'If you leave me I'll kill myself'....

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

Indulge me MN-ers. How many of you had that threatened at some point when you were leaving an abusive bully and how many of the abusive bullies are still with us today?

my ex apparently had a go. only he took way too few tablets for it in any way to have been a serious attempt according to the ambulance man who I sent to find him.

stupid nurse I spoke to on the phone the next day asked me "was there no chance we could work it out?

I called the police the last time, he'd text me asking me to tell his boss exactly where the he'd left the works van!

The police went looking for him, helicopter everything, finally tracked him down and got him to go to his friends, apparently he seemed fine! Huge waste of police time if you ask me!

Could probably get threatened with it again tonight since I'm going to have the 'think you should go to your Dads for a while' (200+ miles away) talk!

Good luck with the talk tonight candylicious and yes, if he has form for this kind of behaviour, you might get the same threat again tonight. Like another poster said, hand him the number for the Samaritans if he does.

Yep ex threatened it many times. When I finally realised I wasn't responsible and got out few months later he had one last ditch threat that involved saying goodbye to everyone. Later he admitted he'd done it all just for a shag!
His poor mum and friends!!! Oh and yes he's still very much alive

No direct experience but my friend's exh threatened a lot, half-heartedly attempted a few times, never actually did it though.

The ones that threaten rarely do it, the ones that do it rarely threaten it seems, they just go off and do it, either way it is wrong, wrong to try force someone to stay with you through guilt and wrong to kill yourself and leave the ones behind with the knowledge that they may be partly to blame.

My ex threatened and this like many of you fired the final nail into the coffin that was our marriage, my father threatened it for years but never did it, and my ex knew this so when he played what he thought was his winning hand, it was in fact his final hand......

I was driving him into work at 3am, middle of the night really, he came out with this statement, so I pulled over, looked at him, really looked at him and saw ugly........

I said that's okay you kill yourself but I have some things to say to you before you do it

1. Make sure that unlike everything else in this life you fuck up that you manage to do this one thing correctly
2. If you screw it up you will be going home to your mothers cos no way will you be getting back into my home
3. Make sure your kids understand why you are doing it, cos I will tell them your such a selfish cunt that you weren't man enough to stay in their lives and took the easy way out.
4. And don't for one second think I care, cos I don't...

At that I drove him the rest of the way to work, and said bye now, do let your kids know if you will be back later or if I have to arrange an undertaker, he slammed the door and walked off lol....He was back the the house later that night, still breathing worse bloody luck........

okay that took eggs! wow, /salute

My ex announcd he had three months to live due to an unspecified illness when I left 25 years ago. Does that count ? Since then he's been given three months a further three times, coincidently straight after each new gf has come to her senses and left him. Bloody medical miricle my ex.

Hints of imminent demise, whether self-inflicted or not, certainly count as emotional blackmail Betrayedbutsurvived... :) Anyone remember the 'dying' mother in Moonstruck?

^ Mine (same as above, I know it's ridiculous) told his good friends he had a brain tumour and me that he had early onset dementia and a brain disorder which meant he had a couple of years to live. I knew he lied to his friends, didn't think he was lying to me- how stupid can you get.

It's the way he did it that just kills me. We hadn't known each other that long, but we'd had a good night, we were just going for a drink in the uni bar and were having a smoke outside. He suddenly started shuffling his feet and then said, "not sure if we're intimate enough yet (??) BUT....." and then came out with a whole load of crap. Really detailed lies. And kept it up in such a detailed way for a year. Telling me all about his scans, improvements and how the stupid British doctors wouldn't let him continue on the cocktail of meds he'd been put on in his own country.
That's added to a whole other raft of lies that I just swallowed. It's textbook actually everything he made up, just to make himself look great and make people feel sorry for him.

oops x post that ^ was to betrayed

my ex threatened it and turned up to my house with tablets in his pocket. I took him seriously as he had been suffering with MH problems due to ex wife stopping contact with their ds and divorce. He became more and more abusive and New years eve 2012 pinned me to bed and hit me and threatened me. I called the police and got him removed from my property. Unfortunately i am not over it and seem to have gone into depression :-( how another human being can behave this way. He said he was "desperate"... I had a MC to him, probably for the best as dont think i could have coped with him for the rest of my life..

