My decision to speak about this publicly was not an easy one. On one level, it serves as an acknowledgment of my vulnerability and blind spots. As a professional coach who has helped hundreds of clients with their relationships, it was humbling to realize that this could happen to me without my awareness. This experience has taught me about the dangers of false hope and the limitations of my best intentions and sense of responsibility.
I want to note that, despite calling out very harmful behaviors in this woman, a woman I was involved with for seven years, my goal is not to condemn her as an evil person. I have always believed that the truth is more nuanced than this, starting with the view that people with such tendencies are people who ultimately need help. I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that, even though this may be a beautiful way of seeing it, nobody (including me) could help her if she wasn’t sincerely willing and able to recognize her issues and take responsibility for herself.
As of now, I am a year and nine months into my recovery, which has played out very differently from how I had imagined it would. I have struggled with ongoing PTSD and a tendency to become easily triggered by conflicts or situations where I still feel like it’s not safe to stand up for myself. The strange thing is that I thought I was handling it well during the relationship. I thought I was seeing myself clearly through her distortions and communicating my boundaries effectively while patiently working to improve our dynamic. In retrospect, I had been oblivious to the long term effects of gaslighting, and was completely unaware of the extent of my own emotional and psychological vulnerability. I simply had no idea how it would affect me over time, or that someone with many positive characteristics could also be so abusive.
In writing this, my goal is to honor myself and support my healing process by speaking my truth. I also hope that by sharing this, others who have survived abusive relationships might find validation and insight that helps them in some way. The double-sided shame of talking about this is no joke. So my goal here also has to do with facing reality as it is and speaking my truth despite any shame I might still be working through. It is thanks to the support of various friends, family members, professionals, and other abuse survivors that I know I am not alone, and that I find the strength to share this publicly.
It is worth noting that during the time that led up to meeting my abuser in early 2016, I was already struggling with a sense of confusion in my love life. I did not yet know at the time that I was autistic, and like many undiagnosed adults on the spectrum, I carried a significant amount of internalized ableism. My impulse to bounce back from prior failed relationships contained a healthy element of determination to master relationship skills, which did serve me well. However, it was also driven in part by shame, as if my difficulties with relationships were somehow my fault. These factors set me up to be extra generous and accommodating, sometimes sacrificing myself to try to make it work.
There is indeed evidence that autistic people are more vulnerable to abusive relationships, but this was only one factor that made me susceptible. Coming into this relationship, I also carried a significant sense of guilt and confusion about my own needs, in part due to the abuse I had experienced as a child. This made me even easier to manipulate. In my own parts work, I’ve identified an unconscious fear of my own power, as if it was something bad that I should feel guilty about. I’ve learned that this is a common type of golden shadow that many abuse survivors can relate to. In Jungian psychology, this is what draws us into the shadow dance, where we unconsciously attract a “darkly powerful other” that our disowned healthy power gets projected onto. At a cosmic level, my tendency to attract experiences of being treated like a doormat is also a common experience of 2nd stage Aries, my Sun sign. I’m beginning the story here because I consider these bits of context to be essential in understanding the unique conditions that made me susceptible to abuse.
We met in 2016 at a parent-teacher evening for the Waldorf school that our kids (from previous relationships) attended. The beginning seemed magical. She showed up in a dream two months before I met her. My previous relationship ended due to a painful betrayal, and this magical beginning gave me a sense of hope that life was taking care of me. We developed a friendship that took several months to become romantic, and it was another year before she moved into my house.
At the time, my corporate job as a software engineering manager made it possible to support her financially. I was able to cover the mortgage, utilities, and various expenses so that she could focus on trying to grow her coaching business. I helped with her website and podcast and provided countless hours of encouragement and emotional support. I had become interested in becoming a coach myself, and I was happy to share my talents and resources to help build a life together. Despite a pattern of emotional blow-ups based on misunderstandings that was starting to reveal itself, I trusted the adventure of where it was all leading, and I tried to focus on how I could grow through our difficulties.
