Abused by my ex girlfriend
Alonso
Registrant
The last few months I've been really low. I have been even more disconnected from the world than usually. I have barely left home. It's been a huge effort to do even the most mundane tasks. Over the last few years it has been very traumatic to realize how my mother has betrayed me and abused me throughout my life. Now I'm trying to face the fact that Sandra (names are made up), my ex girlfriend, has done approximately the same. I think that's the reason I've been so low these months.
Sandra was my partner between 1995 and 2014. Until 2007 we were "officially" a couple. In 2007 I split up with her, but until 2014 we kept behaving as a couple in many ways. Only recently have I realized that most of those years Sandra abused me, betrayed me and deceived me. However, until quite recently I only said great things about her: She loved me so much, I owed her everything, I was so lucky to have found her, etc.
When I met Sandra I was shattered by the abuses of my parents. When I was thirteen I tried to commit suicide by riding my bike into an SUV. I did it because my parents were heavily mistreating me. The SUV nearly killed me, I was in hospital for two weeks and using a wheelchair and crutches for the next three months. During those three months my parents reduced their abuses and let me have some peace. I had an almost miraculous recovery, but after that their abuse became even worse. My father mistreated me even more than before: He used to hit me, insult me, and say he was going to beat me up until he killed me. My mother pretended she was on my side, but in fact she was always stirring the conflict between my father and me and manipulating my father to make him aggressive and violent towards me. My father is the thug of my mother, but back then I thought that my mother was good, she tricked my sisters and me into believing that she was a victim of my father. Here I explain in more detail some of the abuses of my parents.
I started to date Sandra when I was seventeen. For the first time in many years I felt loved. From the beginning of our relationship we spent a lot of time together. Both of us were virgins (at least that's what she said) and we started to have sex immediately. However, she had a pathological behaviour from the beginning. I had to call her every day, if I didn't she would make a big fuss. Her determination to create drama at the slightest opportunity troubled me, but compared to the abuses of my parents it was heaven, I was delighted with her. Her drama was better than the sexual abuses of my mother or the death threats of my father.
Little by little Sandra's control over me increased. Before I met Sandra my mother thoroughly dominated me. My mother was probably certain that it didn't matter what she did to me, I would always stay tied to her apron strings even if she abused me, so she kept abusing me. For years she remained confident that she controlled me completely in spite of my relationship with Sandra. Little by little I started to get further away from my mother and closer to Sandra, and to become more dependent on Sandra. Sandra was my escape from the hell of living with my parents. Faced with the choice between hell and a little abuse from Sandra, I certainly preferred Sandra's abuse.
I created a family through my relationship with Sandra. Her parents, her siblings, her nieces and even her in-laws became my family, a family that was much more real than my biological family. I spent a lot of time with them, they didn't mistreat me and I could count on them to some degree.
Meanwhile, my parents kept abusing me until I decided to severe ties with them in 1999. For five years (1999-2004) I had no contact with any member of my biological family and focused on Sandra and her (our?) family. Eventually my mother accepted that Sandra was a serious rival in the contest for controlling me. She got back in touch with me and started to be so kind with me. All of a sudden I became her beloved child. She used to say very often that I was great and that she loved me so much, which was so hypocritical, of course.
My mother has never loved me, but neither has Sandra. Loving someone means looking for the best for them, trying to help them be as happy as possible. Usually with you, but also without you if that's the best for them. Sandra didn't want that, she wanted the opposite. Just like my mother, she wanted to keep me as isolated as possible to make sure that I was hers, and hers alone. That was the same my mother had done before, although my mother did it in a much more brutal way. After all, during my relationship with Sandra I was an adult, and, at least in theory, I was capable of standing up for myself, whereas my mother isolated me and abused me when I was a child and I didn't have any chance of standing up for myself.
Paradoxically enough, Sandra and I were supposed to have an open relationship. This idea of an open relationship didn't have much to do with reality, though. It was an "open relationship" in which, even after splitting up, for six years Sandra kept manipulating me to keep me away from other women. It was the opposite of an open relationship, she required me to give her everything.
