Editor’s note: This article was submitted by Steve Becker, LCSW, CH.T, who has a private psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and clinical consulting practice in New Jersey, USA. For more information, visit his website, powercommunicating.com.
You really need to admire yourself for surviving an exploitative relationship. I say this very seriously, not flippantly. We all, of course, hope to minimize our involvement with exploitative individuals. But in the course of life, as we know, that’s not always possible. It is vital, therefore, if you’ve been victimized by and/or are recovering from involvement with an exploiter, to fully, genuinely appreciate (and remind yourself constantly) that you are indeed strong, impressively strong, because only the strong survive exploitation.
Many clients with whom I work (really, most people, I think) tend to see personal strength and insecurity; personal strength and low self-esteem, as incompatible. They balk at the idea that you can be a very strong person and insecure at the same time; that you can be a very strong person even with low self-esteem. For instance, when someone violates you (especially chronically) and you don’t defend yourself properly, the tendency is to attribute your failure at self-protection to “personal weakness.” The thought is something like, “If I was a strong person, I wouldn’t have let that abuse occur. I’d have asserted myself, defended myself, drawn the line.”
But it’s not personal weakness that explains the failure to protect your boundaries; it’s more often a lack of clarity, in knowing precisely what your boundaries are, and precisely what constitutes an unacceptable violation of them. Victims of sustained exploitation/abuse aren’t personally weak, quite the contrary. My experience has affirmed again and again how remarkably strong and resourceful most of them are. What they lack, however, often is a clear, secure sense of their boundaries; this insecurity of boundaries leaves them vulnerable to compromising themselves. After all, you can’t assert and/or protect your boundaries unless and until you’ve established them very clearly and securely (in your mind).
This explains what for many can seem so confusing and dichotomous: how a victim of sustained exploitation/abuse can, on the one hand, lobby so effectively for others’ interests, while, with respect to her/his own, appear stuck in circumstances he or she would counsel anyone else to reject and escape.
But I restate: You can’t protect your interests if they aren’t, in the first place, clearly defined. And you can’t defend your boundaries if, on any level, you’re uncertain, or ambivalent about, what they are. This disadvantaged position helps explain how an otherwise strong, resourceful adult can find her/himself tolerating and enduring the meanness and nonsense of a defective partner.
When my clients who have been in exploitative relationships discover confidently their boundaries, they often feel sad, on one hand, not to have done so sooner; but thrilled on the other to find themselves, as if miraculously, just as skilled at protecting their own interests as they’ve always been at protecting others’.
It’s a kind of bittersweet discovery. The bitter part, if grieved properly, is usually short-lived; the sweet aspect is long-lasting.
Dear Wisernow,
You are INDEED, WISER NOW! Very good post. Thank you for sharing that well written post.
Good luck to you.
Dear Wisernow. I was struggling to establish boundaries, but he took NO NOTICE. It taught me a hard lesson. He had no problem AT ALL sticking to HIS boundaries. Infact he was so rigid and unyielding (there was absolutely no give and take) that when I suggested a place for us to meet for a drink, he agreed then declined saying he preferred somewhere else across the road. I refused to submit, and I sat in one bar and he sat in the bar across the road and when he went home he passed ‘my bar’ – big red flag. I didnt always put my words into action, I allowed myself to be ‘diluted’ and my needs were reduced to nothing. He was occasionally complicit when he was setting me up to get something out of me, as he didnt have a car, he was always getting lifts – but he never asked, he waited for me to offer – clever – they exploit your goodness – good people dont do that. I have friends who respect my goodness and dont exploit it. We learn through this to differentiate between the good people and the exploiters.
I DID speak up for myself, but at the time I didnt understand the parameters of his ‘game’, but I didnt stand by my words, I kept thinking of reasons to let him off the hook, or I believed his crooked lies instead of believing my intuition.
Like you, I have had to exist under my own steam and with no support and I have always been a giver and all my jobs have been like that too and Ihave burnt out of 3 jobs giving too much.
For people like us, receiving is a big issue, somewhere we feel we are not worthy, so that when we meet someone who appears to be there for us, we give in abundance. Another lesson for me, is to work on being my own person and realise that I mustnt sell myself short, and that I am worthy and I dont have to give my gifts away and that my energy and time are precious too.
My N was the ‘perfect suitor’ reliable, showed personal integrity etc for a short while, until his shadow side came out and it was vicious. We have to remember that in all relationships, we cannot know all sides of someone in the first 6 months and that we have to allow the negative hidden sides of someone to come out so that we see a rounded view of the person, THEN WE choose whether we want to invest.
When he started his weird behaviour, I was going to ‘cheating’ websites and I realised that I had NO CLEAR idea of my boundaries and that some of the stuff I was allowing made me feel uncomfortable and he could offer no reasonable explanation – because he was obviously lying. I am much clearer about my boundaries now, problem is that many of them do their stuff in secret.
Bottom line is that we must have had self worth in order to extract ourselves from the abusive relationship, even if they engineered the ‘end’, we refused to accept – so we can build on that. Good luck and healing to you Wisernow
This is my first post here and I have to say thank you to everyone for all these comments. Reading through the site is giving me hope at a challenging time that I am not alone. I’m a guy who lives in NYC and have had the pleasure of dating back to back sociopaths.
I must agree that the lack of clarity is so important in enabling her behavior and has been one of my biggest weaknesses. Which in my case is progress, because I used to not even pick up the signals of lying and deceit. Now that I’ve become slightly better at reading non-verbal cues and listening more closely, I need to get better at demanding more clarity – and then taking action when I find inconsistencies.
