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.
IN the book of Job (old testament) it tells about a righteous man named Job who loves and obeys God.
Satan and God are discussing Job and Satan says “well, why wouldn’t he love you, you have made him rich?” So God says to Satan, well take it all away and Job will still love me. So Satan does, he takes everything away and still Job doesn’t sin and denounce God.
So Satan says to God, well, Okay, so he lost all his material possessions, but if you touch him himself, he will denounce you.
Well, God says, “Okay, but don’t kill him” well Satan gives Job all kinds of sores on his skin and he is miserable and his best friends come to him and say “well, Job, you MUST HAVE SINNED OR GOD WOULDN’T DO YOU THIS WAY” So the rest of the book is the conversations between Job and his friends. His wife says “curse God and die, you are so miserable.”
Job remains faithful and everything he had before is restored to him and he is richer than before.
Not all stories in the Bible are meant to be taken literally I don’t think. But I think a lot of the things that there are “tests” that God tests people, like him telling abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac as a burnt offering, and abraham takes the boy and goes out to do that, and you can only imagine how much grief he felt being told to kill this only son that he loved so much, the son of the PROMISE born in his old age—I think God knew what Abraham would do, but ABRAHAM didn’t know what he would do. Of course Abraham stopped him from really killing the boy but I think the “test” if this was a literal story was about showing ABRAHAM how much faith he had. God already knows.
So I think a lot of the things we might see in our own lives as “tests” are not to show God what we will do, but to show OURSELVES HOW STRONG WE ARE. How much faith we have.
I can’t remember who said it but it goes “Things are not bad for you because they are labeled “Sins”– but things that are bad for you ARE labeled “sins.”
If you look at the “commandments” in the Bible there are none of them that the Bible commands you to do that are BAD for YOU. Even the tough things that are difficult to DO—like praying for those that abuse you—tough to do! But I did it because it was commanded, and as I prayed, God knew I am sure that I DID NOT MEAN ONE WORD OF IT, but before long, I actually started to NOT feel so angry and hostile and mean.
Jesus said “be ye angry and sin not.” Even Jesus got angry when there was a good reason for it. So anger is not a “sin” but Jesus said “let not the sun go down upon your WRATH”—Wrath is not just “anger” but FERMENTED ROTTEN ANGER that eats at YOU not at the person you are wrathful toward. So there is a “reason” we are told not to hang on to that wrath, because it eats at US and our peace.
We are told to treat others as we would have them treat us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t expect others to respect us as well. Even St. Paul advised Essentially “no contact” with evil people, he said don’t even eat with them. Proverbs says “evil companions corrupt good morals.” The Bible is filled with GOOD advice for living a happy, peaceful life as well as religious ideals.
So even if someone isn’t a Believer in God or Jesus there is still some good advice there on how to behave.
I think the story of Job as well demonstrated how we suffer innocently at the hands of “fate” and Satan the ULTIMATE SOCIOPATH…and sometimes how powerless we are in fighting against the things they do to us, but we must still hang on to our lives and our hope for recovery. It also demonstrates that others, like Job’s wife and friends, DON’T GET IT about dealing with the sociopaths.
Kim and Oxy,
Kim, God can’t experience doubt. He is all knowing. He does what He does to prove a point to US. But in this story He pretends to be proving a point to Satan at first.
That was a good start on the story Oxy, but you forgot about the conversation Job had with God at the end.
This conversation is my favorite part about the story.
Job, like all of us on LF after their encounter with the sociopath, is asking “WHY ME?”. He never renounces God but he does curse the day he was born, because he is sooo miserable. God pays him a visit and basicall says, “How dare you question Me? were you there when I made the heavens and the earth. what would you know about it? You know nothing, so you can’t question My wisdom and why I do what I do.”
So even though Job WAS a good man and obedient to God, and even though he was innocent of all the things his friends accused him of, he did have a modicum of narcissism. He had enough narcissism to make him question God’s plans when things didn’t go well for him. God set him straight on that: “you are Job and I AM GOD don’t question ME” It was a lesson in humility for this man who already thought he was humble enough.
The reason I love this story is because humilty is the greatest weapon against sociopaths. When you have humilty you have no hooks. They can’t see you, you are gray rock, invisible. Sociopaths target our own narcissism, no matter how tiny it might be. Their ultimate goal is to alienate us from God. That might sound esoteric, but it’s factual, in my experience. As you all know, my spath wrote a letter, admitting that he likes to go around finding people and enticing them to do evil and he wrote that letter to God.
