Trying hard to win the war within yourself

Dear Bloggers,

My wife is going through some traumatic times as she is emotional abused for almost three years in a row by two psychopathic and narcissistic persons (managers) that did everything to bring employees down that didn't fit into their profile. The company gives them a lot of freedom and it is a very sick atmosphere. A lot of former employees signed for their resignation and got a few months pay so they agreed to keep their mouth shut. My wife wasn't in the flow for leaving the company as she enjoyed what she was doing and this was against all the expectations of her manager. He was not amused with the fact that she was putting up so much resistance to keep her job. 

She kept up the fight for three years and dragged herself to work everyday. I pulled the plug in February of 2014 and she was tired and mentally so beaten up. In the last two years we have been trying to get her back on her feet with psychological help and psychiatric assistance. She has been checked on a medical scale by a neurologist and she was tested on defects by a neuro psychologist, lucky enough that there is no damage found in the brain. She is diagnosed with Complex PTSD with a panic and a anxiety disorder. Our wonderful future has been destroyed by two bastards that should be held responsible. 
 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is mostly associated with soldiers returning from war. After the horrors witnessed in such an unnatural setting, many wo/men have a difficult time returning to “normal” life, often suffering from flashbacks, panic attacks, and severe anxiety.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Acute Stress Disorder (or Reaction) are not typical responses to prolonged abuse. They are the outcomes of sudden exposure to severe or extreme stressors (stressful events). Yet, some victims whose life or body have been directly and unequivocally threatened by an abuser react by developing these syndromes. PTSD is, therefore, typically associated with the aftermath of physical and sexual abuse in both children and adults.

Any traumatic event can trigger it. Rape, assault, acts of physical or verbal violence, even repeated emotional abuse or the sudden split of a significant relationship, especially if abuse was involved.

Repeated abuse has long lasting pernicious and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hyper vigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks (intrusive memories), suicidal ideation, and psychosomatic symptoms. The victims experience shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability.

My wife is rather ashamed to admit that she has experienced them all. These last few weeks have made me realize just how deep the managers have traumatized me, she said. It was my husband who noticed, actually. He said that I was exhibiting symptoms of PTSD, and he was right. How embarrassing to be experiencing PTSD because of such a short-lived work-relationship. But all of a sudden there it is.

However, this reaction doesn’t reflect her or her ability to cope with it, as much as it speaks to the depth of the abuse. The depth of the trauma caused by emotional, cruel verbal, and even narcissistic pressure abuse, not to mention the sudden change in her personality and subsequent abandonment.

The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps re-living the experiences through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations (“flashbacks”) or dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state and physically re-enacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts.

In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startle response, the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighbourhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and so on). My wife has somethings the other way round for example she has no more fear of heights and isn't afraid of spiders anymore. Strange how the brain works

Her fear has been so great, that an email from him throws me into a panic attack, knowing that it just contains more pain. She doesn’t read them when they come in. In fact, she does not longer know if they are coming in or not, thanks to email filters that just delete them before we will even see them.
Thank goodness for technology.

Emotional abuse, like gaslighting as well as so many other insidious forms, is hard to recognize and even harder to prove. Let me first of all explain the gaslighting effect: “Gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that is difficult to recognize and even harder to break free from. That’s because it plays into one of our worst fears – of being abandoned – and many of our deepest needs: to be understood, appreciated, and loved. The abuser is usually a very insecure person. He has a need to put others down in an attempt to make himself feel better. He must be seen as right at all times.” Often, the only indication that your partner is causing emotional damage is to trust yourself and how you feel.

• Are you asking yourself if you’re crazy?
• Are you questioning reality?
• Do you feel blamed for everything in the relationship?
• Do you feel unsafe to talk with your partner about anything? 
  
  
  
   
  

Certainly not all charming people are predators or abusive, but it is something of which to take note, especially if they are particularly charming. Please, please look closer, or perhaps, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Find out about their past relationships. How many? How did they end? Do they take responsibility for their actions? Their words? Are they relatively consistent in their words/actions?
indication: They don’t take responsibility for their own actions.
Please believe me when I say that these actions are insidious. I mean it. They are so subtle and often covered up by grand gestures of love and excessive affection. It is very intoxicating and convincing, but beneath it all there might be a constant assault on your sense of self through gaslighting and other forms of covert abuse.