The early warning signs didn’t occur to me as a serious problem at the time. I began to notice that she seemed to be quite ungrateful when it came to money, even entitled and demanding at times. For example, I was purchasing a new bed and when I offered to include her input, she insisted that only an organic, latex mattress would do, costing twice as much as the other options. When I expressed that frugality was an important consideration for me, things escalated. She was angered by my suggestion that since it was my money, it might be appropriate for the final decision to be up to me. Rattled by the accusatory, sharp tone of her anger and unsure of what to do, I resolved it by conceding and getting the expensive mattress she wanted. Perhaps, I thought, life was trying to show me that I needed to be less stubborn and stingy, and that I needed to be more generous.
Then there was the time I bought her a dinnerware set as a Christmas present. When she opened it, she was immediately disappointed by the design and became angry, asking why I would have chosen it without her input. When I apologized and tried to reassure her that I had picked it out while sincerely considering what I thought she would like, she escalated further, raising her voice in a punishing, accusatory tone in front of the children, who were 9 and 10 years old at the time. I asked to relocate to another room away from the kids, to continue trying to repair the situation. She demanded an answer to how I could be so ignorant and selfish. Even my repeated reassurance that we could exchange it didn’t seem to calm her down, and when I tried to share how it felt for me to have my good intentions misunderstood, it only caused her anger to escalate again into yelling, and we would be back to square one. By the end of it, the kids had been waiting for over half an hour to continue to unwrap their Christmas gifts.
This pattern of irresolvable conflicts based on misunderstandings of my intent, escalating into yelling, continued and worsened as our relationship progressed. I continued to try and make the best of it, confused in self-doubt that perhaps I was indeed being too stubborn or too stingy. I would flip-flop between this perspective and the perspective that something was wrong, that I wasn’t being treated fairly, and that we needed to clear up whatever was causing these misunderstandings, once and for all.
Over time, our conflicts progressed into verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse. She would often act vengefully as if she was punishing me for not agreeing with her distorted version of reality. If I tried to speak the truth about my intentions when I made an honest mistake, hoping to clear things up, I was made to regret it by having insults screamed in my face, often aimed directly at my deepest vulnerabilities.
Sometimes, her explosions would take place in front of the kids, which was especially concerning to me. Despite her saying that she agreed it wasn’t good behavior, she kept doing it. My usual, calm and constructive approach didn’t seem to work, and on a few occasions, I even allowed myself to yell back. I had never seen myself sink to this level of drama before in a relationship, and I felt horrible about it even though it felt necessary to stand up for myself and get across that her behavior was unacceptable. I later learned that what I was experiencing was a mild version of reactive abuse. I never directed physical aggression at her, but I did slam the kitchen counter one time, which prompted her to call the police. The ongoing drama was taking a toll on me. My nervous system had become chronically dysregulated, and I began to experience waves of anxiety and insomnia for weeks after each blow-up. Just as I would begin to feel like things were becoming peaceful, it would happen again.
With the help of my coach, I began working on improving my boundaries. It was difficult and exhausting, but it seemed like we might be getting somewhere. When I was calmly firm, persistent, and serious with her about how these patterns were causing me to have concerns about the health of our relationship, she would take time to reflect and then come back a day or two later, usually sharing a big realization about how her trauma was at play. Whenever this happened, it came as a huge relief for me. She seemed to be uncovering whatever it was that was causing her to distrust me and assume manipulative, selfish intent. Each time she would blow up and assault me with accusations, I would try to validate her feelings while offering clarifications to try and clear up the misunderstanding. However, I was also gradually sinking deeper into a confused state of wondering if she might be right, and if I had something shady going on in myself that I wasn’t aware of. When she came back with a realization about her triggers, it relieved me of feeling responsible and renewed my hope in the relationship. Things would get better again, for a while.
During one of these periods of renewed hope and positive momentum, I proposed to her and we got engaged. I bought us a fun vacation and we started talking about wedding ideas. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was beginning to struggle with depression, and my growing desperation had me grasping for something positive to look forward to. I needed to believe that things were improving and that life would reward me for sticking it out. Beneath my hope was an intense fear that I wouldn’t be able to handle yet another heartbreak, and the magical beginning still had me in a trance.
In 2018, I decided to take my own interest in coaching more seriously and completed the training program at Newfield Network. A wild series of events unfolded for me at work, which I plan to write about in a separate post. It led to a decision to leave my corporate job and pursue coaching full-time. I decided to sell my house, invest the proceeds, and use that money to sustain myself while building up a coaching practice. It was a scary decision, but the adventure and deep sense of meaning I got from coaching made it an irresistible decision.
