You are involved, say, with a pathologically self-centered personality, perhaps a narcissist or sociopath?
That is, he wants what he wants when he wants it, and he’ll do whatever’s necessary (his entitlement) to get it, or take it.
Key diagnostic trait: he reserves the right to punish you when you obstruct his agenda.
Now here’s the thing: in the heat of the moment, you may actually be pretty good at confronting his abuse. Maybe you stand up for yourself pretty effectively? Maybe, in the moment, you’re even pretty good at setting limits and challenging his nonsense?
So then what’s the problem?
The problem occurs when you step away from these incidents.
In stepping away from them, you potentially risk enacting your own form of compartmentalization, by which I mean that, while in the moment you may address his abuse with some backbone, yet beyond the moment you effectively “drop the ball” by failing to process, and own, the greater pattern.
It’s a case of our seeing the trees in the forest just fine, yet somehow, defensively, ensuring that we fail to see the forest through the trees.
I’m referring, of course, to a kind of defense mechanism with which some—not all—of us may be familiar?
As I suggested, strategically this defense mechanism deploys a form of compartmentalization, while tactically it assumes forms of denial, minimization and avoidance (of reality).
What precisely is the function and, more importantly, the danger of this defense mechanism?
Its function, I suspect, is to prevent us from connecting the dots; that is, our failure (defensively) to connect the dots enables our avoidance of confronting the greater pattern that underlies the series of incidents.
So long as we address the “abusive incidents” separately—as discreet events—thereby defensively ignoring their wider pattern, then we can rationalize more easily our “staying in” the relationship with a kind of pseudo-dignity and pseudo self-respect.
To be clear, we achieve this self-compromise by reframing the abuse as a series of brushfires to be troubleshot on an ongoing basis, much like a manageable chronic illness.
And especially if, as I’ve noted, we’re pretty good at this—somewhat effective, that is, at confronting these brushfires on a case by case basis—then it becomes easier to compartmentalize in the manner I’m describing.
The danger, of course, is how this defensive process—in its reframing of the exploitation as a series of disconnected, but manageable, events—supports our denial that the relationship has, in fact, been globally and fatally compromised by the exploitation.
This highlights, yet again, the basic conundrum of defense mechanisms: the protection they confer is so often exceeded, unfortunately, by their cost to our well-being and, sometimes, integrity.
(My use of “he” in this article was for strictly for convenience’s sake, not to imply that females aren’t capable of the behaviors discussed. This article is copyrighted © 2009 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
Witsend I am shocked at the lack of information this school has given to you. I understand that teachers are sometimes overloaded with problems in the classroom but a child sleeping through a whole term is a major problem – why didn’t they at the very least inform you? That could have been a medical condition or anything? Any ideas as to why he is sleeping so much? Is it just a result of staying up the whole night or could there be something going wrong in his body?
This is exactly the kinds of trouble my colleague has run into. Back when they could have intervened to help him, they didn’t because ‘he hasn’t done anything yet, but if he breaks the law then perhaps we can do something then.’ She has been everywhere trying to get help for him and now he is well into his delinquency lifestyle and refuses to comply with anything. I really worry about these kids – how will they get work and support themselves down the track when they are ruining their own reputations now?
I find it very strange that the family has taken him in so quickly and with no discussion with you – as you say though he could have said anything and these kids can be highly manipulative. You are obviously expecting him to get dumped back on your doorstep – it’s not a good condition to be in. You must be very worried and anxious. How unfair of him after how hard you must have worked to raise him and teach him right. I watched some of that programme Brat Camp where children from the UK were sent on a wilderness hike trip until they sorted out their respect issues and boundaries – I understand though that these sorts of programmes can be prohibitively expensive. We urgently need centralised funding and support for families going through these issues with their teens BEFORE they go completely off the rails and wreck their lives. Funny how society is happy to provide the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff after the event, but not to intervene when assistance would be useful in the beginning stages.
This must be a very frustrating time for you on top of all you’ve been through – sorry you are going through it and hope things turn around with your son.
pollyannanomore,
It really is shocking how the school handled this situation so far. And last year when he was sleeping in class during the 2nd semester I do believe he was going through depression.
This year they have handled him differently as he had 2 male teachers the first semester that didn’t like his non compliance in their classroom. And so he was taken out of these classes.
But this is what I learned from all of this. Please pass this onto your friend because if her son is 16 or under she might be able to still do something.
I ALSO found that evey time I turned for help I was told that they couldn’t do ANYTHING until he had broken the law. Once he broke the law they could step in. Well DUH…I am looking for an intervention and hoping to AVOID the law being broken.
