Not surprisingly given the painful experiences many readers have experienced living with psychopaths, letters to Lovefraud describe much troublesome rumination. This week and next I will be describing a two-pronged way of thinking about the problem of rumination – why it’s harmful to deal with these matters this way and next week (sorry to delay it) a very way that psychologists have found for processing such things.
Disclaimer
You will appreciate that I am not in a position to give psychological advice in this forum. What follows is not a recommendation but rather a way to think about what’s involved when one ruminates. If it makes sense to you please discuss it with a mental health professional.
What rumination is and isn’t
Rumination is unproductively, endlessly going over something in one’s mind. When one is troubled by something rumination is an attempt to resolve that distress – but it is a failed attempt in that it doesn’t resolve anything. Rumination is circular and all it succeeds in doing is entrenching pointless and demoralising regurgitation. “I should have…”, “Next time…”, “If only…”, “Perhaps…”, etc.
Rumination is not the healthy experiencing of true emotions, nor is it working something out or through. If rumination is circular, feeling and thinking are linear in that they lead somewhere; it’s important to be able to recognise the difference. When therapists and psychologists advocate stopping rumination they are not suggesting that one stops feeling or thinking. It is on the round-and-round, repetitious activity of rumination that is being addressed.
Why rumination is unhelpful
Rumination can increase anxiety, depression, and sleeplessness; it can interfere with clear thinking, ordinary life, and regular pleasures. It is importrant that we’re careful about what we ruminate on because it uses up valuable megabytes and entrenches stuck thinking patterns.
The bad news is that in the brain ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. So obsessing about something produces and then strengthens a neural pathway where a thought leads to a feeling which leads to a memory which leads to another feeling which leads to another thought, etc. The more we activate that neural pathway the stronger it gets and the more likely stray thoughts will lead to the pathway and strengthen it further. Thus people say thay they can’t switch it off, or can’t stop thinking about something.
The good news is that in the brain the rule ‘use it or lose it’ also applies. The less a neural pathway is activated the weaker the connections get. That means that seemingly fixed lines of thought can be unfixed. And, what’s more, because of the ‘neurons that fire together wire together’ rule, new preferred pathways can be produced.
Neuropsychology tells us that it takes about three weeks to form and strengthen a new neural pathway. After that it becomes easier and easier to go down the new pathway rather than the old one. Thus the stronger the new pathway becomes and the weaker the old one. (To be clear – the problem is not necessarily conquered in three weeks, but by then significant neurological changes have begun.)
To summarise, constant thinking about, worrying on, a topic will entrench it and make it harder and harder to avoid, and vice versa. In this sense thoughts are things, as Napoleon Hill said.
Yes, but CAN it be done?
How does one stop ruminating? Here’s an old Bob Newhart clip which heartlessly shows what’s required.
Sometimes people distract themselves as they would distract a child: No, don’t look there, look here! They turn the music up, they cook a meal, they change seats…anything to interrupt the the endless chain of ruminative thought. I’d be very interested to hear from readers what strategies they’ve come up with.
Here’s an example of an ‘ever-present’ thought going away for a spell
A Doonesbury cartoon has this conversation between B.D., a Gulf War veteran, and his therapist:
B.D: The thing is I just can’t stop thinking about Iraq. It crowds out everything.
Th: Okay, B.D., I want you to do something for me…
First, think about the worst thing you experienced in Iraq. Fix it in your mind, Okay?
All right, now I want you to tell me the birthdates of everyone in your family as fast as you can. Go!
B.D: Uh…July 21, 1919, May 27, 1921, September 16, 1945, October 31, 1950, January 11, 1951, May 14, 1992!
Th: Very good.
B.D.: So what’s that prove?
Th: You said you couldn’t stop thinking about Iraq. Well, you just did.
D.B.: But that’s…that’s cheating.
Th: By making yourself think about something else? How you figure?
B.D.: Well, I’ll be damned.
Th: No, I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen you smile before.
The point here isn’t that B.D.’s rumination problem is over, but that he sees that it can be over – that he is able to think about something else after all. Now it’s up to him, the therapist is suggesting, to practice that.
