He Left for OW, But Stays in Touch Daily

He’s also keeping you sweet in case it doesn’t work out with the AP-turned wife.

You are no Plan B. You are worth so much more than that. Now is the time to strike out and create a new life for yourself. Rebuild. Think about things you want to do with your time – volunteer, get a dog, take up a new hobby, focus on your health with yoga, pilates. Distract yourself from him with lots of positive things to rebuild YOU. It’s all about YOU now. Good luck.

A glaring issue is his children’s behavior toward you. It makes me wonder how much bad mouthing he did. They probably heard every little complaint he thought up. There are people who are never satisfied with their lives. They move on to the next chapter without ever stopping to think about the good things in their lives. He is already bad mouthing his new wife. What do you want to bet the kids are hearing the same old complaints?
CL/CN has your back. Stay here, read and you will find your way out.

Oh Cali. I’m so sorry you’re going through this pain. We all know that landscape well. But…it’s temporary. The way out of this hell is disciplined no contact cold turkey. Replace the urge to check and look with something healthier. Distract. You are trauma bonded to him. I get it. The farther away you get the easier it becomes. Make a list of things you want and need to do. The gift here is that you found out he’s not what you thought he was and now you are free. Now you take center stage, not mister lying cheaterpants. He will do it again. They always do. Just read what all of our village has experienced. It’s a playbook we know well. So well, in fact, that his future behavior is predicted on these pages. You will get better. It will feel better. Keep going. We are rooting for you and all the suffering souls who are forced to go though this shit show with these clowns. You can do this.

The ex dumped me after 26 years for an ex gf. He never admitted the affair and I found emails. My father died only a few weeks before I was dumped. I was 59. Before I knew about the affair, I was desperate for him to come back. I danced around making a fool of myself. I say that because his behaviour leading up to my discard was sufficient justification on its own for me to have dumped him, even without the affair. He sucked up my dancing. He strutted and preened and smirked. He wouldn’t divorce me – wanted to wait 2 years with consent (UK). ExgfOW wanted him to start divorce proceedings on the grounds of my unreasonable behaviour immediately, so that they could ‘tell the world about their ‘love’ and get married (I saw the emails). I gave him what we both wanted. I did not want that lying, narcissistic cheat hanging round my neck like a milestone for any longer than necessary. Of course, he delayed and dragged his feet even though he wanted to be free, he said. He threw his toys out of the pram when I refused to deal with him other than through lawyers. There came a point when we were trying to get him to collect his hoarded rubbish, including his hundreds of books which we had dragged around on every move at vast removal expense and which he said he didn’t want once he had to take sole responsibility. He wanted to come to the house. What he wanted was to strut, preen, and bully me into disposing of his rubbish at my expense. I told my lawyer (I’m a lawyer too), that I never wanted to see his face again. My lawyer told his lawyer that I ‘never wanted to see your client’s face again under any circumstances whatsoever’. It was very final, like death. And I have never heard from him or his toxic family again. No kids made it easier.

The thing is, part of me continued to hope that he would ‘fight for me’, that he would show that he cared. 26 years is a long time and I felt as if I was cutting off my nose to spite my face. But what that meant was that, in order to be in his amazing orbit, I had to settle for scraps. I had to continue to be available as a friend, with exgfOW keeping him on that leash, in a toxic, poisonous situation. The truth is that the friends thing only applies if you still have an emotional connection with the ex, a lying cheater. That emotional connection will harm the chump while the ex has a good laugh about his mightiness as a woman magnet (or man magnet). You cannot heal a wound that’s having poison washed into it daily. You keep the wound clean, eat well, sleep well, put good stuff on it, and it heals. Stick tetanus in a cut and you’ll get tetanus and die. Blocking the ex POS was hard and the best thing I did. My wound still gapes from time to time (it’s gaping today) but it’s closed for longer than it’s open and the healing happens much more quickly now. Good luck.

