it’s midsummer in the northern hemisphere and i am still being stalked, a year on.
today and yesterday i have been hiding in my ex husband’s house, curtains drawn and staying clear of windows.
the great manipulator is currently lurking in my little village, sticking out like dog’s balls, demanding i give him 10 minutes to speak.
i won’t.
the same man stalks his ex girlfriends, using the same tactics, and has done for years. stalked them while he was with me and accusing me of keeping in contact with my ex husband for legal reasons, hawking phone call duration, stalking them and me when he’s bored, or for whatever reason he gives himself to believe that what he is doing is not psychopath behaviour.
stalking entails repeated unsolicited, unwanted, uninvited contact, be that physically or via social media, email, telephone and other means.
it means hacking your social accounts, messages, photos, putting trackingware and spyware on your devices.
it’s completely invasive and a form of coercive control over another human being, either during or after break up – or without even having had any relationship whatsoever.
as soon as I was informed he was in town i contacted the police who could not do anything without the guys being under my house, which when they eventually drove by of course he wasn’t going to be around. they did me the honour at least of making their presence felt around town more so than usual. enough to make someone feel unwelcome.
after a day of his lurking, after a suicide mention, i sent a message to his female friend. she has proven to diffuse situations as he does not want the mask to slip with her.
in switzerland, the country the great manipulator has ingratiated himself into, the anti stalking legislation is a complete shitshow, as it is in many countries. but the swiss by now should know better. and in particular if you’re a woman they turn over your case with “why did you respond?” because “i fear for my life” or “i wasn’t aware i would be in an anti stalking case earning my evidence through the nose” obviously doesn’t cut the mustard.
laws that can be flipped overnight and fine you for not wearing a mask during a pandemic, instead take literal centuries for movement against stalking and sexual harassment laws.
sexual harassment is a pandemic. rape is a pandemic. femicide is a pandemic.
there is movement forward, but the whole system is constipated.
so in the meantime we need to protect ourselves first and foremost, and that’s difficult if you don’t know how and you weren’t shown how (words to that effect are just not enough if you haven’t been shown how).
i can’t recommend often enough about finding a trauma informed therapist or coach. start with podcasts to inform through stories told by others. i’ve listed some resources which i’ll link to below this post, and i’m adding to them all the time as it’s ongoing work and the podcasts evolve.
if money is an issue (and some of these coaches and therapists price themselves out of the budget range of the very demographic of people who often need it the most) then the free podcasts and videos are a great start. it’s important to empower the self with others’ stories, because feeling isolated in this is what undermines the sense of self.
what I’ve learned:
absolutely no contact is absolutely vital.
it is so tempting to react or respond to digital contact – and my great manipulator loves to poke and prod at those triggers – leaving everything from smarmy sweet i love you so so so so sorry videos to downright threatening and demeaning texts, and suicide threats.
it’s tempting to respond because those triggers flip up your defences (guilt; shame), leaving your vulnerable underside exposed, and that’s just what they want: a reaction that will get their multi-barbed fishhook in.
and then you’re back to square one.
though it helped to diffuse an unpredictable situation, my error resides in the fact that, though i didn’t contact directly, i contacted using a third party in order to arrange delivery to a fourth party of my belongings, important material items that he has been holding for ransom (damned if I leave them there and damned if he wants to deliver them – he uses it as leverage either way). sounded hermetically sealed. agreeable. these past days have taught me all things have to be done through a court of law. there’s no other way, and a person displaying narcissistic traits will not be reasoned with if there’s noting in it for them. you will never make them see reason. your exhaustion in the effort to do so is simply fueling them. no contact. punto.
grey rock.
i love the term grey rock, and I thought I had it in the bag but i’m still a long way from there. that’s the point in which you are wholly outwardly zen even in the midst of their snarky barrage or downright threats, even face to face. a barking chihuahua through the fence vs an oak in the woods.
i am far from that point still because I know that if he approaches me he’ll want to touch me, he will not accept my no… and then i will react and i will end up in prison.
i am working hard on that zen.
