Is this the script? Handhold please

[Whatachliche]

I can't believe I'm typing this - after 25 years my HB wants to move out.

When he left for a recent work trip, we were both set to work on our relationship with a therapist. after his return, he has a new gym routine, bought new underwear and has decided he is not feeling emotionally connected to me anymore and he is too 'confused' to know what he wants.

This is the f* script right?

there have been struggles like loss and illness and an unhealthy communication style from his side but we just started couples therapy to work on our relationship and turn things around. now this.

Do I entertain his quest for space or do I believe the signs of the script and just start divorce? I don't want to look through his phone, I think I can't deal with the truth. I rather walk away without knowing if that makes sense, or is that just the fear of no point of return?

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain
I've read about that happening a good few times on mn over the years so I would also bet he's done that on purpose.

Going through his texts and aligning occasions and promises against actual dates and facts, it seems he lies all the time. Confusingly, even if there is no lie needed. Things like telling a neighbour, who really doesn't care about image, that he was at a VIP party when it was just a normal night out. It is all so confusing, I think he is much more of a covert narcissist than I thought. Today I'm crying my eyes out. Not because of him directly, not because the loss of my marriage - I can't be rid of him soon enough. I'm crying over the absolute confusion about what is real and what isn't. I opened up to friends and their kindness, love and support made me lose all composure. It feels like the burden of living in his world of intricate and convincing lies has lifted, which makes me break down emotionally. In the same moment, friends recognising his mind games, aligning their reality with mine, not his, makes my misery real. healing from it feels un-manageable. His cheating is only a small part of what I think is quite pathological. In all of this web of lies and confusion I am blaming myself for not realising sooner that something is extremely off.

*Didn’t you get half of the house sale etc?

And as it turned out, his last million. Solely on paper and company closed with a five figure loss.

Karma’s a bitch ain’t it?*

I did, yes. And yes, she is. 😉

@Whatachliche I promise you that you will heal. However sad and desolate you feel at the moment, you will heal. Your friends are a great support.

Your H has been truly contemptuous of you and of his marriage vows.
You've acted with integrity throughout.

I myself found it difficult to reconcile the man I thought my husband was with the man he ultimately turned out to be. I did not believe that I would heal, but I did.

It takes time.

@Whatachliche gaslighting and lies on that scale are traumatising I'm not surprised you are struggling.

Healing takes time

@Whatachliche I’m so, so sorry. The lying and subsequent realisation that you have no idea what to count on in your past or even the present is totally de-stabilising and confusing. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors at an amusement park. There are three different reflections at the same time showing different distorted versions of you and you just want somebody to point out which is the real reflection; to know what really went/ is going on. Don’t underestimate how traumatic this is, it’s incredibly damaging and hard to deal with . Cut yourself slack here, be as kind to yourself as your lovely friends. That’s why I think infidelity is abusive behaviour. Affairs and infidelity are portrayed on tv like Romeo and Juliet or uncontrollable hot sex etc and ‘falling in love’ used as an excuse or a way of minimising responsibility for abusive behaviour, as if falling in love makes it all ok then etc. Lying, gaslighting and deceiving are never ok, they are psychological manipulation and abuse of another person. My advice is to stop trying to work it all out, I obsessed over details far, far longer than was good for me and guess what? It changed absolutely nothing, I couldn’t go back and undo or erase the past. Let him do him now, you do you and get laser-focused on you and your future.
Honestly? (This is hard to hear but true) You haven’t and probably never will have the full picture. Ever. It won’t change anything to actually know, so pull yourself away from the cross-checking. It increases the feelings of panic and sands shifting beneath your feet and won’t serve you. I know and totally understand why you’re doing it, you’re traumatised and desperate to just KNOW in order to try to regain equilibrium. I’m not judging you at all for your doing this, I know and I get it because I did it. A lot. A whole lot. I regret it. Why? What was the result? Total frustration and sobbing for hours because my life as I thought it was wasn’t what I thought it was. To make it worse I had no way of ever really finding out what it actually was. I get it. I honestly do, but please pull yourself away from it. Allow yourself to feel what you feel and cry and get it out if your system each time a wave of it hits you. But then with all your might pull yourself back to the present moment and just breathe.
Listen to your breathing for one minute and deliberately slow it down by taking a slightly longer in-breath. When we are shocked we breathe rapidly with short breath intakes. If we are startled by a loud noise, we instantly rapidly breathe in. It triggers our brain into fight/ flight mode. What do we do when we are relieved? We breathe out with a literal ‘sigh of relief’ , our breath is a long “pheeewww” sound. We can trick our brains into calming ourselves down, by taking a slightly longer in- breath followed by a long, gentle out-breath. It slows your pulse, it really, really works.
Concentrate on your present moment and make any looking to the future is about you, not him. Leave him to his murky past, don’t let him steal another moment of head space from you and your brighter future. Stay away from the past and the shifting sands. Stick to what you know is real today. You’ll heal, one day, hour, minute and even one breath at a time. It’s hard, really hard, but you’ll do it. Sending you love and strength, you’ve got this.

