By Joyce Alexander, RNP (Retired)
I was reading an article about Steve Jobs’ new biography that came out this past week, and some of the stories about his life. There is no doubt in my mind that Steve Jobs was one of the smartest and most savvy guys in the Twentieth Century. The inventions that he fostered or personally thought of have changed our society and our culture, and remarkably changed the communication field. An amazing man!
You may have read the title of this article and are already wondering how Steve Jobs was killed by a “psychopath.” Jobs died of the terminal stages of pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with this very serious form of cancer. Apparently, according to what I read, it was a slower growing kind of this cancer, and if he had had surgery right then, there is a good chance that he might have actually effected a cure and be alive even today.
That wasn’t what Steve chose to do, though ”¦ he chose to deny the seriousness and the urgency to take drastic action immediately to exorcise the tumor out of his system. He did not essentially “go NO CONTACT” with the toxic, malignant entity that had silently invaded his body. As smart as Jobs was, and even though he had access to the best and most knowledgeable physicians in the world, he did not take the “appropriate action” to have the surgery. Jobs told his biographer that he did “not want to be cut open like that.” He later regretted that decision and even realized that it may have cost him his life.
His biographer says that he ultimately saw that the colon cleansing and other “new age” treatments did nothing for him, and nine months after he turned down after recommended surgery, Jobs finally decided to have it—what is called a “Whipple procedure” to remove the tumor. It was too late; he had missed that narrow “window of opportunity” in which he could have saved his life. He “got a divorce” from the tumor too late, the damage had been done. Though Steve Jobs fought valiantly for the next decade, the ultimate “win” by the psychopathic cancer was a foregone conclusion. He had failed to excise the cancer from his life while it was small.
Psychopaths as cancers
Too many times, I see psychopathic relationships with “malignant” individuals, and like cancers, they may grow inside us without being detectable as toxic until one day, even before we know they are toxic, the fatal damage has been done. Or, we may get a chance recognize them and to excise them when they are “small” in relationship to the rest of our lives. We can remove them without leaving large scars or holes in our lives. If we get this chance to remove the “malignant” people from our lives and we, like Steve Jobs, decide on a “want and see” plan, we allow them to grow and infiltrate our lives more fully, so that if and when we do decide to “surgically” remove them from our lives, the hole and the scars that they leave is much larger and more debilitating than if we had “done the surgery” when the situation wasn’t quite so ingrown.
Jesus talked about “if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, if thy hand offend thee, cut it off,” and went on to analogize that it is better to live a life with one eye or one hand than to live in “hell” with two eyes or two hands. Sometimes I think the “surgery” necessary to remove the psychopathic personality from our lives is very much like “plucking out your own eye” or “cutting off your own hand” with a rusty butcher knife. But the point of the situation is that in order to live a good life, or in some cases to live at all, we must make the hard decision to excise the toxic person, or the malignant tumor, from our lives as soon as we know what they are. Waiting around, treating this toxic, malignant issue with “kindness and love,” isn’t going to remove it from our lives or our bodies, or change it into something benign. We must take drastic and surgical action to remove this malignant person from our lives completely.
Removing those around the psychopath
That may also mean taking out the “lymph nodes” of the people around the cancerous person, just like the doctor will remove lymph nodes from around a breast containing cancer where that malignancy has spread into those nodes so that they, in turn, don’t spread the toxin to the rest of the body. It is unfortunate but true that a toxic psychopath will frequently have spread their lies and toxins to other people around us that we may also love ”¦ their families, our mutual friends, etc. A “cure” from the toxic psychopath may require us to be NC with those people too, and excise them from our lives as well. The longer the psychopath has been in our lives and the more deeply involved, the more likely this will be necessary. Failing to “bite the bullet” and do this as well may result in a recurrence of the malignancy this person leaves in our lives.
Steve Jobs was a significant personality in our culture. Of course there is no guarantee that if he had elected to have the surgery sooner rather than later, that he would have lived longer or better, but I can guarantee that living with a psychopathic person longer, or trying every “alternative” cure, except total surgical removal, isn’t going to improve your life in any way.
