Lovefraud recently heard from Janine in Florida. Here is what she wrote:
In May it will be two years since I realized my ex-husband was a sociopath and every day I deal with the psychological nightmare that he has given me. I try so hard not to think about the destruction he has done to me…but every day it is there. Destroyed period.
How can one put this behind them?? Yes I have moved on with my life but every day in my mind what he did to me is there and will be in my brain forever. I have been told to forgive him and I do in a way because I realize how sick he is but it is still there!
Taken, abused, used, destroyed as a woman, as a human being and of course him shoving everything down my throat. Defaming my character, slandering me and doing his best to destroy my life. That is the hardest part, the man I helped the most in my life to live his dreams became my nightmare…I will carry this with me until my dying day.
Sociopaths charm their way into our lives, destroy us, and then leave. They go on their merry ways, and we are left with emotional train wrecks. Anger, shock, betrayal, disbelief, disappointment, sadness, shame, fear, grief, hatred, rage—all adding up to incredible pain. What are we to do with it?
I believe we must allow ourselves to feel it.
Facing the Fire
In 1993, I attended a workshop given by John Lee, author of Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately. Lee talks about anger as a physical sensation that gets stuck in the body. Many of us walk around carrying decades of anger—childhood anger at our parents, anger from adolescent taunts, anger from previous husbands or wives. Unless we do something about it, the anger of the past stays there, affecting our present.
Anger builds into rage. Rage builds into numbness.
John Lee’s book offers techniques for dealing with our anger. Many of us try to intellectualize our anger away. This doesn’t work. Anger is a physical emotion that needs to be physically released. The idea is to do it without hurting other people or domestic animals. Lee suggests pounding pillows, twisting towels, stomping on the ground and breaking old cups and saucers into trash cans. We have to keep doing it until we experience a release.
To learn more on these ideas, read an interview with John Lee.
Experiencing the pain
When I finally learned that my ex-husband was a con man, that he had fathered a child with another woman during our marriage, that the $227,000 he took from me was gone, I had extreme anger—and all of those other negative emotions—adding up to incredible pain.
Luckily, I had employed John Lee’s techniques before—I tried them all, and found that punching pillows worked best for me. I also had a therapist who guided me in experiencing my pain. Because that is what needed to happen.
The pain had to come out, and the way to do it was physically. This meant punching pillows until I collapsed. It meant crying—deep, loud wails. It meant telling my ex-husband, emphatically, exactly how I felt—even though he wasn’t there to hear it.
Make no mistake, this is not pretty. It is best done in privacy, or with a skilled therapist. And it takes a long time, because there are layers and layers of pain—you dig one out, and another one surfaces.
But it works. I can honestly say that the pain is gone—not only the pain of the sociopath, but the pain I was carrying around beforehand that enabled me to fall for his lies.
I have recovered. I am happily remarried to a wonderful man. And I am peaceful.
Polly
I never take a multi because I have not found 1 that doesn’t make me sick. I think it might be the niacin that makes me feel sick. I feel much better taking a dozen different vitamins Rather than 1 multivitamin.
Your explanation about magnesium is exactly why I took it and it really did help so much for my fibromialgia. I don’t believe you can take too much magnesium. The worst that can happen is you flush it out with diarrhea. at that point you need to bring the dosage down.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/246489-overview#aw2aab6b5
Too much magnesium is not a common thing, and many times Sky is right the diarrhea will eliminate most of the excess, but not always so there can be problems especially if you have kidney problems or other metabolic problems.
Too much of anything is usually not a good idea. Moderation seems to be the key to me.
When you have other imbalances, sometimes the normal range of supplementation isn’t enough. That is the situation with adrenal exhaustion caused by stress and also with fibromyalgia. That said, the form of magnesium is also important. Magnesium chelated with citrate is a common form and cheap, but you have to take much much more for the benefits compared to taking Magnesium chelated with malic acid. The difference is night and day. And by taking less, you don’t have to deal with the diahrea.
I agree Ox, there are too many quacks touting the latest fad, and the latest one being touted by the allopathic medical establishment is high dosages of vitamin D. Something smells fishy about that one. Especially since it is a fat soluable one. and virtually impossible to get such high amounts naturally.
Sky,
Isn’t it amazing that people actually lived and thrived without mega vitamins for eons? LOL Actually some of my ancestors actually died of vitamin deficiencies and my great grandmother died in 1905 from lack of B vitamins due to living on “salt pork, corn meal and molasses” much of the year without fresh meat or veggies…it was common back in those days on the subsistence farms…along with scurvy etc. especially for women who were generally preg or nursing or both….
On one of the polar expeditions the explorers were coming out, only two left alive, and they were eating their dogs as they made their way toward rescue. The sicker of the two men was in the sled and the other man was giving the sicker man the “best” cut of the dog—-the liver. What neither of them knew though was that 1 cubic inch of dog liver has enough vitamin A to be TOXIC so every day the man was eating MULTIPLE TOXIC DOSES of vitamin A so in an effort to help him more as he got sicker, the more well of the men gave ALL the liver to the sick man whose skin soon started to slough off. At that time little was actually known about the role of vitamins or how they worked.
But K, A, D AND E are ones that are stored in fat in the body IF OVER TAKEN…and if there is no fat to store them in, then they are allowed to “roam freely”—if you have a big batch of stored K,A,D, & E in your fat and you go on a diet, releasing this excess vitamins you can also become toxic….so these are all considerations to think about.
