Many think I’m crazy. You play the game to position me as such. But I know better. I’m as sane as they come. Sure, I may miss the mark sometimes which makes my “accusations” sound crazy, but most of the time the craziest part is that I’m spot on, and you know it. And it scares the Bejesus out of you. You think you hide it so well, until I reveal something I have caught you in, or something I know, or suspect. And then you play the game right back to me, making it all seem like one huge scary coincidence.
I don’t put it past you to have a watchful eye in the sky. Or an always listening ear somewhere near. George Orwell I always have given accolades to as a genius long before his time.
Making nice right now. Holding on until the foundation breaks. Until I see my out. Until I feel secure to go it alone. Until everything is in it’s place. Until then, you go ahead and keep sucking up to those who made me not see through you all these years. The reason you changed your tune and flipped a 180°, because you saw green. As soon as you heard we were back in, cha-ching, I’m of value to you, and you want to play again and think that maybe, just maybe you can tow the line and hang on till their end. Heck, it can’t be too much longer now, can it? Surprise, surprise, I’ll be long gone before they will and so will their money, and you won’t be getting any of it just like the original deal was. Takes one to know one, and maybe he did have something right after all. Maybe he did really see you for what you were from the get go. Maybe that was one of the few things I should have listened to him about all those years ago…Cluster B’s are a cluster. I’m sure you’ll slip soon enough to make it unbearable enough where it will be easy and the right time. Until then…Hanging by a watchful moment here with you.
Earning my doctorate degree in acting. Hanging on and playing my role until I can get myself in the position I need to feel comfortable with my exit strategy. I’m sure I’m suspected. I’m sure all of the current road blocks we’re strategically planted. I’m sure it’s all a ruse just to delay my intentions, to make it harder, to make me second guess myself, to keep me roped in. News flash. Nothing will work. It might stall, it may derail temporarily, but when my mind is made up, nothing will shake me from my course. It may take me longer to get there. And that is why it sometimes takes me longer to make my mind up with larger life decisions, because once I do decide, I don’t turn back. I see it all, plain as day. There is no pulling the wool over my eyes any longer. Even if I occasionally falsely accuse, I live no longer in naivete. I call your shots before you make them. I predict your moves before you make them. You read like a faithful old book that I’ve read a thousand times. One day I will step in to my new life. I’m on the path. My eyes see through the veil to the other side. I can see all obstacles in my way, but I can still see the other side. Because my eyes are real.
Right now I’m in no hurry to fold. The longer I can sit at the table, the longer I have to set my affairs in order. I know how to read every face that’s made. I can see right through the shades meant to hide his lyin’ eyes. He’s trying to call my bluff, but he should know by now that I never bluff when I play cards. But I’m finally calling his. Right now I’m slowly walking away, but when I am fully ready, I will be running full speed ahead. I have my particular timeline in mind. Some days are much harder than others to keep a poker face. No matter, should I need to go all in, I am prepared if need be. But I hope to draw out the game to suit my benefit a wee bit longer. Until not only will he be all out of aces, but then all will be in my hand.
He might have saved himself by the bell that rang 3 hours earlier than my proclaimed deadline. Thus, my last post was written a bit prematurely. But it gives me more time to plan and get my proverbial sh!t together which will only put me in a better place anyway in the long run. The only way I want to leave on the emergency plan is if I’m backed in to a corner. Because I will leave on my terms, with my dignity in tact. I am finally standing up for myself, and as shallow as it might sound, I will not let him believe that he is leaving me under any circumstances. I need to do this for my own assertiveness building tool kit. I need him to know that I’m the one calling the shots and that I have the upper hand for the first time in this relationship.
