I came to SI because my ex fiance cheated on me with his ex wife, got her pregnant and now there is an OC. So after he so wisely did all of that, he came back to me, then got himself involved into an EA that he carried on in front of me for a very long time, gas lighting me, etc
I cut off contact.. then one day he shows up again, says he is done with both women.
NC with the emotional affair. Avoids his ex wife like the plague, and is currently trying to figure out a way to see his kids WITHOUT seeing the ex. He decided that is impossible and for the last 2 months he has not been in contact with ex wife, OC and his 10 year old daughter. ex wife won't let him talk to either child on the phone and is trying to force him to go over to her place. He won't do it.
Admittedly prior to the last few months, I was losing it a lot. Lashing out, trying to NC so I could calm down.
In return he has been working to fix things as he sees them coming up, usually AFTER a big blow up that goes like this:
I trigger some, try to ask him to handle things a bit different ( for example, he doesn't say goodbye when hanging up the phone or he disappears for hours without giving head's up.)
What I specifically ask for is what I view as common courtesy. He also has a nasty habit of blocking me on IM when he gets mad. I realize this may sound dumb, but when I get that block, it enrages me. I feel so disrespected, devalued, mistreated.
Well, a lot of it has stopped, the blocking, I mean. Things were getting better, I thought.
Until yesterday.
This is what happened.
I work from home, he was on skype IM. He has it on his cell phone and we chat off and on through out the day.
Lately he has been "disappearing" then shows up later and says sorry honey, I crashed. He fell asleep on the sofa. Or he was traveling around town and it was hard to have a conversation.
This may sound weird of me, but it really bothers me when he disappears. I don't think he is cheating. I don't know he has gone, he was chatting at me, then he is just GONE.
It's pushing my buttons bad. He just tells me don't be stupid, you know I am not really gone, just wait and I will show up later.
Like hours later, or the next day.
Yesterday we are in the middle of a serious conversation and he suddenly disappeared. So I kept talking. No response. I was trying to talk to him about the disappearances. Basically I want for him to tell me when he cant talk.
Mainly because it has become so pervasive that I feel disrespected.
He's disappeared MANY times in the past when trying to talk to him. Gets up, leaves, Walks out, doesn't come back for days. Blocks me on IM's, social sites.
At the least it is annoying, at the worst, it can send me into a tailspin and I freak out and he ignores me, and I end up having a massive outburst where I have a verbal meltdown that is always in the form of a huge email slapping him around for the cheating etc.
I have been able to calm down enough the last few months, stay way calm in comparison to how I was, because this time last year I was a raw screaming fit.
So when he disappeared on IM yesterday, I waited a while. Nothing from him, and then i said are you there. He answered after a bit and said yes. he had seen what I wrote and he had decided to wait until he got home to talk instead of trying to have "an important conversation" on his cell phone.
Does anyone else find it weird that he sat there watching what I wrote, saw me getting upset some for the disapearance, and then after almost 2 hours told me he had seen it and had been reading the whole time, but never responded with... "I see what you are saying, I cant respond atm, but will when I get home".
Do you understand? He was in the conversations, decided to stop responding, and didn't bother to give me heads up?
Anyway, he gets home, ( we are currently separated) and gets on skype, and says ok to talk. So I try to talk to him. His response is slow, and slowly he just drifts away until zero response. This took about 15 minutes.
So I get suspicious. We both play an MMORG together, he is way more of an avid player than me. So I log in and he is there, playing and blowing me off.
We have a shared channel in there, and tbh, I was mad. Felt ignored and disrespected.
So I say, what gives? I waited for you to get home like you asked and you said you had time to talk and you disappeared in the middle and now you are hear and the discussion went no where.
So he gets mad. He says WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!
I kind of wanted him to grow up. I feel shocked because we had most calm for a few months.
Then he said basically he was tired of me trying to talk at him, he had enough and decided to have a break.
Without telling me. And I said to him, well this is exactly what I was trying to talk to you about.
So he refuses to respond. I am dumb, because I didn't expect this crappy behavior. So I wait 20 minutes and I try to talk again.
So he blocks me in the game.
As I said, this is a HUGE trigger for me. So I log out of the game and try to stay calm. I have PANIC attacks over this treatment. End result is I lost control and told him to unblock me and stop doing it, insert about 10 f-bombs and you get the picture.
So he says to me, I am going to block you here, too, until your fingers learn some control.
Now he KNOWS I have massive issues with the blocking. And maybe you guys think I am out of line.
He certainly does.
So I just drop it as best I can, I am in the middle of huge panic attack, so I take a xanax and go to bed.
I get up this morning and he has unblocked me and he leaves me THIS message.
"You think too much about how others treat you. You don't really think about how you treat others. Especially of long term consequences of you being mad and losing control"
Basically he has been very blaming towards me for my actions while he was cheating on me, when the baby came out of nowhere, and he was screwing around with his emotional affair.
yes. I was losing it a lot. yes, I had a lot to say to him then about it and after initial attempts at discussion that repeatedly ended with him blocking, walking out, disappearing and flaunting it, I really went off the deep end.
