Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Bruce Rubenstein, M.D., a psychiatrist based in New York City.
Knowing how I know myself, and others ”¦
By Bruce Rubenstein, M.D.
Introduction
In this piece, when referring to psychopaths, sociopaths, the personality disordered, malignant narcissists, etc, I shall refer to them as pronouns in italics, as I believe they are all one and the same on a continuum. The various widely used terms to designate them (e.g., sociopath, malignant narcissist, etc.), mostly all clinical in derivation, all carry with them associations and assumptions of which I believe much is incorrect and misleading. So rather than evoking those associations, I will just use italicized pronouns as a stylistic way to separate them from us.
Knowing
In the journey to understand ourselves and them, and in order to heal from relationships with them, one must go through an anguishing process of re-evaluating everything we thought to be true. We must transcend the chaos and confusion they infused through manipulation and distortion in order to attain clarity using our rational minds. As one very wise person who grew up with them as parents once remarked about the healing process: “Start with the head; the heart will catch up later.” We want to understand the TRUTH, but it is crucial to take a moment to contemplate how we know things. At first glance, the question may seem abstract and overly philosophical. However, it is not. Take a moment to think about your experiences with them. Once you thought you knew them. Now you know them differently. Which is the TRUTH? The answer is in understanding “how” we know things. In philosophy, this is called epistemology. Others study how we know things in the fields of consciousness, psychology and neuroscience. Let’s focus on two closely related aspects of how we know things.
The first is what we REALLY mean when we say, “I know.” What we REALLY mean is that we’ve made something or someone familiar to us. In other languages, there are distinct verbs that convey this difference: French connâitre or Spanish conocer”—to be familiar with,” such as a person, versus French savoir or Spanish saber, meaning “to know” intellectually. Thus, when we encounter something or someone new, we will frequently use metaphor or simile, both ways of relating “new” to “familiar.” The first time you taste rabbit, for example, you might say, “It tastes just like chicken” (“rabbit” is new; “chicken” is familiar). Or, perhaps you might be walking down a Parisian street and comment, “This is sublime.” Here too you are relating something new, i.e., the sentient experience whilst walking in Paris, with a feeling with which you are already familiar: sublimity. So, too, of encounters with others. Upon perceiving various aspects of someone’s personality, you will frequently relate your responses to something familiar to you and then over time have the sense that you “know” that person. We all do it, but it is worthwhile to take a few moments to appreciate how frequently we take something/someone new, make it familiar to us, and then say to ourselves, “I know it,” or “I know him/her.”
The process by which we relate something or someone to the realm of familiarity is a product of consciousness. Consciousness is the state of being aware of what we are perceiving as opposed to other animals that, to the best of our knowledge, do not have consciousness. Whilst awake, we “live” in our conscious minds almost always. Ninety-nine percent of the time, after we perceive something, we “translate” it into something our consciousness understands. Here is a critical point: Our consciousness understands thoughts and their representation—words or symbols. We are quite sophisticated in that we have the ability to combine many words and many thoughts and string them together into theories, basic assumptions, narratives, and so on.
But this realm of consciousness is quite limited for several reasons. First, there is a limit to how many “things” it can contemplate and put together at one time. Let’s use a flower as an example of something we are contemplating. When we contemplate that flower in any one moment in time, there are lots of things going on in the roots, stem, petals, etc. In the non-visual realm, photosynthesis and metabolic processes are occurring. Our conscious brain, however, cannot “think” about everything going on in that flower at one time. We focus on one thing or the other, despite the fact that the actual flower’s existence is not broken down into parts—it is a complete, whole being. Our conscious mind’s process of breaking things down into parts thus creates an artificial sense of what the flower truly is. Of course, we can acknowledge this point but in truth, our limited conscious mind cannot contemplate the entire or whole existence of the flower at one point in time.
Moreover, even the notion of “time” is a product of the limitations of consciousness. For example, we cannot “think” about a flower’s entire lifecycle all at once: sprouting, growing, blooming and then fading. We break it down into chunks of time. But in reality, that flower’s “real existence” is not broken down into arbitrary or artificial time segments. It’s a continuum of life.
[To imagine what it would be like to not exist “consciously,” think about dreaming. In dreams everything is all jumbled. You are everyone in your dream and everyone is you. Time is relative. In the dream you had last night, perhaps you crossed the country in one minute. Perhaps you were in one place with one group of people and in the very next moment, you were somewhere else with entirely different people.]Memory and concentration studies bear out this point by demonstrating that we can only reliably think about roughly six to eight things at one time. We have known this for quite some time, and it is the reason that your telephone number has seven digits. The telephone company did studies back in the 1950s to see how many digits an individual could remember as one “phone number” and the ideal number was seven. (Please remember that it was before area codes. In those days, if you wanted to phone a different “area code,” you’d have to phone the operator.) Today some countries, like France, have instituted eight digit numbers. However, the ideal number of digits is seven.
