Acknowledging Domestic Violence/Pathology
Awareness Month
With the POWER of Information!
Every once in a while
you need to be reminded that not everyone thinks you know diddly-squat.
Sometimes it’s the people closest to you who think you really don’t have a
clue. It’s not that it’s new to me. It reminds me that not everyone believes me
when I tell them I think he’s pathological and it reminds me that denial is a
mighty force—like a tidal wave.
My girlfriend’s
daughter (I’ll call her ‘E’) could have been in my Women Who Love Psychopaths book—that is,
her traits, her background, the men she chooses, the father of her child—are
identical to the women in the book EXCEPT she hasn’t broken through her own
denial yet. The women in the book broke through their’s long enough to at least
answer the survey. E hasn’t come that far yet, no matter how many of my books I
give her or how many times I have pounded this into her head when I see
her.
E has a daughter
with the pathological who is 9 years old. In E’s daughter’s short life, the
pathological has been out of jail probably less than one year, in small
increments of months at a time, until he does something else and goes back to
jail. He has no empathy and no insight about his behavior. He lives a parasitic
life off of others, he deals drugs for his full-time employment (when he’s out
of prison), he never learns from his consequences, and he expects others to
cater to his pitiful life. In short, he meets the criteria for a psychopath.
I have known E
since she was about 7 or 8 years old and she grew up with my children. She’s now
31. E once told her mother, “Sandy doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She
may write books, but she doesn’t really know
what she thinks she knows. She assumes these people can’t change, but I am the
hopeful type that believes anyone can change, especially if ‘they want to’, and
with God’s help. You can’t be a Christian and believe that people don’t
change.”
Did you sigh a big
sigh reading that? That’s how I feel day in and day out as I see the mixed
effects on women from both a lack of public psychopathy education in this
country and a whopping dose of denial. Denial is often an underrated defense
belief system in terms of the devastation it can cause people. Over and over I
watch just one defense mechanism—DENIAL—kill women, harm their children, lose
their career over, go into financial bankruptcy because of it, become
spiritually bankrupt as well, and emotionally harmed and scarred. All because
of one simple highly defensive belief system: Denial.
Denial is a
defense mechanism, postulated by Freud, that when a person is faced with a fact
that is too uncomfortable to accept, one will reject it instead, insisting that
it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. In E’s case that would
be: he doesn’t work, he lives 10 months out of every year in jail, he doesn’t
pay child support, he lives with his parents or other women, he lies/steals/cheats/deals
and has never done anything different. This is the ‘overwhelming evidence’ of
psychopathy upon which her denial is based. And I’m sure, in E’s defense, it’s uncomfortable
to accept that he’s never going to help her and her child’s dad will live most
of his life in jail or in prison.
Denial is
different than ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t have the information to make an
informed choice. E has the information in the form of previous experience with
him, his consistent behavior that never changes, and a lot of information she’s
gotten from me, and she refuses to use it to develop honest insight about his
traits, behaviors, outcomes, and, ultimately, his mental health. She needs the
illusion that he isn’t pathological, that one day he will somehow ‘just be
different’. It’s magical thinking at best, and sad, sad, sad denial at worst.
It will cost her
everything to stubbornly cling to the belief that he won’t live the rest of his
life in jail, live off of others, and do nothing for his child. It may cost her
a child abduction when he doesn’t bring her back when he’s supposed to (oh
yeah, she already went through that). It may cause her serious financial
struggles when he doesn’t pay child support and she must do it all. (Oh yeah,
she’s already living that—she has to live with her mother because he doesn’t
pay support.)
It may cost her
child constant attachment/detachment problems when she goes for long periods of
time and doesn’t see him and is told, “Daddy is in time-out.” (What a way to
put it!) Oh yeah, the 9-year-old is already in mental-health counseling,
according to her mother, because, “It’s important she has a relationship with
her dad.” No child deserves to have exposure to a psychopathic parent.
With denial, E
doesn’t see that her daughter doesn’t have a relationship with her dad! And
since he is incapable of true attachment, empathy, love, consistency, or
insight, what in the world can he give to her? He deals drugs with her in the
car and she stays 90 percent of the time with his parents. But denial lets E believe that ‘something’ other than
drug dealing is happening in those times her child has with her dad in those scarce
moments in-between jail/prison time.
The theory of
denial was first researched seriously by Freud’s daughter, Anna. She classified
denial as a mechanism of the immature mind because it conflicts with the “ability
to learn from and cope with reality”. Learning from reality is what the path of
recovery is all about—accepting WHAT IS—his diagnosis, his incurable disorder,
his pathology. You can’t learn from something that you don’t accept and you
will never cope with something you don’t believe.
There are so many
forms of denial, no wonder it is so prevalent—denial of facts, denial of
responsibility, denial of impact, denial of awareness, denial of cycles, even
denial of denial! With so many forms to get entangled with, is it any wonder it
can take a woman years to ‘come to believe’ that her life with a pathological
is unmanageable, dangerous, and deadening?
The last time I looked
in the face of this kind of scary denial—where I was told I didn’t know what I
was talking about in explaining possible lethality to a mom, she was shot in
the head by him and died in front of her young children. Now parentless AND
traumatized, the children are the by-product of his deadly pathology and her
deadly denial.
I hate denial
because I saw someone die because of it—and all to protect and defend an
illusionary concept of a relationship that DIDN’T EVEN EXIST the way she
believed it did simply because she didn’t want to face reality.
Reality is a gift.
It’s the only truth. Truth is bigger and even safer than hope. Hope in him gets
plenty of women and their children hurt when denial eclipses ‘overwhelming
evidence’. Why women who love pathologicals hang onto denial like a shark has
been the focus of our award-winning book, Women
Who Love Psychopaths.
(**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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