“Let Go or Be Dragged” ~ Author unknown

I don’t know who wrote that slogan, but I loved it so much I bought it on a magnet. My first thought was, “Oh, I LOVE that saying for the women!”  But in a flash, I realized it’s a slogan for everyone. A friend of mine in recovery said she loved it for her AA recovery slogan.  Another person told me she loved it as a spiritual theme—to hold with an open hand or face the consequences. But, I do love it for all of you. Here’s why…

Pathological attachments are ‘gorilla glue.’ The pathological partners have a vibe—a come-hither, bonding vortex that sucks you in and holds you there in a hypnotic-like trance. It’s a powerful, seductive, subconscious attachment that mirrors the worst addictive feeling you could ever have. It vibrates throughout your body with a message and sensation that you will literally die if you are disconnected from the source. Letting go never feels like an option. It feels like sure death — death by disconnection, death by umbilical severing, death by life-force loss.

Its trance-like hold of your mind, body, and spirit leaves you stupefied with an inability to enact your own will or your ability to choose sanely the option of getting away from this catatonia. The same trance-like hold that held you in rapture, reverie, and ecstasy, now holds you in a cataleptic coma. Alive, with your eyes open, but your mind dead and unable to move. You look mildly functional to the world but the world doesn’t see the transfixion that is keeping you paralyzed beneath your eyes.

You hold on because you are glued. You hold on because there was rapture, reverie, and ecstasy. You hold on because to NOT hold on is to release your grip on the emotional life support system you think he has been. You hold on because you believe if you hold on long enough, the dazed and glazed existence you have been living will revert to rapture.  The nightmare will then become the dream. The stupor will become the high of the intensity. You hold on because you believe you can’t let go.

WAIT! HOLD UP! Let us ask, “Where are you? How did your clothes get torn? Where is the life you used to have? Where are the relationships with others that you once held dear? Why are your knees skinned? Why do you have those dark circles under your eyes? Why are you on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication? Where is the career you built? Why are your nails digging into your hands? Why is your stomach in your throat? Why are you now somewhere you never wanted to go? How did you get here? Why are you bleeding from your soul?” It’s because your belief about letting go has kept you being dragged.

Drag: verb. Related to: haul, lug, move, pull, schlep, tug, yank, crawl, creep, shuffle.  Your soul is bleeding—it’s your courtesy warning system from your spirit that is telling you to let go.

Even being dragged can be a gift. It can be the first scraped knee that crosses you over to recovery. You’ve held on for lots of reasons including your own version of ‘pathological hope’ that he will change and it will be different. History has taught you otherwise. It’s time to accept the wisdom that ‘no change’ brings to us. Your skinned knee is a metaphor for the beginning of your recovery because the word dragged means “to haul something to a new place.”

                                           Let go or be dragged.

In our last two articles, I have been talking about trance states, dissociation, hypnotic suggestion, mind control… all ways the pathological controls your mind, thoughts, feelings and, ultimately, your behavior.

This is not hocus-pocus stuff. Trance states, dissociation and hypnosis are all normal ways our bodies and minds respond to certain conditions. The only argument is if these pathologicals KNOW they are doing it to others! My answer would be YES—they are MASTERS at noticing what works on other people. So, to that degree, they tweak what works.

Additionally, many of you may be aware of the seminars, books, websites and TV shows about seduction and the techniques that are taught men about coming in under the radar to seduce women through hypnotic methods. My guess is that the pathologicals are teaching their findings to others…passing on the horrid knowledge of their own disorders and how to covertly and subconsciously attract women into sexual relationships. Appalling? You bet! Just one more big WAKE-UP CALL to women—pay attention and guard your minds.

Trance, mind control and hypnotic suggestion also are based on one’s own level of suggestibility. This is related to how responsive you are to the suggestions and opinions of others. The more responsive you are, the more suggestible and more easily you are mind-controlled or hypnotizable.

A women’s suggestibility is often influenced by her own biology. Women who are highly cooperative and value how others perceive them are likely to be more suggestible. Also, women’s fatigability highly influences her suggestibility.

Almost all women report high levels of emotional, physical, sexual, financial, and spiritual fatigue within Pathological Love Relationships. They take a toll on them—wearing them down until their emotional reserves, that would normally not give in, are repressed. At that time when a woman’s fatigue level is high, her suggestibility is also high. Tired and spaced out, it’s easy to be controlled by him. Messages told to her during tired and spaced-out times are recorded deeply and often subconsciously. “Can’t get him out of my head” is very real.

The women who participated in our research survey on “women who love psychopaths” showed us just how susceptible women can be to suggestibility, fatigability, and the resulting mind control. Almost all of the women experienced some form of trance, hypnosis, or mind control of “spellbound” symptoms.

