Reading about "me"

[Family Court Strategies: When Your Partner Has BPD OR NPD Traits.]

I just learned that my ex published a short story at the end of last year (two years after the final break), and I read it, and it's quite obviously about us. I mean, it's fiction, fictionalized, it's not one-to-one, but it's him and me in some form. The man is attracted to the woman for some really specific, recognizable reasons. He is an army vet in the story, with PTSD from a deployment in Afghanistan instead of from a childhood of horrific abuse. He has a fling with his neighbor, a waitress, and struggles to win her over despite being really damaged. The neighbor ends up getting together with the fat, bald, old boss at the diner where she works. In the end, the traumatized vet is peeping through the window of the trailer where she and her loutish new boyfriend are having dinner.

Wow. That was interesting.

[steelwork]

I just learned that my ex published a short story at the end of last year (two years after the final break), and I read it, and it's quite obviously about us. I mean, it's fiction, fictionalized, it's not one-to-one, but it's him and me in some form. The man is attracted to the woman for some really specific, recognizable reasons. He is an army vet in the story, with PTSD from a deployment in Afghanistan instead of from a childhood of horrific abuse. He has a fling with his neighbor, a waitress, and struggles to win her over despite being really damaged. The neighbor ends up getting together with the fat, bald, old boss at the diner where she works. In the end, the traumatized vet is peeping through the window of the trailer where she and her loutish new boyfriend are having dinner.

Wow. That was interesting.

[Insom]

Oh, wow, what was that like for you to read?

[steelwork]

It was a complicated experience. I had a lot of different feelings, including (in no particular order):

- I was interested to know that I was still in some way on his mind. I have wondered about that--he seemed to want to erase me. I think on some level I was glad to know he hadn't.

- I feel like he's done some work on processing the relationship. Whatever I think of how it (and I) were represented in the story--and keeping in mind that it is fiction--I have to hand it to him that he did put effort into making some kind of sense of what happened rather than sweeping it under the rug. I think I'm proud of him for that.

- I saw that the "me" in the story, while not being an especially developed character, was not a terrible person. She was weary and preoccupied with her own life. I think that's how he saw me, before he became angry at me. So maybe the anger has cleared? It has really hurt to think of him being angry at me and vilifying me. Maybe I feel some peace about that.

- But I also feel frustrated at not being understood. The "me" character does not have love and compassion for the "him" character. Her decision seems to be easy and motivated by cold practicalities. I guess reading it made me wish I could talk to him about it. I still want him to see what a terrible spot I was in, and how I did not give up on him, how I still loved him when he gave up on me.

- I guess it sort of bolsters my feeling that the relationship he experienced was about him--that he never put much thought into what I was going through.

- The woman in the story is using the man. That is a sore spot. He intimated a few times that I was using him, which really hurt my feelings.

- On the other hand, I am reminded how present the traumas were for him. They were immediate, as though he had just been released from that terrible childhood. The man in the story thinks how he needs the woman to know everything--everything he'd been through and everything he'd done--and she never would. And she would never know how much he needed her. I guess I let him down. I let him down. Although it's also true that he said to me once that he would never be so viscerally understood by anyone else as he was by me. So I don't know. It's a story. And feelings change. And maybe in the end he didn't think I understood him after all.

- And the soldier, he's so childlike and fun and he needs love and he's doing his best, and it reminds me of him, and so reading this made me miss him terribly.

 

[steelwork]

The next day.

How I feel now is like I'm back to focusing on him. Obviously he would be writing from his perspective. That's natural. So (to the extent that this fictional story reflects his lived experience) I'm now re-immersed in his view of our relationship--in which he went to me for understanding and healing and I abandoned him because I was selfish. This is where I spent the first year after our breakup, more or less.

It's not physically flattening, as it would have been then. I'm not having fight-or-flight feelings. But I am sad and frustrated and longing to talk to him, and also somewhat feeling "what if" again. Until I remember that this is an incomplete perspective (in addition to being a story).

[Sunfl0wer]

Been working in trauma therapy on lots of stuff.
We do lots of modalities including EMDR, brainspotting, etc.

Anyways... .
Something that comes up sometimes is when working on a trauma, sometimes getting closure on it is imagining replaying the scene I feel stuck in, but replaying it with the outcome or interactions I wish would happen.

So one time I was injured and the most traumatic part of the scene was actually not the truma to my body injured.  Part I ended up finding myself stuck on was my ex ignored me completely and did not take me to hospital.  Didn't even suggest it and he actually treated me like a nuisance.  He recalled the ending of that evening as me being sour, ruining the mood.  Ummm... .I chopped a very small piece of my finger off... .damn right I was feeling sour!  So in therapy, after doing the EMDR on the trauma, he then had me imagine how I wish it played out.  In my mind, I imagined him, instead of still cooking the steak, he pulled the meat off the burner, and helped me stop the bleeding, wrapped it up, helped drive me to the ER.  (I never got to ER till next day, they told me I came by too late) (instead, he grumbled over how I was not joining him at the table to eat, coddling my finger, ugh!)

So replaying this in my head, and creating for me what I wished would have happened... .was what helped me to seal the reprocessing of this memory from being traumatic, to feeling more healed.

Idk if that could help... .
Maybe create your own ending?
And seal it in thru some bilateral stimulation like butterfly hugs.

