If it’s easy getting into a relationship with an exploiter, getting out isn’t always so simple. What makes the getting out so difficult?
In retrospect (if we’re lucky enough to say “in retrospect”) it seems like it should have been a no-brainer. In truth there are many reasons it can be hard to leave a destructive relationship and destructive person. I’ve addressed several of them in previous posts, and the LoveFraud community in general has addressed this theme comprehensively.
But here I’d like to consider a less-appreciated factor.
I regard it as the factor of habituation. Optimally the best time to end a relationship with an exploiter is the very first signal you get that something is amiss. The next best time to leave the relationship would the second signal that something is amiss.
When we don’t act on these early signals, increasingly we are less likely to act on subsequent ones. One of many reasons for this is the process of habituation.
Habituation is basically how, through repeated exposure to something initially uncomfortable, even highly disturbing, we adjust to it. We are built, it seems, to habituate to unsettling situations and experiences.
And the key to successful habituation is exposure. Sustained exposure to almost anything increases our tolerance of, and comfort with, it.
Consider what happens when we’re willing to endure the initial shock of cold water in a lake, or pool. Our sustained exposure (non-flight) gradually results in our bodies’ adjusting, or habituating, to the cold water, which begins to feel less cold, maybe even warm.
This is great news for someone with a social phobia. We just have to be willing to intentionally expose ourselves, repeatedly and sustainedly, to disturbing social situations, and quite likely we’ll experience a gradual reduction of anxiety.
Unfortunately the same thing can be said of abusive, exploitative relationships. The longer you expose yourself to, and repeatedly tolerate, the abuse, the more habituated you become to it.
Alarming behaviors that initially signaled our self-protective response (like flight) gradually lose their activating properties as we habituate to them. The avoidance-flight signal particularly—in the face of repeated, sustained exposure—dulls and/or we become less responsive to it.
Heeding the avoidant-flight response, in other words, can be critical to our safety and self-interest. It is great to confront and conquer avoidance when the avoidance hinders our personal growth; but it is dangerous to do so in the face of real, violating circumstances.
When I work with partners of sociopaths and other abusers, I find that habituation to the exploiter’s abuse often has occurred over time and contributes to the inertia that keeps the exploited partner in the relationship.
Of course there are often many other (and sometimes more compelling) reasons that one stays in a relationship with an exploitative partner.
But habituation to the abuse, I believe, is not only real, but sometimes helps explain why an otherwise dignified individual would tolerate behaviors that, from the outside—that is, from the unhabituated’s perspective—should be (or should have been) no-brainer deal-breakers.
When relevant I encourage clients to examine this factor in their analysis of the indignities they’ve sustained sometimes for years in relationships with disturbed, violating partners.
Paradoxically (and precisely to my point) their suffering was often highest early in the relationship before, through habituation, they grew slowly more numb and inured to—more tolerant of—the abuse, and thereby less motivated to do what was advisable at the outset—flee.
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
Henry
I can’t believe you Bit that Hook! :)~ LOVE JJ
good morning and blessings to all my LF friends,
i just did something i NEVER thought i could do.
i had 17 voice messages from the ex spath that i just couldn’t delete. in my mind, they were the last ”proof” that he ”loved” me. the sweet voice, the sexy comments, the cute laughter about an inside joke. i couldn’t delete them.
i was speaking with my minister yesterday and he made a general statement that, ”you can’t have a ‘new’ year holding on to old things.”
i looked at my cell phone this morning and knew what i had to do. first i got rid of the 15 beautiful (but phoney as hell) loving messages. i kept the semi-threatening one, and the one he left three months after NC telling me he ”needed my advice” so call him back.’
a few minutes later i decided that wasn’t good enough. i deleted those too.
that is the LAST of him in my world. i was actually able to say, ”good bye. i hope you are happy in the life you have chosen.”
NOT easy. but i feel cleansed. i’m crying a little, but i think it’s more because another release has occurred. it’s almost like i can’t fill my heart back up until it is completely empty of him. believe me, i’m in NO rush, but he just doesn’t have a place in me any longer. in truth, i’m free.
… through the grace of god the healing continues …
i hope you all have a blessed day.
