Head vs. Heart

[~Solo]

Tough last 5 or so days....not that all of them haven't been tough.  I have had great insight and peace at times since I moved out of house from N husband.  However, I'm finding that my heart appears to be holding on even though my head "knows" the ugly of it all.  My head says, "no way you can EVER make it with this man".  I know in my hear that he is already seeing someone or someones.  A woman knows and I have not had any contact with him by phone or email till the day before yesterday (since April 29 email).  I had shut down in order to keep the confusion to  minimum.  So, then two days ago, I realized that I can't just keep this under the rug...or can I?  I guess he is most likely hoping that I just file for divorce and then he doesn't have to be responsible in any way.  He has not done anything to be responsible for this in any way, other than writing a check to me once I moved out.  There is literally no feeling there.  The only thing I saw in him was his confusion upon my initial departure, but I never felt that it was heartfelt or about us.  It was about him.  So, I emailed to him day before yesterday - because we do need to iron out a couple of things - and said, "I guess we should connect at some point.  What do you think?".  An hour later, he wrote back a very long, deliriously frantic and busy sounding schedule (with days and flights and programs?? - except he did give me a day that he says what he was doing but not where.  Then he said he was flying to Phoenix and back in one day?) giving me three times of meeting me that would work for him.  He then asked if he should bring anything, what to expect and if I had mailed divorce papers to him.  I think a part of me wanted to know if he was going to question our next move, but it seemed as though the distance I had put in there had become quite comfy to him.  I responded yesterday morning.  I told him I had not served him and that I would tell him before hand.  I asked him point blank if he was serious about counseling and our "perfect storm" (as he suggested in an email before I cut contact).  He conveyed that our situation had been a piling up of unmanageable circumstances when combined.  I then asked, to him, what that meant to us.  I haven't heard from him yet.  I'm sure the directness wasn't something he was ready for as he has to be in control and he changes his mind so often that I most likely caught him at a time where he is euphorically existing.  At those times, he would not give up our split for anything.  It's the dysphoria that will have him writing to me in utter confusion as he did before I cut off contact.    
So, my head knows....sign the papers and get them out.  I think the more the distance, the more he is sinking further into his pathology.  I can't change him and I know it.  Also, what is the deal with me even considering for a moment that it could work considering the abuse that he put me through?  It's that darn devaluation!  That has really done something to me.  He will never know it though, because THAT is MY ONLY power left.  I cannot show him that he affects me one ounce.  I'm checking in.... in tears and sad that I thought my life plan was unfolding.  I know it could be much worse and I do not discount what others have endured or sacrificed to gain the knowledge you now have.  I feel as though I could break out of myself screaming.  I don't know who would emerge.  I have been quite self controlled and I feel that I need a release other than the quiet lonely tears I have been shedding....  AND the worst part is, that no man is my N husband.  I'm afraid that it takes this sort of being to ignite my passions.  I "really" want to grow and love someone who will be good for me and love me back.  

I'm so sad..... help  
~Solo  

[CZBZ]

Dear Solo,


This may be the Golden Rule of message boards like ours: "Anything you lose automatically doubles in value." ~Mignon McLaughlin

I never knew that until I lost my husband, though. I never knew how amazingly handsome, desirable, competent, perfect, manly and irreplaceable he was until he was gone. For some crazy reason and who knows how come, we yearn even more for someone if they reject us. I tell ya, this is how it is when we're ending a relationship and it makes no freaking sense because prior to leaving (or being rejected), we didn't sit around 'mooning' over our perfect partner, now did we? I don't know why our brains do that OR our hearts. You'd think that getting OUT of an unhealthy/controlling/abusive or narcissistic relationship would make us so dang happy we'd never look back!

BUT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! It's not like that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not At All!

What you're going through is what I went through too. It made me feel so crazy to yearn for a guy that treated me so badly and yet, hey, I can admit it: yearn for him I did.

There's a huge difference between Yearning and Yielding however. You can yearn all day long. You can yearn all night, while at work, in teh bathroom or fixing a crappy dinner for yourself because you can't stop crying. You can YEARN on the way to the dentist or your favorite therapist. What you cannot do is YIELD to the yearning without taking another hit to your self-esteem.

I discoverd that the more intense my YEARNING and the more disciplined my refusal to YIELD to those yearnings, the higher my self-esteem became. Probably because I learned to trust myself even when the cravings were intense. so in an odd way, YEARNING can restore our sense of self AS LONG AS WE DON'T GIVE IN TO THE YEARNINGS.

