Healing & Forgiving

As many of you already know I am currently seeing a counselor and trying to not only recover from this relationship but also some of my past not related to the relationship.  I can feel the depression kind of lifting off of me and I contribute that to not only therapy but also the grace of God.  I think that healing takes time and lots of prayer and advice from counselors and loved ones who have your best interest at heart.  What I came to realize is that I DO NOT want to be that bitter ex-girlfriend who constantly talks about the failed relationship over and over again.  I don't want to be a man hater and swear off dating for the rest of my life.  I want God to send me a mate that is right for me and in His perfect timing.  Will I go on dating sites again?  I'm going to say probably not at this point in time but who knows what the future holds. 

On to the forgiveness part of the story and how that looks for me.  I don't believe that forgiving means forgetting or that I have to be friends with the person or persons I am forgiving.  Forgiving to me means letting go of the past wrongs and hurt and choosing to not let hate consume me.  I see it as something I am doing for myself not for someone else.  I am choosing to forgive this man because I am tired of dwelling on what went down between us.  I am choosing to forgive him because he was once a small child that got hurt in a traumatic way and because of that has turned into a man who cannot let go of hurts and wrongs done to him.  Does this excuse his behavior towards me and others?  No I don't think so, I think it just explains and helps me understand who he is and why.  I was going to go meet the current ex-girlfriend and get some things of mine that she has but I've decided not to do that.  I've decided that the things are not that important and can be replaced.  I want to continue blogging as I continue healing but I will no longer bash anyone and keep going over the things that have been said and done.  I don't regret sharing those things with you but for my sanity I am choosing to move onward and upward from here.  So if you hear me reverting back to the bashing or hear me talking about how I was done wrong please call me out.  Remind me that I have moved on and am learning to come into my own.  I hope you all continue to read my blog and share in my journey of recovery.  Until next time...

Clearing out...

When I say clearing out, I mean literally and mentally.  It took a couple of weeks for him to slowly let me come and get little by little all of my things from the house.  He would suck me in again and again, telling me lie after lie about how much he loved me and how perfect we were for each other.  I'm going to be honest with you, I would start to believe it when I was around him, but as soon as I was away the voice of reason (God, I believe) would tell me the truth.  The truth that I didn't need him or his lies or his manipulation, that I am and was good enough on my own.  See, I always had this vision of myself married to the perfect man, living the American dream, being so in love that nothing else mattered.  What I didn't realize is that who I needed to be in love with was God and His vision for me.  Am I here to brag about what a great Christian I am?  No I am certainly not, because I am not a great Christian, I am horrible at it and horrible at this thing called life.  I am in no way perfect, I drink, I cuss (a lot) and I sin every single day.  But what I don't have is a man telling me I'm worthless without him, that I need him to make me a better person and that I'll never find someone else better then him.  I believe God has a plan for me and I don't know if that includes a man or not, but I am learning to be okay with that either way it turns out.  I'll stop rambling on and finish telling you about the clearing out of my things from his house. 

So after weeks of no communication he finally reached out to me and said I could come and get the rest of my things.  I didn't go alone, because I had no idea what I would be walking into.  Well what I walked into was another woman sitting exactly where I had sat not that long ago.  Yes he had moved on and gotten another woman or should I say victim.  I wanted to tell to her to run, that I wasn't the crazy one and not to believe the lies.  But I kept my mouth shut and my friend and I cleared my things out and left in a matter of 15 minutes.  And I thought I was done with him and his new friend, until yesterday.  Yesterday when she called me at work and told me that not only had they broken up already but that he has now moved another victim into the house.  I believe I got out just in time.

The beginning of the end

Things got worse, he was having trouble at his job, like on the TV news kind of  trouble.  He kept telling himself, me and whomever would listen what a great person he was and how lucky we all were to know him or work with him.  One night we were at dinner with two of his friends when he started going off on how he was going to get even with the people that were against him.  One of  his friends had the nerve to disagree with him on this point and he lost it and stormed out of the restaurant without me (thank God we had taken separate cars).  So there I am sitting with his friends and they are looking at me like what am I going to do about him.  I told them good night and left the restaurant and drove home slowly, I had a lot to think about.  I decided then that I didn't want to be with him anymore, this was not the life I had imagined.  I didn't know how I was going to end it but I knew I had to and I started to pray that God would help me be strong and do what needed to be done. 

