Editor’s note: This is the first post by Lovefraud’s newest blog author, Kathleen Hawk. She previously posted many thoughtful comments under the screen name “khatalyst.”
Last year, 2008, was a year in which we faced the cost of sociopathy in our economy. Huge financial firms were destroyed or deeply damaged by their own corporate cultures. Their employees were encouraged to pursue personal gain, without concern about the messes they left behind or the damage they did to other people’s lives. The results are loss and suffering, even for people who had nothing to do with these companies.
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sociopathy taken to a grand scale. But there are people and institutions that didn’t buy into the subprime mortgage debacle. There are people who turned down the opportunity to invest with Bernard Madoff. Likewise, there are people who don’t get involved with sociopaths. They don’t attract them, or if they do, they get rid of them before any damage is done.
This article is about my suggestions for New Years resolutions that will help make us like those people.
About 20 years ago, I was fortunate to attend a week-long training at Brain Technologies, a consulting firm founded by the authors of Strategy of the Dolphin.* This book — written for business managers but also useful for people wanting to better manage their own lives — divides the world into sharks and carps. Both act out their addictions. Sharks are addicted to winning. Carps are addicted to being loved.
There was a third type of character in the “pool.” That was the dolphin. The dolphin learned in action, adapting its behavior to what was required at any given moment. If threatened, it might act like a shark. At more comfortable times, it might act like a carp. One of my favorite dolphin strategies described in the book is “tit for tat.” That is, if a shark takes a bite out of a dolphin, the dolphin takes an equivalent bite out of the shark. Not to escalate the fight, but just let the shark know that it was not dealing with a carp.
You’ll notice the dolphin doesn’t cringe and say, “Please don’t bite me.” It doesn’t pat the shark on the head and say, “You must have had a difficult childhood and you clearly need more love.” It absolutely doesn’t lie down and say, “I can see you’re hungry, and I can spare a part or two.” What it does is communicate in concrete terms that a dolphin lunch is going to be very, very expensive for the shark.
Which brings me to the New Year’s resolutions we might consider to makes ourselves sociopath-proof.
1. Eliminate pity.
This may sound very strange to those of us who were taught that we are responsible to help the less fortunate. But pity is not what we were supposed to learn. Pity is an emotion that places us in a one-up position to someone we view as less than us. It is also dangerously linked to feeling sorry for ourselves. In acting on pity, we get into emotionally tangled situations of entitlement and debt, which leave us feeling unappreciated and resentful.
Empathy and compassion are much more functional and respectful emotions. Empathy is extending ourselves to understand another’s circumstances. (“That must be difficult for you.”) Compassion is extending ourselves to understand how they feel. (“That must be painful for you.”) Both of them can lead to bonding experiences. Neither of them requires us to take action to help. In fact, “dispassionate compassion” is the respectful recognition that other people are following their own paths, which have nothing to do with us. This doesn’t mean that we won’t help, but it keeps things in perspective.
As most people who have been involved with sociopaths know, the ability to elicit pity and then take advantage of our knee-jerk inclination to help is one of their greatest manipulative tools. It can be particularly seductive, because they seem so strong and confident, except for this one little weakness. If we practice offering empathy or compassion without offering to help, we can short-circuit the pity play, and gain control over where we place our helping efforts.
2. Demand reciprocity.
“Demand” doesn’t mean trying to make people do what is unnatural to them. It means making choices to pursue relationships in which reciprocity clearly exists. If we are generous to someone who seems to have an unlimited appetite for our generosity, but little inclination to give back, we cut that person out of our life.
In demanding reciprocity, we become clear about what we’re giving and what we want back. For example, if we are open about our feelings, then we may want the same in return. If we are willing to provide emotional support, we may want that back. If we are providing financial or material support, we may want something material or financial in return for it. (If we’re paying money for emotional support, this is a professional relationship, not a personal one.)
