The Power Of ‘Positive Thinking’- A Pathological Effort To Suppress Your ‘Negative’ Emotions?

      I love my friend, Nicky. She is brilliant. She occupies my page with her thoughts that give so much room for the notion of ‘thinking outside the box’,  an entirely different perspective. I appreciate this about her.
We often think in parallels, she and I. We have had some major disagreements about things, but overall, her opinion and friendship is prized and I think she’s a fabulous person.

Aside from that, she posted the following to a post I wrote about the power of ‘positive thinking’, something I feel, well, only minimally positive about. There are times when I feel this ‘attitude’ is harmful to those who are genuinely suffering. And that the power of ‘positive thinking’ is a subtle message of shame for those who do not have the capacity to magically ‘positively think’ differently about their situations and/ or if they have organic mental health issues that prevent this ready-made ‘cure-all’.

The following is my friend Nicky’s response to my post on the page, questioning the power of ‘positive thinking’:

“Positive thinking is a ‘movement’ based on fluff – there is no solid proof behind any of it but it helps to ease pain and kinda numb us from glaring reality. We can’t positively think away Cancer, War, or any of the other very real bad things that happen EVERYDAY. To hear some of these Guru’s talk, they get the whole group riled up and high off of B.S. and if someone comes with a legitimate problem or gripe they are told to think positive, and if they protest or poke holes they’re treated like a leper. “Everything happens for a reason”….REALLY? Why would a baby die of cancer? Why would ‘God’ do that? What reason and WHO THE HELL got the memo on that? I want proof? It’s a drug like anything else, granted we can’t always be doom and gloom…OPTIMISM and HOPE are cool, but many sheeple are feeding too many wolves and that is due to lack of a sound education on the ART of manipulation and B.S. which permeates society”…http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-moment-youth/201206/the-art-positive-skepticism

The “art of manipulation’. Very powerful words about a subject that is growing increasingly popular. I saw a post today on my personal page on my newsfeed about how thinking negatively affects your immune system. I’ve also seen many meme’s and posts from those who are well meaning, meaning my friends, who accentuate this powerful ‘art of manipulation’ without realizing that they are doing so.

The messages are more than clear: don’t hang out with ‘negative’ people or it will ‘bring you down’. Nicky was right, this IS the ‘art of manipulation’. Societal and cultural manipulation. The superficial, repulsive notion that unless we are thinking positively and have consistently happy thoughts, that somehow this will magically shift our lives somehow.

Because I have a tendency to think way beyond a superficial level, in reality, these posts bother me greatly. Don’t hang out with ‘negative’ people. The problem with this is that there are no ‘specifics’ as to what negative people means. Do you mean someone who is healing from a relationship with a psychopath/narcissist? Do you mean someone who struggles with organic mental health issues like depression, PTSD and anxiety? Do you mean someone who is really feeling pressured, stressed and a bit down because they’re working two jobs to feed their family and aren’t  making it, yet are being exploited by society as ‘lazy’? You mean THOSE negative people?

Our very narcissistic society is into denial, superficiality, put on a happy face and it will be all better. The only people that a ‘negative’ person makes happy with a smile on their face are those that don’t want to deal with their pain. Many people who are genuinely suffering are ostracized and exploited as being not only emotionally lazy, but negative, unhappy parasites whose negative attitudes are a drain on society.

On my prior post today, about the wounded ‘healer’, a guy on my page wrote in response…”but I don’t understand, I thought you were a ‘happy life person”…

I didn’t want to laugh when I read it, but I did. Then when I was done with my chuckle, I wrote, “What do you mean by ‘happy life person’…perhaps you could clarify what your perspective is on that.” It was interesting because this guy was apparently bummed out that I had not written about something ‘happy’. I could sit here all day long and ask people to clarify what ‘happiness’ means to them and I’d get a hundred different answers. IS there such a thing? If there is, I haven’t experienced it. What I’ve experienced is pieces of joy in my life, the majority of the rest of the time is peaceful. What does this mean for me? Quiet, alone, taking in nature, spending time with my son, spending time playing with my dog, listening to quiet music, writing…no drama, no chaos and no pathology.

The visuals we have of what happiness looks like are extreme and unrealistic in a real world. It is even more so with survivors who are struggling just to get through everyday, to deal with their PTSD and their emotions about the psychopath/narcissist and the absolute swath of destruction he left behind. They carry enough shame for having been in the relationship in the first place, must we shame them more? I don’t think so.

People who have these attitudes and are well practiced in the art of manipulation, don’t realize how this comes across to those who live in reality and are struggling. It comes off as arrogant, as just a tad narcissistic, and has an undertone of a holier than thou attitude which is harmful to those who are struggling so much. We are so very ignorant and careless when it comes to the suffering of others. We want it just to go away, to suppress them and there is no better way to do that, then with the ‘art of manipulation’, complicating survivor’s lives further with some idea that these ‘positive thinkers’ have something that we who are in the midst of suffering don’t. In the back of my mind, when someone says they are always happy, I highly question it.

Survivors have often asked me, during recovery, “Will I ever be happy again?” DEFINE. HAPPY. You mean the kind of floating on air, happy? You  mean consistent confetti, balloons, party whistle happy? That’s what it is with psychopaths and that’s not ‘happy’ that’s ‘high’.

I think when we are ‘happy’, it manifests more as peace. I think authentic and genuine ‘happiness’ comes from within and not from the societal perspectives of superficial happiness or someone else we’re getting an ego boost from that is more about getting high and living in fantasy versus reality. I see ‘happiness’ as solitude. I think we can ‘feel’ negative and still have peace. We will have bad days, all of us. For some of us, it will be harder to be ‘positive’ than others due to life circumstances. There are so many variables that dictate what happiness means to people, but to say that ‘negative’ people bring us down, one needs to be more specific as to what that means as well.

All of this derives from a society that suggests that we worry more about what others think of us, then what we  think of ourselves. In relationships with psychopaths/narcissists, whether we were raised in it, or we were partnered up with it, we learned to live for, work for this person to be ‘happy’ with  us. Part of the addiction is to people please and try to make them happy That’s what pathology provokes and it does on a societal level too. Too much of anything can become pathological.

I’m not suggesting we ‘wallow’ but I’m not suggesting we deny either. I don’t think you can openly discuss what happened to you with everyone, but there is a point where the positive thinking encourages denial and can be potentially dangerous. By dangerous, I mean a couple of things: One, people aren’t comfortable around others who are sad inside. Subsequently, we then begin to recognize the subtleties in others about our condition and doubt ourselves and wonder if they’re right as they try to tell us to ‘be positive’ after such a devastating experience and two, if we suppress our emotions in an subtle attempt to people please and appease their discomfort or try to stuff our emotions when we are feeling sad, we miss an opportunity (which is ultimately positive) to heal something that may well be underlying the sadness to begin with. Ignoring it pushes healing out further because survivors are often taken by surprise with a trigger that is out of the blue with all of that ‘positive’ attitude..it shows up to me like this “but….I thought I had healed??” No, you stuffed and ignored what you were feeling and so now it’s manifest as something that sideswiped you in recovery.” Pathology is malignant, an emotional cancer, no matter from where it comes and you do not put a band aid on cancer.

Don’t buy into the BS about ‘positive thinking’. Doing so forces us into a place of suppressing our authenticity. Find people in your life who genuinely care for you and have compassion for your pain, people you can talk openly with and that you trust. This makes a huge difference in the ability to be ‘happy when we can share our experiences, honestly, as well as it lifts a major burden from our shoulders.

For all the pontificating that we, as survivor supporters do in encouraging authenticity and healing through process (which includes sharing your emotions openly, positive OR negative with those you trust or on our pages and blogs), know that process means you are actively dealing with something that was extremely negative in your life. There is nothing more negative than a psychopath/narcissist and I’m guessing that it’s probably many of them who are the ‘guru’s’ that head the ‘positive thinking’ movement in society. It’s to get us to shut the hell up.

Don’t. Keep talking. Keep working through it and know that someday, you may well be ‘happy’ again, whatever that means for you, and for many survivors that ultimately means PEACE in their lives.

Onward and upward.

Survivors As Wounded ‘Healers’- “I’m Writing A Book About My Experience!”

     I have yet to have a few days pass that a survivor has not made a declaration about writing a book about their experience with the psychopath/narcissist. I see this in various page announcements on face book and survivor blogs. I see it in posts by survivors to my page and I have survivor friends who have already written books about the experience, but a couple of them are well established, well known authors, who have been published through publishing firms or are well established on their own.

Because I have heard this so often, I would like to share my observances about this with you if this is a burning desire of yours. I say this with love and in an effort to create a reality for you about this because I have seen what these endeavors mean for survivors who are not yet healed or where ego comes into play and they become too big for their britches! These are usually pathological survivors and they are those who create pages and want to write books….for the purposes of numbers and fame, but there are fewer of those, thank God, then there are survivors who want to help or share their story. This post is also a little bit of wisdom offered to you if you’re a survivor who is also a supporter and educator, whether you are new to this or have been established for awhile.

When we come out of these relationships and begin to heal, we develop a burning, passionate desire to derive meaning from the experience. Many survivors want to utilize their high empathy to support other survivors who are just coming out of the relationship. There is nothing innately wrong with this, however I think it would help to recognize a few things in our endeavors in the support field, creating support pages, writing blogs and writing books.

When I started a page a couple of years ago, I was very depressed, still reacting to the abuse and had as yet undiagnosed PTSD. I had not yet developed the burning desire to support and really knew nothing about it, I just knew that two of the pages I frequented were run by pathologicals and I was quite done with that and had hoped by creating a page that I might find others who were interested in discussing how to move forward without the spin and rumination of psychopath. In other words, for catharsis and connection to those interested in moving forward with the idea that it was now time to look at ourselves, taking the focus off the obsessing about the psychopath.

Oh boy. I learned a lot, but it was not an overall positive experience for me because I was not educated in what could happen when you’re doing an online page about how to heal from psychopathic abuse. I was not prepared for the trolls who would litter the page, the competitive targeting of other pathological page owners and their emotionally dependent minion, nor the fact that I would react in anger to it all, which is exactly what happened. My expectations were not overwhelming when I started it. Despite all the trolling, my page grew rapidly over a period of a few months to 1400. At the time, this was a rather large face book audience, and in my naivete, I didn’t see pathological targeting headed my direction because I was viewed as a ‘threat’ to other pages encouraging rumination and obsessing about psychopaths. Being pathological, none of the admins saw this as an opportunity and/or lesson in moving survivors forward, because they didn’t want to change that. They wanted to prevent tired and weary worn, ruminated out, survivors from coming to my page and sharing about moving forward. Such is pathology. . .

I closed the page after about eight months or so and removed myself from face book so that I could heal more. Face book, in many is a nice social networking tool if you’re promoting a business or to keep in touch with friends who do not live close by. All but two of my children are on face book and I can reach them easier there than I could over the phone! SAD! But the reality is that there are millions on face book, and with those millions it stands to reason that there would be many pathologicals, as well as survivors, trolling the pages, starting pages, targeting page owners, etc. It is a place where if a survivor is already disordered, that ego can become inflated rather quickly. Let’s put this into perspective: there are now thousands of pages dedicated to recovery from abuse. There is room for everyone. As a consequence of that experience, I warn survivors about the impact of pages in which trolls operate and what they look like. They are very dangerous and have the potential to create a transference of emotional dependence, from the psychopathic/narcissistic partner, onto the page admin. This happens less so on blogs, but it is prevalent on pages. The ‘competition’ is ridiculous.

When I shut down the page, I had some time to heal, receive a diagnosis of PTSD and began to work my program. I had planned never to return to face book. Then one day, I received a snail mail from one of my friends who lived in Michigan and she wrote that she was upset to find I was not on face book anymore (I’d left abruptly), and that she missed my presence. I then received emails from others on my list who expressed the same sentiments and so I was drawn back in. I had a plan of action prior to going back in. Stay on my list only, get rid of those that I don’t speak to or don’t know well (an impressive friends list is not where it’s at for me), and continue the friendships I had that were easy to maintain daily through face book. I had long since passed any desire to check up on the ex and there was still some leftover fear that he could contact, so I stayed far away from it.

My desire to support began to grow again when I was contacted by survivors who remembered the page and my name.

I opened my page again, briefly and then decided to close it permanently and open another with a new name. One that also matched my blog because I had started that as well. I began to have that ‘burning’ desire to support. It was different this time for me. I love to write. I felt that I could utilize my low level skills in helping other survivors understand their experiences. I wanted it to be low key this time. I did not use the same name as I had had before. It was brand new. It wasn’t long before the page admins I had dealt with before, found out about my new site and sent their minion to intimidate, but that was brief. I just kept going and ignored them. If I’m not responding, then it’s not fun for them anymore.

I had little expectations about the blog and the page. I was doing it for the joy of writing and for the connection to survivors who were in pain and struggling. I think I helped a few, but this time my perspective had changed too. I was a small fish in a huge pond. I had no desire whatsoever to ‘compete’. I see no need for it. I find it repulsive and stupid. When I see things on a universal level, rather than just limited to my own space, the world, I realize is rather large and full of gifts and talents. Everyone wants to start a page, everyone wants to write a book…everyone wants to get a blog going. . .

I think it’s important for as many survivors that wish too, to share their stories. Abusers are all about silence and the more we speak out, collectively, the more the abusers are revealed. It’s important, in my opinion, for every survivor to share their story, but not so much in that anyone is going to ‘make it’ in the writing field, but that it’s cathartic for them. If you help one or two survivors, you have established meaning about your experiences. If you’re willing to learn more about yourself, about the disordered and about how survivors are pretty much all the same when it comes to their aftermath reactions and the predictability of the playing out of their relationships, it’ll give you a good idea about what a book may look like if you choose to write it.

