Comments about Blog Talk Radio - Divorcing the Narcissist ( I ran out of room there )

I wish Lisa’s radio show and this site had been available to me 3 years ago. I just listened to the latest show about divorcing a narcissist. My separation, divorce and ongoing property settlement was, and still is an absolute nightmare. Elena shared some very accurate and helpful advice during yesterday’s show about divorcing a Narcissist. I knew on one level that leaving my ex N was going to provoke some bad behavior, but on another level I was in denial, believing that he really did care about me and our daughter. The truth was that he has treated me worse than I ever imagined possible, not caring if his actions hurt our daughter either.

My ex N resorted to his last remaining method of being able to control me after I enforced total no contact. I started out talking with him on the phone, but soon realized that this kind of contact was harmful to me when I would notice how I was feeling during the conversation. It got so that just the sound of the phone ringing would make me anxious. Voice messages, text messages and even emails from him were causing me to have symptoms similar to panic attacks, even if the actual content of the communications were superficially quite benign…. there was always a slight undercurrent of impending nastiness. Any contact with him at all made me feel controlled and powerless, so I ended up blocking his email and communicating through my lawyer only.

He has been delaying property settlement, going on 3 years now, using passive/aggressive techniques. But the most frustrating part of all this is that with the help of his very expensive lawyer, he has managed at times to make it appear as if I have been just as difficult, if not worse, than him. It took about 2 years for my lawyer to finally start to realize that ‘my former husband’ might possibly be acting difficult intentionally and that his manner is unusually arrogant.

I am in Australia and the family court system here may be slightly different, but I have been through 2 lawyers, one trial where I was bought up on charges of contravening a parenting order when our 12 year old daughter was refusing to go and stay with him on ‘his’ weekends because she was scared of him. And one property trial. I’m $55,000. in debt and its still going on, even though final orders were given more than 6 months ago. I suppose I could have ended it myself 3 years ago, by just going along with what he wanted, believing the lies he produced as his financial statement and taking what he was offering. In hindsight, especially because of the debt I have incurred by not backing down and accepting less than I’m entitled too, financially, I would be better off now. But for me, the point was not about money, it was about regaining my power, self- esteem and finally standing up to him because once I no longer dealt with him directly, I felt safe enough to demand the equality I deserved. I sacrificed so much of who I was during our marriage, during the last few years it was something of a choice…. a difficult one with two options, a rock or a hard place. While I stayed with him I was providing a very bad role model of a relationship for our daughter, but she was relatively safe from his direct emotional abuse, he was rarely around and when he was, I was there too, so I could see what was going on and do damage control. If I left him, then he would have access to our daughter for whole weekends at a time, by himself and from what I had seen, he couldn't be trusted to put her needs before his own self serving agenda. For the last year we were together, I didn’t know that he already had set up for himself a new family situation, complete with alternative source of supply. He was lying to both of us, using her for his main secondary source of supply and using me as housekeeper, cook, nanny and chauffeur, mainly for our daughter, but for him too when he chose to ‘honor us with his presence’.

He had often threatened to leave me and take our daughter away. That was a real fear for me, because I know it does happen. My ex N is a US citizen and our daughter was born in the States, before we moved here to Australia where my family is. Our daughter has duel citizenship, I knew it was possible for him to kidnap her, take her back to the States and totally ruin her life. I hoped that he was just bluffing because he had also told me that he would never want to move back the States himself, this country has been very good to him. If we were divorced while our daughter was too young, even if he didn’t remove her from me completely, he would be able to manipulate her and damage her emotionally, much more easily during the times he had her all to himself.

Elena is so right with all her advise, I learned it as I went through the process, by myself. My ex-N had total financial control and everything, apart from our house was in his name only. He was one of those narcissists who manage to overcome their lazyness enough to totally control finances, he didn't start out that way though, it began when he started to earn significant amounts of money, so I guess it was in his best interests to control his money so I wouldn't spend any of it without his authority. As soon as he found out I was serious about not letting him back into our house, he cut me off financially. He shut off things like health insurance, cable TV, online game accounts, internet, half of the things he cancelled were things that only our daughter used. He stopped paying the bills on the car I drove and wouldn’t send them to me to pay, so the license expired and the car got impounded by the shire. It had been in his name. I had no car to drive for almost 2 years…. it was our daughter who suffered most, because before the divorce, she had lived quite a comfortable lifestyle….. she goes to a private school. One of my priorities was to keep her in her school with her friends….. I thought that the security and stability of friendships she had built over the years was something that would protect her from some of the emotional trauma of the situation.