I think even in his death, Steve Jobs left us one more important thing ”¦ a lesson for anyone involved with a toxic relationship of any kind.
One Joy-I really like your last line and I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.
I have really no insight into the process of a therapist and what steps they take to help one in the healing process. I guess if they came right out and told us, we wouldn’t be comfortable. I will ask her more directly, though. I’ve been curious as to what she is getting at, myself.
My therapist came from an extremely rigid sect of Christianity. By some of the things she has said, I’m assuming this is something she has rejected. She made a point to remind me that it is not healthy to shun anyone and that I shouldn’t be upset with my friends who don’t “shun” blatantly disordered people. I think she is getting at my co-dependency (I can’t control anyone, I can only control myself) This is also where she repeatedly mentions that everything is on a spectrum and that there is not black and white.
She has never ever made me feel like a “bad” christian for any of this. In fact, she is constantly reminding me that we are all on our own unique spiritual journeys and that we cannot “judge” someone for not being where we are on that journey…But this is where the confusion lay.
She does have impressive credentials. Her and her husband are family therapists.
I have read the Betrayal Bond and my therapist also recommended the book. It is a really great book for me.
I think her intentions are good, but I still get the feeling that she doesn’t quite understand why my ex-spath has wounded me so deeply. She keeps trying to minimize it by saying that it was just the straw that broke the camels back. That I had prior conditioning and abuse that made me ripe for this experience. I do agree with that but I also am really trying to get through to her that my ex-spath was an equally painful loss to me. Not an added loss or the final straw.
Because of my loneliness and lack of support from anyone, I put all my eggs in my ex-spaths basket. I thought he was the answer to all my worries. I thought he was the ticket to a marvelous life. He obviously wasn’t. I guess my therapist is trying to say that if it weren’t for my crappy parents and lack of emotional support and love, I would have never bee affected by this jerk. I would have walked away at the first sign of abuse. (I do kind of agree with that).
BUT…My ex-spath caused me a great deal of anguish in his own right. And I don’t think I was just hypersensitive to my experience with him because I was already sufferring from CPTSD before I met him.
I don’t think she is discounting any of my feelings in the larger sense. I just hate when she minimizes my feelings towards my ex. I did pationately and deeply love him. I had never been in-love like that before. But she says that it was all fantasy and none of it was real. I was in love with the glitter and not the real person. I think I was in love with who I thought was the real person. And yes, he glittered. I was enamoured. And I am stuggling with the fact that I think he gives his wife the glittery guy I fell in love with. Sucks for me!
She does agree that she does not think his wife is treated well and that he has not changed. She thinks that maybe his wife just handles the disappointment better than I did.
I don’t know. I think I’m rambling now. Thanks for listening
Sisterhood,
From what you post, your therapist is not achieving what you need. I get the impression that she is providing the kind of therapy SHE would need, not what YOU need.Therapists need to be able to address a clients needs from many different processes.
To answer you: the process should be open and transparent. That’s how a therapist establishes trust and how you as a client knows you are on track or off track. And clearly, your therapy is off track.
AND YES, She is trivializing/minimizing your experience, trying to reframe it as SHE interprets it which means she is changing YOUR experience. That means you are getting help for HER feelings, not yours.
Finally, if he was spath, it was NOT a normal relationship. It was predatory. To basically say if you were healthy, it wouldn’t have happened is simply NOT TRUE (and incredibly invalidating). Spaths seek out both healthy people and basket cases: it depends on THEIR MO’s (mode of operation). My spath likes certain types highly intelligent single moms. My sister is an spath with a low IQ so she only likes easily duped victims. What is similar for all spaths is their lack of empathy, their predatory exploitation, and their lack of remorse/conscience.
