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.
Beverly, I can relate to your MULTIPLE crisises, in a 4 yr period my husband burned to death in a plane crash here at our small airport (one of my sons and 2 friends were also severely burned in the crash and I was the one to be first on the scene for medical support, I am a retired registered nurse practitioner), then my step dad died after 18 months of cancer, my mom had 3 major surgeries and complications, one of my foster kids from years ago committed suicide, my P-son sent a “Trojan Horse” P to infiltrate my family by renting a house that I had for rent and then “befriending us” with my mother’s declining health he became her “caregiver” and then started an affair with my daughter in law who lived next door to my mom with my son C. The TH-P was actually sent to murder me and make it look like suicide—when I realized what was going on, they had drugged my mother and convinced her that I was the “anti-christ” and got her to put her assets in their names. All the while my P-son, who is in prison was “controlling” what was going on. When son C found out about the affair (about 3 months after I had literally fled my home (I bought an RV and left for parts unknown) my son’s wife and the TH-P tried to kill him and make it look like “self defense”–fortunately, thank God, he got through to 911 before they could kill him and the police arrested them.
Since the TH-P was an ex-convict (also sex offender with children ages 9, 11, and 14) he was sentenced for being in possession of a fire arm and she was sentenced for buying it for him, knowing he was an ex-convict. He is still in prison and she is out on probation, and my son C is divorced from her. When I went to a new psychotherapist, after telling him my “story” it was so “outrageous” and sounded so “off the wall” I actually had to bring in court documents to prove to him I was not some paranoid delusional nut case! (I was not offended! I knew how it sounded) LOL Sort of reminded me of the plot of some trashy novel. LOL It would have been funny if it had not all been true.
After all that, my mother, who is a HARD CORE ENABLER, and my P-son is her “golden child” that she sees NO BAD IN, or excuses any she does admit, LIKE THE GIRL HE MURDERED SEVERAL YEARS AGO, or the multiple felonous crimes he has committed, and EVEN KNOWING that he tried to have me killed, she was still “feeling sorry ” for him and sending him money in prison. He is still trying desperately via mail to regain control over her and over us…the letters he has written to e veryone he can think of pleading how pitiful he is and how UNchrisitian we are to not give him UNCONDITIONAL LOVE (READ: send money) are simply unbelieveable.
Getting out of the fog of insanity that I have been in, and realizing that all of his “remorse” is nothing but manipulation, and realizing that I had held on to MALIGNANT HOPE for so long, and been actually DELUSIONAL for so long, failing to see what I was doing….took me to the depths of despair and grief. It took my physical and mental and spiritual health to the utter depts of despair and loss.
Now, it is difficult for me to believe that I was ever in such a quagmire of DENIAL at what should/would have been “obvious” to anyone “with one eye and half sense” is almost unbelieveable. I am starting to finally HEAL mentally, emotiionally and spiritually.
I also realized that the spiritual aspect of my healing meant that I had to recognize that my mothers SICK ENABLING was just that, that her “concept” of “Chrisitian forgiveness” was in reality “let’s pretend it never happened”—and I realized that I could not deal with her and her twisted “religion” and until I finally was able to throw off the guilt-trip that she had foisted off on me from my very earliest days as a child, I could not heal because of the unreasonable guilt “tapes” that played in my head.
Until I separated myself from that guilt of spriit and realized that until I separated myself from HER I would never heal. I was literally physically, mentally and emotionally DYING from the stress because until I examined why I felt so guilty, why I had been in DENIAL so long, and separated myself from that I could not do the things that I needed to do for myself.
I was just as “sick” and disordered and dysfunctional as my deluded mother. I realize that she is from a LONG line of enabling women who have been associated with disordered Ps who have been abusive, and she actually believes that she must “-protect” them from the consequences of their behavior, and she will NEVER CHANGE and though she is just as unhappy as I was at 79 she does not have the insight or strength to even want to change, she clings tenatiously to her dysfunctional views.
I actually feel a great deal of pity for her, as she is alone and desperate (I am her only child, her “golden child” grandson is in prison and most likely will never get out—if I have anything to do with it) her only other grandson has left the state since the attempt on his life, and I am NC with her and she actually does not know where I am.
