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I’ll bet she does!
Your H sounds as dumb as mine, Bev.
Victoria, did your SA actually read Barb’s book?
Unfortunately, we all know that SAs are so self-absorbed they wouldn’t take the time to explore this site, try to learn or understand what we are thinking and feeling about post-D Day.
I have always been aware of the possibility of an irate husbad signing up to spy on his wife.
Although it would be possible for a SAH to sign up, it would be pretty hard for them to get past me. I check each sign up very carefully. First, I see the name and address of everyone via their credit card or PayPal info. Second, I see what they wrote as a reason for signing up. Third, I am always keeping an eye on what everyone writes, looking for authenticity.
I have privately written and questioned several new Sisters who I have had doubts about. Fortunately I have not found a fake Sister yet.
And, just as Tina said above, if you understand the narcissistic personality of these guys you will realize that even if they did get in they would quickly become bored and leave or enraged and tip their hand because everything here is about US, and everything here is the truth–two things they just can’t deal with.
Speaking for myself, I couldn’t care less if Larry read anything I wrote, it’s all the truth and I would say it right to his face.
I do everything I can to make this a safe place for everyone.
~ JoAnn
JoAnn,
I worried, too, about my STBX signing up- and I really wouldn’t put it past him, honestly. I mean we are talking about someone who has printed out my emails and secretly recorded our conversations for years. There have been times I have been careful about what I said or how I said it, JIC.
But I decided that I really couldn’t live without support. I needed this site more than I feared him.
Victoria, oh my gosh, I feel for what you are going through. I just really, really want to get you some distance from the hell he is putting you through with his suicide threats and now this. He is keeping you- what was it Helen said? tethered to his tornado. I mean WTF with the coworker/crush thing?
What these guy say/think is crazy-making. Sometimes it’s good to know because it helps you face reality, but it always is just plain mind-boggling. The less you hear of it, the better.
That’s good to know, JoAnn.
He did read Barb’s book at the start of this year, at my request. I would say it only made an impact on him for about 2 weeks, with regards to being more supportive and understanding to me. However, overall it did educate him on the basics about partner trauma and PTSD. He cried one night after finishing it because of how difficult it is for partners to heal, especially for me because there’s barely any resources in the part of the world we live. He never believed the co-addict stuff from Patrick Carnes about partners, and Barbara’s book helped further cement that for him.
For some more background about me — we never married. We were de facto. I certainly felt married to him all those 10 years and it hurts similar, though. He never proposed to me, but I never felt in a rush because I assumed it would happen eventually – you know, always knew he was my husband-to-be, “the one”, felt so secure and sure about everything. Sigh. He once had plans to surprise me with an engagement ring when we travelled to New Zealand a few years ago, but for some reason nothing eventuated. Thankfully! Very grateful. Although, not being married somewhat keeps me in a very odd limbo place — like drifting along, one month together, one month not, together again, then not really, etc.
I have just recently told him the “relationship” is on pause. Essentially, it cannot improve or get better, until he gets better.
D-day was January 16th, 2011. I found his porn accounts online because he left the window up. First, I made him sleep on the couch. Then I decided one week after D-day, when he told me about the physical cheating with the naked strippers all over the country, that I couldn’t possibly live with such a stranger, and so I immediately packed my clothes and moved out. I have been physically separated from him for 20 months. I have been living with my parents and 2 sisters ever since. I wish I had kicked him out, but my strong flight instinct was for me to run. Every bone in my body knew there was no way I could possibly stay living there. I’m glad I got out because it gave me space to breathe and think, even though at times I really do miss what was my home and my normal routine of living.
It hasn’t been easy for me though, even though I am very grateful I have a roof over my head and appreciate my parents financial help. Living here has been tougher than expected because I don’t have a good relationship with my mother. Our past is filled with fighting and me being emotional abused. She can be very unsupportive and invalidating. It’s hard to take when I’m in pain and already a pile of brokenness. It makes me cry just thinking about how much I have lost and where my life is at now. I feel homeless, even though I’m technically not. I sleep on the floor on a single bed mattress in my sister’s room. I live out of my suitcase. I have no sufficient income anymore, lost most of my work contracts after D-day because I stopped accepting new jobs as I couldn’t focus and PTSD took over my daily life.
Karen, for support, face to face I only have my therapist and sister. I don’t have any close friends. I don’t have any children. I don’t have any pets – my angel cat died just one month before D-day. I am really quite alone. I have no idea how to make more support exist out of nowhere. Not sure what else I can do.
