Hi everyone.

I've been reading over this forum and after a couple of weeks of reading, I finally worked up the courage to post.

I've found reading your stories and advice so comforting.

I can't believe I didn't work out what my ex was for so many years. I guess when he first came into my life he was unpracticed and not as good at his manipulations of me. However, looking back, all the signs were there. I guess over time i chose to forget those red flags and the reasons i left him and just remember the good times.

But now 10 years later, in his second comming into my life, he is more ruthless, more seductive in his persuit of me. To the point where I have thrown my own morals out the window. I think it is this that disgusts me the most. He seduced me into cheating on my husband. I allowed him to manipulate me to the point where I supplied him with all the ammunition he needs to destroy my happy life without him. I know I must accept responsibility. In the end I made the choice. But it is hard to say no when it happened so gradually, such small little increments. I guess he just kept "moving the goal posts" on me until I became so obsessed with pleasing him I didn't think about anything else.

Now I have realised what he is. I have started no contact and it's been a few weeks. I want him gone, out of my life, so it's easy not to talk to him in that sense. What isn't easy is the fear of the repercussions of no contact. There has been, in the past, threats of telling my husband about my affairs. I don't want to leave my husband or tell him. I know intellectually I should tell him. But it's hard.

If my story sounds disjointed, I apologise, but I'm so anxious all the time. I hope sharing this will give me comfort and strength to take responsibility for my actions and keep me out of his clutches in future.

Dear Seems normal,

No contact is a good thing. How's his contact with you? Is he trying?
The worry that he might 'out you' to your husband must be a terrible stress. If he's holding no contact and the longer, he might move on. If he starts to
escalate, you might want to think about coming clean before 'an incident' , that way he loses power over you and your husband.
A difficult choice on your part . Certainly don't try to talk to the Spath about your concerns, or try to appease him, he will pick up on the manipulation and use it.

Good luck with this dilemma and Stay Safe.

In the past when I have said I wanted to end it he has threatened, but not this time. When I broke up with him the first time he contacted my new boyfriend to tell him I had cheated on him. But this time he is married and maybe telling my husband could be risky as he has a marriage to lose also.

His contact with me has been slow. I guess it's because since January I have been trying to distance myself from him. Trying to become boring to him so he would move on. I'd take longer and longer to reply to his emails (we live very far from each other so the Internet is where we talk) to the point where his emails have dropped off. I stopped replying about three weeks ago. I have had several emails since then, but only one or two a week.

No contact is a good thing- 3 weeks is awesome, way to go! But he's still contacting you via email, and you're still reading them, right? In my book that's still contact. His words are still affecting you. Block his email address or better yet- change your email addresses. Don't let him in at all. Distance is a good thing too!

And I wonder if that anxiety you're feeling is cognitive dissonance. Have you thought about going to therapy? I had a very hard time with my CD fr weeks but it began to unravel when I started therapy.

SeemsNormal,

Welcome to the site. I think you will find a lot of answers and support here. The advice of NC is certainly the best. Shayna is right, it also includes electronic contact and social media such as facebook. NC is difficult, but will help you break your addiction to this person. Keep reading and keep posting- we are here for you.

Thanks everyone for your helpful responses.

The stress is huge, it could be cognitive dissonance. I am trying to justify what I did by saying he MADE me do it. But I feel like, although I was a willing participant at times, other times I wanted to stop, to pull back on the things he 'suggested' I do, but was not allowed to. The continual 'suggestions', especially at times of heightened arousal made it hard to say no, if impossible.

Am I a fool for trying to justify my actions? Or am I just trying to come to terms with the things I did. Things I would never have done without the encouragement and suggestions him.

What do you guys think?

Im not 'totally' sure what you are saying, but my 'guess' as to my own experience is that you went out of your comfort zone and did some things you might be ashamed of, and it looks sexual. On those points, I wouldn't work it over. Seriously? The least of our problems is the great sex, or slightly ashamed sex we had with the Spaths. It might be the only great or fun thing we take away from the experience.
If I've read you wrong, forgive me.
Sex with Spaths can be great and unleashed. You get all kinds of exciting stuff because THEY need Extra. If you liked it, it's ok. If you feel a tiny but ashamed it's ok too, if you weren't harmed. The way I feel about sex, it's All Good. The bad is when it goes bad. And it does. That was the sucky part.

For example: We had great sex, all over the place, you name it, it was in play. but then sometimes he'd try to hurt me, I complained and he would get mad, he said 'that's the point' but I resisted pain, no way. I insisted that play was 'erotic' but without pain, but I saw he was angry about my not going for it.

They are ALL into kinky sex, aren't they? I did not have sex with mine, being that I'm married and many many states away from him. But we did have a chat once and the subject came up. I made a reference to pain and he got very excited and said, "S and M, baby!" and so on. It was all supposed to be in jest, but looking back, I'd say that no, it was not in jest for him. Sometimes I wonder if the guy he was involved with (I believe he used both men and women equally, depending on who came along) ...I wonder if he got him to do things outside his boundaries because he seemed terrified to hear from me and to be told what I knew about the Psychopath. Hmm.