After we got home and he was done raging and ranting about all the wrongs people had done to him in his life, I started to get my nerve up.  We were sitting on opposite sides of the living room when I felt a literal kind of push and I just blurted it out that I didn't want to be with him and in that house anymore.  He lost his shit big time.  There was more raging and ranting about how I would never find anyone as good as him and that I didn't deserve it if I did.  Then as I started to pack a few things, the tears came.  He started begging me to not leave to please stay and give our love a chance.  But I stayed strong and packed some stuff and went on my way.  On the way to my parents house that night he called me non stop switching from telling me how awful I was to telling me how much he needed me.  I finally turned my phone off and went to try and get some sleep, I knew the next few days, until I got all my stuff, were going to be very hard.

Signs...

Back to the signs I missed when I was blind with love and affection for this man. I once made the comment in front of him and a couple of my friends that my family always came first, his response was "not when we are together".  He would start to show signs of jealousy in regards to my friends and family and when I wanted to spend time with them. When I was with them he would text me constantly to see what I was doing and when I would be done. He slowly but surely would plan things so it would be just he and I and maybe a friend of his but not mine. I was being seperated and distanced from the ones I loved, things got worse once I moved in with him. He would tell me how they didn't want the best for me and were jealous of the love we had and the things we did.  I was so blinded and confused by him that I started to believe these things and withdrew from the people that would speak truth into my life and lost a couple friends along the way because of this. He would weave these wild tales of things he and his friends had done and talk like he had even been in the military and had taken lives of people that had done wrong just to scare me into submission.  This man had my flight or fight sense so on edge I couldn't relax and was even losing sleep.  He would also talk incessantly about the wrongs people had done to him and how he was going to exact revenge.  I was always talking him off the ledge and reassuring him how wonderful he was and how wrong they were and that they didn't deserve the energy he was putting into going over these perceived wrongs.  He would tell me I was silly and sometimes dumb for thinking that way but would relish in the pictures I painted of how wonderful he was, how much better he was then other people, I was feeding into his delusions of grandeur.

The webs we weave...

The definition of a narcissist is:

Definition of narcissistic

: of, relating to, or characterized by narcissism: such as

a : extremely self-centered with an exaggerated sense of self-importance : marked by or characteristic of excessive admiration of or infatuation with oneself a narcissistic personality.

 

Little did I know this is who I was falling in love with, he said all the right things and bought all the right gifts.  In the beginning there were dinners out, flowers, romantic weekend getaways and even a vacation to the Smokey Mountains.  I'm not going to lie, this guy literally swept me off my feet. Looking back and after much research I realize he was doing what is known as "love bombing".  Showering me with affection that I was starving for and romance I ached for, even telling me he loved me almost right off the bat. I fell head over heals in love and thought I had found the man of my dreams. See, I thought I would never find someone to love me, someone to spend the rest of my life with and to take care of me the way someone who loves you does. I think this way of thinking goes back to a not so great childhood, which we will talk about later in this blog. But when I was in the thick of things I didn't notice just how much he talked about himself, puffed himself up to be something so important.  One of his favorite sayings about the small town he lives in is that he was shark swimming in a mud puddle, the big man on campus so to speak. He would tell me wild tales of things he had done and places he had been and the adventures that awaited the two of us. Oh the many signs I missed along the way that this man was not who he seemed to be. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/communication-success/201409/10-signs-youre-in-relationship-narcissist

Above is a link that might be of interest to some of you, I wish I had read this earlier...

How it all began

I'm not really sure how this whole blog thing goes but I wanted to start one in hopes of helping at least one other person out there.  My journey on Match.com started almost a year ago and has left with me a few funny stories as well as a few scars.  Let's not start with the heavy stuff and instead start with a little light comedy about some of the weirdo's that are out there trolling the dating world.  My first "match" started with someone I kind of new was not the real deal but was kind of hoping for the best.  That ended rather quickly when he asked me for $10,000 to get him out of a business deal that went wrong.  Needless to say if I had that kind of money just laying around I sure in the hell would not give it to someone  whom I had never in my life met in person.  Follow that with numerous "matches" that were wrong on so many levels.  Some were as young as 18 while others were mysterious men from a far hoping to trap a trusting woman in their treacherous webs of deceit.

Throwing caution to the wind I stayed with the online dating world a little longer waiting for my Prince Charming.  And then finally, I thought, I had found the perfect one.  He was charming, charismatic and said all the right things.  Little did I know he would turn out to be the biggest deceiver of all and break me in more ways then I thought possible.  I have to go for now, but please stay tuned as I continue to share my journey.