he deserves to be in prison, not me.
and so hiding myself and not answering is the next best option, with complete no contact, no response, no complying with demands.
the other tactic is to deploy those around me who support me. i’ve made sure to be loud mouthed about it. everyone knows. i’ve had to swallow gallons of shame (we’ll talk about shame in another post) but i think of all the shamed women before me, and the real shame is abuse, and that is squarely on the abuser, society and expectations, not on the individual woman (it happens to men, too, i know, but i’m female and for the purpose of this post i’m using women as examples. we’re unfortunately the majority in this).
i am completely humbled and grateful at the support and help i’ve received from all sources in any capacity.
using my tales of experience as examples, these are some of the classic npd red flag traits to look out for. this is a long and incomplete list as i press publish, and i’ll add to it as i remember and read.
back before i realised what the hell i was living through, i’d looked too narrowly at “retroactive jealousy” as a possibility. but it was through researching more deeply into it that on youtube i discovered a suggested video that opened my eyes.
the fact that i had been searching at all should have been a red flag in and of itself.
i thought i could fix, or save, the great manipulator to return him to being the nice, articulate and intelligent human being i’d met. by accident, during my quick snatches of searching, i came across narcissistic personality disorder, and seeing that template acting itself out in the grande manipulator was a huge dawning for me…altogether an aha moment, a feeling of dread, shame, and a sense of relief that it wasn’t me going crazy. and that he couldn’t be saved.
love bombing and future faking rushing the relationship with grandiose plans that soooo align with what you had in mind. so romantic and intelligent and generous at first. warm, sweet, intelligent. such a giver (just ask him – he’ll tell you!). “you and me are two of a kind. i’ve never felt like this with anyone…” someone hand me a bucket and some carbolic acid, please.
everything was sped up so that he didn’t have to keep up the charm forever. grooming takes a hell of a lot of work and there was a lot of energy spent to not show me who he really was! and all those grand plans? they never fucking happened, nowhere near it. the great manipuator is a guy the swiss government pays three times as much as what i earn to sit on his arse and bother women.
trauma bonding and being the supply they start off so lovely. you confess everything, feel able to finally confide in someone who really, trully understands you. later you’ll realise you’d just armed them with all your vulnerabilities and deepest secrets. now, if you don’t comply with the ever-shifting sands of the narc’s whims, you’ll know about it. they’ll tailor you a horror show with all that they know about you. now i know what this is via the great manipulator, i can also see this tactic with certain people i’ve called friends.
whether this is a toxic friend or a partner, you are then expected to be the emotional rehabilitation for that person. you’re exhausted from all the warding off of your own vulnerabilities tossed back at you like dung. the feeling of them coming home or visiting you fills you with a sinking feeling, and when they go you feel relief and nausea.
these people require and demand adoration and attention at all times, and no matter how much you give it will never be enough. no matter what you give, it’s not good enough. it’s a form of slavery, and it’s this slavery that bonded me to my abuser. i was exhausted because it was cyclic: maximum 2 days good, one full day of hell, quite literally lasting till 5 in the morning, after which, if he actually left me alone, i would pass out from exhaustion, and he’d act like nothing happened the following day, or give me a big hug (and then expect sex). if my body stiffened up because i was exhausted, angry and hurt, we’d go into round two of his pity-me shenanigans and critique of me. or tell me he thought i was a woman who had energy. i was, till i met him. when i began to head out of the house during these incidences, then he would beg me to stay, using the so so so sorry hoovering tactic.
hoovering the only time they’ll be sorry is when they want something, i.e: you as their “supply”. but i’ve changed, he said, for the thousandth time. the last time he stalked me, he pulled the crocodile tears because i refused to make any contact and i called the police. he discovered i am friends with his ex girlfriends, that i heard their stories. and so he bombed me with poetry, he tried to pass off his abuse of me and them because he has been traumatised. i’d been suckered in by this way too often. then the when the sick relative ruse doesn’t work, he pulls out the deck of suicide threats (which will never happen because he wouldn’t be around to lap up the attention). after he stalked me this last time, he went back to the country who lets him sponge off them and straight back to harassing his ex for having been in contact with me – because in his eyes it’s obviously she who turned me off him. he doesn’t see that his deplorable behaviour is the reason i want fuck all to do with him. no change that i can see there. people displaying narcissistic personality disorder will never take accountability for their actions, they will always blame someone or something else for their shit behaviour. they will never change because they simply cant. it’s always someone else’s fault. i can’t stress that enough: they won’t change. that seemingly lovely and charismatic person you met at the beginning will never return because they never existed in the first place.