TOWANDA!!!!!
LIG,
I remember the day my daughter and I took every last item that the X S had ever given either of us to the local dump.. My daughter stated it felt like that good feeling you get after you PUKE…..
In the Asian cultures that is part of “feng shui”( getting rid of everything related to an X…)
Muldoon: my daughter and I slept with pepper spray,2 cell phones and a loaded 38 for a weeks after my break up last summer… Be careful yours sounds like a total Charlie Manson…
LIG,
Good for you! It’s cleansing. It’s empowering! And it’s okay that it took a while. We do these things at the right time for us and that time will be different for every individual. Healing is very individual.
Yes! TOWANDA!
Indigoblue I have seen kharma take care of things many times, that part of why I have been such a doormat, I trust whatever it is that is out there to take care opf me, yes I can do bad things but I never go out of my way to cause another mysery, nor do I take the p**s out of people, I always knew kharma would deal with him and sometimes in a small ways he already has been.
Stormee, Hope you are not serious about manson and my ex? To be honest although I know it is not normal and I dont like it and its damaging the kids I am kind of used to that behaviour from seeing it with my father and mother.
Guaranteed at some point I will be on heree sharing how I rebuuffed his bullsh*t advances and how I am finally frree of it all.
Hi Muldoon- Hope you are hanging in there and getting some support from us. I know that not all of what we say is helpful, and probably only parts of it apply to your experience – hopefully you can tease out what is, and is not helpful for you. I believe that all of us have the best intentions in supporting each other, but we don’t know the unique circumstances in the individual situations of the others, and sometimes our advice might be a bit off the mark. I apologize if that’s been the case for anything I’ve written. I feel so strongly about this topic that sometimes I write in earnest and don’t always reflect a lot on what I wrote.
But I think what everyone is saying, at the core of the messages, is that you need to protect yourself, and your children, from this man. He sounds dangerous, and you sound very vulnerable. Get all the resources you can, legal, and mental healthwise…..and reach out to the helpful and healthy people in your family.
You asked me a question as a mental health professional – and I want to stress that I am not well-trained in dealing with sociopaths and sociopath survivors (not at all, really), and much of what I have learned has been from brutal personal experience in the past two years, and really helpful experience on this site.
I do know, from having worked with a large number of people with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) that the critical first step – and this is only the first step, is to get completely removed and protected from the traumatic situation. If you stay in it, you will spend your life in a state of PTSD, which is horrible. Once you get out, you still have the PTSD, but there is much hope for healing. There is no hope for healing if you stay in.
I hope you are okay, Muldoon, whatever okay is, given the circumstances. My heart goes out to you – and my heart is not as broken and useless as it felt six months ago – it is healing. Yours will too.
Dear Muldoon,
The road to healing is unfortunately frought with pot holes, rocks, ruts, and people who will try to rope you and drag you off, and there are days when it is so uphill that you must literally climb on all fours and hope you don’t fall, but even with all of that, it is THE ONLY WAY OUT OF THIS.
Many people find the healing road so painful and scary that they would rather go back to the pain they KNOW rather than face a scary pain they are not familiar with. I used to think these people who did that were “weak” and I felt likek I was better than them, but I know so much more now, and I know that I am just like them, I might not have let a man hit me or hurt me ovr and over, but I let my mother and my P-son do so. I would try to break away but the pain was always so scary and they would “love bomb” me again to get me back into the game again.
Without a VICTIM to prey on, these people have no lives, so it is important to them to hook you back into the game of “love bomb” and “betrayal” over and over and over, and I can guarentee that if you fall for the “love bomb” or the “threats” either, and go back into the frey it will never change. I can also guarentee that though t he road to healing is rough at first, as you progress past the barriers the road does get smoother, and we here at LF are there to help you, hold your hand, encourage you and support you.
I’ve been on this road, and off and on it what I think is my entire life and I have been distracted, pulled off, jumped off and fallen off the healing road, but I AM DETERMINED TO STAY ON IT NOW, to protect myself and to lend support to others on the road as well. Without the support I got from my “cyber friends” I could not have made it this far, and I can TESTIFY that life is so much better now. Even when I step in a pot hole now, I am not breaking my legs like I did before, I just get up and get back on the road. There is time now to experience joy and peace and smell the roses (if there were any this time of year, it’s 25 degrees out for a high today!)
