Search Results for: PTSD

Over the past month or more, I have been talking about healing from a dangerous and/or pathological love relationship. The chronic stress disorder and often Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that occurs from the damage done in the relationship requires a serious change in lifestyle in order to heal.

We have been talking about those changes – what needs to change physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In Part 5, we discussed the negative ‘worldview’ effects resulting from pathological exposure. The negative worldview impacts how you now see your post-pathological relationship world. This includes how you NOW see yourself, others, the world, your future, and God.

One of the seriously undertreated effects of pathological love relationship exposure is the healing of the personal worldview. The untreated aspects mimic PTSD symptoms with increases in depression, anxiety, fear, isolation, dread of the future and other similarly related PTSD side effects. Healing your worldview is critical to a healthy future.

Another often untreated effect of pathological relationship exposure is the ‘unconscious adopting of the pathological’s worldview.’ Not only was your worldview altered from the damage done to you IN the relationship, but your worldview was also altered from the damage done to you THROUGH the pathological. One of the unrelenting side effects is the ‘learned experience’ of seeing the world through his eyes.

One of the things that makes pathologicals pathological is the effect of their pathology on how they see themselves in relation to the world and others. Pathologicals are noted for their over/under sense of themselves, over/under opinion of others, and their unusual view of what the world should do for them.

While you may not have adopted these exact views like the pathological, chances are your views have been tainted with the pathological’s viewpoint. This can include normalizing abnormal behaviors or dissociating pieces of reality AWAY from you. Normalizing can make womanizing, over/under employment, drug dealing, alcohol/drug abuse, domestic violence, lying, cheating, stealing, or other overtly wrong behavior ‘marginal,’ when you have taken on his view of life and right/wrong. Pathologicals don’t operate by the rules. They create them for their unique situations and break them for fun.

When your grip on societal boundaries begins to slip, you have been affected by his view of the world. When his behaviors become ‘just a little different’ than other people’s or ‘all people are like this’ – your worldview has been infiltrated. When you begin to think of other people like he does, or define others by his warped definitions, when you believe his ‘take’ on things or tell yourself only partial truths so you don’t have to really see his real self – your worldview has been penetrated. When you become numb and lethargic to the things he has done, your worldview has been violated.

This is just one more aspect of your wounded worldview that needs healing if you are going to recover. A wounded worldview does not allow for living the gentle life. And the gentle life is probably not even possible until the way you see yourself, others and the world becomes ‘gentle.’

Pathologicals are harsh. They leave people feeling irritated, rubbed raw, and chapped. Your interior does not feel ‘gentle’ – it feels rough.

Pathologicals are notoriously negative, so you may have found your mood, thinking, and reactions to have taken on his negativity. It’s hard to heal when everything looks like he told you it looked – bad (and it’s all your fault!). It’s hard to live the gentle life for yourself when your emotions are anything BUT gentle.

This is the point about the necessity of healing the worldview – it’s a critical part of your recovery. Because having been warped by a pathological, ‘HOW you see determines WHAT you see.’

(**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

The last few weeks we have been talking about the necessity of living a gentle life if you are recovering from a pathological love relationship. The damage it does to a person is profound and many are often diagnosed with a chronic stress disorder or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These disorders respond best to a “gentle life” that allows the body, mind, and spirit to rest from the overload of adrenaline and stress it has experienced in the pathological relationship.

We have talked about how to physically adjust your environment if you have a stress disorder, and we have also talked about the emotional effects – anxiety, depression, and other aftermath effects associated with PTSD. Today, we are addressing the spiritual effects.

Dangerous and pathological relationships violate at a deep soul level. That’s because they touch on the core building blocks of our concepts about relationships – hope, love, and trust. Deception is evil and sick, and when you realize ‘who and what’ you have been with, there is a violation that cuts to the deepest part of a person – one’s spirit. Because of this, I devoted a portion of Women Who Love Psychopaths to the subject of spiritual evil and its correlation to some of the symptoms associated with pathology. There is an interesting chart in the chapter that connects psycho/spiritual evil.

Often these kinds of pathological relationships have already ‘played into’ your soul connection, leading you down the path of believing that your ‘connection’ was spiritual in nature. There were probably a lot of promises of the ‘life together’ and all of the “reasons God brought [you two] together.” In the end, they were lies. But before you knew they were lies, they were HOPES.

~ “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul.” ~ (Emily Dickenson)

So many pathological love relationships have an ‘intense attachment’ that feels like a ‘connection’ or ‘passion,’ when, in reality, it is just the intense game of the pathological sucking you in and hoping you will confuse intensity with something healthy.

Hope, love, and trust are all core spiritual values. When you have invested these core values and beliefs in someone, and then the heinous deception is revealed – that the ‘goal’ of the relationship was to manipulate you all along – something ‘rips’ inside of you. This ‘soul tearing’ brings a spiritual skepticism, a distrust that permeates everything you EVER believed… sometimes even about God. It’s a disastrous wound to your worldview – how you see yourself, others, God, and the world at large.

These mortal wounds to your worldview can last a long time because, in effect, they are the ways you have come to believe about yourself (I can’t trust my intuition), others (everyone is evil), the world (it’s a sick place), and God (He didn’t protect me). This profound shift in your worldview can increase the symptoms of PTSD – depression, anxiety, alienation, loneliness, isolation, and a fear or dread of the future.

So often the spiritual effects of the dangerous relationship are overlooked both by the victim and by the therapist. This ‘worldview earthquake’ has shaken the foundation of your belief system. Without repair to the foundation from which you build your self-concept, healing is limited to only symptom management. Spiritual healing of your worldview is paramount to your overall recovery.

If you are in counseling, please address the issue of spiritual effects with your counselor.  This is an area so often undertreated by many counselors. I teach on this aspect a lot during professional conferences, and therapists are eager to understand this facet of the spiritual side effects of the pathological relationship and their impact on chronic stress disorders.

(**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

“Ah, just get a life!”

Have people ever told you that? Sometimes from the chronic stress and upheaval the pathological love relationship caused, people can get very one-dimensional and hyper-focused on him, their relationship, or the problems surrounding the relationship. They stop doing the kinds of things in their lives that could help them be LESS obsessed, depressed, or anxious. That’s because survivors tend to ‘lose themselves’ in the pathological relationship. It’s a testimony to the strength of pathology and the almost labyrinthine maze of hypnotic lull that occurs in these relationships.

The crazier it gets, the more the survivor feels like she needs to “try to understand it,” or “try to make him understand what he is doing,” or “do something that will help the relationship feel less pathological.” These ideas can create a 24/7 obsession – it can take up your whole life trying to balance the relationship, which you have probably figured out, cannot be balanced.

Getting lost in a very dark tunnel can draw people away from the actions, behaviors, thoughts, people, and resources that previously allowed them to live a happier and more balanced life. The pathological relationship is all-consuming, and soon, any level of your own self-care is abandoned for the insane focus on how to help him, or mend the relationship.

It isn’t very long before others around you notice the myopic and single-focused person you have become – that can’t think or talk about anything except the pathological relationship. This myopic view of your relationship has now blocked out any other part of your life. Consequently, people are bailing out of your life, and emotional resources are dwindling, as your life has become the size and shape of him.

Women in the most dire situations (especially in domestic violence cases) are those who have lost physical and emotional resources and can find no way to get out. The less support a woman feels from others, the more likely she is to stay because it takes support to get out, to break up, and to not go back. So, by the act of myopia, her life and resources just dwindle away.

One day someone says to her, “Man, you need to get a bigger life than THIS,” and something really hits her about that statement. Like coming out of a deep freeze, the lightbulb goes on. She notices her lack of a life and says, “What happened to me? Where is my life?”

The last few weeks in the newsletter, I have been talking about ‘living the gentle life,’ especially if you are someone who has lived in a pathological love relationship, or has a chronic stress disorder or PTSD. A gentle life is a full life. It is a life that includes the kinds of things that nurture you and bring you peace. The gentle life is healing, because the feeling of joy is sending the right kinds of signals to your brain that fight depression and anxiety. This gives the sensation of well-being. In order to heal, you need to be a ‘joy hunter.’

The fact is, women go back, or choose poorly again, because they fail to build a life for themselves. They know how to ‘invest and invest’ in him and in the relationship, but do not know how to ‘invest’ and build a life of their own – without him. Women who have healthy lives on the outside of the relationship are more likely to get out and to stay out.

Loneliness is one of the key risk factors that cause women to return to the relationship or one that is similar. There are so many ways to get your needs met for friendship, fun, support, beauty, or whatever you love in life. Building a life – especially a gentle life, is the best prevention for relapse a woman can do.