isolation, helicoptering, stalking he was successful in undermining and eliminating a number of my friendships, whisked me away against my “no, i am not ready”, bulldozing me into a yes with tireless manipulation, stating that he had already organised a lift and I would be putting other people out. this little people pleaser hated putting others out, at her own expense (now she doesn’t give a toss if people don’t like her prickliness when they step over her boundaries). until i began my language course in switzerland, i had been friendless. i don’t count his friends, because of the triangulation that he’d perform, and their loyalty, i knew, would always lie with him, no matter how they told me otherwise. however, for a long time i was almost never without his company. he hacked my social media, messaging platforms, snooped my phone, checked who i’d called and for how long, and at the beginning i had no wifi except what was tethered from his phone. after that i had a number that he’d organised in his name. i had to wait until a scheduled visit to my country of residence to leave, and then the janus-faced pandemic came in to save the day.
sex addict, sexual double standardsand sexual / reproductive coercion his bragging about shagging 4 women in a day, but the fact that i’d had multiple partners – and two marriages – in my whole lifetime meant that i was a whore and came from a “shit culture”. he demanded to know how many orgasms had i had with that person and that person and that person demanding access to my menstrual cycle app and then snooping back on ovulation dates yeeeaaaars before i’d even met him, to drill me on had my husband and i had sex then. he was pushing to have a baby knowing i can’t conceive and then using the fact my ex husband and i had been trying in order bully me because i obviously tried for other people and never for him! my personal choice, to be extremely frank, is to never engage in anal sex. he told me that i mustn’t love him, then, because i wouldn’t even do that for him. he hounded and hounded and hounded. it was exhausting and distressing, though he though it was so so so so funny. nope. thankfully that was a boundary that i never ever let be crossed.
flying monkeys and triangulation those female friends? they’re all ready to fly at his whim to help him hoover me back, delivering sweet messages of luuurv right to your aching heart, and he’s so so so so sorry, and he is just not doing so well without you. they’re all female, yes, and none of them know one another. some of these women he says he had never slept with, but most of them my intuition told me that he most certainly had. and because in part he is such a theatrical being and in part because their heads are either so far up their own arses, or buried in the sand, even after hearing myriad tales of woe from a variety of women he has hurt, they will still see only the good and golden boy juxtaposed against the unhinged girlfriend. why won’t they listen? because, we’ve been smeared, little by little, convincingly, into being the crazy ex, or we’ve been reactive, we’ve self-harmed, we’re mentally unstable, we’ve had a past that doesn’t include being married off to cousins at age 15, and therefore it takes two to tango. they have also been gaslit. by him, by a system, by religion, fear, adoration, charisma, culture.
triangulation is the control of communication between two other people: • such and such thinks [insert bullsit here] about you. • they told me they think [insert bullsit here]. • if you need to talk to someone about [insert bullsit here], flying monkey number 1 is available any time.
