Of Elves and Men

Day 116

Zoe dearly loves the Christmas movie Elf, in which a human raised by elves at the North Pole travels to New York City in search of his real father. While there, he uses his elf-skills and unbounded, characteristically elfin enthusiasm to great effect; for instance by transforming apartments and department stores into winter wonderlands overnight with common materials.

When Zoe had started spending more time at my house it happened that she took a nap one afternoon. I don't remember exactly what I did with the time but I think I spent it tidying up the house, doing laundry, and getting dinner ready as I often did. When she emerged after some hours and found what I had been doing she remarked that my productivity made me like the hero of Elf.

At the time I was charmed by the comparison to one of her favorite movies. But after spending many more months with her and seeing what she was capable of, what her moods and almost-constant defeatism were like, I saw something else about that remark: from her perspective ordinary human levels of activity belong to the realm of supernatural beings.

Zoe never has much of a surplus of energy for anything; how could she? Since early childhood she has been managing an extreme amount of emotional pain by using survival mechanisms like denial and projection, by twisting the truth about what happened to her and about what she became as a result into something more acceptable than it really is. Sustaining these fictions is hard work. There isn't enough time and energy left to do much more than that, especially not to do much more for other people. The closest you can come as a Non to understanding what this is like is by paying attention to how you feel soon after you have been abused and discarded by your PD partner, in that period of time when you're not taking care of yourself and probably can't care much about anyone else either. That's the kind of darkness they have always lived in. The emptiness and self-sabotage and unhealthy ways of coping that you are wrestling with are like those that torture the untreated survivors of childhood trauma even in good times.

Now you are a trauma survivor too. But you are an adult, you can take care of yourself, you can do better than mere survival, your fate has not been sealed as theirs was. If you are like me, one of the lucky ones, you didn't spend enough time with your abuser for your scars to be permanent ones. You have shared nothing that will tie you to them for the rest of your life and give them fresh opportunities to hurt you again and again. If you are unlucky, and have been married to a PD individual or, much worse, have children with them, my heart aches for you; you are one of the unlucky ones; you have a heavy burden to carry down a long road.

But whatever the case, no matter how deep your wounds go, promise yourself you will not behave as they did. Don't let them drag you down to their level, no matter what they did or what they continue to do. Keep yourself pointed at what you used to be. There will come a time when you find yourself in a relationship again; be wise and use what you have learned, but don't punish anyone else for what's been done to you. Take responsibility for yourself, get some help, choose more cautiously, but be willing to open yourself again, learn to trust again.

And for God's sake, if you find that you have to break up with someone, do it like a human being. As Mr. Goodlove has to say:

The reason you are in so much pain, is because you have been betrayed, cut off and abandoned cold by someone you loved. Remember this pain, and never, ever do that to another human being. Especially if you find yourself dating another emotionally disturbed person, and have to call it quits. You take their calls, and you stand your ground, and you hold their hand through it. You let them know you still care about them, while enforcing your boundaries. Even if you are right, and they are assholes. Why, because its your responsibility as a human. That is all.

God bless you Buddy.

Borderline Awareness Month

May is Borderline Awareness Month. Although Zoe has never received psychiatric care and thus remains without a formal diagnosis, it is my belief, supported by my psychologist, that Borderline Personality Disorder is one of her problems.

There is no question in my mind that borderline personalities suffer badly. Being perpetually unable to form a real emotionally close bond without experiencing such terror that it becomes necessary to destroy that bond is as close to hell on earth as I can imagine.

For a long time hope has been in short supply for these people and for those that surround them. Many therapists refuse to treat BPD; it is difficult for a non-specialist to form a productive "therapeutic alliance" with BP patients because of their tendency to sabotage this as they sabotage any close relationship.

But there is evidence supporting new methods of therapy. Currently Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), developed by Marsha Linehan, herself a BPD sufferer, offers the most promising results. As always, however, responsibility for healing ultimately rests with the sufferer. They have to know that something is wrong; they have to locate that something within themselves; they have to set out to do something about it. If they are to be successful it is probable, at least with current methods, that they will never be able to leave therapy.

