Dealing with a sociopath means stress. Somehow, we have to find ways to reduce it. Here’s why:
Yet another reason to reduce stress: It shrinks your brain, on CommercialAppeal.com.
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How to recognize and recover from everyday sociopaths - narcissists
This article states, “Generally, stress is considered to come from a feeling of having no control.”
Doesn’t that pretty much sum up being near a P? Not knowing what is going on or what will happen next? Of course, ignorance can be bliss. I guess you’d need to know that something COULD happen.
LF readers have two excellent solutions to reducing stress – gray rock and no contact.
I wonder if the inverse is true? Certainly, Ps must feel that they have quite a bit of control because they are master puppeteers, manipulators, and controllers. They must feel quite serene.
No wonder they get away with so much when they start yoga scams. LOL
I’ve never noted much stress coming off the Ps in my life. I’ve seen anger and tension when they are confronted or aren’t getting their own way, but it isn’t the type of stress of feeling that you’re not in control. That kind of stress I equate with a victim, i.e., you have no idea what is going to hit you next and you’re scared to death because of your vulnerability. How vulnerable do omnipotent Ps feel?
Is this situational, delusional, realistic, or something else? Believing how much control you have?
Is it knowing what sort of things you do have control over, like calming yourself through meditation, walking, soothing music, or no contact versus things you have no control over, like the world economy going down the tubes?
One final thing – after going through all the stress that we do from Ps, I bet our brains look like Swiss cheese.
G1S, Holmes and Rahe were two earlier researchers of stress. They realized that people who are stressed tend to get sick or have accidents more than people who aren’t under stress.
They developed a “scale” for various life events and saw that people with a score of 300 over a 3 year period were more likely to get sick or have a serious accident….you can google their scale.
At one point I had over 1,500 points in less than a 3 year period. It takes TIME of calm for the stress effects to decrease.
CHANGE is stress, even good change (like winning the lotto) so stress is not only “negative” events.
I have also read some books on the chemistry and anatomy of the brain and how it does CHANGE in response to the various events (stressful and non stressful) and how new connections are formed and old ones withered. The brain is not the static organ that it was first thought to be.
Lack of control is one difficult stressor but also things happening “randomly” so that you are always on hyper alert never knowing when “the other shoe will drop”
That first part of the article describes totally the feeling I had after the aircraft crash that killed my husband.
“”For a year, I couldn’t think,” says Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas. “I couldn’t write a coherent word. I couldn’t do anything.”
“When patients come in, we commonly see concentration problems, the inability to make decisions,”
– so many think they have dementia or Alzheimer’s — to having their memory totally back to normal. It’s fantastic, absolutely.”
It has been almost 8 years (in july) since the crash and my brain is NOT “back to normal”—I am different, there are word-finding difficulties still, and other deficits in function.
I had to retire as I was no longer able to perform my job which was critical enough that people’s lives depended on my memory and even some short term memory problems were unacceptable to the job.
Even now, I am not as resilient as I once was. My ability to bounce back from a stressful event is not as easy as it once was. My physical health has taken a nose dive and I’ve had four life threatening infections since the crash, as well as not being able to make decisions as well as I could before the crash. Of course this time in my life, this MOST vulnerable time was when the psychopathic group chose to strike. I can’t even imagine that I would have allowed all these things to take place if I had been at the top of my game, able to make decisions that made sense. Instead I was emotionally and mentally fragile and physically ill at the time I call “the summer of chaos” in 2007 when I had to flee my home and hide out.
I think if I had not found Love Fraud at that time I wouldn’t have made it through that summer alive, I would have died from the infections I had and didn’t even realize I was critically ill for over two months before I finally went to a physician.
People around us may think we are “crazy” for some of the “strange” or illogical things we may do, and I have no doubt that I appeared crazy to others because we have trouble setting priorities that make sense to others.
It seems to me that my psychopathic son Patrick THINKS he has control when in fact, he has NO control…he is in prison for God’s sake, but he doesn’t see it that way, he feels like he is in control because he can put “one over on” some stupid guard or another convict, and he doesn’t “count” the fact that he is behind bars. He sees himself as a BIG SUCCESS when in fact, he is nothing but another low-life convict that wasn’t even a successful crook, because he got caught almost every time he broke the law.
