Someone asked me the other day if there was anything anyone could have done that would have made a difference in what eventually happened when I was with the sociopath who is no longer in my life.
Interesting question.
Had I been forced into a program that made me aware of what was happening within me while I was with him, would you have gone down so far, they asked?
Don’t know.
I do remember the craziness in my head while I was trying to justify his actions to myself, and pulling away from my friends as they tried to pull me into reality. We’ve talked a lot about how they felt so helpless watching me disappear before their eyes in my attempt to become invisible. They wanted so desperately to help me. And I wanted to be so far beyond their help because I could not bear their pain added to mine.
In retrospect, at the time, everything was so wrong within me, that I simply could not hear anything outside of the howling inside my head. Their love hurt because I didn’t believe I was deserving of it.
Today though, it is the love of my daughters, my family and my friends that has helped me heal. Their love has given me the strength and courage to trust, have faith and believe in me. Their love has reconnected me with my divine truth, love is limitless and I am connected to the circle of our love because I am alive.
About the only thing that would have changed the course of history at the time, would have been for them to perform an ‘intervention’. Lock me away somewhere for a couple of weeks, where I received professional treatment to unhook his unholy tentacles wrapped around my mind. But who knows what would have happened when I was released?
Back then, I was pretty sick. I didn’t know about No Contact. And I definitely didn’t know about sociopaths and abuse.
Today, I do.
Since receiving the miracle of my life when he was arrested May 21, 2003, my healing has been a journey of discovery of me.
In those first critical moments of freedom, I did not ask why, why, why. I accepted I got my life back. It was a miracle. It was up to me to treat it with respect.
For me, that is the greatest gift I gave myself. To not ask ‘why did he do what he did?’ but rather, ‘what happened to me?’. Where did I go? How did I get so lost?
In those first heady days of freedom I focused on understanding sociopathy and narcissism so that I could learn as much as I could about what had happened to me. I learned about the behaviours, the red flags, etc. But I didn’t waste my energy trying to understand him. He is the lie. That’s all I need to know to heal.
When I write, He is the lie. That is true for me.
From hello to good-bye. I love you to I hate you. You’re beautiful to you’re ugly.
It was all a lie.
And I have no room in my life today for lies.
When friends or my family ask, but what about this, or what about that, I tell them. It was all a lie. There was no truth in him.
If I spend my time trying to figure out fact from fiction, all I am doing is trying to prove — I wasn’t so stupid. See, this was true. That’s why I fell in love with him.
Truth is. I fell in love with him because I believed his lie.
When I discovered the truth, I was so enmeshed in his lie, I couldn’t find the truth in me. And so I sank.
He did a lot of horrible, terrorizing things to ensure I stayed hooked into his lies.
In accepting the truth, that what he did was based on lies, I am able to accept that the hooks are also lies — and in that truth comes the power to let them go.
I still have moments though! Every so often he’ll sneak up into the back pockets of my mind and settle in for a little visit.
That’s when I have to turn up for me and say, go away. There is nothing in you I believe in. Everything in me I do.
And when the tears and fears and sorrow become too great, I simply breathe, look up into the sky and see once again the limitless possibilities of my life today.
And in that action of looking up, I surrender and fall once again, in love.
Was he my addiction? He manifested for me all that was out of harmony within me. He played the discordant note that set my psyche ajar and tilted my world so completely I almost slid off the edge.
In accepting him as the catalyst of my opening into myself, I let go of the need to remember him in love or hatred. As a catalyst, he exploded when I stepped into the light of my life and freedom to be all of me.
I can no longer look to him, however, as the reason for my angst. He is gone. If I am in angst, it is because I am off-balance and reacting to a circumstance or situation in fear. So, I breathe and in that breath my memory is triggered. I am who I am, beauty and the beast, joy and sorrow, fear and love — and in that breath, I move into love so that my fear becomes just a memory of something I knew or didn’t know to be true for me today. Back then, I feared the past. I feared the future. Today I fear neither. I cannot change one nanosecond of what happened and the future will only be revealed through my courage and beauty and truth today to live without fear that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. Doesn’t have to be.
In fact, in the choices I make today, the past will never be my future because I make choices that honour and support me on my journey in freedom.
