Today I am thankful for internet wisdom.
This morning, I read about "the detective rule" from the website psychopathfree[.]com.
To quote,
"The idea is simple: if you find yourself playing detective with someone, you remove them from your life immediately."
I sure wish I had that nugget of wisdom 23 years ago. I could have saved myself a ton of heartache. "The idea is simple: if you find yourself playing detective with someone, you remove them from your life immediately."
I am still playing detective with my ex-husband. I need to figure out how his family knows where to find me. I need to know why they are doing this. I need to know Michael's part in it. I want to know that it is done. I don't think they are. I think they are going to do this so long as the children live with me. I have another eight years to go.
I gave up playing detective with the missing money.
Now, I just want to feel safe.
Now, I just want to feel safe.
I know Steve lied to me a lot.
That's not really a problem. I mean, he tried to create little love triangles with non-existent women pursuing him. He once said the lady at the local convenience store was interested in him. We went in their together and she didn't even notice him.
That was contrived.
I knew it was.
It was easy to tell that those stories were bids for attention. That didn't bother me. His abusive emails, texts, Facebook posts and telephone messages bothered me. Steve attacking my friends online bothered me. Steve's reading negative intent into my positive posts bothered me. Really? Who gets "she's leaving me" from a sunshiny post that reads "have a good day??!!"
Steve would run to Facebook and lie about me in order to get attention from other women. On a couple of occasions some of my friends would get on me for being mean to him. He'd claim that I made him feel like a bad boyfriend because I hired a therapist to deal with a rape trauma from my youth. He just would only write that I made him feel bad. He never told anyone what was really going on. If I told him how it made me feel....he'd chastise me because no one can make a healthy person feel anything. Yet, in the next breath he'd claim that I made him feel bad.
Those are the little things that make women run for the hills.
Only one friend never got the memo.....only one didn't understand that Steve was insecure. I had to block him and cut ties. I knew him for several years. We fought side by side. He was always defending Steve's behavior. I caught him quoting Steve. That's okay....some people are too stupid to know when they're being played as a chump card.
I realized that Steve lied about me to force me to come back to him. I'd break up with him. He'd start lying. I would come back just to stop the slander. He was slick until the end. He always made it sound like a misunderstanding. In the end, it was my fault. I wasn't "committed enough" to the relationship to endure his abuse.
I had no choice but to walk away.
He wrote that he apologized to me "in every possible way." He NEVER apologized.
I think I left him when he said that I "never lifted a finger to help him, not even one." I drove him around. He never paid for gas. I'm the only one who bought gifts for the other person because he always broke up with me before holidays and birthdays. I swept his floors. I don't know what the heck he is talking about but I think he was taking me for granted. I can't be with someone like that.
The lies were not so bad. Steve's lies haven't cost me money. They haven't ruined my career. No one who knows me believes his bullshit.
In fact, my friends had been trying to get me to dump him for months. He would get drunk and attack them on their Facebook walls. It was hard taking him to political events because my friends would hover over me like they were trying to protect me.
Steve's behavior is just a shock to my system. He is the last person I expected of psychopathy. He kept calling me a sociopath. He told me that he worked for the CIA and stalked psychopaths. He doesn't have a degree in psychology. Why would he drop that term so much?
Ah ha!! He must have been accused of it at some point.
I had to ask my ex-husband to stop stalking Steve's Facebook page. I don't want to know the bullshit he writes about. That's why his emails go into an archived folder. That's why he's blocked on my cell phone and work phone. A smart man who wanted me back could have sent flowers within days of acting like an idiot. He didn't. I waited one week to block him. The emails he sent within that time frame were abusive. My daughter saw them first. She brought my laptop to her dad. He is the one that confronted me about Steve's abuse.
Steve continued to lie about me online. I have no room for that in my life.
My friends were getting tired of seeing it. They want to know what he is going on about. All I tell them is that he changed his Facebook status to "in a domestic partnership." He wasn't living with me. I broke up with him. They tend to agree that I did the right thing. That typically is all they need to know to get the message. I'm glad that I don't have to say much about it.
