Heartbroken all over - will he be different with her?

[TigerIsHome]

Hi

I'm sure you will remember me. I was doing ok. My name is slightly different now as I think my last account was erased despite pleas to reinstate it. I am being totally visible about that - I'm the same person.

You may remember my Heartbroken post from last year. I have been in intensive and ongoing therapy over my ex, who I have been told by numerous therapists, is narcissistic and abusive and that the version of him that I fell for, wasn't actually real. This is the man who, without going over all the dreaded detail again, entered into a relationship with me, has the two ex wives and travels back and forward to Vietnam. His children have no relationship with him either, and have disowned him. I am now 50 and this man is 54.

For reference I absolutely adored this man, we weren't together very long and at the start it was all new exciting, thrilling lots of contact and intimacy. But it soon turned very sour and as we worked together, I had to move departments due to his childish and irregular behaviour. He began hiding from me in the toilets at work - for the one reason that I had borrowed his coffee cup - telling my colleagues and called a meeting with our boss in which he told me that our intimacy wasn't love making - it was f - and my boss did nothing. During one of his regular trips to Vietnam, I moved departments. On the odd occasions when I do see him now, he will deviate between complete ignorance, and joking. Just last week as he told me he was returning to Vietnam, he asked me if the bag I was carrying contained a 'sexual item' and asked was it a 'rubber vagina'. This from the man who once said I made him so uncomfortable that he had to hide in the toilets. He then proudly announced he was going to Vietnam this week.

As if that wasn't enough, he completely stuck the knife in by announcing, 'I have a girlfriend, she's 38, beautiful, and I love her, I'm happy. I know in my heart it's right'. He then took out a picture of her and thrust it in my face. He said they 'facetime every night'. He claims he is now a Buddhist and has quit smoking and drugs. He was on a lot of cocaine for years.

This was a week and a half ago and I have struggled ever since. My therapist maintains he is a narcissist but what is making it worse for me is the current rumour that he may be getting married to this woman. He has met her in person once. The photo has him with his head on her shoulder and she is on his knee, they are holding hands. He was in no way kind in how he chose to tell me.

I feel absolutely devastated. He was brutally cruel to me for the time I was with him, blowing hot and cold but always saying 'just give me time' and I believed him. He said I was his soulmate and wanted me to meet his family. He asked me to move into my Mum's room with him knowing she had only died a few years previous to that. Then he pulled the rug, with me struggling to understand since then (3 years ago) what I've done wrong.

I've tried to get help and am doing things like going to the gym and yoga. But this has really set me back to the point my therapist told me today that she is insistent that I ring my GP as my 'core scores' were through the roof. I feel exhausted, even walking the short distance to the bus stop, I'm on edge, I feel sick and the reason is I am desperately wondering why she seems to be getting the better version of him. I loved him with my whole heart, I was patient, supportive, understanding and kind. I don't know why he is throwing it in my face that he loves her and if he does marry her, to me, in my mind, it will sort of highlight that I was the problem all along. This would be his third marriage - his second to a Vietnamese woman. He is just moving on as if I didn't exist and I'm struggling so badly to heal. My own mind is frightening me as I feel so deeply and I feel like something is wrong with me? I spoke to a mutual friend who says he is like a child, always chasing after the next shiny thing but even that makes me wonder why I wasn't shiny enough to keep.

I'm sorry to contact you all again, but do you really think he could be different with her? When his own kids won't talk to him? What the hell is so special about Vietnam? His last wife was from there and dumped him when she got her citizenship to the UK.

Thanks again, for listening to me.

Completely ignored majority of this sensible, well thought out comment.

And I could keep going. You’re having your own conversation and nothing anyone here says impacts that. Wishing you the best of luck.

If you have nothing kind to say to me, but thanks for the good wishes, please don't criticise. I can't take it at the minute. I'm sorry you find me frustrating. My brain doesn't work the way other people's seem to and it is frightening for me, I'm sorry.

There you go. Four answers which are all meaningful.

