There is no straight line to healing after an encounter with a psychopath. No clearly defined path that says, step here, go there. For most of us, there are no tools in our lifeboats that will aid us in the process of letting go so that we can move on to live and laugh and love again.
Healing from such an encounter takes energy. It requires a personal commitment to doing what it takes to clear your mind, body and spirit of his or her lies. Healing takes time.
When I first got my life back after the psychopath was arrested I looked at the devastation around me and cried. How could a once vibrant, successful, loving woman have fallen so far from her path? How could she have lost her grace and dignity by loving such a man? I didn’t want to believe that woman was me. I didn’t want to believe my life had crumbled to such disarray. But to heal, I had to accept what was and let go of my disbelief that it couldn’t be true. It was true. I had loved a man who lied. I had fallen into his web and let go of all that I had held true.
Stepping Into Acceptance
That was my first step. Acceptance. Acceptance of my life that day, in that moment. It was in tatters. My home was gone. My life savings evaporated. My belongings disappeared. I had to accept where I was at without falling victim to wishing, ”˜if only’. I had to accept that I had done things that hurt my daughters, my family, my friends, myself. I had to accept that in order to keep the appearance of that relationship alive, I too had lied, deceived and manipulated. In giving into him I had to accept that I had given up on me to the point that I no longer existed as a separate individual. I had conspired with him in my destruction. I had to accept I was a victim of abuse.
Acceptance was hard. Facing the truth of what I had done and what I had become hurt. But, to be free of the past I had to face myself and love myself for the wounded, abused woman that I was and acknowledge that I did not have to stay there. I had to accept that only I could create the change in my life that I desired, that it was up to me. If I wanted to move beyond his abuse, move away from that painful place I found myself in, I would need to find my courage and turn up for myself so that I could step into forgiveness.
The Gift of Forgiveness
And that was my second step. Forgiveness. For all that I had done and said and become that hurt me and everyone in my life. For, no matter how blind or stupid or gullible I had been, no matter how unintentional my actions, I had betrayed the sacred trust I entered into when I gave birth to my daughters. In my betrayal of that trust, I had broken my commitment to be a conscious and loving mother that they could count on to be there for them when they needed me.
Truth was, I hadn’t been there for them. In keeping myself locked in that man’s unholy embrace, I had hurt them. They too had suffered through what he had done, who I had become and what had become of me. For all of us to heal, I needed to forgive myself and to ask for their forgiveness and be willing to accept their right to be angry without picking up their anger for them. In forgiveness, I could lovingly let them move through their pain without forcing them to let it go before they were ready. And in giving them that grace, I gave myself the grace to feel my feelings, without having to deny them, denigrate them, or escape them through searching for myself in someone else’s arms.
My Commitment to Myself
Through forgiveness, I found myself taking my third step. Commitment. To myself, to my daughters, to those who love me. Through my commitment to do what was loving and necessary to get what I needed in my life, I made a commitment to turn up for me, without fear, without judgement, without hesitation. I made a commitment that I would honour my journey, no matter how painful, and keep myself safe on the path to healing by not falling back into remorse, self-denigration, self-abasement and guilt. By committing myself to love myself, warts and all, I gave myself the grace and space to move into my fourth loving step.
Embracing Gratitude
Gratitude. Yes, he had hurt me. Betrayed me. But I was alive. I had the chance to heal, the opportunity to begin again. By stepping into an attitude of gratitude I chose to create harmony, not discord, with all my words and actions. To bemoan what he had done, to focus on his misdeeds would have held me pinioned to the pain of his passing through my life. I deserved better. And so, I embraced gratitude and let regret and remorse go. I did not need to get even with him. I did not need revenge. What I needed was to find my peace of mind, to create a life of harmony without him in it. Every night I wrote out my list of gratitudes, I thanked my angels, God, the Divine. I gave thanks for my life, my daughters’ lives, the love that filled my heart and the opportunity to make amends.
