FB "stalking" - mixed blessing
FB "stalking" - mixed blessing
FB “stalking” has been a lightning rod topic. Nonetheless, I want to chime in with my experience. And I won’t call it FB stalking. I’m going to call it FB viewing.
FB viewing, for me, has been a mixed blessing. I think it was my attempt to gain closure. I was stuck in obsessing, trying to figure out what happened to me. How did the person who seemingly loved me so intensely completely cut me off? I could NOT make sense of it. I am a scientist. I think I was gathering “data.” If I don’t understand what is going on, I keep researching. If I can’t make sense of the data, try another hypothesis, another research project. This is what we do in the cognitive dissonance phase, right?
Did I spend so much time FB viewing/researching that I wasn’t able to enjoy life? Yes. But I think I couldn’t enjoy life, anyway, until I got an answer. Whether I understood what happened to me by learning about narcissism through this site or by trying to find answers via FB viewing, there had to be some explanation.
Through FB viewing, I had to see him flirt over and over with other women for me to finally incorporate the fact that I really wasn’t special. And then, the big one. I never would have seen this if I hadn’t been FB viewing so much. He accidentally drunk posted an FB message on his son’s profile page to another woman. He used the same terms of endearment that he used with me, the same choice of words. Unrefutable data! It flew in the face of his reason for ending things with me, which was: “I cannot accept collateral victims” (meaning our respective children). His son has almost 400 FB friends. That’s 400 potential witnesses. A huge public f*** up. Not many of us get to see the narc screw up so publicly. Will he probably be able to weasel his way out of it? Good chance. But the public record was there, even though the post was removed the next day. And I know his son saw it because he commented on how embarrassing it was that his dad (still married) drunk posted a message to "a girl" on his FB page.
I feel deep sorrow for how this must be impacting his son. We all know how we suffered at the hands of a narc. Life for the children of narcs must be its own hell.
It was this last bit of evidence, which I gained through FB viewing, that freed me from the illusion that I lost something good. He’s a dog. Seeing that set me free. Coincidentally, this happened a couple of days after I found this site. Finally, my prayers for release were answered. (BTW – They were answered when I stopped praying for him to come back to me, and started to pray for the ability to get through what I was feeling).
P.S. My view is that if someone posts something publicly on FB, it’s the equivalent of posting it on the electronic version of Times Square. If I go to Times Square to watch the ads, I might be wasting my time, but I’m not stalking. If I go to your house, follow you in your car, wait outside your place of employment, and hack into your email and/or computer, that is stalking.
darling.girl
Face book stalking is not
My way, my truth
Part of recovery is getting your smile back
sorry to hop onto this thread
sea
helped me understand but devastating to see the reality
"Hit by a train"
Is it REALLY wrong of me to
No...no, it is not.
A bunch of great comments
Only you know when it becomes part of the sickness
I kicked my asshole ex out of
More Thoughts About Facebook
Yep, it is not stalking per
DG, you can classify it
spinning
Spinning, love your
Heading to no contact
Stalking, or closure?
I also looked because I