By Ox Drover
What’s the most important thing the sociopath took from you? Money? Love? Your home? Your self-esteem? Sex? Or, is it something else, which in my opinion may be even more important than just about anything?
The most important thing I think I lost from every sociopath I ever dealt with was my own confidence in myself to make assessments about people and then, reasonable choices about those people, based on those accurate assessments.
Many former victims have said that they just have trouble “trusting others” again after being totally hoodwinked and ripped off for so many important things in their lives by the sociopath. Is it others that they don’t trust, though, or are they unable to trust themselves to make accurate assessments of others they may meet in the future? I think it isn’t so much others we don’t trust, as it is ourselves we don’t trust to make good judgments of the intentions and sincerity of others.
Dr. Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” says that the first thing we are concerned with in our lives is out biological needs for oxygen, water, food and relatively constant body temperature. These are the strongest needs we have, about in that order, because if we don’t have these things not much else matters.
The next need we have, according to Maslow, when the physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling out thoughts and behaviors, is the need for safety and security. We (adults) don’t usually think about “safety” until we feel threatened. Of course after we have been injured by a sociopath, we really don’t feel safe at all. Our world of safety is upside down.
The next highest need of mankind, according to Maslow, is the need for love, affection and belongingness. We seek to overcome feelings of alienation and loneliness by both giving and receiving affection.
If our need for “safety” is not satisfied, it is very difficult for us to seek affection, because we feel threatened.
However, because we had difficulty “seeing” from the looks or behaviors of past encounters with sociopaths that these people were “dangerous” to us, we become “paranoid” of others, especially new others. We want the affection of others, but because we have failed in the past to correctly assess the dangerousness of previous people we felt affection for, we are afraid to get too close to others. It is not so much the others that we don’t trust, as we don’t trust ourselves to make good choices.
Not feeling safe makes it very difficult for us to advance on to the “higher needs” such as affection and connectedness with others when we fear that we may make another poor assessment of another’s sincerity and motives with will lead to more pain and injury.
Rather than working on trying to trust others, I suggest we should work on learning to trust ourselves and our ability to make valid and correct assessments of others. This may seem that it is the same thing, but I actually don’t think it is at all.
How do we learn to trust ourselves again? How do we put our past mistakes in assessment of others we have sought to have mutual affection with behind us?
I think we do it slowly by forming new friendships, first of all, rather than looking for a lifetime mate. We meet new people in our environment, or go out and seek to interact with new people. We keep our distance at first from these new people, and we look at them, watching their behavior, and watching for the red flags of deception in their words and actions.
We educate ourselves on what we believe makes a good friend, and we accept nothing less in those that we allow to become closer friends.
We look at people who are already in our “circle” and assess them by what we know about their past and current behavior. Does this person now, or have they in the past, shown less than stellar respect for us? What are the benefits versus the liabilities of having this person in our lives? Maybe we decide that this person doesn’t fit well within our circle of people we think we can trust and we distance ourselves from them.
Just as a child slowly learns whom they can trust by observation, or just as an animal learns that certain people are liable to hurt them, or that certain people will reward them for approaching, we need to reeducate ourselves slowly and carefully, and learn to trust ourselves. If we trust ourselves, it will be much easier to trust ourselves to keep us safe when we venture into “unknown” territory, because we will know that we will keep ourselves safe by our valid and good observations.
We will also know that caution with others is a good thing to have. We will validate that we respect ourselves and love ourselves enough to keep ourselves safe without depriving ourselves of the opportunity to have the love, affection and connectedness that we, as humans, need and want.
Dear Jadeleilani,
I just saw your post (I think we were posting/writing at the same time) I am glad you are here. Your husband does sound like a sociopath. You are not alone, there are many people here who have lived this nightmare.
Read and read and learn more. Keep yourself safe, and if you are in fear, go back to the shelter and ask for safety. There are resources there to help you, but only you can save yourself and your children. there is support here and comfort. God bless you and your children as you learn, heal and recover!
I think my post disappeared into cyberspace.
LIG I don’t think you have lost those qualities, you have been slimed with ENVY. This emotion is the root of their problems (remember, Kim? memetic desire from Violence and the Sacred?) Narcissists feel overwhelming envy that can’t be satisfied so they want everyone else to feel this pain too. They can slime others with it and in fact they spend all their time impoverishing others so that they will feel just like a P. You can eventually remove the slime with gratitude. When you focus on gratitude you cannot feel envy or fear. It’s hard at first but takes time and practice to maintain it. The good thing is that you do feel it immediately while you are practicing and, because it feels good, you tend to keep practicing.
Jade and Polly, you were both financially impoverished by your P, for the same reasons, they want you to FEEL poor, so that you will FEEL envy. Polly, he would NEVER have allowed you to have a child because you wanted it more than anything. Under NO circumstances would you be allowed children. When we first met, my xP would say, “we would have great looking children.” and “I would be a great father” All of that was to see if I wanted children and to seed the desire of something he was never going to allow.