Making Amends
Making amends was my fifth step. Making amends does not mean putting straight other people’s lives. It doesn’t mean righting the past. It means, staying true to who I am today. To keeping my commitments, my word, my promises. It means consciously choosing each step of my journey with dignity and grace, treating my world and everyone in it with integrity, being honest and open about my feelings, my life, my journey. Making amends means asking those I have hurt what they need and being committed to do what it takes to give it to them. Making amends means knowing who I am today and being the best me I can be so that I can live my sixth and final step without reservation.
Living with Grace
There is no easy way through the pain of having loved a psychopath. But, no matter the darkness of the path, the rocks and potholes strewn across the way, the fierce winds that blow or stormy seas we navigate, living with grace gives me the courage to face life’s ups and downs without losing my way. Like a sailboat aiming for shore, my journey is not a straight line. I continually correct my course without losing site of my objective. Standing in my ”˜I’, staying focused on my journey, I am not pulled from my centre by the winds that blow around me. With grace, I turn up, pay attention, speak my truth and stay unattached to the outcome. With grace, I am free to be all that I am meant to be, confident that my best is good enough.
What one has to endure! 😀
Being so easy living and leting others live. But these enslavers exist….Hay que joderse.
You’re right, Oxy. I think it’s not going to be bad lesson for me in the long run because i have a tendency to be anarchic, and that’s not very advisable because these narcissistics abound and it’s easier to please them for a while and to run as soon as possible than to confront them.
Thanks for you empathy LL. Yes, he’s really irritating. I would rather burn his dick than becoming actress, but i’ll make an effort and i’ll buy, at least, one chinesse ball, to improve my face expression.
LL and Claudia,
lets crash this thread. It’s much shorter. We can gang up on Hens for making dirty jokes.
EVA!
You don’t need the chinesse balls. LEARN to act. Stop being FUSSY! You told me I had to stop being fussy and learn to eat psycho meat, so take some of your own advice.
ROTFLOL
the word is chinesse, not cheese, or chinese.
But I thought they were for exercising your hands. Aren’t they huge? My exP came home with a couple one day. Come to think of it, I don’t know where they went.
Skylar, i am fussy! I always was.
This cursed psycho is raping my personality! 😀
I always was very bad actress. But i’ll make an effort.
I’ll ask him if i still put constipated face expression and that if i need the chinesse balls to improve it.
Eva, you’re so funny! But really, with people like that prof, just knowing (in your own mind) that they’re full of bs and full of themselves may be enough to help you go through the motions and get a good grade.
You guys better be NICE or Donna will delete us all! LOL I swear you guys feed on each other—LOL ROTFLMAO Highjacking this thread! Yea it does load easier.
Seriously though, learning to spot them in the “wild” in our work places and in our schools, neighborhoods, etc. IS IMPORTANT and to avoid conflicts with them. They are not always such that we can easily get away from them without wrecking our own job or life. Sometimes you have to “go along to get along” with them. I’ve learned that the hard way. Some of them are VICIOUS and we have to realize that. Just being RIGHT doesn’t always win the brass ring, sometimes it gets you tossed out on your ear without a job. Look at what happened to nolarn recently. And when we are RAW and bleeding from the Ps in our personal lives lots of times we don’t have the extra strength to fight or tolerate or deal the best way with the Ps at work as well.
I know for myself that when I am stressed I am CRANKY–yea, I know it is difficult to believe that anyone as nice and humble as I am could even think about being CRANKY but yes, I CAN be a cranky biatch! LOL (speaking of constipated face!) LOL
The thing is that we have to use our energy and our stealth to the best advantage….just like if you are living with one and you plan to leave, DON’T TELL THEM YOUR PLANS…Boy did I ever violate that rule. I got upset, angry and told them what I intended to do to them! FOREWARNED THEM!!! BAD IDEA!!!
So just like any military strategy it is best not to let the ENEMY know what you are up to. Keep them in the dark and as EB would say,, “bite them when they least expect it.”
Ox? You are wise.
And you’re right. The way of life he was involved in skirted the edge of sanity. He is excluded from that now, because he has been away, because he is an “old head” in street slang and because his skills are rusty.
He is strong and can fight but the way things are settled on the streets these days is by guns. He cannot have a gun as a conviced felon. And if he is picked up with one, he then satisfies the “three strikes rule” in that a third felony is an automatic life sentence.
