Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.
By Shocknawe
As a fellow victim of a spath, I’ve been both heartened and heartbroken by the stories told on Lovefraud. Also, like many of us here, I have a natural inclination to feel for others and to do what I can to support and assist in whatever way I can to help ease others’ difficulties that’s a key reason we were targeted in the first place, isn’t it? My experience has caused me to try to understand the nature of suffering and what can be done about it. So if the members will indulge me, I’d like to share some thoughts that have come to me as I continue to process, and perhaps help those on a similar path.
In the immediate aftermath of the trauma of victimization, there is a palpable shock, a disorientation and confusion a feeling of suddenly being lost, without direction or meaning in our life. Combined with the actual physical trauma to our bodies, this period can be at turns, agonizing and terrifying. It is completely natural to seek relief from such pain and torment as quickly as possible in whatever way we think will work, and so we often become consumed by the urge to escape our misery; we may spend our entire lives in this search. We try to escape the pain in countless ways through analysis, trying to make sense of the senseless, or through some authority, or conversation with those close to us who may impart some perspective or rationale that will ease our minds, or simply through distractions of every sort to just help us get through our days and nights. (Hopefully, this does not include harmful alcohol or drugs.)
What these and other forms of relief-seeking share, and which we all understandably engage in, is a common thread: a belief that if we do something, we will bring about the end of our suffering, even if only temporarily, and restore to ourselves a sense of normalcy, before the storm. We in the West have a cultural bias towards self-determinacy in the face of adversity, and we are heavily conditioned by that culture to act.
I’d like to suggest a contrary approach for consideration to those currently dealing with our particular brand of anguish and misery.
The constant searching for escape from our pain is like digging in the earth again and again, in the hope we’ll harvest the fruit that offers the nourishment we yearn for. Maybe in a time of profound distress, what we really need is just the opposite: to cultivate receptivity and stillness, to simply provide the rich soil in order for peace to take root.
Rather than actively seeking escape, perhaps, as unnatural as it may feel to us, we need to be inactive to become inwardly quiet and allow the opportunity to focus on the purification of our hearts and minds. Instead of filling every moment with outward activity, chatter and escape, we could benefit from the solitude our situation forces upon us to create a space inside in which to heal. Through subsequent acceptance and openness, we become receptive to assistance from those aspects of our nature that have our best interests at heart, for some a Higher Power, which brings peace. In short, we don’t find it by actively searching, the relief we seek finds us when we create the space through stillness to allow it to happen. Not the space of a “time out,” but the eternal space we cover up and which is inside us all the time underneath our “lives.”
It may be that the infinite forms our searches for solutions to our suffering take, are in fact no more than escapes dressed in productive activity. Paradoxically, perhaps by dropping our active urge to find peace, and becoming quiet and receptive, we consent to allowing peace to find us.
Ox Drover
Dear Constantine,
Well the agrarian life style is hard WORK…..that’s for sure. I actually love to milk. I used to go milk our family cow with my grandmother and there are good memories associated with squatting under a cow (or goat) that are imprinted on my mind. I’m having to get real about how much I can still DO though, and my gardening is limited to raised beds now instead of 10 acres of “truck” (vegetables) and my milk comes from the store, though I do keep a few ducks for eggs, I could realistically buy eggs for 1/10th of what I invest in money, much less time, in raising my own. LOL
We still do raise our own meat and butcher it ourselves.When I get to where I cant produce my own meat I will probably quit eating meat unless I can buy “home grown” meat from someone I personally know and trust.
The days of the small farmers who produced all or most of what they used or needed are long gone, and even making a living on a “small” farm these days is very difficult, and the joke is “the way you tell a REAL farmer is by what kind of job he has in town.” I am fortunate that I inherited the land to live on, and had a good job to support my habit of cows and my husband’s habit of airplanes…like the doctor that I worked with for so many years, he said he “made a SMALL fortune in farming, but he started with a LARGE ONE!” LOL I always told him I wished I had gone to medical school instead of RNP school so I could have more money to farm on a larger scale! LOL
MoonDancer
Katydid – You should check out Craigs movie ‘ Love is the Devil ‘…the searing portrait of the english painter Frances Bacon at the height of his fame in the 1960’s is one of the nastiest and most truthful portraits of the artist – as – monster ever filmed…..Craig play’s a gay character (Frances Bacon’s lover/ boy toy) and leaves nothing to the imagination (hint)…Frances Bacon was in real life a twisted, perverted Physcopath……
KatyDid
Oxy
We used to have people visit the ranch on their summer vacations and they fell in love with small town life. Green flowing pastures, happy cows dancing in the lane to go get milked, cool weather (obviously not in TEXAS). I’d tell them if they wanted my life, to come back in FEB when the rains from Alaska pelted sideways like tiny shards of glass, and all was bitter cold mud, cows were KICKING not dancing, and the cute little stores were boarded up, deserted by shopkeepers desperate for tourist dollars. Yes, I lived some days in paradise but other days… the cows still needed to be milked, twice a day, in flood or freeze. (still, secret? wouldn’t have traded it for city life in a million years. I am now in the city B/C of spath and NO OTHER REASON.)
Louise
Hens:
There’s another good Daniel Craig film you should check out…”Flashbacks of a Fool.”
one/joy_step_at_a_time
Sarahsmiles: soliciting my compassion and empathy was how the spath conned me. she conned me in the depths of my joy and most treasured values and desires, and cut my spirit open. And when I realized that ’he’ probably hadn’t died, and that meant he wasn’t who he said he was (internet/ phone con, woman pretending to be a male), I could not speak against ’him’. Someone else who she ensnared in the same con, called me and said, ’I think this isn’t real’ ”“ and all I could say was, “I can’t talk about it”. I didn’t say, ’yes, I think the same.’ I didn’t say, ’I have been doing a lot of research and this is what I think’, and I didn’t say, ’this person is a spath.’ I agreed with EVERYTHING she said, and could not say that aloud. My skin burned with anxiety, my mind raced with fear, my heart ached with the reality I was confronting. The depth of my loyalty (and fear at that point ”“ WTH WAS I dealing with???) to him was larger, deeper and wider than I felt * I* was. I know now, that this was false. And I knew it before the spath. My heart is still broken, my spirit is healing, and I hope that I can mend my relationship with my values, desires and joy.
Please let go of him. He is of no value.
Ana
Louise,
Sounds like the name of my spath’s life…lol
Ana
(((One Joy Step)))
I feel for you girl.
Ana
One Joy Step,
I saw it today and meant to ask you. What about Medicine Buddha? Have you tried it? I’m sure you have!
MoonDancer
Ana I have flashbacks of a fool,,,,and love was the devil…oh my
MoonDancer
1steprs 🙂