Women must understand that “staying in the relationship to figure it out” or “see what happens” or “wait until he works on himself and gets better” is absolutely risky for you. Your ability to be covertly controlled by him is significantly higher than with other females in his life.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

In last week’s article, we started talking about the very REAL issue of trance in a relationship with pathologicals. Women have described this as feeling “under his spell,” “spellbound,” “mesmerized,” “hypnotized,” “spaced out,” “not in control of my own thoughts…” All of these are ways of saying that various levels of covert and subtle mind control have been happening with the pathological. And why wouldn’t it be happening? These are power-hungry people who live to exert their dominance over others. That includes your body, mind or spirit. Mind-control techniques, either physical or mental, are used on prisoners of war, in cults, and in hostage-taking. They obviously work or there wouldn’t be ‘techniques’ and bad people wouldn’t use them.

Mind control, brainwashing, coercion… are all words for the same principles that are used to produce the results of reducing your own effectiveness and being emotionally overtaken by someone intent on doing so. The result is the victim’s intense attachment to her perpetrator. This is often referred to as Betrayal Bonding or Trauma Bonding.  This is created by:

• Perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the captor/perpetrator would carry out the threat.
• Perceived small kindness from the captor/perpetrator to the captive.
• Perceived inability to escape.
• Isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor/perpetrator.

Mind control then produces dissociation which is a form of trance state. Dissociation is when your mind becomes overloaded and you need to ‘step outside of yourself’ to relieve the stress. Dissociation and trance are common reactions to trauma. For instance, dissociation happens during abuse in childhood as well as during adult traumas like rape. Prolonged mind control in adults will even produce trance states where adults begin to feel like they are being controlled—and they are!

If you have experienced mind control in your relationships, treatment and recovery for it includes:

• Breaking the isolation—Helping you identify sources of supportive intervention, self-help groups or group therapy, hotlines, crisis centers, shelters and friends.
• Identifying violence—As a victim in an abusive relationship, minimization of the abuse can occur, or denial about the different types of violent behavior that you encounter. Confusion about what is acceptable male (parental/authority) behavior is often common. Journal-keeping, autobiographical writing, reading of first-hand accounts or seeing films that deal with abuse may be helpful for you to understand the types of abuse you experienced.
• Renaming perceived kindness—Since abuse confuses the boundaries between kindness and manipulation, you may need to develop alternative sources of nurturance and caring other than the captor/perpetrator.
• Your ability to validate both love and terror—Because pathologicals often are dichotomous or have polar-opposite behaviors such as kind and sadistic, there is often a split by the victim in how they see the abuser. Treatment may be needed to help you integrate both dissociated sides of the abuser and will assist you in moving through the dreamlike state in how you view and remember him.

In next week’s article, we’ll continue our discussion on other forms of trance states and spellbound conditions.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

© www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com

Time and again women allude to the mystical aspects of the pathological with whom they are involved. They describe them as “being under his spell,” “entranced with him” or “hypnotized by him,” even “spellbound” or “mind-controlled”.

Women aren’t exactly able to define what they are experiencing or even to accurately describe what they think is occurring, but they do unanimously conclude that something is happening that feels like it’s hypnotic. Beyond the ‘hocus-pocus’ of hypnosis lies real truth about what IS probably happening in those relationships.

Trance happens to every person every day. It is a natural lull in the body when many of its systems are resting, or a state we enter when tired. Blood sugar levels, metabolism and other natural body functions can affect the sleepy states of trance that we enter all day long.

You’ve probably heard of ‘highway hypnosis’. This occurs when you have been driving and are so concentrated on the driving or, when you are getting sleepy while driving and watching those yellow lines, that you forget about the last few miles, and—all of a sudden—you’re aware that you’re almost at your destination. Highway hypnosis is a trance or light form of self-hypnosis. No one put you in that state of hypnosis—you went into it on your own. Check in with most people around 2 p.m. and you’ll see lots of people in sleepy trances.

But pathology can cause people to enter trance states frequently. Pathological Love Relationships are exhausting and take their toll on your body through stress, diet, loss of sleep, and worry. While you are worn down and fatigued, you are more suggestible to the kinds of things that are said to you while you are in that state of mind during which these words, feelings and concepts sink in at a deeper level than other ideas and statements said to you when you are NOT in a trance state.

If he is telling you that you are crazy, or gaslighting you by telling you that you really didn’t see him do what you think he did, or that the problems of the relationship are because of you… those statements said to you when you are suggestible stay filed in your subconscious and are replayed over and over again, creating intrusive thoughts and obsessive thinking.

If he tells you positives when you are in trance states, such as “I need you” and “please don’t ever leave me”, those phrases, too, are stored in a subconscious location, working you over without your knowledge. When it’s time to redirect your beliefs about him, disengage, or break up, women feel like ‘old tapes’ are running in their heads. It’s very hard for them to get these messages to stop activating their thinking, feeling, and behavior.

Women who have strong personality traits in suggestibility and fatigability are more at risk of trance-like states in which words, meanings, and symbols are more concretely stored in the subconscious. Women feel relieved to find out that they really aren’t crazy—it really DOES feel like you are under his spell, because, in many ways, you are.

More information on trance states in Pathological Love Relationships is covered in detail in my book, Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists.

In our next newsletter, we’ll talk about other ways that trance states can be affected in the Pathological Love Relationship.

(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also available in our retreats, 1:1s, or phone sessions. See the website for more information.)

 © www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com