Editor’s note: The following article was written by the Lovefraud reader who posts as “Adelade.”
Holiday seasons are looming on the horizon. For those of us who are in recovery, this time of year can be very depressing, or very liberating. For those who are still embedded in the World of Spath, the holiday season can be more desperate than any other time of the year.
Before escaping sociopathic entanglements, the Holiday Season is a time of withhold/reward, predictable outcomes, and ruined expectations. “Perhaps, this year will be better. Perhaps, he/she will make the changes and save the relationship.” Well, if the spath isn’t engaging in withhold/reward, they’re engaging in situational love bombing. If we are pliable to what the spath wants, the children will have presents to open, family members will be invited to celebrate, friends will be allowed to visit, and all will be well with the world. We only have to bargain with the spath to achieve a peaceful, loving, and happy Season.
The predicted outcomes are a result that we have previously experienced routine disappointments, and we know (on an academic level) that there is no bargaining with the spath that will assure that our children, family, friends, and selves will experience any of these desired outcomes. Events will be canceled or unattended. Friends will be uncomfortable in our environments and stay only a short time, or not even drop by. Family members will either attend our gatherings with dread, or not at all. And, we will be left feeling empty, robbed, devalued, and dismissed.
End of the entanglement
Once we have exited the spath entanglement, the Holiday Season might be an opportunity to throw the biggest Pity Party of the year, or it could be an opportunity to construct new traditions and emotional freedoms that previously didn’t exist. Think about how many milestones, important events, and holidays went by without notice. This year could be the best year of our lifetimes – we have the opportunity to celebrate in our own ways, using our own creativity, and actually feel the freedom from the emotional bondage and torment that the socipathic dynamics generated. Then, again ”¦ we could indulge ourselves in self-pity and drive away every person that would enjoy our company. Why regret an illusion that’s finally exposed? What good does it do to ruminate over a system of false beliefs? Weren’t those beliefs proven false? What more could there be to celebrate than truth?
Sure, it’s sad that the spath(s) took so much away from us. But, we can’t rebuild that illusion no matter what we use to try. What they said, what they did, and what they’re doing are important to us only as examples of what we never will allow, again.
My important events were dismissed
In my situation with the exspath, my birthdays, my graduation (with honors), my business grand opening, holidays, and important creative events were all dismissed. And, when I use the word “dismissed,” I mean to say that the exspath would give a cursory nod in my general direction, but preparations, celebrations, and acknowledgement of my accomplishments were never made. When I was honored with a scholarship, I received my award in a campus ceremony, alone. When I graduated with a 4.0 GPA, I walked onto the stage to receive my certificate, alone. After my graduation, there was no card. There was no celebratory dinner or family gathering. My birthdays would come and go with a Hallmark card I would pick out my own gift and purchase my own birthday cake. Holidays were barely acknowledged and my elaborate holiday meals were complimented, but not appreciated. The last several years of my marriage to the second exspath were spent in abject dismissal Adelade was rendered unimportant, inconsequential, and nonexistent by overt and subtle dismissals.
So, this year, I don’t have to experience the predictable disappointments. Regardless of my financial issues, I am free of any obligation to see to the needs of anyone else. I am free of the dismissal and invalidation. I am free to celebrate this freedom to be myself in any way that I choose to. I can prepare dishes that I want to prepare and not have to concern myself with whether the exspath will even appreciate the monumental effort that goes into producing a holiday meal. This year is all about me. This year has the potential to be all about you, as well. Make it happen for yourself. Take this time to grasp onto yourself for validation and appreciation. Recognize that this will be all about you and no longer all about what he/she did or is doing.
May this year be the most emotionally empowering one yet. May this year be the year when we discover our incredible strengths and recognize our vulnerabilities. May this be the year that we finally claim our Selves and set aside the fear of rejection, dismissal, and abandonment and place boulders of strength, courage, resolve, and wisdom as the foundation blocks of our newfound boundaries. This year is The Year Of Recovery for me. May it also be The Year Of Recovery for you.
Dear Adelade,
HOw right you are!!!!!
It is a shame that we have let so many opportunities for joy and celebration go by during which we felt let down because the psychopath didn’t appreciate or validate it, but in reality, WE are the ones who need to validate our celebrations. It is NICE when we also have someone else to share our joy at a wonderfully prepared dish or an accomplishment, but in the end, it is our own joy that matters.
Like you, I am going to enjoy my own celebrations and my own holidays, not dependent on someone else’s opinions.
There’s one thing to be thankful for – the article that I just read! And, many thanks for all that I have learned and for the sharing that goes on here.
I have been wrestling with trying to find ways to celebrate the holidays. I figure maybe going back to old traditions may help.
