Precious Pearl of Purity – The Opposite Of Slime
Purity is not the same as innocence. You were born innocent. You did not know evil: you had no malice within and could not conceive of the idea of someone being malicious to you, let alone knew that people are able to mask their malice so well. When evil has touched you, harmed you and you have learned the tactics of evil, you are not innocent anymore. You know evil now. You lived with it. You loved it. You slept with it. You have become tainted, not by your own actions, but by the psychopath. While you cannot retrieve your innocence, you can find purity.
You have realized that you were involved with a highly malignant disordered individual: a narcissist, a psychopath or a borderliner. You learned about these disorders. You may even be well on the way to healing from it. But you feel ashamed about some instances that happened, too ashamed to tell it to someone, because, “Who would put up with that?” You probably feel shame for having been involved with them. Or you feel ashamed every time you notice someone toxic trying to talk to you. You might be thinking that you attract these people like flies and wonder what is wrong with you. Or you may simply wonder ‘How will I be able to feel clean, pure, myself again?’ So, let us tackle that mountain pile of slime. Let us see how we can recover what is pure and avoid getting tainted again. Because the steps and ideas behind the Pearl of Purity are so comprehensive it is impossible to cover it all in one article. This article is only the first in a Pearl of Purity series about helping you to purge yourself from slime and help you to become a repellent to it.
WHAT IS SLIME?
Extensive contact with a psychopath leads to multi-faceted destruction: financial, physical, emotional, mental that takes minimally a year, but usually more, to recover from. But even short contact of but an hour has at least one hallmark impact on normal empathic people: you end up feeling slimed! Slime feels like shame. Slime is not yours, but another one’s that you picked up and think to be your own fault. Basically, slime means that you feel responsible and ashamed for something the psychopath did, either through association or because they blame you. If you were intimately involved with a psychopath, you’ll feel like drowning in a pile of slime, self-blame and shame. Slime comes from those we meet personally, as well as social and religious doctrine. Slime prevents us from seeing reality, from making the right decisions and to heal. It perverts and wounds our soul, our being, our health.
A typical slime incident that is very recognizable for women is when, for example, they wear a summer dress on a hot summer evening that shows some cleavage. You go out with friends to cool off at a terrace. When it is your turn to order the drinks inside, the bartender explicitly gapes and talks at your breasts. You end up feeling embarrassed and regret wearing that dress. Well, this is a deliberate act by that bartender, because he knows very well that you will notice where his eyes rest all the time. Most men indeed see the cleavage, but will talk to you as if you are wearing a turtle neck. They would feel embarrassed if they were caught gaping at your breasts. And they have no wish to embarrass you either. In other words, the bartender behaves in a shameless manner and intends to push all the shame your way. If you were to remark on it to the bartender, he might even go as far as say to you that he’s entitled to gape if you wear such a summer dress.
Other examples would be: The new partner of your best friend makes sexually tinted compliments to you or acts in another improper manner. It may be a colleague who says to others (including your boss) that he or she cannot find certain items on their desk after they were on sick leave, while they know you had to perform some tasks at their desk. It might be pupils who wrote a derogatory remark about you on a class desk. Perhaps your partner comments on your clothing, make-up, body, or hygiene. You take a date to an important business dinner who makes inappropriate, crass jokes to the rest of the company. You end up feeling embarrassed and regret inviting him along. All these are attempts at making you question yourself. What you forget to see is that these people acted in a way they should not at all. Their insolent behaviour is not in proportion to whatever you might have mistakenly done, if you even made a mistake at all. They are sliming you and other people.
Particularly healthy, empathic people who have a natural feeling of personal responsibility are the easiest to slime. They will automatically question their own actions before they question the actions of others. Even if an empathic person concludes they were not responsible, or that the behaviour was disproportionate in relation to the mistake, the empath will still feel dirty. Just the act of checking with yourself, about what you might have done wrong, already gives slime the opportunity to attach to you. And the more you believe you are ultimately responsible for how other people behave as well as what happens to you in your life uninvited, the more chance the slime has to bury itself deeper and deeper and deeper…
PRECIOUS PEARL OF PURITY
Pearls are a natural, but peculiar phenomenon: they are created and grown by a living being, inside that living being, a mollusk. When a mollusk is attacked by a threatening parasite inside its soft tissue or a predator from the outside on the mantle, it creates a pearl sack around the parasite or alien object to seal it off. This pearl sack is pure calcite and does not look like a pearl much yet. But in time the mantle of the mollusk deposits layers of a mixture of aragonite (and calcite) with organic horn-like conchiolin. [1][2] Together they combine into mother-of-pearl (nacre), which appears iridescent because the building blocks are close to the wavelength of visible light and interfere with it, revealing the beauty of light, playing with it. It is a strong material and resilient – tough, almost as strong as silicon. Over time the pearl sack grows and becomes a pearl: rare, precious, highly valuable, beautiful, natural, and resilient.
