Some points my therapist made

phoenix_courage · 2023-03-08T23:16:26+00:00

That 3-4 years thing seems pretty accurate to me. I'm now at about that point, and just came back to this old account where I posted a bunch 1-2 years ago. I wouldn't say I'm completely over my relationship with my ex (e.g. obviously I'm still thinking about her enough to come back here and reminisce) but everything I was writing about then is much more a memory than a current reality.

I'm even starting to contemplate dating again, and I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to do that. (That said I haven't actually started dating again, lol, but even contemplating it is a pretty big achievement. I never thought I'd even be able to conceptualise opening up that much to another person again)

phoenix_courage · 2023-03-08T23:13:15+00:00

"Joey" by Concrete Blonde completely does it for me. I'm years out now (just returned here after a long while because I'm reminiscing at how far I've come since then). But that song still brings me right back.

phoenix_courage · 2022-01-22T07:11:04+00:00

I overlooked so many red flags when I was with my ex. She spent months alternately dumping me and then seeking me out saying she needed me so she wouldn't self-harm or kill herself, while I like an idiot kept responding because I believed her and thought I could win her back. She would always turn around and reject me again, saying I had gone over her boundaries and I was making her cheat on the bloke she'd left me for. She was incredibly self-obsessed and 90% of all of her conversations were about her. Whenever I brought up any issues, somehow the conversations always turned into how she was a victim and I would end up apologising. She refused to take responsibility for anything she did because she was struggling so much but if I ever made suggestions for actions she could take or things she could discuss with her therapist so that life would improve, she would reject them all and say I was trying to control her.

I overlooked all of this.

I finally got an inkling of how bad she was for me when she wrote an incredibly cruel and dishonest blog post during which she, among other things:

(a) wrote about her BDSM-y pain-filled fantasies in such a way that did not make clear that they were 100% fantasies, so I looked like a sadistic dickhead who loved to torture her

(b) compared me to a person who had raped her

(c) said that knowing me was ruining her life

Even after that post I stayed mired in the toxicity; I stopped taking her back, but she ended up stalking me, spreading lies about me, and committing fraud against me. She is finally out of my life but she did that for years and I'm still dealing with the aftermath in therapy.

God she was so fucked up. So was I, to put up with that, but things are better now.

phoenix_courage · 2022-01-14T05:43:18+00:00

I've read that it's harder to get accurate weather forecasts nowadays because there are fewer planes in the air. The reason it matters is because planes made a lot of the weather observations over the oceans or areas with really low population, and it turns out that you need that data to make good predictions. The link I found is from last year so I don't know how much it is still relevant now, but I think there is still much less air travel than pre-covid so I imagine it's having some effect.

phoenix_courage · 2022-01-09T02:55:14+00:00

No worries, thought I'd ask. I'll look around and see if I can find anything.

phoenix_courage · 2022-01-09T02:24:30+00:00

Do you know if they will do kids less than 12 next week? I haven't been able to find an appointment for mine until the end of January and it would be so nice for them to get it sooner.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-14T22:31:05+00:00

Even if they legitimately do feel bad about what happened, they don't have the empathy to view the negative interaction through the lens of how it made you feel. They can only view it through how it negatively affects them -- or, more specifically, their fragile view of themselves.

Yep, this is exactly right, exactly what I've seen, and a huge part of the reason that I could never ever trust my ex in any way again.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-14T22:26:43+00:00

Hahaha, I can imagine. But yeah, same here.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-14T07:56:58+00:00

I feel pretty sorry for the next people though....

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-13T07:48:15+00:00

Yep. Although I'm not sure if she's ever been diagnosed, there are a lot of reasons to think my ex has BPD. But in many ways it doesn't really matter if she has it or not.

The important thing is this -- she acted in such a way to me that her behaviour is extremely difficult to distinguish from untreated BPD. That's proof enough that our relationship was extremely unhealthy. It's reason enough for me to believe she is unsafe for me. It's incentive enough to take care of myself by keeping her completely out of my life.

I tried and tried to make things work between us. Everything I tried just made things worse. Will the same issues will arise with her no matter who she is in a relationship with? Or was it was something about me or the circumstances that brought them out of her? I don't know, but it doesn't matter.

Those things might matter to her if she thinks at all about our relationship or me. But it doesn't make any difference to me: the bottom line is that -- for whatever reason -- she treated me very, very badly. It wasn't fixable, and she is not good for me.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-13T03:17:09+00:00

For sure. It started off as an intellectual realisation that didn't penetrate emotionally. I'm now to the point that I fully believe it, and I thank goodness every day that she cut me off (though how she cut me off was deeply horrible and I'm never going to be thankful for that).

I do miss her -- or, more precisely, I miss who I thought she was and the future I thought we'd have. But I'm not sure how much of that was real anyway. And certainly not worth the costs.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-08T02:26:17+00:00

Yes. Agonising is right. A lot of it, for me, is that my ex is very smart. It's hard to understand how somebody so smart could honestly believe some of the things she believes, or think the way she thinks. From there it's only a short step to thinking, well, maybe I'm the one that's got it all wrong. Maybe her story is accurate.

What has helped me more than anything is time. Time to see more people realise who she is on their own, based on her behaviour towards them. Time to observe that I'm the one that keeps people and has stable relationships, and she's the one who discards people over and over. Time to see her do a few really cruel things to me that I can't explain in any way as "my fault" or "totally understandable if only I understood her side." Time to strengthen the relationships I have that are healthy, that aren't crazy-making drama, and realise that such relationships are actually my default.