manipulation, poor me syndrome, and hypochondria after i left, covid became particularly handy for him in terms of how many of his rels were apparently dropping like flies, and i was such a meany not dropping everything to rush to patpat his forehead. well, that’s what happens when you cry wolf, boy-oh. i don’t believe you anymore. to get me back or to stop me from leaving this guy had the following happen: • a trauma related mental breakdown in which he would use his flying monkey service to deliver such sad and distressing news. • kidney stone. apparently turned out true; not entirely convinced. he’s got a bachelor degree in drama – seriously! • dead brother, which each of the exes, have also mentioned. big family, i guess. • mother in hospital – that happened very conveniently as i was booking a flight out of warsaw to escape • gagging and retching dramatically from trauma – particularly notable was the performance when i was heading out of the country and he’d lied and said he’d had to have his ex print out my covid declaration • a gang of maurauding haters • a series of award-winning filmed selfies of howling crocodile tears that seriously ought to win Oscars
gaslighting & blame shifting for me, the gaslighting and manipulation that i may have caused harm to him and others was what he used to hit me with the most, and was the hardest to shake. gaslighting means that something is done or said and when you question it, it is shifted right back atcha, making you doubt yourself, your sanity, and the situation you’re in. it’ll make you second guess everything you think, say or do, because the repercussions are seriously not worth it. it’s complicated because everything you’ve ever confided is used against you (and this ties up already with your own blame and guilt), they’ll use triangualtion (he or she said this or thinks this about you), the flying monkeys with get in on the act (no, he’s such a great guy).
blameshifting goes hand in hand with gaslighting: any of these sound familiar?? “it was a misunderstanding.” “you never replied to me.” “you should have said!” “i don’t speak enough of your language!” “you’re too sensitive/slow/stupid.” “after everything i’ve done for you!”
he blamed an illness/father’s death in childhood/homeland trauma for shitfully bad behaviour, regularly. he did the same with his ex girlfirends, which, among many other instances, screams to me it that it is calcualted behaviour and he knows exactly how to wound and when he’s doing it. but it got old with me pretty quickly; it burnt the people pleaser right out of me. i see it in others now – once you see it you can’t unsee it – and i don’t care at all if anyone calls me harsh, hard, cold or cruel. if that means that i will be safe, or at the very least not bulldozed and sucked dry by energy parasites, and not have arseholes such as the great manipulator in my life, they can all call me what they want.
a lived example: blame shifting: when i told him about a friend’s car accident death with her stalker ex boyfriend when she was 19, he said that they both derved to die because they hadn’t done anything good with their lives. gaslighting: i pulled him up on that and then he said i’d heard that wrong, and blamed his crappy english. incidentally, blaming the language for not being able to articulate properly was one of the most overused of his excuses. and on the flip side of that he boasted to anyone that would listen that he could speak 7 languages. how convenient.
erratic & dangerous behaviour i feared for my life at times. aside from the fact i was regularly embarrassed by his rudeness to other human beings out in public, that time he physically pushed people out of the way in an aeroplane queue, when he grabbed me by the neck by the river (passerby on the bike? you suck, mate), pushed me from behind down the stairs in an airbnb, and screamed at me while i was night driving in the rain in a car i had never before driven (because i was going too slow). the inability to accept another human being for who they are, and needing to change them, and throwing a tantrum when they dig their heels in. one day someone won’t take kindly to his rudeness.
lies lies lies the great manipulator is a pathological liar, and sometimes i bark out a laugh when things come back to me that i’d forgotten, or i hear the other side to a well-scripted story from the ex girlfirends i am in contact with. his lies are always mixed with a grain of truth, so it would leave me wondering and doubting. he called himself mr detail (and that was certainly true when it pertained to my apparently gloriously horrendous past of which he was jealous and hashed out with much drama, night after night). unfortunately, mr sordid detail would forget which version of the tale he’d told me earlier. and there were holes in the story i could sail a fleet of ships through. i’d catch him out, and he’d arc up. and arcing up was how he told the truth: every minor infraction and major disgusting horror i’d caused, every accusation he made was an admission, every time he called me a liar and whore. every time he said, i’ve only ever done this with you. every time i caught him out. every time he opens his mouth.
just like shedding the narc is never a clean cut, neither are the next steps to being free.
healing is not linear.
trauma finds those little buttons hidden in dreams and smells and names and accents. it sits latent in the body like a virus.
just when i think it’s safe to exhale, just when I think I’m out of the proverbial woods, it’ll flare up, constrict the chest, wake me at 3.
the anger was easier to deal with. envisioning receiving a call to say he was dead and the flooding relief. imagining him deported, jailed, publicly humiliated by all the women he’d threatened with shame.
