Ending an abusive relationship can be easier than dealing with the aftermath, which may include forgetting why you had to end it.
Abuse is abuse, but psychological abuse isn’t as easy to recognize as is a bruise or a cut to the flesh.
We’ve all heard the saying love hurts. How much is it really supposed to hurt? It shouldn’t hurt all the while you’re in a relationship.
Love is an elusive subject. I imagine love can have many meanings and different shapes, but abuse is not love.
I loved a wonderful man, I thought. I also loved the way I believed he loved me.
The man I loved was kind, compassionate, generous, funny, smart and told me every day he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.
Unfortunately, I loved an illusion and an impostor. I loved a character that was passionately and intelligently designed, especially for me. I loved a man, who I honestly believe has Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
The man I loved created a character for me, mostly through what I now realize were constant interrogations. He would sit by my window with me in the mornings where I liked having coffee. He asked me questions about my life twenty years earlier. Over and over he asked the same questions. He disguised his questioning as an interest in getting to know, “everything about me,” which he called love.
How he created the character is a long story. It was continuously being created in every moment we spent together.
The first day we were sexually intimate he began asking me about fantasies. Had I ever had this one or that one and if I said no, he would ask had I ever at least considered certain ones he had mentioned. He also wanted to know about every relationship I’d ever had as if we were in our early twenties or even teenagers. He was in his early sixties, almost twenty years my senior.
He wanted to know all about my childhood. Basically, he wanted to know everything I liked, disliked, desired or had ever desired so that he could create my perfect mate.
There are reasons good and intelligent people fall for abusive and pathological personalities. We don’t fall in love with a cruel person. It’s the opposite. Sometimes cruel people seek out kind people. We fall for the kindness they pretend to have. We fall for characteristics, such as a great sense of humor, what looks like compassion, an acknowledgment of our hard work in life.
In my case, the man I loved was wonderful until the first time I expressed my personal feelings about something other than being grateful to have such a terrific person like him.
He became a cruel, deceiving, lewd, sarcastic and possibly, the most destructive, was that he became intensely revengeful. The man felt rejected by me. I would learn that this triggered what he called his, “childhood narcissistic injuries.”
He spent six months working hard to gain my love, admiration and respect. I finally fell for him and this was the hardest part of ending the relationship.
When I finally told him that I trusted his love, I never again saw the man he had pretended to be. It was as if the man I loved died and that’s exactly how it felt.
Instead of chocolate and roses, poetry books for lovers, and gifts he thought I would like, he began sending me emails clearly calculated in ways to leave me in the dark about what he was doing and stunned by descriptions of recent activities he described.
I don’t know how long he thought I would hang in there, and I can’t believe I was in that relationship even one day, but hindsight is everything.
He started being cruel to me, finally sending me emails offering me, “whatever my price,” to be one of his nude models. I never knew he had nude models. He described their bodies. At first, I thought he was trying to make me jealous. He was, but he had a dark agenda.
Eventually, he sent me an email the day after he’d come to support me while my mom was in an ER. A young nurse was working that night. I was having a severe episode of chronic fatigue syndrome. He sat up with me while we waited all night.
I hadn’t felt support in the areas of my life where I needed it. An older sibling wasn’t willing to help that night. She doesn’t believe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a real illness. Someone needed to be with my mom, but since I was the one who said she needed to go to the ER, which she did, then I was told that I had travel to that town, and stay with her until she was discharged. I did, but I felt alone and exhausted. His being there that night meant a lot to me.
The next day, I got an email from him. He told me he’d gotten the nurse’s phone number. Then he described them going to his new condo, the one that I’d never seen, and in detail, he wrote about being with the young woman in the shower. I suspected it was all a lie. I didn’t believe he could even get into those positions he had detailed, but it was a hard read no less.
I was truly sickened.
Not long afterwards, I received an email from him offering me all sorts of promises for the future, “if (I) could compartmentalize my feelings.”