Although our relationship lasted eighteen years, we only lived together for two years, over two different periods. In these two periods there were times when I didn't want to have sex with her. Maybe the reason is that she was much more a mother (a very twisted one) than a girlfriend to me. So maybe I didn't want to have sex with her because I didn't want to have sex with my mother. When that happened she got so upset. She accepted her role of being my mother in every sense except for the sex. Sex was so important for her, she wanted a lot of sex and got very angry if I wasn't up for it.
In December 2007 I split with Sandra and we "officially" ceased to be a couple. However, we still lived together (without sex) for another nine months, and for most practical purposes we still behaved as a couple for another six years. Over those six years we were in touch almost all the time. I told her almost everything about my life, and we even had sex now and then. "Officially" she was no longer my girlfriend, but she still had a huge influence in my life. I used to do almost everything she wanted me to do. When she didn't want me to hang out with someone (usually a woman), she showed clearly her rejection towards that person. Then, without being aware of what I was doing, I quickly and sharply stopped dealing with that person. All of that still affects my life significantly nowadays. Over the years I severed ties with all the people Sandra disapproved of. Now I barely have any friends, and two of the friends I have managed to keep are people whom Sandra approved of back in the day. Now I wonder why I allowed Sandra to tell me what I could and couldn't do, who I could and couldn't see. I think I accepted it because I wanted to see her as a "good mother", I felt she was the only person who had ever loved me. But I need to accept that she didn't. She's obsessed with me, but that's not love.
In spite of all of this I always saw Sandra in a very positive light. Sandra always said that we would love each other forever even if we were no longer a couple, even if we lost contact, and I believed her. Between 2010 and 2014 I told my therapist this and other similar fictions about Sandra. From these fictions my therapist returned a very distorted view of Sandra. She said: Healthy mother-son relationships are based on unconditional love, the son feels loved in an unconditional way. Your mother didn't give you that. That made you develop the belief that you were not worth of the love of others. But when you met Sandra she treated you as though she was your mother and gave you something similar to that unconditional love you yearned for. Sandra's love helped you to understand that you deserve to be loved. A part of that might be connected to reality, but Sandra didn't really love me, unconditionally or otherwise. She just wanted to control me. But I wanted to believe that she loved me and that her love was unconditional, and that's what I conveyed every time I talked about Sandra.
For years I kept building these fictions about Sandra in my therapy sessions. For the six years we stayed in touch after splitting up, Sandra used to say that she didn't have romantic relationships with any men (I don't know if that's true), and she told me how she sabotaged all her friendships with men. That, coupled with my constant rejection of other women, led me to develop the idea that Sandra and I were blocking each other's lives. My interpretation at the time was that, by staying in touch with each other, I was interfering with her relationships and she was interfering with mine. That interpretation was wrong. It's true that I was allowing Sandra to block my interactions with other people, but I was doing nothing to block hers. Actually, I was doing the opposite. She used to spend hours telling me about her friendships with men and I would listen, support her and give her lots of advice to help her to improve those relations. Anyway, with the help of my therapists I used this wrong interpretation to reach the conclusion that the best for both of us was to severe ties, which would allow us to open up to other people and other relations. The premise was wrong, but the conclusion was right, at least for me.
It took me years to actually do it, but in September 2014 I eventually managed to stop the contact with Sandra. My approach at the time was completely different from the one I have now. Back then I still didn't understand that her behaviour towards me was abusive. For several months I went over the idea and considered the best way of doing it. When I eventually told her, I spent several hours talking to her and explaining my decision. Before I left I hugged her and said "I love you so much, but I know this is the best for both of us. Even if you don't agree now, you will thank me in the future".