She will have to be really insistant. Pushy if you will. And really think about herself as her sons only advocate and if she doesn’t speak up no one else will. BECAUSE that is the REALITY of her situation as well as it was mine.
If he is still under age she might be able to file incorrigible teenager with the juvenile court system. I don’t know if the UK has something like this? But the parent actually goes in front of a judge and then there is a court order for the teen to go to school ect. So when this order is broken and the teen doesn’t comply at school the court backs you up as a parent.
do you know if she has looked into anything such as this?
pollyannanomore, I’m just dropping in and out now, so I’m not responding to posts that have been written to me. (And apologies for that; I’m just having to focus on work.)
But I wanted to say how much I enjoy your writing about your experiences. I’ve often discovered in retrospect that I’ve gained new knowledge and skills, trying to help other people achieve their dreams. And it sounds like you are the one who should be creating and submitting your shorts to festivals.
You mentioned that my ex was at least publishing something. He’s actually a wonderful writer in terms of style; it’s just the content that’s so emotionally empty and pointless. He would call it irony, but I know him and his life. I sometimes wonder that he’s not making a greater attempt to mask his inner life. But then I think that he probably can’t. Depending on my mood of the day, I find it creepy, or sad.
I know I made other people laugh when I made fun of him the other day. But I didn’t feel so good about it afterward. If he destroys my compassion, he wins. I’d rather feel sorry for him (and keep him at a good distance) than despise him.
Kathy
Kathy: ” But I didn’t feel so good about it afterward. If he destroys my compassion, he wins.”
I do the same thing. I believe it’s because it’s WHO WE ARE and that while we do things of this nature as a safety valve…it lets off stress and allows us to channel the hurt/anger in a more positive way…it violates our inner being. I totally relate. Shakespeare said; “To thine own self be true.”
Plus: hate is not the death of love…indifference is…….
You’re right, TB. Sometimes, I think because I’ve done so much processing, that I should be done with it. And I want to rush myself into being finished, when I’m not really finished with it all.
I was kind of holding onto hope that the huge investments I made in him would at least turn into to great writing. After all, that was his excuse for using me, that he would do anything to … blah, blah, blah…something about his needing to be a writer. So, fine, even though everything else was lost, at least maybe there would be some brilliant piece of literature.
Hear me whine? It cracks me up when I hear myself slipping back into early stage processing. I am so disappointed, frustrated and feeling like everything I do turns to doodoo. But that’s how I feel about this.
So I have to get mad at the thing, and then grieve it and let it go. How fast can I do that now? Watch me:
1. He disappointed me again. I was so stupid, stupid, stupid to trust him and give him all that money.
2. Maybe if I read it all a few more times, I can find something meaningful in it. Maybe it’s enough that, one way or another, half of his stories are about me. Maybe I can just admire him for his endurance and his attempt to make something out of the broken, puny, half-assed piece of …. can you hear me graduating into…?
3. I hate this. I hate that he took my money, my attention, my affection, my willingness to let him all over my life, and turned it into this shallow, self-congratulatory, anti-social crap. I hate him for being such a loser. I hate what he did with our relationship in his writing. I hate having to face the fact that he is exactly what he is and not what I wanted him to be. I’m pissed of at him. I’m pissed at whatever made him that way. And I’m pissed at the circumstances and whatever else brought him into my life. And I’d like to kick it all around the room until it vaporized into dust. (Mentally — me kicking this thing like a soccer ball, kick, kick, kick until it falls apart.)
4. Unfortunately, even though I can make it into a funny cartoon in my mind, it does not change any of the facts. What happened happened and I have to live with. Oh phooey. Oh I could just cry. Oh, life can be such an incredible drag. Oh sigh, sometimes it just doesn’t matter how good you’re trying to be or how smart you are about other things, it just doesn’t come out well. Sigh, Sniffle. Sigh. Sniffle.
5. It was such a pretty dream. I really liked it a lot. It would have been nice if it came out. And it was actually fun helping him at the time, imagining I was the patron of a budding artist. There were things that were good about it, even though it turned out to be a lie. See: here’s the fun and here’s the lie. The fun. The lie. The fun. The lie. And it all adds up to not getting what I wanted. Big nothing. Was the fun worth it? Was it fun enough that I don’t care if someone lies like that to me again?