The first step is recognizing abuse as abuse. One very surprising thing I learned about this over the past few weeks is that some types of emotional abuse feel like love. Another reason the trauma is so deep: it’s not just the damage , but it is unhealed damage from a lifetime of emotional abuse.

Research PTSD and Emotional Abuse. If you are exhibiting any of the signs, you might be trapped in a betrayal or trauma bond with the abuser. This makes it even harder to get away and heal.

Let us all learn how to protect ourselves from such people, for in this society, there is no other recourse. No way to prove it. No way to make them accountable for the damage they cause. Our only hope of defense against this type of abuse is to recognize the danger early, reinforce our armor, and get away before a trauma bond can be created. Slowly we start with counseling. To me it’s an interesting one, and it might be helpful to you, reading this blog, as it shows how one is in so much denial at first because of the shock and disbelieve, and how, if you commit to healing, you can uncover some pretty horrific things and extensive PTSD.

My wife quotes: “I might never be working again and damaged for life. Still, I’d rather know, accept, and heal than to fall into the same trap with another predator”.
Let's hope the future brings better times.



The Old Sailor,

What if you became the victim of a manipulator

Dear Bloggers,

What if you became the victim of a manipulator on your job. If your manager is one of those kind of bosses what would you do if he picked you as his victim.

Loads of people would flea and others will pick up the fight. But fighting is difficult and it might take more than you ever could imagine. My wife has always been someone who wasn't scared to tell you if there was something wrong work wise and you had a tough time when she was sure that she was right.

She could be pretty much point out were the problem was. She lost the three year long battle against two managers and has ended up with a mental state of mind as the last one did every thing in his power to make the kill and that she would leave without any hassle. I am pretty impressed that these people get that much freedom from the higher management to do that much damage to a happy personality (I've seen people that were that much destroyed as they had been captured and tortured by kidnapping something that you could expect.)

 

I am often asked how a person can get to each other through the process of picking up the pieces and overcoming the scars of an abusive or manipulative workplace once they finally found the courage to end it.

In fact, I’ve been asked several times to consider writing a book, on this topic alone. It seems that dysfunctional work relationship survivors often experience some unique kinds of emotional and mental turmoil. And although I’ve written about the fundamental ways these individuals can empower themselves and start over, I haven’t written very much on the kinds of things they typically experience as they’re trying to heal their wounds and put their lives back together. 

Most families fall apart after the abuse as the partners can't cope anymore. The one that has been victimized has trouble to trust people including their own spouse and children. It is a bumpy road to get your life back on track. 

Many people have told me about how hard it was for them to stop blaming themselves and engaging in a lot of self-doubt and reproach. ”How could I have been so blind…. or so stupid, or why didn't I walk away from this?” they ask themselves. It’s difficult for them to reconcile the way they saw things in the days before their toxic relationship and the way they have come to view things since their painful experience. They sometimes question their rationality as well as their sanity. 

 
But the truth of the matter is that while they might indeed have had some personality characteristics of their own that made them particularly naive and vulnerable (most of us do), the fact is that covert-aggressors are generally quite skilled at what they do, and the more seriously character disturbed social predators among us (i.e. the psychopaths/sociopaths) are extremely astute and talented when it comes to the “art of the con.” And in their very nature, manipulation tactics are often hard to see until after the fact. 

Besides, it’s relatively pointless to play the self-blame game. Lovingly reckoning with your vulnerabilities and vowing to become a stronger, better person in the aftermath of a troubled workrelationship is one thing, but doing an emotional hatchet-job on yourself just because you happened to fall prey to a good con artist is quite another.

And after years of being manipulated it’s easy to get into the habit of doubting yourself. This can be an even bigger problem if you tried counseling the manipulator at some point and the disturbed character who is wanting the ultimate power managed to con the therapist as well. Still, as hard as it might be, the one of the most important tasks for any “recovering” person has before them is to end the destructive cycle of self-doubt and blame.

