by AlohaTraveler
Today, July 3, is a significant day for me. On this day, three years ago, I left the Bad Man. Let’s take stock of that moment in time:
- Total cash = $700
- Debt = at least $16,000
- Job = None
- Place to live, bed to sleep in, a clue = No
- Plan = None
- Me = A total wreck.
Between May of 2005, when I moved in with the Bad Man, and May of 2007, I have moved 10 times. This includes one move back to the islands in September 2005 and then back to California again on November 29, 2005. My car has 7,200 nautical miles on it and it shows. It looks like it’s eating itself. Cars aren’t meant to go to sea and mine crossed the ocean three times between July 3, 2005 and November 29, 2005.
Below is the Reader’s Digest version of my trials and tribulations.
Movin’ movin’ movin’
- Moved in with the Bad Man for one last hurrah after having been apart for 4.5 months. What was I thinking?!
- The great escape: Moved out from Bad Man while he was at work.
- Moved from one friend to another.
- Moved back the the islands.
- Moved out of the hotel and into a condo.
- Moved back to California again.
- Moved in with my employer as a live-in nanny.
- Moved in with friends who took care of me for four months because I was a WRECK.
- Moved in with another friend after four months of rest, armed with a new plan. Finally.
- Moved in with my dear friends, Eric and Jen. This is where I live now and have been living for over a year.
Jobs, jobs, jobs
Between July 3, 2005 and May 2007, I landed and lost six jobs all for various reasons.
- North Shore Resort: Resigned and left Hawaii for a second time. Finally, a good choice.
- Internet start up: Business went under
- “Wellness” company: Fired by a narcissist
(Noticed right away that the boss reminded me of the Bad Man. Shortly before she gave me the ax, I was told that it was suspect that she had narcissistic personality disorder. Upon hearing this, I had a massive anxiety attack.) - Internet company: Not the right fit
- Live-in nanny: Not the right fit again
- County job: Contract ran out.
Where I am today
I have a place to call home and have been there for over a year now. Shortly after I moved in, my friends gave me an old dresser. It’s big and heavy and feels like an anchor, a welcome anchor. I unpacked my suitcases for the first time in nearly two years. That night, as I lay in bed, I stared at my “new” dresser and I cried. Since I have been here, life has finally started to stabilize for me.
My symptoms of PTSD have subsided. Occasionally, I have a strange choking, coughing sensation in my throat when I have a distressing thoughts but I don’t have anxiety attacks like I did before. I smile more. I laugh more. I sleep better. I don’t think about the Bad Man and worry if he really was the one and if it really was me that messed it all up. I fully embrace and accept that he is a pathological, not fixable, person and it has absolutely nothing to do with me.
I have two jobs now. I have been at the first one since November of last year. I have been at the second one since March of this year. They are both in the area of social services and are an extension of the county contract I did last year. I have applied for grad school for an MSW and I am waiting to hear if I have been accepted.
I have paid off over $11,000 of that original Maui debt. Keep in mind that since I have been home, I have been unemployed off and on for at least 10 months and have worked for long periods of time for just $10 an hour.
I have started to date. At times, it feels like stepping out on thin ice, but I am doing it. I have started to rejoin the activities I loved in the past, such as sailing and baking and LAUGHING!
The road leads to you
I believe we will recover at the rate equivalent to the degree that we are committed to telling ourselves the truth. Now that you are here at Lovefraud, the truth is available to you and right under your nose. Will you accept it? It’s up to you.
Whatever it is you have lost, you will eventually get one thing back if you keep trying. Life might not ever look like it did before you crossed paths with a pathological partner but if you are open, it can look better. And at the end of the road, you will find YOU, and… another road… and maybe an old dresser.
Sitting in my “Big Girl Panties” today
- Debts = under control.
- Jobs = more than one
- A safe place to live, warm bed, and a plan for my life = check!
- Me = a whole lot wiser and not a juicy pick anymore for a Bad Man.
RATS!!!
I don’t know what she is saying. Is she going back?
Well, at least she knows where to find us.
Jane,
You are right. Five years with a Bad Man is a lot of time.
Still, I am a plain speaking straight talker. We each have our own style and something to offer to the healing of others. Who knows what will be exactly the right thing to say? Who knows when is exactly the right time to say it? And who knows how long we will have to say it before a reader may disappear, perhaps to be sucked back down that emotional black hole.
I see the healing process in part like de-programming someone that has just left a cult. The cult people are banging on the door as you are attempting to talk some sense into the escapee. How much time do you have? We don’t know.
There is no formula for the timing of telling the truth.
I offer my plain and direct speaking from the same place in my heart that another might offer things like: “I am so sorry you went through this” or “Here’s a hug.”