That’s the gift of freedom today.
It is so liberating on the other side of the relationship, isn’t it? I just finished reading one of the links on the msn/narcissism site which focused on the very same subject. You probably have seen it.
It’s the phenomenon of the Stockholm Syndrome in which victims bond with their captors/abusers and resist all help and reason. It’s because of this paradoxical bond, where so often victims will turn on those who separate them from their abusers. that police dread domestic abuse calls.
On the surface, it doesn’t seem possible, it doesn’t make sense.
Now that I’m on the other side of the experience, though, I know how it feels even though I never saw it coming.
I’m not sure what it would have taken for me to leave voluntarily. I had already made so many compromises and lowered my standards so much that he would have had to have been viciously brutal to make me leave, which, in the end, he was.
But leaving was not something I could do for myself or because of anyone’s logic, pressure or intervention. I would have argued against any of it.
I know this to be true because, in my heart I had for a long time anticipated the break-up and stayed longer than I should have just to to avoid the inevitable pain of withdrawal from him and the life – the side dishes so to speak – that I enjoyed and the hope that things would magically turn around.
The pain in that lesson was so great that it’s one lesson I won’t have to repeat. It’s seared into my soul.
“the pain in that lesson was so great, it’s seared into my soul” … I like that!! It’s a very apt description of where we’re all at right now.
ML, your words of encouragement are so well placed and they certainly do touch each of us.
“He manifested for me all that was out of harmony within me. He played the discordant note that set my psyche ajar and tilted my world so completely I almost slid off the edge.” … oh my word … never a truer word has been spoken of this encounter.
I wish speedy healing and strength to everyone reading these blogs … This site is a Godsend, administered by angels and appreciated by every victim. As we all diligently post this website address on forums, facebook, support sites, etc I hope with all sincerity that many people will become a little more educated and have the ability to see the light and the truth for what it is … before it’s too late.
Eyesopened– what a great screen name! That is exactly how I live my life today having come through that experience. And yes, the SS is not something I actually believed possible until I experienced it and realized — it is possible.
Thank you!
Buzzibee — And speedy recovery to you too. I know from what you write, you have come a long, long way. Great healing!
Life is so much better in the light. Light and love to you!
I was someone, many years ago, who would hear about a woman being beaten, and my first response was, why doesn’t she just leave? I would hear a lot of others say she must like it. Little do any of us know until we’ve endured to help them make sense of the insanity. I can now actually thank God for it happening, because it made me even more supportive and understanding of people. If we can relate, we can usually offer a word of support and maybe shed some light on what they endured. I went through it and thought I was keeping an awful secret and was ashamed to think that all this was happening behind closed doors. It all makes sense now. Well somewhat.
I have a sister who no longer talks to me after I tried to explain to her why I’m where I’m at in this stage of life. She turned on me so badly, and wrote me a letter telling me what a selfish, self centered person I am. My own sister couldn’t even stay neutral. I think there must be some sibling rivalry there, as I’m the youngest, and this was just the thing to bring it out. So many in my life, thought because I was the younger, I needed guidance. Like I had no thought process. What they all didn’t know, I was storing information and pondering it all, making my own comparisons, and I want to say, “how do you like me now?” What a trip! I am much better for it though. I no longer feel like that unenlightened woman, who thought she was deserving of this kind of treatment. It’s when I started talking, that it all came out and I would ask others, if this treatment was normal. So many were appalled. I started seeing my life through other’s eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw.
I have pretty much healed, but it took many twists and turns to get here. Wasn’t a pleasant journey, but I’m back. And it feels so good to be in control of my own life. I really don’t have to let someone in, if I don’t want. As so many say, if it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. I’ve learned to trust my gut instinct, and I’m most always right. And how many are going through it and will never know the freedom? I think of ones like Lacey Peterson, and so many others we read about. What brutality. And they are gone, but we, here, have survived and we can pass on to others the will to survive and conquer the demons that threatened to destroy us and our children.
“In accepting the truth, that what he did was based on lies, I am able to accept that the hooks are also lies and in that truth comes the power to let them go.”