This led to a conversation with my then-fiancee, who so far had not been making any contributions to our living costs. We needed to find a place to rent for a few years, and I wasn’t going to be able to afford to cover it all by myself anymore. Either we needed to lower our standard of living by downsizing and choosing a cheaper neighborhood, or I would need her to start paying for her half of the living expenses. When I brought this up with her, she said “No problem. I can start paying half.” Great!
Around the same time, she was in the process of applying to schools to obtain a Master’s Degree in Social Work, so that should could pursue a career as a therapist. She was also applying for student loans to cover her costs. We found a rental in an ideal location, with plenty of square footage for our home offices and other conveniences. Within a couple of weeks of moving in, she came to me one day to express her concern about how large her student loans were going to be if she had to start paying half the rent, utilities, and other shared expenses. When I told her that I had assumed she had considered this when she agreed to start paying her half, she assured me that she intended to honor our agreement, but just hadn’t realized how much it was going to add up to.
At this point, I was fraught with conflicting perspectives in my thought process. It felt important not to cave in and offer to continue covering our housing costs, which I truly couldn’t afford anymore. I was worried because it was starting to seem like she might have some immature concepts about money. Maintaining a clear boundary based on what I was willing to give, versus what I truly couldn’t afford, became a matter of real importance. I needed to see that she could respect my autonomy. However, I did have money in savings from having sold my house, which I was looking for ways to preserve and invest. Was I being too stingy again? Was life trying to teach me to trust, let go of material things, and put the relationship first? She was my fiancee, after all, and the life I wanted was one of teamwork and mutual support. Surely, her education would help her to mature and things would only get better.
So, in an effort to help, I had what seemed like a good idea at the time. If she borrowed the money from me to cover her half of the housing costs, I could give her a much better interest rate than what she could get from a student loan. It would allow me to be as generous as possible in the near term, while still respecting my own financial needs with an understanding that it would be paid back.
She said that she liked the idea. We discussed it and agreed to keep track of the loan balance in a spreadsheet as I continued to pay for the rent, utilities, mobile phone bills, and other expenses for three and a half years. I trusted our verbal agreement and it never crossed my mind to ask her to sign anything.
My feelings of guilt didn’t go away, and I continued to second-guess myself. On more than one occasion, she complained about how it felt to have everything tracked in a spreadsheet. Feeling bad about this, I offered to adjust it so that she was only responsible for 40% of the rent and I covered 60%. A few months later, despite having received funding from her student loans, she was short on covering her next tuition payment. I offered to pay the difference, not as a loan but as a gift. It’s strange to admit this, but in retrospect, I can see now that I was so eager to create a feeling of positivity in the relationship that I thought that even more generosity might finally earn her trust and respect.
It was becoming painfully apparent to me by this point in the relationship that she had never learned about good boundaries when it came to money. Her parents were still supporting her financially, which was understandable, but they were also paying for her daughter’s private school tuition. I also loved Waldorf school and had been paying for my son to attend there for years. But when it came to the reality of how my career transition would impact my finances, it just wasn’t going to be possible for me to afford it anymore.
My decision to begin looking at public middle schools for my son was deeply upsetting to her. This led to a series of tense confrontations about how she couldn’t believe I would even consider this. She even went so far as to tell me that it was making her question what kind of person I was. To her, the public school system was nothing but a machine for indoctrinating kids into mainstream ideology, and a Waldorf education was our only hope of protecting them from becoming soul-less robots.
This added to my concerns about the relationship. It was as if I had become an outsider who was even less trustworthy now because my son wouldn’t be at Waldorf school anymore. She couldn’t seem to understand the legitimacy of my situation and didn’t seem to respect my sense of financial responsibility. There was something extreme about her point of view that worried me. First of all, not respecting that I was my own person with the ability to make decisions for myself and my son. Second, she seemed to hold a sense of entitlement about having her daughter attend a private school that she wasn’t even paying for herself.