1. the pain will only stop with time, and with removing the source of pain. Being near this man in any way is like picking at a scab.
2. the confusion? It’s not really about him, you know he’s an arsehole. The confusion is about you - how did you get to a place where you allowed this man in? Work on that, and you can rebuild. The confusion is about how someone can treat you like shit when you are decent. Well, it happens. But to move forward you need to look inward, and not at him.
3. to be happy. Of course you do, we all do. I am these days at being content, and I had to do a lot of work to get there. I have bad days and I get sad that I wasted years thinking like this. In total, you were only involved with this man for one year and it ended three years ago. You have many years to go.
4. to forget him. It’s like that feeling you have when you go to bed and a song plays in your head you’ve heard that day. When you get up you then play that record all day. It’s stuck in a groove in your head. Stop playing the record. Do anything. You need to replace old thoughts with new habits.

Pointing out that you are completely ignoring what is actually being said to you isn’t unkind.

Nothing anyone says, kind, critical or otherwise, has any impact on you.

This book is brilliant. Don’t take the title to heart, it is meant to grab your attention!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Does-Everybody-Hate-Sensitivity/dp/1399827839

Oh come on Tiger, you've had more than one thread about this sorry excuse of a bloke, have been given tonnes of useful advice, but here you are again! You need to take some responsibility for yourself now as nothing anyone is saying is sinking in

He HASN’T become a “wonderful man” overnight. He has moved onto a new innocent victim. He has found a younger woman as they are easier to influence, control and bully into submission. It is nothing to do with you.

This might sound harsh but you really need to let go of this man. He's proven to you that he is not worth the time. He won't change for anyone and even if he did it does you no good to obsess over what he's up to now. He probably loves the idea that he's getting to you with his new partner. Don't give him the satisfaction.

It must be harder because you work in the same place. I get that. Stick with your therapy and try to make steps towards letting him go.

Thank you that's really helpful.

I guess my logic up until now has been that if someone can treat you really badly, despite loving them, there has to be an issue with YOU. I know that's not right, but it's how I've interpreted it. And I also have a weird logic that in order to be loved, as a woman you have to be absolutely perfect in every way, especially physically.

I remember a while back, like a few years back, a colleague telling me that 'he takes absolutely no responsibility for anything. He runs, he closes off. He didn't even fight for his own kids'. But for some reason, I didn't want to believe it, and thought he was just this wounded man. I mean he is, he was physically beaten by his father as a child, but that's no excuse really.

I'm starting to get really really conscious of the fact I may have to leave my beloved job to be fully free of this.

We are all designed to receive messages about who we are in the reflections and the reactions of those around us. Some people get stuck on this. They learnt that they can influence and have control over this. They want a set reflection, they don’t want who they really are reflected back. When they don’t get the reflection they want then it’s the mirror that is at fault. In a way you and him are using the same method of self reflection. When you come across a narc then everything becomes twisted. We look in the narc mirror and what we get back is not the genuine reflection of who we are. We need to understand this. We don’t need to stop looking for value in others we need to understand that this particular mirror was twisted. If we do in fact behave in ways that aren’t nice then we need to face ourselves. We can tend to work out it is us if we receive constant negative feedback from all our relationships. I have behaved in negative ways and that’s ok because we are only human.

I really think a new job would be hugely helpful OP.

You cannot love someone hard enough to make them treat you well if they don’t want to.

And as for physical perfection being a way to stop men being horrible to you, well - Beyonce, Jennifer Aniston and Shakira (just a few examples) are all beautiful, successful women who are even multi millionaires and have still been cheated on.

The best way to protect yourself from horrible men is to look for red flags and act on them by ceasing to spend time with anyone who waves one. Let alone loads like this guy. You can’t fix people. It’s way beyond your pay grade and what you don’t seem to get is that his life works for him. He doesn’t want to be better or different.

You have spent more time on his self improvement to an he has. Time to focus on yourself now.

It's only because I thought this change in his circumstances, changed everything. I thought it meant he isn't an asshole :( I'm sorry.