Reciprocity exists in real time. This is not like being good all our life, so that after we die, we go to heaven. This is being good and getting good back. Here and now. People act out of their characters and also out of their real objectives. If the other person’s real objectives don’t include being fair to us right now, then we are in an unfair situation. This is the year we abandon unfairness in our lives.
3. Trust conditionally.
It’s a basic human need to trust and be trusted. Like love, we want it to be perfect and forever. Like love, maintaining trust often takes shared effort, and it can lead to disappointment. Some of us hope that we if treat people as though they were trustworthy, they will rise to the occasion.
As those of us who have been involved with sociopaths know, treating them as though they can be trusted is equivalent to asking a burglar to watch our jewelry box while we make a pot of coffee. What we got back for treating them as though they could be trusted is loss.
But this isn’t just about sociopaths. In day-to-day living, we are continually learning new things about the people we know. Sometimes, we learn good things that make us trust someone more. Sometimes we learn troubling things that make us trust someone less. When we trust them less, it means that we are more guarded in sharing ourselves and our resources. When we trust them more, we are more relaxed.
Diminished trust is not the end of the world. There are ways that we can work with another person to rebuild trust, if that person is worthy of trust. And there are ways to deal with untrustworthy people if we can’t get rid of them, as in a work situation. However it plays out, the important thing is to be honest with ourselves about how trusting we really feel. It has everything to do with our survival and well-being.
4. Value what we have.
Other than pity, the sociopath’s best tool of manipulation is identifying our dissatisfactions with our own lives, magnifying them, and then claiming to have the solution. They set their hooks in the voids in our lives, the lacks that we worry over, dream over.
If we wonder what kind of person is invulnerable to sociopathic wiles, it is the kind who invests time and energy on what he or she has, rather than what’s missing. That doesn’t mean they aren’t working on improvements. But when they look at themselves and their lives, they see something they own, planned and built by they own efforts. It doesn’t mean they never made a mistake, but they survived it and learned from it.
That kind of attitude is fundamentally positive. It looks at what exists in the environment — internal and external — and says “What good thing can I do with this?” How can I use it to make me happier or my life more interesting? What can I do with it to make the world a better place for the people I care about?
For those of us who are still raw from a brutally exploitive relationship, it may be hard to focus on anything but what we’ve lost. We are wounded and we feel pain. But in healing, we learn that pain is one of our valued resources. It motivates us to learn. It can even keep us from learning the wrong thing. For example, deciding to never trust anyone again is a premature learning, and we feel pain whenever we go in that direction. Pain is one of the voices of our inner wisdom. It keeps us from settling for the wrong thing.
5. Self-validate.
In other words, care less about what other people think. Turn within for encouragement, approval, comfort, inspiration and kindness.
Sociopaths have been called “soul killers,” because they separate us from our inner wisdom. First they seduce us with our own dreams, then they cause us to question our ideas and our values, and finally they beat us down with disloyalty and denigration while telling us that we asked for it. The longer and deeper our involvement, the more we lose ourselves in self-questioning and ultimately self-hatred.
If there is one good thing about a relationship with a sociopath, it is the clarification that we are our own primary support. In dealing with someone who is dishonest, undependable, untrustworthy and viciously unkind, most of us discover that we know better. We know that we are not what they think of us. We are not even how we are behaving. There is something in us that knows better. Knows who we really are. Knows how we really want our life to be.
We also discover that no one else — not the sociopath, not our friends, not our advisors —knows us better than we do. It doesn’t mean that we know everything about the world. We still collect information. We still seek role models for things we don’t know how to do yet. We’re not proud or over-impressed with ourselves. We just know rationally that we’re our own best counsel, our only decider of what we think, feel, believe, want and choose to do.
When we learn how to self-validate, it changes our lives. For those of us who hear the denigrating voice of the sociopath in our thoughts, self-validating is a way to bypass it. To say, “Oh, shut up. You’re not me, you’re just a bad memory” while we move on to explore our thoughts and feelings. It takes practice to self-validate. We have to make a decision about wanting to be independent in creating our own lives. We have to train ourselves to find our inner wisdom and push aside anything that gets in the way of hearing it.