The pearl is a metaphor to all of these perceptions and has always been a symbol of purity, typically worn by brides since the first civilizations. But purity is not necessarily virginal. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus refers to the Kingdom of Heaven as a ‘pearl of great price’.[3] The twelve gates of the New Jerusalem are called the ‘Pearly Gates'[4]. And of course our expression of ‘pearls before swines’ comes from scripture as well [5]. There is the Hymn of The Pearl, a passage in the apocryphal and gnostic Acts of Thomas. It tells the tale of a boy, ‘The Son of the King of Kings’, who has to retrieve a pearl from a serpent in Egypt. But when he arrives in Egypt he forgets his origin and his mission. Only through a letter from the King of Kings does he remember again and retrieves the pearl. It is commonly interpreted as a Gnostic view of the human condition: that we forget our origin, bedazzled by the world of matter. [6] The metaphor of the Pearl can be found in other religious traditions as well, such as Hinduism. In mythology pearls are also often thought of as tears, whether from mermaids or Adam and Eve or the gods themselves. [7] It is thus a symbol of how a mourning process can produce a most cherished gem. So, the actual natural formation process as well as its symbol fit as a name to identify not only a healing process, but also protection as well as replacing the lost innocence with something even more mysterious and resilient than that – purity.
Before the psychopath you were innocent of malice. Then you were slimed. The opposite of slime is not being perfect or innocent, but purity. It is purity that will replace your former innocence. Purity is rare and precious and is born out of our tears of the damage done to us and prevents slime from infecting us again, which is why I use the pearl as metaphor.
EMOTIONAL CONTAMINATION
Before I can explain how we begin to create this pearl, how we transform our former innocence into purity via the tearful process of confronting the slime and shame, I need to explain how such a contamination is possible. When we understand how we could be emotionally contaminated, it is far easier to recognize slime for what it is – not our own shame – and to discover our purity.
Parasites, and that is what psychopaths ultimately are, are experts in getting into our system unseen and – preferably for them- undetected for a long while to wreak havoc. They prefer all the time in the world to live on us and perhaps infect others with it. The worst and most successful parasites are chameleons that deceive our body into thinking they are part of us, so that our immunity system does not start attacking them or cannot adapt fast enough to the adapted parasite. That is how a psychopath’s slime works. It enters our emotional and mental system and we think it is ours. We do not recognize it to be the psychopath’s. So, we end up carrying it around with us, possibly for years, without ever realizing we are under attack.
emotional contagion pearl of protection
Aside from empathy there is a term called emotional-contagion. The difference between the two is that at least with empathy you still are aware that you imagine what someone else must be feeling. You clearly feel they are not your own feelings, but those of somebody else[9]. With emotional contagion you end up feeling a certain way as if the source is yourself, even though those emotions were transferred by someone else.
Empathy is the ability to recognize the emotional state of somebody else than ourselves. Our empathy can be fooled though. We can walk more than a mile in someone’s shoes purely on a hypothetical case, and imagine for example how someone can become a Jihad terrorist[8]. Actors or animation figures display emotion on screen in a story and we end up feeling what we believe the character feels. Dolphins are generally mistaken to be happy creatures because of the curving mouth, which reminds us of a smile. Psychopaths fake emotions by making the right facial expressions. So we project our own hypothetical emotions onto the psychopaths if they only display the right facial expressions and body postures.
I once experienced emotional contagion in an extreme way with the anger emotion, and it illustrates how different it is from empathy. One night, over a decade ago, I had a late night appointment with the dentist. She had me locally sedated with the maximum amount of eight shots and had been working on my wisdom tooth, when the doorbell rang. She was surprised, because I was the last one with an appointment. A young man entered the office. He had a peculiar, menacing attitude. The dentist was on alert as was I. Instinctively, I looked apprehensively at my purse and coat hanging behind him. I suspect this man had not counted on there being a patient, but that my dentist would be by herself. He ended up making an appointment, but whatever his real original intentions were, I doubt they were good ones. He left shortly after and my dentist finished her job on me. While my dentist tried to hide it, she was clearly shaken.
When I drove home I decided to get some take away instead of cook myself, because it would be easier to chew. Right before I entered the shop though I became aware I was filled with an extreme mean rage for no reason at all. I went inside and I felt like smashing my fist in the face of anybody who looked at me. It was a rage that wanted to destroy and cause pain. Several strong men actually stepped away from me with apprehension and quickly averted their eyes. I knew intellectually this could not possibly have come from myself, yet it felt as if it was. I thought astonished, “This is how a hooligan must feel.” When I came home, the anger was still raging inside, and I eventually got rid of it by punching my mattress for several minutes. I knew it could not truly come from myself, because this type of malicious rage was alien to me. I do not want to hurt anybody or anything. In fact, it felt as if a hooligan had possessed my whole emotional system against my will. I have no other explanation for that rage than that it somehow jumped from the stranger to me while I lay there vulnerable and sedated at the dentist. My normal emotional barriers were down and my nerve system was almost completely knocked out. That is an extreme example of emotional contagion where I ended up taking over an emotion that was not my own. It was nothing like empathy at all.