With my ex-girlfriend there was always a sense that she was holding back expressions of joy and hapiness and ‘on edge’ and ready to criticize at any moment – even while we hung ornaments on the Christmas tree. It really felt like she hated the idea of others – especially me – being happy. And this applied year ’round. Whenever there was an opportunity to pull together, to get especially close, for example, in a walk around ‘Waterfire’ in Providence, to attend a Groban concert, to stand with me during any legal case I was involved with, to attend a church service, to lie on the beach in the evening and watch the moonrise – she always would find a way to duck out or later ruin the memory with sarcasm, ridicule and criticism. Imagine feeling your heart well up with love and warmth at a moment and thinking how it could be one of the most fulfilling moments in your life- something that you have never experienced before and, you feel like you are about to ‘feel’ emotions that seem eternal and infinite…. and then have someone come up behind you and stab you in the back.
And when you try to express how special the moment is, that is developing – you are told that you are ‘too intense,’ and by the way..what about this or that ‘thing’. Of course, after you are lying on the ground and ‘bleeding out’ – figuratively speaking – she comes to your side and lightly strokes your head.
I just wrote a very long piece in response to this. For some reason, it didn’t post and I lost it.
I’ve battled this problem for most of my life. No contact is the way to go to stop the invalidation and abuse, but to make the holidays or any special memorable, we need to create those events and memories for ourselves.
I’ve gotten very creative with how I will do things differently. I refuse to be alone. I invite people over or go to places where there will be people.
I look for other ways to celebrate the holidays. It isn’t necessary to buy into the mainstream expectations.
I’m so grateful that I don’t have to endure a day of constant criticism and dodging the unpleasant things that are bound to happen.
I know who the positive people are in my life and the places where we can go where we will be welcomed. It turned out that my son and I have spent numerous holidays with my widowed aunt. I was humbled that while I was tempted to feel sorry for us, we actually enriched somebody who was more alone than we were. The day became so special.
I appreciate this article, Adelade, though it brought back some very sad/bad memories.
I know I was so affected by my relationship to my spath, that even though 22 years ago before it all started, I was an accomplished home chef and party-giver extraordinaire, with many appreciative friends, a happy home pleasantly decorated, a nice, growing career, full of hope and dreams…. within a few short years after marriage, you could absolutely see it in the photographs of me at that time — bad skin, dull hair, vacant, desperate, trapped stare in my eyes, holding a toddler and 2 babies on my lap.
No, the elaborate meals were NEVER appreciated. The time I spent doing it (a thing of former pleasure to me — a hobby) was RESENTED and I was punished for it — either in front of the guests or later, after they left. I stopped entertaining. I closed myself up.
Today…. I still do not entertain. It brings back too many bitter memories. I am still wounded from that. PTSD. And I do not decorate my house anymore for the holidays — not any of them! It reminds me of the hopes and dreams of a normal, happy married-with-children life that I will NEVER have. I can’t do it. It seems stupid to me. I just can’t. I still have the boxes of decorations packed away, but I cannot bring myself to open them.
I make a fantastic thanksgiving dinner…. but I have not wanted to for the past couple years.
I know, I know, “loss of interest in things previously enjoyed” is a “sign” of “something.” I don’t think it’s that. Not exactly. It’s just still a big wound with lots of memories and I haven’t been able to approach it completely, yet.
Most of everything I believed in was broken by my relationship with the spath. I can go through the motions, which I often do for the kids, but underneath my joy is not there.
I can be sort of quietly peaceful. I have found NEW interests that are taking the place of the old ones. It’s not so much that my interests have changed (though that is part of it) but because I HAD to find new interests. The old ones, the old hobbies, were too triggering. Still are.
This is such an invisible wound, that’s why it’s so hard. I do believe I appear entirely normal to the world around me.
20years:
HUGS to you. Your post made me feel sadness for you because I understand. And I know so many others here do also. The loss of joy is my greatest hurdle. Nothing has been the same and when other negative things happen in my life, everything is amplified. I just don’t feel good right now. Before it was mentally, but now it is mentally and physically as I am fighting off a virus I think. I am not sick; I just feel kind of lousy physically right now.
I have family struggles again right now and it’s defeating. I don’t really want to say anymore about it…what’s the point really?
Have a good day everyone.
Thank you for writing this article Adelade. My favorite line is where you wrote, “What more could there be to celebrate than truth?”
Perhaps what we should be aiming for is a national holiday to celebrate the truth. It would be a positive, happy holiday that raises awareness about getting our heads out of the sand and taking off our rose colored glasses.
20 years, your story resonated with me. Thanksgiving memories are triggering. Beginning with the first one in which spath wanted to celebrate by going to some “friends'” apartment — people I’d never even met — and everyone was sitting around watching graphic pornography on TV. To the last Tgiving dinner I ever cooked, where I spent a hundred dollars on organic, gluten free ingredients, just for me and the spath, but he refused to eat even a bite of it. Later I realized it was because it was poisoned.