They don't know what really happened. That did happen. That happened three weeks before I left him for good. I honestly thought he let another woman move in with him, so I broke up.
There was little need to play detective in that relationship. Everything was overt. It was getting kinda creepy.
******
I want to know how I attract takers into my life.
*****
I think I just attracted another drug abuser into my life. I'm treading carefully. I'm going to stay mum on who the person is or what I can do.
In conversations with that person, who claims to be homeless, I get the sense there is a drug addiction. I spent four hours on the phone with this person Monday and hung up in the wee hours of the morning. I got four hours of sleep because I had to be at the polls very early Tuesday morning.
I can't constantly be there for people who are not there for themselves. I cannot enable people. I did ask this person to contact third parties for help. That person is calling me constantly. I am going to make them wait a couple of days.
I can't make another person's lifestyle changes for him or her.
We have to take responsibility for ourselves.
That's the thing.
True love involves taking care of ourselves and freeing up our partners to take care of themselves. That way we can be the healthiest people we can be in our relationship. That will enable each party to grow and thrive.
*****
I am a little angry.
I wanted my house cleaned up by now.
I wanted the boxes gone.
I wanted some kind of clarity in my situation.
You may or may not know that I am a trained social worker (not licensed....just trained at a county level job). I hated the job but I can do it. My original training involved social work. I didn't last six months in that job. First, I was hounded by my in-laws at work. I worked as a social worker checking in on new mothers who had post-partum depression. My boss drove me nuts because she wanted me to report the families who had dirty dishes in the sink. Mike drove me nuts because he expected to accompany me to the women's homes while sitting out in the car waiting for me. That was creepy. It annoyed the heck out of me.
I left and did an internship with the DA's office. I was a victim's advocate. Most of my job entailed finding the families of illegal immigrants who died during the commission of a crime or in car accidents. They often do not have identification with them. It is a daunting process. I thought my working in law enforcement would keep my in-laws at bay. That didn't stop the phone harassment. One of Mike's friends had a case with the DA and he would call me constantly to try to talk to me about the case. His aim was to get it thrown out.
Do you know what he did? He murdered his 18 month old daughter. I remember the day she was born vividly. Her birthday was three days and twenty eight years after mine. Her death was the first Monday in May 1999. He called me that day at 4:05 p.m. just to say that he dropped his child off at daycare. She was found dead twenty minutes later. He never spoke to me. In all the years I knew him, this was the first time he spoke to me directly. It was like he left a time stamp.
To this day, I fear the DA will call me in as a witness in the case. The DA knows about that phone call. This man knows this. He has never been indicted. The DA is looking for hard proof. This bastard had the unmitigated gall to blame his eight year old son for roughhousing with his sister. I wrote an article demanding that the newspapers retract that statement. They published my letter and never repeated that abusive statement again. I was livid!! I pray that young man never finds it during an ego-search. Only a monster says something like that in public!
I believe this man dropped his daughter off dead and called me to time stamp their arrival. I hope he goes to jail someday.
This man also had numerous citations for beating up his wife. She wound up leaving him. The judge awarded him custody of their two living children.
His mother told him that if he could trick me into talking to him about the case, the DA would throw it out. The only response I had was that the questions he had needed to be addressed by his legal counsel. I couldn't talk to him about the case. When the DA asked me to look through the contents of this guy's folder, I had to explain what was going on and to recuse myself from the entire issue.
My real name is incredibly common phonetically. I want to know.........how this man knew I worked for the DA. How did he know that I was Mike's wife? I never told anyone where I worked outside of Michael.
I bet it was Michael.
When I wasn't fired over my failure to deal with this case, Michael started yelling at me when my boss would call the house. I was let go for being a victim of domestic violence. One cannot be a victim's advocate when one is enduring stalking and emotional abuse.