Some folks have a lot of anger to deal with after their abusive relationship is finally over. They can harbor resentment that their former abuser seemed to “get away with” being such a Son of a gun while they (and perhaps their children as well) had to pay all the prices involved. To make matters worse, some possessive controllers as in my spouse her case do their best to make the ordeal of manipulating their husband as well which might lead to separation or divorce and make their live like a living hell on those who have finally had enough and found the courage to walk away. And the collateral damage that can be done to otherwise healthy relationships with others who might possibly have been sources of support can also make a survivor angry, bitter, and resentful.

For the reasons mentioned above as well as some very important others, especially for purposes of healthy information-sharing, I’d like to invite all of the readers who can identify themselves with these issues to comment on the various things they might have gone through when ending a job or even worse a relationship with a manipulator or other character-disturbed person and trying to start a new life. 

And I’ll might be writing some more on this topic in the coming months.

The Old Sailor,

She's running me through the emotional washer

Dear Bloggers,

I am probably not the only bloke on earth that has issues in his marriage and therefor the raging fire in me has died out to a minimized glow like charcoal after a night on the barbeque.

Do not see it as complaining about my life in general it has been a rocky road but it was not that bad as we always had eachother. After my wife had some counseling therapy by being offended by her team manager she suddenly started to change and stood up for herself. She got in her first fight with one of her siblings who could not deal with the situation as she gave up on being the weak one and apoligize for something that wasn’t even her fault. But it is hard to change people’s manners after letting them do it for nearly fourty years. The second one that came into the shooting range was our sitter who blew out all the fuses when she implemented that our kids were lieing and cheating to her daughter. She came to talk about it when our daughter was still up. So my wife turned her down and got angry with her and told her too leave. As she struggled back she kicked her out. She was quite surprised by the anger that she had in her. I got the feeling that i am the next one in line. Like many others out there,

 

I originally post about my marriage but from now on it will be my sexless marriage and as I may hope I will receive comforting and thoughtful replies. After reading a lot about how people change after counceling and having lengthy conversations with my wife, I have a greater knowledge and understanding as to what has caused my marriage to be sexless.

Come to find out, there are multiple reasons I am sexless as it is not only her fault there is a lot of it caused by me.

Resentment, she resents me for a few of the financial decisions I've made that have set us back a few years. She is struggling with being able to put these behind her. These seem to be the most engrained issue affecting our relationship. The Tax office is not our friend at the moment as we made a mistake somewhere they want a hell lot of many back.

Low testosterone I recently had blood work done and I am low on testosterone. So far, no problem for me, but somehow it makes me feel dis-comfortable as it gets more and more an obsession to me. I have less and less erotic feelings left as I am only up to one thing and that is disturbing the whole thing, I guess. She got her medication changed to feel better as she is suffering from........... It made her breasts tender to the touch. It caused her to stay in bed one morning as it tyres her out.

Overall she has low desire for me, I just don't think she finds me all that attractive any longer. She did say that I am kind of boring because I never flirt with her. I think that is my own protective buildup from the years of rejection...why flirt with someone that will shut you out when it's supposed to be play time?

I was a Nice Guy, up until a couple of weeks ago, I was the poster child of Nice Guys...there have been books written about me (at least they hit the nail on the head).

Over the course of the past two weeks, I have read three books, The Five Love Languages, No More Mr. Nice Guy and Married Man's Sex Life Primer. She has read the Five Love Languages. We both understand that we each speak a different love language, but just addressing that issue isn't going to solve my problems anytime soon.

Nearly 15 years of marriage, 20 years being together, the sex and overall excitement in our relationship has continued to diminish where I am now absolutely miserable as it currently stands.

She had an appointment this morning for her second set of counselings, but oops...she forgot about the appointment. I asked her if she was going to reschedule and she replied, "yea, but really don't want these kind of therapy." During our conversations over the weekend, when we would touch on an issue where neither one of us had an immediate answer, I suggested she bring that to the attention of her counselor when she next meets with her this coming Frisday. She told me she didn't think she could talk with her anymore. 

