The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, by Martha Stout, Ph.D., will be the topic of discussion at a New York City Barnes & Noble Book Store on April 22, 2010, at 7 p.m.
The event is sponsored by the Non-Fiction Reading Club at the Barnes & Noble at 86th and Lexington Avenue. All are welcome.
Event announcement provided by a Lovefraud reader.
Hi everyone,
Littlewhitehorse, you are not alone. We all know the cycles of charm-abuse of a sociopath. Though I got off the rollercoaster after only a few months, the trauma devastated me for quite a while, and I was suicidal. It’s helpful to find sympathetic friends. But no one will be able to really understand what you are going through unless they’ve been through it. Sadly, there are many of us.
Bulletproof,
I’m sending a virtual hug to you. I remember the point in my life where I cried uncontrollably over the spath. I must have cried every day for a month. I know you feel you will break from the pain, but you will get through it. The pain is very honest. It means you finally realize this man did not and never will love you. You are seeing it clearly. The pain can be overwhelming. But once you’ve been to the bottom of the well, there is nowhere to climb but out.
I’m not having the greatest of days myself. Long over the sociopath, I battle with so many other demons. Today I broke it off with my therapist. I love her dearly, but just don’t feel like talk therapy is worth the money for me because my issues are preverbal and from early childhood. Somehow, rehashing over and over again how my parents were narcissists and my stepfather was sociopathic just doesn’t get me to a place where I feel better or can express my feelings any better.
I had an old boyfriend from many years ago drop into town and want to see me. I really didn’t want to see him because I felt at the time we dated like he really never knew who I was. Because of his own denial, he didn’t realize the things that he did that were hurtful to me. I don’t know why I even agreed to visit with him. We had a friendly visit and “caught up”. But after he left I imploded with pain–all the pain of past relationships where I felt emotionally or physically abandoned. I had to work hard to calm myself down, or I would have ended up in the psych ward that night. The pain was so great and so bottled up, I got a splitting headache from it. It probably would have been empowering for me to just let him know how much he hurt me all those years ago. But I just couldn’t do it because I didn’t think he would be able to handle my feelings and would think I was “too much.” It’s the story of my life.
That night I really started to give up on myself, guys. I hate to admit that. I realized that a part of me is very broken. Though I have a healthy side, I just don’t know what to do to make the broken part better. I have been to so many therapists. I have been rolfed, reiki’d, and therapized countless times. And still I feel isolation and depression and don’t really know how to get my feelings out, nor have I created much of a support system of people who would want to hear them.
I had a dream that night that I was in a room full of people and a psychic was up at the front of the room speaking. She sent a “bot” out around the room. It was a little part animal/part robot that was going around and giving indivualized psychic readings to people. When it got to me, it told me I was going to die an untimely death in the near future.
I woke up thinking about the dream and wondered if this was true or just a symbol of my emotional death.
In any event, I have stopped thinking too much into the future. I’m planning a trip to Costa Rica with money I was saving for a new home. I’m living my life as if I won’t be around for another few years.
I just feel like I’m giving up. I’m giving up on love, and on my future. So the next best thing is to just take my money and travel. Even when I’ve been depressed, I’ve always loved to travel and immerse myself in other cultures. So that’s all I know to do. I will put my money toward that and not into therapy. I don’t know if it’s the right choice. I discussed this with my therapist, hoping she would just encourage me to stay. But she didn’t; she didn’t know if she was the right therapist for me or not. I felt very sad to leave and I cried because I had bonded with her in spite of myself. But therapy is supposed to help you get better, not just be a place to talk. It sucks to think that I have to pay someone every week or two just to have someone to talk to.
Sorry for writing so much. I’m just not in a good space today. And yet I’m not suicidal. Life goes on.
Welcome to Lovefraud Littewhitehorse I have been reading your post and my thoughts are with you…
Stargazer needs a big HUG tonite ((((())))))…
Yes, she does. Thanks, henry.
Star:
XXOOXXOO darlen!!!
I know the feeling of ‘talking’ to a therapist. I loved mine, he sure helped me out during the dark moments….but at some point I felt like I was just ‘gossiping’ about my life……I didn’t want to pay for it.
So I stopped…..
We certainly still grow in ourselves….alone….and maybe this is the time your in currently….it’s okay….
It sounds as if your on a plateu….your supposed to be on right now…..don’t get down about it….just ‘be’.
Things will turn when they are ready to turn…..
And you’ll enter another phase and embrace it.
Just allow the process….of NOW….it’s part of the phases.
I think it’s fabulous that your doing the Costa RIca thing….and really…..none of us know what’s around the corner…..Your living in the NOW.
It’s not a doom….it’s the NOW!!
Big xXOOOOO to you darlen!!!
{{{{{{{{Star & Littlewhitehorse}}}}}}}}}
Stargazer, you’re not “giving up,” you’re feeling directionless – we’ve all been there, and I sometimes go back to the Land Devoid of Direction for while. Our pasts cannot be altered, and they cannot ever be “fixed.” No amount of therapy (talk, shamanism, or anything else) wholly “cures” our pasts. We are the sum total of our experiences, good and bad – we wouldn’t be who we are without our Life’s Experiences. It’s what we choose to do with those experiences that determines how difficult our paths are going to be. Notice, it’s what we do WITH, not ABOUT. We can’t do anything about them – they are done and that’s that.