Every day since our breakup I've prayed to God that Zoe receives the help she needs. But I don't have much hope for that now. Anyone can lead a horse to water, but even God can't make it drink.

The rest is up to her.

A Song for the Weekend: "Wasting My Young Years", London Grammar

You crossed this line
Do you find it hard to sit with me tonight?
I've walked these miles but I've walked them straight-lined
You'll never know what was like to be ... fine

This is a song for the betrayed, a song full of longing for the "old ideas" of loyalty, fidelity, romance. These lines particularly resonate with me, holding out the possibility of forgiveness as they do, but turning a bit rueful anyway:

Don't you know that it's only fear?
I wouldn't worry, you have all your life
I've heard it takes some time to get it right

Some people never get it right—a heartbreaking idea, and a heartbreaking performance by Hannah Reid.

Miss Fortune, Part Two

Day 66

In the first part of this post I began describing the various ways in which Zoe presented herself to me as a victim, and the effect that had on me, focusing on her change in profession and living situation. But her escape from home, family, friends, and her old career was driven by much more than mere grad-school ennui.

After a very short time I realized that I had been hearing Zoe make references to her mother, but not to her father. Gritting my teeth because I already guessed the answer, I asked the question and heard what I expected: her parents were divorced and she had no relationship at all with her dad.

She told me that he had come from a very sick background. She told me he had been emotionally abusive to her. She told me that he had serially cheated on her mother. She told me that at some point in her twenties the family had confronted him with an intervention, which hadn't worked, and that her mother divorced him soon after this last attempt. Zoe had then cut him out of her life entirely, to the point of fleeing if she encountered him on the street. She told me that he had been fiercely jealous of her academic success and had sabotaged one of her graduation celebrations by persuading much of her family to leave; but of all the stories she told me this still remains the only clear example of abusive behavior.

Although it's now difficult to trust anything I heard from her at all, I still believe that her father really was consistently abusive. For one, the personality-disordered apple doesn't fall far from the personality-disordered tree; something happened to Zoe that made her this way, and her mother seems like the opposite of an abuser: a co-dependent rescuer and enabler (her brother seems to have taken after their mother in this respect). Although I haven't heard her rather private mother directly say that her husband had been abusive, she didn't object to Zoe saying things of that sort, and it was obvious they had divorced in an unfriendly way.

Of course I didn't blame Zoe for what she had been through; her stories, told openly and with what I imagined was courage, only drew me closer to her and added fuel to my fiery desire to save her and protect her from everything that had gone undeservedly wrong in her life. But if she bears no responsibility for what was done to her as a child, her relationship history, as it was told to me in these early months, was already another matter entirely.

Zoe had been engaged once before, at a too-young age, but had broken the engagement when she realized she had become depressed and couldn't possibly continue. Alarmingly she told me her family acted as though this result had been expected all along. She told me that she never had any contact with this ex-fiancee or indeed, with any of her exes, because why would she want to speak to someone that turned out not to want her? (Sounds healthy, right? It isn't.) She told me that it was fortunate we hadn't met earlier, because less-mature Zoe "would have destroyed you". Most alarming of all, she told me that, at the age of 34, she had never been in a relationship lasting longer than a year.

I didn't break that record either.

Zoe began to say things that revealed what she really thought about men in general:

• How lucky she was to have met me, which I wouldn't be able to understand because I didn't know "what's out there"
• How if not for me she would have given up serious relationships all together
• That "all men are liars", excepting, naturally, myself and her brother

If I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to pay attention to these beliefs, to the stories she told me about her father and about other men. I have since learned that the personality-disordered will eventually find ways to fit you into their system of beliefs, no matter how far from reality they may be. You are only really important to them as an object, as the latest man or woman to play the role in their continuously-running psychodramas. If her father was an abuser, she will find a way to convince herself that you are one too. If she believes all men are liars, she will eventually believe that you are a liar. If she believes that all men have problems with anger, she will do whatever it takes to make you angry to prove it to herself.