But sadly, many will not do this. After more than 25 years of doing this type of work, I can pick out who will and who will not invest in themselves by building a life. Those who don’t are in the same boat years down the road – either with the same pathological person, or another one just like him. Those who do build a life are less likely to feel pressure to date or, worse yet, to phone him out of loneliness.

The gentle life isn’t even possible unless you have a life and a mindset that is ready for transformation. Living with a pathological or picking another one is just about as opposite a gentle life as there is. Will you be one who rebuilds a fabulous life?

Joyce Brown, who inspired our work and who happens to have been my mother, said, “I’ve got to stop focusing on him and get a great life!” At 60, she went to college. At 70, she took up belly dancing. And after 70, she sailed her own boat to the Bahamas, traveled to Paris and beyond. She proved the point that creating a great life was, in and of itself, learning to create a gentle life.

Much healing to you!

(**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

Last week I began talking about recovering from a pathological love relationship. The toll it takes on people often leaves them with symptoms of chronic stress. For extremely bad relationships, often the result is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—a diagnosed anxiety disorder. The long-term stress from the pathological love relationship (with narcissists, abusive partners, socio/psychopaths) affects people emotionally, physically, sexually and spiritually.

I have been talking about what the body does when it is under chronic stress and the results of this unrelenting stress. The last newsletter discussed how to deal with the physical ramifications of stress. I also talked about changing your physical environment to embrace the needs of a stress disorder.

Today, we are going to discuss emotional effects and how to create the gentle life for your emotional needs as well.

PTSD is an emotional disorder that falls in the category of anxiety disorders. Therefore, someone with chronic stress of any kind needs to learn the types of techniques that help reduce emotional anxiety. The problem is, by the time people ask for help with chronic stress or PTSD, they have often lived with it for a long time and the symptoms are then extreme.

The emotional effects of untreated PTSD can include tension, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, flashbacks, or hyper-startle reflex. All of these are distressing and, over time, a combination of these symptoms can normally occur at the same time.

Relaxation techniques are a way of managing the physical symptoms of PTSD. Relaxation techniques are not ‘optional’ in the recovery of chronic stress/PTSD. That’s because these techniques have a dual purpose. These same relaxation techniques also help manage the emotional and physical symptoms. Learning correct breathing to ward off anxiety and panic attacks can be done through relaxation techniques.

Likewise, these same techniques can help with sleep disruptions and tension. Chronic stress and PTSD are disorders that should be treated by a professional therapist. Especially with PTSD, the symptoms tend to increase over time if not treated. People make the mistake of waiting until it is totally unbearable, and then it takes time to ease the symptoms. People are often hopeful it will just go away when the pathological relationship has ended or contact has ceased. These aren’t called the worst relationships in the world for nothing! They are labeled as such because they produce horrible side effects!

Unfortunately, PTSD is a chronic disorder meaning you are likely to have symptoms off and on for years, maybe a lifetime. This is all the more reason to learn how to manage the symptoms when you may need to. Intrusive thoughts are one of the most complained-about symptoms.

This is when unwanted thoughts of the pathological person or relationship keep popping up in your head. No matter how many times you try to not to think about them, they keep coming back. The problem with the images in your mind is that each time they pop up, they have the ability to trigger you. Your body responds to the trigger with adrenaline and starts the whole stress cycle over again. So managing the intrusive thoughts and flashbacks is imperative to emotionally regulating yourself and living the gentle life.

Living the gentle life means removing yourself from personalities that are similar to the pathological relationship. We often tend to migrate BACK to the same kinds of people and relationships we just left. These kinds of abusive people can cause an emotional avalanche. It is important that you understand the kinds of traits in people that should be avoided if you have PTSD or high-level stress. These could be people who remind you of the pathological person, loud or aggressive people, or those who violate your boundaries or bother you in other ways. Stress and PTSD do mandate that you develop self-protective skills such as setting boundaries—learning to say no or leave environments that increase your symptoms. Learn to migrate instead to people who are serene or leave you feeling relaxed and happy.

Creating your gentle physical environment will also help you emotionally. An environment that is soothing, calm, quiet, soft, and comfortable has the best chance of allowing an over-stimulated body to relax. Changing your physical environment for your emotional benefit, and adding relaxation techniques can greatly impact the amount of emotional symptoms you experience. Learning ‘emotional regulation skills’ for stress and PTSD is a must.

If you are in need of the following:

• Pathological love relationship education
• Healing the aftermath symptoms of intrusive thoughts, obsessive thinking, flashbacks, anxiety, depression
• Learning to manage PTSD

…The Institute is just the place to get your life back! For information on the services we offer, go to www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com. We’ll be happy to help you find a treatment modality that is right for you.

(**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

Last week I began talking about the normal aftermath of pathological love relationships—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

PTSD is an anxiety disorder that is often reactivated by ‘triggers’. These can include people, places, things, or sensory feelings that reconnect you with the trauma of the relationship. In the last newsletter, I talked briefly about the gentle life and how an overtaxed and anxious body/mind needs a soothing life. I cannot stress this enough: people MUST remember that their PTSD symptoms CAN BE reactivated if they aren’t taking care of themselves and living a gentle life.

What IS a gentle life? A gentle life is a life lived remembering the sensitivities of your PTSD. It isn’t ignored or wished away—it is considered and compensated for. Since PTSD affects one physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually—all of those elements need to be considered in a gentle life. Just as if you had diabetes you would consider what to eat or what medication you need to take, so it is with PTSD.

Interestingly, although PTSD is listed in the psychiatric manual as an emotional disorder, PTSD has some very real physical effects as well. In fact, there has been some discussion among professionals about having PTSD listed in physicians manuals as well, because the untreated, ongoing effects of acute stress are well-known in the medical community. Since PTSD has both components of emotional and physical symptoms, someone recovering from PTSD must take those aspects into account.

Physically, PTSD often becomes a chronic condition by the time you get help. That means you have been living with it for a while and it has been wreaking havoc on your physical body during that time. Unbridled anxiety/stress/fear pumps enormous amounts of adrenaline and cortisol into your body. This over-stimulates your body and mind, and causes insomnia, paranoia, hyperactivity, a racing mind/intrusive thoughts and the inability to ‘let down’ and ‘rest’.

A body that has been living on adrenaline needs the adrenal glands to ‘chill!’ People often complain of chronic insomnia, which also leads to depression. Depression can lead to lethargy, overeating, weight gain and hopelessness. It is possible to have both anxiety and depression occurring at the same time. Unmanaged stress, anxiety, and adrenaline can lead to long-term medical problems often associated with stress—lower GI problems, migraines, teeth grinding, aggravated periods, chest pain, panic attacks, and most auto-immune disorders like fibromyalgia, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, arthritis and MS.

So, CLEARLY, PTSD is something that SHOULD be treated. Physically, that means going to someone who can diagnose you—a therapist or psychiatrist. In the early part of treatment, it is normal to take anti-anxiety medication, anti-depressants or sleep aids in order to rectify your depleted brain chemistry and to allow the adrenal glands to rest and stop pumping out adrenaline. Your doctor is the best person to tell you what will help to relieve your physical symptoms. Some use alternative medicine to deal with those symptoms. What is effective for each person varies.

Additionally, you need to help your body and brain produce the ‘good stuff’ in your brain chemistry. This means exercising, eating well, and learning relaxation techniques. Too much adrenaline has been pumping through your body with no way to get utilized.  Excessive adrenaline makes you feel jumpy and restless. Exercise (even moderate walking) helps to produce endorphins in your brain, which produce those feelings of well-being and help to burn off the adrenaline and any extra weight you might have gained.

Although during depression you often don’t FEEL like exercising, you will always feel bad if you don’t get your body moving. Stress is even stored at the cellular level of our bodies. You must, must, must get moving in order to feel better.

Eating well means not trying to medicate your depression and low energy with carbs. When you are depressed your body craves carbs as a source of quick energy, but the spikes in blood sugar add to the sense of mood highs and lows. You’ve already had enough ‘junk’ in the relationship—think of it as nurturing your body with good food to replace all the ‘junk’ that it has been through. You can greatly help mood swings by eating well.

It’s also necessary to deal with the negative habits you have acquired as coping mechanisms. Many people with PTSD try to medicate their anxiety and depression. This could be through smoking, relationship hopping, sex, eating/bingeing/purging, drugs (legal and illegal), and the increased use of alcohol. In fact, one of the devastating side effects of PTSD is how many people develop alcoholism as a result. Any habits you are prone to right now tend to increase when you have PTSD, because the particular habit becomes more and more a way to manage your PTSD symptoms. Finding positive coping skills instead of negative habits is a great step toward your recovery.