Yea, Sky it is like this diet that is being touted now with the starvation and taking growth hormones to lose weight. I was watching Dr. OZ the other day and he was actually convinced that it might be worth a try….DUH!!!!! Well, I just lost interest in his opinions and actually I was thinking he sounded pretty smart and was giving out good information until then. I don’t watch him every day, but once in a while. Now NEVER AGAIN. That was like that phen-fen diet craze a few years ago….then they found out that it could cause heart problems. DUH! How about just eating less and exercising more?
True Oxy, we did survive for eons without supplements, but remember too that our food had actual nutrients in it. But now it’s all grown on mineral depleted land that is pumped full of nitrogen and phosphorus. Then there are the pesticides and fungacides and the GMO. The world we live in now is not what our ancestors evolved in. Not to mention all the stress from spaths everywhere!!
🙂
So the key would be to live like you do, as much as possible, grow your own and do it the normal way, not with chemical fertilizers. Your duck stories are awsome and I’m inspired to get ducks too! Oh and removing spath from your life is inspiring too.
I’m just an old QUACK POT!!!! LOL
I find the chewy gummy vitamins that you give to little kids work fabulous for my own self. The big solid vitamins, I have always suspected, come out the other side looking a lot like they did when I swallowed them, seeing as I have a hard time digesting concrete!
Ox Drover, ducks are wonderful animals. I used to have a few. When I left, the ole ex-husband drove down the road throwing them out the car window into the wild. Bye bye little duckies.
I like to release my anger by throwing horseshoes. I just set up horseshoe pits in my new front yard. I’m not very accurate yet, but you just wait.
It’s been almost a year now since I seen the ex. Wow, things have really changed! Progress can actually happen this way. I can actually take care of my own self and all these children, despite his dire warnings that we would NEVER be able to EXIST without him.
I thought about the prospect of a boyfriend the other day. But I am still unable to grow feelings. Like for example, it seems impossible for someone to hurt my feelings and I wonder if I’m still human and if I still actually own a heart. Or perhaps my heart is petrified into steel, like a vehicle’s carbuerator. It pumps away and will last a long long while, but there aren’t soft parts. I have respect for others, great respect, so I know I haven’t turned vampire too, but…. Well I just hardly feel human. It doesn’t necessarily bother me, like I wouldn’t have it any other way, but somehow that seems wrong.
Skylar – interesting that you find multi’s make you sick … your body must be quite sensitive and intuitive. You’re dead right on the ‘normal range’ … many scientists categorically state RDAs are far too low for optimal health. And of course each person is a unique biology with unique requirements.
Oxy I have been looking into that regime you mentioned – the HCG approach. I’ve actually discussed it with my Dr – he had a clinic in Spain where he gave the injections daily. I also read the research the approach is based on and it seems to make sense. It mimics the fat burning state that women approach naturally in pregnancy where stored fat is burned off during morning sickness so the fetus doesn’t starve. The regime is daily injections of a small amount of HCG and B12 and other b vitamins. The person also has to follow a 500 calorie a day diet and the scheme is followed for either 23 days or 42 days. Most people lose a pound a day with this approach – some research is saying the injections have nothing to do with it and it’s the low calorie diet, but b12 is known as the energy vitamin and is used in this approach to stave off hunger and provide energy.
I haven’t committed to doing it though. It’s basically a short term to lose a big amount of weight quickly and get the body back to some kind of balance with a healthy diet afterwards. I’m pretty chicken with needles and am finding giving myself a once a week b12 injection into the thigh is difficult – I avoid it as long as possible! If you look on youtube you can see lots of videos from people who have done it – chronicling their experiences and with before and after pictures. My Dr said it definitely works for weight loss ….I guess I’m slightl attached to my rolls lol
If you exercise daily with bodyweight exercises, you need the right amount of nutritions to help you create muscles.
We don’t really need extra multi-vitamins, because if you eat healthy and varied, you will get all that you need.
An easy rule, without needing to resort to sites with calories or weighing your food:
– 2 cups of chopped veggies
– 1 cup of carbohydrates (bread, pasta, rice, …)
– meat, poultry or fish no bigger than the palm of your hand
Eat 5 times a day a meal, every 3 hours, of the above portions, and not only will you be getting all the vitamins and nutricients you need. You will not feel hungry (though eating less carbs might be tough), and because of that your body will start to think over time that it would be better to burn food faster, rather than just slower to preserve food for when you starve yourself. In other words, your metabolism will rise.
And as you get more muscle over time, that will help to raise your metabolism as well, because muscles basically are energy burners, even if you’re sleeping.
Pollyanna, while there may be a possibility that that HCG program is okay and doens’t do any long term harm to your body, there is a GREAT WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT THAT I GUARANTEE IS PERFECTLY SAFE….eat less and exercise more. It isn’t magic, and it isn’t fast, but it is absolutely SAFE AND SANE and FREE!!!!!
I have lost over 30 pounds since last October when I started this….and need to lose another 30…I have cut down my sodium level to well below what the American Heart Association recommends for everyone (1,500 mg) and my blood pressure is great, my feet don’t swell any more and I feel much much MUCH better.
Darwin’s mom is right that muscle burns calories just “laying there” even when you sleep, so getting our muscles (and bones) healthy is important and exercise is the only way to do that.
I don’t eat a low carb diet, I eat a balanced one, with lots of fruits and veggies and very little concentrated sugars of any kind. Low fat and low cholesterol and of course low sodium, and high fiber and enough oat grain that I’m about to whinney.
I stopped smoking about two years ago, have cut down on coffee and tea and other things that contain caffine — not on purpose but just doesn’t appeal to me any more….
Sleeping better and feeling better…btw, exercise also calms the soul and helps decrease depression and anxiety.