Not that people are perfect about never 'yielding'. I did it plenty of times myself.

It Is Absolutely Shocking and Emotional Traumatizing when we allow ourselves to fully notice how detached the narcissist is from us. To truly grasp the shallowness of his or her emotional attachment. To admit, once and for all, that we really didn't matter all that much. Hey, that's hard to do when the narcissist mattered so much to you that you agonized over helping him, the relationship and changing yourself. Even after somersaulting over insults year after year, we could been cardboard cutouts. Rather than FACE that pain (which is deep and cold and brutal), we give the relationship one last desperate chance because we do NOT want to accept the truth about our relationship. That's what I think, anyway.

You're doing good by taking care of yourself this morning.  

Hugs,
CZ

[RB22]

Solo,

I can tell you I wanted him.. my heart didn't want him to leave.  My heart would have given him anything he wanted had he stayed and took care of me like he used to.....BUT  my head would NOT let me do that... it kept showing different 'not nice' memories on that movie screen in my head... to combat the lovey dovey feeling I had for wanting him. 

I would engage him, here and there... give in just a bit to my heart and test HIS waters.... what I found were dead shark eyes staring at me.  A wise person once told me that if I saw the shark eyes... he was a shark and sharks eat people... and that was what he was doing to me...devouring my self esteem bite by bite. 

It took a few times....before I realized I was better with no contact from him...NOW I can say I am happier with no contact from him.... it took awhile to say it.

Please give yourself the gift of time.....things change with time.

Hugs,

RB

[honeybearII]

Just echoing what CZ and RB have said.  It is human nature to value things that seem to be beyond our reach - even marriages that are crumbling.  During the separation and divorce, I was like CZ.  I yearned for my husband in a way I never had when he was an actual physical presence, LOL.

See it as the last emotional gasps before you finally begin the healing process, solo.  One thing I DID do, with the help of a therapist, was that every time I went into one of those yearning times, I consciously called to mind one of the many times he had treated me so horribly, and I wrote it down in a notebook.  Over the weeks and months that began to accumulate with no real effort on his part to see me or reconnect with me, I read those things over and over.  Every time I did so I got angrier until the anger and feeling of despising him began to be much, much stronger than the emotional yearning to be connected with him. 

Why in the world would I want to be back into a relationship where I felt belittled, disrespected, and despised?

Honey

[Julia]

Solo,

THere is something undeniably addicting about abuse - it programs us to devalue the self and turn toward the  abuser.  This has been documented in people who spent much less time with the abuser and had zero commitment to them - hostages. So what ELSE can we, who committed our lives, futures, families to these men expect? We who denied our true feelings during many, many years of crazy-making manipulation and devaluation? THere is a huge tug towards the abuser and huge self doubt about what we know was abusive. I feel it even now, even with his multiple NPD diagnoses; even as he is completely transformed and no longer resembles anything that I ever loved.

I enjoyed the discussion of shark eyes. It inspired me to look for images. I wish I could include a picture of Ns own shark eyes. I'm not sure how to do the whole photobucket thing- so I will just post these images from the web.

Worth a thousand words: Found in google images under  - shark eyes


Real shark's eyes-


This is a great book btw



And finally, the faces of 40  killers

[SusyP14]

Solo,

There is a long reason why the good memories surface to the top, which I will post below.  One of the best suggestions that I received was to make a list of my red flags.  I had a list of ****70***** red flags that ignored, dismissed or renamed.  ****70**** most were major, some were minor, some make my hair stand on end and ask:  WTH were you thinking?

So whenever you think:  He was so hot, so fit, so whatever it is he was for you, pull out your red flag list and say:  THIS?  This is what I miss?

Someone I know put all the red flags on index cards and taped them all over her room to be an even bigger reminder.

Here is why the good memories come up first:

WHY YOU ONLY REMEMBER THE GOOD STUFF OF A BAD RELATIONSHIP 
PART I

by Sandra L. Brown, M.A.

Over and over again women are puzzled by their own process in trying to recover from a pathological relationship. What is puzzling is that despite the treatment they received by him, despite the absolute mind screwing he did to her emotions, not only is the attraction still VERY INTENSE but also the POSITIVE memories still remain strong.