She eventually backed off on this topic, accepting my decision. Even though she still didn’t seem to respect it, I trusted that it was just a matter of time before she would start to get where I was coming from, and the gratitude and respect I’d been longing for would finally be forthcoming. I couldn’t see at the time how my hope had been turning into desperation.
I was finally diagnosed with level 1 autism in early 2021, after suspecting I might be autistic for some time. I thought it might provide some answers to our relationship challenges and provide us with insight that could help. While it did end up becoming a life-changing discovery for me, all it seemed to do for my fiancee was deepen her stance that I was the problem. I received little compassion or understanding about my neurodiverse needs, and she wasn’t at all interested in considering how this might partly explain why she frequently misunderstood my intent as manipulative or selfish.
So far, I haven’t mentioned the challenges I was experiencing with my fiancee’s daughter, but this started to become a more serious problem as she reached the age of 12. Anyone who has raised a pre-teen girl knows that this can be a difficult age, and anyone who has been a step-parent knows that this type of relationship can make it even more difficult. My efforts to communicate boundaries and remind her about our house rules were perceived as a power battle that she would try to win in increasingly manipulative and clever ways. Whenever I tried to communicate my needs, she seemed to see it as an opportunity to prove that I couldn’t control her. The disrespectful attitude and constant drama were becoming a living nightmare for me.
I sought help in therapy, which confirmed that I was already handling everything quite well. This helped with my self-doubt and gave me greater confidence in setting boundaries, but it was unclear why it wasn’t translating into any improvement in attitude or behavior. My therapist eventually started asking questions about my relationship with my fiancee and concluded that this might be the source of the problem. This was the first external confirmation I’d gotten that indeed something wasn’t right in our relationship, and it felt overwhelming to consider what that meant at the time.
When I tried to discuss these issues with my fiancee, she would flip between agreeing to work on things with her daughter and blaming it on me for not being more warm and fatherly. She still wasn’t interested in trying to understand how my autism presented a challenge for me to convey care and warmth, and she insisted that if I wanted to earn her daughter’s respect, I needed to treat her more like she was my own child. She seemed to think that I wasn’t giving her the same love as my son, but I truly was, and the same boundaries too. But she seemed to interpret my boundaries as unloving, and my son was never disrespectful in these ways when I set boundaries with him. Having grown up in a stepfamily myself, expecting us to be just as close as if I were her real father didn’t seem realistic to me. From my perspective, it would be more appropriate for my fiancee to help us both by teaching her daughter to respect my boundaries, while I focused on creating opportunities to connect and have fun together, in a way that was authentic for me.
My fiancee and I ended up finding and reading the book Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships, by Patricia Papernow. It is an excellent book that I highly recommend. The book confirmed that my approach was indeed the most realistic and effective way to go, and stressed the importance of letting go of the expectation that a step-parent relationship should be as close as that of a blood parent. My fiancee flat-out rejected this advice. She argued that since it was written by an American author, it must be culturally biased. She started to accuse me of not allowing room for her family’s cultural values in our blended family, and this became yet another source of chronic misunderstandings and irresolvable conflict.
I continued to work on firmly but gently communicating my boundaries with her daughter. One day in early 2021, when I invited her to join me and my son to go sledding on a snowy day, she responded with an attitude and a disrespectful remark. I told her that it didn’t feel good when she talked to me that way and that I’d be happy to have her join us if we could try the conversation again, more respectfully. She rolled her eyes and stomped off to her room. My son and I got ready to go, and then I checked in with her to give her another chance. She rolled her eyes and ignored me.
I headed downstairs and before leaving with my son to go sledding, I checked in with my fiancee to let her know what happened and why her daughter wouldn’t be joining us. She got angry, accusing me of being unnecessarily harsh with her daughter when all she wanted was to come sledding. I tried to explain that I was just following the advice of my therapist, following the steps to communicate my boundaries when her attitude was disrespectful. I expressed that I was open to her ideas if she could think of a better way to handle the situation. Instead of offering a suggestion, she made a demand that I let her daughter come anyways, making me wrong for what I needed and not allowing room any boundaries at all.