Is all rumination bad? No
It might be that some rumination is part of one’s natural ways of coping. If, however, one is still obsessively thinking about something six months later, those mechanisms aren’t doing the job.
Can rumination actually be prevented? Sometimes…
I wrote a post once how I once narrowly avoided rumination:
At about age 10 I suddenly realised one day that eggs contain chick foetuses. (I say ‘realised’ because (a) in fact the eggs we eat have not been fertilised and so can’t produce chicks, but (b) it felt like a sudden insight.)
Horrified by the idea I began to think through the implications…. And then – here’s the relevant bit -caught myself in the act, as it were. In an early instance of metathinking I realised that if I continued this way that I would make it impossible for myself to eat eggs, to stand having eggs eaten around me…and so on. In short I saw that I was on the road to becoming what might nowadays be called a pro-lifer of the poultry world.
Vegans, please relax. Whether or not egg-eating is a bad thing is not the point here. The point is how to prevent oneself constructing a train of thought which in turn may construct us.
My realisation was enough and early enough to begin combatting the rumination. I stopped myself thinking about X (eating eggs is murder) and thought about Y (something else that caught my 10-year old mind).
No egg problems since.
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Let me know your thoughts and experiences.
The trick to prevent rumination is to become more like the ones who caused you to enter into this process in the first place. They don’t sit up at nights thinking about all the things they did to you. They aren’t worried about you at all. They don’t care so why should you? It’s easy for me to say all this because I can relate more to your ex then I can with you. But my questionable advice is to stop caring. What will dwelling on an issue really get you anyway? It’s done, it’s over with, move on and learn from it. Use your bad experiences to help others if you like. Or don’t.
I can guarantee you the longer you make yourself effected by what they did to you the more joy they get out of it. I am not blaming you for what they did to you. I am saying you have the power to enable your ex-sociopath to do what he does. Without your submission to his games he has nothing. He may appear to be the one in power, which is something he enjoys, but you truly have the power because he needs you. He needs you to create the circuit in his power/dominance relationship.
If you stop caring he no longer will receive any joy in hurting you because you don’t care if he does.
Cheers
Mr Green I think I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think there lies the way to health, either. Narcissism and Psychopathy has been likened to a virus by some, and with good reason: once you’ve interacted with one for any length of time they tend to rub off on you for awhile — their coldness and attitude are somehow assimilated by the kind, caring, empathic partners whom they target.
It doesn’t last long…you come out of the fog, eventually. Still remember the day I came out of my unfeeling fog after the P left…I was driving down the road and saw a stooped-over homeless man shuffling along. I just started crying. It was the first time I’d cried in months, the first time to connect with genuine, heartfelt emotion since the P returned to my life.
It was a weird mix of sadness….and then GRATITUDE. I could FEEL again! My self was returned to me, not quite whole yet, but the recognition of who I had always been – for better or worse, a girl and then later a woman deeply touched by human suffering and sadness whose instinct is to help – was the first step back to reclaiming my essence he had tried to rob from me.
Asking anyone to care less, while good intentioned, seems a slippery slope towards us becoming more like them just to avoid pain. That’s why they do some of what they do, I think — because they have to win and refuse to feel pain.
I’d rather embrace pain because it’s genuine emotion – something that separates normal people from sociopaths. It’s important to get over being hurt by what they did, specifically, but there’s a thin line between getting over something and hardening or walling yourself off from emotions.
Thank you Dr. Steve for your great thoughts on ruminating and Mr. Green, for your insight. I’m also grateful for all the women who have shared their stories. This site has been a part of the healing process for me since I parted ways with a very dysfunctional man. I would love to read comments from women who have stopped ruminating and moved on – and how they did it. As for me, I believe I’m on my way to that good place. I’ve gone to counselling, I’ve gotten an order of protection from the court and I’ve tried to look on the bright side most days. One night last year, my ex raped me and told me he was going mutilate me and kill me but I got away. All that was after 2+ years of me putting up w/his addictions & lies. My counselor has helped me regain my equilibrium, given me sage advice, and told me, because I’m an attorney, that, and this is her belief (I’m getting there too – though I’m not sure I would put it quite the way she did), God saved me that very bad night so that I can use my experience and my education to help others in a way I wouldn’t have been able to do before. If anything, I want to ruminate on those kind of positive thoughts – though some times that’s easier said that done. I’d love to be able to come to this site on such a day when I’m vulnerable and low and find more comments not from the vanquished but rather from the victors which I’d like to think includes most of us who come here – if not now, then in the not too distant future.