Negative beliefs about men are a psychological necessity for her; she cannot allow herself to let these go without feeling her emotional survival is at stake. If she did she would have to face the possibility that her failures in relationships, coming as they have with remarkable regularity, have more to do with her than with her partners. If she wasn't able to eventually include me in that system of beliefs she would have to confront this reality: she discarded, for no reason, a basically decent man who loved her dearly, offered her exactly what she wanted, tried very hard to support her and make her happy, whose only "crime" was taking some measures to protect himself instead of handing over all control of his life wholly to her and her madness. She would have to understand that she did tremendous psychological damage to me, dealt me wounds that are not even close to healing today.

But in those early months, I understood none of this. I thought I was doing great.

At this time my career had reached a new height; I had negotiated a raise and was working on promising new projects; my family was well; I had rewarding relationships with my friends, fun hobbies, exciting travel plans; I was renovating a portion of my house. The contrast between my own life and hers must have looked intimidating, and she expressed it to me. I didn't see things that way, so I comforted her. In those months I had a feeling, probably for the first time ever, that I was incredibly lucky. I told her often how lucky I was. Although my life had always looked pretty damn good on paper, I had never really enjoyed it like I was able to with her. Being with her was finally illuminating how good everything else was.

Obviously I have some serious issues myself, some issues that make me very susceptible to what Zoe was presenting as herself. Disordered personalities don't usually get away with abusing the healthiest people, I expect, and anyway, enjoying as I do a relatively successful and stable and put-together life, why is it that ten months with an emotionally damaged woman skating the edge of psychosis counts as the happiest I've ever been?

It didn't take long for me to understand that Zoe was feeling inadequate. She started verbalizing things like "you're kinder and wiser and cleverer than I am" and "I'm a bad girlfriend". She wondered aloud if she could contribute as much as I could to our relationship. Feeling generally pretty great about my life and about us as a couple, I tried to tell her not to worry about any of that; I understood that she was in a transitional state and that it would take some time before she was fully on her own feet again. I told her I was investing in the future, that one day, inevitably, I'd fall on hard times, I'd be suffering or poor or unhealthy and then, when I needed her most, she'd be there for me.

I've never been more wrong.

Miss Fortune, Part One

Day 64

Looking back for the first signs of trouble is a very natural behavior after the end of any relationship. You don't want to repeat your mistakes, after all. Even I, as unhealthy as I am at the moment, as distasteful as ever dating again feels to me, as much as I feel that I'd take her back if she ceased the silent treatment some day and reached out to me, know on an intellectual level (if on no other) that I'd better learn to identify PD women a mile away in a nanosecond. I imagine it becomes an obsession with all survivors.

In the case of Zoe, many of the red flags were concealed until it was too late. But there was one that was always obvious, a red thread woven into the fabric of her life. She couldn't conceal it if she tried and in fact, she didn't even want to; displaying this aspect of her history and personality openly was part of her plan all along. She must have guessed, and guessed correctly, that she could get away with almost anything if she presented herself to me as a victim.

A personal detail: Zoe works as a flight attendant. I wrestled for some time about whether or not to reveal that fact. Indeed, since the beginning of my recovery I've been navigating the line of how much I should openly publish, as it feels like a betrayal even though I've been betrayed by her about as completely as one can be already. But no one will ever make the connection to her anyway, and it's an important part of the complete story that I mean to tell.

At first her chosen career was an interesting, even glamorous feature of her life. I had a million questions. There is something undeniably fascinating about the world of aviation, and I was able to re-live that every time I introduced her to someone new—invariably all the same questions would be asked again. Everyone's flown before, everyone can relate. And then, of course, there's the promise of free travel, which I even enjoyed here and there during our time together.