This year, 2009, is the year that all of us get better. Better friends with ourselves and others because we’re cultivating compassion and empathy. Better lovers because we’re learning to love out of choice, not need. Better partners of every sort, because we give and demand kindness and respect. Better members of our community because “dispassionate compassion” enables us to select our helpful efforts, rather than feeling forced into them.
Should a sociopath show up, we are learning the best way to be sociopath-proof. That is, to value ourselves and our lives. And to exercise our options — to be a ruthlessly determined shark or a sweetly generous carp — depending on what our circumstances require.
Namaste. The dolphin in me salutes the dolphin in you.
Kathy
* Strategy of the Dolphin, Dudley Lynch and Paul Kordis, 1989. Out of print, but available from sellers at Amazon. More information on additional books and personal assessment tests can be found at Brain Technologies.
Dear Kathleen,
You guys were right on in “reading my mind” on what I was trying to say. I ASSUMED that a “gift” was giving freely, NOT a down payment on control, but I quickly realized what was going on, and STOPPED accepting gifts from those people.
When I was dating my X-BF who was a P, the first week he and I were dating, my washer went out and he immediately offered to buy me a new one. I immediately realized that was “odd” for someone who had just started dating someone to offer them a $500 gift. I know he had been “generous” with his previous GFs. But I told him “I appreciate the offer, but I will get me a new one.” He seemed upset really that I had refused his “gift” offer.
I realize now that his “gifts” were given so he could say “Oh, I was so generous with that woman” AFTER he had screwed her over. He was giving gifts in advance so she wouldn’t be able to say how mean he was….he knew he was going to be mean. LOL
After my husband died, my mother kept asking me if I needed money (a nice gesture, right?) NOPE. I thanked her and declined her offer of financial assistance and said “Thanks, but I am doing fine.” I also realized that if I had been living in a tent and eating out of a dumpster I WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN A DIME from her, because I will not give up my independence or sell it for money.
She also was “offended” that I would not accept money from her….but my P-DIL and the Trojan horse P sure would!!! They also “sold” control to her as well, and then BETRAYED THAT BY STEALING FROM HER. She was totally bumbed out and said “But they were always so RESPECTFUL to me” Like, DUH! Yea, they should call you a “senile old bat” like I did and you would have given them more money, right?” Of course not, they were “respectful” to her because to be otherwise would have stopped the flow of money. I was NOT after her money so I could be “rude” (I did apologize for that comment immediately, but she refused to accept my apology because she said “it wasn’t sincere.”) LOL
The tit for tat thing works SOMETIMES with SOME Ps. My X-BF P burned down his previous GF’s house when she dumped him. I figured he would do something like that to me, and I set some consequences on him (or told him anyway) that if lightening struck my house and set it on fire and I SAW the lightening strike that my sons would still come after him and that he would be IN his house when it burned to the ground.
I realize that making such a statement is technically illegal and is called “terrorist threatening” and you can be arrested for it, BUT I made sure there were no witnesses so it would have been a he said\she said thing if he brought charges against me. I didn’t think he would as it might have brought some attempt to charge him for burning his X-GF’s house. He h ad threatened her, and was in her town the day it happened, and he had actually told me how he would “burn a house” and that is the way her house burned. He knew she would not be home that day etc. and there is enough evidence to convince us, but not enough for a conviction) Anyway, I knew he was about half afraid of my son C because one time we had been horsing around in C’s presence and he had actually accidentally hurt me and Ii didn’t see it, but C had almost gone off on him for it, then realized it was an accident and let it go, but the BF had noticed it and mentioned it to son D who had also seen the incident and his brother C’s reaction. So, I don’t think that my BF would take a chance to burn my house like he did the other GF;s. I do think he would have if he had not feared my son C.