It’s amazing to me that now that I have turned the tables and am basically pulling a him on him, that he doesn’t even know how to handle it. He seems pretty certain that I’m cheating on him. He thinks it’s ok for him to stay out all hours of the night and for the first time I’m not questioning him or wondering or worried about where he is. And now when I stay out with no checking in and things don’t seem to add up in his mind, I get the third degree when I come home. It’s hilarious to me that all the years he gave me reasons to be suspicious and I would act paranoid, he’d act as though not trusting him was an act of crazy making on my part. And here we are on the flip side and who is crazy making now? Him. When I have been 100% innocent in all that I do. Sure, some of the things that I am doing right now do seem out of the ordinary for me because I flipped a switch and some of them might sound a bit off, like the fact that a music groupI started subbing for is called “Hotel Paradise Orchestra”. But I swear, I couldn’t make this crap up if I tried. But this all gives him rise to be on alert that I am cheating and to be amping up the mindgames. And just because I am playing along, doesn’t mean my resolve has weakened.
I might be worried about the process of how everything will shake out, but I have never felt stronger and never been more excited or felt more ready to feel free. I can’t wait to get to the other side. They always say that you will keep repeating the same pattern until you learn your lesson and until you finally break the pathology. And this pathology that I have lived for 40 years will finally be broken for good. I can say with complete authority that I will never end up in a situation like this ever again. I can see this a mile away now. I am on to these people. I am strong enough now to stand up for myself. I won’t let anyone bring me down ever again.
I might always be an empath, but I have this neat little switch inside of me. And when I see with complete clarity someone or some situation for what it truly is in its full gory, painful details, I’m completely done and just don’t feel the good stuff anymore. And I don’t feel the hurt anymore. Annoyed, irritated, stung, empty maybe, but no more tears, no more knots in the pit of my stomach, no more love, no more longing, no more desire.
I look younger and thinner and more beautiful than I have in years. He thinks I strut around the house looking good and knowing I look good for the first time, probably in our whole relationship, because he always made me feel bad about myself and made me feel not good enough. For the first time, I found the confidence from inside myself and haven’t looked to anyone else for the validation. Probably all the more reason for him to think I’m cheating as well. Oh well, guess he should have appreciated what he had while he had it. Guess he should have made me feel loved and made me feel beautiful. Guess he should have made me feel like I was more important than all the other stuff he puts above me in his life. But he couldn’t, can’t and won’t. Because he’s a sociopath. And that will never change. It can never change. And that has nothing to do with me. I am worthy of so much more.
I guess there is no more mystery as to when it will happen. He thinks he’s calling the shots by not coming home tonight, but he’s got another thing coming when I tell him the next time I see his face today that I want a divorce. If he thinks this is a scare tactic, or that he is leaving me with this maneuver, he is sorely mistaken. The only reason I have even hung on for this long is because I have been trying to buy myself some extra time to get things together to make a smoother transition for all of us involved on my side of it. But I guess he is going to make that an impossibility. Because that’s what sociopaths do.
And I’m already anticipating all of his moves in the aftermath of this. And since I figured out that he is a sociopath, I have been able to predict with scary accuracy his every move. I see every gaslight, every headgame and how they will play out in the end. I know if I respond to his moves a certain way exactly what his counteract will be. I have had 40 years in training with a Narcissistic Personality Disordered Adoptive Father to be wise to this. My Cluster B husband underestimates my intelligence and grossly overestimates his own. I think he must be a Narcopath since he thinks he is much slicker than he is.
I have allowed him to think he hasn’t been caught in a good majority of things. He has NO clue the amount of things I know. I let him know some of the things I know, so he knows I’m on to him and that I’m not completely ignorant. But I hate confrontation. Always have. And I just don’t have it in me to fight over every single little thing he does. And God knows it’s a daily thing. And I shouldn’t have to. Not when he always tries to turn everything on me anyway which only plays on my self esteem. It’s just not worth it anymore.
Today is the day my life starts to begin again. One of the scariest yet most liberating days all at the same time. For anyone reading this, please keep me in your thoughts today. I will need all the good mojo I can get. I know it will be better when I’m on the other side, but it will be a tough ride for a while. And I’m scared for my 11 year old….