So, I ask myself...Am I pushing the issue of our sexless marriage too quickly, all of a sudden out of thin air? Is she feeling overwhelmed with all I have thrown at her the past couple of weeks and need to allow her a bit more time to absorb it all?
Everything came to a head Saturday night, when after a bit of talking and getting a sense of each of us understanding each other a bit better, I mentioned to her I had a desire to do her. She said that would never happen, so I told her if she didn't want to try, I would not press the issue. I accept her not wanting to do it...end of story. 

Well, it should have been the end of the story, but then sometime around 3AM, I wake with some killer heartburn from the things I ate earlier. She is well awake and starts arguing about this and that and that now she has to comply with doing it.......blah, blah, blah. I told her that she already voiced her opinion of it and I have dropped it, never to be mentioned ever again.

But she won't let it go...acting like she has to comply or my sex life won't be fulfilling. I told her it wasn't a big deal...was just a fantasy and it can remain a fantasy, as I have no desire to force her compliance with anything. She is the one with a hangup about it and she should let it go, as she will never hear anything about it from me again. I think she saw this as an angle where she has reason to be upset with me, but since I didn't press the issue, she was attempting to keep it at the surface so there is reason to continue our sexless lifestyle...all because she has a crutch to use against me.

The following morning, I spelled it all out for her...either we resolve our differences and create a loving, caring, fulfilling relationship where we are both happy, or we should divorce and go our separate ways. I refuse to continue our relationship where resentment and lack of desire fill the air. Her first reaction was how she would lose her comforting surroundings and where to put all her furniture, because she would have no place to store them. Another comment in the night before was that I couldn't kick her out to the street corner because she currently does have a  straight job and the half of what we own is hers. Like as if I am stupid and would not know this but am I supposed to feel any sympathy or what???

Basically, at this point, I am waiting on her...sure I have a few things I need to work on, like flirting and being more Alpha, but most is on her to change. She needs to figure out how to let her resentments go...I have already reassured her about my job and that I promised to stay in the working field and not deviate as I had in the past. She needs to get her hormones balanced out...I can't do this for her. How much time is enough time to get these things in order? Do I set a timeline and vocalize it to her, or keep it to myself and just watch the progress, if there is any?

As it currently stands, if there are no improvements/participation on her part, I don't ever see this as fixable. I don't want this to be a thing of me continually hoping things will get better and her using it as a way to hijack my sex life, all so she can continue to be my live-in maid. At least that is how it feels as I am only here to feed some hungry mouths and do some cleaning. Let us see how this will evolve?

The Old Sailor,

For what?

Dear Bloggers,

Today I will write about so called senseless violence, it is one of the items that kept my family busy after the horrible news from Norway on 22th of July. We wandered what happens to person that can get so violent without any regrets killing a large amount of people. The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York came out of nothing and without any pre warnings. Several years ago Meindert Tjoelker was kicked to death by a group of drunk guys only because he was telling them that heir behavior was inappropriate. There might be more cases but for me these are stuck in my memories as matters of senseless violence.

One of the problems with any reflection on absurd forms of violence in society is that these thoughts can never be, from a scientific point of view, truly interesting and technical. Before we know it, moral and political considerations and emotions sneak in and objective thought will be overruled by, for example, the indignation over the nature and amount of that violence. For if you start to think about violence, you will soon feel highly involved and at the same time completely powerless. Even if we should be inclined to choose violence in certain cases, when it comes from ourselves, when it is not the raw violence of nature and looks like reasonable action, it always turns out to be bigger and stronger in its consequences and its emotional implications than the one who unleashes violence or approves of it. Merely by thinking about it it is taken out of our own hands.

No matter what we think or how passionately we want to denounce violence as vulgar, immoral or inefficient, it will still occur time after time and we are never neutral bystanders, like when observing the behavior of chickens on a lawn or dogs in the street. Our words are filled with emotions and prejudices. Therefore, I want to restrict my reflection on to a couple of words, with which we appear to try and make sense of an occurrence on which we apparently, despite all of our pretenses, have as little influence as on the weather, but which fascinates us, either annoyingly or amusingly, in a much higher degree.