When I explained why that wouldn’t work for me, her anger escalated into screaming in my face, calling me names, threatening me, and bringing up unrelated, personal topics in an attempt to target my vulnerabilities. My son was standing there at the door, witnessing the whole thing. I tried to tell her that this way of treating me was not okay and that I needed her to calm down if we were going to continue the conversation, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I told her that I was going to leave now and I grabbed our sleds to head outside. She followed us, continuing to scream profanities at me as we walked out into the cul-de-sac in the middle of the neighborhood. She still had a piece of raw chicken in one hand, and a large knife in the other which she was shaking and pointing at me as she continued screaming.
When my son and I made it to the sledding hill, we just sat there in silence, both of us badly shaken up. I asked how he was feeling, and he just asked me if we had to go back home after sledding. He was scared of her. I reassured him that indeed, that wasn’t okay what she did, and that I was going to make sure that this didn’t continue, even if it required moving out and finding our own place to live.
It became clear to me at this point that we had a serious problem, and I started to think seriously about leaving the relationship. As usual, my fiancee apologized within a couple days. However, she was still in disagreement about the appropriateness of my boundary with her daughter.
I was visiting my doctor a few days later and we were discussing how bad my anxiety had become. Perhaps intuitively, she asked me about how my relationship with my fiancee was going. I told her the story of what had just happened. She was shocked and went on to inform me that based on what I was telling her, she was going to be required by law to report the incident because it presented a child safety concern. Part of me felt scared, but part of me felt relieved. I had been trying to deal with all of this myself, and I needed help. I needed my fiancee to somehow see that her disrespectful and abusive behavior was going too far, and I thought this might finally lead to her realizing it.
We went through the formal process of being contacted by our county’s Department of Housing & Human Services. They had a case worker come out to interview us and each child separately to assess the situation. It resulted in a relatively soft warning and case status of “monitor”. It terrified my fiancee to think that she could lose custody of her daughter, and as hard as it was to watch her go through the experience, it seemed like a necessary and appropriate consequence for her behavior. Our conversations following this incident led to her signing up for an anger management course. I almost ended the relationship after that incident, but it was her apparent sincerity in seeking help, combined with my hope that things were finally changing that convinced me to give her another chance.
Two weeks later, she was still processing her feelings about it. She brought up that she couldn’t believe our doctor just went ahead and reported the incident without speaking to her first, to hear her side of the story. I found this very concerning for obvious reasons. It brought the sincerity of her remorse into question, and when I expressed this concern to her, she seemed to shrug it off, avoiding a direct response. None of this made sense to me because I was still in disbelief, holding onto my hope that, surely, there must be a good person in there somewhere who was capable of learning from this experience.
Part of my hope was riding on the idea that my constant generosity was a necessary thing to uphold, so that she might see it once she finally came around. So, I continued to give her money to help with tuition. These contributions, which were intended as a gift, added up to over $30k by the time she graduated in 2022. That was separate from the $46k she eventually owed me in our spreadsheet, based on the loan agreement for her 40% of the rent and other shared expenses for several years.
It might be difficult to understand how I could have still been so unaware of what was happening at this point. As we were entering the final year of our seven-year relationship, the incidents and warning signs continued. I won’t include them all here, but there was one other incident that was especially disconcerting, and caused me to finally begin to snap out of my trance of hope.
I was rafting with friends on Independence Day, about an hour’s drive from home. My car was at the take-out and my friend’s car was at the put-in. We were only a few minutes down the river when my backpack somehow managed to liberate itself of its contents, and I lost my car keys in the river. I felt overwhelmed by the stress of the situation, trying to think of what to do. We used my friend’s phone so I could call my fiancee and ask for her help. She had my other car key and I asked if she might be willing to bring it to where we were stranded.
She became angry, accusing me of not caring about how it would impact her day. I apologized and tried to assure her that this wasn’t the case, that I would be extremely grateful, and that I felt horrible asking. I just couldn’t think of what else to do. It dragged on, with her raising her voice yet again, going on and on about how selfish I was. I probably would have just hung up had I not felt so sincerely dependent upon her assistance. Our phone call went on for half an hour as my friend waited, growing concerned as he overheard it. Eventually, he interrupted and offered to drive me all the way home to get my other car key. Thank goodness. Three hours later, I got into my car, he got his stuff, and I made it home.