I was actually totally surprised and relieved that my son C who l ives out of state now, was and is very supportive and understanding about me being NC with my mother. My adopted son D is also very supportive and understanding about that as well.
I retired about 6 months after my husband’s death as I was no longer able to function in a high stress and critical medical job in which people’s lives depending on me functioning at a high level of responsibility. My short term memory is still very poor from day to day but is improving, my physical strength is slowly returning, and my life is beginning to have meaning and worth again. My faith in my God has become very strong and is totally different than the “TOTAL FEAR OF AN ANGRY GOD” that my mother had instilled in me from my earliest years. I can actually remember being afraid of this angry God that could read my miind and send me to burn forever at 5 or 6 years of age.
The thing is, as awful as my “story” is, I am actually thankful that it finally got so BAD and SO STRESSFUL that it actually made me TAKE ACTION. If it had not become “so bad” I would have lived in that world of pain for the rest of my life and not even known that there was anything I could have done about it. I had a therapist tell me once that I had the thickest set of “rose-colored glasses” she had ever seen. I realize now that what she told me is absolutely TRUE. I could look at a pile of cat crap and if one of my abusers told me it was candy, I would have eaten it and tasted the “sweetness”—(shaking my head) but now, I am at last becoming a real human being, and realizing the good and wonderful things that I am, not looking for validation of my goodness, or my emotions or my thoughts from anyone else. Not allowing others to cross boundaries and abuse me. Yet, trying to use common sense and caution, but not becoming paranoid.
Realizing that it is OK to take care of me FIRST. If I don’t take care of ME, I will have nothing to give to anyone else.
I visualize my “life” as a journey in a canoe, and if you love me and want to share my canoe that is wonderful, we will paddle along together, but if you think you must take an ax and chop holes in the canoe, then I will pitch you overboard. Or if you want to sit in the canoe and me do all the paddling, that is not acceptable either. We can take turns doing the paddling or we can paddle together but there are NO free rides in my canoe for people who are too lazy or narcissistic to paddle. Neither will I allow someone else to defend the person in the canoe that is chopping holes in the bottom either. Even if that means that they both go over the side. It doesn’t matter if I gave birth to them or they gave birth to me, I won’t let ANYONE chop holes in the bottom of what is left of the rest of my life.
I know that the “road to healing” is not a destination, but a journey and that I must continue to walk that road for the rest of my life, just as an addict must take one day at a time in their recovery and that as they are never “cured” neither will I be, but living one day at a time, enjoying that day, giving thanks for that day, makes the road good, and sharing it with those I love, and giving a helping hand, or a hug or a pat on the shoulder to others who are walking that same road helps not only them, but me, to continue on in a healthy manner. But I also realize that I cannot walk that road for them, I must walk it for myself…we all must. But a joy shared is doubled and a trouble shared is halved.
God b less you Beverly with your cancer treatment and I do hope that you can keep us aprised of your progress with that. I will keep you in my prayers.
Gillian,
May I ask which part of the PAcific Ocean you were looking at? I would love to meet someone from LoveFraud and I noticed you mentioned that. I am in Santa Cruz quite often. I wonder if you are in my area. If you don’t feel comfortable answering, that’s okay.
Aloha… E.R.
alohatraveler,
I was looking at the Pacific Ocean from Carlsbad, which is where my mom lives. I live in socal mountains. I do head up to northern Ca from time to time, and I think my daughter is going to go to Humboldt (she has applied to UCSC also, but I think she’s made up her mind), so I will have another reason to head north. I’d love to get together with you sometime.
Wouldn’t that be cool!?
The ocean is healing. It keeps doing it’s thing no matter what is happening in our world.
Just for fun, here is my email: iseethebeach@juno.com.
Keep it in case you pass through.
Aloha… E.R.
P.S. that email is registered under a fake name so don’t be thrown off by the false initials. I did that to protect myself from Bad Man.
OxDrover,
Your story is really moving and you must be amazingly strong having survived all that. Congratulations for starting on your path to healing. 🙂 I know of a few people who have died in a state of denial and who, until the end, refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong in the family. My grandmother was one. We never talked about our family problems and she loooved my socio stepmother.
It must be really really hard to be NC with your own family members but I admire you for doing it since it is the best thing for your health and the health of your “normal” loved ones.