But life’s challenges obviously involve much more than recalling seven digits. We deal with more input or perception by creating “buckets” or “categories” in our minds. An example: living things. We have created “buckets” like animals, plants, micro-organisms, etc. But if you really think about it, no such buckets exist in nature, in reality. We simply categorize things in order for us to consciously digest them. An analogy might be our digestive systems—we eat “food,” but then break it down into “chunks” (i.e., fats, amino acids, etc.) that are digestible.
It’s crucial to consider this, to consider our own limitations. And consider the fact that each person will probably create different “buckets,” depending on that person’s nature, experiences, etc. For example, someone who is quite concrete and overwhelmed by too many choices will create fewer buckets, possibly even only two buckets, like “Good and Bad,” or “Pretty and Ugly.” The more buckets, though, the more variation based on individual factors. For example, you may have had a talk and shared your experience of them with a friend who is very concrete and never had such an unfortunate experience. That talk was probably unsatisfying and frustrating because your friend puts people into two buckets: “Good” and “Bad.” But after your terrible experience, you now know that it’s not quite so simple. You now have several buckets with varying degrees of “goodness” and “badness.” And not to complicate it even further, but consider the fact that nearly all those who read Lovefraud, and who have had similar experiences, likely have slightly different buckets. Therefore, the important point here is to keep in mind that we create buckets in order to be able to think about things in a distilled form.
As things get more complex, we create different levels or strata of buckets. This is where we get into organizing principles, theories, ways to see the world, and particularly how we experience other people. But these systems of buckets must change over time as we observe things that don’t “fit” with our underlying assumptions, our underlying “buckets.” As one example, Freud created an enormously complex theoretical base to explain all of human mental life and behavior. Frankly, it’s nearly impossible to integrate what we observe about them into Freud’s ideas. Hard core Freudians will go to great lengths to make this square peg fit into one of Freud’s round holes. The reason is that we get very attached to our basic assumptions. That’s human nature, to prefer the “known,” the “familiar,” or to stay in our comfort zone. And the more elaborate that base theoretical construct is, the more we can manipulate it and convince ourselves that it really does explain everything. I’m not picking on Freud, although his theory is quite elaborate. I could have chosen any theoretical approach to understanding human nature, e.g., object relations, Jungian theory, even what they call “strict neuroscience,” looking at neurons and neurotransmitters.
One more important point on consciousness—it tends to either exclude or metaphorize any perception that cannot be put into a thought or word. Thus, everything that deals with intuition is immediately either dismissed or shoved into another construct. But intuition is very real. Think about how many aspects of them you perceive and then make you say to yourself, “What the hell is this?” Well, so much of what we see in them is utterly irrational, unthinkable and indescribable. Our conscious mind, that “tool” we use to think about EVERYTHING, including ourselves and others, doesn’t do well in the realm of irrationality. What then drives us crazy is that despite the irrational nature of their behavior, they all behave in a similar, predictable manner (i.e., lying, cheating, etc.). That is one reason that trying to understand them is so crazy making. The fact that you can predict and observe consistent behaviors in them suggests a cause-effect or rational template to them. We “should” be able to create “buckets” to understand. But it’s NOT rational. Rather, we have all of these other observations about them—those that are more “intuitive,” but for which we lack the words or we lack the ability to incorporate those perceptions in our “rational” conscious mind. The result is confusion—that anguishing confusion every person experiences after interaction with them.
No matter which basic assumptions or theories you use, even a combination of theories, understanding them and how we get involved with them is elusive. We don’t realize how much of our thinking is based on years and years and years of all sorts of basic assumptions, or “buckets,” that we automatically invoke in order to understand or make them familiar to how we are USED to thinking about ourselves, others, goodness and even evil. You may not even have had an “evil” bucket at all. Trying to fit the square pegs of our observations of them into our pre-existing round holes requires far too much time and energy. The healing process, therefore, involves the very difficult and frequently anguishing journey of getting rid of pre-existing “buckets” and creating new ones. By the way, one could call this process, “Personal Growth” or the “Search for Truth.”
