By Ox Drover
Yet Being Someone Other is the title of one of my favorite books and sometimes I think that title applies to me as well, at least since I recognized the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that has become such a part of my life these last six years. Now I’m “someone other” than who I used to be. I’m not the same person at all. I no longer think like that other person did, that FIRST ME as it were. The NOW ME is different.
This was a very disturbing thing for quite some time as I had to get used to things being gone that I had depended on previously. I had to make adjustments to the changes in myself, sort of like a teenager has to make adjustments to larger feet and longer legs, and for a while becomes quite clumsy as they learn to use these appendages which have suddenly changed in dimensions. I felt very clumsy for a while, and still do to some extent. In other ways, I feel like an amputee that is having to relearn to walk with only one leg, or to use a prosthetic leg. To me, this is quite unsatisfactory. I want the old me back, the familiar me.
Worst of all I think, is that my mind doesn’t work the way it did, and it keeps on changing. At first I couldn’t read at all, not even one sentence, as I was in shock and couldn’t retain the words from the first of the sentence long enough to add them to the last words of the sentence in order to make sense of it all. That was frustrating and scary. I’d watch a movie and enjoy it, and then put the same DVD in the next night and not realize I had seen it the night before until maybe near the end when some specific line would make me realize I had seen it. Then I would feel so stupid that I had watched it again, not remembering.
I talked to my psychiatrist about this and she reassured me, “It will get better, it will come back,” but I didn’t believe her, and even after six years, she is only partly right. It has gotten better, but I realize and finally accept that it will never be the same. I am Someone Other than who I was before. I still have word finding problems like a stroke patient, seeing the image of a tree in my mind, yet not being able to find the word “tree.” It is as if my brain is now made of Swiss cheese, with large empty holes at random within it. I stutter when I talk, trying to find the words I want to express myself, and sound to others as if I have the early onset of dementia. I apologize to them for not being able to find the word I am seeking, and explain why, or try to, but not really knowing if they believe me or not, or if they are simply humoring me to be polite. I don’t talk as much to strangers now, the New Me doesn’t want to have to explain. The Old Me never met a stranger, or was reluctant to exchange conversation with someone they just met.
I have found that for some strange reason the muscle memory of typing which the Old Me always did well, though not quite intact, is actually better for producing words and thoughts than verbally doing so. Though I now have problems spelling, and will use the word “here” instead of “hear” and not realize it until I read back through the typescript. Sometimes my spelling is so bad on more complex words that even spell check doesn’t know what I am trying to say to fix it, so I have to go back and find a simpler word that I can still spell, so my vocabulary has decreased by a large percentage.
Reading, which has always been one of my passions, is still a passion for me, but now instead of reading at breakneck speed, reading by phrases at twice or three times the rate most people read, I am again reading word by word at about 200-250 words per minute which is about average speed. I also know that my memory of a series of numbers, which was once quite extraordinary, can’t even extend to the seven digits of a phone number long enough to dial it.
Through the last six years the Now Me has gone through many changes, some quite painful, and has had to navigate through the rapids of multiple episodes of grief, make decisions while not fully functional as far as logic is concerned, and reinvestigate what my core beliefs are, and which direction my moral compass should point.
The feelings have been sometimes like that feeling of unreality you have inside a house of mirrors at the county fair! You end up holding out your hands in front of you to touch the things you think you see in order to navigate because you learn you cannot trust your eyes to navigate your way out. The Now Me must learn to use other senses besides sight to move by. Sometimes I’ve had to close my eyes and grope in the dark to find the path out of the maze because if the Old Me tried to find her way out by sight, she would confuse the Now Me.
Time has helped to calm the fears of things being different, of be being Someone Other than the Old Me. I’m learning to adjust, and to accept the Now Me and not grieve the way the Old Me was. There is really nothing in this life that is constant except change, and though the PTSD does seem to cause this change to accelerate at what seems like a breakneck speed, in many ways the Now Me has adapted well to these changes and is learning to care for herself in ways that the Old Me never was able to.