From what you write, your therapist does not have the perspective required for recovery from an spath and she is treating you from the perspective that you were messed up and had a normal messed up loss. If that is what you experienced, then her approach is appropriate. But I find her disrespectful of your experience and unable to comprehend your therapy need. Just b/c someone has impressive credentials – and you skipped what those creds are, a PHD? Clinicals where? Education? – doesn’t make them a good fit for those of us trying to recover from a relationship with a sociopath (if that’s what your therapy goal is… she did ask and affirm your goal, right??).
Katy
sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong.
Sisterhood,
not rambling at ALL. Very clear. Very well stated.
IMO, your therapist sounds like she is extremely educated and remembers her lessons on PD’s very well. She just doesn’t get it.
She never got it beyond the superficial aspect of it. She is taking you through all the paces that she has been taught to do. There is nothing wrong with that, but she still doesn’t get it. She doesn’t get EVIL.
Maybe there will come a time when we have grown so far beyond that evil won’t matter to us anymore and we can look at everything clinically. But that isn’t where we are at right now. And there is no skipping the step of recognizing evil for what it is. We have to understand evil for what it is and feel repulsed by its toxicity. Without that knowledge and feeling, we can’t progress to the next stage of accepting that we are all children of God and letting Him judge the evil ones.
Well, now I’m rambling… I think that you have much to teach your therapist.
Sisterhood,
I’m with the other commentators here about the therapist. Whatever she’s doing does not seem helpful: she’s invalidating your experience and trauma and feelings, she’s pushing you into a direction when you are not ready yet for it. And the premisse that you would not have been spathed by a spath if you had not been abused in the past is not true. I come from a loving nest who taught me boundaries and all, and have always been an assertive person who called wrong what was wrong imo. I got spathed anyway.
In my experience my therapist just sits back and lets me talk my own way out of the mess with her. She mostly listens. She is very validating. What she will not do though is put medical labels on me or others. She might with other patients, but she has specific reasons not to do it with me. I make better progress when I rephrase my behaviour and condition as normal for myself within extreme circumstances. The only thing she pushes are the meetings with her. If she feels I’m in deep mental shit, she will see me weekly or 2 weekly, may even give me an assignment. When she feels I’m seeing the end of the tunnel she relaxes the appointments. And she’ll make it my own decision to declare myself healed enough and that I do not need anymore therapy.
Anyway, it seems unhelpful that you feel invalidated and that she pushes you into a direction while you don’t feel you’ve processed the spathing yet. Not that it’s wrong to look at the abusive past before that, but your own mind and emotions will know when you are ready for that. And she might drop hints and suggestions to verify if you are ready for it. But you are capable of knowing your own pace and she should respect that. By not doing that she’s crossing your boundaries, and that seems quite unhealthy coming from someone in a powerful position you turn to for help, especially when you’ve known abuse from very young. Therapists are not supposed to fix you, but are supposed to guide you through your self-paced process to fix yourself
oh rats – i just wrote a very long post to you sisterhood, and lost it. now i have to go to work. 🙁
i’ll try again later tonight.
Sisterhood,
There are those that think like your therapist: To quote your above post:
“She made a point to remind me that it is not healthy to shun anyone and that I shouldn’t be upset with my friends who don’t “shun” blatantly disordered people. I think she is getting at my co-dependency (I can’t control anyone, I can only control myself) This is also where she repeatedly mentions that everything is on a spectrum and that there is not black and white.”
Her “it is not healthy to shun anyone” is about as STUPID as I can imagine for any professional to say!!!!
“there is not black and white” Again, an absolutely STUPID and IGNORANT thing for someone to believe.
Of course there is BLACK and WHITE, and there are shades of GRAY in between but “yes, Virginia there is a SATAN, there is EVIL and there is NO SANTA CLAUS!”
