Shortly after I started working at a Community Mental Health Center, I recognized that my then boyfriend had a lot of similarities with the personality disordered clients I was working with.
At the time, I thought he was a veteran who had served in the Gulf War and I approached his episodes of bad behavior (aka abuse) as related to PTSD. I knew what it was like to have untreated PTSD, so I gave him a pass…Actually lots of passes for his emotionally erratic behavior and anger outbursts.
Looking Back
Looking back I see clearly that we were in a cycle of abuse. It was a lot more difficult to see when I was in the middle of it because he wasn’t always abusive. Well at least that’s what I thought. I now know he was lying to me throughout our fraudulationship and that the entire thing was one long episode of abuse. But back to how it was before I knew.
Not Always Abusive
So he wasn’t always abusive. As I’ve said in previous articles, he could be extremely romantic, stopping everything we were working on to dance with me in the garage, stopping to watch the sunset when we were out riding in the ATV, taking me out to dinner or on trips. But in between these great times, he could be distant, come home extremely late from work, and I always had the feeling he was cheating on me with women online. I’m not a suspicious person and had never had this sense in other relationships. But I didn’t have any proof. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And married him.
The Wedding
Our wedding was lovely, except for the fact that he wanted us to go to a bowling alley/bar with his friends after the reception instead of going back to our room with me. We got back too late to spend any time together on our wedding night. Once we got home, life was great for about 4 months after we were married. Month 5 something shifted in him. He was not nice. Not patient. Back to his controlling, angry behaviors mixed in with bits of romance. He would silent treatment and withhold intimacy.
Failed Attempts to Leave
I actually left the first time 7 months after we were married, but he talked me into coming back after I’d been gone for the weekend. I left again 9 months after we were married. Again he talked me into coming back after only a few hours. It was at that point I stopped talking to my family about thinking I had made a mistake. My ambivalence was annoying to me, I didn’t want to burden my family with it if I couldn’t even stand it myself.
Life Goes On
Life went on. I went to work. I came home. Whenever I was away from him, my mind was screaming at me to run. I literally had some strange soundtrack loop in my head that was the subtext of every other thought: “Run, leave, go. Run, leave, go.” I pushed it away and carried on with my life. It felt like I was losing my mind in some respects. I went to therapy. I took a short-term course of Prozac. Nothing relieved the loop in my head when I was away from him.
Whenever I was with him I was kind of frozen and tried to not rock the boat or do anything to make him upset. I pushed myself to keep up a crazy social pace on the weekends. I drank 5 hour energy shots to combat chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. I finally broke down and told him I couldn’t keep up with him and that my fibromyalgia flares were worse than they had been in years. He wasn’t happy and implied that I was faking. Too bad. I held my ground. I was not going to sacrifice my health for him any more than I already had.
Trying to Focus on the Good Times
As I said, it was difficult to see the cycle of abuse from the inside especially because I was rationalizing his bad behavior as he wasn’t “always” abusive, and/or I attributed it to PTSD. I think a lot of people fall into focusing on the good times. I know I did. Because in all honesty the “good times” were romantic and we had fun. Putting this in context of the cycle of abuse which is generally a period of calm when things are going well, a period of tension build up when you start walking on bigger eggshells/waiting for the other shoe to drop, the explosion/punishment period when there’s an escalation of problematic behaviors and then back to a period of calm.
The Cycle of Abuse
Looking back I see that the romantic/fun periods were usually preceded by a ramp up of his problem behaviors: coming home late, being on his phone even more than he usually was, having temper tantrums. I started to wise up and put my foot down about my own self-care. He was not happy with this and blamed, projected and generally tried to make me feel guilty for not being superhuman or even my not wanting to be on the go 24/7.
I noticed that the longer we were together, the better he became at manipulating me. In the early days, he would just yell and throw a tantrum. Over time he figured out that I didn’t respond well to that. He learned exactly how far he could push and he had a really good sense of when I was ready to walk out the door. I held firm in my self-care and refusal to make myself sick, not get enough sleep and he knew I meant it.