We all have ego. Some more than others. I have met survivors who claim ‘healer’ status and they are those that concern me the most. Taking a position of healer is, in my opinion, the consequence of an inflated ego. Why? Well because in a sense, we all have the potential to encourage a survivor to move toward healing. “Healer’ comes with a sense of ‘entitlement’ that creates discomfort for me personally. It assumes an authority type flavor to support that isn’t earned with degree, but only in labeling self and ego through experience. I am very, very careful about this, because I do not see myself as a ‘healer’ and I don’t apply titles to myself that put me into a position to be an ‘authority’ on anything. I find this intimidating to other survivors and the reality that someone has an established self labeled authority is something to be very cautious about. In my opinion, there are extremely few who could apply this to themselves legitimately.

I say this because there are far too many pathological ‘healers’ out there and in fact, the survivor supporters that claim ‘healer’ status are often disordered. This does not imply that all are or see themselves as authority, but ‘healer’ is a very powerful word and assumption made about one self and for a survivor who is wounded, it can mean disaster in that she is already suffering from emotional dependency issues and may well suffer from other disorders that the ‘healer’ is not prepared to treat. I think knowing your limits is very important, while also having a humility in how much you can really offer and what the expectation is in offering it and who is open to receiving it.

Survivors in positions of ‘authority’ have a major responsibility, not only to the survivors that read their work or listen to their advice, but also to themselves. Most of us carry a high level of empathy, right along with our PTSD or other mental health issues from the relationship. Self care can be avoided and healing yourself can be distracted from in survivor support work. This is when it becomes unhealthy for you as the supporter. There are monumental triggers doing this work. There was a time I could not work with survivors who had just come out of their relationships because the cognitive dissonance, level of denial, lack of education about the disorder, was just too much for me and I would react to them. I had little patience for survivors who just could not walk past the pathological, maintain their NC, sabotage their recovery work, hang onto unhealthy pages where they would ruminate for months, then come to mine and start the same drama. I was just done with that in my life, and with survivors who really weren’t yet invested in their healing for whatever reason, but more so in the drama that certain pages provoke and promote. You will not find peace amidst drama and it’s hard to support survivors in genuine and healing ways when you are partaking in it or allowing unhealed survivors or trolls to upset and trigger you.

My perspective on this has changed now due to having done some healing and growth work and learning the exercise of mindfulness and letting go. The reality is that we can’t ‘save’ everyone and not everyone wants to be saved. Learning to understand how addictive the pull to the psychopath is, as well as the ruminating about psychopathy, PTSD, etc, ironically helped me to have patience, as well as establish boundaries with survivors who were not ready yet to let go of their psychopath/narcissist or who were hanging onto the relationship via rumination and support systems that encouraged this. I don’t and won’t encourage it. There is a very big difference between educating a new survivor and supporting in encouraging them to look at themselves or encouraging them to stay stuck. It’s irresponsible of me to encourage ‘stuck’.

Another lesson I’ve learned about support work is that we are not, repeat, not professionals. I take this very seriously. This means we are not equipped to deal with disorders that should be dealt with in a professional therapeutic environment. I refuse to work with a survivor who is experiencing dissociative disorders, borderline personality disorders, bipolar disorders, depression and PTSD when it is not evaluated and treated professionally. In other words, I won’t take on a professional role when I am not qualified to do so.

Support is fine and even beneficial, but I also know that I can cause hurt to a survivor if I take on more than what I am qualified to do. I will refer and will continue to do so if I see it is something I am not able to handle as supporter and educator. This is such an important understanding and point of wisdom: If you are not professionally licensed to deal with mental health issues and disorders that the survivor is experiencing, PLEASE seek assistance for them if there are suicide attempts or ideation. That is a 911 and I don’t mess with it. If someone has a dissociative response, immediately refer or call 911. I realize that sounds a bit drama, but it’s no fun trying to work with someone who is experiencing this and you can’t ‘talk them down’. I won’t put myself or a survivor in a place of emergency in which I do not know what to do. I understand mental health issues well enough to discern whether or not I can handle it, and what is going on, but I don’t assume to know what to do clinically. I err on the side of caution always. You can potentially do more damage to a survivor if you are unhealed, if you are not professionally capable, if you attempt to walk them through what is an emergency situation.

This is, in part, why I refuse to add ‘healer’ to my name, or associate it with myself because it implies that I can do something that I am not qualified to do. Healing has many aspects to it, many variables and elements. My ego is way too big for my britches by assuming I can handle survivors who are experiencing extreme depression, PTSD triggers, dissociation or suicidal ideation or attempts. I am very mindful that this is also emotionally exhausting work because you are dealing with people who are experiencing extremes in emotions where it relates to trauma.

Taking care of yourself, stepping back, being extremely mindful and aware of your issues, what you can and cannot do, is imperative to your own recovery. I have seen far too many page admins triggered by trolls who haunt their pages and are looking for a vulnerability to send them reeling. This happens A LOT. If you are not expecting this, it will be nigh impossible to do this work when you are not healed. I think it does matter whether or not you are indifferent to your own situation and your ex’s or childhood abuse, while offering support. If not, the chances of your being triggered and subsequently triggering other survivors is very, VERY high. It isn’t healthy for you and it’s not healthy for them, despite your good, and even loving and compassion intentions, it is wise to consider whether or not this is something you have the stomach for. Much like an Emergency Medical Tech who is on the job seeing the most gruesome of accidents, where death is a daily thing, after a time, it can get to you in being exposed, literally and everyday to trauma. This is similar in being exposed to survivors who have experienced extreme trauma too. Some of the stories are absolutely horrifying when it comes to abuse. Preparing to hear this takes a lot of guts. It is not for the faint of heart and it is not for a survivor who is not healed. This is serious work and should be taken seriously too.

Be very cautious about how much information you put out there about your own abuse or your personal information with regards to medications you take, diagnosis you’ve received and your relationship with your psychopaths. I am not in any way suggesting not to share it if you feel compelled too, however it is very, very important to keep in mind that there are lots of trolls online and face book is notorious for this. There is also the possibility that your ex or someone who knows your ex,who can see what you’re writing about. Be very careful in what details you put out that can define who you are to them. It’s also important to keep in mind that what you write, if you’re still in ‘victim’ mode can be seen by a troll in seconds flat and it’s an opportunity to exploit you. Even if you are not in victim mode, but are simply sharing your story of abuse with an indifference to it, having addressed it and moved on from it, you are still open to criticism and others who will not like what you’re sharing. This happens a lot too.

Not everyone is going to agree with what is written. There are lots of armchair psychologists out there, in the form of unhealed survivors and trolls who may offer criticism that would cause you to trigger. Another thing to keep in mind is with regards to friends and family. My personal friends list, is separate from my page, my group and my blog, and there is a way to make your posts to the page private. This is especially true should you be in a private group and get surprised by a post popping up from a group member to the group, or to you. Hide them. If you have critics within your family and they are choosing to read, simply ask them not too if it’s that upsetting to them, or if they don’t listen to this request, ban them. Same goes with friends as well.

If survivor support happens to be your ‘calling’ or your writing and educating is a ‘calling”, this is great, but I have learned lately that some people will not like your ‘calling’. I have created some close friendships with other survivors from early on in recovery a couple of years ago. Most of them remain my friends today and I have a group that we are all apart of and have been for a very long time. This has been tremendously healing for all of us and we have kept the group to an intimate few, however, I am fully aware that that they are also survivors that I have supported in the past. A few of them have gone on to new lives, which is what support is intended to do, but our friendships are now distant or non existent. For a couple of survivors on my friends list (not in my group), they avoid contact because they are involved with pathologicals, caught up in the fantasy again. For others it’s the reality that I’m a reminder of a time in their lives that was very painful. And yet still for others, I’m a reminder of what they don’t want to deal with when addressing the psychopath/narcissist in their lives. I don’t even have to mention anything to them, it’s just a matter of my presence as reminder. It has nothing to do with me personally. I am hesitant now to create friendships with the survivors I support presently, because while it’s comforting for them initially while going through the early stages of recovery, if they are doing the recovery work, eventually, they move away from psychopathy altogether and have no interest in it. They all know what I do within my work. I’m learning a lot about letting go and that sometimes, if not most of the time, people are in your life for a reason and only for a season. It’s a painful lesson to learn, but letting survivors go who have done the work and have moved on, is the reason I got into this in the first place.

Keeping this in mind is really important because ‘bonds’ tend to develop through our connection in our experiences with the disordered as few really understand what it is to have lived it. Having boundaries means that when goodbye comes, it’s GOODBYE and letting survivors go and move on, is healthy for them and healthy, ultimately for you, Why ask a survivor to stay in friendship with you if they are done with psychopathy and this means you too? Don’t take it personally.

Now, about the book writing. This is very easy to do these days. You can self publish on Amazon. Or you can submit manuscripts to publishing companies, but it’s less likely that yours would be chosen to publish. So here’s the reality about writing a book:

There are millions of books out there of varying subjects, authors, etc. There are thousands more about psychopathy, sociopathy and narcissism. There are thousands of books out there in the self help, relationship field. THOUSANDS. The chances of ‘your’ book being different than someone else’s who has had the same experience is pretty slim. The experiences are different, the characters are different, for obvious reasons, but the players (with some variations in roles), the relationship itself and the outcome are all the same. They are predictable. The only difference in the thousands of books written, are the perspectives of those writing them. Some are clinical in nature, others are based upon experience, some are motivational, and yet others are about PTSD and trauma as outcome to the relationships.

I have a friend named “Peace” who self published his own book and he is the owner of the PsychopathFree forum. I love him dearly and we met online. I was humbled to be an occasional support to him during his traumatic experience. He has blossomed and grown a lot over the last couple of years. His book is on my blog via a link to Amazon.

One day, after it was published, I read through the reviews about the book. Some of them were pretty shocking with regards to criticism and one of them was so nasty I found myself responding to it in defense of Peace and his work. But I learned some lessons in having read the book, as well as reading the reviews: when you self publish, you do not have the benefit of an editor. When you self publish and you are not very clear about the fact that you are simply a survivor sharing a story and not speaking from a place of authority in any way, you can’t be criticized for coming off like you’re speaking in clinical, emphatic terms, rather than from experience. I think there was not enough emphasis in Peace’s book about this and it opened him up to ruthless criticism that was not deserved. It’s obvious that it wasn’t a clinical perspective and only one shared from experience. Emphasizing your survivor status sharing an experience is very important. Not just as a way to avoid criticism, because you won’t, but also for other survivors who will read your work. It’s important to have very solid boundaries, even in writing our experiences, so that survivors are not led to believe that our experience or our work is somehow coming from a place of ‘authority’ or from a professional perspective.

When you publish, people are not going to like it. They will rip apart your writing, your grammatical errors, focus on the things you say about the psychopath and call it inaccurate in descriptive terms. They will tell you that it wasn’t worth the money they blew on it. They will compare it to other survivors stories and claim they learned nothing new or that they learned more from a clinical perspective than they did your work.

Again, it takes a cast iron gut to read all of that criticism. When we are writing and are proud of our work, believing it has something to offer the world and that it’s ‘great’ somehow (watch ego), and we publish it, oh boy….unless you have NO expectations about what you’re sharing, that your experience is not much different from others, that you are not a professional writer, nor a clinician, that what you’re writing about is cathartic for you, meant for you and as part of your recovery and if a few survivors read it, and are helped that’s enough. No one is going to make ‘bank’ off a book that thousands of others are working on. No one is going to be called by “Oprah” for an interview. And in light of that, my perspective is that there is a very big universe, full of experiences to be shared and that there is enough room for one and all, because what one survivor may not connect too, they may make a connection to you and your experience and that is important. If you have no expectations, if you aren’t dreaming about the next flight to Chicago for the Oprah interview or that you’ll be buying a big house with a nice car in the drive way…then you’re going to be fine.

I’m working on my own book right now. As one survivor to another who is thinking about or is embarking on this endeavor, for me it is a labor of love. It is a book of meaning for me. It has been very emotional to write. It has been very healing. It has taught me so much about myself, areas where I need work, as well as how far I have come in the process. I have compiled over two years worth of work, from both my pages and my blog, as well as expounding on all of it. The gift is in the process of writing it. It is so interesting to see where I was when I started this journey and where I am now. I have had to really look at myself, my motives for writing it, my own ego, my low level skills as a writer, with more of a message to deliver than grammatical correctness.

I have been back and forth about it for over a year now. The idea floating around in my head, but frozen when applying finger to type in writing it out. I needed to examine my hesitation in writing it. I don’t have the ego to do it. To promote it. To write without flogging myself for the message or for my punctuation and grammar. I don’t see that I have anything ‘special’ to offer because I read so many books that are so damned good in this field, whether they are clinical in perspective or survivor stories glorified into novels (Claudia Moscovici is a close friend of mine and wrote the “The Seducer” a novel about psychopathic seduction, as well as “Dangerous Liaisons” about psychopaths), by author friends that are well read and well written. They are of the ‘professional’ breed and I compare myself a lot to them and frankly, I can’t hold a candle next to their work that I so admire and respect. I see myself as a survivor, a granddaughter, daughter, ex wife, ex mistress and mother to psychopaths, on a shared healing journey, nothing more. There are many out there like me. I’m a small fish in a huge universal pond of very gifted and talented writers. I guess I’m in awe of them and their gifts, and I do not see myself as having anything like that to be considered ‘gifted’.