Other women
After I stopped the contact with Sandra I had other less important relationships with women who are similar to Sandra and my mother to some extent. It looks like that's what I seek, find and get. I'm never going to find a criminal as dangerous as my mother, but Sandra, as well as Anna and Silvia -whom I dated later- lie, deceive and manipulate to achieve what they want with men just like my mother does. For them, deception and manipulation are the basis of their relationships with men. That seems to be the kind of woman I bring into my life.
From February 2016 until December 2017 I had a romantic relationship with Silvia. It was a quite strange relationship because "officially" it was a friendship and we never had sex. Actually, I told her quite bluntly that I didn't want sex with her. She would certainly describe our relationship in very different terms, though. She would say that we never had a romantic relationship at all. She would also say that it was her who rejected me, not the other way around. I had met Silvia back in 2004. Sandra quickly became jealous of her. She manipulated me against Silvia until I eventually ditched her in 2010. However, I got back in touch with Silvia in 2016. "Officially" we were just friends, but it was clear that there was a lot more going on. For almost two years she sabotaged most of my interactions with women. Our relationship finished in December 2017, when I finally complained about all this sabotaging. I avoided mentioning her obvious romantic interest in me, but it was too obvious that the goal of her sabotaging was to have me just for her. She probably felt humiliated: Not only was I rejecting her, I was actually throwing it in her face. Then history repeated: She decided that she no longer wanted to be my "friend", but she also decided to isolate me from all our mutual friends. She badmouthed me and manipulated them until all of them left me behind, including some that I had introduced to her and she had only known for a few months. Silvia's behaviour was despicable, but obviously the origin of this problem is not my relation with Silvia, not even my relation with Sandra. It comes from my relation with my mother.
Restarting the contact with Sandra
When I severed ties with Sandra in 2014 she didn't give up. She didn't do anything explicit, but she used several tricks in more or less subtle ways to restart the contact with me. Some were quite simple: Until 2014 she had never used Facebook. However, after the last time we met she created a Facebook account and used it to visit my Facebook page constantly, so Facebook was always suggesting that I got in touch with her. For more than a year I kept receiving those suggestions, and I knew that meant she was visiting my Facebook page. It was like receiving a daily request to go back to her.
She also used some more twisted tricks: In November 2017 I managed to do something quite extraordinary for me: I got a date with Paula, a woman I liked, who got along with me, and with whom communication worked pretty well. The morning before our date I received a call from a woman who asked for Sandra. This woman confirmed she hadn't made a mistake when dialling, Sandra had actually given her my phone number. A year later I asked Sandra to explain this phone call and she gave me a very stupid excuse: She said that this was a sales woman who had requested her number to sell her some beauty products. According to her, she initially decided to give the sales woman her real number, but then changed her mind as she was speaking, decided to give her a fake number instead, and eventually gave her my number "by mistake". Quite unsurprisingly that evening I managed to screw up my date with Paula to the point that she didn't want to see me again. As I write I realize that it was only a few weeks later that I stopped my relation with Silvia. While stopping my relation with Silvia was quite healthy, it looks like Sandra's trick played a big part on that.
Between 2014 and 2018 Sandra never called me or texted me directly, but she kept using these and other tricks, subtly but constantly, to get back in touch with me. 2014-2018 was roughly the period during which I rediscovered and faced the worst abuses of my parents, including their sexual abuses. I still don't understand many aspects of those abuses. Sandra, having shared my life for eighteen years, knows my parents very well, at some points she even discovered things about them that even I didn't know. Apart from that, Sandra is also a survivor of sexual abuses, although the abuses she suffered were far less serious than those I suffered. Seeing her determination to restart the contact with me, I considered the idea of helping each other to deal with these abuses. In June 2018 I finally called her and said "we haven't talked in a long time, but I'd like you to help me deal with the abuses of my parents. I think you can help me to understand, and I think that I can help you to deal with the abuses you suffered".
