Slowly Opening Eyes

December 18th, 2012

     Today was day one.  It has now been over 24 hours since we last spoke.  I’m still feeling the effects of denial as I still imagine talking to you, seeing you, making love to you.  It was a fairly productive day; I tidied up my house a bit, finally removing the evidence of my recent illness.  I went to the gym and did a half-hearted workout.  I had my recurring daydream about training you, but this time with the bitter realization that it would never come to be.  God it hurts to think of all the things you said you wanted to do with me but never did.  You talked about making meals, getting drunk together at a party, going to a music festival, going to see The Hobbit.  Every time, I believed you had some intent of following through but whenever I pursued it, you were unavailable.

     Today is the first day it has truly sunk in exactly how unavailable you are to me.  You probably always will be.  Now that I’m so deeply associated with the break-up with your ex, seeing me will forever conjure those memories.

     I’ve been reading this blog today dealing with the subject of dating emotionally unavailable men.  It was already starting to dawn on me how little my needs have been considered this whole time when I found out about your other girls.  This blog has further opened my eyes to how I’m doing the exact same thing I was doing with my ex.  I’m carving out large chunks of myself in the hopes of being more satisfactory to you.  I’m stamping down my needs into silence to avoid rocking the boat.  I am abusing myself.  I’ve come to realize that I’ve sacrificed too much and I cannot stay.  I don’t need to see you one last time.  Our last night together was the most beautiful I could imagine.  That night it finally felt like you were there, in the present with me, and happy.  You approved of me and appreciated my art, my body, my presence.  It was what I had wanted these last nine months.  It was too much to bear to feel you pull back away after that level of intensity.  I can’t keep up with the hot/cold yo-yo game.  I feel pulled too thin.

***

     It took Natalie Lue’s blog Baggage Reclaim to show me how much I had been stifling myself to be with M.  With my ex-fiance, I was fully conscious of the sensation of walking on eggshells.  My ex would have a rage reaction to things that upset him, so I very intentionally tried to change my behaviors in order to limit those rages.  With M, the dynamic was much different.  With him, I was not afraid of rage, but rather of judgement and abandonment.  He had made it all too clear that jealousy and clinginess were unacceptable and he had proven to me by his first abandonment that he was not afraid to throw away what he had if I over-stepped my bounds.  For whatever reason, this did not feel like abuse at the time.  I saw it as a man expressing his needs to me.  He claimed to be in pain from his last relationship and in need of space to heal.  I saw his condemnation of jealousy to be a sign of his spiritual enlightenment.  He did not see people as possessions and felt everyone should be free to act according to their own will.  I now understand these to be tools of abuse designed to control his victims.  By creating feelings of fear and guilt, he was able to keep me quiet, so I would not express my discomfort with how he was treating me, lest I be branded as “jealous” or “needy” and suffer the consequential abandonment.  It worked like a charm.  My fear kept me so quiet that most of our phone conversations were me listening to him go on about whatever was on his mind and affirming every word out of his mouth so he would feel safe and accepted. 

     Lue’s blog and her book Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl taught me about blowing hot and cold (acting in love one minute, and completely distant the next), future faking (making up stories about all the things we would do together in the future so that I would be emotionally reeled in without him ever intending to follow through), and the fallback girl (keeping me on the backburner so that if things went awry with his primary relationship, I’d still be on the sidelines to swoop in when he needed me).  It was the first step in seeing abuse in M’s pattern of behavior. 

     At this point, I still believed the root cause of M’s abuse was his break-up with his ex.  I was seeing him as a wounded, but emotionally unavailable man that had trouble with commitment.  I believed that once he finished grieving his last relationship, he would be capable of being with someone in a meaningful way.  I realized I had compromised myself and I needed to get out so I could begin respecting myself again, but I still had NO idea of how deep his pathology runs.  At the very least, Lue’s book had opened the door to realizing that I myself was not to blame for his poor behavior.  I was simply with the wrong guy at the wrong time and I needed to get out. 