I know the test that you’re talking about.
I started to take it after being attacked by my S mother and P sister.
I gave up because I had checked off so much I thought, “OK. It appears I died a couple of years ago.” Decided to just take things as they come, although I have been silently worried and watching to see if anything comes up with my son.
I don’t feel that I am back to being 100% after what we went through. It’s like there is a part of my brain that is always watching, waiting, on alert, worried, what could I have done to have prevented this, if only I had… It takes away from being able to concentrate.
Speaking of appearing crazy, I volunteered to adopt two cats that somebody posted on our local Craigslist two days ago. I recognized her name when she emailed me and told her that I used to be one of the legal secretaries at the law firm her father used. She was supposed to call me last night to discussing picking them up.
Haven’t heard a word from her since. No call. I even emailed her this morning asking if she was still looking for homes.
Don’t know what happened. Maybe she changed her mind, maybe she found another home for them, and I’m working real hard at not assuming that she heard something negative about me. It could be that something came up or she has been super busy, but that’s my PTSD kicking in. I assume the worst and my stress level goes up.
Your son sounds like how my P sister thinks. She ignores the obvious and finds something to spin so she comes out looking like she is the one in control and on top of everybody else.
Hyper alert = hypervigilant. I believe that is the mental health term. Can relate real well to that one, too. The difference between being hypervigilant and being paranoid is that with paranoia, there is no basis for the fear. Being hypervigilant, you’ve got reason to fear and be on alert.
I’ve been waiting for someone to post to this topic.
This certainly explains a lot !!! – like how I couldn’t remember where the service station was that I’ve used dozens of times before.
From now on, it’s “I can’t help it, I have holes in my brain.”
You can adopt my cat G1S, as soon as I remember where I put her. lol
G1S,
Yes, hyper-vigilant is the term. It is that “waiting for the other shoe to drop”—I didn’t know what that meant until I lived in a down stairs apartment and when the guy above me took off his shoes, there was a THUD, then in a minute there would be another THUD…of course the “wait” between the two thuds varied in time…but it always came.
I have seen my son C so hyper-vigilant that if I yelled at the cat, he would come out of his room from a DEAD SLEEP into attack mode. Like a cat that was cornered by a dog, every hair standing errect.
I’ve been there myself, any unexpected noise would make me go into ALERT DEFENSIVE MODE…I still live cautiously, but not in TERROR like I did. I live at the end of a lane that is deep in a wooded area so if someone comes into my drive they are either looking for me, or they are lost, or they are up to no good. I don’t meet strangers at the door any more with a smile, I always have a defensive weapon in hand and I never let a stranger get close enough to grab me.
There’s an old saying “just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you” LOL
As for the woman and the cats, maybe she was ashamed of what her father needed an attorney for and thought you knew some dirt on him….I wouldn’t let it bother me, though, the thing is, what is this woman in the scheme of your life? My egg donor was always concerned with “what would the neighbors think?” and you know, now I could give a rat’s behind what the neighbors think….in actual fact, most of them DON’T think much about me. they may gossip about me some, but I could care less what they think or say. They don’t pay my bills, and they don’t keep a roof over my head so I no longer care what they think or say.
I lived a good life in this community, an honest life, but when the chips were down none of them came to my rescue. None of them said “I’m sorry you were treated this way” and none of them came to me and said “You were RIGHT, the Trojan Horse was a pervert, a criminal, and deserves to be in prison”
Everyone was just like “let’s pretend none of this happened” I’m not sure why…embarrassment? didn’t know what to say? Didn’t care one way or the other?
Why doesn’t matter really, I realized that these people are not the caring compassionate people I thought they were. They really don’t care about me one way or the other.