Ironically, deciding to write it was a push from other survivors and friends who believe in my work and/or have benefited from having read it and applying it to their own experiences. I have heard, countless times, “You should write a book!”

Doesn’t every survivor who writes and where it resonates, hear that? It’s not ‘different’ in that way. So as I’ve been writing, I see that my expectations are nothing. I see my place in the world, not as nothing, but as another survivor supporting other survivors and there are lots of us out there. I see that I can educate and share with my writing, but I don’t come from a clinical perspective, only many experiences and roles played to psychopaths. I see that I have a life outside of pathology and outside of writing that matters more to me in recovery with peace and living life very simply, trying to decide what I want to do with my life now and what I can do with the limitations that I have.

I’m also aware that some folks who do not like me or my work are chomping at the bit, waiting for this book to rip to shreds. Ironically, this is a good thing, because I’m working through that, plugging away and ahead and not giving a rip what they think. It will be published and then it will pass. Just like their books and just like every other book that is published. . .unless of course, you’re a J.K Rowling or a Stephen King!

So, having said that, I hope this gives you some idea as to what it is to write a book and what you can expect. I hope this gives you an idea, as a supporter, how to go about it in a way that’s safe for you and others, and be able to help at the same time.

And if you’re writing that book, good for you! I encourage this if it’s what you want. Just be realistic about it. At the same time, I really do believe that we all have something worth sharing. Just make sure that you keep ego in check and understand that you are just one of many who are wanting to do the same. And hopefully, you’ll be able to reach a few survivors that need to read your experience, contributing in small ways, to their recovery and connecting you to the greater universe. Now that is meaningful!

Onward and upward.

Growing Up In A Psychopathic Home: Why We Fail To Respond To Fear And Red Flags

     If we are an adult child of a psychopathic or narcissistic upbringing (parent) there are reasons why we do not respond appropriately in disengaging from a love bombing psychopath/narcissist in our adult romantic relationships at the luring stage of the relationship.

First, it’s necessary to explain love bombing and why this is the most abusive, exploitative and deceptive part of the relationship.

When the psychopath/narcissist is overwhelming every one of our senses with affection, lots and lots of sex, attention, gifts, money, vacations. . . whirlwind, high speed romancing, he is at the height of deception and manipulation. The psychopath/narcissist knows that your involvement depends on how good he is at deceiving and vortexing you into the relationship to get what he wants. It is driven by the deviancy of his disorder, with intent to hurt you.

Ironically, it is also this stage that survivors tend to remember and focus on when things turn and head south in the relationship. How good the psychopath/narcissist is at luring, is in part, a determination of how long the survivor will stay in the relationship.  When the ‘bad’ abuse starts, the physical/emotional/sexual or verbal abuse, she will remember the beginning of the relationship and he will use this to ‘maintenance’ her between periods of ‘bad’/obvious abuse, and sentimentality in ‘winning’ her back to him, harkening her back to the days of the ‘beginning. Thus begins the addictive cycles of abuse.

The psychopath/narcissist knows exactly what they’re doing and why, and none of it has anything to do with the survivor at all, except what she has to offer him. This could be money, a sex partner, a show pony/trophy wife, image projector, mother to his children, ally in a custody battle or triangulations with the ex, or all of the above. There are many reasons the psychopath targets, but none of them have anything to do with love, compassion or genuine empathy.

Because psychopath/narcissists lack empathy, there is no restraint when it comes to luring, just as there is not at the end of the relationship with the smear campaign. He ”attaches’ just as quickly as he lets go. When we feel overwhelmed by it all, there are reasons for this. It is abnormal behavior. It is meant to keep you from thinking about what he’s doing and asking questions. It is meant to bond you to him sexually as early as possible, as he knows that when you’re bonded to him in this way, it is likely that you will overlook any red flags that alert you to this over the top behavior.

When we come from a pathological home, we will likely miss this behavior as being the extreme abnormality that it is. We do not have the appropriate response to someone so unhealthy, because we are at a deficit. We’ve normalized abusive, exploitive and manipulative  behavior. Growing up in a pathological home prevents us from responding to fear or red flags that keep us safe from predators because we have lived for so long amongst them. At the time the psychopath/narcissist arrives in our lives, we are oftentimes presently caught up in our original trauma bonds with our pathological family.

There are other reasons too. We are often without boundaries and without healthy self esteem. Often, we carry undiagnosed mental health issues of our own. Psychopaths prey on our wounds and emotional injuries. They blow smoke up our bums in very unrealistic and distorted ways because they can ‘sense’ emotional blood: the desire to be loved, to be wanted, to be cared for. It isn’t just our heightened sense of empathy, it’s also our longing and desperation for love that was never given. We are so easily responsive to someone who appears to show us that we are finally going to be loved the way we were not in our growing up environment. We feel empathy and pity for them and their tales of woe, like we do for our pathological parent, even though they continue to abuse us. Our perceptions of what love looks like, what we imagine it to be, is what the psychopath/narcissist appears to offer. It is damned intoxicating to those of us from pathological homes. We are drawn easily into the psychopath/narcissist trap.

I hope that in some way it’s helpful to note the psychopath’s response to your intoxication of his love bombing: he will think you to be stupid. He will be high off each piece of bait he throws at you and that you willingly take while you’re swooning over him. His ”excitement’ is overwhelming to him in that the more he lies and deceives you and ‘gets away with it’ the higher his ego boost. He “peacocks’ his way around you and your family with his impressive gestures, compliments and over the top sucking up to you. Like the predatory shark that he is, the psychopath/narcissist knows you will bleed with emotional pain and writhe in future agony over what he is doing to you and what he knows will eventually be in abuse. His ‘careful’ observances of your speech, your habits, your lifestyle, his behind the scenes studying of you through Google searches and face book, are all exploitative efforts at extracting personal, deeply intimate information out of you to later use against you in his smear campaign, to threaten you with abandonment and to place blame upon you for the failure of the relationship that he constantly sabotages.  It is an effort to mirror you, to ‘morph’ into your perfect partner.  Quite the catch, that one, eh? To me, it is very, very FRIGHTENING.

It is an old and worn out analogy when we compare this relationship to an addiction. This is what trauma bonds provoke in us. The power of familiarity and the normalizing of pathological behavior becomes the driving force in an unhealed survivors life. The psychopath/narcissist becomes our drug of choice. The love bombing manipulation done in extremes, when introduced to us, is not only familiar, but the ‘high’ we have with this deceptive ego boost is like the first time using heroin. The first time is when we have the best high. After that, we spend the rest of the time in the relationship chasing the initial high.

After a time in the relationship and when the mask begins to slip in those occasional WTF moments, we are acting on addiction, our brains are literally wired and connected to respond to the abuse cycles. We don’t get high anymore, we move into a place where our drug (psychopath/narcissist) is used to avoid withdrawal. We will keep using, no matter how sick we become. Likewise, the psychopath is just as addicted to harming us, as we are to being harmed. We feed off of one another addictions, in a sick and twisted dance. The only way off this addictive roller coaster, is to simply make the decision to get off.

Like any addict, most of us will need a lot of help once we have rid ourselves of the drug of choice (psychopath/narcissist). Like AA and NA meetings are to alcoholics and drug addicts, are support systems focused solely on remaining free of our addiction to the psychopath/narcissist. No contact will feel much like withdrawal. And for those of us who come from a background of psychopathic/narcissistic abuse, this is a life changing event when we are thrown into awareness through the pain of our addiction to the psychopath. There is so much to heal from, it is very challenging and difficult to know where to begin. Many of us are, for the very first time, seeing our pathological backgrounds with clear eyes. There may be many people we have to eliminate from our lives. It may be that we have no one left by the time we have completed painful extrication of  pathologicals in our lives. This is an excrutiating process for survivors of childhood abuse. Staying away from the drug of choice is going to be a life long endeavor, with many potential relapses in between.

There is nothing as tragic as a child raised in violence and nothing is more violent than one without conscience.

Our failure to respond appropriately to red flags is a set up from our early beginnings in a psychopathic environment. Whatever ‘fear’ we had as children, we were not allowed to respond too. We developed ‘coping skills’ that were unhealthy and destructive to ourselves and to others. A love bombing psychopath would appear initially as very flattering to a healthy person, but with its growing intensity, would become something to fear. It is suffocating, degrading and obviously fake. Idealization, when focused on a healthy individual, will feel and appear shallow. It will feel and appear as distorted and unrealistic as the psychopath/narcissist really is. But to those of us who have never known genuine love or a healthy relationship, this will feel like flattery, it will feel like ‘love’. It will feel like ‘soul mate’ status assigned. The idealization will be a high to which we have never experienced.

We will not be repulsed. We will not see behind the mask until it is too late and we are hooked.

When we are out of the relationship, and we begin to sift through the destruction left behind, it can be extremely anxiety provoking to realize and truly embrace the awareness that not only was our relationship built on deception and exploitation, but that our entire lives may feel like having lived a huge lie. It will be very difficult to define yourself for  yourself when you’re not sure who or what you are when pathology has defined you and you realize that you are literally having to ‘re-parent’ yourself. Coming to consciousness about this can have some very powerful emotions that erupt. We can feel rage, grief, relief, sadness and ultimately we can  achieve a level of peace.

Part of recovery and ‘re-parenting’ ourselves means building a new foundation for ourselves, including establishing healthy boundaries, learning new healthy coping skills, such as meditation, changing our habits, diet, implementing exercise, and most importantly, if it is at all possible, seeking therapeutic services. I can’t say enough about how important I believe this is to recovery. Healing from a lifetime of pathologicals is no easy task and is not something I personally believe should be done without the assistance of a qualified trauma therapist. There is so much to sift through and so many emotions involved, so much abuse, that a support group alone, cannot help you with ‘re-parenting’ yourself the way a trained trauma therapist can.

When we begin to come into focus in our life through healing as individuals separate from psychopathy, our boundaries will be easier to establish and stick too. With this, comes learning to understand ‘fear’ and that the small still voice speaking to us about red flags and shady behavior, will be something we’ll be able to discern and act upon if we need too. It will be trial and error, but with this new awareness, getting to know ourselves, building boundaries, self esteem and most of all executing enormous, and much deserved self compassion, we will be able to keep psychopaths and narcissists out of our lives. If you do happen to have an encounter, you will know precisely what to do about it. And guess what? The love bombing will appear to you ‘differently’ than it did before. You will want to run. And that IS an appropriate response to fear and red flags.

As you move through recovery, keeping the Cluster B’s at bay, your life will begin to settle. You’ll enjoy this part of recovery, because while purging is very painful, there will be moments of clarity and of peace. For some of us, it’s the first time we have ever experienced this level of peaceful bliss. It will be absolutely precious to you in your recovery. The longer you are away from Cluster B’s, the more ‘abnormal’ they will feel and be to you when you encounter them. Oftentimes, it’s during this part of recovery, that adult survivors consider going no contact with their psychopathic/narcissistic parental unit. This is a very difficult decision, but as time passes, you’ll be able to tolerate pathology less and less and the decisions you may need to make about it, will become more clear to you.

I appreciate the ‘gift of fear’ more now. I am able to observe and to listen to myself and to others. There are times that I struggle, two years out, but overall, it is so much better than it was. It doesn’t happen overnight, but this gift is something I appreciate and it keeps me safe.

Onward and upward.

Note: This article also applies to men who are survivors of psychopathic women.

Seeking “Justice’ For The Pain The Psychopath/Narcissist Causes

  When I was first out of the relationship with my ex psychopath, and for a time afterward, I was not only very hurt, but very angry.
I pontificated to all who would listen, especially my fellow survivors, that the psychopath would ‘get his’ eventually. Karma would come. His lack of empathy makes him miserable, and I have it, so there, rinse, repeat.

For months I waited and hoped that his life would continue to spin out of control and that he would reap what he had sown. Anything that I heard about him in the negative (I was still plugged in for awhile through acquaintances), was reason for joy and an ah-hahahaha!!! attitude. Bastard!! He DESERVES what he gets!

I stopped pontificating about it so much and began to work on myself and my recovery. The wishing and hoping for justice was still in the back of my mind though.

Then I was told he got married again. He was ‘happy’ and the victim he had selected was a money generator for him, as well as his image. He had successfully rebuilt his finances and his image in just a year. He got what he wanted and my hope for justice was gone. I think the marriage hurt me less then the reality of the unfairness in that he had ‘gotten away with it’, in having caused so much pain to so many, myself included.

It took awhile to understand and accept that, for many of us, there IS no justice. I will not see ‘karma’ happen to him. I will never see him ‘suffer’ for the pain he caused and in fact, I don’t believe that psychopaths DO suffer at all. Their lack of empathy makes this impossible. The hardest thing in recovery to accept is that they don’t care about our pain. They simply move on. Their lives are all about the game, the dupe.

Because they do not have the ‘itch’ of conscience like we do, they are not capable of remorse. They are not capable of any insight into the pain they cause or have caused. All our ‘hoping’ for justice is futile and creates only more bitterness and pain and keep us stuck in the cycles of abuse, only now it’s not about their abuse of us anymore, we are abusing ourselves, hoping for some consequence to magically appear for him, so that we can personally witness his personal demise.

One of the most challenging hurdles to get over in this process, is letting go of the injustice.

There is something to be said for accepting that life isn’t fair at times. It’s enough for me to know, that ultimately, I made the choice to get out because the disorder doesn’t allow for a connection to anyone. It would always be the ‘dance of darkness’, hoping for change that will never come.

