D-Day Plus 42

Easter Sunday, 2015.

Six weeks ago, my girlfriend left me.

In ten insane minutes she brought to an end ten months in which I felt the strongest joy, love, beauty, contentment, excitement, spiritual growth, commitment, confusion, despair, anger, self-doubt, pain, and fear. This was not my first relationship, nor my longest, but from the beginning to the end there was something singular in this one, something that grabbed me quickly and still refuses to release me. The experience and its shocking, abrupt end has been so traumatic that I, a life-long atheist, have been brought to the point of praying daily for her and even, sometimes, for myself.

Given what I now know about her disordered state of mind it is difficult to say with certainty that she experienced any of our time together the same way I did.

I didn't see the end coming. But I knew that there was something wrong. She came from a very sick background. She had suffered emotional abuse from her own father, had cut him out of her life ruthlessly years before, but now felt herself victimized instead by almost everyone else. Although very attractive, when I met her she was 34 and had never been in a relationship lasting longer than a year. Although very pleasant and even shy, she seemed to be in stormy conflict with everyone around her. Although very intelligent, she had abandoned a promising academic career and moved far from home for a low-paying yet stressful job, starting from scratch surrounded by women ten years her junior. To this day she has never received treatment or therapy of any kind.

I loved her anyway. I did everything I could to care for her, to get her the help she needed, to give myself a name for what was going on with her, to make sense of what she was doing to me.

I couldn't save her. Now I have to save myself.

A breakup with someone like her will leave you with nothing that could be called "closure". A woman that I loved more intensely than I had ever thought possible detached from me in a couple of hours, "split me black" (a phrase now permanently burned into my brain), and disappeared in a manner so extravagantly dramatic and cruel that I can't quite bring myself to believe it even now, more than a month later. She sent me two text messages after that, both of them absolutely necessary to retrieve her stuff from my house and remove herself from my cell phone plan, a plan that she joined two days prior to breaking up with me. Neither of her messages contained one word more than was strictly required to achieve those goals. I never received any expression of regret, of gratitude, of affection, not even a goodbye. She blocked all channels of communication quickly and thoroughly; she refused to respond to any of my attempts to contact her, even though every one of them was kind and apologetic and expressed concern for her well-being, even though I was still, after the relationship, helping her in small ways that she may not have even noticed, much less appreciated. I gave up reaching out to her only because her behavior and what I understood of her beliefs were such that I feared her next step was to initiate legal proceedings and to claim that I was stalking or harassing her.

Eventually I got so desperate to hear anything at all that even an angry tirade or stream of accusations, even listening to her assigning all blame to me for what happened, one more time, would have done wonders for my mood, or so I imagined.

With a great deal of reading online I've come to understand that although what happened is new to me, it's all part of a pattern that is familiar to those unfortunate enough to love somebody with a Personality Disorder. In romantic relationships, some of the most damaging and most commonly encountered PD's are described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' Axis II, Cluster B—hence the title of this blog, also a reference to a devastating weapon "prone to indiscriminate effects" that "can kill or maim civilians long after a conflict has ended".

Speculation about her particular diagnosis will be reserved for later posts.

Much has already been written and posted all over the Internet by survivors of abusive relationships with the personality-disordered. I am adding my own small contribution to the literature for the following reasons:

1. I need to do this to save myself. One of the most distressing results of my emotionally abusive relationship has been, in its final months, the gradually building conviction that I'm the crazy one. She took active steps, whether consciously or sub-consciously, to encourage me to think this way; at the end she worked hard to create and believe a false story about what happened, a story I've no doubt she has promoted to the people that remain on her side of the breakup divide.

   I need to tell my story too. All names will be changed and I've taken every effort to keep this blog anonymous; the odds are almost zero that she will ever read any of this. But for some reason the idea that the truth will exist on the Internet, forever, comforts me just a little bit. There is no way for me to reach her now. This will have to do.

   Over the weeks I've received quite a lot of validation from friends, family, and a professional psychologist to the effect that I'm not the crazy one, that I did all that anyone could have done, that in the end I was discarded not for doing something wrong, but in fact, for doing something right. But a lot of damage has been done to my sanity, identity, and sense of self-worth. It's going to take a lot of repetition of the facts, a lot of untangling my story by writing it all down, before I can really be healed.

2. Other survivors need validation too. The hardest part of the struggle for me has been the need to prevent sympathy for her from creeping back in, clouding my judgement, and causing me to make bad decisions like contacting her. I find that constant reinforcement from blogs like this one has been uniquely effective in keeping me strong; reading post after post from other survivors and seeing the similarities between their stories and mine is often the only thing that gets me through another day without suffering a setback.

   There are many of these stories on the Internet, but there are still not enough. Maybe adding mine can strengthen someone else who needs the same kind of repetition I do.

3. Not all cases of PD relationship abuse are the same. That is not to say they aren't remarkably similar, they are, and that depressing similarity is one of the things that has helped persuade me that there is nothing I could have done differently because, at her worst, I wasn't interacting with a person but with a sickness.

   However, the disorder presented by my girlfriend had some special characteristics that made the early signs harder to see until it was too late. It's easy to look at lists of behaviors common to, for example, Borderline Personality Disordered women, and to argue yourself out of the correct conclusion because she doesn't do the obvious things like cutting herself or breaking the dishes. Some cases are more subtle than others. Some damaged people act aggressively because they are boiling with rage inside. Other damaged people act passively for the same reason: because they are boiling with rage inside.

   My girlfriend was one of the quiet ones, until she wasn't. Her weapons were mostly those of passive-aggression—distance, withdrawal, escape, silence—until fight replaced flight and I saw naked aggression and hatred from her for the first and last time.

   Maybe telling the story in detail will help someone else understand what's going on faster than I did, and help them do what they need to do sooner.

There's much more to come. Until then, take good care of yourselves.