I can’t go completely NC with my stepmother because she and my father are still married. But I try to have the least contact possible.
Denial really makes us sick, doesn’t it? Inside and out. Once I acknowledged that I had been psychologically abused as a child (I was ashamed to say the word “abuse” before because she never hit me or injured me physically) I got over the crushing depression that I had for years. I am really the healthiest I have ever been. Right now I am still dealing with my difficulty in trusting anyone and I am reading everything I can get my hands on about sociopathy.
Beverly,
Stay strong and I’ll be praying for you. We are all rooting for you here.
Yes, denial makes us sick–of mind, emotions and soul. I am sure my mother will die in a state of denial, she clings to it so desperately. I think she clings so desperately because her entire life has been based on denial of reality and if she gave that up, she would not be able to face what she has done in the name of “Christian forgiveness”—
My mother is not a psychopath, yet her clinging to denial has enabled the psychopaths in our family to function for decades. I tried desperately to “toe the line” but doing so was so painful that I eventually had to accept reality or DIE.
I chose to live. Seeing reality, letting go of every delusion that I had was so painful, emotionally and mentally, that I felt as if I had lost everything I held dear. All the fantasies that she protected, and I had helped protect, came tumbling down.
I am strong…I was strong in holding on to fantasy, almost as strong as my mother…but I had to turn that strength into survival. I think if the situation had not gotten literally to a point of life and death I might have also held on to my fantasy, albeit a bit less “happily” that my mother seemed to.
Though her MALIGNANT enabling has done as much damage as the psychopaths’ themselves, and has been done with as much tight control, I don’t think my mother is so much a geneticly made N or P as she is a “trained” one—yet, she can look at me with that LOOK of utter rage and frustration that I have seen in the eyes of my P-son, and my P-bio-father, when she is unable to CONTROL my rebellion against her enabling of the P-grandson (my son).
The passage in the Bible in II Samuel, where King David’s P-son, Absalom has rebelled against his father, and been killed in the final battle reminds me of my mother’s attitude.
Upon hearing of his P-son’s death, King david goes into a loud wailing in morning for his son, tearing his clothing and heaping ashes upon his head. His loyal general goes in to the King and says “I perceive that if the young man had lived and ALL of us had died, you would have been well pleased.”
When I read that passage of scripture, I realized that my mother would have been “well pleased” if my P-son had gotten out of prison on parole while she still lived, and if I had been killed, even at his hand, that would have been OK.”
Fortunately, King David saw the justice and rightness in his general’s comment, got up and washed his face, and thanked the people who had sacrificed so much to retain his kingdom.
My mother, on the other hand, still “damns” me for doing everything I can to keep my son in prison. Even though she knows that he plotted to have me killed, and quite frankly I think not only me, but my other sons and her as well…in order to obtain the family inheritence. There is NO doubt about this, it isn’t a fantasy on my part…two people are already in prison over this so there is no way she can deny the truth of it—and she doesn’t deny that truth–but she “forgives” it– literally in her words “Let’s pretend that none of this happened.”
When she said that, and with thinking about the story about King David’s enabling of his son, I turned to her and said, “Well, I can’t play let’s pretend any more, and if you want to play that, let’s set places at the table for daddy and for my husband (both deceased) and pretend that they never died. It will do just as much good.”
That was the start of my healing–I started to say “recovery” but I think RE indicates that you have lost something and regained it, I am not sure I ever HAD IT to start with.
Since then, since NC with my mother, I have become stronger each day both physically and emotionally and spiritually as well. Her twisted view of Christian “forgivenss” was “let’s pretend it never happened”—and letting that person back into your circle of trust—or “O TO HELL AND BURN FOREVER–and on top of that, if you don’t “play pretend” your mother will be angry with you and withhold her approval.”
When I think of the decades of pain I have endured because I couldn’t hold on to delusions and reality at the same time (they are very hard to reconcile in a sane way) I realize that ALL the pain I have endured in my life with the exception of labor pains and a few minor injuries, has been from trying to reconcile the painful delusions with reality. It amazes me how much EFFORT and ENERGY it takes away from the joy of living in order to do this.