Physical recovery also means paying attention to not reactivating your symptoms. Your physical environment in which you live, play and work must be conducive to low stimulation. That means low light, low noise, low aggravation. Sometimes that means making big changes in the people you hang out with—getting rid of the loud, noisy, overactive, aggressive and pathological. And sometimes it means making big changes in a job where the environment does nothing but trigger you.

Lastly, learning relaxation techniques is not optional for people with PTSD. PTSD is a chronic state of hyper-vigilance, agitation, and restlessness. Your body has been over-ridden with adrenaline for a long time and has ‘forgotten’ its equilibrium in relaxation. It must be re-taught. Re-teaching means doing it daily. Take 5 to 10 minutes a day to use relaxation breathing and allow your mind to unwind. Give positive messages to your body to relax to help you tap into this natural relaxation, even during times you are not actively trying to relax. The more you use these techniques, the quicker your body can relax—even at work or when you are doing something else because it has ‘remembered’ how to.

There are many tapes, CDs and videos you can buy on relaxation that walk you through the process of relaxation. We have products created especially for managing PTSD on the magazine site—www.saferelationshipsmagazine.com/category/audio-products.

Taking yoga will also teach you how to use correct breathing techniques that help correct the shallow/panting breathing that is associated with PTSD and anxiety. Shallow breathing or panting can actually trigger panic attacks. Learning to breathe well again is a metaphor for ‘exhaling’ all the junk you’ve been through and releasing it. If you don’t have a relaxation tape, you can download our mp3 audio on relaxation techniques. Most important is to just become acutely aware that PTSD is as physical (and often medical) as it is emotional.

Next week we will talk about PTSD and the emotional effects.

(**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

Be gentle with yourself. The rest of your life deserves it. ~ Sandra L. Brown, MA

As we’ve discussed before, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a trauma-related anxiety disorder, and is often seen as an aftermath constellation of symptoms from pathological love relationships. Exposure to other people’s pathology (and the corresponding emotional, physical/sexual abuse) can, and often does, give other people stress disorders, including PTSD. Our psychological and emotional systems are simply not wired for long-term exposure to someone else’s abnormal psychology. Often the result is a conglomeration of aftermath symptoms that include PTSD, which is described as a normal reaction to an abnormal life event.

The profound and long-term effects of PTSD create what I refer to as a ‘cracked vessel.’ The fragmentation caused by the trauma creates a crack in the emotional defense system of the person. While treatment can ‘glue the crack back together,’ and the vessel can once again function as a vessel, if pressure is applied to the crack, the vase will split apart again. This means that the crack is a stress fracture in the vessel—it’s the part of the vessel that is damaged and weakened in that area.

There are numerous types of therapies that can help PTSD. If you have it, or someone you care about has it, you/they should seek treatment. PTSD does not go away by itself, and if left untreated, can worsen. People often have missed the opportunity of treating PTSD when it was still relatively treatable and responsive to therapy. The sooner it’s treated, the better the outcome. But any treatment, at any time, can still help PTSD.

However, what is often not recognized is the ‘continual’ life that must be lived when living with the aftermath of PTSD. Because the cracked vessel can crack again, a gentle and balanced life will relieve a lot of the PTSD symptoms that can linger. I have often seen people who have put a lot of effort into their recovery and NOT put a lot of effort into the quality of a gentle life following treatment. This is a mistake, because going back into a busy and crazy life, or picking another pathological, could reactivate PTSD.

As much as people want to ‘get back out there,’ and think they can return to the life they used to live, often that’s not true. Wanting to live like you did in the past or do what you did before does not mean that you will be able to. I know, I know… it ticks you off that the damage is interfering with the person you used to be… before pathology exposure (BPE). But wanting it to be different doesn’t make it different. If you have PTSD, you need to know what to realistically expect in your prognosis.

Consequently, many people’s anxiety symptoms return if their life is not gentle enough.  Much like a 12-step program, ‘living one day at a time’ is necessary, and understanding your proclivity must be foremost in your mind.

Living the gentle life means reducing your exposure to triggers that can reactivate your PTSD. Only you know what these are. If you don’t know, then that’s the first goal of therapy—to find and identify your triggers. You can’t avoid (or even treat) what you don’t know exists.

Triggers are exposures to emotional, physical, sexual, visual, auditory, or kinesthetic reminders that set off anxiety symptoms. These triggers could be people, places, objects, sounds, phrases (songs!), tastes, or smells which reconnect you to your trauma. Once you are reconnected to your trauma, your physical body reacts by pumping out the adrenaline and you become hyper-aroused, which is known as hyper-vigilance. This increases paranoia, insomnia, startle reflex and a lot of other overstimulated and anxiety-oriented behaviors.

Other triggers that are not trauma-specific, but you should be on the alert for, are violent movies, TV, or music, and high-level noises. Also, be alert to lifestyle/jobs/people that are too fast-paced, busy environments, risky or scary jobs, bosses or co-workers who have personality disorders and are abrasive, or any other situations that kick-start your anxiety. Women are often surprised that other people’s pathology now sets them off. Once they have been exposed to pathology and have acquired PTSD from this exposure, other pathology can trigger PTSD symptoms. Living ‘pathology free’ is nearly mandatory—to the degree that you can ‘un-expose’ yourself to other known pathologies.

The opposite of chronic exposure to craziness and pathology would be the gentle life.  Think ‘zen retreat center’—a subdued environment where your senses can rest… where a body that has been pumped up with adrenaline can let down… and a mind that races can relax. Where the video flashbacks can go on pause, and fast-paced chest panting can turn into slow, diaphragmatic breathing. Where darting eyes can close, soft scents soothe, and gentle music lulls. Where high heels come off and flip-flops go on. Where long quiet walks give way to tension release … quieting of the mind chases off the demons of hyperactive thinking… so when you whisper, you can hear yourself.

Only, this isn’t a retreat center for a yearly visit… this is your life, where your recovery and your need for all things gentle are center in your life. It doesn’t mean you need to quit your job or move to a mountain, but it does mean that you attend to your over-stimulated physical body. Those things in your life that you can control, such as the tranquility of your environment, need to be adjusted. Lifestyle adjustments ARE required for those who want to avoid reactivating anxiety. This includes psychological/emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual self-care techniques.

The one thing you can count on about PTSD is, when you aren’t taking care of yourself, your body will SCREAM IT! Your life cannot be the crazy-filled life you may watch others live. Your need for exercise, quiet, healthy food, spirituality, tension release, and joy are as necessary as oxygen for someone with PTSD. Walking the gentle path is your best guard against more anxiety and your best advocate for peace.

(**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

Over the years, I have talked about the frequent aftermath of pathological love relationships which is often Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Many women emerge from these relationships either diagnosed, or not yet diagnosed, with PTSD—an anxiety disorder so extreme that the core concept of self is often fragmented.

To demonstrate PTSD, I use the analogy of a cracked vessel. PTSD causes a fracture to the core concept of self. This fragmentation produces a crack in the soul, but the soul, mind and body must continue to try to function as an undamaged vase or vessel. The vase can be glued back together enough to function, but push on the crack, and the vessel will break again.

PTSD is a mood disorder, specifically, an anxiety disorder. The common symptoms of PTSD (whether in you or someone you care about who has been in a pathological relationship) include:

• Intrusive thoughts about him/relationship/events of the relationship
• Nightmares
• Flashbacks or sensing effects recurring in the present moment
• Extreme reactions upon exposure to things that symbolize or resemble parts of the relationship
• Trying to avoid thinking about him or the relationship
• Trying to avoid situations that remind you of him or the relationship
• Blocked recall of all the events that occurred
• Decreased interest in daily activities
• Feeling numb, detached, unable to feel loving feeling
• Difficulty concentrating
• Hyper-vigilance (startle reflex)
• Hyper-arousal (feeling keyed up or too alert)
• Insomnia
• Anger/Irritability

Some of the biggest concerns for women are the symptoms associated with PTSD, because it is interfering with the quality of their lives, their level of functioning, and often their ability to parent effectively. Many don’t realize they have PTSD so they don’t seek treatment. They just feel like they’re ‘going crazy’ or “I should be over it by now—why am I still having these experiences?” People are often relieved to learn the name and the reason for their experiences.

Unfortunately, others around them may also not realize what is wrong, and may tell them to “move on,” “get over it,” or “just meet someone else,” and yet, months, and even years later, women can still have PTSD symptoms. That’s because PTSD does not just ‘go away’ without treatment. In fact, it worsens over time when neglected.