Sometimes a GOOD BLUFF is as good a deterrent as “doing it,” but they MUST BELIEVE that you are capable and willing to follow through. A bluff that is not believeable or you are not capable of doing is no good. The BF did get “even” with me in another way that actually wasn’t damaging to me because I didn’t care (slander) but I knew he would do SOMETHING and he did. Better a smear campaign than my house burning.
I have effectively used bluffs of various kinds with various people over the years, and as long as they think you can and will follow through on them, they are effective deterients. However, if you are not good at it, it is a losing proposition, and you must PICK AND CHOOSE where and when you make a “threat” of a bluff.
With some people it is like the “red flag” in front of the bull, it makes them more determined to charge at you….and you can make the situation worse.
First you must assess if the bluff is effective and “believable” and if there is something that is “valuable” enough to them that they will do ANYTHING to avoid it happening. If not, you better quit while you are ahead and keep your mouth shut.
Some people are so afraid of being publicly “exposed” that they will do anything to keep from being exposed. Some people are so afraid of going to prison that they will do anything to not go. But there are some people who will not be afraid of anything, and some Ps fall into that catagory. I have bluffed my P-son a few times, the first time when he was 11 yrs old, and he STILL RESENTS IT HIGHLY and carries a BIG GRUDGE against me for it…I did what I had to do, and it worked. He knows NOW it was a bluff, but because I “won” that round he is pissed. I also turned him in to the police when he was 17 for robbery, and he RESENTS THAT TOO. I had told him I would, and I DID..that wasn’t a bluff, I was willing to carry through if he didn’t stop stealing. I’m not sure if he thought it was a bluff and he challenged it, and was suprised when I did, or what, but he HATES ME FOR IT. Still, 20+ yrs later.
So with him, I would never bluff him again.
My son C told my mother that if she continued to send money to my P-son, he would go NC with her, he has and I think she thought he was bluffing, he was NOT bluffing. I’m not sure if she really cares, I know she doesn’t care if I am NC with her, I have no value to her. We hoped that son C would have value enough that she would prefer him over son P, but didn’t workk out that way.
Now, we are going to use one last “bluff” against her to see if we can get her to stop sending money (and therefore ammunition) to son P, and that is PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF HER LIES TO THE CHURCH. Her public reputation and this saintly old lady with a good heart as good as gold, is important to her, so we will see if we can make her think her LIES and other bad behavior will be exposed. Will see if it works, if not, we haven’t lost anything…but even exposing her won’t help if the bluff doesn’t work…since son C actually followed through on NC we will hope that she will BELIEVE it and that her reputation will be important enough that she will stop sending the P money to use against us.
I realize it is manuvering, still playing the game some, but since it is concerning our SAFETY I am willing to “play”—but on MY terms, not theirs. Since I no longer WANT anything from them except for her to stop helping him get in a position again to harm us, maybe this will work…can’t hurt and I am not emotionally involved with her. It may tic me off if she continues to send money, but at least I will know that I did the best I could to protect myself, and I may end up having to leave home again, and if so, will do so, but would LIKE to avoid it if I can.
Kathy,
You said..”Personally I don’t care who thinks they “won.” I care about the quality of my own life, and my ability to pursue the things that give me pleasure and a feeling that I’m contributing something.”
And…”From my own perspective, I would be more likely to disappear from the scene if possible and let the bully think he’d won.”
Great advice here. I choose which battles I wish to fight. Or I simply don’t play the game at all. The latter is a win-win situation for me as I am so direct and forthright that mind games will either piss me off or tire me out. In both instances, I just walk away in disgust while the fool is still rambling away in crazyville.
Why would anyone want to waste such precious energy and time trying to be rational, logical to the illogical, the irrational?
I only figured that truth out in the last year or so. Yes, I would beat that poor, dead horse over and over again, resolving nothing and going nowhere.