But I learned very quickly: being a flight attendant is a terrible job. It's stressful. They're constantly falling ill. The schedules are inconsistent and exhausting. The flight benefits are a lot less beneficial than you might expect. And in the first years, at least, before one climbs the seniority ladder, the pay is abysmal. She was scraping out a living not far from the federal poverty line, in fact.

It might make sense for people in their twenties, people that want to travel a bit and have fun before becoming fully adult. Some of those might even stick it out until the lifestyle becomes sustainable, subsidized in the meantime by parents and partners, no doubt.

Zoe was thirty-four and had been in the job two months when I met her.

I've seen her academic CV. Becoming a professor isn't easy, no doubt, but she had the background; I believe she would have made it. Her degrees and her doctoral work were done at one of the best universities in the United States in her field. She was smart enough. But she had thrown all of that away, and for reasons that were never really explained. Her early attempts included:

• "I had to leave my home town, it was killing my soul". Killing my soul. She would come to use this sort of apocalyptic language frequently throughout our relationship. Eventually, and very hurtfully, she would apply it to me as well.
• References to a lot of interpersonal conflict in her university department, all of it created, of course, by others.

At the time I chalked it up to the usual despair experienced by the graduate student. I can understand that. She still had one foot in the university too: it was possible for her to return if she registered soon, in the next semester, to keep her already-earned credits alive.

When I met Zoe she lived somewhat near the airport, in a "crashpad" condo with four other girls, all of them in their mid-twenties, sharing bedrooms, some sleeping on air mattresses. Very quickly quite a lot of interpersonal conflict made living there almost unbearable for Zoe. Once again, all of it was created, of course, by others.

But this was relatively easy to explain away too; after all I already believed that nothing but chaos and drama could come from living in close quarters with four somewhat-transient and mostly not-really-educated women in their mid-twenties. It was easy to see Zoe as the victim of all that, as the one sane adult trying to keep the extended-adolescence lunatic asylum together and running smoothly.

She began to tell me stories about the other girls, about how they had turned against her and were busy spreading malicious rumors. Once again that was all easy to accept at the time; Zoe is an adorable, shy, introverted, petite woman that knows very well how to present herself as a "nice girl" that's fallen into some trouble. If she's suffering because of conflict with others (and one way or another she is always suffering because of conflict with others), the most natural thing is to believe her story, one-hundred-percent, and accept her anger into yourself—why is it happening to this poor girl, again?

There was something that stuck to my mind even then, however: Zoe signed a year-long lease committing herself to that situation, a lease that already looked like a serious mistake less than a month into it.

I've since realized that when someone comes into your life appearing to be perpetually the victim of circumstances, the kindest rational explanation is that they make bad decisions that cause these situations to occur. A less-kind explanation is that the victim pose is how they get away with abusing others.

If one of those "condo girls", as they came to be known, approached me then and told me any of what they were saying about Zoe, I wouldn't have believed it, not for a second. I'm still inclined to believe that she made a naive error and fell in with bad folk, but I'd be stupid to believe that completely. After everything I've seen, I can't be sure anymore.

But at the time I was sure; my protective instincts were roaring inside my brain and all I wanted was to take my beloved away from that place, wrap her up warm in some of my stability and prosperity, help her to thrive in this new life of hers, and rescue her from a mistake, even if she had clearly made that mistake herself.

And that was my mistake, the first of many.

An Untold Story

Day 63

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."—Maya Angelou

Damn straight. I will continue writing.

Symptoms of Distress

I've felt some disturbing physical symptoms since the breakup:

• Pain in my teeth and face, mostly due to grinding my teeth at night and clenching my jaw.
• Higher-than-normal blood pressure.
• Numbness in my little toes resulting from back pain.
• Vivid dreams of her, naturally.
• Periods of insomnia that last for days, even weeks at a time.
• Vomiting myself awake out of a nightmare (3 times!).
• Loss of appetite and weight.

Don't be alarmed if you experience anything out of the ordinary right now; it's perfectly natural in the wake of trauma. A visit to a doctor for a checkup would not go amiss. Be patient and treat yourself well.