PTSD is considered a ‘trauma disorder’ because you have lived through an abnormal and traumatic life event. Trauma disorders require specific types of treatment in order to recover. Untreated PTSD can lead to chronic anxiety and depression, substance abuse to help cope with the anxiety, other compulsive behaviors like eating, smoking, and sexual acting out, addiction to sleep aids, and chronic stress related medical conditions. It’s not a disorder to be taken lightly.

Those who have already been diagnosed with PTSD may not realize that PTSD is often a life-long condition. You won’t always feel as anxiety-ridden as you do now, but depending on the severity of your PTSD, it can leave the vessel cracked. Future damage can cause the stress crack to re-fracture.

Survivors either highly identify with the analogy of the cracked vessel, or hate the analogy. Some have written me and said, “I don’t like what you said about being a cracked vessel—anyone can change.” I didn’t create the symptoms and effects of PTSD.  I have only learned to live with them.

People with PTSD need to live quiet, gentle lives. Their households, jobs, environments, and relationships need to reflect the tranquility that an overtaxed body needs. These are not people who need to have fast-paced, dramatic, traumatic and chaotic jobs, lifestyles or relationships. These are people whose bodies, minds, and spirits need to exist in a healing environment.

In our upcoming seven-part series on ‘Living a Gentle Life,’ we will go into much more detail about recovery from PTSD and other parts of the aftermath from a 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

William James, an early writer on psychology from the late 1800’s wrote about happiness and reality. I think what he has to say applies a lot to the issues that women face in pathological relationships. Let’s see how…

The crux of James’ pragmatic approach to happiness was rooted in his belief about expectation and its effect on how we come to feel about whether we are happy or depressed. The shortcut to his analogy about beliefs and happiness is:

‘If your reality lives up to your expectations, you experience happiness. If it doesn’t, you are depressed.’

Women who enter into relationships with pathologicals who are notorious for their hidden lives and covert disorders are not dealing with his reality. In her defense, how could she be? She doesn’t even know what his reality is–his disorders, his hidden life, or his pathology that is yet to annihilate her. His charming presentation is anything but real but is effective because it simply hands back to her a mirrored image of all her desires. This mirroring back increases her sensation of attachment because it comfortably reflects herself. Humans feel most at home with the traits that are most like them. However in a pathological, the mirroring, the traits and the resulting connection are not authentic–it’s merely her reflected traits she is attracted to IN him. His mirrored traits are nothing more than a magician’s illusion.

But what impacts her most is not that it is a sham–it’s that she believes it IS real. William James said “The value of any truth is utterly dependent upon its use to the person who holds it.” The value of him being normal is critically important to her in the beginning of the relationship. She will be relationally dependent about his portrayal of himself as true and real. Why? The women we surveyed tested extremely high in relationship investment. What she puts in and gets out of her relationships is almost the single most important thing in her life. The value of the psychopath’s truth is dependent on how much she wants it to BE true. In essence, she sees what he portrays AND she sees what she is invested in: this relationship.

What this creates with a pathological however, is that the first brick laid in the building of this relationship is flawed with all the corrosiveness of his disorder but pressure washed with the glow of his impression management. His mask and skillfully skewed image is built on sand with nothing to build off of. Upon that first brick of reality (or in pathology’s case, unreality), her next brick, which is expectations, is laid.

Her concept of reality about him and the relationship, in the end, can never live up to her expectations she has for them as a couple. Her foundational belief upon which all of this is built is that he is who he says he is, and that he is normal. Her expectations are based on normalcy. Such as–the relationship is going to bring the love, attachment, and joy that she perceives she is experiencing. What woman doesn’t expect that there isn’t potential in the relationship initially? After all, his best performance is always his matinees! Expectations are of a shared life, building a business, buying a home, raising children, growing old together–normal life stuff. Except–the first brick of reality wasn’t what it seemed.

What are realistic relationship expectations for covert pathology? How DO you build a healthy relationship with a narcissist or psychopath?

Most women will never choose in-your-face-pathology for a partner. However, not consciously choosing pathology still does not deter what she ends up with. Her expectations for their relationship are eventually pitifully ignored if not sabotaged. Her time, youth, love, loyalty, finances, trust, and sexuality were all poured into an expectation of a life together. None of this, of course happens for long.

Instead, pathology produces what it always produces: infidelity, a thief of all things sincere, loathing, financial disaster, distrust, and robbery of sexuality and spirituality. As its psychological signature and imprint, it marks her with the all the signs of Aftermath symptoms. Intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, obsessive thinking, stress disorders/PTSD, cognitive dissonance are her hallmark signs of having truly experienced a pathological love relationship.

In retrospect, it is easy to see in pathology how expectations have everything to do with the eventual outcome of unhappiness. When reality is skewed and he is not as he seems, and normal expectations for happy life are unfortunately with an abnormally disordered person, the outcome is misery.

Skewed reality + Unadjusted Expectations = Misery!

Pathological relationships always end in this way. It’s their trademark. While you can’t adjust what their impression management did to you initially, you can adjust what you come to expect from someone this disordered. When he lies, does it one more time, steals, cheats, hides his life—the only adjustment that can be made is ‘were you expecting normal behavior from an abnormal disorder?’ What part of him ‘doing it one more time’ is really a shock? The expectation (once you know his pathology) is what keeps you stuck in the cycle of your intrusive and obsessive thinking. If you dig down into what you are really thinking, you are expecting ‘this time’ the pathological will be different. He will be honest, he will tell the truth, he will pay the taxes, he won’t cheat, he’ll stop porn, he will stop splitting the children against you….

Your expectation of a permanently disordered and low-conscience abnormality is creating your continued depression. Adjust your expectation and you will adjust your future.

If your reality lives up to your expectations, you experience happiness. If it doesn’t, you are depressed.

Last week we began talking about the difference between fear and anxiety. Real fear draws on your animalistic instincts and causes a sincere fight-or-flight reaction. Anxiety causes you to worry about the situation, but you aren’t likely to bolt.

Anxiety can develop as a counterfeit trait to the true fear you never reacted to.

Gavin de Becker is a Danger Analyst and, in his classic book The Gift of Fear, has much to say about the preventability of most bad outcomes. He says there is, “Always, always, always a pre-incident indicator (a PIN) that women ignore.”

In my books, I call them red flags—the wisdom of your body that recognizes primitive fear and sends a signal to your body to react.  In that split second, you can run or you can rename it. Renaming it causes your body to react less and less to the messages it does send. Not one woman in the 25+ years I’ve been doing this has said there wasn’t an initial red flag that she CONSCIOUSLY ignored. Almost 100% of the time, the early red flags end up being exactly why the relationship ended. You could have saved yourself 3, 5, 15, 20 or more years of a dangerous relationship by listening to your body instead of your head!

Let’s go back to more stories by Gavin…

Dorothy says her ex-boyfriend, Kevan, was a fun guy with a master’s degree and a CPA. “He was charming, and it never let up,” Dorothy says. “He was willing to do whatever I wanted to do.”

Eventually, Dorothy began to feel that something wasn’t right. “He would buy me a present or buy me a beautiful bouquet of roses and have it sitting on the table and that was very nice, but that night or the next day he wanted me to be with him all the time.”

As Dorothy shares her story, Gavin points out some of the warning signs, starting with Kevan’s charm. “A great thing is to think of charm as a verb. It’s something you do. ‘I will charm [Dorothy] now.’ It’s not a feature of [one’s] personality,” Gavin says.

What happened next stunned Dorothy. “I was out visiting my sister in California, and he was calling me, calling me, and he asked me to marry him over the cell phone,” she says.  “I thought, you’re kidding. I’ve always said I would never get married again. And I said, ‘That’s the last time I’m going to talk about it.’”

After rejecting Kevan and coming home, Dorothy says he remained persistent. He showed Dorothy the picture of a diamond ring he wanted to buy, and told her he wanted to buy a house. “And he had it all mapped out, how it was going to work for us,” she says.

When Kevan refused to listen when Dorothy repeatedly told him no, Gavin says it should have raised serious red flags. “Anytime someone doesn’t hear no, it means they’re trying to control you,” Gavin says. “When a man says no in this culture, it’s the end of the discussion. When a woman says no, it’s the beginning of a negotiation.”

After four and a half years and many red flags, Dorothy finally broke off her relationship with Kevan. But that wasn’t the end. “He kept calling me, calling me with repeated questions. ‘What are you doing now?’ ‘What are you going to do tonight?’” Dorothy says. “And that’s when I realized I am in trouble here.”