Denial and the Other Woman

December 17, 2012

Dear M,

     A million thoughts have been swirling around in my head for days.  So far, a few things have become clear.  I don’t want you to leave me.  The last time almost broke me and I’m not sure that I’m prepared for such a test of strength.

     That being said, I have been a wreck this past week as I try to make sense of what I have learned.  I feel embarrassed.  It’s like we both caught me making up some cute little fantasy about how you and I had some sacred bond.  I believed I was enough.  I thought I was giving you the space you needed to grow and flourish as an individual, to pursue your hobbies and to succeed at work, but now I see that when you say you are busy and don’t have time, it’s not that you don’t have time for socializing and relaxation, it’s that you don’t have time for me.

     I used to believe you when you told me what was keeping you so busy but now I find myself wondering if one of those times “eating dinner with my folks” wasn’t the truth.  With your rigidly busy schedule, how on Earth could you find the time to pursue intimate relationships with numerous women?

     I also feel a bit compromised.  When I invite you to release semen inside my body, it’s based on the knowledge you have provided me with about your sexual history.  By keeping the complete picture from me, I feel that my right to make informed decisions about my health and my body was compromised by someone who claims to care about my well-being.  This I feel is unfair.

     My emotions have also been compromised.  With my limited view of the playing field, this situation with you looked a lot different than it turned out to be.  I allowed myself to believe in a dream where you and I were able to make each other happy with our infrequent trysts.  I thought what we had was special, that you had made an exception for me to be in your life when other women were not open-minded enough to respect your need for space.

     Now it looks to me as if I have been one tier in a redundant system of lovers, a system designed so that you are never left completely alone.  But here I am, alone, while you are at a party you would never invite me to, forced to view your life from the very distant sideline but never really allowed in.

     So now it’s time to make a decision.  I am an addict.  Do I keep using the moments you are willing to grant me as a way to get a fix, always tortured and longing for the next hit?  Or do I buckle down and try to quit cold turkey, fearing I may not make it out the other side?  Do I try to find the equivalent of a methadone clinic, in the form of another lover or in booze or weed?  Which pain is the worst, the slow torture of being kept low on your priority list and never hearing those words which I so long to hear escape your lips or the pain of walking away and turning my back on someone that I love with my entire being?  I don’t honestly know and I fear either may kill me.

***

      It’s still difficult for me to read these words that I wrote a year ago.  I can still feel the pain of my discovery slowly sinking in as I start to realize how much I had been lying to myself.  This letter was written before I knew the depth of his relationship with A, and none of the anger I came to experience in later days had presented itself yet.  I was still trying to rationalize a way to stay with him, knowing he had other women, because I had already experienced the alternative and it had nearly killed me.  I did not want to go back to not eating and feeling suicidal on a daily basis.  The only thing that had saved me last time was him coming back into my life.  Would I be able to make a clean break this time without sacrificing myself? 

     At this point, I knew M had been hiding some things from me, but I still had no idea how narrow my knowledge of him as a person was.  I had believed that I knew what he was doing with about 90% of his time, he was often at work, spending time with his family, or practicing with one of the three bands he was involved in.  I’ve come to realize I only knew about 20% of what he was up to.  I knew what he was doing when he was with me (sometimes…I think even then things were going on right in front of my eyes that I was not aware of, such as texting his other women) and I’m fairly certain he was at his job Monday through Friday from 7am-3pm, but once I realized he was somehow hiding these other women right in front of my eyes, I knew some of these other things must have been cover ups for his true activities.  I had been texting him every day.  He had always told me what he was up to, or so I had believed.  I started to understand that our text-centric communication style was only playing into his agenda, allowing him to lie to me as much as needed. 

     A large part of a relationship with a Narcissist is rewiring one’s brain to accept all the bullshit that he/she is putting you through.  One must really turn a blind eye to their bad behavior for the relationship to persist for any duration.  Once a Narcissist has you hooked, their behavior becomes abysmal.  They know exactly how much you are willing to put up with and they will take this to the limit. 

