The last few weeks we have been talking about how your defense mechanisms affect your emotional suffering. We’ve looked at denial and fantasy. Today we are going to look at how your own distortions in thinking can also cause emotional suffering.
I am reminded frequently that this statement ‘Just because you believe it, doesn’t make it true’ is accurate when it comes to denial in pathological love relationships. There’s something about a narcissist and psychopath that can make you forget all about their pathology and return to your previous ‘fog’ of beliefs.
F.O.G.–Fear, Obligation and Guilt
Entrenched in your own desires is to have a normal partner. Couple that with the NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and PP’s (Psychopath’s) ability to convince you of their, at least fleeting, normalcy and you have a woman who has dug her finger nails into the nano-second of his normal behavior and she’s not gonna let it go! Otherwise highly educated, bright, and successful women can be reduced to blank-stared-hypnotized-believers when it comes to believing he is normal, can be normal, or that it’s her that is really the messed up one.
You may feel you have made substantial headway in understanding the nature of the unchangeableness of his disorder and then what appears to come out of nowhere, you are blank-staring and hypnotized yet again.
While pathology never changes, what did change is your belief system. Obviously an NPD and/or PP are not capable of true sustainable change. He didn’t change. But your desire to believe his normalcy and to deny his pathology is the only thing that has changed. It’s not so much a ‘change’ per se, as it is a return to straddling the fence about the belief system.
Most partners live a life of cognitive dissonance–this conflict between ‘He’s good/He’s bad’ that is so distracting they never resolve the internal conflict of whether he is MORE good than bad, or MORE bad than good. They live in a fog of circulating remembrances that support both view points–remembering the good, but still feeling the bad. This circulating remembrance keeps them straddling the fence with the inability to resolve a consistent belief system about him.
This inability to hold a consistent belief system is what causes cognitive dissonance; it’s also what increases it and causes intrusive thoughts. Dissonance is caused by thought inconsistency which leads eventually to your behavioral inconsistency–breaking up and making up constantly. Thought and behavioral inconsistency increase Dissonance which increases Intrusive Thoughts. No wonder you can’t get symptom relief!
Your desire to ‘believe it’ doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t make him normal. It doesn’t cure his NPD or Psychopathy. It only keeps you stuck straddling a belief system that has caused you emotional paralysis. Joyce Brown (the mentor in pathological love relationships for The Institute) said “the only thing that happens when you’re straddling a fence is you get a fence post up your butt!” Try moving when you’re paralyzed by a fence post!
Just because you believe it, doesn’t mean he’s ok, he’s going to stop doing the thing he said he’d stop, that counseling is going to work, that there never was anything wrong with him, that it’s probably you….or any of the other items you tell yourself in order to stay in a relationship of pathological disaster.
Even Benjamin Franklin said “We hold these truths to be self evident…” For us in the field of psychopathology, these self-evident truths are that pathology is permanent whether you believe it or not.
If we can help you with your beliefs or cognitive dissonance, join us for phone coaching, telesupport groups or retreats.