As I mentioned at the beginning, the healing process necessarily requires achieving clarity using our rational minds. It is thus helpful to begin with only two buckets, and they are:
1) This makes sense
2) This doesn’t make sense
At first this simple binary delineation may prove harder than you think. This is because you are so used to your old “buckets” that you will find yourself tempted by them. Try to resist the temptation. Try to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing “right now.” To quote a colleague of mine, the process is “tolerating discomfort for the sake of growth.” Over time it will get easier. But even initially, you will begin to feel a certain freedom that will arise as a result of you beginning to trust yourself again. At the core, all good people have good instincts.
There is another important point to make in this regard: Never throw out a perception, even if it doesn’t make sense right now. Many people run into problems by equating a perception that doesn’t make sense with something that is not true. For example, one frequently hears, “I loved him/her.” That observation will go into bucket #2: “It doesn’t make sense to love someone who is not reciprocal, who is hurting me.” But it doesn’t mean it is not true, rather, it doesn’t make sense now. As an alternative, spend some time thinking about what it means when we say, “I love someone.” It turns out it can mean many things to many people. Then keep the observation (“I loved him/her“) on hold. Don’t discard it as not true just because now it isn’t making sense to you. Allow for the possibility that it doesn’t make “rational” sense right now, but at one time it did make sense. It doesn’t change the reality of your clearer mind today that it doesn’t make sense. You can come back to it later. In the meanwhile, without you even noticing, you are learning to be more accepting of what you do not “know,” or of what is not familiar to you. Clearly mistreating others should NEVER be familiar to you. Learning to accept that which we do not understand right now is not only crucial to healing, but also exigent to what it means to be most human throughout our lives. Patience and acceptance bring peace.
Postscript
After letting the ideas presented here percolate for a while, it may be clear to you why I use the “buckets” of italicized pronouns (e.g., he, she, them) rather than using terms such as sociopath, narcissist, etc. Even the way in which we write or read about them is part of how we “know” them.
Dear Ox Drover: You are an inspiration to all. I feel buoyed up when I read your messages as the feeling of failure looms over me like a lead weight. The pressure I put on myself for “not getting over it” is overwhelming.
I told you last week that he had joined my gym and to date, I’ve not seen him. It has been a relief as I now feel that if the gym ran a credit check, he probably failed (it is very expensive) and with him being $100K in credit card debt and filing for bankruptcy, I doubt that they would have continued a financial relationship with him. But, I look for him every time I walk in the door.
Thank you for your posts.
Yeah great article Took a while to digest. After years of emotional and psychological abuse it is obviously going to take a long time to heal, but you will….. I am still recovering so every article I read is another link in the restoration chain. My story is unique as I am a male and the abuse was from another male. To read an article like the above amazes me that these people are all text book cases So predicable it astounds me. Looking back my intuition was correct on every count. But you have to understand that this is challenged by a sociopath / psychopath. “Maybe I am wrong “, so you suppress your feelings which are God given. Now you have to learn to trust them again. You will win but it takes time. Read all you can……education is your best defense.
Grandmother
I know that this will not endear me to you I will be honest with you anyway.
You have virtually no chance of winning right now because you are in an emotional state. Your best chance is to continue educating yourself by reading reading reading. Continue to watch her and learn from your observations. Be as patient as a serpent and as wise as a dove.
It will take a couple of years or more as you begin to understand things differently. You will learn even more about yourself. what you learn will serve you well. Trust God.
Frankie, you are so right-on. The intuition thing takes a back-seat when you love someone. I find it interesting that the emotion takes control over the pragmatic side of us all. We saw it, heard it, but yet did not challenge it. That is the thing that has hurt the most.
Again, thank you for your comments. Here are a few more clarifications:
Soimnotthecrazee1 – Anything that doesn’t make sense to us in our current constellation of buckets is discarded. Thus what you perceived but determined to be “…I don’t get this bucket and will make sense of it later…” is not a bucket. Yes, you clearly remembered that line, that action, but you put it aside, discarded it at the moment, “un-knew” it, denied it. That is what people mean by cognitive dissonance. You perceive something that doesn’t fit into any of your familiar ways of thinking, into your pre-existing buckets. Then there’s this tension between what you perceive and what you consciously know. This tension creates confusion, anxiety, fatigue, etc. The only way to make your perceptions and your buckets match is to re-do your buckets and create one called, “This is irrational and incomprehensible” and accept the fact that right now, you cannot understand it.
There is however another way we respond to perceptions lacking an “Incomprehensible” bucket. We distort the perception – rationalize it, justify it, etc. Thus we may perceive a nasty statement but then distort it into an existing bucket like, “Things we say that we don’t mean because we’re stressed” or “We sometimes misinterpret.” Here too, the only way to correct the situation is stop distorting the perception and create a bucket, “This is mean.”
