Scratching the surface

“Scratching the surface.” It’s a phrase we use for a lot for different reasons. Sometimes we use it to tell people we want them to tell us more—“I think you’re just scratching the surface.” Or we use it to tell someone we have more to say—“Hold on, I’m just scratching the surface.”

For some people, scratching the surface in a confession is truly an art form. They know how to admit just enough that you believe they are telling the entire story. I mean you have to, right? If they admit to something you never thought they’d admit to, then they must be telling the full story.

Until you see someone repeatedly “scratch the surface” in a confession, you probably don’t even realize that’s what he is doing.

I just finished the four-part documentary, “Lorena.” It’s about the saga many of us watched unfold on television between John and Lorena Bobbitt. She became famous for cutting off his penis and he became famous for something I’m still not sure of. Their story really should have centered on violence against women, but it turned into something else—something really sad and hopefully something that will start a bigger conversation on violence against women.

One of the state prosecutors interviewed in the doc says she remembers when John was arrested (again) for domestic violence against a woman in Virginia and how the prosecutor went back to look at what he had told police. The reason she gave was that she had learned that men who are serial abusers have a history of giving confessions that only scratch the surface of what really took place. They admit to possibly hitting the woman rather than denying the entire event completely. It’s a tactic used to get people to think, ‘well he must be telling the truth.’ It’s also a great tactic to give the man sympathy and to find a way to turn the investigation back on the woman to make her look like she is exaggerating or somehow deserved a good ole slap in the face--an of course to believe him when he says he'll never do it again.

And this tactic isn’t just used by serial abusers, it’s used by others in in our lives who are manipulative, mentally abusive, sociopaths, and narcissistic. I’ve seen it. It took me a long time to understand that my ex used this tactic. He would get caught doing something big. He would act so sad about being caught and then say, “I’m just going to tell you everything.”

And when you’ve been kept in the dark for so long and all you want is the other person to just open-up and talk to you, you’re willing to accept any morsel of what may seem like the truthful statement you have been dying to hear for years.

The confessions would be explosive—things I’d never heard before. And it would be so explosive that I would quickly assume it had to be whole the story—I mean, how could there be more? Over the years, I would slowly begin to realize, he was just scratching the surface. There was a whole other story going on. I was getting just a crumb of what would turn out to be an entire cookie and that cookie was just a part of an entire package of secrets, lies, deception, and a really tragic backstory that led this person to become this way. 

And when you see that entire package for the first time, you realize why you were OK with the crumbs you got from scratching the surface—the truth can be almost paralyzing. It can be heartbreaking and mind-numbing. I think it’s just human nature to put up a wall that keeps you from “really” wanting to know the entire truth—like you just don’t believe you can really handle the truth and you know your life will change forever once that entire package is revealed.

 But the truth will also set you free in the end. It’s a process for sure, but if you never allow yourself to really know the truth, how will you ever really know what you are truly made of and what your life is meant to be. How can you live your truth if you don’t know the truth?

And the next time someone abusive in your life tries to just “scratch the surface” to turn the blame back on you, just remember there was once this woman who had been repeatedly traumatized by a man to the point she took something very important to him and threw it in a field on the side of the road—and he still had the nerve to try to make her look like the crazy one…. And people believed him.

As Lil Wayne would say, “now, where’s the uproar?”

Sometimes you have to get really mad to see the crumbs of truth are just a part of that bigger cookie sitting in that bag. It’s up to you as to what you do with that anger—but I would suggest shining a light on what’s truly the rest of the story. Own it, tell it, and live your truth now matter if anyone believes you or not. Because somewhere out there, someone else knows you are telling the truth because she has lived through the same crap and she's smart enough to know the difference between crumbs and a whole damn pack of cookies. 

Gaslight much?

Gaslight: 

Verb: manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. 

"In the first episode of her life, Jane is gaslighted by her former husband." 

I used to call it the Jedi mind trick. The idea that a person can just say something with such resolve that it must be true—say with such certainty that obviously I’m somehow crazy.  

