Women who Love too Much Community Group
WHEN BEING IN LOVE, MEANS BEING IN PAIN... This group is to help women through the journey of realizing they can love themselves. To help realize that they are capable of having a happy, healthy, whole relationship and break the cycle of abuse and heartache from loving emotionally unavailable men.
by Sandra L. Brown, M.A.
In a session someone says I really miss what we had. I could get over this if it had not been in the most wonderful relationship of my life. I just feel like something has been cut out of me like Im missing a big part of myself now.
Pathology is marked by the issue of illusion. Its why our logo is a mask because it best represents the mirage of normalcy that pathologicals can often project...at least for a while. Cleckley, a writer about pathology from the 1940s called it The Mask of Sanity and states that pathology gives all the surface signals of deep connection, the most fun ever experienced with someone else, someone who is really into you while behind the curtain, you are being used as a distraction, a pay check, grotesquely as a vaginal doormat or some other form of feeding of the pathological piranha. What you are experiencing you are internally labeling as normal or wonderful or love and yet it really isnt any of those things. Its just a label of experience you have tagged him with. If someone else was watching your relationship as a movie and watched the other scenes in which the pathological is exposed for what he is, your scene would be tagged and labeled by the watcher very differently than how you thought of your own experience. Thats because the watchers would see the pathologicals behaviors and words as manipulative and the watcher would under go a distinctly different view of the storyline. Your labeling of your experience isnt always accurate. As I often say, Your thinking is what got you into this pathological relationship. Dont always believe what you think.
Being invested in being correct is part of the human condition and is in part, the way our brains work. The more important the question such as Does he love me? Is this THEE one? The greater the pleasure will seem from labeling the experience as positive. The more positive the relationship is perceived, the more invested you will be to label the experiences and his behavior as positive and to get the reward of your label such as him, marriage, or the relationship. Of course none of this is problematic except if you have misread the illusion, believed the mask, and labeled an experience with a narcissist, antisocial, or socio/psychopath as positive.
The illusion is that:
He was normal
He was in love with you
He was what he said he was
And he did what he said he did.
In pathology, thats never the case.
Their attachments are surface (which is not love)
They are mentally disordered (which is not normal)
They never present themselves as disordered/sexually promiscuous/and incapable of love (so he was not what he said he was)
And they harbor hidden lives filled with other sex partners, hook ups, criminality, or illegal/moral behavior (so they dont disclose what hes really up to).
What you had (that you cant possibly miss) is a pathological relationship. What you miss, is the ability to wrap yourself up like a blanket in the illusion to go back to the time before you knew this was all illusion.
Women often say when they try to break up they have the feeling that something is cut out of them. They feel like they are missing a part of themselves. This sensation is similar to what is called phantom limb pain that is a medical mystery of sorts. When a person has an arm that is accidentally amputated, the portion of the brain that use to receive sensory messages about the existing arm goes through a series of changes that causes it to misread the brain message and creates the ghostly illusion that the arm is still there and in pain. Even though the patient can see that the arm is gone and what they are experiencing is an illusion, they cant stop the distressing phantom limb sensations of wanting to believe the arm is still there, the arm is in pain, the arm is anything but gone. The amputee must learn to cope differently by beginning with relabeling the experience they are having which is the pretense of the arm is a perceptual illusion.
So it is with those leaving the illusionary pathological love relationship. The emotional pain you experience is based on the illusion the pathological presented, a perceptual illusion that was mislabeled, experienced as positive and invested in. Keeping that positive illusion is initially important to you. Learning to adjust the cognitive dissonance which is the ping ponging between he was good he was bad) is the challenge in overcoming the ghostly emotional baggage of phantom relationship pain.
In a session someone says I really miss what we had. I could get over this if it had not been in the most wonderful relationship of my life. I just feel like something has been cut out of me like Im missing a big part of myself now.
Pathology is marked by the issue of illusion. Its why our logo is a mask because it best represents the mirage of normalcy that pathologicals can often project...at least for a while. Cleckley, a writer about pathology from the 1940s called it The Mask of Sanity and states that pathology gives all the surface signals of deep connection, the most fun ever experienced with someone else, someone who is really into you while behind the curtain, you are being used as a distraction, a pay check, grotesquely as a vaginal doormat or some other form of feeding of the pathological piranha. What you are experiencing you are internally labeling as normal or wonderful or love and yet it really isnt any of those things. Its just a label of experience you have tagged him with. If someone else was watching your relationship as a movie and watched the other scenes in which the pathological is exposed for what he is, your scene would be tagged and labeled by the watcher very differently than how you thought of your own experience. Thats because the watchers would see the pathologicals behaviors and words as manipulative and the watcher would under go a distinctly different view of the storyline. Your labeling of your experience isnt always accurate. As I often say, Your thinking is what got you into this pathological relationship. Dont always believe what you think.
Being invested in being correct is part of the human condition and is in part, the way our brains work. The more important the question such as Does he love me? Is this THEE one? The greater the pleasure will seem from labeling the experience as positive. The more positive the relationship is perceived, the more invested you will be to label the experiences and his behavior as positive and to get the reward of your label such as him, marriage, or the relationship. Of course none of this is problematic except if you have misread the illusion, believed the mask, and labeled an experience with a narcissist, antisocial, or socio/psychopath as positive.
The illusion is that:
He was normal
He was in love with you
He was what he said he was
And he did what he said he did.
In pathology, thats never the case.
Their attachments are surface (which is not love)
They are mentally disordered (which is not normal)
They never present themselves as disordered/sexually promiscuous/and incapable of love (so he was not what he said he was)
And they harbor hidden lives filled with other sex partners, hook ups, criminality, or illegal/moral behavior (so they dont disclose what hes really up to).
What you had (that you cant possibly miss) is a pathological relationship. What you miss, is the ability to wrap yourself up like a blanket in the illusion to go back to the time before you knew this was all illusion.
Women often say when they try to break up they have the feeling that something is cut out of them. They feel like they are missing a part of themselves. This sensation is similar to what is called phantom limb pain that is a medical mystery of sorts. When a person has an arm that is accidentally amputated, the portion of the brain that use to receive sensory messages about the existing arm goes through a series of changes that causes it to misread the brain message and creates the ghostly illusion that the arm is still there and in pain. Even though the patient can see that the arm is gone and what they are experiencing is an illusion, they cant stop the distressing phantom limb sensations of wanting to believe the arm is still there, the arm is in pain, the arm is anything but gone. The amputee must learn to cope differently by beginning with relabeling the experience they are having which is the pretense of the arm is a perceptual illusion.
So it is with those leaving the illusionary pathological love relationship. The emotional pain you experience is based on the illusion the pathological presented, a perceptual illusion that was mislabeled, experienced as positive and invested in. Keeping that positive illusion is initially important to you. Learning to adjust the cognitive dissonance which is the ping ponging between he was good he was bad) is the challenge in overcoming the ghostly emotional baggage of phantom relationship pain.
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