Thus, it is entirely possible to get infected by the shame that should belong to someone else in a manner that you believe it to be your own shame. And yet, just as I was able to realize this malicious rage could in no way have come from myself and it must have been the stranger’s at the dentist, we can at some point realize that a psychopath attempts to infect us with their slime.
THE CREATION OF THE PEARL OF PURITY – RECOGNIZING SLIME IN YOUR SYSTEM THROUGH THE WISDOM OF RIGHT VIEW AND RIGHT INTENT
You are here, reading on psychopathy and how to recover from it. That means you have uncovered some of the parasitic slime and you recognized it not to be yours and are trying to isolate it from the rest of your system. Something so disproportionally ugly happened, that you completely recognized, for the first time, it was not something you deserved, no matter what flaws you thought you had. The day you discovered something was seriously wrong with the psychopath and that they were malicious, was the day you discovered you were not to blame. On that same day you created a pearl sack around the slime of the event. It forms the core of your purity, and while every other layer of you may have gotten slimed, that core repels it instantly. It is the purity within you that was always there and that the psychopath could never taint. And you already instinctively know that the key to detect slime, in order to grow your purity, lies in having a right view – recognizing you are not responsible of how others behave. It is their responsibility.
During the devaluation, I often blamed myself: I was not ‘understanding’ enough, not ‘doing’ enough, not expanding my loan to get a ticket to Nicaragua, and plenty more of that. But the discard itself changed me completely. As is typical for a psychopath he attempted to destroy me in one giant emotional blow: over Facebook with a two line message that ‘he was sorry but he had met somebody else’ and dissolving our relationship status and instantly requesting relationship status with another. Witnessing it live, I felt as if I was being dropped on the set of some shallow dramarama-teen movie. I could have accepted that we grew apart, that he had fallen in love with another woman, even. It happens. But I could not accept that a man of 28 would end the relationship in such a childish, mean, and callous manner. The moment he pulled off his mask, was the moment I recognized the parasitic slime inside of me and I instantly insulated it in a pearl sack. Nothing could convince me that I ever deserved this. I would not have accepted such an ugly discard if I had been a teen even. What had been an attempt of final destruction, became not only my salvation, but my victory of the soul and my first true steps on the path of purity.
Once you detect slime for what it is, you need to search out more of the slime infection in your system: the psychopath’s, those of others, and ultimately those by society and repeated meme-beliefs that infected you enough to fall prey for the psychopath. The latter are the hardest to purify yourself from, because you may have been infected with it since you were but a little child. These infections have become so much part of yourself that it is difficult to recognize them as slime at all.
Let us first tackle the largest and more pressing infection of slime: the psychopath’s. You will inevitably start to reassess past incident after incident for who was actually responsible and how much you blamed yourself mistakenly. It is not a pleasant journey: triggers, feeling all of the damage and hurt of trauma, anger, and shame. But even though painful, it will also heal you. With each revisiting you will be able to see that you were not responsible nor to blame for the event, or that the psychopath’s behaviour was wildly disproportionate. Every incident that left slime on an emotional, physical or mental level is tackled during this process and isolated in the growing pearl sack. It may take several months to perhaps a year or even more to go through the whole of your system and pick the slime and isolate it, but once you have gathered it all, you arrive at a higher stage of tackling slime.
THE TEARS COVERING THE PEARL OF PURITY WITH MOTHER OF PEARL – THE SHAME OF BEING A VICTIM
Once you see all that slime of the psychopath gathered in the pearl sack, and therefore recognize with a clear view you never were responsible for any of these incidents, you will probably be overcome with shock and amazement that you never recognized it earlier on. You start to feel very much ashamed of how you allowed someone to do this to you for so long, that so much parasitic damage went unnoticed.
These feelings of shame regarding your ‘naivety’ and ‘allowing yourself to be abused’ will be the first social slime you will encounter. Often enough you will hear social judgment on victims for staying with someone so obviously wrong: you must have been in willful denial, you gave them chance after chance despite all the evidence, you ignored your gut feelings, you were fool enough to be fooled. We fear that judgment after realizing how thoroughly we were abused.
Well, I would say this black and white persecution of self is not true. You were not naive. You did see it when the psychopath behaved wrong to you and others, you just did not recognize the malice behind it yet. I am pretty sure that you communicated with them that it was wrong. I am sure you had confrontations to get the truth out of them as well as arguments to make them understand what they were doing was wrong. I know I did not allow any of it. I may not have tried to stop the psychopath in the most efficient way, but I did act in an effort to stop the abuse to others and myself. Of course these were not actions that solved, let alone stopped the abuse, but you did not just roll over and say ‘abuse me’. You displayed damage control behaviour with the effort to stop and gain control over the abuse and chaos. The fact that most of the actions we took were fruitless, does not warrant us to say we did not nothing.