I saw a video a while back of a two-legged Border Collie working sheep at a dead run. One of the things I’ve learned in my years of having and raising collies is that they are a “can do” breed and ”working,” which to them is play, is very important to them, and if there is any way they can succeed in doing that, they will find it. I didn’t see that two legged dog sitting down whining on the side lines, but running as hard as she could go, doing what she loved. It was only when she sat down that she fell over, so I intend to keep on running and being and appreciating that the Now Me, while not identical to the Old Me, is still able to do what I really want to do.
Answering questions: Since I am feeling like myself today, I’m going to ATTEMPT to answer questions posed to me that were horribly painful to the best of my ability at this time.
I have only dated six men my entire life and four of them were disordered. I have always been completely unsuccessful in picking the right people. First you have to understand my history. I am a product of a narcissistic mother who physically and emotionally abused me and a father who verbally and emotionally abused me and was also absent because he had a job that required constant travel. My mother had to one to “reign in her behavior”. She is a religious fanatic who uses religion to control and fool people about her true self. She ingrained in me that everyone was good and no one was truly evil and everyone deserved the benefit of the doubt. She made me believe that I should always trust everyone until they give me a reason not too. She had me convinced that men/boys only wanted sex. She kept me locked away all the time. I became completely naive, inexperienced, and trusting of everyone. I was incapable of knowing when someone was lying to me. My first two boyfriends were when I was 16 and 19. One dumped me because I wasn’t ready to have sex and the other cheated on me with a 15 year old because she was also willing to have sex when I wasn’t ready. I always believed sex was to be only with someone I was committed to and loved.
The next two relationships were with sociopaths. The first was the one who was the son of the minister. He was the one who raped me and took my virginity because I still wasn’t ready to give it up. He was also a parasite who left me in severe debt when I ended the relationship. The next one lied about everything. I found out that he was married and he had told me nothing but lies to hide it so I ended the relationship.
The next one was my first narcissist who pulled the wool over my eyes again. Lied to me. Played with my mind so bad that he would play tug o war with my emotions and put me through hell and I lost myself. That one was the one who broke up with my while having post concussion syndrome and then changed his mind and practically stalked me to get me back. I refused and moved out of state. I was so distraught over the fact that I was never going to find the right person that I didn’t date for five years. In walks my current ex narc-the worst most evil of all of them. I had never been in love until him and I wanted that more than anything. He was the MARRIED ONE who brought up all the questions on this blog that I’m trying to answer.
I will start by saying that there are a lot of things that I don’t remember because I have become really good at blocking things out-I guess it’s a defense mechanism. A*** and I were friends from the start. I came from out of state to work. He was a trauma surgeon and I was a trauma nurse. He was very fixated on status and reputation. I came from a top ten rated hospital-somewhere where he had no hope of being hired. He acted like some kind brilliance would rub off on him from me. He also knew right away that I was a huge baseball fan and my favorite team was also his favorite. He was falling all over himself trying to talk to me and get to know me. I blew him off at first as he was 16 years older. He finally wore me down and we became buddies. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. Our friendship developed but we never talked about marriage because he didn’t wear a ring. I didn’t know jack about narcissists at the time-totally naive. A red flag is that they spend all their time probing you to get you to disclose as much about yourself as possible while revealing very little about themselves. I didn’t even catch or or think that was odd. He knew about my past painful relationships-he was “the good listener”. He knew about my rape. He immediately became my big strong protector. Everytime another doctor would be mean to me and I told him, that person would be falling all over themselves trying to apologize the next day. I knew he was getting a crush on me and it was mutual. My boss picked up on it right away. She told me–“that man has the BIGGEST crush on you I have ever seen and he’s married”. I started to try to pull from him but he always said or did something to pull me back in. He is the soul-mate narcissist. He gets you by being “the knight in shining armor”.
