LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Things people say

Skylar, you wrote: “NC works for a spath lover, because you can find a new lover, but with parents it’s a one shot deal and NC is just like a death sentence.” You also mentioned being imprinted on them and not having any choice.

These are your current beliefs, but I suggest that you study them a bit. Break them down into their separate parts. If you meditate, use bits of the statements as mantras. Or just take bits and repeat them over and over and over to yourself until their meaning fades and you start to see what’s behind them.

Every single thing you wrote in these statements can be questioned. Debated with someone else, like a therapist, or just with yourself. You’ve done a very good thing just getting this stuff out of your head and into the air, so you can look at it and it can be discussed.

I want to offer you an imaginary exercise. It has two parts.

First take one of your parents and write down everything you believe an ideal parent should be. Let’s say it’s the father you wish you had. If that’s hard for you, think of what they’re doing that angers or frustrates you, and flip it around for what would be its opposite. Then put that away for later.

Now imagine yourself in one of those test environments they have at college where they’re doing psychological research. You’re at a desk, watching a video of a man. It is your father, but in the imaginary scenario, you don’t know this man. They show you five minutes of clips of this man talking with other people, making decisions, and doing whatever he does in his life, like driving, doing work he does, eating, reading a newspaper.

The people doing the testing ask you to write down your impressions of this person. His personality type, his ethics, his interests and tastes, and is possible, his personal goals. When you’re done with that, they ask if, overall, you have a positive or negative response to him, whather you like him. The last question is, if you had to deal with him like asking him a favor or working on some kind of business transaction, how do you think would be the best way to approach him so that it worked out well.

Now you leave the testing exercise and go back to your own space. You pull out the two sheets and compare them. One is a description of your own iconic idea of “father.” The other is your best shot at getting inside who your real father actually is. You have focussed entirely on him and gathered information to try to understand his experience. (This, by the way, is very close to my definition of compassion.)

Pay attention to how you’re feeling when you do this. If these feelings are some kind of suffering (grief, disappointment, resentment, rage), this is what is happening because you are stubbornly demanding that your father be someone else. And everything that happens because of these feelings is the damage that you are doing to your life, because of your refusal to accept that he’s not who you want him to be.

Now this is a very Bhuddist way of processing. The Bhuddists teach that our suffering is caused by attachments, some demand that the universe be what we want it to be, rather than what it is. That attachments not only create our misery, but keep us focussed on it, because we think it’s our job to change reality and so we keep hammering at it. And sometimes we’re not only refusing to accept what’s going on in the outside word, but we’re also demanding that we be different, that we not have the feelings we have.

One more interesting thing about Bhuddist teaching is that we are encouraged to have our own feelings. We are alive. We live through things that are pleasing and satisfying; we also live through losses and disappointments. This is part of reality. We’re okay where we are. But we’re supposed to fully experience it, not stuff it, so we can learn from it. Identify our attachments, explore them and discover why they’re so important to us, and ultimately decide whether they’re worth the energy we’re giving them. Or if there is something more interesting and productive and cheerful and rewarding that we might give our attention to.

So let’s go back to these things you said.

1. It’s okay if you go NC with a lover because there will always be another one.

That may be true, but it’s a very mechanical and cold way of viewing both your lovers and yourself. If you fell in love with someone, it was because they reflected some deep desire you have for your life. Of course, you can and should leave behind someone who causes you pain or doesn’t have meaning anymore in your life.

But if you don’t reflect on why that person was there, what powerful need you have that he satisfied, then you’ve invested huge energy and attention on an experience and gotten little back for it. We fall in love with our teachers. What did he teach you? More importantly, what did you learn about yourself and your deep needs? And how will you use that learning to change your life?

This may sound very peculiar, especially when we’re talking about relationships with abusive or predatory people, but they are also our teachers. In the end, if you want the experience to be something about you and you want to extract the good out of it, the learning and the life-changing, you have to focus on what this means for you. And how you can turning what appears to be losing into a victory. If and when you do that, you can actually look back at the relationship as a good thing. You’ve seen me right that I’m grateful for my relationship with my ex. This is true. And it’s one of the reasons I can feel compassionate toward him, though I don’t want him in my life anymore. And feel sorry for him too, because he’s not capable of learning the way I do, because his pathology is such a closed circle and keeps him so stuck.

2. With parents, it’s a one-shot deal.

Skylar, I don’t know how old you are, but this is the statement of someone who is trapped in a dependent relationship with people who are inadequate to hold up their end of the deal. Like many of us were as children.

So with all respect, I would suggest that your issues with your parents are based in history, old history, not what’s going on now. The child in you that didn’t get what it needed to develop along a healthy path of self-esteem, self-empowerment with some important skills. Like the ability to comfort yourself (because your pain was dismissed as unimportant or burdensome or weakness). Or the ability to extend compassion and understanding to other people (because your expression of your own needs was not respected or actively discouraged). Or the ability to make and trust your own critical judgments about what is good or bad for you and then act on them (because your observations and inclinations were disparaged or ignored or you were expected to bury your own needs in favor of other people’s needs).

So because you didn’t get everything you needed to grow up, parts of you are still in that framework, struggling to get what you needed from the people who didn’t give them to you in the first place.

The thing is, if you look at this, you already know this is a fool’s game. As I wrote previously, these people are who they are, and as parents, they probably are just as unable to foster your personal growth as they ever were. (Because they have their own issues of never having fully matured emotionally.)

And the truth is that there are parents we can grab all over the place. An astounding (to me) number the people I coach or counsel have told me at some point that I am the mother they never had. But the thing is that I’m not the “whole” mother. They don’t want me to cook their dinners or do their laundry or drive them to soccer practice. They want me to help them develop emotionally or learn objective reasoning skills or find the courage to be who they want to be. In other words, they see in me something about who they want to be (or who they really are) and they spend time with me to unblock unfinished developmental paths.