C in C – I. too, lost my home, extended family and beloved kitties when I left. I thought it would be a trial separation and we would both work on our marriage. Nope. I ended up going gray rock (minimal contact), filling for divorce and went no contact. That allowed me to keep my dignity and sanity. At this point, your ex is a bad habit that will fade if you intentionally replace the email/phone call with almost anything else. Make a list of 21 activities that are pleasant, healthy and/or productive. Do those instead. Repeat every 21 days.

Anyone who cheats has no morals at all. They also don’t see other people as human. It doesn’t chance. I’ve never seen someone develop a conscience. Never. Cheaters are the serial killers of relationships. They don’t regret it, they are sick. It’s horrible to read of so much trauma and grief and I can’t understand how people can be so cruel and heatless to people who were loyal and honest either. It’s a scary thing and it’s plan evil. Unfortunately these people are black holes there is nothing good in there. Nothing. It’s just dark vast darkness and you have to keep away from them like your life depends on it because it does.

Start accepting that you were married to someone that was not the man you thought he was. He probably never existed. Did you see any red flags before you married him? Why did his first marriage not work? I am not saying it was your fault. He fooled you. Please build a life without his interruptions. It is hard but there is nothing in this for you but more pain. Believe everything CL said! Do you want to be friends with a person who lies and cheats and either can’t make up his mind but enjoys keeping a hurt X in his Plan Z file? There is only more hurtache in this for you. SORRY/

There are so many people and communities who could use the attention of someone as loving as you are.

Big Brothers and Sisters, Adult Literacy, your local church if that’s your thing, reading books to babies in the natal unit of your local hospital, volunteering at your local library…
There are also many senior singles, my Grandmother met the love of her life at age 85. A lovely widower who’s family considered her one of their own and they visited her even after he passed away.

Once you can drop the rope on this horrible user of a man, you can spend your energy finding people and communities that need and will love you. He isn’t your only option to not be alone. Sending all the love.

It’s the trauma bond that you’re experiencing. What your ex is doing is typical; cheaters are black holes and nothing and no one can ever satisfy them. Channel the pain and anger into focusing on making the best life for yourself and reach out to a good therapist. .

My pet died the month after fuckwit’s affair was exposed and my friend, who had ovarian cancer, passed away the following month. It was their loss that helped me realize that I wanted nothing to do with a heartless individual like FW or his deranged sloppy seconds anywhere near my life going forward.

It gets better. What’s important is that you no longer allow him the ability to affect your present and future life.

OMG – that verse from Ezekiel. Well done, Chump Lady! Well done! ????????????????????????

Thanks for doing this topic today. Very timely; I really needed it. It’s weird how grieving works. You think you’re doing fine but then it’s almost too fine, like how the tide goes out reeeeaaalllyyy far before a tidal wave comes in for the kill.

Leeches have a powerful anticoagulant in their saliva called hirudin that keeps the wound perpetually open so the leech can keep feeding. Separating from an abuser is like pulling off a massive blood sucking leech. You dread the moment of complete separation because you know you’re going to keep bleeding for a period after the thing is finally ripped away. But it’s only when the thing is pried loose, the poison washed away and the wound allowed to heal a bit that clouds clear and the real story starts to emerge that sets things in perspective.

One thing that was familiar in Cali’s story is that when her FW pronounced his intent to move out, she automatically assumed it was because he was “tired.” It suggests that she may have been trained over a period of many years to view him as “overwhelmed,” and “exhausted” and “put upon”– in fact, victimized!– by obligations and also that she’d been trained to repeatedly forgive weird behavior because she was led to believe she had some fault in his put-upon state.

Because abusers are pretty cookie-cutter and predictable in their tactics, I’ll hazard a guess that she feels paralyzed to the degree that her FW had, over years and years, subtly instilled a sense of “FOG” or “fear/obligation/guilt” in her. It’s a classic tact of abusers. Personally I was boiled like a frog for ages through FW’s daily displays of “FOG” gesture warfare that ranged from subtle and nearly undetectable to periodic fits and tantrums over his tragic lot in life. And tucked within his tragic rhapsodies were always a few hints that it was me who was causing his suffering.