Never again, I say. I’ve fortunately realized, from extensive de-brainwashing, that I’m far removed from submissive, docile, agreeable (to the wackos, not normals), and tolerant of ignorance and bullchit.
For years I smothered my true nature, misbelieving that I should give, give and give some more of myself or people won’t like me. People won’t love me. Pah! What crap I sowed for myself! I’ve dispelled that myth completely now that I no longer give a fig if I’m liked/loved or not.
The good people in my life love me and respect me more because I’ve revealed I have a spine of steel. Ironic, huh? I cluelessly thought I should bend over backwards, forwards, sideways or folks will not want to be with me. Not true. Quite the opposite, I’ve learned.
Anyway, so ecstatic you’ve become a LF contributor. You have so much to offer, to share to those who need to hear it.
Thanks much!
🙂
Dear Wini, I read a book about Strategems, old Chinese war Tactics, and out of 36 very elaborate tactics there is the last one:”just go away when it is not worth the effort”. It is the last advice/resort in this book, and sometimes when you risk to lose EVERYTHING it might be better to just let it go and move on than to be brave, and sometimes you have to use tactics like a fox for not getting bitten in the behind as you leave (like the postman gets bitten by some dogs). Sometimes the other one has to have the feeling of “having won completely”, and if you do PLAY these tactics in full knowledge that you are playing THEM then in order to PROTECT YOURSELF it is not bad in my oppinion as you have it in your hands when to switch back from Shark- to Carp-mode (I like the analogy). Protecting oneself is not just about guns and oven cleaners and peppersprays! Use of their own wheapons is far more rewarding, because they do not sense them. It looks like a favour to them.
Although being brave pays off sometimes in the memory of further generations. Maybe you made a difference in the head of one of your coworkers, and you do not know? Maybe in 10 years some other will stand up because he/she remembers YOU as you remember your father?. I was at the Alamo in San Antonio a month ago, VERY IMPRESSIVE, with sarcophages and a solemn air I never encountered in the USA so far. They ARE now heroes, REMEMBER THE ALAMO. It was a DEFEAT at first, that turned into a victory!
But there are other people who did small things that made a big difference in the long run as not getting up from a seat as Rosa Parks. She got prosecuted, if I remember correctly. Martin Luther King said we shall overcome and got killed, and I am not sure whether he could imagine some 40 years later there would be a black president. Or Mahatma Ghandi by simply collecting salt from the sea, or Nelson Mandela not getting bitter over his very long imprisonment on Robben Island (I am still wondering what forces kept him from becoming insane). Mandela later managed to cooperate with his former enemies to a higher goal, his fellow countrymen to live better, and he now must be very uneasy to see how his accomplishments are thrown in the dust by his corrupt and violent followers. THAT IS BITTER!
Maybe you can turn your what seems to be now a total defeat in analogy to the Alamo into a personal victory (I am not American, so the patriots may forgive me); look at it as Your personal victory because you did remember your wonderful father and did do the right thing for your own peace.
I’d rather lose everything than my face in front of the mirror in the morning; because that is the very moment where validating myself starts. When I can trust myself basically, and go tit for tat and liking it, with a dash of cooperation.
You can be VERY proud of yourself by having accomplished these things, and it is at your complete discretion when you think that it is better to move on with better thoughts and not to give them bastards one more blocking minute of YOUR PRECIOUS BRAIN TIME. Sometimes it is very nice to indulge in self pity, I am a great master in it, but it is like Fango to me, and it sticks around (I then like to imagine myself being a lovely, laughing pig in the mudpot and LOVING it). But in the long run it is not helpful at all as I get stuck and needy for external validation, and exactly that is the perfect situation for the next P to start his game. It is “more of the same”, and I am decidedly not willing to get “more of the same” in 2009. I wish you a very successful 2009, and “remember the Alamo!”
Thanks, Oxy. I felt a little embarrassed when I exposed myself as an occasional Machiavellian. It’s nice to know you’re also a chess player.