This incident seriously shook me. So far, I had always assumed that she would care about me and have my back in a rare situation like this. Not only did she not demonstrate any concern for my needs in the situation, but her response was cruel and abusive, adding more stress and a sense of profound isolation to my already overwhelming day.
Coming to the stark realization that she didn’t actually care about me was very difficult and took several more months to sink in. Dr. Ramani offers a great explanation for why I was being treated this way in my most vulnerable moments. I started thinking about all the other times she wasn’t there for me. Like, for example, the handful of times when my anxiety or depression would flare up and she would criticize me for how hard it was for her to have to deal with what a downer I was. On top of struggling myself, I felt guilty about the effect it was having on her, and I became afraid to ask her for any support. For the first time, it dawned on me that my worsening mental health symptoms might be a direct result of the effect that this relationship was having on me.
At one point, my doctor and my therapist were recommending that it might be time to give anti-depressants a try. When I came home with a prescription in hand, my fiancee responded with disgust. To her, anti-depressants were a cop-out on my personal growth work. Not wanting to worsen her perception of me, and half-believing that she might be right, I never took the medication. I just kept going, concerned that if my suffering was a teacher whose lesson I must be failing to grasp, then I just needed to try harder.
Part of what made this all so confusing for me is that my abuser wasn’t the only person reinforcing this idea. It seems to have become a surprisingly common distortion of our times, especially in alt-spiritual circles where the concept of empowerment mindset often gets twisted into a form of victim blaming that can deepen the harm caused by actual abuse. Perhaps I’ll dedicate another post to exploring this cultural drift as it relates to individualism, ableism, and toxic positivity.
Thanks to my therapist and some friends who had themselves survived abusive relationships, I began educating myself on the topic in early 2022. I started reading books and listening to podcasts about narcissistic abuse, and I was shocked to discover how much of it perfectly fit what I had been experiencing. It’s hard to explain the sickening mixture of shock, disgust, embarrassment, heartbreak, grief, and profound disorientation that hit hard when I finally started to see it. I noticed myself desperately looking for a way to cling to the illusion I had placed so much hope in for seven agonizing years. I didn’t know how to process it all, but it was starting to dawn on me that I had myself become a victim of abuse. This experience was on par with what is portrayed in cult documentaries such as The Vow, where survivors escape only after a profoundly difficult process of coming to terms with reality.
I took the advice of a friend and decided not to act too quickly. Instead, I started observing everything very closely, to be absolutely sure of myself before making a decision and not turning back. About a month went by, and it all became very clear. I started to see the more subtle forms of abuse, even when things were relatively peaceful. I started to see how her dismissiveness and her way of flipping the script whenever I tried to communicate how I was getting hurt was a subtle form of gaslighting. I started to see how I had learned to fawn as a way of protecting myself, and somehow I wasn’t even conscious I was doing it.
Healthy anger began to surface as I finally realized the extent to which I felt unsafe in the relationship. When I tried to express to her what I was realizing about this, she came right out and told me that she had been doing some reflecting, and had come to a clear understanding within herself. She explained how she had “seen” that it wasn’t her dharma to care for my needs and that I needed to rely on other people for this while allowing our relationship to be what it was instead of trying to “control her to meet my needs”. This made no sense since my need to feel safe with her could only be met by her. If she was behaving in harmful ways, then what exactly did she think I was supposed to be getting from others that would address that problem?
On another level, all of this did make perfect sense. I finally saw how she wasn’t even interested in trying to understand this, or anything else about my needs. She projected all-knowing confidence that her proposed solution of having an open relationship was right for both of us and when I calmly explained that it wouldn’t work for me, she exploded, accusing me of succumbing to fear, possessiveness, and not respecting her “feminine wisdom”. This served as an obvious and disturbing confirmation of what I was finally starting to see, and I ended the relationship that night, in late May of 2023.
Extracting myself was not easy. I stayed with friends as much as I could, coming back to pack my belongings when she wasn’t home. I spoke with her only when necessary for logistical reasons. She played hardball on every front, including telling me that she’d spoken with a lawyer and since we had no written agreement, she had no legal obligation to pay me back any of the $46k that she had borrowed. Ironically, she had just graduated and was finally working full-time as a therapist, with the ability to begin paying it back. I was furious, beyond belief, yet increasingly not surprised that she had it in her to do such a thing.
