I have still not managed to go NC. Still sending ex messages on Facebook about how I cannot believe he lied to me about making it his priority that we be friends, that he ignored the pregnancy and abortion I went through.
I know he sees them- as I get the time and date of seeing- and he has not blocked me. I know I must stop this.
I have a hollow feeling from my heart to my gut and I know I have to look into myself, to understand or 'feel through' the reasons why I gave him so much power. Why I wanted so much to believe his lies and cling to my fantasy of 'troubled soulmates'.
First of all, and in the most shallow sense, staying with him gave me intense and dramatic sex to which I became addicted. But I think that the force of the sex came from something deeper. The emotional power of the connection with this astonishingly and bottomlessly needy person which for a short while I could fulfil with sexual passion.
I was a plain and nerdy child and teenager. I married a man who was a great companion but to whom I was not attracted, so the marriage did not last. Into my life swept a young man with masses of energy and the looks and body of a Latin porn star
- at first I pushed him away feeling too plain and unsexy for him. But he validated my deep desire to be desired and feel beautiful which I rarely had. At the same time he frequently criticised me and my body, aging, etc. So I was kept on that boundary of always feeling the longed for validation might be coming. But never being sure of it.
Secondly, I wanted to help him. To protect this often sad and lost little boy of a man who could switch from childish delight to bitter anger, jealousy and tantrums within hours. I wanted to fulfil his needs, soothe the pain of abandonment which I guess I must have also felt a lot and got used to in my very lonely childhood.
I remember one night after an awful, awful row. It had started because he wanted to watch a film. I had initially said yes but then got a book out. I didn't see this as a problem, I was at home relaxing with my partner wasn't I? He threw a fit claiming I had 'made an appointment with him and was breaking it'. I could not take any more what felt like another example of constant control and fault finding which was making it completely impossible for us to live together unless I basically followed his instructions all the time. He escalated into indirect violence as he often did, pulling the duvet cover off me aggressively. It erupted into the full BPD rage screaming, throwing fight and I also lost it and said nasty things and namecalled. Some of it is now a traumatic haze like so many of our awful fights. But I remember somehow him going downstairs and hearing him fall and slump down the steps. He went into a strange dissociated state. He sat out on the small veranda of my house and the outside light flicked on. He was slumped with head in hands, unable to speak to me. Lost in his own world.
I can still SEE HIM right there. Like the image froze onto my retinas. Every morning when I go downstairs I see him slumped there in his underpants.
I wanted to help him then so much. I wanted him to feel better.
Other times when he briefly apologised and confessed to the terror of abandonment that made him so violently aggressive with me, i FELT exactly the pain he was expressing. I told him I would never truly abandon him (even though I had many times because I couldn't take any more violence).
And in the end I didn't abandon him. He abandoned me pregnant and going through abortion alone, which I cannot forgive yet.
I cannot put together the hurt child I wanted to help so so much, the broken person who once told me after I collapsed sobbing on the floor following a tirade of abuse from him 'I am sorry that I failed'. He couldn't see any further than that, couldnt' see how to fix it. He was just for that moment, a 'failure' to himself.
I never wanted him to feel like that. I wanted him to feel whole. And also to trust me. To see me as a whole person who would always be his friend.
I know that this is probably a projection of what I needed. Acceptance and compassion for the faults and flaws I am aware of myself. And to slake my own lifelong loneliness with an intense relationship of shared wounds.
But the wounds were never truly shared. And this is what I must live with.
xx to everyone.
