Healed my body, broke my heart

It’s been a while since I last visited these pages as things have been going well but tonight revealed a side of someone that wasn’t what I expected at all. Let me elaborate……

From my last post you may recall my car show narcissist who was always in my face and gave me the silent treatment when things didn’t go his way. Since my post last year, I have been working with a personal trainer to lose some weight and get healthy after years of inactivity. He became a trusted friend and during our working together I was able to work through the trauma of what the narc had done to me and healed enough that we are now able to visit at car shows and even have lunch together in a group. I am so glad to be through that difficult part of my life – it just ate too many years up.

My trainer and I become very close friends, too close, and as his time in this country was limited as he was only here on assignment while his wife had a postdoc scholarship, he started to promise me that we would always be close and he would stay in touch to see how I was doing by using FaceTime and regular texts.

Well, you’ve guessed it – he has moved away and the texts have become few and far between and when he started ignoring me I called him out on it. We had a very good discussion but I made myself heard in that I thought he had been inappropriate with me and got far too close for what a personal trainer should be to a client. He was shocked that I mentioned I could document this and expose him – he said he would be happy to still call me a friend and keep wishing me the best in my life – I think he tried to butter me up.

So even though we are on ‘good’ terms, if you want to call it that, he has made it clear that he has moved on and his priorities are with his family and parents now and he can’t give me the energy or time he once did. I get that – so why did he promise that in the first place? A widow’s heart is already broken – no need to add more injury to it.

I may sound like a jilted teenager but I’m angry at all the lies just to make me feel good before he left. I feel used, abused, and felt I was taken advantage of. He was the teacher and I was the student and in this era of the MeToo movement, it makes me want to scream from the rooftops to never allow this man near a vulnerable woman again. He says he tried to love me back to health, since I was still a lonely and broken widow, but he knew he was leaving so it was unfair to give me a sample of love thinking it would fix me and get rid of my grief.

So here I sit tonight, not sure what to do other than to plan to write a book or continue my blog just to get this all out. I won’t name names, not yet anyway, I want to see how this transpires once he gets more settled in his new environment.

Time to talk to the counsellor again. Don’t know if I should let it go or plan revenge and destroy his career. I could do either….

And soon it begins again…

Hi everyone, hope you have been well this past winter and stayed safe and warm.

Thought I would check in and give you an update on life with the narcissist; fortunately I have very little contact with him. He still continues to be confusing – friendly one day, cruel the next.

When I last checked in with you, car season was well underway and even though I had limited contact, he still managed to cross my path for the rest of the summer. We did exchange a few pleasantries at various shows, but mostly I ignored him wherever I could and gave up a lot of the classic car season in favour of different sports car clubs. Overall it was a good summer but I was far from healed. Every encounter with him carried the potential for pain and I got more than I wanted. He became so annoying and I wanted to have some space so I blocked him on my phone and let him know it via text before I hit the button to cut him off.

At the last big classic car meet of the summer I took my neighbour along as he has a classic and had never been to a show at our local A&W. We parked together and proceeded into the restaurant for a burger. Being crowded inside, we sat out at a table by the windows and the narc was inside at a table near there coincidentally (or maybe I might have planned that just a little bit..) My neighbour and I had a great visit – he’s married but doesn’t wear a ring – and the narc did not take his eyes off us the whole time. I had my dark sunglasses on so he couldn’t see I noticed but I could almost feel his glare without even looking in his direction.

We didn’t speak at all that night since I was busy introducing my neighbour to the regulars and it turned out to be a great evening. My TBird was giving me a bit of transmission trouble on the way home but I didn’t worry too much about it. The next day was our annual club highway cleanup and I didn’t want to miss it.

That next morning I made the cleanup but on the way to the restaurant for lunch afterwards, the TBird started to lurch and wouldn’t shift gears very well. When our meal was over I asked another club member to follow me on the way home to make sure I got there safely. Simple enough request. I glanced over at the narc and was shocked to see such hate in his eyes – genuine green-eyed jealousy hate.