As for your “friends” refusing to “shun” someone who has hurt you by evil behavior–well, they “aint’ no friends of yours.” Just as my own egg donor REFUSES TO SHUN my Psychopathic son Patrick JUST BECAUSE HE MURDERED A GIRL IN COLD BLOOD, AND TRIED TO HAVE ME KILLED….I mean, comeeeeee on, why would anyone SHUN him, after all he is my son and her grandson, we can’t give up on him just because he is a cold blooded murderer now can we? He isn’t EVIL, it isn’t BLACK and WHITE and if we pretend enough maybe the girl he murdered will come back to life. CALL BULL SHEET ON YOUR THERAPIST!
ps Sisterhood,
in response to her INVALIDATING your “feeling of love” for this person because “you were so young”—this woman is hopeless as a therapist and she is, I think, doing you a Total DISSERVICE. SHE needs the therapy….
She is not the ONLY Christian therapist in the world, but she is NOT a good therapist in my opinion, because she is trying to tell you how you SHOULD feel….and INVALIDATING how you actually feel.
Quit trying to find excuses of why you need to continue to see this woman, you may feel “connected to her” because she is more screwed up than you are. LOL You leaving therapy this week confused is a BIG RED FLAG that she is not a good therapist for you. Her statements of “it is unhealthy to shun anyone” is BLACK AND WHITE thinking on her part.
Oxy, “You leaving therapy this week confused is a BIG RED FLAG that she is not a good therapist for you.”
Totally agree! Good therapy would either feel as if a little weight is from your shoulders or as if you gained an insight or 2. Confusion means that whatever she’s doing is not working for you.
Right on, Oxy!
By the way, one of the things I really love about this site, is that having been here so long, I can read a post like Sisterhood’s, and know what you guys are going to say to her before I even scroll down! It’s like the “old married couple” thing on a collective level.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been reading a wonderful book by the brilliant forensic psychologist Michael Stone, called “Abnormalities of Personality Within and Beyond the Realm of Treatment.” I won’t go into details, but I do recommend it. What’s more, the chapter on Psychopathy repeadedly echoes the collective wisdom that you find here, almost verbatim in some cases. Actually, there really isn’t a whole lot that’s new in that respect, but I was amused at how many of his arguments and sentiments could in many cases be taken verbatim from this site. So perhaps we really are getting wiser!
At any rate, from one radicalized person to another, I’m thoroughly sick of these therapists telling people about “shades of gray.” Indeed, when people start talking about shades of gray, I think what they often really mean are “SHADES OF YELLOW.”
Thanks constantine and Darwinsmom,
Constantine, your comments about “an old married couple” finishing each other’s sentences etc. is pretty much on track. There isn’t anything really “profound” left to say, it is all a RINSE AND REPEAT of NO CONTACT, NO CONTACT, NO CONTACT!!!!! Stay away from them and you will heal, keep in contact and you will not heal.
I wish some of these “goodie two shoes” people who think “there’s good in every one deep down” and all the other platitudes of “new age love and kindness” would GET REAL! Heck, even Jesus saw and called BS on these people who are psychopaths! The story of the “good Samaritian” is a perfect example of how He saw these “holier than thou” psychopaths who preached to others about how holy they were while ignoring things like empathy and compassion as they walked by on the other side of the road and watched the poor man lie there bleeding in the ditch and wouldn’t even stop to help him. The man who DID stop though was from Samaria and was looked down on as TRASH by the Jewish Priests (psychopathic and narcissisticly walking by)
The people at the little church where Dickie Ray Chance, the man who was arrested for the internet porn, preached are just like the Catholic church, trying to “keep it quiet” and cover it up. And of course he wrote letters to the church “repenting” so now he will sit on the front row and be used as an example of being “saved” from hell fire by his belief! Yea, just like my son Patrick!
There IS EVIL IN THIS WORLD, there are people who are not redeemable and we SHOULD SHUN them.
St. Paul said that we SHOULD SHUN our brother if they continue in their sinful ways, “NOT EVEN EAT WITH THEM. Treat them as a heathen ”
So if Sisterhood’s “therapist” says that shunning them is unhealthy maybe Sisterhood might rather listen to St. Paul and Jesus when they come to this subject.