There is a whole world of teachers that we call “mentors” or “coaches” or “best friends” or “lovers.” We are attracted to them because we see something in them that’s really about ourselves. A strength where we are weak. A freedom where we are trapped. A skill set that enables them to maneuver successfully in circumstances that we always fail at.

I married several of my teachers and lived with other ones. (I wish a knew then what I know now, because some of my leavetakings were very cruel after I “outgrew” them.) But I also followed some people I thought were wiser than me for a while. I also inhaled certain subject areas — like my reading about childhood development, personality disorders, theories of therapeutic treatment, religious philosophy, and models of trauma processing — while I was recuperating from the relationship with the sociopath and determined to “fix what was wrong with me.”

My parents will always be my bloodline progenitors, and in learning to be more adult, I learned a lot by thinking about their characters and their backgrounds, as well as how it played out on the lives of my siblings and me. I can’t change where I physically came from or my inheritance from that background. But I can make decisions about how I view it, and how I use it.

And part of that was about love. I went NC with my father and I never stopped being angry if I thought about things he did to me. Because it was right to be angry. If I was not angry I would not be honoring my own need to be respected and treated with love and caring. But I don’t hate my father. I hate what was wrong with him, perhaps. But he too was a victim of what my sister and I call the family curse, the generational transmission of abuse and the psychological damage the goes with it. I also remember the good that he did, and how hard he tried in many ways. And I love him for that, and for all the extraordinary trails he passed on to me. Because if I hate him, I also hate myself. And there is nothing gained in that.

But from the perspective of an active, rather than purely genetic father, his potential to provide anything meaningful was exhausted long before I left that house. Which meant that I had to look elsewhere for good parenting. And so do you, and any of us who are not finished with some of the development we should have been able to do as children.

And that, alone, is one very good reason to find a therapist. The good thing about therapists, as opposed to other quasi-parental figures, is that we pay them for their time and (hopefully) they can be totally on our side without looking for something else for their own gain. In the “real world,” that’s never true. We make deals with people to get our needs met, and those deals get be very complicated and often turn bad, as you probably already know.

3. NC is just like a death sentence.

Only if you believe that there is no other source for what you need from them.

And if right now, you feel like giving up on getting what you need from them equates to giving up getting it at all, I would suggest that you really do need to go NC in order to get some perspective. They are just not that important to your development now. In fact, this idea that they are important is probably holding you back from becoming your best self, growing into your potential.

So maybe you ought to really dig into the idea you have that going NC is equivalent to death. Maybe you’re right in a way. Maybe it’s equivalent to letting go of the resentments that give you a kind of strength. And you don’t know who you would be if all those coping skills you developed to deal with them became just obsolete artifacts of another era in your life. Things you didn’t need anymore. I can certainly relate to that. Incest survivors like me have massive, muscular coping mechanisms that we think are “who we are.”

I had to let a lot of myself “die,” or at least get stored away in the closet of patterns I chose to uninstall. All the little-girl charm, the unasked-helpfulness, the willingness to do anything — those things that were useful in surviving abusive situations. Because they were creating abusive situations. And believe me, they fought back as I was withdrawing energy from them. “Well what about this?” and “What happens if that?” and “Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?” and “You’re becoming an unlovable bitch, and an abuser, and you’re going to become a bag lady because no one will ever love again.”

It can take a lot of courage to leave your past behind and stop up to being a better, more self-sustaining, more free, more empowered self.

4. Imprinting.

It’s what we do with our teachers. The same thing as the “falling in love with our teachers” thing. Except we may not interpret them as teacher. We may interpret them as the source of our good. Or the thing that keeps us alive. Or our necessary support system. Imprinting is just another word for a feeling of need.

Another thing to question yourself about. What is the need? You’re not imprinting about everything. They are not an extension of your entire psyche. You said I gave you comfort and encouragement you imprinted on me. Okay, that was the need. And you’ll stay imprinted until you take care of that need in another way. Find a better source. Or figure out how to do it for yourself.

Finally, a word on self-comforting. I think that this may be one of the most important things that we either get or don’t get from our upbringing. And lack of skill at self-comforting may be the single most influential thing in whether we are vulnerable or not to sociopaths and other abusers.

Taking our own pain seriously is part of loving ourselves. If we hurt, we need to study it. Take the time to be “inside it” and listen to it. Understand what is causing it. See what we need that we’re not getting. Find a source to fulfill that need and bring us back to equanimity.

People who don’t respect themselves enough to do this are prone to addictions. They just feel their pain as an ungrounded, unexplained “bad” in their systems. And they do something to make it go away. Likewise I see a lot of people here saying “I’m angry/sad/confused. I don’t want to feel that way. Help me make it go away.” There is a good reason, always, that we feel pain. It is there to tell us that something is not right in our lives. And we need to do something about that. Sometimes the first thing we think of to do turns out not to be the best thing. (I started buying myself “presents” on eBay when I was starving for affection with the sociopath, because when the packages came, I felt like someone cared about me. Later I found better ways to be self-caring, because this solution created messes in my life.)

If we’re focussed on getting our needs me, the pain becomes a messenger and we can use it to lean how to live better. But we have to take it seriously. To take care of ourselves when we’re suffering. To not flip it off, and say we don’t want to feel that way, as though we could just turn a dial on the radio to find another station. This is not living consciously.

I know this is another long one. I hope it’s helpful and not too repetitive of previous posts.

You’re asking all the right questions and talking about important things. It means you’re on the path.

Kathy