I had a friend who was dying of multiple sclerosis and as he lost more and more of his capabilities, he told me, “I don’t focus on the things that I can’t do, I focus on the things that I can do – like FISHING!” This is the attitude of gratitude that I try to keep in my mind when the P tried to slime me. These words protected me before I left the P and I never felt envy with this thought. It also helped me when I felt overwhelmed by too much to do. It made me appreciate the fact that I had 2 arms and 2 legs and the ability to DO those things.
The IRONY is that this friend who died was my fiance before I met the P. I broke off my engagement to him because he was kind of a dumb pot smoking, beach bum and I wanted more in life. HA! My P seemed so much smarter. LOL.
One more thing. The P called me yesterday and I told him, “I know you were trying to seed envy in me all these years.” and I gave him various examples of what he had said and done. Then I told him, “This is part of your personality disorder, it is part of your profile, it’s not anything unique, it’s textbook! But I was very aware of it, because I DON’T FEEL ENVY. ENVY IS AN IRRATIONAL AND STUPID EMOTION. It makes no sense. that’s why I DON’T FEEL ENVY.”
I continue to tell him how “common” and “cookie cutter” his disorder is. Every word that comes out of his mouth, I reduce it to a pathological symptom straight out of a text book. He is now beginning to doubt his uniqueness. Then I tell him how stupid and irrational the disorder is. He asked me, “Are you enjoying telling me how stupid I am? Is that what you are doing?” I answered, “No, I’m trying to guide you so you can change.”
They are very sensitive to being made to feel stupid.
jadeleilani,
You mention many troubling things in your above post about your husband.
When I read the post two things stand out, that to me ARE something you should consider for your safety as well as your childrens safety.
First of all the counselors ARE using the word sociopath to you. I don’t think they say this word loosely. If they have determined that he has sociopathic tendancys then you need to BELIEVE that he does.
But even more troubling is that you said HIS mother doesn’t think he is capable of change. If she said thet to YOU, believe it. Generally speaking his family would be his biggest advocates. Many mothers would choose to be in DENIAL about their grown sons “issues”….So if his own family is AWARE that he has issues, you can believe that he does.
I think it is important that you do SERIOUSLY consider leaving this man. Do NOT let him know your plan.
And if there isn’t a court order for you to stay in your state then it is possible you might be able to take them out of state. This would be worth checking into. Either way it is not safe to stay with a man who justifies to a judge (of all people) about pinching his child.
You need to seperate yourself from him so that you can think clearly as well.
when you are living under the same roof with such a toxic person all their crazymaking tactics that they do seem to make “sense” after awile, and what is really happening is they are distorting your own sense of REALITY.
skylar: can you please explain further. i’m not understanding how what i posted points to envy.
thanks.
Thanks, Oxy, for a wonderful, thought-provoking article.
Five years after my relationship ended, I am still unwrapping the layers of damage. And though I’ve come to the point where I don’t blame it all on him, because I think that a lot of my damage pre-dated him and made me susceptible to his attraction and then his brutality, I am still faced with huge challenges to recover my trust in myself.
At this point, it seems to come down to courage. It’s so much easier not to take chances in my life. To hunker down in the relatively safe world I’ve created around myself in my country home and my work, and find a million reasons not to step out of it. And when I do, when some business commitment or personal chore, drags me out of it, I am always startled by how pleasant it is. People missed me. I am better than I remember at doing things. I get the feeling that the world is waiting for me to show up again.
As Oxy has pointed out many times, and I agree, we never stop working on ourselves. But in my life, the long grinding work of sorting things out in my head is often shortened by experiences outside my head. And I have to remind myself that the occasional burst of anguish or insecurity is nothing new in my life. It comes with my history. And I have a choice. I can dig down into it and see if I can resolve it at the source. Or I can go outside myself and choose the new instead of the old. To live instead of remember.
I’m working now on a second article about forgiveness, as I work through some really painful situations that popped up in the last few weeks. And I think this works back to what Oxy said about trusting ourselves. If sociopaths teach us anything, it is that we can’t control everything. There are situations that are just larger than we are, and if we live, we are going to run into them. And in misjudging them or our own capacities, we can make terrible mistakes.
I have literally curled up in a ball and hated myself for years at a time for making these mistakes — the cause of my great depressions. When I was younger, I used to just wait for the depression to run its course. Now, I know that I have to find a way to forgive myself. This is part of learning anything from the experience. As long as I’m hating myself, it gets in the way of me understanding why I was there and what happened. So I absolutely have to forgive myself — and that includes accepting the fact that I’m human and “doing the best I can” doesn’t equate to being perfect.