On the urging of her son, Dorothy got a restraining order against Kevan, which she says gave her peace of mind. “And that was a huge mistake,” she says.

One night, Dorothy was asleep in her bed when she awoke to the sound of her name being shouted. “I turned to my left shoulder, and I saw a knife [about 10 inches long]. I could see the reflection of my TV in the blade. Then I saw that he had cutoff surgical gloves, and that was scary,” Dorothy says. “I put the covers right over my head and curled into a fetal position and started praying. He said to me, ‘Are you scared?’”

Rather than panic, Dorothy says she got out of bed, stood up and told Kevan he was leaving. As she walked calmly out the door, he followed her to the parking lot. “So I said, ‘You’re leaving now,’” she says. “He turned, went down the street, and I didn’t see him again.” Dorothy immediately called 9-1-1, and police later arrested Kevan. He was convicted and is serving a four-year prison sentence.

Gavin says when Dorothy stood up, spoke firmly to Kevan and walked out, she was accepting a gift of power by acting on her instincts. “The fetal position is not a position of power, but you came out of it with a great position of power. And the pure power to say to him, ‘You’re leaving now,’ is fantastic,” he says. “Of all the details in that story, the one that stayed with me the most is that you saw the reflection on your little television set on the bedside table in the knife. And what that told me was you are on, you are in the on position. You were seeing every single detail and acting on it.”

Just like ignoring your intuition, Gavin says the way women are conditioned to be nice all the time can lead them into dangerous situations. “The fact is that men, at core, are afraid that women will laugh at them. And women, at core, are afraid that men will kill them.”

This conditioning and fear, Gavin says, leads many women to try to be nice to people whose very presence makes them fearful and uncomfortable. They often believe that being mean increases risk, he says, when, in fact, the opposite is true.

“It’s when you’re nice that you open up and give information, that you engage with
someone you don’t want to talk to,” he says. “I have not heard of one case in my entire career where someone was raped or murdered because they weren’t nice. In other words, that’s not the thing that motivates rape and murder. But I’ve heard of many, many cases where someone was victimized because they were open to the continued conversation with someone they didn’t feel good about talking to.”

In my own book, How to Spot a Dangerous Man, I talk about cultural conditioning and how women feel they should be polite and at least go out with a man once. If you’re saying yes to a psychopath, once is all he needs.

Women also have HORRID and NONEXISTENT breakup skills. What in the world is more important than having good breakup skills? You are likely to date a dozen men in your lifetime and not likely to marry but one of them. What are you gonna do with the rest of them?

In this culture, with all the books on how to attract men, very little is written about how to break up. Women spend more time on a Glamour Shots picture of themselves for a dating site than learning how strong boundaries can protect them. A woman who is attracted to the bad boys doesn’t need the book, “How to Attract a Man”—she’s already doing it. But how can she get rid of the predator she DID attract? (See my book, Women Who Love Psychopaths.)

Women who buy our books, do phone counseling, come to 1:1’s and retreats, all have a primary motive: “Help me to never do this again.” While you definitely need insight about your own Super Traits that have positioned you in the line of fire with a psychopath, you also need most the ability to reconnect with your internal safety signal. Everything in the world we can teach you will not keep you safe if you ignore your body. Our cognitive information cannot save you the way your body can. That’s the bottom line. This is something you have to do for yourself.

This issue, of real fear vs. mere anxiety, is of utmost importance. It has really struck me that we may have missed something in our discussion about PTSD and its relationship to fight or flight reactions. Gavin helps us to see that fear happens in the moment—it’s an entire body sensation—the flash of fear followed by the intense adrenaline and fight or flight. The intensity of the body’s reactions usually COMPELS people into fight or flight.

With PTSD, I see how we have lumped more minor reactive reactions, like PTSD-induced fight or flight, with the real in-the-moment reactions of fear. I see them as different now. If the woman is THAT afraid of him and compelled by real fear as opposed to worry, (“He might harm me in the future, but he isn’t mad right now and not going to hurt me this second.”), she wouldn’t be with him because her animalistic reaction would be to flee.

Real fear IN THE MOMENT demands action. Our own ability to tolerate what he is doing suggests it’s not TRUE survival fear. This is the difference between animalistic/survival fear and our common-day PTSD reactionary fear.

Sometimes our body has reactions to evil or pathology. Normal psychology should ALWAYS have a negative reaction to abnormal psychology. So your first meeting with him should have produced SOMETHING in you. It may not have been the true fear reaction that COMPELLED you to run away, but you may have gotten other kinds of thoughts or bodily reactions to be in the presence of significant abnormality and sometimes, pure evil.

Listen to your body. It is smarter than your brain.

Women who have been in pathological relationships come away from them with problems associated with fear, worry, and anxiety. This is often related to Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), or what we call ‘High Harm Avoidance’—being on high alert, looking for ways they might get harmed now or in the future.

PTSD, by its own nature as a disorder, is an anxiety disorder that is preoccupied by both the past (flashbacks and intrusive thoughts of him or events) and by the future (worry about future events, trying to anticipate his behaviors, etc.). With long-term exposure to PTSD, this anxiety and worry begins to mask itself, at least in the mind, as fear. In fact, most women lump together the sensations of anxiety, worry, and fear into one feeling, and don’t differentiate between them.

Fear is helpful and safety-oriented whereas worry and anxiety are not helpful, and are related to phantom ‘possible’ events that often don’t happen. To that degree, worry and anxiety are distracting from real fear signals that could help you.

In his book, The Gift of Fear, which is now a classic on predicting harmful behavior in others, author Gavin deBecker delineates the difference between what we need fear FOR and what we DON’T need anxiety and worry for. In some ways, the ability to use fear correctly while stopping the use of anxiety and worry may do much to curtail PTSD symptoms.

deBecker, who is not a therapist but a Danger Analyst, has done what other therapists haven’t even done—nix PTSD symptoms of anxiety and worry by focusing on true fear and its necessity versus anxiety and its false meaning to us.

Freud used the term ‘fear’ (in contrast to anxiety), to refer to the reaction to real danger. Freud emphasized the difference between fear and anxiety in terms of their relation to danger:

~ Anxiety is a state characterized by the expectation of and preparation for a danger—even if it is unknown.

~ Fear implies a specific object to be feared in the here and now.

(Anxiety is: “He MIGHT harm me;” whereas, fear is: “He IS harming me—with his fist, words, actions, etc.”)

If you heard that there was a weapon proven to prevent most crimes (including picking a dangerous partner) before they happened, would you run out and buy it? World-renowned security expert, Gavin deBecker says this weapon exists but you already have it. He calls it “the gift of fear.”

The story of a woman named Kelly begins with a simple warning sign. A man offers to help carry her groceries into her apartment—and instantly, Kelly doesn’t like the sound of his voice. Kelly goes against her gut and lets him help her—and in doing so, she lets a rapist into her home.

“We get a signal prior to violence,” Gavin says. “There are pre-incident indicators— things that happen—before violence occurs.”

Gavin says that, unlike any other living creature, humans will sense danger, yet still walk right into it. He goes on to say, “You’re in a hallway waiting for an elevator late at night.  The elevator door opens, and there’s a guy inside, and he makes you afraid. You don’t know why, you don’t know what it is. And many women will stand there and look at that guy and say [to themselves], ‘Oh, I don’t want to think like that. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lets the door close in his face. I’ve got to be nice. I don’t want him to think I’m not nice.’ And so human beings will get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone they’re afraid of. There’s not another animal in nature that would even consider it.”

Gavin says that “eerie feelings” are exactly what he wants women to pay attention to. “We’re trying to analyze the warning signs,” he says, “and what I really want to teach, today and forever, is the feeling of the warning sign. All the other stuff is our explanation for the feeling—why it was this, why it was that. The feeling itself IS the warning sign.”

What happens over and over again is that women dismantle their OWN internal safety system by ignoring it. The longer they ignore it, the more ‘overrides’ it receives and this retrains the brain to ignore the fear signal. Once rewired, women are at tremendous risks of all kinds… risks of picking the wrong men, of squelching fear signals, of impending violence, shutting off alarms about potential sexual assaults, shutting down red flags about financial ripoffs, squeaking out hints about poor character in other people… and the list goes on. What is left after your whole entire safety system is dismantled? Not much.

Women, subconsciously sensing they need to have ‘something’ to fall back on, swap out true and profoundly accurate fear signals with the miserly counterfeit and highly unproductive feelings of worry and anxiety.

LADIES—WRONG FEELINGS!