That is a big deterrent for him now. That is what changed. Not him. But the consequences.
You are right in that safety is paramount.
I am trying.
The trauma bond is strong. I was the perfect target and he was the perfect predator.
What I know for today is that I will not answer his calls. I will delete any voice mails he may leave.
I don’t see him in my daily travels.
I will pray for the strength to resist the temptation to connect with him. The fact that I don’t have his number and don’t know where he lives helps with that. God has blessed me in a strange way, I guess.
Dear Trimama,
Sugar you deserve better than a 2X convicted x con who is dangerous! Believe me, I have a son who is a convicted convict, still in prison, but would not let that deter him from violence. Would not “go straight” if he got out and had 10 million dollars, they love the excitement of the risk and the thrill of getting away with stuff.
One thing I have learned is that “rule number 1” is that if someone is not HONEST and KIND….you do not need them in your life, no matter who they are. So use RULE NUMBER 1 in all that you do with everyone. If you see a sign that someone is dishonest or unkind—ANY SIGN OF THAT—run from them, get away from them and STAY away from them.
If they steal or do drugs, lie or cheat, you do not need them—even if it means you have to give up every “friend” you have and start over, DO IT! In the end, you will be better off! I promise you!
If you feel yourself wanting to go back to him, come here—there is usually someone here 24/7 but if not, then READ. Knowledge gives us power, so come here and take back your power over your own life. Remember the girl my son murdered…Her name was Jessica and she was 17, she thought he was a “coolllll bad boy” but he was EVIL and he killed her because she wasn’t wise. She knew he was a convict but she didn’t stay away from him. So YOU be wiser than she was and you will make her death worth something. God bless you.
Oxy,
I’m still ruminating about this shift and I came up with some analogies to describe it. I need to define it with words in order to hold on to it. This is how I would describe it:
It’s about, like you said, “learning to recognize them in the wild”. All my life I’ve been like a blind person, FEELING my way through life. In other words, I was reacting emotionally, with my gut instead of thinking, with my mind. This is OK for children because they don’t have much cognitive sense, but it’s like my cognition was turned off in this particular area of emotion. My parents, through trauma bonding me, enhanced that sensory perception of FEELING to navigate. This occured to the detriment of my other senses – especially the eyesight. In other words, I got so good at FEELING that I never bothered developing SEEING. A victim of my own success?
On a side note, I have often thought of spaths in a similar way: they are victims of their own success as children. They were so good at emotional manipulation that they never bothered to learn a better way and they stayed emotional retards, unable to stop manipulating, unable to feel for others, lacking empathy and therefore evil. For some reason, I was not a manipulator but I was successful at trauma bonding and feeling, which are also survival mechanisms based on feeling. It’s not that I can’t manipulate, I just don’t find it very interesting to do so because then the person I’m manipulating is being who I want them to be, rather than being themselves. Being themselves makes them much more interesting to connect with, in my opinion.
Back to the original thought: Feeling was the first sense I learned and now I have seeing (the equivalent of knowing) but I was still afraid because I know that the eyes can be deceived by lies. I was worried that I would be fooled again unless I found and memorized all the red flags. I was still afraid. I wished I was like normal people who, can SMELL the odor of the personality disordered and run away instinctively. Unfortunately, being raised in a stinky environment conditioned me to not notice it very well. The feeling of DISGUST, is what one should have around the spaths. It should be automatic but only if you can SMELL it. In some cases, I COULD smell it, like when I felt the need to shower after visiting with my trojan horse brother in law. So the olfactory sense was there. But I had been raised to IGNORE the bad smells so that’s what I did automatically. Still, I can not count on the feeling of a need to shower to save me from all spaths. So what is the answer?
The answer was so simple. Use ALL of your senses. Duh? We don’t go through life navigating space by using only one sense at a time, so why did I expect to navigate the emotional dimensions with only one sense at a time? They are all there to be used and when one is fooled, the others can “check” the data.
Anyway, I think that possibly my shift occurred when I took all the knowledge of the past year and finally integrated it into my sensory perceptions. It’s like learning to drive, one day you realize that you are no longer trying so hard to navigate and you just got to your destination on auto pilot without any thought. That’s where I want to get.