my vibrating outrage was like the sun, subaudible, self-refuelling, seemingly infinite. gas bright, hard to look at, warming my bones through the winter.
healing out of that razor-wire anger was hard as an addiction to kick. the healee’s way out is potholed, and is often cruelest on those closest to me. but my experience is not about others, and yet it is. because despite what all the memes say about creating those magical fortified boundaries, those triggers and reactions during a panic attack are for me frighteningly real, and i still had to deal with other human beings.
until the end of my time with the narcissist, i’d lived my life not knowing boundaries – quite often my no would be coerced into a yes in every aspect of my life, out of fear of losing a job, dipleasing a friend, hurting someone’s feelings.
I am growing boundaries.
in the meantime the reactive armour erected around the regrowth can still be sharp and pointy.
reaction is the flotsam and jetsam of the trauma shipwreck. reaction to people meaning well, wanting me to do things, be things, be *there* in the way they want and not the way I can.
and then in swoops a good old panic attack to inconvenience the day, and best laid plans go out the window and in their stead others’ ideas on how I could have at least cancelled the day before, as though my panic attack could be scheduled (wouldn’t that be lovely).
isn’t the trauma all gone by now?
so all of a sudden i am dealing with someone else’s tangible disappointment about how i should heal or live or act or behave. and the disappointment in myself and anger at the panic attack…and all that caused it that now inconveniences someone else’s wish to go to the beach in the middle of winter in the middle of a pandemic with police checks at every crossroads. and the thought alone of being enclosed inside a car with another human being for hours has taken a lot for me to surpass.
i find myself having to tell the same stories, writing list points of whats and whys, which i don’t believe were were ever read… and it makes me so tired, all this explaining. all this justifying.
i set up gentle boundaries and i am met with distance, and that is to be expected, the wise ones say. those who don’t understand will fall away. in the end, being shed by those in a hurry, is ok by me. really ok. it saves me from the exhaustion of having to do it myself.
i know it’s not just me in the world. but it’s me in my world and only I know how i can breath into the varying daily degrees of *my* healing. I owe that to no one else but me.
my healing is not linear. my trauma is here, and one day might not be ever again.
in the meantime, for those who wish to be a positive part of my healing, including myself, the rules are this:
just hold space. no advice. no criticism. no pity. no negativity.
each time i felt like a third party should be sitting in on every conversation, i knew it was time to go.
he’d shift things around, like i was trying to confuse him. or his english wasn’t good and he hadn’t understood very well. or that i’d told him something i most certainly had not.
i journaled, though; wrote down all the injustices and recorded on the phone when he berated me. played back, i sound like a woman disappearing from the world, from my self.
exiled.
he tried his best to lift away my identity like peeling off a living snail’s shell.
man, i resisted though. at the time i didn’t think i was, but you can hear it in my cracked voice. in my writing you can see i knew everything he said and did was wrong, and i was still torn, tied to his trauma. guilty, guilty.
you can hear it in the slaps i gave myself so that i wouldn’t slap him because i didn’t think i’d be able to stop and he’d been through so much.
they call this push back “reactive abuse” and the narc will use this, and your associated guilt gatherend over the weeks, months, years, to manipulate and coerce.
he began recording everything, too. trying to catch me out as the crazy lunatic, my bating and his arsehole behaviour he’d then edit to ensure he’d be the victim.
after i’d gone, as a hoovering tactic, he said he watched some of these, made himself sick, felt sorry and ashamed when he saw himself in action, saw what he’d done to me. and when that didn’t work he went right back to being what he is.
he knows what he does. he knows what he is.
i play my recordings to myself, from time to time, and read my writings on the things he did to me. these help me breathe out the trauma, guilt and anger, and obliterates from me the slightest weak moments in which i feel at all sorry for him.
if anyone shits this phrase from their mouth – be that your partner, a family member, a friend, a boss, a co-worker, anyone – do not be flattered. the person uttering this nonsense is projecting their view of you back onto you, and expecting you to live up to that.