It is a very unkind thing to ask someone to do what they are incapable of doing. It is unkind to them and it is unkind to you. You have the ability to love, you have empathy, you have compassion. Why would we consciously choose to be involved with someone who cannot give us what we deserve when we are capable of giving it?

I have compassion, as well as pity for those who are involved in his life now. They are merely tools to be utilized for his personal consumption. They are hoping, waiting and asking for him to do things that he cannot do and we already know how hellish that is, don’t we? .

The justice we seek cannot be found in a karmic event in his life, but it can be found in the peace we attain for ourselves in letting go of something so disturbing and toxic to us. Let’s not forget why we chose to leave. If we were dumped, let’s not forget that this was divine intervention in preserving what we have to offer and give in connection to others.

Some survivors become very upset when I share that the psychopath/narcissist will not see justice in the pain caused to them by their ex’s, parents, children. There is a reason for this and it comes from a place of compassion: ACCEPTANCE of a Cluster B disorder, means that you EMBRACE REALITY when it comes to what it means to be without empathy. It is not only part of the process in letting go of ALL of the relationship and the psychopath, but it is also self protective. We often project our empathy onto others who do not have it, which is why we become involved in the first place.

Psychopaths/narcissists COUNT ON this ability of ours to exploit and to get what they want. It is a GAME to them. When we do not accept this reality of a lack of empathy and compassion on their part, it keeps us stuck. Stuck in the relationship, stuck afterward in wanting justice, hoping ‘they”ll get theirs’ eventually. It also opens us up to be vulnerable again in the future to another disordered individual, rendering us incapable of implementing boundaries, and subsequently, offering excuses for their lacking. Some of those excuses in our inability to accept are of the following, but not an all inclusive list: “He was abused as child”, “I’ve  met his parents and they are HORRIBLE people, I understand why he is the way he is (troubled, hurting, angry-anything but lacking in empathy), “He had abusive partners. I know how he feels because it’s happened to me too.”, “He is Aspies’, he has PTSD, he is depressed, he is alcoholic (he is ANYTHING that can be fixed but disordered)”, etc.

I have a friend who was born with spina bifida. He doesn’t know what it’s like to walk. He has been in a wheelchair the majority of his life. He cannot imagine what it is to function like someone without his disability. One day, while talking about his life and how he feels about his condition, he said, “If I were to be ‘cured’ and have the ability to walk, I would have a very difficult time adjusting to that way of life’. That conversation was profound for me. I take for granted that I can walk. It comes naturally to me. So does my empathy. My friend can’t imagine what it is to walk, a disordered one cannot imagine what it is to FEEL because it has never been there. It would be unkind and lacking in compassion and empathy to expect my friend to ‘get’ what it is to walk when he never has. That conversation was profound for me in learning to understand that I need to accept that a lack of empathy means and how to avoid someone who doesn’t have it so that I stay safe.

Don’t focus on his inabilities and what’s going on or not in his life and what you hope will happen to him, but never will. Just concentrate on your recovery and work on being grateful that you had the courage to get out of the relationship and stop the pain. Be grateful for your abundance of empathy and learn to utilize it in a way that doesn’t invite those who do not have it into your life.

Onward and upward.

Psychopaths And Women: We are All The Other Woman

* I wrote this post last November and decided to reblog it* 

I’ve pondered writing this post for a long time. I’ve hesitated in doing so because I understand that my perceptions may create controversy, whether you were the wife, girlfriend or the mistress of a psychopath or other disordered individual.

It’s fair to say that I can’t *make it okay* to have played the role of mistress to my ex. I understand this is a hot button issue for many wives who have been very wounded by the other woman in the psychopaths life. Ironically, I have been on both sides of the fence, giving me an understanding of the view as to the depth of pain for both of these roles that women play.

In having worked with survivors, I have yet to see one of their ex’s who was “faithful”.  Whether or not it was the reason to end the marriage/relationship or she found out about it later, it stands to reason that psychopathy/narcisism/sociopathy, however you wish to label it, is not mutually exclusive with monogamy.

I have come to believe that it isn’t possible for any disordered individual to be truly “committed” to a relationship or marriage, given that everything the disorder is and does, is not characteristically aligned to empathy, respect, and carries a monumental  lack of remorse or guilt. The disorder is about destruction, it’s about harm.

When viewed in this light, monogamy becomes highly unlikely, if not impossible in relationships with psychopaths. ALL women, no matter what their relationship status at the time of targeting, are fair game for a psychopath. Psychopaths are extremely notorious for their propensity for boredom, risk taking and novelty. Once past the honeymoon phase of a relationship, when the psychopath knows he has “secured” his current victim, the novelty wears off and he is on the prowl again. Many times he is on the prowl prior to cementing his relationship with the current victim. His sense of entitlement is so overwhelming that infidelity is his right and he easily justifies this to himself (women can be psychopathic too), which makes it simple to lie, deceive and manipulate.

One of the Psychopath’s favorite games is triangulation. This makes sense when we understand that the psychopath creates this drama and chaos to bring attention to himself. There is nothing more gratifying for a disordered one then to have two or more women fighting over him. Many times the women do not know about one another, but this “set up” favors him exclusively in keeping himself from being committed to any woman until he is discovered in his exploits. It’s also the ultimate for him in achieving “power over” many women at one time. Many survivor stories do not include just one mistress, but a series of many over years.

He is especially uncommitted to his wife. She bears the biggest burden of his infidelity in that she is the object he uses to assume normality and an image projected of loving father and husband. She has built a life and home, and if she has children with him, her loyalty to him, as well as being caught in a pathological bond, is likely to be very high. A survivor who discovers another woman in the psychopath’s life, often pathologizes her, rendering her psychopath free from accountability. In reality, she appears unstable as those around her understand that the psychopath is guilty of his infidelity, and in seeing her defensiveness of him, while smearing the other woman. The psychopath assumes a victim status and manipulates his spouse to be an ally against the other woman who was ‘trying to destroy her or their marriage’. It works nearly every time.

Psychopaths choose their victims carefully. They know which women are vulnerable, desperate to be loved or who want to be in a relationship, widowed, divorced, single for a long time, or in a bad, even abusive marriage. He does this with precision because part of setting up his future is to have his partner at a deficit, so that her loyalty is endless to him. A perfect scenario in which, after he secures her, he then chooses another vulnerable target who will be equally as loyal to him as his wife, but in the role of mistress. This combination, when discovered, guarantees that women will fight over him and feel threatened with abandonment.

When you are at a deficit when entering the relationship and buy into the psychopaths machinations, and become emotionally dependent upon him, the likelihood that he will get away with his behavior is higher. The idea of “sistahood” is out the window when emotional, financial, sexual or spiritual dependence and trauma bonding has occurred with the psychopath. Women fail to understand that his precision like effort to triangulate, serves his sadistic purposes and elevates his ego to a new level..

Time after time, survivors have shared that their psychopath’s mistress or new partner is “disordered”. It is true that some of them are, but the majority, while also at a deficit with him while in the relationship, are not. It doesn’t matter what that deficit was. Not on the part of his wife, nor on the part of his mistress. It’s so easy to believe that the other woman’s role was somehow purposeful in becoming involved with the psychopath because she knew he was married. When considering my role in my ex psychopath’s life as his “mistress”, I do understand this. I do understand my involvement and that it was wrong. I also understand what it is to be the wife of a psychopath for 20 years, with a man who cheated mercilessly. What a quandry to be in, yet at the same time, helpful to me in understanding both roles that women play in the psychopath’s life. Both the wife and mistress role to the psychopath, when it comes to involvement, clearly have boundary issues, self esteem issues and dependency issues. There is no ‘virtuousness’ in being married to a man who harms repeatedly.

When my ex husband cheated on me, numerous times, the other woman was only in the equation insofar as wondering what she had that I didn’t have. It was an expression of my low self esteem and not an expression of hatred or bitterness toward them. I had the opportunity to meet a couple of the women my ex was with during our marriage. I liked them both. They were good women who, when speaking with them, had been just as lied too, deceived and manipulated as I had been in being drawn into the marriage, as well as having remained in it. I felt compassion for them because they too, were at a deficit in their own lives. How could I judge them when the common denominator here was not them, but him? I find it very sad when women refuse to listen to one another about the man they are sleeping with, no matter which role is played, versus listening to his continued pathological lies. I learned much about my ex psychopathic husband, with my willingness to listen to the women.

Only of the women my ex psychopathic husband was with was truly disordered and the differences were stark compared to the women he had been with who were not. She was most clearly psychopathic herself and many things in her life, as established patterns of behavior and complete lack of empathy, were present. Her parenting skills were just as unstable and the state had removed her children from her on more than one occasion, as well as her frequent visits to jail.

My ex husband has been with my ex best friend now for ten years. I had an opportunity to see her last year. I felt compassion and such sadness  for her, because this man had not changed. He got worse and still she refused to get out. Many areas of her life were destroyed or not reparable due to the harm he had caused. His cheating never ceased, including having slept with her best friends. I do not and did not see this as karmic in any way. She was a woman who was targeted, like I was, but her deficits were monumental, and she was not able to rise above them. I owe her a debt of gratitude because she saved my life. Literally. She is no longer able to  consider living without him. Her fantasy of him became her reason for living. Just the mention of my name or the thought of me being near him, causes her great anxiety and feelings of jealousy when they are unfounded and we had been apart for eleven years at that time. This is what blinding loyalty and ultimate dysfunction look like when the victim is unable to let go and this happens more often than not.

There were many red flags shown to me during the courtship phase with my ex husband. I ignored them. My fear would not allow me to acknowledge it. Having come from an abusive background, his behavior was familiar, as it was with my last ex. With the last ex, the similarities to my father, including what he did for a living, were uncanny. I did not choose well with either of these men. Both men were, in equal parts, a mistake and caused unrelenting pain to me and others in my life. I did not have boundaries in  my marriage or my affair relationship.

I allowed abuse for years and years, while believing and engaging in nothing less than what I consider to be “shady” behavior because being with someone who is disordered, requires it. The lies I told to others about my marriage, and my feelings about it were not filled with integrity nor honesty. The pain caused to my children, with exposure to his abuse of me and his manipulation and abuse of them,  was not a stellar example of my parenting skills. There was nothing about my marriage that was honest and nothing about me that was behaving honestly, or living authentically in it.

It was the same with the affair. I went into it at a deficit. I played the role. I believed the lies, the manipulations. I lied and manipulated to remain in it. I justified my behavior in that relationship. It was not filled with integrity or honesty. Considering that NO RELATIONSHIP/MARRIAGE with a psychopath begins without extreme deception as its relational foundation, or without the benefit of boundaries or self worth going in, how can any of us believe that there is a reason to be pious about it if you’re the one married….to a PSYCHOPATH?

This does not in any way excuse what I knew at the time to be true in that my ex was married. I was married at the time too. I’m not innocent, take responsibility for my behavior and actions. I carried a lot of shame, his included, while he carried none of it. I hurt for the pain I caused his wife, while he felt justified in being with me because she was “abusive”. All of which was nothing short of a lie. He was held “accountable” in that his wife finally did divorce him after beginning an affair of her own, discovered by him, while still with me and to which he lied to her about again, only to turn around and cheat on me, target many other victims, marry the third victim, while also targeting someone else to play the role of “mistress” in the present marriage. Confused yet? 

  Neither of my ex’s were  single for any stretch of time. Both went from me, to many other women before going in for the kill with the current victim. There was not and will never be, remorse, regret or guilt on their part. Ever. This IS what psychopaths do. Unfortunately, as long as there are victims to be preyed upon with deficits that secure their loyalty to him, he will always carry on these triangulations and he will be allowed to do so freely.

And while he does, and while the women he has left behind pick up the pieces of their lives, most of us have one thing in common that is positive if we are willing to do the work: We can change our lives, when they never will. Whether we were the wives of these men, or the other woman to these men, we can self flagellate, or blame, or carry shame and bitterness, but what about this holds him accountable or offers us an opportunity to learn from our participation in these relationships?  To grow?

In being alone for a little while now, growing and developing boundaries and aligning more with my values and living within my integrity, the woman who married a psychopath and the woman that was the mistress to yet another, I know now, I would not settle for less again. I would never be a mistress to a psychopath (or any man for that matter), or be the wife of one either. The pain experienced and caused to others, as a wife to a psychopath or as a mistress to one are very different, but nevertheless present in both situations. Neither is good, neither is noble. They are both dysfunctional and harmful to ourselves, our children and our friends/family if they too, are not disordered.

Pathology does not come without inevitable harm to anyone who is involved. It doesn’t matter what role is played.

I can’t change what choices I have made. Given what I have learned from playing both roles to psychopaths, while there is much room for regret and  continued consequences with pain from both the marriage and the relationship,  one of the things that has happened is a growing of compassion for all women involved with these men. 

Whether you were the wife or the other woman in relationship with the disordered, the pain your experiencing in having been through it, will be met with compassion here.

The psychopath sets women up to hate one another, rather than to respect and listen to one another,  Given his mysogyny, this is largely a projection. It is  also a result of our vulnerabilities and dysfunctional loyalty to a very sick person that creates the cat fights and bitterness between women that often result upon discovery.

I think it’s time that we, as women, hold the psychopath accountable for the strategically evil individual he is. And we can do that by forgiving one another, encouraging one another, and becoming stronger individuals so that we can align with one another with respect, without shame, and in taking the time to listen to one another. How many times, if you were given the opportunity, did you really LISTEN to the ‘ex’ or the other woman in his life? And if you didn’t listen, why? 