Lilygirl has gone through living Hell. It appears she might be stepping back into Hell if I understand her cryptic message. I hope not. But if I had the chance, I would be shouting the truth for as long as I could still see her car driving away. I might even run down the road for as long as I could keep up.
Do you get what I mean?
My goal is to shine a clear and direct light out of the Fog. If I see her going off in the direction of feeling sorry for him because “his Mom didn’t pay attention to him”, I am going to start waving the flag wildly to get her attention off of that. Feeling sorry for them is a trap. They want us to feel sorry for them because it keeps us distracted from the fact that they are abusing us.
If she says it is hard for him to be nice, I am going to point out, “No, it isn’t. This is an integral part of the game they are playing with our minds.” Believing it’s hard for him to be nice is just another version of feeling sorry for him and keeping our attention diverted from the healing spot… in ourselves.
We were all being abused one way or another but a pathological partner has the unique ability to keep our attention on them and not on your own broken nose. We have to pull our attention off of them and give all that loving attention to ourselves… the sooner the better.
The healing lies within us.
All the best to you all.
Peace and Love,
Aloha
lilygirl…i hope you will write somemore here…your writing helps me soooooo much…..especially when you wrote about him showing off to his mom that he found the ONE…..and then how that flips later in his game…that hit me so hard…..you knew to draw the line when he kept picking on your son…you KNEW the right thing to do and did it….yes sometime i wonder how we made it out of their grip….and i know what you mean that you know he will one day call or show up….thats why this sight is good, in that we keep hearing NO CONTACT and i feel a comraderie of folks here to help us stick to that…you are 4 months away…wow ..it gets easier each day with no contact…a small part of some of our egos, wants him to attempt to contact us, so we can hurt him by ignoring him….but the trick is, it wont hurt him…he will just become indignant and boast some more about how crazy we are….the people he boasts to will get sick of hearing it…and you show the grace of a non-crazy by not dignifying his illness with a response…..i hope you write more soon, because you are helping me to be stronger……(the mother thing…she must be as crazy as him…imagine how many women he told her before us were just the perfect woman)
lily…i just read something somewhere else that helps me…of course we all know this, but reading it after accomplishing it, makes me realize a new sep forward ive made…im now about 11 months out…the sooner a decision to adhere to no contact is made in your mind, the sooner YOU have control…not him…when we decide it doesnt matter if he tries to contact us or not,…it will not affect our lives, the sooner we will heal….i got stuck thinking i could explain to him and hed see what he was doing….HELLO….never….they seem so smart, but definitely not about this…there must be something like a tornado in their brain that shuffles everything up each new thought they put into words…like someone here said , its like a shark that looks just like a dolphin is trying to hang around with the dolphins…..they just cant fake what they are for long…………………….anyway, i need you to write some more if its not too painful…i need more help and your story sooooo parallels mine…sorry if that sounds a bit selfish terri
newworld.. terri,
So much wisdom in your post above.
I did that too… tried to think of the right words to say to get through to him. This was when I thought that surely, no one would want to hurt someone else so much OR surely, he must not realize how much he hurt me and since he said he loves me he would want to know and make it better. Surely. :o(
It is empowering to let go of all that, isn’t it?
I was just speaking to another reader yesterday. She has found out some more shocking news. But she realized that it didn’t hurt as much as before.
I think it hurts the most when we have not yet let go of the man we thought they were… a man that cared, a man that was our dream come true. Once we embrace who they really are, then hearing a terrible thing that they did fits. Hmmm… I am having a hard time putting this into words.
If your sweet fluffy sheep viciously bites you, that’s shocking.
If a wolf bites you, that’s not shocking.
Once you realize that the sheep that bit you is really a wolf with a costume on, well, it’s not shocking anymore when he bites, right?
That’s what I am saying over and over.. my own theory of course which I realize I am cramming down everyone’s throat… from my own experience, now that I know what BM is, I don’t feel hurt anymore.
Do I have things to work through? YES! I am always trying to tear at the “costume” of people, looking for the wolf in them. Trust is really hard right now.
I don’t miss the BM. I don’t cry about BM. I don’t care about BM. But of course, I am three years down the road.
My experience with BM will always be in me and has forever changed the way I see the world. I believe I see more now. And in a way, life is richer.
I never would have guessed this would be the result.
i find myself stuck in the stage of explaing to him what he did wrong, i feel like he will get it, but i have to accept that iam wasting my time. i always want him to feel my pain that he caused me, i want him to understand what he did wrong. i want to yell and scream at him.
hey aloha and blondie….tks it is VERY empowering to get to where we dont care…im not fully there yet, but feel much closer now….and i think these posts gets me there even closer.. and yes this experience will always be with me too….and yes it has made my life richer….i too like you aloha am always trying to find the costume on others…im working on that, because not everyone is in hiding..there is still good out there…and sadly many left that dont know about these creatures…i fear they too will have to learn the painful way………….and blondieyou sound very close now to accepting that you are wasting good energy on him….he will NEVER NEVER get it…its like when we talk all he hears is like that tv commercial….blah blah blah blah blah blah…..his brain does not process info…………i think part of my ego wants to know/hear that he misses me…..but that is something i will never hear……there is no closure with these creatures, because there was never even a beginning…..we were just another detour in their life…..thank God, were off the broken down ride now, before it got even more dangerous and killed us…which it nearly did to many of us……..keep reading and writing…..i mean it this support can not be bought..