When we finally knew that the feelings were becoming unstoppable, we met and had a very long conversation in which he started to reveal things to me. The only problem is, is that they are pathological liars and I didn’t know that. The saying “how to tell if a narcissist is lying–is when their lips are moving”. I was completely clueless. We talked about the marriage issue-also clueless/naive in how they play the victime. These men are master actors and he deserves an academy award for what laid on me-that why they fool the experts and they can fool lie detectors. He began talking about how he was inexperienced with girls when he was in college and had low self esteem. Erin could relate to that. He didn’t think that he could find anyone who would want to be with him. I didn’t know at the top but he was giving me a tiny peek under his mask because the reason they develop their false self has a lot to do with childhood abuse and low self esteem. Self hatred was something we had in common. He told me that he and his wife were friends in college and got together because they both felt they weren’t very attractive and decided it would good to marry a friend-that way they could have someone. So he basically got to her the same way he got to me but years and years earlier. They both had goals for status, careers, reputation, etc. They got married and a year later had a daughter. I feel like I was brainwashed a little. They do have a way of doing that too but I haven’t researched it enough yet. He always knew just what to say.
It started with him claiming that there relationship had always been platonic but became increasingly so after the child came. What neither his wife or I knew was that he had started cheating almost immediately after the marriage started. They know to pick a respectable with low self esteem who will ignore or enable him. He than began telling me that he was so misunderstood. She didn’t want anything from him but his money. He basically said everything he could to put her down and make her seem like the wicked witch to me. She didn’t understand him. She didn’t have anything in common with him except her wanting status and social aspirations. She spent his money carelessly. She was lazy. She didn’t like his friends or want to hang with them. He could only take her to three restaurants in town cuz she was SO picky. All the things he complained about in her, I was the exact opposite.
It was asked to me about why marriage wasn’t a boundary to me. I though that it was-after all I had broken up with that other guy when I found he was married. Katydid told me that she wan’t allowed to have boundaries with her husband. Thanks to my parents, I wasn’t allowed to have boundaries, opinions, feelings, emotions. If I expressed those things I would receive threats, verbal tirades, or get the shit beat out of me. I had NO boundaries for how I let people TREAT me and evidently-how I treated others-I was oblivious. I was love-bombed and worshipped by this man. He had open heart surgery 6 yrs before I met him. He said that although his wife was there and stuck by him, she didn’t take care of him. He said that once his daughter was born, they had a VERY minimal sex life for years and that after his heart surgery they stopped all together. He told me that he just couldn’t get it up with her anymore. They tried once-he couldn’t perform so they decided that they would have a sexless marriage. He was not interested in taking medication for her to save it because she wasn’t his soulmate. I would get phone calls and texts constantly telling me how I was everything that she wasn’t. I was his soulmate. I was the love of his life. He never should have settled for her. I was the only one for him. He never truly knew what love felt like until I came into his life. Anything you can imagine he said to me.
He couldn’t divorce her because she had been there for him through all his training, his surgery, etc. He owed her something. His big thing was that he had to make sure that I was going to stay with him and be committed to him and he had to be sure. That’s how he kept the window open that there would eventually be divorce. He had built up a life and reputation for himself and since I was so much younger that he had to be absolutely sure that I wasn’t going to go anywhere. He said that he couldn’t believe that someone like me would be interested in him. That was fed to me constantly. He brought my self esteem from non existent to soaring high and when we finally kissed, after fighting it for so long and felt the chemistry, we were both GONE. The chemistry was so unbelievable that words can’t even describe it. He was all I ever wanted my whole life and he told me that’s how I was to him. I NEVER EVER thought I would be in that position in my life. I knew that I finally felt love for the first time in my life. I was on such a natural high and brainwashed that I was able to lose my moral compass. We were on a rollercoaster going down a steep grade with no brakes and no way to stop and once the sex started-there was no hope for us. I made him wait for awhile and he told me that he would wait as long as I needed him to because he loved me so much. He used to used my past rape in that to tell me “I promise that I will be the only one who never hurts you. I will take care of you for the rest of my life”. He always knew exactly what to say. He was more than willing to get medication because he said he was afraid that he couldn’t please me. I said, I don’t want you on meds unless it’s absolutely necessary. Let’s try and see what happens. Surprise-he had no difficulty what soever. The first time we made love, we both cried.