He used to be my helper in times like this, but since his wife started tagging along years ago he wouldn’t help me anymore. Why he should hate me so now for asking another man perhaps means he still wants control over me even though he threw me away has me baffled, but I guess if he can’t have me, then no one else should.

The man I asked to help me didn’t follow me home – he turned off when he got near his house, leaving me about 15 miles from home with a malfunctioning car in heavy traffic. Thanks a lot.

I ended up pulling into a shopping centre and texted my son to meet me. While I waited, my phone rang once with the narc’s number and went right to voice mail so he knew he was still blocked. Silly me thought maybe he was just checking to see if I got home safe, but nope, he was just checking to see if he was still blocked. I texted back to see what he wanted and I got a snarky reply back that he was in the process of blocking people, including me, and he wouldn’t be talking to me again.

I was a bit hurt but only for a moment. Good riddance I thought.

As has happened every other year, when we have had a falling out, he missed the next two car meetings to avoid me. However in December he showed up with her at our Christmas gift exchange and we ended up chatting and actually having a few laughs. It was a bit tense but not as bad as I expected.

When he blocked me in the fall, I presumed he had removed my contact info from his phone because his birthday disappeared from my calendar – iPhones, and maybe others, put the birthdays of contacts automatically in the calendar – there is no way to get rid of them unless the contact is deleted.

A day after the Christmas gathering his birthday suddenly reappeared. The man who said he would never talk to me again apparently decided to reopen the connection. I am also the communications director for our car club so he was receiving no information from me. Whatever the reason, he decided to come back again – for the 10th time at least. I have lost count.

Since then I have only seen him twice at meetings and we have said very little to each other. Last week he left the room when the meeting was over and wouldn’t say hi, yet I am still in his phone if my calendar is correct. I had sent out a few emails to the club earlier in the month with photos of a car display I had been to and photos of a man he is jealous of were in there as his car won an award. That was enough to start up the silent treatment again and now he won’t acknowledge any club communication.

Part of me is looking forward to getting the TBird out again for the summer but a bigger part of me is not excited at all, knowing the narc will be in my face again for some of the shows I want to attend with my friends. How I wish he would go away for good.

I will see how this plays out again as I plan to stay away as much as I can, but it spoils the car season and I can’t just relax. There are only so many car groups in town so I can’t avoid him totally. Fingers crossed I can keep away and avoid the ever-present bombs and arrows he sends my way.

Stay safe and well, thanks for reading.

Liz

Time to write again

Where did the last two years go? I haven’t written much during the pandemic but I believe we all got lost in the fog these past few years. Now that the world is hopefully getting back to normal, it’s time to write again.

I wanted to fully explore my relationship with the narcissist in my life and hopefully offer some insight as well as get some ideas from others.

This summer I decided to reduce contact as best as I could taking into account the times my path crosses his due to common social connections. I let him know he won’t be seeing me much and that seems to have brought out the ugly side of him. More criticism when he’s not giving me the silent treatment and just general unpleasantness. I don’t know if he’s angry that he’s losing control or that he’s been defeated by me, but there has been a definite shift in his behaviour.

Now that I am focusing more on myself, I will make more time to add posts and share my journey, and hopefully I will be able to report he is gone for good.

Thanks for reading, stay well.

Liz

I have been trying to do the impossible

Since my ill-fated romance with the narcissist ended three years ago (has it been that long?), I have read so many books on narcissism, breakups, recovery – I have gobbled them up while drinking far too many cups of coffee but still not found a solution or even a few nuggets of wisdom to help me move past this.

He is always around me so no contact doesn’t work. We belong to the same antique car club, so there are monthly meetings, then in the summer, shows and cruises two, or sometimes three times a week. He is really in my face then.

No one is aware who he really is. In person at the events, he is charming, folksy, laughing etc., but via email or text to me, the evil comes out, which is why he deceives everyone. He has been called a ‘gentle soul’ (barf), and a nice guy etc etc. They don’t see the other side of him once he is out of the public eye.

I have been forced to stay in email and text contact with him because as the president of this club, I regularly send out information to the members, to which sometimes I need a reply. I have to keep his contact info on my phone so blocking is not an option.