And is this 'desperate' man still alive and kicking Maomstripes?

Yup. And still here. Ar**e

Yep, my ex. He's still breathing, he was in fact so devastated by the end of our relationship that he was with not just one but 2 new girls within a month of me ending it.

Of course I only found this out later, and for a few months after I had to put up with his mum calling me every other week with random crap about him. Of course he got her to ring rather than do it himself, because he knew I'd panic that she was ringing to say he was dead. Nice.

Ex did this.
I called the police. He spent the night in custody and then had to convince their doctor that he wasn't suicidal and didn't have to be committed.
Cogito I think it's great to have this thread to show people it's a technique that abusive partners use. The other point I wish I had known was that EA/DV types quite consistently threaten to get full custody of any dcs. It's just another technique in their 'maintaining control' rulebook.

my dad held a bread knife to his abdomen, gave the handle to my sister and told her to push, she'd "practically killed him already".
She was nine years old at the time.

He was having a break down at the time but he is still here and still as selfish, self-absorbed as ever. I've only just this month gone nc with him (not over this. He is impossible to handle in other ways, too and I'm sick of it). He would never kill himself because he would miss out on watching the aftermath.

I had an ex that threatened this. However when I did finally leave him, that night he slept with our next door neighbour and married her 6 weeks later. On my birthday!

Wish I'd left him years earlier...

Yes kate - that is true. They all threaten for custody. My first one did - 7 years in court...trying to get him to maintain consistent contact after 2 years he withdrew his custody battle - but continued with the inconsistent contact for a further 5 grr! Now he doesnt see them at all. Been over a year now.

My ex took my ds from nursery and refused to give him back. Now im not allowing contact for various other reasons!

They are all a bunch of control heads!
You often find they arent even interested in the kids - just the power they can have over you through using the kids.

Yes for threatening custody as well. And taking the child away.

Along with the threats on my life, all this has done to exH is a criminal process, not being able to see DS unsupervised, and a divorce, of course.

Oh, and then they are crap at keeping contact, yes.
So predictable.

I can add one friend's ex, threatening it "I drove my car to the roof of x car park last night and sat thinking about it".
It really worried her, she'd just dumped him after too many beatings.
So that's maybe a year ago? He pulled through that terrible low, it seems ;)

I can also add a supposed suicide attempt from a friend's ex, about a year after she left him. Uncorroborated. Unsuccessful. He's still here to not pay for his kids.

So that's another 2 for the bullshit pile!

People with BPD tend to threaten suicide (maybe not as a manipulation thing in a relationship though, more cause they are so unhappy/angry) and then sometimes go on to do it according to various stats.

But even then I'm not sure someone else can live their lives held hostage to the threat. God-awful situation to be in though :s

My friend had a terrible experience with someone like this.

They went out for a while and he was a nightmare, needy, controlling and possessive, she tried to chuck him a couple of times but each time he pulled the "I will kill myself" card. The final time she said that she was sorry but she didnt want to see him anymore and that was that.

Except he kept texting her for weeks saying he would do it, she just ignored him. Then he texted that he was going to take a load of pills, again, and it would be her fault he was dead, again, but that he wouldnt do it if she would take him back, again. She ignored him, again.

The next morning she had the police at her door because he had died.

Turns out he had taken some pills, texted his sister to tell her what he had done knowing she was due to go round that evening and left the door open so she could get in. Except she didnt get the message and didnt go round as a member of her family had been taken to A&E, she got it the next day when it was too late. At the inquest it was agreed that he had not mean to kill himself.

My friend has never really gotten over it, to this day she feels guilty that she didnt call an ambulance that night, or on one of the other times he threatened it because that might have brought him to his senses :(

I'm sorry your friend feels guilty Bogeyface. She isn't and never was responsible for his crass stupidity and clearly he had never heard the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.