sad to lose a male friend/acquaintance who didn't treat me well

[remembranceofthingspast]

Please be gentle as this is very upsetting.

So the first part is when I first left home so this was a very special time. I was into paganism and finally met what I thought were my people. I had a male friend who used the occult to curse me, and told me in the most disrespectful and unnerving way that I had been cursed while claiming it was someone else (whether we believe in all this or not, the upsetting thing was that I loved him as a friend and he disliked me so much he and his friend did this) blackballed me socially/spiritually, then he decided he liked me as a person after all and helped me move house but then we stopped being in touch.

Decades later I got back in touch on facebook to see how he was. The conversation was flirtatious and he did say he had a girlfriend but let the conversation continue flirtatiously until only a few days before he was due to get married, without telling me he was getting married. 'Why didn't I mention this before? The answer is it just didn't come up.' He had written a book about that time in the 90s, where he portrayed me as pretty but gullible. He carried on flirting with me after he married and saying he would like to make love to me etc. I found Jesus after a few years so didn't join in this flirting anymore, but wanted to stay friends. Eventually his marriage ended presumably because of some activities with other women.

We were supposed to meet up for a gig as friends, he had asked me to stay at his for it but I booked a place for myself as I still saw it as inappropriate due to his being separated and my faith. But I have bipolar and one time I did proposition him- I regret that but genuinely wasn't myself. He was surprisingly lukewarm given his previous behaviour. He gradually reduced contact. I got in touch to tell him how the gig went (I went to one nearer me instead as I hadn't heard from him.) He said 'sorry to say I am coming off facebook soon.' I said 'so you are with someone knew and you don't want to get in trouble for how you talk to women online. I can behave you know, I did for years when you were with your wife, after I found Jesus.' He just said 'that's exactly it' and blocked. He didn't come off facebook, that was a lie.

I was so upset for months. Recently I reread his book. He was very scathing about my sex life with his friend, describing something I did as 'absurd' 'stupid' and 'horrendous.' He also invented extra insulting details. When I was first back in touch with him and read the book 8 years ago, I was too happy to be in touch with him and fond of him to allow myself to register these details.

So that is the story of 'Bruce.' Cheer me up about no longer having him around and help me get my head around it permanently please.

You are intellectualising his faults though. Also his faults are extreme in nature. Everyone has faults but some people are on balance far worse people than others. He fits that bill and you keep getting drawn back in. You are examining him but you are not examining yourself and more importantly changing yourself.

@Loveandlive I suppose so. I hadn't thought of it that way. I just thought of it as being due to the fact that I love (as a friend) a wrong'un and that I was just feeling what I felt due to that fondness I developed years ago.

Only read as far as him putting a "curse" on you.

@noidea69 I know it sounds mad but it happened. From someone I saw as a friend. We can believe in it or not but he believed in it, and disliked me enough at the time to do that.

And yet you got back in touch with him decades after this, to ‘see how he was’. You’re cross that he wrote about you in his book as ‘pretty but gullible’, but he has a point about your gullibility, surely. He cursed you, ‘blackballed’ you ‘spiritually and socially’, dropped you entirely, later depicted you negatively in a book in which he was scathing about your sex life, flirted with you online for what sounds like years, rejected you when you propositioned him, and has finally blocked you on SM — but you’re still obsessed with him. It’s like he challenged himself to see how badly he could treat someone gullible and vulnerable and for them still to come back for more.

You say you have bipolar disorder, OP. Are you taking your medication regularly?

@PheasantandAstronomers Yes I'm very good with my meds. I just think it's that due to childhood bullying, when I met these people I thought my first adult social circle, it's like I imprinted on them, also trauma bonding as they were awful but practiced intermittent reinforcement. There is a somewhat similar one from the same time.

He sounds like a vile POS and the reluctance you have to bin him sounds like trauma bonding.

He has never done anything nice for you - you don’t owe him a single scrap of your time or energy.

Cut him off and pretend you don’t know who he is.

My goodness, I wouldn’t want him near any of my children(!)

he didnt put a curse on you.

No one can put a curse on anyone.

@MyTrivia Good point! I don't think he would've harmed a child as he wouldn't risk his career but he definitely had nothing that particularly made him try to be a good influence except maybe for their academic development. And of course he will've had some flakey theories about magic and science he hopefully didn't try to convince them of.

I believe a few people can but that's not relevant.

The upsetting thing was I loved him as a friend and he performed that, tried to harm me spiritually as much as possible. And he believed in it.

This is the other one. Please remember I was 19 when most of this happened. Some of it was when I was not well with bipolar (definitely the later incidents at least) and so emotion and memory of it are heightened. I was effectively involved with a group where there was spiritual abuse. This is long winded so I apologise lol.

