I've been with both kinds of narcissists, the cerebral and the somatic. I've shared my story about the cerebral before. I haven't posted this part of the story because it is still a tad raw.
This week, I've met another of Nyles'victims. For her, I post here...in the open...so she knows that she was taken just as others were....
I suppose telling my story helps some although I’m not sure why. I used to be embarrassed by it, being a college educated woman in my late forties and all. I’m sharing it because if it helps one person cope and see that there is hope and a future then it makes my pain worth it.
When I met Nyles, I was very lonely, vulnerable. I’ve posted about my life over the last five years and it wasn’t pretty. The thing about narcissists is that they find the most vulnerable part of your spirit and they latch on, manipulate it to make sure that they get in deep.
We had known each other via the internet and through a business he owned in our town.
Two and a half months after it got physical, he left his wife to be with me. Yes, we were both married. I own that. It was wrong. I have paid dearly for it.
Two weeks later he went back. We went no contact at that point. I went through all the crying and “why is this happening” crap. The thing is, it hadn’t really lasted that long and I wasn’t sure why I felt like I was over reacting on huge level, not like the professional woman I had always been. It was because he had already begun that taking over the spirit that narcissists do.
In a short time, he came back to me wanting forever and that is when he left his wife for good. I was beginning to move on. The thing is, I loved him and I wanted him. He told me all the things that I’d longed to hear. That I was deeply loved. That I was the best sex he’d ever had. That he knew that he couldn’t be without me.
He would tell me, “Jeanette, we are giving up the good for the great. We both have good marriages, but we have something so great here, so wonderful, soon enough we will be launching our life together”.
He would call me LOML. He signed all his emails that way. He put me in his phone under that pseudonym. Everywhere he went, he would send me pictures with LOML written….in the sand….with rocks….in the dirt. LOML…it means Love of My Life.
We began our life together. He brought me into the open immediately. I was incredibly happy.
It was at that point he went on a business trip. We had been living together for months. I was so happy. Clueless really, but incredibly happy.
We had merged bank accounts. Planning a cruise. Vacations. Plans for the holidays.
While he was on the business trip, I found emails between him and another woman. Someone he had been seeing the entire time we were together. He’d met her and started sleeping with her while he was "working on his marriage". He had kept up the relationship while launching forever with me.
The emails were printed out and left in a desk drawer. He hadn’t even meant to hide them. He had wanted me to find them. I am absolutely sure of it.
He came home from the business trip. He asked for a couple of weeks to just think things through. Since I’m all about personal space, I had no problem with that. We had also just rented a house because I was getting custody of my children and we needed something bigger.
Three weeks later, I went to our favorite bar that was around the corner from the condo. He wasn’t taking my calls or emails and I hadn’t connected with him in three weeks. The bartender said, “Who is the skanky blond Nyles keeps bringing in”? I questioned the bartender and she was sure that this woman was living in my condo which happened to be around the corner from the bar.
I called him begging him to tell me what the hell was going on. He finally called me back. Told me he had met the woman of his dreams, Jenn, a third other woman. She works minimum wage, has never been married, and has four children all by different fathers according to Nyles. She needed him more than I did and he said I was too independent for him.
He met her on the internet while he was on his business trip. He physically met her the day after he asked me for his “personal space" two weeks. He moved her into MY condo five days after he met her so he told me because she was just perfect for him....the one.
He went on to tell me that I was fading into his past and I needed to move on and that he could never be with a woman long term that would sleep with a married man. Didn’t seem to matter that he was still married and was now living with his third other woman in a year.
This launched a year of deep investigation and pain. Jenn turned out to be a complete psycho who launched her own vendetta on his wife, me and the other woman.
Six months of asking questions, I was able to piece together this as the first week of his self-imposed silence.
Sunday – Dump Jeanette
Monday – Meet Jenn for the first time.
Tuesday – Have the other woman spend the night at the condo. She had left her family for him that day.
Wednesday – Take the other woman to breakfast. He told her that she could leave her husband if she wanted, but that he wouldn’t be there for her and didn’t want her because she sleeps with married men.
Thursday – Wife spends the night in my condo.
Friday – Jenn spends the night in my condo for the first time.
Saturday – Nyles drives 200 miles to move Jenn into the condo.
I learned that his wife is a beautiful blond. She was kind, patient, and loving. I was thoroughly guilt ridden because of my part in hurting her. She was not at all like I had imagined. The thing is, he could only see and describe her as a controlling bitch to justify punishing her. He had his first affair one month into their marriage with her best friend.
I know now that the 25 years they were married at the time, she was just trying to hold on to what she had and that is what made her act out. Nyles had created her to be this way.
He loved his strip clubs and massage parlors, loved his many other women. He was always put out about his life not being what he wanted it to be. He had always told me that I was his first affair. (A narcissistic trait that lying).
He is a full-blown narcissist with a Cluster B Personality Disorder, aka Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Narcissists are people without a self-esteem who destroy everyone close to them to get what they want because, after all, narcissists are too lazy to work for anything themselves. My therapist diagnosed him from emails and phone messages. He also diagnosed me with PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress. It was a horrible time in my life.
While trying to figure out what the hell was happening, I was paying for the rental house. I was paying for the condo that Nyles and Jenn were living in. I was now waiting for the results of my STD check.
After a month, I went to the condo to retrieve the rest of my things. As I knocked on the door, the a woman yelled at me that she was going to call the police. Nyles called my cell phone. He told me I was scaring her . I told him I just wanted my things and I would quietly leave. She refused to open the door. Nyles told me that I had no right to anything in the place because I had abandoned him and the condo. (Rewriting history….a trait of narcissism)
The condo was on the fifth floor. When I got down to my car, with nothing I might add, things started to hit the sidewalk. The woman threw things off the balcony. Breakables that had been in my family for generations were hitting and shattering on the pavement. It was such a picture showing how my life was shattered. I got in my car and drove away.