Abusers do this both to retroactively justify their bad past behavior and proactively pave the way for more. They’re the world’s biggest victims and they feel its their due. It was only after D-Day and during the wreckonsiliation period that it dawned on me that he’d kept me constantly off balance and mildly anxious because of these gestures and, in doing so, he managed to foster my dependence on his reassurances to relieve that anxiety. I’d formerly advocated for battered women but because FW’s fuckery came in “lite” form for most of the marriage, I failed to notice that it was the exact pattern that domestic batterers employ, aka the cycle of abuse: tension building, explosion, remorse/lovebombing. It’s also the same as the random reinforcement/punishment that creates “learned helplessness” in lab animals.

For another animal analogy, the behavior also reminds me of a favorite cat I’d had since kittenhood. He was a charming, hilarious, smart doll-faced Persian so his quirk of occasionally going into “military mode” was forgivable. Sometimes he liked his belly petted but sometimes he’d bunch up on your hand like a bear trap with all four paws and half-bite you, then would immediately start grooming the hand he just feigned to bite. Bite/make it better, bite/make it better, bite/make it better. He was forgiven because he never left a mark and because he was a cat, not a human. When humans do this, they tend to leave infected wounds and it’s not forgivable.

After D-Day, I became intolerant of even the subtlest little FOG displays from FW and realized that calling him on each and every one was like playing wack-a-mole. How had I not previously seen how relentless he was? I almost don’t regret the otherwise regrettable RIC thing because it gave me a chance to really study him and his “bite/make it better” tactics. Every FW is probably different in how they induce “FOG.” I started keeping lists. A few classic examples of things that took place day to day:

–Wakes up in the morning with a sour expression, refuses to admit he’s in a mood. Gets hissy when questioned and then rhapsodizes about chronic lack of sleep in a dramatic, husky tone and asks if we can please get to sleep earlier (subtext: implies with his attitude that somehow it’s my fault even when he insisted that dinner be served at 9:30PM so he could prepare for a work meeting and then stayed up until two AM watching Netflix the night before).

–While sitting at the kitchen table talking about something serious, he lurches away suddenly as if the stove were on fire but, in fact, was only retrieving a cup of coffee. Stubs his toe dramatically and spills coffee on the way back and makes a huge, hopping deal out of it, hissing curses and filling the room with a sense of dread (subtext: minor terror tactics as diversion to get out of having the discussion).

— Driving back at 8PM from a very long and important doctor’s consultation for a child with a chronic condition, he gets hissy when I suggest we stop at the grocery store to pick up something that will be quick to cook because everyone’s starving. Him… Do we need to do this now, isn’t there anything at home, organic pork chops are so expensive and he’d been doing the accounting and we needed to tighten our belts because he can’t keep working at this pace without ending up having a stroke (subtext: competing with sick child whose care he neglected during an affair; decrying the credit card debt he created with his affair; blaming the “burden of having a family” in front of the kids for his potential tragic demise…).

After D-Day, the high point of the FOG campaign was when FW “helpfully” gave me a book on the clinical importance of sleep. Every cheater seems to have main themes in their blame reversal and justification for mistreating their partner. In FW’s case, lacking anything else to blame me for, he’d sort of settled on this narrative that I was somehow the “enemy of sleep” and, er, uh, that’s what had driven him to become a fourth stage alcoholic within a few months, bang the office doorknob and blow the kids’ college funds on a drunken, spendy affair. The irony was too much for me. I’d suffered debilitating insomnia during and in the wake of the affair– literally years of Guantanamo level sleep deprivation. When he handed me the paperback, I turned into a hissing, spitting demon, tore the thing into tiny pieces and swore to make a paper mache sculpture of him fucking the AP with it on top of a bed made of money and the corpses of his family.

The look on his face was priceless. I’d stolen his drama queen crown! But I’d never wanted to be in a drama queen death match. I’ve never been a crier or scene-maker. My idea of communicating hardship was simply telling people close to me in a neutral voice and in a neutral moment that such-and-such was going on and I’d appreciate support and that, out of empathy, people who care about you will quietly provide help out just as you would do in turn. Life provides enough drama and shock on its own without adding to it with exhausting displays.