Woman after woman says the same thing that when it comes to remaining strong in not contacting him (what we call Starving the Vampire) she struggles to pull up (and maintain the pulled up) negative memories of him and his behavior that could help her keep strong and detached.

But why? Why are the positive memories floating around in her head freely and strongly and yet the bad memories are stuffed in a mind closet full of fuzzy cobwebs that prevent her from actively
reacting to those memories?

There are a couple of reasons of which we will discuss today only the first one.  Lets think of your mind like a computer. Memories are stored much like they are stored on a computer. When there is pain and trauma, memories are stored differently then when its a positive memory. Pulling up the negative memories from your hard drive is different than pulling up a memory that is on your desk top as an icon emblem.

Traumatic memories get fragmented on their way to being stored on the hard drive. They get divided up into more than one file. In one file is the emotional feelings, another file is the sights, another file the sounds, another file the physical sensations.

But a WHOLE and complete memory is made up of ALL those files TOGETHER AT THE SAME TIME what you emotionally felt, saw, heard, and physically experienced.  Not just one piece of it and not just the positive memory of it. A memory is good + bad = complete.

But when things are traumatic, (or stressful) the mind seperates the whole experience into smaller bits and pieces and then stores them seperately in the mind because its less painful that way.

When women try to remind themselves why they should not be with him, they might get flashes of the bad memory but strangely, the emotional feelings are NOT attached to it. They wonder where did the feelings go?  They can see the bad event but they dont feel much about what they remember.

If you are playing a movie without the sound, how do you know what the actors are passionately feeling? Its the same thing with this traumatic recall of memories. You might see the video but not hear the pain in the voices. The negative or traumatic memory is divided up into several files and you are only accessing one of the files in a place where you have stored the positive aspects of the relationship.

To complicate things further, positive memories are not stored like negative memories. They are not divided up into other files. They do not need to be they are not traumatic.

So when you remember a time when the relationship was good or cuddly or the early parts of the relationships which are notoriously honeymoonish, the whole memory comes up the emotional feelings, the visual, the auditory, the sensations. You have a WHOLE and STRONG memory with that. Of course that is WAY MORE appealing to have a memory that is not only GOOD but one in which you feel all the powerful aspects of it as well.

Now, close your eyes and pull up a negative memory can you feel the difference? You might see it but not feel it. Or hear it and not see much of it. Or feel a physical sensation of it but not the emotional piece that SHOULD go with the physical sensation. No matter what your experience is of the negative emotion, it is probably fragmented in some way.

Negative and traumatic memories are often incomplete memories they are memory fragments floating all over your computer/mind. They are small files holding tiny bits of info that have fragmented your sense of the whole complete memory. These distorted and broken memory fragments are easily lost in your mind.

If you have grown up in an abusive or alcoholic home, you were already subconsciously trained how to seperate out memories like this. If your abuse was severe enough early on, your mind just automatically does this anyway if you get scared, or someone raises their voice, or you feel fear in anyway your
brain starts breaking down the painful experience so its easier for you to cope with.

Next week we will talk about one other way your mind handles positive and negative memories and why you are flooded with positive recall and blocked from remembering and feeling those negative things hes done to you.

I hope by now with these newsletters you can see the unqiue aspects of what you have lived thru in the pathological relationship and why this is a whole different thing to heal from then other relationships. This is why regular counseling often does not work and forget about reading regular relationship books! They are NOT written for pathologically based dynamics! Imago therapy is not gonna help this. Dr. Phils books arent gonna touch this. The pathological relationship dynamics are UNIQUE and require a combination of several approaches to help you heal. If your parents were pathological as well, you have the double whammy to heal from.

Please do not live your whole life with symptoms that CAN BE treated and helped. We have made our retreats as cheap as we possibly can so that each of you can receive help and healing.

[~Solo]

Thanks EVERYONE for your input.  You could say that I have reached the next level in the process.  I left then went into a flood of being positive, just happy to have some peace away from N even though I loved him.  Now, I am feeling the real separation and my own personal losses.  I'm also more aware of what I was attracted to and I'm trying deal with that.  I can really see his pathology now too.  He is literally absent (even though we need to finalize a few details before dissolution).  I have enough knowledge of why he's the way he is so I'm not reacting to it, but I am dealing with my pain that IS still real.  I feel the large empty space now even though not much has changed.  I'm still doing the same things as before (alone) I left N.  Now, however, I am not trying to be with him, I'm trying to remove him from my heart and mind.  I hear time and time again that all wounds heal in time.  I can see that it's imperative that I "really" do heal properly from this.  People really have no idea of the dangers out there so easily stumbled into.  They are life altering.  I'm wondering if I'll ever really be able to get over this.  Are some things just not healed?  Maybe we just push the importance of that pain to the back seat somewhere?        