Trusting myself is a lot like trusting other people, in the sense that I need to be realistic about what I’m good at. So I don’t exactly trust myself in some ways. And that’s okay. I love what Oxy wrote about forming new friendships, feeling our way along to see what is okay for us and what is not, I would probably add, at least for me, being very suspicious of any inclination I have to leap into an intense commitment “because it feels good.” Or because it massively meets some need that I was suffering with.
Forgiving is linked to apologies. And apologies are meaningless unless they come with a commitment to change. From the beginning of my recovery, I saw it as an opportunity to change. Any trust I have in myself now is linked to evidence that I’ve used my mistakes to learn and change. That’s what transforms these terrible mistakes into something meaningful, and what makes us creators of our lives, rather than victims of circumstance.
I want to be the best me I can be. Alive, aware, involved, learning all the time, and hopefully a good influence, leaving the world better than I found it. Even this I can’t control, and I’m going to make more mistakes before it’s over. But good intentions are a form of joy and optimism. And I think is better to be bumbling along on my good intentions, than hiding out in a closet afraid to act at all.
Well, you know I used to always say: watch what attracted you to the relationship to begin with cause that is going to be what ends it too………..
Dear Kathleen,
Thank you for this wonderful response! Right on! The “forgiving ourselves for being human” (i.e. NOT PERFECT) was the turning point for me as well. Several months ago I wrote the “Forgiving yourself for being human” article, and that was a BIG step for me as well. I had set standards for myself (perfection) that no one could live up to, and if I did not acheive this “perfection” totally, then I felt myself a failure. I did NOT, however, expect others to live up to this perfection, only myself. How SELF-DEFEATING is that!?!
You are also right in that the trauma we experience with the psychopath(s) is a sign that there may be underlying vulnerabilities to abuse because of childhood or previous problems that we did not “work out” at the time they occured or afterwards. I think until we “get it” ourselves, both intellectually AND emotionally, we will keep REPEATING this lesson over and over…at least in my case I was like a kid in school who kept failing the grade and couldn’t understand WHY!
It doesnt matter to me nearly as much if i can trust YOU (that is the “universal “you””) as it doees matter if I can TRUST MYSELF. Of course I will CONTINUE to make mistakes soemtimes, because I am, after all, HUMAN and humans do make mistakes, but I realize too that I AM NOW MUCH MORE TRUSTWORTHY than I was before, I trust myself to work on my own safety, to take care of my needs, and not to put others always first before me.
I try to hold others to the same standard hold for myself—not perfection, but with good intentions at least. When People display that their intentions are not benign, that their behaviors indicate that they are not caring individuals, I trust myself to TAKE ACTION to protect myself from these individuals. I DISTANCE MYSELF EMOTIONALLY (if not physically) from these people so that they have less chance of inflicting “damages” on to me.
Sometimes these emotional vampires are “attached” in some way to people I do love, for example, a certain “drama queen” I know and have EMOTIONALLY distanced myself from, is married to a dear friend of our family who is in considerable bad health (may not be around much longer) and because my sons and I want to spend as much time with him as possible, we have to “tolerate” her physical presence some….but at the same time, I will not emotionally interact with her even when her physcal presence is there. I can trust myself to be physcally around her (for a reason) because I know that whatever she does or says is NOT important to me. SHE is no longer important to me emotionally. I don’t try to change her, I don’t try to reason with her, I simply tolerate her for limited periods of time so that my sons and I can enjoy the company of her husband and that he can have some time of enjoyment with my sons and me. (Just seeing his smile is enough reward for the irritation of tolerating her for a few hours!)
QUOTE KATHY: “…..a commitment to change. From the beginning of my recovery, I saw it as an opportunity to change. Any trust I have in myself now is linked to evidence that I’ve used my mistakes to learn and change. That’s what transforms these terrible mistakes into something meaningful, and what makes us creators of our lives, rather than victims of circumstance. ”
a GREAT SUMMATION, KATHY! (((((hugs)))) and big thanks!!! God bless!
Jadeleilani, I read your post and feel for you. Most of us here have been in a similar mental state in our relationships with sociopaths, and particularly toward the end.
But these feelings have their flip side. Just feeling so inadequate, despairing, afraid, blocked at every side can drive us to a deep will to survive and, if we have children, to protect them. And one of the first things that will to survive does is make us more realistic about what we’re dealing with. At our centers, we become more cold-eyed. And we become more capable of planning — privately and for our own good — what we need to do to survive.
That inner toughness is what is going to change your life. You’ll find it, and it sounds like you have some support with counselors and even the court system. (Which a lot of us haven’t had.) But ultimately, no matter what support you have, this is about you finding the steely certainty in yourself that you will do what you have to do to take your life back.