I wonder sometimes why I still hurt so much, but all this constant interaction is making me nuts. At shows he will bring his lawn chair and sit with me, even when his wife is near. Sometimes he will purposely sit with her and ignore me. On it goes.

I really don’t know what to do about this.

Thanks for reading. Peace

#narcissist #narcissisticabuse #betrayal #movingforward #widow #revenge #recovery #mentalhealth

You can’t talk to a narcissist

The other day I wrote about how I kicked my narcissistic ex-lover to the curb. Today I felt a tiny bit bad (silly me) and reached out. Because I am the president of our social club, I didn’t want to use my power so to speak to keep him from coming to club meetings or events. As much as I didn’t want to see him, I knew it was an abuse of my position to keep him from coming to such things, so I wrote a short email saying I can’t keep him from coming so if he does, I will keep my distance.

Here’s what he wrote back:

Don’t flatter yourself, you dont keep me from doing anything. I do what I want, when I want, always have, always will.
For God’s sake pull yourself together, if for no other reason than for your son’s sake. You’re all he’s got, he needs you to be stable and rational.
Stop playing this poor victim card all the time. Nobody has done you any harm, quite the opposite. Think about me teaching you driving, think about seeing your home town. You had a great fling at a point in your life when the chances of that happening were slim to none.
Give it a rest.

Sorry for the big font, I didn’t know how to shrink it.

See how he is calling my mental stability into question, and insulting my ability to find a love at my age. Ouch. I fired right back at him again to put him in his place, but you can see how a narcissist will call your sanity into question and make you wonder if indeed you are becoming unhinged.

He used and abused me and he is calling me unstable. He should look in the mirror.

So it appears what friendship we had is over, but it’s about time. He brought nothing to the table as the business types say – all he did was ignore and then hoover, be cruel then kind. I wanted off the roller coaster and it appears that I might finally be.

Thanks for reading. Peace.

#widow #metoo #abuse #narcissist #betrayal #recovery

I kicked him to the curb today

I haven’t written for a while but wanted to get back to it again.

I was going to tell you the story of how we first got involved but after I wrote the first few blogs of how our feelings started to develop, I found I just couldn’t relive those days anymore.

Today I had enough of his hot / cold, silent treatment / hoovering, kindness / rudeness – you get the picture. I laid it out on the line for him today and accused him of taking advantage of me when I was grieving my husband, and his stories about leaving his wife were just lies – I let it rip, in a polite way because I am president of the social club we belong to, but I told him I don’t want to hear from him anymore and I need time and space to move forward.

He read my text – I wish I was a fly on the wall, but then I blocked him and I am done.

I had such a headache today, but then I fell asleep in my chair after supper and I feel better now. I think I may finally have a good sleep tonight.

I am done with the narcissist dance. Will he come back down the road? I will be seeing him a lot at events – weekly in the summer – and I’m not looking forward to that but I will do my best. He has come back each time I have told him what I thought and I wondered why. He is older than me so he is either a narc needing my supply or maybe just getting senile and he doesn’t remember what I said to him.

He is gone for now and maybe I can finally heal. I will write more about how we got involved when the pain of this subsides a bit more. In the meantime I will write about my progress and all the things he did to me along the way so hopefully if you are going through this, you will find some tips to help you get out before it consumes you like it did me.

Thanks for reading. I wish you peace.

The long winter got a little shorter….

Once my classic car had been put in storage for the long winter, my small hatchback became my daily driver.  I loved that little car and still do.

At one of our first car shows together, I had admired the lovely wooden storage box Ian had in his trunk – compartmentalized for cans of cleaner, bottles of oil, and a space for rags and other miscellaneous items.   I didn’t need anything in my classic car at the time because I was still learning to drive and didn’t go to any out of town shows where I would need cleaning supplies, but my little hatchback was a bit of a mess.  The hatch was always littered with rags, jumper cables, cleaners – all kinds of detritus.  