I decided, at that point, to return to school for my doctorate in psychology. The stalking and harassment followed me on campus. I wound up taking distance learning courses (to avoid the stalking) and leaving with just my master's degree. By the time I left, my sister-in-law had a reputation for harassing my academic advisors and the spiritual leaders of the Jesuit school I attended. She allegedly told them that I was a "bad wife for going to school." She wasn't shy about sharing her identity. Everyone knew she was my tall, incredibly obese, sister-in-law.
Two of my professors confronted me. One of the most vocal professors now lives across the street from me. She refuses to speak to me until Michael moves out of the house. She hates him. She and a male professor in Boulder used to chastise me for allowing myself to be a victim of domestic violence and told to leave my husband before finishing my doctorate.
It doesn't look good to allow these things to go on. It makes me look co-dependent.
Truth be told, there is little help for people being emotionally and financially abused. If he hits me, I can get help.
There was a Christmas morning in 2009 when the cops witnessed him blocking my path to my car. One of them pleaded with me to admit to what was going on. Apparently, it is a crime to impede another person's attempt to enter their own property. I couldn't do that to my kids. I couldn't let them see their dad hauled off to jail. It was Christmas!
Sigh......
*****
A darling ten year old boy in the neighborhood was just sent into foster care. I could have done it if the stalking were resolved. I could have done it if my ex-husband would have moved out of the house. I would have had a spare bedroom. I would have had a clean house devoid of dusty boxes. I would have had the peace and quiet that could help the young man.
He could have stayed in the same school. He could have stayed with his friends. He could have kept some familiarity in his life.
I could have taken a refresher foster parent course with the county.
Damn it!
I need the truth!
I'm tired of my life being on hold due to my obnoxious former in-laws.
Something is going to have to give.
I'll let you know when I get the bug sweeper. I'll let you know what I find.
Love ya,
S.
Edit: I contacted my network and found two organizations willing to help my homeless friend get housing, psychological help, medical help, get back into college, and find work. It's up to this person to call them and work things out. We have let other people take ownership of their issues. It will help their motivation level. It will also give them a sense of pride and accomplishment once they start making steps towards their own recovery.
Good things happen when we step out of denial.
I can't help people who refuse to be honest. If someone gets hurt when you mention concern about their drinking, how can you speak to your discomfort? I tried with Steve. He is in denial.
Speaking of denial, I know that I have been emotionally abused in both relationships. Michael admits to it freely but doesn't get help. Steve says that I am lying about everything. He claims that Michael never hit the walls, interfered with my career, or yelled at me. He also claims that I never divorced Michael.
I'm sure a quick check of county records could clear up his misunderstanding. He didn't want me enough to do that. Heck...I carried my divorce decree, separation agreement and numerous other legal documents in my car! All he had to do is ask.
Asking must not be as much fun as emotionally abusing someone and running to Facebook to share those accusations with my friends....the ones he friended after meeting them.
I had a recovering alcoholic friend say that cutting him off showed that I was not his friend. What do you do? If someone gets upset when you say you are concerned about their drinking and starts to abuse you, are you supposed to sit around and enable them?
He was damaging his appliances!! There was a hole in his bedroom door!
He kept claiming that I did the things he was doing. When he claimed I was abusing his daughter....I refused to see him again....for her sake. If she thinks my driving is scary. If he thinks my driving her around is abuse. I need to stay away for her benefit.
The bizarre thing is that he wanted me to stop posting about domestic violence. I now have two friends who escaped physical abusers in the past two months. A man I knew murdered his girlfriend before shooting himself. I wanted those posts to make a difference. I wasn't going to take them down!
Steve demanded that I go to Facebook and apologize. He wanted the world to know he was a great guy. He claimed I was bad communicator.
His daughter....within a few days....went to Facebook to apologize "to the world" for being a "bad communicator.
I don't think I was the one abusing her.
I miss her.
I have to stay away.
******
I do think writing about it is helping me see the pattern. I am too caring. I care too much. This is why I attract people who try to take advantage of me.
I will never allow myself to be put in that situation again.