The problem was that most of the abuse was covert or disguised. And when the abuse was more overt, you were gaslighted, or pity played for your sympathy to give them another chance. A psychopath will make sure that you keep running with tunnel survival vision after each separate incident. They will do all in their power to prevent you from ‘seeing the forest for the trees’ by gaslighting and trauma-bonding you. So, when you blame yourself for having been a victim to a psychopath’s mask, it is as if you are blaming a woman being raped because she wears a mini-skirt. You are not to blame for what the psychopath did to you. You neither invited nor expected him to do it. You were simply innocent of malice, and there is nothing shameful about it. In fact, it is completely normal! You could not have been more emotionally and mentally normal than being innocent of malice.
Remember the first time you realized that no flaw or mistake of yours deserved that particular ugly incident that woke you up to the fact that this person was a psychopath? Remember how you understood that you did not deserve any of the incidents of the past with this person? If you were not responsible for the incidents, then why should you hold only yourself responsible for the whole bag of them? Just let go of that bag!
Now, I am not saying you or I did not make mistakes. We did. I am not saying we are blameless of filling in the gaps. We did empathically project fictional emotions within the psychopath despite the evidence in their actions that they have none or shallow ones. We told ourselves lies. We sometimes used controlling behaviour in a situation where all control was taken away from us. But nothing of what the psychopath did was ever in proportion to those mistakes. To conclude that we deserved what we got and that we allowed them to abuse us is not a realistic view. Take responsibility of your mistakes, learn from them, but do not blame yourself for the bag of slime. When you realize this, then you will coat the pearl sack with its first layer of self-forgiving mother-of-pearl. And that pearl starts to look like a beautiful tear from the gods.
CONCLUSION
The psychopath tainted our innocence with slime. Purifying it cannot us make us innocent again, but creates something new and beautiful inside us: a Precious Pearl of Purity that isolates and protects us from slime. In time it will grow with coated layer after layer. The foundation of purity lies in the ability to correctly allocate personal responsibility, the right view. You need to be able to see responsibilities in a proper perspective before you can even start to speak and act in a manner that both protects you as well as others. When you see responsibilities correctly you are well on your way to reflect an exposing iridescent light that reveals the truth about people without you needing to even make an effort for it. And finally by recognizing who was truly responsible for what, you take the first step to looking in the mirror and recognize that you are in fact a Pearl, someone beautiful, pure, precious, and rare.
Sources:
[1] http://science.yourdictionary.com/articles/how-do-oysters-make-pearls.html
[2] http://marinelife.about.com/od/invertebrates/f/How-Do-Pearls-Form.htm
[3] The bible, New Testament, Matthew 13: 45–46
[4] The bible, New Testament, Revelation 21:21
[5] The bible, New Testament, Matthew 7:6
[6] http://www.gnosis.org/library/hymnpearl.htm
[7] http://www.pearl-guide.com/pearls-in-myth.shtml
[8] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html
[9] http://www.danielsonkin.com/articles/anger_attachment.html
Further recommended reading:
1. https://180rule.com/180-Lexicon/slime/
2. https://180rule.com/apocalypse-of-the-psychopath/
3. https://180rule.com/the-knowledge-of-good-and-evil-what-you-learn-from-an-encounter-with-a-psychopath/
Sky, the story of the old lady and the rear ending of the car….well SHE was apparently willing to be involved in an ILLEGAL SCHEME and I would bet dollars to donuts that she gave him part of the money you had given her.
You know, it is difficult to cheat an “honest” person in that case. There are people who will go along with such a scam of an “insurance” company…didn’t he have LIABILITY ON HIS TRUCK? If not, he was driving illegally in most states that REQUIRE you to have at least a minimal liability policy.
And of course, the ULTIMATE victim is YOU.
Oxy,
There’s much more to the story:
months earlier, the spath began to drop hints. He said that he was inventing a bird feeder for caged birds. It would solve the problem of seed shells mixing with the seeds and wasted seeds not getting eaten. It would have a fan that lifted the lighter husks out of the way, while the heavier seeds dropped down so that the birds could continue to feed. He was working on a design in his CAD program.
I thought that was interesting.
Much later, when he hit the woman’s car, he mentioned that she lived alone, in a house next to her mother’s house, with only a bird as a pet…. interesting. When I got the car, there was bird seed all over the back seat because she takes her bird with her to lots of places. I also found her library card in the back seat.
The mother, is/was in her eighties and she is the mayor of the little town in which they live. Being mayor is only a part time job.
All of this happened the year before the final con, so I never suspected anything then. All of those puzzle pieces emerged from the WTF? bucket more than a year later and I put it together.
He really may not have gotten any money from her. I paid the auto auction company a small amount for the car and spath was legally obligated to pay the rest to the insurance company. Of course, I had to pay it. And no, spath never does anything legally, so he doesn’t carry auto insurance. He does better than that, he just gets to know all the cops in the area, so they never give him tickets because he’s their “friend”.
The spath’s goal in life is to make other people cross boundaries, commit crimes and indulge in immoral behavior. Whatever else he does, it is in service toward that goal. So gaining money is only a side benefit and he doesn’t really care that much.