I’m often not surprised when a survivor is decimated at having learned about another woman in a psychopath’s life and reacting accordingly only to find out that their relationship started because SHE was the other woman, whether she was a mistress outside of his marriage or a side dish girlfriend, she didn’t think he’d do it to her, even though he did it to his ex’s. Well, because she’s just THAT special. This is narcissistic, because there is no one ‘special’ enough to make it for a psychopath. I know, I thought that too, and in the end, none of what he did should have been a shock at all, including his inability to be monogamous.

I think as women, we need to stop blaming one another and start understanding that the psychopath counts on each of us, no matter what role we play, to vindicate him. Validate him. Put him on a pedestal and overlook his deviant behavior. In not doing so, in not listening to one another, we inevitably kick ourselves later when we are in desperate pain after being dumped.

Think about it.

Onward and upward.

Wolves In Sheep’s Clothing- Psychopaths/Narcissists As Christian

  ** Please be mindful, that if you’re a Christian reading this blog,  the following post may be triggering.**

When my last psychopath and I first met, 20 years ago, I was on his case load at the social service agency where he worked (and still does). I felt connected to him, and we would be ‘chatty’ during his yearly visits, or when I had to call and ask questions regarding my case.

There were strange red flags waving in the wind at the time. He was extremely good looking, but exceptionally calm. An eery kind of calm without even a hint of anxiety, a hint of emotional . .  .anything. . .

Sometimes, when I would call and ask a question right after the yearly mandatory visit, I would repeat something he told me with regards to a rule or procedure, making sure that what he had asked me to implement, was correct and done properly. When I repeated what he had told me, he would flatly state, “I never said that.” This would throw me into a heightened state of confusion and anxiety. At the time, I didn’t know that this is exactly what it was meant to do.

My ex psychopath husband and I moved out of the area in which my caseworker (psychopath) lived for a few years. But I considered the town we had live in before, home. I wanted to go back and raise the kids there, a desire for stability for them, with school and their friends that they missed.

When it was time to get ready to look for a place prior to our return, I called the agency and spoke with the psychopath. He remembered me right away and was very friendly and nice. Chatty and what not. Talking about things other than the case issue at hand. During the transition, more conversation was required. During this time, a friendship began to develop, although slowly. . .

The next couple of years were painful years for me with my ex husband. The abuse had increased, as had his alcoholism. We had moved again to a different part of town, close to the high school this time, as the children had and some of them were, approaching adolescence. Again, there was transition work and by this time the psychopath and I were chatting frequently via phone and email.

He was a Christian, with a bachelor’s degree in Theology. A licensed Pastor (not practicing), worship leader and board member at his church. He was married with two young children. Our ‘friendship’ had developed into a ”deep’ one (I thought) and we began to commiserate about our ‘abusive’ marriages. I was shocked to learn about the things that he claimed his wife was doing. Most of it verbal abuse, a few times physical.

There were times he would call me and let me hear her screaming at the top of her lungs at him. Then hang up. One time, to ‘seal the deal’ with me, he brought a shirt that she had given him for father’s day over to my place, to show me how ‘abusive’ she was. He said that she got angry because he told her the shirt was the wrong size, so she took a pair of scissors and cut the shirt to shreds, leaving it in the bathroom, with a note of apology. He acted forever the victim, caught in a “Christian” marriage that he did not want to be in, but was ‘because of the kids’.

And all of it was bullshit. Every single ‘story’ he told, these long tall tales of abuse, were projections. It was what he was doing to her. There was another time in which he had taken a video recorder and videotaped her screaming at him, while he laughed and egged her on. He constantly did things to provoke her. Now, I cannot imagine the pain and heartache and terror he put her through.

One time, after a church board meeting, he called me and wanted to come over. For sex. “Be ready”, he said. And I was. This was common ‘after hours’ behavior (any time other than our daily lunch dates).

He told me stories about how he had to initiate sex all the time and that he was tired of it, so of course, I took over that role.  He invited me to come watch him play in his band,  and I would drive to another town 45 minutes away to do so when his wife wasn’t there, once to videotape the gig. He was not at all bothered by this, even though his band mates knew his wife and knew he was married.

He would come to see me everyday at lunch, bottle of wine in hand (over the course of ten years, I developed an addiction to alcohol, drinking with him) to see me. There were many times where I would try to initiate conversations about God, spirituality, etc, but he was not interested in discussion about it after we became intimate, rarely before, although he pontificated a lot about those he was ‘ministering’ too and bringing to Christ. Prior to this, he could quote scriptural text and verse off the top of his head and I was impressed.

He painted a picture of himself as ultimately spiritual, having come from a fundamentalist home. From his stories told about his family, I don’t think there was a lot of love there. Both of his parents were remarkably abusive. I do believe his mother was a narcissist, and his father, potentially a successful psychopath. Both carried high academic degrees. His father was a principal at the high school he attended. But something felt very wrong… the stories were very sick and there were huge gaps missing from the stories and in time and space with regarding their occurrence. Most of the gaps were related to his behavior, who he was, where he was, what he was doing during these times.

His first marriage was shared with me in a way that told me she was the abuser. I said nothing about this and chose to believe that it was HE who was the victim. The first night we ever got together intimately, when his wife was out of town on a women’s retreat with the church, he had tears in his eyes as he told me about how he lost his first child, a daughter when the marriage broke up. He said it was the worst experience and the most painful of his life.

After the separation, he made efforts to see his daughter, and his ex wife (I now realize, out of fear), ran as fast as she could back to their home state, taking the child with her. Eventually, he said, he had a ‘talk’ with his parents, and decided to sign off his parental rights. There was not a reason given for this, but that didn’t feel right either. It was contradictory to how he said he felt about his child, and about his ex wife. Some years later into the relationship, I brought up the first marriage again, which  he never mentioned after that first weekend together. I said it was he that was the ‘crazy’ one. I asked why she left the marriage and he flatly stated, “She said I was emotionally abusive.” HUGE red flag. Later on, he denied saying this to me, but when he said it, it felt true and the stories he told of HER reactions during the marriage, made sense. I was putting two and two together. . .because these reactions were the reactions of his second wife and they had also become mine.

Because his image as a ‘Christian man’ were projected so strongly, any seed of doubt (many) and contradictions to what he said and what he was doing with me, were put to the back of my mind. He was a ‘Christian’ after all, and this meant, in my mind, he must be telling the truth. The more stories of woe that he told about his marriage, and his sex life in the marriage, the more I felt sorry for him. I could feel his pain, because I was experiencing my own. I could relate to the ‘Christian’ aspects in the reasons why he stayed, for those were the reasons I too stayed so long in my own marriage. He was mirroring me and my experience.

I grew up in a home that celebrated Catholicism. An Irish Catholic background that meant we followed all the Catholic rules. My psychopathic grandmother and her enabling husband, my grandfather, attended church every Sunday and there was Catholic symbolism in their home, with pictures of my grandfather’s catholic nun sister’s, crucifixes everywhere, along with portraits or statues of various Saints. These things always creeped me out. I went to Catholic school the first six years of elementary school and it was a very dark time. I was enduring a lot of abuse at home, yet in spiritual and contradictory fashion, what was practiced and preached, was not lived within the confines of my pathological upbringing. It was for image only, while my psychopathic father continued to behave as deviant in the marriage with my mother. It was the same behavior as my last psychopath, but in a different way and practicing a different religion.

I viewed God as Almighty. I was in absolute awe of my ex and his life with his wife. I wanted that life. Why I believed it was worth having, were the glorious pictures he painted of it all. The happy family, the happy church family. I perceived it as being ‘worthy’ of something. This man and his position of power in the church, as well as his projected arrogance in how well respected and liked he was, overwhelmed me. He had become my God. He was a believer who exploited my spirituality in a way that was so devious, so painful, that when the relationship ended, I nearly lost my faith in God.

He connected dots to himself and to God. I was not ‘worthy’ of conversation about God. I was not worthy of him. There were times he would tell me that it was time to go home and work his marriage. He played on my fears of abandonment and his ultimate authority in my life, twisting me to and fro like a lion who had captured his prey, ripping it to shreds in his mouth. God it was so painful. During these times, I would let go.

But he would come back. Every time.

Throughout all of this, the familiarity of his behaviors and my reactions to it, all connected to my abuse history, but not yet having come to awareness, were replaced by conscience. This was just wrong. I began to voice my objections to it with him. I chastised him for coming to me while he sat on a church board, proud of himself because the church members voted him in, never seeing, nor caring about the reality that his affair with me, might well be something to consider in his position of authority in that until he cleaned up the mess with his wife and with me, he didn’t belong in a place where he was making decisions on behalf of the church and its members, collectively or not. It never bothered him, however due to my constant complaining about it, and threats to leave the relationship, he eventually removed himself from the board. . . only to be given the position of worship leader, in which he completely sucked. But the truth was, I wanted him to make the decision to get out of the relationship, because I did not have the strength to do so.

It was shortly after he removed himself from the board, about four years into the relationship, that I wanted out. I loved this man, he WAS still God to me, the battle between  my past and what I wanted for my future, as well as growing pangs of painful conscience about what I was doing, motivated me to make attempts to get out. One of his favorite games, that took me  years to figure out, was taking his wife on vacation every year, sometimes every six months. He knew these ‘vacations’ were very painful to  me. He would not tell me about them until the day he was leaving, or just the day before. One time, he told me five days before. Lucky me! But I will never forget a time when he wrote me an email one morning, announcing (again) his intent to ‘work his marriage’ and that he was leaving with her to another state for ‘vacation’ to see if it would ‘work out’. This time, I was numbed by it. The abandonment trauma again, but this time, I had grown tired of it. I would not react. I was done. I did not yet realize that this was also addiction, but it was my last, but ultimately futile attempt to get out.

I did not respond to that email. He called while he was gone, professing to miss me as if nothing ever happened. Once. I did not answer. This was not typical of me. When a week had passed and I was feeling pretty good about my strength in not responding, gearing up for my ‘new’ life, I sat down one morning to read email. One was from him. A Monday morning, back at work and home from his attempted effort at his marriage. He wrote that he did what he did because he was upset that I was dating other men. As a single woman, this was my right. At first, I laughed. I get it, so this was punishment! He shared how much he really loved me, that he wanted to see me for lunch, that he continues to live ‘with her’ because of the children, but that he was ‘clear now’ that this was a ‘business deal’ and his taking her on vacation was apart of the ‘maintenance’ he must provide for her. Over and over again, “I love you, Babe. Please see me. It was just ….I was so angry that you were seeing other guys….”

At the time, this was a powerful moment. I could choose. I stared at that email, then began to write my response, deleted it, started again. Got up and walked away….came back to it. I could feel the pull of my addiction, still so strongly in place, I felt myself giving way.

It is the single most regrettable choice I have ever made. I saw him, the sex was overwhelming and I was catapulted right back to where we left off. He had won. Again. Today, I still kick myself about that decision. It was a time during the relationship that I was so clear about my choices, clearer about him, and I felt the Holy Spirit speaking to me in that I knew it was the absolute right thing to do. I began to feel that I was worthy of more than this treatment, and my perspective of Christianity had severely eroded. But as so often happens, my addiction to him overwhelmed my desire to proceed forward without him in my life.

It would be five more years of this. Of pain. The longer it went on, the worse I felt. There were no more highs, only more lows. The behaviors in that he was a projecting and now outright telling me, showing me in every way that i was not worthy. He blamed me when it all came out five years in (he told his wife about us, because I had threatened too), and called me on the phone, while his wife was in fetal position on their kitchen floor after he told her about us, sobbing. My heart ached for her. He was panic stricken. He said to me, “I don’t know what to do! What should I do here? This is your fault. I need to go now. YOU HURT MY WIFE!”

Eight months later, when the dust had settled enough for him, he was back, but not before several phone conversations, in which he would call me and rage at me for hours at a time, that I had ruined his marriage, hurt his wife and made it impossible for him to ever enjoy freedom for himself the way he once did. Rinse, repeat.

There were other assorted traumas that happened leading up to the end of the relationship, including his being outed at work. An ethics violation, an abuse of power in being involved with a client. He was fired, but through a hearing process and a judge’s decision and further exploitation and smearing of me, he got his job back. It is still much too upsetting to address now.

My dignity, my faith, were all but MIA, but with whatever was left, the tattered remnants of myself, believing that somehow, God did love me, I managed the strength to get out. I saw the most horrendous and deviant behavior out of him, that I had ever seen. The mask had not only slipped, it was completely off.  The endless parade of women after his divorce. His demonizing of his ex wife (to which I would defend her, making me an epic fail as an ally), the manipulation of his children with money, shopping trips and credit cards. The exploitation of those ‘fellow christians’ that he managed to gather against his ex wife, which were few, as he was shunned out of the church. She told everyone what he had done during their 17 year marriage. Including his ten year long affair with me.

There was an all forgiving, naive, sort of big bumbling, greying, teddy bear type Pastor that was very kind to everyone and to which my ex saw as exploitation material. The spiritual parasite that he is, he ‘moved in’ to this church and with the few there that would ‘forgive’ him and his professed ‘mistake’, he now holds the position of worship leader, with a new victim he married a little over a year ago, who knows no truth of him, isolated from what he has done in the past, but is believing in faith, that God just sent her the man of her dreams.