A couple of weeks after moving out, she reached out to me and her tone had changed. She claimed to have had a transformative experience where she saw how unfairly she had been treating me during our relationship. She apologized and seemed to be more sincere than she had ever been before. She also committed to paying back the money she had borrowed and expressed a desire to give it another try. I thanked her for this apology and offered that it did open a possibility of friendship in the future, but that for now, I needed to focus on healing and getting myself back.
She did begin making regular monthly payments according to our loan agreement for almost a year. I was traveling, staying with friends and family, and trying to get help as I started showing symptoms of PTSD. We spoke rarely, but it was respectful when we did. In June of 2024, she texted me to say that she had been thinking about me and hoping we could be friends, if and when I was ready. I responded with appreciation for the sentiment but honesty about how I was still struggling and needing space unless something had changed that would make a deeper repair possible. She responded by suggesting that it wasn’t time yet. This confirmed that she still didn’t get it.
Two weeks later, I received a text from her saying that I’m “not going to get another cent from her for the rest of my existence”. She accused me of “treating her and her daughter appallingly, and of manipulating everyone around me to get my needs met instead of trusting life”.
The interesting thing about this text is that it mirrored the same kind of projection that I experienced throughout the relationship. Just as the accusations in her text aptly described herself, her distrust of me throughout our entire relationship reflected her own lack of trustworthiness. The opposite was true for me. I had falsely trusted her all that time, in a way that would have been called for had I been in a relationship with someone who was the same as me. We were both blind to the reality of the person we were with.
Despite seeing this clearly, it did throw me back into my old state of confused flip-flopping for several weeks. Could it be that what I thought I was doing trying to communicate boundaries all those years was somehow manipulative in a way I hadn’t recognized? I found myself back in this maze of self-doubt again, eventually grounding myself in clarity about my actions and intentions, supported by what I had learned about narcissistic tactics as it applied to this situation.
I didn’t respond right away, but when I did, it was from a respectful place of seeking resolution while proposing to move on from past resentments. I suggested we hire a mediator to help us find a mutually fair resolution regarding the money she borrowed. She never replied back. I wrote to her one more time, by email, pleading for her to consider doing the fair thing and getting a mediator. Again, no response.
I did talk to a few attorneys about my situation, and unfortunately, my chances of winning in court were estimated at only 50%, and the costs would be significant. Not to mention the time and emotional strain of a drawn-out process in court, and the chance that it could backfire. It wouldn’t have been worthwhile.
At this time of writing, I am finally beginning to emerge through the other side of my grief about the bitter injustice of it all. This grief has at times been overwhelming. Despite the ongoing PTSD, waves of self-doubt and other lingering mental health issues, I am gradually feeling better. I have contacted various mutual friends and family who are still in contact with her, requesting their help to encourage her to do the right thing and pay me back, or at least see a mediator together. That may never happen, but the empathy and support have been encouraging, and it’s a relief to know that I at least have some degree of justice in getting my life back and knowing that I’m not alone.
The whole experience has led to much wisdom for me, which I look forward to living by. It highlights just how valuable it is to have people who see us for our good intentions, despite legitimate challenges we struggle with that can make it seem otherwise. It deepens my appreciation for the practice of staying curious, questioning automatic assumptions, and learning to navigate triggers in our relationships while maintaining respect and practicing mature communication skills. It has shown me how we all deserve the chance to make mistakes and learn from our relationship foibles, and we all deserve to be treated in ways that make it safe to learn. We’re all responsible for looking at where we can grow, treating others with respect as they are growing, and claiming our right to feel safe in the process despite our imperfections. Above all, it has become clear that our reverence for the sanctity of the agreements we make in our relationships is what makes them healthy, and determines whether or not they serve our evolutionary purpose.
Perhaps what I experienced was cosmically necessary to catalyze my transition beyond 2nd stage Aries, and I can find acceptance in that. Grief has its role in transformation, and that which we cannot bypass guarantees our evolution. Where we feel overwhelmed by an impossible sense of responsibility shows us where, in fact, we were never responsible. At the same time, when we find ourselves repeating unconscious, self-defeating patterns, life gives us infinite chances to discover where we were responsible all along and never knew it.