hi dr. steve,
i find myself here a lot lately. i guess i am in the acute stage of ‘no contact’ and i need an outlet for my anxiety…
anyway, i am thinking about rumination…last night i wrote a little about why i think we begin ruminating.
i read an out of print book called “stop! you’re making me crazy!” and while much of the book didn’t apply to me, it did explain one crucial aspect of why i ruminated on my S’s behavior.
it begins with expectations. i have a close friend who constantly tries to get me to deny my expectations, who says i set myself up by having them. that they are too high.
i don’t believe that. i believe our expectations in life are what we have come to know as our reality. it is our security in trusting our perceptions. it is the way we are able to go out in the world and trust that we won’t be harmed.
the book talks about a waitress, who comes to your table and says ‘i’ll be your server tonight, whatever you need, i’ll take care of you.”
but then she proceeds to ignore you for the next two hours.
are you wrong to expect her to serve you? i don’t think so.
and if you complain and she responds with ‘screw you’ your expectations clash with her response.
you just can’t figure it out. was it something you did? did you not hear her right? don’t waitresses usually take your dinner order? isn’t that your experience?
you get angry and try to get her to change her attitude so you can feel more comfortable, knowing your experience of reality is sound. you are safe in your perception of the world.
but if you complain and she responds with “i am so sorry, but i just got a call that my father had a heart attack and was taken by ambulance to the hospital,” your anger, confusion and rumination ends immediately.
you end up caring for the waitress, forgetting your own immediate need for dinner, and realize that yes, she was supposed to take your order, but there was a good reason she didn’t. you are safe.
i think in our relationships with S’s, like i said last night in my post, is that our S’s tell us they love us, make us feel loved, and our expectation is that if they love us, they are on our side, they want us to be happy.
that expectation is not wrong at all. our expectation is reasonable.
but what happens is while they tell us they love us, they treat us like the enemy.
immediately, like in the restaurant, we try to figure it out. was it something we did? did we hear right?
and then throw in a friend who innocently says, ‘your expectations are too high,’ and it is easy to understand why we start to ruminate.
when we express our distress to the S, he/she seizes on the opportunity to garner our “caring” and pushes us to forget our own needs, just as we forget about ordering our dinner when we hear of the waitress’ misfortune.
The S’s are masters at this, i truly believe it is at the core of all of this insanity.
i think one of the ways to stop ruminating is to try to understand why it begins, at least that helped me. i no longer go over and over and over things in my head. just understanding that simple, logical idea has helped me a lot.
my expectations when i entered this relationship were reasonable and sound. when someone loves me, they want the best for me. that is reasonable. i didn’t expect too much when i believed he wouldn’t crush me.
that is why i think we have such trouble letting these relationships go.
the waitress never comes back to the table and gives us a reasonable explanation. she just says ‘screw you.’
our sense of a secure reality is shaken to its core, and is replaced with a fear of the dangerously unknown. nothing is as we believed.
but then i remember that when i go out in the world, police have guns, but they don’t open fire on innocent people. other drivers don’t purposely crash their cars into me. my son’s teacher doesn’t let him out of the building on his own.
so except for this small number of S’s, i think we can be pretty secure in our perception of reality. our expectations are reasonable.
so, despite what my friend says, i will continue to keep my expectations. lowering them is not going to do the world, or me, much good.
