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.)
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