The quite recent combination of words “senseless violence” mostly seems to relate to something that we, if it did not sound as cynical, could call recreational violence, eventhough it happens in small groups that will kill an innocent guy by kicking him to death as he would try to stop them from demolishing a bicycle, or a large group called supporters which appears predominately around soccer-fields, in amusement halls with violent war games and in so-called action movies, hence on the fringes of social life. But how large, how infectious and how determining of our culture is the contribution of this type of violence as a spectacle in television shows and other forms of relaxation on which we spend a large part of our free time? (My wife is a big fan of these what I call “Murder and manslaughter tv series”.) Do I have an excorsist in the house?



The combination of words “senseless violence” seems to have been specifically invented to qualify this pointless violence as a derailment or at least a singular occurrence, in order to not too suddenly and quite radically, exclude the possibility of a human violence that might be called “sensible”. That not senseless, but efficiently and prudently used violence would be in our control from beginning to end, and a predictable and positive outcome could be expected: order, security, and peace.

Seen from this perspective, the expression “senseless violence” has to create a space for the belief that another, perhaps efficient, meaningful and permissible unleashing of violence might be possible. Taking the soccer game as an example again. There are complaints that some parents being so fanatic that they scare their own children as their fanatism will end up into an escalation of violence as an exercise in power by the lower less responsible persons and that can prevent that by slogans like “soccer is war” a spiral of spectacular, but meaningless recreational violence will start.



Along with more power, the means not only have to be greater in number, but also more effective, and they have to appear less like the force of an aimless explosion, the raw violence of a hurricane or the unrestrained behavior of a rowdy crowd. A government that does not have these available, is not superior and has no more say than any random club.

The result of violence is always characterized by a hail of unintended, incalculable and destructive side-effects sensible, unless of course we read the word “goal” as something military and war-like, “hit” as the destruction of this goal and “use” as the unleashing of every random force that we do not control. In this way, the guillotine could be regarded as an effective mean for relieving headaches, or pulling all teeth as an adequate means against biting nails. (there is a dark sense of humor needed here.)

Seeing a proof of superiority in this seems a bit shortsighted to me: it is rather a manifestation of impotence or inability to link adequate and carefully dosed means. At best we can say that in certain circumstances in a somewhat ritual way we have reserved the authority to exert this impotence or the threat thereof and necessitated ourselves to leave out the, in this context painful, qualification senseless. But the question is wether this is more than a mere verbal and ritual exercise that does not change a thing about the situation itself.

There seem to be at least two reasons why we speak in such hidden terms about all kinds of violence, including that of the government. One is that a start of violence or a display of superiority can cause a shock that may bring people to their senses. (Just think about what happened in Oslo and on Utoya or less recent the 9-11 attacks.)



If you, for example, want to quiet a boisterous crowd, you sometimes have to quickly produce a higher volume of sound than the bothersome murmur you intend to override. This will increase the total disorder, but still the expectation can be that silence will be its effect. There are reasons to believe in temporary violence and in the logic of something like a warning shot.

A second reason not to radically rule out every form of violence as a means has to lie in the fact that to this form of active performing there seems to be but one alternative, i.e. standing by powerlessly. But that alternative has to be rejected more forcefully according the measure in which the organization that would decline from performing it is ascribed greater power or authority.

And if you are supposed to have all capabilities, you will always be guilty when you stand by powerlessly. In an activist culture, one that for the greater part is a culture of violence disguised as sport, as expression, as display of power or as spectacle rather than a culture of peaceful technique and of adequate and subtle means, standing by powerlessly or even the acceptance of powerlessness is always regarded as reprehensible. In the phraseology of that culture it is always better to do something than to do nothing at all or, in military terms less familiar to me: it is better to miss or even obliterate the goal than not to shoot at all. This will inevitably lead to absurd situations.



Even if peace would be no more than the absence of war and violence (but how will we ever know?) and even if it has to be maintained by a power that keeps itself in the background, it would still be preferable as a form of civilization to the outbursts of barbaric violence which we have to witness, happening to our shame, time and time again and on all fronts.

I wish that there would be no more victims of senseless violence but this probably an impossible dream.

The Old Sailor,