By taking money from me and leaving me broke he was hoping to drive me to commit suicide. That would be the ultimate sin for me and he spared no effort toward driving me there. For spath, it’s not really about the money.
Today, in the US, we are celebrating “Thanksgiving.” I wanted to offer my most sincere gratitude for where I am, today, and even where I was before I got here.
For nearly my entire life, I did not ever feel deserving or worthy of celebration – or, even, acknowledgment as a human being. Today is the first holiday in years that I actually have a sense of being deserving and worthy of celebrating, ANYthing.
My point is to express and wish my most sincere and brightest blessings to anyone who is suffering or grieving. Recovery and healing are possible.
Truthy, happy Thanksgiving to you!
Your post lifted my mood, it makes me glad to know that you feel worthy of celebrating. Thank you.
Happy Thanksgiving from the UK! I didn’t know much about this special day before but it seems we could learn a lot from you guys in the US. Giving thanks for what we have and showing gratitude are seriously in decline in my country. Everyone wants more, more, more! It’s so awful that the western world especially, measure success by gain and materialism.
My experience has changed me. I finally paid off my debts that I ran up with Spath; I am grateful to my mum who gave me the rest of the money to settle it. She passed away in October so your words are ringing true for me particularly, Truthy. Life is sometimes very hard but there is light after dark and happiness after sorrow. I’m raising a virtual glass to Thanksgiving. I have so much to be thankful for. 🙂
Strongawoman & Sky, it’s an interesting concept to express gratitude and spend time with family or friends in a meaningful way, and the very next day, run out in the wee hours of the morning to stand in line, bum-rush a retail establishment, and fist-fight over bargains on “Black Friday.” ROTFLMAO!!!
But, in all sincerity, this holiday was literally the first one in many years (if ever) that I actually FELT “deserving” of celebrating. Typically, past holidays passed with a deep sense of regret and sadness. The past 5 years were all spent with a sense of desperation, as well. In retrospect, this response was generated by other people with the full expectation that I wouldn’t allow myself to enjoy any aspect of any holiday or special event. From birthdays, to college graduation, to holidays, they were all shot down and minimized. Never, again. I’m building my own traditions and my gratitude, one step at a time. And, it feels “good,” at long last.
Strict aside, Bob actually wanted participate in the “Black Friday” mayhem, as a lark, and we simply do not have a penny to spend on such a folly. BUT……he was so intrigued by this event taking place the day after Thanksgiving, that he watched YouTube videos of this year’s events and just couldn’t process what had been captured. He declared that he never wanted to be a part of this sordid event, ever.
For those of us who have survived and emerged from “bad” relationships, regardless of whom was involved, we have every reason to experience gratitude. Our experiences have been horrid and wretched, to be sure – those experiences have shattered our beliefs in humanity, the Law, and in ourselves. But, we have the opportunity to reconstruct our beliefs and our lives to reflect the Truth without bitterness or hatred. We have this opportunity to rise above what “THEY” are, and be what WE are – empathetic without extremes, and truthful without cruelty. This, above everything else, is what I am grateful for. And, it is my wish that everyone who is surviving their experiences to emerge a stronger, wiser human being. 🙂
Truthy,
Black Friday can be considered a holiday of it’s own. Economic transactions, according to Girard’s theories, were developed as part of the mechanism that keeps envy (mimetic desire) in check. Whether it’s the potlatch gift-giving celebrations of the North American tribes or the trading at your local Walmart, the idea is that if everyone has a chance to own things, they will envy their neighbors less and that’s what keeps violence down. That is why people trade, buy and sell.
But you know how it is, with every ritual, there has to be a sacrificial victim(s). On the previous Thursday, the turkey gets axed and on Friday the frenzied crowd eventually polarizes it’s violence. Then the next month is a huge celebration of the economic transaction, which somehow, never actually seems to dispel envy at all.
Truthy and Sky, I agree with you both about “Black Friday” and the Christmas selling that starts in September now. This is really the first time in 10 years that I have really felt “the Christmas spirit” and started in the summer making jams and jellies to give to friends…I bought cheap cute baskets in the flea markets for a couple of bucks each, took scrap christmas themed materials I got cheap at the auction, decorated the baskets and the jars, packed baskets full of jams and jellies…and this past weekend at the Thanksgiving camp out for my living history group, I distributed some to people that I wouldn’t see until after Christmas, and passed out individual jars of jelly and jams to just about everyone at the event….didn’t cost much and everyone was grateful and enjoyed my special recipes…
The three things my therapist told me that we need for being happy and well balanced are
1. GRATITUDE
2. ALTRUISM
3. ACCEPTANCE
And I totally believe that without gratitude life is not much…without altruism, helping others, giving of ourselves, it isn’t much either, and of course acceptance of what IS versus being upset about what is NOT, makes life wonderful again.