Then they end up in counseling for their fourth dangerous relationship and wonder if they have a target sign on their forehead. No they don’t. They have learned to dismantle, rename, minimize, justify, or deny the fear signals they get or got in the relationship—as if their ability to ‘take it’ or ‘not be afraid’ of very dangerous behavior is some sort of win for them, as if their ability to look danger in the face and STAY means they are as tough or competitive as he is.

No—it means they have a fear signal that no longer saves them. Their barely stuttering signal means it’s been over-ridden by her. She felt it, labeled it, and released it, all the while staring eye-to-eye with what she should fear most.

Then later, another day or week passes, and she has mounting anxiety, “over what?” she wonders. She has a chronic low-grade worry, wisps of anxiety that waft through her life. She can’t put two and two together to figure out that ignoring true fear will demand to be recognized by her subconscious in some way—an illegitimate way through worry and anxiety that does nothing to save her from real danger. Her real ally (her true fear) has been squelched and banished.

When coming to us for counseling she wants us to help her ‘feel safe’ again when actually, we can’t do any of that. It’s all in her internal system as it’s always been. Her safety is inside her as is her future healing.

She will sit in the counselor’s office denying true fear and begging for relief from the mounting anxiety she is experiencing. She doesn’t trust herself, her intuition, her judgments—all she can feel is anxiety. And with good reason! True fear is her true intuition…not anxiety. But she’s already canned what can save her, and now, on some level, she must know she has nothing left that can help her feel and react.

Animals instinctively react to the danger signal—the adrenaline, flash of fear, and flood of cortisol. They don’t have internal dialogue with themselves, like, “What did that mean? Why did he say that? I don’t like that behavior—I wonder if he was abused as a child.”

An animal is trained to have a natural reaction to the fear signal—they run. You don’t see animals ‘stuck’ in abusive mating environments! In nature, as in us, we are wired with the King of Comments, which is the danger signal. When we respond to the flash of true fear, we aren’t left having a commentary with ourselves.

“The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.” ~John Schaar

People who were raised by pathological parents, or with siblings who are pathological, are more likely to repeatedly date pathological people. Some of the patterns of partner selection have to do with learned conditioning—learning to normalize abnormal behavior until that is the norm.

Some pathology can also be genetically transmitted, so people are often concerned if there are down lines in their family tree where pathology exists. For instance, one of the Cluster Bs with a fairly high transmission rate is narcissism. Psychopathy, too, is genetically transmitted way too often!

Clients have two concerns about pathology and its effect on them:

1. If pathology can be genetic and my parents were pathological, am I PATHOLOGICAL, TOO?
2. If damage can be done when parented by a pathological, am I DAMAGED?

Pathology can be genetic. There are many people who are born to, and raised by, pathological parents who are damaged by this pathological parenting, but don’t grow up to be pathological themselves. There has been a lot of research and study about this issue of resilience in people and why some do become pathological and others do not.  Nonetheless, about half of the children of pathological parents do NOT become pathological from genetic transmission or from pathological parenting.

However, many of these 50 percent who do NOT become pathological from genetic transmission or pathological parenting are STILL negatively affected by the parenting they did receive. They may carry aftermath symptoms that affect their choices, patterns, feelings, and behaviors. You might be plagued with self-doubt, low self-esteem, chronic caregiving of others, and/or a total disregard for your own needs or self-care. You could battle depression or chronic anxiety, or fight nagging pessimism about your future or the world around you. You might be dangerously naïve, never trusting your own instincts, and constantly be taken advantage of.

You could have eating disorders, sexual addictions/other sexual disorders, or obsessive- compulsive behaviors. You could medicate your feelings with drugs or alcohol or find abusive religious affiliations to take up where your pathological parents fell away. You may have emotional intimacy problems, or jump from relationship to relationship, fearing abandonment or being alone. Or you may engage in what is known as “sexual anorexia”—the forbidding of yourself to ever be intimate or loving with someone else.

Whether you understand why your parents (or siblings) behaved like they did, or you are engulfed in compassion and pity for their illness, the rubber meets the road at the point where your needs went so chronically unmet that you now have your own emotional problems because of what you didn’t get at those crucial developmental points of your life.  Compassion, pity, forgiveness and understanding don’t help you with what you never got from the most important people in your life. If you recognize these symptoms in yourself you probably were/are affected from pathological parenting.

If you learned to normalize abnormal behavior, no wonder dangerous and pathological men look like pretty normal people for you to date! Pathological parenting instills a pathological worldview about yourself, others, and the world around you. The “others” part of the worldview is how you keep ending up with pathological men—narcissists, sociopaths, and other dangerous types. What you learned at the feet of your parents was that black was white and white was black. So many women find that their level of attraction to pathological men was largely generated and supported within the pathological family.

This is a complicated issue that has its roots in several factors related to your adult life. Some of these patterns are related to:

• Your chronic pattern of selection in men
• Your inability to recognize and respond to red flags
• Your non-existent boundaries in intimate relationships
• Your pathologized worldview that sees black as white and white as black
• Your ongoing symptoms of relationship confusion, PTSD symptoms or other symptoms you might be having

Reading relationship books or going to relationship counselors is not going to address your pathological worldview and your corresponding symptoms and patterns of selection in men. Your unique family system and relating difficulties need to have the specific understanding and treatment associated with adult children of pathological parents.

We do recognize your unique needs. And we also understand your concern about having been so chronically exposed to pathology through your early years and its devastating results now in your adult life. Rest assured that if YOU were pathological, you would most likely NOT be reading this newsletter or seeking out treatment for your symptoms. Pathologicals don’t stay in counseling or treatment. If you see yourself in the list of symptoms from pathological parenting in this newsletter, rest assured they are VERY treatable!

The good news is that you can recover! Get the help you need in order to stop the cycle of pattern selection and the aftermath symptoms that plague you!

(**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

Women in these relationships and their family members who watch her relationship dynamics all wonder about **why** this dangerous guy is so hard to leave. While all the people around her have the easy and rational answers of how and why she should leave, the disengagement and detachment is harder with pathological persons than anyone else.

No one knows this better than her. At the heart of the attachment is the intensity of bonding produced in a relationship that has an emotional vortex pull. Much like magnets pointed towards each other, the draw and pull and staying power of pathologicals is not like other relationship dynamics.

As we studied these particular attachments we saw that there are unusual qualities to the relationships that even the women can’t define or adequately describe. This includes the dichotomous thinking often seen in mind control, the hypnotic engagement often seen in trauma, and the betrayal bonding often seen in sexual addiction. Combined, this power cocktail renders her not only entranced but paralyzed from action.

Normal motivations do not motivate her. Not her current roller-coaster mental health, her other family relationships, her declining health, her children, her job or any other force that would usually rally her to her own self care. No wonder people who care about her are baffled that a high functioning, bright, proactive woman has been reduced to a near catatonic/hypnotized/brain washed version of her former self.

An hour a week at the counselor’s office has done little to unwedge her from this super-glued relationship. It hasn’t recognized the hypnotic entrancement, the growing PTSD symptoms, the cognitive loops and entrenched dichotomous thinking. It hasn’t unveiled the death grip that pathologicals can have on a squirming victim. Or the mind control that sucks the willpower and brain function from her.

Physically and emotionally exhausted from the too-many-go-rounds with him, there isn’t enough left of her to fight her way out or even think her way out. Many women now suffer from Chronic Fatigue from the wearing process with the pathological.

Without the emotional resources and physical strength, her lethargy just allows the relationship to roll like waves over the top of her. Without help or intervention, she is likely to have a complete physical break down including severe medical problems, sleep disruptions, mental confusion, panic attacks, anxiety, depression and more. Women have developed auto immune disease and cardiac problems in the middle of these acutely stressful relationships.

With all of their resources sapped and their concentration at a near record low, many have had to quit their jobs, have been fired, been in car accidents, or have incurred sporting injuries because of the inability to concentrate. Taking an inventory of just what it has cost her to be in a relationship with a pathological is often the first step towards education.

The disengagement process is a function supported by counselors or The Institute in which education, acceptance of his diagnosis, self care re-initiation, symptom management and then the full recovery process is necessary. Some need short term programs that help them kick start their own recovery.

Many of the women have PTSD now from the exposure to the pathological. PTSD worsens without treatment, with added stress, and with time. Somewhere she has to find the counseling resources in order to return her to a life she used to know before the pathological. This includes finding support people, support groups, counseling, specific focused books and audios on the subject, and if needed, retreat or residential programs.

If this describes your current situation, get what you need to heal now–to minimize the effects of the growing PTSD and the intrusive and ping ponging thoughts. Most of all, in order to be broken, the intensity of attachment must first be understood.