Yes… yes….M. L. you gave to me my new matra…. when those thoughts of her creep back in my mind.. and I feel the hook in my heart….I can simply say…. she was a lie, and the hook in my heart is a part of her lie…….and yes.. eyesopened… you have one of the best quotes I have heard in a while….”The pain in that lesson was so great that it’s one lesson I won’t have to repeat. It’s seared into my soul.”…………I discovered this site almost a year ago… what a year it’s been…. I am at peace most times with it all.. yes.. there are those triggers.. but I have learned to deal with them…. In this past year I have read more then at anytime in my life….. books, blogs, blurbs, and yes.. the bible…. looking for a nugget here.. a nugget there.. words of wisdom… words of encouragement… words that help heal….. words that point me in the right direction….. words that bring peace to me….. I have found many of those nuggets here……. I have a whole database in my head full of these inspirational truths….. M.L… you speak a lot about truth…… it sure feels good to grasp it doesn’t it? I remember my early days after the bottom fell out with my socio…. truth seemed to be something that I couldn’t find…….my head was so full of lies… her lies….Today… clarity reigns….. and after many months of sadness….. I am no longer sad……. My… I have grown…. I not only recaptured the man that I was before her.. but I have evolved into something much better…….I am love and light… and now I have my truth………..I still need those nuggets though….. to re-enforce my thinking from time to time….. sometimes it takes the right person, at the right time, to say the right thing… and you have a “Oprah” moment… and in that moment… you moved forward 100 miles…. that is really sweet especially when it felt like you hadn’t moved in a while…….. M.L….. your written word above “The hooks are also lies”…….did just that for me….. because I have cursed those hooks now for nearly 2 years…… and at times.. I felt powerless to get them out of my heart….. so now…. just like everything else about her…. I see them as a part of her lies….. Very Good……..very good indeed…..
Love and Light to all…..
Apt/Mrg — I too am the youngest daughter — my eldest sister, shortly after the sociopath was arrested wrote and told me how the whole thing was of my own doing, except the last three months. But, I had asked for it. Thank you for caring enough to share, I wrote back. I couldn’t, wouldn’t pick up her anger — I had enough of my own. Today, we talk. We share family events, laughter, stories. We’re not close but we’re not distant either. She is an awesome aunt to my daughters, and a good sister, and a great daughter to our mother. I love her for the family she represents.
Southernman — I am honoured that those words have given you insight — it is what I find so incredibly powerful here — the sharing of our insights, our truth and our strength.
Thank you everyone! You are awesome.
ML
ML
My daughters said I should write back to her, but I’ve been around her long enough to know it would have all become a battle of words. I could never have convinced her. She had formed her opinion of me, and nothing I could do would sway her. She even told our other sister that my youngest daughter probably deserved the treatment of her father. She wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t believe me. So I’ve let it go, and am just waiting and praying that God will reveal to her that she judged me without mercy. I didn’t tell her for her to condemn my husband, but for her to understand why I’m where I’m at. She has a lot of double standards. I told her that if I had to do it over again, I would have taken my girls and would have run. She, very vehemently proclaimed, that’s not acceptable. But her pastor is divorced and her son is married to a divorced woman. I knew I couldn’t get her to understand either. I’ve learned by example, that I will try once, then I quit. I no longer try and get someone to see. This is my life and I don’t go around telling people what to do. I usually take first responses and go on that. It’s been a long time coming, but I no longer wait in trepidation for someone to form an opinion of me. I know who I am and I don’t need someone else to determine my boundaries. If we can’t compromise, then I say, oh well. I tried and move on. It’s not always what I want, but I will no longer stand around with my hand out, saying, “Is it my turn yet?” I have learned to be content.
I went through the empty nest syndrome so badly when my children left and there was no one for me. I have no family close and my husband at that time, was in his own world of his making. What a miserable co-existence! How two people can walk and talk together but be on totally different pages. Actually I think it’s different books. But I am so much better for what those, who I thought cared, didn’t, because it forced me to look elsewhere and that was inside. I can do this. I have no choice but to keep working on me and being the best I can be.
