heal. When we’re in the midst of the trauma, this may feel counterintuitive. We want somebody to do something about the sociopath. We want somebody to deliver us from our circumstances. We want somebody to fix us.
Unfortunately, it’s rare for the situation to change quickly enough to make us feel better. But we don’t have to wait for changed circumstances in order to begin healing. In fact, we shouldn’t wait, because that’s not the way the energy of life works. First we heal ourselves, then the circumstances change.
Pursuing healing requires conscious action, participation on our part. It is something we do, not something that we wait for. So how do we pursue healing? By purposely finding peace and moments of joy.
Peace and joy
Yes, we can find peace within us, even as the storm rages around us. You can use any method that is comfortable and comforting, such as quiet contemplation, meditation, prayer, religious services, walking in nature, listening to music, or any activity that brings a sense of stillness and calm.
At first, we may feel only fleeting moments of peace before we are interrupted by stressful thoughts of our circumstances. That’s okay. Keep trying, and little by little, you’ll find that you’re able to hold on to the peace for longer and longer periods of time.
Then, as you go through your day, look for moments of joy wherever you can find them. Maybe you find a sock that you thought the washing machine ate. Maybe you get a good parking spot. Maybe a clerk in a store is helpful. Maybe a friend takes you out to lunch. Notice those little treasures, no matter how small. And when you do, say a small prayer of gratitude—it can be as quick as the words, “Thank you.”
What happens when you focus on peace and joy? It reduces your stress, which deactivates your fight or flight response, which allows your body’s natural healing capacity to do its job. I’ll be talking more about this in a future blog post, but for now, know that focusing on peace and joy starts the process of change.
Miracles
Healing your heart is always the answer. When we work on healing our hearts, miracles happen. When we create peace, harmony and health within us, our life circumstances improve as well.
I know this for a fact, because it happened in my life. I worked on changing my inner landscape, and as I made progress, my life got better. It took time, but I finally let go, emotionally, of the sociopathic ex-husband. As soon as I did, I met Terry Kelly, the man who became my new husband.
Terry and I are now in the midst of what we call “Love Week—”the celebration of our wedding anniversary and Valentine’s Day. We go out to dinner. We indulge in a one-pound box of chocolate and slowly nibble away, a couple of pieces at a time. Best of all, we exchange mushy sweet somethings, words that reflect our love and happiness.
True love feels like a miracle, but in reality, it is a direct result of a healed heart.
This post brings me to tears.
LL
Happy Valentine’s Day, Terry and Donna!!!!
Thank you for sharing your heart with us. xoxo
Thanks Donna, I am so happy for Terry and you that you found each other. But at the same time, I realize that “finding someone” is not the SOLUTION to making us happy and fulfilled.
The “happy and fulfilled” must, I think come FIRST—then, if per-chance we find someone also happy and fulfilled who wants to SHARE our happiness, like you and Terry found each other, then that is the ULTIMATE…but in the event we never find that person in this life, none-the-less, that should not keep us from being happy and fulfilled.
My late husband and I had a grand time (not perfect, but a great marriage none-the-less) but I realized after he was gone that way too much of my own “happiness” had depended on HIM rather than on myself.
None of us can guarantee someone else that they will be there forever for them (on this earth) because we all die…so we may either leave the one we love behind, or they may leave us behind, and I think it is important for our happiness to be OUR OWN, and SHARED with the one(s) we love, not dependent on having others be there for us.
My own neediness after the loss of my husband and my own feelings of being Alone, lonely, wanting someone to rescue me from my pain opened me up for the adventure I had with the boy friend I think is a psychopath. Now that I am further along the road toward healing my wounded soul from the losses of my husband, step father and the damage from the psychopathic chaos in my family, I feel much happier and ready to share that happiness if someone were to come along, but if not, that’s okay too…my happiness doesn’t depend on the presence of someone else…it depends on ME.
I guess I’m gonna have to shape a can of tuna into a heart.
Pinkey is my Valintine this year….and a pretty good one, too. He’s soft and furry and purry and warm.