Many of us don’t have the money to rush out and buy buy BUY “stuff” but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate and be grateful and happy. If you look at the news, you will see that some of the most miserable and unhappy people are FILTHY RICH with huge multi-million dollar homes and all the things that money can buy, but they are miserable..their spouses cheat on them, or they cheat on the spouses, fight and hit each other, and abuse the kids…you know, money can NOT buy happiness or contentment.
OxD, I was speaking to my counselor about grasping on to any personal progress with a “death grip” – that was the term that I used in describing my feelings. She said that she wanted to offer me an option of gratitude, rather than holding on to progress like it was an overturned life raft. WHAT a light bulb THAT was, I have to say.
After my mother became sober, I spent a lot of time in support group meetings – Alateen, Alanon, and some open AA meetings. There was this pervasive discussion of “attitude of gratitude” that I heard, saw, and believed that I understood, but have learned that I never really understood the concept of “gratitude,” especially when it felt that my life had crumbled.
Feeling grateful is more of a blessing than anything that I can describe. Even feeling grateful for the ugly lessons that I’ve learned is a blessing. If I’m upright and breathing, it’s something to be grateful for, seriously.
Altruism is very easy to present for the wealthy – setting up foundations or 501c organizations to “help the poor” seems so unselfish, doesn’t it? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was formed by bazillionaires who needed a tax write-off – they’re not down in the trenches actually feeding the homeless or holding the hand of a domestic violence victim. Those of us who KNOW trauma and are living in the aftermaths can offer so much more than money to those who are desperate, frightened, and despondent. We can offer empathy, sympathy, and understanding, in person and face-to-face.
Acceptance? For me, it was understanding and putting into practice the concept that the facts and truths cannot be renegotiated, bartered, or bargained into facts and truths that were more pleasant or less painful. I am not under any moral, legal, or ethical obligation to “LIKE” the facts and truths, but I can accept them as a matter of recovering and healing myself – FOR myself.
Nope………money pays the bills and can make Life a little easier. But, money does not buy happiness, under any circumstances. At this point, I don’t feel that I would trade my independent poverty for all of the tea in China. There is always a price to pay – tolerance of abuse, neglect, adultery, etc. is NOT worth money. As a strict aside, I worked with someone at the studio that was a legitimate multi-millionaire. He and his wife had probably married for appearances and adopted 2 daughters. They were involved in many, many “altruistic” endeavors, but they were not as “perfect” as they appeared to be. On occasion, the man would drop his mask and verbally abuse his wife in the studio, and the wife is (IMHO) a closet alcoholic. Both daughters were sent away to boarding schools for their entire lives, and they are as dysfunctional as anyone I’ve ever seen.
So……..yeah. It was a “good” holiday and I’m looking forward to many, many more “good” times, ahead.
Truthy, that above post is very very VERY good. You pretty well summed up what I was trying to say about gratitude, altruism, and acceptance. Without those three things I don’t think we can really heal. They must be MAINTAINED though by introspection and changes in our attitude. we can’t change others, but we CAN change ourselves. You get my biggest ATTA GIRL Truthy!!! WAAAY TO GO!!!!
Truthy and Oxy,
For many years, my family members used to call me, “Skylar, what do I get ______, for Christmas? I don’t know what she (or he) likes! What are you getting them?” They are so uninterested in each other’s lives that they don’t even know each other. When they give presents, they give things that THEY like. I would get jewelry (which I don’t wear), or hats (which I don’t wear), or candles, or fancy kitchen items and useless gadgets. Finally I told everyone to give me underwear because at least I’ll wear it. You should’ve seen my spath brother-in-law’s face when I opened my Christmas presents that year! He got to see my new underwear. 😛
I like making the gifts I give. A handmade gift means that you’ve given a lot of thought to the person receiving it. Making something with your hands also expresses the identity of the giver better than any store bought item. So the handmade gift creates a bond between the two people. Or so I thought…it doesn’t work that way with spaths.
One year my spath BIL and spath sister went on a vacation in the caribbean, on board a schooner type sailboat. They asked to borrow my video camera.
When they gave it back, they left the tape inside, as though they’d forgotten it. In retrospect, I now understand that they wanted me to see it and be envious. But I didn’t see it for years because I never used that camera after that, I got a new one.
So years later, I found it the week before xmas and I thought it would make an awesome gift to edit it into a really nice movie with music. I spent a week putting it together. My spath watched me do this.
Even though the video was shaky and amateurish, I managed to make it into a nice movie. But what the spaths couldn’t understand was why I was not envious of the vacation. Envy was supposed to turn me bitter. I was supposed to be driven to suicide by comparing my horrible life with the spath to my spath’s sister’s life of endless vacations. That was one of the reasons spath sent the trojan horse to marry my sister. It NEVER occurred to them that I would be HAPPY for my sister. Spaths just don’t think that way.
Just like I thought everyone else was like me, the spaths also thought that I would be like them. Instead, not only was I happy for her, I also enjoyed the work of editing video and music.