This will be a P-FREE CHRISTMAS, and my two wonderful sons are with me and we are happy and have each other…I couldn’t ask for more blessings from God than I already have.
Yes, Matt, there have been times I hve been tempted to “shoot and shovel” the psychopaths but I limit that to maurading dogs that prey on the livestock. I have never killed a human being, but I actually don’t think I would have a psychological melt down if I did so in self defense. I’m a pretty tough old bird where that kind of thing comes in.
I am a great animal lover and also a push over for anything that is hurt or in pain, but I have no problem putting down an animal, even one that I love, as long as it is done humanely. Heck, I even go to the butcher with my beef animals so they are “not scared” when their time comes. When I was a kid I always made a pet out of the hogs we butchered each fall and cried when they were slaughtered, but I have long since over come that emotional point of view, but I do have a BIG thing about having it done painlessly.
Last year I lost three long-time and beloved pets, I had to put one down because of age and injury, and one was shot by some vandal, but not killed, but I had to put her down due to the extent of her injury, and the other was an old horse I had, so it was a bad year for my pets. With the other losses I had had during the year with the Ps it was very traumatic to me to lose these old friends.
I usually take stock of what has happened during the year about now, as the year winds to a close, and looking back to last December, this is the same week I moved my RV back to the farm and “came home.” Even though I was back here, for some reason I couldn’t make myself leave the RV and move back into the house. I just parked the RV close to the house and hooked up the utilities to it and stayed in there. Some way it seemed “safer” to me I guess, and it wasn’t until June that I was finally able to move back into my home again.
I haven’t even thought about selling the RV (though I could use the money) and it stands ready, fully stocked with food and utensils, and ready at a moment’s notice to hook up and haul ass if I feel the need to again for safety. This piece of dirt that I live on has been in my family since 1833, and it is prescious to me, important to me, and I have spent the last 20 years restoring it to fertility and beauty, built my home and my husband built his dream of an airport “in his front yard” and it has memories from my entire life here. It is my heritage and my love, but I do realize now that NO place or piece of dirt is more important than my life and my safety.
Though I am way along the road to healing and am again experiencing joy, happiness, and some peace, I am not “there” yet, because “healing” is a JOURNEY, not a destination. My sons and I are working toward making the farm into a sanctuary for others as well as for ourselves with a non-profit foundation for suvivors of abuse. That’s still a ways down the road yet, and I must be sure that the farm is SAFE from predators before we actually start taking in clients, but we are getting there slowly.
I realize that as long as my son lives there will be some danger, but I would like to minimize it as much as possible. I have to fight myself sometimes from wishing that some other convict would shove a shank in his heart or cut his throat when I think about the hate he has for us.
My hypervigilence has decreased, but I still keep my 38 handy, but I no longer jump when someone knocks at the door or the dogs bark alerting me that there is someone on the place. My son C who just recently returned home and is staying with me right now is still very hypervigilent and if he hears me shouting at my dog he comes barreling out of his room asking “what’s wrong?” I’m having to learn to scold the dog in a quiet voice! LOL
I know that he is much better than he was when he left the state in a panic after his now-X-wife and her BF psychopath the Troan Horse my P-son sent to invade our family for the purpose of murder tried to kill him. The Trojan Horse just recently got out of prison on parole, and my P0son who is in prison in TExas is again getting money and support from my mother, so until we can get a bit more secure here with electronic alarms, etc. I can and do understand his hypervigilence, but if he wasn’t much better than he was a year and a half ago when they tried to murder him, he wouldn’t have come back. Personally, with 3 of us here instead of two I do feel safer, because I’m never left here on the farm totally alone.
HH, I do find loads usefull and today, yesterday I was all over the place looking at Christmas coming and the ex through slightly rose coloured glasses. Today I used the pulling different files and when I do think of all that stuff that has been going on I think about the cheek and cruelty of it and how I despise people who treat love with such contempt.