Ruminating—something I did for several months after I discovered I had been conned. But I had to get my life back in order. I had to hire an attorney out of state. I had to sell a boat. I knew I was going to be looking for a new job in several months. And I knew that I was going to have to get a loan so as not to lose my home. Guess what? I accomplished all of these on my own!! I was on that race track, going round and round about what happened and what I could have done different. My therapist suggested I read “The Sociopath next Door”. Wow! Was she sitting on my shoulder? Then I read “Without Conscience”. What is going on here? Now I was on to something – so I started digging. I “googled” sociopaths and found out more information and ended up here at Lovefraud. I’m not alone!! After reading everyone’s posts I felt that I could have written yours – and you could have written mine. Sociopath’s seem to have come from the same cookie cutter. And now I’m sure I know what my S is doing to his next victim. They don’t change their behavior – the same bait and switch. To get my mind off the ruminating I also started crocheting again. Last year I made 11 baby afghans that I donated to the local pregnancy crisis center. If I keep busy then I can’t sit and dwell. And if thoughts do come through, they are quicker to vanish and now without pain. When I’m at work, it puts me in an atmosphere where I don’t have time think about it. I’m on a bowling league and watch my grandson one day a week.
For me, education has been the key to recovery. Everyone had to told me to drop it and just move on, but I knew there had to more to this story (and I am the type that needs to know everything). My S had to be more than a womanizer and a jerk. He does have a deep seeded problem and it has nothing to do with me. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have also educated his family. We all knew something was going on, but couldn’t put our finger on it. Now we all know. I know he will never change and that he never loved me, just the money. And after all the money he has taken from all these women – he owns nothing and now has filed bankruptcy, chapter 13 for which I am back in court. I just laugh now, sure he is thinking that he picked on the wrong woman, because I’m not giving up on my money.
Thank you Donna for this site, and to all of you that have posted. It is comfort knowing the you have felt the same why I have – even using words and phrases that I have to describe the experience. I too feel I have come out a better person, and have had to look at myself to see what led me done this path. I decided I had to take this bad situation and spin it into something positive. As someone posted – it is hard to thank the S for this discovery of ourselves, but people do come into our life for a reason, and I quess this is why he came into mine. I have learned that I can do things on my own, and I’m quite proud of what I have accomplished in the last 2 years. Moving forward I would like to be able to help others that have fallen into the anquish of a sociopath.
God Bless all of you!
Donna wrote my true lovefraud story. I am the woman from Chicago that was conned by the pilot.
EMJ17OORD: First of all, sorry you were told to “drop it and just move on”. We talked about that in other posts on this site and it is frustrating to be told that as it is so unlike other relationships you heal from.
The rumination seems to be so common with all of us. I dont ache in my heart so much anymore. I think I got so exhausted by the end of my 2 years with him that I felt almost a relief in my heart to be done. But the mind is another story. I catch myself having fleeting thoughts often throughout the day – little memories, things that were said, promises, deceptions, they continue to simmer on the back burner dispite my knowing that I am best without him.
Mr. Green: of course its hard for you being a self proclaimed sociopath for those here who didnt know that yet… to understand disappointment. Being let down, being finally loved like you didnt know before, promises made, living life with this person happy, content, and believing you both felt the same, lucky to have found each other… only to discover that it was all a coverup. Lies, cheating, manipulating… etc.
I think that is mostly the content of my rumination: the shock and disbelief that someone has that evil spirit inside to play with someone’s mind and heart at such a deep level. I replay all our wonderful times together and try to fathom how he could have been enjoying us so much (I believe he did) yet one woman was never enough. He had me as his constant, day-to-day relationship, safe, loving, secure…and on the side he had all his playmates. And the circles of lies that were told to keep it all going. It baffles me, I am able to stop loving, able to stop missing, able to stop caring —but I am finding it so hard to believe the ugliness I’ve discovered in another human being that professed so much love for me.
Also, they consume so much of your mind, body, time, and attention that their absence leaves a great hole in your life. It is a slow process to begin to piece together things to fill in all those gaps. It leaves too much time for thinking (ruminating) and is so clear to me now that no relationship in my future should ever be so all consuming. If it becomes that way, get out!
In some ways, I view “rumination” a little differently. I raise cattle and so I see it a bit like the cows do. They take in large amounts of tough food, then let it ferment a while, then they burp it back up and chew it and then swallow and digest it.
If you define “rumination” as obscessive rehashing, yes, it is not beneficial, but to me, analyzing the situation (rechewing) …i.e. first, what happened? second, what was my part in it? third how can I prevent this in the future?
My situation with the multiple Ps in my life and my family recently almost resulted in my murder, and did result in the almost total destruction of my family’s peace and security.