I blocked his emails after that day.
He was financially wealthy. He tried using money and promises of financial security to manipulate me. He called his offers a good deeds in the name of charity and love.
This was not love.
There was pure malice in his offers. He knew it would break my heart to hear him talk about his lust and sex with other women (even though I didn’t really believe him. Self doubt over my own intuition had been nurtured). Telling me all about his new home and his, “wonderful new furniture,” while never inviting me there, was simply a way of hurting me. And it worked.
I discovered that everything he had told me had been lies. His lies were complex, complicated and detailed.
The entire time he maintained that he knew what love was, as if he were a master of the subject. It was amazing. He wrote demanding righteous long emails about what love and courtship meant. I was stunned and for a little while, silenced.
I’d ask him what was going on. He maintained that he had been wronged. My crime was that I wasn’t willing to be his devotee.
“It is your loyalty that I desire,” he wrote. “The loyalty you have to your son and mother.”
I thought it was absurd for a mature adult man to say those things, and it was. Plus, if he had been the man he’d pretended to be, then he would have had my loyalty. I concluded he hadn’t really wanted me at all, nor my loyalty, because when he had it, he trashed it. The man wanted nothing more than a lifeless doll.
I was tricked, deceived, used, manipulated and conned.
Narcissists are great tricksters. Anyone can fall prey.
There were many red flags in the beginning, but wow, was he good at lies!
In the start of his con, he had constantly told me me how wonderful I was and how he adored everything about me.
When a man puts a woman on a pedal stool, constantly praising her, telling her how awesome and wonderful she is, she should beware.
I’m not talking about real love or the wonderful sensations of falling in love. I’m not talking about the kind of love that grows out of mutual respect and sincerely getting to know another person. I’m talking about a person who is lying, pretending and putting on a show. One day this will turn and you will hear just the opposite.
Narcissists play games. Pathological destructive games that hurt and damage people.
He told me after he gave up trying to impress me, that he had never known love. He said he didn’t feel anything. He said he had used me, “to feel emotions, mainly through having sex.”
“You felt something,” he remarked, adding, “so that’s what I liked about being with you.”
Much of his behavior was a way to mimic being in love.
He bragged about all he had provided for his son and how sad it was that my son had not had the same. No socks or glasses, but he offered to pay for me to have a face life. He’d had several.
He was terribly threatened by my having a few normal friends and a family. Big red flag.
Loving a person means wanting the best for that person. It means wanting them to thrive.
It may be true that love hurts, but this is different than the hurt that comes from abuse.
I had had no reason to think the man was acting and lying, aside from my gut screaming out at me. Most of us take people for who they say they are. We can judge them by how they act around us and treat us, along with listening to how they speak of other people.
Malignant narcissists have a damaged character. They portray a public image that has nothing to do with who they are, but this is for the public and it is not what people close to them see in private.
You may see on the outside a confident and outgoing person, seemingly quite concerned for the well-being of others, a social butterfly, a community leader, a leader in a church, a member of well-respected organizations, a giver to charity — but on the inside is an entirely different story. There is a person without any substance and sadly, he knows it.
Any person can be a victim of abuse. Recognizing red flags is important. Listening to your intuition is too.
Sometimes we do not know what is happening to us until we discover that there are actually words to describe the experience. Knowledge really is freedom.
If you are in a relationship where you feel confused, like every single thing that goes wrong is your fault and you begin to feel badly about yourself, like you just aren’t good enough, all the while you hear someone say how much he or she loves you, something is definitely wrong.
I hope those of us who have been hurt in a psychologically abusive relationship will heal. I hope we will recognize signs of an abusive personality and walk the other way.
I hope we will choose love and leave abuse.
Thank you for visiting my blog.
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Of course I’d been told about stealing and the Ten Commandments. I had also been specifically instructed, perhaps too many times for my rebellious nature, not to take, I mean steal, apples from the old lady’s yard.
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