Once we calmed down a little and the guilt would come in and he would say the right things to stifle it. I ignored all red flags-obviously about the marriage. My friends hated him. He would get stressed if I showed too much emotion. Every night when he left me to go home to her, I would cry. He would get upset if I did it in front of him. He would get teary and beg me not to cry because it hurt him. I would stifle it. When he left, he always talked to me on the phone until he pulled into his driveway. If I cried on the phone he would do the same thing. He would go home and then text me all evening telling me how he missed me so much and wanted to be back with me instead of there but it was never strong enough for him to leave. He would tell me how he was achy for me and couldn’t take it. He always called or texted me everynight before he went to bed to tell me how much he loved me. On the rare occasions we would fight, he would hurt my feelings right before he was in a situation where he couldn’t talk. Everytime I tried to break up with him, he would cry all over the place-that was when it hurt so much him leaving me. Then he would miraculously be able to make an excuse/lie to her to get out the house to see/talk to me because we promised we would never go to bed angry.
This is all that I have the strength to tell, except that I was filled with guilt and pain and he knew what to say all the time to make me forget. I have been in horrible guilt in the 15 months that we have been apart. I apologized to his wife so many times. She lied to get me in her corner, wanted to me testify against him in her divorce. She acted like it was me and her against him. She told me that he had done this with 3 other young naive women like me. In those relationships she was able to catch him fast enough so they were only really little flings. She said that she HATED me because I was the one that she felt he was truly in love with. She turned on me and told me that she was “GOING TO TAKE ME DOWN, NO MATTER WHAT”. I had to change email address, phone number, and move out of state temporarily to make it stop.
She ran me out of one job, gave me no other choice but to quit my dream job. She now has shown up and works at my current job. All I want is the drama to end. I don’t want this following me. She knows we’re in the same building but she doesn’t know who I am-what I look like. I see her in the halls and we have been in the elevator together. This causes great anxiety for me.
The next question is why do I have animosity toward her? She has repeatedly taken him back over and over again. This last time, he promised her all the financial awards to get her back. He told her terrible lies about me to make her think I wasn’t important. He admitted to me when confronted that” everything I told her about you was a lie. You have to understand that I will tell her whatever lie I have to, to get her back because I have my reputation and my status to uphold”. If she continues to take him back, she has no one to blame but herself. I learned the ultimate lesson. I still have PTSD at times from this.
Katydid-I want you to know that I gathered up myself and wrote a truthful response to the questions that you asked me. It was in excess of 8 paragraphs and it was very hard for me to write. When I attempted to post it, it did not post and I didn’t show up anywhere. I can’t re-write it but I wanted you to know that I tried. Maybe it is a sign that it is not the right time for you to know the answer to those questions. I don’t what else to say. Erin1972
so far this is the oldest I have ever been…
xxx
Now what? xx
What is wrong with thi freakin blog? No posts are showing up! Posts are disappearing and no one can communicate! Donna says they’re getting caught in the spam filter.
Hi E72
I wanted to thank you very much for sharing your story about your ex Spath with KatyDid, but I also found it helpful to be fair.
Reading it became very clear to me what may have happened with the ‘other woman’ in my story. I could imagine that my exN said similar things to his knew woman about me as was said about his wife to you. ExN used similar techniques to ‘Lovebomb’ me too which kept me ‘hooked’ when my intuition was screaming that something was badly wrong.
Spookily word for word my exN said (in counselling) “I promise that I will be the only one who never hurts you. I will be there for you forever”. This was about a week before I found out that he’d been cheating all along and he ‘dumped and discarded me’ I had also been raped at 15 and my exN used this as the reason that I ‘didn’t deserve to be hurt again’. The logic of this is clear, so it’s pretty sick to use that as an excuse to hurt me later.