My threats also were or could have been illegal. Among other things, I told him I’d make it my business to call his boss and and the HR department if he ever got a job in my industry again, to tell them about the time he transferred $20,000 out of my corporate account to his personal account. And how he used his mother’s position at the bank to pull it off, putting her career at risk. I’d provide them all the related correspondence with the bank’s lawyers.
I have a feeling that’s not legal, but I’d still risk prosecution to keep him away from anything to do with my life. There were other threats related to his contacts with my friends and family, where he settled after leaving here, and the repercussions of anything happening to me. I have a file of information with my lawyer that will be delivered to two newspapers and the local DA if I’m hurt or killed in suspicious circumstances.
I don’t know if I’m bluffing, if I’d actually carry out these threats. (Other than the lawyer thing; that’s a done deal.) I’m not sure. I know that the thought of having to see him, know about him, or deal with his future victims makes my stomach turn. When I got him out of my life, I didn’t want him coming back. And I still feel that way.
At the same time, I’ve enjoyed some lovely revenge fantasies. My therapist told me that homicidal thoughts are okay, if you don’t act on them. And I swear, it was like being handed a license to fantasize. My favorite was taking a boombox to the city where he was living with his new victim. And then dancing on the sidewalk in one of his favorite pieces of lingerie with a ticket to Paris in one hand and a $10,000 check in the other and watching him sweat as he tried to figure out what to do. I also fantasized about spray-painting his care with “f—s old women for money” and his phone number. (He was considerably younger than me.)
Thinking about this stuff made me laugh out loud, which was probably the most healing thing I could do for myself. EyeoftheStorm was talking about using our creative talents in our healing process. Maybe an anthology of revenge fantasy stories?
Kathleen,
Just after the initial breakup, way back before I knew just how bad my S/P really was, I grabbed a novel called “Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman.” I was so, so disappointed! Not only was there NO actual revenge, but the heroine was a piece of damp cardboard who let the cheating ex and the new girlfriend walk all over her.
I suspect there is quite a market out there for some REAL revenge fantasy! Ha!
gillian, I missed your post. It sounds like you have tit for tat down. As Oxy said, it really helps if we know what they’re afraid of.
Good luck on keeping him from re-writing history. I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine about that topic. Her ex has been spreading his version of their relationship, and she’s finally decided to speak up.
But she was thinking about saying that he was a liar and a thief. I suggested that, instead of calling him names (which tends to backfire), why didn’t she just say that he stole $7,000 from her.
I think that she felt the story was too complicated for her to just state that bald fact. Maybe she was embarrassed or ashamed of being in a situation where he could steal that money. But, you know, I think sociopaths depend on that, that we’ll be too embarrassed to talk or too upset to talk clearly. Our silence makes it possible for them to cover their tracks.
I like facts, even if they’re soft facts. Like, “He was a disappointment to me.” But hard facts are better. He was constantly unfaithful. He’s never paid back the money he borrowed from me. Whenever we had an argument, he hit me. I paid for everything and he complained that I didn’t have more money. (Not anything he did to anyone else or anything like hearsay. Just what you know from your own experience.)
That sort of thing serves two purposes. It shoots holes in the myth being spread by the sociopath. And because it’s a statement of fact, it puts them on the defensive, rather than us.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I tend to over-explain these things, because I’m so embarrassed about my involvement with this guy. But it really isn’t necessary. We don’t even have to call them names, like sociopath. We can just drop a few facts, and let other people figure it out.
JaneSmith, that post made me want to jump up and down and cheer.
libelle, thank you so much. You said it so much better. And you apparently know more about the story than I do.
Wini, I had to drive to the bus station after I wrote that note to you, and I was thinking about your writing. You know, sometimes telling and publishing the story is the best revenge. I also thought that passion might be channeled into organizing or become a spokesperson for a cause you believe in.
If you haven’t read “The Starfish and the Spider,” you should read it. The title says its about the “power of leaderless organizations,” but it’s really about the power of individuals to effect change. It’s a fun, fast read, and you might find yourself in it.