One of the reasons, I find Girard so interesting is because even though I understand the spaths, I’d like to understand those people who are not considered spaths because they don’t fit the PCL-R, yet we find out that they enjoy watching others suffer. In other words, they still engage in scapegoating the innocent. Like Oxy’s son D and my parents, WTF? Girard says that they convince themselves that the scapegoat is guilty, but ….I’m having a hard time believing that. My parents envied me. And Son-D and egg-donor may have envied something about Oxy. For sure, I know that both Oxy and I are just too freakin nice to everyone. Is that why they hated us?
I think I may have answered my own question.
Yes, they hate us for being too nice. My exP went around telling everyone I thought I was a saint. And he told me that he was “tired of my God-like attitude”.
MamaGem was also reviled by her daughters no matter how much she bent over backwards for them.
Wow, why would being so nice make people hate you?
Anyone?
Sky, it is son C that is the arsehole, son D is my sweet “saint” (he puts up with me.) Actually I think egg donor did envy me, she envied the time and attention that my grandparents gave to me, there is not doubt about that. But at the time they were raising her they didn’t have TIME or energy to give her as much attention as I got when they were much older and in better financial shape. When she was growing up,, they were doing barely well enough to keep her fed and clothed, at the time I was born they weren’t wealthy but they weren’t working like galley slaves to keep food on the table. BIG difference in the circumstances.
Egg donor was only 15 when she completed high school and did one summer in college and taught that fall. She got married at 16 was only 17 when I was born, returned back to live with her folks and divorced the P sperm donor, who was in the base hospital with VD when she rode the train and took me to live with him in Texas after my birth. My GM was my primary care giver and egg donor remarried when I was three…she took me to live with her and my step dad, but I wanted to stay with my grandparents on the farm. I grew to love my step father, he was a wonderful guy, but I wanted to be on the farm so was there during summers and every weekend and vacation, then she would drag me kicking and screaming back to live with her and my step dad in another town.
I don’t think she wanted me with her as much as she didn’t want people to think she had dumped her kid on her parents…it was always about “what would the neighbors think?” By the time I was 15 she and I fought like cats and dogs, that was the time she actually Beat me, the one time really, and my step dad has to pull her off me–she had foam flying out of her mouth as she was clubbing me with the buckle end of the belt for sassing her. I was really DEFIANT by that time. Thank God I left for college the next year, did one year in college, then went to live with sperm donor and never lived in her house again. We “made up” by the time son C was born,, but it was off and on again though I tended to forget the “off agains” in my effort to Please her. It is AMAZING just how much we can “forget” or push “back” in order to convince ourselves we are “getting along with” some of the dysfunctional people, much less the psychopaths.
Dear Kim,
I went and listened to “something so right.” Boy, you sure nailed that one! I also listened to “No more I love you’s” and I never imagined in a million years that would be the video for that song!It’s nuts! Men ballerina’s with hairy armpits-but she does mention that one of her “monsters” is desire.
Oxy,
sorry, didn’t mean to diss Son-D.
I believe that my parents, also envied their kids. Even as they provided so that we could have more than they did, they simultaneously created an environment of fear, so that we became too emotionally hobbled to use all the “advantages” we were given. This way they cold maintain the control over us that they so desperately wanted. They knew that we would grow, like oxen, stronger than they were. But they needed to keep us tied to them emotionally so that we would never rebel. They wanted to keep using our power when we became more powerful than they were.
I don’t know if they are aware of their motivations, probably not, but they learned all the tricks of trauma bonding from their own parents. So it really doesn’t matter why they do it. Envy is just one emotion that propels the behavior and whether they are spaths or not doesn’t make them less toxic, as you so often say. I still think it’s important to understand the spaths, but I’m getting more and more convinced of your words, that toxic is toxic no matter what you call it.
Sky, you just got the initials wrong! LOL My grandmother, egg donor’s mom, was a big time enabler of the males in the family, mainly her worthless son my Uncle Monster—and that went back GENERATIONS that I know about, way back before the civil war, drinking, wife beating hateful alcoholics with wives that were enablers. My grandfather quit drinking though the year egg donor was born, and I’m not sure that he was all that abusive prior to that even when he was drinking. If he was I never heard about it. I never heard him raise his voice to my grandmother or to be verbally abusive in any way or treat her anyway except nice. He never did confront my uncle Monster as an adult about his drinking though. He went along with the “keep the secrets” as I didn’t know about Monster’s drinking or wife beating until I was grown. Even Egg donor didn’t put up with it until after grandma died, and then she took on the role of the family enabler, enabling Monster. I noticed it at the time because she did an almost 180 degree turn in the way she dealt with Uncle Monster and became his PROTECTOR where as before my GM’s death, Egg donor hadn’t had any soft spot for her brother at all.
I noticed this and even studied a bit of “family role theory” in nursing school psych classes, but except to see it, I really didn’t put 2 and 2 together about it. NOW it makes sense, but sometimes we see a “symptom” but we don’t connect it with the “disease” til later.