Met Kurt (30) official first point of contact for the local pagan scene when I was 19.
After sex he said "Get yourself down the GUM clinic tomorrow luv." I said "You're only my second partner."
I was groggy after sex. He led me in a guided meditation "Imagine you are a flower. Suddenly a freezing cold wind hits your petals." He did this to wake me up to get me out of his/his girlfriend's place fast.
He said "this is just sex. If it becomes anything else it has to end." But soon I said "I love you" and he said "I love you too."
I felt I had to join in a group ritual he arrangedfor no one to find out he was seeing me, even though it was the last thing I wanted.
Kurt asked me for a certain sex act ( not in the heat of the moment) but I was a romantic then and said no. He said "that means you're repressed." I knew that was manipulative bollox even then.
Someone told Kurt's girlfriend he was seeing me. He said "I've got hidden cameras watching me." I thought that he had lost it a bit.
Another time he said "I'm going to hire a hit man to kill whoever told Nicola. I know someone who will do it for a few hundred quid."
I bought my first pomegranate. This was expensive on my budget. I said to him "you eat it with a pin." (my mum must've said that, it's not something I would bother with nowadays.) I must've given him the pomegranate and pin. He said "f*ck that" ripped my first pomegranate in half and shoved it in his mouth.
He came round to mine once, I let him in and I lay down on the bed. He unzipped his trousers while keeping them on, shagged me, zipped up, and left. He kept his boots on the entire time.
Once we went to a pagan camp. He said "you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me." There is a photo and in the photo he has grabbed my hand to try and stop him being caught being touched by me in a photo.
At one point he said "I'm your best friend in Aberdeen."
I spoke to Bruce on the phone once and he said "Kurt told us he's not seeing you anymore." I said "he was round here this afternoon." I said to Kurt that maybe we could live in my flat which I loved. He said "no we'll live somewhere else." I dumped the live-in boyfriend I moved up with because of Kurt. Eventually Kurt disappeared out of my life. I had to leave my flat I loved, as I couldn’t afford it financially on my own.
Later he sent a letter saying he was going to move to a different city and said "don't be sad you're too young for that.' He knew I would be sad. The claim he was going to move was a lie.
2018 I reached out to them on Facebook just to ask how they were doing. Flirtatious chat with both of them though I knew Kurt had a partner. Kurt cannot have sex anymore for health reasons and seemed virtually as nostalgic as me. Sent photos of us both together which he had kept. Said he “happened to pass by where I used to live”, and sent me surprise photos of it.
Kurt had conspiracy theory views about vaccines (this was before covid.) I answered him back on his wall as I knew that and other stuff wasn't accurate, and he eventually blocked me over it. Seemed a shame to me as he was more important to me than that. I am more over this than Bruce though as the block from Kurt was eight years ago.

Respectfully, OP, there’s exactly the same pattern of obsession with a man who didn’t treat you well many, many years ago, them mistreating you repeatedly, you accepting it, and you not appearing to see that there’s a difference between someone stealing your pomegranate and coercing you into group sex, or whatever, AND getting in touch with them decades later and flirting.

What makes you get back in touch with godawful people from your teens decades on?

@PheasantandAstronomers There was no group sex thankfully :) I think I formed very strong attachments to certain people/men in my teens.

And I have had some unsavoury men over the years. I did do the freedom programme a few years ago so hopefully I wouldn't put up with Kurt's amount of rubbish anymore. Mind you, I still didn't realise Bruce was as bad as he was, or I still stuck with him as a friend because of how I felt about him.

obviously I know the difference between pomegranate brutalising and failed attempts at coercion. :) The pomegranate incident is just symbolic of the whole way he was milking his 'relationship' with me for all it was worth.

@PheasantandAstronomers Also in my experience, how a man treats your possessions can show how they go on to treat you. I had a man do a similar thing with a bottle of wine and go on to immediately rape me. I believe if he hadn't been a nine stone weakling Kurt could easily have gone on to get rapey. Thankfully he ghosted me soon after that so didn't get round to doing it either way.

The issue here is not that he is an utter bastard ( he is) but that despite him behaving like an utter bastard to you and his wife you were emotionally intertwined with him and seeing him as a friend.

You need to seek support to stop this type of destructive attachment behaviour or you will repeat it with other men.

He is not the issue you need to work on, you are. And I say that to be helpful.

@iceteababy I've kind of worked on it a lot in general with professionals and thought I had fixed it. Hey ho, the work continues I guess. And I hadn't seen Bruce as as bad as he was.

I was actually wondering if I knew these bellends until you mentioned this was in Scotland.

There are a lot of men like this who are drawn to alternative communities such as Goth, Pagan, bdsm etc and they end up as fucking Edge Lords who the older members of the group can see through but younger more inexperienced women (mainly) fall prey to them.

As you have a Christian faith now I echo a pp to speak to a minister or an older lady in your church (although perhaps not an easily shocked one 😂) A friend of mine told me that when someone has wronged her in a way she's finding hard to let go of, she symbolicly "lays them at the foot of the Cross" and asks Jesus to take care of bringing the person to a better way of life, and she finds it easier to then let go of both the person and the anger and pain that they caused.

Best wishes - you deserve much better friends than this pair of dicks!

@EvenMoreFuriousVexationWrong'uns are interested in the occult and BDSM for sure. IDK if I said but Bruce was also into BDSM. Thankfully I am not into what he's looking for or he might've been more keen to meet up with me. He is into being dominated

@EvenMoreFuriousVexation I could be completely wrong but I believe he finally found a domme and that's why he cut ties with me.

Any affair partner knows exactly what he's like with women online and might have told him to cut ties with women he flirted with.

But either way he wouldn't want to lose another relationship to this. He's fat and getting old, plus if she were a domme he would see her as precious. And he didn't want to lose his last relationship, his marriage. He was fairly happy, he just wanted more sex on the side. And flirting I guess.

I really appreciate everyone's comments. Any more? :)

To anyone that cares- I've been doing a lot better, getting out and about and forgetting about that lot (except to update :) )