it should scare you to hear it. this is an attempt at control over your autonomy, simple personal choice, and your very dear, golden self.
this is gaslighting.
i heard this phrase often, and it came packaged together with isolation and estrangement from family, and from friends that just didn’t get it, so there is a very real danger in believeing that you have no choice except to fall into the hands belonging to the one who “knows you better than you know yourself’.
no other phrase, i believe, can underminde self-trust in quite the same way, because it’s dressed up as love and care.
remember this: no one knows you like you know you.
your duty to your integrity is staying aligned to that as the very core of your inner compass. for that, i can’t recommend highly enough therapy, especially voice dialogue / parts work to help work through the deeper and many selves that we have.
the many selves that make us who we are come from a complex tapestry of experiences that have led a person to this moment, and take a lifetime to know for those of us actively doing the work to grow and heal…so when your garden variety manipulative and coercive type exhibiting narcissistic tendencies says that they know you better?
taking the reins is a phrase that (for me) always precedes the question that my therapist asked me to ask myself in any given situation:
“what are you willing to accept?”
it was only through actively asking myself this that i was able to wake a little out of the freeze enough to ask for (useful) assistance to help me to plan my way out – and stay out – of my situation.
a person who displays narcissist traits and behaviour will not change, cannot change, and will only make a theatrical appearance of apology, shame and positive change… until you cave and go back with them.
as they see it, you’re the fuel for their life, and they’ll suck you dry. sometimes that can look like you’ve made them happy, but it’s only temporary. and when that brief blissed out period ceases (and it always does) the next cycle begins.
i’d repeated that cycle enough, i wasn’t willing to accept and it was time to get the hell out of this shitshow and stay out permanently.
that was just the first step, and relatively easy once the decision was in motion, and i had to play it safe – i can’t emphasise that enough. leaving is a dangerous time.
it became apparent, though, that it would prove way more difficult to come to a place of power in the simple-yet-difficult-to achieve place of “no contact”, in blocking the flying monkeys without responding to them, and to not react. feeling empowered was barely a pinpoint of light on the horizon.
for a long time at the beginning of healing my way out of this, i was (and i still am as I write this) being stalked, and my being believed by the women surrounding him felt paramount to my existence. that he didn’t smear me was vital to my already obliterated reputation.
and he will smear. he’s done it to others. he will be just as dirty about it, too, needling for a reaction, for sympathy. seeking to come out of all of this as the golden child, mask intact. under duress, he will threaten everything from revenge nude photos (having taken photographs of me that were not consensual) to thinly veiled threats of hurting ex partners. he’s an old hat at this shizz – he’s done the same thing so often to others, using the same tactics. he’s getting sloppy, and for the first time he’s reached a person who, armed with these threats, will quickflash make moves to have him deported to protect herself and others against him if need be, without engaging with him in any form.
my narrative of trauma and fear shifted after i contacted two of his ex girlfriends, heard their similarly horrendous stories (he stalked one of them for 11 years), and our trio of solidarity in shared tales of woe – and connection with even more women who have been affected – meant that finally i felt i didn’t need to peddle my case to his flying monkey service (circus!) anymore, or live in hope that they’d change their minds and finally see him for the vapid shitheap monster the rest of us know he is.
i am enough, i am the one that lived that experience, however (thankfully) briefly. no one else can discredit that, and to those who continue to associate with a person they know from several sources that is physically violent and coercive toward women, or blame me for his abuse of me…well those humanoids have no place in my life in any capacity.
it’s up to each of us individually, we who’ve managed to get out of our unique and discrete situations, to do the rest of the work ourselves. part of that comes in the form of self protection (boundaries), learning to be non responsive in the face of needling for reaction and threats, and how to let all the rest of it go, and what to do with the very real emotions, triggers and fear that linger and jump out at inopportune moments down the track.
a big lesson is: don’t poke the narc hornet nest – ever – not with retorts, not with any form of communication.
and what i don’t want to be any longer is victim. i’ve done that sorry-for-myself part – in my experience, it is a necessary and vital a period i had to walk through. it let the snowglobe shitshow settle down and that stuff was then able to exit me in healthier modes.