Thank you. I sometimes do wonder, because I lost my Dad, who was the most wonderful man, at such a young age, if I didn't really get to learn and recognise red flags because I didn't have that protective male influence. My Dad had a real strong sense about my first ever boyfriend, when I was 20, and although I never took it on board, many years later an article appeared in the paper, outing this man as a paedophile and voyeur. I know my Dad would have tried to warn me had he spotted anything with future boyfriends but sadly he only knew of this one, before he died. I have always tried to give people the benefit of the doubt (not the paedophile obviously because I didn't know then!) but always believed people have the right to be who they are, so haven't had many boundaries when it comes to:

Drug taking
Asking me to move cities then leaving for a 9 month trip to Cambodia leaving me in new city alone
Sudden and extreme christianity
Control and dominance
Name calling and humiliation

For some reason I've always thought I either don't have a right to say anything or that I caused it. Even with this most current guy, the first time we were intimate he penetrated me anally, roughly, without discussing it first. Then claimed he didn't know how he did it. It's like I have a mental block on how to respond to that.

You absolutely have it within your power to stop the pain and confusion and be happy – by moving jobs. You say you like where you work, but can't you see how diminished you've become continuing to work in the same place as him? It must be torturous and it is clearly damaging your mental health. Why would you continue to inflict that on yourself, knowing there is an easy way out open to you?

Sweetheart, that’s rape. He is a rapist.

I am so sorry you lost your dad and in the process lost the gift of a positive male role model.

Your dad would want you to focus on your one, precious life. He would want you to leave a job that has a toxic, misogynistic and nasty culture where your misogynistic ex who sexually assaulted you works and continues to occupy your headspace.

Please do consider seriously the idea of moving jobs. It could be life changing for you and get you out of this cycle of thinking x

The first time you had sex he raped you? Oh lord. Please do not pine for a millisecond longer over this appalling excuse of a man. He will not change for this new bride of his – men like him don't. He will abuse her and mistreat her in the same way, all in the guise of being in love. He's a monster.

I didn't recognise it as rape as I didn't stop it. I just thought, it was our first time in bed together and got caught up in the excitement of being with him, I hadn't been intimate with anyone for 13 years... I didn't say no, but it was sore and I bled a LOT the next day.

Hopefully now you realise it's rape it will help re-enforce what a nasty piece of work he is, and help you raise the bar for any future relationships once you've had a chance to work on your self esteem.

I'm sorry that this happened to you, have you spoken to a therapist about it? It might help...

I did yes, she said it was hard to know if was rape or not, or if it qualified as such.

Did you consent? No, you weren't able to as he didn't give you a chance.

I really think you need a different therapist. This one doesn't sound like they're helping you at all!

Normal men do not horribly abuse some of their girlfriends and not others. They can treat some of their partners poorly but that's not the same as abuse.

Abusive men take pleasure in abusing their partners. Normal men are looking for someone to love. Abusive men are looking for a victim.

There's no cross over.

Normal men will never be looking for a woman to abuse. Abusive men will never be looking for a woman to love.

Not sure if you're in the UK but this is the legal definition of rape here.

Rape
(1)A person (A) commits an offence if—
(a)he intentionally penetrates the vagina, anus or mouth of another person (B) with his penis,
(b)B does not consent to the penetration, and
(c)A does not reasonably believe that B consents.
(2)Whether a belief is reasonable is to be determined having regard to all the circumstances, including any steps A has taken to ascertain whether B consents.
(3)Sections 75 and 76 apply to an offence under this section.
(4)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable, on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for life.

As for the therapist......Either she isn't familiar with the legal definition of rape or she's an internally misogynistic rapist apologist. Neither position makes her an appropriate therapist for you or anyone else.

Oh my God. I thought because we were already in an intimate setting that it wasn't rape.He just turned me around and did it. Sorry to be graphic.

Your therapist doesn’t sound particularly competent OP.

You didn’t consent to anal sex, let alone rough anal sex that left you injured and bleeding.

It’s also a relatively common response for women who are raped to then go on and later have consensual sex with the same person as it can be a way of trying to stop yourself having to accept it was rape - if the relationship continues / develops it’s somehow easier to put it down to a mistake or accident or somehow take control of the situation.

Him raping you is not your fault. And it wasn’t an accident. It’s not physically possible for a man to genuinely mistake those two places. He is a monster, that’s why he has his nickname.

Please do consider perhaps trying another therapist x

Don’t apologise for being graphic.

It was rape, I’m so sorry.

Consenting to intimacy of one kind doesn’t mean you can reasonably have been expected to automatically consent to rough, anal sex with no preparation or discussion.

This man is so awful and I am so glad you are no longer in a relationship with him.