Shame

That Sinking Feeling

This blog is written for female survivors of male perpetrators.

That sinking feeling when you start to realise that the pain is not going to go away this time is very very frightening. This time it's not just the pain of breaking up with someone you loved. It's the slow, dawdling pain of realising bit by bit, truth by truth, that everything you believed to be true was an illusion - perpetuated either by your manipulative ex or by your own delusions of the way things are.

Peeling the layers of the onion after a relationship with a narcissistic sociopath keeps you crying until the very last layer has been peeled away.

The pain of sudden abandonment, disappearance or death is one thing. As Elizabeth Kubler-Ross observed, we pass through the stages of loss from shock to denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance (and back again) in due course. The pain of slowly discovering that you have been living on a diet of lies for the duration of your relationship adds shame to the mix.

The pain of being blamed for your own suffering adds another layer that feels like betrayal on a grand scale. Dusted over with the pain of not being believed because nice charming Dr Jekyll 'would never do that'. It's not that he left, or that he fell for someone else. It's the maze of smoke and mirrors he has employed over an extended period of time to wrongly convict you that sinks you.

The pain of the shame snare is perhaps greater than the original loss. The avalanche of shaming that comes your way if you dare to express your pain can be debilitating. People so badly want to defend the blameless man and find fault with his hapless victim that it is astonishing. They want to peck you to death while you are at your weakest and most vulnerable. 

The level of antipathy is astonishing too. Dare to share your conundrum with people you imagine to be 'safe' and you will find all your discernment of safe people to be haywire. You will lose family and friends. At the same time, you will be surprised at who doesn't cast judgement and blame. By enlarge; it is people who have similarly suffered.  Or just people who have suffered enormous loss.

You will be shamed for wanting to talk about it. We are supposed to keep our pain to ourselves. You will be shamed for not seeing it coming. Women are supposed to know when their husbands are lying to them.  You will be shamed for your anger, your resentment, and your bitterness.

Women are not allowed to get angry when they are wronged. You will be shamed for your helplessness and hopelessness. We despise weakness as if it were a crime. You will be shamed for any bit of foolish behaviour in your past by people who remember it. You will shame yourself.

Then, when you begin the divorce process a year later, you will be shamed again. Every aspect of your marriage will be taken out and displayed for your legal team, who can only examine a complex moral contract by looking at the money trail. So you will be traumatised again. For it is in the divorce process that the scourge of your partner's lack of conscience can really take flight.

There, the thrill of deceiving everybody becomes a playground for your narcissistic sociopath. He gets to use you all over again, with increased intensity, for as long as you try to fight. He gets to completely discredit you by lying under oath. He gets to stonewall and gaslight and smear all over again with impunity. He is in Heaven and you are in Hell.

That sinking feeling of having your whole life slowly fall to pieces around your ears persists. You will likely suffer more and more loss. You might lose your home, your business, your children, your life savings. You might lose other personal relationships. You might feel like you have lost your mind. The best you can hope for is to learn how not to suffer over your pain. Because the pain persists.

The process demands that you pick the scab off every day for as long as you choose (or can afford) to fight. You discover that bravery is fear holding on a minute longer. Bravery is sometimes just getting through the day. Getting out of bed. Bravery is staying alive when all you want to do is die. To escape your Hell. To escape untruths parading as truth. To escape loss after loss. To escape your own reactions to being covertly victimised and publicly humiliated.

So how do you survive on this diet of shame? Burying it inside your body only makes you sick. Throwing the second punch only escalates your shame. Acting out from your churning mind only deepens the suffering. Trying to fight dishonesty with honesty only tightens the snare.

Asking for help and support begets more shaming. Nothing can undo the maize of smoke and mirrors that has victimised you. Nothing can undo the injustice you feel you have suffered. Nothing can bring closure. This is not a normal break up!

Somehow, you have to find a way to drop the story. Because going over and over the story the way our minds want us to do is not going to bring the closure we crave. Discovering that the foul behaviour we've experienced is common to many and the disorder has a name doesn't end the pain. Even admitting to our own faults and apologising for transgressions in our past won't bring closure, while it might bring some temporary relief. Avoiding people and circumstances and situations that trigger us will also bring temporary relief.

The thing that can relieve the pain of the churning mind is developing the observer self.

With daily practice, we can learn to step outside that churning mind. We can halt that sinking feeling, if only for a few minutes. With practice, the relief of stepping outside it can be extended to longer and longer periods. We can learn to observe the pain instead of suffering inside it continuously. We can discover that inside that churning mind there is someone doing the thinking. The thinking happens by itself.

We have no control over the thoughts or feelings that arise from our pain. We can't stop the anger, the resentment, the bitterness arising. But we can learn to observe what arises. We can learn to notice when we are triggered. Then we can learn to observe our habitual reactions to being triggered. Then we can learn to refrain from responding in the habitual ways that haven't helped us in the past.

We can learn to recognise that sinking feeling and intercept it. Apply antidotes to the pain. Refrain from escalating the suffering. Along the way, our worldview changes. There will be a phase when the ugliness of our own dark side and the world around us shocks us into grief again. But we get through it. We learn to live with our new vision. We learn to accept things the way they are.

And as we peel the layer of our own onion, we find moments of unimagined beauty. We experience bliss. Fleeting momentary glimpses of bliss. Moments when the song of a bird or the icy cut of a cold wind or the kindness of a stranger trigger us into joy instead of pain.

We start to understand that we are recovering not only from the pain of our psychopathic entanglement, but from the pain of life itself. The pain of being human. Every day becomes not about the suffering of being human but the joy of recovering from being human. Every moment of joy feels like a reward for our bravery. And the valence of this leads us to cultivate more courage.

We move from relating to the victims of this world to aspiring to become the courageous warriors of myth. Our reality morphs and changes and our focus shifts from our own suffering. Instead of that sinking feeling, we start to feel the thrill of life's daily challenges. The thrill of boredom. The thrill of injustice. The thrill of betrayal. The thrill of aimlessness.

By now, you will doubtless be thinking I am completely unashamedly nuts. Describing the beginner's journey towards awakening sounds a little bit nuts, no matter how we try to go about it. Now is probably the time to refer you to those skillful teachers whose descriptions of the path to enlightenment don't sound quite so nutty as mine.

You have come to this site in your search for understanding and compassion and all I can do is fumble my way to encouraging you; supporting you in my own small way. Treading the fine line between my old rescuer self and my new helper self. Encouraging you to begin to tread the time-worn path to freedom, if you haven't already started.

© Margot MacCallum 2021

Helpful References:

A BOOK TO CONVINCE YOU BUDDHISM ISN’T JUST FOR HIPPIES

“Toward a Psychology of Awakening – Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation”, John Welwood, Shambala, 2002.

A HALF HOUR OVERVIEW BY A SKILFUL TEACHER

PBS Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason, Pema Chodron 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-fB8e8LsM

A BOOK TO HELP YOU THROUGH THE WORST OF TRAUMA

“Solid Ground: Buddhist Wisdom for Difficult Times”, Silvia Boorstein, Norman Fischer, Parallax Press, 2011