Yea, Patrick ignores the failures completely when he is keeping score, and he credits only the “wins” and apparently the NUMBER of wins is always a positive score and the VALUE of the losses versus the “value” of the wins is never taken into account. Like a +1 is smuggled in an extra pair of socks past the guard = a score of +1, getting arrested for murder isn’t his fault, if that arsehole detective hadn’t recorded his jail house calls to the guy asking him to move the body, her body never would have been found, so the score is still +1 and he has one more pair of socks than the rules allow so he is a BIG success. LOL ROTFLMAO
Swiss cheese for brains, MiLo. 😉
Never heard that expression before, Oxy, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.” I like it!
As for the cat lady, her father was a business man. The law firm handled a lot of his business transactions. He wasn’t in trouble. He was very highly regarded in the town. He was asked to be the town’s 4th of July parade marshall one year, a huge honor considering the parade is the largest in the country.
The cat thing probably worked out for the best. One of my babies is hyperstressed over the new addition. He has twitchy-back, rippling-back cat syndrome a.k.a. Feline Hyperesthesia.
His back ripples and goes into spasms. He is definitely stress-related, but we have no idea what he is so stressed about. He’s knocked over a few lamps and broken things. One time, he was at the foot of my bed when I was sleeping. He sunk his claws so deeply into my calf that I had scars for three weeks. That hurt, but my poor baby.
He sleeps with our new cat and even washes her face. He flips out” about once per day where he looks like he’s spinning in every direction possible, sort of like a self-contained, spinning globe. It isn’t epilepsy or something like that.
We feel so badly for him. They could put him on tranquilizers, but since he goes outside and there are coyotes, I’d rather he not be sedated to any degree.
So, maybe I shouldn’t be adding two new cats to the household.
Oxy, maybe your neighbors didn’t want to get involved because it would have demanded a lot of their time, at least in their minds. More than they were willing to invest, let’s put it that way. I’ve noticed that, too. People suddenly have something else to do and they disappear.
I had a cat that acted squirrely like that and it was a neurological injury from some cropland poison that he got sprayed with (neighbor). My vet gave me something (can’t remember what it was 35 years ago) that seemed to help him.
I just went outside and found that my “Mouse” cat (that’s her name) just had her babies. I have a general idea where they are but will leave them alone for now. This is her first litter. I’ll check on the kittens tomorrow and hope she doesn’t move and hide them from me so that they are wild and have to be caught in a live trap. My inside cat’s mother was feral because her very tame mother hid her out until she was 8-10 weeks old and she never really tamed down. She finally got to where she would let you touch her while she ate but that was about all. She was a good provider for her kittens and taught them to hunt. While I was in hiding, she stayed here and supported herself by hunting. There was no way I could have taken her with me since she was semi feral herself.
Back to the neighbors, these people are distant relatives who have known me since I was born, and our families have had close association for generations….but everyone is busy, has their own lives, and really can’t be bothered with the lives of others, is what it amounts to I think. But whatever it is, I think it is more apathy than anything else. I guess i am as guilty of that as anyone, just keeping my nose back here in the woods and out of other people’s business.
No bobbing baby kitty tails, Oxy. Promise?
G1S I already promised you, G1S, no bobbed tails.
Son D just went out and checked there are 6 kitties, 3 white and 3 all black…one of the white ones however didn’t make it, so we ended up with 3 all black kitties and 2 all white kitties, and all have the extra toes on all 4 feet.
Today was Friday the 13th, can you believe it? January 13th, Friday was the day I dropped the tool box on my Achilles tendon and smashed it…then Wednesday of this week, just as that ankle was almost well, I slipped on the wet grass and sprained it (at least) may have broken it…still not sure, it’s swollen, black and blue, but have an ortho appt next Tuesday…and on top of everything, my Jack russell terrier disappeared on Wednesday. We’ve combed the woods and called and been to the neighbors but no sign of him, so at best I can hope some of the oil field trash picked him up for a squirrel dog, maybe when they find out he won’t bark on a tree they’ll drop him back. It’s been kind of a bleak week for us.
Oxy,
I’m sorry you’re having a hard week! 🙁
I hope you feel better and your dog comes back. Try to lay low for the rest of the day. No use tempting fate!