(**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

By Sandra L. Brown, MA

Part of the problem we face in trying to get to the nitty-gritty of pathological love relationships is that how we do it or what we call it is judged so severely that it impairs sharing the valuable outcomes that are learned. There are groups of professionals, women’s organizations, and service agencies that tiptoe around what we call patterns of selection in relationships. There are unspoken rules and heavily weighted opinions about what we can discuss and how we discuss the outcomes.

What am I talking about? Since the 1970’s and the women’s movement, discussing the specifics about women’s choices in relationships, patterns of selection, personality traits, mental health, and sexual addiction/deviancy has been largely discouraged as labeling the victim or victim blaming. It has put the victim off-limits for any in-depth understanding other than a victimology theory that was developed in the 1970’s.

It is hard to get around the billboard image of victim to talk about any kind of relationship dynamics or other psychological aspects (including biology or temperament-engrained traits) that is happening in the pathological love relationship.

We may study the perpetrator, but we already have a theory for the victim that is not to be disturbed.  Compare this to any other field of mental health and it’s absurd that we would say, for example, “Since we already understand depression, no more theories, no more studying!  Don’t call it depression or you are blaming the patients for their own depression.”

To study the woman is to blame her. To measure her traits to see if there are vulnerabilities or pattern typing is to suggest she is flawed.

• The victim assuredly has been through trauma.
• Studying the victim in no way says she has not been through trauma.
• The victim is not to blame for what happened to her.
• Studying the victim in no way says she is responsible for what happened to her.
• The victim did not choose the victimization, but in relational dysfunction, she did choose the victimizer.

Can we learn something about that?

How will cancer be eradicated, or a cure for AIDS found if we don’t study the problem from all angles? If we conclude that studying the victims blames them, then we have cut off an entire segment of research that can help us in prevention, intervention, and treatment—whether it’s a medical disorder or a pathological relationship.

Studying victimology, including various aspects, is not victim character assassination. It might be trait examination or pattern of selection analysis. It might be a lot of things that have nothing to do with blame and shame but everything to do with understanding or creating new paradigms in which to see these relationships.

It might piggyback off of theories developed in the 1970’s… surely we have learned SOMETHING new about relationship dynamics, pathology in relationships, personality disorders in intimate partners, violence and addiction, and their part in these relationships… surely we can UPDATE a theory without our own assassination or that of the victim?

In some ways, I envy the scientific and research communities that look at the data, and pass all the political correctness and emotional politics of labeling something certain groups find offensive. They test and crunch the numbers and put it in a journal without all the rigmarole. But in our case, what we study and how we describe what we find, is subject to so much scrutiny that many clinicians and writers hesitate to publish what is found.

So it has been with what The Institute has studied, found, reported, and written.  In many organizations my first book, How to Spot a Dangerous Man, was rejected for looking at family role modeling, patterns of selection, and other aspects that women themselves said contributed to their pathological relationship.  On the other hand, it has been hailed by many domestic violence agencies and used widely in shelters, treatment centers and women’s prisons.

We stepped it up a big notch in Women Who Love Psychopaths where we used testing instruments to look at women’s traits to see if there were temperament patterns in women who ended up in the most dangerous and disordered of relationships. This caught huge attention from some groups as the groundbreaking trait identification that it was, and still is. However, victims’ groups saw it as labeling. How can we help women if we don’t understand their biological makeup?

Ironically, what we found was significant—Super Traits so perfectly and symmetrically seen in most cases. Did we hurt any victims by studying that? Or have we helped thousands of women who have read the books, been counseled by our trained therapists, and come to our treatment programs? How would we have gotten here today without daring to look deeper… to even risk looking at the victim? Not to blame her, but to understand her!

Some of the biggest breakthroughs that have been happening are in understanding the neurobiology of our brains and the consequences it has on our behaviors, choices, and what ramifications these have on our future. We know that MRIs are being done on psychopathic brains, revealing areas of the brain that work differently. Someday, I think that may cross over, and other personality disorders and chronic mental illnesses will be able to be detected by MRIs as well. This will assist immensely in understanding how those disorders affect neurobiology and brain function.

How can we understand the victim of the pathological?

• If we used the word damaged and looked at how different brain regions of victims function—over- or under-functioning, influences of stress, PTSD, adrenaline, cortisol, and early childhood abuse—could we come to understand how their brains might function in their patterns of selection in dangerous relationships?
• Could we come to understand that even temperament traits might give proclivity to how the brain chooses or how the brain categorizes or ignores red flags of danger, or is highly reactive to traumatized attraction?
• Could we understand brains that have higher tolerance levels because of certain brain areas that operate differently than in other people?
• Could we understand traumatic memory storage and why good memories of the pathological (as awful as he might be) are so much stronger than the memories of abuse?
• If we know what part of the brain distorts memory storage, can we work with that?
• Could we come to understand trait temperaments as risk factors or certain brain functions as possible victim vulnerabilities?
• Would we know who is at risk and understand better how to more effectively TREAT the victim in counseling, and develop prevention and intervention programs?
• Or, how intensity of attachment could be either a temperament trait or a brain function instead of merely calling it victim labeling.

I am not only interested in the psychobiology of the victim, but how the psychobiology affects patterns of selection and reactions in the most pathological of relationships.

When we really start dealing with an open dialogue about these survivors, looking past ridiculous theories that imply asking questions equals victim blaming, then maybe we can really offer some new theories into victimology that bypass band-aid approaches to complex psycho/bio/social understandings.

This is what The Institute continues to do.

(**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

By Sandra L. Brown, MA

At the heart of any grassroots effort or organization is the concept of the wounded healer. There wouldn’t be a women’s movement without those who have been victims of something or other helping newer victims. It’s not only the heart of grassroots organizations like ours, but of the victims-rights movement and many other strong and healing national movements in general. I think of Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program—drug addicts helping other addicts, rape survivors helping new victims, domestic violence victims volunteering at shelters, Hurricane Katrina victims helping at Habitat for Humanity. And the list goes on. It’s the genesis of any giving organization—someone gets hurt, heals, and then helps. That’s how it all works. The trick is to know when you are well enough to help.

In 1983 my father was murdered. I was in my 20s and happily working in the field of marketing—far, far away from psychology or the self-help field. But after seeing the murder scene, acquiring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), finding no help and getting worse, I decided if I EVER got better I’d help others with PTSD. Luckily, a national pilot project for survivors of homicide victims was forming to see if we responded to group counseling. I was fortunate to be in the first test group—I was helped and I did keep my word. I stayed on at the group… helped open an office, developed training programs to teach others how to treat surviving family members of a murder, did court advocacy with family members of murder victims, was a media spokesperson on large public murder trials, spoke at conferences, lobbied for new laws and went back to school to get my degree so I could do even more. As I began to heal, I slowly became more involved in the field of victimology.

That was over 30 years ago. Since then, I have worked not only with survivors of homicide, but those of incest, cults, domestic violence, rape, and every kind of trauma disorder imaginable. I have started nonprofit mental-health centers, the country’s first long-term residential treatment program for women with multiple personalities (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder), hospital trauma programs, outpatient programs, and church programs. I have worked in domestic violence shelters, women’s programs, and court-ordered battering programs for men. I have worked with the sexually addicted and the sexually traumatized. I have traveled to Brazil and helped start victim organizations there to help millions of abandoned street children. I have trained workers for Australia in cult deprogramming. I developed and hosted my own TV show called, “A Voice for Victims” and did regular radio shows with several stations. I have written seven books (and counting), numerous e-books, created CDs and DVDs, and written for several women’s online websites and programs.

Now I direct The Institute, conduct research, phone counseling, writing, therapeutic retreats and counseling. To tell the truth, I can’t even REMEMBER everything I have done to date! LOL! (Maybe that’s a GOOD thing!) The point is, many years ago my life was altered by a murder. For over 30 years I have given my life’s work to reaching out. I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all been easy or even financially supportive work. It’s been a financially ‘barren’ field of work—I’ll never make retirement. Whatever financial gain there is, I just dole it back out to other women’s organizations. BUT it’s at the heart of my own recovery and belief system that when we are ready enough and healthy enough, giving back strengthens our own recovery.

Someone once said, “You never help someone else without first helping yourself.” Every time I help someone else with PTSD, it helps me too. Every time I help someone recognize pathology in others, it helps me remember it too. At the core of recovery is the need and almost spiritual mandate to reach out and give others the hope that you now have. It’s only hope that keeps others going, not ‘end it all’ or want to give up and go back to him.