6. Hell no, it wasn’t worth it. This was very expensive fun. I could have hired two dozen rental guys to charm me for a year at a villa in Costa Rica, and come out of it with a plumped-up ego and a tan for what this cost me. No more lies. They just lead to disappointments. No more thinking that people are going to do things later that are out of character now. No more thinking that money and love are going to change people.
7. And maybe, finally, no more reading his stupid stories, so I don’t have to go through this again.
8. Grrrr. Grrrr. Grrrr. I’m really an angry person. Yeah. Welllll, you still want to be angry about this? Hummph, I certainly don’t want to forget the lesson. Well, can you remember the lesson without all this dramatic fuming, or do you still need to flounce around for a while? You know, the sun is shining out there, you’ve got other interesting things to do, like actually doing everything we planned to do today, which did not include getting all balled up with him again. Oh yeah, I’m kind of letting him back into my life again, aren’t I? Well, duh. Okay, I’ve had enough of this. He’s a jerk. He writes stupid stories. None of it has anything to do with me anymore. Let’s get back to my life.
Ta-da!
Actually, it’s not quite that easy. The mental work has to percolate down to the emotional level. Which usually brings a few more surprises, because until I actually let go, I don’t discover what else is attached to that little drama. Sometimes it turns out I have to process something deeper, and sometimes it turns out that I’m really done with something and I have fresh air and sunshine in a part of my mind that used to be dark swamp or all thunder and lightning.
But I wrote that mostly, because I’ve been trying to figure out how to show the actual progression to letting go.
I don’t think it’s possible to let go until we’re able to love what we’re letting go of. (And I probably didn’t write that well enough into the process.) So we really can’t grieve and let go while we’re still in the angry phase. We have to get to the point of realizing that our anger can’t change the past. The past is what is troubling us. And the nature of that trouble is that we lost something we loved.
In this case, I loved the dream. I also loved playing my part in the dream. There was all the garbage that I had reason to get mad about, but now I’m looking at something else. The things I loved and lost. And now, looking at them with the experience of anger in the background, I have more insight about why I lost them, and the fact that even though they were never really true, I was true to myself. What I loved, I loved.
That’s why I held up the lie in one hand, the dream in the other, and finally came to understand that the outcome was…well, not there. Not what I hoped. At this point, the grief makes sense. I’ve been through the anger and learned that it really was about bad luck, other people’s issues, me being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I’ve been through the beginnings of grief and understand that I really did lose something that meant something to me. So I’ve got a reason to feel sad, a real and logical reason that allows me to cry without feeling bad about myself or having any other complications to the feeling.
It also allows me to realize that continuing to fight this loss is not productive. It’s past and done. I can’t change it. I’ve even gone through a great deal of reacting and thinking about causes in the angry phase, so I don’t need to keep searching for causes. I laid a foundation in the angry phase for the lessons I’m going to take away. But at that point they were defensive, reactive.
In the process of grieving and letting go, they become less emotionally changed. Because I’m not seeing through anger, and eventually not even seeing through overwhelming sadness (because that tends to loose its intensity once we give it our full attention), the lessons begin to seem like what they are. Experiences that changed how we think about the world and maybe how we think about ourselves. Yes, we were true to ourselves in what we loved, but maybe there is reason to reconsider why we loved that or how we go about getting it.
I didn’t take that sequence into the next realm of processing. That is when we begin to bring the learning back into our dealings with ourselves, thinking about if there’s anything in us we want to change in order to create the next chapter of our lives.
I hope this makes sense. The processing in that last post was genuine. I really did need to sort out this stuff, because I don’t want him in my head that way. But I wanted to do it here, because I’m trying to figure out how to make the sequence of processing more clear.
I know, I’ve heard here that everyone doesn’t process in the same way. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I observe what’s going on here, and there are still parts of it I’m trying to get clear about. Especially the way other people experience the transition from anger to grief, or anger to letting go.
BTW, there is a really good series on PBS right now called “This Emotional Life.” I haven’t seen it all, but what I’ve seen is very interesting. Last night was the third one (though they’re rerunning it at various times). It was narrated by a psychologist from Harvard who was way too arrogant and academic for my tastes (well, he’s from Harvard), but there was lots of fascinating information it it.
In last night’s episode, there was segment on the man I took forgiveness training with (online). It was a very good explanation of the process, and why we do it to stop letting anger rule our lives. I found the training really useful when I got to that point.
Kathy
Kathleen: QUOTE—
“And maybe, finally, no more reading his stupid stories, so I don’t have to go through this again.”