Her initial reaction was very positive. She said she didn't want to discuss the abuses she had suffered, but she was willing to help me with my problems. With hindsight, she probably thought that the real reason why I was contacting her was that I wanted to restart our romantic relationship. Her positive attitude was very short lived because I made it clear very soon that that was not going to happen. I wanted her help with this problem, but nothing more. When she understood this her attitude changed drastically. All of a sudden she was too busy to take my calls. The tone of her messages became very unpleasant. She started to repeat a bunch of lies about me that she used to say often during our relationship: She said that I mistreated her, and that when I moved to Ireland she stayed in touch with me to support me because I was so alone. I have always been very isolated indeed. But she never wanted to help me. Quite the opposite, she wanted to isolate me even more. For years I had heard these lies, and deep inside I always knew they were lies, but until then I had forced myself to believe them to be able to stay with Sandra. But after four years of "Sandra detox", when I heard these lies again I finally managed to answer.
My answer was quite soft, given the circumstances. I sent her a mail reminding her in a conciliatory tone that reality was quite different than what she said. I reminded her, for instance, of the lies she told me about Silvia to trick me into ditching her. And that, indeed, I did ditch Silvia to make her happy. Badmouthing Silvia to keep me away from her was not trying to help me overcome my isolation. It was trying to isolate me even more. Sandra's answer to my mail was "I prefer not to talk to you again". That was the turning point, the moment in which I started to realize who Sandra really is. Still, it took me a long time to react. Back then my life was horrible, as usual, but it was still a bit better than it is now. I had met a woman I liked and I was excited about that. Even after Sandra's answer I hoped we could fix our conflict. It took me months to start to acknowledge that Sandra had been deceiving me for eighteen years. I started to realize that my life is roughly divided in two halves: The first half was dominated by the abuses of my mother, the second half was dominated by the abuses of my ex girlfriend.
In December I had a conversation with Corinna, a woman who befriended Sandra for one or two years. During that time they shared many confidences, but after a while Corinna decided to end their friendship. The reason was that Sandra was so selfish. Corinna has her own problems, like everybody, but Sandra didn't care about that, she only wanted to talk about me. Corinna didn't tell me anything new, deep inside I already knew that's who Sandra is. I had been seeing it for eighteen years, and Sandra's behaviour with me was far worse than it was with Corinna. But it was very important for me to talk to someone who's had an experience similar to mine, it helped me to accept who Sandra is.
No wonder I reject women...
Sandra was my partner between 1995 and 2014. Until 2007 we were "officially" a couple. In 2007 I split up with her, but until 2014 we kept behaving as a couple in many ways. Only recently have I realized that most of those years Sandra abused me, betrayed me and deceived me. However, until quite recently I only said great things about her: She loved me so much, I owed her everything, I was so lucky to have found her, etc.
When I met Sandra I was shattered by the abuses of my parents. When I was thirteen I tried to commit suicide by riding my bike into an SUV. I did it because my parents were heavily mistreating me. The SUV nearly killed me, I was in hospital for two weeks and using a wheelchair and crutches for the next three months. During those three months my parents reduced their abuses and let me have some peace. I had an almost miraculous recovery, but after that their abuse became even worse. My father mistreated me even more than before: He used to hit me, insult me, and say he was going to beat me up until he killed me. My mother pretended she was on my side, but in fact she was always stirring the conflict between my father and me and manipulating my father to make him aggressive and violent towards me. My father is the thug of my mother, but back then I thought that my mother was good, she tricked my sisters and me into believing that she was a victim of my father. Here I explain in more detail some of the abuses of my parents.
I started to date Sandra when I was seventeen. For the first time in many years I felt loved. From the beginning of our relationship we spent a lot of time together. Both of us were virgins (at least that's what she said) and we started to have sex immediately. However, she had a pathological behaviour from the beginning. I had to call her every day, if I didn't she would make a big fuss. Her determination to create drama at the slightest opportunity troubled me, but compared to the abuses of my parents it was heaven, I was delighted with her. Her drama was better than the sexual abuses of my mother or the death threats of my father.