We don’t really have the answers for another person’s life; we only have information and hope. That’s what we give. But like Mother Teresa said, “Give what you’ve got.” The title, ‘wounded healer’ is a little misleading. It sounds like anyone wounded can be a healer; that any trauma leads to triumph, that any hurt can help others.

Over the years of running counseling programs and centers and teaching counseling classes, I heard fresh new interns come in and say, “I was raped so I want to help the raped.” It’s a great grassroots philosophy and, when it works, it works great. And when it doesn’t work, it hurts other people. I would try to explain to interns when they would really be able to EFFECTIVELY give back, but many didn’t want to hear me; if they wanted to do it, it must be time to do it.

When it matters more that you “just do it” than if you do it safely and effectively, then it’s probably not about the victim and more about your own woundedness that still needs healing.

The interns would volunteer to run an abuse group and the first story that hit too close to home or sounded like their own trauma, they ended up in a meltdown—crying in the group they were supposed to lead. They would go home and have nightmares or flashbacks or become so preoccupied they could no longer function well. We call this ‘vicarious trauma’ or Secondary PTSD—when PTSD becomes reactivated from working or helping too soon after their own trauma OR, like in the 9/11 attacks, when so much overexposure to other people’s pain causes symptoms of PTSD they didn’t previously have.

Jumping in too early leads to reactivation of PTSD and career burnout (like being in and out of the counseling field in only a couple of years). The helper can become so re-engrossed in their own trauma that they end up acting more like the people they are trying to help because they…

• believe they can ‘save or fix’ someone else
• tell their own stories in too much detail in group
• become reactivated emotionally, physically, spiritually and sexually
• feel overwhelmed with the responsibility of helping others
• are too invested in helping other people change their lives
• invest too much of their personal or family time in other people’s problems
• go home re-traumatized as if they told their own story even though they hadn’t
• neglect their own self-care, family, and their own emotional and spiritual needs
• can become encased in a Messiah Complex

Then they end up burning out because their startle reflex is increased, their sleep is disrupted and their irritability is high. If this happened to a professional mental-health counselor, we would call this an ‘impaired practitioner,’ and she might be put on a hiatus for R&R. If you are a volunteer and you act this way, you get the Volunteer of the Year Award and are rewarded for burning yourself out. In too many self-help areas, vicarious trauma is applauded and upheld as a standard of devotion to a cause instead of an unbalanced act of self-neglect.

We need people in our organizations who WANT to give back. We need them to be healed enough that they actually HAVE something to give back, which is why I’m leery of online forums run by survivors who might not be in the greatest emotional shape themselves. Gauging your own self-health may be subjective… Am I ready? is a great self-exploratory question. Because at the heart of all of us who want to give back robustly, we want to do it with a right motive—giving, not expecting, to get anything back from extremely wounded people—AND with a healthy mental state that allows us to listen without triggers and to help without burning out.

If you feel you are ready, there are lots of great places to help. Go work at a women’s organization—answer the office phones, help with a fundraiser, work in the office, pick up donations. Get your feet wet and stay around the issue you want to work in and see how you do. Don’t offer to answer the crisis phone line if you are only a few months out of your own crisis relationship. That isn’t realistic.

Recovery from abuse is slo-o-ow… it takes longer than you think it does. But you probably have skills you CAN use now—in other ways. When I was too burned out to be of help to anyone, I knew I could plate food at a homeless shelter and offer a smile. I could do that much at that time. Do what you can, stay healthy yourself, continue to work on your own recovery—recovery isn’t an event, it’s a lifestyle. The opportunity to help others will continue to present itself. It’s just what happens when the hurt heals and the hurt helps others.

If you know you are ready give the best of yourself to a women’s organization in your own community, don’t volunteer to distract yourself from your necessary healing. Volunteer when you’ve achieved a healthy, strong recovery and can maintain it. If we can help you in your recovery, we’re here to help you strengthen so you too can pay it forward.

(**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

By Sandra L. Brown, MA

Raise your hand if you believe that, if you were run over by a train, you could reasonably expect to heal in 6 months, a year, even two years. If you suffered a traumatic brain injury from
being run over by a train, would a neurologist say to you, “You’ll be good as new – like nothing ever happened – in a year”? Highly unlikely…

You have been run over by The Pathology Train. And anyone hit by this train will have acquired a trauma disorder from it (re-experiencing it over and over). You will have medical conditions and a neurological impact. Your core self will have been shattered at a deep level and all those aspects will need to be treated.

Can you expect to treat a trauma disorder, medical conditions, a shattered self, and a TBI all in a year or some pre-conceived time frame? No one has a magic wand to wave over you to get all that damage zipped up in a short period of time.

The problem is your level of expectation is not equal to the level of damage you have experienced. This isn’t just “a bad break up”. You have been harmed emotionally, physically, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, financially, existentially at your core self level, and neurologically.

Survivors say, “I have been no contact for 2 years, why am I not better?” Or, “I have been out 4 years and dating why am I not better? Why do I still have triggers? Why do new triggers begin? Why am I triggered by dating?”

The question should not be ‘why.’ The answer is your experience–you aren’t well yet. You have a level of expectation that, because time has passed, you should be better – but you aren’t. That you aren’t better in a short period of time, in and of itself, points to the reality that this is extreme damage. Extreme.

There is no Oprahology positive psychology approach that wipes this away. It is the arduous task of rebuilding your life, not making symptoms simply go away. There is no drive-thru healing despite all the ridiculous books that claim simply to go no contact or breathe and it will all be ok.

Believing this is recovery from a bad break up sets you up for unrealistic expectations that, yet again, make you doubt your judgment which sets off more cognitive dissonance about trusting yourself and your recovery.

This is the most complicated form of trauma I have ever seen in 30 years. But among your Super Traits is resourcefulness and resilience. You will have some levels of recovery but obviously not as quickly as you think.

If it were easy, you wouldn’t be here. If everything else had worked, you wouldn’t be here. If you had gotten up and walked away from being run over by The Pathology Train, you wouldn’t be here.

‘Why’ is not the question, it’s the answer to the extremity of your experience.

Trauma is not only calculated by the depth of his disorder. It has just as much to do with your own previous levels of trauma (childhood, adulthood, etc.) and your own mixture of resiliency and inner resources. Everyone is different. Some people with earlier trauma are taken down hard and fast by these relationships while others, who had no previous trauma but might have had a more pathological partner, may fare better. You can’t judge, it just is what it is.

Recovery depends on previous traumas, inner resources, resiliency factors and other things that feed into the equation on recovery. Recovery is not linear with ebbing and flowing as periodic challenges highlight what is left to work on because trauma is like an onion. As you peel down the layers and get different symptoms in different layers, it might be getting to the core and some of the final symptoms that need treatment.

Some of these recovery challenges are due to the emotional dysregulation that comes from PLRs. It is either dysregulation from not having learned recovery skills or it is dysregulation that has been created from now being very sensitive to pathology in which you become highly reactive to situations that stir up those emotions. Either way, skills for dysregulation is what is needed. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is effective for developing these skills.

When you try to get people who have not experienced a PLR to affirm your situation, it’s like war vets trying to get others to know what it was like to have served in a war. It is a set up for non-affirmation and rightfully so because others never lived it. While they may have compassion for your situation, they cannot have empathy for something they haven’t experienced. It isn’t possible to get affirmation from people who haven’t walked in our shoes.

Survivors often get the recovery process backwards–they are still having symptoms and haven’t learned consistent symptom management but are dealing with loneliness or boredom and friends suggest the best way to get revenge is to get back out there in the dating scene. Or they are symptom managing but they haven’t learned how to rein in their super traits with normal people much less intimate others. They don’t understand or ‘hear’ their super traits. Their PTSD still has their intuition numbed or hyped up so either they don’t receive red flags or all they see are red flags.

All of these are indicators of work still to be done before you are ready to date. The Institute has some dating bylaws we go by or you can have a session with Jennifer who prepares people for dating and assesses whether they are ready. But until you have built a strong recovery and a GREAT and GENTLE Life and are living it, you are putting the cart before the horse.

Recovery requires the ability to reclaim your previous self and remove yourself from the storyline of victimization.

Recovery isn’t just about no contact with him or learning and using breathing exercises. It’s about disengagement from the whole topic. It’s about learning what your Super Traits are, what they ‘sound like’ in your interactions with others, and learning how to manage them in order to protect yourself from harm. It’s about learning how to calm your raging physical symptoms and how your physical health is at risk if these symptoms are left unmanaged. There are multiple facets to recovery.

Recovery is about building a new life, a different life – one in which you will be safe from this kind of harm in the future.

(**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