You’ll be finding this out in the near future. The plans have been made and the facilitation is being finalized. I am reclaiming my life. I have learned to love myself. Even when those who were supposed to didn’t. I am worthy. I am good enough. I deserve better…
No. Wrong. Maybe that is the amount that understand you from your warped point of view. I probably used to be included in that number. That was when I played IN to your game rather than PLAYING your game. Now, I am actually THE only person who truly understands you. But you’ll never see that. Because I see you better than you see yourself. You’re so deep in to lying to the world that you also lie to yourself. I do have a natural gift for seeing through people’s layers of bullshit and seeing through to the core of what they’re trying to hide. It’s as if I have x-ray psyche vision.
I’ve said it for so many years now. The hypochrisy has been reaching the levels of what I grew up around. You KNEW how much I hated that. And you condemn him for that character traits too and still. And yet. And yet. Here you are doing it too. How do you not see this? How do you not see that the same things you yell at and about your daughters for, you do. How can I sit here and try to create good habits in them when you are setting a bad example ALL over the place?
For all your bravado, and all your talk of defending my honor, I sit here and can only come up with one time that you did so where it was not motivated by some other self serving motive. And that was the time you called and reemed out the clarinet repair man who had my clarinets for over a month and I was at his house trying to catch them at home to pick my clarinets up and they weren’t home. And even then, there still could have been the outside motivation of being worried that you might have to buy me a new set of clarinets. The time you told my mom off to tell my dad off the night of my bridal shower it was because of the things he had also said about you and because at that point you may have thought you had nothing to lose because I had been told I was being cut out of their will if I married you. It hurts like hell that you still haven’t gone next door and had the conversation you swore you would have in defense of me. Even having an AR 15 rifle pointed at me (granted it was by a cop), as I innocently walked my students out one morning thanks to the next door neighbors isn’t enough to motivate you to action over words.
All of the questions, all of the oddities that weren’t adding up, all of the confusion, all of the anger, all of the emptiness….it is all starting to synchronize. I can’t believe I missed it all this time.
To be loved unconditionally. To have someone defend me. To be wanted. Apparently these are all too tall of an order for pretty much all of the biggest key players in my life. When I finally have all of those things in place within myself, look out world, because I will be a completely indestructible force that no one can wreckon with.
In the same manner that people with Cluster B personality disorders feign emotions, I have had to mimic their manipulative masterminds. It has become a matter of my mental and physical survival in what has become the cold and harsh world of this empath.
I was raised by an adoptive father who has full blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder and an adoptive mother who was raised by a mother who had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who then raised me with narcissistic parenting as well. She became the Flying Monkey of my Narcissistic father who treated me as his Emotional Partner because he didn’t have anything in common with my mother. So he smothered me and took over my life. My activities became his activities. Many of my friends saw this as a parent who loved his child and was just involved and were envious if they had parents who were absent from their lives. But my dad took it to a completely different extreme. Every. Single. Activity. I did, he was overly involved in. He was a co-leader of my girl scout troop. He was the Band Parents President of my band. He made a point of getting in close to MY friends, to make sure that my friends even sided with him whenever I was upset about something like teenagers get. I couldn’t even have friends who were on my side. It has a name. Emotional Incest. I was my dad’s surrogate wife.
My dad would do inappropriate things too. He was struggling with his sexual identity at the time (still does). At the time no one knew he was gay yet. We hadn’t caught him yet. But I had my suspicions, I just hadn’t told my mom yet. He found it funny to ooze out his gayness in other ways like sending postcards of naked men or men in bikini’s to other men (friends of his) anonymously and would send them from different states when he’d travel to try and throw them off so they wouldn’t know it was him. He told my friends about his little scheme. One of my friends who was laughing about it and placating him, my dad decided to do that to. He warned him about it, that he was going to do it and said it in a joking manner, but then he did it. A freshman or sophmore boy in high school receiving a postcard addressed to him in the mail of a guy in a bikini….awesome!!!! I am so lucky that friend and his parents had a decent sense of humor. That could have gone really bad.