Little by little Sandra's control over me increased. Before I met Sandra my mother thoroughly dominated me. My mother was probably certain that it didn't matter what she did to me, I would always stay tied to her apron strings even if she abused me, so she kept abusing me. For years she remained confident that she controlled me completely in spite of my relationship with Sandra. Little by little I started to get further away from my mother and closer to Sandra, and to become more dependent on Sandra. Sandra was my escape from the hell of living with my parents. Faced with the choice between hell and a little abuse from Sandra, I certainly preferred Sandra's abuse.
I created a family through my relationship with Sandra. Her parents, her siblings, her nieces and even her in-laws became my family, a family that was much more real than my biological family. I spent a lot of time with them, they didn't mistreat me and I could count on them to some degree.
Meanwhile, my parents kept abusing me until I decided to severe ties with them in 1999. For five years (1999-2004) I had no contact with any member of my biological family and focused on Sandra and her (our?) family. Eventually my mother accepted that Sandra was a serious rival in the contest for controlling me. She got back in touch with me and started to be so kind with me. All of a sudden I became her beloved child. She used to say very often that I was great and that she loved me so much, which was so hypocritical, of course.
My mother has never loved me, but neither has Sandra. Loving someone means looking for the best for them, trying to help them be as happy as possible. Usually with you, but also without you if that's the best for them. Sandra didn't want that, she wanted the opposite. Just like my mother, she wanted to keep me as isolated as possible to make sure that I was hers, and hers alone. That was the same my mother had done before, although my mother did it in a much more brutal way. After all, during my relationship with Sandra I was an adult, and, at least in theory, I was capable of standing up for myself, whereas my mother isolated me and abused me when I was a child and I didn't have any chance of standing up for myself.
Paradoxically enough, Sandra and I were supposed to have an open relationship. This idea of an open relationship didn't have much to do with reality, though. It was an "open relationship" in which, even after splitting up, for six years Sandra kept manipulating me to keep me away from other women. It was the opposite of an open relationship, she required me to give her everything.
Although our relationship lasted eighteen years, we only lived together for two years, over two different periods. In these two periods there were times when I didn't want to have sex with her. Maybe the reason is that she was much more a mother (a very twisted one) than a girlfriend to me. So maybe I didn't want to have sex with her because I didn't want to have sex with my mother. When that happened she got so upset. She accepted her role of being my mother in every sense except for the sex. Sex was so important for her, she wanted a lot of sex and got very angry if I wasn't up for it.
In December 2007 I split with Sandra and we "officially" ceased to be a couple. However, we still lived together (without sex) for another nine months, and for most practical purposes we still behaved as a couple for another six years. Over those six years we were in touch almost all the time. I told her almost everything about my life, and we even had sex now and then. "Officially" she was no longer my girlfriend, but she still had a huge influence in my life. I used to do almost everything she wanted me to do. When she didn't want me to hang out with someone (usually a woman), she showed clearly her rejection towards that person. Then, without being aware of what I was doing, I quickly and sharply stopped dealing with that person. All of that still affects my life significantly nowadays. Over the years I severed ties with all the people Sandra disapproved of. Now I barely have any friends, and two of the friends I have managed to keep are people whom Sandra approved of back in the day. Now I wonder why I allowed Sandra to tell me what I could and couldn't do, who I could and couldn't see. I think I accepted it because I wanted to see her as a "good mother", I felt she was the only person who had ever loved me. But I need to accept that she didn't. She's obsessed with me, but that's not love.
In spite of all of this I always saw Sandra in a very positive light. Sandra always said that we would love each other forever even if we were no longer a couple, even if we lost contact, and I believed her. Between 2010 and 2014 I told my therapist this and other similar fictions about Sandra. From these fictions my therapist returned a very distorted view of Sandra. She said: Healthy mother-son relationships are based on unconditional love, the son feels loved in an unconditional way. Your mother didn't give you that. That made you develop the belief that you were not worth of the love of others. But when you met Sandra she treated you as though she was your mother and gave you something similar to that unconditional love you yearned for. Sandra's love helped you to understand that you deserve to be loved. A part of that might be connected to reality, but Sandra didn't really love me, unconditionally or otherwise. She just wanted to control me. But I wanted to believe that she loved me and that her love was unconditional, and that's what I conveyed every time I talked about Sandra.