Stargazer –
Clarification – I also (like nolarn) do not have the time or energy currently for telephone calls but I do check my email most days (not all, but most) and would be delighted to swap emails with you at your convenience and when you are ready. No pressure. I think both nolarn and I felt the same pang when we read about your loneliness, not having anyone real to “talk” to.
I also agree with everyone else who has already said, “whatever gets you through the night”; your having a conversation with an imaginary person could be no less valid than the complex discussions my dogs and I had before my friend moved in with me a year back. Before that, my pets and I were on our own for 3 years and they became very well-versed in all of my opinions and random thoughts!
“I have very low tolerance for mindless drivel or people who are addicted to drama. ”
Oh good! THAT’S a relief, because so do I…..(just because we have HAD ongoing dramas, doesn’t mean that we LIKE it that way or that we want it to continue! I dream of a BORING life…)
kim frederick –
“one of my favorite Annie Lennox songs that reminds me of Star, and also of myself, and a lot of us here at LF with abandonment and trust issues…entitled, “something so right.” ”
Hah! It’s also one of my favourites Kim; I have the album. She is such a clever lady. It’s one of the songs I made myself listen to over and over after I was spathed. If you like that one, you would probably also like Norah Jones’ “Not my Friend”. Completely different style but the words just pack a punch. Another of my post-spath treatments.
kim frederick says:
“What I thought was this: Satan is the sociopath.”
I agree.
“He gets God to doubt Job. How can that be? Isn’t God all-knowing?”
I disagree. God didn’t doubt Job. He allowed Satan to test Job.
There were bigger issues than Job and his life at stake. If you read the beginning of the book of Job, Satan had sought an audience with God in front of an assembled crowd of all the myriads of God’s other angelic creatures (the angels). Satan issued an outright challenge – not against God’s superior power, of which there was no doubt, but to God’s RIGHT to rule and to ask for obedience and worship from his creations.
Satan craved that obedience and worship for himself and had already broken away as a renegade, having originally been one of the angels but having used the free will he was created with to choose a path in oppostion to God, his creator. In Noah’s time period, Satan had cleverly influenced other angels to misuse THEIR freedom of choice to join him in his rebellion.
When Satan issued the challenge to God, he gave Job as an example, saying in effect that Job ONLY worshipped God because of what God gave Job. (So – Satan chose Job to test – not God). It was also Satan who kept upping the ante each time Job faced a devastating tragedy and rose above it, steadfast in his worship.
Now God could easily have just zapped Satan – along with any of the other angels who made a squeak against him – and be done with it. But that wasn’t the issue – they all knew God had the most power. If God had zapped Satan, the other spirit creatures would only have worshipped God after that out of fear – not out of love, by their own free will, which is what God wanted. The issue of universal sovereignty would have been left hanging, unanswered, until challenged again or at the very least, continuing to cause fear of retribution.
Gos wasn’t against his creatures questioning him on things they weren’t sure of or didn’t understand: that’s not what happened here. There are many examples throughout the Bible of God’s patience with people who questioned him or even argued outright with him. The situation in Job was not like that – it was a malicious and calculated (spathlike!) plan to cause the ruination of others; to take somebody else down with him.
That is why it was allowed to run it’s course. Job’s example was quoted in the Christian Greek Scriptures (the so-called “New Testament”) by both Jesus and the apostle Paul, as someone to emmulate when the going gets tough for us.
“Of course he allowed Jesus to be scape-goated for the sake of all humanity.”
True, but don’t forget that prior to coming to the earth to be born as a human, Jesus was a powerful angel in heaven, second only to God the Creator – and that Jesus KNEW beforehand what lay ahead of him, yet he chose to come and to be sacrificed for that purpose. He also knew that God could give him back his life, if God chose to (which God did).
It’s a bit like the Abraham and Isaac story – so many story books show Isaac as a little boy, but if you read the account, he wasn’t. Abraham was a very old man and Isaac was in his 20’s or 30’s (I forget without checking) – he could easily have overpowered Abraham once he knew what the plan was; he chose not to.
All very interesting, but only able to be understood properly in the correct context and with all of the facts.
Aussie,
I LOVE your posts. They are FULL of insightfulness and mindful reflection and abundant intelligence!
I love how you described the story of Job. Very helpful to me!
LL
LL – once again, AWWWW shucks…. x
I am just so grateful to have what little of my brain is left WORKING again (SOME of the time…LOL) after months of “Fibro fog” last year where I honestly thought I would stay that way –
dippy, forgetful, stuttering, stammering, wordless…it was dreadful.
Nice to know that I occasionally make some sort of sense to someone out there!