It started to become clear the FOG nonsense was daily behavior and he’d always done it in one form or another. All through the marriage he had shown an effort to “make up” for these spates of unsettling behavior but those apologies were always laced with more hints of his victim status, that he was doing these things because he was tired, overworked, overwhelmed, because the behavior was modeled to him in his (woeful) childhood, etc. Even his bits of “stoic” behavior had an undercurrent of long and solitary suffering beneath it and subtle resentment. So when his behavior got worse during the affair, my first thought had been that he was “exhausted, overwhelmed, cracking under pressure!” just as I’d been trained to think. The text threads from that period really illustrate the over-the-top rhapsodizing manipulation of constantly depicting himself as a victim of life. I’d been so acclimatized to the behavior that I had begun to feel automatically responsible for whatever was wrong with him. And during the affair, I waited for his typical “So sorry, I’ll make it up to you, my dad used to do this and I hate it, I understand and I’m determined to change this…” bs but the “groom/reassurance/lovebomb” became scarcer and scarcer and I was just left with the bite marks and growing infections. And then he began the DARVO “deny, attack, reverse victim/offender” tactics where he claimed to have always been miserable from all my complaining… from the guy who never stopped complaining and blaming.

Going back to the leech analogy, I think we dread the moment of prying the thing loose because the leech who put the gaping wound there convinced us it was, in fact, a living tourniquet! They backfill reality and gaslight so much that we end up believing we must have always had an open wound of chronic anxiety and the helpful abuser was just there to staunch the bleeding! If the behavior is chronic, it’s easy to forget who bit first, who kept the injury open with daily fuckery or mood swings or odd behaviors or tantrums or just an eerie feeling something wasn’t right– whatever it took to keep us unsettled and dependent on the “make it better” reassurances. If a victim did happen to have a cause for anxiety that preceded the relationship, it can be even harder to determine the ways an abuser keeps “refreshing” that anxiety and disallows the healing that might have come with time. For others, abusers are the originators and perpetuators of destabilizing dread.

In my experience, I think someone’s feeling of helpless dependency and paralysis following betrayal is a dead giveaway that they had been subjected to some sort of FOG campaign and cyclical abuse for a period leading up to betrayal. In the improbable case of marrying someone who was perfectly wonderful, loving, sane and balanced for years but who changed overnight and becomes a betrayer, I suspect the initial shock might be greater but the recovery much swifter. So I don’t believe the post-abuse paralysis is solely from the shock of betrayal itself but from years of undermining, sabotaging, etc.

Because abusers are famous for having selective memories, for forgetting the disordered things they do and for creating elaborate narratives of why their victims deserved abuse, abusers’ conviction about the “truth” of these narratives can be spellbinding. It can take time to break the spell and start remembering how things really were, but those revelations aren’t going to come until the abuser is fully out of the picture. I think many abusers try to stick around and string along former victims in order to keep updating the spellbinding “program” and keep the victim drowning in the false narrative precisely because the abuser realizes that, in their absence, the truth will start seeping back in and they will be damned in the victim’s assessment.

I can attest to how powerful that spellbinding is because even my past training to recognize cyclical abuse dynamics, captor bonding, learned helplessness and the rest weren’t enough to fully spare me the paralyzing effects. But I think it helped that those dynamics were in the back of my mind so that when I got out, I knew I’d have to start deprogramming. I did this by writing out the story of the relationship from beginning to end from my own perspective. The more I wrote, the more little forgotten details I’d recall. The final picture was absolutely damning and clear but it hadn’t seemed that way at the time.

It was at that point that I allowed myself to mourn the past because I’d finally pieced together the story of the disaster. I think grieving can act as a kind of epilogue, a seal that’s put on an experience before storing it away and moving on. I didn’t want to put a seal on the narrative that I’d “lost the love of my life because he was a poor, sad, disordered sausage” because that was his bloody story, not mine. By the time I got to grieving, it was manageable because it was just over lost time, not over the loss of an abuser.

This “cake eating” behavior by FWs reminds me of the monsters who largely abandon a pet or livestock – throwing the tiniest bit of nutrition to keep them from straying and (barely) alive. It’s not that they don’t understand, it’s that they don’t care.