In fact, I became suicidal. Every little incident blew me apart and I smacked his ex wife around, I told his EA's husband, I called him every dirty name under the sun.. essentially I went crazy for about 2 years.
Now. He wants me to account to him for the long term damage I did to his feelings and pat and soothe him and take care, change my ways.
I reiterated to him that we had discussed the blocking and it is a MAJOR issue for me. Basically don't do it.
So the ONLY time I am actually getting that upset with the guy is when he starts the silent treatment, blocking, walking off in the middle of discussions.
I said to him he can easily tell me he had enough discussion BEFORE he leaves. I never fight with him over it. But by the time he does a disappearance, screwing me around.. I am pretty upset.
I don't want to let it go without saying I would like him to tell me he is leaving, because I FEEL really disrespected otherwise.
And he wants to focus on how my outbursts are causing long term damage to him and other people.
I don't argue with anyone else. And I am pretty disappointed. This episode ended with unfriending on social sites, blocking me on IM's. Completely ignoring me because I didn't respond right to his statement about how much long term damage I am doing to him.
it's pretty hard to put myself in that headspace after what he has done to me and when I complain he says he cant ever talk about what he did, he has no excuse for it and what is the point of dragging it up?
What he wants to talk about is what I did in response to his cheating, lying, EA..
Am I being unfair and overly demanding, should I be setting aside my own upsets to try to explore his feelings of hurt for calling him a whoring fucktard when he was cheating on me?
I am not being facetious. Do I need to address this with him?
[This message edited by Kalliopeia at 8:05 PM, October 1st (Tuesday)]
He hasn't taken any responsibility, has he? Beyond the very facetious "sorry"s, that is?
Read this book: "Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" by Lundy Bancroft. Really read it. It will contain some painful messages. But it can help you.
He's trying to stay in control. He values control over communication and care. He is NOT a healthy person, and this dynamic isn't healthy.
Right now, no, I don't think you need to try to listen to him and understand him. I think you need to get away from him. Not just because he's unhealthy. Also because he is emotionally abusive. He is playing mind games with you. He is hurting you.
I know that is not easy to hear. I remember how hard it was to leave him behind. It was almost like being brainwashed into believing that that was what I deserved. It's not about deserve or not deserve... Very simply, what he is doing is wrong, and you are not mistaken.
How will you protect yourself from him? He is not on your team. To quote another member here: "He knows how to push your buttons because he's the one who installed the fuckers!" Please, you don't have to put up with his mind games! You can be free of him. (((hugs)))
[This message edited by silverhopes at 8:23 PM, October 1st (Tuesday)]
He's right in that actions have consequences. But it seems that he's perverting that sentiment and twisting it in order to *control* you.
Stbx had the same problem as your WS. His action was never the problem that we dealt with, it was my *reaction* that he turned the focus on to and declared to be the issue. It was NEVER about the event that preceded my *talking to him in the wrong way or saying the wrong thing to him*.
A couple of years ago I talked stbx into going to a community group that had a program that worked with abusive, angry people. Stbx sat in front of this man and woman and talked about how *terribly* I spoke to him and yadayada.....they both just kind of looked at him, shook their heads and smiled. They both told him "you are getting back what you put in for so long." They could see me. They had heard me speak. They could see that I wasn't some raging, out-of-control lunatic. And they could see/hear that he was a *clueless* abuser.
Personally, I think that you should block your xwF everywhere that you can. Stop chasing after him trying to get him to *see* what a disrespectful dick he's being and has been. You're handing your personal power over to this jerk. Stop it.
Think of it this way -- what if one of your girlfriends treated you in the way that he is? Would you still be friends with her? A person that just *vapors* in the middle of a conversation or who gets in a snit and runs around blocking you all the time? You probably wouldn't stay friends with that person for very long, would you?
In my effort to be *concise*, I often come off as blunt and harsh. Sorry, don't mean to be offensive.
Always, tell the other BS! Always!
"It's hard to be in love when you can't tell lies"!
he says he simply sees no reason to subject himself to the abuse from me. he finds it hurtful and says if I was simply more patient and not panicking all over the place and then lashing out when I do, life would be a lot more smooth.
Just telling what he said. and sure if I paid no attention and let it go, he does always show up.
I really need that.
It is a whole new level of *crazy* when the abuser begins accusing *you* of being the abusive one. The reason that it brings on the *crazy* is because there might be a nugget of truth in there -- in a *technical* sense. And that nugget is one that, once an abuser takes hold of it, you are in for nothing but a massive amount of brain damage over.
Stbx would label me *abusive* if I told him that he was a lying cheater. I didn't really understand that because he WAS lying and he WAS cheating. You are lying and you are cheating, thus you are a lying cheater, right? It just seemed like a statement of fact to me. But he declared that my saying that he was a lying cheater was me engaging in name-calling....which is abusive. "You're the abusive one, Gonna! LOOK at HOW you TALK to ME!!!!" Oh, for ffs. The poor lying, cheating guy.