Anitasee – Good point. Many of us have a “But…” bucket. I believe it is another example of what I described in the last paragraph above of distorting the perception. The other bucket you mentioned is “he is doing his best.” This is a fine example of distorting the perception by putting into a bucket that describes what YOU are and assumes that others will follow suit. In fact it is you who always tries your best. His nefarious behaviors don’t fit into that bucket. In my experience, people who always try their best are characterized by: 1) immediate apology and regret/remorse after doing less than one’s best, and 2) immediate change in behavior so that the adverse behavior either never appears again or is noticeably improved. Anyone who blithely repeats a behavior injurious to another AFTER it was pointed out already is NOT doing his/her best.
Kim Frederick – “If you’ve got more than a few things in the wtf? bucket, transfer them to the trash can and run.” Well said. But then finish the job of your own growth and don’t forget to take the time to reflect and create new buckets for yourself so that in the future, you do not try to seek out a bucket at all when you hear a “wtf” statement. You merely turn away from that person and avoid future contact.
Regarding your later posting, I do not think that what you went through was a waste of time. Although it was painful, it was necessary. This IS how we heal. This IS how we learn to accept. It is our capacity to tolerate that process that results in personal growth.
Superkid10 – Thank you for your kind words. Indeed some may interpret your quest to understand as not moving forward or may even label it obsessive. In my experience, some people simply must understand and stay with it until they are satisfied. Provided that process doesn’t go on for too many years, or doesn’t significantly interfere with other aspects of life, that process should go on as long as necessary. Some of us must dot every “i” and cross every “t.” That type of tenacity and thoroughness is commendable. By the way, given your journey, it would be most appropriate for you to change your nickname to “Superadult.”
Twice Betrayed – When one sees these traits in one’s children, when one cannot relate to one’s own children, it is the most heartbreaking. Please know that I’m sure your willingness to share your experiences provides much solace to other parents in the same situation.
Perniciousfamilycourts – Your experience sounds simply terrible. You bring up a few extremely important points and although they are not directly related to the piece, I did want to comment on them:
1) You are 100% correct. There are as many female predators out there as male predators. In my practice, I have seen far more men injured by women than women injured by men. There may very well be one factor to explain my experience – injured men may feel more comfortable seeing a male therapist (conversely women may be more inclined to seek a female therapist). But from what I’ve observed, the malevolent actions of predatory women equal that of men. You said it very well: “The female, in my view tends to be far more passive aggressive, covert, manipulative, rather than “controlling” by use of intimidation, verbal abuse, and shaming. In my personal experience, the Fraud is just as pernicious, yet even more difficult to quantify and identify.”
2) The legal system is utterly corrupted. “No fault” is a fiction created in order to avoid having to spend the time necessary to get to the bottom of what is going on. The judges (both divorce and family court) and attorneys that populate this system are frequently as corrupted as the system itself in their pursuit of forced compliance rather than truth. And although I professionally know only a few colleagues who do psychological evaluations for the court system, they seem either oblivious or reluctant to spend the necessary time to reveal the truth. And I’ve witnessed several cases where the court appointed guardian, social worker or attorney for the child is as if not more toxic than the malevolent parent.
Skylar – You say you have a bucket for the horrible feelings you had that they “slimed” you with? I have no doubt that you suffered terribly. However I truly doubt you or any other decent person can or will ever experience the bottomless abyss that is their existence. Do not misconstrue this statement as sympathy or compassion for them. Their inner existence is something you will never understand. It will never be familiar to you. Conversely they will never be familiar with the suffering you have endured. This is a crucial point. They and us are NOT the same and their darkness will never be familiar to us. We will never “know” it.
Frankie – Your story may be unique to LoveFraud, but here in New York City I see plenty of men targeted by women and other men, and women targeted not only by men but by other women. This phenomenon does not discriminate by gender. As for trusting your emotions again, I refer you to something I mentioned in the article: “Start with the head; the heart will catch up later.”
frankie – your experience is not unique here. there are men here who have been duped by men. i am a woman who was duped by a woman…pretending to be a man. ahhh, the internet!
Dr. R,
Thanks for your reply. I am working on re-doing my buckets. Actually completely eliminating any buckets I acquired as a result of my xspath except for the one you mentioned “irrational and incomprhensible” when I see someones actions in that bucket, I will walk away and have no further association with them. Boy you said it… anxiety, confussion and fatigue!!!!! I lived on raw nerves, anxiety and adrenaline and was completely exhausted. Thank God I left him and now I am healing!