But the happiest part for me, was to see his ex wife happy. Truly happy and free. Before our break up, he kept pictures of her in his bedside table. They show a happy, beautiful woman, on hiking trips with her friends. The hatred he had at her unhappiness, was mind blowing. Just beneath that drawer that held the picture, was a loaded gun to which he pulled on me one night, right after a sexual encounter. His actions were anything but “Christ-like”, yet this is the image he projected, to all who would listen, all who would believe. His entire life, full of extreme contradictions when it came to image versus the evil he was in private. He spent many of those years, demonizing those around him, most of whom  he hated, yet most of those with whom he worked and played and prayed with at church. He hated low income people. He hated gays ( one of his brothers is gay and a source of ‘shame’ for the family, but I believe the only member who is emotionally healthy and for the most part, NC with them all). and I believe he too, was effeminate and was a closeted gay.

I have dealt with guilt and shame about this experience and the role I played. I have been many roles to psychopaths. All were lessons taught to me in how to be tolerant of others.

But there is no relationship more harmed, then my relationship with God. Associating God’s authority with a psychopath who proclaimed to be an ardent Christian man, has changed my entire perspective of Christianity altogether. I began to see things within the Christian sphere that were very contradictory in behavior and not just with my ex. I began to see it in my Christian friends, I saw it when my son disclosed that he was gay. I lost a few Christian friends then. I saw exploitation, fear mongering, judgment, bullying, harassment and serious misuse of the bible to promote a person RELIGIOUS agenda, rather than a spiritual one.

My ex one time told me, during his ‘attempt’ to work his marriage, that they were going through the book “The Five Love Languages”. He ripped it completely apart, yet continued to work on it with his wife, until she became so frustrated with his behavior about it in blame, that she gave up. Precisely what he wanted to avoid any indication that his mask might slip. She was a good, faithful Christian wife, who loved her husband and believed in family. She also believed what was preached endlessly to her about marriage, complete with biblical scripture taken out of context, and used to hold her in the marriage, both by her husband and by the church. Divorce is a sin, is not missed on a survivor married to a psychopath. And it is used liberally by him and those many ignorant who surround him, ready to take his side.

I have seen these survivors over and over again in the last two years. Some of their stories are the most shocking and heartbreaking. The level of deviancy and outright evil, using and exploiting God and the survivor’s faith, was nothing more than vomit provoking. He exploits her shame,  her guilt, along with her faith, which is what RELIGION, labeled as ‘Christianity’ promotes. It is not, I have learned, what God teaches. What Jesus taught. But a Christian survivor’s faith is convoluted, complicated, deep and borders much on brainwashing. It is deeply saddening to me to see a survivor’s hurt in this way.  Psychopaths love Christianity. They use this in politics and they use it in the church, as well as in their private lives. They will always have a willing, faithful following who choose their ignorance, disguised as faith over educating themselves about the reality that evil exists and it sits in their pews and preaches behind their pulpits. It even leads worship on Sunday.

It took a long time for me to recognize, the difference between religious zealousness that causes harm to others, and spirituality, which encompasses love for others with the only exception being those who are evil, demonic in behavior, deviant at a deep level and psychopathy and narcissism and sociopathy represent evil human forces.

It took awhile in recovery to realize that Christianity, as a RELIGION, is pathological. It assumes people as ‘special’ and ‘entitled’ to remove the rights of others, to promote austerity politically, to care about the unborn, but to leave the born to a single unwed mother or low income family as unworthy of the basic human right to survive. It is used by the rich and powerful to alienate, bully and abuse those who are different, from gays to the poor, disabled and sick, physically or mentally. It is a manifestation of cruelty and deviant behavior that causes ongoing harm and irreparable damage to those who might otherwise come to a genuine knowing of Christ. It is an exclusive, entitled club that alienates those who use expletives or do not function biblically in a way that is suitable to be labeled as “christian’. It is my ex psychopath, my father, my ex friends who bolted when they found my son was gay. It’s those on pages who exclude or use their ‘christian entitlement’ to cast shame onto those who ‘offend’ them, whether in speech or perceived action. It is the Christian bullies who pushed a family friend of 20 years old to suicide this last November.

The God I serve and the Jesus that lived and taught, did none of these things. Jesus was all about the sick, the poor, the ‘sinners’. He cast out demons (wish he was here to do the same with psychopaths/narcissists), and cared for the children. He was about forgiveness, and love. He was about mercy and grace. This is not what current representations of Christianity, for the most part, project.

I have Christian friends still in my life who practice their RELIGION but do not harm others. They do not pontificate, exclude, bully, judge or shame. These friends truly are ‘special’ when it comes to what it means to be a Christian and most of them are appalled at what their fellow ‘brothers and sisters’ are doing in the name of God and Christ, not just in particular, psychopaths who find that ‘heaven’ is the easily exploitable religious who practically live in their churches. These friends of mine, offer unconditional love to others, yet have boundaries for themselves personally, as well as RESPECT for the boundaries of others, including not pushing their religious agendas onto others. Ironically, these are the very people who bring more people to Christ through SPIRITUALITY, then through religious, dogmatic means.

I am very triggered by those who put themselves in such an entitled place. NO one is better than another. No one has the right to assume that God plays favorites and that they are his pieces on a universal chess board, utilized to condemn those that do not believe the same or are ‘different’ in some way.

The ways in which I have experienced psychopathy over a lifetime, are those which have richly blessed me in seeing God outside of the box. God is bigger than the ignorance, and pathological harm done to fellow human beings. Spirituality encompasses forces far bigger than I, outside of the realm of my existence, out in the universe to the smallest blade of grass. God is everywhere. I find Him most in nature. I can hardly deny His existence when pondering the beauty that surrounds me in nature, or in survivor’s whose will to live, to hope and to dream after such horrendous tragedy and exposure to evil. Both and many more, encompass more than religion, but a higher spirituality achieved only having lived equally, such evil force.

I no longer apply the term, ‘Christian” to myself, but consider myself to be ‘spiritual’. I avoid those who think they are so special and entitled. Spirituality does no harm, but religion, just like pathology, does. I no longer tolerate intolerance that breeds hatred, gossip, lies, pathological narcissism and inevitable harm to others. My hatred for intolerance is not about ‘judgment’ of ‘Christians’ as spiritual, but of a pontificating religion that creates enormous division and the countless survivors I’ve supported and mentored who have been spiritually damaged or forever turned off to anything associated with God. Those are the most tragic cases. It isn’t God that separates, it’s people. If we do not hate intolerance, there is a problem.

Here’s hoping you never face a greater evil than a pathological ‘Christian’, and I’ve discovered that there are many. Too many. A true wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Onward and upward.

After The Psychopath: Does Your Empathy Keep You Re-victimizing Yourself And Others?

     Empathy is an incredible gift. It is the mark of one with conscience. It allows us to share in the pain of others, to put ourselves into someone else shoes. It allows us to dispense compassion, liberally when needed. It allows us the gift of expression in love, the gift of listening to those in pain, as well as rejoicing in their happiness or peace. . .

These are the characteristics of those with high empathy.

But there are also dangers with a high level of empathy. Our empathy can be utilized spontaneously in situations where someone is deserving of this from us. Likewise, it can get us into tremendous trouble when we are targeted by a psychopath or any other toxic individual.

There are other factors that coincide with empathy that create the vulnerability we have had that vortex us into the relationship, or kept us empathizing, sympathizing and providing compassion and an overload of energy upon those who were unable to respond to it without exploiting it and us. We may have grown up in a pathological home, or endured some other trauma that created limitations with regards to our boundaries, hence dropping the ball when it came time to protect ourselves from being targeted by one without conscience. We simply did not see “it” coming, when in most cases it was utterly obvious and would have been, had we had healthy boundaries and understood that we are not required to love ‘just anyone’, feel sorry for ‘just anyone’,but we are responsible for making sure we love ourselves enough to protect our empathy.

So when the relationship is over and we begin to put the pieces of our lives back together again, there comes a point in time if we are working our process, that we realize that maybe our empathy is switched to the ‘on’ position nearly all of the time. There is that ‘twinge’ we have when anyone professes to be in pain and/or in need. We feel sorry for everyone and everything. We assume that all are good and are telling the truth when they are in pain, especially those who have been through a similar experience.

But the problem with this, you see, is that what we hear, is not always the truth. Is not always reality. Wearing our heart on our sleeve, while it seems admirable, and is to an extent, is also dangerous and borders on martyrdom. Our empathy becomes a dysfunctional, wildly swinging, erratic compass when we do not have boundaries and when we are in pain ourselves and want to be validated or to share it. Our empathy can be used to draw others into our own pain, along with their own in shared experience.

We really can feel so sorry for ourselves, believing we are simply exhibiting empathy and compassion for others who have also suffered as we have, that we get stuck. We re-victimize ourselves over and over again. We keep the spin going, for ourselves and for others. We have not learned appropriate boundaries, so while the relationship is over and we are hyper focused on being cautious with the disordered, and we ‘get’ where we went wrong with our empathy given to them, we throw empathy to the wind and justify our ruminating and continued victimization by gathering a group together of injured and wounded emotional soldiers to mourn the cause. Our empathy is magnified in situations like this. We feel sorry for those who are hurting like us. We are defensive when anyone dares to challenge the martyr/victim role that we are unaware that we are playing with others and with ourselves. Our defensiveness to this, is perceived as someone who maybe disordered, because unless it’s another survivor, all are a threat.

In reality, this behavior is unhealthy. By not learning to have healthy boundaries through much reflection, education and dealing with why we were in the relationship in the first place, or healing our traumas, we are merely inviting more inevitable pain. Our self proclaimed empathy and sympathy for others who are also in recovery or share a similar experience, becomes the distraction from ourselves.

We justify these things by telling ourselves, or anyone who will listen, that we are just ‘supporting’ them. We tell ourselves and everyone else, that we need to do this so no one is ever hurt like this again! We tell ourselves that it’s okay to ‘reveal all’ to other survivors, on our pages and blogs, as a ‘leader’ or as a ‘follower’. The reality is that it keeps us stuck in our pain and it keeps others stuck too. Survivors who do not move on to learn about healthy boundaries and when to be empathic and when to protect it, keep the door open to victimization, even from other survivors because we are reactive, experiencing varying levels of PTSD, and we are very raw. Our wounds are open and exposed, not yet carefully attended too professionally, through therapeutic means, or through a deep process of self evaluation, completely away from exposure to others that are experiencing the pain of the aftermath with a psychopath. Without recognizing what we are doing, we are adding further to our pain and that of others, rather than attempting to heal it on our own.

There are signals that tell us we are not healing.  We wonder why we are still ruminating and obsessing about the psychopath, or over our involvement, or our past abuse history. We don’t give empathy to ourselves through healthy boundaries and time away from pathological discussion.

Discovering that we have little to no boundaries can be quite a shocking thing, especially if we have never had them, were never taught to have them. It can be extremely uncomfortable to develop and implement healthy boundaries, feeling that it’s ‘cruel’ and ‘mean’ to others when we are cautious about who we give our empathy too. The reverse is true. It’s our absence of boundaries, freely giving our empathy away, that is cruel. Cruel to ourselves, and ultimately, cruel to others too, although not intentionally.

We are not helping one another when we keep each other in pain or in spin under the guise of our high empathy. We can’t see when there are red flags amongst fellow survivors or others in pain and/or need, in that maybe the story isn’t truth, maybe the motives are not real. We just see their ‘pain’. We can get into trouble again, with the very people we think we are helping. Some survivors are themselves disordered, and this is often readily missed when they appear in our lives when we are unhealed and hurting.

We need to be helping ourselves first.

I know women who have healthy boundaries and have been approached by a psychopath or narcissist. They see instantly the games, the ‘word salad’, the love bombing. They have effective radar systems that tell them to shut down the empathy with this person targeting them. I have seen women repulsed and even amused by the targeting efforts of a disordered one because it looks so fake and ridiculous. They are aware of their vulnerabilities, They have, again, boundaries. They know that not all are good. They are cautious in giving out personal information about themselves too soon. They observe the behaviors of men who approach them. They have self respect, self esteem to go with those boundaries.

And they also have extremely high levels of empathy too.

When we are high in empathy and low/no boundaries, we are a predator’s dinner. But we are also low in self esteem and self respect. We get caught up in the fantasy as the psychopath blows a whole lot of smoke up our bums. We are desperate to be loved, to be in a relationship with someone, anyone..and there is nothing more persuasive than a psychopath on the prowl..

If we are a child of a psychopathic or narcissistic parent, our empathy allows us to continue to re-victimize ourselves in fear, obligation and in guilt. It matters not that they see us as merely tools to be used to their benefit. They create pain for us over and over again, on purpose. The most difficult challenge for the survivors I support with psychopathic parents, is implementation of boundaries and removal of empathy from the parent. This is the original trauma bond and that bond is incredibly strong for the survivor of this parent. Our empathy is applied liberally with the parent. If we are parents ourselves, it’s even more challenging to implement boundaries because we project our empathy onto the pathological parent, understanding what it is to BE a parent and we just can’t imagine that our parent would feel anything other than what we feel in love for our own children.

But they don’t. Learning to protect our empathy, learning to have healthy boundaries, getting rid of the martyr complex that distracts us from providing compassion and healing to ourselves, justifying our continued activities in wasting time and energy on others who cannot give back, who cannot respond, who cannot appreciate and who cannot love, is what we need to be avoiding.

The hardest thing you will do in recovery, is to work on yourself and to give yourself all the empathy and compassion that you deserve. We cannot fix people who do not want to be fixed. We cannot fix ourselves, when we are in the business of other people’s business! It just won’t work.