For years I kept building these fictions about Sandra in my therapy sessions. For the six years we stayed in touch after splitting up, Sandra used to say that she didn't have romantic relationships with any men (I don't know if that's true), and she told me how she sabotaged all her friendships with men. That, coupled with my constant rejection of other women, led me to develop the idea that Sandra and I were blocking each other's lives. My interpretation at the time was that, by staying in touch with each other, I was interfering with her relationships and she was interfering with mine. That interpretation was wrong. It's true that I was allowing Sandra to block my interactions with other people, but I was doing nothing to block hers. Actually, I was doing the opposite. She used to spend hours telling me about her friendships with men and I would listen, support her and give her lots of advice to help her to improve those relations. Anyway, with the help of my therapists I used this wrong interpretation to reach the conclusion that the best for both of us was to severe ties, which would allow us to open up to other people and other relations. The premise was wrong, but the conclusion was right, at least for me.
It took me years to actually do it, but in September 2014 I eventually managed to stop the contact with Sandra. My approach at the time was completely different from the one I have now. Back then I still didn't understand that her behaviour towards me was abusive. For several months I went over the idea and considered the best way of doing it. When I eventually told her, I spent several hours talking to her and explaining my decision. Before I left I hugged her and said "I love you so much, but I know this is the best for both of us. Even if you don't agree now, you will thank me in the future".
Other women
After I stopped the contact with Sandra I had other less important relationships with women who are similar to Sandra and my mother to some extent. It looks like that's what I seek, find and get. I'm never going to find a criminal as dangerous as my mother, but Sandra, as well as Anna and Silvia -whom I dated later- lie, deceive and manipulate to achieve what they want with men just like my mother does. For them, deception and manipulation are the basis of their relationships with men. That seems to be the kind of woman I bring into my life.
From February 2016 until December 2017 I had a romantic relationship with Silvia. It was a quite strange relationship because "officially" it was a friendship and we never had sex. Actually, I told her quite bluntly that I didn't want sex with her. She would certainly describe our relationship in very different terms, though. She would say that we never had a romantic relationship at all. She would also say that it was her who rejected me, not the other way around. I had met Silvia back in 2004. Sandra quickly became jealous of her. She manipulated me against Silvia until I eventually ditched her in 2010. However, I got back in touch with Silvia in 2016. "Officially" we were just friends, but it was clear that there was a lot more going on. For almost two years she sabotaged most of my interactions with women. Our relationship finished in December 2017, when I finally complained about all this sabotaging. I avoided mentioning her obvious romantic interest in me, but it was too obvious that the goal of her sabotaging was to have me just for her. She probably felt humiliated: Not only was I rejecting her, I was actually throwing it in her face. Then history repeated: She decided that she no longer wanted to be my "friend", but she also decided to isolate me from all our mutual friends. She badmouthed me and manipulated them until all of them left me behind, including some that I had introduced to her and she had only known for a few months. Silvia's behaviour was despicable, but obviously the origin of this problem is not my relation with Silvia, not even my relation with Sandra. It comes from my relation with my mother.
Restarting the contact with Sandra
When I severed ties with Sandra in 2014 she didn't give up. She didn't do anything explicit, but she used several tricks in more or less subtle ways to restart the contact with me. Some were quite simple: Until 2014 she had never used Facebook. However, after the last time we met she created a Facebook account and used it to visit my Facebook page constantly, so Facebook was always suggesting that I got in touch with her. For more than a year I kept receiving those suggestions, and I knew that meant she was visiting my Facebook page. It was like receiving a daily request to go back to her.