It would make sense that I while still under the thumb of my dad, that I would be easily wooed by someone who on the outside seemed to vastly different from my dad, yet somehow apparently something deep inside of me knew something felt like home to me.
After meeting my birthdad, I also found out that my husband is much like him as well. In looks, mannerisms, the loner status, the background in how things went with the ex-wives, the rock music and rock musician potential (one having led more of the real lifestyle and one lacking the opportunity to but having the innate ability for it), both who ooze the brooding pessimism, etc….So even without having met this man, there was something encoded within me to have chosen these traits when choosing a mate.
It is said that we keep having situations attracted to us until we resolve them. And obviously this is a prime example for me. It is even more true to have been said for girls marrying their dads and boys marrying their moms, the Oedipus Complex. Apparently, I have fallen right in to that trap.
Yesterday I met with a friend who explores spirituality and psychology and philosophy much in a similar fashion to the way that I do. As we were discussing my present state of mind and how to become unstuck from my sick cycle of a carousel, she spoke of my need to forgive myself. She felt I needed to stop my self loathing and needed to forgive myself. I struggle with this concept because many of my hang ups were created from my childhood, when I was innocent and didn’t do anything to deserve the manipulation that was done to my mind which has become the voice which continues to play in my head on constant repeat. When she asked me to name one of the things that I struggle with that started when I was young and still continues, I named that I never feel smart enough. It turned into quite a visceral reaction (another thing I struggle with that I medicate in order to temper because that is something many people can’t handle about me, and it does become too exhausting for me as well). Feeling smart enough is a hard thing to feel confident about when I still have my dad letting me know (just a week and a half ago) that he doesn’t think so (even though I know he does), and my husband making comments that make me feel dumb from time to time. I have constant reminders when I might not be street smart enough or have an airheaded moment. They are always pointed out to me and I am made fun of for those moments.
I am starting to come to a conclusion that I am caught in another cluster cycle. One of a different strain this time, however. The headgames have just become what I do with some people in my life. I had to become good at them in order to mentally survive my childhood. Ignorance isn’t bliss in my world. With my intelligence constantly being challenged, I don’t like to feel as if the wool is being pulled over my eyes. I don’t like people thinking they can outsmart me and have control over me. I have tried to take the high road with these people, and when I have they only find some other way in the heat of the moment to take advantage of the fact that I am an empath and I don’t think fast on my feet and fear confrontation. And so I end up “losing” most fights. And so I have ended up playing their games back to them. Subtly letting them know in their own language that I am on to them and everything they try to hide from me and every way they try to get in my head. I let them know I am two steps ahead of them always. I never let on exactly how much I know but I always let them know in some way enough that they know the jig is up, and I watch them do a 180 and change their tactics.
Some people probably wonder if I do all of this manipulating and headgames, then doesn’t that make me a cluster b also? If you ask any of my nornal friends, they would all tell you that I don’t play any of those head games with them. I only do it with those who start them with me for survival purposes. One of these days this wolf will shed her sheep’s clothing and show that she really is the dominant wolf and she won’t be afraid of the vicious wolves any longer. For she has no need to scare with fear and gnarled teeth. She will lead with confidence and boundaries.
There is a question out there that asks, “Have you ever been so mad that you are calm?” I could also substitute the word mad for hurt. There have been a couple of times in my life that I have gotten to this point. And when I have, I have numbed out. I have flipped my Humanity Switch. The most significant time in my life that I did this I had done it for a span of about 4 years. It was after I got out a a relationship with an abusive ex boyfriend who was probably an NPD, and had just figured out about my dad being gay and confronting him about it. It was during this period of time that I ended up falling prey to my current situation. It seemed so opposite of everything I had known but subconsciously I must have known deep inside it was a return to home base, to the familiar.
One day at a time 