Yes, Sky, one of the things we must learn is that THEY DO NOT THINK LIKE WE DO, their MOTIVES ARE NOT THE SAME…and we can’t truly understand them because their entire internal “culture” is different than for someone with empathy. LOL
OxD, I recently had another quasi-meltdown experience when I received a call from a service provider that wanted to be paid. Without going into great detail, I contacted the insurance provider to find out why the service provider hadn’t been paid. Well, because the exspath was the holder of the policy, checks were sent to him with detailed explanations of whom was to be paid and when the services were provided. Of course, the idiot deposited the checks into his account and had himself a very Merry Christmas – most likely buying additional gimp suits for himself. LMAO!!!
But, here’s the kicker that caused me to break out of my funk. His attorney replied that his “client” had “advised” him that he had, indeed, cashed the checks, but that his client had been “holding” the funds in his checking account because he didn’t know whom he had to pay. I laughed so hard that I nearly lost my bladder. Of course, his attorney is going to be paid for forwarding the lame excuse, but I imagine that the attorney HAD to feel like strangling his “client.” How could a nearly-40 year old man NOT know whom to pay when all of the information was included WITH the checks?!?! ROTFLMAO
So, the whole point of this post is that the disordered most certainly do NOT think like “we” do, and they absolutely have intent and motive behind everything that they do.
What an idiot the exspath is, and I cannot imagine being nearly 40 years old and making up such a childish excuse as he did. If he really believes his own lies, then what a pitiful THING he truly is.
That’s the thing, Truthy, is that because we think ONE WAY And they think ANOTHER WAY because we have a conscience we ASSUME they do too…and they assume we are as amoral as they are so “game on”
I saw this with Patrick, once when michael and I went to visit him, I went to the rest room in the visiting room at the prison and Patrick told Michael “I know you,, you are JUST LIKE ME” and was trying to get Michael to control me for him, to pull my strings until Patrick got out. LOL In fact, Michael is NOTHING like Patrick and patrick just does not see it because he thinks everyone else thinks like him.
Part of our own healing process is to realize and ACCEPT that psychopaths do NOT think like we do…and if we assume that all psychopath have some sort of conscience they we make ourselves vulnerable to their abuse.
As children we are taught MYTHS about “there’s good in everyone” BS! “It takes two to fight” BS! “There are two (valid) sides to every story” BS!!! and so on,, these are WRONG and we must rid ourselves of operating under these FALSE ideas. I wish that people who are “politically correct” about “everyone deserves a second change” and so on will get REAL but it seems that is not the case at all.
OxD, 145% spot-on. Getting to that point of “acceptance” that we will never, ever, EVER have the ability to “understand” their world is a challenge for nearly every survivor. Personally, I kept asking, “How can another human being that I care about simply NOT CARE? How is that even possible?” Well, the answer as to “how” is that they just don’t care, and why it’s possible is “because it is.”
And, I’m one of “those people” that requires information to convince me of facts, and I’ve spent most of my lifetime working like a fiend to REFUTE the facts, even when the evidence is overwhelming and absolutely undeniable. Cog/diss kicked in because that was what I was taught, as a child, to use to process the traumas of living in alcoholic dysfunction.
You are so spot-on about the flawed beliefs that I was taught, as a child. Mom was drinking, and she didn’t intend for me to be locked out of the house in the middle of winter in my nightclothes – so, I was obligated to pretend that everything was just dandy and that it was my fault that neighbors “knew” about mom’s “illness” because I would run to them when I was locked out of the house, alone, and freezing.
It’s absolutely false that everyone deserves a second chance, and that there’s always 2 sides of a story. The spath side of the story is so far and away from fact and truth that it’s a waste of time to even entertain it.
Truthy it is a “shame” that it took us so long to catch on. LOL That deal about keeping the family “secrets” of shameful behavior seems to have been an almost universal thing among our families…if we allowed the secret to get out rather than stand out in the cold freezing then the problem in the family was CREATED by us, not the person whose shameful behavior caused us to be locked out in the freezing weather. Eventually we internalized this.
My family’s mantra was “what would the neighbors think?” Like this was THE most important thing in the whole world.
Actually, I recognized this fairly early on, but I didn’t really realize just how TWISTED this concept was. In fact, I used to joke that no matter what was going on, or even if she had a knife in her chest, and a neighbor knocked on the door, my mother would put an apron over it and invite them in for coffee. And that is almost the truth, only slightly exaggerated.
Later, when I studied “family role theory” and realized that if a family is protecting an offender that the “problem” is NOT just the offender, but the entire family. Same with the scape goat ini the family. If the scape goat escapes, another member will be shoved into their place.
Or the family enabler…when my grandmother who was our family enabler died…my mother took over her spot which was almost a 180 degree change, she went from despising her abusive alcoholic brother to PROTECTING HIM and not only that but DEMANDING that others do so as well.
Then after my step father died, mom started grooming me to be the “family enabler” and protect Patrick and when I refused all hail broke loose…
It is almost like a SCRIPT…there is actually a book called “Scripts People Live” and it is very good, and I realized finally that I had lived a SCRIPT. Jumping off that stage is difficult but being the author of our own lives is the ONLY way to live it well.
