By Ox Drover
A thought struck me the other day as I was musing ”¦ many people today have at least thought about how they want things to proceed when they come toward the end of their lives. Do they want to be “kept on life support” with feeding tubes and ventilators and lying unconscious in an intensive care nursing unit?
Is that kind of “life” really anything but prolonging drying? Or, is it possible that if you stayed there with mechanical life support, that you might actually wake up and heal, and go on and enjoy more time in a healthy life? Many of us have made decisions which we have placed into “Living Wills” and have appointed someone to be our decision maker if we can’t make our own decision at the time. (BTW if you don’t have a living will which is legally valid, your nearest relative or your spouse will be automatically appointed.)
When the time came to make the decision about providing life support for my husband with the terrible burns he had, between the medical knowledge I had about his chances of survival (zero) and his wishes, there was no decision to make, nothing could have helped him live longer, only prolong the unavoidable.
In my career as a registered nurse practitioner I have watched families vacillate over whether to put their loved one on mechanical life support, to take them off, or put in a feeding tube or to take one out. I have seen them cry and fight and have seen childhood jealousies come to the front to make decisions which should have been made by a cooler head.
Life support and psychopaths
As I was musing about these physical end of life life-supports, I thought about the fact that sometimes in my relationships I’ve done the same thing. I’ve kept a relationship that was essentially “brain dead and suffering” on life support, loath to let it die a natural and peaceful death by just not sustaining it artificially any more. Hoping against hope that it might improve if I just gave it enough time and energy. Later realizing that I had expended a tremendous amount of energy sustaining this relationship which only became sicker and sicker, sucked away resources I could have used for other more positive things.
Looking back, hindsight is always 20/20, I can see that I kept my relationship with my psychopathic son on life-support from the time he was 17, and when I went to the local jail to get him, as he walked up to me and my husband he said, “What the f&%k took you so long?” At that time, I said to the jailer, “Sir, there’s a problem, this isn’t my son, because my son wouldn’t talk to me like that, take this young man back upstairs.” Right then I had seen the relationship was dead, there was no mutuality about it, there was no respect for me, or for my position as his mother.
But I couldn’t conceive that my relationship with my son couldn’t be somehow miraculously saved by some magical miracle so that “everything would be all right.”
So because I couldn’t stand the thought or the pain of pulling the rest of the life support for the relationship, I put it back on life support and kept it there for decades after that. Even when it took turns for the worse and he wound up not just in juvy jail, but it big-boy’s prison for a felony robbery, then back again for murder.
I kept on refusing to let myself disconnect from the corpse of our relationship, refused to let it die a natural death , and feel the grief. In my prolonged denial of how seriously flawed our relationship was, I tortured myself with hope. Hope that was unfounded on reality, malignant hope that my son might survive inside this corpse of a soul.
Had to pull the plug
Eventually there came a time when I realized that the relationship was not repairable. I could not, medicine could not, nothing could fix the relationship, and in addition the relationship on life support was poisoning everything about itself—including me. It was requiring all the energy I had to keep it as the living dead. It was a source of contagion that used my energy, infected other relationships around it and me. I had to pull the plug and let it go, in order to survive.
I actually had a memorial service for the boy that was, the little boy I had grown to love so much, oh gosh was he cute, but he’s no longer living, and my relationship with him is only in my memory. Just as my late husband and I are only in my memory. Yet, by letting both of them go, and doing the appropriate and painful grieving, I have released those good memories to be enjoyed and loved the rest of my life.
Nothing should outlast its time. When something is dead or broken and can’t be fixed, it is time for us to let it go. Cherish the memories if we can, but let the rest of it go.
Oxy Can you please write a book? x
OxD……thank you, so very much, for this outstanding article. You’ve shared your grief with me and helped me through some of my darkest days, of late. Yes…life support plays an ugly role in maintaining that connection with the spath.
For those of us who were (or, remain) married (or, bound) to a spath partner, I believe that your description of emotional life support is 100% applicable. We remain because we belive that there will be some epiphany for the spath, and that our “love” and “tolerance” of their atrocious behaviors will win the day and they will magically evolve into the people that we believed that they were.
Life Support……..superb piece, OxD. Thank you from the very bottom of my heart.
Very moving. Thank you for that. Must of took some strength to post this here.
I could not imagine having to pull the plug on someone you love so much – it is one of them seminal events that only decent people seem to have to suffer. A sociopath would be off somewhere else wondering what the fuss is all about and texting the nurses to do it.
To illustrate this, a freind of mine was married to a sociopath woman and near the end of their relationship which he was still trying to save, he developed a brain infection of some kind and he was in a terrible way. His only next of kin around was his wife whom the hospital called after he was rushed in. What he told me was just amazing.
He said she was completely disconnected in any humane manner from what he was going through. She showed no support, or even the basic empathy and decency that we would give to a stranger in the same position. He said she just stood there acting puzelled by the entire spectcle. She had no idea how to behave. No understanding of support – the lack of basic humanity is like she had no psychopath manual on how to behave.