It is why I believe a new relationship with a healthy man would help me. Debora once said to me “The meeting someone new is interesting. Living in such a dysfunctional setting has skewed my reality. I think if I were to be in a healthy loving give and take relationship, I could heal”. She articulated so perfectly what I mean – apart from therapy, I have no real healthy relationships that promote my healing. I think being in one, connecting with a man who is normal and sane, would be a springboard to healing. An encouraging place to repair and build. Almost like grounding? Re-entering planet earth? I long to interact normally with someone, I long for the basics – to feel wanted, visible, appreciated, liked, loved, cared about. The thought just makes me feel happy, even if it’s unrealistic and probably may never happen.
JoAnn – thank you for all you do to keep this a safe and supportive space for us sisters. I can’t say enough how much I appreciate you!!!
Victoria – you do need to build some new relationships. Yes, that will help you heal. No, it is not unrealistic that one day you will find a loving and supportive partner. But finding a new partner or fantasizing about that is not where your focus should be right now. If you want to start interacting normally or differently with someone, and build your support network, start with platonic friends. Join a group, take a class, exercise somewhere in a group. Try to get to know some new people. You don’t have to share all of yourself with them. You can take it slow. If you need to find something free (i think you live in Australia? i am not that familiar with resources there) but i do know there are free and low-cost options for this, often – at parks where groups of people exercise, local colleges, churches, etc. Look in your newspaper or community paper to see if there are groups meeting on anything you’re interested in. If you were in the U.S. i’d say volunteer on a campaign if you are in the – it’s election season! That is a great way to get to know people and get out of the house. Maybe there are options for this kind of stuff in Australia? If you don’t want to support a candidate, you can do nonpartisan voter registration or non partisan or issue-based campaign volunteering. Community papers and newspapers often have an events listing, groups listing, and a free events section. Check those out. They said that part of healing is doing new things to re-activate neural pathways. Even one small thing a day. Push yourself a little bit.
i remember you posted somewhere that you liked to bake cakes. is there something there? one of my new year’s resolutions this year was to learn to cook one new dish every month. i always loved cooking, and it has been fun to push myself a little bit.I know it is hard. I know it is scary. Yesterday I had to force myself to leave the house to go to the gym in the evening. It was a friend’s birthday party in the afternoon and I couldn’t face being around all those people. I just didn’t respond to the invites… I was anxious about walking to the gym because I didn’t know who I’d run into and couldn’t deal with answering random “how’s SA” questions or even “how are you?”
Victoria, i know this is hard but you have been through some serious trauma and continue to be retraumatized through your SA’s actions, manipulations, and threats. you need to prioritize your healing 100%. focus on YOU, sister. one day you will be ready for your new relationship with a healthy man, and able to bring your whole healing self to it.Yes, living in Australia. I’m glad you brought up politics and campaigns — used to be one of my absolute deepest passions before D-day, Artemis. It feels like you knew “former me”. Problem is, I don’t feel like that person anymore, it’s like everything about who I was died, my interests and everything I used to feel was super important have all disappeared, evaporated, or been tainted. I’m trying to get into following the current US election, but it’s like my mind just can’t focus or care. I actually think my political views have changed a lot from this experience, too, and that feels very weird.
I do love cooking and baking. I love trying new recipes. Me and SA used to always cook dinner together before d-day, it was “our time”, and so it always brings a lot of sad memories now. I do try my best to keep active in the kitchen, though – even if it’s merely putting a frozen meal in the oven.
My SA truly was my best friend, my everything, so that’s why I feel like I have this massive big gap now in my life. It has been in the back of my mind to somehow start socializing more and meet people, perhaps out in groups. I just need to push myself one day to just go do it! I feel nervous, like I’m going not be able to relate to anyone, or they might trigger me.
To update about that previous night – I immediately turned my phone off because I couldn’t stomach the idea of talking to him. He tried calling me 11 times. Sounds like he was hounding/chasing me etc as I hear many SA’s usually do, but it’s very out of character for my SA to even bother. Then I turned my phone back on because I remembered my sister was supposed to text me. He called later, which I hanged up twice. Then I thought fuck it, I’m going to address this.
He asked me what was on my mind? I cried on the phone, at times wailed in pain. I could barely get my words out. I stressed how he owes me an explanation, I need to know what our relationship truly was, I need to know if I was used from the start, I need to know if the first few years were real. I need to know if I have just been a hole in the mattress to him. I need to know if I was just part of his addiction. I need to know if I was just escalation for him, the progression from porn to flesh.