OxD, exactly! If one family member fails in their role, the understudy takes their place. Eugh…..
And, “what will the neighbors think?” was also very prominent in our dynamics. It’s a common thread, I think. It’s also a common thread in the development of cog/diss – I never had an inkling of what “normal” or “healthy” was, so I had to invent stories for other people’s behaviors because they didn’t fit into my system of beliefs, no matter HOW flawed those beliefs were. And, the script that accompanied the dysfunction had me in a perpetual tailspin of depression and anxiety.
Being at this other end of the spectrum – all business and extremely UN-trusting – is a place that is unfamiliar to me and uncomfortable. Learning about what’s healthy and normal has been interesting and challenging, to be sure. But, I know that I never, ever want to be the person that I once was. I most certainly DO want to have the joy of life return – that appreciation of life and the world around me. That will come, in due time.
Truthy,, I think the person we have to learn to trust is OURSELVES. In the past we thought we trusted ourselves to keep us safe, and that obviously wasn’t true. We couldn’t be trusted to keep ourselves safe…because of the thought processes and belief systems we used to make decisions on “safety” but now that we have seen that our previous belief systems (like “everyone deserves a second chance” I’m not perfect so I can expect others to be” and so on) we know that these thoughts and beliefs are MYTHS.
True, we are not perfect, and others are also not perfect, but, BUT, there are some things that are so TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE that we cannot tolerate them even ONCE, and sure enough NOT TWICE.
Now that we are starting to set boundaries that once crossed, there IS NO SECOND CHANCE…WE CAN ENFORCE THESE BOUNDARIES.
We actually, I think, have to mentally make a “list” of what these boundaries are.
My list essentially is not too complex.
1. Liars…don’t need em
2. Thieves…don’t need them
3. Manipulators…nope
4. People who are irresponsible…not my friends
5. Leeches and mooches…nope
6. Hateful to anyone or any thing…not my friend
I have come to realize that “poor planning on another’s part is not an emergency on my part.”
So when I see any of those broadly defined behaviors in someone, I back away…quietly or otherwise.
I did not realize until I started setting boundaries, realistic ones, that I had a whole covey of abusers around my life as “friends.” Recently I was contacted by someone I used to consider a “close friend” and she was updating me on her life in the last couple of years since I had heard from her and went into great detail on how she had “divested herself” of her substantial assets so that she qualified for medicaid, food stamps etc. and was advising me to follow her example.
After the call I got to thinking about this and decided that “you know, this woman is and always has been dishonest to some extent or another,” so why do I need her as a “friend?” Well the truth is I don’t need her in my life.
Welfare fraud, even if you have enough assets to hire a lawyer to put your money in trusts of some kind so you qualify for benefits “legally” doesn’t make it RIGHT. I have no intention of doing that even if it were possible. Sure I’d like to get food stamps and my medicare supplement policy paid, but it would be DISHONEST so I’m not interested. I’m not wealthy by a long shot and my income is limiited but I’m not going to cheat the taxpayers.
In any case…I’ve eliminated many such people from my circle of “friends”—I’d rather have 2-3 good friends that are honest, up right, caring people than 1,000 friends who are any of the crooked people that populate my life.
OxD, I just don’t have the time or energy to involve myself with toxic or crooked people. I’ve done the same thing with people in my life, too – even if they aren’t clearly disordered but simply toxic, they’re out.
The friendships that I do have are important to me – they’re people who speak truthfully and live “good” lives, rather than pretenders or mimics.
Deleted – Ox Drover is helping.
Truthy, none of us is perfect and we shouldn’t expect others to be “perfect” either…but there is a big difference between making a “mistake” and making a BAD CHOICE. A mistake is when you add your checking balance wrong and bounce a check…a bad CHOICE is when you write a check on an account you know is not high enough to cash it.
Even good people sometimes make bad choices, BUT they do not make a HABIT OF IT….and those choices are not ones that HURT other people. I’ve made plenty of bad choices, but they ended up hurting me. I chose to continue to “hope” my friends and family that were toxic would change….but eventually I came to realize that was a BAD choice and I changed MYSELF and my relationships with them.
I learned to set boundaries.
OxD, absolutely spot-on!!! I personally don’t expect “perfection” from anyone – my dear gawd, I’ve made countless mistakes and errors in judgment, and that’s perfectly “okay,” because I am completely human, mortal, and imperfect.
I’m in complete agreement that “bad” choices are actually a necessity because we cannot learn without making mistakes, as well as triumphs. I, too, have maintained a false hope on numerous occasions that a toxic person would change, to my own detriment. But, that was the only way that I could actually absorb the lesson about the difference between my feelings, and facts, and bind the “emotional mind” with the “practical mind” to finally begin developing a “wise mind.” I’m still in the infancy of the “wise mind,” and it’s really pretty comforting to finally know that wisdom is attainable! LOL
Yes……….boundaries. For myself, as well. 🙂