Hi all. I've name changed here but I have spoken about some of this before and been in correspondence with a couple of MNners who have been through similar. If you recognise me, please don't call me out on my real username. I'm a longtime poster.
Apologies in advance for length. It's a long story!!!
So, I'm 35 and married with two children, eldest is 2 and little one is 6 months. Very happy, lovely husband. Good job as a solicitor that I trained long and hard for and that I do part time (on ML at the moment).
When I was 14 I began (or to be more accurate, I was roped into) a sexual relationship with one of my teachers. He was 15 years older than me and married. Claimed to love me and that what we had was a real fairytale love-of-your-life thing. Asked me to marry him when I was 15 and promised he would "make it good"... Whatever happened long term he would come back for me and marry me.
What followed was a long and tempestuous eight years (until I was 22) with him eventually separating from his wife and living with me when I was at uni. I loved him very much but looking back, he was very very abusive. Used to mess with my head and was sexually somewhat unusual. We had a very passionate and intense sexual connection, but he enjoyed cross dressing and brought this into our sex life early on. He was a bit of a porn addict too (pre internet so had a vast collection- like a cupboard under the stairs- of videos and magazines.) and exposed me to hardcore porn when I was 14 so I grew up around this thinking it was normal. Only in adulthood do I get how weird that was.
It ended badly. Very badly. One day he jus disappeared. Didn't come back to the flat where he had been living with me and no one seemed to know where he had gone (work etc). It seems (or so he said) that he had had some kind of realisation that what he did was so bad that he had to "let me go". I think he had a nervous breakdown. He went to live with his mother in Wales for a while (we were in East Anglia) and then suddenly reconciled with his wife (or was it suddenly? Always kind of suspected he might have been keeping her on the back burner. Never found out). She had been my teacher too but forgave him for his "indiscretions" and she invited me round her house to tell me that they were "working on" their marriage and basically that I should back off and never contact him (or her) again and that if I kicked up a fuss I would "pay the consequences" and she would make sure my name was mud locally.
I lost my shit quite badly. Was in the middle of some really important law exams and more or less dropped out (luckily had a very understanding uni and it did all get sorted in the end). My parents never knew the extent of it and thought ( Because that's what we told them) that we had met one another randomly on a night out when I was 20 and got together. They had (and still have) no idea that there had been 6 years before that. It seemed incredibly important to shied them from the truth, they were and are very good parents and they didn't fail me. He was just an evil and manipulative wanker who convinced me to lie to them.
I went to the police but it was 2002, pre the law change that made it illegal to shag your pupils, and they looked into and said that basically it was my word against his. They questioned him and he said he had never had sex with me until I was 20. There was nothing they could do. He did tell me he would leave teaching. I went massively off the rails. Never heard from him again.
When I was 26 and just back on an evenish keel after a couple of years of hard drinking, drugs, partying and casual sex- working very hard in my job and living with a boyfriend from work- I bumped into him by chance. He tried to ignore me (in a pub) but I made him talk to me. He was clearly very embarrassed. He was with a friend from work and through the course of the conversion it turned out he was teaching but had moved districts. I was livid (although didn't show him that!) what followed was a period of depression and anxiety that I think was a delayed nervous breakdown. I had a lot of therapy and CBT and was put on medication. This time I felt like I dealt with it all and emerged a couple of years later feeling I had confronted the past and my demons. The next year I met my DH and for the first time (at 29!) felt I had fallen in love properly and had a proper happy life. DS1 was born two years later and I can honestly say my life is very happy. DH is lovely and we have a happy and contented life. We have a good and happy sex life, lovely kids and he's a kind and good man. I'm really happy.
Except for the anger. It's not always there but when it is, I could kill him. I look back and can't believe what he did to me. I hate him. For all my therapy and CBT I just want to batter him and it doesn't seem to get less as the years go on. Coupled with the fact- and I am deeply ashamed of this- that I still feel like he exists at the centre of my sexuality. I regularly- during the angry periods- have vivid (and not unpleasant) sex dreams about him. And then I wake up angry and ashamed that he still has that "over me".
I've now reached the point where I think that the only way of dealing with it that I haven't explored is to tell him what he did to me and make him aware of the havoc he reaped. But my sane side says leave it in the past, no good can come of tracking him down and telling him he's a bastard. But what's the alternative? Live with this anger forever? Will it be forever? Is it because he just left? Is it a lack of closure?
I've been dealing with this man being in my head for more than half my life. I'm tired. I want him to leave. Is finding him the only way to exorcise him?
Sorry again for length. If you got to the end of this then Thanks. any advice or insight happily taken on board.