I still have a really hard time if I feel someone is trying to gaslight me. I think it’s probably one of the biggest things in my life that I get really defensive about. Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is just mistaken about what just happened or if they are trying to manipulate me. Either way, I don’t like the feeling that my memory is completely wrong.  

There is new documentary on Netflix right now called “Abducted in Plain Sight.” It’s truly shocking and will probably make you rethink people in your own life or past. The true story in the documentary shows the extremes of manipulation—a man works for years through a series of lies and manipulation to get into a family and control the parents with shame and guilt in order to take their young daughter away to be his lover. Yeah, it’s creepy as hell. 

I think the response I hear the most from people who watched this documentary, is “how in the hell do you let someone do that to your family?” I’m sure that’s the question this family will now have to endure for the rest of their lives.  

But really, how does that happen?  

If you’ve ever had to live with someone in your life who is a sociopath (Defined as: ‘a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience’) then you know that something as crazy as this movie can happen to anyone.  

And the question, “How did you not know?” becomes a popular question among friends when you finally tell your truth. 

I think the question comes from what most of us feel when we see a movie like “Abducted in Plain Sight,” is simply, “Could this ever happen to me?” 

If you know my story, then you know I spent almost 17 years of my life with someone that I would now refer to as a sociopath. It took me many years to understand that he was a sociopath and what that term actually means. If you know me, then you also know, I’m smart. So, if you think intelligence will protect you, then you underestimate the power of a sociopath. 

For instance, some characteristics of a sociopath include: Superficial charm and good intelligence; absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking; absence of nervousness or neurotic manifestations; unreliability; untruthfulness and insincerity; lack of remorse and shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behavior; poor judgment and failure to learn by experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; general poverty in major affective reactions; specific loss of insight; unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations; fantastic and uninviting behavior with alcohol and sometimes without; suicide threats rarely carried out; sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated; failure to follow any life plan. 

But I think the most important thing to know about sociopaths is that the traits they seek out in people to take advantage of are the same traits most of us already have--which is why we have to realize that it really can happen to anyone. Your life could be the next trending Netflix documentary.  

Why? Because we all make mistakes. I know in my personal life I did things that I am not proud of and those are the points in your life that a sociopath can use to control you. And that’s how it begins--and from there, it’s just a matter of time before you’re down that rabbit hole and people are asking you the question--how did you not know? 

And the only truthful answer I can give is that a part of me did know but the bigger part of me, the part that I wanted to believe, did not truly acknowledge or even have the power to acknowledge what was really going on in my life. 

I think the best gift I got out of what happened to me many years ago is the gift of knowing that even if you’re a smart, good, loving person, bad things can happen to you. You can end up broke, you can end up with your kids in therapy, you can end up alone, you can end up on food stamps and government healthcare, you can end up in debt, you can end up getting behind on bills, your house can go into foreclosure, you can be publicly humiliated, you can feel like the biggest failure on the planet. 

And why would that be a gift? Because in the end, there is always going to be a part of us that can be abducted in plain sight—for some of us it’s our trust, our marriage, our belief in other people, our faith. For others, it’s their dignity, their family, their home, their money.  And when that end happens, people are going to ask, “how did you not know?”  

I didn’t know. Even though the truth was right there in plain sight, I just didn’t see it. I beat up myself for it. I was embarrassed. I replayed moments over and over in my mind. I’ve seen my friends do the same thing in their own lives—wondering how they allowed someone they cared for to trick them, lie to them, gaslight them.  

It’s OK. Bad things are going to happen to you in plain sight, it’s how you handle it inside yourself that matters in the end.  

I have a friend who is going through a divorce right now and the part I think that seems to bother her the most is that she feels she wasted 20 years of her life with a person that she knew didn’t really love her or respect her. And my response to her is to just forget that part—focus on the now. Focus on what you can control and focus on where you want to go.  

Don’t waste your time beating yourself up or feeling like an idiot or feeling like you have to answer questions about how you didn’t really know. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what happened. Telling yourself that you are stupid is just a way to gaslight yourself. And why do any of us need anyone else gaslighting us?