He first said in reality the relationship was fake because of his addiction. I said, look I don’t want to hear post d-day “insights” or simply you affirming stuff I’ve drummed into you, I simply want to hear what our relationship really was and meant to you back then.
I read out a part from a love note to me from 2004 and asked him, while absolutely balling my eyes out, why did you write that stuff?? Why did you make me believe it was real??
He said because it was what he felt at that time. It wasn’t crap, it was actually what he thought, he did feel what he wrote. He said in our relationship the moments, thoughts and feelings at that time were real. He loved me. Had feelings for me. He did say that times he took me to hotels for “romantic evenings” were certainly done with sex number one in his mind.
It made me feel slightly better about the whole thing, but I then was left thinking that is all so very easy for him just to say, perhaps I was manipulated just again? I cannot believe him with anything. Is he more likely to be honest with the addicts or with me? Obviously, with them. Or is it a pissing contest, like Lynn thinks? Is he regurgitating what he hears from others, like Bev warns? Does he even know, himself, as everyone else says?
My sister was just as shocked when I showed her, she said there’s no way that can be true – that I could have just been a body to him. She thought she knew him like a brother. He was very close with my family – did everything with us, so a lot of effort just for easy access to a body. The entire thing has also reminded me so much of how prostitutes are “kept” by men. I then thought, why would he “keep me” as his hooker, when a) I’m not even that exciting in the bedroom b) he doesn’t even enjoy sex c) I have no boobs d) I have pubes, which if you remember when he compared my vagina to the strippers, isn’t “his preference” e) I didn’t even like having sex a lot. Why put in ALL that effort of building a full life with me, spending all that time with me, doing a lot for me, becoming so embedded with my family, just for sex? This guy is very lazy. It doesn’t make sense. There would have been easier options. Although, I was the one interested in him when we first met, so perhaps in a way it was easy for him.
I know it’s pointless trying to decipher an SA’s upside down mind, but I’m kind of just getting it out here as I type so I don’t go to sleep with it all caught in my mind.
I am wondering though — what type of positive self-protective defences can one possibly have against the pain of reading you may have just been used as meat by your partner/husband/best friend? To not feel hurt, I honestly think you would have to be non-human. Even if detached, how would you not feel affected by such an horrific truth about your past, the very essence of who/what you were to the man from the very beginning?
Our main contact is phone and email. I did see him last week at the apartment, but that was essentially to assess the suicide situation. Things had really calmed down since everything reached extreme boiling point. I have consciously tried not to be as aggressive with my words and not to name-call, because being like that is not the type of person I like being, as expressed in the “Looking in the Mirror” thread. He’s been different. He kept asking me how I am, how I’ve slept, text me a few times out of the blue in the day seeing how I’ve been doing. The atmosphere has just been easier. He’s still active with his the porn, though, as I learned today.
I think one part of my problem is believing the addiction model, and that I just can’t mentally digest his crazy shit. All the stuff, like he stopped loving me the day I found his porn and had a relationship just so he could have sex – this insanity is so damn far out there, adrift from normal humanity, that after the painful shock begins to dissipate and settle about a week later, it’s like I start to break it down as to him just talking “crazy”, as if from his mouth it’s a delusional mental illness talking. Almost like I’m not talking to a real person, just hearing words from a mental patient splattering crazy stuff. I really think that is what my mind has been doing. At least it feels that way? Because it’s all so very fucked up, senseless and beyond what seems actually possible.
I have done no contact many times in the past – 3 months initially, 2 months, 2-3 weeks at time etc. Sometimes I’m the one being ignored too. The factors that make it difficult for me right now: his suicide risk and threats play on my mind even though I know it shouldn’t, I am concerned he’ll go after my money, and he always ends up using my no contact as an excuse/invitation to go on dating sites – which really still stings me. When he does that, I always then regret the no-contact and kick myself.
If no-contact is not used by him as an opportunity to double down on his recovery so that he can be a real partner to you, then why regret finding out that truth? I understand regret–believe me. I regret that I find myself in this situation, that I chose him, that I continue to live with him…BUT if I discovered he was acting out, I wouldn’t regret or feel any responsibility for “causing” that. If the only way they can “behave” is if we give them everything they want, make ourselves their personal slaves, and cower to all forms of emotional blackmail, what kind of relationship do we have, what kind of life? Even when they’re trying, life with an SA is horrible enough. And please don’t take that as a judgment; it’s just me “thinking” out loud, trying to parse some things for myself as well. I mean, under the best of circumstances, THIS SUCKS.