After he figured out that his silent treatment and anger didn’t work as well as he thought it might, he moved into the lovebombing stage of “wanting to make me happy.” His “romantic gestures” increased. He used my caring, empathetic nature against me. He swore he would do anything for me and just wanted me to be happy. He would claim that his anxiety was acting up and causing chest pain. He tried to make me worry about his health.
After I left, he hoovered me back in by playing on my sympathies and saying what he thought I wanted to hear. He apologized without apologizing. He promised to go to therapy. The reality was he lied about going to therapy the same way he lied about everything else in our relationship. Once I agreed to come home, the cycle started all over again.
Lovebombing Intensifies
Over time and most especially right before I found out about his fraud, I distanced myself emotionally from him and became quiet because it just wasn’t worth the risk of having a conversation with him when I knew that he would not really be listening and that I would have to repeat what I was saying multiple times. Granted he has a hearing impairment, but you can tell the difference between someone who is not paying attention and someone who didn’t hear what you said.
He responded by increasing his lovebombing behaviors. What this looked like in real life was this: Him coming home early 2-3 times a week to eat dinner with me, asking me to go on a walk with him after dinner, coming up to bed when I went to bed rather than staying downstairs watching TV or on his phone until 2 or 3 a.m. In other words, he started paying attention to me and to the relationship because I really think he had a sense that I was about to walk away. Scratch that. He didn’t have a sense of it. He knew it. Because when he would threaten to end the marriage, I told him I was going to put us out of our misery and do it myself because it wasn’t healthy for either of us.
He didn’t expect me to say that and immediately stopped threatening to leave. Then he ramped up the lovebombing behaviors as I described. All this time, running through my head was “run, leave, go.” I kept pushing that down and worried that something was wrong with me. If something was wrong with me, that would be so much easier to solve. I could fix me. I couldn’t fix him.
The Night Before Everything Collapsed
When I stood in my bedroom on October 6th and said to the Universe: “I have a million little reasons to leave, but I know me. I need something big to get me out of here. Little did I know that the next day I would uncover the most unexpected thing that would move me to leave: He was a complete and utter fraud and he had been lying to me since the first moment we interacted. He was not a Navy SEAL. He was not a military veteran. He did not have cancer. Nothing he said was true. Nothing.
Why Tell My Story?
The reason I’m telling my story is because I know there are others who are exactly where I was. The trauma bond was real and the cognitive dissonance was stronger than any physical ropes could have ever been. It took me finding out about his fraud to move me, even though he had raged at me to the point I was crumbled on the floor, thrown things at me, not followed through on things he promised, the list goes on.
I’m not a weak woman. I don’t just lay down and take being mistreated. In each instance I told him in no uncertain terms that his behavior was not acceptable and that it needed to stop. What I didn’t know was that he was a predator and that abusive relationships weren’t 100% bad behavior all of the time. And I was trauma bonded to him because of the intermittent reinforcement of good times mixed with abuse. I also wanted to believe him when he said he loved me. I wanted to believe that he wanted to be a better person. I thought I could help him be a better person. It looked like his anger was reducing the more I stood up for myself. But the fact is that he just got better at covering it up. It was all a game for him. But he met his match in me. I figured out his con. After more than 20 years deceiving everyone he came across: friends, his kids, his first ex-wife, I blew the cover off his charade.
This Isn’t Your Permanent State
If you find yourself in a similar situation, I want you to know that you’re not crazy. The damage these predators inflict on others is real. I also want you to know that the tattered, confused, shell of a person you feel like is not your permanent state of being. The intrusive thoughts, the anger, the sadness and grief is not your permanent state of being. The financial difficulties you’re having because of him is not your permanent state of being. You can rise. You will rise. Life will be better. Life will be safe. Step by step you will plod through the muck and mess he created and on the other side you will be amazed by how far you’ve come, at your strength, and beauty. Your good nature, your loving kindness is still there and you will feel that again. It will be a better version of yourself. A wiser version of yourself. Stand in your power. Create your own support system of people who have gone through what you’ve been through. Reach out. It may not feel like it right this minute, but you’ve got this. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are good. You are a survivor. You deserve a life of peace and you will get there.