I hear you apt/mgr — When I was still living on the coast and my daughter’s 1,000 miles away in the city where the debacle unfolded, my middle sister organized a surprise birthday party for me. Several friends flew in, along with my daughters (pretty emotional because it was 8 months since the ending of the debacle and the first time I’d seen them). My eldest sister debated coming and then apparently decided it would look bad to others if she wasn’t there. We barely talked while she was there, but I decided to accept her presence as an olive branch — she didn’t know what she didn’t know and she didn’t know what had happened ‘to’ me (as in inside my head while with him). I couldn’t force her to understand, I could stay true to my desire to create harmony in all areas of my life. What I understand today, more than anything else with her, is that her frame of reference on life is very, very different than mine. In not having to make mine the same as hers any longer, I am free to look at the world from my POV and let her have hers — much better position for both of us.
Like you, I kept my focus on me. I can’t change anyone else — I can however work on me to be the best I can be! Very wise words apt/mgr. Thanks!
M. L.
I can’t help but wish that my sister and I could come to some kind of agreement and I thought we were close, but it took this to bring out the whole truth. Once she got daughters-in-law and grandchildren, it’s like she no longer wanted us. I was blessed with two daughters and she has 4 sons, but she always wanted girls. She has lots of money, but yet it’s like there was something missing. Maybe deep inside she has always been jealous of me, although I never gave her reason. I use to be bothered by wanting to be friends with everyone. I went through a time in my life where I thought in order to please God, I had to please people, no matter how they treated me. I finally woke up and realized that isn’t possible. Besides, none of these people are trying to please me. So I’ve come to terms with it all. I’ve searched my heart and know I didn’t do anything to cause her to feel like she did. I refuse to own their opinions based on their own thought process and I’ve matured enough to quit trying to change their opinion. If they want to feel like that about me, I say, have at it. It’s their problem and not mine.
It saddens me that so many don’t want to embrace all and just be accepting. I know that as far as my sister goes, I’m not the only one who noticed the changes in her. Once she became more affluent, she changed her demeanor. Almost like she was on a different spiritual plain than the rest of us. Even the scriptures detail that. It talks about people who acquaint godliness to wealth. But through all that plus the others in my life, I’ve learned to be happy within myself and if they don’t like me, oh well. I’m going to make me the best I can be and if I don’t lay any straws in their path, they have no cause to condemn me. As long as God gives me life, I’m going to take care of me. I raised my children and they are very respectful, responsible, contributing members of society. Now it’s my turn. I’m going to work on trying to lose a part of me that has kept me bound. I want to lose weight again. I’ve been an emotional eater, only because that was my main vice. I’m not a fighter, so I ate. But I’ve learned to recognize the why and now I’m ready to work on the results.
It really helps to be able to vent on a place such as this and to find kindred spirits who can relate. We can all glean something from each other’s pain and use it in our situation. It helps to know we are okay. It’s like we know each other. Talking is a great panacea and this is a good place to do it. It helps to get those words out of our heads and that way we don’t have to carry them around taunting us. That’s why I would turn to food. It brought me a semblance of comfort. I thought I was so alone. But misery really does love company! I’m looking forward to continue finding the real me. I think I’ve kept myself from losing weight because I could hide behind it. Now if I can lose 50-60 pounds, I will find out just who I really am. I will no longer allow someone the ability to upset me. I’m very thankful for all the good words I’ve found on this site. Thank you, too M. L. for your words. We kind of all think alike.
Thank you, M.L., as always for your insight. This column was so on point that it ruffled some interior feathers. I had to take a few days to think about it.
Now, three and a half years after I threw him out, well into my healing, when I feel like I’m stronger and more centered than anytime in my life, I still find myself focusing on him when I’m stressed or life throws me a curve ball. “You did this to me,” I think. Or “I wouldn’t be like this, if not for you.”
About a year after he was gone, I was returning to an interstate highway after stopping for gas, and accidentally took an on-ramp going in the wrong direction. As I realized what I’d done, I also realized that it was my own simple mistake, the first time in many years that I hadn’t made some kind of “wrong turn” because half my mind was taken up with grief, anger and anxiety about him. He had nothing to do with this one. I had done it all by myself.
But that was a little practical thing. What I mostly lived with after him was the crippling sense that there was something wrong with me, that I couldn’t trust myself anymore. So many things I once took for granted were gone, and not just my confidence in myself. Though I fought it, I had absorbed his words that I was too old, too fat, too disorganized, too hopelessly incompetent for anyone to love me again. I was afraid in my work, that I would fall apart in a crunch, that my emotional instability would repel my clients. The list went on and on.