SusyP - LOVED the article.  Can you tell me about the newsletter?  HOW DO I FIND OUT ABOUT THESE PATHOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP RETREATS? Thanks!!
SEFG - the continual reminder about god is great....
Eyes - true-the relationship with myself will be the most important
Julia - interesting pics!
Honey - I find that writing on here has helped and being able to go back and read my posts serves as a notebook!  
RB22 - u were good to keep looking at those bad memories....
CZBZ - yearning / yielding - it's true, It has helped me with my self confidence when not reacting to my yearning.  I'm learning that I'm stronger than I was told by N or knew myself!  I also think secretly, he is baffled by my ability to do this.... hmmm?

Heartfelt thanks,
~Solo
  

[SusyP14]

Solo,

I am huge fan of Sandra Browns.  Here is her websites and here is the list of the upcoming retreats (they are in Brevard, NC).  I did a 5 day intensive.  If you can wait until July, I would wait on the incorporation of EMDR.  I found EMDR (rapid eye movement therapy) very helpful for me in managing PTSD symptoms.

General website:
http://saferelationshipsmagazine.com/

Retreats:
http://saferelationshipsmagazine.com/educational-ctr/retreats-2

Open for registration: Healing the Aftermath
Monday, June 7- Friday, June 11, 2010

Healing the Aftermath And Spa Package
Dates: June 21-25

Healing for emotions, body, and soul! The Institute is combining our highly effective Healing the Aftermath Retreat with a Soul Revitalizing Spa Package! 

Accommodations, airport pick up and drop off (Asheville, NC), continental breakfast, up to 5 hours of group coaching per day, shared twin room, and Spa Package 5 days/4 nights . (Does not include transportation or other food).

The Institute will be offering symptom reduction of Intrusive Thoughts and Obsessional Thinking using EMDR July 26-31. More details will be available soon.

[Flower]

Julia,
Thank you for your post with the photos of the shark eyes and eyes of the psychopaths.

In previous posts on other forums, these eyes have also been referred to as "chameleon" or "reptilian" eyes. There has even been websites about people with reptilian eyes and going as far as saying that they are the off-spring of reptilian aliens without regard for human emotions.      I don't know if I would take it that far!

Nevertheless, I do perceive a difference in the eyes between empathic people and those who are referred to as sociopathic or psychopathic. It is difficult for me to explain, but there is a "warmness" in the eyes when an empathic person smiles as opposed to a n/p, who has a smarmy grin with cold and intense eyes.  This grin was especially strong in one person I encountered who ended up stalking me. I still am not sure why I dismissed that cold intense stare.

I did a quick google and here is some of the websites I came up with:

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/esp_vida_alien_29.htmhttp://

http://masksofsanity.blogspot.com/2009/02/stare-of-psychopath-whats-beneath-it.

I couldn't believe all the websites out there that have to do with reptilian eyes and many of them are too far out there for me.  Some of them go on about shapeshifting. I guess my curious and cynical mind will have to check it out, LOL



Flower

[SusyP14]

who has a smarmy grin with cold and intense eyes. ~ Flower

OMG This describes xn PERFECTLY.  I am glad to know this as something else to pick up on.  Come to think of it, I never saw that man laugh (I laugh all the time) EXCEPT once when he saw me trip (luckily I did not fall or he may have cracked a rib).  What an ARSE!!!  Other then that, he did not seem to find many things funny or ever have a real smile. 

I do remember wondeirng why his eyes had no life and no sparkle.

[Flower]

SEFG,

For narcissists,it is all about appearances...just superficiality.  Have you ever heard or read the expression, "Street angel, house devil.?"

So many narcissist can be an azz in private to the ones in their household, but to those who they are trying to impress, they can be the friendliess and most mannerly person you would want to meet.

And about shapeshifting, this has to do with changing the entire appearance of one's body. In most of these websites, shapeshifting is changing the color and appearance of eyes to look
more repilitian or snake-like. 

I am not surprised that your N is really into that.  IME, as Ns age, they tend to get more paranoid and believe in more conspiracy theories. Isn't there a thread somewhere here about that? LOL

Flower