Thanks!
soimnotthecrazee1!
Dr. R…
Thanks for your comments on our comments, they are wonderful!
Dr. Rubenstein, I read your post twice and then came back to read it again, because different things kept popping out at me. Thank you for giving us such a thought-provoking and helpful piece.
One of my new patterns after working on myself for a few years is to make things that confuse me (particularly in business, but also in personal matters that involve planning) a reason to dig in my heels and refuse to go farther, until I do understand. At one level, I’m a little sorry about this. Because I used to be more adventurous, seeing things I didn’t understand as an opportunity for a big learning experience. And I’d jump in and see what happened. These days, what I’m more likely to exercise is judgment. I have standards. (Gosh!) I keep meaning to go back and take Myers-Briggs again, and see if I’ve moved on the perceiver-judger scale. I used to be off-the-chart perceiver. It would be nice if I were more to center now.
I related to your advice, “Never throw out a perception, even if it doesn’t make sense right now.” I’m not sure people can do that, anyway. I know I can’t. While I was going through my recovery (which I viewed as fixing the much older issues that made me vulnerable to the sociopath and continuing to imagine I loved him for five years while he plundered my identity and my life), I resolved a lot of old confusions. In fact, I realized that I had hundreds of them that were floating around like ribbons in the air. All of them memories of something that was waiting for me to figure it out, so it could be finally filed away.
Not all of them were about him (though a lot were). One notable one was about a call I got from an old friend while I was in the middle of that toxic relationship. We had known each other through a lot of big life dramas. But she told me that she was getting seriously into meditation and she couldn’t listen to my terrible stories anymore. She didn’t want me to call her again. My initial reaction to be offended and want to defend myself, but then I realized that there was something in this that I would understand later. It went into the group of floating ribbons waiting to drop to the floor. (It did eventually drop, when I was learning to protect not just my body and money, but also my peace of mind.)
And finally, I don’t mean to complicate things further. But one of the things I find myself dealing with now, long after the big, dramatic work of recovery is over (though I’ll never be out of the “mop up” phase), is making peace with who I used to be. As an incest survivor, I learned about the threads of pain and warped belief that shaped my life, but understanding myself didn’t equate to liking myself. And the “better” I got, the more I struggled with disgust for who I used to be. Not the girl who was so stupid as to fall in love with this dangerously crippled man. But the girl who debased herself and threw herself away and agreed to all kinds of terrible things that hurt her and other people too.
Only lately have I realized this distancing I have done with my own history, as though I am better than my old self, rather than its future, a blessedly happier and more grown-up iteration. And I’m finding that I’m having to reparent and comfort myself again, only this time in too many time dimensions to understand rationally. I did the best I could. After a very rough start, I did my best to learn and grow up. It just took a long time. That last relationship almost finished what my father started, but it didn’t. Because there was something about the timing of it, something about me, something about my ability to come that close to nothingness in order to realize I wanted to take myself back. Stop being what other people made me.
And I don’t know if it’s true for other people, but somewhere inside of me, I knew this was going on, all the while I was going through that incredibly destructive drama. Somewhere, I knew that this was really about me, and not him. But I couldn’t figure out how. Couldn’t figure out what I believed that wasn’t true. What survival rules were just accommodations to abuse. What parts of me were masks and which were real. It took some years after he was gone to make progress with that.
I’m sitting here shaking my head at myself, thinking it’s easy to talk about the magical opportunity at the heart of not knowing, after you’ve finally figured out what the hell it was you were supposed to be learning. Kind of like labor pains, it’s easy to forget what it felt like to be dogpaddling as fast as I could, trying to keep from drowning in the bucket of wtf.
One of the most interesting things about your article is its implicit belief in the power of all of us to see through it eventually. I always believed that. And maybe that’s a big thing that kept me from surrendering to terminal despair. It can take a long time to see through. Depression, if that’s part of the process, can seem to go on forever. But I once read that depression is part of the learning process, nearly all the way through; it’s just resistance to accepting something we’ve already learned. And I like that idea; it feels right.
What I said earlier about digging my heels in when I don’t understand is only true when I have to depend on someone else. When it’s me and the universe, I’m a lot more flexible. If I believe that not knowing is the beginning of learning, how could I possibly demand to understand everything right now? I have to trust I’m designed to evolve as a human being. And I’ve learned that the big jumps forward are usually the ones that involve leaving part of my old self behind. Ouch! Then, ah and awe.
I hope you come back and write more. I think you inspire us.
Kathy
aussie – you around? how are you?