***

     An aside: This post has been difficult for me to finish.  I started writing it almost a month ago, but the memories it dredged up, along with it being the one year anniversary of me finding out about M’s true story was overwhelming.  I had to put everything aside for a few weeks and once again began trying to drown my pain in alcohol.  I knew it had to be a temporary solution just to get me through the holidays, but the pain had become so overbearing that I found it too difficult to remain sober.  Since the first of the year (my last big trigger date), my anxiety and the accompanying intrusive thoughts have been dying down, and I’ve been able to step away from the alcohol again. 

     A HUGE part of this journey has been finally reaching the place where my pain was too great to be numbed by alcohol.  Something had happened to me that was so devastating that attempting to add alcohol to the mix was taking me to a very dangerous place.  No longer was my addiction a safe escape from the everyday pain of life.  It became a scary place that I was no longer able to control.  I was afraid I’d get attacked or harassed while walking home from the bar, blacking out in the wee hours of the morning, drunk beyond comprehension.  I was afraid I’d get pregnant, or that I’d do something to hurt myself while in a drunken depressive fit.  I was afraid I’d call M. and harass him (which he was telling me A. was doing after she found out what he was up to).  I was afraid that I’d continue to cry in social situations, with the alcohol acting as an emotional lubricant.  I had to stop going out with my girlfriends on Thursday nights because I’d cry every time a man approached me to chat. 

     By giving up alcohol, I’ve slowly been able to learn healthier coping mechanisms that do not leave me in a worse emotional state than before.  The constant cycle of drinking/poor sleep/hangover was not allowing me to heal or to have many good days.  Since removing the alcohol from the equation, my emotions have become a lot more stable and easier to predict.  I know I tend to get hyper-emotional when I’m tired or hungry, so I can do what I can to prevent those things by eating and sleeping well. 

     I have also had to give up sex…completely.  I have found that the act of being intimate with another person, even as a fling is WAY too triggering to be worth it.  As a textbook Scorpio, this has been a difficult adjustment because my sexuality is very tied up in my personality.  By giving up sex, I no longer feel like myself.  That being said, I now have the room to heal, that I was not allowing myself before.  I was thinking I was ready to move on, so I joined some online dating sites and set to work.  I found myself meeting more Narcissists, liars, users, domestic abusers and even one of M's COWORKERS and after crying through many first dates, I came to the conclusion that I was not so ready to move on after all.  These people did indeed provide a distraction, but no healing work was being done, and with every successive jerk-off that I met, the wounds were just being cut deeper. 

     In essence, I gave up M cold turkey.  One by one, I cut ties with all my usual coping mechanisms until I was left with nothing but myself.  Stripped down, I was in a panic and desperately needed some new coping mechanisms to take the place of the old.  I sought counseling, knowing that for the first time in my life I could not handle this alone.  I took up yoga.  The violence in my brain was constant and I was desperate to find a way to quiet the turmoil for a moment.  Yoga provided me with almost a solid hour of distraction from my mind.  In the initial stages of breaking the addiction to M, this hour was a godsend.  It was the only hour out of my day I could chase him out of my head.  Now I can go about most of my day without thinking of him very often, sometimes I think I go a few days in a row without him crossing my mind.  The progress has been slow, and not all that steady, but compared to where I was this time last year, I really can’t complain.  Last January was spent drinking my face off and going for 3 hour long, rage-filled beach walks that still couldn’t calm me down.  I’m still angry, but no longer am I on the verge of destroying myself with my rage.

     I’m skipping a little bit ahead of myself in the story here.  Most of this rage and breakdown did not happen as of the writing of the above letter.  It came about 3 weeks later.  I included it here as it seemed relevant to my lapse in posting for the past few weeks.  So here I am, back on the wagon, and ready to finish up the rest of this story.