My Dad was in the Navy during the second world war, and his ship was sunk on Feb.14, 1942 in the South Pacific.
I got a box of chocolates from my Dad every Valintine’s Day that he was alive. I think it was an excercise in gratitude for him. So, today I am especially remembering my Dad, and sending him images of heart shaped boxes of candy.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today was a special day, having fun giving my children Valentine cards, along with Valentine candy. When they woke up this morning, there was a card and candy waiting for each child. It was nice to be able to give the cards to them, expressing my love to them.
WOW! Kim, that is so special! What a wonderful memory of your father! I can only imagine how grateful he must have been to survive such a thing. I’ve got a book ordered about the captain of the whale ship Essex which was sunk in the early 1800s by a sperm whale. The men escaped the ship but spent 90 days in 3 small life boats and only a few survived by actually drawing straws to see which would be killed for food and which would do the killing.
The story was the idea for what became the book Moby Dick. In 1822 the same captain’s boat sunk in 15 ft of water and he returned to Boston and got a job as a night watchman and did not go back to sea. They just recently found what was left of the boat that sunk in 1822 off Hawaii.
I can’t say as I blame the man for not going back to sea any more.
I love stories of extreme surviving under awful conditions…maybe it is because Sometimes I have felt like I have survived under “extreme conditions”—and I think WE ALL HAVE done so.
I think that our strength is the same strength that would allow the survivors of the Nazi prison camps like Dr. Viktor Frankl, and people who have survived kidnapping like Elizabeth Smart, Patty Hearst, and Jaycee Dugard etc. to survive. Even though our trauma may not have been quite as physical or quite as dramatic, none the less, it still took a tremendous amount of STRENGTH on the part of each of us to SURVIVE and THRIVE, so I we should give ourselves a big TOWANDA!!!!! You obviously got your dad’s strength to survive, Kimmie!!!!
Yeah, Oxy, this is funny: When my Dad and his ship-mates got Stateside, they were all sent for an examination by a shrink to determine if they had PTSD. My Dad readilly admitted to fudging a bit…exagerating symptoms and such. Shrink looked at him at end of interview and said, D, you don’t want to go back to sea, do you. My dad wearing sheepish grin, shook his head and said quietly…”No Sir, not much.”
Shrink said, “ok, get outta here, next.” LOL.
“Life is never the same after we have loved and been loved by someone amazing. We become filled and blessed in so many ways – lending truth to the wisdom of “better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all.””
This was in a post by a friend elsewhere. Sadly, it is NOT true when you have been “loved” by a sociopath. The fact is, they are incapable of loving of course, but we were not. We are the ones who hurt, not them. And we can’t even comfort ourselves with the thought expressed above.
In fact, our loving and losing was not anything like the normal losing in love. That pain is great enough! But our pain….finding out the person we loved never really existed, and being left doubting our own ability to perceive reality….adds a whole new dimension to the hurt.
But gradually we realize we loved…and ultimately, finally, won. Won our freedom from being blinded by our dreams. I think sociopaths hook into our dearest dreams….dreams that we want SO BADLY to be true, that we ignore the red flags, that little feeling that told us things were not right.
So we loved someone who didn’t really exist, it was a charade. We lost the love. AND we lost our dream…that often we wanted more than even our self-respect.
And we ultimately win when we see ourselves clearly, stengths and weaknesses, and then that dream no longer can control us.
I have to admit, my dream still has allure for me. But at least I’m aware of it and if someone speaks to it….red flags go up to not get sucked in!
And I’m finding new dreams to replace the old. Dreams that I CAN make come true for me. Dreams that don’t depend on what anyone else does or doesn’t do.
And i’m redefining what love is. We are given such a shallow interpretation of it by our society!
neveragain, wise post; i like it. So true an experience with a sociopath makes you more realistic and mature.
http://thxthxthx.com/?p=1192
This is one of my favorite “perspective” websites ~ today’s oddly appropriate for me, I think (since I’m new here and all that!)