She also used some more twisted tricks: In November 2017 I managed to do something quite extraordinary for me: I got a date with Paula, a woman I liked, who got along with me, and with whom communication worked pretty well. The morning before our date I received a call from a woman who asked for Sandra. This woman confirmed she hadn't made a mistake when dialling, Sandra had actually given her my phone number. A year later I asked Sandra to explain this phone call and she gave me a very stupid excuse: She said that this was a sales woman who had requested her number to sell her some beauty products. According to her, she initially decided to give the sales woman her real number, but then changed her mind as she was speaking, decided to give her a fake number instead, and eventually gave her my number "by mistake". Quite unsurprisingly that evening I managed to screw up my date with Paula to the point that she didn't want to see me again. As I write I realize that it was only a few weeks later that I stopped my relation with Silvia. While stopping my relation with Silvia was quite healthy, it looks like Sandra's trick played a big part on that.
Between 2014 and 2018 Sandra never called me or texted me directly, but she kept using these and other tricks, subtly but constantly, to get back in touch with me. 2014-2018 was roughly the period during which I rediscovered and faced the worst abuses of my parents, including their sexual abuses. I still don't understand many aspects of those abuses. Sandra, having shared my life for eighteen years, knows my parents very well, at some points she even discovered things about them that even I didn't know. Apart from that, Sandra is also a survivor of sexual abuses, although the abuses she suffered were far less serious than those I suffered. Seeing her determination to restart the contact with me, I considered the idea of helping each other to deal with these abuses. In June 2018 I finally called her and said "we haven't talked in a long time, but I'd like you to help me deal with the abuses of my parents. I think you can help me to understand, and I think that I can help you to deal with the abuses you suffered".
Her initial reaction was very positive. She said she didn't want to discuss the abuses she had suffered, but she was willing to help me with my problems. With hindsight, she probably thought that the real reason why I was contacting her was that I wanted to restart our romantic relationship. Her positive attitude was very short lived because I made it clear very soon that that was not going to happen. I wanted her help with this problem, but nothing more. When she understood this her attitude changed drastically. All of a sudden she was too busy to take my calls. The tone of her messages became very unpleasant. She started to repeat a bunch of lies about me that she used to say often during our relationship: She said that I mistreated her, and that when I moved to Ireland she stayed in touch with me to support me because I was so alone. I have always been very isolated indeed. But she never wanted to help me. Quite the opposite, she wanted to isolate me even more. For years I had heard these lies, and deep inside I always knew they were lies, but until then I had forced myself to believe them to be able to stay with Sandra. But after four years of "Sandra detox", when I heard these lies again I finally managed to answer.
My answer was quite soft, given the circumstances. I sent her a mail reminding her in a conciliatory tone that reality was quite different than what she said. I reminded her, for instance, of the lies she told me about Silvia to trick me into ditching her. And that, indeed, I did ditch Silvia to make her happy. Badmouthing Silvia to keep me away from her was not trying to help me overcome my isolation. It was trying to isolate me even more. Sandra's answer to my mail was "I prefer not to talk to you again". That was the turning point, the moment in which I started to realize who Sandra really is. Still, it took me a long time to react. Back then my life was horrible, as usual, but it was still a bit better than it is now. I had met a woman I liked and I was excited about that. Even after Sandra's answer I hoped we could fix our conflict. It took me months to start to acknowledge that Sandra had been deceiving me for eighteen years. I started to realize that my life is roughly divided in two halves: The first half was dominated by the abuses of my mother, the second half was dominated by the abuses of my ex girlfriend.
In December I had a conversation with Corinna, a woman who befriended Sandra for one or two years. During that time they shared many confidences, but after a while Corinna decided to end their friendship. The reason was that Sandra was so selfish. Corinna has her own problems, like everybody, but Sandra didn't care about that, she only wanted to talk about me. Corinna didn't tell me anything new, deep inside I already knew that's who Sandra is. I had been seeing it for eighteen years, and Sandra's behaviour with me was far worse than it was with Corinna. But it was very important for me to talk to someone who's had an experience similar to mine, it helped me to accept who Sandra is.
No wonder I reject women...
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