Wow, what a brilliant post @Thewookiemustgo

That's really good advice @Whatachliche

Focus on YOU. Focus on today and feeling some pleasure from today and being alive.

FUCK HIM.

Why not join a dating site OP. Not to date but just to let him think you’ve ‘moved on’
and rub his nose in it

I agree with this. Keep your laptop open at the page.

"If I had known".... "If I had been more attentive"... "If I had said No when he first did X Y Z"...... Hindsight is like diving into a rabbit hole that has no exit.
You are normal, with morals, a generally standard kind person.
He is really damaged goods, he was brought up believing he was better than everyone, & for whatever reason, to buff his ego he has lied, & lied over & over.
So people think he's Good, Clever, Better ....
But he is a fake, he is a pathological liar.
As PP said, live in the "now". Trying to unravel that sack of worms is impossible. Your future will be better, his will progressively get worse.

So What is he suggesting happens now ? He will still try & get attention, Mr big ego won't just go quietly.
I hope you simply pass like ships in the night.

@Whatachliche

I'm crying over the absolute confusion about what is real and what isn't.

In the same moment, friends recognising his mind games, aligning their reality with mine, not his, makes my misery real.

I think you need to try and reframe the narrative. What they are doing is validating you. I'm not saying your misery isn't real or isn't normal to feel, just that when our misery is validated it can help lessen it, or start to. Because it means that someone is saying "Yes, your feeling is real and it's valid. You were treated so so badly. You aren't imagining it or making it worse than it was". From that comes healing. Knowing/acknowledging truth is always healing. It'll take time but you'll get there.

The tears and the roller coaster you're experiencing are your mind trying to heal and at the same time trying to deny or push away the bad feelings. You're going to experience this for awhile. But you have to let it roll over you. Have you ever swam in the sea and been caught in a wave? All you can do is relax & let it roll you until the it subsides. Fighting the wave makes it worse and panic sets it. It's sort of the same.

Just feel what you feel until you don't feel it anymore. Soon you'll find that the length lessens and the intervals get longer. And then it doesn't happen anymore. You'll get there, honestly.

You might want to make your own thread, I have reported

Sorry I haven't done this before I added a post instead of a new thread.

This is exactly what the covert narc I was seeing was like - just stupid lies to make himself seem like a big man.

One of the things I read about them that resonates so much was that you are left so confused because the lies are so grandiose that at the time you think “it must be true because who would lie about that?” so for instance he told me his wife was a recluse who hadn’t left the house for four years, then that she’d tried to OD and he was texting me pretending to be at the hospital, he also told me that my dh (at that point we weren’t together) had my house bugged and had a P.I. following us, that his mum had died when he was a kid, made out like he was the main man at his workplace and everybody relied on him to get things done, said he had an elderly neighbour who he did favours and dog sat for. That he was going to climb Everest next year! Then he suddenly told me he had bowel cancer last year and it had returned. It was all lies. I had red flags going in the back of my mind at some points but when you are a sane, honest person yourself you just cannot conceivably imagine why anyone would lie about stuff like that.

It really is a very insidious personality disorder, they are truly sick. They wear a mask of respectability and niceness but it isn’t who they really are. Even they don’t really know who they are which is why they mirror the people they are with - to create a false sense of compatibility so you crave their attention.

It certainly took some unraveling and wtf moments to figure him out afterwards.

When his wife found out he then told her a pack of lies about me and made out like I was some crazy person who had threatened to kill myself if he didn’t carry on seeing me! It just beggars belief.

I totally get it OP - it’s truly shocking when you discover the depths of their deceit.

In all of this web of lies and confusion I am blaming myself for not realising sooner that something is extremely off.

DO NOT blame yourself. They are like scammers and conmen who dupe people even in everyday life.

They are very clever at what they do and it takes a while to figure them out.