Dear Blondie,
I was stuck in that mode of trying to get BM to understand and I remained stuck there even after I left him. Somewhere in my computer is a document called “vent” in which, long after I left, I wrote a letter to the bad man to try to get him to see how wrong it was to treat me the way he did.
I never sent it.
I guess by the time I wrote it, I was already there. The more I tried to find the right words to get through to him, the more I realized it was impossible. There’s nothing I can say to make him get it, to make him sorry, or to make him care.
I recall one time explaining to him that it is not right to call me names. If I step back and look at that, why would I need to explain to a GROWN MAN and a FORMER MINISTER… that it is not okay to call me “scum bag” and other profanities?
He knows better. He just doesn’t care… but he sure did cry foul on the TWO occassions where I finally told him what I thought of him.
I did know better but he really earned it.
Anyway, Blondie, you can get there. You can get to the place where you will realize that trying to explain this to him is just a waste of breathe… and wasting more precious time on him.
Instead of sitting with him and trying to explain how rotten he was to you, take the time to do something sweet and wonderful for yourself. You might get more healing from that. You can spend that time validating yourself by doing something special for YOU!
Do it Blondie!!! Do something fabulous for yourself and then share it with us!
Good luck in getting unstuck. :o)
Aloha
thanks everyone for your comments.
i wrote him a letter and never sent it about the pain he has caused me and all the things he did wrong to me. it makes me feel better to write that letter. they dont ever get what they did. i always feel like well maybe this time when they call he will say sorry, maybe he will say i was wrong for treating you that way, but no its never that way. he says well im sorry you feel that way. all of this is more frustrating then all the lies and cheating. when he doest want to hear what i have to say, he will say to me hold on i have another call or hold on let me call you right back, he always avoids what iam talking about, if its not about him or he doest like it what i have to say, he has to get off the phone, its so rude, and i made a promise to myself that that was the last time he put me on hold or hung up bc he didt want the hear what i had to say.
I HAD ENOUGH OF BEGGING SOMEONE TO WANT TO TALK ABOUT OUR ISSUES, OR RESOVLE THEM. IT SHOULD NEVER BE THAT WAY.
I’ve learned you can’t reason with the unreasonable. Their heart is filled with them and there is no room for another. Until they set themselves aside, they will never experience any kind of fulfillment, but I don’t think that’s their goal in life. They seem to want the satisfaction of seducing, gaining the upper hand and being totally in control.
We are all created individually and not collectively and we all have wants, needs and desires. We are allowed to own them. They are us. I think our sexuality, emotions, opinions are as much ours as our DNA is. But unless they see us as an individual, we are nothing more than an object to be used.
I see now that this man I met, who I thought was my ticket to a saner existence, was only trying to mold me into something of his choosing. His games he played, in his mind, were to break me. Little did he know I had my own arsenal. God gave me a brain and I better use it. But having places like this, gives us the inside track. These dysfunctional ones aren’t unique as they like to think so. They are cut from the same cloth and once we figure out their M.O., we are onto them and can actually beat them at their game.
I learned the hard way. I’m having more of a difficult time forgiving myself for not stopping the abuse of my husband towards our youngest, and then for me allowing this man to do what he did to exploit money from me, than forgiving them. I just didn’t know I had the power to stop their insidious behavior. We do. If it doesn’t look right, smell right or taste right, it’s rotten and time to throw it out. It’s about taking back what they took. Our minds. For me it was my sexuality. I thought I needed that for fulfillment. Love doesn’t need sex. Lust does. When the body can no longer perform, there should be a back up plan and it should be in place from the beginning. Lust is that burning desire that seeks fulfillment and when these men know what works, they can get away with murder. But once they realize they no longer can manipulate us through sex, they move on. But if that’s all they want and they can get it anywhere, we are just a superfluous ornament.
It took me finding out before I had sex with another that he was out getting it from anyone who would stand still long enough. That took the shine off him. He was no longer my knight. His armor was tarnished and I saw the real him. His morals were in the gutter, but he wanted me to think he was like me. I waited and am glad I did. He didn’t get the ultimate prize he was after. I’m so glad I resisted. He’s not and that gives me the upper hand now. I didn’t win all the battles, but I feel I have won this war. I’m free and didn’t have to surrender.