[roberto516]

I actually wrote a novel and published it based off the relationship and my depression. It's fairly obvious if someone knows the situation but I did my best to show how both characters were flawed... .at least I hope I did.

[steelwork]

A letter to not-send. I'll post it here instead.


======

I read your story in The [redacted] Review. I read it several times, actually. I’m writing after a few days of debating the wisdom of addressing this or anything else to you, but I don’t have to send it, so I guess I will not worry for now.

I felt very proud of you—not just for writing a good, honest, at times very beautiful story and getting it published, but for writing it at all. I am going on the assumption that the story was about or inspired by what I think it was about or inspired by, and for my part, I don’t think I could wrestle the feelings onto a page like that. I don’t think I could have found a through-line for the story of us—that is, the story from my perspective. I remember a lot of details—a lot of scenes and conversations and long-deleted emails—but they don’t add up to a clean story. Maybe that's because of the kind of person I am: a person who makes everything more complicated than it needs to be.  

Then again, I see that you accomplished what you did by tossing out the details and building a narrative out of what seem to be invented parts. And yet I recognize the emotional outlines of the story, which means you succeeded. But it sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering. How much should I read into the choices you made? There has to be a difference between the story and my experience of our relationship—I mean, there has to be—but how much of that difference is a result of the requirements of narrative, of privacy, etc, and how much is an artifact of the difference between your perspective and mine? Where license was taken, what meaning should I impute?

Quote:

“You don’t love that fat ___,” F- said. Pulled her halfway down the hall. Said he needed her. She didn’t know, would never know, how he needed her. He needed her to know everything.

When I read that, I remembered you telling me you’d never felt so viscerally understood as you did by me. I wondered: did you forget? Or did you change your mind? Or was that line one of the story’s inventions?

I found myself in conversation with the story. Who is R-? The woman in the story is tired and hardworking, made up of practical obligations and mild aggravation. She’s short and smells like hay and lavender. We know the active relationship between F- and R-, unlike ours, is a one-or-two-week fling. “Maybe it wasn’t love between them, but the start was there, something heavy about to tip over at the slightest touch.” Why didn’t it tip over? Because F- yelled at her a few times? Is that enough to explain why their relationship didn't grow into something more?

What if R- was already involved with that fat ___, that bald old C- when they met? What if C- cried and begged whenever she tried to leave him, and it broke her heart?

What if F- got impatient? What if, when he felt abandoned by R-, he went silent?

What if those silences terrorized R-?

What if F- kept going away and then coming back, and she was so relieved every time, but she didn’t know when it would happen again?

What if R- was afraid of what she was doing to F-? What if she began holding herself back because she didn’t want to hurt him more?

What if it scared R- to be put on a pedestal and then knocked off and put on and knocked off, and it made her feel like she wasn't real to F-? What if being understood was as important for R- as it was for F-?

And what if R- were a veteran of her own war? What if C-, that fat bald ___, had been the closest thing R- had ever had to a loving parent who would never abandon her?

What if choosing between F- and C- felt to R- like choosing between love and family? What if it felt like being handed a cleaver and asked to cut off her right hand or her left hand?

You get the idea, and that is not real literary criticism. You have to omit and change and emphasize and deemphasize—and not just in fiction, as I’ve learned over the long years of writing my book. There is always another story you could have written, right? You wrote the story that made sense to you, that was accessible to you, and it is a good true honest story. Some of the choices you made brought me to tears, because they were in their way truer than fact. Like making F- a vet, with all that trauma only six months in the past. That made me think how your childhood was with you, doing its damage, controlling the way you felt the things.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve experienced a new awareness of the ways my childhood is always with me, the ways it colors my perceptions and makes comfortable with some things and extremely uncomfortable with others. In my case, the hard parts of growing up were more difficult to name and thus easier to bury. No one beat me or told me I was possessed by the devil. It was a lot less direct than that, and hidden even (maybe especially) from me—which is maybe why I’m not good at trusting summaries, or the surface of things.

Anyhow. I’m guessing that rewriting the story, replacing the murky and ambiguous and confusing elements with simple clear elements that yield to understanding more easily, is healthy. It's part of what lets you turn the corner, like F- does in the end. It helps you to back away from the window of the trailer and never look in again. I wish I could change what you saw when you looked in the window, and the memories you took away, but then I don’t begrudge you any healing you can give yourself.

Here’s a stab at boiling things down to their elements. We were in love—not about to tip, and not for a week or two. But you needed me to be free before I was able to be free (and, incidentally, before you were free), and that started a bad feedback loop—you trying to pull me in and then getting angry and punishing me and going away and coming back, me increasingly paralyzed and skittish. All that on top of the complications and questions that, as they will, began to surface after a few months of getting to know each other. Trust was eroded a bit at a time, even though the feelings never were. If the feelings had died out, it would have been simple.

The situation became intolerable to you, and you needed it to stop, so you stopped it finally. You did what you had to do to the story of us to make it stop. I wish you could have been kinder to me at the end, and less contemptuous. When you went away, I was alone in my pain, blaming myself and wishing like anything for a chance to start over, to be the one to make you feel better. It was a very rough landing for me, but I made it. I had to give myself the understanding I needed, I guess.

That’s the last thing I want to say about your story. R-may have been reduced to a stock player in a bit part, but at least F- knows it wasn’t her who broke him so badly.  I hope that means you’ve forgiven me, just as I’ve forgiven you