Of course I know for sure my exN told the new target about my being raped as ammunition that ‘he loved me alot but that I was too crazy to be with etc because I had issues’. Total betrayal of trust in every conceivable way and beyond any standard of decency to betray confidences like this and use them dishonestly for his own sick ends.
Obviously our stories are different people, but from your story told so honestly I think I really started to ‘get it’. I.e. the ‘other woman’ in my story didn’t have the right facts to make the right decisions and she really was a dupe, I have been able to let go alot of vestiges of ‘intolerance’ and understand better ‘the sorts of carp that went on’ and ‘let it go’.
Course I’ll never know the ‘exact things’ but Spaths have such patterns so you can bet that the lines that are used on one woman will be close to the lines that were used on me and the other target of my exN.
Duh – just like me. I’d always intellectually ‘known’ this but haven’t ‘felt it’ so clearly as hearing from yourself as a fellow target of an Spath.
It seems so obvious now how his sustained campaign was really odiously determined to dupe you whatever the cost to you (and to others) and that whatever objection you threw up he found a way to get around it. How carefully he set the ground. How practised and how cynical was approaches. Even the first clue ‘not wearing a wedding ring at work’. I’m sure he told his spouse that it got in the way working or something, but to anyone else a subliminal first signal of ‘available’.
I hope that there was some benefit to ‘getting this out’ to yourself too.
I understand your anger with Spath’s wife – I think you’re right to be angry in some senses – she clearly knows what’s she’s dealing with more than anyone, and is choosing to enable him. Though I still kinda see her as a dupe who’ll live to regret her decision.
I also was very angry that the target of my exN believed his lies about me so readily. I guess alot of us here on LF will relate to the outrage of the blatent and vicious ‘smear campaign’.
The wife must believe that he was the one to ‘blow you off’ or ‘come to his senses that he really loves her’ and that you’re the ‘pursuer’ who ‘won’t leave him alone’ to have such vitriol for you, he must also have hurt her by using the possibility of going back to you to ‘bait her’ and make her cling on tighter. She’s been told a pack of lies, and though she should know better she’s choosing to ‘believe him’ – it’s daft of her…….who knows what evil he’s setting her up for. Some Spaths kill the spouse that they feel they can’t divorce for whatever reason as it better gets them what they want (contents of a will, assets once a home is paid off etc). Shiver. Be glad that you’re not the target Erin! I would bet my own money that there’s a pure financial motive for him being with his wife right now and spin off ‘status’ – i.e. re his career. urgh – what a horrid reason for someone to be married to you. Also there’ll be no ‘somatic’ phase cos ‘he got her’. and doesn’t need the ‘physical hook anymore’.
Maybe she’s an S too and she’s about to financially outSpath him and take him to the cleaners- anyway what’s guaranteed is that neither of them are going to know love and happiness whilst their together – sounds like it been pure torture all the way through so far! More drama that you need lovely – you’ll get enough of that carp when you’re in the police!
LOL
Delta1
Delta1-thanks for not judging me. I am glad I put that out there because people automatically think that we are the evil homewreckers and we are made to look like the devil. I have been feeling so shitty this weekend thinking about all this. Going to the range didn’t even help today.
I am glad she took him back. If she hadn’t, I truly believe he would try to kill me. You should have seen how scary his Mr. Hyde is. I think that if she hadn’t taken him back that he would have tried to kill her too. The only reason I feel bad for her is that I wonder if she’s afraid to leave him too. I know she loves the money and the status too. She really hates me because when he called me 3 months after the discard to “get closure”, I went off on him for an hour. He was so drugged up on some kind of psych meds that he listened to me-until I pushed his buttons too hard. After the call, I emailed her and told her that her POS pathetic husband had better not call me again. I told her this–“I am so glad to be rid of him. I don’t deserve his treatment and he doesn’t deserve my love. He told me that he would tell you whatever lie he had to to get you back. You are pathetic as he is. What kind of example are you setting for your daughter. You complained to me that you finally got her to dump the guy who was treating her like shit. As soon as she found out what went down with her dad and me and you, she was back in the boyfriend’s arms. It’s OK honey, your boyfriend can treat you like shit and cheat on you, as long as he has money your good?” That’s whe she really began to threaten me. I think she is disordered as well.