Littlewhitehorse, you’re in the right place, and the more that you examine some of these posts, the more you will realize that you are not alone and that you didn’t “ask for” your own experiences.
As crazy as this may sound, without my experiences with the spaths in my life, I wouldn’t be stronger, wiser, and more shrewd about my choices of partners and friends. Had I not had the experiences that I had prior to this most recent event, I think I might have just lost my mind rather than recognize the patterns and just walk away.
Brightest blessings on you both, and everyone else who is suffering because of another human beings actions.
Thank you, guys. I woke up this morning feeling a lot of rage about how I was never safe to express myself when I was hurt or angry. As usual, I don’t know how to deal with it. It would just be so great if I could just call my mother and tell her how angry I am. But she is a narcissist and cannot deal with my feelings (though she’s happy to spew her own). This is the catch 22. I don’t feel safe to express anger because the people I’m angry at CAN’T HEAR IT. Every time I get angry around my mother, she can’t handle it. This has been true for the majority of my friends and boyfriends, if not all of them.
So I will be angry here, for lack of a better place. How can a mother give birth to two children, batter them and neglect them, and allow her husband to abuse them for many years–and then not let them be angry about it? I DON’T GET IT! And yet she still wants to have a relationship with me? WTF?????
She wrote to me a few years ago and said she wants to will her estate to someone but she can’t will it to me if I’m not talking to her (which is not true anyway–she knows where I live). So I wrote her back and told her that she is the one who cut off communications with me because she didn’t want to hear what I had to say.
Isn’t that a freaking double bind? My mother, who never gave me a freaking umbrella in a snowstorm, wants to give me an inheritance, but only if I stuff my feelings down and pretend everything is fine, like I used to, pretend all of the abuse was no big deal or didn’t happen, and just “get over it”. Wow, what a WORTHLESS PIECE OF CRAP EXCUSE FOR A HUMAN BEING! Never mind a parent. What business do people like that have in having kids? Why bother have kids? So the kids can grow up screwed up with marginal quality of life? I’m angrier than words can say right now.
I once dated this guy who was fairly wealthy. I was emotionally bonded to him, and I thought I was very lucky to have found someone who could help ease my burden of lifelong poverty. But he used to do the same thing….he’d dangle material things over me like a carrot and then take them away if he didn’t like my behavior. Even though he wanted to marry me and had feelings for me long after we split up, I could not be with this type of person.
Ah……..the old “You Get Money If…” game.
This is what I’ve learned about money – it pays the bills. Period. I’m in the throes of poverty and I’m grateful for every meal, every bill that’s paid, and the roof over my head. The rest are just Things that tend to distract me.
With regard to inherited monies – I had a former friend who, at the very least, was narcissistic. When I first left my ex, it was under difficult financial circumstances and I was constantly struggling. She would “gift” me with things like groceries and really odd luxuries that I never asked for, or even hinted that I either needed or wanted. As time went by, the gifts became more frequent and lavish and I explained that I was very uncomfortable with the gifting and asked her to stop – she KNEW that I would never, ever be able to “repay” her kindnesses and sacrifices in like kind because I kept telling her so.
Come to find out, her father was paying her way through life. Her personal “sacrifices” that touched me so deeply were not true scacrifices, at all! It’s very easy to “help” someone when there’s no such thing as a budget, but quite different and meaningful when someone actually makes the decision to forego their personal wants to help someone else! I ended the relationship shortly after she demanded that her father purchase a house for her because (and, I quote) “After all, it’s MY money, too!” Well, it wasn’t her money, at all. Even in reference to an expected inheritance, she didn’t earn it and it would be a gift, not a guaranteed income.
I would rather be living in the throes of poverty and feel that I’m rich in Life’s Experiences than have access to millions. I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of money, anyway! Probably set up some kind of scholarship or foundation for kids, I guess, but even THAT would be perverted by someone’s greed.
Stargazer,
It is my belief that once we begin to work on ourselves and really dig DEEP into ourselves to make change in our lives….The process never ends. Once we start peeling the layers back it is an ongoing thing. If it took us 40-50 years of past life experience to get to where we are today, the “”repair work” & healing process involved will be a continuing process.
What we are today has so much to do with how we engaged in life up until now. And how we “engaged” in life up until now has so very much to do with how we were raised and what our beliefs were.
Changing all our “false beliefs” of our perception of the world since we were a child is not an easy task.
A disfunctional family might be at the core, where it all began, but it doesn’t have to be forever what “keeps” us there.
I think it is important to feel all the feelings, especially the anger, sometimes the one we have the most difficult time processing. And maybe anger is the one that holds us most captive during the time we are trying to process it. But we can’t side step it.
Its important to validate that anger, feel it, but not get stuck there. We can’t change the past, all we can do is change how we process our past into our future. It doesn’t have to define who we are today. It is just a part of who we are today.
Maybe the WORST part of our past can help us to be a BETTER person in our future. If we try to heal that part of us.
Maybe you are exactly where you should be in this process.
Well said, Wits……very well said.