I spotted the lying in the beginning and let it go. Why? It only became more egregious. I guess I’ll have to ask myself why I didn’t confront it in the first place. It turned out that she waited to get comfortable with me before she restarted old relationships on the side.
It hurts a lot right now, because my illusions have been shattered again. But I have hope that I am escaping comparatively intact and can draw on the wisdom and support of others here so that I can evolve enough to have less chance of making the same mistakes again.
Dear Treeman, Hello and Welcome. With regard to clarity, there are some ‘indicators’ that might help and people here will probably add their own. Finding out about someones past ‘track record’ is pretty important and may throw up some red flags. Type of occupation can be a smokescreen and is not a reliable indicator, anyhow some of them stay ‘beneath’ the law.
The big one for me, is that actions and words have to match with consistency, so if someone is professing that you are their ideal partner, are they actually showing that on a regular consistent basis. Predators will always let themselves down in some way and weird behaviour or behaviour that leaves you with a question mark is a red flag. Women though are much more wily then men, but of course the mobile phone is the chief means of communication, just observe how they ‘police’ their phone. Is their behaviour OPEN and TRANSPARENT? My ex used to ‘forget’ and leave his wallet in my car overnight!! Predators also will take much more than they give and they will only give to get. How much actual consistent energy and effort is the person putting into the relationship. I am sorry that you have had to suffer from being with that person but as you say, you will gain alot of wisdom and support here.
Dear Treeman,
The first RED FLAG most of us see is some “small” lie–and I’m not talking about the “do thes epants make my butt lookk big?” kind of lie, but just something about themselves that builds them up a bit, making more of an education than they really acheived or something on that scale, or lying about why they were late or didn’t call when they were supposed to meet you somewhere. AT THE FIRST LIE I am out of there! There is no need to lie it shows that they do not repect you enough to tell you the truth.
I have given many people second chances evena fter confronting them about a significant lie and I HAVE ALWAYS LIVED TO REGRET IT. ****ALWAYS**** no exceptions.
(I am talking about adults here not small children)
Run from the LIE is my best advice. DON’T LOOK BACK and don’t question it. Just RUN.
There are other red flags as well, and I think there are some threads here on red flags so see ifyou can find them. The first one most of us see too, is the “you’re my perfect prince/ss” routine–they are just TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Love at first sight might happen, but if they come on “too good to be true” keep your eyes opened for the HOOK, it may be there. Don’t fall for it no matter how enticing it is. Read some of the true love fraud stories and it will give your hair a permanent wave!
Welcome.
Beverly, Thank you for your kind words. It’s still pretty fresh and I dont feel out of the woods yet, so again am grateful for this site.
With respect to your comment on the mobile phone, that was the Major red flag. Her behavior with the blackberry/phone became clandestine after about a month. If she had left if out on a table and I happened to be near it, she would swoop it up and put it in her purse. At a concert we attended, whenever I walked up to get us cokes, the blackberry came out within five seconds of my having walked up a few stairs. (this happened all the time) When I asked to use her phone when mine had broken that same night, her fear was palpable. When she checked her phone one night at my apartment and said ‘oh someone called me’ as if I were to ask ‘who’, I asked and she said, oh nobody. When I came out of my bathroom one night at 11.30pm she was with her back to me and texting someone on the phone. I asked whats up and she said ‘oh Im just texting one of my patients mothers to make sure they’re coming in the morning’. Doubtful.
I could go on. So, no her behavior was not open or transparent. The tough thing is that, with someone schooled in the game, its difficult to catch her outright without compromising your own integrity (like sneaking into her phone, which I refused to do) or basically saying ‘hey I dont trust you, could you hand me your phone for the night’.
So my choices became, waste my time trying to ‘catch her’ at something or let my gut feeling and a preponderance of sketchy behavior inform me that I simply didn’t trust her. And the toughest thing of all is that she could be so damn nice to me when she wanted to.
OxDrover, Thank you for your comments and advice on setting hard boundaries for others’ behavior. Sometimes it is hard to believe that someone that could be so good to you could cause so much pain. So, even though the signs are there and I can read them sometimes, I find myself wanting to believe otherwise. That’s where I get myself into trouble.
Yea, treeman, DON’T WE ALL! LOL
Dear Treeman, Cheaters often get caught via their mobile or computer. My ex had his phone pin protected and he gave me a warning and said that he would not tolerate any girlfriend checking his phone or belongings. Red Flag!! Anyway, my ex had at least 12 phones and I only saw one at a time, so he was possibly using 12 different phone numbers. I got very caught up in trying to catch him, but after he was telling me and doing things that made me uncomfortable, I decided that I didnt need proof and would finish things, because he wasnt worth the effort.
I didnt want to intrude into his privacy either, but then we didnt trust them – because they were giving us CAUSE not to. Every woman I know would check their bfs phone if they felt they had cause to! I would have no problem if my boyfriend picked up my phone, because i would have nothing to fear. But my ex kept his phone with him all of the time, like his right hand. OxDrover is right, setting boundaries is very important and being open with your partner about your observations – a genuine faithful person will be open and reassuring.
I was married to a sociopath 9 years ago !!! I still bring up good qualities he had with my future fiance now !!!! I do not know anyone on this blog but I can honestly say I am over him. My fiance says why do I bring up him and not my first marriage why only him!!!!! I do not want to lose this relationship what can I do to save it I have not recently brought him up but my future fiance cannot forget !!!!!! What is the best thing to say?