I wish I could post my story all over the place so people will see that the “other woman” is miserable. She doesn’t enjoy it and she has way more to lose than he does. You have no idea how much I lost and he left his life almost completely intact. He’s already built his rep back up. He smeared me all over the place!
To Erin1972 and Delta1
I think I can add some enlightenment.
First, as I alluded to in an earlier post, I am NOT religious, I am spiritual/philosophical. (Erin and I could compete which mother best used religion as a stick to beat us with… and I’m saying from what Erin has written about her so far, I would WIN that one!) So when I refer to God, it is probably not the one that comes to your mind.
Erin, You thought you were in it for the love from a honey, but as the wife, my perspective was that I was in it as a life or death survival. I think a LOT of wives of s-paths are at that level of mania, esp. after years of reality ripped away and ALice in Nightmareland and not knowing which to believe while at the same time, NO ONE believes what we have to say. (they always make us out to me the crazy wife don’t they. WELL, the situation was crazy but I wasn’t.)
In the beginning, I was duped (some red flags but I thought so out of character that I excused them away), After marriage, as time went on, I realized he was NOTHING what he pretended to be (explanations were not making sense). But I took vows and I meant them and this was the middle time so I also thought that he’d settle down when he got older. Meanwhile ALL my initial decisions were made based on “no divorce” so I agreed to all these things that lead to undermining my rights and appropriate care for myself. I was happy to marry a man who was the one who told me he was marrying forever, and he so contemptuous of cheaters.
I’m betting your s-path’s wife KNOWS he doesn’t love her, but sadly as you know, he couldn’t possibly love you either. What you were was a replacement, someone WORTHY to take care of him – which is why you were a true threat because until you, the little horndogs weren’t worthy. Taking care of him was HER job, and as he treated her shabby, she stopped caretaking him. He didn’t care WHO took care of him, but she was easier b/c she had the rights to a pile of money! (Another thing, married s-paths think ALL the assets are theirs.) Thank God she got him back. (Truly! Thank God for unanswer prayers!) It’s HER HELL but she’s lived it long enough, it what she knows.
At the end of living with my husband, he was blatant in his contempt of me, and and realizing the first affair was NOT a one off but a MASK OFF, I still tried to FIX us. ONLY BECAUSE I was losing much more than a husband. I gave up a career, had NO way to support myself, they defrauded me of my home, a house I BUILT with my own hands, literally blood sweat tears and SOUL in my home, suffereing b/c I have arthritis in all my fingers, but I endured b/c it was supposed to be my home unitl I died (a natural death at 100 looking young and beautiful….!!!), I had been isolated by him, and I helped isolate myself b/c I was convinced NO one liked me (grew up with that, my lovely mom constantly reminded me that I was the one she wished she never had. I told my husband and he used it on me later, that no one he knew wanted me around and how even my mother knew something was so off in me that no none could stand me.) I was alone, abandoned, no money, no home, no employment history, extremely sick with an illness inherited from my mom but the stress had blown my immune system, paranoid about others, unemployable, and zero trust. That is what I was like when I moved away. And moving away saved my life.
This final affair? I have NOT interferred with it at all. She is WORTHY to my husband, a fitting replacement of me. Not the skank that the others were. (I told my husband, if I had known he’d date a skank, I’d have never married him b/c that showed his value system. ) Currently I am hoping he will let me have the divorce, b/c at this stage, he is still impressing her. Yes, I am using her. Yes, it is wrong. But she’s not going to listen to me anyway. I will tell her when I am free. No she absolutley does not deserve waht he is going to do to her so I have an responsibility to offer her the insight that he has no concience, no remorese, no empathy, no emotional connection. Maybe by then, enough will have happened that she will listen.
Thus ends this wife’s perspective.
This is my first time visiting this sight and I am completely overwhelmed! I am desperately seeking support and advice and not sure exactly how this site works??