I can never recover those decades of lost living, but the days ahead of me will not be bowed down by the weight of the pain of trying to reconcile those two things–which can’t be done!
I am sad that my mother is in such pain, has endured a life time of such pain and wasted living, but she is not likely to change now, to give up everything she has worked so hard to maintain–I think if she did give it up, the weight of reality would crush the life out of her and send her to her grave in such great grief she could not endure it. It is easier for her to blame me for being so “cruel” to her grandson that I would never want him to have “another chance” outside prison.
But I realize that he is PROUD of the horror of his crime (murder) and brags about how much more horrible it was than the “cops even knew.” Which I do not doubt in the least.
I can forgive my mother and I have, but forgiveness to me, means working the bitterness out of my own heart, not trusting the person who injured you. Fortunately for me, both of my other sons totally support me in this NC with my mother and understand the reasons for it, and that it is NECESSARY to my survival. The fact that both my sons are also NC with their brother, and only limited contact with my mother (in order to make sure she doesn’t continue to send money to my P son and give him the wherewithall to send another of his ex-convict friends to kill us).
Having the validation and understanding of my sons is important to me, but I was prepared to go it alone if they did not support me in this.
The malignant enabler in many ways is as destructive or more so than the P themselves, and having an enabler inside the family to “defend” them allows them to perpetuate their reign of terror in ways that they could not without that assistance. I realize that I have participated in maintaining the delusions, in my mother and in my own mind, but NO MORE. I am FREE…and life is good, one day at a time.
Ariadne. Thank you so much, I am rallying round people in support of me, something I have never done before. You are so right, denial is one of the big hurdles. I have realised recently how much I have denied in myself. A child without a voice. A voice that was asking for help, but was ignored. Now everyone is listening to me, and right now I am being as real as I have ever been, even down to telling my daughter’s father (my ex ex) that despite my requests to him over the years to help me, in just little ways, he has not helped me at all and has ignored me, to get on with the struggle of bringing how a child alone, working and running a home.
I have realised that we are all in a state of denial and different ways and that when you really start listening to yourself, your life changes. I am finding also that I have been reacting to old worn out scripts – like poison in my system, I have believed them to be real. I gave them my attention. Like you, I have only recently reconciled the fact that I was an abused child, by being emotionally neglected and I now own this fact and it has taken me along time to realise that. I never reconciled abandonment and neglect with abuse – but it is the pain in silence, operating in the background. As one contributor on this site said, it is the final taboo, operating quite strongly in the culture.
Beverly,
I am so glad that you are coming to a “healing place” in your heart. It is so important to your physical health and your battle with the cancer. Our “bodies and minds” are not two things, but ONE and what effects one effects the other. Positive imaging, yoga, meditation, or whatever you use to help you with your healing journey WILL help you as long as you believe it will. Belief is the thing, but also Research has shown too that having others pray for you also improves medical outcomes. (Groups of patients chosen at random who had no idea they were in a “study” were randomly picked to have people pray for them or not, and in the studies, patients who were prayed for had less pain, and better outcomes medically)
The strength and wisdom that you now have is apparent in your posts, God bless you and godspeed to your recovery from this latest hurdle to cross. (((hug))))
Dear OxDrover. Just this evening I have made a list of all the things that I need to do, visualisation, yoga and meditation are on there. I have people backing me, in prayer and offers of support. People say I am a strong woman, but I have been tested to the limit many times in my life and I am determined not to be deprived out of the dream I had to at last give myself a better life. God bless you for your comfort.
For what it is worth, Beverly, I think that “spiritual” strength is just like physical strength–those people whose worst “life hurdle” has been a broken finger nail don’t develop the strength of character that those of us who have been challenged to the uttermost depths of our strength.
Just as “pumping iron” challenges your muscles to grow and develop, I think so does exercising our spirits to overcome the most difficult challenges. Dealing with the Ps certainly separates the “wheat from the chaff” in that those who are not strong of spirit in the first place don’t survive and grow or they give up. I can tell that you are not a “giver upper” and that whatever happens in life, with this, or any other hurdle that you may have to cross you will do it with strength!
I can’t remember where I read it or heard it, it has been part of my “one liner vocabulary” for a long long time, but it goes “the FINEST CHina has been through the hottest fires without cracking.”