Tood, I read that book too. You’re right; the title was the best thing about it. We could certainly do a lot better.
Excellent article, Kathleen, and something I really needed to read today. Yesterday was 11 months exactly since I last saw my P. He can’t leave a vm (box been full 11 months), but he has tried periodically, plus has phoned my Mom (whom he does not know well) up thru the 1st of Sept. As of yesterday it was 3 1/2 months since he last tried to reach me so since this is the longest he had gone without trying to make some sort of contact I thought finally maybe it was really over.
Until last night. Phoned twice, but of course I didn’t answer and he couldn’t leave a message. Previously he did not have pic txt on his phone, so I guess he switched phones since I saw him last. Later on I got a pic msg and since my nephew frequently sends them to me, I opened it, thinking maybe it was from him. It was a up close up pic of the ex –the P. I damn near SH*T. I have some old photos of him and in most he looks very teddy bear loveable, but he also sometimes gets that “P LOOK” we have discussed before on the blogs.
This pic was “THE P LOOK”. You know how some people just look like the stereoptypical ax murderer (even if they’re not). Well this pic looked like an evil MUG SHOT. I’m assuming he wasn’t having “fond” thoughts of me when he took it and sent it. (this is the point where after not having a cigarette all day cause I was trying to stop, I went and bought a pack and started smoking like a fein. Of course, being a smoker who makes excuses to not stop a frightening thunder storm may have had the same effect. 🙂 )
Then when I got back I got another pic msg and this time I opened it knowing full well it was probably from him. (what can I say, I had my cigarettes now and –curiosity killed the cat and I am a very curious person. Of course he KNOWS this, too.) It was an upclose of a death notice of a very young (barely out of teens) and close relative of his. My reaction to this was OMG poor XXX, what happened! Then I started feeling guilty like I should call the P or at least his family. This went on awhile, then I looked at the pic again and realized the date of death was SIX weeks ago. Plus I also started thinking how the P didn’t even like this relative, nor did this particular relative like him.
So, why did he send me the notice? My theory on that is that the phone calls and his pic didn’t work, so he knew how I would react to news of the death, both by feeling like I “should” call or if I didn’t that made me a bad unfeeling person. Plus he knew I would be curious as to what the hell happened resulting in such an untimely and young death. So he was counting on that to tug at my emotions and make me cave and call. I still feel bad about the passing and I am still struggling with that “should” call and express condolences or I’m a bad person feeling. But I’m STILL not calling.
Kathleen,
Thank you for your reply to my post and for your helpful insights. I don’t want to go into more detail because I found out for a fact today there is a lurker on here reading my posts…….someone I told about the site. Someone I trusted and now regret it……..I have to tweak my trust knob and decide about continuing to post!
Anyway, you made good and valuable comments which I will keep in mind. They will undoubtedly help others too
because I think this sort of thing is all too frequent.
Eye
Oh, I forgot the paranoid phase I also went through last night. Because when I was in the same area he would make direct threats to my face, but via voicemail he would couch them in inuendos that would get the point across what he was thinking, yet without directly implicating him in any way, the thought also occured to me that since the only portion of the death notice I could see was “BURIAL OFFICE, then most of the name (but not all of it) and then the DOB and DOD, that this could also have been a subliminal type threat he was issuing since it had already been six weeks since this person passed.
Sort of like when in person he would directly say to me he would burn my house down if I did or didn’t do so and so…..then later on if I didn’t do what he wanted he would phone and say you did this or that and I’m so mad right now all I can see is red…fire…all I can see is red. I just see red…FIRE. Or would call and leave a message asking me if I remembered to get a fire sprinkler system installed in my house because “you know how careless you are” and “how easily fires start.” (that sort of thing).
So I spent some time feeling like a bit crazy paranoid over the death notice and why he sent it, but then I decided it was likely just a ploy to get my sympathy so I would call.