I had been very naïve and much too trusting. I knew nothing about our financial situation or about his salary package, bank accounts, credit card accounts. I had lived off an insufficient weekly allowance which he transferred to an account he made me set up in just my name. He gave me access to one of his credit card accounts which had a very low limit, but I had to ask his permission to use it if I wanted to buy anything for myself or the house, I was allowed to spend up to $100. without his permission if it was something for our daughter though. He made me apply for welfare so that I could get money to buy food and pay some bills and access government funded low-cost food centers. I had my own credit card from before we met, it also had a very low limit. When we first got together, he lived with his mother, he was bankrupt, had no credit of his own, so I gave him access to my credit. After 12 years, the balance of financial power had turned around. He was spending thousands of dollars weekly at restaurants, hotels and the casino while I was buying $2. hamburger from an old chest freezer in a shed, served by volunteer workers. After I locked him out of our home, I was left with no money, no real income of my own and my own credit card almost maxed out. He was on $400,000. a year as a GM for a very large corporate computer company with company penthouse apartment overlooking the river near his office, a $50,000. car and regular worldwide travel.

The last straw for me was when I found out that he had taken his girlfriend on his last trip back to the States….. he got careless and left his email open one afternoon when he was suffering from jetlag. I found out that they had visited Las Vegas and then he had taken her to his hometown near Chicago. I was very lucky in the events which led up to my being able to ‘escape’ with minimal risk and emotional trauma. He didn’t know that I knew the truth about his girlfriend, so when I confronted him with it unexpectedly and threatened to let her know what had been going on, he went in to immediate damage control, seemed to cut his losses with me and made all kinds of promises to me, if I left her out of it. (Of course he broke every one of his promises, even though I resisted my urges to 'protect' his girlfriend and her children from this monster I had imported into this country. One of the things he knew about me, from intercepting an email I had sent to my mother, was that I was scared of him. So he told me to change the locks on our home and he promised he would never come back if I didn’t want him to. I got them changed the very next morning. When I changed the locks, there was $80,000. in an account I had no access too, but I had seen a bank statement one time, I knew it had to be somewhere. I never did find that statement and that bank account shrank to under $30,000 very quickly. But I didn’t find that out until about a year later when his financial documents were subpoenaed by my lawyer due to non-disclosure.

If I had listened to Elena's advice before I confronted my husband and then locked him out, I would have had myself much better prepared….. as it was, I got a crash course in narcissist survival and learned how to take care of myself by trial and error while using the two forward, one backwards method. I've been running on empty emotionally, for much of the last 3 years. I had some support from family, who were suffering from shock almost as much as I was, they were getting an education about narcissism, like I was and trying to come to terms with the reality of who this person really was who they had taken into their family like a son and trusted with their daughter and a significant amount of their own money. I am now in a healthy relationship with a non-narcissist and this relationship has provided me with some really deep healing experiences and the kind of support I've never experienced before in my life.

Leaving a narcissist is like nothing normal people can even imagine. When a narcissist is confronted with their own powerlessness, they give up all pretense of being human, and behave in the most disgusting ways, trying to escape from their inner demons…. nothing is sacred when a narcissist realizes that he no longer has control of you….. it can get uglier than you ever want to see. So being educated and prepared, before actually letting your N know of your intentions, will certainly increase your odds of getting out with a better outcome and less risk, trauma and further abuse.

I am currently waiting for my lawyer to file an application with the court so that orders can be changed and I will be able to transfer the title of our house into my name and continue to buy it by myself. This is what I wanted to do 3 years ago, but he didn’t agree, not because he wanted the house himself, but because he knew how much it meant to me. I can’t prove it, but I think he bribed the court appointed valuer to over value the house so I would be unable to afford this option. It very quickly dropped in value when he was pretending to be interested in buying it. Funny thing is though, even with his huge salary, he can’t seem to get together enough finance to take over the house and pay me the small amount left over which is required. He wanted to have another 2 years to find $20,000. and wanted to not give me the $10,000. he has been ordered to pay me for part of my costs due to his non-disclosure. Well anyway, his 7 days was up yesterday….. so back to court we go. I can see light at the end of the tunnel now, but still, I wont be surprised if a few more rabbits are pulled from hats and have to be chased away before I can finally say…… ‘Its over, I have escaped with my life, my sanity and most importantly…. my integrity and that is something he will never have’.