Kathy, I think maybe in a way, this reading his stories is BREAKING NC, like looking up his page on Face Book would be or reading an e mail he sent to you even though you don’t RESPOND to it, by taking in information FOR OR ABOUT him, it is breaking NC.
As for you “feeling sorry” for him being such a “failure” when he could be such as “success” with his talents (if he had an understanding of emotions–which as a P he doesn’t) is giving him “rental space” in your head.
I know that when I have PITY for any of the Ps that have hurt me, I am still giving them a part of myself.
When I give them hatred I also seem to be giving them a part of myself.
Sure, anger is a STAGE in disconnecting from them. Anger is a normal and JUSTIFABLE emotion generated by injury to us. But of course though it is natural, normal etc. we don’t want to STAY in that anger state FOREVER, or in hate forever.
Pity is also a “natural” emotion that is generated when we see another human who is disabled, injured, etc. and it is a good emotion as it motivated the “Good Samaritian” in the Bible to stop and help the injured man on the side of the road. The other people who passed by HAD NO PITY on this man, they had indifference to some other human’s suffering, and we sure don’t want to be like those people were. We want to FEEL PITY when someone is injured, because it MOMTIVATES US to help that person.
However, we also have learned (I think and I hope) that PSYCHOPATHS will “hook” into this natural and good emotion and PLAY IT FOR ALL IT IS WORTH. They are NOT deserving of our pity because their deficiencies are not something that we can “help” but MANIPULATIONS to appear “pitiful” so that we will be moved to allow them to continue to manipulate us.
I think, for what it is worth, that PITY is a good emotion, and I don’t want to lose my pity for the downtrodden and injured, but neither do I want to FEEL PITY for those who would abuse me.
QUOTE KATHLEEN:
“Oh yeah, I’m kind of letting him back into my life again, aren’t I? Well, duh. Okay, I’ve had enough of this. He’s a jerk. He writes stupid stories. None of it has anything to do with me anymore. Let’s get back to my life.”
I have to keep reminding myself of this above quote as well, Kathy, because if I let myself, I let my PITY for someone’s problems over come my logical self that realizes these people are RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN INJURIES, and I am NOT responsible for their injuries, and I cannot help them because all the “love and money” I would pour into them would be pounding sand down a rat hole, it isn’t going to help them, but it WILL DEPRESS ME.
As you know, I am going through a “tough” time right now with realizing some things about a Non-P son that is less than I would wish in wisdom and and impulse control, and also dealing with the P-son in prison and getting through a re-hash of the emotions and behavior that he targeted me with and trying to keep him in prison….I know I have to do it, but it is sort of a “breaking of NC” as well because it drags out the pain, the emotions, the memories, and so on that I would rather not concentrate on.
I think at least in my case, though I generally do a pretty good job of “having a life” that dredginhg up these old things can quickly put me into the abyss of “pity party” and “anger” and slow down my journey toward healing and having a good life. It takes away my logic and replaces it with emotional pain and pity for myself, second guessing myself, and all the other flip flop emotions I felt back when this was FRESH.
If you figure out a way to “fix” this, let me know! LOO
Oxy. I think Pity is the wrong word here, what we dont want to lose is our COMPASSION. Pity is a useless emotion on its own,
most disabled people will tell you they dont want our pity,pity makes them feel way WORSE. Its acceptance, empathy and compassion that they like and that s helpful to them.And I think that Anger is good as long as it doesnt develop into malevolent RAGE. Im finding myself very angry with my daughter, but more lately with MYSELF for going on enabling her for 30 odd years, when clearly she was not going to say sorry, mean it, and show me by her actions she had changed.
Anger will rise to the surface to let us know something is very wrong, and we need to pay attention to our gut. I think acute depression is only anger tamped down and down,-like a pressure cooker it will BLOW one day! And thats good, and healthy.! Likea suppurating boil, it comes to a head, and bursts and pus goes everywhere!{Not a pretty analogy!}As far as processing these emotions, it takes as long as it takes. As Kubler Ross says, the stages of grief, denial, anger,hurt, guilt,self pity, and finally acceptance, all take TIME to process, and we swing between one emotion to the other.Spaths dont appear to have any conscience, empathy, remorse or guilt, its like their brains lack that vital wiring that makes us fully human.I think we are WAY to hard on ourselves, God is more forgiving of us than we are to ourselves!How we lash and flagellate ourselves with false guilt, with endless “If onlys”.Love, GemXX
Kathy: “I could have hired two dozen rental guys to charm me for a year at a villa in Costa Rica,…..”
I have one question: When do we leave? 😉 ahahahahahaaaaa!