Fortunately, it was not successful, but re-chewing (rumination) over what happened, and what my part in allowing it to get to that stage, why I ignored the red flags for so long, how the Ps turned the rest of my family against me, making me appear to be the “crazy” one—until finally, they were arrested…and I eventually got “vindication” that my assessment of them and their intentions was right.
Before the arrest, I think if I had not chewed and rechewed what was going on, I might have missed one of the clues that literally saved my life.
Now that I am SAFE, though, if I continually and obscessively continue to dwell on the PAST and “what might have happened” or to castigate myself for why “didn’t I see this sooner” or “how could I be so stupid”—etc. then it does become counter productive.
We will I think, NEVER be truly able to understand how the Ps think/feel because they are as alien to the rest of humanity as if they were from Mars. They do not share the same “value systems” built on emotions and feelings, and on empathy or respect for laws and “right and wrong.” Trying incessantly to “understand” them can drive us to distraction, or worse.
Total NC to me, and not just physical NC, but EMOTIONAL NC as well, is the key to being able to “stop thinking” about them. The cartoon about BD is very good…we can make ourselves think about other things, count, say the ABCs, do your multiplication tables in your head, meditate, read, watch a movie, sing a song (inside your head if you can’t sing aloud) or a million other things to keep from thinking about them incessantly.
I won’t rent them “space in my head” any more, any more than they can have a room in my house.
I have never heard of rumination before, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it is easier to stop ruminating if the abuser is out of your life completely. This is hard to do when you have children with this person and live in the same town as this person and his family. The other day, I was driving to the drug store, and when I reached a stop sign my ex happened to be right across me. I tried to avoid making eye contact, but in the split second it took me to recognize him, he was laughing at me in an exaggerated, mocking way, like, “Ha! Ha! I win! You lose!” He laughs at me this way every chance he can get away with it…even when we have been in court. This private laugh is so contrary to his public performance of him being a wonderful, caring father who only wants the very best for his children. In the restaurant example above, it is like I am being told that I have to eat at that restaurant only, regardless of how the waitress treats me, when I complain about the service to the management they tell me, “Put up, or shut up! We don’t know what you are talking about …that waitress has received the “Waitress of the Year Award” two years in a row! Then when I look around the restaurant in disbelief, I catch the waitress’s eye and she mockingly laughs at me…Ha! Ha! No one will ever believe you, and the great thing is….you have to eat at this restaurant for the next eighteen years! I think if I am forced to eat at that restaurant and deal with that waitress for such a long period of my life then it is important that I minimize the time I have to spend in that restaurant to the bear minimum, and do my best to try to sit in the part of the restaurant that the waitress doesn’t serve. I also try to make my life outside the restaurant really positive. I have a job and part of my life that is so separate from my ex , a part of my life that he can not touch. My job, my church and my own family (brothers, sisters, father) are a part of me that my ex can’t touch. He isn’t standing in the background mocking me and even if he tried to, these people know me for who I truly I am, so his lies would have no effect on them.
hi fran,
i wrote about the restaurant, i am sorry you are getting food poisoning…
my S lives about a half-mile away, and while i luckily don’t have children with him, the stop sign encounter is inevitable. i am laying low for now to avoid it…
i hope in the face of the waitress of the year award, you hold on to your sense of reality. his laughs are still shaking your perception of reality, the support he gets from others is doing it too.
that’s what he wants, that’s what gives him his power trip. with a glance he can rock your world.
but maybe what you don’t see as you are rocked, is YOUR power over him. you have qualities he lacks, you have something he will never have.
you have so much and he is so empty, trying to feel like a big man by beating up on you. he’s a bully, and bullies love it when they get to us.
hold onto your reality, trust your gut. your gut is your most powerful weapon against this madness. it will pull you through, i promise!
the only way to defeat them is to believe in our gut.
when he laughs in your face next time, try to picture his bloated, swollen, waterlogged body and say this to yourself:
‘if i sit by the river long enough, my enemy will float by.’
I really have a problem with this. It’s like no matter what I’m doing, I am always thinking SOMETHING about the sociopath.
It drives me crazy.