I think so, yes. So long as they are not on the receiving end . Their relationship to BDSM is predicated on them being the giver of pain - never the other way around. Incidentally, they do not uphold agreements about what is called power-exchange, which is NEVER forced but always voluntary and need not, if ever, involve pain of any kind. Consensus is the password so to speak.

A psychopath into BDSM is a recipe for disaster. Run!

Nan

Ill try and explain myself better.

The sex was probably what lead me back into a relationship with him again. My marriage wasn't great at the time and I stupidly told him that the sex was lacking. So that was his first in. Innocent enough at first but it got more and more. We don't live in the same area, so he came up with the idea that if I was unhappy with the sex with my husband I should look elsewhere for sex only. At first I said no, I wouldn't do that. After months of his coaxing, he talked me into finding other unhappy married people to have sex with. And I did. And of course I had to tell him all the details.... Eventually it lead to sending pictures etc.

It's funny you should mention BDSM. I think that was what got me hooked again. I am interested in being submissive and my husband and I played around with it. When I told my spath about it, he became more excited and more interested in me than ever before. Whenever I said no to him he would say "but I own you" or would pull back his affections until I did something to "make it up to him" for "disappointing" him. He would also say things like "you need me because no other man could ever give you what you want". And I believed it for a time. But I soon realised it wasn't a real power exchange when I realised my boundaries were never reapected, the goal posts always moved. It was like if I did one thing or slept with one guy, he would say "well, you've done it once, it should be easier to do it next time."

An of course I liked parts of it. The attention I felt lacking in my marriage was there. But that's what abusers an manipulaters often do isn't it? If you like just enough of them, you seem to overlook the other parts.

Yep, mine was into the whole BDSM thing too. I'm not ashamed of the sex we had- like others have said, it was great. Even after I went NC with mine a couple months ago I've often thought about having a couple last flings with him. Not seriously considering it, just more of a 'wouldn't it be nice if' kind of thing. As for the giving, it went both ways for us.

At the end of our relationship I found he'd joined a local group sex site a few days before I left him. You have no idea how fortunate I feel for avoiding that... not only the potential STDs if/when he indulges in all that but the situations he might've created if he tried to get me to join in at some point. No thank you.

As for the cognitive dissonance- it was a solid two weeks for me before I understood why I was carrying around as much anxiety as I was, and another week before I began noticing any real improvement with it. However, I've been in therapy throughout the whole thing so without a doubt this is helping me work through it.

You were not a fool for "falling" for what you did. You were manipulated just like the rest of us were. However, while I think it's important to accept that fact I also think it's important to own the role we've played as well. We did make poor choices while we were with our Psychopaths. We have to accept that and forgive ourselves, and learn from it. We'll be stronger for it and then we won't be so willing to move those goal posts anymore!

It's a wisdom we gain through all this.

Well, yes, LOL, that's true, Shayna, hopefully minus the STD...

I made a joke about using a "safe word" and he told me that his favorite reply is, "that's not it". Ew. Can you even imagine? I can't...

So it's been a few weeks of no contact.

He is still emailing (infrequently- about once a week). Which, in my mind confirms, for me that I don't mean anything to him. It helps me confirm everything I know. I hope and pray that he is justly flicking me an email every once in a while, hoping that I'll give in and respond. But I still have huge fear about being exposed. That he will tell my husband. I have the hope that by exposing our relationship, it could negatively effect his own marriage- and I'm pretty sure his marriage is important to him, as his wife comes from a wealthy family and he gets free holidays and perks from her family all the time.

I hope I am unimportant to him, but I won't know until he makes a move.

How do you deal with the fear? How do you get past the idea that they know all of your weaknesses and will use them, embarrass you, shame you or humiliate you?

Hi Normal

It's been two months of NC for me, but I've also blocked him from everything so I haven't gotten anything from him because he has no way of doing it. He has slandered me right after I left him to the people he knows were closest to me and I've had to work hard to repair those relationships. Some were easier than others, but each one took time. A lot were lies, there was some truth, but in the end the people he contacted don't care about his disorder so I found trying to tell them about it was a dead end, so I focused on repairing the damage with what he said.

It's always in the back of my mind that he'll reach out again but since then I opened up to nearly everyone with what happened and what's going on, so it's easier now. The initial blast from him was very, very hard to get through and it made my life very hard for a while, but as time passed it got easier. I never lost any friends over it. Most everyone knows what he's about to some degree now so it's easier to think whatever he does will reflect on him now and not me.

I know you feel that you're not in any sort of position to do anything preemptively though, and you never know, your Psychopath may never do anything... but you'll have to accept that some day you may have to deal with it all too, and that's a pretty heavy burden to carry. You may even decide telling your husband is an option. We all make mistakes in life. I don't know what to tell you about dealing with the fear, I can only tell you what I did. I no longer fear my Psychopath at all.