As soon as he got well he threw her out of the house and divorced her. But he kept telling me that when she was wooing him she was in total lovebombing mode, could not be more “loving” – yet when he was almost dying and in agony and needed just basic human compassion, she was to use his words “a worthless human being”.
I think situations like these shows the difference between a psychopath and a normal person. A psychopath is completely and utterly useless in such events when you are in serious medical trouble and need their support and help. Even then they are thinking of their own agenda if they act concerned. Or somehow you are bothering them with you suffering.
Not to play down the tragic events you went through, but there is a song by The Smiths from the 1980’s which is a brilliant insight into a psychopath having to deal with his dying girlfriend written in a brilliant and very clever way. I think I even read once that the songwriter Morrissey (who has written loads of songs about everyday psychopaths he grew up with) said it was about someone who knew who tried to act all concerned in the hospital to hide his true nature. But in reality he wanted to date her sister.
Girlfriend in a coma, I know
I know – it’s serious
Girlfriend in a coma, I know
I know – it’s really serious
There were times when I could
Have “murdered” her
(But you know, I would hate
Anything to happen to her)
NO, I DON’T WANT TO SEE HER
Do you really think
She’ll pull through ?
Do you really think
She’ll pull through ?
Pull through …
Girlfriend in a coma, I know
I know – it’s serious
My, my, my, my, my, my baby, goodbye
There were times when I could
Have “strangled” her
(But you know, I would hate
Anything to happen to her)
WOULD YOU PLEASE
LET ME SEE HER !
Do you really think
She’ll pull through ?
Do you really think
She’ll pull through ?
Pull Through …
As I whisper my last goodbyes
I know – IT’S SERIOUS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnjWfG0C-J0
I’m trying to keep up with Ox Drover’s analogy here….
Socios are also very adept at keeping us “under the anesthesia” of their gaslighting/manipulation, so we cannot see how deadly the relationship actually is.
It’s only when we “pull out the IV of the anesthesia (of illusion)” and take back our power, that we can see what is really going on.
Then, hopefully we regain our strength and can pull the plug on the entire parasitic relationship.
Because as long as you are under the “anesthesia” in any relationship, you are powerless.
Ox This is your best article..When we love someone we rationalize the abuse and hope things will get better. When it is our parent or child we put up with so much because after all they are family, and we all have those good memories to keep us bonded.. It was lack of respect for me that pulled the plug…If we continue letting them treat us with lack of respect then we are not respecting ourselves, and that affect’s every good relationship we have…good article – good analogy..
Thanks, Guys, glad you enjoyed the article…..you know me, I think in analogies. But I can sure see the “desperate hope” that we have with our RELATIONSHIPS that are DEAD, and that we keep on “life support” to the many times I’ve seen families put “grandma” or “daddy” on life support when there is NO WAY in hell that they are ever going to live one minute off that ventilator, just because the family or even one person in the family, can’t “bear to see mama die” and if the corpse is still warm and lying in a bed she is not “dead” as far as them having to admit it to themselves.
I see how our relationships with the psychopaths are as DEAD as dead can be, but how I (and others I know) have kept on deluding ourselves that this relationship is still “alive” and capable of “healing” from the horrible maladies it suffers from.
Even more than 20 years ago when my son asked me “what the Frack took you so long” to come get him at the jail, I KNEW then the relationship was dead, and did the right thing, I walked out of the jail and left him there….but then I did CPR on the corpse and revived that relationship again and took him back into my home. From that day forward I kept on doing CPR on the relationship, putting more and more of my resources and energy into keeping it “breathing” HOPING against
The amensia the psychopath puts one under reminds me always of Plato’s !Allegory of the Cave”. Were the prisioners mistake the shadows on the wall for the real world while the psychopath is the puppet master.
http://faculty.winthrop.edu/oakesm/HMXP_Teacher_Training/Platocave.JPG
I am not sure why the above post went live before I was done, but here’s the ps.
For decades I kept hoping against hope that the relationship would heal, grow, mature, survive, become well…and you all know the results of that MALIGNANT HOPE, that denial of the truth…the “living corpse” of the relationship rotted and stunk to high heaven, and others could see it was decaying, they could smell the stink, but I just kept on believing it was just a temporary set back.
I know how strongly I have always felt about people keeping a living body on futile life support just in order to keep from having to admit that their loved one is dead and gone, hanging on to that thin hope, that malignant hope that doesn’t do anything but prolong the dying, not the living, and in the end, keep them from having a chance to have a healthy and normal period of grieving.
I did that with the relationship with my son, but I didn’t see how it was EXACTLY like me keeping his physical corpse on life support, which I would not have done. Back then I just could NOT see that they were exactly the same, and both just as futile.
And Ox I might be bold in saying, but you give a lot of us life & thank you for expressing and giving us your energy when you cant to the people closest too you! I hope that made sense to you x
Dear Dani S,
That was very sweet of you to say! I’m glad to give you or anyone else support,, because there were people who gave me support when I needed it the worst, who were there for me to help me pull the plug on the most precious thing in my life, my realtionship with my kids….but pulling the plug on ANY relationship that is important to us is just as painful…but it is the only way we can free ourselves from the denial keeping the relationships on “life support” when there really is no hope for recovery.