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.
Eden,
your list of what he robbed you of, is just like my own.
The lack of naturally happy thoughts is what I miss most. I used to have a tendency toward optimism. My spath tore me down one day at a time for 25 years. He did it slowly so that I wouldn’t notice that he was the cause. For the last few years I would wake up every day and curse that I hadn’t died in my sleep. And I STILL didn’t “get it” that HE was the reason I felt this way. I thought I just wasn’t strong enough to deal with everything life threw at me.
One day, I was talking to a store clerk and told him about my depression. He said, “you feel that way because bad things happen and there aren’t any good things happening to balance out your life” – it struck me that this was true and I hadn’t noticed. I was a frog getting boiled slowly.
Then when I left the spath, I knew that I had been set up to feel bad and I thought everything would finally balance out. It HAS gotten better. The only sad thing left is knowing that spaths EXIST and that they are everywhere. It really puts a damper on my own existance. Every day I ask myself, “What can we DO about it?”
Skylar.
Me too. Part of the agony for me is that anyone would have to suffer so much.
Thanks for your post.
RB
Eden,
Some how I missed your above post about the homeopathics, until now.
Those are great suggestions. I’d forgotten about those and I have all 3 of those in my cupboard at the cabin. I’ll give it a shot. Thanks.
Roses,
I’m not sure I understand. Do you mean spath survivors suffering so much?
Yes. I think if it can be prevented or in the aftermath, more info to reach out to survivors, then all the better. I hate thinking of others suffering so much pain. It’s agonizing for me.
RB
Ox,
If I am worthy or YOUR praise it is only because I have been embraced by the wisdom and experience of yourself and others here who were THERE when I found myself sitting alone in a room where the Federal Marshals had just removed the man I married for the love of my life, at gun point.
I said the other day, “its all fun and games until the Feds get there”!
To me, losing that relationship feels like ( and maybe more really so than I want to think) a near death experience which gives me a grand second chance.
In that respect and in finding the voices that spoke to me through the FOG that followed discovery, I am so very lucky.
There is no praise for me except that it reflects a collected and giving wisdom of so many here. Yourself included.
No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.
— John Donne
Silver, JD is one of my favorite poets.
A verse I love:
Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name,
So, in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angel’s effect us oft, and worshiped be.
VOICES in the fog????????
There are dr’s for that!
🙂
Sounds like you may have spent too much time on the river bank in Paris!!!
EB, you mean you don’t have voices in the fog?
holy split pea soup. I’ve been halluscinating.
Hello. Anybody out there? 🙂
Nice quote, Silver. I like it.
Roses,
Yes, it’s painful to know that others suffer. It’s even more painful to know that lives are wasted and destroyed by spaths. Suffering wouldn’t be so bad if there was always redemption at the end. WE ARE THE LUCKY ONES. We got OUT. We have a CHANCE for redemption. So many people don’t get out. They die. My friend Mary, died suicide by spath. My aunt, died cancer by spath. Many go to their grave having wasted their lives living with spaths that oppressed them and never knowing it. I almost did.
A quote along the same vein as Silvermoons, this is from the song, “Losing It” by Rush.
Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasies.
But most of us just dream about
the things we’d like to be.
Sadder still to watch it die
than never to have known it.
For you the blind who once could see,
the bell tolls for thee.