Use your empathy for yourself right now. Give yourself the compassion and care that’s needed. Take the time it will take to learn to create boundaries and a new life for yourself. It is very easy to create emotional dependence with others who are in pain, the same pain we feel. It’s easy to justify our ‘support’ when we sit in spin, drama and chaos, which is what abuse is about, as well as the ruminating about it, digging it up over and over again.

It has taken me over two years now to even begin to scrape the surface of what it means to heal and have a modicum of peace. It is possible, but it won’t come without pain. Part of that pain, will be to follow through with boundary creation because there will be people who will be butt hurt and/or angry because you are not being the doormat, martyr, torch carrier for them that you were. And what’s wrong with that? Did they care about your need to take care of yourself?

We are not capable of really loving others in healthy ways when we cannot love ourselves. Our empathy may feel very genuine, and to an extent it is genuine, however, there are motives behind it that we are not aware of sometimes, when we continue to give it out without boundaries. At that point it’s more than feeling sorry for others in the same situation. It’s a reason to keep us from looking at ourselves and doing the painful work we must do, so that we can live in peace and harmony with ourselves.

We must learn to let go of other people to work their process so we can work our own, and then come together and share how we are doing it. How what we have learned can help others and encourage personal growth and healing, not spin. Not more pain. Not more re-vicitmizing.

Take the time today, to use all of that empathy for you. Learn to genuinely love yourself, because when you do, when you have healthy boundaries, self respect, self esteem, and move with caution in whom you give your empathy too, giving and supporting will feel much more authentic, as well as much more fruitful for others.

Onward and upward.

Confessions Of A Self Confessed Sociopath And The Lessons I’ve Learned…

      This morning, I attended my monthly doctor appointment. Things are changing within the clinic, my provider is leaving and I met my new provider today (he is fantastic). Prior to seeing the doctor, of course, a nurse brings me back, does the typical weighing, temperature and blood pressure check. I had my tablet with me, writing a post for the blog. The nurse saw I was writing it and asked me, “Whatya writing about?”

Now, generally speaking, when I am asked this question with regards to the subject that I write about, I’m cautious in how I respond. Many people are not familiar with personality disorders and look at you as if you had two heads when describing it. Commonly, if the subject comes up in conversation (with me it does often, which is odd), and I have an opportunity to share about it, once I outline the behaviors, a look of knowing comes across their faces, a slow nodding of the head and as if projected onto a screen, I can see their minds going through the lists of people they know who just might be this way.

That’s the typical response of someone who is unaware of psychopathy and is empathic. It is quite different when it is a disordered one. This would not be the first time this has happened to me. So going back to the story here. . .

“Whatya writin about?” he asked.  I said, “uhhhh…well I’m a domestic violence advocate, so I write to help survivors…”, “Oh” , he said rather curtly, and then I continued, “Ya…with a focus on psychopaths, narcissists and sociopaths…” (voice quivering)…

This guy’s face lit up like a newly put together Christmas tree! “REALLY! FASCINATING! I LOVE THAT SHIT! I”M A SOCIOPATH! MY MOTHER IS A FULL BLOWN SOCIOPATH AND A PSYCHOLOGIST, THIS IS COOL!”

I just about fell over.

I said, “Well, I’m quite surprised by your response. Most sociopaths won’t discuss their sociopathy, let alone admit they have the disorder”. He said, “Well, I’m different. I spent the first half of my life believing I was better than everyone else because, you know, I hung out with others LESS INTELLIGENT THAN I.” I immediately burst out laughing…

So we began to chat about him of course. Absolutely fascinating. His roommate is a full blown female psychopath/alcoholic, who is totally hidden and is right now in school to get her doctorate in psychology. I was blown away.  How frightening this was, but yet I was eerily drawn in by utter observance and fascination.

I shared that my grandmother, father, past partners and son are psychopaths. We discussed the differences between the two briefly. He was very proud of the way he handles his sociopathy, believing that with this awareness, he has the ability to keep a ‘handle’ on his behaviors, as well as helping people in the process. As is for typical sociopaths, he name dropped about a famous physician he worked with in the past and the many mental health patients he has seen hospitalized that he knew were sociopathic. Like a huge rubber necking accident on the freeway, was this sociopath taking my temperature, talking openly about manipulating and exploiting people, “but only in a positive ways”, he said…

I had the biggest epiphany of my recovery with this experience.

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to psychopaths and how I wish to approach information within my blog.

Depending where I am in process, what I wish to write about fluctuates. One minute I’m sick of psychopaths and talking about them, the next it’s all about PTSD, then it’s back to psychopaths, well. . .you get the picture..

There was a time where talking about psychopaths just made me feel angry. I couldn’t deal with survivors just coming out of the spin. It was very triggering to me as so much of my life has been about psychopathy, having been born into it. I’ve worked very hard to avoid discussion about it in my personal life. Moving on meant let’s talk about PTSD instead. . .but that depressed me, because it was a constant reminder of what I have lived and that part of my life is now over. It felt like wallowing to me. I see patterns of this in my posts and behavior of the past, during times of stress and during times where I’m feeling relatively confident or somewhere in between.

But still….there are new insights, reflections and a new sense of acceptance about this and my experiences with psychopaths that means this isn’t such a bad thing to know about. I’m the granddaughter, daughter, past partner and mother of a psychopath. That’s a hell of a lot of psychopathy, yes?

And I survived all of it. I’ve lived to walk through many experiences with it, as well as to share about it.

After my encounter with the sociopath today, something I’m still processing, I got to thinking a lot about my PTSD. My reactions to people and things. I know that I have PTSD, I accept that I do, I see what my limitations are. . .and I stopped blaming my abusers for my pain.

Yes, life did suck. It was a most unfortunate set of circumstances I was born into. Because of it, I have disabilities now that I will live with the rest of my life, but I really do have a choice in how I perceive it. I have a choice in how much power I give to others who stigmatize, hurt or invalidate me. I can allow it to paralyze me and sometimes it will, even without trying, but it’s ultimately up to me in how I choose to respond or react to it or what I need to learn from it so I don’t react/respond the same way another time in a similar situation. People only have as much power over me as I allow them too. This is most especially so when it comes to my abusers.

I saw a beautiful post today, so simple a personal narrative,  from another page owner. The page owner mentioned that she grew up (matured), that she stopped worrying about what other people were thinking. She realized that she deserves to be happy. This post, a bright shining light, as opposed to the negative posts on other pages dealing with everything from PTSD to stigmatizing I saw a pattern evolving on the PTSD pages, as it does similarly on other psychopathy pages that keep survivors stuck: ruminating about PTSD. There is a monumental difference between educating ourselves, supporting one another in healthy ways and learning how to manage PTSD, versus being ‘stuck’ there.

As a survivor of abuse, one of my addictive tendencies is to develop emotional dependence upon people. This is something I have worked very hard on and have had to be extremely mindful about, for my sake, as well as the survivors I support. My therapist takes this approach with me, and without realizing it, she is teaching me valuable lessons in discerning when it’s time to really step in and help and when it’s time to sit back and let me figure it out, so I do not develop emotional dependence upon her. This is critically important to recovery, but a piece I believe is missing in many support systems. There is a time where emotional support is imperative to a survivor during a trigger or in crisis, but the outcome, hopefully, once past the trigger or crisis is to learn from it. What do I need to address now? How can I handle this if confronted with this situation again? How can I learn to manage my reactions and responses to perceived lack of safety or where trust is compromised?

Ruminating about PTSD, however, does not help survivors learn new coping skills, new tools they can utilize to become more emotionally self sufficient.

Abuse is about power and control. The abuser is all about creating dependence out of his/her victims, to where they fall into a learned helplessness that is incredibly difficult to work away from. The pages about any issue, whether it’s psychopathy, another mental health issue (more pages are popping up with those struggling with bipolar, borderline, depression, etc, which is fabulous!), or some other form of abuse, in which the there are victims, really have good intentions for the most part. There are a few pages administered by the disordered who are encouraging ruminating, with a sea of vulnerable victims to exploit and they are not just limited to psychopathy or narcissism pages, they are also within any page that has victims. What is so sad about this, is that, for many of them with compassionate and empathic hearts, they do not realize that they are creating emotional dependence upon those who are filling up their pages, those desperate for help, some that are way beyond the page owners capabilities and with some owners, it further exacerbates their own symptoms and dependencies and for those who are of the Cluster B, ratcheting up a good reaction out of survivors is where its at.

The emotional dependency is tied directly to the trauma bonds that the abuser(s) created in their victims. I think very few are aware of how crucial a role this powerful addictive quality is for a survivor. All the ruminating I see, is in part due to transference of the trauma bond from the abuser onto another survivor who has gone through a similar experience. While the intentions and motives for most are genuine, real and even necessary initially, it can become a disabling issue for a survivor who needs to learn to stand again on their own two feet, alone. This does not nullify the need for emotional support. Not at all, but it does validate the need for boundaries and encouragement for survivors to learn to live free of crippling emotional dependence.

I’m feeling very grateful today for the experiences I’ve had with psychopaths. Yes, GRATEFUL. It has made me an incredibly strong woman. I’m learning to change my narrative about myself now and to tune out the noise that delivers messages that have me perceiving that unless I’m ‘stuck’ in the negative, somehow I’m not aware or doing PTSD ‘right’, not doing recovery right or that I lack empathy for survivors in pain. This is so far from the truth for me. I’ve learned through priceless examples in close friendships and in working with my therapist, about healthy boundaries and that their genuine care really means trusting me enough to learn to live on my own emotionally, learn how to solve my problems without the helplessness piece, learn to advocate for myself on every level in taking care of myself. They cared enough to step back, to draw a line and to help me learn to trust myself again. I could not learn to do that, if I continued to cling to a dependence upon someone else and in remaining stuck in my abusers darkness, or the outcomes that have affected my life.

Just as there are those stuck in really dark places, there are those who are clamoring to remove themselves from it.

My struggles with PTSD, with my disabilities as a result won’t go away, I don’t believe, but they can be greatly reduced in working towards acceptance of what I can’t do, embracing and being creative with what I can, and sharing space and time with those in my life who are encouraging and uplifting, helping me to move from continued soul destroying places.

My experience today with the sociopath, as well as understanding what has so bothered me in what I see on other pages, but couldn’t quite identify or articulate, now make perfect sense to me. I have indifference about the disordered. I see them as they are. I do not have control over what they do, how they do it, nor their condition, but I do have control over how much exposure I have to it, as well as what my reactions are to it. Awareness has brought its own special gifts to me. It can take awhile to get there, but in being open to new perspectives and experiences, I can learn to cope better.

There will always be abuse in the world. There will always be drama. The world is not a safe place and our society grows ever more narcissistic or apathetic to the pain caused by psychopaths in authority and power. We don’t need to be feeling sorry for ourselves about it, we don’t need to act as if we are not surprised that their actions cause harm and damage to others on every level. What we need is to wake up from our apathy and get damned angry enough to take our power back. This is not just a personal thing, created for us on an individual level, it is societal too. I can sit and feel sorry for myself or I can do whatever is possible to help to educate, support and uplift others.

Psychopaths in power have created a level of trauma bonding through their devious actions that nullify the majority in society, while glamorizing those who share their propensity for power, control and image. The same is true in personal relationships with them. But it really isn’t psychopathy that is destroying our society. It is our fear of them and our apathy that allows this to continue. It’s turning our heads, not in disbelief, but in a sort of learned helplessness. Perhaps in the near future, we will become angry enough at the betrayal, at our own apathy, and each in our own way, do something about it. Again, the same can be said for each of us on a personal level with this too. Change, in my opinion and experience, has happened because I got sick and tired of being sick and tired!

I will continue in my endeavors and commitment to supporting survivors and to educating others about psychopathy. I’ve reached a blissful, almost cathartic level of indifference to psychopaths in my personal life. Hopefully, each survivor works to derive meaning through continued hope and perseverance in recovery, through discovery of self, and a building of a new foundation built upon a renewed, sometimes even for the first time with lifetime chronic abuse, level of self esteem and personal empowerment.

My abusers are gone now. They are in the past. I will have to deal with the triggers that will surely come from a lifetime of it, but I don’t want to focus on that anymore.

I want very much to continue to work toward the shining light of hope and of peace.

Onward and upward.

After The Psychopath: Changing My Focus From Victim To Survivor

I love this photo my son took recently. Armed with a new camera, he has been taking some extraordinarily simple pictures of nature, experimenting, engaging in his talents, freedom in exploration and learning all about his camera and what it can do. When he downloaded his pics to my computer, this picture stood out to me. He then applied it as the background wallpaper and when enlarged, it was a neon sign to me: FOCUS…. ON BEING A SURVIVOR…

I found myself perusing through my newsfeed on my facebook page yesterday. There are several PTSD groups there and I read them. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s a healthy thing for me to do. I began to feel somewhat depressed, losing my focus, feeling sad and somewhat frustrated. Why are we focusing on how shitty things are? Does this help? Do I feel connected and better after having read that?

The truth is, I don’t. It reminds me of my own victimization, it reminds me of the outcomes of abuse, the outcome to which keeps me feeling a lot of self pity, victimized.

When I read my abuse history to my therapist last year, the one thing that struck me in her summary of what I had read to her, was that I had “tude” (attitude). I was a kid with attitude, despite the horrendous abuse that was inflicted upon me. I was a fighter, a SURVIVOR.

Now, if only I had lived under better circumstances in which my ‘tude’ would have helped me make better choices in life, instead of set me up to be a ‘victim’ to so many psychopaths. Instead, it helped me to survive it.