He's playing the *deflection* game with you, Kalli. I have no idea about *how* you deal with him when he pulls his *ignore Kalli* bullshit....and maybe it IS abusive....but if it is, then you are just playing right into his hands and giving him the ammunition that he needs to keep the attention away from where it needs to be.
What you are doing now isn't working. You are playing *his* game....and that will not end well for you. It's time for a new game plan on your end.
I asked you whether you would put up with this same type of shit from a friend....you didn't answer....but I hope that it's planted a seed that the way that he's treating you is wrong, wrong, wrong. You are right. His treatment of you IS demeaning and dismissive. And it is a *good* sign that you are pissed about it. You do not deserve to be treated that way and you do not have to put up with it.......
Go dark and be inaccessible to him for a while......
In terms of him, one of the problems I have is that I do understand that he feels hurt.
He is desperate for me to take responsibility for lashing out at him and hurting his feelings and self esteem.
What I then run into in my own head is a couple of things.
First, I don't as a life choice, normally verbally abuse anyone. And last year about this time, I pointed out to him what I saw when I looked at him. They were the sort of observations that are actually TRUE, but kind of leaves the person you say them to feeling pretty rotton.
And his emotional affair, why telling her husband was an attempt to destroy her marriage and how terrible am I? Actually it was an attempt to get her to back off, but nevermind that.
I don't know if it is possible for me to separate out my hurt from what he did and set it aside to account to HIM for calling him a selfish POS whoremonger when that is exactly what he was doing.
What was I supposed to say when I found out?
"I really don't feel good about you having intercourse with your ex wife and g etting her pregnant and then lying to me and hiding that from me for over a year. Please excuse me whilst I freshen up in the powder room."
No, he does not really take responsibility. I think if he was doing so, he would figure bad choices lead to bad consequences.
Instead he is bullying ME to accept that MY bad choices of responding so negatively have led to how HE is treating me NOW.
I actually sat down earlier to try and figure out how to respond to his complaint in an empathetic way, but he popped onto skype and said he was "tired of always being the betrayer who betrays" and I said "well stop doing it then!"
And. HE BLOCKED ME AGAIN.
Gently - if you are separated, why are you engaging with this asshole???
I completely understand your reaction to the blocking, but dickwad is doing that as a control mechanism.
As a previous poster said: the only way to 'win' is NOT TO PLAY.
Go NC. Detach. You WILL find your way toward peace.
((((Kalliopeia))))
It really doesn't seem like anything has changed since your Thread in the RECONCILIATION forum.in March...where you posted about this exact same, outrageous behaviors from this man in about 27 Posts: The thread "Trying to reconcile. Not going well, don't know what to do"
I really have to ask: WHY do you continue allowing this man to abuse you this way? You do recognize he's continuing to ABUSE YOU, don't you?
[This message edited by Dare2Trust at 12:23 AM, October 2nd (Wednesday)]
I can understand being alone; but I hate being with someone and feeling lonely.
"tired of always being the betrayer who betrays"
He blocked you AGAIN. Color me surprised....not. For the third time tonight....STOP engaging with this guy. Go Dark. If he *unblocks* you for 2 seconds in order to send you a message....ignore the fuck out of him.
I wouldn't put up with it. I would figure they were a flake and distance myself.
This guy is manipulating the hell out of you, Kalli. You seem to have a pretty good head on your shoulders, so stop letting him make you second-guess yourself (another total red flag that you are in an abusive relationship....).
I am also a *nice* person who doesn't like to *hurt* people and apologizes quickly if I do. However, do NOT offer any type of apology to that guy right now. Don't accept any form of *responsibility*. He is just going to throw it back at you ten-fold.
He dealt you a really, really *shit* hand. And that facetious reply that you came up with is right along the lines of how he expects you to deal with it, so it seems. All reasonable and whatnot -- of course it is understandable that he would knock his x up while he was in a relationship with you... (moron)
Go Dark, Kalli. Seriously. NC.
[This message edited by gonnabe2016 at 12:48 AM, October 2nd (Wednesday)]
I advise you to go back to the NPD thread. The folks there have the expertise in the disorder that is keeping you controlled.
NC is the only way through this. Plus IC for you.
You really need to stop responding to him at all. Gonnabe is right on about him. You may not believe it but you deserve better than the treatment you're getting from him. Really, if you keep putting up with it you have to at some point ask yourself if you're feeding off it.
Is he still involved in that "club?"
..that feeling you get in your stomach, when you heart's broken. It's like all the butterflies just died.
What about YOUR self esteem? It's in the basement because of the way he treats you. Why do you chhose this life for yourself?
You deserve to be loved by someone who puts you first - always. Not 2nd, 3rd, or 100th to everything. He's not the one. Please get some counseling and get this lowlife out of your life. Do you want to spend your life this way?
