2ndtimeftw's story

A Monster is At Work

Hearing about this site was a godsend because I didn't know how narcs operated and was caught unawares by the lying, cheating and manipulative push and pull of the narc. I was made to feel small and crazy or the queen of the universe, depending on the whims of this guy's moods.

I am so happy to say that I walked away right after the new year and will be in my third month out of that toxic, horrible relationship. However, I cannot report that I am narc-free because he still attempts to contact me and I still hear from his wife (who he had left and completely demonized and vilified to me but has since returned to).

I was so generous and good to him and loved him more than I'd ever loved another man. He filled every need that was missing in my marriage, or so I thought. At least for the first few months of being together. After he completed his conquest --talking me into leaving my husband with a sustained, amazingly romantic and effective campaign -- he began to show his true colors. He began sleeping with his wife again (I know this sounds weird), all the while telling me divorce was imminent. He told her that I was nothing to him and he was considering moving back home.

After she and I both discovered this betrayal, he committed to me and told her I was the love of his life. I gave him another chance. But after another few months, I noticed the same familiar change in his demeanor and started feeling sick in my gut again. He said he wanted to take me on a romantic trip to Colorado, which was last October. The first night there, I received a string of text messages and emails between him and his wife proving that they were back together and having sex all the time. Turns out, he actually double-dipped us both in the same day. He told her he was going to Colorado alone to clear his head. He told me he has a surprise waiting for me. Silly me, I thought a proposal.

So I kicked him out and stayed by myself in Colorado for several days. Hiking alone, crying hysterically, wondering how I could be so dumb and so betrayed.

But here's the rub. He's not just a man who can't decide between two loves. He is an expert manipulative monster. When we both got back to town, he took up therapy to win me back. He and his therapist devised a strategy to set boundaries with the "ex" and to give him a path forward to me. I listened to him. I took him back again because he was doing everything "right." He worked on my heart day and night with amazing emails and texts and visits and promises. And he began expediting his divorce.

I told him trust needed to be earned; he said he'd give me all the time in the world. Ha! It didn't take him but another 6 weeks before he started chipping away at these new boundaries and diddling the ex again. I'd had it. Enough was enough. My family had an intervention and said that my normally outgoing, vivacious personality had been diminished to the point (over a year) where they were worried about my physical and mental safety. They put their foot down. No more Narc. Never. Even despite this, I continued to respond to emails for the first week in january, telling him I loved him but I just needed to get back to the real me. I needed to walk away for my health.

So here's where the fun begins, as if he hadn't already exposed his true self. Because he no longer has control of me, he's taking every tact he can to keep his hooks in. First the sweet emails. Then when no response, the threatening and mean ones about how "my plan to destroy his family didn't work." This week he began emailing friends and even my mother with sexually intimate details and telling them that anything bad he ever said about his wife was untrue. That he demonized her to placate my obsessive desire for him. That I forced my children on him. That I forced him out of his loving marriage.

He has also began a campaign to blame all of his bad decisions on adult ADHD and has contacted an award winning ADHD author to send him copies of his books so he can save other marriages from people like me. I'm sorry, but ADHD doesn't make you fuck your wife and your girlfriend in the same day!!! It doesn't force you to lie about me and my role in his terrible choices. It's transparent to me that this is a very public way for him and for his wife to exonerate themselves and blame external forces for bad behavior.

I read another woman's story about having to raise his kids. When the Narc left his wife, he asked me to be a mentor to his daughter during her senior year, which I gladly did because he crafted a horrible tale of how poorly she was treated by her step mother (his current wife). And, he told me terrible stories about her birth mother. I believed his every word. Now I realize there's a pattern of destroying women and turning them against each other.

His wife emailed me yesterday and said they're back together and she accidentally looked at my linked in profile on his account and she wants to make sure I don't think he's looking at me or interested. She's sent me horrible, horrible emails. I am the slut, the demon, the Scarlet A. I am starting to feel sorry for her, even as she's contributed to my pain, because she's back with him...has to parent with him...and she's so nervous about him coming back to me that she feels she needs to make sure I don't think he's interested.

There's so much wrong with the situation. I'm staying with the no contact policy, as are my friends and family. But I am worried that this is just the beginning of his public campaign to smear me. To make matters worse, he runs a family rec center and puts himself out there as a pillar of the community. People believe every word he says. He throws money around and donates to charities. So if he's emailing these untrue things about me, along with sex details and also how he and his wife are back together, I have no control over that and I guess I have to sit back and let it unfold.

I want to hold my head up high and trust that the professionals in our smallish town will suspend judgement and not believe everything he or she says. I fear he won't stop short of destroying me as a way to exonerate himself.

Ugh. Glad I'm free. She can have him. Just wish it didn't keep getting thrown in my face.

Oh, and unlike him, I am going through with my divorce. He was a catalyst for change, but I am not running back to the safe place and risk re hurting my ex again like he is doing.