Im at the stage now where I just feel so relieved that I discovered his lies and got away from him. His wife has been with him for 15 years and is by all accounts an intelligent woman. I dread to think of the lies he must’ve been telling her over the years - she even gave him a substantial amount of money when his business went into liquidation to pay off his debtors because he convinced her they’d have to go into hiding otherwise as people would be after him for money.
Now his second business is going under too. He must’ve been duping her for years - same as you’ve been duped OP.
You didn’t know who he really was and he basically presented a fake person to you, you weren’t to know. All you are guilty of is being a genuine person who believed he was who he said he was - and why wouldn’t you? I mean, who the fuck does that? They’re completely messed up people.

I hope in time you will feel thankful that you discovered who he really was.

Thewookiemustgo

Is absolutely correct. At first you are going over everything and desperately trying to figure it all out and the why, what, where - what was real?

But you will never know. Even if you confront him with everything you know, even if you show them physical evidence they will simply lie and twist and gaslight some more. They can never, ever be wrong or admit their deceit.

So don’t send yourself crazy trying to psychoanalyse him. It helped me when my thoughts started spiralling to imagine sweeping all the thoughts into a pile and then sweeping it all over a cliff edge. Also putting on my favourite music and dancing! Just fake it to make it and eventually you really will stop thinking about it so much - and after a bit longer you won’t think about them at all.

Time is the best healer x

OP I’m sorry for what you’re going through. But so glad you have some great friends who now know and can help you through.

If it’s any consolation, it sounds like he is very much narcissistic, and he won’t even know who he is himself. Must be exhausting with all the lies and covering up a big black hole in their personalities.

I don’t agree with the advice from PP to show you are actively dating. He wont care in the way he should but might take it as a narcissistic injury which would make him very nasty. So far you’ve played this as well as you possibly could with someone who has one of these personalities.

💐

Playing him so you get the financial outcome you want ie buying him out of the property is your priority. "Winning" anything with a narcissist is difficult so keep being Eagle and walk away knowing he will be livid when he realises that you got what you wanted without him even realising.

thats it: "I myself found it difficult to reconcile the man I thought my husband was with the man he ultimately turned out to be. "

that is exactly my struggle. the web of lies I have unearthed is on a scale that makes the existence of the 3 OW small in comparison.

I can not comprehend my HB is this very same person. I understand it is pathological, he meets every Covert Narcissist description, but still - I can not comprehend.

@Thewookiemustgo thanks for putting this feeling into words, this really describes it perfectly how I feel:

" The lying and subsequent realisation that you have no idea what to count on in your past or even the present is totally de-stabilising and confusing. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors at an amusement park. There are three different reflections at the same time showing different distorted versions of you and you just want somebody to point out which is the real reflection; to know what really went/ is going on. "

As a person usually quite rooted in reality, or so I thought, this revelation feels so destabilising. I don't care about the OW x 3 so much anymore, but am more worried about my mental stability and the bigger web of lies that seems to touch everything of my life.

@AcrossthePond55 oh your wave analogy is a good one - just the wave that's tumbling me around right now is not just crushing me, it also has plenty of turds swimming around. 😂

your point about listening to my friends - I hear you, I will make sure to lean on them.

@Imjustagirlintheworld I feel we share the same kind of abuse from people with the same personality disorder. your previous posts sent me off to research covert narcissism and what I read made the scales fall from my eyes. he is pretty textbook.
I'm grateful for pp advice to remain in eagle mode, now that I learned about narcissistic collapse when confronted. My subconsciousness must have felt this possibility. How long did it take you to see through his mind games and manipulation? Did you confront him when you left? or did you play it safe? You mentioned your situation earlier int he thread, I wasn't too familiar with the covert version of narcissism back then.

You are handling this amazingly.

for my own sanity and self preservation, I just kept things close to my chest and only told those people close to me who were not going to tell him. I became the grey rock - so boring to him that his attention swivelled elsewhere. You cannot underestimate their need to win and come out on top, so why bring more drama to my life - just extracate yourself in the best way possible - luckily they are often not too bright so if you are able to work a way to get what you want in a very quiet way, its likely the best option - after all he is distracted by the glittery and shiny elsewhere, so tying up a few loose ends that free him to his supposed wonderful new life doesnt often take up too much attention.

They do seem to be found out further along the way though - let that be your comfort. They have become blase in their manipulation of you but forget that it was years in the making - in their new life they try to go full in on the lies with none of the groundwork and people are more aware nowdays, and capable of putting 2 and 2 together with use of technology. The fall WILL come, and you can watch it unfold from afar, safe in your new secure life.

And he will continue to lie. Those who care for you will know he is lying. Those who dont care, dont matter. Later they will know.

Narc do what narcs do. But ultimately its almost impossible to keep up with the multitude of lies, and they will become like my ex - fun to have around as a drinking associate, but nobody would touch him with a bargepole for a relationship.