Victoria, I can so relate to what you wrote. Mine has a phobia around sex so I’ll never understand why he’d decide to use sex the way he did.
And I used to be a news junkie too. Now I don’t have a clue what’s going on in the world, and I can barely remember the news sites I used to read every day.
And ‘can’t mentally digest the crazy shit,’ as you say. It’s like we’re trying to make sense of something that makes no sense at all. Because we can’t wrap our heads around the idea that years and years of our lives were an illusion. I think about times when I would be full of interest listening to what he was doing on his trips abroad. He went to Prague twice..hot bed of sex clubs, which I hadn’t known at the time. He described the city to me while he was there, and I was enthralled. But now I know that while I was listening to him, he had gone there again because he was trying to find this hooker who’d given him a lap dance the year before, but later that night stood him up for their ‘sex appointment.’ So he went off with another hooker on his second trip there. And I thought he’d just loved the city. It’s things like this that keep us wanting answers. Like trying to put a puzzle together, but the pieces are so wacked out that it’s never going to come together. I feel for you, hon. I..we..know just how it feels. And it’s surreal, to say the least. I guess detachment is the ideal, but in reality, it just doesn’t work that way. We don’t just suddenly switch off our love and our feeling that they were our best friend. It’s like you said, if we were able to do that, then we wouldn’t be human. It’s a rough and weird road, but you’re not alone. We are all here for you. Sending you big hugs. xoxo
joann,
i am so so so happy to hear how you screen new members! since i’m planning divorce, and decided recently to tell my sah NOTHING, it’s a real relief to know this site is protected.
victoria, i hear your pain and understand your confusion. please focus on yourself fully. FULLY. stop wondering about your partner. he will only hurt you more. invest in people and situations that bring you joy, not pain.
even if that joy isn’t apparent for a while, it will begin to affect you in a positive way.
live for yourself. trust yourself. love yourself.
Victoria, you are breaking my heart. Remember the writing/poetry prompt that March gave us? It was to write a letter to yourself when you were at a time that felt like you. I would absolutely take my 28 year old self back. Don`t hang around and let him take your 30`s and 40`s too. He isn`t your friend. I am so sorry but he is not. I am not asking you to hate him. I am asking you to meet some “normal” people. I don`t care where you meet them but do it. I don`t blame you for running and going to your parents. I would have done the same but I have 2 kids and the law won`t let me run. Now, you need a plan to get out of your mother`s house. Start making very tiny plans. You don`t have to do it tomorrow….But set small goals. You could even just go around and look at apartments. It`s ok if you can`t get one now. Just try to focus on something good for you that does not include him….
love, bev
Victoria,
It takes a lot of courage to pour out your heart and soul like that. Your pain and anguish are palpable. And I think you are learning that, really, there is not much satisfaction to be got from him, unfortunately. How can you ever believe him once he has deceived you so profoundly? I think we have all been in that spot- turning to them for support or to ease our suffering. It just doesn’t work.But if you start taking care of you, I promise you, it will get better. It takes time and effort, but you will get there.
Dear Victoria,
so sorry for your pain. from your descriptions of him, I can’t help but see your SA as a petulant child. If he can’t act outward, — sex w hookers, dating, or contacting you– he acts inward and threatend suicide. it’s like a rebellious teenager whom you take car priveliges away for bad behavior. what do theydo? they stay in and try to make everyone’s lives hell until you give in.
he’s testing testing what he can get from you, how much he can manipulate, and he has no f’cking clue as to why he’s done the things he’s done. addictions escalate, so it is possible he was not nearly addicted or unhealthy as he is now. therfore, back the, the relationship was possibly more equitable, loving or normal. but something else has take over his brain, and he backpaints everything prior through his current mindf8ck addictive pd lens. dont listen to his shit.
if you loved him, and felt love was reciprocated at one time, then it WAS. the end. because it was YOUR relationship and reality. who cares what he was thinking. it’s like asking an amoeba for an IQ. don’t bother.
take the pieces of the past you cherish and don’t let him taint them. cherish them. hold them dear. and let him grow up, or not. and make a decision as to what you want to do when you are ready.
take strength. he’s playing you like a wii.
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