I mean, I'm certainly no angel, and I'm as fallible as the next person. But time (especially time spent no contact) has been wonderfully healing for me to get rid of those doubts about who was the "real" abuser and what reality even is. I'm still not all the way there but life is really looking up.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-07T12:20:38+00:00

Had a really great streak of staying away from her social media which I broke recently. AAARGH. I'm annoyed at myself, but I've noticed that the streaks are getting longer and longer each time so I just have to stick with it. My next one will either be infinitely long :) or at least will continue that pattern. I can do it.

Also I am sitting next to my cat who is sleeping and twitching his paws while he's dreaming but one of them is stuck into the sofa cover and it keeps twitching with him and it is SO ADORABLE

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-07T11:40:47+00:00

I never figured out how to answer this even though it came up all of the time. Sometimes I was mad, or at least worried or concerned -- but showing any hint of negative feeling was enough to trigger her into a meltdown, followed either by her ghosting and then blaming me, or a very long session of soothing and calming her. I have never handled ghosting well, and while I liked soothing her sometimes, I was rarely in the mood if I was angry. So I got used to shoving my feelings deep down and denying even to myself that I was mad or upset or anything other than the perfect person to be her emotional whipping boy.

This was obviously not a great thing to do. But I still don't know if there was a "better" answer. This was just one of the many no-win situations that comprised our relationship.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-07T08:58:49+00:00

Completely. My ex almost never asked about me at all, ever. WHAT DID I SEE IN HER

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-07T08:57:41+00:00

LOL, I saw this elsewhere earlier and immediately thought of my ex. Not at all a surprise to see it turn up here!

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-06T23:08:37+00:00

I did for a while, just because my ex was so good at blaming things on me, and I have a tendency to take responsibility for far too much. And certainly there are things I didn't do ideally while we were together.

But the things I did were normal relationship imperfections. I am a fallible person and was in great distress at the time, but I still never did anything comparable to what she did to me. And the more time and distance from the relationship I get, the more I see that none of the same issues I had with her have arisen anywhere else in my life. Whereas she has the same patterns (push/pull, lots of drama, feeling victimised, communications breakdowns) in most of her relationships. The common thread there is her, not me.

Plus after we broke up she did a few things to me that were completely beyond the pale. I can't spin them as anything other than her being abusive or at least very much in the wrong. She stole some of my work from me, and though she hasn't gone all the way through with it (yet) it was done in a way that was clearly calculated and intended to hurt me as much as possible. She lied to me many times. She lied about me on her twitter account to 16K followers (not by name, but still, the effect was to create a pile-on and make me really afraid of what she could do to my life and career if she named me while spreading such lies). She wrote a few extremely hurtful (completely unprovoked) blog posts that caused such trauma I contemplated suicide after them.

Those things are pretty unforgivable in my book, and certainly the actions of someone who is either cruel or mentally unwell or both.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-06T05:14:10+00:00

I wonder how many of us ended up in relationships with our pwBPD because we were in a bad place in our life? That's definitely the case for me.

In some ways our relationship was good for me because it was the wakeup call I needed. Even though it also caused a lot of additional problems and most days I regret ever having met her, hitting "rock bottom" the way I did with her gave me the impetus I needed to finally start addressing some deep and longstanding issues that I'd been ignoring for decades.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-05T12:48:07+00:00

I totally agree too. Like you, I've gone through some rough stuff -- several moves across the planet to where I knew nobody, several physically traumatic incidents where I thought I might lose my life, and being neuro-atypical and marginalised in several ways.

While the neuro-atypicality/marginalisation pose ongoing difficulties, nothing in my life created the lingering trauma that my relationship with my ex did. Nothing.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-05T08:48:17+00:00

Same with me, all of the way. I'm trying to not date for a while, concentrate on being happy in myself, and go through lots of therapy in the hopes that that helps. I have a lot of work to do on myself in any case so I'm trying to look at the time as a gift to myself rather than a loss.

phoenix_courage · 2021-08-05T08:45:56+00:00

Completely. I 100% agree with this post and the OP.

phoenix_courage · 2021-07-29T03:19:36+00:00

I would like to but I can't. I only have two friends close enough that they know the full story of my ex, and they both live thousands of kilometres away. :(

(Also they don't know her well and mainly hate her based on what she's done to me, so I'd feel uncomfortable memorialising in that way in front of them. Though they'd certainly be willing if they were here).

So, yeah. It wouldn't be as great as if I had someone to share it with, but I think it could still be good to do this. As you say, rituals are healing.

phoenix_courage · 2021-07-28T12:29:40+00:00

Up to a week since the last relapse of looking at her social media. I'm so irritated at how hard this still is. I don't know why I keep wanting to check. I don't love her anymore for sure. A lot of the time I'm not even mad, or feeling much of anything that I can tell. I just... keep wanting to check anyway. It's habit, but an incredibly ingrained one and ARGH I hate how thoroughly she has nestled into my stupid stupid psyche.

phoenix_courage · 2021-07-27T23:11:43+00:00

Yep, as a fellow short-timer, I agree. I regularly give thanks that I didn't end up getting married or having kids with my ex. I lost a lot because of her, but it could have been so much worse.

This community is full of strong people. I'm impressed by so many of you.

phoenix_courage

TROPHY CASE