I had mentioned to him that I could use something like that in my hatch, so I was very happy when he suggested that he could make a similar one that was custom fit to my car.   About a month later he invited me over to his house so he could do some measurements and I got to pick out what kind of wood I wanted from the various pieces he had in his shop.

We kept in touch as he worked on it, and in the late fall it was ready and I loved it.  Beautiful light golden wood trimmed with cherry; dovetail joints, gleaming hardware, and a special tray that slid back and forth, revealing the contents in the bottom of the box while holding smaller items above.  It was gorgeous.

At each subsequent monthly car club meeting at the local legion, he would often help me carry things out to the car and admire his handiwork each time I opened the hatch.   I always pointed out the box to other people I knew whenever I had the opportunity as I was so tickled with it and that he had made something special just for me.   

I was starting to become even more attracted to him as the winter progressed even though I knew I shouldn’t, but I could tell he was starting to feel the same way.

I looked forward to each monthly meeting and it wasn’t too long before spring arrived and it was time to take the cars out again.  That was when our friendship started to grow a little closer…..

His name is Ian

His name is Ian. I use the term ‘is’ and not ‘was’ because he is still very much a part of my life as we both belong to the same classic car group and that is how I met him.

I still remember the first time I saw him. A few years older than me, balding on top, quiet and a bit shy. He was sitting by himself in our meeting room and before the proceedings started, I went over to say hello and to make him feel welcome, as I had been a member for a few years already and I liked to make new people feel comfortable and part of the group. We chit chatted for a bit and I thought what a nice man he was. I then saw the wedding ring and felt bad, for after three long years without even a coffee date, I was lonely, and I thought he might be a potential date.

We became friends as we attended many car shows with the club and his wife had zero interest in the hobby. For the first summer I knew him, he was kind and friendly, and would compliment me each time he saw me pull in to a show, as I was a very nervous driver and had just started to learn how to maneuver my late father’s large classic car around the busy city streets. I was terrified of the highway though, as my husband had always driven the fast roads and I had no highway experience at all.

Occasionally we would sit together at shows and I would show him the paper map I kept in the car, all the new roads I had travelled were highlighted in yellow. He took an interest in my progress and each week I looked forward to showing him the latest additions on the map.

I was happy to have someone care about me, even if it was just driving to a show, and I felt comfortable sharing my achievements and also my fears with him.

When the summer car season ended I was crushed, for I knew I would only see him once a month at the meetings. He is a hobby woodworker, so I devised a plan to fit in a few extra visits with him during the lonely winter months and he was happy to oblige…..

It wasn’t supposed to be like this…

So how did I get here?

I was married for just over 34 years to a wonderful man I met in university. He was a workaholic though, even through his schooling – many a night we couldn’t go out on a date because he wanted to stay home and type up all of his class notes from the day.

I suppose it was this craving for attention that got me into my mess later on down the road.

He was tall, athletic, never smoked, never drank and yet cancer claimed him at the age of 56. Sometimes life makes no sense at all.

I fell down into the pit of grief after I lost him and through the encouragement of my son, I started to attend a few sports car shows just to get out of the house. I tagged along to some the first summer, then a few more the following year, but only as a spectator, as I couldn’t drive due to a bad accident years earlier and I was too scared to get behind the wheel. But by 2015 I decided it was enough and I started to learn to drive again very slowly with the help of a friend. And that’s where I met him….

A grieving heart does strange things…

Looking for the light…

It’s been a long road since I lost my husband just over six years ago to a sudden and totally unexpected illness.

My journey through grief has been slow and steady and I have been making good progress in creating a new life while honouring the past I had with him.

What I didn’t expect was to be totally blindsided by a man I knew from a classic car club I had joined recently.

He started out as a friend – kind, encouraging, cheering me on as I learned to make my way without my husband.

Then a twist – he took advantage of my lonely grieving heart and suggested he become my lover. Nice idea, but he was married even though his marriage was almost dead.

That was three years ago and the pain is just a fresh now, as this man is still a part of my social group.

The road has been rocky – worse than the grief I went through when my husband died. This saga is seemingly never-ending.

Come along with me as I sort through the emotional wreckage, lies, deceit, and confusion as I once again start over.