Because of the kind of childhood I have had I can be resiliant if the mood takes me and whereas some of the stuff I have seen would drive someone else around the bend or have them suicidal I withstand it easier.Its not nice but its familiar territory if you get what I mean.
Of course I am sad that my children will grow up without a father and that although the 4 yr old isnt even asking where he is anymore at some point she will know she does not have a dad….Apart from his brain storms we spent everyday together, he even walked me to the shops and sometimes sat on the stair waiting for me to come out of the toilet!!
Oxdrover I am sad to hear it is your son who has caused you the pain and stress, you must have been torn in two…mother versus victim. I do not envy you.
I agree about going back to familiar, I am a creature of habit and do not like change. And besides the not wanting change there was always hop I was misreading, provoking or not understanding him at fault. I now know for absolute certain no matter what i did or how I changed he will always be a bully, he no longer needs a reason to kick off, he does because he can and because that is him.
Before it was hard to accept someone else having the good loving side of him, it crushed me, now I think how long before she walks in my shoes on the same eggshells I have myself walked nd I am actually gald he is not my problem anymore.
Dear Muldoon,
I’ve had them around me so much in my life, my bio-father was a raging bully and a psychopath, my mother is an enabler, her brother was the guy I call “Uncle Monster” who was a vicious bully and drunk, I had an ex-father-in-law who was one, and I’ve worked for them, I’ve had them as business partners, and after my husband’s death I dated one, thought I had found another “soul mate”—sheesh, I am only now learning to deal with them, and that the ONLY way is to GET AWAY FROM THEM…and even then sometimes they will stalk you. My P-son has been stalking us as a family from his prison cell where he is incarcerated for murder. My “good” son married one, she tried to kill him a little over a year ago with her psychopathic boy friend! Sounds like a soap opera doesn’t it! I can laugh at it now, but there was a time when I was huddled in a corner, in the fetal position, sucking my thumb (emotionally if not physically) and shaking like a leaf in a gale!
There are stories on here that are more of a “drama” than mine, so you are in good company no matter what your story is…we have all been through the mill and all of us have been filled with pain, no matter how “mundane” or how “complex” our stories are.
It is so very important that you go totally NC with him, do not listen to him, get all the real world help you can, go to a shelter if you must to keep you and your children safe, there is nothing more important than you SAFETY. 50+% of the women murdered in the US are victims of domestic violence and are killed by their boy friends or husbands. That’s a startling statistic but a REAL ONE. Men are (and so are women for that matter) perfectly capable of killing out of rage and revenge.
I never liked my X-DIL, I knew she married my son for a meal ticket, but though I knew she was hateful and deceptive, I NEVER FOR ONE MOMENT THOUGHT SHE WOULD TRY TO MURDER HIM. The thing is with the personality disordered, their emotions are NOT “normal” and many times they are full throttle up or down. And they can go from Zero to a hundred in a tenth of a second. She had planned this murder for over a week, after he had caught her in an affair and offered to go to counseling etc and “work it out”—she even had sex with him the night before she intended to kill him to lower his level of wariness. Later, as the police were hauling her and her boyfriend who is a pedophile sex offender, ex-convict etc., off to jail she flung back that her having sex with my son the night before “made my skin crawl”—
They just don’t get it.
I knew my son wasn’t happy when he was married to this woman, that he was depressed, etc. but it never dawned on me that she had been abusing him since shortly after the wedding. She had alienated and isolated him from me for so long I really had no way of knowing what was going on in that household even though we lived on the same farm.
I know we have been joking here about “shoot and shovel” but there have been women and men who have gone to prison protecting themselves from these people. There have also been plenty who have gone to the graveyard because they didn’t protect themselves from them. So BE CAREFUL.
It would also be a good idea to get one of the little digital tape recorders that is voice activated and keep it in your pocket or on your person and record some of the threats etc. Also, it might be wise to go to court or the police and get him removed. I know you worry about how it is effecting your children but the thing is that your children will be more damaged by seeing him kill you or seriously hurt you than by anything else. KEEP SAFE ABOVE ALL. I will keep you in my prayers. ((((hugs))))