And when these feelings hit, they somehow came with his ghost. I could feel him around me, sometimes doing the “bad” thing of criticizing and sneering at me, something doing the “good” thing of being charming and interested and helpful. I would start to talk with him, argue with him, try to understand why he had been like that, try to make him understand me, try to figure out if he had been a bad person, or if I had just failed to rise to the occasion.
In all of it, he was the cause and the cure for my misery, as he had been for that awful five years. Even though I’d thrown him out and told him never to come back, never to contact me again in any way, part of me believed that if I could just change enough, he would love me and we could live happily ever after. Strange as it sounds, I think in those first years of recovery, I was doing it for love of him, trying to learn to be more self-interested, more disciplined, more committed to my own dreams, so I could be more like him. (Which was pretty silly on the face of it, because anyone like him wouldn’t have had anything to do with him.)
I wrote through my recovery. Wrote and wrote and wrote for ten or more hours a day, as I lived with these feelings and tried to understand what had happened to me. Part of what I wrote was letters to him. In those three years, I wrote nearly a thousand letters to him. Most of them unsent, but a good proportion sent to a hotmail address. I didn’t expect him to read them and couldn’t see any reason why he would. They were “therapy” writing. I said in each letter not to write me back. But he was the cause of all this, I said, and I needed to talk directly to him to work it out.
And maybe, I hoped against hope, there was something in him that would profit from understanding what he’d left behind. And what it took me to get over it. I wasn’t the only one he’d left emotionally damaged. His girlfriend before me was even worse off, years later, eating Xanax and anti-depressants, barely able to make a decision on her own. His comment about her was that he “didn’t understand. She was more fun when I met her.”
It took a long time before I realized that I always wrote him when I started to feel afraid about my life and myself. When work became to demanding, or I couldn’t figure out how to overcome some challenge, or I was afraid that I’d never find my way back to who I used to be. I began to think of him in a different way. Not as the handsome, seductive monster who’d destroyed my self-esteem and plundered my life, but as a kind of avatar, a symbol for something in myself that already broken and afraid when I met him, and just waiting for a chance to come up to the surface and demand attention.
That complicated thought helped a lot. Instead of throwing myself over and over against the Teflon wall of his coldness, lack of understanding, and inability to love, I turned back into myself to understand where this voice of self-suspicion and despair came from. It’s not that he didn’t matter, but that he was in my life for a reason. I had found him and welcomed him, because there was something in me that needed to be healed. Now I needed to dig in and find the real source of that pain, when I really learned to feel like that, and see if I couldn’t repair it.
I did that work, partly alone and partly with a therapist when it got too hard to do alone, because I am an incest survivor. He specialized in incest survivors or survivors of other serious family abuse. We’re perfect for him. We have no boundaries and romantically hope that somehow we will recover our “real selves,” the ones we were supposed to be, before great traumas occurred in our families of origin. He is perfect for us, suggesting that if we change our looks, our emotional responses, our way of life, we will be the superwoman he demands for a life partner. But of course, we need to be loved to pull that off. And he withholds love and anything like it, until we meet his standards. We fall apart.
After all the work I’ve done, I sometimes forget, when anxiety comes to fragment my concentration with its high-pitched static, that this is not about him. That it’s about me, facing the challenges of taking care of myself alone, owning my own life, living with the possibility of making my own mistakes because I’m not perfect. This is what I’ve learned how to do, since he’s gone. There is no “other me” or other life waiting for me, if I can just get back to who I used to be. There is my life, and it’s not so bad. I am good at my work. I have my caring friends and beloved dogs. I have a nice home and an absurd number of possessions I bought to comfort myself in my shopaholic phase. (At least it wasn’t booze or heroin.)
It’s just a little scary sometimes. Since I’ve given up trying to be Miss Perfect, I’ve discovered that the world is full of people struggling with their own challenges, living through good and bad times.
So I thank you, M.L., for reminding me that it’s not about him, it was never about him. It’s about me. And being human. Taking what I learned about myself and how much I cherish my life, and moving on. I love your writing, and am proud of us all, as we use this experience to become better at being ourselves.