Calling him a sociopath just means that he’s not going to change. That the worst of him is as real as the best of him, and you can’t depend on him for anything but more trouble. You’ll get good practical advice here, and that’s not my specialty. But I can tell you that you have it in you to to recognize him for what he is, no matter what he’s saying to you or doing to you, and how it makes you feel.
You have lots of reasons to feel overwhelmed right now, but they are just circumstances. And circumstances change. When you feel panicky, try taking ten slow, deep breaths. It really helps.
You’ve taken a lot of good steps already. But the most important step is to stop caring about him in any way, stop believing him in any way, and to recognize that his only real objective toward you is to use you. I know that’s easier said that done, but you might start repeating, like a mantra, he is not my friend, he is not my friend. It’s like leaving a cult. They diminish your self-trust and make you dependent on them for feeling like you’re worth anything. This is what you have to undo. You are a human being with your own life, soul, mind and dreams.
We’re all here with you. You’re in the worst most painful part of recovery right now, but you’re in recovery. Once you realize that he’s not your friend, not in any way, things will get a lot easier. And you’re headed in that direction. It’s all through your letter. He’s fighting to keep you under control, and you’re fighting back.
Congratulations for finding us. It will get better.
Kathy
LIG, sorry I wasn’t clear, my first post disappeared and I think I abbreviated the second time.
Envy is an interesting/complicated emotion. It is the root of narcissism along with shame.
When you feel envy you cannot feel generous and you cannot feel gratitude for what you have.
Narcissist feel what you described:
i don’t really want to do much for anybody. i want to keep it all for me. instead of openly offering loving touches as a matter of course (a small loan to a friend short on rent, a hug to a student who is upset, a meal for a friend with a sick parent), i am now somewhat contemptuous of others needs.
But you never were this way before, so I know that he slimed you.
The root of selfishness comes from envy. When you give a small loan, or a hug you give more than that, you give happiness, hope and momentary relief. That’s what you intended to give, maybe without even knowing it. But the narcissist doesn’t want anyone to have happiness, hope or relief from fear. They want to take EVERYTHING away from EVERYONE. They want only anguish to exist on earth.
I posted these lyrics before, from One, by U2. but they very succinctly state the problem of slimed envy.
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
They feel an injury, that they’ve been wronged, that they never got love and they want no one else to have it. Now you have it too. But you can make it go away by directing your thoughts to gratitude.
Skylar, you are writing something close to my personal take on people on that end of the personality disorder spectrum. I believe that their fundamental issue is feeling incurably ripped off. And that creates the emotional states of resentment, distrust, feeling inadequate or like an outsider (with its flip side of grandiosity), envy, entitlement to right the balance by taking without giving back, and all the behavioral patterns that go with it.
I would call your idea of being “slimed,” being subject to the contagion of this emotional state. Feelings are contagious. And if we’re exposed to a narcissist or sociopath for an extended period of time, it’s like being in a club where they play a certain type of music all the time. I think that one of the most profound ways they vampire off us is in trying to fix their own feelings of inadequacy by making us smaller. For them, it’s virtually an addiction, because their feeling of being unsafe because they are unlovable (the childish interpretation of the cause of the original narcissistic wound) creates such a need for relief.
I know that for me, at least, trying to feel gratitude would not have worked in my early recovery. I felt ripped off. I felt resentful. I even felt envious of his ability to organize his own life without caring about anyone else, and walking away with all my resources without ever looking back. I was so out of touch with anything like a spiritual connection — and gratitude is so related to positive spirituality — that I couldn’t accept help or even simple concern without feeling humiliated or ashamed. I didn’t trust myself or anyone else.
I had to explore these feelings, to indulge them in myself and see what they were really about, before I could even come close to getting rid of them. And in fact, I didn’t get rid of them. I realized that he had a whole other set of feelings that I didn’t acknowledge in myself, and I needed to integrate them into my personality. I needed to learn how to be angry without apologizing for it. I needed to use that envy as a clue to what I really wanted and was too repressed to go after in my life. And I needed to learn distrust as a virtue.
Sociopaths and narcissists are not able to learn from us the way we learn from them. But for people like me, who carry their own narcissistic wounds but don’t become so self-sufficient, and instead keep looking for love to cure them, a close encounter with one of these people can ultimately be a life-enriching thing. It was not pleasant getting into his consciousness, being slimed by his miserable emotional states, but it taught me a lot about where I was lacking.
I got back my spiritual connection, after I learned to love myself again — inner sociopath and all. And now I’m truly grateful for the experience, odd as they might sound to someone who is still in the trenches of denial, bargaining or anger. But I could not have felt like this or any other sort of gratitude for my situation before. Even suggesting that I feel grateful when I was so mired in feeling like a victim would have seemed like disrespect to me. I was suffering and I had a right to feel that way.
This is just my opinion, reflecting my own path of recovery. I respect the huge amount of thinking and research all of us are putting into our own paths.
Kathy