With memories like that, and with knowing my family is filled with spaths, we just have to find a new meaning to thanksgiving. Not sure what exactly.
Louise, I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. Take some echinacea, it will help fight off the virus.
You have the power and knowledge to deal with any toxic people you encounter, even in your family. You can do this.
((Hugs Louise))
skylar:
Thanks. I am resting most of the time when I can to help feel better physically.
I do have the knowledge and power to deal with any toxic people, but it still doesn’t make it any easier. It’s so hard to not act on emotions and instead count on facts, but I am trying. It just seems like it’s always something and I am tired. Thanks for your support.
The “Halloween Holiday”….
For a great many years, I received threatening, stalking,
frightening, voice-altered calls from “IT” on this day.
Imagine that. Doubt I will get any this year!!! mwahahaha!~
I must say that THIS YEAR is FRIGHTFULLY quiet,
for the first time in a great many years. Amazing.
NOTICEABLY AMAZING.
(((Hang in there Louise)))
YOU ARE LOVED.
Dupey
Thanks for this article. It made me very sad, but I’m glad I read it. All those things you had to do alone… that’s exactly what my life with my exspath was like. I labored alone with all of my child births (he was there in body only), mothered alone (again he was there, but in body only), and suffered alone (he cared not one bit when I was sick, in pain, losing a loved one, lonely, scared, or in any other myriad of ways suffering). The aloneness was so devastating. I was nothing to him. He hated me and I knew it, despite his hollow assertions.
Holidays were all about him and his traditions. Well, actually so was life. I learned quickly to ask for nothing, expect nothing, and complain about nothing. If I needed anything from him, I was dysfunctional. If I complained about anything, I was harassing him and I was delusional because he provided everything a woman could ask for; why couldn’t I see that?
He loved holidays; especially Christmas. BUT he ruined every single Christmas for me and the kids. He’d charge, charge, charge us into the poor house to buy a bunch of crap we didn’t need. And this is weird; almost every gift he bought for me or for the kids was really for himself!!!! I’ve never seen anything like it. Gifts in disguise you could say. And he’d buy more gifts for himself and WRAP THEM!!! Who the hell does that?
I was never allowed to have company. Not even on holidays. The loneliness was devastating. Only his family was welcome.
This will be my first holiday season since I was freed from him. (I considered myself rescued, literally). I have absolutely no sadness or concern whatsoever about what it will be like because nothing could be as bad as having spent all those holidays (12 years worth) with him.
Oh, and yes I remember the bargaining. Nothing was ever freely given. Any tiny token of human compassion or regard had to be gleaned through bargaining, and then he had to be praised as if he was the most giving man on earth.
I don’t know what the holidays will bring for me this year. I am depressed, struggling for reasons I don’t understand. But despite that, I am so very thankful that I’ve been rescued from this evil man.
to Louise and lovinglem,
My heart goes out to you. Whatever you are going through. Louise, I am fighting off a virus, too! It is true I have built my immune system up, but had some extra stress recently, and I think that’s all it takes sometimes. I hope you get the better of this one.
lovinglem, that is so well put, what you said. Yes, the loneliness.
I figured out that I have this “need.” when I figured it out, I really had to laugh, because I suspect it is a need that everyone has. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I figured it out, I wondered why I hadn’t figured it out before. here goes: I absolutely long to be fully known by someone, and then fully accepted, as I am. As simple as that. It has been the great unmet need of my entire life. Not my parents, not any man I ever spent time with (including my spath ex-husband), ever got very far with the “knowing me” part.
I am sure that it started so early in my life that I just didn’t realize what was missing. So it was easier for me to not recognize what was missing, when spath came along (and all those other guys that preceded him).
I am with someone now who I think has this capacity to know me, to want to know me *more* and to accept the me that he finds, whatever me that is at any given time. I am still extremely cautious and taking it very slow. (I have been dating him for two years).
the loneliness in the “now” is starting to crack, but the cracking and opening up REALLY HURTS because I’m 50 years old and I’ve never known this before. Now that I think I have found the sort of relationship that has been missing…. the pain seems so much more intense. It was easier to be numb or blocked or not knowing what I was missing.
And I deeply regret that I did not know sooner, because I would have parented my children differently. I know I have been a good mom, but I have also been putting a happy face on when I have been shellshocked, and I worry about the effects of that on my kids.
I’m opening up more, but I am still so scared that I might be wrong… I am afraid. I think the joy is lurking out there somewhere, but I am still just too scared. It seem safer, for now, to stick with “quietly peaceful, accepting” as an alternative to the abusive drama I endured for so long.
I’m not ready to open up to “joy” just yet.
But I’m hopeful.