Over the next six months, I stayed engaged. How I wish I had just walked away.
Many horrible things happened over the next few months, things that were always attributed to Jenn being a psycho. After discussions I've had this week, I’m now beginning to wonder if it wasn’t Nyles pretending to be Jenn. Blaming her as he was blaming me. (Narcissists have a way of altering the victim’s reality)
Nyles would call or text me to meet him outside the condo. I would go. Then I was told by someone that Nyles and Jenn were complaining that I was stalking them. Each thing that happened I thought was rational but I would find that Nyles had turned it into being my insane behavior, that I wouldn’t let go of the relationship. (Narcissists will often manipulate to become the victim).
I changed my phone number at least four times that year. I changed my job four different times in one year. It was insane that I was willing to derail my career rather than engage with these people.
He continued to email me wanting to be friends. I asked him once why he wanted to be friends. His response was that he wanted me there in case he needed me later. (A classic symptom of narcissism.)
I asked him why he chose her. His response was that she was a drinker and desperate. (Classic narcissism - go for the lowest common denominator)
He still emails me every couple of months fishing. I suppose I should block him and did for a time. But each email reminds me of what he is and that he is dangerous. It is easy to ignore him now.
He walked up behind me once in a Starbucks. I turned around and I couldn’t believe what I saw. In a matter of months he had become this old man and he looked so weird. He had shaved his head, pierced his ears, totally become a hippy. He was a 50 year old man trying to look like a 20 year old hippy.
All I could do is blurt out, “What the hell happened to you” and walk away. (Changing appearance to mirror your SO is a narcissistic symptom)
A year after we went no contact, I had a chance meeting with him. I was so shocked. He looked terrible even his teeth were falling apart.
His phone rang and rang. He kept sending it to voicemail. I finally said, “Perhaps that’s important”. He said something like, it’s just Jenn, she never leaves me alone and then he turned his phone off.
He wanted to know if we got back together did I think it could work. I stood there stunned. It was like watching a documentary of NPD behavior. I couldn’t look or walk away. How could I have missed so much of his insanity?
I had still not buried the pretend guy so I asked him if I was still the "love of his life", something he had always called me. He said, "I won't know if you are the love of my life until I'm on my deathbed". I said, "Good to know, but by then, there will have been so many other women, you won't remember me at all anyway".
At the end of the conversation, he said, “You just used me now just like you always used me. You are so selfish”, then he asked me to meet him on Thursday because he missed sex with me. (Classic projection…classic retribution…classic narcissist)
What was most amazing about that encounter is that he had created Jenn to be a controlling bitch just like his wife in less than a year and was complaining about her just like he had his wife.
It has been two years since I was Devalued & Discarded. A term that is well known in the community of narcissist survivors.
While I still get emails from him as if we were still friends and lovers, it has been more than a year since I have talk to Nyles or responded to him.
In that time, I have talked to and met several of his other women. I have just recently met a woman that he was seeing the entire time he was with me. She had a three year relationship with him. She thought she was the only one, just as I did. I now know that he was seeing and sleeping with at least four women during the time he was planning to marry me.
While it is really hard to come to grips with how deep the rabbit hole goes, I now know without a doubt that it wasn’t me. Nyles told me it was me, that we would have worked out if I wasn’t such a bad person. (Another narcissist trait). It took a long, long time to come to the understanding that it wasn’t me.
What did I gain….
Myself.
My self-esteem.
The best real life friends I’ve ever found.
A different job making more money than I’ve ever made.
Healthy children who managed to survive it all who now call Nyles, “Him who shall not be named”.
I’m healthier than I’ve ever been because I am no contact with all parties, but I still have a long way to go to launch a relationship with someone new.
There have been times through the last four years that I did exactly what my friends told me to do and nothing else because I couldn’t think for myself. I was a puddle on the floor, loving a man who never existed. I was only with him a couple of years, but I believed everything that he ever told me as truth.
I cannot deny that I loved him and was perhaps, in love for the first time in my life. I can't deny that in many ways I still love him or perhaps the man I thought he was, the man he said he wanted to be to me. The thing is, he killed that man and he is now buried and long gone…..if he ever existed at all.
I have learned more about narcissism than I should have ever had to know.
I’ve learned that when you are in the narcissistic fog, you can’t think straight even when you try. The lies are deep and loads of fun for them to tell. When lives begin to fall apart at the narcissist’s hands, they truly enjoy watching it. It feeds them. It is why, should any of his other women ever come to me for answers, I will sing like a bird.
I dodged a bullet and I am so very thankful
My heart breaks for his wife.
What I value now most of all, what I have learn is that I am my own best friend, a good friend to others, a great mom, a stellar employee, and some day, I will love a real man who will love me back with a real love. He will be deeply appreciated just because he is real.
I have a friend. I have talked to her about starting a website so that when people google his name, they would find it and be warned. The thing is, when I lived with him, I believed that I was the only one, the love of his life. I don’t believe the person that I met this week would have believed a warning either. He is just THAT good.
So I choose to concentrate on the beauty of my life. To slog through these memories and when a victim crosses my path, to help them up, brush them off, and tell them it wasn’t them.
I also choose to read each and every email that Nyles sends me because it reminds me that I dodged a bullet.
So that my friends, is where this blog started….trying to heal from a relationship that never should have taken place. I’ve been asked if I think Nyles is the love of my life. My answer every time is the same....I sure hope not because if that is as good as it gets I’m screwed.
I am free and going to have a great life. He will never be happy and will live tormented all his life because of the way he attempts to destroy people for his own pleasure.
BLISS….2009 Word of the Year!
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