I can’t change the choices I’ve made in my life. I struggle everyday with self doubt, bouts of self pity, the habit of victimizing myself, rather than exhibiting self compassion and working with my PTSD, but overall, I ultimately stand up victorious because I refuse to allow myself to stay stuck for very long. Because I was raised in a tragic psychopathic environment, from my perspective, does not give me permission to ‘wallow’ in self pity. In my opinion, it pushes me to move beyond the scope of what developed into nothing less than an addictive pull to feel sorry for myself.

This does not imply that I’m ‘done’ dealing with my PTSD, quite the contrary: If I submit to what are my disabilities and limitations, I find peace in being able to work within my limits. I can accept that as a result of abuse, I have had to greatly modify my life and live differently, using new coping skills to achieve that peace. I’m in no way suggesting this is easy or that it happens overnight, but I think that ‘tude’ I have, being angry at the abuse, fuels my desire to stear clear of victimizing myself and allowing others to victimize me. As everyday passes, and with all of my experiences accumulated, survivor means more now.

There are some who believe my approach lacks compassion and empathy. That it’s narcissistic. I think the opposite is true: why would I want for someone else’s continued victimization? Why would I encourage self pity? I realize there are times where we will absolutely have moments of feeling sorry for ourselves,going through a long process of greiving for what was lost and for many of us, it’s a lifetime of stuff, but it’s about what we do with that self pity that makes the difference.There can be a measure of peace, based upon hope, embracing awareness and integrating acceptance and new coping skills to deal with our PTSD.

I can wallow for quite awhile, but eventually that gets old, and it’s getting old fast. This is where the ‘tude’ comes in and where I have to make a choice to do something about it, and in doing so, I ask a lot of questions: Why am I feeling sorry for myself? How can I get ‘unstuck’ from this? Is this old behavior, the addiction to being a victim? To being helpless? Am I sabotaging myself? How is this familiar to me? Old habits die hard. Just as with any other addiction, we have to work very hard, everyday, to overcome or to manage it.

Growing up in such an adverse environment lays the groundwork for habits that are unhealthy coping. If we don’t know that self pity and re-victimizing ourselves, in no matter what way, is unhealthy, how can we change it? Once we become aware of it, it is our responsibility to change it. Addiction is an incredible force, whether it’s to chemicals, relationships, or to self victimization. We CAN absolutely be, the Phoenix rising from the ashes.

I have a friend who has been showing me how this is done within the parameters of self acceptance. This means all of me. My illnesses, my PTSD, my attitudes and behaviors. Her example has been nothing less than stellar in educating me by example, how this process works in avoiding being stuck in victim mode for too long. Being a victim doesn’t mean going beyond what you are able to do, it means accepting what you are not able to do and coping with it. For example: I use to beat the CRAP out of myself before I was aware of my PTSD, and the things I could not do, as hard as I tried. I was a go getter and could never complete anything. Unaware of the self sabotage and the abusive voices of the past, pushing past illness and ignoring myself medically, engaging in risky behavior within the scope of relationships with psychopaths, feeling sorry for myself afterward, I was stuck in a perpetual cycle of self victimization.

When I became aware of this, a whole new approach had to be introduced. A whole new focus. The life I wanted to live, was not the life I would be living. There was a time of grieving, of mourning, of intense fear, and as long as I fought this fear, fought with myself about it, beat myself up, I was caught in a re-victimizing cycle and was unable to help myself because my expectations were too high. My focus on overcoming, was to have the life I wanted, delete the past. I found it doesn’t work that way. The harder I fought against, rather than embrace, the more self pity I felt, the harder it was to change.

My friend deals with illness too. She has taught me what it is to embrace it and work with it. Pacing, self compassion, keeps her healthier. A large part of this is self acceptance. She embraces all of it and I find that to be admirable. Her willingness to be direct with me, with much of the same ‘tude’ doesn’t feel at all narcissistic, it feels loving. I want someone to tell me the truth, because I have been lied too for so long. Her firmness, exudes compassion for me. She cares so deeply for me, that she doesn’t want to see me ‘slip into the abyss’.” Keep moving, Kelli! We will make it!” Is her mantra….

It is becoming mine too. I’m learning that to engage in self pity and re-victimizing, is to forfeit the human capacity for growth and change. It’s giving my abusers, who are now gone and out of my life the upper hand. Sure, there are times where my PTSD sideswipes me and I’m triggered, but with each trigger, I learn something new about myself. I have to incorporate a new coping skill, or implement another change, or purge more garbage in therapy. Learning to accept this has been the hardest part. There are things now that I cannot do anymore. They are real limitations, but I’m learning to embrace those too and in doing so, I’m in a much better position to advocate for myself. It doesn’t always flow, but most of the time it does. While my circumstances truly suck right now, there is a level of peace in learning to embrace it, trust the process, trust God for my life and all in it.

I’ve learned that life isn’t always justified or fair. Shit happens. It’s what we do with it, how we respond to it, that matters. I don’t have abuse in my life anymore. There are consequences to me emotionally and physically as an outcome of that abuse. That’s just the way it is. I accept this and embrace it, and in doing so, it has opened so many new doors to creativity and ideas that I would not otherwise have engaged in. If you’re a survivor, you’re creative!

Part of rejecting the addiction and habituation to being and acting like a victim, is motivated by anger. Anger can play a healthy role in my life too. It fuels my determination to move beyond all of the outcomes of the abuse. I know addiction well. From psychopaths, to alcohol, I’ve beat them, but it’s also a daily dose of anger at what was done to me and the choices I made through victimization that pushes me to move away from senseless and needless re-victimizing, catastrophizing. I despise these things in myself. I accept that they are there and am aware of them, but I simply will not allow it to keep me down.

I have a great deal of hope still left. There have been times when I felt I had none, but it wasn’t true. It still lives in me.

I believe it can live in others too.

So from now on, I’ll stay off those pages and keep looking forward.

I’ll keep my focus on being a survivor.

Onward and upward.

After The Psychopath/Narcissist: Being Single Is NOT “Abnormal”

“Wait to get into a relationship again until you know you can be truly comfortable alone and not have one desire for man, but yet to live your own life as if it may never be. . .”~ Me.

So lately, a few of my friends have embarked upon the path of new relationships. One of them is involved with what looks like a psychopath, but doesn’t see it yet. He screams it. So she is avoiding me because she knows I write about psychopaths and I think she doesn’t want to hear it from me, after having heard it once already after asking…the other two, I see red flags…..

Not necessarily with the men they’ve chosen, although it’s questionable, but in their behavior….they’re caught up in the fantasy of having a man to the exclusion of all else. This is a red flag. I do think that society perpetuates this notion, as well as being a cultural thing, that we are nothing without a man. I do think this is a deeply ingrained belief, lending to the overwhelming and intoxicating notion of  fantasy, pushing reality away, opening doors to all kinds of disorder and pain. It never ceases to amaze me how many women, even after the experience of an abusive psychopath, are so easily ‘swept off their feet’.

So I began to question some things while observing these new relationships: why cut off your family and friends for this person? Did life just suddenly stop now that you’re not ‘single’ anymore and it’s just you and he against the world? What vulnerabilities are there that are not recognized by you that make this new man someone with whom you want to spend every second of everyday, breathing in the other’s exhaled air?

When you get sucked into fantasy and ‘forget’ your life and the people around you, become neglectful of your friends and family, the things you love to do for the things he does. . .why? This is especially so for survivors. It’s how we got involved with our psychopaths/narcissists in the first place. This isn’t healthy behavior and has the potential for disaster.

Survivors that go tremendously slow are those I know who have experienced a great deal of growth and are willing to choose themselves first, should they be pushed. Making him wait is a fantastic idea and it shows a level of self respect for these survivors who are ‘testing the dating waters’, but for those who are swept up in fantasy, there is a lot more going on, some unfinished business that they are not wanting to attend too. . .but that will show itself when the honeymoon is over. I hate to see this happen, but sometimes it takes more than once to learn.

I think it’s very difficult for many survivors to be totally comfortable alone. I think being caught up in fantasy and excluding what was your life prior to this new man, cuts off your awareness to a degree. Women do not want to hear this and become very, very defensive when it’s all about her new relationship. It drives her apart from the very support systems she needed while single. It is so important to keep your friendships active and alive, breathing space for yourself and time spent with your family, your children in particular and not every single waking second with this person. Doing so is a vulnerability in itself that says you are willing to become emotionally dependent upon this potential partner. . and very quickly. Toxic men and women know this and encourage it through fantasy.

When will we reach a point where we don’t need a man to ‘complete’ us? If you cannot be comfortable long enough in  your own presence, to grow and learn and to become aware at all times of your vulnerabilities, to the point where having a relationship is no longer a priority, you’re going to get into trouble later on.

But in observing, I’ve learned something about myself too. . .

I realize just how much I love being single. 

It has brought more to my life than any man ever could. I spent 46 years of my life within the realms of abuse. I love that I don’t feel ‘pressured’ to make a man happy. With sex, with time, with cooking for….sacrificing my needs for his. I love that I sleep in my huge bed alone…well, kinda, as I have my dog, but…it’s peaceful. I love most that I understand that there isn’t a little voice in the back of my mind saying, ‘will I ever have another relationship again?” or “Gee, I’d sure like to share my life with a man!”..as if I’m not somehow enough for me, that somehow this is suppose to, in some way, ‘complete’ my life. I love that when I do talk with men, I don’t feel this ‘pressure’ going on inside my mind about ‘what if’ and ‘am I saying/doing the right thing?’ I can just be me, I realized that me is enough.

It is so freeing to feel this way. Some might think I’m bitter towards men because I don’t want a relationship. There are times where I have felt a subtle message that I’m somehow not ‘normal’ for choosing not to have a relationship and that, perhaps in contemplation, I may never want another relationship again in my life. When did it become a ‘bad’ thing to be comfortable with myself enough to say it, feel it? I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “Never say never” or “oh you will want/have a relationship someday!” as if I’m ‘missing out’ on something others have that I don’t. In reality, I just look at them quizzically and shake my head…I often wonder if that isn’t a projection sometimes because it is they that either need or want a relationship or a man, or that this is somehow a priority over everything else. It isn’t for me. And yes, I’m serious!

With all of its issues, and all of its trials, life is so so so much better doing it alone. I can count on me. It dawned on me today that it wouldn’t be true to say that I don’t have anyone that cares for me or loves me, when I’m triggered or in a really difficult place of survival…I do. I have loving friends, some of whom are men, and I have me. I have my God and my dog. I have my kids and grand kids. Life is full enough with that.

I love that my life is not filled with relationship issues or complications. I love that I  don’t feel pressured to date and I love that when I’ve been asked out, I can stand my ground if it feels uncomfortable, mindful of red flags, mindful of my own vulnerabilities and know that the world won’t end if I say, “um, no”. Too many people jump into bed and into relationships (in that order), and then when the honeymoon is over, into misery. I believe sex is so overrated and while I’m not necessarily shocked, I do find it disturbing how quickly women will have sex with a man so soon into dating. Those pressures are no longer mine and if it were ever to be a situation where I had to choose between myself and a man who was coercive, manipulative or ‘pushing’ for sex, I could so walk away, choosing me and my self respect. If he wants me, he will wait. The great thing about feeling this way is that it gives me control over my own peace, my own life, my own body, my own time and my own needs. It’s no longer compulsive, desperate, nor does it arise from dependence  or a feeling that I have to or else.

It’s interesting to me that people believe that alone = lonely. For me, this is so far from the truth. I prize my alone time and I am far from lonely. I spent much more time being ‘lonely’ in my marriage and my last relationship, than I ever have being single. I’m just learning to embrace my spirituality now and through growth, understanding that there is a divine being whose grace toward me is measured in my ability to stand alone in this world with courage and with determination to build a relationship with with that being, uninterrupted by drama, distraction and pain. It’s an open door to learning more about myself and achieving a level of mindfulness that I have never experienced before and could not while in a relationship and tied into someone else.

There are pros and cons to being ‘coupled’ up with someone, but no matter what, once the ‘honeymoon’ phase is over, reality sets in and accommodations and changes need to be made that are reflective of the partner’s personality, habits and  life style. It’s when we see ‘the real deal’, and sometimes that isn’t so pleasant as those of us survivors understand, that the relationship is tested. Even when the relationship is a healthy one, it does not thrive on fantasy, but on a reality in which two people come together as a whole and not half. They add to one another, not take away. Still, there are issues involved and I’m happy to be without them.

If you can’t create your own peace, or learn to live a long time alone, working through your stuff, how can you create that with someone else if you are not whole? They become half of you, not someone who adds to your life, but an energy depleting source, while watching the new life you’ve built, crumble.

If you have to ‘sell out’ those around you, or change your life drastically for someone else, getting caught up in fantasy, you have work yet to do and unfortunately, it will take more heartache to learn.

The most significant thing in all of this for me is that the emotional dependence that I had is gone and with that, I feel that the chains of abuse are being severed. On so many levels, I’m grateful to be experiencing this now, with the freedom to do so. I am so very glad I got out when I did.

Being single is not for the faint of heart. It brings with it growth and wisdom that can’t be found in going one relationship to the next. I see how important this is and remember feeling upset when even the suggestion of alone time was mentioned. . .how things have changed! It turns out that I have utilized my single status as a tool to challenge myself on every level that was dysfunctional in all of my relationships. I don’t recognize that needy, clingy, emotionally dependent person I was over two years ago now.

I think this is what it means to be truly free.

Onward and upward.