at first i was listening to podcasts about the actual stories of others, the nitty gritty details of domestic violence and tales of domestic abusers and their tactics. i needed to feed off those other stories to make damned sure that’s what my experience was (having been gaslit), i had to soak myself absolutely in all of it till i’d reached permanent saturation point. after that i progressed to psychologist-hosted podcasts for survival steps, followed by those from narcissistic abuse recovery coaches who’ve lived it and promote thriving rather than victimhood – always and ever without judgement. i didn’t want to get stuck in those dark places, yet i didn’t want to forget.
but in thriving (not just surviving) is where i will begin to take the reins of my life. it will only be as I, years down the track, look back over my shoulder I’ll see how far I’ve come.
after months of weighing it up, after the hundredth psychopathic email (blocked), fake social accounts and smarmy-sweet videos (blocked), odd anonymous phone calls from numbers from all over the world, and yet another dying relative / kidney stone / marauding gang coercion to try to convince me “but I’m not a bad guy” and therefore I should come back so he can show me, and “you always leave me under the rain”… i bit the bullet, finally, and reached out to a number of the women who came before me, simply to ask: how the hell were you gals able to halt the stalking and harassment?
and, whoa, down the terrifying rabbit hole of lies and years of coercive and physical abuse we went.
turns out, even to this day, he has never stopped stalking the women who came before me, digitally and / or physically.
i wish I’d had the wherewithal to have enquired months and months ago. it did cross my mind. but aside from it being an unpredictable and treacherous road, it’s such a delicate network of individual boundaries that butt up against moral human obligation, security, and decency. and what do you say to the woman who comes after you who is still blinded by the lies and only wants him to love her, and can see nothing but that? by speaking up are you putting them in danger? if they question their abuser, will they be further isolated and surveilled? will you yourself be harassed in creatively horrid ways to within an inch of your sanity? and, if you know what you know and you don’t proceed with a warning…are you in any way complicit in whatever comes after?
and for me, that’s my great dark dilemma: it rubs against the very lining of me to think that someone else is going to be coerced and abused and then driven mad by harassment and “just showing up” surprises for months and years afterwards, because that has been the track record of this oxygen thief.
through my nauseous digging i discovered that one of the great manipulator’s female friends who gushed how much she loved me (by all her own accounts a mighty feminist) knew of previous and life-threatening coercion and mental and physical abuse to other women who came before me.
while she mentioned his many girlfriends, i was not warned about his abuse of some of them. in fact, straight after it had taken place, i sent her audio footage of the last time i was abused while on “holiday” where, between me hyperventilating in panic, my abuser clearly admits to it and says he “did it because I [insert excuse for my inhumanity here]”.
no response from the friend. not a peep. and through my contact with the otehr survivors it came to light that she’d known of his history of abuse. if she had said something to me aimed at actually supporting what happened to the women who came before me, and me, when i’d left the first time I would have stayed out.
contacting one another to share our stories was a huge risk to all of us, because he’s told each of us the story of the other, and with the gaslighting that creates a story that doesn’t exist anywhere but in the realms of coercive control, smear campaign and manipulation.
i discovered he’s been reported to the police for the abuse and harassment of several women, in a number of countries – but he’s such an accomplished liar and squashing survivor voices and reconstructing identity is part of the narc aim.
we’ve pulled the cover off his lies and his mask came with it, and an unmasked bully is a slimy and perilous creature. so it’s monumental that we can finally, in solidarity, validate one another, that we’re not crazy or neurotic – as we’ve been painted to be, and in turn become certain we are – and we are not isolated in this. we’re not the bad guys. we have been hurt and that is not our fault. our reactions to abuse and gaslighting are completely justified. that’s taken a shitload of work on my own part to understand that at a core level, and it’s a continual work in progress.
with absolute grace and gratitude i take my hat off to all the women who came before me. we’re many and we’re alive, thank god. holding space (and a catching net) for all those who come after.
departure point 